Xerxes Also Had a Very Rich Country Behind Him: But He Got Badly Whipped

THE newspapers are printing figures to show how many more billions in resources this country has than most of the other countries put together.

I wish they would stop.

Such figures are a natural source of pride: but we have entered all of our wars on a wave of the kind of pride that goeth before a fall. And I should like to see this war an exception to our rule.

It is a time for intelligent pessimism, for the kind of far-sighted vision that England did not develop until she had been at war for a whole year.

By our entry into the war we have won the joyful acclaim of Great Britain and France and Italy and Russia and Japan: we, who a few months ago had no friend in the world, suddenly find ourselves popular again. And we like it, of course.

But as our preparations for active service drag along—as drag they always do under a democracy—we are going to be criticized by our allies, just as England has been criticized by her allies. It is going to take the utmost patience and hard work and statesmanship to hold this big, unwieldy alliance together until the war is won.

We ought to enter the fight as if we were expecting to have to bear the brunt of it alone.

We ought so to gird ourselves that if Russia were to make a separate peace, or if Mexico were to flare up, or even if England were to be weakened by the submarine, we should still be prepared to see the thing through.

Never was war fought in such haphazard fashion as our American Revolution.

Men were enlisted for three months or nine months or a year. They fought a little while, and went home at critical moments in the operations.

In the whole seven years no fewer than 393,858 men were enlisted in the Continental Army, to fight a British force of less than 150,000.

Yet at Valley Forge Washington could muster only between 10,000 and 15,000: his letters are a constant stream of discouraged complaint because of the inefficiency that rendered his efforts futile. Only two operations in the whole war were of real military advantage to us, and the last and largest of these would have been utterly impossible without the help of the French troops and fleet.

The War of 1812 culminated in the Battle of Bladensburg, where 1500 British regulars defeated four times their number of American troops.

So sure were President Madison and Secretary Monroe of the outcome of the battle that they prepared a big banquet for the victorious officers, and then rode out to see the victory. But it was the British officers that night who ate the dinner; and the next day they burned the capital.

Volunteers for the Civil War were called for a period of ninety days. It was to be a three months' holiday, with gold braid and glory for all, and Thanksgiving dinner at home with the folks.

And it dragged along for four years, and cost thousands of lives that might have been saved had it been entered into as a life-and-death struggle at the start.

We hope that Germany will crack wide open within a few months. We hope that it will all be over before another spring. We hope that the mere contemplation of our vast resources will so discourage the enemy that it will give up in despair.

We shall do wisely if we put these hopes resolutely away. We have entered every other war expecting the best: we shall do well to enter this prepared for the worst.

"God takes care of the United States," President Taft was fond of saying.

We believe that to be true.

And our wars have been fought as if we expected Him to open the Atlantic Ocean and swallow our enemies, as He once opened the Red Sea and engulfed the Egyptians.

War is life lived at its tensest.

And, as in every other activity of life, nothing wins but dogged endurance and work—work—work.

NEW WARS FOR OLD

Painted for Every Week by Frank Tenney Johnson

THE Montana Sioux, savagely fighting in defense of their homes, wiped out the invading Custer and his thousand soldiers by the simple expedient of forcing them into a pocket of the Black Hills and killing them, one by one, in hand-to-hand conflict. For which good deed Mesdames Squaw proclaimed them some fighters. But that was in 1876, when war was still child's play. Present-day war is carried on by artillery fire directed by wireless from aeroplane scouts.

Four types of aircraft are used by the Allies: reconnaissance aeroplanes of moderate power and reasonable armament, which carry a quantity of fuel, two passengers, and a photographing outfit; small high-powered single-seaters, with two hours' fuel and machine-guns intended to destroy enemy craft of the first type; small, fast single-seaters equipped with wireless to report where shells fall and how much damage they are doing; and big, slow machines built to carry great loads of bombs to be dropped upon railroad trains, food-supply stations, munitions factories, and among civilian population generally.

A French flier says: "An aerial duel is a terrific adventure," and adds that every war pilot ought to have a change of three machines, and three months' rest for every three months of the nerve-racking service.

MORGAN'S MEN

By ALBERT W. ATWOOD

JUST as young lawyers think of the United States Supreme Court as the ultimate goal of their ambitions, so young bankers and financiers look up to the firm of J. P. Morgan & Company as the last word, the magic circle, the house of peers, of national and international finance. A partner's desk. in the cold, gray, massive fortress that pokes its nose out into Wall Street means a share in vast profits and entrance into the inner sanctum of world finance. It is Wall Street's patent of nobility.

J. P. Morgan is commander-in-chief of an unusually large organization of super-trained and experienced financiers. There are a round dozen of them, about half of whom are in New York, and the others in Philadelphia, London, and Paris. For more than half a century the two J. P. Morgans, father and son, have headed the most powerful organization of its kind in this country—and, since the war, in the world. Of what stuff Morgan picks his men, and why, has always been of the keenest interest to the business world. The selection of a new partner is an event. Not only is it an event to the man himself, but in Wall Street it means the almost formal recognition of a new captain, a new genius of finance.

Wall Street a Hotbed of Gossip

WALL STREET is a hotbed of gossip and rumor of every description, but only once did it turn out a rumor of a Morgan partnership being declined. The man in question was, and is, president of one of the greatest banks in the country, and he preferred to keep his extremely important job. Rarely, however, does a man need to be tapped twice. He accepts at once. It is said that a good many years ago a certain handsome, able, sharp-eyed young man happened to be standing beside one of the old mahogany desks in Morgan's office.

"How would you like that desk?" asked Morgan abruptly.

"Why, I'd like it, Mr. Morgan—" replied the rather puzzled and confused young man.

"It's yours," said the laconic banker, leaving the room.

There is no rank or official status among Morgan's men. They are all partners. But there are always some who are, to a certain extent, senior partners. The firm has had a succession of strong men who, without any title or rank, came to be recognized outside as a sort of chief-of-staff or executive officer, or, as they say in some places, managing partner. In the time of J. P. Morgan the elder there was J. Hood Wright, and perhaps Charles Coster, and then George W. Perkins. Finally came Henry P. Davison, who still holds this place, if any one does. Usually this chief-of-staff and the commander-in-chief, J. P. Morgan, have modified, reinforced, and supplemented each other. This is especially true of the present Morgan and his partner, Davison.

But the organization is so large now, and there are so many men of extraordinary experience in it, that no one can say who are the more important. While, all are specialists, yet at many points the partners work in common. Every morning about eleven o'clock the entire firm meets in conference. New partners who have just taken their seats at the back of the class, so to speak, like Thomas Cochran, a very recent addition, and who must work their way forward toward the throne, both literally as regards the location of their desks in the main banking room and their private offices on the floor above, as well as figuratively, take part in the conference.

The Present Head of Morgan's

THE present J. Pierpont Morgan is a big man, who conveys the impression of perfect physical and mental health. His vigor of step, erect carriage, and pose of head are in keeping with a straight, penetrating glance and absolutely simple, direct, and unaffected manners. He lives a quiet, dignified life, with few interests outside his family and business. In this respect he is unlike his father, but he is like his father in having plenty of power. He shuns publicity in every form.

Morgan is the type of a good, sound, working business man. He has few theoretical interests, and professes modest ignorance of such things as social and economic reform. But he has an international outlook, and knows thoroughly the intricate business of foreign exchange and foreign securities. He is a man of deeds and very few words, of the type that is the big, quiet, athletic hero as a college boy, but would rather die than make an after-dinner speech or write a signed article for a magazine. Despite a rather careless, easy manner and complete freedom from self-consciousness, there is always a note of authority about his few simple remarks, and his rugged character is perhaps the most valuable single contribution that any one makes to the firm of Morgan.

Henry P. Davison, whose desk is next to Morgan's, is a keen, hard-surfaced business man, as his pictures show him. He is stockily knit

"I promise to pay to the order of Almighty God the sum of $1000 when presented by Charles Freeman. Penalty if forfeited—death."

"You will have to be identified," said Davison.

"No, I won't," replied the lunatic, as he shoved a loaded revolver toward the young teller's face. "I want the money to found a cure for consumptives. Hurry up, or suffer the consequences."

"How do you want the money, in dimes?" asked Davison—after having read the check in a loud voice, to attract attention.

Then, while he slowly counted out the money, the house detective, attracted by the unusual noise, seized the madman from behind.

But Davison has gracious manners, and makes many friends, even though he is firm, decisive, and quick acting. Back of his aggressive self-confidence and the almost steel-like mechanism of him, there is intelligence, wide reading, vision, imagination, and a careful study of economic, political, and international conditions. Like Mr. Morgan, he is singularly free from affectation. If he has something to say he says it plainly, straight from the shoulder, with no beating about the bush.

Outside of business, Davison is full of a spirit of play and humor. He is generous and intensely loyal to his friends, a trait for which all Wall Street knows him. But his loyalty is based on the merit system, in that promotion and preferment never go to friends unless they have ability. Davison is probably the most powerful patron that a young and aspiring business man could have. He has pushed more young men to positions of prominence in finance than any other man in America. No one's friendship is more valuable financially, or perhaps as valuable, as his. Take six young men with equal ability, and the one who gets ahead is the one who knows Davison; but he doesn't get ahead at all unless he has "the goods."

Davison worked his way up through the banking business, his first salary being $300 a year. He was offered a partnership in Morgan's because he, showed great knowledge of local banking conditions in the panic of 1907, when the elder Morgan became financial dictator. The old man never liked hesitating people—which fact accounts for several of his partners.

Lamont Was a Newspaper Reporter

THOMAS W. LAMONT, next in chronological order of the more widely known Morgan men, is a very different type. He started as a newspaper reporter after a course at Harvard, whereas Davison began as a bank clerk. He has the rather more human and mellow outlook upon life that characterizes newspaper trained men in distinction to those trained in business. When he was a reporter he became interested in a small company that distributed food products. It was in the panic of 1893; and Lamont, along with a Harvard classmate, had a desperate time raising money. But the two young men curtailed waste in every department, and put life and energy into the little company. Lamont was really an efficiency engineer before such a creature had been discovered.

About the same time, Lamont and his classmate tried to buy another small food distributing company. They needed $25,000, and raked the town for it. About $20,000 was pledged, but they could not get the other $5000. If they had succeeded they would have made millions. But finally Lamont was able to get the American selling rights for a famous European chocolate, and from that time on he prospered. He embarked upon a selling campaign for this chocolate that made it famous from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Other articles were merchandised by him with the same degree of success, and it was his rapid upward movement in this field that led to an invitation to enter the banking business.

Lamont has an amazingly wide variety of educational and philanthropic interests. He is an authority on railroad finance, but his particular forte is negotiation. His tact, moderation, and self-control make him an ideal man for conducting big negotiations.

Then there is William H. Porter, the commercial banker of the concern. He was president of the Chemical National Bank, the richest for its size in New York, when he was invited to enter Morgan's. He carries much of the burden of the daily business of the office. Morgan's, besides its business of foreign exchange,—"underwriting" huge bond issues, buying supplies for the Allies, and acting generally for the Allies, as the Rothschilds used to act for European nations,—has a huge regular banking business, something like $80,000,000 of deposits. It also owns stock in many banks.

Porter is the typical American banker rather than the international

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The "Different" Partner

EDWARD R. STETTINIUS is different from all the others. He is the one who actually knows how to run corporations himself, and has done it. Essentially he is not a banker at all. His father was president of one of the first insurance companies in the middle West, in St. Louis. The son began as a broker, but became interested in a harvester company, later was president of a large boiler company, and then became head of the Diamond Match Company. He took these two concerns when they were nearly down and out, and built them up to success.

Stettinius was taken into Morgan's when the firm began to organize the business of buying supplies for the Allies. This amounted to more than $100,000,000 a month; in one class of supplies alone to more than a million dollars a day. No one knows more about manufacturing plants in this country than Stettinius.

Stettinius is a "strong man" without rigidity or severity. He can play as hard as he can work. He loves children,—he has four of his own,—and children love him. One summer, while on a yachting trip, he landed in a little town, and soon was talking to several newsboys. Almost before the boys knew what had happened, he had bought out the nearest fruit-stand as a treat for them. It was no carefully planned charity with large headlines in the local paper, but merely his way of showing his fondness for boys wherever he met them.

The youngest partners are Dwight W. Morrow and Thomas Cochran—the last being the "baby" of the firm. Morrow and Charles Steele, an older man who was inactive for several years on account of ill health, but who now is able to resume many of his duties, are the legal partners.

Like all of Morgan's men, Morrow believes in getting things done. He was a member of a commission appointed on January 22 of this year by the Governor of New Jersey to investigate the scandals of the Trenton prison. On February 5, two weeks after the commission was appointed, it made its report.

"I'm going to get quick action," said Morrow when he was appointed; and he did. The commission sat one day from 10 A. M. to 10 P. M.

Morrow is noted in the financial world for his powers of mental concentration, a highly desirable quality for one who has to work out intricate and difficult legal- financial problems. When his mind is concentrated on any given problem he forgets everything and everybody else in the world. He works as if in a trance.

The Youngest Member

THOMAS COCHRAN, now at the foot of the class, has an extraordinary history of pluck. His father was rich, but lost his fortune when "Tom" was a student at Yale. The young man worked his way through his last year, and, while in no sense obligated, he assumed all the father's debts. These amounted to a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and in the course of some year's Cochran actually paid them off.

Most young men would consider such a handicap an insuperable obstacle to success. Cochran tried all sorts of occupations. At first he tutored boys for Yale. Then he entered the hardware business in St. Paul, the railroad business in Albany, and the real estate business in New York. As in the case of nearly all successful men, a certain small element of luck played its part, in that he was thrown in contact with Mr. Davison, just as Davison, in his turn, was thrown in contact with the elder Morgan. Davison put Cochran in as an officer of a new trust company he was forming, and. Cochran's rise was rapid.

Every one of Morgan's partners had luck on their side, in the sense that they became acquainted with capitalists who could help them. But, for that matter, so have thousands of other business men who have not scored any notable success. Whether these same partners would have risen to financial eminence if they had never "met" Morgan or other money kings, I can not say; but we can be sure that merely meeting the "right people" is of no use unless there is the ability to make good when given the chance.

These super-active men of Morgan's are young, in the Wall Street sense at least. Porter is the oldest, fifty-six. Davison is fifty, Lamont is forty-seven, Stettinius is fifty-one, and Morrow and Cochran are each about forty-five.

Let Them Lean on You

By WILLIAM G. SHEPHERD

Most humans in this world are trying to lean on somebody or on something.

Are you willing to have them lean on you?

Nearly everybody is trying to shift responsibility—even responsibility for his own personal welfare—on to some other man's shoulders. Are you willing to let your shoulders take some of the world's burden?

There have been men in history who have suddenly reached out and grasped all the responsibility there was in sight, so that the world, looking on, shuddered.

Abraham Lincoln was a man who was always willing to have weaker men lean on him. He was born with a sense of responsibility.

"At home," says Francis Browne, the Lincoln historian, "Lincoln was the most agreeable fellow in the world. He was always ready to do everything for everybody. He was everybody's friend."

