Chapter 16

and some gave generously and some gave niggardly and some did not give at all. The subscriptions were voluntary, for no one could be forced to remove a mosquito-breeding nuisance from his property. This was in 1911, and only in 1915 has a mosquito law been passed in Connecticut. The Mosquito Man was forced to use "indirect influence," which does not expedite matters.

A subscription of $1,000 came from the big land corporation of the neighborhood, after the "indirect influence" had rather forcibly expressed itself.

"I want $1,000 from you," said the Mosquito Man to the representative of the president--the president was in South America. The representative laughed, so the Mosquito Man spent several days explaining to him why property is more valuable when it is not infested with pests. But every time that the $1,000 was mentioned, the representative could not restrain the smile.

"Well," the Mosquito Man said, at last, "I will make the drainage on your property anyway, and it will cost me $2,000. If you want it left you will have to pay me every cent of the $2,000, not just the $1,000 that I am asking now. Otherwise I shall fill up my ditches and let you enjoy your mosquitoes."

The representative did not laugh at this, but cabled the president in South America. As the president had just been at Panama, and had seen the mosquito extermination work, the $1,000 subscription came back by return cable.

The Darien Board of Health also was a spot against which in direct influence was knocking, for it was a rich Board of Health with $150 at its disposal--and the Mosquito Man wanted that appropriation to flaunt in the faces of the old settlers.

"God sent mosquitoes," objected one member of the Board of Health, "and it is going in the face of Providence to try to get rid of them."

All in all, the money was raised. Some whom he asked for $100 gave $25, and some whom he asked for $25 gave $100, and some millionaires did not give at all--but a sail-maker is still telling proudly of how he gave $5, and "I haven't regretted a cent of it since."

The draining now commenced, and the expert and the Mosquito Man were of the same stripe. The work was completed in six weeks. Just about this time people stopped calling the Mosquito Man "a bug," and the members of the Country Club even tried to make him talk mosquitoes to them, while the sail-maker felt sure that his $5 had done the whole job. Hammocks were swung out in the yards--and a hammock hung outside of the screens is the barometer of the mosquito condition.

The Mosquito Man was feeling very satisfied the night he went to a dance at the Country Club. But the east wind blew in the mosquitoes from the Norwalk marshes.

"It was the most embarrassing experience I have ever had," said the Mosquito Man. "I sat right behind a big fat lady whose dress was very low and I watched the mosquitoes bite her; her whole back was covered with red lumps. That night I telegraphed to the man who had done the draining and he telegraphed back that all of Norwalk township must be drained."

Norwalk proved to be a much severer task than Darien. In Darien the Mosquito Man had found only indifference and prejudice; in Norwalk he met active opposition. Property owners and city councils seem to be afraid that the value of property will be brought down if any sanitation scandal is advertised. It really appeared to be simpler and better business to ignore the fact.

To do away with this opposition, the Mosquito Man handled his campaign in a popular manner. The cooperation of the newspapers was gained and every day he published articles on the mosquito question; some of the articles were educational and others were facetious--while one came out that brought the property owners crying "murder" about his ears. This was the article in which he gave the statistics of Norwalk's health rate in comparison with other Connecticut towns. The smallest subscriptions were encouraged, for, after a man has given a dollar to a cause, that cause is his. Many a child was received with a welcoming smile when he brought to the campaign offices a ten-cent donation.

True, ten-cent donations were not suggested to adult contributors, and the Mosquito Man did much to induce the well-to-do citizens to subscribe according to their means. He still tells with relish of the club of women which took up a collection, after his talk, and presented him with two dollars, in small change.

"The women, though, were my greatest help," he adds; "I found that the women are as a rule better citizens than the men and are glad to be organized to fight the mosquito and fly menace. Of course, I found some uneducated ones that owned a piece of property a foot square, and were afraid that I would walk off with it in my pocket if I came to look it over--but, as for the educated women, I could not have managed my campaign without them."

A large contributor to the fund was the monastery at Kaiser Island. For years this had been a summer resort for the monks, who filled the dormitories in the old days before the mosquitoes took the island. Only one priest was there when the Mosquito Man visited the place to ask for a subscription.

"Very few come any more," said the priest. "It is because of the mosquitoes."

"Will you contribute $500 to get rid of them?" asked the Mosquito Man.

Briefly, the Mosquito Man offered to repay the $500 himself if he did not exterminate the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes went; the monks came back to Kaiser Island.

Yet, in spite of the occasional generous giver, the $7,500 was never quite raised, and the Mosquito Man himself had to make up the deficit. The citizens of Norwalk, for instance, contributed only $150.

This all happened three years ago, and now not a child in the twelve miles but can tell you all about mosquitoes and how a community can avoid having them. The Mosquito Man is appreciated now, and the community understands what he has done for them and what he is still doing--for the contract merely drained the salt marshes, doing away with the salt-water mosquitoes. There were still the fresh-water mosquitoes, and there was still much work for some one to do. That some one has been the Mosquito Man.

During the three years, he has made it his business to drain every inland marsh within his territory, to turn over every tub which may collect water, to let the plug out of every old boat which is breeding mosquitoes, and to convince every ancestor-encumbered autocrat that his inherited woods can breed mosquitoes just as disastrously as do the tin cans of the Hungarian immigrant down the road. The Mosquito Man has an assistant, paid by the towns of Darien and Norwalk--and together they traverse the country.

"It was difficult finding a man who would go into mud to the waist when need was," said the Mosquito Man, "but I finally found a good man with the proper scorn of public opinion on the clothes question, and with a properly trained wife who cleaned without scolding."

You can find traces of the two men any place you go in the woods of Darien or Norwalk. In a ferned dell where you are quite sure that yours is the first human presence, you come upon a ditch, as clean and smooth as a knife--or you find new grass in a place which you remember as a swamp. Perhaps you may even be lucky enough to come on the two workers themselves, digging with their pick and spade--for all summer long the Mosquito Man is working eight hours a day at his self-appointed task.

You might even find him in New York some off-day--and you will know him, for surely he will be telling some rebellious apartment-house owner that the tank on his roof is unscreened. For they do say that he carries his activities into any part of the world where he may chance to be; they do say that, when he was in Italy not so very long ago, he went out to investigate the mosquitoes which had disturbed his rest the night before.

"Now you must oil your swamp," said he to the innkeeper.

That night there was no salad for dinner, for the innkeeper had obeyed the order to the best of his ability. He had poured all of his best olive oil on the mosquito marsh.

* * * * *

_(Country Gentleman)_

Five half-tone illustrations, with the following captions: 1. "A Traction Ditcher at Work Digging Trench for Tile." 2. "Ditch Dug With Dynamite Through Woods." 3. "Apple Packing House and Cold Storage at Ransomville." 4. "Nelson R. Peet, County Agent and Manager of the Niagara County Farm Bureau, New York." 5. "Part of the Crowd Listening to the Speakers."

A COUNTY SERVICE STATION

WHERE NEW YORK FARMERS GET HELP IN THEIR FRUIT GROWING AND MARKETING PROBLEMS

BY D. H. WILLIAMS

You've got to look into the family closet of a county and study its skeletons before you can decide whether that county's farming business is mostly on paper or on concrete. You've got to know whether it standardizes production and marketing, or just markets by as many methods as there are producers.

As a living example of the possibility of tightening up and retiming the gears of a county's economic machinery to the end of cutting out power losses, Niagara County, New York, stands in a distinct class by itself.

Here is an area of 558 square miles, with Lake Ontario spraying its northern line. A network of electric and steam railways and hundreds of miles of splendid state highways make up a system of economic arteries through which the industrial life-blood of the county circulates.

Forty-eight hours to Chicago's markets, the same distance to New York's; three wealthy industrial and agricultural cities within the county itself--Lockport, Niagara Falls and North Tonawanda--operating with a wealth of cheap electric power generated at Niagara Falls--these are some of the advantages within and without the county, the value of which is self-evident.

Beginning with the southern plain section, Niagara's agriculture changes in type from general hay and grain farming to a more intense fruit-growing industry as the northern plain section is approached, until within the zone of Lake Ontario's tempering influence the fruit industry almost excludes all other types of farming.

There is hardly a more favored fruit section in the country than the northern half of Niagara County. Apples, pears, peaches, plums, grapes, cherries, quinces make up the county's horticultural catalogue. The latest available figures rank Niagara County first among the counties of New York in the number of fruit trees; second in the total number of bushels of fruit produced; first in the quantity of peaches, pears, plums and prunes, quinces and cherries; third in the number of bushels of apples.

Yet there are things about the county which no statistics will ever show, such things, for instance, as the condition of the orchards, the market value of the fruit, the earning capacity of the land as a whole--in other words, the bedrock rating of the county. You have to get at these things by a different avenue of approach.

A rather close auditing during 1914 of the accounts of some eighty-seven typical good farms in perhaps the best section of Niagara County brought out the fact that labor incomes from these farms, on the whole, could not be classed as strictly giltedge. One diagnosis made by a Niagara County investigator is recorded in these words:

"Though Niagara County has many of the best fruit farms in New York State, there are numbers of orchards that have been abandoned to the ravages of insects and disease. There is also a tendency toward extensive rather than intensive fruit growing, which has resulted in many large plantings being made.

"Niagara County does not need more orchards, but rather cultivation and spraying of the present orchards; it does not need to produce more fruit, but rather to insure better grading and marketing of the present production."

This observation is dated 1914, one year after leading farmers and business men of the county, convinced that all was not so well with them as the lifeless census figures would have one believe, made the move to set up and operate for the county a farm bureau. New York is the national hotbed of farm-bureau enthusiasm and propaganda.

Almost six years to the day after the inauguration of this bureau, I went into Niagara County. And before I left I was able to sketch a rather vivid mental picture of what a farm bureau really can do for a county, be the raw material with which it must work good, bad or indifferent.

Up in the office of the Niagara County Farm Bureau at Lockport I waited some two hours for an interview with its manager, Nelson R. Peet. That wait was an eye-opener.

Three women clerks and stenographers and the assistant manager occupied this room. The clerks were trying to typewrite, answer the continuous ringing of the phone, respond to buzzer summons from Manager Peet's private office and talk with a stream of visitors, all at the same time.

I spent two whole days and half a night in these offices and not once save at night was there a let-up in this sort of thing. It was business all the time; the business of service! Niagara County farmers are using the bureau.

Nelson Peet, manager, is a spectacled human magneto. His speech and his movements fairly crackle with energy; his enthusiasm is as communicable as a jump spark. A young man in years, yet mature in the knowledge of men and the psychology of service, he never wastes a minute dilating upon the philosophy of farm management; but he has worked twenty hours a day to see that Niagara County farmers got all the labor they needed during rush seasons.

This man has been with the bureau three years. When he came to it the bureau had a paid-up membership of 325. In March this year, when I was in Niagara County, the membership stood at 2185, and was increasing daily. It led by a good margin, I was told, the fifty-five New York county farm bureaus. These, in 1918, had a total membership of 60,000. More than half the farmers in Niagara County are members of the Niagara Bureau.

When Peet first took charge there were two broad courses open to him. He might have planned a program of paternalistic propaganda in behalf of the farmers of the county. Such a program calls for a tremendous amount of talking and writing about coöperation and community interests, better economics and better social conditions, but too often results in the propagandist doing the "coing," while the "operating" is left to somebody else.

The other course was to find out what the farms and farmers in the county needed most and then set to work with little ado to get those things. Peet chose the latter course. And in so doing he has staged one of the best demonstrations in rural America. He has shown that a farm bureau can be made into a county service station and actually become the hub of the county's agricultural activities.

With the aid of state-college men, one of Peet's foremost lines of bureau work has been that of taking inventories of the farming business of Niagara County. For four years these records have been taken on some 100 typical farms. Group meetings are regularly held at the homes of the bureau's community committeemen. Here, with the records they have been keeping, the farmers assemble. Here they work out their own labor incomes and compare notes with their neighbors. The farm bureau helps the men make these business analyses--it does not do the work for them. Now the farmers ask for the blank forms and are themselves as enthusiastic over farm-management records as the men who specialize in such.

These figures serve the bureau as an index to the county's progress. More than once Peet has referred to them and discovered where leaks could be plugged. For example, these records showed an average labor income of $182 a farm for the four years ending 1916.

"This fact," Mr. Peet explained, "we put to work as the reason for doing something to benefit the fruit industry. What could be done? The answer in other highly specialized fruit sections seems to have been central packing houses. We held a meeting, inviting one very influential fruit grower from each loading station in the county. We showed charts of the farm-management records. It didn't take long for the meeting to go on record as favoring the central-packing-house plan.

"Later meetings were held in each community, the farm-management charts were again shown, and at every loading station the meetings went on record as favoring central packing houses. To make a long story short, sites and methods of financing these houses were worked out. There were already two old central packing houses in operation. They took on new life. Five new ones have been formed. All were incorporated and federated into a central parent association, which owns the brand adopted and makes the rules and regulations under which the fruit is packed.

"From the very beginning the proposition has been pushed not as a means of beating the selling game by selling coöperatively, but as a means of securing the confidence of the consuming public, which must ultimately result in a wider distribution and better prices. In fact, the matter of selling has not been fostered from the farm-bureau office. We have concerned ourselves solely with uniform grading and central packing. We believed from the start that the selling of properly graded and packed fruit will take care of itself, and this stand has been justified.

"Each association makes its own arrangements for selling, and in every case has secured better prices than the growers who sold under the old system. The most satisfactory feature of this work centers round the fact that the best and most influential growers are heart and soul behind the proposition. The personnel of coöperative movements, I believe, is the main feature."

When I visited Niagara County the seven central packing associations were doing a splendid business, handling about $1,000,000 worth of apples between them. Only two of the associations were more than one year old. Many of the associations were dickering for additional space for packing and for extensions for their refrigerator service. Other communities in Niagara and in other counties were writing in for details of the plan, to the end of getting the same thing started in their sections. And inquiries were coming in from states outside of New York.

Even with the best of selling methods, no commodity will bring a profit to the producer unless the greater portion of it is eligible to the A-1 class. Too many seconds or culls will throw any orchard venture on the rocks of bankruptcy. It came to Manager Peet's attention early in 1917 that the farm bureau had a golden opportunity to put on another service, which alone, if it worked out in practice as well as it did on paper, would justify the existence of the bureau.

He noticed that though orchardists were following spraying schedules--the best they could find--some had splendid results in controlling apple scab and other pests, but others got results ranging between indifferent and poor. This seemed paradoxical, in view of the fact that one man who followed the same spraying schedule as his neighbor would have more scabby apples than the other.

At that time L.F. Strickland, orchard inspector for the state department of agriculture, had paid particular attention to a limited number of apple orchards in Niagara County with a view to controlling scab by spraying. He discovered that, though the average spraying calendar is all right, climatic conditions in different parts of the same county often upset these standard calculations, so that a difference of one day or even a few hours in time of spraying often meant the difference between success and failure. In other words, it was necessary to study all contributing factors, watch the orchards unremittingly and then decide on the exact day or even hour when conditions were right for a successful spray treatment. He found that one must strike the _times between times_ to get the optimum of results.

So Mr. Strickland, in conjunction with his regular work, kept an eagle eye on a few orchards and would notify the owners when it seemed the moment for spraying had come. It worked out that those favored orchardists had magnificent yields of A-1 fruit; others in the same sections, following the rather flexible spraying calendars, didn't do nearly so well.

All this set Manager Peet to thinking. "Strickland hasn't got an automobile and has lots of other work to do," he reasoned; "but why, if he had a car and could give all the time necessary to such work, couldn't the same results be had in orchards all over the county? Why can't this farm bureau put on a spraying service?"

He put the idea up to the executive committee of the bureau. The idea was good, they agreed, but it would cost at least $500 to try it out the first year. The bureau didn't have the available funds.

"Tell you what," they finally said: "If you want to get out and rustle up 500 new members at one dollar each to pay for this thing, we'll authorize it."

Peet was telling me about it. "Here the bureau had been working for four years with a paid-up membership of about 375," he said, "and if I believed in my idea I had to get 500 more by spring. It was February eighth when the committee gave me this decision. Well, I did it in time to start the ball that spring!"

He got the new members because he had a service to sell them. Arrangements were made whereby the county was divided into six zones, varying in soil and topographic conditions. Criterion orchards were selected in each zone. The inspector, with the aid of daily telegraphic weather reports and through constant inspection of the criterion orchards, decided when the hour struck for the most effective spraying of these orchards.

In the meantime Manager Peet and the inspector had worked out a code system for spraying instructions and put this into the hands of the growers in the six zones. When it came time to spray, the telephones from headquarters in Lockport were put to work and the code message sent to certain orchardists; these in turn repeated the instructions to a number of other orchardists agreed upon, until every member had received the message.

The scheme has worked. The first year there were 800 members who took this service; the second year--1918--there were 900; this year there are 1500. It is paying for itself many times over. One central packing house with nine grower members reports that eight of the members used the spraying service and that none of these had more than five per cent of their fruit to cull out. The ninth member sprayed, but not through the service. He culled forty-five per cent of his crop. There are scores of similar instances.

Seeing how quickly he could get the support of the Niagara farmers for any move which had practice and not theory to recommend it, Manager Peet next began to agitate for an improvement in city-marketing conditions in Lockport. Up to August, 1915, the system--if system it might be called--of distributing farm produce for Lockport's consumption consisted of sporadic visits by producers to the city with produce to be sold at prices largely controlled by the local grocerymen. Likewise retail prices to consumers were chiefly regulated by the same standard.

A grower might drive into Lockport with 100 quarts of strawberries. He would stop at a grocery and offer them.

"No," the grocer would say, "I don't want any. Say, how much do you want for them anyhow?"

"Ten cents a quart."

"Too high; I'll give you six."

Whereupon the man would drive on to see the next grocer. But the man who offered six cents might go straight to his phone, call up the rest of the trade and inform it that there were 100 quarts of strawberries on the streets for which he had offered six cents against ten asked. The result would be that the farmer would get no better offer than six cents.

So Manager Peet joined hands with the Lockport Board of Commerce and went at the job of righting this condition. He proposed a city market for farmers. The nearest approach to a market was a shelter for teams which the local food dealers had rented.

To 700 farmers in the vicinity of Lockport Manager Peet wrote letters, calling their attention to these conditions and offering the city-market idea as a remedy. And he used publicity among Lockport's population of consumers, showing them the economy of such a move. The farmers held a get-together meeting, decided on a location for a market in Lockport, decided on market days and market hours. After this the farm bureau got the city's common council to pass an ordinance prohibiting the huckstering of farm produce on the streets during market hours; also an ordinance setting the market hours, marking off a street section which should be used as a market stand, and putting the superintendent of streets in charge.

That was all. Not a cent of appropriation asked for. The market opened August 10, 1917, with fifty farm wagons in place. Before the summer was over it was common to find more than 100 at their stands. The local war-garden supervisor acted as inspector. He looked over the produce, advised the farmers how to pack and display it, and used every energy in the direction of popularizing the market among producers and consumers alike.

Between Manager Peet and the inspector a scheme was worked out whereby every Thursday was bargain day in market. They would get a certain number of farmers to agree to pack and offer for sale on those days a limited number of baskets of their finest tomatoes, say. Or it might be corn. In the case of tomatoes the bargain price would be ten cents for baskets which that day were selling regularly for eighteen to twenty-five cents. To each of these baskets--no farmer was asked to sacrifice more than ten--was attached a green tag noting that it was a bargain.

Each bargain day was advertised in advance among Lockport consumers. Thursday mornings would see an early rush to the market. The bargains would be cleaned out and then business at normal prices would continue at a brisker rate than usual.

The first year of its operation this market was held on fifty-one days. During this period 1300 rigs sold out their produce for a total of $13,000. This simple move has resulted in stabilizing prices in Lockport and has encouraged the bringing in of farm produce. Prices automatically regulate themselves. If they begin to get too low in Lockport, the supply in sight is immediately reduced through action by the producers in shipping the stuff to Niagara Falls or Buffalo by motor trucks.

The distribution of Lockport's milk supply, as happens in hundreds of cities, has been attended by considerable waste and expense as a result of duplication of delivery routes, breakage of bottles and uneconomic schedules.

The first night I was in Lockport, Manager Peet was holding a meeting of the milk producers supplying the city for the purpose of settling this inequity once and for all. A little agitation had been carried on ahead of this meeting, but only a little. Peet had a plan.

"It's all wrong to plan for a municipally owned central distributing system," he was explaining to me the next morning; "these are too likely to get mixed up in politics. So last night we just about clinched our arrangement for having our city distributing system owned by the producers themselves. In the past we have had eight distributors with fifteen wagons handling the milk supplied from fifty dairy farms. There has been a big loss in time and money as a result of this competition.

"The farm bureau got the producers together on the plan of securing options on these distributors' interests, and last night we just about wound up all the preliminaries. We already have our limited liability corporation papers. We're incorporating under the Membership Corporation Law. Our organization comes under the amendment to the Sherman Antitrust Law, you know, following closely the California law under which the California fruit growers' associations operate.

"We figure that we will need between $20,000 and $30,000 for the purchase of buildings, wagons, equipment and good-will now in the hands of the distributors. At first we thought it would be a good plan to have every member of the association subscribe to the amount proportioned by the number of cows he keeps or the amount of milk he has for sale. But for several reasons this wouldn't work. So we hit on the scheme of having each man subscribe to the amount he personally is able to finance.

"We already have $24,000 subscribed in sums between set limits of $100 and $1000. We're issuing five-year certificates of indebtedness bearing six per cent interest. Our producers will have about $9000 worth of milk a month to distribute. We plan to deduct five per cent every month from these milk checks to pay off the certificates. Then later we'll create a new set of certificates and redistribute these in proportion to the amounts of milk produced on the members' farms."

Manager Peet and the producers are making it perfectly plain to Lockport consumers that this is no move contemplating price control. In fact, they expect to sell milk for a cent a quart under the old price.

The farm-labor shortage which antedated our entrance into the war became a national menace about the time our selective draft began to operate. New York farmers were as hard hit as any other farmers, particularly in the fruit sections, where a tremendous labor supply falls suddenly due at harvest time. Niagara County came in for its full share of this trouble and the Niagara County Farm Bureau went its length to meet the emergency.

In 1917 Western New York produced the biggest crop of peaches in its history, and in the face of the greatest labor famine. There were nearly 8000 cars of the fruit in danger of spoiling on the trees and on the ground. Peet anticipated the crisis by converting the farm bureau into a veritable county labor department. He was promised a good number of high-school boys who were to help in the peach harvest and who were to be cleared through a central office in Buffalo.

Manager Peet worked out arrangements for the care of these boys in forty-two camps strategically located. The camps were to accommodate thirty boys each. The farmers had asked Peet for 4500 hands. He applied for 1500 boys and had every reason to expect these. But at the critical moment something went wrong in Buffalo headquarters and of the 1500 asked for he got only 200!

"I was in Buffalo at the time the news was broken," Manager Peet was saying to me, "and my first impulse was to jump off one of the docks!"

Here was a nice kettle of fish! The fruit was ripening on the trees, and the phones in the bureau offices were ringing their plating off with calls from frantic farmers. Peet didn't jump off a Buffalo dock; he jumped out of his coat and into the fray. He got a Federal Department of Labor man to help him. They plastered appeals for help all over Western New York--on the walls of post offices, railroad stations, on boarding houses. They worked on long-distance phones, the telegraph, the mails. They hired trucks and brought city men and boys and women and girls from cities to work in the orchards over week-ends. Labor, attracted by the flaring posters, drifted into the bureau's offices in Lockport and immediately was assigned to farms; and hundreds of laborers whom Peet never saw also came.

By working seven days a week and often without meals and with cat naps for sleep the bureau cleared 1200 laborers through its office, to say nothing of the loads brought overland by motor truck and which never came near the office. Business houses in the towns closed down and sent their help to the orchards. Lockport's organization of "live wires"--lawyers, doctors, bankers--went out and worked in the orchards.

"Well," was Peet's comment, "we saved the crop, that's all!"

Last year the bureau placed 1095 men and four women on farms in Niagara County. In addition, 1527 soldiers were secured on two-day furloughs from Fort Niagara to help harvest the fruit crops. "We did this," said Manager Peet, "mainly by starting early and keeping persistently at it with the War Department, in order to cut the red tape."

This fall there will go into effect in New York State an amendment to its drainage law which is going to do more properly to drain the state than all the steam diggers that could have been crowded on its acres under former conditions. This action came out of Niagara County, through the farm bureau.

To realize the importance of drainage in this county one must remember that it lies in two levels broken by the ridge which forms the locks at Lockport, the falls at Niagara Falls, and which extends across the county from east to west. In each plateau the land is very level, there being but few places in the county having a difference in elevation of twenty feet within a radius of a mile. Good drainage is very necessary and in the past has been very hard to secure.

"Practically no man can secure adequate drainage without being concerned in the drainage of his neighbor's land," said Mr. Peet. "If the neighbor objects the situation is complicated. And our drainage laws have been woefully inadequate to handle these problems."

But recently the farm bureau put it up to a conference of county agents of New York to get the "state leader" to appoint a state committee to work this thing out and persuade the state legislature to make the necessary amendments to the drainage law. The plan went through, and one of the laws passed compels an objecting property owner to open drains which are necessary for the relief of his neighbors. This law goes into effect next fall.

Farmers are looking to the farm bureau for help in the cleaning and repairing of some sixty drainage ditches constructed in the past under the county-commissioner plan. But the records on file in the county clerk's office are in bad shape. The farm bureau has taken it upon itself to arrange all this material so that it is available on a minute's notice, and as a result has drawn up petitions to the supervisors for the cleaning out of three of these ditches.

Cooperating with the New York State Food Commission, the farm bureau had a power-tractor ditcher placed in the county last summer. Peet placed his assistant in full charge, and the machine never lost a single day as a result of lack of supervision. It has dug over 4000 rods of ditch for tile on twenty-eight farms.

For four years Niagara County farmers had not made expenses in growing tomatoes for the canneries. The farm bureau called a meeting of some fourteen growers and together they figured the cost of production. The average cost for 1917 was found to be $85 an acre; the estimated cost for 1918 was $108 an acre. The average crop was set at six tons to the acre. A joint committee went out of the conference and laid these facts before the canners. The result was that the growers got $20 a ton for their crops in 1918.

These are some outstanding features of the service rendered its farmers by the Niagara bureau. Here are some of its "lesser" activities:

Taking an agricultural census by school districts of each farm in the county and completing the job in one week.

Effecting an interchange of livestock and seed.

Distributing 1000 bushels of seed corn among 383 farmers, twenty-two tons of nitrate of soda at cost among sixty-two farmers, and securing and distributing six tons of sugar to fifty beekeepers for wintering bees.

Indorsing 200 applications for military furloughs.

Assisting in organizing Liberty Loan campaigns, especially the third.

Assisting in the delivery of twenty carloads of feed, fertilizer, farm machinery and barrels, which had been delayed.

Holding twelve demonstration meetings, attended by 602 farmers.

Conducting two tractor schools, attended by 125 farmers.

Arranging eight farmers' institutes, attended by 900 farmers.

Organizing a Federal Farm Loan Association which has loaned $125,000 to nineteen farmers.

The bureau keeps its members posted on what is going on in the county and what the bureau is doing through the medium of a well-edited monthly "News" of eight pages. The best feature of the handling of this publication is that it costs neither bureau nor members a cent. The advertisements from local supply dealers pay for it, and two pages of ads in each issue settles the bill.

The bureau's books show that last year it spent five dollars in serving each member. The membership fee is only one dollar. The difference comes from Federal, state and county appropriations.

The success of this bureau comes from having at the head of it the right man with the right view of what a farm bureau should do. Manager Peet sees to it that the organization works with the local chamber of commerce--the one in Lockport has 700 members--which antedates the farm bureau and which always has supported the bureau. Peet's policy has been to keep the bureau not only before the farmers but before the city people as well.

The "live-wire" committee of the Lockport chamber, composed of lawyers, doctors, bankers, merchants, and the like, has made Manager Peet an _ex-officio_ member. The Niagara Falls and Tonawanda Chambers of Commerce get together with the Lockport chamber and the farm bureau and talk over problems of inter-county importance. These conferences have worked out a unified plan for road development, for instance. The Niagara Farm Bureau helped the Niagara Falls city administration to secure the services of a Federal market inspector. In this way all rivalry between different sections and towns in Niagara County is freed of friction.

About the only criticism I heard against the farm bureau of Niagara County was that Peet was the wrong man. The farmers want a man who will _stay_ manager. But some of the best members hinted that Peet will not stay because he's just a bit too efficient. They seem to fear that some business corporation is going to get him away. And when you look over the record of his work as organizer and executive, you must admit there's something in this.

* * * * *

_(Detroit News)_

Four half-tone illustrations: 1. The Settling Basin at the Water Works. 2. Interior of the Tunnel Through which the Water is Pumped. 3. Where Detroit's Water Comes From. 4. Water Rushing into the Settling Basin.

GUARDING A CITY'S WATER SUPPLY

HOW THE CITY CHEMIST WATCHES FOR THE APPEARANCE OF DEADLY BACILLI; WATER MADE PURE BY CHEMICALS

BY HENRY J. RICHMOND

"COLON." The city chemist spoke the one significant word as he set down the test tube into which he had been gazing intently. The next morning the front page of all the city papers displayed the warning, "Citizens should boil the drinking water."

Every morning, as the first task of the day, the city chemist uncorks a curious little crooked tube containing a few spoonsful of very ordinary bouillon, akin to that which you might grab at the quick lunch, but which has been treated by the admixture of a chemical. This tube begins in a bulb which holds the fluid and terminates in an upturned crook sealed at the end. Into this interesting little piece of apparatus, the chemist pours a small quantity of the city drinking water, and he then puts the whole into an incubator where it is kept at a temperature favorable to the reactions which are expected if the water is contaminated.

