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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Americans All, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Americans All
+       Stories of American Life of To-Day
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Benjamin A. Heydrick
+
+Release Date: October 26, 2007 [EBook #23207]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMERICANS ALL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+AMERICANS ALL
+
+STORIES OF AMERICAN LIFE OF TO-DAY
+
+EDITED BY
+BENJAMIN A. HEYDRICK
+Editor "Types of the Short Story," etc.
+
+[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
+
+NEW YORK
+HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
+HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.
+
+PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
+THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
+RAHWAY. N. J.
+
+
+
+
+ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
+
+
+For permission to reprint the stories in this volume, acknowledgement is
+made to the owners of the copyrights, as follows:
+
+For "The Right Promethean Fire," to Mrs. Atwood, R. Martin and
+Doubleday, Page & Company.
+
+For "The Land of Heart's Desire," to Messrs. Doubleday, Page & Company.
+
+For "The Tenor," to Alice I. Bunner and to Charles Scribners' Sons.
+
+For "The Passing of Priscilla Winthrop," to William Allen White and The
+Macmillan Company.
+
+For "The Gift of the Magi," to Messrs. Doubleday, Page & Company.
+
+For "The Gold Brick," copyright 1910, to Brand Whitlock and to The
+Bobbs, Merrill Company.
+
+For "His Mother's Son," to Edna Ferber and the Frederick A. Stokes
+Company.
+
+For "Bitter-Sweet," to Fannie Hurst and Harper & Brothers.
+
+For "The Riverman," to Stewart Edward White and Doubleday, Page &
+Company.
+
+For "Flint and Fire," to Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Messrs. Henry Holt
+& Company.
+
+For "The Ordeal at Mt. Hope," to Mrs. Alice Dunbar, Mrs. Mathilde
+Dunbar, and Messrs. Dodd, Mead & Company.
+
+For "Israel Drake," to Katherine Mayo and Messrs. Houghton Mifflin
+Company.
+
+For "The Struggles and Triumph of Isidro," to James M. Hopper.
+
+For "The Citizen," to James F. Dwyer and the Paget Literary Agency.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+In the years before the war, when we had more time for light pursuits, a
+favorite sport of reviewers was to hunt for the Great American Novel.
+They gave tongue here and there, and pursued the quarry with great
+excitement in various directions, now north, now south, now west, and
+the inevitable disappointment at the end of the chase never deterred
+them from starting off on a fresh scent next day. But in spite of all
+the frenzied pursuit, the game sought, the Great American Novel, was
+never captured. Will it ever be captured? The thing they sought was a
+book that would be so broad, so typical, so true that it would stand as
+the adequate expression in fiction of American life. Did these tireless
+hunters ever stop to ask themselves, what is the Great French Novel?
+what is the Great English Novel? And if neither of these nations has
+produced a single book which embodies their national life, why should we
+expect that our life, so much more diverse in its elements, so
+multifarious in its aspects, could ever be summed up within the covers
+of a single book?
+
+Yet while the critics continued their hopeless hunt, there was growing
+up in this country a form of fiction which gave promise of some day
+achieving the task that this never-to-be written novel should
+accomplish. This form was the short story. It was the work of many
+hands, in many places. Each writer studied closely a certain locality,
+and transcribed faithfully what he saw. Thus the New England village,
+the western ranch, the southern plantation, all had their chroniclers.
+Nor was it only various localities that we saw in these one-reel
+pictures; they dealt with typical occupations, there were stories of
+travelling salesmen, stories of lumbermen, stories of politicians,
+stories of the stage, stories of school and college days. If it were
+possible to bring together in a single volume a group of these, each one
+reflecting faithfully one facet of our many-sided life, would not such a
+book be a truer picture of America than any single novel could present?
+
+The present volume is an attempt to do this. That it is only an attempt,
+that it does not cover the whole field of our national life, no one
+realizes better than the compiler. The title _Americans All_ signifies
+that the characters in the book are all Americans, not that they are all
+of the Americans.
+
+This book then differs in its purpose from other collections of short
+stories. It does not aim to present the world's best short stories, nor
+to illustrate the development of the form from Roman times to our own
+day, nor to show how the technique of Poe differs from that of Irving:
+its purpose is none of these things, but rather to use the short story
+as a means of interpreting American life. Our country is so vast that
+few of us know more than a small corner of it, and even in that corner
+we do not know all our fellow-citizens; differences of color, of race,
+of creed, of fortune, keep us in separate strata. But through books we
+may learn to know our fellow-citizens, and the knowledge will make us
+better Americans.
+
+The story by Dorothy Canfield has a unique interest for the student, in
+that it is followed by the author's own account of how it was written,
+from the first glimpse of the theme to the final typing of the story.
+Teachers who use this book for studying the art of short story
+construction may prefer to begin with "Flint and Fire" and follow with
+"The Citizen," tracing in all the others indications of the authors'
+methods.
+
+                                               BENJAMIN A. HEYDRICK.
+
+NEW YORK CITY,
+    March, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+   I. IN SCHOOL DAYS
+        THE RIGHT PROMETHEAN FIRE              _George Madden Martin_  3
+        Sketch of George Madden Martin                                16
+
+  II. JUST KIDS
+        THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE             _Myra Kelly_           21
+        Sketch of Myra Kelly                                          37
+
+ III. HERO-WORSHIP
+        THE TENOR                              _H. C. Bunner_         41
+        Sketch of H. C. Bunner                                        54
+
+  IV. SOCIETY IN OUR TOWN
+        THE PASSING OF PRISCILLA WINTHROP      _William Allen White_  59
+        Sketch of William Allen White                                 73
+
+   V. A PAIR OF LOVERS
+        THE GIFT OF THE MAGI                   _O. Henry_             79
+        Sketch of O. Henry                                            86
+
+  VI. IN POLITICS
+        THE GOLD BRICK                         _Brand Whitlock_       91
+        Sketch of Brand Whitlock                                     111
+
+ VII. THE TRAVELLING SALESMAN
+        HIS MOTHER'S SON                       _Edna Ferber_         117
+        Sketch of Edna Ferber                                        130
+
+VIII. AFTER THE BIG STORE CLOSES
+        BITTER-SWEET                           _Fannie Hurst_        135
+        Sketch of Fannie Hurst                                       166
+
+  IX. IN THE LUMBER COUNTRY
+        THE RIVERMAN                           _Stewart Edward White_173
+        Sketch of Stewart E. White                                   185
+
+   X. NEW ENGLAND GRANITE
+        FLINT AND FIRE                         _Dorothy Canfield_    191
+        HOW "FLINT AND FIRE" STARTED AND GREW  _Dorothy Canfield_    210
+        Sketch of Dorothy Canfield                                   221
+
+  XI. DUSKY AMERICANS
+        THE ORDEAL AT MT. HOPE                 _Paul Laurence Dunbar_227
+        Sketch of Paul Laurence Dunbar                               249
+
+ XII. WITH THE POLICE
+        ISRAEL DRAKE                           _Katherine Mayo_      255
+        Sketch of Katherine Mayo                                     273
+
+XIII. IN THE PHILIPPINES
+        THE STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPH
+          OF ISIDRO DE LOS MAESTROS            _James M. Hopper_     279
+        Sketch of James M. Hopper                                    295
+
+ XIV. THEY WHO BRING DREAMS TO AMERICA
+        THE CITIZEN                            _James F. Dwyer_      299
+        Sketch of James F. Dwyer                                     318
+
+  XV. LIST OF AMERICAN SHORT STORIES                                 321
+        Classified by locality
+
+ XVI. NOTES AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY                                  325
+
+
+
+
+IN SCHOOL DAYS
+
+_Are any days more rich in experiences than school days? The day one
+first enters school, whether it is the little red schoolhouse or the big
+brick building that holds a thousand pupils,--that day marks the
+beginning of a new life. One of the best records in fiction of the world
+of the school room is called_ EMMY LOU. _In this book George Madden
+Martin has traced the progress of a winsome little maid from the first
+grade to the end of high school. This is the story of the first days in
+the strange new world of the school room._
+
+
+
+
+THE RIGHT PROMETHEAN FIRE
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE MADDEN MARTIN
+
+
+Emmy Lou, laboriously copying digits, looked up. The boy sitting in line
+in the next row of desks was making signs to her.
+
+She had noticed the little boy before. He was a square little boy, with
+a sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of the nose and a cheerful
+breadth of nostril. His teeth were wide apart, and his smile was broad
+and constant. Not that Emmy Lou could have told all this. She only knew
+that to her the knowledge of the little boy concerning the things
+peculiar to the Primer World seemed limitless.
+
+And now the little boy was beckoning Emmy Lou. She did not know him, but
+neither did she know any of the seventy other little boys and girls
+making the Primer Class.
+
+Because of a popular prejudice against whooping-cough, Emmy Lou had not
+entered the Primer Class until late. When she arrived, the seventy
+little boys and girls were well along in Alphabetical lore, having long
+since passed the a, b, c, of initiation, and become glibly eloquent to a
+point where the l, m, n, o, p slipped off their tongues with the liquid
+ease of repetition and familiarity.
+
+"But Emmy Lou can catch up," said Emmy Lou's Aunt Cordelia, a plump and
+cheery lady, beaming with optimistic placidity upon the infant populace
+seated in parallel rows at desks before her.
+
+Miss Clara, the teacher, lacked Aunt Cordelia's optimism, also her
+plumpness. "No doubt she can," agreed Miss Clara, politely, but without
+enthusiasm. Miss Clara had stepped from the graduating rostrum to the
+schoolroom platform, and she had been there some years. And when one has
+been there some years, and is already battling with seventy little boys
+and girls, one cannot greet the advent of a seventy-first with acclaim.
+Even the fact that one's hair is red is not an always sure indication
+that one's temperament is sanguine also.
+
+So in answer to Aunt Cordelia, Miss Clara replied politely but without
+enthusiasm, "No doubt she can."
+
+Then Aunt Cordelia went, and Miss Clara gave Emmy Lou a desk. And Miss
+Clara then rapping sharply, and calling some small delinquent to order,
+Emmy Lou's heart sank within her.
+
+Now Miss Clara's tones were tart because she did not know what to do
+with this late comer. In a class of seventy, spare time is not offering
+for the bringing up of the backward. The way of the Primer teacher was
+not made easy in a public school of twenty-five years ago.
+
+So Miss Clara told the new pupil to copy digits.
+
+Now what digits were, Emmy Lou had no idea, but being shown them on the
+black-board, she copied them diligently. And as the time went on, Emmy
+Lou went on copying digits. And her one endeavor being to avoid the
+notice of Miss Clara, it happened the needs of Emmy Lou were frequently
+lost sight of in the more assertive claims of the seventy.
+
+Emmy Lou was not catching up, and it was January.
+
+But to-day was to be different. The little boy was nodding and
+beckoning. So far the seventy had left Emmy Lou alone. As a general
+thing the herd crowds toward the leaders, and the laggard brings up the
+rear alone.
+
+But to-day the little boy was beckoning. Emmy Lou looked up. Emmy Lou
+was pink-cheeked and chubby and in her heart there was no guile. There
+was an ease and swagger about the little boy. And he always knew when to
+stand up, and what for. Emmy Lou more than once had failed to stand up,
+and Miss Clara's reminder had been sharp. It was when a bell rang one
+must stand up. But what for, Emmy Lou never knew, until after the others
+began to do it.
+
+But the little boy always knew. Emmy Lou had heard him, too, out on the
+bench glibly tell Miss Clara about the mat, and a bat, and a black rat.
+To-day he stood forth with confidence and told about a fat hen. Emmy Lou
+was glad to have the little boy beckon her.
+
+And in her heart there was no guile. That the little boy should be
+holding out an end of a severed india-rubber band and inviting her to
+take it, was no stranger than other things happening in the Primer World
+every day.
+
+The very manner of the infant classification breathed mystery, the sheep
+from the goats, so to speak, the little girls all one side the central
+aisle, the little boys all the other--and to over-step the line of
+demarcation a thing too dreadful to contemplate.
+
+Many things were strange. That one must get up suddenly when a bell
+rang, was strange.
+
+And to copy digits until one's chubby fingers, tightly gripping the
+pencil, ached, and then to be expected to take a sponge and wash those
+digits off, was strange.
+
+And to be told crossly to sit down was bewildering, when in answer to c,
+a, t, one said "Pussy." And yet there was Pussy washing her face, on the
+chart, and Miss Clara's pointer pointing to her.
+
+So when the little boy held out the rubber band across the aisle, Emmy
+Lou took the proffered end.
+
+At this the little boy slid back into his desk holding to his end. At
+the critical moment of elongation the little boy let go. And the
+property of elasticity is to rebound.
+
+Emmy Lou's heart stood still. Then it swelled. But in her filling eyes
+there was no suspicion, only hurt. And even while a tear splashed down,
+and falling upon the laboriously copied digits, wrought havoc, she
+smiled bravely across at the little boy. It would have made the little
+boy feel bad to know how it hurt. So Emmy Lou winked bravely and smiled.
+
+Whereupon the little boy wheeled about suddenly and fell to copying
+digits furiously. Nor did he look Emmy Lou's way, only drove his pencil
+into his slate with a fervor that made Miss Clara rap sharply on her
+desk.
+
+Emmy Lou wondered if the little boy was mad. One would think it had
+stung the little boy and not her. But since he was not looking, she felt
+free to let her little fist seek her mouth for comfort.
+
+Nor did Emmy Lou dream, that across the aisle, remorse was eating into a
+little boy's soul. Or that, along with remorse there went the image of
+one Emmy Lou, defenceless, pink-cheeked, and smiling bravely.
+
+The next morning Emmy Lou was early. She was always early. Since
+entering the Primer Class, breakfast had lost its savor to Emmy Lou in
+the terror of being late.
+
+But this morning the little boy was there before her. Hitherto his tardy
+and clattering arrival had been a daily happening, provocative of
+accents sharp and energetic from Miss Clara.
+
+But this morning he was at his desk copying from his Primer on to his
+slate. The easy, ostentatious way in which he glanced from slate to book
+was not lost upon Emmy Lou, who lost her place whenever her eyes left
+the rows of digits upon the blackboard.
+
+Emmy Lou watched the performance. And the little boy's pencil drove with
+furious ease and its path was marked with flourishes. Emmy Lou never
+dreamed that it was because she was watching that the little boy was
+moved to this brilliant exhibition. Presently reaching the end of his
+page, he looked up, carelessly, incidentally. It seemed to be borne to
+him that Emmy Lou was there, whereupon he nodded. Then, as if moved by
+sudden impulse, he dived into his desk, and after ostentatious search
+in, on, under it, brought forth a pencil, and held it up for Emmy Lou to
+see. Nor did she dream that it was for this the little boy had been
+there since before Uncle Michael had unlocked the Primer door.
+
+Emmy Lou looked across at the pencil. It was a slate-pencil. A fine,
+long, new slate-pencil grandly encased for half its length in gold
+paper. One bought them at the drug-store across from the school, and one
+paid for them the whole of five cents.
+
+Just then a bell rang. Emmy Lou got up suddenly. But it was the bell for
+school to take up. So she sat down. She was glad Miss Clara was not yet
+in her place.
+
+After the Primer Class had filed in, with panting and frosty entrance,
+the bell rang again. This time it was the right bell tapped by Miss
+Clara, now in her place. So again Emmy Lou got up suddenly and by
+following the little girl ahead learned that the bell meant, "go out to
+the bench."
+
+The Primer Class according to the degree of its infant precocity was
+divided in three sections. Emmy Lou belonged to the third section. It
+was the last section and she was the last one in it though she had no
+idea what a section meant nor why she was in it.
+
+Yesterday the third section had said, over and over, in chorus, "One and
+one are two, two and two are four," etc.--but to-day they said, "Two and
+one are three, two and two are four."
+
+Emmy Lou wondered, four what? Which put her behind, so that when she
+began again they were saying, "two and four are six." So now she knew.
+Four is six. But what is six? Emmy Lou did not know.
+
+When she came back to her desk the pencil was there. The fine, new, long
+slate-pencil encased in gold paper. And the little boy was gone. He
+belonged to the first section, and the first section was now on the
+bench. Emmy Lou leaned across and put the pencil back on the little
+boy's desk.
+
+Then she prepared herself to copy digits with her stump of a pencil.
+Emmy Lou's were always stumps. Her pencil had a way of rolling off her
+desk while she was gone, and one pencil makes many stumps. The little
+boy had generally helped her pick them up on her return. But strangely,
+from this time, her pencils rolled off no more.
+
+But when Emmy Lou took up her slate there was a whole side filled with
+digits in soldierly rows across, so her heart grew light and free from
+the weight of digits, and she gave her time to the washing of her desk,
+a thing in which her soul revelled, and for which, patterning after her
+little girl neighbors, she kept within that desk a bottle of soapy water
+and rags of gray and unpleasant nature, that never dried, because of
+their frequent using. When Emmy Lou first came to school, her cleaning
+paraphernalia consisted of a sponge secured by a string to her slate,
+which was the badge of the new and the unsophisticated comer. Emmy Lou
+had quickly learned that, and no one rejoiced in a fuller assortment of
+soap, bottle, and rags than she, nor did a sponge longer dangle from the
+frame of her slate.
+
+On coming in from recess this same day, Emmy Lou found the pencil on her
+desk again, the beautiful new pencil in the gilded paper. She put it
+back.
+
+But when she reached home, the pencil, the beautiful pencil that costs
+all of five cents, was in her companion box along with her stumps and
+her sponge and her grimy little slate rags. And about the pencil was
+wrapped a piece of paper. It had the look of the margin of a Primer
+page. The paper bore marks. They were not digits.
+
+Emmy Lou took the paper to Aunt Cordelia. They were at dinner.
+
+"Can't you read it, Emmy Lou?" asked Aunt Katie, the prettiest aunty.
+
+Emmy Lou shook her head.
+
+"I'll spell the letters," said Aunt Louise, the youngest aunty.
+
+But they did not help Emmy Lou one bit.
+
+Aunt Cordelia looked troubled. "She doesn't seem to be catching up," she
+said.
+
+"No," said Aunt Katie.
+
+"No," agreed Aunt Louise.
+
+"Nor--on," said Uncle Charlie, the brother of the aunties, lighting up
+his cigar to go downtown.
+
+Aunt Cordelia spread the paper out. It bore the words:
+
+"It is for you."
+
+So Emmy Lou put the pencil away in the companion, and tucked it about
+with the grimy slate rags that no harm might befall it. And the next day
+she took it out and used it. But first she looked over at the little
+boy. The little boy was busy. But when she looked up again, he was
+looking.
+
+The little boy grew red, and wheeling suddenly, fell to copying digits
+furiously. And from that moment on the little boy was moved to strange
+behavior.
+
+Three times before recess did he, boldly ignoring the preface of
+upraised hand, swagger up to Miss Clara's desk. And going and coming,
+the little boy's boots with copper toes and run-down heels marked with
+thumping emphasis upon the echoing boards his processional and
+recessional. And reaching his desk, the little boy slammed down his
+slate with clattering reverberations.
+
+Emmy Lou watched him uneasily. She was miserable for him. She did not
+know that there are times when the emotions are more potent than the
+subtlest wines. Nor did she know that the male of some species is moved
+thus to exhibition of prowess, courage, defiance, for the impressing of
+the chosen female of the species.
+
+Emmy Lou merely knew that she was miserable and that she trembled for
+the little boy.
+
+Having clattered his slate until Miss Clara rapped sharply, the little
+boy rose and went swaggering on an excursion around the room to where
+sat the bucket and dipper. And on his return he came up the center
+aisle between the sheep and the goats.
+
+Emmy Lou had no idea what happened. It took place behind her. But there
+was another little girl who did. A little girl who boasted curls, yellow
+curls in tiered rows about her head. A lachrymosal little girl, who
+affected great horror of the little boys.
+
+And what Emmy Lou failed to see was this: the little boy, in passing,
+deftly lifted a cherished curl between finger and thumb and proceeded on
+his way.
+
+The little girl did not fail the little boy. In the suddenness of the
+surprise she surprised even him by her outcry. Miss Clara jumped. Emmy
+Lou jumped. And the sixty-nine jumped. And, following this, the little
+girl lifted her voice in lachrymal lament.
+
+Miss Clara sat erect. The Primer Class held its breath. It always held
+its breath when Miss Clara sat erect. Emmy Lou held tightly to her desk
+besides. She wondered what it was all about.
+
+Then Miss Clara spoke. Her accents cut the silence.
+
+"Billy Traver!"
+
+Billy Traver stood forth. It was the little boy.
+
+"Since you seem pleased to occupy yourself with the little girls, Billy,
+_go to the pegs_!"
+
+Emmy Lou trembled. "Go to the pegs!" What unknown, inquisitorial terrors
+lay behind those dread, laconic words, Emmy Lou knew not.
+
+She could only sit and watch the little boy turn and stump back down the
+aisle and around the room to where along the wall hung rows of feminine
+apparel.
+
+Here he stopped and scanned the line. Then he paused before a hat. It
+was a round little hat with silky nap and a curling brim. It had
+rosettes to keep the ears warm and ribbon that tied beneath the chin. It
+was Emmy Lou's hat. Aunt Cordelia had cautioned her to care concerning
+it.
+
+The little boy took it down. There seemed to be no doubt in his mind as
+to what Miss Clara meant. But then he had been in the Primer Class from
+the beginning.
+
+Having taken the hat down he proceeded to put it upon his own shock
+head. His face wore its broad and constant smile. One would have said
+the little boy was enjoying the affair. As he put the hat on, the
+sixty-nine laughed. The seventieth did not. It was her hat, and besides,
+she did not understand.
+
+Miss Clara still erect spoke again: "And now, since you are a little
+girl, get your book, Billy, and move over with the girls."
+
+Nor did Emmy Lou understand why, when Billy, having gathered his
+belongings together, moved across the aisle and sat down with her, the
+sixty-nine laughed again. Emmy Lou did not laugh. She made room for
+Billy.
+
+Nor did she understand when Billy treated her to a slow and
+surreptitious wink, his freckled countenance grinning beneath the
+rosetted hat. It never could have occurred to Emmy Lou that Billy had
+laid his cunning plans to this very end. Emmy Lou understood nothing of
+all this. She only pitied Billy. And presently, when public attention
+had become diverted, she proffered him the hospitality of a grimy little
+slate rag. When Billy returned the rag there was something in
+it--something wrapped in a beautiful, glazed, shining bronze paper. It
+was a candy kiss. One paid five cents for six of them at the drug-store.
+
+On the road home, Emmy Lou ate the candy. The beautiful, shiny paper she
+put in her Primer. The slip of paper that she found within she carried
+to Aunt Cordelia. It was sticky and it was smeared. But it had reading
+on it.
+
+"But this is printing," said Aunt Cordelia; "can't you read it?"
+
+Emmy Lou shook her head.
+
+"Try," said Aunt Katie.
+
+"The easy words," said Aunt Louise.
+
+But Emmy Lou, remembering c-a-t, Pussy, shook her head.
+
+Aunt Cordelia looked troubled. "She certainly isn't catching up," said
+Aunt Cordelia. Then she read from the slip of paper:
+
+
+     "Oh, woman, woman, thou wert made
+     The peace of Adam to invade."
+
+
+The aunties laughed, but Emmy Lou put it away with the glazed paper in
+her Primer. It meant quite as much to her as did the reading in that
+Primer: Cat, a cat, the cat. The bat, the mat, a rat. It was the jingle
+to both that appealed to Emmy Lou.
+
+About this time rumors began to reach Emmy Lou. She heard that it was
+February, and that wonderful things were peculiar to the Fourteenth. At
+recess the little girls locked arms and talked Valentines. The echoes
+reached Emmy Lou.
+
+The valentine must come from a little boy, or it wasn't the real thing.
+And to get no valentine was a dreadful--dreadful thing. And even the
+timidest of the sheep began to cast eyes across at the goats.
+
+Emmy Lou wondered if she would get a valentine. And if not, how was she
+to survive the contumely and shame?
+
+You must never, never breathe to a living soul what was on your
+valentine. To tell even your best and truest little girl friend was to
+prove faithless to the little boy sending the valentine. These things
+reached Emmy Lou.
+
+Not for the world would she tell. Emmy Lou was sure of that, so grateful
+did she feel she would be to anyone sending her a valentine.
+
+And in doubt and wretchedness did she wend her way to school on the
+Fourteenth Day of February. The drug-store window was full of
+valentines. But Emmy Lou crossed the street. She did not want to see
+them. She knew the little girls would ask her if she had gotten a
+valentine. And she would have to say, No.
+
+She was early. The big, empty room echoed back her footsteps as she went
+to her desk to lay down book and slate before taking off her wraps. Nor
+did Emmy Lou dream the eye of the little boy peeped through the crack of
+the door from Miss Clara's dressing-room.
+
+Emmy Lou's hat and jacket were forgotten. On her desk lay something
+square and white. It was an envelope. It was a beautiful envelope, all
+over flowers and scrolls.
+
+Emmy Lou knew it. It was a valentine. Her cheeks grew pink.
+
+She took it out. It was blue. And it was gold. And it had reading on it.
+
+Emmy Lou's heart sank. She could not read the reading. The door opened.
+Some little girls came in. Emmy Lou hid her valentine in her book, for
+since you must not--she would never show her valentine--never.
+
+The little girls wanted to know if she had gotten a valentine, and Emmy
+Lou said, Yes, and her cheeks were pink with the joy of being able to
+say it.
+
+Through the day, she took peeps between the covers of her Primer, but no
+one else might see it.
+
+It rested heavy on Emmy Lou's heart, however, that there was reading on
+it. She studied it surreptitiously. The reading was made up of letters.
+It was the first time Emmy Lou had thought about that. She knew some of
+the letters. She would ask someone the letters she did not know by
+pointing them out on the chart at recess. Emmy Lou was learning. It was
+the first time since she came to school.
+
+But what did the letters make? She wondered, after recess, studying the
+valentine again.
+
+Then she went home. She followed Aunt Cordelia about. Aunt Cordelia was
+busy.
+
+"What does it read?" asked Emmy Lou.
+
+Aunt Cordelia listened.
+
+"B," said Emmy Lou, "and e?"
+
+"Be," said Aunt Cordelia.
+
+If B was Be, it was strange that B and e were Be. But many things were
+strange.
+
+Emmy Lou accepted them all on faith.
+
+After dinner she approached Aunt Katie.
+
+"What does it read?" asked Emmy Lou, "m and y?"
+
+"My," said Aunt Katie.
+
+The rest was harder. She could not remember the letters, and had to copy
+them off on her slate. Then she sought Tom, the house-boy. Tom was out
+at the gate talking to another house-boy. She waited until the other boy
+was gone.
+
+"What does it read?" asked Emmy Lou, and she told the letters off the
+slate. It took Tom some time, but finally he told her.
+
+Just then a little girl came along. She was a first-section little girl,
+and at school she never noticed Emmy Lou.
+
+Now she was alone, so she stopped.
+
+"Get any valentines?"
+
+"Yes," said Emmy Lou. Then moved to confidence by the little girl's
+friendliness, she added, "It has reading on it."
+
+"Pooh," said the little girl, "they all have that. My mamma's been
+reading the long verses inside to me."
+
+"Can you show them--valentines?" asked Emmy Lou.
+
+"Of course, to grown-up people," said the little girl.
+
+The gas was lit when Emmy Lou came in. Uncle Charlie was there, and the
+aunties, sitting around, reading.
+
+"I got a valentine," said Emmy Lou.
+
+They all looked up. They had forgotten it was Valentine's Day, and it
+came to them that if Emmy Lou's mother had not gone away, never to come
+back, the year before, Valentine's Day would not have been forgotten.
+Aunt Cordelia smoothed the black dress she was wearing because of the
+mother who would never come back, and looked troubled.
+
+But Emmy Lou laid the blue and gold valentine on Aunt Cordelia's knee.
+In the valentine's center were two hands clasping. Emmy Lou's forefinger
+pointed to the words beneath the clasped hands.
+
+"I can read it," said Emmy Lou.
+
+They listened. Uncle Charlie put down his paper. Aunt Louise looked over
+Aunt Cordelia's shoulder.
+
+"B," said Emmy Lou, "e--Be."
+
+The aunties nodded.
+
+"M," said Emmy Lou, "y--my."
+
+Emmy Lou did not hesitate. "V," said Emmy Lou, "a, l, e, n, t, i, n,
+e--Valentine. Be my Valentine."
+
+"There!" said Aunt Cordelia.
+
+"Well!" said Aunt Katie.
+
+"At last!" said Aunt Louise.
+
+"H'm!" said Uncle Charlie.
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE MADDEN MARTIN
+
+
+In the South it is not unusual to give boys' names to girls, so it
+happens that George is the real name of the woman who wrote _Emmy Lou_.
+George Madden was born in Louisville, Kentucky, May 3, 1866. She
+attended the public schools in Louisville, but on account of ill health
+did not graduate. She married Atwood R. Martin, and they made their home
+at Anchorage, a suburb of Louisville. Here in an old house surrounded by
+great catalpa trees, with cardinals nesting in their branches, she was
+recovering from an illness, and to pass the time began to write a short
+story. The title was "How They Missed the Exposition"; when it was sent
+away, and a check for seventy-five dollars came in payment, she was
+encouraged to go on. Her next work was the series of stories entitled
+_Emmy Lou, Her Book and Heart_. This at once took rank as one of the
+classics of school-room literature. It had a wide popularity in this
+country, and was translated into French and German. One of the pleasant
+tributes paid to the book was a review in a Pittsburgh newspaper which
+took the form of a letter to Emmy Lou. It ran in part as follows:
+
+
+     Dear Little Emmy Lou:
+
+     I have read your book, Emmy Lou, and am writing this letter to tell
+     you how much I love you. In my world of books I know a great
+     assembly of lovely ladies, Emmy Lou, crowned with beauty and
+     garlanded with grace, that have inspired poets to song and the
+     hearts of warriors to battle, but, Emmy Lou, I love you better than
+     them all, because you are the dearest little girl I ever met.
+
+     I felt very sorry for you when the little boy in the Primer World,
+     who could so glibly tell the teacher all about the mat and the bat
+     and the black rat and the fat hen, hurt your chubby fist by
+     snapping an india-rubber band. I do not think he atoned quite
+     enough when he gave you that fine new long slate pencil, nor when
+     he sent you your first valentine. No, he has not atoned quite
+     enough, Emmy Lou, but now that you are Miss McLaurin, you will
+     doubtless even the score by snapping the india-rubber band of your
+     disdain at his heart. But only to show him how it stings, and then,
+     of course, you'll make up for the hurt and be his valentine--won't
+     you, Emmy Lou?...
+
+     And when, at twelve years, you find yourself dreaming, Emmy Lou,
+     and watching the clouds through the schoolroom window, still I love
+     you, Emmy Lou, for your conscience, which William told about in his
+     essay. You remember, the two girls who met a cow.
+
+     "Look her right in the face and pretend we aren't afraid," said the
+     biggest girl. But the littlest girl--that was you--had a
+     conscience. "Won't it be deceiving the cow?" she wanted to know.
+     Brave, honest Emmy Lou!
+
+     Yes, I love you, Emmy Lou, better than all the proud and beauteous
+     heroines in the big grown-up books, because you are so sunshiny and
+     trustful, so sweet and brave--because you have a heart of gold,
+     Emmy Lou. And I want you to tell George Madden Martin how glad I am
+     that she has told us all about you, the dearest little girl since
+     Alice dropped down into Wonderland.
+
+                                                       George Seibel.
+
+
+The book is more than a delightful piece of fiction. Through its
+faithful study of the development of a child's mind, and its criticism
+of the methods employed in many schools, it becomes a valuable
+contribution to education. As such it is used in the School of Pedagogy
+of Harvard University.
+
+George Madden Martin told more about Emmy Lou in a second book of
+stories entitled _Emmy Lou's Road to Grace_, which relates the little
+girl's experience at home and in Sunday school. Other works from her pen
+are: _A Warwickshire Lad_, the story of William Shakespeare's early
+life; _The House of Fulfillment_, a novel; _Abbie Ann_, a story for
+children; _Letitia; Nursery Corps, U. S. A._, a story of a child, also
+showing various aspects of army life; _Selina_, the story of a young
+girl who has been brought up in luxury, and finds herself confronted
+with the necessity of earning a living without any equipment for the
+task. None of these has equalled the success of her first book, but that
+is one of the few successful portrayals of child life in fiction.
+
+
+
+
+JUST KIDS
+
+_That part of New York City known as the East Side, the region south of
+Fourteenth Street and east of Broadway, is the most densely populated
+square mile on earth. Its people are of all races; Chinatown, Little
+Hungary and Little Italy elbow each other; streets where the signs are
+in Hebrew characters, theatres where plays are given in Yiddish, notices
+in the parks in four or five languages, make one rub his eyes and wonder
+if he is not in some foreign land. Into this region Myra Kelly went as a
+teacher in the public school. Her pupils were largely Russian Jews, and
+in a series of delightfully humorous stories she has drawn these little
+citizens to the life._
+
+
+
+
+THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE
+
+BY
+
+MYRA KELLY
+
+
+Isaac Borrachsohn, that son of potentates and of Assemblymen, had been
+taken to Central Park by a proud uncle. For weeks thereafter he was the
+favorite bard of the First Reader Class and an exceeding great trouble
+to its sovereign, Miss Bailey, who found him now as garrulous as he had
+once been silent. There was no subject in the Course of Study to which
+he could not correlate the wonders of his journey, and Teacher asked
+herself daily and in vain whether it were more pedagogically correct to
+encourage "spontaneous self-expression" or to insist upon "logically
+essential sequence."
+
+But the other members of the class suffered no such uncertainty. They
+voted solidly for spontaneity in a self which found expression thus:
+
+"Und in the Central Park stands a water-lake, und in the water-lake
+stands birds--a big all of birds--und fishes. Und sooner you likes you
+should come over the water-lake you calls a bird, und you sets on the
+bird, und the bird makes go his legs, und you comes over the
+water-lake."
+
+"They could be awful polite birds," Eva Gonorowsky was beginning when
+Morris interrupted with:
+
+"I had once a auntie und she had a bird, a awful polite bird; on'y
+sooner somebody calls him he _couldn't_ to come the while he sets in a
+cage."
+
+"Did he have a rubber neck?" Isaac inquired, and Morris reluctantly
+admitted that he had not been so blessed.
+
+"In the Central Park," Isaac went on, "all the birds is got rubber
+necks."
+
+"What color from birds be they?" asked Eva.
+
+"All colors. Blue und white und red und yellow."
+
+"Und green," Patrick Brennan interjected determinedly. "The green ones
+is the best."
+
+"Did you go once?" asked Isaac, slightly disconcerted.
+
+"Naw, but I know. Me big brother told me."
+
+"They could to be stylish birds, too," said Eva wistfully. "Stylish und
+polite. From red und green birds is awful stylish for hats."
+
+"But these birds is big. Awful big! Mans could ride on 'em und ladies
+und boys."
+
+"Und little girls, Ikey? Ain't they fer little girls?" asked the only
+little girl in the group. And a very small girl she was, with a softly
+gentle voice and darkly gentle eyes fixed pleadingly now upon the bard.
+
+"Yes," answered Isaac grudgingly; "sooner they sets by somebody's side
+little girls could to go. But sooner nobody holds them by the hand they
+could to have fraids over the rubber-neck-boat-birds und the water-lake,
+und the fishes."
+
+"What kind from fishes?" demanded Morris Mogilewsky, monitor of Miss
+Bailey's gold fish bowl, with professional interest.
+
+"From gold fishes und red fishes und black fishes"--Patrick stirred
+uneasily and Isaac remembered--"und green fishes; the green ones is the
+biggest; and blue fishes und _all_ kinds from fishes. They lives way
+down in the water the while they have fraids over the
+rubber-neck-boat-birds. Say--what you think? Sooner a
+rubber-neck-boat-bird needs he should eat he longs down his neck und
+eats a from-gold fish."
+
+"'Out fryin'?" asked Eva, with an incredulous shudder.
+
+"Yes, 'out fryin'. Ain't I told you little girls could to have fraids
+over 'em? Boys could have fraids too," cried Isaac; and then spurred by
+the calm of his rival, he added: "The rubber-neck-boat-birds they
+hollers somethin' fierce."
+
+"I wouldn't be afraid of them. Me pop's a cop," cried Patrick stoutly.
+"I'd just as lief set on 'em. I'd like to."
+
+"Ah, but you ain't seen 'em, und you ain't heard 'em holler," Isaac
+retorted.
+
+"Well, I'm goin' to. An' I'm goin' to see the lions an' the tigers an'
+the el'phants, an' I'm goin' to ride on the water-lake."
+
+"Oh, how I likes I should go too!" Eva broke out. "O-o-oh, _how_ I likes
+I should look on them things! On'y I don't know do I need a ride on
+somethings what hollers. I don't know be they fer me."
+
+"Well, I'll take ye with me if your mother leaves you go," said Patrick
+grandly. "An' ye can hold me hand if ye're scared."
+
+"Me too?" implored Morris. "Oh, Patrick, c'n I go too?"
+
+"I guess so," answered the Leader of the Line graciously. But he turned
+a deaf ear to Isaac Borrachsohn's implorings to be allowed to join the
+party. Full well did Patrick know of the grandeur of Isaac's holiday
+attire and the impressionable nature of Eva's soul, and gravely did he
+fear that his own Sunday finery, albeit fashioned from the blue cloth
+and brass buttons of his sire, might be outshone.
+
+At Eva's earnest request, Sadie, her cousin, was invited, and Morris
+suggested that the Monitor of the Window Boxes should not be slighted by
+his colleagues of the gold fish and the line. So Nathan Spiderwitz was
+raised to Alpine heights of anticipation by visions of a window box "as
+big as blocks and streets," where every plant, in contrast to his lanky
+charges, bore innumerable blossoms. Ignatius Aloysius Diamantstein was
+unanimously nominated as a member of the expedition; by Patrick, because
+they were neighbors at St. Mary's Sunday-school; by Morris, because they
+were classmates under the same rabbi at the synagogue; by Nathan,
+because Ignatius Aloysius was a member of the "Clinton Street gang"; by
+Sadie, because he had "long pants sailor suit"; by Eva, because the
+others wanted him.
+
+Eva reached home that afternoon tingling with anticipation and
+uncertainty. What if her mother, with one short word, should close
+forever the gates of joy and boat-birds? But Mrs. Gonorowsky met her
+small daughter's elaborate plea with the simple question:
+
+"Who pays you the car-fare?"
+
+"Does it need car-fare to go?" faltered Eva.
+
+"Sure does it," answered her mother. "I don't know how much, but some it
+needs. Who pays it?"
+
+"Patrick ain't said."
+
+"Well, you should better ask him," Mrs. Gonorowsky advised, and, on the
+next morning, Eva did. She thereby buried the leader under the ruins of
+his fallen castle of clouds, but he struggled through them with the
+suggestion that each of his guests should be her, or his, own banker.
+
+"But ain't you got _no_ money 't all?" asked the guest of honor.
+
+"Not a cent," responded the host. "But I'll get it. How much have you?"
+
+"A penny. How much do I need?"
+
+"I don't know. Let's ask Miss Bailey."
+
+School had not yet formally begun and Teacher was reading. She was
+hardly disturbed when the children drove sharp elbows into her shoulder
+and her lap, and she answered Eva's--"Miss Bailey--oh, Missis Bailey,"
+with an abstracted--"Well, dear?"
+
+"Missis Bailey, how much money takes car-fare to the Central Park?"
+
+Still with divided attention, Teacher replied--"Five cents, honey," and
+read on, while Patrick called a meeting of his forces and made
+embarrassing explanations with admirable tact.
+
+There ensued weeks of struggle and economy for the exploring party, to
+which had been added a chaperon in the large and reassuring person of
+Becky Zalmonowsky, the class idiot. Sadie Gonorowsky's careful mother
+had considered Patrick too immature to bear the whole responsibility,
+and he, with a guile which promised well for his future, had complied
+with her desires and preserved his own authority unshaken. For Becky,
+poor child, though twelve years old and of an aspect eminently
+calculated to inspire trust in those who had never held speech with her,
+was a member of the First Reader Class only until such time as room
+could be found for her in some of the institutions where such
+unfortunates are bestowed.
+
+Slowly and in diverse ways each of the children acquired the essential
+nickel. Some begged, some stole, some gambled, some bartered, some
+earned, but their greatest source of income, Miss Bailey, was denied to
+them. For Patrick knew that she would have insisted upon some really
+efficient guardian from a higher class, and he announced with much heat
+that he would not go at all under those circumstances.
+
+At last the leader was called upon to set the day and appointed a
+Saturday in late May. He was disconcerted to find that only Ignatius
+Aloysius would travel on that day.
+
+"It's holidays, all Saturdays," Morris explained; "und we dassent to
+ride on no cars."
+
+"Why not?" asked Patrick.
+
+"It's law, the rabbi says," Nathan supplemented. "I don't know why is
+it; on'y rides on holidays ain't fer us."
+
+"I guess," Eva sagely surmised; "I guess rubber-neck-boat-birds rides
+even ain't fer us on holidays. But I don't know do I need rides on birds
+what hollers."
+
+"You'll be all right," Patrick assured her. "I'm goin' to let ye hold me
+hand. If ye can't go on Saturday, I'll take ye on Sunday--next Sunday.
+Yous all must meet me here on the school steps. Bring yer money and
+bring yer lunch too. It's a long way and ye'll be hungry when ye get
+there. Ye get a terrible long ride for five cents."
+
+"Does it take all that to get there?" asked the practical Nathan. "Then
+how are we goin' to get back?"
+
+Poor little poet soul! Celtic and improvident! Patrick's visions had
+shown him only the triumphant arrival of his host and the beatific joy
+of Eva as she floated by his side on the most "fancy" of boat-birds. Of
+the return journey he had taken no thought. And so the saving and
+planning had to be done all over again. The struggle for the first
+nickel had been wearing and wearying, but the amassment of the second
+was beyond description difficult. The children were worn from long
+strife and many sacrifices, for the temptations to spend six or nine
+cents are so much more insistent and unusual than are yearnings to
+squander lesser sums. Almost daily some member of the band would confess
+a fall from grace and solvency, and almost daily Isaac Borrachsohn was
+called upon to descant anew upon the glories of the Central Park. Becky,
+the chaperon, was the most desultory collector of the party. Over and
+over she reached the proud heights of seven or even eight cents, only to
+lavish her hoard on the sticky joys of the candy cart of Isidore
+Belchatosky's papa or on the suddy charms of a strawberry soda.
+
+Then tearfully would she repent of her folly, and bitterly would the
+others upbraid her, telling again of the joys and wonders she had
+squandered. Then loudly would she bewail her weakness and plead in
+extenuation: "I seen the candy. Mouses from choc'late und Foxy Gran'pas
+from sugar--und I ain't never seen no Central Park."
+
+"But don't you know how Isaac says?" Eva would urge. "Don't you know how
+all things what is nice fer us stands in the Central Park? Say, Isaac,
+you should better tell Becky, some more, how the Central Park stands."
+
+And Isaac's tales grew daily more wild and independent of fact until the
+little girls quivered with yearning terror and the boys burnished up
+forgotten cap pistols. He told of lions, tigers, elephants, bears, and
+buffaloes, all of enormous size and strength of lung, so that before
+many days had passed he had debarred himself, by whole-hearted lying,
+from the very possibility of joining the expedition and seeing the
+disillusionment of his public. With true artistic spirit he omitted all
+mention of confining house or cage and bestowed the gift of speech upon
+all the characters, whether brute or human, in his epic. The
+merry-go-round he combined with the menagerie into a whole which was not
+to be resisted.
+
+"Und all the am'blins," he informed his entranced listeners; "they goes
+around, und around, und around, where music plays und flags is. Und I
+sets a lion und he runs around, und runs around, und runs around.
+Say--what you think? He had smiling looks und hair on the neck, und
+sooner he says like that 'I'm awful thirsty,' I gives him a peanut und I
+gets a golden ring."
+
+"Where is it?" asked the jealous and incredulous Patrick.
+
+"To my house." Isaac valiantly lied, for well he remembered the scene in
+which his scandalized but sympathetic uncle had discovered his attempt
+to purloin the brass ring which, with countless blackened duplicates, is
+plucked from a slot by the brandishing swords of the riders upon the
+merry-go-round. Truly, its possession had won him another ride--this
+time upon an elephant with upturned trunk and wide ears--but in his mind
+the return of that ring still ranked as the only grief in an otherwise
+perfect day.
+
+Miss Bailey--ably assisted by Æsop, Rudyard Kipling, and Thompson
+Seton--had prepared the First Reader Class to accept garrulous and
+benevolent lions, cows, panthers, and elephants, and the exploring
+party's absolute credulity encouraged Isaac to higher and yet higher
+flights, until Becky was strengthened against temptation.
+
+At last, on a Sunday in late June, the cavalcade in splendid raiment met
+on the wide steps, boarded a Grand Street car, and set out for Paradise.
+Some confusion occurred at the very beginning of things when Becky
+Zalmonowsky curtly refused to share her pennies with the conductor. When
+she was at last persuaded to yield, an embarrassing five minutes was
+consumed in searching for the required amount in the nooks and crannies
+of her costume where, for safe-keeping, she had cached her fund. One
+penny was in her shoe, another in her stocking, two in the lining of her
+hat, and one in the large and dilapidated chatelaine bag which dangled
+at her knees.
+
+Nathan Spiderwitz, who had preserved absolute silence, now contributed
+his fare, moist and warm, from his mouth, and Eva turned to him
+admonishingly.
+
+"Ain't Teacher told you money in the mouth ain't healthy fer you?" she
+sternly questioned, and Nathan, when he had removed other pennies, was
+able to answer:
+
+"I washed 'em off--first." And they were indeed most brightly clean.
+"There's holes in me these here pockets," he explained, and promptly
+corked himself anew with currency.
+
+"But they don't tastes nice, do they?" Morris remonstrated. Nathan shook
+a corroborative head. "Und," the Monitor of the Gold Fish further urged,
+"you could to swallow 'em und then you couldn't never to come by your
+house no more."
+
+But Nathan was not to be dissuaded, even when the impressionable and
+experimental Becky tried his storage system and suffered keen discomfort
+before her penny was restored to her by a resourceful fellow traveler
+who thumped her right lustily on the back until her crowings ceased and
+the coin was once more in her hand.
+
+At the meeting of Grand Street with the Bowery, wild confusion was made
+wilder by the addition of seven small persons armed with transfers and
+clamoring--all except Nathan--for Central Park. Two newsboys and a
+policeman bestowed them upon a Third Avenue car and all went well until
+Patrick missed his lunch and charged Ignatius Aloysius with its
+abstraction. Words ensued which were not easily to be forgotten even
+when the refreshment was found--flat and horribly distorted--under the
+portly frame of the chaperon.
+
+Jealousy may have played some part in the misunderstanding, for it was
+undeniable that there was a sprightliness, a joyant brightness, in the
+flowing red scarf on Ignatius Aloysius's nautical breast, which was
+nowhere paralleled in Patrick's more subdued array. And the tenth
+commandment seemed very arbitrary to Patrick, the star of St. Mary's
+Sunday-school, when he saw that the red silk was attracting nearly all
+the attention of his female contingent. If Eva admired flaunting ties it
+were well that she should say so now. There was yet time to spare
+himself the agony of riding on rubber-neck-boat-birds with one whose
+interest wandered from brass buttons. Darkly Patrick scowled upon his
+unconscious rival, and guilefully he remarked to Eva:
+
+"Red neckties is nice, don't you think?"
+
+"Awful nice," Eva agreed; "but they ain't so stylish like high-stiffs.
+High-stiffs und derbies is awful stylish."
+
+Gloom and darkness vanished from the heart and countenance of the Knight
+of Munster, for around his neck he wore, with suppressed agony, the
+highest and stiffest of "high-stiffs" and his brows--and the back of his
+neck--were encircled by his big brother's work-a-day derby. Again he saw
+and described to Eva the vision which had lived in his hopes for now so
+many weeks: against a background of teeming jungle, mysterious and alive
+with wild beasts, an amiable boat-bird floated on the water-lake: and
+upon the boat-bird, trembling but reassured, sat Eva Gonorowsky, hand in
+hand with her brass-buttoned protector.
+
+As the car sped up the Bowery the children felt that they were indeed
+adventurers. The clattering Elevated trains overhead, the crowds of
+brightly decked Sunday strollers, the clanging trolley cars, and the
+glimpses they caught of shining green as they passed the streets leading
+to the smaller squares and parks, all contributed to the holiday
+upliftedness which swelled their unaccustomed hearts. At each vista of
+green they made ready to disembark and were restrained only by the
+conductor and by the sage counsel of Eva, who reminded her impulsive
+companions that the Central Park could be readily identified by "the
+hollers from all those things what hollers." And so, in happy watching
+and calm trust of the conductor, they were borne far beyond 59th Street,
+the first and most popular entrance to the park, before an interested
+passenger came to their rescue. They tumbled off the car and pressed
+towards the green only to find themselves shut out by a high stone wall,
+against which they crouched and listened in vain for identifying
+hollers. The silence began to frighten them, when suddenly the quiet air
+was shattered by a shriek which would have done credit to the biggest of
+boat-birds or of lions, but which was--the children discovered after a
+moment's panic--only the prelude to an outburst of grief on the
+chaperon's part. When the inarticulate stage of her sorrow was passed,
+she demanded instant speech with her mamma. She would seem to have
+expressed a sentiment common to the majority, for three heads in Spring
+finery leaned dejectedly against the stone barrier while Nathan removed
+his car-fare to contribute the remark that he was growing hungry.
+Patrick was forced to seek aid in the passing crowd on Fifth Avenue, and
+in response to his pleading eyes and the depression of his party, a lady
+of gentle aspect and "kind looks" stopped and spoke to them.
+
+"Indeed, yes," she reassured them; "this is Central Park."
+
+"It has looks off the country," Eva commented.
+
+"Because it is a piece of the country," the lady explained.
+
+"Then we dassent to go, the while we ain't none of us got no sickness,"
+cried Eva forlornly. "We're all, all healthy, und the country is for
+sick childrens."
+
+"I am glad you are well," said the lady kindly; "but you may certainly
+play in the park. It is meant for all little children. The gate is near.
+Just walk on near this wall until you come to it."
+
+It was only a few blocks, and they were soon in the land of their
+hearts' desire, where were waving trees and flowering shrubs and
+smoothly sloping lawns, and, framed in all these wonders, a beautiful
+little water-lake all dotted and brightened by fleets of tiny boats. The
+pilgrims from the East Side stood for a moment at gaze and then bore
+down upon the jewel, straight over grass and border, which is a course
+not lightly to be followed within park precincts and in view of park
+policemen. The ensuing reprimand dashed their spirits not at all and
+they were soon assembled close to the margin of the lake, where they got
+entangled in guiding strings and drew to shore many a craft, to the
+disgust of many a small owner. Becky Zalmonowsky stood so closely over
+the lake that she shed the chatelaine bag into its shallow depths and
+did irreparable damage to her gala costume in her attempts to "dibble"
+for her property. It was at last recovered, no wetter than the toilette
+it was intended to adorn, and the cousins Gonorowsky had much difficulty
+in balking Becky's determination to remove her gown and dry it then and
+there.
+
+Then Ignatius Aloysius, the exacting, remembered garrulously that he had
+as yet seen nothing of the rubber-neck-boat-birds and suggested that
+they were even now graciously "hollering like an'thing" in some remote
+fastness of the park. So Patrick gave commands and the march was resumed
+with bliss now beaming on all the faces so lately clouded. Every turn of
+the endless walks brought new wonders to these little ones who were
+gazing for the first time upon the great world of growing things of
+which Miss Bailey had so often told them. The policeman's warning had
+been explicit and they followed decorously in the paths and picked none
+of the flowers which as Eva had heard of old, were sticking right up out
+of the ground. But other flowers there were dangling high or low on tree
+or shrub, while here and there across the grass a bird came hopping or a
+squirrel ran. But the pilgrims never swerved. Full well they knew that
+these delights were not for such as they.
+
+It was, therefore, with surprise and concern that they at last
+debouched upon a wide green space where a flag waved at the top of a
+towering pole; for, behold, the grass was covered thick with children,
+with here and there a beneficent policeman looking serenely on.
+
+"Dast _we_ walk on it?" cried Morris. "Oh, Patrick, dast we?"
+
+"Ask the cop," Nathan suggested. It was his first speech for an hour,
+for Becky's misadventure with the chatelaine bag and the water-lake had
+made him more than ever sure that his own method of safe-keeping was the
+best.
+
+"Ask him yerself," retorted Patrick. He had quite intended to accost a
+large policeman, who would of course recognize and revere the buttons of
+Mr. Brennan _père_, but a commander cannot well accept the advice of his
+subordinates. But Nathan was once more beyond the power of speech, and
+it was Morris Mogilewsky who asked for and obtained permission to walk
+on God's green earth. With little spurts of running and tentative jumps
+to test its spring, they crossed Peacock Lawn to the grateful shade of
+the trees at its further edge and there disposed themselves upon the
+ground and ate their luncheon. Nathan Spiderwitz waited until Sadie had
+finished and then entrusted the five gleaming pennies to her care while
+he wildly bolted an appetizing combination of dark brown bread and
+uncooked eel.
+
+Becky reposed flat upon the chatelaine bag and waved her still damp
+shoes exultantly. Eva lay, face downward beside her, and peered
+wonderingly deep into the roots of things.
+
+"Don't it smells nice!" she gloated. "Don't it looks nice! My, ain't we
+havin' the party-time!"
+
+"Don't mention it," said Patrick, in careful imitation of his mother's
+hostess manner. "I'm pleased to see you, I'm sure."
+
+"The Central Park is awful pretty," Sadie soliloquized as she lay on her
+back and watched the waving branches and blue sky far above. "Awful
+pretty! I likes we should live here all the time."
+
+"Well," began Ignatius Aloysius Diamantstein, in slight disparagement of
+his rival's powers as a cicerone; "well, I ain't seen no lions, nor no
+rubber-neck-boat-birds. Und we ain't had no rides on nothings. Und I
+ain't heard no hollers neither."
+
+As if in answer to this criticism there arose, upon the road beyond the
+trees, a snorting, panting noise, growing momentarily louder and
+culminating, just as East Side nerves were strained to breaking point,
+in a long hoarse and terrifying yell. There was a flash of red, a cloud
+of dust, three other toots of agony, and the thing was gone. Gone, too,
+were the explorers and gone their peaceful rest. To a distant end of the
+field they flew, led by the panic-stricken chaperon, and followed by Eva
+and Patrick, hand in hand, he making show of bravery he was far from
+feeling, and she frankly terrified. In a secluded corner, near the
+restaurant, the chaperon was run to earth by her breathless charges:
+
+"I seen the lion," she panted over and over. "I seen the fierce, big red
+lion, und I don't know where is my mamma."
+
+Patrick saw that one of the attractions had failed to attract, so he
+tried another.
+
+"Le's go an' see the cows," he proposed. "Don't you know the po'try
+piece Miss Bailey learned us about cows?"
+
+Again the emotional chaperon interrupted. "I'm loving much mit Miss
+Bailey, too," she wailed. "Und I don't know where is she neither." But
+the pride of learning upheld the others and they chanted in sing-song
+chorus, swaying rhythmically the while from leg to leg:
+
+
+     "The friendly cow all red and white,
+         I love with all my heart:
+     She gives me cream with all her might,
+         To eat with apple-tart Robert Louis Stevenson."
+
+
+Becky's tears ceased. "Be there cows in the Central Park?" she
+demanded.
+
+"Sure," said Patrick.
+
+"Und what kind from cream will he give us? Ice cream?"
+
+"Sure," said Patrick again.
+
+"Let's go," cried the emotional chaperon. A passing stranger turned the
+band in the general direction of the menagerie and the reality of the
+cow brought the whole "memory gem" into strange and undreamed reality.
+
+Gaily they set out through new and always beautiful ways; through
+tunnels where feet and voices rang with ghostly boomings most pleasant
+to the ear; over bridges whence they saw--in partial proof of Isaac
+Borrachsohn's veracity--"mans und ladies ridin'." Of a surety they rode
+nothing more exciting than horses, but that was, to East Side eyes, an
+unaccustomed sight, and Eva opined that it was owing, probably, to the
+shortness of their watch that they saw no lions and tigers similarly
+amiable. The cows, too, seemed far to seek, but the trees and grass and
+flowers were everywhere. Through long stretches of "for sure country"
+they picked their way, until they came, hot but happy, to a green and
+shady summerhouse on a hill. There they halted to rest, and there
+Ignatius Aloysius, with questionable delicacy, began to insist once more
+upon the full measure of his bond.
+
+"We ain't seen the rubber-neck-boat-birds," he complained. "Und we ain't
+had no rides on nothings."
+
+"You don't know what is polite," cried Eva, greatly shocked at this
+carping spirit in the presence of a hard-worked host. "You could to
+think shame over how you says somethings like that on a party."
+
+"This ain't no party," Ignatius Aloysius retorted. "It's a 'scursion. To
+a party somebody _gives_ you what you should eat; to a 'scursion you
+_brings_ it. Und anyway, we ain't had no rides."
+
+"But we heard a holler," the guest of honor reminded him. "We heard a
+fierce, big holler from a lion. I don't know do I need a ride on
+something what hollers. I could to have a fraid maybe."
+
+"Ye wouldn't be afraid on the boats when I hold yer hand, would ye?"
+Patrick anxiously inquired, and Eva shyly admitted that, thus supported,
+she might not be dismayed. To work off the pride and joy caused by this
+avowal, Patrick mounted the broad seat extending all around the
+summerhouse and began to walk clatteringly upon it. The other pilgrims
+followed suit and the whole party stamped and danced with infinite
+enjoyment. Suddenly the leader halted with a loud cry of triumph and
+pointed grandly out through one of the wistaria-hung openings. Not De
+Soto on the banks of the Mississippi nor Balboa above the Pacific could
+have felt more victorious than Patrick did as he announced:
+
+"There's the water-lake!"
+
+His followers closed in upon him so impetuously that he was borne down
+under their charge and fell ignominiously out on the grass. But he was
+hardly missed, he had served his purpose. For there, beyond the rocks
+and lawns and red japonicas, lay the blue and shining water-lake in its
+confining banks of green. And upon its softly quivering surface floated
+the rubber-neck-boat-birds, white and sweetly silent instead of red and
+screaming--and the superlative length and arched beauty of their necks
+surpassed the wildest of Ikey Borrachsohn's descriptions. And relying
+upon the strength and politeness of these wondrous birds there were
+indeed "mans und ladies und boys und little girls" embarking,
+disembarking, and placidly weaving in and out and round about through
+scenes of hidden but undoubted beauty.
+
+Over rocks and grass the army charged towards bliss unutterable,
+strewing their path with overturned and howling babies of prosperity
+who, clumsy from many nurses and much pampering, failed to make way.
+Past all barriers, accidental or official, they pressed, nor halted to
+draw rein or breath until they were established, beatified, upon the
+waiting swan-boat.
+
+Three minutes later they were standing outside the railings of the
+landing and regarding, through welling tears, the placid lake, the sunny
+slopes of grass and tree, the brilliant sky and the gleaming
+rubber-neck-boat-bird which, as Ikey described, "made go its legs," but
+only, as he had omitted to mention, for money. So there they stood,
+seven sorrowful little figures engulfed in the rayless despair of
+childhood and the bitterness of poverty. For these were the children of
+the poor, and full well they knew that money was not to be diverted from
+its mission: that car-fare could not be squandered on bliss.
+
+Becky's woe was so strong and loud that the bitter wailings of the
+others served merely as its background. But Patrick cared not at all for
+the general despair. His remorseful eyes never strayed from the bowed
+figure of Eva Gonorowsky, for whose pleasure and honor he had striven so
+long and vainly. Slowly she conquered her sobs, slowly she raised her
+daisy-decked head, deliberately she blew her small pink nose, softly she
+approached her conquered knight, gently and all untruthfully she
+faltered, with yearning eyes on the majestic swans:
+
+"Don't you have no sad feelings, Patrick. I ain't got none. Ain't I told
+you from long, how I don't need no rubber-neck-boat-bird rides? I don't
+need 'em! I don't need 'em! I"--with a sob of passionate longing--"I'm
+got all times a awful scare over 'em. Let's go home, Patrick. Becky
+needs she should see her mamma, und I guess I needs my mamma too."
+
+
+
+
+MYRA KELLY
+
+
+Is it necessary to say that she was Irish? The humor, the sympathy, the
+quick understanding, the tenderness, that play through all her stories
+are the birthright of the children of Erin. Myra Kelly was born in
+Dublin, Ireland. Her father was Dr. John E. Kelly, a well-known surgeon.
+When Myra was little more than a baby, the family came to New York City.
+Here she was educated at the Horace Mann High School, and afterwards at
+Teachers College, a department of Columbia University, New York. She
+graduated from Teachers College in 1899. Her first school was in the
+primary department of Public School 147, on East Broadway, New York,
+where she taught from 1899 to 1901. Here she met all the "little
+aliens," the Morris and Isidore, Yetta and Eva of her stories, and won
+her way into their hearts. To her friends she would sometimes tell of
+these children, with their odd ideas of life and their dialect. "Why
+don't you write these stories down?" they asked her, and at last she sat
+down and wrote her first story, "A Christmas Present for a Lady." She
+had no knowledge of editorial methods, so she made four copies of the
+story and sent them to four different magazines. Two of them returned
+the story, and two of them accepted it, much to her embarrassment. The
+two acceptances came from _McClure's Magazine_ and _The Century_. As
+_McClure's_ replied first she gave the story to them, and most of her
+other stories were first published in that magazine.
+
+When they appeared in book form, they were welcomed by readers all over
+the country. Even the President of the United States wrote to express
+his thanks to her, in the following letter:
+
+
+                                                     Oyster Bay, N. Y.
+                                                       July, 26, 1905.
+
+     My dear Miss Kelly:--
+
+     Mrs. Roosevelt and I and most of the children know your very
+     amusing and very pathetic accounts of East Side school children
+     almost by heart, and I really think you must let me write and thank
+     you for them. When I was Police Commissioner I quite often went to
+     the Houston Street public school, and was immensely impressed by
+     what I saw there. I thought there were a good many Miss Baileys
+     there, and the work they were doing among their scholars (who were
+     largely of Russian-Jewish parentage like the children you write of)
+     was very much like what your Miss Bailey has done.
+
+                                    Very sincerely yours,
+                                               Theodore Roosevelt.
+
+
+After two years of school room work, Miss Kelly's health broke down, and
+she retired from teaching, although she served as critic teacher in the
+Speyer School, Teachers College, for a year longer. One of the persons
+who had read her books with delight was Allen Macnaughton. Soon after he
+met Miss Kelly, and in 1905 they were married. They lived for a time at
+Oldchester Village, New Jersey, in the Orange mountains, in a colony of
+literary people which her husband was interested in establishing. After
+several years of very successful literary work, she developed
+tuberculosis. She went to Torquay, England, in search of health, and
+died there March 31, 1910.
+
+Her works include the following titles: _Little Citizens_; _The Isle of
+Dreams_; _Wards of Liberty_; _Rosnah_; _the Golden Season_; _Little
+Aliens_; _New Faces_. One of the leading magazines speaks of her as the
+creator of a new dialect.
+
+
+
+
+HERO WORSHIP
+
+_Most of us are hero-worshippers at some time of our lives. The boy
+finds his hero in the baseball player or athlete, the girl in the
+matinée idol, or the "movie" star. These objects of worship are not
+always worthy of the adoration they inspire, but this does not matter
+greatly, since their worshippers seldom find it out. There is something
+fine in absolute loyalty to an ideal, even if the ideal is far from
+reality. "The Tenor" is the story of a famous singer and two of his
+devoted admirers_.
+
+
+
+
+THE TENOR[1]
+
+BY
+
+H. C. BUNNER
+
+
+It was a dim, quiet room in an old-fashioned New York house, with
+windows opening upon a garden that was trim and attractive, even in its
+wintry days--for the rose-bushes were all bundled up in straw ulsters.
+The room was ample, yet it had a cosy air. Its dark hangings suggested
+comfort and luxury, with no hint of gloom. A hundred pretty trifles told
+that it was a young girl's room: in the deep alcove nestled her dainty
+white bed, draped with creamy lace and ribbons.
+
+"I was _so_ afraid that I'd be late!"
+
+The door opened, and two pretty girls came in, one in hat and furs, the
+other in a modest house dress. The girl in the furs, who had been afraid
+that she would be late, was fair, with a bright color in her cheeks, and
+an eager, intent look in her clear brown eyes. The other girl was
+dark-eyed and dark-haired, dreamy, with a soft, warm dusky color in her
+face. They were two very pretty girls indeed--or, rather, two girls
+about to be very pretty, for neither one was eighteen years old.
+
+The dark girl glanced at a little porcelain clock.
+
+"You are in time, dear," she said, and helped her companion to take off
+her wraps.
+
+Then the two girls crossed the room, and with a caressing and almost a
+reverent touch, the dark girl opened the doors of a little carven
+cabinet that hung upon the wall, above a small table covered with a
+delicate white cloth. In its depths, framed in a mat of odorous double
+violets, stood the photograph of the face of a handsome man of forty--a
+face crowned with clustering black locks, from beneath which a pair of
+large, mournful eyes looked out with something like religious fervor in
+their rapt gaze. It was the face of a foreigner.
+
+"O Esther!" cried the other girl, "how beautifully you have dressed him
+to-day!"
+
+"I wanted to get more," Esther said; "but I've spent almost all my
+allowance--and violets do cost so shockingly. Come, now--" with another
+glance at the clock--"don't let's lose any more time, Louise dear."
+
+She brought a couple of tiny candles in Sevrès candlesticks, and two
+little silver saucers, in which she lit fragrant pastilles. As the pale
+gray smoke arose, floating in faint wreaths and spirals before the
+enshrined photograph, Louise sat down and gazed intently upon the little
+altar. Esther went to her piano and watched the clock. It struck two.
+Her hands fell softly on the keys, and, studying a printed program in
+front of her, she began to play an overture. After the overture she
+played one or two pieces of the regular concert stock. Then she paused.
+
+"I can't play the Tschaikowski piece."
+
+"Never mind," said the other. "Let us wait for him in silence."
+
+The hands of the clock pointed to 2:29. Each girl drew a quick breath,
+and then the one at the piano began to sing softly, almost inaudibly,
+"les Rameaux" in a transcription for tenor of Fauré's great song. When
+it was ended, she played and sang the _encore_. Then, with her fingers
+touching the keys so softly that they awakened only an echo-like sound,
+she ran over the numbers that intervened between the first tenor solo
+and the second. Then she sang again, as softly as before.
+
+The fair-haired girl sat by the little table, gazing intently on the
+picture. Her great eyes seemed to devour it, and yet there was something
+absent-minded, speculative, in her steady look. She did not speak until
+Esther played the last number on the program.
+
+"He had three encores for that last Saturday," she said, and Esther
+played the three encores.
+
+Then they closed the piano and the little cabinet, and exchanged an
+innocent girlish kiss, and Louise went out, and found her father's coupé
+waiting for her, and was driven away to her great, gloomy, brown-stone
+home near Central Park.
+
+Louise Laura Latimer and Esther Van Guilder were the only children of
+two families which, though they were possessed of the three "Rs" which
+are all and more than are needed to insure admission to New York
+society--Riches, Respectability and Religion--yet were not in Society;
+or, at least, in the society that calls itself Society. This was not
+because Society was not willing to have them. It was because they
+thought the world too worldly. Perhaps this was one reason--although the
+social horizon of the two families had expanded somewhat as the girls
+grew up--why Louise and Esther, who had been playmates from their
+nursery days, and had grown up to be two uncommonly sentimental,
+fanciful, enthusiastically morbid girls, were to be found spending a
+bright Winter afternoon holding a ceremonial service of worship before
+the photograph of a fashionable French tenor.
+
+It happened to be a French tenor whom they were worshiping. It might as
+well have been anybody or any thing else. They were both at that period
+of girlish growth when the young female bosom is torn by a hysterical
+craving to worship something--any thing. They had been studying music
+and they had selected the tenor who was the sensation of the hour in New
+York for their idol. They had heard him only on the concert stage; they
+were never likely to see him nearer. But it was a mere matter of chance
+that the idol was not a Boston Transcendentalist, a Popular Preacher, a
+Faith-Cure Healer, or a ringleted old maid with advanced ideas of
+Woman's Mission. The ceremonies might have been different in form: the
+worship would have been the same.
+
+M. Hyppolite Rémy was certainly the musical hero of the hour. When his
+advance notices first appeared, the New York critics, who are a
+singularly unconfiding, incredulous lot, were inclined to discount his
+European reputation.
+
+When they learned that M. Rémy was not only a great artist, but a man
+whose character was "wholly free from that deplorable laxity which is so
+often a blot on the proud escutcheon of his noble profession;" that he
+had married an American lady; that he had "embraced the Protestant
+religion"--no sect was specified, possibly to avoid jealousy--and that
+his health was delicate, they were moved to suspect that he might have
+to ask that allowances be made for his singing. But when he arrived, his
+triumph was complete. He was as handsome as his picture, if he _was_ a
+trifle short, a shade too stout.
+
+He was a singer of genius, too; with a splendid voice and a sound
+method--on the whole. It was before the days of the Wagner autocracy,
+and perhaps his tremolo passed unchallenged as it could not now; but he
+was a great artist. He knew his business as well as his advance-agent
+knew his. The Rémy Concerts were a splendid success. Reserved seats, $5.
+For the Series of Six, $25.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the following Monday, Esther Van Guilder returned her friend's call,
+in response to an urgent invitation, despatched by mail. Louise
+Latimer's great bare room was incapable of transmutation into a cosy
+nest of a boudoir. There was too much of its heavy raw silk
+furniture--too much of its vast, sarcophagus-like bed--too much of its
+upholsterer's elegance, regardless of cost--and taste. An enlargement
+from an ambrotype of the original Latimer, as he arrived in New York
+from New Hampshire, and a photograph of a "child subject" by Millais,
+were all her works of art. It was not to be doubted that they had
+climbed upstairs from a front parlor of an earlier stage of social
+development. The farm-house was six generations behind Esther; two
+behind Louise.
+
+Esther found her friend in a state of almost feverish excitement. Her
+eyes shone; the color burned high on her clear cheeks.
+
+"You never would guess what I've done, dear!" she began, as soon as they
+were alone in the big room. "I'm going to see _him_--to speak to
+him--_Esther!_" Her voice was solemnly hushed, "to _serve_ him!"
+
+"Oh, Louise! what _do_ you mean?"
+
+"To serve him--with my own hands! To--to--help him on with his coat--I
+don't know--to do something that a servant does--anything, so that I can
+say that once, once only, just for an hour, I have been near him, been
+of use to him, served him in one little thing as loyally as he serves
+OUR ART."
+
+Music was THEIR art, and no capitals could tell how much it was theirs
+or how much of an art it was.
+
+"Louise," demanded Esther, with a frightened look, "are you crazy?"
+
+"No. Read this!" She handed the other girl a clipping from the
+advertising columns of a newspaper.
+
+
+     CHAMBERMAID AND WAITRESS.--WANTED, A NEAT and willing girl, for
+     light work. Apply to Mme. Rémy, The Midlothian, ... Broadway.
+
+
+"I saw it just by accident, Saturday, after I left you. Papa had left
+his paper in the coupé. I was going up to my First Aid to the Injured
+Class--it's at four o'clock now, you know. I made up my mind right
+off--it came to me like an inspiration. I just waited until it came to
+the place where they showed how to tie up arteries, and then I slipped
+out. Lots of the girls slip out in the horrid parts, you know. And then,
+instead of waiting in the ante-room, I put on my wrap, and pulled the
+hood over my head and ran off to the Midlothian--it's just around the
+corner, you know. And I saw his wife."
+
+"What was she like?" queried Esther, eagerly.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. Sort of horrid--actressy. She had a pink silk wrapper
+with swansdown all over it--at four o'clock, think! I was _awfully_
+frightened when I got there; but it wasn't the least trouble. She hardly
+looked at me, and she engaged me right off. She just asked me if I was
+willing to do a whole lot of things--I forgot what they were--and where
+I'd worked before. I said at Mrs. Barcalow's."
+
+"Mrs. Barcalow's?"
+
+"Why, yes--my Aunt Amanda, don't you know--up in Framingham. I always
+have to wash the teacups when I go there. Aunty says that everybody has
+got to do _something_ in _her_ house."
+
+"Oh, Louise!" cried her friend, in shocked admiration; "how can you
+think of such things?"
+
+"Well, I did. And she--his wife, you know--just said: 'Oh, I suppose
+you'll do as well as any one--all you girls are alike.'"
+
+"But did she really take you for a--servant?"
+
+"Why, yes, indeed. It was raining. I had that old ulster on, you know.
+I'm to go at twelve o'clock next Saturday."
+
+"But, Louise!" cried Esther, aghast, "you don't truly mean to go!"
+
+"I do!" cried Louise, beaming triumphantly.
+
+"_Oh, Louise!_"
+
+"Now, listen, dear," said Miss Latimer, with the decision of an
+enthusiastic young lady with New England blood in her veins. "Don't say
+a word till I tell you what my plan is. I've thought it all out, and
+you've got to help me."
+
+Esther shuddered.
+
+"You foolish child!" cried Louise. Her eyes were sparkling: she was in a
+state of ecstatic excitement; she could see no obstacles to the
+carrying out of her plan. "You don't think I mean to _stay_ there, do
+you? I'm just going at twelve o'clock, and at four he comes back from
+the matinée, and at five o'clock I'm going to slip on my things and run
+downstairs, and have you waiting for me in the coupé, and off we go. Now
+do you see?"
+
+It took some time to bring Esther's less venturesome spirit up to the
+point of assisting in this undertaking; but she began, after a while, to
+feel the delights of vicarious enterprise, and in the end the two girls,
+their cheeks flushed, their eyes shining feverishly, their voices
+tremulous with childish eagerness, resolved themselves into a committee
+of ways and means; for they were two well-guarded young women, and to
+engineer five hours of liberty was difficult to the verge of
+impossibility. However, there is a financial manoeuvre known as
+"kiting checks," whereby A exchanges a check with B and B swaps with A
+again, playing an imaginary balance against Time and the Clearing House;
+and by a similar scheme, which an acute student of social ethics has
+called "kiting calls," the girls found that they could make Saturday
+afternoon their own, without one glance from the watchful eyes of
+Esther's mother or Louise's aunt--Louise had only an aunt to reckon
+with.
+
+"And, oh, Esther!" cried the bolder of the conspirators, "I've thought
+of a trunk--of course I've got to have a trunk, or she would ask me
+where it was, and I couldn't tell her a fib. Don't you remember the
+French maid who died three days after she came here? Her trunk is up in
+the store-room still, and I don't believe anybody will ever come for
+it--it's been there seven years now. Let's go up and look at it."
+
+The girls romped upstairs to the great unused upper story, where heaps
+of household rubbish obscured the dusty half-windows. In a corner,
+behind Louise's baby chair and an unfashionable hat-rack of the old
+steering-wheel pattern, they found the little brown-painted tin trunk,
+corded up with clothesline.
+
+"Louise!" said Esther, hastily, "what did you tell her your name was?"
+
+"I just said 'Louise'."
+
+Esther pointed to the name painted on the trunk,
+
+
+                             LOUISE LEVY
+
+
+"It is the hand of Providence," she said. "Somehow, now, I'm _sure_
+you're quite right to go."
+
+And neither of these conscientious young ladies reflected for one minute
+on the discomfort which might be occasioned to Madame Rémy by the
+defection of her new servant a half-hour before dinner-time on Saturday
+night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Oh, child, it's you, is it?" was Mme. Rémy's greeting at twelve o'clock
+on Saturday. "Well, you're punctual--and you look clean. Now, are you
+going to break my dishes or are you going to steal my rings? Well, we'll
+find out soon enough. Your trunk's up in your room. Go up to the
+servant's quarters--right at the top of those stairs there. Ask for the
+room that belongs to apartment 11. You are to room with their girl."
+
+Louise was glad of a moment's respite. She had taken the plunge; she was
+determined to go through to the end. But her heart _would_ beat and her
+hands _would_ tremble. She climbed up six flights of winding stairs, and
+found herself weak and dizzy when she reached the top and gazed around
+her. She was in a great half-story room, eighty feet square. The most of
+it was filled with heaps of old furniture and bedding, rolls of carpet,
+of canvas, of oilcloth, and odds and ends of discard of unused household
+gear--the dust thick over all. A little space had been left around three
+sides, to give access to three rows of cell-like rooms, in each of which
+the ceiling sloped from the very door to a tiny window at the level of
+the floor. In each room was a bed, a bureau that served for wash-stand,
+a small looking-glass, and one or two trunks. Women's dresses hung on
+the whitewashed walls. She found No. 11, threw off, desperately, her hat
+and jacket, and sunk down on the little brown tin trunk, all trembling
+from head to foot.
+
+"Hello," called a cheery voice. She looked up and saw a girl in a dirty
+calico dress.
+
+"Just come?" inquired this person, with agreeable informality. She was a
+good-looking large girl, with red hair and bright cheeks. She leaned
+against the door-post and polished her finger-nails with a little brush.
+Her hands were shapely.
+
+"Ain't got onto the stair-climbing racket yet, eh? You'll get used to
+it. 'Louise Levy,'" she read the name on the trunk. "You don't look like
+a sheeny. Can't tell nothin' 'bout names, can you? My name's Slattery.
+You'd think I was Irish, wouldn't you? Well, I'm straight Ne' York. I'd
+be dead before I was Irish. Born here. Ninth Ward an' next to an engine
+house. How's that? There's white Jews, too. I worked for one, pickin'
+sealskins down in Prince Street. Most took the lungs out of me. But that
+wasn't why I shook the biz. It queered my hands--see? I'm goin' to be
+married in the Fall to a German gentleman. He ain't so Dutch when you
+know him, though. He's a grocer. Drivin' now; but he buys out the boss
+in the Fall. How's that? He's dead stuck on my hooks, an' I have to keep
+'em lookin' good. I come here because the work was light. I don't have
+to work--only to be doin' somethin', see? Only got five halls and the
+lamps. You got a fam'ly job, I s'pose? I wouldn't have that. I don't
+mind the Sooprintendent; but I'd be dead before I'd be bossed by a
+woman, see? Say, what fam'ly did you say you was with?"
+
+The stream of talk had acted like a nerve-tonic on Louise. She was able
+to answer:
+
+"M--Mr. Rémy."
+
+"Ramy?--oh, lord! Got the job with His Tonsils? Well, you won't keep it
+long. They're meaner'n three balls, see? Rent their room up here and
+chip in with eleven. Their girls don't never stay. Well, I got to step,
+or the Sooprintendent'll be borin' my ear. Well--so long!"
+
+But Louise had fled down the stairs. "His Tonsils" rang in her ears.
+What blasphemy! What sacrilege! She could scarcely pretend to listen to
+Mme. Rémy's first instructions.
+
+The household _was_ parsimonious. Louise washed the caterer's dishes--he
+made a reduction in his price. Thus she learned that a late breakfast
+took the place of luncheon. She began to feel what this meant. The beds
+had been made; but there was work enough. She helped Mme. Rémy to sponge
+a heap of faded finery--_her_ dresses. If they had been _his_ coats!
+Louise bent her hot face over the tawdry silks and satins, and clasped
+her parboiled little finger-tips over the wet sponge. At half-past three
+Mme. Rémy broke the silence.
+
+"We must get ready for Musseer," she said. An ecstatic joy filled
+Louise's being. The hour of her reward was at hand.
+
+Getting ready for "Musseer" proved to be an appalling process. First
+they brewed what Mme. Rémy called a "teaze Ann." After the _tisane_, a
+host of strange foreign drugs and cosmetics were marshalled in order.
+Then water was set to heat on a gas-stove. Then a little table was
+neatly set.
+
+"Musseer has his dinner at half-past four," Madame explained. "I don't
+take mine till he's laid down and I've got him off to the concert.
+There, he's coming now. Sometimes he comes home pretty nervous. If he's
+nervous, don't you go and make a fuss, do you hear, child?"
+
+The door opened, and Musseer entered, wrapped in a huge frogged
+overcoat. There was no doubt that he was nervous. He cast his hat upon
+the floor, as if he were Jove dashing a thunderbolt. Fire flashed from
+his eyes. He advanced upon his wife and thrust a newspaper in her
+face--a little pinky sheet, a notorious blackmailing publication.
+
+"Zees," he cried, "is your work!"
+
+"What _is_ it now, Hipleet?" demanded Mme. Rémy.
+
+"Vot it ees?" shrieked the tenor. "It ees ze history of how zey have
+heest me at Nice! It ees all zair--how I have been heest--in zis sacre
+sheet--in zis handkairchif of infamy! And it ees you zat have told it to
+zat devil of a Rastignac--_traitresse!_"
+
+"Now, Hipleet," pleaded his wife, "if I can't learn enough French to
+talk with you, how am I going to tell Rastignac about your being
+hissed?"
+
+This reasoning silenced Mr. Rémy for an instant--an instant only.
+
+"You _vood_ have done it!" he cried, sticking out his chin and thrusting
+his face forward.
+
+"Well, I didn't," said Madame, "and nobody reads that thing, any way.
+Now, don't mind it, and let me get your things off, or you'll be
+catching cold."
+
+Mr. Rémy yielded at last to the necessity of self-preservation, and
+permitted his wife to remove his frogged overcoat, and to unwind him
+from a system of silk wraps to which the Gordian knot was a slip-noose.
+This done, he sat down before the dressing-case, and Mme. Rémy, after
+tying a bib around his neck, proceeded to dress his hair and put
+brilliantine on his moustache. Her husband enlivened the operation by
+reading from the pinky paper.
+
+"It ees not gen-air-al-lee known--zat zees dees-tin-guished tenor vos
+heest on ze pob-lic staidj at Nice--in ze year--"
+
+Louise leaned against the wall, sick, faint and frightened, with a
+strange sense of shame and degradation at her heart. At last the tenor's
+eye fell on her.
+
+"Anozzair eediot?" he inquired.
+
+"She ain't very bright, Hipleet," replied his wife; "but I guess she'll
+do. Louise, open the door--there's the caterer."
+
+Louise placed the dishes upon the table mechanically. The tenor sat
+himself at the board, and tucked a napkin in his neck.
+
+"And how did the Benediction Song go this afternoon?" inquired his
+wife.
+
+"Ze Bénédiction? Ah! One _encore_. One on-lee. Zese pigs of Ameéricains.
+I t'row my pairls biffo' swine. _Chops once more!_ You vant to mordair
+me? Vat do zis mean, madame? You ar-r-re in lig wiz my enemies. All ze
+vorlt is against ze ar-r-r-teest!"
+
+The storm that followed made the first seem a zephyr. The tenor
+exhausted his execratory vocabulary in French and English. At last, by
+way of a dramatic finale, he seized the plate of chops and flung it from
+him. He aimed at the wall; but Frenchmen do not pitch well. With a ring
+and a crash, plate and chops went through the broad window-pane. In the
+moment of stricken speechlessness that followed, the sound of the final
+smash came softly up from the sidewalk.
+
+"Ah-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ah!"
+
+The tenor rose to his feet with the howl of an anguished hyena.
+
+"Oh, good gracious!" cried his wife; "he's going to have one of his
+creezes--his creezes de nare!"
+
+He did have a _crise de nerfs_. "Ten dollair!" he yelled, "for ten
+dollair of glass!" He tore his pomaded hair; he tore off his bib and his
+neck-tie, and for three minutes without cessation he shrieked wildly and
+unintelligibly. It was possible to make out, however, that "arteest" and
+"ten dollair" were the themes of the improvisation. Finally he sank
+exhausted into the chair, and his white-faced wife rushed to his side.
+
+"Louise!" she cried, "get the foot-tub out of the closet while I spray
+his throat, or he can't sing a note. Fill it up with warm water--102
+degrees--there's the thermometer--and bathe his feet."
+
+Trembling from head to foot, Louise obeyed her orders, and brought the
+foot-tub, full of steaming water. Then she knelt down and began to serve
+the maestro for the first time. She took off his shoes. Then she looked
+at his socks. Could she do it?
+
+"Eediot!" gasped the sufferer, "make haste! I die!"
+
+"Hold your mouth open, dear," said Madame, "I haven't half sprayed you."
+
+"Ah! _you!_" cried the tenor. "Cat! Devil! It ees you zat have killed
+me!" And moved by an access of blind rage, he extended his arm, and
+thrust his wife violently from him.
+
+Louise rose to her feet, with a hard set, good old New England look on
+her face. She lifted the tub of water to the level of her breast, and
+then she inverted it on the tenor's head. For one instant she gazed at
+the deluge, and at the bath-tub balanced on the maestro's skull like a
+helmet several sizes too large--then she fled like the wind.
+
+Once in the servant's quarters, she snatched her hat and jacket. From
+below came mad yells of rage.
+
+"I kill hare! give me my knife--give me my rivvolvare! Au secours!
+Assassin!"
+
+Miss Slattery appeared in the doorway, still polishing her nails.
+
+"What have you done to His Tonsils?" she inquired. "He's pretty hot,
+this trip."
+
+"How can I get away from here?" cried Louise.
+
+Miss Slattery pointed to a small door. Louise rushed down a long
+stairway--another--and yet others--through a great room where there was
+a smell of cooking and a noise of fires--past white-capped cooks and
+scullions--through a long stone corridor, and out into the street. She
+cried aloud as she saw Esther's face at the window of the coupé.
+
+She drove home--cured.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] From "Stories of H. C. Bunner," copyright, 1890, 1896, by Alice L.
+Bunner; published by Charles Scribner's Sons. By permission of the
+publishers.
+
+
+
+
+H. C. BUNNER
+
+
+Henry Cuyler Bunner was his full name, H. C. Bunner was the way he
+always signed his writings, and "Bunner" was his name to his friends,
+and even to his wife. He was born in Oswego, New York, August 3, 1855.
+His parents soon moved to New York City, and Bunner was educated in the
+public schools there. Then he became a clerk in a business house, but
+this did not satisfy him, and he began to write for newspapers, finally
+getting a position on the _Arcadian_, a short-lived journal. In 1877 the
+publishers of _Puck_, a humorous weekly printed in the German language,
+decided to issue an edition in English, and made Bunner assistant
+editor. It was a happy choice. He soon became editor-in-chief, and under
+his direction the paper became not only the best humorous journal of its
+time, but a powerful influence in politics as well. Bunner wrote not
+only editorials, humorous verse, short stories, and titles for pictures,
+but often suggested the cartoons, which were an important feature of the
+paper.
+
+Outside the office he was a delightful conversationalist. His friends
+Brander Matthews, Lawrence Hutton and others speak of his ready wit, his
+kindness of heart, and his wonderfully varied store of information. He
+was a constant reader, and a good memory enabled him to retain what he
+read. It is said that one could hardly name a poem that he had not read,
+and it was odds but that he could quote its best lines. Next to reading,
+his chief pleasure was in wandering about odd corners of the city,
+especially the foreign quarters. He knew all the queer little
+restaurants and queer little shops in these places.
+
+His first literary work of note was a volume of poems, happily entitled
+_Airs from Arcady_. It contains verses both grave and gay: one of the
+cleverest is called "Home, Sweet Home, with Variations." He writes the
+poem first in the style of Swinburne, then of Bret Harte, then of Austin
+Dobson, then of Oliver Goldsmith and finally of Walt Whitman. The book
+also showed his skill in the use of French forms of verse, as in this
+dainty triolet:
+
+
+            A PITCHER OF MIGNONETTE
+
+     A pitcher of mignonette
+       In a tenement's highest casement:
+     Queer sort of flower-pot--yet
+     That pitcher of mignonette
+     Is a garden in heaven set,
+       To the little sick child in the basement--
+     The pitcher of mignonette
+       In the tenement's highest casement.
+
+
+The last poem in the book, called "To Her," was addressed to Miss Alice
+Learned, whom he married soon after, and to whom, as "A. L. B." all his
+later books were dedicated. Soon after his marriage he moved to Nutley,
+New Jersey. Here he was not only the editor and man of letters but the
+neighbor who could always be called on in time of need, and the citizen
+who took an active part in the community life, helping to organize the
+Village Improvement Society, one of the first of its kind.
+
+He followed up his first volume by two short novels, _The Midge_ and
+_The Story of a New York House_. Then he undertook the writing of the
+short story, his first book being _Zadoc Pine and other Stories_. The
+title story of this book contains a very humorous and faithful
+delineation of a New Englander who is transplanted to a New Jersey
+suburb. Soon after writing this he began to read the short stories of
+Guy de Maupassant. He admired them so much that he half translated, half
+adapted a number of them, and published them under the title _Made in
+France_. Then he tried writing stories of his own, in the manner of de
+Maupassant, and produced in _Short Sixes_ a group of stories which are
+models of concise narrative, crisply told, artistic in form, and often
+with a touch of surprise at the end. Other volumes of short stories are
+_More Short Sixes_, and _Love in Old Cloathes_. _Jersey Street and
+Jersey Lane_ was a book which grew out of his Nutley life. He also wrote
+a play, _The Tower of Babel_, which was produced by Marie Wainwright in
+1883. He died at Nutley, May 11, 1896. He was one of the first American
+authors to develop the short story as we know it to-day, and few of his
+successors have surpassed him in the light, sure style and the firmness
+of construction which are characteristic of his later work.
+
+
+
+
+SOCIETY IN OUR TOWN
+
+_Life in a small town, which means any place of less than a hundred
+thousand people, is more interesting than life in a big city. Both
+places have their notables, but in the small town you know these people,
+in the city you only read about them in the papers._ IN OUR TOWN _is a
+series of portraits of the people of a typical small city of the Middle
+West, seen through the keen eyes of a newspaper editor. This story tells
+how the question of the social leadership of the town was finally
+settled._
+
+
+
+
+THE PASSING OF PRISCILLA WINTHROP
+
+BY
+
+WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
+
+
+What a dreary waste life in our office must have been before Miss
+Larrabee came to us to edit a society page for the paper! To be sure we
+had known in a vague way that there were lines of social cleavage in the
+town; that there were whist clubs, and dancing clubs and women's clubs,
+and in a general way that the women who composed these clubs made up our
+best society, and that those benighted souls beyond the pale of these
+clubs were out of the caste. We knew that certain persons whose names
+were always handed in on the lists of guests at parties were what we
+called "howling swells," but it remained for Miss Larrabee to sort out
+ten or a dozen of these "howling swells," who belonged to the strictest
+social caste in town, and call them "howling dervishes." Incidentally it
+may be said that both Miss Larrabee and her mother were dervishes, but
+that did not prevent her from making sport of them. From Miss Larrabee
+we learned that the high priestess of the howling dervishes of our
+society was Mrs. Mortimer Conklin, known by the sisterhood of the mosque
+as Priscilla Winthrop. We in our office had never heard her called by
+that name, but Miss Larrabee explained, rather elaborately, that unless
+one was permitted to speak of Mrs. Conklin thus, one was quite beyond
+the hope of a social heaven.
+
+In the first place, Priscilla Winthrop was Mrs. Conklin's maiden name;
+in the second place, it links her with the Colonial Puritan stock of
+which she is so justly proud--being scornful of mere Daughters of the
+Revolution--and finally, though Mrs. Conklin is a grandmother, her
+maiden name seems to preserve the sweet, vague illusion of girlhood
+which Mrs. Conklin always carries about her like the shadow of a dream.
+And Miss Larrabee punctuated this with a wink which we took to be a
+quotation mark, and she went on with her work. So we knew we had been
+listening to the language used in the temple.
+
+Our town was organized fifty years ago by Abolitionists from New
+England, and twenty years ago, when Alphabetical Morrison was getting
+out one of the numerous boom editions of his real estate circular, he
+printed an historical article therein in which he said that Priscilla
+Winthrop was the first white child born on the town site. Her father was
+territorial judge, afterward member of the State Senate, and after ten
+years spent in mining in the far West, died in the seventies, the
+richest man in the State. It was known that he left Priscilla, his only
+child, half a million dollars in government bonds.
+
+She was the first girl in our town to go away to school. Naturally, she
+went to Oberlin, famous in those days for admitting colored students.
+But she finished her education at Vassar, and came back so much of a
+young lady that the town could hardly contain her. She married Mortimer
+Conklin, took him to the Centennial on a wedding trip, came home,
+rebuilt her father's house, covering it with towers and minarets and
+steeples, and scroll-saw fretwork, and christened it Winthrop Hall. She
+erected a store building on Main Street, that Mortimer might have a
+luxurious office on the second floor, and then settled down to the
+serious business of life, which was building up a titled aristocracy in
+a Kansas town.
+
+The Conklin children were never sent to the public schools, but had a
+governess, yet Mortimer Conklin, who was always alert for the call,
+could not understand why the people never summoned him to any office of
+honor or trust. He kept his brass signboard polished, went to his office
+punctually every morning at ten o'clock, and returned home to dinner at
+five, and made clients wait ten minutes in the outer office before they
+could see him--at least so both of them say, and there were no others in
+all the years. He shaved every day, wore a frock-coat and a high hat to
+church--where for ten years he was the only male member of the
+Episcopalian flock--and Mrs. Conklin told the women that altogether he
+was a credit to his sex and his family--a remark which has passed about
+ribaldly in town for a dozen years, though Mortimer Conklin never knew
+that he was the subject of a town joke. Once he rebuked a man in the
+barber shop for speaking of feminine extravagance, and told the shop
+that he did not stint his wife, that when she asked him for money he
+always gave it to her without question, and that if she wanted a dress
+he told her to buy it and send the bill to him. And we are such a polite
+people that no one in the crowded shop laughed--until Mortimer Conklin
+went out.
+
+Of course at the office we have known for twenty-five years what the men
+thought of Mortimer, but not until Miss Larrabee joined the force did we
+know that among the women Mrs. Conklin was considered an oracle. Miss
+Larrabee said that her mother has a legend that when Priscilla Winthrop
+brought home from Boston the first sealskin sacque ever worn in town she
+gave a party for it, and it lay in its box on the big walnut bureau in
+the spare room of the Conklin mansion in solemn state, while
+seventy-five women salaamed to it. After that Priscilla Winthrop was the
+town authority on sealskins. When any member of the town nobility had a
+new sealskin, she took it humbly to Priscilla Winthrop to pass judgment
+upon it. If Priscilla said it was London-dyed, its owner pranced away on
+clouds of glory; but if she said it was American-dyed, its owner crawled
+away in shame, and when one admired the disgraced garment, the martyred
+owner smiled with resigned sweetness and said humbly: "Yes--but it's
+only American-dyed, you know."
+
+No dervish ever questioned the curse of the priestess. The only time a
+revolt was imminent was in the autumn of 1884 when the Conklins
+returned from their season at Duxbury, Massachusetts, and Mrs. Conklin
+took up the carpets in her house, heroically sold all of them at the
+second-hand store, put in new waxed floors and spread down rugs. The
+town uprose and hooted; the outcasts and barbarians in the Methodists
+and Baptist Missionary Societies rocked the Conklin home with their
+merriment, and ten dervishes with set faces bravely met the onslaughts
+of the savages; but among themselves in hushed whispers, behind locked
+doors, the faithful wondered if there was not a mistake some place.
+However, when Priscilla Winthrop assured them that in all the best homes
+in Boston rugs were replacing carpets, their souls were at peace.
+
+All this time we at the office knew nothing of what was going on. We
+knew that the Conklins devoted considerable time to society; but
+Alphabetical Morrison explained that by calling attention to the fact
+that Mrs. Conklin had prematurely gray hair. He said a woman with
+prematurely gray hair was as sure to be a social leader as a spotted
+horse is to join a circus. But now we know that Colonel Morrison's view
+was a superficial one, for he was probably deterred from going deeper
+into the subject by his dislike for Mortimer Conklin, who invested a
+quarter of a million dollars of the Winthrop fortune in the Wichita
+boom, and lost it. Colonel Morrison naturally thought as long as Conklin
+was going to lose that money he could have lost it just as well at home
+in the "Queen City of the Prairies," giving the Colonel a chance to win.
+And when Conklin, protecting his equities in Wichita, sent a hundred
+thousand dollars of good money after the quarter million of bad money,
+Colonel Morrison's grief could find no words; though he did find
+language for his wrath. When the Conklins draped their Oriental rugs for
+airing every Saturday over the veranda and portico railings of the house
+front, Colonel Morrison accused the Conklins of hanging out their stamp
+collection to let the neighbors see it. This was the only side of the
+rug question we ever heard in our office until Miss Larrabee came; then
+she told us that one of the first requirements of a howling dervish was
+to be able to quote from Priscilla Winthrop's Rug book from memory. The
+Rug book, the China book and the Old Furniture book were the three
+sacred scrolls of the sect.
+
+All this was news to us. However, through Colonel Morrison, we had
+received many years ago another sidelight on the social status of the
+Conklins. It came out in this way: Time honored custom in our town
+allows the children of a home where there is an outbreak of social
+revelry, whether a church festival or a meeting of the Cold-Nosed Whist
+Club, to line up with the neighbor children on the back stoop or in the
+kitchen, like human vultures, waiting to lick the ice-cream freezer and
+to devour the bits of cake and chicken salad that are left over. Colonel
+Morrison told us that no child was ever known to adorn the back yard of
+the Conklin home while a social cataclysm was going on, but that when
+Mrs. Morrison entertained the Ladies' Literary League, children from the
+holy Conklin family went home from his back porch with their faces
+smeared with chicken croquettes and their hands sticky with jellycake.
+
+This story never gained general circulation in town, but even if it had
+been known of all men it would not have shaken the faith of the
+devotees. For they did not smile when Priscilla Winthrop began to refer
+to old Frank Hagan, who came to milk the Conklin cow and curry the
+Conklin horse, as "François, the man," or to call the girl who did the
+cooking and general housework "Cosette, the maid," though every one of
+the dozen other women in town whom "Cosette, the maid" had worked for
+knew that her name was Fanny Ropes. And shortly after that the homes of
+the rich and the great over on the hill above Main Street began to fill
+with Lisettes and Nanons and Fanchons, and Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington
+called her girl "Grisette," explaining that they had always had a
+Grisette about the house since her mother first went to housekeeping in
+Peoria, Illinois, and it sounded so natural to hear the name that they
+always gave it to a new servant. This story came to the office through
+the Young Prince, who chuckled over it during the whole hour he consumed
+in writing Ezra Worthington's obituary.
+
+Miss Larrabee says that the death of Ezra Worthington marks such a
+distinct epoch in the social life of the town that we must set down
+here--even if the narrative of the Conklins halts for a moment--how the
+Worthingtons rose and flourished. Julia Neal, the eldest daughter of
+Thomas Neal--who lost the "O" before his name somewhere between the
+docks of Dublin and the west bank of the Missouri River--was for ten
+years principal of the ward school in that part of our town known as
+"Arkansaw," where her term of service is still remembered as the "reign
+of terror." It was said of her then that she could whip any man in the
+ward--and would do it if he gave her a chance. The same manner which
+made the neighbors complain that Julia Neal carried her head too high,
+later in life, when she had money to back it, gave her what the women of
+the State Federation called a "regal air." In her early thirties she
+married Ezra Worthington, bachelor, twenty years her senior. Ezra
+Worthington was at that time, had been for twenty years before, and
+continued to be until his death, proprietor of the Worthington Poultry
+and Produce Commission Company. He was owner of the stockyards,
+president of the Worthington State Bank, vice-president, treasurer and
+general manager of the Worthington Mercantile Company, and owner of five
+brick buildings on Main Street. He bought one suit of clothes every five
+years whether he needed it or not, never let go of a dollar unless the
+Goddess of Liberty on it was black in the face, and died rated "at
+$350,000" by all the commercial agencies in the country. And the first
+thing Mrs. Worthington did after the funeral was to telephone to the
+bank and ask them to send her a hundred dollars.
+
+The next important thing she did was to put a heavy, immovable granite
+monument over the deceased so that he would not be restless, and then
+she built what is known in our town as the Worthington Palace. It makes
+the Markley mansion which cost $25,000 look like a barn. The
+Worthingtons in the life-time of Ezra had ventured no further into the
+social whirl of the town than to entertain the new Presbyterian preacher
+at tea, and to lend their lawn to the King's Daughters for a social,
+sending a bill in to the society for the eggs used in the coffee and the
+gasoline used in heating it.
+
+To the howling dervishes who surrounded Priscilla Winthrop the
+Worthingtons were as mere Christian dogs. It was not until three years
+after Ezra Worthington's death that the glow of the rising Worthington
+sun began to be seen in the Winthrop mosque. During those three years
+Mrs. Worthington had bought and read four different sets of the best
+hundred books, had consumed the Chautauque course, had prepared and
+delivered for the Social Science Club, which she organized, five papers
+ranging in subject from the home life of Rameses I., through a Survey of
+the Forces Dominating Michael Angelo, to the Influence of Esoteric
+Buddhism on Modern Political Tendencies. More than that, she had been
+elected president of the City Federation clubs and being a delegate to
+the National Federation from the State, was talked of for the State
+Federation Presidency. When the State Federation met in our town, Mrs.
+Worthington gave a reception for the delegates in the Worthington
+Palace, a feature of which was a concert by a Kansas City organist on
+the new pipe-organ which she had erected in the music-room of her house,
+and despite the fact that the devotees of the Priscilla shrine said that
+the crowd was distinctly mixed and not at all representative of our best
+social grace and elegance, there is no question but that Mrs.
+Worthington's reception made a strong impression upon the best local
+society. The fact that, as Miss Larrabee said, "Priscilla Winthrop was
+so nice about it," also may be regarded as ominous. But the women who
+lent Mrs. Worthington the spoons and forks for the occasion were
+delighted, and formed a phalanx about her, which made up in numbers what
+it might have lacked in distinction. Yet while Mrs. Worthington was in
+Europe the faithful routed the phalanx, and Mrs. Conklin returned from
+her summer in Duxbury with half a carload of old furniture from Harrison
+Sampson's shop and gave a talk to the priestesses of the inner temple on
+"Heppelwhite in New England."
+
+Miss Larrabee reported the affair for our paper, giving the small list
+of guests and the long line of refreshments--which included
+alligator-pear salad, right out of the Smart Set Cook Book. Moreover,
+when Jefferson appeared in Topeka that fall, Priscilla Winthrop, who had
+met him through some of her Duxbury friends in Boston, invited him to
+run down for a luncheon with her and the members of the royal family who
+surrounded her. It was the proud boast of the defenders of the Winthrop
+faith in town that week, that though twenty-four people sat down to the
+table, not only did all the men wear frock coats--not only did Uncle
+Charlie Haskins of String Town wear the old Winthrop butler's livery
+without a wrinkle in it, and with only the faint odor of mothballs to
+mingle with the perfume of the roses--but (and here the voices of the
+followers of the prophet dropped in awe) not a single knife or fork or
+spoon or napkin was borrowed! After that, when any of the sisterhood had
+occasion to speak of the absent Mrs. Worthington, whose house was filled
+with new mahogany and brass furniture, they referred to her as the
+Duchess of Grand Rapids, which gave them much comfort.
+
+But joy is short-lived. When Mrs. Worthington came back from Europe and
+opened her house to the City Federation, and gave a colored
+lantern-slide lecture on "An evening with the Old Masters," serving
+punch from her own cut-glass punch bowl instead of renting the
+hand-painted crockery bowl of the queensware store, the old dull pain
+came back into the hearts of the dwellers in the inner circle. Then just
+in the nick of time Mrs. Conklin went to Kansas City and was operated
+on for appendicitis. She came back pale and interesting, and gave her
+club a paper called "Hospital Days," fragrant with iodoform and Henley's
+poems. Miss Larrabee told us that it was almost as pleasant as an
+operation on one's self to hear Mrs. Conklin tell about hers. And they
+thought it was rather brutal--so Miss Larrabee afterward told us--when
+Mrs. Worthington went to the hospital one month, and gave her famous
+Delsarte lecture course the next month, and explained to the women that
+if she wasn't as heavy as she used to be it was because she had had
+everything cut out of her below the windpipe. It seemed to the temple
+priestesses that, considering what a serious time poor dear Priscilla
+Winthrop had gone through, Mrs. Worthington was making light of serious
+things.
+
+There is no doubt that the formal rebellion of Mrs. Worthington, Duchess
+of Grand Rapids, and known of the town's nobility as the Pretender,
+began with the hospital contest. The Pretender planted her siege-guns
+before the walls of the temple of the priestess, and prepared for
+business. The first manoeuver made by the beleaguered one was to give a
+luncheon in the mosque, at which, though it was midwinter, fresh
+tomatoes and fresh strawberries were served, and a real authoress from
+Boston talked upon John Fiske's philosophy and, in the presence of the
+admiring guests, made a new kind of salad dressing for the fresh lettuce
+and tomatoes. Thirty women who watched her forgot what John Fiske's
+theory of the cosmos is, and thirty husbands who afterward ate that
+salad dressing have learned to suffer and be strong. But that salad
+dressing undermined the faith of thirty mere men--raw outlanders to be
+sure--in the social omniscience of Priscilla Winthrop. Of course they
+did not see it made; the spell of the enchantress was not over them; but
+in their homes they maintained that if Priscilla Winthrop didn't know
+any more about cosmic philosophy than to pay a woman forty dollars to
+make a salad dressing like that--and the whole town knows that was the
+price--the vaunted town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with its old
+furniture and new culture, which Priscilla spoke of in such repressed
+ecstasy, is probably no better than Manitou, Colorado, where they get
+their Indian goods from Buffalo, New York.
+
+Such is the perverse reasoning of man. And Mrs. Worthington, having
+lived with considerable of a man for fifteen years, hearing echoes of
+this sedition, attacked the fortification of the faithful on its weakest
+side. She invited the thirty seditious husbands with their wives to a
+beefsteak dinner, where she heaped their plates with planked sirloin,
+garnished the sirloin with big, fat, fresh mushrooms, and topped off the
+meal with a mince pie of her own concoction, which would make a man
+leave home to follow it. She passed cigars at the table, and after the
+guests went into the music-room ten old men with ten old fiddles
+appeared and contested with old-fashioned tunes for a prize, after which
+the company danced four quadrilles and a Virginia reel. The men threw
+down their arms going home and went over in a body to the Pretender. But
+in a social conflict men are mere non-combatants, and their surrender
+did not seriously injure the cause that they deserted.
+
+The war went on without abatement. During the spring that followed the
+winter of the beefsteak dinner many skirmishes, minor engagements,
+ambushes and midnight raids occurred. But the contest was not decisive.
+For purposes of military drill, the defenders of the Winthrop faith
+formed themselves into a Whist Club. _The_ Whist Club they called it,
+just as they spoke of Priscilla Winthrop's gowns as "the black and white
+one," "the blue brocade," "the white china silk," as if no other black
+and white or blue brocade or white china silk gowns had been created in
+the world before and could not be made again by human hands. So, in the
+language of the inner sanctuary, there was "The Whist Club," to the
+exclusion of all other possible human Whist Clubs under the stars. When
+summer came the Whist Club fled as birds to the mountains--save
+Priscilla Winthrop, who went to Duxbury, and came home with a brass
+warming-pan and a set of Royal Copenhagen china that were set up as holy
+objects in the temple.
+
+But Mrs. Worthington went to the National Federation of Women's Clubs,
+made the acquaintance of the women there who wore clothes from Paris,
+began tracing her ancestry back to the Maryland Calverts--on her
+mother's side of the house--brought home a membership in the Daughters
+of the Revolution, the Colonial Dames and a society which referred to
+Charles I. as "Charles Martyr," claimed a Stuart as the rightful king of
+England, affecting to score the impudence of King Edward in sitting on
+another's throne. More than this, Mrs. Worthington had secured the
+promise of Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, Vice-President of the National
+Federation, to visit Cliff Crest, as Mrs. Worthington called the
+Worthington mansion, and she turned up her nose at those who worshiped
+under the towers, turrets and minarets of the Conklin mosque, and played
+the hose of her ridicule on their outer wall that she might have it
+spotless for a target when she got ready to raze it with her big gun.
+
+The week that Ellen Vail Montgomery came to town was a busy one for Miss
+Larrabee. We turned over the whole fourth page of the paper to her for a
+daily society page, and charged the Bee Hive and the White Front Dry
+Goods store people double rates to put their special advertisements on
+that page while the "National Vice," as the Young Prince called her, was
+in town. For the "National Vice" brought the State President and two
+State Vices down, also four District Presidents and six District Vices,
+who, as Miss Larrabee said, were monsters "of so frightful mien, that to
+be hated need but to be seen." The entire delegation of visiting
+stateswomen--Vices and Virtues and Beatitudes as we called them--were
+entertained by Mrs. Worthington at Cliff Crest, and there was so much
+Federation politics going on in our town that the New York _Sun_ took
+five hundred words about it by wire, and Colonel Alphabetical Morrison
+said that with all those dressed-up women about he felt as though he was
+living in a Sunday supplement.
+
+The third day of the ghost-dance at Cliff Crest was to be the day of the
+big event--as the office parlance had it. The ceremonies began at
+sunrise with a breakfast to which half a dozen of the captains and kings
+of the besieging host of the Pretender were bidden. It seems to have
+been a modest orgy, with nothing more astonishing than a new gold-band
+china set to dishearten the enemy. By ten o'clock Priscilla Winthrop and
+the Whist Club had recovered from that; but they had been asked to the
+luncheon--the star feature of the week's round of gayety. It is just as
+well to be frank, and say that they went with fear and trembling. Panic
+and terror were in their ranks, for they knew a crisis was at hand. It
+came when they were "ushered into the dining-hall," as our paper so
+grandly put it, and saw in the great oak-beamed room a table laid on the
+polished bare wood--a table laid for forty-eight guests, with a doily
+for every plate, and every glass, and every salt-cellar, and--here the
+mosque fell on the heads of the howling dervishes--forty-eight
+soup-spoons, forty-eight silver-handled knives and forks; forty-eight
+butter-spreaders, forty-eight spoons, forty-eight salad forks,
+forty-eight ice-cream spoons, forty-eight coffee spoons. Little did it
+avail the beleaguered party to peep slyly under the spoon-handles--the
+word "Sterling" was there, and, more than that, a large, severely plain
+"W" with a crest glared up at them from every piece of silver. The
+service had not been rented. They knew their case was hopeless. And so
+they ate in peace.
+
+When the meal was over it was Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, in her
+thousand-dollar gown, worshiped by the eyes of forty-eight women, who
+put her arm about Priscilla Winthrop and led her into the conservatory,
+where they had "a dear, sweet quarter of an hour," as Mrs. Montgomery
+afterward told her hostess. In that dear, sweet quarter of an hour
+Priscilla Winthrop Conklin unbuckled her social sword and handed it to
+the conqueror, in that she agreed absolutely with Mrs. Montgomery that
+Mrs. Worthington was "perfectly lovely," that she was "delighted to be
+of any service" to Mrs. Worthington; that Mrs. Conklin "was sure no one
+else in our town was so admirably qualified for National Vice" as Mrs.
+Worthington, and that "it would be such a privilege" for Mrs. Conklin to
+suggest Mrs. Worthington's name for the office. And then Mrs.
+Montgomery, "National Vice" and former State Secretary for Vermont of
+the Colonial Dames, kissed Priscilla Winthrop and they came forth
+wet-eyed and radiant, holding each other's hands. When the company had
+been hushed by the magic of a State Vice and two District Virtues,
+Priscilla Winthrop rose and in the sweetest Kansas Bostonese told the
+ladies that she thought this an eminently fitting place to let the
+visiting ladies know how dearly our town esteems its most distinguished
+townswoman, Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington, and that entirely without her
+solicitation, indeed quite without her knowledge, the women of our
+town--and she hoped of our beloved State--were ready now to announce
+that they were unanimous in their wish that Mrs. Worthington should be
+National Vice-President of the Federation of Women's Clubs, and that
+she, the speaker, had entered the contest with her whole soul to bring
+this end to pass. Then there was hand-clapping and handkerchief waving
+and some tears, and a little good, honest Irish hugging, and in the
+twilight two score of women filed down through the formal garden of
+Cliff Crest and walked by twos and threes in to the town.
+
+There was the usual clatter of home-going wagons; lights winked out of
+kitchen windows; the tinkle of distant cow-bells was in the air; on Main
+Street the commerce of the town was gently ebbing, and man and nature
+seemed utterly oblivious of the great event that had happened. The
+course of human events was not changed; the great world rolled on, while
+Priscilla Winthrop went home to a broken shrine to sit among the the
+potsherds.
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
+
+(Written by Mr. White especially for this book.)
+
+
+I was born in Emporia, Kansas, February 10, 1868, when Emporia was a
+pioneer village a hundred miles from a railroad. My father came to
+Emporia in 1859 and my mother in 1855. She was a pioneer school teacher
+and he a pioneer doctor. She was pure bred Irish, and he of Yankee
+lineage since 1639. When I was a year old, Emporia became too effete for
+my parents, and they moved to El Dorado, Kansas. There I grew up. El
+Dorado was a town of a dozen houses, located on the banks of the Walnut,
+a sluggish, but a clear and beautiful prairie stream, rock bottom, and
+spring fed. I grew up in El Dorado, a prairie village boy; went to the
+large stone school house that "reared its awful form" on the hill above
+the town before there were any two-story buildings in the place.
+
+In 1884, I was graduated from the town high school, and went to the
+College of Emporia for a year; worked a year as a printer's devil;
+learned something of the printer's trade; went to school for another
+year, working in the afternoons and Saturdays at the printer's case;
+became a reporter on the _Emporia News_; later went to the State
+University for three years. After more or less studying and working on
+the Lawrence papers, I went back to El Dorado as manager of the _El
+Dorado Republican_ for State Senator T. B. Murdock.
+
+From the _El Dorado Republican_, I went to Kansas City to work for the
+_Kansas City Journal_, and at 24 became an editorial writer on the
+_Kansas City Star_. For three years I worked on the _Star_, during which
+time I married Miss Sallie Lindsay, a Kansas City, Kansas, school
+teacher. In 1895 I bought the _Emporia Gazette_ on credit, without a
+cent in money, and chiefly with the audacity and impudence of youth. It
+was then a little paper; I paid three thousand dollars for it, and I
+have lived in Emporia ever since.
+
+In 1896, I published a book of short stories called _The Real Issue_; in
+1899, another book of short stories called _The Court of Boyville_. In
+1901, I published a third book of short stories called _Stratagems and
+Spoils_; in 1906, _In Our Town_. In 1909, I published my first novel, _A
+Certain Rich Man_. In 1910, I published a book of political essays
+called _The Old Order Changeth_; in 1916, a volume of short stories
+entitled _God's Puppets_. A volume half novel and half travel sketches
+called _The Martial Adventures of Henry & Me_ filled the gap between my
+two novels; and the second novel, _In the Heart of a Fool_ was published
+in 1918.
+
+I am a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters; the Short
+Ballot Association; the International Peace Society; National Civic
+Federation; National Academy of Political Science; have honorary degrees
+from the College of Emporia, Baker University, and Columbia University
+of the City of New York; was regent of the Kansas State University from
+1905 to 1913. Politically I am a Republican and was elected National
+Republican Committeeman from Kansas in 1912, but resigned to be
+Progressive National Committeeman from Kansas that year. I am now a
+member of the Republican National Committee on Platforms and Policies
+appointed by the National Chairman, Will S. Hays. I am a trustee of the
+College of Emporia; a member of the Congregational Church, and of the
+Elks Lodge, and of no other organization.
+                                            WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE.
+
+
+To the above biography a few items about Mr. White's literary work may
+be added. It was through an editorial that he first became famous. This
+appeared in the _Emporia Gazette_ in 1896, with the title, "What's the
+matter with Kansas?" It contained so much good sense, and was written
+in such vigorous English that it was copied in newspapers all over the
+country. Perhaps no other editorial ever brought such sudden recognition
+to its author. In the same year he published his first book, _The Real
+Issue_, a volume of short stories. Some of them pictured the life of a
+small town, some centered about politics, and some were stories of small
+boys. These three subjects were the themes of most of Mr. White's later
+books.
+
+_Stratagems and Spoils_, a volume of short stories, dealt chiefly with
+politics, as seen from the inside. _In Our Town_, from which "The
+Passing of Priscilla Winthrop" is taken, belongs to the studies of
+small-town life. His first novel, _A Certain Rich Man_, was published in
+1909. Its theme is the development of an American multi-millionaire,
+from his beginning as a small business man with a reputation for close
+dealing, his success, his reaching out to greater schemes, growing more
+and more unscrupulous in his methods, until at last he achieves the
+great wealth he had sought, but in winning it he loses his soul.
+
+This book was written during a vacation in the Colorado mountains. His
+family were established in a log cabin, and he set up a tent near by for
+a workshop. This is his account of his method of writing:
+
+
+     My working day was supposed to begin at nine o'clock in the
+     morning, but the truth is I seldom reached the tent before ten.
+     Then it took me some time to get down to work. From then on until
+     late in the afternoon I would sit at my typewriter, chew my tongue,
+     and pound away. Each night I read to my wife what I had written
+     that day, and Mrs. White would criticise it. While my work was
+     redhot I couldn't get any perspective on it--each day's installment
+     seemed to me the finest literature I had ever read. She didn't
+     always agree with me. When she disapproved of anything I threw it
+     away--after a row--and re-wrote it.
+
+
+In his next book, _The Old Order Changeth_, Mr. White turned aside from
+fiction to write a series of papers dealing with various reform
+movements in our national life. He shows how through these much has been
+done to regain for the people the control of municipal and state
+affairs. The material for this book was drawn largely from Mr. White's
+participation in political affairs.
+
+In 1917 he was sent to France as an observer by the American Red Cross.
+The lighter side of what he saw there was told in _The Martial
+Adventures of Henry and Me_. His latest book is a long novel, _In the
+Heart of a Fool_, another study of American life of to-day.
+
+All in all, he stands as one of the chief interpreters in fiction of the
+spirit of the Middle West,--a section of our country which some
+observers say is the most truly American part of America.
+
+
+
+
+A PAIR OF LOVERS
+
+_The typical love story begins by telling us how two young people fall
+in love, allows us to eavesdrop at a proposal, with soft moonlight
+effects, and then requests our presence at a wedding. Or perhaps an
+elopement precedes the wedding, which gives us an added thrill. The
+scene may be laid anywhere, the period may be the present or any time
+back to the Middle Ages, (apparently people did not fall in love at any
+earlier periods), but the formula remains the same. O. Henry wrote a
+love story that does not follow the formula. He called it "The Gift of
+the Magi."_
+
+
+
+
+THE GIFT OF THE MAGI
+
+BY
+
+O. HENRY
+
+
+One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it
+was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the
+grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned
+with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied.
+Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the
+next day would be Christmas.
+
+There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch
+and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that
+life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles
+predominating.
+
+While the mistress of the house is gradually subsiding from the first
+stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per
+week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that
+word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.
+
+In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go,
+and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring.
+Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. James
+Dillingham Young."
+
+The "Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of
+prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the
+income was shrunk to $20, the letters of "Dillingham" looked blurred, as
+though they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and
+unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and
+reached his flat above he was called "Jim" and greatly hugged by Mrs.
+James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all
+very good.
+
+Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag.
+She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a
+gray fence in a gray backyard. To-morrow would be Christmas Day, and she
+had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving
+every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a
+week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated.
+They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a
+happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something
+fine and rare and sterling--something just a little bit near to being
+worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.
+
+There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have
+seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may,
+by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips,
+obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender,
+had mastered the art.
+
+Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. Her
+eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within
+twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its
+full length.
+
+Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which
+they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch that had been
+his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair. Had the
+Queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have
+let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her
+Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all
+his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his
+watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from
+envy.
+
+So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her, rippling and shining like
+a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself
+almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and
+quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or
+two splashed on the worn red carpet.
+
+On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of
+skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered
+out the door and down the stairs to the street.
+
+Where she stopped the sign read: "Mme. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All
+Kinds." One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame,
+large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the "Sofronie."
+
+"Will you buy my hair?" asked Della.
+
+"I buy hair," said Madame. "Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at
+the looks of it."
+
+Down rippled the brown cascade.
+
+"Twenty dollars," said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.
+
+"Give it to me quick," said Della.
+
+Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed
+metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present.
+
+She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else.
+There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all
+of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain, simple and chaste in
+design, properly proclaiming its value by substance and not by
+meretricious ornamentation--as all good things should do. It was even
+worthy of The Watch.
+
+As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim's. It was like him.
+Quietness and value--the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars
+they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With
+that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in
+any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the
+sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a
+chain.
+
+When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence
+and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went
+to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is
+always a tremendous task, dear friends--a mammoth task.
+
+Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls
+that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at
+her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
+
+"If Jim doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second
+look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what
+could I do--oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?"
+
+At seven o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back
+of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
+
+Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on
+the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she
+heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight and she turned
+white for just a moment. She had a habit of saying little silent prayers
+about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered:
+
+"Please God, make him think I am still pretty."
+
+The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and
+very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two--and to be burdened
+with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
+
+Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of
+quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in
+them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger,
+nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments
+that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with
+that peculiar expression on his face.
+
+Della wriggled off the table and went to him.
+
+"Jim, darling," she cried, "don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut
+off and sold it because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without
+giving you a present. It'll grow out again--you won't mind, will you? I
+just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say 'Merry Christmas!'
+Jim, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice--what a beautiful,
+nice gift I've got for you."
+
+"You've cut off your hair?" asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not
+arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.
+
+"Cut it off and sold it," said Della. "Don't you like me just as well,
+anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?"
+
+Jim looked about the room curiously.
+
+"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with an air almost of idiocy.
+
+"You needn't look for it," said Della. "It's sold, I tell you--sold and
+gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you.
+Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with a sudden
+serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I
+put the chops on, Jim?"
+
+Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to awake. He enfolded his Della.
+For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some
+inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a
+million a year--what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would
+give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was
+not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.
+
+Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.
+
+"Don't make any mistake, Dell," he said, "about me. I don't think
+there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that
+could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package
+you may see why you had me going a while at first."
+
+White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an
+ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to
+hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of
+all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
+
+For there lay The combs--the set of combs, side and back, that Della had
+worshipped for long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise
+shell, with jewelled rims--just the shade to wear in the beautiful
+vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had
+simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of
+possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have
+adorned the coveted adornments were gone.
+
+But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up
+with dim eyes and a smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Jim!"
+
+And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, "Oh, oh!"
+
+Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him
+eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with
+reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.
+
+"Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have
+to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I
+want to see how it looks on it."
+
+Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands
+under the back of his head and smiled.
+
+"Dell," said he, "let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em a
+while. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get
+the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on."
+
+The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men--who brought
+gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving
+Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones,
+possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And
+here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two
+foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other
+the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of
+these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the
+wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest.
+Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
+
+
+
+
+O. HENRY
+
+
+He came to New York in 1902 almost unknown. At his death eight years
+later he was the best known writer of short stories in America. His life
+was as full of ups and downs, and of strange turns of fortune, as one of
+his own stories. William Sidney Porter, who always signed his stories as
+O. Henry, was born in Greenboro, North Carolina, September 11, 1862. His
+mother died when he was but three years old; and an aunt, Miss Evelina
+Porter, cared for him and gave him nearly all his education. Books, too,
+were his teachers. He says that between his thirteenth and nineteenth
+years he did more reading than in all the years since. His favorite
+books were _The Arabian Nights_, in Lane's translation, and Burton's
+_Anatomy of Melancholy_, an old English book in which bits of science,
+superstition and reflections upon life were strangely mingled. Other
+books that he enjoyed were the works of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray,
+Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. He early showed ability as a
+cartoonist, and was noted among his friends as a good story teller.
+After school days he became a clerk in his uncle's drug store, and here
+acquired that knowledge which he used to such good effect in stories
+like "Makes the Whole World Kin" and "The Love Philtre of Ikey
+Schoenstein."
+
+His health was not robust, and confinement in a drug store did not
+improve it. A friend who was going to Texas invited him to go along, and
+from 1882 to 1884 he lived on a ranch, acting as cowboy, and at odd
+moments studying French, German and Spanish. Then he went to Austin,
+where at various times he was clerk, editor, bookkeeper, draftsman, bank
+teller, actor and cartoonist. In 1887 he married Miss Athol Roach. He
+began contributing short stories and humorous sketches to newspapers,
+and finally purchased a paper of his own, which he called _Rolling
+Stones_, a humorous weekly. After a year the paper failed, and the
+editor went to Houston to become a reporter on the _Daily Post_. A year
+later, it was discovered that there were serious irregularities in the
+bank in which he had worked in Austin. Several arrests were made, and O.
+Henry was called to stand trial with others. He had not been guilty of
+wrong doing, but the affairs of the bank had been so loosely managed
+that he was afraid that he would be convicted, so he fled to Central
+America. After a year there, he heard that his wife's health was
+failing, and returned to Austin to give himself up. He was found guilty,
+and sentenced to five years in the Ohio penitentiary. His wife died
+before the trial. His time in prison was shortened by good behavior to a
+little more than three years, ending in 1901. He wrote a number of
+stories during this time, sending them to friends who in turn mailed
+them to publishers. The editor of _Ainslie's Magazine_ had printed
+several of them and in 1902 he wrote to O. Henry urging him to come to
+New York, and offering him a hundred dollars apiece for a dozen stories.
+He came, and from that time made New York his home, becoming very fond
+of Little Old-Bagdad-on-the-Subway as he called it.
+
+He had found the work which he wished to do, and he turned out stories
+very rapidly. These were first published in newspapers and magazines,
+then collected in book form. The first of these volumes, _Cabbages and
+Kings_, had Central America as its setting. He said that while there he
+had knocked around chiefly with refugees and consuls. _The Four Million_
+was a group of stories of New York; it contained some of his best tales,
+such as "The Gift of the Magi," and "An Unfinished Story." _The Trimmed
+Lamp_ and _The Voice of the City_ also dealt with New York. _The Gentle
+Grafter_ was a collection of stories about confidence men and "crooks."
+The material for these narratives he had gathered from his companions in
+his prison days. _Heart of the West_ reflects his days on a Texas
+ranch. Other books, more or less miscellaneous in their locality, are
+_Roads of Destiny_, _Options_, _Strictly Business_, _Whirligigs_; and
+_Sixes and Sevens_. He died in New York, June 5, 1910. After his death a
+volume containing some of his earliest work was published under the
+title _Rolling Stones_.
+
+His choice of subjects is thus indicated in the preface to _The Four
+Million_:
+
+"Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only
+'Four Hundred' people in New York who were really worth noticing. But a
+wiser man has arisen--the census taker--and his larger estimate of human
+interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little
+stories of the 'Four Million.'"
