The Immortality of Influence

I HAVE been reading a wonderfully illuminating essay on Bismarck, by Andrew D. White.

And I thought to myself: "It is not an army that the Allies are fighting, but an idea. It is the Bismarckian conception of the right of kings, and the right of might in the world, which must be blotted out before this war is won."

Bismarck believed in the divine rig* of kings, when even kings themselves had, almost ceased to believe it

King William of Prussia had actually signed his abdication, and was preparing to flee his throne, because majority of Parliament was against him.

Bismarck made him ashamed of his weakness. What right had Parliament to interfere with the government? he demanded. What right had the people to question their kings? Rule in spite of Parliament: defy its majority: send its members home.

So the King stuck to the throne: and Bismarck, governing in spite of Parliament, made him Emperor of Germany.

It was he who transformed. the German people from a discordant, factious mass into a compact unit, aggressively demanding their place in the sun.

It was he who picked the quarrel with Austria, not for any principle, but because the boundaries of Germany must be rounded out.

When the yearned-for war with France seemed about to fall through, it was he who altered the reading of a telegram, and so goaded France to a declaration.

It was he who first used the German fleet to bully weaker peoples; he who rattled the sword wherever German interests were, even in the least degree, encroached upon.

Curious mixture that he was of medieval ideals and modern efficiency. Deeply religious, and unsparingly brutal. Loving God, and trampling on the rights of his brothers. Believing the Almighty on his side, and scrupling at nothing. Gentle and considerate in his family life, boorish in his public manners; a scholar in his library, a glutton at his table.

It has taken the blood of millions to wash out of the world the continuing influence of Bismarck.

I know a certain college fraternity whose senior delegation ten years ago had a strong man in it who ought to have been its leader. Instead of which he drank, and left the fraternity leaderless.

As a result, a weak group of freshmen was chosen that year.

Three years later, when those freshmen were about to become seniors, they, in turn, chose a weak group of freshmen.

For ten years weak delegations followed one another in that fraternity, the influence of one bad man perpetuating itself long after he himself had passed.

I printed in this magazine at one time the story of Martin Kalikak.

He was a soldier in the Revolutionary army. He married a feeble-minded woman, and they had a feeble-minded daughter. Of their 480 descendants, 143 were feeble-minded; 36 were illegitimate; 24 were confirmed alcoholics; 3 were epileptics; 82 died in infancy; 3 were criminal.

For more than a hundred years the evil that Martin Kalikak did has—in increasing volume—lived after him.

I know of no more solemn thought than this—that no man's influence in the world really ends with his life; that the most inconsequential acts may reach down; from generation to generation, through the ages.

Of course there is the brighter side. If the evil that men do lives after them, so also does the good.

If sins live forever, so also do righteous acts: if unkind ness perpetuates itself, smiles, and pleasant words, and the deed done in mercy, but soon forgotten, also are immortal.

Jefferson's idea that "governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed," Lincoln's idea of an equal chance for every man, still live in the world, side by side with Bismarck's idea.

The good living with the evil—

And slowly, little by little, outliving it.

Bruce Barton, Editor.

Painted byStockton Mulford

S. ORTON, STOCKHOLDER

By Edwin Balmer

Illustrations by Stockton Mulford

THE line before the Traders' Trust and Savings Bank had begun forming before dawn. Something of a run had started the previous afternoon; but it was not till the evening papers were on the streets that the public learned that the Chicago Clearing House had refused to clear cheeks on the Traders', and examiners, hastily summoned, were at work in the bank. The morning papers further spread the sensations that tumbled six thousand men, women, and children breakfastless from their homes to fight for favorable positions in the herd which the police, patient and pitying, were shoving and thrusting and scolding into some semblance of a line.

At ten, the usual opening hour, the doors of the Traders' opened, and the thousands in the street yelled and cried and sobbed in relief; but the line moved forward scarcely at all. In half an hour barely a score of depositors had got their money, so slow was the work of the tellers. Then, at half past ten, the chief of the examiners—convinced of the hopeless condition of the bank—ordered the doors closed.

It had begun to rain—a cold, dark November rain. It was still raining and night had come when, at five o'clock, Larry Gresham, summoned by a telegram from his lawyer, Semmes, reached the city.

The wire, despatched the evening before, had caught him in camp in northern Wisconsin, where he was shooting ducks. It had described, briefly, the condition of the Traders', and stated that his monthly income, or slightly over twelve hundred dollars, had been deposited to his account in the Traders' five days before. That sum, however, was the least of Larry's worries; he had checked out most of that. It was the danger to his stock interest in the Traders'—an interest totaling a hundred thousand dollars and comprising almost half of his assets—that set him and his Indian guide to paddling the length of the lake, portaging the dark woodland, and paddling again to catch the fast train that took him to Chicago.

THE excited, hysterical lines of men and women, of which he had read in the papers, had disintegrated now into a mob—a soaked, surging mob, pushing one way and the ether before the bank. Larry, leaving his taxicab a block away, plunged into this throng. It pushed him back and repulsed him. He plunged again and worked through the first ranks. Then men, dull and sullen, blocked him.

No one hoped to get into the bank now, but the impulse of the day persisted—the impulse to hold one's place in the line and push every one else back. Larry, trying again, at last reached the ropes before the entrance, where such of the bank officials as were not under arrest were coming and going.

Lights were burning behind drawn curtains. The doorman, recognizing Larry, informed him that receivers were to be appointed who would make a statement to stockholders as soon as possible. Meanwhile, nothing could be said except that the bank would not reopen; its condition was as bad as could be feared.

Larry turned away from the door dizzily. That meant that his hundred thousand dollars there was gone! It might mean something worse than that. The law gave the receivers the right to call upon stockholders to pay an assessment equal to the amount of their stock, if the losses of the depositors could not otherwise be paid. That meant that they would take a hundred thousand dollars more. Larry's lip trembled in contempt for that crying, clamoring crowd out there on the street in the rain on the other side of the ropes. The losses of individuals there—those ugly, incoherently threatening men—would be at most a few hundreds of dollars; while his—!

The rain blew under the eaves of the entrance, and he moved to the other side of a pillar. A girl was standing there, also watching the crowd and the police struggling to keep order. When Larry first saw her, he supposed she had been employed in some way in the bank; but now he recognized her as a girl whom he had seen often riding in Lincoln Park and on the Drive—a lithe, very graceful and skilful horsewoman. She was slight without being small, with straight, well filled shoulders and rounded arms and bust. Her neck, under her loosened fur collar, was white and perfect; her forehead, finely formed nose, and chin were equally wonderful in profile and now when she turned toward him Her eyes were gray and dark-lashed, her brows brown, her hair a little lighter and thick under her small toque. Trouble was in her eyes; it trembled on her lips.

"They can't believe it!" she said to him.

"What?"

"That their money's been stolen—that they can't get it from us."

"Us?" Larry repeated.

It was so impossible to connect blame or reproach of any sort with this girl that he demanded:

"Why do you say that?"

A BRAWL that had started in the street took her attention. Men began to stone the bank.

"Come behind here!" Larry interposed himself before the girl, and tried to push her into the protection of a pillar. But, while she resisted him, a stone flew over Larry's shoulder and struck her on the forehead. He caught her and carried her to the bank door, which opened to admit them. One of the women clerks, who helped bathe the girl's face, told Larry that she was S. Orton, a stockholder—"the daughter of, the architect, you know, who died last year." He appeared to have left most of his property in stock of the 'Traders'; the clerk mentioned "the girl's holdings as about thirty thousand dollars. Larry get a teller to look up her address, and he had a taxicab come to the entrance.

S. Orton was conscious again, but white and very quiet: She sat on the cab seat beside Larry, with her head inclined; one small bare hand—some one had removed her gloves—rested on the seat between them. He touched it and found it cold, and took it between his own to

warm it. The cab, turning, let them look back at the mob before the bank.

"Savages!" Larry accused them. "Beasts!"

His wrath, which since last night had been rising against the officers of the bank who had despoiled him, was shifting to the whining, weeping, violent crowd. The bank officers had deprived him of the first half of his possessions; but these were going to lay claim to the rest. They were going to rob this little girl likewise, after having tried to kill her.

"Brutes!"

"Did you see them this morning?" the girl questioned him; it was still difficult for her to speak: "Men came mostly, at first; then their wives took their places—or children stood in line, if both the mother and father had to work. Such terribly poor people—so many of them! There was a little girl I spoke to; she stood in the rain all day with her father's pass-book. He's crippled with rheumatism and can't work any more. He had saved seventeen hundreds dollars, and had it all in our bank; and she'd promised him—that little thing—she'd stay in line, till she got his money for him. I told her—I found her in line yet at four o'clock—it wouldn't do any good to wait any longer; but she couldn't go home to him without— I suppose that's the trouble with them back there they can't go home without—"

"Don't!", Larry forbade. His resentment had been, rising with beautiful spontaneity against those people; he needed that anger; he didn't want it quashed. "Don't think, of such things now; you must be calm."

"Calm! There was a woman I spoke to; her name was Seiler. She had been saving—from scrubbing floors of office buildings at night."

The car, clearing the towering structures of the Loop, dashed out upon the lake-front boulevard: Larry lowered the window to let in the fresh, wet breeze. S. Orton relaxed in her corner of the seat and rested. He could see her quite well from time to time as the boulevard lamps lighted the interior of the cab. When he had noticed her riding in the park, he had the thought often that he would give a good deal to know her; but he had never till now she was beside him and under his care, that any one in the world could be as sweet and gentle and feel as little, and lovable as S. Orton had been when she had lain for a minute all limp in his arms.

At moments his thoughts went back in bitter wrath to his loss; then the light would give her to him again. And when at last he brought her to her door, and she thanked him, it was many minutes before he found himself able to be angry at any one again.

The condition of the bank, however, proved quite as bad as any one could have feared. The interest of the stockholders not only was a total loss, but the receivers immediately called upon the stockholders for one hundred per cent assessments. Many of the stockholders proved insolvent thereupon; but, if the others met their assessments, the receivers hoped to pay to depositors twelve or thirteen cents on the dollar of their deposits.

NOTICE of the assessment reached Lawrence Gresham at his rooms a week after the failure. He had four rooms to himself, neither the most nor the least costly in the big bachelors' apartment building—just about right for a gentleman without dependents or responsibility and assured of about twelve hundred a month over and above such sums as he earned by his occasional exertions in selling, bonds. For a man with income cut almost in half—the income from the Traders' stock being gone—the rooms were decidedly extravagant. So also was membership in two downtown clubs, two golf clubs, a big game club, a yacht club, and the Casino. If he now had to pay an assessment of a hundred thousand dollars in addition, he would have barely thirty or thirty-five thousand left between him and living on his earnings, which even his most optimistic figuring could not total to a hundred a month. Payment of the assessment, therefore, was purely impossible if Larry, were to maintain any sort of standing.

His father—though a life insurance agent—had worked himself into an early grave gaining that standing for his son. "Gall" Gresham, he had been called by men of his generation, who were partly amused, partly annoyed, yet also partly influenced by him: for he made them fear death and insure. But when he sought membership in their clubs and companionship with them, they left his name, undisturbed, upon the waiting lists. Gresham responded by getting them to take out more insurance, and, from the premiums they paid him, he sent his son East, with theirs, to preparatory school and college, to absorb, not the art of making, but grace in spending.

"Gall" Gresham had a hundred and fifty thousand then, and, before he died and became a "claim" for seventy-five thousand more, Larry had achieved rating among the first twenty polo-players in America, had climbed the Matterhorn, hunted in South America, and generally so impressed father that "Gall" Gresham spent his last days with Semmes at his side, aptly tying up the principal sums of his bequests to his son.

Semmes now deposed that he had foreseen every eventuality; the principal of that Traders' stock, for instance, had been. bequeathed so that no one could prove that Lawrence Gresham was the legal holder of the stock; he had merely. been receiving the income from it.

Upon receipt of notice of assessment, therefore, Larry ordered his more recent roadster and took it to Semmes' office. At three that afternoon, after a long session with the receivers, he signed a slip authorizing Semmes to pay himself five hundred dollars from Larry's income, and he returned to his car.

He had been to see S. Orton several times that week, and he had intended to drop in again this afternoon to make sure

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that she was still recovered from the stoning. But, as he neared her apartment, the uneasiness which had been vexing him that afternoon became more acute, and he drove past. He returned—errandless—almost to town, then went back to her house and stopped.

She shared a pleasant, good-sized apartment with a Mrs. Willis, who had been a friend of Mrs. Orton. A paper, posted since the day before yesterday upon the entrance door of the building, now offered that particular apartment for sub-lease; and Larry found, when he entered the hall, that the door was open and a number of people were crowded within. Silver and household treasures of various sorts were being auctioned. The sale was almost over; but he saw on the old-fashioned silver that was being taken away an engraved "0."

LARRY, rather white and nervous, waited outside until he had seen the auctioneer depart; then he knocked upon the door which had been left ajar, and, as it swung farther open, he saw S. Orton alone in the front room. She had been crying a little, but, when she saw him, she tried to wink the wetness away. He entered and closed the door behind him.

The little stockholder seemed even younger and less protected than he had seen her before. The feeling of the warmth of her lithe little figure in his arms had returned, often, to torment him; but never so much as now. The money which the auctioneer had left was in a pile of ragged bills and silver on the table beside her.

"I saw the sign on the door," he said, as if that were his reason for having come. "You're planning to move?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Mrs. Willis won't need so much room now; she will take a smaller apartment."

"You mean you're leaving her?" Larry demanded.

"Yes," she said quietly.

"Why, please?"

She did not answer.

"Because you're going to work?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

She gazed at him, bewildered at his inquisition.

"I spent an hour or so to-day with the receivers of the Traders'," Larry explained. "To furnish a contrast for my conduct, one of them informed me that one of the stockholders—and a girl—had turned over to them about ten thousand dollars in bonds, which represented almost all she now possessed, in part payment on the assessment of thirty-five thousand dollars which they had been obliged to levy upon her stock. She also had sold her horse, and was soon to sell other personal possessions, and was to assume payment of the remainder of her assessment. There was only one such stockholder on the list; so I suppose," his eyes went toward the table, "that is what you mean to give them now; and you're going to work to pay the rest."

Her cheeks went crimson.

"Is there any other way?" she asked quietly.

"If you're going to pay, I suppose not. I'm not paying. You and I had been getting to be—well, you'd let me come around and we seemed to like a good many of the same things; so I came to tell you I could pay my assessment from other funds which I happen to have; but I'm not going to. The bank stock happened to have been held in such a way that the law can not bother me.

"The law could not bother you, either; the receivers mentioned that as making your case quite parallel with mine. They recognized that, as you were a minor, they could oblige you to turn over nothing; they certainly couldn't make you go to work for them."

"I'm not going to work for them," Shirley said.