After a sufficient time the tube is inspected. To the untrained eye nothing appears. The bouillon still remains in the little bulb apparently unchanged. Its color and clearness have not been affected. But the chemist notices that it does not stand so high in the closed end of the tube as it did when placed in the incubator. The observation seems trivial, but to the man of science it is significant.

What has happened? The water contained some minute organisms which when acted upon by the chemical in the tube have set up a fermentation. Gradually, one by one in the little bulb, bubbles of gas have formed and risen to the surface of the liquid in the closed upper end of the tube. As this gas was liberated, it took the place of the liquid in the tube, and the liquid was forced downward until there was quite a large space, apparently vacant but really filled with gas.

It was this phenomenon that had attracted the attention of the chemist. What did it mean? It was the evidence that the water which was being furnished to the city for half a million people to drink contained some living organism.

Now that, in itself, was enough to make an official of the health department begin to take an interest. It was not, however, in itself a danger signal.

Not all bacterial life is a menace to health, the chemist will tell you. Indeed, humanity has come to live on very peaceable terms with several thousand varieties of bacteria and to be really at enmity with but a score or more. Without the beneficent work of a certain class of bacteria the world would not be habitable. This comes about through a very interesting, though rather repulsive condition--the necessity of getting rid of the dead to make room for the living.

What would be the result if no provision had been made for the disintegration of the bodies of all the men and animals that have inhabited the earth since the beginning? Such a situation is inconceivable. But very wisely providence has provided that myriads and myriads of tiny creatures are ever at work breaking up worn-out and dead animal matter and reducing it to its original elements. These elements are taken up by plant life, elaborated into living vegetable growth and made fit again for the nourishment of animal life, thus completing the marvelous cycle. And so we must not get the notion that all bacteria are our mortal foes. We could not live without them, and our earth, without their humble services, would no longer be habitable.

Neither need we fear the presence of bacterial life in our drinking water. Drinking water always contains bacteria. We, ourselves, even when in the best of health, are the hosts of millions upon millions of them, and it is fair to suppose that they serve some useful purpose. At any rate, it has never been demonstrated that they do us any harm under normal conditions.

And so, the chemist was not alarmed when he discovered that the formation of gas in his crooked tube gave indication of bacteria in the drinking water. He must ascertain what type of bacteria he had entrapped. To this end, he analyzed the gas, and when he determined that the fermentation was due to the presence of colon bacilli in the water, he sent out his warning. Not that the colon bacilli are a menace to health. The body of every human being in the world is infested with millions of them. But the presence of colon bacilli in drinking water is an indication of the presence of a really dangerous thing--sewage.

Thus, when the city chemist turned from his test tube with the exclamation, "Colon!" he did not fear the thing that he saw, but the thing that he knew might accompany it.

There has been much discussion of late of the possibility that the great lakes cities may suffer a water famine. The rapid increase of population along the borders of these great seas, it has been said, might render the water unfit for use. This fear is based upon the assumption that we shall always continue the present very foolish practice of dumping our sewage into the source of our water supply. The time may come when we shall know better how to protect the public health and at the same time husband the public resources. But even at that, the city chemist says that he hardly expects to see the time when the present intake for water near the head of Belle Isle will not be both safe and adequate.

No doubt he makes this statement because he has confidence that the purification of water is both simple and safe. There are two principal methods. The first, and most expensive, is nature's own--the filter. The application of this method is comparatively simple though it involves considerable expense. The trick was learned from the hillside spring which, welling up through strata of sand and gravel, comes out pure and clear and sparkling. To make spring water out of lake water, therefore, it is merely necessary to excavate a considerable area to the desired depth and lead into it the pipes connected with the wells from which water is to be pumped. Then the pit is filled with successive layers of crushed stone graduated in fineness to the size of gravel and then covered with a deep layer of fine sand. This area is then flooded with the water to be filtered, which slowly percolates and comes out clear and pure. The best results in purification of contaminated water supplies have probably been attained in this way; that is, as measured by the improvement of health and the general reduction of the death rate from those diseases caused by the use of contaminated water.

But when the alarm was given this spring by the city chemist there was no time to excavate and build an extensive filtering plant. The dreaded typhoid was already making its appearance and babies were dying. Something had to be done at once.

If some afternoon you take a stroll through Gladwin park your attention may be attracted to a little white building at the lower end of the settling basin. It is merely a temporary structure yet it is serving a very important purpose. Approach the open door and your nostrils will be greeted by a pungent odor that may make you catch your breath. The workmen, too, you will notice, do not stay long within doors, but take refuge in a little shelter booth outside. Strewn about here and there are traces of a white, powdery substance which seems to have been tracked down from a platform erected on the roof. This is hypochlorite of lime, the substance used for sterilizing the city drinking water.

This is so powerful a disinfectant that it destroys all bacteria in water even in an extremely dilute solution. The method of applying it is interesting. The city water comes in from the river through a great tunnel about 10 feet in diameter. The little chlorinating plant is situated on the line of this tunnel so that the solution is readily introduced into the water before it reaches the pool called a settling basin.

The hypochlorite reaches the plant in iron cylinders containing 100 pounds. These are carried up to the roof and poured into the first mixing tank through a hopper fixed for the purpose. There are within the building four of these mixing tanks. In the first, up near the roof, a very strong solution is first made. This is drawn off into a second tank with a greater admixture of water and thence passes into the third and fourth. From the last it is forced out into the main tunnel by a pipe and mingles with the great flood that is pouring constantly into the wells beneath pumping engines. And this is the strength of the chemical: five pounds of it mingled with one million gallons of water is sufficient to render the water fit for drinking purposes. Nearly 98 per cent of the bacteria in the water is destroyed by this weak solution. The water is tasteless and odorless. Indeed, probably very few of the citizens of Detroit who are using the city water all the time, know that the treatment is being applied.

But the chemist continues his tests every morning. Every morning the little crooked tubes are brought out and filled and carefully watched to ascertain if the telltale gas develops which is an index of "death in the cup." Thus is the city's water supply guarded.

No more important work can devolve on the board of health. Before science had learned to recognize the tiny enemies which infest drinking water, typhoid and kindred diseases were regarded as a visitation of divine providence for the sins of a people. We now know that a rise in the death rate from these diseases is to be laid rather to the sins of omission on the part of the board of health and the public works department.

* * * * *

_(The Outlook)_

THE OCCUPATION AND EXERCISE CURE

BY FRANK MARSHALL WHITE

The nerve specialist leaned back in his chair behind the great mahogany desk in his consulting-room and studied the features of the capitalist as that important factor in commerce and industry explained the symptoms that had become alarming enough to drive him, against his will, to seek medical assistance. The patient was under fifty years of age, though the deep lines in his face, with his whitening hair--consequences of the assiduity with which he had devoted himself to the accumulation of his millions and his position in the Directory of Directors--made him appear ten years older. An examination had shown that he had no organic disease of any kind, but he told the physician that he was suffering from what he called "inward trembling," with palpitation of the heart, poor sleep, occasional dizziness, pain in the back of the neck, difficulty in concentrating his attention, and, most of all, from various apprehensions, such as that of being about to fall, of losing his mind, of sudden death--he was afraid to be alone, and was continually tired, worried, and harassed.

"You present merely the ordinary signs of neurasthenia," said the specialist. "These symptoms are distressing, but not at all serious or dangerous. You have been thinking a great deal too much about yourself and your feelings. You watch with morbid interest the perverted sensations that arise in various parts of your body. You grow apprehensive about the palpitation of your heart, which is not at all diseased, but which flutters a little from time to time because the great nerve of the heart is tired, like the other great nerves and nerve-centers of your body. You grow apprehensive over the analogous tremor which you describe as 'inward trembling,' and which you often feel all through your trunk and sometimes in your knees, hands, and face, particularly about the eyes and mouth and in the fingers."

The capitalist had started at the mention of the word neurasthenia, and had seemed much relieved when the physician had declared that the symptoms were not dangerous. "I had been under the impression that neurasthenia was practically an incurable disease," he said. "However, you have described my sensations exactly."

"One hundred per centum of cases of neurasthenia are curable," responded the specialist. "Neurasthenia is not, as is usually supposed, an equally diffused general exhaustion of the nervous system. In my opinion, it is rather an unequally distributed multiple fatigue. Certain more vulnerable portions of the nervous system are affected, while the remainder is normal. In the brain we have an overworked area which, irritated, gives rise to an apprehension or imperative idea. By concentration of energy in some other region of the brain, by using the normal portions, we give this affected part an opportunity to rest and recuperate. New occupations are therefore substituted for the old habitual one. A change of interests gives the tired centers rest."

"I have heard the 'rest cure' advocated in cases like mine," suggested the capitalist.

"In the treatment of neurasthenia we must take the whole man into consideration," said the physician. "We must stimulate nutrition, feed well the tired and exhausted organism, and, above all, provide some sort of rest and distraction for the mind. The mind needs feeding as well as the body. The rest cure is a kind of passive, relaxing, sedative treatment. The field is allowed to lie fallow, and often to grow up with weeds, trusting to time to rest and enrich it. The 'exercise and occupation cure,' on the other hand, is an active, stimulating, and tonic prescription. You place yourself in the hands of a physician who must direct the treatment. He will lay out a scheme with a judicious admixture of exercise which will improve your general health, soothe your nervous system, induce good appetite and sleep, and of occupation which will keep your mind from morbid self-contemplation. One of the best means to this end is manual occupation--drawing, designing, carpentry, metal-work, leather-work, weaving, basket-making, bookbinding, clay-modeling, and the like--for in all these things the hands are kept busy, requiring concentration of attention, while new interests of an artistic and æsthetic nature are aroused. The outdoor exercise, taken for a part of each day, if of the right sort, also distracts by taking the attention and creating interest."

The capitalist had called upon the specialist braced for a possible sentence of death, prepared at the least to be informed that he was suffering from a progressive mental malady. Now, while a tremendous weight was lifted from his mind with the information that he might anticipate a complete return to health, the idea of devoting his trained intelligence, accustomed to cope with great problems of trade and finance, to such trivialities as basket-making or modeling in clay appeared preposterous. Nevertheless, when the physician told him of a resort near at hand, established for the treatment of cases just such as his, where he might be under continuous medical supervision, without confinement indoors or being deprived of any of the comforts or luxuries of life, he decided to put himself in the other's hands unreservedly. The specialist informed him that the length of time required for his cure would depend largely upon himself. He might, for instance, even keep in touch with his office and have matters of import referred to him while he was recuperating his mental and physical strength, but such a course would inevitably retard his recovery, and possibly prevent it. To get the best results from the treatment he ought to leave every business interest behind him, he was told.

The fee that the capitalist paid the specialist made his advice so valuable that the other followed it absolutely. The next evening saw the patient in the home of the "occupation and exercise cure." He arrived just in time to sit down to dinner with a score of other patients, not one of whom showed any outward sign of illness, though all were taking the cure for some form of nervous trouble. There were no cases of insanity among them, however, none being admitted to the institution under any circumstances. The dinner was simple and abundant, and the conversation at the tables of a lively and cheerful nature. As everybody went to bed by ten o'clock--almost every one considerably before that hour, in fact--the newcomer did likewise, he having secured a suite with a bath in the main building. Somewhat to the surprise of the capitalist, who was accustomed to be made much of wherever he happened to be, no more attention was paid to him than to any other guest of the establishment, a condition of affairs that happened to please him. He was told on retiring that breakfast would be served in the dining-room from 7:30 to 8:30 in the morning, but that, if he preferred to remain in his room, it would be brought to him there at nine o'clock.

The capitalist had a bad night, and was up to breakfast early. After he had concluded that repast the medical superintendent showed him about the place, but did not encourage him to talk about his symptoms. The grounds of the "occupation and exercise cure" comprised a farm of forty acres located among the hills of northern Westchester County in the Croton watershed, with large shade trees, lawns, flower gardens, and an inexhaustible supply of pure spring water from a well three hundred feet deep in solid rock. The main building, situated on a knoll adjacent to a grove of evergreen trees, contained a great solarium, which was the favorite sitting-room of the patients, and the dining-room was also finished with two sides of glass, both apartments capable of being thrown open in warm weather, and having the advantage of all the sun there was in winter. In this building were also the medical offices, with a clinical laboratory and hydro- and electro-therapeutic equipment, and accommodations for from twelve to fifteen guests. Two bungalows under the trees of the apple orchard close at hand, one containing two separate suites with baths, and the other two living-rooms with hall and bath-room, were ideal places for quiet and repose. Situated at the entrance to the grounds was a club-house, with a big sitting-room and an open fireplace; it also contained a solarium, billiard-room, bowling alleys, a squash court, a greenhouse for winter floriculture, and the arts and crafts shops, with seven living-rooms. Every living-room in the main building, the club-house, and the bungalows was connected with the medical office by telephone, so that in case of need patients might immediately secure the services of a physician at any hour of the day or night.

The arts and crafts shops being the basic principle of the "occupation and exercise cure," the capitalist was introduced to an efficient and businesslike young woman, the instructress, who explained to him the nature of the avocations in which he might choose to interest himself. Here he found his fellow-patients busily and apparently congenially employed. In one of the shops a recent alumnus of one of the leading universities, who had undergone a nervous breakdown after graduation, was patiently hammering a sheet of brass with a view to converting it into a lampshade; a matron of nearly sixty, who had previously spent eight years in sanatoriums, practically bedridden, was setting type in the printing office with greater activity than she had known before for two decades; two girls, one sixteen and the other twelve, the latter inclined to hysteria and the former once subject to acute nervous attacks, taking the cure in charge of trained nurses, were chattering gayly over a loom in the construction of a silk rug; a prominent business man from a Western city, like the New York capitalist broken down from overwork, was earnestly modeling in clay what he hoped might eventually become a jardiniere; one of last season's debutantes among the fashionables, who had been leading a life of too strenuous gayety that had told on her nerves, was constructing a stamped leather portfolio with entire absorption; and half a dozen others, mostly young women, were engaged at wood-carving, bookbinding, block-printing, tapestry weaving, or basket-making, each one of them under treatment for some nervous derangement.

The new patient decided to try his hand at basket-making; and, although he figured out that it would take him about four days to turn out a product that might sell for ten cents, he was soon so much interested in mastering the manual details of the craft that he was disinclined to put the work aside when the medical superintendent suggested a horseback ride. When, at the advice of the specialist, the capitalist had decided to try the occupation and exercise cure, he did so with little faith that it would restore him to health, though he felt that there was perhaps a slight chance that it might help him. The remedy seemed to him too simple to overcome a disease that was paralyzing his energies. To his great surprise, he began to improve at once; and though for the first week he got little sleep, and his dizziness, with the pain in the back of his neck and his apprehensions, continued to recur for weeks, they did so at always increasing intervals.

He learned bookbinding, and sent to his library for some favorite volumes, and put them into new dress; he made elaborate waste-paper baskets, and beat brass into ornamental desk-trays, which he proudly presented to his friends in the city as specimens of his skill. Work with him, as with the others of the patients, was continually varied by recreation. In the summer months there were lawn-tennis, golf, croquet, canoeing, rowing, fishing, riding, and driving. In winter, such outdoor sports as skating, tobogganing, coasting, skeeing, snowshoeing, and lacrosse were varied by billiards, bowling, squash, the medicine ball, and basket and tether ball. The capitalist was astonished to discover that he could take an interest in games. The specialist, who called upon his patient at intervals, told him that a point of great importance in the cure was that exercise that is _enjoyed_ is almost twice as effective in the good accomplished as exercise which is a mere mechanical routine of movements made as a matter of duty.

The net result was that, after four months of the "occupation and exercise cure," the capitalist returned to New York sound in mind and body, and feeling younger than he had before in years. Complete cures were effected in the cases of the other patients also, which is the less remarkable when the circumstance is taken into consideration that only patients capable of entire recovery are recommended to take the treatment.

Of course the institution that has been described is only for the well-to-do, and physicians are endeavoring to bring the "occupation and exercise cure" within the reach of the poor, and to interest philanthropists in the establishment of "colony sanatoriums," such as already exist in different parts of Europe, for those suffering from functional nervous disorders who are without means. Contrary to the general opinion, neurasthenia, particularly among women, is not confined to the moneyed and leisure class; but, owing to the fact that women have taken up the work of men in offices and trades as well as in many of the professions, working-women are continually breaking down under nervous strain, and many, under present conditions, have little chance for recovery, because they cannot afford the proper treatment. As a speaker at the last annual meeting of the American Medical Association declared, "Idiots and epileptics and lunatics are many; but all together they are less numerous than the victims of nervousness--the people afflicted with lesser grades of psychasthenic and neurasthenic inadequacy, who become devoted epicures of their own emotions, and who claim a large share of the attention of every general practitioner and of every specialist."

Scientists declare that this premature collapse of nerve force is increasing to such an extent as to become a positive menace to the general welfare. The struggle for existence among the conditions of modern life, especially among those found in the large centers of industrial and scientific activity, and the steady, persistent work, with its attendant sorrows, deprivations, and over-anxiety for success, are among the most prolific causes--causes which are the results of conditions from which, for the large mass of people, according to a leading New York alienist, there has been no possibility of escape.

"Especially here in America are people forced into surroundings for which they have never been fitted," the alienist asserts, "and especially here are premature demands made upon their nervous systems before they are mature and properly qualified. The lack of proper training deprives many of the workers, in all branches, of the best protection against functional nervous diseases which any person can have, namely, a well-trained nervous system. This struggle for existence by the congenital neuropath or the educationally unfit forces many to the use, and then to the abuse, of stimulants and excitants, and herein we have another important exciting cause. This early and excessive use of coffee, tea, alcohol, and tobacco is especially deleterious in its action upon the nervous system of those very ones who are most prone to go to excess in their use.

"Therefore, predisposition, aided by the storm and stress of active competition and abetted by the use of stimulants, must be looked upon as the main cause for the premature collapse of nerve force which we call neurasthenia; so it will be found that the majority of neurasthenics are between twenty-five and fifty years of age, and that their occupations are those which are attended by worry, undue excitement, uncertainty, excessive wear and tear, and thus we find mentally active persons more easily affected than those whose occupation is solely physical. Authors, actors, school-teachers, governesses, telegraph and telephone operators, are among those most frequently affected, and the increase of neurasthenia among women dates from the modern era which has opened to them new channels of work and has admitted them more generally into the so-called learned professions. But whatever may be the occupation in which persons have broken down, it is never the occupation alone which has been the cause.

"This cannot be too often repeated. The emotional fitness or unfitness of an individual for his occupation is of the utmost importance as a causative factor, and overwork alone, without any emotional cause and without any errors in mode of life, will never act to produce such a collapse. It is therefore not astonishing that this class of functional nervous diseases is not confined to the wealthy, and that the rich and the poor are indiscriminately affected. But certain causes are of greater influence in the one class, while different ones obtain in the other. Poverty in itself, with its limitations of proper rest and recuperation, is a very positive cause. Years of neurological dispensary work among the poor have convinced me that nervousness, neurasthenia, hysteria, etc., are quite as prevalent among the indigent as among the well-to-do."

Physicians agree that the prime requisite in the treatment of these disorders is the removal of the patient from his or her habitual surroundings, where recognition of the existence of actual disease is generally wanting, where the constant admonitions of well-meaning friends to "brace up" and to "exert your will power" force the sick man or woman to bodily and mental over-exertion, and where the worries about a livelihood are always dominant. Such a change alone, however, the experts say, will help but few, for it is being recognized more and more that these functional diseases of the nervous system can receive satisfactory treatment only in institutions, where constant attention may be had, with expert supervision and trained attendants.

The "occupation and exercise cure" is applicable also to epilepsy, and is the therapeutic principle of the Craig Colony for Epileptics at Sonyea, in Livingston County, supported by the State, and that institution furnishes a general model for the "colony sanatoriums" suggested for indigent patients suffering from functional nervous disorders. The Craig Colony was the idea of Dr. Frederick Peterson, Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University, and former President of the New York State Commission of Lunacy and of the New York Neurological Society, which he based upon the epileptic colony at Beilefeld, Germany, that was founded in 1867. The Craig Colony was founded in 1894, and there are now being cared for within its confines more than thirteen hundred patients, who have turned out this year agricultural products, with bricks, soap, and brooms, to the value of $60,000. The colony is named after the late Oscar Craig, of Rochester, who, with William P. Letchworth, of Buffalo, purchased the two-thousand-acre tract of land on which it is situated from the Shaker colony at Sonyea and presented it to the State, Dr. Peterson devoting several months of each year for nine years to getting the institution into working order. The first patients were housed in the old Shaker buildings, which were well constructed and fairly well arranged for the purpose, but as additional applications for admission have been made new buildings have been erected. To-day there are eighty buildings in the colony, but a thousand patients are waiting for admission, eight hundred of whom are in New York City.

Epilepsy, the "falling sickness," is a most difficult malady to treat even in an institution for that purpose, and it is impossible to treat it anywhere else. An epileptic in a family is an almost intolerable burden to its other members, as well as to himself. The temperamental effect of the disease takes the form in the patient of making frequent and unjust complaints, and epileptics invariably charge some one with having injured them while they have been unconscious during an attack. Then, too, living at home, they are often dangerous to younger members of a family, and they are fault-finding, exacting, and irritable generally. The seizures frequently come on without warning, and the patient drops where he stands, often injuring himself severely. The last annual report of the Craig Colony records more than four hundred injuries within the year to patients during seizures which required a surgeon's attention, the injuries varying from severe bruises to fractures of the skull.

The object of the Craig Colony is to remove the burden of the epileptic in the family from the home without subjecting the patient to the hardship of confinement with the insane. "Very few epileptics suffer permanent insanity in any form except dementia," says the medical superintendent of the Colony. "Acute mania and maniac depressive insanity not infrequently appear as a 'post-convulsive' condition, that generally subsides within a few hours, or at most a few days. Rarely the state may persist a month. Melancholia is extremely infrequent. Delusions of persecution, hallucinations of sight or hearing, systematized in character, are almost never encountered in epilepsy."

Only from six to fifteen per cent of epileptics are curable, and hence the work of the Craig Colony is largely palliative of the sufferings of the patients. Each individual case is studied with the utmost care, however, and patients are given their choice of available occupations. The Colony is not a custodial institution. There are no bars on the windows, no walls or high fences about the farm. The patients are housed in cottages, men and women in separate buildings some distance apart, about thirty to each cottage. In charge of each of these families are a man and his wife, who utilize the services of some of the patients in the performance of household work, while the others have their duties outside. Kindness to the unfortunates under their care is impressed upon every employee of the Colony, and an iron-bound rule forbids them to strike a patient even in case of assault.

Besides the agricultural work in the Craig Colony, and that in the soap and broom factories and the brick-yard, the patients are taught blacksmithing, carpentry, dressmaking, tailoring, painting, plumbing, shoemaking, laundrying, and sloyd work. It is insisted on that all patients physically capable shall find employment as a therapeutic measure. The records show that on Sundays and holidays and on rainy days, when there is a minimum of physical activity among the patients, their seizures double and sometimes treble in number. Few of the patients know how to perform any kind of labor when they enter the Colony, but many of them learn rapidly. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that boys from eighteen to twenty years of age can spend two years in the sloyd shop and leave it fully qualified as cabinet-makers, and capable of earning a journeyman's wages.

There are about two hundred children in the colony of epileptics at Sonyea, more than half of whom are girls. As children subject to epileptic seizures are not received in the public schools of the State, the only opportunity for any education among these afflicted little ones whose parents are unable to teach them themselves or provide private tutors for them is in the schools of the Colony. Some of the children are comparatively bright scholars, while the attempt to teach others seems a hopeless task. For instance, it took one girl ninety days to learn to lay three sticks in the form of a letter A.

Every effort is made to encourage recreation among the patients in the Craig Colony, both children and adults. The men have a club of 250 members, with billiards, chess, checkers, cards, and magazines and newspapers. The boys have their baseball and football, and play match games among themselves or with visiting teams. The women and girls play croquet, tennis, and other outdoor games. There is a band composed of patients that gives a concert once a week, and there are theatricals and dancing, with occasional lectures by visiting celebrities. As the Colony, with the medical staff, nurses, and other employees, has a population of 2,000, there is always an audience for any visiting attraction. The maintenance of the Colony is costing the State $225,000 the present year.

Since the founding of the Craig Colony similar institutions have been established in Massachusetts, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Kansas, and other States are preparing to follow their example. There are other private sanatoriums throughout the country similar to the one in Westchester County, where the nervous or neurasthenic patient who is well-to-do may obtain relaxation and supervision, but there is no place at all to-day where the man or woman suffering from curable nervous disorders who is without means can go for treatment.

* * * * *

_(McClure's Magazine)_

Five illustrations: two wash drawings by André Castaigne showing mono-rail trains in the future, five half-tone reproductions of photographs of the car on its trial trip, and one pen-and-ink diagram of the gyroscopes.

THE BRENNAN MONO-RAIL CAR

BY PERCEVAL GIBBON

It was November 10, 1909--a day that will surely have its place in history beside that other day, eighty-five years ago, when George Stephenson drove the first railway locomotive between Stockton and Darlington. In the great square of the Brennan torpedo factory at Gillingham, where the fighting-tops of battleships in the adjacent dockyard poise above the stone coping of the wall, there was a track laid down in a circle of a quarter of a mile. Switches linked it up with other lengths of track, a straight stretch down to a muddy cape of the Medway estuary, and a string of curves and loops coiling among the stone and iron factory sheds. The strange thing about it was that it was single--just one line of rail on sleepers tamped into the unstable "made" ground of the place.

And there was Brennan, his face red with the chill wind sweeping in from the Nore, his voice plaintive and Irish, discoursing, at slow length, of revolutions per minute, of "precession," and the like. The journalists from London, who had come down at his invitation, fidgeted and shivered in the bitter morning air; the affair did not look in the least like an epoch in the history of transportation and civilization, till--

"Now, gentlemen," said Brennan, and led the way across the circle of track.

And then, from its home behind the low, powder-magazine-like sheds, there rode forth a strange car, the like of which was never seen before. It was painted the businesslike slatyblue gray of the War Department. It was merely a flat platform, ten feet wide by forty feet long, with a steel cab mounted on its forward end, through the windows of which one could see a young engineer in tweeds standing against a blur of moving machine-parts.

It ran on the single rail; its four wheels revolved in a line, one behind another; and it traveled with the level, flexible equilibrium of a ship moving across a dock. It swung over the sharp curves without faltering, crossed the switch, and floated--floated is the only word for the serene and equable quality of its movement--round and round the quarter-mile circle. A workman boarded it as it passed him, and sat on the edge with his legs swinging, and its level was unaltered. It was wonderful beyond words to see. It seemed to abolish the very principle of gravitation; it contradicted calmly one's most familiar instincts.

Every one knows the sense one gains at times while watching an ingenious machine at its work--a sense of being in the presence of a living and conscious thing, with more than the industry, the pertinacity, the dexterity, of a man. There was a moment, while watching Brennan's car, when one had to summon an effort of reason to do away with this sense of life; it answered each movement of the men on board and each inequality in the makeshift track with an adjustment of balance irresistibly suggestive of consciousness. It was an illustration of that troublous theorem which advances that consciousness is no more than the co-relation of the parts of the brain, and that a machine adapted to its work is as conscious in its own sphere as a mind is in its sphere.

The car backed round the track, crossed to the straight line, and halted to take us aboard. There were about forty of us, yet it took up our unequally distributed weight without disturbance. The young engineer threw over his lever, and we ran down the line. The movement was as "sweet" and equable as the movement of a powerful automobile running slowly on a smooth road; there was an utter absence of those jars and small lateral shocks that are inseparable from a car running on a double track. We passed beyond the sheds and slid along a narrow spit of land thrusting out into the mud-flanked estuary. Men on lighters and a working-party of bluejackets turned to stare at the incredible machine with its load. Then back again, three times round the circle, and in and out among the curves, always with that unchanging stateliness of gait. As we spun round the circle, she leaned inward like a cyclist against the centrifugal pull. She needs no banking of the track to keep her on the rail. A line of rails to travel on, and ground that will carry her weight--she asks no more. With these and a clear road ahead, she is to abolish distance and revise the world's schedules of time.

"A hundred and twenty miles an hour," I hear Brennan saying, in that sad voice of his; "or maybe two hundred. That's a detail."

In the back of the cab were broad unglazed windows, through which one could watch the tangle of machinery. Dynamos are bolted to the floor, purring under their shields like comfortable cats; abaft of them a twenty-horse-power Wolseley petrol-engine supplies motive power for everything. And above the dynamos, cased in studded leather, swinging a little in their ordered precession, are the two gyroscopes, the soul of the machine. To them she owes her equilibrium.

Of all machines in the world, the gyroscope is the simplest, for, in its essential form, it is no more than a wheel revolving. But a wheel revolving is the vehicle of many physical principles, and the sum of them is that which is known as gyroscopic action. It is seen in the ordinary spinning top, which stands erect in its capacity of a gyroscope revolving horizontally. The apparatus that holds Brennan's car upright, and promises to revolutionize transportation, is a top adapted to a new purpose. It is a gyroscope revolving in a perpendicular plane, a steel wheel weighing three quarters of a ton and spinning at the rate of three thousand revolutions to the minute.

Now, the effect of gyroscopic action is to resist any impulse that tends to move the revolving wheel out of the plane in which it revolves. This resistance can be felt in a top; it can be felt much more strongly in the beautiful little gyroscopes of brass and steel that are sold for the scientific demonstration of the laws governing revolving bodies. Such a one, only a few inches in size, will develop a surprising resistance. This resistance increases with the weight of the wheel and the speed at which it moves, till, with Brennan's gyroscopes of three quarters of a ton each, whirling in a vacuum at three thousand revolutions per minute, it would need a weight that would crush the car into the ground to throw them from their upright plane.