+
+It was the common man,--the clerk, the bartender, the policeman, the
+waiter, the tramp, that O. Henry chose for his characters. He loved to
+talk to chance acquaintances on park benches or in cheap lodging houses,
+to see life from their point of view. His stories are often of the
+picaresque type; a name given to a kind of story in which the hero is an
+adventurer, sometimes a rogue. He sees the common humanity, and the
+redeeming traits even in these. His plots usually have a turn of
+surprise at the end; sometimes the very last sentence suddenly
+illuminates the whole story. His style is quick, nervous, often slangy;
+he is wonderfully dextrous in hitting just the right word or phrase. His
+descriptions are notable for telling much in a few words. He has almost
+established a definite type of short story writing, and in many of the
+stories now written one may clearly see the influence of O. Henry.
+
+
+
+
+IN POLITICS
+
+_Politics is democracy in action. If we believe in democracy, we must
+recognize in politics the instrument, however imperfect, through which
+democracy works. Brand Whitlock knew politics, first as a political
+reporter, then as candidate for mayor in four campaigns, in each of
+which he was successful. Under his administration the city of Toledo
+became a better place to live in. In_ THE GOLD BRICK _he describes a
+municipal campaign, as seen from the point of view of the newspaper
+office._
+
+
+
+
+THE GOLD BRICK
+
+BY
+
+BRAND WHITLOCK
+
+
+Ten thousand dollars a year! Neil Kittrell left the office of the
+_Morning Telegraph_ in a daze. He was insensible of the raw February
+air, heedless of sloppy pavements, the gray day had suddenly turned
+gold. He could not realize it all at once; ten thousand a year--for him
+and Edith! His heart swelled with love of Edith, she had sacrificed so
+much to become the wife of a man who had tried to make an artist of
+himself, and of whom fate, or economic determinism, or something, had
+made a cartoonist. What a surprise for her! He must hurry home.
+
+In this swelling of his heart he felt a love not only of Edith but of
+the whole world. The people he met seemed dear to him; he felt friendly
+with every one, and beamed on perfect strangers with broad, cheerful
+smiles. He stopped to buy some flowers for Edith--daffodils, or tulips,
+which promised spring, and he took the daffodils, because the girl said:
+
+"I think yellow is such a spirituelle color, don't you?" and inclined
+her head in a most artistic manner.
+
+But daffodils, after all, which would have been much the day before,
+seemed insufficient in the light of new prosperity, and Kittrell bought
+a large azalea, beautiful in its graceful spread of pink blooms.
+
+"Where shall I send it?" asked the girl, whose cheeks were as pink as
+azaleas themselves.
+
+"I think I'll call a cab and take it to her myself," said Kittrell.
+
+And she sighed over the romance of this rich young gentleman and the
+girl of the azalea, who, no doubt, was as beautiful as the young woman
+who was playing _Lottie, the Poor Saleslady_ at the Lyceum that very
+week.
+
+Kittrell and the azalea bowled along Claybourne Avenue; he leaned back
+on the cushions, and adopted the expression of ennui appropriate to that
+thoroughfare. Would Edith now prefer Claybourne Avenue? With ten
+thousand a year they could, perhaps--and yet, at first it would be best
+not to put on airs, but to go right on as they were, in the flat. Then
+the thought came to him that now, as the cartoonist on the _Telegraph_,
+his name would become as well known in Claybourne Avenue as it had been
+in the homes of the poor and humble during his years on the _Post_. And
+his thoughts flew to those homes where tired men at evening looked for
+his cartoons and children laughed at his funny pictures. It gave him a
+pang; he had felt a subtle bond between himself and all those thousands
+who read the _Post_. It was hard to leave them. The _Post_ might be
+yellow, but as the girl had said, yellow was a spiritual color, and the
+_Post_ brought something into their lives--lives that were scorned by
+the _Telegraph_ and by these people on the avenue. Could he make new
+friends here where the cartoons he drew and the _Post_ that printed them
+had been contemned, if not despised? His mind flew back to the dingy
+office of the _Post_; to the boys there, the whole good-natured,
+happy-go-lucky gang; and to Hardy--ah, Hardy!--who had been so good to
+him, and given him his big chance, had taken such pains and interest,
+helping him with ideas and suggestions, criticism and sympathy. To tell
+Hardy that he was going to leave him, here on the eve of the
+campaign--and Clayton, the mayor, he would have to tell him, too--oh,
+the devil! Why must he think of these things now?
+
+After all, when he had reached home, and had run up-stairs with the news
+and the azalea, Edith did not seem delighted.
+
+"But, dearie, business is business," he urged, "and we need the money!"
+
+"Yes, I know; doubtless you're right. Only please don't say 'business
+is business;' it isn't like you, and--"
+
+"But think what it will mean--ten thousand a year!"
+
+"Oh, Neil, I've lived on ten thousand a year before, and I never had
+half the fun that I had when we were getting along on twelve hundred."
+
+"Yes, but then we were always dreaming of the day when I'd make a lot;
+we lived on that hope, didn't we?"
+
+Edith laughed. "You used to say we lived on love."
+
+"You're not serious." He turned to gaze moodily out of the window. And
+then she left the azalea, and perched on the flat arm of his chair.
+
+"Dearest," she said, "I am serious. I know all this means to you. We're
+human, and we don't like to 'chip at crusts like Hindus,' even for the
+sake of youth and art. I never had illusions about love in a cottage and
+all that. Only, dear, I have been happy, so very happy, with you,
+because--well, because I was living in an atmosphere of honest purpose,
+honest ambition, and honest desire to do some good thing in the world. I
+had never known such an atmosphere before. At home, you know, father and
+Uncle James and the boys--well, it was all money, money, money with
+them, and they couldn't understand why I--"
+
+"Could marry a poor newspaper artist? That's just the point."
+
+She put her hand to his lips.
+
+"Now, dear! If they couldn't understand, so much the worse for them. If
+they thought it meant sacrifice to me, they were mistaken. I have been
+happy in this little flat; only--" she leaned back and inclined her head
+with her eyes asquint--"only the paper in this room is atrocious; it's a
+typical landlord's selection--McGaw picked it out. You see what it means
+to be merely rich."
+
+She was so pretty thus that he kissed her, and then she went on:
+
+"And so, dear, if I didn't seem to be as impressed and delighted as you
+hoped to find me, it is because I was thinking of Mr. Hardy and the
+poor, dear common little _Post_, and then--of Mr. Clayton. Did you think
+of him?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You'll have to--to cartoon him?"
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+The fact he had not allowed himself to face was close to both of them,
+and the subject was dropped until, just as he was going down-town--this
+time to break the news to Hardy--he went into the room he sarcastically
+said he might begin to call his studio, now that he was getting ten
+thousand a year, to look for a sketch he had promised Nolan for the
+sporting page. And there on his drawing-board was an unfinished cartoon,
+a drawing of the strong face of John Clayton. He had begun it a few days
+before to use on the occasion of Clayton's renomination. It had been a
+labor of love, and Kittrell suddenly realized how good it was. He had
+put into it all of his belief in Clayton, all of his devotion to the
+cause for which Clayton toiled and sacrificed, and in the simple lines
+he experienced the artist's ineffable felicity; he had shown how good,
+how noble, how true a man Clayton was. All at once he realized the
+sensation the cartoon would produce, how it would delight and hearten
+Clayton's followers, how it would please Hardy, and how it would touch
+Clayton. It would be a tribute to the man and the friendship, but now a
+tribute broken, unfinished. Kittrell gazed a moment longer, and in that
+moment Edith came.
+
+"The dear, beautiful soul!" she exclaimed softly. "Neil, it is
+wonderful. It is not a cartoon; it is a portrait. It shows what you
+might do with a brush."
+
+Kittrell could not speak, and he turned the drawing-board to the wall.
+
+When he had gone, Edith sat and thought--of Neil, of the new position,
+of Clayton. He had loved Neil, and been so proud of his work; he had
+shown a frank, naive pleasure in the cartoons Neil had made of him. That
+last time he was there, thought Edith, he had said that without Neil the
+"good old cause," as he called it, using Whitman's phrase, could never
+have triumphed in that town. And now, would he come again? Would he ever
+stand in that room and, with his big, hearty laugh, clasp an arm around
+Neil's shoulder, or speak of her in his good friendly way as "the little
+woman?" Would he come now, in the terrible days of the approaching
+campaign, for rest and sympathy--come as he used to come in other
+campaigns, worn and weary from all the brutal opposition, the
+vilification and abuse and mud-slinging? She closed her eyes. She could
+not think that far.
+
+Kittrell found the task of telling Hardy just as difficult as he
+expected it to be, but by some mercy it did not last long. Explanation
+had not been necessary; he had only to make the first hesitating
+approaches, and Hardy understood. Hardy was, in a way, hurt; Kittrell
+saw that, and rushed to his own defense:
+
+"I hate to go, old man. I don't like it a little bit--but, you know,
+business is business, and we need the money."
+
+He even tried to laugh as he advanced this last conclusive reason, and
+Hardy, for all he showed in voice or phrase, may have agreed with him.
+
+"It's all right, Kit," he said. "I'm sorry; I wish we could pay you
+more, but--well, good luck."
+
+That was all. Kittrell gathered up the few articles he had at the
+office, gave Nolan his sketch, bade the boys good-by--bade them good-by
+as if he were going on a long journey, never to see them more--and then
+he went.
+
+After he had made the break it did not seem so bad as he had
+anticipated. At first things went on smoothly enough. The campaign had
+not opened, and he was free to exercise his talents outside the
+political field. He drew cartoons dealing with banal subjects, touching
+with the gentle satire of his humorous pencil foibles which all the
+world agreed about, and let vital questions alone. And he and Edith
+enjoyed themselves: indulged oftener in things they loved; went more
+frequently to the theater; appeared at recitals; dined now and then
+downtown. They began to realize certain luxuries they had not known for
+a long time--some he himself had never known, some that Edith had not
+known since she left her father's home to become his bride. In more
+subtle ways, too, Kittrell felt the change: there was a sense of larger
+leisure; the future beamed with a broader and brighter light; he formed
+plans, among which the old dream of going ere long to Paris for serious
+study took its dignified place. And then there was the sensation his
+change had created in the newspaper world; that the cartoons signed
+"Kit," which formerly appeared in the _Post_, should now adorn the broad
+page of the _Telegraph_ was a thing to talk about at the press club; the
+fact of his large salary got abroad in that little world as well, and,
+after the way of that world, managed to exaggerate itself, as most facts
+did. He began to be sensible of attentions from men of prominence--small
+things, mere nods in the street, perhaps, or smiles in the theater
+foyer, but enough to show that they recognized him. What those children
+of the people, those working-men and women who used to be his unknown
+and admiring friends in the old days on the _Post_, thought of
+him--whether they missed him, whether they deplored his change as an
+apostasy or applauded it as a promotion--he did not know. He did not
+like to think about it.
+
+But March came, and the politicians began to bluster like the season.
+Late one afternoon he was on his way to the office with a cartoon, the
+first in which he had seriously to attack Clayton. Benson, the managing
+editor of the _Telegraph_, had conceived it, and Kittrell had worked on
+it that day in sickness of heart. Every line of this new presentation of
+Clayton had cut him like some biting acid; but he had worked on, trying
+to reassure himself with the argument that he was a mere agent, devoid
+of personal responsibility. But it had been hard, and when Edith, after
+her custom, had asked to see it, he had said:
+
+"Oh, you don't want to see it; it's no good."
+
+"Is it of--him?" she had asked.
+
+And when he nodded she had gone away without another word. Now, as he
+hurried through the crowded streets, he was conscious that it was no
+good indeed; and he was divided between the artist's regret and the
+friend's joy in the fact. But it made him tremble. Was his hand to
+forget its cunning? And then, suddenly, he heard a familiar voice, and
+there beside him, with his hand on his shoulder, stood the mayor.
+
+"Why, Neil, my boy, how are you?" he said, and he took Kittrell's hand
+as warmly as ever. For a moment Kittrell was relieved, and then his
+heart sank; for he had a quick realization that it was the coward within
+him that felt the relief, and the man the sickness. If Clayton had
+reproached him, or cut him, it would have made it easier; but Clayton
+did none of these things, and Kittrell was irresistibly drawn to the
+subject himself.
+
+"You heard of my--new job?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," said Clayton, "I heard."
+
+"Well--" Kittrell began.
+
+"I'm sorry," Clayton said.
+
+"So was I," Kittrell hastened to say. "But I felt it--well, a duty, some
+way--to Edith. You know--we--need the money." And he gave the cynical
+laugh that went with the argument.
+
+"What does _she_ think? Does she feel that way about it?"
+
+Kittrell laughed, not cynically now, but uneasily and with
+embarrassment, for Clayton's blue eyes were on him, those eyes that
+could look into men and understand them so.
+
+"Of course you know," Kittrell went on nervously, "there is nothing
+personal in this. We newspaper fellows simply do what we are told; we
+obey orders like soldiers, you know. With the policy of the paper we
+have nothing to do. Just like Dick Jennings, who was a red-hot
+free-trader and used to write free-trade editorials for the _Times_--he
+went over to the _Telegraph_, you remember, and writes all those
+protection arguments."
+
+The mayor did not seem to be interested in Dick Jennings, or in the
+ethics of his profession.
+
+"Of course, you know I'm for you, Mr. Clayton, just exactly as I've
+always been. I'm going to vote for you."
+
+This did not seem to interest the mayor, either.
+
+"And, maybe, you know--I thought, perhaps," he snatched at this bright
+new idea that had come to him just in the nick of time; "that I might
+help you by my cartoons in the _Telegraph_; that is, I might keep them
+from being as bad as they might--"
+
+"But that wouldn't be dealing fairly with your new employers, Neil," the
+mayor said.
+
+Kittrell was making more and more a mess of this whole miserable
+business, and he was basely glad when they reached the corner.
+
+"Well, good-by, my boy," said the mayor, as they parted. "Remember me to
+the little woman."
+
+Kittrell watched him as he went on down the avenue, swinging along in
+his free way, the broad felt hat he wore riding above all the other hats
+in the throng that filled the sidewalk; and Kittrell sighed in deep
+depression.
+
+When he turned in his cartoon, Benson scanned it a moment, cocked his
+head this side and that, puffed his briar pipe, and finally said:
+
+"I'm afraid this is hardly up to you. This figure of Clayton, here--it
+hasn't got the stuff in it. You want to show him as he _is_. We want the
+people to know what a four-flushing, hypocritical, demagogical
+blatherskite he is--with all his rot about the people and their damned
+rights!"
+
+Benson was all unconscious of the inconsistency of having concern for a
+people he so despised, and Kittrell did not observe it, either. He was
+on the point of defending Clayton, but he restrained himself and
+listened to Benson's suggestions. He remained at the office for two
+hours, trying to change the cartoon to Benson's satisfaction, with a
+growing hatred of the work and a disgust with himself that now and then
+almost drove him to mad destruction. He felt like splashing the piece
+with India ink, or ripping it with his knife. But he worked on, and
+submitted it again. He had failed, of course; failed to express in it
+that hatred of a class which Benson unconsciously disguised as a hatred
+of Clayton, a hatred which Kittrell could not express because he did not
+feel it; and he failed because art deserts her devotees when they are
+false to truth.
+
+"Well, it'll have to do," said Benson, as he looked it over; "but let's
+have a little more to the next one. Damn it! I wish I could draw. I'd
+cartoon the crook!"
+
+In default of which ability, Benson set himself to write one of those
+savage editorials in which he poured out on Clayton that venom of which
+he seemed to have such an inexhaustible supply.
+
+But on one point Benson was right: Kittrell was not up to himself. As
+the campaign opened, as the city was swept with the excitement of it,
+with meetings at noon-day and at night, office-seekers flying about in
+automobiles, walls covered with pictures of candidates, hand-bills
+scattered in the streets to swirl in the wild March winds, and men
+quarreling over whether Clayton or Ellsworth should be mayor, Kittrell
+had to draw a political cartoon each day; and as he struggled with his
+work, less and less the old joy came to cheer and spur him on. To read
+the ridicule, the abuse, which the _Telegraph_ heaped on Clayton, the
+distortion of facts concerning his candidature, the unfair reports of
+his meetings, sickened him, and more than all, he was filled with
+disgust as he tried to match in caricature these libels of the man he so
+loved and honored. It was bad enough to have to flatter Clayton's
+opponent, to picture him as a noble, disinterested character, ready to
+sacrifice himself for the public weal. Into his pictures of this man,
+attired in the long black coat of conventional respectability, with the
+smug face of pharisaism, he could get nothing but cant and hypocrisy;
+but in his caricatures of Clayton there was that which pained him
+worse--disloyalty, untruth, and now and then, to the discerning few who
+knew the tragedy of Kittrell's soul, there was pity. And thus his work
+declined in value; lacking all sincerity, all faith in itself or its
+purpose, it became false, uncertain, full of jarring notes, and, in
+short, never once rang true. As for Edith, she never discussed his work
+now; she spoke of the campaign little, and yet he knew she was deeply
+concerned, and she grew hot with resentment at the methods of the
+_Telegraph_. Her only consolation was derived from the _Post_, which of
+course, supported Clayton; and the final drop of bitterness in
+Kittrell's cup came one evening when he realized that she was following
+with sympathetic interest the cartoons in that paper.
+
+For the _Post_ had a new cartoonist, Banks, a boy whom Hardy had picked
+up somewhere and was training to the work Kittrell had laid down. To
+Kittrell there was a cruel fascination in the progress Banks was making;
+he watched it with a critical, professional eye, at first with
+amusement, then with surprise, and now at last, in the discovery of
+Edith's interest, with a keen jealousy of which he was ashamed. The boy
+was crude and untrained; his work was not to be compared with
+Kittrell's, master of line that he was, but Kittrell saw that it had the
+thing his work now lacked, the vital, primal thing--sincerity, belief,
+love. The spark was there, and Kittrell knew how Hardy would nurse that
+spark and fan it, and keep it alive and burning until it should
+eventually blaze up in a fine white flame. And Kittrell realized, as the
+days went by, that Banks' work was telling, and that his own was
+failing. He had, from the first missed the atmosphere of the _Post_,
+missed the _camaraderie_ of the congenial spirits there, animated by a
+common purpose, inspired and led by Hardy, whom they all loved--loved as
+he himself once loved him, loved as he loved him still--and dared not
+look him in the face when they met!
+
+He found the atmosphere of the _Telegraph_ alien and distasteful. There
+all was different; the men had little joy in their work, little interest
+in it, save perhaps the newspaper man's inborn love of a good story or a
+beat. They were all cynical, without loyalty or faith; they secretly
+made fun of the _Telegraph_, of its editors and owners; they had no
+belief in its cause; and its pretensions to respectability, its parade
+of virtue, excited only their derision. And slowly it began to dawn on
+Kittrell that the great moral law worked always and everywhere, even on
+newspapers, and that there was reflected inevitably and logically in the
+work of the men on that staff the hatred, the lack of principle, the
+bigotry and intolerance of its proprietors; and this same lack of
+principle tainted and made meretricious his own work, and enervated the
+editorials so that the _Telegraph_, no matter how carefully edited or
+how dignified in typographical appearance, was, nevertheless, without
+real influence in the community.
+
+Meanwhile Clayton was gaining ground. It was less than two weeks before
+election. The campaign waxed more and more bitter, and as the forces
+opposed to him foresaw defeat, they became ugly in spirit, and
+desperate. The _Telegraph_ took on a tone more menacing and brutal, and
+Kittrell knew that the crisis had come. The might of the powers massed
+against Clayton appalled Kittrell; they thundered at him through many
+brazen mouths, but Clayton held on his high way unperturbed. He was
+speaking by day and night to thousands. Such meetings he had never had
+before. Kittrell had visions of him before those immense audiences in
+halls, in tents, in the raw open air of that rude March weather, making
+his appeals to the heart of the great mass. A fine, splendid, romantic
+figure he was, striking to the imagination, this champion of the
+people's cause, and Kittrell longed for the lost chance. Oh, for one day
+on the _Post_ now!
+
+One morning at breakfast, as Edith read the _Telegraph_, Kittrell saw
+the tears well slowly in her brown eyes.
+
+"Oh," she said, "it is shameful!" She clenched her little fists. "Oh, if
+I were only a man I'd--" She could not in her impotent feminine rage say
+what she would do; she could only grind her teeth. Kittrell bent his
+head over his plate; his coffee choked him.
+
+"Dearest," she said presently, in another tone, "tell me, how is he? Do
+you--ever see him? Will he win?"
+
+"No, I never see him. But he'll win; I wouldn't worry."
+
+"He used to come here," she went on, "to rest a moment, to escape from
+all this hateful confusion and strife. He is killing himself! And they
+aren't worth it--those ignorant people--they aren't worth such
+sacrifices."
+
+He got up from the table and turned away, and then realizing quickly,
+she flew to his side and put her arms about his neck and said:
+
+"Forgive me, dearest, I didn't mean--only--"
+
+"Oh, Edith," he said, "this is killing me. I feel like a dog."
+
+"Don't dear; he is big enough, and good enough; he will understand."
+
+"Yes; that only makes it harder, only makes it hurt the more."
+
+That afternoon, in the car, he heard no talk but of the election; and
+down-town, in a cigar store where he stopped for cigarettes, he heard
+some men talking mysteriously, in the hollow voice of rumor, of some
+sensation, some scandal. It alarmed him, and as he went into the office
+he met Manning, the _Telegraph_'s political man.
+
+"Tell me, Manning," Kittrell said, "how does it look?"
+
+"Damn bad for us."
+
+"For us?"
+
+"Well, for our mob of burglars and second story workers here--the gang
+we represent." He took a cigarette from the box Kittrell was opening.
+
+"And will he win?"
+
+"Will he win?" said Manning, exhaling the words on the thin level stream
+of smoke that came from his lungs. "Will he win? In a walk, I tell you.
+He's got 'em beat to a standstill right now. That's the dope."
+
+"But what about this story of--"
+
+"Aw, that's all a pipe-dream of Burns'. I'm running it in the morning,
+but it's nothing; it's a shine. They're big fools to print it at all.
+But it's their last card; they're desperate. They won't stop at
+anything, or at any crime, except those requiring courage. Burns is in
+there with Benson now; so is Salton, and old man Glenn, and the rest of
+the bunco family. They're framing it up. When I saw old Glenn go in,
+with his white side-whiskers, I knew the widow and the orphan were in
+danger again, and that he was going bravely to the front for 'em. Say,
+that young Banks is comin', isn't he? That's a peach, that cartoon of
+his to-night."
+
+Kittrell went on down the hall to the art-room to wait until Benson
+should be free. But it was not long until he was sent for, and as he
+entered the managing editor's room he was instantly sensible of the
+somber atmosphere of a grave and solemn council of war. Benson
+introduced him to Glenn, the banker, to Salton, the party boss, and to
+Burns, the president of the street-car company; and as Kittrell sat down
+he looked about him, and could scarcely repress a smile as he recalled
+Manning's estimate of Glenn. The old man sat there, as solemn and
+unctuous as ever he had in his pew at church. Benson, red of face, was
+more plainly perturbed, but Salton was as reserved, as immobile, as
+inscrutable as ever, his narrow, pointed face, with its vulpine
+expression, being perhaps paler than usual. Benson had on his desk
+before him the cartoon Kittrell had finished that day.
+
+"Mr. Kittrell," Benson began, "we've been talking over the political
+situation, and I was showing these gentlemen this cartoon. It isn't, I
+fear, in your best style; it lacks the force, the argument, we'd like
+just at this time. That isn't the _Telegraph_ Clayton, Mr. Kittrell." He
+pointed with the amber stem of his pipe. "Not at all. Clayton is a
+strong, smart, unscrupulous, dangerous man! We've reached a crisis in
+this campaign; if we can't turn things in the next three days, we're
+lost, that's all; we might as well face it. To-morrow we make an
+important revelation concerning the character of Clayton, and we want to
+follow it up the morning after by a cartoon that will be a stunner, a
+clencher. We have discussed it here among ourselves, and this is our
+idea."
+
+Benson drew a crude, bald outline, indicating the cartoon they wished
+Kittrell to draw. The idea was so coarse, so brutal, so revolting, that
+Kittrell stood aghast, and, as he stood, he was aware of Salton's little
+eyes fixed on him. Benson waited; they all waited.
+
+"Well," said Benson, "what do you think of it?"
+
+Kittrell paused an instant, and then said:
+
+"I won't draw it; that's what I think of it."
+
+Benson flushed angrily and looked up at him.
+
+"We are paying you a very large salary, Mr. Kittrell, and your work, if
+you will pardon me, has not been up to what we were led to expect."
+
+"You are quite right, Mr. Benson, but I can't draw that cartoon."
+
+"Well, great God!" yelled Burns, "what have we got here--a gold brick?"
+He rose with a vivid sneer on his red face, plunged his hands in his
+pockets, and took two or three nervous strides across the room. Kittrell
+looked at him, and slowly his eyes blazed out of a face that had gone
+white on the instant.
+
+"What did you say, sir?" he demanded.
+
+Burns thrust his red face, with its prognathic jaw, menacingly toward
+Kittrell.
+
+"I said that in you we'd got a gold brick."
+
+"You?" said Kittrell. "What have you to do with it? I don't work for
+you."
+
+"You don't? Well, I guess it's us that puts up--"
+
+"Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" said Glenn, waving a white, pacificatory hand.
+
+"Yes, let me deal with this, if you please," said Benson, looking hard
+at Burns. The street-car man sneered again, then, in ostentatious
+contempt, looked out the window. And in the stillness Benson continued:
+
+"Mr. Kittrell, think a minute. Is your decision final?"
+
+"It is final, Mr. Benson," said Kittrell. "And as for you, Burns," he
+glared angrily at the man, "I wouldn't draw that cartoon for all the
+dirty money that all the bribing street-car companies in the world could
+put into Mr. Glenn's bank here. Good evening, gentlemen."
+
+It was not until he stood again in his own home that Kittrell felt the
+physical effects which the spiritual squalor of such a scene was certain
+to produce in a nature like his.
+
+"Neil! What is the matter?" Edith fluttered toward him in alarm.
+
+He sank into a chair, and for a moment he looked as if he would faint,
+but he looked wanly up at her and said:
+
+"Nothing; I'm all right; just a little weak. I've gone through a
+sickening, horrible scene--"
+
+"Dearest!"
+
+"And I'm off the _Telegraph_--and a man once more!"
+
+He bent over, with his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and
+when Edith put her calm, caressing hand on his brow, she found that it
+was moist from nervousness. Presently he was able to tell her the whole
+story.
+
+"It was, after all, Edith, a fitting conclusion to my experience on the
+_Telegraph_. I suppose, though, that to people who are used to ten
+thousand a year such scenes are nothing at all." She saw in this trace
+of his old humor that he was himself again, and she hugged his head to
+her bosom.
+
+"Oh, dearest," she said, "I'm proud of you--and happy again."
+
+They were, indeed, both happy, happier than they had been in weeks.
+
+The next morning after breakfast, she saw by his manner, by the
+humorous, almost comical expression about his eyes, that he had an idea.
+In this mood of satisfaction--this mood that comes too seldom in the
+artist's life--she knew it was wise to let him alone. And he lighted his
+pipe and went to work. She heard him now and then, singing or whistling
+or humming; she scented his pipe, then cigarettes; then, at last, after
+two hours, he called in a loud, triumphant tone:
+
+"Oh, Edith!"
+
+She was at the door in an instant, and, waving his hand grandly at his
+drawing-board, he turned to her with that expression which connotes the
+greatest joy gods or mortals can know--the joy of beholding one's own
+work and finding it good. He had, as she saw, returned to the cartoon of
+Clayton he had laid aside when the tempter came; and now it was
+finished. Its simple lines revealed Clayton's character, as the
+sufficient answer to all the charges the _Telegraph_ might make against
+him. Edith leaned against the door and looked long and critically.
+
+"It was fine before," she said presently; "it's better now. Before it
+was a portrait of the man; this shows his soul."
+
+"Well, it's how he looks to me," said Neil, "after a month in which to
+appreciate him."
+
+"But what," she said, stooping and peering at the edge of the drawing,
+where, despite much knife-scraping, vague figures appeared, "what's
+that?"
+
+"Oh, I'm ashamed to tell you," he said. "I'll have to paste over that
+before it's electrotyped. You see, I had a notion of putting in the
+gang, and I drew four little figures--Benson, Burns, Salton and Glenn;
+they were plotting--oh, it was foolish and unworthy. I decided I didn't
+want anything of hatred in it--just as he wouldn't want anything of
+hatred in it; so I rubbed them out."
+
+"Well, I'm glad. It is beautiful; it makes up for everything; it's an
+appreciation--worthy of the man."
+
+When Kittrell entered the office of the _Post_, the boys greeted him
+with delight, and his presence made a sensation, for there had been
+rumors of the break which the absence of a "Kit" cartoon in the
+_Telegraph_ that morning had confirmed. But, if Hardy was surprised, his
+surprise was swallowed up in his joy, and Kittrell was grateful to him
+for the delicacy with which he touched the subject that consumed the
+newspaper and political world with curiosity.
+
+"I'm glad, Kit," was all that he said. "You know that."
+
+Then he forgot everything in the cartoon, and he showed his instant
+recognition of its significance by snatching out his watch, pushing a
+button, and saying to Garland, who came to the door in his shirtsleeves:
+
+"Tell Nic to hold the first edition for a five-column first-page
+cartoon. And send this up right away."
+
+They had a last look at it before it went, and after gazing a moment in
+silence Hardy said:
+
+"It's the greatest thing you ever did, Kit, and it comes at the
+psychological moment. It'll elect him."
+
+"Oh, he was elected anyhow."
+
+Hardy shook his head, and in the movement Kittrell saw how the strain of
+the campaign had told on him. "No, he wasn't; the way they've been
+hammering him is something fierce; and the _Telegraph_--well, your
+cartoons and all, you know."
+
+"But my cartoons in the _Telegraph_ were rotten. Any work that's not
+sincere, not intellectually honest----"
+
+Hardy interrupted him:
+
+"Yes; but, Kit, you're so good that your rotten is better than 'most
+anybody's best." He smiled, and Kittrell blushed and looked away.
+
+Hardy was right. The "Kit" cartoon, back in the _Post_, created its
+sensation, and after it appeared the political reporters said it had
+started a landslide to Clayton; that the betting was 4 to 1 and no
+takers, and that it was all over but the shouting.
+
+That night, as they were at dinner, the telephone rang, and in a minute
+Neil knew by Edith's excited and delighted reiteration of "yes," "yes,"
+who had called up. And he then heard her say:
+
+"Indeed I will; I'll come every night and sit in the front seat."
+
+When Kittrell displaced Edith at the telephone, he heard the voice of
+John Clayton, lower in register and somewhat husky after four weeks'
+speaking, but more musical than ever in Kittrell's ears when it said:
+
+"I just told the little woman, Neil, that I didn't know how to say it,
+so I wanted her to thank you for me. It was beautiful in you, and I wish
+I were worthy of it; it was simply your own good soul expressing
+itself."
+
+And it was the last delight to Kittrell to hear that voice and to know
+that all was well.
+
+But one question remained unsettled. Kittrell had been on the
+_Telegraph_ a month, and his contract differed from that ordinarily made
+by the members of a newspaper staff in that he was paid by the year,
+though in monthly instalments. Kittrell knew that he had broken his
+contract on grounds which the sordid law would not see or recognize and
+the average court think absurd, and that the _Telegraph_ might legally
+refuse to pay him at all. He hoped the _Telegraph_ would do this! But it
+did not; on the contrary, he received the next day a check for his
+month's work. He held it up for Edith's inspection.
+
+"Of course, I'll have to send it back," he said.
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"Do you think me quixotic?"
+
+"Well, we're poor enough as it is--let's have some luxuries; let's be
+quixotic until after election, at least."
+
+"Sure," said Neil; "just what I was thinking. I'm going to do a cartoon
+every day for the _Post_ until election day, and I'm not going to take a
+cent. I don't want to crowd Banks out, you know, and I want to do my
+part for Clayton and the cause, and do it, just once, for the pure love
+of the thing."
+
+Those last days of the campaign were, indeed, luxuries to Kittrell and
+to Edith, days of work and fun and excitement. All day Kittrell worked
+on his cartoons, and in the evening they went to Clayton's meetings. The
+experience was a revelation to them both--the crowds, the waiting for
+the singing of the automobile's siren, the wild cheers that greeted
+Clayton, and then his speech, his appeals to the best there was in men.
+He had never made such speeches, and long afterward Edith could hear
+those cheers and see the faces of those working-men aglow with the hope,
+the passion, the fervent religion of democracy. And those days came to
+their glad climax that night when they met at the office of the _Post_
+to receive the returns, in an atmosphere quivering with excitement, with
+messenger boys and reporters coming and going, and in the street outside
+an immense crowd, swaying and rocking between the walls on either side,
+with screams and shouts and mad huzzas, and the wild blowing of
+horns--all the hideous, happy noise an American election-night crowd can
+make.
+
+Late in the evening Clayton had made his way, somehow unnoticed, through
+the crowd, and entered the office. He was happy in the great triumph he
+would not accept as personal, claiming it always for the cause; but as
+he dropped into the chair Hardy pushed toward him, they all saw how
+weary he was.
+
+Just at that moment the roar in the street below swelled to a mighty
+crescendo, and Hardy cried:
+
+"Look!"
+
+They ran to the window. The boys up-stairs who were manipulating the
+stereopticon, had thrown on the screen an enormous picture of Clayton,
+the portrait Kittrell had drawn for his cartoon.
+
+"Will you say now there isn't the personal note in it?" Edith asked.
+
+Clayton glanced out the window, across the dark, surging street, at the
+picture.
+
+"Oh, it's not me they're cheering for," he said; "it's for Kit, here."
+
+"Well, perhaps some of it's for him," Edith admitted loyally.
+
+They were silent, seized irresistibly by the emotion that mastered the
+mighty crowd in the dark streets below. Edith was strangely moved.
+Presently she could speak:
+
+"Is there anything sweeter in life than to know that you have done a
+good thing--and done it well?"
+
+"Yes," said Clayton, "just one: to have a few friends who understand."
+
+"You are right," said Edith. "It is so with art, and it must be so with
+life; it makes an art of life."
+
+It was dark enough there by the window for her to slip her hand into
+that of Neil, who had been musing silently on the crowd.
+
+"I can never say again," she said softly, "that those people are not
+worth sacrifice. They are worth all; they are everything; they are the
+hope of the world; and their longings and their needs, and the
+possibility of bringing them to pass, are all that give significance to
+life."
+
+"That's what America is for," said Clayton, "and it's worth while to be
+allowed to help even in a little way to make, as old Walt says, 'a
+nation of friends, of equals.'"
+
+
+
+
+BRAND WHITLOCK
+
+
+Brand Whitlock, lawyer, politician, author and ambassador, was born in
+Urbana, Ohio, March 4, 1869. His father, Rev. Elias D. Whitlock, was a
+minister of power and a man of strong convictions. Brand was educated
+partly in the public schools, partly by private teaching. He never went
+to college, but this did not mean that his education stopped; he kept on
+studying, and to such good purpose that in 1916 Brown University gave
+him the degree of Doctor of Laws. Like many other writers, he received
+his early training in newspaper work. At eighteen he became a reporter
+on a Toledo paper, and three years later was reporter and political
+correspondent for the Chicago _Herald_. While in Chicago he was a member
+of the old Whitechapel Club, a group of newspaper men which included F.
+P. Dunne, the creator of _Mr. Dooley_; Alfred Henry Lewis, author of
+_Wolfville_; and George Ade, whose _Fables in Slang_ were widely popular
+a few years ago.
+
+He was strongly drawn to the law, and in 1893 went to Springfield,
+Illinois, and entered a law office as a student. He was admitted to the
+bar, and shortly after went to Toledo, Ohio, to practice. In eight years
+he had established himself as a successful lawyer, and something more.
+He was recognized as a man of high executive ability, and as being
+absolutely "square." Such men are none too common, and Toledo decided
+that it needed him in the mayor's chair. Without a political machine,
+without a platform, and without a party, he was elected mayor in 1905,
+reelected in 1907, again in 1909, again in 1911--and could probably have
+had the office for life if he had been willing to accept it. In the
+meantime he had written several successful novels; he wanted more time
+for writing, and when in 1913 he was offered the post of United States
+Minister to Belgium, he accepted, thinking that he would find in this
+position an opportunity to observe life from a new angle, and leisure
+for literary work. In August 1914 he was on his vacation, and had begun
+work on a new novel. In his own words:
+
+
+     I had the manuscript of my novel before me.... It was somehow just
+     beginning to take form, beginning to show some signs of life; at
+     times some characters in it gave evidence of being human and alive;
+     they were beginning to act now and then spontaneously, beginning to
+     say and to do things after the manner of human beings; the long
+     vista before me, the months of laborious drudging toil and pain,
+     the long agony of effort necessary to write any book, even a poor
+     one, was beginning to appear less weary, less futile; there was the
+     first faint glow of the joy of creative effort.
+
+
+and then suddenly the telephone bell rang, and announced that the
+Archduke of Austria had been assassinated at Sarajevo.
+
+The rest of the story belongs to history. How he went back to Brussels;
+how when the city seemed doomed, and all the government officials left,
+he stayed on; how when the city was preparing to resist by force, he
+went to Burgomaster Max and convinced him that it was useless, and so
+saved the city from the fate of Louvain; how he took charge of the
+relief work, how the King of Belgium thanked him for his services to the
+country; how the city of Brussels in gratitude gave him a picture by Van
+Dyck, a priceless thing, which he accepted--not for himself but for his
+home city of Toledo; how after the war, he went back, not as Minister
+but as Ambassador,--all these are among the proud memories of America's
+part in the World War.
+
+Brand Whitlock is so much more than an author that it is with an effort
+that we turn to consider his literary work. His first book, _The
+Thirteenth District_, published in 1902, was a novel of American
+politics; it contains a capital description of a convention, and shows
+the strategy of political leaders as seen by a keen observer. In _Her
+Infinite Variety_ he dealt with the suffrage movement as it was in
+1904, with determined women seeking the ballot, and equally determined
+women working just as hard to keep it away from them. _The Happy
+Average_ was a story of an every-day American couple: they were not
+rich, nor famous, nor divorced,--yet the author thinks their story is
+typical of most American lives. _The Turn of the Balance_ is a novel
+that grew out of his legal experiences: it deals with the underworld of
+crime, and often in a depressing way. It reflects the author's belief
+that the present organization of society, and our methods of
+administering justice, are the cause of much of the misery in the world.
+Following these novels came two volumes of short stories, _The Gold
+Brick_ and _The Fall Guy_: both deal with various aspects of American
+life of to-day. In 1914 he published an autobiography under the title
+_Forty Years of It_. This is interesting as a picture of political life
+of the period in Ohio. His latest book, _Memories of Belgium under the
+German Occupation_, tells the story of four eventful years. In all that
+trying time, each night, no matter how weary he was, he forced himself
+to set down the events of the day. From these records he wrote a book
+that by virtue of its first-hand information and its literary art ranks
+among the most important of the books called forth by the Great War.
+
+
+
+
+THE TRAVELING SALESMAN
+
+_The traveling salesman is a characteristic American type. We laugh at
+his stories, or we criticise him for his "nerve," but we do not always
+make allowance for the fact that his life is not an easy one, and that
+his occupation develops "nerve" just as an athlete's work develops
+muscle. The best presentation of the traveling salesman in fiction is
+found in the stories of Edna Ferber. And the fact that her "salesman" is
+a woman only adds to the interest of the stories. When ex-President
+Roosevelt read Miss Ferber's book, he wrote her an enthusiastic letter
+telling her how much he admired Emma McChesney. We meet her in the first
+words of this story_.
+
+
+
+
+HIS MOTHER'S SON
+
+BY
+
+EDNA FERBER
+
+
+"Full?" repeated Emma McChesney (and if it weren't for the compositor
+there'd be an exclamation point after that question mark).
+
+"Sorry, Mrs. McChesney," said the clerk, and he actually looked it, "but
+there's absolutely nothing stirring. We're full up. The Benevolent
+Brotherhood of Bisons is holding its regular annual state convention
+here. We're putting up cots in the hall."
+
+Emma McChesney's keen blue eyes glanced up from their inspection of the
+little bunch of mail which had just been handed her. "Well, pick out a
+hall with a southern exposure and set up a cot or so for me," she said,
+agreeably, "because I've come to stay. After selling Featherloom
+Petticoats on the road for ten years I don't see myself trailing up and
+down this town looking for a place to lay my head. I've learned this one
+large, immovable truth, and that is, that a hotel clerk is a hotel
+clerk. It makes no difference whether he is stuck back of a marble
+pillar and hidden by a gold vase full of thirty-six-inch American Beauty
+roses at the Knickerbocker, or setting the late fall fashions for men in
+Galesburg, Illinois."
+
+By one small degree was the perfect poise of the peerless personage
+behind the register jarred. But by only one. He was a hotel night clerk.
+
+"It won't do you any good to get sore, Mrs. McChesney," he began,
+suavely. "Now a man would----"
+
+"But I'm not a man," interrupted Emma McChesney. "I'm only doing a
+man's work and earning a man's salary and demanding to be treated with
+as much consideration as you'd show a man."
+
+The personage busied himself mightily with a pen, and a blotter, and
+sundry papers, as is the manner of personages when annoyed. "I'd like to
+accommodate you; I'd like to do it."
+
+"Cheer up," said Emma McChesney, "you're going to. I don't mind a little
+discomfort. Though I want to mention in passing that if there are any
+lady Bisons present you needn't bank on doubling me up with them. I've
+had one experience of that kind. It was in Albia, Iowa. I'd sleep in the
+kitchen range before I'd go through another."
+
+Up went the erstwhile falling poise. "You're badly mistaken, madam. I'm
+a member of this order myself, and a finer lot of fellows it has never
+been my pleasure to know."
+
+"Yes, I know," drawled Emma McChesney. "Do you know, the thing that gets
+me is the inconsistency of it. Along come a lot of boobs who never use a
+hotel the year around except to loaf in the lobby, and wear out the
+leather chairs, and use up the matches and toothpicks and get the
+baseball returns, and immediately you turn away a traveling man who uses
+a three-dollar-a-day room, with a sample room downstairs for his stuff,
+who tips every porter and bell-boy in the place, asks for no favors, and
+who, if you give him a halfway decent cup of coffee for breakfast, will
+fall in love with the place and boom it all over the country. Half of
+your Benevolent Bisons are here on the European plan, with a view to
+patronizing the free-lunch counters or being asked to take dinner at the
+home of some local Bison whose wife has been cooking up on pies, and
+chicken salad and veal roast for the last week."
+
+Emma McChesney leaned over the desk a little, and lowered her voice to
+the tone of confidence. "Now, I'm not in the habit of making a nuisance
+of myself like this. I don't get so chatty as a rule, and I know that I
+could jump over to Monmouth and get first-class accommodations there.
+But just this once I've a good reason for wanting to make you and myself
+a little miserable. Y'see, my son is traveling with me this trip."
+
+"Son!" echoed the clerk, staring.
+
+"Thanks. That's what they all do. After a while I'll begin to believe
+that there must be something hauntingly beautiful and girlish about me
+or every one wouldn't petrify when I announce that I've a six-foot son
+attached to my apron-strings. He looks twenty-one, but he's seventeen.
+He thinks the world's rotten because he can't grow one of those fuzzy
+little mustaches that the men are cultivating to match their hats. He's
+down at the depot now, straightening out our baggage. Now I want to say
+this before he gets here. He's been out with me just four days. Those
+four days have been a revelation, an eye-opener, and a series of rude
+jolts. He used to think that his mother's job consisted of traveling in
+Pullmans, eating delicate viands turned out by the hotel chefs, and
+strewing Featherloom Petticoats along the path. I gave him plenty of
+money, and he got into the habit of looking lightly upon anything more
+trifling than a five-dollar bill. He's changing his mind by great leaps.
+I'm prepared to spend the night in the coal cellar if you'll just fix
+him up--not too comfortably. It'll be a great lesson for him. There he
+is now. Just coming in. Fuzzy coat and hat and English stick. Hist! As
+they say on the stage."
+
+The boy crossed the crowded lobby. There was a little worried, annoyed
+frown between his eyes. He laid a protecting hand on his mother's arm.
+Emma McChesney was conscious of a little thrill of pride as she realized
+that he did not have to look up to meet her gaze.
+
+"Look here, Mother, they tell me there's some sort of a convention here,
+and the town's packed. That's what all those banners and things were
+for. I hope they've got something decent for us here. I came up with a
+man who said he didn't think there was a hole left to sleep in."
+
+"You don't say!" exclaimed Emma McChesney, and turned to the clerk.
+"This is my son, Jock McChesney--Mr. Sims. Is this true?"
+
+"Glad to know you, sir," said Mr. Sims. "Why, yes, I'm afraid we are
+pretty well filled up, but seeing it's you maybe we can do something for
+you."
+
+He ruminated, tapping his teeth with a penholder, and eying the pair
+before him with a maddening blankness of gaze. Finally:
+
+"I'll do my best, but you can't expect much. I guess I can squeeze
+another cot into eight-seven for the young man. There's--let's see
+now--who's in eighty-seven? Well, there's two Bisons in the double bed,
+and one in the single, and Fat Ed Meyers in the cot and----"
+
+Emma McChesney stiffened into acute attention. "Meyers?" she
+interrupted. "Do you mean Ed Meyers of the Strauss Sans-silk Skirt
+Company?"
+
+"That's so. You two are in the same line, aren't you? He's a great
+little piano player, Ed is. Ever hear him play?"
+
+"When did he get in?"
+
+"Oh, he just came in fifteen minutes ago on the Ashland division. He's
+in at supper."
+
+"Oh," said Emma McChesney. The two letters breathed relief.
+
+But relief had no place in the voice, or on the countenance of Jock
+McChesney. He bristled with belligerence. "This cattle-car style of
+sleeping don't make a hit. I haven't had a decent night's rest for three
+nights. I never could sleep on a sleeper. Can't you fix us up better
+than that?"
+
+"Best I can do."
+
+"But where's mother going? I see you advertise 'three large and
+commodious steam-heated sample rooms in connection.' I suppose mother's
+due to sleep on one of the tables there."
+
+"Jock," Emma McChesney reproved him, "Mr. Sims is doing us a great
+favor. There isn't another hotel in town that would----"
+
+"You're right, there isn't," agreed Mr. Sims. "I guess the young man is
+new to this traveling game. As I said, I'd like to accommodate you,
+but-- Let's see now. Tell you what I'll do. If I can get the housekeeper
+to go over and sleep in the maids' quarters just for to-night, you can
+use her room. There you are! Of course, it's over the kitchen, and there
+may be some little noise early in the morning----"
+
+Emma McChesney raised a protesting hand. "Don't mention it. Just lead me
+thither. I'm so tired I could sleep in an excursion special that was
+switching at Pittsburgh. Jock, me child, we're in luck. That's twice in
+the same place. The first time was when we were inspired to eat our
+supper on the diner instead of waiting until we reached here to take the
+leftovers from the Bisons' grazing. I hope that housekeeper hasn't a
+picture of her departed husband dangling life-size on the wall at the
+foot of the bed. But they always have. Good-night, son. Don't let the
+Bisons bite you. I'll be up at seven."
+
+But it was just 6.30 A.M. when Emma McChesney turned the little bend in
+the stairway that led to the office. The scrub-woman was still in
+possession. The cigar-counter girl had not yet made her appearance.
+There was about the place a general air of the night before. All but the
+night clerk. He was as spruce and trim, and alert and smooth-shaven as
+only a night clerk can be after a night's vigil.
+
+"'Morning!" Emma McChesney called to him. She wore blue serge, and a
+smart fall hat. The late autumn morning was not crisper and sunnier than
+she.
+
+"Good-morning, Mrs. McChesney," returned Mr. Sims, sonorously. "Have a
+good night's sleep? I hope the kitchen noises didn't wake you."
+
+Emma McChesney paused with her hand on the door. "Kitchen? Oh, no. I
+could sleep through a vaudeville china-juggling act. But--what an
+extraordinarily unpleasant-looking man that housekeeper's husband must
+have been."
+
+That November morning boasted all those qualities which November-morning
+writers are so prone to bestow upon the month. But the words wine, and
+sparkle, and sting, and glow, and snap do not seem to cover it. Emma
+McChesney stood on the bottom step, looking up and down Main Street and
+breathing in great draughts of that unadjectivable air. Her complexion
+stood the test of the merciless, astringent morning and came up
+triumphantly and healthily firm and pink and smooth. The town was still
+asleep. She started to walk briskly down the bare and ugly Main Street
+of the little town. In her big, generous heart, and her keen, alert
+mind, there were many sensations and myriad thoughts, but varied and
+diverse as they were they all led back to the boy up there in the
+stuffy, over-crowded hotel room--the boy who was learning his lesson.
+
+Half an hour later she reentered the hotel, her cheeks glowing. Jock was
+not yet down. So she ordered and ate her wise and cautious breakfast of
+fruit and cereal and toast and coffee, skimming over her morning paper
+as she ate. At 7:30 she was back in the lobby, newspaper in hand. The
+Bisons were already astir. She seated herself in a deep chair in a quiet
+corner, her eyes glancing up over the top of her paper toward the
+stairway. At eight o'clock Jock McChesney came down.
+
+There was nothing of jauntiness about him. His eyelids were red. His
+face had the doughy look of one whose sleep has been brief and feverish.
+As he came toward his mother you noticed a stain on his coat, and a
+sunburst of wrinkles across one leg of his modish brown trousers.
+
+"Good-morning, son!" said Emma McChesney. "Was it as bad as that?"
+
+Jock McChesney's long fingers curled into a fist.
+
+"Say," he began, his tone venomous, "do you know what
+those--those--those----"
+
+"Say it!" commanded Emma McChesney. "I'm only your mother. If you keep
+that in your system your breakfast will curdle in your stomach."
+
+Jock McChesney said it. I know no phrase better fitted to describe his
+tone than that old favorite of the erotic novelists. It was vibrant with
+passion. It breathed bitterness. It sizzled with savagery. It--Oh,
+alliteration is useless.
+
+"Well," said Emma McChesney, encouragingly, "go on."
+
+"Well!" gulped Jock McChesney, and glared; "those two double-bedded,
+bloomin', blasted Bisons came in at twelve, and the single one about
+fifteen minutes later. They didn't surprise me. There was a herd of
+about ninety-three of 'em in the hall, all saying good-night to each
+other, and planning where they'd meet in the morning, and the time, and
+place and probable weather conditions. For that matter, there were
+droves of 'em pounding up and down the halls all night. I never saw such
+restless cattle. If you'll tell me what makes more noise in the middle
+of the night than the metal disk of a hotel key banging and clanging up
+against a door, I'd like to know what it is. My three Bisons were all
+dolled up with fool ribbons and badges and striped paper canes. When
+they switched on the light I gave a crack imitation of a tired working
+man trying to get a little sleep. I breathed regularly and heavily, with
+an occasional moaning snore. But if those two hippopotamus Bisons had
+been alone on their native plains they couldn't have cared less. They
+bellowed, and pawed the earth, and threw their shoes around, and yawned,
+and stretched and discussed their plans for the next day, and reviewed
+all their doings of that day. Then one of them said something about
+turning in, and I was so happy I forgot to snore. Just then another key
+clanged at the door, in walked a fat man in a brown suit and a brown
+derby, and stuff was off."
+
+"That," said Emma McChesney, "would be Ed Meyers, of the Strauss
+Sans-silk Skirt Company."
+
+"None other than our hero." Jock's tone had an added acidity. "It took
+those four about two minutes to get acquainted. In three minutes they
+had told their real names, and it turned out that Meyers belonged to an
+organization that was a second cousin of the Bisons. In five minutes
+they had got together a deck and a pile of chips and were shirt-sleeving
+it around a game of pinochle. I would doze off to the slap of cards, and
+the click of chips, and wake up when the bell-boy came in with another
+round, which he did every six minutes. When I got up this morning I
+found that Fat Ed Meyers had been sitting on the chair over which I
+trustingly had draped my trousers. This sunburst of wrinkles is where he
+mostly sat. This spot on my coat is where a Bison drank his beer."
+
+Emma McChesney folded her paper and rose, smiling. "It is sort of
+trying, I suppose, if you're not used to it."
+
+"Used to it!" shouted the outraged Jock. "Used to it! Do you mean to
+tell me there's nothing unusual about----"
+
+"Not a thing. Oh, of course you don't strike a bunch of Bisons every
+day. But it happens a good many times. The world is full of Ancient
+Orders and they're everlastingly getting together and drawing up
+resolutions and electing officers. Don't you think you'd better go in to
+breakfast before the Bisons begin to forage? I've had mine."
+
+The gloom which had overspread Jock McChesney's face lifted a little.
+The hungry boy in him was uppermost. "That's so. I'm going to have some
+wheat cakes, and steak, and eggs, and coffee, and fruit, and toast, and
+rolls."
+
+"Why slight the fish?" inquired his mother. Then, as he turned toward
+the dining-room, "I've two letters to get out. Then I'm going down the
+street to see a customer. I'll be up at the Sulzberg-Stein department
+store at nine sharp. There's no use trying to see old Sulzberg before
+ten, but I'll be there, anyway, and so will Ed Meyers, or I'm no skirt
+salesman. I want you to meet me there. It will do you good to watch how
+the overripe orders just drop, ker-plunk, into my lap."
+
+Maybe you know Sulzberg & Stein's big store? No? That's because you've
+always lived in the city. Old Sulzberg sends his buyers to the New York
+market twice a year, and they need two floor managers on the main floor
+now. The money those people spend for red and green decorations at
+Christmas time, apple-blossoms and pink crêpe paper shades in the
+spring, must be something awful. Young Stein goes to Chicago to have his
+clothes made, and old Sulzberg likes to keep the traveling men waiting
+in the little ante-room outside his private office.
+
+Jock McChesney finished his huge breakfast, strolled over to Sulzberg &
+Stein's, and inquired his way to the office only to find that his mother
+was not yet there. There were three men in the little waiting-room. One
+of them was Fat Ed Meyers. His huge bulk overflowed the spindle-legged
+chair on which he sat. His brown derby was in his hands. His eyes were
+on the closed door at the other side of the room. So were the eyes of
+the other two travelers. Jock took a vacant seat next to Fat Ed Meyers
+so that he might, in his mind's eye, pick out a particularly choice spot
+upon which his hard young fist might land--if only he had the chance.
+Breaking up a man's sleep like that, the great big overgrown mutt!
+
+"What's your line?" said Ed Meyers, suddenly turning toward Jock.
+
+Prompted by some imp--"Skirts," answered Jock. "Ladies' petticoats."
+("As if men ever wore 'em!" he giggled inwardly.)
+
+Ed Meyers shifted around in his chair so that he might better stare at
+this new foe in the field. His little red mouth was open ludicrously.
+
+"Who're you out for?" he demanded next.
+
+There was a look of Emma McChesney on Jock's face. "Why--er--the Union
+Underskirt and Hosiery Company of Chicago. New concern."
+
+"Must be," ruminated Ed Meyers. "I never heard of 'em, and I know 'em
+all. You're starting in young, ain't you, kid! Well, it'll never hurt
+you. You'll learn something new every day. Now me, I----"
+
+In breezed Emma McChesney. Her quick glance rested immediately upon
+Meyers and the boy. And in that moment some instinct prompted Jock
+McChesney to shake his head, ever so slightly, and assume a blankness of
+expression. And Emma McChesney, with that shrewdness which had made her
+one of the best salesmen on the road, saw, and miraculously understood.
+
+"How do, Mrs. McChesney," grinned Fat Ed Meyers. "You see I beat you to
+it."
+
+"So I see," smiled Emma, cheerfully. "I was delayed. Just sold a nice
+little bill to Watkins down the street." She seated herself across the
+way, and kept her eyes on that closed door.
+
+"Say, kid," Meyers began, in the husky whisper of the fat man, "I'm
+going to put you wise to something, seeing you're new to this game. See
+that lady over there?" He nodded discreetly in Emma McChesney's
+direction.
+
+"Pretty, isn't she?" said Jock, appreciatively.
+
+"Know who she is?"
+
+"Well--I--she does look familiar, but----"
+
+"Oh, come now, quit your bluffing. If you'd ever met that dame you'd
+remember it. Her name's McChesney--Emma McChesney, and she sells T. A.
+Buck's Featherloom Petticoats. I'll give her her dues; she's the best
+little salesman on the road. I'll bet that girl could sell a ruffled,
+accordion-plaited underskirt to a fat woman who was trying to reduce.
+She's got the darndest way with her. And at that she's straight, too."
+
+If Ed Meyers had not been gazing so intently into his hat, trying at
+the same time to look cherubically benign he might have seen a quick and
+painful scarlet sweep the face of the boy, coupled with a certain tense
+look of the muscles around the jaw.
+
+"Well, now, look here," he went on, still in a whisper. "We're both
+skirt men, you and me. Everything's fair in this game. Maybe you don't
+know it, but when there's a bunch of the boys waiting around to see the
+head of the store like this, and there happens to be a lady traveler in
+the crowd, why, it's considered kind of a professional courtesy to let
+the lady have the first look-in. See? It ain't so often that three
+people in the same line get together like this. She knows it, and she's
+sitting on the edge of her chair, waiting to bolt when that door opens,
+even if she does act like she was hanging on the words of that lady
+clerk there. The minute it does open a crack she'll jump up and give me
+a fleeting, grateful smile, and sail in and cop a fat order away from
+the old man and his skirt buyer. I'm wise. Say, he may be an oyster, but
+he knows a pretty woman when he sees one. By the time she's through with
+him he'll have enough petticoats on hand to last him from now until
+Turkey goes suffrage. Get me?"
+
+"I get you," answered Jock.
+
+"I say, this is business, and good manners be hanged. When a woman
+breaks into a man's game like this, let her take her chances like a man.
+Ain't that straight?"
+
+"You've said something," agreed Jock.
+
+"Now, look here, kid. When that door opens I get up. See? And shoot
+straight for the old man's office. See? Like a duck. See? Say, I may be
+fat, kid, but I'm what they call light on my feet, and when I see an
+order getting away from me I can be so fleet that I have Diana looking
+like old Weston doing a stretch of muddy country road in a
+coast-to-coast hike. See? Now you help me out on this and I'll see that
+you don't suffer for it. I'll stick in a good word for you, believe me.
+You take the word of an old stager like me and you won't go far--"
+
+The door opened. Simultaneously three figures sprang into action. Jock
+had the seat nearest the door. With marvelous clumsiness he managed to
+place himself in Ed Meyers' path, then reddened, began an apology,
+stepped on both of Ed's feet, jabbed his elbow into his stomach, and
+dropped his hat. A second later the door of old Sulzberg's private
+office closed upon Emma McChesney's smart, erect, confident figure.
+
+Now, Ed Meyers' hands were peculiar hands for a fat man. They were
+tapering, slender, delicate, blue-veined, temperamental hands. At this
+moment, despite his purpling face, and his staring eyes, they were the
+most noticeable thing about him. His fingers clawed the empty air,
+quivering, vibrant, as though poised to clutch at Jock's throat.
+
+Then words came. They spluttered from his lips. They popped like corn
+kernels in the heat of his wrath; they tripped over each other; they
+exploded.
+
+"You darned kid, you!" he began, with fascinating fluency. "You
+thousand-legged, double-jointed, ox-footed truck horse! Come on out of
+here and I'll lick the shine off your shoes, you blue-eyed babe, you!
+What did you get up for, huh? What did you think this was going to be--a
+flag drill?"
+
+With a whoop of pure joy Jock McChesney turned and fled.
+
+They dined together at one o'clock, Emma McChesney and her son Jock.
+Suddenly Jock stopped eating. His eyes were on the door. "There's that
+fathead now," he said, excitedly. "The nerve of him! He's coming over
+here."
+
+Ed Meyers was waddling toward them with the quick light step of the fat
+man. His pink, full-jowled face was glowing. His eyes were bright as a
+boy's. He stopped at their table and paused for one dramatic moment.
+
+"So, me beauty, you two were in cahoots, huh? That's the second low-down
+deal you've handed me. I haven't forgotten that trick you turned with
+Nussbaum at DeKalb. Never mind, little girl. I'll get back at you yet."
+
+He nodded a contemptuous head in Jock's direction. "Carrying a packer?"
+
+Emma McChesney wiped her fingers daintily on her napkin, crushed it on
+the table, and leaned back in her chair. "Men," she observed,
+wonderingly, "are the cussedest creatures. This chap occupied the same
+room with you last night and you don't even know his name. Funny! If two
+strange women had found themselves occupying the same room for a night
+they wouldn't have got to the kimono and back hair stage before they
+would not only have known each other's names, but they'd have tried on
+each other's hats, swapped corset cover patterns, found mutual friends
+living in Dayton, Ohio, taught each other a new Irish crochet stitch,
+showed their family photographs, told how their married sister's little
+girl nearly died with swollen glands, and divided off the mirror into
+two sections to paste their newly-washed handkerchiefs on. Don't tell
+_me_ men have a genius for friendship."
+
+"Well, who is he?" insisted Ed Meyers. "He told me everything but his
+name this morning. I wish I had throttled him with a bunch of Bisons'
+badges last night."
+
+"His name," smiled Emma McChesney, "is Jock McChesney. He's my one and
+only son, and he's put through his first little business deal this
+morning just to show his mother that he can be a help to his folks if he
+wants to. Now, Ed Meyers, if you're going to have apoplexy, don't you go
+and have it around this table. My boy is only on his second piece of
+pie, and I won't have his appetite spoiled."
+
+
+
+
+EDNA FERBER
+
+
+A professor of literature once began a lecture on Lowell by saying: "It
+makes a great deal of difference to an author whether he is born in
+Cambridge or Kalamazoo." Miss Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, but it
+hasn't made much difference to her. The date was August 15, 1887. She
+attended high school at Appleton, Wisconsin, and at seventeen secured a
+position as reporter on the Appleton _Daily Crescent_. That she was
+successful in newspaper work is shown by the fact that she soon had a
+similar position on the _Milwaukee Journal_, and went from there to the
+staff of the _Chicago Tribune_, one of the leading newspapers in the
+United States.
+
+But journalism, engrossing as it is, did not take all of her time. She
+began a novel, working on it in spare moments, but when it was finished
+she was so dissatisfied with it that she threw the manuscript into the
+waste basket. Here her mother found it, and sent it to a publisher, who
+accepted it at once. The book was _Dawn O'Hara_. It was dedicated "To my
+dear mother who frequently interrupts, and to my sister Fannie who says
+Sh-sh-sh outside my door." With this book Miss Ferber, at twenty-four,
+found herself the author of one of the successful novels of the year.
+
+Her next work was in the field of the short story, and here too she
+quickly gained recognition. The field that she has made particularly her
+own is the delineation of the American business woman, a type familiar
+in our daily life, but never adequately presented in fiction until Emma
+McChesney appeared. The fidelity with which these stories describe the
+life of a traveling salesman show that Miss Ferber knew her subject
+through and through before she began to write. Her knowledge of other
+things is shown in an amusing letter which she wrote to the editor of
+the _Bookman_ in 1912. He had criticized her for writing a story about
+baseball, saying that no woman really knew baseball. This was her reply,
+in part:
+
+
+     You, buried up there in your office, or your apartment, with your
+     books, books, books, and your pipe, and your everlasting
+     manuscripts, and makers of manuscripts, don't you know that your
+     woman secretary knows more about baseball than you do? Don't you
+     know that every American girl knows baseball, and that most of us
+     read the sporting page, not as a pose, but because we're interested
+     in things that happen on the field, and track, and links, and
+     gridiron? Bless your heart, that baseball story was the worst story
+     in the book, but it was written after a solid summer of watching
+     our bush league team play ball in the little Wisconsin town that I
+     used to call home.
+
+     Humanity? Which of us really knows it? But take a fairly
+     intelligent girl of seventeen, put her on a country daily
+     newspaper, and then keep her on one paper or another, country and
+     city, for six years, and--well, she just naturally can't help
+     learning some things about some folks, now can she?...
+
+     You say that two or three more such books may entitle me to serious
+     consideration. If I can get the editors to take more stories, why I
+     suppose there'll be more books. But please don't perform any more
+     serious consideration stuff over 'em. Because me'n Georgie Cohan,
+     we jest aims to amuse.
+
+
+Her first book of short stories was called _Buttered Side Down_ (her
+titles are always unusual). This was followed by _Roast Beef, Medium_,
+in which Mrs. McChesney appears as the successful distributor of
+Featherloom skirts. _Personality Plus_ tells of the adventures of her
+son Jock as an advertising man. _Cheerful--by Request_ introduces Mrs.
+McChesney and some other people. By this time her favorite character had
+become so well known that the stage called for her, so Miss Ferber
+collaborated with George V. Hobart in a play called _Our Mrs.
+McChesney_, which was produced with Ethel Barrymore in the title role.
+Her latest book, _Fanny Herself_, is a novel, and in its pages Mrs.
+McChesney appears again.
+
+Her stories show the effect of her newspaper training. The style is
+crisp; the descriptions show close observation. Humor lights up every
+page, and underlying all her stories is a belief in people, a faith that
+life is worth while, a courage in the face of obstacles, that we like to
+think is characteristically American. In the structure and the style of
+her stories, Miss Ferber shows the influence of O. Henry, or as a
+newspaper wit put it,
+
+
+     O. Henry's fame, unless mistaken I'm
+     Goes ednaferberating down through time.
+
+
+
+
+AFTER THE BIG STORE CLOSES
+
+_We all go to the Big Store to buy its bargains, and sometimes we
+wonder idly what the clerks are like when they are not behind the
+counter. This story deals with the lives of two people who punched the
+time-clock. When the store closes, it is like the striking of the clock
+in the fairy tales: the clerks are transformed into human beings, and
+become so much like ourselves that it is hard to tell the difference._
+
+
+
+
+BITTER-SWEET
+
+BY
+
+FANNIE HURST
+
+
+Much of the tragical lore of the infant mortality, the malnutrition, and
+the five-in-a-room morality of the city's poor is written in statistics,
+and the statistical path to the heart is more figurative than literal.
+
+It is difficult to write stylistically a per-annum report of 1,327
+curvatures of the spine, whereas the poor specific little vertebra of
+Mamie O'Grady, daughter to Lou, your laundress, whose alcoholic husband
+once invaded your very own basement and attempted to strangle her in the
+coal-bin, can instantly create an apron bazaar in the church
+vestry-rooms.
+
+That is why it is possible to drink your morning coffee without nausea
+for it, over the head-lines of forty thousand casualties at Ypres, but
+to push back abruptly at a three-line notice of little Tony's, your
+corner bootblack's, fatal dive before a street-car.
+
+Gertie Slayback was statistically down as a woman wage-earner; a typhoid
+case among the thousands of the Borough of Manhattan for 1901; and her
+twice-a-day share in the Subway fares collected in the present year of
+our Lord.
+
+She was a very atomic one of the city's four millions. But after all,
+what are the kings and peasants, poets and draymen, but great, greater,
+or greatest, less, lesser, or least atoms of us? If not of the least,
+Gertie Slayback was of the very lesser. When she unlocked the front door
+to her rooming-house of evenings, there was no one to expect her, except
+on Tuesdays, which evening it so happened her week was up. And when she
+left of mornings with her breakfast crumblessly cleared up and the box
+of biscuit and condensed-milk can tucked unsuspectedly behind her
+camisole in the top drawer there was no one to regret her.
+
+There are some of us who call this freedom. Again there are those for
+whom one spark of home fire burning would light the world.
+
+Gertie Slayback was one of these. Half a life-time of opening her door
+upon this or that desert-aisle of hall bedroom had not taught her heart
+how not to sink or the feel of daily rising in one such room to seem
+less like a damp bathing-suit, donned at dawn.
+
+The only picture--or call it atavism if you will--which adorned Miss
+Slayback's dun-colored walls was a passe-partout snowscape, night
+closing in, and pink cottage windows peering out from under eaves. She
+could visualize that interior as if she had only to turn the frame for
+the smell of wood fire and the snap of pine logs and for the scene of
+two high-back chairs and the wooden crib between.
+
+What a fragile, gracile thing is the mind that can leap thus from nine
+bargain basement hours of hairpins and darning-balls to the downy
+business of lining a crib in Never-Never Land and warming No Man's
+slippers before the fire of imagination.
+
+There was that picture so acidly etched into Miss Slayback's brain that
+she had only to close her eyes in the slit-like sanctity of her room and
+in the brief moment of courting sleep feel the pink penumbra of her
+vision begin to glow.
+
+Of late years, or, more specifically, for two years and eight months,
+another picture had invaded, even superseded the old. A stamp-photograph
+likeness of Mr. James P. Batch in the corner of Miss Slayback's mirror,
+and thereafter No Man's slippers became number eight-and-a-half C, and
+the hearth a gilded radiator in a dining-living-room somewhere between
+the Fourteenth Street Subway and the land of the Bronx.
+
+How Miss Slayback, by habit not gregarious, met Mr. Batch is of no
+consequence, except to those snug ones of us to whom an introduction is
+the only means to such an end.
+
+At a six o'clock that invaded even Union Square with heliotrope dusk,
+Mr. James Batch mistook, who shall say otherwise, Miss Gertie Slayback,
+as she stepped down into the wintry shade of a Subway kiosk, for Miss
+Whodoesitmatter. At seven o'clock, over a dish of lamb stew _à la_ White
+Kitchen, he confessed, and if Miss Slayback affected too great surprise
+and too little indignation, try to conceive six nine-hour week-in-and
+week-out days of hairpins and darning-balls, and then, at a heliotrope
+dusk, James P. Batch, in invitational mood, stepping in between it and
+the papered walls of a dun-colored evening. To further enlist your
+tolerance, Gertie Slayback's eyes were as blue as the noon of June, and
+James P. Batch, in a belted-in coat and five kid finger-points
+protruding ever so slightly and rightly from a breast pocket, was hewn
+and honed in the image of youth. His the smile of one for whom life's
+cup holds a heady wine, a wrinkle or two at the eye only serving to
+enhance that smile; a one-inch feather stuck upright in his derby
+hatband.
+
+It was a forelock once stamped a Corsican with the look of emperor. It
+was this hat feather, a cock's feather at that and worn without sense of
+humor, to which Miss Slayback was fond of attributing the consequences
+of that heliotrope dusk.
+
+"It was the feather in your cap did it, Jimmie. I can see you yet,
+stepping up with that innocent grin of yours. You think I didn't know
+you were flirting? Cousin from Long Island City! 'Say,' I says to
+myself, I says, 'I look as much like his cousin from Long Island City,
+if he's got one, as my cousin from Hoboken (and I haven't got any) would
+look like my sister if I had one.' It was that sassy little feather in
+your hat!"
+
+They would laugh over this ever-green reminiscence on Sunday park
+benches and at intermission at moving pictures when they remained
+through it to see the show twice. Be the landlady's front parlor ever so
+permanently rented out, the motion-picture theater has brought to
+thousands of young city starvelings, if not the quietude of the home,
+then at least the warmth and a juxtaposition and a deep darkness that
+can lave the sub-basement throb of temples and is filled with music with
+a hum in it.
+
+For two years and eight months of Saturday nights, each one of them a
+semaphore dropping out across the gray road of the week, Gertie Slayback
+and Jimmie Batch dined for one hour and sixty cents at the White
+Kitchen. Then arm and arm up the million-candle-power flare of Broadway,
+content, these two who had never seen a lake reflect a moon, or a slim
+fir pointing to a star, that life could be so manifold. And always, too,
+on Saturday, the tenth from the last row of the De Luxe Cinematograph,
+Broadway's Best, Orchestra Chairs, fifty cents; Last Ten Rows,
+thirty-five. The give of velvet-upholstered chairs, perfumed darkness,
+and any old love story moving across it to the ecstatic ache of Gertie
+Slayback's high young heart.
+
+On a Saturday evening that was already pointed with stars at the
+six-o'clock closing of Hoffheimer's Fourteenth Street Emporium, Miss
+Slayback, whose blondness under fatigue could become ashy, emerged from
+the Bargain Basement almost the first of its frantic exodus, taking the
+place of her weekly appointment in the entrance of the Popular Drug
+Store adjoining, her gaze, something even frantic in it, sifting the
+passing crowd.
+
+At six o'clock Fourteenth Street pours up from its basements, down from
+its lofts, and out from its five-and-ten-cent stores, shows, and
+arcades, in a great homeward torrent--a sweeping torrent that flows full
+flush to the Subway, the Elevated, and the surface car, and then spreads
+thinly into the least pretentious of the city's homes--the five flights
+up, the two rooms rear, and the third floor back.
+
+Standing there, this eager tide of the Fourteenth Street Emporium, thus
+released by the six-o'clock flood-gates, flowed past Miss Slayback.
+White-nosed, low-chested girls in short-vamp shoes and no-carat gold
+vanity-cases. Older men resigned that ambition could be flayed by a
+yard-stick; young men still impatient of their clerkship.
+
+It was into the trickle of these last that Miss Slayback bored her
+glance, the darting, eager glance of hot eyeballs and inner trembling.
+She was not so pathetically young as she was pathetically blond, a
+treacherous, ready-to-fade kind of blondness that one day, now that she
+had found that very morning her first gray hair, would leave her ashy.
+
+Suddenly, with a small catch of breath that was audible in her throat,
+Miss Slayback stepped out of that doorway, squirming her way across the
+tight congestion of the sidewalk to its curb, then in and out, brushing
+this elbow and that shoulder, worming her way in an absolutely supreme
+anxiety to keep in view a brown derby hat bobbing right briskly along
+with the crowd, a greenish-black bit of feather upright in its band.
+
+At Broadway, Fourteenth Street cuts quite a caper, deploying out into
+Union Square, an island of park, beginning to be succulent at the first
+false feint of spring, rising as it were from a sea of asphalt. Across
+this park Miss Slayback worked her rather frenzied way, breaking into a
+run when the derby threatened to sink into the confusion of a hundred
+others, and finally learning to keep its course by the faint but
+distinguishing fact of a slight dent in the crown. At Broadway, some
+blocks before that highway bursts into its famous flare, Mr. Batch, than
+whom it was no other, turned off suddenly at right angles down into a
+dim pocket of side-street and into the illuminated entrance of Ceiner's
+Café Hungarian. Meals at all hours. Lunch, thirty cents. Dinner, fifty
+cents. Our Goulash is Famous.
+
+New York, which expresses itself in more languages to the square block
+than any other area in the world, Babylon included, loves thus to dine
+linguistically, so to speak. To the Crescent Turkish Restaurant for its
+Business Men's Lunch comes Fourth Avenue, whose antique-shop patois
+reads across the page from right to left. Sight-seeing automobiles on
+mission and commission bent allow Altoona, Iowa City, and Quincy,
+Illinois, fifteen minutes' stop-in at Ching Ling-Foo's Chinatown
+Delmonico's. Spaghetti and red wine have set New York racing to reserve
+its table d'hôtes. All except the Latin race.
+
+Jimmie Batch, who had first seen light, and that gaslight, in a block in
+lower Manhattan which has since been given over to a milk-station for a
+highly congested district, had the palate, if not the purse, of the
+cosmopolite. His digestive range included _borsch_ and _chow main_;
+_risotta_ and "ham and."
+
+To-night, as he turned into Café Hungarian, Miss Slayback slowed and
+drew back into the overshadowing protection of an adjoining
+office-building. She was breathing hard, and her little face, somehow
+smaller from chill, was nevertheless a high pink at the cheek-bones.
+
+The wind swept around the corner, jerking her hat, and her hand flew up
+to it. There was a fair stream of passers-by even here, and occasionally
+one turned for a backward glance at her standing there so frankly
+indeterminate.
+
+Suddenly Miss Slayback adjusted her tam-o'-shanter to its flop over her
+right ear, and, drawing off a pair of dark-blue silk gloves from over
+immaculately new white ones, entered Ceiner's Café Hungarian. In its
+light she was not so obviously blonder than young, the pink spots in her
+cheeks had a deepening value to the blue of her eyes, and a black velvet
+tam-o'-shanter revealing just the right fringe of yellow curls is no
+mean aid.
+
+First of all, Ceiner's is an eating-place. There is no music except at
+five cents in the slot, and its tables for four are perpetually set each
+with a dish of sliced radishes, a bouquet of celery, and a mound of
+bread, half the stack rye. Its menus are well thumbed and badly
+mimeographed. Who enters Ceiner's is prepared to dine from barley soup
+to apple strudel. At something after six begins the rising sound of
+cutlery, and already the new-comer fears to find no table.
+
+Off at the side, Mr. Jimmie Batch had already disposed of his hat and
+gray overcoat, and tilting the chair opposite him to indicate its
+reservation, shook open his evening paper, the waiter withholding the
+menu at this sign of rendezvous.
+
+Straight toward that table Miss Slayback worked quick, swift way,
+through this and that aisle, jerking back and seating herself on the
+chair opposite almost before Mr. Batch could raise his eyes from off the
+sporting page.
+
+There was an instant of silence between them--the kind of silence that
+can shape itself into a commentary upon the inefficacy of mere speech--a
+widening silence which, as they sat there facing, deepened until, when
+she finally spoke, it was as if her words were pebbles dropping down
+into a well.
+
+"Don't look so surprised, Jimmie," she said, propping her face calmly,
+even boldly, into the white-kid palms. "You might fall off the Christmas
+tree."
+
+Above the snug, four-inch collar and bow tie Mr. Batch's face was taking
+on a dull ox-blood tinge that spread back, even reddening his ears. Mr.
+Batch had the frontal bone of a clerk, the horn-rimmed glasses of the
+literarily astigmatic, and the sartorial perfection that only the rich
+can afford not to attain.
+
+He was staring now quite frankly, and his mouth had fallen open. "Gert!"
+he said.
+
+"Yes," said Miss Slayback, her insouciance gaining with his
+discomposure, her eyes widening and then a dolly kind of glassiness
+seeming to set in. "You wasn't expecting me, Jimmie?"
+
+He jerked up his hand, not meeting her glance. "What's the idea of the
+comedy?"
+
+"You don't look glad to see me, Jimmie."
+
+"If you--think you're funny."
+
+She was working out of and then back into the freshly white gloves in a
+betraying kind of nervousness that belied the toss of her voice. "Well,
+of all things! Mad-cat! Mad, just because you didn't seem to be
+expecting me."
+
+"I--There's some things that are just the limit, that's what they are.
+Some things that are just the limit, that no fellow would stand from any
+girl, and this--this is one of them."
+
+Her lips were trembling now. "You--you bet your life there's some things
+that are just the limit."
+
+He slid out his watch, pushing back. "Well, I guess this place is too
+small for a fellow and a girl that can follow him around the town like
+a--like----"
+
+She sat forward, grasping the table-sides, her chair tilting with her.
+"Don't you dare to get up and leave me sitting here! Jimmie Batch, don't
+you dare!"
+
+The waiter intervened, card extended.
+
+"We--we're waiting for another party," said Miss Slayback, her hands
+still rigidly over the table-sides and her glance like a steady drill
+into Mr. Batch's own.
+
+There was a second of this silence while the waiter withdrew, and then
+Mr. Batch whipped out his watch again, a gun-metal one with an open
+face.
+
+"Now look here. I got a date here in ten minutes, and one or the other
+of us has got to clear. You--you're one too many, if you got to know
+it."
+
+"Oh, I do know it, Jimmie! I been one too many for the last four
+Saturday nights. I been one too many ever since May Scully came into
+five hundred dollars' inheritance and quit the Ladies' Neckwear. I been
+one too many ever since May Scully became a lady."
+
+"If I was a girl and didn't have more shame!"
+
+"Shame! Now you're shouting, Jimmie Batch. I haven't got shame, and I
+don't care who knows it. A girl don't stop to have shame when she's
+fighting for her rights."
+
+He was leaning on his elbow, profile to her. "That movie talk can't
+scare me. You can't tell me what to do and what not to do. I've given
+you a square deal all right. There's not a word ever passed between us
+that ties me to your apron-strings. I don't say I'm not without my
+obligations to you, but that's not one of them. No, siree--no
+apron-strings."
+
+"I know it isn't, Jimmie. You're the kind of a fellow wouldn't even talk
+to himself for fear of committing himself."
+
+"I got a date here now any minute, Gert, and the sooner you----"
+
+"You're the guy who passed up the Sixty-first for the Safety First
+regiment."
+
+"I'll show you my regiment some day."
+
+"I--I know you're not tied to my apron-strings, Jimmie. I--I wouldn't
+have you there for anything. Don't you think I know you too well for
+that? That's just it. Nobody on God's earth knows you the way I do. I
+know you better than you know yourself."
+
+"You better beat it, Gertie. I tell you I'm getting sore."
+
+Her face flashed from him to the door and back again, her anxiety almost
+edged with hysteria. "Come on, Jimmie--out the side entrance before she
+gets here. May Scully ain't the company for you. You think if she was,
+honey, I'd--I'd see myself come butting in between you this way,
+like--like a--common girl? She's not the girl to keep you straight.
+Honest to God she's not, honey."
+
+"My business is my business, let me tell you that."
+
+"She's speedy, Jimmie. She was the speediest girl on the main floor, and
+now that she's come into those five hundred, instead of planting it for
+a rainy day, she's quit work and gone plumb crazy with it."
+
+"When I want advice about my friends I ask for it."
+
+"It's not the good name that worries me, Jimmie, because she ain't got
+any. It's you. She's got you crazy with that five hundred, too--that's
+what's got me scared."
+
+"Gee! you ought to let the Salvation Army tie a bonnet under your
+chin."
+
+"She's always had her eyes on you, Jimmie. Ain't you men got no sense
+for seein' things? Since the day they moved the Gents' Furnishings
+across from the Ladies' Neckwear she's had you spotted. Her goings-on
+used to leak down to the basement, alrighty. She's not a good girl, May
+ain't, Jimmie. She ain't, and you know it. Is she? Is she?"
+
+"Aw!" said Jimmie Batch.
+
+"You see! See! Ain't got the nerve to answer, have you?"
+
+"Aw--maybe I know, too that she's not the kind of a girl that would turn
+up where she's not----"
+
+"If you wasn't a classy-looking kind of boy, Jimmie, that a fly girl
+like May likes to be seen out with, she couldn't find you with
+magnifying glasses, not if you was born with the golden rule in your
+mouth and had swallowed it. She's not the kind of girl, Jimmie, a fellow
+like you needs behind him. If--if you was ever to marry her and get your
+hands on them five hundred dollars----"
+
+"It would be my business."
+
+"It'll be your ruination. You're not strong enough to stand up under
+nothing like that. With a few hundred unearned dollars in your pocket
+you--you'd go up in spontaneous combustion, you would."
+
+"It would be my own spontaneous combustion."
+
+"You got to be drove, Jimmie, like a kid. With them few dollars you
+wouldn't start up a little cigar-store like you think you would. You and
+her would blow yourselves to the dogs in two months. Cigar-stores ain't
+the place for you, Jimmie. You seen how only clerking in them was nearly
+your ruination--the little gambling-room-in-the-back kind that you pick
+out. They ain't cigar-stores; they're only false faces for gambling."
+
+"You know it all, don't you?"
+
+"Oh, I'm dealing it to you straight! There's too many sporty crowds
+loafing around those joints for a fellow like you to stand up under. I
+found you in one, and as yellow-fingered and as loafing as they come, a
+new job a week, a----"
+
+"Yeh, and there was some pep to variety, too."
+
+"Don't throw over, Jimmie, what my getting you out of it to a decent job
+in a department store has begun to do for you. And you're making good,
+too. Higgins teld me to-day, if you don't let your head swell, there
+won't be a fellow in the department can stack up his sales-book any
+higher."
+
+"Aw!"
+
+"Don't throw it all over, Jimmie--and me--for a crop of dyed red hair
+and a few dollars to ruin yourself with."
+
+He shot her a look of constantly growing nervousness, his mouth pulled
+to an oblique, his glance constantly toward the door.
+
+"Don't keep no date with her to-night, Jimmie. You haven't got the
+constitution to stand her pace. It's telling on you. Look at those
+fingers yellowing again--looka----"
+
+"They're my fingers, ain't they?"
+
+"You see, Jimmie, I--I'm the only person in the world that likes you
+just for what--you ain't--and hasn't got any pipe dreams about you.
+That's what counts, Jimmie, the folks that like you in spite, and not
+because of."
+
+"We will now sing psalm number two hundred and twenty-three."
+
+"I know there's not a better fellow in the world if he's kept nailed to
+the right job, and I know, too, there's not another fellow can go to the
+dogs any easier."
+
+"To hear you talk, you'd think I was about six."
+
+"I'm the only girl that'll ever be willing to make a whip out of herself
+that'll keep you going and won't sting, honey. I know you're soft and
+lazy and selfish and----"
+
+"Don't forget any."
+
+"And I know you're my good-looking good-for-nothing, and I know, too,
+that you--you don't care as much--as much for me from head to toe as I
+do for your little finger. But I--like you just the same, Jimmie.
+That--that's what I mean about having no shame. I--do like you so--so
+terribly, Jimmie."
+
+"Aw now--Gert!"
+
+"I know it, Jimmie--that I ought to be ashamed. Don't think I haven't
+cried myself to sleep with it whole nights in succession."
+
+"Aw now--Gert!"
+
+"Don't think I don't know it, that I'm laying myself before you pretty
+common. I know it's common for a girl to--to come to a fellow like this,
+but--but I haven't got any shame about it--I haven't got anything,
+Jimmie, except fight for--for what's eating me. And the way things are
+between us now is eating me."
+
+"I---- Why, I got a mighty high regard for you, Gert."
+
+"There's a time in a girl's life, Jimmie, when she's been starved like I
+have for something of her own all her days; there's times, no matter how
+she's held in, that all of a sudden comes a minute when she busts out."
+
+"I understand, Gert, but----"
+
+"For two years and eight months, Jimmie, life has got to be worth while
+living to me because I could see the day, even if we--you--never talked
+about it, when you would be made over from a flip kid to--to the kind of
+a fellow would want to settle down to making a little two-by-four home
+for us. A little two-by-four all our own, with you steady on the job and
+advanced maybe to forty or fifty a week and----"
+
+"For God's sake, Gertie, this ain't the time or the place to----"
+
+"Oh yes, it is! It's got to be, because it's the first time in four
+weeks that you didn't see me coming first."
+
+"But not now, Gert. I----"
+
+"I'm not ashamed to tell you, Jimmie Batch, that I've been the making
+of you since that night you threw the wink at me. And--and it hurts,
+this does. God! how it hurts!"
+
+He was pleating the table-cloth, swallowing as if his throat had
+constricted, and still rearing his head this way and that in the tight
+collar.
+
+"I--never claimed not to be a bad egg. This ain't the time and the place
+for rehashing, that's all. Sure you been a friend to me. I don't say you
+haven't. Only I can't be bossed by a girl like you. I don't say May
+Scully's any better than she ought to be. Only that's my business. You
+hear? my business. I got to have life and see a darn sight more future
+for myself than selling shirts in a Fourteenth Street department store."
+
+"May Scully can't give it to you--her and her fast crowd."
+
+"Maybe she can and maybe she can't."
+
+"Them few dollars won't make you; they'll break you."
+
+"That's for her to decide, not you."
+
+"I'll tell her myself. I'll face her right here and----"
+
+"Now, look here, if you think I'm going to be let in for a holy show
+between you two girls, you got another think coming. One of us has got
+to clear out of here, and quick, too. You been talking about the side
+door; there it is. In five minutes I got a date in this place that I
+thought I could keep like any law-abiding citizen. One of us has got to
+clear, and quick, too. Gad! you wimmin make me sick, the whole lot of
+you!"
+
+"If anything makes you sick, I know what it is. It's dodging me to fly
+around all hours of the night with May Scully, the girl who put the tang
+in tango. It's eating around in swell sixty-cent restaurants like this
+and----"
+
+"Gad! your middle name ought to be Nagalene."
+
+"Aw, now, Jimmie, maybe it does sound like nagging, but it ain't, honey.
+It--it's only my--my fear that I'm losing you, and--and my hate for the
+every-day grind of things, and----"
+
+"I can't help that, can I?"
+
+"Why, there--there's nothing on God's earth I hate, Jimmie, like I hate
+that Bargain-Basement. When I think it's down there in that manhole I've
+spent the best years of my life, I--I wanna die. The day I get out of
+it, the day I don't have to punch that old time-clock down there next to
+the Complaints and Adjustment Desk, I--I'll never put my foot below
+sidewalk level again to the hour I die. Not even if it was to take a
+walk in my own gold-mine."
+
+"It ain't exactly a garden of roses down there."
+
+"Why, I hate it so terrible, Jimmie, that sometimes I wake up nights
+gritting my teeth with the smell of steam-pipes and the tramp of feet on
+the glass sidewalk up over me. Oh, God! you dunno--you dunno!"
+
+"When it comes to that, the main floor ain't exactly a maiden's dream,
+or a fellow's, for that matter."
+
+"With a man it's different. It's his job in life, earning, and--and the
+woman making the two ends of it meet. That's why, Jimmie, these last two
+years and eight months, if not for what I was hoping for us,
+why--why--I--why, on your twenty a week, Jimmie, there's nobody could
+run a flat like I could. Why, the days wouldn't be long enough to putter
+in. I--Don't throw away what I been building up for us, Jimmie, step by
+step! Don't, Jimmie!'
+
+"Good Lord, girl! You deserve better'n me."
+
+"I know I got a big job, Jimmie, but I want to make a man out of you,
+temper, laziness, gambling, and all. You got it in you to be something
+more than a tango lizard or a cigar-store bum, honey. It's only you
+ain't got the stuff in you to stand up under a five-hundred-dollar
+windfall and--a--and a sporty girl. If--if two glasses of beer make you
+as silly as they do, Jimmie, why, five hundred dollars would land you
+under the table for life."
+
+"Aw--there you go again!"
+
+"I can't help it, Jimmie. It's because I never knew a fellow had what's
+he's cut out for written all over him so. You're a born clerk, Jimmie."
+
+"Sure, I'm a slick clerk, but----"
+
+"You're born to be a clerk, a good clerk, even a two-hundred-a-month
+clerk, the way you can win the trade, but never your own boss. I know
+what I'm talking about. I know your measure better than any human on
+earth can ever know your measure. I know things about you that you don't
+even know yourself."
+
+"I never set myself up to nobody for anything I wasn't."
+
+"Maybe not, Jimmie, but I know about you and--and that Central Street
+gang that time, and----"
+
+"You!"
+
+"Yes, honey, and there's not another human living but me knows how
+little it was your fault. Just bad company, that was all. That's how
+much I--I love you, Jimmie, enough to understand that. Why, if I thought
+May Scully and a set-up in business was the thing for you, Jimmie, I'd
+say to her, I'd say, if it was like taking my own heart out in my hand
+and squashing it, I'd say to her, I'd say, 'Take him, May.' That's how
+I--I love you, Jimmie. Oh, ain't it nothing, honey, a girl can come here
+and lay herself this low to you----"
+
+"Well, haven't I just said you--you deserve better."
+
+"I don't want better, Jimmie. I want you. I want to take hold of your
+life and finish the job of making it the kind we can both be proud of.
+Us two, Jimmie, in--in our own decent two-by-four. Shopping on Saturday
+nights. Frying in our own frying-pan in our own kitchen. Listening to
+our own phonograph in our own parlor. Geraniums and--and kids--and--and
+things. Gas-logs. Stationary washtubs. Jimmie! Jimmie!"
+
+Mr. James P. Batch reached up for his hat and overcoat, cramming the
+newspaper into a rear pocket.
+
+"Come on," he said, stalking toward the side door and not waiting to see
+her to her feet.
+
+Outside, a banner of stars was over the narrow street. For a chain of
+five blocks he walked, with a silence and speed that Miss Slayback could
+only match with a running quickstep. But she was not out of breath. Her
+head was up, and her hand where it hooked into Mr. Batch's elbow, was in
+a vise that tightened with each block.
+
+
+You who will mete out no other approval than that vouched for by the
+stamp of time and whose contempt for the contemporary is from behind the
+easy refuge of the classics, suffer you the shuddering analogy that
+between Aspasia who inspired Pericles, Theodora who suggested the
+Justinian code, and Gertie Slayback who commandeered Jimmie Batch, is a
+sistership which rounds them, like a lasso thrown back into time, into
+one and the same petticoat dynasty behind the throne.
+
+True, Gertie Slayback's _mise en scène_ was a two-room kitchenette
+apartment situated in the Bronx at a surveyor's farthest point between
+two Subway stations, and her present state one of frequent red-faced
+forays down into a packing-case. But there was that in her eyes which
+witchingly bespoke the conquered, but not the conqueror. Hers was
+actually the titillating wonder of a bird which, captured, closes its
+wings, that surrender can be so sweet.
+
+Once she sat on the edge of the packing-case, dallying with a hammer,
+then laid it aside suddenly, to cross the littered room and place the
+side of her head to the immaculate waistcoat of Mr. Jimmie Batch,
+red-faced, too, over wrenching up with hatchet-edge a barrel-top.
+
+"Jimmie darling, I--I just never will get over your finding this place
+for us."
+
+Mr. Batch wiped his forearm across his brow, his voice jerking between
+the squeak of nails extracted from wood.
+
+"It was you, honey. You give me the to let ad. and I came to look,
+that's all."
+
+"Just the samey, it was my boy found it. If you hadn't come to look we
+might have been forced into taking that old dark coop over on Simpson
+Street."
+
+"What's all this junk in this barrel?"
+
+"Them's kitchen utensils, honey."
+
+"Kitchen what?"
+
+"Kitchen things that you don't know nothing about except to eat good
+things out of."
+
+"What's this?"
+
+"Don't bend it! That's a celery-brush. Ain't it cute?"
+
+"A celery-brush! Why didn't you get it a comb, too?"
+
+"Ah, now, honey-bee, don't go trying to be funny and picking through
+these things you don't know nothing about! They're just cute things I'm
+going to cook something grand suppers in, for my something awful bad
+boy."
+
+He leaned down to kiss her at that. "Gee!"
+
+She was standing, her shoulder to him and head thrown back against his
+chest. She looked up to stroke his cheek, her face foreshortened.
+
+"I'm all black and blue pinching myself, Jimmie."
+
+"Me too."
+
+"Every night when I get home from working here in the flat I say to
+myself in the looking-glass, I say, 'Gertie Slayback, what if you're
+only dreamin'?'"
+
+"Me too."
+
+"I say to myself, 'Are you sure that darling flat up there, with the new
+pink-and-white wall-paper and the furniture arriving every day, is going
+to be yours in a few days when you're Mrs. Jimmie Batch?'"
+
+"Mrs. Jimmie Batch--say, that's immense."
+
+"I keep saying it to myself every night, 'One day less.' Last night it
+was two days. To-night it'll be--one day, Jimmie, till I'm--her."
+
+She closed her eyes and let her hand linger up to his cheek, head still
+back against him, so that, inclining his head, he could rest his lips in
+the ash-blond fluff of her hair.
+
+"Talk about can't wait! If to-morrow was any farther off they'd have to
+sweep out a padded cell for me."
+
+She turned to rumple the smooth light thatch of his hair. "Bad boy!
+Can't wait! And here we are getting married all of a sudden, just like
+that. Up to the time of this draft business, Jimmie Batch, 'pretty soon'
+was the only date I could ever get out of you, and now here you are
+crying over one day's wait. Bad honey boy!"
+
+He reached back for the pink newspaper so habitually protruding from his
+hip-pocket. "You ought to see the way they're neck-breaking for the
+marriage-license bureaus since the draft. First thing we know the whole
+shebang of the boys will be claiming exemption of sole support of wife."
+
+"It's a good thing we made up our minds quick, Jimmie. They'll be
+getting wise. If too many get exemption from the army by marrying right
+away, it'll be a give-away."
+
+"I'd like to know who can lay his hands on the exemption of a little
+wife to support."
+
+"Oh, Jimmie, it--it sounds so funny. Being supported! Me that always did
+the supporting, not only to me, but to my mother and great-grandmother
+up to the day they died."
+
+"I'm the greatest little supporter you ever seen."
+
+"Me getting up mornings to stay at home in my own darling little flat,
+and no basement or time-clock. Nothing but a busy little hubby to eat
+him nice, smelly, bacon breakfast and grab him nice morning newspaper,
+kiss him wifie, and run downtown to support her. Jimmie, every morning
+for your breakfast I'm going to fry----"
+
+"You bet your life he's going to support her, and he's going to pay back
+that forty dollars of his girl's that went into his wedding duds, that
+hundred and ninety of his girl's savings that went into furniture----"
+
+"We got to meet our instalments every month first, Jimmie. That's what
+we want--no debts and every little darling piece of furniture paid up."
+
+"We--I'm going to pay it, too."
+
+"And my Jimmie is going to work to get himself promoted and quit being a
+sorehead at his steady hours and all."
+
+"I know more about selling, honey, than the whole bunch of dubs in that
+store put together if they'd give me a chance to prove it."
+
+She laid her palm to his lips.
+
+"Shh-h-h! You don't nothing of the kind. It's not conceit, it's work is
+going to get my boy his raise."
+
+"If they'd listen to me, that department would----"
+
+"Sh-h-h! J. G. Hoffheimer don't have to get pointers from Jimmie Batch
+how to run his department store."
+
+"There you go again. What's J. G. Hoffheimer got that I ain't? Luck and
+a few dollars in his pocket that, if I had in mine, would----"
+
+"It was his own grit put those dollars there, Jimmie. Just put it out of
+your head that it's luck makes a self-made man."
+
+"Self-made! You mean things just broke right for him. That's two-thirds
+of this self-made business."
+
+"You mean he buckled right down to brass tacks, and that's what my boy
+is going to do."
+
+"The trouble with this world is it takes money to make money. Get your
+first few dollars, I always say, no matter how, and then when you're on
+your feet scratch your conscience if it itches. That's why I said in the
+beginning, if we had took that hundred and ninety furniture money and
+staked it on----"
+
+"Jimmie, please--please! You wouldn't want to take a girl's savings of
+years and years to gamble on a sporty cigar proposition with a card-room
+in the rear. You wouldn't, Jimmie. You ain't that kind of fellow. Tell
+me you wouldn't, Jimmie."
+
+He turned away to dive into the barrel. "Naw," he said. "I wouldn't."
+
+The sun had receded, leaving a sudden sullen gray; the little square
+room, littered with an upheaval of excelsior, sheet-shrouded furniture,
+and the paper-hanger's paraphernalia and inimitable smells, darkening
+and seeming to chill.
+
+"We got to quit now, Jimmie. It's getting dark and the gas ain't turned
+on in the meter yet."
+
+He rose up out of the barrel, holding out at arm's-length what might
+have been a tinsmith's version of a porcupine.
+
+"What in-- What's this thing that scratched me?"
+
+She danced to take it. "It's a grater, a darling grater for horseradish
+and nutmeg and cocoanut. I'm going to fix you a cocoanut cake for our
+honeymoon supper to-morrow night, honey-bee. Essie Wohlgemuth over in
+the cake-demonstrating department is going to bring me the recipe.
+Cocoanut cake! And I'm going to fry us a little steak in this darling
+little skillet. Ain't it the cutest!"
+
+"Cute she calls a tin skillet."
+
+"Look what's pasted on it. 'Little Housewife's Skillet. The Kitchen
+Fairy.' That's what I'm going to be, Jimmie, the kitchen fairy. Give me
+that. It's a rolling-pin. All my life I've wanted a rolling-pin. Look
+honey, a little string to hang it up by. I'm going to hang everything up
+in rows. It's going to look like Tiffany's kitchen, all shiny. Give me,
+honey; that's an egg-beater. Look at it whiz. And this--this is a pan
+for war bread. I'm going to make us war bread to help the soldiers."
+
+"You're a little soldier yourself," he said.
+
+"That's what I would be if I was a man, a soldier all in brass buttons."
+
+"There's a bunch of the fellows going," said Mr. Batch, standing at the
+window, looking out over roofs, dilly-dallying up and down on his heels
+and breaking into a low, contemplative whistle.
+
+She was at his shoulder, peering over it. "You wouldn't be afraid, would
+you, Jimmie?"
+
+"You bet your life I wouldn't."
+
+She was tiptoes now, her arms creeping up to him. "Only my boy's got a
+wife--a brand-new wifie to support, ain't he?"
+
+"That's what he has," said Mr. Batch, stroking her forearm, but still
+gazing through and beyond whatever roofs he was seeing.
+
+"Jimmie!"
+
+"Huh?"
+
+"Look! We got a view of the Hudson River from our flat, just like we
+lived on Riverside Drive."
+
+"All the Hudson River I can see is fifteen smokestacks and somebody's
+wash-line out."
+
+"It ain't so. We got a grand view. Look! Stand on tiptoe, Jimmie, like
+me. There, between that water-tank on that black roof over there and
+them two chimneys. See? Watch my finger. A little stream of something
+over there that moves."
+
+"No, I don't see."
+
+"Look, honey-bee, close! See that little streak?"
+
+"All right, then, if you see it I see it."
+
+"To think we got a river view from our flat! It's like living in the
+country. I'll peek out at it all day long. God! honey, I just never will
+be over the happiness of being done with basements."
+
+"It was swell of old Higgins to give us this half-Saturday. It shows
+where you stood with the management, Gert--this and a five-dollar gold
+piece. Lord knows they wouldn't pony up that way if it was me getting
+married by myself."
+
+"It's because my boy ain't shown them down there yet the best that's in
+him. You just watch his little safety-first wife see to it that from now
+on he keeps up her record of never in seven years pushing the time-clock
+even one minute late, and that he keeps his stock shelves O. K. and
+shows his department he's a comer-on."
+
+"With that bunch of boobs a fellow's got a swell chance to get
+anywheres."
+
+"It's getting late, Jimmie. It don't look nice for us to stay here so
+late alone, not till--to-morrow. Ruby and Essie and Charley are going to
+meet us in the minister's back parlor at ten sharp in the morning. We
+can be back here by noon and get the place cleared up enough to give 'em
+a little lunch, just a fun lunch without fixings."
+
+"I hope the old guy don't waste no time splicing us. It's one of the
+things a fellow likes to have over with."
+
+"Jimmie! Why, it's the most beautiful thing in the world, like a garden
+of lilies or--or something, a marriage ceremony is! You got the ring
+safe, honey-bee, and the license?"
+
+"Pinned in my pocket where you put 'em, Flirty Gertie."
+
+"Flirty Gertie! Now you'll begin teasing me with that all our life--the
+way I didn't slap your face that night when I should have. I just
+couldn't have, honey. Goes to show we were just cut and dried for each
+other, don't it? Me, a girl that never in her life let a fellow even bat
+his eyes at her without an introduction. But that night when you winked,
+honey--something inside of me just winked back."
+
+"My girl!"
+
+"You mean it, boy? You ain't sorry about nothing, Jimmie?"
+
+"Sorry? Well, I guess not!"
+
+"You seen the way--she--May--you seen for yourself what she was, when we
+seen her walking, that next night after Ceiner's, nearly staggering, up
+Sixth Avenue with Budge Evans."
+
+"I never took no stock in her, honey. I was just letting her like me."
+
+She sat back on the box edge, regarding him, her face so soft and wont
+to smile that she could not keep its composure.
+
+"Get me my hat and coat, honey. We'll walk down. Got the key?"
+
+They skirmished in the gloom, moving through slit-like aisles of
+furniture and packing-box.
+
+"Ouch!"
+
+"Oh, the running water is hot, Jimmie, just like the ad. said! We got
+red-hot running water in our flat. Close the front windows, honey. We
+don't want it to rain in on our new green sofa. Not till it's paid for,
+anyways."
+
+"Hurry."
+
+"I'm ready."
+
+They met at the door, kissing on the inside and the outside of it; at
+the head of the fourth and the third and the second balustrade down.
+
+"We'll always make 'em little love landings, Jimmie, so we can't ever
+get tired climbing them."
+
+"Yep."
+
+Outside there was still a pink glow in a clean sky. The first flush of
+spring in the air had died, leaving chill. They walked briskly, arm in
+arm, down the asphalt incline of sidewalk leading from their
+apartment-house, a new street of canned homes built on a hillside--the
+sepulchral abode of the city's trapped whose only escape is down the
+fire-escape, and then only when the alternative is death. At the base of
+the hill there flows, in constant hubbub, a great up-and-down artery of
+street, repeating itself, mile after mile, in terms of the butcher, the
+baker, and the every-other-corner drug-store of a million dollar
+corporation. Housewives with perambulators and oilcloth shopping bags.
+Children on roller-skates. The din of small tradesmen and the humdrum of
+every city block where the homes remain unboarded all summer, and every
+wife is on haggling terms with the purveyor of her evening roundsteak
+and mess of rutabaga.
+
+Then there is the soap-box provender, too, sure of a crowd, offering
+creed, propaganda, patent medicine, and politics. It is the pulpit of
+the reformer and the housetop of the fanatic, this soap-box. From it the
+voice to the city is often a pious one, an impious one, and almost
+always a raucous one. Luther and Sophocles and even a Citizen of
+Nazareth made of the four winds of the street corner the walls of a
+temple of wisdom. What more fitting acropolis for freedom of speech
+than the great out-of-doors!
+
+Turning from the incline of cross-street into this petty Bagdad of the
+petty wise, the voice of the street corner lifted itself above the
+inarticulate din of the thoroughfare. A youth, thewed like an ox,
+surmounted on a stack of three self-provided canned-goods boxes, his
+in-at-the-waist silhouette thrown out against a sky that was almost
+ready to break out in stars; a crowd tightening about him.
+
+"It's a soldier-boy talkin', Gert."
+
+"If it ain't!" They tiptoed at the fringe of the circle, heads back.
+
+"Look, Gert, he's a lieutenant; he's got a shoulder-bar. And those four
+down there holding the flag are just privates. You can always tell a
+lieutenant by the bar."
+
+"Uh-huh."
+
+"Say, them boys do stack up some for Uncle Sam."
+
+"'Shh-h-h, Jimmie!"
+
+"I'm here to tell you that them boys stack up some."
+
+A banner stiffened out in the breeze, Mr. Batch reading: "Enlist before
+you are drafted. Last chance to beat the draft. Prove your patriotism.
+Enlist now! Your country calls!"
+
+"Come on," said Mr. Batch.
+
+"Wait. I want to hear what he's saying."
+
+" ... there's not a man here before me can afford to shirk his duty to
+his country. The slacker can't get along without his country, but his
+country can very easily get along without him."
+
+Cheers.
+
+"The poor exemption boobs are already running for doctors' certificates
+and marriage licenses, but even if they get by with it--and it is
+ninety-nine to one they won't--they can't run away from their own
+degradation and shame."
+
+"Come on, Jimmie."
+
+"Wait."
+
+"Men of America, for every one of you who tries to dodge his duty to
+his country there is a yellow streak somewhere underneath the hide of
+you. Women of America, every one of you that helps to foster the spirit
+of cowardice in your particular man or men is helping to make a coward.
+It's the cowards and the quitters and the slackers and dodgers that need
+this war more than the patriotic ones who are willing to buckle on and
+go!
+
+"Don't be a buttonhole patriot! A government that is good enough to live
+under is good enough to fight under!"
+
+Cheers.
+
+"If there is any reason on earth that has manifested itself for this
+devastating and terrible war it is that it has been a maker of men.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen, I am back from four months in the trenches with
+the French army, and I've come home, now that my own country is at war,
+to give her every ounce of energy I've got to offer. As soon as a hole
+in my side is healed up I'm going back to those trenches, and I want to
+say to you that them four months of mine face to face with life and with
+death have done more for me than all my twenty-four civilian years put
+together."
+
+Cheers.
+
+"I'll be a different man, if I live to come back home after this war and
+take up my work again as a draftsman. Why, I've seen weaklings and
+self-confessed failures and even ninnies go into them trenches and come
+out--oh yes, plenty of them do come out--men. Men that have got close
+enough down to the facts of things to feel new realizations of what life
+means come over them. Men that have gotten back their pep, their
+ambitions, their unselfishness. That's what war can do for your men, you
+women who are helping them to foster the spirit of holding back, of
+cheating their government. That's what war can do for your men. Make of
+them the kind of men who some day can face their children without
+having to hang their heads. Men who can answer for their part in making
+the world a safe place for democracy."
+
+An hour they stood there, the air quieting but chilling, and lavishly
+sown stars cropping out. Street lights had come out, too, throwing up in
+ever darker relief the figure above the heads of the crowd. His voice
+had coarsened and taken on a raw edge, but every gesture was flung from
+the socket, and from where they had forced themselves into the tight
+circle Gertie Slayback, her mouth fallen open and her head still back,
+could see the sinews of him ripple under khaki and the diaphragm lift
+for voice.
+
+There was a shift of speakers then, this time a private, still too
+rangy, but his looseness of frame seeming already to conform to the
+exigency of uniform.
+
+"Come on, Jimmie. I--I'm cold."
+
+They worked out into the freedom of the sidewalk, and for ten minutes,
+down blocks of petty shops already lighted, walked in a silence that
+grew apace.
+
+He was suddenly conscious that she was crying, quietly, her handkerchief
+wadded against her mouth. He strode on with a scowl and his head bent.
+
+"Let's sit down in this little park, Jimmie. I'm tired."
+
+They rested on a bench on one of those small triangles of
+breathing-space which the city ekes out now and then; mill ends of land
+parcels.
+
+He took immediately to roving the toe of his shoe in and out among the
+gravel. She stole out her hand to his arm.
+
+"Well, Jimmie?" Her voice was in the gauze of a whisper that hardly left
+her throat.
+
+"Well, what?" he said, still toeing.
+
+"There--there's a lot of things we never thought about, Jimmie."
+
+"Aw!"
+
+"Eh, Jimmie?"
+
+"You mean _you_ never thought about."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I know what I mean alrighty."
+
+"I--I was the one that suggested it, Jimmie, but--but you fell in. I--I
+just couldn't bear to think of it, Jimmie--your going and all. I
+suggested it, but--you fell in."
+
+"Say, when a fellow's shoved he falls. I never gave a thought to
+sneaking an exemption until it was put in my head. I'd smash the fellow
+in the face that calls me coward, I will."
+
+"You could have knocked me down with a feather, Jimmie, looking at it
+his way, all of a sudden."
+
+"You couldn't me. Don't think I was ever strong for the whole business.
+I mean the exemption part. I wasn't going to say nothing. What's the
+use, seeing the way you had your heart set on--on things? But the whole
+business, if you want to know it, went against my grain. I'll smash the
+fellow in the face that calls me a coward."
+
+"I know, Jimmie; you--you're right. It was me suggested hurrying things
+like this. Sneakin'! Oh, God! ain't I the messer-up!"
+
+"Lay easy, girl. I'm going to see it through. I guess there's been
+fellows before me and will be after me who have done worse. I'm going to
+see it through. All I got to say is I'll smash up the fellow calls me
+coward. Come on, forget it. Let's go."
+
+She was close to him, her cheek crinkled against his with the frank kind
+of social unconsciousness the park bench seems to engender.
+
+"Come on, Gert. I got a hunger on."
+
+"'Shh-h-h, Jimmie! Let me think. I'm thinking."
+
+"Too much thinking killed a cat. Come on."
+
+"Jimmie!"
+
+"Huh?"
+
+"Jimmie--would you--had you ever thought about being a soldier?"
+
+"Sure. I came in an ace of going into the army that time after--after
+that little Central Street trouble of mine. I've got a book in my trunk
+this minute on military tactics. Wouldn't surprise me a bit to see me
+land in the army some day."
+
+"It's a fine thing, Jimmie, for a fellow--the army."
+
+"Yeh, good for what ails him."
+
+She drew him back, pulling at his shoulder so that finally he faced her.
+"Jimmie!"
+
+"Huh?"
+
+"I got an idea."
+
+"Shoot."
+
+"You remember once, honey-bee, how I put it to you that night at
+Ceiner's how, if it was for your good, no sacrifice was too much to
+make."
+
+"Forget it."
+
+"You didn't believe it."
+
+"Aw, say now, what's the use digging up ancient history?"
+
+"You'd be right, Jimmie, not to believe it. I haven't lived up to what I
+said."
+
+"Oh Lord, honey! What's eating you now? Come to the point."
+
+She would not meet his eyes, turning her head from him to hide lips that
+would quiver. "Honey, it--it ain't coming off--that's all. Not
+now--anyways."
+
+"What ain't?"
+
+"Us."
+
+"Who?"
+
+"You know what I mean, Jimmie. It's like everything the soldier boy on
+the corner just said. I--I saw you getting red clear behind your ears
+over it. I--I was, too, Jimmie. It's like that soldier boy was put there
+on that corner just to show me, before it was too late, how wrong I been
+in every one of my ways. Us women who are helping to foster slackers.
+That's what we're making of them--slackers for life. And here I been
+thinking it was your good I had in mind, when all along it's been mine.
+That's what it's been, mine!"
+
+"Aw, now, Gert----"
+
+"You got to go, Jimmie. You got to go, because you want to go
+and--because I want you to go."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"To war."
+
+He took hold of her two arms because they were trembling. "Aw, now,
+Gert, I didn't say anything complaining. I----"
+
+"You did, Jimmie, you did, and--and I never was so glad over you that
+you did complain. I just never was so glad. I want you to go, Jimmie. I
+want you to go and get a man made out of you. They'll make a better job
+out of you than ever I can. I want you to get the yellow streak washed
+out. I want you to get to be all the things he said you would. For every
+line he was talking up there, I could see my boy coming home to me some
+day better than anything I could make out of him, babying him the way I
+can't help doing. I could see you, honey-bee, coming back to me with the
+kind of lift to your head a fellow has when he's been fighting to make
+the world a safe place for dem--for whatever it was he said. I want you
+to go, Jimmie. I want you to beat the draft, too. Nothing on earth can
+make me not want you to go."
+
+"Why, Gert--you're kiddin'!"
+
+"Honey, you want to go, don't you? You want to square up those shoulders
+and put on khaki, don't you? Tell me you want to go!"
+
+"Why--why, yes, Gert, if----"
+
+"Oh, you're going, Jimmie! You're going!"
+
+"Why, girl--you're crazy! Our flat! Our furniture--our----"
+
+"What's a flat? What's furniture? What's anything? There's not a firm in
+business wouldn't take back a boy's furniture--a boy's
+everything--that's going out to fight for--for dem-o-cracy! What's a
+flat? What's anything?"
+
+He let drop his head to hide his eyes.
+
+
+Do you know it is said that on the Desert of Sahara, the slope of
+Sorrento, and the marble of Fifth Avenue the sun can shine whitest?
+There is an iridescence to its glittering on bleached sand, blue bay,
+and Carrara façade that is sheer light distilled to its utmost.
+
+On one such day when, standing on the high slope of Fifth Avenue where
+it rises toward the Park, and looking down on it, surging to and fro, it
+was as if, so manifest the brilliancy, every head wore a tin helmet,
+parrying sunlight at a thousand angles of refraction.
+
+Parade-day, all this glittering midstream is swept to the clean sheen of
+a strip of moiré, this splendid desolation blocked on each side by
+crowds half the density of the sidewalk.
+
+On one of these sun-drenched Saturdays dedicated by a growing tradition
+to this or that national expression, the Ninety-ninth Regiment, to a
+flare of music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned
+into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable
+row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw
+if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were,
+for the great primordial mire of war.
+
+There is no state of being so finely sensitized as national
+consciousness. A gauntlet down, and it surges up. One ripple of a flag
+defended can goose-flesh a nation. How bitter and how sweet it is to
+give a soldier!
+
+To the seething kinetic chemistry of such mingling emotions there were
+women who stood in the frontal crowds of the sidewalks stifling
+hysteria, or ran after in terror at sight of one so personally hers,
+receding in that great impersonal wave of olive drab.
+
+And yet the air was martial with banner and with shout. And the ecstasy
+of such moments is like a dam against reality, pressing it back. It is
+in the pompless watches of the night or of too long days that such dams
+break, excoriating.
+
+For the thirty blocks of its course Gertie Slayback followed that wave
+of men, half run and half walk. Down from the curb, and at the beck and
+call of this or that policeman up again, only to find opportunity for
+still another dive out from the invisible roping off of the sidewalk
+crowds.
+
+From the middle of his line, she could see, sometimes, the tail of
+Jimmie Batch's glance roving for her, but to all purports his eye was
+solely for his own replica in front of him, and at such times, when he
+marched, his back had a little additional straightness that was almost
+swayback.
+
+Nor was Gertie Slayback crying. On the contrary, she was inclined to
+laughter. A little too inclined to a high and brittle sort of dissonance
+over which she seemed to have no control.
+
+"'By, Jimmie. So long! Jimmie! You-hoo!"
+
+Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp.
+
+"You-hoo! Jimmie! So long, Jimmie!"
+
+At Fourteenth Street, and to the solemn stroke of one from a tower, she
+broke off suddenly without even a second look back, dodging under the
+very arms of the crowd as she ran out from it.
+
+She was one and three-quarter minutes late when she punched the
+time-clock beside the Complaints and Adjustment Desk in the
+Bargain-Basement.
+
+
+
+
+FANNIE HURST
+
+
+"I find myself at twenty-nine exactly where at fourteen I had planned I
+would be." So Miss Hurst, in a sketch written for the _American
+Magazine_ (March, 1919), sums up the story of a remarkable literary
+career.
+
+Fannie Hurst was born in St. Louis, October 19, 1889. She attended the
+public schools, and began to write--with the firm intention of becoming
+an author--before she was out of grammar school. "At fourteen," she
+tells us in the article just referred to, "the one pigeon-hole of my
+little girl's desk was already stuffed with packets of rejected verse
+which had been furtively written, furtively mailed, and still more
+furtively received back again by heading off the postman a block before
+he reached our door." To this dream of authorship--the secret of which
+was carefully guarded from her family--she sacrificed her play and even
+her study hours. The first shock to her family came on St. Valentine's
+Day. There was to be a party that night, her first real party. A new
+dress was ready for the occasion, and a boy escort was to call for her
+in a cab. It happened that Valentine's day fell on Saturday, and
+Saturday was her time for writing. That day she turned from poetry to
+fiction, and was just in the middle of her first story when it came time
+to get ready for the party. She did not get ready. The escort arrived,
+cab and all; the family protested, but all to no purpose. She finished
+the story, mailed it, three weeks later received it back, and began her
+second story. All through her high school days she mailed a manuscript
+every Saturday, and they always came back.
+
+After high school she entered Washington University, St. Louis,
+graduating in 1909. And still she kept writing. To one journal alone
+she sent during those four years, thirty-four short stories. And they
+all came back--all but one. Just before graduation she sold her first
+article, a little sketch first written as a daily theme, which was
+published in a local weekly, and brought her three dollars. This was the
+total result of eight years' literary effort. So quite naturally she
+determined to go on.
+
+She announced to her family that she was going to New York City to
+become a writer. There was a stormy discussion in the Hurst family, but
+it ended in her going away, with a bundle of manuscripts in her trunk,
+to brave the big city alone. She found a tiny furnished room and set
+forth to besiege the editors' offices. One evening she returned, to find
+the house being raided, a patrol wagon at the curb, and the lodgers
+being hustled into it. She crossed the street and walked on, and never
+saw her bag or baggage again. By the help of the Young Women's Christian
+Association she found another room, in different surroundings, and set
+out again to make the round of the editorial offices.
+
+Then followed months and months of "writing, rewriting, rejections, and
+re-rejections." From home came letters now beseeching, now commanding
+her to return, and at length cutting off her allowance. So she returned
+her rented typewriter and applied at a theatrical agency. She secured a
+small part in a Broadway company, and then came her first acceptance of
+a story, with an actual check for thirty dollars. She left the stage and
+rented another typewriter,--but it was six months before she sold
+another story.
+
+In all this time she dipped deeply into the great stream of the city's
+life. To quote her own account:
+
+
+     For a month I lived with an Armenian family on West Broadway, in a
+     room over a tobacconist's shop. I apprenticed myself as a
+     sales-girl in New York's most gigantic department store. Four and
+     one-quarter yards of ribbon at seven and a half cents a yard proved
+     my Waterloo, and my resignation at the end of one week was not
+     entirely voluntary. I served as waitress in one of New York's most
+     gigantic chain of white-tiled lunch rooms. I stitched boys' pants
+     in a Polish sweatshop, and lived for two days in New York's most
+     rococo hotel. I took a graduate course in Anglo Saxon at Columbia
+     University, and one in lamp-shade making at Wanamaker's: wormed
+     into a Broadway musical show as wardrobe girl, and went out on a
+     self-appointed newspaper assignment to interview the mother of the
+     richest baby in the world.
+
+
+All these experiences yielded rich material for stories, but no one
+would print them. Her money was gone; so was a diamond ring that had
+been a Commencement present; it seemed as if there was nothing left but
+to give up the struggle and go back home. Then, just as she had struck
+bottom, an editor actually told her she could write, and followed up his
+remark by buying three stories. Since that time she has never had a
+story rejected, and her checks have gone up from two figures into four.
+And so, at the end of a long fight, as she says, "I find myself at
+twenty-nine exactly where at fourteen I had planned I would be. And best
+of all, what popular success I am enjoying has come not from pandering
+to popular demand or editorial policy, but from pandering to my own
+inner convictions, which are like little soul-tapers, lighting the way."
+
+All her work has been in the form of the short story. Her first book,
+_Just Around the Corner_, published in 1914, is a collection of stories
+dealing with the life of working girls in a city. _Every Soul Hath Its
+Song_ is a similar collection; the title suggests the author's outlook
+upon life. Some one has said that in looking at a puddle of water, you
+may see either the mud at the bottom or the sky reflected on its
+surface. Miss Hurst sees the reflection of the sky. The _Boston
+Transcript_ said of this book: "Here at last is a story writer who is
+bent on listening to the voices of America and interpreting them."
+_Gaslight Sonatas_, from which "Bitter-Sweet" is taken, showed an
+advance over her earlier work. Two of the stories from this volume were
+selected by Mr. O'Brien for his volume, _Best Short Stories_, for 1916
+and 1917. _Humoresque_, her latest work, continues her studies of city
+types, drawn from New York and St. Louis. The stories show her insight
+into character and her graphic descriptive power. Miss Hurst is also the
+author of two plays, _The Land of the Free_ and _The Good Provider_.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE LUMBER COUNTRY
+
+_The men of the woods are not as the men of the cities. The great open
+spaces where men battle with the primeval forest set their mark upon
+their inhabitants, not only in physique but in character. The
+lumberman,--rough, frank, independent, humorous, equally ready for a
+fight or a frolic, has been portrayed at full length by Stewart Edward
+White in_ THE BLAZED TRAIL _and_ THE RIVERMAN. _In the following sketch,
+taken from his_ BLAZED TRAIL STORIES, _he shows the lumberman at work
+and at play._
+
+
+
+
+THE RIVERMAN
+
+BY
+
+STEWART EDWARD WHITE
+
+
+I first met him one Fourth of July afternoon in the middle eighties. The
+sawdust streets and high board sidewalks of the lumber town were filled
+to the brim with people. The permanent population, dressed in the
+stiffness of its Sunday best, escorted gingham wives or sweethearts; a
+dozen outsiders like myself tried not to be too conspicuous in a city
+smartness; but the great multitude was composed of the men of the woods.
+I sat, chair-tilted by the hotel, watching them pass. Their heavy
+woollen shirts crossed by the broad suspenders, the red of their sashes
+or leather shine of their belts, their short kersey trousers "stagged"
+off to leave a gap between the knee and the heavily spiked "cork
+boots"--all these were distinctive enough of their class, but most
+interesting to me were the eyes that peered from beneath their little
+round hats tilted rakishly askew. They were all subtly alike, those
+eyes. Some were black, some were brown, or gray, or blue, but all were
+steady and unabashed, all looked straight at you with a strange humorous
+blending of aggression and respect for your own business, and all
+without exception wrinkled at the corners with a suggestion of dry
+humor. In my half-conscious scrutiny I probably stared harder than I
+knew, for all at once a laughing pair of blue eyes suddenly met mine
+full, and an ironical voice drawled,
+
+"Say, bub, you look as interested as a man killing snakes. Am I your
+long-lost friend?"
+
+The tone of the voice matched accurately the attitude of the man, and
+that was quite non-committal. He stood cheerfully ready to meet the
+emergency. If I sought trouble, it was here to my hand; or if I needed
+help he was willing to offer it.
+
+"I guess you are," I replied, "if you can tell me what all this outfit's
+headed for."
+
+He thrust back his hat and ran his hand through a mop of closely cropped
+light curls.
+
+"Birling match," he explained briefly. "Come on."
+
+I joined him, and together we followed the crowd to the river, where we
+roosted like cormorants on adjacent piles overlooking a patch of clear
+water among filled booms.
+
+"Drive just over," my new friend informed me. "Rear come down last
+night. Fourther July celebration. This little town will scratch fer th'
+tall timber along about midnight when the boys goes in to take her
+apart."
+
+A half-dozen men with peavies rolled a white-pine log of about a foot
+and a half in diameter into the clear water, where it lay rocking back
+and forth, three or four feet from the boom piles. Suddenly a man ran
+the length of the boom, leaped easily into the air, and landed with both
+feet square on one end of the floating log. That end disappeared in an
+ankle-deep swirl of white foam, the other rose suddenly, the whole
+timber, projected forward by the shock, drove headlong to the middle of
+the little pond. And the man, his arms folded, his knees just bent in
+the graceful nervous attitude of the circus-rider, stood upright like a
+statue of bronze.
+
+A roar approved this feat.
+
+"That's Dickey Darrell," said my informant, "Roaring Dick. He's hell
+_and_ repeat. Watch him."
+
+The man on the log was small, with clean beautiful haunches and
+shoulders, but with hanging baboon arms. Perhaps his most striking
+feature was a mop of reddish-brown hair that overshadowed a little
+triangular white face accented by two reddish-brown quadrilaterals that
+served as eyebrows and a pair of inscrutable chipmunk eyes.
+
+For a moment he poised erect in the great calm of the public performer.
+Then slowly he began to revolve the log under his feet. The lofty gaze,
+the folded arms, the straight supple waist budged not by a hair's
+breadth; only the feet stepped forward, at first deliberately, then
+faster and faster, until the rolling log threw a blue spray a foot into
+the air. Then suddenly _slap! slap!_ the heavy caulks stamped a
+reversal. The log came instantaneously to rest, quivering exactly like
+some animal that had been spurred through its paces.
+
+"Magnificent!" I cried.
+
+"Hell, that's nothing!" my companion repressed me, "anybody can birl a
+log. Watch this."