Horse races, wrestling matches, family squabbles, political issues, personal problems, all the questions of human pleasure or sorrow that came up in the region of Illinois where Abraham Lincoln was known, were umpired or settled by him. He had his great, gawky shoulders under that part of the world which was nearest to him when he was only a hulking, unlettered boy.

Lincoln never ran away from any human being that tried to lean on him. And he never tried to lean on anybody.

On that Wednesday morning, in Springfield, Illinois, when he knew he had been elected, he went home and, working all alone, he selected his Cabinet.

"I felt as I never had before," he said later, "the responsibility that was upon me."

Abraham Lincoln wrote the Proclamation of Emancipation without the advice or assistance of any human being; and having written it, he called his Cabinet together and said: "I do not ask your advice in this matter. I have only called you here to tell you what I have done."

Under every great crisis in human history are the bared shoulders of some strong man who has come to the front and has said to his nation, "Lean on me."

Many men in the business world are leaners; they are the half-successes. They go running about with their money, asking, "Where can I put it out so that it will give me a sure and safe return?"

A James J. Hill steps forward. "Lean on me," he says. "Give me your money. I will use it to build a great railroad. The sleepless nights and all the worries shall be mine. And on bond-clipping day you shall have your interest."

The world pays good money to the man who works well with his hands. It pays better money to the man who works with his head. But the preeminent rewards of earth go to the man who is willing to work with his shoulders.

Disraeli, seeking to build the Suez Canal, discovered, at a critical moment, that the Egyptian government, which had taken half the stock of the enterprise, could not pay for it. The Khedive was hawking the stock about Europe. If Germany got the stock the Indian empire would be jeopardized. Parliament was not in session, and it was therefore impossible for the British government to buy the Egyptian shares. Disraeli bought the stock of the Khedive, without asking the advice of a single human being; and he carried the staggering responsibility until, when Parliament met, he persuaded it to take over the debt.

Life insurance is a splendid institution, but it is based on the yearning of ordinary human beings to lean. We ordinary mortals can not be sure that we will save so much money every month, throughout our lives, to care for our loved ones after we are gone. But the life insurance company steps to the front and says: "Oh, yes; you can save money regularly for such a purpose. Just sign this contract with us, and we'll he responsible for your

Dishonest stock promoters always play on this willingness of humanity to lean. They know that the cry that will always attract human beings is, "Lean on me; I'11 be responsible."

People who lean may be counted by millions; those who may be leaned upon are few.

Pupin, the great Serbian inventor of the coil that has made long-distance telephony possible, was asked one day to select from his classes at Columbia several young men for positions with the telephone company. He named several, and said they would be worth perhaps ten dollars a week.

"But can't you name some one who would be worth fifty dollars a week?" he was asked.

"Oh, you want young men who will take responsibility," he said. "No. I know plenty of young men who are electrical experts, but I don't happen to know any young man, just now, who can carry responsibilities."

Most of us think that we are escaping trouble by avoiding responsibility. We find some little nook in life, some quiet job in a quiet office, and there we stay and let the world whirl by. But we pay a penalty for doing this—a penalty of warped souls and even warped bodies. Nature has a way of punishing creatures who try to dodge the big game of life. It is a gruesome punishment she has paid out, for instance, to that best of table fish, the sole.

Somewhere, back in the course of evolution, a fish one day decided that playing

Laziness was the first punishment of nature. Before very long the fish became too indolent to stand upright. He turned over on his left side and became a fish that lies down!

"Very well," nature seems to have said. "Lie there, if you will. But a fish's back should always be uppermost, and so I'll have to turn your right side into a back."

And then began the warping that always comes to the leaner. This fish, leaning on the bottom, began to change color. Its right side became black and its left side took on a yellowish belly color.

It was also necessary, of course, to change the shape of the fish's head, and it is when we come to examine this part of the sole that the story of deepest misery is told. The face has been twisted at a right angle. The jaws and skull-bones have become distorted, and the eyes have been turned in their sockets so that they both may gaze out from the right side. In some species the left eye has migrated through the head, so that both eyes occupy the right eye socket.

Every sole starts out in life just like any other fish, with a normal and upright body, looking almost exactly like some of his near cousins. But, after passing through a certain promising stage, the family curse comes on the baby sole, the terrible leaning develops, and over he goes onto his side, while the hideous twisting of body, face, eyes, and brain goes through its accustomed course.

As you grow in your relations with men and things, do you yield to the temptation to dodge responsibility—to lean?

Responsibilities are hard to bear. They bring gray hairs and put lines into men's faces. But bearing them never warps the soul or body nor distorts the vision, as does the cowardly purpose to evade them.

Reach out, young man, and grasp responsibilities. Grasp all you can reach. The world will notice and will repay you.

Billy Fortune and the Hard Proposition

By WILLIAM R. LIGHTON

Illustrations by D. C. Hutchison

JUST because we drink whisky mostly for fun, and just because there's a lot of comical things that happen when we've got some of it inside of us—that don't make whisky-drinkin' a joke. A man oughtn't to fool himself about that. I claim that there's times when whisky-drinkin' can be pretty near serious. The time when you come to quit is one of 'em. It's the quittin' that's the hard proposition.

I'm right wise about both ends of that. I ought to be. I've absorbed enough whisky to let me find out every single thing it can do to me, and I've quit so often that there ain't a bit of variety in quittin' any more. If there's any joke in it, either way, then it's one of these sly jokes that have got to be explained before a plain man can laugh at 'em. If you don't want to take my word for it, then you ought to let me tell you about Russell J. Stark. Russell J. Stark, he knows I'm tellin' the solemn truth.

Russell J. Stark, he was a perfect stranger when he come to Redstone. He didn't even belong in Wyoming. He come from Illinois. That part's all right; I'm just tellin' you he was a stranger.

The first time I set eyes on him was one afternoon when I was lazyin' on the edge of the sidewalk in front of the Redstone Hotel, waitin' for the east mail to get in before I'd start back for the ranch. The up train was goin' to be away late, same as usual. I wasn't carin'. It just suited me to set there with my arms across my knees and the sun warm on my shoulders and my mind kind of floatin' round, with nothin' in the world to do except to reach for my cigarette makin's once in a while.

Over across the road there was a man fussin' round in the room next to Beck McGillicuddy's bank, where the millinery shop used to be. Right busy, he was. I judged it must be somebody movin' in, because out in front there was a row of big boxes that had come by freight.

Pretty soon he come outside and started to tackle one of his boxes. I'd say he made a real good try, but he couldn't budge it on the rough boards. After a bit he got sight of me and come over.

I liked the looks of him, right from the jump. Even if he was a rank stranger, he was one of the kind that you don't have to wait to get acquainted with. Thirty or so. I'd guess; and he had a couple of good legs, and a couple of good shoulders, and a couple of real good eyes that could look right straight at you.

"Brother," he says to me, "I wonder if your afternoon happens to be wholly taken up with what you're doing."

"Whose? Mine?" I says. "Well, you might say it is or it ain't. Right now I'm settin' here thinkin' about gettin' up one of these helpin' hand societies."

He give a quick little lift to the corners of his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth.

"Fine!" says he. "Now, if I might get you to spend fifteen minutes or such a matter in spreading the gospel, I'd be no end obliged."

I'M fair to middlin' strong; but when I'd took the first heave at the first of his boxes, I had to ease off and brace myself.

"Well, gee whiz!" I says. "That box don't look so heavy. The heaviness must be all inside of it."

"Right!" says he. "I have an idea that there's nothing on earth heavier than the literature of what people are good enough to call the learned professions."

"Oh!" I says. "Law books!"

"Not law," says he. "Medicine. Russell J. Stark, physician and surgeon—late of little old Illinois."

We got the boxes rolled inside by and by, and then I pried the lids off for him.

"That's all, brother, for this time," says he. "I'll do the rest." He'd fished up a little handful of silver, and was standin' there rattlin' it and takin' a slow look at me. "Back where I came from," he says, "a quarter of a dollar would be about the right thing. I wonder what's right up here?"

"Well," I says, "now let's see how good a guesser you are."

He kept his eyes on me for a minute, and then he let his money slip back in his pocket, a piece at a time. It tickled me, and it set me to likin' him more yet.

"All right!" he says. "Now, tell me this: can you spell the word whisky'?"

"Yes indeedy!" I says. "Frontwards and backwards, and both ways from the middle. If they'd left that word out of the spellin' books I'd certainly miss it."

So we went across to Pete's place.

HE wasn't any amateur at pourin' out a drink, that man wasn't. You can tell. If a man's new at it, he'll dribble his glass only half full, or else he'll slop it out clear over the top; but if he's had experience he'll know how to fill up a-plenty for a good drink without runnin' any chances of wastin' a drop. That's the way Russell J. Stark did it; and then he took it with just one sure, steady motion.

"Good!" says he. "Excellent! I suppose it's occurred to you that one of the many excellences of whisky is that you can meet it anywhere and everywhere without having to negotiate a new acquaintance. It's always the same."

"That's pretty, near what it is," I says.

"That's what gives me a sort of a grudge against it sometimes. There's been times when I've wished it would do me different, somehow, just for a change."

He laughed at me—a deep, lazy kind of a laugh.

"There are chairs over there, beside that table," says he. "I'm in no hurry—are you? What do you say to sitting down?"

There wasn't any hurry about the drinkin', either. We was both of us willin' to wait a while before I'd mention the second one. We was sizin' each other up a little more, and lettin' the talk just ramble along, easy and casual.

"Whatever made you think about comin' up here?" I says to him pretty soon. "Redstone's so rank healthy. Nobody ever thinks about callin' a doctor in this country, anyway, unless there's somethin' real bad that's ailin' him."

"Thank the Lord for that!" says he. "I hope they stick to it. I've had enough of the other sort of thing. I've spent eight years, back there in Illinois, doctoring pimples and hysterics for those corn-fed women—nothing else. And nothing in the world the matter with them but over-eating. I had to clear out."

"It'll be real different here," I says. "If you get anything to do here, it'll either be plumb serious or plumb comical. It won't be humdrum. The last time a doctor got called up here was when Bluebeard Peter's pony roughed him off, all spraddled out, in a big mess of cactus and spiked him fast to the ground. There wasn't anybody there to help him; and then, while he was worryin' himself loose, there was a big blind rattlesnake come along and bit him on the leg."

THIS seemed to be right amusin' to Russell J. You'd have liked the sound of his laugh, deep and rollicky and enjoyin'. That was when I motioned to Pete to fetch the second drink.

After he'd had it I commenced watchin' him a little closer. You let me tell you this about drinkin' whisky: The man that gets foolish with the first one, it don't make such a lot of difference whether he drinks it or lets it alone, because he's foolish-headed anyway. With a strong-headed man it's the second one that begins to show you what whisky'll do to him.

Page 8

That's the way it turned out with the Stark man. The first one hadn't seemed to get to him at all, not even to put a new flicker of light in his steady eyes. The second one reached him, though. I knew it was goin' to, because he was leanin' back in his chair and sort of settin' his lips together, with his eyes gettin' broody. I knew what that meant. He was waitin' for the signs he'd learned to expect when the whisky had found him. I was wonderin' what the signs would be.

They kind of surprised me when they come. I was lookin' for him to loosen up, with that disposition of his, and get talky. That wasn't the way of it, though. Pretty soon he straightened up a little, with his elbows on the table, and set his hands over his eyes, givin' 'em a weary kind of a rub.

"Oh-ho!" says he. "This world and the next! I might have stayed in Illinois and been just as well off, I suppose. I was making money there, anyway. What difference can it make whether one man more or less is satisfied with what he draws in this life? It's all an illusion. Even the poets lie to us. 'There where thou art not, there joy is found!' Do you believe that? Do you believe, there is any such thing as joy waiting anywhere on earth for us mortals?"

WELL, there it was! The second drink was goin' to make him get melancholy. I don't ever like to see that in a man I'm liable to be carin' anything about, because he's pretty near bound to have to take another one before long, to sort of dull his sadness, and then most likely a couple more before he's through, to help him forget the whole business. That ain't healthy.

I might have tried to answer the Stark man if there'd been time. But there wasn't, because right then was when Beck McGillicuddy come in, whistlin', with his hat tipped over to one side of his head. You can't put your mind to anything else when Beck's actin' that way. Over in his bank Beck's a banker; but after four o'clock in the afternoon, when he pulls his door shut behind him, he's as flighty as anybody.

"Hello, Billy!" he says to me. "Doctor, how are you! I see you're getting settled."

He stopped long enough to call to Pete to bring him a glass of that mineral water he drinks, and then he shoved his hat over to the other side of his head.

"Say, Billy, listen!" he says. "Here's a conundrum for you. Brand-new! I made it myself, crossing over here. Say, what's the reason that a great big owl can't become deeply attached to a crock of milk? You tell me that, now! That's a good one!"

"Oh, shucks!" I says. "What's the sense of squanderin' your time thinkin' up things like that, Beck?"

"It stimulates the intellect," says Beck. "Honest, it does! Can't you see the point? What's the reason that a great big owl can't become genuinely attached to a crock of milk?"

"If you've got to know," I says, "I reckon it's because the milk sours on him."

"No!" says Beck. "No, no! That's the obvious answer. I thought you'd guess that. It's because the crock of milk don't give a hoot for the owl."

"Fiddle!" I says. "If you want to exercise your intellect that way, you might try tellin' me why it is that a hot pancake can't climb a tree out here in the middle of the road. That's every bit as good a one as yours is."

"A hot pancake?" says Beck. "Let's see—it's something about the hot pancake's cold feet—ain't it?"

"No, it ain't," I says. "Mine's a better one than yours, because it's got several answers to it. You could say it's because the pancake ain't a cat. Or you could say it's because the pancake is afraid of tearin' its breeches. Or you could say it's because there ain't any tree in the middle of the road. You could say lots of things."

If Russell J. Stark had been an average kind of a man with a couple drinks of whisky in him, that kind of foolishness would have been likely to amuse him some, even if he didn't think much of it. But he wasn't appearin' to notice it at all. He was just settin' and lookin' out of the window beside the table, with his mind away off yonder somewheres and his face as glum as a wooden Indian's. After a bit he got up and went away.

IT wa a week or so before I saw him the next time. I'd rode into town after somethin' or other that mornin', and I saw him on the sidewalk, swingin' along from the post-office up towards his room.

"Hello, there, brother!" he sung out to me, and I pulled my pony in beside the walk.

"Well," I says, "how's doctorin'?"

"Fine!" says he. "I'm going to like it here first-rate. No pimples yet! You're not a pimply people, are you? I'm going to like you. Now, if I can manage to make you like me, it will be a very happy arrangement."

He laughed, with his voice soundin' deep and strong and contented. He wasn't feelin' a mite melancholy that mornin'. I set at the same table with Beck McGillicuddy when I had my dinner at the hotel that noon, and we got to talkin' about him.

"Beck," I says, "how about that doctor person? He's pretty near the right kind, ain't he? Do you reckon he's goin' to make a go of it here?"

Beck was a little slow with what he said.

"Why, I don't know, Billy," says he. "I shouldn't wonder. A whole lot depends on the trails a man lays out for himself right at first in a new town. His first trails are likely to fix his habits."

