Enemies Within

DO you know what used to be weapons of torture for Russian children? The three quite useless letters in our alphabet, which are now exiled from their places by the Bolsheviki.

The first was the worst. We have many words that were spelled with [?] or with its twin E. But, although these two letters are alike in sound, in many words they were not interchangeable. The why of it is concealed in the darkness of the past.

At school old pedagogues with goggles on their noses told us that these letters sounded differently in olden times: but that was a poor consolation for students of the present day.

We had no rule in the grammar to guide us, and we simply were obliged to memorize ever so many words with [?] inside. I do not remember how many of these treacherous words I had to memorize; but, when I did it, the list seemed to be an enormous army of enemies. These wicked letters were hated by the children as much as our old government is hated by the Bolsheviki, and to abandon them was a precious Christmas present for them.

The Russian reforms in spelling are big reforms. I need not explain to Ango-Saxons, I know. You who are martyrs to your spelling understand me perfectly well. We have a joke to that effect in Russia: "The English spell something Washington and pronounce it Boston." And many of us poor foreigners who cherished the phantom hope of writing ENglish perfetly learned, with deep depression, that your spelling is as far from your pronunciation as Petrograd is from New York.

My first English teacher tried to console me for your "thoughs" and your "coughs" by saying: "Do not be so ashamed of your mistakes! Every Englishman has his individual spelling."

And of course that was very cheering.

The free Anglo-Saxon may be brave enough not to mind very mcuh his mistakes, which were called gently by my teacher "the individual spelling." But how many a heart was broken by this difficult spelling in our Russian schools! How many a career was cut short!

You know, we had a very involved system of education, with many marks, punishments, and prizes. And many tears were shed on account of these three useless letters in our alphabet. I remember the dark times when my little comrades were left without dinner and even beaten for these bloodthirsty barbarians.

The second of the enemy letters, [?] , was without sound.

We call it the "hard sign." It stands as a silent guard at the end of many words. It was such a miserable, short-bodied, inconspicuous letter! No wonder our scholars have often forgotten to put it in its place.

And how that silly dismissed nothingness had its revenge! Scholars have been punished for it as much as for a misplaced [?] .

The third, [?] was an aristocratic letter: it was put into very few words—only some first names and some old-fashioned religious words had it. It had its plebeian double, [?] , which sounds like it, and careless pupils were prone to mix them democratically together. And the insulted letter aristocrat had its revenge, too.

Poor children of Russia!

The propaganda from the stage has always been popular in Russia. And this alphabet reform has been dramatized.

About ten years ago, on a holiday for the children, they saw for the first time an amusing and picturesque comedy of the letters performed on the stage of the big municipal theater in Odessa. Thousands of school children crowded the teater, where the actors represented the letters of the Russian alphabet. And these three of which I write were tried, judged guilty, and publicly burned—to the wild joy of the audience.

It is characteristic of our old regime that this innocent comedy was prohibited after a few performances: it was considered "dangerous propaganda" against official education.

I believe that the hearts of young Anglo-Saxons will go out in compassion to the Russian letters' reform. The serious statesmen of other countries may go on saying:

Why do the Bosheviki occupy themselves with such a trifle?

But our scholars know very well,—the spelling reform was no trifle; it was a devil's power those three black insects had: [?] , [?] , and [?] .

This is the Place Where—

The boast of heraldry,
the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all
that wealth e'er gave,
Await alike the inevitable
hour;
The paths of glory
lead but to the grave.

ON a September evening in 1759 General James Wolfe, dropping down the St. lawrence with his flotilla to attack Montcalm before Quebec and give to England a new dominion, repeated those lines, and, turning to the officers with him, said:

"Gentlemen, I would rather be the author of that poem than the possessor of the glory of beating the French to-morrow."

"To-morrow," as every school-boy knows, he had beaten the French, and was dead in the moment of victory.

it was beneath this "yew tree's shade" in the graveyard at Stoke Poges, ENgland, that Thoams Gray composed the "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" nine years before General Wolfe recited the stanza from it. The man of action was only thirty-three years old that morning when his path of glory led to the grave, and the poet was but a year older when he wrote the poem that was to give him fame beyond the power of death or time to dim.

The Fine Rare Habit of Learning to Do Without

CURIOUS things come to light when men are dead and the lawyers are busy with their estates.

Some months ago, in New York, a bank president died. I have never seen him, but his name was familiar enough, and I supposed that of course he must have left a considerable fortune.

Apparently every one else was of the same opinion, incuding even the business associates who knew him best.

Imagine, then, their surprise when it was discovered that, instead of an estate, he had left debts of thousands of dollars.

Had he lost heavily in the market? No; apparently he never speculated at all. Foolish investments? No. Women and wine? No.

Incredible as it seemed, this man whose income was more than a hundred thousand dollars a year got rid of it all, not in gambling or dissipation, but in the every-day expenses of living.

He had come up through the various stages of bank employment to the presidency of a great institution; and at every point in his career his expenses were in excess of his income.

Even when the income crossed the hundred-thousand-dollar mark, it was still a few steps behind. Never for one moment had he been the master of his life. At a hundred thousand a year he was as much the slave of circumstance as any twelve-dollar-a-week clerk who expenses are fourteen dollars.

An extraordinary case, you exclaim. Yes— but extraordinary only in the size of the figures involved. In all other respects the gentleman was typical of a large percentage of his fellow countrymen.

A general, he was, in the unfortunate army of thsoe who take orders of their fears, and march day after day to the music of a piper whom they can not afford to pay.

What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage.

All of us are born into the world free: and immediately we begin to get ourselves into slavery to things.

We let the number of things that are necessary for our daily life multiply to such an extent that we have neither time nor money for the things that really count.

I stood the other night in a big store, looking around at the shelves. And it came over me with a sudden shock that, of all the hundreds of articles displayed on the shelves around me, hardly a signle one was considered a necessity by my grandfather.

None of them were included in the lives of the ancient Greeks, who gave birth to more great men than any similar period of history has been able to produce since.

Once a year at least I like to get down Thoreau's "Walden" and read it over again: and I pass on that good tonic to any of you who may not have discovered it.

Thoreau was a Harvard graduate who built a hut for himself on the shores of a little lake near COncord, Massachusetts, and lived in it for two years and two months.

For eight months of the period he kept careful financial records; and in that time his total expenses, including the cost of his house, were $61.00, of which he earned by raising vegetables and by occasional day labor more than half.

He threw worry out of the window; reduced his living expenses to a point where he could provide them with the labor of a very small part of his days; and so freed the remainder of his life for reading and writing and tramps through the woods—and useful thought.

We can not all do what Thoreau did; but, at least, the war is helping us to learn the lesson of his example.

It has set us to questioning of each element in our lives. Is this worth what I have been paying for it?

And to pondering on the important truth that no man is so independent as he who has learned to do without.

Bruce Barton, Editor.

Women and That Sort of Thing

By CYNICAL CHARLES

THE BIG BUSINESS OF WAR

By JAMES H. COLLINS

IF one little pamphlet published by the United States government could be put into the hands of every grocery-store strategist in the United States, it would do much to explain the war to patriots who occasionally become impatient.

War is an entirely personal and concrete matter to the Pumpkin Corners strategist. He reads the head-lines in the paper this morning, and wonders why Wilson doesn't fire Baker.

If he could see the Military Telephone Directory of Washington—a volume little known outside the capital—it would give him a vivid notion of the size and impersonality of modern war.

This book contains only telephone numbers of Army officers in Washington alone. Practically every man listed is the head of some office connected with supplies, ordnance, communication, traffic, medicine, law, strategy, tactics. There are about 3,500, and it would be difficult to crowd them and their assistants into the Woolworth or the Equitable building. About as many business telephones as one would find in a city of 100,000 people—say Salt Lake City.

And that is only the Washington end of the Army, which in the first year of war grew from about 210,000 officers and men to 1,650,000.

The Washington end of the Navy, with its increase from 80,000 to 350,000, has expanded in the same proportions. So have the civil departments. And there are new government activities brought by war, such as the Food Administration and the Emergency Fleet Corporation, all running up into organizations, officials, clerks, offices—and work.

The civil departments in Washington expanded about 20,000 workers in the first year of war, and about 10,000 were added to what might be called the "uncivil service"—Food Administration, Fuel Administration, Shipping Board, War Trade Board, and other war bureaus that do not come under the civil service rules.

What Hoover's 2,000 Employees Do

FOOD? Pumpkin Corners thinks only of Hoover, and is astounded to hear that he has a great emergency office building containing 2,000 employees.

"What on earth do they all do?" ask the hot-stove strategists.

"What on earth do they not do!" answers Washington. Hardly a day passes but some necessary food adjustment touches the grocery store in Pumpkin Corners itself, bringing an inquiry, a protest, the need for a decision. Multiply Pumpkin Corners by 100,000, and center all its food adjustments in one place, and you wonder that 2,000 people are able to take care of them.

For instance, Pumpkin Corners keeps bees. Bees eat sugar in winter, when honey is short. Last winter honey was short; so was sugar. Hoover rationed sugar, and Pumpkin Corners could not buy food for bees. There were protests, and the matter had to be investigated, and a decision made giving bees sugar to keep them alive. At the Pumpkin Corners end this all looks very simple. But what happens at the Washington end is illustrated in a Hoover story:

Late one night Howard Elliot and Hoover wound up a long conference. The railroad president sat back and sighed with relief.

"Decisions, decisions, decisions!" he said. "Hoover, when this war ends, I'll put on an old suit, go to the South Sea Islands, and loaf where I won't have to make another blamed decision."

"So will I," agreed Hoover. "But I am going to hire a man to decide what old suit to wear."

An Office Building Constructed in Seventeen Days

LAST May, two Army officers moved their desks into an old office building vacated by a government department, and started the Bureau of Supplies, Ordnance Department. To-day that bureau, which handles all the guns and hardware for the Army, has a big emergency building with several thousand officers and employees, and, on its orderly program for growth, will probably double in size during the year.

In the Navy the corresponding Bureau of Supplies and Accounts, under Admiral "Sammy" McGowan, had twenty-eight people when war was declared, and now has nearly 1,000. To house new employees as they were added, several emergency buildings have been erected—one of them, a complete office structure for 200 people, built in seventeen days.

In one of Washington's tree-lined streets a year ago there was an old hotel. The government commandeered it for a new war bureau which a few weeks before had started with a dozen workers. By the time this hotel was emptied it was too small, and remnants of workers crowded into surrounding residences. Then they built an emergency office structure, and the bureau moved again, and found that too small, leaving a remnant of workers in the old hotel. Presently the old hotel was full once more, and another emergency building needed. When they moved into that, the hotel was converted into lodgings for clerks.

Along the Mall they have been clearing space for emergency office buildings to house department overflow and special war administrations. Seventy-five-year-old trees are cut down, and great structures of lumber, wall-board, roofing-paper, and glass are thrown together in a matter of days, with hundreds of thousands of feet of office space, and a great central heating and lighting plant to serve them. Even while the carpenters hammer and saw, the departments are growing. As each new structure is ready, the moving-vans roll up, like army transports, unloading desks, typewriters, files, file cabinets, and adding-machines, and the battalions of clerks tramp in and go to work.

Washington Learning to Move Fast

THE Shipping Board and Emergency Fleet Corporation at one time had 2,500 workers scattered through twenty-one buildings in Washington. The War Risk Insurance Bureau found emergency quarters in a natural history museum, a dance-hall, a lodge-room, and a hospital, with a commandeered garage to repair its tabulating equipment. Minor activities like those of the War Trade Board and Alien Property Custodian have started with a routine proclamation and appointment by the President, and before any one in Washington realized what was going on there were 500 or 1,000 clerks at work. In its clerical activities, and for spreading information about the war through manuals, text-books, reports, and pamphlets, the government will use this year about one pound of paper for every man, woman, and child in the United States—100,000,000 pounds, or four times the normal requirements.

"Nothing seems to stay put in Washington nowadays!" complained a personnel officer the other day. She is a woman charged with keeping track of new employees hired, old ones resigned or transferred, and shiftings from one section of a government department to another. Changes are made so fast and newcomers are so many that her card system can barely keep track of them.

An old army staff officer put it even more forcibly.

"Everything was all right here in the War Department until this damned war came along!" he protested, when, in one day, his bureau was criticized by the Senate and he got orders to move his office again.

Business men have gone to Washington and spent several days searching for the right official, and been referred from one bureau to another. Not long ago the writer, who has been in Washington for nearly a year, had to carry some papers to a new Army officer. They could not be delivered by boy because the information bureau where this officer works did not yet have him listed.

Go to Washington and fail to connect with the right bureau, and you will say all the unkind things that many others have said about lost motion—delay—apparent inefficiency. But volunteer to work in one of the war bureaus, see how

Concluded on page 21

THOSE BLUE DEVILS OF FRANCE

THAT invaluable military asset which we call "morale" needs constant cultivating: and the French are past masters in its cultivation. Even the salute is not too small a thing to engage the attention of the commanding officer.

The following extraordinary order, issued by the general commanding the Chasseurs Alpins—the famous "blue devils"—came into the hands of an American officer in France, and by him was sent to us:

A Soldier's Feeling About the Y. M. C. A.

By CAPTAIN A. P. CORCORAN

IF I were a psychologist I could tell you more fully what they perform. Being only a soldier, I must confine myself to the creature comforts—to the hot coffee, the kind word, the concert, the ready hand, the hundred and one trifles that mean so little in normal life but so much when one is living in the midst of death.

There was a time when the Y. M. C. A. needed defenders at the front—though never among the actual fighters. People doubted its fitness on the field of battle. But that time is gone for good. The Y. M. C. A. has finally won its spurs, won them so completely and efficiently that no campaign is now planned without it.

When you speak of the Y. M. C. A. one is apt immediately to imagine a picture of the now famous "hut" behind the line, of the long room with its crowded counter at one end and its concert stage and piano at the other end. Let me dispel this illusion once for all.

Always Moving Toward the Front

WHEN I went first to the front, the Y. M. C. A. was indeed a refuge where one could always be sure of safety from the range of guns. But the Y. M. C. A. worker, being a discerning sort of person, soon discovered that the nearer the fighting, the greater the need of his services. And, being not only earnest but determined, he decided to advance his "hut." Slowly but surely, he pushed himself forward, until now he is practically on the very line.