Readers of MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE were made familiar with the working of Brennan's gyroscope by Mr. Cleveland Moffett's article in the issue of December, 1907. The occasion of that article was the exhibition of Brennan's model mono-rail car before the Royal Society and in the grounds of his residence at Gillingham. For a clear understanding of the first full-sized car, it may be well to recapitulate a few of the characteristics of the gyroscope.

When Brennan made his early models, he found that, while the little cars would remain upright and run along a straight rail, they left the track at the first curve. The gyroscope governed their direction as well as their equilibrium. It was the first check in the evolution of the perfect machine. It was over ten years before he found the answer to the problem--ten years of making experimental machines and scrapping them, of filing useless patents, of doubt and persistence. But the answer was found--in the spinning top.

A spinning top set down so that it stands at an angle to the floor will right itself; it will rise till it stands upright on the point of equal friction. Brennan's resource, therefore, was to treat his gyroscope as a top. He enclosed it in a case, through which its axles projected, and at each side of the car he built stout brackets reaching forth a few inches below each end of the axle.

The result is not difficult to deduce. When the car came to a curve, the centrifugal action tended to throw it outward; the side of the car that was on the inside of the curve swung up and the bracket touched the axle of the gyroscope. Forthwith, in the manner of its father, the top, the gyroscope tried to stand upright on the bracket; all the weight of it and all its wonderful force were pressed on that side of the car, holding it down against the tendency to rise and capsize. The thing was done; the spinning top had come to the rescue of its posterity. It only remained to fit a double gyroscope, with the wheels revolving in opposite directions, and, save for engineering details, the mono-rail car was evolved.

Through the window in the back of the cab I was able to watch them at then; work--not the actual gyroscopes, but their cases, quivering with the unimaginable velocity of the great wheels within, turning and tilting accurately to each shifting weight as the men on board moved here and there. Above them were the glass oilcups, with the opal-green engine-oil flushing through them to feed the bearings. Lubrication is a vital part of the machine. Let that fail, and the axles, grinding and red-hot, would eat through the white metal of the bearings as a knife goes through butter. It is a thing that has been foreseen by the inventor: to the lubricating apparatus is affixed a danger signal that would instantly warn the engineer.

"But," says Brennan, "if one broke down, the other gyroscope would hold her up--till ye could run her to a siding, anyway."

"But supposing the electric apparatus failed?" suggests a reporter--with visions of headlines, perhaps. "Supposing the motor driving the gyroscopes broke down; what then?"

"They'd run for a couple of days, with the momentum they've got," answers the inventor. "And for two or three hours, that 'ud keep her upright by itself."

On the short track at Gillingham there are no gradients to show what the car can do in the way of climbing, but here again the inventor is positive. She will run up a slope as steep as one in six, he says. There is no reason to doubt him; the five-foot model that he used to exhibit could climb much steeper inclines, run along a rope stretched six feet above the ground, or remain at rest upon it while the rope was swung to and fro. It would do all these things while carrying a man; and, for my part, I am willing to take Brennan's word.

Louis Brennan himself was by no means the least interesting feature of the demonstration. He has none of the look of the visionary, this man who has gone to war with time and space; neither had George Stephenson. He is short and thick-set, with a full face, a heavy moustache hiding his mouth, and heavy eyebrows. He is troubled a little with asthma, which makes him somewhat staccato and breathless in speech, and perhaps also accentuates the peculiar plaintive quality of his Irish voice. There is nothing in his appearance to indicate whether he is thirty-five or fifty-five. As a matter of fact, he is two years over the latter age, but a man ripe in life, with that persistence and belief in his work which is to engineers what passion is to a poet.

The technicalities of steel and iron come easily off his tongue; they are his native speech, in which he expresses himself most intimately. All his life he has been concerned with machines. He is the inventor of the Brennan steerable torpedo, whose adoption by the Admiralty made him rich and rendered possible the long years of study and experiment that went to the making of the mono-rail car. He has a touch of the rich man's complacency; it does not go ill with his kindly good humor and his single-hearted pride in his life work.

It is characteristic, I think, of his honesty of purpose and of the genius that is his driving force that hitherto he has concerned himself with scientific invention somewhat to the exclusion of the commercial aspects of his contrivance. He has had help in money and men from the British Government, which likewise placed the torpedo factory at his disposal; and the governments of India and--of all places--Kashmir have granted him subsidies. Railroad men from all parts of the world have seen his model; but he has not been ardent in the hunt for customers. Perhaps that will not be necessary; the mono-rail car should be its own salesman; but, in the meantime, it is not amiss that a great inventor should stand aloof from commerce.

But, for all the cheerful matter-of-factness of the man, he, too, has seen visions. There are times when he talks of the future as he hopes it will be, as he means it to be, when "transportation is civilization." Men are to travel then on a single rail, in great cars like halls, two hundred feet long, thirty to forty feet wide, whirling across continents at two hundred miles an hour--from New York to San Francisco between dawn and dawn.

Travel will no longer be uncomfortable. These cars, equipped like a hotel, will sweep along with the motion of an ice-yacht. They will not jolt over uneven places, or strain to mount the track at curves; in each one, the weariless gyroscopes will govern an unchanging equilibrium. Trustful Kashmir will advance from its remoteness to a place accessible from anywhere. Streetcar lines will no longer be a perplexity to paving authorities and anathema to other traffic; a single rail will be flush with the ground, out of the way of hoofs and tires. Automobiles will run on two wheels like a bicycle. It is to be a mono-rail world, soothed and assured by the drone of gyroscopes. By that time the patient ingenuity of inventors and engineers will have found the means to run the gyroscopes at a greater speed than is now possible, thus rendering it feasible to use a smaller wheel. It is a dream based on good, solid reasoning, backed by a great inventor's careful calculations; H.G. Wells has given a picture of it in the last of his stories of the future.

Practical railroad men have given to the mono-rail car a sufficiently warm welcome. They have been impressed chiefly by its suitability to the conditions of transportation in the great new countries, as, for instance, on that line of railway that is creeping north from the Zambesi to open up the copper deposits of northwestern Rhodesia, and on through Central Africa to its terminus at Cairo. Just such land as this helped to inspire Brennan. He was a boy when he first saw the endless plains of Australia, and out of that experience grew his first speculations about the future of railway travel. Such lands make positive and clear demands, if ever they are to be exploited for their full value to humanity. They need railways quickly laid and cheaply constructed; lines not too exacting in point of curves and gradients; and, finally, fast travel. It is not difficult to see how valuable the mono-rail would have been in such an emergency as the last Sudan War, when the army dragged a line of railway with it down toward Omdurman. Petrol-driven cars to replace the expensive steam locomotives, easy rapid transit instead of the laborious crawl through the stifling desert heat--a complete railway installation, swiftly and cheaply called into being, instead of a costly and cumbersome makeshift.

The car went back to her garage, or engine-shed, or stable, or whatever the railway man of the future shall decide to call it. Struts were pulled into position to hold her up, the motors were switched off, and the gyroscopes were left to run themselves down in forty-eight hours or so. When the mono-rail comes into general use, explained Brennan, there will be docks for the cars, with low brick walls built to slide under the platforms and take their weight.

While his guests assembled in a store-shed to drink champagne and eat sandwiches, he produced a big flat book, sumptuously bound, and told us how his patents were being infringed on in Germany. On that same day there was an exhibition of a mono-rail car on the Brennan principle taking place at the Zoölogical Gardens in Berlin; the book was its catalogue. It was full of imaginative pictures of trains fifty years hence, and thereto was appended sanguine letter-press. While there sounded in our ears the hum of the gyroscopes from the car housed in the rear, I translated one paragraph for him. It was to the effect that one Brennan, an Englishman, had conducted experiments with gyroscopes ten years ago, but the matter had gone no further.

"There, now," said Brennan.

* * * * *

(_Everybody's Magazine_)

A NEW POLITICAL WEDGE

THE WAY ST. LOUIS WOMEN DROVE A NINE-HOUR DAY INTO THE LAW

BY INIS H. WEED

It was the evening before the state primaries--a sweltering first of August night in the tenement district of St. Louis, where the factory people eat their suppers and have their beds. Men in shirt-sleeves and women with babies sat on the steps for a breath of air, and the streets were a noisy welter of children.

Two of the most enthusiastic girls in the Women's Trade Union League stopped before the group silhouetted in the gaslight at No. 32 and handed the men in the group this card:

REPUBLICAN VOTERS ----------------- It is the Women and Children that are the Victims of Manufacturers and Manufacturers Associations and it is the WORKING WOMAN AND CHILD that demands your protection at the PRIMARIES, TUESDAY, AUGUST 2nd Scratch ------- E.J. Troy Secretary St. Louis Manufacturers Association and run by them on the Republican Ticket for the Legislature in the 1st District Comprising WARDS 10, 11, 2,13, and 24. Precincts 14 of the 15th WARD. Precincts 1, 2, 3 of the 23rd WARD. Precincts 1, 2 of the 15th WARD. Precincts 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13 of the 14th WARD. Precincts 1, 4, 5 of the 9th Ward

"So yez would be afther havin' me scratch Misther Troy?" Mike Ryan ran his fingers through his stubby crop with a puzzled air. "Oi'm always fur plazin' the loidies, but Misther Troy, he's a frind o' mine. Shure, he shmokes a grand cigar, an' he shakes yer hand that hearty."

So Mike belonged to the long, long glad-hand line. Well, _personal_ arguments were necessary in his case then. That was the way the girls sized up Mike Ryan.

"But this ticket has something to do with your oldest girl."

"With Briddie?"

"It sure does, Mr. Ryan. Didn't I hear your wife tellin' what with the hard times an' all, you'd be puttin' Briddie in the mill this winter as soon as ever she's turned fourteen? Wouldn't you rather they worked her nine hours a day instead o' ten--such a soft little kid with such a lot o' growin' to do? There's a lot of us goin' to fight for a Nine-Hour Bill for the women and children this winter, an' do you think a manufacturers' representative, like Troy, is goin' to help us? Look at his record! See how he's fought the employees' interests in the legislature! That's a part of his job! _He_ won't vote for no Nine-Hour Bill!"

And the two girls went on to the next tenement.

They were only two of the hundreds of Trade Union girls who were "doing" the First Electoral District (about one-third of St. Louis) on the eve of the primaries. They were thorough. They had the whole district organized on the block system, and they went over each block house by house.

_A new move, is it not, this carefully organized effort of factory women to secure justice through the ballot-box?_

How have St. Louis women attained this clear vision that their industrial future is bound up in politics? It is a three years' story. Let us go back a little.

St. Louis is essentially a conservative city. First, it was an old French town; then a Southern town; then a German tradesman's town. With such strata superimposed one above the other, it could hardly be other than conservative. In addition, St. Louis was crippled in the war between the states. She lost her market. This made her slow.

In the 'eighties, this old French-Southern-German city began to recover from the ruin of her Southern trade. Little by little she took heart, for the great Southwest was being settled. There was a new field in which to build up trade. To-day St. Louis is _the_ great wholesale and jobbing depot, _the_ manufacturing city for that vast stretch of territory known as the Southwest.

Since 1890, great fortunes have been amassed--most of them, indeed, in the past ten years. There has been a rapid growth of industry. The old Southern city has become a soft-coal factory center. A pall of smoke hangs over the center of the city where the factories roar and pound. In the midst of this gloom the workfolk are creating rivers of beer, carloads of shoes and woodenware, millions of garments and bags, and the thousand and one things necessary to fill the orders of hundreds of traveling salesmen in the Southwest territory--and in the South, too, for St. Louis is winning back some of her old-time trade.

And the toil of their lifting hands and flying fingers has wrought a golden age for the men who control the capital and the tools. The men who manage have been shaking hands in their clubs for the past decade and congratulating themselves and each other over their drinks. "Yes, St. Louis is a grand old business town. Solid! No mushroom real-estate booms, you know, but a big, steady growth. New plants starting every month and the old ones growing. Then, when we get our deep waterway, that's going to be another big shove toward prosperity.

"Nice town to live in, too! Look at our handsome houses and clubs and public buildings. Never was anything like our World's Fair in the history of men--never! Look at our parks, too. When we get 'em linked together with speedways, where'll you find anything prettier?" Thus the money-makers in this heavy German town.

But what about the employees--the clerks and the factory workers? Have they been "in" on this "big shove toward prosperity?" Have they found it a "nice" town to live in?

No, to each count. For the people at the bottom of the ladder--for the people who tend machines, dig ditches, and stand behind the notion counter--St. Louis is a smoky town, where people have gray lungs instead of pink; a town where franchise grabbing and an antiquated system of taxation have their consequence of more than New York city rents. A town whose slums, says Lee Frankel, are the worst in the country. A town where wages are low (in some occupations twenty-five per cent lower than in New York City); where employment is irregular, the speeding-up tremendous, the number of women entering industry steadily increasing, and where the influx of immigrant labor is pulling down the wage scale and the standard of living.

The average wage of the shoe-workers in the East is $550 per year. In St. Louis it is $440 if work is steady--and rents are higher than in New York City.

It must be remembered that this sum is an average, and that thousands of shoe-workers earn, less than $440, for full-time work. The same is true of thousands engaged in other kinds of manufacture and in department stores.

Somehow the town looks different from the two ends of the ladder.

The government of Missouri and St. Louis has been about as little adapted to the needs of the industrial worker as it well could be. Men have been concerned not so much with social justice as with government protection for money-making schemes.

Business opportunity has depended much on _pliable state and municipal laws_. How the interests fought to keep them pliable; how St. Louis and Missouri became a world scandal in this steady growth to riches, we all know.

We know, too, the period of political reform. People thought the killing trouble in Missouri lay largely with the governmental machinery; and the optimists' faith in a state primary law, in the initiative and referendum as panacea, was white and shining. _They did not see that the underlying problem is industrial_.

After the reform wave had spent itself, the crooked people who had kept out of jail crept from their holes and went back to their old job of beating the game. The only essential difference is that their methods to-day are less raw and crude. They play a more gentlemanly game; but the people are still robbed of their rights.

Thus it came to pass that when the cheerful optimist went to the cupboard to get his poor dog a bone, why, lo! the cupboard was bare.

Meantime the dog has taken up the struggle for social justice on his own account, not singly but in groups and packs. As yet, although a deal of snuffing, running to and fro, barking, yelping, and fighting has been done, little has been accomplished; for one reason, because labor has lacked great organizers in St. Louis.

It has remained for the working women of St. Louis to make the industrial idea effective and to reach out with united single purpose to bend the political bow for their protection.

The Women's Trade Union League, whose real general is Cynthelia Isgrig Knefler, the most dynamic woman in St. Louis, received its first impetus only three years ago in the idealism of a brilliant young Irish girl, Hannah Hennessy, who died at Thanksgiving, 1910, a victim of exhausting work in a garment shop and of her own tireless efforts to organize the working girls of her city.

Hannah Hennessy was sent by the Garment Workers' Union to the National Labor Convention of 1907 at Norfolk, Virginia.

There she glimpsed for the first time the inevitable great world march of women following industry as machinery takes it out of the home and into the shop--saw these women, blind, unorganized, helpless to cope with the conditions offered by organized capital. The vision fired this Irish girl to a pitch of enthusiasm peculiar to the Celtic temperament. Back she came to St. Louis with the spirit of the Crusaders, her vision "the eight-hour day, the living wage to guard the home."

For the first time she saw the broken physical future of women who label three thousand five hundred bottles of beer an hour, and accept their cuts and gashes from the bursting bottles as inevitable; of women who put eyelets on a hundred cases of shoes a day, twenty-four pairs to the case; of women who must weave one thousand yards of hemp cloth a day to hold their job in a mill where the possible speed of woman and machine is so nicely calculated that the speediest person in the factory can weave only twelve hundred and sixty yards a day; where the lint from this hemp fills the air and is so injurious to eyes and throat that the company furnishes medical attendance free.

To undertake the huge task of organizing these thousands of St. Louis women would require not only vision but time and energy. Hannah's return meant being engulfed in the vast roar made by rows of throbbing, whirring machines, into one of which she sewed her vitality at dizzy speed ten hours a day. Vision she had, but training, time, energy--no!

It was at this point that she met Cynthelia Isgrig Knefler, a leisure-class young woman, who had been gripped by a sense of the unevenness of the human struggle. Cynthelia Knefler was groping her way through the maze of settlement activities to an appreciation of their relative futility in the face of long hours, low wages, and unsanitary shops.

Then the idealism of these two young women, born on the one hand of hard experience, on the other of a gentle existence, fused, and burned with a white light whose power is beginning to touch the lives of the women who toil and spin for the great Southwest.

Both women possessed fire and eloquence. Hannah's special contribution was first-hand experience; Mrs. Knefler's the knowledge of economic conditions necessary to an understanding of our complicated labor problems. Wise, sane, conservative, Mrs. Knefler not only helped Hannah to organize branch after branch of the Women's Trade Union League in the different industries, but set out at once to train strong, intelligent leaders. She stimulated them to a critical study of labor laws with the evolution of industry for background.

Night after night for two years Mrs. Knefler and Hannah were out organizing groups of girls. Mrs. Knefler's friends finally stopped remonstrating with her. Hannah, utterly self-forgetful despite ten hours a day in the mills, hurled herself into the new work. Evening after evening her mother protested anxiously, but Hannah, heedless of her own interest, would eat her supper and hurry across the city to help groups of new girls--American, Russian, Roumanian--a confused mass, to find themselves and pull together.

One June morning in 1910 the papers announced that the Manufacturers' Association and the Business Men's League had decided on E.J. Troy as their candidate to the State Legislature for the First District. His candidacy was also backed by the Republican machine. The papers went on to say that E.J. Troy was one of "our ablest and most popular fellow townsmen," that he had grown up in his district, had a host of friends, and might be expected to carry the primaries by a big majority.

That evening at the weekly dinner of the officers of the Women's Trade Union League at the Settlement, Mrs. Knefler hurried in: "Girls, have you seen the morning papers? Do you know that we've got E.J. Troy to contend with again?"

At the same moment in dashed Hannah Hennessy by another door, calling out, "Girls, they're goin' to put Troy on the carpet again!"

To both speeches came half a dozen excited replies that that's just what they were talking about!

Over the potatoes and meat and bread-pudding the situation was discussed in detail.

"Yes, 'twas him, all right, that thought up most of those tricky moves when we was tryin' to get our Nine-Hour Bill before," reflected a wiry, quick-motioned girl during a second's pause.

"Don't it just make you boil," began another, "when you think how he riled 'em up at every four corners in Missouri! He had every old country storekeeper standin' on end about that Nine-Hour Bill. He had 'em puttin' on their specs and callin' to mother to come and listen to this information the manufacturers had sent him:--how the labor unions was tryin' to get a Nine-Hour Bill for women passed; how it would keep their youngest girl, Bessie, from helping in the store when the farmers drove in of a Saturday night; and how it was a blow at American freedom."

"E.J. Troy's got to be squenched at the primaries," said a third, quietly and decisively.

"But how?" asked a more timid officer.

Bing! Mrs. Knefler got into action. There never was a woman for whom a difficult situation offered a more bracing tonic quality. The business meeting that followed fairly bristled with plans.

The girls' first move was to go before the Central Labor Body and ask them to indorse their objections to E.J. Troy. Definite action beyond indorsement the girls did not ask or expect. This much they got.

One day a little later, when Mrs. Knefler's campaign was beginning to take form, a representative of E.J. Troy called Mrs. Knefler on the telephone. The voice was bland, smooth, and very friendly. Wouldn't she--that is--ah--er--wouldn't her organization confer with Mr. E.J. Troy? He felt sure they would come to a pleasant and mutually helpful understanding.

Mrs. Knefler explained to the mouthpiece (take it either way) that it would be quite useless; that the stand of the League was taken on Mr. Troy's previous record and on the "interests" he represented; that while they had nothing against him in his private capacity, as a public servant they must oppose him. All this in Mrs. Knefler's suavest fashion. She feels intensely, but she never loses her self-possession. That's why she is such a formidable antagonist.

It was the last week in June--they had just a month before the primaries in which to rouse public opinion. The newspapers must help, of course.

Mrs. Knefler went to the editors. They were polite, they admitted the justice of her stand, but they were evasive. Mrs. Knefler opened her paper the next morning after she had made the rounds, to find not a single word about the danger to the working woman's interests.

What could the papers do? Weren't they in the hands of the "big cinch," as a certain combination of business men in St. Louis is known? Naturally they refused to print a line. You never step on your own toe, do you, or hit yourself in the face--if you can help it?

One must admit that things looked bad for the League. How were girls who raced at machines all day, who had neither money nor the voice of the press, to rouse this sluggish, corrupt city to the menace of sending to the legislature men like E.J. Troy, pledged body and soul to the manufacturers? How could they waken the public to woman's bitter necessity for shorter hours? The case looked hopeless, but Mrs. Knefler merely set her teeth, and got busy--decidedly busy.

She planned a campaign that no other St. Louis woman in her class would have had the courage to tackle. Mrs. Knefler is a member of the club that is the St. Louis clubwomen's "holy of holies." They have a club-house that just drips art, and they steep themselves in self-culture. As a group their consciousness of the city's industrial problems is still nebulous. The high light in which Mrs. Knefler's work must inevitably stand out is intensified by this background of self-culture women, with a few--only a few--rash daughters shivering around preparatory to taking their first cold plunge in the suffrage pool.

In such an atmosphere Cynthelia Knefler planned and carried out the biggest, the most modern and strategic campaign for the working woman ever waged outside a suffrage state. It was done simply because her heart was filled with the need of the thousands of helpless, unorganized girls for protection from the greed of organized capital.

There are moments when love gives vision and raises us head and shoulders above our group. So it was with Cynthelia Knefler, brought up in this conservative city, educated in a prunes-and-prisms girls' school, steeped in the Southern idea that no "lady" would ever let her picture or her opinions get into the newspapers, and that making public speeches was quite unthinkable!

The press was silent, but at least Mrs. Knefler could speak to the labor unions. She and two other women appealed to every labor union in St. Louis with a speech against E.J. Troy. They fought him--not as a man, but as a representative of the "big interests." Mrs. Knefler made seventy-six speeches in that one month before the primaries. That meant hurrying from hall to hall on hot summer nights and making two speeches, and sometimes three and four, while her friends were wearing white muslin and sitting on the gallery, to get the cool of the evening.

Mrs. Knefler's mind was working like a trip-hammer that month; seeking ways and means for rousing the busy, unthinking, conglomerate mass of people to the real issue. Money in the League was scarce. There are no rich members. But out of their wages and out of raffles and entertainments the League had a small reserve. Part of this they used to print sixty thousand cards. So that when you went in to get a shave your glance was caught, as the barber turned your head, by this red ticket "Scratch E.J. Troy." When you stopped in for a loaf of bread, a red ticket behind the glass of the case advised you to "Scratch E.J. Troy." When you went in for a drink, there leaped into sight dozens of little red tickets: "Scratch E.J. Troy."

There are always some men, though, who are moved only by the big, noisy things of life. Only Schneider's band sounds like music to them; only "Twenty Buckets of Blood, or Dead Man's Gulch" appeals to them as literature; and the only speaker is the man who rips out Old Glory and defies forked lightning. In a political campaign the little red ticket is lost on that kind of man. Mrs. Knefler understood this. So one hot July day huge posters in high, wood-block letters screamed from billboards and the walls of saloons and barber shops and labor halls: "Union men and friends, Scratch E.J. Troy."

All this printing and bill-posting was expensive for working girls. They came back at the Central Labor body again. "Your sympathy is great, but your funds are better," they said.

"You've tackled too big a job," the Labor leaders told the girls, with a benevolent air. "He's the candy around this town--E.J. Troy is. It would take a mint of money to beat E.J. Troy."

However, the Central body instructed the legislative committee of five to give the girls every help, and they did good service. But the Central Body didn't instruct the Committee to go down very far into the treasury.

July was wearing on. The League hurled itself upon the press once more. Surely after so much speech-making and bill-posting the editors would accord them some recognition merely as news. Silence--absolute silence in the next day's papers, and the next.

How did they accomplish the next move? That is one of the secrets. Their money was gone, the silence of the press had crushed them with an overwhelming sense of helplessness, but nevertheless they turned the trick. They reached the upper and middle class readers of the South Side District, Troy's district, which the papers were determined to keep as much in ignorance as possible. All one night, silent, swift-moving men whipped the paste across the billboards of that section and slapped on huge posters, so that when Papa Smith and young Mr. Jones and Banker Green came out of their comfortable houses next morning on their way to business, they neglected their papers to find out why they should "scratch E.J. Troy."

The day of the primaries was almost come. Now to reach the dull fellows who hadn't seen the cards and the huge posters, who use their eyes only to avoid obstacles. One night, as the factory whistles blew the signal of dismissal, the men in the lines of operators who filed out of shop and mills found themselves mechanically taking and examining this ticket handed them by League girls, who had gone off their job a bit early and had their wages docked in order to work for the larger good.

The Committee of the Central Body was now openly active in their behalf. Men as well as women were passing out the tickets.

Then came the eve of the election. Busy pairs of girls who had already done ten hours' work were going over E.J. Troy's district, with its sections of rich and poor and well-to-do. Throbbing feet that had carried the body's weight ten hot, fatiguing hours hurried up and down the blocks, climbed flight after flight of stairs, and stood at door after door.

"Say, kid, ain't it the limit that a woman can't vote on her own business?" said one girl too another after they had finished the one hundred and forty-fifth family and tried to explain their stake in the election to a bigoted "head of the house."

On the morning of the primaries Mrs. Schurz, as she took the coffee off the stove, remonstrated with her oldest daughter, Minna. "Vat, Minna, you ain't goin' to stay out of de mill today and lose your pay?

"Yes, I be, _Mutter_," retorted Minna, with a tightening of the lips and a light in her eyre. "I'm goin' to the polls to hand out cards to the voters. I'm goin'. I don't care if I lose my job even."

"Oh, Minna, dat is bad, and me wid four _kinder_ to eat de food. Where is de _fleisch_ and de _brot_ widout your wages?" Mrs. Schurz's heavy face wore the anxious despondence so common to the mothers of the poor.

The girl hesitated, then tightened her lips once more. "I've got to take the risk, _Mutter_. It'll come out right--it's got to. Do you want the rest of the children workin' ten hours a day too? Look at me! I ain't got no looks any more. I'm too dead tired to go out of a Saturday night. I can't give nobody a good time any more. I guess there won't be no weddin' bells for mine--ever. But the kids"--pointing to the inside bedroom, where the younger girls were still asleep--"the kids is a-goin' to keep their looks."

So at six o'clock Minna joined the relays of working girls who--many of them, like Minna, at personal risk and sacrifice--handed out cards all day to each man who entered. Thus the men were reminded at the last moment of the working woman's stake in the election. "Scratch E.J. Troy" was before their eyes as they crossed their tickets.

Every moment of the day there were alert girls to make this final quiet appeal for justice. They were serious, dignified. There was no jeering, no mirth on the part of the men at the novelty of this campaign--nothing to make any woman self-conscious.

The girls were quiet enough outwardly, but the inner drama was keyed high. Had all their speech-making, placarding, bill-posting and the canvassing of factories, blocks, and primaries--had all their little savings, their risk and personal sacrifice accomplished anything? That was what the girls asked themselves. The thermometer of their hope rose and fell with the rumors of the day. The fathers of the Central Labor Body patted them on the head benevolently and tried to ease their fall, if they were to fall, by saying that anyway it would be something to make Troy run third on his ticket.

Seven o'clock, and the girls were leaving the primaries in twos and threes, tired but excitedly discussing the situation. Between hope and despondency the comment varied on the streets, at the supper-tables, and in the eager, waiting groups of girls on tenement steps and stairs.

At last came the authentic returns. E.J. Troy ran _3,338 votes behind his ticket. With a silent press and practically no money, the working women had defeated one of the most popular men in St. Louis._

A man pledged to the interests of labor legislation won his place. That made the outlook better for the Women's Nine-Hour Bill, and thousands of working girls tumbled into bed, tired, but with new hope.

Every newspaper in St. Louis failed to comment on the victory. The slaves who sit at the editorial desk said they couldn't--they weren't "let." _So the most hopeful feature in St. Louis politics has never been commented on by the American press._

As for Hannah Hennessy--she had been too ill to share in the active work of the campaign, but her influence was everywhere--a vital force, a continual inspiration.

Week by week her cheeks grew thinner, her cough more rasping. But after the campaign against Troy was over, she turned with the same intensity of interest to the National Convention of the American Federation of Labor which was to meet there in November. For a year she had been making plans, eager to make this convention a landmark in the history of women's labor. But in November she was in bed by the little grate fire in the family sitting-room. And when convention week came with its meetings a scant three blocks from her home, she could be there in spirit only; she waited restlessly for the girls to slip in after the daily sessions and live them over again for her.

On Thanksgiving Day, between the exhausting strain of high-tension work and the zeal of the young reformer, her beautiful life and brilliant fire were burned out. The committee for the prevention of tuberculosis added her case to their statistics, and the League girls bore her into the lighted church.

In the winter of 1910-11 the leaders of all the labor and social forces of St. Louis, all the organizations for various forms of uplift, united under an able secretary and began their custom of lunching together once a week to discuss the pending social legislation. They played a good game. First, there was the educational effect of their previous legislative campaign to build on. Then there was all the economy and impetus gained from consolidation. They knew the rules of the game better, too. Their plans were more carefully laid and executed.

With a more wary and sophisticated eye on the Manufacturers' Association and a finger in the buttonhole of every legislator, the socially awake of St. Louis have secured _more humane child labor legislation, and the Nine-Hour Day for women and children with no exception in favor of shop-keepers_.