"Well," I says, "you don't have to be so tight about it. You don't have to use them wise riddles when you talk to me. You might loosen up and tell me what you're meanin'."

"There's one trail he's laid out that won't hurt him any," says Beck. "It runs up to old Sam Beecher's front gate."

"What?" I says. "Judas Priest! Already? Why, I didn't know the Beecher girls had got home."

"One of them's at home," says Beck. "The pick of the lot, to my way of thinking—the Martha one. Stark doesn't seem to require more than that one."

"For the love of country!" I says. "Who would? If that's the way it is, then I wouldn't be so awful anxious about the rest of his gettin' along here."

"Well, that's the way it is," Beck says. "You couldn't complain that he isn't using his chances, either. He's been riding with her once, and he went to church with her Sunday night, and they tell me he's been up to the house singing with her a time or two. That's all fair enough. But, Billy, between-whiles—"

"Yes, sir!" I says. "I'll bet you I can guess the between-whiles part. That other trail of his is a short, straight one, ain't it? He don't take the trouble to go up to the end of the block and cross over; he just cuts right across the street. I've had a couple drinks with him myself. I've been wonderin' if he was a man that was real fond of it as a steady thing."

"If he hates whisky," says Beck, "he takes a queer way of showing it. His way isn't what you might call notorious, but it's—well, noticeable. Afternoons, mostly, on the days when he isn't due at Beecher's."

"But he ain't been goin' too far with it yet, has he?" I says.

"Too far?" says Beck. "Billy, your dictionary and mine are two different books. You know what I think. Anything past the dead-line this side of the first drink is too far for me."

Stark was lookin' all right when I got sight of him that afternoon on my way home. He was out on the Star Butte trail, horseback, with the Beecher girl alongside of him. You couldn't have wanted to look at anything prettier than the sight of them two right then, comin' towards me across the big, open country, with the big, open sky over 'em and the warm sun shinin' on 'em.

They pulled down when they got close to me. I knew that was likely the girl's doin'. That was a way she had. There wasn't a livin' soul in the whole country that she wouldn't stop and talk to if she met him out like that.

"Why, Billy!" she says to me. "You Billy Fortune! I'm awfully glad to see you. How long is it since the last time?"

"A heap too long to suit me," I says. "It seems like years and years."

She laughed at me, settin' up straight and supple and givin' me a friendly look with her glowin' eyes out from under the edge of her hat. I hadn't been lyin' to her with what I'd said. She was certainly one of the kind that you miss when they ain't around.

PRETTY? Sure she was! But you haven't even commenced to explain that girl when you've got all through sayin' she was pretty. With lots and lots of 'em you have to stop after you've called 'em pretty, because that's every last thing there is to 'em. Martha Beecher was a heap more than that. She was lovely. 'Most any man can get awful weary of pink-and-whiteness, or a cunnin' way of blushin', or a cute little trick a pretty girl will have of usin' her eyes. That kind of thing gets stale for you real quick after she's once gone through with all she knows.

Martha Beecher didn't seem to know any tricks at all. The thing that made her so lovely was somethin' away down deeper than that—somethin' warm and livin' and rich. She was just an everlastin' surprise to you. It wasn't a bit of trouble to like that girl.

"How does everything go with you, Billy?" she says. "Are you happy?"

"I ain't as happy as I ought to be, mebbe, right this minute," I says, "because I know this minute can't last so very long."

She laughed at me again, easy and natural. She was so human that she could always enjoy havin' admirin' things said to her, it didn't matter who it was that said 'em. She kind of lived on havin' everybody like her.

"Billy!" says she. "You've been studying that over, coming along the train"

"No, I ain't!" I says. "A man don't have to study much to know what he thinks of you."

The Stark man laughed too. He was feelin' just right for it, judgin' by his looks. You couldn't have figured from his face that he'd ever had a melancholy minute in all his life. I was likin' him better than ever right then—the straight, square look of him in the saddle, and the strong lift of his head, and the fire showin' from away back in his eyes. "Where did you get that knack of speech?" he says to me. "Is it native to you, or is it the climate?"

"It ain't a knack," I says, "nor it ain't the climate. It's just this girl here."

She picked up her bridle-rein then, and her horse quit croppin' at the bunch-grass and struck off in a long lope, with her smilin' back at me over her shoulder.

"You Billy!" I says to myself. "If he could only keep that up, now!"

But I reckon you've noticed that it ain't so horrible easy to keep things goin' just right. It wasn't for him.

FOR a couple weeks or so I was busy down-country; and then, when I got up to Redstone again, it was a Saturday afternoon and no hurry about gettin' back, so I'd have time for pokin' round a little and takin' a hand in whatever might come up in the evenin'.

By and by I went past Stark's place, and stopped to take a look inside. Russell J., he was settin' at his desk in the back end of the room, with his head down on his crossed arms. I judged he'd been busy at somethin' before that, because the top of his desk was littered with a mess of books layin' open. He raised up when he heard me at the door, squintin' his eyes against the light.

His eyes wasn't the same as I'd seen 'em last time; nor his face, either. He was feelin' dull and heavy. I didn't have to guess whether he'd had his first drink yet for that day.

"Come in!" he says to me; but there wasn't any sing to his voice. I went over and set down across from him.

"Well," I says, "how's it goin'?"

He made a poor sort of a beginnin' at straightenin' up in his chair; but then he seemed to think it wasn't any use and he sagged back again.

"Oh, Lord!" he says.

It wasn't much of a remark, but he didn't have to say anything more. I could tell right where he'd got to. He wasn't what you'd call drunk. The time when a man feels real helpless with the drink ain't when he's clear drunk; it's when he's got along about middle-ways with it, and is sort of dreadin' to go ahead and knowin' he can't go back, either. That was the fix Stark was in.

"Well," I says, "are you beginnin' to get things started?"

"Started!" says he. "I wish to God something would start—anything! This is deadly. I've known what it is to waste time on idiotic trifles, but I've never before had an absolutely empty month. I've always had enough to do to keep me from thinking entirely of myself, even if it wasn't the thing I wanted to do. There's been nothing here—not a thing except myself to look at and see what I amount to after eight years of work. Have you any idea what hell's like? Hell is sitting stock-still and considering yourself when you know that you've never done anything to prove that you're not an abject failure."

If that was the way he was feelin', I wasn't goin' to argue it with him.

ALL of a sudden he stood up and went over to one of his book-cases, and pulled out a great big book, and reached in behind.

"Will you have a drink?" says he. "This is better whisky than you get at the hotel bar."

"No," I says, "I guess I won't—not yet. I'm sort of puttin' it off to-day till some of the boys gets round."

It was a quart bottle, half empty, that he had bid. He didn't bother to pour him out a drink; he just tipped the bottle up and took it that way. That's an awful poor way, if a man is aimin' to keep any track of himself. He took a long one, and then he put the bottle back, and stood where he was, scowlin' at me.

"If you don't mind," says he, "I'm going to shut my door now."

He'd slept some of it off by evenin', when he got to Pete's place. But the worst thing about sleepin' off just the

Page 9

Russell J.'s sleepin' hadn't fixed him so he was ready to quit. You couldn't say he was still feelin' the whisky in him much, but he was feelin' the lack of it awful bad. He went over to the bar and had one by himself, standin' up, before he come across to the table where me and Beck McGillicuddy and Steve Brainard and a few of the others had started a little draw. Old Sam Beecher, he was there too. Old Sam, he was right fond of draw if he had a bunch of men he liked to play with and if you didn't try to hold him down too close to the ground.

OLD Sam wasn't a man that anybody could hold down when he took a notion to rise up. It wasn't worth while tryin', because that would always make him get peevish; and when he got peevish it would always make him get rough. He was a kind of a rough person, anyway.

He was havin' a streak of luck when Stark come over to us, and he was pokin' fun at us. He didn't notice Stark at first; but pretty soon he did. He took a long look at him, with his gray eyes turnin' steady and cold. He was always swift in his judgments—and sure, too. He didn't have to be told what was ailin' Russell J.

"Good evening, Mr. Beecher," says the doctor. "I just dropped in here on my way up to your home."

Old Sam laid his cards face down on the table, and rolled back in his chair.

"What?" he says. "Goin' up to my house? Like hell you are! Not in that shape you ain't! You're half drunk. You go near one of my girls when you're that way, and I'll take you all apart."

It was terrible abrupt. The old man wasn't carin' who heard him say it. Old Sam hadn't touched a drop, not for years, on account of his girls.

I was plumb sorry for the doctor. If old Sam had slapped him across the face it couldn't have been as bad as that. He could have fought back then. But what could he do now? Just nothin'! The blazin' hot red run clear up to his hair, and he was shakin' all over; but he didn't try to say anything back. He done the only thing there was for him to do: he turned round and walked right out.

There was a minute when everybody kept still. The old man was the first one that got out a word.

"Hang me!" he says. "That's always the way with me. I hadn't ought to done that. I could have been peaceabler with it. Now I've got to drop out, just when I'm winnin' all this money, and go find him and square it with him. He ain't a bad man. Which one of you is friendly with him? Billy, are you? Come along with me, then."

We didn't find where he'd got to. If he was in his room with his door locked, he was keepin' real still. We couldn't raise him there—no, nor any place else. There wasn't so very many places where he might be; but we put in as much as a couple of hours, huntin' up and down.

"Well," says old Sam, "I can prove it by you, anyway, that I'm sayin' I'm sorry. I'd say it to him, if he was here. I like that man. Billy, what have you got in your mind about it?"

"Nothin' much," I says. "I heard Beck McGillicuddy say once that things like this are mostly in the laps of the gods. Do you reckon that's so?"

"Hell!" says old Sam. "What kind of talk is that? All my life I ain't ever left

WE didn't find him, though. And then, when the next thing come, it didn't seem as if it was goin' to help any.

I was in my room in the hotel, pullin' off my boots, when old Daddy Swammett, that runs the place, come blunderin' up the stairs and stuck his bald head in at the door. He was all worked up.

"My land!" says he. "Say, Billy, do you know where the doctor is? He's wanted. They're telephonin' for him from Star Butte. The night shift in the mine has had a blow-up, and they's six or eight of 'em bad hurt. For Gad's sake! I can't rouse him at his office. Where might he be, now?"

I got my boots back on, and went out. Stark's room was the first place I put for. The door was locked yet, but I stood still outside and listened. He was in there, all right; I could hear him snorin'. I took a chance, and set my shoulder against the door and broke it in. And then I found his lamp and lit it. He was sleepin' on a cot he had fixed up behind a curtain, with all his clothes on, layin' flat on his back; and down on the floor was an empty bottle.

He didn't stir for the light, nor when I shook him. There couldn't be any mistake about what he'd done: he'd gone at it and paralyzed himself. I fetched his pitcher of water off his wash-stand and poured it over him before he'd get his eyes open. That didn't bring him rightly awake: he stayed stupid, just blinkin' at me.

"Doc!" I says to him. "Get up! Kingdom come! You're needed! Get up and listen! It's down at the mines. They want you—quick! There's been a big bunch of men hurt. Get up!"

I dragged him up to his feet and done everything I could think of; but I didn't seem to make much headway. He'd been takin' a terrible lot since he was over in Pete's place. The very best I could do was just to give him a little flicker of understandin' of what I was tellin' him.

"Come on!" I says. "I'll go along with you. It's eighteen miles down there. The ride'll take some of it out of you. Hurry!"

He couldn't hurry. He couldn't do a thing but stare at me with his dull, hot eyes, shakin' all over with a sick chill.

"I can't go," he says. "Look at me! I can't go. Good God!"

And with that he dropped back on his cot. I had to go away and let him alone.

DIDN'T tell anybody about him. I lied for him and told 'em I couldn't find him. And then I went back to him real early in the mornin', before it was full daylight yet. But I wasn't early enough to beat old Sam Beecher. Me and old Sam, we come, together right at his door and went in together; and there was Russell J., settin' up on the edge of his cot with his head in his hands, quakin' and shakin'. He wasn't a pretty sight.

He give us a sufferin' look out of his eyes, makin' a sufferin' sound away deep in his throat.

"Tell me!" says he. "I was wanted last night, and I couldn't go. Tell me—"

"It's right bad," I says. "There was a charge went off too soon down there at the Star Butte mine, and hurt a bunch of 'em. There's a couple doctors from Douglas that's just got there; but two of the men died while they was waitin'. Of course, they might have died anyway."

Nobody said anything for a little while.

"Doc," I says, "if it was me, I'd figure it was pretty near time for me to begin lettin' it alone now."

He didn't answer me. He didn't even take his head out of his hands.

Old Sam was the one that took me up.

"You're tootin' right, Billy!" says he. "The drink don't get you a thing, Doc. The best it's goin' to give you, in the long run, is just exactly what it's giving you now.

"Sure enough," I says. "Why don't you quit it?"

He didn't say a word; he didn't do a thing but just shake his head.

"Well, then," I says, "if you can't tell me that, mebbe you could try tellin' me what it is that makes you want to drink it at all."

That seemed as if it got to him, because he jerked himself straight up, flingin' out both his hands at us.

"Why?" says he. "Why do I do it? Almighty! I drink it because I like it—and I like it because it dulls the terrible edge of things for me. That's why!"

"Oh!" I says. "Dulls the edge! Dulls the edge of what, now? What's this terrible edge?"

"The edge of knowing what I am!" says he. "Thirty-two years old—and nothing done that marks me as a man! A poor sham!"

That wasn't the sort of talk that would suit old Sam. I heard him drawin' his breath hard through his nose.

"You accomplished considerable last night, young fellow, didn't you?" says he. "You helped things a lot for yourself, didn't you?"

"Well, now," I says, "go on with it. Mebbe what you've said is part of the reason. Now see if you can tell the rest —honest!"

"The rest?" says Russell J. "There isn't anything else. I'm telling you the plain truth."

"No, you ain't," I says. "You ain't even headed towards the honest truth. You're not doin' a thing but just givin' poor excuses. I can tell you the truth a whole lot better than that. You're doin' your drinkin' just to take the edge off of knowin' that there ain't another thing in the whole world that you love any better than you love whisky. That's about the meanest thing that any man can know about himself. You know it. And whisky helps you forget it. You can't name anything you love as much as you love whisky."

Russell J. was starin' at me steady.

"Love!" he says. "Love!"

"That's it!" I says. "And there's more yet. A healthy man has got to love somethin'—just some one thing—more than ho loves all the rest. He's got to! You won't ever quit whisky till there's come to be somethin' that you love more. if you want to know the truth, then that's it."

Old Sam reached over and took hold of my shoulder, givin' it a rough squeeze.

"Yes, sir!" he says. "Billy, you're tootin' right! There's nothin' to it but that. I know there ain't!"

Russell J. give a laugh that wasn't so very good to listen to.

"Love!" he says.

"That's the idea," I says. "It ain't havin' somebody love you, either; it's lovin' somethin' yourself harder than you love whisky—somethin' plumb different from whisky."

The Doctor, he raised up and faced us square.

"Look at me!" says he. "Take a good look! What am I? I lost the first chance of my life, last night, for doing a man's work. I've finished myself here. I'll have to go away."