"I know; it's for the depositors. If you'd been an officer of the bank, I might agree that you had reason to feel that way. But you weren't; and neither was I one of the robbers. We're victims just the same as the depositors, and we've already lost lots more than any of them. And what good will it do them for us to ruin ourselves? What good will your money or mine, if we give it all, do? They'll get, on an average, about a dollar each."

"Not if I paid up all at once, and if every one paid up all!" she cried. "Forgive me—please forgive me," she pleaded. "I didn't mean to say that. I was thinking, when you were speaking of the depositors, of that Mrs. Seiler whom I spoke to before the bank. Did you see, in the paper this morning, how she—A dollar, even a dollar of her own, might have meant everything to her—yesterday! But each one's the right to think what to do for one's self."

Larry retreated and fumbled at the door-knob.

"Thank you," he murmured. "I thought—I had an idea, when I was coming here, that I might make you see; but—good-by!"

"Good-by?" she repeated, surprised.

It was at the finality which, without being quite conscious of all he felt, he had put into the words. He turned and fled out to his car, and drove furiously up the Avenue. Where he was going he did not know, except that it was away from little S. Orton ,forever! He had not suspected, until now, how much he had built and planned upon seeking her soon again and often afterward—as often as he could. But now, though she would not judge him, he knew he had no right to return to her.

HE did not seek her, therefore, till five dreary, endless days dragged past; and then, when he looked for her, she was gone. Mrs. Willis, who gave him what information he obtained, told him that she had taken a position in an office the day after the sale, and had moved to a boardinghouse nearer town. She had started to make money, and was saving, from her twelve dollars a week, to pay the depositors in the Traders'; but, suddenly and without warning, on the evening previous she had paid her bill at the boarding-house and disappeared, taking only a suit-case, and leaving no address.

Larry roamed the streets senselessly that night, looking for little S. Orton. For the papers, upon the day of her disappearance, had been full of the story of one of the depositors in the Traders' Trust—a cripple who had had all his savings in the bank. He had killed himself rather than take charity or longer burden his daughter, a little girl of twelve, who made a tragic attempt to support him.

The little girl, undoubtedly, was the same with whom Shirley had spoken before the bank; and when Larry read the story he knew he had better go and see S. Orton at once; it was the sort of story to make a girl who took things the way she did do—well, anything!

Larry advertised—shamelessly advertised, using her name and his initials and address—in all the newspapers the next day; and he formed an alliance of search with Mrs. Willis.

She received a letter, mailed in Chicago, saying that Shirley Orton was safe and well; but of what she was doing and where she was doing it, the letter gave no intimation.

It was about the middle of the second reel of "The Terrible Flight"—a film

play released in Chicago five months later—that Larry Gresham suddenly jerked forward and stared, breathless. The star in the play, as announced upon the posters outside, was the reigning favorite, Phyllis Ware. Unquestionably it was Phyllis—sweet, demure, petite—who had appeared in the domestic scenes of the first reel and the early part of the second; but now it was not she.

The climax came when the heroine tried to make her escape on horseback, pursued by a dozen riders. She took the most breakneck leaps successfully until, fleeing down a wooded road, she was shot from the saddle and fell into the road, while her horse went on and the pursuers leaped over her. The fall was one that simply could not have been faked; nor could the leap of the pursuing horses over her body. And the body was no dummy: it was a girl who moved.

The exclamations of the audience told that the girl was, to them, the adorable Phyllis. Larry alone of all in that house knew that, though Phyllis Ware started the ride, the girl who was thrown, and over whom the horses galloped as she rolled, was little S. Orton.

Now, before Larry could sit back in his seat, the swift-clicking camera showed a close-up of the girl in the road after the horses had passed; that girl was Phyllis. Could Larry, tricked by a likeness of figure and no little similarity of feature, perhaps, have imagined he had seen Shirley in that terrible fall?

He waited through another showing of the second reel. There was Phyllis starting on the ride; there she was again. But now! Ah, that was the girl he had seen galloping just that way on the bridle path of the park. Now she was to take that awful fall! Larry found himself gripping the arms of the seat as she was thrown and the great horses were upon her again. The absurd terror came to him—suppose they would not leap over her this time? But they were gone, and the girl in the road was only Phyllis Ware.

THE next morning, after a night during which he slept less than any since the first after S. Orton had disappeared, Larry went to see a broker who financed film companies.

"What's up? Want a few shares of Phyllis Ware Company stock?" Forster asked. "Get in, boy. You can't lose; the best buy in the market. Phyllis Ware's had just one fault: her temperament's confined her to the slow type of plays. She's never had the nerve to go

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into the extensively dramatic; and no one could get a double for her who'd fool any one and who wasn't a dummy. But Barrister's got her now, boy! And she's a bear! She's nineteen and will do anything—that's merely dangerous—if you pay her. A bear! She's Phyllis's figure, and the profile—if not too close and the make-up is on—will fool anybody. The eyes and the front face are not much like Phyll— Her name? She says it's Barbara Sears. Don't know where she comes from."

"I'd like," said Larry, "to look the company over. Where are they working now?"

"I'll fix that; but they're pretty far northwest just now—on location, doing mountain stuff. Barrister's had a bear of a plot involving some hot mountain stuff that he's been crazy to pull for two years; and this new girl's game to do it. Say, he sent me a piece of the scenario; want to look it over?"

LARRY took the scenario away and looked it over; then he read it closely, intently, with sweat standing on his forehead and cold in the palms of his hands. "Hot stuff," Forster had called it, who knew nothing of mountains; but Larry knew mountains and something of heights. So they were going to "pull" that stuff on some mountain this week; and S. Orton—to make money to pay her assessment—was offering her slight, lithe self to do it.

That night Larry took the fastest train for the northwest. At noon of the fourth day following, having left behind the plains of Saskatchewan and Alberta, he alighted at a little mountain station which was the point to which, during the season, tourists' traveled to view and American Alpiners came to climb the steep heights of Mt. Trasmir towering to the north. It was early in May, so the season had not started. Larry obtained a mountain pony and set off at once down the trail.

He had viewed the pinnacles of Trasmir, sheer-sided, snow-clad, for half an hour as the train twisted and turned toward it through the pass. High hung in the heavens, with clouds now and then drifting about it, the mighty mountain had dominated its neighbors; but now, with the surrounding peaks passed, it showed all its gleaming slope. Ten thousand feet it rose from the budding verdure in the valley, at first pine-girded, with the green-blue of the trees clothing the rock for half a mile or more; then the trees thinned; the ascent was steeper; there were big bald patches, almost vertical, with ledges where clumps of stunted firs clung. Next the regions of the snows sloped brokenly for a thousand yards; a glacier, snow-covered, lay in a great hollow; above it bare rocks rose almost perpendicular, brown and gray, stark, naked rock reaching up two thousand feet more, far too steep to hold snow; then the strata slanted again—steeply, very steeply, to be sure—but slanted enough so that the pinnacles pointed glistening white with snow into the turquoise of the mountain sky.

A marvelous, a spectacular summit, that top of Trasmir! To reach it required a truly perilous, spectacular ascent, well adapted to the purposes of the scenario which Larry had read in Chicago. As he recalled it and gazed again at the mountain, his hands were cold and moist in his gloves and his shoulders drew together. That great, bare bank of rock, steep above the glacier, undoubtedly was where S. Orton—"doubling" for Phyllis Ware—was working to earn the money for her assessment, where she was playing with death to try to prevent other deaths of depositors.

Larry took from the case the binoculars he had brought—strong-lensed Zurich glasses which he had carried in his ascents of the Jungfrau and the Matterhorn—and examined the mountain more carefully. Quite as he thought, the little specks upon the mountainside above the glacier were climbing parties. They were two parties, the first of three, the second of four, each group undoubtedly roped together.

The sunlight was shining fair upon them, and the glasses gave them to him clearly. The three in the first party, Larry was quite sure, were all men; they carried packs; one, probably, was a camera man, the others Swiss guides who were employed, during the summer, in these mountains.

Larry studied the other four figures intently. He fancied he could see that the second figure, which seemed to be white-jacketed, was slighter than the others. That meant that it was a girl's figure—that it was Shirley's. He could discern, beyond any doubt, that the leading figure of the four climbed skilfully. The second figure followed without great difficulty; the third climbed like the first; the fourth seemed to need help. "Swiss first and third," Larry said to himself. "She's climbing second. Folworth's fourth." Folworth was the actor required in the summit scenes with Shirley. Larry wiped his forehead and put down his glass.

Suddenly he brought the glasses back to his eyes. The fourth climber in the second party had slipped. Larry could see him kicking and clutching at the rock for holds. He had fallen as far as the rope, bound to the belt of the guide above him, had let him fall. The guide had been watchful and prepared. He held firm, and the other two figures held firm; and the fourth climber regained footing and hand-holds. In a minute the party was climbing again, slowly, carefully. Larry, as he put down his glass again, urged his pony on faster.

TWO men, also staring up at the great mountain, were blocking the path. They were middle-aged men, with the strong, active, compact figures of the Swiss with whom he was familiar at Zermatt and Chamonix. They wore the cap and costume of guides, and they were talking to each other in the patois of their native canton.

"Insenses!" Larry caught the ejaculation. "Imbeciles!"

As he hailed them in French, they spun about and took off their caps.

"What is the matter?" Larry asked.

Jules Bonfol and his partner, Recon,—both of St. Maurice, both licensed guides of Dent du Midi, Mt. Blanc, to whom the Mönch, the Eiger, were nothing; they who were, as all would say, the most familiar with the mountains about here,—they had been engaged by M. Barrister the week before to take the absolutely inexperienced up on the mountain. This they had done, choosing such practice climbs as they considered safe for the inexperienced. They had had under their charge particularly the young Mademoiselle Sears—so small, so fair, so adorable, and withal so cool, so brave! Monsieur knows her? Ah, then he understands!

Well, last evening M. Barrister tell to Bonfol that he and Recon take mademoiselle to the top of Trasmir and perform there. Bonfol would not waste words: it meant murder. If the climb was to be by the western arête—you may see it, Monsieur, where there is more gradual slope—it might be done; but no, it must be by the southern arête, Monsieur, for there was the sun. For two thousand feet it is almost a wall, up and down! A good climber could make it, of course, Monsieur; yet not even a good man by himself; two, giving mutual aid with a rope, are required, even if both climb well. To take the inexperienced there—particularly the mademoiselle—no! Bonfol refused; Recon refused. M. Barrister swear; he say it is necessaire. The picture, it is a week late already, and must be made at once. So Bonfol and Recon they are afraid, is it? Perhaps they are ingénieux. They say another week practice climbs are necessaire, so they get more money. Ah! Monsieur, that to guides of Chamonix!

Was there anything to do but take one's rope and ice-ax and go away? Yet look what M. Barrister has done now, Monsieur! They have brought, overnight, guides from another district to take up the mademoiselle and M. Folworth together, neither of whom, till the week before, had had Alpine rope about the waist! Ali, mon Dieu, look! Look! Voila! Mon Dieu, has it occurred?

EXACTLY what had happened, even the good Zurich lenses could not tell Larry for the distance. But disaster, whatever it was, had come to the party of four who were in clear relief in the sunlight against the sheer rock of Trasmir twelve hundred or, perhaps, fifteen hundred feet perpendicular above the glacier. The four figures had stopped and stood still. They were not resting; the place was not one which could conceivably have been chosen for rest. Besides, the posture of the figures was not that of rest: it was of strain. Larry could see that. He could see it in three of the figures, at least; but not in the fourth.

Now, as Recon cried out, Larry looked to the three climbers who had been a hundred feet or so higher up on the mountain's flank. The minute before, they had stopped their ascent; and now they were descending as swiftly as men may descend such rock.

They passed the leading man of the four; descended below the second figure; below the third; and reached the fourth. Now all were moving in the same direction, neither much up nor down, but laterally to some sort of a shelf—so narrow that it cast no shadow that Larry could see; yet a shelf of some sort: for all but one stood upon it.

Then six began to descend.

"Ils le portent!" cried Recon, who at that instant held the glass which the guides shared between them. "Mon Dieu! Ils le portent!"

Larry made it out almost as soon. They were bearing some one, as the guide had cried. Five of the six who had started the descent were bearing the sixth. One of the five was below; the other four were above. The positions of all showed that the five were bearing the sixth between them by means of their ropes; and that the sixth was inert, helpless—indeed, so far as any sign showed, that figure was lifeless.

Bonfol, the older of the guides, turned quickly.

"That is not la petite mademoiselle, Monsieur!" he said; his eyes, as he looked up, were a little wet. "No; it is certain that she climbed second; and it was he, who was fourth, whom they went to help. It is certainly he whom they bear down now. Besides, mademoiselle, she has the white jacket. See, Monsieur; you may see the tache blanche. It is she whom they have left upon the ledge!"

Larry looked. Upon the little ledge—some slight protrusion of strata from the naked granite wall—the small figure with the white jacket stood. The five bearers with their burden now had descended so far that there was no doubt that the seventh had been left to stay there alone. Larry held his glass fixed upon that figure and the ledge upon which it stood. Then suddenly his knees, which had gripped the horse's flanks in their tension, lost strength, and half tumbling, he came from the saddle.

"I see!" he said to the guides. "I see!"

LOOKING downward,—Shirley was trying to obey the order not to look down, but sometimes she stared down in spite of herself,—the drop was more than fifteen hundred feet to the upper edge of the ice and rock of the lower slope. Looking upward,—this was not forbidden, but it was only less appalling,—the rugged, savage rock rose with the same terrible

steepness, for a thousand feet more. The shelf of strata upon which she stood ran, brokenly, for fifty feet, perhaps, from left to right. At its broader outcropping it was three feet wide; at its narrowest, less than a foot.

The slab was full of fissures, and decidedly rotten in places. Little bits of it were broken off, now and then, and rattled down the mountain as little bits from above rattled down past her—down, down, down, with their terrible invitation to lean over and watch them as they fell. But the slab, so far as strength to support her weight went, was safe. It was its height—the terror of height over the abyss from which never more than a step separated her.

Height-terror had come to her during the night, when she lay gripping the blankets of her bed at the châlet in dread of this day's climb; it had beset her when, called in the cold twilight before sunrise, she had arisen, obediently, to make the early start. The stimulation of strong coffee given her and the physical exertion of the ascent had steadied her so that she seemed again quite courageous and cool. She had recognized, of course, that the climbs which she had made with Bonfol and Recon during the last days had been only practice ascents. She had known that Mr. Folworth's climbs also had been mere training in mountaineering, for the grand ascent that they were to make together. She also had been aware that, for the last few days. Mr. Barrister had been receiving telegrams urging him to make all haste: that the public was clamoring for another of the new Phyllis Ware releases with a big thrill.

Nevertheless she had not expected that Mr. Folworth and she were to be ordered upon the great ascent just yet. Bonfol had said that it would be quite a week yet before they should be taken farther. But the guides this morning had proved strangers. Resdale, the chief camera man, who was to direct the scenes on the ascent, was ready with other guides. So, when they roped her between these two strange guides, she knew that they meant to take the picture, and she stood, smiling and steady, while they photographed her.