+
+Roaring Dick for the first time unfolded his arms. With some appearance
+of caution he balanced his unstable footing into absolute immobility.
+Then he turned a somersault.
+
+This was the real thing. My friend uttered a wild yell of applause which
+was lost in a general roar.
+
+A long pike-pole shot out, bit the end of the timber, and towed it to
+the boom pile. Another man stepped on the log with Darrell. They stood
+facing each other, bent-kneed, alert. Suddenly with one accord they
+commenced to birl the log from left to right. The pace grew hot. Like
+squirrels treading a cage their feet twinkled. Then it became apparent
+that Darrell's opponent was gradually being forced from the top of the
+log. He could not keep up. Little by little, still moving desperately,
+he dropped back to the slant, then at last to the edge, and so off into
+the river with a mighty splash.
+
+"Clean birled!" commented my friend.
+
+One after another a half-dozen rivermen tackled the imperturbable Dick,
+but none of them possessed the agility to stay on top in the pace he set
+them. One boy of eighteen seemed for a moment to hold his own, and
+managed at least to keep out of the water even when Darrell had
+apparently reached his maximum speed. But that expert merely threw his
+entire weight into two reversing stamps of his feet, and the young
+fellow dove forward as abruptly as though he had been shied over a
+horse's head.
+
+The crowd was by now getting uproarious and impatient of volunteer
+effort to humble Darrell's challenge. It wanted the best, and at once.
+It began, with increasing insistence, to shout a name.
+
+"Jimmy Powers!" it vociferated, "Jimmy Powers!"
+
+And then by shamefaced bashfulness, by profane protest, by muttered and
+comprehensive curses I knew that my companion on the other pile was
+indicated.
+
+A dozen men near at hand began to shout. "Here he is!" they cried. "Come
+on, Jimmy." "Don't be a high banker." "Hang his hide on the fence."
+
+Jimmy, still red and swearing, suffered himself to be pulled from his
+elevation and disappeared in the throng. A moment later I caught his
+head and shoulders pushing toward the boom piles, and so in a moment he
+stepped warily aboard to face his antagonist.
+
+This was evidently no question to be determined by the simplicity of
+force or the simplicity of a child's trick. The two men stood
+half-crouched, face to face, watching each other narrowly, but making no
+move. To me they seemed like two wrestlers sparring for an opening.
+Slowly the log revolved one way; then slowly the other. It was a mere
+courtesy of salute. All at once Dick birled three rapid strokes from
+left to right as though about to roll the log, leaped into the air and
+landed square with both feet on the other slant of the timber. Jimmy
+Powers felt the jar, and acknowledged it by a spasmodic jerk with which
+he counterbalanced Darrell's weight. But he was not thrown.
+
+As though this daring and hazardous manoeuvre had opened the combat,
+both men sprang to life. Sometimes the log rolled one way, sometimes the
+other, sometimes it jerked from side to side like a crazy thing, but
+always with the rapidity of light, always in a smother of spray and
+foam. The decided _spat, spat, spat_ of the reversing blows from the
+caulked boots sounded like picket firing. I could not make out the
+different leads, feints, parries, and counters of this strange method of
+boxing, nor could I distinguish to whose initiative the various
+evolutions of that log could be ascribed. But I retain still a vivid
+mental picture of two men nearly motionless above the waist, nearly
+vibrant below it, dominating the insane gyrations of a stick of pine.
+
+The crowd was appreciative and partisan--for Jimmy Powers. It howled
+wildly, and rose thereby to even higher excitement. Then it forgot its
+manners utterly and groaned when it made out that a sudden splash
+represented its favorite, while the indomitable Darrell still trod the
+quarter-deck as champion birler for the year.
+
+I must confess I was as sorry as anybody. I climbed down from my
+cormorant roost, and picked my way between the alleys of aromatic piled
+lumber in order to avoid the press, and cursed the little gods heartily
+for undue partiality in the wrong direction. In this manner I happened
+on Jimmy Powers himself seated dripping on a board and examining his
+bare foot.
+
+"I'm sorry," said I behind him. "How did he do it?"
+
+He whirled, and I could see that his laughing boyish face had become
+suddenly grim and stern, and that his eyes were shot with blood.
+
+"Oh, it's you, is it?" he growled disparagingly. "Well, that's how he
+did it."
+
+He held out his foot. Across the instep and at the base of the toes ran
+two rows of tiny round punctures from which the blood was oozing. I
+looked very inquiring.
+
+"He corked me!" Jimmy Powers explained. "Jammed his spikes into me!
+Stepped on my foot and tripped me, the----" Jimmy Powers certainly could
+swear.
+
+"Why didn't you make a kick?" I cried.
+
+"That ain't how I do it," he muttered, pulling on his heavy woollen
+sock.
+
+"But no," I insisted, my indignation mounting. "It's an outrage! That
+crowd was with you. All you had to do was to _say_ something----"
+
+He cut me short. "And give myself away as a damn fool--sure Mike. I
+ought to know Dickey Darrell by this time, and I ought to be big enough
+to take care of myself." He stamped his foot into his driver's shoe and
+took me by the arm, his good humor apparently restored. "No, don't lose
+any hair, bub; I'll get even with Roaring Dick."
+
+That night, having by the advice of the proprietor moved my bureau and
+trunk against the bedroom door, I lay wide awake listening to the taking
+of the town apart. At each especially vicious crash I wondered if that
+might be Jimmy Powers getting even with Roaring Dick.
+
+The following year, but earlier in the season, I again visited my little
+lumber town. In striking contrast to the life of that other midsummer
+day were the deserted streets. The landlord knew me, and after I had
+washed and eaten approached me with a suggestion.
+
+"You got all day in front of you," said he; "why don't you take a horse
+and buggy and make a visit to the big jam? Everybody's up there more or
+less."
+
+In response to my inquiry, he replied:
+
+"They've jammed at the upper bend, jammed bad. The crew's been picking
+at her for near a week now, and last night Darrell was down to see about
+some more dynamite. It's worth seein'. The breast of her is near thirty
+feet high, and lots of water in the river."
+
+"Darrell?" said I, catching at the name.
+
+"Yes. He's rear boss this year. Do you think you'd like to take a look
+at her?"
+
+"I think I should," I assented.
+
+The horse and I jogged slowly along a deep sand road, through wastes of
+pine stumps and belts of hardwood beautiful with the early spring, until
+finally we arrived at a clearing in which stood two huge tents, a
+mammoth kettle slung over a fire of logs, and drying racks about the
+timbers of another fire. A fat cook in the inevitable battered derby
+hat, two bare-armed cookees, and a chore "boy" of seventy-odd summers
+were the only human beings in sight. One of the cookees agreed to keep
+an eye on my horse. I picked my way down a well-worn trail toward the
+regular _clank, clank, click_ of the peavies.
+
+I emerged finally to a plateau elevated some fifty or sixty feet above
+the river. A half-dozen spectators were already gathered. Among them I
+could not but notice a tall, spare, broad-shouldered young fellow
+dressed in a quiet business suit, somewhat wrinkled, whose square,
+strong, clean-cut face and muscular hands were tanned by the weather to
+a dark umber-brown. In another moment I looked down on the jam.
+
+The breast, as my landlord had told me, rose sheer from the water to the
+height of at least twenty-five feet, bristling and formidable. Back of
+it pressed the volume of logs packed closely in an apparently
+inextricable tangle as far as the eye could reach. A man near informed
+me that the tail was a good three miles up stream. From beneath this
+wonderful _chevaux de frise_ foamed the current of the river,
+irresistible to any force less mighty than the statics of such a mass.
+
+A crew of forty or fifty men were at work. They clamped their peavies to
+the reluctant timbers, heaved, pushed, slid, and rolled them one by one
+into the current, where they were caught and borne away. They had been
+doing this for a week. As yet their efforts had made but slight
+impression on the bulk of the jam, but some time, with patience, they
+would reach the key-logs. Then the tangle would melt like sugar in the
+freshet, and these imperturbable workers would have to escape suddenly
+over the plunging logs to shore.
+
+My eye ranged over the men, and finally rested on Dickey Darrell. He
+was standing on the slanting end of an upheaved log dominating the
+scene. His little triangular face with the accents of the quadrilateral
+eyebrows was pale with the blaze of his energy, and his chipmunk eyes
+seemed to flame with a dynamic vehemence that caused those on whom they
+fell to jump as though they had been touched with a hot poker. I had
+heard more of Dickey Darrell since my last visit, and was glad of the
+chance to observe Morrison & Daly's best "driver" at work.
+
+The jam seemed on the very edge of breaking. After half an hour's
+strained expectation it seemed still on the very edge of breaking. So I
+sat down on a stump. Then for the first time I noticed another
+acquaintance, handling his peavie near the very person of the rear boss.
+
+"Hullo," said I to myself, "that's funny. I wonder if Jimmy Powers got
+even; and if so, why he is working so amicably and so near Roaring
+Dick."
+
+At noon the men came ashore for dinner. I paid a quarter into the cook's
+private exchequer and so was fed. After the meal I approached my
+acquaintance of the year before.
+
+"Hello, Powers," I greeted him, "I suppose you don't remember me?"
+
+"Sure," he responded heartily. "Ain't you a little early this year?"
+
+"No," I disclaimed, "this is a better sight than a birling match."
+
+I offered him a cigar, which he immediately substituted for his corn-cob
+pipe. We sat at the root of a tree.
+
+"It'll be a great sight when that jam pulls," said I.
+
+"You bet," he replied, "but she's a teaser. Even old Tim Shearer would
+have a picnic to make out just where the key-logs are. We've started her
+three times, but she's plugged tight every trip. Likely to pull almost
+any time."
+
+We discussed various topics. Finally I ventured:
+
+"I see your old friend Darrell is rear boss."
+
+"Yes," said Jimmy Powers, dryly.
+
+"By the way, did you fellows ever square up on that birling match?"
+
+"No," said Jimmy Powers; then after an instant, "Not yet."
+
+I glanced at him to recognize the square set to the jaw that had
+impressed me so formidably the year before. And again his face relaxed
+almost quizzically as he caught sight of mine.
+
+"Bub," said he, getting to his feet, "those little marks are on my foot
+yet. And just you tie into one idea: Dickey Darrel's got it coming." His
+face darkened with a swift anger. "God damn his soul!" he said,
+deliberately. It was no mere profanity. It was an imprecation, and in
+its very deliberation I glimpsed the flare of an undying hate.
+
+About three o'clock that afternoon Jimmy's prediction was fulfilled.
+Without the slightest warning the jam "pulled." Usually certain
+premonitory _cracks_, certain sinkings down, groanings forward,
+grumblings, shruggings, and sullen, reluctant shiftings of the logs give
+opportunity for the men to assure their safety. This jam, after
+inexplicably hanging fire for a week, as inexplicably started like a
+sprinter almost into its full gait. The first few tiers toppled smash
+into the current, raising a waterspout like that made by a dynamite
+explosion; the mass behind plunged forward blindly, rising and falling
+as the integral logs were up-ended, turned over, thrust one side, or
+forced bodily into the air by the mighty power playing jack-straws with
+them.
+
+The rivermen, though caught unaware, reached either bank. They held
+their peavies across their bodies as balancing-poles, and zig-zagged
+ashore with a calmness and lack of haste that were in reality only an
+indication of the keenness with which they fore-estimated each chance.
+Long experience with the ways of saw-logs brought them out. They knew
+the correlation of these many forces just as the expert billiard-player
+knows instinctively the various angles of incident and reflection
+between his cue-ball and its mark. Consequently they avoided the centers
+of eruption, paused on the spots steadied for the moment, dodged moving
+logs, trod those not yet under way, and so arrived on solid ground. The
+jam itself started with every indication of meaning business, gained
+momentum for a hundred feet, and then plugged to a standstill. The
+"break" was abortive.
+
+Now we all had leisure to notice two things. First, the movement had not
+been of the whole jam, as we had at first supposed, but only of a block
+or section of it twenty rods or so in extent. Thus between the part that
+had moved and the greater bulk that had not stirred lay a hundred feet
+of open water in which floated a number of loose logs. The second fact
+was, that Dickey Darrell had fallen into that open stretch of water and
+was in the act of swimming toward one of the floating logs. That much we
+were given time to appreciate thoroughly. Then the other section of the
+jam rumbled and began to break. Roaring Dick was caught between two
+gigantic millstones moving to crush him out of sight.
+
+An active figure darted down the tail of the first section, out over the
+floating logs, seized Darrell by the coat-collar, and so burdened began
+desperately to scale the very face of the breaking jam.
+
+Never was a more magnificent rescue. The logs were rolling, falling,
+diving against the laden man. He climbed as over a treadmill, a
+treadmill whose speed was constantly increasing. And when he finally
+gained the top, it was as the gap closed splintering beneath him and the
+man he had saved.
+
+It is not in the woodsman to be demonstrative at any time, but here was
+work demanding attention. Without a pause for breath or congratulation
+they turned to the necessity of the moment. The jam, the whole jam, was
+moving at last. Jimmy Powers ran ashore for his peavie. Roaring Dick,
+like a demon incarnate, threw himself into the work. Forty men attacked
+the jam in a dozen places, encouraging the movement, twisting aside the
+timbers that threatened to lock anew, directing pigmy-like the titanic
+forces into the channel of their efficiency. Roaring like wild cattle
+the logs swept by, at first slowly, then with the railroad rush of the
+curbed freshet. Men were everywhere, taking chances, like cowboys before
+the stampeded herd. And so, out of sight around the lower bend swept the
+front of the jam in a swirl of glory, the rivermen riding the great boom
+back of the creature they subdued, until at last, with the slackening
+current, the logs floated by free, cannoning with hollow sound one
+against the other. A half-dozen watchers, leaning statuesquely on the
+shafts of their peavies, watched the ordered ranks pass by.
+
+One by one the spectators departed. At last only myself and the
+brown-faced young man remained. He sat on a stump, staring with
+sightless eyes into vacancy. I did not disturb his thoughts.
+
+The sun dipped. A cool breeze of evening sucked up the river. Over near
+the cook-camp a big fire commenced to crackle by the drying frames. At
+dusk the rivermen straggled in from the down-river trail.
+
+The brown-faced young man arose and went to meet them. I saw him return
+in close conversation with Jimmy Powers. Before they reached us he had
+turned away with a gesture of farewell.
+
+Jimmy Powers stood looking after him long after his form had
+disappeared, and indeed even after the sound of his wheels had died
+toward town. As I approached, the riverman turned to me a face from
+which the reckless, contained self-reliance of the woods-worker had
+faded. It was wide-eyed with an almost awe-stricken wonder and
+adoration.
+
+"Do you know who that is?" he asked me in a hushed voice. "That's
+Thorpe, Harry Thorpe. And do you know what he said to me just now, _me_?
+He told me he wanted me to work in Camp One next winter, Thorpe's One.
+And he told me I was the first man he ever hired straight into One."
+
+His breath caught with something like a sob.
+
+I had heard of the man and of his methods. I knew he had made it a
+practice of recruiting for his prize camp only from the employees of his
+other camps, that, as Jimmy said, he never "hired straight into One." I
+had heard, too, of his reputation among his own and other woodsmen. But
+this was the first time I had ever come into personal contact with his
+influence. It impressed me the more in that I had come to know Jimmy
+Powers and his kind.
+
+"You deserve it, every bit," said I. "I'm not going to call you a hero,
+because that would make you tired. What you did this afternoon showed
+nerve. It was a brave act. But it was a better act because your rescued
+your enemy, because you forgot everything but your common humanity when
+danger----"
+
+I broke off. Jimmy was again looking at me with his ironically quizzical
+grin.
+
+"Bub," said he, "if you're going to hang any stars of Bethlehem on my
+Christmas tree, just call a halt right here. I didn't rescue that
+scalawag because I had any Christian sentiments, nary bit. I was just
+naturally savin' him for the birling match next Fourther July."
+
+
+
+
+STEWART EDWARD WHITE
+
+
+There are some authors whom we think of as bookmen; there are others
+whom we think of as men first, and as writers secondarily. Lowell, for
+example was a bookman; Roosevelt was a man of action who wrote books.
+Stewart Edward White, far more of a literary artist than Roosevelt,
+gives like him the impression of a man who has done things, of one who
+lives a full life, and produces books as a sort of by-product: very
+valuable, but not the chief end of existence.
+
+Mr. White was born in a small town near Grand Rapids, Michigan, March
+12, 1873. His parents had their own ideas about bringing up children.
+Instead of sending him to school they sent for a teacher to instruct
+him, they encouraged him to read, they took him traveling, not only to
+cities but to the silent places, the great forests, and to the lumber
+camps. He spent four years in California, and became a good horseman,
+making many trips in the saddle to the picturesque old ranches. When
+finally, he entered high school, at sixteen, he went in with boys of his
+own age, and graduated at eighteen, president of his class. And what he
+was most proud of was that he won and still holds, the five-mile running
+record of his school. He was intensely interested in birds at this time,
+and spent all his spare hours in the woods, studying bird-life. The
+result was a series of articles on birds, published in various
+scientific journals,--papers whose columns are not usually open to high
+school contributors.
+
+Then came a college course at the University of Michigan, with vacations
+spent in cruising about the Great Lakes in a twenty-eight-foot cutter
+sloop. After graduation he worked for a time in a packing house, then
+hearing of the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, he set off with
+the other gold-diggers. He did not find a mine, but the experience gave
+him a background for two later novels, _The Claim Jumpers_, and _The
+Westerners_.
+
+He went east for a year of graduate study at Columbia University. Like
+many other students, he found a friend in Professor Brander Matthews,
+who encouraged him to write of some of his western experiences. He sold
+a few short stories to magazines, and his first novel, _The Claim
+Jumpers_ was accepted by Appleton's. _The Westerners_, his next book,
+brought him $500 for the serial rights, and with its publication he
+definitely determined upon making authorship his calling. But it was not
+authorship in a study. _The Blazed Trail_ was written in a lumber camp
+in midwinter. He got up at four o'clock, wrote until eight, then put on
+his snowshoes and went out for a day's work. When the story was finished
+he gave it to the foreman of the camp to read. The man began it after
+supper, and when White got up next morning at four, he found him still
+reading, so he felt that the book would succeed.
+
+Another year he made a trip to the Hudson Bay country, and on his return
+wrote _Conjurer's House_. This was dramatized by George Broadhurst, and
+was very successful on the stage. With Thomas Fogarty, the artist, he
+made a long canoe trip, and the resulting book, _The Forest_, was
+illustrated by Mr. Fogarty. A camping trip in the Sierra Mountains of
+California was followed by the writing of _The Mountains_. His next
+book, _The Mystery_, was written jointly by Mr. White and Samuel Hopkins
+Adams. When it was finished they not only divided the proceeds but
+divided the characters for future stories, White taking Handy Solomon,
+whom he used again in _Arizona Nights_, and Darrow, who appeared in _The
+Sign at Six_.
+
+Then without warning, Mr. White went to Africa. His explanation was
+simple:
+
+
+     I went because I wanted to. About once in so often the wheels get
+     rusty and I have to get up and do something real or else blow up.
+     Africa seemed to me a pretty real thing. Let me add that I did not
+     go for material. I never go anywhere for material; if I did I
+     should not get it. That attitude of mine would give me merely
+     externals, which are not worth writing about. I go places merely
+     because for one reason or another they attract me. Then if it
+     happens that I get close enough to the life, I may later find that
+     I have something to write about. A man rarely writes anything
+     convincing unless he has lived the life; not with his critical
+     faculty alert, but whole-heartedly and because, for the time being,
+     it is his life.
+
+
+Naturally he found that he had something to write about on his return.
+_The Land of Footprints_, _African Camp Fires_, _Simba_, and _The
+Leopard Woman_ were books that grew out of his African trip. Mr. White
+next planned to write a series of three novels dealing with the romantic
+history of the state of California. The first of these books, _Gold_,
+describes the mad rush of the Forty-Niners on the first discovery of
+gold in California. _The Gray Dawn_, the second of the series, tells of
+the days of the Vigilantes, when the wild life of the mining camps
+slowly settled down to law and order. The coming of the World War was a
+fresh challenge to his adventurous spirit, and he saw service in France
+as a major in the U. S. Field Artillery.
+
+From this sketch it is apparent that Mr. White's books have all grown
+out of his experience, in the sense that the background is one that he
+has known. This explains the strong feeling of reality that we
+experience as we read his stories.
+
+
+
+
+NEW ENGLAND GRANITE
+
+_From the day the Pilgrims landed on a rockbound coast, the name New
+Englander has suggested certain traits of character. It connotes a
+restraint of feeling which more impulsive persons may mistake for
+absence of feeling; a reserve carried almost to the point of coldness; a
+quiet dignity which to a breezy Westerner seems like "stand-offishness."
+But those who come to know New England people well, find that beneath
+the flint is fire. Dorothy Canfield suggests the theme of her story in
+the title--"Flint and Fire."_
+
+
+
+
+FLINT AND FIRE
+
+BY
+
+DOROTHY CANFIELD
+
+
+My husband's cousin had come up from the city, slightly more fagged and
+sardonic than usual, and as he stretched himself out in the big
+porch-chair he was even more caustic than was his wont about the
+bareness and emotional sterility of the lives of our country people.
+
+"Perhaps they had, a couple of centuries ago, when the Puritan
+hallucination was still strong, a certain fierce savor of religious
+intolerance; but now that that has died out, and no material prosperity
+has come to let them share in the larger life of their century, there is
+a flatness, a mean absence of warmth or color, a deadness to all
+emotions but the pettiest sorts----"
+
+I pushed the pitcher nearer him, clinking the ice invitingly, and
+directed his attention to our iris-bed as a more cheerful object of
+contemplation than the degeneracy of the inhabitants of Vermont. The
+flowers burned on their tall stalks like yellow tongues of flame. The
+strong, sword-like green leaves thrust themselves boldly up into the
+spring air like a challenge. The plants vibrated with vigorous life.
+
+In the field beyond them, as vigorous as they, strode Adoniram Purdon
+behind his team, the reins tied together behind his muscular neck, his
+hands grasping the plow with the masterful sureness of the successful
+practitioner of an art. The hot, sweet spring sunshine shone down on
+'Niram's head with its thick crest of brown hair, the ineffable odor of
+newly turned earth steamed up about him like incense, the mountain
+stream beyond him leaped and shouted. His powerful body answered every
+call made on it with the precision of a splendid machine. But there was
+no elation in the grimly set face as 'Niram wrenched the plow around a
+big stone, or as, in a more favorable furrow, the gleaming share sped
+steadily along before the plowman, turning over a long, unbroken brown
+ribbon of earth.
+
+My cousin-in-law waved a nervous hand toward the sternly silent figure
+as it stepped doggedly behind the straining team, the head bent forward,
+the eyes fixed on the horses' heels.
+
+"There!" he said. "There is an example of what I mean. Is there another
+race on earth which could produce a man in such a situation who would
+not on such a day sing, or whistle, or at least hold up his head and
+look at all the earthly glories about him?"
+
+I was silent, but not for lack of material for speech. 'Niram's reasons
+for austere self-control were not such as I cared to discuss with a man
+of my cousin's mental attitude. As we sat looking at him the noon
+whistle from the village blew and the wise old horses stopped in the
+middle of a furrow. 'Niram unharnessed them, led them to the shade of a
+tree, and put on their nose-bags. Then he turned and came toward the
+house.
+
+"Don't I seem to remember," murmured my cousin under his breath, "that,
+even though he is a New-Englander, he has been known to make up errands
+to your kitchen to see your pretty Ev'leen Ann?"
+
+I looked at him hard; but he was only gazing down, rather cross-eyed, on
+his grizzled mustache, with an obvious petulant interest in the increase
+of white hairs in it. Evidently his had been but a chance shot. 'Niram
+stepped up on the grass at the edge of the porch. He was so tall that he
+overtopped the railing easily, and, reaching a long arm over to where I
+sat, he handed me a small package done up in yellowish tissue-paper.
+Without hat-raisings, or good-mornings or any other of the greetings
+usual in a more effusive civilization, he explained briefly:
+
+"My stepmother wanted I should give you this. She said to thank you for
+the grape-juice." As he spoke he looked at me gravely out of deep-set
+blue eyes, and when he had delivered his message he held his peace.
+
+I expressed myself with the babbling volubility of one whose manners
+have been corrupted by occasional sojourns in the city. "Oh, 'Niram!" I
+cried protestingly, as I opened the package and took out an exquisitely
+wrought old-fashioned collar. "Oh, 'Niram! How _could_ your stepmother
+give such a thing away? Why, it must be one of her precious old relics.
+I don't _want_ her to give me something every time I do some little
+thing for her. Can't a neighbor send her in a few bottles of grape-juice
+without her thinking she must pay it back somehow? It's not kind of her.
+She has never yet let me do the least thing for her without repaying me
+with something that is worth ever so much more than my trifling
+services."
+
+When I had finished my prattling, 'Niram repeated, with an accent of
+finality, "She wanted I should give it to you."
+
+The older man stirred in his chair. Without looking at him I knew that
+his gaze on the young rustic was quizzical and that he was recording on
+the tablets of his merciless memory the ungraceful abruptness of the
+other's action and manner.
+
+"How is your stepmother feeling to-day, 'Niram?" I asked.
+
+"Worse."
+
+'Niram came to a full stop with the word. My cousin covered his
+satirical mouth with his hand.
+
+"Can't the doctor do anything to relieve her?" I asked.
+
+'Niram moved at last from his Indian-like immobility. He looked up under
+the brim of his felt hat at the sky-line of the mountain, shimmering
+iridescent above us. "He says maybe 'lectricity would help her some. I'm
+goin' to git her the batteries and things soon's I git the rubber
+bandages paid for."
+
+There was a long silence. My cousin stood up, yawning, and sauntered
+away toward the door. "Shall I send Ev'leen Ann out to get the pitcher
+and glasses?" he asked in an accent which he evidently thought very
+humorously significant.
+
+The strong face under the felt hat turned white, the jaw muscles set
+hard, but for all this show of strength there was an instant when the
+man's eyes looked out with the sick, helpless revelation of pain they
+might have had when 'Niram was a little boy of ten, a third of his
+present age, and less than half his present stature. Occasionally it is
+horrifying to see how a chance shot rings the bell.
+
+"No, no! Never mind!" I said hastily. "I'll take the tray in when I go."
+
+Without salutation or farewell 'Niram Purdon turned and went back to his
+work.
+
+The porch was an enchanted place, walled around with starlit darkness,
+visited by wisps of breezes shaking down from their wings the breath of
+lilac and syringa, flowering wild grapes, and plowed fields. Down at the
+foot of our sloping lawn the little river, still swollen by the melted
+snow from the mountains, plunged between its stony banks and shouted its
+brave song to the stars.
+
+We three middle-aged people--Paul, his cousin, and I--had disposed our
+uncomely, useful, middle-aged bodies in the big wicker chairs and left
+them there while our young souls wandered abroad in the sweet, dark
+glory of the night. At least Paul and I were doing this, as we sat, hand
+in hand, thinking of a May night twenty years before. One never knows
+what Horace is thinking of, but apparently he was not in his usual
+captious vein, for after a long pause he remarked, "It is a night almost
+indecorously inviting to the making of love."
+
+My answer seemed grotesquely out of key with this, but its sequence was
+clear in my mind. I got up, saying: "Oh, that reminds me--I must go and
+see Ev'leen Ann. I'd forgotten to plan to-morrow's dinner."
+
+"Oh, everlastingly Ev'leen Ann!" mocked Horace from his corner. "Can't
+you think of anything but Ev'leen Ann and her affairs?"
+
+I felt my way through the darkness of the house, toward the kitchen,
+both doors of which were tightly closed. When I stepped into the hot,
+close room, smelling of food and fire, I saw Ev'leen Ann sitting on the
+straight kitchen chair, the yellow light of the bracket-lamp bearing
+down on her heavy braids and bringing out the exquisitely subtle
+modeling of her smooth young face. Her hands were folded in her lap. She
+was staring at the blank wall, and the expression of her eyes so
+startled and shocked me that I stopped short and would have retreated if
+it had not been too late. She had seen me, roused herself, and said
+quietly, as though continuing a conversation interrupted the moment
+before:
+
+"I had been thinking that there was enough left of the roast to make
+hash-balls for dinner"--"hash-balls" is Ev'leen Ann's decent Anglo-Saxon
+name for croquettes--"and maybe you'd like a rhubarb pie."
+
+I knew well enough she had been thinking of no such thing, but I could
+as easily have slapped a reigning sovereign on the back as broken in on
+the regal reserve of Ev'leen Ann in her clean gingham.
+
+"Well, yes, Ev'leen Ann," I answered in her own tone of reasonable
+consideration of the matter; "that would be nice, and your pie-crust is
+so flaky that even Mr. Horace will have to be pleased."
+
+"Mr. Horace" is our title for the sardonic cousin whose carping ways are
+half a joke, and half a menace in our family.
+
+Ev'leen Ann could not manage the smile which should have greeted this
+sally. She looked down soberly at the white-pine top of the kitchen
+table and said, "I guess there is enough sparrow-grass up in the garden
+for a mess, too, if you'd like that."
+
+"That would taste very good," I agreed, my heart aching for her.
+
+"And creamed potatoes," she finished bravely, thrusting my unspoken
+pity from her.
+
+"You know I like creamed potatoes better than any other kind," I
+concurred.
+
+There was a silence. It seemed inhuman to go and leave the stricken
+young thing to fight her trouble alone in the ugly prison, her
+work-place, though I thought I could guess why Ev'leen Ann had shut the
+doors so tightly. I hung near her, searching my head for something to
+say, but she helped me by no casual remark. 'Niram is not the only one
+of our people who possesses to the full the supreme gift of silence.
+Finally I mentioned the report of a case of measles in the village, and
+Ev'leen Ann responded in kind with the news that her Aunt Emma had
+bought a potato-planter. Ev'leen Ann is an orphan, brought up by a
+well-to-do spinster aunt, who is strong-minded and runs her own farm.
+After a time we glided by way of similar transitions to the mention of
+his name.
+
+"'Niram Purdon tells me his stepmother is no better," I said. "Isn't it
+too bad?" I thought it well for Ev'leen Ann to be dragged out of her
+black cave of silence once in a while, even if it could be done only by
+force. As she made no answer, I went on. "Everybody who knows 'Niram
+thinks it splendid of him to do so much for his stepmother."
+
+Ev'leen Ann responded with a detached air, as though speaking of a
+matter in China: "Well, it ain't any more than what he should. She was
+awful good to him when he was little and his father got so sick. I guess
+'Niram wouldn't ha' had much to eat if she hadn't ha' gone out sewing to
+earn it for him and Mr. Purdon." She added firmly, after a moment's
+pause, "No, ma'am, I don't guess it's any more than what 'Niram had
+ought to do."
+
+"But it's very hard on a young man to feel that he's not able to marry,"
+I continued. Once in a great while we came so near the matter as this.
+Ev'leen Ann made no answer. Her face took on a pinched look of
+sickness. She set her lips as though she would never speak again. But I
+knew that a criticism of 'Niram would always rouse her, and said: "And
+really, I think 'Niram makes a great mistake to act as he does. A wife
+would be a help to him. She could take care of Mrs. Purdon and keep the
+house."
+
+Ev'leen Ann rose to the bait, speaking quickly with some heat: "I guess
+'Niram knows what's right for him to do! He can't afford to marry when
+he can't even keep up with the doctor's bills and all. He keeps the
+house himself, nights and mornings, and Mrs. Purdon is awful handy about
+taking care of herself, for all she's bedridden. That's her way, you
+know. She can't bear to have folks do for her. She'd die before she'd
+let anybody do anything for her that she could anyways do for herself!"
+
+I sighed acquiescingly. Mrs. Purdon's fierce independence was a rock on
+which every attempt at sympathy or help shattered itself to atoms. There
+seemed to be no other emotion left in her poor old work-worn shell of a
+body. As I looked at Ev'leen Ann it seemed rather a hateful
+characteristic, and I remarked, "It seems to me it's asking a good deal
+of 'Niram to spoil his life in order that his stepmother can go on
+pretending she's independent."
+
+Ev'leen Ann explained hastily: "Oh, 'Niram doesn't tell her anything
+about--She doesn't know he would like to--he don't want she should be
+worried--and, anyhow, as 'tis, he can't earn enough to keep ahead of all
+the doctors cost."
+
+"But the right kind of a wife--a good, competent girl--could help out by
+earning something, too."
+
+Ev'leen Ann looked at me forlornly, with no surprise. The idea was
+evidently not new to her. "Yes, ma'am, she could. But 'Niram says he
+ain't the kind of man to let his wife go out working." Even while she
+dropped under the killing verdict of his pride she was loyal to his
+standards and uttered no complaint. She went on, "'Niram wants Aunt
+Em'line to have things the way she wants 'em, as near as he can give
+'em to her--and it's right she should."
+
+"Aunt Emeline?" I repeated, surprised at her absence of mind. "You mean
+Mrs. Purdon, don't you?"
+
+Ev'leen Ann looked vexed at her slip, but she scorned to attempt any
+concealment. She explained dryly, with the shy, stiff embarrassment our
+country people have in speaking of private affairs: "Well, she _is_ my
+Aunt Em'line, Mrs. Purdon is, though I don't hardly ever call her that.
+You see, Aunt Emma brought me up, and she and Aunt Em'line don't have
+anything to do with each other. They were twins, and when they were
+girls they got edgeways over 'Niram's father, when 'Niram was a baby and
+his father was a young widower and come courting. Then Aunt Em'line
+married him, and Aunt Emma never spoke to her afterward."
+
+Occasionally, in walking unsuspectingly along one of our leafy lanes,
+some such fiery geyser of ancient heat uprears itself in a boiling
+column. I never get used to it, and started back now.
+
+"Why, I never heard of that before, and I've known your Aunt Emma and
+Mrs. Purdon for years!"
+
+"Well, they're pretty old now," said Ev'leen Ann listlessly, with the
+natural indifference of self-centered youth to the bygone tragedies of
+the preceding generation. "It happened quite some time ago. And both of
+them were so touchy, if anybody seemed to speak about it, that folks got
+in the way of letting it alone. First Aunt Emma wouldn't speak to her
+sister because she'd married the man she'd wanted, and then when Aunt
+Emma made out so well farmin' and got so well off, why, then Mrs. Purdon
+wouldn't try to make up because she was so poor. That was after Mr.
+Purdon had had his stroke of paralysis and they'd lost their farm and
+she'd taken to goin' out sewin'--not but what she was always perfectly
+satisfied with her bargain. She always acted as though she'd rather have
+her husband's old shirt stuffed with straw than any other man's whole
+body. He was a real nice man, I guess, Mr. Purdon was."
+
+There I had it--the curt, unexpanded chronicle of two passionate lives.
+And there I had also the key to Mrs. Purdon's fury of independence. It
+was the only way in which she could defend her husband against the
+charge, so damning to her world, of not having provided for his wife. It
+was the only monument she could rear to her husband's memory. And her
+husband had been all there was in life for her!
+
+I stood looking at her young kinswoman's face, noting the granite under
+the velvet softness of its youth, and divining the flame underlying the
+granite. I longed to break through her wall and to put my arms about
+her, and on the impulse of the moment I cast aside the pretense of
+casualness in our talk.
+
+"Oh, my dear!" I said. "Are you and 'Niram always to go on like this?
+Can't anybody help you?"
+
+Ev'leen Ann looked at me, her face suddenly old and gray. "No, ma'am; we
+ain't going to go on this way. We've decided, 'Niram and I have, that it
+ain't no use. We've decided that we'd better not go places together any
+more or see each other. It's too--If 'Niram thinks we can't"--she flamed
+so that I knew she was burning from head to foot--"it's better for us
+not----" She ended in a muffled voice, hiding her face in the crook of
+her arm.
+
+Ah, yes; now I knew why Ev'leen Ann had shut out the passionate breath
+of the spring night!
+
+I stood near her, a lump in my throat, but I divined the anguish of her
+shame at her involuntary self-revelation, and respected it. I dared do
+no more than to touch her shoulder gently.
+
+The door behind us rattled. Ev'leen Ann sprang up and turned her face
+toward the wall. Paul's cousin came in, shuffling a little, blinking his
+eyes in the light of the unshaded lamp, and looking very cross and
+tired. He glanced at us without comment as he went over to the sink.
+"Nobody offered me anything good to drink," he complained, "so I came in
+to get some water from the faucet for my nightcap."
+
+When he had drunk with ostentation from the tin dipper he went to the
+outside door and flung it open. "Don't you people know how hot and
+smelly it is in here?" he said, with his usual unceremonious abruptness.
+
+The night wind burst in, eddying, and puffed out the lamp with a breath.
+In an instant the room was filled with coolness and perfumes and the
+rushing sound of the river. Out of the darkness came Ev'leen Ann's young
+voice. "It seems to me," she said, as though speaking to herself, "that
+I never heard the Mill Brook sound so loud as it has this spring."
+
+
+I woke up that night with the start one has at a sudden call. But there
+had been no call. A profound silence spread itself through the sleeping
+house. Outdoors the wind had died down. Only the loud brawl of the river
+broke the stillness under the stars. But all through this silence and
+this vibrant song there rang a soundless menace which brought me out of
+bed and to my feet before I was awake. I heard Paul say, "What's the
+matter?" in a sleepy voice, and "Nothing," I answered, reaching for my
+dressing gown and slippers. I listened for a moment, my head ringing
+with all the frightened tales of the morbid vein of violence which runs
+through the character of our reticent people. There was still no sound.
+I went along the hall and up the stairs to Ev'leen Ann's room, and I
+opened the door without knocking. The room was empty.
+
+Then how I ran! Calling loudly for Paul to join me, I ran down the two
+flights of stairs, out of the open door, and along the hedged path which
+leads down to the little river. The starlight was clear. I could see
+everything as plainly as though in early dawn. I saw the river, and I
+saw--Ev'leen Ann.
+
+There was a dreadful moment of horror, which I shall never remember
+very clearly, and then Ev'leen Ann and I--both very wet--stood on the
+bank, shuddering in each other's arms.
+
+Into our hysteria there dropped, like a pungent caustic, the arid voice
+of Horace, remarking, "Well, are you two people crazy, or are you
+walking in your sleep?"
+
+I could feel Ev'leen Ann stiffen in my arms, and I fairly stepped back
+from her in astonished admiration as I heard her snatch at the straw
+thus offered, and still shuddering horribly from head to foot, force
+herself to say quite connectedly: "Why--yes--of course--I've always
+heard about my grandfather Parkman's walking in his sleep. Folks _said_
+'twould come out in the family some time."
+
+Paul was close behind Horace--I wondered a little at his not being
+first--and with many astonished and inane ejaculations, such as people
+always make on startling occasions, we made our way back into the house
+to hot blankets and toddies. But I slept no more that night.
+
+Some time after dawn, however, I did fall into a troubled
+unconsciousness full of bad dreams, and only woke when the sun was quite
+high. I opened my eyes to see Ev'leen Ann about to close the door.
+
+"Oh, did I wake you up?" she said. "I didn't mean to. That little Harris
+boy is here with a letter for you."
+
+She spoke with a slightly defiant tone of self-possession. I tried to
+play up to her interpretation of her rôle.
+
+"The little Harris boy?" I said, sitting up in bed. "What in the world
+is he bringing me a letter for?"
+
+Ev'leen Ann, with her usual clear perception of the superfluous in
+conversation, vouchsafed no opinion on a matter where she had no
+information, but went downstairs and brought back the note. It was of
+four lines, and--surprisingly enough--from old Mrs. Purdon, who asked me
+abruptly if I would have my husband take me to see her. She specified,
+and underlined the specification, that I was to come "right off, and in
+the automobile." Wondering extremely at this mysterious bidding, I
+sought out Paul, who obediently cranked up our small car and carried me
+off. There was no sign of Horace about the house, but some distance on
+the other side of the village we saw his tall, stooping figure swinging
+along the road. He carried a cane and was characteristically occupied in
+violently switching off the heads from the wayside weeds as he walked.
+He refused our offer to take him in, alleging that he was out for
+exercise and to reduce his flesh--an ancient jibe at his bony frame
+which made him for an instant show a leathery smile.
+
+There was, of course, no one at Mrs. Purdon's to let us into the tiny,
+three-roomed house, since the bedridden invalid spent her days there
+alone while 'Niram worked his team on other people's fields. Not knowing
+what we might find, Paul stayed outside in the car, while I stepped
+inside in answer to Mrs. Purdon's "Come _in_, why don't you!" which
+sounded quite as dry as usual. But when I saw her I knew that things
+were not as usual.
+
+She lay flat on her back, the little emaciated wisp of humanity, hardly
+raising the piecework quilt enough to make the bed seem occupied, and to
+account for the thin, worn old face on the pillow. But as I entered the
+room her eyes seized on mine, and I was aware of nothing but them and
+some fury of determination behind them. With a fierce heat of impatience
+at my first natural but quickly repressed exclamation of surprise she
+explained briefly that she wanted Paul to lift her into the automobile
+and take her into the next township to the Hulett farm. "I'm so shrunk
+away to nuthin', I know I can lay on the back seat if I crook myself
+up," she said, with a cool accent but a rather shaky voice. Seeming to
+realize that even her intense desire to strike the matter-of-fact note
+could not take the place of any and all explanation of her extraordinary
+request, she added, holding my eyes steady with her own: "Emma Hulett's
+my twin sister. I guess it ain't so queer, my wanting to see her."
+
+I thought, of course, we were to be used as the medium for some
+strange, sudden family reconciliation, and went out to ask Paul if he
+thought he could carry the old invalid to the car. He replied that, so
+far as that went, he could carry so thin an old body ten times around
+the town, but that he refused absolutely to take such a risk without
+authorization from her doctor. I remembered the burning eyes of
+resolution I had left inside, and sent him to present his objections to
+Mrs. Purdon herself.
+
+In a few moments I saw him emerge from the house with the old woman in
+his arms. He had evidently taken her up just as she lay. The piecework
+quilt hung down in long folds, flashing its brilliant reds and greens in
+the sunshine, which shone so strangely upon the pallid old countenance,
+facing the open sky for the first time in years.
+
+We drove in silence through the green and gold lyric of the spring day,
+an elderly company sadly out of key with the triumphant note of eternal
+youth which rang through all the visible world. Mrs. Purdon looked at
+nothing, said nothing, seemed to be aware of nothing but the purpose in
+her heart, whatever that might be. Paul and I, taking a leaf from our
+neighbors' book, held, with a courage like theirs, to their excellent
+habit of saying nothing when there is nothing to say. We arrived at the
+fine old Hulett place without the exchange of a single word.
+
+"Now carry me in," said Mrs. Purdon briefly, evidently hoarding her
+strength.
+
+"Wouldn't I better go and see if Miss Hulett is at home?" I asked.
+
+Mrs. Purdon shook her head impatiently and turned her compelling eyes on
+my husband. I went up the path before them to knock at the door,
+wondering what the people in the house would possibly be thinking of us.
+There was no answer to my knock. "Open the door and go in," commanded
+Mrs. Purdon from out her quilt.
+
+There was no one in the spacious, white-paneled hall, and no sound in
+all the big, many-roomed house.
+
+"Emma's out feeding the hens," conjectured Mrs. Purdon, not, I fancied,
+without a faint hint of relief in her voice. "Now carry me up-stairs to
+the first room on the right."
+
+Half hidden by his burden, Paul rolled wildly inquiring eyes at me; but
+he obediently staggered up the broad old staircase, and waiting till I
+had opened the first door to the right, stepped into the big bedroom.
+
+"Put me down on the bed, and open them shutters," Mrs. Purdon commanded.
+
+She still marshaled her forces with no lack of decision, but with a
+fainting voice which made me run over to her quickly as Paul laid her
+down on the four-poster. Her eyes were still indomitable, but her mouth
+hung open slackly and her color was startling. "Oh, Paul, quick! quick!
+Haven't you your flask with you?"
+
+Mrs. Purdon informed me in a barely audible whisper, "In the corner
+cupboard at the head of the stairs," and I flew down the hallway. I
+returned with a bottle, evidently of great age. There was only a little
+brandy in the bottom, but it whipped up a faint color into the sick
+woman's lips.
+
+As I was bending over her and Paul was thrusting open the shutters,
+letting in a flood of sunshine and flecky leaf-shadows, a firm, rapid
+step came down the hall, and a vigorous woman, with a tanned face and a
+clean, faded gingham dress, stopped short in the doorway with an
+expression of stupefaction.
+
+Mrs. Purdon put me on one side, and although she was physically
+incapable of moving her body by a hair's breadth, she gave the effect of
+having risen to meet the newcomer. "Well, Emma, here I am," she said in
+a queer voice, with involuntary quavers in it. As she went on she had it
+more under control, although in the course of her extraordinarily
+succinct speech it broke and failed her occasionally. When it did, she
+drew in her breath with an audible, painful effort, struggling forward
+steadily in what she had to say. "You see, Emma, it's this way: My
+'Niram and your Ev'leen Ann have been keeping company--ever since they
+went to school together--you know that 's well as I do, for all we let
+on we didn't, only I didn't know till just now how hard they took it.
+They can't get married because 'Niram can't keep even, let alone get
+ahead any, because I cost so much bein' sick, and the doctor says I may
+live for years this way, same's Aunt Hettie did. An' 'Niram is
+thirty-one, an' Ev'leen Ann is twenty-eight, an' they've had 'bout's
+much waitin' as is good for folks that set such store by each other.
+I've thought of every way out of it--and there ain't any. The Lord knows
+I don't enjoy livin' any, not so's to notice the enjoyment, and I'd
+thought of cutting my throat like Uncle Lish, but that'd make 'Niram and
+Ev'leen Ann feel so--to think why I'd done it; they'd never take the
+comfort they'd ought in bein' married; so that won't do. There's only
+one thing to do. I guess you'll have to take care of me till the Lord
+calls me. Maybe I won't last so long as the doctor thinks."
+
+When she finished, I felt my ears ringing in the silence. She had walked
+to the sacrificial altar with so steady a step, and laid upon it her
+precious all with so gallant a front of quiet resolution, that for an
+instant I failed to take in the sublimity of her self-immolation. Mrs.
+Purdon asking for charity! And asking the one woman who had most reason
+to refuse it to her.
+
+Paul looked at me miserably, the craven desire to escape a scene written
+all over him. "Wouldn't we better be going, Mrs. Purdon?" I said
+uneasily. I had not ventured to look at the woman in the doorway.
+
+Mrs. Purdon motioned me to remain, with an imperious gesture whose
+fierceness showed the tumult underlying her brave front. "No; I want you
+should stay. I want you should hear what I say, so's you can tell folks,
+if you have to. Now, look here, Emma," she went on to the other, still
+obstinately silent; "you must look at it the way 'tis. We're neither of
+us any good to anybody, the way we are--and I'm dreadfully in the way
+of the only two folks we care a pin about--either of us. You've got
+plenty to do with, and nothing to spend it on. I can't get myself out of
+their way by dying without going against what's Scripture and proper,
+but----" Her steely calm broke. She burst out in a screaming, hysterical
+voice: "You've just _got_ to, Emma Hulett! You've just _got_ to! If you
+don't I won't never go back to 'Niram's house! I'll lie in the ditch by
+the roadside till the poor-master comes to get me--and I'll tell
+everybody that it's because my own twin sister, with a house and a farm
+and money in the bank, turned me out to starve--" A fearful spasm cut
+her short. She lay twisted and limp, the whites of her eyes showing
+between the lids.
+
+"Good God, she's gone!" cried Paul, running to the bed.
+
+I was aware that the woman in the doorway had relaxed her frozen
+immobility and was between Paul and me as we rubbed the thin, icy hands
+and forced brandy between the placid lips. We all three thought her dead
+or dying, and labored over her with the frightened thankfulness for one
+another's living presence which always marks that dreadful moment. But
+even as we fanned and rubbed, and cried out to one another to open the
+windows and to bring water, the blue lips moved to a ghostly whisper:
+"Em, listen----" The old woman went back to the nickname of their common
+youth. "Em--your Ev'leen Ann--tried to drown herself--in the Mill Brook
+last night.... That's what decided me--to----" And then we were plunged
+into another desperate struggle with Death for the possession of the
+battered old habitation of the dauntless soul before us.
+
+"Isn't there any hot water in the house?" cried Paul, and "Yes, yes; a
+tea-kettle on the stove!" answered the woman who labored with us. Paul,
+divining that she meant the kitchen, fled down-stairs. I stole a look at
+Emma Hulett's face as she bent over the sister she had not seen in
+thirty years, and I knew that Mrs. Purdon's battle was won. It even
+seemed that she had won another skirmish in her never-ending war with
+death, for a little warmth began to come back into her hands.
+
+When Paul returned with the tea-kettle, and a hot-water bottle had been
+filled, the owner of the house straightened herself, assumed her
+rightful position as mistress of the situation, and began to issue
+commands. "You git right in the automobile, and go git the doctor," she
+told Paul. "That'll be the quickest. She's better now, and your wife and
+I can keep her goin' till the doctor gits here."
+
+As Paul left the room she snatched something white from a bureau-drawer,
+stripped the worn, patched old cotton nightgown from the skeleton-like
+body, and, handling the invalid with a strong, sure touch, slipped on a
+soft, woolly outing-flannel wrapper with a curious trimming of zigzag
+braid down the front. Mrs. Purdon opened her eyes very slightly, but
+shut them again at her sister's quick command, "You lay still, Em'line,
+and drink some of this brandy." She obeyed without comment, but after a
+pause she opened her eyes again and looked down at the new garment which
+clad her. She had that moment turned back from the door of death, but
+her first breath was used to set the scene for a return to a decent
+decorum.
+
+"You're still a great hand for rick-rack work, Em, I see," she murmured
+in a faint whisper. "Do you remember how surprised Aunt Su was when you
+made up a pattern?"
+
+"Well, I hadn't thought of it for quite some time," returned Miss
+Hulett, in exactly the same tone of everyday remark. As she spoke she
+slipped her arm under the other's head and poked the pillow to a more
+comfortable shape. "Now you lay perfectly still," she commanded in the
+hectoring tone of the born nurse; "I'm goin' to run down and make you up
+a good hot cup of sassafras tea."
+
+I followed her down into the kitchen and was met by the same refusal to
+be melodramatic which I had encountered in Ev'leen Ann. I was most
+anxious to know what version of my extraordinary morning I was to give
+out to the world, but hung silent, positively abashed by the cool
+casualness of the other woman as she mixed her brew. Finally, "Shall I
+tell 'Niram--What shall I say to Ev'leen Ann? If anybody asks me----" I
+brought out with clumsy hesitation.
+
+At the realization that her reserve and family pride were wholly at the
+mercy of any report I might choose to give, even my iron hostess
+faltered. She stopped short in the middle of the floor, looked at me
+silently, piteously, and found no word.
+
+I hastened to assure her that I would attempt no hateful picturesqueness
+of narration. "Suppose I just say that you were rather lonely here, now
+that Ev'leen Ann has left you, and that you thought it would be nice to
+have your sister come to stay with you, so that 'Niram and Ev'leen Ann
+can be married?"
+
+Emma Hulett breathed again. She walked toward the stairs with the
+steaming cup in her hand. Over her shoulder she remarked, "Well, yes,
+ma'am; that would be as good a way to put it as any, I guess."
+
+
+'Niram and Ev'leen Ann were standing up to be married. They looked very
+stiff and self-conscious, and Ev'leen Ann was very pale. 'Niram's big
+hands, bent in the crook of a man who handles tools, hung down by his
+new black trousers. Ev'leen Ann's strong fingers stood out stiffly from
+one another. They looked hard at the minister and repeated after him in
+low and meaningless tones the solemn and touching words of the marriage
+service. Back of them stood the wedding company, in freshly washed and
+ironed white dresses, new straw hats, and black suits smelling of
+camphor. In the background among the other elders, stood Paul and Horace
+and I--my husband and I hand in hand; Horace twiddling the black ribbon
+which holds his watch, and looking bored. Through the open windows into
+the stuffiness of the best room came an echo of the deep organ note of
+midsummer.
+
+"Whom God hath joined together----" said the minister, and the epitome
+of humanity which filled the room held its breath--the old with a wonder
+upon their life-scarred faces, the young half frightened to feel the
+stir of the great wings soaring so near them.
+
+Then it was all over. 'Niram and Ev'leen Ann were married, and the rest
+of us were bustling about to serve the hot biscuit and coffee and
+chicken salad, and to dish up the ice-cream. Afterward there were no
+citified refinements of cramming rice down the necks of the departing
+pair or tying placards to the carriage in which they went away. Some of
+the men went out to the barn and hitched up for 'Niram, and we all went
+down to the gate to see them drive off. They might have been going for
+one of their Sunday afternoon "buggy-rides" except for the wet eyes of
+the foolish women and girls who stood waving their hands in answer to
+the flutter of Ev'leen Ann's handkerchief as the carriage went down the
+hill.
+
+We had nothing to say to one another after they left, and began soberly
+to disperse to our respective vehicles. But as I was getting into our
+car a new thought suddenly struck me.
+
+"Why," I cried, "I never thought of it before! However in the world did
+old Mrs. Purdon know about Ev'leen Ann--that night?"
+
+Horace was pulling at the door, which was badly adjusted and shut hard.
+He closed it with a vicious slam "_I_ told her," he said crossly.
+
+
+
+
+HOW "FLINT AND FIRE" STARTED AND GREW
+
+BY
+
+DOROTHY CANFIELD
+
+
+I feel very dubious about the wisdom or usefulness of publishing the
+following statement of how one of my stories came into existence. This
+is not on account of the obvious danger of seeming to have illusions
+about the value of my work, as though I imagined one of my stories was
+inherently worth in itself a careful public analysis of its growth; the
+chance, remote as it might be, of usefulness to students, would outweigh
+this personal consideration. What is more important is the danger that
+some student may take the explanation as a recipe or rule for the
+construction of other stories, and I totally disbelieve in such rules or
+recipes.
+
+As a rule, when a story is finished, and certainly always by the time it
+is published, I have no recollection of the various phases of its
+development. In the case of "Flint and Fire", an old friend chanced to
+ask me, shortly after the tale was completed, to write out for his
+English classes, the stages of the construction of a short story. I set
+them down, hastily, formlessly, but just as they happened, and this
+gives me a record which I could not reproduce for any other story I ever
+wrote. These notes are here published on the chance that such a truthful
+record of the growth of one short story, may have some general
+suggestiveness for students.
+
+No two of my stories are ever constructed in the same way, but broadly
+viewed they all have exactly the same genesis, and I confess I cannot
+conceive of any creative fiction written from any other beginning ...
+that of a generally intensified emotional sensibility, such as every
+human being experiences with more or less frequency. Everybody knows
+such occasional hours or days of freshened emotional responses when
+events that usually pass almost unnoticed, suddenly move you deeply,
+when a sunset lifts you to exaltation, when a squeaking door throws you
+into a fit of exasperation, when a clear look of trust in a child's eyes
+moves you to tears, or an injustice reported in the newspapers to
+flaming indignation, a good action to a sunny warm love of human nature,
+a discovered meanness in yourself or another, to despair.
+
+I have no idea whence this tide comes, or where it goes, but when it
+begins to rise in my heart, I know that a story is hovering in the
+offing. It does not always come safely to port. The daily routine of
+ordinary life kills off many a vagrant emotion. Or if daily humdrum
+occupation does not stifle it, perhaps this saturated solution of
+feeling does not happen to crystallize about any concrete fact, episode,
+word or phrase. In my own case, it is far more likely to seize on some
+slight trifle, the shade of expression on somebody's face, or the tone
+of somebody's voice, than to accept a more complete, ready-made episode.
+Especially this emotion refuses to crystallize about, or to have
+anything to do with those narrations of our actual life, offered by
+friends who are sure that such-and-such a happening is so strange or
+interesting that "it ought to go in a story."
+
+The beginning of a story is then for me in more than usual sensitiveness
+to emotion. If this encounters the right focus (and heaven only knows
+why it is the "right" one) I get simultaneously a strong thrill of
+intense feeling, and an intense desire to pass it on to other people.
+This emotion may be any one of the infinitely varied ones which life
+affords, laughter, sorrow, indignation, gayety, admiration, scorn,
+pleasure. I recognize it for the "right" one when it brings with it an
+irresistible impulse to try to make other people feel it. And I know
+that when it comes, the story is begun. At this point, the story begins
+to be more or less under my conscious control, and it is here that the
+work of construction begins.
+
+"Flint and Fire" thus hovered vaguely in a shimmer of general emotional
+tensity, and thus abruptly crystallized itself about a chance phrase and
+the cadence of the voice which pronounced it. For several days I had
+been almost painfully alive to the beauty of an especially lovely
+spring, always so lovely after the long winter in the mountains. One
+evening, going on a very prosaic errand to a farm-house of our region, I
+walked along a narrow path through dark pines, beside a brook swollen
+with melting snow, and found the old man I came to see, sitting silent
+and alone before his blackened small old house. I did my errand, and
+then not to offend against our country standards of sociability, sat for
+half an hour beside him.
+
+The old man had been for some years desperately unhappy about a tragic
+and permanent element in his life. I had known this, every one knew it.
+But that evening, played upon as I had been by the stars, the darkness
+of the pines and the shouting voice of the brook, I suddenly stopped
+merely knowing it, and felt it. It seemed to me that his misery emanated
+from him like a soundless wail of anguish. We talked very little, odds
+and ends of neighborhood gossip, until the old man, shifting his
+position, drew a long breath and said, "Seems to me I never heard the
+brook sound so loud as it has this spring." There came instantly to my
+mind the recollection that his grandfather had drowned himself in that
+brook, and I sat silent, shaken by that thought and by the sound of his
+voice. I have no words to attempt to reproduce his voice, or to try to
+make you feel as I did, hot and cold with the awe of that glimpse into a
+naked human heart. I felt my own heart contract dreadfully with helpless
+sympathy ... and, I hope this is not as ugly as it sounds, I knew at the
+same instant that I would try to get that pang of emotion into a story
+and make other people feel it.
+
+That is all. That particular phase of the construction of the story
+came and went between two heart-beats.
+
+I came home by the same path through the same pines along the same
+brook, sinfully blind and deaf to the beauty that had so moved me an
+hour ago. I was too busy now to notice anything outside the rapid
+activity going on inside my head. My mind was working with a swiftness
+and a coolness which I am somewhat ashamed to mention, and my emotions
+were calmed, relaxed, let down from the tension of the last few days and
+the last few moments. They had found their way out to an attempt at
+self-expression and were at rest. I realize that this is not at all
+estimable. The old man was just as unhappy as he had been when I had
+felt my heart breaking with sympathy for him, but now he seemed very far
+away.
+
+I was snatching up one possibility after another, considering it for a
+moment, casting it away and pouncing on another. First of all, the story
+must be made as remote as possible from resembling the old man or his
+trouble, lest he or any one in the world might think he was intended,
+and be wounded.
+
+What is the opposite pole from an old man's tragedy? A lover's tragedy,
+of course. Yes, it must be separated lovers, young and passionate and
+beautiful, because they would fit in with the back-ground of spring, and
+swollen shouting starlit brooks, and the yearly resurrection which was
+so closely connected with that ache of emotion that they were a part of
+it.
+
+Should the separation come from the weakness or faithlessness of one of
+the lovers? No, ah no, I wanted it without ugliness, pure beautiful
+sorrow, to fit that dark shadow of the pines ... the lovers must be
+separated by outside forces.
+
+What outside forces? Lack of money? Family opposition? Both, perhaps. I
+knew plenty of cases of both in the life of our valley.
+
+By this time I had come again to our own house and was swallowed in the
+usual thousand home-activities. But underneath all that, quite steadily
+my mind continued to work on the story as a wasp in a barn keeps on
+silently plastering up the cells of his nest in the midst of the noisy
+activities of farm-life. I said to one of the children, "Yes, dear,
+wasn't it fun!" and to myself, "To be typical of our tradition-ridden
+valley-people, the opposition ought to come from the dead hand of the
+past." I asked a caller, "One lump or two?" and thought as I poured the
+tea, "And if the character of that opposition could be made to indicate
+a fierce capacity for passionate feeling in the older generation, that
+would make it doubly useful in the story, not only as part of the
+machinery of the plot, but as indicating an inheritance of passionate
+feeling in the younger generation, with whom the story is concerned." I
+dozed off at night, and woke to find myself saying, "It could come from
+the jealousy of two sisters, now old women."
+
+But that meant that under ordinary circumstances the lovers would have
+been first cousins, and this might cause a subconscious wavering of
+attention on the part of some readers ... just as well to get that stone
+out of the path! I darned a sock and thought out the relationship in the
+story, and was rewarded with a revelation of the character of the sick
+old woman, 'Niram's step-mother.
+
+Upon this, came one of those veering lists of the ballast aboard which
+are so disconcerting to the author. The story got out of hand. The old
+woman silent, indomitable, fed and deeply satisfied for all of her hard
+and grinding life by her love for the husband whom she had taken from
+her sister, she stepped to the front of my stage, and from that moment
+on, dominated the action. I did not expect this, nor desire it, and I
+was very much afraid that the result would be a perilously divided
+interest which would spoil the unity of impression of the story. It now
+occurs to me that this unexpected shifting of values may have been the
+emergence of the element of tragic old age which had been the start of
+the story and which I had conscientiously tried to smother out of sight.
+At any rate, there she was, more touching, pathetic, striking, to my
+eyes with her life-time proof of the reality of her passion, than my
+untried young lovers who up to that time had seemed to me, in the full
+fatuous flush of invention as I was, as ill-starred, innocent and
+touching lovers as anybody had ever seen.
+
+Alarmed about this double interest I went on with the weaving back and
+forth of the elements of the plot which now involved the attempt to
+arouse in the reader's heart as in mine a sympathy for the bed-ridden
+old Mrs. Purdon and a comprehension of her sacrifice.
+
+My daily routine continued as usual, gardening, telling stories, music,
+sewing, dusting, motoring, callers ... one of them, a self-consciously
+sophisticated Europeanized American, not having of course any idea of
+what was filling my inner life, rubbed me frightfully the wrong way by
+making a slighting condescending allusion to what he called the mean,
+emotional poverty of our inarticulate mountain people. I flew into a
+silent rage at him, though scorning to discuss with him a matter I felt
+him incapable of understanding, and the character of Cousin Horace went
+into the story. He was for the first day or two, a very poor cheap
+element, quite unreal, unrealized, a mere man of straw to be knocked
+over by the personages of the tale. Then I took myself to task, told
+myself that I was spoiling a story merely to revenge myself on a man I
+cared nothing about, and that I must either take Cousin Horace out or
+make him human. One day, working in the garden, I laughed out suddenly,
+delighted with the whimsical idea of making him, almost in spite of
+himself, the _deus ex machina_ of my little drama, quite soft and
+sympathetic under his shell of would-be worldly disillusion, as
+occasionally happens to elderly bachelors.
+
+At this point the character of 'Niram's long-dead father came to life
+and tried to push his way into the story, a delightful, gentle, upright
+man, with charm and a sense of humor, such as none of the rest of my
+stark characters possessed. I felt that he was necessary to explain the
+fierceness of the sisters' rivalry for him. I planned one or two ways to
+get him in, in retrospect--and liked one of the scenes better than
+anything that finally was left in the story. Finally, very
+heavy-hearted, I put him out of the story, for the merely material
+reason that there was no room for him. As usual with my story-making,
+this plot was sprouting out in a dozen places, expanding, opening up,
+till I perceived that I had enough material for a novel. For a day or so
+I hung undecided. Would it perhaps be better to make it a novel and
+really tell about those characters all I knew and guessed? But again a
+consideration that has nothing to do with artistic form, settled the
+matter. I saw no earthly possibility of getting time enough to write a
+novel. So I left Mr. Purdon out, and began to think of ways to compress
+my material, to make one detail do double work so that space might be
+saved.
+
+One detail of the mechanism remained to be arranged, and this ended by
+deciding the whole form of the story, and the first-person character of
+the recital. This was the question of just how it would have been
+materially possible for the bed-ridden old woman to break down the
+life-long barrier between her and her sister, and how she could have
+reached her effectively and forced her hand. I could see no way to
+manage this except by somehow transporting her bodily to the sister's
+house, so that she could not be put out on the road without public
+scandal. This transportation must be managed by some character not in
+the main action, as none of the persons involved would have been willing
+to help her to this. It looked like putting in another character, just
+for that purpose, and of course he could not be put in without taking
+the time to make him plausible, human, understandable ... and I had just
+left out that charming widower for sheer lack of space. Well, why not
+make it a first person story, and have the narrator be the one who takes
+Mrs. Purdon to her sister's? The narrator of the story never needs to be
+explained, always seems sufficiently living and real by virtue of the
+supremely human act of so often saying "I".
+
+Now the materials were ready, the characters fully alive in my mind and
+entirely visualized, even to the smoothly braided hair of Ev'leen Ann,
+the patch-work quilt of the old woman out-of-doors, and the rustic
+wedding at the end, all details which had recently chanced to draw my
+attention; I heard everything through the song of the swollen brook, one
+of the main characters in the story, (although by this time in actual
+fact, June and lower water had come and the brook slid quiet and
+gleaming, between placid green banks) and I often found myself smiling
+foolishly in pleasure over the buggy going down the hill, freighted so
+richly with hearty human joy.
+
+The story was now ready to write.
+
+I drew a long breath of mingled anticipation and apprehension, somewhat
+as you do when you stand, breathing quickly, balanced on your skis, at
+the top of a long white slope you are not sure you are clever enough to
+manage. Sitting down at my desk one morning, I "pushed off" and with a
+tingle of not altogether pleasurable excitement and alarm, felt myself
+"going." I "went" almost as precipitately as skis go down a long white
+slope, scribbling as rapidly as my pencil could go, indicating whole
+words with a dash and a jiggle, filling page after page with scrawls ...
+it seemed to me that I had been at work perhaps half an hour, when
+someone was calling me impatiently to lunch. I had been writing four
+hours without stopping. My cheeks were flaming, my feet were cold, my
+lips parched. It was high time someone called me to lunch.
+
+The next morning, back at the desk, I looked over what I had written,
+conquered the usual sick qualms of discouragement at finding it so
+infinitely flat and insipid compared to what I had wished to make it,
+and with a very clear idea of what remained to be done, plodded ahead
+doggedly, and finished the first draught before noon. It was almost
+twice too long.
+
+After this came a period of steady desk work, every morning, of
+re-writing, compression, more compression, and the more or less
+mechanical work of technical revision, what a member of my family calls
+"cutting out the 'whiches'". The first thing to do each morning was to
+read a part of it over aloud, sentence by sentence, to try to catch
+clumsy, ungraceful phrases, overweights at one end or the other,
+"ringing" them as you ring a dubious coin, clipping off too-trailing
+relative clauses, "listening" hard. This work depends on what is known
+in music as "ear", and in my case it cannot be kept up long at a time,
+because I find my attention flagging. When I begin to suspect that my
+ear is dulling, I turn to other varieties of revision, of which there
+are plenty to keep anybody busy; for instance revision to explain facts;
+in this category is the sentence just after the narrator suspects
+Ev'leen Ann has gone down to the brook, "my ears ringing with all the
+frightening tales of the morbid vein of violence which runs through the
+characters of our reticent people." It seemed too on re-reading the
+story for the tenth or eleventh time, that for readers who do not know
+our valley people, the girl's attempt at suicide might seem improbable.
+Some reference ought to be brought in, giving the facts that their
+sorrow and despair is terrible in proportion to the nervous strain of
+their tradition of repression, and that suicide is by no means unknown.
+I tried bringing that fact in, as part of the conversation with Cousin
+Horace, but it never fused with the rest there, "stayed on top of the
+page" as bad sentences will do, never sank in, and always made the
+disagreeable impression on me that a false intonation in an actor's
+voice does. So it came out from there. I tried putting it in Ev'leen
+Ann's mouth, in a carefully arranged form, but it was so shockingly out
+of character there, that it was snatched out at once. There I hung over
+the manuscript with that necessary fact in my hand and no place to lay
+it down. Finally I perceived a possible opening for it, where it now is
+in the story, and squeezing it in there discontentedly left it, for I
+still think it only inoffensively and not well placed.
+
+Then there is the traditional, obvious revision for suggestiveness, such
+as the recurrent mention of the mountain brook at the beginning of each
+of the first scenes; revision for ordinary sense, in the first draught I
+had honeysuckle among the scents on the darkened porch, whereas
+honeysuckle does not bloom in Vermont till late June; revision for
+movement to get the narrator rapidly from her bed to the brook; for
+sound, sense proportion, even grammar ... and always interwoven with
+these mechanical revisions recurrent intense visualizations of the
+scenes. This is the mental trick which can be learned, I think, by
+practice and effort. Personally, although I never used as material any
+events in my own intimate life, I can write nothing if I cannot achieve
+these very definite, very complete visualizations of the scenes; which
+means that I can write nothing at all about places, people or phases of
+life which I do not intimately know, down to the last detail. If my life
+depended on it, it does not seem to me I could possibly write a story
+about Siberian hunters or East-side factory hands without having lived
+long among them. Now the story was what one calls "finished," and I made
+a clear copy, picking my way with difficulty among the alterations, the
+scratched-out passages, and the cued-in paragraphs, the inserted pages,
+the re-arranged phrases. As I typed, the interest and pleasure in the
+story lasted just through that process. It still seemed pretty good to
+me, the wedding still touched me, the whimsical ending still amused me.
+
+But on taking up the legible typed copy and beginning to glance rapidly
+over it, I felt fall over me the black shadow of that intolerable
+reaction which is enough to make any author abjure his calling for ever.
+By the time I had reached the end, the full misery was there, the
+heart-sick, helpless consciousness of failure. What! I had had the
+presumption to try to translate into words, and make others feel a
+thrill of sacred living human feeling, that should not be touched save
+by worthy hands. And what had I produced? A trivial, paltry, complicated
+tale, with certain cheaply ingenious devices in it. I heard again the
+incommunicable note of profound emotion in the old man's voice, suffered
+again with his sufferings; and those little black marks on white paper
+lay dead, dead in my hands. What horrible people second-rate authors
+were! They ought to be prohibited by law from sending out their
+caricatures of life. I would never write again. All that effort, enough
+to have achieved a master-piece it seemed at the time ... and this,
+_this_, for result!
+
+From the subconscious depths of long experience came up the cynical,
+slightly contemptuous consolation, "You know this never lasts. You
+always throw this same fit, and get over it."
+
+So, suffering from really acute humiliation and unhappiness, I went out
+hastily to weed a flower-bed.
+
+And sure enough, the next morning, after a long night's sleep, I felt
+quite rested, calm, and blessedly matter-of-fact. "Flint and Fire"
+seemed already very far away and vague, and the question of whether it
+was good or bad, not very important or interesting, like the chart of
+your temperature in a fever now gone by.
+
+
+
+
+DOROTHY CANFIELD
+
+
+Dorothy Canfield grew up in an atmosphere of books and learning. Her
+father, James H. Canfield, was president of Kansas University, at
+Lawrence, and there Dorothy was born, Feb. 17, 1879. She attended the
+high school at Lawrence, and became friends with a young army officer
+who was teaching at the near-by Army post, and who taught her to ride
+horseback. In 1917 when the first American troops entered Paris, Dorothy
+Canfield, who had gone to Paris to help in war work, again met this army
+officer, General John J. Pershing.
+
+But this is getting ahead of the story. Dr. Canfield was called from
+Kansas to become president of Ohio State University, and later to be
+librarian at Columbia University, and so it happened that Dorothy took
+her college course at Ohio State and her graduate work at Columbia. She
+specialized in Romance languages, and took her degree as Doctor of
+Philosophy in 1904. In connection with Professor Carpenter of Columbia
+she wrote a text book on rhetoric. But books did not absorb quite all of
+her time, for the next item in her biography is her marriage to John R.
+Fisher, who had been the captain of the Columbia football team. They
+made their home at Arlington, Vermont, with frequent visits to Europe.
+In 1911-1912 they spent the winter in Rome. Here they came to know
+Madame Montessori, famous for developing a new system of training
+children. Dorothy Canfield spent many days at the "House of Childhood,"
+studying the methods of this gifted teacher. The result of this was a
+book, _A Montessori Mother_, in which the system was adapted to the
+needs of American children.
+
+_The Squirrel Cage_, published in 1912, was a study of an unhappy
+marriage. The book was favorably received by the critics, but found only
+a moderately wide public. A second novel, _The Bent Twig_, had college
+life as its setting; the chief character was the daughter of a professor
+in a Middle Western university. Meantime she had been publishing in
+magazines a number of short stories dealing with various types of New
+England country people, and in 1916 these were gathered into a volume
+with the title _Hillsboro People_. This book met with a wide acceptance,
+not only in this country but in France, where, like her other books, it
+was quickly translated and published. "Flint and Fire" is taken from
+this book. _The Real Motive_, another book of short stories, and
+_Understood Betsy_, a book for younger readers, were her next
+publications.
+
+Meantime the Great War had come, and its summons was heard in their
+quiet mountain home. Mr. Fisher went to France with the Ambulance Corps;
+his wife as a war-relief worker. A letter from a friend thus described
+her work:
+
+
+     She has gone on doing a prodigious amount of work. First running,
+     almost entirely alone, the work for soldiers blinded in battle,
+     editing a magazine for them, running the presses, often with her
+     own hands, getting books written for them; all the time looking out
+     for refugees and personal cases that came under her attention:
+     caring for children from the evacuated portions of France,
+     organizing work for them, and establishing a Red Cross hospital for
+     them.
+
+
+Out of the fullness of these experiences she wrote her next book, _Home
+Fires in France_, which at once took rank as one of the most notable
+pieces of literature inspired by the war. It is in the form of short
+stories, but only the form is fiction: it is a perfectly truthful
+portrayal of the French women and of some Americans who, far back of the
+trenches, kept up the life of a nation when all its people were gone. It
+reveals the soul of the French people. _The Day of Glory_, her latest
+book, is a series of further impressions of the war in France.
+
+It is not often that an author takes us into his workshop and lets us
+see just how his stories are written. The preceding account of Dorothy
+Canfield's literary methods was written especially for this book.
+
+
+
+
+DUSKY AMERICANS
+
+_Most stories of Negro life fall into one of two groups. There is the
+story of the Civil War period, which pictures the "darky" on the old
+plantation, devoted to "young Massa" or "old Miss,"--the Negro of
+slavery. Then there are stories of recent times in which the Negro is
+used purely for comic effect, a sort of minstrel-show character. Neither
+of these is the Negro of to-day. A truer picture is found in the stories
+of Paul Laurence Dunbar. The following story is from his FOLKS FROM
+DIXIE._
+
+
+
+
+THE ORDEAL AT MT. HOPE
+
+BY
+
+PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
+
+
+"And this is Mt. Hope," said the Rev. Howard Dokesbury to himself as he
+descended, bag in hand, from the smoky, dingy coach, or part of a coach,
+which was assigned to his people, and stepped upon the rotten planks of
+the station platform. The car he had just left was not a palace, nor had
+his reception by his fellow-passengers or his intercourse with them been
+of such cordial nature as to endear them to him. But he watched the
+choky little engine with its three black cars wind out of sight with a
+look as regretful as if he were witnessing the departure of his dearest
+friend. Then he turned his attention again to his surroundings, and a
+sigh welled up from his heart. "And this is Mt. Hope," he repeated. A
+note in his voice indicated that he fully appreciated the spirit of keen
+irony in which the place had been named.
+
+The color scheme of the picture that met his eyes was in dingy blacks
+and grays. The building that held the ticket, telegraph, and train
+despatchers' offices was a miserably old ramshackle affair, standing
+well in the foreground of this scene of gloom and desolation. Its
+windows were so coated with smoke and grime that they seemed to have
+been painted over in order to secure secrecy within. Here and there a
+lazy cur lay drowsily snapping at the flies, and at the end of the
+station, perched on boxes or leaning against the wall, making a living
+picture of equal laziness, stood a group of idle Negroes exchanging rude
+badinage with their white counterparts across the street.
+
+After a while this bantering interchange would grow more keen and
+personal, a free-for-all friendly fight would follow, and the newspaper
+correspondent in that section would write it up as a "race war." But
+this had not happened yet that day.
+
+"This is Mt. Hope," repeated the new-comer; "this is the field of my
+labors."
+
+Rev. Howard Dokesbury, as may already have been inferred, was a
+Negro,--there could be no mistake about that. The deep dark brown of his
+skin, the rich over-fullness of his lips, and the close curl of his
+short black hair were evidences that admitted of no argument. He was a
+finely proportioned, stalwart-looking man, with a general air of
+self-possession and self-sufficiency in his manner. There was firmness
+in the set of his lips. A reader of character would have said of him,
+"Here is a man of solid judgement, careful in deliberation, prompt in
+execution, and decisive."
+
+It was the perception in him of these very qualities which had prompted
+the authorities of the little college where he had taken his degree and
+received his theological training, to urge him to go among his people at
+the South, and there to exert his powers for good where the field was
+broad and the laborers few.
+
+Born of Southern parents from whom he had learned many of the
+superstitions and traditions of the South, Howard Dokesbury himself had
+never before been below Mason and Dixon's line. But with a confidence
+born of youth and a consciousness of personal power, he had started
+South with the idea that he knew the people with whom he had to deal,
+and was equipped with the proper weapons to cope with their
+shortcomings.
+
+But as he looked around upon the scene which now met his eye, a doubt
+arose in his mind. He picked up his bag with a sigh, and approached a
+man who had been standing apart from the rest of the loungers and
+regarding him with indolent intentness.
+
+"Could you direct me to the house of Stephen Gray?" asked the minister.
+
+The interrogated took time to change his position from left foot to
+right and shift his quid, before he drawled forth, "I reckon you's de
+new Mefdis preachah, huh?"
+
+"Yes," replied Howard, in the most conciliatory tone he could command,
+"and I hope I find in you one of my flock."
+
+"No, suh, I's a Babtist myse'f. I wa'n't raised up no place erroun' Mt.
+Hope; I'm nachelly f'om way up in Adams County. Dey jes' sont me down
+hyeah to fin' you an' tek you up to Steve's. Steve, he's workin' to-day
+an' couldn't come down."
+
+He laid particular stress upon the "to-day," as if Steve's spell of
+activity were not an every-day occurrence.
+
+"Is it far from here?" asked Dokesbury.
+
+"'T ain't mo' 'n a mile an' a ha'f by de shawt cut."
+
+"Well, then, let's take the short cut, by all means," said the preacher.
+
+They trudged along for a while in silence, and then the young man asked,
+"What do you men about here do mostly for a living?"
+
+"Oh, well, we does odd jobs, we saws an' splits wood an' totes bundles,
+an' some of 'em raises gyahden, but mos' of us, we fishes. De fish bites
+an' we ketches 'em. Sometimes we eats 'em an' sometimes we sells 'em; a
+string o' fish'll bring a peck o' co'n any time."
+
+"And is that all you do?"
+
+"'Bout."
+
+"Why, I don't see how you live that way."
+
+"Oh, we lives all right," answered the man; "we has plenty to eat an'
+drink, an' clothes to wear, an' some place to stay. I reckon folks ain't
+got much use fu' nuffin' mo'."
+
+Dokesbury sighed. Here indeed was virgin soil for his ministerial
+labors. His spirits were not materially raised when, some time later, he
+came in sight of the house which was to be his abode. To be sure, it was
+better than most of the houses which he had seen in the Negro part of
+Mt. Hope; but even at that it was far from being good or
+comfortable-looking. It was small and mean in appearance. The weather
+boarding was broken, and in some places entirely fallen away, showing
+the great unhewn logs beneath; while off the boards that remained the
+whitewash had peeled in scrofulous spots.
+
+The minister's guide went up to the closed door, and rapped loudly with
+a heavy stick.
+
+"G' 'way f'om dah, an' quit you' foolin'," came in a large voice from
+within.
+
+The guide grinned, and rapped again. There was a sound of shuffling feet
+and the pushing back of a chair, and then the same voice asking: "I bet
+I'll mek you git away f'om dat do'."
+
+"Dat's A'nt Ca'line," the guide said, and laughed.
+
+The door was flung back as quickly as its worn hinges and sagging bottom
+would allow, and a large body surmounted by a face like a big round full
+moon presented itself in the opening. A broomstick showed itself
+aggressively in one fat shiny hand.
+
+"It's you, Tom Scott, is it--you trif'nin'----" and then, catching sight
+of the stranger, her whole manner changed, and she dropped the
+broomstick with an embarrassed "'Scuse me, suh."
+
+Tom chuckled all over as he said, "A'nt Ca'line, dis is yo' new
+preachah."
+
+The big black face lighted up with a broad smile as the old woman
+extended her hand and enveloped that of the young minister's.
+
+"Come in," she said. "I's mighty glad to see you--that no-'count Tom
+come put' nigh mekin' me 'spose myse'f." Then turning to Tom, she
+exclaimed with good-natured severity, "An' you go 'long, you scoun'll
+you!"
+
+The preacher entered the cabin--it was hardly more--and seated himself
+in the rush-bottomed chair which "A'nt Ca'line" had been industriously
+polishing with her apron.
+
+"An' now, Brothah----"
+
+"Dokesbury," supplemented the young man.
+
+"Brothah Dokesbury, I jes' want you to mek yo'se'f at home right erway.
+I know you ain't use to ouah ways down hyeah; but you jes' got to set in
+an' git ust to 'em. You mus'n' feel bad ef things don't go yo' way f'om
+de ve'y fust. Have you got a mammy?"
+
+The question was very abrupt, and a lump suddenly jumped up in
+Dokesbury's throat and pushed the water into his eyes. He did have a
+mother away back there at home. She was all alone, and he was her heart
+and the hope of her life.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I've got a little mother up there in Ohio."
+
+"Well, I's gwine to be yo' mothah down hyeah; dat is, ef I ain't too
+rough an' common fu' you."
+
+"Hush!" exclaimed the preacher, and he got up and took the old lady's
+hand in both of his own. "You shall be my mother down here; you shall
+help me, as you have done to-day. I feel better already."
+
+"I knowed you would," and the old face beamed on the young one. "An' now
+jes' go out de do' dah an' wash yo' face. Dey's a pan an' soap an' watah
+right dah, an' hyeah's a towel; den you kin go right into yo' room, fu'
+I knows you want to be erlone fu' a while. I'll fix yo' suppah while you
+rests."
+
+He did as he was bidden. On a rough bench outside the door, he found a
+basin and a bucket of water with a tin dipper in it. To one side, in a
+broken saucer, lay a piece of coarse soap. The facilities for copious
+ablutions were not abundant, but one thing the minister noted with
+pleasure: the towel, which was rough and hurt his skin, was,
+nevertheless, scrupulously clean. He went to his room feeling fresher
+and better, and although he found the place little and dark and warm, it
+too was clean, and a sense of its homeness began to take possession of
+him.
+
+The room was off the main living-room into which he had been first
+ushered. It had one small window that opened out on a fairly neat yard.
+A table with a chair before it stood beside the window, and across the
+room--if the three feet of space which intervened could be called
+"across"--stood the little bed with its dark calico quilt and white
+pillows. There was no carpet on the floor, and the absence of a
+washstand indicated very plainly that the occupant was expected to wash
+outside. The young minister knelt for a few minutes beside the bed, and
+then rising cast himself into the chair to rest.
+
+It was possibly half an hour later when his partial nap was broken in
+upon by the sound of a gruff voice from without saying, "He's hyeah, is
+he--oomph! Well, what's he ac' lak? Want us to git down on ouah knees
+an' crawl to him? If he do, I reckon he'll fin' dat Mt. Hope ain't de
+place fo' him."
+
+The minister did not hear the answer, which was in a low voice and came,
+he conjectured, from Aunt "Ca'line"; but the gruff voice subsided, and
+there was the sound of footsteps going out of the room. A tap came on
+the preacher's door, and he opened it to the old woman. She smiled
+reassuringly.
+
+"Dat' uz my ol' man," she said. "I sont him out to git some wood, so's
+I'd have time to post you. Don't you mind him; he's lots mo' ba'k dan
+bite. He's one o' dese little yaller men, an' you know dey kin be
+powahful contra'y when dey sets dey hai'd to it. But jes' you treat him
+nice an' don't let on, an' I'll be boun' you'll bring him erroun' in
+little er no time."
+
+The Rev. Mr. Dokesbury received this advice with some misgiving. Albeit
+he had assumed his pleasantest manner when, after his return to the
+living-room, the little "yaller" man came through the door with his
+bundle of wood.
+
+He responded cordially to Aunt Caroline's, "Dis is my husband, Brothah
+Dokesbury," and heartily shook his host's reluctant hand.
+
+"I hope I find you well, Brother Gray," he said.
+
+"Moder't, jes' moder't," was the answer.
+
+"Come to suppah now, bofe o' you," said the old lady, and they all sat
+down to the evening meal of crisp bacon, well-fried potatoes, egg-pone,
+and coffee.
+
+The young man did his best to be agreeable, but it was rather
+discouraging to receive only gruff monosyllabic rejoinders to his most
+interesting observations. But the cheery old wife came bravely to the
+rescue, and the minister was continually floated into safety on the flow
+of her conversation. Now and then, as he talked, he could catch a
+stealthy upflashing of Stephen Gray's eye, as suddenly lowered again,
+that told him that the old man was listening. But as an indication that
+they would get on together, the supper, taken as a whole, was not a
+success. The evening that followed proved hardly more fortunate. About
+the only remarks that could be elicited from the "little yaller man"
+were a reluctant "oomph" or "oomph-uh."
+
+It was just before going to bed that, after a period of reflection, Aunt
+Caroline began slowly: "We got a son"--her husband immediately bristled
+up and his eyes flashed, but the old woman went on; "he named 'Lias, an'
+we thinks a heap o' 'Lias, we does; but--" the old man had subsided, but
+he bristled up again at the word--"he ain't jes' whut we want him to
+be." Her husband opened his mouth as if to speak in defense of his son,
+but was silent in satisfaction at his wife's explanation: "'Lias ain't
+bad; he jes' ca'less. Sometimes he stays at home, but right sma't o' de
+time he stays down at"--she looked at her husband and hesitated--"at de
+colo'ed s'loon. We don't lak dat. It ain't no fitten place fu' him. But
+'Lias ain't bad, he jes' ca'less, an' me an' de ol' man we 'membahs him
+in ouah pra'ahs, an' I jes' t'ought I'd ax you to 'membah him too,
+Brothah Dokesbury."
+
+The minister felt the old woman's pleading look and the husband's
+intense gaze upon his face, and suddenly there came to him an intimate
+sympathy in their trouble and with it an unexpected strength.
+
+"There is no better time than now," he said, "to take his case to the
+Almighty Power; let us pray."
+
+Perhaps it was the same prayer he had prayed many times before; perhaps
+the words of supplication and the plea for light and guidance were the
+same; but somehow to the young man kneeling there amid those humble
+surroundings, with the sorrow of these poor ignorant people weighing
+upon his heart, it seemed very different. It came more fervently from
+his lips, and the words had a deeper meaning. When he arose, there was a
+warmth at his heart just the like of which he had never before
+experienced.
+
+Aunt Caroline blundered up from her knees, saying, as she wiped her
+eyes, "Blessed is dey dat mou'n, fu' dey shall be comfo'ted." The old
+man, as he turned to go to bed, shook the young man's hand warmly and in
+silence; but there was a moisture in the old eyes that told the minister
+that his plummet of prayer had sounded the depths.
+
+Alone in his own room Howard Dokesbury sat down to study the situation
+in which he had been placed. Had his thorough college training
+anticipated specifically any such circumstance as this? After all, did
+he know his own people? Was it possible that they could be so different
+from what he had seen and known? He had always been such a loyal Negro,
+so proud of his honest brown; but had he been mistaken? Was he, after
+all, different from the majority of the people with whom he was supposed
+to have all thoughts, feelings, and emotions in common?
+
+These and other questions he asked himself without being able to arrive
+at any satisfactory conclusion. He did not go to sleep soon after
+retiring, and the night brought many thoughts. The next day would be
+Saturday. The ordeal had already begun,--now there were twenty-four
+hours between him and the supreme trial. What would be its outcome?
+There were moments when he felt, as every man, howsoever brave, must
+feel at times, that he would like to shift all his responsibilities and
+go away from the place that seemed destined to tax his powers beyond
+their capability of endurance. What could he do for the inhabitants of
+Mt. Hope? What was required of him to do? Ever through his mind ran that
+world-old question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" He had never asked, "Are
+these people my brothers?"
+
+He was up early the next morning, and as soon as breakfast was done, he
+sat down to add a few touches to the sermon he had prepared as his
+introduction. It was not the first time that he had retouched it and
+polished it up here and there. Indeed, he had taken some pride in it.
+But as he read it over that day, it did not sound to him as it had
+sounded before. It appeared flat and without substance. After a while he
+laid it aside, telling himself that he was nervous and it was on this
+account that he could not see matters as he did in his calmer moments.
+He told himself, too, that he must not again take up the offending
+discourse until time to use it, lest the discovery of more imaginary
+flaws should so weaken his confidence that he would not be able to
+deliver it with effect.
+
+In order better to keep his resolve, he put on his hat and went out for
+a walk through the streets of Mt. Hope. He did not find an encouraging
+prospect as he went along. The Negroes whom he met viewed him with
+ill-favor, and the whites who passed looked on him with unconcealed
+distrust and contempt. He began to feel lost, alone, and helpless. The
+squalor and shiftlessness which were plainly in evidence about the
+houses which he saw filled him with disgust and a dreary hopelessness.
+
+He passed vacant lots which lay open and inviting children to healthful
+play; but instead of marbles or leap-frog or ball, he found little boys
+in ragged knickerbockers huddled together on the ground, "shooting
+craps" with precocious avidity and quarreling over the pennies that made
+the pitiful wagers. He heard glib profanity rolling from the lips of
+children who should have been stumbling through baby catechisms; and
+his heart ached for them.
+
+He would have turned and gone back to his room, but the sound of shouts,
+laughter, and the tum-tum of a musical instrument drew him on down the
+street. At the turn of a corner, the place from which the noise emanated
+met his eyes. It was a rude frame building, low and unpainted. The panes
+in its windows whose places had not been supplied by sheets of tin were
+daubed a dingy red. Numerous kegs and bottles on the outside attested
+the nature of the place. The front door was open, but the interior was
+concealed by a gaudy curtain stretched across the entrance within. Over
+the door was the inscription, in straggling characters, "Sander's
+Place;" and when he saw half-a-dozen Negroes enter, the minister knew
+instantly that he now beheld the colored saloon which was the
+frequenting-place of his hostess's son 'Lias; and he wondered, if, as
+the mother said, her boy was not bad, how anything good could be
+preserved in such a place of evil.
+
+The cries of boisterous laughter mingled with the strumming of the banjo
+and the shuffling of feet told him that they were engaged in one of
+their rude hoe-down dances. He had not passed a dozen paces beyond the
+door when the music was suddenly stopped, the sound of a quick blow
+followed, then ensued a scuffle, and a young fellow half ran, half fell
+through the open door. He was closely followed by a heavily built
+ruffian who was striking him as he ran. The young fellow was very much
+the weaker and slighter of the two, and was suffering great punishment.
+In an instant all the preacher's sense of justice was stung into sudden
+life. Just as the brute was about to give his victim a blow that would
+have sent him into the gutter, he felt his arm grasped in a detaining
+hold and heard a commanding voice,--"Stop!"
+
+He turned with increased fury upon this meddler, but his other wrist was
+caught and held in a vise-like grip. For a moment the two men looked
+into each other's eyes. Hot words rose to the young man's lips, but he
+choked them back. Until this moment he had deplored the possession of a
+spirit so easily fired that it had been a test of his manhood to keep
+from "slugging" on the football field; now he was glad of it. He did not
+attempt to strike the man, but stood holding his arms and meeting the
+brute glare with manly flashing eyes. Either the natural cowardice of
+the bully or something in his new opponent's face had quelled the big
+fellow's spirit, and he said doggedly, "Lemme go. I wasn't a-go'n to
+kill him no-how, but ef I ketch him dancin' with my gal any mo', I----"
+He cast a glance full of malice at his victim, who stood on the pavement
+a few feet away, as much amazed as the dumfounded crowd which thronged
+the door of "Sander's Place." Loosing his hold, the preacher turned,
+and, putting his hand on the young fellow's shoulder, led him away.
+
+For a time they walked on in silence. Dokesbury had to calm the tempest
+in his breast before he could trust his voice. After a while he said:
+"That fellow was making it pretty hot for you, my young friend. What had
+you done to him?"
+
+"Nothin'," replied the other. "I was jes' dancin' 'long an' not thinkin'
+'bout him, when all of a sudden he hollered dat I had his gal an'
+commenced hittin' me."
+
+"He's a bully and a coward, or he would not have made use of his
+superior strength in that way. What's your name, friend?"
+
+"'Lias Gray," was the answer, which startled the minister into
+exclaiming,--
+
+"What! are you Aunt Caroline's son?"
+
+"Yes, suh, I sho is; does you know my mothah?"
+
+"Why, I'm stopping with her, and we were talking about you last night.
+My name is Dokesbury, and I am to take charge of the church here."
+
+"I thought mebbe you was a preachah, but I couldn't scarcely believe it
+after I seen de way you held Sam an' looked at him."
+
+Dokesbury laughed, and his merriment seemed to make his companion feel
+better, for the sullen, abashed look left his face, and he laughed a
+little himself as he said: "I wasn't a-pesterin' Sam, but I tell you he
+pestered me mighty."
+
+Dokesbury looked into the boy's face,--he was hardly more than a
+boy,--lit up as it was by a smile, and concluded that Aunt Caroline was
+right. 'Lias might be "ca'less," but he wasn't a bad boy. The face was
+too open and the eyes too honest for that. 'Lias wasn't bad; but
+environment does so much, and he would be if something were not done for
+him. Here, then, was work for a pastor's hands.
+
+"You'll walk on home with me, 'Lias, won't you?"
+
+"I reckon I mout ez well," replied the boy. "I don't stay erroun' home
+ez much ez I oughter."
+
+"You'll be around more, of course, now that I am there. It will be so
+much less lonesome for two young people than for one. Then, you can be a
+great help to me, too."
+
+The preacher did not look down to see how wide his listener's eyes grew
+as he answered: "Oh, I ain't fittin' to be no he'p to you, suh. Fust
+thing, I ain't nevah got religion, an' then I ain't well larned enough."
+
+"Oh, there are a thousand other ways in which you can help, and I feel
+sure that you will."
+
+"Of co'se, I'll do de ve'y bes' I kin."
+
+"There is one thing I want you to do soon, as a favor to me."
+
+"I can't go to de mou'nah's bench," cried the boy, in consternation.
+
+"And I don't want you to," was the calm reply.
+
+Another look of wide-eyed astonishment took in the preacher's face.
+These were strange words from one of his guild. But without noticing the
+surprise he had created, Dokesbury went on: "What I want is that you
+will take me fishing as soon as you can. I never get tired of fishing
+and I am anxious to go here. Tom Scott says you fish a great deal about
+here."
+
+"Why, we kin go dis ve'y afternoon," exclaimed 'Lias, in relief and
+delight; "I's mighty fond o' fishin', myse'f."
+
+"All right; I'm in your hands from now on."
+
+'Lias drew his shoulders up, with an unconscious motion. The preacher
+saw it, and mentally rejoiced. He felt that the first thing the boy
+beside him needed was a consciousness of responsibility, and the lifted
+shoulders meant progress in that direction, a sort of physical
+straightening up to correspond with the moral one.
+
+On seeing her son walk in with the minister, Aunt "Ca'line's" delight
+was boundless. "La! Brothah Dokesbury," she exclaimed, "wha'd you fin'
+dat scamp?"
+
+"Oh, down the street here," the young man replied lightly. "I got hold
+of his name and made myself acquainted, so he came home to go fishing
+with me."
+
+"'Lias is pow'ful fon' o' fishin', hisse'f. I 'low he kin show you some
+mighty good places. Cain't you, 'Lias?"
+
+"I reckon."
+
+'Lias was thinking. He was distinctly grateful that the circumstances of
+his meeting with the minister had been so deftly passed over. But with a
+half idea of the superior moral responsibility under which a man in
+Dokesbury's position labored, he wondered vaguely--to put it in his own
+thought-words--"ef de preachah hadn't put' nigh lied." However, he was
+willing to forgive this little lapse of veracity, if such it was, out of
+consideration for the anxiety it spared his mother.
+
+When Stephen Gray came in to dinner, he was no less pleased than his
+wife to note the terms of friendship on which the minister received his
+son. On his face was the first smile that Dokesbury had seen there, and
+he awakened from his taciturnity and proffered much information as to
+the fishing-places thereabout. The young minister accounted this a
+distinct gain. Anything more than a frowning silence from the "little
+yaller man" was gain.
+
+The fishing that afternoon was particularly good. Catfish, chubs, and
+suckers were landed in numbers sufficient to please the heart of any
+amateur angler.
+
+'Lias was happy, and the minister was in the best of spirits, for his
+charge seemed promising. He looked on at the boy's jovial face, and
+laughed within himself; for, mused he, "it is so much harder for the
+devil to get into a cheerful heart than into a sullen, gloomy one." By
+the time they were ready to go home Harold Dokesbury had received a
+promise from 'Lias to attend service the next morning and hear the
+sermon.
+
+There was a great jollification over the fish supper that night, and
+'Lias and the minister were the heroes of the occasion. The old man
+again broke his silence, and recounted, with infinite dryness, ancient
+tales of his prowess with rod and line; while Aunt "Ca'line" told of
+famous fish suppers that in the bygone days she had cooked for "de white
+folks." In the midst of it all, however, 'Lias disappeared. No one had
+noticed when he slipped out, but all seemed to become conscious of his
+absence about the same time. The talk shifted, and finally simmered into
+silence.
+
+When the Rev. Mr. Dokesbury went to bed that night, his charge had not
+yet returned.
+
+The young minister woke early on the Sabbath morning, and he may be
+forgiven that the prospect of the ordeal through which he had to pass
+drove his care for 'Lias out of mind for the first few hours. But as he
+walked to church, flanked on one side by Aunt Caroline in the stiffest
+of ginghams and on the other by her husband stately in the magnificence
+of an antiquated "Jim-swinger," his mind went back to the boy with
+sorrow. Where was he? What was he doing? Had the fear of a dull church
+service frightened him back to his old habits and haunts? There was a
+new sadness at the preacher's heart as he threaded his way down the
+crowded church and ascended the rude pulpit.
+
+The church was stiflingly hot, and the morning sun still beat
+relentlessly in through the plain windows. The seats were rude wooden
+benches, in some instances without backs. To the right, filling the
+inner corner, sat the pillars of the church, stern, grim, and critical.
+Opposite them, and, like them, in seats at right angles to the main
+body, sat the older sisters, some of them dressed with good
+old-fashioned simplicity, while others yielding to newer tendencies were
+gotten up in gaudy attempts at finery. In the rear seats a dozen or so
+much beribboned mulatto girls tittered and giggled, and cast bold
+glances at the minister.
+
+The young man sighed as he placed the manuscript of his sermon between
+the leaves of the tattered Bible. "And this is Mt. Hope," he was again
+saying to himself.
+
+It was after the prayer and in the midst of the second hymn that a more
+pronounced titter from the back seats drew his attention. He raised his
+head to cast a reproving glance at the irreverent, but the sight that
+met his eyes turned that look into one of horror. 'Lias had just entered
+the church, and with every mark of beastly intoxication was staggering
+up the aisle to a seat, into which he tumbled in a drunken heap. The
+preacher's soul turned sick within him, and his eyes sought the face of
+the mother and father. The old woman was wiping her eyes, and the old
+man sat with his gaze bent upon the floor, lines of sorrow drawn about
+his wrinkled mouth.
+
+All of a sudden a great revulsion of feeling came over Dokesbury.
+Trembling he rose and opened the Bible. There lay his sermon, polished
+and perfected. The opening lines seemed to him like glints from a bright
+cold crystal. What had he to say to these people, when the full
+realization of human sorrow and care and of human degradation had just
+come to him? What had they to do with firstlies and secondlies, with
+premises and conclusions? What they wanted was a strong hand to help
+them over the hard places of life and a loud voice to cheer them through
+the dark. He closed the book again upon his precious sermon. A something
+new had been born in his heart. He let his glance rest for another
+instant on the mother's pained face and the father's bowed form, and
+then turning to the congregation began, "Come unto me, all ye that labor
+and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you,
+and learn of me: for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find
+rest unto your souls." Out of the fullness of his heart he spoke unto
+them. Their great need informed his utterance. He forgot his carefully
+turned sentences and perfectly rounded periods. He forgot all save that
+here was the well-being of a community put into his hands whose real
+condition he had not even suspected until now. The situation wrought him
+up. His words went forth like winged fire, and the emotional people were
+moved beyond control. They shouted, and clapped their hands, and praised
+the Lord loudly.
+
+When the service was over, there was much gathering about the young
+preacher, and handshaking. Through all 'Lias had slept. His mother
+started toward him; but the minister managed to whisper to her, "Leave
+him to me." When the congregation had passed out, Dokesbury shook 'Lias.
+The boy woke, partially sobered, and his face fell before the preacher's
+eyes.
+
+"Come, my boy, let's go home." Arm in arm they went out into the street,
+where a number of scoffers had gathered to have a laugh at the abashed
+boy; but Harold Dokesbury's strong arm steadied his steps, and something
+in his face checked the crowd's hilarity. Silently they cleared the way,
+and the two passed among them and went home.
+
+The minister saw clearly the things which he had to combat in his
+community, and through this one victim he determined to fight the
+general evil. The people with whom he had to deal were children who must
+be led by the hand. The boy lying in drunken sleep upon his bed was no
+worse than the rest of them. He was an epitome of the evil, as his
+parents were of the sorrows, of the place.
+
+He could not talk to Elias. He could not lecture him. He would only be
+dashing his words against the accumulated evil of years of bondage as
+the ripples of a summer sea beat against a stone wall. It was not the
+wickedness of this boy he was fighting or even the wrong-doing of Mt.
+Hope. It was the aggregation of the evils of the fathers, the
+grandfathers, the masters and mistresses of these people. Against this
+what could talk avail?
+
+The boy slept on, and the afternoon passed heavily away. Aunt Caroline
+was finding solace in her pipe, and Stephen Gray sulked in moody silence
+beside the hearth. Neither of them joined their guest at evening
+service.
+
+He went, however. It was hard to face those people again after the
+events of the morning. He could feel them covertly nudging each other
+and grinning as he went up to the pulpit. He chided himself for the
+momentary annoyance it caused him. Were they not like so many naughty,
+irresponsible children?
+
+The service passed without unpleasantness, save that he went home with
+an annoyingly vivid impression of a yellow girl with red ribbons on her
+hat, who pretended to be impressed by his sermon and made eyes at him
+from behind her handkerchief.
+
+On the way to his room that night, as he passed Stephen Gray, the old
+man whispered huskily, "It's de fus' time 'Lias evah done dat."
+
+It was the only word he had spoken since morning.
+
+A sound sleep refreshed Dokesbury, and restored the tone to his
+overtaxed nerves. When he came out in the morning, Elias was already in
+the kitchen. He too had slept off his indisposition, but it had been
+succeeded by a painful embarrassment that proved an effectual barrier to
+all intercourse with him. The minister talked lightly and amusingly, but
+the boy never raised his eyes from his plate, and only spoke when he was
+compelled to answer some direct questions.
+
+Harold Dokesbury knew that unless he could overcome this reserve, his
+power over the youth was gone. He bent every effort to do it.
+
+"What do you say to a turn down the street with me?" he asked as he
+rose from breakfast.
+
+'Lias shook his head.
+
+"What! You haven't deserted me already?"
+
+The older people had gone out, but young Gray looked furtively about
+before he replied: "You know I ain't fittin' to go out with
+you--aftah--aftah--yestiddy."
+
+A dozen appropriate texts rose in the preacher's mind, but he knew that
+it was not a preaching time, so he contented himself with saying,--
+
+"Oh, get out! Come along!"
+
+"No, I cain't. I cain't. I wisht I could! You needn't think I's ashamed,
+'cause I ain't. Plenty of 'em git drunk, an' I don't keer nothin' 'bout
+dat"--this in a defiant tone.
+
+"Well, why not come along then?"
+
+"I tell you I cain't. Don't ax me no mo'. It ain't on my account I won't
+go. It's you."
+
+"Me! Why, I want you to go."
+
+"I know you does, but I mustn't. Cain't you see that dey'd be glad to
+say dat--dat you was in cahoots wif me an' you tuk yo' dram on de sly?"
+
+"I don't care what they say so long as it isn't true. Are you coming?"
+
+"No, I ain't."
+
+He was perfectly determined, and Dokesbury saw that there was no use
+arguing with him. So with a resigned "All right!" he strode out the gate
+and up the street, thinking of the problem he had to solve.
+
+There was good in Elias Gray, he knew. It was a shame that it should be
+lost. It would be lost unless he were drawn strongly away from the paths
+he was treading. But how could it be done? Was there no point in his
+mind that could be reached by what was other than evil? That was the
+thing to be found out. Then he paused to ask himself if, after all, he
+were not trying to do too much,--trying, in fact, to play Providence to
+Elias. He found himself involuntarily wanting to shift the
+responsibility of planning for the youth. He wished that something
+entirely independent of his intentions would happen.
+
+Just then something did happen. A piece of soft mud hurled from some
+unknown source caught the minister square in the chest, and spattered
+over his clothes. He raised his eyes and glanced about quickly, but no
+one was in sight. Whoever the foe was, he was securely ambushed.
+
+"Thrown by the hand of a man," mused Dokesbury, "prompted by the malice
+of a child."
+
+He went on his way, finished his business, and returned to the house.
+
+"La, Brothah Dokesbury!" exclaimed Aunt Caroline, "what's de mattah 'f
+you' shu't bosom?"
+
+"Oh, that's where one of our good citizens left his card."
+
+"You don' mean to say none o' dem low-life scoun'els----"
+
+"I don't know who did it. He took particular pains to keep out of
+sight."
+
+"'Lias!" the old woman cried, turning on her son, "wha' 'd you let
+Brothah Dokesbury go off by hisse'f fu? Why n't you go 'long an' tek
+keer o' him?"
+
+The old lady stopped even in the midst of her tirade, as her eyes took
+in the expression on her son's face.
+
+"I'll kill some o' dem damn----"
+
+"'Lias!"
+
+"'Scuse me, Mistah Dokesbury, but I feel lak I'll bus' ef I don't
+'spress myse'f. It makes me so mad. Don't you go out o' hyeah no mo'
+'dout me. I'll go 'long an' I'll brek somebody's haid wif a stone."
+
+"'Lias! how you talkin' fo' de ministah?"
+
+"Well, dat's whut I'll do, 'cause I kin outth'ow any of 'em an' I know
+dey hidin'-places."
+
+"I'll be glad to accept your protection," said Dokesbury.
+
+He saw his advantage, and was thankful for the mud,--the one thing that
+without an effort restored the easy relations between himself and his
+protégé.
+
+Ostensibly these relations were reversed, and Elias went out with the
+preacher as a guardian and protector. But the minister was laying his
+nets. It was on one of these rambles that he broached to 'Lias a subject
+which he had been considering for some time.
+
+"Look here, 'Lias," he said, "what are you going to do with that big
+back yard of yours?"
+
+"Oh, nothin'. 'Tain't no 'count to raise nothin' in."
+
+"It may not be fit for vegetables, but it will raise something."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Chickens. That's what."
+
+Elias laughed sympathetically.
+
+"I'd lak to eat de chickens I raise. I wouldn't want to be feedin' de
+neighborhood."
+
+"Plenty of boards, slats, wire, and a good lock and key would fix that
+all right."
+
+"Yes, but whah 'm I gwine to git all dem things?"
+
+"Why, I'll go in with you and furnish the money, and help you build the
+coops. Then you can sell chickens and eggs, and we'll go halves on the
+profits."
+
+"Hush man!" cried 'Lias, in delight.
+
+So the matter was settled, and, as Aunt Caroline expressed it, "Fu' a
+week er sich a mattah, you nevah did see sich ta'in' down an' buildin'
+up in all yo' bo'n days."
+
+'Lias went at the work with zest and Dokesbury noticed his skill with
+tools. He let fall the remark: "Say, 'Lias, there's a school near here
+where they teach carpentry; why don't you go and learn?"
+
+"What I gwine to do with bein' a cyahpenter?"
+
+"Repair some of these houses around Mt. Hope, if nothing more,"
+Dokesbury responded, laughing; and there the matter rested.
+
+The work prospered, and as the weeks went on, 'Lias's enterprise became
+the town's talk. One of Aunt Caroline's patrons who had come with some
+orders about work regarded the changed condition of affairs, and said,
+"Why, Aunt Caroline, this doesn't look like the same place. I'll have to
+buy some eggs from you; you keep your yard and hen-house so nice, it's
+an advertisement for the eggs."
+
+"Don't talk to me nothin' 'bout dat ya'd, Miss Lucy," Aunt Caroline had
+retorted. "Dat 'long to 'Lias an' de preachah. Hit dey doin's. Dey done
+mos' nigh drove me out wif dey cleanness. I ain't nevah seed no sich
+ca'in' on in my life befo'. Why, my 'Lias done got right brigity an'
+talk about bein' somep'n."
+
+Dokesbury had retired from his partnership with the boy save in so far
+as he acted as a general supervisor. His share had been sold to a friend
+of 'Lias, Jim Hughes. The two seemed to have no other thought save of
+raising, tending, and selling chickens.
+
+Mt. Hope looked on and ceased to scoff. Money is a great dignifier, and
+Jim and 'Lias were making money. There had been some sniffs when the
+latter had hinged the front gate and whitewashed his mother's cabin, but
+even that had been accepted now as a matter of course.
+
+Dokesbury had done his work. He, too, looked on, and in some
+satisfaction.
+
+"Let the leaven work," he said, "and all Mt. Hope must rise."
+
+
+It was one day, nearly a year later, that "old lady Hughes" dropped in
+on Aunt Caroline for a chat.
+
+"Well, I do say, Sis' Ca'line, dem two boys o' ourn done sot dis town on
+fiah."
+
+"What now, Sis' Lizy?"
+
+"Why, evah sence 'Lias tuk it into his haid to be a cyahpenter an' Jim
+'cided to go 'long an' lu'n to be a blacksmiff, some o' dese hyeah
+othah young people's been trying to do somep'n'."
+
+"All dey wanted was a staht."
+
+"Well, now will you b'lieve me, dat no-'count Tom Johnson done opened a
+fish sto', an' he has de boys an' men bring him dey fish all de time. He
+gives 'em a little somep'n fu' dey ketch, den he go sell 'em to de white
+folks."
+
+"Lawd, how long!"
+
+"An' what you think he say?"
+
+"I do' know, sis'."
+
+"He say ez soon 'z he git money enough, he gwine to dat school whah
+'Lias and Jim gone an' lu'n to fahm scientific."
+
+"Bless de Lawd! Well, 'um, I don' put nothin' pas' de young folks now."
+
+Mt. Hope had at last awakened. Something had come to her to which she
+might aspire,--something that she could understand and reach. She was
+not soaring, but she was rising above the degradation in which Harold
+Dokesbury had found her. And for her and him the ordeal had passed.
+
+
+
+
+PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
+
+
+The Negro race in America has produced musicians, composers and
+painters, but it was left for Paul Laurence Dunbar to give it fame in
+literature. He was of pure African stock; his father and mother were
+born in slavery, and neither had any schooling, although the father had
+taught himself to read. Paul was born in Dayton, Ohio, June 27, 1872. He
+was christened Paul, because his father said that he was to be a great
+man. He was a diligent pupil at school, and began to make verses when he
+was still a child. His ability was recognized by his class mates; he was
+made editor of the high school paper, and wrote the class song for his
+commencement.
+
+The death of his father made it necessary for him to support his mother.
+He sought for some employment where his education might be put to some
+use, but finding such places closed to him, he became an elevator boy.
+He continued to write, however, and in 1892 his first volume was
+published, a book of poems called _Oak and Ivy_. The publishers were so
+doubtful of its success that they would not bring it out until a friend
+advanced the cost of publication. Paul now sold books to the passengers
+in his elevator, and realized enough to repay his friend. He was
+occasionally asked to give readings from his poetry. Gifted as he was
+with a deep, melodious voice, and a fine power of mimicry, he was very
+successful. In 1893 he was sought out by a man who was organizing a
+concert company and who engaged Paul to go along as reader. Full of
+enthusiasm, he set to work committing his poems to memory, and writing
+new ones. Ten days before the company was to start, word came that it
+had been disbanded. Paul found himself at the approach of winter without
+money and without work, and with his mother in real need. In his
+discouragement he even thought of suicide, but by the help of a friend
+he found work, and with it courage. In a letter written about this time
+he tells of his ambitions: "I did once want to be a lawyer, but that
+ambition has long since died out before the all-absorbing desire to be a
+worthy singer of the songs of God and nature. To be able to interpret my
+own people through song and story, and to prove to the many that we are
+more human than African."
+
+A second volume of poems, _Majors and Minors_, appeared in 1895. Like
+his first book it was printed by a local publisher, and had but a small
+sale. The actor James A. Herne happened to be playing _Shore Acres_ in
+Toledo; Paul saw him, admired his acting, and timidly presented him with
+a copy of his book. Mr. Herne read it with great pleasure, and sent it
+on to his friend William Dean Howells, who was then editor of _Harper's
+Weekly_. In June, 1896, there appeared in that journal a full-page
+review of the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, quoting freely from his
+poems, and praising them highly. This recognition by America's greatest
+critic was the beginning of Paul's national reputation. Orders came for
+his books from all over the country; a manager engaged him for a series
+of readings from his poems, and a New York firm, Dodd Mead & Co.,
+arranged to bring out his next book, _Lyrics of Lowly Life_.
+
+In 1897 he went to England to give a series of readings. Here he was a
+guest at the Savage Club, one of the best-known clubs of London. His
+readings were very successful, but a dishonest manager cheated him out
+of the proceeds, and he was obliged to cable to his friends for money to
+come home.
+
+Through the efforts of Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, the young poet obtained
+a position in the Congressional Library at Washington. It was thought
+that this would give him just the opportunity he needed for study, but
+the work proved too confining for his health. The year 1898 was marked
+by two events: the publication of his first book of short stories,
+_Folks From Dixie_, and his marriage to Miss Alice R. Moore. In 1899 at
+the request of Booker T. Washington he went to Tuskeegee and gave
+several readings and lectures before the students, also writing a school
+song for them. He made a tour through the South, giving readings with
+much success, but the strain of public appearances was beginning to tell
+upon his health. He continued to write, and in 1899 published _Lyrics of
+the Hearthside_, dedicated to his wife. He was invited to go to Albany
+to read before a distinguished audience, where Theodore Roosevelt, then
+governor, was to introduce him. He started, but was unable to get
+farther than New York. Here he lay sick for weeks, and when he grew
+stronger, the doctors said that his lungs were affected and he must have
+a change of climate. He went to Colorado in the fall of 1899, and wrote
+back to a friend: "Well, it is something to sit under the shadow of the
+Rocky Mountains, even if one only goes there to die." From this time on
+his life was one long fight for health, and usually a losing battle, but
+he faced it as courageously as Robert Louis Stevenson had done. In
+Colorado he wrote a novel, The _Love of Landry_, whose scene was laid in
+his new surroundings. He returned to Washington in 1900, and gave
+occasional readings, but it was evident that his strength was failing.
+He published two more volumes, _The Strength of Gideon_, a book of short
+stories, and _Poems of Cabin and Field_, which showed that his genius
+had lost none of its power. His last years were spent in Dayton, his old
+home, with his mother. He died February 10, 1906.
+
+One of the finest tributes to him was paid by his friend Brand Whitlock,
+then Mayor of Toledo, who has since become famous as United States
+Minister to Belgium during the Great War. This is from a letter written
+when he heard that the young poet was dead:
+
+
+     Paul was a poet: and I find that when I have said that I have said
+     the greatest and most splendid thing that can be said about a
+     man.... Nature, who knows so much better than man about everything,
+     cares nothing at all for the little distinctions, and when she
+     elects one of her children for her most important work, bestows on
+     him the rich gift of poesy, and assigns him a post in the greatest
+     of the arts, she invariably seizes the opportunity to show her
+     contempt of rank and title and race and land and creed. She took
+     Burns from a plough and Paul from an elevator, and Paul has done
+     for his own people what Burns did for the peasants of Scotland--he
+     has expressed them in their own way and in their own words.
+
+
+
+
+WITH THE POLICE
+
+_Not all Americans are good Americans. For the lawbreakers, American
+born or otherwise, we need men to enforce the law. Of these guardians of
+public safety, one body, the Pennsylvania State Police, has become
+famous for its achievements. Katherine Mayo studied their work at first
+hand, met the men of the force, visited the scenes of their activity,
+and in_ THE STANDARD BEARERS, _tells of their daring exploits. This
+story is taken from that book_.
+
+
+
+
+ISRAEL DRAKE
+
+BY
+
+KATHERINE MAYO
+
+
+Israel Drake was a bandit for simple love of the thing. To hunt for
+another reason would be a waste of time. The blood in his veins was pure
+English, unmixed since long ago. His environment was that of his
+neighbors. His habitat was the noble hills. But Israel Drake was a
+bandit, just as his neighbors were farmers--just as a hawk is a hawk
+while its neighbors are barnyard fowls.
+
+Israel Drake was swarthy-visaged, high of cheek bone, with large, dark,
+deep-set eyes, and a thin-lipped mouth covered by a long and drooping
+black mustache. Barefooted, he stood six feet two inches tall. Lean as a
+panther, and as supple, he could clear a five-foot rail fence without
+the aid of his hand. He ran like a deer. As a woodsman the very deer
+could have taught him little. With rifle and revolver he was an expert
+shot, and the weapons he used were the truest and best.
+
+All the hill-people of Cumberland County dreaded him. All the scattered
+valley-folk spoke softly at his name. And the jest and joy of Israel's
+care-free life was to make them skip and shiver and dance to the tune of
+their trepidations.
+
+As a matter of fact, he was leader of a gang, outlaws every one. But his
+own strong aura eclipsed the rest, and he glared alone, in the thought
+of his world, endued with terrors of diverse origin.
+
+His genius kept him fully aware of the value of this preeminence, and it
+lay in his wisdom and pleasure to fan the flame of his own repute. In
+this it amused him to seek the picturesque--the unexpected. With an
+imagination fed by primeval humor and checked by no outward
+circumstances of law, he achieved a ready facility. Once, for example,
+while trundling through his town of Shippensburg on the rear platform of
+a freight train, he chanced to spy a Borough Constable crossing a bridge
+near the track.
+
+"Happy thought! Let's touch the good soul up. He's getting stodgy."
+
+Israel drew a revolver and fired, neatly nicking the Constable's hat.
+Then with a mountaineer's hoot, he gayly proclaimed his identity.
+
+Again, and many times, he would send into this or that town or
+settlement a message addressed to the Constable or Chief of Police:--
+
+"I am coming down this afternoon. Get away out of town. Don't let me
+find you there."
+
+Obediently they went away. And Israel, strolling the streets that
+afternoon just as he had promised to do, would enter shop after shop,
+look over the stock at his leisure, and, with perfect good-humor, pick
+out whatever pleased him, regardless of cost.
+
+"I think I'll take this here article," he would say to the trembling
+store-keeper, affably pocketing his choice.
+
+"Help yourself, Mr. Drake! Help yourself, sir! Glad we are able to
+please you to-day."
+
+Which was indeed the truth. And many of them there were who would have
+hastened to curry favor with their persecutor by whispering in his ear a
+word of warning had they known of any impending attempt against him by
+the agents of peace.
+
+Such was their estimate of the relative strength of Israel Drake and of
+the law forces of the Sovereign State of Pennsylvania.
+
+In the earlier times they had tried to arrest him. Once the attempt
+succeeded and Israel went to the Penitentiary for a term. But he emerged
+a better and wilier bandit than before, to embark upon a career that
+made his former life seem tame. Sheriffs and constables now proved
+powerless against him, whatever they essayed.
+
+Then came a grand, determined effort when the Sheriff, supported by
+fifteen deputies, all heavily armed, actually surrounded Drake's house.
+But the master-outlaw, alone and at ease at an upper window, his
+Winchester repeating-rifle in his hand and a smile of still content on
+his face, coolly stood the whole army off until, weary of empty danger,
+it gave up the siege and went home.
+
+This disastrous expedition ended the attempts of the local authorities
+to capture Israel Drake. Thenceforth he pursued his natural course
+without pretense of let or hindrance. At the time when this story
+begins, no fewer than fourteen warrants were out for his apprehension,
+issued on charges ranging from burglary and highway robbery through a
+long list of felonies. But the warrants, slowly accumulating, lay in the
+bottom of official drawers, apprehending nothing but dust. No one
+undertook to serve them. Life was too sweet--too short.
+
+Then came a turn of fate. Israel chanced to bethink himself of a certain
+aged farmer living with his old wife near a spot called Lee's
+Cross-Road. The two dwelt by themselves, without companions on their
+farm, and without neighbors. And they were reputed to have money.
+
+The money might not be much--might be exceedingly little. But, even so,
+Israel could use it, and in any event there would be the fun of the
+trick. So Israel summoned one Carey Morrison, a gifted mate and
+subordinate, with whom he proceeded to act.
+
+At dead of night the two broke into the farmhouse--crept into the
+chamber of the old pair--crept softly, softly, lest the farmer might
+keep a shotgun by his side. Sneaking to the foot of the bed, Israel
+suddenly flashed his lantern full upon the pillows--upon the two pale,
+deep-seamed faces crowned with silver hair.
+
+The woman sat up with a piercing scream. The farmer clutched at his
+gun. But Israel, bringing the glinting barrel of his revolver into the
+lantern's shaft of light, ordered both to lie down. Carey, slouching at
+hand, awaited orders.
+
+"Where is your money?" demanded Israel, indicating the farmer by the
+point of his gun.
+
+"I have no money, you coward!"
+
+"It's no use your lying to me. _Where's the money?_"
+
+"I have no money, I tell you."
+
+"Carey," observed Israel, "hunt a candle."
+
+While Carey looked for the candle, Israel surveyed his victims with a
+cheerful, anticipatory grin.
+
+The candle came; was lighted.
+
+"Carey," Israel spoke again, "you pin the old woman down. Pull the quilt
+off. Clamp her feet together. So!"
+
+Then he thrust the candle-flame against the soles of those gnarled old
+feet--thrust it close, while the flame bent upward, and the melting
+tallow poured upon the bed.
+
+The woman screamed again, this time in pain. The farmer half rose, with
+a quivering cry of rage, but Israel's gun stared him between the eyes.
+The woman screamed without interval. There was a smell of burning flesh.
+
+"Now we'll change about," remarked Israel, beaming. "I'll hold the old
+feller. You take the candle, Carey. You don't reely need your gun--now,
+do ye, boy?"
+
+And so they began afresh.
+
+It was not a game to last long. Before dawn the two were back in their
+own place, bearing the little all of value that the rifled house had
+contained.
+
+When the news of the matter spread abroad, it seemed, somehow, just a
+straw too much. The District Attorney of the County of Cumberland blazed
+into white heat. But he was powerless, he found. Not an officer within
+his entire jurisdiction expressed any willingness even to attempt an
+arrest.
+
+"Then we shall see," said District Attorney Rhey, "what the State will
+do for us, since we cannot help ourselves!" And he rushed off a
+telegram, confirmed by post, to the Superintendent of the Department of
+State Police.
+
+The Superintendent of the Department of State Police promptly referred
+the matter to the Captain of "C" Troop, with orders to act. For
+Cumberland County, being within the southeastern quarter of the
+Commonwealth, lies under "C" Troop's special care.
+
+It was Adams, in those days, who held that command--Lynn G. Adams, now
+Captain of "A" Troop, although for the duration of the war serving in
+the regular army, even as his fathers before him have served in our
+every war, including that which put the country on the map. Truer
+soldier, finer officer, braver or straighter or surer dealer with men
+and things need not be sought. His victories leave no needless scar
+behind, and his command would die by inches rather than fail him
+anywhere.
+
+The Captain of "C" Troop, then, choosing with judgment, picked his
+man--picked Trooper Edward Hallisey, a Boston Irishman, square of jaw,
+shrewd of eye, quick of wit, strong of wind and limb. And he ordered
+Private Hallisey to proceed at once to Carlisle, county seat of
+Cumberland, and report to the District Attorney for service toward
+effecting the apprehension of Israel Drake.
+
+Three days later--it was the 28th of September, to be exact--Private
+Edward Hallisey sent in his report to his Troop Commander. He had made
+all necessary observations, he said, and was ready to arrest the
+criminal. In this he would like to have the assistance of two Troopers,
+who should join him at Carlisle.
+
+The report came in the morning mail. First Sergeant Price detailed two
+men from the Barracks reserve. They were Privates H. K. Merryfield and
+Harvey J. Smith. Their orders were simply to proceed at once, in
+civilian clothes, to Carlisle, where they would meet Private Hallisey
+and assist him in effecting the arrest of Israel Drake.
+
+Privates Merryfield and Smith, carrying in addition to their service
+revolvers the 44-caliber Springfield carbine which is the Force's heavy
+weapon, left by the next train.
+
+On the Carlisle station platform, as the two Troopers debarked, some
+hundred persons were gathered in pursuance of various and centrifugal
+designs. But one impulse they appeared unanimously to share--the impulse
+to give as wide a berth as possible to a peculiarly horrible tramp.
+
+Why should a being like that intrude himself upon a passenger platform
+in a respectable country town? Not to board a coach, surely, for such as
+he pay no fares. To spy out the land? To steal luggage? Or simply to
+make himself hateful to decent folk?
+
+He carried his head with a hangdog lurch--his heavy jaw was rough with
+stubble beard. His coat and trousers fluttered rags and his toes stuck
+out of his boots. Women snatched back their skirts as he slouched near,
+and men muttered and scowled at him for a contaminating beast.
+
+Merryfield and Smith, drifting near this scum of the earth, caught the
+words "Four-thirty train" and the name of a station.
+
+"Right," murmured Merryfield.
+
+Then he went and bought tickets.
+
+In the shelter of an ancient, grimy day-coach, the scum muttered again,
+as Smith brushed past him in the aisle.
+
+"Charlie Stover's farm," said he.
+
+"M'm," said Smith.
+
+At a scrap of a station, in the foothills of ascending heights the tramp
+and the Troopers separately detrained. In the early evening all three
+strayed together once more in the shadow of the lilacs by Charlie
+Stover's gate.