"What?" says old Sam. "Go away? You mean quit? Quit Redstone? Now? Not by a long sight! Run away from this? Here's where you're goin' to stay. Right here's the place to fight this out, where you've got friends that's goin' to stick by you. It's too hard a proposition for a man away from his friends. I don't know: mebbe Redstone can turn up somethin' for you that's better worth lovin' than a bottle. Anyway, your friends'll stick by you—won't they, Billy?"

"You're tootin' right—they will!" I says.

Well, so that's the way it stood. He didn't go away: he stuck. I liked that. It's a bad sign when a man tries gettin' away from himself by runnin' off

Page 10

He was over there at his desk, spraddled out in his shirt sleeves over a mess of books, with his hair all mussed up where he'd been runnin' his fingers through it. It was gettin' along towards the tedious time of day for him, but he hadn't quit his books yet. There was somethin' else I noticed, too: his whisky bottle wasn't hid now back behind his shelves. It was standin' on the little table beside his bed, right in plain sight, with the whisky comin' up to the top of the label. That kind of bothered me some. The look of his face did too, when he raised up to see who I was, markin' the place he was readin' with the end of his finger. He wasn't happy, but he was sober.

"Hello!" says he—just that one word.

"Hello!" says I. "How's everything?"

"All right!" says he, and he give a weary motion with his hand across his eyes.

He didn't ask me to come in. I judged he'd rather I wouldn't, and so in a minute I went pokin' on up the street.

And then the rest of that month I never thought about him again, because I was off down on the Platte, helpin' to halter-break a bunch of range horses. For as much as three weeks, Russell J. Stark didn't even flit through my mind once. I was plumb wore out when I got back to Redstone.

IT was old Sam Beecher that made me think about the doctor person. Old Sam was down at the railroad corral, watchin' us load; and by and by, when we'd got through and I was settin' on the ends of the ties to rest, he come and set down beside me.

"Well," I says after a bit, "it's this world and then the next—ain't it? Sam, can you see any use of bein' human, just rammin' round like I am, and not arrivin' any place? I'd pretty near as soon be one of the critters in that box-car."

He didn't say anything; he just give a short, dry kind of a laugh, pickin' up a handful of little stones and commencin' to flip 'em away with his thumb.

"How's Doc makin' it?" I asks.

"Doc?" says he. "Well, he's— Billy, I was meanin' to speak to you about him. He's been hangin' on, Doc has. He ain't been drunk yet. But that's pretty near all I can say for him. He's—he's wrastlin' with the stuff. One of 'em's goin' to take a fall out of the other one some of these times—and it's goin' to be the decidin' fall of the match. It looks like a fifty-fifty bet to me, right now."

He'd quit monkeyin' with the little stones: he was just lettin' 'em run out of his hand one at a time, down on the ground, real absent-minded.

"I don't seem to get right close next to Doc," he says. "He's been up to the house a couple times or so, when he's been asked; but he's stayed away the rest of the time. That girl of mine, she could easy think a sight of that man. I'm kind of lettin' him be. If it was me, I'd want it that way. I wouldn't want to have other folks proppin' me up. That's the way Doc wants it, if I'm any guesser. Billy, I like that man. Say, you've got some cunnin' ways with you. I wish you'd kind of drop in on him while you're here. Mebbe you could devil him along a little. I can't."

It was after sunset when I went to Russell J.'s place, and gettin' shadowy. His door was locked, but when I'd knocked I heard him come shufflin' across the floor, slow and listless. He let me in, and then he went stumblin' back to his chair without speakin' a word.

Old Sam was sure correct. He'd been havin' a fight, that lad had. He wasn't hardly lookin' like the same person—thin and tired, but with his eyes blazin'. And there was his bottle on the desk in front of him, with a glass beside it, poured half full.

That didn't seem to be the time for foolishness. I didn't fool with him.

"Well, Doc?" I says. "Are you aimin' to take that drink?"

He looked at me a long time, hard and straight, without sayin' a single thing; and then he turned his hot eyes towards the glass.

"If that's the way it is," I says, "you let me pour that drink back, and then let's go take a little walk outdoors."

That fetched him.

"Don't you dare touch it!" says he, and he put out his shakin' hand to keep it from me. "That drink stands right there till this thing is settled. If that's my love, I'm going to find it out for myself before that glass is emptied."

"That's a crazy way!" I says.

"It's the way I've taken," says he. "Let it alone! Let me alone, too. Please go out! I don't want you here."

THERE was nothin' for me to do but go, lettin' him lock the door behind me and shut himself in with his whisky. It didn't look like a fifty-fifty bet to me right then.

I had my supper, and then I played draw a while; and then, when it was gettin' late, I started to go up to the barn after my horse, to light out for the ranch. Then was when I met up with old Sam.

He was comin' down the road from his house on the run. He was a world too heavy for runnin'. He wasn't makin' a bit of speed, flounderin' along with a lot of extra motions of his thick legs, and his arms flappin' and his big body heavin'. It would have been comical if I hadn't known there was somethin' the matter. He couldn't do any more than just gasp it out when he run onto me.

"Billy!" he says. "Martha—she was comin' home from the Fredericks place, and her black mare throwed her and dragged her. Good Lord! That doctor— She's bad hurt. Do you reckon there's a chance that Doc—"

"I'll go see!" I says. "You go back home!"

I was scared. I'd have been willin' to bet anything on how I was goin' to find Russell J. I was pretty near too scared to hammer on his door.

"Doc!" I called to him. "Quick! Open up! You're wanted!"

He struck a light first, and then he opened the door. I took a swift sight of things, and I come pretty close to laugh- in' out loud. There was the bottle, just exactly like it had been; and there was the glass beside it, half full yet; and there was Russell J., plumb sober!

"Hurry!" I says to him. "It's Martha Beecher. She's been hurt."

"Martha!" says he. For just the littlest bit of a minute he stood stock-still and stared at me. "Martha!" he says, and he put his hands up to his face with a funny kind of a motion. "Martha! Oh, thank God!"

He certainly was needed. All night long I set out on Sam's front porch steps, waitin', in case there was somethin' I could do. It was terrible slow, not knowin' a blessed thing about what was goin' on inside. A couple of times old Sam come out on the porch and walked up and down a little; but he didn't say nothin' to me. I don't believe he even noticed I was there.

IT was gettin' gray daylight when the two of 'em come out together, Sam and Doc. I didn't like the looks of it. The old man, he was stumblin' blind, and as soon as he got outside he set his big arms crossways up against a post on the porch and dropped his head down on 'em and started cryin' like a sufferin' kid, with Russell J. givin' him a comfortin' kind of a pat on his great big shoulder.

I had to know. "Doc!" I says. "Tell me!"

He stood lookin' down at me as if he was seein' me from away up on some high place. He needn't have said anything: it was in his eyes—in the clean, straight sureness of 'em.

"She'll do, Billy!" says he. "She's just gone to sleep."

It sounded right plain and humdrum. I reckon he'd have told me more if I'd asked him; but I didn't want to talk. There wasn't a bit of use in it. Every single thing he could have said to me I could see shinin' in them eyes of his.

Well, there it is! What can you make out of it? I know what I think. It's like I told that Stark man: a man has got to love somethin'; but mebbe there's a few things that can be loved without havin' to stop to take the cork out.

Switching Arts on Leon

By SEWELL FORD

Illustration by Arthur William Brown

OH, sure! We're coming along grand. Did you think we'd be heavin' the blue willow-ware at each other by this time? No. We've hardly displayed any before-break-fast dispositions yet.

Not that we confine ourselves to the coo vocabulary, or advertise any continuous turtle-dove act. Gettin' married ain't jellied our brains, I hope. Besides, we're busy. I've got a new gilt-edged job to fill, you know; and Vee, she has one of her own, too.

Well, I can't say that her scheme of runnin' a Boots, Limited, has mesmerized all New York into havin' its shoe-shinin' done out. There's something about this cloth top and white gaiter craze that's puttin' a crimp in her perfectly good plans. But she's doin' fairly well, and she don't have to think up ways of killin' time.

Course, we have a few other things to think about, too. Just learnin' how to live in New York is a merry little game all by itself. That's one of my big surprises. I'd thought all along it was so simple.

But say, we've been gettin' wise to a few facts this last month or so, for we've been tryin' to dope out which one of the forty-nine varieties of New York's home-sweet-home repertoire was the kind for us. I don't mean we've been changin' our street number, or testin' out different four-room-and-bath combinations. The studio apartment I got at a bargain suits first rate. It's the meal proposition.

First off, we decides gay and reckless that we'll breakfast and lunch in and take our dinners out. That listened well and seemed easy enough—until Vee got to huntin' up a two-handed, light-footed female party who could boil eggs without scorchin' the shells, dish up such things as canned salmon with cream sauce, and put a few potatoes through the French fry process, doublin' in bed-makin' and dust-chasin' durin' her spare time. That shouldn't call for any prize-winnin' graduate from a cookin' college, should it?

BUT say, the specimens that go in for general housework in this burg are a sad lot. I ain't goin' all through the list. I'll just touch lightly on Bertha.

She was a cheerful soul, even when she was servin' soggy potatoes or rappin' me in the ear with her elbow as she reached across to fill my water glass.

"He-he! Haw-haw! Oxcuse, Mister," was Bertha's repartee for such little breaks.

Course, I could plead with her for the umpteenth time to try pourin' from the button hand side, but it would have been simpler to have worn a head guard durin' meals.

And who would have the heart to put the ban on a yodel that begins in our kitchenette at 7 A. M., even on cloudy mornin's?

If Bertha had been No. 1, or even No. 2, she'd have had her passports handed her about the second mornin'; but, as she was the last of a punk half dozen, we tried not to mind her musical interludes. So at the end of three weeks her friendly relations with us were still unbroken, though most of the dishes were otherwise.

So you might have thought we'd been glad, when 6:30 P. M. came, to put on our things and join about a million or so other New Yorkers in findin' a dinner joint where the cooks and waiters made no claim to havin' an amateur standin'.

But, believe me, while my domestic instincts may be sproutin' late, they're comin' strong. I'm beginnin' to yearn for nourishment that I don't have to learn the French for or pick off'm a menu. I'd like to eat without bein' surrounded by three-chinned female parties with high blood pressure, or bein' stared at by pop-eyed old sports who're givin' some kittenish cloak model a bright evenin'. And Vee feels more or less the same way.

"Besides," says she, "I wish we could entertain some of our friends."

"Just what I was wishin'," says I. "Say, couldn't we find a few simple things in the cook-book that Bertha couldn't queer?"

"Such as canned baked beans and celery?" asks Vee, chucklin'. "And yet, if I stood by and read the directions to her —who knows?"

"Let's try her on the Piddies," I suggests.

WELL, we did. And if the potatoes had been cooked a little more and the roast a little less, it wouldn't have been so bad. The olives was all right, even if Bertha did forget to serve 'em until she brought in the ice cream. But then, the Piddies are used to little slips like that, havin' lived so long out in Jersey.

"You see," explains Vee to me afterwards, "Bertha was a bit flurried over her first dinner-party. She isn't much used to a gas oven, either. Don't you think we might try another?"

"Sure!" says I. "What are friends for, anyway? How about askin' Mr. and Mrs. Robert Ellins?"

"Oh, dear!" sighs Vee, lookin' scared. Then she is struck with a bright idea. "I'll tell you: we will rehearse the next one the night before."

"Atta girl!" says I. "Swell thought."

IT was while she and Bertha was strugglin' over the cook-book, and gettin' advice from various sources, from housekeepin' magazines to the janitor's wife, that this Leon Battou party shows up with his sob hist'ry.

"Oh, Torchy!" Vee hails me with, as I come home from the office here the other evenin'. "What becomes of people when they're dispossessed—when they're put out on the street with their things, you know?"

"Why," says I, "they generally stay out until they can find a place where they can move in. Has anybody been threatenin' to chuck us out for not—"

"Silly!" says she. "It's the Battous."

"Don't know 'em," says I.

"But surely," goes on Vee, "you've seen him. He's that funny little old Frenchman who's always dodging in and out of the elevator with odd-looking parcels under his arm."

"0h, yes!" says I. "The one with the twinklin' eyes and the curly iron-gray

Continued on page 15

GOOD NIGHT BOYS

THE HIGH COST OF LIVING

Page 13

GHOSTS

Continued from page 10

hair, who always bows so polite and shoots that bon-shure stuff at you. Him?"

It was.

It seems the agent had served notice on 'em that mornin'. They'd been havin' a grand pow-wow over it in the lower vestibule, when Vee had come along and got mixed up in the debate. She'd seen Mrs. Battou doin' the weep act on hubby's shoulder while he was tryin' to explain and makin' all sorts of promises. I expect the agent had heard such tales before. Anyway, he was kind of rough with 'em—at which Vee had sailed in and told him just what she thought.

"I'm sure you would have done the same, Torchy," says she.

"I might," says I, "if he hadn't been too husky. But what now?"

"I told them not to worry a bit," says Vee, "and that when you came home you would tell them what to do. You will, won't you, Torchy?"

Course, there was only one real sensible answer to that. Who was I, to step in casual and ditch a court order? But say, when the only girl in the universe tackles you with the clingin' clinch, hints that you're a big, brainy hero who can handle any proposition that's batted up to you—well, that's no time to be sensible.

"I'll do any foolish little thing you name," says I.

"Goody!" says Vee. "I just knew you would. We'll go right up and—"

"Just a sec," says I. "Maybe I'd better have a private talk with this Mr. Battou first off. Suppose you run up and jolly the old lady while he comes down here."

SHE agrees to that, and three minutes later I've struck a pose which is sort of a cross between that of a justice of the supreme court and a bush league umpire, while M. Leon Battou is sittin' on the edge of a chair opposite, conversin' rapid with both hands and a pair of eloquent eyebrows.

"But consider, Monsieur," he's sayin'. "Only because of owing so little! Can they not wait until I have found some good customers for my paintings?"

"Oh! Then you're an artist, are you?"

"I have the honor," says he. "I should be pleased to have you inspect some of my—"

"It wouldn't help a bit," says I. "All I know about art is that as a rule it don't pay. Don't you do anything else?"

He hunches his shoulders and spreads out both hands.

"It is true, what you say of art," he goes on. "And so then I must I do the decorating of walls—the wreaths of roses on the ceiling. That was my profession when we lived at Peronne. But here— there is trouble about the union. The greasy plumber will not work where I am, it seems. Eh bien! I am forced out. So I return to my landscapes. Are there not many rich Americans who pay well for such things?"

I waves him back into his chair. "How'd you come to wander so far from this Péronne place?" says I.

"It was because of our son, Henri," says he. "You see, he preferred to be as my father was, a chef. I began that way, too. The Battous always do—a family of cooks. But I broke away. Henri would not. He became the pastry chef at the Hotel Gaspard in Peronne. And who shall say, too, that he was not an artist in his way? Yes, with a certain fame. At least, they heard here, in New York. You would not believe what they offered if he would leave Peronne. And after months of saying no he said yes. It was true. They paid as they promised— more. So Henri sends for us to come also. We found him living like a prince. Truly! For more than three years we enjoyed his good fortune.