MR. FOLWORTH had slipped the first time before they had ascended more than a hundred feet above the glacier. Both the guides—Fleuron and Douret—had been watchful, and the rope was taut when Folworth needed it. Two hundred feet higher, he faltered again, but regained his holds. The guides became more and more cautious. Douret, who climbed just ahead of him, spoke cheerfully and often to restore his confidence and particularly to stop his gazing down. In the next two hours, therefore, while they ascended higher and higher up the rocks, but one slip occurred before the fall that ended the climb.

Fleuron, who was leading, had just come opposite this ledge; she was the span of rope—twenty feet—below; and Douret was the same distance below her. All three had halted and Mr. Folworth was the one to move. He was to climb up close to Douret and halt, then Douret was to climb and halt, she was to climb and halt, and Fleuron lead on again.

Mr. Folworth had almost reached Douret: and the guide, who had been drawing the rope tight to aid him, had believed he had a secure position when he suddenly lost footing, just as Douret himself turned to continue ascent. The guide, crying warning

Continued on page 21

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

WASTE NO FOOD!

"Waste no food!" is the heading on a bulletin of the United States Department of Agriculture. We Americans, in our characteristic care-free manner, have been throwing away seven hundred million dollars' worth of food each year—most of it, with a regal gesture, into the garbage-pail.

A lot of us eat more than our bodies need. "Eat enough and no more," says the bulletin. "Overeating tends to poor health and fat instead of brawn, makes us sluggish and indolent instead of energetic and resourceful. Eat for physical and mental efficiency."

The absent-minded cooks of the country, by burning bread, putting too much salt in the soup, and all the other things that drive us downtown to dinner, waste whole warehouses full of provender. "Improperly or carelessly prepared food is left on the table. As another instance of improper handling, it is discovered that in the preparation of potatoes twenty per cent of the edible part is discarded."

No complaint can be made against the poor; they are frugal and painstaking with their food. The rich and the well- to-do are the greatest wasters. There is an unspoken tradition among this class that food must be cooked in lavish proportions; a generous surplus must be served at the table and those uneaten portions left on the plate carried to the garbage-pail. Thousands of housewives either don't know how or scorn to use left-over foods to make appetizing dishes.

"Learn to know the needs of your family, and serve each no more than you think he will want.

"Buy clean food, keep it clean until used, and be neat in all details of cooking and serving. This lessens waste and is a valuable health measure.

"Feed your family first; don't feed high-priced food to hogs and chickens; don't pour into the sewer nourishing food in the shape of milk, skim milk, sweet or sour, soup, gravy, or melted fat, or water in which cereals or vegetables have been cooked.

"Make saving rather than spending your social standard."

DO YOU KNOW HOW TO HIRE MEN?

ONE of the great sources of waste in business is the old haphazard way of picking employees.

In Choosing Employees by Mental and Physical Tests William Fretz Kemble describes his system of testing applicants. These tests also try to discover what kind of work a man is fitted for. "The reason why there seem to be so many incompetents in the world is that workers are so often working at jobs that do not appeal to them. A certain firm, in testing its typists, discovered that one of them was absolutely useless as a typist. But it also discovered that he was an extraordinarily gifted mathematician. This discovery was not made by accident, but by a scientific system of man-analysis."

One of the most important tests for employees is the questionary. Mr. Kemble submitted twenty questions to twelve great executive Americans, Edison among them. From the twelve answers to his questionary, he struck an average—the average thought of men in great executive positions—and credited that answer with 100 per cent. The average human being, when confronted with this questionary, can get only forty-one per cent.

Here are some of the questions:

Do you believe:

DIARY OF A FRENCH OFFICER

"SUDDENLY I fell. I was alone. My coat was covered with blood. My arm hung limp. But what of my soldiers? I raised my head. Nobody in front of me, nobody behind me. Corpses all around. I was alone ten yards from the enemy's trench. I could see the Boches moving in it."

So writes René Nicolas, a very young sub-lieutenant, in his Campaign Diary of a French Officer (Houghton, Mifflin Company). In the ardor of his first charge he had left his company far behind.

"I could not crawl on my stomach. I was obliged to lie on my back and advance head first toward the French trench. The rockets gave me a glimpse of their lines, several hundred yards distant. I pushed myself with my feet, as does a man when swimming on his back. As soon as a rocket flashed its light, I remained motionless, feigning death among the dead. And in those few instants of immobility I could hear my heart beat and a vague, horrible murmur, made up of moans of men dying and of wounded calling for help. I passed a soldier who was groaning feebly. I recognized him, and tried to drag him with me. I pulled him a few feet, and then I saw I was dragging a corpse.

"Several times I bumped my head into dead bodies. Crawling backwards, I could not see these obstacles. But my whole being was strained to one idea—to go back, to reach the French trench. Meanwhile the German shells kept falling in rapid succession. But now the goal was very near. I shouted with all my might: "France, France! I am a lieutenant of the Eleventh Company." I dimly heard voices saying: "This way, this way." I directed myself by those voices. My strength was almost gone. I felt myself being seized and pulled. I fell into the trench—the French trench. Then I fainted."

LOOK OUT FOR TYPHOID ON YOUR VACATION

To keep from getting typhoid fever, first of all, be immunized, says the Public Health Leaflet of the New York Health Department. This means inoculating a healthy person with killed typhoid germs in order to prevent that person from becoming infected with the fever. After that:

THE TROUBLES OF BEING A METHODIST

ONE hundred years ago, boys had to be flogged to keep them away from church. Such a boy was John Gaddis, whose conversion is related by Samuel Gardiner Ayres in Methodist Heroes of Other Days (Methodist Book Concern).

John Gaddis belonged to a family of Scotch seceders. Out of curiosity, they all attended a Methodist camp meeting. John was converted. The father felt that he was disgraced, and began to cane his erring son homeward. The mother also felt the disgrace bitterly, and said with tears that she would rather have seen her son in his grave than to have him bring sorrow to her gray hairs by going over to the Methodists.

The next day John begged his father to let him go to the Methodist meeting. His father finally consented, but his mother refused to do so, and John retired to the barn to pray. He prayed all day. When evening came and his mother could not find him, she decided he had slipped off to the meeting. In a rage she started after him, but was arrested by his voice lifted in prayer.

"As she listened," says the author, "she was powerfully convicted of her sin. She returned to the house, but she could not sleep. Her alarm increased so greatly that her husband was frightened, and proposed that John should get a physician. As soon as John saw his mother he realized the trouble, and prayed for her, and she was soundly converted, and the remainder of the night was spent in prayer and praise. The father thought both were demented."

But in time the whole family became Methodists, and the heroic young convert, with his two brothers, pioneered in Ohio as traveling preachers.

FOR THE MAN WHO CAN SAVE

THE foreigner is so much better at saving than the American that his account with the postal savings bank is just about twice that of the American-born depositor. That is why foreign depositors have nearly three fourths of the money in the postal savings bank.

"The citizen who wants to get six per cent. on his money, to say nothing of him who would like to get seven or eight per cent., will never be content with the two or two and one half per cent. paid by the Post Office Department," says Waldon Fawcett in the Postmasters' Advocate. But there are a surprising number of people who prefer the smaller interest with the absolute safety assured by the national government, rather than a bigger income with some risk.

"To this class of depositors the postal savings system has been rendered more attractive by the action of Congress, which, in addition to raising the deposit limit, removed the vexatious restriction of deposits to a maximum of $100 per month. Under the old plan it was not allowable for a depositor to deposit more than $100 in one month. Nowadays any sum up to $1000 may be deposited at one time. This convenience is going to attract the funds of people who suddenly come into possession of money which they wish to .put aside in a place where it will be absolutely secure."

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WHAT A WOOD-LOT MEANS TO A FARM

THERE are three reasons why a farm should not be bared of trees: the wood-lot produces a valuable crop of its own; it prevents erosion and acts as a windbreak; and it improves the appearance of a farm and so increases the sale value.

A thirty-five acre farm was abandoned because the poor, gravelly soil had been so worked out that it no longer paid under an ordinary farm crop, says E. G. Cheney in the Farmer. For twenty-two years it lay neglected. Of its own accord it grew up to hard-woods. When the owner was offered $15 an acre for the land and timber, he accepted it, and laughed to think what a sharp bargain he was driving for a worthless farm.

The buyer also laughed to think what a sharp bargain he had driven. He moved in a portable sawmill, and from the neglected little patch of timber sawed lumber worth $106 an acre. This would be $4.82 an acre annually for the twenty-two years the farm had been abandoned. Not many a grain field would show such an average. Yet most farmers think they can't spare ground for a wood-lot.

Where timber is entirely cleared away, says the writer, there is erosion. The break in the sod opens the way for a washout; gulleys cut the pastures and destroy thousands of acres.

"The third value, that of appearance, has long been recognized in the cities," says the writer. "Thousands of dollars are spent on city parks to increase the value of the surrounding property. It is quite as potent in the country. Drive through a country where the groves are thick, and compare its attractiveness as a place to live in with the land where a tree is seldom seen. Nine people out of ten would pick the country of the shady groves, even if they knew that the soil was not so rich.

"If you have no eye for beauty, ask your wife what the grove is worth; and be assured that the wife of the man who comes to buy will think no less of it; and be assured also that, in this age of the suffragette, she will have some voice in selecting the new home. The farm should be a home, not a factory, and nothing will do more to make it look homelike than a handsome grove of trees."

DON'T TRY TO HARDEN YOUR CHILD

OUR admiration for the wild Indian —his indifference to exposure, to draughts, to wet feet—started us in a movement to harden our own children by giving them frequent cold baths, browning them to a turn, and dressing them in thin clothing and half-socks. It was a long time before the promoters of this idea realized that to try and harden young children is a dangerous physical torture, writes Frederick L. Wachenheim, M. D., in The Climatic Treatment of Children (Rebman Company).

"Hecker was the first to call a halt to the votaries of strenuousness. He found that the rigorously hardened children were just twice as likely to catch colds as the totally unhardened, and that the moderately hardened children occupied an intermediate position. The hardened children had a marked tendency to neurosis and anemia and nearly always gave the impression of being 'delicate.'

"It is most easy for any practitioner to satisfy himself as to the leading fact, that the coddled children are not any more susceptible to respiratory affections than the hardened ones, while those who are handled with ordinary intelligence rather than dogmatism in either direction seem to thrive best of all."

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.

EDUCATIONAL DIRECTORY, 1916-17. THE RED SPIDER ON COTTON. IS MOSQUITO OR MAN THE WINTER CARRIER OF MALARIA ORGANISMS? HOW THE FEDERAL FARM LOAN ACT BENEFITS THE FARMER. EGGS AND THEIR VALUE AS FOOD. RELATION OF CLIMATE TO THE TREATMENT OF PULMONARY TUBERCULOSIS. THE USE OF A DIARY FOR FARM ACCOUNTS.

A PEOPLE'S CORRESPONDENCE COURSE

DEAR EDITOR: I noticed that you left out your two digest pages this week. Please don't drop that feature. I am a business man, secretary of the company whose letter-head I am using: I had to give up my schooling very early and go to work, and I have never had either the time or the education to become a reader of books. I can honestly say that I have learned more worth-while things from your two digest pages than from any other reading I have ever done. They give me the feeling of keeping up with the progress of the world, even though I have no time to read. They are a kind of "people's correspondence school." Please don't let them be lost.

HOW BIG MANAGERS WORK

"NOT genius nor influence nor affluence, but a scientific work schedule, makes the great man or business. Whoever can order his own day can order his own destiny," writes Edward Earle Purinton in the Independent.

"A manager in charge of any kind of business should be paid on the same basis as a mechanic—not for holding a job, but for turning out work. A manager who does not execute original ideas is not a manager, but a foreman."

Here is a way to find out how much time and money you waste in your job: "On-the basis of your entire income, figure what each minute of your office time is worth to the company. Take a sheet of cardboard and rule off six vertical columns. In the first put all your executive duties, from the least to the largest. In the second put the average daily time required for each. In the third put the managerial cost of each (number of minutes multiplied by your salary per minute). In the fourth put your estimate of the productive value of each item. In the fifth put the difference between the cost and the value of each of your jobs. In the sixth and last column put the annual loss on each item (daily loss multiplied by number of working days a year)."

All managers should be able to answer the following questions with "Yes."

Is your routine work done in five hours?

Have you delegated all duties that a lower-priced man could complete?

Do you know that the time-pieces in your place are kept right?

Have you reduced half your daily interviews to five minutes or less?

Can you get a satisfactory report from any department on five minutes' notice?

Can you play hard enough or dream hard enough to make you forget efficiency a little while each day?

AMERICAN MANNERS-BY A LAME MAN

A LAME man tells in the Outlook what he has learned about American courtesy from the point of vantage that crutches give. For him the subway guard changes his "Step lively" to "Take your time." For him the passenger who spreads himself over as much space as possible gives up his place by the door. The busy old gentleman pilots him across the street, and the cabby offers to take him across for nothing.

Once when he was trying to get on a car at such a busy hour that the scrambling crowd paid no attention to his struggles, an angry young man snarled in his ear: "Want to get on? Well, if you're in a hurry, I'll punch some of these people in the eye and put you on."

"That was absolutely the purest spirit of chivalry," said he. "Lancelot or Galahad did no more than that young man offered to do."

The spirit of freedom, thinks the lame man, makes a spirit of regard for others. Once he was walking in Milan with a distinguished Italian musician who had resided many years in New York, when something ruffled the gentleman's temper. Stopping short, he brandished his fist in the air and exclaimed:

"I t'ank God that I am not an Italian! I t'ank God that I am an American! I never knew what it was to respect myself or to respect other people till I went to America."

It is lack of freedom, suggests the writer, that makes American women one of the few classes to show rudeness to a lame man.

"I happened to be, some time ago, in a large crowd of women who were moving from one room to another. I was jostled and pushed about so that I was in some danger of being knocked down. In decided irritation, I remarked to the person who was with me, 'There is nothing under God's heaven so rude as a crowd of Women.'

"A lady of my acquaintance who was passing turned and came back, saying, 'I heard what you said, Mr. Lame Man, and I am sorry to say that it is true.'"

SHALL WE LIVE TO BE TWO HUNDRED?

"I DO not consider it impossible for a man carefully dieted from his birth, possessing a sound body and a sound mind, to reach the age of two hundred and fifty years. There is no physiological reason why the human machine should not run smoothly for that time," writes Sampson Morgan in the Fortnightly Review.

By a fruit diet the life of any man, he believes, can be prolonged from twenty to fifty years.

The old notion was that a vigorous man needed at least two meals a day of "condensed inflammatory foods," as the author calls them; but meat and rich nitrogenous foods are absorbed with difficulty by the system. They produce sluggish action.