+
+Over the supper-table Hallisey gave the news. "Drake is somewhere on the
+mountain to-night," said he. "His cabin is way up high, on a ridge
+called Huckleberry Patch. He is practically sure to go home in the
+course of the evening. Then is our chance. First, of course, you fellows
+will change your clothes. I've got some old things ready for you."
+
+Farmer Stover, like every other denizen of the rural county, had lived
+for years in terror and hatred of Israel Drake. Willingly he had aided
+Hallisey to the full extent of his power. He had told all that he knew
+of the bandit's habits and mates. He had indicated the mountain trails
+and he had given the Trooper such little shelter and food as the latter
+had stopped to take during his rapid work of investigation. But now he
+was asked to perform a service that he would gladly have refused; he was
+asked to hitch up a horse and wagon and to drive the three Troopers to
+the very vicinity of Israel Drake's house.
+
+"Oh, come on, Mr. Stover," they urged. "You're a public-spirited man, as
+you've shown. Do it for your neighbors' sake if not for your own. You
+want the county rid of this pest."
+
+Very reluctantly the farmer began the trip. With every turn of the
+ever-mounting forest road his reluctance grew. Grisly memories, grisly
+pictures, flooded his mind. It was night, and the trees in the darkness
+whispered like evil men. The bushes huddled like crouching figures. And
+what was it, moving stealthily over there, that crackled twigs? At last
+he could bear it no more.
+
+"Here's where _I_ turn 'round," he muttered hoarsely. "If you fellers
+are going farther you'll go alone. I got a use for _my_ life!"
+
+"All right, then," said Hallisey. "You've done well by us already.
+Good-night."
+
+It was a fine moonlight night and Hallisey now knew those woods as well
+as did his late host. He led his two comrades up another stiff mile of
+steady climbing. Then he struck off, by an almost invisible trail, into
+the dense timber. Silently the three men moved, threading the fragrant,
+silver-flecked blackness with practised woodsmen's skill. At last their
+file-leader stopped and beckoned his mates.
+
+Over his shoulder the two studied the scene before them: A clearing
+chopped out of the dense tall timber. In the midst of the clearing a log
+cabin, a story and a half high. On two sides of the cabin a straggling
+orchard of peach and apple trees. In the cabin window a dim light.
+
+It was then about eleven o'clock. The three Troopers, effacing
+themselves in the shadows, laid final plans.
+
+The cabin had two rooms on the top floor and one below, said Hallisey,
+beneath his breath. The first-floor room had a door and two windows on
+the north, and the same on the south, just opposite. Under the west end
+was a cellar, with an outside door. Before the main door to the north
+was a little porch. This, by day, commanded the sweep of the
+mountain-side; and here, when Drake was "hiding out" in some neighboring
+eyrie, expecting pursuit, his wife was wont to signal him concerning the
+movements of intruders.
+
+Her code was written in dish-water. A panful thrown to the east meant
+danger in the west, and _vice versa_; this Hallisey himself had seen and
+now recalled in case of need.
+
+Up to the present moment each officer had carried his carbine, taken
+apart and wrapped in a bundle, to avoid the remark of chance observers
+by the way. Now each put his weapon together, ready for use. They
+compared their watches, setting them to the second. They discarded their
+coats and hats.
+
+The moon was flooding the clearing with high, pale light, adding greatly
+to the difficulty of their task. Accordingly, they plotted carefully.
+Each Trooper took a door--Hallisey that to the north, Merryfield that to
+the south, Smith that of the cellar. It was agreed that each should
+creep to a point opposite the door on which he was to advance, ten
+minutes being allowed for all to reach their initial positions; that at
+exactly five minutes to midnight the advance should be started, slowly,
+through the tall grass of the clearing toward the cabin; that in case of
+any unusual noise or alarm, each man should lie low exactly five minutes
+before resuming this advance; and that from a point fifty yards from the
+cabin a rush should be made upon the doors.
+
+According to the request of the District Attorney, Drake was to be taken
+"dead or alive," but according to an adamantine principle of the Force,
+he must be taken not only alive, but unscathed if that were humanly
+possible. This meant that he must not be given an opportunity to run and
+so render shooting necessary. If, however, he should break away, his
+chance of escape would be small, as each Trooper was a dead shot with
+the weapons he was carrying.
+
+The scheme concerted, the three officers separated, heading apart to
+their several starting-points. At five minutes before midnight, to the
+tick of their synchronized watches, each began to glide through the tall
+grass. But it was late September. The grass was dry. Old briar-veins
+dragged at brittle stalks. Shimmering whispers of withered leaves echoed
+to the smallest touch; and when the men were still some two hundred
+yards from the cabin the sharp ears of a dog caught the rumor of all
+these tiny sounds,--and the dog barked.
+
+Every man stopped short--moved not a finger again till five minutes had
+passed. Then once more each began to creep--reached the fifty-yard
+point--stood up, with a long breath, and dashed for his door.
+
+At one and the same moment, practically, the three stood in the cabin,
+viewing a scene of domestic peace. A short, square, swarthy woman, black
+of eye, high of cheek bone, stood by a stove calmly stirring a pot. On
+the table besides her, on the floor around her, clustered many jars of
+peaches--jars freshly filled, steaming hot, awaiting their tops. In a
+corner three little children, huddled together on a low bench, stared at
+the strangers with sleepy eyes. Three chairs; a cupboard with dishes;
+bunches of corn hanging from the rafters by their husks; festoons of
+onions; tassels of dried herbs--all this made visible by the dull light
+of a small kerosene lamp whose dirty chimney was streaked with smoke.
+All this and nothing more.
+
+Two of the men, jumping for the stairs, searched the upper half-story
+thoroughly, but without profit.
+
+"Mrs. Drake," said Hallisey, as they returned, "we are officers of the
+State Police, come to arrest your husband. Where is he?"
+
+In silence, in utter calm the woman still stirred her pot, not missing
+the rhythm of a stroke.
+
+"The dog warned them. He's just got away," said each officer to himself.
+"She's _too_ calm."
+
+She scooped up a spoonful of the fruit, peered at it critically,
+splashed it back into the bubbling pot. From her manner it appeared the
+most natural thing in the world to be canning peaches at midnight on the
+top of South Mountain in the presence of officers of the State Police.
+
+"My husband's gone to Baltimore," she vouchsafed at her easy leisure.
+
+"Let's have a look in the cellar," said Merryfield, and dropped down the
+cellar stairs with Hallisey at his heels. Together they ransacked the
+little cave to a conclusion. During the process, Merryfield conceived an
+idea.
+
+"Hallisey," he murmured, "what would you think of my staying down here,
+while you and Smith go off talking as though we were all together? She
+might say something to the children, when she believes we're gone, and I
+could hear every word through that thin floor."
+
+"We'll do it!" Hallisey answered, beneath his voice. Then, shouting:--
+
+"Come on, Smith! Let's get away from this; no use wasting time here!"
+
+And in another moment Smith and Hallisey were crashing up the
+mountain-side, calling out: "Hi, there! Merryfield--Oh! Merryfield,
+wait for us!"--as if their comrade had outstripped them on the trail.
+
+Merryfield had made use of the noise of their departure to establish
+himself in a tenable position under the widest crack in the floor. Now
+he held himself motionless, subduing even his breath.
+
+One--two--three minutes of dead silence. Then came the timorous
+half-whisper of a frightened child:
+
+"Will them men kill father if they find him?"
+
+"S-sh!"
+
+"Mother!" faintly ventured another little voice, "will them men kill
+father if they find him?"
+
+"S-sh! S-sh! I tell ye!"
+
+"Ma-ma! Will they kill my father?" This was the wail, insistent,
+uncontrolled, of the smallest child of all.
+
+The crackling tramp of the officers, mounting the trail, had wholly died
+away. The woman evidently believed all immediate danger past.
+
+"No!" she exclaimed vehemently, "they ain't goin' to lay eyes on yo'
+father, hair nor hide of him. Quit yer frettin'!"
+
+In a moment she spoke again: "You keep still, now, like good children,
+while I go out and empty these peach-stones. I'll be back in a minute.
+See you keep still just where you are!"
+
+Stealing noiselessly to the cellar door as the woman left the house,
+Merryfield saw her making for the woods, a basket on her arm. He watched
+her till the shadows engulfed her. Then he drew back to his own place
+and resumed his silent vigil.
+
+Moments passed, without a sound from the room above. Then came soft
+little thuds on the floor, a whimper or two, small sighs, and a slither
+of bare legs on bare boards.
+
+"Poor little kiddies!" thought Merryfield, "they're coiling down to
+sleep!"
+
+Back in the days when the Force was started, the Major had said to each
+recruit of them all:--
+
+"I expect you to treat women and children at all times with every
+consideration."
+
+From that hour forth the principle has been grafted into the lives of
+the men. It is instinct now--self-acting, deep, and unconscious. No
+tried Trooper deliberately remembers it. It is an integral part of him,
+like the drawing of his breath.
+
+"I wish I could manage to spare those babies and their mother in what's
+to come!" Merryfield pondered as he lurked in the mould-scented dark.
+
+A quarter of an hour went by. Five minutes more. Footsteps nearing the
+cabin from the direction of the woods. Low voices--very low.
+Indistinguishable words. Then the back door opened. Two persons entered,
+and all that they now uttered was clear.
+
+"It was them that the dog heard," said a man's voice. "Get me my rifle
+and all my ammunition. I'll go to Maryland. I'll get a job on that stone
+quarry near Westminster. I'll send some money as soon as I'm paid."
+
+"But you won't start _to-night_!" exclaimed the wife.
+
+"Yes, to-night--this minute. Quick! I wouldn't budge an inch for the
+County folks. But with the State Troopers after me, that's another
+thing. If I stay around here now they'll get me dead sure--and send me
+up too. My gun, I say!"
+
+"Oh, daddy, daddy, don't go away!" "_Don't_ go away off and leave me,
+daddy!" "_Don't go, don't go!_" came the children's plaintive wails,
+hoarse with fatigue and fright.
+
+Merryfield stealthily crept from the cellar's outside door, hugging the
+wall of the cabin, moving toward the rear. As he reached the corner, and
+was about to make the turn toward the back, he drew his six-shooter and
+laid his carbine down in the grass. For the next step, he knew, would
+bring him into plain sight. If Drake offered any resistance, the
+ensuing action would be at short range or hand to hand.
+
+He rounded the corner. Drake was standing just outside the door, a rifle
+in his left hand, his right hand hidden in the pocket of his overcoat.
+In the doorway stood the wife, with the three little children crowding
+before her. It was the last moment. They were saying good-bye.
+
+Merryfield covered the bandit with his revolver.
+
+"Put up your hands! You are under arrest," he commanded.
+
+"Who the hell are you!" Drake flung back. As he spoke he thrust his
+rifle into the grasp of the woman and snatched his right hand from its
+concealment. In its grip glistened the barrel of a nickel-plated
+revolver.
+
+Merryfield could have easily shot him then and there--would have been
+amply warranted in doing so. But he had heard the children's voices. Now
+he saw their innocent, terrified eyes.
+
+"Poor--little--kiddies!" he thought again.
+
+Drake stood six feet two inches high, and weighed some two hundred
+pounds, all brawn. Furthermore, he was desperate. Merryfield is merely
+of medium build.
+
+"Nevertheless, I'll take a chance," he said to himself, returning his
+six-shooter to its holster. And just as the outlaw threw up his own
+weapon to fire, the Trooper, in a running jump, plunged into him with
+all fours, exactly as, when a boy, he had plunged off a springboard into
+the old mill-dam of a hot July afternoon.
+
+Too amazed even to pull his trigger, Drake gave backward a step into the
+doorway. Merryfield's clutch toward his right hand missed the gun,
+fastening instead on the sleeve of his heavy coat. Swearing wildly while
+the woman and children screamed behind him, the bandit struggled to
+break the Trooper's hold--tore and pulled until the sleeve, where
+Merryfield held it, worked down over the gun in his own grip. So
+Merryfield, twisting the sleeve, caught a lock-hold on hand and gun
+together.
+
+Drake, standing on the doorsill, had now some eight inches advantage of
+height. The door opened inward, from right to left. With a tremendous
+effort Drake forced his assailant to his knees, stepped back into the
+room, seized the door with his left hand and with the whole weight on
+his shoulder slammed it to, on the Trooper's wrist.
+
+The pain was excruciating--but it did not break that lock-hold on the
+outlaw's hand and gun. Shooting from his knees like a projectile,
+Merryfield flung his whole weight at the door. Big as Drake was, he
+could not hold it. It gave, and once more the two men hung at grips,
+this time within the room.
+
+Drake's one purpose was to turn the muzzle of his imprisoned revolver
+upon Merryfield. Merryfield, with his left still clinching that deadly
+hand caught in its sleeve, now grabbed the revolver in his own right
+hand, with a twist dragged it free, and flung it out of the door.
+
+But, as he dropped his right defense, taking both hands to the gun, the
+outlaw's powerful left grip closed on Merryfield's throat with a
+strangle-hold.
+
+With that great thumb closing his windpipe, with the world turning red
+and black, "Guess I can't put it over, after all!" the Trooper said to
+himself.
+
+Reaching for his own revolver, he shoved the muzzle against the bandit's
+breast.
+
+"Damn you, _shoot_!" cried the other, believing his end was come.
+
+But in that same instant Merryfield once more caught a glimpse of the
+fear-stricken faces of the babies, huddled together beyond.
+
+"Hallisey and Smith must be here soon," he thought. "I won't shoot yet."
+
+Again he dropped his revolver back into the holster, seizing the wrist
+of the outlaw to release that terrible clamp on his throat. As he did
+so, Drake with a lightning twist, reached around to the Trooper's belt
+and possessed himself of the gun. As he fired Merryfield had barely time
+and space to throw back his head. The flash blinded him--scorched his
+face hairless. The bullet grooved his body under the upflung arm still
+wrenching at the clutch that was shutting off his breath.
+
+Perhaps, with the shot, the outlaw insensibly somewhat relaxed that
+choking arm. Merryfield tore loose. Half-blinded and gasping though he
+was, he flung himself again at his adversary and landed a blow in his
+face. Drake, giving backward, kicked over a row of peach jars, slipped
+on the slimy stream that poured over the bare floor, and dropped the
+gun.
+
+Pursuing his advantage, Merryfield delivered blow after blow on the
+outlaw's face and body, backing him around the room, while both men
+slipped and slid, fell and recovered, on the jam-coated floor. The table
+crashed over, carrying with it the solitary lamp, whose flame died
+harmlessly, smothered in tepid mush. Now only the moonlight illuminated
+the scene.
+
+Drake was manoeuvring always to recover the gun. His hand touched the
+back of a chair. He picked the chair up, swung it high, and was about to
+smash it down on his adversary's head when Merryfield seized it in the
+air.
+
+At this moment the woman, who had been crouching against the wall
+nursing the rifle that her husband had put into her charge, rushed
+forward clutching the barrel of the gun, swung it at full arm's length
+as she would have swung an axe, and brought the stock down on the
+Trooper's right hand.
+
+That vital hand dropped--fractured, done. But in the same second Drake
+gave a shriek of pain as a shot rang out and his own right arm fell
+powerless.
+
+In the door stood Hallisey, smoking revolver in hand, smiling grimly in
+the moonlight at the neatness of his own aim. What is the use of killing
+a man, when you can wing him as trigly as that?
+
+Private Smith, who had entered by the other door, was taking the rifle
+out of the woman's grasp--partly because she had prodded him viciously
+with the muzzle. He examined the chambers.
+
+"Do you know this thing is loaded?" he asked her in a mild, detached
+voice.
+
+She returned his gaze with frank despair in her black eyes.
+
+"Drake, do you surrender?" asked Hallisey.
+
+"Oh, I'll give up. You've got me!" groaned the outlaw. Then he turned on
+his wife with bitter anger. "Didn't I tell ye?" he snarled. "Didn't I
+tell ye they'd get me if you kept me hangin' around here? These ain't no
+damn deputies. _These is the State Police!_"
+
+"An' yet, if I'd known that gun was loaded," said she, "there'd been
+some less of 'em to-night!"
+
+They dressed Israel's arm in first-aid fashion. Then they started with
+their prisoner down the mountain-trail, at last resuming connection with
+their farmer friend. Not without misgivings, the latter consented to
+hitch up his "double team" and hurry the party to the nearest town where
+a doctor could be found.
+
+As the doctor dressed the bandit's arm, Private Merryfield, whose broken
+right hand yet awaited care, observed to the groaning patient:--
+
+"Do you know, you can be thankful to your little children that you have
+your life left."
+
+"To hell with you and the children and my life. I'd a hundred times
+rather you'd killed me than take what's comin' now."
+
+Then the three Troopers philosophically hunted up a night restaurant and
+gave their captive a bite of lunch.
+
+"Now," said Hallisey, as he paid the score, "where's the lock-up?"
+
+The three officers, with Drake in tow, proceeded silently through the
+sleeping streets. Not a ripple did their passing occasion. Not even a
+dog aroused to take note of them.
+
+Duly they stood at the door of the custodian of the lock-up, ringing the
+bell--again and again ringing it. Eventually some one upstairs raised a
+window, looked out for an appreciable moment, quickly lowered the window
+and locked it. Nothing further occurred. Waiting for a reasonable
+interval the officers rang once more. No answer. Silence complete.
+
+Then they pounded on the door till the entire block heard.
+
+Here, there, up street and down, bedroom windows gently opened, then
+closed with finality more gentle yet. Silence. Not a voice. Not a foot
+on a stair.
+
+The officers looked at each other perplexed. Then, by chance, they
+looked at Drake. Drake, so lately black with suicidal gloom, was
+grinning! Grinning as a man does when the citadel of his heart is
+comforted.
+
+"You don't understand, do ye!" chuckled he. "Well, I'll tell ye: What do
+them folks see when they open their windows and look down here in the
+road? They see three hard-lookin' fellers with guns in their hands, here
+in this bright moonlight. And they see somethin' scarier to them than a
+hundred strangers with guns--they see _ME_! There ain't a mother's son
+of 'em that'll budge downstairs while I'm here, not if you pound on
+their doors till the cows come home." And he slapped his knee with his
+good hand and laughed in pure ecstasy--a laugh that caught all the
+little group and rocked it as with one mind.
+
+"We don't begrudge you that, do we boys?" Hallisey conceded. "Smith,
+you're as respectable-looking as any of us. Hunt around and see if you
+can find a Constable that isn't onto this thing. We'll wait here for
+you."
+
+Moving out of the zone of the late demonstration, Private Smith learned
+the whereabouts of the home of a Constable.
+
+"What's wanted?" asked the Constable, responding like a normal burgher
+to Smith's knock at his door.
+
+"Officer of State Police," answered Smith. "I have a man under arrest
+and want to put him in the lock-up. Will you get me the keys?"
+
+"Sure. I'll come right down and go along with you myself. Just give me a
+jiffy to get on my trousers and boots," cried the Constable, clearly
+glad of a share in the adventure.
+
+In a moment the borough official was at the Trooper's side, talking
+eagerly as they moved toward the place where the party waited.
+
+"So, he's a highwayman, is he? Good! and a burglar, too, and a
+cattle-thief! Good work! And you've got him right up the street, ready
+to jail! Well, I'll be switched. Now, what might his name be? Israel
+Drake? _Not Israel Drake!_ Oh, my God!"
+
+The Constable had stopped in his tracks like a man struck paralytic.
+
+"No, stranger," he quavered. "I reckon I--I--I won't go no further with
+you just now. Here, I'll give you the keys. You can use 'em yourself:
+These here's for the doors. This bunch is for the cells. _Good_-night to
+you. I'll be getting back home!"
+
+By the first train next morning the Troopers, conveying their prisoner,
+left the village for the County Town. As they deposited Drake in the
+safe-keeping of the County Jail and were about to depart, he seemed
+burdened with an impulse to speak, yet said nothing. Then, as the three
+officers were leaving the room, he leaned over and touched Merryfield on
+the shoulder.
+
+"Shake!" he growled, offering his unwounded hand.
+
+Merryfield "shook" cheerfully, with his own remaining sound member.
+
+"I'm plumb sorry to see ye go, and that's a fact," growled the outlaw.
+"Because--well, because you're the only _man_ that ever tried to arrest
+me."
+
+
+
+
+KATHERINE MAYO
+
+
+Miss Katherine Mayo comes of Mayflower stock, but her birthplace was
+Ridgway, Pennsylvania. She was educated in private schools at Boston and
+Cambridge, Mass. Her earliest literary work to appear in print was a
+series of articles describing travels in Norway, followed by another
+series on Colonial American topics, written for the New York _Evening
+Post_. Later, during a residence in Dutch Guiana, South America, she
+wrote for the _Atlantic Monthly_ some interesting sketches of the
+natives of Surinam. After this came three years wholly devoted to
+historic research. The work, however, that first attracted wide
+attention was a history of the Pennsylvania State Police, published in
+1917, under the title of _Justice To All_.
+
+This history gives the complete story of the famous Mounted Police of
+Pennsylvania, illustrated with a mass of accurate narrative and
+re-enforced with statistics. The occasion of its writing was a personal
+experience--the cold-blooded murder of Sam Howell, a fine young American
+workingman, a carpenter by trade, near Miss Mayo's country home in New
+York. The circumstances of this murder could not have been more
+skilfully arranged had they been specially designed to illustrate the
+weakness and folly of the ancient, out-grown engine to which most states
+in the Union, even yet, look for the enforcement of their laws in rural
+parts. Sam Howell, carrying the pay roll on pay-day morning, gave his
+life for his honor as gallantly as any soldier in any war. He was shot
+down, at arm's length range, by four highway men, to whom, though
+himself unarmed, he would not surrender his trust. Sheriff, deputy
+sheriffs, constables, and some seventy-five fellow laborers available as
+sheriff's posse spent hours within a few hundred feet of the little
+wood in which the four murderers were known to be hiding, but no arrest
+was made and the murderers are to-day still at large.
+
+"You will have forgotten all this in a month's time," said Howell's
+fellow-workmen an hour after the tragedy, to Miss Mayo and her friend
+Miss Newell, owner of the estate, on the scene. "Sam was only a laboring
+man, like ourselves. We, none of us, have any protection when we work in
+country parts."
+
+The remark sounded bitter indeed. But investigation proved it, in
+principle, only too true. Sam Howell had not been the first, by many
+hundreds, to give his life because the State had no real means to make
+her law revered. And punishment for such crimes had been rare. Sam
+Howell, however, was not to be forgotten, neither was his sacrifice to
+be vain. From his blood, shed unseen, in the obscurity of a quiet
+country lane, was to spring a great movement, taking effect first in the
+state in which he died, and spreading through the Union.
+
+At that time Pennsylvania was the only state of all the forty-seven that
+had met its just obligations to protect all its people under its laws.
+Pennsylvania's State Police had been for ten years a body of defenders
+of justice, "without fear and without reproach". The honest people of
+the State had recorded its deeds in a long memory of noble service. But,
+never stooping to advertise itself, never hesitating to incur the enmity
+of evildoers, it had had many traducers and no historian. There was
+nothing in print to which the people of other states might turn for
+knowledge of the accomplishment of the sister commonwealth.
+
+So, in order that the facts might be conveniently available for every
+American citizen to study from "A" to "Z" and thus to decide
+intelligently for himself where he wanted his own state to stand, in the
+matter of fair and full protection to all people, Miss Mayo went to
+Pennsylvania and embarked on an exhaustive analysis of the workings of
+the Pennsylvania State Police Force, viewed from the standpoint of all
+parts of the community. Ex-President Roosevelt wrote the preface for
+_Justice To All_, the book in which the fruits of this study were
+finally embodied, and, in the meantime, Miss Newell devoted all her
+energies to the development of an active and aggressive state-wide
+movement for a State Police. _Justice To All_, in this campaign was
+widely used as a source of authority on which to base the arguments for
+the case. And in 1917 came Sam Howell's triumph, the passage of the Act
+creating the Department of New York State Police, now popularly called
+"the State Troopers".
+
+In the course of collecting the material for this book, Miss Mayo
+gathered a mass of facts much greater than one volume could properly
+contain. From this she later took fifteen adventurous stories of actual
+service in the Pennsylvania Force, of which some, including "Israel
+Drake" appeared in the _Saturday Evening Post_, while others came out
+simultaneously in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and in the _Outlook_. All were
+later collected in a volume called _The Standard Bearers_, which met
+with a very cordial reception by readers and critics.
+
+During the latter part of the World War, Miss Mayo was in France
+investigating the war-work of the Y. M. C. A. Her experiences there
+furnished material for a book from which advance pages appeared in the
+_Outlook_ in the form of separate stories, "Billy's Hut," "The Colonel's
+Lady" and others. The purpose of this book was to determine, as closely
+as possible, the real values, whatever those might be, of the work
+actually accomplished by the Overseas Y, and to lay the plain truth
+without bias or color, before the American people.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE PHILIPPINES
+
+_When the Philippine Islands passed from the possession of Spain to
+that of the United States, there was a change in more than the flag.
+Spain had sent soldiers and tax-gatherers to the islands; Uncle Sam sent
+road-builders and school teachers. One of these school teachers was also
+a newspaper man; and in a book called_ CAYBIGAN _he gave a series of
+vivid pictures of how the coming generation of Filipinos are taking the
+first step towards Americanization._
+
+
+
+
+THE STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPH OF ISIDRO DE LOS MAESTROS
+
+BY
+
+JAMES HOPPER
+
+
+_I--Face to Face with the Foe_
+
+Returning to his own town after a morning spent in "working up" the
+attendance of one of his far and recalcitrant barrio-schools, the
+Maestro of Balangilang was swaying with relaxed muscle and half-closed
+eyes to the allegretto trot of his little native pony, when he pulled up
+with a start, wide awake and all his senses on the alert. Through his
+somnolence, at first in a low hum, but fast rising in a fiendish
+crescendo, there had come a buzzing sound, much like that of one of the
+saw-mills of his California forests, and now, as he sat in the saddle,
+erect and tense, the thing ripped the air in ragged tear, shrieked
+vibrating into his ear, and finished its course along his spine in
+delicious irritation.
+
+"Oh, where am I?" murmured the Maestro, blinking; but between blinks he
+caught the flashing green of the palay fields and knew that he was far
+from the saw-mills of the Golden State. So he raised his nose to heaven
+and there, afloat above him in the serene blue, was the explanation. It
+was a kite, a great locust-shaped kite, darting and swooping in the hot
+monsoon, and from it, dropping plumb, came the abominable clamor.
+
+"Aha!" exclaimed the Maestro, pointing accusingly at the thin line
+vaguely visible against the sky-line in a diagonal running from the kite
+above him ahead to a point in the road. "Aha! there's something at the
+end of that; there's Attendance at the end of that!"
+
+With which significant remark he leaned forward in the saddle, bringing
+his switch down with a whizz behind him. The pony gave three rabbit
+leaps and then settled down to his drumming little trot. As they
+advanced the line overhead dropped gradually. Finally the Maestro had to
+swerve the horse aside to save his helmet. He pulled up to a walk, and a
+few yards further came to the spot where string met earth in the
+expected Attendance.
+
+The Attendance was sitting on the ground, his legs spread before him in
+an angle of forty-five degrees, each foot arched in a secure grip of a
+bunch of cogon grass. These legs were bare as far up as they went, and,
+in fact, no trace of clothing was reached until the eye met the lower
+fringe of an indescribable undershirt modestly veiling the upper half of
+a rotund little paunch; an indescribable undershirt, truly, for
+observation could not reach the thing itself, but only the dirt
+incrusting it so that it hung together, rigid as a knight's iron
+corslet, in spite of monstrous tears and rents. Between the teeth of the
+Attendance was a long, thick cheroot, wound about with hemp fiber, at
+which he pulled with rounded mouth. Hitched around his right wrist was
+the kite string, and between his legs a stick spindled with an extra
+hundred yards. At intervals he hauled hand-over-hand upon the taut line,
+and then the landscape vibrated to the buzz-saw song which had so
+compellingly recalled the Maestro to his eternal pursuit.
+
+As the shadow of the horse fell upon him, the Attendance brought his
+eyes down from their heavenly contemplation, and fixed them upon the
+rider. A tremor of dismay, mastered as soon as born, flitted over him;
+then, silently, with careful suppression of all signs of haste, he
+reached for a big stone with his little yellow paw, then for a stick
+lying farther off. Using the stone as a hammer, he drove the stick into
+the ground with deliberate stroke, wound the string around it with
+tender solicitude, and then, everything being secure, just as the
+Maestro was beginning his usual embarrassing question:
+
+"Why are you not at school, eh?"
+
+He drew up his feet beneath him, straightened up like a jack-in-a-box,
+took a hop-skip-jump, and with a flourish of golden heels, flopped
+head-first into the roadside ditch's rank luxuriance.
+
+"The little devil!" exclaimed the disconcerted Maestro. He dismounted
+and, leading his horse, walked up to the side of the ditch. It was full
+of the water of the last baguio. From the edge of the cane-field on the
+other side there cascaded down the bank a mad vegetation; it carpeted
+the sides, arched itself above in a vault, and inside this recess the
+water was rotting, green-scummed; and a powerful fermentation filled the
+nostrils with hot fever-smells. In the center of the ditch the broad,
+flat head of a caribao emerged slightly above the water; the floating
+lilies made an incongruous wreath about the great horns and the
+beatifically-shut eyes, and the thick, humid nose exhaled ecstasy in
+shuddering ripplets over the calm surface.
+
+Filled with a vague sense of the ridiculous, the Maestro peered into the
+darkness. "The little devil!" he murmured. "He's somewhere in here; but
+how am I to get him, I'd like to know. Do you see him, eh, Mathusalem?"
+he asked of the stolid beast soaking there in bliss.
+
+Whether in answer to this challenge or to some other irritant, the
+animal slowly opened one eye and ponderously let it fall shut again in
+what, to the heated imagination of the Maestro, seemed a patronizing
+wink. Its head slid quietly along the water; puffs of ooze rose from
+below and spread on the surface. Then, in the silence there rose a
+significant sound--a soft, repeated snapping of the tongue:
+
+"Cluck, cluck."
+
+"Aha!" shouted the Maestro triumphantly to his invisible audience. "I
+know where you are, you scamp; right behind the caribao; come out of
+there, _pronto, dale-dale_!"
+
+But his enthusiasm was of short duration. To the commanding
+tongue-click the caribao had stopped dead-still, and a silence heavy
+with defiance met the too-soon exultant cries. An insect in the foliage
+began a creaking call, and then all the creatures of humidity hidden
+there among this fermenting vegetation joined in mocking chorus.
+
+The Maestro felt a vague blush welling up from the innermost recesses of
+his being.
+
+"I'm going to get that kid," he muttered darkly, "if I have to wait
+till--the coming of Common Sense to the Manila office! By gum, he's the
+Struggle for Attendance personified!"
+
+He sat down on the bank and waited. This did not prove interesting. The
+animals of the ditch creaked on; the caribao bubbled up the water with
+his deep content; above, the abandoned kite went through strange
+acrobatics and wailed as if in pain. The Maestro dipped his hand into
+the water; it was lukewarm. "No hope of a freeze-out," he murmured
+pensively.
+
+Behind, the pony began to pull at the reins.
+
+"Yes, little horse, I'm tired, too. Well," he said apologetically, "I
+hate to get energetic, but there are circumstances which----"
+
+The end of his sentence was lost, for he had whisked out the big Colt's
+dissuader of ladrones, that hung on his belt, and was firing. The six
+shots went off like a bunch of fire-crackers, but far from at random,
+for a regular circle boiled up around the dozing caribao. The disturbed
+animal snorted, and again a discreet "cluck-cluck" rose in the sudden,
+astounded silence.
+
+"This," said the Maestro, as he calmly introduced fresh cartridges into
+the chambers of his smoking weapon, "is what might be called an
+application of western solutions to eastern difficulties."
+
+Again he brought his revolver down, but he raised it without shooting
+and replaced it in its holster. From beneath the caribao's rotund belly,
+below the surface, an indistinct form shot out; cleaving the water like
+a polliwog it glided for the bank, and then a black, round head emerged
+at the feet of the Maestro.
+
+"All right, bub; we'll go to school now," said the latter, nodding to
+the dripping figure as it rose before him.
+
+He lifted the sullen brownie and straddled him forward of the saddle,
+then proceeded to mount himself, when the Capture began to display
+marked agitation. He squirmed and twisted, turned his head back and up,
+and finally a grunt escaped him.
+
+"El volador."
+
+"The kite, to be sure; we mustn't forget the kite," acquiesced the
+Maestro graciously. He pulled up the anchoring stick and laboriously,
+beneath the hostilely critical eye of the Capture, he hauled in the line
+till the screeching, resisting flying-machine was brought to earth. Then
+he vaulted into the saddle.
+
+The double weight was a little too much for the pony; so it was at a
+dignified walk that the Maestro, his naked, dripping, muddy and still
+defiant prisoner a-straddle in front of him, the captured kite passed
+over his left arm like a knightly shield, made his triumphant entry into
+the pueblo.
+
+
+_II--Heroism and Reverses_
+
+When Maestro Pablo rode down Rizal-y-Washington Street to the
+schoolhouse with his oozing, dripping prize between his arms, the kite,
+like a knightly escutcheon against his left side, he found that in spite
+of his efforts at preserving a modest, self-deprecatory bearing, his
+spine would stiffen and his nose point upward in the unconscious
+manifestations of an internal feeling that there was in his attitude
+something picturesquely heroic. Not since walking down the California
+campus one morning after the big game won three minutes before blowing
+of the final whistle, by his fifty-yard run-in of a punt, had he been
+in that posture--at once pleasant and difficult--in which one's vital
+concern is to wear an humility sufficiently convincing to obtain from
+friends forgiveness for the crime of being great.
+
+A series of incidents immediately following, however, made the thing
+quite easy.
+
+Upon bringing the new recruit into the schoolhouse, to the perfidiously
+expressed delight of the already incorporated, the Maestro called his
+native assistant to obtain the information necessary to a full
+matriculation. At the first question the inquisition came to a
+dead-lock. The boy did not know his name.
+
+"In Spanish times," the Assistant suggested modestly, "we called them
+"de los Reyes" when the father was of the army, and "de la Cruz" when
+the father was of the church; but now, we can never know _what_ it is."
+
+The Maestro dashed to a solution. "All right," he said cheerily. "I
+caught him; guess I can give him a name. Call him--Isidro de los
+Maestros."
+
+And thus it was that the urchin went down on the school records, and on
+the records of life afterward.
+
+Now, well pleased with himself, the Maestro, as is the wont of men in
+such state, sought for further enjoyment.
+
+"Ask him," he said teasingly, pointing with his chin at the
+newly-baptized but still unregenerate little savage, "why he came out of
+the ditch."
+
+"He says he was afraid that you would steal the kite," answered the
+Assistant, after some linguistic sparring.
+
+"Eh?" ejaculated the surprised Maestro.
+
+And in his mind there framed a picture of himself riding along the road
+with a string between his fingers; and, following in the upper layers of
+air, a buzzing kite; and, down in the dust of the highway, an urchin
+trudging wistfully after the kite, drawn on irresistibly, in spite of
+his better judgment, on and on, horrified but fascinated, up to the
+yawning school-door.
+
+It would have been the better way. "I ought to go and soak my head,"
+murmured the Maestro pensively.
+
+This was check number one, but others came in quick succession.
+
+For the morning after this incident the Maestro did not find Isidro
+among the weird, wild crowd gathered into the annex (a transformed sugar
+storehouse) by the last raid of the Municipal Police.
+
+Neither was Isidro there the next day, nor the next. And it was not till
+a week had passed that the Maestro discovered, with an inward blush of
+shame, that his much-longed-for pupil was living in the little hut
+behind his own house. There would have been nothing shameful in the
+overlooking--there were seventeen other persons sharing the same
+abode--were it not that the nipa front of this human hive had been blown
+away by the last baguio, leaving an unobstructed view of the interior,
+if it might be called such. As it was, the Municipal Police was
+mobilized at the urgent behest of the Maestro. Its "cabo," flanked by
+two privates armed with old German needle-guns, besieged the home, and
+after an interesting game of hide-and-go-seek, Isidro was finally caught
+by one arm and one ear, and ceremoniously marched to school. And there
+the Maestro asked him why he had not been attending.
+
+"No hay pantalones"--there are no pants--Isidro answered, dropping his
+eyes modestly to the ground.
+
+This was check number two, and unmistakably so, for was it not a fact
+that a civil commission, overzealous in its civilizing ardor, had passed
+a law commanding that every one should wear, when in public, "at least
+one garment, preferably trousers?"
+
+Following this, and an unsuccessful plea upon the town tailor who was on
+a three weeks' vacation on account of the death of a fourth cousin, the
+Maestro shut himself up a whole day with Isidro in his little nipa
+house; and behind the closely-shut shutters engaged in some mysterious
+toil. When they emerged again the next morning, Isidro wended his way to
+the school at the end of the Maestro's arm, trousered!
+
+The trousers, it must be said, had a certain cachet of distinction. They
+were made of calico-print, with a design of little black skulls
+sprinkled over a yellow background. Some parts hung flat and limp as if
+upon a scarecrow; others pulsed, like a fire-hose in action, with the
+pressure of flesh compressed beneath, while at other points they bulged
+pneumatically in little foot-balls. The right leg dropped to the ankle;
+the left stopped discouraged, a few inches below the knee. The seams
+looked like the putty mountain chains of the geography class. As the
+Maestro strode along he threw rapid glances at his handiwork, and it was
+plain that the emotions that moved him were somewhat mixed in character.
+His face showed traces of a puzzled diffidence, as that of a man who has
+come in sack-coat to a full-dress function; but after all it was
+satisfaction that predominated, for after this heroic effort he had
+decided that Victory had at last perched upon his banners.
+
+And it really looked so for a time. Isidro stayed at school at least
+during that first day of his trousered life. For when the Maestro, later
+in the forenoon paid a visit to the annex, he found the Assistant in
+charge standing disconcerted before the urchin who, with eyes indignant
+and hair perpendicular upon the top of his head, was evidently holding
+to his side of the argument with his customary energy.
+
+Isidro was trouserless. Sitting rigid upon his bench, holding on with
+both hands as if in fear of being removed, he dangled naked legs to the
+sight of who might look.
+
+"Que barbaridad!" murmured the Assistant in limp dejection.
+
+But Isidro threw at him a look of black hatred. This became a tense,
+silent plea for justice as it moved up for a moment to the Maestro's
+face, and then it settled back upon its first object in frigid
+accusation.
+
+"Where are your trousers, Isidro?" asked the Maestro.
+
+Isidro relaxed his convulsive grasp of the bench with one hand, canted
+himself slightly to one side just long enough to give an instantaneous
+view of the trousers, neatly folded and spread between what he was
+sitting with and what he was sitting on, then swung back with the
+suddenness of a kodak-shutter, seized his seat with new determination,
+and looked eloquent justification at the Maestro.
+
+"Why will you not wear them?" asked the latter.
+
+"He says he will not get them dirty," said the Assistant, interpreting
+the answer.
+
+"Tell him when they are dirty he can go down to the river and wash
+them," said the Maestro.
+
+Isidro pondered over the suggestion for two silent minutes. The prospect
+of a day spent splashing in the lukewarm waters of the Ilog he finally
+put down as not at all detestable, and getting up to his feet:
+
+"I will put them on," he said gravely.
+
+Which he did on the moment, with an absence of hesitation as to which
+was front and which was back, very flattering to the Maestro.
+
+That Isidro persevered during the next week, the Maestro also came to
+know. For now regularly every evening as he smoked and lounged upon his
+long, cane chair, trying to persuade his tired body against all laws of
+physics to give up a little of its heat to a circumambient atmosphere of
+temperature equally enthusiastic; as he watched among the rafters of the
+roof the snakes swallowing the rats, the rats devouring the lizards, the
+lizards snapping up the spiders, the spiders snaring the flies in
+eloquent representation of the life struggle, his studied passiveness
+would be broken by strange sounds from the dilapidated hut at the back
+of his house. A voice, imitative of that of the Third Assistant who
+taught the annex, hurled forth questions, which were immediately
+answered by another voice, curiously like that of Isidro.
+
+Fiercely: "Du yu ssee dde hhett?"
+
+Breathlessly: "Yiss I ssee dde hhett."
+
+Ferociously: "Show me dde hhett."
+
+Eagerly: "Here are dde hhett."
+
+Thunderously: "Gif me dde hhett."
+
+Exultantly: "I gif yu dde hhett."
+
+Then the Maestro would step to the window and look into the hut from
+which came this Socratic dialogue. And on this wall-less platform which
+looked much like a primitive stage, a singular action was unrolling
+itself in the smoky glimmer of a two-cent lamp. The Third Assistant was
+not there at all; but Isidro was the Third Assistant. And the pupil was
+not Isidro, but the witless old man who was one of the many sharers of
+the abode. In the voice of the Third Assistant, Isidro was hurling out
+the tremendous questions; and, as the old gentleman, who represented
+Isidro, opened his mouth only to drule betel-juice, it was Isidro who,
+in Isidro's voice, answered the questions. In his rôle as Third
+Assistant he stood with legs akimbo before the pupil, a bamboo twig in
+his hand; as Isidro the pupil, he plumped down quickly upon the bench
+before responding. The sole function of the senile old man seemed that
+of representing the pupil while the question was being asked, and
+receiving, in that capacity, a sharp cut across the nose from
+Isidro-the-Third-Assistant's switch, at which he chuckled to himself in
+silent glee and druled ad libitum.
+
+For several nights this performance went on with gradual increase of
+vocabulary in teacher and pupil. But when it had reached the "Do you see
+the apple-tree?" stage, it ceased to advance, marked time for a while,
+and then slowly but steadily began sliding back into primitive
+beginnings. This engendered in the Maestro a suspicion which became
+certainty when Isidro entered the schoolhouse one morning just before
+recess, between two policemen at port arms. A rapid scrutiny of the
+roll-book showed that he had been absent a whole week.
+
+"I was at the river cleaning my trousers," answered Isidro when put face
+to face with this curious fact.
+
+The Maestro suggested that the precious pantaloons which, by the way,
+had been mysteriously embellished by a red stripe down the right leg and
+a green stripe down the left leg, could be cleaned in less than a week,
+and that Saturday and Sunday were days specially set aside in the
+Catechismo of the Americanos for such little family duties.
+
+Isidro understood, and the nightly rehearsals soon reached the stage of:
+
+"How menny hhetts hev yu?"
+
+"I hev _ten_ hhetts."
+
+Then came another arrest of development and another decline, at the end
+of which Isidro again making his appearance flanked by two German
+needle-guns, caused a blush of remorse to suffuse the Maestro by
+explaining with frigid gravity that his mother had given birth to a
+little pickaninny-brother and that, of course, he had had to help.
+
+But significant events in the family did not stop there. After birth,
+death stepped in for its due. Isidro's relatives began to drop off in
+rapid sequence--each demise demanding three days of meditation in
+retirement--till at last the Maestro, who had had the excellent idea of
+keeping upon paper a record of these unfortunate occurrences, was
+looking with stupor upon a list showing that Isidro had lost, within
+three weeks, two aunts, three grandfathers, and five
+grandmothers--which, considering that an actual count proved the house
+of bereavement still able to boast of seventeen occupants, was plainly
+an exaggeration.
+
+Following a long sermon from the Maestro in which he sought to explain
+to Isidro that he must always tell the truth for sundry philosophical
+reasons--a statement which the First Assistant tactfully smoothed to
+something within range of credulity by translating it that one must not
+lie to _Americanos_, because _Americanos_ do not like it--there came a
+period of serenity.
+
+
+_III--The Triumph_
+
+There came to the Maestro days of peace and joy. Isidro was coming to
+school; Isidro was learning English. Isidro was steady, Isidro was
+docile, Isidro was positively so angelic that there was something
+uncanny about the situation. And with Isidro, other little savages were
+being pruned into the school-going stage of civilization. Helped by the
+police, they were pouring in from barrio and hacienda; the attendance
+was going up by leaps and bounds, till at last a circulative report
+showed that Balangilang had passed the odious Cabancalan with its less
+strenuous school-man, and left it in the ruck by a full hundred. The
+Maestro was triumphant; his chest had gained two inches in expansion.
+When he met Isidro at recess, playing cibay, he murmured softly: "You
+little devil; you were Attendance personified, and I've got you now." At
+which Isidro, pausing in the act of throwing a shell with the top of his
+head at another shell on the ground, looked up beneath long lashes in a
+smile absolutely seraphic.
+
+In the evening, the Maestro, his heart sweet with content, stood at the
+window. These were moonlight nights; in the grassy lanes the young girls
+played graceful Spanish games, winding like garlands to a gentle song;
+from the shadows of the huts came the tinkle-tinkle of serenading
+guitars and yearning notes of violins wailing despairing love. And
+Isidro, seated on the bamboo ladder of his house, went through an
+independent performance. He sang "Good-night, Ladies," the last song
+given to the school, sang it in soft falsetto, with languorous drawls,
+and never-ending organ points, over and over again, till it changed
+character gradually, dropping into a wailing minor, an endless croon
+full of obscure melancholy of a race that dies.
+
+"Goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies; goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh
+loidies-ies-ies; goo-oo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies-ies," he
+repeated and repeated, over and over again, till the Maestro's soul
+tumbled down and down abysses of maudlin tenderness, and Isidro's chin
+fell upon his chest in a last drawling, sleepy note. At which he shook
+himself together and began the next exercise, a recitation, all of one
+piece from first to last syllable, in one high, monotonous note, like a
+mechanical doll saying "papa-mama."
+
+"Oh-look-et-de-moon-she-ees-shinin-up-theyre-oh-mudder-she
+look-like-a-lom-in-de-ayre-lost-night-she-was-smalleyre-on-joos
+like-a-bow-boot-now-she-ees-biggerr-on-rrraon-like-an-O."
+
+Then a big gulp of air and again:
+
+"Oh-look-et-de-moon-she-ees-shinin-up-theyre,----" etc.
+
+An hour of this, and he skipped from the lyric to the patriotic, and
+then it was:
+
+
+     "I-loof-dde-name-off-Wash-ing-ton,
+       I-loof-my-coontrrree-tow,
+     I-loof-dde-fleg-dde-dear-owl-fleg,
+       Off-rridd-on-whit-on-bloo-oo-oo!"
+
+
+By this time the Maestro was ready to go to bed, and long in the torpor
+of the tropic night there came to him, above the hum of the mosquitoes
+fighting at the net, the soft, wailing croon of Isidro, back at his
+"Goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies."
+
+These were days of ease and beauty to the Maestro, and he enjoyed them
+the more when a new problem came to give action to his resourceful
+brain.
+
+The thing was this: For three days there had not been one funeral in
+Balangilang.
+
+In other climes, in other towns, this might have been a source of
+congratulation, perhaps, but not in Balangilang. There were rumors of
+cholera in the towns to the north, and the Maestro, as president of the
+Board of Health, was on the watch for it. Five deaths a day, experience
+had taught him, was the healthy average for the town; and this sudden
+cessation of public burials--he could not believe that dying had
+stopped--was something to make him suspicious.
+
+It was over this puzzling situation that he was pondering at the morning
+recess, when his attention was taken from it by a singular scene.
+
+The "batas" of the school were flocking and pushing and jolting at the
+door of the basement which served as stable for the municipal caribao.
+Elbowing his way to the spot, the Maestro found Isidro at the entrance,
+gravely taking up an admission of five shells from those who would
+enter. Business seemed to be brisk; Isidro had already a big bandana
+handkerchief bulging with the receipts which were now overflowing into a
+great tao hat, obligingly loaned him by one of his admirers, as one by
+one, those lucky enough to have the price filed in, feverish curiosity
+upon their faces.
+
+The Maestro thought that it might be well to go in also, which he did
+without paying admission. The disappointed gate-keeper followed him. The
+Maestro found himself before a little pink-and-blue tissue-paper box,
+frilled with paper rosettes.
+
+"What have you in there?" asked the Maestro.
+
+"My brother," answered Isidro sweetly.
+
+He cast his eyes to the ground and watched his big toe drawing vague
+figures in the earth, then appealing to the First Assistant who was
+present by this time, he added in the tone of virtue which _will_ be
+modest:
+
+"Maestro Pablo does not like it when I do not come to school on account
+of a funeral, so I brought him (pointing to the little box) with me."
+
+"Well, I'll be----" was the only comment the Maestro found adequate at
+the moment.
+
+"It is my little pickaninny-brother," went on Isidro, becoming alive to
+the fact that he was a center of interest, "and he died last night of
+the great sickness."
+
+"The great what?" ejaculated the Maestro who had caught a few words.
+
+"The great sickness," explained the Assistant. "That is the name by
+which these ignorant people call the cholera."
+
+
+For the next two hours the Maestro was very busy.
+
+Firstly he gathered the "batas" who had been rich enough to attend
+Isidro's little show and locked them up--with the impresario himself--in
+the little town-jail close by. Then, after a vivid exhortation upon the
+beauties of boiling water and reporting disease, he dismissed the school
+for an indefinite period. After which, impressing the two town
+prisoners, now temporarily out of home, he shouldered Isidro's pretty
+box, tramped to the cemetery and directed the digging of a grave six
+feet deep. When the earth had been scraped back upon the lonely little
+object, he returned to town and transferred the awe-stricken playgoers
+to his own house, where a strenuous performance took place.
+
+Tolio, his boy, built a most tremendous fire outside and set upon it all
+the pots and pans and caldrons and cans of his kitchen arsenal, filled
+with water. When these began to gurgle and steam, the Maestro set
+himself to stripping the horrified bunch in his room; one by one he
+threw the garments out of the window to Tolio who, catching them,
+stuffed them into the receptacles, poking down their bulging protest
+with a big stick. Then the Maestro mixed an awful brew in an old
+oil-can, and taking the brush which was commonly used to sleek up his
+little pony, he dipped it generously into the pungent stuff and began an
+energetic scrubbing of his now absolutely panic-stricken wards. When he
+had done this to his satisfaction and thoroughly to their discontent, he
+let them put on their still steaming garments and they slid out of the
+house, aseptic as hospitals.
+
+Isidro he kept longer. He lingered over him with loving and strenuous
+care, and after he had him externally clean, proceeded to dose him
+internally from a little red bottle. Isidro took everything--the
+terrific scrubbing, the exaggerated dosing, the ruinous treatment of his
+pantaloons--with wonder-eyed serenity.
+
+When all this was finished the Maestro took the urchin into the
+dining-room and, seating him on his best bamboo chair, he courteously
+offered him a fine, dark perfecto.
+
+The next instant he was suffused with the light of a new revelation.
+For, stretching out his hard little claw to receive the gift, the little
+man had shot at him a glance so mild, so wistful, so brown-eyed, filled
+with such mixed admiration, trust, and appeal, that a queer softness had
+risen in the Maestro from somewhere down in the regions of his heel, up
+and up, quietly, like the mercury in the thermometer, till it had flowed
+through his whole body and stood still, its high-water mark a little
+lump in his throat.
+
+"Why, Lord bless us-ones, Isidro," said the Maestro quietly. "We're only
+a child after all; mere baby, my man. And don't we like to go to
+school?"
+
+"Señor Pablo," asked the boy, looking up softly into the Maestro's still
+perspiring visage, "Señor Pablo, is it true that there will be no school
+because of the great sickness?"
+
+"Yes, it is true," answered the Maestro. "No school for a long, long
+time."
+
+Then Isidro's mouth began to twitch queerly, and suddenly throwing
+himself full-length upon the floor, he hurled out from somewhere within
+him a long, tremulous wail.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES MERLE HOPPER
+
+
+James Merle Hopper was born in Paris, France. His father was American,
+his mother French; their son James was born July 23, 1876. In 1887 his
+parents came to America, and settled in California. James Hopper
+attended the University of California, graduating in 1898. He is still
+remembered there as one of the grittiest football players who ever
+played on the 'Varsity team. Then came a course in the law school of
+that university, and admission to the California bar in 1900. All this
+reads like the biography of a lawyer: so did the early life of James
+Russell Lowell, and of Oliver Wendell Holmes: they were all admitted to
+the bar, but they did not become lawyers. James Hopper had done some
+newspaper work for San Francisco papers while he was in law school, and
+the love of writing had taken hold of him. In the meantime he had
+married Miss Mattie E. Leonard, and as literature did not yet provide a
+means of support, he became an instructor in French at the University of
+California.
+
+With the close of the Spanish-American War came the call for thousands
+of Americans to go to the Philippines as schoolmasters. This appealed to
+him, and he spent the years 1902-03 in the work that Kipling thus
+describes in "The White Man's Burden":
+
+
+     To wait in heavy harness
+       On fluttered folk and wild--
+     Your new-caught sullen peoples,
+       Half devil and half child.
+
+
+His experiences here furnished the material for a group of short stories
+dealing picturesquely with the Filipinos in their first contact with
+American civilization. These were published in _McClure's_, and
+afterwards collected in book form under the title _Caybigan_.
+
+In 1903 James Hopper returned to the United States, and for a time was
+on the editorial staff of _McClure's_. Later in collaboration with Fred
+R. Bechdolt he wrote a remarkable book, entitled "_9009_". This is the
+number of a convict in an American prison, and the book exposes the
+system of spying, of treachery, of betrayal, that a convict must
+identify himself with in order to become a "trusty." His next book was a
+college story, _The Freshman_. This was followed by a volume of short
+stories, _What Happened in the Night_. These are stories of child life,
+but intended for older readers; they are very successful in reproducing
+the imaginative world in which children live. In 1915 and 1916 he acted
+as a war correspondent for _Collier's_, first with the American troops
+in Mexico in pursuit of Villa, and later in France. His home is at
+Carmel, California.
+
+
+
+
+THEY WHO BRING DREAMS TO AMERICA
+
+_"No wonder this America of ours is big. We draw the brave ones from
+the old lands, the brave ones whose dreams are like the guiding sign
+that was given to the Israelites of old--a pillar of cloud by day, a
+pillar of fire by night." "The Citizen" is a story of a brave man who
+followed his dream over land and sea, until it brought him to America, a
+fortunate event for him and for us._
+
+
+
+
+THE CITIZEN
+
+BY
+
+JAMES FRANCIS DWYER
+
+
+The President of the United States was speaking. His audience comprised
+two thousand foreign-born men who had just been admitted to citizenship.
+They listened intently, their faces, aglow with the light of a new-born
+patriotism, upturned to the calm, intellectual face of the first citizen
+of the country they now claimed as their own.
+
+Here and there among the newly-made citizens were wives and children.
+The women were proud of their men. They looked at them from time to
+time, their faces showing pride and awe.
+
+One little woman, sitting immediately in front of the President, held
+the hand of a big, muscular man and stroked it softly. The big man was
+looking at the speaker with great blue eyes that were the eyes of a
+dreamer.
+
+The President's words came clear and distinct:
+
+_You were drawn across the ocean by some beckoning finger of hope, by
+some belief, by some vision of a new kind of justice, by some
+expectation of a better kind of life. You dreamed dreams of this
+country, and I hope you brought the dreams with you. A man enriches the
+country to which he brings dreams, and you who have brought them have
+enriched America._
+
+The big man made a curious choking noise and his wife breathed a soft
+"Hush!" The giant was strangely affected.
+
+The President continued:
+
+_No doubt you have been disappointed in some of us, but remember this,
+if we have grown at all poor in the ideal, you brought some of it with
+you. A man does not go out to seek the thing that is not in him. A man
+does not hope for the thing that he does not believe in, and if some of
+us have forgotten what America believed in, you at any rate imported in
+your own hearts a renewal of the belief. Each of you, I am sure, brought
+a dream, a glorious, shining dream, a dream worth more than gold or
+silver, and that is the reason that I, for one, make you welcome._
+
+The big man's eyes were fixed. His wife shook him gently, but he did not
+heed her. He was looking through the presidential rostrum, through the
+big buildings behind it, looking out over leagues of space to a
+snow-swept village that huddled on an island in the Beresina, the
+swift-flowing tributary of the mighty Dnieper, an island that looked
+like a black bone stuck tight in the maw of the stream.
+
+It was in the little village on the Beresina that the Dream came to Ivan
+Berloff, Big Ivan of the Bridge.
+
+The Dream came in the spring. All great dreams come in the spring, and
+the Spring Maiden who brought Big Ivan's Dream was more than ordinarily
+beautiful. She swept up the Beresina, trailing wondrous draperies of
+vivid green. Her feet touched the snow-hardened ground, and armies of
+little white and blue flowers sprang up in her footsteps. Soft breezes
+escorted her, velvety breezes that carried the aromas of the far-off
+places from which they came, places far to the southward, and more
+distant towns beyond the Black Sea whose people were not under the sway
+of the Great Czar.
+
+The father of Big Ivan, who had fought under Prince Menshikov at Alma
+fifty-five years before, hobbled out to see the sunbeams eat up the snow
+hummocks that hid in the shady places, and he told his son it was the
+most wonderful spring he had ever seen.
+
+"The little breezes are hot and sweet," he said, sniffing hungrily with
+his face turned toward the south. "I know them, Ivan! I know them! They
+have the spice odor that I sniffed on the winds that came to us when we
+lay in the trenches at Balaklava. Praise God for the warmth!"
+
+And that day the Dream came to Big Ivan as he plowed. It was a wonder
+dream. It sprang into his brain as he walked behind the plow, and for a
+few minutes he quivered as the big bridge quivers when the Beresina
+sends her ice squadrons to hammer the arches. It made his heart pound
+mightily, and his lips and throat became very dry.
+
+Big Ivan stopped at the end of the furrow and tried to discover what had
+brought the Dream. Where had it come from? Why had it clutched him so
+suddenly? Was he the only man in the village to whom it had come?
+
+Like his father, he sniffed the sweet-smelling breezes. He thrust his
+great hands into the sunbeams. He reached down and plucked one of a
+bunch of white flowers that had sprung up overnight. The Dream was born
+of the breezes and the sunshine and the spring flowers. It came from
+them and it had sprung into his mind because he was young and strong. He
+knew! It couldn't come to his father or Donkov, the tailor, or Poborino,
+the smith. They were old and weak, and Ivan's dream was one that called
+for youth and strength.
+
+"Ay, for youth and strength," he muttered as he gripped the plow. "And I
+have it!"
+
+That evening Big Ivan of the Bridge spoke to his wife, Anna, a little
+woman, who had a sweet face and a wealth of fair hair.
+
+"Wife, we are going away from here," he said.
+
+"Where are we going, Ivan?" she asked.
+
+"Where do you think, Anna?" he said, looking down at her as she stood by
+his side.
+
+"To Bobruisk," she murmured.
+
+"No."
+
+"Farther?"
+
+"Ay, a long way farther."
+
+Fear sprang into her soft eyes. Bobruisk was eighty-nine versts away,
+yet Ivan said they were going farther.
+
+"We--we are not going to Minsk?" she cried.
+
+"Aye, and beyond Minsk!"
+
+"Ivan, tell me!" she gasped. "Tell me where we are going!"
+
+"We are going to America."
+
+"_To America?_"
+
+"Yes, to America!"
+
+Big Ivan of the Bridge lifted up his voice when he cried out the words
+"To America," and then a sudden fear sprang upon him as those words
+dashed through the little window out into the darkness of the village
+street. Was he mad? America was 8,000 versts away! It was far across the
+ocean, a place that was only a name to him, a place where he knew no
+one. He wondered in the strange little silence that followed his words
+if the crippled son of Poborino, the smith, had heard him. The cripple
+would jeer at him if the night wind had carried the words to his ear.
+
+Anna remained staring at her big husband for a few minutes, then she sat
+down quietly at his side. There was a strange look in his big blue eyes,
+the look of a man to whom has come a vision, the look which came into
+the eyes of those shepherds of Judea long, long ago.
+
+"What is it, Ivan?" she murmured softly, patting his big hand. "Tell
+me."
+
+And Big Ivan of the Bridge, slow of tongue, told of the Dream. To no one
+else would he have told it. Anna understood. She had a way of patting
+his hands and saying soft things when his tongue could not find words to
+express his thoughts.
+
+Ivan told how the Dream had come to him as he plowed. He told her how it
+had sprung upon him, a wonderful dream born of the soft breezes, of the
+sunshine, of the sweet smell of the upturned sod and of his own
+strength. "It wouldn't come to weak men," he said, baring an arm that
+showed great snaky muscles rippling beneath the clear skin. "It is a
+dream that comes only to those who are strong and those who want--who
+want something that they haven't got." Then in a lower voice he said:
+"What is it that we want, Anna?"
+
+The little wife looked out into the darkness with fear-filled eyes.
+There were spies even there in that little village on the Beresina, and
+it was dangerous to say words that might be construed into a reflection
+on the Government. But she answered Ivan. She stooped and whispered one
+word into his ear, and he slapped his thigh with his big hand.
+
+"Ay," he cried. "That is what we want! You and I and millions like us
+want it, and over there, Anna, over there we will get it. It is the
+country where a muzhik is as good as a prince of the blood!"
+
+Anna stood up, took a small earthenware jar from a side shelf, dusted it
+carefully and placed it upon the mantel. From a knotted cloth about her
+neck she took a ruble and dropped the coin into the jar. Big Ivan looked
+at her curiously.
+
+"It is to make legs for your Dream," she explained. "It is many versts
+to America, and one rides on rubles."
+
+"You are a good wife," he said. "I was afraid that you might laugh at
+me."
+
+"It is a great dream," she murmured. "Come, we will go to sleep."
+
+The Dream maddened Ivan during the days that followed. It pounded within
+his brain as he followed the plow. It bred a discontent that made him
+hate the little village, the swift-flowing Beresina and the gray
+stretches that ran toward Mogilev. He wanted to be moving, but Anna had
+said that one rode on rubles, and rubles were hard to find.
+
+And in some mysterious way the village became aware of the secret.
+Donkov, the tailor, discovered it. Donkov lived in one-half of the
+cottage occupied by Ivan and Anna, and Donkov had long ears. The tailor
+spread the news, and Poborino, the smith, and Yanansk, the baker, would
+jeer at Ivan as he passed.
+
+"When are you going to America?" they would ask.
+
+"Soon," Ivan would answer.
+
+"Take us with you!" they would cry in chorus.
+
+"It is no place for cowards," Ivan would answer. "It is a long way, and
+only brave men can make the journey."
+
+"Are you brave?" the baker screamed one day as he went by.
+
+"I am brave enough to want liberty!" cried Ivan angrily. "I am brave
+enough to want----"
+
+"Be careful! Be careful!" interrupted the smith. "A long tongue has
+given many a man a train journey that he never expected."
+
+That night Ivan and Anna counted the rubles in the earthenware pot. The
+giant looked down at his wife with a gloomy face, but she smiled and
+patted his hand.
+
+"It is slow work," he said.
+
+"We must be patient," she answered. "You have the Dream."
+
+"Ay," he said. "I have the Dream."
+
+Through the hot, languorous summertime the Dream grew within the brain
+of Big Ivan. He saw visions in the smoky haze that hung above the
+Beresina. At times he would stand, hoe in hand, and look toward the
+west, the wonderful west into which the sun slipped down each evening
+like a coin dropped from the fingers of the dying day.
+
+Autumn came, and the fretful whining winds that came down from the north
+chilled the Dream. The winds whispered of the coming of the Snow King,
+and the river grumbled as it listened. Big Ivan kept out of the way of
+Poborino, the smith, and Yanansk, the baker. The Dream was still with
+him, but autumn is a bad time for dreams.
+
+Winter came, and the Dream weakened. It was only the earthenware pot
+that kept it alive, the pot into which the industrious Anna put every
+coin that could be spared. Often Big Ivan would stare at the pot as he
+sat beside the stove. The pot was the cord which kept the Dream alive.
+
+"You are a good woman, Anna," Ivan would say again and again. "It was
+you who thought of saving the rubles."
+
+"But it was you who dreamed," she would answer. "Wait for the spring,
+husband mine. Wait."
+
+It was strange how the spring came to the Beresina that year. It sprang
+upon the flanks of winter before the Ice King had given the order to
+retreat into the fastnesses of the north. It swept up the river escorted
+by a million little breezes, and housewives opened their windows and
+peered out with surprise upon their faces. A wonderful guest had come to
+them and found them unprepared.
+
+Big Ivan of the Bridge was fixing a fence in the meadow on the morning
+the Spring Maiden reached the village. For a little while he was not
+aware of her arrival. His mind was upon his work, but suddenly he
+discovered that he was hot, and he took off his overcoat. He turned to
+hang the coat upon a bush, then he sniffed the air, and a puzzled look
+came upon his face. He sniffed again, hurriedly, hungrily. He drew in
+great breaths of it, and his eyes shone with a strange light. It was
+wonderful air. It brought life to the Dream. It rose up within him, ten
+times more lusty than on the day it was born, and his limbs trembled as
+he drew in the hot, scented breezes that breed the _Wanderlust_ and
+shorten the long trails of the world.
+
+Big Ivan clutched his coat and ran to the little cottage. He burst
+through the door, startling Anna, who was busy with her housework.
+
+"The Spring!" he cried. "_The Spring!_"
+
+He took her arm and dragged her to the door. Standing together they
+sniffed the sweet breezes. In silence they listened to the song of the
+river. The Beresina had changed from a whining, fretful tune into a
+lilting, sweet song that would set the legs of lovers dancing. Anna
+pointed to a green bud on a bush beside the door.
+
+"It came this minute," she murmured.
+
+"Yes," said Ivan. "The little fairies brought it there to show us that
+spring has come to stay."
+
+Together they turned and walked to the mantel. Big Ivan took up the
+earthenware pot, carried it to the table, and spilled its contents upon
+the well-scrubbed boards. He counted while Anna stood beside him, her
+fingers clutching his coarse blouse. It was a slow business, because
+Ivan's big blunt fingers were not used to such work, but it was over at
+last. He stacked the coins into neat piles, then he straightened himself
+and turned to the woman at his side.
+
+"It is enough," he said quietly. "We will go at once. If it was not
+enough, we would have to go because the Dream is upon me and I hate this
+place."
+
+"As you say," murmured Anna. "The wife of Littin, the butcher, will buy
+our chairs and our bed. I spoke to her yesterday."
+
+Poborino, the smith; his crippled son; Yanansk, the baker; Dankov, the
+tailor, and a score of others were out upon the village street on the
+morning that Big Ivan and Anna set out. They were inclined to jeer at
+Ivan, but something upon the face of the giant made them afraid. Hand in
+hand the big man and his wife walked down the street, their faces turned
+toward Bobruisk, Ivan balancing upon his head a heavy trunk that no
+other man in the village could have lifted.
+
+At the end of the street a stripling with bright eyes and yellow curls
+clutched the hand of Ivan and looked into his face.
+
+"I know what is sending you," he cried.
+
+"Ay, _you_ know," said Ivan, looking into the eyes of the other.
+
+"It came to me yesterday," murmured the stripling. "I got it from the
+breezes. They are free, so are the birds and the little clouds and the
+river. I wish I could go."
+
+"Keep your dream," said Ivan softly. "Nurse it, for it is the dream of a
+man."
+
+Anna, who was crying softly, touched the blouse of the boy. "At the back
+of our cottage, near the bush that bears the red berries, a pot is
+buried," she said. "Dig it up and take it home with you and when you
+have a kopeck drop it in. It is a good pot."
+
+The stripling understood. He stooped and kissed the hand of Anna, and
+Big Ivan patted him upon the back. They were brother dreamers and they
+understood each other.
+
+Boris Lugan has sung the song of the versts that eat up one's courage as
+well as the leather of one's shoes.
+
+
+     "Versts! Versts! Scores and scores of them!
+     Versts! Versts! A million or more of them!
+     Dust! Dust! And the devils who play in it,
+     Blinding us fools who forever must stay in it."
+
+
+Big Ivan and Anna faced the long versts to Bobruisk, but they were not
+afraid of the dust devils. They had the Dream. It made their hearts
+light and took the weary feeling from their feet. They were on their
+way. America was a long, long journey, but they had started, and every
+verst they covered lessened the number that lay between them and the
+Promised Land.
+
+"I am glad the boy spoke to us," said Anna.
+
+"And I am glad," said Ivan. "Some day he will come and eat with us in
+America."
+
+They came to Bobruisk. Holding hands, they walked into it late one
+afternoon. They were eighty-nine versts from the little village on the
+Beresina, but they were not afraid. The Dream spoke to Ivan, and his big
+hand held the hand of Anna. The railway ran through Bobruisk, and that
+evening they stood and looked at the shining rails that went out in the
+moonlight like silver tongs reaching out for a low-hanging star.
+
+And they came face to face with the Terror that evening, the Terror that
+had helped the spring breezes and the sunshine to plant the Dream in the
+brain of Big Ivan.
+
+They were walking down a dark side street when they saw a score of men
+and women creep from the door of a squat, unpainted building. The little
+group remained on the sidewalk for a minute as if uncertain about the
+way they should go, then from the corner of the street came a cry of
+"Police!" and the twenty pedestrians ran in different directions.
+
+It was no false alarm. Mounted police charged down the dark thoroughfare
+swinging their swords as they rode at the scurrying men and women who
+raced for shelter. Big Ivan dragged Anna into a doorway, and toward
+their hiding place ran a young boy who, like themselves, had no
+connection with the group and who merely desired to get out of harm's
+way till the storm was over.
+
+The boy was not quick enough to escape the charge. A trooper pursued
+him, overtook him before he reached the sidewalk, and knocked him down
+with a quick stroke given with the flat of his blade. His horse struck
+the boy with one of his hoofs as the lad stumbled on his face.
+
+Big Ivan growled like an angry bear, and sprang from his hiding place.
+The trooper's horse had carried him on to the sidewalk, and Ivan seized
+the bridle and flung the animal on its haunches. The policeman leaned
+forward to strike at the giant, but Ivan of the Bridge gripped the left
+leg of the horseman and tore him from the saddle.
+
+The horse galloped off, leaving its rider lying beside the moaning boy
+who was unlucky enough to be in a street where a score of students were
+holding a meeting.
+
+Anna dragged Ivan back into the passageway. More police were charging
+down the street, and their position was a dangerous one.
+
+"Ivan!" she cried, "Ivan! Remember the Dream! America, Ivan! _America!_
+Come this way! Quick!"
+
+With strong hands she dragged him down the passage. It opened into a
+narrow lane, and, holding each other's hands, they hurried toward the
+place where they had taken lodgings. From far off came screams and
+hoarse orders, curses and the sound of galloping hoofs. The Terror was
+abroad.
+
+Big Ivan spoke softly as they entered the little room they had taken.
+"He had a face like the boy to whom you gave the lucky pot," he said.
+"Did you notice it in the moonlight when the trooper struck him down?"
+
+"Yes," she answered. "I saw."
+
+They left Bobruisk next morning. They rode away on a great, puffing,
+snorting train that terrified Anna. The engineer turned a stopcock as
+they were passing the engine, and Anna screamed while Ivan nearly
+dropped the big trunk. The engineer grinned, but the giant looked up at
+him and the grin faded. Ivan of the Bridge was startled by the rush of
+hot steam, but he was afraid of no man.
+
+The train went roaring by little villages and great pasture stretches.
+The real journey had begun. They began to love the powerful engine. It
+was eating up the versts at a tremendous rate. They looked at each other
+from time to time and smiled like two children.
+
+They came to Minsk, the biggest town they had ever seen. They looked out
+from the car windows at the miles of wooden buildings, at the big church
+of St. Catharine, and the woolen mills. Minsk would have frightened them
+if they hadn't had the Dream. The farther they went from the little
+village on the Beresina the more courage the Dream gave to them.
+
+On and on went the train, the wheels singing the song of the road.
+Fellow travelers asked them where they were going. "To America," Ivan
+would answer.
+
+"To America?" they would cry. "May the little saints guide you. It is a
+long way, and you will be lonely."
+
+"No, we shall not be lonely," Ivan would say.
+
+"Ha! you are going with friends?"
+
+"No, we have no friends, but we have something that keeps us from being
+lonely." And when Ivan would make that reply Anna would pat his hand and
+the questioner would wonder if it was a charm or a holy relic that the
+bright-eyed couple possessed.
+
+They ran through Vilna, on through flat stretches of Courland to Libau,
+where they saw the sea. They sat and stared at it for a whole day,
+talking little but watching it with wide, wondering eyes. And they
+stared at the great ships that came rocking in from distant ports, their
+sides gray with the salt from the big combers which they had battled
+with.
+
+No wonder this America of ours is big. We draw the brave ones from the
+old lands, the brave ones whose dreams are like the guiding sign that
+was given to the Israelites of old--a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar
+of fire by night.
+
+The harbormaster spoke to Ivan and Anna as they watched the restless
+waters.
+
+"Where are you going, children?"
+
+"To America," answered Ivan.
+
+"A long way. Three ships bound for America went down last month."
+
+"Our ship will not sink," said Ivan.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because I know it will not."
+
+The harbor master looked at the strange blue eyes of the giant, and
+spoke softly. "You have the eyes of a man who sees things," he said.
+"There was a Norwegian sailor in the _White Queen_, who had eyes like
+yours, and he could see death."
+
+"I see life!" said Ivan boldly. "A free life----"
+
+"Hush!" said the harbor master. "Do not speak so loud." He walked
+swiftly away, but he dropped a ruble into Anna's hand as he passed her
+by. "For luck," he murmured. "May the little saints look after you on
+the big waters."
+
+They boarded the ship, and the Dream gave them a courage that surprised
+them. There were others going aboard, and Ivan and Anna felt that those
+others were also persons who possessed dreams. She saw the dreams in
+their eyes. There were Slavs, Poles, Letts, Jews, and Livonians, all
+bound for the land where dreams come true. They were a little
+afraid--not two per cent of them had ever seen a ship before--yet their
+dreams gave them courage.
+
+The emigrant ship was dragged from her pier by a grunting tug and went
+floundering down the Baltic Sea. Night came down, and the devils who,
+according to the Esthonian fishermen, live in the bottom of the Baltic,
+got their shoulders under the stern of the ship and tried to stand her
+on her head. They whipped up white combers that sprang on her flanks and
+tried to crush her, and the wind played a devil's lament in her rigging.
+Anna lay sick in the stuffy women's quarters, and Ivan could not get
+near her. But he sent her messages. He told her not to mind the sea
+devils, to think of the Dream, the Great Dream that would become real in
+the land to which they were bound. Ivan of the Bridge grew to full
+stature on that first night out from Libau. The battered old craft that
+carried him slouched before the waves that swept over her decks, but he
+was not afraid. Down among the million and one smells of the steerage he
+induced a thin-faced Livonian to play upon a mouth organ, and Big Ivan
+sang Paleer's "Song of Freedom" in a voice that drowned the creaking of
+the old vessel's timbers, and made the seasick ones forget their
+sickness. They sat up in their berths and joined in the chorus, their
+eyes shining brightly in the half gloom:
+
+
+     "Freedom for serf and for slave,
+     Freedom for all men who crave
+     Their right to be free
+     And who hate to bend knee
+     But to Him who this right to them gave."
+
+
+It was well that these emigrants had dreams. They wanted them. The sea
+devils chased the lumbering steamer. They hung to her bows and pulled
+her for'ard deck under emerald-green rollers. They clung to her stern
+and hoisted her nose till Big Ivan thought that he could touch the door
+of heaven by standing on her blunt snout. Miserable, cold, ill, and
+sleepless, the emigrants crouched in their quarters, and to them Ivan
+and the thin-faced Livonian sang the "Song of Freedom."
+
+The emigrant ship pounded through the Cattegat, swung southward through
+the Skagerrack and the bleak North Sea. But the storm pursued her. The
+big waves snarled and bit at her, and the captain and the chief officer
+consulted with each other. They decided to run into the Thames, and the
+harried steamer nosed her way in and anchored off Gravesend.
+
+An examination was made, and the agents decided to transship the
+emigrants. They were taken to London and thence by train to Liverpool,
+and Ivan and Anna sat again side by side, holding hands and smiling at
+each other as the third-class emigrant train from Euston raced down
+through the green Midland counties to grimy Liverpool.
+
+"You are not afraid?" Ivan would say to her each time she looked at him.
+
+"It is a long way, but the Dream has given me much courage," she said.
+
+"To-day I spoke to a Lett whose brother works in New York City," said
+the giant. "Do you know how much money he earns each day?"
+
+"How much?" she questioned.
+
+"Three rubles, and he calls the policemen by their first names."
+
+"You will earn five rubles, my Ivan," she murmured. "There is no one as
+strong as you."
+
+Once again they were herded into the bowels of a big ship that steamed
+away through the fog banks of the Mersey out into the Irish Sea. There
+were more dreamers now, nine hundred of them, and Anna and Ivan were
+more comfortable. And these new emigrants, English, Irish, Scotch,
+French, and German, knew much concerning America. Ivan was certain that
+he would earn at least three rubles a day. He was very strong.
+
+On the deck he defeated all comers in a tug of war, and the captain of
+the ship came up to him and felt his muscles.
+
+"The country that lets men like you get away from it is run badly," he
+said. "Why did you leave it?"
+
+The interpreter translated what the captain said, and through the
+interpreter Ivan answered.
+
+"I had a Dream," he said, "a Dream of freedom."
+
+"Good," cried the captain. "Why should a man with muscles like yours
+have his face ground into the dust?"
+
+The soul of Big Ivan grew during those days. He felt himself a man, a
+man who was born upright to speak his thoughts without fear.
+
+The ship rolled into Queenstown one bright morning, and Ivan and his
+nine hundred steerage companions crowded the for'ard deck. A boy in a
+rowboat threw a line to the deck, and after it had been fastened to a
+stanchion he came up hand over hand. The emigrants watched him
+curiously. An old woman sitting in the boat pulled off her shoes, sat in
+a loop of the rope, and lifted her hand as a signal to her son on deck.
+
+"Hey, fellers," said the boy, "help me pull me muvver up. She wants to
+sell a few dozen apples, an' they won't let her up the gangway!"
+
+Big Ivan didn't understand the words, but he guessed what the boy
+wanted. He made one of a half dozen who gripped the rope and started to
+pull the ancient apple woman to the deck.
+
+They had her halfway up the side when an undersized third officer
+discovered what they were doing. He called to a steward, and the steward
+sprang to obey.
+
+"Turn a hose on her!" cried the officer. "Turn a hose on the old woman!"
+
+The steward rushed for the hose. He ran with it to the side of the ship
+with the intention of squirting on the old woman, who was swinging in
+midair and exhorting the six men who were dragging her to the deck.
+
+"Pull!" she cried. "Sure, I'll give every one of ye a rosy red apple an'
+me blessing with it."
+
+The steward aimed the muzzle of the hose, and Big Ivan of the Bridge let
+go of the rope and sprang at him. The fist of the great Russian went out
+like a battering ram; it struck the steward between the eyes, and he
+dropped upon the deck. He lay like one dead, the muzzle of the hose
+wriggling from his limp hands.
+
+The third officer and the interpreter rushed at Big Ivan, who stood
+erect, his hands clenched.
+
+"Ask the big swine why he did it," roared the officer.
+
+"Because he is a coward!" cried Ivan. "They wouldn't do that in
+America!"
+
+"What does the big brute know about America?" cried the officer.
+
+"Tell him I have dreamed of it," shouted Ivan. "Tell him it is in my
+Dream. Tell him I will kill him if he turns the water on this old
+woman."
+
+The apple seller was on deck then, and with the wisdom of the Celt she
+understood. She put her lean hand upon the great head of the Russian and
+blessed him in Gaelic. Ivan bowed before her, then as she offered him a
+rosy apple he led her toward Anna, a great Viking leading a withered old
+woman who walked with the grace of a duchess.
+
+"Please don't touch him," she cried, turning to the officer. "We have
+been waiting for your ship for six hours, and we have only five dozen
+apples to sell. It's a great man he is. Sure he's as big as Finn
+MacCool."
+
+Some one pulled the steward behind a ventilator and revived him by
+squirting him with water from the hose which he had tried to turn upon
+the old woman. The third officer slipped quietly away.
+
+The Atlantic was kind to the ship that carried Ivan and Anna. Through
+sunny days they sat up on deck and watched the horizon. They wanted to
+be among those who would get the first glimpse of the wonderland.
+
+They saw it on a morning with sunshine and soft wind. Standing together
+in the bow, they looked at the smear upon the horizon, and their eyes
+filled with tears. They forgot the long road to Bobruisk, the rocking
+journey to Libau, the mad buckjumping boat in whose timbers the sea
+devils of the Baltic had bored holes. Everything unpleasant was
+forgotten, because the Dream filled them with a great happiness.
+
+The inspectors at Ellis Island were interested in Ivan. They walked
+around him and prodded his muscles, and he smiled down upon them
+good-naturedly.
+
+"A fine animal," said one. "Gee, he's a new white hope! Ask him can he
+fight?"
+
+An interpreter put the question, and Ivan nodded. "I have fought," he
+said.
+
+"Gee!" cried the inspector. "Ask him was it for purses or what?"
+
+"For freedom," answered Ivan. "For freedom to stretch my legs and
+straighten my neck!"
+
+Ivan and Anna left the Government ferryboat at the Battery. They started
+to walk uptown, making for the East Side, Ivan carrying the big trunk
+that no other man could lift.
+
+It was a wonderful morning. The city was bathed in warm sunshine, and
+the well-dressed men and women who crowded the sidewalks made the two
+immigrants think that it was a festival day. Ivan and Anna stared at
+each other in amazement. They had never seen such dresses as those worn
+by the smiling women who passed them by; they had never seen such
+well-groomed men.
+
+"It is a feast day for certain," said Anna.
+
+"They are dressed like princes and princesses," murmured Ivan. "There
+are no poor here, Anna. None."
+
+Like two simple children, they walked along the streets of the City of
+Wonder. What a contrast it was to the gray, stupid towns where the
+Terror waited to spring upon the cowed people. In Bobruisk, Minsk,
+Vilna, and Libau the people were sullen and afraid. They walked in
+dread, but in the City of Wonder beside the glorious Hudson every person
+seemed happy and contented.
+
+They lost their way, but they walked on, looking at the wonderful shop
+windows, the roaring elevated trains, and the huge skyscrapers. Hours
+afterward they found themselves in Fifth Avenue near Thirty-third
+Street, and there the miracle happened to the two Russian immigrants. It
+was a big miracle inasmuch as it proved the Dream a truth, a great
+truth.
+
+Ivan and Anna attempted to cross the avenue, but they became confused in
+the snarl of traffic. They dodged backward and forward as the stream of
+automobiles swept by them. Anna screamed, and, in response to her
+scream, a traffic policeman, resplendent in a new uniform, rushed to her
+side. He took the arm of Anna and flung up a commanding hand. The
+charging autos halted. For five blocks north and south they jammed on
+the brakes when the unexpected interruption occurred, and Big Ivan
+gasped.
+
+"Don't be flurried, little woman," said the cop. "Sure I can tame 'em by
+liftin' me hand."
+
+Anna didn't understand what he said, but she knew it was something nice
+by the manner in which his Irish eyes smiled down upon her. And in front
+of the waiting automobiles he led her with the same care that he would
+give to a duchess, while Ivan, carrying the big trunk, followed them,
+wondering much. Ivan's mind went back to Bobruisk on the night the
+Terror was abroad.
+
+The policeman led Anna to the sidewalk, patted Ivan good-naturedly upon
+the shoulder, and then with a sharp whistle unloosed the waiting stream
+of cars that had been held up so that two Russian immigrants could cross
+the avenue.
+
+Big Ivan of the Bridge took the trunk from his head and put it on the
+ground. He reached out his arms and folded Anna in a great embrace. His
+eyes were wet.
+
+"The Dream is true!" he cried. "Did you see, Anna? We are as good as
+they! This is the land where a muzhik is as good as a prince of the
+blood!"
+
+
+The President was nearing the close of his address. Anna shook Ivan, and
+Ivan came out of the trance which the President's words had brought upon
+him. He sat up and listened intently:
+
+_We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in
+the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's
+evening. Some of us let those great dreams die, but others nourish and
+protect them, nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the
+sunshine and light which come always to those who sincerely hope that
+their dreams will come true._
+
+The President finished. For a moment he stood looking down at the faces
+turned up to him, and Big Ivan of the Bridge thought that the President
+smiled at him. Ivan seized Anna's hand and held it tight.
+
+"He knew of my Dream!" he cried. "He knew of it. Did you hear what he
+said about the dreams of a spring day?"
+
+"Of course he knew," said Anna. "He is the wisest man in America, where
+there are many wise men. Ivan, you are a citizen now."
+
+"And you are a citizen, Anna."
+
+The band started to play "My Country, 'tis of Thee," and Ivan and Anna
+got to their feet. Standing side by side, holding hands, they joined in
+with the others who had found after long days of journeying the blessed
+land where dreams come true.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES FRANCIS DWYER
+
+
+Mr. Dwyer is an American by adoption, an Australian by birth. He was
+born in Camden, New South Wales, April 22, 1874; and received his
+education in the public schools there. He entered newspaper work, and in
+the capacity of a correspondent for Australian papers traveled
+extensively in Australia and in the South Seas, from 1898 to 1906. In
+1906 he made a tour through South Africa, and at the conclusion of this
+went to England. He came to America in 1907, and since that time has
+made his home in New York City. He has been a frequent contributor to
+_Collier's_, _Harper's Weekly_, _The American Magazine_, _The Ladies'
+Home Journal_, and other periodicals. He has published five books,
+nearly all dealing with the strange life of the far East. His first
+book, _The White Waterfall_, published in 1912, has its scene in the
+South Sea Islands. A California scientist, interested in ancient
+Polynesian skulls, goes to the South Seas to investigate his favorite
+subject, accompanied by his two daughters. The amazing adventures they
+meet there make a very interesting story. _The Spotted Panther_ is a
+story of adventure in Borneo. Three white men go there in search of a
+wonderful sword of great antiquity which is in the possession of a tribe
+of Dyaks, the head-hunters of Borneo. There are some vivid descriptions
+in the story and plenty of thrills. _The Breath of the Jungle_ is a
+collection of short stories, the scenes laid in the Malay Peninsula and
+nearby islands. They describe the strange life of these regions, and
+show how it reacts in various ways upon white men who live there. _The
+Green Half Moon_ is a story of mystery and diplomatic intrigue, the
+scene partly in the Orient, partly in London.
+
+In his later work Mr. Dwyer has taken up American themes. _The Bust of
+Lincoln_, really a short story, deals with a young man whose proudest
+possession is a bust of Lincoln that had belonged to his grandfather;
+the story shows how it influences his life. The story _The Citizen_ had
+an interesting origin. On May 10, 1915, just after the sinking of the
+_Lusitania_, President Wilson went to Philadelphia to address a meeting
+of an unusual kind. Four thousand foreign-born men, who had just become
+naturalized citizens of our country, were to be welcomed to citizenship
+by the Mayor of the city, a member of the Cabinet, and the President of
+the United States. The meeting was held in Convention Hall; more than
+fifteen thousand people were present, and the event, occurring as it did
+at a time when every one realized that the loyalty of our people was
+likely to be soon put to the test, was one of historic importance. Moved
+by the significance of this event, Mr. Dwyer translated it into
+literature. His story, "The Citizen," was published in _Collier's_ in
+November, 1915.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF AMERICAN SHORT STORIES CLASSIFIED BY LOCALITY
+
+
+I. THE EAST
+
+
+NEW ENGLAND
+
+_A New England Nun_; _A Humble Romance_, Mary Wilkins-Freeman.
+_Meadow-Grass_; _The Country Road_, Alice Brown.
+_A White Heron_; _The Queen's Twin_, Sarah Orne Jewett.
+_Pratt Portraits_; _Later Pratt Portraits_, Anna Fuller.
+_The Village Watch Tower_, Kate Douglas Wiggin.
+_The Old Home House_, Joseph C. Lincoln.
+_Hillsboro People_, Dorothy Canfield.
+_Out of Gloucester_; _The Crested Seas_, James B. Connolly.
+_Under the Crust_, Thomas Nelson Page.
+_Dumb Foxglove_, Annie T. Slosson.
+_Huckleberries Gathered From New England Hills_, Rose Terry Cooke.
+
+
+NEW YORK CITY
+
+_The Four Million_; _The Voice of the City_; _The Trimmed Lamp_,
+   O. Henry.
+_Van Bibber and Others_, Richard Harding Davis.
+_Doctor Rast_, James Oppenheim.
+_Toomey and Others_, Robert Shackleton.
+_Vignettes of Manhattan_, Brander Matthews.
+_The Imported Bridegroom_, Abraham Cahan.
+_Little Citizens_; _Little Aliens_, Myra Kelly.
+_The Soul of the Street_, Norman Duncan.
+_Wall Street Stories_, Edwin Le Fevre.
+_The Optimist_, Susan Faber.
+_Every Soul Hath Its Song_, Fannie Hurst.
+
+
+NEW JERSEY
+
+_Hulgate of Mogador_, Sewell Ford.
+_Edgewater People_, Mary Wilkins-Freeman.
+
+
+PENNSYLVANIA
+
+_Old Chester Tales_; _Doctor Lavender's People_, Margaret Deland.
+_Betrothal of Elypholate_, Helen R. Martin.
+_The Passing of Thomas_, Thomas A. Janvier.
+_The Standard Bearers_, Katherine Mayo.
+_Six Stars_, Nelson Lloyd.
+
+
+II. THE SOUTH
+
+
+ALABAMA
+
+_Alabama Sketches_, Samuel Minturn Peck.
+_Polished Ebony_, Octavius R. Cohen.
+
+
+ARKANSAS
+
+_Otto the Knight_; _Knitters in the Sun_, Octave Thanet.
+
+
+FLORIDA
+
+_Rodman the Keeper_, Constance F. Woolson.
+
+
+GEORGIA
+
+_Georgia Scenes_, A. B. Longstreet.
+_Free Joe_; _Tales of the Home-Folks_, Joel Chandler Harris.
+_Stories of the Cherokee Hills_, Maurice Thompson.
+_Northern Georgia Sketches_, Will N. Harben.
+_His Defence_, Harry Stilwell Edwards.
+_Mr. Absalom Billingslea_; _Mr. Billy Downes_, Richard Malcolm Johnston.
+
+
+KENTUCKY
+
+_Flute and Violin_; _A Kentucky Cardinal_, James Lane Allen.
+_In Happy Valley_, John Fox, Jr.
+_Back Home_; _Judge Priest and his People_, Irvin S. Cobb.
+_Land of Long Ago_; _Aunt Jane of Kentucky_, Eliza Calvert Hall.
+
+
+LOUISIANA
+
+_Holly and Pizen_; _Aunt Amity's Silver Wedding_, Ruth McEnery Stuart.
+_Balcony Stories_; _Tales of Time and Place_, Grace King.
+_Old Creole Days_; _Strange True Stories of Louisiana_, George W. Cable.
+_Bayou Folks_, Kate Chopin.
+
+
+TENNESSEE
+
+_In the Tennessee Mountains_; _Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains_,
+  Charles Egbert Craddock. (Mary N. Murfree.)
+
+
+VIRGINIA
+
+_In Ole Virginia_, Thomas Nelson Page.
+_Virginia of Virginia_, Amelie Rives.
+_Colonel Carter of Cartersville_, F. Hopkinson Smith.
+
+
+NORTH CAROLINA
+
+_North Carolina Sketches_, Mary N. Carter.
+
+
+III. THE MIDDLE WEST
+
+
+INDIANA
+
+_Dialect Sketches_, James Whitcomb Riley.
+
+
+ILLINOIS
+
+_The Home Builders_, K. E. Harriman.
+
+
+IOWA
+
+_Stories of a Western Town_; _The Missionary Sheriff_, Octave Thanet.
+_In a Little Town_, Rupert Hughes.
+
+
+KANSAS
+
+_In Our Town_; _Stratagems and Spoils_, William Allen White.
+
+
+MISSOURI
+
+_The Man at the Wheel_, John Hanton Carter.
+_Stories of a Country Doctor_, Willis King.
+
+
+MICHIGAN
+
+_Blazed Trail Stories_, Stewart Edward White.
+_Mackinac and Lake Stories_, Mary Hartwell Catherwood.
+
+
+OHIO
+
+_Folks Back Home_, Eugene Wood.
+
+
+WISCONSIN
+
+_Main-Travelled Roads_, Hamlin Garland.
+_Friendship Village_; _Friendship Village Love Stories_, Zona Gale.
+
+
+
+IV. THE FAR WEST
+
+
+ARIZONA
+
+_Lost Borders_, Mary Austin.
+_Arizona Nights_, Stewart Edward White.
+
+
+ALASKA
+
+_Love of Life_; _Son of the Wolf_, Jack London.
+
+
+CALIFORNIA
+
+_The Cat and the Cherub_, Chester B. Fernald.
+_The Luck of Roaring Camp_; _Tales of the Argonauts_, Bret Harte.
+_The Splendid Idle Forties_, Gertrude Atherton.
+
+
+NEW MEXICO
+
+_The King of the Broncos_, Charles F. Lummis.
+_Santa Fe's Partner_, Thomas A. Janvier.
+
+
+WYOMING
+
+_Red Men and White_; _The Virginian_; _Members of the Family_,
+  Owen Wister.
+_Teepee Tales_, Grace Coolidge.
+
+
+PHILIPPINE ISLANDS
+
+_Caybigan_, James N. Hopper.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY
+
+
+THE RIGHT PROMETHEAN FIRE
+
+In Greek mythology, the work of creating living things was entrusted to
+two of the gods, Epimetheus and Prometheus. Epimetheus gave to the
+different animals various powers, to the lion strength, to the bird
+swiftness, to the fox sagacity, and so on until all the good gifts had
+been bestowed, and there was nothing left for man. Then Prometheus
+ascended to heaven and brought down fire, as his gift to man. With this,
+man could protect himself, could forge iron to make weapons, and so in
+time develop the arts of civilization. In this story the "Promethean
+Fire" of love is the means of giving little Emmy Lou her first lesson in
+reading.
+
+     1. A test that may be applied to any story is, Does it read as if
+     it were true? Would the persons in the story do the things they are
+     represented as doing? Test the acts of Billy Traver in this way,
+     and see if they are probable.
+
+     2. In writing stories about children, a writer must have the power
+     to present life as a child sees it. Point out places in this story
+     where school life is described as it appears to a new pupil.
+
+     3. One thing we ought to gain from our reading is a larger
+     vocabulary. In this story there are a number of words worth adding
+     to our stock. Define these exactly: inquisitorial; lachrymose;
+     laconic; surreptitious; contumely.
+
+     Get the habit of looking up new words and writing down their
+     meanings.
+
+     4. Can you write a story about a school experience?
+
+     5. Other books containing stories of school life are:
+
+     _Little Aliens_, Myra Kelly; _May Iverson Tackles Life_, Elizabeth
+     Jordan; _Ten to Seventeen_, Josephine Daskam Bacon; _Closed Doors_,
+     Margaret P. Montague. Read a story from one of these books, and
+     compare it with this story.
+
+
+THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE
+
+Central Park, New York, covers an era of more than eight hundred acres,
+with a zoo and several small lakes. On one of the lakes there are large
+boats with a huge wooden swan on each side. Richard Harding Davis
+located one of his stories here: See "Van Bibber and the Swan Boats,"
+in the volume called _Van Bibber and Others_.
+
+     1. How is this story like the preceding one? What difference in the
+     characters? What difference in their homes?
+
+     2. How does Myra Kelly make you feel sympathy for the little folks?
+     In what ways have their lives been less fortunate than the lives of
+     children in your town?
+
+     3. What is peculiar about the talk of these children? Do they all
+     speak the same dialect? Many of the children of the East Side never
+     hear English spoken at home.
+
+     4. What touches of humor are there in this story?
+
+     5. What new words do you find? Define garrulous, pedagogically,
+     cicerone.
+
+     6. Where did Miss Kelly get her materials for this story? See the
+     life on page 37.
+
+     7. What other stories by this author have you read? This is from
+     _Little Citizens_; other books telling about the same characters
+     are _Little Aliens_, and _Wards of Liberty_.
+
+     8. Other books of short stories dealing with children are:
+     _Whilomville Stories_, by Stephen Crane; _The Golden Age_, by
+     Kenneth Grahame; _The Madness of Philip_, by Josephine Daskam
+     Bacon; _The King of Boyville_, by William Allen White; _New
+     Chronicles of Rebecca_, by Kate Douglas Wiggin. Read one of these,
+     and compare it with Myra Kelly's story.
+
+
+THE TENOR
+
+     1. Point out the humorous touches in this story.
+
+     2. Is the story probable? To answer this, consider two points:
+     would Louise have undertaken such a thing as answering the
+     advertisement? and would she have had the spirit to act as she did
+     at the close? Note the touches of description and characterization
+     of Louise, and show how they prepare for the events that follow.
+
+     3. One of the most effective devices in art is the use of contrast;
+     that is, bringing together two things or persons or ideas that are
+     very different, perhaps the exact opposite of each other. Show that
+     the main effect of this story depends on the use of contrast.
+
+     4. Read the paragraph on page 43 beginning, "It happened to be a
+     French tenor." Give in your own words the thought of this
+     paragraph. Is it true? Can you give examples of it?
+
+     5. Compare the length of this story with that of others in the
+     book. Which authors get their effects in a small compass? Could any
+     parts of this story be omitted?
+
+     6. Other stories by H. C. Bunner that you will enjoy are "The Love
+     Letters of Smith" and "A Sisterly Scheme" in _Short Sixes_.
+
+
+THE PASSING OF PRISCILLA WINTHROP
+
+     1. Does the title fit the story well? Why?
+
+     2. Notice the familiar, almost conversational style. Is it suited
+     to the story? Why?
+
+     3. Show how the opening paragraph introduces the main idea of the
+     story.
+
+     4. To make a story there must be a conflict of some sort. What is
+     the conflict here?
+
+     5. How does the account of Julia Neal's career as a teacher (page
+     64) prepare for the ending of the story?
+
+     6. Do you have a clear picture in your mind of Mrs. Winthrop? Of
+     Mrs. Worthington? Why did not the author tell about their personal
+     appearance?
+
+     7. Point out humorous touches in the next to the last paragraph.
+
+     8. Is this story true to life? Who is the Priscilla Winthrop of
+     your town?
+
+     9. What impression do you get of the man behind this story? Do you
+     think he knew the people of his town well? Did he like them even
+     while he laughed at them? What else can you say about him?
+
+     10. Other books of short stories dealing with life in a small town
+     are: _Pratt Portraits_, by Anna Fuller; _Old Chester Tales_, by
+     Margaret Deland; _Stories of a Western Town_, by Octave Thanet; _In
+     a Little Town_, by Rupert Hughes; _Folks Back Home_, by Eugene
+     Wood; _Friendship Village_, by Zona Gale; _Bodbank_, by Richard W.
+     Child. Read one of these books, or a story from one, and compare it
+     with this story.
+
+     11. In what ways does life in a small town differ from life in a
+     large city?
+
+
+THE GIFT OF THE MAGI
+
+This story, taken from the volume called _The Four Million_, is a good
+example of O. Henry's method as a short-story writer. It is notable for
+its brevity. The average length of the modern short story is about five
+thousand words; O. Henry uses a little over one thousand words. This
+conciseness is gained in several ways. In his descriptions, he has the
+art of selecting significant detail. When Della looks out of the window,
+instead of describing fully the view that met her eyes, he says: "She
+looked out dully at a grey cat walking a grey fence in a grey backyard."
+A paragraph could do no more. Again, the beginning of the story is
+quick, abrupt. There is no introduction. The style is often elliptical;
+in the first paragraph half the sentences are not sentences at all. But
+the main reason for the shortness of the story lies in the fact that the
+author has included only such incidents and details as are necessary to
+the unfolding of the plot. There is no superfluous matter.
+
+Another characteristic of O. Henry is found in the unexpected turns of
+his plots. There is almost always a surprise in his stories, usually at
+the end. And yet this has been so artfully prepared for that we accept
+it as probable. Our pleasure in reading his stories is further
+heightened by the constant flashes of humor that light up his pages. And
+beyond this, he has the power to touch deeper emotions. When Della heard
+Jim's step on the stairs, "she turned white just for a moment. She had a
+habit of saying little silent prayers about the simplest things, and now
+she whispered, 'Please God, make him think I am still pretty.'" One
+reads that with a little catch in the throat.
+
+In his plots, O. Henry is romantic; in his settings he is a realist.
+Della and Jim are romantic lovers, they are not prudent nor calculating,
+but act upon impulse. In his descriptions, however, he is a realist. The
+eight-dollar-a-week flat, the frying pan on the back of the stove, the
+description of Della "flopping down on the couch for a cry," and
+afterwards "attending to her cheeks with the powder-rag,"--all these are
+in the manner of realism.
+
+And finally, the tone of his stories is brave and cheerful. He finds the
+world a most interesting place, and its people, even its commonplace
+people, its rogues, its adventurers, are drawn with a broad sympathy
+that makes us more tolerant of the people we meet outside the books.
+
+     1. Compare the beginning of this story with the beginning of
+     "Bitter-Sweet." What difference do you note?
+
+     2. Select a description of a person that shows the author's power
+     of concise portraiture.
+
+     3. What is the turn of surprise in this story? What other stories
+     in this book have a similar twist at the end?
+
+     4. What is the central thought of this story?
+
+     5. Other stories of O. Henry's that ought not to be missed are "An
+     Unfinished Story" and "The Furnished Room" in _The Four Million_;
+     "A Blackjack Bargainer" in _Whirligigs_; "Best Seller" and "The
+     Rose of Dixie" in _Options_; "A Municipal Report" in _Strictly
+     Business_; "A Retrieved Reformation" in _Roads of Destiny_; and
+     "Hearts and Crosses" in _Hearts of the West_.
+
+
+THE GOLD BRICK
+
+This story, first published in the _American Magazine_, was reprinted in
+a volume called _The Gold Brick_, published in 1910. The quotation "chip
+at crusts like Hindus" is from Robert Browning's poem "Youth and Art."
+The reference to "Old Walt" at the end of the story is to Walt Whitman,
+one of the great poets of democracy.
+
+     1. To make a story interesting, there must be a conflict. In this
+     the conflict is double: the outer conflict, between the two
+     political factions, and the inner conflict, in the soul of the
+     artist. Note how skilfully this inner struggle is introduced: at
+     the moment when Kittrell is first rejoicing over his new position,
+     he feels a pang at leaving the _Post_, and what it stood for. This
+     feeling is deepened by his wife's tacit disapproval; it grows
+     stronger as the campaign progresses, until the climax is reached in
+     the scene where he resigns his position.
+
+     2. If you knew nothing about the author, what could you infer from
+     this story about his political ideals? Did he believe in democracy?
+     Did he have faith in the good sense of the common people? Did he
+     think it was worth while to make sacrifices for them? What is your
+     evidence for this?
+
+     3. How far is this story true to life, as you know it? Do any
+     newspapers in your city correspond to the _Post_? To the
+     _Telegraph_? Can you recall a campaign in which the contest was
+     between two such groups as are described here?
+
+     4. Does Whitlock have the art of making his characters real? Is
+     this true of the minor characters? The girl in the flower shop, for
+     instance, who appears but for a moment,--is she individualized?
+     How?
+
+     5. Is there a lesson in this story? State it in your own words.
+
+     6. What experiences in Whitlock's life gave him the background for
+     this story?
+
+     7. What new words did you gain from this? Define meritricious;
+     prognathic; banal; vulpine; camaraderie; vilification; ennui;
+     quixotic; naïve; pharisaism. What can you say of Whitlock's
+     vocabulary?
+
+     8. Other good stories dealing with politics are found in
+     _Stratagems and Spoils_, by William Allen White.
+
+
+HIS MOTHER'S SON
+
+     1. Note the quick beginning of the story; no introduction, action
+     from the start. Why is this suitable to this story?
+
+     2. Why is slang used so frequently?
+
+     3. Point out examples of humor in the story.
+
+     4. In your writing, do you ever have trouble in finding just the
+     right word? Note on page 123 how Edna Ferber tries one expression
+     after another, and how on page 122 she finally coins a
+     word--"unadjectivable." What does the word mean?
+
+     5. Do you have a clear picture of Emma McChesney? Of Ed Meyers?
+     Note that the description of Meyers in the office is not given all
+     at once, but a touch here and then. Point out all these bits of
+     description of this person, and note how complete the portrait is.
+
+     6. What have you learned in this story about the life of a
+     traveling salesman?
+
+     7. What qualities must a good salesman possess?
+
+     8. Was Emma McChesney a lady? Was Ed Meyers a gentleman? Why do you
+     think so?
+
+     9. This story is taken from the book called _Roast Beef, Medium_.
+     Other good books of short stories by this author are _Personality
+     Plus_, and _Cheerful--by Request_.
+
+
+BITTER-SWEET
+
+     1. Note the introduction, a characteristic of all of Fannie Hurst's
+     stories. What purpose does it serve here? What trait of Gertie's is
+     brought out? Is this important to the story?
+
+     2. From the paragraph on page 139 beginning "It was into the
+     trickle of the last----" select examples that show the author's
+     skill in the use of words. What other instances of this do you note
+     in the story?
+
+     3. Read the sketch of the author. What episode in her life gave her
+     material for parts of this story?
+
+     4. Notice how skillfully the conversation is handled. The opening
+     situation developes itself entirely through dialogue, yet in a
+     perfectly natural way. It is almost like a play rather than a
+     story. If it were dramatized, how many scenes would it make?
+
+     5. What does the title mean? Does the author give us the key to its
+     meaning?
+
+     6. What do you think of Gertie as you read the first part of the
+     conversation in the restaurant? Does your opinion of her change at
+     the end of the story? Has her character changed?
+
+     7. Is the ending of the story artistic? Why mention the time-clock?
+     What had Gertie said about it?
+
+     8. State in three or four words the central idea of the story. Is
+     it true to life?
+
+     9. What is the meaning of these words: atavism; penumbra;
+     semaphore; astigmatic; insouciance; mise-en-scene; kinetic?
+
+     10. Other books of stories dealing with life in New York City are
+     _The Four Million_, and _The Voice of the City_, by O. Henry; _Van
+     Bibber and Others_, by Richard Harding Davis; _Every Soul Hath Its
+     Song_, by Fannie Hurst; _Doctor Rast_, by James Oppenheim.
+
+
+THE RIVERMAN
+
+     1. In how many scenes is this story told? What is the connection
+     between them?
+
+     2. Is there anything in the first description of Dicky Darrell that
+     gives you a slight prejudice against him?
+
+     3. Why was the sympathy of the crowd with Jimmy Powers in the
+     birling match?
+
+     4. Comment on Jimmy's remark at the end of the story. Did he mean
+     it, or is he just trying to turn away the praise?
+
+     5. What are the characteristics of a lumberman, as seen in Jimmy
+     Powers?
+
+     6. Read the sketch of Stewart Edward White, and decide which one of
+     his books you would like to read.
+
+
+FLINT AND FIRE
+
+     1. What does the title mean?
+
+     2. How does the author strike the keynote of the story in the
+     opening paragraph?
+
+     3. Where is the first hint of the real theme of the story?
+
+     4. Point out some of the dialect expressions. Why is dialect used?
+
+     5. What turn of surprise comes at the end of the story? Is it
+     probable?
+
+     6. What characteristics of New England country people are brought
+     out in this story? How does the author contrast them with "city
+     people"?
+
+     7. Does this story read as if the author knew the scenes she
+     describes? Read the description of Niram plowing (page 191), and
+     point out touches in it that could not have been written by one who
+     had always lived in the city.
+
+     8. Read the account of how this story was written, (page 210). What
+     first suggested the idea? What work remained after the story was
+     first written? How did the author feel while writing it? Compare
+     what William Allen White says about his work, (page 75).
+
+     9. Other stories of New England life that you will enjoy reading
+     are found in the following books: _New England Nun_, Mary E.
+     Wilkins; _Cape Cod Folks_, S. P. McLean Greene; _Pratt Portraits_,
+     Anna Fuller; _The Country Road_, Alice Brown; _Tales of New
+     England_, Sarah Orne Jewett.
+
+
+THE ORDEAL AT MT. HOPE
+
+     1. This story contains three characters who are typical of many
+     colored people, and as such are worth study. Howard Dokesbury is
+     the educated colored man of the North. What are the chief traits of
+     this character?
+
+     2. Aunt Caroline is the old-fashioned darky who suggests slavery
+     days. What are her chief characteristics?
+
+     3. 'Lias is the new generation of the Southern negro of the towns.
+     What are his characteristics?
+
+     4. Is the colored American given the same rights as others? Read
+     carefully the opening paragraph of the story.
+
+     5. What were the weaknesses of the colored people of Mt. Hope? How
+     far are they true of the race? How were they overcome in this case?
+
+     6. There are two theories about the proper solution of what is
+     called "The Negro Problem." One is, that the hope of the race lies
+     in industrial training; the other theory, that they should have
+     higher intellectual training, so as to develope great leaders.
+     Which theory do you think Dunbar held? Why do you think so?
+
+     7. Other stories dealing with the life of the colored people are:
+     _Free Joe_, and _Tales of the Home Folks_, by Joel Chandler Harris;
+     _Polished Ebony_, by Octavius R. Cohen; _Aunt Amity's Silver
+     Wedding_, by Ruth McEnery Stuart; _In Ole Virginia_, by Thomas
+     Nelson Page.
+
+
+ISRAEL DRAKE
+
+The Pennsylvania State Police have made a wonderful record for
+maintaining law and order in the rural sections of the state. The
+history of this organization was told by Katherine Mayo in a book called
+_Justice to All_. In a later book, _The Standard Bearers_, she tells
+various incidents which show how these men do their work. The book is
+not fiction--the story here told happened just as it is set down, even
+the names of the troopers are their real names.
+
+     1. Do you get a clear picture of Drake from the description? Why
+     are several pages given to telling his past career?
+
+     2. Where does the real story begin?
+
+     3. Who was the tramp at the Carlisle Station? When did you guess
+     it?
+
+     4. What are the principles of the State Police, as you see them in
+     this story?
+
+     5. Why was such an organization necessary? Is there one in your
+     state?
+
+     6. What new words did you find in this story? Define aura,
+     primeval, grisly.
+
+
+THE STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPH OF ISIDRO
+
+In this story the author introduces a number of unfamiliar words,
+chiefly of Spanish origin, which are current in the Philippines. The
+meanings are given below.
+
+     _baguio_, hurricane.
+     _barrio_, ward; district.
+     _carabao_, a kind of buffalo, used as a work animal.
+     _cabo_, head officer.
+     _cibay_, a boys' game.
+     _daledale_, hurry up!
+     _de los Reyes_, of the King.
+     _de la Cruz_, of the cross.
+     _hacienda_, a large plantation.
+     _ladrones_, robbers.
+     _maestro_, teacher.
+     _nipa_, a palm tree or the thatch made from it.
+     _palay_, rice.
+     _pronto_, quickly.
+     _pueblo_, town.
+     _que barbaridad!_--what an atrocious thing!
+     _volador_, kite.
+
+     1. Why does the story end with Isidro's crying? What did this
+     signify? What is the relation of this to the beginning of the
+     story?
+
+     2. Has this story a central idea? What is it?
+
+     3. This might be called a story of local color, in that it gives in
+     some detail the atmosphere of an unfamiliar locality. What are the
+     best descriptive passages in the story?
+
+     4. Judging from this story, what are some of the difficulties a
+     school teacher meets with in the Philippines? What must he be
+     besides a teacher?
+
+     5. What other school stories are there in this book? The pupils in
+     Emmy Lou's school, (in Louisville, Ky.) are those with several
+     generations of American ancestry behind them; in Myra Kelly's
+     story, they are the children of foreign parents; in this story they
+     are still in a foreign land--that is, a land where they are not
+     surrounded by American influences. The public school is the one
+     experience that is common to them all, and therefore the greatest
+     single force in bringing them all to share in a common ideal, to
+     reverence the great men of our country's history, and to comprehend
+     the meaning of democracy. How does it do these things?
+
+
+THE CITIZEN
+
+     1. During the war, President Wilson delivered an address at
+     Philadelphia to an audience of men who had just been made citizens.
+     The quoted passages in this story are taken from this speech. Read
+     these passages, and select the one which probably gave the author
+     the idea for this story.
+
+     2. Starting with the idea, that he would write a story about
+     someone who followed a dream to America, why should the author
+     choose Russia as the country of departure?
+
+     3. Having chosen Russia, why does he make Ivan a resident of a
+     village far in the interior? Why not at Libau?
+
+     4. Two incidents are told as occurring on the journey: the charge
+     of the police at Bobrinsk, and the coming on board of the apple
+     woman at Queenstown. Why was each of these introduced? What is the
+     purpose of telling the incident on Fifth Avenue?
+
+     5. What have you learned about the manner in which this story was
+     written? Compare it with the account given by Dorothy Canfield as
+     to how she wrote her story.
+
+     6. What is the main idea in this story? Why do you think it was
+     written? Edward Everett Hale wrote a story called "A Man without a
+     Country." Suggest another title for "The Citizen."
+
+     7. Has this story in any way changed your opinion of immigrants? Is
+     Big Ivan likely to meet any treatment in America that will change
+     his opinion of the country?
+
+     8. The part of this story that deals with Russia affords a good
+     example of the use of local color. This is given partly through the
+     descriptions, partly through the names of the villagers--Poborino,
+     Yanansk, Dankov; partly through the Russian words, such as verst
+     (about three quarters of a mile), ruble (a coin worth fifty cents),
+     kopeck (a half cent), muzhik (a peasant). How is local color given
+     in the conversations?
+
+     9. For a treatment of the theme of this story in poetry, read "Scum
+     o' the Earth," by Robert Haven Schauffler, in Rittenhouse's _Little
+     Book of Modern Verse_. This is the closing stanza:
+
+
+     "Newcomers all from the eastern seas,
+     Help us incarnate dreams like these.
+     Forget, and forgive, that we did you wrong.
+     Help us to father a nation, strong
+     In the comradeship of an equal birth,
+     In the wealth of the richest bloods of earth."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Americans All, by Various
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Americans All, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Americans All
+       Stories of American Life of To-Day
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Benjamin A. Heydrick
+
+Release Date: October 26, 2007 [EBook #23207]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMERICANS ALL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
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+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<h1>AMERICANS ALL</h1>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3>STORIES OF AMERICAN<br />LIFE OF TO-DAY</h3>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3>EDITED BY</h3>
+
+<h2>BENJAMIN A. HEYDRICK</h2>
+
+<p class="center">Editor "Types of the Short Story," etc.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><img src="images/002.png" width='90' height='89' alt="Publisher's logo" /></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3>NEW YORK<br />HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY</h3>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY<br />HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY<br />THE QUINN &amp; BODEN COMPANY<br />RAHWAY. N. J.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2><a name="ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS" id="ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS"></a>ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS</h2>
+
+<p>For permission to reprint the stories in this volume, acknowledgement is
+made to the owners of the copyrights, as follows:</p>
+
+<p>For "The Right Promethean Fire," to Mrs. Atwood, R. Martin and Doubleday, Page &amp; Company.</p>
+
+<p>For "The Land of Heart's Desire," to Messrs. Doubleday, Page &amp; Company.</p>
+
+<p>For "The Tenor," to Alice I. Bunner and to Charles Scribners' Sons.</p>
+
+<p>For "The Passing of Priscilla Winthrop," to William Allen White and The Macmillan Company.</p>
+
+<p>For "The Gift of the Magi," to Messrs. Doubleday, Page &amp; Company.</p>
+
+<p>For "The Gold Brick," copyright 1910, to Brand Whitlock and to The Bobbs, Merrill Company.</p>
+
+<p>For "His Mother's Son," to Edna Ferber and the Frederick A. Stokes Company.</p>
+
+<p>For "Bitter-Sweet," to Fannie Hurst and Harper &amp; Brothers.</p>
+
+<p>For "The Riverman," to Stewart Edward White and Doubleday, Page &amp; Company.</p>
+
+<p>For "Flint and Fire," to Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Messrs. Henry Holt &amp; Company.</p>
+
+<p>For "The Ordeal at Mt. Hope," to Mrs. Alice Dunbar, Mrs. Mathilde Dunbar, and Messrs. Dodd, Mead &amp; Company.</p>
+
+<p>For "Israel Drake," to Katherine Mayo and Messrs. Houghton Mifflin Company.</p>
+
+<p>For "The Struggles and Triumph of Isidro," to James M. Hopper.</p>
+
+<p>For "The Citizen," to James F. Dwyer and the Paget Literary Agency.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<p>In the years before the war, when we had more time for light pursuits, a
+favorite sport of reviewers was to hunt for the Great American Novel.
+They gave tongue here and there, and pursued the quarry with great
+excitement in various directions, now north, now south, now west, and
+the inevitable disappointment at the end of the chase never deterred
+them from starting off on a fresh scent next day. But in spite of all
+the frenzied pursuit, the game sought, the Great American Novel, was
+never captured. Will it ever be captured? The thing they sought was a
+book that would be so broad, so typical, so true that it would stand as
+the adequate expression in fiction of American life. Did these tireless
+hunters ever stop to ask themselves, what is the Great French Novel?
+what is the Great English Novel? And if neither of these nations has
+produced a single book which embodies their national life, why should we
+expect that our life, so much more diverse in its elements, so
+multifarious in its aspects, could ever be summed up within the covers
+of a single book?</p>
+
+<p>Yet while the critics continued their hopeless hunt, there was growing
+up in this country a form of fiction which gave promise of some day
+achieving the task that this never-to-be written novel should
+accomplish. This form was the short story. It was the work of many
+hands, in many places. Each writer studied closely a certain locality,
+and transcribed faithfully what he saw. Thus the New England village,
+the western ranch, the southern plantation, all had their chroniclers.
+Nor was it only various localities that we saw in these one-reel
+pictures; they dealt with typical occupations, there were stories of
+travelling salesmen, stories of lumbermen, stories of politicians,
+stories of the stage, stories of school and college<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span> days. If it were
+possible to bring together in a single volume a group of these, each one
+reflecting faithfully one facet of our many-sided life, would not such a
+book be a truer picture of America than any single novel could present?</p>
+
+<p>The present volume is an attempt to do this. That it is only an attempt,
+that it does not cover the whole field of our national life, no one
+realizes better than the compiler. The title <i>Americans All</i> signifies
+that the characters in the book are all Americans, not that they are all
+of the Americans.</p>
+
+<p>This book then differs in its purpose from other collections of short
+stories. It does not aim to present the world's best short stories, nor
+to illustrate the development of the form from Roman times to our own
+day, nor to show how the technique of Poe differs from that of Irving:
+its purpose is none of these things, but rather to use the short story
+as a means of interpreting American life. Our country is so vast that
+few of us know more than a small corner of it, and even in that corner
+we do not know all our fellow-citizens; differences of color, of race,
+of creed, of fortune, keep us in separate strata. But through books we
+may learn to know our fellow-citizens, and the knowledge will make us
+better Americans.</p>
+
+<p>The story by Dorothy Canfield has a unique interest for the student, in
+that it is followed by the author's own account of how it was written,
+from the first glimpse of the theme to the final typing of the story.
+Teachers who use this book for studying the art of short story
+construction may prefer to begin with "Flint and Fire" and follow with
+"The Citizen," tracing in all the others indications of the authors'
+methods.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Benjamin A. Heydrick</span>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">New York City</span>,<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; March, 1920.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<div class="index">
+<ul>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS">ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#PREFACE">PREFACE</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#IN_SCHOOL_DAYS">I.</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;IN SCHOOL DAYS</li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#THE_RIGHT_PROMETHEAN_FIRE"><span class="smcap">The Right Promethean Fire</span></a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>George Madden Martin</i></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#GEORGE_MADDEN_MARTIN">Sketch of George Madden Martin</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#JUST_KIDS">II.</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;JUST KIDS</li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#THE_LAND_OF_HEARTS_DESIRE"><span class="smcap">The Land of Heart's Desire</span></a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>Myra Kelly</i></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#MYRA_KELLY">Sketch of Myra Kelly</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#HERO_WORSHIP">III.</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;HERO WORSHIP</li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#THE_TENOR1"><span class="smcap">The Tenor</span></a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>H. C. Bunner</i></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#H_C_BUNNER">Sketch of H. C. Bunner</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#SOCIETY_IN_OUR_TOWN">IV.</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;SOCIETY IN OUR TOWN</li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#THE_PASSING_OF_PRISCILLA_WINTHROP"><span class="smcap">The Passing of Priscilla Winthrop</span></a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>William Allen White</i></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#WILLIAM_ALLEN_WHITE">Sketch of William Allen White</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#A_PAIR_OF_LOVERS">V.</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;A PAIR OF LOVERS</li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#THE_GIFT_OF_THE_MAGI"><span class="smcap">The Gift of the Magi</span></a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>O. Henry</i></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#O_HENRY">Sketch of O. Henry</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#IN_POLITICS">VI.</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;IN POLITICS</li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#THE_GOLD_BRICK"><span class="smcap">The Gold Brick</span></a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>Brand Whitlock</i></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BRAND_WHITLOCK">Sketch of Brand Whitlock</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#THE_TRAVELING_SALESMAN">VII.</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;THE TRAVELING SALESMAN</li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#HIS_MOTHERS_SON"><span class="smcap">His Mother's Son</span></a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>Edna Ferber</i></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#EDNA_FERBER">Sketch of Edna Ferber</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#AFTER_THE_BIG_STORE_CLOSES">VIII.</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;AFTER THE BIG STORE CLOSES</li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BITTER-SWEET"><span class="smcap">Bitter-Sweet</span></a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>Fannie Hurst</i></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#FANNIE_HURST">Sketch of Fannie Hurst</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#IN_THE_LUMBER_COUNTRY">IX.</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;IN THE LUMBER COUNTRY</li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#THE_RIVERMAN"><span class="smcap">The Riverman</span></a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>Stewart E. White</i></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#STEWART_EDWARD_WHITE">Sketch of Stewart E. White</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#NEW_ENGLAND_GRANITE">X.</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;NEW ENGLAND GRANITE</li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#FLINT_AND_FIRE"><span class="smcap">Flint and Fire</span></a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>Dorothy Canfield</i></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#HOW_FLINT_AND_FIRE_STARTED_AND_GREW"><span class="smcap">How "Flint and Fire" Started and Grew</span></a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>Dorothy Canfield</i></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#DOROTHY_CANFIELD">Sketch of Dorothy Canfield</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#DUSKY_AMERICANS">XI.</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;DUSKY AMERICANS</li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#THE_ORDEAL_AT_MT_HOPE"><span class="smcap">The Ordeal at Mt. Hope</span></a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>Paul Laurence Dunbar</i></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#PAUL_LAURENCE_DUNBAR">Sketch of Paul Laurence Dunbar</a></span></li>
+<li><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#WITH_THE_POLICE">XII.</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;WITH THE POLICE</li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#ISRAEL_DRAKE"><span class="smcap">Israel Drake</span></a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>Katherine Mayo</i></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#KATHERINE_MAYO">Sketch of Katherine Mayo</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#IN_THE_PHILIPPINES">XIII.</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;IN THE PHILIPPINES</li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#THE_STRUGGLES_AND_TRIUMPH_OF_ISIDRO_DE_LOS_MAESTROS"><span class="smcap">The Struggles and Triumph of Isidro de los Maestros</span></a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>James M. Hopper</i></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#JAMES_MERLE_HOPPER">Sketch of James M. Hopper</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#THEY_WHO_BRING_DREAMS_TO_AMERICA">XIV.</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;THEY WHO BRING DREAMS TO AMERICA</li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#THE_CITIZEN"><span class="smcap">The Citizen</span></a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>James F. Dwyer</i></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#JAMES_FRANCIS_DWYER">Sketch of James F. Dwyer</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#LIST_OF_AMERICAN_SHORT_STORIES_CLASSIFIED_BY_LOCALITY">XV.</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">List of American Short Stories</span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Classified by locality</span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#NOTES_AND_QUESTIONS_FOR_STUDY">XVI.</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Notes and Questions for Study</span></li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IN_SCHOOL_DAYS" id="IN_SCHOOL_DAYS"></a>IN SCHOOL DAYS</h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p><p><i>Are any days more rich in experiences than school days? The day one
+first enters school, whether it is the little red schoolhouse or the big
+brick building that holds a thousand pupils,&mdash;that day marks the
+beginning of a new life. One of the best records in fiction of the world
+of the school room is called</i> <span class="smcap">Emmy Lou</span>. <i>In this book George Madden
+Martin has traced the progress of a winsome little maid from the first
+grade to the end of high school. This is the story of the first days in
+the strange new world of the school room.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_RIGHT_PROMETHEAN_FIRE" id="THE_RIGHT_PROMETHEAN_FIRE"></a>THE RIGHT PROMETHEAN FIRE</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">George Madden Martin</span></h3>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou, laboriously copying digits, looked up. The boy sitting in line
+in the next row of desks was making signs to her.</p>
+
+<p>She had noticed the little boy before. He was a square little boy, with
+a sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of the nose and a cheerful
+breadth of nostril. His teeth were wide apart, and his smile was broad
+and constant. Not that Emmy Lou could have told all this. She only knew
+that to her the knowledge of the little boy concerning the things
+peculiar to the Primer World seemed limitless.</p>
+
+<p>And now the little boy was beckoning Emmy Lou. She did not know him, but
+neither did she know any of the seventy other little boys and girls
+making the Primer Class.</p>
+
+<p>Because of a popular prejudice against whooping-cough, Emmy Lou had not
+entered the Primer Class until late. When she arrived, the seventy
+little boys and girls were well along in Alphabetical lore, having long
+since passed the a, b, c, of initiation, and become glibly eloquent to a
+point where the l, m, n, o, p slipped off their tongues with the liquid
+ease of repetition and familiarity.</p>
+
+<p>"But Emmy Lou can catch up," said Emmy Lou's Aunt Cordelia, a plump and
+cheery lady, beaming with optimistic placidity upon the infant populace
+seated in parallel rows at desks before her.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Clara, the teacher, lacked Aunt Cordelia's optimism, also her
+plumpness. "No doubt she can," agreed Miss Clara, politely, but without
+enthusiasm. Miss Clara had stepped<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> from the graduating rostrum to the
+schoolroom platform, and she had been there some years. And when one has
+been there some years, and is already battling with seventy little boys
+and girls, one cannot greet the advent of a seventy-first with acclaim.
