What About the Preferred Shares of Big Railroads?

By ALBERT W. ATWOOD

THERE are so many ways of making money earn a fair interest rate that to pick out any particular group of securities seems like an injustice to the rest. One group which I think is often overlooked by many people who would profit from a closer acquaintance is introduced by the following question from a woman living in Delaware:

"Would you be willing to give a little advice as to purchasing Baltimore & Ohio preferred stock at 69 or 70? As the par is 100 it looks very attractive, and surely will go as high as 85, if not higher, soon. Could not one be able to realize something on it inside of a year?"

For the Small Investor

BALTIMORE & OHIO is one of a group of stocks, the preferred shares of the stronger railroads of the country, which deserve attention. These stocks as a class do not invite active speculation, although they are all listed and dealt in on the New York Stock Exchange. None of them pay more than 5 1/2%, and the best of them pay less than 5%. But the stocks are free from taxation in many States. They are not reached, as bonds are, by the Federal Income Tax. Moreover, this particular group of stocks is so well known that any bank in the country will lend freely upon them. They serve the purpose of the small investor well, because most of them can be bought for less than $100 a share, and, finally, there is more likelihood of an advance in price than with most bonds, and they are as safe practically as the majority of bonds.

Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe preferred may be purchased at 100 or 101, and it pays 5%. Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul preferred sells at 125 and pays 7%, or a net return of 5.60%. This stock has sold as high as 218 in the last ten years; in 1913 and 1912 it sold up to 146 and never below 130. Net earnings of the railroad would have to decrease some six or seven million dollars a year below the present poor receipts before this 7% dividend on the preferred stock would be in danger.

Then there is Union Pacific preferred, paying 4%, which means at the present market about 4.90% net. The margin of safety is so large that no possible question as to the continuance of this dividend is ever raised. Reading second preferred pays about the same income and is equally secure.

In direct reply to the question about Baltimore & Ohio preferred I should say that at 69 or 70 it is a safe and attractive investment. With its 4% dividend this means from 5.80% to 5.71% on the outlay. In spite of a very bad slump in earnings last year the company covered its preferred dividend from three to four times over. Last year it sold at 98%. Net earnings, after expenses, taxes, and interest on all of its bonds are provided for, would have to fall off about $6,000,000 a year before the 4% on the preferred stock is endangered.

But I can not say positively that a person who buys this stock will realize something inside of a year, or that, it will surely go to 85. Yet these suppositions are well within reason. The stock sold as low as 63 3/4 on February 25 and by April 19 had risen to 79 7/8. On June 10 it was 69 and 70. Certainly the preferred stocks of a few of the stronger railroad companies offer exceptional opportunities.

Next week Mr. Atwood will answer the question: "How About Buying Baby Bonds?"

Is Olive Oil Good for Me?

By EDWIN F. BOWERS, M.D.

HAS olive oil any medicinal or food value?

Olive oil may not be the cause of the clear complexions, the bright eyes, the robust digestions, the happy dispositions of our Italian brethren, but it has a good deal to do with them.

For the oil expressed from ripe olives is one of the few fats that stimulate the activity of the liver and gall bladder. And anything that will make the liver laugh will go far toward banishing pimples and skin eruptions, and also improve digestions and dispositions.

In the prevention of that inspissation (or drying) of the blood plasma which is a chief cause of gall-stones, nothing equals olive oil. In large and frequently repeated doses, it often cures or very materially relieves gall-stone colic—when, of course, the condition is not surgical.

A tablespoonful of oil of olives, three times daily with meals or half an hour after eating, also will have a gentle, persuasive action upon the liver which will accomplish more satisfactory and permanent results than a drastic course of cathartics.

Hope for Dyspeptics

AS a cure for the condition that produces acid dyspepsia—either fomentative or from a too free secretion of hydrochloric acid—olive oil, in tablespoonful doses after meals, is wonderfully effective. Cases of many years' standing, that have resisted all the usual methods; almost invariably leave the premises in deep dejection when sluiced with this oleaginous fluid. This was news to me, when first I heard it from an Italian friend.

Owing to the ease with which it is saponified (prepared for assimilation in the small intestine), olive oil is more readily absorbed than any other animal or vegetable fat.

Therefore, in order to gain weight, it should be eaten or drunk religiously—either "whole," upon salads, or in soups. The Italians use it freely in their cooking.

As an inunction for thin, under-nutritioned babies or young children, olive oil has largely supplanted cod liver oil in the practice of many medical men.

And for that stiffness in the joints and spine—particularly in the aged—there is nothing much better than a good, vigorous massage with olive oil. The massage, however, should be sufficiently vigorous to rub the oil in and the pain and stiffness out.

For dryness of the scalp, and for falling hair and dandruff due to excessive dryness, a small quantity of olive oil, rubbed into the scalp with the fingertips, is most excellent. It is claimed also that it contributes, by its absorption, to the nutrition of the oil-starved hair follicles. In any event, it is one of the few fats that may be safely used on the scalp, as it does not become rancid so readily as do most other animal and vegetable products.

The Italians and other southern European races use oil almost exclusively in frying meats and fish. Those who have eaten their deliciously prepared and readily digested cookery will never, of their free will and accord, go back to the greasy foods of our American cookery. Indeed, the objection to fried foods lies not so much in the frying as in the stuff we employ to fry them in. Stomach distress and fatty eructations rarely result from eating chops, steaks, or fish that have been prepared with this delicate food product.

Each week Dr. Bowers answers the most interesting question. Next week: "How Much Water Should I Drink in a Day?"

One Minute with the Editor

I Married a Rich Wife

THE title is ours: the story is one of those peculiarly interesting human documents that a magazine gets hold of only once in a long while.

Twenty years ago, fresh from college, the man fell in love with and married a rich girl. It was no sordid marriage: they were really in love. To-day he has everything that money can buy. The men who were in college with him have the things that money can not buy, the things that only work can win. Which is happier, he or they?

You will read this story with interest next week.

The Animals of the Movies

A NEW profession has been created—the business of training animals so they will act before the moving picture camera without eating the other actors. Next week we show a double page of pictures of these moving picture animals—and the men and women who act with them.

Another Torchy Story

"HOW in the world does Sewell Ford do it?" asked a well known writer a few days ago. "He's been writing Torchy stories for nine years, and they seem to me to get better and better!"

We don't know how he does it, but he does. In proof of which we can promise another Torchy story next week.

Why Not?

WHY must all Christmas stories be published just at Christmas time? Why not a good, cool Christmas tale in the middle of August, when we need it most? Well, why not? We have a good little Christmas story on the desk right now, and we rather think we'll print it next week, or the week after, at the latest.

We Answer a Timely Question

DEAR EDITOR: Can you tell me whether you plan to publish another serial by the author of "Who Was Marie Dupont?" and if so, when?

We do. It is already arranged for, and we expect to begin it late in the autumn. Miss Luehrmann says it is an even better story than the last.

Little Lessons on Preparedness

"ALL these exertions put forth by Napoleon were in striking contrast to the preparations made by the Spaniards, which were pitifully meager. Every one overestimated the amount of forces at disposal, as well as the capacity of the generals and the courage of the troops. The French were welcome to enter the country if they pleased; they would be surrounded right and left and taken prisoners all at once. This was the opinion, not as expressed by subordinates and the lower classes of people, but as the conclusion of a council of war held in September. In fact, some of the newspapers even spoke seriously of 'wreaking vengeance on the other side of the Pyrenees.' And meanwhile, blinded by this infatuation, the army—which had been ostensibly estimated at between 300,000 and 400,000 men, while numbering in reality little more than 100,000—was left without sufficient cavalry, the troops not drilled for fighting, and were without clothing and provisions. Moreover, instead of putting it under command of a general in chief, the military guidance was intrusted to a war-committee, which was to direct operations from Aranjuez."—From Fournier's "Napoleon the First."

"We should worry," said the Spaniards. And a couple of weeks later Napoleon was sitting comfortably in their national palace in Madrid, telling them to leave their bank books and gold watches with the doorman as they came in.

The Truth About the Chorus

By FLORENZ ZIEGFELD, Jr.

I PREFER little girls to big ones. They are generally more intelligent, are better workers, and more apt to meet the requirements of modern dancing. Irish girls predominate in my choruses. The beginners must be between the ages of seventeen and twenty.

Most of Them Can't Sing

ONE of the most beautiful women in my chorus has been with me for ten years. If she stays as level-headed as she has been, she may continue with me for ten years more.

I never try the voices of my chorus applicants. Most of them can't sing. I know it, and don't waste time confirming that knowledge. I have a certain number of girls who are chosen especially to do the singing. If you ever see a plain girl in my chorus, you may take it for granted that she is a singer.

I judge a girl first by her hands and feet; after that I glance at her face.

Chorus girls come from everywhere. The most beautiful ones come from Louisville; the greatest number come from New York; the gingeriest from the gingerless city of Philadelphia. The majority of them come from families in moderate circumstances. Most of them have done no other work before applying for a place in the chorus. They usually come the first year or two after leaving school.

Thousands of girls write from country towns offering themselves for the chorus. Of these, not more than five per cent. are engaged. There is too vast a discrepancy between what they think of themselves and what they are.

The price of chorus service has gone up. There was a time, not more than five years ago, when girls received from eighteen to twenty dollars a week, and paid for their own shoes and stockings. Most managers compel them to do that now; they say it makes them more careful.

I don't; my girls are as fastidious as I. I pay from thirty to fifty dollars a week. I do this because I want the best. I try to make it worth their while.

Selecting a chorus is something like recruiting an army. Plenty of hopeless specimens hopefully present themselves. It is a continual process of sifting. In picking the winners, I rely upon no one but myself. My stage directors, Julian Mitchell and Leon Errol, seldom agree with me about beauty. They think I don't know a beauty when I see one, and I am certain they don't. I follow my own judgment—with one exception. I have found one person who is as good a judge of feminine beauty as I am, and that is my wife, Billie Burke. She has been of invaluable aid to me. She admires brunettes and is chiefly responsible for the fact that brunettes predominate in my chorus.

A Stepping-Stone for Stars

THE chorus has become a place worth any girl's ambition, even if she looks upon her job as merely a stepping-stone to bigger things. Out of the chorus many stars have risen. Elsie Ferguson was a member of the Ziegfeld chorus; so was Mae Murray. Lulu Glaser is another notable example of the girl who has risen from the chorus. So, too, are Pauline Frederick and Anna Pennington.

Before the opening of a new season notice is sent out that on a certain day I will see any one who wishes an engagement in the chorus of the next "Follies." On a rainy morning last May, two thousand girls thronged the approach to the stage entrance. While inspecting these applicants I sat at a table in the middle of the stage, with the stage director beside me. What followed is typical of the way in which a chorus is engaged.

Picking the Winners

"READY," I said, and the order was passed along.

There was the sound of the opening and closing of the outside door. Then followed the patter of many feet and the swish of many skirts, succeeded by harsher sounds.

I looked up and nodded at the man who stood in the wings.

"Walk across the stage slowly," he commanded.

The march began. Girls walked with free, strong strides across the stage. Girls minced across the stage. Girls in their nervousness broke gait, starting quickly and, bethinking themselves, finishing the "cross" slowly, with suddenly remembered dignity. Girls crossed the stage as grenadiers would do. Girls floated across weightlessly, suggesting the possession of what Mrs. Castle describes as "dancing sense."

As they passed I noted mentally their nationality.

The Irish girls I recognized by their strong yet graceful figures, their blue-gray eyes, clear, brilliant, so distinctive the world around, their abundant black hair, and their broad, ready, good-humored smile.

The French girls were unmistakable—trim, nimble, vivacious rather than pretty. One third of my choruses is made up of French girls, or girls of French extraction, as one half of my choruses is Irish or Irish-American.

Next comes a low-set girl with dark eyes and a graceful walk. "Spanish," I think, "or Spanish-American." And I am right. There shall be some like her in the chorus—tabasco for flavoring in small quantities.

The purely American type I know by the greater independence of air, by the greater intelligence in eye and bearing. Yes, there must be a generous representation of American girls as leaders for all the rest.

While this is subconsciously proceeding in my mind, I am actually conscious of a greater need than that of mere national classifications. The hands, the feet—they must not escape my eye, for by them I judge a girl. They must be small, but not too small. They must be shapely. But, no matter how small or shapely, if the hands are too thin, the girl must go to another theater, another manager. If the hands are covered with, we will say, two veilings of flesh, that indicates that the figure is likewise well covered. This point is extremely important. The beauty of a chorus stands or falls by it. The very thin girl is impossible. The fat girl is contraband. The medium girl is the only one for the chorus.

A glance at their faces. The instantaneous question is not "Is she pretty?" but "Will make-up cause her to seem pretty?" For beauty as seen by the audience is chiefly illusion.

The Question of Age

AN important question is that of age. "How old is she?" I ask myself of a beginner; for after twenty-three neither the mind nor the body is as plastic as before. I would not care to teach chorus evolutions to a girl older than that. But, once having learned the work, a girl may stay in the chorus indefinitely.

One of my cleverest chorus girls has worked for me ten years; two others have been in my employ for fifteen years. These three girls live as human beings should. When the play has closed, they go home. They do not overeat, and they drink nothing but water and orange juice. They are up at eight o'clock and are taking the necessary exercise in the air and sunshine as it should be taken—by walking. They get as much sleep as they need, but do not sleep in the day-time.

The term of life for a chorus girl may be long if she lives in this way. The work does not make inordinate demands upon her strength. It provides exercise that city girls would not get if they devoted themselves to sedentary pursuits.

But for the light-headed sort three years is the average term of chorus life. After-theater suppers, champagne, gaiety by night and sleep by day, will terminate their career, as they terminated that of the Virginia beauty, Florence Schenck, whom I saw in a New York sanatorium before she took her life.