When the casualties are so heavy that the ambulances can not carry them and stretcher-bearers succumb beneath their loads, when there are some sixty thousand in six days, as we had at Loos, then many men must shift for themselves. If you can walk, then walk you must—though your arm is half shot off or your head bashed in and you are faint from loss of blood. A special track, marked out before the advance begins, tells you the road that you are to take. Many a man dropped in the old days, and lay unaided until a comrade picked him up. Which gave the Red Triangle an idea.

"Why can't we," said the workers, "open huts along these tracks and look after these men?"

It was the Canadians who first tried it out.

"Well, if they can do it, why not the whole British Army?" argued the High Command.

And so the Y. M. C. A. was admitted to the councils of the military mighty. When a push is planned, it is assigned its proper place. At every point of the line, whether it stretches for five miles or fifty, a hut is erected at stated points along the track.

It gives drink to the thirsty, food to the hungry, strength to the weary, and cheer to the downcast. It charges nothing—not a single sou. But what a toll of toil it exacts from its workers! What sights they see! What endurance they display!

They tell a story of one soldier—a "walking case"—whose face was so bashed in that barely a mouth remained. He staggered to the station, a horrible apparition. But a Y. M. C. A. man met him. He poured a drink into that mouth, and then thrust a cigarette between the lips.

The man, speechless with pain and with gratitude, could not express what such service means, but he put his

hand in his pocket and drew out what was in it—a few francs and some English pennies. The worker had to take it: it was his way of giving thanks—just his mite toward the cost of such comfort to another. And a heavy cost it is—thousands of dollars for a few days' work. Chocolate and coffee are precious things in war times.

The Chocolate Was Still Hot

BUT the Red Triangle man is not always satisfied with his own service. He wants to do more, if he can. There was one hut to which a stretcher-bearer who had been working incessantly for days stumbled, absolutely spent with fatigue. Like a log he dropped on the floor, unable to move hand or foot further. And stretcher-bearers were sadly needed at the time—it was at Messines. A worker tended him, and then set himself to think.

Any one, he argued, could take his place in the hut. The men could fend for themselves, if necessary. So off he set, in the stretcher-bearer's place, out in the midst of the battle. He got hurt, but he had done his duty as he saw it.

But he might have got hurt had he stayed where he was. There was one hut which one morning engaged an enemy aviator's eye. He dropped a bomb on it which removed the concert-hall. But the counter was untouched, so the work went on. In the evening came another bomb which removed that. Next morning showed some debris to mark the scene of former activities. But by evening another erection had risen on the ruins. To be sure, it consisted only of some loose timber and corrugated iron, but it served the purpose. The chocolate was hot.

Stand in one of those huts and watch the men as they come in, caked with mud or blood, dead beat, from the trenches.

"Cup of corfey, please." They are very quiet—too tired to talk.

They drink it, eat a sandwich, sit down a while, perhaps play a game. Or some one starts the piano going. Or there is a movie in the back room. Half past eight—lights out. See them as they file to billets. Their shoulders no longer droop. Their eyes are no longer heavy. Their lips are no longer silent. They are laughing or humming.

But the Red Triangle is not confined to the trenches. Like the engineers, its motto ought to be Ubique. For it is ubiquitous, just like the need for it. Suppose the men are going home, wounded or on leave. Their train stops at a station—they've had no hot food for many hours, and no prospect of it for many more to come.

"This way to the hut!" sings out a voice along the platform.

See them tumble from their seats and make a rush!

"Forty dinners, please, Miss. We've only fifteen minutes!"

"Those are the orders they issue, and those are the orders that are filled.

But suppose they can't tumble from their seats. "Then in comes the food. And not only food, but cigarettes, and post-cards to write home, and pens to write them with—and hands to write them if the soldier's are out of commission. No, there is nothing these Y. M. C. A. workers neglect. And it allows no distinction of race or creed. Common humanity is its key note.

Don't Go to the North Pole: Join the Navy

THIS vessel, cloaked in solid ice from stem to stern, looks as if it must have been photographed "farthest north." It is, however, merely an American warship voyaging across the ocean last winter. Even the big guns are chocked with ice. One of the trying jobs of the seamen is to clear the decks of the frozen spray that makes every step dangerous and every rope a stiff rod.

Why the British Line Holds

IN the moments of greatest stress it becomes evident that the fight on the western front is really one of mass discipline against the strength of individual initiative. The Germans, moving forward in great waves, meet the resistance of men who have in civil life learned to think for themselves.

Who can believe that any mass of men can break through a line that is held by men like these whose deeds are recorded in the London Times?

On the Hike

By PRIVATE CHARLES DIVINE

A STRANGE road, an open road, by hedges or by fills,
A sunlit wave of gleaming guns that climbs the rolling hills;
The unknown windings, sudden turnings, houses shining white
"I like 'em all," says Private Pease; "it helps the appetite.
"Forward!" says the Major, a-riding on his horse.
"March!" says the Major, who doesn't walk, of course.
The faded, dusty leggins flashing white across the ground,
In even rows the column goes; there's scarcely any sound
Except the tramp, tramp, tramp of feet upon the dust,
The road that leads where censors' scissors never gather rust.
"Its strange," says Private Pease, the "while his hob-nailed gunboats thump, I joined the standing army, but Pm always on the jump."
Unhook your sling, and swing your rifle up against your back,
And, marching at the route step, lads, we all can take a whack
At singing of the songs we've heard and some we never knew,
But keep your gun from worrying the fellow back of you.
"Battalion, halt!" the Major says. "Fall out now, men, and rest."
"And that command," says Private Pease, "I executed the best."

Written from a French Hospital

AS might be expected, the typical American boy finds something to laugh about even in the grim experience of being caught in a German barrage. Corporal J. H. Buckley, of a United States field artillery battery, was wounded recently by a piece of shell that hit him in the back. Writing from the hospital to his brother in New York, he says:

'I was on guard at 5:30 A. M., and all of a sudden the Dutch started a barrage. I flopped in a small ditch, and immediately after a shell, roaring like the Twentieth Century Limited, fell flat in the trench about one foot from my feet. Just a small piece hit me. I was lying down at the time, thank God, or the game would have been over.

"They must have thrown a hundred within fifty yards of me. Lasted thirty minutes. I thought of everything I had done, from robbing birds' nests up. Couldn't move an inch because they were everywhere. Then gas shells came over, and I put on my mask. Finally it stopped. The wound didn't hurt a bit and wasn't deep. We were fired on at least twenty-five times. The Colonel heard I was hit, and came up and saw the place it hit and where I was lying at the time. He almost turned green.

"Well, this is in the nature of an explanation if any one writes it home first. Don't tell Mom, because the ———'s will tell her I was running when I was clouted."

"Wounded in the Left Hand"

VERY early in the war surgeons behind the lines became familiar with certain injuries that were not inflicted by the enemy. Men tired out by the strain of fighting, and especially new soldiers, overtaken by homesickness and fear, voluntarily cut themselves, poison themselves, or shoot themselves in the left hand—anything to get away from the trenches a while and back into a clean bed in a hospital.

Professor Attilio Ascarelli, of the medical corps of the Italian Army, has published in Rome his observations on this subject, and they are quoted in the New York World. These injuries tend to become epidemic, he finds. A man will shoot himself in the left hand; his comrades see him taken back to ease and comfort: and in that sector other injuries of the same sort will follow, until there have been so many that the men know the fraud will be discovered. Then the injuries cease as promptly as they began.

More frequent than wounds from shooting are the cases of inflammation caused by the injection of such substances as petroleum, benzine, or chloride of lime into the calf, knee, or heel. Swelling produced by tight bandaging is also common. The most interesting fact noted by Professor Ascarelli is that most of the cases of self-mutilation occur among men who have recently been home on leave.

In other words, the lesson of this as of other phenomena of the war is plain—that morale is a condition of the army for whose maintenance the folks back home are chiefly responsible.

It is the soldiers who come out of discouraged homes who are first to become discouraged.

With Our Mules in France

Will Gas Win the War?

"WE have tried out every agency that war can devise against the enemy," writes a soldier in France whose letter is quoted by David Lawrence in the New York Evening Post, "and we know now that we have one weapon that will do the business. That weapon is gas."

Seventy-five per cent of the time the wind in France is favorable to the Allies, says this soldier: and with its help a cloud of gas can be blown over the Germans for a distance of from ten to fifteen miles back of the lines. Moreover, gas is not expensive to manufacture or difficult to transport. America can make quantities of it, once her factories are started going.

That they have been started, and that the output of gas will presently be very large, Mr. Lawrence is in a position to state; though the details are military secrets, of course. He finds that the soldier whose letter he quotes is by no means alone in his opinion that gas will do the business.

ALL IN THE DAY'S WORK FOR MISS RANKIN

By FREDA KIRCHWEY

"SHE never has a moment's privacy except when she's asleep." Her secretary spoke with a mixture of despair and resignation in her voice.

President Wilson may play golf in the morning and go to the theater in the evening, Mr. Hoover may read detective stories. But Jeannette Rankin, Representative-at-large from Montana, has been to the theater only twice this year, and she never has time even to walk to her office.

Few people realize what it means to be the only woman in Congress.

Other members have one secretary or a stenographer apiece. Representative Rankin has a regular office force of six, working at high pressure all day and often until late in the evening.

Other members have one office apiece. Only chairmen of committees have an extra one for committee work. Miss Rankin has two. The superintendent of the House Office Building did not even need to be asked. When he saw the hopeless congestion of work and traffic in the room allotted to her he immediately turned over the office next door.

Ordinarily each member is given two large filing cabinets to last him for his two years' term. When Miss Rankin's private secretary, Belle Fligelman, arrived in Washington to make ready for her chief, she looked dubiously at the two cabinets.

"We shall need more than that," she said.

The superintendent laughed. "How long do you think you're going to be here?" he asked. "Everybody else gets along all right with two. They'll last you for years."

There was no provision for more, so Miss Fligelman held her peace. Six months after the session started, both cabinets were bursting. The contents had to be filed in packing-boxes, and Miss Rankin's secretaries started over again.

Pink-Tea Politics?

BUT it isn't only the office force that works.

"Why is it," I asked, "that Miss Rankin has no time to herself? I've never noticed that congressmen in general are an overworked class."

Miss Fligelman looked thoughtful. "I think," she said, "that I'll give you a sample day. Then you'll understand why it is."

I took out paper and pencil and wrote it down as she gave it, and I offer it free to those who think women are going to turn politics into a pink tea.

On the day in question Miss Rankin had to make some calls before she could get to her office. She went first to the Department of the Interior to see the Commissioner of Public Lands. Miss Rankin is a member of the House Committee on Public Lands, and some very important homesteading cases are now before her.

She called on the Department of Agriculture to inquire about seed grain for Montana to make up for the lack caused by the droughts of last summer.

She reached her office at ten o'clock.

The room in which Miss Rankin has her desk is dominated by an immense American flag—the very one that floated over the Capitol on the day that the House of Representatives passed the Federal Suffrage Amendment. It is a cherished trophy.

Miss Rankin waded through constituents and congressmen and reporters and women to the semi-seclusion of her desk. Here, behind a screen, she received her callers.

A fellow member wanted to find out what she was doing about soldiers from her State. A woman in the government employ brought a complaint about her job: she wasn't getting a square deal, and would Miss Rankin please fix it? A woman from somewhere in New England poured out her personal tragedy, and waited confidently for help and counsel. Two suffragists came for advice about the Senate and the Federal Amendment. A society woman wanted Miss Rankin to speak at a meeting in her house. Some soldier boys from her home town dropped in to say howdy.

Each caller was greeted with unfailing warmth; each story heard with genuine interest.

All the women in the country seem to consider themselves Miss Rankin's constituents. They come from every State and lay their problems, their plans, and their complaints at her feet. Often her secretaries try to steer them to their own congressmen. To a woman, they refuse to go. "What's the use?" one of them said, the other day. "They don't listen to us. We haven't the vote. They don't feel they have to do what we want, but only what the people want who sent them here."

When the callers were disposed of, Miss Rankin turned to her mail. All day several secretaries are busy reading, sorting, and answering the flood of correspondence that comes from all corners of the country and all classes of people. She glanced through the most important of them, signed letters, and nibbled a sandwich as she worked, for to-day there was no time for regular luncheon.

Then, before she could sign the last letter and swallow the last mouthful, the bell rang clamorously for roll-call, and Miss Rankin walked over to the Capitol to take her place on the floor of the House.

She Never Takes an Afternoon Off

COMMONLY the House of Representatives in action resembles the worst play of the season on the night that the managers decide to call it off. Out of four hundred members, from forty or sixty lounge in and sit around in hopelessly dreary attitudes while the session drones on. Among those scattered members Miss Rankin forms the only constant factor. They come or stay away. They sit around or stroll out into committee rooms for a rest and a smoke. Miss Rankin is always there. There is no place for her to go and rest, and if there were she could not take advantage of it. For the eyes of the gallery and the press are always on her. Even if she is called off the floor to talk with a reporter or a constituent, the gallery, seeing her vanish, whispers, "Not 'tending to her business!" Every visitor searches the floor for the one congresswoman, and, if she is missing, goes away with a damaged idea of women in politics. So the Lady from Montana never has an afternoon off.

An amusing incident occurred when she made her first speech. She was not scheduled. The seats were almost empty. From those present came the usual murmur of talk. Suddenly Miss Rankin asked for the floor. A hush fell over the room. She spoke quietly, but the news of her speech spread somehow to the committee rooms. Then from every door came a flood of congressmen, tiptoeing in, sneaking back to their seats, dozens of them, till the room was filled with men, interested for once, straining to hear.

So, as usual, on our sample day, from twelve until five Miss Rankin followed closely the course of business in the House. It is tiring work; if you doubt it, ask any of the congressmen having a smoke outside. At five she went back to her office, signed some more letters, eluded a few visitors, and left. She drove her own car borne to the apartment where she lives with her mother and sister and two small nieces.

But the day's work was not yet done. In the evening she must attend a meeting of the Republican caucus. These meetings come far too often to please the younger niece. The other day she asked earnestly: "Aunt Jeannette, what are those old Republican carcasses?"