Knowing the sickening fate of industrial legislation in certain other states when tried before judges whose social vision is fifty years behind the times, the winners of this new bill began to wait tensely enough for its testing. So far, however, the Women's Nine-Hour law has not been contested. It has also been exceptionally well enforced, considering that there are only four factory inspectors for all the myriad shops and mills of this manufacturing city of the Southwest, and only seven factory inspectors for the whole state of Missouri.

Meanwhile St. Louis's new political wedge, the Women's Trade Union League, continues to be a perfectly good political wedge. When there is legislation wanted, all kinds of organizations invariably call upon this league of the working women, whose purpose is a wider social justice.

St. Louis is another American city where the working women are discovering that they can do things if they only think so.

* * * * *

(_The Delineator_)

Illustrated by two pen-and-ink sketches made by a staff artist.

THE JOB LADY

GIVES THE YOUNG WAGE-EARNER A FAIR WORKING CHANCE

BY MARY E. TITZEL

The Jones School, the oldest public school building in Chicago, is at Harrison Street and Plymouth Court. When it was new, it was surrounded by "brown-stone fronts," and boys and girls who to-day are among the city's most influential citizens learned their A-B-C's within its walls. Now, the office-buildings and printing-houses and cheap hotels and burlesque shows that mark the noisy, grimy district south of the "loop" crowd in upon it; and only an occasional shabby brown-stone front survives in the neighborhood as a tenement house. But in the Jones School, the process of making influential citizens is still going on. For there the "Job Lady" has her office, her sanctum.

Job Lady is a generic term that includes Miss Anne Davis, director of the Bureau of Vocational Supervision, and her four assistants. The Bureau--which is the newest department of Chicago's school system--is really an employment agency, but one that is different from any other employment agency in the United States. It is concerned solely with a much-neglected class of wage-earners--children from fourteen to sixteen years of age; and its chief purpose is, not to find positions for its "patrons," but to keep them in school.

It was founded as a result of the discovery that there were not nearly enough jobs in Chicago to go around among the twelve or fifteen thousand children under sixteen years of age who left school each year to go to work; also that, though a statute of the State required a child either to work or to go to school, there were about twenty-three thousand youngsters in the city who were doing neither. The law had made no provision for keeping track of the children once they had left school. No one knew what had become of them. So Miss Davis, acting as special investigator for the School of Civics and Philanthropy and the Chicago Women's Club, set to work to find out.

She discovered--and she can show you statistics to prove it--that "bummin'" around, looking aimlessly for work, brought many a boy and girl, unable to withstand the temptations of the street, into the Juvenile Court. And she found, as other statistics bear witness, that the fate of the children who found jobs was scarcely better than that of their idle brothers and sisters. Undirected, they took the first positions that offered, with the result that most of them were engaged in "blind-alley" occupations, unskilled industries that offered little, if any, chance for advancement and that gave no training for the future. The pay was poor; it averaged two dollars a week. Working conditions were frequently unhealthful. Moral influences of shop and factory and office were often bad. For the most part, the industries that employed children were seasonal; and many boys and girls were forced into long periods of inactivity between positions. This state of affairs, combined with a natural tendency to vary the monotony of life by shifting, on the slightest pretext, from one job to another, was making of many children that bane of modern industry, the "casual" laborer.

The Bureau--started informally in the course of initial investigations and kept alive through the grace of the Women's Club, until the Board of Education was ready to adopt it--has been able to do much in amelioration of the lot of the fourteen-to-sixteen-year-old worker. But no statistics it can produce are as telling as the sight of the Bureau in operation. Sit with your eyes and ears open, in a corner of the office in the Jones School and you will make the acquaintance of one of the humanest employment agencies in the world; also you will learn more about such grave subjects as the needs of our educational system and the underlying causes of poverty than you can learn out of fat treatises in a year.

"Why do you want to leave school?" That is the first question the Job Lady asks of each new applicant who comes to the Bureau for work. Perhaps the child has heard that question before; for in those schools from which the greatest numbers of children go out at the age of fourteen, Miss Davis and her assistants hold office hours and interview each boy or girl who shows signs of restlessness. They give informal talks to the pupils of the sixth and seventh grades about the opportunities open to boys and girls under sixteen; they discuss the special training offered by the schools and show the advisability of remaining in school as long as possible; they try to find an opportunity of talking over the future with each member of the graduating class.

But even when the way has been paved for it, the question, "Why do you want to leave school?" brings to light the most trivial of reasons. In very few cases is it economic necessity that drives a child to work.

"I ain't int'rusted," explained one boy to Miss Davis. "I jest sits."

The Job Lady is often able to convince even the sitters that school is, after all, the best place for boys and girls under sixteen. She persuaded between twenty-five and thirty per cent. of the children that applied at the Bureau last year to return to school. Sometimes all she had to do was to give the child a plain statement of the facts in the case--of the poor work and poor pay and lack of opportunity in the industries open to the fourteen-year-old worker. Often she found it necessary only to explain what the school had to offer. One boy was sent to Miss Davis by a teacher who had advised him to go to work, although he had just completed the seventh grade, because he had "too much energy" for school! He was a bright boy--one capable of making something of himself, if the two important, formative years that must pass before he was sixteen were not wasted; so he was transferred from his school to one where vocational work was part of the curriculum--where he could find an outlet for his superfluous energy in working with his hands. Now he is doing high-school work creditably; and he has stopped talking about leaving school.

But it isn't always the whim of the child that prompts him to cut short his education. Sometimes he is driven into the industrial world by the ignorance or greed of his parents. Miss Davis tells of one little girl who was sacrificed to the great god Labor because the four dollars she brought home weekly helped to pay the instalments on a piano, and of a boy who was taken from eighth grade just before graduation because his father had bought some property and needed a little extra money. Frequently boys and girls are put to work because of the impression that schools have nothing of practical value to offer.

Still, even the most miserly and most stubborn and most ignorant of parents can sometimes be made to see the wisdom of keeping a child in school until he is sixteen. They are won to the Job Lady's point of view by a statement of the increased opportunity open to the child who is sixteen. Or they are brought to see that the schools are for _all_ children, and that work, on the contrary, is very bad for some children.

But often all the Job Lady's efforts fail. The child is incurably sick of school, the parent remains obdurate. Or, perhaps, there is a very real need of what little the son or daughter can earn. Often some one can be found who will donate books, or a scholarship ranging from car-fare to a few dollars a week. Over four hundred dollars is being given out in scholarships each month, and every scholarship shows good returns. But often no scholarship is forthcoming; and there is nothing for the Job Lady to do but find a position for the small applicant.

Then begins the often difficult process of fitting the child to some available job. The process starts, really, with fitting the job to the child, and that is as it should be. The Job Lady always tries to place the boys and girls that come to her office where there will be some chance for them to learn something. But jobs with a "future" are few for the fourteen-year-old worker. The trades will not receive apprentices under the age of sixteen; business houses and the higher-grade factories won't bother with youngsters, because they are too unreliable; as one man put it, with unconscious irony, too "childish." So the Job Lady must be content to send the boys out as office and errand boys or to find employment for the girls in binderies and novelty shops. But she investigates every position before a child is sent to fill it; and if it is found to be not up to standard in wages or working conditions, it is crossed off the Bureau's list.

The Job Lady has established a minimum wage of four dollars a week. No children go out from the Bureau to work for less than that sum, excepting those who are placed in the part-time schools of some printing establishments, or in dressmaking shops, where they will be learning a useful trade. This informal minimum-wage law results in a raising of the standard of payment in a shop.

In such manner, the Bureau makes over many a job to fit the worker. But the fitting process works both ways. The Job Lady knows that it is discouraging, often demoralizing, for a child to be turned away, just because he is not the "right person" for a place. So she tries to make sure that he _is_ the right person. That she succeeds very often, the employers who have learned to rely on the Bureau will testify.

"If you haven't a boy for me now," one man said to Miss Davis, "I'll wait until you get one. It will save time in the end, for you always send just the boy I want."

The secret of finding the right boy lies, first of all, in discovering what he wants to do; and, next, in judging whether or not he can do it. Very often, he has not the least idea of what he wants to do. He has learned many things in school, but little or nothing of the industrial world in which he must live. To many boys and girls, especially to those from the poorest families, an "office job" is the acme of desire. It means to them, pitifully enough, a respectability they have never been quite able to encompass. As a result, perhaps, of our slow-changing educational ideals, they scorn the trades.

Into the trades, however, Miss Davis finds it possible to steer many a boy who is obviously unfitted for the career of lawyer, bank clerk, or, vaguely, "business man." And she is able to place others in the coveted office jobs, with their time-honored requirement: "only the neat, honest, intelligent boy need apply."

Often, given the honesty and intelligence, she must manufacture a child to fit the description. Sometimes all that is necessary is a hint about soap and water and a clean collar. Sometimes the big cupboard in her office must yield up a half-worn suit or a pair of shoes that some luckier boy has outgrown. Occasionally, hers is the delicate task of suggesting to a prematurely sophisticated little girl that some employers have an unreasonable prejudice against rouge and earrings; or that even the poorest people can wash their underwear. Manners frequently come in for attention.

When the boys or girls are placed, the Bureau, unlike most employment agencies, does not wash its hands of them. Its work has only begun. Each child is asked to report concerning his progress from time to time; and if he does not show up, a vocational supervisor keeps track of him by visits to home or office, or by letters, written quarterly. The Job Lady is able to observe by this method, whether or not the work is suitable for the child, or whether it offers him the best available chance; and she is often able to check the habit of "shifting" in its incipient stages. She is continually arbitrating and making adjustments, always ready to listen to childish woes and to allay them when she can.

Not long ago, I went to a conference on Vocational Guidance. There I heard, from the mouths of various men, what hope the work being done by the Bureau held for the future. One showed how it had infused new blood into the veins of an anemic educational system, how it was making the schools a more efficient preparation for life--the life of factory and shop and office--than they ever had been before.

Another man pointed out that the Bureau, through the schools, would strike at one of the deep roots of poverty--incompetency. More people are poor for lack of proper equipment to earn a living and proper direction in choosing a vocation, he said, than for any other one reason.

A third man saw in the Vocational Bureau a means of keeping a control over employing interests. "You treat our children well, and you pay them well," the schools of the future, he declared, would be able to say to the employer, as the Bureau was already saying, "or we won't permit our children to work for you." A fourth had a vision of what the Bureau and the new education it heralded could do toward educating the men and women of the future to a knowledge of their rights as workers.

And then there came a man with a plea. "All of these things," he said, "the Bureau can accomplish--must accomplish. But let us not forget, in our pursuance of great ends, that it is the essential _humanness_ of the Bureau that has made it what it is."

Here was the final, immeasurable measure of its success. It counts, of course, that the Job Lady helps along big causes, drives at the roots of big ills; but, somehow it counts more that an anxious-faced youngster I saw at the Bureau should have brought his woes to her. His employer had given him a problem to solve--and he couldn't do it. He was afraid he'd lose his job. He had never been to the Bureau before, but "a boy you got a job for said you'd help me out," he explained--and he was sent off happy, the problem solved.

It counts too, that Tillie, who had once found work through the Bureau, but was now keeping house for her father, should turn to the Bureau for aid. Her father had been sick and couldn't afford to buy her anything new to wear. "My dress is so clumsy," she wrote, "that the boys laugh at me when I go out in the street." She was confident that the Job Lady would help her--and her confidence was not misplaced. It counts that the Jameses and Henrys and Johns and Marys and Sadies come, brimming over with joy, to tell the Job Lady of a "raise" or of a bit of approbation from an employer. All the funny, grateful, pathetic letters that pour in count unspeakably!

To hundreds of boys and girls and parents the Job Lady has proved a friend. There has been no nonsense about the matter. She has not sentimentalized over her work; she has not made it smack of charity. Indeed, there is no charity about it. The boys and girls and parents who come to the Job Lady are, for the most part, just average boys and girls and parents, as little paupers as millionaires. They are the people who are generally lost sight of in a democracy, where one must usually be well-to-do enough to, buy assistance, or poor enough to accept it as alms, if he is to have any aid at all in solving the problems of life.

It is a great thing for the schools, through the Bureau, to give to these average men and women and children practical aid in adjusting their lives to the conditions under which they live and work, and to do it with a sympathy and an understanding--a humanness that warms the soul.

* * * * *

_(Kansas City Star)_

Two illustrations with the captions: 1. "Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher," an Illustration in the "Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (Harpers), which met the Author's Approval.

2. Mrs. Laura Frazer, the Original "Becky Thatcher," Pouring Tea at Mark Twain's Boyhood Home in Hannibal, Mo., on the Anniversary of the Author's Birth.

MARK TWAIN'S FIRST SWEETHEART, BECKY THATCHER, TELLS OF THEIR CHILDHOOD COURTSHIP

To Mrs. Laura Frazer of Hannibal, Mo., Mark Twain's immortal "Adventures of Tom Sawyer" is a rosary, and the book's plot is the cord of fiction on which beads of truth are strung. In the sunset of her life she tells them over, and if here and there among the roseate chaplet is a bead gray in coloring, time has softened the hues of all so they blend exquisitely. This bead recalls a happy afternoon on the broad Mississippi with the boys and girls of seventy years ago; the next brings up a picture of a schoolroom where a score of little heads bob over their books and slates, and a third visualizes a wonderful picnic excursion to the woods with a feast of fried chicken and pie and cake.

For Mrs. Frazer is the original of Becky Thatcher, the childhood sweetheart of Tom Sawyer, and the original of Tom Sawyer, of course, was Mark Twain himself.

"Yes, I was the Becky Thatcher of Mr. Clemens's book," Mrs. Frazer said the other day, as she sat in the big second floor front parlor of the old time mansion in Hannibal, which is now the Home for the Friendless. Mrs. Frazer is the matron of the home.

"Of course I suspected it when I first read the 'Adventures of Tom Sawyer,'" she went on. "There were so many incidents which I recalled as happening to Sam Clemens and myself that I felt he had drawn a picture of his memory of me in the character of Judge Thatcher's little daughter. But I never confided my belief to anyone. I felt that it would be a presumption to take the honor to myself.

"There were other women who had no such scruples--some of them right here in Hannibal--and they attempted to gain a little reflected notoriety by asserting that they were the prototypes of the character. When Albert Bigelow Paine, Mr. Clemens's biographer, gathered the material for his life of the author, he found no fewer than twenty-five women, in Missouri and elsewhere, each of whom declared she was Becky Thatcher, but he settled the controversy for all time on Mr. Clemens's authority when the biography was published. In it you will find that Becky Thatcher was Laura Hawkins, which was my maiden name.

"We were boy and girl sweethearts, Sam Clemens and I," Mrs. Frazer said with a gentle little laugh.

She is elderly, of course, since it was seventy years ago that her friendship with Mark Twain began, and her hair is gray. But her heart is young, and she finds in her work of mothering the twenty-five boys and girls in her charge the secret of defying age. On this particular afternoon she wore black and white striped silk, the effect of which was a soft gray to match her hair, and her placid face was lighted with smiles of reminiscence.

"Children are wholly unartificial, you know," she explained. "They do not learn to conceal their feelings until they begin to grow up. The courtship of childhood, therefore, is a matter of preference and of comradeship. I liked Sam better than the other boys, and he liked me better than the other girls, and that was all there was to it."

If you had seen this lady of Old Missouri as she told of her childhood romance you would have recalled instinctively Mark Twain's description:

A lovely little blue eyed creature with yellow hair plaited into two long tails, white summer frock and embroidered pantalettes. * * * He worshipped this new angel with furtive eye until he saw that she had discovered him; then he pretended he did not know she was present, and began to "show off" in all sorts of absurd boyish ways, in order to win her admiration.

And you would have found it easy to conceive that this refined, gentle countenance once was apple cheeked and rosy, that the serene gray eyes once sparkled as blue as the Father of Waters on a sunny day and that the frosted hair was as golden as the sunshine.

"I must have been 6 or 7 years old when we moved to Hannibal," Mrs. Frazer said. "My father had owned a big mill and a store and a plantation worked by many negro slaves further inland, but he found the task of managing all too heavy for him, and so he bought a home in Hannibal and was preparing to move to it when he died. My mother left the mill and the plantation in the hands of my grown brothers--I was one of ten children, by the way--and came to Hannibal. Our house stood at the corner of Hill and Main streets, and just a few doors west, on Hill Street, lived the Clemens family.

"I think I must have liked Sam Clemens the very first time I saw him. He was different from the other boys. I didn't know then, of course, what it was that made him different, but afterward, when my knowledge of the world and its people grew, I realized that it was his natural refinement. He played hookey from school, he cared nothing at all for his books and he was guilty of all sorts of mischievous pranks, just as Tom Sawyer is in the book, but I never heard a coarse word from him in all our childhood acquaintance.

"Hannibal was a little town which hugged the steamboat landing in those days. If you will go down through the old part of the city now you will find it much as it was when I was a child, for the quaint old weatherbeaten buildings still stand, proving how thoroughly the pioneers did their work. We went to school, we had picnics, we explored the big cave--they call it the Mark Twain Cave now, you know."

"Were you lost in the cave, as Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher were?" Mrs. Frazer was asked.

"No; that is a part of the fiction of the book," she answered. "As a matter of fact, some older persons always went with us. Usually my older sister and Sam Clemens's older sister, who were great friends, were along to see that we didn't get lost among the winding passages where our candles lighted up the great stalagmites and stalactites, and where water was dripping from the stone roof overhead, just as Mr. Clemens has described it."

And then she proceeded to divorce the memory of Mark Twain from "the little red schoolhouse" forever.

"In those days we had only private schools," Mrs. Frazer said. "If there were public schools I never heard of them. The first school I went to was taught by Mr. Cross, who had canvassed the town and obtained perhaps twenty-five private pupils at a stated price for the tuition of each. I do not know how much Mr. Cross charged, but when I was older I remember that a young woman teacher opened a school after getting twenty-five pupils at $25 each for the year's tuition. I shall never forget that Mr. Cross did not belie his name, however, or that Sam Clemens wrote a bit of doggerel about him."

She quoted it this way:

Cross by name and Cross by nature, Cross hopped out of an Irish potato.

"The schoolhouse was a 2-story frame building with a gallery across the entire front," she resumed. "After a year together in that school Sam and I went to the school taught by Mrs. Horr. It was then he used to write notes to me and bring apples to school and put them on my desk. And once, as a punishment for some prank, he had to sit with the girls and occupied a vacant seat by me. He didn't seem to mind the penalty at all," Mrs. Frazer added with another laugh, "so I don't know whether it was effective as a punishment or not.

"We hadn't reached the dancing age then, but we went to many 'play parties' together and romped through 'Going to Jerusalem,' 'King William was King George's Son' and 'Green Grow the Rushes--O.'

"Judge Clemens, Sam's father, died and left the family in straitened circumstances, and Sam's schooling ended there. He began work in the printing office to help out, and when he was 17 or 18 he left Hannibal to go to work in St. Louis. He never returned to live, but he visited here often in the years that followed."

Mrs. Frazer's own story formed the next chapter of her narrative. A young physician, Doctor Frazer of Madisonville, which was a little inland village in Ralls County, adjoining, came often to Hannibal and courted pretty Laura Hawkins. When she was 20 they were married and went to live in the new house Doctor Frazer had built for his bride at Madisonville. There they reared two sons until they required better school facilities, when they went to Rensselaer, also in Ralls County, but nearer Hannibal. They lived in Rensselaer until Doctor Frazer's death, when the mother and younger son moved to the General Canby farm. This son's marriage led to Mrs. Frazer's return to Hannibal twenty-two years ago. She was offered the position of matron at the Home for the Friendless, and for twenty-two years she has managed it. The boys and girls who have gone out from it in nearly every case have become useful men and women as a result of her guidance at the critical period of their life, for the girls remain in the home until they are 14 and the boys until they are 12. The old mansion which houses the score or more of children always there is to be abandoned in the spring for a new and modern building, a gift from a wealthy citizen to the private charity which has conducted the institution so long without aid from city, county or state.

It was given to Mrs. Frazer and Mark Twain to renew their youthful friendship after a lapse of half a century. In 1908 Mrs. Frazer made a trip East, accepting an invitation to visit Albert Bigelow Paine at Redding, Conn. Mr. Paine had visited Hannibal two years before in a search for material for his biography of Mark Twain and had made Mrs. Frazer's acquaintance then. He mentioned the approaching visit to the great humorist and Mark Twain promptly sat down and wrote Mrs. Frazer that she must be a guest also at Stormfield, his Redding estate. So it came about that the one-time little Laura Hawkins found herself lifting the knocker at the beautiful country home of Mark Twain in the Connecticut hills.

"The door was opened by Clara Clemens, Mr. Clemens's daughter," Mrs. Frazer said, "and she threw her arms about me and cried:

'I know you, for I've seen your picture, and father has told me about you. You are Becky Thatcher, and I'm happy to see you.'

"And that," Mrs. Frazer said, "was the first time I really knew I was the original of the character, although I had suspected it for thirty years. Clara Clemens, you know, even then was a famous contralto, and Ossip Gabrilowitsch, whose wife she is now, was 'waiting' on her at the time.

"It was a wonderful visit," she went on. "Mr. Clemens took me over Stormfield. It must have been a tract of three hundred acres. We went through the fields, which were not fields at all, since they were not cultivated, and across a rustic bridge over a little rushing brook which boiled and bubbled among the rocks in the bed of a great ravine, and we sat down under a rustic arbor and talked of the old days in Hannibal when he was a little boy and I a little girl, before he went out into the world to win fame and before I lived my own happy married life. Mr. Clemens had that rare faculty of loyalty to his friends which made the lapse of fifty years merely an interim. It was as if the half century had rolled away and we were there looking on the boy and girl we had been.

"Mr. Clemens had won worldwide fame; he had been a welcome guest in the palaces of Old World rulers and lionized in the great cities of his own country. He had been made a Doctor of Literature by the University of Oxford, the highest honor of the greatest university in the world, and yet there at Stormfield to me he seemed to be Sam Clemens of old Hannibal, rather than the foremost man in the American world of letters.

"That, I believe, is my most treasured memory of Sam Clemens," Mrs. Frazer ended. "I love to think of him as the curly-headed, rollicking, clean minded little boy I played with as a child, but I like better still to think of him as he was in his last days, when all that fame and fortune had showered on him did not, even momentarily, make him waver in his loyalty to the friends of his youth."

In Hannibal stands the quaint little 2-story house flush with the sidewalk which Samuel Langhorne Clemens's father built in 1844, after he had moved to the old river town from Florida, Mo., where the great story teller was born. Restored, it houses many reminders of the author and is maintained as a memorial to Mark Twain. There, November 30, the eighty-second anniversary of the birth of Clemens, the people of Hannibal and persons from many cities widely scattered over America will go to pay tribute to his memory.

And there they will see Becky Thatcher in the flesh, silkengowned, gray-haired and grown old, but Becky Thatcher just the same, seated in a chair which once was Mark Twain's and pouring tea at a table on which the author once wrote. And if the aroma of the cup she hands out to each visitor doesn't waft before his mind a vision of a curly-headed boy and a little girl with golden long-tails at play on the wharf of old Hannibal while the ancient packets ply up and down the rolling blue Mississippi, there is nothing whatever in the white magic of association.

* * * * *

(_Milwaukee Journal_)

FOUR MEN OF HUMBLE BIRTH HOLD WORLD DESTINY IN THEIR HANDS

BY WILLIAM G. SHEPHERD

WASHINGTON--Out of a dingy law office in Virginia, out of a cobbler's shop in Wales, out of a village doctor's office in France and from a farm on the island of Sicily came the four men who, in the grand old palace at Versailles, will soon put the quietus on the divine right of kings.

In 1856, three days after Christmas, a boy named Thomas was born in the plain home of a Presbyterian parson in Staunton, Va. When this boy was 4 years old, there was born in Palermo, on the island of Sicily, 4,000 miles away, a black-eyed Sicilian boy. Into the town of Palermo, on that July day, came Garibaldi, in triumph, and the farmer-folk parents of the boy, in honor of the occasion, named their son Victor, after the new Italian king, whom Garibaldi had helped to seat.

Three years later still, when Thomas was playing the games of 7-year-old boys down in Virginia, and when Victor, at 3, spent most of his time romping on the little farm in Sicily, there was born in the heart of the foggy, grimy town of Manchester, in England, a boy named David. His home was the ugliest of the homes of all the three. It was of red brick, two stories high, with small windows, facing a busy stone sidewalk. Its rooms were small and little adorned, and not much hope of greatness could ever have sprung from that dingy place.

There was one other boy to make up the quartet. His name was George. He was a young medical student in Paris twenty-two years old when David was born in England. He thought all governments ought to be republics, and, by the time he was 25, he came over to the United States to study the American republic, and, if possible, to make a living over here as a doctor. He had been born in a little village in France, in a doctor's household.

While George was in New York, almost starving for lack of patients, and later, while he taught French in a girls' school in Stamford, Conn., little Thomas, down in Virginia, at the age of 10 years, had buckled down to his studies, with the hope of being a lawyer; Victor, at 6, was studying in a school in far-away Palermo, and David, at 3, fatherless by this time, was getting ready for life in the home of his uncle, a village shoemaker, in a little town of Wales. The only city-born boy of the four, he was taken by fate, when his father died, to the simplicity of village life and saved, perhaps, from the sidewalks.

The years whirled on. George married an American girl and went back to France, to write and teach and doctor. Thomas went to a university to study law. David, seven years younger, spent his evenings and spare time in his uncle's shoe shop or in the village blacksmith shop, listening to his elders talk over the affairs of the world.

Victor, with law as his vision, crossed the famous old straits of Messina from his island home and went to Naples to study in the law school there.

In the '80s things began to happen. Down in Virginia, Thomas was admitted to the bar. In old Wales, David, who, by this time, had learned to speak English, was admitted to practice law in 1884, and, in 1885, the black-eyed, hot-blooded Sicilian Victor received the documents that entitled him to practice at the Italian bar.

George, in France, by this time had dropped medicine. Bolshevism had arisen there in the form of the Commune, and he had fought it so desperately that he had been sentenced to death. He hated kings, and he also hated the autocracy of the mob. He fled from Paris.

Soon they will sit at a peace table together, the first peace table in all human history from which divine-right kings are barred. The future and the welfare of the world lie in their four pairs of hands. Their full names are: Georges Clemenceau, premier of France; David Lloyd George, prime minister of England; Victor Emanuel Orlando, premier of Italy, and Thomas Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States.

* * * * *

_(Saturday Evening Post)_

Three half-tone reproductions of wash-drawings by a staff artist.

THE CONFESSIONS OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR'S WIFE

A college professor--as may be proved by any number of novels and plays--is a quaint, pedantic person, with spectacles and a beard, but without any passions--except for books. He takes delight in large fat words, but is utterly indifferent to such things as clothes and women--except the dowdy one he married when too young to know better.... It is always so interesting to see ourselves as authors see us.

Even more entertaining to us, however, is the shockingly inconsistent attitude toward academic life maintained by practical people who know all about real life--meaning the making and spending of money.

One evening soon after I became a college professor's wife I enjoyed the inestimable privilege of sitting next to one of America's safest and sanest business men at a dinner party given in his honor by one of the trustees of the university.

When he began to inform me, with that interesting air of originality which often accompanies the platitudes of our best citizens, that college professors were "mere visionary idealists--all academic theories; no practical knowledge of the world"--and so on, as usual--I made bold to interrupt:

"Why, in the name of common sense, then, do you send your own sons to them to be prepared for it! Is such a policy safe? Is it sane? Is it practical?" And I am afraid I laughed in the great man's face.

He only blinked and said "Humph!" in a thoroughly businesslike manner; but throughout the rest of the evening he viewed me askance, as though I had become a dangerous theorist too--by marriage. So I turned my back on him and wondered why such a large and brilliant dinner was given for such a dull and uninteresting Philistine!

This shows, by the way, how young and ignorant I was. The mystery was explained next day, when it was intimated to me that I had made what is sometimes called, even in refined college circles, a break. Young professors' wives were not expected to trifle with visitors of such eminent solvency; but I had frequently heard the materialistic tendencies of the age condemned in public, and had not been warned in private that we were all supposed to do our best to work this materialist for a million, with which to keep up the fight against materialism.

In the cloistered seclusion of our universities, dedicated to high ideals, more deference is shown to the masters of high finance than to the masters of other arts--let me add not because Mammon is worshiped, but because he is needed for building cloisters.

The search for truth would be far more congenial than the search for wealth; but, so long as our old-fashioned institutions remain, like old-fashioned females, dependent for their very existence on the bounty of personal favor, devious methods must be employed for coaxing and wheedling money out of those who control it--and therefore the truth.

I was a slender bride and had a fresh, becoming trousseau. He was a heavy-jowled banker and had many millions. I was supposed to ply what feminine arts I could command for the highly moral purpose of obtaining his dollars, to be used in destroying his ideals.

Well, that was the first and last time I was ever so employed. Despite the conscientious flattery of the others he gruntingly refused to give a penny. And--who knows--perhaps I was in part responsible for the loss of a million! A dreadful preface to my career as a college professor's wife.

However, before pursuing my personal confessions, I must not overlook the most common and comic characteristic of the college professor we all know and love in fiction. I refer to his picturesque absent-mindedness. I had almost forgotten that; possibly I have become absent-minded by marriage too! Is not the dear old fellow always absent-minded on the stage? Invariably and most deliriously! Just how he manages to remain on the Faculty when absent-minded is never explained on the program; and it often perplexes us who are behind the scenes.

I tell my husband that, in our case, I, as the dowdy and devoted wife, am supposed to interrupt his dreams--they always have dreams--remove his untidy dressing gown--they always wear dressing gowns--and dispatch him to the classroom with a kiss and a coat; but how about that great and growing proportion of his colleagues who, for reasons to be stated, are wifeless and presumably helpless?