Fruit, on the other hand, is almost immediately absorbed; it stimulates and electrifies the body. It keeps the muscles, arteries, and tissues flexible and elastic. A man with flexible muscles, arteries, and joints, be he ninety-nine and a half, is still a young man.

"Tissues of animals that are scavengers by nature should never be partaken of by those who study their health. Fishes eat the refuse of sea and river. Pigs are an abomination. So long as these are consumed in enormous quantities, cancer, scrofula, and tumors will continue to scourge humanity.

"An ideal meal consists of 'six ounces of wholemeal bread and fresh butter or olive oil, with six ounces of fresh fruit and nuts, chiefly fruit'—although the amount, of course, will vary with the age, constitution, and locality of the person."

Selling the Hard Ones

By JAMES H. COLLINS

Illustrations by E. Hopper

THIS salesman was only a youngster, and had been selling cash-registers hardly six months. But he was a worker and a thinker, and his record led the home office to pay him a compliment. It switched him into a territory all his own, a section rather notorious for tough customers. One of these, a grocer in a small town, was considered about the toughest customer of all.

The youngster resolved to sell that grocer first of all, for the effect upon himself. So he hurried down to see him.

He found him quite different from his mental pictures of a tough customer—no horns, no hoofs, no hostility: just a mild, tired man, listening absently to explanations of what a cash-register would do to simplify accounts and prevent losses.

But there was a clerk who appeared to have as much to say about running the store as the boss did. He was a sharp- faced chap with a perky pompadour, and kept interrupting the talk with questions: Where were Mrs. Smith's oil-cans? Did Mrs. Jones order butter?

That afternoon the salesman got the grocer's ear again, and, when the clerk interrupted, suggested that the store windows needed washing. The grocer thought that a good idea, and Mr. Perky went to work at the job. Finally it seemed as if a sale could be made. But, just as the grocer was coming around to order, the clerk leaned over from his step-ladder and asked:

"Boss, did you hear about the brickyard? It closes down Saturday."

That killed the sale—then. The brickyard was the chief local industry, and its closing down brought thoughts of retrenchment. But the salesman went away confident.

The following week somebody bought a lot of stuff from that clerk with marked money, and secured proof that he was a thief. This was the secret obstacle to the sale. Not only was a cash-register installed, but the clerk was compelled to disgorge several hundred dollars in money.

A Woman Tamed Him

ANOTHER hard customer was the proprietor of a department-store.

He had become a terror to salesmen in half a dozen States because, although his purchases were large, nobody knew where to find him temperamentally from trip to trip. Owning a business inherited from his father, he had been over-educated, and was extremely finicky about "taste." He sought the carriage trade of his town, went in for art-collecting, and took a high-brow attitude in buying.

"Go back and tell your people to study design," was a characteristic pronouncement of his, after glancing casually at samples. "Design—design! Learn the kindergarten principles."

A woman tamed him.

She was responsible for design in merchandise carried by a big wholesale house. The sales force had not been able to put her line into this man's store. She went to have a look at him.

He was busy, fidgeting from one thing to another, making stinging criticisms, browbeating his clerks. She stood aside and watched, and in three minutes saw he had force, no concentration, no purpose. She had only to keep her poise to bring him round like a spoiled child.

Finally he came over.

"Well—you wanted to see me?" he snapped. "Be quick—what is it about?"

"I have plenty of time," she answered, "and will wait until you are able to give me your whole attention."

"What is that in your hand?" he asked curiously.

"That is a new pattern in my merchandise that you are going to buy when you have time."

He was a tired, nervous wreck. What chance did he stand against a strong, poised woman? She tamed him, sold him, made him her friend—and then advised the credit man of her house to deal with him cautiously, because he was not a good business man. And she was right. For within a year he failed, involving many concerns that had extended liberal credit on the basis of his father's reputation.

Analyzing the Hard Customer

EVERY salesman has his story of the hardest customer, and usually it is a stirring story of a battle between wits. There are two ways to look at the hard customer.

One salesman will regard him as an exception to humanity in general, handle him as an interesting individual problem, and enjoy the experience as an adventure.

Another man, with more disposition to think below the surface, sees that the hard customer is often a symptom of something wrong in himself, his goods, or his house.

Both views are right, in a way.

For, out of ten hard customers, one may be just an eccentric individual, like the department-store proprietor who failed, while the other nine will be difficult because some factor is hidden, like the grocer with the thieving clerk. A thinking salesman regards the hard customer as a hint to dig for something wrong.

"Men are hard to sell for three reasons," says an Eastern sales-manager of wide experience. "First, because they are posted; second, because they are not posted; third, because they have approached the end of their credit. The man who is posted is hard for the salesman with a bad proposition. He can not be sold a gold brick. Goods or salesman must be improved. The man who is not posted does not know a good thing when it is offered to him—he must be informed. As for the fellow with slender credit, there is no incentive to sell him at all.

"When a real salesman finds a man who is hard to sell, he goes to work to find out that man's peculiarities, his characteristics. That man is being handled by somebody, and is worth all the study required to land him, because he does not change his business methods lightly. He concentrates his buying, and will stick to you if you can prove that you have some business advantage over your competitors.

"The salesman who comes nearest to selling every one is a student of human nature and his own merchandise. He must feel that his knowledge of his line makes him stronger than those he sells to. No man is hard to sell, to the salesman who has a conviction. The great trouble with the average salesman is lack of knowledge—he has not made the thorough study of his line that will give him confidence."

The Salesman Must Sell Himself

VERY often the difficulty is in the salesman himself. The hardest sale ever made by many a man has been the original sale of his own goods to himself—the process of acquiring confidence in them, and also the detailed, instant knowledge that enables him to answer every question and objection raised by a buyer.

Salesmen sometimes work under temperamental handicaps that must be discovered and overcome.

A young fellow left a clerkship and went on the road selling thermometers. He was a studious, diffident sort of chap, with plenty of quiet, solid qualities that would enable him to hold trade when he got acquainted. But he found many hard customers at first among merchants who were busy, brusque, indifferent.

With a simple scheme he wiped out all of these hard customers automatically. His trade was mainly in cheap thermometers; but his house made some very fine scientific instruments. Carrying a forty-dollar aneroid barometer in his pocket, he would begin by taking it out and saying:

"Here is something interesting that we make—an aneroid barometer for measuring altitude. It is so sensitive that, by its readings, I believe I can tell how many feet your show-case sits above the floor."

Then he would take the readings, and, even though the exact distance was not shown, the customer could see that the instrument was very sensitive. To the man who bought ten-cent thermometers that was a novelty. It paved the way to acquaintance, and gave him confidence in the salesman's ten-cent goods.

Sometimes the goods are wrong rather than the salesman. Somebody at the top has partly thought out a new product, and sent men on the road to adjust it to the consumer and the trade. Modern products are made and sold on such slender margins of profit nowadays, and must be so carefully figured to give real advantages in quality, service, and profit to everybody who is asked to buy, from wholesaler to consumer, that the use of salesmen to perfect goods in actual competition is a criminal waste.

One sales-manager illustrates this point vividly:

"Suppose you sent one man out to sell life insurance, giving him one policy. It has never been adjusted to actuarial facts, so the payments are wrong. It has never been adjusted to people who need insurance, so there are very few potential customers. Your salesman may work his heart out; but, while the defects of the policy are apparent to him every day, he is getting only a local and partial experience to help set them right. To make that policy really right, you must get a national experience over many years, through an actuary, and adjust it accordingly.

"Your man will meet chiefly hard customers. If he stays out long enough he will go broke. If he sells many policies, you will go broke. Now, many a salesman in the merchandise field to-day is being asked to adjust products that are just as wrong, measured by national experience and time; and when salesmen constantly report hard customers, it is well for the house to get busy and make adjustments in the stuff."

The president of a young but thriving manufacturing concern called on the buyer for a Chicago packing company.

"In the last two years I have written you forty-eight letters, and our salesmen have called on you fourteen times. Still, we have never done any business. Now I am here to ask if you will please tell me why."

"You really want to know?" said the buyer bluntly. "Your house is not important enough: Most of the things you make we get from others, and you offer little in the way of special service."

"That's what I wanted to know," said the manufacturer. "Thanks for your frankness. When we come to you again we'll be important."

A year later his factory had developed and 'acquired' additional goods to such a degree that it could no longer be overlooked, and he went back and sold to that buyer.

To Educate the Customer

ONE of the principal difficulties at the bottom of hard customers is lack of general knowledge about goods that it would be to their advantage to use. So many new products are constantly coming into existence, and so many new uses are being found for old ones, that a broad scheme of education may be the best way of dealing with what appear to be obstinate individual customers.

When steel was first advocated for car-wheels, an engineer started out to sell it for that purpose. Until then wrought iron had been the staple material. Steel cost more per pound, but wore much longer, and kept idle cars out of the repair shop; so it was much cheaper. But the salesman found nothing but hard customers among the railroad officials, car-builders, and designing engineers.

What the industry needed was a general awakening. So he prepared a lecture on steel car-wheels, illustrated it with stereopticon slides and test specimens, and started on a tour of the engineering schools. There were no car-builders or railroaders in those institutions then—nothing but a lot of students. But in a year or two those students would be engineers. It took a couple of years to do the awakening, but it worked wonderfully when results began to come, and car- wheels have been made of steel ever since.

SPORT SUITS

WORSE JOBS THAN OURS

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WHAT BECOMES OF CONVERTS?

A Recruit for the Eight-Three

By SEWELL FORD

Illustrations by Arthur William Brown

HAVE you a shiny little set of garden tools in your home? Have we? Well, I should seed catalogue. Honest to goodness! Here! I can show you a local time-table and my commuter's ticket. How about that, eh, for me?

And I don't know now just what it was worked the sudden shift for us—the Battous, or our visit to the Robert Ellinses', or meetin' up with MacGregor Shinn, the consistent grouch.

It begun with window-boxes. Professor Leon Battou, our official wall decorator and actin' cook, springs 'em on me timid one day after lunch. It had been some snack, too—onion soup sprinkled with croutons and sprayed with grated cheese; calf's brains au buerre noir; a mixed salad; and a couple of gooseberry tarts with the demi-tasse. Say, I'm gettin' so I can eat in French, even if I can't talk it.

And while all that may listen expensive, I have Vee's word for it that since Madame Battou has been doin' the marketin' the high coat of livin' has been jarred off the roost. I don't know how accurate Professor Leon is at countin' up the calories in every meal, but I'm here to announce that he always produces something tasty, with no post-prandial regrets concealed in the bottom of the casserole.

"Professor," says I, "I've been a stranger to this burry brains style of nourishment a long time, but you can ring an encore on that whenever you like."

He smiles grateful, but shakes his head.

"Ah, Monsieur," says he,—oh; yes, just like that,—"but if I had the fresh chives, the—the fin herbes—ah, then you should see!"

"Well, can't Madame 'get what you need at the stores?" says I.

"But at such a price!" says Leon. "Arid of so discouraging a quality. While, if we had but a few handfuls of good soil in some small boxes by the windows—Come, I will show you.; Here, and here, where the sun comes in the morning. I could secure them: myself if you would not think them unlovely to have in view."

"How about it, Vee?" I asks. "Are we too proud to grow our soup greens on the premises?"

She says we ain't, so I tells Leon to breeze ahead with his hangin' garden. Course, I ain't lookin' for anything more'n a box on the ledge. But he's an ingenious old boy, Leon. With a hammer and saw and a few boxes from the grocery, he builds a rack that fits into one of the front windows; and the first thing I know, he has the space chuckful of shallow trays, and seeds planted in every one. A few days later, and the other window is blocked off similar. Also I get a bill from the florist for two bushels of dirt.

Well, our front windows did look kind of odd, and our view out was pretty well barred off; but he had painted the things up neat, and he did all his waterin' and fussin' around early in the mornin', so we let it ride. When he starts in to use our bedroom windows the same way, though, I has to call him off.

"See here, Professor," says I, "you ain't mistakin' this studio apartment for a New Jersey truck-farm, are you? Besides, we have to keep them windows open at night, and your green stuff is apt to get nipped."

"Oh, but the night air is bad to breathe, Monsieur," says he.

"Not for us," says I. "Anyway, we're used to it, so I guess you'll have to lay off this bedroom garden business."

He takes away the boxes, but it's plain he's disappointed. I believe if I'd let him gone on he'd had cabbages growin' on the mantelpiece, a lettuce bed on the readin'-table, and maybe a potato patch on the fire-escape. I never knew gardenin' could be made such an indoor sport.

"Poor chap!" says Vee. "He has been telling me what wonderful things he used to raise when he lived in Péronne. Isn't there some way, Torchy, that we could give him more room?"

"We might rent the roof and glass it in for him," I suggests, "or get a permit to bridge over the street."

"Silly!" says she, rumplin' my red hair reckless.

That was about the time we was havin' some of that delayed winter weather, and it was touchin' to see Professor Battou nurse along them pale green shoots that he'd coaxed up in his window-boxes. Then it runs off warm and sunny again, just as we gets this week-end invite from Mr. Robert.

COURSE, I'd been out to his Long Island place before, but somehow I hadn't got excited over it. This time it's different. Vee was goin' along, for one thing. And I expect the fact that spring had come bouncin' in on us after a hard winter had something to do with our enthusiasm for gettin' out of town. You know how it is. For eleven months you're absolutely sure the city's the only place to live in, and you feel sorry for them near-Rubes who have to catch trains to get home. And then, all of a sudden, about this time of year, you get that restless feelin', and wonder what it is ails you. I think it struck Vee harder than it did me.

"Goody!" says she, when I tell her we're expected to go out Saturday noon and stay over until Monday mornin'. "It is real country out there, too, isn't it?"

"Blamed near an hour away," says I. "Ought to be, hadn't it?"

"I hope they have lilac bushes in bloom," says Vee. "Do you know, Torchy, if I lived in the country, I'd have those if nothing else. Wouldn't you?"

"I expect so," says I, "though I ain't doped out just what I would do in a case like that. It ain't seemed worth while. But if lilacs are the proper stunt for a swell country place, I'll bet Mr. Robert's got 'em."

By the time we'd been shot out to Harbor Hills station, though, I'd forgot whether it was lilacs or lilies-of-the-valley that Vee was particular about; for Mr. Robert goes along with us, and he's joshin' us about our livin' in a four-and-bath and sportin' a French chef.

"Really," says he, "to live up to him you ought to move mto a brewer's palace on Riverside Drive, at least."

"Oh, Battou would be satisfied if I'd lease Madison Square park for him, so he could raise onions," says I.

Which reminds Mr. Robert of something.

"Oh, I say!" he goes on. "You must see my garden. I'm rather proud of it, you know."

"Your garden!" says I, grinnin'. "You don't mean you've been gettin' the hoe and rake habit, Mr. Robert?"

HONEST, that's the last thing you'd look for from him, for until he got married about the only times he ever strayed from the pavements was when he went yachtin'. But by the way he talks now you'd think farmer was his middle name.