To-morrow night she must make a speech, and the next night will be devoted to callers who missed her in the morning. So it goes.

"Of course," said Miss Fligelman, "that is only one day. There are a dozen other things that happen on other days. She has different departments to call upon, important delegations to meet, meetings of the Public Lands Committee."

"Doesn't she ever have any recreation?" I demanded. "Even prisoners and Presidents have some recreation."

"Oh, yes," Miss Fligelman hastened to reassure me. "Every Sunday evening she is at home to her friends. She usually has a few people there for supper, and then others drop in sociably afterward."

I thought of comfortable evenings in front of an open fireplace, long Sunday tramps in the country, occasional trips to the theater,—and decided not to run for Congress.

A Point on Which Miss Rankin Agrees with Anti-Suffragists

BUT Miss Rankin would hate to think she discouraged any woman from entering public life. She is all for it, for others as well as herself.

I walked with her down the long tunnel that leads from the House Office Building to the Capitol. The gong had sounded for roll-call, but very few congressmen were going our way. Miss Rankin said things to confirm some of the worst fears of the anti-suffragists. "If women vote, they'll want to go into politics," they used to say. Miss Rankin says the same thing; but the difference is that she is glad of it.

"A curious change is coming over the women of this country," she says, "especially the young ones. It was brought home to me the other day by a question one of the other members asked me.

"'Have you always intended and planned to go to Congress?' he said, and told me how, even in school, he had made speeches and pretended he was a representative or a senator.

"'No,' I answered; 'I never thought of such a thing. It couldn't have occurred to me.'

"Why should it? At that time such a thing was outside the range of possibility.

But now, under the influence of suffrage, and with a woman actually in Congress, girls are changing their attitude of indifference toward public life. I have received dozens of letters from young women asking how they can get to Congress too. Some of them are naive and amusing, and some of them are serious inquiries about the best training for public life. But all of them are significant of the change that is taking place in women's minds. Politics is no longer a thing apart."

"And what do you tell these young politicians?"

Miss Rankin spoke slowly and earnestly. "I believe in training," she said, "for every kind of serious work. Women must train themselves for politics as thoroughly as if they were going to be doctors. But they musn't get their training only in the city ward—or 'work up through the organization' in the bad, old-fashioned way. Social work is a good training course for public life, and the suffrage fight has been a hard school in which hundreds of women have learned all there is to know about politics. Girls who want to make this their career should study social conditions and social needs; they should study government and constitutional law; they should watch legislatures at work."

"Do you advise women to go into politics as a career?"

"Why not?" Miss Rankin spoke eagerly. "Why not, as well as newspaper work, or motherhood, or any other career?"

This Monument Became an Insult

SOME folks just naturally "wake up at the right time, while others need an alarm-clock.

A sermon on German atrocities by a preacher who had seen mute evidence of ten thousand of them was the alarm-clock that woke up the citizens of Davenport, Iowa, to the fact that America is at war with the Huns.

This preacher's sermon was just one of hundreds of alarm-clocks that the government set off in the ears of a half awake country a few months ago.

Somehow or other, years ago Davenport stood for the Deutscher Kampgenossen Verein putting up this monument, which, while pretending to symbolize America's protection over her German-American citizens, in reality brags in the wreath lettering of the war of 1870-71, in which Germany crushed France.

After we declared war on Germany in 1917, neighboring cities began to ask Davenport why it kept the statue—unveiled while a letter from the Kaiser was being read—in Washington Square. Davenport laughed good-naturedly at the queries.

Then came the alarm-clock sermon. It pictured the truth about German frightfulness in Belgium so clearly that all Davenport saw it. The next night something happened, and the following morning the statue was found twisted partly off its base and the German exultation over France chiseled off.

The Mayor, a German, bowed to public opinion, and announced that the offending shaft would be removed. Davenport plans to saw it into tombstones to commemorate the death of Prussian ideas as they are one by one wiped out of the world.

Such is the power of the alarm-clock.

BETWEEN DECKS

By OCTAVUS ROY COHEN and ERIC LEVISON

Illustrations by Anton Otto Fischer

A SCOWLING coxswain emerged from the forward turret of the U. S. S. Springfield, dropped to the deck, and started toward the forward hatch, muttering beneath his breath.

Old Sails, the elongated and grizzled sailmaker's mate, who had service stripes half way up the sleeve of his blue jumper, turned paternally to the rookie.

"Happy-lookin' guy, ain't he?"

The rookie agreed readily. Being a rookie, he was much given to agreeing with the oracle of the Springfield.

"A swell guy Gregson ain't!" observed Old Sails positively. "He's been bawled out again, sure. Lookit 'im, sulkin' like a six-year-old. If he'd stay off the booze ashore, maybe he'd lose some o' that nervousness o' his."

Old Sails broke off suddenly, and his eyes popped from their sockets.

"See that guy comin' up the gangway? Holy mackerel! Watch 'im."

The rookie needed no second bidding. He turned his eyes toward the gangway, and saw coming aboard a huge hulk of a man—a man with mildly inquiring blue eyes and a babyish-pink skin, signs of placidity that were given the lie by the barrel chest, the tremendous apelike arms, and the aggressively rolling stride.

The rookie saw him step on the deck of the Springfield and make his way forward. And then he saw something else. He saw Ben Gregson stare at the new-comer as if gazing at an apparition. He saw the scowl on Gregson's face supplanted by a look akin to terror. He saw Gregson scramble to his feet and scuttle precipitately down the hatch. And, shifting his interested stare back to the newcomer, he saw the stranger's eyes following Ben Gregson, and in them something of more than casual interest.

Old Sails rolled across the deck to meet the man. "George Dane!" he cried, extending his hand; and then, catching sight of the new rating badge on the man's sleeve: "An' a first-class jimmy-legs, eh?"

Dane smiled a slow, quiet smile, and pumped Old Sails' hand earnestly.

"Thought I'd find you hangin' aroun' doin' nothin', Sails. That's been your specialty a long time, eh?"

"G'wan with you, Dane. What you doin' aboard?"

"Transferred from the Texas," came the quiet answer.

The big man swung his heavy bundle up lightly from the deck. "I'll be goin' below, Sails. See you later." And he disappeared down the hatch, leaving Old Sails to stare after him wonderingly.

"That's George Dane," volunteered Old Sails, and the rookie nodded.

"And the other man's Gregson. Holy sufferin' snakes!" And Old Sails whistled.

"Meaning?" inquired the rookie.

"Meaning that when George Dane starts anything he finishes it," continued Sails. "An' it's plain as the nose on the face of a parrot that he's started something."

"Regarding Gregson, you mean?"

"Of course; who else? But—oh, you don't know."

The rookie agreed that he did not.

"Well, it's about Dane's wife."

The rookie edged closer. "Yeh?"

"She's engaged to marry Gregson."

"She—whadaya mean? Engaged to marry Gregson? How c'n Dane's wife—"

"She ain't Dane's wife."

"But you said just—"

"She was Dane's wife. She got a Nevada divorce about four months ago. An' now she's engaged to marry Gregson, and Dane's been transferred from the Texas. Rookie, there's somethin' gonna bust loose on this craft, mark me, and I'm one man that's glad he ain't Ben Gregson."

"There's a yarn to it?" the rookie questioned wheedlingly.

"It's the same old stuff about a female woman with lots o' good looks but not too heavy a cargo o' brains. I know Clara—Clara Gatlin was her name before she hitched up with George Dane—and her old man. An' I knew 'em a long time when I was on the receivin' ship in the Charleston yard.

"The old man ran a canteen for the boys just outside o' the navy-yard limits: a good, square place where the boys' credits was pretty good. An' I watched Clara grow an' fill out from a lanky kid into a fine-looking woman.

"DANE had always been skirt-shy, 's, long 's I knew him. He was the best that dropped into the Gatlin canteen—there ain't no two ways about that. An' bein' the best, Clara fell f'r him. Dane ain't so old; he's not more'n thirty-five right now. He just seems old. It's a habit he's got, which he can't help.

"Anyway, Clara fell for him, and he—Well, sir, some day, when you get older and know a little more about things than nothin' at all, you'll understand, maybe, what happens inside a man like George when he finds the right one.

"At that time Big George was gettin' his forty-four a month, with C. S. C. and good-conduct pay and commutation of rations hitched on, an' he had a little place just outside the navy-yard. It was one of them places what the guy who wrote 'Home Sweet Home' had in mind when he pulled that be-it-ever-so-humble line. It was that—humble—but it was home! An' that's where he took Clara.

"The enlisted men's affairs in Charleston is pretty good things—specially those the C. P. O.'s get up, an' sometimes Clara'd beg George to take her. He'd go when she did it, but he didn't seem to like it none, an' after a while she laid off askin' him to take her. But makin' them sort o' little sacrifices made her sore at him. Funny how a woman is built that-a-way.

"Things drifted along that way nearly a year, an' Clara gettin' more an' more discontented every week. I think maybe if he'd batted her over the head once or twice, or swore at her or somethin', she'd 'a' been more content.

"Which is when Ben Gregson butted in.

"The Springfield had just been commissioned; an' Charleston was her home port. She comes down there, and in the natural course o' events Gregson meets Clara; an', as you know for yourself, Gregson ain't hard to look at, exactly.

"Furthermore, he'd had a little schoolin' before he shipped in the outfit, an' he was a great one to show it off. The first time he and Clara got together an' he saw she was interested in his bein' different from the most of the crowd and mainly different from Dane—well, it was all off.

"Gregson's one of them kind o' birds with a screw loose. He's got two o' the three weaknesses, drink and women, and he don't need to sing none to hold his rate. The first he's gotta drink and the second he's gotta make love to. If it's another man's wife—why, so much more fun. The worst of it is, she took him seriously. Starvin' for understandin', she thought she was, an' she got so blamed serious that after a while Greg got serious too. You know how it is."

The rookie nodded sagely to show that he did know.

"Gregson's everything Dane ain't: he's quick-witted; likes to dance an' have a general good time; an' he's got some swell manners with women which always makes a hit with 'em. I've overheard him sayin' sweet things to 'em—an' I know he worked overtime with Clara,

---

which is another place where Dane was left out in the cold. He could as soon have paid a compliment to a woman as he could have chewed the capstan offen the Texas. An', foolish or not, rookie, women like compliments.

"IT didn't take long before the whole yard was buzzin' with the story. Some of us were all for puttin' a stop to it ourselves; for we knew what an empty-headed kid Clara was, an' we knew Dane was too much in love to think there was anything wrong with his wife.

"But it didn't take us overlong to make out that, come what might, George Dane had lost out with his own wife. He just wasn't the kind o' man Clara thought she wanted. I 'member her tellin' me once, plaintive-like, that George didn't have no more romance than a fiddler-crab. That's the kind she was: always wantin' some one to tell her that she stood queen-high. An' Dane didn't. He might 'a' looked it, but talk—he simply couldn't. If he could have, I'm one who's bettin' she'd 'a' fell in love with him all over ag'in; but he didn't—an', what's important, Ben Gregson did.

"Of course it couldn't go on forever right under Dane's nose without him gettin' wise—because, believe me, rookie, that man ain't nobody's fool. An' one day (I was still on the Texas) he comes aboard with all his dunnage, an' tells me sorta quiet that he's been transferred aboard by his own request. Just about that time Clara disappears, an' just a few months ago the News and Courier carries a little notice from Reno that Mrs. Clara Gatlin Dane has been granted an absolute divorce. She shows up at her old man's place again, an' in a few days her engagement to Gregson is announced.

"It was about then that I was transferred to the Springfield, so I didn't have a chance to watch Dane. I'm kinder glad of it, too, because I hate to see a big, strong man like him walkin' around lookin' like somebody had swatted him with a black-jack."

The rookie stretched his legs and relaxed.

"An' that's the way things stand right now, rookie. Only—well, Gregson ain't reformed none since he became engaged to Clara. He's a booze-fighter proper ashore, and it shows aboard ship.

"Which brings me back wonderin' what Gregson thinks o' Dane's bein' aboard here. I'm tellin' you, rookie, that Dane ain't the kind o' man to get himself transferred to Gregson's ship unless he means business. An' whatever he's set out to do he's gonna do. I know it, an' he knows it, and, best of all, Gregson knows it. An' Gregson is scared. Not that I blame him; I'd be scared too if I thought George Dane was after me." Old Sails paused. "How 'bout some makin's, rookie?"

He took the proffered sack, rolled a cigarette, and clambered stiffly to his feet.

"Don't forget, rookie," he flung over his shoulder, as he moved off, "I ain't told you nothin'!"

"No," said the rookie; "you ain't told me a thing. An' I won't forget what you told me, neither."

And there the rookie sat, turning the story over in his mind, until the blare of the bugle announced the midday meal, and sent all hands scurrying below. Nor did the rookie fail to notice the very curious gazes of other men fixed on the scowling Gregson, who sat where he could not fail to see each man who came down the amidships hatch in answer to the mess call.

And then the electrical murmur spread:

"Here he comes!"

The rookie turned his eyes where all others were focused.

Dane descended the ladder slowly, to all appearances utterly unconscious of the battery of eyes trained on him. The rookie saw Gregson flush hotly and shift nervously on his bench. And then Dane did the unexpected. He deliberately walked across to the table at which Gregson sat. Men held their breath as they watched. Gregson sat tense.

Near the man, Dane smiled—smiled in a fashion that no one, from the adolescent rookie to Old Sails, could translate.

"Howdy, Greg?" he said calmly, and passed on.

Gregson ate silently and swiftly. The meal over, he hurried below, where, in the ditty-box compartment, he sat on the deck, drew a ditty-box between his outstretched legs by way of a table, and wrote to Dane's former wife:

I guess you know that George has been transferred aboard here, and it's pretty easy to guess he's after me. But if he thinks he can hound me into beating it, he's got another one coming; and I'm a little too valuable in the turret for him to get away with any rough stuff. Of course, him being a jimmy-legs, he can rub it in a little, but I'll get him for all he gets me. He's up against a man this time. But I don't like the fool way he has of looking at a fellow. And what did he mean by speaking to me at mess like I was his best friend?