The Modern Chorus Misnamed

ALL this passes through my mind as the girls cross the stage. The girls do not know this; they know only that as some of them pass, I whisper to the stage manager, who sits beside me, "This one" or "That one." The names and addresses of those I have chosen are checked. The next day letters go to them to report for a preliminary rehearsal.

At that preliminary rehearsal more sifting is done—but never according to the voice. A few of the experienced chorus girls have good voices and can be depended upon to carry the tune.

The rest do not matter, for modern choruses are misnamed. They are expected to contribute, not music, but human scenery.

They Make Your Journey Safer

VIEWED from a balloon, the twenty miles of railroad track between West Philadelphia and Paoli, Pennsylvania, look like a long, slender spider web. Hundreds of human spiders, catching a strand of the web with arms or legs, lean far out over the rails and spin the connecting strands that bind the whole together.

And below them on the glistening rails no fewer than 2,295 separate movements of trains take place every twenty-four hours,—every movement on schedule time,—just as if the human spiders were not there.

Four million dollars is being spent on the task that has been set for these human spiders. Four million dollars is enough, ordinarily, to buy land and build four hundred miles of railroad. But this is no ordinary job: it is about the biggest thing that has ever been attempted in the electrifying of railroads. And it has been done, so far, without delaying a single train, and without the loss of one life.

Why must there be a spider web of wires for a railroad? Why not a third rail, or a simple trolley wire?

Why the "Spider Web" Is Superior

THE spider web accomplishes two things. In the first place, it gives added flexibility to the wires, so that the trolley never jumps. More important than this, it is a protection against accident. If one wire of the web should break it could not touch the car, and nothing would happen. If they all should break—an almost inconceivable thing—even then the current would run harmlessly through the steel coaches into the ground; and an instant after the break it would shut of automatically at the control station.

Instead of the old red-arm semaphore, a new block signal, consisting of powerful electric lights, will guard the tracks. The lights burn day and night,—twice as much candle power in the daytime as at night,—and they are so strong that in the darkest night large type can be read by their light a thousand feet away. Each block protects a stretch of track 3,500 feet long. A train passing the signal will set it automatically at "stop"; when the train reaches the next block the signal changes to "caution"; another position of the lights shows that two full blocks are clear. Both the engineer and the fireman would have to drop dead in the cab before a train could run into another train on this twenty miles of track, after the human spiders have finished their work.

In Spite of Broken Bones

Feeding Express Packages

SUPPOSE you were an express messenger, thumbing over your way-bills while your car was rolling at sixty miles an hour, and you should suddenly look over your shoulder and behold a prancing bull aiming himself at your back. What would you do? L. T. Wheeler, a well known express messenger of the Middle West, found himself in precisely those circumstances not long ago. What he did was to grab the bull by the lowered horns, wrench and strain with the animal for several minutes, and finally by sheer strength force it steadily back into its broken crate and nail it up. Ursus of "Quo Vadis" was no better man than Wheeler.

Violent experiences like this in the handling of animals via express are out of the ordinary, of course; but your average expressman nowadays is a pretty fair menagerie manager. He handles Noah's Ark in small sections. One day it is a string of polo-ponies; another time, a venomous Gila monster or a box of rattlers; and then perhaps a pair of kangaroos from Australia or a South American armadillo. And, alas for the poor expressmen! these animals do not always remain calmly in their crates.

In Jefferson City, Missouri, a while ago a pair of armadillos in transit escaped from the cellar of the local express office by burrowing under the flooring, and led the town as merry a five-day chase as it ever had. Four men with picks and shovels started a counter-trench, and finally located the pair—ten feet underground and still burrowing. The ground in the neighborhood of the express office began to look like a segment of the "labyrinth" north of Arras; but finally, on the fifth night, the armadillos could stand it no longer, and came up for food.

No easier was the task that fell to the lot of the express people at Oakland, California, who had contracted to collect and deliver a herd of llamas. The drivers who went to gather the animals found them browsing in a ten-acre hillside let, not at all anxious to leave. The expressmen scrambled around for several hours, trying to land a llama, but without any results; for llamas are the finest dodgers in the Western Hemisphere, and they simply dote on hills. Reinforcements and lariats, however, managed to corral them, but not until sundown. The llamas were started on their transcontinental journey securely nailed up in crates of double strength.

Snakes and Alligators Receive Special Attention

SOMETIMES the expressman has to go pretty far to take proper care of his live-stock shipments. Only the other day a tiny baby lamb made a stay at Pennsylvania express office, and was fed with milk from a baby's bottle. Polar bears and live fish require special food; and the care bestowed on snakes, alligators, and other reptiles must be of the best. A sea-lion never worries an express messenger, for it can go thirty days without food; but a baby calf—that's a trained nurse's job! There is one town in Oregon that ships nearly fifty calves a day, scarcely one of them more than twenty-four hours old. The messenger in the express-car has to play mother he the whole family on the journey down the coast, petting and feeding them.

The Pretender

By VERA EDMONDSON

Illustrations by Frank Snapp

"NAME?" asked the superintendent. Rosie Belinsky hesitated not a second. "Rosalie Bell," she answered clearly.

"Age?"

This time only half a second's falter. "Eighteen."

"Oh, come!" The superintendent was fifty-two, caustic and drear. Not for nothing had he been with Hempil Brothers, New York and Philadelphia, for twenty-five years, and interviewed countless thousands of applicants. He laid down his pen now with a chill smile. "Don't try to put that over," he advised severer. "Do you want to get yourself—and us—into trouble?"

"Trouble?" said Rosalie, her great, clear eyes meeting his with simple wonder. How could such a little thing as a "pretend" get one into trouble? She was eighteen plus in her aspirations, and as "man of the house" must land a husky, eighteen year-old job. That was no idle "pretend."

"But I am eighteen," she insisted. "Anyway, I can write like eighteen. Let me show you."

And on a ruled yellow card, with a flush of pride and a stately flourish, she wrote for the first time the glorious name of her heart's adoption—Rosalie Bell.

"Um!" said the superintendent, and, before the remarkable firmness of the signature, scanned her more closely. "Think you could write addresses like that?" He diplomatically waived the question of age. We might use you in Mail Order." Then, noting the soft baby curves of her cheeks, he amended, as the mighty may: "No, I think we need you in Men's Gloves."

"Oh!" said Rosalie, enraptured.

"Seven a week, to start." He jotted something on a slip. "Hand this card to Mr. Jackson, first floor. He'll tell you when to report."

Rosalie took it with glistening eyes.

"Next!" said the superintendent.

THE new employee of Hempil Brothers rose obediently, but at the door turned. I've got an older sister, Beckie. She's eighteen, truly."

"Send her in," said the superintendent. "We need new girls in Basement. Next!"

"And I've got a younger sister, Sadie." Rosalie stood on her two-inch heels firmly. "She's not so strong. She couldn't sell goods; but she could paste labels great."

"How old is she?"

"She's fifteen and a half, and much taller'n me."

"Send her in," said the superintendent.

"And I've got an older brother, Danny—I mean Victor. He's twenty-one. He can drive a delivery wagon fine."

"Say," said the superintendent, forgetting for a full moment how many million girls he had interviewed since eight-thirty, "how many of you are there, anyway?"

"Six," said Rosalie, with composure.

"Well," said the superintendent, "this brother of yours—you say he's twenty-one and can drive. We can always use more drivers—if you're sure he's steady."

"Sure," said Rosalie faintly. "He can drive fine. He's driven for three firms." She forbore to add for how long.

The superintendent looked at her half-dubiously. "I don't know, though, about trusting a new man with a uniform. Ordinarily we require a deposit. Understand," he stipulated sternly, "if he doesn't stick, the two dollars for his uniform comes out of your pay envelop."

"Oh, that's all right; I'll make him stick," said Rosalie resolutely.

"Then write his name on this card, and send him in to-morrow."

She took the card. "I'll write my sisters' names too. They'll be in with him."

And composedly she wrote the three names, "Victor Bell, 21 years; Eugenia Bell, 18 years; Ernestine Bell, 15 years," and handed him the card.

He read it perplexedly.

"But these are not the names you said before. Beckie and Sad—"

"Oh, those," explained Rosalie, "are just their happen-so names that they couldn't help. These are their lookin'-up names. I chose them myself."

Before the joyous, all-conquering youth in her eyes the superintendent suddenly felt parched and old—at least a thousand years old. "Well, send them in," he said shortly. "I'll see what I can do."

On the reminder pad before him he jotted the one word Bell. "I must watch that girl," was his thought.

"Have Mr. Jackson understand—Men's Gloves—that's the place for you," he said to the girl.

"Oh, I'll make him understand," said Rosalie.

WITH head aloft, she walked proudly past the waiting group outside, and straight into the elevator marked "For Customers Only." What matter that that term did not seem to cover her just now? To a certainty it would some day, by every lovely law of pretend.

The elevator boy, cutting short the motion to oust her, grinned sympathetically as he called "First!"

Rosalie smiled back blithely. "Can you tell me which is Mr. Jackson?"

"Sure," said the boy. "That short, stout guy over there. You can't miss him."

Rosalie approached Jackson and handed him the superintendent's slip with radiant composure.

He gave her one slow, all-appraising glance of his near-sighted eyes. "Just walk this way. I shall put you in Silk Gloves," he announced.

"In Men's Gloves," Rosalie corrected.

"In Men's Gloves—no; that is no place for you," said Jackson.

"But he said it was just the place; that I was to tell you specially—Men's Gloves." She disregarded his gathering scowl. "He said they needed me there; that that's where I can get ahead fastest. I must get ahead—"

His glance softened. "For the present, then." He reluctantly conducted her "three aisles over" to a counter adjoining a slim, "dressy" blond with a lace collar a shade too open, like her gaze.

"Miss Collins, Miss Bell. Will you kildly show her the stock."

Miss Collins gave the attractions of her new rival a frankly appraising stare.

"My, but you're short! Think you can reach those top boxes?"

"Oh, yes, I can reach them by jumping," said Rosalie. "And to-morrow—just wait—I can wear higher wads in my shoes."

"Can you start by to-morrow?" asked Jackson.

"Oh, I'm going to stay now," answered Rosalie.

By noon she had learned the stock by heart, removed immemorial layers of dust from the top shelves, and revolutionized her coiffure to Fifth Avenue standards. By noon also approached Jackson.

"We have two stores, Miss Bell; one in New York, one in Philadelphia." He fixed her impressively with his near-sighted gaze. "And it is part of each young lady's duty to read the ads of the Philadelphia store daily."

Miss Collins yawned.

"We make this a special request." He handed Rosalie a copy of the Philadelphia Bugler. "It appears on this society page every morning, adjoining Social Items. And the Philadelphia Bugler is always to be had at the news-stand below the elevated."

"Slow poke!" muttered Miss Collins beneath her breath. "I guess I've better ways to spend my salary than buying Philadelphia papers." But the next instant she caught her breath in amaze.

"Don't trouble to buy the papers, Miss Bell," Jackson was saying. "I shall be glad to bring you a copy every morning."

"LIVE with your folks?" by four-thirty Miss Collins had unbent to inquire.

"With my mother," said Rosalie. "My father is abroad," she stated without the quiver of an eyelash. "He's an importer. He has to go very often—every six weeks or so." It was thus, as befitted family pride, she referred always to Daddy Belinski's periodical visits to "the Island."

"Just think o' that!" said Miss Collins, with heightened respect.

"Yes, there's six of us," Rosalie elaborated later, "and we live in the dearest apartment,—nine rooms and bath—all sunny—overlooking Morningside Park. I'd love to ask you up," she added hastily; "but you see my mother's an invalid. She can't open her mouth at all, or see anyone. She has—lockjaw. I know it's—it's usually quite incurable," she hurried on; "but the Doctor (he's a—a great mouth specialist from London—Sir Leighton Parks—you may have heard of him) says she'll be quite well, and able to go out and—and—see everyone quite soon; by Thanksgiving anyway, we hope," she ended.

"Lockjaw! Gee, but that must be fierce!" condoled Miss Collins, deeply impressed. "Wha'd you say was the name of the London guy? Parks? Wasn't there a page about him in the Sunday Screamer? Sure I've heard of him."

ON her way to the subway that night, Rosalie paused to gaze raptly at the beautiful display in a shop-window. She turned, with face aglow, to meet a firm, heavy-set figure gravely regarding her. Her breath quickened a trifle. Just so, some day, would the Shining Prince gaze, when he dashed up breathless on his milk-white charger, to bear her away to the Gardens of Delight. Only he, of course, would be tall, and blond, and of princely grace. What have chunky, thickset forms and near-sighted eyes in common with princes? The light died from her eyes. This was only Jackson.

He bowed gravely. "Then you go by the subway too? Can't I help you to a seat?"

"Oh thank you," said Rosalie, "I don't need any seat. I—I haven't far to go—only to Morningside Park." She flushed uneasily. What if he should insist on coming too? "I—I must hurry. I live with my Aunt Patricia and my Uncle Lionel, and they're so very particular if I'm late a minute. Besides, my mother's terribly sick—with lockjaw. She has it so badly she can't possibly see any one until Thanksgiving—any one at all. So good-by."

She sped down the subway steps.

"It's not good-by," said Jackson, following her with his eyes—and let seven subway trains crash past him.

ROSALIE was a protest against all the laws of eugenics. By every rule of heredity, she ought to have been sickly, stunted, and depraved. On the contrary, she was robust, dauntless, and aspiring. Reared on delicatessen horrors and doomed to dubious ablutions at one reluctant spigot, she glowed pink and white with health. Stifled and cramped by prison walls, she beat them back as determinedly

---

as a lily rears its head through the mud. In addition she had the Gift of Dreams. Lies? Call them so, if you must. But what is Truth? To Rosalie it lay, not in the hideous bare realities of facts, but in the lovely Land of Heart's Desire.

Speeding up the subway steps at her station, she turned sharply west, and, walking three mean blocks of dingy, moth-eaten doorways" turned at last into her own. Rosalie bounded up the five flights of stairs, fitted a key into a lock, and burst into a room.