"And then—la guerre! Henri must go to join his regiment. True, he might have stayed. But we talked not of that. It was for France. So he went, not to return. Ah, yes! At Ypres, after only three months in the trenches. Then I say to the little mother, 'Courage! I, Leon Battou, am still a painter. The art which has been as a pastime shall be made to yield us bread. You shall see.' Ah, I believed—then."

"Nothing doing, eh?" says I.

Battou shakes his head.

"Well," says I, "the surest bet just now would be to locate some wall-frescoin'. I'll see what can be done along that line."

"Ah, that is noble of you, young man," exclaims Battou. "It is wonderful to find such a friend. A thousand thanks! I will tell the little mother that we are saved."

With that he shakes me by both hands, gives me a bear hug, and rushes off.

Pretty, soon Vee comes down with smiles in her eyes.

"I just knew you would find a way, Torchy," says she. "You don't know how happy you've made them. Now tell me all about it."

And say, I couldn't convince her I hadn't done a blamed thing but shoot a little hot air, not after I'd nearly gone hoarse explainin'.

"Oh, but you will," says she. "You'll do something."

Who could help tryin', after that? I tackles the agent with a proposition that Battou should work out the back rent, but he's a fish-eyed gink.

"Say," he growls out past his cigar, "if we tried to lug along every panhandling artist that wanted to graft rent off us, we'd be in fine shape by the end of the year, wouldn't we? Forget it."

"How about his art stuff?" I asks Vee, when I got back.

"Oh, utterly hopeless," says she. "But one can't tell him so. He doesn't know how bad it is. I suppose he is all right as a wall decorator. Do you know, Torchy, they must be in serious straits. Those two little rooms of theirs are almost bare, and I'm sure they've been living on cheese and crackers for days. What do you think I've done?"

"Sent 'em an anonymous ham by parcels post?" says I.

"No," says Vee: "I'm going to have them down to-night for the rehearsal dinner."

"Fine dope!" says I. "And if they survive bein' practised on—"

But Vee has skipped off to the kitchenette without waitin' to hear the rest.

"Is this to be a reg'lar dress rehearsal?" I asks, when I comes home again. "Should I doll up regardless?"

Yes, she says I must. I was just strugglin' into my dinner coat, too, when the bell rings. I expect Vee had forgot to tell 'em that six-forty-five was our reg'lar hour. And say, M. Leon was right there with the boulevard costume—peg-top trousers, fancy vest, flowin' tie, and a silk tile. As for Madame Batton, she's all in gray and white.

I'D towed 'em into the studio, and was havin' 'em shed their things, when Vee bounces in out of the kitchenette and announces impetuous:

"Oh, Torchy! We've made a mess of everything. That horrid leg of lamb won't do anything but sozzle away in the pan; the string-beans have been scorched; and—oh, goodness!"

She'd caught sight of our guests.

"Please don't mind," says Vee. "We're not very good cooks, Bertha and I. We—we've spoiled everything, I guess."

She's tryin' to be cheerful over it. And she sure is a picture, standin' there with a big apron coverin' up most of her evenin' dress, and her upper lip a bit trembly.

"Buck up, Vee," says I. "Better luck next time. Chuck the whole shootin' match into the discards, and we'll all chase around to Roverti's and—"

"Bother Roverti's!" breaks in Vee. "Can't we ever have a decent dinner in our own home? Am I too stupid for that? And there's that perfectly gug-good l-l-l-leg of—of—"

"Pardon," says M. Battou, steppin' to the front; "but perhaps, if you would permit, I might assist with—with the lamb."

It's a novel idea, I admit. No wonder Vee gasps a little.

"Why not?" says I. "Course it ain't reg'lar, but if Mr. Batton wants to do some expert coachin', I expect you and Bertha could use it."

"Do, Leon," urges Madame Batton. "Lamb, is it? Oh, he is wonderful with lamb."

She hadn't overstated the case, either. Inside of two minutes he has his coat off, a bath towel draped over his fancy vest, and has sent Bertha skirmishin' down the avenue for garlic, cloves, parsley, carrots, and a few other things that had been overlooked, it seems.

Well, we stands grouped around the kitchenette door for a while, watchin' him resuscitate that pale-lookin' leg of lamb, jab things into it, pour stuff over it, and mesmerize the gas oven into doin' its full duty.

Once he gets started, he ain't satisfied with simply turnin' out the roast. He takes some string-beans and cuts 'em into shoe-laces; he carves rosettes out of beets and carrots; he produces a swell salad out of nothing at all; and with a little flour and whipped cream he throws together some kind of puffy dessert that looked like it would melt in your mouth.

And by seven-thirty we was sittin' down to a meal such as you don't meet up with outside of some of them Fifth Avenue joints where you have to own a head waiter before they let you in.

"Whisper, Professor," says I, "did you work a spell on it, or what?"

"Ah-h-h!" says Batton, chucklin' and rubbin' his hands together. "It is cooked à la Payson, after the manner of Peronne, and with it is the sauce château."

"That isn't mere cookery," says Vee; "that's art."

It was quite a cheery evenin'. And, after the Battous had gone, Vee and I asked each other, almost in chorus: "Do you suppose he'd do it again?"

"He will if I'm any persuader," says I. "Wouldn't it be great to spring something like that on Mr. Robert?"

And while I'm shavin' next mornin' I connect with the big idea. Do you ever get 'em that way? It cost me a nick under the ear, but I didn't care. While I'm usin' the alum stick I sketches out the scheme for Vee.

"But, Torchy!" says she. "Do you think he would—really?"

Before I can answer there's a ring at the door, and here is M. Leon Battou.

"The agent once more!" says he, producin' a paper. "In three days, it says. But you have found me the wall-painting, yes?"

"Professor," says I, "I hate to say it, but there's nothin' doing in the free-hand fresco line—absolutely."

He slumps into a chair, and that pitiful, hunted look settles in his eyes.

"Then—then we must go," says he.

"Listen, Professor," says I, pattin' him soothin' on the shoulder. "Why not can this art stuff, that nobody wants, and switch to somethin' you're a wizard at?"

"You—you mean," says he, "that I should—should turn chef? I—Leon Battou—in a big noisy hotel kitchen? Oh, but I could not. No, I could not!"

"Professor," says I, "the only person in this town that I know of who's nutty enough to want to hire a wall decorator reg'lar is me!"

"You!" gasps Batton, starin' around at our twelve by eighteen livin'-room.

I nods.

"What would you take it on for as a steady job?"

"Oh, anything that would provide for us," says he, eager. "But how—"

"That's just the point," says I. "When you wasn't paintin' could you cook a little on the side? Officially you'd be a decorator, but between times— Eh?"

He's a keen one, Mr. Battou.

"For so charming young people," says he, bowin' low, "it would be a great pleasure. And the little mother—ah, you should see what a manager she is! She can make a franc go farther. Could she assist also?"

"Could she!" exclaims Vee. "If she only would!"

WELL, say, inside of half an hour we'd fixed up the whole deal, I'd armed Batton with a check to shove under the nose of that agent, and Vee had given Bertha her permanent release. And believe me, compared to what was put before Mr. and Mrs. Robert Ellins that evenin', the dress rehearsal dinner looked like Monday night at an actors' boardin'-house.

"I say," whispers Mr. Robert, "your cook must be a real artist."

"That's how he's carried on the fam'ly pay-roll," says I.

"Of course," says Vee afterwards, "while we can afford it, I suppose, it does seem scandalously extravagant for us to have cooking like that every day."

"Rather than have you worried with any more Bunglin' Berthas," says I, "I'd subsidize the whole of Péronne to come over. And just think of all I'll save by not havin' to buy my hat back from the coat-room boys every night."

THE MELTING POT

In Which the New Books and Magazines are Boiled Down to Give You Fifteen Minutes of Health, Efficiency, Travel, Biography, and Adventure

HE CAN JOKE IN CHINESE

HIS first piece of luck was to be the son of a poor missionary; for that is how he learned Chinese so well that he could joke in it. After graduating from Cornell, where he was an amiable and inventive, handsome and easy-going young man, Willard Straight was given a position in a British commercial expedition to China. Although an orphan without uncles in the banking business, or without any special commercial genius, this happened because he could think in Chinese.

Four years later he was appointed vice-consul of a small Chinese town, and then consul-general at Mukden in Manchuria.

In 1912 China wanted to borrow $50,000,000 to build railroads. Heretofore she had always turned to European bankers for money. American bankers, naturally, wished to share in this loan to China, teeming as it is with potential trade and rich securities. They looked around for a man who understood the Chinese, and, finding Straight, he was sent as their representative. The American bankers received an equal share in the loan, and Straight was put in charge of the J. P. Morgan compound in China with a salary of $50,000. Then he married Dorothy Payne Whitney, whose family is so old and dignified that you can find it after Vanderbilt in the Almanac.

He is now thirty-seven years old. He attends directors' meetings with Vanderlip, Schwab, Morgan, and the rest. He lives on upper Fifth Avenue. He plays polo and collects old masters. His regular job is vice-president of the American International Corporation, organized, with its shipyards and steamship lines, to develop trade and industries and railroads in foreign countries.

So this story, you see, has a moral: learn languages, young man!

THE COSTLY CABBAGE

THE cabbage, Dr. F. X. Gouraud assures us in What Shall I Eat? (Rebman Company) is the favorite food of all nations. It represents one fifth of the green vegetables consumed. The chief quality of the cabbage consists in the high grade of mineralization; for in it phosphorus, lime, magnesium, and iron reach a height scarcely surpassed in any other food, making it one of the most difficult of the green vegetables to digest.

On the other hand, of all vegetable foods, potatoes are the easiest on the stomach, says Dr. Gouraud. By their wholesome action on the digestive organs they improve the general tone of the whole system.

Although their nutritive value is below that of bread, and their purchase price higher, he recommends them for their good effect on the intestinal digestion. Baked, steamed, or mashed, he says, they are excellent for dyspeptics, anemics, debilitated persons, and convalescents.

HAVE YOU A GOOD SPEAKING VOICE?

THE living voice is that which sways the soul," said Pliny. "Yet in nothing are we more careless and negligent than in our every-day conversation," writes E. Standard Thomas in Scientific Singing (Paul Elder & Company). "We allow our voices to become coarse and throaty, and are too indifferent to speak our words clearly. So prevalent is this fault that the person who uses perfect diction is distinguished."

Better than his face or gestures, a voice can express a man's sympathy, warmth, good nature, his humor and his refinement. In "Pygmalion" Bernard Shaw tries to prove that the most raucous-voiced coster-girl need only mouth her vowels clearly and elegantly to pass for a first-water duchess.

"Do you realize how much your voice governs your contact with people—how much they judge you by your voice? Your education, experience, character, and personality, all are told in your voice.

"The physician deals with people who are most sensitive to inharmony. A resonant, tuneful voice, under perfect control, may have even a healing influence. And, to say the least, it is a business asset.

"The business man deals with difficult problems of conciliation. In the art of handling men, his voice needs the calmness of absolute authority. Or, in a business situation demanding accurate adjustment, the evenness of a perfectly controlled voice may alter a decision or determine a verdict.

"The tone quality and natural pitch of the speaker's voice has a psychological effect upon the listener. The perfectly modulated voice receives instant recognition and attention, and thereby helps to secure confidence and approval."

SETTLING EMPLOYEES' QUARRELS

QUARRELS between employees are generally expensive for the employer, in the long run. That is why Wallach's, says Joseph G. Wallach in System, takes time to settle little bickerings among its people.

"It would seem," he says, "that disputes between the employees were a matter of small concern to the management. We find it otherwise, because in the event of a serious quarrel we are bound to lose one and possibly both of the operators. It costs money to take on new people. It costs so much money that we will go to extremes, even to the extreme of apparent weakness, to hold our help. We insist that every quarrel be brought to us; then we have the whole thing aired by the participants, and usually succeed in getting them together.

"All the members of the firm know every one of our more than four hundred employees by name," says Mr. Wallach. "We go about among them, and we encourage them to come into the executive offices whenever they like. When they are in trouble we lend them money. We have never had a strike. When all laundry operators in the whole city were called out, the labor leaders did not call out our force."

A NEW USE FOR THE FAMILY HORSE

THIS old Frenchwoman has found a new use for her plow-horse, out of work these many months. Riding him into the lines, she hunts for wounded soldiers, and then ambles them back to the hospital, one at a time.

There are hundreds of stories of peasants in the war. Cornhill Magazine tells of a Breton farmer who went to see the Secretaire-General. "What is it, my friend?" asked that very busy man. "Monsieur," replied the old man, "I want you to tell me honestly if you believe we are going to win." "But of course we are going to win!" answered the official, in surprise. "You are sure? You give me your word of honor?" The old man's voice impressed the official with a sense of something out of the common, and he declared himself ready to swear by what he had said. "Then," answered the peasant, turning quietly away, "my sacrifice has not been too great." He had lost seven sons.

TO LIVE LONG, GET MARRIED

NOW comes science with absolute proof that "the chances of attaining vigorous old age are much higher among the married than the unmarried. Stark's record for Scotland, taken from 100,000 individuals, is published in Walter M. Gallichan's new book, The Great Unmarried (Frederick A. Stokes Company):

DEATHS

"These figures show the favorable influence of marriage, especially from the age of twenty to forty-five, and in old age. The same holds true with women. From thirty to thirty-five, out of 1000 married women, there were nine deaths against eleven among the unmarried. It is estimated that by marrying a man adds five years to his life and a woman four. Hygienic and medical authority concurs in the great benefit of marriage for the sex destined to bear children.

"The physiological and psychic life is obviously more normal and harmonious than that of the unmarried. There is greater resistance to disease, higher vitality, and more mental stability among the conjugal than among the celibate. The tedium of life, the melancholias, and the manias that often impel to suicide are less frequent among the married than the unmarried.

"Falret found that, out of one hundred suicides in several large towns, sixty-seven were unmarried. Brierre de Boismont, in a more extended, inquiry stated that, out of 4595 persons who took their own lives, 2080 were celibates, 560 were widowers and widows, and 1644 married.

"Georget, among 764 male lunatics, found that 492 were unmarried, 50 widowers and widows, against 201 married. Napheys says that nearly two thirds of suicides, and in some cases nearly three fourths, are committed by celibates.

"In France judicial statistics show that among a hundred criminals sixty were unmarried. Celibacy exposes to excesses, follies, and mental aberrations. The celibate and pseudo-celibate are more egotistic, self-centered, and usually more irresponsible than the fathers and mothers of the nation.

"Marriage is educative and disciplinary, and as a social force its tendency is humanizing and beneficent. The conjugal life is in accordance with biological law, the security of the State, social morality, and the well being of the individual."

Page 17

FEAR OF DEATH IN WAR

A BRITISH soldier, writing for the Spectator, describes the fear that all men feel in the trenches. He signs himself "A Student in Arms."

"At the moment of charge," he writes, explaining the fact that thousands of men have gone to meet destruction without giving a sign of terror, "men are in an absolutely abnormal condition. I do not know how to describe their condition in scientific terms; but there is a sensation of tense excitement, combined with a sort of uncanny calm. Noises, sights, and sensations which would ordinarily produce pity or dread have no effect upon them, and yet never was their mind clearer. With the issue before them, with death or victory, their minds blankly refuse to come to grips.