IT was Clarkson, the chief yeoman, who volunteered to talk of Gregson to Dane; and Clarkson knew a great deal of what transpired aboard the Springfield, for he was the Captain's writer, and all matters pertaining to the ship and its personnel came to his knowledge sooner or later. He met Dane thoughtfully pacing the deck forward, and fell into step beside him.

"If there's anything I can do, Dane—" he started awkwardly.

But the big man shook his head in the slow, rather bovine fashion peculiar to him, and merely said:

"Huh? No, thanks, Clarkson."

Clarkson subsided temporarily, only to break out with:

"Goin' to make a try for turret one?"

"Number one? Vacancy in there? This close to the range?"

"They're ready to drop one of the hoist-men."

"Who?"

"Gregson—too much booze."

He glanced covertly at Dane, but the big man remained unmoved.

"Gregson? So? You don't tell me!"

AND that was all the chief yeoman could get from Dane, although he wondered a bit when, later in the afternoon, he saw the big fellow strolling slowly about turret number one, gazing affectionately at the black muzzles of the protruding guns. The huge block letter "E," which signified excellence in marksmanship, and which had decorated the turret's side in days gone by, had been painted over. Dane shook his head sadly. He well knew what the feelings of the gun crew had been when this sign manual of superiority had been shorn from them.

Dane leaned pensively against the turret wall, and stared out over the water.

"Well, well—and how is the old-timer making it?"

Dane turned to look into the keen eyes of Lieutenant Kern, commander of turret number one. He knew Kern; for under the keen eyes of the young lieutenant Dane had more than once spun home the plug hard on the heels of the last bag of powder, to the muttered "Well done, Dane," from the lieutenant.

It was obvious that the thoughts of the two men should he directed into the same channel, and the lieutenant nodded briefly and significantly to the blank space on the turret wall—the place where the "E" had been.

"Lost it last year, Dane." Then, with the optimism of all turret officers: "But we've got it cinched for to-morrow."

Dane smiled in a rather embarrassed fashion.

"Glad to hear it, Mr. Kern."

Kern eyed the man before him speculatively. The story concerning the phlegmatic Dane, the volatile Ben Gregson, and the wife of the former had, naturally, penetrated the exclusive officers' quarters aft. Lieutenant Kern was but human.

"How'd you like to be on the hoist of number one's left gun?"

Dane fidgeted. "I'm a plugman, Mr. Kern, and I—"

"We need a reliable man, Dane."

"That so, sir? The fellow you've got—"

"Nervous. Drink, probably, judging from his record. No use beating about the bush: it's Gregson."

"Yes, sir; I knew it was Gregson."

The big man looked away suddenly.

"How'd you like to have his place?"

Dane faced his superior calmly, his heavy face inscrutable.

"I'll take commands, sir; but I've had no practice this year. And, as I've said, sir, I'm a plugman."

The lieutenant stared at the hulking figure a second, then whirled about.

"All right, Dane. Glad to have you aboard again."

And he strode aft, where, a few minutes later, he confided to a fellow officer cryptically: "I'd guess that George Dane is either a cow or a devil. And Gregson stays in the turret. I can't take chances at this late stage."

LATER in the afternoon, while Gregson was rereading a letter from his fiancee, Lieutenant Kern found him.

Gregson sprang upright and saluted smartly. Kern came directly to the subject in hand:

"Think you've got over your nervousness of this morning, Gregson? You'll be able to do all right to-morrow?"

"I—I think so, sir."

"You need sleep," continued the lieutenant. "Sleep to-night in the six-bell compartment. That'll help considerably; and, remember, I'm counting on you to make good on the range."

As he walked away Gregson grinned quietly.

"Score one for Ben Gregson," he muttered. "If Dane counted on getting my place—he missed clean."

SUNSET found the U. S. S. Springfield, 8 stacks belching smoke, plowing her way through the Atlantic, her crew gripped in the tenseness that precedes the day for target practice. Gregson walked stiffly aft, and stopped before Lieutenant Kern, who stood leaning idly against the life-lines.

"Well, Gregson?"

The sailor shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other.

"If you don't mind, Mr. Kern, I'd like to say, sir, that I've been working on the hoist, and—and I think I'm all right for to-morrow, sir."

Kern smiled.

"Glad to hear it, Gregson. We're after that E, you know. Suppose you get a little additional practice after crew drill in the morning. And remember: it's better to drop the car back from the bumpers than to cut off the power too soon."

"Yes, sir."

Gregson saluted, turned, and walked forward, unconscious of the speculative glance directed after him.

Kern was puzzled. At last he shrugged slightly: "It's none of my infernal business, I suppose," and he turned to descend to his quarters.

Skeptical as Kern was, his doubts were somewhat allayed at loading drill the following morning. Gregson stood at the hoist controller as if carved from marble. His actions were as mechanically accurate as those of an automaton. He worked deftly and competently, seeming to sense to a second when the lieutenant's voice would give the order, "Load!" And his ammunition-car, rumbling from the depths of the handling-room, stopped invariably within a hair-breadth of its proper place. And when the lieutenant's stop-watch showed that only twenty-nine and one half seconds elapsed between the time of his command to load and the gun captain's song, "Ready, left!" he hung his watch in the turret booth, with a smile of satisfaction, and brought a flush to Gregson's face with a "Good work, there, Gregson."

The crew clambered from the confines of the turret, but Gregeon remained at his post.

Finally he relaxed. He was tired. With the unconscious gesture of the cigarette-smoker, and characteristically care-less of regulations, he reached idly into the small pocket of his jumper, extracted therefrom the "makings," deftly rolled a cigarette, and lighted it. He seated himself on the turret floor, puffing luxuriously; and, seated there, he lost himself in a bewildering maze of conjecture.

Still puzzling, he idly flipped his cigarette away and dropped through the hatch to the deck. Then he made his way be-low through the narrow passageway deep under the turret, and so into the handling-room, where the ammunition for the left gun of turret number one was loaded into the trays preparatory to its ascent to the turret above.

In one corner of the steel compartment lay a nearly empty sack of powder which had burst in handling, and which lay where it had been thrown aside. In another corner several huge powder bags were stacked, the canvas coverings bulging with their potentially powerful contents designed to hurl tremendous steel shells from the guns. A half open bulkhead door near the stacked powder bags opened into the magazine, another into the shell room.

Gregson stooped idly over the ammunition hoist. As he did so, there was a snapping hiss, and a livid sheet of flame seared his face. He staggered back

Continued on page 15

A FLIER WHO PAINTS FLIERS

An Interview with Lieutenant Henri Farre

SHORTLY before he disappeared on a lone scouting trip far within the German lines, Guynemer, greatest of the French airmen, told Lieutenant Henri Farre, the story of what he considered his most notable exploit. Lieutenant Farr,, who paints by day the things he sees while bombing the Boche from the air at night, has made that account the subject of one of his pictures Guynemer had fought 800 battles and had downed 74 German planes when he disappeared. It is the code of the fighting airmen of both sides to report to his friends the death or capture of a flier, but no word has come of Guynemer.

As Lieutenant Farre selected from among his pictures those he thought most typical of the scenes that will become familiar to the American airmen now training for battle, he told Guynemer's story exactly, he said, as the consumptive little flying ace had told it to him, and added a word to our aces of the air that are to be:

"'One day,' said Guynemer, 'I found myself alone, hunting in the German lines. Suddenly I heard firing—and saw that I was overtaken by a Boche. I dove, made a loop, and found myself under the tail of the German machine.

"'I noticed that they were no longer tiring. Alas, I thought, they have

something wrong with the mitrailleuse, and as I had no charge in my own, the thought came to me that if I could only force them to the ground and make them surrender, it would be a beautiful victory.

"'But I was under the German machine. All the same, I made a movement as though to aim and fire. The observers, finding themselves unable any longer to use their arms, threw up their hands in surrender. We were still 500 kilometers from the French lines. I made a sign to the observer, indicating that he descend in a certain direction

"'Without a sign of resistance, the enemy machine descended quietly. I followed closely, allowing them to turn neither right nor left, until we found ourselves over the French Aviation Field. 200 feet up.

"'The German machine landed safely I followed. You can picture the excitement of officers and mechanics that hour, seeing an enemy machine within its lines, intact, without a single shot fired.

"'I presented myself to the Germans and told them I was Captain Guynemer. The Germans saluted and said, "Well, we have done all that we could; our machine broken, we could no longer attack you." I replied: "That is very good; but you might not have been so obedient or so gladly accented my orders had you known that I was without ammunition myself—as helpless as you." The Germans were furious.'

"That" said Lieutenant Farre, "is the sort of thing that will win this war. Guynemer didn't outfight his adversary—he out-thought him. And it is as important to out-think the Germans as to outshoot them. Battles and wars are won by the army that can keep its thoughts, its morale, and its equipment just a little ahead of the other fellow's.

"Your American boys now training for the air will do well to remember Guynemer's exploit, for the burden of victory will rest on them. And this is why: Most advances at the front are made with small units of men, after long and costly preparation. If we Allies can train enough of the right kind of fliers—Guynemer fliers—to beat the German planes back and keep them from seeing our preparations, and at the same time keep a clear air eye on what the Germans are doing, the war will be won. If we can't— Ah, but we must!"

SOMETIMES WE THINK WE'D RATHER DIE THAN GET WELL

---

MA'S

Continued from page 10

against the bulkhead, gasping for breath and cursing with sheer sudden terror.

Mechanically he steadied himself and brushed from his sleeve a piece of burning powder bag. Instinctively he knew what had occurred: he had flipped his half burned cigarette into the turret's ammunition hoist, where it had dropped into the handling-room. Perhaps, by touching it inadvertently with his foot as he leaned over the hoist, he had pushed the smoldering cigarette into a broken powder bag.

A section of the bag had caught fire, and there had been a hissing explosion which had served to scatter the steel deck with bits of burning canvas. His eyes flashed to the corner where stood the stacked bags of powder, and over to the half-opened door of the magazine. Once let a spark touch those powder bags

The instinct of self-preservation caused him to leap for the corner that contained the powder bags. He stamped viciously on a bit of smoldering, powder-impregnated canvas.

His effort served only to make the bit of burning cloth hiss beneath his feet. Fearfully he lifted it in his hand and smothered the flame in his bare palm. The flame seared horribly but the cloth was extinguished. He knew then that he would have to extinguish the innumerable bits of smoldering canvas by bare-handed smothering. It was a task seemingly impossible of accomplishment; and should he fail—

A cry of terror broke from his lips and he made a wild leap for the passageway, his one thought that of personal safety.

And suddenly his passage was blocked. His popping, terrified eyes stared into the heavy, stolid face of George Dane. It was plain to him that the big man had appraised the full potentialities of the situation. Then Dane spoke, his tone politely conversational:

"No hurry, Greg. You're going back." Gregson's face turned livid with terror. He tried to fight his way past Dane; but with surprising ease the big man pinioned his arms, and then, when Gregson struggled terrifiedly, the big man hurled him bodily back into the handling-room.

SELDOM in the history of the Charleston Navy Yard had there been the curious excitement that attended the return of the U. S. S. Springfield from her cruise.

For days the story of the saving of the Springfield had been on every man's lips. In the staid old city the newspapers, eager for a sensation, had played the story to its limit. The name of the hero who had saved the ship was on everybody's tongue. It was common knowledge that steps were being taken to see that Ben Gregson received the Congressional Medal for heroism.

Charleston had prepared to do homage to the hero. The navy-yard was doubly willing, for it felt that Gregson had been done an injustice, that he had been a much misunderstood man. But, of all who read the much-adjectived stories of the papers, they meant most to a pretty little woman in a Society Street boarding-house.

She corrected details that she knew were inaccurate, and supplied a myriad mental halos for Ben Gregson. Of course, she was not surprised. Gregson was her knight-errant—just the kind of man to do what he had done. The saving of the Springfield and, ironically, the dragging of the unconscious figure of George Dane from the handling-room when the danger had passed— The woman thrilled responsively.

Peculiar that, of all the thousand men aboard the Springfield, it should have been her ex-husband whose life had been saved by Gregson. Clara Dane smiled.

It was late afternoon when the Springfield let go her anchors and swung placidly in the river. Almost immediately the first liberty party checked off, and Greg-son, cleverly dodging the reporters who had gained admittance to the yard, made his way by a back route to the navy-yard trolley which was waiting at the station on its trip to the city from North Charleston.

It was not the same Gregson who had left with the Springfield. The man seemed to have aged ten years. The devil-may-care smile was gone from his lips; the superciliousness had disappeared from his bearing. The other passengers on the car stared at the bandaged face and white-swathed hands of the sailor, and whispered the name of "Gregson" about. One man made so bold as to ask the bandaged jackie if he were Gregson, and the man answered surlily: "What d'yuh mean, Gregson?" The passenger apologized and backed away precipitately.

HE made his way toward King Street, entering a somber unpainted boarding-house midway of the block. An ebony serving-girl who recognized him flew up-stairs with the news; and into the dingy red-carpeted parlor where he had been shown came the girl—radiant with pride.

She swept across the room toward him, her eyes wide with pain and sympathy for his burned face and hands and arms. The man made no effort to approach her, and she stopped before him.

"What—what's the matter, Ben?"

His answer came back, strained and unnatural:

"Sit down—I'll tell you."

She obeyed silently, wonderingly. For a long time he stared at her, nervously moving his bandaged hands. And when finally he did speak, his words surprised her:

"Do I seem different?"

She laughed nervously. "Why—why, yes.

"Small wonder." He coughed disgustedly. "I'm a hero!"

"Ye-e-s?" Something in his tone warned her.

"Tell me what you know about it," he ordered. And she told him briefly the stories that the newspapers had been printing.

When she finished, he threw back his head and laughed unpleasantly. "Beggin' your pardon, Clara—it's all a damned lie!"

"But—but—the Navy Department—"

"Knows nothing about it. And I'm about as much a hero— But, of all people in the world, you've a right to know."

"Yes." The girl watched him with wide eyes.

"In the first place, what nobody knows about it is that I started the fire—"

"You?"

"Yes, me. Let me finish now, or I'm liable to get this hero bug so bad that I'd keep it to myself.