"Mutter, Mutter!" she called gaily.

"Is that you, Rosie? Sh!" came a querulous voice.

"Sh! Why sh?" Rosalie threw her strong young arms about the woman's bent shoulders. "It's no time for sh now," she exulted proudly, "when I've got a fine new job at last, at Hempil's—in Men's Gloves! How's that, Mutter darling? And they're going to make a place for all the others,—for Beck, and Sade, and even Danny too! And you're going to have a grand new set of teeth at last, so you can go out again like folks and see every one," she gloried. "Don't you— why, Mutter—"

"Sh!" warned the little mother again. "After supper, Rosie. He's back."

"So soon?" Rosalie recoiled sharply. There was no need for names.

She dropped her arms, all her young ardor turned to ice. Above the fumes of burnt stew, and onions and grease and grime, a new scent was assailing her nostrils,—new but too well known,—the scent of a pale yellow liquid in a loathsome bulb. She turned down the hallway with a gesture of repulsion.

Daddy Belinski had returned from "abroad"!

"YES, he got off this morning, I guess," Beckie, otherwise Eugenia, confided in the privacy of the alcove wherein she was trying a new "marcel." "Well, so long as. he don't stick round the parlor nights, and scare off Jim."

She calcimined her already plastered nose aggressively; for Beckie, be it known, had a "fellah,"—not a Shining Prince, alas! just a plain "fellah." Poor Beckie! He rejoiced in the name of Stubbs, and his line was shirts,—his territory from Troy to Babylon, L. I. Poor Beckie, again!

"But never mind—poor old Beck!" cried Rosalie sympathetically. "I've got a real job for you, hon; a nice, easy one this time, honest," she hastened to reassure. "And one for Sade and Danny too."

"Oh, I guess Sade can't go." Beckie carefully inspected a pimple on her chin. "She's had another turn!"

"She has?" Rosalie's face fell. These "turns" of Sade's had grown far too frequent of late. "But you'll go, won't you?" she pleaded. "All you'll have to do is come down with me and take it to-morrow. It's all waiting—"

"Well, I'll see." Beckie reapproved the marcel. "I guess I'll talk with Jim first. He asked me last night didn't I know I was heaps too pretty to be wasting my looks on any more stores, and I guess he's right." A furtive gleam lit her shrewd young eyes. "But say" Rosie!" She dropped the hand-glass with a bang. "There's a swell manicuring course at Haffney's,—seven-fifty complete in ten lessons; only two dollars down—and they place you when you're through. Can't you lend me your two dollars, Rosie? Oh, well, if you won't," as Rosalie was silent. "You'd rather give it to Danny, I suppose?" she accused shrilly. "And that's what he does with it!" She pointed vindictively beyond the greasy alcove curtains.

"What do you mean?" asked Rosalie tensely. "I haven't given any two dollars to Danny. It was to Mutter I gave it, for Sade's medicine."

"Well, that's how she buys Sade's medicine." Beckie laughed sharply. She lifted the curtain, and pointed derisively to a harmonica among the dented pillows on the sofa.

"A harmonica!" said Rosalie in a choked tone. "When he knows how Mutter needs teeth, and you and I need shoes! Where is Danny?" she demanded.

"Can't you see he's here?" Beckie indicated the piles of sodden ashes on the floor, and an empty beer bottle protruding from a greasy pillow. "He's just having his own special supper early, so he can get to the first show in time. Oh, yes!" she threw out angrily. "Go find him a job, if you like your trouble for your pains. How long will he hold it?"

"You'll see—I'll make him hold it!" cried Rosalie with passion.

And she did—for two days. At the end of that time Victor Bell, extra driver No. 2218 for Hempil Brothers, failed to report, and the yellow pay envelop handed to saleslady No. 5003, Men's Gloves, that Saturday, contained in consequence only five dollars and a printed receipt slip:

To price one uniform for brother, $2.

Received payment,

HEMPIL BROTHERS.

IN the weeks that followed Rosalie threw herself into the daily work at the counter with such feverish energy that in two months' time the sum in her weekly envelop went all the way from seven to twelve dollars.

Five dollars at a jump! The days of miracles have not departed, then, from glove counters! But even miracles need a miracle worker. Could it have been Jackson? Who else? The thought brought the same odd, uneasy pain she felt so often now when she was conscious of his grave eyes steadily regarding her.

"Why does he look at me like that?" she wondered. She approached him timidly to thank him. But—

"It is nothing, nothing at all, but what you have earned," said Jackson.

And she turned back to the counter with a baffled sense of something warm and wonderful just missed; yet with it a shy sense of gratitude. How good he was, Mr. Jackson! If only—

ON the last Saturday in May, Gerald Manning Knight, LL. D., who held the chair of sociology in a small university, hastily approached the glove counter. His need for entering the store was actual. He was en route from Philadelphia to Narragansett to gain much-needed respite on the completion of his notable work, "Daughters of Toil," and—

"If you'll look in the top drawer of my jewel trunk, dear," his wife had written from the Pier, "you'll find the ring. You'll remember the setting's all wrong; but the pearl's a good one—didn't you choose it? So why not take it back and have it reset? And on the way stop in at Hempil's and get me three more pairs of the pearl suede gloves and four of the lavender. Don't forget,—three gray, four lavender,—and while getting them, don't leave the ring on the counter—careless boy!"

The commission was no unusual one, the professor being an artist in such marital details. The ring was in his pocket as he passed Men's Gloves, and at sight of Rosalie he changed his errand.

"Have you any—ah—walking gloves of pigskin, my size?" he inquired genially, extending a long, slight hand of more than feminine delicacy—the left one, naturally—with a great seal ring upon it.

Rosalie took the hand. "What shade?" she inquired with a little gasp as she felt the counter reel and a sudden new and all-enveloping delight sweep through her.

He was tall—ten feet at least—and princely, slim and blond and magnificent—the Shining Prince at last, beyond all fear or peradventure!

"Cash!" called Jackson in the dim and unreal distance.

"Haven't you any—ah—two shades darker?" the Prince was murmuring about that time.

"Oh, yes"" said Rosalie.

The two shades darker were found and fitted. Rosalie started to dust the powder, and overturned it instead. With fitting grace her customer bent his head to help her, and, bending, spoke low-toned words, and then others, still lower—

"Cash!" the intruding voice of Jackson, vehement and nearer; but Rosalie heard it not.

"There will be fireworks to-night at Brighton, I hear. Would you care to see them?"

"Oh," said Rosalie, in an awe-stricken gasp; "To see them with you?"

"With me, certainly." His voice was discreetly lowered. "Do you know the Antwerp Hotel?"

"Oh, yes," said Rosalie.

"I'd better write the name, to make sure. There's a little waiting room with a sofa just at the left of the door." He had hurriedly pressed a card within her hand. "You will be there at six-thirty?" he whispered.

"At six-thirty," Rosalie answered down from the edge of a rosy cloud.

"What was the swell guy saying to you, Rose?" inquired Miss Collins some seconds (or hours) later.

"Oh, nothing," said Rosalie, jealously tucking the card beneath her shirt-waist.

"Cash, No. 77!" called Jackson.

The card bore the words he had lightly penciled,—"The Antwerp," a sacred Fifth Avenue hostelry hitherto entered only by "pretend." But that was not half so wonderful as the name engraved upon it:

DOCTOR GERALD MANNING KNIGHT,
Manning Lodge,
The University.

"Doctor Knight!" she practised the words softly.

AT six-thirty she had found the waiting room, sofa and all; but to her relief no waiting was in order. The Wonder Prince was there before her, more princely than ever in a great-coat of London tweed.

"Come!" He led her rather hastily toward the door. "It's quiet here, but not quiet enough." He seemed to breathe more freely outside. "You've had a rackety day," he explained. "What do you say to a sail down on the boat, and then dine down there?"

"Oh, that will be lovely!" said Rosalie.

Two hours later, within the sheltered nook of their own table overlooking the ocean, Rosalie was watching the rockets trail their splendid curves across the sky.

A swishing sound. "Oh, see that one!" cried Rosalie in tremulous rapture, as one rocket rose high, high above the rest. And, being but seventeen and a half, she foresaw not how black the utter blackness of the descending rocket may be.

It was a never-to-be-forgotten wonder evening, all flashing, thrilling seconds and galloping hours; perfect in every detail, even though the Prince must leave at Grand Central. He had a midnight train to catch to Narragansett.

"And it may be some days—even weeks—before I can hope to see you again. I am a very busy man. It may even be Thanksgiving. I will write you, of course."

Ah, at least he would write!

"In the meantime, promise me one thing," he exacted gravely.

"Yes!" breathed Rosalie.

"That you will never doubt me, even for a moment. You would not, I think—" He scanned her closely, as still half dissatisfied.

Doubt the Prince—now he had come? "No, never!" Rosalie vowed.

"Still, to make sure." He fumbled in his breast pocket, with a swift glance, still not quite sure.

The glance must have decided; for he drew forth a tiny jewel box. "Let me put this on your finger."

It was a very fair pearl; not large, but flawless—had he not chosen it himself?

Would it not have been worth an even larger one to draw a certain light to her eyes,—the glow of life's first-awakened dawn?

"Pearls for purity, for faith, for truth," he murmured quite contentedly. "Now you will never doubt me!"

The words smote her heart in a long quiver of light. "Doubt you?" cried Rosalie, with her first blaze of woman's fire. "I will trust you to the end of the world!"

That night, long after Beckie was asleep, she crept from her cot and stood by the window shaft, watching a struggling moon's ray draw still tenderer rays from her pearl.

"Oh, God" make me worthy!" was her prayer from a heart bowed with humility.

The ring was still glowing with wonder-warmth when she reached her counter on Monday, and its glow warmed her heart all day; though there was as yet no letter: only a postal with the picture of a steamship and the lightly penciled words, "Finest boat service. Will write soon. G. M. K." Not quite the same as a letter: still the postal found a fluttering home beneath her shirt-waist until the coming of the letter, as it would surely come tomorrow—or still to-morrow. Every morning Rosalie scanned with feverish hope the slit that did duty for mailbox in the Belinski vestibule.

"I will trust you forever!"

Should she fail him so soon, in this first princely test he had set her? It would come to-morrow.

And one to-morrow it did come,—a thick vellum envelop, with the name of a Narragansett Pier club stamped in silver. With a wildly thumping heart she read the four hurried lines beginning "Dear child," and felt her hands drop nerveless. The intense heat, coupled with highly exacting work, may quite prostrate even a prince, it seemed. He was suffering keenly from long strain and greatly in need of soul refreshment from the glimpse of her, for which he hoped as he passed through town in August. If not then, at his next breathing space, Thanksgiving. And he was, as you know (underscored), in all ways, Faithfully yours, G. M. K.

"Not till August," said Rosalie faintly, "and not then, maybe!"

To be sure, "Faithfully yours, as you know," that must mean something, and August was not so far off now, if you count by weeks, and not by aching, fitful days and sleepless nights. But what if August should vacantly come and go, to no avail, as it seemed to be doing? "I will trust you to the end of the world!" had she said? And that is longer even than Thanksgiving.

And so summer scorched its way straight into the cool, uncaring heart of fall; and hope deferred tortured faint hollows in the baby curves of her cheeks, and painted feverish shadows beneath her eyes. "She's falling off something fierce, Miss Collins observed.

There remained Thanksgiving and its preparations; for the Prince must not find her unready. Fresh scrim curtains at spotless windows in the little "parlor"; a frond of fern-like green on the stained and discolored near-marble stand; an inviting new cushion on the one easy chair where he would sit. Unfaltering courage has accomplished miracles greater than these, and Rosalie went about them with firmly set lips, even to tearing down the hideous oleographs from the mustard-colored walls, since all things sordid and un-princeworthy must be banished at the Prince's coming. If he came! It was a feeble "if" now, for the tapers of hope were burning low; but each night she relit them beside her little "Watch Me Grow' bank. That, at least, had not failed. It was steadily growing heavier each week beneath the weight of quarters and dimes.

AND now at last the Tuesday before Thanksgiving! What time more fitting for the bank opening? If it proven half as full as it felt, there would surely be enough for the new teeth. Fifty cents a week had easily mounted to eighty and ninety, with no longer Beckie's constant clamor for money; for Rosalie had at last yielded and Beckie had taken the manicure course.

Rosalie frowned. She would almost have had Beck back in her old penniless state than this train of new and baffling perplexities since Beck had landed her dazzling new job as manicurist at the Hotel Glazenhall. These strange new fits of irritability of Beck's, all these new and unexplained articles of finery—

"I don't like it," Rosalie reflected, on the edge of her cot. "It looks queer; There had been other actions of Beck's, still queerer. Even the once distasteful Mr. Stubbs would have been a welcome

---

vision these days. And now Beck was talking of a room downtown—to be nearer the Glazenhall.

"I don't like it," said Rosalie again.

"IS that you, Rosalie?" A toil-worn hand lifted the alcove curtain on her cogitations.

"Yes, Mutter." The girl's face softened indescribably. "Come in. I'm just going to get the bank now, and we'll open it, just you and I, and find how much there is over fourteen dollars. I've got it all saved, Mutter dear. Let's get the bank—"

"That's what I'm trying to tell you, Rosie." The mother's eyes strained with a frightened whimper. "Your bank—he—he didn't mean it, Danny didn't. He's a good boy," she mumbled with the instinct of defending her best-loved, and dropped her eyes to the floor.

Rosalie followed her gaze, picked a piece of bent and twisted tin from beneath the sofa. "Do you mean," she gasped, "that Victor—that Danny has dared to break open my bank and steal my fourteen dollars?" Fury tore her. "When I've pinched and saved and gone without lunches for six months, so that you needn't be hidden away in the dark, but could hold up your head—like folks!" She lifted the rifled bank, and balanced it grimly. "So that's your baby's latest!"