"It is before an attack that a man is more liable to fear—while he still has leisure to think. This part is comparatively easy. One indulges in regrets about the home one may never see again. One is sorry for one's self. One feels mildly heroic, which is not wholly disagreeable."

Allied to the nameless dread caused by bursting shells is that caused by gas. No one can enter the trenches "without a certain anxiety and dread if he knows the enemy has gas-cylinders in position and the wind is in the east."

Few men fear death; but, when there is nothing else to think about, all men experience a terrible physical shrinking from the pain of death.

"Last of all, there is the loathing for the whole business of war that comes to a man after a battle, when the tortured and dismembered dead lie strewn about the trench. But neither is that fear of death. It is a repulsion that breeds hot anger more often than cold fear—reckless hatred of life more often than abject clinging to it."

WRITING A SUCCESSFUL ADVERTISEMENT

THE first requirement for an advertisement is that it catch the eye of readers; the second, that, by appealing to the needs and interests of readers, it stick in their minds. You would think then that all advertisements should be attractive, charming, well designed, and beautifully colored.

"We find it necessary to put much attractive charm into certain advertisements," writes George French in How to Advertise (Doubleday, Page & Company), "and almost to eliminate it in others. The advertisement that might be designed successfully to attract ladies to certain perfumes, for example, would not attract the same ladies to a bank that wished to solicit their patronage. The advertisement designed so attractively to induce women to buy hats, would scarcely help to sell bonds to the same women.

"If it is hats that we are to try to sell, we are to consider that hats are more decorative, when worn by women, than utilitarian. Therefore the advertisement

The wise banker does not approach a man to whom he hopes to sell a block of bonds with a pirouette. He comes to him soberly, frankly, and he tells an unvarnished tale of earnings and security. He does not speak in heavy type, italic type, queerly designed type. He does not embroider his talk with decorative borders, nor are his illustrations reproduced in three colors. His talk is, let us say, all in 12-point Roman type, without display lines, borders, illustrations, or decorations. It is not in full-page volume, but restricted to reasonable space—restrained, modest as to form, and informing as to content."

IMPRACTICAL

MANY great discoverers are unknown because they are not practical. They are too timid to fight. They allow other men to wage the battle and win the rewards. In Practicality (Funk & Wagnalls Company), R. Nicolle gives three interesting examples of genius that failed because it was not backed by practicality.

Branly discovered the principle of wireless telegraphy; but after he discovered it he did nothing more. Too terrified at life to make a struggle, he is as poor and obscure as he ever was. Marconi was not afraid. He applied Branly's discovery, made a fortune, and won fame.

Charles Tellier discovered the principle of cold storage. Like Branly, he was too timid, too modest, too easily discouraged to face the world. He died as Branly lived, poor and obscure. But plenty of companies sprang up to exploit his invention. They are rich and powerful.

The mechanic Michaud discovered the principle of the bicycle pedal. He lived in poverty and died in misery. But he too made countless companies rich.

"These poor inventors were not men with the practical sense," says the author. "They lacked the hardihood to fling themselves into the struggle and conquer a place for themselves. They lacked decision, will power, force."

YOU CAN'T USE TOO MUCH COMMON SENSE WITH YOUR BABY

HOUSEKEEPERS, HOW WOULD YOU ANSWER THIS TEST?

HOW long do you keep an employee? For what reasons do you make changes?

Do you require courtesy from your employees to your children? Do you require courtesy from your children to your employees?

What arrangements do you make with regard to days out, evenings out? What financial arrangements do you make with regard to vacations?

Do you assist in any of the household work? Do you personally order household supplies?

Do you serve different food to your employees than to your family?

Have you a practical knowledge of the intelligent planning of the work of a household, so that each employee may be given a reasonable time of rest?

Have your employees a rest-room downstairs, or do they entertain their friends in the kitchen? Have they a bath-room or the use of one? Have they comfortable beds? Have they comfortable chairs? Are they provided with newspapers and magazines after the family have read them?

Is the relationship between you and your employees merely one of so much money for so much work, or is it based partly upon personal interest and attachment? Do you think that this relationship, in general, might be placed upon a more sympathetic basis with benefit to employer and employee?

These are some of the questions in the efficiency test issued by Mrs. Thetta Quay Franks in the New York Times. Upon the way you answer them rests your chance to get efficient help.

There are 60,000 housewives to-day in America who want help and can't get it. Is this because they lack heart or intelligence? No, says Mrs. Franks; it is because they lack imagination. They have never learned the real meaning of "Put yourself in his place."

When household employers attend classes with their employees, and learn what they expect their helpers to know; when they cease to be mistress and become comrades; when they look upon home-snaking as just as worthy a profession for the employee as for the employer—then girls will be as willing to take up household employment as professions that demand mental training.

"Thirty years ago professional nursing was unknown," says Mrs. Franks. "The care of the sick was left to untrained elderly women, who were looked upon much as cooks are regarded to-day. With growing knowledge the world learned that nurses required training, and their occupation was elevated to a profession.

"When women know more about the effect of food on the human body, and realize the vital need of our nation for more intelligent eating habits, the delicate art of cooking the daily food will take its true place in the public estimation."

Books Worth Sending For

Any of the following books may be secured by sending a money order to the Superintendent of Public Documents (mentioning the department indicated). Washington, D.C.

The Blue Aura

By ELIZABETH YORK MILLER

Illustration by A. I. Keller

ALTHOUGH her seat was well forward, Edith Trelawny managed to take stock of the congregation. Dora's late associates, the ladies of the ballet, had settled themselves in one thick group, with the exception of the consumptive-looking girl, who sat apart in her ill gotten finery, a wistful Magdalen in her isolation. This girl had a dreamy face like a saint's; her eyes were unhappy.

Tyson's friends were also well represented. They herded together on the other side, and were all of the masculine persuasion; so that the church was not unlike a Quaker house of worship in its main division of the sexes.

Scattered about less compactly, a little furtively because unbidden, were stragglers and curiosity-seekers from the streets. There was an old woman concealing her tray of matches under her cape, pretending that she had come in to pray, and vastly astonished to find a wedding in progress. There were the usual bold children who make a business of evading the school inspectors, but who, nevertheless, must pick up their learning somewhere.

Twisting her neck in an uninteresting moment of the ceremony, the mother of Dora became aware of a familiar face in the background. She had not seen the man for years, and he had changed, but she recognized him instantly. Like her, he had come to see Dora married, but furtively, as the old match-seller and the other stragglers had come.

Edith gave him the benefit of a cold stare through her severe pince-nez. Whatever had she seen in him, she wondered? What fools girls were!

A beam of sunlight forced its way through one of the old windows as Edith turned to look again. This time her searching glance discovered another man sitting on the opposite side of the aisle, also well at the back; and him she recognized, too. She had reason to fear that he would know her, and turned her head quickly.

He, also, was a gentleman. How had he come to be in the church? Was it his whim to attend the weddings of humble strangers?

He was a noble lord, this other, and Edith Trelawny's acquaintance with him was not of a personal nature. She had merely served as a go-between postmistress for him and the shockingly frivolous daughter-in-law of her employer. She had formed the opinion that he was a bad man, albeit a fascinating one.

The presence of Henry Mayfield was not inexplicable; but that other, Lord Anthony Harland—how explain him? He had not come to bear Mayfield company. She had caught them looking at each other with upraised eyebrows and faint smiles of surprise. They were acquainted, then—but they had not come together.

When the bridal party came out again, it was with great relief that she observed both men to be gone. On the drive back to the Milano, she whispered to Dora:

"Mr. Mayfield was in the church."

Dora flushed and made no reply. There was no doubt about it: if the day could be spoiled, her mother would accomplish it.

THE day was not spoiled, however. Turco saved it.

Some of the girls and Tyson's friends had been bidden to the luncheon feast. They were twelve in all until, to every one's horror, there arrived a thirteenth in the person of the ballet mistress, who was a little late.

What to do?

Even seating some one at a separate table did not quite solve the matter. So Turco decided not to be a guest at all, but to play at being a waiter. He put on an apron and a false mustache and soon they were all roaring at his antics. The real waiters could scarcely attend to their business, so funny was Turco. Even the bridegroom, who knew most of his partner's tricks by heart, was convulsed.

As for Edith Trelawny, between Turco and the one glass of champagne she permitted herself, fears for her reputation were forgotten. Best of all, she forgot to criticize.

So Dora was married and a certain chapter closed.

IT was August, and the acrobats had a month's holiday before starting on their long and tedious provincial tour. A holiday from engagements, however, did not mean a rest. It meant harder work, as they were introducing a new turn, and the turn itself would introduce Dora.

There had been some touring already, and Dora had spent the first few months of her marriage very pleasantly at such places as Blackpool, Llandudno, Eastbourne, and Margate. The excitement of travel and change delighted her. They were like three vagabonds, and there was nothing at all to worry them—unless it was a certain little mystery about Turco, which Dora felt but could not penetrate. Turco had a secret, and, like Pandora of old, Dora could not be quite happy until she had discovered it.

He both wrote and received long letters. Those that came for him bore the London postmark and what was plainly feminine handwriting; but Dora never saw the envelops of those he sent. She only saw him engaged in writing the letters. Turco also bought little gifts which were not always for her, but, from their nature, could be intended only for a member of her sex. This made her jealous.

It was vain to question Tyson. He was as much in the dark as Dora. He said Turco always went on like that when they were touring. No; Turco wasn't married. At least, Teddie Tyson hadn't heard of it.

It was also vain to question Turco, which Dora did with persistent energy. His reply was always the same: "She's my sweetheart, of course."

"But I am your sweetheart," Dora would say, with a sly look at her husband. "You know I am your sweetheart, Turco."

Turco, grinning evilly, would then suggest that he was a ravishing lady-killer and had more than one string to his bow.

Dora usually threatened to fly into a temper at this. She was restrained from doing so only by the thought of the black vortices and flaming tongues into which her astral body would be plunged.

Generally she got as far as stamping her foot.

"You're an ugly old man! You look exactly like a monkey. What woman

Page 19

"One of them is doing it now," Turco would say.

He was never angry, no matter how cruelly she insulted him.

"At least, you might tell me her name, Turco. Just her name. I won't ask another question."

"Aw—I can't give a lady away! It wouldn't be fair."

"I wouldn't tell anybody," Dora pleaded. "Just whisper it in my ear, Turco."

"Very well, then," replied Turco. And the name he whispered was "Dumpling."

And never, never could any more information be got out of him.

This, then, was the slight cloud on Dora's happiness. Cloud is perhaps a strong word. It was the irritation, rather, of unsatisfied curiosity.

Where, she asked her husband, did Turco live when they were in London? Strange to say, Tyson could not answer this question, either. Manlike, he had minded his own business where his partner's private life was concerned, and counseled Dora to do likewise.

"The old boy won't tell you if he doesn't want to. Turco's a queer fish."

"I can see that for myself. But why shouldn't he tell us? We're his best friends. Supposing he was taken ill or something, and we didn't know where to find him?"

The young married couple had returned to Mrs Petrosini's house, which was the nearest thing they knew to home. The Milano was convenient for meals, and they had rented a loft in Long Acre for their arduous rehearsals. Dora had a sitting-room at Mrs. Petrosini's, where she could sew and entertain her friends at afternoon tea.

Turco was the plutocrat of the little troupe; for Dora spent all of her husband's superfluous money on clothes, and Tyson himself was not insensible to the charm of raiment. Turco spent so little on his own person that it might be said to be negligible. And, Dora reflected, he could not be spending a great deal on that woman, either.

DORA was uncommonly clever at learning her new profession. Of course they gave her mostly the ornamental things to do; but she had a wonderful sense of balance, and no fear.

So behold the three of them, on a stifling afternoon in August, hard at work in the loft, which they called the studio.

Dora's raiment was reduced to the knickerbockers and blouse of a bathing-suit and a pair of white canvas running shoes. Tyson was much the same.

It was a killing afternoon. The trio consumed ginger beer and lemonade at intervals; but nothing could allay the heat, and the heat was exhausting.

Their hands sweated, necessitating constant visits to the chalk-box; and once, because of Tyson's carelessness in that respect, Turco slipped from his partner's grasp when they were swinging from the trapeze, and had a bad fall.

The accident took him unaware and he had no time to save himself by one of the quick leaps at which he was adept.

At first they thought he had fainted or worse; but he was merely dazed, and gathered himself together slowly, too spent to scold Tyson.

Cunning in even this unexpected crisis, Dora realized her great opportunity. Turco must be driven home in a cab. For once, he was off his guard. His smiles came feebly; the pathetic monkey's eyes looked sick.

"Perhaps he's hurt worse than he lets on," Dora whispered to her husband, as they hurriedly dressed behind the screen. "Have you had accidents like that before?"

"Dozens," Tyson replied rather irritably. "It took his wind, that's all."

"Oughtn't he to have a doctor?"

"Not a bit of good; he wouldn't see one. He'll be all right to-morrow."

But Tyson was not very happy, nor so optimistic as he pretended. The accident had been his fault for neglecting to chalk his hands for that particular trick. It was criminal carelessness, and he knew it. Nor was it an isolated case. Of late the handsome young acrobat had seemed to make a habit of carelessness.

And Dora was usually at the bottom of these little things, although neither of them realized it. No one could have blamed her for Turco's fall; but if she had not claimed his attention just as he was getting ready, Tyson would have remembered to chalk his hands.

"You must go home in a cab, Turco," Dora said.

"Have it your own way," Turco replied listlessly.

"And Ted will take you," she added, thinking that, now, at last, she would discover where Turco lived. She was too canny to suggest going herself, and was content merely to call the cab.

Turco got up painfully, and was helped into his coat. Tyson insisted on carrying him piggy-back down the stairs. He seemed absolutely wilted.

THE next day, however, Turco was quite well again, and complained of nothing more serious than a shoulder bruise.

It was Dora who did not feel well that day. Hypocritical Dora! She sighed and groaned and complained so steadily that at last they let her off.

Before she left, however, she went to some pains to discover how long they would remain in the studio, and whether Turco would come back to New Compton Street for tea.

"Where're you going?" Tyson called after her suspiciously.

"Home, of course," she retorted, flying down the stairs. She looked very charming, but not wholly innocent, as she turned and made a little moue at him.

By this time poor Teddie knew her for an incorrigible liar when it suited her book to be one. He was terribly unhappy. Last night, before she would let him sleep, Dora had made him tell her where Turco lived.

Dora had tricked them both, and felt not the slightest compunction about what she had done and meant to do further. The time was ripe for her to probe Turco's secret.

She was not particularly anxious for him to find her out, but that must be left to chance. If the worst came to the worst, she would put a brazen face on the whole matter and ask him what he meant to do about it?

Would Turco quarrel with them? Not likely.

So Dora sped like a determined young eaglet from Long Acre to the number in Percy Street where Turco had been driven the afternoon before, and which he had entered alone, according to Teddie's solemn oath.