"I'd been practisin' on the hoist, 'cause they'd like to threw me outa the turret because I'd been bungling things; and I knew, if I went, George Dane would go in. It wasn't that I cared a darn about bein' in the turret, but I knew they'd laugh if I lost out to George.

"After I finished practisin' I got to thinkin' 'bout Dane bein' aboard. I knew he was after me, and I knew he was after me hard. He couldn't help havin' it in for me after the way I done him, though he'd been talkin' soft around the ship— Oh! I'd heard a heap o' things he didn't know I heard. Anyway, I smoked a cigarette, and when I finished I chucked it away. I didn't know where I'd chucked it—just flipped it away, so—and the thing went down the ammunition hoist to the handlin'-room.

"During the morning drill some one in the handlin'-room had busted a bag of powder. Worse than that, they were makin' ready for the range in the afternoon, and they'd moved a lot of powder from the magazine into the handlin'-room. It may be against regulations; that ain't here nor there—it was done.

"I went down into the handlin'-room from the turret, and I suppose I must have kicked the cigarette stump. And I kicked it right into a little bit of that powder. It shot up with a flash—and there was just enough explosion to bust the torn canvas bag into little bits and send it flying all around the compartment. Each little piece was burning, and a heap of them were close to the powder bags stacked up in there, where one spark would have sent them higher 'n a kite; then the magazine would 'a' let go. And if that had happened—well, there wouldn't 'a' been much left of the Spring."

He told her honestly then the story of meeting Dane in the handlingroom, and what had followed:

"Tellin' the truth as I am, I tell you, Clara, I was never more scared in my life. I was cold all over—knowin' it was the end of me if them bags ever caught—and nothing to put them million pieces of sack out with except our bare hands.

"I started in. I was so scared I had to, and I begun to crush them burning pieces o' sack in my hands, yellin' and cursin' Dane, who just stood and watched.

"'You fool,' I yells at him, 'ain't you gonna help?' Then, when he don't move: 'We'll both be killed!' I screams, grabbin' a piece of red-hot canvas from near one of the powder sacks.

"'No, we won't,' he answers. 'You're gonna put it out.'

"'You mean you ain't gonna help at all?' All the time I was working away as hard as I could, sweat runnin' in my eyes and chokin' from the powder fumes—and scared—scared stiff. That's the only thing that kept me goin'.

"'You'll make it all right,' he nods. 'I've always said you c'd do something big when you once got started.'

"I was almost crazy, hardly knowin' what I was doin' as I grabbed and smothered all the burnin' canvas around.

"'An' remember this, Ben,' he says just as calm as you please, 'when you have once done somethin' worth while and they begin to think you're a real hero, you're gonna live up to it. You're too stuck on yourself to do anything else.'

"'You're tryin' to kill me 'cause I'm goin' to marry Clara,' I howls at him.

"`I'm tryin' to make a man o' you,' he explains, 'because you're gonna marry Clara.'

"An' that was all. He just stood there watchin' me as I burned my hands down to the bone—him just sort o' smilin' and puttin' in a word now an' then, like: 'That's the boy, Ben.' 'Good work, old man.' And once he said: 'You've got it now, Ben. You'll win out. Clara'll be mighty proud when she hears what you've done, an' you'll be a better man for havin' a reputation to live up to.'

"I ain't no softy, Clara, and I'm short on mush. But there was two or three minutes in that handlin'-room when there wasn't no more than the thickness of a' piece of canvas standin' between us and

Continued on page 22

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

PHOTOGRAPHIC MARRIAGE

THE strangest of all the commodities that the Orient sends across the seas to Seattle are the picture brides. Every liner that docks from Kobe and Yokohama unloads a burden of shy girls, dressed in fluttering kimonos, each clutching a photograph. And on the dock, or waiting in the United States immigration office, are their husbands, whom they have never seen.

The husbands have photographs, too, and they study the faces as the girls come down the gang-plank, each one looking for his bride. These young men are usually quite American in dress and bearing, and one of the first things they do is to hurry their silk-clad wives to shops and fit them out with American clothes.

"When the Japanese father of a young man residing in America decides that his son has attained the age and station in life when he should wed, he looks about among his friends in the Orient for a suitable wife. When he finds a maiden whom he thinks would make a suitable wife for his offspring, he enters into an agreement with the prospective bride's parents. Then the son in America is furnished by his father with the name of the parents of the maiden chosen, and mails his photograph to the prospective bride. Then the girl's father sends a picture of his daughter. According to true Oriental custom, there is no exchange of correspondence between the principals. After a proper lapse of time, the parents of the son and those of the daughter appear before the marriage registrar in the city in which they reside, and "register" the marriage. Then the new husband sends transportation money for his bride.

The newly married pairs often make strange contrasts as they leave the pier. One little Japanese girl, straight from her father's home and rice-fields, arrived recently in Seattle, and glanced uncertainly about her. She was dressed in rich, brilliant silks, and her hair was arranged high and stiffly. The photograph she held was of Joe Yoshida, the proprietor of a dye works in Seattle, He is very "American," well tailored, wears a derby, and owns an automobile. "My wife," he announced proudly to the immigration officer, exhibiting a photograph; and when he found her among the other picture brides, his greeting was a hearty American embrace. Then he escorted her to his waiting motor-car, and whisked her to their new bungalow home.

WHEN THEY COME MARCHING HOME

ALREADY people are worrying about the problem of providing for the soldier when he comes home from the front. Will he be content to return to commercial pursuits and the humdrum routine of life? Both soldiers and psychologists say, "Not likely."

One partial solution may be found in opening some of the wide lands of the Northwest to settlement and cultivation.

Running across the line where the District of British Columbia meets the State of Idaho is the fertile, lovely valley of the Kootenay. Canada and Idaho have joined in a project to turn some seventy thousand acres of this land into a reserve for returned soldiers.

William A. Baillie Grohman, writing in the Nineteenth Century and After, says:

Considering the productiveness of the reclaimed land, the homesteads for our warriors need not be larger than twenty acres, with say thirty or forty acres of adjacent hillside land. There will be probably room for 4000 Canadian and American soldiers who will here find homes of unusual attractiveness in a beautiful country favored by an equable climate, where harmful summer frosts are almost entirely unknown, with a rainfall of about twenty inches, and no excessive heat or cold. The bumper crops they will be able to grow on this soil of practically inexhaustible fertility will find the best possible markets at the door in the shape of numerous mining settlements, smelters, etc.

Except when mosquitoes for a couple of months are bad—they will probably disappear after reclamation—I know no drawback to as good a country for white men as I have come across in wide travels from Mexico to Alaska.

GUESSING WHAT 1500 PEOPLE WILL EAT FOR LUNCHEON

HOW is it that a big hotel can supply all the possible wants of an indefinite number of patrons without the most shocking waste? Simply because there is nothing indefinite about either factor, says Lucius M. Boomer, president of the Waldorf Company, and manager of several of New York's largest and most expensive hotels and restaurants.

There is no guess-work in running hotels. They know exactly what and how much their patrons will order. They know how many people will happen in on each day of the week, winter and summer. Says Mr. Boomer in The American Magazine:

"For example, we know at the Hotel McAlpin that every Monday between September and June, with a slight increase during the winter months, there will be twelve hundred people at luncheon. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, when there are theater matinees, we know there will be about fifteen hundred people at luncheon, and that on Sunday there will be very few. In the same way, we know that January and August are with us the two biggest months of the year."

Mr. Boomer receives the weather forecasts from Washington every day, and orders accordingly. "Rain or snow hits the business of selling food, although snow has not such a bad effect as rain. My experience has taught me that men and women do not come to hotels to eat when the weather is bad. The men go to the nearest place, and the women stay at home."

The varieties and amounts of food ordered are estimated down to the last pound:

"We know that we must bake two and a half rolls per capita, as that is the amount used, although not eaten. We have to prepare this amount because of the thoughtlessness of persons who, while engaged in conversation, break up and spoil rolls, thus rendering them useless to us.

"We know that the average man likes various kinds of consomme better than any other kind of soup, and that he eats more apple pie (with mince pie a close second in winter) than any other kind, and likes chocolate and vanilla ice cream better than strawberry or any other flavor.

"And so we are able to gauge orders, year in and year out, because the public taste varies so little.

"Wild duck, as a rule, is the most expensive dish being ordered at hotels. It costs four dollars and twenty cents a portion. It is ordered, perhaps, about twenty-five times a week. Among the other meats, roast beef, of course, is the most popular, with bacon and ham running a close second.

"It has always been of interest to me to see how differently people from other cities act in New York hotels and restaurants. When a Westerner or a Southerner sits down in a New York restaurant, the first thing he asks for is sea-food. Westerners are keen about oysters, while the Southerner wants fresh clams."

THIS BOY COULD LEARN ALMOST ANYTHING

FRED STONE—until his partner's death a member of the famous team of Montgomery and Stone—is probably the funniest man on the stage. That is what he is known for all over the country. But he is more than a funny man: he is an athlete who might be a champion in any one of a dozen lines.

This year Fred Stone is featured in a play that requires, in addition to humor and his usual tumbling and acrobatic stunts, a skating scene.

Stone wasn't much of a skater. "He could not even turn around or skate backward," says Carl Easton Williams in Physical Culture.

In six months he learned not only to skate backward, but to do the most sensational fancy skating and acrobatic stunts on the ice that have been seen for a long time. And Fred Stone is forty-four years old.

It was pioneer life that gave Fred Stone his start. His athletic career really started in Wellington, Kansas, when he was eight years old. By diligently practising for weeks on trees and telegraph-poles he won a $5 prize for climbing the greased pole at the Fourth of July celebration.

He used to practise tight-rope walking by himself. When the circus came to town, Fred Stone walked up the wire outside the tent and watched the show through the hole in the canvas at the peak of the tent. The manager hailed him down indignantly, and then offered him a job.

He was only ten years old, but his father let him go. From then on he was a show man.

In those days circuses traveled by wagon from village to village, and in the course of time the ambitious youngster traveled all over Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, and other States, as acrobat, clown, and rough rider. Since that time he has done everything in the show line except Shakespearian drama.

During the winter Fred Stone doesn't need much more exercise than he gets in his play. But in vacation time he goes on hunting and fishing trips, practises rough-riding, and plays polo. Once he went after polar bears in the arctic, and last summer he lassoed and handcuffed a live lion.

---

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MOTION PICTURES

THE psychology of motion pictures is something that can not be learned from books. It must be learned from experience as recorded in the box-office receipts.

A stage play must make an appeal to the public: a photo-play must appeal to a crowd. The distinction is one that all successful directors and managers reckon on.

The "public" is a permanent body of opinion which must be touched if a stage play is to last. But a motion picture is in its nature a momentary sort of exhibition. "Photo-plays," says Victor O. Freeburg in The Art of Photo-play Making (Macmillan), "are seen and judged by single isolated crowds in Boston and Kalamazoo and Galveston, but rarely by a steady succession of crowds in one place—a succession that might finally develop a public criticism."

To influence a crowd, a manager must have striking scenic effects, attractive forms of physical motion. The crowd is emotional rather than intellectual, and a popular photo-play will give the audience a chance to escape into a world of imaginaray experience. Novelty in mechanical devices attracts people, and comic appeal is universal.

The old trick of suspense is good if the audience has already been aroused to a keen personal sympathy with the characters.

If photo-plays have no public, photo-play actors have. Plays may come and go, but Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin and Mr. and Mrs. Drew go on, at least indefinitely.

HOW THE KAISER WOULD RAISE YOUR BABY

THOSE old-fashioned people who have the notion that parents should be allowed a good deal of liberty in the development of their own children better do their best on the Liberty Loans. For Wilhelm and his little group do not have much respect for the desire of the individual parent. Child-raising is mapped out by high officials, and passed down the line in a series of decrees. And the decrees go into very great detail, says the Survey:

In one case the district presidents, big bugs as they are, are told that they must join central societies for the protection of infants, and that they must subscribe to a periodical which is mentioned by name. Again, it is a poster on infant mortality, or even a special make of baby-bottle, that has aroused the minister's interest, and his views on the subject are ordered to be brought by the district presidents to the attention of burgomasters of the cities, to be discussed by them with their city councils and boards. A Saxe-Weimar decree prescribes that physicians be told the exact manner and method of distributing government rewards to midwives who induce their patients to nurse their own infants, while in the duchy of Oldenburg the government finances a competition between midwives in this regard, giving to the one who persuades the most mothers a prize of fifty marks.

Wilhelm does his best to have the baby-raising scientific. And yet, in spite of all his rules and his Verbotens, the results have not been good these past years, owing to the general food shortage. Professor Thiele, the school physician of Stuttgart, in the article quoted in the Survey, gives the following figures to show the alarming increase in tuberculosis:

           

Entering School	1913 Per Cent	1916 Per Cent	1917 Per Cent
Anaemic	22.48	22.90	28.50
Tuberculous	1.07	2.10	2.35
Candidates for Confirmation
Anaemic	21.74	30.99	31.20
Tuberculous	1.51	4.16	4.90

"According to this table," says the Volkssimme, "tuberculosis has doubled among children entering school and trebled among candidates for confirmation. It is hardly possible to calculate the increase in misery and want that this signifies.

THE FIRST WHITE MAN WHO WENT TO THE YELLOWSTONE

DISCOVERIES are apt to come about in a casual way. The wonders of the Yellowstone National Park were stumbled upon by the merest chance by a trapper, John Colter, in the year 1807. After traveling and trading with the Crow Indians in Wyoming, he left their band at Jackson Hole, and struck due north. Entirely alone, he journeyed across the territory that is now the Park, and saw the Grand Cañon and the hot springs and the Falls of the Yellowstone.

To be the first white man ever to see and report those wonders would seem enough achievement for one man; but John Colter could not keep away from the wilderness.

He started up the Missouri with a companion named Potts, Hiram Martin Chittenden, retired brigadier-general of the United States Army, says in the Yellowstone National Park (Stewart Kidd Company). Before they had gone they were attacked and captured by a band of Blackfeet Indians. Potts killed an Indian, and then was shot down himself. Colter was seized and stripped naked. He waited for the shot that should finish him. But his captors decided on a slower, crueler death. A chief led him out in front of the crowd and motioned to him to run for his life. Colter was famous as a runner. He seized this faint hope and ran.