"He's a good boy," the little mother repeated feebly.

"A good boy! Oh, yes, he's a prince!" said Rosalie bitterly. Then the strain broke. She threw her young arms about the seared and futile bundle of motherhood, and kissed it tenderly. "Never mind, Mutter. Maybe he won't come back now—for a time. He won't dare. And there are good times coming. I'll get you the money yet."

But not in time for Thanksgiving—and the Prince's coming!

"It doesn't matter in the least." She fought back a great choking sob from the sight of the Prince's ring. "I can stand it all, everything—if you'll just come!"

SHE reached the counter pallid and shaky that Wednesday morning, and started another endless day. There were still ravaging traces of passion in her face.

"What you going to do to-morrow?" Miss Collins inquired.

"I don't know," she had to admit.

"Have you seen the Philadelphia ad, young ladies?" inquired Jackson, in an afternoon lull.

"I've seen enough of it," responded Miss Collins, with a show of "proper spirit."

"I haven't seen it yet," said Rosalie languidly.

"Only a small Thanksgiving ad to-day." He handed her the Philadelphia Bugler, with a look of concern at her listless eyes.

"Yes" it was only a small "Store Closed To-morrow" ad, set in a border of turkeys, adjoining Madame Bavarde's triple column of social chat and the picture of a radiant woman in a flowing evening gown. Rosalie glanced at the portrait mechanically, and the words beneath it flashed out:

MRS. GERALD MANNING KNIGHT,
Who with Professor Knight will receive
at Manning Lodge, Thanksgiving Day.

Somehow, the whole staggering weight of meaning fell, and she quietly crumpled beneath it to the floor.

"Well,'d y' ever know the beat of that?" cried Miss Collins, aghast. "Struck all in heap—and right in a minute! Here, here! Rosie, Rosie!" She shook the limp shoulder to no avail. "Help, help, somebody! Water, quick!" she called excitedly.

"Here," said Jackson, quietly producing a glass of water from nowhere. "Go upstairs and tell the nurse to have a bed ready in the rest room," he directed briefly, and raised the crumpled form like a child's in his arms.

"Gee, but she looks like a goner!" agreed Ladies' Mousquetaires with Men's Motor Gauntlets.

But Youth—sheer, merciless youth—was too strong. Soon, all too soon, the blackness raised, giving place to something far worse,—light. Lurid, hideous light, shot with twisting vipers, above a whirling, yawning abyss—and it was through this—oh, unclean, horrible!—she must drag all her shamed days—alone! Despair broke, dry and pitiless. Rosalie sat up with a moan.

"Hadn't you better rest quiet, deary?" came the chill tattoo of professional sympathy.

"Rest?" the girl shuddered. "I can never rest again. I must be starting home." She struggled vainly to her feet: felt them double under her. "How can I ever, ever start?"

"A bit more of the ginger, deary?"

"No, no!" She dragged wearily down to the cloakroom for her wraps, quite uncaring that the mirror showed her face ghastly blue, with hideous pinched caverns beneath the somber-burning eyes.

The timekeeper at the grimy employees' exit threw some remonstrance after her to the street. She caught but the one word "umbrella," and let it fall unheeded to the soaked pavements. Was it raining,

then? And she had no umbrella. What of it? A great, menacing gale came crashing round the corner, tearing the breath from her throat, and beating her like pulp against the pitiless gray Hempil walls. In a moment it would beat her again—and again. She plunged weakly forward.

"THIS way. There's no wind here," came a voice at her shoulder, and a firm hand had drawn her round the corner. The Furies had calmed; or was it only that the voice had raised an umbrella?

"Can you walk across to the subway?" the voice asked next, and her breath returned, hot and strangling. It was Jackson!

"I—can—try," said Rosalie.

He said nothing on the way across; nothing until they reached the ticket window, where he bought two tickets; nothing then but—"I am going to take you home," in the calmest every-day voice.

He did not ask permission to-day, as that once, long ago. Why not? she wondered numbly, before she sank back, too tired to wonder. She was rather glad it was Mr. Jackson. To have him there hardly hurt at all, and after a while it was almost a comfort, when the train lurched, to feel his steadying grasp. One could even pretend, behind closed lids, it meant something real and sheltering, even though that could never, never be more than a pretend—and oh, how tired she was of pretending!

A REAL splash of human color had crept back to her lips when they reached her station. Jackson assisted her to the street, and then for the first time paused.

"Would you rather have this?" He indicated the umbrella a bit uncertainly.

"Then you won't come too? Oh, please!"

"May I? I am glad of that," said Jackson, falling readily into step. "We couldn't talk on the train, and I have something to tell you—I must tell you." He spoke with unwonted gravity. "I have never been quite straight with you."

Rosalie looked at him in amaze. "You not straight with me?"

"Not as I must be; as you've forced me to be, since I've known you day by day, and you've shown me all your beautiful, brave life. I never knew a girl could be so brave—"

"Oh, stop, stop!" Molten shame was rising, submerging; but he steadily persisted:

"And now it's my turn to let you know me—just as I am. In the first place," he drew a leather card-case from his pocket, "my name is not Jackson; at least, that's just a part of it. Here's the rest." He handed her a card from the case, and "Mr. Jackson H. Prentice, Galesburg, Illinois," she read.

"That's my real home. I was never made for New York," he explained. "I come from the plainest of country people,—not high up like yours,—and here I'm only a floor manager, I know. But I'm learning the business from the ground up, how to run one, and how not to run one. That has always been my dream, or a part of it,—to open a store of my own some day," he confessed. "And at first it seemed fair enough, my being here to 'learn the game'—that was what I called it; and even the Jackson part too, until I knew you, and you showed me what it means to be open and on the level. Then it didn't seem like a game at all. I've been sorry, ashamed—"

"Oh, don't, don't!" She cut him short again. "It's all wrong. You think you know me: you know nothing, nothing at all! But you shall—you must! I'll show you." She drew him hurriedly along the last mean block of hideous doorways, into the most hideous of all.

"Here!" They stood at last within the murky entry. "Light a match!" she commanded.

From a plain gold case he drew one, and obediently lit it.

"Read that!" She indicated one of the grimy slips above the left-hand array of tubes, and bending he read the scribbled name "Belinski."

"That means me. That's my father's name," said Rosalie. "It never was anything else. Rosalie and Bell too—they're just lies, like the rest of it, all lies! This is where I live. I've never lived anywhere else. There never was any nine-room apartment on Morningside. There never was any Aunt Patricia or Uncle Lionel. They're just lies too. I took them because I was ashamed—I have nothing—nobody—" The words were wrenched from her.

"Do you know where my father is now? If we were to go upstairs—we won't, but if we should—we'd find him sitting in the kitchen, wrapped in a dirty blanket, with his horrible needle. He's a dope fiend. He will always be one; just as my brother will always be a bum. Oh, we're a beautiful family—"

"Your mother?" asked Jackson gravely. "Is she dead?"

"She's not dead; though she might better be dead too—with six of us, and everyone rotten. But you'll never see her either—and do you know why? Because," passionately, "she can't open her mouth; she has no front teeth. Oh, yes, I tried," brokenly; "but it takes fourteen dollars to buy them, and she will never, never have them now, because Victor has broken open my bank and stolen the money—"

Scalding tears surged, as she turned, beaten at last. "It's no use. Go away, please," she begged thickly, "and leave me where I belong."

An endless space. Why didn't he go? Or he had gone, of course. That was it. She turned her eyes timidly at last, to meet Jackson's—yes, still Jackson's!—and still steadily waiting.

"Are you ready?" he asked quietly.

"Shall we go up now to the little Mutter, and tell her—you are going to marry me to-morrow—because you want to? Heart's Dearest, why do you cry so?"

"Oh;" sobbed Rosalie, "don't pretend!"

The Girl of the Nutmeg Isle

By BEATRICE GRIMSHAW

Illustration by Harvey T. Dunn

I DON'T think the lessons of Red Bob—about being surprised and so on—had been altogether wasted on me. I answered at once, and quietly:

"Certainly, Miss Ravenna. What can I do for you?"—although it seemed as if all the blood in my body had suddenly flung itself in one wave toward my head, and as if the sleeve that brushed accidentally against something soft and near were charged with a strong electric current.

"You can't do anything for me," said the voice rather breathlessly; "but I can do something for you—if I can speak where nobody hears."

She was not whispering; she spoke in a soft but rather high-pitched tone that somehow made one think of winds and waters—as different from the carneying tones of Miss Siddis as morning dew from treacle.

"You are most kind," I answered. "If there is anything you want to say, we had better go a little way back into the bows —or, indeed, no one can hear us here."

"Oh, but they could," said the girl, still rather breathlessly. "You've no idea how people can overhear on a ship—I hadn't, till to-night. That's what I want to— Please, in the bow. I won't be a minute, but you must hear; it's important."

THERE was not a shade of self-consciousness in her manner. Not the veriest coxcomb who ever hinted at a hundred conquests could have seen anything flattering to himself, or coquettish in her, at the back of the strange request.

I took it as it was spoken. "Certainly," I said. "It is dark; let me lead you."

She gave me her hand with perfect confidence,—it was a cool, firm hand, as smooth as silk, but not soft,—and I helped her past the covered-up donkey-engine to the quiet place I had just left.

"No one can see or hear us," I said.

I took off my coat and threw it lightly round her shoulders.

"The night air is sometimes chilly," I told her; and indeed, it was not so warm as it had been. Then, standing by the bulwark,—for she did not sit down,—I waited. I thought she might begin with "You must think me very forward," or "I hope you won't be shocked," or some cliche of the kind. But I did not know my lady of the mountain.

"I'm afraid," she said, with simple directness, "that there are people on board who mean you some mischief."

"Oh, is that the case?" I said, laughing a little. "Perhaps I mean them some mischief, too."

"You don't understand," she said, considering. "I will tell you just what it was. I was lying on the deck, with a cushion under my head"—because I could not keep my chair from slipping about,—and it was dark. And my head was a little over the side of the ship, under the rail, to catch the breeze. And there was a porthole just beneath, and people inside, smoking and talking. They were speaking in German—"

"Do you speak German, then?" I asked.

"Why of course," she answered" "though I wasn't born a German—perhaps you know—"

She paused, and I, thinking I did know, answered: "Yes, Miss Siddis told me."

Isola Ravenna did not go on with her story immediately. Her tall, slim figure, just visible in its white dress against the dense black of the sky, swung lightly to and fro with the rolling of the steamer.

The foam about the bows made such a hissing that I could not tell whether she sighed; yet somehow I thought she did.

"WELL!" she said presently. "I was going to tell you. They were talking about you. It was Richter, I think—he smokes those very nice-smelling cigars, doesn't he?"

"Yes," I said, remembering the sample I had enjoyed that afternoon.

"And the tall, fair young Prussian, Hahn—I know his voice. And several others. They were in a private cabin—one that hasn't any deck outside it. Richter said—I must try to remember: 'I have talked to him, and he is no sheep's head, that young Englander. Thou wast right, Hahn,'—that was what he said,—'he is clever enough to play the stupid game. And, see thou, when a man plays even so, he has something to hide. Also, he is not at all stupid.' And then they said things I could not catch. And then I heard Hahn, and he said: 'Truly, sir, I did not do it on that account, but because he had insulted Germany.' And Richter said—oh, he said—I can't remember the words, but it was about Hahn having done right, although he had been hasty. 'Perhaps I should not have wanted it if the youngster had been the common English fool,' he said. 'But I find him quite other, and what Vincent Gore knows, be assured

Continued on page 16

Short-Haired Women and Long-Haired Men

CURLEY is a pure Crow Indian, and chief of his tribe; but his blue blood and exalted position haven't done him any particular good. He put up a good fight for his people's rights, but finally in 1873, signed the treaty that ceded to the government the richest part of the Montana Crow reservation—the part where the gold is. The pale-faces haven't left Curley even his own name, which is Ash-ish-ish-e.

ETHEL LEGINSKA, the young pianist who looks like Liszt, is English by birth and American by choice. She is still in her early twenties. Clothes make the woman as well as the man, she thinks, and playfully ascribes the vigor of her playing to the fact she never wears French-heeled, aced-up-the-back boots or chiffon blouses.

SENATOR VARDAMAN was elected Governor of Mississippi chiefly because he disapproved so eloquently of Theodore Roosevelt's having Booker T. Washington to luncheon. On the other hand, when, as Governor, he found that the negroes in a certain penitentiary were being badly looked after, he briefly told the warden to fix things up at once or take his place among them. His flowing locks and Senator Gallinger's bald head are two objects that always catch the eyes of visitors to the Senate Chamber.

WHEN the Civil War broke out, Dr. Mary Walker applied for an army surgeon's appointment, and was told: "A woman in any capacity has no business where sick or wounded are." Thereupon she went to President Lincoln about it. He replied in three words: "I am willing." Dr. Mary, with the rank of first lieutenant, put in four years of heroic service, for which the government awarded her a bronze medal, a pension of 8.50 a month, and permission to continue wearing the male attire that she adopted for convenience when on the field.

SWINBURNE, Browning, Thomas Hardy, Ibsen, and Bjornson have all taken chances with Miss Harraden's best tea-cups. Her "Ships that Pass in the Night" was one of those popular successes that keep a good deal of their thrill after nearly twenty-five years. This novelist works only ninety minutes a day. The rest of the time she says she is "diligently idle."

As soon as Buffalo Bill—alias the Hon. William F. Cody—got through celebrating his sixty-ninth birthday last February, he turned round and signed up for another season in a Wild West show. Ranchmen in Utah still talk of the days when, as Pony Express rider, Buffalo Bill used to cover forty-five miles in three hours, by dint of three changes of horses. While cooling off, our hero took flyers in subduing the Mormons and the Indians. Then he took a year's rest in the Nebraska legislature. He has been running his Wild West show for a quarter of a century.