+Even the fact that one's hair is red is not an always sure indication
+that one's temperament is sanguine also.</p>
+
+<p>So in answer to Aunt Cordelia, Miss Clara replied politely but without
+enthusiasm, "No doubt she can."</p>
+
+<p>Then Aunt Cordelia went, and Miss Clara gave Emmy Lou a desk. And Miss
+Clara then rapping sharply, and calling some small delinquent to order,
+Emmy Lou's heart sank within her.</p>
+
+<p>Now Miss Clara's tones were tart because she did not know what to do
+with this late comer. In a class of seventy, spare time is not offering
+for the bringing up of the backward. The way of the Primer teacher was
+not made easy in a public school of twenty-five years ago.</p>
+
+<p>So Miss Clara told the new pupil to copy digits.</p>
+
+<p>Now what digits were, Emmy Lou had no idea, but being shown them on the
+black-board, she copied them diligently. And as the time went on, Emmy
+Lou went on copying digits. And her one endeavor being to avoid the
+notice of Miss Clara, it happened the needs of Emmy Lou were frequently
+lost sight of in the more assertive claims of the seventy.</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou was not catching up, and it was January.</p>
+
+<p>But to-day was to be different. The little boy was nodding and
+beckoning. So far the seventy had left Emmy Lou alone. As a general
+thing the herd crowds toward the leaders, and the laggard brings up the
+rear alone.</p>
+
+<p>But to-day the little boy was beckoning. Emmy Lou looked up. Emmy Lou
+was pink-cheeked and chubby and in her heart there was no guile. There
+was an ease and swagger about the little boy. And he always knew when to
+stand up, and what for. Emmy Lou more than once had failed to stand up,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+and Miss Clara's reminder had been sharp. It was when a bell rang one
+must stand up. But what for, Emmy Lou never knew, until after the others
+began to do it.</p>
+
+<p>But the little boy always knew. Emmy Lou had heard him, too, out on the
+bench glibly tell Miss Clara about the mat, and a bat, and a black rat.
+To-day he stood forth with confidence and told about a fat hen. Emmy Lou
+was glad to have the little boy beckon her.</p>
+
+<p>And in her heart there was no guile. That the little boy should be
+holding out an end of a severed india-rubber band and inviting her to
+take it, was no stranger than other things happening in the Primer World
+every day.</p>
+
+<p>The very manner of the infant classification breathed mystery, the sheep
+from the goats, so to speak, the little girls all one side the central
+aisle, the little boys all the other&mdash;and to over-step the line of
+demarcation a thing too dreadful to contemplate.</p>
+
+<p>Many things were strange. That one must get up suddenly when a bell
+rang, was strange.</p>
+
+<p>And to copy digits until one's chubby fingers, tightly gripping the
+pencil, ached, and then to be expected to take a sponge and wash those
+digits off, was strange.</p>
+
+<p>And to be told crossly to sit down was bewildering, when in answer to c,
+a, t, one said "Pussy." And yet there was Pussy washing her face, on the
+chart, and Miss Clara's pointer pointing to her.</p>
+
+<p>So when the little boy held out the rubber band across the aisle, Emmy
+Lou took the proffered end.</p>
+
+<p>At this the little boy slid back into his desk holding to his end. At
+the critical moment of elongation the little boy let go. And the
+property of elasticity is to rebound.</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou's heart stood still. Then it swelled. But in her filling eyes
+there was no suspicion, only hurt. And even while a tear splashed down,
+and falling upon the laboriously copied digits, wrought havoc, she
+smiled bravely across at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> the little boy. It would have made the little
+boy feel bad to know how it hurt. So Emmy Lou winked bravely and smiled.</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon the little boy wheeled about suddenly and fell to copying
+digits furiously. Nor did he look Emmy Lou's way, only drove his pencil
+into his slate with a fervor that made Miss Clara rap sharply on her
+desk.</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou wondered if the little boy was mad. One would think it had
+stung the little boy and not her. But since he was not looking, she felt
+free to let her little fist seek her mouth for comfort.</p>
+
+<p>Nor did Emmy Lou dream, that across the aisle, remorse was eating into a
+little boy's soul. Or that, along with remorse there went the image of
+one Emmy Lou, defenceless, pink-cheeked, and smiling bravely.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning Emmy Lou was early. She was always early. Since
+entering the Primer Class, breakfast had lost its savor to Emmy Lou in
+the terror of being late.</p>
+
+<p>But this morning the little boy was there before her. Hitherto his tardy
+and clattering arrival had been a daily happening, provocative of
+accents sharp and energetic from Miss Clara.</p>
+
+<p>But this morning he was at his desk copying from his Primer on to his
+slate. The easy, ostentatious way in which he glanced from slate to book
+was not lost upon Emmy Lou, who lost her place whenever her eyes left
+the rows of digits upon the blackboard.</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou watched the performance. And the little boy's pencil drove with
+furious ease and its path was marked with flourishes. Emmy Lou never
+dreamed that it was because she was watching that the little boy was
+moved to this brilliant exhibition. Presently reaching the end of his
+page, he looked up, carelessly, incidentally. It seemed to be borne to
+him that Emmy Lou was there, whereupon he nodded. Then, as if moved by
+sudden impulse, he dived into his desk, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> after ostentatious search
+in, on, under it, brought forth a pencil, and held it up for Emmy Lou to
+see. Nor did she dream that it was for this the little boy had been
+there since before Uncle Michael had unlocked the Primer door.</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou looked across at the pencil. It was a slate-pencil. A fine,
+long, new slate-pencil grandly encased for half its length in gold
+paper. One bought them at the drug-store across from the school, and one
+paid for them the whole of five cents.</p>
+
+<p>Just then a bell rang. Emmy Lou got up suddenly. But it was the bell for
+school to take up. So she sat down. She was glad Miss Clara was not yet
+in her place.</p>
+
+<p>After the Primer Class had filed in, with panting and frosty entrance,
+the bell rang again. This time it was the right bell tapped by Miss
+Clara, now in her place. So again Emmy Lou got up suddenly and by
+following the little girl ahead learned that the bell meant, "go out to
+the bench."</p>
+
+<p>The Primer Class according to the degree of its infant precocity was
+divided in three sections. Emmy Lou belonged to the third section. It
+was the last section and she was the last one in it though she had no
+idea what a section meant nor why she was in it.</p>
+
+<p>Yesterday the third section had said, over and over, in chorus, "One and
+one are two, two and two are four," etc.&mdash;but to-day they said, "Two and
+one are three, two and two are four."</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou wondered, four what? Which put her behind, so that when she
+began again they were saying, "two and four are six." So now she knew.
+Four is six. But what is six? Emmy Lou did not know.</p>
+
+<p>When she came back to her desk the pencil was there. The fine, new, long
+slate-pencil encased in gold paper. And the little boy was gone. He
+belonged to the first section, and the first section was now on the
+bench. Emmy Lou leaned across and put the pencil back on the little
+boy's desk.</p>
+
+<p>Then she prepared herself to copy digits with her stump of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> a pencil.
+Emmy Lou's were always stumps. Her pencil had a way of rolling off her
+desk while she was gone, and one pencil makes many stumps. The little
+boy had generally helped her pick them up on her return. But strangely,
+from this time, her pencils rolled off no more.</p>
+
+<p>But when Emmy Lou took up her slate there was a whole side filled with
+digits in soldierly rows across, so her heart grew light and free from
+the weight of digits, and she gave her time to the washing of her desk,
+a thing in which her soul revelled, and for which, patterning after her
+little girl neighbors, she kept within that desk a bottle of soapy water
+and rags of gray and unpleasant nature, that never dried, because of
+their frequent using. When Emmy Lou first came to school, her cleaning
+paraphernalia consisted of a sponge secured by a string to her slate,
+which was the badge of the new and the unsophisticated comer. Emmy Lou
+had quickly learned that, and no one rejoiced in a fuller assortment of
+soap, bottle, and rags than she, nor did a sponge longer dangle from the
+frame of her slate.</p>
+
+<p>On coming in from recess this same day, Emmy Lou found the pencil on her
+desk again, the beautiful new pencil in the gilded paper. She put it
+back.</p>
+
+<p>But when she reached home, the pencil, the beautiful pencil that costs
+all of five cents, was in her companion box along with her stumps and
+her sponge and her grimy little slate rags. And about the pencil was
+wrapped a piece of paper. It had the look of the margin of a Primer
+page. The paper bore marks. They were not digits.</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou took the paper to Aunt Cordelia. They were at dinner.</p>
+
+<p>"Can't you read it, Emmy Lou?" asked Aunt Katie, the prettiest aunty.</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll spell the letters," said Aunt Louise, the youngest aunty.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p><p>But they did not help Emmy Lou one bit.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Cordelia looked troubled. "She doesn't seem to be catching up," she
+said.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Aunt Katie.</p>
+
+<p>"No," agreed Aunt Louise.</p>
+
+<p>"Nor&mdash;on," said Uncle Charlie, the brother of the aunties, lighting up
+his cigar to go downtown.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Cordelia spread the paper out. It bore the words:</p>
+
+<p>"It is for you."</p>
+
+<p>So Emmy Lou put the pencil away in the companion, and tucked it about
+with the grimy slate rags that no harm might befall it. And the next day
+she took it out and used it. But first she looked over at the little
+boy. The little boy was busy. But when she looked up again, he was
+looking.</p>
+
+<p>The little boy grew red, and wheeling suddenly, fell to copying digits
+furiously. And from that moment on the little boy was moved to strange
+behavior.</p>
+
+<p>Three times before recess did he, boldly ignoring the preface of
+upraised hand, swagger up to Miss Clara's desk. And going and coming,
+the little boy's boots with copper toes and run-down heels marked with
+thumping emphasis upon the echoing boards his processional and
+recessional. And reaching his desk, the little boy slammed down his
+slate with clattering reverberations.</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou watched him uneasily. She was miserable for him. She did not
+know that there are times when the emotions are more potent than the
+subtlest wines. Nor did she know that the male of some species is moved
+thus to exhibition of prowess, courage, defiance, for the impressing of
+the chosen female of the species.</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou merely knew that she was miserable and that she trembled for
+the little boy.</p>
+
+<p>Having clattered his slate until Miss Clara rapped sharply, the little
+boy rose and went swaggering on an excursion around the room to where
+sat the bucket and dipper. And on his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> return he came up the center
+aisle between the sheep and the goats.</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou had no idea what happened. It took place behind her. But there
+was another little girl who did. A little girl who boasted curls, yellow
+curls in tiered rows about her head. A lachrymosal little girl, who
+affected great horror of the little boys.</p>
+
+<p>And what Emmy Lou failed to see was this: the little boy, in passing,
+deftly lifted a cherished curl between finger and thumb and proceeded on
+his way.</p>
+
+<p>The little girl did not fail the little boy. In the suddenness of the
+surprise she surprised even him by her outcry. Miss Clara jumped. Emmy
+Lou jumped. And the sixty-nine jumped. And, following this, the little
+girl lifted her voice in lachrymal lament.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Clara sat erect. The Primer Class held its breath. It always held
+its breath when Miss Clara sat erect. Emmy Lou held tightly to her desk
+besides. She wondered what it was all about.</p>
+
+<p>Then Miss Clara spoke. Her accents cut the silence.</p>
+
+<p>"Billy Traver!"</p>
+
+<p>Billy Traver stood forth. It was the little boy.</p>
+
+<p>"Since you seem pleased to occupy yourself with the little girls, Billy,
+<i>go to the pegs</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou trembled. "Go to the pegs!" What unknown, inquisitorial terrors
+lay behind those dread, laconic words, Emmy Lou knew not.</p>
+
+<p>She could only sit and watch the little boy turn and stump back down the
+aisle and around the room to where along the wall hung rows of feminine
+apparel.</p>
+
+<p>Here he stopped and scanned the line. Then he paused before a hat. It
+was a round little hat with silky nap and a curling brim. It had
+rosettes to keep the ears warm and ribbon that tied beneath the chin. It
+was Emmy Lou's hat. Aunt Cordelia had cautioned her to care concerning
+it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p><p>The little boy took it down. There seemed to be no doubt in his mind as
+to what Miss Clara meant. But then he had been in the Primer Class from
+the beginning.</p>
+
+<p>Having taken the hat down he proceeded to put it upon his own shock
+head. His face wore its broad and constant smile. One would have said
+the little boy was enjoying the affair. As he put the hat on, the
+sixty-nine laughed. The seventieth did not. It was her hat, and besides,
+she did not understand.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Clara still erect spoke again: "And now, since you are a little
+girl, get your book, Billy, and move over with the girls."</p>
+
+<p>Nor did Emmy Lou understand why, when Billy, having gathered his
+belongings together, moved across the aisle and sat down with her, the
+sixty-nine laughed again. Emmy Lou did not laugh. She made room for
+Billy.</p>
+
+<p>Nor did she understand when Billy treated her to a slow and
+surreptitious wink, his freckled countenance grinning beneath the
+rosetted hat. It never could have occurred to Emmy Lou that Billy had
+laid his cunning plans to this very end. Emmy Lou understood nothing of
+all this. She only pitied Billy. And presently, when public attention
+had become diverted, she proffered him the hospitality of a grimy little
+slate rag. When Billy returned the rag there was something in
+it&mdash;something wrapped in a beautiful, glazed, shining bronze paper. It
+was a candy kiss. One paid five cents for six of them at the drug-store.</p>
+
+<p>On the road home, Emmy Lou ate the candy. The beautiful, shiny paper she
+put in her Primer. The slip of paper that she found within she carried
+to Aunt Cordelia. It was sticky and it was smeared. But it had reading
+on it.</p>
+
+<p>"But this is printing," said Aunt Cordelia; "can't you read it?"</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Try," said Aunt Katie.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span></p><p>"The easy words," said Aunt Louise.</p>
+
+<p>But Emmy Lou, remembering c-a-t, Pussy, shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Cordelia looked troubled. "She certainly isn't catching up," said
+Aunt Cordelia. Then she read from the slip of paper:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Oh, woman, woman, thou wert made</div>
+<div>The peace of Adam to invade."</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The aunties laughed, but Emmy Lou put it away with the glazed paper in
+her Primer. It meant quite as much to her as did the reading in that
+Primer: Cat, a cat, the cat. The bat, the mat, a rat. It was the jingle
+to both that appealed to Emmy Lou.</p>
+
+<p>About this time rumors began to reach Emmy Lou. She heard that it was
+February, and that wonderful things were peculiar to the Fourteenth. At
+recess the little girls locked arms and talked Valentines. The echoes
+reached Emmy Lou.</p>
+
+<p>The valentine must come from a little boy, or it wasn't the real thing.
+And to get no valentine was a dreadful&mdash;dreadful thing. And even the
+timidest of the sheep began to cast eyes across at the goats.</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou wondered if she would get a valentine. And if not, how was she
+to survive the contumely and shame?</p>
+
+<p>You must never, never breathe to a living soul what was on your
+valentine. To tell even your best and truest little girl friend was to
+prove faithless to the little boy sending the valentine. These things
+reached Emmy Lou.</p>
+
+<p>Not for the world would she tell. Emmy Lou was sure of that, so grateful
+did she feel she would be to anyone sending her a valentine.</p>
+
+<p>And in doubt and wretchedness did she wend her way to school on the
+Fourteenth Day of February. The drug-store window was full of
+valentines. But Emmy Lou crossed the street. She did not want to see
+them. She knew the little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> girls would ask her if she had gotten a
+valentine. And she would have to say, No.</p>
+
+<p>She was early. The big, empty room echoed back her footsteps as she went
+to her desk to lay down book and slate before taking off her wraps. Nor
+did Emmy Lou dream the eye of the little boy peeped through the crack of
+the door from Miss Clara's dressing-room.</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou's hat and jacket were forgotten. On her desk lay something
+square and white. It was an envelope. It was a beautiful envelope, all
+over flowers and scrolls.</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou knew it. It was a valentine. Her cheeks grew pink.</p>
+
+<p>She took it out. It was blue. And it was gold. And it had reading on it.</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou's heart sank. She could not read the reading. The door opened.
+Some little girls came in. Emmy Lou hid her valentine in her book, for
+since you must not&mdash;she would never show her valentine&mdash;never.</p>
+
+<p>The little girls wanted to know if she had gotten a valentine, and Emmy
+Lou said, Yes, and her cheeks were pink with the joy of being able to
+say it.</p>
+
+<p>Through the day, she took peeps between the covers of her Primer, but no
+one else might see it.</p>
+
+<p>It rested heavy on Emmy Lou's heart, however, that there was reading on
+it. She studied it surreptitiously. The reading was made up of letters.
+It was the first time Emmy Lou had thought about that. She knew some of
+the letters. She would ask someone the letters she did not know by
+pointing them out on the chart at recess. Emmy Lou was learning. It was
+the first time since she came to school.</p>
+
+<p>But what did the letters make? She wondered, after recess, studying the
+valentine again.</p>
+
+<p>Then she went home. She followed Aunt Cordelia about. Aunt Cordelia was
+busy.</p>
+
+<p>"What does it read?" asked Emmy Lou.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p><p>Aunt Cordelia listened.</p>
+
+<p>"B," said Emmy Lou, "and e?"</p>
+
+<p>"Be," said Aunt Cordelia.</p>
+
+<p>If B was Be, it was strange that B and e were Be. But many things were
+strange.</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou accepted them all on faith.</p>
+
+<p>After dinner she approached Aunt Katie.</p>
+
+<p>"What does it read?" asked Emmy Lou, "m and y?"</p>
+
+<p>"My," said Aunt Katie.</p>
+
+<p>The rest was harder. She could not remember the letters, and had to copy
+them off on her slate. Then she sought Tom, the house-boy. Tom was out
+at the gate talking to another house-boy. She waited until the other boy
+was gone.</p>
+
+<p>"What does it read?" asked Emmy Lou, and she told the letters off the
+slate. It took Tom some time, but finally he told her.</p>
+
+<p>Just then a little girl came along. She was a first-section little girl,
+and at school she never noticed Emmy Lou.</p>
+
+<p>Now she was alone, so she stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"Get any valentines?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Emmy Lou. Then moved to confidence by the little girl's
+friendliness, she added, "It has reading on it."</p>
+
+<p>"Pooh," said the little girl, "they all have that. My mamma's been
+reading the long verses inside to me."</p>
+
+<p>"Can you show them&mdash;valentines?" asked Emmy Lou.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, to grown-up people," said the little girl.</p>
+
+<p>The gas was lit when Emmy Lou came in. Uncle Charlie was there, and the
+aunties, sitting around, reading.</p>
+
+<p>"I got a valentine," said Emmy Lou.</p>
+
+<p>They all looked up. They had forgotten it was Valentine's Day, and it
+came to them that if Emmy Lou's mother had not gone away, never to come
+back, the year before, Valentine's Day would not have been forgotten.
+Aunt Cordelia smoothed the black dress she was wearing because of the
+mother who would never come back, and looked troubled.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p><p>But Emmy Lou laid the blue and gold valentine on Aunt Cordelia's knee.
+In the valentine's center were two hands clasping. Emmy Lou's forefinger
+pointed to the words beneath the clasped hands.</p>
+
+<p>"I can read it," said Emmy Lou.</p>
+
+<p>They listened. Uncle Charlie put down his paper. Aunt Louise looked over
+Aunt Cordelia's shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"B," said Emmy Lou, "e&mdash;Be."</p>
+
+<p>The aunties nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"M," said Emmy Lou, "y&mdash;my."</p>
+
+<p>Emmy Lou did not hesitate. "V," said Emmy Lou, "a, l, e, n, t, i, n,
+e&mdash;Valentine. Be my Valentine."</p>
+
+<p>"There!" said Aunt Cordelia.</p>
+
+<p>"Well!" said Aunt Katie.</p>
+
+<p>"At last!" said Aunt Louise.</p>
+
+<p>"H'm!" said Uncle Charlie.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="GEORGE_MADDEN_MARTIN" id="GEORGE_MADDEN_MARTIN"></a>GEORGE MADDEN MARTIN</h2>
+
+<p>In the South it is not unusual to give boys' names to girls, so it
+happens that George is the real name of the woman who wrote <i>Emmy Lou</i>.
+George Madden was born in Louisville, Kentucky, May 3, 1866. She
+attended the public schools in Louisville, but on account of ill health
+did not graduate. She married Atwood R. Martin, and they made their home
+at Anchorage, a suburb of Louisville. Here in an old house surrounded by
+great catalpa trees, with cardinals nesting in their branches, she was
+recovering from an illness, and to pass the time began to write a short
+story. The title was "How They Missed the Exposition"; when it was sent
+away, and a check for seventy-five dollars came in payment, she was
+encouraged to go on. Her next work was the series of stories entitled
+<i>Emmy Lou, Her Book and Heart</i>. This at once took rank as one of the
+classics of school-room literature. It had a wide popularity in this
+country, and was translated into French and German. One of the pleasant
+tributes paid to the book was a review in a Pittsburgh newspaper which
+took the form of a letter to Emmy Lou. It ran in part as follows:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Dear Little Emmy Lou:</p>
+
+<p>I have read your book, Emmy Lou, and am writing this letter to tell
+you how much I love you. In my world of books I know a great
+assembly of lovely ladies, Emmy Lou, crowned with beauty and
+garlanded with grace, that have inspired poets to song and the
+hearts of warriors to battle, but, Emmy Lou, I love you better than
+them all, because you are the dearest little girl I ever met.</p>
+
+<p>I felt very sorry for you when the little boy in the Primer World,
+who could so glibly tell the teacher all about the mat and the bat
+and the black rat and the fat hen, hurt your chubby fist by
+snapping an india-rubber band. I do not think he atoned quite
+enough when he gave you that fine new long slate pencil, nor when
+he sent you your first valentine. No, he has not atoned quite
+enough, Emmy Lou, but now that you are Miss McLaurin, you will
+doubtless even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> the score by snapping the india-rubber band of your
+disdain at his heart. But only to show him how it stings, and then,
+of course, you'll make up for the hurt and be his valentine&mdash;won't
+you, Emmy Lou?...</p>
+
+<p>And when, at twelve years, you find yourself dreaming, Emmy Lou,
+and watching the clouds through the schoolroom window, still I love
+you, Emmy Lou, for your conscience, which William told about in his
+essay. You remember, the two girls who met a cow.</p>
+
+<p>"Look her right in the face and pretend we aren't afraid," said the
+biggest girl. But the littlest girl&mdash;that was you&mdash;had a
+conscience. "Won't it be deceiving the cow?" she wanted to know.
+Brave, honest Emmy Lou!</p>
+
+<p>Yes, I love you, Emmy Lou, better than all the proud and beauteous
+heroines in the big grown-up books, because you are so sunshiny and
+trustful, so sweet and brave&mdash;because you have a heart of gold,
+Emmy Lou. And I want you to tell George Madden Martin how glad I am
+that she has told us all about you, the dearest little girl since
+Alice dropped down into Wonderland.</p>
+
+<p class="right">George Seibel.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>The book is more than a delightful piece of fiction. Through its
+faithful study of the development of a child's mind, and its criticism
+of the methods employed in many schools, it becomes a valuable
+contribution to education. As such it is used in the School of Pedagogy
+of Harvard University.</p>
+
+<p>George Madden Martin told more about Emmy Lou in a second book of
+stories entitled <i>Emmy Lou's Road to Grace</i>, which relates the little
+girl's experience at home and in Sunday school. Other works from her pen
+are: <i>A Warwickshire Lad</i>, the story of William Shakespeare's early
+life; <i>The House of Fulfillment</i>, a novel; <i>Abbie Ann</i>, a story for
+children; <i>Letitia; Nursery Corps, U. S. A.</i>, a story of a child, also
+showing various aspects of army life; <i>Selina</i>, the story of a young
+girl who has been brought up in luxury, and finds herself confronted
+with the necessity of earning a living without any equipment for the
+task. None of these has equalled the success of her first book, but that
+is one of the few successful portrayals of child life in fiction.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="JUST_KIDS" id="JUST_KIDS"></a>JUST KIDS</h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span></p><p><i>That part of New York City known as the East Side, the region south of
+Fourteenth Street and east of Broadway, is the most densely populated
+square mile on earth. Its people are of all races; Chinatown, Little
+Hungary and Little Italy elbow each other; streets where the signs are
+in Hebrew characters, theatres where plays are given in Yiddish, notices
+in the parks in four or five languages, make one rub his eyes and wonder
+if he is not in some foreign land. Into this region Myra Kelly went as a
+teacher in the public school. Her pupils were largely Russian Jews, and
+in a series of delightfully humorous stories she has drawn these little
+citizens to the life.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_LAND_OF_HEARTS_DESIRE" id="THE_LAND_OF_HEARTS_DESIRE"></a>THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Myra Kelly</span></h3>
+
+<p>Isaac Borrachsohn, that son of potentates and of Assemblymen, had been
+taken to Central Park by a proud uncle. For weeks thereafter he was the
+favorite bard of the First Reader Class and an exceeding great trouble
+to its sovereign, Miss Bailey, who found him now as garrulous as he had
+once been silent. There was no subject in the Course of Study to which
+he could not correlate the wonders of his journey, and Teacher asked
+herself daily and in vain whether it were more pedagogically correct to
+encourage "spontaneous self-expression" or to insist upon "logically
+essential sequence."</p>
+
+<p>But the other members of the class suffered no such uncertainty. They
+voted solidly for spontaneity in a self which found expression thus:</p>
+
+<p>"Und in the Central Park stands a water-lake, und in the water-lake
+stands birds&mdash;a big all of birds&mdash;und fishes. Und sooner you likes you
+should come over the water-lake you calls a bird, und you sets on the
+bird, und the bird makes go his legs, und you comes over the
+water-lake."</p>
+
+<p>"They could be awful polite birds," Eva Gonorowsky was beginning when
+Morris interrupted with:</p>
+
+<p>"I had once a auntie und she had a bird, a awful polite bird; on'y
+sooner somebody calls him he <i>couldn't</i> to come the while he sets in a
+cage."</p>
+
+<p>"Did he have a rubber neck?" Isaac inquired, and Morris reluctantly
+admitted that he had not been so blessed.</p>
+
+<p>"In the Central Park," Isaac went on, "all the birds is got rubber
+necks."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span></p><p>"What color from birds be they?" asked Eva.</p>
+
+<p>"All colors. Blue und white und red und yellow."</p>
+
+<p>"Und green," Patrick Brennan interjected determinedly. "The green ones
+is the best."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you go once?" asked Isaac, slightly disconcerted.</p>
+
+<p>"Naw, but I know. Me big brother told me."</p>
+
+<p>"They could to be stylish birds, too," said Eva wistfully. "Stylish und
+polite. From red und green birds is awful stylish for hats."</p>
+
+<p>"But these birds is big. Awful big! Mans could ride on 'em und ladies
+und boys."</p>
+
+<p>"Und little girls, Ikey? Ain't they fer little girls?" asked the only
+little girl in the group. And a very small girl she was, with a softly
+gentle voice and darkly gentle eyes fixed pleadingly now upon the bard.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," answered Isaac grudgingly; "sooner they sets by somebody's side
+little girls could to go. But sooner nobody holds them by the hand they
+could to have fraids over the rubber-neck-boat-birds und the water-lake,
+und the fishes."</p>
+
+<p>"What kind from fishes?" demanded Morris Mogilewsky, monitor of Miss
+Bailey's gold fish bowl, with professional interest.</p>
+
+<p>"From gold fishes und red fishes und black fishes"&mdash;Patrick stirred
+uneasily and Isaac remembered&mdash;"und green fishes; the green ones is the
+biggest; and blue fishes und <i>all</i> kinds from fishes. They lives way
+down in the water the while they have fraids over the
+rubber-neck-boat-birds. Say&mdash;what you think? Sooner a
+rubber-neck-boat-bird needs he should eat he longs down his neck und
+eats a from-gold fish."</p>
+
+<p>"'Out fryin'?" asked Eva, with an incredulous shudder.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, 'out fryin'. Ain't I told you little girls could to have fraids
+over 'em? Boys could have fraids too," cried Isaac; and then spurred by
+the calm of his rival, he added: "The rubber-neck-boat-birds they
+hollers somethin' fierce."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p><p>"I wouldn't be afraid of them. Me pop's a cop," cried Patrick stoutly.
+"I'd just as lief set on 'em. I'd like to."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, but you ain't seen 'em, und you ain't heard 'em holler," Isaac
+retorted.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm goin' to. An' I'm goin' to see the lions an' the tigers an'
+the el'phants, an' I'm goin' to ride on the water-lake."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, how I likes I should go too!" Eva broke out. "O-o-oh, <i>how</i> I likes
+I should look on them things! On'y I don't know do I need a ride on
+somethings what hollers. I don't know be they fer me."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'll take ye with me if your mother leaves you go," said Patrick
+grandly. "An' ye can hold me hand if ye're scared."</p>
+
+<p>"Me too?" implored Morris. "Oh, Patrick, c'n I go too?"</p>
+
+<p>"I guess so," answered the Leader of the Line graciously. But he turned
+a deaf ear to Isaac Borrachsohn's implorings to be allowed to join the
+party. Full well did Patrick know of the grandeur of Isaac's holiday
+attire and the impressionable nature of Eva's soul, and gravely did he
+fear that his own Sunday finery, albeit fashioned from the blue cloth
+and brass buttons of his sire, might be outshone.</p>
+
+<p>At Eva's earnest request, Sadie, her cousin, was invited, and Morris
+suggested that the Monitor of the Window Boxes should not be slighted by
+his colleagues of the gold fish and the line. So Nathan Spiderwitz was
+raised to Alpine heights of anticipation by visions of a window box "as
+big as blocks and streets," where every plant, in contrast to his lanky
+charges, bore innumerable blossoms. Ignatius Aloysius Diamantstein was
+unanimously nominated as a member of the expedition; by Patrick, because
+they were neighbors at St. Mary's Sunday-school; by Morris, because they
+were classmates under the same rabbi at the synagogue; by Nathan,
+because Ignatius Aloysius was a member of the "Clinton Street gang"; by
+Sadie, because he had "long pants sailor suit"; by Eva, because the
+others wanted him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span></p><p>Eva reached home that afternoon tingling with anticipation and
+uncertainty. What if her mother, with one short word, should close
+forever the gates of joy and boat-birds? But Mrs. Gonorowsky met her
+small daughter's elaborate plea with the simple question:</p>
+
+<p>"Who pays you the car-fare?"</p>
+
+<p>"Does it need car-fare to go?" faltered Eva.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure does it," answered her mother. "I don't know how much, but some it
+needs. Who pays it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Patrick ain't said."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you should better ask him," Mrs. Gonorowsky advised, and, on the
+next morning, Eva did. She thereby buried the leader under the ruins of
+his fallen castle of clouds, but he struggled through them with the
+suggestion that each of his guests should be her, or his, own banker.</p>
+
+<p>"But ain't you got <i>no</i> money 't all?" asked the guest of honor.</p>
+
+<p>"Not a cent," responded the host. "But I'll get it. How much have you?"</p>
+
+<p>"A penny. How much do I need?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. Let's ask Miss Bailey."</p>
+
+<p>School had not yet formally begun and Teacher was reading. She was
+hardly disturbed when the children drove sharp elbows into her shoulder
+and her lap, and she answered Eva's&mdash;"Miss Bailey&mdash;oh, Missis Bailey,"
+with an abstracted&mdash;"Well, dear?"</p>
+
+<p>"Missis Bailey, how much money takes car-fare to the Central Park?"</p>
+
+<p>Still with divided attention, Teacher replied&mdash;"Five cents, honey," and
+read on, while Patrick called a meeting of his forces and made
+embarrassing explanations with admirable tact.</p>
+
+<p>There ensued weeks of struggle and economy for the exploring party, to
+which had been added a chaperon in the large and reassuring person of
+Becky Zalmonowsky, the class<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> idiot. Sadie Gonorowsky's careful mother
+had considered Patrick too immature to bear the whole responsibility,
+and he, with a guile which promised well for his future, had complied
+with her desires and preserved his own authority unshaken. For Becky,
+poor child, though twelve years old and of an aspect eminently
+calculated to inspire trust in those who had never held speech with her,
+was a member of the First Reader Class only until such time as room
+could be found for her in some of the institutions where such
+unfortunates are bestowed.</p>
+
+<p>Slowly and in diverse ways each of the children acquired the essential
+nickel. Some begged, some stole, some gambled, some bartered, some
+earned, but their greatest source of income, Miss Bailey, was denied to
+them. For Patrick knew that she would have insisted upon some really
+efficient guardian from a higher class, and he announced with much heat
+that he would not go at all under those circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>At last the leader was called upon to set the day and appointed a
+Saturday in late May. He was disconcerted to find that only Ignatius
+Aloysius would travel on that day.</p>
+
+<p>"It's holidays, all Saturdays," Morris explained; "und we dassent to
+ride on no cars."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" asked Patrick.</p>
+
+<p>"It's law, the rabbi says," Nathan supplemented. "I don't know why is
+it; on'y rides on holidays ain't fer us."</p>
+
+<p>"I guess," Eva sagely surmised; "I guess rubber-neck-boat-birds rides
+even ain't fer us on holidays. But I don't know do I need rides on birds
+what hollers."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll be all right," Patrick assured her. "I'm goin' to let ye hold me
+hand. If ye can't go on Saturday, I'll take ye on Sunday&mdash;next Sunday.
+Yous all must meet me here on the school steps. Bring yer money and
+bring yer lunch too. It's a long way and ye'll be hungry when ye get
+there. Ye get a terrible long ride for five cents."</p>
+
+<p>"Does it take all that to get there?" asked the practical Nathan. "Then
+how are we goin' to get back?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span></p><p>Poor little poet soul! Celtic and improvident! Patrick's visions had
+shown him only the triumphant arrival of his host and the beatific joy
+of Eva as she floated by his side on the most "fancy" of boat-birds. Of
+the return journey he had taken no thought. And so the saving and
+planning had to be done all over again. The struggle for the first
+nickel had been wearing and wearying, but the amassment of the second
+was beyond description difficult. The children were worn from long
+strife and many sacrifices, for the temptations to spend six or nine
+cents are so much more insistent and unusual than are yearnings to
+squander lesser sums. Almost daily some member of the band would confess
+a fall from grace and solvency, and almost daily Isaac Borrachsohn was
+called upon to descant anew upon the glories of the Central Park. Becky,
+the chaperon, was the most desultory collector of the party. Over and
+over she reached the proud heights of seven or even eight cents, only to
+lavish her hoard on the sticky joys of the candy cart of Isidore
+Belchatosky's papa or on the suddy charms of a strawberry soda.</p>
+
+<p>Then tearfully would she repent of her folly, and bitterly would the
+others upbraid her, telling again of the joys and wonders she had
+squandered. Then loudly would she bewail her weakness and plead in
+extenuation: "I seen the candy. Mouses from choc'late und Foxy Gran'pas
+from sugar&mdash;und I ain't never seen no Central Park."</p>
+
+<p>"But don't you know how Isaac says?" Eva would urge. "Don't you know how
+all things what is nice fer us stands in the Central Park? Say, Isaac,
+you should better tell Becky, some more, how the Central Park stands."</p>
+
+<p>And Isaac's tales grew daily more wild and independent of fact until the
+little girls quivered with yearning terror and the boys burnished up
+forgotten cap pistols. He told of lions, tigers, elephants, bears, and
+buffaloes, all of enormous size and strength of lung, so that before
+many days had passed he had debarred himself, by whole-hearted lying,
+from the very <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>possibility of joining the expedition and seeing the
+disillusionment of his public. With true artistic spirit he omitted all
+mention of confining house or cage and bestowed the gift of speech upon
+all the characters, whether brute or human, in his epic. The
+merry-go-round he combined with the menagerie into a whole which was not
+to be resisted.</p>
+
+<p>"Und all the am'blins," he informed his entranced listeners; "they goes
+around, und around, und around, where music plays und flags is. Und I
+sets a lion und he runs around, und runs around, und runs around.
+Say&mdash;what you think? He had smiling looks und hair on the neck, und
+sooner he says like that 'I'm awful thirsty,' I gives him a peanut und I
+gets a golden ring."</p>
+
+<p>"Where is it?" asked the jealous and incredulous Patrick.</p>
+
+<p>"To my house." Isaac valiantly lied, for well he remembered the scene in
+which his scandalized but sympathetic uncle had discovered his attempt
+to purloin the brass ring which, with countless blackened duplicates, is
+plucked from a slot by the brandishing swords of the riders upon the
+merry-go-round. Truly, its possession had won him another ride&mdash;this
+time upon an elephant with upturned trunk and wide ears&mdash;but in his mind
+the return of that ring still ranked as the only grief in an otherwise
+perfect day.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Bailey&mdash;ably assisted by &AElig;sop, Rudyard Kipling, and Thompson
+Seton&mdash;had prepared the First Reader Class to accept garrulous and
+benevolent lions, cows, panthers, and elephants, and the exploring
+party's absolute credulity encouraged Isaac to higher and yet higher
+flights, until Becky was strengthened against temptation.</p>
+
+<p>At last, on a Sunday in late June, the cavalcade in splendid raiment met
+on the wide steps, boarded a Grand Street car, and set out for Paradise.
+Some confusion occurred at the very beginning of things when Becky
+Zalmonowsky curtly refused to share her pennies with the conductor. When
+she was at last persuaded to yield, an embarrassing five minutes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> was
+consumed in searching for the required amount in the nooks and crannies
+of her costume where, for safe-keeping, she had cached her fund. One
+penny was in her shoe, another in her stocking, two in the lining of her
+hat, and one in the large and dilapidated chatelaine bag which dangled
+at her knees.</p>
+
+<p>Nathan Spiderwitz, who had preserved absolute silence, now contributed
+his fare, moist and warm, from his mouth, and Eva turned to him
+admonishingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't Teacher told you money in the mouth ain't healthy fer you?" she
+sternly questioned, and Nathan, when he had removed other pennies, was
+able to answer:</p>
+
+<p>"I washed 'em off&mdash;first." And they were indeed most brightly clean.
+"There's holes in me these here pockets," he explained, and promptly
+corked himself anew with currency.</p>
+
+<p>"But they don't tastes nice, do they?" Morris remonstrated. Nathan shook
+a corroborative head. "Und," the Monitor of the Gold Fish further urged,
+"you could to swallow 'em und then you couldn't never to come by your
+house no more."</p>
+
+<p>But Nathan was not to be dissuaded, even when the impressionable and
+experimental Becky tried his storage system and suffered keen discomfort
+before her penny was restored to her by a resourceful fellow traveler
+who thumped her right lustily on the back until her crowings ceased and
+the coin was once more in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>At the meeting of Grand Street with the Bowery, wild confusion was made
+wilder by the addition of seven small persons armed with transfers and
+clamoring&mdash;all except Nathan&mdash;for Central Park. Two newsboys and a
+policeman bestowed them upon a Third Avenue car and all went well until
+Patrick missed his lunch and charged Ignatius Aloysius with its
+abstraction. Words ensued which were not easily to be forgotten even
+when the refreshment was found&mdash;flat and horribly distorted&mdash;under the
+portly frame of the chaperon.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p><p>Jealousy may have played some part in the misunderstanding, for it was
+undeniable that there was a sprightliness, a joyant brightness, in the
+flowing red scarf on Ignatius Aloysius's nautical breast, which was
+nowhere paralleled in Patrick's more subdued array. And the tenth
+commandment seemed very arbitrary to Patrick, the star of St. Mary's
+Sunday-school, when he saw that the red silk was attracting nearly all
+the attention of his female contingent. If Eva admired flaunting ties it
+were well that she should say so now. There was yet time to spare
+himself the agony of riding on rubber-neck-boat-birds with one whose
+interest wandered from brass buttons. Darkly Patrick scowled upon his
+unconscious rival, and guilefully he remarked to Eva:</p>
+
+<p>"Red neckties is nice, don't you think?"</p>
+
+<p>"Awful nice," Eva agreed; "but they ain't so stylish like high-stiffs.
+High-stiffs und derbies is awful stylish."</p>
+
+<p>Gloom and darkness vanished from the heart and countenance of the Knight
+of Munster, for around his neck he wore, with suppressed agony, the
+highest and stiffest of "high-stiffs" and his brows&mdash;and the back of his
+neck&mdash;were encircled by his big brother's work-a-day derby. Again he saw
+and described to Eva the vision which had lived in his hopes for now so
+many weeks: against a background of teeming jungle, mysterious and alive
+with wild beasts, an amiable boat-bird floated on the water-lake: and
+upon the boat-bird, trembling but reassured, sat Eva Gonorowsky, hand in
+hand with her brass-buttoned protector.</p>
+
+<p>As the car sped up the Bowery the children felt that they were indeed
+adventurers. The clattering Elevated trains overhead, the crowds of
+brightly decked Sunday strollers, the clanging trolley cars, and the
+glimpses they caught of shining green as they passed the streets leading
+to the smaller squares and parks, all contributed to the holiday
+upliftedness which swelled their unaccustomed hearts. At each vista of
+green they made ready to disembark and were restrained only by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+conductor and by the sage counsel of Eva, who reminded her impulsive
+companions that the Central Park could be readily identified by "the
+hollers from all those things what hollers." And so, in happy watching
+and calm trust of the conductor, they were borne far beyond 59th Street,
+the first and most popular entrance to the park, before an interested
+passenger came to their rescue. They tumbled off the car and pressed
+towards the green only to find themselves shut out by a high stone wall,
+against which they crouched and listened in vain for identifying
+hollers. The silence began to frighten them, when suddenly the quiet air
+was shattered by a shriek which would have done credit to the biggest of
+boat-birds or of lions, but which was&mdash;the children discovered after a
+moment's panic&mdash;only the prelude to an outburst of grief on the
+chaperon's part. When the inarticulate stage of her sorrow was passed,
+she demanded instant speech with her mamma. She would seem to have
+expressed a sentiment common to the majority, for three heads in Spring
+finery leaned dejectedly against the stone barrier while Nathan removed
+his car-fare to contribute the remark that he was growing hungry.
+Patrick was forced to seek aid in the passing crowd on Fifth Avenue, and
+in response to his pleading eyes and the depression of his party, a lady
+of gentle aspect and "kind looks" stopped and spoke to them.</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed, yes," she reassured them; "this is Central Park."</p>
+
+<p>"It has looks off the country," Eva commented.</p>
+
+<p>"Because it is a piece of the country," the lady explained.</p>
+
+<p>"Then we dassent to go, the while we ain't none of us got no sickness,"
+cried Eva forlornly. "We're all, all healthy, und the country is for
+sick childrens."</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad you are well," said the lady kindly; "but you may certainly
+play in the park. It is meant for all little children. The gate is near.
+Just walk on near this wall until you come to it."</p>
+
+<p>It was only a few blocks, and they were soon in the land<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> of their
+hearts' desire, where were waving trees and flowering shrubs and
+smoothly sloping lawns, and, framed in all these wonders, a beautiful
+little water-lake all dotted and brightened by fleets of tiny boats. The
+pilgrims from the East Side stood for a moment at gaze and then bore
+down upon the jewel, straight over grass and border, which is a course
+not lightly to be followed within park precincts and in view of park
+policemen. The ensuing reprimand dashed their spirits not at all and
+they were soon assembled close to the margin of the lake, where they got
+entangled in guiding strings and drew to shore many a craft, to the
+disgust of many a small owner. Becky Zalmonowsky stood so closely over
+the lake that she shed the chatelaine bag into its shallow depths and
+did irreparable damage to her gala costume in her attempts to "dibble"
+for her property. It was at last recovered, no wetter than the toilette
+it was intended to adorn, and the cousins Gonorowsky had much difficulty
+in balking Becky's determination to remove her gown and dry it then and
+there.</p>
+
+<p>Then Ignatius Aloysius, the exacting, remembered garrulously that he had
+as yet seen nothing of the rubber-neck-boat-birds and suggested that
+they were even now graciously "hollering like an'thing" in some remote
+fastness of the park. So Patrick gave commands and the march was resumed
+with bliss now beaming on all the faces so lately clouded. Every turn of
+the endless walks brought new wonders to these little ones who were
+gazing for the first time upon the great world of growing things of
+which Miss Bailey had so often told them. The policeman's warning had
+been explicit and they followed decorously in the paths and picked none
+of the flowers which as Eva had heard of old, were sticking right up out
+of the ground. But other flowers there were dangling high or low on tree
+or shrub, while here and there across the grass a bird came hopping or a
+squirrel ran. But the pilgrims never swerved. Full well they knew that
+these delights were not for such as they.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span></p><p>It was, therefore, with surprise and concern that they at last
+debouched upon a wide green space where a flag waved at the top of a
+towering pole; for, behold, the grass was covered thick with children,
+with here and there a beneficent policeman looking serenely on.</p>
+
+<p>"Dast <i>we</i> walk on it?" cried Morris. "Oh, Patrick, dast we?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ask the cop," Nathan suggested. It was his first speech for an hour,
+for Becky's misadventure with the chatelaine bag and the water-lake had
+made him more than ever sure that his own method of safe-keeping was the
+best.</p>
+
+<p>"Ask him yerself," retorted Patrick. He had quite intended to accost a
+large policeman, who would of course recognize and revere the buttons of
+Mr. Brennan <i>p&egrave;re</i>, but a commander cannot well accept the advice of his
+subordinates. But Nathan was once more beyond the power of speech, and
+it was Morris Mogilewsky who asked for and obtained permission to walk
+on God's green earth. With little spurts of running and tentative jumps
+to test its spring, they crossed Peacock Lawn to the grateful shade of
+the trees at its further edge and there disposed themselves upon the
+ground and ate their luncheon. Nathan Spiderwitz waited until Sadie had
+finished and then entrusted the five gleaming pennies to her care while
+he wildly bolted an appetizing combination of dark brown bread and
+uncooked eel.</p>
+
+<p>Becky reposed flat upon the chatelaine bag and waved her still damp
+shoes exultantly. Eva lay, face downward beside her, and peered
+wonderingly deep into the roots of things.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't it smells nice!" she gloated. "Don't it looks nice! My, ain't we
+havin' the party-time!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't mention it," said Patrick, in careful imitation of his mother's
+hostess manner. "I'm pleased to see you, I'm sure."</p>
+
+<p>"The Central Park is awful pretty," Sadie soliloquized as she lay on her
+back and watched the waving branches and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> blue sky far above. "Awful
+pretty! I likes we should live here all the time."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," began Ignatius Aloysius Diamantstein, in slight disparagement of
+his rival's powers as a cicerone; "well, I ain't seen no lions, nor no
+rubber-neck-boat-birds. Und we ain't had no rides on nothings. Und I
+ain't heard no hollers neither."</p>
+
+<p>As if in answer to this criticism there arose, upon the road beyond the
+trees, a snorting, panting noise, growing momentarily louder and
+culminating, just as East Side nerves were strained to breaking point,
+in a long hoarse and terrifying yell. There was a flash of red, a cloud
+of dust, three other toots of agony, and the thing was gone. Gone, too,
+were the explorers and gone their peaceful rest. To a distant end of the
+field they flew, led by the panic-stricken chaperon, and followed by Eva
+and Patrick, hand in hand, he making show of bravery he was far from
+feeling, and she frankly terrified. In a secluded corner, near the
+restaurant, the chaperon was run to earth by her breathless charges:</p>
+
+<p>"I seen the lion," she panted over and over. "I seen the fierce, big red
+lion, und I don't know where is my mamma."</p>
+
+<p>Patrick saw that one of the attractions had failed to attract, so he
+tried another.</p>
+
+<p>"Le's go an' see the cows," he proposed. "Don't you know the po'try
+piece Miss Bailey learned us about cows?"</p>
+
+<p>Again the emotional chaperon interrupted. "I'm loving much mit Miss
+Bailey, too," she wailed. "Und I don't know where is she neither." But
+the pride of learning upheld the others and they chanted in sing-song
+chorus, swaying rhythmically the while from leg to leg:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"The friendly cow all red and white,</div>
+<div class="i2">I love with all my heart:</div>
+<div>She gives me cream with all her might,</div>
+<div class="i2">To eat with apple-tart Robert Louis Stevenson."</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span></p><p>Becky's tears ceased. "Be there cows in the Central Park?" she
+demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure," said Patrick.</p>
+
+<p>"Und what kind from cream will he give us? Ice cream?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure," said Patrick again.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's go," cried the emotional chaperon. A passing stranger turned the
+band in the general direction of the menagerie and the reality of the
+cow brought the whole "memory gem" into strange and undreamed reality.</p>
+
+<p>Gaily they set out through new and always beautiful ways; through
+tunnels where feet and voices rang with ghostly boomings most pleasant
+to the ear; over bridges whence they saw&mdash;in partial proof of Isaac
+Borrachsohn's veracity&mdash;"mans und ladies ridin'." Of a surety they rode
+nothing more exciting than horses, but that was, to East Side eyes, an
+unaccustomed sight, and Eva opined that it was owing, probably, to the
+shortness of their watch that they saw no lions and tigers similarly
+amiable. The cows, too, seemed far to seek, but the trees and grass and
+flowers were everywhere. Through long stretches of "for sure country"
+they picked their way, until they came, hot but happy, to a green and
+shady summerhouse on a hill. There they halted to rest, and there
+Ignatius Aloysius, with questionable delicacy, began to insist once more
+upon the full measure of his bond.</p>
+
+<p>"We ain't seen the rubber-neck-boat-birds," he complained. "Und we ain't
+had no rides on nothings."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't know what is polite," cried Eva, greatly shocked at this
+carping spirit in the presence of a hard-worked host. "You could to
+think shame over how you says somethings like that on a party."</p>
+
+<p>"This ain't no party," Ignatius Aloysius retorted. "It's a 'scursion. To
+a party somebody <i>gives</i> you what you should eat; to a 'scursion you
+<i>brings</i> it. Und anyway, we ain't had no rides."</p>
+
+<p>"But we heard a holler," the guest of honor reminded him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> "We heard a
+fierce, big holler from a lion. I don't know do I need a ride on
+something what hollers. I could to have a fraid maybe."</p>
+
+<p>"Ye wouldn't be afraid on the boats when I hold yer hand, would ye?"
+Patrick anxiously inquired, and Eva shyly admitted that, thus supported,
+she might not be dismayed. To work off the pride and joy caused by this
+avowal, Patrick mounted the broad seat extending all around the
+summerhouse and began to walk clatteringly upon it. The other pilgrims
+followed suit and the whole party stamped and danced with infinite
+enjoyment. Suddenly the leader halted with a loud cry of triumph and
+pointed grandly out through one of the wistaria-hung openings. Not De
+Soto on the banks of the Mississippi nor Balboa above the Pacific could
+have felt more victorious than Patrick did as he announced:</p>
+
+<p>"There's the water-lake!"</p>
+
+<p>His followers closed in upon him so impetuously that he was borne down
+under their charge and fell ignominiously out on the grass. But he was
+hardly missed, he had served his purpose. For there, beyond the rocks
+and lawns and red japonicas, lay the blue and shining water-lake in its
+confining banks of green. And upon its softly quivering surface floated
+the rubber-neck-boat-birds, white and sweetly silent instead of red and
+screaming&mdash;and the superlative length and arched beauty of their necks
+surpassed the wildest of Ikey Borrachsohn's descriptions. And relying
+upon the strength and politeness of these wondrous birds there were
+indeed "mans und ladies und boys und little girls" embarking,
+disembarking, and placidly weaving in and out and round about through
+scenes of hidden but undoubted beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Over rocks and grass the army charged towards bliss unutterable,
+strewing their path with overturned and howling babies of prosperity
+who, clumsy from many nurses and much pampering, failed to make way.
+Past all barriers, accidental or official, they pressed, nor halted to
+draw rein or breath until<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> they were established, beatified, upon the
+waiting swan-boat.</p>
+
+<p>Three minutes later they were standing outside the railings of the
+landing and regarding, through welling tears, the placid lake, the sunny
+slopes of grass and tree, the brilliant sky and the gleaming
+rubber-neck-boat-bird which, as Ikey described, "made go its legs," but
+only, as he had omitted to mention, for money. So there they stood,
+seven sorrowful little figures engulfed in the rayless despair of
+childhood and the bitterness of poverty. For these were the children of
+the poor, and full well they knew that money was not to be diverted from
+its mission: that car-fare could not be squandered on bliss.</p>
+
+<p>Becky's woe was so strong and loud that the bitter wailings of the
+others served merely as its background. But Patrick cared not at all for
+the general despair. His remorseful eyes never strayed from the bowed
+figure of Eva Gonorowsky, for whose pleasure and honor he had striven so
+long and vainly. Slowly she conquered her sobs, slowly she raised her
+daisy-decked head, deliberately she blew her small pink nose, softly she
+approached her conquered knight, gently and all untruthfully she
+faltered, with yearning eyes on the majestic swans:</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you have no sad feelings, Patrick. I ain't got none. Ain't I told
+you from long, how I don't need no rubber-neck-boat-bird rides? I don't
+need 'em! I don't need 'em! I"&mdash;with a sob of passionate longing&mdash;"I'm
+got all times a awful scare over 'em. Let's go home, Patrick. Becky
+needs she should see her mamma, und I guess I needs my mamma too."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="MYRA_KELLY" id="MYRA_KELLY"></a>MYRA KELLY</h2>
+
+<p>Is it necessary to say that she was Irish? The humor, the sympathy, the
+quick understanding, the tenderness, that play through all her stories
+are the birthright of the children of Erin. Myra Kelly was born in
+Dublin, Ireland. Her father was Dr. John E. Kelly, a well-known surgeon.
+When Myra was little more than a baby, the family came to New York City.
+Here she was educated at the Horace Mann High School, and afterwards at
+Teachers College, a department of Columbia University, New York. She
+graduated from Teachers College in 1899. Her first school was in the
+primary department of Public School 147, on East Broadway, New York,
+where she taught from 1899 to 1901. Here she met all the "little
+aliens," the Morris and Isidore, Yetta and Eva of her stories, and won
+her way into their hearts. To her friends she would sometimes tell of
+these children, with their odd ideas of life and their dialect. "Why
+don't you write these stories down?" they asked her, and at last she sat
+down and wrote her first story, "A Christmas Present for a Lady." She
+had no knowledge of editorial methods, so she made four copies of the
+story and sent them to four different magazines. Two of them returned
+the story, and two of them accepted it, much to her embarrassment. The
+two acceptances came from <i>McClure's Magazine</i> and <i>The Century</i>. As
+<i>McClure's</i> replied first she gave the story to them, and most of her
+other stories were first published in that magazine.</p>
+
+<p>When they appeared in book form, they were welcomed by readers all over
+the country. Even the President of the United States wrote to express
+his thanks to her, in the following letter:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p class="right"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>Oyster Bay, N. Y.<br />
+July, 26, 1905. &nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>My dear Miss Kelly:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Roosevelt and I and most of the children know your very
+amusing and very pathetic accounts of East Side school children
+almost by heart, and I really think you must let me write and thank
+you for them. When I was Police Commissioner I quite often went to
+the Houston Street public school, and was immensely impressed by
+what I saw there. I thought there were a good many Miss Baileys
+there, and the work they were doing among their scholars (who were
+largely of Russian-Jewish parentage like the children you write of)
+was very much like what your Miss Bailey has done.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Very sincerely yours, &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<br />Theodore Roosevelt.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>After two years of school room work, Miss Kelly's health broke down, and
+she retired from teaching, although she served as critic teacher in the
+Speyer School, Teachers College, for a year longer. One of the persons
+who had read her books with delight was Allen Macnaughton. Soon after he
+met Miss Kelly, and in 1905 they were married. They lived for a time at
+Oldchester Village, New Jersey, in the Orange mountains, in a colony of
+literary people which her husband was interested in establishing. After
+several years of very successful literary work, she developed
+tuberculosis. She went to Torquay, England, in search of health, and
+died there March 31, 1910.</p>
+
+<p>Her works include the following titles: <i>Little Citizens</i>; <i>The Isle of
+Dreams</i>; <i>Wards of Liberty</i>; <i>Rosnah</i>; <i>the Golden Season</i>; <i>Little
+Aliens</i>; <i>New Faces</i>. One of the leading magazines speaks of her as the
+creator of a new dialect.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="HERO_WORSHIP" id="HERO_WORSHIP"></a>HERO WORSHIP</h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span></p><p><i>Most of us are hero-worshippers at some time of our lives. The boy
+finds his hero in the baseball player or athlete, the girl in the
+matin&eacute;e idol, or the "movie" star. These objects of worship are not
+always worthy of the adoration they inspire, but this does not matter
+greatly, since their worshippers seldom find it out. There is something
+fine in absolute loyalty to an ideal, even if the ideal is far from
+reality. "The Tenor" is the story of a famous singer and two of his
+devoted admirers</i>.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_TENOR1" id="THE_TENOR1"></a>THE TENOR<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3>H. C. <span class="smcap">Bunner</span></h3>
+
+<p>It was a dim, quiet room in an old-fashioned New York house, with
+windows opening upon a garden that was trim and attractive, even in its
+wintry days&mdash;for the rose-bushes were all bundled up in straw ulsters.
+The room was ample, yet it had a cosy air. Its dark hangings suggested
+comfort and luxury, with no hint of gloom. A hundred pretty trifles told
+that it was a young girl's room: in the deep alcove nestled her dainty
+white bed, draped with creamy lace and ribbons.</p>
+
+<p>"I was <i>so</i> afraid that I'd be late!"</p>
+
+<p>The door opened, and two pretty girls came in, one in hat and furs, the
+other in a modest house dress. The girl in the furs, who had been afraid
+that she would be late, was fair, with a bright color in her cheeks, and
+an eager, intent look in her clear brown eyes. The other girl was
+dark-eyed and dark-haired, dreamy, with a soft, warm dusky color in her
+face. They were two very pretty girls indeed&mdash;or, rather, two girls
+about to be very pretty, for neither one was eighteen years old.</p>
+
+<p>The dark girl glanced at a little porcelain clock.</p>
+
+<p>"You are in time, dear," she said, and helped her companion to take off
+her wraps.</p>
+
+<p>Then the two girls crossed the room, and with a caressing and almost a
+reverent touch, the dark girl opened the doors of a little carven
+cabinet that hung upon the wall, above a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> small table covered with a
+delicate white cloth. In its depths, framed in a mat of odorous double
+violets, stood the photograph of the face of a handsome man of forty&mdash;a
+face crowned with clustering black locks, from beneath which a pair of
+large, mournful eyes looked out with something like religious fervor in
+their rapt gaze. It was the face of a foreigner.</p>
+
+<p>"O Esther!" cried the other girl, "how beautifully you have dressed him
+to-day!"</p>
+
+<p>"I wanted to get more," Esther said; "but I've spent almost all my
+allowance&mdash;and violets do cost so shockingly. Come, now&mdash;" with another
+glance at the clock&mdash;"don't let's lose any more time, Louise dear."</p>
+
+<p>She brought a couple of tiny candles in Sevr&egrave;s candlesticks, and two
+little silver saucers, in which she lit fragrant pastilles. As the pale
+gray smoke arose, floating in faint wreaths and spirals before the
+enshrined photograph, Louise sat down and gazed intently upon the little
+altar. Esther went to her piano and watched the clock. It struck two.
+Her hands fell softly on the keys, and, studying a printed program in
+front of her, she began to play an overture. After the overture she
+played one or two pieces of the regular concert stock. Then she paused.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't play the Tschaikowski piece."</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind," said the other. "Let us wait for him in silence."</p>
+
+<p>The hands of the clock pointed to 2:29. Each girl drew a quick breath,
+and then the one at the piano began to sing softly, almost inaudibly,
+"les Rameaux" in a transcription for tenor of Faur&eacute;'s great song. When
+it was ended, she played and sang the <i>encore</i>. Then, with her fingers
+touching the keys so softly that they awakened only an echo-like sound,
+she ran over the numbers that intervened between the first tenor solo
+and the second. Then she sang again, as softly as before.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p><p>The fair-haired girl sat by the little table, gazing intently on the
+picture. Her great eyes seemed to devour it, and yet there was something
+absent-minded, speculative, in her steady look. She did not speak until
+Esther played the last number on the program.</p>
+
+<p>"He had three encores for that last Saturday," she said, and Esther
+played the three encores.</p>
+
+<p>Then they closed the piano and the little cabinet, and exchanged an
+innocent girlish kiss, and Louise went out, and found her father's coup&eacute;
+waiting for her, and was driven away to her great, gloomy, brown-stone
+home near Central Park.</p>
+
+<p>Louise Laura Latimer and Esther Van Guilder were the only children of
+two families which, though they were possessed of the three "Rs" which
+are all and more than are needed to insure admission to New York
+society&mdash;Riches, Respectability and Religion&mdash;yet were not in Society;
+or, at least, in the society that calls itself Society. This was not
+because Society was not willing to have them. It was because they
+thought the world too worldly. Perhaps this was one reason&mdash;although the
+social horizon of the two families had expanded somewhat as the girls
+grew up&mdash;why Louise and Esther, who had been playmates from their
+nursery days, and had grown up to be two uncommonly sentimental,
+fanciful, enthusiastically morbid girls, were to be found spending a
+bright Winter afternoon holding a ceremonial service of worship before
+the photograph of a fashionable French tenor.</p>
+
+<p>It happened to be a French tenor whom they were worshiping. It might as
+well have been anybody or any thing else. They were both at that period
+of girlish growth when the young female bosom is torn by a hysterical
+craving to worship something&mdash;any thing. They had been studying music
+and they had selected the tenor who was the sensation of the hour in New
+York for their idol. They had heard him only on the concert stage; they
+were never likely to see him nearer. But it was a mere matter of chance
+that the idol was not a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> Boston Transcendentalist, a Popular Preacher, a
+Faith-Cure Healer, or a ringleted old maid with advanced ideas of
+Woman's Mission. The ceremonies might have been different in form: the
+worship would have been the same.</p>
+
+<p>M. Hyppolite R&eacute;my was certainly the musical hero of the hour. When his
+advance notices first appeared, the New York critics, who are a
+singularly unconfiding, incredulous lot, were inclined to discount his
+European reputation.</p>
+
+<p>When they learned that M. R&eacute;my was not only a great artist, but a man
+whose character was "wholly free from that deplorable laxity which is so
+often a blot on the proud escutcheon of his noble profession;" that he
+had married an American lady; that he had "embraced the Protestant
+religion"&mdash;no sect was specified, possibly to avoid jealousy&mdash;and that
+his health was delicate, they were moved to suspect that he might have
+to ask that allowances be made for his singing. But when he arrived, his
+triumph was complete. He was as handsome as his picture, if he <i>was</i> a
+trifle short, a shade too stout.</p>
+
+<p>He was a singer of genius, too; with a splendid voice and a sound
+method&mdash;on the whole. It was before the days of the Wagner autocracy,
+and perhaps his tremolo passed unchallenged as it could not now; but he
+was a great artist. He knew his business as well as his advance-agent
+knew his. The R&eacute;my Concerts were a splendid success. Reserved seats, $5.
+For the Series of Six, $25.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p>On the following Monday, Esther Van Guilder returned her friend's call,
+in response to an urgent invitation, despatched by mail. Louise
+Latimer's great bare room was incapable of transmutation into a cosy
+nest of a boudoir. There was too much of its heavy raw silk
+furniture&mdash;too much of its vast, sarcophagus-like bed&mdash;too much of its
+upholsterer's elegance, regardless of cost&mdash;and taste. An enlargement
+from an ambrotype of the original Latimer, as he arrived in New York<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>
+from New Hampshire, and a photograph of a "child subject" by Millais,
+were all her works of art. It was not to be doubted that they had
+climbed upstairs from a front parlor of an earlier stage of social
+development. The farm-house was six generations behind Esther; two
+behind Louise.</p>
+
+<p>Esther found her friend in a state of almost feverish excitement. Her
+eyes shone; the color burned high on her clear cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>"You never would guess what I've done, dear!" she began, as soon as they
+were alone in the big room. "I'm going to see <i>him</i>&mdash;to speak to
+him&mdash;<i>Esther!</i>" Her voice was solemnly hushed, "to <i>serve</i> him!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Louise! what <i>do</i> you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"To serve him&mdash;with my own hands! To&mdash;to&mdash;help him on with his coat&mdash;I
+don't know&mdash;to do something that a servant does&mdash;anything, so that I can
+say that once, once only, just for an hour, I have been near him, been
+of use to him, served him in one little thing as loyally as he serves
+OUR ART."</p>
+
+<p>Music was THEIR art, and no capitals could tell how much it was theirs
+or how much of an art it was.</p>
+
+<p>"Louise," demanded Esther, with a frightened look, "are you crazy?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. Read this!" She handed the other girl a clipping from the
+advertising columns of a newspaper.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>CHAMBERMAID AND WAITRESS.&mdash;WANTED, A NEAT and willing girl, for
+light work. Apply to Mme. R&eacute;my, The Midlothian, ... Broadway.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>"I saw it just by accident, Saturday, after I left you. Papa had left
+his paper in the coup&eacute;. I was going up to my First Aid to the Injured
+Class&mdash;it's at four o'clock now, you know. I made up my mind right
+off&mdash;it came to me like an inspiration. I just waited until it came to
+the place where they showed how to tie up arteries, and then I slipped
+out. Lots of the girls slip out in the horrid parts, you know. And then,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>instead of waiting in the ante-room, I put on my wrap, and pulled the
+hood over my head and ran off to the Midlothian&mdash;it's just around the
+corner, you know. And I saw his wife."</p>
+
+<p>"What was she like?" queried Esther, eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know. Sort of horrid&mdash;actressy. She had a pink silk wrapper
+with swansdown all over it&mdash;at four o'clock, think! I was <i>awfully</i>
+frightened when I got there; but it wasn't the least trouble. She hardly
+looked at me, and she engaged me right off. She just asked me if I was
+willing to do a whole lot of things&mdash;I forgot what they were&mdash;and where
+I'd worked before. I said at Mrs. Barcalow's."</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Barcalow's?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes&mdash;my Aunt Amanda, don't you know&mdash;up in Framingham. I always
+have to wash the teacups when I go there. Aunty says that everybody has
+got to do <i>something</i> in <i>her</i> house."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Louise!" cried her friend, in shocked admiration; "how can you
+think of such things?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I did. And she&mdash;his wife, you know&mdash;just said: 'Oh, I suppose
+you'll do as well as any one&mdash;all you girls are alike.'"</p>
+
+<p>"But did she really take you for a&mdash;servant?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes, indeed. It was raining. I had that old ulster on, you know.
+I'm to go at twelve o'clock next Saturday."</p>
+
+<p>"But, Louise!" cried Esther, aghast, "you don't truly mean to go!"</p>
+
+<p>"I do!" cried Louise, beaming triumphantly.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Oh, Louise!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Now, listen, dear," said Miss Latimer, with the decision of an
+enthusiastic young lady with New England blood in her veins. "Don't say
+a word till I tell you what my plan is. I've thought it all out, and
+you've got to help me."</p>
+
+<p>Esther shuddered.</p>
+
+<p>"You foolish child!" cried Louise. Her eyes were sparkling: she was in a
+state of ecstatic excitement; she could see no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> obstacles to the
+carrying out of her plan. "You don't think I mean to <i>stay</i> there, do
+you? I'm just going at twelve o'clock, and at four he comes back from
+the matin&eacute;e, and at five o'clock I'm going to slip on my things and run
+downstairs, and have you waiting for me in the coup&eacute;, and off we go. Now
+do you see?"</p>
+
+<p>It took some time to bring Esther's less venturesome spirit up to the
+point of assisting in this undertaking; but she began, after a while, to
+feel the delights of vicarious enterprise, and in the end the two girls,
+their cheeks flushed, their eyes shining feverishly, their voices
+tremulous with childish eagerness, resolved themselves into a committee
+of ways and means; for they were two well-guarded young women, and to
+engineer five hours of liberty was difficult to the verge of
+impossibility. However, there is a financial man&oelig;uvre known as
+"kiting checks," whereby A exchanges a check with B and B swaps with A
+again, playing an imaginary balance against Time and the Clearing House;
+and by a similar scheme, which an acute student of social ethics has
+called "kiting calls," the girls found that they could make Saturday
+afternoon their own, without one glance from the watchful eyes of
+Esther's mother or Louise's aunt&mdash;Louise had only an aunt to reckon
+with.</p>
+
+<p>"And, oh, Esther!" cried the bolder of the conspirators, "I've thought
+of a trunk&mdash;of course I've got to have a trunk, or she would ask me
+where it was, and I couldn't tell her a fib. Don't you remember the
+French maid who died three days after she came here? Her trunk is up in
+the store-room still, and I don't believe anybody will ever come for
+it&mdash;it's been there seven years now. Let's go up and look at it."</p>
+
+<p>The girls romped upstairs to the great unused upper story, where heaps
+of household rubbish obscured the dusty half-windows. In a corner,
+behind Louise's baby chair and an unfashionable hat-rack of the old
+steering-wheel pattern, they found the little brown-painted tin trunk,
+corded up with clothesline.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p><p>"Louise!" said Esther, hastily, "what did you tell her your name was?"</p>
+
+<p>"I just said 'Louise'."</p>
+
+<p>Esther pointed to the name painted on the trunk,</p>
+
+<p class="center">LOUISE LEVY</p>
+
+<p>"It is the hand of Providence," she said. "Somehow, now, I'm <i>sure</i>
+you're quite right to go."</p>
+
+<p>And neither of these conscientious young ladies reflected for one minute
+on the discomfort which might be occasioned to Madame R&eacute;my by the
+defection of her new servant a half-hour before dinner-time on Saturday
+night.</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p>"Oh, child, it's you, is it?" was Mme. R&eacute;my's greeting at twelve o'clock
+on Saturday. "Well, you're punctual&mdash;and you look clean. Now, are you
+going to break my dishes or are you going to steal my rings? Well, we'll
+find out soon enough. Your trunk's up in your room. Go up to the
+servant's quarters&mdash;right at the top of those stairs there. Ask for the
+room that belongs to apartment 11. You are to room with their girl."</p>
+
+<p>Louise was glad of a moment's respite. She had taken the plunge; she was
+determined to go through to the end. But her heart <i>would</i> beat and her
+hands <i>would</i> tremble. She climbed up six flights of winding stairs, and
+found herself weak and dizzy when she reached the top and gazed around
+her. She was in a great half-story room, eighty feet square. The most of
+it was filled with heaps of old furniture and bedding, rolls of carpet,
+of canvas, of oilcloth, and odds and ends of discard of unused household
+gear&mdash;the dust thick over all. A little space had been left around three
+sides, to give access to three rows of cell-like rooms, in each of which
+the ceiling sloped from the very door to a tiny window at the level of
+the floor. In each room was a bed, a bureau that served for wash-stand,
+a small looking-glass, and one or two trunks. Women's dresses<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> hung on
+the whitewashed walls. She found No. 11, threw off, desperately, her hat
+and jacket, and sunk down on the little brown tin trunk, all trembling
+from head to foot.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello," called a cheery voice. She looked up and saw a girl in a dirty
+calico dress.</p>
+
+<p>"Just come?" inquired this person, with agreeable informality. She was a
+good-looking large girl, with red hair and bright cheeks. She leaned
+against the door-post and polished her finger-nails with a little brush.
+Her hands were shapely.</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't got onto the stair-climbing racket yet, eh? You'll get used to
+it. 'Louise Levy,'" she read the name on the trunk. "You don't look like
+a sheeny. Can't tell nothin' 'bout names, can you? My name's Slattery.
+You'd think I was Irish, wouldn't you? Well, I'm straight Ne' York. I'd
+be dead before I was Irish. Born here. Ninth Ward an' next to an engine
+house. How's that? There's white Jews, too. I worked for one, pickin'
+sealskins down in Prince Street. Most took the lungs out of me. But that
+wasn't why I shook the biz. It queered my hands&mdash;see? I'm goin' to be
+married in the Fall to a German gentleman. He ain't so Dutch when you
+know him, though. He's a grocer. Drivin' now; but he buys out the boss
+in the Fall. How's that? He's dead stuck on my hooks, an' I have to keep
+'em lookin' good. I come here because the work was light. I don't have
+to work&mdash;only to be doin' somethin', see? Only got five halls and the
+lamps. You got a fam'ly job, I s'pose? I wouldn't have that. I don't
+mind the Sooprintendent; but I'd be dead before I'd be bossed by a
+woman, see? Say, what fam'ly did you say you was with?"</p>
+
+<p>The stream of talk had acted like a nerve-tonic on Louise. She was able
+to answer:</p>
+
+<p>"M&mdash;Mr. R&eacute;my."</p>
+
+<p>"Ramy?&mdash;oh, lord! Got the job with His Tonsils? Well, you won't keep it
+long. They're meaner'n three balls, see?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> Rent their room up here and
+chip in with eleven. Their girls don't never stay. Well, I got to step,
+or the Sooprintendent'll be borin' my ear. Well&mdash;so long!"</p>
+
+<p>But Louise had fled down the stairs. "His Tonsils" rang in her ears.
+What blasphemy! What sacrilege! She could scarcely pretend to listen to
+Mme. R&eacute;my's first instructions.</p>
+
+<p>The household <i>was</i> parsimonious. Louise washed the caterer's dishes&mdash;he
+made a reduction in his price. Thus she learned that a late breakfast
+took the place of luncheon. She began to feel what this meant. The beds
+had been made; but there was work enough. She helped Mme. R&eacute;my to sponge
+a heap of faded finery&mdash;<i>her</i> dresses. If they had been <i>his</i> coats!
+Louise bent her hot face over the tawdry silks and satins, and clasped
+her parboiled little finger-tips over the wet sponge. At half-past three
+Mme. R&eacute;my broke the silence.</p>
+
+<p>"We must get ready for Musseer," she said. An ecstatic joy filled
+Louise's being. The hour of her reward was at hand.</p>
+
+<p>Getting ready for "Musseer" proved to be an appalling process. First
+they brewed what Mme. R&eacute;my called a "teaze Ann." After the <i>tisane</i>, a
+host of strange foreign drugs and cosmetics were marshalled in order.
+Then water was set to heat on a gas-stove. Then a little table was
+neatly set.</p>
+
+<p>"Musseer has his dinner at half-past four," Madame explained. "I don't
+take mine till he's laid down and I've got him off to the concert.
+There, he's coming now. Sometimes he comes home pretty nervous. If he's
+nervous, don't you go and make a fuss, do you hear, child?"</p>
+
+<p>The door opened, and Musseer entered, wrapped in a huge frogged
+overcoat. There was no doubt that he was nervous. He cast his hat upon
+the floor, as if he were Jove dashing a thunderbolt. Fire flashed from
+his eyes. He advanced upon his wife and thrust a newspaper in her
+face&mdash;a little pinky sheet, a notorious blackmailing publication.</p>
+
+<p>"Zees," he cried, "is your work!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p><p>"What <i>is</i> it now, Hipleet?" demanded Mme. R&eacute;my.</p>
+
+<p>"Vot it ees?" shrieked the tenor. "It ees ze history of how zey have
+heest me at Nice! It ees all zair&mdash;how I have been heest&mdash;in zis sacre
+sheet&mdash;in zis handkairchif of infamy! And it ees you zat have told it to
+zat devil of a Rastignac&mdash;<i>traitresse!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Hipleet," pleaded his wife, "if I can't learn enough French to
+talk with you, how am I going to tell Rastignac about your being
+hissed?"</p>
+
+<p>This reasoning silenced Mr. R&eacute;my for an instant&mdash;an instant only.</p>
+
+<p>"You <i>vood</i> have done it!" he cried, sticking out his chin and thrusting
+his face forward.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I didn't," said Madame, "and nobody reads that thing, any way.
+Now, don't mind it, and let me get your things off, or you'll be
+catching cold."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. R&eacute;my yielded at last to the necessity of self-preservation, and
+permitted his wife to remove his frogged overcoat, and to unwind him
+from a system of silk wraps to which the Gordian knot was a slip-noose.
+This done, he sat down before the dressing-case, and Mme. R&eacute;my, after
+tying a bib around his neck, proceeded to dress his hair and put
+brilliantine on his moustache. Her husband enlivened the operation by
+reading from the pinky paper.</p>
+
+<p>"It ees not gen-air-al-lee known&mdash;zat zees dees-tin-guished tenor vos
+heest on ze pob-lic staidj at Nice&mdash;in ze year&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Louise leaned against the wall, sick, faint and frightened, with a
+strange sense of shame and degradation at her heart. At last the tenor's
+eye fell on her.</p>
+
+<p>"Anozzair eediot?" he inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"She ain't very bright, Hipleet," replied his wife; "but I guess she'll
+do. Louise, open the door&mdash;there's the caterer."</p>
+
+<p>Louise placed the dishes upon the table mechanically. The tenor sat
+himself at the board, and tucked a napkin in his neck.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span></p><p>"And how did the Benediction Song go this afternoon?" inquired his
+wife.</p>
+
+<p>"Ze B&eacute;n&eacute;diction? Ah! One <i>encore</i>. One on-lee. Zese pigs of Ame&eacute;ricains.
+I t'row my pairls biffo' swine. <i>Chops once more!</i> You vant to mordair
+me? Vat do zis mean, madame? You ar-r-re in lig wiz my enemies. All ze
+vorlt is against ze ar-r-r-teest!"</p>
+
+<p>The storm that followed made the first seem a zephyr. The tenor
+exhausted his execratory vocabulary in French and English. At last, by
+way of a dramatic finale, he seized the plate of chops and flung it from
+him. He aimed at the wall; but Frenchmen do not pitch well. With a ring
+and a crash, plate and chops went through the broad window-pane. In the
+moment of stricken speechlessness that followed, the sound of the final
+smash came softly up from the sidewalk.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ah!"</p>
+
+<p>The tenor rose to his feet with the howl of an anguished hyena.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, good gracious!" cried his wife; "he's going to have one of his
+creezes&mdash;his creezes de nare!"</p>
+
+<p>He did have a <i>crise de nerfs</i>. "Ten dollair!" he yelled, "for ten
+dollair of glass!" He tore his pomaded hair; he tore off his bib and his
+neck-tie, and for three minutes without cessation he shrieked wildly and
+unintelligibly. It was possible to make out, however, that "arteest" and
+"ten dollair" were the themes of the improvisation. Finally he sank
+exhausted into the chair, and his white-faced wife rushed to his side.</p>
+
+<p>"Louise!" she cried, "get the foot-tub out of the closet while I spray
+his throat, or he can't sing a note. Fill it up with warm water&mdash;102
+degrees&mdash;there's the thermometer&mdash;and bathe his feet."</p>
+
+<p>Trembling from head to foot, Louise obeyed her orders, and brought the
+foot-tub, full of steaming water. Then she knelt down and began to serve
+the maestro for the first time.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> She took off his shoes. Then she looked
+at his socks. Could she do it?</p>
+
+<p>"Eediot!" gasped the sufferer, "make haste! I die!"</p>
+
+<p>"Hold your mouth open, dear," said Madame, "I haven't half sprayed you."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! <i>you!</i>" cried the tenor. "Cat! Devil! It ees you zat have killed
+me!" And moved by an access of blind rage, he extended his arm, and
+thrust his wife violently from him.</p>
+
+<p>Louise rose to her feet, with a hard set, good old New England look on
+her face. She lifted the tub of water to the level of her breast, and
+then she inverted it on the tenor's head. For one instant she gazed at
+the deluge, and at the bath-tub balanced on the maestro's skull like a
+helmet several sizes too large&mdash;then she fled like the wind.</p>
+
+<p>Once in the servant's quarters, she snatched her hat and jacket. From
+below came mad yells of rage.</p>
+
+<p>"I kill hare! give me my knife&mdash;give me my rivvolvare! Au secours!
+Assassin!"</p>
+
+<p>Miss Slattery appeared in the doorway, still polishing her nails.</p>
+
+<p>"What have you done to His Tonsils?" she inquired. "He's pretty hot,
+this trip."</p>
+
+<p>"How can I get away from here?" cried Louise.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Slattery pointed to a small door. Louise rushed down a long
+stairway&mdash;another&mdash;and yet others&mdash;through a great room where there was
+a smell of cooking and a noise of fires&mdash;past white-capped cooks and
+scullions&mdash;through a long stone corridor, and out into the street. She
+cried aloud as she saw Esther's face at the window of the coup&eacute;.</p>
+
+<p>She drove home&mdash;cured.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTE:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> From "Stories of H. C. Bunner," copyright, 1890, 1896, by
+Alice L. Bunner; published by Charles Scribner's Sons. By permission of
+the publishers.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="H_C_BUNNER" id="H_C_BUNNER"></a>H. C. BUNNER</h2>
+
+<p>Henry Cuyler Bunner was his full name, H. C. Bunner was the way he
+always signed his writings, and "Bunner" was his name to his friends,
+and even to his wife. He was born in Oswego, New York, August 3, 1855.
+His parents soon moved to New York City, and Bunner was educated in the
+public schools there. Then he became a clerk in a business house, but
+this did not satisfy him, and he began to write for newspapers, finally
+getting a position on the <i>Arcadian</i>, a short-lived journal. In 1877 the
+publishers of <i>Puck</i>, a humorous weekly printed in the German language,
+decided to issue an edition in English, and made Bunner assistant
+editor. It was a happy choice. He soon became editor-in-chief, and under
+his direction the paper became not only the best humorous journal of its
+time, but a powerful influence in politics as well. Bunner wrote not
+only editorials, humorous verse, short stories, and titles for pictures,
+but often suggested the cartoons, which were an important feature of the
+paper.</p>
+
+<p>Outside the office he was a delightful conversationalist. His friends
+Brander Matthews, Lawrence Hutton and others speak of his ready wit, his
+kindness of heart, and his wonderfully varied store of information. He
+was a constant reader, and a good memory enabled him to retain what he
+read. It is said that one could hardly name a poem that he had not read,
+and it was odds but that he could quote its best lines. Next to reading,
+his chief pleasure was in wandering about odd corners of the city,
+especially the foreign quarters. He knew all the queer little
+restaurants and queer little shops in these places.</p>
+
+<p>His first literary work of note was a volume of poems, happily entitled
+<i>Airs from Arcady</i>. It contains verses both grave and gay: one of the
+cleverest is called "Home, Sweet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> Home, with Variations." He writes the
+poem first in the style of Swinburne, then of Bret Harte, then of Austin
+Dobson, then of Oliver Goldsmith and finally of Walt Whitman. The book
+also showed his skill in the use of French forms of verse, as in this
+dainty triolet:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i1">A PITCHER OF MIGNONETTE</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>A pitcher of mignonette</div>
+<div class="i1">In a tenement's highest casement:</div>
+<div>Queer sort of flower-pot&mdash;yet</div>
+<div>That pitcher of mignonette</div>
+<div>Is a garden in heaven set,</div>
+<div class="i1">To the little sick child in the basement&mdash;</div>
+<div>The pitcher of mignonette</div>
+<div class="i1">In the tenement's highest casement.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The last poem in the book, called "To Her," was addressed to Miss Alice
+Learned, whom he married soon after, and to whom, as "A. L. B." all his
+later books were dedicated. Soon after his marriage he moved to Nutley,
+New Jersey. Here he was not only the editor and man of letters but the
+neighbor who could always be called on in time of need, and the citizen
+who took an active part in the community life, helping to organize the
+Village Improvement Society, one of the first of its kind.</p>
+
+<p>He followed up his first volume by two short novels, <i>The Midge</i> and
+<i>The Story of a New York House</i>. Then he undertook the writing of the
+short story, his first book being <i>Zadoc Pine and other Stories</i>. The
+title story of this book contains a very humorous and faithful
+delineation of a New Englander who is transplanted to a New Jersey
+suburb. Soon after writing this he began to read the short stories of
+Guy de Maupassant. He admired them so much that he half translated, half
+adapted a number of them, and published them under the title <i>Made in
+France</i>. Then he tried writing stories of his own, in the manner of de
+Maupassant, and produced in <i>Short Sixes</i> a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> group of stories which are
+models of concise narrative, crisply told, artistic in form, and often
+with a touch of surprise at the end. Other volumes of short stories are
+<i>More Short Sixes</i>, and <i>Love in Old Cloathes</i>. <i>Jersey Street and
+Jersey Lane</i> was a book which grew out of his Nutley life. He also wrote
+a play, <i>The Tower of Babel</i>, which was produced by Marie Wainwright in
+1883. He died at Nutley, May 11, 1896. He was one of the first American
+authors to develop the short story as we know it to-day, and few of his
+successors have surpassed him in the light, sure style and the firmness
+of construction which are characteristic of his later work.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="SOCIETY_IN_OUR_TOWN" id="SOCIETY_IN_OUR_TOWN"></a>SOCIETY IN OUR TOWN</h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span></p><p><i>Life in a small town, which means any place of less than a hundred
+thousand people, is more interesting than life in a big city. Both
+places have their notables, but in the small town you know these people,
+in the city you only read about them in the papers.</i> <span class="smcap">In Our Town</span> <i>is a
+series of portraits of the people of a typical small city of the Middle
+West, seen through the keen eyes of a newspaper editor. This story tells
+how the question of the social leadership of the town was finally
+settled.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_PASSING_OF_PRISCILLA_WINTHROP" id="THE_PASSING_OF_PRISCILLA_WINTHROP"></a>THE PASSING OF PRISCILLA WINTHROP</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">William Allen White</span></h3>
+
+<p>What a dreary waste life in our office must have been before Miss
+Larrabee came to us to edit a society page for the paper! To be sure we
+had known in a vague way that there were lines of social cleavage in the
+town; that there were whist clubs, and dancing clubs and women's clubs,
+and in a general way that the women who composed these clubs made up our
+best society, and that those benighted souls beyond the pale of these
+clubs were out of the caste. We knew that certain persons whose names
+were always handed in on the lists of guests at parties were what we
+called "howling swells," but it remained for Miss Larrabee to sort out
+ten or a dozen of these "howling swells," who belonged to the strictest
+social caste in town, and call them "howling dervishes." Incidentally it
+may be said that both Miss Larrabee and her mother were dervishes, but
+that did not prevent her from making sport of them. From Miss Larrabee
+we learned that the high priestess of the howling dervishes of our
+society was Mrs. Mortimer Conklin, known by the sisterhood of the mosque
+as Priscilla Winthrop. We in our office had never heard her called by
+that name, but Miss Larrabee explained, rather elaborately, that unless
+one was permitted to speak of Mrs. Conklin thus, one was quite beyond
+the hope of a social heaven.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, Priscilla Winthrop was Mrs. Conklin's maiden name;
+in the second place, it links her with the Colonial Puritan stock of
+which she is so justly proud&mdash;being scornful of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> mere Daughters of the
+Revolution&mdash;and finally, though Mrs. Conklin is a grandmother, her
+maiden name seems to preserve the sweet, vague illusion of girlhood
+which Mrs. Conklin always carries about her like the shadow of a dream.
+And Miss Larrabee punctuated this with a wink which we took to be a
+quotation mark, and she went on with her work. So we knew we had been
+listening to the language used in the temple.</p>
+
+<p>Our town was organized fifty years ago by Abolitionists from New
+England, and twenty years ago, when Alphabetical Morrison was getting
+out one of the numerous boom editions of his real estate circular, he
+printed an historical article therein in which he said that Priscilla
+Winthrop was the first white child born on the town site. Her father was
+territorial judge, afterward member of the State Senate, and after ten
+years spent in mining in the far West, died in the seventies, the
+richest man in the State. It was known that he left Priscilla, his only
+child, half a million dollars in government bonds.</p>
+
+<p>She was the first girl in our town to go away to school. Naturally, she
+went to Oberlin, famous in those days for admitting colored students.
+But she finished her education at Vassar, and came back so much of a
+young lady that the town could hardly contain her. She married Mortimer
+Conklin, took him to the Centennial on a wedding trip, came home,
+rebuilt her father's house, covering it with towers and minarets and
+steeples, and scroll-saw fretwork, and christened it Winthrop Hall. She
+erected a store building on Main Street, that Mortimer might have a
+luxurious office on the second floor, and then settled down to the
+serious business of life, which was building up a titled aristocracy in
+a Kansas town.</p>
+
+<p>The Conklin children were never sent to the public schools, but had a
+governess, yet Mortimer Conklin, who was always alert for the call,
+could not understand why the people never summoned him to any office of
+honor or trust. He kept his brass signboard polished, went to his office
+punctually every morning at ten o'clock, and returned home to dinner at
+five,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> and made clients wait ten minutes in the outer office before they
+could see him&mdash;at least so both of them say, and there were no others in
+all the years. He shaved every day, wore a frock-coat and a high hat to
+church&mdash;where for ten years he was the only male member of the
+Episcopalian flock&mdash;and Mrs. Conklin told the women that altogether he
+was a credit to his sex and his family&mdash;a remark which has passed about
+ribaldly in town for a dozen years, though Mortimer Conklin never knew
+that he was the subject of a town joke. Once he rebuked a man in the
+barber shop for speaking of feminine extravagance, and told the shop
+that he did not stint his wife, that when she asked him for money he
+always gave it to her without question, and that if she wanted a dress
+he told her to buy it and send the bill to him. And we are such a polite
+people that no one in the crowded shop laughed&mdash;until Mortimer Conklin
+went out.</p>
+
+<p>Of course at the office we have known for twenty-five years what the men
+thought of Mortimer, but not until Miss Larrabee joined the force did we
+know that among the women Mrs. Conklin was considered an oracle. Miss
+Larrabee said that her mother has a legend that when Priscilla Winthrop
+brought home from Boston the first sealskin sacque ever worn in town she
+gave a party for it, and it lay in its box on the big walnut bureau in
+the spare room of the Conklin mansion in solemn state, while
+seventy-five women salaamed to it. After that Priscilla Winthrop was the
+town authority on sealskins. When any member of the town nobility had a
+new sealskin, she took it humbly to Priscilla Winthrop to pass judgment
+upon it. If Priscilla said it was London-dyed, its owner pranced away on
+clouds of glory; but if she said it was American-dyed, its owner crawled
+away in shame, and when one admired the disgraced garment, the martyred
+owner smiled with resigned sweetness and said humbly: "Yes&mdash;but it's
+only American-dyed, you know."</p>
+
+<p>No dervish ever questioned the curse of the priestess. The only time a
+revolt was imminent was in the autumn of 1884<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> when the Conklins
+returned from their season at Duxbury, Massachusetts, and Mrs. Conklin
+took up the carpets in her house, heroically sold all of them at the
+second-hand store, put in new waxed floors and spread down rugs. The
+town uprose and hooted; the outcasts and barbarians in the Methodists
+and Baptist Missionary Societies rocked the Conklin home with their
+merriment, and ten dervishes with set faces bravely met the onslaughts
+of the savages; but among themselves in hushed whispers, behind locked
+doors, the faithful wondered if there was not a mistake some place.
+However, when Priscilla Winthrop assured them that in all the best homes
+in Boston rugs were replacing carpets, their souls were at peace.</p>
+
+<p>All this time we at the office knew nothing of what was going on. We
+knew that the Conklins devoted considerable time to society; but
+Alphabetical Morrison explained that by calling attention to the fact
+that Mrs. Conklin had prematurely gray hair. He said a woman with
+prematurely gray hair was as sure to be a social leader as a spotted
+horse is to join a circus. But now we know that Colonel Morrison's view
+was a superficial one, for he was probably deterred from going deeper
+into the subject by his dislike for Mortimer Conklin, who invested a
+quarter of a million dollars of the Winthrop fortune in the Wichita
+boom, and lost it. Colonel Morrison naturally thought as long as Conklin
+was going to lose that money he could have lost it just as well at home
+in the "Queen City of the Prairies," giving the Colonel a chance to win.
+And when Conklin, protecting his equities in Wichita, sent a hundred
+thousand dollars of good money after the quarter million of bad money,
+Colonel Morrison's grief could find no words; though he did find
+language for his wrath. When the Conklins draped their Oriental rugs for
+airing every Saturday over the veranda and portico railings of the house
+front, Colonel Morrison accused the Conklins of hanging out their stamp
+collection to let the neighbors see it. This was the only side of the
+rug question we ever heard in our office until Miss <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>Larrabee came; then
+she told us that one of the first requirements of a howling dervish was
+to be able to quote from Priscilla Winthrop's Rug book from memory. The
+Rug book, the China book and the Old Furniture book were the three
+sacred scrolls of the sect.</p>
+
+<p>All this was news to us. However, through Colonel Morrison, we had
+received many years ago another sidelight on the social status of the
+Conklins. It came out in this way: Time honored custom in our town
+allows the children of a home where there is an outbreak of social
+revelry, whether a church festival or a meeting of the Cold-Nosed Whist
+Club, to line up with the neighbor children on the back stoop or in the
+kitchen, like human vultures, waiting to lick the ice-cream freezer and
+to devour the bits of cake and chicken salad that are left over. Colonel
+Morrison told us that no child was ever known to adorn the back yard of
+the Conklin home while a social cataclysm was going on, but that when
+Mrs. Morrison entertained the Ladies' Literary League, children from the
+holy Conklin family went home from his back porch with their faces
+smeared with chicken croquettes and their hands sticky with jellycake.</p>
+
+<p>This story never gained general circulation in town, but even if it had
+been known of all men it would not have shaken the faith of the
+devotees. For they did not smile when Priscilla Winthrop began to refer
+to old Frank Hagan, who came to milk the Conklin cow and curry the
+Conklin horse, as "Fran&ccedil;ois, the man," or to call the girl who did the
+cooking and general housework "Cosette, the maid," though every one of
+the dozen other women in town whom "Cosette, the maid" had worked for
+knew that her name was Fanny Ropes. And shortly after that the homes of
+the rich and the great over on the hill above Main Street began to fill
+with Lisettes and Nanons and Fanchons, and Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington
+called her girl "Grisette," explaining that they had always had a
+Grisette about the house since her mother first went to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>housekeeping in
+Peoria, Illinois, and it sounded so natural to hear the name that they
+always gave it to a new servant. This story came to the office through
+the Young Prince, who chuckled over it during the whole hour he consumed
+in writing Ezra Worthington's obituary.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Larrabee says that the death of Ezra Worthington marks such a
+distinct epoch in the social life of the town that we must set down
+here&mdash;even if the narrative of the Conklins halts for a moment&mdash;how the
+Worthingtons rose and flourished. Julia Neal, the eldest daughter of
+Thomas Neal&mdash;who lost the "O" before his name somewhere between the
+docks of Dublin and the west bank of the Missouri River&mdash;was for ten
+years principal of the ward school in that part of our town known as
+"Arkansaw," where her term of service is still remembered as the "reign
+of terror." It was said of her then that she could whip any man in the
+ward&mdash;and would do it if he gave her a chance. The same manner which
+made the neighbors complain that Julia Neal carried her head too high,
+later in life, when she had money to back it, gave her what the women of
+the State Federation called a "regal air." In her early thirties she
+married Ezra Worthington, bachelor, twenty years her senior. Ezra
+Worthington was at that time, had been for twenty years before, and
+continued to be until his death, proprietor of the Worthington Poultry
+and Produce Commission Company. He was owner of the stockyards,
+president of the Worthington State Bank, vice-president, treasurer and
+general manager of the Worthington Mercantile Company, and owner of five
+brick buildings on Main Street. He bought one suit of clothes every five
+years whether he needed it or not, never let go of a dollar unless the
+Goddess of Liberty on it was black in the face, and died rated "at
+$350,000" by all the commercial agencies in the country. And the first
+thing Mrs. Worthington did after the funeral was to telephone to the
+bank and ask them to send her a hundred dollars.</p>
+
+<p>The next important thing she did was to put a heavy, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>immovable granite
+monument over the deceased so that he would not be restless, and then
+she built what is known in our town as the Worthington Palace. It makes
+the Markley mansion which cost $25,000 look like a barn. The
+Worthingtons in the life-time of Ezra had ventured no further into the
+social whirl of the town than to entertain the new Presbyterian preacher
+at tea, and to lend their lawn to the King's Daughters for a social,
+sending a bill in to the society for the eggs used in the coffee and the
+gasoline used in heating it.</p>
+
+<p>To the howling dervishes who surrounded Priscilla Winthrop the
+Worthingtons were as mere Christian dogs. It was not until three years
+after Ezra Worthington's death that the glow of the rising Worthington
+sun began to be seen in the Winthrop mosque. During those three years
+Mrs. Worthington had bought and read four different sets of the best
+hundred books, had consumed the Chautauque course, had prepared and
+delivered for the Social Science Club, which she organized, five papers
+ranging in subject from the home life of Rameses I., through a Survey of
+the Forces Dominating Michael Angelo, to the Influence of Esoteric
+Buddhism on Modern Political Tendencies. More than that, she had been
+elected president of the City Federation clubs and being a delegate to
+the National Federation from the State, was talked of for the State
+Federation Presidency. When the State Federation met in our town, Mrs.
+Worthington gave a reception for the delegates in the Worthington
+Palace, a feature of which was a concert by a Kansas City organist on
+the new pipe-organ which she had erected in the music-room of her house,
+and despite the fact that the devotees of the Priscilla shrine said that
+the crowd was distinctly mixed and not at all representative of our best
+social grace and elegance, there is no question but that Mrs.
+Worthington's reception made a strong impression upon the best local
+society. The fact that, as Miss Larrabee said, "Priscilla Winthrop was
+so nice about it," also may be regarded as ominous. But the women who
+lent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> Mrs. Worthington the spoons and forks for the occasion were
+delighted, and formed a phalanx about her, which made up in numbers what
+it might have lacked in distinction. Yet while Mrs. Worthington was in
+Europe the faithful routed the phalanx, and Mrs. Conklin returned from
+her summer in Duxbury with half a carload of old furniture from Harrison
+Sampson's shop and gave a talk to the priestesses of the inner temple on
+"Heppelwhite in New England."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Larrabee reported the affair for our paper, giving the small list
+of guests and the long line of refreshments&mdash;which included
+alligator-pear salad, right out of the Smart Set Cook Book. Moreover,
+when Jefferson appeared in Topeka that fall, Priscilla Winthrop, who had
+met him through some of her Duxbury friends in Boston, invited him to
+run down for a luncheon with her and the members of the royal family who
+surrounded her. It was the proud boast of the defenders of the Winthrop
+faith in town that week, that though twenty-four people sat down to the
+table, not only did all the men wear frock coats&mdash;not only did Uncle
+Charlie Haskins of String Town wear the old Winthrop butler's livery
+without a wrinkle in it, and with only the faint odor of mothballs to
+mingle with the perfume of the roses&mdash;but (and here the voices of the
+followers of the prophet dropped in awe) not a single knife or fork or
+spoon or napkin was borrowed! After that, when any of the sisterhood had
+occasion to speak of the absent Mrs. Worthington, whose house was filled
+with new mahogany and brass furniture, they referred to her as the
+Duchess of Grand Rapids, which gave them much comfort.</p>
+
+<p>But joy is short-lived. When Mrs. Worthington came back from Europe and
+opened her house to the City Federation, and gave a colored
+lantern-slide lecture on "An evening with the Old Masters," serving
+punch from her own cut-glass punch bowl instead of renting the
+hand-painted crockery bowl of the queensware store, the old dull pain
+came back into the hearts of the dwellers in the inner circle. Then just
+in the nick<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> of time Mrs. Conklin went to Kansas City and was operated
+on for appendicitis. She came back pale and interesting, and gave her
+club a paper called "Hospital Days," fragrant with iodoform and Henley's
+poems. Miss Larrabee told us that it was almost as pleasant as an
+operation on one's self to hear Mrs. Conklin tell about hers. And they
+thought it was rather brutal&mdash;so Miss Larrabee afterward told us&mdash;when
+Mrs. Worthington went to the hospital one month, and gave her famous
+Delsarte lecture course the next month, and explained to the women that
+if she wasn't as heavy as she used to be it was because she had had
+everything cut out of her below the windpipe. It seemed to the temple
+priestesses that, considering what a serious time poor dear Priscilla
+Winthrop had gone through, Mrs. Worthington was making light of serious
+things.</p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt that the formal rebellion of Mrs. Worthington, Duchess
+of Grand Rapids, and known of the town's nobility as the Pretender,
+began with the hospital contest. The Pretender planted her siege-guns
+before the walls of the temple of the priestess, and prepared for
+business. The first manoeuver made by the beleaguered one was to give a
+luncheon in the mosque, at which, though it was midwinter, fresh
+tomatoes and fresh strawberries were served, and a real authoress from
+Boston talked upon John Fiske's philosophy and, in the presence of the
+admiring guests, made a new kind of salad dressing for the fresh lettuce
+and tomatoes. Thirty women who watched her forgot what John Fiske's
+theory of the cosmos is, and thirty husbands who afterward ate that
+salad dressing have learned to suffer and be strong. But that salad
+dressing undermined the faith of thirty mere men&mdash;raw outlanders to be
+sure&mdash;in the social omniscience of Priscilla Winthrop. Of course they
+did not see it made; the spell of the enchantress was not over them; but
+in their homes they maintained that if Priscilla Winthrop didn't know
+any more about cosmic philosophy than to pay a woman forty dollars to
+make<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> a salad dressing like that&mdash;and the whole town knows that was the
+price&mdash;the vaunted town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with its old
+furniture and new culture, which Priscilla spoke of in such repressed
+ecstasy, is probably no better than Manitou, Colorado, where they get
+their Indian goods from Buffalo, New York.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the perverse reasoning of man. And Mrs. Worthington, having
+lived with considerable of a man for fifteen years, hearing echoes of
+this sedition, attacked the fortification of the faithful on its weakest
+side. She invited the thirty seditious husbands with their wives to a
+beefsteak dinner, where she heaped their plates with planked sirloin,
+garnished the sirloin with big, fat, fresh mushrooms, and topped off the
+meal with a mince pie of her own concoction, which would make a man
+leave home to follow it. She passed cigars at the table, and after the
+guests went into the music-room ten old men with ten old fiddles
+appeared and contested with old-fashioned tunes for a prize, after which
+the company danced four quadrilles and a Virginia reel. The men threw
+down their arms going home and went over in a body to the Pretender. But
+in a social conflict men are mere non-combatants, and their surrender
+did not seriously injure the cause that they deserted.</p>
+
+<p>The war went on without abatement. During the spring that followed the
+winter of the beefsteak dinner many skirmishes, minor engagements,
+ambushes and midnight raids occurred. But the contest was not decisive.
+For purposes of military drill, the defenders of the Winthrop faith
+formed themselves into a Whist Club. <i>The</i> Whist Club they called it,
+just as they spoke of Priscilla Winthrop's gowns as "the black and white
+one," "the blue brocade," "the white china silk," as if no other black
+and white or blue brocade or white china silk gowns had been created in
+the world before and could not be made again by human hands. So, in the
+language of the inner sanctuary, there was "The Whist Club," to the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>exclusion of all other possible human Whist Clubs under the stars. When
+summer came the Whist Club fled as birds to the mountains&mdash;save
+Priscilla Winthrop, who went to Duxbury, and came home with a brass
+warming-pan and a set of Royal Copenhagen china that were set up as holy
+objects in the temple.</p>
+
+<p>But Mrs. Worthington went to the National Federation of Women's Clubs,
+made the acquaintance of the women there who wore clothes from Paris,
+began tracing her ancestry back to the Maryland Calverts&mdash;on her
+mother's side of the house&mdash;brought home a membership in the Daughters
+of the Revolution, the Colonial Dames and a society which referred to
+Charles I. as "Charles Martyr," claimed a Stuart as the rightful king of
+England, affecting to score the impudence of King Edward in sitting on
+another's throne. More than this, Mrs. Worthington had secured the
+promise of Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, Vice-President of the National
+Federation, to visit Cliff Crest, as Mrs. Worthington called the
+Worthington mansion, and she turned up her nose at those who worshiped
+under the towers, turrets and minarets of the Conklin mosque, and played
+the hose of her ridicule on their outer wall that she might have it
+spotless for a target when she got ready to raze it with her big gun.</p>
+
+<p>The week that Ellen Vail Montgomery came to town was a busy one for Miss
+Larrabee. We turned over the whole fourth page of the paper to her for a
+daily society page, and charged the Bee Hive and the White Front Dry
+Goods store people double rates to put their special advertisements on
+that page while the "National Vice," as the Young Prince called her, was
+in town. For the "National Vice" brought the State President and two
+State Vices down, also four District Presidents and six District Vices,
+who, as Miss Larrabee said, were monsters "of so frightful mien, that to
+be hated need but to be seen." The entire delegation of visiting
+stateswomen&mdash;Vices and Virtues and Beatitudes as we called them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>&mdash;were
+entertained by Mrs. Worthington at Cliff Crest, and there was so much
+Federation politics going on in our town that the New York <i>Sun</i> took
+five hundred words about it by wire, and Colonel Alphabetical Morrison
+said that with all those dressed-up women about he felt as though he was
+living in a Sunday supplement.</p>
+
+<p>The third day of the ghost-dance at Cliff Crest was to be the day of the
+big event&mdash;as the office parlance had it. The ceremonies began at
+sunrise with a breakfast to which half a dozen of the captains and kings
+of the besieging host of the Pretender were bidden. It seems to have
+been a modest orgy, with nothing more astonishing than a new gold-band
+china set to dishearten the enemy. By ten o'clock Priscilla Winthrop and
+the Whist Club had recovered from that; but they had been asked to the
+luncheon&mdash;the star feature of the week's round of gayety. It is just as
+well to be frank, and say that they went with fear and trembling. Panic
+and terror were in their ranks, for they knew a crisis was at hand. It
+came when they were "ushered into the dining-hall," as our paper so
+grandly put it, and saw in the great oak-beamed room a table laid on the
+polished bare wood&mdash;a table laid for forty-eight guests, with a doily
+for every plate, and every glass, and every salt-cellar, and&mdash;here the
+mosque fell on the heads of the howling dervishes&mdash;forty-eight
+soup-spoons, forty-eight silver-handled knives and forks; forty-eight
+butter-spreaders, forty-eight spoons, forty-eight salad forks,
+forty-eight ice-cream spoons, forty-eight coffee spoons. Little did it
+avail the beleaguered party to peep slyly under the spoon-handles&mdash;the
+word "Sterling" was there, and, more than that, a large, severely plain
+"W" with a crest glared up at them from every piece of silver. The
+service had not been rented. They knew their case was hopeless. And so
+they ate in peace.</p>
+
+<p>When the meal was over it was Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, in her
+thousand-dollar gown, worshiped by the eyes of forty-eight women, who
+put her arm about Priscilla <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>Winthrop and led her into the conservatory,
+where they had "a dear, sweet quarter of an hour," as Mrs. Montgomery
+afterward told her hostess. In that dear, sweet quarter of an hour
+Priscilla Winthrop Conklin unbuckled her social sword and handed it to
+the conqueror, in that she agreed absolutely with Mrs. Montgomery that
+Mrs. Worthington was "perfectly lovely," that she was "delighted to be
+of any service" to Mrs. Worthington; that Mrs. Conklin "was sure no one
+else in our town was so admirably qualified for National Vice" as Mrs.
+Worthington, and that "it would be such a privilege" for Mrs. Conklin to
+suggest Mrs. Worthington's name for the office. And then Mrs.
+Montgomery, "National Vice" and former State Secretary for Vermont of
+the Colonial Dames, kissed Priscilla Winthrop and they came forth
+wet-eyed and radiant, holding each other's hands. When the company had
+been hushed by the magic of a State Vice and two District Virtues,
+Priscilla Winthrop rose and in the sweetest Kansas Bostonese told the
+ladies that she thought this an eminently fitting place to let the
+visiting ladies know how dearly our town esteems its most distinguished
+townswoman, Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington, and that entirely without her
+solicitation, indeed quite without her knowledge, the women of our
+town&mdash;and she hoped of our beloved State&mdash;were ready now to announce
+that they were unanimous in their wish that Mrs. Worthington should be
+National Vice-President of the Federation of Women's Clubs, and that
+she, the speaker, had entered the contest with her whole soul to bring
+this end to pass. Then there was hand-clapping and handkerchief waving
+and some tears, and a little good, honest Irish hugging, and in the
+twilight two score of women filed down through the formal garden of
+Cliff Crest and walked by twos and threes in to the town.</p>
+
+<p>There was the usual clatter of home-going wagons; lights winked out of
+kitchen windows; the tinkle of distant cow-bells was in the air; on Main
+Street the commerce of the town was gently ebbing, and man and nature
+seemed utterly oblivious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> of the great event that had happened. The
+course of human events was not changed; the great world rolled on, while
+Priscilla Winthrop went home to a broken shrine to sit among the the
+potsherds.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="WILLIAM_ALLEN_WHITE" id="WILLIAM_ALLEN_WHITE"></a>WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE</h2>
+
+<p class="center">(Written by Mr. White especially for this book.)</p>
+
+<p>I was born in Emporia, Kansas, February 10, 1868, when Emporia was a
+pioneer village a hundred miles from a railroad. My father came to
+Emporia in 1859 and my mother in 1855. She was a pioneer school teacher
+and he a pioneer doctor. She was pure bred Irish, and he of Yankee
+lineage since 1639. When I was a year old, Emporia became too effete for
+my parents, and they moved to El Dorado, Kansas. There I grew up. El
+Dorado was a town of a dozen houses, located on the banks of the Walnut,
+a sluggish, but a clear and beautiful prairie stream, rock bottom, and
+spring fed. I grew up in El Dorado, a prairie village boy; went to the
+large stone school house that "reared its awful form" on the hill above
+the town before there were any two-story buildings in the place.</p>
+
+<p>In 1884, I was graduated from the town high school, and went to the
+College of Emporia for a year; worked a year as a printer's devil;
+learned something of the printer's trade; went to school for another
+year, working in the afternoons and Saturdays at the printer's case;
+became a reporter on the <i>Emporia News</i>; later went to the State
+University for three years. After more or less studying and working on
+the Lawrence papers, I went back to El Dorado as manager of the <i>El
+Dorado Republican</i> for State Senator T. B. Murdock.</p>
+
+<p>From the <i>El Dorado Republican</i>, I went to Kansas City to work for the
+<i>Kansas City Journal</i>, and at 24 became an editorial writer on the
+<i>Kansas City Star</i>. For three years I worked on the <i>Star</i>, during which
+time I married Miss Sallie Lindsay, a Kansas City, Kansas, school
+teacher. In 1895 I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> bought the <i>Emporia Gazette</i> on credit, without a
+cent in money, and chiefly with the audacity and impudence of youth. It
+was then a little paper; I paid three thousand dollars for it, and I
+have lived in Emporia ever since.</p>
+
+<p>In 1896, I published a book of short stories called <i>The Real Issue</i>; in
+1899, another book of short stories called <i>The Court of Boyville</i>. In
+1901, I published a third book of short stories called <i>Stratagems and
+Spoils</i>; in 1906, <i>In Our Town</i>. In 1909, I published my first novel, <i>A
+Certain Rich Man</i>. In 1910, I published a book of political essays
+called <i>The Old Order Changeth</i>; in 1916, a volume of short stories
+entitled <i>God's Puppets</i>. A volume half novel and half travel sketches
+called <i>The Martial Adventures of Henry &amp; Me</i> filled the gap between my
+two novels; and the second novel, <i>In the Heart of a Fool</i> was published
+in 1918.</p>
+
+<p>I am a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters; the Short
+Ballot Association; the International Peace Society; National Civic
+Federation; National Academy of Political Science; have honorary degrees
+from the College of Emporia, Baker University, and Columbia University
+of the City of New York; was regent of the Kansas State University from
+1905 to 1913. Politically I am a Republican and was elected National
+Republican Committeeman from Kansas in 1912, but resigned to be
+Progressive National Committeeman from Kansas that year. I am now a
+member of the Republican National Committee on Platforms and Policies
+appointed by the National Chairman, Will S. Hays. I am a trustee of the
+College of Emporia; a member of the Congregational Church, and of the
+Elks Lodge, and of no other organization.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">William Allen White.</span></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>To the above biography a few items about Mr. White's literary work may
+be added. It was through an editorial that he first became famous. This
+appeared in the <i>Emporia Gazette</i> in 1896, with the title, "What's the
+matter with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> Kansas?" It contained so much good sense, and was written
+in such vigorous English that it was copied in newspapers all over the
+country. Perhaps no other editorial ever brought such sudden recognition
+to its author. In the same year he published his first book, <i>The Real
+Issue</i>, a volume of short stories. Some of them pictured the life of a
+small town, some centered about politics, and some were stories of small
+boys. These three subjects were the themes of most of Mr. White's later
+books.</p>
+
+<p><i>Stratagems and Spoils</i>, a volume of short stories, dealt chiefly with
+politics, as seen from the inside. <i>In Our Town</i>, from which "The
+Passing of Priscilla Winthrop" is taken, belongs to the studies of
+small-town life. His first novel, <i>A Certain Rich Man</i>, was published in
+1909. Its theme is the development of an American multi-millionaire,
+from his beginning as a small business man with a reputation for close
+dealing, his success, his reaching out to greater schemes, growing more
+and more unscrupulous in his methods, until at last he achieves the
+great wealth he had sought, but in winning it he loses his soul.</p>
+
+<p>This book was written during a vacation in the Colorado mountains. His
+family were established in a log cabin, and he set up a tent near by for
+a workshop. This is his account of his method of writing:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>My working day was supposed to begin at nine o'clock in the
+morning, but the truth is I seldom reached the tent before ten.
+Then it took me some time to get down to work. From then on until
+late in the afternoon I would sit at my typewriter, chew my tongue,
+and pound away. Each night I read to my wife what I had written
+that day, and Mrs. White would criticise it. While my work was
+redhot I couldn't get any perspective on it&mdash;each day's installment
+seemed to me the finest literature I had ever read. She didn't
+always agree with me. When she disapproved of anything I threw it
+away&mdash;after a row&mdash;and re-wrote it.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>In his next book, <i>The Old Order Changeth</i>, Mr. White turned aside from
+fiction to write a series of papers dealing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> with various reform
+movements in our national life. He shows how through these much has been
+done to regain for the people the control of municipal and state
+affairs. The material for this book was drawn largely from Mr. White's
+participation in political affairs.</p>
+
+<p>In 1917 he was sent to France as an observer by the American Red Cross.
+The lighter side of what he saw there was told in <i>The Martial
+Adventures of Henry and Me</i>. His latest book is a long novel, <i>In the
+Heart of a Fool</i>, another study of American life of to-day.</p>
+
+<p>All in all, he stands as one of the chief interpreters in fiction of the
+spirit of the Middle West,&mdash;a section of our country which some
+observers say is the most truly American part of America.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="A_PAIR_OF_LOVERS" id="A_PAIR_OF_LOVERS"></a>A PAIR OF LOVERS</h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p><p><i>The typical love story begins by telling us how two young people fall
+in love, allows us to eavesdrop at a proposal, with soft moonlight
+effects, and then requests our presence at a wedding. Or perhaps an
+elopement precedes the wedding, which gives us an added thrill. The
+scene may be laid anywhere, the period may be the present or any time
+back to the Middle Ages, (apparently people did not fall in love at any
+earlier periods), but the formula remains the same. O. Henry wrote a
+love story that does not follow the formula. He called it "The Gift of
+the Magi."</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_GIFT_OF_THE_MAGI" id="THE_GIFT_OF_THE_MAGI"></a>THE GIFT OF THE MAGI</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">O. Henry</span></h3>
+
+<p>One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it
+was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the
+grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned
+with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied.
+Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the
+next day would be Christmas.</p>
+
+<p>There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch
+and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that
+life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles
+predominating.</p>
+
+<p>While the mistress of the house is gradually subsiding from the first
+stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per
+week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that
+word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.</p>
+
+<p>In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go,
+and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring.
+Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. James
+Dillingham Young."</p>
+
+<p>The "Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of
+prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the
+income was shrunk to $20, the letters of "Dillingham" looked blurred, as
+though they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and
+unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and
+reached his flat above he was called "Jim" and greatly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> hugged by Mrs.
+James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all
+very good.</p>
+
+<p>Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag.
+She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a
+gray fence in a gray backyard. To-morrow would be Christmas Day, and she
+had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving
+every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a
+week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated.
+They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a
+happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something
+fine and rare and sterling&mdash;something just a little bit near to being
+worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.</p>
+
+<p>There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have
+seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may,
+by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips,
+obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender,
+had mastered the art.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. Her
+eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within
+twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its
+full length.</p>
+
+<p>Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which
+they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch that had been
+his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair. Had the
+Queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have
+let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her
+Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all
+his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his
+watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from
+envy.</p>
+
+<p>So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her, rippling and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> shining like
+a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself
+almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and
+quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or
+two splashed on the worn red carpet.</p>
+
+<p>On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of
+skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered
+out the door and down the stairs to the street.</p>
+
+<p>Where she stopped the sign read: "Mme. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All
+Kinds." One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame,
+large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the "Sofronie."</p>
+
+<p>"Will you buy my hair?" asked Della.</p>
+
+<p>"I buy hair," said Madame. "Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at
+the looks of it."</p>
+
+<p>Down rippled the brown cascade.</p>
+
+<p>"Twenty dollars," said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Give it to me quick," said Della.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed
+metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present.</p>
+
+<p>She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else.
+There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all
+of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain, simple and chaste in
+design, properly proclaiming its value by substance and not by
+meretricious ornamentation&mdash;as all good things should do. It was even
+worthy of The Watch.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim's. It was like him.
+Quietness and value&mdash;the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars
+they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With
+that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in
+any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the
+sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a
+chain.</p>
+
+<p>When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence
+and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went
+to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is
+always a tremendous task, dear friends&mdash;a mammoth task.</p>
+
+<p>Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls
+that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at
+her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.</p>
+
+<p>"If Jim doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second
+look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what
+could I do&mdash;oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?"</p>
+
+<p>At seven o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back
+of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.</p>
+
+<p>Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on
+the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she
+heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight and she turned
+white for just a moment. She had a habit of saying little silent prayers
+about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered:</p>
+
+<p>"Please God, make him think I am still pretty."</p>
+
+<p>The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and
+very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two&mdash;and to be burdened
+with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.</p>
+
+<p>Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of
+quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in
+them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger,
+nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments
+that she had been <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with
+that peculiar expression on his face.</p>
+
+<p>Della wriggled off the table and went to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Jim, darling," she cried, "don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut
+off and sold it because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without
+giving you a present. It'll grow out again&mdash;you won't mind, will you? I
+just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say 'Merry Christmas!'
+Jim, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice&mdash;what a beautiful,
+nice gift I've got for you."</p>
+
+<p>"You've cut off your hair?" asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not
+arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.</p>
+
+<p>"Cut it off and sold it," said Della. "Don't you like me just as well,
+anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?"</p>
+
+<p>Jim looked about the room curiously.</p>
+
+<p>"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with an air almost of idiocy.</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't look for it," said Della. "It's sold, I tell you&mdash;sold and
+gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you.
+Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with a sudden
+serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I
+put the chops on, Jim?"</p>
+
+<p>Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to awake. He enfolded his Della.
+For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some
+inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a
+million a year&mdash;what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would
+give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was
+not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.</p>
+
+<p>Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't make any mistake, Dell," he said, "about me. I don't think
+there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> or a shampoo that
+could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package
+you may see why you had me going a while at first."</p>
+
+<p>White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an
+ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to
+hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of
+all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.</p>
+
+<p>For there lay The combs&mdash;the set of combs, side and back, that Della had
+worshipped for long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise
+shell, with jewelled rims&mdash;just the shade to wear in the beautiful
+vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had
+simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of
+possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have
+adorned the coveted adornments were gone.</p>
+
+<p>But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up
+with dim eyes and a smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Jim!"</p>
+
+<p>And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, "Oh, oh!"</p>
+
+<p>Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him
+eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with
+reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have
+to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I
+want to see how it looks on it."</p>
+
+<p>Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands
+under the back of his head and smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Dell," said he, "let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em a
+while. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get
+the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on."</p>
+
+<p>The magi, as you know, were wise men&mdash;wonderfully wise men&mdash;who brought
+gifts to the Babe in the manger. They<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> invented the art of giving
+Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones,
+possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And
+here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two
+foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other
+the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of
+these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the
+wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest.
+Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="O_HENRY" id="O_HENRY"></a>O. HENRY</h2>
+
+<p>He came to New York in 1902 almost unknown. At his death eight years
+later he was the best known writer of short stories in America. His life
+was as full of ups and downs, and of strange turns of fortune, as one of
+his own stories. William Sidney Porter, who always signed his stories as
+O. Henry, was born in Greenboro, North Carolina, September 11, 1862. His
+mother died when he was but three years old; and an aunt, Miss Evelina
+Porter, cared for him and gave him nearly all his education. Books, too,
+were his teachers. He says that between his thirteenth and nineteenth
+years he did more reading than in all the years since. His favorite
+books were <i>The Arabian Nights</i>, in Lane's translation, and Burton's
+<i>Anatomy of Melancholy</i>, an old English book in which bits of science,
+superstition and reflections upon life were strangely mingled. Other
+books that he enjoyed were the works of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray,
+Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. He early showed ability as a
+cartoonist, and was noted among his friends as a good story teller.
+After school days he became a clerk in his uncle's drug store, and here
+acquired that knowledge which he used to such good effect in stories
+like "Makes the Whole World Kin" and "The Love Philtre of Ikey
+Schoenstein."</p>
+
+<p>His health was not robust, and confinement in a drug store did not
+improve it. A friend who was going to Texas invited him to go along, and
+from 1882 to 1884 he lived on a ranch, acting as cowboy, and at odd
+moments studying French, German and Spanish. Then he went to Austin,
+where at various times he was clerk, editor, bookkeeper, draftsman, bank
+teller, actor and cartoonist. In 1887 he married Miss Athol Roach. He
+began contributing short stories and humorous sketches<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> to newspapers,
+and finally purchased a paper of his own, which he called <i>Rolling
+Stones</i>, a humorous weekly. After a year the paper failed, and the
+editor went to Houston to become a reporter on the <i>Daily Post</i>. A year
+later, it was discovered that there were serious irregularities in the
+bank in which he had worked in Austin. Several arrests were made, and O.
+Henry was called to stand trial with others. He had not been guilty of
+wrong doing, but the affairs of the bank had been so loosely managed
+that he was afraid that he would be convicted, so he fled to Central
+America. After a year there, he heard that his wife's health was
+failing, and returned to Austin to give himself up. He was found guilty,
+and sentenced to five years in the Ohio penitentiary. His wife died
+before the trial. His time in prison was shortened by good behavior to a
+little more than three years, ending in 1901. He wrote a number of
+stories during this time, sending them to friends who in turn mailed
+them to publishers. The editor of <i>Ainslie's Magazine</i> had printed
+several of them and in 1902 he wrote to O. Henry urging him to come to
+New York, and offering him a hundred dollars apiece for a dozen stories.
+He came, and from that time made New York his home, becoming very fond
+of Little Old-Bagdad-on-the-Subway as he called it.</p>
+
+<p>He had found the work which he wished to do, and he turned out stories
+very rapidly. These were first published in newspapers and magazines,
+then collected in book form. The first of these volumes, <i>Cabbages and
+Kings</i>, had Central America as its setting. He said that while there he
+had knocked around chiefly with refugees and consuls. <i>The Four Million</i>
+was a group of stories of New York; it contained some of his best tales,
+such as "The Gift of the Magi," and "An Unfinished Story." <i>The Trimmed
+Lamp</i> and <i>The Voice of the City</i> also dealt with New York. <i>The Gentle
+Grafter</i> was a collection of stories about confidence men and "crooks."