Away across the flat prairie, five miles wide between the Jefferson and Madison rivers, sped Colter toward the latter stream—sped as never man sped before.

Surely a stranger sight the wild prairies never saw—this lone, naked man, pursued by a pack of howling savages. The distance between him and them increased. By the time he had gotten halfway across the plain, however, he began to feel the effects of his terrible exertion. His breath was almost gone. He paused and looked around, and saw that one solitary Indian was close upon him. Compelled to pause for breath, he called to the Indian in Crow language (which the Blackfeet understood to some extent), and begged for his life. The Indain replied by seizing in both hands the spear he was carrying and making a desperate lunge at Colter. Colter seized the spear-shaft and stabbed the Indian to death. Then he resumed his flight, feeling, as he said, "as if he had not run a mile."

Reaching the river-bank at last, Colter's quick eye discovered near at hand an asylum of refuge in the form of a huge beaver house on the bank. As is well known, these houses are closed on the outside, the only entrance being under water. It was a risky venture, but Colter resolved to try it. Diving into the water, he made for the house, and found an entrance large enough for his body. He climbed into the upper story, and was soon sitting high and dry in a kind of shelter such as probably no man ever sought refuge in before. If he found any beaver there, he didn't bother to kill them.

When the baffled Indians gave up the search, Colter climbed out and went on his way. Warily, wearily, for eleven days he walked, naked, without weapons or food, except what he could pick up on his way. He got back to camp safely.

SOUNDS LIKE GERMANY, DOESN'T IT?

THERE are people alive now who can afford to smile at the small deprivations forced upon us by this war. Aunt Mary Killen, for instance, who used to be a slave, and who has acted as "mammy" for three generations of one Southern family, can remember when, during the Civil War, her people lived through wheatless years instead of wheatless days. Flour reached the prohibitive price of $300 a barrel, and in many places could not be obtained at all. Meal was $50, corn $15 a bushel, and coffee from $20 to $30 a pound. The only "sweetenin'" to be had was black molasses.

Like Germany, the Confederacy was shut in by a blockade that cut off many of the things necessary to make life comfortable. The following quotations from James Ford Rhodes's History of the Civil War (Macmillan) sound almost as if they might refer to the conditions inside the Imperial dominions to-day:

The blockade was a source of acute discomfort. Salt, coffee, tea, soap, candles, matches, glue, advanced enormously in price, and were extremely scarce. Many common medicines were hard to get. In October, 1862, when General Sherman was in command at Memphis, an imposing funeral headed by a handsome city hearse, with pall and plumes, was allowed to pass through the Union lines; the coffin which was borne by the hearse contained a lot of well selected medicines for the Confederate army.

No deprivation was felt so keenly as the lack of tea and coffee. "Tea is beyond the reach of all save the most opulent," said the Charleston Courier in April, 1862. "I have not tasted coffee or tea for more than a year," is an entry of Jones on February 4, 1864. People resorted to all kinds of substitutes. Parched rye, wheat, corn, sweet potatoes, chestnuts, peanuts, chicory, and cotton-seed took the place of the Arabian berry. For tea a concoction of dried currant, blackberry, and sage leaves, of sassafras root or blossoms was drunk.

Another serious handicap arose from the scarcity of paper. Many of the newspapers were finally printed on half sheets. Sometimes one sheet would be brown, another wall-paper. There was danger of an iron famine, and certain other metals were in short supply.

"Hunger," wrote Professor Gildersleeve, "was the dominant note of life in the Confederacy."

The results of this situation were like those that we may hope for in Germany in the coming months. "As men became weary of the war, desertion was more common. Homesickness and the wretched fare of the army were prolific causes of this abandonment of duty. Soldiers deserted by the hundreds; even whole regiments left at a time. Deserters almost always carried their muskets, and when halted and asked their authority to be absent from the army would pat their guns and say defiantly, "This is my furlough."

GEORGE WASHINGTON'S COPY-BOOKS

IN 1729 there sailed to Virginia, with his bride, the Rev. James Marye, who opened is school that for years showed its influence on the character and manners of the men of Virginia. To this school Washington went as a boy of fourteen, and under Marye's dictation wrote in his copy-book the moral precepts of which those printed below are samples.

Most of them, says Owen Wister in The Seven Ages of Washington (Macmillan), were doubtless taken from a book entitled "Youth's Behaviour, or Decency in Conversation amongst men. Composed in French by grave persons for the use and benefit of their youth. Now newly translated into English by Francis Hawkins." And Washington, as his copy-books show, wrote them over and over again:

Read no Letters, Books, or Papers in Company, but when there is a Necessity for the doing of it you must ask leave: come not near the Books or Writings of Another so as to read them unless desired. Look not nigh when another is writing a Letter."

"Speak not of doleful things in a time of mirth."

"Talk not with meat in your mouth."

"Labour to keep alive in your breast that little Spark of Celestial fire called Conscience."

WRISTERS

—By DOROTHY CULVER MILLS

Illustration by W. C. Nims

SHE was as incongruous as a frail white violet strayed into the company of buxom linen roses. The other two girls were robust and florid, and wore large black velvet hats above their bold round eyes and coarsely embroidered pink dresses. But she was a childish figure in a simple white frock, with shy brown eyes very ill at ease beneath the drooping straw brim that shaded them. She lagged a step behind as they loitered arm and arm on the park hill, while the Sunday afternoon band was rendering the "Miserere" in brassy sobs from the horns.

Suddenly the roving gaze of the largest girl found its quarry. "There he is, Marie! With the red tie—towin' around the fellow in checks! He sees us now!"

The uneasiness of the small girl in white increased. "I don't know them, Stella; and I sha'n't hang round. I want to listen to the music, anyway. I'll take my knitting over there." She pointed to several empty benches on the brow of the hill, apart from the crowd, yet within sound of the music. "You can come over for me when you're ready to go home."

"All right, kid," agreed the big girl good-naturedly. "I guess they ain't your style, anyhow. Hello, Mr. Stranger!"

When the small girl reached the brow of the hill, she paused uncertainly in the late September sunshine, for the benches that she had seen empty when she started were now occupied. Then, apart from the others and slightly down the slope, she glimpsed one whose iron back was dappled by the sunlight filtering through the yellowing maple above it.

But when she arrived she found that it was not vacant. The boy sitting there had been hidden from her by the tree-trunk and the shade. With arms folded, he was staring across the green spaces and the silver river to the city beyond.

She halted in confusion as he glanced up, and she blushed the more pinkly as she felt her distressed cheeks burning.

"I—I didn't know anybody was here."

"I'm going," he answered, rising.

He had direct blue eyes; his teeth gleamed in a friendly smile. He seemed a bit reluctant to move off after he had really looked at her.

"Please don't," she cried. "I mean, unless you were going anyway—I mean not for me—I don't mind—" She grew still more pink with more distressed confusion.

He laughed nicely. "All right, then. I wasn't, really. I won't bother you. I'll just lie down here, if I may."

He threw himself on the sward in the sun, a few feet in front of the bench, and rested his head on his arm.

She drew out her knitting from a small dangling bag, her fingers working uncertainly at the strip of gray wool attached to the steel needles. Often her eyes sought the motionless figure—the broad blue serge back; the stained, big-knuckled hands; the heavy black hair, stirred by the light breeze. A vaguely contented feeling held her. The world was suddenly right, as it should be, and not all wrong, as it just had been.

ABRUPTLY he rolled over and faced her, smiling into the brown eyes that had had no time to withdraw.

"Knittin'?" he asked. His voice was indulgent, casual, respectful.

She nodded. "I'm just learning to purl, and it's mixing. It'll be a pair of wristers some day."

"Got anybody goin'?"

She shook her head. There was a brief silence. Then she spoke on impulse:

"Did you see the parade two weeks ago, when the first draft went off to camp?"

"Yes.

"Did it make you feel queer?"

"Some," he replied.

She missed the grimness in his voice. She was hunting words for a feeling she incoherently and surprisingly wanted to confide to this stranger whose presence made her so oddly comfortable and at home.

"It made me feel awfully queer. The woman beside me was crying; she has somebody going this next Wednesday. And I was crying too, a little. But it was as much because I had no one to go, and was out of it all, as anything else."

After a pause she added: "I know I ought to be glad I have no brothers or cousins or—or—anybody to go off and get killed. But then again, it's mean to be shut out of everything. They say, 'What do you know about it? You're not having anybody go.' And they'll all be getting letters from over there, and souvenirs and things—"

"Don't you know anybody goin'?"

"Nobody well. I'm a stranger in the city; I'm sewing for my aunt, that's a dressmaker. And in the little town I come from, the boy I know best has weak lungs; and the one across the street drew a high number; and my cousin has his mother dependent on him. But none of them are so much to me, anyway—and they all think I'm just a kid. But I'm seventeen!"

He was silent, for she seemed not to expect a reply.

"It's funny doing these," she mused. "I often wonder who'll be wearing them."

"Maybe I will," he answered almost harshly.

Her fingers ceased and dropped to her lap. "Are you going?" she cried. "But you're not old enough!"

"I'm twenty-one. I leave Wednesday."

"Oh!" she breathed, and leaned forward. In her eyes were many questions that her lips. hesitated to utter. "Isn't it awfully hard—to leave home?" she asked at last, timidly.

"I have no home to leave. And I'm all for the war—I hate the Germans—so it's better me than lots of others. But I wish I knew some fellows going along Wednesday. Then it wouldn't feel so darn queer starting off. I've only been in this burg six months,—I'm from the West,—and the boys I happen to know got high numbers."

"Oh!" she breathed again. "I suppose you've got—a girl—" she dared to whisper pitifully; for that there should be no girl for this boy was in credible. She did not ask herself why she must find out.

He shook his head.

"Don't you know any girls?"

"I know some," he answered bluntly. "But they aren't the kind that count."

"Oh!" she uttered again, abashed at the sophistication he dimly hinted.

BOTH were silent for a long moment in which speech seemed very near the surface. Then he spoke humbly.

"Perhaps—you'd let me have those?" He nodded at the gray wool in her hands.

"Oh, do you want them? I was hoping you would!"

"I was hoping you'd want me to have them!"

They laughed. But she quickly sobered, and in her eyes again gathered words her tongue checked.

"Say it!" he prompted.

She gasped. "I don't know if I can—Well, it's this: So long as things are this way—why can't I adopt you, sort of? Then I'd have somebody real to make things for—and it'd be sort of nice for you, too—having somebody back here that—that's interested. Of course it'll be mostly pretend, for we don't know each other exactly—and yet, it'll be real enough to make a difference—"

"I was thinkin' about that," he answered so simply that her embarrassment vanished. "There's no use in talkin' about what a difference it'll make to me—it's mostly all on my side— What's your name?"

"It's a funny one. It's Aspen—Aspen Blake. My father—he was a carpenter, but he loved trees and things outdoors—and poetry about them, too. He thought aspen trees were pretty, and he liked the name for a girl."

"So do I. Mine's Harry O'Brien."

HE broke the next pause: "Will you be seeing the parade Wednesday?"

"I'll manage it somehow."

"Gee, that sounds good!" He looked at her steadily. "I'd be mighty sorry if you didn't—now! I'll know you're there—and maybe I'll even see you. Where do you think you'll be standing?"

As they planned his face grew lighter and an exultant relief throbbed in his voice.

"I guess that was the matter with me," he told her. "I've had an awful grouch all week—had it when I looked up and saw you standing there. That parade, with no one to care a hang—it got on my nerves. I can't quite believe it yet. It's not as if it was serious," he went on stoutly. "You can't lose. For there's nothing binding. If you get another fellow, or we feel different when I come back, or if I get killed or hurt—"

"Oh, don't!"

"We've—I've got to face that. And—I don't believe in talking about it, but I wanted you to know that I won't ever forget this is just pretend, as you say. That is—"

"The Star-Spangled Banner" began to boom through the early dusk. They jumped to their feet, and drew closer as they stood quivering to the music. Their country's song had miraculously become their own song: the band was playing it to them. But when it stopped

"The girls'll be hunting me," she cried, a mingled distress sobbing in her voice. "They'll laugh—"

"I'll go right away." Then he asked the question they had been avoiding: "Will I see you again before Wednesday?"

He was very near her, very big and very eager. But her carpenter father had been a poet,—lacking only the gift of expression,—and she had her father's eyes. Beneath a palely bright moon in a pale pink and blue sky, she thought of her aunt's kitchen-scented parlor and of her aunt's curious questioning.

"I think it's sort of nicer—not—" she faltered. "Not that I don't want to awfully. But to-day's been just perfect—"

SHE was very near him, very tender, very little, and so anxious not to hurt his feelings that his word could sway her. But there was a bit of the wistful Irish in him, a remote touch of Celtic romance that understood her.

"All right. What you say goes—Aspen." He experimented with her name gently. "But if I'd known—I wish—" He glanced around him. "I'm not goin' to say goodby—I don't believe in that in war times. But there's nobody lookin'—"

The final crash of cymbals was clattering as he caught her to him and kissed her.

"See you later," he promised cheerily as he hurried off.

She stood still, quite unable to move, watching him till he was lost in the crowd. At that moment she saw Stella and Marie advancing.

"Get a lot done?" Stella called with careless kindness.

"A good deal," Aspen answered nervously, breathlessly. Then, in the dusk, she blushed hotly at her words.

A TRIFLE

—By ELLA RANDALL PEARCE

Illustration by W. C. Dexter

SHE had but a few days longer to live. She knew the truth; for, with her insistent questions and probing glances, it had been wrested from the old family physician when he, in friendly sympathy, would have spared her. But, to his surprise, the truth had not even depressed her. She had received it with a wan, flickering smile and looked calmly into his troubled eyes.

"I knew it," she murmured. "I wanted you to verify my suspicions, that was all. Well, I should not want to be an invalid—nor yet a very old woman. It is all right."

But, while she neither rebelled nor mourned, from that hour her strength seemed to dwindle. The fire of her spirit sank, and her interest in things mundane became negligible.

She lay in her exquisite bed-chamber, swathed in scented tissues and laces, silent most of the time, with her eyes half or wholly closed. Matilda, faithful companion of many years, stepped noislessly about the large room, directing furtive glances now and again at the long, slenderly outlined figure and grayish, cameo-like profile of her mistress.