Mrs. HAVELOCK ELLIS'S most popular lecture is called "Havelock Ellis—An Analysis." As an internationalist, Mrs. Ellis can't see any sense in war, unless, perhaps, each nation should send only its criminals and lunatics to the front.

Risking Your Life for a Living

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The Four Richest Widows in the World

She Makes War on Rattlesnakes

MRS. JOHN GRAY, who keeps a hotel at Palmer Lake, Colorado, has probably killed more rattlesnakes than any other woman in the United States. There are plenty of women in the West who are not much afraid of rattlesnakes, who kill them from necessity or from a sense of good citizenship. But Mrs. Gray is an experienced hunter, and has for years gone gunning for rattlers as a form of sport.

Before she came to Palmer Lake, Mrs. Gray used to keep a hotel at X Park, not far from an abandoned stone quarry which is an empire of rattlesnakes. They sometimes got venturesome and would, as she says, "leak down into her garden" and terrify the women boarders. Then Mrs. Gray would take her gun and go out to reduce the reptile population. Usually her husband or her son or some adventurous guest went with her—for company. She always chose a hot day, and when she reached the quarry the rattlers would be out in regiments for their afternoon nap. When she began firing on them, the snakes never had sense enough to make for cover" but always showed fight and began rattling and jumping toward the volleys of shot.

Mrs. Gray considered fifty snakes a good afternoon's sport. There were several old powder cans half buried in the sand about the quarry, and she could be pretty sure of finding as many as a dozen in each of these. She sometimes took with her a forked stick such as the Indians have used from time immemorial.

Mrs. Gray used to get this fork over the snake's neck, just behind the head, hold the reptile pinned down, and see how far it could spit. She says a much enraged rattler can squirt a thin jet of black poison as far as three feet.

Occasionally she took a few snakes home in a leather bag. She never kept them about the house, but she sometimes sent one by express, neatly done up in a candy box, to a timid friend. She insists that nobody who has any skill with rattlers need ever be bitten, and that skill is not difficult to acquire. In the parlor of her hotel Mrs. Gray has some fine mounted specimens of big game she has shot. She is an excellent cook, a good shot, and plays a good game of pool. In the winter, when hotel-keeping is slow, she writes adventure stories and hunting articles for sportsmen's journals.

But around X Park Mrs. Gray's fame as a rattlesnake killer overshadows any other. She usually had to kill two or three hundred snakes a summer. If her guests found one or two rattlers about the grounds, they were willing to accept them as local color; but more than two set the women to packing their trunks. "Within easy walking distance of a rattlesnake center" is not a good advertisement for a summer hotel.

Any One of These Girls May Be a Pavlowa

The Red Grainger

By LEONA DALRYMPLE

Illustrations by Elise Goldberg

DICKIE was nine. He was a little sorry and sensitive about this; for, with the world so full of various ages, it did seem a sort of disgrace to toll one's age in one figure, along with Squint Wilcox and Buster Nevins.

Dickie glanced at the picture of a bright red automobile and wished he was not quite so sleepy; for he loved automobiles. And this one was red enough—almost—to penetrate the scratchy, strained feeling that assailed the interior of Dickie's eye-lids. Pinks, his little sister,—nicknamed by reason of a telltale flower-flush in moments of guilt,—was soundly—gladly asleep.

With a sigh Dickie took from beneath his pillow a small triangle of contraband molasses candy, and bookmarked the page effectively for future reference. Then, feeling queerly loose and infirm where his head joined his spine, he reached up and Pulled the cord Mother had appended to the electric light. Dickie and the light collapsed together.

"DICKIE!"

Dickie sat up, tousled and disillusioned. Only the instant before he had been expertly driving a snorting, scarlet motorcar through admiring crowds. Now Dickie groaned. Nineness was upon him again,—nineness, mother's microscopic interest in his ears, and school.

Dickie's day was a long and busy one, due chiefly to a misinterpretation of his mood on the part of Miss Murfree, his teacher. He remembered the red automobile at twilight—his memory coincident with the discovery of his molasses bookmark by Aunt Sue Spencer—visiting and caustic. Dickie retired to his father's den—having annexed, by a species of legerdemain at which he was uncommonly proficient, the magazine Aunt Sue had discarded with a snort of disgust—and gloated again over the red automobile.

It appeared that one might write for further details. Dickie, pleasantly excited by the vehicular blaze of temptation before him, gently closed the door of the den to muffle the sound of forbidden type-writer keys, and laboriously spelled out the following:

gRainger MOTOR car co.
detroit, MICHIGan.
kindly sEnd dEtaiLs.

Which, save for highly individual ideas about capitals, pawed very well indeed.

Thrilled out of nineness into transient manhood, Dickie considered a signature.

Dickie Spencer sounded painfully juvenile. Dickie rewrote his letter and typewrote his signature:

RicHard sPencer.
4 cresCent terrace,
RINGwood,n,j.

Climbing spiritual heights of satisfaction, he leaned back in his chair an excellent cigar held invisibly in his mouth and considered the letter with the narrowed glance of maturity—only to be plunged into self-conscious nineness by the appearance of Pinks. Pinks heatedly desired her brother to write an instant request to Grandfather for a lollypop, Mother, encouraged by Aunt Sue, not being in a lollypoppian mood.

Dickie conscientiously refused. Pinks was very young and indiscriminately greedy. Besides, Dickie

could not hope to typewrite indefinitely without capture, and there was a postscript to be added to his own letter, expressing his inflexible preference for red. He essayed this with a nervous frown at Pinks, and hit a great many more keys than he had intended. To Dickie's appalled gaze the whole keyboard fell suddenly upon the paper. Pinks shrieked. And Dickie, unaware that he was flirting with Fate, went to mail his letter with a stamp that had fairly jumped into his hand from Father's desk.

IF Dickie's father had been a senior Richard, this tale would never have been told. But he wasn't, and therefore the letter to Richard Spencer was duly received, without confusion of identity, by Richard Spencer, who was Dickie.

"It's only an ad, Dickie," said Dickie's pretty mother, intercepting his sidelong glance of interest. "Dear me! how in the world did they get a child upon the mailing list?"

The letter looked innocent enough. Dickie, in his father's den, discarded considerable superfluous pamphlet material, and came at last to a letter which began "My DEAR MR. SPENCER." After considerable syllabic foolishness, which Dickie spelled out with absolutely no result, he found himself confronting the following startling fact:

Our agency in your town is new, and we are very eager for your interest. We have instructed a demonstrator to call upon you and give you a careful demonstration. We know you will like the car.

This upset Dickie not a little. It was somehow an expression of absolute faith in his maturity. And thinking first of the agent's shock on finding only three feet of Richard Spencer where he had likely figured upon five and a half at the least, and then of his mother's shock, and then of an interview with his father, who was eternally investigating Dickie's activities, Dickie felt that this threatened demonstration was totally uncalled for.

Rubbing his ankle with his toe, Dickie wondered, with a gulp, just what he had said in that letter to commit himself. He couldn't remember. He blamed Pinks for her intrusion. Likely in the postscript he had struck some keys by accident that spelled something, and this demonstration was the result. The prospect worried him.

"Dickie!"

"Yes, Mother."

"Breakfast's ready, dear, and Father's in a hurry."

Dickie descended, glancing furtively through the glass panel of the door to be sure the scarlet Nemesis was not already upon his trail. But the paneled landscape was merely a pleasant pastel of early spring green, and Dickie with a sigh of relief went on in to breakfast.

Here Pinks unexpectedly upset him again by pointing a wabbly, fat forefinger at him and laughing, her blue eyes mischievous saucers of mirth. It was a disconcerting habit. Dickie could never get accustomed to it.

"Mother!" Dickie's resentful whine blended with a chirpy giggle from Pinks, who made a foolish atmospheric dab at him and collapsed, laughing immoderately.

"Yes, dear."

"Make Pinks stop."

"Why, what is she doing, Dickie?"

"Pointin' and gigglin'." Dickie had a system of intoning that perilously approached a sullen mumble.

Father looked up from a paper propped against the coffee urn. "Wherefore the grouch, son?" he inquired mildly.

Dickie felt that he had trouble enough of his own with an incriminating demonstration pending without paying for Pinks' idiocy. Prepared for transient scarlet, he kept an eye upon the window, losing interest in his breakfast. If he could only remember what keys he'd hit and what on earth they spelled! Under the pretense of inspecting the tulip bed for shoots Dickie disappeared and brooded.

"Dickie can't be well," said his mother, troubled. "He's left his breakfast—"

"Dickie," said Dickie's father, who was young and of penetrative cynicism, "has something on his conscience."

YOU could of course, reflected Dickie by the tulip bed, write almost anything when you weren't fully aware what letters were tumbling on the paper and your sister was bothering you about a lollypop. You might—the thought was horrible—you might even hit keys enough to order a red car!

"We know you will like the car!" There was sinister portent enough there to worry anybody into a panic.

Dickie felt a sickening wave of apprehension shudder its way along his spine. No matter what the outcome might be, he felt that he was somehow in for it. Suppose the Red Grainger appeared for demonstration when his father was home! Exposure would lead to an eventual hullabaloo about the typewriter and the stamp. That, owing to several previous misunderstandings, was unavoidable and, to boot, highly undesirable. On the other hand, suppose the Red Grainger appeared when he was quite alone and he was forced to admit his Richard Spencership! The demonstrator would likely find cause for mortal offense in that missing two and a half feet of stature and his humiliating nineness—neither any fault of Dickie's—have him arrested.

If he had hit keys enough to order a red car, conceded Dickie miserably, he must consider the thing at once and make some plans. What, for instance, could prevent the Grainger Motor Car Co. from delivering a scarlet incubus at any time? With a shiver of foreboding Dickie saw the red Grainger delivered at the very door.

There was a sordid side too. Somebody would undoubtedly expect him to pay something, and his income was subject to undependable ebb and flow. By a frantic emergency attack upon the penny bank with a paper cutter he could of course make a cash payment of twenty-one cents; but this acquisitive trick was in disfavor.

Facing a dead wall of misery, Dickie presently sidled over to the fence and flattened himself against the palings. Beyond Squint Wilcox had appeared, under the temporary delusion that he was an escaped Indian. He was tomahawking his mother's magnolia tree with hieroglyphic results. Dickie offered assistance.

"Nam!" said Squint. "I kin do it."

"Squint!" hissed Dickie, hungry for sympathy.

"What?" queried Squint.

"I ain't well, are you?"

"Yep."

"My heart's skippin' beats."

Squint felt no special interest in cardiac irregularities and didn't pretend any.

"I may," urged Dickie darkly, "get arrested."

This brought Squint to the fence, and, satisfied with his revenge, Dickie withdrew to the tulip bed again, where he whittled a stick in morose silence. Nor did he trouble to allay Squint's brazen curiosity, tinged now with envy and awe. Squint was summoned to a tomahawk conference with his mother, and Dickie embarked once more upon a morbid sea of speculation.

For all Dickie keyed himself to an extraordinary mental preparation, the shock was cataclysmic when the Red Grainger did appear. He was mercifully alone, Mother having departed somewhere for the afternoon with Pinks. One instant he had been idly propelling paper balls through the attic window at the heads of unsuspecting pedestrians—lulled into temporary forgetfulness of his entanglement by the antics of a very old gentleman of exceptional pantomimic powers of resentment. The next, after an interval of frozen flight, he was sitting, with protuberant eyes, upon the attic stairs, holding his foot and listening in palsied horror for the bell to ring. It had turned redly into the street without warning, just as the old gentleman began to run down.

The doorbell rang. Dickie bolted for the baluster, and defying all laws of balance draped himself over the rail.

"Tell him," he hoarsely instructed the maid, "tell him Mr. Spencer isn't home."

Mr. Spencer, of course, wasn't home. Hulda, unaware of the diabolic guilt in the small inverted face above her, said so with pretty inanity. The demonstrator departed with the cordial assurance that he would return. Dickie, fearfully biting two fingers in a cheek-swollen interest, heard the sinister threat and swallowed very hard. Caught in a wave of panic, he locked himself in the bath-room, where, in a reckless moment of depression, he absently carved the word "Grainger" upon a cake of soap with the handle of his father's toothbrush. Finding effacement impossible without the aid of dynamite, he irritably flung the soap out of the bath-room window. The soap was unfortunately the alien property of Aunt Sue. Dickie later found it difficult to believe that the disappearance of one cake of unessential soap could provoke so much futile discussion.

THEREAFTER suspense and uncertainty colored Dickie's life with awful misery. The Red Grainger did not return. Dickie read in this something altogether sinister and inexplicable. Still he kept himself tensed in preparation. Almost any day, any hour, any minute, the red thunderbolt might appear. And there was always the terrifying chance of an unexpected meeting on the way to school. Dickie adopted a circuitous back route, arriving so late and breathless that his teacher telephoned a protest.

"But I don't understand, Miss Murfree," said Dickie's mother helplessly. "I really don't. He starts in time—"

"His habits," declared Miss Murfree, "have become mysteriously furtive and irregular. It almost seems as if he had something on his mind."

Dickie had. Whether he viewed himself in the light of a fugitive from justice or an insolvent owner of an undelivered automobile, there was food enough for worry. He grew to hate the sight of red. It was no longer a warning and a decoration, but rather a menace and a flaming badge of guilt. A flash of scarlet sent him

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scuttling to the nearest fence for shelter. He was wary as a cat, and seemed ever to be listening. And at night dreadful dreams assailed him, in which he was responsible for the total disruption of the Grainger Motor Car Co., which had concentrated upon the discovery and exposure of Richard Spencer, 4 Crescent Terrace, Ringwood, N. J., to the utter ruin of its business.

"THERE was a time," said Dickie's mother one morning, "when contact with Dickie's ears transformed the softest cloth into sandpaper: Now he's almost apathetic. And he's snubbed the little Wilcox boy next door for no reason at all that I can see, save that he has a red sweater and Dickie hasn't. I asked him if he wanted one, and he shuddered."