"Now, over there," says he, after we've been picked up at the station by his machine and rolled off three or four miles, "over there I am raising a crop of Italian clover to plow in. That's a new hedge I'm setting out, too—hydrangeas, I think. It takes time to get things in shape, you see."

"Looks all right to me, as it is," says I. "You got a front yard big enough to get lost in."

Also the house ain't any small shack, with all its dormers and striped awnin's and deep verandas.

But it's too nice an afternoon to spend much time inside, and after we've found Mrs. Robert, Vee asks to be shown the garden.

"Certainly," says Mr. Robert. "I will exhibit it myself. That is—er—by the way, Gertrude, where the deuce is that garden of ours?"

Come to find out, it was Mrs. Robert who was the pie-plant and radish expert. She could tell you which rows was beets and which was corn without lookin' it up on her chart.

She'd been takin' a course in landscape-gardenin', too; and as she pilots us around the grounds, namin' the different bushes and things, she listens like a nursery pamphlet. And Vee falls for it hard.

"How perfectly splendid," says she, "to be able to plan things like that, and to know so many shrubs by their long names. But haven't you anything as common as lilacs?"

Mrs. Robert laughs and shakes her head.

"They were never mentioned in my course, you see," says she. "But our nearest neighbor has some wonderful lilac bushes. Robert, don't you think we might walk down the east drive and ask your dear friend Mr. MacGregor Shinn if he'd mind—"

"Decidedly no," cuts in Mr. Robert. "I'd much prefer not to trouble Mr. Shinn at all."

"Oh, very well," says Mrs. Robert. And then, turnin' to us: "We haven't been particularly fortunate in our relations with Mr. Shinn; our fault, no doubt."

BUT you know Vee. Half an hour later, when we've been left to ourselves, she announces:

"Come along, Torchy. I am going to find that east drive."

"It's a case of lilacs or bust, eh?" says I. "All right; I'm right behind you. But let's make it a sleuthy getaway, so they won't know."

We let on it was a risky stunt, slippin' out a side terrace door, dodgin' past the garage, and finally strikin' a driveway different from the one we'd come in by. We follows along until we fetches up by some big stone gate-posts.

"There they are!" exclaims Vee. "Loads of them. And aren't they fragrant? Smell, Torchy."

"I am," says I, sniffin' deep. "Don't you hear me?"

"Yes; and that Mr. Shinn will too, if you're as noisy as that over it," says she. "I suppose that is where he lives. Isn't it the cutest little cottage?"

"It needs paint here and there," says I.

"I know," says Vee. "But look at that old Dutch roof with the wide eaves, and the recessed doorway, and the trellises on either side, and that big clump of purple lilacs nestling against the gable end. Oh, and there's a cunning little pond in the rear, just where it ought to be! I do wish might go in and walk around "Why not?" says I. "What would it hurt?"

"But that Shinn person," protests Vee, "might—might not—"

"Well, he couldn't any more'n shoo us off," says I, "and if he's nutty enough to do that after a good look at you, then he's hopeless."

"You absurd boy!" says Vee, squeezin' my hand. "Well, anyway, we might venture in a step or two."

As a matter of fact, there don't seem to be any one in sight. You might almost think nobody lived there; for the new grass ain't been cut, the flower beds are full of dry weeds left over from last fall, and most of the green shutters are closed.

There's smoke comin' from the kitchen chimney, though, so we wanders around front, bringin' up under the big lilac bush. It's just covered with blossoms—a truck-load, I should say; and it did seem a shame, Vee bein' so strong for 'em, that she couldn't have one little spray.

"About a quarter a bunch, them would be on Broadway," says I, diggin' up some change. "Well, here's where Neighbor Shinn makes a sale."

And, before Vee can object, I've snapped off the end of a twig.

I'd just dropped the quarter in an envelop and was stickin' it on the end of the broken branch, when the front

---

door opens, and out dashes this tall gink with the rusty Van Dyke and the hectic face. Yep, it's a lurid map, all right. Some of it might have been from goin' without a hat in the wind and weather, for his forehead and bald spot are just as high-colored as the rest; but there's a lot of temper tint, too, lightin' up the tan, and the deep furrows between the eyes shows it ain't an uncommon state for him to be in. Quite a husk he is, costumed in a plaid golf suit, and he bores down on us just as gentle as a tornado.

"I SAY, you!" he calls out. "Stop where you are."

"Don't hurry," says I. "We'll wait for you."

"Ye will, wull ye!" he snarls, as he comes stampin' up in front of us. "Ye'd best. And what have ye there, Miss? Hah! Pickin' me posies, eh? And trespassin', too."

"That's right," says I. "Petty larceny and breakin' and enterin'. I'm the guilty party."

"I'm sure there's nothing to make such a fuss about," says Vee, eyein' him scornful.

"Oh, ho!" says he. "It's a light matter, I suppose, prowling around private grounds and pilfering? I ought to be taking it as a joke, eh? Don't ye know,

you two, I could have you taken in charge for this?"

"Breeze ahead, then," says I. "Call the high sheriff. Only let's not get all foamed up over it, Mr. MacGregor Shinn."

"Ha!" says he. "Then ye know who I am? Maybe you're stopping up at the big house?"

"We are guests of Mr. Ellins, your neighbor," puts in Vee.

"He's no neighbor of mine," snaps Shinn. "Not him. His bulldog worries me cat, his roosters wake me up in the morning, and his Dago workmen chatter about all day long. No, I'll not own such a man as neighbor. Nor will I have his guests stealing my posies."

"Then take it," says Vee, throwing the lilac spray on the ground.

"You'll find a quarter stuck on the bush," says I. "Sorry, MacGregor, we couldn't make a trade. The young lady is mighty fond of lilacs."

"Is she, now?" says Shinn, still scowlin' at us.

"And she thinks your place here is pretty cute," I adds.

"It's a rotten hole," says he.

"Maybe you're a poor judge," says I.

"If it was fixed up a bit I should think it might be quite spiffy."

"What call has an old bachelor to be fixing things up?" he demands. "What do I care how the place looks? And what business is it of yours, anyway?"

"Say, you're a consistent grouch, ain't you?" says I, givin' him the grin. "What's the particular trouble—was you toppin' your drive to-day?"

"Slicin' mon," says he. "Hardly a tee shot found the fairway the whole round. And then you two come breaking me bushes."

"My error," says I. "But you should have hung out a sign that you was inside chewin' nails."

"I was doing nothing of the kind," says he. "I was waiting for that grinning idiot, Len Hung, to give me me tea."

"Well, don't choke over it when you do get it," says I. "And if you ain't ready to sic the police on us we'll be trotting along back."

"Ye wull not," says MacGregor; "ye'll have tea with me."

It sounds like a threat, and I can see Vee gettin' ready to object strenuous. So I gives her the nudge.

I expect it's because I'm so used to Old Hickory's blowin' out a fuse that I don't duck quicker when a gas-bomb disposition begins to sputter around. They don't mean half of it, these furious fizzers.

Sometimes it's sciatica, more often a punk digestion, and seldom pure cussedness. If you don't humor 'em by comin' back messy yourself, but just jolly 'em along, they're apt to work out of it. And I'd seen sort of a human flicker in them blue-gray eyes of MacGregor Shinn's

"Vee," says I, "our peevish friend is invitin' us to take tea with him. Shall we chance it?"

And you know what a good sport Vee is. She lets the curve come into her mouth corners again, both of her cheek dimples show, and she shoots a quizzin' smile at Mr. Shinn.

"Does he say it real polite?" she asks.

"Na," says MacGregor. "But there'll be hot scones and marmalade."

"M-m-m-m!" says Vee. "Let's, Torchy."

IT'S an odd finish to an affair that started so scrappy. Not that Shinn reverses himself entirely, or turns from a whiskered golf grump into a stage fairy in spangled skirts. He goes right on with his growlin' and grumblin'—about the way his Chink cook serves the tea, about havin' to live in a rotten hole like Harbor Hills, about everything in general. But a great deal of it is just to hear himself talk, I judge.

We had a perfectly good high tea, and them buttered scones with marmalade couldn't be beat. Also he shows us all over the house, and Vee raves about it.

"Look, Torchy!" says she. "That glimpse of water from the living-room windows. Isn't that dear? And one could have such a wonderful garden beyond. Such a splendid big fireplace, too. And what huge beams in the ceiling! It's a very old house, isn't it, Mr. Shinn?"

"The rascally agent who sold it to me said it was," says MacGregor, "but I wouldn't believe a word of his on any subject. 'Did I ask you for an old house, at all?' I tells him. For what I wanted was just a place where I could live quiet, and maybe have me game of golf when I wanted it. But here I've gone off me game; and, besides, the country's no place to live quiet in. I should be in town, so I should, like any decent white man. I've a mind to look up a place at once. Try another scone, young lady."

So it was long after six before we got away, and the last thing MacGregor does is to load Vee down with a whole armful of lilac blossoms.

I suppose Mr. and Mrs. Robert thought we'd been makin' a wholesale raid when they saw us comin' in with the plunder. Mrs. Robert almost turns pale.

"Mercy!" says she. "You don't mean to say you got all those from our neighbor's bushes, do you?"

"Uh-huh," says I. "We've been mesmerizin', MacGregor. He's as tame a Scot now as you'd want to see."

They could hardly believe it, and when they heard about our havin' tea with him they gasped.

"Of all persons!" says Mrs. Robert. "Why, he has been glaring at us for 'a year, and sending us the most b ristling messages. I don't understand."

Mr. Robert, though, winks knowin'.

"Some of Torchy's red-headed diplomacy, I suspect," says he. "I must engage you to make our peace with MacGregor."

That's all we saw of him, though, durin' our stay. For one thing, we was kept fairly busy. I never knew you could have so much fun in the country. Ever watch a bunch of young ducks waddin' about? Say, ain't they a circus! And them fluffy little chicks squabblin' over worms. Honest, I near laughed myself sick. Vee was for luggin' some of 'em home to the apartment. But she was thrilled over 'most everything out there, from the fat robins on the lawn to the new leaves on the trees.

AND, believe me, when we gets back to town again, our studio apartment seems cramped and stuffy. We talked over everything we'd seen and done at the Ellinses'.

"That's really living, isn't it?" says Vee.

"Why not," says I, "with a twenty-room house, and grounds half as big as Central Park?"

"I know," says Vee. "But a little place like Mr. Shinn's would be large enough for us."

"I expect it would," says I. "You don't really think you'd like to live out there, do you, though?"

"Wouldn't I!" says Vee, her eyes sparklin'. "I'd love it."

"What would you do all day alone?" I suggests.

"I'd raise ducks and chickens and flowers," says Vee. "And Leon could have a garden. Just think!"

Yep—I thought. I must have kept awake hours that night, tryin' not to. And the more I mulled it over— Well, in the mornin' I had a talk with Mr. Robert, after which I got busy with the long-distance 'phone. I didn't say anything at lunch about what I'd done, but around three o'clock I calls up the apartment.

"I'm luggin' home some one to dinner," says I. "Guess who?"

Vee couldn't.

"MacGregor the grouch," says I.

"Really?" says Vee. "How funny!"

"It's part of the plot," says I. "Tell the Professor to spread himself on the eatings, and have the rooms all fixed up slick."

Vee says she will. And she does. MacGregor falls for it, too. You should have seen him after dinner, leanin' back comfortable in our biggest chair, sippin' his coffee, and puffin' one of Old Hickory's special perfectos that I'd begged for the occasion.

And still I didn't let on. What I'm after is to have him spring the proposition on me. Just before he's ready to go, too, he does.

"I say," says he casual, "this isn't such a bad hole you have here."

"Perfectly rotten," says I.

"Then we might make a trade," says he. "What?"

"There's no tellin'," says I. "You mean a swap, as things stand?"

"That's it," says he. "I'm no hand for moving rubbish about."

"Me either," says I. "But if you mean business, suppose you drop in to-morrow at the office, about ten-thirty, and talk it over."

"Very well," says MacGregor. "I'll stop in town to-night."

"Torchy!" says Vee, after he's gone.

"Do—do you suppose he will—really?"

"You're still for it, eh?" says I. "Sure, now'?"

"Oh, it would be almost too good to be true," says she. "That could be made just the dearest place!"

"Yes," says I; "but my job is to talk MacGregor into lettin' it go cheap, or else we can't afford to touch it."

Well, I can't claim it was all my smooth work that did the trick, for MacGregor had bought the place at a bargain first off, and now he was anxious to unload. Still, he hadn't been born north of Glasgow for nothing. But the figures Mr. Robert said would be about right I managed to shade by twenty per cent., and my lump invoice of that old mahogany of ours maybe was a bit generous. Anyway, when I goes home that night I tosses Vee a long envelop.

"What's this?" says she.

"That's your chicken permit," says I. "All aboard for Lilac Lodge! Gee! I wonder should I grow whiskers, livin' out there?"

How I Learned to Like My Work

By an OFFICE MAN

I HAVE been working for my company in various clerical capacities for more than twenty years. If I continue to work for this concern twenty years longer I can retire on a pension of $100 a month for the rest of my life. But it is not the pension, nor even the satisfaction of looking forward to an assured income of this amount in old age, that I now like best about my work. It is a deeper and more pleasurable thing than that. It is nothing less than that I have learned to like my work, and am not troubled as I used to be with the feeling that I could do almost anything else a good deal better.

It is a wonder to me now that I was able to do my work well enough for the company to keep me on its pay-roll during the years I was itching to do something else. About three years ago I reached the point where I had to decide either to learn to like my work if I was going to succeed at it, or to get out of it. All the time there was a feeling deeply rooted in me that I should make a mistake if I changed my line of work after spending nearly twenty years of my life at it. This was also the opinion of my wife, who steadily urged me to stick to it. I knew there was plenty of future for me, even if I never got outside of the big concern I am employed by, if I could only acquire a feeling of being satisfied with my work, and gave it the same effort I felt like giving to something else, like life insurance or selling automobiles.

Gradually all my thinking crystallized into one big thought, which was that, if I could form the habit of liking my work, all my troubles would be ended. It began to dawn on me that I already had a good position, that there were better and bigger paying jobs ahead of me, but that I was deliberately crippling my chances for success by allowing myself to be forever thinking I was in the wrong line. There were lots of days when I would stop work for a while to dream of how many automobiles or how much life insurance I would sell that day if I was down in the street, instead of being chained (as I thought) to a desk for life.

Three things helped me to accomplish my determination to form the habit of liking my work:

1. I observed that nearly all the people around me were in my fix: they didn't like the work they were doing, and very few of them were getting anywhere at it I noticed, too, that whenever a man was promoted he was always taken from that small minority of us who undoubtedly worked as if they liked the jobs they held. It began to impress itself upon me that a love for one's work had a whole lot to do with the quality of it. Next, I found myself almost unconsciously being impressed by the manner of those whom I found to be happy at their work. Especially did an elevator-man impress me. He always seemed to be enjoying his work. Many people would ride in no other elevator but his. His "good mornin" alone put one in good spirits for starting the day's work. He was changed to another lift, but we all followed him. Shortly after he was made head elevator-man, and not long after was promoted to manager of the building. I firmly believe that man's success was due to the fact that he loved his work.