Being only a woman, I cannot explain how bachelors retain their positions; but I shall venture to assert that no business in the world--not even the army and navy--is conducted on a more ruthless and inexorable schedule than the business of teaching.

My two brothers drift into their office at any time between nine and ten in the morning and yet control a fairly successful commercial enterprise; whereas, if my husband arrived at his eight-o'clock classroom only one minute late there would be no class there to teach. For it is an unwritten law among our engaging young friends the undergraduates that when the "prof" is not on hand before the bell stops ringing they can "cut"--thus avoiding what they were sent to college for and achieving one of the pleasantest triumphs of a university course.

My confessions! Dear me! What have I, a college professor's wife, to confess? At least three things:

1--That I love my husband so well that I wish I had never married him.

2--That I have been such a good wife that he does not know he ought never to have had one.

3--That if I had to do it all over again I would do the same thing all over again! This is indeed a confession, though whether it be of weakness of will or strength of faith you may decide if you read the rest.

The first time I saw the man who became my husband was at the Casino in Newport. And what was a poor professor doing at Newport? He was not a professor--he was a prince; a proud prince of the most royal realm of sport. Carl, as some of you might recall if that were his real name, had been the intercollegiate tennis champion a few years before, and now, with the kings of the court, had come to try his luck in the annual national tournament. He lasted until the finals this time and then was put out. That was as high as he ever got in the game.

Alas for the romance of love at first sight! He paid not the slightest attention to me, though he sat beside me for ten minutes; for, despite his defeat, he was as enthusiastically absorbed in the runner-up and the dashing defender of the title as--well, as the splendid sportsman I have since found him to be in disappointments far more grim.

As for me, I fear I hardly noticed him either, except to remark that he was very good-looking; for this was my first visit to Newport--the last too--and the pageantry of wealth and fashion was bewilderingly interesting to me. I was quite young then. I am older now. But such unintellectual exhibitions might, I fancy, still interest me--a shocking confession for a college professor's wife!

I did not see Carl again for two years, and then it was in another kind of pageant, amid pomp and circumstance of such a different sort; and, instead of white flannel trousers, he now wore a black silk gown. It had large flowing sleeves and a hood of loud colors hanging down behind; and he was blandly marching along in the academic procession at the inaugural ceremonies of the new president of the university.

I wonder why it is that when the stronger sex wishes to appear particularly dignified and impressive, as on the bench or in the pulpit, it likes to don female attire! No matter whether suffragists or antis--they all do it. Now some of these paraders seemed as embarrassed by their skirts as the weaker sex would be without them; but the way Carl wore his new honors and his new doctor's hood attracted my attention and held it. He seemed quite aware of the ridiculous aspect of an awkward squad of pedagogues paraded like chorus girls before an audience invited to watch the display; but, also, he actually enjoyed the comedy of it--and that is a distinction when you are an actor in the comedy! His quietly derisive strut altogether fascinated me. "Hurrah! Aren't we fine!" he seemed to say.

As the long, self-conscious procession passed where I sat, smiling and unnoticed, he suddenly looked up. His veiled twinkle happened to meet my gaze. It passed over me, instantly returned and rested on ray eyes for almost a second. Such a wonderful second for little me!... Not a gleam of recollection. He had quite forgotten that our names had once been pronounced to each other; but in that flashing instant he recognized, as I did, that we two knew each other better than anyone else in the whole assemblage.

The nicest smile in the world said as plainly as words, and all for me alone: "Hurrah! You see it too!" Then, with that deliciously derisive strut, he passed on, while something within me said: "There he is!--at last! He is the one for you!" And I glowed and was glad.

Carl informed me afterward that he had a similar sensation, and that all through the long platitudinous exercises my face was a great solace to him.

"Whenever they became particularly tiresome," he said, "I looked at you--and bore up."

I was not unaware that he was observing me; nor was I surprised when, at the end of the exhausting ordeal, he broke through the crowd--with oh, such dear impetuosity!--and asked my uncle to present him, while I, trembling at his approach, looked in the other direction, for I felt the crimson in my cheeks--I who had been out three seasons! Then I turned and raised my eyes to his, and he, too, colored deeply as he took my hand.

We saw no comedy in what followed.

There was plenty of comedy, only we were too romantic to see it. At the time it seemed entirely tragic to me that my people, though of the sort classified as cultured and refined, deploring the materialistic tendency of the age, violently objected to my caring for this wonderful being, who brilliantly embodied all they admired in baccalaureate sermons and extolled in Sunday-school.

It was not despite but because of that very thing that they opposed the match! If only he had not so ably curbed his materialistic tendencies they would have been delighted with this well-bred young man, for his was an even older family than ours, meaning one having money long enough to breed contempt for making it. Instead of a fortune, however, merely a tradition of _noblesse oblige_ had come down to him, like an unwieldy heirloom. He had waved aside a promising opening in his cousin's bond-house on leaving college and invested five important years, as well as his small patrimony, in hard work at the leading universities abroad in order to secure a thorough working capital for the worst-paid profession in the world.

"If there were only some future in the teaching business!" as one of my elder brothers said; "but I've looked into the proposition. Why, even a full professor seldom gets more than four thousand--in most cases less. And it will be years before your young man is a full professor."

"I can wait," I said.

"But a girl like you could never stand that kind of life. You aren't fitted for it. You weren't brought up to be a poor man's wife."

"Plenty of tune to learn while waiting," I returned gayly enough, but heartsick at the thought of the long wait.

Carl, however, quite agreed with my brothers and wanted impetuously to start afresh in pursuit of the career in Wall Street he had forsworn, willing and eager--the darling!--to throw away ambition, change his inherited tastes, abandon his cultivated talents, and forget the five years he had "squandered in riotous learning," as he put it!

However, I was not willing--for his sake. He would regret it later. They always do. Besides, like Carl, I had certain unuttered ideals about serving the world in those days. We still have. Only now we better understand the world. Make no mistake about this. Men are just as noble as they used to be. Plenty of them are willing to sacrifice themselves--but not us. That is why so few of the sort most needed go in for teaching and preaching in these so-called materialistic days.

What was the actual, material result of my lover's having taken seriously the advice ladled out to him by college presidents and other evil companions of his innocent youth, who had besought him not to seek material gain?

At the time we found each other he was twenty-seven years of age and had just begun his career--an instructor in the economics department, with a thousand-dollar salary. That is not why he was called an economist; but can you blame my brothers for doing their best to break the engagement?... I do not--now. It was not their fault if Carl actually practiced what they merely preached. Should Carl be blamed? No; for he seriously intended never to marry at all--until he met me. Should I be blamed? Possibly; but I did my best to break the engagement too--and incidentally both our hearts--by going abroad and staying abroad until Carl--bless him!--came over after me.

I am not blaming anybody. I am merely telling why so few men in university work, or, for that matter, in most of the professions nowadays, can support wives until after the natural mating time is past. By that time their true mates have usually wed other men--men who can support them--not the men they really love, but the men they tell themselves they love! For, if marriage is woman's only true career, it is hardly true to one's family or oneself not to follow it before it is too late--especially when denied training for any other--even though she may be equally lacking in practical training for the only career open to her.

This sounds like a confession of personal failure due to the typical unpreparedness for marriage of the modern American girl. I do not think anyone could call our marriage a personal failure, though socially it may be. During the long period of our engagement I became almost as well prepared for my lifework as Carl was for his. Instead of just waiting in sweet, sighing idleness I took courses in domestic science, studied dietetics, mastered double-entry and learned to sew. I also began reading up on economics. The latter amused the family, for they thought the higher education of women quite unwomanly and had refused to let me go to college.

It amused Carl too, until I convinced him that I was really interested in the subject, not just in him; then he began sending me boxes of books instead of boxes of candy, which made the family laugh and call me strong-minded. I did not care what they called me. I was too busy making up for the time and money wasted on my disadvantageous advantages, which may have made me more attractive to men, but had not fitted me to be the wife of any man, rich or poor.

All that my accomplishments and those of my sisters actually accomplished, as I see it now, was to kill my dear father; for, though he made a large income as a lawyer, he had an even larger family and died a poor man, like so many prominent members of the bar.

I shall not dwell on the ordeal of a long engagement. It is often made to sound romantic in fiction, but in realistic life such an unnatural relationship is a refined atrocity--often an injurious one--except to pseudo-human beings so unreal and unromantic that they should never be married or engaged at all. I nearly died; and as for Carl--well, unrequited affection may be good for some men, but requited affection in such circumstances cannot be good for any man--if you grant that marriage is!

A high-strung, ambitious fellow like Carl needed no incentive to make him work hard or to keep him out of mischief, any more than he needed a prize to make him do his best at tennis or keep him from cheating in the score. What an ignoble view of these matters most good people accept! In point of fact he had been able to do more work and to play better tennis before receiving this long handicap--in short, would have been in a position to marry sooner if he had not been engaged to marry! This may sound strange, but that is merely because the truth is so seldom told about anything that concerns the most important relationship in life.

Nevertheless, despite what he was pleased to call his inspiration, he won his assistant professorship at an earlier age than the average, and we were married on fifteen hundred a year.

Oh, what a happy year! I am bound to say the family were very nice about it. Everyone was nice about it. And when we came back from our wedding journey the other professors' wives overwhelmed me with kindness and with calls--and with teas and dinners and receptions in our honor. Carl had been a very popular bachelor and his friends were pleased to treat me quite as if I were worthy of him. This was generous, but disquieting. I was afraid they would soon see through me and pity poor Carl.

I had supposed, like most outsiders, that the women of a university town would be dreadfully intellectual and modern--and I was rather in awe of them at first, being aware of my own magnificent limitations; but, for the most part, these charming new friends of mine, especially the wealthier members of the set I was thrown with, seemed guilelessly ignorant in respect of the interesting period of civilization in which they happened to live--almost as ignorant as I was and as most "nice people" are everywhere.

Books sufficiently old, art sufficiently classic, views sufficiently venerable to be respectable--these interested them, as did foreign travel and modern languages; but ideas that were modern could not be nice because they were new, though they might be nice in time--after they became stale. College culture, I soon discovered, does not care about what is happening to the world, but what used to happen to it.

"You see, my dear," Carl explained, with that quiet, casual manner so puzzling to pious devotees of "cultureine"--and even to me at first, though I adored and soon adopted it! "--universities don't lead thought--they follow it. In Europe institutions of learning may be--indeed, they frequently are--hotbeds of radicalism; in America our colleges are merely featherbeds for conservatism to die in respectably." Then he added: "But what could you expect? You see, we are still intellectually _nouveaux_ over here, and therefore self-consciously correct and imitative, like the _nouveaux riches_. So long as you have a broad _a_ you need never worry about a narrow mind."

As for the men, I had pictured the privilege of sitting at their feet and learning many interesting things about the universe. Perhaps they were too tired to have their feet encumbered by ignorant young women; for when I ventured to ask questions about their subject their answer was--not always--but in so many cases a solemn owllike "yes-and-no" that I soon learned my place. They did not expect or want a woman to know anything and preferred light banter and persiflage. I like that, too, when it is well done; but I was accustomed to men who did it better.

I preferred the society of their wives. I do not expect any member of the complacent sex to believe this statement--unless I add that the men did not fancy my society, which would not be strictly true; but, even if not so intellectual as I had feared, the women of our town were far more charming than I had hoped, and when you cannot have both cleverness and kindness the latter makes a more agreeable atmosphere for a permanent home. I still consider them the loveliest women in the world.

In short my only regret about being married was that we had wasted so much of the glory of youth apart. Youth is the time for love, but not for marriage! Some of our friends among the instructors marry on a thousand a year, even in these days of the high cost of living; and I should have been so willing to live as certain of them do--renting lodgings from a respectable artisan's wife and doing my own cooking on her stove after she had done hers.

Carl gave me no encouragement, however! Perhaps it was just as well; for when first engaged I did not know how to cook, though I was a good dancer and could play Liszt's Polonaise in E flat with but few mistakes.

As it turned out we began our wedded life quite luxuriously. We had a whole house to ourselves--and sometimes even a maid! In those days there were no flats in our town and certain small but shrewd local capitalists had built rows of tiny frame dwellings which they leased to assistant professors, assistant plumbers, and other respectable people of the same financial status, at rates which enabled them--the owners, not the tenants--to support charity and religion.

They were all alike--I refer to the houses now, not to all landlords necessarily--with a steep stoop in front and a drying yard for Monday mornings in the rear, the kind you see on the factory edges of great cities--except that ours were cleaner and were occupied by nicer people.

One of our next-door neighbors was a rising young butcher with his bride and the house on the other side of us was occupied by a postman, his progeny, and the piercing notes of his whistle--presumably a cast-off one--on which all of his numerous children, irrespective of sex or age, were ambitiously learning their father's calling, as was made clear through the thin dividing wall, which supplied visual privacy but did not prevent our knowing when they took their baths or in what terms they objected to doing so. It became a matter of interesting speculation to us what Willie would say the next Saturday night; and if we had quarreled they, in turn, could have--and would have--told what it was all about.

"Not every economist," Carl remarked whimsically, "can learn at first hand how the proletariat lives."

I, too, was learning at first hand much about my own profession. My original research in domestic science was sound in theory, but I soon discovered that my dietetic program was too expensive in practice. Instead of good cuts of beef I had to select second or third quality from the rising young butcher, who, by the way, has since risen to the dignity of a touring car. Instead of poultry we had pork, for this was before pork also rose.

My courses in bookkeeping, however, proved quite practical; and I may say that I was a good purchasing agent and general manager from the beginning of our partnership, instead of becoming one later through bitter experience, like so many young wives brought up to be ladies, not general houseworkers.

Frequently I had a maid, commonly called along our row the "gurrul"--and quite frequently I had none; for we could afford only young beginners, who, as soon as I had trained them well, left me for other mistresses who could afford to pay them well.

"Oh, we should not accuse the poor creatures of ingratitude," I told Carl one day. "Not every economist can learn at first hand the law of supply and demand."

If, however, as my fashionable aunt in town remarked, we were picturesquely impecunious--which, to that soft lady, probably meant that, we had to worry along without motor cars--we were just as desperately happy as we were poor; for we had each other at least. Every other deprivation seemed comparatively easy or amusing.

Nor were we the only ones who had each other--and therefore poverty. Scholarship meant sacrifice, but all agreed that it was the ideal life.

To be sure, some members of the Faculty--or their wives--had independent means and could better afford the ideal life. They were considered noble for choosing it. Some of the alumni who attended the great games and the graduating exercises were enormously wealthy, and gave the interest of their incomes--sometimes a whole handful of bonds at a time--to the support of the ideal life.

Was there any law compelling them to give their money to their Alma Mater? No--just as there was none compelling men like Carl to give their lives and sacrifice their wives. These men of wealth made even greater sacrifices. They could have kept in comfort a dozen wives apiece--modest ones--on what they voluntarily preferred to turn over to the dear old college. Professors, being impractical and visionary, cannot always see these things in their true proportions.

We, moreover, in return for our interest in education, did we not shamelessly accept monthly checks from the university treasurer's office? It was quite materialistic in us. Whereas these disinterested donors, instead of receiving checks, gave them, which is more blessed. And were they not checks of a denomination far larger than those we selfishly cashed for ourselves? Invariably. Therefore our princely benefactors were regarded not only as nobler but as the Nobility.

Indeed, the social stratification of my new home, where the excellent principles of high thinking and plain living were highly recommended for all who could not reverse the precept, struck me, a neophyte, as for all the world like that of a cathedral town in England, except that these visiting patrons of religion and learning were treated with a reverence and respect found only in America. Surely it must have amused them, had they not been so used to it; for they were quite the simplest, kindest, sweetest overrich people I had ever met in my own country--and they often took pains to tell us broad-mindedly that there were better things than money. Their tactful attempts to hide their awful affluence were quite appealing--occasionally rather comic. Like similarly conscious efforts to cover evident indigence, it was so palpable and so unnecessary.

"There, there!" I always wanted to say--until I, too, became accustomed to it. "It's all right. You can't help it."

It was dear of them all the same, however, and I would not seem ungrateful for their kind consideration. After all, how different from the purse-proud arrogance of wealth seen in our best--selling--fiction, though seldom elsewhere.

For the most part they were true gentlefolk, with the low voices and simple manners of several generations of breeding; and I liked them, for the most part, very much--especially certain old friends of our parents, who, I learned later, were willing to show their true friendship in more ways than Carl and I could permit.

One is frequently informed that the great compensation for underpaying the college professor is in the leisure to live--_otium cum dignitate_ as returning old grads call it when they can remember their Latin, though as most of them cannot they call it a snap.

Carl, by the way, happened to be the secretary of his class, and his popularity with dear old classmates became a nuisance in our tiny home. I remember one well-known bachelor of arts who answered to the name of Spud, a rather vulgar little man. Comfortably seated in Carl's study one morning, with a cigar in his mouth, Spud began:

"My, what a snap! A couple of hours' work a day and three solid months' vacation! Why, just see, here you are loafing early in the morning! You ought to come up to the city! Humph! I'd show you what real work means."

Now my husband had been writing until two o'clock the night before, so that he had not yet made preparation for his next hour. It was so early indeed that I had not yet made the beds. Besides, I had heard all about our snap before and it was getting on my nerves.

"Carl would enjoy nothing better than seeing you work," I put in when the dear classmate finished; "but unfortunately he cannot spare the time."

Spud saw the point and left; but Carl, instead of giving me the thanks I deserved, gave me the first scolding of our married life! Now isn't that just like a husband?

Of course it can be proved by the annual catalogue that the average member of the Faculty has only about twelve or fourteen hours of classroom work a week--the worst-paid instructor more; the highest-paid professor less. What a university teacher gives to his students in the classroom, however, is or ought to be but a rendering of what he acquires outside, as when my distinguished father tried one of his well-prepared cases in court. Every new class, moreover, is a different proposition, as I once heard my brother say of his customers.

That is where the art of teaching comes in and where Carl excelled. He could make even the "dismal science," as Carlyle called economics, interesting, as was proved by the large numbers of men who elected his courses, despite the fact that he made them work hard to pass. Nor does this take into account original research and the writing of books like Carl's scholarly work on The History of Property, on which he had been slaving for three solid summers and hundreds of nights during termtime; not to speak of attending committee meetings constantly, and the furnace even more constantly. The latter, like making beds, is not mentioned in the official catalogue. I suppose such details would not become one's dignity.

As in every other occupation, some members of the Faculty do as little work as the law requires; but most of them are an extremely busy lot, even though they may, when it suits their schedule better, take exercise in the morning instead of the afternoon--an astonishing state of affairs that always scandalizes the so-called tired business man.

As for Carl, I was seeing so little of him except at mealtimes that I became rather piqued at first, being a bride. I felt sure he did not love me any more!

"Do you really think you have a right to devote so much time to outside work?" I asked one evening when I was washing the dishes and he was starting off for the university library to write on his great book.--It was the indirect womanly method of saying: "Oh, please devote just a little more time to me!"--"You ought to rest and be fresh for your classroom work," I added.

Being a man he did not see it.

"The way to advance in the teaching profession," he answered, with his veiled twinkle, "is to neglect it. It doesn't matter how poorly you teach, so long as you write dull books for other professors to read. That's why it is called scholarship--because you slight your scholars."

"Oh, I'm sick of all this talk about scholarship!" I cried. "What does it mean anyway?"

"Scholarship, my dear," said Carl, "means finding out all there is to know about something nobody else cares about, and then telling it in such a way that nobody else can find out. If you are understood you are popular; if you are popular you are no scholar. And if you're no scholar, how can you become a full professor? Now, my child, it is all clear to you."

And, dismissing me and the subject with a good-night kiss, he brushed his last year's hat and hurried off, taking the latchkey.

So much for _otium_.

"But where does the dignity come in?" I asked Carl one day when he was sharpening his lawnmower and thus neglecting his lawn tennis; for, like a Freshman, I still had much to learn about quaint old college customs.

"Why, in being called p'fessor by the tradesmen," said Carl. "Also in renting a doctor's hood for academic pee-rades at three dollars a pee-rade, instead of buying a new hat for the rest of the year. Great thing--dignity!"

He chuckled and began to cut the grass furiously, reminding me of a thoroughbred hunter I once saw harnessed to a plow.

"P'fessors of pugilism and dancing," he went on gravely, "haven't a bit more dignity than we have. They merely have more money. Just think! There isn't a butcher or grocer in this town who doesn't doff his hat to me when he whizzes by in his motor--even those whose bills I haven't paid. It's great to have dignity. I don't believe there's another place in the world where he who rides makes obeisance to him who walks. Much better than getting as high wages as a trustee's chauffeur! A salary is so much more dignified than wages."

He stopped to mop his brow, looking perfectly dignified.

"And yet," he added, egged on by my laughter, for I always loved his quiet irony--it was never directed at individuals, but at the ideas and traditions they blandly and blindly followed--

"And yet carping critics of the greatest nation on earth try to make out that art and intellectuality are not properly recognized in the States. Pessimists! Look at our picture galleries, filled with old masters from abroad! Think how that helps American artists! Look at our colleges, crowded with buildings more costly than Oxford's! Think how that encourages American teachers! Simply because an occasional foreign professor gets higher pay--bah! There are better things than money. For example, this!"

And he bent to his mower again, with much the same derisively dignified strut as on that memorable day long ago when I came and saw and was conquered by it--only then he wore black silk sleeves and now white shirtsleeves.

And so much for dignity.

I soon saw that if I were to be a help and not a hindrance to the man I loved I should have to depart from what I had been carefully trained to regard as woman's only true sphere. Do not be alarmed! I had no thought of leaving home or husband. It is simply that the home, in the industrial sense, is leaving the house--seventy-five per cent of it social scientists say, has gone already--so that nowadays a wife must go out after it or else find some new-fashioned productive substitute if she really intends to be an old-fashioned helpmate to her husband.

It was not a feminist theory but a financial condition that confronted us. My done-over trousseau would not last forever, nor would Carl's present intellectual wardrobe, which was becoming threadbare. Travel abroad and foreign study are just as necessary for an American scholar as foreign buying is for an American dealer in trousseaus.

I thought of many plans; but in a college town a woman's opportunities are so limited. We are not paid enough to be ladies, though we are required to dress and act like them--do not forget that point. And yet, when willing to stop being a lady, what could one do?

Finally I thought of dropping entirely out of the social, religious and charitable activities of the town, investing in a typewriter and subscribing to a correspondence-school course in stenography. I could at least help Carl prepare his lectures and relieve him of the burden of letter writing, thus giving him more time for book reviewing and other potboiling jobs, which were not only delaying his own book but making him burn the candle at both ends in the strenuous effort to make both ends meet.

I knew Carl would object, but I had not expected such an outburst of profane rage as followed my announcement. The poor boy was dreadfully tired, and for months, like the thoroughbred he was, he had repressed his true feelings under a quiet, quizzical smile.

"My heavens! What next?" he cried, jumping up and pacing the floor. "Haven't you already given up everything you were accustomed to--every innocent pleasure you deserve--every wholesome diversion you actually need in this God-forsaken, monotonous hole? Haven't I already dragged you down--you, a lovely, fine-grained, highly evolved woman--down to the position of a servant in my house? And now, on top of all this--No, by God! I won't have it! I tell you I won't have it!"

It may be a shocking confession, but I loved him for that wicked oath. He looked so splendid--all fire and furious determination, as when he used to rush up to the net in the deciding game of a tennis match, cool and quick as lightning.

"You are right, Carl dear," I said, kissing his profane lips; for I had learned long since never to argue with him. "I am too good to be a mere household drudge. It's an economic waste of superior ability. That's why I am going to be your secretary and save you time and money enough to get and keep a competent maid."

"But I tell you--"

"I know, dear; but what are we going to do about it? We can't go on this way. They've got us down--are we going to let them keep us down? Look into the future! Look at poor old Professor Culberson. Look at half of the older members of the Faculty! They have ceased to grow; their usefulness is over; they are all gone to seed--because they hadn't the courage or the cash to develop anything but their characters!"

Carl looked thoughtful. He had gained an idea for his book and, like a true scholar, forgot for the moment our personal situation.

"Really, you know," he mused, "does it pay Society to reward its individuals in inverse ratio to their usefulness?" He took out his pocket notebook and wrote: "Society itself suffers for rewarding that low order of cunning called business sense with the ultimate control of all other useful talents." He closed his notebook and smiled.

"And yet they call the present economic order safe and sane! And all of us who throw the searchlight of truth on it--dangerous theorists! Can you beat it?"

"Well," I rejoined, not being a scholar, "there's nothing dangerous about my theory. Instead of your stenographer becoming your wife, your wife becomes your stenographer--far safer and saner than the usual order. Men are much more apt to fall in love with lively little typewriters than with fat, flabby wives."

Though it was merely to make a poor joke out of a not objectionable necessity, my plan, as it turned out, was far wiser than I realized.

First, I surreptitiously card-catalogued the notes and references for Carl's "epoch-making book," as one of the sweet, vague wives of the Faculty always called her husband's volumes, which she never read. Then I learned to take down his lectures, to look up data in the library, to verify quotations, and even lent a hand in the book reviewing.

Soon I began to feel more than a mere consumer's interest--a producer's interest--in Carl's work. And then a wonderful thing happened: My husband began to see--just in time, I believe--that a wife could be more than a passive and more or less desirable appendage to a man's life--an active and intelligent partner in it. And he looked at me with a new and wondering respect, which was rather amusing, but very dear.

He had made the astonishing discovery that his wife had a mind!

Years of piano practice had helped to make my fingers nimble for the typewriter, and for this advantage I was duly grateful to the family's old-fashioned ideals, though I fear they did not appreciate my gratitude. Once, when visiting them during the holidays, I was laughingly boasting, before some guests invited to meet me at luncheon, about my part in the writing of Carl's History of Property, which had been dedicated to me and was now making a sensation in the economic world, though our guests in the social world had never heard of it.

Suddenly I saw a curious, uncomfortable look come over the faces of the family. Then I stopped and remembered that nowadays wives--nice wives, that is--are not supposed to be helpmates to their husbands except in name; quite as spinsters no longer spin. They can help him spend. At that they are truly better halves, but to help him earn is not nice. To our guests it could mean only one thing--namely, that my husband could not afford a secretary. Well, he could not. What of it?

For a moment I had the disquieting sensation of having paraded my poverty--a form of vulgarity that Carl and I detest as heartily as a display of wealth.

The family considerately informed me afterward, however, that they thought me brave to sacrifice myself so cheerfully. Dear me! I was not being brave. I was not being cheerful. I was being happy. There is no sacrifice in working for the man you love. And if you can do it with him--why, I conceitedly thought it quite a distinction. Few women have the ability or enterprise to attain it!

One of my sisters who, like me, had failed to "marry well" valeted for her husband; but somehow that seemed to be all right. For my part I never could see why it is more womanly to do menial work for a man than intellectual work with him. I have done both and ought to know.... Can it be merely because the one is done strictly in the home or because no one can see you do it? Or is it merely because it is unskilled labor?

It is all right for the superior sex to do skilled labor, but a true womanly woman must do only unskilled labor, and a fine lady none at all--so clothed as to prevent it and so displayed as to prove it, thus advertising to the world that the man who pays for her can also pay for secretaries and all sorts of expensive things. Is that the old idea?

If so I am afraid most college professors' wives should give up the old-fashioned expensive pose of ladyhood and join the new womanhood!

Well, as it turned out, we were enabled to spend our sabbatical year abroad--just in time to give Carl a new lease of life mentally and me physically; for both of us were on the verge of breaking down before we left.

Such a wonderful year! Revisiting his old haunts; attending lectures together in the German and French universities; working side by side in the great libraries; and meeting the great men of his profession at dinner! Then, between whiles, we had the best art and music thrown in! Ah, those are the only real luxuries we miss and long for! Indeed, to us, they are not really luxuries. Beauty is a necessity to some persons, like exercise; though others can get along perfectly well without it and, therefore, wonder why we cannot too.

Carl's book had already been discovered over there--that is perhaps the only reason it was discovered later over here--and every one was so kind about it. We felt quite important and used to wink at each other across the table. "Our" book, Carl always called it, like a dear. His work was my work now--his ambitions, my ambitions; not just emotionally or inspirationally, but intellectually, collaboratively. And that made our emotional interest in each other the keener and more satisfying. We had fallen completely in love with each other. For the first time we two were really one. Previously we had been merely pronounced so by a clergyman who read it out of a book.

Oh, the glory of loving some one more than oneself! And oh, the blessedness of toiling together for something greater and more important than either! That is what makes it possible for the other thing to endure--not merely for a few mad, glad years, followed by drab duty and dull regret, but for a happy lifetime of useful vigor. That, and not leisure or dignity, is the great compensation for the professorial life.

What a joy it was to me during that rosy-sweet early period of our union to watch Carl, like a proud mother, as he grew and exfoliated--like a plant that has been kept in a cellar and now in congenial soil and sunshine is showing at last its full potentialities. Through me my boy was attaining the full stature of a man; and I, his proud mate, was jealously glad that even his dear dead mother could not have brought that to pass.

His wit became less caustic; his manner more genial. People who once irritated now interested him. Some who used to fear him now liked him. And as for the undergraduates who had hero-worshiped this former tennis champion, they now shyly turned to him for counsel and advice. He was more of a man of the world than most of his colleagues and treated the boys as though they were men of the world too--for instance, he never referred to them as boys.

"I wouldn't be a damned fool if I were you," I once overheard him say to a certain young man who was suffering from an attack of what Carl called misdirected energy.

More than one he took in hand this way; and, though I used to call it--to tease him--his man-to-man manner, I saw that it was effective. I, too, grew fond of these frank, ingenuous youths. We used to have them at our house when we could spare an evening--often when we could not.