"What on earth ails the child?" demanded Dickie's father irritably. "And why did he plunge the house into an uproar over Sue's soap?"

"He didn't," said Mrs. Spencer indignantly. "Sue did. It might almost have been a sacred cake set with diamonds. I feel that Dickie threw the soap out of the window; though why I can't for the life of me make out. Hulda found it yesterday under a corner of the arbor directly in line with the bath-room window, and it had the word 'Granger' or 'Gringer' carved into it. You don't suppose Dickie's joined a secret society, do you, and it's preying on his mind?"

Dickie's father scoffed. "I think," he added thoughtfully, "there was some of Sue's soap upon the handle of my toothbrush."

When Dickie's appetite began to fail he became an object of definite attention. It was discovered that he had become addicted to violent starts, and hated the doorbell, that he had lost weight and color, slept jerkily, and was subject to discreditable gusts of temper. Pinks was afraid of him, and he had unpleasantly aggravated her terror by a species of lightning grimace of remarkable muscular ingenuity and slyness. Its meteoric passing defied adult detection. Annoying Pinks, indeed, seemed his one pastime.

WHEN one morning he awoke sobbing with such passionate abandon that his mother turned pale, the family physician was summoned. But Dickie, morosely himself again, could not somehow see his way clear to explain that he had been arraigned in the night before a nebulous judge and jury who had imprisoned him for life beneath the front seat of a red automobile.

The doctor added to the general muddle an atmosphere of professional perplexity and distinction—nothing more. He admitted Dickie's pallor and thinness, and left a tonic of horrible acridity. Dickie, experimental, estranged the family cat and mislaid the tonic.

Later in the day his father called upon Miss Murfree.

His father's arrival, Dickie felt, was singularly inopportune. Earlier in the afternoon Dickie had accidentally dropped a bag of sour-balls in a two-fingered endeavor to convey one furtively from a bag between his knees to his mouth. Dickie's protuberant eyes had mutely deplored the fact that he was the focal point of so many directions. He had believed the floor quite flat. The landslide of sour-balls disillusioned him. To sit upon the apex of a board hill for most of a term without suspecting it is grievance enough without writing sour-balls a hundred times.

And to watch one's schoolmates work with stoical faces upon the captured fruit of one's savings! Verily Fate and her flail were busy! Dickie knew exactly how his false friends were evading detection. You kept your face stiff and studious and did all the work with your tongue, and save for a tense peculiarity of expression there was no special cause for pedagogic suspicion.

But why on earth, with all this to bear, one's parent should arrive immediately after the inscription of the sixty-seventh sour-ball was more than Dickie could fathom.

IT was of course of a piece with the annoying complications of the day that his father's first remark should have been one fraught with intense chagrin to his son.

Father said pleasantly that he was glad to meet Miss Murfree; for Dickie, in the bosom of the family, had expressed his intention of marrying her. In a wild moment, Dickie recalled with a frown, he had maritally committed himself; but a mental effort to divorce Miss Murfree from school surroundings had been futile. Any existence apart from desks and inkwells had proved inconceivable, and Dickie felt that for complete happiness in married maturity he must leave those excrescences behind him forever. Miss Murfree, he felt vaguely, likely went home to a schoolhousy home and slept in a sort of bed desk. Besides, she had petty hallucinations about the punitive value of inscriptional duplicates. A wife with such a notion of vengeance could not possibly remain popular with her husband. Dickie visioned his father writing sour-balls a hundred times under his mother's direction, and sniggered.

Miss Murfree expressed redundant regret for the sour-balls in a louder voice than was necessary. After that she went into low-voiced conference with Dickie's father, who seemed worried. Dickie, finding the inscription of a sixty-eighth sour-ball uninteresting after viewing the place for it from a great many angles, divided his attention between fearful muscular efforts with his ears to eavesdrop and intermittent interest in the tale of desperado.

The desperado's dilemmas, exciting as they were, did not parallel his own. The denouement, however, made his eyeballs choke in their sockets and his heart quake; for the desperado, after just such a painful period of slinking as his own, had given himself up to justice. It was a new and terrible thought, compelling in its sinister fascination.

"To be hung"" said Black Belcher with a hoarse, wild laugh of ringing bravery, "is easier than this grinding, gritting, horrible remorse!"

Was it? A frozen flood of dreadful indecision filled Dickie's veins. No! No! Impossible! For they hung you with a clothes line and buried you in whitewash!

Life, somebody insists, is a chain of chances. Dickie's father had depended upon the conference with Miss Murfree to clear up something of the mystery of Dickie. It was fruitless. He merely

learned again what he already knew,—that his son was complex. The tale of the desperado sparked the mine of mystery instead.

A night of sleepless torment nerved Dickie to heroics. He set out shakily at noon, his legs no more dependable than soft tin. Dickie marveled at their hypocritical appearance of efficiency. His voice, in an experimental crisis, failed him altogether, and he was glad he had not tried to say good-by to his mother. Voiceless and legless, he would have made a mess of it.

HAVING reached the end of the longest route he could devise, Dickie prowled around the final block a number of times in tortured preparation until, finding himself between a pair of green lamps he had been frantically seeking to avoid, he ran up the steps with a sob. A brass-buttoned man behind a desk felt that he had never seen a look of such terrible stoniness upon the face of anything alive. A green-apple deathbed might possibly so congeal a child's features: certainly nothing else.

"I," bayed the small boy hoarsely, "am Richard—Spencer!"

Helpless in face of the inferential sugfestion that the name was notorious, the deskman stared. "All right"" said he hastily. "I'm the desk officer, and this is the police station. What can I do for you, son?"

Dickie choked. He wondered if any sort of hasty operation could remove the conglomerate mass of words from his windpipe.

The words came suddenly all at once. "I want—I want—" he blurted, his small face working with emotion, "I wanta give myself up!"

"Stop making faces," advised the desk officer kindly, "and say it slow."

But Dickie couldn't. Functional dumbness had settled down upon him without warning. A policeman or two approached the desk and looked him over keenly.

"Lost kid?" said one.

"He's sick," said another. "Look at his face. He's swellin' up. Better call the chief."

The convalescence of Dickie's stricken vocal cords simply thickened the mystery.

"To be hung," wailed Dickie after Black Belcher, "is easier'n grindin'—"

It wasn't right, of course; but no one save Dickie himself knew it. His glance of mortified misery found a new pair of eyes, keen and kindly.

"Dear, dear!" said the old chief, who had grandchildren of his own—not quite so complicated psychologically perhaps, but fully as juvenile. "What in the world is all this?"

"He wants to be hung," said an officer.

It was meant to be jovial. Dickie misinterpreted, and unleashed a lusty howl.

The howl ushered in a storm of the wildest sobbing the old chief had ever heard. And seated upon the official knee, with his face buried in the official coat and one hand clinging convulsively to the nearest button, Dickie, in the fashion of Black Belcher" confessed in exhaustive detail.

AT 4 Crescent Terrace the Red Grainger had again appeared for demonstration. Dickie's mother opened the door.

"Mr. Spencer," she repeated—"Mr. Richard Spencer? You're sure it's Richard?"

The young man consulted a notebook.

"Mr. Richard Spencer," he assured her with a smile.

"Why, dear me," said Dickie's mother, "he's only a very little boy!"

The young man looked blank, laughed suddenly, and drew a letter from his pocket. "Well, really," he said" "that's very funny. The factory forwarded this, Mrs. Spencer, and we attributed some of its singularities to a—er—lack of type- writing experience; but—"

Mrs. Spencer took the letter with foreboding. "That's Dickie!" she said instantly. "He will write for things. Just a minute. Hulda! Hulda! Will you excuse me just a minute? I don't believe she hears the 'phone."

The young man waited, unaware of his own subtle relation to the 'phone call. Nor did he know that he was the dreaded monster in a terrible tale involving a lollypop, a typewriter, a stamp, a cake of

soap, a red automobile, Black Belcher, four officers, and a chief of police.

He did, however, hear Mrs. Spencer's horrified "Oh!" and her final "Yes, yes, thank you. Yes, indeed! I'll come just as quickly as I can. We've been wondering for days. Thank you. I'm so glad he's feeling better!"

The young man's pleasant brown eyes accepted Mrs. Spencer's agitation with charming frankness. "I beg your pardon," he apologized; "I couldn't help hearing. If you're going somewhere in hurry, I'd be awfully glad to take you there in the car."

"It's the police station!" said Dickie's mother.

Then she laughed, the mother-laughter that is tears and humor and tenderness all in one. "Dickie," she went on in curiously muffled tones, "has just given himself up to the police for obtaining a demonstration under false pretenses."

The young man collapsed.

"Dickie," said Dickie's mother, "has very intricate system of inductive reasoning."

DICKIE stood upon the steps of the police station, holding very tightly to the chief's hand, when the Red Grainger flamed in sight. Though Mother had telephoned preparation and reassurance, the Scarlet Terror awoke in his breast an instant instinct of flight. This the old chief nullified by carrying him out to the car, where there was a great deal more laughter than Dickie felt was consistent with the gravity of the situation. Moreover, though the young man at the wheel had the friendliest kind of eyes, Dickie met his overtures with formality. One cannot reconstruct conceptions at a glance. The biggest relief of all lay in the fact that Mother's eyes, bright with tearful twinkles, promised a thorough understanding; for once, of the typewriter and the stamp.

And we'll have that demonstration yet. You and I, Dickie, are going to have a great many rides together in this red dev—" the young man choked and hastily synonymed— "Satan. And here's your letter. You may just possibly not want it at large."

Dickie took the letter with dignity; his hand trembled. Later he frantically spread out the sheet and stared at the torturing postscript:

xtg%la:xgbsvu xSx*R3% RED/x~

The Best Paid Occupations for Women

By EDWARD MOTT WOOLLEY

A WELL equipped woman in these modern days can earn from a thousand dollars a year to ten thousand or more. A hundred callings are open to women in the higher walks of endeavor.

An almost unlimited field is the business world; and, to show that women can make good as well as men if they have reasonable aptitude and application, I am going to cite some typical instances, first, of women who either own or manage large business undertakings.

In Johnstown, New York, Mrs. Charles B. Knox faced a difficult situation when she took charge of a food-product business. She built it into a great and far-reaching enterprise.

Out in Des Moines, Iowa, Mrs. L. C. Rawson did something of the same kind, and specialized in the study of insurance. She became president of an insurance company. Both these women specialized strongly.

Mrs. Rosa Herrman was president of a large lumber concern in New York, and knew more about lumber than many men who had been in the business lifetime.

Likewise, Miss Alice M. Durkin went into the contracting business in New York, and made a specialty of schools and public buildings.

Mrs. Victor Grimwood, another New York woman, established a riding school because she loved horses.

"The sort of work doesn't matter," she told me, "if women stay on the job."

Women Have Invaded All Lines of Business

ELSIE DE WOLFE, whom you will remember as an actress, had a strong bent for furnishings and house beautifying, and she established an interior decorating business that has prospered. She has offices at home and abroad.

Miss Gertrude F. Gheen was in the employ of Miss De Wolfe, but quit to establish an office of her own in New York. She, too, has made good.

Then, there is a firm of commercial photographers in New York that has made a success, and both partners are women: Miss Frances Benjamin Johnston and Mrs. Mattie Edwards Hewitt. Miss Johnston was a photographer in Washington, and Mrs. Hewitt was in the same line in St. Louis. They joined forces in Washington, and then jumped to New York and into the midst of fierce competition, carrying out certain ideals they had.

In New York, too, is Mrs. Agnes K. M. Mulligan, doing a large real estate business.

In these women you have variety; and most of them are earning well up toward ten thousand dollars a year or more. But a study of their successes shows unusual nerve and mastery of detail.

Women as Bankers and in the Advertising Field

THERE are in the United States a number of women bank officials; and their salaries run from forty dollars a month up to two hundred. In Joplin, Missouri, one bank has for its vice-president Bessie Carlson, for its cashier Tillie M. Ade, and for its assistant cashier Blanche Jenkins. In Los Angeles, Ada Carr is assistant cashier of a bank; and in Diamondale, Michigan, Mrs. J. M. Corbin is a bank vice-president.

Banking seems to be a coming field for women.

Ella S. Leonard and Mrs. Caroline L. Overman are examples of women specializing in another wide field—advertising. They are with a New York agency and are concentrating on women's goods. In the advertising field women's salaries run from twenty-five dollars a week to two hundred.

Mrs. Crystal E. Benedict held an executive position with a prominent automobile company in New York, and Miss Jean E. Mohle is an automobile saleswoman. I am told that there are several women in the automobile world who get five thousand dollars a year. The business world also offers good opportunities to women who are specially trained to be private secretaries.

Miss Edna Burns holds such a position in an advertising office in the Metropolitan Tower, New York, and Miss Mary Johnson holds a similar position for a theatrical supply company in New York. While I am not authorized to state their salaries, I know women secretaries holding such positions as these who get three thousand and thirty-five hundred dollars a year.

But so much for business proper. Take librarians. Miss Belle Green, who has charge of the Morgan private library in New York, is said to receive ten thousand dollars a year. But this is exceptionally high. The salaries of heads of departments in the large libraries range from twelve hundred to twenty-five hundred dollars, while salaries in most secondary libraries are from a thousand to two thousand dollars.

Women College Professors and Scientists

COLLEGE professorships offer women fair opportunities, with salaries ranging up to five thousand dollars or more. Not long ago the Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston made inquiries among some of the larger colleges for women, in an attempt to find a woman with mathematical training to fill a position outside the colleges at eighteen hundred dollars a year. Florence Jackson, director of the Union, tells me: "I was told that the assistant professors were getting more than that." Even in a small college a woman professor of biology, for instance, commands fourteen hundred.