2. It was part of my job to talk to aplicants for work. I discovered that among those who applied were a number who had previously worked for our company—many of them at good jobs—but who had left us to take up other lines of work or to go in business. Some of them told me they made twice as much to start with; but something went wrong, or something unforeseen turned up, and they lost out.

A man I had envied bitterly when he left us two or three years before to accept the managership of a small concern, came in one day and almost begged for a job of any kind. In fact, I began to discover that many of these men considered me as eminently successful because I still held a good job with my company. I began to think so, too.

3. The third thing, but certainly not the least thing, that helped me to learn to like my work, was a woman's love and intuition. My wife would never believe that I was cut out for a salesman. She was not satisfied with my progress or my position; but she had that inside knowledge that so many wives have of their husbands' capabilities. She knew that the average man ought not to spend twenty years with one concern and then leave it. So she encouraged me to stick. She helped me through many a fit of the blues when some chipper salesman told me how he was cleaning up $300 a month selling automobiles. She helped me to see clearly that if I would learn the secret of being satisfied with my work, an enthusiasm would be born of it that would help me finally to achieve jobs in my line worth two or three times $300 a month— to say nothing of that pension of $100 a month for life when I am old enough to quit. She never lost sight of that.

There must be thousands of people who are working at one thing and dreaming of success at another. To all of these I say: dig in your own yards. The diamonds of happiness are perhaps buried under your own door-step.

A Woman's Experience in Making Munitions

By JEANNE JUDSON

IT was my first day in the munitions factory in England. I wore a blue over-all like a long painter's smock, and a blue cap. Around me were other women wearing the same garb and doing the same work. I was one of them. They could not know that I had come across the Atlantic and gone to work in the factory merely to get "impressions," and not only to get impressions, but to find out a few truths.

Just what has been the effect of men's work on women? I had listened to the people who say that the effect of masculine labor is destructive to femininity.

"They will never be willing to go back to their old way of living," say these evil prophets. "They will lose all interest in home and children."

As a woman, I had never believed these things. I believed that deep in the heart of every woman, no matter what her work or her surroundings, is the treasured dream of a husband and home and children of her own; and I had come to find out for myself whether my theory would stand the test of the industrial change that has swept over Europe since the beginning of the war.

Of all the work that women are doing, the work in munitions factories is perhaps the most distinctly masculine; and at the end of my first day I was convinced that I was right. I had been running a lathe in a room where shell-fuse bodies were being made. It is unskilled work, requiring little intelligence, quite a bit of muscle, and any amount of careful watching. I was dazed by the sight of the constantly moving machinery, the light, the noise, and the unaccustomed smell of machine oil. I cut my hands on the sharp tools out of sheer awkwardness. My muscles ached, and my ankles grew so tired from long standing that my feet turned over.

"No woman will be tempted away from home by this work," I thought.

But that was only the first day. After a time my muscles became accustomed to the exercise. I became more skilful.

The other women helped me.

"Pull the lever out with a quick motion, like this," said the girl beside me, "and it won't be so hard."

They all talked to me, not waiting for introductions. Men's work has taught women the foolishness of petty conventions, and they no longer fear each other. They are unreserved and honest, because they have a common labor and a common cause.

As the work grew easier and I noted the splendid camraderie and cheerfulness of them all, I began to doubt again. Perhaps the evil prophets were right. What could these skilled women mechanics in blue over-alls, their hands soiled with labor, know or care about homes and babies?

There were all sorts of women—stenographers, clerks, sales-girls, dressmakers, artists, milliners, domestics, and hundreds of leisure-class women who had left homes of luxury for the factory—all working side by side. And they all talked to me with equal freedom.

"Do you like this work?" I asked the girl next to me.

"It's awfully interesting," she answered brightly. Then she sighed.

"Tired?" I asked.

"No, of course not. One can't afford to get tired. I was just thinking about my hands. It is hard on the hands, you know. I was a stenographer before the war. Such nice, clean work."

"You intend going back to it after the war?" The girl was an expert tool-fitter, and would not be dependent on the making of munitions if she cared to continue work as a machinist after the war.

"Indeed I do; that is, unless—"

And then she told me about the man. He was in the hospital now, and probably would not go back to the front. His left arm would never be quite right. They hoped to marry just as soon as he was discharged.

After that I talked to others, and they were all the same. There was not one who before the war had been engaged in a typically feminine vocation, who did not confess that she would be only too glad to go back to her old work; and it seemed almost silly to ask the woman who had come from a home of luxury whether she would be willing to leave her machine and go back to wearing fluffy evening gowns instead of greasy over-alls.

Yet not one of these women would think of leaving the factory as long as England needs them. They are working for England; and for almost every one I found that England was personified in some one man—a husband, a father, a brother, a son, or, most often of all, a sweetheart—at the front.

Each one of them seemed to have her little romance. Usually he was a soldier. Perhaps he was in the hospital, and she was very happy because for the time he was safe from death. Perhaps he was in France and she had not had a letter for some time. She was worried but hopeful—the mails are so often delayed in wartime. Sometimes he was a lad from her own village or from the same part of London, and he had told her he loved her before he went away.

Very often there was a romantic story of a soldier from Canada or Australia or from South Africa. She was prepared to follow him across the sea to a new home when the war was ended. They had met when she visited a hospital, or at a soldiers' tea, and it had been "love at first sight."

These stories were told me as we ate our lunch in the factory canteen, or while some worker waited for her tools to be set or her machine repaired. It does not in any wise indicate that the women in England's munitions factories are not taking their work seriously. They are taking it very seriously—working with a courage and faithfulness that has no parallel in history.

They are not working for industrial advancement, but each woman for her own man at the front, just as the men in the trenches are fighting for England—an England symbolized for each man by the thought of his own fireside and the woman who is the presiding spirit there.

When the war ends, the leisure-class women will go back to their homes, the working-women will for the most part return to the tasks that engaged them before the war. In the very nature of things, some women will be compelled to continue in work that was formerly considered the special prerogative of men. They will do this work as women have done all work from the beginning of time—because the work is to be done, and the women can do it.

No need to fear that working in machine shops or driving motor-buses or working on farms will ever change the heart of a woman.

It is only when women get the career idea that they relinquish thoughts of home and husband and babies; and even then the story of successful women proves that thousands of them have won personal success and have not had to resign the bigger destiny that centers round a cradle.

The woman heart is the same to-day as it was a thousand years ago, and work and fashions and politics and conventions are powerless to change it. I learned this running a lathe in one of England's munitions factories.

The Man Who Saved Teddy

By WALT MASON

IT'S Elbert E. Martin whose face you observe; a man who's distinguished for excellent nerve.

You all will remember when Teddy was shot, up there in Wisconsin, by some locoed sot; the shootist was wild to plug Teddy some more, but Martin just pushed him down into the floor, and seized on the gun he was brandishing there, and rocked him to sleep without turning a hair.

For that act of courage, inspiring this ode, he wears a gold watch that the Colonel bestowed. He used to punch cows in the halcyon days; he's roughed it and traveled the dangerous ways. And now he has reached a remarkable end—Four Hundred's philosopher, counselor, friend.

Publicity man for Hotel Vanderbilt, he moves in the circles of velvet and gilt. It keeps him quite busy; the bilt social affairs receive the attention such functions should gain—a task that's too big for a cheap grade of brain. He does more to keep in the limelight the names of beautiful damsels and opulent dames than any one living in Gotham, they say; and yet he's not broken or haggard or gray.

The leaders of fashion and diplomats grand, and nobles from Europe, or t'other-most land, and artists and writers and statesmen of fame, and men who've won millions while playing the game, and all kinds of people who wish to cut ice, just hunt up this Martin, to ask his advice. He tells them just how they should stage a pink tea, a dance or a pageant, or old-fashioned bee.

It seems a far cry from the ranch and the bronk to making society conquerors conk.

The Blue Aura

By ELIZABETH YORK MILLER

Illustration by Arthur I. Keller

(Continued)

THERE was no reason why Harland should not be in Chapin's that evening. Everybody goes to Chapin's if he has the price, or credit with the management.

There were several reasons why the young man should be alone, however. One of them, curiously enough, was remotely connected with Dora's mother and a letter intrusted to her care, which had miscarried. The letter should have been delivered to the daughter-in-law of Edith Trelawny's mistress. Instead of which it fell into other hands.

Suffice it for the moment, however, that Lord Anthony Harland was alone, and in a depressed frame of mind; and when he saw the acrobats and their ballet-girl friends ringed around a big table dotted with gold-necked bottles, he elected to join them.

Dora welcomed him with snobbish pride. Here was a chance to show off before Betty and Ivy.

Her welcome was enough. It did not matter to him in the least that Turco, though respectful, was not pressing, and that Tyson—the man who had knocked him out so boorishly—showed the cheerful face of Monday morning.

"You shall sit by me," said Dora imperiously, patting the red velvet couch. "Change over, Ted."

Dora glanced at Harland sidewise out of her magnificent eyes. Quite unconsciously she was flirting again, and her husband saw it. Turco saw it, too, this time: A queer look came into his face.

Betty and Ivy were frankly over-awed and envious. They averted their faces and talked in low tones to each other about their own humble affairs, sipping their wine with an exaggerated air of refinement.

Tyson had nothing whatever to say. Perhaps the poor boy felt that his doom lay not so much in Lord Anthony Harland as in Dora's fervid flying into the arms of flattery at every touch and turn. There was no trusting her. He turned from the sight with sick loathing in his heart.

Nor had Turco anything to say, until he broke into Dora's voluble flow of conversation to remind her that Dumpling was expecting them.

Smilingly Dora nodded, and allowed Harland to arrange her cloak.

"You'll come too?" she said. "We're going back to Turco's."

"I'll come if I may drive you alone," he replied, his back to the others, so that they did not hear. "Your friends are very charming, but—"

He finished with an expressive smile. The monocle seemed to wink at her, and the ends of the little mustache twitched upward.

Dora appreciated the compliment, although it was not very subtle. She said "If you like" in a husky, hurried whisper. No one seconded her invitation, but to Harland it was apparently sufficient. There was a hansom on the rank, and, to every one's surprise, he hailed it and bundled Dora in before they quite knew what he was about. Tyson, in fact, had gone back into the café to fetch a feather boa that Ivy had left behind.

THE rain had ceased, but it was a cold, dark night—unpleasantly cold, oppressively dark.

Dora, in the hansom with Harland, felt very self-conscious all of a sudden. She held herself rigidly and tried to cover her nervousness with light conversation—to cover her fears also; for she was wondering about Ted and how his anger would manifest itself.

"So I am alone at last with beautiful Dora!" exclaimed Harland.

"Did you want to be—so much?"

"More than anything else in the world," he replied. "Where've you been keeping yourself hidden so long?"

"We've been on tour."

"Oh, yes—you and strong men. For heaven's sake, why do you do it? You ought to be starring—ballerina asolata—in Symonds' new revue. Fancy you being buried in the halls!"

"Buried! We're head-liners," Dora said indignantly.

"I dare say. How much do you make—if I may ask?"

"They give me a third—that's because Turco's so generous. I get ten pounds a week."

"I fancy I could get you twenty-five if I spoke to Symonds. He's a good friend of mine."

"Symonds hated me," Dora observed, with an honesty that did her credit. "Even in the ballet, I wasn't much good."

"Only because you have too much temperament—and any clever dancer could make a hit in one of those spectacular effects. You're clever—and beautiful. Shall I suggest it to Symonds?"

"I don't know. I'd have to ask my husband—"

"He'd object, of course."

"I'm afraid he would."

"Then there's no more to be said. But it's a great pity."

There was no more to be said just now, because Lord Anthony also was clever, and knew that when seed is sown a little time must elapse before it will sprout.

The hansom jogged on through the dark, deserted streets. The others must have reached Turco's long ago, for they would have gone in a taxicab.

Dora's uneasiness increased. Harland took her hand, and, though she left it quietly in his clasp, her heart throbbed painfully.

Suddenly she wished she were not married. In full force the visions of her girlhood came back to her. It might have been so different if she had waited. It was the vision and not the reality of Harland that made him suddenly seem so important.

"You're a dear little thing—" he whispered.

And then the hansom drew up with a jerk. They were in Percy Street.

Harland jumped out and almost lifted her down. To her great surprise and relief, he said he would not come in. He would see her again, perhaps soon.

He went off by himself in the hansom, and Dora hurried up the steps, concocting excuses, hoping against hope that Ted would accept them.

IT seemed to be all dark at Turco's. The street door had been left open for her. She flew up the stairs, a guilty truant.

Turco was waiting for her at the top outside his flat. Rising up in the gloom, he gave her a start, and she screamed faintly.

"Oh, Turco, is that you? Whatever are you sitting here for! Where's Ted— and Betty and Ivy?"

"Are you alone?" Turco asked.

"Yes—Lord Anthony wouldn't come in. You weren't very cordial to him; I—I don't blame him."

"I didn't want him," said Turco.

"Oh, well!" Dora sniffed. "Are we going to stand out here in the hall all night?"

"Dumpling's gone to bed. The girls decided not to come, after all—and Ted wouldn't, either. He left us outside Chapin's."

Dora's heart stood still for a second. Ted was angry with her, of course. She had known he would be.

"Then I had better go home," she said.

"I'll go with you," Turco offered.

"It isn't at all necessary."

"It may be."

"Don't be absurd, Turco! Do you think Ted is going to beat me?"

"No."

"What then?"

"I'm afraid—of something else."

In her rage she shook him.

"Tell me what you mean! Tell me at once!"

He would not tell her, however, and all the way to New Compton Street she berated and implored him. They could not get a cab, and they walked.

"But what have I done, Turco?" she whimpered at last.

"Don't ask me what you've done. I don't know. His lordship's no good to you, Dora, and Ted is jealous. He has reason to be."

"It's a lie!"

"It's the truth!"

"How dare you?"

"Because I feel—I know."

"Oh! Been seeing his aura, I suppose," she sniffed.

"Yes."

"You make me tired!"

Turco did not reply, and for a while she trotted along beside him in silence. The rain had stopped, but the pavements were still glistening. Their footsteps made a clatter in the empty streets. The bank of clouds overhead parted, and a wan, watery-looking moon peered down at them for a moment. On either side loomed dark, forbidding tenements.

"To-morrow we open at Chiswick, I suppose you know. There's a call for rehearsal at eleven," he reminded her.

"Of course I know," she replied. "It's nothing but work, work, work—and precious little in it for me, that I can see."

"Many a girl would thank God on her knees for all you have," Turco said.

"Huh! I could get twenty-five as easy as easy—"

She stopped short, and nipped her unruly tongue in self-punishment.