None of this work, it may be mentioned, is referred to in the annual catalogue or provided for in the annual budget; and yet it is often the most vital and lasting service a teacher renders his students--especially when their silly parents provide them with more pocket money than the professor's entire income for the support of himself, his family, his scholarship and his dignity.

"Your husband is not a professor," one of them confided shyly to me--"he's a human being!"

After the success of our book we were called to another college--a full professorship at three thousand a year! Carl loved his Alma Mater with a passion I sometimes failed to understand; but he could not afford to remain faithful to her forever on vague promises of future favor. He went to the president and said so plainly, hating the indignity of it and loathing the whole system that made such methods necessary.

The president would gladly have raised all the salaries if he had had the means. He could not meet the competitor's price, but he begged Carl to stay, offering the full title--meaning empty--of professor and a minimum wage of twenty-five hundred dollars, with the promise of full pay when the funds could be raised.

Now we had demonstrated that, even on the Faculty of an Eastern college, two persons could live on fifteen hundred. Therefore, with twenty-five hundred, we could not only exist but work efficiently. So we did not have to go.

* * * * *

I look back on those days as the happiest period of our life together. That is why I have lingered over them. Congenial work, bright prospects, perfect health, the affection of friends, the respect of rivals--what more could any woman want for her husband or herself?

Only one thing. And now that, too, was to be ours! However, with children came trouble, for which--bless their little hearts!--they are not responsible. Were we? I wonder! Had we a right to have children? Had we a right not to have children? It has been estimated by a member of the mathematical department that, at the present salary rate, each of the college professors of America is entitled to just two-fifths of a child.

Does this pay? Should only the financially fit be allowed to survive--to reproduce their species? Should or should not those who may be fittest physically, intellectually and morally also be entitled to the privilege and responsibility of taking their natural part in determining the character of America's future generations, for the evolution of the race and the glory of God?

I wonder!

* * * * *

(_Boston Transcript_)

A PARADISE FOR A PENNY

MADDENED BY THE CATALOGUES OF PEACE-TIME, ONE LOVER OF GARDENS YET MANAGED TO BUILD A LITTLE EDEN, AND TELLS HOW HE DID IT FOR A SONG

By WALTER PRICHARD EATON

War-time economy (which is a much pleasanter and doubtless a more patriotically approved phrase than war-time poverty) is not without its compensations, even to the gardener. At first I did not think so. Confronted by a vast array of new and empty borders and rock steps and natural-laid stone, flanking a wall fountain, and other features of a new garden ambitiously planned before the President was so inconsiderate as to declare war without consulting me, and confronted, too, by an empty purse--pardon me, I mean by the voluntarily imposed necessity for economy--I sat me down amid my catalogues, like Niobe amid her children, and wept. (Maybe it wasn't amid her children Niobe wept, but for them; anyhow I remember her as a symbol of lachrymosity.) Dear, alluring, immoral catalogues, sweet sirens for a man's undoing! How you sang to me of sedums, and whispered of peonies and irises--yea, even of German irises! How you spoke in soft, seductive accents of wonderful lilacs, and exquisite spireas, and sweet syringas, murmurous with bees! How you told of tulips and narcissuses, and a thousand lovely things for beds and borders and rock work--at so much a dozen, so very much a dozen, and a dozen so very few! I did not resort to cotton in my ears, but to tears and profanity.

Then two things happened. I got a letter from a Boston architect who had passed by and seen my unfinished place; and I took a walk up a back road where the Massachusetts Highway Commissioners hadn't sent a gang of workmen through to "improve" it. The architect said, "Keep your place simple. It cries for it. That's always the hardest thing to do--but the best." And the back-country roadside said, "Look at me; I didn't come from any catalogue; no nursery grew me; I'm really and truly 'perfectly hardy'; I didn't cost a cent--and can you beat me at any price? I'm a hundred per cent American, too."

I looked, and I admitted, with a blush of shame for ever doubting, that I certainly could not beat it. But, I suddenly realized, I could steal it!

I have been stealing it ever since, and having an enormously enjoyable time in the bargain.

Of course, stealing is a relative term, like anything else connected with morality. What would be stealing in the immediate neighborhood of a city is not even what the old South County oyster fisherman once described as "jest pilferin' 'round," out here on the edges of the wilderness. I go out with the trailer hitched to the back of my Ford, half a mile in any direction, and I pass roadsides where, if there are any farmer owners of the fields on the other side of the fence, these owners are only too glad to have a few of the massed, invading plants or bushes thinned out. But far more often there is not even a fence, or if there is, it has heavy woods or a swamp or a wild pasture beyond it. I could go after plants every day for six months and nobody would ever detect where I took them. My only rule--self-imposed--is never to take a single specimen, or even one of a small group, and always to take where thinning is useful, and where the land or the roadside is wild and neglected, and no human being can possibly be injured. Most often, indeed, I simply go up the mountain along, or into, my own woods.

I am not going to attempt any botanical or cultural description of what I am now attempting. That will have to wait, anyhow, till I know a little more about it myself! But I want to indicate, in a general way, some of the effects which are perfectly possible, I believe, here in a Massachusetts garden, without importing a single plant, or even sowing a seed or purchasing any stock from a nursery.

Take the matter of asters, for instance. Hitherto my garden, up here in the mountains where the frosts come early and we cannot have anemone, japonica, or chrysanthemums, has generally been a melancholy spectacle after the middle of September. Yet it is just at this time that our roadsides and woodland borders are the most beautiful. The answer isn't alone asters, but very largely. And nothing, I have discovered, is much easier to transplant than a New England aster, the showiest of the family. Within the confines of my own farm or its bordering woods are at least seven varieties of asters, and there are more within half a mile. They range in color from the deepest purple and lilac, through shades of blue, to white, and vary in height from the six feet my New Englands have attained in rich garden soil, to one foot. Moreover, by a little care, they can be so massed and alternated in a long border (such a border I have), as to pass in under heavy shade and out again into full sun, from a damp place to a dry place, and yet all be blooming at their best. With what other flower can you do that? And what other flower, at whatever price per dozen, will give you such abundance of beauty without a fear of frosts? I recently dug up a load of asters in bud, on a rainy day, and already they are in full bloom in their new garden places, without so much as a wilted leaf.

Adjoining my farm is an abandoned marble quarry. In that quarry, or, rather, in the rank grass bordering it, grow thousands of Solidago rigida, the big, flat-topped goldenrod. This is the only station for it in Berkshire County. As the ledges from this quarry come over into my pastures, and doubtless the goldenrod would have come too, had it not been for the sheep, what could be more fitting than for me to make this glorious yellow flower a part of my garden scheme? Surely if anything belongs in my peculiar soil and landscape it does. It transplants easily, and under cultivation reaches a large size and holds its bloom a long time. Massed with the asters it is superb, and I get it by going through the bars with a shovel and a wheelbarrow.

But a garden of goldenrod and asters would be somewhat dull from May to mid-August, and somewhat monotonous thereafter. I have no intention, of course, of barring out from my garden the stock perennials, and, indeed, I have already salvaged from my old place or grown from seed the indispensable phloxes, foxgloves, larkspur, hollyhocks, sweet william, climbing roses, platycodons and the like. But let me merely mention a few of the wild things I have brought in from the immediate neighborhood, and see if they do not promise, when naturally planted where the borders wind under trees, or grouped to the grass in front of asters, ferns, goldenrod and the shrubs I shall mention later, a kind of beauty and interest not to be secured by the usual garden methods.

There are painted trilliums, yellow and pink lady's slippers, Orchis spectabilis, hepaticas, bloodroot, violets, jack-in-the-pulpit, masses of baneberries, solomon's seal, true and false; smooth false foxglove, five-flowered and closed gentians, meadow lilies (Canadensis) and wood lilies (Philadelphicum), the former especially being here so common that I can go out and dig up the bulbs by the score, taking only one or two from any one spot. These are but a few of the flowers, blooming from early spring to late fall, in the borders, and I have forgotten to mention the little bunch berries from my own woods as an edging plant.

Let me turn now for a moment to the hedge and shrubbery screen which must intervene between my west border and the highway, and which is the crux of the garden. The hedge is already started with hemlocks from the mountain side, put in last spring. I must admit nursery in-grown evergreens are easier to handle, and make a better and quicker growth. But I am out now to see how far I can get with absolutely native material. Between the hedge and the border, where at first I dreamed of lilacs and the like, I now visualize as filling up with the kind of growth which lines our roads, and which is no less beautiful and much more fitting. From my own woods will come in spring (the only safe time to move them) masses of mountain laurel and azalea. From my own pasture fence-line will come red osier, dogwood, with its white blooms, its blue berries, its winter stem-coloring, and elderberry. From my own woods have already come several four-foot maple-leaved vibernums, which, though moved in June, throve and have made a fine new growth. There will be, also, a shadbush or two and certainly some hobble bushes, with here and there a young pine and small, slender canoe birch. Here and there will be a clump of flowering raspberry. I shall not scorn spireas, and I must have at least one big white syringa to scent the twilight; but the great mass of my screen will be exactly what nature would plant there if she were left alone--minus the choke cherries. You always have to exercise a little supervision over nature!

A feature of my garden is to be rock work and a little, thin stream of a brooklet flowing away from a wall fountain. I read in my catalogues of marvellous Alpine plants, and I dreamed of irises by my brook. I shall have some of both too. Why not? The war has got to end one of these days. But meanwhile, why be too down-hearted? On the cliffs above my pasture are masses of moss, holding, as a pincushion holds a breastpin, little early saxifrage plants. From the crannies frail hair bells dangle forth. There are clumps of purple cliffbrase and other tiny, exquisite ferns. On a gravel bank beside the State road are thousands of viper's bugloss plants; on a ledge nearby is an entire nursery of Sedum acre (the small yellow stone crop). Columbines grow like a weed in my mowing, and so do Quaker ladies, which, in England, are highly esteemed in the rock garden. The Greens Committee at the nearby golf club will certainly let me dig up some of the gay pinks which are a pest in one of the high, gravelly bunkers. And these are only a fraction of the native material available for my rock work and bank. Many of them are already in and thriving.

As for the little brook, any pond edge or brookside nearby has arrowheads, forget-me-nots, cardinal flowers, blue flag, clumps of beautiful grasses, monkey flowers, jewel-weed and the like. There are cowslips, too, and blue vervain, and white violets. If I want a clump of something tall, Joe-pye-weed is not to be disdained. No, I do not anticipate any trouble about my brookside. It will not look at all as I thought a year ago it was going to look. It will not look like an illustration in some "garden beautiful" magazine. It will look like--like a brook! I am tremendously excited now at the prospect of seeing it look like a brook, a little, lazy, trickling Yankee brook. If I ever let it look like anything else, I believe I shall deserve to have my spring dry up.

Probably I shall have moments of, for me, comparative affluence in the years to come, when I shall once more listen to the siren song of catalogues, and order Japanese irises, Darwin tulips, hybrid lilacs, and so on. But by that time, I feel sure, my native plants and shrubs will have got such a start, and made such a luxuriant, natural tangle, that they will assimilate the aliens and teach them their proper place in a New England garden. At any rate, till the war is over, I am 100 per cent Berkshire County!

* * * * *

WANTED: A HOME ASSISTANT

(_Pictorial Review_)

One illustration made by a staff artist, with the caption, "The New Home Assistant is Trained for Her Work."

WANTED: A HOME ASSISTANT

BUSINESS HOURS AND WAGES ARE HELPING WOMEN TO SOLVE THE SERVANT PROBLEM

BY LOUISE F. NELLIS

WANTED: A HOME ASSISTANT--Eight hours a day; six days a week. Sleep and eat at home. Pay, twelve dollars a week.

Whenever this notice appears in the Help Wanted column of a city newspaper, fifty to one hundred answers are received in the first twenty-four hours!

"Why," we hear some one say, "that seems impossible! When I advertised for a maid at forty dollars a month with board and lodging provided, not a soul answered. Why are so many responses received to the other advertisement?"

Let us look more closely at the first notice.

Wanted: A Home Assistant! How pleasant and dignified it sounds; nothing about a general houseworker or maid or servant, just Home Assistant! We can almost draw a picture of the kind of young woman who might be called by such a title. She comes, quiet, dignified, and interested in our home and its problems. She may have been in an office but has never really liked office work and has always longed for home surroundings and home duties.

I remember one case I was told of--a little stenographer. She had gladly assumed her new duties as Home Assistant, and had wept on the first Christmas Day with the family because it was the only Christmas she had spent in years in a home atmosphere. Or perhaps the applicant for the new kind of work in the home may have been employed in a department store and found the continuous standing on her feet too wearing. She welcomes the frequent change of occupation in her new position. Or she may be married with a little home of her own, but with the desire to add to the family income. We call these Home Assistants, Miss Smith or Mrs. Jones, and they preserve their own individuality and self-respect.

"Well, I would call my housemaid anything if I could only get one," says one young married woman. "There must be more to this new plan than calling them Home Assistants and addressing them as Miss."

Let us read further in the advertisement: "Eight hours a day; six days a week." One full day and one half day off each week, making a total of forty-four hours weekly which is the standard working week in most industrial occupations. At least two free Sundays a month should be given and a convenient week-day substituted for the other two Sundays. If Saturday is not the best half day to give, another afternoon may be arranged with the Home Assistant.

"Impossible," I can hear Mrs. Reader say, "I couldn't get along with eight hours' work a day, forty-four hours a week." No! Well, possibly you have had to get along without any maid at all, or you may have had some one in your kitchen who is incompetent and slovenly, whom you dare not discharge for fear you can not replace her. Would you rather not have a good interested worker for eight hours a day than none at all? During that time the Home Assistant works steadily and specialization is done away with. She is there to do your work and she does whatever may be called for. If she is asked to take care of the baby for a few hours, she does it willingly, as part of her duties; or if she is called upon to do some ironing left in the basket, she assumes that it is part of her work, and doesn't say, "No, Madam, I wasn't hired to do that," at the same time putting on her hat and leaving as under the old system.

The new plan seems expensive? "Twelve dollars a week is more than I have paid my domestic helper," Mrs. Reader says. But consider this more carefully. You pay from thirty-five to fifty dollars a month with all the worker's food and lodging provided. This is at the rate of eight to eleven dollars a week for wages. Food and room cost at least five dollars a week, and most estimates are higher. The old type of houseworker has cost us more than we have realized. The new system compares favorably in expense with the old.

"I am perfectly certain it wouldn't be practical not to feed my helper," Mrs. Reader says. Under the old system of a twelve to fourteen-hour working day, it would not be feasible, but if she is on the eight-hour basis, the worker can bring a box-luncheon with her, or she can go outside to a restaurant just as she would if she were in an office or factory. The time spent in eating is not included in her day's work. Think of the relief to the house-keeper who can order what her family likes to eat without having to say, "Oh, I can't have that; Mary wouldn't eat it you know."

"I can't afford a Home Assistant or a maid at the present wages," some one says. "But I do wish I had some one who could get and serve dinner every night. I am so tired by evening that cooking is the last straw."

Try looking for a Home Assistant for four hours a day to relieve you of just this work. You would have to pay about a dollar a day or six dollars a week for such service and it would be worth it.

How does the Home Assistant plan work in households where two or more helpers are kept? The more complicated homes run several shifts of workers, coming in at different hours and covering every need of the day. One woman I talked to told me that she studied out her problem in this way! She did every bit of the work in her house for a while in order to find out how long each job took. She found, for instance, that it took twenty-five minutes to clean one bathroom, ten minutes to brush down and dust a flight of stairs, thirty minutes to do the dinner dishes, and so on through all the work. She made out a time-card which showed that twenty-two hours of work a day was needed for her home. She knew how much money she could spend and she proceeded to divide the work and money among several assistants coming in on different shifts. Her household now runs like clockwork. One of the splendid things about this new system is its great flexibility and the fact that it can be adapted to any household.

Thoughtful and intelligent planning such as this woman gave to her problems is necessary for the greatest success of the plan. The old haphazard methods must go. The housekeeper who has been in the habit of coming into her kitchen about half past five and saying, "Oh, Mary, what can we have for dinner? I have just come back from down-town; I did expect to be home sooner," will not get the most out of her Home Assistant. Work must be scheduled and planned ahead, the home must be run on business methods if the system is to succeed. I heard this explained to a group of women not long ago. After the talk, one of them said, "Well, in business houses and factories there is a foreman who runs the shop and oversees the workers. It wouldn't work in homes because we haven't any foreman." She had entirely overlooked her job as forewoman of her own establishment!

"Suppose I have company for dinner and the Home Assistant isn't through her work when her eight hours are up, what happens?" some one asks. All overtime work is paid for at the rate of one and one-half times the hourly rate. If you are paying your assistant twelve dollars for a forty-four-hour week, you are giving her twenty-eight cents an hour. One and one half times this amounts to forty-two cents an hour, which she receives for extra work just as she would in the business world.

"Will these girls from offices and stores do their work well? They have had no training for housework unless they have happened to do some in their own homes," some one wisely remarks. The lack of systematic preparation has always been one of the troubles with our domestic helpers. It is true that the new type of girl trained in business to be punctual and alert, and to use her mind, adapts herself very quickly to her work, but the trained worker in any field has an advantage. With this in mind the Central Branch of the Young Women's Christian Association in New York City has started a training-school for Home Assistants. The course provides demonstrations on the preparation of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, and talks on the following: House-cleaning, Laundry, Care of Children, Shopping, Planning work, Deportment, Efficiency, and Duty to Employer. This course gives a girl a general knowledge of her duties and what is even more important she acquires the right mental attitude toward her work. The girls are given an examination and those who successfully pass it are given a certificate and placed as Trained Home Assistants at fifteen dollars a week.

The National Association would like to see these training-schools turning out this type of worker for the homes all over the country. This is a constructive piece of work for women to undertake. Housewives' Leagues have interested themselves in this in various centers, and the Y.W.C.A. will help wherever it can. There are always home economics graduates in every town who could help give the course, and there are excellent housekeepers who excel in some branch who could give a talk or two.

The course would be worth a great deal in results to any community. The United States Employment Bureaus are also taking a hand in this, and, with the coöperation of the High Schools, are placing girls as trained assistants on the new basis. I have talked with many women who are not only using this plan to-day but have been for several years.

It has been more than six years ago since Mrs. Helene Barker's book "Wanted a Young Woman to Do Housework" was published.

This gave the working plan to the idea. Women in Boston, Providence, New York, Cleveland, and in many other cities have become so enthusiastic over their success in running their homes with the Home Assistants that a number are giving their time to lecturing and talking to groups of women about it.

Let me give two concrete illustrations of the practical application of housework on a business basis.

Mrs. A. lives in a small city in the Middle West. Her household consists of herself, her husband, and her twelve year old son. She had had the usual string of impossible maids or none at all until she tried the new system. Through a girls' club in a factory in the city, she secured a young woman to work for her at factory hours and wages. Her assistant came at seven-thirty in the morning. By having the breakfast cereal prepared the night before, breakfast could be served promptly at eight, a plan which was necessary in order that the boy get to school on time. Each morning's work was written out and hung up in the kitchen so that the assistant wasted no time in waiting to know what she had to do. Lunch was at twelve-fifteen, and at one o'clock the Home Assistant went home.

She came back on regular duty at five-thirty to prepare and serve the dinner. Except for times when there were guests for dinner she was through her work by eight. When she worked overtime, there was the extra pay to compensate. Mrs. A. paid her thirteen dollars a week and felt that she saved money by the new plan. The assistant was off duty every other Sunday, and on alternate weeks was given all day Tuesday off instead of Sunday. Tuesday was the day the heavy washing was done and the laundress was there to help with any work which Mrs. A. did not feel equal to doing. Even though there are times in the day when she is alone, Mrs. A. says she would not go back to the old system for anything.

Mrs. B. lives in a city apartment. There are four grown people in the family. She formerly kept two maids, a cook-laundress, and a waitress-chambermaid. She often had a great deal of trouble finding a cook who would do the washing. As her apartment had only one maid's room, she had to give one of the guestrooms to the second maid. She paid these girls forty dollars apiece and provided them with room and board. Her apartment cost her one hundred and fifteen dollars a month for seven rooms, two of which were occupied by maids.

Mrs. B. decided to put her household on the new business basis last Fall. She moved into a five-room apartment which cost her ninety dollars, but she had larger rooms and a newer building with more up-to-date improvements than she had had before. She saved twenty-five dollars a month on rent plus eighty dollars wages and about thirty dollars on her former maids' food. All together she had one hundred and thirty-five dollars which could be used for Home Assistants. This is the way the money was spent:

A laundress once a week................................ $2.60 Home Assistant, on duty from 7.30 A.M. to 2 P.M........ 10.00 Home Assistant, on duty from 12 M. to 9 P.M............ 15.00 _____ Week...............................................$27.60

On this schedule the work was done better than ever before. There was no longer any grievance about the washing. Mrs. B. had some one continuously on duty. The morning assistant was allowed a half hour at noon to eat her luncheon which she brought with her. As Mrs. B. entertained a great deal, especially at luncheon, she arranged to have the schedule of the two assistants overlap at this time of day. The morning worker, it will be noted, was employed for only six hours. The afternoon worker was a trained assistant and, therefore, received fifteen dollars a week. She had an hour off, between three-thirty and four-thirty and was on duty again in time to serve tea or afternoon refreshments. If there were a number of extra people for dinner, the assistant was expected to stay until nine and there was never any complaining about too much company. Mrs. B. has a better apartment and saves money every month besides!

* * * * *

(_New York Sun_)

SIX YEARS OF TEA ROOMS

BUSINESS CAREER OF A WOMAN COLLEGE GRADUATE

"For the last three years I have cleared $5,000 a year on my tea rooms," declared a young woman who six years ago was graduated with distinction at one of the leading colleges of the country.

"I attained my twenty-third birthday a month after I received my diploma. On that day I took stock of the capital with which I was to step into the world and earn my own living. My stock taking showed perfect health, my college education and $300, my share of my father's estate after the expenses of my college course had been paid.

"In spite of the protests of many of my friends I decided to become a business woman instead of entering one of the professions. I believed that a well conducted tea room in a college town where there was nothing of the kind would pay well, and I proceeded to open a place.

"After renting a suitable room I invested $100 in furnishings. Besides having a paid announcement in the college and town papers I had a thousand leaflets printed and distributed.

"Though I couldn't afford music I did have my rooms decorated profusely with flowers on the afternoon of my opening. As it was early in the autumn the flowers were inexpensive and made a brave show. My only assistant was a young Irish woman whom I had engaged for one month as waitress, with the understanding that if my venture succeeded I would engage her permanently.

"We paid expenses that first afternoon, and by the end of the week the business had increased to such an extent that I might have engaged a second waitress had not so many of my friends persisted in shaking their heads and saying the novelty would soon wear off. During the second week my little Irish girl and I had so much to do that on several occasions our college boy patrons felt themselves constrained to offer their services as waiters, while more than one of the young professors after a long wait left the room with the remark that they would go elsewhere.

"Of course it was well enough to laugh as we all knew there was no 'elsewhere,' but when I recalled how ready people are to crowd into a field that has proved successful, I determined no longer to heed the shaking heads of my friends. The third week found me not only with a second assistant but with a card posted in a conspicuous place announcing that at the beginning of the next week I would enlarge my quarters in such a way as to accommodate more than twice as many guests.

"Having proved to my own satisfaction that my venture was and would be successful, I didn't hesitate to go into debt to the extent of $150. This was not only to repair and freshen up the new room but also to equip it with more expensive furnishing than I had felt myself justified in buying for the first.

"Knowing how every little thing that happens is talked about in a college town, I was sure the difference in the furnishings of the rooms would prove a good advertisement. I counted on it to draw custom, but not just in the way it did.

"Before I realized just what was happening I was receiving letters from college boys who, after proclaiming themselves among my very first customers, demanded to know why they were discriminated against. I had noticed that everybody appeared to prefer the new room and that on several occasions when persons telephoning for reservations had been unable to get the promise of a table in there, they had said they would wait and come at another time. What I had not noticed was that only men coming alone or with other men, and girls coming with other girls, would accept seats in the first room.

"I learned from the letters of 'my very first patrons' that no gentleman would take a girl to have tea in a second class tea room. They were not only hitting at the cheaper furnishings of my first room but also at the waiter whom I had employed, because I felt the need of a man's help in doing heavy work. The girl in her fresh apron and cap was more attractive than the man, and because he happened to serve in the first room he also was second class.

"No, I couldn't afford to buy new furniture for that room, so I did the only thing I could think of. I mixed the furniture in such a way as to make the two rooms look practically alike. I hired another girl and relegated the man to the kitchen except in case of emergency.

"Although my custom fell off in summer to a bare sprinkling of guests afternoons and evenings and to almost no one at lunch, I kept the same number of employees and had them put up preserves, jams, syrups, and pickles for use the coming season. I knew it would not only be an economical plan but also a great drawing card, especially with certain of the professors, to be able to say that everything served was made on the place and under my own supervision.

"My second winter proved so successful that I determined to buy a home for my business so that I might have things exactly as I wished. I was able to pay the first instalment, $2,500, on the purchase price and still have enough in bank to make alterations and buy the necessary furnishings.

"The move was made during the summer, and when I opened up in the autumn I had such crowds afternoons and evenings that I had to put extra tables in the halls until I could get a room on the second floor ready. At present I have two entire floors and often have so many waiting that it is next to impossible to pass through the entrance hall.

"Three summers ago I opened a second tea room at a seashore resort on the New England coast. I heard of the place through a classmate whose family owned a cottage down there. She described it as deadly dull, because there was nothing to do but bathe and boat unless you were the happy possessor of an automobile or a horse.

"I was so much interested in her description of the place that I went down one warm day in April and looked things over. I found a stretch of about three miles of beach lined with well appearing and handsome cottages and not a single place of amusement. The village behind the beach is a lovely old place, with twenty or more handsome old homes surrounded by grand trees. There are two or three small stores, a post office, two liveries and the railroad station half a mile away.

"Before I left that afternoon I had paid the first month's rent on the best of the only two cottages to be rented on the beach. Of course it needed considerable fixing up and that had to be done at my own expense, but as I was getting it at a rental of $200 for the season I was not worried at the outlay. The cottages told me enough of the character of the people who summered on that beach to make me sure that I would get good interest on all the money spent.

"Immediately after commencement I shut up my college tea rooms, leaving only the kitchen and storeroom open and in charge of an experienced woman with instructions to get more help when putting up preserves and pickles made it necessary. Then I moved.

"The two first days on the beach my tea room didn't have a visitor. People strolled by and stared at the sign, but nobody came in to try my tea. The third day I had a call from my landlord, who informed me that he had been misled into letting me have his cottage, and offering to return the amount paid for the first month's rent, he very politely requested me to move out.

"After considerable talking I discovered that the cottagers didn't like the way my waitresses dressed. They were too stylish and my rooms appeared from the outside to be so brilliantly lighted that they thought I intended to sell liquor.

"I didn't accept the offered rent, neither did I agree to move out, but I did assure my landlord that I would go the very day anything really objectionable happened on my premises. I told him of my success in the college town and then invited him to bring his family the following afternoon to try my tea.

"Well, they came, they saw, and I conquered. That evening all the tables on my piazza were filled and there was a slight sprinkling indoors. A few days later the classmate who had told me of the place came down for the summer and my troubles were at an end.

"The secret of my success is hard work and catering to the taste of my patrons. Had I opened either a cheap or a showy place in the college town, I would not have gained the good will of the faculty or the patronage of the best class of students. If my prices had been too high or the refreshments served not up to the notch, the result would not have been so satisfactory.

"Knowing one college town pretty well, I knew just about what was needed in the student's life; that is, an attractive looking place, eminently respectable, where you can take your best girl and get good things to eat well served at a reasonable cost.

"The needs of the beach were pretty much the same. People can't stay in the water all the time, neither can they spin around the country or go to an unlighted village at night in their carriages and automobiles. My tea room offers a recreation, without being a dissipation.

"Another point about which many people question me is the effect of my being a business woman on my social standing. I haven't noticed any slights. I receive many more invitations than it is possible for me to accept. I go with the same set of girls that I did while I was in college.

"Two of my classmates are lawyers, more than one is a doctor, and three have gone on the stage. I know that my earnings are far more than any of theirs, and I am sure they do not enjoy their business any more than I do. If I had to begin again I would do exactly as I have done, with one exception--I would lay out the whole of my $300 in furnishing that first tea room instead of keeping $75 as a nest egg in bank."

* * * * *

(_Country Gentleman_)

Two illustrations: 1. Half-tone reproducing photograph of dressed chickens with the caption, "There is this rule you must observe: Pick your chickens clean." 2. Reproduction in type of shipping label.

BY PARCEL POST

ONE MAN'S WAY OF SERVING THE DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER MARKET

By A. L. SARRAN

If you live within a hundred and fifty miles of a city, if you possess ordinary common sense and have the ability to write a readable and understandable letter, you may, from September to April of each year, when other farmers and their wives are consuming instead of producing, earn from fifty to a hundred and fifty dollars net profit each month. You may do this by fattening and dressing chickens for city folks, and by supplying regularly fresh country sausage, hams, lard and eggs.

This is not an idle theory. Last September I began with one customer; today--this was written the end of March--I have nearly 500 customers to whom I am supplying farm products by parcel post.

Instead of selling my chickens to the huckster or to the local poultry house for twelve cents a pound, I am selling them to the consumer in the city for twenty cents a pound, live weight, plus the cost of boxing and postage. Not only that, I am buying chickens from my neighbors at a premium of one to two cents over the huckster's prices, "milk feeding" them, and selling them to my city customers at a profit of six to seven cents a pound.

I buy young hogs from my neighbors at market prices and make them into extra good country sausage that nets me twenty-five cents a pound in the city, and into hams for which I get twenty-five cents a pound, delivered. The only pork product on which I do not make an excellent profit is lard. I get fifteen cents a pound for it, delivered to the city customer, and it costs me almost that much to render and pack it.