There are many distinguished women professors. Mary E. Woolley is president of Mount Holyoke College; Mary Whiton Calkins is professor of philosophy and psychology at Wellesley; Isabel Bevier is professor of household science at the University of Illinois; Mary Wilson Brownson is in the chair of modern European history at the Pennsylvania College for Women. I could name women professors of zoology, art, political economy—of almost anything.

An allied calling is that of scientist, which opens a field for trained women and pays up to several thousand dollars a year. Alice Hamilton of Chicago, bacteriologist, who has done extensive work for institutions and the government, is a notable example.

Government Positions

GOVERNMENT positions for women of the higher class are not very plentiful. I asked Charlotte C. Barnum, now of New Haven, but for years connected prominently with the United States Observatory and the Department of Agriculture, what chance an educated woman had with the government.

"The best openings are in the Department of Agriculture," she said, "for chemists, botanists, librarians, plant pathologists, investigators in nutrition and adulterations of food, organizers of girls' canning clubs, workers among farm women, and the like; and some of the best openings are in the Department of Labor. Beginners do best with expert stenography, starting where they can and seeking a transfer."

The last statistics show 1,457 women at Washington who received as much as twelve hundred dollars a year, nine who got two thousand, and two who were paid more than twenty-five hundred.

To Miss Marie C. Brehm, lecturer on temperance, suffrage, and other topics, who lives in Pittsburgh, I put the question: "Is it possible for a woman to earn a fair income on the lecture platform?"

She replied: "Yes, provided she is equipped for the work." She believes a woman should have a message to deliver, and a voice of sufficient power to carry that message. Miss Brehm began in a very modest way to speak in public, and afterward the Chautauqua platform provided her a living wage. Her work at that time commanded fifty dollars for a single lecture, seventy-five for two, and one hundred dollars for three lectures at the same meeting. Out of these fees she paid her own expenses. Since that time she has crossed the continent twenty-four times in her lecture tours, and has spoken abroad. The well equipped lecturer can earn several thousand dollars a year.

I asked Lucile Patterson, the New York illustrator, about art as a calling for women.

"It would seem," she answered, "that a woman can attain the greatest success only by commercializing the thing in which she is most interested."

Illustrators like Miss Patterson and May Wilson Preston get from seventy-five to a hundred and fifty dollars, and sometimes much more, for their covers. A cover may take half a day or several days. I should say that a hundred dollars a week is a common income earned by women artists in this class. Some of this money comes from commercial work.

Women Should Specialize

THEN, the miscellaneous fields for women are many, and the financial returns seem to depend always on the degree of specialization. Dr. Katherine M. H. Blackford had a salary of fifteen thousand dollars a year because she devoted herself to the art of selecting employees for large industrial concerns. Mrs. Louise Bethune of Buffalo, who died recently, was a draftsman, when she decided to go further. She studied architecture, and became the first woman architect in the United States. She practised with financial success for many years.

Miss Edith Julia Griswold of Hastingson-Hudson, New York, took up strange studies for a woman: civil and mechanical engineering and electricity. Afterward she opened an office in New York as a mechanical draftsman, and finally studied law and put her mechanical education at work by specializing in patent law. She became an expert in patent suits, and draws large fees.

I inquired of Mrs. Fannie Klinck, of Clarksville, Iowa, about the possibilities in farming for women. Mrs Klinck has made a notable success.

"If possible, a woman should select the work she is happy in doing," she answered. "For the woman with home ties I would suggest flowers. A very small plot will yield a large income if she can raise pedigreed pansy seed, and collect insects, seeds, and so on."

Altogether, there is plenty of profitable work for women if only they fit themselvess to do it.

Here is more of

The Girl of the Nutmeg Isle

Continued from page 8

he knows. We can not catch that bird with salt on the nose, as the English say; but the young chick we can.' And then he said, 'Thou, Hahn, when we get to Kronprinzhaven, fight thou like a right Prussian, and avenge the honor of Germany.' And they laughed, and talked together, so that I could not hear. But by and by I heard Hahn, and he said: 'No matter about the choice of weapons; to me it is all the same. Thou, wilt thou take the challenge to-night?' And some one else said he would."

She stopped a moment; she seemed out of breath.

"Well!" I said to myself, ramming my hands deep down into my pockets, "this is plummy!"

To Miss Ravenna I spoke with more formality. I told her that she was very kind indeed, and that I could not be sufficiently grateful to her; that I would tell Mr. Gore what she had told me, and act on his advice; and that I hoped she would not trouble herself in any way about the matter, but rest assured that everything would be all right.

She answered nothing at all to this, but gathered her thin skirts round her, and slipped past the donkey-engine again, supported by my hand. I don't think the support was indispensable, but Isola Ravenna did not seem to find it disagreeable. For all that, I rather liked the manner in which she drew away that silken, firm small hand of hers as soon as we were on the open deck again, and the quick, silent fashion of her bow and instant disappearance.

RED BOB had turned in, but he answered instantly to my knock, and I entered, feeling none too comfortable in face of the interview that I foresaw. It was clear that I had been "made a hare of" in the completest manner. I had answered readily to provocation that was meant to get me into trouble, and I had allowed Richter—who was assuredly some one of importance in the secret service—to suspect a hidden motive underlying the apparent object of our journey. There was only one course to pursue, and it was bitter in my mouth. I would have to tell Gore everything, and act by his advice.

I did tell him, first turning on the noisy electric fan to make sure that no one could hear me.

Gore, sitting up in his berth, with his long legs in their gay covering, and his thin, arched bare feet dangling out into empty air, looked at me for a moment without any expression at all. Then, loosening the neck of his pajama coat,—for the night was hot,—he remarked:

"We might as well have two beers."

I pressed the bell, and a steward popped up like a pantomime demon. While we waited for the beer neither of us spoke. As soon as the tall glass mugs, cloudy with coolness, had been handed in, Red Bob remarked, "Shut the door," and buried his face in his mug. I did the same, feeling that what was to be would be—hoping, anyhow, that my fun was not going to be curtailed.

Red Bob finished his beer in one slow draught, reached for a handkerchief, deliberately wiped his mustache, and said:

"I suppose you understand just what kind of a fool you are?"

"Does that matter?" I said.

"Devil a bit," said Red Bob. "The thing is, what are we going to do? They have caught you in a trap that they knew was too plain for this old fox. It may stop our job. If the thing's put up, as it seems, they mightn't even play fair. They know I need a companion or I wouldn't have brought one. Yes, they can hang me up nicely—especially as you played a game with Richter that he knows better than you do. Well! These are my orders, young Paul, and you've got to mind them. You'll have to fight."

"I hope so," I cut in.

"But you're not on any account, or for any dashed piece of conceit, to kill, wound, or touch young Hahn. Do you understand? If he kills or wings you—well, that can't be helped: you've brought it on yourself. But if you even damage him, you can rely on it you will see the inside of the jail at Frederick Wilhelmshaven, and won't get out in a hurry. And I shall have to hang about and bother over you. And the fat will be in the fire generally. Now you have your orders. Off to bed with you."

He snapped off the light and lay down. I heard him breathing long and quietly before I was out of the cabin.

KRONPRINZHAVEN lies some way beyond the German-Dutch boundary of New Guinea. We came up to it in the very early morning, before the sun had gathered warmth, and while the shadows on the deck of the Afzelia were still powdered with dew as fine and sparkling as ground glass.

Wolff had made a formal call on the evening before on behalf of Hahn, and had arranged the details with Gore—who, of course, acted as my second. We were to use pistols at twenty paces. Hahn was rather anxious for rapiers, and I would not have been sorry to oblige him; but Gore had put me through ten minutes of fencing earlier in the evening, and delivered it as his opinion that I was safer with the pistol.

We went ashore in the ship's boat, Red Bob, Hahn, Wolff, and myself, and the mysterious Richter, who declared himself qualified as a doctor, in case we should need the services of one. The dueling pistols—Richter lent them—were hidden in the folds of a mackintosh. I can't remember much about that landing. The sun-beaten splendor, the cruel, feverish beauty of the spot, may have touched my senses at the moment—I do not know. I have only the recollection of setting foot on a beach that was white and heavy, and walking across it into a windy coolness of palms; of a dark forest after. Then the track opened out, and there was a space of empty meadow-land, and Wolff was chattering joyously about a duel he had seen in Pomerania, where "the Captain his brains all outrushing upon the green grass spilled."

I knew we had come to the place when I saw this open, sunny bit of land, walled in by the immense forest standing round about. I threw a look at Hahn, and decided, not without disappointment, that he was perfectly cool. In fact, everybody was except Wolff, and he was simply bubbling over with delight.

GORE and Wolff tossed for position, and Hahn won. I had the sun in my eyes, but that didn't matter much, because it was still low. I fixed my eyes on Hahn's pink face, with the golden mustache and the outstanding heavy ears, like handles to his head. I knew what I was going to do, and knew I should do it.

The handkerchief fell, and a harsh German voice cried: "Feuer!"

At the same moment something hit me hard on the forehead, and I staggered.

"Did I do it?" I shouted out, straightening up and trying hard to see—one eye was oddly obscured. I was afraid I might be badly hit and going to die. And if I died I shouldn't know if I had done what I wanted to do.

"Confound you all!" I cried, losing my temper as the blood—I knew it was blood now—poured down, and I began to get sick and giddy. "Can't any of you tell me—did I clip his right ear?"

"Sit down," said Richter's voice; and I sat on the grass.

"I'm not hurt," I said. "Let me have another go. I tell you, I can clip his ear like a sheep, and I want to do it."

"Sit still, thou young fire-eater, while I sew up that iron head of thine," said Richter, with the suspicion of a laugh in his hard voice. "Yes, truly, thou bast clipped his ear. A moment, now—"

He lifted the piece of scalp that had been shot loose and was hanging over my eye, and I saw Hahn a few yards away, holding a handkerchief to his ear.

"Hooray!" I cried, though weakly. "Just the tip, wasn't it?"

"Even so," answered Hahn, looking at me with an odd mixture of expressions.

"What about another go?" I asked anxiously, as soon as Richter's stitchery was finished. "I want to clip the other." "Yes," said Hahn, showing his teeth unpleasantly. "I should like to give him the chance."

"I object," said Red Bob, coming forward. "Herr Wolff, do you consider that honor is satisfied?"

Wolff did not look as if he did, but a glance from Richter tamed him.

"Yes, yes," he said discontentedly. "The insult to Germany and to her colonies without doubt now out is wiped."

I got up from my seat and went over to Hahn, who was standing in the full sunlight (for the rising rays were just now over the forest), looking, with his golden hair and martial bearing, like a splendid, sulky young war-god.

"Shake!" I said. He put his hand into mine; and I saw, as he let his handkerchief fall, that the tip of the right ear was indeed shot neatly off.

"I could have done the other," I said, with some regret. And, to my surprise, they all burst out laughing.

"Come," said Richter, quite good-humoredly. "It is time for the coffee for one. Mr. Corbet, you shoot straight—for an Englishman."

"Sorry I can't say the same for you," I said, looking him fairly in the eyes. I think he understood, but it took more than the discovery of one small plot to unnerve Justus Richter.

"Ah," he said pleasantly, "you mean Hahn." (I didn't.) "But I think he has shot quite near enough for you. Do you like to see the native village before we will return to the ship? I know all this coast, and I can conduct you with safety."

I said I would like it, and we left the field of battle in a body, all very cheerful, as I suppose people generally are after a duel in which no one has been killed and there has been a little bloodshed, just to give the event a flavor.

Gore was swinging along in front, just about to enter the forest, his hat tossed back on his head, his big frame slightly bent forward to hear what Richter was saying, when, all of a sudden, he straightened himself up, east a glance at the path ahead" and bolted down a side path.

I ALONE of the party guessed what had happened. I had heard a woman's voice in the distance, asking the way of a native, who evidently did not understand her, and my foreseeing soul cried out, "Miss Siddis!"

To save my employer's face, however, I made haste to explain that he had been taken suddenly ill; that I had seen these odd fits before, and that he would without doubt be all right in half an hour; also, that he liked to be left alone when thus affected. Wolff and Hahn accepted the explanation. Richter did not. He looked me through with those chill Baltic eyes, and asked himself, apparently, why I was taking the trouble to lie.

In another minute a woman's figure burst out of the forest, running as hard as it could—which was not very hard—on small flat feet. She was dressed in an untidy medley of muslins, with a hat over one eye, and her face was redder than I should have thought the face of any mortal being not stricken with apoplexy could be—and, as she went, bobbing her head with every call, like a cuckoo in a cuckoo-clock:

"Mr. Gore! Mr. Corbet! Stop!"

Hahn, with the reddened handkerchief twisted about his ear, Wolff carrying the

---

pistols, stood still in their tracks and stared, a wide grin spreading itself over their countenances. But Richter made a quick, light step over to Miss Siddis, caught her by the arm, and almost shook her.

"Have you brought Frau Schultz on this fool's errand—you who are supposed to look after her?" he said.

The mysterious Frau Schultz again! I thought that nothing could have added to my astonishment at her name being brought into the business of the duel; but Richter's next words did it.

"This is your doing!" he said to me, his usual icy caution melting away in the heat of some incomprehensible anger. "It is you who have told Frau Schultz, and she and this fool have—"

HE broke off short and looked about him. It was plain now that Miss Siddis was alone.

She, not minded to be left out of the conversation, began her cuckoo-clock exclaiming again:

Stop the duel—I insist upon it. Stop it! The life of Mr. Vincent Gore must not be— Stop the duel! Mr. Corbet, how can you stand by and— Stop the duel!"

She really seemed to be out of her mind for the moment. I had no doubt that she had run the whole way from the shore, repeating her clockwork cry all the time. Some one on board must have let it out to her after we had gone; and she had very nearly been in time to run screaming into the glade at the worst possible minute.