"Could you, now!" exclaimed Turco. "As easy as easy! With his lordship's help, eh? He's got a little money in Symonds' new show. Is that what you mean?"

"Never mind what I mean," said Dora.

THEY had reached Mrs. Petrosini's, and she let herself in with her latch-key.

"I'm coming up," Turco declared.

"I don't want you to."

"It isn't what you want."

Sullenly she allowed him to enter, and he hurried up the stairs ahead of her. Before she had reached the top he was back again.

"As I thought. He's not here. I shall have to look for him."

This time it was Turco who gripped Dora. He took her hard by the shoulders.

"You're just like all women! Must have your little games! One of 'em tried it on once before, and I sent her packing. For two pins I'd send you!"

Never before had Dora seen Turco angry. It was a miracle, that he could be angry with her. Her teeth chattered.

"You're hurting me. Let me go—you brute! What have I done? Where is Ted?"

He released her, muttering to himself.

"Where're you going?"

"To find Ted—if I can."

Dora raced after him.

"I'm coming too."

"Don't be a fool, Dora; you can't come."

"Yes, I can! He's my husband. You talk very big, Turco—but you don't scare me."

"I don't want to scare you, but—"

"Then don't try."

Out into the night they went once more. In Charing Cross Road they found a taxi. Turco gave the driver an address, but Dora did not catch it, and he seemed deaf when she questioned him.

Hidden away in the by-ways of the great town were strange places—houses with darkened fronts and glittering interiors. Turco's knowledge of them all was peculiar. One might have taken him for an habitué yet Dora knew that he was not. This sort of thing had happened before. She put one and one together and made two—herself and another woman.

They found her husband at last—in an unspeakable drinking-hole tucked away in an alley off the Tottenham Court Road. Tyson was dead drunk. There is no milder term for it. Turco and another man lifted him into the cab, where he fell asleep with his head on Dora's shoulder. Nor did he know who she was, for he called her by another woman's name.

Dora had received two staggering

---

surprises that night. Turco, displaying anger, furnished one. Her husband was the other, and the greater. She did not know how she could ever be friends with him again after such outrageous conduct. Her own conduct—the little thing that had inspired him to make a beast of himself—seemed lily pure by comparison.

They reached home at last, and Turco put his loutish, half insensible partner to bed. Then he went off to get some sleep himself, leaving Dora alone with the horror.

She undressed in the sitting-room and lay down on the couch, after bolting the door. Neither the door nor the bolt, however, could keep out Tyson's penetrating snores.

TURCO arrived early the next morning. Dora let him in, and turned her face to the wall again with quivering lips.

She listened dully while Turco went into the bedroom. There were groans as he shook his partner back to consciousness; then a low murmur of voices.

Presently Turco returned, closing the door behind him.

"We can't go on to-day," he said grimly. "If we get the sack, it's your fault."

"Oh, yes, my fault! I suppose I got drunk."

"Much better for us if it had been you," Turco said gloomily. "We could have got along without you. Leave him alone—if you can. There isn't anything to be done. I'll come around again later."

Dora buried her head in her arms. That Turco should turn against her was the last straw. Turco—upon whom she would have counted above all other men!

And then she knew that he was standing beside the couch where she lay huddled.

"Dora—'tisn't in the heart of me to be so cruel unkind to you," he said gently. "I'm a great sinner myself. Who am I, to be scolding you?"

"Who, indeed!" exclaimed Dora, without turning to look at him.

"I'm only frightened for you, Dora; my dear. His lordship's turned your head. He isn't for the likes of you, Dora."

"I'm sure I don't want him. I don't care if I never see him again."

"You'll be kind to Ted when he comes to himself?"

"Not likely I'll speak to him."

"You'll only make matters worse if you don't."

He took his departure without saying anything more.

BY eleven o'clock Turco was back again, having made what arrangements with the management he could. He had to tell them the truth, for a doctor's certificate was out of the question. He came bearing mysterious bottles and a small parcel from the chemist's. With his antidotes he disappeared into the bedroom.

Dora was studiously deaf to what might be going on in there. She made herself tidy in a half-hearted way, and set the room to rights.

Mrs. Petrosini, under the mistaken notion that Tyson was seriously ill, brought up a bunch of mimosa. She wondered why the doctor had not been summoned.

Then the front bell rang, and when she had answered it, a visitor was shown up.

The visitor was about as welcome as a surprise party to a victim of acute toothache. It was Dora's mother.

Edith Trelawny came in, carrying a small hand-bag and neatly furled umbrella. She looked as trim and severe as usual in her dark serge costume and round hat with its modest wing trimming There was a spot of color on each cheek-bone.

"I was wondering if you could put me up for a day or two," she said, without the preface of greeting.

"Put you up?" Dora echoed.

She was dismayed. Her own domestic crisis loomed so large that she could scarcely think of anything else.

"Only until I get a new situation," Edith replied.

"But—"

"I've left Mrs. Darrell. Snuffy old woman she was, too. I couldn't stand her another minute. We had words yesterday, and I simply popped off. Not for worlds would I go back there."

Dora glanced anxiously toward the door of the bedroom. The ways of mistresses and their maids were as Greek to her. That her mother could "pop off" on the spur of the moment was remarkable only because it was a personal inconvenience to herself.

Edith sat down and began to take off her gloves. She regarded the matter as settled.

"Who's in there?" she asked, nodding toward the door.

"My husband—and Turco. Ted's ill. Turco is looking after him."

"What's the matter with him?" Edith asked indifferently.

"He got drunk last night," Dora replied with brutal exactitude.

"Oh! Does he do that often?"

"Never before."

"You don't look any too well yourself," Dora's mother said critically, noticing her for the first time.

"I couldn't sleep."

"Aren't you working?"

"We were to have—but Ted's upset it for to-day. I don't know what to do about you. Perhaps Mrs. Petrosini could let you have a room."

"I can, sleep anywhere," said Edith. "I haven't made up my mind what to do—whether to advertise or go to an agency. Leaving as I did, of course I couldn't ask her for a reference."

At this point in their conversation, Turco emerged from the bedroom.

"Oh, how do you do!" he exclaimed, his worried-looking monkey's eyes questioning Dora's.

"My mother is staying here for a few days," the girl said in explanation.

"Until I get a new situation," Edith amplified.

"Oh, I see," said Turco.

He was at a loss. There was something he wanted to say privately to Dora. He hoped to effect a reconciliation between her and her husband, for the moment seemed ripe for it.

Edith Trelawny came to his aid quite unconsciously.

"Well, Dora; I have to go out for a little while. I shall be back for tea. My bag will be safe enough here, I suppose?"

"Oh, yes!"

"Au revoir, then. And to you, Mr. Turco. I hope my son-in-law will be feeling better presently."

"Yes, ma'am; thank you kindly." said Turco, blinking.

EDITH TRELAWNY, in her neat, ladylike attire, holding firmly to the furled umbrella and wearing her eyeglasses with an academic air, sallied forth from New Compton Street. Opposite the Palace Theater she boarded an omnibus that would take her to Victoria. She knew where she was going—no need to consult a directory. The address was quite familiar to her, although she had never visited it in person.

At the corner by Grosvenor Gardens she alighted, walked a block, and turned into a side street where the houses were smaller. Some of them had been made into shops of a semi-elegant nature. Here was a modiste rejoicing in the Christian name of Alphonsine; over the way, a florist's window, banked with flowers caught a stray gleam from the reluctant sun. At the corner was an antique shop.

Edith found the house she wanted. It was quite the nicest in the genteel street, but from the look of it one would not suspect its owner of possessing immoderate means.

A middle-aged man-servant answered her ring.

"I don't suppose his lordship is in," Edith said crisply, "but I have important business with him and would like to make an appointment. My name is Miss Trelawny. If you will be good enough—"

"His lordship has just come in," the servant interrupted. "As a matter of fact, his lordship is expecting you, miss. Will you step this way?"

Inside it was a charming little house, but somewhat crowded. The walls of the

---

narrow corridor were over-burdened with the heavy portraits of ancestors. A huge chest almost blocked the way.

Edith was shown into a study littered with books and bibelots, overlooking a soot-stained handkerchief-sized garden.

Harland did not keep her waiting. She had time for one survey of the room, and he was there, twitching mustache, monocle, and all, demanding explanations.

"For heaven's sake, Trelawny, tell me how it happened!" he cried. "I've had only the wire from you. She—Mrs. Darrell—hasn't written."

"No, my lord. It was like this."

"Yes, yes; tell me!"

"Young Mr. Darrell came into her bedroom as I was doing madam's frock. I'd just given madam the letter as had come by the evening post, addressed to me, as per usual."

"Yes!"

"Madam was reading it. Her husband came in quite softly. Neither of us heard him, my lord. He snatched it out of her hand, envelop and all—and of course the envelop had my name on it. I flew out of the room, because I knew there'd be a scene. I saw it in his face. Then I got the wire off to you."

"Yes. That was thoughtful of you, Trelawny."

"Thank you, my lord."

"What then?"

Edith shrugged her shoulders.

"After dinner—which, I got it from Mr. Burge, nobody ate—old madam had me on the carpet. She didn't say much; but what she did say—"

"Was to the point, eh?"

"As your lordship puts it."

"You're sacked—booted?"

"Yes, my lord."

"No references?"

"Not from old Mrs. Darrell, my lord. She could scarcely give me a reference— could she?"

"I'm very sorry, Trelawny. Of course, in a way, it's my fault. Will you accept a fiver?

Her fingers closed over the bank-note with businesslike promptitude.

"Thank you, I'm sure, my lord; but—"

"But you can't live on five pounds forever? I know that. Look here, what do you say to a sort of theatrical engagement—dresser in a theater?"

"What's it worth?"

"Fifteen bob a week—and tips. I haven't a notion what the tips amount to."

"What sort of persons?"

"Semi-principals—young ladies with a few lines, or a song or dance. Not more than four or five."

"It wouldn't be permanent, then?"

"You might take it while you're looking up something permanent. Hang it all, Trelawny, we're both in the same boat, in a manner of speaking. You've been jolly well paid. You accepted the risk. Now that the game is up—'!

"Ah yes, my lord! I wasn't complaining. You're very kind indeed! I'd be grateful for the situation you mention. When do I begin?"

Harland sat down at a crowded little desk and began to scribble hastily on a letter-pad. At intervals he spoke:

"This day week. To-day's Monday, isn't it? Heavens, I thought it was next month! ... I'll tell Harding to expect you. He's the stage-manager. Give him this. It's the Auditorium Theater, in Shaftesbury Avenue."

"Thank you, my lord."

She slipped the letter into her bag. Harland rang a bell, and the man-servant came to show her out.

DORA, meanwhile, was being asked to forgive her husband.

At Turco's instigation, he came shakily into the sitting-room. The bout with alcohol had altered his appearance in a becoming way. He was wan and white, and looked a suffering but interesting creature. Turco had pulled him together, amazingly well.

Of course he had put himself hopelessly in the wrong. Getting intoxicated, and thus jeopardizing the professional engagements of all three of them, was a much more heinous offense than the one that Dora had committed, and he did not attempt to defend himself. He only hoped she would forgive him, as Turco had done, and say no more about it.

The expression of Dora's mouth was not pretty, although she said she forgave him. She said that because she wanted Turco to go.

Turco took the hint. Scarcely had the door closed on him when Dora asked coldly:

"Who is 'Molly'?"

Tyson's nerves were not very steady. He jumped.

"W-why—" he stammered, "I don't know what you mean. Who's been yarning to you?"

"Who is 'Molly'?" Dora repeated, more coldly and very firmly.

"How the devil should I know!" he exclaimed, forgetting that he prided himself on truth and candor.

Dora gritted her teeth and smiled at him ferociously.

"You seemed to know last night when you put your head on my shoulder in the cab. You thought I was Molly."

"I don't remember anything about it," Tyson stated emphatically; and doubtless he was truthful enough in saying that.

"Was she the woman Turco threw out of the troupe?"

"Oh, Turco's put you up to this!"

"He didn't mean to—it was when we were so worried, looking for you. He seemed to know just where to look. He said it was my fault you was such a fool. He said it had happened before—over another woman."

Tyson groaned a little and held his head.

"I can't help it if it did," he replied. There was no getting out of traps when Dora laid them.

"Then you lied to me—you who always tell the truth!" she sneered.

"How have I lied?" He was frankly puzzled.

"You said you'd never been in love before you met me. You said that I was the first—"

"Oh, Lord, what a fellow tells a girl when he's courting her has to be thrown up at me! I haven't passed all my life in jail."

"You admit, then, that there have been other women in your life?"

Dora's heart had grown quite hard by this time.

"I'll admit that there'll never be another," Tyson said. "Sometimes even one is too much, when she has a tongue like yours. Sharpen it on somebody else. I'm sick of being ground."

"Oh!"

"Always picking on me! Can't you see how rotten I feel? Can't you leave me alone for a minute? I'm going back to bed."

Dora said nothing. In silence she allowed him to seek once more the sanctuary his nerves demanded.

Presently, however, she followed him in, but not to notice him. He lay on the disordered bed, half dressed, pretending to be asleep, but really watching her.

Dora was going out. She took down her checked skirt and smart little fur coat, and hunted out the best of her blouses. On her head she put a round fur cap that matched the collar and cuffs.

Watching her slyly, Tyson was reminded of that time when she said she was going to leave him; but at the moment, somehow, he could get neither excited nor apprehensive at the idea that perhaps she was leaving him now.

To Dora it was almost incredible that he did not question her, for she knew that he was not asleep.

Her heart grew harder and harder.

When she sallied forth there was nothing definite in her mind. She had a fairly full purse, and some of her wickedness blew itself off in the neighborhood of Oxford and Regent streets. There were many things for which she had been saving to buy, and this afternoon she bought most of them, caution flung to the winds.

AT tea-time, in a shop in the neighborhood, she remembered her vow of vengeance, and pondered on it while consuming the meal—which she made a heavy one, having missed lunch.

It was then that the idea of wickedness took on the definite personality of Lord Anthony Harland.

Discovering his address and telephone number was a simple matter. By this time it was nearly six o'clock, and she decided to ring him up. She had a good enough excuse.

Over the wire his voice replied, sharply eager:

"Hello. Is that—is that you?"

For a second she thought perhaps he took her for some one else.

"It's Mrs. Tyson," she replied.

"Oh! How jolly! I thought it was you," he said.

Yet there was the least lingering note of disappointment in his voice.

Dora's conceit, however, kept her from noticing it.

"I wanted to ask you—that is, if you aren't busy—I thought perhaps you might tell me a little more about that engagement you mentioned last evening," she said.

"Nothing would please me better," he replied with absent-minded heartiness. "What are you doing now?"

"I've just had my tea. I'm telephoning from the post-office in Regent Street."

"Then why don't you jump into a taxi and come around here? I'm not dining until late, and I've got to hang about a bit for a message; otherwise—"

It was daring enough. If Ted knew, he would be sorry there had ever been a Molly on his list of lady friends.