Matilda had been a young girl, pretty and sprightly, when she had first come to serve as maid in the home of the fashionable young widow, Mrs. Evangeline Embree. But now Matilda was softly plump and slow moving, with her auburn hair faded, and with round, bright eyes and a beak nose conspiring to make a birdlike effect.

Seated in her chair in the luxurious

---

room that recently had become shadowed and cheerless for her, Matilda patiently waited. She was wondering dully what her mistress was thinking of in these long, quiet stretches of time.

Mrs. Evangeline Embree was not thinking of Matilda, or of any phases of her life in which Matilda had figured. Her mind, slipping back over the years in which she had borne the name of Embree with its distinction of complementary riches, wandered among the scenes of her humbler but happier youth—happier, perhaps, because of dreams of the things which in later life she had attained and found less gratifying than youth had fancied.

THROUGH these recalled scenes a familiar image moved, flashing in and out with increasing vividness and attraction. All the people she had known in her girlhood days trooped dimly around her bedside; but the one who appeared most insistently was Rose Sinclair.

Mrs. Embree opened her eyes once, to encounter the darting, birdlike glances of Matilda. She beckoned with a feeble hand, and Matilda drew nearer.

"I've been thinking of Rose a great deal lately. Rose Sinclair, you know."

"Mrs. Quee? Yes; I remember."

"Rose Sinclair," repeated the invalid, slightly frowning. "We were such good friends—grew up together almost like sisters. But Rose was stubborn, for all her softness." The elderly woman's gaze shifted dreamily to the window beyond Matilda's form, and her voice droned on monotonously:

"If she hadn't been so stubborn I might have forgiven her. It was such a trifle. You know, Matilda—our quarrel."

"Yes; I heard you speak of a quarrel, long ago," replied the other smoothly.

"So long ago. And such a trifle. But Rose wasn't fair. And then—you can't grant forgiveness when it isn't asked, can you?"

Matilda murmured a suitable reply and waited with folded hands.

"We had always been friends, and we grew up together," continued Mrs. Embree, speaking slowly. "Rose was pretty, very pretty, but the kind that fades early, I think. I never saw her afterward."

"But you heard about her sometimes."

"Oh, yes; several times. I couldn't ever seem to forget Rose. And when I thought I had forgotten, some stray news would come. The last time, she had a boarding-house in Fall River—a cheap boarding-house for factory folks. Imagine—Rose Sinclair! But that's what shiftless Sam Quee brought her to, I suppose."

"Sam Quee's dead," reminded Matilda.

"Don't I know? But Rose was a proud girl and vain. It was her vanity that parted us.

She was quiet and meditative a long time; then her droning voice resumed:

"I can see her now, staring at that bracelet with her heart in her eyes. There was only one of that kind in the little shop. We both wanted it. I was going to be married, and Rose was to be bridesmaid. Our dresses—everything was ready. But Rose wasn't fair."

"Did you quarrel over the bracelet?"

"I was to have it. It was agreed. But Rose hurried to the shop that night and bought it for herself. Then we quarreled."

"Oh, yes. Too bad," said Matilda sympathetically.

It seemed pitiful to her that the mind of her mistress should be troubled by this childish affair of long ago. With so many more impressive things to occupy her drifting thoughts, why should she cling to those simple memories? There were the affairs of her growing prosperity, her social successes, her travels through foreign lands.

But no. A woman she had not seen for almost a lifetime—and had given little thought to during that time, Matilda was quite certain—needs must appear in phantom guise now and rob her last hours of peace. "As if that quarrel was the most important thing of her life," reflected Matilda. "Why can't she think of something else?"

SHE felt a kindling resentment against the girl who had grown up to he Mrs. Quee, an impecunious and hard working widow whose pride and vanity had ended in the sordid struggles of maintaining a cheap boarding-house for factory folks.

Mrs. Embree was speaking again:

"I might have done something for Rose, if things had been different. She had children, too. It must have been hard."

"No doubt Mrs. Quee has managed all right," soothed Matilda.

"It spoiled my wedding day," persisted Mrs. Embree. "I was very fond of Rose. And now I can't help thinking what a little thing it was, to come between friends. A bracelet—a twisted coral bracelet with a little gold chain; a cheap trinket."

"A twisted coral bracelet. A little gold chain."

Matilda was repeating the words in a parrot-like way, her eyes blinking, and a queer expression settling upon her features. She gulped nervously and caught at the arms of her chair.

"Why, Mrs. Embree! I—how could I know? You never told me before."

The eyes of her mistress flashed accusingly upon her.

"What is it, Matilda? What has happened ?"

"Oh, nothing. Only, I didn't know."

Concluded on page 21

Do You Ever Have to Call People Down?

By JAMES H. COLLINS

IN a big manufacturing plant it was found that the work force changed about four times a year. That is, with something like six hundred employees nearly two thousand people were hired yearly, and either quit or were discharged. Figuring that the cost of breaking in each new worker was at least $50, to say nothing of work spoiled, machinery run below capacity and frequently damaged, and the general slacking up caused by change of workers, this business staggered along under an overhead charge of not less than $100,000 yearly for labor turn-over.

Investigation showed that much of the trouble was traceable to foremen and superintendents who lacked judgment in reprimanding and discharging employees. A workman spoiled a job, or was late in the morning, or caused delay. Instantly his foreman jumped upon him with both feet. Sometimes he was discharged, or again scolded so that he quit, while even if he stayed the reprimand pulled down his efficiency.

Much of the labor turn-over in this business was eliminated by setting up a sort of central scolding department—a place to which every workman in difficulty was sent by his foreman. No foreman was permitted to discharge or reprimand, but he referred all such troubles to the central department, where a quiet investigation was made. Sometimes the worker's blunders and incompetence warranted discharge; but in far more cases they called for correction and instruction.

Very often a good employee could be retained by transferring him to another department, where change of work or foreman cured the difficulty. Under the old haphazard way of assigning men to various parts of the plant, they had been put at tasks for which they were not fitted, or under bosses who were not congenial.

High-strung, high-pressure workers, for instance, had been assigned to a temperamental foreman.

To reprimand subordinates skilfully is one of the finest arts in management. Nine times in ten, the man who thinks that a reprimand is needed assumes that a certain amount of indignation and sarcasm are also necessary. But these merely complicate matters, and eliminating them makes for better discipline, not only of the employee who is corrected, but of the fellow who does the correcting.

The general manager of a large Eastern organization was an athlete at college, playing football, boxing, and wrestling. One rule in athletics works as surely as gravity—that is, if you lose your temper you lose the game. When you stand up to an opponent and permit him to try to break your nose or back, certainly that is a situation in which a little bad temper might appear excusable. But any boxer or wrestler will tell you that lost temper means a lost match, and that the chief stock in trade of many a fighter and wrestler has been his ability to "get the other fellow's goat."

This manager eliminated most of the indignation that went with reprimands in his organization by making it a rule that before scolding or discharging an employee the foreman or superintendent should come to him and explain why. At first they used to come around fairly boiling with indignation over some "bone-head play" made by Tom Smith or Bill Jones. When the manager pinned them down to actual facts and demanded reasons for punishing the offender, however, they usually found it hard to give reasons; and after they had fought it out with him, the indignant foreman vs. the trained athlete, the broader and more reasonable aspects of the case emerged—incidentally they had spent the energy of their indignation.

If you are managing other people, and have occasion to reprimand any one, it may be helpful to remember that there is a very wide field for cleverness and originality in this direction.

The other morning a business man returned to his office after a two weeks' trip, and found his secretary filled with indignation at the janitor, who had neglected to wash the windows while the boss was away. She had been waiting for the boss to get back so she could tell him about it; and the janitor's neglect had evidently obsessed her so that she mentioned various other shortcomings in calling attention to the dirty windows. The boss agreed with her that it was scandalous, and, after giving her a refreshing outlet for her indignation, called in the guilty janitor and reprimanded him in a way that made everybody laugh.

"George," said he, "if these windows were washed this morning so that I could see out of them, I am sure it would not be misunderstood."

This oblique reprimand is one excellent substitute for indignation. Ridicule is another—many a delinquent has been brought into line pleasantly and effectively by the simple device of bringing his short-coming out where fellow workers could good-naturedly chaff him about it as something that anybody with his experience and skill should have known better than to blunder into.

Then, there is the indirect reprimand, illustrated by the method of a factory superintendent who keeps his organization in line by reprimanding the foreman when one of the latter's men blunders or shirks. Very often this takes the form of a scolding administered to the foreman so that the offender can overhear. The lesson never fails to go home, and the sting is taken out by indirection. The offender is sorry for the blunder that brought his foreman the scolding, and glad it was not administered to himself, and afterward the superintendent squares matters by taking the foreman aside and explaining that it was all for effect.

Next time you have occasion to correct anybody under you, just reflect that scolding is a more or less undeveloped art —also that it has a definite financial side, because it plays a tremendous part in the three or four hundred per cent labor turn-over in many a business organization.

DISCONTENT, says the New Success, is a wonderful thing. Columbus discovered America, Bell invented the telephone, Elias Howe made the first sewing machine, Marconi perfected wireless telegraphy, the Wright boys built a flying-machine that would fly—because they were discontented. Arc you discontented?

This Cow is in a Bank

A BULL in a china-shop is, of course, disastrous; but Cashier Ed Crow of the Commercial National of Raleigh, North Carolina, has proved that a cow in a bank can be made a highly profitable investment both for the bank and for the bank's patrons.

"How much cheaper it would be," Mr. Crow figured, "if the folks hereabout who have barns and back lots would just buy a good family cow, and not have to depend on the markets for their milk and butter and cheese." The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea; and finally he bought Lady Ursine and her baby, and installed them near the cashier's cage in the lobby.

Then the event was vigorously advertised. What a good average cow will produce in the way of dairy stuff, figures on cost and maintenance, and an offer to lend 75 per cent of the purchase price to any man, woman, or child who wanted to invest in a cow, were published broadcast in the county.

The net result was that 3,590 interested persons attended Bossy's reception, and orders for forty family cows on the bank's loan plan were taken.

"It was the greatest day in the history of the bank," said Crow, "and a great day in the history of the county. It helped us, it helped the purchasers, and it saved for lives of usefulness many cows that otherwise would have been slaughtered for beef without a chance to reduce the cost of living in this neighborhood."

The A B C of Getting Ahead

"I CHANCED to be in a manager's office when several boys applied for a position," says Dr. William H. Tolman in a business man's magazine. "All were examined, and two finally selected."

"'Why did you choose them?' I asked.

"'Well, for one thing,' said the manager, 'they were neatly and plainly dressed. They were self-confident without being hold or forward. I thought to myself, "If those boys are clean and neat in their personal appearance they'll carry the same ideas to the bench and shop. If they respect themselves, they will respect the work they do for me." If boys only knew that personal appearance is a big business asset, they would make it a part of their personal preparedness.'"

Dr. Tolman is absolutely right. And what he says applies to grown men and women who apply for positions just as much as it does to boys. You may not know it from anything he does or says, but while you are being interviewed by your future employer he is sizing you up very carefully. He won't give you the job unless he thinks it will be worth while for him to do so. Of course he doesn't know what you can do; but, with his wide experience, he will pick out little points, just as the manager mentioned did, and base a pretty shrewd judgment of your ability on that. And all the while he is saying to himself:

"Can we make something of this youngster? Will it pay me to spend time and money and effort training him?" The answer may be in your shoes. If they are run down, unbrushed, or with broken laces, your chances are far less than if they are neat, common-sense shoes.

The A B C of all this, according to Dr. Tolman, is self-discipline. Discipline yourself, he says, by cleaning your clothes and laying them out at night, so you won't have to hunt for buttons and laces and things and grow a grouch in the morning. Neither dawdle nor rush over dressing.

Have a time schedule, and run on it, just as a successful railroad or a successful business man does. Get out of bed at a given hour, winter and summer, rain or shine. Be careful about what you eat, and regulate your comings and goings so you won't upset your digestion by being always in a hurry.

It's just as easy to follow good habits as bad ones, once you get them established. Such is the groundwork of success.

Why Typists Tire

IF you are a hard-working stenographer, and have headaches, and nervous spells and feel all tired out at the end of the day, maybe your feet are to blame. The way you sit at your desk, and the kind of chair and foot-rest you use, have a lot to do with those things sometimes.

Typing steadily is a heavy strain on your physical make-up. In an average day's work your fingers travel a distance of about nine miles over the keyboard, and Frank M. Gilbreth of Providence, Rhode Island, has discovered, according to Forbes' Magazine, several little contrivances to ease your task. Chief among them is the barrel foot-rest that the young lady in the picture is using.

To use this foot-rest to good purpose you must wear low-heeled shoes. In places where it has been tried it has increased the quality and quantity of the girls' work and made it more enjoyable in the doing. There is almost no complaint of nervous headaches, not so much fatigue, and fewer errors than before.

The chair that goes with this foot-rest is arranged to distribute the weight of the body evenly; and the foot-rest, no matter how the sitting position is shifted, always leaves the right distance from the knee to the point of foot-pressure.

Perhaps your boss may think it worth while to add to his bank-roll and your happiness by trying this little brain-saver.

The Big Business of War

—Concluded from page 5

fast it grows and how activities and organizations change from week to week, and you get another view of the problem.

A production expert loaned by a large corporation went into one of the war bureaus recently to work out an efficiency system for keeping track of orders as they progressed from contract to delivery. Conditions were so different from those he had been accustomed to, and pressure and unavoidable confusion so great, that he finally devised an entirely new system. Whenever a contract was let, he assigned an assistant to that job, with orders to follow it until the goods were ready for delivery—a human requisition tied to the order, instead of a requisition form!

The magnitude of war runs in two directions, like the magnitude of infinity. It is telescopic, and also microscopic. In one direction, millions of fighting men, billions in munitions and supplies. In the other direction, a world of detail to be kept track of. Increase the Army and Navy to 2,000,000 men. You find that certain things are needed—so many million coats, trousers, shoes, and hats, so much beef and flour.