Dora discovered Percy Street to be a superior neighborhood to her own. The house where Turco lived might have seen better days, but it was also seeing quite good ones still.

Dora was suddenly jealous of Turco for establishing himself so fashionably and not even inviting them to call.

"He's leading a double life—that's what it is," she told herself. "Very well; I shall soon find out."

The street door stood open, giving a rather spacious vista of stairs and corridor covered with bright-hued linoleum. There were five bells and name-plates, including the care-taker's. It was an old-fashioned house that had been turned into flats.

Dora did not pull the care-taker's bell. Number three was a brass plate labeled "M. La Turcque."

That must be Turco. Oh, what a name? Dora doubled up with silent laughter. She had a mind to go away and keep her innocence, so that to-morrow she could address him as "Monsieur La Turcque" as if she had evolved it in her own mind. But here was the box, and Pandora must lift the lid. It was absolutely essential to her happiness.

The blood was racing through her veins in excited anticipation as she bounded lightly up the stairs. In her summer dress of muslin and a little hat gay with flowers, she looked so well that she felt uncommonly sure of herself.

There was a moment of pause as Dora stood: before the door of Number Three; but, despising her emotion of weakness, Dora lifted the iron knocker and gave the panel a resounding thwack.

There was no answer, and she tried again, leaning her cheek against the door to listen for sounds inside.

What a pity! No one at home. She must go down and ask questions of the care-taker.

And then—just as she was giving it up—there was a sound from inside. A voice called out, "Why don't you come in?"

Why not, indeed, since the door proved to be unlocked?

Dora tried the handle softly.

"Is that you, Turco darling?" called the voice, more audible this time. "I know you! Playing another trick on me, eh?"

"It's not Mr. La Turcque," said Dora, standing indecisively in the short corridor which gave the pick of three doors.

The place smelled of summer roses, and it was pleasantly dim and cool.

There was a short silence; and then the voice, more reserved, asked:

"Who is it, please?"

Why on earth didn't the woman come? Dora replied haughtily:

"I am a friend of Turco's. Could I speak to somebody a moment?"

"Oh, certainly! Do come in."

At that Dora opened the door.

HEAVEN be kind!—what was this? Dora could have screamed with fright.

As for the poor creature in the invalid chair, it also seemed dismayed, and stared at Dora as at something from another world.

It looked nothing much more than a child in years—an ugly, misshapen girl—child with a big head and little dangling feet at the end of short legs. It had rippling golden hair, soft brown eyes, and a terrible bulging brow.

The room was big and well kept, not badly furnished, and filled with summer roses. On the mantel and walls were the evidences of Turco's thoughtfulness—the china vases and bowls, presents from Eastbourne and Margate, carefully labeled; a papier-mache anchor forming a frame for a colored lithograph of the Victory,—that had come from Portsmouth,—all sorts of knick-knacks, and quite a lot of books.

The misshapen creature was propped up with pillows in a wheel-chair. Before her was a deal table on which there were books, drawing materials, and a box of water-color paints. She wore a clean blue gingham pinafore, the sleeves turned back at the wrists, and her hands were astonishingly beautiful.

Into the queer face there came a rapt expression. "What are you?" she asked in a hushed voice.

Dora trembled from head to foot. Now that Turco's secret was disclosed, she would have given her soul not to possess it.

Poor Turco! Poor little monstrosity that had somehow fallen to his care!

The creature seemed to gather courage, and began to meditate aloud:

"You have the most beautiful physical body I have ever seen. I didn't know there were such people in the world. Turco is handsome, but you—you are wonderful. Yet you are not an astral body. You must be a human being. You are a woman, aren't you? Yes, I am sure of it. How nice of you to come and see me."

Was the poor little creature mad? Dora backed toward the door.

"I'm so sorry—I made a mistake—I'm ever so sorry," she murmured.

"Oh, please don't go! Mrs. Smith will be back in a moment. I want her to see you. She only ran out to get our supper. She looks after me, you know, and keeps everything tidy. I'm rather helpless myself. I had a bad fall when I was a little girl. I can just remember it. I was four years old. They—my father and mother—were teaching me to do the back somersault, and the net broke. I was dreadfully ill. But I don't suffer very much now. I'm nearly seventeen. My mother and father went away and left me when I was in hospital. Wasn't that a strange thing to do? So Turco took care of me. Turco says I'm the most beautiful thing in the world. But I always thought he was wrong. Now I shall tell him so."

"Don't tell him!" Dora cried, sick with contrition. "He'd never forgive me!"

"Forgive you for what? Turco is so selfish sometimes. He never lets me see anybody but Mrs. Smith, and it's very lonely for me. But he wouldn't be angry. He never is. Do sit down; you'll find that chair very comfortable."

What delicate manners she had, and a smile of the truest hospitality!

Dora only half understood the mystery, even as yet; but she understood enough to be ashamed of herself.

"Have you a name?" the curious creature went on, when her visitor had accepted the invitation to sit down. "Mine is 'Dumpling'—at least, that's what Turco calls me. He's very fond of dumplings,—suet ones, you know,—so he calls me after them. Only his bit of fun, but I like it. What is your name?"

"Dora Tyson," Dora replied.

"Dora? You're Dora! Oh, how delightful! Turco is in love with you. He told me so. He says he loves you next after me and Mrs. Smith. I wish you would dance for me. Sometimes Turco tries to show me how beautifully you dance. But now I have seen you, I know how absurd he was. Do you think this is pretty?"

She switched lightly to another subject, and held up a water-color sketch of what appeared to be a sunburst, a blend of radiant yet delicate tones of lilac, blue, gold, and pale green.

"It's very pretty," Dora assented. "What is it?"

"A beautiful, heavenly thought," Dumpling replied seriously. "It's the sort of thought Turco has frequently. I've often seen it. Only I can't paint it as beautiful as it really is. Nor can I give it its true, exquisite form. Turco expresses his thoughts most beautifully in a material way, too. He sends me such charming presents. Do you see all those? Turco sends them to me when he is on tour, and he brings me roses and vanilla ices every day, now it is so hot, and lets me off lessons. One day he is going to take me out into the world—when I can bear it, he says. He thinks the world won't please me very much. But he doesn't quite understand. God helps you to bear everything, doesn't He? I love God with all my heart and soul. Don't you?"

To the frank simplicity of this question there was but one possible reply. Dora said, "Yes—of course," a little frightened, very much ashamed.

It was difficult to get away. Dumpling poured forth conversation in a stream that would not be stemmed.

"But you'll come again, beautiful Dora, to-morrow, perhaps! Will you ask Turco to let me see the world now? I know why he wouldn't—he was afraid I would suffer; but I can bear it—truly I can. Tell him so. Au revoir, then, if you must go. Au revoir, dear Dora!"

Feeling like a miserable, slinking wretch, Dora crept out finally, and encountered Mrs. Smith on the stairs. She knew it must be Mrs. Smith, because the woman was a hunchback.

HOW describe the feelings of Dora as she made her way back to New Compton Street?

A school-boy who not only deserves but knows he is going to get a good hiding, could have sympathized with her; but, even then, the school-boy might not have been guilty of anything despicable, and Dora knew that she had been.

It was useless to have tried to make a compact of secrecy with the garrulous Dumpling. The poor creature's intellect was far from being impaired, but she had the absolute simplicity of a child. She would tell Turco all about it. Doubtless she was even now telling Mrs. Smith.

Pandora's box had, indeed, revealed a

Page 20

The chamber of horrors might be a shrine, for love permeated every corner of it. Even Tureo's "selfishness" was love. He had kept the poor broken child from the world because he was afraid she could not "bear it."

The thoughtless would turn to gape—the cruel and heartless would laugh—at the sight of that sad body.

As she neared Mrs. Petrosini's her footsteps dragged. How could she tell Tureo what she had done—how ruthlessly her curious hands had flung open the door of his inner shrine? She did not put it into quite those words, but it was what she felt.

Perhaps he would not have come back with Ted. That thought buoyed her up a little.

But when she reached the little sitting-room, he was there—her husband too, of course. They were having tea.

Dora came into the room with the air of a guilty puppy, and was immediately pounced upon by her adoring but anxious husband. By rousing her antagonism he helped her to overcome the sense of humiliation.

"Where've you been?" he demanded, eyeing her severely.

"For a walk," she replied.

"Feeling better?" asked Tureo, adding hot water to the tea.

"There was nothing the matter with her," Tyson cut in. "She was up to some trick of her own, and I can guess what it was. I know where she's been—and I hope she's satisfied."

You made me what I am to-day;
I hope you're satisfied."

chanted Dora, with a lump in her throat.

Tureo laughed.

"Don't quarrel, or else I'm off. It's too hot to fight."

"Never for Ted. He's always picking on me," said Dora.

Mingled with the bitterness of her own self-reproach was fury at her husband. Why should he see through her so plainly—he who was as stupid as he was handsome?

She attacked him angrily:

"You make me tired. I have been for a walk, and you can believe me or not, as you like. Who cares? Not me. I didn't marry you to be bullied. All beef and muscle, you are, and think no end of yourself, but if you dare say anotehr word to me, I'll scratch your eyes out, and leave a memento or two on your lovely face. Try it?"

Tyson didn't "try it." He contented himself with sullen silence, while Tureo poured a cup of tea for Dora and coaxed her to drink it.

By this time she was on the verge of tears. SHe couldn't confess to Tureo with her husband looking on. Tureo might understand if she wheedled and wept, but Ted was dead against her. Ted would call her a miserable sneak, which she undoubtedly was, and would blame himself, too, for having told her Tureo's address. And he was to blame.

If he hadn't been so weak, Dora concluded unfairly, it wouldn't have happened.

MEANWHILE Tureo's psychic powers seemed to sleep. He was amiable and insuspecting. Perhaps the accident of uesterday had put him out of joint, astrally speaking.

"Well, I must be getting along," he said finally. "You two aren't very good company. make it up by to-morrow, will you?"

Tyson grunted, and Dora attempted a watery smile. She was still like a poppy—feebly beating its tail now.

"Tureo dar—Tureo, I—"

"What then?" asked Tureo.

"Guilty conscience," murmured Tyson, but so low that neither heard him.

"Nothing," said Dora.

She could not confess—at least, not before Ted.

"See you at the studio to-morrow at ten," Tureo said, picking up his disrepu- table hat. "I wonder if I could get some vanilla ice at the Milano?"

Dora started guiltily, and Tyson looked surprised.

"I think I could—and it would keep if I took a taxi," Tureo concluded.

They heard him scampering down the stairs as if already homeward bound with the perishable confection.

DORA'S husband was very angry.

Scarcely had Tureo's footsteps died away before he flew at her as only a rather dull-witted young man would have had the courage to do.

"You've been spying on Tureo. I knew you mean to do it—you baggage!" he cried loudly.

By way of his reply he got a resounding slap on the face. It jurt, but he only laughed.

"What did you find out, then—eh?"

Sullen silence from Dora, who, having delivered her blow, crouched on the hassock like a bristling young tiger cat.

"Couldn't rest until you'd pried into his business, could you? Must go sneaking about behind his back just to find out something that's no concern of yours. You aren't even ashamed of yourself."

Dora quivered. She was engulfed in shame at that very moment, but her husband could not see it. Tureo would have seen.

He blundered on, since he could get no response from her:

"For nearly seven years, now, me 'n' Tureo have worked together. We've been good pals. I never tried to pry into his personal affairs. No more did he mine, except I asked him. And now along comes a woman, and makes a sneak out of me as well as out of herself. But you were born that way. You can't help yourself, I suppose. Almost the first words you spoke to me were a lie—giving yourself such airs! Trelawny Manor, indeed! High-born, indeed! You were starving, and if it hadn't been for me—"

He broke off, conscious of saying more than he had meant at the start. There was a look about Dora that frightened him a little. He loved her. It was only because he loved her so dearly that he could hit her so hard. And she was down enough as it was, poor thing. Shee needed kindness, not killing.

So she retaliated to the best of her ability:

"Just for that, Mr. Tyson, I'll walk out of here and never come back. Thanks for your hospitality. Tell Tureo that it wasn't your fault you gave me his address. Tell him the woman tempted you, and ask him to forgive me. As for you—!"

Words failed her. She felt that she would burst if she tried to tell her husband what she thought of him.

As she stood before him in her pretty summer frock and the dear little hat gay with flowers, her beauty was a terrible, almost wicked thing. The wide, smiling mouth, so savage, the glittering eyes, the thin, distended nostrils, mocked him. He felt her defiance. With all his strength, he was helpless before Dora.

It couldn't be true that she was going to leave him just because he was obliged to scold her. The fact didn't animate his slow brain until she was actually at the door. Then, in a flash, he comprehended.

He was beside her instantly, and Dora suddenly found herself pinioned by the wrists and dragged back.

No; she shouldn't leave him, if he had to tie her up to prevent it! In the beginning he had been unwilling to take her into his life. She had compelled his love almost against his will. Now he would compel at least her obedience.

"Dora, what were you going to do?" he asked in an agonized whisper.

Dora smiled as one who said: "Oh, yes; oyu are stronger than I am—in one way. But I can wait." She did not actually say it, however. The smile conveyed her meaning perfectly. It was like a song without words.

"Dora—I didn't mean to hurt you. What did it matter what you told me about yourself? And I'll tell Tureo it was all my fault, if you like."

Dora's eyes grew frozen. Another song without words—"Unhand me, ruffian," this time.

He did to the extent of putting his arms around her. SHe held herself like a ramrod.

"Don't look at me like that! Dora, you don't hate me—you can't!"

"I despise you," said Dora.

The coldness in her voice carried conviction to his slow brain.

She despised him!

He didn't quite know what he had done. In the beginnign he had started with the assumption that she was in the wrong. His folly had been in overstating his case and getting on to non-essentials. After all, what had Trelawny Manor—that castle in Spain—to do with Dora's sneaking on Tureo?

"I'm going," said Dora, and moved toward the door again, taking a cruel pleasure in his misery. Where she was going she had not the slightest idea. That did not trouble her.

She walked slowly and haughtily, expecting at each step the spring from behind that would pinion her again, the importunities that only served to make her more stubborn.

But nothing happened this time, and, turning for a final sarcastic word of farewell, she was surprised at what she saw.

Her husband was on the little hassock, his head bowed to his knees, his arms embracing both head and knees together—an abject, dolorous spectacle, if ever there was one. She saw his shoulders heave, and heard a gasping sob that seemed to be torn from the very heart of anguish.

She paused and her breath came quickly. A delicious sense of warmth permeated her body, a softening of every fiber, like the sweetness of spring stealing into the hard locked soul of winter. To her surprise, her eyes were moist.

She could not resist the impulse. It rushed through every vein. The figure on the hassock, abandoned to such abject desolation, had the same pwoer over her as that of a child to break its mother's heart.

"Oh, Ted!"

She rushed to him—crushed her arms about him. She kissed his ruffled hair, and hugged and rocked him in a tremulous tumult of remorse.

Alas! In the crystal of the future one seemed to see him sitting there again like that.

Dora was not going to desert him. She loved him truly, and generously forgave him everything, and he was grateful to be forgiven. They held each other close, and trembled as they thought of the calamity that had so nearly happened.