"Very well; I'll come at once," Dora said—and added under her breath: "And that's one for you!"—meaning her husband.

To be continued next week

He Built It Himself

THIS is Mr. William O'Brien and his home-made foot-propelled automobile. You probably say to yourself, "Why does a big magazine want to publish a picture of an old man on a home-made toy?" Well, we'll tell you. The significant fact to us about this picture is that Mr. O'Brien is more than seventy years old. Some one has said that "genius is the power to become a boy again at will." We are inclined to believe that whoever said that said something real. Are you going to be tired of living by the time you reach seventy? Or are you, like Mr. O'Brien, going to be still a boy at heart? It's worth thinking about. Get some hobby—something that will interest you even in old age—if it's only building a foot-propelled automobile.

S. Orton, Stockholder

—Continued from page 7

to her and Fleuron, secured himself against the shock on the rope about him; but he could not prevent Mr. Folworth from falling the length of the rope span. He struck his head against a crag as he fell and lost consciousness.

The guides felt certain they could "line" the body down, though unconscious. One of Resdale's men had actually assisted in a similar emergency, and with the help of other guides, had borne a body down the most difficult descent of the Matterhorn. Of course it was impossible to include a girl in such a party; she would only double the danger.

Resdale already was photographing them all upon the ledge. Since he now would be unable to deliver the scenes ordered, he would deliver what he could get. With the material on hand, Mr. Barrister might rearrange his scenario.

Guides actually taking an unconscious man down Trasmir! Pictures of that, properly put in a play, would beat the planned climax. There would be points, in the descent, where it could be safely photographed. Resdale realized that it meant leaving Barbara Sears alone there to await the return of the Swiss. But Barbara was a game little girl; she didn't have any nerves. She had just to sit there. She was perfectly safe.

WHILE they had been near and she did not have to look far over the ledge to see them, and while she could hear Fleuron calling his directions and cautions in the painful, perilous descent, Barbara had managed to maintain complete unconcern for herself. But now they were gone; their cries, from far below, had ceased to echo up to her; she could not see them at all. She was alone, with her back to a thousand-foot wall of rock—a step in front of her the drop to the rock and ice debris above the glacier.

She knelt and, scooping together a little heap of the stone bits, set herself to forming a tiny causeway from one part of the shelf to the other. Her fingers were trembling. She had been shaken by Mr. Folworth's fall more than she had let the others see; but there was no one to see now. She got up, with one hand pressing against the mountain, and stood again. When she looked down, she was dizzy. That wouldn't do! Probably it came from focusing upon the bits of rock she had been playing with and then looking so very, very far away as was the next nearest object.

She shut her eyes and waited, with fingers thrust tight into a little crack she had found. One had to be exceedingly careful in such a place as this, she recognized, not to get dizzy from the sudden change of focus, because everything was either right close smack upon you or so awfully far away. There were no middle distances at all. You had to look at the mountain, which was only a foot away, or at the ledge, which was just under your boots; and then, when you shifted your glance just the least bit, you were looking miles off to the next mountain-tops or away, away down below to the glacier.

She opened her eyes and looked away off to the next mountain. That didn't make her dizzy; she was all right now. But in between her and the mountain-tops was something that seemed to be pulling, pulling, pulling down. It was as if there was a string from her shoulders to those mountain-tops and something between was dragging it down. It was the depth between, of course—the valley. Perhaps the best thing was to lie down for a few minutes.

She knelt first, facing the length of the ledge; then very carefully she sat down and cautiously lay back. She folded her arms under her head at first. But she was too round in that position; there was nothing to stop her rolling if she started toward the edge. She stretched out her right arm, therefore. As far as the wrist she could feel rock below; but her hand reached out over nothing. She could feel the pull of it upon her fingers.

She moved a bit of rock that was loose, and she felt it slip off and fall. She listened to hear it strike something; but she did not hear anything at all. It just fell silently without striking. That's the way she would fall, if she slipped that way a little—just fall.

She sat up and, creeping on her knees till she reached the fissure into which she could thrust her fingers, she stood up again. After all, it was better that way.

The watch on her wrist showed it was four o'clock. They had been gone, now, about three hours. She was becoming quite hungry. They had all eaten their lunch at the noon halting place a couple of hours before the accident, and they had consumed all the food except chocolate which Fleuron carried. He had left all of this with her, and also a little brandy; he had taken the rest of the brandy along to be of aid to Mr. Folworth, if he recovered. They did not carry water; they were to make tea from snow melted in the spirit lamp. She had the spirit lamp, but there was no snow on this ledge; and she was afraid to drink the brandy. But she ate a little chocolate, and put the rest away. One of those cakes would have been Mr. Folworth's. She wondered whether it was the one she had eaten; she wondered if he had died.

She realized, suddenly, that she was in the shadow. The sun had gone behind the mountain, and warmth had departed with it. She was cold. She could look down and see before her the monstrous shadow of the mountain over the valley. The clouds were coming now—white mists forming from nothing and floating off as clouds.

The magic of it fascinated her. She could see down into the valley, where the trees were and where the river ran. Then, as an invisible breeze blew into the mountain shadow, white gossamer formed, grew, to substance, and, catching the sun as it floated free of the shadow, glowed a glorious gold.

The clouds lost their glory as the sun set, and, gray and gloomy, clustered close about the mountain. They rose higher and closed about her, and hid from her even the end of the ledge. They were thicker than any fog she had ever experienced, and they destroyed alarmingly all sense of the depth just a step away,—destroyed that sense, while at the same time they tempted the step, allured and impelled it more than at any moment before. They made the step seem safe.

She thrust out a toe, at last, to test it. The clouds cleared and showed her stepping over to the bergschrund down in the blackness below. She caught herself back, and knew what she was to do before the clouds shrouded her that way again and all light left the world. Forty or fifty feet above her, a crevice opened in the rock—a narrow crevice, but big enough, she felt quite sure, to hold her.

Resdale and his guides had climbed that way: she could see the cracks and projections by which they had sustained themselves; she could follow them. It was safer to try, at any rate, than to stay there doing nothing. Why, the taking of the first hand-holds steadied her. She climbed her height, twice her height. She caught the bottom of the crevice, drew herself up, thrust in her arms, caught with her knees, and pushed in.

The crevice was cramped and very tight where her feet thrust down; but she liked that. The rock pressed her close, almost crushed her, it held her so firm; and if it was tight, it was deep. She was at least twelve feet away now from the drop to the bergschrund. She could not see the fall at all; and she was very comfortable.

SHE did not realize at once, when she awoke, that while she had been asleep the guides must have returned and, not finding her, must have believed she had fallen from the ledge. She recognized only that it was night, and the moon was shining outside, and she was wedged so firmly in the bottom of the crevice that she could not move. She tried with all her strength to lift herself; but her legs had no power, and her hands had nothing to grasp. Enough moonlight came in to let

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her see her wrist-watch. The time was four; that meant four in the morning. She knew then that the guides had come and gone. It was very cold now in the crevice. Her legs were numbed by the cold as well as held tight by the rock, and she could not warm them.

FOUR o'clock! By ten, at the very latest, the guides had promised to return; six hours gone! She called again and again, as she struggled; but she knew they were two thousand feet below now, looking for her body upon the bergschrund. It would not surprise them to fail to find it among the hillocks and caverns and crevasses there about the glacier. No, they would scarcely expect to find it; so they would not look for her again up there. No one would come until another party, passing that way, looked into that split in the mountain rock.

She struggled and thrust and pushed and pulled vainly till all her strength was gone. And, as she was numb now all over, she prepared, as decently as she could, to die. She had nothing to write with and nothing to write upon but the hoar-frost that had formed on the freezing rock from her breath as she had fought. With a finger she scratched in it:

"I am Shirley Orton, of Chicago, stockholder in the Traders' Bank. Please pay to the receivers any money due me."

Her head fell forward then; and her breath formed frost elsewhere. When she would be discovered, Mrs. Willis and some others would feel badly, of course; but no one would be really greatly grieved—except perhaps that nice boy who had taken care of her that night the bank failed, and who had come to see her afterward, and had advertised for her after she went away. When she thought of leaving every one now, it was queer that she was dreaming most of all about him. They had agreed, as he had said, about all but one thing, and about that—he had surely the right to decide for himself. She seemed to hear him now calling her name:

"Shirley! Shirley!"

It came so clearly, and with such great fear and passion, that it stirred her, and she tried to answer with his name. That was silly, because he was nowhere near; and no one really was calling: for no one about knew that was her name.

But his voice was nearer and louder now; and she heard a scrape like the scramble of climbing. And something shut off the dawn; and his voice cried out in exultation just before her; and she felt strong, eager hands—his hands which had held her—on her shoulders, and a warm cheek against hers, and he was lifting her up.

After he got her away from the grip of the rock and was holding her against him, he seemed to see what she had written; for he cried out something and hugged her close.

"They told me you were dead. We met them on the way down, after they'd come back for you; and they said you were not on the mountain—you must have fallen. So I went back with them to look for you on the bergschrund. But I could not give you up. I wouldn't believe you were there! You had to be alive! So I came back and found you!"

THAT night two telegrams went to Chicago from Mt. Trasmir. One, to broker Forster, informed him that he couldn't boost the new Phyllis Ware release too strong; the play was changed to include actual scenes of guides taking Folworth unconscious down Trasmir, and also absolutely wonderful girl stuff when a fellow, who was crazy about the girl, brought Barbara Sears down, with the help of two guides, that morning.

The other telegram, to Semmes, instructed the attorney to "Sell my securities to amount sufficient to pay in full my Traders' assessment and also balance unpaid in name of stockholder S. Orton." This was signed Lawrence Gresham. But Semmes was not a lawyer for nothing. He wired Larry to find if he had despatched a message, and, if so, to repeat it. So Larry this time added:

Also wire me a thousand dollars here. We're going to get married. And look out for a regular job for me.

What Kind of a Magazine Is This?

A MAN who had never seen EVERY WEEK asked us the other day: "What is your ambition? What kind of a magazine are you trying to make?"

We answered: "We are trying to help one million people get the information and inspiration that will result in better health, better homes, better children, better jobs, and more money in the bank.

"Sometimes," we said, "we get a letter that makes us think we are succeeding."

And we picked up these two letters from our desk and showed them to him. "You ought to publish those," said he. So we thought we would. THE EDITOR.

Peace Stocks

By ALBERT W. ATWOOD

TO the careful observer nothing is more amazing than the readiness with which small investors throw their money into cheap mining stocks and the shares of companies exploiting new inventions, processes, schemes, or devices, or a new and untried industry. Mining is always a gamble, except in the case of very large holding companies that own many different developed properties, and stocks in such companies are rarely the type that small investors favor. New industries in their early and chaotic stages, such as the motion-picture industry is now, have always been the graveyard of capital, and new inventions, schemes, and devices are the most risky forms of business.

Small investors turn to these channels, first, because of the lure of rare but possible large profits, and second, because shares in such companies are sold in small units. Of course, there is really no advantage in the share of small unit. One good share costing $200 is far better than twenty poor ones costing $10 each.

Purchase of this type of securities is all the more tragic because in every financial center, which means every large city, there are available a great variety of both sound and profitable investments in solid, basic industries of demonstrated and reasonably permanent value. These facts are pertinent now, when so many people are rushing into war stocks. Naturally, it is not easy to separate the war from the peace stocks.

War prosperity has been so widespread that nearly all lines of business have been favorably affected. But, aside from companies that have taken actual war orders, those most directly stimulated are steel, copper, zinc, chemical, oil, and sugar concerns.

Stocks in many of these, companies may prove highly desirable even after the war; but there is no denying that the present abnormal profits that they are able to earn are possible only because of the war.

The surest "peace" stocks are those concerned with stable, recognized, basic industries. Great and secure industries are those that are not necessarily old, but that, on the other hand, have not grown overnight.

Among the simon-pure peace stocks are those of banks and trust companies. Banks sometimes fail; but the proportion that fail is very small.

The immediate interest return on bank stocks is nearly always small, but in the long run it is very large. In New York City, with which I am most familiar, the banks and trust companies of the first class—those that have always borne a good, clean reputation—have weathered panic after panic and maintained their dividends. Their history is one long record of stock dividends, "rights," and "extras." The situation is essentially the same elsewhere.

Peace stocks are also to be found in the "public utility" field. The stronger companies engaged in selling electric light and power, electric traction, gas, and telephone and telegraph service are but little affected by war, if at all. Discrimination is needed in this field, as in any other; but there are hundreds if not thousands of safe bonds and attractive stocks, the latter often paying 6 and 7 per cent.

Other peace stocks are those of companies making agricultural implements, like the International Harvester Company. Still others are the shares of the fertilizer companies, of which several are large and well known. Tobacco stocks are essentially peace shares. There are many large, exceedingly prosperous, and well managed tobacco companies. Often they pay very large dividends.

The chain stores and mail-order houses are peace industries in every respect. The increase of such concerns is one of the striking tendencies of to-day in the merchandising field. But there are several relatively old and well established concerns in the field whose profits are still huge despite competition, and which pay large dividends. Such are the Woolworth Company, and Sears, Roebuck & Company.

Finally, there are hundreds of sound, well managed, well organized "industrials," companies not easily put into any general classification. I refer to those well known concerns, the reasonable permanency and profit-making capabilities of which no one doubts, because of the success and conservatism that have marked their careers. In this group it is invidious almost to pick out examples.

I have in mind companies of the type of the General Electric, American Radiator, American Car & Foundry, Pullman, Child's Restaurant, Swift & Company, Singer Sewing Machine, Borden's Milk, Otis Elevator, and New Jersey Zinc (before the war).

In every large city there are stocks known to be immensely valuable. Such were Eastman Kodak in Rochester, and Proctor & Gamble in Cincinnati, both now very high in price. Detroit is probably full of such stocks to-day.

Free Booklets You May Have for the Asking

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 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.

The conservative investor can safely purchase listed stocks and bonds on the partial-payment basis by investing a moderate amount monthly. This plan is described in a special letter issued by Wright, Slade & Harnickell, members of New York Stock Exchange, 71 Broadway, New York City. This circular sent on request.

Some very interesting literature regarding 6 per cent. farm mortgages on improved Montana farm land is being issued by Phelps-Eastman Co., Investment Bankers. McKnight Building, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Copy sent free of charge on request.

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.

"June Stock and Bond Investment Suggestions," a circular containing a diversified selection of securities at present available is issued by Merrill, Lynch & Co. members of New York Stock Exchange, 7 Wall Street, New York City. This circular and a list of high-grade $100 bonds suitable for the moderate investor sent on request.

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.

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."

The safety of the first-mortgage loans of Perkins & Company, of Lawrence, Kansas, has been fully established by more than forty years of successful business. Interest paid promptly each six months. Their saving certificates, yielding 6 per cent., are convenient for small investors. Write for circular No. 721.

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.

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