"See, you foolish woman!" said Richter. "There is nothing to make a fuss about. See! There is no one hurt; Mr. Gore was not fighting; it was this youngling. He has a scratch, and so has the other; that is all."

At this she seemed to come to herself.

"But where is Mr. Gore?" she asked.

"He is gone a walk. Where is Frau Schultz?" asked Richter sternly.

I began to wonder if Frau Schultz were a criminal being taken back to German Guinea for trial and imprisonment. Certainly I had never set eyes on her yet, though we were several days out from Banda. Miss Siddis and Miss Ravenna I had seen; also Frau Baumgartener—the lady whose fat gray back and scraped up hair I had noticed on the day of sailing. But of the mysterious Frau Schultz I had not had a glimpse. Miss Siddis' answer only added to my perplexity.

"Where should she be but on the deck, where she always is?" was her reply.

"She is there even too much," said Richter. "She walks about too much at night. See, then, Schultz is my very good friend, and I warn you that I will look after his interests."

"Oh, but, Herr Richter—" began Miss Siddis in her most carneying tone.

Richter did not wait to hear her. Conscious, no doubt, of having betrayed himself in some way, he walked on ahead, rapidly leaving the party behind.

We strolled to the shore together, Hahn, Wolff, the still panting Miss Siddis, and I. Not much was said till the beach shone out before us, white and glaring in the seven o'clock sun. Then Hahn, who had been sulking all the way, turned to me and held out his hand.

"You shoot well, and you are a brave youngster," he said. "I am your friend. No, Wolff, you need not look at me. From this day I am the friend of Paul Corbet, and any man may know it who likes."

He pronounced my Christian name to make it rhyme with "Howl"; but nevertheless I felt gratified.

RICHTER was waiting in the launch for the rest of us, and we all went over to the ship together. Miss Siddis had found her tongue again, and her prattle nearly maddened me. What a pity that Mr. Corbet should have been hurt—and Mr. Hahn. Now, she was only a poor little woman, but if we would let her just tell us how wrong and foolish—

At this point Richter looked up from the bottom boards of the boat and remarked:

"Fräulein Siddis, these affairs of honor have nothing to do with women. Hold your tongue. You understand me?

Miss Siddis, taken in full flow, stopped, blinked, and swallowed.

"You are so natural and simple, you Prussians—so strong!" she murmured, honey in her tones and something very like hate in her small gray eyes. "yes, Herr Richter, if you wish it, I will keep silence. A simple little woman like me—what does she know, after all, when there are men older and wiser than herself to decide.

"Exactly," said Richter.

Nothing more was said till we reached the ship. An accommodation ladder was set slanting down her side, and we climbed up one by one.

To the smart, starched officer who stood at the head of the steps Richter said:

"We have met with a little accident ashore. A tree fell in the forest; it has injured Herr Hahn's ear, and the forehead of Herr Corbet. I myself have given first aid; there will be no need of the doctor."

"So," said the officer, with an inexpressive face.

We filed through the companionway just as the first breakfast bell began to ring, and I went to my cabin with my head feeling like a turbine that is just beginning to go round and round under the pressure of the steam.

Doubtless the injury I had received had something to do with this, but still more had a sight that flashed upon my eyes just as we were ascending the ship's tall side—Isola Ravenna's face, framed in a porthole, white as the paint of the ship, wide-eyed, and with the under lip drooped as lips only droop in terror or dismay. Her hands, clutching the brazen rim of tee port, were blanched with the closeness of the grip. When she saw me pass, chatting with Hahn, a cigarette in my mouth, the terror on her face dissolved as snow dissolves beneath a thawing wind. Her back into the dusk of her cabin, thinking, no doubt, that nobody had seen her.

I fancied Richter had, for he cast a curious glance at me as we reached the grating, and then threw a rapid look down the ship's side. When we got on board, he went off at once down the alleyway. He had his back to me, but I could see that he was twisting his mustache violently with both hands, and I fancied, somehow, that something had occurred to annoy him.

I DON'T know when Red Bob came on board. We sailed very shortly. He did not appear till we were well out at sea, and the ship was beginning her long, steady roll once more.

Sitting together in our old retreat right up in the nose of the ship, we had a short talk over the events of the morning.

"You did the best thing, in the circumstances," he allowed somewhat grudgingly, looking, not at me, but at the illimitable, sailless sea that stretched out on our port beam—a sea scarce changed, in its Schouten and Lemaire sailed over it. "It was a put-up job from beginning to end, and not a nice one. They couldn't have known you were handy with weapons that a young Englishman generally knows nothing about. I don't quite get the whole reason , somehow. It's true that your loss would have embarrassed me—but that could have been worked otherwise. Almost seems like a grudge against you. But that's not likely."

"No," I agreed.

Then, remembering the incomprehensible things that Richter had said to me when Miss Siddis invaded the scene of the duel, I repeated his words as nearly as I could remember them.

"I can't make head or tail of him and his Frau Schultz," I said.

Gore said nothing; you would have thought he was looking on the far horizon for the ships that never were there.

"I'm glad you told me," he said by and by. "It'll straighten out. Things do."

"I—I said you were ill," I ventured. "when you ran off like that. Was I right?"

Red Bob's hard face broke up into a mass of leathery creases.

"Right, right!" he said, his eyes twinkling. "I was. Young Paul, to tell you the truth about that dashed Siddis woman, I ran because I was morally and physically certain she'd have her arms round my neck in two seconds if I didn't. It's the way they try to save your life,—God knows why!—especially in shipwrecks or fires, or at any time when you want your hands free and your head cool. And she was out to save mine. You couldn't have stopped her with a club. So—I ran, as many a braver man than myself has done. Give me a match."

He ducked down beneath the bulwark to light his cigar—for the wind was blowing strong from those seas where no man sailed—and came up again, puffing.

"Pick no more quarrels, and let no more be fastened on you," he said in a tone of authority. "And don't flirt too much with that pretty girl from Banda; I smell trouble there, and we've had enough already. In short, if it's in the nature of a young rip like yourself to keep out of mischief generally, do it."

He swung off the bulwark.

"Do it!" he said, with the red flash showing up for an instant in his eye; and was gone.

To be continued next week

The Only Terrapin Farm in the World

MR. ALEXANDER M. BARBEE, of Isle of Hope, Georgia, enjoys the distinction of being the proprietor of the only terrapin farm in the world. He has successfully solved the heretofore impossible problem of terrapin propagation, and claims that by his method he can actually rear more young terrapins than can the females themselves, because of the protection he affords the eggs and young from the natural predatory enemies of the turtle family. He sells terrapin regularly to the hotels and restaurants in all the larger cities.

Unless experts are mistaken, Mr. Barbee's unique enterprise will prevent the threatened extinction of the terrapin. Once considered a nuisance along the Chesapeake Bay, they have disappeared so rapidly within the last few years that to-day the genuine article, of suitable size and sex for the market, commands a price of thirty-six dollars a dozen.

Where Terrapin Eggs Are Found

MR. BARBEE has disproved the generally prevailing belief that the trouble with breeding terrapins lies in hatching out the eggs and rearing the young. The insuperable difficulty, he says, is to get the eggs. The female terrapin buries her eight or ten eggs in the sand for the sun to hatch, but leaves no distinguishing mark to show where they are located. When kept in captivity, the eggs are laid and hidden in the sand, as in the natural habitat; but they are almost invariably eaten by the indiscriminate parents or spoiled by the water which several times a week must be let in to flood the pens where the terrapins are confined.

A Lucky Accident

THE proper way to secure and preserve the eggs came to Mr. Barbee by a lucky accident. One night he left a pile of sand in one of the pens, instead of raking it off smooth, as had been his custom. The next morning he discovered a score

of fighting for places on the sand-pile. Curious to know what they were after, he drove them away and ran his hand down into the pile, where he found a perfect gold mine of eggs. Then the secret was out, and he wondered why he hadn't thought of it before—the instinct for the females to lay their eggs safely above the tide level.

Ever since that day he has been heaping up sand-piles, each one about the size of an inverted waste-basket, and reaping the harvest.

Incubator Babies

TO hatch the eggs Mr. Barbee employs incubators, which are really nothing but shallow boxes filled with screened sand. The eggs are packed in layers, with an inch or so of sand between the layers, and each egg separated from its neighbors. Once a week they are sprinkled with sea water, and in ninety days they hatch out. No artificial heat is required, since on the Georgia coast the warmth of the sand is sufficient, even in winter, to incubate the eggs.

When the young terrapins are hatched out, they are placed first in larger boxes of sand with room enough for exercise, and later in pens, like their parents. These pens are underlaid with a floor of wood to prevent the creatures from escaping by burrowing.

Caring for the Infant Terrapins

REARING the baby terrapins is simple enough. In hot weather they are fed three times a week; but from October to April not at all. Their food consists of lettuce, celery, cabbages, and other vegetables, varied by shrimps and fish cut up and soaked in sea water, which floods the pens on feeding days.

Fresh water is also turned in three times a week, not only for drinking, but for cleansing the pens. The mortality among the terrapins is immeasurably less than in their natural habitat, just as it is among deer, quail, and any other game protected in preserves from men and beasts they prey.

Speeding Up the Plow

FOURTEEN acres per hour is the new plowing record just established on the Purdue University Farm. Not long ago it would have taken fifty men and one hundred and fifty horses to accomplish this result; but this record was made by one machine and four men.

The machine pulled fifty plow bottoms and cut a strip fifty-eight feet four inches wide, plowing the ground at the rate of an acre every four minutes and fifteen seconds.

It required twenty-two gallons of fuel (a low grade of kerosene distillate) every hour to operate the engines, so that they actual cost of fuel was estimated as being 6 1/2 cents per acre. The experiment proved very economical both as to the cost of fuel and labor.

Mechanical plows may be used to do work that it would be impossible to do with the ordinary horse-drawn plow. They work successfully in the toughest kind of soil, or even where the ground is frozen and covered with snow. The tractors that have taken the place of houses pull not only plows but smoothing harrows as well, making it possible for the farmer to do in one operation what it formerly took two or three trips over the ground to accomplish.

These Girls Work a Mining Claim

TWO Western girls, Grace Carmalt and Susie Norwood, of Baker, Oregon, have proved that it doesn't take a man to work a mining claim or to run a stamp-mill; for they are doing both of these things every day, with a little assistance from a couple of men employees.

When the claim came into the possession of the two young women a few years ago through the death of Miss Norwood's father, it was simply a good "prospect." A horizontal shaft had been started in the side of a mountain about twelve miles from Baker, but the pay ore was still a long way back, and no preparations had been made for handling the output.

As both Miss Norwood and Miss Carmalt had often been in the shaft when Miss Norwood's father was working, they were thoroughly familiar with the methods used in following veins, in walling up the tunnels with timbers, and in the use of picks and blasting powder. They decided that they would work the claim themselves.

A building to house a large stamp machine for crushing the ore was the first thing to which they turned their attention, after they had located themselves in a little log cabin near the mine.

Then, after a track for the ore-cars had been laid from the mine to the mill, the real job of working the claim was begun.

There is now a mile of tunnels running in various directions from the main shaft, and in these the young women work every day, dressed in miner's overalls and with lighted candles in their caps, confident that the rich veins of ore which they know lie somewhere in the mountainside will eventually be found.

Meanwhile their life in the mountains is a joyous one, varied occasional by a week-end trip to Baker.

He Plays Ball Between Sermons

HIS name is Allen A. Stockdale. So it is written on the black-and-gold tablet outside his church. The baseball men, though, call him plain Stockdale; and there is something in the brevity of the name that is peculiarly appropriate to the personality of the man who, though not yet forty, is at the head of a large city parish, and who, though a clergyman, is an avowed "fan" and baseball player.

A clergyman who is a Y. M. C. A. baseball pitcher and who occasionally pitches for the practice games of the National League is a little unusual.

Went to College with Ten Dollars

STOCKDALE believes in hard work to put your brain in shipshape order. That is why he had the courage to start for Taylor University in Indiana with ten dollars in his pocket. Four years later, when he was graduated, he owed just ten dollars and had ten dollars in his pocket with which to pay it. The man to whom he owed it told him to keep it until he got on his feet.

Stockdale decided that the preacher's job would about suit him. He didn't have a seminary education but there was a church in Indiana that wanted a preacher. It paid $600 a year: Stockdale got the job.

"I figured," says he, "that if one could live on $600 a year, two could live a great deal better."

So he and Ella Stockdale lived for two years on the salary that the church paid. Now Stockdale is getting nearer $6,000.

Stockdale wanted a Reverend before his name, so he went to Boston University. His wife and baby stayed back in Indiana. He got odd jobs to do on Sundays, but the collections where he preached ran small. But he didn't grow discouraged;

he continued to make a noise, and finally a church in Truro, Massachusetts, engaged him to preach $400 worth a year. Stockdale wired for his wife and boy. Not many years after finishing his theological education, he became minister of one of the largest churches in Boston.

The Ball-Players' Friend

AND the baseball men? They come in droves. Some of Stockdale's most valued friendships are among the men of the National League. Now and again communications from them reach his study. He has pictures of the men, of their wives and babies. And sometimes the babies are named Allen.

"If you'll wait," he sometimes says in his pulpit,—"after to-night's service, any young man that's lonesome and wants company, I'll be very glad to have you join me in a walk in the country."

It is not at all unusual on a Sunday night to see anywhere from twenty to fifty young men tramping off with Stockdale.

Keeping in Trim

HE believes in keeping in trim for his job. When he is tired he writes verse or reads Whitcomb Riley or plays one of several musical instruments. When he is restless he gets a horse and rides for hours. For genuine pleasure, and as a panacea for all ills, however, he plays baseball. For some years he has been pitcher for the Boston Y. M. C. A. team. His boy is big enough now to go with him to the games, and they frequently travel to New York or Philadelphia to see a specially big game.

Stockdale is now in Toledo, where he has assumed the duties of one of the largest parishes of that city. Not least among his activities are his baseball interests.