+The material for these narratives he had gathered from his companions in
+his prison days. <i>Heart of the West</i> reflects his days on a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> Texas
+ranch. Other books, more or less miscellaneous in their locality, are
+<i>Roads of Destiny</i>, <i>Options</i>, <i>Strictly Business</i>, <i>Whirligigs</i>; and
+<i>Sixes and Sevens</i>. He died in New York, June 5, 1910. After his death a
+volume containing some of his earliest work was published under the
+title <i>Rolling Stones</i>.</p>
+
+<p>His choice of subjects is thus indicated in the preface to <i>The Four
+Million</i>:</p>
+
+<p>"Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only
+'Four Hundred' people in New York who were really worth noticing. But a
+wiser man has arisen&mdash;the census taker&mdash;and his larger estimate of human
+interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little
+stories of the 'Four Million.'"</p>
+
+<p>It was the common man,&mdash;the clerk, the bartender, the policeman, the
+waiter, the tramp, that O. Henry chose for his characters. He loved to
+talk to chance acquaintances on park benches or in cheap lodging houses,
+to see life from their point of view. His stories are often of the
+picaresque type; a name given to a kind of story in which the hero is an
+adventurer, sometimes a rogue. He sees the common humanity, and the
+redeeming traits even in these. His plots usually have a turn of
+surprise at the end; sometimes the very last sentence suddenly
+illuminates the whole story. His style is quick, nervous, often slangy;
+he is wonderfully dextrous in hitting just the right word or phrase. His
+descriptions are notable for telling much in a few words. He has almost
+established a definite type of short story writing, and in many of the
+stories now written one may clearly see the influence of O. Henry.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IN_POLITICS" id="IN_POLITICS"></a>IN POLITICS</h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span></p><p><i>Politics is democracy in action. If we believe in democracy, we must
+recognize in politics the instrument, however imperfect, through which
+democracy works. Brand Whitlock knew politics, first as a political
+reporter, then as candidate for mayor in four campaigns, in each of
+which he was successful. Under his administration the city of Toledo
+became a better place to live in. In</i> <span class="smcap">The Gold Brick</span> <i>he describes a
+municipal campaign, as seen from the point of view of the newspaper
+office.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_GOLD_BRICK" id="THE_GOLD_BRICK"></a>THE GOLD BRICK</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Brand Whitlock</span></h3>
+
+<p>Ten thousand dollars a year! Neil Kittrell left the office of the
+<i>Morning Telegraph</i> in a daze. He was insensible of the raw February
+air, heedless of sloppy pavements, the gray day had suddenly turned
+gold. He could not realize it all at once; ten thousand a year&mdash;for him
+and Edith! His heart swelled with love of Edith, she had sacrificed so
+much to become the wife of a man who had tried to make an artist of
+himself, and of whom fate, or economic determinism, or something, had
+made a cartoonist. What a surprise for her! He must hurry home.</p>
+
+<p>In this swelling of his heart he felt a love not only of Edith but of
+the whole world. The people he met seemed dear to him; he felt friendly
+with every one, and beamed on perfect strangers with broad, cheerful
+smiles. He stopped to buy some flowers for Edith&mdash;daffodils, or tulips,
+which promised spring, and he took the daffodils, because the girl said:</p>
+
+<p>"I think yellow is such a spirituelle color, don't you?" and inclined
+her head in a most artistic manner.</p>
+
+<p>But daffodils, after all, which would have been much the day before,
+seemed insufficient in the light of new prosperity, and Kittrell bought
+a large azalea, beautiful in its graceful spread of pink blooms.</p>
+
+<p>"Where shall I send it?" asked the girl, whose cheeks were as pink as
+azaleas themselves.</p>
+
+<p>"I think I'll call a cab and take it to her myself," said Kittrell.</p>
+
+<p>And she sighed over the romance of this rich young gentleman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> and the
+girl of the azalea, who, no doubt, was as beautiful as the young woman
+who was playing <i>Lottie, the Poor Saleslady</i> at the Lyceum that very
+week.</p>
+
+<p>Kittrell and the azalea bowled along Claybourne Avenue; he leaned back
+on the cushions, and adopted the expression of ennui appropriate to that
+thoroughfare. Would Edith now prefer Claybourne Avenue? With ten
+thousand a year they could, perhaps&mdash;and yet, at first it would be best
+not to put on airs, but to go right on as they were, in the flat. Then
+the thought came to him that now, as the cartoonist on the <i>Telegraph</i>,
+his name would become as well known in Claybourne Avenue as it had been
+in the homes of the poor and humble during his years on the <i>Post</i>. And
+his thoughts flew to those homes where tired men at evening looked for
+his cartoons and children laughed at his funny pictures. It gave him a
+pang; he had felt a subtle bond between himself and all those thousands
+who read the <i>Post</i>. It was hard to leave them. The <i>Post</i> might be
+yellow, but as the girl had said, yellow was a spiritual color, and the
+<i>Post</i> brought something into their lives&mdash;lives that were scorned by
+the <i>Telegraph</i> and by these people on the avenue. Could he make new
+friends here where the cartoons he drew and the <i>Post</i> that printed them
+had been contemned, if not despised? His mind flew back to the dingy
+office of the <i>Post</i>; to the boys there, the whole good-natured,
+happy-go-lucky gang; and to Hardy&mdash;ah, Hardy!&mdash;who had been so good to
+him, and given him his big chance, had taken such pains and interest,
+helping him with ideas and suggestions, criticism and sympathy. To tell
+Hardy that he was going to leave him, here on the eve of the
+campaign&mdash;and Clayton, the mayor, he would have to tell him, too&mdash;oh,
+the devil! Why must he think of these things now?</p>
+
+<p>After all, when he had reached home, and had run up-stairs with the news
+and the azalea, Edith did not seem delighted.</p>
+
+<p>"But, dearie, business is business," he urged, "and we need the money!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p><p>"Yes, I know; doubtless you're right. Only please don't say 'business
+is business;' it isn't like you, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But think what it will mean&mdash;ten thousand a year!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Neil, I've lived on ten thousand a year before, and I never had
+half the fun that I had when we were getting along on twelve hundred."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but then we were always dreaming of the day when I'd make a lot;
+we lived on that hope, didn't we?"</p>
+
+<p>Edith laughed. "You used to say we lived on love."</p>
+
+<p>"You're not serious." He turned to gaze moodily out of the window. And
+then she left the azalea, and perched on the flat arm of his chair.</p>
+
+<p>"Dearest," she said, "I am serious. I know all this means to you. We're
+human, and we don't like to 'chip at crusts like Hindus,' even for the
+sake of youth and art. I never had illusions about love in a cottage and
+all that. Only, dear, I have been happy, so very happy, with you,
+because&mdash;well, because I was living in an atmosphere of honest purpose,
+honest ambition, and honest desire to do some good thing in the world. I
+had never known such an atmosphere before. At home, you know, father and
+Uncle James and the boys&mdash;well, it was all money, money, money with
+them, and they couldn't understand why I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Could marry a poor newspaper artist? That's just the point."</p>
+
+<p>She put her hand to his lips.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, dear! If they couldn't understand, so much the worse for them. If
+they thought it meant sacrifice to me, they were mistaken. I have been
+happy in this little flat; only&mdash;" she leaned back and inclined her head
+with her eyes asquint&mdash;"only the paper in this room is atrocious; it's a
+typical landlord's selection&mdash;McGaw picked it out. You see what it means
+to be merely rich."</p>
+
+<p>She was so pretty thus that he kissed her, and then she went on:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p><p>"And so, dear, if I didn't seem to be as impressed and delighted as you
+hoped to find me, it is because I was thinking of Mr. Hardy and the
+poor, dear common little <i>Post</i>, and then&mdash;of Mr. Clayton. Did you think
+of him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll have to&mdash;to cartoon him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so."</p>
+
+<p>The fact he had not allowed himself to face was close to both of them,
+and the subject was dropped until, just as he was going down-town&mdash;this
+time to break the news to Hardy&mdash;he went into the room he sarcastically
+said he might begin to call his studio, now that he was getting ten
+thousand a year, to look for a sketch he had promised Nolan for the
+sporting page. And there on his drawing-board was an unfinished cartoon,
+a drawing of the strong face of John Clayton. He had begun it a few days
+before to use on the occasion of Clayton's renomination. It had been a
+labor of love, and Kittrell suddenly realized how good it was. He had
+put into it all of his belief in Clayton, all of his devotion to the
+cause for which Clayton toiled and sacrificed, and in the simple lines
+he experienced the artist's ineffable felicity; he had shown how good,
+how noble, how true a man Clayton was. All at once he realized the
+sensation the cartoon would produce, how it would delight and hearten
+Clayton's followers, how it would please Hardy, and how it would touch
+Clayton. It would be a tribute to the man and the friendship, but now a
+tribute broken, unfinished. Kittrell gazed a moment longer, and in that
+moment Edith came.</p>
+
+<p>"The dear, beautiful soul!" she exclaimed softly. "Neil, it is
+wonderful. It is not a cartoon; it is a portrait. It shows what you
+might do with a brush."</p>
+
+<p>Kittrell could not speak, and he turned the drawing-board to the wall.</p>
+
+<p>When he had gone, Edith sat and thought&mdash;of Neil, of the new position,
+of Clayton. He had loved Neil, and been so proud<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> of his work; he had
+shown a frank, naive pleasure in the cartoons Neil had made of him. That
+last time he was there, thought Edith, he had said that without Neil the
+"good old cause," as he called it, using Whitman's phrase, could never
+have triumphed in that town. And now, would he come again? Would he ever
+stand in that room and, with his big, hearty laugh, clasp an arm around
+Neil's shoulder, or speak of her in his good friendly way as "the little
+woman?" Would he come now, in the terrible days of the approaching
+campaign, for rest and sympathy&mdash;come as he used to come in other
+campaigns, worn and weary from all the brutal opposition, the
+vilification and abuse and mud-slinging? She closed her eyes. She could
+not think that far.</p>
+
+<p>Kittrell found the task of telling Hardy just as difficult as he
+expected it to be, but by some mercy it did not last long. Explanation
+had not been necessary; he had only to make the first hesitating
+approaches, and Hardy understood. Hardy was, in a way, hurt; Kittrell
+saw that, and rushed to his own defense:</p>
+
+<p>"I hate to go, old man. I don't like it a little bit&mdash;but, you know,
+business is business, and we need the money."</p>
+
+<p>He even tried to laugh as he advanced this last conclusive reason, and
+Hardy, for all he showed in voice or phrase, may have agreed with him.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all right, Kit," he said. "I'm sorry; I wish we could pay you
+more, but&mdash;well, good luck."</p>
+
+<p>That was all. Kittrell gathered up the few articles he had at the
+office, gave Nolan his sketch, bade the boys good-by&mdash;bade them good-by
+as if he were going on a long journey, never to see them more&mdash;and then
+he went.</p>
+
+<p>After he had made the break it did not seem so bad as he had
+anticipated. At first things went on smoothly enough. The campaign had
+not opened, and he was free to exercise his talents outside the
+political field. He drew cartoons dealing with banal subjects, touching
+with the gentle satire of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> humorous pencil foibles which all the
+world agreed about, and let vital questions alone. And he and Edith
+enjoyed themselves: indulged oftener in things they loved; went more
+frequently to the theater; appeared at recitals; dined now and then
+downtown. They began to realize certain luxuries they had not known for
+a long time&mdash;some he himself had never known, some that Edith had not
+known since she left her father's home to become his bride. In more
+subtle ways, too, Kittrell felt the change: there was a sense of larger
+leisure; the future beamed with a broader and brighter light; he formed
+plans, among which the old dream of going ere long to Paris for serious
+study took its dignified place. And then there was the sensation his
+change had created in the newspaper world; that the cartoons signed
+"Kit," which formerly appeared in the <i>Post</i>, should now adorn the broad
+page of the <i>Telegraph</i> was a thing to talk about at the press club; the
+fact of his large salary got abroad in that little world as well, and,
+after the way of that world, managed to exaggerate itself, as most facts
+did. He began to be sensible of attentions from men of prominence&mdash;small
+things, mere nods in the street, perhaps, or smiles in the theater
+foyer, but enough to show that they recognized him. What those children
+of the people, those working-men and women who used to be his unknown
+and admiring friends in the old days on the <i>Post</i>, thought of
+him&mdash;whether they missed him, whether they deplored his change as an
+apostasy or applauded it as a promotion&mdash;he did not know. He did not
+like to think about it.</p>
+
+<p>But March came, and the politicians began to bluster like the season.
+Late one afternoon he was on his way to the office with a cartoon, the
+first in which he had seriously to attack Clayton. Benson, the managing
+editor of the <i>Telegraph</i>, had conceived it, and Kittrell had worked on
+it that day in sickness of heart. Every line of this new presentation of
+Clayton had cut him like some biting acid; but he had worked on, trying
+to reassure himself with the argument that he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> a mere agent, devoid
+of personal responsibility. But it had been hard, and when Edith, after
+her custom, had asked to see it, he had said:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you don't want to see it; it's no good."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it of&mdash;him?" she had asked.</p>
+
+<p>And when he nodded she had gone away without another word. Now, as he
+hurried through the crowded streets, he was conscious that it was no
+good indeed; and he was divided between the artist's regret and the
+friend's joy in the fact. But it made him tremble. Was his hand to
+forget its cunning? And then, suddenly, he heard a familiar voice, and
+there beside him, with his hand on his shoulder, stood the mayor.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Neil, my boy, how are you?" he said, and he took Kittrell's hand
+as warmly as ever. For a moment Kittrell was relieved, and then his
+heart sank; for he had a quick realization that it was the coward within
+him that felt the relief, and the man the sickness. If Clayton had
+reproached him, or cut him, it would have made it easier; but Clayton
+did none of these things, and Kittrell was irresistibly drawn to the
+subject himself.</p>
+
+<p>"You heard of my&mdash;new job?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Clayton, "I heard."</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;" Kittrell began.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry," Clayton said.</p>
+
+<p>"So was I," Kittrell hastened to say. "But I felt it&mdash;well, a duty, some
+way&mdash;to Edith. You know&mdash;we&mdash;need the money." And he gave the cynical
+laugh that went with the argument.</p>
+
+<p>"What does <i>she</i> think? Does she feel that way about it?"</p>
+
+<p>Kittrell laughed, not cynically now, but uneasily and with
+embarrassment, for Clayton's blue eyes were on him, those eyes that
+could look into men and understand them so.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you know," Kittrell went on nervously, "there is nothing
+personal in this. We newspaper fellows simply do what we are told; we
+obey orders like soldiers, you know.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> With the policy of the paper we
+have nothing to do. Just like Dick Jennings, who was a red-hot
+free-trader and used to write free-trade editorials for the <i>Times</i>&mdash;he
+went over to the <i>Telegraph</i>, you remember, and writes all those
+protection arguments."</p>
+
+<p>The mayor did not seem to be interested in Dick Jennings, or in the
+ethics of his profession.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, you know I'm for you, Mr. Clayton, just exactly as I've
+always been. I'm going to vote for you."</p>
+
+<p>This did not seem to interest the mayor, either.</p>
+
+<p>"And, maybe, you know&mdash;I thought, perhaps," he snatched at this bright
+new idea that had come to him just in the nick of time; "that I might
+help you by my cartoons in the <i>Telegraph</i>; that is, I might keep them
+from being as bad as they might&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But that wouldn't be dealing fairly with your new employers, Neil," the
+mayor said.</p>
+
+<p>Kittrell was making more and more a mess of this whole miserable
+business, and he was basely glad when they reached the corner.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, good-by, my boy," said the mayor, as they parted. "Remember me to
+the little woman."</p>
+
+<p>Kittrell watched him as he went on down the avenue, swinging along in
+his free way, the broad felt hat he wore riding above all the other hats
+in the throng that filled the sidewalk; and Kittrell sighed in deep
+depression.</p>
+
+<p>When he turned in his cartoon, Benson scanned it a moment, cocked his
+head this side and that, puffed his briar pipe, and finally said:</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid this is hardly up to you. This figure of Clayton, here&mdash;it
+hasn't got the stuff in it. You want to show him as he <i>is</i>. We want the
+people to know what a four-flushing, hypocritical, demagogical
+blatherskite he is&mdash;with all his rot about the people and their damned
+rights!"</p>
+
+<p>Benson was all unconscious of the inconsistency of having<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> concern for a
+people he so despised, and Kittrell did not observe it, either. He was
+on the point of defending Clayton, but he restrained himself and
+listened to Benson's suggestions. He remained at the office for two
+hours, trying to change the cartoon to Benson's satisfaction, with a
+growing hatred of the work and a disgust with himself that now and then
+almost drove him to mad destruction. He felt like splashing the piece
+with India ink, or ripping it with his knife. But he worked on, and
+submitted it again. He had failed, of course; failed to express in it
+that hatred of a class which Benson unconsciously disguised as a hatred
+of Clayton, a hatred which Kittrell could not express because he did not
+feel it; and he failed because art deserts her devotees when they are
+false to truth.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it'll have to do," said Benson, as he looked it over; "but let's
+have a little more to the next one. Damn it! I wish I could draw. I'd
+cartoon the crook!"</p>
+
+<p>In default of which ability, Benson set himself to write one of those
+savage editorials in which he poured out on Clayton that venom of which
+he seemed to have such an inexhaustible supply.</p>
+
+<p>But on one point Benson was right: Kittrell was not up to himself. As
+the campaign opened, as the city was swept with the excitement of it,
+with meetings at noon-day and at night, office-seekers flying about in
+automobiles, walls covered with pictures of candidates, hand-bills
+scattered in the streets to swirl in the wild March winds, and men
+quarreling over whether Clayton or Ellsworth should be mayor, Kittrell
+had to draw a political cartoon each day; and as he struggled with his
+work, less and less the old joy came to cheer and spur him on. To read
+the ridicule, the abuse, which the <i>Telegraph</i> heaped on Clayton, the
+distortion of facts concerning his candidature, the unfair reports of
+his meetings, sickened him, and more than all, he was filled with
+disgust as he tried to match in caricature these libels of the man he so
+loved and honored. It was bad enough to have to flatter Clayton's
+opponent, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> picture him as a noble, disinterested character, ready to
+sacrifice himself for the public weal. Into his pictures of this man,
+attired in the long black coat of conventional respectability, with the
+smug face of pharisaism, he could get nothing but cant and hypocrisy;
+but in his caricatures of Clayton there was that which pained him
+worse&mdash;disloyalty, untruth, and now and then, to the discerning few who
+knew the tragedy of Kittrell's soul, there was pity. And thus his work
+declined in value; lacking all sincerity, all faith in itself or its
+purpose, it became false, uncertain, full of jarring notes, and, in
+short, never once rang true. As for Edith, she never discussed his work
+now; she spoke of the campaign little, and yet he knew she was deeply
+concerned, and she grew hot with resentment at the methods of the
+<i>Telegraph</i>. Her only consolation was derived from the <i>Post</i>, which of
+course, supported Clayton; and the final drop of bitterness in
+Kittrell's cup came one evening when he realized that she was following
+with sympathetic interest the cartoons in that paper.</p>
+
+<p>For the <i>Post</i> had a new cartoonist, Banks, a boy whom Hardy had picked
+up somewhere and was training to the work Kittrell had laid down. To
+Kittrell there was a cruel fascination in the progress Banks was making;
+he watched it with a critical, professional eye, at first with
+amusement, then with surprise, and now at last, in the discovery of
+Edith's interest, with a keen jealousy of which he was ashamed. The boy
+was crude and untrained; his work was not to be compared with
+Kittrell's, master of line that he was, but Kittrell saw that it had the
+thing his work now lacked, the vital, primal thing&mdash;sincerity, belief,
+love. The spark was there, and Kittrell knew how Hardy would nurse that
+spark and fan it, and keep it alive and burning until it should
+eventually blaze up in a fine white flame. And Kittrell realized, as the
+days went by, that Banks' work was telling, and that his own was
+failing. He had, from the first missed the atmosphere of the <i>Post</i>,
+missed the <i>camaraderie</i> of the congenial spirits there,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> animated by a
+common purpose, inspired and led by Hardy, whom they all loved&mdash;loved as
+he himself once loved him, loved as he loved him still&mdash;and dared not
+look him in the face when they met!</p>
+
+<p>He found the atmosphere of the <i>Telegraph</i> alien and distasteful. There
+all was different; the men had little joy in their work, little interest
+in it, save perhaps the newspaper man's inborn love of a good story or a
+beat. They were all cynical, without loyalty or faith; they secretly
+made fun of the <i>Telegraph</i>, of its editors and owners; they had no
+belief in its cause; and its pretensions to respectability, its parade
+of virtue, excited only their derision. And slowly it began to dawn on
+Kittrell that the great moral law worked always and everywhere, even on
+newspapers, and that there was reflected inevitably and logically in the
+work of the men on that staff the hatred, the lack of principle, the
+bigotry and intolerance of its proprietors; and this same lack of
+principle tainted and made meretricious his own work, and enervated the
+editorials so that the <i>Telegraph</i>, no matter how carefully edited or
+how dignified in typographical appearance, was, nevertheless, without
+real influence in the community.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile Clayton was gaining ground. It was less than two weeks before
+election. The campaign waxed more and more bitter, and as the forces
+opposed to him foresaw defeat, they became ugly in spirit, and
+desperate. The <i>Telegraph</i> took on a tone more menacing and brutal, and
+Kittrell knew that the crisis had come. The might of the powers massed
+against Clayton appalled Kittrell; they thundered at him through many
+brazen mouths, but Clayton held on his high way unperturbed. He was
+speaking by day and night to thousands. Such meetings he had never had
+before. Kittrell had visions of him before those immense audiences in
+halls, in tents, in the raw open air of that rude March weather, making
+his appeals to the heart of the great mass. A fine, splendid, romantic
+figure he was, striking to the imagination, this <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>champion of the
+people's cause, and Kittrell longed for the lost chance. Oh, for one day
+on the <i>Post</i> now!</p>
+
+<p>One morning at breakfast, as Edith read the <i>Telegraph</i>, Kittrell saw
+the tears well slowly in her brown eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said, "it is shameful!" She clenched her little fists. "Oh, if
+I were only a man I'd&mdash;" She could not in her impotent feminine rage say
+what she would do; she could only grind her teeth. Kittrell bent his
+head over his plate; his coffee choked him.</p>
+
+<p>"Dearest," she said presently, in another tone, "tell me, how is he? Do
+you&mdash;ever see him? Will he win?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I never see him. But he'll win; I wouldn't worry."</p>
+
+<p>"He used to come here," she went on, "to rest a moment, to escape from
+all this hateful confusion and strife. He is killing himself! And they
+aren't worth it&mdash;those ignorant people&mdash;they aren't worth such
+sacrifices."</p>
+
+<p>He got up from the table and turned away, and then realizing quickly,
+she flew to his side and put her arms about his neck and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Forgive me, dearest, I didn't mean&mdash;only&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Edith," he said, "this is killing me. I feel like a dog."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't dear; he is big enough, and good enough; he will understand."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; that only makes it harder, only makes it hurt the more."</p>
+
+<p>That afternoon, in the car, he heard no talk but of the election; and
+down-town, in a cigar store where he stopped for cigarettes, he heard
+some men talking mysteriously, in the hollow voice of rumor, of some
+sensation, some scandal. It alarmed him, and as he went into the office
+he met Manning, the <i>Telegraph</i>'s political man.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me, Manning," Kittrell said, "how does it look?"</p>
+
+<p>"Damn bad for us."</p>
+
+<p>"For us?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, for our mob of burglars and second story workers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> here&mdash;the gang
+we represent." He took a cigarette from the box Kittrell was opening.</p>
+
+<p>"And will he win?"</p>
+
+<p>"Will he win?" said Manning, exhaling the words on the thin level stream
+of smoke that came from his lungs. "Will he win? In a walk, I tell you.
+He's got 'em beat to a standstill right now. That's the dope."</p>
+
+<p>"But what about this story of&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Aw, that's all a pipe-dream of Burns'. I'm running it in the morning,
+but it's nothing; it's a shine. They're big fools to print it at all.
+But it's their last card; they're desperate. They won't stop at
+anything, or at any crime, except those requiring courage. Burns is in
+there with Benson now; so is Salton, and old man Glenn, and the rest of
+the bunco family. They're framing it up. When I saw old Glenn go in,
+with his white side-whiskers, I knew the widow and the orphan were in
+danger again, and that he was going bravely to the front for 'em. Say,
+that young Banks is comin', isn't he? That's a peach, that cartoon of
+his to-night."</p>
+
+<p>Kittrell went on down the hall to the art-room to wait until Benson
+should be free. But it was not long until he was sent for, and as he
+entered the managing editor's room he was instantly sensible of the
+somber atmosphere of a grave and solemn council of war. Benson
+introduced him to Glenn, the banker, to Salton, the party boss, and to
+Burns, the president of the street-car company; and as Kittrell sat down
+he looked about him, and could scarcely repress a smile as he recalled
+Manning's estimate of Glenn. The old man sat there, as solemn and
+unctuous as ever he had in his pew at church. Benson, red of face, was
+more plainly perturbed, but Salton was as reserved, as immobile, as
+inscrutable as ever, his narrow, pointed face, with its vulpine
+expression, being perhaps paler than usual. Benson had on his desk
+before him the cartoon Kittrell had finished that day.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Kittrell," Benson began, "we've been talking over the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> political
+situation, and I was showing these gentlemen this cartoon. It isn't, I
+fear, in your best style; it lacks the force, the argument, we'd like
+just at this time. That isn't the <i>Telegraph</i> Clayton, Mr. Kittrell." He
+pointed with the amber stem of his pipe. "Not at all. Clayton is a
+strong, smart, unscrupulous, dangerous man! We've reached a crisis in
+this campaign; if we can't turn things in the next three days, we're
+lost, that's all; we might as well face it. To-morrow we make an
+important revelation concerning the character of Clayton, and we want to
+follow it up the morning after by a cartoon that will be a stunner, a
+clencher. We have discussed it here among ourselves, and this is our
+idea."</p>
+
+<p>Benson drew a crude, bald outline, indicating the cartoon they wished
+Kittrell to draw. The idea was so coarse, so brutal, so revolting, that
+Kittrell stood aghast, and, as he stood, he was aware of Salton's little
+eyes fixed on him. Benson waited; they all waited.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Benson, "what do you think of it?"</p>
+
+<p>Kittrell paused an instant, and then said:</p>
+
+<p>"I won't draw it; that's what I think of it."</p>
+
+<p>Benson flushed angrily and looked up at him.</p>
+
+<p>"We are paying you a very large salary, Mr. Kittrell, and your work, if
+you will pardon me, has not been up to what we were led to expect."</p>
+
+<p>"You are quite right, Mr. Benson, but I can't draw that cartoon."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, great God!" yelled Burns, "what have we got here&mdash;a gold brick?"
+He rose with a vivid sneer on his red face, plunged his hands in his
+pockets, and took two or three nervous strides across the room. Kittrell
+looked at him, and slowly his eyes blazed out of a face that had gone
+white on the instant.</p>
+
+<p>"What did you say, sir?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>Burns thrust his red face, with its prognathic jaw, menacingly toward
+Kittrell.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p><p>"I said that in you we'd got a gold brick."</p>
+
+<p>"You?" said Kittrell. "What have you to do with it? I don't work for
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't? Well, I guess it's us that puts up&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" said Glenn, waving a white, pacificatory hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, let me deal with this, if you please," said Benson, looking hard
+at Burns. The street-car man sneered again, then, in ostentatious
+contempt, looked out the window. And in the stillness Benson continued:</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Kittrell, think a minute. Is your decision final?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is final, Mr. Benson," said Kittrell. "And as for you, Burns," he
+glared angrily at the man, "I wouldn't draw that cartoon for all the
+dirty money that all the bribing street-car companies in the world could
+put into Mr. Glenn's bank here. Good evening, gentlemen."</p>
+
+<p>It was not until he stood again in his own home that Kittrell felt the
+physical effects which the spiritual squalor of such a scene was certain
+to produce in a nature like his.</p>
+
+<p>"Neil! What is the matter?" Edith fluttered toward him in alarm.</p>
+
+<p>He sank into a chair, and for a moment he looked as if he would faint,
+but he looked wanly up at her and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing; I'm all right; just a little weak. I've gone through a
+sickening, horrible scene&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Dearest!"</p>
+
+<p>"And I'm off the <i>Telegraph</i>&mdash;and a man once more!"</p>
+
+<p>He bent over, with his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and
+when Edith put her calm, caressing hand on his brow, she found that it
+was moist from nervousness. Presently he was able to tell her the whole
+story.</p>
+
+<p>"It was, after all, Edith, a fitting conclusion to my experience on the
+<i>Telegraph</i>. I suppose, though, that to people who are used to ten
+thousand a year such scenes are nothing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> at all." She saw in this trace
+of his old humor that he was himself again, and she hugged his head to
+her bosom.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, dearest," she said, "I'm proud of you&mdash;and happy again."</p>
+
+<p>They were, indeed, both happy, happier than they had been in weeks.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning after breakfast, she saw by his manner, by the
+humorous, almost comical expression about his eyes, that he had an idea.
+In this mood of satisfaction&mdash;this mood that comes too seldom in the
+artist's life&mdash;she knew it was wise to let him alone. And he lighted his
+pipe and went to work. She heard him now and then, singing or whistling
+or humming; she scented his pipe, then cigarettes; then, at last, after
+two hours, he called in a loud, triumphant tone:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Edith!"</p>
+
+<p>She was at the door in an instant, and, waving his hand grandly at his
+drawing-board, he turned to her with that expression which connotes the
+greatest joy gods or mortals can know&mdash;the joy of beholding one's own
+work and finding it good. He had, as she saw, returned to the cartoon of
+Clayton he had laid aside when the tempter came; and now it was
+finished. Its simple lines revealed Clayton's character, as the
+sufficient answer to all the charges the <i>Telegraph</i> might make against
+him. Edith leaned against the door and looked long and critically.</p>
+
+<p>"It was fine before," she said presently; "it's better now. Before it
+was a portrait of the man; this shows his soul."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's how he looks to me," said Neil, "after a month in which to
+appreciate him."</p>
+
+<p>"But what," she said, stooping and peering at the edge of the drawing,
+where, despite much knife-scraping, vague figures appeared, "what's
+that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'm ashamed to tell you," he said. "I'll have to paste over that
+before it's electrotyped. You see, I had a notion of putting in the
+gang, and I drew four little figures&mdash;Benson,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> Burns, Salton and Glenn;
+they were plotting&mdash;oh, it was foolish and unworthy. I decided I didn't
+want anything of hatred in it&mdash;just as he wouldn't want anything of
+hatred in it; so I rubbed them out."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm glad. It is beautiful; it makes up for everything; it's an
+appreciation&mdash;worthy of the man."</p>
+
+<p>When Kittrell entered the office of the <i>Post</i>, the boys greeted him
+with delight, and his presence made a sensation, for there had been
+rumors of the break which the absence of a "Kit" cartoon in the
+<i>Telegraph</i> that morning had confirmed. But, if Hardy was surprised, his
+surprise was swallowed up in his joy, and Kittrell was grateful to him
+for the delicacy with which he touched the subject that consumed the
+newspaper and political world with curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad, Kit," was all that he said. "You know that."</p>
+
+<p>Then he forgot everything in the cartoon, and he showed his instant
+recognition of its significance by snatching out his watch, pushing a
+button, and saying to Garland, who came to the door in his shirtsleeves:</p>
+
+<p>"Tell Nic to hold the first edition for a five-column first-page
+cartoon. And send this up right away."</p>
+
+<p>They had a last look at it before it went, and after gazing a moment in
+silence Hardy said:</p>
+
+<p>"It's the greatest thing you ever did, Kit, and it comes at the
+psychological moment. It'll elect him."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he was elected anyhow."</p>
+
+<p>Hardy shook his head, and in the movement Kittrell saw how the strain of
+the campaign had told on him. "No, he wasn't; the way they've been
+hammering him is something fierce; and the <i>Telegraph</i>&mdash;well, your
+cartoons and all, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"But my cartoons in the <i>Telegraph</i> were rotten. Any work that's not
+sincere, not intellectually honest&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Hardy interrupted him:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but, Kit, you're so good that your rotten is better<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> than 'most
+anybody's best." He smiled, and Kittrell blushed and looked away.</p>
+
+<p>Hardy was right. The "Kit" cartoon, back in the <i>Post</i>, created its
+sensation, and after it appeared the political reporters said it had
+started a landslide to Clayton; that the betting was 4 to 1 and no
+takers, and that it was all over but the shouting.</p>
+
+<p>That night, as they were at dinner, the telephone rang, and in a minute
+Neil knew by Edith's excited and delighted reiteration of "yes," "yes,"
+who had called up. And he then heard her say:</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed I will; I'll come every night and sit in the front seat."</p>
+
+<p>When Kittrell displaced Edith at the telephone, he heard the voice of
+John Clayton, lower in register and somewhat husky after four weeks'
+speaking, but more musical than ever in Kittrell's ears when it said:</p>
+
+<p>"I just told the little woman, Neil, that I didn't know how to say it,
+so I wanted her to thank you for me. It was beautiful in you, and I wish
+I were worthy of it; it was simply your own good soul expressing
+itself."</p>
+
+<p>And it was the last delight to Kittrell to hear that voice and to know
+that all was well.</p>
+
+<p>But one question remained unsettled. Kittrell had been on the
+<i>Telegraph</i> a month, and his contract differed from that ordinarily made
+by the members of a newspaper staff in that he was paid by the year,
+though in monthly instalments. Kittrell knew that he had broken his
+contract on grounds which the sordid law would not see or recognize and
+the average court think absurd, and that the <i>Telegraph</i> might legally
+refuse to pay him at all. He hoped the <i>Telegraph</i> would do this! But it
+did not; on the contrary, he received the next day a check for his
+month's work. He held it up for Edith's inspection.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, I'll have to send it back," he said.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p><p>"Certainly."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think me quixotic?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we're poor enough as it is&mdash;let's have some luxuries; let's be
+quixotic until after election, at least."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure," said Neil; "just what I was thinking. I'm going to do a cartoon
+every day for the <i>Post</i> until election day, and I'm not going to take a
+cent. I don't want to crowd Banks out, you know, and I want to do my
+part for Clayton and the cause, and do it, just once, for the pure love
+of the thing."</p>
+
+<p>Those last days of the campaign were, indeed, luxuries to Kittrell and
+to Edith, days of work and fun and excitement. All day Kittrell worked
+on his cartoons, and in the evening they went to Clayton's meetings. The
+experience was a revelation to them both&mdash;the crowds, the waiting for
+the singing of the automobile's siren, the wild cheers that greeted
+Clayton, and then his speech, his appeals to the best there was in men.
+He had never made such speeches, and long afterward Edith could hear
+those cheers and see the faces of those working-men aglow with the hope,
+the passion, the fervent religion of democracy. And those days came to
+their glad climax that night when they met at the office of the <i>Post</i>
+to receive the returns, in an atmosphere quivering with excitement, with
+messenger boys and reporters coming and going, and in the street outside
+an immense crowd, swaying and rocking between the walls on either side,
+with screams and shouts and mad huzzas, and the wild blowing of
+horns&mdash;all the hideous, happy noise an American election-night crowd can
+make.</p>
+
+<p>Late in the evening Clayton had made his way, somehow unnoticed, through
+the crowd, and entered the office. He was happy in the great triumph he
+would not accept as personal, claiming it always for the cause; but as
+he dropped into the chair Hardy pushed toward him, they all saw how
+weary he was.</p>
+
+<p>Just at that moment the roar in the street below swelled to a mighty
+crescendo, and Hardy cried:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span></p><p>"Look!"</p>
+
+<p>They ran to the window. The boys up-stairs who were manipulating the
+stereopticon, had thrown on the screen an enormous picture of Clayton,
+the portrait Kittrell had drawn for his cartoon.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you say now there isn't the personal note in it?" Edith asked.</p>
+
+<p>Clayton glanced out the window, across the dark, surging street, at the
+picture.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it's not me they're cheering for," he said; "it's for Kit, here."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, perhaps some of it's for him," Edith admitted loyally.</p>
+
+<p>They were silent, seized irresistibly by the emotion that mastered the
+mighty crowd in the dark streets below. Edith was strangely moved.
+Presently she could speak:</p>
+
+<p>"Is there anything sweeter in life than to know that you have done a
+good thing&mdash;and done it well?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Clayton, "just one: to have a few friends who understand."</p>
+
+<p>"You are right," said Edith. "It is so with art, and it must be so with
+life; it makes an art of life."</p>
+
+<p>It was dark enough there by the window for her to slip her hand into
+that of Neil, who had been musing silently on the crowd.</p>
+
+<p>"I can never say again," she said softly, "that those people are not
+worth sacrifice. They are worth all; they are everything; they are the
+hope of the world; and their longings and their needs, and the
+possibility of bringing them to pass, are all that give significance to
+life."</p>
+
+<p>"That's what America is for," said Clayton, "and it's worth while to be
+allowed to help even in a little way to make, as old Walt says, 'a
+nation of friends, of equals.'"</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="BRAND_WHITLOCK" id="BRAND_WHITLOCK"></a>BRAND WHITLOCK</h2>
+
+<p>Brand Whitlock, lawyer, politician, author and ambassador, was born in
+Urbana, Ohio, March 4, 1869. His father, Rev. Elias D. Whitlock, was a
+minister of power and a man of strong convictions. Brand was educated
+partly in the public schools, partly by private teaching. He never went
+to college, but this did not mean that his education stopped; he kept on
+studying, and to such good purpose that in 1916 Brown University gave
+him the degree of Doctor of Laws. Like many other writers, he received
+his early training in newspaper work. At eighteen he became a reporter
+on a Toledo paper, and three years later was reporter and political
+correspondent for the Chicago <i>Herald</i>. While in Chicago he was a member
+of the old Whitechapel Club, a group of newspaper men which included F.
+P. Dunne, the creator of <i>Mr. Dooley</i>; Alfred Henry Lewis, author of
+<i>Wolfville</i>; and George Ade, whose <i>Fables in Slang</i> were widely popular
+a few years ago.</p>
+
+<p>He was strongly drawn to the law, and in 1893 went to Springfield,
+Illinois, and entered a law office as a student. He was admitted to the
+bar, and shortly after went to Toledo, Ohio, to practice. In eight years
+he had established himself as a successful lawyer, and something more.
+He was recognized as a man of high executive ability, and as being
+absolutely "square." Such men are none too common, and Toledo decided
+that it needed him in the mayor's chair. Without a political machine,
+without a platform, and without a party, he was elected mayor in 1905,
+reelected in 1907, again in 1909, again in 1911&mdash;and could probably have
+had the office for life if he had been willing to accept it. In the
+meantime he had written several successful novels; he wanted more time
+for writing, and when in 1913 he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> was offered the post of United States
+Minister to Belgium, he accepted, thinking that he would find in this
+position an opportunity to observe life from a new angle, and leisure
+for literary work. In August 1914 he was on his vacation, and had begun
+work on a new novel. In his own words:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>I had the manuscript of my novel before me.... It was somehow just
+beginning to take form, beginning to show some signs of life; at
+times some characters in it gave evidence of being human and alive;
+they were beginning to act now and then spontaneously, beginning to
+say and to do things after the manner of human beings; the long
+vista before me, the months of laborious drudging toil and pain,
+the long agony of effort necessary to write any book, even a poor
+one, was beginning to appear less weary, less futile; there was the
+first faint glow of the joy of creative effort.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>and then suddenly the telephone bell rang, and announced that the
+Archduke of Austria had been assassinated at Sarajevo.</p>
+
+<p>The rest of the story belongs to history. How he went back to Brussels;
+how when the city seemed doomed, and all the government officials left,
+he stayed on; how when the city was preparing to resist by force, he
+went to Burgomaster Max and convinced him that it was useless, and so
+saved the city from the fate of Louvain; how he took charge of the
+relief work, how the King of Belgium thanked him for his services to the
+country; how the city of Brussels in gratitude gave him a picture by Van
+Dyck, a priceless thing, which he accepted&mdash;not for himself but for his
+home city of Toledo; how after the war, he went back, not as Minister
+but as Ambassador,&mdash;all these are among the proud memories of America's
+part in the World War.</p>
+
+<p>Brand Whitlock is so much more than an author that it is with an effort
+that we turn to consider his literary work. His first book, <i>The
+Thirteenth District</i>, published in 1902, was a novel of American
+politics; it contains a capital description of a convention, and shows
+the strategy of political leaders as seen by a keen observer. In <i>Her
+Infinite Variety</i> he dealt with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> the suffrage movement as it was in
+1904, with determined women seeking the ballot, and equally determined
+women working just as hard to keep it away from them. <i>The Happy
+Average</i> was a story of an every-day American couple: they were not
+rich, nor famous, nor divorced,&mdash;yet the author thinks their story is
+typical of most American lives. <i>The Turn of the Balance</i> is a novel
+that grew out of his legal experiences: it deals with the underworld of
+crime, and often in a depressing way. It reflects the author's belief
+that the present organization of society, and our methods of
+administering justice, are the cause of much of the misery in the world.
+Following these novels came two volumes of short stories, <i>The Gold
+Brick</i> and <i>The Fall Guy</i>: both deal with various aspects of American
+life of to-day. In 1914 he published an autobiography under the title
+<i>Forty Years of It</i>. This is interesting as a picture of political life
+of the period in Ohio. His latest book, <i>Memories of Belgium under the
+German Occupation</i>, tells the story of four eventful years. In all that
+trying time, each night, no matter how weary he was, he forced himself
+to set down the events of the day. From these records he wrote a book
+that by virtue of its first-hand information and its literary art ranks
+among the most important of the books called forth by the Great War.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_TRAVELING_SALESMAN" id="THE_TRAVELING_SALESMAN"></a>THE TRAVELING SALESMAN</h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p><p><i>The traveling salesman is a characteristic American type. We laugh at
+his stories, or we criticise him for his "nerve," but we do not always
+make allowance for the fact that his life is not an easy one, and that
+his occupation develops "nerve" just as an athlete's work develops
+muscle. The best presentation of the traveling salesman in fiction is
+found in the stories of Edna Ferber. And the fact that her "salesman" is
+a woman only adds to the interest of the stories. When ex-President
+Roosevelt read Miss Ferber's book, he wrote her an enthusiastic letter
+telling her how much he admired Emma McChesney. We meet her in the first
+words of this story</i>.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="HIS_MOTHERS_SON" id="HIS_MOTHERS_SON"></a>HIS MOTHER'S SON</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Edna Ferber</span></h3>
+
+<p>"Full?" repeated Emma McChesney (and if it weren't for the compositor
+there'd be an exclamation point after that question mark).</p>
+
+<p>"Sorry, Mrs. McChesney," said the clerk, and he actually looked it, "but
+there's absolutely nothing stirring. We're full up. The Benevolent
+Brotherhood of Bisons is holding its regular annual state convention
+here. We're putting up cots in the hall."</p>
+
+<p>Emma McChesney's keen blue eyes glanced up from their inspection of the
+little bunch of mail which had just been handed her. "Well, pick out a
+hall with a southern exposure and set up a cot or so for me," she said,
+agreeably, "because I've come to stay. After selling Featherloom
+Petticoats on the road for ten years I don't see myself trailing up and
+down this town looking for a place to lay my head. I've learned this one
+large, immovable truth, and that is, that a hotel clerk is a hotel
+clerk. It makes no difference whether he is stuck back of a marble
+pillar and hidden by a gold vase full of thirty-six-inch American Beauty
+roses at the Knickerbocker, or setting the late fall fashions for men in
+Galesburg, Illinois."</p>
+
+<p>By one small degree was the perfect poise of the peerless personage
+behind the register jarred. But by only one. He was a hotel night clerk.</p>
+
+<p>"It won't do you any good to get sore, Mrs. McChesney," he began,
+suavely. "Now a man would&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But I'm not a man," interrupted Emma McChesney. "I'm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> only doing a
+man's work and earning a man's salary and demanding to be treated with
+as much consideration as you'd show a man."</p>
+
+<p>The personage busied himself mightily with a pen, and a blotter, and
+sundry papers, as is the manner of personages when annoyed. "I'd like to
+accommodate you; I'd like to do it."</p>
+
+<p>"Cheer up," said Emma McChesney, "you're going to. I don't mind a little
+discomfort. Though I want to mention in passing that if there are any
+lady Bisons present you needn't bank on doubling me up with them. I've
+had one experience of that kind. It was in Albia, Iowa. I'd sleep in the
+kitchen range before I'd go through another."</p>
+
+<p>Up went the erstwhile falling poise. "You're badly mistaken, madam. I'm
+a member of this order myself, and a finer lot of fellows it has never
+been my pleasure to know."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know," drawled Emma McChesney. "Do you know, the thing that gets
+me is the inconsistency of it. Along come a lot of boobs who never use a
+hotel the year around except to loaf in the lobby, and wear out the
+leather chairs, and use up the matches and toothpicks and get the
+baseball returns, and immediately you turn away a traveling man who uses
+a three-dollar-a-day room, with a sample room downstairs for his stuff,
+who tips every porter and bell-boy in the place, asks for no favors, and
+who, if you give him a halfway decent cup of coffee for breakfast, will
+fall in love with the place and boom it all over the country. Half of
+your Benevolent Bisons are here on the European plan, with a view to
+patronizing the free-lunch counters or being asked to take dinner at the
+home of some local Bison whose wife has been cooking up on pies, and
+chicken salad and veal roast for the last week."</p>
+
+<p>Emma McChesney leaned over the desk a little, and lowered her voice to
+the tone of confidence. "Now, I'm not in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> habit of making a nuisance
+of myself like this. I don't get so chatty as a rule, and I know that I
+could jump over to Monmouth and get first-class accommodations there.
+But just this once I've a good reason for wanting to make you and myself
+a little miserable. Y'see, my son is traveling with me this trip."</p>
+
+<p>"Son!" echoed the clerk, staring.</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks. That's what they all do. After a while I'll begin to believe
+that there must be something hauntingly beautiful and girlish about me
+or every one wouldn't petrify when I announce that I've a six-foot son
+attached to my apron-strings. He looks twenty-one, but he's seventeen.
+He thinks the world's rotten because he can't grow one of those fuzzy
+little mustaches that the men are cultivating to match their hats. He's
+down at the depot now, straightening out our baggage. Now I want to say
+this before he gets here. He's been out with me just four days. Those
+four days have been a revelation, an eye-opener, and a series of rude
+jolts. He used to think that his mother's job consisted of traveling in
+Pullmans, eating delicate viands turned out by the hotel chefs, and
+strewing Featherloom Petticoats along the path. I gave him plenty of
+money, and he got into the habit of looking lightly upon anything more
+trifling than a five-dollar bill. He's changing his mind by great leaps.
+I'm prepared to spend the night in the coal cellar if you'll just fix
+him up&mdash;not too comfortably. It'll be a great lesson for him. There he
+is now. Just coming in. Fuzzy coat and hat and English stick. Hist! As
+they say on the stage."</p>
+
+<p>The boy crossed the crowded lobby. There was a little worried, annoyed
+frown between his eyes. He laid a protecting hand on his mother's arm.
+Emma McChesney was conscious of a little thrill of pride as she realized
+that he did not have to look up to meet her gaze.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Mother, they tell me there's some sort of a convention here,
+and the town's packed. That's what all those<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> banners and things were
+for. I hope they've got something decent for us here. I came up with a
+man who said he didn't think there was a hole left to sleep in."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't say!" exclaimed Emma McChesney, and turned to the clerk.
+"This is my son, Jock McChesney&mdash;Mr. Sims. Is this true?"</p>
+
+<p>"Glad to know you, sir," said Mr. Sims. "Why, yes, I'm afraid we are
+pretty well filled up, but seeing it's you maybe we can do something for
+you."</p>
+
+<p>He ruminated, tapping his teeth with a penholder, and eying the pair
+before him with a maddening blankness of gaze. Finally:</p>
+
+<p>"I'll do my best, but you can't expect much. I guess I can squeeze
+another cot into eight-seven for the young man. There's&mdash;let's see
+now&mdash;who's in eighty-seven? Well, there's two Bisons in the double bed,
+and one in the single, and Fat Ed Meyers in the cot and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Emma McChesney stiffened into acute attention. "Meyers?" she
+interrupted. "Do you mean Ed Meyers of the Strauss Sans-silk Skirt
+Company?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's so. You two are in the same line, aren't you? He's a great
+little piano player, Ed is. Ever hear him play?"</p>
+
+<p>"When did he get in?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he just came in fifteen minutes ago on the Ashland division. He's
+in at supper."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said Emma McChesney. The two letters breathed relief.</p>
+
+<p>But relief had no place in the voice, or on the countenance of Jock
+McChesney. He bristled with belligerence. "This cattle-car style of
+sleeping don't make a hit. I haven't had a decent night's rest for three
+nights. I never could sleep on a sleeper. Can't you fix us up better
+than that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Best I can do."</p>
+
+<p>"But where's mother going? I see you advertise 'three<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> large and
+commodious steam-heated sample rooms in connection.' I suppose mother's
+due to sleep on one of the tables there."</p>
+
+<p>"Jock," Emma McChesney reproved him, "Mr. Sims is doing us a great
+favor. There isn't another hotel in town that would&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You're right, there isn't," agreed Mr. Sims. "I guess the young man is
+new to this traveling game. As I said, I'd like to accommodate you,
+but&mdash; Let's see now. Tell
+you what I'll do. If I can get the housekeeper to go over and sleep in
+the maids' quarters just for to-night, you can use her room. There you
+are! Of course, it's over the kitchen, and there may be some little
+noise early in the morning&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Emma McChesney raised a protesting hand. "Don't mention it. Just lead me
+thither. I'm so tired I could sleep in an excursion special that was
+switching at Pittsburgh. Jock, me child, we're in luck. That's twice in
+the same place. The first time was when we were inspired to eat our
+supper on the diner instead of waiting until we reached here to take the
+leftovers from the Bisons' grazing. I hope that housekeeper hasn't a
+picture of her departed husband dangling life-size on the wall at the
+foot of the bed. But they always have. Good-night, son. Don't let the
+Bisons bite you. I'll be up at seven."</p>
+
+<p>But it was just 6.30 <span class="smaller">A.M.</span> when Emma McChesney turned the little bend in
+the stairway that led to the office. The scrub-woman was still in
+possession. The cigar-counter girl had not yet made her appearance.
+There was about the place a general air of the night before. All but the
+night clerk. He was as spruce and trim, and alert and smooth-shaven as
+only a night clerk can be after a night's vigil.</p>
+
+<p>"'Morning!" Emma McChesney called to him. She wore blue serge, and a
+smart fall hat. The late autumn morning was not crisper and sunnier than
+she.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span></p><p>"Good-morning, Mrs. McChesney," returned Mr. Sims, sonorously. "Have a
+good night's sleep? I hope the kitchen noises didn't wake you."</p>
+
+<p>Emma McChesney paused with her hand on the door. "Kitchen? Oh, no. I
+could sleep through a vaudeville china-juggling act. But&mdash;what an
+extraordinarily unpleasant-looking man that housekeeper's husband must
+have been."</p>
+
+<p>That November morning boasted all those qualities which November-morning
+writers are so prone to bestow upon the month. But the words wine, and
+sparkle, and sting, and glow, and snap do not seem to cover it. Emma
+McChesney stood on the bottom step, looking up and down Main Street and
+breathing in great draughts of that unadjectivable air. Her complexion
+stood the test of the merciless, astringent morning and came up
+triumphantly and healthily firm and pink and smooth. The town was still
+asleep. She started to walk briskly down the bare and ugly Main Street
+of the little town. In her big, generous heart, and her keen, alert
+mind, there were many sensations and myriad thoughts, but varied and
+diverse as they were they all led back to the boy up there in the
+stuffy, over-crowded hotel room&mdash;the boy who was learning his lesson.</p>
+
+<p>Half an hour later she reentered the hotel, her cheeks glowing. Jock was
+not yet down. So she ordered and ate her wise and cautious breakfast of
+fruit and cereal and toast and coffee, skimming over her morning paper
+as she ate. At 7:30 she was back in the lobby, newspaper in hand. The
+Bisons were already astir. She seated herself in a deep chair in a quiet
+corner, her eyes glancing up over the top of her paper toward the
+stairway. At eight o'clock Jock McChesney came down.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing of jauntiness about him. His eyelids were red. His
+face had the doughy look of one whose sleep has been brief and feverish.
+As he came toward his mother you noticed a stain on his coat, and a
+sunburst of wrinkles across one leg of his modish brown trousers.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p><p>"Good-morning, son!" said Emma McChesney. "Was it as bad as that?"</p>
+
+<p>Jock McChesney's long fingers curled into a fist.</p>
+
+<p>"Say," he began, his tone venomous, "do you know what
+those&mdash;those&mdash;those&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Say it!" commanded Emma McChesney. "I'm only your mother. If you keep
+that in your system your breakfast will curdle in your stomach."</p>
+
+<p>Jock McChesney said it. I know no phrase better fitted to describe his
+tone than that old favorite of the erotic novelists. It was vibrant with
+passion. It breathed bitterness. It sizzled with savagery. It&mdash;Oh,
+alliteration is useless.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Emma McChesney, encouragingly, "go on."</p>
+
+<p>"Well!" gulped Jock McChesney, and glared; "those two double-bedded,
+bloomin', blasted Bisons came in at twelve, and the single one about
+fifteen minutes later. They didn't surprise me. There was a herd of
+about ninety-three of 'em in the hall, all saying good-night to each
+other, and planning where they'd meet in the morning, and the time, and
+place and probable weather conditions. For that matter, there were
+droves of 'em pounding up and down the halls all night. I never saw such
+restless cattle. If you'll tell me what makes more noise in the middle
+of the night than the metal disk of a hotel key banging and clanging up
+against a door, I'd like to know what it is. My three Bisons were all
+dolled up with fool ribbons and badges and striped paper canes. When
+they switched on the light I gave a crack imitation of a tired working
+man trying to get a little sleep. I breathed regularly and heavily, with
+an occasional moaning snore. But if those two hippopotamus Bisons had
+been alone on their native plains they couldn't have cared less. They
+bellowed, and pawed the earth, and threw their shoes around, and yawned,
+and stretched and discussed their plans for the next day, and reviewed
+all their doings of that day. Then one of them said something about
+turning in, and I was so happy I forgot to snore. Just<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> then another key
+clanged at the door, in walked a fat man in a brown suit and a brown
+derby, and stuff was off."</p>
+
+<p>"That," said Emma McChesney, "would be Ed Meyers, of the Strauss
+Sans-silk Skirt Company."</p>
+
+<p>"None other than our hero." Jock's tone had an added acidity. "It took
+those four about two minutes to get acquainted. In three minutes they
+had told their real names, and it turned out that Meyers belonged to an
+organization that was a second cousin of the Bisons. In five minutes
+they had got together a deck and a pile of chips and were shirt-sleeving
+it around a game of pinochle. I would doze off to the slap of cards, and
+the click of chips, and wake up when the bell-boy came in with another
+round, which he did every six minutes. When I got up this morning I
+found that Fat Ed Meyers had been sitting on the chair over which I
+trustingly had draped my trousers. This sunburst of wrinkles is where he
+mostly sat. This spot on my coat is where a Bison drank his beer."</p>
+
+<p>Emma McChesney folded her paper and rose, smiling. "It is sort of
+trying, I suppose, if you're not used to it."</p>
+
+<p>"Used to it!" shouted the outraged Jock. "Used to it! Do you mean to
+tell me there's nothing unusual about&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Not a thing. Oh, of course you don't strike a bunch of Bisons every
+day. But it happens a good many times. The world is full of Ancient
+Orders and they're everlastingly getting together and drawing up
+resolutions and electing officers. Don't you think you'd better go in to
+breakfast before the Bisons begin to forage? I've had mine."</p>
+
+<p>The gloom which had overspread Jock McChesney's face lifted a little.
+The hungry boy in him was uppermost. "That's so. I'm going to have some
+wheat cakes, and steak, and eggs, and coffee, and fruit, and toast, and
+rolls."</p>
+
+<p>"Why slight the fish?" inquired his mother. Then, as he turned toward
+the dining-room, "I've two letters to get out. Then I'm going down the
+street to see a customer. I'll be up at the Sulzberg-Stein department
+store at nine sharp.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> There's no use trying to see old Sulzberg before
+ten, but I'll be there, anyway, and so will Ed Meyers, or I'm no skirt
+salesman. I want you to meet me there. It will do you good to watch how
+the overripe orders just drop, ker-plunk, into my lap."</p>
+
+<p>Maybe you know Sulzberg &amp; Stein's big store? No? That's because you've
+always lived in the city. Old Sulzberg sends his buyers to the New York
+market twice a year, and they need two floor managers on the main floor
+now. The money those people spend for red and green decorations at
+Christmas time, apple-blossoms and pink cr&ecirc;pe paper shades in the
+spring, must be something awful. Young Stein goes to Chicago to have his
+clothes made, and old Sulzberg likes to keep the traveling men waiting
+in the little ante-room outside his private office.</p>
+
+<p>Jock McChesney finished his huge breakfast, strolled over to Sulzberg &amp;
+Stein's, and inquired his way to the office only to find that his mother
+was not yet there. There were three men in the little waiting-room. One
+of them was Fat Ed Meyers. His huge bulk overflowed the spindle-legged
+chair on which he sat. His brown derby was in his hands. His eyes were
+on the closed door at the other side of the room. So were the eyes of
+the other two travelers. Jock took a vacant seat next to Fat Ed Meyers
+so that he might, in his mind's eye, pick out a particularly choice spot
+upon which his hard young fist might land&mdash;if only he had the chance.
+Breaking up a man's sleep like that, the great big overgrown mutt!</p>
+
+<p>"What's your line?" said Ed Meyers, suddenly turning toward Jock.</p>
+
+<p>Prompted by some imp&mdash;"Skirts," answered Jock. "Ladies' petticoats."
+("As if men ever wore 'em!" he giggled inwardly.)</p>
+
+<p>Ed Meyers shifted around in his chair so that he might better stare at
+this new foe in the field. His little red mouth was open ludicrously.</p>
+
+<p>"Who're you out for?" he demanded next.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p><p>There was a look of Emma McChesney on Jock's face. "Why&mdash;er&mdash;the Union
+Underskirt and Hosiery Company of Chicago. New concern."</p>
+
+<p>"Must be," ruminated Ed Meyers. "I never heard of 'em, and I know 'em
+all. You're starting in young, ain't you, kid! Well, it'll never hurt
+you. You'll learn something new every day. Now me, I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>In breezed Emma McChesney. Her quick glance rested immediately upon
+Meyers and the boy. And in that moment some instinct prompted Jock
+McChesney to shake his head, ever so slightly, and assume a blankness of
+expression. And Emma McChesney, with that shrewdness which had made her
+one of the best salesmen on the road, saw, and miraculously understood.</p>
+
+<p>"How do, Mrs. McChesney," grinned Fat Ed Meyers. "You see I beat you to
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"So I see," smiled Emma, cheerfully. "I was delayed. Just sold a nice
+little bill to Watkins down the street." She seated herself across the
+way, and kept her eyes on that closed door.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, kid," Meyers began, in the husky whisper of the fat man, "I'm
+going to put you wise to something, seeing you're new to this game. See
+that lady over there?" He nodded discreetly in Emma McChesney's
+direction.</p>
+
+<p>"Pretty, isn't she?" said Jock, appreciatively.</p>
+
+<p>"Know who she is?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;I&mdash;she does look familiar, but&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come now, quit your bluffing. If you'd ever met that dame you'd
+remember it. Her name's McChesney&mdash;Emma McChesney, and she sells T. A.
+Buck's Featherloom Petticoats. I'll give her her dues; she's the best
+little salesman on the road. I'll bet that girl could sell a ruffled,
+accordion-plaited underskirt to a fat woman who was trying to reduce.
+She's got the darndest way with her. And at that she's straight, too."</p>
+
+<p>If Ed Meyers had not been gazing so intently into his hat,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> trying at
+the same time to look cherubically benign he might have seen a quick and
+painful scarlet sweep the face of the boy, coupled with a certain tense
+look of the muscles around the jaw.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now, look here," he went on, still in a whisper. "We're both
+skirt men, you and me. Everything's fair in this game. Maybe you don't
+know it, but when there's a bunch of the boys waiting around to see the
+head of the store like this, and there happens to be a lady traveler in
+the crowd, why, it's considered kind of a professional courtesy to let
+the lady have the first look-in. See? It ain't so often that three
+people in the same line get together like this. She knows it, and she's
+sitting on the edge of her chair, waiting to bolt when that door opens,
+even if she does act like she was hanging on the words of that lady
+clerk there. The minute it does open a crack she'll jump up and give me
+a fleeting, grateful smile, and sail in and cop a fat order away from
+the old man and his skirt buyer. I'm wise. Say, he may be an oyster, but
+he knows a pretty woman when he sees one. By the time she's through with
+him he'll have enough petticoats on hand to last him from now until
+Turkey goes suffrage. Get me?"</p>
+
+<p>"I get you," answered Jock.</p>
+
+<p>"I say, this is business, and good manners be hanged. When a woman
+breaks into a man's game like this, let her take her chances like a man.
+Ain't that straight?"</p>
+
+<p>"You've said something," agreed Jock.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, look here, kid. When that door opens I get up. See? And shoot
+straight for the old man's office. See? Like a duck. See? Say, I may be
+fat, kid, but I'm what they call light on my feet, and when I see an
+order getting away from me I can be so fleet that I have Diana looking
+like old Weston doing a stretch of muddy country road in a
+coast-to-coast hike. See? Now you help me out on this and I'll see that
+you don't suffer for it. I'll stick in a good word for you, believe me.
+You take the word of an old stager like me and you won't go far&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span></p><p>The door opened. Simultaneously three figures sprang into action. Jock
+had the seat nearest the door. With marvelous clumsiness he managed to
+place himself in Ed Meyers' path, then reddened, began an apology,
+stepped on both of Ed's feet, jabbed his elbow into his stomach, and
+dropped his hat. A second later the door of old Sulzberg's private
+office closed upon Emma McChesney's smart, erect, confident figure.</p>
+
+<p>Now, Ed Meyers' hands were peculiar hands for a fat man. They were
+tapering, slender, delicate, blue-veined, temperamental hands. At this
+moment, despite his purpling face, and his staring eyes, they were the
+most noticeable thing about him. His fingers clawed the empty air,
+quivering, vibrant, as though poised to clutch at Jock's throat.</p>
+
+<p>Then words came. They spluttered from his lips. They popped like corn
+kernels in the heat of his wrath; they tripped over each other; they
+exploded.</p>
+
+<p>"You darned kid, you!" he began, with fascinating fluency. "You
+thousand-legged, double-jointed, ox-footed truck horse! Come on out of
+here and I'll lick the shine off your shoes, you blue-eyed babe, you!
+What did you get up for, huh? What did you think this was going to be&mdash;a
+flag drill?"</p>
+
+<p>With a whoop of pure joy Jock McChesney turned and fled.</p>
+
+<p>They dined together at one o'clock, Emma McChesney and her son Jock.
+Suddenly Jock stopped eating. His eyes were on the door. "There's that
+fathead now," he said, excitedly. "The nerve of him! He's coming over
+here."</p>
+
+<p>Ed Meyers was waddling toward them with the quick light step of the fat
+man. His pink, full-jowled face was glowing. His eyes were bright as a
+boy's. He stopped at their table and paused for one dramatic moment.</p>
+
+<p>"So, me beauty, you two were in cahoots, huh? That's the second low-down
+deal you've handed me. I haven't forgotten that trick you turned with
+Nussbaum at DeKalb. Never mind, little girl. I'll get back at you yet."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p><p>He nodded a contemptuous head in Jock's direction. "Carrying a packer?"</p>
+
+<p>Emma McChesney wiped her fingers daintily on her napkin, crushed it on
+the table, and leaned back in her chair. "Men," she observed,
+wonderingly, "are the cussedest creatures. This chap occupied the same
+room with you last night and you don't even know his name. Funny! If two
+strange women had found themselves occupying the same room for a night
+they wouldn't have got to the kimono and back hair stage before they
+would not only have known each other's names, but they'd have tried on
+each other's hats, swapped corset cover patterns, found mutual friends
+living in Dayton, Ohio, taught each other a new Irish crochet stitch,
+showed their family photographs, told how their married sister's little
+girl nearly died with swollen glands, and divided off the mirror into
+two sections to paste their newly-washed handkerchiefs on. Don't tell
+<i>me</i> men have a genius for friendship."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, who is he?" insisted Ed Meyers. "He told me everything but his
+name this morning. I wish I had throttled him with a bunch of Bisons'
+badges last night."</p>
+
+<p>"His name," smiled Emma McChesney, "is Jock McChesney. He's my one and
+only son, and he's put through his first little business deal this
+morning just to show his mother that he can be a help to his folks if he
+wants to. Now, Ed Meyers, if you're going to have apoplexy, don't you go
+and have it around this table. My boy is only on his second piece of
+pie, and I won't have his appetite spoiled."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="EDNA_FERBER" id="EDNA_FERBER"></a>EDNA FERBER</h2>
+
+<p>A professor of literature once began a lecture on Lowell by saying: "It
+makes a great deal of difference to an author whether he is born in
+Cambridge or Kalamazoo." Miss Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, but it
+hasn't made much difference to her. The date was August 15, 1887. She
+attended high school at Appleton, Wisconsin, and at seventeen secured a
+position as reporter on the Appleton <i>Daily Crescent</i>. That she was
+successful in newspaper work is shown by the fact that she soon had a
+similar position on the <i>Milwaukee Journal</i>, and went from there to the
+staff of the <i>Chicago Tribune</i>, one of the leading newspapers in the
+United States.</p>
+
+<p>But journalism, engrossing as it is, did not take all of her time. She
+began a novel, working on it in spare moments, but when it was finished
+she was so dissatisfied with it that she threw the manuscript into the
+waste basket. Here her mother found it, and sent it to a publisher, who
+accepted it at once. The book was <i>Dawn O'Hara</i>. It was dedicated "To my
+dear mother who frequently interrupts, and to my sister Fannie who says
+Sh-sh-sh outside my door." With this book Miss Ferber, at twenty-four,
+found herself the author of one of the successful novels of the year.</p>
+
+<p>Her next work was in the field of the short story, and here too she
+quickly gained recognition. The field that she has made particularly her
+own is the delineation of the American business woman, a type familiar
+in our daily life, but never adequately presented in fiction until Emma
+McChesney appeared. The fidelity with which these stories describe the
+life of a traveling salesman show that Miss Ferber knew her subject
+through and through before she began to write. Her knowledge of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> other
+things is shown in an amusing letter which she wrote to the editor of
+the <i>Bookman</i> in 1912. He had criticized her for writing a story about
+baseball, saying that no woman really knew baseball. This was her reply,
+in part:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>You, buried up there in your office, or your apartment, with your
+books, books, books, and your pipe, and your everlasting
+manuscripts, and makers of manuscripts, don't you know that your
+woman secretary knows more about baseball than you do? Don't you
+know that every American girl knows baseball, and that most of us
+read the sporting page, not as a pose, but because we're interested
+in things that happen on the field, and track, and links, and
+gridiron? Bless your heart, that baseball story was the worst story
+in the book, but it was written after a solid summer of watching
+our bush league team play ball in the little Wisconsin town that I
+used to call home.</p>
+
+<p>Humanity? Which of us really knows it? But take a fairly
+intelligent girl of seventeen, put her on a country daily
+newspaper, and then keep her on one paper or another, country and
+city, for six years, and&mdash;well, she just naturally can't help
+learning some things about some folks, now can she?...</p>
+
+<p>You say that two or three more such books may entitle me to serious
+consideration. If I can get the editors to take more stories, why I
+suppose there'll be more books. But please don't perform any more
+serious consideration stuff over 'em. Because me'n Georgie Cohan,
+we jest aims to amuse.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Her first book of short stories was called <i>Buttered Side Down</i> (her
+titles are always unusual). This was followed by <i>Roast Beef, Medium</i>,
+in which Mrs. McChesney appears as the successful distributor of
+Featherloom skirts. <i>Personality Plus</i> tells of the adventures of her
+son Jock as an advertising man. <i>Cheerful&mdash;by Request</i> introduces Mrs.
+McChesney and some other people. By this time her favorite character had
+become so well known that the stage called for her, so Miss Ferber
+collaborated with George V. Hobart in a play called <i>Our Mrs.
+McChesney</i>, which was produced with Ethel Barrymore in the title role.
+Her latest book, <i>Fanny Herself</i>, is a novel, and in its pages Mrs.
+McChesney appears again.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span></p><p>Her stories show the effect of her newspaper training. The style is
+crisp; the descriptions show close observation. Humor lights up every
+page, and underlying all her stories is a belief in people, a faith that
+life is worth while, a courage in the face of obstacles, that we like to
+think is characteristically American. In the structure and the style of
+her stories, Miss Ferber shows the influence of O. Henry, or as a
+newspaper wit put it,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>O. Henry's fame, unless mistaken I'm</div>
+<div>Goes ednaferberating down through time.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="AFTER_THE_BIG_STORE_CLOSES" id="AFTER_THE_BIG_STORE_CLOSES"></a>AFTER THE BIG STORE CLOSES</h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span></p><p><i>We all go to the Big Store to buy its bargains, and sometimes we
+wonder idly what the clerks are like when they are not behind the
+counter. This story deals with the lives of two people who punched the
+time-clock. When the store closes, it is like the striking of the clock
+in the fairy tales: the clerks are transformed into human beings, and
+become so much like ourselves that it is hard to tell the difference.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="BITTER-SWEET" id="BITTER-SWEET"></a>BITTER-SWEET</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Fannie Hurst</span></h3>
+
+<p>Much of the tragical lore of the infant mortality, the malnutrition, and
+the five-in-a-room morality of the city's poor is written in statistics,
+and the statistical path to the heart is more figurative than literal.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to write stylistically a per-annum report of 1,327
+curvatures of the spine, whereas the poor specific little vertebra of
+Mamie O'Grady, daughter to Lou, your laundress, whose alcoholic husband
+once invaded your very own basement and attempted to strangle her in the
+coal-bin, can instantly create an apron bazaar in the church
+vestry-rooms.</p>
+
+<p>That is why it is possible to drink your morning coffee without nausea
+for it, over the head-lines of forty thousand casualties at Ypres, but
+to push back abruptly at a three-line notice of little Tony's, your
+corner bootblack's, fatal dive before a street-car.</p>
+
+<p>Gertie Slayback was statistically down as a woman wage-earner; a typhoid
+case among the thousands of the Borough of Manhattan for 1901; and her
+twice-a-day share in the Subway fares collected in the present year of
+our Lord.</p>
+
+<p>She was a very atomic one of the city's four millions. But after all,
+what are the kings and peasants, poets and draymen, but great, greater,
+or greatest, less, lesser, or least atoms of us? If not of the least,
+Gertie Slayback was of the very lesser. When she unlocked the front door
+to her rooming-house of evenings, there was no one to expect her, except
+on Tuesdays, which evening it so happened her week was up. And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> when she
+left of mornings with her breakfast crumblessly cleared up and the box
+of biscuit and condensed-milk can tucked unsuspectedly behind her
+camisole in the top drawer there was no one to regret her.</p>
+
+<p>There are some of us who call this freedom. Again there are those for
+whom one spark of home fire burning would light the world.</p>
+
+<p>Gertie Slayback was one of these. Half a life-time of opening her door
+upon this or that desert-aisle of hall bedroom had not taught her heart
+how not to sink or the feel of daily rising in one such room to seem
+less like a damp bathing-suit, donned at dawn.</p>
+
+<p>The only picture&mdash;or call it atavism if you will&mdash;which adorned Miss
+Slayback's dun-colored walls was a passe-partout snowscape, night
+closing in, and pink cottage windows peering out from under eaves. She
+could visualize that interior as if she had only to turn the frame for
+the smell of wood fire and the snap of pine logs and for the scene of
+two high-back chairs and the wooden crib between.</p>
+
+<p>What a fragile, gracile thing is the mind that can leap thus from nine
+bargain basement hours of hairpins and darning-balls to the downy
+business of lining a crib in Never-Never Land and warming No Man's
+slippers before the fire of imagination.</p>
+
+<p>There was that picture so acidly etched into Miss Slayback's brain that
+she had only to close her eyes in the slit-like sanctity of her room and
+in the brief moment of courting sleep feel the pink penumbra of her
+vision begin to glow.</p>
+
+<p>Of late years, or, more specifically, for two years and eight months,
+another picture had invaded, even superseded the old. A stamp-photograph
+likeness of Mr. James P. Batch in the corner of Miss Slayback's mirror,
+and thereafter No Man's slippers became number eight-and-a-half C, and
+the hearth a gilded radiator in a dining-living-room somewhere between
+the Fourteenth Street Subway and the land of the Bronx.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p><p>How Miss Slayback, by habit not gregarious, met Mr. Batch is of no
+consequence, except to those snug ones of us to whom an introduction is
+the only means to such an end.</p>
+
+<p>At a six o'clock that invaded even Union Square with heliotrope dusk,
+Mr. James Batch mistook, who shall say otherwise, Miss Gertie Slayback,
+as she stepped down into the wintry shade of a Subway kiosk, for Miss
+Whodoesitmatter. At seven o'clock, over a dish of lamb stew <i>&agrave; la</i> White
+Kitchen, he confessed, and if Miss Slayback affected too great surprise
+and too little indignation, try to conceive six nine-hour week-in-and
+week-out days of hairpins and darning-balls, and then, at a heliotrope
+dusk, James P. Batch, in invitational mood, stepping in between it and
+the papered walls of a dun-colored evening. To further enlist your
+tolerance, Gertie Slayback's eyes were as blue as the noon of June, and
+James P. Batch, in a belted-in coat and five kid finger-points
+protruding ever so slightly and rightly from a breast pocket, was hewn
+and honed in the image of youth. His the smile of one for whom life's
+cup holds a heady wine, a wrinkle or two at the eye only serving to
+enhance that smile; a one-inch feather stuck upright in his derby
+hatband.</p>
+
+<p>It was a forelock once stamped a Corsican with the look of emperor. It
+was this hat feather, a cock's feather at that and worn without sense of
+humor, to which Miss Slayback was fond of attributing the consequences
+of that heliotrope dusk.</p>
+
+<p>"It was the feather in your cap did it, Jimmie. I can see you yet,
+stepping up with that innocent grin of yours. You think I didn't know
+you were flirting? Cousin from Long Island City! 'Say,' I says to
+myself, I says, 'I look as much like his cousin from Long Island City,
+if he's got one, as my cousin from Hoboken (and I haven't got any) would
+look like my sister if I had one.' It was that sassy little feather in
+your hat!"</p>
+
+<p>They would laugh over this ever-green reminiscence on Sunday park
+benches and at intermission at moving pictures when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> they remained
+through it to see the show twice. Be the landlady's front parlor ever so
+permanently rented out, the motion-picture theater has brought to
+thousands of young city starvelings, if not the quietude of the home,
+then at least the warmth and a juxtaposition and a deep darkness that
+can lave the sub-basement throb of temples and is filled with music with
+a hum in it.</p>
+
+<p>For two years and eight months of Saturday nights, each one of them a
+semaphore dropping out across the gray road of the week, Gertie Slayback
+and Jimmie Batch dined for one hour and sixty cents at the White
+Kitchen. Then arm and arm up the million-candle-power flare of Broadway,
+content, these two who had never seen a lake reflect a moon, or a slim
+fir pointing to a star, that life could be so manifold. And always, too,
+on Saturday, the tenth from the last row of the De Luxe Cinematograph,
+Broadway's Best, Orchestra Chairs, fifty cents; Last Ten Rows,
+thirty-five. The give of velvet-upholstered chairs, perfumed darkness,
+and any old love story moving across it to the ecstatic ache of Gertie
+Slayback's high young heart.</p>
+
+<p>On a Saturday evening that was already pointed with stars at the
+six-o'clock closing of Hoffheimer's Fourteenth Street Emporium, Miss
+Slayback, whose blondness under fatigue could become ashy, emerged from
+the Bargain Basement almost the first of its frantic exodus, taking the
+place of her weekly appointment in the entrance of the Popular Drug
+Store adjoining, her gaze, something even frantic in it, sifting the
+passing crowd.</p>
+
+<p>At six o'clock Fourteenth Street pours up from its basements, down from
+its lofts, and out from its five-and-ten-cent stores, shows, and
+arcades, in a great homeward torrent&mdash;a sweeping torrent that flows full
+flush to the Subway, the Elevated, and the surface car, and then spreads
+thinly into the least pretentious of the city's homes&mdash;the five flights
+up, the two rooms rear, and the third floor back.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p><p>Standing there, this eager tide of the Fourteenth Street Emporium, thus
+released by the six-o'clock flood-gates, flowed past Miss Slayback.
+White-nosed, low-chested girls in short-vamp shoes and no-carat gold
+vanity-cases. Older men resigned that ambition could be flayed by a
+yard-stick; young men still impatient of their clerkship.</p>
+
+<p>It was into the trickle of these last that Miss Slayback bored her
+glance, the darting, eager glance of hot eyeballs and inner trembling.
+She was not so pathetically young as she was pathetically blond, a
+treacherous, ready-to-fade kind of blondness that one day, now that she
+had found that very morning her first gray hair, would leave her ashy.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, with a small catch of breath that was audible in her throat,
+Miss Slayback stepped out of that doorway, squirming her way across the
+tight congestion of the sidewalk to its curb, then in and out, brushing
+this elbow and that shoulder, worming her way in an absolutely supreme
+anxiety to keep in view a brown derby hat bobbing right briskly along
+with the crowd, a greenish-black bit of feather upright in its band.</p>
+
+<p>At Broadway, Fourteenth Street cuts quite a caper, deploying out into
+Union Square, an island of park, beginning to be succulent at the first
+false feint of spring, rising as it were from a sea of asphalt. Across
+this park Miss Slayback worked her rather frenzied way, breaking into a
+run when the derby threatened to sink into the confusion of a hundred
+others, and finally learning to keep its course by the faint but
+distinguishing fact of a slight dent in the crown. At Broadway, some
+blocks before that highway bursts into its famous flare, Mr. Batch, than
+whom it was no other, turned off suddenly at right angles down into a
+dim pocket of side-street and into the illuminated entrance of Ceiner's
+Caf&eacute; Hungarian. Meals at all hours. Lunch, thirty cents. Dinner, fifty
+cents. Our Goulash is Famous.</p>
+
+<p>New York, which expresses itself in more languages to the square block
+than any other area in the world, Babylon included, loves thus to dine
+linguistically, so to speak. To the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> Crescent Turkish Restaurant for its
+Business Men's Lunch comes Fourth Avenue, whose antique-shop patois
+reads across the page from right to left. Sight-seeing automobiles on
+mission and commission bent allow Altoona, Iowa City, and Quincy,
+Illinois, fifteen minutes' stop-in at Ching Ling-Foo's Chinatown
+Delmonico's. Spaghetti and red wine have set New York racing to reserve
+its table d'h&ocirc;tes. All except the Latin race.</p>
+
+<p>Jimmie Batch, who had first seen light, and that gaslight, in a block in
+lower Manhattan which has since been given over to a milk-station for a
+highly congested district, had the palate, if not the purse, of the
+cosmopolite. His digestive range included <i>borsch</i> and <i>chow main</i>;
+<i>risotta</i> and "ham and."</p>
+
+<p>To-night, as he turned into Caf&eacute; Hungarian, Miss Slayback slowed and
+drew back into the overshadowing protection of an adjoining
+office-building. She was breathing hard, and her little face, somehow
+smaller from chill, was nevertheless a high pink at the cheek-bones.</p>
+
+<p>The wind swept around the corner, jerking her hat, and her hand flew up
+to it. There was a fair stream of passers-by even here, and occasionally
+one turned for a backward glance at her standing there so frankly
+indeterminate.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly Miss Slayback adjusted her tam-o'-shanter to its flop over her
+right ear, and, drawing off a pair of dark-blue silk gloves from over
+immaculately new white ones, entered Ceiner's Caf&eacute; Hungarian. In its
+light she was not so obviously blonder than young, the pink spots in her
+cheeks had a deepening value to the blue of her eyes, and a black velvet
+tam-o'-shanter revealing just the right fringe of yellow curls is no
+mean aid.</p>
+
+<p>First of all, Ceiner's is an eating-place. There is no music except at
+five cents in the slot, and its tables for four are perpetually set each
+with a dish of sliced radishes, a bouquet of celery, and a mound of
+bread, half the stack rye. Its menus are well thumbed and badly
+mimeographed. Who enters<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> Ceiner's is prepared to dine from barley soup
+to apple strudel. At something after six begins the rising sound of
+cutlery, and already the new-comer fears to find no table.</p>
+
+<p>Off at the side, Mr. Jimmie Batch had already disposed of his hat and
+gray overcoat, and tilting the chair opposite him to indicate its
+reservation, shook open his evening paper, the waiter withholding the
+menu at this sign of rendezvous.</p>
+
+<p>Straight toward that table Miss Slayback worked quick, swift way,
+through this and that aisle, jerking back and seating herself on the
+chair opposite almost before Mr. Batch could raise his eyes from off the
+sporting page.</p>
+
+<p>There was an instant of silence between them&mdash;the kind of silence that
+can shape itself into a commentary upon the inefficacy of mere speech&mdash;a
+widening silence which, as they sat there facing, deepened until, when
+she finally spoke, it was as if her words were pebbles dropping down
+into a well.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't look so surprised, Jimmie," she said, propping her face calmly,
+even boldly, into the white-kid palms. "You might fall off the Christmas
+tree."</p>
+
+<p>Above the snug, four-inch collar and bow tie Mr. Batch's face was taking
+on a dull ox-blood tinge that spread back, even reddening his ears. Mr.
+Batch had the frontal bone of a clerk, the horn-rimmed glasses of the
+literarily astigmatic, and the sartorial perfection that only the rich
+can afford not to attain.</p>
+
+<p>He was staring now quite frankly, and his mouth had fallen open. "Gert!"
+he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Miss Slayback, her insouciance gaining with his
+discomposure, her eyes widening and then a dolly kind of glassiness
+seeming to set in. "You wasn't expecting me, Jimmie?"</p>
+
+<p>He jerked up his hand, not meeting her glance. "What's the idea of the
+comedy?"</p>
+
+<p>"You don't look glad to see me, Jimmie."</p>
+
+<p>"If you&mdash;think you're funny."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span></p><p>She was working out of and then back into the freshly white gloves in a
+betraying kind of nervousness that belied the toss of her voice. "Well,
+of all things! Mad-cat! Mad, just because you didn't seem to be
+expecting me."</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;There's some things that are just the limit, that's what they are.
+Some things that are just the limit, that no fellow would stand from any
+girl, and this&mdash;this is one of them."</p>
+
+<p>Her lips were trembling now. "You&mdash;you bet your life there's some things
+that are just the limit."</p>
+
+<p>He slid out his watch, pushing back. "Well, I guess this place is too
+small for a fellow and a girl that can follow him around the town like
+a&mdash;like&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She sat forward, grasping the table-sides, her chair tilting with her.
+"Don't you dare to get up and leave me sitting here! Jimmie Batch, don't
+you dare!"</p>
+
+<p>The waiter intervened, card extended.</p>
+
+<p>"We&mdash;we're waiting for another party," said Miss Slayback, her hands
+still rigidly over the table-sides and her glance like a steady drill
+into Mr. Batch's own.</p>
+
+<p>There was a second of this silence while the waiter withdrew, and then
+Mr. Batch whipped out his watch again, a gun-metal one with an open
+face.</p>
+
+<p>"Now look here. I got a date here in ten minutes, and one or the other
+of us has got to clear. You&mdash;you're one too many, if you got to know
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I do know it, Jimmie! I been one too many for the last four
+Saturday nights. I been one too many ever since May Scully came into
+five hundred dollars' inheritance and quit the Ladies' Neckwear. I been
+one too many ever since May Scully became a lady."</p>
+
+<p>"If I was a girl and didn't have more shame!"</p>
+
+<p>"Shame! Now you're shouting, Jimmie Batch. I haven't got shame, and I
+don't care who knows it. A girl don't stop to have shame when she's
+fighting for her rights."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span></p><p>He was leaning on his elbow, profile to her. "That movie talk can't
+scare me. You can't tell me what to do and what not to do. I've given
+you a square deal all right. There's not a word ever passed between us
+that ties me to your apron-strings. I don't say I'm not without my
+obligations to you, but that's not one of them. No, siree&mdash;no
+apron-strings."</p>
+
+<p>"I know it isn't, Jimmie. You're the kind of a fellow wouldn't even talk
+to himself for fear of committing himself."</p>
+
+<p>"I got a date here now any minute, Gert, and the sooner you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You're the guy who passed up the Sixty-first for the Safety First
+regiment."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll show you my regiment some day."</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I know you're not tied to my apron-strings, Jimmie. I&mdash;I wouldn't
+have you there for anything. Don't you think I know you too well for
+that? That's just it. Nobody on God's earth knows you the way I do. I
+know you better than you know yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"You better beat it, Gertie. I tell you I'm getting sore."</p>
+
+<p>Her face flashed from him to the door and back again, her anxiety almost
+edged with hysteria. "Come on, Jimmie&mdash;out the side entrance before she
+gets here. May Scully ain't the company for you. You think if she was,
+honey, I'd&mdash;I'd see myself come butting in between you this way,
+like&mdash;like a&mdash;common girl? She's not the girl to keep you straight.
+Honest to God she's not, honey."</p>
+
+<p>"My business is my business, let me tell you that."</p>
+
+<p>"She's speedy, Jimmie. She was the speediest girl on the main floor, and
+now that she's come into those five hundred, instead of planting it for
+a rainy day, she's quit work and gone plumb crazy with it."</p>
+
+<p>"When I want advice about my friends I ask for it."</p>
+
+<p>"It's not the good name that worries me, Jimmie, because she ain't got
+any. It's you. She's got you crazy with that five hundred, too&mdash;that's
+what's got me scared."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span></p><p>"Gee! you ought to let the Salvation Army tie a bonnet under your
+chin."</p>
+
+<p>"She's always had her eyes on you, Jimmie. Ain't you men got no sense
+for seein' things? Since the day they moved the Gents' Furnishings
+across from the Ladies' Neckwear she's had you spotted. Her goings-on
+used to leak down to the basement, alrighty. She's not a good girl, May
+ain't, Jimmie. She ain't, and you know it. Is she? Is she?"</p>
+
+<p>"Aw!" said Jimmie Batch.</p>
+
+<p>"You see! See! Ain't got the nerve to answer, have you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Aw&mdash;maybe I know, too that she's not the kind of a girl that would turn
+up where she's not&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"If you wasn't a classy-looking kind of boy, Jimmie, that a fly girl
+like May likes to be seen out with, she couldn't find you with
+magnifying glasses, not if you was born with the golden rule in your
+mouth and had swallowed it. She's not the kind of girl, Jimmie, a fellow
+like you needs behind him. If&mdash;if you was ever to marry her and get your
+hands on them five hundred dollars&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It would be my business."</p>
+
+<p>"It'll be your ruination. You're not strong enough to stand up under
+nothing like that. With a few hundred unearned dollars in your pocket
+you&mdash;you'd go up in spontaneous combustion, you would."</p>
+
+<p>"It would be my own spontaneous combustion."</p>
+
+<p>"You got to be drove, Jimmie, like a kid. With them few dollars you
+wouldn't start up a little cigar-store like you think you would. You and
+her would blow yourselves to the dogs in two months. Cigar-stores ain't
+the place for you, Jimmie. You seen how only clerking in them was nearly
+your ruination&mdash;the little gambling-room-in-the-back kind that you pick
+out. They ain't cigar-stores; they're only false faces for gambling."</p>
+
+<p>"You know it all, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span></p><p>"Oh, I'm dealing it to you straight! There's too many sporty crowds
+loafing around those joints for a fellow like you to stand up under. I
+found you in one, and as yellow-fingered and as loafing as they come, a
+new job a week, a&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yeh, and there was some pep to variety, too."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't throw over, Jimmie, what my getting you out of it to a decent job
+in a department store has begun to do for you. And you're making good,
+too. Higgins teld me to-day, if you don't let your head swell, there
+won't be a fellow in the department can stack up his sales-book any
+higher."</p>
+
+<p>"Aw!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't throw it all over, Jimmie&mdash;and me&mdash;for a crop of dyed red hair
+and a few dollars to ruin yourself with."</p>
+
+<p>He shot her a look of constantly growing nervousness, his mouth pulled
+to an oblique, his glance constantly toward the door.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't keep no date with her to-night, Jimmie. You haven't got the
+constitution to stand her pace. It's telling on you. Look at those
+fingers yellowing again&mdash;looka&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"They're my fingers, ain't they?"</p>
+
+<p>"You see, Jimmie, I&mdash;I'm the only person in the world that likes you
+just for what&mdash;you ain't&mdash;and hasn't got any pipe dreams about you.
+That's what counts, Jimmie, the folks that like you in spite, and not
+because of."</p>
+
+<p>"We will now sing psalm number two hundred and twenty-three."</p>
+
+<p>"I know there's not a better fellow in the world if he's kept nailed to
+the right job, and I know, too, there's not another fellow can go to the
+dogs any easier."</p>
+
+<p>"To hear you talk, you'd think I was about six."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm the only girl that'll ever be willing to make a whip out of herself
+that'll keep you going and won't sting, honey. I know you're soft and
+lazy and selfish and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't forget any."</p>
+
+<p>"And I know you're my good-looking good-for-nothing, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> I know, too,
+that you&mdash;you don't care as much&mdash;as much for me from head to toe as I
+do for your little finger. But I&mdash;like you just the same, Jimmie.
+That&mdash;that's what I mean about having no shame. I&mdash;do like you so&mdash;so
+terribly, Jimmie."</p>
+
+<p>"Aw now&mdash;Gert!"</p>
+
+<p>"I know it, Jimmie&mdash;that I ought to be ashamed. Don't think I haven't
+cried myself to sleep with it whole nights in succession."</p>
+
+<p>"Aw now&mdash;Gert!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't think I don't know it, that I'm laying myself before you pretty
+common. I know it's common for a girl to&mdash;to come to a fellow like this,
+but&mdash;but I haven't got any shame about it&mdash;I haven't got anything,
+Jimmie, except fight for&mdash;for what's eating me. And the way things are
+between us now is eating me."</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;&mdash; Why, I got a mighty
+high regard for you, Gert."</p>
+
+<p>"There's a time in a girl's life, Jimmie, when she's been starved like I
+have for something of her own all her days; there's times, no matter how
+she's held in, that all of a sudden comes a minute when she busts out."</p>
+
+<p>"I understand, Gert, but&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"For two years and eight months, Jimmie, life has got to be worth while
+living to me because I could see the day, even if we&mdash;you&mdash;never talked
+about it, when you would be made over from a flip kid to&mdash;to the kind of
+a fellow would want to settle down to making a little two-by-four home
+for us. A little two-by-four all our own, with you steady on the job and
+advanced maybe to forty or fifty a week and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"For God's sake, Gertie, this ain't the time or the place to&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, it is! It's got to be, because it's the first time in four
+weeks that you didn't see me coming first."</p>
+
+<p>"But not now, Gert. I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not ashamed to tell you, Jimmie Batch, that I've been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> the making
+of you since that night you threw the wink at me. And&mdash;and it hurts,
+this does. God! how it hurts!"</p>
+
+<p>He was pleating the table-cloth, swallowing as if his throat had
+constricted, and still rearing his head this way and that in the tight
+collar.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;never claimed not to be a bad egg. This ain't the time and the place
+for rehashing, that's all. Sure you been a friend to me. I don't say you
+haven't. Only I can't be bossed by a girl like you. I don't say May
+Scully's any better than she ought to be. Only that's my business. You
+hear? my business. I got to have life and see a darn sight more future
+for myself than selling shirts in a Fourteenth Street department store."</p>
+
+<p>"May Scully can't give it to you&mdash;her and her fast crowd."</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe she can and maybe she can't."</p>
+
+<p>"Them few dollars won't make you; they'll break you."</p>
+
+<p>"That's for her to decide, not you."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell her myself. I'll face her right here and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Now, look here, if you think I'm going to be let in for a holy show
+between you two girls, you got another think coming. One of us has got
+to clear out of here, and quick, too. You been talking about the side
+door; there it is. In five minutes I got a date in this place that I
+thought I could keep like any law-abiding citizen. One of us has got to
+clear, and quick, too. Gad! you wimmin make me sick, the whole lot of
+you!"</p>
+
+<p>"If anything makes you sick, I know what it is. It's dodging me to fly
+around all hours of the night with May Scully, the girl who put the tang
+in tango. It's eating around in swell sixty-cent restaurants like this
+and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Gad! your middle name ought to be Nagalene."</p>
+
+<p>"Aw, now, Jimmie, maybe it does sound like nagging, but it ain't, honey.
+It&mdash;it's only my&mdash;my fear that I'm losing you, and&mdash;and my hate for the
+every-day grind of things, and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p><p>"I can't help that, can I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, there&mdash;there's nothing on God's earth I hate, Jimmie, like I hate
+that Bargain-Basement. When I think it's down there in that manhole I've
+spent the best years of my life, I&mdash;I wanna die. The day I get out of
+it, the day I don't have to punch that old time-clock down there next to
+the Complaints and Adjustment Desk, I&mdash;I'll never put my foot below
+sidewalk level again to the hour I die. Not even if it was to take a
+walk in my own gold-mine."</p>
+
+<p>"It ain't exactly a garden of roses down there."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I hate it so terrible, Jimmie, that sometimes I wake up nights
+gritting my teeth with the smell of steam-pipes and the tramp of feet on
+the glass sidewalk up over me. Oh, God! you dunno&mdash;you dunno!"</p>
+
+<p>"When it comes to that, the main floor ain't exactly a maiden's dream,
+or a fellow's, for that matter."</p>
+
+<p>"With a man it's different. It's his job in life, earning, and&mdash;and the
+woman making the two ends of it meet. That's why, Jimmie, these last two
+years and eight months, if not for what I was hoping for us,
+why&mdash;why&mdash;I&mdash;why, on your twenty a week, Jimmie, there's nobody could
+run a flat like I could. Why, the days wouldn't be long enough to putter
+in. I&mdash;Don't throw away what I been building up for us, Jimmie, step by
+step! Don't, Jimmie!'</p>
+
+<p>"Good Lord, girl! You deserve better'n me."</p>
+
+<p>"I know I got a big job, Jimmie, but I want to make a man out of you,
+temper, laziness, gambling, and all. You got it in you to be something
+more than a tango lizard or a cigar-store bum, honey. It's only you
+ain't got the stuff in you to stand up under a five-hundred-dollar
+windfall and&mdash;a&mdash;and a sporty girl. If&mdash;if two glasses of beer make you
+as silly as they do, Jimmie, why, five hundred dollars would land you
+under the table for life."</p>
+
+<p>"Aw&mdash;there you go again!"</p>
+
+<p>"I can't help it, Jimmie. It's because I never knew a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>fellow had what's
+he's cut out for written all over him so. You're a born clerk, Jimmie."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure, I'm a slick clerk, but&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You're born to be a clerk, a good clerk, even a two-hundred-a-month
+clerk, the way you can win the trade, but never your own boss. I know
+what I'm talking about. I know your measure better than any human on
+earth can ever know your measure. I know things about you that you don't
+even know yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"I never set myself up to nobody for anything I wasn't."</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe not, Jimmie, but I know about you and&mdash;and that Central Street
+gang that time, and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, honey, and there's not another human living but me knows how
+little it was your fault. Just bad company, that was all. That's how
+much I&mdash;I love you, Jimmie, enough to understand that. Why, if I thought
+May Scully and a set-up in business was the thing for you, Jimmie, I'd
+say to her, I'd say, if it was like taking my own heart out in my hand
+and squashing it, I'd say to her, I'd say, 'Take him, May.' That's how
+I&mdash;I love you, Jimmie. Oh, ain't it nothing, honey, a girl can come here
+and lay herself this low to you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, haven't I just said you&mdash;you deserve better."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want better, Jimmie. I want you. I want to take hold of your
+life and finish the job of making it the kind we can both be proud of.
+Us two, Jimmie, in&mdash;in our own decent two-by-four. Shopping on Saturday
+nights. Frying in our own frying-pan in our own kitchen. Listening to
+our own phonograph in our own parlor. Geraniums and&mdash;and kids&mdash;and&mdash;and
+things. Gas-logs. Stationary washtubs. Jimmie! Jimmie!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. James P. Batch reached up for his hat and overcoat, cramming the
+newspaper into a rear pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"Come on," he said, stalking toward the side door and not waiting to see
+her to her feet.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span></p><p>Outside, a banner of stars was over the narrow street. For a chain of
+five blocks he walked, with a silence and speed that Miss Slayback could
+only match with a running quickstep. But she was not out of breath. Her
+head was up, and her hand where it hooked into Mr. Batch's elbow, was in
+a vise that tightened with each block.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>You who will mete out no other approval than that vouched for by the
+stamp of time and whose contempt for the contemporary is from behind the
+easy refuge of the classics, suffer you the shuddering analogy that
+between Aspasia who inspired Pericles, Theodora who suggested the
+Justinian code, and Gertie Slayback who commandeered Jimmie Batch, is a
+sistership which rounds them, like a lasso thrown back into time, into
+one and the same petticoat dynasty behind the throne.</p>
+
+<p>True, Gertie Slayback's <i>mise en sc&egrave;ne</i> was a two-room kitchenette
+apartment situated in the Bronx at a surveyor's farthest point between
+two Subway stations, and her present state one of frequent red-faced
+forays down into a packing-case. But there was that in her eyes which
+witchingly bespoke the conquered, but not the conqueror. Hers was
+actually the titillating wonder of a bird which, captured, closes its
+wings, that surrender can be so sweet.</p>
+
+<p>Once she sat on the edge of the packing-case, dallying with a hammer,
+then laid it aside suddenly, to cross the littered room and place the
+side of her head to the immaculate waistcoat of Mr. Jimmie Batch,
+red-faced, too, over wrenching up with hatchet-edge a barrel-top.</p>
+
+<p>"Jimmie darling, I&mdash;I just never will get over your finding this place
+for us."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Batch wiped his forearm across his brow, his voice jerking between
+the squeak of nails extracted from wood.</p>
+
+<p>"It was you, honey. You give me the to let ad. and I came to look,
+that's all."</p>
+
+<p>"Just the samey, it was my boy found it. If you hadn't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> come to look we
+might have been forced into taking that old dark coop over on Simpson
+Street."</p>
+
+<p>"What's all this junk in this barrel?"</p>
+
+<p>"Them's kitchen utensils, honey."</p>
+
+<p>"Kitchen what?"</p>
+
+<p>"Kitchen things that you don't know nothing about except to eat good
+things out of."</p>
+
+<p>"What's this?"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't bend it! That's a celery-brush. Ain't it cute?"</p>
+
+<p>"A celery-brush! Why didn't you get it a comb, too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, now, honey-bee, don't go trying to be funny and picking through
+these things you don't know nothing about! They're just cute things I'm
+going to cook something grand suppers in, for my something awful bad
+boy."</p>
+
+<p>He leaned down to kiss her at that. "Gee!"</p>
+
+<p>She was standing, her shoulder to him and head thrown back against his
+chest. She looked up to stroke his cheek, her face foreshortened.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm all black and blue pinching myself, Jimmie."</p>
+
+<p>"Me too."</p>
+
+<p>"Every night when I get home from working here in the flat I say to
+myself in the looking-glass, I say, 'Gertie Slayback, what if you're
+only dreamin'?'"</p>
+
+<p>"Me too."</p>
+
+<p>"I say to myself, 'Are you sure that darling flat up there, with the new
+pink-and-white wall-paper and the furniture arriving every day, is going
+to be yours in a few days when you're Mrs. Jimmie Batch?'"</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Jimmie Batch&mdash;say, that's immense."</p>
+
+<p>"I keep saying it to myself every night, 'One day less.' Last night it
+was two days. To-night it'll be&mdash;one day, Jimmie, till I'm&mdash;her."</p>
+
+<p>She closed her eyes and let her hand linger up to his cheek, head still
+back against him, so that, inclining his head, he could rest his lips in
+the ash-blond fluff of her hair.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span></p><p>"Talk about can't wait! If to-morrow was any farther off they'd have to
+sweep out a padded cell for me."</p>
+
+<p>She turned to rumple the smooth light thatch of his hair. "Bad boy!
+Can't wait! And here we are getting married all of a sudden, just like
+that. Up to the time of this draft business, Jimmie Batch, 'pretty soon'
+was the only date I could ever get out of you, and now here you are
+crying over one day's wait. Bad honey boy!"</p>
+
+<p>He reached back for the pink newspaper so habitually protruding from his
+hip-pocket. "You ought to see the way they're neck-breaking for the
+marriage-license bureaus since the draft. First thing we know the whole
+shebang of the boys will be claiming exemption of sole support of wife."</p>
+
+<p>"It's a good thing we made up our minds quick, Jimmie. They'll be
+getting wise. If too many get exemption from the army by marrying right
+away, it'll be a give-away."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd like to know who can lay his hands on the exemption of a little
+wife to support."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Jimmie, it&mdash;it sounds so funny. Being supported! Me that always did
+the supporting, not only to me, but to my mother and great-grandmother
+up to the day they died."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm the greatest little supporter you ever seen."</p>
+
+<p>"Me getting up mornings to stay at home in my own darling little flat,
+and no basement or time-clock. Nothing but a busy little hubby to eat
+him nice, smelly, bacon breakfast and grab him nice morning newspaper,
+kiss him wifie, and run downtown to support her. Jimmie, every morning
+for your breakfast I'm going to fry&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You bet your life he's going to support her, and he's going to pay back
+that forty dollars of his girl's that went into his wedding duds, that
+hundred and ninety of his girl's savings that went into furniture&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"We got to meet our instalments every month first, Jimmie. That's what
+we want&mdash;no debts and every little darling piece of furniture paid up."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p><p>"We&mdash;I'm going to pay it, too."</p>
+
+<p>"And my Jimmie is going to work to get himself promoted and quit being a
+sorehead at his steady hours and all."</p>
+
+<p>"I know more about selling, honey, than the whole bunch of dubs in that
+store put together if they'd give me a chance to prove it."</p>
+
+<p>She laid her palm to his lips.</p>
+
+<p>"Shh-h-h! You don't nothing of the kind. It's not conceit, it's work is
+going to get my boy his raise."</p>
+
+<p>"If they'd listen to me, that department would&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Sh-h-h! J. G. Hoffheimer don't have to get pointers from Jimmie Batch
+how to run his department store."</p>
+
+<p>"There you go again. What's J. G. Hoffheimer got that I ain't? Luck and
+a few dollars in his pocket that, if I had in mine, would&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It was his own grit put those dollars there, Jimmie. Just put it out of
+your head that it's luck makes a self-made man."</p>
+
+<p>"Self-made! You mean things just broke right for him. That's two-thirds
+of this self-made business."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean he buckled right down to brass tacks, and that's what my boy
+is going to do."</p>
+
+<p>"The trouble with this world is it takes money to make money. Get your
+first few dollars, I always say, no matter how, and then when you're on
+your feet scratch your conscience if it itches. That's why I said in the
+beginning, if we had took that hundred and ninety furniture money and
+staked it on&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Jimmie, please&mdash;please! You wouldn't want to take a girl's savings of
+years and years to gamble on a sporty cigar proposition with a card-room
+in the rear. You wouldn't, Jimmie. You ain't that kind of fellow. Tell
+me you wouldn't, Jimmie."</p>
+
+<p>He turned away to dive into the barrel. "Naw," he said. "I wouldn't."</p>
+
+<p>The sun had receded, leaving a sudden sullen gray; the little square
+room, littered with an upheaval of excelsior, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>sheet-shrouded furniture,
+and the paper-hanger's paraphernalia and inimitable smells, darkening
+and seeming to chill.</p>
+
+<p>"We got to quit now, Jimmie. It's getting dark and the gas ain't turned
+on in the meter yet."</p>
+
+<p>He rose up out of the barrel, holding out at arm's-length what might
+have been a tinsmith's version of a porcupine.</p>
+
+<p>"What in&mdash; What's this thing that scratched me?"</p>
+
+<p>She danced to take it. "It's a grater, a darling grater for horseradish
+and nutmeg and cocoanut. I'm going to fix you a cocoanut cake for our
+honeymoon supper to-morrow night, honey-bee. Essie Wohlgemuth over in
+the cake-demonstrating department is going to bring me the recipe.
+Cocoanut cake! And I'm going to fry us a little steak in this darling
+little skillet. Ain't it the cutest!"</p>
+
+<p>"Cute she calls a tin skillet."</p>
+
+<p>"Look what's pasted on it. 'Little Housewife's Skillet. The Kitchen
+Fairy.' That's what I'm going to be, Jimmie, the kitchen fairy. Give me
+that. It's a rolling-pin. All my life I've wanted a rolling-pin. Look
+honey, a little string to hang it up by. I'm going to hang everything up
+in rows. It's going to look like Tiffany's kitchen, all shiny. Give me,
+honey; that's an egg-beater. Look at it whiz. And this&mdash;this is a pan
+for war bread. I'm going to make us war bread to help the soldiers."</p>
+
+<p>"You're a little soldier yourself," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"That's what I would be if I was a man, a soldier all in brass buttons."</p>
+
+<p>"There's a bunch of the fellows going," said Mr. Batch, standing at the
+window, looking out over roofs, dilly-dallying up and down on his heels
+and breaking into a low, contemplative whistle.</p>
+
+<p>She was at his shoulder, peering over it. "You wouldn't be afraid, would
+you, Jimmie?"</p>
+
+<p>"You bet your life I wouldn't."</p>
+
+<p>She was tiptoes now, her arms creeping up to him. "Only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> my boy's got a
+wife&mdash;a brand-new wifie to support, ain't he?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's what he has," said Mr. Batch, stroking her forearm, but still
+gazing through and beyond whatever roofs he was seeing.</p>
+
+<p>"Jimmie!"</p>
+
+<p>"Huh?"</p>
+
+<p>"Look! We got a view of the Hudson River from our flat, just like we
+lived on Riverside Drive."</p>
+
+<p>"All the Hudson River I can see is fifteen smokestacks and somebody's
+wash-line out."</p>
+
+<p>"It ain't so. We got a grand view. Look! Stand on tiptoe, Jimmie, like
+me. There, between that water-tank on that black roof over there and
+them two chimneys. See? Watch my finger. A little stream of something
+over there that moves."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't see."</p>
+
+<p>"Look, honey-bee, close! See that little streak?"</p>
+
+<p>"All right, then, if you see it I see it."</p>
+
+<p>"To think we got a river view from our flat! It's like living in the
+country. I'll peek out at it all day long. God! honey, I just never will
+be over the happiness of being done with basements."</p>
+
+<p>"It was swell of old Higgins to give us this half-Saturday. It shows
+where you stood with the management, Gert&mdash;this and a five-dollar gold
+piece. Lord knows they wouldn't pony up that way if it was me getting
+married by myself."</p>
+
+<p>"It's because my boy ain't shown them down there yet the best that's in
+him. You just watch his little safety-first wife see to it that from now
+on he keeps up her record of never in seven years pushing the time-clock
+even one minute late, and that he keeps his stock shelves O. K. and
+shows his department he's a comer-on."</p>
+
+<p>"With that bunch of boobs a fellow's got a swell chance to get
+anywheres."</p>
+
+<p>"It's getting late, Jimmie. It don't look nice for us to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> stay here so
+late alone, not till&mdash;to-morrow. Ruby and Essie and Charley are going to
+meet us in the minister's back parlor at ten sharp in the morning. We
+can be back here by noon and get the place cleared up enough to give 'em
+a little lunch, just a fun lunch without fixings."</p>
+
+<p>"I hope the old guy don't waste no time splicing us. It's one of the
+things a fellow likes to have over with."</p>
+
+<p>"Jimmie! Why, it's the most beautiful thing in the world, like a garden
+of lilies or&mdash;or something, a marriage ceremony is! You got the ring
+safe, honey-bee, and the license?"</p>
+
+<p>"Pinned in my pocket where you put 'em, Flirty Gertie."</p>
+
+<p>"Flirty Gertie! Now you'll begin teasing me with that all our life&mdash;the
+way I didn't slap your face that night when I should have. I just
+couldn't have, honey. Goes to show we were just cut and dried for each
+other, don't it? Me, a girl that never in her life let a fellow even bat
+his eyes at her without an introduction. But that night when you winked,
+honey&mdash;something inside of me just winked back."</p>
+
+<p>"My girl!"</p>
+
+<p>"You mean it, boy? You ain't sorry about nothing, Jimmie?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sorry? Well, I guess not!"</p>
+
+<p>"You seen the way&mdash;she&mdash;May&mdash;you seen for yourself what she was, when we
+seen her walking, that next night after Ceiner's, nearly staggering, up
+Sixth Avenue with Budge Evans."</p>
+
+<p>"I never took no stock in her, honey. I was just letting her like me."</p>
+
+<p>She sat back on the box edge, regarding him, her face so soft and wont
+to smile that she could not keep its composure.</p>
+
+<p>"Get me my hat and coat, honey. We'll walk down. Got the key?"</p>
+
+<p>They skirmished in the gloom, moving through slit-like aisles of
+furniture and packing-box.</p>
+
+<p>"Ouch!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p><p>"Oh, the running water is hot, Jimmie, just like the ad. said! We got
+red-hot running water in our flat. Close the front windows, honey. We
+don't want it to rain in on our new green sofa. Not till it's paid for,
+anyways."</p>
+
+<p>"Hurry."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm ready."</p>
+
+<p>They met at the door, kissing on the inside and the outside of it; at
+the head of the fourth and the third and the second balustrade down.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll always make 'em little love landings, Jimmie, so we can't ever
+get tired climbing them."</p>
+
+<p>"Yep."</p>
+
+<p>Outside there was still a pink glow in a clean sky. The first flush of
+spring in the air had died, leaving chill. They walked briskly, arm in
+arm, down the asphalt incline of sidewalk leading from their
+apartment-house, a new street of canned homes built on a hillside&mdash;the
+sepulchral abode of the city's trapped whose only escape is down the
+fire-escape, and then only when the alternative is death. At the base of
+the hill there flows, in constant hubbub, a great up-and-down artery of
+street, repeating itself, mile after mile, in terms of the butcher, the
+baker, and the every-other-corner drug-store of a million dollar
+corporation. Housewives with perambulators and oilcloth shopping bags.
+Children on roller-skates. The din of small tradesmen and the humdrum of
+every city block where the homes remain unboarded all summer, and every
+wife is on haggling terms with the purveyor of her evening roundsteak
+and mess of rutabaga.</p>
+
+<p>Then there is the soap-box provender, too, sure of a crowd, offering
+creed, propaganda, patent medicine, and politics. It is the pulpit of
+the reformer and the housetop of the fanatic, this soap-box. From it the
+voice to the city is often a pious one, an impious one, and almost
+always a raucous one. Luther and Sophocles and even a Citizen of
+Nazareth made of the four winds of the street corner the walls of a
+temple of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>wisdom. What more fitting acropolis for freedom of speech
+than the great out-of-doors!</p>
+
+<p>Turning from the incline of cross-street into this petty Bagdad of the
+petty wise, the voice of the street corner lifted itself above the
+inarticulate din of the thoroughfare. A youth, thewed like an ox,
+surmounted on a stack of three self-provided canned-goods boxes, his
+in-at-the-waist silhouette thrown out against a sky that was almost
+ready to break out in stars; a crowd tightening about him.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a soldier-boy talkin', Gert."</p>
+
+<p>"If it ain't!" They tiptoed at the fringe of the circle, heads back.</p>
+
+<p>"Look, Gert, he's a lieutenant; he's got a shoulder-bar. And those four
+down there holding the flag are just privates. You can always tell a
+lieutenant by the bar."</p>
+
+<p>"Uh-huh."</p>
+
+<p>"Say, them boys do stack up some for Uncle Sam."</p>
+
+<p>"'Shh-h-h, Jimmie!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm here to tell you that them boys stack up some."</p>
+
+<p>A banner stiffened out in the breeze, Mr. Batch reading: "Enlist before
+you are drafted. Last chance to beat the draft. Prove your patriotism.
+Enlist now! Your country calls!"</p>
+
+<p>"Come on," said Mr. Batch.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait. I want to hear what he's saying."</p>
+
+<p>" ... there's not a man here before me can afford to shirk his duty to
+his country. The slacker can't get along without his country, but his
+country can very easily get along without him."</p>
+
+<p>Cheers.</p>
+
+<p>"The poor exemption boobs are already running for doctors' certificates
+and marriage licenses, but even if they get by with it&mdash;and it is
+ninety-nine to one they won't&mdash;they can't run away from their own
+degradation and shame."</p>
+
+<p>"Come on, Jimmie."</p>
+
+<p>"Wait."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span></p><p>"Men of America, for every one of you who tries to dodge his duty to
+his country there is a yellow streak somewhere underneath the hide of
+you. Women of America, every one of you that helps to foster the spirit
+of cowardice in your particular man or men is helping to make a coward.
+It's the cowards and the quitters and the slackers and dodgers that need
+this war more than the patriotic ones who are willing to buckle on and
+go!</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be a buttonhole patriot! A government that is good enough to live
+under is good enough to fight under!"</p>
+
+<p>Cheers.</p>
+
+<p>"If there is any reason on earth that has manifested itself for this
+devastating and terrible war it is that it has been a maker of men.</p>
+
+<p>"Ladies and gentlemen, I am back from four months in the trenches with
+the French army, and I've come home, now that my own country is at war,
+to give her every ounce of energy I've got to offer. As soon as a hole
+in my side is healed up I'm going back to those trenches, and I want to
+say to you that them four months of mine face to face with life and with
+death have done more for me than all my twenty-four civilian years put
+together."</p>
+
+<p>Cheers.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll be a different man, if I live to come back home after this war and
+take up my work again as a draftsman. Why, I've seen weaklings and
+self-confessed failures and even ninnies go into them trenches and come
+out&mdash;oh yes, plenty of them do come out&mdash;men. Men that have got close
+enough down to the facts of things to feel new realizations of what life
+means come over them. Men that have gotten back their pep, their
+ambitions, their unselfishness. That's what war can do for your men, you
+women who are helping them to foster the spirit of holding back, of
+cheating their government. That's what war can do for your men. Make of
+them the kind of men who some day can face their children without
+having<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> to hang their heads. Men who can answer for their part in making
+the world a safe place for democracy."</p>
+
+<p>An hour they stood there, the air quieting but chilling, and lavishly
+sown stars cropping out. Street lights had come out, too, throwing up in
+ever darker relief the figure above the heads of the crowd. His voice
+had coarsened and taken on a raw edge, but every gesture was flung from
+the socket, and from where they had forced themselves into the tight
+circle Gertie Slayback, her mouth fallen open and her head still back,
+could see the sinews of him ripple under khaki and the diaphragm lift
+for voice.</p>
+
+<p>There was a shift of speakers then, this time a private, still too
+rangy, but his looseness of frame seeming already to conform to the
+exigency of uniform.</p>
+
+<p>"Come on, Jimmie. I&mdash;I'm cold."</p>
+
+<p>They worked out into the freedom of the sidewalk, and for ten minutes,
+down blocks of petty shops already lighted, walked in a silence that
+grew apace.</p>
+
+<p>He was suddenly conscious that she was crying, quietly, her handkerchief
+wadded against her mouth. He strode on with a scowl and his head bent.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's sit down in this little park, Jimmie. I'm tired."</p>
+
+<p>They rested on a bench on one of those small triangles of
+breathing-space which the city ekes out now and then; mill ends of land
+parcels.</p>
+
+<p>He took immediately to roving the toe of his shoe in and out among the
+gravel. She stole out her hand to his arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Jimmie?" Her voice was in the gauze of a whisper that hardly left
+her throat.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what?" he said, still toeing.</p>
+
+<p>"There&mdash;there's a lot of things we never thought about, Jimmie."</p>
+
+<p>"Aw!"</p>
+
+<p>"Eh, Jimmie?"</p>
+
+<p>"You mean <i>you</i> never thought about."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p><p>"What do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know what I mean alrighty."</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I was the one that suggested it, Jimmie, but&mdash;but you fell in. I&mdash;I
+just couldn't bear to think of it, Jimmie&mdash;your going and all. I
+suggested it, but&mdash;you fell in."</p>
+
+<p>"Say, when a fellow's shoved he falls. I never gave a thought to
+sneaking an exemption until it was put in my head. I'd smash the fellow
+in the face that calls me coward, I will."</p>
+
+<p>"You could have knocked me down with a feather, Jimmie, looking at it
+his way, all of a sudden."</p>
+
+<p>"You couldn't me. Don't think I was ever strong for the whole business.
+I mean the exemption part. I wasn't going to say nothing. What's the
+use, seeing the way you had your heart set on&mdash;on things? But the whole
+business, if you want to know it, went against my grain. I'll smash the
+fellow in the face that calls me a coward."</p>
+
+<p>"I know, Jimmie; you&mdash;you're right. It was me suggested hurrying things
+like this. Sneakin'! Oh, God! ain't I the messer-up!"</p>
+
+<p>"Lay easy, girl. I'm going to see it through. I guess there's been
+fellows before me and will be after me who have done worse. I'm going to
+see it through. All I got to say is I'll smash up the fellow calls me
+coward. Come on, forget it. Let's go."</p>
+
+<p>She was close to him, her cheek crinkled against his with the frank kind
+of social unconsciousness the park bench seems to engender.</p>
+
+<p>"Come on, Gert. I got a hunger on."</p>
+
+<p>"'Shh-h-h, Jimmie! Let me think. I'm thinking."</p>
+
+<p>"Too much thinking killed a cat. Come on."</p>
+
+<p>"Jimmie!"</p>
+
+<p>"Huh?"</p>
+
+<p>"Jimmie&mdash;would you&mdash;had you ever thought about being a soldier?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span></p><p>"Sure. I came in an ace of going into the army that time after&mdash;after
+that little Central Street trouble of mine. I've got a book in my trunk
+this minute on military tactics. Wouldn't surprise me a bit to see me
+land in the army some day."</p>
+
+<p>"It's a fine thing, Jimmie, for a fellow&mdash;the army."</p>
+
+<p>"Yeh, good for what ails him."</p>
+
+<p>She drew him back, pulling at his shoulder so that finally he faced her.
+"Jimmie!"</p>
+
+<p>"Huh?"</p>
+
+<p>"I got an idea."</p>
+
+<p>"Shoot."</p>
+
+<p>"You remember once, honey-bee, how I put it to you that night at
+Ceiner's how, if it was for your good, no sacrifice was too much to
+make."</p>
+
+<p>"Forget it."</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't believe it."</p>
+
+<p>"Aw, say now, what's the use digging up ancient history?"</p>
+
+<p>"You'd be right, Jimmie, not to believe it. I haven't lived up to what I
+said."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh Lord, honey! What's eating you now? Come to the point."</p>
+
+<p>She would not meet his eyes, turning her head from him to hide lips that
+would quiver. "Honey, it&mdash;it ain't coming off&mdash;that's all. Not
+now&mdash;anyways."</p>
+
+<p>"What ain't?"</p>
+
+<p>"Us."</p>
+
+<p>"Who?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know what I mean, Jimmie. It's like everything the soldier boy on
+the corner just said. I&mdash;I saw you getting red clear behind your ears
+over it. I&mdash;I was, too, Jimmie. It's like that soldier boy was put there
+on that corner just to show me, before it was too late, how wrong I been
+in every one of my ways. Us women who are helping to foster slackers.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+That's what we're making of them&mdash;slackers for life. And here I been
+thinking it was your good I had in mind, when all along it's been mine.
+That's what it's been, mine!"</p>
+
+<p>"Aw, now, Gert&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You got to go, Jimmie. You got to go, because you want to go
+and&mdash;because I want you to go."</p>
+
+<p>"Where?"</p>
+
+<p>"To war."</p>
+
+<p>He took hold of her two arms because they were trembling. "Aw, now,
+Gert, I didn't say anything complaining. I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You did, Jimmie, you did, and&mdash;and I never was so glad over you that
+you did complain. I just never was so glad. I want you to go, Jimmie. I
+want you to go and get a man made out of you. They'll make a better job
+out of you than ever I can. I want you to get the yellow streak washed
+out. I want you to get to be all the things he said you would. For every
+line he was talking up there, I could see my boy coming home to me some
+day better than anything I could make out of him, babying him the way I
+can't help doing. I could see you, honey-bee, coming back to me with the
+kind of lift to your head a fellow has when he's been fighting to make
+the world a safe place for dem&mdash;for whatever it was he said. I want you
+to go, Jimmie. I want you to beat the draft, too. Nothing on earth can
+make me not want you to go."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Gert&mdash;you're kiddin'!"</p>
+
+<p>"Honey, you want to go, don't you? You want to square up those shoulders
+and put on khaki, don't you? Tell me you want to go!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why&mdash;why, yes, Gert, if&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you're going, Jimmie! You're going!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, girl&mdash;you're crazy! Our flat! Our furniture&mdash;our&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What's a flat? What's furniture? What's anything? There's not a firm in
+business wouldn't take back a boy's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>furniture&mdash;a boy's
+everything&mdash;that's going out to fight for&mdash;for dem-o-cracy! What's a
+flat? What's anything?"</p>
+
+<p>He let drop his head to hide his eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Do you know it is said that on the Desert of Sahara, the slope of
+Sorrento, and the marble of Fifth Avenue the sun can shine whitest?
+There is an iridescence to its glittering on bleached sand, blue bay,
+and Carrara fa&ccedil;ade that is sheer light distilled to its utmost.</p>
+
+<p>On one such day when, standing on the high slope of Fifth Avenue where
+it rises toward the Park, and looking down on it, surging to and fro, it
+was as if, so manifest the brilliancy, every head wore a tin helmet,
+parrying sunlight at a thousand angles of refraction.</p>
+
+<p>Parade-day, all this glittering midstream is swept to the clean sheen of
+a strip of moir&eacute;, this splendid desolation blocked on each side by
+crowds half the density of the sidewalk.</p>
+
+<p>On one of these sun-drenched Saturdays dedicated by a growing tradition
+to this or that national expression, the Ninety-ninth Regiment, to a
+flare of music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned
+into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable
+row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw
+if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were,
+for the great primordial mire of war.</p>
+
+<p>There is no state of being so finely sensitized as national
+consciousness. A gauntlet down, and it surges up. One ripple of a flag
+defended can goose-flesh a nation. How bitter and how sweet it is to
+give a soldier!</p>
+
+<p>To the seething kinetic chemistry of such mingling emotions there were
+women who stood in the frontal crowds of the sidewalks stifling
+hysteria, or ran after in terror at sight of one so personally hers,
+receding in that great impersonal wave of olive drab.</p>
+
+<p>And yet the air was martial with banner and with shout.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> And the ecstasy
+of such moments is like a dam against reality, pressing it back. It is
+in the pompless watches of the night or of too long days that such dams
+break, excoriating.</p>
+
+<p>For the thirty blocks of its course Gertie Slayback followed that wave
+of men, half run and half walk. Down from the curb, and at the beck and
+call of this or that policeman up again, only to find opportunity for
+still another dive out from the invisible roping off of the sidewalk
+crowds.</p>
+
+<p>From the middle of his line, she could see, sometimes, the tail of
+Jimmie Batch's glance roving for her, but to all purports his eye was
+solely for his own replica in front of him, and at such times, when he
+marched, his back had a little additional straightness that was almost
+swayback.</p>
+
+<p>Nor was Gertie Slayback crying. On the contrary, she was inclined to
+laughter. A little too inclined to a high and brittle sort of dissonance
+over which she seemed to have no control.</p>
+
+<p>"'By, Jimmie. So long! Jimmie! You-hoo!"</p>
+
+<p>Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp.</p>
+
+<p>"You-hoo! Jimmie! So long, Jimmie!"</p>
+
+<p>At Fourteenth Street, and to the solemn stroke of one from a tower, she
+broke off suddenly without even a second look back, dodging under the
+very arms of the crowd as she ran out from it.</p>
+
+<p>She was one and three-quarter minutes late when she punched the
+time-clock beside the Complaints and Adjustment Desk in the
+Bargain-Basement.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="FANNIE_HURST" id="FANNIE_HURST"></a>FANNIE HURST</h2>
+
+<p>"I find myself at twenty-nine exactly where at fourteen I had planned I
+would be." So Miss Hurst, in a sketch written for the <i>American
+Magazine</i> (March, 1919), sums up the story of a remarkable literary
+career.</p>
+
+<p>Fannie Hurst was born in St. Louis, October 19, 1889. She attended the
+public schools, and began to write&mdash;with the firm intention of becoming
+an author&mdash;before she was out of grammar school. "At fourteen," she
+tells us in the article just referred to, "the one pigeon-hole of my
+little girl's desk was already stuffed with packets of rejected verse
+which had been furtively written, furtively mailed, and still more
+furtively received back again by heading off the postman a block before
+he reached our door." To this dream of authorship&mdash;the secret of which
+was carefully guarded from her family&mdash;she sacrificed her play and even
+her study hours. The first shock to her family came on St. Valentine's
+Day. There was to be a party that night, her first real party. A new
+dress was ready for the occasion, and a boy escort was to call for her
+in a cab. It happened that Valentine's day fell on Saturday, and
+Saturday was her time for writing. That day she turned from poetry to
+fiction, and was just in the middle of her first story when it came time
+to get ready for the party. She did not get ready. The escort arrived,
+cab and all; the family protested, but all to no purpose. She finished
+the story, mailed it, three weeks later received it back, and began her
+second story. All through her high school days she mailed a manuscript
+every Saturday, and they always came back.</p>
+
+<p>After high school she entered Washington University, St. Louis,
+graduating in <b>1909.</b> And still she kept writing. To<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> one journal alone
+she sent during those four years, thirty-four short stories. And they
+all came back&mdash;all but one. Just before graduation she sold her first
+article, a little sketch first written as a daily theme, which was
+published in a local weekly, and brought her three dollars. This was the
+total result of eight years' literary effort. So quite naturally she
+determined to go on.</p>
+
+<p>She announced to her family that she was going to New York City to
+become a writer. There was a stormy discussion in the Hurst family, but
+it ended in her going away, with a bundle of manuscripts in her trunk,
+to brave the big city alone. She found a tiny furnished room and set
+forth to besiege the editors' offices. One evening she returned, to find
+the house being raided, a patrol wagon at the curb, and the lodgers
+being hustled into it. She crossed the street and walked on, and never
+saw her bag or baggage again. By the help of the Young Women's Christian
+Association she found another room, in different surroundings, and set
+out again to make the round of the editorial offices.</p>
+
+<p>Then followed months and months of "writing, rewriting, rejections, and
+re-rejections." From home came letters now beseeching, now commanding
+her to return, and at length cutting off her allowance. So she returned
+her rented typewriter and applied at a theatrical agency. She secured a
+small part in a Broadway company, and then came her first acceptance of
+a story, with an actual check for thirty dollars. She left the stage and
+rented another typewriter,&mdash;but it was six months before she sold
+another story.</p>
+
+<p>In all this time she dipped deeply into the great stream of the city's
+life. To quote her own account:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>For a month I lived with an Armenian family on West Broadway, in a
+room over a tobacconist's shop. I apprenticed myself as a
+sales-girl in New York's most gigantic department store. Four and
+one-quarter yards of ribbon at seven and a half cents a yard proved
+my Waterloo, and my resignation at the end of one week<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> was not
+entirely voluntary. I served as waitress in one of New York's most
+gigantic chain of white-tiled lunch rooms. I stitched boys' pants
+in a Polish sweatshop, and lived for two days in New York's most
+rococo hotel. I took a graduate course in Anglo Saxon at Columbia
+University, and one in lamp-shade making at Wanamaker's: wormed
+into a Broadway musical show as wardrobe girl, and went out on a
+self-appointed newspaper assignment to interview the mother of the
+richest baby in the world.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>All these experiences yielded rich material for stories, but no one
+would print them. Her money was gone; so was a diamond ring that had
+been a Commencement present; it seemed as if there was nothing left but
+to give up the struggle and go back home. Then, just as she had struck
+bottom, an editor actually told her she could write, and followed up his
+remark by buying three stories. Since that time she has never had a
+story rejected, and her checks have gone up from two figures into four.
+And so, at the end of a long fight, as she says, "I find myself at
+twenty-nine exactly where at fourteen I had planned I would be. And best
+of all, what popular success I am enjoying has come not from pandering
+to popular demand or editorial policy, but from pandering to my own
+inner convictions, which are like little soul-tapers, lighting the way."</p>
+
+<p>All her work has been in the form of the short story. Her first book,
+<i>Just Around the Corner</i>, published in 1914, is a collection of stories
+dealing with the life of working girls in a city. <i>Every Soul Hath Its
+Song</i> is a similar collection; the title suggests the author's outlook
+upon life. Some one has said that in looking at a puddle of water, you
+may see either the mud at the bottom or the sky reflected on its
+surface. Miss Hurst sees the reflection of the sky. The <i>Boston
+Transcript</i> said of this book: "Here at last is a story writer who is
+bent on listening to the voices of America and interpreting them."
+<i>Gaslight Sonatas</i>, from which "Bitter-Sweet" is taken, showed an
+advance over her earlier work. Two of the stories from this volume were
+selected by Mr. O'Brien for his volume, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span><i>Best Short Stories</i>, for 1916
+and 1917. <i>Humoresque</i>, her latest work, continues her studies of city
+types, drawn from New York and St. Louis. The stories show her insight
+into character and her graphic descriptive power. Miss Hurst is also the
+author of two plays, <i>The Land of the Free</i> and <i>The Good Provider</i>.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IN_THE_LUMBER_COUNTRY" id="IN_THE_LUMBER_COUNTRY"></a>IN THE LUMBER COUNTRY</h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p><p><i>The men of the woods are not as the men of the cities. The great open
+spaces where men battle with the primeval forest set their mark upon
+their inhabitants, not only in physique but in character. The
+lumberman,&mdash;rough, frank, independent, humorous, equally ready for a
+fight or a frolic, has been portrayed at full length by Stewart Edward
+White in</i> <span class="smcap">The Blazed Trail</span> <i>and</i> <span class="smcap">The Riverman</span>. <i>In the following sketch,
+taken from his</i> <span class="smcap">Blazed Trail Stories</span>, <i>he shows the lumberman at work
+and at play.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_RIVERMAN" id="THE_RIVERMAN"></a>THE RIVERMAN</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Stewart Edward White</span></h3>
+
+<p>I first met him one Fourth of July afternoon in the middle eighties. The
+sawdust streets and high board sidewalks of the lumber town were filled
+to the brim with people. The permanent population, dressed in the
+stiffness of its Sunday best, escorted gingham wives or sweethearts; a
+dozen outsiders like myself tried not to be too conspicuous in a city
+smartness; but the great multitude was composed of the men of the woods.