At this writing storekeepers and egg buyers in my county are paying the farmer seventeen cents for his eggs. I am getting twenty-five cents a dozen for eggs in thirty-dozen eases and twenty-nine cents a dozen in two-dozen boxes. My prices to the city man are based upon the Water Street, Chicago, quotation for "firsts," which, at this writing, is nineteen cents. If this price goes up I go up; if it goes down I go down.

I got my customers by newspaper advertising--almost exclusively. It is a comforting belief that one satisfied customer will get you another, and that that customer will get you another, and so on, but it has not so worked out in my experience. Out of all my customers less than twelve have become customers through the influence of friends.

My experience has taught me another thing: That direct advertising does not pay. By direct advertising I mean the mailing of letters and circulars to a list of names in the hope of selling something to persons whose names are on that list.

I tried it three times--once to a list of names I bought from a dealer in such lists; once to a list that I myself compiled from the society columns of two Chicago dailies; and once to a classified list that I secured from a directory.

The results in these cases were about the same. The net cost of each new customer that I secured by circulars and letters was $2.19. The net cost of each new customer that I secured by newspaper advertising was fifty-four cents.

Not every city newspaper will get such results. In my case I selected that paper in Chicago which in my judgment went into the greatest number of prosperous homes, and whose pages were kept clean of quack and swindling advertisements. I used only the Sunday issues, because I believe the Sunday issues are most thoroughly read.

The farmer will want to use, and properly so, the classified columns of the paper for his advertising. But he should patronize only that paper whose columns provide a classification especially for farm and food products.

I spent twelve dollars for advertising in one clean Chicago daily with a good circulation, and got three orders. The trouble was that my advertisement went into a column headed "Business Personals," along with a lot of manicure and massage advertising.

He on the farm who proposes to compete with the shipper, commission man and retailer for the city man's trade should devote his efforts to producing food of a better quality than the city man is accustomed to get via the shipper-commission-man-retailer route. Wherefore I proposed to give the city man the fattest, tenderest, juiciest, cleanest, freshest chicken he could get--and charge him a profitable price in so doing.

When I wrote my advertisements I did not stint myself for space. An advertisement that tells no reason why the reader should buy from the advertiser is, in my opinion, a poor advertisement. Therefore, I told my story in full to the readers of the Sunday paper, although it cost me six cents a word to do it. Here is a sample of my advertising:

I send young, milk-fed chickens, ready for the cook, direct to you from the farm. These chickens are fattened in wire-bottomed, sanitary coops, thus insuring absolute cleanliness, on a ration of meal, middlings and milk. The chicken you get from me is fresh; it is killed AFTER your order is received; is dressed, drawn, cooled out for 24 hours in dry air, wrapped in waxed paper and delivered to you on the morning of the third day after your order is mailed; it is fat, tender and sweet. The ordinary chicken that is fattened on unspeakable filth in the farmer's barnyard, and finds its way to your table via the huckster-shipper-commission-man-retailer route cannot compare with one of mine. Send me your check--no stamps--for $1.15 and I will send you a five-pound--live-weight--roasting chicken for a sample. If it does not please you I'll give your money back. Add 62 cents to that check and I'll mail you in a separate box a two-pound package of the most delicious fresh-ground sausage meat you ever ate. Made from the selected meats of young hogs only; not highly seasoned. These sausage cakes make a breakfast fit for a President. Money back if you don't like them.

A. L. SARRAN.

Notice that I told why the reader should buy one of my chickens rather than a chicken of whose antecedents he knew nothing. That it paid to spend six cents a word to tell him so is proved by the fact that this particular advertisement brought me, in four days, twenty-three orders, each accompanied by a check. I repeated my advertisements in Sunday issues, stopping only when I had as many customers as I could take care of.

Getting a customer and keeping him are two different propositions. A customer's first order is sent because of the representation made in the advertisement that he read. His second and his subsequent orders depend upon how you satisfy him and continue to satisfy him.

My rule is to select, weigh, dress, draw, handle, wrap and box the chicken with the same scrupulous care that I would exercise if the customer were actually present and watching me.

I have another rule: The customer is always right. If he complains I satisfy him, immediately and cheerfully. It is better to lose a chicken than to lose a customer.

I am now about to make a statement with which many of my readers will not agree. It is more than true; it is so important that the success of a mail-order business in dressed chickens depends upon a realization of it. It is this: _A majority of farmers and their wives do not know what constitutes a fat chicken._

I make this statement because of the experience I have had with country folks in buying their chickens for my feeding coops. If they really consider to be fat the chickens which they have assured me were fat, then they do not know fat chickens. A chicken can be fat to a degree without being so fat as he can or should be made for the purpose of marketing.

There is a flavor about a well-fattened, milk-fed chicken that no other chicken has. Every interstice of his flesh is juicy and oily. No part of him is tough, stringy muscle, as is the case if he is "farm-fattened" while being allowed to range where he will.

If you think your chicken is a fat one, pick it up and rub the ball of your thumb across its backbone about an inch behind the base of the wings. If the backbone is felt clearly and distinctly the chicken is not fat.

I fatten my chickens in coops the floors of which are made of heavy wire having one-inch mesh; underneath the wire is a droppings pan, which is emptied every day. My coops are built in tiers and long sections. I have ninety of them, each one accommodating nine chickens. I have enough portable feeding coops with wire bottoms and droppings pans underneath to enable me to feed, in all, about one thousand chickens at one time.

Chickens should be fed from ten to fourteen days in the coops. I give no feed whatever to the chicken the first day he is in the coop, but I keep a supply of sour milk in the trough for him. I feed my chickens three times a day.

At seven A.M. I give them a fairly thick batter of meal, middlings or oat flour, about half and half, and sour milk. I feed them only what they will clean up in the course of half an hour. At noon I feed them again only what they will clean up in half an hour. This feed is the same as the morning feed except that it is thinner. About four o'clock I give them a trough full of the same feed, but so thick it will barely pour out from the bucket into the trough.

The next morning the troughs are emptied--if anything remains in them--into the big kettle where the feed is mixed for the morning feeding. The idea is this: More fat and flesh are made at night than in the daytime; therefore see that no chicken goes to bed with an empty crop.

About the eighth to tenth day force the feeding--see to it that the chicken gets all it will eat three times a day.

By keeping an accurate account of the costs of meal, milk, and so on, I find that I can put a pound of fat on a coop-fed chicken for seven cents. When one considers that this same pound brings twenty cents, and that milk feeding in coops raises the per pound value of the chicken from twelve to twenty cents, one must admit that feeding chickens is more profitable than feeding cattle.

Do not feed your chicken anything for twenty-four hours before killing it. Do not worry about loss in weight. The only weight it will lose will be the weight of the feed in its crop and gizzard, and the offal in its intestines--and you are going to lose that anyway when you dress and draw it. If you will keep the bird off feed for twenty-four hours you will find that it will draw much more easily and cleanly.

Hang the chicken up by the feet and kill it by bleeding it away back in the mouth. Let it bleed to death. Grasp the chicken's head in your left hand, the back of its head against the palm of your hand. Do not hold it by the neck, but grasp it by the bony part of its head and jaws. Reach into the throat with a three-inch, narrow, sharp knife and cut toward the top and front of the head.

You will sever the big cross vein that connects the two "jugular" veins in the neck, and the blood will pour out of the mouth. If you know how to dry-pick you will not need to be told anything by me; if you do not know it will do you no good to have me tell you, because I do not believe a person can learn to dry-pick chickens by following printed instructions. At any rate, I could not. I never learned until I hired a professional picker to come out from town to teach me.

So far as I can judge, it makes no difference to the consumer in the city whether the chicken is scalded or dry-picked. There is this to be said for the scalded chicken--that it is a more cleanly picked chicken than the dry-picked one. The pin feathers are more easily removed when the chicken is scalded.

On the other hand, there are those feed-specializing, accurate-to-the-ten-thousandth-part-of-an-inch experts, who say that the dry-picked chicken keeps better than the scalded one. If the weather is warmer than, say, seventy-five degrees, it might; under that, there is no difference.

I do the most of my selling in Chicago, and my place is a hundred and fifty miles south of that city; if a scalded chicken will keep when I am selling it that far away it will keep for almost anyone, because none of you is going to sell many chickens at any point more than a hundred and fifty miles from your place.

There is this caution to be observed in scalding a chicken: Do not have the water too hot. I had trouble on this score, and as a result my chickens were dark and did not present an appetizing appearance. Finally I bought a candy thermometer--one that registered up to 400 degrees. By experimenting I found that 180 degrees was the point at which a chicken scalded to pick the easiest, but that a chicken scalded at 165 degrees presented a better appearance after being picked and cooled. Whichever method you use, observe this rule: Pick your chicken clean.

After my chicken has cooled out enough so the flesh will cut easily, I draw it. I chop off the head close up, draw back the skin of the neck a couple of inches, and then cut off the neck. The flap of skin thus left serves to cover the bloody and unsightly stub of the neck. Next I open up the chicken from behind and below the vent and pull out the gizzard--if the chicken has been kept off feed for twenty-four hours the empty crop will come with it--intestines and liver. I remove the gall bladder from the liver, open and clean the gizzard, and replace it and the liver in the chicken.

Then I cut a slit across the chicken just back of the keel of the breast bone. I cut the feet off at the knee joint and slip the drumstick through this slit. Then I lay the chicken up to cool out overnight. The next morning it may be wrapped and boxed, and is then ready for mailing.

Wrapping and boxing must not be slighted. The clean, sanitary appearance of the chicken when it is unpacked in the kitchen of your customer goes a long way toward prejudicing that customer in your favor. I buy thirty pounds of waxed paper, twenty-four by thirty-six inches, and have the paper house cut it in two. This gives me 1000 sheets, each eighteen by twenty-four inches, for the price of a ream of the full size--at this time about five dollars, or a half cent a sheet.

Each chicken is wrapped in one sheet of this waxed paper, and is then packed in a corrugated paper box made especially for sending chickens by parcel post.

I buy three sizes of these boxes. One size, which costs me four cents each, will hold one four-pound chicken when dressed and drawn. The next size, costing five cents each, will hold two very small chickens, or one large chicken. The third size, costing six cents each, will hold two large chickens, three medium-sized ones, or four small ones.

Do not use makeshifts, such as old shoe boxes. In the first place, your shipment is not properly protected by such a box; in the second place, your postmaster is likely to refuse to accept it for mailing, as he would be justified in doing; and in the third place, your customer receives his chicken in a box that has been used for he wonders what, and has been in he wonders what places.

It is for this reason that I never ask a customer to return a box to me. I do not want to use a box a second time. If I were a city man, getting my chickens by mail, I should want them sent to me in a brand-new box, made for the special purpose of sending chickens by mail--and I'd want them in no other box. Then I'd feel sure of them.

The cost of shipping by parcel post is low. I live ten miles from my county seat, and the postage required to send a five-pound, live-weight chicken, dressed and boxed, from my place to town is eight cents. The postage required to send that same five-pound chicken from here to Chicago, one hundred and fifty miles, is eight cents. The express company charges twenty-six cents for the same service, and does not deliver so quickly.

But parcel-post delivery was not always so admirably done in Chicago. When I began shipping up there last September it was no uncommon thing for my packages to be so delayed that many chickens would spoil.

I recall the "straw that broke the camel's back." I mailed twenty-six chickens one day--and in due course I received thirteen letters, each advising me of the same mournful event. The chicken had spoiled because of delay in delivery. My wife wanted to quit. I didn't. I made good the losses to the customers and prepared a label, a copy of which I forwarded to the Third Assistant Postmaster General at Washington, asking his permission to use it, and telling him of the vexatious and expensive delays in delivering my packages in Chicago.

In due time I received the desired permission, and ordered the labels printed. The scheme worked. Every time a package was not delivered on schedule time the customer notified me, and I made complaint to the postmaster at Chicago.

Gradually the service improved until now I have no trouble at all. If I were to ship two packages today to the same address in Chicago, sending one by parcel post and the other by express, I believe the parcel-post package would be delivered first. At any rate, it has been done for me.

The weakness in the parcel-post delivery lies in the fact that perishable products--such as dressed chickens--cannot be handled in warm weather. I think that if the Post Office Department would cut some of its red tape and permit the shipment of air-tight packages in air-tight conveyors this particular problem could be solved.

You will, of course, have more or less correspondence with your customers. By all means use your own letterheads, but do not let your printer embellish them with cuts of roosters, chickens, pigs, or the like. Not that we are ashamed of them; far be it from such. You do not, however, need to have a sheet of paper littered up with pictures of imaginary animals in order to convince your customer that you are selling the meats of that animal. I like a plainly printed letterhead that carries my name, my address and my business. That's all.

By all means keep books on your farm-to-table venture, if you undertake it. Set down on one side of the page what you pay for boxes, labels, postage, and so on, including what you pay yourself for chickens at your huckster's prices. On the other side of the page set down what your city customer pays you. Add up the pages, do a simple sum in subtraction, and you will know just how much you have made.

If I kept only twenty-five hens I should sell my eggs and my chickens direct to the city consumer. When the farmer learns to sell direct instead of letting the huckster, the poultry house, the commission man, the dresser and the retailer stand between him and the consumer, then poultry raising will become really profitable.

There are too many folks who sell their eggs and "take it out in trade."

* * * *

_(Saturday Evening Post)_

One large illustration, a wash drawing, made by a staff artist.

SALES WITHOUT SALESMANSHIP

BY JAMES H. COLLINS

"Say, you're a funny salesman!" exclaimed the business man. "Here I make up my own mind that I need two motor trucks and decide to buy 'em from your company. Then I send for a salesman. You come down and spend a week looking into my horse delivery, and now you tell me to keep my horses. What kind of a salesman do you call yourself anyway?"

"What made you think you needed motor trucks?" was the counterquestion of the serious, thick-spectacled young chap.

"Everyone else seems to be turning to gasoline delivery. I want to be up to date."

"Your delivery problem lies outside the gasoline field," said the salesman. "Your drivers make an average of ninety stops each trip. They climb stairs and wait for receipts. Their rigs are standing at the curb more than half the time. Nothing in gasoline equipment can compete with the horse and wagon under such conditions. If you had loads of several tons to be kept moving steadily I'd be glad to sell you two trucks."

"Suppose I wanted to buy them anyway?"

"We could not accept your order."

"But you'd make your commission and the company its profit."

"Yes; but you'd make a loss, and within a year your experience would react unfavorably upon us."

So no sale was effected. Facts learned during his investigation of this business man's delivery problem led the salesman to make suggestions that eliminated waste and increased the effectiveness of his horse rigs.

About a year later, however, this business man sent for the salesman again. He contemplated motorized hauling for another company of which he was the president. After two days' study the salesman reported that motor trucks were practicable and that he needed about five of them.

"All right--fill out the contract," directed the business man.

"Don't you want to know how these trucks are going to make you money?" asked the salesman.

"No; if you say I need five trucks, then I know that's just what I need!"

A new kind of salesmanship is being developed in many lines of business--and particularly in the rebuilding of sales organizations made necessary by the ending of the war and return to peace production. "Study your goods," was the salesman's axiom yesterday. "Study your customer's problem," is the viewpoint to-day; and it is transforming the salesman and sales methods.

Indeed, the word salesman tends to disappear under this new viewpoint, for the organization which was once charged largely with disposing of goods may now be so intimately involved in technical studies of the customers' problems that selling is a secondary part of its work. The Sales Department is being renamed, and known as the Advisory Department or the Research Staff; while the salesman himself becomes a Technical Counsel or Engineering Adviser.

Camouflage? No; simply better expression of broader functions.

As a salesman, probably he gave much attention to the approach and argument with which he gained his customer's attention and confidence. But, with his new viewpoint and method of attack, perhaps the first step is asking permission to study the customer's transportation needs, or accounting routine, or power plant--or whatever section of the latter's business is involved.

The experience of the thick-spectacled motor-truck salesman was typical. Originally he sold passenger cars. Then came the war, with factory facilities centered on munitions and motor trucks. There being no more passenger cars to sell, they switched him over into the motor-truck section. There he floundered for a while, trying to develop sales arguments along the old lines. But the old arguments did not seem to fit, somehow.

It might have been possible to demonstrate the superior construction of his motor truck; but competitors would meet point with point, and customers were not interested in technicalities anyway. He tried service as an argument; but that was largely a promise of what motor trucks would do for people after they bought them, and competitors could always promise just as much, and a little more.

Company reputation? His company had a fine one--but motor-truck purchasers wanted to know the cost of moving freight. Price? No argument at all, because only one other concern made motor trucks calling for so great an initial investment.

So Thick-Specs, being naturally serious and solid, began to dig into motor trucks from the standpoint of the customer. He got permission to investigate delivery outfits in many lines. Selling a five-ton motor truck to many a business man was often equivalent to letting Johnny play with a loaded machine gun. Such a vehicle combined the potentiality of moving from fifty to seventy-five tons of freight daily, according to routing and the number of hours employed; but it involved a daily expense of twenty-five dollars.

The purchaser could lose money in two ways at swift ratios, and perhaps unsuspectingly: He might not use his full hauling capacity each day or would use it only half the year, during his busy season. Or he might underestimate costs by overlooking such items as interest and depreciation.

Thick-Specs' first actual sale was not a motor truck at all, but a motorcycle, made by another company. Within three months, however, this motorcycle added two big trucks to a fleet of one dozen operated by a wholesale firm. That concern had good trucks, and kept them in a well-equipped garage, where maintenance was good. But at least once daily there would be a road breakdown. Usually this is a minor matter, but it ties up the truck while its puzzled driver tries to locate the trouble.

When a motorcycle was bought for the garage, drivers were forbidden to tamper with machinery on the road--they telephoned in to the superintendent. By answering each call on his own motorcycle--about an hour daily--the repairman kept equipment in such good shape that valuable extra service was secured from the fleet each day.

The salesman-adviser did not originate this scheme himself, but discovered it in another concern's motor-truck organization; in fact, this is the advantage the salesman-adviser enjoys--acquaintance with a wide range of methods and the knack of carrying a good wrinkle from one business to another. He brings the outside point of view; and, because modern business runs toward narrow specialization, the outside point of view is pretty nearly always welcome, provided it is honest and sensible.

In another case he had to dig and invent to meet a peculiar situation.

There was a coal company working under a handicap in household deliveries. Where a residence stood back from the sidewalk coal had often to be carried from the motor truck in baskets. This kept the truck waiting nearly an hour. A motor truck's time is worth several dollars hourly. If the coal could have been dumped on the sidewalk and carried in later, releasing the truck, that would have saved expense and made more deliveries possible.

A city ordinance prohibited dumping coal on the sidewalk except by permit. Coal men had never tried to have that ordinance changed. But the salesman-adviser went straight to the city authorities and, by figures showing the expense and waste involved, secured a modification, so that his customer, the coal company, got a blanket permit for dumping coal and gave bonds as an assurance against abuse of the privilege. Then a little old last year's runabout was bought and followed the coal trucks with a crew to carry the coal indoors, clearing sidewalks quickly.

This salesman-adviser's philosophy was as simple as it was sound. Confidence is the big factor in selling, he reasoned. Your customer will have confidence in you if he feels that you are square and also knows what you are talking about. By diligent study of gasoline hauling problems in various lines of business he gained practical knowledge and after that had only to apply his knowledge from the customer's side of the problem.

"Put it another way," he said: "Suppose you had a factory and expected to run it only one year. There would not be time to get returns on a costly machine showing economies over a five-year period; but if you intended to run your factory on a five-year basis, then that machine might be highly profitable.

"In sales work it was just the same; if you were selling for this year's profit alone, you'd close every sale regardless of your customer's welfare. Let the purchaser beware! But if you meant to sell on the five-year basis, then confidence is the big investment, and the most profitable sale very often one you refuse to make for immediate results."

He had a fine following when the draft reached him; and during the eight months he spent in an Army uniform he utilized his knowledge of gasoline transportation as an expert in Uncle Sam's motor service. Upon being discharged he returned to his job and his customers, and to-day the concern with which he is connected is taking steps to put all its motor-truck salesmen on this advisory basis.

War shot its sales force to pieces--the Army and the Navy reached out for men and tied up production facilities; so there was nothing to sell. But war also gave a clean slate for planning a new sales force.

As old salesmen return and new men are taken on for sales instruction, this concern trains them--not with the old sales manual, by standard approach and systematic sales argument, but by sending them out into the field to study gasoline hauling problems. They secure permission to investigate trucking methods of contractors, department stores, wholesale merchants, coal dealers, truck owners hauling interstate freight, mills, factories and other lines of business. They investigate the kinds and quantities of stuff to be moved, the territory and roads covered, the drivers, the garage facilities. They ride behind typical loads and check up running time, delays, breakdowns, gasoline and oil consumption.

Engineering teaches people to think in curves. This youngster had to make a curve of the grocer's trucking before he could visualize it himself. His curve included factors like increase in stuff that had been hauled during the past three years and additions to the motor equipment. When you have a healthy curve showing any business activity, the logical thing to do, after bringing it right down to date, is to let it run out into the future at its own angle. This was done with the grocery curve, and its future extension indicated that not more than three months later the grocery house would need about four more five-ton motor trucks.

Closer investigation of facts behind the curve revealed an unusual growth in sugar hauling, due to the increase in supply and removal of consumer war restrictions. And that grocery concern bought additional trucks for sugar within two months. With the insight made possible by such a curve a salesman might safely have ordered the trucks without his customer's knowledge and driven them up to his door the day the curve showed they were needed.

"Here are the trucks you wanted to haul that sugar."

"Good work! Drive 'em in!"

What has been found to be sound sales policy in the motor truck business applies to many other lines. Yesterday the salesman of technical apparatus sought the customer with a catalogue and a smile--and a large ignorance of the technical problems. To-day that kind of selling is under suspicion, because purchasers of technical equipment have been led to buy on superficial selling points and left to work out for themselves complex technicalities that belong to the manufacturer of the equipment.

In the West during recent years a large number of pumps of a certain type have been sold for irrigating purposes. Purchasers bought from the catalogue-and-smile type of salesman, hooked their pumps up to a power plant--and found that they lifted only about half the number of gallons a minute promised in the catalogue. Manufacturers honestly believed those pumps would do the work indicated in their ratings. They had not allowed for variations in capacity where pumps were installed under many different conditions and run by different men. The situation called for investigation at the customer's end; when it was discovered that these pumps ought to be rated with an allowance for loss of capacity a half to two-thirds of the power, due to friction and lost power.

It might have been dangerous for the salesman to show up again in an irrigation district where a lot of his pumps were "acting up," armed only with his catalogue and smile. But when an engineer appeared from the pump company to help customers out of their difficulties, he won confidence immediately and made additional sales because people felt that he knew what he was talking about.

The superintendent of a big machinery concern found that his expense for cutting oils was constantly rising. Salesmen had followed salesmen, recommending magic brands of the stuff; yet each new barrel of oil seemed to do less work than the last--and cost more in dollars.

One day a new kind of visitor showed up and sent in the card of a large oil company. He was not a salesman, but an investigator of oil problems. The superintendent took him through the plant. He studied the work being done by screw-cutting machines, lathes and other equipment operated with cutting oil. Where salesmen had recommended brands without technical knowledge of either the work to be done or the composition of the oil, this stranger wrote specifications that cut down the percentage of costly lard oil used on some work; and he eliminated it altogether on others.

Moreover, he pointed out sheer losses of oil by picking up a handful of metal cuttings from a box, letting them drip, measuring the oil that accumulated and recommending a simple device for reclaiming that oil before the waste metal was sold.

This new viewpoint in selling is developing in so many lines that to enumerate them would be to make a national directory of business concerns manufacturing milling machinery, office devices, manufacturing and structural materials, equipment for the farm and the mine.

People who purchase such products have been accustomed to meeting two different representatives of manufacturers: First, the salesman skilled in selling, but deficient in technical knowledge.

"This chap is here to see how much he can get out of me," said the prospective consumer to himself; and he was on his guard to see that the visitor got as little as possible, either in the way of orders or information.

The other representative came from the mechanical department to see how present equipment was running, or perhaps to "shoot trouble." He was long on technical knowledge, but probably dumb when it came to salesmanship.

"This fellow is here to help me out of my troubles," said the customer. "I'll see how much I can get out of him."

Presently manufacturers of equipment woke up to the fact that their mechanical men--inspectors and trouble shooters--had a basis of confidence which the salesman pure and simple was rapidly losing. Moreover, the technical man gained a knowledge of the customer's requirements that furnished the best foundation for selling new equipment.

The salesman discovered the technical man and went to him for tips on new equipment needed by customers whose plants he had visited. The technical man also discovered the salesman, for it was plain enough that equipment well sold--skillfully adjusted to the customer's needs--gave the least margin for trouble shooting.

So there has been a meeting of minds; and to-day the salesman studies the technicalities, and the technical man is learning salesmanship, and their boss is standing behind them both with a new policy. This is the policy of performance, not promises--service before sales. Under that policy the very terms salesmanship and sales department are beginning to disappear, to be replaced by new nomenclature, which more accurately indicates what a manufacturer's representative can do for the customer, and gives him access to the latter on the basis of confidence and good will.

* * * * *

_(Munsey's Magazine)_

THE ACCIDENT THAT GAVE US WOOD-PULP PAPER

HOW A MIGHTY MODERN INDUSTRY OWED ITS BEGINNING TO GOTTFRIED KELLER AND A WASP

BY PARKE F. HANLEY

On the day when President Wilson was inaugurated to his second term, this country had its fiftieth anniversary of the introduction of wood-pulp. Were it not for a series of lucky chances that developed into opportunity, this wood-pulp anniversary might have remained for our children's children.

Have you ever given thought to the accidentalism of many great discoveries? The element of haphazard is generally combined with a series of coincidences. Looking back over the developments that led to gigantic contributions to our civilization, one cannot fail to be struck by the coordination of events. Apparently there always has been a conspiracy of natural forces to compel men of thought and resourcefulness to add another asset to progress.

Your earliest school readers have been full of these--for instance, Watt and his steam-kettle, Franklin and his kite. Now the youngsters are reading that the Wrights derived a fundamental principle of aviation--the warping-tip--from the flight of crows. With the awe comes a disquieting thought. How far back should we be were it not for these fortuitous circumstances?

Among all the great things that have been given to the world in the last three-quarters of a century, few measure beside the wood-pulp industry. With its related trades and sciences, it is comprised within the ten great activities of mankind. In manufacture and distribution, it employs an army matching in size the Russian battle hordes. Its figures of investment and production are comparable to the debts of the great war.

Yet it remained for a wasp and Gottfried Keller to bring us out of the era of rag paper. Together, they saved us from a retardation of universal thought. Therefore, let us consider the agents.

First, the wasp. She was one of a family of several hundreds, born in the Hartz Mountains in the year 1839. When death claimed most of her relatives at the end of the season allotted as the life of a wasp, this survivor, a queen wasp, became the foundress of a family of her own. She built her nest of selected wood-fibers, softened them to a pulp with her saliva, and kneaded them into cells for her larvæ. Her family came forth in due course, and their young wings bore them out into the world. The nest, having served its purpose, was abandoned to the sun and the rain.

Maeterlinck, who attributes emotions to plants and souls to bees, might wrap a drama of destiny about this insect. She would command a leading place in a cast which included the butterfly that gave silk to the world, the mosquito that helped to prove the germ theory of disease, and the caterpillar that loosed the apple which revealed the law of gravitation to Sir Isaac Newton.

As to Keller, he was a simple German, by trade a paper-maker and by avocation a scientist of sorts. One day in 1840--and this marks the beginning of the accidents--returning home from his mill, he trod upon the abandoned nest. Had not the tiny dwelling been deserted, he probably would have cherished nothing but bitter reflections about the irascibility of wasps. As it was, he stooped to see the ruin he had wrought.

The crushed nest lay soft in his hand, soft and pliable, and yet tough in texture. It was as soft as his own rag-made paper. It was not paper, and yet it was very much like paper. Crumbling It in his fingers, he decided that its material was wood-pulp.

Keller was puzzled to know how so minute a creature had welded wood into a paperlike nest. His state of mind passed to interest, thence to speculation, and finally to investigation. He carried his problem and its possibilities to his friend, Heinrich Voelter, a master mechanic. Together they began experiments. They decided to emulate the wasp. They would have to granulate the wood as she had done. The insect had apparently used spruce; they used spruce under an ordinary grindstone. Hot water served as a substitute for the wasp's salivary juices.

Their first attempts gave them a pulp astonishingly similar to that resulting from the choicest rags. They carried the pulp through to manufacture, with a small proportion of rags added--and they had paper. It was good paper, paper that had strength. They found that it possessed an unlooked-for advantage in its quick absorption of printing-ink.

Have you followed the chain of accidents, coincidences, and fortunate circumstances? Suppose the wasp had not left her nest in Keller's path. What if he had been in haste, or had been driven off by the queen's yellow-jacketed soldiers? What if he had no curiosity, if he had not been a paper-maker, if he had not enjoyed acquaintance with Voelter? Wood-pulp might never have been found.

Leaving Gottfried Keller and Voelter in their hour of success, we find, sixteen years afterward, two other Germans, Albrecht and Rudolf Pagenstecher, brothers, in the export trade in New York. They were pioneering in another field. They were shipping petroleum to Europe for those rising young business men, John D. and William Rockefeller. They were seeking commodities for import when their cousin, Alberto Pagenstecher, arrived from the fatherland with an interesting bit of news.

"A few weeks ago, in a paper-mill in the Hartz, I found them using a new process," he said. "They are making paper out of wood. It serves. Germany is printing its newspapers on wood-pulp paper."