All right! Most people follow you that far. But suppose, to make war, you have to put twenty-five per cent barley or corn into a nations daily bread. Few people realize that all the grain-dealers, flour-millers, bakers, grocers, hotel men, and housewives must be told about it; that it must be specified in regulations; that everybody must be told how to do it; that somebody must watch them to see that they do it; that those who do not observe regulations must be dealt with. Despite the most patriotic spirit of the people in a war need like that, you will presently have 500 clerks at Washington writing letters and checking reports, with anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 volunteer food inspectors throughout the country helping.

When you have to supervise every export shipment, account for hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of property owned by enemy nations, regulate the profit on bread, decide which industries shall have steel, coal, and cars first, provide insurance for 1,500,000 fighting men, do the accounting and production charting for a $2,000,000,000 job of ship-building, raise nearly a billion dollars monthly, and at the same time try to tell the nation something about it all as it happens, you are obviously going to run into detail work.

Congress expresses fine sarcastic amazement when Secretary Baker admits that he is a bit hazy on some Army detail attended to by Lieutenant Smith or Captain Brown. In the telephone directory of the War Department at Washington there are thirty-six Smiths, fourteen of them lieutenants, and nineteen Browns, of whom seven are captains.

War Must Be Our Chief Business

THE farther we go into this business of war, the more it will become our main business activity, and the more we shall approximate England in the creation of bureaus, departments, boards, commissions, and committees. England had, at last accounts, something like 200 war service organizations.

An American journalist stepped into the Censor's office in London, one afternoon, and said he would like to see how they did things there and write an article about it.

"How much time had you wished to devote to this matter?" they asked.

"I must go to Scotland to-morrow, and should like to finish the job this afternoon."

Like every one who has received an English letter with its big label over the end bearing the words, "Opened by the Censor," he had visualized censorship in the person of one or two crusty old gentlemen. When they showed him that British censorship employs thousands of people, and is a Secret Service ramifying all over the world, gathering much more information than it suppresses, he stayed and wrote a book about it.

You have heard that a nation is not really fighting until every man, woman, and child at home has been enlisted. In these great war activities at Washington the enlistment process may be seen. It goes on so fast, and runs to such size and intricacy, as to outrun the imagination. This is the magnitude of war—what war means when a nation of 100,000,000 people decide that they have really got to fight, and take off their coats and go to it!

A Trifle

—Concluded from page 19

Matilda could not keep the distress out of her voice. "There—it is all right. I'll tell you about it. A package came two or three days ago, all soiled and torn and with no writing inside. In it was a cheap little coral bracelet with a broken chain."

"Matilda!"

"Now, please, Mrs. Embree. It was like a child's toy—and my mind was on you. And the doctor came just then. So I laid the package aside and forgot it till now. It was such a trifling thing—and no writing inside. I didn't know about Mrs. Quee."

Over the pallid face of her mistress a faint flush was spreading, warming it for the moment into a semblance of its familiar animation. The large dark eyes opened fully, and the droning voice took on its old imperious crispness:

"Bring it to me at once. And the wrapper, too, Matilda. Did you keep the wrapper?"

"Oh, yes. It is all together."

Matilda brought the bracelet. Her mistress's first words were those of reproach: "Oh, Matilda, if you had kept this from me!" Then a flickering smile touched the cameo-like features of the sick woman. She fingered the torn wrapper eagerly.

'Rose's writing. She always would run her letters together. She dressed like that, too—in a careless, haphazard fashion that was somehow more effective than other girls' studied care. Did I ever tell you what a pretty child she was, Matilda? Dancing yellow curls and eyes like a doll. I used to think if I ever had a child—a little girl— How Rose must have hated to see her beauty go! So stubborn, too, with all her softness. And now she sends this to me—at last."

She relapsed into silence again. Matilda, in her chair, waited with folded hands. A few words came to her, brokenly but clearly:

"It is a rich church. It does not need money—so much money. Working hard and growing old—I might have done something for her long ago if things had been different. Can't grant forgiveness when you don't know. But now—poor Rose!"

She turned her profile toward the watcher, and her voice strengthened:

"Matilda!"

AN hour later, Lawyer Hoskins, summoned to the sick-room, bent obsequiously to receive his client's instructions. He had drawn up a will for Mrs. Embree within the last month. With the exception of a generous bequest to Matilda and some smaller gifts to distant relatives, the rich woman's fortune had been left to the Church of St. Thomas, of which she had long been a member.

"Change my will," said Mrs. Evangeline Embree. "Half for St. Thomas's Church, and the remainder—the other half—for Rose Sinclair. Mrs. Rose Sinclair Quee. I want her to know I have forgiven her."

A twisted coral bracelet with a broken chain hung on her thin wrist as, propped up by Matilda and assisted by her lawyer, she signed her name to the new will.

This is Her Week

ONE day Harriet Beecher Stowe received a letter from her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, which read in part:

Now, Hattie, if I were you and could use my pen as you can, I would write something that would make the whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is."

After reading this letter Mrs. Stowe stood up with an expression on her face that her husband and children never forgot. "I will if God gives me strength," she declared.

She went to work on the book that night, and wrote the chapter that told of the death of Uncle Tom, while she rocked the cradle in which her youngest child lay ill.

The book went slowly. Professor Stowe was working hard at Bowdoin College, in Maine; she had three young children and a house full of boarders. Help was scarce, and much of the labor fell on her.

"I believe some force outside myself must have guided my hand," she has told the world, "otherwise I never could have done it."

It took her a year and a half to finish the book, and upon its completion she sold it serially to the New Era for $300. It was published the same year, and its success literally bewildered the little professor's wife. Five hundred thousand copies were sold in America the first year, and it ran through thirty editions in London. Within two years it had been translated into twenty foreign languages. Queen Victoria wrote her a personal letter of thanks; Dickens wrote her, and so did Charles Kingsley.

She became a celebrity so quickly that it took her breath away. She became rich. "Having been poor all my life, and expecting to be poor always, the idea of making money on a book I wrote because I could not help it had never occurred to me," she explained later.

The following year she went abroad for the first time, and crowds in Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London cheered her as she drove through the streets. Not only the United States, but the whole world, was ready for the Civil War when it came. It was she who had made it possible.

Between Decks

—concluded from page 15

what comes after. An', that bein' the case, a man is apt to do some thinkin'.

"At first I was hopin' that something would happen that would kill Dane and let me off. Then I got to wonderin' about things—workin' like hell all the time, with the pain so bad from the burns that I didn't hardly know I had hands. What was he doin' it for? Because he wanted to see me make good? I tell you, Clara, he hates me worse'n the devil. But he was doin' it—doin' it because he was in love with you, an' because he knowed I wasn't the kind you ought to marry, an' because the big fool got the idea that once they treated me like a reg'lar feller aboard, and not like a dog, I'd try to make good. Oh, he grinned cheerful, an' all the time I knew he was doin' it for you. Me? He'd 'a' slung me overboard an' been glad o' the chance—except for you.

"Of course I got the thing out. I wouldn't be here tellin' you about it if I hadn't. An', just before I get it all done, he reached down an' picks up a piece o' burnin' canvas, an' lets it burn in his own hands—still smilin' at me. Then, all of a sudden, he keels over.

"I don't know whether the powder fumes got 'im, or whether he was fakin' so I could be more of a hero. It was a fierce in there—you couldn't hardly breathe. An' I know if he'd 'a' dropped ten minutes before I'd 'a' let him stay there and would 'a' run. But I'd been through—oh! you understand. I dragged him out into the passage, where a bunch was comin' on the run, attracted by some of the smoke that had seeped out. Then I flopped over on top o' George.

"When I come to, I heard Dane tellin' the skipper an' Lieutenant Kern what a hero I was, an' how I'd saved the ship single-handed, an' had the presence of mind to shut the magazine an' all, while he was standin' paralyzed—and a lot o' more lies like that. An' what could I say? Could I tell 'em the truth? I kept my mouth shut.

"It was later on that I seen Dane heavin' overboard the piece o' cigarette he'd brought out o' the handlin'-room. It ouwln'd have done for a hero to have started his own fire, you know. Then later he comes to me an' says, still quiet and slow an' smilin', that now I was a hero maybe I could live up to the reputation—for your sake.

"Well, he tried to make a man out o' me. He was workin' on pretty poor material. Two or three times it seemed like he wouldn't have no material to work on at all—we was that close to kingdom come. But we come out, and it was for you. About the only decent thing I've had a chance to do in the whole mess is this tellin' you the truth about it.

"I ain't your kind, Clara. All the kind o' things you think I am and the papers say I am—like them cavalier fellows—well, I just ain't. But he is. An' he love you in a way I don't even know the meanin' of. An' you—why you've been lovin' him all the time; and you know it now—now that you know the kind o' man he really is. I don't get these decent streaks often. I guess even George don't know what he was teachin' me down in that hell of a handlin'-room. But I know—Aw! Don't cry—there ain't no use sobbin' like that—"

Gregson stopped. He stumbled across the room to the door and out into the night without a backward glance at the girl.

IN the gloom of the navy-yard Ben Gregson found Dane wandering aimlessly about. With a gesture of his bandaged hands he stopped the big man, and gazed earnestly into the heavy, stolid face and the mildly inquiring blue eyes that confronted him. Gregson spoke quickly, as if afraid of himself, and his voice was choked.

"Dane—I—I—want—" he floundered hopelessly.

Dane touched him lightly on the shoulder.

"That's all right, Greg. You'll make good. We both know that—now."

He turned abruptly and would have gone; but Gregson again stepped before him.

"There's a car leavin' for Charleston in ten minutes, Dane—an'—an' there's a woman up on Society Street who knows the whole truth—and—and—who wants you back. She wants you back, George—now!"

THE EDITOR ANSWERS

WHAT has become of the old-fashioned silver dollar, the " cart-wheel" of our youth? I can remember when I used to think, as a boy, that if I ever reached the place where I could be paid one of those big fellows for a day's work, and carry it home every night, the world could hold nothing more glorious for me.

And yesterday it occurred to me that I haven't seen one of them for years. Who's hoarding them, Mr. Hoover?

Getting Leave in the Navy

A SAILOR tells me that the mortality among aunts, uncles, and grandmothers in this war has been terrible beyond all precedent. At Newport, just before last Christmas, telegrams were received by the sailor boys reporting the death or serious illness of more relatives than died in the whole last year's baseball season.

Among the crowd applying for Christmas leave were two apprentice seamen, named Bill and Jake. Jake's application was allowed, but Bill's was not. On the day after Jake's departure Bill received the following telegram:

Mike sick. Come quick. JAKE.

And Bill went.

It's Just Like the Measles

Dear Sir:

Some eight months ago my husband and I were moving from the city to a small country town. Realizing how much we would miss the Public Library, I began to look up magazines to take its place. I subscribed to a number, among them EVERY WEEK.

When the first number came, my husband looked at the cover, noted the three-cent price, and threw it down, exclaiming: "You must have been asleep when you subscribed for that! I can't imagine why you ever wasted your money on so cheap a paper." The weeks went by; the copies came, and I read them mentioning bits of interesting information I had gathered.

Gradually he began to glance at the copies himself; and now—if I want to get a glimpse of EVERY WEEK before he has read it from cover to cover, I have to set the alarm for an early morning hour.

Keep coming, Mr. Editor: you are mighty welcome in this home.

J. N. M., Oregon.

We sometimes feel that we ought to warn readers about letting this magazine into their homes. It's like measles: every member of the family is bound to succumb to it, one after another.

We Sow a Little Discord

Dear Sir:

It may interest you to know that there are three of us girls at home. When it is time for EVERY WEEK to arrive, whichever spies it first grabs it and sits on it all through supper, while the other two are asking mother: "Where has that magazine gone?" We love our darling sisters, but O you EVERY WEEK!

A. I., Indiana.

Have you ever read Shakespeare and "Pilgrim's Progress," A. I.? Not that they are as good as this magazine; but they might help to fill in while you are waiting for sister to get through.

Mr. Garfield—Please Copy

Dear Sir:

Your correspondent is perfectly correct in stating that wetted coal is an increased heat-producer. Great Britain has a number of away-from-home coaling stations where the coal is kept stored beneath water. Our own navy has adopted the same idea with its Hawaiian reserve supply, I believe.

F. A. E., New York.

We Told You So

Dear Sir:

In a recent article entitled "Beware the Exhaust Gas Peril" you said, "A rat exposed closely to the exhaust gas from an automobile will die." I can verify that statement. Last year we had a pest of rats in our corn-crib, so I backed up my car, attached a rubber hose to the exhaust, and poked the other end in numerous rat holes in the crib. When we took up the floor later, we found a total of forty rats, all "gassed."

L. H. S., Illinois.

We are glad to pass on this recipe for killing rats. Can any one send in a formula for getting a wife who is knitting for the Red Cross to stop and sew on a button for a mere non-combatant husband?

This is Our Day for Being Helpful

Dear Sir:

I am one of those poor unfortunates who at the age of fourteen have to wear glasses. This has caused me no end of misery—foolish, perhaps, but real. Is there anything you could do to change my views?

R. S., Chicago.

Our dear Ruth, the thing for you to do is to forget yourself, and to remember that, so far as glasses are concerned, you are in exactly the same class as Teddy Roosevelt, President Wilson, and ourself.

"My Secret"

IT was in our very first month in a newspaper office, we remember, that we came across one of those wonderful stories that are destined never to be printed. It would have made very interesting reading, that story, but the principal character in it was a man of great reputation and power; and there were very good reasons why the story should remain buried in our memories.

For months we never passed that great man's office, or saw his name in print, without a little inner thrill of excitement. "How much trouble we might stir up for you," we thought to ourself, "if we were ever to tell our secret."

Not all secrets carry trouble in their wake. But there is a peculiar interest attaching to the word: secrets are fascinating—and most of us have one or more that we have never told.

Have you?

Can you tell it in such a way that no one will suspect you as the teller or will be harmed by the telling?

We are curious to know what a question like this will bring out. What is your most interesting untold secret? Put it into five hundred words and send it in. We will pay for those that we can publish. All must be in our hands by July 13, and no manuscript can be returned.

Here's a chance to unburden your mind as you have wanted so long to do. Address your letter to the "My Secret Contest," care of the Editor of this magazine, 381 Fourth Avenue, New York.