AFTER that, of course, Dora told him all about Tureo's secret; and she was so sorry and remorseful that he had not the heart to reproach her. In the end, he said he would tell Tureo, himself, how sorry she was, and take all the blame. For, after all, he had been weak about giving her the address.

So cunning was Dora, socleverly had she worked her points, that Tyson really began to think he was to blame. If any doubt crept in, he had only to remember how very nearly she had left him.

In that dread moment the poor young fellow knew what life without Dora would mean to him. It would be death. He thought he could not live without her. He was enveloped in horror whenever he thought of it.

This was the love whose coming, as a care-free bachelor, he had dreaded. Even when he first met Dora he had had quite another idea of following up his fancy for her. Some bewildering change had taken place in her that night they had dined at Chapin's with Tureo. She had become an impudent, self-sufficient young thing, all in a flash, and the falsh had revealed to him his own longing.

He knew that husbands and wives sometimes left each other; but that it was possible for Dora to leave him gave him such a shock as he would not soon to get over.

In his slow way he realized that he must keep close to her—that, if need be, he must even sacrifice Tureo on the altar of his marital felicity.

To be continued next week

WHAT SCIENCE IS DOING

To Roll This Old World Along

DRY-CLEANING THE COW

WHEN Stevenson sang of

The friendly cow, all red and white, I love with all my might,

The latest electrical cow-currying device first of all takes all the dirt from the cow's coat by the vacuum

This machine justifies itself to the average dairyman on the grounds of hygiene; but for the show animal it will prove indespensable. The most hardened hudge still puts a good deal of store by the sheen on an entrant's coat. And blue ribbons come fluttering in the wake of Grade A cattle with coats of velvet.

WHY THE STEAM LOCOMOTIVE PERSISTS

THE steam locomotive is not yet doomed to death, in spite of the fact that a great many railroads have electrified portions of their main lines. It has some advantages over the electric puller, although under some conditions it is a complete back number.

W. R. Steinmetz, speaking before the New England Railroad Club, told succinctly the status of the battle between steam and electricity from the railroad point of view. It must be remembered that he is an electrical engineer; but he put the matter neutrally.

The great advantage of the steam locomotive is its capacity to handle overloads—"take punishment," the sporting writers call it—without spoiling the tremendously valuable machinery. A steam locomotive can be rated to haul so much weight, and, having hauled that manount, it will always do so; for if the power is there the wheels will go round.

An electric machine will, paradoxically, haul loads it was never meant to pull. This is because the motor is merely a transformer of energy, and it will transform all the power coming from the water wheel or the power house, if it is allowed to. But in doing this it kills itself. It is the willing horse that runs until it drops.

The capacity of the electric is measured by the heating of its motoers; and heating takes time. Thus, when a great train hauled by an electric locomotive hits a grade that taxes the strength of the puller, it goes right on, doing the while damage to the motors which may not be discovered for a week—and then who knows who did the damage? If a steam locomotive hits a grade that is too much for it, the train stops.

Steam railroads will not electrify their lines until the amount of traffic becomes so great that the advantages of the electric will create an adequate interest on the money necessary to buy them. That is to say, should a railroad have traffic trouble from congestion, and should it be able to save the interest on the investment to electrify by decreasing this congestion with electric power, the directors would make the change.

If the advent of the electric machine had not caused great improvements to be made on the steam type, the former would have outstripped the old style long ago. But when the rival came, automatic stokers were constructed, so that more coal could be burned, brick arches increased the efficiency of the fire-boses, feed water heaters and steam super heaters kept the familiar smoke-stack in the running, because these improvements made it possible to build larger machines.

Before stokers came in, the size of locomotives was held down to the amount of coal that could be shoveled in an hour. The human fireman could deliver hardly mroe than three tons in that time, and now the big steamers use as much as six for every hour of work. But remember also that when the electric is idle it is not using power and the steamer is.

THERE'S NO REST FOR THE WEARY

A Fresh Start in the Old Line

SIX years ago, in a burst of indignation over the pettiness that attended my work as a teacher, I gave up a college instructorship and accepted a position as a traveling salesman for a big land company. My ambition was to make a sudden rise to affluence—chiefly, I presume, because that was so impossible in teaching. Today I find myself back in the class-room, facing old problems with finer spirit, I trust, and greater wisdom. And now, when I hear my colleagues airing their grievances and criticism everything right and left, I often wish that they could take a post-graduate course in the school of real knocks and imperfections. I am sure that, as a result, the standard of teaching would be raised fifty per cent.

As I look back, it appears that the commonest delusion among academic teachers is the tendency to confound book knowledge with real wisdom. In consequence they suffer from a form of intellectual vanity that precludes the possibility of their ever doing anything other than teaching, however much they would like to be people of the world. Their habit of making sweeping criticisms is evidence of this limitation. It come from a lack of real experience.

I started out in my new work with the same handicap. Hitherto my life had been so regular that people set their clocks when they saw me leaving home in the morning. My salary, though moderate, came in with unvarying regularity at the end of every month. This meant of course, three square meals a day, bills paid on time, and decent clothes to wear. The idea of hardship and privation never entered my mind. The world owed me a living, I was getting it, and perhaps I deserved more. I boasted a theoretic knowledge of men and affairs. Being lord of the class-room, my word was law.

The effect of all this was a sense of smug and selfish superiority. Anything that did not fit into my little system was preposterous. The reader may judge the effect of this attitude on my students. I imagine that some of them must have hated me like poison.

But I was to get some severe mental jolts. The old order of things was badly shaken up when I went on the road. I had to get up at all hours of the night to catch trains, drive out in all kinds of weather, and meet all sorts and conditions of men. It soon dawned on me what it meant to live close to the earth. Being at last in a real world, I had to get down to hard tacks. I winced under the discipline. I began to understand that grim necessity is the foundation-stone of all endeavor and gives color to thought; and presently my little system with its intellectual vanities vanished.

Above all, my new work instilled a more kindly attitude toward the world. Previously Shakespeare's plays had contained all the worth-while tragedies. Now I found at first hand others that were unsung.

One day I had to motor twenty miles out into the country in a blinding snow-storm. It was bitter cold. When I had gone three quarters of the way, my machine stalled beside a big lake, over which the wind was blowing a hurricane. The car was stuck in a snow-drift. Having no shovel, I set out to find one. On looking around I discovered a bleak little house on a knoll in the woods, and made for it. I could hardly believe that any one could live in such a hovel. I rapped on the door. There was no answer.

Being half frozen, I pushed it open and entered. What an ill-smelling place! What sordidness! The floor was covered with filth and rubbish. Scattered promiscuously was a slab of bacon, an open pail of herring, a pan of milk, carrots, potatoes, corn, onions; and picking their way among it all were three or four cats.

Presently from an opening in the floor in an old woman literally crawled out of the earth. Her appearance corresponded to the hopeless jumble around her. Never had I seen such wasted features and such claw-like hands. She could not understand English. I gesticulated, and she uttered inarticulate sounds. I could I scarcely believe that I was only fifty miles from Minneapolis, one of the most progressive cities of the Northwest. But managed to get a shovel, and dug out my machine.

It took two hot punches to thaw me out that night. The good warm supper that followed just naturally made me overflow with gratitude that I had not succumbed in the snow beside that wind-swept lake. In bed that night, while the wind raged around the corners of the hotel, my thoughts kept going back to that poor old woman. Perhaps thousands of people fared no better. I began to count my blessings, for the first time in years.

Well, I learned a few things. I learned to be cheerful under trying conditions. Incidentally, I discovered that there are lots of bright people outside of the teaching profession,—a conviction that has been growing with me in late years,—and that real initiative and punch must be sought outside of an institution of learning.

There were some disillusionments too. After my first year on the road I realized that the talk about fabulous incomes and great killings, so fondly lingered over by dissatisfied pedagogues, belonged chiefly to the realm of fiction, and that a man can not suddenly jump into something new and make a meteoric success of it, unless he happens to be a scintillating genius. Experience has taught me, besides, that every one has about as much trouble as he can well meet, in whatever work he may be engaged, and that, in some form or other, each must pay the price of his achievements.

But I did learn the art of selling, and its hundred and one requisites. As a result, I am a more competent teacher. Why did I go back to the classroom? Because my work kept me from home constantly. I had improved a hundred per cent., but my wife and children were paying the price.

I still go on the road every summer. It is a treat and vacation for me as well as my family, as it means a change for us all. Nothing I would recommend more unreservedly to any teacher suffering from dry-rot than some avocation like this. While I come back from my summer's work rested and cheerful, I observe that Yellowstone or Glacier Park has no such effect on my colleagues. They have spent their hard earned money seeking a change, and have returned low in purse and courage, whereas I have had not only a change, but also the added satisfaction of knowing that my bank account has increased.

I am sure that by thus keeping close to the earth and attending the big school of the world, I am better natured, more inventive, more versatile, more practical, more helpful, more human, and more sympathetic—in other words, a better teacher than if I should attend Oxford or the University of Berlin a thousand years.

How Can I Get Into the Stock and Bond Business?

By ALBERT W. ATWOOD

IN this period of great activity in stocks and bonds many such questions as these come to us: "I am a young man 24 years old. How can I get into the stock and bond business?" or: "I have an established business in real estate and insurance in the town of ———, and would like to add stocks and bonds to my line. Is there any margin of profit in securities, and how should I go at it?" These and other similar inquiries may be answered as follows:

1. Usually the best plan is to associate oneself as a local representative of an established firm. These firms are always on the lookout to extend their business, open new branch offices, and find trustworthy representatives. By forming such an association no capital is required, and the good name and standing of the house is a help to the beginner.

Except for bank cashiers, retired or ex-bank presidents, and perhaps corporation treasurers, who have had an actual financial training in the community they work in, it is necessary for persons entering the stock and bond business to become acquainted at first hand with securities. The methods of selling them and other practical information can not be learned from books, as a rule. A course in a school of journalism may be a great help to a newspaper reporter, and reading books and periodicals will help the prospective bond seller; but in neither case is the candidate a journeyman until he has had some actual experience. A year's work in a broker's or bond dealer's office is almost essential for any one who hopes to enter the business, unless he has already had extensive banking or corporation finance work.

If a young man already has had some business experience, one year of serious work in the offices of the firm should equip him to start out as a salesman.

What to Read

2. It must not be supposed that reading is not vitally important. Practically all firms of bond dealers make their salesmen go through regular courses, and insist upon them reading certain books. The beginner should get a list of such books. Many of them have been referred to from time to time in these articles, and mention is made of several in a chapter of ourbooklet, "Making Your Money Work for You."

The Investment Bankers Association planning to bring out three syllabi on the subject this coming summer. These can be obtained from the secretary of the organization in Chicago, either free or for a small sum. The first deals with the principles governing the issuance and sale of securities. The second adds municipal and governmental securities to the first, and considers the values of securities. And the third deals with the stock exchanges, among other topics.

Rich Men's Sons

3. It goes without saying that success in selling bonds or stocks depends upon industry, experience, intelligence and common sense, just as it does in any other line—in fact, more so. These qualities are in great demand because so many rich men put their sons into the bond and stock business, perhaps because of its supposed gentility. Of course, some rich men's sons are just as able as poor men's sons; but any business that is so overrun with scions offers unusual opportunity for the man with brains. Indeed, it is a common description of a new firm of investment dealers to say that one partner was selected for his money, another because of his connections with some great banker or corporation magnate, and the third for his brains.

It is a business where money, social connections, and brains can all be used to advantage. But the first two inevitably fail without the third. Of course the beginner, the bond salesman, does not need much, if any, money.

4. It is difficult to generalize as to the margin of profit in this business. Very clever, hard working salesmen will make from $4000 to $10,000 a year, the exceptional few even more. No such income as this need be expected until after a man has built up a clientele. Usually the results of the first year's work are pretty lean. Some houses pay straight salaries, others a drawing account and commissions. It is doubtful whether a man can fill up all his time in one city of much less than 30,000 or 40,000 inhabitants, because in smaller places there are not enough investors to keep one one busy.

Free Booklets You May Have for the Asking

Arrangements have been made by which any reader mentioning this magazine may have any or all of the following booklets on request.

The Railway Investors' League, of which Mr. John Muir is chairman has been incorporated as a membership corporation under the laws of the State of New York. The organization is taking an active part in the movement to secure higher rates for the railroads. Descriptive circulars may be obtained on application to P. M. Whelan, secretary, 61 Broadway, New York.

The Citizens Savings & Trust Co., of Cleveland, Ohio, will furnish to our readers, upon request, Booklet P, which contains some very interesting information on banking by mail.

The Key, a monthly magazine published by R. H. Woods & Co., 128 Broadway, New York, contains quotations and information about high-grade bond investments in $100, $500, and $1000 denominations. An excellent and helpful publication for those who above all want to invest safely with an interest return of 4 per cent. to 6 per cent. Copy sent upon request. Ask for booklet 2.

The Bache Review is described by a commentator as the best literature and the soundest finance and economics that comes out of Wall Street. Filled with important and interesting information on financial and commercial conditions prevailing in these unparalleled times, it is of great value to the business man and the investor. Issued weekly by J.S. Bache & Co., 43 Broadway, New York. Sent on application.

A new circular, showing how to obtain a dividend every month through the Odd Lot method, has been issued by Hartshorne & Picabia, members of the New York Stock Exchange, 7 Wall Street, New York City. Ask for Circular O-14. The firm also offers special inducements in the way of advice to small investors.

Phelps-Eastman Co., Investment Bankers, McKnight Building, Minneapolis, Minn., are making a specialty of selling first-mortgage Minneapolis real estate bonds in denominations of $500 and $1000. These bonds are protected by improved city real estate, and net the investor 6 per cent. Descriptive circulars will be forwarded on application.

The Odd Lot Review, published weekly. summarizes financial conditions in terse, readable form in a style to meet the need of the small as well as large investor. Sample copy sent on request to 61 Broadway, New York City.

All investors interested in the remarkable progress of public-utility bonds should write to P. W. Brooks & Co., 115 Broadway, New York, for a copy of their magazine, entitled Bond Talk, which deals with the fundamental principles of investment and the advantages of public-utility bonds. Ask for Bond Talk E.

Investors desiring to acquire $100 bonds of the best known issues, and of a class that is legal for investment by trustees and savings banks, should send for the special list U that has been prepared by Merrill, Lynch & Co., members of the New York Stock Exchange, 7 Wall Street, New York City.

Any one interested in the security market should send to L.R. Latrobe & Co., No. 111 Broadway, New York, for their statistical books on Copper Stocks, Motor Stocks, Standard Oil Stocks, Investor's Guide (270 pages), or Weekly Market Letter. This firm will mail you any one of these books free on request. Partial-Payment Plan.

First farm mortgages and real estate bonds are not subject to fluctuations in value in these uncertain times. E. J. Lander & Co., Grand Forks, North Dakota, will send a booklet free to those who are interested in farm mortgages. Ask for booklet "R."

Have you read Mr. Atwood's financial booklet, "Making Your Money Work for You"? It is written especially for our readers, and if you will write him, inclosing five cents in stamps, at 381 Fourth Avenue, New York, he will send you a copy.