+I sat, chair-tilted by the hotel, watching them pass. Their heavy
+woollen shirts crossed by the broad suspenders, the red of their sashes
+or leather shine of their belts, their short kersey trousers "stagged"
+off to leave a gap between the knee and the heavily spiked "cork
+boots"&mdash;all these were distinctive enough of their class, but most
+interesting to me were the eyes that peered from beneath their little
+round hats tilted rakishly askew. They were all subtly alike, those
+eyes. Some were black, some were brown, or gray, or blue, but all were
+steady and unabashed, all looked straight at you with a strange humorous
+blending of aggression and respect for your own business, and all
+without exception wrinkled at the corners with a suggestion of dry
+humor. In my half-conscious scrutiny I probably stared harder than I
+knew, for all at once a laughing pair of blue eyes suddenly met mine
+full, and an ironical voice drawled,</p>
+
+<p>"Say, bub, you look as interested as a man killing snakes. Am I your
+long-lost friend?"</p>
+
+<p>The tone of the voice matched accurately the attitude of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> man, and
+that was quite non-committal. He stood cheerfully ready to meet the
+emergency. If I sought trouble, it was here to my hand; or if I needed
+help he was willing to offer it.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess you are," I replied, "if you can tell me what all this outfit's
+headed for."</p>
+
+<p>He thrust back his hat and ran his hand through a mop of closely cropped
+light curls.</p>
+
+<p>"Birling match," he explained briefly. "Come on."</p>
+
+<p>I joined him, and together we followed the crowd to the river, where we
+roosted like cormorants on adjacent piles overlooking a patch of clear
+water among filled booms.</p>
+
+<p>"Drive just over," my new friend informed me. "Rear come down last
+night. Fourther July celebration. This little town will scratch fer th'
+tall timber along about midnight when the boys goes in to take her
+apart."</p>
+
+<p>A half-dozen men with peavies rolled a white-pine log of about a foot
+and a half in diameter into the clear water, where it lay rocking back
+and forth, three or four feet from the boom piles. Suddenly a man ran
+the length of the boom, leaped easily into the air, and landed with both
+feet square on one end of the floating log. That end disappeared in an
+ankle-deep swirl of white foam, the other rose suddenly, the whole
+timber, projected forward by the shock, drove headlong to the middle of
+the little pond. And the man, his arms folded, his knees just bent in
+the graceful nervous attitude of the circus-rider, stood upright like a
+statue of bronze.</p>
+
+<p>A roar approved this feat.</p>
+
+<p>"That's Dickey Darrell," said my informant, "Roaring Dick. He's hell
+<i>and</i> repeat. Watch him."</p>
+
+<p>The man on the log was small, with clean beautiful haunches and
+shoulders, but with hanging baboon arms. Perhaps his most striking
+feature was a mop of reddish-brown hair that overshadowed a little
+triangular white face accented by two reddish-brown quadrilaterals that
+served as eyebrows and a pair of inscrutable chipmunk eyes.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span></p><p>For a moment he poised erect in the great calm of the public performer.
+Then slowly he began to revolve the log under his feet. The lofty gaze,
+the folded arms, the straight supple waist budged not by a hair's
+breadth; only the feet stepped forward, at first deliberately, then
+faster and faster, until the rolling log threw a blue spray a foot into
+the air. Then suddenly <i>slap! slap!</i> the heavy caulks stamped a
+reversal. The log came instantaneously to rest, quivering exactly like
+some animal that had been spurred through its paces.</p>
+
+<p>"Magnificent!" I cried.</p>
+
+<p>"Hell, that's nothing!" my companion repressed me, "anybody can birl a
+log. Watch this."</p>
+
+<p>Roaring Dick for the first time unfolded his arms. With some appearance
+of caution he balanced his unstable footing into absolute immobility.
+Then he turned a somersault.</p>
+
+<p>This was the real thing. My friend uttered a wild yell of applause which
+was lost in a general roar.</p>
+
+<p>A long pike-pole shot out, bit the end of the timber, and towed it to
+the boom pile. Another man stepped on the log with Darrell. They stood
+facing each other, bent-kneed, alert. Suddenly with one accord they
+commenced to birl the log from left to right. The pace grew hot. Like
+squirrels treading a cage their feet twinkled. Then it became apparent
+that Darrell's opponent was gradually being forced from the top of the
+log. He could not keep up. Little by little, still moving desperately,
+he dropped back to the slant, then at last to the edge, and so off into
+the river with a mighty splash.</p>
+
+<p>"Clean birled!" commented my friend.</p>
+
+<p>One after another a half-dozen rivermen tackled the imperturbable Dick,
+but none of them possessed the agility to stay on top in the pace he set
+them. One boy of eighteen seemed for a moment to hold his own, and
+managed at least to keep out of the water even when Darrell had
+apparently reached his maximum speed. But that expert merely threw his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+entire weight into two reversing stamps of his feet, and the young
+fellow dove forward as abruptly as though he had been shied over a
+horse's head.</p>
+
+<p>The crowd was by now getting uproarious and impatient of volunteer
+effort to humble Darrell's challenge. It wanted the best, and at once.
+It began, with increasing insistence, to shout a name.</p>
+
+<p>"Jimmy Powers!" it vociferated, "Jimmy Powers!"</p>
+
+<p>And then by shamefaced bashfulness, by profane protest, by muttered and
+comprehensive curses I knew that my companion on the other pile was
+indicated.</p>
+
+<p>A dozen men near at hand began to shout. "Here he is!" they cried. "Come
+on, Jimmy." "Don't be a high banker." "Hang his hide on the fence."</p>
+
+<p>Jimmy, still red and swearing, suffered himself to be pulled from his
+elevation and disappeared in the throng. A moment later I caught his
+head and shoulders pushing toward the boom piles, and so in a moment he
+stepped warily aboard to face his antagonist.</p>
+
+<p>This was evidently no question to be determined by the simplicity of
+force or the simplicity of a child's trick. The two men stood
+half-crouched, face to face, watching each other narrowly, but making no
+move. To me they seemed like two wrestlers sparring for an opening.
+Slowly the log revolved one way; then slowly the other. It was a mere
+courtesy of salute. All at once Dick birled three rapid strokes from
+left to right as though about to roll the log, leaped into the air and
+landed square with both feet on the other slant of the timber. Jimmy
+Powers felt the jar, and acknowledged it by a spasmodic jerk with which
+he counterbalanced Darrell's weight. But he was not thrown.</p>
+
+<p>As though this daring and hazardous man&oelig;uvre had opened the combat,
+both men sprang to life. Sometimes the log rolled one way, sometimes the
+other, sometimes it jerked from side to side like a crazy thing, but
+always with the rapidity of light,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> always in a smother of spray and
+foam. The decided <i>spat, spat, spat</i> of the reversing blows from the
+caulked boots sounded like picket firing. I could not make out the
+different leads, feints, parries, and counters of this strange method of
+boxing, nor could I distinguish to whose initiative the various
+evolutions of that log could be ascribed. But I retain still a vivid
+mental picture of two men nearly motionless above the waist, nearly
+vibrant below it, dominating the insane gyrations of a stick of pine.</p>
+
+<p>The crowd was appreciative and partisan&mdash;for Jimmy Powers. It howled
+wildly, and rose thereby to even higher excitement. Then it forgot its
+manners utterly and groaned when it made out that a sudden splash
+represented its favorite, while the indomitable Darrell still trod the
+quarter-deck as champion birler for the year.</p>
+
+<p>I must confess I was as sorry as anybody. I climbed down from my
+cormorant roost, and picked my way between the alleys of aromatic piled
+lumber in order to avoid the press, and cursed the little gods heartily
+for undue partiality in the wrong direction. In this manner I happened
+on Jimmy Powers himself seated dripping on a board and examining his
+bare foot.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry," said I behind him. "How did he do it?"</p>
+
+<p>He whirled, and I could see that his laughing boyish face had become
+suddenly grim and stern, and that his eyes were shot with blood.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it's you, is it?" he growled disparagingly. "Well, that's how he
+did it."</p>
+
+<p>He held out his foot. Across the instep and at the base of the toes ran
+two rows of tiny round punctures from which the blood was oozing. I
+looked very inquiring.</p>
+
+<p>"He corked me!" Jimmy Powers explained. "Jammed his spikes into me!
+Stepped on my foot and tripped me, the&mdash;&mdash;" Jimmy Powers certainly could
+swear.</p>
+
+<p>"Why didn't you make a kick?" I cried.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span></p><p>"That ain't how I do it," he muttered, pulling on his heavy woollen
+sock.</p>
+
+<p>"But no," I insisted, my indignation mounting. "It's an outrage! That
+crowd was with you. All you had to do was to <i>say</i> something&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He cut me short. "And give myself away as a damn fool&mdash;sure Mike. I
+ought to know Dickey Darrell by this time, and I ought to be big enough
+to take care of myself." He stamped his foot into his driver's shoe and
+took me by the arm, his good humor apparently restored. "No, don't lose
+any hair, bub; I'll get even with Roaring Dick."</p>
+
+<p>That night, having by the advice of the proprietor moved my bureau and
+trunk against the bedroom door, I lay wide awake listening to the taking
+of the town apart. At each especially vicious crash I wondered if that
+might be Jimmy Powers getting even with Roaring Dick.</p>
+
+<p>The following year, but earlier in the season, I again visited my little
+lumber town. In striking contrast to the life of that other midsummer
+day were the deserted streets. The landlord knew me, and after I had
+washed and eaten approached me with a suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>"You got all day in front of you," said he; "why don't you take a horse
+and buggy and make a visit to the big jam? Everybody's up there more or
+less."</p>
+
+<p>In response to my inquiry, he replied:</p>
+
+<p>"They've jammed at the upper bend, jammed bad. The crew's been picking
+at her for near a week now, and last night Darrell was down to see about
+some more dynamite. It's worth seein'. The breast of her is near thirty
+feet high, and lots of water in the river."</p>
+
+<p>"Darrell?" said I, catching at the name.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. He's rear boss this year. Do you think you'd like to take a look
+at her?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think I should," I assented.</p>
+
+<p>The horse and I jogged slowly along a deep sand road,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> through wastes of
+pine stumps and belts of hardwood beautiful with the early spring, until
+finally we arrived at a clearing in which stood two huge tents, a
+mammoth kettle slung over a fire of logs, and drying racks about the
+timbers of another fire. A fat cook in the inevitable battered derby
+hat, two bare-armed cookees, and a chore "boy" of seventy-odd summers
+were the only human beings in sight. One of the cookees agreed to keep
+an eye on my horse. I picked my way down a well-worn trail toward the
+regular <i>clank, clank, click</i> of the peavies.</p>
+
+<p>I emerged finally to a plateau elevated some fifty or sixty feet above
+the river. A half-dozen spectators were already gathered. Among them I
+could not but notice a tall, spare, broad-shouldered young fellow
+dressed in a quiet business suit, somewhat wrinkled, whose square,
+strong, clean-cut face and muscular hands were tanned by the weather to
+a dark umber-brown. In another moment I looked down on the jam.</p>
+
+<p>The breast, as my landlord had told me, rose sheer from the water to the
+height of at least twenty-five feet, bristling and formidable. Back of
+it pressed the volume of logs packed closely in an apparently
+inextricable tangle as far as the eye could reach. A man near informed
+me that the tail was a good three miles up stream. From beneath this
+wonderful <i>chevaux de frise</i> foamed the current of the river,
+irresistible to any force less mighty than the statics of such a mass.</p>
+
+<p>A crew of forty or fifty men were at work. They clamped their peavies to
+the reluctant timbers, heaved, pushed, slid, and rolled them one by one
+into the current, where they were caught and borne away. They had been
+doing this for a week. As yet their efforts had made but slight
+impression on the bulk of the jam, but some time, with patience, they
+would reach the key-logs. Then the tangle would melt like sugar in the
+freshet, and these imperturbable workers would have to escape suddenly
+over the plunging logs to shore.</p>
+
+<p>My eye ranged over the men, and finally rested on Dickey<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> Darrell. He
+was standing on the slanting end of an upheaved log dominating the
+scene. His little triangular face with the accents of the quadrilateral
+eyebrows was pale with the blaze of his energy, and his chipmunk eyes
+seemed to flame with a dynamic vehemence that caused those on whom they
+fell to jump as though they had been touched with a hot poker. I had
+heard more of Dickey Darrell since my last visit, and was glad of the
+chance to observe Morrison &amp; Daly's best "driver" at work.</p>
+
+<p>The jam seemed on the very edge of breaking. After half an hour's
+strained expectation it seemed still on the very edge of breaking. So I
+sat down on a stump. Then for the first time I noticed another
+acquaintance, handling his peavie near the very person of the rear boss.</p>
+
+<p>"Hullo," said I to myself, "that's funny. I wonder if Jimmy Powers got
+even; and if so, why he is working so amicably and so near Roaring
+Dick."</p>
+
+<p>At noon the men came ashore for dinner. I paid a quarter into the cook's
+private exchequer and so was fed. After the meal I approached my
+acquaintance of the year before.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello, Powers," I greeted him, "I suppose you don't remember me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure," he responded heartily. "Ain't you a little early this year?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," I disclaimed, "this is a better sight than a birling match."</p>
+
+<p>I offered him a cigar, which he immediately substituted for his corn-cob
+pipe. We sat at the root of a tree.</p>
+
+<p>"It'll be a great sight when that jam pulls," said I.</p>
+
+<p>"You bet," he replied, "but she's a teaser. Even old Tim Shearer would
+have a picnic to make out just where the key-logs are. We've started her
+three times, but she's plugged tight every trip. Likely to pull almost
+any time."</p>
+
+<p>We discussed various topics. Finally I ventured:</p>
+
+<p>"I see your old friend Darrell is rear boss."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p><p>"Yes," said Jimmy Powers, dryly.</p>
+
+<p>"By the way, did you fellows ever square up on that birling match?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Jimmy Powers; then after an instant, "Not yet."</p>
+
+<p>I glanced at him to recognize the square set to the jaw that had
+impressed me so formidably the year before. And again his face relaxed
+almost quizzically as he caught sight of mine.</p>
+
+<p>"Bub," said he, getting to his feet, "those little marks are on my foot
+yet. And just you tie into one idea: Dickey Darrel's got it coming." His
+face darkened with a swift anger. "God damn his soul!" he said,
+deliberately. It was no mere profanity. It was an imprecation, and in
+its very deliberation I glimpsed the flare of an undying hate.</p>
+
+<p>About three o'clock that afternoon Jimmy's prediction was fulfilled.
+Without the slightest warning the jam "pulled." Usually certain
+premonitory <i>cracks</i>, certain sinkings down, groanings forward,
+grumblings, shruggings, and sullen, reluctant shiftings of the logs give
+opportunity for the men to assure their safety. This jam, after
+inexplicably hanging fire for a week, as inexplicably started like a
+sprinter almost into its full gait. The first few tiers toppled smash
+into the current, raising a waterspout like that made by a dynamite
+explosion; the mass behind plunged forward blindly, rising and falling
+as the integral logs were up-ended, turned over, thrust one side, or
+forced bodily into the air by the mighty power playing jack-straws with
+them.</p>
+
+<p>The rivermen, though caught unaware, reached either bank. They held
+their peavies across their bodies as balancing-poles, and zig-zagged
+ashore with a calmness and lack of haste that were in reality only an
+indication of the keenness with which they fore-estimated each chance.
+Long experience with the ways of saw-logs brought them out. They knew
+the correlation of these many forces just as the expert billiard-player<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>
+knows instinctively the various angles of incident and reflection
+between his cue-ball and its mark. Consequently they avoided the centers
+of eruption, paused on the spots steadied for the moment, dodged moving
+logs, trod those not yet under way, and so arrived on solid ground. The
+jam itself started with every indication of meaning business, gained
+momentum for a hundred feet, and then plugged to a standstill. The
+"break" was abortive.</p>
+
+<p>Now we all had leisure to notice two things. First, the movement had not
+been of the whole jam, as we had at first supposed, but only of a block
+or section of it twenty rods or so in extent. Thus between the part that
+had moved and the greater bulk that had not stirred lay a hundred feet
+of open water in which floated a number of loose logs. The second fact
+was, that Dickey Darrell had fallen into that open stretch of water and
+was in the act of swimming toward one of the floating logs. That much we
+were given time to appreciate thoroughly. Then the other section of the
+jam rumbled and began to break. Roaring Dick was caught between two
+gigantic millstones moving to crush him out of sight.</p>
+
+<p>An active figure darted down the tail of the first section, out over the
+floating logs, seized Darrell by the coat-collar, and so burdened began
+desperately to scale the very face of the breaking jam.</p>
+
+<p>Never was a more magnificent rescue. The logs were rolling, falling,
+diving against the laden man. He climbed as over a treadmill, a
+treadmill whose speed was constantly increasing. And when he finally
+gained the top, it was as the gap closed splintering beneath him and the
+man he had saved.</p>
+
+<p>It is not in the woodsman to be demonstrative at any time, but here was
+work demanding attention. Without a pause for breath or congratulation
+they turned to the necessity of the moment. The jam, the whole jam, was
+moving at last. Jimmy Powers ran ashore for his peavie. Roaring Dick,
+like a demon incarnate, threw himself into the work. Forty men attacked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+the jam in a dozen places, encouraging the movement, twisting aside the
+timbers that threatened to lock anew, directing pigmy-like the titanic
+forces into the channel of their efficiency. Roaring like wild cattle
+the logs swept by, at first slowly, then with the railroad rush of the
+curbed freshet. Men were everywhere, taking chances, like cowboys before
+the stampeded herd. And so, out of sight around the lower bend swept the
+front of the jam in a swirl of glory, the rivermen riding the great boom
+back of the creature they subdued, until at last, with the slackening
+current, the logs floated by free, cannoning with hollow sound one
+against the other. A half-dozen watchers, leaning statuesquely on the
+shafts of their peavies, watched the ordered ranks pass by.</p>
+
+<p>One by one the spectators departed. At last only myself and the
+brown-faced young man remained. He sat on a stump, staring with
+sightless eyes into vacancy. I did not disturb his thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>The sun dipped. A cool breeze of evening sucked up the river. Over near
+the cook-camp a big fire commenced to crackle by the drying frames. At
+dusk the rivermen straggled in from the down-river trail.</p>
+
+<p>The brown-faced young man arose and went to meet them. I saw him return
+in close conversation with Jimmy Powers. Before they reached us he had
+turned away with a gesture of farewell.</p>
+
+<p>Jimmy Powers stood looking after him long after his form had
+disappeared, and indeed even after the sound of his wheels had died
+toward town. As I approached, the riverman turned to me a face from
+which the reckless, contained self-reliance of the woods-worker had
+faded. It was wide-eyed with an almost awe-stricken wonder and
+adoration.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know who that is?" he asked me in a hushed voice. "That's
+Thorpe, Harry Thorpe. And do you know what he said to me just now, <i>me</i>?
+He told me he wanted me to work in Camp One next winter, Thorpe's One.
+And he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> told me I was the first man he ever hired straight into One."</p>
+
+<p>His breath caught with something like a sob.</p>
+
+<p>I had heard of the man and of his methods. I knew he had made it a
+practice of recruiting for his prize camp only from the employees of his
+other camps, that, as Jimmy said, he never "hired straight into One." I
+had heard, too, of his reputation among his own and other woodsmen. But
+this was the first time I had ever come into personal contact with his
+influence. It impressed me the more in that I had come to know Jimmy
+Powers and his kind.</p>
+
+<p>"You deserve it, every bit," said I. "I'm not going to call you a hero,
+because that would make you tired. What you did this afternoon showed
+nerve. It was a brave act. But it was a better act because your rescued
+your enemy, because you forgot everything but your common humanity when
+danger&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>I broke off. Jimmy was again looking at me with his ironically quizzical
+grin.</p>
+
+<p>"Bub," said he, "if you're going to hang any stars of Bethlehem on my
+Christmas tree, just call a halt right here. I didn't rescue that
+scalawag because I had any Christian sentiments, nary bit. I was just
+naturally savin' him for the birling match next Fourther July."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="STEWART_EDWARD_WHITE" id="STEWART_EDWARD_WHITE"></a>STEWART EDWARD WHITE</h2>
+
+<p>There are some authors whom we think of as bookmen; there are others
+whom we think of as men first, and as writers secondarily. Lowell, for
+example was a bookman; Roosevelt was a man of action who wrote books.
+Stewart Edward White, far more of a literary artist than Roosevelt,
+gives like him the impression of a man who has done things, of one who
+lives a full life, and produces books as a sort of by-product: very
+valuable, but not the chief end of existence.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. White was born in a small town near Grand Rapids, Michigan, March
+12, 1873. His parents had their own ideas about bringing up children.
+Instead of sending him to school they sent for a teacher to instruct
+him, they encouraged him to read, they took him traveling, not only to
+cities but to the silent places, the great forests, and to the lumber
+camps. He spent four years in California, and became a good horseman,
+making many trips in the saddle to the picturesque old ranches. When
+finally, he entered high school, at sixteen, he went in with boys of his
+own age, and graduated at eighteen, president of his class. And what he
+was most proud of was that he won and still holds, the five-mile running
+record of his school. He was intensely interested in birds at this time,
+and spent all his spare hours in the woods, studying bird-life. The
+result was a series of articles on birds, published in various
+scientific journals,&mdash;papers whose columns are not usually open to high
+school contributors.</p>
+
+<p>Then came a college course at the University of Michigan, with vacations
+spent in cruising about the Great Lakes in a twenty-eight-foot cutter
+sloop. After graduation he worked for a time in a packing house, then
+hearing of the discovery of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> gold in the Black Hills, he set off with
+the other gold-diggers. He did not find a mine, but the experience gave
+him a background for two later novels, <i>The Claim Jumpers</i>, and <i>The
+Westerners</i>.</p>
+
+<p>He went east for a year of graduate study at Columbia University. Like
+many other students, he found a friend in Professor Brander Matthews,
+who encouraged him to write of some of his western experiences. He sold
+a few short stories to magazines, and his first novel, <i>The Claim
+Jumpers</i> was accepted by Appleton's. <i>The Westerners</i>, his next book,
+brought him $500 for the serial rights, and with its publication he
+definitely determined upon making authorship his calling. But it was not
+authorship in a study. <i>The Blazed Trail</i> was written in a lumber camp
+in midwinter. He got up at four o'clock, wrote until eight, then put on
+his snowshoes and went out for a day's work. When the story was finished
+he gave it to the foreman of the camp to read. The man began it after
+supper, and when White got up next morning at four, he found him still
+reading, so he felt that the book would succeed.</p>
+
+<p>Another year he made a trip to the Hudson Bay country, and on his return
+wrote <i>Conjurer's House</i>. This was dramatized by George Broadhurst, and
+was very successful on the stage. With Thomas Fogarty, the artist, he
+made a long canoe trip, and the resulting book, <i>The Forest</i>, was
+illustrated by Mr. Fogarty. A camping trip in the Sierra Mountains of
+California was followed by the writing of <i>The Mountains</i>. His next
+book, <i>The Mystery</i>, was written jointly by Mr. White and Samuel Hopkins
+Adams. When it was finished they not only divided the proceeds but
+divided the characters for future stories, White taking Handy Solomon,
+whom he used again in <i>Arizona Nights</i>, and Darrow, who appeared in <i>The
+Sign at Six</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Then without warning, Mr. White went to Africa. His explanation was
+simple:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>I went because I wanted to. About once in so often the wheels get
+rusty and I have to get up and do something real or else blow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> up.
+Africa seemed to me a pretty real thing. Let me add that I did not
+go for material. I never go anywhere for material; if I did I
+should not get it. That attitude of mine would give me merely
+externals, which are not worth writing about. I go places merely
+because for one reason or another they attract me. Then if it
+happens that I get close enough to the life, I may later find that
+I have something to write about. A man rarely writes anything
+convincing unless he has lived the life; not with his critical
+faculty alert, but whole-heartedly and because, for the time being,
+it is his life.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Naturally he found that he had something to write about on his return.
+<i>The Land of Footprints</i>, <i>African Camp Fires</i>, <i>Simba</i>, and <i>The
+Leopard Woman</i> were books that grew out of his African trip. Mr. White
+next planned to write a series of three novels dealing with the romantic
+history of the state of California. The first of these books, <i>Gold</i>,
+describes the mad rush of the Forty-Niners on the first discovery of
+gold in California. <i>The Gray Dawn</i>, the second of the series, tells of
+the days of the Vigilantes, when the wild life of the mining camps
+slowly settled down to law and order. The coming of the World War was a
+fresh challenge to his adventurous spirit, and he saw service in France
+as a major in the U. S. Field Artillery.</p>
+
+<p>From this sketch it is apparent that Mr. White's books have all grown
+out of his experience, in the sense that the background is one that he
+has known. This explains the strong feeling of reality that we
+experience as we read his stories.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="NEW_ENGLAND_GRANITE" id="NEW_ENGLAND_GRANITE"></a>NEW ENGLAND GRANITE</h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span></p><p><i>From the day the Pilgrims landed on a rockbound coast, the name New
+Englander has suggested certain traits of character. It connotes a
+restraint of feeling which more impulsive persons may mistake for
+absence of feeling; a reserve carried almost to the point of coldness; a
+quiet dignity which to a breezy Westerner seems like "stand-offishness."
+But those who come to know New England people well, find that beneath
+the flint is fire. Dorothy Canfield suggests the theme of her story in
+the title&mdash;"Flint and Fire."</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="FLINT_AND_FIRE" id="FLINT_AND_FIRE"></a>FLINT AND FIRE</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Dorothy Canfield</span></h3>
+
+<p>My husband's cousin had come up from the city, slightly more fagged and
+sardonic than usual, and as he stretched himself out in the big
+porch-chair he was even more caustic than was his wont about the
+bareness and emotional sterility of the lives of our country people.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps they had, a couple of centuries ago, when the Puritan
+hallucination was still strong, a certain fierce savor of religious
+intolerance; but now that that has died out, and no material prosperity
+has come to let them share in the larger life of their century, there is
+a flatness, a mean absence of warmth or color, a deadness to all
+emotions but the pettiest sorts&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>I pushed the pitcher nearer him, clinking the ice invitingly, and
+directed his attention to our iris-bed as a more cheerful object of
+contemplation than the degeneracy of the inhabitants of Vermont. The
+flowers burned on their tall stalks like yellow tongues of flame. The
+strong, sword-like green leaves thrust themselves boldly up into the
+spring air like a challenge. The plants vibrated with vigorous life.</p>
+
+<p>In the field beyond them, as vigorous as they, strode Adoniram Purdon
+behind his team, the reins tied together behind his muscular neck, his
+hands grasping the plow with the masterful sureness of the successful
+practitioner of an art. The hot, sweet spring sunshine shone down on
+'Niram's head with its thick crest of brown hair, the ineffable odor of
+newly turned earth steamed up about him like incense, the mountain
+stream beyond him leaped and shouted. His powerful body answered every
+call made on it with the precision of a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>splendid machine. But there was
+no elation in the grimly set face as 'Niram wrenched the plow around a
+big stone, or as, in a more favorable furrow, the gleaming share sped
+steadily along before the plowman, turning over a long, unbroken brown
+ribbon of earth.</p>
+
+<p>My cousin-in-law waved a nervous hand toward the sternly silent figure
+as it stepped doggedly behind the straining team, the head bent forward,
+the eyes fixed on the horses' heels.</p>
+
+<p>"There!" he said. "There is an example of what I mean. Is there another
+race on earth which could produce a man in such a situation who would
+not on such a day sing, or whistle, or at least hold up his head and
+look at all the earthly glories about him?"</p>
+
+<p>I was silent, but not for lack of material for speech. 'Niram's reasons
+for austere self-control were not such as I cared to discuss with a man
+of my cousin's mental attitude. As we sat looking at him the noon
+whistle from the village blew and the wise old horses stopped in the
+middle of a furrow. 'Niram unharnessed them, led them to the shade of a
+tree, and put on their nose-bags. Then he turned and came toward the
+house.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't I seem to remember," murmured my cousin under his breath, "that,
+even though he is a New-Englander, he has been known to make up errands
+to your kitchen to see your pretty Ev'leen Ann?"</p>
+
+<p>I looked at him hard; but he was only gazing down, rather cross-eyed, on
+his grizzled mustache, with an obvious petulant interest in the increase
+of white hairs in it. Evidently his had been but a chance shot. 'Niram
+stepped up on the grass at the edge of the porch. He was so tall that he
+overtopped the railing easily, and, reaching a long arm over to where I
+sat, he handed me a small package done up in yellowish tissue-paper.
+Without hat-raisings, or good-mornings or any other of the greetings
+usual in a more effusive civilization, he explained briefly:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p><p>"My stepmother wanted I should give you this. She said to thank you for
+the grape-juice." As he spoke he looked at me gravely out of deep-set
+blue eyes, and when he had delivered his message he held his peace.</p>
+
+<p>I expressed myself with the babbling volubility of one whose manners
+have been corrupted by occasional sojourns in the city. "Oh, 'Niram!" I
+cried protestingly, as I opened the package and took out an exquisitely
+wrought old-fashioned collar. "Oh, 'Niram! How <i>could</i> your stepmother
+give such a thing away? Why, it must be one of her precious old relics.
+I don't <i>want</i> her to give me something every time I do some little
+thing for her. Can't a neighbor send her in a few bottles of grape-juice
+without her thinking she must pay it back somehow? It's not kind of her.
+She has never yet let me do the least thing for her without repaying me
+with something that is worth ever so much more than my trifling
+services."</p>
+
+<p>When I had finished my prattling, 'Niram repeated, with an accent of
+finality, "She wanted I should give it to you."</p>
+
+<p>The older man stirred in his chair. Without looking at him I knew that
+his gaze on the young rustic was quizzical and that he was recording on
+the tablets of his merciless memory the ungraceful abruptness of the
+other's action and manner.</p>
+
+<p>"How is your stepmother feeling to-day, 'Niram?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Worse."</p>
+
+<p>'Niram came to a full stop with the word. My cousin covered his
+satirical mouth with his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Can't the doctor do anything to relieve her?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>'Niram moved at last from his Indian-like immobility. He looked up under
+the brim of his felt hat at the sky-line of the mountain, shimmering
+iridescent above us. "He says maybe 'lectricity would help her some. I'm
+goin' to git her the batteries and things soon's I git the rubber
+bandages paid for."</p>
+
+<p>There was a long silence. My cousin stood up, yawning, and sauntered
+away toward the door. "Shall I send Ev'leen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> Ann out to get the pitcher
+and glasses?" he asked in an accent which he evidently thought very
+humorously significant.</p>
+
+<p>The strong face under the felt hat turned white, the jaw muscles set
+hard, but for all this show of strength there was an instant when the
+man's eyes looked out with the sick, helpless revelation of pain they
+might have had when 'Niram was a little boy of ten, a third of his
+present age, and less than half his present stature. Occasionally it is
+horrifying to see how a chance shot rings the bell.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no! Never mind!" I said hastily. "I'll take the tray in when I go."</p>
+
+<p>Without salutation or farewell 'Niram Purdon turned and went back to his
+work.</p>
+
+<p>The porch was an enchanted place, walled around with starlit darkness,
+visited by wisps of breezes shaking down from their wings the breath of
+lilac and syringa, flowering wild grapes, and plowed fields. Down at the
+foot of our sloping lawn the little river, still swollen by the melted
+snow from the mountains, plunged between its stony banks and shouted its
+brave song to the stars.</p>
+
+<p>We three middle-aged people&mdash;Paul, his cousin, and I&mdash;had disposed our
+uncomely, useful, middle-aged bodies in the big wicker chairs and left
+them there while our young souls wandered abroad in the sweet, dark
+glory of the night. At least Paul and I were doing this, as we sat, hand
+in hand, thinking of a May night twenty years before. One never knows
+what Horace is thinking of, but apparently he was not in his usual
+captious vein, for after a long pause he remarked, "It is a night almost
+indecorously inviting to the making of love."</p>
+
+<p>My answer seemed grotesquely out of key with this, but its sequence was
+clear in my mind. I got up, saying: "Oh, that reminds me&mdash;I must go and
+see Ev'leen Ann. I'd forgotten to plan to-morrow's dinner."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, everlastingly Ev'leen Ann!" mocked Horace from his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> corner. "Can't
+you think of anything but Ev'leen Ann and her affairs?"</p>
+
+<p>I felt my way through the darkness of the house, toward the kitchen,
+both doors of which were tightly closed. When I stepped into the hot,
+close room, smelling of food and fire, I saw Ev'leen Ann sitting on the
+straight kitchen chair, the yellow light of the bracket-lamp bearing
+down on her heavy braids and bringing out the exquisitely subtle
+modeling of her smooth young face. Her hands were folded in her lap. She
+was staring at the blank wall, and the expression of her eyes so
+startled and shocked me that I stopped short and would have retreated if
+it had not been too late. She had seen me, roused herself, and said
+quietly, as though continuing a conversation interrupted the moment
+before:</p>
+
+<p>"I had been thinking that there was enough left of the roast to make
+hash-balls for dinner"&mdash;"hash-balls" is Ev'leen Ann's decent Anglo-Saxon
+name for croquettes&mdash;"and maybe you'd like a rhubarb pie."</p>
+
+<p>I knew well enough she had been thinking of no such thing, but I could
+as easily have slapped a reigning sovereign on the back as broken in on
+the regal reserve of Ev'leen Ann in her clean gingham.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes, Ev'leen Ann," I answered in her own tone of reasonable
+consideration of the matter; "that would be nice, and your pie-crust is
+so flaky that even Mr. Horace will have to be pleased."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Horace" is our title for the sardonic cousin whose carping ways are
+half a joke, and half a menace in our family.</p>
+
+<p>Ev'leen Ann could not manage the smile which should have greeted this
+sally. She looked down soberly at the white-pine top of the kitchen
+table and said, "I guess there is enough sparrow-grass up in the garden
+for a mess, too, if you'd like that."</p>
+
+<p>"That would taste very good," I agreed, my heart aching for her.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span></p><p>"And creamed potatoes," she finished bravely, thrusting my unspoken
+pity from her.</p>
+
+<p>"You know I like creamed potatoes better than any other kind," I
+concurred.</p>
+
+<p>There was a silence. It seemed inhuman to go and leave the stricken
+young thing to fight her trouble alone in the ugly prison, her
+work-place, though I thought I could guess why Ev'leen Ann had shut the
+doors so tightly. I hung near her, searching my head for something to
+say, but she helped me by no casual remark. 'Niram is not the only one
+of our people who possesses to the full the supreme gift of silence.
+Finally I mentioned the report of a case of measles in the village, and
+Ev'leen Ann responded in kind with the news that her Aunt Emma had
+bought a potato-planter. Ev'leen Ann is an orphan, brought up by a
+well-to-do spinster aunt, who is strong-minded and runs her own farm.
+After a time we glided by way of similar transitions to the mention of
+his name.</p>
+
+<p>"'Niram Purdon tells me his stepmother is no better," I said. "Isn't it
+too bad?" I thought it well for Ev'leen Ann to be dragged out of her
+black cave of silence once in a while, even if it could be done only by
+force. As she made no answer, I went on. "Everybody who knows 'Niram
+thinks it splendid of him to do so much for his stepmother."</p>
+
+<p>Ev'leen Ann responded with a detached air, as though speaking of a
+matter in China: "Well, it ain't any more than what he should. She was
+awful good to him when he was little and his father got so sick. I guess
+'Niram wouldn't ha' had much to eat if she hadn't ha' gone out sewing to
+earn it for him and Mr. Purdon." She added firmly, after a moment's
+pause, "No, ma'am, I don't guess it's any more than what 'Niram had
+ought to do."</p>
+
+<p>"But it's very hard on a young man to feel that he's not able to marry,"
+I continued. Once in a great while we came so near the matter as this.
+Ev'leen Ann made no answer. Her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> face took on a pinched look of
+sickness. She set her lips as though she would never speak again. But I
+knew that a criticism of 'Niram would always rouse her, and said: "And
+really, I think 'Niram makes a great mistake to act as he does. A wife
+would be a help to him. She could take care of Mrs. Purdon and keep the
+house."</p>
+
+<p>Ev'leen Ann rose to the bait, speaking quickly with some heat: "I guess
+'Niram knows what's right for him to do! He can't afford to marry when
+he can't even keep up with the doctor's bills and all. He keeps the
+house himself, nights and mornings, and Mrs. Purdon is awful handy about
+taking care of herself, for all she's bedridden. That's her way, you
+know. She can't bear to have folks do for her. She'd die before she'd
+let anybody do anything for her that she could anyways do for herself!"</p>
+
+<p>I sighed acquiescingly. Mrs. Purdon's fierce independence was a rock on
+which every attempt at sympathy or help shattered itself to atoms. There
+seemed to be no other emotion left in her poor old work-worn shell of a
+body. As I looked at Ev'leen Ann it seemed rather a hateful
+characteristic, and I remarked, "It seems to me it's asking a good deal
+of 'Niram to spoil his life in order that his stepmother can go on
+pretending she's independent."</p>
+
+<p>Ev'leen Ann explained hastily: "Oh, 'Niram doesn't tell her anything
+about&mdash;She doesn't know he would like to&mdash;he don't want she should be
+worried&mdash;and, anyhow, as 'tis, he can't earn enough to keep ahead of all
+the doctors cost."</p>
+
+<p>"But the right kind of a wife&mdash;a good, competent girl&mdash;could help out by
+earning something, too."</p>
+
+<p>Ev'leen Ann looked at me forlornly, with no surprise. The idea was
+evidently not new to her. "Yes, ma'am, she could. But 'Niram says he
+ain't the kind of man to let his wife go out working." Even while she
+dropped under the killing verdict of his pride she was loyal to his
+standards and uttered no complaint. She went on, "'Niram wants Aunt
+Em'line to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> have things the way she wants 'em, as near as he can give
+'em to her&mdash;and it's right she should."</p>
+
+<p>"Aunt Emeline?" I repeated, surprised at her absence of mind. "You mean
+Mrs. Purdon, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>Ev'leen Ann looked vexed at her slip, but she scorned to attempt any
+concealment. She explained dryly, with the shy, stiff embarrassment our
+country people have in speaking of private affairs: "Well, she <i>is</i> my
+Aunt Em'line, Mrs. Purdon is, though I don't hardly ever call her that.
+You see, Aunt Emma brought me up, and she and Aunt Em'line don't have
+anything to do with each other. They were twins, and when they were
+girls they got edgeways over 'Niram's father, when 'Niram was a baby and
+his father was a young widower and come courting. Then Aunt Em'line
+married him, and Aunt Emma never spoke to her afterward."</p>
+
+<p>Occasionally, in walking unsuspectingly along one of our leafy lanes,
+some such fiery geyser of ancient heat uprears itself in a boiling
+column. I never get used to it, and started back now.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I never heard of that before, and I've known your Aunt Emma and
+Mrs. Purdon for years!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, they're pretty old now," said Ev'leen Ann listlessly, with the
+natural indifference of self-centered youth to the bygone tragedies of
+the preceding generation. "It happened quite some time ago. And both of
+them were so touchy, if anybody seemed to speak about it, that folks got
+in the way of letting it alone. First Aunt Emma wouldn't speak to her
+sister because she'd married the man she'd wanted, and then when Aunt
+Emma made out so well farmin' and got so well off, why, then Mrs. Purdon
+wouldn't try to make up because she was so poor. That was after Mr.
+Purdon had had his stroke of paralysis and they'd lost their farm and
+she'd taken to goin' out sewin'&mdash;not but what she was always perfectly
+satisfied with her bargain. She always acted as though she'd rather have
+her husband's old shirt stuffed with straw than any other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> man's whole
+body. He was a real nice man, I guess, Mr. Purdon was."</p>
+
+<p>There I had it&mdash;the curt, unexpanded chronicle of two passionate lives.
+And there I had also the key to Mrs. Purdon's fury of independence. It
+was the only way in which she could defend her husband against the
+charge, so damning to her world, of not having provided for his wife. It
+was the only monument she could rear to her husband's memory. And her
+husband had been all there was in life for her!</p>
+
+<p>I stood looking at her young kinswoman's face, noting the granite under
+the velvet softness of its youth, and divining the flame underlying the
+granite. I longed to break through her wall and to put my arms about
+her, and on the impulse of the moment I cast aside the pretense of
+casualness in our talk.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my dear!" I said. "Are you and 'Niram always to go on like this?
+Can't anybody help you?"</p>
+
+<p>Ev'leen Ann looked at me, her face suddenly old and gray. "No, ma'am; we
+ain't going to go on this way. We've decided, 'Niram and I have, that it
+ain't no use. We've decided that we'd better not go places together any
+more or see each other. It's too&mdash;If 'Niram thinks we can't"&mdash;she flamed
+so that I knew she was burning from head to foot&mdash;"it's better for us
+not&mdash;&mdash;" She ended in a muffled voice, hiding her face in the crook of
+her arm.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, yes; now I knew why Ev'leen Ann had shut out the passionate breath
+of the spring night!</p>
+
+<p>I stood near her, a lump in my throat, but I divined the anguish of her
+shame at her involuntary self-revelation, and respected it. I dared do
+no more than to touch her shoulder gently.</p>
+
+<p>The door behind us rattled. Ev'leen Ann sprang up and turned her face
+toward the wall. Paul's cousin came in, shuffling a little, blinking his
+eyes in the light of the unshaded lamp, and looking very cross and
+tired. He glanced at us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> without comment as he went over to the sink.
+"Nobody offered me anything good to drink," he complained, "so I came in
+to get some water from the faucet for my nightcap."</p>
+
+<p>When he had drunk with ostentation from the tin dipper he went to the
+outside door and flung it open. "Don't you people know how hot and
+smelly it is in here?" he said, with his usual unceremonious abruptness.</p>
+
+<p>The night wind burst in, eddying, and puffed out the lamp with a breath.
+In an instant the room was filled with coolness and perfumes and the
+rushing sound of the river. Out of the darkness came Ev'leen Ann's young
+voice. "It seems to me," she said, as though speaking to herself, "that
+I never heard the Mill Brook sound so loud as it has this spring."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>I woke up that night with the start one has at a sudden call. But there
+had been no call. A profound silence spread itself through the sleeping
+house. Outdoors the wind had died down. Only the loud brawl of the river
+broke the stillness under the stars. But all through this silence and
+this vibrant song there rang a soundless menace which brought me out of
+bed and to my feet before I was awake. I heard Paul say, "What's the
+matter?" in a sleepy voice, and "Nothing," I answered, reaching for my
+dressing gown and slippers. I listened for a moment, my head ringing
+with all the frightened tales of the morbid vein of violence which runs
+through the character of our reticent people. There was still no sound.
+I went along the hall and up the stairs to Ev'leen Ann's room, and I
+opened the door without knocking. The room was empty.</p>
+
+<p>Then how I ran! Calling loudly for Paul to join me, I ran down the two
+flights of stairs, out of the open door, and along the hedged path which
+leads down to the little river. The starlight was clear. I could see
+everything as plainly as though in early dawn. I saw the river, and I
+saw&mdash;Ev'leen Ann.</p>
+
+<p>There was a dreadful moment of horror, which I shall never<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> remember
+very clearly, and then Ev'leen Ann and I&mdash;both very wet&mdash;stood on the
+bank, shuddering in each other's arms.</p>
+
+<p>Into our hysteria there dropped, like a pungent caustic, the arid voice
+of Horace, remarking, "Well, are you two people crazy, or are you
+walking in your sleep?"</p>
+
+<p>I could feel Ev'leen Ann stiffen in my arms, and I fairly stepped back
+from her in astonished admiration as I heard her snatch at the straw
+thus offered, and still shuddering horribly from head to foot, force
+herself to say quite connectedly: "Why&mdash;yes&mdash;of course&mdash;I've always
+heard about my grandfather Parkman's walking in his sleep. Folks <i>said</i>
+'twould come out in the family some time."</p>
+
+<p>Paul was close behind Horace&mdash;I wondered a little at his not being
+first&mdash;and with many astonished and inane ejaculations, such as people
+always make on startling occasions, we made our way back into the house
+to hot blankets and toddies. But I slept no more that night.</p>
+
+<p>Some time after dawn, however, I did fall into a troubled
+unconsciousness full of bad dreams, and only woke when the sun was quite
+high. I opened my eyes to see Ev'leen Ann about to close the door.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, did I wake you up?" she said. "I didn't mean to. That little Harris
+boy is here with a letter for you."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke with a slightly defiant tone of self-possession. I tried to
+play up to her interpretation of her r&ocirc;le.</p>
+
+<p>"The little Harris boy?" I said, sitting up in bed. "What in the world
+is he bringing me a letter for?"</p>
+
+<p>Ev'leen Ann, with her usual clear perception of the superfluous in
+conversation, vouchsafed no opinion on a matter where she had no
+information, but went downstairs and brought back the note. It was of
+four lines, and&mdash;surprisingly enough&mdash;from old Mrs. Purdon, who asked me
+abruptly if I would have my husband take me to see her. She specified,
+and underlined the specification, that I was to come "right off, and in
+the automobile." Wondering extremely at this mysterious bidding,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> I
+sought out Paul, who obediently cranked up our small car and carried me
+off. There was no sign of Horace about the house, but some distance on
+the other side of the village we saw his tall, stooping figure swinging
+along the road. He carried a cane and was characteristically occupied in
+violently switching off the heads from the wayside weeds as he walked.
+He refused our offer to take him in, alleging that he was out for
+exercise and to reduce his flesh&mdash;an ancient jibe at his bony frame
+which made him for an instant show a leathery smile.</p>
+
+<p>There was, of course, no one at Mrs. Purdon's to let us into the tiny,
+three-roomed house, since the bedridden invalid spent her days there
+alone while 'Niram worked his team on other people's fields. Not knowing
+what we might find, Paul stayed outside in the car, while I stepped
+inside in answer to Mrs. Purdon's "Come <i>in</i>, why don't you!" which
+sounded quite as dry as usual. But when I saw her I knew that things
+were not as usual.</p>
+
+<p>She lay flat on her back, the little emaciated wisp of humanity, hardly
+raising the piecework quilt enough to make the bed seem occupied, and to
+account for the thin, worn old face on the pillow. But as I entered the
+room her eyes seized on mine, and I was aware of nothing but them and
+some fury of determination behind them. With a fierce heat of impatience
+at my first natural but quickly repressed exclamation of surprise she
+explained briefly that she wanted Paul to lift her into the automobile
+and take her into the next township to the Hulett farm. "I'm so shrunk
+away to nuthin', I know I can lay on the back seat if I crook myself
+up," she said, with a cool accent but a rather shaky voice. Seeming to
+realize that even her intense desire to strike the matter-of-fact note
+could not take the place of any and all explanation of her extraordinary
+request, she added, holding my eyes steady with her own: "Emma Hulett's
+my twin sister. I guess it ain't so queer, my wanting to see her."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span></p><p>I thought, of course, we were to be used as the medium for some
+strange, sudden family reconciliation, and went out to ask Paul if he
+thought he could carry the old invalid to the car. He replied that, so
+far as that went, he could carry so thin an old body ten times around
+the town, but that he refused absolutely to take such a risk without
+authorization from her doctor. I remembered the burning eyes of
+resolution I had left inside, and sent him to present his objections to
+Mrs. Purdon herself.</p>
+
+<p>In a few moments I saw him emerge from the house with the old woman in
+his arms. He had evidently taken her up just as she lay. The piecework
+quilt hung down in long folds, flashing its brilliant reds and greens in
+the sunshine, which shone so strangely upon the pallid old countenance,
+facing the open sky for the first time in years.</p>
+
+<p>We drove in silence through the green and gold lyric of the spring day,
+an elderly company sadly out of key with the triumphant note of eternal
+youth which rang through all the visible world. Mrs. Purdon looked at
+nothing, said nothing, seemed to be aware of nothing but the purpose in
+her heart, whatever that might be. Paul and I, taking a leaf from our
+neighbors' book, held, with a courage like theirs, to their excellent
+habit of saying nothing when there is nothing to say. We arrived at the
+fine old Hulett place without the exchange of a single word.</p>
+
+<p>"Now carry me in," said Mrs. Purdon briefly, evidently hoarding her
+strength.</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't I better go and see if Miss Hulett is at home?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Purdon shook her head impatiently and turned her compelling eyes on
+my husband. I went up the path before them to knock at the door,
+wondering what the people in the house would possibly be thinking of us.
+There was no answer to my knock. "Open the door and go in," commanded
+Mrs. Purdon from out her quilt.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span></p><p>There was no one in the spacious, white-paneled hall, and no sound in
+all the big, many-roomed house.</p>
+
+<p>"Emma's out feeding the hens," conjectured Mrs. Purdon, not, I fancied,
+without a faint hint of relief in her voice. "Now carry me up-stairs to
+the first room on the right."</p>
+
+<p>Half hidden by his burden, Paul rolled wildly inquiring eyes at me; but
+he obediently staggered up the broad old staircase, and waiting till I
+had opened the first door to the right, stepped into the big bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>"Put me down on the bed, and open them shutters," Mrs. Purdon commanded.</p>
+
+<p>She still marshaled her forces with no lack of decision, but with a
+fainting voice which made me run over to her quickly as Paul laid her
+down on the four-poster. Her eyes were still indomitable, but her mouth
+hung open slackly and her color was startling. "Oh, Paul, quick! quick!
+Haven't you your flask with you?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Purdon informed me in a barely audible whisper, "In the corner
+cupboard at the head of the stairs," and I flew down the hallway. I
+returned with a bottle, evidently of great age. There was only a little
+brandy in the bottom, but it whipped up a faint color into the sick
+woman's lips.</p>
+
+<p>As I was bending over her and Paul was thrusting open the shutters,
+letting in a flood of sunshine and flecky leaf-shadows, a firm, rapid
+step came down the hall, and a vigorous woman, with a tanned face and a
+clean, faded gingham dress, stopped short in the doorway with an
+expression of stupefaction.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Purdon put me on one side, and although she was physically
+incapable of moving her body by a hair's breadth, she gave the effect of
+having risen to meet the newcomer. "Well, Emma, here I am," she said in
+a queer voice, with involuntary quavers in it. As she went on she had it
+more under control, although in the course of her extraordinarily
+succinct speech it broke and failed her occasionally. When it did, she
+drew in her breath with an audible, painful effort, struggling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> forward
+steadily in what she had to say. "You see, Emma, it's this way: My
+'Niram and your Ev'leen Ann have been keeping company&mdash;ever since they
+went to school together&mdash;you know that 's well as I do, for all we let
+on we didn't, only I didn't know till just now how hard they took it.
+They can't get married because 'Niram can't keep even, let alone get
+ahead any, because I cost so much bein' sick, and the doctor says I may
+live for years this way, same's Aunt Hettie did. An' 'Niram is
+thirty-one, an' Ev'leen Ann is twenty-eight, an' they've had 'bout's
+much waitin' as is good for folks that set such store by each other.
+I've thought of every way out of it&mdash;and there ain't any. The Lord knows
+I don't enjoy livin' any, not so's to notice the enjoyment, and I'd
+thought of cutting my throat like Uncle Lish, but that'd make 'Niram and
+Ev'leen Ann feel so&mdash;to think why I'd done it; they'd never take the
+comfort they'd ought in bein' married; so that won't do. There's only
+one thing to do. I guess you'll have to take care of me till the Lord
+calls me. Maybe I won't last so long as the doctor thinks."</p>
+
+<p>When she finished, I felt my ears ringing in the silence. She had walked
+to the sacrificial altar with so steady a step, and laid upon it her
+precious all with so gallant a front of quiet resolution, that for an
+instant I failed to take in the sublimity of her self-immolation. Mrs.
+Purdon asking for charity! And asking the one woman who had most reason
+to refuse it to her.</p>
+
+<p>Paul looked at me miserably, the craven desire to escape a scene written
+all over him. "Wouldn't we better be going, Mrs. Purdon?" I said
+uneasily. I had not ventured to look at the woman in the doorway.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Purdon motioned me to remain, with an imperious gesture whose
+fierceness showed the tumult underlying her brave front. "No; I want you
+should stay. I want you should hear what I say, so's you can tell folks,
+if you have to. Now, look here, Emma," she went on to the other, still
+obstinately silent; "you must look at it the way 'tis. We're neither of
+us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> any good to anybody, the way we are&mdash;and I'm dreadfully in the way
+of the only two folks we care a pin about&mdash;either of us. You've got
+plenty to do with, and nothing to spend it on. I can't get myself out of
+their way by dying without going against what's Scripture and proper,
+but&mdash;&mdash;" Her steely calm broke. She burst out in a screaming, hysterical
+voice: "You've just <i>got</i> to, Emma Hulett! You've just <i>got</i> to! If you
+don't I won't never go back to 'Niram's house! I'll lie in the ditch by
+the roadside till the poor-master comes to get me&mdash;and I'll tell
+everybody that it's because my own twin sister, with a house and a farm
+and money in the bank, turned me out to starve&mdash;" A fearful spasm cut
+her short. She lay twisted and limp, the whites of her eyes showing
+between the lids.</p>
+
+<p>"Good God, she's gone!" cried Paul, running to the bed.</p>
+
+<p>I was aware that the woman in the doorway had relaxed her frozen
+immobility and was between Paul and me as we rubbed the thin, icy hands
+and forced brandy between the placid lips. We all three thought her dead
+or dying, and labored over her with the frightened thankfulness for one
+another's living presence which always marks that dreadful moment. But
+even as we fanned and rubbed, and cried out to one another to open the
+windows and to bring water, the blue lips moved to a ghostly whisper:
+"Em, listen&mdash;&mdash;" The old woman went back to the nickname of their common
+youth. "Em&mdash;your Ev'leen Ann&mdash;tried to drown herself&mdash;in the Mill Brook
+last night.... That's what decided me&mdash;to&mdash;&mdash;" And then we were plunged
+into another desperate struggle with Death for the possession of the
+battered old habitation of the dauntless soul before us.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't there any hot water in the house?" cried Paul, and "Yes, yes; a
+tea-kettle on the stove!" answered the woman who labored with us. Paul,
+divining that she meant the kitchen, fled down-stairs. I stole a look at
+Emma Hulett's face as she bent over the sister she had not seen in
+thirty years, and I knew that Mrs. Purdon's battle was won. It even
+seemed that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> she had won another skirmish in her never-ending war with
+death, for a little warmth began to come back into her hands.</p>
+
+<p>When Paul returned with the tea-kettle, and a hot-water bottle had been
+filled, the owner of the house straightened herself, assumed her
+rightful position as mistress of the situation, and began to issue
+commands. "You git right in the automobile, and go git the doctor," she
+told Paul. "That'll be the quickest. She's better now, and your wife and
+I can keep her goin' till the doctor gits here."</p>
+
+<p>As Paul left the room she snatched something white from a bureau-drawer,
+stripped the worn, patched old cotton nightgown from the skeleton-like
+body, and, handling the invalid with a strong, sure touch, slipped on a
+soft, woolly outing-flannel wrapper with a curious trimming of zigzag
+braid down the front. Mrs. Purdon opened her eyes very slightly, but
+shut them again at her sister's quick command, "You lay still, Em'line,
+and drink some of this brandy." She obeyed without comment, but after a
+pause she opened her eyes again and looked down at the new garment which
+clad her. She had that moment turned back from the door of death, but
+her first breath was used to set the scene for a return to a decent
+decorum.</p>
+
+<p>"You're still a great hand for rick-rack work, Em, I see," she murmured
+in a faint whisper. "Do you remember how surprised Aunt Su was when you
+made up a pattern?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I hadn't thought of it for quite some time," returned Miss
+Hulett, in exactly the same tone of everyday remark. As she spoke she
+slipped her arm under the other's head and poked the pillow to a more
+comfortable shape. "Now you lay perfectly still," she commanded in the
+hectoring tone of the born nurse; "I'm goin' to run down and make you up
+a good hot cup of sassafras tea."</p>
+
+<p>I followed her down into the kitchen and was met by the same refusal to
+be melodramatic which I had encountered in Ev'leen Ann. I was most
+anxious to know what version of my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> extraordinary morning I was to give
+out to the world, but hung silent, positively abashed by the cool
+casualness of the other woman as she mixed her brew. Finally, "Shall I
+tell 'Niram&mdash;What shall I say to Ev'leen Ann? If anybody asks me&mdash;&mdash;" I
+brought out with clumsy hesitation.</p>
+
+<p>At the realization that her reserve and family pride were wholly at the
+mercy of any report I might choose to give, even my iron hostess
+faltered. She stopped short in the middle of the floor, looked at me
+silently, piteously, and found no word.</p>
+
+<p>I hastened to assure her that I would attempt no hateful picturesqueness
+of narration. "Suppose I just say that you were rather lonely here, now
+that Ev'leen Ann has left you, and that you thought it would be nice to
+have your sister come to stay with you, so that 'Niram and Ev'leen Ann
+can be married?"</p>
+
+<p>Emma Hulett breathed again. She walked toward the stairs with the
+steaming cup in her hand. Over her shoulder she remarked, "Well, yes,
+ma'am; that would be as good a way to put it as any, I guess."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>'Niram and Ev'leen Ann were standing up to be married. They looked very
+stiff and self-conscious, and Ev'leen Ann was very pale. 'Niram's big
+hands, bent in the crook of a man who handles tools, hung down by his
+new black trousers. Ev'leen Ann's strong fingers stood out stiffly from
+one another. They looked hard at the minister and repeated after him in
+low and meaningless tones the solemn and touching words of the marriage
+service. Back of them stood the wedding company, in freshly washed and
+ironed white dresses, new straw hats, and black suits smelling of
+camphor. In the background among the other elders, stood Paul and Horace
+and I&mdash;my husband and I hand in hand; Horace twiddling the black ribbon
+which holds his watch, and looking bored. Through the open windows into
+the stuffiness of the best room came an echo of the deep organ note of
+midsummer.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span></p><p>"Whom God hath joined together&mdash;&mdash;" said the minister, and the epitome
+of humanity which filled the room held its breath&mdash;the old with a wonder
+upon their life-scarred faces, the young half frightened to feel the
+stir of the great wings soaring so near them.</p>
+
+<p>Then it was all over. 'Niram and Ev'leen Ann were married, and the rest
+of us were bustling about to serve the hot biscuit and coffee and
+chicken salad, and to dish up the ice-cream. Afterward there were no
+citified refinements of cramming rice down the necks of the departing
+pair or tying placards to the carriage in which they went away. Some of
+the men went out to the barn and hitched up for 'Niram, and we all went
+down to the gate to see them drive off. They might have been going for
+one of their Sunday afternoon "buggy-rides" except for the wet eyes of
+the foolish women and girls who stood waving their hands in answer to
+the flutter of Ev'leen Ann's handkerchief as the carriage went down the
+hill.</p>
+
+<p>We had nothing to say to one another after they left, and began soberly
+to disperse to our respective vehicles. But as I was getting into our
+car a new thought suddenly struck me.</p>
+
+<p>"Why," I cried, "I never thought of it before! However in the world did
+old Mrs. Purdon know about Ev'leen Ann&mdash;that night?"</p>
+
+<p>Horace was pulling at the door, which was badly adjusted and shut hard.
+He closed it with a vicious slam "<i>I</i> told her," he said crossly.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="HOW_FLINT_AND_FIRE_STARTED_AND_GREW" id="HOW_FLINT_AND_FIRE_STARTED_AND_GREW"></a>HOW "FLINT AND FIRE" STARTED AND GREW</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Dorothy Canfield</span></h3>
+
+<p>I feel very dubious about the wisdom or usefulness of publishing the
+following statement of how one of my stories came into existence. This
+is not on account of the obvious danger of seeming to have illusions
+about the value of my work, as though I imagined one of my stories was
+inherently worth in itself a careful public analysis of its growth; the
+chance, remote as it might be, of usefulness to students, would outweigh
+this personal consideration. What is more important is the danger that
+some student may take the explanation as a recipe or rule for the
+construction of other stories, and I totally disbelieve in such rules or
+recipes.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule, when a story is finished, and certainly always by the time it
+is published, I have no recollection of the various phases of its
+development. In the case of "Flint and Fire", an old friend chanced to
+ask me, shortly after the tale was completed, to write out for his
+English classes, the stages of the construction of a short story. I set
+them down, hastily, formlessly, but just as they happened, and this
+gives me a record which I could not reproduce for any other story I ever
+wrote. These notes are here published on the chance that such a truthful
+record of the growth of one short story, may have some general
+suggestiveness for students.</p>
+
+<p>No two of my stories are ever constructed in the same way, but broadly
+viewed they all have exactly the same genesis, and I confess I cannot
+conceive of any creative fiction written<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> from any other beginning ...
+that of a generally intensified emotional sensibility, such as every
+human being experiences with more or less frequency. Everybody knows
+such occasional hours or days of freshened emotional responses when
+events that usually pass almost unnoticed, suddenly move you deeply,
+when a sunset lifts you to exaltation, when a squeaking door throws you
+into a fit of exasperation, when a clear look of trust in a child's eyes
+moves you to tears, or an injustice reported in the newspapers to
+flaming indignation, a good action to a sunny warm love of human nature,
+a discovered meanness in yourself or another, to despair.</p>
+
+<p>I have no idea whence this tide comes, or where it goes, but when it
+begins to rise in my heart, I know that a story is hovering in the
+offing. It does not always come safely to port. The daily routine of
+ordinary life kills off many a vagrant emotion. Or if daily humdrum
+occupation does not stifle it, perhaps this saturated solution of
+feeling does not happen to crystallize about any concrete fact, episode,
+word or phrase. In my own case, it is far more likely to seize on some
+slight trifle, the shade of expression on somebody's face, or the tone
+of somebody's voice, than to accept a more complete, ready-made episode.
+Especially this emotion refuses to crystallize about, or to have
+anything to do with those narrations of our actual life, offered by
+friends who are sure that such-and-such a happening is so strange or
+interesting that "it ought to go in a story."</p>
+
+<p>The beginning of a story is then for me in more than usual sensitiveness
+to emotion. If this encounters the right focus (and heaven only knows
+why it is the "right" one) I get simultaneously a strong thrill of
+intense feeling, and an intense desire to pass it on to other people.
+This emotion may be any one of the infinitely varied ones which life
+affords, laughter, sorrow, indignation, gayety, admiration, scorn,
+pleasure. I recognize it for the "right" one when it brings with it an
+irresistible impulse to try to make other people feel it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> And I know
+that when it comes, the story is begun. At this point, the story begins
+to be more or less under my conscious control, and it is here that the
+work of construction begins.</p>
+
+<p>"Flint and Fire" thus hovered vaguely in a shimmer of general emotional
+tensity, and thus abruptly crystallized itself about a chance phrase and
+the cadence of the voice which pronounced it. For several days I had
+been almost painfully alive to the beauty of an especially lovely
+spring, always so lovely after the long winter in the mountains. One
+evening, going on a very prosaic errand to a farm-house of our region, I
+walked along a narrow path through dark pines, beside a brook swollen
+with melting snow, and found the old man I came to see, sitting silent
+and alone before his blackened small old house. I did my errand, and
+then not to offend against our country standards of sociability, sat for
+half an hour beside him.</p>
+
+<p>The old man had been for some years desperately unhappy about a tragic
+and permanent element in his life. I had known this, every one knew it.
+But that evening, played upon as I had been by the stars, the darkness
+of the pines and the shouting voice of the brook, I suddenly stopped
+merely knowing it, and felt it. It seemed to me that his misery emanated
+from him like a soundless wail of anguish. We talked very little, odds
+and ends of neighborhood gossip, until the old man, shifting his
+position, drew a long breath and said, "Seems to me I never heard the
+brook sound so loud as it has this spring." There came instantly to my
+mind the recollection that his grandfather had drowned himself in that
+brook, and I sat silent, shaken by that thought and by the sound of his
+voice. I have no words to attempt to reproduce his voice, or to try to
+make you feel as I did, hot and cold with the awe of that glimpse into a
+naked human heart. I felt my own heart contract dreadfully with helpless
+sympathy ... and, I hope this is not as ugly as it sounds, I knew at the
+same instant that I would try to get that pang of emotion into a story
+and make other people feel it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span></p><p>That is all. That particular phase of the construction of the story
+came and went between two heart-beats.</p>
+
+<p>I came home by the same path through the same pines along the same
+brook, sinfully blind and deaf to the beauty that had so moved me an
+hour ago. I was too busy now to notice anything outside the rapid
+activity going on inside my head. My mind was working with a swiftness
+and a coolness which I am somewhat ashamed to mention, and my emotions
+were calmed, relaxed, let down from the tension of the last few days and
+the last few moments. They had found their way out to an attempt at
+self-expression and were at rest. I realize that this is not at all
+estimable. The old man was just as unhappy as he had been when I had
+felt my heart breaking with sympathy for him, but now he seemed very far
+away.</p>
+
+<p>I was snatching up one possibility after another, considering it for a
+moment, casting it away and pouncing on another. First of all, the story
+must be made as remote as possible from resembling the old man or his
+trouble, lest he or any one in the world might think he was intended,
+and be wounded.</p>
+
+<p>What is the opposite pole from an old man's tragedy? A lover's tragedy,
+of course. Yes, it must be separated lovers, young and passionate and
+beautiful, because they would fit in with the back-ground of spring, and
+swollen shouting starlit brooks, and the yearly resurrection which was
+so closely connected with that ache of emotion that they were a part of
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Should the separation come from the weakness or faithlessness of one of
+the lovers? No, ah no, I wanted it without ugliness, pure beautiful
+sorrow, to fit that dark shadow of the pines ... the lovers must be
+separated by outside forces.</p>
+
+<p>What outside forces? Lack of money? Family opposition? Both, perhaps. I
+knew plenty of cases of both in the life of our valley.</p>
+
+<p>By this time I had come again to our own house and was swallowed in the
+usual thousand home-activities. But <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>underneath all that, quite steadily
+my mind continued to work on the story as a wasp in a barn keeps on
+silently plastering up the cells of his nest in the midst of the noisy
+activities of farm-life. I said to one of the children, "Yes, dear,
+wasn't it fun!" and to myself, "To be typical of our tradition-ridden
+valley-people, the opposition ought to come from the dead hand of the
+past." I asked a caller, "One lump or two?" and thought as I poured the
+tea, "And if the character of that opposition could be made to indicate
+a fierce capacity for passionate feeling in the older generation, that
+would make it doubly useful in the story, not only as part of the
+machinery of the plot, but as indicating an inheritance of passionate
+feeling in the younger generation, with whom the story is concerned." I
+dozed off at night, and woke to find myself saying, "It could come from
+the jealousy of two sisters, now old women."</p>
+
+<p>But that meant that under ordinary circumstances the lovers would have
+been first cousins, and this might cause a subconscious wavering of
+attention on the part of some readers ... just as well to get that stone
+out of the path! I darned a sock and thought out the relationship in the
+story, and was rewarded with a revelation of the character of the sick
+old woman, 'Niram's step-mother.</p>
+
+<p>Upon this, came one of those veering lists of the ballast aboard which
+are so disconcerting to the author. The story got out of hand. The old
+woman silent, indomitable, fed and deeply satisfied for all of her hard
+and grinding life by her love for the husband whom she had taken from
+her sister, she stepped to the front of my stage, and from that moment
+on, dominated the action. I did not expect this, nor desire it, and I
+was very much afraid that the result would be a perilously divided
+interest which would spoil the unity of impression of the story. It now
+occurs to me that this unexpected shifting of values may have been the
+emergence of the element of tragic old age which had been the start of
+the story and which I had conscientiously tried to smother out of sight.
+At any rate,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> there she was, more touching, pathetic, striking, to my
+eyes with her life-time proof of the reality of her passion, than my
+untried young lovers who up to that time had seemed to me, in the full
+fatuous flush of invention as I was, as ill-starred, innocent and
+touching lovers as anybody had ever seen.</p>
+
+<p>Alarmed about this double interest I went on with the weaving back and
+forth of the elements of the plot which now involved the attempt to
+arouse in the reader's heart as in mine a sympathy for the bed-ridden
+old Mrs. Purdon and a comprehension of her sacrifice.</p>
+
+<p>My daily routine continued as usual, gardening, telling stories, music,
+sewing, dusting, motoring, callers ... one of them, a self-consciously
+sophisticated Europeanized American, not having of course any idea of
+what was filling my inner life, rubbed me frightfully the wrong way by
+making a slighting condescending allusion to what he called the mean,
+emotional poverty of our inarticulate mountain people. I flew into a
+silent rage at him, though scorning to discuss with him a matter I felt
+him incapable of understanding, and the character of Cousin Horace went
+into the story. He was for the first day or two, a very poor cheap
+element, quite unreal, unrealized, a mere man of straw to be knocked
+over by the personages of the tale. Then I took myself to task, told
+myself that I was spoiling a story merely to revenge myself on a man I
+cared nothing about, and that I must either take Cousin Horace out or
+make him human. One day, working in the garden, I laughed out suddenly,
+delighted with the whimsical idea of making him, almost in spite of
+himself, the <i>deus ex machina</i> of my little drama, quite soft and
+sympathetic under his shell of would-be worldly disillusion, as
+occasionally happens to elderly bachelors.</p>
+
+<p>At this point the character of 'Niram's long-dead father came to life
+and tried to push his way into the story, a delightful, gentle, upright
+man, with charm and a sense of humor, such as none of the rest of my
+stark characters possessed. I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> felt that he was necessary to explain the
+fierceness of the sisters' rivalry for him. I planned one or two ways to
+get him in, in retrospect&mdash;and liked one of the scenes better than
+anything that finally was left in the story. Finally, very
+heavy-hearted, I put him out of the story, for the merely material
+reason that there was no room for him. As usual with my story-making,
+this plot was sprouting out in a dozen places, expanding, opening up,
+till I perceived that I had enough material for a novel. For a day or so
+I hung undecided. Would it perhaps be better to make it a novel and
+really tell about those characters all I knew and guessed? But again a
+consideration that has nothing to do with artistic form, settled the
+matter. I saw no earthly possibility of getting time enough to write a
+novel. So I left Mr. Purdon out, and began to think of ways to compress
+my material, to make one detail do double work so that space might be
+saved.</p>
+
+<p>One detail of the mechanism remained to be arranged, and this ended by
+deciding the whole form of the story, and the first-person character of
+the recital. This was the question of just how it would have been
+materially possible for the bed-ridden old woman to break down the
+life-long barrier between her and her sister, and how she could have
+reached her effectively and forced her hand. I could see no way to
+manage this except by somehow transporting her bodily to the sister's
+house, so that she could not be put out on the road without public
+scandal. This transportation must be managed by some character not in
+the main action, as none of the persons involved would have been willing
+to help her to this. It looked like putting in another character, just
+for that purpose, and of course he could not be put in without taking
+the time to make him plausible, human, understandable ... and I had just
+left out that charming widower for sheer lack of space. Well, why not
+make it a first person story, and have the narrator be the one who takes
+Mrs. Purdon to her sister's? The narrator of the story never needs to be
+explained, always seems<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> sufficiently living and real by virtue of the
+supremely human act of so often saying "I".</p>
+
+<p>Now the materials were ready, the characters fully alive in my mind and
+entirely visualized, even to the smoothly braided hair of Ev'leen Ann,
+the patch-work quilt of the old woman out-of-doors, and the rustic
+wedding at the end, all details which had recently chanced to draw my
+attention; I heard everything through the song of the swollen brook, one
+of the main characters in the story, (although by this time in actual
+fact, June and lower water had come and the brook slid quiet and
+gleaming, between placid green banks) and I often found myself smiling
+foolishly in pleasure over the buggy going down the hill, freighted so
+richly with hearty human joy.</p>
+
+<p>The story was now ready to write.</p>
+
+<p>I drew a long breath of mingled anticipation and apprehension, somewhat
+as you do when you stand, breathing quickly, balanced on your skis, at
+the top of a long white slope you are not sure you are clever enough to
+manage. Sitting down at my desk one morning, I "pushed off" and with a
+tingle of not altogether pleasurable excitement and alarm, felt myself
+"going." I "went" almost as precipitately as skis go down a long white
+slope, scribbling as rapidly as my pencil could go, indicating whole
+words with a dash and a jiggle, filling page after page with scrawls ...
+it seemed to me that I had been at work perhaps half an hour, when
+someone was calling me impatiently to lunch. I had been writing four
+hours without stopping. My cheeks were flaming, my feet were cold, my
+lips parched. It was high time someone called me to lunch.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning, back at the desk, I looked over what I had written,
+conquered the usual sick qualms of discouragement at finding it so
+infinitely flat and insipid compared to what I had wished to make it,
+and with a very clear idea of what remained to be done, plodded ahead
+doggedly, and finished the first draught before noon. It was almost
+twice too long.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p><p>After this came a period of steady desk work, every morning, of
+re-writing, compression, more compression, and the more or less
+mechanical work of technical revision, what a member of my family calls
+"cutting out the 'whiches'". The first thing to do each morning was to
+read a part of it over aloud, sentence by sentence, to try to catch
+clumsy, ungraceful phrases, overweights at one end or the other,
+"ringing" them as you ring a dubious coin, clipping off too-trailing
+relative clauses, "listening" hard. This work depends on what is known
+in music as "ear", and in my case it cannot be kept up long at a time,
+because I find my attention flagging. When I begin to suspect that my
+ear is dulling, I turn to other varieties of revision, of which there
+are plenty to keep anybody busy; for instance revision to explain facts;
+in this category is the sentence just after the narrator suspects
+Ev'leen Ann has gone down to the brook, "my ears ringing with all the
+frightening tales of the morbid vein of violence which runs through the
+characters of our reticent people." It seemed too on re-reading the
+story for the tenth or eleventh time, that for readers who do not know
+our valley people, the girl's attempt at suicide might seem improbable.
+Some reference ought to be brought in, giving the facts that their
+sorrow and despair is terrible in proportion to the nervous strain of
+their tradition of repression, and that suicide is by no means unknown.
+I tried bringing that fact in, as part of the conversation with Cousin
+Horace, but it never fused with the rest there, "stayed on top of the
+page" as bad sentences will do, never sank in, and always made the
+disagreeable impression on me that a false intonation in an actor's
+voice does. So it came out from there. I tried putting it in Ev'leen
+Ann's mouth, in a carefully arranged form, but it was so shockingly out
+of character there, that it was snatched out at once. There I hung over
+the manuscript with that necessary fact in my hand and no place to lay
+it down. Finally I perceived a possible opening for it, where it now is
+in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> story, and squeezing it in there discontentedly left it, for I
+still think it only inoffensively and not well placed.</p>
+
+<p>Then there is the traditional, obvious revision for suggestiveness, such
+as the recurrent mention of the mountain brook at the beginning of each
+of the first scenes; revision for ordinary sense, in the first draught I
+had honeysuckle among the scents on the darkened porch, whereas
+honeysuckle does not bloom in Vermont till late June; revision for
+movement to get the narrator rapidly from her bed to the brook; for
+sound, sense proportion, even grammar ... and always interwoven with
+these mechanical revisions recurrent intense visualizations of the
+scenes. This is the mental trick which can be learned, I think, by
+practice and effort. Personally, although I never used as material any
+events in my own intimate life, I can write nothing if I cannot achieve
+these very definite, very complete visualizations of the scenes; which
+means that I can write nothing at all about places, people or phases of
+life which I do not intimately know, down to the last detail. If my life
+depended on it, it does not seem to me I could possibly write a story
+about Siberian hunters or East-side factory hands without having lived
+long among them. Now the story was what one calls "finished," and I made
+a clear copy, picking my way with difficulty among the alterations, the
+scratched-out passages, and the cued-in paragraphs, the inserted pages,
+the re-arranged phrases. As I typed, the interest and pleasure in the
+story lasted just through that process. It still seemed pretty good to
+me, the wedding still touched me, the whimsical ending still amused me.</p>
+
+<p>But on taking up the legible typed copy and beginning to glance rapidly
+over it, I felt fall over me the black shadow of that intolerable
+reaction which is enough to make any author abjure his calling for ever.
+By the time I had reached the end, the full misery was there, the
+heart-sick, helpless consciousness of failure. What! I had had the
+presumption to try to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>translate into words, and make others feel a
+thrill of sacred living human feeling, that should not be touched save
+by worthy hands. And what had I produced? A trivial, paltry, complicated
+tale, with certain cheaply ingenious devices in it. I heard again the
+incommunicable note of profound emotion in the old man's voice, suffered
+again with his sufferings; and those little black marks on white paper
+lay dead, dead in my hands. What horrible people second-rate authors
+were! They ought to be prohibited by law from sending out their
+caricatures of life. I would never write again. All that effort, enough
+to have achieved a master-piece it seemed at the time ... and this,
+<i>this</i>, for result!</p>
+
+<p>From the subconscious depths of long experience came up the cynical,
+slightly contemptuous consolation, "You know this never lasts. You
+always throw this same fit, and get over it."</p>
+
+<p>So, suffering from really acute humiliation and unhappiness, I went out
+hastily to weed a flower-bed.</p>
+
+<p>And sure enough, the next morning, after a long night's sleep, I felt
+quite rested, calm, and blessedly matter-of-fact. "Flint and Fire"
+seemed already very far away and vague, and the question of whether it
+was good or bad, not very important or interesting, like the chart of
+your temperature in a fever now gone by.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="DOROTHY_CANFIELD" id="DOROTHY_CANFIELD"></a>DOROTHY CANFIELD</h2>
+
+<p>Dorothy Canfield grew up in an atmosphere of books and learning. Her
+father, James H. Canfield, was president of Kansas University, at
+Lawrence, and there Dorothy was born, Feb. 17, 1879. She attended the
+high school at Lawrence, and became friends with a young army officer
+who was teaching at the near-by Army post, and who taught her to ride
+horseback. In 1917 when the first American troops entered Paris, Dorothy
+Canfield, who had gone to Paris to help in war work, again met this army
+officer, General John J. Pershing.</p>
+
+<p>But this is getting ahead of the story. Dr. Canfield was called from
+Kansas to become president of Ohio State University, and later to be
+librarian at Columbia University, and so it happened that Dorothy took
+her college course at Ohio State and her graduate work at Columbia. She
+specialized in Romance languages, and took her degree as Doctor of
+Philosophy in 1904. In connection with Professor Carpenter of Columbia
+she wrote a text book on rhetoric. But books did not absorb quite all of
+her time, for the next item in her biography is her marriage to John R.
+Fisher, who had been the captain of the Columbia football team. They
+made their home at Arlington, Vermont, with frequent visits to Europe.
+In 1911-1912 they spent the winter in Rome. Here they came to know
+Madame Montessori, famous for developing a new system of training
+children. Dorothy Canfield spent many days at the "House of Childhood,"
+studying the methods of this gifted teacher. The result of this was a
+book, <i>A Montessori Mother</i>, in which the system was adapted to the
+needs of American children.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Squirrel Cage</i>, published in 1912, was a study of an <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>unhappy
+marriage. The book was favorably received by the critics, but found only
+a moderately wide public. A second novel, <i>The Bent Twig</i>, had college
+life as its setting; the chief character was the daughter of a professor
+in a Middle Western university. Meantime she had been publishing in
+magazines a number of short stories dealing with various types of New
+England country people, and in 1916 these were gathered into a volume
+with the title <i>Hillsboro People</i>. This book met with a wide acceptance,
+not only in this country but in France, where, like her other books, it
+was quickly translated and published. "Flint and Fire" is taken from
+this book. <i>The Real Motive</i>, another book of short stories, and
+<i>Understood Betsy</i>, a book for younger readers, were her next
+publications.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime the Great War had come, and its summons was heard in their
+quiet mountain home. Mr. Fisher went to France with the Ambulance Corps;
+his wife as a war-relief worker. A letter from a friend thus described
+her work:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>She has gone on doing a prodigious amount of work. First running,
+almost entirely alone, the work for soldiers blinded in battle,
+editing a magazine for them, running the presses, often with her
+own hands, getting books written for them; all the time looking out
+for refugees and personal cases that came under her attention:
+caring for children from the evacuated portions of France,
+organizing work for them, and establishing a Red Cross hospital for
+them.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Out of the fullness of these experiences she wrote her next book, <i>Home
+Fires in France</i>, which at once took rank as one of the most notable
+pieces of literature inspired by the war. It is in the form of short
+stories, but only the form is fiction: it is a perfectly truthful
+portrayal of the French women and of some Americans who, far back of the
+trenches, kept up the life of a nation when all its people were gone. It
+reveals the soul of the French people. <i>The Day of Glory</i>, her latest
+book, is a series of further impressions of the war in France.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span></p><p>It is not often that an author takes us into his workshop and lets us
+see just how his stories are written. The preceding account of Dorothy
+Canfield's literary methods was written especially for this book.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="DUSKY_AMERICANS" id="DUSKY_AMERICANS"></a>DUSKY AMERICANS</h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span></p><p><i>Most stories of Negro life fall into one of two groups. There is the
+story of the Civil War period, which pictures the "darky" on the old
+plantation, devoted to "young Massa" or "old Miss,"&mdash;the Negro of
+slavery. Then there are stories of recent times in which the Negro is
+used purely for comic effect, a sort of minstrel-show character. Neither
+of these is the Negro of to-day. A truer picture is found in the stories
+of Paul Laurence Dunbar. The following story is from his <span class="smcap">Folks From
+Dixie</span>.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_ORDEAL_AT_MT_HOPE" id="THE_ORDEAL_AT_MT_HOPE"></a>THE ORDEAL AT MT. HOPE</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Paul Laurence Dunbar</span></h3>
+
+<p>"And this is Mt. Hope," said the Rev. Howard Dokesbury to himself as he
+descended, bag in hand, from the smoky, dingy coach, or part of a coach,
+which was assigned to his people, and stepped upon the rotten planks of
+the station platform. The car he had just left was not a palace, nor had
+his reception by his fellow-passengers or his intercourse with them been
+of such cordial nature as to endear them to him. But he watched the
+choky little engine with its three black cars wind out of sight with a
+look as regretful as if he were witnessing the departure of his dearest
+friend. Then he turned his attention again to his surroundings, and a
+sigh welled up from his heart. "And this is Mt. Hope," he repeated. A
+note in his voice indicated that he fully appreciated the spirit of keen
+irony in which the place had been named.</p>
+
+<p>The color scheme of the picture that met his eyes was in dingy blacks
+and grays. The building that held the ticket, telegraph, and train
+despatchers' offices was a miserably old ramshackle affair, standing
+well in the foreground of this scene of gloom and desolation. Its
+windows were so coated with smoke and grime that they seemed to have
+been painted over in order to secure secrecy within. Here and there a
+lazy cur lay drowsily snapping at the flies, and at the end of the
+station, perched on boxes or leaning against the wall, making a living
+picture of equal laziness, stood a group of idle Negroes exchanging rude
+badinage with their white counterparts across the street.</p>
+
+<p>After a while this bantering interchange would grow more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> keen and
+personal, a free-for-all friendly fight would follow, and the newspaper
+correspondent in that section would write it up as a "race war." But
+this had not happened yet that day.</p>
+
+<p>"This is Mt. Hope," repeated the new-comer; "this is the field of my
+labors."</p>
+
+<p>Rev. Howard Dokesbury, as may already have been inferred, was a
+Negro,&mdash;there could be no mistake about that. The deep dark brown of his
+skin, the rich over-fullness of his lips, and the close curl of his
+short black hair were evidences that admitted of no argument. He was a
+finely proportioned, stalwart-looking man, with a general air of
+self-possession and self-sufficiency in his manner. There was firmness
+in the set of his lips. A reader of character would have said of him,
+"Here is a man of solid judgement, careful in deliberation, prompt in
+execution, and decisive."</p>
+
+<p>It was the perception in him of these very qualities which had prompted
+the authorities of the little college where he had taken his degree and
+received his theological training, to urge him to go among his people at
+the South, and there to exert his powers for good where the field was
+broad and the laborers few.</p>
+
+<p>Born of Southern parents from whom he had learned many of the
+superstitions and traditions of the South, Howard Dokesbury himself had
+never before been below Mason and Dixon's line. But with a confidence
+born of youth and a consciousness of personal power, he had started
+South with the idea that he knew the people with whom he had to deal,
+and was equipped with the proper weapons to cope with their
+shortcomings.</p>
+
+<p>But as he looked around upon the scene which now met his eye, a doubt
+arose in his mind. He picked up his bag with a sigh, and approached a
+man who had been standing apart from the rest of the loungers and
+regarding him with indolent intentness.</p>
+
+<p>"Could you direct me to the house of Stephen Gray?" asked the minister.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span></p><p>The interrogated took time to change his position from left foot to
+right and shift his quid, before he drawled forth, "I reckon you's de
+new Mefdis preachah, huh?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," replied Howard, in the most conciliatory tone he could command,
+"and I hope I find in you one of my flock."</p>
+
+<p>"No, suh, I's a Babtist myse'f. I wa'n't raised up no place erroun' Mt.
+Hope; I'm nachelly f'om way up in Adams County. Dey jes' sont me down
+hyeah to fin' you an' tek you up to Steve's. Steve, he's workin' to-day
+an' couldn't come down."</p>
+
+<p>He laid particular stress upon the "to-day," as if Steve's spell of
+activity were not an every-day occurrence.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it far from here?" asked Dokesbury.</p>
+
+<p>"'T ain't mo' 'n a mile an' a ha'f by de shawt cut."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, let's take the short cut, by all means," said the preacher.</p>
+
+<p>They trudged along for a while in silence, and then the young man asked,
+"What do you men about here do mostly for a living?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, we does odd jobs, we saws an' splits wood an' totes bundles,
+an' some of 'em raises gyahden, but mos' of us, we fishes. De fish bites
+an' we ketches 'em. Sometimes we eats 'em an' sometimes we sells 'em; a
+string o' fish'll bring a peck o' co'n any time."</p>
+
+<p>"And is that all you do?"</p>
+
+<p>"'Bout."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I don't see how you live that way."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, we lives all right," answered the man; "we has plenty to eat an'
+drink, an' clothes to wear, an' some place to stay. I reckon folks ain't
+got much use fu' nuffin' mo'."</p>
+
+<p>Dokesbury sighed. Here indeed was virgin soil for his ministerial
+labors. His spirits were not materially raised when, some time later, he
+came in sight of the house which was to be his abode. To be sure, it was
+better than most of the houses which he had seen in the Negro part of
+Mt. Hope; but even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> at that it was far from being good or
+comfortable-looking. It was small and mean in appearance. The weather
+boarding was broken, and in some places entirely fallen away, showing
+the great unhewn logs beneath; while off the boards that remained the
+whitewash had peeled in scrofulous spots.</p>
+
+<p>The minister's guide went up to the closed door, and rapped loudly with
+a heavy stick.</p>
+
+<p>"G' 'way f'om dah, an' quit you' foolin'," came in a large voice from
+within.</p>
+
+<p>The guide grinned, and rapped again. There was a sound of shuffling feet
+and the pushing back of a chair, and then the same voice asking: "I bet
+I'll mek you git away f'om dat do'."</p>
+
+<p>"Dat's A'nt Ca'line," the guide said, and laughed.</p>
+
+<p>The door was flung back as quickly as its worn hinges and sagging bottom
+would allow, and a large body surmounted by a face like a big round full
+moon presented itself in the opening. A broomstick showed itself
+aggressively in one fat shiny hand.</p>
+
+<p>"It's you, Tom Scott, is it&mdash;you trif'nin'&mdash;&mdash;" and then, catching sight
+of the stranger, her whole manner changed, and she dropped the
+broomstick with an embarrassed "'Scuse me, suh."</p>
+
+<p>Tom chuckled all over as he said, "A'nt Ca'line, dis is yo' new
+preachah."</p>
+
+<p>The big black face lighted up with a broad smile as the old woman
+extended her hand and enveloped that of the young minister's.</p>
+
+<p>"Come in," she said. "I's mighty glad to see you&mdash;that no-'count Tom
+come put' nigh mekin' me 'spose myse'f." Then turning to Tom, she
+exclaimed with good-natured severity, "An' you go 'long, you scoun'll
+you!"</p>
+
+<p>The preacher entered the cabin&mdash;it was hardly more&mdash;and seated himself
+in the rush-bottomed chair which "A'nt Ca'line" had been industriously
+polishing with her apron.</p>
+
+<p>"An' now, Brothah&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span></p><p>"Dokesbury," supplemented the young man.</p>
+
+<p>"Brothah Dokesbury, I jes' want you to mek yo'se'f at home right erway.
+I know you ain't use to ouah ways down hyeah; but you jes' got to set in
+an' git ust to 'em. You mus'n' feel bad ef things don't go yo' way f'om
+de ve'y fust. Have you got a mammy?"</p>
+
+<p>The question was very abrupt, and a lump suddenly jumped up in
+Dokesbury's throat and pushed the water into his eyes. He did have a
+mother away back there at home. She was all alone, and he was her heart
+and the hope of her life.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said, "I've got a little mother up there in Ohio."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I's gwine to be yo' mothah down hyeah; dat is, ef I ain't too
+rough an' common fu' you."</p>
+
+<p>"Hush!" exclaimed the preacher, and he got up and took the old lady's
+hand in both of his own. "You shall be my mother down here; you shall
+help me, as you have done to-day. I feel better already."</p>
+
+<p>"I knowed you would," and the old face beamed on the young one. "An' now
+jes' go out de do' dah an' wash yo' face. Dey's a pan an' soap an' watah
+right dah, an' hyeah's a towel; den you kin go right into yo' room, fu'
+I knows you want to be erlone fu' a while. I'll fix yo' suppah while you
+rests."</p>
+
+<p>He did as he was bidden. On a rough bench outside the door, he found a
+basin and a bucket of water with a tin dipper in it. To one side, in a
+broken saucer, lay a piece of coarse soap. The facilities for copious
+ablutions were not abundant, but one thing the minister noted with
+pleasure: the towel, which was rough and hurt his skin, was,
+nevertheless, scrupulously clean. He went to his room feeling fresher
+and better, and although he found the place little and dark and warm, it
+too was clean, and a sense of its homeness began to take possession of
+him.</p>
+
+<p>The room was off the main living-room into which he had been first
+ushered. It had one small window that opened out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> on a fairly neat yard.
+A table with a chair before it stood beside the window, and across the
+room&mdash;if the three feet of space which intervened could be called
+"across"&mdash;stood the little bed with its dark calico quilt and white
+pillows. There was no carpet on the floor, and the absence of a
+washstand indicated very plainly that the occupant was expected to wash
+outside. The young minister knelt for a few minutes beside the bed, and
+then rising cast himself into the chair to rest.</p>
+
+<p>It was possibly half an hour later when his partial nap was broken in
+upon by the sound of a gruff voice from without saying, "He's hyeah, is
+he&mdash;oomph! Well, what's he ac' lak? Want us to git down on ouah knees
+an' crawl to him? If he do, I reckon he'll fin' dat Mt. Hope ain't de
+place fo' him."</p>
+
+<p>The minister did not hear the answer, which was in a low voice and came,
+he conjectured, from Aunt "Ca'line"; but the gruff voice subsided, and
+there was the sound of footsteps going out of the room. A tap came on
+the preacher's door, and he opened it to the old woman. She smiled
+reassuringly.</p>
+
+<p>"Dat' uz my ol' man," she said. "I sont him out to git some wood, so's
+I'd have time to post you. Don't you mind him; he's lots mo' ba'k dan
+bite. He's one o' dese little yaller men, an' you know dey kin be
+powahful contra'y when dey sets dey hai'd to it. But jes' you treat him
+nice an' don't let on, an' I'll be boun' you'll bring him erroun' in
+little er no time."</p>
+
+<p>The Rev. Mr. Dokesbury received this advice with some misgiving. Albeit
+he had assumed his pleasantest manner when, after his return to the
+living-room, the little "yaller" man came through the door with his
+bundle of wood.</p>
+
+<p>He responded cordially to Aunt Caroline's, "Dis is my husband, Brothah
+Dokesbury," and heartily shook his host's reluctant hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope I find you well, Brother Gray," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Moder't, jes' moder't," was the answer.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span></p><p>"Come to suppah now, bofe o' you," said the old lady, and they all sat
+down to the evening meal of crisp bacon, well-fried potatoes, egg-pone,
+and coffee.</p>
+
+<p>The young man did his best to be agreeable, but it was rather
+discouraging to receive only gruff monosyllabic rejoinders to his most
+interesting observations. But the cheery old wife came bravely to the
+rescue, and the minister was continually floated into safety on the flow
+of her conversation. Now and then, as he talked, he could catch a
+stealthy upflashing of Stephen Gray's eye, as suddenly lowered again,
+that told him that the old man was listening. But as an indication that
+they would get on together, the supper, taken as a whole, was not a
+success. The evening that followed proved hardly more fortunate. About
+the only remarks that could be elicited from the "little yaller man"
+were a reluctant "oomph" or "oomph-uh."</p>
+
+<p>It was just before going to bed that, after a period of reflection, Aunt
+Caroline began slowly: "We got a son"&mdash;her husband immediately bristled
+up and his eyes flashed, but the old woman went on; "he named 'Lias, an'
+we thinks a heap o' 'Lias, we does; but&mdash;" the old man had subsided, but
+he bristled up again at the word&mdash;"he ain't jes' whut we want him to
+be." Her husband opened his mouth as if to speak in defense of his son,
+but was silent in satisfaction at his wife's explanation: "'Lias ain't
+bad; he jes' ca'less. Sometimes he stays at home, but right sma't o' de
+time he stays down at"&mdash;she looked at her husband and hesitated&mdash;"at de
+colo'ed s'loon. We don't lak dat. It ain't no fitten place fu' him. But
+'Lias ain't bad, he jes' ca'less, an' me an' de ol' man we 'membahs him
+in ouah pra'ahs, an' I jes' t'ought I'd ax you to 'membah him too,
+Brothah Dokesbury."</p>
+
+<p>The minister felt the old woman's pleading look and the husband's
+intense gaze upon his face, and suddenly there came to him an intimate
+sympathy in their trouble and with it an unexpected strength.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span></p><p>"There is no better time than now," he said, "to take his case to the
+Almighty Power; let us pray."</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it was the same prayer he had prayed many times before; perhaps
+the words of supplication and the plea for light and guidance were the
+same; but somehow to the young man kneeling there amid those humble
+surroundings, with the sorrow of these poor ignorant people weighing
+upon his heart, it seemed very different. It came more fervently from
+his lips, and the words had a deeper meaning. When he arose, there was a
+warmth at his heart just the like of which he had never before
+experienced.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Caroline blundered up from her knees, saying, as she wiped her
+eyes, "Blessed is dey dat mou'n, fu' dey shall be comfo'ted." The old
+man, as he turned to go to bed, shook the young man's hand warmly and in
+silence; but there was a moisture in the old eyes that told the minister
+that his plummet of prayer had sounded the depths.</p>
+
+<p>Alone in his own room Howard Dokesbury sat down to study the situation
+in which he had been placed. Had his thorough college training
+anticipated specifically any such circumstance as this? After all, did
+he know his own people? Was it possible that they could be so different
+from what he had seen and known? He had always been such a loyal Negro,
+so proud of his honest brown; but had he been mistaken? Was he, after
+all, different from the majority of the people with whom he was supposed
+to have all thoughts, feelings, and emotions in common?</p>
+
+<p>These and other questions he asked himself without being able to arrive
+at any satisfactory conclusion. He did not go to sleep soon after
+retiring, and the night brought many thoughts. The next day would be
+Saturday. The ordeal had already begun,&mdash;now there were twenty-four
+hours between him and the supreme trial. What would be its outcome?
+There were moments when he felt, as every man, howsoever brave, must
+feel at times, that he would like to shift all his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>responsibilities and
+go away from the place that seemed destined to tax his powers beyond
+their capability of endurance. What could he do for the inhabitants of
+Mt. Hope? What was required of him to do? Ever through his mind ran that
+world-old question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" He had never asked, "Are
+these people my brothers?"</p>
+
+<p>He was up early the next morning, and as soon as breakfast was done, he
+sat down to add a few touches to the sermon he had prepared as his
+introduction. It was not the first time that he had retouched it and
+polished it up here and there. Indeed, he had taken some pride in it.
+But as he read it over that day, it did not sound to him as it had
+sounded before. It appeared flat and without substance. After a while he
+laid it aside, telling himself that he was nervous and it was on this
+account that he could not see matters as he did in his calmer moments.
+He told himself, too, that he must not again take up the offending
+discourse until time to use it, lest the discovery of more imaginary
+flaws should so weaken his confidence that he would not be able to
+deliver it with effect.</p>
+
+<p>In order better to keep his resolve, he put on his hat and went out for
+a walk through the streets of Mt. Hope. He did not find an encouraging
+prospect as he went along. The Negroes whom he met viewed him with
+ill-favor, and the whites who passed looked on him with unconcealed
+distrust and contempt. He began to feel lost, alone, and helpless. The
+squalor and shiftlessness which were plainly in evidence about the
+houses which he saw filled him with disgust and a dreary hopelessness.</p>
+
+<p>He passed vacant lots which lay open and inviting children to healthful
+play; but instead of marbles or leap-frog or ball, he found little boys
+in ragged knickerbockers huddled together on the ground, "shooting
+craps" with precocious avidity and quarreling over the pennies that made
+the pitiful wagers. He heard glib profanity rolling from the lips of
+children who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> should have been stumbling through baby catechisms; and
+his heart ached for them.</p>
+
+<p>He would have turned and gone back to his room, but the sound of shouts,
+laughter, and the tum-tum of a musical instrument drew him on down the
+street. At the turn of a corner, the place from which the noise emanated
+met his eyes. It was a rude frame building, low and unpainted. The panes
+in its windows whose places had not been supplied by sheets of tin were
+daubed a dingy red. Numerous kegs and bottles on the outside attested
+the nature of the place. The front door was open, but the interior was
+concealed by a gaudy curtain stretched across the entrance within. Over
+the door was the inscription, in straggling characters, "Sander's
+Place;" and when he saw half-a-dozen Negroes enter, the minister knew
+instantly that he now beheld the colored saloon which was the
+frequenting-place of his hostess's son 'Lias; and he wondered, if, as
+the mother said, her boy was not bad, how anything good could be
+preserved in such a place of evil.</p>
+
+<p>The cries of boisterous laughter mingled with the strumming of the banjo
+and the shuffling of feet told him that they were engaged in one of
+their rude hoe-down dances. He had not passed a dozen paces beyond the
+door when the music was suddenly stopped, the sound of a quick blow
+followed, then ensued a scuffle, and a young fellow half ran, half fell
+through the open door. He was closely followed by a heavily built
+ruffian who was striking him as he ran. The young fellow was very much
+the weaker and slighter of the two, and was suffering great punishment.
+In an instant all the preacher's sense of justice was stung into sudden
+life. Just as the brute was about to give his victim a blow that would
+have sent him into the gutter, he felt his arm grasped in a detaining
+hold and heard a commanding voice,&mdash;"Stop!"</p>
+
+<p>He turned with increased fury upon this meddler, but his other wrist was
+caught and held in a vise-like grip. For a moment the two men looked
+into each other's eyes. Hot words<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> rose to the young man's lips, but he
+choked them back. Until this moment he had deplored the possession of a
+spirit so easily fired that it had been a test of his manhood to keep
+from "slugging" on the football field; now he was glad of it. He did not
+attempt to strike the man, but stood holding his arms and meeting the
+brute glare with manly flashing eyes. Either the natural cowardice of
+the bully or something in his new opponent's face had quelled the big
+fellow's spirit, and he said doggedly, "Lemme go. I wasn't a-go'n to
+kill him no-how, but ef I ketch him dancin' with my gal any mo', I&mdash;&mdash;"
+He cast a glance full of malice at his victim, who stood on the pavement
+a few feet away, as much amazed as the dumfounded crowd which thronged
+the door of "Sander's Place." Loosing his hold, the preacher turned,
+and, putting his hand on the young fellow's shoulder, led him away.</p>
+
+<p>For a time they walked on in silence. Dokesbury had to calm the tempest
+in his breast before he could trust his voice. After a while he said:
+"That fellow was making it pretty hot for you, my young friend. What had
+you done to him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothin'," replied the other. "I was jes' dancin' 'long an' not thinkin'
+'bout him, when all of a sudden he hollered dat I had his gal an'
+commenced hittin' me."</p>
+
+<p>"He's a bully and a coward, or he would not have made use of his
+superior strength in that way. What's your name, friend?"</p>
+
+<p>"'Lias Gray," was the answer, which startled the minister into
+exclaiming,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"What! are you Aunt Caroline's son?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, suh, I sho is; does you know my mothah?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I'm stopping with her, and we were talking about you last night.
+My name is Dokesbury, and I am to take charge of the church here."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought mebbe you was a preachah, but I couldn't scarcely believe it
+after I seen de way you held Sam an' looked at him."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span></p><p>Dokesbury laughed, and his merriment seemed to make his companion feel
+better, for the sullen, abashed look left his face, and he laughed a
+little himself as he said: "I wasn't a-pesterin' Sam, but I tell you he
+pestered me mighty."</p>
+
+<p>Dokesbury looked into the boy's face,&mdash;he was hardly more than a
+boy,&mdash;lit up as it was by a smile, and concluded that Aunt Caroline was
+right. 'Lias might be "ca'less," but he wasn't a bad boy. The face was
+too open and the eyes too honest for that. 'Lias wasn't bad; but
+environment does so much, and he would be if something were not done for
+him. Here, then, was work for a pastor's hands.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll walk on home with me, 'Lias, won't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon I mout ez well," replied the boy. "I don't stay erroun' home
+ez much ez I oughter."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll be around more, of course, now that I am there. It will be so
+much less lonesome for two young people than for one. Then, you can be a
+great help to me, too."</p>
+
+<p>The preacher did not look down to see how wide his listener's eyes grew
+as he answered: "Oh, I ain't fittin' to be no he'p to you, suh. Fust
+thing, I ain't nevah got religion, an' then I ain't well larned enough."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, there are a thousand other ways in which you can help, and I feel
+sure that you will."</p>
+
+<p>"Of co'se, I'll do de ve'y bes' I kin."</p>
+
+<p>"There is one thing I want you to do soon, as a favor to me."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't go to de mou'nah's bench," cried the boy, in consternation.</p>
+
+<p>"And I don't want you to," was the calm reply.</p>
+
+<p>Another look of wide-eyed astonishment took in the preacher's face.
+These were strange words from one of his guild. But without noticing the
+surprise he had created, Dokesbury went on: "What I want is that you
+will take me fishing as soon as you can. I never get tired of fishing
+and I am anxious to go here. Tom Scott says you fish a great deal about
+here."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span></p><p>"Why, we kin go dis ve'y afternoon," exclaimed 'Lias, in relief and
+delight; "I's mighty fond o' fishin', myse'f."</p>
+
+<p>"All right; I'm in your hands from now on."</p>
+
+<p>'Lias drew his shoulders up, with an unconscious motion. The preacher
+saw it, and mentally rejoiced. He felt that the first thing the boy
+beside him needed was a consciousness of responsibility, and the lifted
+shoulders meant progress in that direction, a sort of physical
+straightening up to correspond with the moral one.</p>
+
+<p>On seeing her son walk in with the minister, Aunt "Ca'line's" delight
+was boundless. "La! Brothah Dokesbury," she exclaimed, "wha'd you fin'
+dat scamp?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, down the street here," the young man replied lightly. "I got hold
+of his name and made myself acquainted, so he came home to go fishing
+with me."</p>
+
+<p>"'Lias is pow'ful fon' o' fishin', hisse'f. I 'low he kin show you some
+mighty good places. Cain't you, 'Lias?"</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon."</p>
+
+<p>'Lias was thinking. He was distinctly grateful that the circumstances of
+his meeting with the minister had been so deftly passed over. But with a
+half idea of the superior moral responsibility under which a man in
+Dokesbury's position labored, he wondered vaguely&mdash;to put it in his own
+thought-words&mdash;"ef de preachah hadn't put' nigh lied." However, he was
+willing to forgive this little lapse of veracity, if such it was, out of
+consideration for the anxiety it spared his mother.</p>
+
+<p>When Stephen Gray came in to dinner, he was no less pleased than his
+wife to note the terms of friendship on which the minister received his
+son. On his face was the first smile that Dokesbury had seen there, and
+he awakened from his taciturnity and proffered much information as to
+the fishing-places thereabout. The young minister accounted this a
+distinct gain. Anything more than a frowning silence from the "little
+yaller man" was gain.</p>
+
+<p>The fishing that afternoon was particularly good. Catfish,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> chubs, and
+suckers were landed in numbers sufficient to please the heart of any
+amateur angler.</p>
+
+<p>'Lias was happy, and the minister was in the best of spirits, for his
+charge seemed promising. He looked on at the boy's jovial face, and
+laughed within himself; for, mused he, "it is so much harder for the
+devil to get into a cheerful heart than into a sullen, gloomy one." By
+the time they were ready to go home Harold Dokesbury had received a
+promise from 'Lias to attend service the next morning and hear the
+sermon.</p>
+
+<p>There was a great jollification over the fish supper that night, and
+'Lias and the minister were the heroes of the occasion. The old man
+again broke his silence, and recounted, with infinite dryness, ancient
+tales of his prowess with rod and line; while Aunt "Ca'line" told of
+famous fish suppers that in the bygone days she had cooked for "de white
+folks." In the midst of it all, however, 'Lias disappeared. No one had
+noticed when he slipped out, but all seemed to become conscious of his
+absence about the same time. The talk shifted, and finally simmered into
+silence.</p>
+
+<p>When the Rev. Mr. Dokesbury went to bed that night, his charge had not
+yet returned.</p>
+
+<p>The young minister woke early on the Sabbath morning, and he may be
+forgiven that the prospect of the ordeal through which he had to pass
+drove his care for 'Lias out of mind for the first few hours. But as he
+walked to church, flanked on one side by Aunt Caroline in the stiffest
+of ginghams and on the other by her husband stately in the magnificence
+of an antiquated "Jim-swinger," his mind went back to the boy with
+sorrow. Where was he? What was he doing? Had the fear of a dull church
+service frightened him back to his old habits and haunts? There was a
+new sadness at the preacher's heart as he threaded his way down the
+crowded church and ascended the rude pulpit.</p>
+
+<p>The church was stiflingly hot, and the morning sun still beat
+relentlessly in through the plain windows. The seats were rude<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> wooden
+benches, in some instances without backs. To the right, filling the
+inner corner, sat the pillars of the church, stern, grim, and critical.
+Opposite them, and, like them, in seats at right angles to the main
+body, sat the older sisters, some of them dressed with good
+old-fashioned simplicity, while others yielding to newer tendencies were
+gotten up in gaudy attempts at finery. In the rear seats a dozen or so
+much beribboned mulatto girls tittered and giggled, and cast bold
+glances at the minister.</p>
+
+<p>The young man sighed as he placed the manuscript of his sermon between
+the leaves of the tattered Bible. "And this is Mt. Hope," he was again
+saying to himself.</p>
+
+<p>It was after the prayer and in the midst of the second hymn that a more
+pronounced titter from the back seats drew his attention. He raised his
+head to cast a reproving glance at the irreverent, but the sight that
+met his eyes turned that look into one of horror. 'Lias had just entered
+the church, and with every mark of beastly intoxication was staggering
+up the aisle to a seat, into which he tumbled in a drunken heap. The
+preacher's soul turned sick within him, and his eyes sought the face of
+the mother and father. The old woman was wiping her eyes, and the old
+man sat with his gaze bent upon the floor, lines of sorrow drawn about
+his wrinkled mouth.</p>
+
+<p>All of a sudden a great revulsion of feeling came over Dokesbury.
+Trembling he rose and opened the Bible. There lay his sermon, polished
+and perfected. The opening lines seemed to him like glints from a bright
+cold crystal. What had he to say to these people, when the full
+realization of human sorrow and care and of human degradation had just
+come to him? What had they to do with firstlies and secondlies, with
+premises and conclusions? What they wanted was a strong hand to help
+them over the hard places of life and a loud voice to cheer them through
+the dark. He closed the book again upon his precious sermon. A something
+new had been born in his heart. He let his glance rest for another
+instant on the mother's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> pained face and the father's bowed form, and
+then turning to the congregation began, "Come unto me, all ye that labor
+and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you,
+and learn of me: for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find
+rest unto your souls." Out of the fullness of his heart he spoke unto
+them. Their great need informed his utterance. He forgot his carefully
+turned sentences and perfectly rounded periods. He forgot all save that
+here was the well-being of a community put into his hands whose real
+condition he had not even suspected until now. The situation wrought him
+up. His words went forth like winged fire, and the emotional people were
+moved beyond control. They shouted, and clapped their hands, and praised
+the Lord loudly.</p>
+
+<p>When the service was over, there was much gathering about the young
+preacher, and handshaking. Through all 'Lias had slept. His mother
+started toward him; but the minister managed to whisper to her, "Leave
+him to me." When the congregation had passed out, Dokesbury shook 'Lias.
+The boy woke, partially sobered, and his face fell before the preacher's
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Come, my boy, let's go home." Arm in arm they went out into the street,
+where a number of scoffers had gathered to have a laugh at the abashed
+boy; but Harold Dokesbury's strong arm steadied his steps, and something
+in his face checked the crowd's hilarity. Silently they cleared the way,
+and the two passed among them and went home.</p>
+
+<p>The minister saw clearly the things which he had to combat in his
+community, and through this one victim he determined to fight the
+general evil. The people with whom he had to deal were children who must
+be led by the hand. The boy lying in drunken sleep upon his bed was no
+worse than the rest of them. He was an epitome of the evil, as his
+parents were of the sorrows, of the place.</p>
+
+<p>He could not talk to Elias. He could not lecture him. He would only be
+dashing his words against the accumulated evil<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> of years of bondage as
+the ripples of a summer sea beat against a stone wall. It was not the
+wickedness of this boy he was fighting or even the wrong-doing of Mt.
+Hope. It was the aggregation of the evils of the fathers, the
+grandfathers, the masters and mistresses of these people. Against this
+what could talk avail?</p>
+
+<p>The boy slept on, and the afternoon passed heavily away. Aunt Caroline
+was finding solace in her pipe, and Stephen Gray sulked in moody silence
+beside the hearth. Neither of them joined their guest at evening
+service.</p>
+
+<p>He went, however. It was hard to face those people again after the
+events of the morning. He could feel them covertly nudging each other
+and grinning as he went up to the pulpit. He chided himself for the
+momentary annoyance it caused him. Were they not like so many naughty,
+irresponsible children?</p>
+
+<p>The service passed without unpleasantness, save that he went home with
+an annoyingly vivid impression of a yellow girl with red ribbons on her
+hat, who pretended to be impressed by his sermon and made eyes at him
+from behind her handkerchief.</p>
+
+<p>On the way to his room that night, as he passed Stephen Gray, the old
+man whispered huskily, "It's de fus' time 'Lias evah done dat."</p>
+
+<p>It was the only word he had spoken since morning.</p>
+
+<p>A sound sleep refreshed Dokesbury, and restored the tone to his
+overtaxed nerves. When he came out in the morning, Elias was already in
+the kitchen. He too had slept off his indisposition, but it had been
+succeeded by a painful embarrassment that proved an effectual barrier to
+all intercourse with him. The minister talked lightly and amusingly, but
+the boy never raised his eyes from his plate, and only spoke when he was
+compelled to answer some direct questions.</p>
+
+<p>Harold Dokesbury knew that unless he could overcome this reserve, his
+power over the youth was gone. He bent every effort to do it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span></p><p>"What do you say to a turn down the street with me?" he asked as he
+rose from breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>'Lias shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"What! You haven't deserted me already?"</p>
+
+<p>The older people had gone out, but young Gray looked furtively about
+before he replied: "You know I ain't fittin' to go out with
+you&mdash;aftah&mdash;aftah&mdash;yestiddy."</p>
+
+<p>A dozen appropriate texts rose in the preacher's mind, but he knew that
+it was not a preaching time, so he contented himself with saying,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, get out! Come along!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I cain't. I cain't. I wisht I could! You needn't think I's ashamed,
+'cause I ain't. Plenty of 'em git drunk, an' I don't keer nothin' 'bout
+dat"&mdash;this in a defiant tone.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, why not come along then?"</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you I cain't. Don't ax me no mo'. It ain't on my account I won't
+go. It's you."</p>
+
+<p>"Me! Why, I want you to go."</p>
+
+<p>"I know you does, but I mustn't. Cain't you see that dey'd be glad to
+say dat&mdash;dat you was in cahoots wif me an' you tuk yo' dram on de sly?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care what they say so long as it isn't true. Are you coming?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I ain't."</p>
+
+<p>He was perfectly determined, and Dokesbury saw that there was no use
+arguing with him. So with a resigned "All right!" he strode out the gate
+and up the street, thinking of the problem he had to solve.</p>
+
+<p>There was good in Elias Gray, he knew. It was a shame that it should be
+lost. It would be lost unless he were drawn strongly away from the paths
+he was treading. But how could it be done? Was there no point in his
+mind that could be reached by what was other than evil? That was the
+thing to be found out. Then he paused to ask himself if, after all, he
+were not trying to do too much,&mdash;trying, in fact, to play <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>Providence to
+Elias. He found himself involuntarily wanting to shift the
+responsibility of planning for the youth. He wished that something
+entirely independent of his intentions would happen.</p>
+
+<p>Just then something did happen. A piece of soft mud hurled from some
+unknown source caught the minister square in the chest, and spattered
+over his clothes. He raised his eyes and glanced about quickly, but no
+one was in sight. Whoever the foe was, he was securely ambushed.</p>
+
+<p>"Thrown by the hand of a man," mused Dokesbury, "prompted by the malice
+of a child."</p>
+
+<p>He went on his way, finished his business, and returned to the house.</p>
+
+<p>"La, Brothah Dokesbury!" exclaimed Aunt Caroline, "what's de mattah 'f
+you' shu't bosom?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that's where one of our good citizens left his card."</p>
+
+<p>"You don' mean to say none o' dem low-life scoun'els&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know who did it. He took particular pains to keep out of
+sight."</p>
+
+<p>"'Lias!" the old woman cried, turning on her son, "wha' 'd you let
+Brothah Dokesbury go off by hisse'f fu? Why n't you go 'long an' tek
+keer o' him?"</p>
+
+<p>The old lady stopped even in the midst of her tirade, as her eyes took
+in the expression on her son's face.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll kill some o' dem damn&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"'Lias!"</p>
+
+<p>"'Scuse me, Mistah Dokesbury, but I feel lak I'll bus' ef I don't
+'spress myse'f. It makes me so mad. Don't you go out o' hyeah no mo'
+'dout me. I'll go 'long an' I'll brek somebody's haid wif a stone."</p>
+
+<p>"'Lias! how you talkin' fo' de ministah?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, dat's whut I'll do, 'cause I kin outth'ow any of 'em an' I know
+dey hidin'-places."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll be glad to accept your protection," said Dokesbury.</p>
+
+<p>He saw his advantage, and was thankful for the mud,&mdash;the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> one thing that
+without an effort restored the easy relations between himself and his
+prot&eacute;g&eacute;.</p>
+
+<p>Ostensibly these relations were reversed, and Elias went out with the
+preacher as a guardian and protector. But the minister was laying his
+nets. It was on one of these rambles that he broached to 'Lias a subject
+which he had been considering for some time.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, 'Lias," he said, "what are you going to do with that big
+back yard of yours?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, nothin'. 'Tain't no 'count to raise nothin' in."</p>
+
+<p>"It may not be fit for vegetables, but it will raise something."</p>
+
+<p>"What?"</p>
+
+<p>"Chickens. That's what."</p>
+
+<p>Elias laughed sympathetically.</p>
+
+<p>"I'd lak to eat de chickens I raise. I wouldn't want to be feedin' de
+neighborhood."</p>
+
+<p>"Plenty of boards, slats, wire, and a good lock and key would fix that
+all right."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but whah 'm I gwine to git all dem things?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I'll go in with you and furnish the money, and help you build the
+coops. Then you can sell chickens and eggs, and we'll go halves on the
+profits."</p>
+
+<p>"Hush man!" cried 'Lias, in delight.</p>
+
+<p>So the matter was settled, and, as Aunt Caroline expressed it, "Fu' a
+week er sich a mattah, you nevah did see sich ta'in' down an' buildin'
+up in all yo' bo'n days."</p>
+
+<p>'Lias went at the work with zest and Dokesbury noticed his skill with
+tools. He let fall the remark: "Say, 'Lias, there's a school near here
+where they teach carpentry; why don't you go and learn?"</p>
+
+<p>"What I gwine to do with bein' a cyahpenter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Repair some of these houses around Mt. Hope, if nothing more,"
+Dokesbury responded, laughing; and there the matter rested.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span></p><p>The work prospered, and as the weeks went on, 'Lias's enterprise became
+the town's talk. One of Aunt Caroline's patrons who had come with some
+orders about work regarded the changed condition of affairs, and said,
+"Why, Aunt Caroline, this doesn't look like the same place. I'll have to
+buy some eggs from you; you keep your yard and hen-house so nice, it's
+an advertisement for the eggs."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't talk to me nothin' 'bout dat ya'd, Miss Lucy," Aunt Caroline had
+retorted. "Dat 'long to 'Lias an' de preachah. Hit dey doin's. Dey done
+mos' nigh drove me out wif dey cleanness. I ain't nevah seed no sich
+ca'in' on in my life befo'. Why, my 'Lias done got right brigity an'
+talk about bein' somep'n."</p>
+
+<p>Dokesbury had retired from his partnership with the boy save in so far
+as he acted as a general supervisor. His share had been sold to a friend
+of 'Lias, Jim Hughes. The two seemed to have no other thought save of
+raising, tending, and selling chickens.</p>
+
+<p>Mt. Hope looked on and ceased to scoff. Money is a great dignifier, and
+Jim and 'Lias were making money. There had been some sniffs when the
+latter had hinged the front gate and whitewashed his mother's cabin, but
+even that had been accepted now as a matter of course.</p>
+
+<p>Dokesbury had done his work. He, too, looked on, and in some
+satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>"Let the leaven work," he said, "and all Mt. Hope must rise."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It was one day, nearly a year later, that "old lady Hughes" dropped in
+on Aunt Caroline for a chat.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I do say, Sis' Ca'line, dem two boys o' ourn done sot dis town on
+fiah."</p>
+
+<p>"What now, Sis' Lizy?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, evah sence 'Lias tuk it into his haid to be a cyahpenter an' Jim
+'cided to go 'long an' lu'n to be a blacksmiff, some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> o' dese hyeah
+othah young people's been trying to do somep'n'."</p>
+
+<p>"All dey wanted was a staht."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now will you b'lieve me, dat no-'count Tom Johnson done opened a
+fish sto', an' he has de boys an' men bring him dey fish all de time. He
+gives 'em a little somep'n fu' dey ketch, den he go sell 'em to de white
+folks."</p>
+
+<p>"Lawd, how long!"</p>
+
+<p>"An' what you think he say?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do' know, sis'."</p>
+
+<p>"He say ez soon 'z he git money enough, he gwine to dat school whah
+'Lias and Jim gone an' lu'n to fahm scientific."</p>
+
+<p>"Bless de Lawd! Well, 'um, I don' put nothin' pas' de young folks now."</p>
+
+<p>Mt. Hope had at last awakened. Something had come to her to which she
+might aspire,&mdash;something that she could understand and reach. She was
+not soaring, but she was rising above the degradation in which Harold
+Dokesbury had found her. And for her and him the ordeal had passed.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PAUL_LAURENCE_DUNBAR" id="PAUL_LAURENCE_DUNBAR"></a>PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR</h2>
+
+<p>The Negro race in America has produced musicians, composers and
+painters, but it was left for Paul Laurence Dunbar to give it fame in
+literature. He was of pure African stock; his father and mother were
+born in slavery, and neither had any schooling, although the father had
+taught himself to read. Paul was born in Dayton, Ohio, June 27, 1872. He
+was christened Paul, because his father said that he was to be a great
+man. He was a diligent pupil at school, and began to make verses when he
+was still a child. His ability was recognized by his class mates; he was
+made editor of the high school paper, and wrote the class song for his
+commencement.</p>
+
+<p>The death of his father made it necessary for him to support his mother.
+He sought for some employment where his education might be put to some
+use, but finding such places closed to him, he became an elevator boy.
+He continued to write, however, and in 1892 his first volume was
+published, a book of poems called <i>Oak and Ivy</i>. The publishers were so
+doubtful of its success that they would not bring it out until a friend
+advanced the cost of publication. Paul now sold books to the passengers
+in his elevator, and realized enough to repay his friend. He was
+occasionally asked to give readings from his poetry. Gifted as he was
+with a deep, melodious voice, and a fine power of mimicry, he was very
+successful. In 1893 he was sought out by a man who was organizing a
+concert company and who engaged Paul to go along as reader. Full of
+enthusiasm, he set to work committing his poems to memory, and writing
+new ones. Ten days before the company was to start, word came that it
+had been disbanded. Paul found himself at the approach of winter without
+money and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> without work, and with his mother in real need. In his
+discouragement he even thought of suicide, but by the help of a friend
+he found work, and with it courage. In a letter written about this time
+he tells of his ambitions: "I did once want to be a lawyer, but that
+ambition has long since died out before the all-absorbing desire to be a
+worthy singer of the songs of God and nature. To be able to interpret my
+own people through song and story, and to prove to the many that we are
+more human than African."</p>
+
+<p>A second volume of poems, <i>Majors and Minors</i>, appeared in 1895. Like
+his first book it was printed by a local publisher, and had but a small
+sale. The actor James A. Herne happened to be playing <i>Shore Acres</i> in
+Toledo; Paul saw him, admired his acting, and timidly presented him with
+a copy of his book. Mr. Herne read it with great pleasure, and sent it
+on to his friend William Dean Howells, who was then editor of <i>Harper's
+Weekly</i>. In June, 1896, there appeared in that journal a full-page
+review of the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, quoting freely from his
+poems, and praising them highly. This recognition by America's greatest
+critic was the beginning of Paul's national reputation. Orders came for
+his books from all over the country; a manager engaged him for a series
+of readings from his poems, and a New York firm, Dodd Mead &amp; Co.,
+arranged to bring out his next book, <i>Lyrics of Lowly Life</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In 1897 he went to England to give a series of readings. Here he was a
+guest at the Savage Club, one of the best-known clubs of London. His
+readings were very successful, but a dishonest manager cheated him out
+of the proceeds, and he was obliged to cable to his friends for money to
+come home.</p>
+
+<p>Through the efforts of Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, the young poet obtained
+a position in the Congressional Library at Washington. It was thought
+that this would give him just the opportunity he needed for study, but
+the work proved too confining for his health. The year 1898 was marked
+by two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> events: the publication of his first book of short stories,
+<i>Folks From Dixie</i>, and his marriage to Miss Alice R. Moore. In 1899 at
+the request of Booker T. Washington he went to Tuskeegee and gave
+several readings and lectures before the students, also writing a school
+song for them. He made a tour through the South, giving readings with
+much success, but the strain of public appearances was beginning to tell
+upon his health. He continued to write, and in 1899 published <i>Lyrics of
+the Hearthside</i>, dedicated to his wife. He was invited to go to Albany
+to read before a distinguished audience, where Theodore Roosevelt, then
+governor, was to introduce him. He started, but was unable to get
+farther than New York. Here he lay sick for weeks, and when he grew
+stronger, the doctors said that his lungs were affected and he must have
+a change of climate. He went to Colorado in the fall of 1899, and wrote
+back to a friend: "Well, it is something to sit under the shadow of the
+Rocky Mountains, even if one only goes there to die." From this time on
+his life was one long fight for health, and usually a losing battle, but
+he faced it as courageously as Robert Louis Stevenson had done. In
+Colorado he wrote a novel, The <i>Love of Landry</i>, whose scene was laid in
+his new surroundings. He returned to Washington in 1900, and gave
+occasional readings, but it was evident that his strength was failing.
+He published two more volumes, <i>The Strength of Gideon</i>, a book of short
+stories, and <i>Poems of Cabin and Field</i>, which showed that his genius
+had lost none of its power. His last years were spent in Dayton, his old
+home, with his mother. He died February 10, 1906.</p>
+
+<p>One of the finest tributes to him was paid by his friend Brand Whitlock,
+then Mayor of Toledo, who has since become famous as United States
+Minister to Belgium during the Great War. This is from a letter written
+when he heard that the young poet was dead:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Paul was a poet: and I find that when I have said that I have said
+the greatest and most splendid thing that can be said about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> a
+man.... Nature, who knows so much better than man about everything,
+cares nothing at all for the little distinctions, and when she
+elects one of her children for her most important work, bestows on
+him the rich gift of poesy, and assigns him a post in the greatest
+of the arts, she invariably seizes the opportunity to show her
+contempt of rank and title and race and land and creed. She took
+Burns from a plough and Paul from an elevator, and Paul has done
+for his own people what Burns did for the peasants of Scotland&mdash;he
+has expressed them in their own way and in their own words.</p></blockquote>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="WITH_THE_POLICE" id="WITH_THE_POLICE"></a>WITH THE POLICE</h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span></p><p><i>Not all Americans are good Americans. For the lawbreakers, American
+born or otherwise, we need men to enforce the law. Of these guardians of
+public safety, one body, the Pennsylvania State Police, has become
+famous for its achievements. Katherine Mayo studied their work at first
+hand, met the men of the force, visited the scenes of their activity,
+and in</i> <span class="smcap">The Standard Bearers</span>, <i>tells of their daring exploits. This
+story is taken from that book</i>.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="ISRAEL_DRAKE" id="ISRAEL_DRAKE"></a>ISRAEL DRAKE</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Katherine Mayo</span></h3>
+
+<p>Israel Drake was a bandit for simple love of the thing. To hunt for
+another reason would be a waste of time. The blood in his veins was pure
+English, unmixed since long ago. His environment was that of his
+neighbors. His habitat was the noble hills. But Israel Drake was a
+bandit, just as his neighbors were farmers&mdash;just as a hawk is a hawk
+while its neighbors are barnyard fowls.</p>
+
+<p>Israel Drake was swarthy-visaged, high of cheek bone, with large, dark,
+deep-set eyes, and a thin-lipped mouth covered by a long and drooping
+black mustache. Barefooted, he stood six feet two inches tall. Lean as a
+panther, and as supple, he could clear a five-foot rail fence without
+the aid of his hand. He ran like a deer. As a woodsman the very deer
+could have taught him little. With rifle and revolver he was an expert
+shot, and the weapons he used were the truest and best.</p>
+
+<p>All the hill-people of Cumberland County dreaded him. All the scattered
+valley-folk spoke softly at his name. And the jest and joy of Israel's
+care-free life was to make them skip and shiver and dance to the tune of
+their trepidations.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, he was leader of a gang, outlaws every one. But his
+own strong aura eclipsed the rest, and he glared alone, in the thought
+of his world, endued with terrors of diverse origin.</p>
+
+<p>His genius kept him fully aware of the value of this preeminence, and it
+lay in his wisdom and pleasure to fan the flame of his own repute. In
+this it amused him to seek the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> picturesque&mdash;the unexpected. With an
+imagination fed by primeval humor and checked by no outward
+circumstances of law, he achieved a ready facility. Once, for example,
+while trundling through his town of Shippensburg on the rear platform of
+a freight train, he chanced to spy a Borough Constable crossing a bridge
+near the track.</p>
+
+<p>"Happy thought! Let's touch the good soul up. He's getting stodgy."</p>
+
+<p>Israel drew a revolver and fired, neatly nicking the Constable's hat.