To his cousins it seemed preposterous that wood could be so converted, but Alberto was convincing. He showed them Voelter's patent grants and pictures of the grinders. The Pagenstechers went to Germany, and when they returned they brought two of the grinders--crude affairs devised for the simple purpose of pressing wood upon a stone. They also brought with them several German mechanics.

A printer in New York, named Strang, had already secured the United States rights of the new process. He was engaged in the manufacture of calendered paper, and, therefore, had no occasion to use wood-pulp; so he was willing to surrender the patents in exchange for a small interest.

The Pagenstechers wanted water-power for their grinders, and they located their first mill beside Stockbridge Bowl, in Curtisville, now Interlaken, Massachusetts. On an outlay of eleven thousand dollars their mill was built and their machinery installed. Two or three trials, with cotton waste added to the ground wood, gave them their paper. Their first product was completed on the 5th of March, 1867.

It was a matter of greater difficulty to dispose of the stock. The trade fought against the innovation. Finally Wellington Smith, of the near-by town of Lee, Massachusetts, was persuaded to try it. Rag-paper had been selling at twenty-four cents a pound. Smith's mill still exhibits the first invoice with the Pagenstechers, which shows the purchase of wood-paper at eleven cents.

The paper was hauled to Lee in the dead of night, for Smith's subordinates wished to spare him from the laughter of his fellow millmen. It was sold, and proved successful, and the Pagenstechers were rushed with orders. They built a second mill in Luzeme, New York, but abandoned it soon afterward for the greater water-power to be obtained at Palmer's Falls, where now stands the second largest mill in the United States.

Manufacturers tumbled over themselves to get the benefit of the new process. The originators in this country held the patent rights until 1884, letting them out on royalties until that time. With each new plant the price of paper fell, until at one period it sold at one and a half cents a pound.

Trial had proved that spruce was the only suitable wood for the pulp. Until 1891 rags were combined in about one-quarter proportion. Then it was found that other coniferous woods might be used to replace the rags, after being submitted to what is called the sulfite process. In this treatment small cubes of wood, placed in a vat, have their resinous properties extracted, and the wood is disintegrated. A combination of ground and sulfite wood makes the paper now used for news-print.

As has been told, the primary advantage of the wood-pulp paper was its immediate absorption of ink. This made possible much greater speed in printing, and led in turn to the development of the great modern newspaper and magazine presses, fed by huge rolls of paper, which they print on both sides simultaneously. These wonderful machines have now reached the double-octuple stage--monsters capable of turning out no less than five thousand eight-page newspapers in a single minute, or three hundred thousand in an hour.

With the evolution from the flat-bed to the web or rotary presses there came further development in typesetting-machines--the linotype, the monotype, and others. With paper and presses brought to such simplification, newspapers have sprouted in every town, almost every village, and the total number of American periodicals is counted by tens of thousands. There are magazines that have a circulation of more than a million copies weekly. The leading daily newspapers in New York print anywhere from one hundred thousand copies to four times as many, and they can put extra editions on the streets at fifteen-minute intervals.

The aggregate circulation of daily newspapers in the United States is close to forty million copies. Weekly newspapers and periodicals reach fifty millions, and monthly publications mount almost to one hundred millions; and all this would be impossible without wood-pulp paper.

The annual production of wood-pulp in the United States and Canada is estimated by Albrecht Pagenstecher, the survivor of the innovators, to be worth nearly five hundred millions of dollars. Take into consideration the hundreds of thousands employed in the mills, the men who cut and bring in the raw product, the countless number in the printing, publishing, and distributing trades. Then hark back to the accident that put the wasp's nest under the toe of Gottfried Keller!

* * * * *

(_Providence Journal_)

One zinc-etching illustration reproducing an old wood-cut of the ship, with the caption, "The Savannah, First Steamship That Crossed the Ocean."

CENTENNIAL OF THE FIRST STEAMSHIP TO CROSS THE ATLANTIC

(7-column head)

One hundred years ago this week there was launched at New York the ship Savannah, which may be called the father of the scores of steamers that are now carrying our soldiers and supplies from the New World to the Old World.

The Savannah was the first ship equipped with steam power to cross the Atlantic ocean. It made the trip in 25 days, using both sails and engine, and the arrival of the strange craft at Liverpool was the cause of unusual stir among our English cousins. Like every step from the beaten path the idea of steam travel between the New World and the Old World was looked upon with much scepticism and it was not until about 20 years later that regular, or nearly regular, steamer service was established.

The launching of the Savannah took place on Aug. 22, 1818. It was not accompanied by the ceremony that is accorded many of the boats upon similar occasions to-day. As a matter of fact, it is probable that only a few persons knew that the craft was intended for a transatlantic trip. The keel of the boat was laid with the idea of building a sailing ship, and the craft was practically completed before Capt. Moses Rogers, the originator of the venture, induced Scarborough & Isaacs, ship merchants of Savannah, to buy her and fit her with a steam engine for service between Savannah and Liverpool.

The ship, which was built by Francis Fickett, was 100 feet long, 28 feet broad and 14 feet deep. It had three masts which, of course, were of far greater importance in making progress toward its destination than was the steam engine.

Capt. Rogers had gained a reputation for great courage and skill in sailing. He had already had the honor of navigating the sea with a steamer, taking the New Jersey from New York to the Chesapeake in 1816, a voyage which was then thought to be one of great danger for such a vessel.

It was natural, then, that he was especially ambitious to go down in history as the first master of a steam ship to cross the ocean. As soon as the vessel had been purchased by the Savannah ship merchants, the work of installing the engine was begun. This was built by Stephen Vail of Speedwell, N.J., and the boiler by David Dod of Elizabeth, N. J.

The paddle-wheels were made of iron and were "detachable," so that the sections could be removed and laid on the deck. This was done when it was desired to proceed under canvas exclusively and was also a precaution in rough weather.

In short, the Savannah was an auxiliary steamer, a combination of steam and sail that later became well known in shipping. This is much like the early development of the gasoline marine engine, which was an auxiliary to the sail, a combination that is still used.

Capt. Rogers took the boat from New York to Savannah in eight days and 15 hours, using steam on this trip for 41½ hours. On May 26, 1819, under Capt. Rogers, the Savannah set sail from her home port for Liverpool and made the trip in 25 days.

As long as the trip took, the voyage was considerably shorter than the average for the sailing ship in 1819, and this reduction in time was accomplished in spite of the fact that the Savannah ran into much unfavorable weather. Capt. Rogers used steam on 18 of the 25 days and doubtless would have resorted to engine power more of the time except for the fact that at one stage of the voyage the fuel was exhausted.

It was natural that the arrival of the steamer in English waters should not have been looked upon with any great favor by the Englishmen. In addition to the jeers of the sceptical, the presence of vessels was accompanied by suspicion on the part of the naval authorities, and the merchants were not favorably impressed.

When the Savannah approached the English coast with her single stack giving forth volumes of dense black smoke, it was thought by those on shore that she was a ship on fire, and British men-of-war and revenue cutters set out to aid her. When the truth was known, consternation reigned among the English officers. They were astonished at the way the craft steamed away from them after they had rushed to assist what they thought was a ship in distress.

The reception of the Savannah at Liverpool was not particularly cordial. Some of the newspapers even suggested that "this steam operation may, in some manner, be connected with the ambitious views of the United States."

A close watch was kept on the boat while she lay in British waters, and her departure was welcome. In the second volume of "Memoranda of a Residence at the Court of St. James," Richard Rush, then American Minister in London, includes a complete log of the Savannah. Dispatch No. 76 from Minister Rush reports the arrival of the ship and the comment that was caused by its presence as follows:

London, July 3,1819.

Sir--On the 20th of last month arrived at Liverpool from the United States the steamship Savannah, Capt. Rogers, being the first vessel of that description that ever crossed the sea, and having excited equal admiration and astonishment as she entered port under the power of her steam.

She is a fine ship of 320 tons burden and exhibits in her construction, no less than she has done in her navigation across the Atlantic, a signal trophy of American enterprise and skill upon the ocean.

I learn from Capt. Rogers, who has come to London and been with me, that she worked with great ease and safety on the voyage, and used her steam full 18 days.

Her engine acts horizontally and is equal to a 72 horsepower. Her wheels, which are of iron, are on the sides, and removable at pleasure. The fuel laid in was 1500 bushels of coal, which got exhausted on her entrance into the Irish Channel.

The captain assures me that the weather in general was extremely unfavorable, or he would have made a much shorter passage; besides that, he was five days delayed in the channel for want of coal. I have the honor to be, etc., RICHARD RUSH.

To have made the first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean under steam was a great accomplishment and brought no little credit to Capt. Rogers and the United States. Pioneers in many ventures, the American people had added another honor to their record. And this was even more of a credit because in those early days skilled workmen were comparatively few on these shores and the machine shops had not reached a stage of efficiency that came a short time later.

There were, of course, in 1819 men who had developed into mechanics and there were shops of some account, as the steamboat for short trips had been in existence for some years. But the whole enterprise of planning a steam voyage in which the boat should be headed due east was characteristic of the boldness and bravery of the Americans.

The Savannah did not return to the States directly from England. It steamed from Liverpool to St. Petersburg and brought forth further comment from the Old World. She proved that the marine steam engine and side-wheels were practicable for deep-sea navigation. The idea of transatlantic travel under steam had been born and it was only necessary to develop the idea to "shorten the distance" between the two continents.

This pioneer voyage, however, was then looked upon more as a novelty than as the inception of a new method of long-distance travel. The trip had failed to demonstrate that steam was an entirely adequate substitute for the mast and sail in regular service.

Since the Savannah was primarily a sailing vessel, the loss of steam power by the crippling of the engine would not be serious, as she could continue on her way with paddle-wheels removed and under full sail.

It was 19 years later that the idea of employing vessels propelled by steam in trade between the United States and England came under the serious consideration of merchants and ship builders. In the interval the marine boiler and the engines had been improved until they had passed the stage of experiment, and coasting voyages had become common on both sides of the Atlantic.

The beginning of real transatlantic steam voyages was made by the Sirius and the Great Western. The latter boat had been built especially for trips across the ocean and the former was taken from the Cork and London line. The Sirius started from Liverpool on April 4, 1838, and the Great Western four days later. They arrived in New York within 24 hours of each other, the Sirius at 10 p.m. on April 22 and the Great Western at 3 o'clock the following afternoon. Neither of the vessels carried much sail.

These boats gave more or less irregular service until withdrawn because of their failure to pay expenses. In 1839 the Cunard Company was formed and the paddle steamers Britannia, Arcadia, Columbia, and Caledonia were put into service.

From that time on the steamer developed with great rapidity, the value of which was never more demonstrated than at the present time. It will always be remembered, however, that this Capt. Rogers with his crude little Savannah was the man whose bold enterprise gave birth to the idea of transatlantic travel under steam.

* * * * *

(A syndicate Sunday magazine section of the _Harrisburg Patriot_)

SEARCHING FOR THE LOST ATLANTIS

By GROSVENOR A. PARKER

Not so long ago a stubby tramp steamer nosed its way down the English Channel and out into the Atlantic. Her rusty black bow sturdily shouldered the seas aside or shoved through them with an insistence that brought an angry hail of spray on deck. The tramp cared little for this protest of the sea or for the threats of more hostile resistance. Through the rainbow kicked up by her forefoot there glimmered and beckoned a mirage of wealthy cities sunk fathoms deep and tenanted only by strange sea creatures. For the tramp and her crew there was a stranger goal than was ever sought by an argosy of legend. The lost cities of Atlantis and all the wealth that they contain was the port awaiting the searchers under the rim of the western ocean.

It's no wild-goose chase that had started thus unromantically. The men who hope to gain fame and fortune by this search are sure of their ground and they have all the most modern mechanical and electrical aids for their quest. On the decks of their ship two submarine boats are cradled in heavy timbers. One of them is of the usual type, but the other looks like a strange fantasy of another Jules Verne. A great electric eye peers cyclops-wise over the bow and reaching ahead of the blunt nose are huge crab-like claws delicate enough to pick up a gold piece and strong enough to tear a wall apart.

These under-water craft are only a part of the equipment that Bernard Meeker, a young Englishman, has provided to help him in his search for the lost city. There are divers' uniforms specially strengthened to resist the great pressure under which the men must work. Huge electric lamps like searchlights to be lowered into the ocean depths and give light to the workers are stacked close beside powerful generators in the ship's hold. In the chart room there are rolls of strange maps plotting out the ocean floor, and on a shelf by itself rests the tangible evidence that this search means gold. It is a little bowl of strange design which was brought up by a diver from the bottom of the Caribbean. When this bowl first came to light it was supposed to be part of loot from a sunken Spanish galleon, but antiquarians could find nothing in the art of the Orient, or Africa, or of Peru and Mexico to bear out this theory. Even the gold of which it was made was an alloy of a different type from anything on record.

It was this that gave Meeker his first idea that there was a city under the sea. He found out the exact spot from which the divers had recovered the bowl, and compared the reckonings with all the ancient charts which spoke of the location of fabled Atlantis. In one old book he located the lost city as being close to the spot where the divers had been, and with this as a foundation for his theories he asked other questions of the men who had explored that hidden country. Their tale only confirmed his belief.

"The floor of the sea is covered with unusual coral formation," one of them told him, "but it was the queerest coral I ever saw. It looked more like stone walls and there was a pointed sort of arch which was different from any coral arch I had ever seen."

That was enough to take Meeker to the Caribbean to see for himself. He won't tell what he found, beyond the fact that he satisfied himself that the "coral" was really stone walls pierced by arched doors and windows.

Meeker kept all his plans secret and might have sailed away on his treasure hunt without making any stir if he had not been careless enough to name one of his submarines "Atlantis." He had given out that he was sailing for Yucatan to search for evidence of prehistoric civilization. It is true that the shores of Yucatan are covered with the remnants of great cities but the word "Atlantis" awoke suspicion. Questions followed and Meeker had to admit the bare facts of his secret.

"Only half a dozen men know the supposed location of Atlantis," he said, just before sailing, "and we don't intend to let any others into the secret. Those who have furnished the money for the expedition have done so in the hope of solving the mystery of the lost continent, and without thought for the profit. The divers and the other men of the crew have the wildest dreams of finding hoarded wealth. It is not at all impossible that their dreams will come true, and that they will be richly rewarded. At any rate they deserve it, for the work will be dangerous.

"Our plans are simple enough. With the submarine of the usual type we will first explore that part of the sea bottom which our charts cover. This vessel has in its conning tower a powerful searchlight which will reveal at least the upper portions of any buildings that may be there. For work in greater depths we will have to depend on the 'Atlantis' with its special equipment of ballast tanks and its hatch-ways for the divers.

"You see, we do not plan to lower the divers from the steamer or from a raft. Instead they will step directly out on the sea floor from a door in the submarine which opens out of an air chamber. In this the diver can be closed and the air pressure increased until it is high enough to keep out the water. All that he has to do then is to open the door and step out, trailing behind him a much shorter air hose and life line than would hamper him if he worked from the surface. The air hose is armored with steel links so that there will be no danger of an inquisitive shark chopping it in two."

Previous to the diver's exploration the claws of the "Atlantis" will search out the more promising places in the ruins. These claws work on a joint operated electrically, and on the tip of each is a sensitive electrical apparatus which sets off a signal in the conning tower of the submarine. Crawling over the bottom like a strange monster, the claws will also help to avoid collisions with walls when the depths of the water veils the power of the searchlight.

There is, in addition, a small electric crane on the nose of the submarine so that heavy objects can be borne to the surface. Meeker does not expect to gain much in the way of heavy relics of the lost city, for certain parts of the sea bottom are so covered with ooze that he believes it only possible to clear it away through suction hose long enough to make quick observation possible. The subaqueous lights which will help this work are powerful Tungsten lamps enclosed in a steel shell with a heavy prismatic lens at the bottom. These lamps are connected to the power plant on the steamer by armored cables and will develop 5,000 candle power each.

The generating station on the parent ship of the expedition, as the rusty tramp is known, is as extensive as those on a first class liner or a dreadnought. Little of the power will go for the benefit of the steamer though. Its purpose is to furnish the light for the swinging Tungstens and to charge the great storage batteries of the submarines. These batteries run the many motors on which depends the success of the work. If it were not for electricity, the searchers would be handicapped. As it is they call to their aid all the strong magic of modern days.

INDEX

"Accident that Gave Us Wood-Pulp Paper, The," 356

Adventure as a source of interest, 41.

Agricultural journals, 11, 20, 23; articles in, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 78; examples of articles in, 81, 248, 341; excerpts from, 127,128, 156

Aims in feature writing, 46

Alliteration in titles, 179

Amateur writers, opportunities for, 7, 12

_American Magazine_, articles from, 76, 87; excerpt from, 158

Amusements as a source of interest, 42

Analysis of articles on factory school, 107, 116

Analysis of special articles, 22; outline for, 201

Animals as a source of interest, 41

Appeals, kinds of, 39; combinations of, 45

"Arbor Day Advice," 57

Arrangement of material, 101

Balance in titles, 179

"Bedroom in Burlap, A," 68

Beginnings, 131; structure of, 131; types of, 132

_Boston Herald_, article from, 204

_Boston Transcript_, articles from, 209, 326; excerpt from, 145

"Boys in Search of Jobs," 209

"Brennan Mono-Rail Car," 274

Browning, John M., personality sketch of, 89

"By Parcel Post," 341

Camera, use of, for illustrations, 194

Captions for illustrations, 196

"Centennial of First Steamship to Cross the Atlantic," 360

_Chicago Tribune_, excerpt from, 159

Children as a source of interest, 41

_Christian Science Monitor_, article from, 206

Clark, Thomas Arkle, personality sketch of, 87

Class publications, 11, 20, 23

College training for writing, 16

_Collier's Weekly_, excerpt from, 139

Collins, James H., article by, 349

Confession articles, 32, 70; examples of, 71

"Confessions of a College Professor's Wife," 307

Contests for supremacy as a source of interest, 41

Correspondents as feature writers, 6

Cosgrove, John O'Hara, on Sunday magazine sections, 9

"County Service Station, A," 248

_Country Gentleman_, articles from, 248, 341; excerpt from, 156

Cover page for manuscripts, 183; form for, 184

Crime, presentation of, 47

Curiosity as a qualification for writers, 15

Definition of special feature article, 4

_Delineator_, article from, 293; excerpt from, 152

Descriptive beginnings, 138

_Designer_, article from, 68

_Detroit News_, article from, 260; excerpt from, 125

Diction, 161

Direct address beginnings, 157

Direct address titles, 178

Drawings for illustrations, 197; mailing of, 197

Eaton, Walter Prichard, article by; 326

Editorial readers, 187

Editors, point of view of, 19

Entertainment as purpose of articles, 47; wholesome, 47

Ethics of feature writing, 23, 47

_Everybody's Magazine_, article from, 281

_Every Week_, article from, 72

Examples, methods of presenting, 118

Exposition by narration and description, 52

Factory school, articles on, 102, 107, 115

Familiar things as a source of interest, 42

_Farm and Fireside_, article from, 81

Farm journals, 11, 20, 23, 78; articles in, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34; examples of articles in, 81, 248, 341; excerpts from, 127, 128, 156

Figures of speech, as element of style, 163; in beginnings, 144; in titles, 176

Filing material, 38

"Forty Years Bartered for What?" 76

"Four Men of Humble Birth Hold World Destiny," 305

Free-Lance writers, 6

Gardiner, A.G., personality sketch of former kaiser by, 166, 167

"Gentle Art of Blowing Bottles, The," 233

Gibbon, Perceval, article by, 274

"Girls and a Camp," 213

_Good Housekeeping_, excerpts from, 141, 151

Greeley Smith, Nixola, article by, 115

"Guarding a City's Water Supply," 260

_Harper's Monthly_, excerpt from, 150

_Harper's Weekly_, excerpt from, 146

Hartswick, F. Gregory, article by, 233

Headlines, 170; types of, 173; methods of framing, 180

Hendrick, Burton J., article by, 53

How-to-do-something articles, 49, 78; examples of, 68, 79

How-to-do-something units, 127

Hungerford, Edward, article by, 218

Ideals in feature writing, 23, 47

_Illustrated World_, excerpt from, 144

Illustrations, value of, 193; photographs for, 194; requirements for, 195; captions for, 196; mailing of, 197

Imperative beginnings, 157

Imperative titles, 178

Incidents, methods of presenting, 122

_Independent_, article from, 233; excerpt from, 140

Indian princess, interview with, 59

Information, trivial _vs._ significant, 49

Informative articles, 49

Instances, methods of presenting, 118

Interest, sources of, 39

Interview type of article, 56; examples of, 57

Interview on Arbor Day, 57; with Indian princess, 59

"Job Lady, The," 293

Journalism, college courses in, 17

"Just Like Pocahontas of 300 Years Ago," 59

Kaempffert, Waldemar, on scientific subjects, 27

_Kansas City Star_, article from, 299; excerpts from, 133, 145, 147, 154

Label titles, 173

Length of articles, 100

_Leslie's Weekly_, excerpts from, 135, 148, 157

London _Daily News_, excerpt from, 166, 167

Magazines, as field for articles, 11; contributors to, 11; study of, 21

Manuscripts, form for, 182, 184; mailing, 186; in editorial offices, 187; rejected, 188; accepted, 189

Manuscript record, 190

_McClure's Magazine,_ article from, 274; excerpts from, 53, 151

McClure Newspaper Syndicate, 192

"Mark Twain's First Sweetheart," 299

_Milwaukee Journal_, article from, 305

_Munsey's Magazine_, article from, 356; excerpts from, 136, 139

Mysteries as a source of interest, 40

Narrative article in third person, 91; examples of, 92

Narrative beginnings, 134

"Neighborhood Playhouse, The," 240

"New Political Wedge, A," 281

Newspaper Enterprise Association, 192; articles from, 89, 115; excerpt from, 152

Newspaper Feature Service, 192; excerpt from, 155

Newspaper work as training for magazine writing, 17

Newspapers, as field for articles, 5; characteristics of, 8; Sunday magazine sections of, 9; study of, 21; as source of subjects, 33

_New York Evening Post_, articles from, 213, 242; excerpt from, 150

_New York Evening Sun_, excerpt from, 154

_New York Sun_, article from, 336

_New York Times_, excerpts from, 119, 137, 145, 155, 158

_New York Tribune_, excerpts from, 129, 141

_New York World_, articles from, 92, 240; excerpt from, 133

Nose for news in feature writing, 14

Notebook, value of, 37

"Now the Public Kitchen," 92

Observation, personal, as a source of subjects and material, 28

"Occupation and Exercise Cure, The," 264

Official documents as a source of material, 34

_Ohio State Journal_, article from, 59

Origin of special feature articles, 3

Outline for analysis of feature articles, 201

Outline of articles on factory schools, 105-07

Outlining articles, value of, 99; method of, 105

_Outlook_, articles from, 95, 264; excerpts from, 126, 133, 135, 146, 156

Overline for illustrations, 197

"Paradise for a Penny, A," 326

Paradoxical beginnings, 144

Paradoxical titles, 175

Paragraphs, length and structure of, 168

Payment, rate of, 7; time of, 190

Personality sketches, 85; examples of, 87

Personal experience articles, 62; examples of, 63

Personal experience as a source of subjects, 30

Personal observation as a source of subjects, 28

Personal success as a source of interest, 43

_Philadelphia Public Ledger_, excerpt from, 130

Photographs, value of, 193; securing, 194; requirements for, 195; sizes of, 195; captions for, 196; mailing of, 197

_Pictorial Review_, article from, 331

Planning an article, 99, 102

_Popular Science Monthly_, excerpt from, 147

Practical guidance articles, 49, 78; examples of, 79

Practical guidance units, 127

Processes, methods of presenting, 125

Prominence as a source of interest, 42

_Providence Journal_, article from, 360; excerpt from, 142

Purpose, definiteness of, 45; statement of, 50

Qualifications for feature writing, 14

Question beginnings, 153

Question titles, 177

Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, on jargon, 163

Quotation beginnings, 149

Quotation titles, 176

_Railroad Man's Magazine_, excerpt from, 148

Readers, editorial, 187

Readers, point of view of, 19, 20

Recipes, methods of presenting, 127

Reporters as feature writers, 6, 17

Revision of articles, 168

Rhyme in titles, 179

Romance as a source of interest, 41

"Sales without Salesmanship," 349

_San Francisco Call_, excerpt from, 155

_Saturday Evening Post_, articles from, 218, 307, 349

Scandal, presentation of, 47

Scientific publications as a source of subjects and material, 27, 35

"Searching for the Lost Atlantis," 364

Sentences, structure of, 165; length of, 166

Shepherd, William G., article by, 305

Siddall, John M., on curiosity, 15; on readers' point of view, 21; on making articles personal, 45

"Singular Story of the Mosquito Man, The," 242

"Six Years of Tea Rooms," 336

Slosson, Edwin E., on scientific and technical subjects, 27

Sources of subjects and material, 25

Space rates for feature articles, 7

Staff system on magazines, 11

Statistics, methods of presenting, 122

Stevenson, Frederick Boyd, on Sunday magazine sections, 10

Stovaine, beginning of article on, 53

Striking statement beginnings, 143

Striking statement titles, 175

Study of newspapers and magazines, 21

Style, 160

Subjects for feature articles, 25

_Successful Farming_, excerpts from, 127, 128

Summary beginnings, 132

Sunday magazine sections, 9

Syndicates, 6, 192

Syndicating articles, 191

_System_, article from, 79; excerpt from, 137

"Taking the School to the Factory," 107

"Teach Children Love of Art Through Story-Telling," 204

Technical publications as a source of subjects and material, 27, 35

"Ten Acres and a Living," 81

"They Call Me the 'Hen Editor,'" 63

"Things We Learned to Do Without," 72

Time of payment for articles, 190

Timeliness in feature articles, 39

Titles, 170; types of, 173; methods of framing, 180

"Tommy--Who Enjoys Straightening Out Things," 87

_Tractor and Gas Engine Review_, excerpt from, 153

Trade journals, 11, 23; articles in, 30; article from, 79; excerpts from, 137, 153

Training for feature writing, 16

Types of beginnings, 131

Types of special articles, 55

Types of titles, 170

Typographical style, 183

Units in articles, 117

"Wanted: A Home Assistant," 331

Weed, Inis H., article by, 281

Welfare of other persons as a source of interest, 43

Wheeler, Howard, on newspaper men as magazine writers, 18

"Where Girls Learn to Wield Spade and Hoe," 206

White, Frank Marshall, article by, 264

"Who'll Do John's Work?" 79

_Woman's Home Companion_, article from, 63

Women as feature writers, 13

"Wonderful America! Thinks Little Austrian," 116

Words, choice of, 161

Writers, opportunities for amateur, 7, 12

"Your Porter," 218

ENGLISH FOR COLLEGE COURSES

EXPOSITORY WRITING By MERVIN J. CURL. Gives freshmen and sophomores something to write about, and helps them in their writing.

SENTENCES AND THINKING By NORMAN FOERSTER, University of North Carolina, and J.M. STEDMAN, Jr., Emory University. A practice book in sentence-making for college freshmen.

A HANDBOOK OF ORAL READING By LEE EMERSON BASSETT, Leland Stanford Junior University. Especial emphasis is placed on the relation of thought and speech, technical vocal exercises being subordinated to a study of the principles underlying the expression of ideas. Illustrative selections of both poetry and prose are freely employed.

ARGUMENTATION AND DEBATING (_Revised Edition_) By WILLIAM T. FOSTER, Reed College. The point of view throughout is that of the student rather than that of the teacher.

THE RHETORICAL PRINCIPLES OF NARRATION By CARROLL LEWIS MAXCY, Williams College. A clear and thorough analysis of the three elements of narrative writing, viz.: setting, character, and plot.

REPRESENTATIVE NARRATIVES Edited by CARROLL LEWIS MAXCY. This compilation contains twenty-two complete selections of various types of narrative composition.

THE STUDY AND PRACTICE OF WRITING ENGLISH By GERHARD R. LOMER, Ph.D., and MARGARET ASHMUN. A textbook for use in college Freshman courses.

HOW TO WRITE SPECIAL FEATURE ARTICLES By WILLARD G. BLEYER, University of Wisconsin. A textbook for classes in Journalism and in advanced English Composition.

NEWSPAPER WRITING AND EDITING By WILLARD G. BLEYER. This fully meets the requirements of courses in Journalism as given in our colleges and universities, and at the same time appeals to practical newspaper men.

TYPES OF NEWS WRITING By WILLARD G. BLEYER. Over two hundred typical stories taken from representative American newspapers are here presented in a form convenient for college classes in Journalism.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 1421

FOR COLLEGE LITERATURE COURSES

HISTORY AND CRITICISM

BOTTA--Handbook of Universal Literature.

GRUMBINE -- Stories from Browning.

HINCHMAN AND GUMMERE -- Lives of Great English Writers from Chaucer to Browning.

MATTHEWS -- A Study of Versification.

MAYNADIER -- The Arthur of the English Poets.

PERRY -- A Study of Prose Fiction.

PERRY -- A Study of Poetry.

ROOT -- The Poetry of Chaucer.

SIMONDS --A Student's History of English Literature.

SIMONDS -- A Student's History of American Literature.

BAKER -- Dramatic Technique.

BROOKE -- The Tudor Drama.

MATTHEWS -- A Study of the Drama.

SCHELLING -- A History of the Elizabethan Drama. 2 vols.

ANTHOLOGIES

POETRY

HOLT -- Leading English Poets from Chaucer to Browning.

NEILSON AND WEBSTER -- The Chief British Poets of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.

PAGE -- The Chief American Poets.

WESTON -- The Chief Middle English Poets.

PROSE

ALDEN -- Readings in English Prose of the Eighteenth Century.

ALDEN -- Readings in English Prose of the Nineteenth Century.