+Then with a mountaineer's hoot, he gayly proclaimed his identity.</p>
+
+<p>Again, and many times, he would send into this or that town or
+settlement a message addressed to the Constable or Chief of Police:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I am coming down this afternoon. Get away out of town. Don't let me
+find you there."</p>
+
+<p>Obediently they went away. And Israel, strolling the streets that
+afternoon just as he had promised to do, would enter shop after shop,
+look over the stock at his leisure, and, with perfect good-humor, pick
+out whatever pleased him, regardless of cost.</p>
+
+<p>"I think I'll take this here article," he would say to the trembling
+store-keeper, affably pocketing his choice.</p>
+
+<p>"Help yourself, Mr. Drake! Help yourself, sir! Glad we are able to
+please you to-day."</p>
+
+<p>Which was indeed the truth. And many of them there were who would have
+hastened to curry favor with their persecutor by whispering in his ear a
+word of warning had they known of any impending attempt against him by
+the agents of peace.</p>
+
+<p>Such was their estimate of the relative strength of Israel Drake and of
+the law forces of the Sovereign State of Pennsylvania.</p>
+
+<p>In the earlier times they had tried to arrest him. Once the attempt
+succeeded and Israel went to the Penitentiary for a term. But he emerged
+a better and wilier bandit than before,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> to embark upon a career that
+made his former life seem tame. Sheriffs and constables now proved
+powerless against him, whatever they essayed.</p>
+
+<p>Then came a grand, determined effort when the Sheriff, supported by
+fifteen deputies, all heavily armed, actually surrounded Drake's house.
+But the master-outlaw, alone and at ease at an upper window, his
+Winchester repeating-rifle in his hand and a smile of still content on
+his face, coolly stood the whole army off until, weary of empty danger,
+it gave up the siege and went home.</p>
+
+<p>This disastrous expedition ended the attempts of the local authorities
+to capture Israel Drake. Thenceforth he pursued his natural course
+without pretense of let or hindrance. At the time when this story
+begins, no fewer than fourteen warrants were out for his apprehension,
+issued on charges ranging from burglary and highway robbery through a
+long list of felonies. But the warrants, slowly accumulating, lay in the
+bottom of official drawers, apprehending nothing but dust. No one
+undertook to serve them. Life was too sweet&mdash;too short.</p>
+
+<p>Then came a turn of fate. Israel chanced to bethink himself of a certain
+aged farmer living with his old wife near a spot called Lee's
+Cross-Road. The two dwelt by themselves, without companions on their
+farm, and without neighbors. And they were reputed to have money.</p>
+
+<p>The money might not be much&mdash;might be exceedingly little. But, even so,
+Israel could use it, and in any event there would be the fun of the
+trick. So Israel summoned one Carey Morrison, a gifted mate and
+subordinate, with whom he proceeded to act.</p>
+
+<p>At dead of night the two broke into the farmhouse&mdash;crept into the
+chamber of the old pair&mdash;crept softly, softly, lest the farmer might
+keep a shotgun by his side. Sneaking to the foot of the bed, Israel
+suddenly flashed his lantern full upon the pillows&mdash;upon the two pale,
+deep-seamed faces crowned with silver hair.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span></p><p>The woman sat up with a piercing scream. The farmer clutched at his
+gun. But Israel, bringing the glinting barrel of his revolver into the
+lantern's shaft of light, ordered both to lie down. Carey, slouching at
+hand, awaited orders.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is your money?" demanded Israel, indicating the farmer by the
+point of his gun.</p>
+
+<p>"I have no money, you coward!"</p>
+
+<p>"It's no use your lying to me. <i>Where's the money?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"I have no money, I tell you."</p>
+
+<p>"Carey," observed Israel, "hunt a candle."</p>
+
+<p>While Carey looked for the candle, Israel surveyed his victims with a
+cheerful, anticipatory grin.</p>
+
+<p>The candle came; was lighted.</p>
+
+<p>"Carey," Israel spoke again, "you pin the old woman down. Pull the quilt
+off. Clamp her feet together. So!"</p>
+
+<p>Then he thrust the candle-flame against the soles of those gnarled old
+feet&mdash;thrust it close, while the flame bent upward, and the melting
+tallow poured upon the bed.</p>
+
+<p>The woman screamed again, this time in pain. The farmer half rose, with
+a quivering cry of rage, but Israel's gun stared him between the eyes.
+The woman screamed without interval. There was a smell of burning flesh.</p>
+
+<p>"Now we'll change about," remarked Israel, beaming. "I'll hold the old
+feller. You take the candle, Carey. You don't reely need your gun&mdash;now,
+do ye, boy?"</p>
+
+<p>And so they began afresh.</p>
+
+<p>It was not a game to last long. Before dawn the two were back in their
+own place, bearing the little all of value that the rifled house had
+contained.</p>
+
+<p>When the news of the matter spread abroad, it seemed, somehow, just a
+straw too much. The District Attorney of the County of Cumberland blazed
+into white heat. But he was powerless, he found. Not an officer within
+his entire jurisdiction expressed any willingness even to attempt an
+arrest.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span></p><p>"Then we shall see," said District Attorney Rhey, "what the State will
+do for us, since we cannot help ourselves!" And he rushed off a
+telegram, confirmed by post, to the Superintendent of the Department of
+State Police.</p>
+
+<p>The Superintendent of the Department of State Police promptly referred
+the matter to the Captain of "C" Troop, with orders to act. For
+Cumberland County, being within the southeastern quarter of the
+Commonwealth, lies under "C" Troop's special care.</p>
+
+<p>It was Adams, in those days, who held that command&mdash;Lynn G. Adams, now
+Captain of "A" Troop, although for the duration of the war serving in
+the regular army, even as his fathers before him have served in our
+every war, including that which put the country on the map. Truer
+soldier, finer officer, braver or straighter or surer dealer with men
+and things need not be sought. His victories leave no needless scar
+behind, and his command would die by inches rather than fail him
+anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>The Captain of "C" Troop, then, choosing with judgment, picked his
+man&mdash;picked Trooper Edward Hallisey, a Boston Irishman, square of jaw,
+shrewd of eye, quick of wit, strong of wind and limb. And he ordered
+Private Hallisey to proceed at once to Carlisle, county seat of
+Cumberland, and report to the District Attorney for service toward
+effecting the apprehension of Israel Drake.</p>
+
+<p>Three days later&mdash;it was the 28th of September, to be exact&mdash;Private
+Edward Hallisey sent in his report to his Troop Commander. He had made
+all necessary observations, he said, and was ready to arrest the
+criminal. In this he would like to have the assistance of two Troopers,
+who should join him at Carlisle.</p>
+
+<p>The report came in the morning mail. First Sergeant Price detailed two
+men from the Barracks reserve. They were Privates H. K. Merryfield and
+Harvey J. Smith. Their orders were simply to proceed at once, in
+civilian clothes, to Carlisle,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> where they would meet Private Hallisey
+and assist him in effecting the arrest of Israel Drake.</p>
+
+<p>Privates Merryfield and Smith, carrying in addition to their service
+revolvers the 44-caliber Springfield carbine which is the Force's heavy
+weapon, left by the next train.</p>
+
+<p>On the Carlisle station platform, as the two Troopers debarked, some
+hundred persons were gathered in pursuance of various and centrifugal
+designs. But one impulse they appeared unanimously to share&mdash;the impulse
+to give as wide a berth as possible to a peculiarly horrible tramp.</p>
+
+<p>Why should a being like that intrude himself upon a passenger platform
+in a respectable country town? Not to board a coach, surely, for such as
+he pay no fares. To spy out the land? To steal luggage? Or simply to
+make himself hateful to decent folk?</p>
+
+<p>He carried his head with a hangdog lurch&mdash;his heavy jaw was rough with
+stubble beard. His coat and trousers fluttered rags and his toes stuck
+out of his boots. Women snatched back their skirts as he slouched near,
+and men muttered and scowled at him for a contaminating beast.</p>
+
+<p>Merryfield and Smith, drifting near this scum of the earth, caught the
+words "Four-thirty train" and the name of a station.</p>
+
+<p>"Right," murmured Merryfield.</p>
+
+<p>Then he went and bought tickets.</p>
+
+<p>In the shelter of an ancient, grimy day-coach, the scum muttered again,
+as Smith brushed past him in the aisle.</p>
+
+<p>"Charlie Stover's farm," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"M'm," said Smith.</p>
+
+<p>At a scrap of a station, in the foothills of ascending heights the tramp
+and the Troopers separately detrained. In the early evening all three
+strayed together once more in the shadow of the lilacs by Charlie
+Stover's gate.</p>
+
+<p>Over the supper-table Hallisey gave the news. "Drake is somewhere on the
+mountain to-night," said he. "His cabin<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> is way up high, on a ridge
+called Huckleberry Patch. He is practically sure to go home in the
+course of the evening. Then is our chance. First, of course, you fellows
+will change your clothes. I've got some old things ready for you."</p>
+
+<p>Farmer Stover, like every other denizen of the rural county, had lived
+for years in terror and hatred of Israel Drake. Willingly he had aided
+Hallisey to the full extent of his power. He had told all that he knew
+of the bandit's habits and mates. He had indicated the mountain trails
+and he had given the Trooper such little shelter and food as the latter
+had stopped to take during his rapid work of investigation. But now he
+was asked to perform a service that he would gladly have refused; he was
+asked to hitch up a horse and wagon and to drive the three Troopers to
+the very vicinity of Israel Drake's house.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come on, Mr. Stover," they urged. "You're a public-spirited man, as
+you've shown. Do it for your neighbors' sake if not for your own. You
+want the county rid of this pest."</p>
+
+<p>Very reluctantly the farmer began the trip. With every turn of the
+ever-mounting forest road his reluctance grew. Grisly memories, grisly
+pictures, flooded his mind. It was night, and the trees in the darkness
+whispered like evil men. The bushes huddled like crouching figures. And
+what was it, moving stealthily over there, that crackled twigs? At last
+he could bear it no more.</p>
+
+<p>"Here's where <i>I</i> turn 'round," he muttered hoarsely. "If you fellers
+are going farther you'll go alone. I got a use for <i>my</i> life!"</p>
+
+<p>"All right, then," said Hallisey. "You've done well by us already.
+Good-night."</p>
+
+<p>It was a fine moonlight night and Hallisey now knew those woods as well
+as did his late host. He led his two comrades up another stiff mile of
+steady climbing. Then he struck off, by an almost invisible trail, into
+the dense timber. Silently the three men moved, threading the fragrant,
+silver-flecked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> blackness with practised woodsmen's skill. At last their
+file-leader stopped and beckoned his mates.</p>
+
+<p>Over his shoulder the two studied the scene before them: A clearing
+chopped out of the dense tall timber. In the midst of the clearing a log
+cabin, a story and a half high. On two sides of the cabin a straggling
+orchard of peach and apple trees. In the cabin window a dim light.</p>
+
+<p>It was then about eleven o'clock. The three Troopers, effacing
+themselves in the shadows, laid final plans.</p>
+
+<p>The cabin had two rooms on the top floor and one below, said Hallisey,
+beneath his breath. The first-floor room had a door and two windows on
+the north, and the same on the south, just opposite. Under the west end
+was a cellar, with an outside door. Before the main door to the north
+was a little porch. This, by day, commanded the sweep of the
+mountain-side; and here, when Drake was "hiding out" in some neighboring
+eyrie, expecting pursuit, his wife was wont to signal him concerning the
+movements of intruders.</p>
+
+<p>Her code was written in dish-water. A panful thrown to the east meant
+danger in the west, and <i>vice versa</i>; this Hallisey himself had seen and
+now recalled in case of need.</p>
+
+<p>Up to the present moment each officer had carried his carbine, taken
+apart and wrapped in a bundle, to avoid the remark of chance observers
+by the way. Now each put his weapon together, ready for use. They
+compared their watches, setting them to the second. They discarded their
+coats and hats.</p>
+
+<p>The moon was flooding the clearing with high, pale light, adding greatly
+to the difficulty of their task. Accordingly, they plotted carefully.
+Each Trooper took a door&mdash;Hallisey that to the north, Merryfield that to
+the south, Smith that of the cellar. It was agreed that each should
+creep to a point opposite the door on which he was to advance, ten
+minutes being allowed for all to reach their initial positions; that at
+exactly five minutes to midnight the advance should be started,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> slowly,
+through the tall grass of the clearing toward the cabin; that in case of
+any unusual noise or alarm, each man should lie low exactly five minutes
+before resuming this advance; and that from a point fifty yards from the
+cabin a rush should be made upon the doors.</p>
+
+<p>According to the request of the District Attorney, Drake was to be taken
+"dead or alive," but according to an adamantine principle of the Force,
+he must be taken not only alive, but unscathed if that were humanly
+possible. This meant that he must not be given an opportunity to run and
+so render shooting necessary. If, however, he should break away, his
+chance of escape would be small, as each Trooper was a dead shot with
+the weapons he was carrying.</p>
+
+<p>The scheme concerted, the three officers separated, heading apart to
+their several starting-points. At five minutes before midnight, to the
+tick of their synchronized watches, each began to glide through the tall
+grass. But it was late September. The grass was dry. Old briar-veins
+dragged at brittle stalks. Shimmering whispers of withered leaves echoed
+to the smallest touch; and when the men were still some two hundred
+yards from the cabin the sharp ears of a dog caught the rumor of all
+these tiny sounds,&mdash;and the dog barked.</p>
+
+<p>Every man stopped short&mdash;moved not a finger again till five minutes had
+passed. Then once more each began to creep&mdash;reached the fifty-yard
+point&mdash;stood up, with a long breath, and dashed for his door.</p>
+
+<p>At one and the same moment, practically, the three stood in the cabin,
+viewing a scene of domestic peace. A short, square, swarthy woman, black
+of eye, high of cheek bone, stood by a stove calmly stirring a pot. On
+the table besides her, on the floor around her, clustered many jars of
+peaches&mdash;jars freshly filled, steaming hot, awaiting their tops. In a
+corner three little children, huddled together on a low bench, stared at
+the strangers with sleepy eyes. Three chairs; a cupboard with dishes;
+bunches of corn hanging from the rafters<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> by their husks; festoons of
+onions; tassels of dried herbs&mdash;all this made visible by the dull light
+of a small kerosene lamp whose dirty chimney was streaked with smoke.
+All this and nothing more.</p>
+
+<p>Two of the men, jumping for the stairs, searched the upper half-story
+thoroughly, but without profit.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Drake," said Hallisey, as they returned, "we are officers of the
+State Police, come to arrest your husband. Where is he?"</p>
+
+<p>In silence, in utter calm the woman still stirred her pot, not missing
+the rhythm of a stroke.</p>
+
+<p>"The dog warned them. He's just got away," said each officer to himself.
+"She's <i>too</i> calm."</p>
+
+<p>She scooped up a spoonful of the fruit, peered at it critically,
+splashed it back into the bubbling pot. From her manner it appeared the
+most natural thing in the world to be canning peaches at midnight on the
+top of South Mountain in the presence of officers of the State Police.</p>
+
+<p>"My husband's gone to Baltimore," she vouchsafed at her easy leisure.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's have a look in the cellar," said Merryfield, and dropped down the
+cellar stairs with Hallisey at his heels. Together they ransacked the
+little cave to a conclusion. During the process, Merryfield conceived an
+idea.</p>
+
+<p>"Hallisey," he murmured, "what would you think of my staying down here,
+while you and Smith go off talking as though we were all together? She
+might say something to the children, when she believes we're gone, and I
+could hear every word through that thin floor."</p>
+
+<p>"We'll do it!" Hallisey answered, beneath his voice. Then, shouting:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Come on, Smith! Let's get away from this; no use wasting time here!"</p>
+
+<p>And in another moment Smith and Hallisey were crashing up the
+mountain-side, calling out: "Hi, there! Merryfield<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>&mdash;Oh! Merryfield,
+wait for us!"&mdash;as if their comrade had outstripped them on the trail.</p>
+
+<p>Merryfield had made use of the noise of their departure to establish
+himself in a tenable position under the widest crack in the floor. Now
+he held himself motionless, subduing even his breath.</p>
+
+<p>One&mdash;two&mdash;three minutes of dead silence. Then came the timorous
+half-whisper of a frightened child:</p>
+
+<p>"Will them men kill father if they find him?"</p>
+
+<p>"S-sh!"</p>
+
+<p>"Mother!" faintly ventured another little voice, "will them men kill
+father if they find him?"</p>
+
+<p>"S-sh! S-sh! I tell ye!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ma-ma! Will they kill my father?" This was the wail, insistent,
+uncontrolled, of the smallest child of all.</p>
+
+<p>The crackling tramp of the officers, mounting the trail, had wholly died
+away. The woman evidently believed all immediate danger past.</p>
+
+<p>"No!" she exclaimed vehemently, "they ain't goin' to lay eyes on yo'
+father, hair nor hide of him. Quit yer frettin'!"</p>
+
+<p>In a moment she spoke again: "You keep still, now, like good children,
+while I go out and empty these peach-stones. I'll be back in a minute.
+See you keep still just where you are!"</p>
+
+<p>Stealing noiselessly to the cellar door as the woman left the house,
+Merryfield saw her making for the woods, a basket on her arm. He watched
+her till the shadows engulfed her. Then he drew back to his own place
+and resumed his silent vigil.</p>
+
+<p>Moments passed, without a sound from the room above. Then came soft
+little thuds on the floor, a whimper or two, small sighs, and a slither
+of bare legs on bare boards.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor little kiddies!" thought Merryfield, "they're coiling down to
+sleep!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span></p><p>Back in the days when the Force was started, the Major had said to each
+recruit of them all:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I expect you to treat women and children at all times with every
+consideration."</p>
+
+<p>From that hour forth the principle has been grafted into the lives of
+the men. It is instinct now&mdash;self-acting, deep, and unconscious. No
+tried Trooper deliberately remembers it. It is an integral part of him,
+like the drawing of his breath.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I could manage to spare those babies and their mother in what's
+to come!" Merryfield pondered as he lurked in the mould-scented dark.</p>
+
+<p>A quarter of an hour went by. Five minutes more. Footsteps nearing the
+cabin from the direction of the woods. Low voices&mdash;very low.
+Indistinguishable words. Then the back door opened. Two persons entered,
+and all that they now uttered was clear.</p>
+
+<p>"It was them that the dog heard," said a man's voice. "Get me my rifle
+and all my ammunition. I'll go to Maryland. I'll get a job on that stone
+quarry near Westminster. I'll send some money as soon as I'm paid."</p>
+
+<p>"But you won't start <i>to-night</i>!" exclaimed the wife.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, to-night&mdash;this minute. Quick! I wouldn't budge an inch for the
+County folks. But with the State Troopers after me, that's another
+thing. If I stay around here now they'll get me dead sure&mdash;and send me
+up too. My gun, I say!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, daddy, daddy, don't go away!" "<i>Don't</i> go away off and leave me,
+daddy!" "<i>Don't go, don't go!</i>" came the children's plaintive wails,
+hoarse with fatigue and fright.</p>
+
+<p>Merryfield stealthily crept from the cellar's outside door, hugging the
+wall of the cabin, moving toward the rear. As he reached the corner, and
+was about to make the turn toward the back, he drew his six-shooter and
+laid his carbine down in the grass. For the next step, he knew, would
+bring<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> him into plain sight. If Drake offered any resistance, the
+ensuing action would be at short range or hand to hand.</p>
+
+<p>He rounded the corner. Drake was standing just outside the door, a rifle
+in his left hand, his right hand hidden in the pocket of his overcoat.
+In the doorway stood the wife, with the three little children crowding
+before her. It was the last moment. They were saying good-bye.</p>
+
+<p>Merryfield covered the bandit with his revolver.</p>
+
+<p>"Put up your hands! You are under arrest," he commanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Who the hell are you!" Drake flung back. As he spoke he thrust his
+rifle into the grasp of the woman and snatched his right hand from its
+concealment. In its grip glistened the barrel of a nickel-plated
+revolver.</p>
+
+<p>Merryfield could have easily shot him then and there&mdash;would have been
+amply warranted in doing so. But he had heard the children's voices. Now
+he saw their innocent, terrified eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor&mdash;little&mdash;kiddies!" he thought again.</p>
+
+<p>Drake stood six feet two inches high, and weighed some two hundred
+pounds, all brawn. Furthermore, he was desperate. Merryfield is merely
+of medium build.</p>
+
+<p>"Nevertheless, I'll take a chance," he said to himself, returning his
+six-shooter to its holster. And just as the outlaw threw up his own
+weapon to fire, the Trooper, in a running jump, plunged into him with
+all fours, exactly as, when a boy, he had plunged off a springboard into
+the old mill-dam of a hot July afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>Too amazed even to pull his trigger, Drake gave backward a step into the
+doorway. Merryfield's clutch toward his right hand missed the gun,
+fastening instead on the sleeve of his heavy coat. Swearing wildly while
+the woman and children screamed behind him, the bandit struggled to
+break the Trooper's hold&mdash;tore and pulled until the sleeve, where
+Merryfield held it, worked down over the gun in his own grip. So
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>Merryfield, twisting the sleeve, caught a lock-hold on hand and gun
+together.</p>
+
+<p>Drake, standing on the doorsill, had now some eight inches advantage of
+height. The door opened inward, from right to left. With a tremendous
+effort Drake forced his assailant to his knees, stepped back into the
+room, seized the door with his left hand and with the whole weight on
+his shoulder slammed it to, on the Trooper's wrist.</p>
+
+<p>The pain was excruciating&mdash;but it did not break that lock-hold on the
+outlaw's hand and gun. Shooting from his knees like a projectile,
+Merryfield flung his whole weight at the door. Big as Drake was, he
+could not hold it. It gave, and once more the two men hung at grips,
+this time within the room.</p>
+
+<p>Drake's one purpose was to turn the muzzle of his imprisoned revolver
+upon Merryfield. Merryfield, with his left still clinching that deadly
+hand caught in its sleeve, now grabbed the revolver in his own right
+hand, with a twist dragged it free, and flung it out of the door.</p>
+
+<p>But, as he dropped his right defense, taking both hands to the gun, the
+outlaw's powerful left grip closed on Merryfield's throat with a
+strangle-hold.</p>
+
+<p>With that great thumb closing his windpipe, with the world turning red
+and black, "Guess I can't put it over, after all!" the Trooper said to
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>Reaching for his own revolver, he shoved the muzzle against the bandit's
+breast.</p>
+
+<p>"Damn you, <i>shoot</i>!" cried the other, believing his end was come.</p>
+
+<p>But in that same instant Merryfield once more caught a glimpse of the
+fear-stricken faces of the babies, huddled together beyond.</p>
+
+<p>"Hallisey and Smith must be here soon," he thought. "I won't shoot yet."</p>
+
+<p>Again he dropped his revolver back into the holster, seizing the wrist
+of the outlaw to release that terrible clamp on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> his throat. As he did
+so, Drake with a lightning twist, reached around to the Trooper's belt
+and possessed himself of the gun. As he fired Merryfield had barely time
+and space to throw back his head. The flash blinded him&mdash;scorched his
+face hairless. The bullet grooved his body under the upflung arm still
+wrenching at the clutch that was shutting off his breath.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps, with the shot, the outlaw insensibly somewhat relaxed that
+choking arm. Merryfield tore loose. Half-blinded and gasping though he
+was, he flung himself again at his adversary and landed a blow in his
+face. Drake, giving backward, kicked over a row of peach jars, slipped
+on the slimy stream that poured over the bare floor, and dropped the
+gun.</p>
+
+<p>Pursuing his advantage, Merryfield delivered blow after blow on the
+outlaw's face and body, backing him around the room, while both men
+slipped and slid, fell and recovered, on the jam-coated floor. The table
+crashed over, carrying with it the solitary lamp, whose flame died
+harmlessly, smothered in tepid mush. Now only the moonlight illuminated
+the scene.</p>
+
+<p>Drake was man&oelig;uvring always to recover the gun. His hand touched the
+back of a chair. He picked the chair up, swung it high, and was about to
+smash it down on his adversary's head when Merryfield seized it in the
+air.</p>
+
+<p>At this moment the woman, who had been crouching against the wall
+nursing the rifle that her husband had put into her charge, rushed
+forward clutching the barrel of the gun, swung it at full arm's length
+as she would have swung an axe, and brought the stock down on the
+Trooper's right hand.</p>
+
+<p>That vital hand dropped&mdash;fractured, done. But in the same second Drake
+gave a shriek of pain as a shot rang out and his own right arm fell
+powerless.</p>
+
+<p>In the door stood Hallisey, smoking revolver in hand, smiling grimly in
+the moonlight at the neatness of his own aim. What is the use of killing
+a man, when you can wing him as trigly as that?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span></p><p>Private Smith, who had entered by the other door, was taking the rifle
+out of the woman's grasp&mdash;partly because she had prodded him viciously
+with the muzzle. He examined the chambers.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know this thing is loaded?" he asked her in a mild, detached
+voice.</p>
+
+<p>She returned his gaze with frank despair in her black eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Drake, do you surrender?" asked Hallisey.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'll give up. You've got me!" groaned the outlaw. Then he turned on
+his wife with bitter anger. "Didn't I tell ye?" he snarled. "Didn't I
+tell ye they'd get me if you kept me hangin' around here? These ain't no
+damn deputies. <i>These is the State Police!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"An' yet, if I'd known that gun was loaded," said she, "there'd been
+some less of 'em to-night!"</p>
+
+<p>They dressed Israel's arm in first-aid fashion. Then they started with
+their prisoner down the mountain-trail, at last resuming connection with
+their farmer friend. Not without misgivings, the latter consented to
+hitch up his "double team" and hurry the party to the nearest town where
+a doctor could be found.</p>
+
+<p>As the doctor dressed the bandit's arm, Private Merryfield, whose broken
+right hand yet awaited care, observed to the groaning patient:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know, you can be thankful to your little children that you have
+your life left."</p>
+
+<p>"To hell with you and the children and my life. I'd a hundred times
+rather you'd killed me than take what's comin' now."</p>
+
+<p>Then the three Troopers philosophically hunted up a night restaurant and
+gave their captive a bite of lunch.</p>
+
+<p>"Now," said Hallisey, as he paid the score, "where's the lock-up?"</p>
+
+<p>The three officers, with Drake in tow, proceeded silently<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> through the
+sleeping streets. Not a ripple did their passing occasion. Not even a
+dog aroused to take note of them.</p>
+
+<p>Duly they stood at the door of the custodian of the lock-up, ringing the
+bell&mdash;again and again ringing it. Eventually some one upstairs raised a
+window, looked out for an appreciable moment, quickly lowered the window
+and locked it. Nothing further occurred. Waiting for a reasonable
+interval the officers rang once more. No answer. Silence complete.</p>
+
+<p>Then they pounded on the door till the entire block heard.</p>
+
+<p>Here, there, up street and down, bedroom windows gently opened, then
+closed with finality more gentle yet. Silence. Not a voice. Not a foot
+on a stair.</p>
+
+<p>The officers looked at each other perplexed. Then, by chance, they
+looked at Drake. Drake, so lately black with suicidal gloom, was
+grinning! Grinning as a man does when the citadel of his heart is
+comforted.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't understand, do ye!" chuckled he. "Well, I'll tell ye: What do
+them folks see when they open their windows and look down here in the
+road? They see three hard-lookin' fellers with guns in their hands, here
+in this bright moonlight. And they see somethin' scarier to them than a
+hundred strangers with guns&mdash;they see <i>ME</i>! There ain't a mother's son
+of 'em that'll budge downstairs while I'm here, not if you pound on
+their doors till the cows come home." And he slapped his knee with his
+good hand and laughed in pure ecstasy&mdash;a laugh that caught all the
+little group and rocked it as with one mind.</p>
+
+<p>"We don't begrudge you that, do we boys?" Hallisey conceded. "Smith,
+you're as respectable-looking as any of us. Hunt around and see if you
+can find a Constable that isn't onto this thing. We'll wait here for
+you."</p>
+
+<p>Moving out of the zone of the late demonstration, Private Smith learned
+the whereabouts of the home of a Constable.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span></p><p>"What's wanted?" asked the Constable, responding like a normal burgher
+to Smith's knock at his door.</p>
+
+<p>"Officer of State Police," answered Smith. "I have a man under arrest
+and want to put him in the lock-up. Will you get me the keys?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure. I'll come right down and go along with you myself. Just give me a
+jiffy to get on my trousers and boots," cried the Constable, clearly
+glad of a share in the adventure.</p>
+
+<p>In a moment the borough official was at the Trooper's side, talking
+eagerly as they moved toward the place where the party waited.</p>
+
+<p>"So, he's a highwayman, is he? Good! and a burglar, too, and a
+cattle-thief! Good work! And you've got him right up the street, ready
+to jail! Well, I'll be switched. Now, what might his name be? Israel
+Drake? <i>Not Israel Drake!</i> Oh, my God!"</p>
+
+<p>The Constable had stopped in his tracks like a man struck paralytic.</p>
+
+<p>"No, stranger," he quavered. "I reckon I&mdash;I&mdash;I won't go no further with
+you just now. Here, I'll give you the keys. You can use 'em yourself:
+These here's for the doors. This bunch is for the cells. <i>Good</i>-night to
+you. I'll be getting back home!"</p>
+
+<p>By the first train next morning the Troopers, conveying their prisoner,
+left the village for the County Town. As they deposited Drake in the
+safe-keeping of the County Jail and were about to depart, he seemed
+burdened with an impulse to speak, yet said nothing. Then, as the three
+officers were leaving the room, he leaned over and touched Merryfield on
+the shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Shake!" he growled, offering his unwounded hand.</p>
+
+<p>Merryfield "shook" cheerfully, with his own remaining sound member.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm plumb sorry to see ye go, and that's a fact," growled the outlaw.
+"Because&mdash;well, because you're the only <i>man</i> that ever tried to arrest me."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="KATHERINE_MAYO" id="KATHERINE_MAYO"></a>KATHERINE MAYO</h2>
+
+<p>Miss Katherine Mayo comes of Mayflower stock, but her birthplace was
+Ridgway, Pennsylvania. She was educated in private schools at Boston and
+Cambridge, Mass. Her earliest literary work to appear in print was a
+series of articles describing travels in Norway, followed by another
+series on Colonial American topics, written for the New York <i>Evening
+Post</i>. Later, during a residence in Dutch Guiana, South America, she
+wrote for the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> some interesting sketches of the
+natives of Surinam. After this came three years wholly devoted to
+historic research. The work, however, that first attracted wide
+attention was a history of the Pennsylvania State Police, published in
+1917, under the title of <i>Justice To All</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This history gives the complete story of the famous Mounted Police of
+Pennsylvania, illustrated with a mass of accurate narrative and
+re-enforced with statistics. The occasion of its writing was a personal
+experience&mdash;the cold-blooded murder of Sam Howell, a fine young American
+workingman, a carpenter by trade, near Miss Mayo's country home in New
+York. The circumstances of this murder could not have been more
+skilfully arranged had they been specially designed to illustrate the
+weakness and folly of the ancient, out-grown engine to which most states
+in the Union, even yet, look for the enforcement of their laws in rural
+parts. Sam Howell, carrying the pay roll on pay-day morning, gave his
+life for his honor as gallantly as any soldier in any war. He was shot
+down, at arm's length range, by four highway men, to whom, though
+himself unarmed, he would not surrender his trust. Sheriff, deputy
+sheriffs, constables, and some seventy-five fellow laborers available as
+sheriff's posse spent hours within a few<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> hundred feet of the little
+wood in which the four murderers were known to be hiding, but no arrest
+was made and the murderers are to-day still at large.</p>
+
+<p>"You will have forgotten all this in a month's time," said Howell's
+fellow-workmen an hour after the tragedy, to Miss Mayo and her friend
+Miss Newell, owner of the estate, on the scene. "Sam was only a laboring
+man, like ourselves. We, none of us, have any protection when we work in
+country parts."</p>
+
+<p>The remark sounded bitter indeed. But investigation proved it, in
+principle, only too true. Sam Howell had not been the first, by many
+hundreds, to give his life because the State had no real means to make
+her law revered. And punishment for such crimes had been rare. Sam
+Howell, however, was not to be forgotten, neither was his sacrifice to
+be vain. From his blood, shed unseen, in the obscurity of a quiet
+country lane, was to spring a great movement, taking effect first in the
+state in which he died, and spreading through the Union.</p>
+
+<p>At that time Pennsylvania was the only state of all the forty-seven that
+had met its just obligations to protect all its people under its laws.
+Pennsylvania's State Police had been for ten years a body of defenders
+of justice, "without fear and without reproach". The honest people of
+the State had recorded its deeds in a long memory of noble service. But,
+never stooping to advertise itself, never hesitating to incur the enmity
+of evildoers, it had had many traducers and no historian. There was
+nothing in print to which the people of other states might turn for
+knowledge of the accomplishment of the sister commonwealth.</p>
+
+<p>So, in order that the facts might be conveniently available for every
+American citizen to study from "A" to "Z" and thus to decide
+intelligently for himself where he wanted his own state to stand, in the
+matter of fair and full protection to all people, Miss Mayo went to
+Pennsylvania and embarked on an exhaustive analysis of the workings of
+the Pennsylvania State<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> Police Force, viewed from the standpoint of all
+parts of the community. Ex-President Roosevelt wrote the preface for
+<i>Justice To All</i>, the book in which the fruits of this study were
+finally embodied, and, in the meantime, Miss Newell devoted all her
+energies to the development of an active and aggressive state-wide
+movement for a State Police. <i>Justice To All</i>, in this campaign was
+widely used as a source of authority on which to base the arguments for
+the case. And in 1917 came Sam Howell's triumph, the passage of the Act
+creating the Department of New York State Police, now popularly called
+"the State Troopers".</p>
+
+<p>In the course of collecting the material for this book, Miss Mayo
+gathered a mass of facts much greater than one volume could properly
+contain. From this she later took fifteen adventurous stories of actual
+service in the Pennsylvania Force, of which some, including "Israel
+Drake" appeared in the <i>Saturday Evening Post</i>, while others came out
+simultaneously in the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> and in the <i>Outlook</i>. All were
+later collected in a volume called <i>The Standard Bearers</i>, which met
+with a very cordial reception by readers and critics.</p>
+
+<p>During the latter part of the World War, Miss Mayo was in France
+investigating the war-work of the Y. M. C. A. Her experiences there
+furnished material for a book from which advance pages appeared in the
+<i>Outlook</i> in the form of separate stories, "Billy's Hut," "The Colonel's
+Lady" and others. The purpose of this book was to determine, as closely
+as possible, the real values, whatever those might be, of the work
+actually accomplished by the Overseas Y, and to lay the plain truth
+without bias or color, before the American people.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IN_THE_PHILIPPINES" id="IN_THE_PHILIPPINES"></a>IN THE PHILIPPINES</h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span></p><p><i>When the Philippine Islands passed from the possession of Spain to
+that of the United States, there was a change in more than the flag.
+Spain had sent soldiers and tax-gatherers to the islands; Uncle Sam sent
+road-builders and school teachers. One of these school teachers was also
+a newspaper man; and in a book called</i> <span class="smcap">Caybigan</span> <i>he gave a series of
+vivid pictures of how the coming generation of Filipinos are taking the
+first step towards Americanization.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_STRUGGLES_AND_TRIUMPH_OF_ISIDRO_DE_LOS_MAESTROS" id="THE_STRUGGLES_AND_TRIUMPH_OF_ISIDRO_DE_LOS_MAESTROS"></a>THE STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPH OF ISIDRO DE LOS MAESTROS</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">James Hopper</span></h3>
+
+<p class="center"><i>I&mdash;Face to Face with the Foe</i></p>
+
+<p>Returning to his own town after a morning spent in "working up" the
+attendance of one of his far and recalcitrant barrio-schools, the
+Maestro of Balangilang was swaying with relaxed muscle and half-closed
+eyes to the allegretto trot of his little native pony, when he pulled up
+with a start, wide awake and all his senses on the alert. Through his
+somnolence, at first in a low hum, but fast rising in a fiendish
+crescendo, there had come a buzzing sound, much like that of one of the
+saw-mills of his California forests, and now, as he sat in the saddle,
+erect and tense, the thing ripped the air in ragged tear, shrieked
+vibrating into his ear, and finished its course along his spine in
+delicious irritation.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, where am I?" murmured the Maestro, blinking; but between blinks he
+caught the flashing green of the palay fields and knew that he was far
+from the saw-mills of the Golden State. So he raised his nose to heaven
+and there, afloat above him in the serene blue, was the explanation. It
+was a kite, a great locust-shaped kite, darting and swooping in the hot
+monsoon, and from it, dropping plumb, came the abominable clamor.</p>
+
+<p>"Aha!" exclaimed the Maestro, pointing accusingly at the thin line
+vaguely visible against the sky-line in a diagonal running from the kite
+above him ahead to a point in the road. "Aha! there's something at the
+end of that; there's Attendance at the end of that!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span></p><p>With which significant remark he leaned forward in the saddle, bringing
+his switch down with a whizz behind him. The pony gave three rabbit
+leaps and then settled down to his drumming little trot. As they
+advanced the line overhead dropped gradually. Finally the Maestro had to
+swerve the horse aside to save his helmet. He pulled up to a walk, and a
+few yards further came to the spot where string met earth in the
+expected Attendance.</p>
+
+<p>The Attendance was sitting on the ground, his legs spread before him in
+an angle of forty-five degrees, each foot arched in a secure grip of a
+bunch of cogon grass. These legs were bare as far up as they went, and,
+in fact, no trace of clothing was reached until the eye met the lower
+fringe of an indescribable undershirt modestly veiling the upper half of
+a rotund little paunch; an indescribable undershirt, truly, for
+observation could not reach the thing itself, but only the dirt
+incrusting it so that it hung together, rigid as a knight's iron
+corslet, in spite of monstrous tears and rents. Between the teeth of the
+Attendance was a long, thick cheroot, wound about with hemp fiber, at
+which he pulled with rounded mouth. Hitched around his right wrist was
+the kite string, and between his legs a stick spindled with an extra
+hundred yards. At intervals he hauled hand-over-hand upon the taut line,
+and then the landscape vibrated to the buzz-saw song which had so
+compellingly recalled the Maestro to his eternal pursuit.</p>
+
+<p>As the shadow of the horse fell upon him, the Attendance brought his
+eyes down from their heavenly contemplation, and fixed them upon the
+rider. A tremor of dismay, mastered as soon as born, flitted over him;
+then, silently, with careful suppression of all signs of haste, he
+reached for a big stone with his little yellow paw, then for a stick
+lying farther off. Using the stone as a hammer, he drove the stick into
+the ground with deliberate stroke, wound the string around it with
+tender solicitude, and then, everything being secure, just as the
+Maestro was beginning his usual embarrassing question:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span></p><p>"Why are you not at school, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>He drew up his feet beneath him, straightened up like a jack-in-a-box,
+took a hop-skip-jump, and with a flourish of golden heels, flopped
+head-first into the roadside ditch's rank luxuriance.</p>
+
+<p>"The little devil!" exclaimed the disconcerted Maestro. He dismounted
+and, leading his horse, walked up to the side of the ditch. It was full
+of the water of the last baguio. From the edge of the cane-field on the
+other side there cascaded down the bank a mad vegetation; it carpeted
+the sides, arched itself above in a vault, and inside this recess the
+water was rotting, green-scummed; and a powerful fermentation filled the
+nostrils with hot fever-smells. In the center of the ditch the broad,
+flat head of a caribao emerged slightly above the water; the floating
+lilies made an incongruous wreath about the great horns and the
+beatifically-shut eyes, and the thick, humid nose exhaled ecstasy in
+shuddering ripplets over the calm surface.</p>
+
+<p>Filled with a vague sense of the ridiculous, the Maestro peered into the
+darkness. "The little devil!" he murmured. "He's somewhere in here; but
+how am I to get him, I'd like to know. Do you see him, eh, Mathusalem?"
+he asked of the stolid beast soaking there in bliss.</p>
+
+<p>Whether in answer to this challenge or to some other irritant, the
+animal slowly opened one eye and ponderously let it fall shut again in
+what, to the heated imagination of the Maestro, seemed a patronizing
+wink. Its head slid quietly along the water; puffs of ooze rose from
+below and spread on the surface. Then, in the silence there rose a
+significant sound&mdash;a soft, repeated snapping of the tongue:</p>
+
+<p>"Cluck, cluck."</p>
+
+<p>"Aha!" shouted the Maestro triumphantly to his invisible audience. "I
+know where you are, you scamp; right behind the caribao; come out of
+there, <i>pronto, dale-dale</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>But his enthusiasm was of short duration. To the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>commanding
+tongue-click the caribao had stopped dead-still, and a silence heavy
+with defiance met the too-soon exultant cries. An insect in the foliage
+began a creaking call, and then all the creatures of humidity hidden
+there among this fermenting vegetation joined in mocking chorus.</p>
+
+<p>The Maestro felt a vague blush welling up from the innermost recesses of
+his being.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going to get that kid," he muttered darkly, "if I have to wait
+till&mdash;the coming of Common Sense to the Manila office! By gum, he's the
+Struggle for Attendance personified!"</p>
+
+<p>He sat down on the bank and waited. This did not prove interesting. The
+animals of the ditch creaked on; the caribao bubbled up the water with
+his deep content; above, the abandoned kite went through strange
+acrobatics and wailed as if in pain. The Maestro dipped his hand into
+the water; it was lukewarm. "No hope of a freeze-out," he murmured
+pensively.</p>
+
+<p>Behind, the pony began to pull at the reins.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, little horse, I'm tired, too. Well," he said apologetically, "I
+hate to get energetic, but there are circumstances which&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The end of his sentence was lost, for he had whisked out the big Colt's
+dissuader of ladrones, that hung on his belt, and was firing. The six
+shots went off like a bunch of fire-crackers, but far from at random,
+for a regular circle boiled up around the dozing caribao. The disturbed
+animal snorted, and again a discreet "cluck-cluck" rose in the sudden,
+astounded silence.</p>
+
+<p>"This," said the Maestro, as he calmly introduced fresh cartridges into
+the chambers of his smoking weapon, "is what might be called an
+application of western solutions to eastern difficulties."</p>
+
+<p>Again he brought his revolver down, but he raised it without shooting
+and replaced it in its holster. From beneath the caribao's rotund belly,
+below the surface, an indistinct form<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> shot out; cleaving the water like
+a polliwog it glided for the bank, and then a black, round head emerged
+at the feet of the Maestro.</p>
+
+<p>"All right, bub; we'll go to school now," said the latter, nodding to
+the dripping figure as it rose before him.</p>
+
+<p>He lifted the sullen brownie and straddled him forward of the saddle,
+then proceeded to mount himself, when the Capture began to display
+marked agitation. He squirmed and twisted, turned his head back and up,
+and finally a grunt escaped him.</p>
+
+<p>"El volador."</p>
+
+<p>"The kite, to be sure; we mustn't forget the kite," acquiesced the
+Maestro graciously. He pulled up the anchoring stick and laboriously,
+beneath the hostilely critical eye of the Capture, he hauled in the line
+till the screeching, resisting flying-machine was brought to earth. Then
+he vaulted into the saddle.</p>
+
+<p>The double weight was a little too much for the pony; so it was at a
+dignified walk that the Maestro, his naked, dripping, muddy and still
+defiant prisoner a-straddle in front of him, the captured kite passed
+over his left arm like a knightly shield, made his triumphant entry into
+the pueblo.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>II&mdash;Heroism and Reverses</i></p>
+
+<p>When Maestro Pablo rode down Rizal-y-Washington Street to the
+schoolhouse with his oozing, dripping prize between his arms, the kite,
+like a knightly escutcheon against his left side, he found that in spite
+of his efforts at preserving a modest, self-deprecatory bearing, his
+spine would stiffen and his nose point upward in the unconscious
+manifestations of an internal feeling that there was in his attitude
+something picturesquely heroic. Not since walking down the California
+campus one morning after the big game won three minutes before blowing
+of the final whistle, by his fifty-yard run-in of a punt,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> had he been
+in that posture&mdash;at once pleasant and difficult&mdash;in which one's vital
+concern is to wear an humility sufficiently convincing to obtain from
+friends forgiveness for the crime of being great.</p>
+
+<p>A series of incidents immediately following, however, made the thing
+quite easy.</p>
+
+<p>Upon bringing the new recruit into the schoolhouse, to the perfidiously
+expressed delight of the already incorporated, the Maestro called his
+native assistant to obtain the information necessary to a full
+matriculation. At the first question the inquisition came to a
+dead-lock. The boy did not know his name.</p>
+
+<p>"In Spanish times," the Assistant suggested modestly, "we called them
+"de los Reyes" when the father was of the army, and "de la Cruz" when
+the father was of the church; but now, we can never know <i>what</i> it is."</p>
+
+<p>The Maestro dashed to a solution. "All right," he said cheerily. "I
+caught him; guess I can give him a name. Call him&mdash;Isidro de los
+Maestros."</p>
+
+<p>And thus it was that the urchin went down on the school records, and on
+the records of life afterward.</p>
+
+<p>Now, well pleased with himself, the Maestro, as is the wont of men in
+such state, sought for further enjoyment.</p>
+
+<p>"Ask him," he said teasingly, pointing with his chin at the
+newly-baptized but still unregenerate little savage, "why he came out of
+the ditch."</p>
+
+<p>"He says he was afraid that you would steal the kite," answered the
+Assistant, after some linguistic sparring.</p>
+
+<p>"Eh?" ejaculated the surprised Maestro.</p>
+
+<p>And in his mind there framed a picture of himself riding along the road
+with a string between his fingers; and, following in the upper layers of
+air, a buzzing kite; and, down in the dust of the highway, an urchin
+trudging wistfully after the kite, drawn on irresistibly, in spite of
+his better judgment,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> on and on, horrified but fascinated, up to the
+yawning school-door.</p>
+
+<p>It would have been the better way. "I ought to go and soak my head,"
+murmured the Maestro pensively.</p>
+
+<p>This was check number one, but others came in quick succession.</p>
+
+<p>For the morning after this incident the Maestro did not find Isidro
+among the weird, wild crowd gathered into the annex (a transformed sugar
+storehouse) by the last raid of the Municipal Police.</p>
+
+<p>Neither was Isidro there the next day, nor the next. And it was not till
+a week had passed that the Maestro discovered, with an inward blush of
+shame, that his much-longed-for pupil was living in the little hut
+behind his own house. There would have been nothing shameful in the
+overlooking&mdash;there were seventeen other persons sharing the same
+abode&mdash;were it not that the nipa front of this human hive had been blown
+away by the last baguio, leaving an unobstructed view of the interior,
+if it might be called such. As it was, the Municipal Police was
+mobilized at the urgent behest of the Maestro. Its "cabo," flanked by
+two privates armed with old German needle-guns, besieged the home, and
+after an interesting game of hide-and-go-seek, Isidro was finally caught
+by one arm and one ear, and ceremoniously marched to school. And there
+the Maestro asked him why he had not been attending.</p>
+
+<p>"No hay pantalones"&mdash;there are no pants&mdash;Isidro answered, dropping his
+eyes modestly to the ground.</p>
+
+<p>This was check number two, and unmistakably so, for was it not a fact
+that a civil commission, overzealous in its civilizing ardor, had passed
+a law commanding that every one should wear, when in public, "at least
+one garment, preferably trousers?"</p>
+
+<p>Following this, and an unsuccessful plea upon the town tailor who was on
+a three weeks' vacation on account of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> death of a fourth cousin, the
+Maestro shut himself up a whole day with Isidro in his little nipa
+house; and behind the closely-shut shutters engaged in some mysterious
+toil. When they emerged again the next morning, Isidro wended his way to
+the school at the end of the Maestro's arm, trousered!</p>
+
+<p>The trousers, it must be said, had a certain cachet of distinction. They
+were made of calico-print, with a design of little black skulls
+sprinkled over a yellow background. Some parts hung flat and limp as if
+upon a scarecrow; others pulsed, like a fire-hose in action, with the
+pressure of flesh compressed beneath, while at other points they bulged
+pneumatically in little foot-balls. The right leg dropped to the ankle;
+the left stopped discouraged, a few inches below the knee. The seams
+looked like the putty mountain chains of the geography class. As the
+Maestro strode along he threw rapid glances at his handiwork, and it was
+plain that the emotions that moved him were somewhat mixed in character.
+His face showed traces of a puzzled diffidence, as that of a man who has
+come in sack-coat to a full-dress function; but after all it was
+satisfaction that predominated, for after this heroic effort he had
+decided that Victory had at last perched upon his banners.</p>
+
+<p>And it really looked so for a time. Isidro stayed at school at least
+during that first day of his trousered life. For when the Maestro, later
+in the forenoon paid a visit to the annex, he found the Assistant in
+charge standing disconcerted before the urchin who, with eyes indignant
+and hair perpendicular upon the top of his head, was evidently holding
+to his side of the argument with his customary energy.</p>
+
+<p>Isidro was trouserless. Sitting rigid upon his bench, holding on with
+both hands as if in fear of being removed, he dangled naked legs to the
+sight of who might look.</p>
+
+<p>"Que barbaridad!" murmured the Assistant in limp dejection.</p>
+
+<p>But Isidro threw at him a look of black hatred. This became a tense,
+silent plea for justice as it moved up for a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> moment to the Maestro's
+face, and then it settled back upon its first object in frigid
+accusation.</p>
+
+<p>"Where are your trousers, Isidro?" asked the Maestro.</p>
+
+<p>Isidro relaxed his convulsive grasp of the bench with one hand, canted
+himself slightly to one side just long enough to give an instantaneous
+view of the trousers, neatly folded and spread between what he was
+sitting with and what he was sitting on, then swung back with the
+suddenness of a kodak-shutter, seized his seat with new determination,
+and looked eloquent justification at the Maestro.</p>
+
+<p>"Why will you not wear them?" asked the latter.</p>
+
+<p>"He says he will not get them dirty," said the Assistant, interpreting
+the answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell him when they are dirty he can go down to the river and wash
+them," said the Maestro.</p>
+
+<p>Isidro pondered over the suggestion for two silent minutes. The prospect
+of a day spent splashing in the lukewarm waters of the Ilog he finally
+put down as not at all detestable, and getting up to his feet:</p>
+
+<p>"I will put them on," he said gravely.</p>
+
+<p>Which he did on the moment, with an absence of hesitation as to which
+was front and which was back, very flattering to the Maestro.</p>
+
+<p>That Isidro persevered during the next week, the Maestro also came to
+know. For now regularly every evening as he smoked and lounged upon his
+long, cane chair, trying to persuade his tired body against all laws of
+physics to give up a little of its heat to a circumambient atmosphere of
+temperature equally enthusiastic; as he watched among the rafters of the
+roof the snakes swallowing the rats, the rats devouring the lizards, the
+lizards snapping up the spiders, the spiders snaring the flies in
+eloquent representation of the life struggle, his studied passiveness
+would be broken by strange sounds from the dilapidated hut at the back
+of his house. A voice, imitative of that of the Third Assistant who
+taught the annex, hurled<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> forth questions, which were immediately
+answered by another voice, curiously like that of Isidro.</p>
+
+<p>Fiercely: "Du yu ssee dde hhett?"</p>
+
+<p>Breathlessly: "Yiss I ssee dde hhett."</p>
+
+<p>Ferociously: "Show me dde hhett."</p>
+
+<p>Eagerly: "Here are dde hhett."</p>
+
+<p>Thunderously: "Gif me dde hhett."</p>
+
+<p>Exultantly: "I gif yu dde hhett."</p>
+
+<p>Then the Maestro would step to the window and look into the hut from
+which came this Socratic dialogue. And on this wall-less platform which
+looked much like a primitive stage, a singular action was unrolling
+itself in the smoky glimmer of a two-cent lamp. The Third Assistant was
+not there at all; but Isidro was the Third Assistant. And the pupil was
+not Isidro, but the witless old man who was one of the many sharers of
+the abode. In the voice of the Third Assistant, Isidro was hurling out
+the tremendous questions; and, as the old gentleman, who represented
+Isidro, opened his mouth only to drule betel-juice, it was Isidro who,
+in Isidro's voice, answered the questions. In his r&ocirc;le as Third
+Assistant he stood with legs akimbo before the pupil, a bamboo twig in
+his hand; as Isidro the pupil, he plumped down quickly upon the bench
+before responding. The sole function of the senile old man seemed that
+of representing the pupil while the question was being asked, and
+receiving, in that capacity, a sharp cut across the nose from
+Isidro-the-Third-Assistant's switch, at which he chuckled to himself in
+silent glee and druled ad libitum.</p>
+
+<p>For several nights this performance went on with gradual increase of
+vocabulary in teacher and pupil. But when it had reached the "Do you see
+the apple-tree?" stage, it ceased to advance, marked time for a while,
+and then slowly but steadily began sliding back into primitive
+beginnings. This engendered in the Maestro a suspicion which became
+certainty when Isidro entered the schoolhouse one morning just before
+recess, between<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> two policemen at port arms. A rapid scrutiny of the
+roll-book showed that he had been absent a whole week.</p>
+
+<p>"I was at the river cleaning my trousers," answered Isidro when put face
+to face with this curious fact.</p>
+
+<p>The Maestro suggested that the precious pantaloons which, by the way,
+had been mysteriously embellished by a red stripe down the right leg and
+a green stripe down the left leg, could be cleaned in less than a week,
+and that Saturday and Sunday were days specially set aside in the
+Catechismo of the Americanos for such little family duties.</p>
+
+<p>Isidro understood, and the nightly rehearsals soon reached the stage of:</p>
+
+<p>"How menny hhetts hev yu?"</p>
+
+<p>"I hev <i>ten</i> hhetts."</p>
+
+<p>Then came another arrest of development and another decline, at the end
+of which Isidro again making his appearance flanked by two German
+needle-guns, caused a blush of remorse to suffuse the Maestro by
+explaining with frigid gravity that his mother had given birth to a
+little pickaninny-brother and that, of course, he had had to help.</p>
+
+<p>But significant events in the family did not stop there. After birth,
+death stepped in for its due. Isidro's relatives began to drop off in
+rapid sequence&mdash;each demise demanding three days of meditation in
+retirement&mdash;till at last the Maestro, who had had the excellent idea of
+keeping upon paper a record of these unfortunate occurrences, was
+looking with stupor upon a list showing that Isidro had lost, within
+three weeks, two aunts, three grandfathers, and five
+grandmothers&mdash;which, considering that an actual count proved the house
+of bereavement still able to boast of seventeen occupants, was plainly
+an exaggeration.</p>
+
+<p>Following a long sermon from the Maestro in which he sought to explain
+to Isidro that he must always tell the truth for sundry philosophical
+reasons&mdash;a statement which the First Assistant tactfully smoothed to
+something within range of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> credulity by translating it that one must not
+lie to <i>Americanos</i>, because <i>Americanos</i> do not like it&mdash;there came a
+period of serenity.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>III&mdash;The Triumph</i></p>
+
+<p>There came to the Maestro days of peace and joy. Isidro was coming to
+school; Isidro was learning English. Isidro was steady, Isidro was
+docile, Isidro was positively so angelic that there was something
+uncanny about the situation. And with Isidro, other little savages were
+being pruned into the school-going stage of civilization. Helped by the
+police, they were pouring in from barrio and hacienda; the attendance
+was going up by leaps and bounds, till at last a circulative report
+showed that Balangilang had passed the odious Cabancalan with its less
+strenuous school-man, and left it in the ruck by a full hundred. The
+Maestro was triumphant; his chest had gained two inches in expansion.
+When he met Isidro at recess, playing cibay, he murmured softly: "You
+little devil; you were Attendance personified, and I've got you now." At
+which Isidro, pausing in the act of throwing a shell with the top of his
+head at another shell on the ground, looked up beneath long lashes in a
+smile absolutely seraphic.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening, the Maestro, his heart sweet with content, stood at the
+window. These were moonlight nights; in the grassy lanes the young girls
+played graceful Spanish games, winding like garlands to a gentle song;
+from the shadows of the huts came the tinkle-tinkle of serenading
+guitars and yearning notes of violins wailing despairing love. And
+Isidro, seated on the bamboo ladder of his house, went through an
+independent performance. He sang "Good-night, Ladies," the last song
+given to the school, sang it in soft falsetto, with languorous drawls,
+and never-ending organ points, over and over again, till it changed
+character gradually, dropping into a wailing minor, an endless croon
+full of obscure melancholy of a race that dies.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span></p><p>"Goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies; goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh
+loidies-ies-ies; goo-oo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies-ies," he
+repeated and repeated, over and over again, till the Maestro's soul
+tumbled down and down abysses of maudlin tenderness, and Isidro's chin
+fell upon his chest in a last drawling, sleepy note. At which he shook
+himself together and began the next exercise, a recitation, all of one
+piece from first to last syllable, in one high, monotonous note, like a
+mechanical doll saying "papa-mama."</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Oh-look-et-de-moon-she-ees-shinin-up-theyre-oh-mudder-she<br />
+look-like-a-lom-in-de-ayre-lost-night-she-was-smalleyre-on-joos<br />like-a-bow-boot-now-she-ees-biggerr-on-rrraon-like-an-O."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Then a big gulp of air and again:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh-look-et-de-moon-she-ees-shinin-up-theyre,&mdash;&mdash;" etc.</p>
+
+<p>An hour of this, and he skipped from the lyric to the patriotic, and
+then it was:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"I-loof-dde-name-off-Wash-ing-ton,</div>
+<div class="i1">I-loof-my-coontrrree-tow,</div>
+<div>I-loof-dde-fleg-dde-dear-owl-fleg,</div>
+<div class="i1">Off-rridd-on-whit-on-bloo-oo-oo!"</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>By this time the Maestro was ready to go to bed, and long in the torpor
+of the tropic night there came to him, above the hum of the mosquitoes
+fighting at the net, the soft, wailing croon of Isidro, back at his
+"Goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies."</p>
+
+<p>These were days of ease and beauty to the Maestro, and he enjoyed them
+the more when a new problem came to give action to his resourceful
+brain.</p>
+
+<p>The thing was this: For three days there had not been one funeral in
+Balangilang.</p>
+
+<p>In other climes, in other towns, this might have been a source of
+congratulation, perhaps, but not in Balangilang. There were rumors of
+cholera in the towns to the north, and the Maestro, as president of the
+Board of Health, was on the watch for it. Five deaths a day, experience
+had taught him,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> was the healthy average for the town; and this sudden
+cessation of public burials&mdash;he could not believe that dying had
+stopped&mdash;was something to make him suspicious.</p>
+
+<p>It was over this puzzling situation that he was pondering at the morning
+recess, when his attention was taken from it by a singular scene.</p>
+
+<p>The "batas" of the school were flocking and pushing and jolting at the
+door of the basement which served as stable for the municipal caribao.
+Elbowing his way to the spot, the Maestro found Isidro at the entrance,
+gravely taking up an admission of five shells from those who would
+enter. Business seemed to be brisk; Isidro had already a big bandana
+handkerchief bulging with the receipts which were now overflowing into a
+great tao hat, obligingly loaned him by one of his admirers, as one by
+one, those lucky enough to have the price filed in, feverish curiosity
+upon their faces.</p>
+
+<p>The Maestro thought that it might be well to go in also, which he did
+without paying admission. The disappointed gate-keeper followed him. The
+Maestro found himself before a little pink-and-blue tissue-paper box,
+frilled with paper rosettes.</p>
+
+<p>"What have you in there?" asked the Maestro.</p>
+
+<p>"My brother," answered Isidro sweetly.</p>
+
+<p>He cast his eyes to the ground and watched his big toe drawing vague
+figures in the earth, then appealing to the First Assistant who was
+present by this time, he added in the tone of virtue which <i>will</i> be
+modest:</p>
+
+<p>"Maestro Pablo does not like it when I do not come to school on account
+of a funeral, so I brought him (pointing to the little box) with me."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'll be&mdash;&mdash;" was the only comment the Maestro found adequate at
+the moment.</p>
+
+<p>"It is my little pickaninny-brother," went on Isidro, becoming alive to
+the fact that he was a center of interest, "and he died last night of
+the great sickness."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span></p><p>"The great what?" ejaculated the Maestro who had caught a few words.</p>
+
+<p>"The great sickness," explained the Assistant. "That is the name by
+which these ignorant people call the cholera."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>For the next two hours the Maestro was very busy.</p>
+
+<p>Firstly he gathered the "batas" who had been rich enough to attend
+Isidro's little show and locked them up&mdash;with the impresario himself&mdash;in
+the little town-jail close by. Then, after a vivid exhortation upon the
+beauties of boiling water and reporting disease, he dismissed the school
+for an indefinite period. After which, impressing the two town
+prisoners, now temporarily out of home, he shouldered Isidro's pretty
+box, tramped to the cemetery and directed the digging of a grave six
+feet deep. When the earth had been scraped back upon the lonely little
+object, he returned to town and transferred the awe-stricken playgoers
+to his own house, where a strenuous performance took place.</p>
+
+<p>Tolio, his boy, built a most tremendous fire outside and set upon it all
+the pots and pans and caldrons and cans of his kitchen arsenal, filled
+with water. When these began to gurgle and steam, the Maestro set
+himself to stripping the horrified bunch in his room; one by one he
+threw the garments out of the window to Tolio who, catching them,
+stuffed them into the receptacles, poking down their bulging protest
+with a big stick. Then the Maestro mixed an awful brew in an old
+oil-can, and taking the brush which was commonly used to sleek up his
+little pony, he dipped it generously into the pungent stuff and began an
+energetic scrubbing of his now absolutely panic-stricken wards. When he
+had done this to his satisfaction and thoroughly to their discontent, he
+let them put on their still steaming garments and they slid out of the
+house, aseptic as hospitals.</p>
+
+<p>Isidro he kept longer. He lingered over him with loving and strenuous
+care, and after he had him externally clean, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>proceeded to dose him
+internally from a little red bottle. Isidro took everything&mdash;the
+terrific scrubbing, the exaggerated dosing, the ruinous treatment of his
+pantaloons&mdash;with wonder-eyed serenity.</p>
+
+<p>When all this was finished the Maestro took the urchin into the
+dining-room and, seating him on his best bamboo chair, he courteously
+offered him a fine, dark perfecto.</p>
+
+<p>The next instant he was suffused with the light of a new revelation.
+For, stretching out his hard little claw to receive the gift, the little
+man had shot at him a glance so mild, so wistful, so brown-eyed, filled
+with such mixed admiration, trust, and appeal, that a queer softness had
+risen in the Maestro from somewhere down in the regions of his heel, up
+and up, quietly, like the mercury in the thermometer, till it had flowed
+through his whole body and stood still, its high-water mark a little
+lump in his throat.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Lord bless us-ones, Isidro," said the Maestro quietly. "We're only
+a child after all; mere baby, my man. And don't we like to go to
+school?"</p>
+
+<p>"Se&ntilde;or Pablo," asked the boy, looking up softly into the Maestro's still
+perspiring visage, "Se&ntilde;or Pablo, is it true that there will be no school
+because of the great sickness?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it is true," answered the Maestro. "No school for a long, long
+time."</p>
+
+<p>Then Isidro's mouth began to twitch queerly, and suddenly throwing
+himself full-length upon the floor, he hurled out from somewhere within
+him a long, tremulous wail.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="JAMES_MERLE_HOPPER" id="JAMES_MERLE_HOPPER"></a>JAMES MERLE HOPPER</h2>
+
+<p>James Merle Hopper was born in Paris, France. His father was American,
+his mother French; their son James was born July 23, 1876. In 1887 his
+parents came to America, and settled in California. James Hopper
+attended the University of California, graduating in 1898. He is still
+remembered there as one of the grittiest football players who ever
+played on the 'Varsity team. Then came a course in the law school of
+that university, and admission to the California bar in 1900. All this
+reads like the biography of a lawyer: so did the early life of James
+Russell Lowell, and of Oliver Wendell Holmes: they were all admitted to
+the bar, but they did not become lawyers. James Hopper had done some
+newspaper work for San Francisco papers while he was in law school, and
+the love of writing had taken hold of him. In the meantime he had
+married Miss Mattie E. Leonard, and as literature did not yet provide a
+means of support, he became an instructor in French at the University of
+California.</p>
+
+<p>With the close of the Spanish-American War came the call for thousands
+of Americans to go to the Philippines as schoolmasters. This appealed to
+him, and he spent the years 1902-03 in the work that Kipling thus
+describes in "The White Man's Burden":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>To wait in heavy harness</div>
+<div class="i1">On fluttered folk and wild&mdash;</div>
+<div>Your new-caught sullen peoples,</div>
+<div class="i1">Half devil and half child.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>His experiences here furnished the material for a group of short stories
+dealing picturesquely with the Filipinos in their first contact with
+American civilization. These were published<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> in <i>McClure's</i>, and
+afterwards collected in book form under the title <i>Caybigan</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In 1903 James Hopper returned to the United States, and for a time was
+on the editorial staff of <i>McClure's</i>. Later in collaboration with Fred
+R. Bechdolt he wrote a remarkable book, entitled "<i>9009</i>". This is the
+number of a convict in an American prison, and the book exposes the
+system of spying, of treachery, of betrayal, that a convict must
+identify himself with in order to become a "trusty." His next book was a
+college story, <i>The Freshman</i>. This was followed by a volume of short
+stories, <i>What Happened in the Night</i>. These are stories of child life,
+but intended for older readers; they are very successful in reproducing
+the imaginative world in which children live. In 1915 and 1916 he acted
+as a war correspondent for <i>Collier's</i>, first with the American troops
+in Mexico in pursuit of Villa, and later in France. His home is at
+Carmel, California.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THEY_WHO_BRING_DREAMS_TO_AMERICA" id="THEY_WHO_BRING_DREAMS_TO_AMERICA"></a>THEY WHO BRING DREAMS TO AMERICA</h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span></p><p><i>"No wonder this America of ours is big. We draw the brave ones from
+the old lands, the brave ones whose dreams are like the guiding sign
+that was given to the Israelites of old&mdash;a pillar of cloud by day, a
+pillar of fire by night." "The Citizen" is a story of a brave man who
+followed his dream over land and sea, until it brought him to America, a
+fortunate event for him and for us.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_CITIZEN" id="THE_CITIZEN"></a>THE CITIZEN</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">James Francis Dwyer</span></h3>
+
+<p>The President of the United States was speaking. His audience comprised
+two thousand foreign-born men who had just been admitted to citizenship.
+They listened intently, their faces, aglow with the light of a new-born
+patriotism, upturned to the calm, intellectual face of the first citizen
+of the country they now claimed as their own.</p>
+
+<p>Here and there among the newly-made citizens were wives and children.
+The women were proud of their men. They looked at them from time to
+time, their faces showing pride and awe.</p>
+
+<p>One little woman, sitting immediately in front of the President, held
+the hand of a big, muscular man and stroked it softly. The big man was
+looking at the speaker with great blue eyes that were the eyes of a
+dreamer.</p>
+
+<p>The President's words came clear and distinct:</p>
+
+<p><i>You were drawn across the ocean by some beckoning finger of hope, by
+some belief, by some vision of a new kind of justice, by some
+expectation of a better kind of life. You dreamed dreams of this
+country, and I hope you brought the dreams with you. A man enriches the
+country to which he brings dreams, and you who have brought them have
+enriched America.</i></p>
+
+<p>The big man made a curious choking noise and his wife breathed a soft
+"Hush!" The giant was strangely affected.</p>
+
+<p>The President continued:</p>
+
+<p><i>No doubt you have been disappointed in some of us, but remember this,
+if we have grown at all poor in the ideal, you</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> <i>brought some of it with
+you. A man does not go out to seek the thing that is not in him. A man
+does not hope for the thing that he does not believe in, and if some of
+us have forgotten what America believed in, you at any rate imported in
+your own hearts a renewal of the belief. Each of you, I am sure, brought
+a dream, a glorious, shining dream, a dream worth more than gold or
+silver, and that is the reason that I, for one, make you welcome.</i></p>
+
+<p>The big man's eyes were fixed. His wife shook him gently, but he did not
+heed her. He was looking through the presidential rostrum, through the
+big buildings behind it, looking out over leagues of space to a
+snow-swept village that huddled on an island in the Beresina, the
+swift-flowing tributary of the mighty Dnieper, an island that looked
+like a black bone stuck tight in the maw of the stream.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the little village on the Beresina that the Dream came to Ivan
+Berloff, Big Ivan of the Bridge.</p>
+
+<p>The Dream came in the spring. All great dreams come in the spring, and
+the Spring Maiden who brought Big Ivan's Dream was more than ordinarily
+beautiful. She swept up the Beresina, trailing wondrous draperies of
+vivid green. Her feet touched the snow-hardened ground, and armies of
+little white and blue flowers sprang up in her footsteps. Soft breezes
+escorted her, velvety breezes that carried the aromas of the far-off
+places from which they came, places far to the southward, and more
+distant towns beyond the Black Sea whose people were not under the sway
+of the Great Czar.</p>
+
+<p>The father of Big Ivan, who had fought under Prince Menshikov at Alma
+fifty-five years before, hobbled out to see the sunbeams eat up the snow
+hummocks that hid in the shady places, and he told his son it was the
+most wonderful spring he had ever seen.</p>
+
+<p>"The little breezes are hot and sweet," he said, sniffing hungrily with
+his face turned toward the south. "I know them, Ivan! I know them! They
+have the spice odor that I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> sniffed on the winds that came to us when we
+lay in the trenches at Balaklava. Praise God for the warmth!"</p>
+
+<p>And that day the Dream came to Big Ivan as he plowed. It was a wonder
+dream. It sprang into his brain as he walked behind the plow, and for a
+few minutes he quivered as the big bridge quivers when the Beresina
+sends her ice squadrons to hammer the arches. It made his heart pound
+mightily, and his lips and throat became very dry.</p>
+
+<p>Big Ivan stopped at the end of the furrow and tried to discover what had
+brought the Dream. Where had it come from? Why had it clutched him so
+suddenly? Was he the only man in the village to whom it had come?</p>
+
+<p>Like his father, he sniffed the sweet-smelling breezes. He thrust his
+great hands into the sunbeams. He reached down and plucked one of a
+bunch of white flowers that had sprung up overnight. The Dream was born
+of the breezes and the sunshine and the spring flowers. It came from
+them and it had sprung into his mind because he was young and strong. He
+knew! It couldn't come to his father or Donkov, the tailor, or Poborino,
+the smith. They were old and weak, and Ivan's dream was one that called
+for youth and strength.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, for youth and strength," he muttered as he gripped the plow. "And I
+have it!"</p>
+
+<p>That evening Big Ivan of the Bridge spoke to his wife, Anna, a little
+woman, who had a sweet face and a wealth of fair hair.</p>
+
+<p>"Wife, we are going away from here," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Where are we going, Ivan?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Where do you think, Anna?" he said, looking down at her as she stood by
+his side.</p>
+
+<p>"To Bobruisk," she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Farther?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, a long way farther."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span></p><p>Fear sprang into her soft eyes. Bobruisk was eighty-nine versts away,
+yet Ivan said they were going farther.</p>
+
+<p>"We&mdash;we are not going to Minsk?" she cried.</p>
+
+<p>"Aye, and beyond Minsk!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ivan, tell me!" she gasped. "Tell me where we are going!"</p>
+
+<p>"We are going to America."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>To America?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, to America!"</p>
+
+<p>Big Ivan of the Bridge lifted up his voice when he cried out the words
+"To America," and then a sudden fear sprang upon him as those words
+dashed through the little window out into the darkness of the village
+street. Was he mad? America was 8,000 versts away! It was far across the
+ocean, a place that was only a name to him, a place where he knew no
+one. He wondered in the strange little silence that followed his words
+if the crippled son of Poborino, the smith, had heard him. The cripple
+would jeer at him if the night wind had carried the words to his ear.</p>
+
+<p>Anna remained staring at her big husband for a few minutes, then she sat
+down quietly at his side. There was a strange look in his big blue eyes,
+the look of a man to whom has come a vision, the look which came into
+the eyes of those shepherds of Judea long, long ago.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Ivan?" she murmured softly, patting his big hand. "Tell
+me."</p>
+
+<p>And Big Ivan of the Bridge, slow of tongue, told of the Dream. To no one
+else would he have told it. Anna understood. She had a way of patting
+his hands and saying soft things when his tongue could not find words to
+express his thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>Ivan told how the Dream had come to him as he plowed. He told her how it
+had sprung upon him, a wonderful dream born of the soft breezes, of the
+sunshine, of the sweet smell of the upturned sod and of his own
+strength. "It wouldn't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> come to weak men," he said, baring an arm that
+showed great snaky muscles rippling beneath the clear skin. "It is a
+dream that comes only to those who are strong and those who want&mdash;who
+want something that they haven't got." Then in a lower voice he said:
+"What is it that we want, Anna?"</p>
+
+<p>The little wife looked out into the darkness with fear-filled eyes.
+There were spies even there in that little village on the Beresina, and
+it was dangerous to say words that might be construed into a reflection
+on the Government. But she answered Ivan. She stooped and whispered one
+word into his ear, and he slapped his thigh with his big hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay," he cried. "That is what we want! You and I and millions like us
+want it, and over there, Anna, over there we will get it. It is the
+country where a muzhik is as good as a prince of the blood!"</p>
+
+<p>Anna stood up, took a small earthenware jar from a side shelf, dusted it
+carefully and placed it upon the mantel. From a knotted cloth about her
+neck she took a ruble and dropped the coin into the jar. Big Ivan looked
+at her curiously.</p>
+
+<p>"It is to make legs for your Dream," she explained. "It is many versts
+to America, and one rides on rubles."</p>
+
+<p>"You are a good wife," he said. "I was afraid that you might laugh at
+me."</p>
+
+<p>"It is a great dream," she murmured. "Come, we will go to sleep."</p>
+
+<p>The Dream maddened Ivan during the days that followed. It pounded within
+his brain as he followed the plow. It bred a discontent that made him
+hate the little village, the swift-flowing Beresina and the gray
+stretches that ran toward Mogilev. He wanted to be moving, but Anna had
+said that one rode on rubles, and rubles were hard to find.</p>
+
+<p>And in some mysterious way the village became aware of the secret.
+Donkov, the tailor, discovered it. Donkov lived in one-half of the
+cottage occupied by Ivan and Anna, and Donkov had long ears. The tailor
+spread the news, and Poborino,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> the smith, and Yanansk, the baker, would
+jeer at Ivan as he passed.</p>
+
+<p>"When are you going to America?" they would ask.</p>
+
+<p>"Soon," Ivan would answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Take us with you!" they would cry in chorus.</p>
+
+<p>"It is no place for cowards," Ivan would answer. "It is a long way, and
+only brave men can make the journey."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you brave?" the baker screamed one day as he went by.</p>
+
+<p>"I am brave enough to want liberty!" cried Ivan angrily. "I am brave
+enough to want&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Be careful! Be careful!" interrupted the smith. "A long tongue has
+given many a man a train journey that he never expected."</p>
+
+<p>That night Ivan and Anna counted the rubles in the earthenware pot. The
+giant looked down at his wife with a gloomy face, but she smiled and
+patted his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"It is slow work," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"We must be patient," she answered. "You have the Dream."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay," he said. "I have the Dream."</p>
+
+<p>Through the hot, languorous summertime the Dream grew within the brain
+of Big Ivan. He saw visions in the smoky haze that hung above the
+Beresina. At times he would stand, hoe in hand, and look toward the
+west, the wonderful west into which the sun slipped down each evening
+like a coin dropped from the fingers of the dying day.</p>
+
+<p>Autumn came, and the fretful whining winds that came down from the north
+chilled the Dream. The winds whispered of the coming of the Snow King,
+and the river grumbled as it listened. Big Ivan kept out of the way of
+Poborino, the smith, and Yanansk, the baker. The Dream was still with
+him, but autumn is a bad time for dreams.</p>
+
+<p>Winter came, and the Dream weakened. It was only the earthenware pot
+that kept it alive, the pot into which the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> industrious Anna put every
+coin that could be spared. Often Big Ivan would stare at the pot as he
+sat beside the stove. The pot was the cord which kept the Dream alive.</p>
+
+<p>"You are a good woman, Anna," Ivan would say again and again. "It was
+you who thought of saving the rubles."</p>
+
+<p>"But it was you who dreamed," she would answer. "Wait for the spring,
+husband mine. Wait."</p>
+
+<p>It was strange how the spring came to the Beresina that year. It sprang
+upon the flanks of winter before the Ice King had given the order to
+retreat into the fastnesses of the north. It swept up the river escorted
+by a million little breezes, and housewives opened their windows and
+peered out with surprise upon their faces. A wonderful guest had come to
+them and found them unprepared.</p>
+
+<p>Big Ivan of the Bridge was fixing a fence in the meadow on the morning
+the Spring Maiden reached the village. For a little while he was not
+aware of her arrival. His mind was upon his work, but suddenly he
+discovered that he was hot, and he took off his overcoat. He turned to
+hang the coat upon a bush, then he sniffed the air, and a puzzled look
+came upon his face. He sniffed again, hurriedly, hungrily. He drew in
+great breaths of it, and his eyes shone with a strange light. It was
+wonderful air. It brought life to the Dream. It rose up within him, ten
+times more lusty than on the day it was born, and his limbs trembled as
+he drew in the hot, scented breezes that breed the <i>Wanderlust</i> and
+shorten the long trails of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Big Ivan clutched his coat and ran to the little cottage. He burst
+through the door, startling Anna, who was busy with her housework.</p>
+
+<p>"The Spring!" he cried. "<i>The Spring!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>He took her arm and dragged her to the door. Standing together they
+sniffed the sweet breezes. In silence they listened to the song of the
+river. The Beresina had changed from a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> whining, fretful tune into a
+lilting, sweet song that would set the legs of lovers dancing. Anna
+pointed to a green bud on a bush beside the door.</p>
+
+<p>"It came this minute," she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Ivan. "The little fairies brought it there to show us that
+spring has come to stay."</p>
+
+<p>Together they turned and walked to the mantel. Big Ivan took up the
+earthenware pot, carried it to the table, and spilled its contents upon
+the well-scrubbed boards. He counted while Anna stood beside him, her
+fingers clutching his coarse blouse. It was a slow business, because
+Ivan's big blunt fingers were not used to such work, but it was over at
+last. He stacked the coins into neat piles, then he straightened himself
+and turned to the woman at his side.</p>
+
+<p>"It is enough," he said quietly. "We will go at once. If it was not
+enough, we would have to go because the Dream is upon me and I hate this
+place."</p>
+
+<p>"As you say," murmured Anna. "The wife of Littin, the butcher, will buy
+our chairs and our bed. I spoke to her yesterday."</p>
+
+<p>Poborino, the smith; his crippled son; Yanansk, the baker; Dankov, the
+tailor, and a score of others were out upon the village street on the
+morning that Big Ivan and Anna set out. They were inclined to jeer at
+Ivan, but something upon the face of the giant made them afraid. Hand in
+hand the big man and his wife walked down the street, their faces turned
+toward Bobruisk, Ivan balancing upon his head a heavy trunk that no
+other man in the village could have lifted.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the street a stripling with bright eyes and yellow curls
+clutched the hand of Ivan and looked into his face.</p>
+
+<p>"I know what is sending you," he cried.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, <i>you</i> know," said Ivan, looking into the eyes of the other.</p>
+
+<p>"It came to me yesterday," murmured the stripling. "I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> got it from the
+breezes. They are free, so are the birds and the little clouds and the
+river. I wish I could go."</p>
+
+<p>"Keep your dream," said Ivan softly. "Nurse it, for it is the dream of a
+man."</p>
+
+<p>Anna, who was crying softly, touched the blouse of the boy. "At the back
+of our cottage, near the bush that bears the red berries, a pot is
+buried," she said. "Dig it up and take it home with you and when you
+have a kopeck drop it in. It is a good pot."</p>
+
+<p>The stripling understood. He stooped and kissed the hand of Anna, and
+Big Ivan patted him upon the back. They were brother dreamers and they
+understood each other.</p>
+
+<p>Boris Lugan has sung the song of the versts that eat up one's courage as
+well as the leather of one's shoes.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Versts! Versts! Scores and scores of them!</div>
+<div>Versts! Versts! A million or more of them!</div>
+<div>Dust! Dust! And the devils who play in it,</div>
+<div>Blinding us fools who forever must stay in it."</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Big Ivan and Anna faced the long versts to Bobruisk, but they were not
+afraid of the dust devils. They had the Dream. It made their hearts
+light and took the weary feeling from their feet. They were on their
+way. America was a long, long journey, but they had started, and every
+verst they covered lessened the number that lay between them and the
+Promised Land.</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad the boy spoke to us," said Anna.</p>
+
+<p>"And I am glad," said Ivan. "Some day he will come and eat with us in
+America."</p>
+
+<p>They came to Bobruisk. Holding hands, they walked into it late one
+afternoon. They were eighty-nine versts from the little village on the
+Beresina, but they were not afraid. The Dream spoke to Ivan, and his big
+hand held the hand of Anna. The railway ran through Bobruisk, and that
+evening they stood and looked at the shining rails that went out in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> the
+moonlight like silver tongs reaching out for a low-hanging star.</p>
+
+<p>And they came face to face with the Terror that evening, the Terror that
+had helped the spring breezes and the sunshine to plant the Dream in the
+brain of Big Ivan.</p>
+
+<p>They were walking down a dark side street when they saw a score of men
+and women creep from the door of a squat, unpainted building. The little
+group remained on the sidewalk for a minute as if uncertain about the
+way they should go, then from the corner of the street came a cry of
+"Police!" and the twenty pedestrians ran in different directions.</p>
+
+<p>It was no false alarm. Mounted police charged down the dark thoroughfare
+swinging their swords as they rode at the scurrying men and women who
+raced for shelter. Big Ivan dragged Anna into a doorway, and toward
+their hiding place ran a young boy who, like themselves, had no
+connection with the group and who merely desired to get out of harm's
+way till the storm was over.</p>
+
+<p>The boy was not quick enough to escape the charge. A trooper pursued
+him, overtook him before he reached the sidewalk, and knocked him down
+with a quick stroke given with the flat of his blade. His horse struck
+the boy with one of his hoofs as the lad stumbled on his face.</p>
+
+<p>Big Ivan growled like an angry bear, and sprang from his hiding place.
+The trooper's horse had carried him on to the sidewalk, and Ivan seized
+the bridle and flung the animal on its haunches. The policeman leaned
+forward to strike at the giant, but Ivan of the Bridge gripped the left
+leg of the horseman and tore him from the saddle.</p>
+
+<p>The horse galloped off, leaving its rider lying beside the moaning boy
+who was unlucky enough to be in a street where a score of students were
+holding a meeting.</p>
+
+<p>Anna dragged Ivan back into the passageway. More police were charging
+down the street, and their position was a dangerous one.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span></p><p>"Ivan!" she cried, "Ivan! Remember the Dream! America, Ivan! <i>America!</i>
+Come this way! Quick!"</p>
+
+<p>With strong hands she dragged him down the passage. It opened into a
+narrow lane, and, holding each other's hands, they hurried toward the
+place where they had taken lodgings. From far off came screams and
+hoarse orders, curses and the sound of galloping hoofs. The Terror was
+abroad.</p>
+
+<p>Big Ivan spoke softly as they entered the little room they had taken.
+"He had a face like the boy to whom you gave the lucky pot," he said.
+"Did you notice it in the moonlight when the trooper struck him down?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she answered. "I saw."</p>
+
+<p>They left Bobruisk next morning. They rode away on a great, puffing,
+snorting train that terrified Anna. The engineer turned a stopcock as
+they were passing the engine, and Anna screamed while Ivan nearly
+dropped the big trunk. The engineer grinned, but the giant looked up at
+him and the grin faded. Ivan of the Bridge was startled by the rush of
+hot steam, but he was afraid of no man.</p>
+
+<p>The train went roaring by little villages and great pasture stretches.
+The real journey had begun. They began to love the powerful engine. It
+was eating up the versts at a tremendous rate. They looked at each other
+from time to time and smiled like two children.</p>
+
+<p>They came to Minsk, the biggest town they had ever seen. They looked out
+from the car windows at the miles of wooden buildings, at the big church
+of St. Catharine, and the woolen mills. Minsk would have frightened them
+if they hadn't had the Dream. The farther they went from the little
+village on the Beresina the more courage the Dream gave to them.</p>
+
+<p>On and on went the train, the wheels singing the song of the road.
+Fellow travelers asked them where they were going. "To America," Ivan
+would answer.</p>
+
+<p>"To America?" they would cry. "May the little saints guide you. It is a
+long way, and you will be lonely."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span></p><p>"No, we shall not be lonely," Ivan would say.</p>
+
+<p>"Ha! you are going with friends?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, we have no friends, but we have something that keeps us from being
+lonely." And when Ivan would make that reply Anna would pat his hand and
+the questioner would wonder if it was a charm or a holy relic that the
+bright-eyed couple possessed.</p>
+
+<p>They ran through Vilna, on through flat stretches of Courland to Libau,
+where they saw the sea. They sat and stared at it for a whole day,
+talking little but watching it with wide, wondering eyes. And they
+stared at the great ships that came rocking in from distant ports, their
+sides gray with the salt from the big combers which they had battled
+with.</p>
+
+<p>No wonder this America of ours is big. We draw the brave ones from the
+old lands, the brave ones whose dreams are like the guiding sign that
+was given to the Israelites of old&mdash;a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar
+of fire by night.</p>
+
+<p>The harbormaster spoke to Ivan and Anna as they watched the restless
+waters.</p>
+
+<p>"Where are you going, children?"</p>
+
+<p>"To America," answered Ivan.</p>
+
+<p>"A long way. Three ships bound for America went down last month."</p>
+
+<p>"Our ship will not sink," said Ivan.</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I know it will not."</p>
+
+<p>The harbor master looked at the strange blue eyes of the giant, and
+spoke softly. "You have the eyes of a man who sees things," he said.
+"There was a Norwegian sailor in the <i>White Queen</i>, who had eyes like
+yours, and he could see death."</p>
+
+<p>"I see life!" said Ivan boldly. "A free life&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Hush!" said the harbor master. "Do not speak so loud." He walked
+swiftly away, but he dropped a ruble into Anna's hand as he passed her
+by. "For luck," he murmured. "May the little saints look after you on
+the big waters."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span></p><p>They boarded the ship, and the Dream gave them a courage that surprised
+them. There were others going aboard, and Ivan and Anna felt that those
+others were also persons who possessed dreams. She saw the dreams in
+their eyes. There were Slavs, Poles, Letts, Jews, and Livonians, all
+bound for the land where dreams come true. They were a little
+afraid&mdash;not two per cent of them had ever seen a ship before&mdash;yet their
+dreams gave them courage.</p>
+
+<p>The emigrant ship was dragged from her pier by a grunting tug and went
+floundering down the Baltic Sea. Night came down, and the devils who,
+according to the Esthonian fishermen, live in the bottom of the Baltic,
+got their shoulders under the stern of the ship and tried to stand her
+on her head. They whipped up white combers that sprang on her flanks and
+tried to crush her, and the wind played a devil's lament in her rigging.
+Anna lay sick in the stuffy women's quarters, and Ivan could not get
+near her. But he sent her messages. He told her not to mind the sea
+devils, to think of the Dream, the Great Dream that would become real in
+the land to which they were bound. Ivan of the Bridge grew to full
+stature on that first night out from Libau. The battered old craft that
+carried him slouched before the waves that swept over her decks, but he
+was not afraid. Down among the million and one smells of the steerage he
+induced a thin-faced Livonian to play upon a mouth organ, and Big Ivan
+sang Paleer's "Song of Freedom" in a voice that drowned the creaking of
+the old vessel's timbers, and made the seasick ones forget their
+sickness. They sat up in their berths and joined in the chorus, their
+eyes shining brightly in the half gloom:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Freedom for serf and for slave,</div>
+<div>Freedom for all men who crave</div>
+<div>Their right to be free</div>
+<div>And who hate to bend knee</div>
+<div>But to Him who this right to them gave."</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It was well that these emigrants had dreams. They wanted them. The sea
+devils chased the lumbering steamer. They<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> hung to her bows and pulled
+her for'ard deck under emerald-green rollers. They clung to her stern
+and hoisted her nose till Big Ivan thought that he could touch the door
+of heaven by standing on her blunt snout. Miserable, cold, ill, and
+sleepless, the emigrants crouched in their quarters, and to them Ivan
+and the thin-faced Livonian sang the "Song of Freedom."</p>
+
+<p>The emigrant ship pounded through the Cattegat, swung southward through
+the Skagerrack and the bleak North Sea. But the storm pursued her. The
+big waves snarled and bit at her, and the captain and the chief officer
+consulted with each other. They decided to run into the Thames, and the
+harried steamer nosed her way in and anchored off Gravesend.</p>
+
+<p>An examination was made, and the agents decided to transship the
+emigrants. They were taken to London and thence by train to Liverpool,
+and Ivan and Anna sat again side by side, holding hands and smiling at
+each other as the third-class emigrant train from Euston raced down
+through the green Midland counties to grimy Liverpool.</p>
+
+<p>"You are not afraid?" Ivan would say to her each time she looked at him.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a long way, but the Dream has given me much courage," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"To-day I spoke to a Lett whose brother works in New York City," said
+the giant. "Do you know how much money he earns each day?"</p>
+
+<p>"How much?" she questioned.</p>
+
+<p>"Three rubles, and he calls the policemen by their first names."</p>
+
+<p>"You will earn five rubles, my Ivan," she murmured. "There is no one as
+strong as you."</p>
+
+<p>Once again they were herded into the bowels of a big ship that steamed
+away through the fog banks of the Mersey out into the Irish Sea. There
+were more dreamers now, nine hundred of them, and Anna and Ivan were
+more comfortable. And these new emigrants, English, Irish, Scotch,
+French, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> German, knew much concerning America. Ivan was certain that
+he would earn at least three rubles a day. He was very strong.</p>
+
+<p>On the deck he defeated all comers in a tug of war, and the captain of
+the ship came up to him and felt his muscles.</p>
+
+<p>"The country that lets men like you get away from it is run badly," he
+said. "Why did you leave it?"</p>
+
+<p>The interpreter translated what the captain said, and through the
+interpreter Ivan answered.</p>
+
+<p>"I had a Dream," he said, "a Dream of freedom."</p>
+
+<p>"Good," cried the captain. "Why should a man with muscles like yours
+have his face ground into the dust?"</p>
+
+<p>The soul of Big Ivan grew during those days. He felt himself a man, a
+man who was born upright to speak his thoughts without fear.</p>
+
+<p>The ship rolled into Queenstown one bright morning, and Ivan and his
+nine hundred steerage companions crowded the for'ard deck. A boy in a
+rowboat threw a line to the deck, and after it had been fastened to a
+stanchion he came up hand over hand. The emigrants watched him
+curiously. An old woman sitting in the boat pulled off her shoes, sat in
+a loop of the rope, and lifted her hand as a signal to her son on deck.</p>
+
+<p>"Hey, fellers," said the boy, "help me pull me muvver up. She wants to
+sell a few dozen apples, an' they won't let her up the gangway!"</p>
+
+<p>Big Ivan didn't understand the words, but he guessed what the boy
+wanted. He made one of a half dozen who gripped the rope and started to
+pull the ancient apple woman to the deck.</p>
+
+<p>They had her halfway up the side when an undersized third officer
+discovered what they were doing. He called to a steward, and the steward
+sprang to obey.</p>
+
+<p>"Turn a hose on her!" cried the officer. "Turn a hose on the old woman!"</p>
+
+<p>The steward rushed for the hose. He ran with it to the side<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> of the ship
+with the intention of squirting on the old woman, who was swinging in
+midair and exhorting the six men who were dragging her to the deck.</p>
+
+<p>"Pull!" she cried. "Sure, I'll give every one of ye a rosy red apple an'
+me blessing with it."</p>
+
+<p>The steward aimed the muzzle of the hose, and Big Ivan of the Bridge let
+go of the rope and sprang at him. The fist of the great Russian went out
+like a battering ram; it struck the steward between the eyes, and he
+dropped upon the deck. He lay like one dead, the muzzle of the hose
+wriggling from his limp hands.</p>
+
+<p>The third officer and the interpreter rushed at Big Ivan, who stood
+erect, his hands clenched.</p>
+
+<p>"Ask the big swine why he did it," roared the officer.</p>
+
+<p>"Because he is a coward!" cried Ivan. "They wouldn't do that in
+America!"</p>
+
+<p>"What does the big brute know about America?" cried the officer.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell him I have dreamed of it," shouted Ivan. "Tell him it is in my
+Dream. Tell him I will kill him if he turns the water on this old
+woman."</p>
+
+<p>The apple seller was on deck then, and with the wisdom of the Celt she
+understood. She put her lean hand upon the great head of the Russian and
+blessed him in Gaelic. Ivan bowed before her, then as she offered him a
+rosy apple he led her toward Anna, a great Viking leading a withered old
+woman who walked with the grace of a duchess.</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't touch him," she cried, turning to the officer. "We have
+been waiting for your ship for six hours, and we have only five dozen
+apples to sell. It's a great man he is. Sure he's as big as Finn
+MacCool."</p>
+
+<p>Some one pulled the steward behind a ventilator and revived him by
+squirting him with water from the hose which he had tried to turn upon
+the old woman. The third officer slipped quietly away.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span></p><p>The Atlantic was kind to the ship that carried Ivan and Anna. Through
+sunny days they sat up on deck and watched the horizon. They wanted to
+be among those who would get the first glimpse of the wonderland.</p>
+
+<p>They saw it on a morning with sunshine and soft wind. Standing together
+in the bow, they looked at the smear upon the horizon, and their eyes
+filled with tears. They forgot the long road to Bobruisk, the rocking
+journey to Libau, the mad buckjumping boat in whose timbers the sea
+devils of the Baltic had bored holes. Everything unpleasant was
+forgotten, because the Dream filled them with a great happiness.</p>
+
+<p>The inspectors at Ellis Island were interested in Ivan. They walked
+around him and prodded his muscles, and he smiled down upon them
+good-naturedly.</p>
+
+<p>"A fine animal," said one. "Gee, he's a new white hope! Ask him can he
+fight?"</p>
+
+<p>An interpreter put the question, and Ivan nodded. "I have fought," he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>"Gee!" cried the inspector. "Ask him was it for purses or what?"</p>
+
+<p>"For freedom," answered Ivan. "For freedom to stretch my legs and
+straighten my neck!"</p>
+
+<p>Ivan and Anna left the Government ferryboat at the Battery. They started
+to walk uptown, making for the East Side, Ivan carrying the big trunk
+that no other man could lift.</p>
+
+<p>It was a wonderful morning. The city was bathed in warm sunshine, and
+the well-dressed men and women who crowded the sidewalks made the two
+immigrants think that it was a festival day. Ivan and Anna stared at
+each other in amazement. They had never seen such dresses as those worn
+by the smiling women who passed them by; they had never seen such
+well-groomed men.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a feast day for certain," said Anna.</p>
+
+<p>"They are dressed like princes and princesses," murmured Ivan. "There
+are no poor here, Anna. None."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span></p><p>Like two simple children, they walked along the streets of the City of
+Wonder. What a contrast it was to the gray, stupid towns where the
+Terror waited to spring upon the cowed people. In Bobruisk, Minsk,
+Vilna, and Libau the people were sullen and afraid. They walked in
+dread, but in the City of Wonder beside the glorious Hudson every person
+seemed happy and contented.</p>
+
+<p>They lost their way, but they walked on, looking at the wonderful shop
+windows, the roaring elevated trains, and the huge skyscrapers. Hours
+afterward they found themselves in Fifth Avenue near Thirty-third
+Street, and there the miracle happened to the two Russian immigrants. It
+was a big miracle inasmuch as it proved the Dream a truth, a great
+truth.</p>
+
+<p>Ivan and Anna attempted to cross the avenue, but they became confused in
+the snarl of traffic. They dodged backward and forward as the stream of
+automobiles swept by them. Anna screamed, and, in response to her
+scream, a traffic policeman, resplendent in a new uniform, rushed to her
+side. He took the arm of Anna and flung up a commanding hand. The
+charging autos halted. For five blocks north and south they jammed on
+the brakes when the unexpected interruption occurred, and Big Ivan
+gasped.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be flurried, little woman," said the cop. "Sure I can tame 'em by
+liftin' me hand."</p>
+
+<p>Anna didn't understand what he said, but she knew it was something nice
+by the manner in which his Irish eyes smiled down upon her. And in front
+of the waiting automobiles he led her with the same care that he would
+give to a duchess, while Ivan, carrying the big trunk, followed them,
+wondering much. Ivan's mind went back to Bobruisk on the night the
+Terror was abroad.</p>
+
+<p>The policeman led Anna to the sidewalk, patted Ivan good-naturedly upon
+the shoulder, and then with a sharp whistle unloosed the waiting stream
+of cars that had been held up so that two Russian immigrants could cross
+the avenue.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span></p><p>Big Ivan of the Bridge took the trunk from his head and put it on the
+ground. He reached out his arms and folded Anna in a great embrace. His
+eyes were wet.</p>
+
+<p>"The Dream is true!" he cried. "Did you see, Anna? We are as good as
+they! This is the land where a muzhik is as good as a prince of the
+blood!"</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The President was nearing the close of his address. Anna shook Ivan, and
+Ivan came out of the trance which the President's words had brought upon
+him. He sat up and listened intently:</p>
+
+<p><i>We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in
+the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's
+evening. Some of us let those great dreams die, but others nourish and
+protect them, nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the
+sunshine and light which come always to those who sincerely hope that
+their dreams will come true.</i></p>
+
+<p>The President finished. For a moment he stood looking down at the faces
+turned up to him, and Big Ivan of the Bridge thought that the President
+smiled at him. Ivan seized Anna's hand and held it tight.</p>
+
+<p>"He knew of my Dream!" he cried. "He knew of it. Did you hear what he
+said about the dreams of a spring day?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course he knew," said Anna. "He is the wisest man in America, where
+there are many wise men. Ivan, you are a citizen now."</p>
+
+<p>"And you are a citizen, Anna."</p>
+
+<p>The band started to play "My Country, 'tis of Thee," and Ivan and Anna
+got to their feet. Standing side by side, holding hands, they joined in
+with the others who had found after long days of journeying the blessed
+land where dreams come true.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="JAMES_FRANCIS_DWYER" id="JAMES_FRANCIS_DWYER"></a>JAMES FRANCIS DWYER</h2>
+
+<p>Mr. Dwyer is an American by adoption, an Australian by birth. He was
+born in Camden, New South Wales, April 22, 1874; and received his
+education in the public schools there. He entered newspaper work, and in
+the capacity of a correspondent for Australian papers traveled
+extensively in Australia and in the South Seas, from 1898 to 1906. In
+1906 he made a tour through South Africa, and at the conclusion of this
+went to England. He came to America in 1907, and since that time has
+made his home in New York City. He has been a frequent contributor to
+<i>Collier's</i>, <i>Harper's Weekly</i>, <i>The American Magazine</i>, <i>The Ladies'
+Home Journal</i>, and other periodicals. He has published five books,
+nearly all dealing with the strange life of the far East. His first
+book, <i>The White Waterfall</i>, published in 1912, has its scene in the
+South Sea Islands. A California scientist, interested in ancient
+Polynesian skulls, goes to the South Seas to investigate his favorite
+subject, accompanied by his two daughters. The amazing adventures they
+meet there make a very interesting story. <i>The Spotted Panther</i> is a
+story of adventure in Borneo. Three white men go there in search of a
+wonderful sword of great antiquity which is in the possession of a tribe
+of Dyaks, the head-hunters of Borneo. There are some vivid descriptions
+in the story and plenty of thrills. <i>The Breath of the Jungle</i> is a
+collection of short stories, the scenes laid in the Malay Peninsula and
+nearby islands. They describe the strange life of these regions, and
+show how it reacts in various ways upon white men who live there. <i>The
+Green Half Moon</i> is a story of mystery and diplomatic intrigue, the
+scene partly in the Orient, partly in London.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span></p><p>In his later work Mr. Dwyer has taken up American themes. <i>The Bust of
+Lincoln</i>, really a short story, deals with a young man whose proudest
+possession is a bust of Lincoln that had belonged to his grandfather;
+the story shows how it influences his life. The story <i>The Citizen</i> had
+an interesting origin. On May 10, 1915, just after the sinking of the
+<i>Lusitania</i>, President Wilson went to Philadelphia to address a meeting
+of an unusual kind. Four thousand foreign-born men, who had just become
+naturalized citizens of our country, were to be welcomed to citizenship
+by the Mayor of the city, a member of the Cabinet, and the President of
+the United States. The meeting was held in Convention Hall; more than
+fifteen thousand people were present, and the event, occurring as it did
+at a time when every one realized that the loyalty of our people was
+likely to be soon put to the test, was one of historic importance. Moved
+by the significance of this event, Mr. Dwyer translated it into
+literature. His story, "The Citizen," was published in <i>Collier's</i> in
+November, 1915.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="LIST_OF_AMERICAN_SHORT_STORIES_CLASSIFIED_BY_LOCALITY" id="LIST_OF_AMERICAN_SHORT_STORIES_CLASSIFIED_BY_LOCALITY"></a>LIST OF AMERICAN SHORT STORIES CLASSIFIED BY LOCALITY</h2>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">I. THE EAST</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">New England</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>A New England Nun</i>; <i>A Humble Romance</i>, Mary Wilkins-Freeman.<br />
+<i>Meadow-Grass</i>; <i>The Country Road</i>, Alice Brown.<br />
+<i>A White Heron</i>; <i>The Queen's Twin</i>, Sarah Orne Jewett.<br />
+<i>Pratt Portraits</i>; <i>Later Pratt Portraits</i>, Anna Fuller.<br />
+<i>The Village Watch Tower</i>, Kate Douglas Wiggin.<br />
+<i>The Old Home House</i>, Joseph C. Lincoln.<br />
+<i>Hillsboro People</i>, Dorothy Canfield.<br />
+<i>Out of Gloucester</i>; <i>The Crested Seas</i>, James B. Connolly.<br />
+<i>Under the Crust</i>, Thomas Nelson Page.<br />
+<i>Dumb Foxglove</i>, Annie T. Slosson.<br />
+<i>Huckleberries Gathered From New England Hills</i>, Rose Terry Cooke.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">New York City</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>The Four Million</i>; <i>The Voice of the City</i>; <i>The Trimmed Lamp</i>, O. Henry.<br />
+<i>Van Bibber and Others</i>, Richard Harding Davis.<br />
+<i>Doctor Rast</i>, James Oppenheim.<br />
+<i>Toomey and Others</i>, Robert Shackleton.<br />
+<i>Vignettes of Manhattan</i>, Brander Matthews.<br />
+<i>The Imported Bridegroom</i>, Abraham Cahan.<br />
+<i>Little Citizens</i>; <i>Little Aliens</i>, Myra Kelly.<br />
+<i>The Soul of the Street</i>, Norman Duncan.<br />
+<i>Wall Street Stories</i>, Edwin Le Fevre.<br />
+<i>The Optimist</i>, Susan Faber.<br />
+<i>Every Soul Hath Its Song</i>, Fannie Hurst.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">New Jersey</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Hulgate of Mogador</i>, Sewell Ford.<br />
+<i>Edgewater People</i>, Mary Wilkins-Freeman.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Pennsylvania</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Old Chester Tales</i>; <i>Doctor Lavender's People</i>, Margaret Deland.<br />
+<i>Betrothal of Elypholate</i>, Helen R. Martin.<br />
+<i>The Passing of Thomas</i>, Thomas A. Janvier.<br />
+<i>The Standard Bearers</i>, Katherine Mayo.<br />
+<i>Six Stars</i>, Nelson Lloyd.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">II. THE SOUTH</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Alabama</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Alabama Sketches</i>, Samuel Minturn Peck.<br />
+<i>Polished Ebony</i>, Octavius R. Cohen.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Arkansas</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Otto the Knight</i>; <i>Knitters in the Sun</i>, Octave Thanet.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Florida</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Rodman the Keeper</i>, Constance F. Woolson.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Georgia</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Georgia Scenes</i>, A. B. Longstreet.<br />
+<i>Free Joe; Tales of the Home-Folks</i>, Joel Chandler Harris.<br />
+<i>Stories of the Cherokee Hills</i>, Maurice Thompson.<br />
+<i>Northern Georgia Sketches</i>, Will N. Harben.<br />
+<i>His Defence</i>, Harry Stilwell Edwards.<br />
+<i>Mr. Absalom Billingslea</i>; <i>Mr. Billy Downes</i>, Richard Malcolm Johnston.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Kentucky</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Flute and Violin</i>; <i>A Kentucky Cardinal</i>, James Lane Allen.<br />
+<i>In Happy Valley</i>, John Fox, Jr.<br />
+<i>Back Home</i>; <i>Judge Priest and his People</i>, Irvin S. Cobb.<br />
+<i>Land of Long Ago</i>; <i>Aunt Jane of Kentucky</i>, Eliza Calvert Hall.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Louisiana</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Holly and Pizen</i>; <i>Aunt Amity's Silver Wedding</i>, Ruth McEnery Stuart.<br />
+<i>Balcony Stories</i>; <i>Tales of Time and Place</i>, Grace King.<br />
+<i>Old Creole Days</i>; <i>Strange True Stories of Louisiana</i>, George W. Cable.<br />
+<i>Bayou Folks</i>, Kate Chopin.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Tennessee</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>In the Tennessee Mountains</i>; <i>Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains</i>, Charles Egbert Craddock. (Mary N. Murfree.)<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Virginia</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>In Ole Virginia</i>, Thomas Nelson Page.<br />
+<i>Virginia of Virginia</i>, Amelie Rives.<br />
+<i>Colonel Carter of Cartersville</i>, F. Hopkinson Smith.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">North Carolina</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>North Carolina Sketches</i>, Mary N. Carter.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">III. THE MIDDLE WEST</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Indiana</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Dialect Sketches</i>, James Whitcomb Riley.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Illinois</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>The Home Builders</i>, K. E. Harriman.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Iowa</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Stories of a Western Town</i>; <i>The Missionary Sheriff</i>, Octave Thanet.<br />
+<i>In a Little Town</i>, Rupert Hughes.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Kansas</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>In Our Town</i>; <i>Stratagems and Spoils</i>, William Allen White.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Missouri</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>The Man at the Wheel</i>, John Hanton Carter.<br />
+<i>Stories of a Country Doctor</i>, Willis King.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Michigan</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Blazed Trail Stories</i>, Stewart Edward White.<br />
+<i>Mackinac and Lake Stories</i>, Mary Hartwell Catherwood.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Ohio</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Folks Back Home</i>, Eugene Wood.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Wisconsin</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Main-Travelled Roads</i>, Hamlin Garland.<br />
+<i>Friendship Village</i>; <i>Friendship Village Love Stories</i>, Zona Gale.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">IV. THE FAR WEST</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Arizona</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Lost Borders</i>, Mary Austin.<br />
+<i>Arizona Nights</i>, Stewart Edward White.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Alaska</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Love of Life</i>; <i>Son of the Wolf</i>, Jack London.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">California</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>The Cat and the Cherub</i>, Chester B. Fernald.<br />
+<i>The Luck of Roaring Camp</i>; <i>Tales of the Argonauts</i>, Bret Harte.<br />
+<i>The Splendid Idle Forties</i>, Gertrude Atherton.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">New Mexico</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>The King of the Broncos</i>, Charles F. Lummis.<br />
+<i>Santa Fe's Partner</i>, Thomas A. Janvier.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Wyoming</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Red Men and White</i>; <i>The Virginian</i>; <i>Members of the Family</i>, Owen Wister.<br />
+<i>Teepee Tales</i>, Grace Coolidge.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Philippine Islands</span></p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Caybigan</i>, James N. Hopper.<br />
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="NOTES_AND_QUESTIONS_FOR_STUDY" id="NOTES_AND_QUESTIONS_FOR_STUDY"></a>NOTES AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY</h2>
+
+<h3>THE RIGHT PROMETHEAN FIRE</h3>
+
+<p>In Greek mythology, the work of creating living things was entrusted to
+two of the gods, Epimetheus and Prometheus. Epimetheus gave to the
+different animals various powers, to the lion strength, to the bird
+swiftness, to the fox sagacity, and so on until all the good gifts had
+been bestowed, and there was nothing left for man. Then Prometheus
+ascended to heaven and brought down fire, as his gift to man. With this,
+man could protect himself, could forge iron to make weapons, and so in
+time develop the arts of civilization. In this story the "Promethean
+Fire" of love is the means of giving little Emmy Lou her first lesson in
+reading.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>1. A test that may be applied to any story is, Does it read as if
+it were true? Would the persons in the story do the things they are
+represented as doing? Test the acts of Billy Traver in this way,
+and see if they are probable.</p>
+
+<p>2. In writing stories about children, a writer must have the power
+to present life as a child sees it. Point out places in this story
+where school life is described as it appears to a new pupil.</p>
+
+<p>3. One thing we ought to gain from our reading is a larger
+vocabulary. In this story there are a number of words worth adding
+to our stock. Define these exactly: inquisitorial; lachrymose;
+laconic; surreptitious; contumely.</p>
+
+<p>Get the habit of looking up new words and writing down their
+meanings.</p>
+
+<p>4. Can you write a story about a school experience?</p>
+
+<p>5. Other books containing stories of school life are:</p>
+
+<p><i>Little Aliens</i>, Myra Kelly; <i>May Iverson Tackles Life</i>, Elizabeth
+Jordan; <i>Ten to Seventeen</i>, Josephine Daskam Bacon; <i>Closed Doors</i>,
+Margaret P. Montague. Read a story from one of these books, and
+compare it with this story.</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3>THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE</h3>
+
+<p>Central Park, New York, covers an era of more than eight hundred acres,
+with a zoo and several small lakes. On one of the lakes there are large
+boats with a huge wooden swan on each side. Richard Harding Davis
+located one of his stories here: See "Van<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> Bibber and the Swan Boats,"
+in the volume called <i>Van Bibber and Others</i>.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>1. How is this story like the preceding one? What difference in the
+characters? What difference in their homes?</p>
+
+<p>2. How does Myra Kelly make you feel sympathy for the little folks?
+In what ways have their lives been less fortunate than the lives of
+children in your town?</p>
+
+<p>3. What is peculiar about the talk of these children? Do they all
+speak the same dialect? Many of the children of the East Side never
+hear English spoken at home.</p>
+
+<p>4. What touches of humor are there in this story?</p>
+
+<p>5. What new words do you find? Define garrulous, pedagogically,
+cicerone.</p>
+
+<p>6. Where did Miss Kelly get her materials for this story? See the
+life on page 37.</p>
+
+<p>7. What other stories by this author have you read? This is from
+<i>Little Citizens</i>; other books telling about the same characters
+are <i>Little Aliens</i>, and <i>Wards of Liberty</i>.</p>
+
+<p>8. Other books of short stories dealing with children are:
+<i>Whilomville Stories</i>, by Stephen Crane; <i>The Golden Age</i>, by
+Kenneth Grahame; <i>The Madness of Philip</i>, by Josephine Daskam
+Bacon; <i>The King of Boyville</i>, by William Allen White; <i>New
+Chronicles of Rebecca</i>, by Kate Douglas Wiggin. Read one of these,
+and compare it with Myra Kelly's story.</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3>THE TENOR</h3>
+
+<blockquote><p>1. Point out the humorous touches in this story.</p>
+
+<p>2. Is the story probable? To answer this, consider two points:
+would Louise have undertaken such a thing as answering the
+advertisement? and would she have had the spirit to act as she did
+at the close? Note the touches of description and characterization
+of Louise, and show how they prepare for the events that follow.</p>
+
+<p>3. One of the most effective devices in art is the use of contrast;
+that is, bringing together two things or persons or ideas that are
+very different, perhaps the exact opposite of each other. Show that
+the main effect of this story depends on the use of contrast.</p>
+
+<p>4. Read the paragraph on page 43 beginning, "It happened to be a
+French tenor." Give in your own words the thought of this
+paragraph. Is it true? Can you give examples of it?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span></p><p>5. Compare the length of this story with that of others in the
+book. Which authors get their effects in a small compass? Could any
+parts of this story be omitted?</p>
+
+<p>6. Other stories by H. C. Bunner that you will enjoy are "The Love
+Letters of Smith" and "A Sisterly Scheme" in <i>Short Sixes</i>.</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3>THE PASSING OF PRISCILLA WINTHROP</h3>
+
+<blockquote><p>1. Does the title fit the story well? Why?</p>
+
+<p>2. Notice the familiar, almost conversational style. Is it suited
+to the story? Why?</p>
+
+<p>3. Show how the opening paragraph introduces the main idea of the
+story.</p>
+
+<p>4. To make a story there must be a conflict of some sort. What is
+the conflict here?</p>
+
+<p>5. How does the account of Julia Neal's career as a teacher (page
+64) prepare for the ending of the story?</p>
+
+<p>6. Do you have a clear picture in your mind of Mrs. Winthrop? Of
+Mrs. Worthington? Why did not the author tell about their personal
+appearance?</p>
+
+<p>7. Point out humorous touches in the next to the last paragraph.</p>
+
+<p>8. Is this story true to life? Who is the Priscilla Winthrop of
+your town?</p>
+
+<p>9. What impression do you get of the man behind this story? Do you
+think he knew the people of his town well? Did he like them even
+while he laughed at them? What else can you say about him?</p>
+
+<p>10. Other books of short stories dealing with life in a small town
+are: <i>Pratt Portraits</i>, by Anna Fuller; <i>Old Chester Tales</i>, by
+Margaret Deland; <i>Stories of a Western Town</i>, by Octave Thanet; <i>In
+a Little Town</i>, by Rupert Hughes; <i>Folks Back Home</i>, by Eugene
+Wood; <i>Friendship Village</i>, by Zona Gale; <i>Bodbank</i>, by Richard W.
+Child. Read one of these books, or a story from one, and compare it
+with this story.</p>
+
+<p>11. In what ways does life in a small town differ from life in a
+large city?</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3>THE GIFT OF THE MAGI</h3>
+
+<p>This story, taken from the volume called <i>The Four Million</i>, is a good
+example of O. Henry's method as a short-story writer. It is notable for
+its brevity. The average length of the modern short<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> story is about five
+thousand words; O. Henry uses a little over one thousand words. This
+conciseness is gained in several ways. In his descriptions, he has the
+art of selecting significant detail. When Della looks out of the window,
+instead of describing fully the view that met her eyes, he says: "She
+looked out dully at a grey cat walking a grey fence in a grey backyard."
+A paragraph could do no more. Again, the beginning of the story is
+quick, abrupt. There is no introduction. The style is often elliptical;
+in the first paragraph half the sentences are not sentences at all. But
+the main reason for the shortness of the story lies in the fact that the
+author has included only such incidents and details as are necessary to
+the unfolding of the plot. There is no superfluous matter.</p>
+
+<p>Another characteristic of O. Henry is found in the unexpected turns of
+his plots. There is almost always a surprise in his stories, usually at
+the end. And yet this has been so artfully prepared for that we accept
+it as probable. Our pleasure in reading his stories is further
+heightened by the constant flashes of humor that light up his pages. And
+beyond this, he has the power to touch deeper emotions. When Della heard
+Jim's step on the stairs, "she turned white just for a moment. She had a
+habit of saying little silent prayers about the simplest things, and now
+she whispered, 'Please God, make him think I am still pretty.'" One
+reads that with a little catch in the throat.</p>
+
+<p>In his plots, O. Henry is romantic; in his settings he is a realist.
+Della and Jim are romantic lovers, they are not prudent nor calculating,
+but act upon impulse. In his descriptions, however, he is a realist. The
+eight-dollar-a-week flat, the frying pan on the back of the stove, the
+description of Della "flopping down on the couch for a cry," and
+afterwards "attending to her cheeks with the powder-rag,"&mdash;all these are
+in the manner of realism.</p>
+
+<p>And finally, the tone of his stories is brave and cheerful. He finds the
+world a most interesting place, and its people, even its commonplace
+people, its rogues, its adventurers, are drawn with a broad sympathy
+that makes us more tolerant of the people we meet outside the books.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>1. Compare the beginning of this story with the beginning of
+"Bitter-Sweet." What difference do you note?</p>
+
+<p>2. Select a description of a person that shows the author's power
+of concise portraiture.</p>
+
+<p>3. What is the turn of surprise in this story? What other stories
+in this book have a similar twist at the end?</p>
+
+<p>4. What is the central thought of this story?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span></p><p>5. Other stories of O. Henry's that ought not to be missed are "An
+Unfinished Story" and "The Furnished Room" in <i>The Four Million</i>;
+"A Blackjack Bargainer" in <i>Whirligigs</i>; "Best Seller" and "The
+Rose of Dixie" in <i>Options</i>; "A Municipal Report" in <i>Strictly
+Business</i>; "A Retrieved Reformation" in <i>Roads of Destiny</i>; and
+"Hearts and Crosses" in <i>Hearts of the West</i>.</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3>THE GOLD BRICK</h3>
+
+<p>This story, first published in the <i>American Magazine</i>, was reprinted in
+a volume called <i>The Gold Brick</i>, published in 1910. The quotation "chip
+at crusts like Hindus" is from Robert Browning's poem "Youth and Art."
+The reference to "Old Walt" at the end of the story is to Walt Whitman,
+one of the great poets of democracy.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>1. To make a story interesting, there must be a conflict. In this
+the conflict is double: the outer conflict, between the two
+political factions, and the inner conflict, in the soul of the
+artist. Note how skilfully this inner struggle is introduced: at
+the moment when Kittrell is first rejoicing over his new position,
+he feels a pang at leaving the <i>Post</i>, and what it stood for. This
+feeling is deepened by his wife's tacit disapproval; it grows
+stronger as the campaign progresses, until the climax is reached in
+the scene where he resigns his position.</p>
+
+<p>2. If you knew nothing about the author, what could you infer from
+this story about his political ideals? Did he believe in democracy?
+Did he have faith in the good sense of the common people? Did he
+think it was worth while to make sacrifices for them? What is your
+evidence for this?</p>
+
+<p>3. How far is this story true to life, as you know it? Do any
+newspapers in your city correspond to the <i>Post</i>? To the
+<i>Telegraph</i>? Can you recall a campaign in which the contest was
+between two such groups as are described here?</p>
+
+<p>4. Does Whitlock have the art of making his characters real? Is
+this true of the minor characters? The girl in the flower shop, for
+instance, who appears but for a moment,&mdash;is she individualized?
+How?</p>
+
+<p>5. Is there a lesson in this story? State it in your own words.</p>
+
+<p>6. What experiences in Whitlock's life gave him the background for
+this story?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span></p><p>7. What new words did you gain from this? Define meritricious;
+prognathic; banal; vulpine; camaraderie; vilification; ennui;
+quixotic; na&iuml;ve; pharisaism. What can you say of Whitlock's
+vocabulary?</p>
+
+<p>8. Other good stories dealing with politics are found in
+<i>Stratagems and Spoils</i>, by William Allen White.</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3>HIS MOTHER'S SON</h3>
+
+<blockquote><p>1. Note the quick beginning of the story; no introduction, action
+from the start. Why is this suitable to this story?</p>
+
+<p>2. Why is slang used so frequently?</p>
+
+<p>3. Point out examples of humor in the story.</p>
+
+<p>4. In your writing, do you ever have trouble in finding just the
+right word? Note on page 123 how Edna Ferber tries one expression
+after another, and how on page 122 she finally coins a
+word&mdash;"unadjectivable." What does the word mean?</p>
+
+<p>5. Do you have a clear picture of Emma McChesney? Of Ed Meyers?
+Note that the description of Meyers in the office is not given all
+at once, but a touch here and then. Point out all these bits of
+description of this person, and note how complete the portrait is.</p>
+
+<p>6. What have you learned in this story about the life of a
+traveling salesman?</p>
+
+<p>7. What qualities must a good salesman possess?</p>
+
+<p>8. Was Emma McChesney a lady? Was Ed Meyers a gentleman? Why do you
+think so?</p>
+
+<p>9. This story is taken from the book called <i>Roast Beef, Medium</i>.
+Other good books of short stories by this author are <i>Personality
+Plus</i>, and <i>Cheerful&mdash;by Request</i>.</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3>BITTER-SWEET</h3>
+
+<blockquote><p>1. Note the introduction, a characteristic of all of Fannie Hurst's
+stories. What purpose does it serve here? What trait of Gertie's is
+brought out? Is this important to the story?</p>
+
+<p>2. From the paragraph on page 139 beginning "It was into the
+trickle of the last&mdash;&mdash;" select examples that show the author's
+skill in the use of words. What other instances of this do you note
+in the story?</p>
+
+<p>3. Read the sketch of the author. What episode in her life gave her
+material for parts of this story?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span></p><p>4. Notice how skillfully the conversation is handled. The opening
+situation developes itself entirely through dialogue, yet in a
+perfectly natural way. It is almost like a play rather than a
+story. If it were dramatized, how many scenes would it make?</p>
+
+<p>5. What does the title mean? Does the author give us the key to its
+meaning?</p>
+
+<p>6. What do you think of Gertie as you read the first part of the
+conversation in the restaurant? Does your opinion of her change at
+the end of the story? Has her character changed?</p>
+
+<p>7. Is the ending of the story artistic? Why mention the time-clock?
+What had Gertie said about it?</p>
+
+<p>8. State in three or four words the central idea of the story. Is
+it true to life?</p>
+
+<p>9. What is the meaning of these words: atavism; penumbra;
+semaphore; astigmatic; insouciance; mise-en-scene; kinetic?</p>
+
+<p>10. Other books of stories dealing with life in New York City are
+<i>The Four Million</i>, and <i>The Voice of the City</i>, by O. Henry; <i>Van
+Bibber and Others</i>, by Richard Harding Davis; <i>Every Soul Hath Its
+Song</i>, by Fannie Hurst; <i>Doctor Rast</i>, by James Oppenheim.</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3>THE RIVERMAN</h3>
+
+<blockquote><p>1. In how many scenes is this story told? What is the connection
+between them?</p>
+
+<p>2. Is there anything in the first description of Dicky Darrell that
+gives you a slight prejudice against him?</p>
+
+<p>3. Why was the sympathy of the crowd with Jimmy Powers in the
+birling match?</p>
+
+<p>4. Comment on Jimmy's remark at the end of the story. Did he mean
+it, or is he just trying to turn away the praise?</p>
+
+<p>5. What are the characteristics of a lumberman, as seen in Jimmy
+Powers?</p>
+
+<p>6. Read the sketch of Stewart Edward White, and decide which one of
+his books you would like to read.</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3>FLINT AND FIRE</h3>
+
+<blockquote><p>1. What does the title mean?</p>
+
+<p>2. How does the author strike the keynote of the story in the
+opening paragraph?</p>
+
+<p>3. Where is the first hint of the real theme of the story?</p>
+
+<p>4. Point out some of the dialect expressions. Why is dialect used?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span></p><p>5. What turn of surprise comes at the end of the story? Is it
+probable?</p>
+
+<p>6. What characteristics of New England country people are brought
+out in this story? How does the author contrast them with "city
+people"?</p>
+
+<p>7. Does this story read as if the author knew the scenes she
+describes? Read the description of Niram plowing (page 191), and
+point out touches in it that could not have been written by one who
+had always lived in the city.</p>
+
+<p>8. Read the account of how this story was written, (page 210). What
+first suggested the idea? What work remained after the story was
+first written? How did the author feel while writing it? Compare
+what William Allen White says about his work, (page 75).</p>
+
+<p>9. Other stories of New England life that you will enjoy reading
+are found in the following books: <i>New England Nun</i>, Mary E.
+Wilkins; <i>Cape Cod Folks</i>, S. P. McLean Greene; <i>Pratt Portraits</i>,
+Anna Fuller; <i>The Country Road</i>, Alice Brown; <i>Tales of New
+England</i>, Sarah Orne Jewett.</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3>THE ORDEAL AT MT. HOPE</h3>
+
+<blockquote><p>1. This story contains three characters who are typical of many
+colored people, and as such are worth study. Howard Dokesbury is
+the educated colored man of the North. What are the chief traits of
+this character?</p>
+
+<p>2. Aunt Caroline is the old-fashioned darky who suggests slavery
+days. What are her chief characteristics?</p>
+
+<p>3. 'Lias is the new generation of the Southern negro of the towns.
+What are his characteristics?</p>
+
+<p>4. Is the colored American given the same rights as others? Read
+carefully the opening paragraph of the story.</p>
+
+<p>5. What were the weaknesses of the colored people of Mt. Hope? How
+far are they true of the race? How were they overcome in this case?</p>
+
+<p>6. There are two theories about the proper solution of what is
+called "The Negro Problem." One is, that the hope of the race lies
+in industrial training; the other theory, that they should have
+higher intellectual training, so as to develope great leaders.
+Which theory do you think Dunbar held? Why do you think so?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span></p><p>7. Other stories dealing with the life of the colored people are:
+<i>Free Joe</i>, and <i>Tales of the Home Folks</i>, by Joel Chandler Harris;
+<i>Polished Ebony</i>, by Octavius R. Cohen; <i>Aunt Amity's Silver
+Wedding</i>, by Ruth McEnery Stuart; <i>In Ole Virginia</i>, by Thomas
+Nelson Page.</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3>ISRAEL DRAKE</h3>
+
+<p>The Pennsylvania State Police have made a wonderful record for
+maintaining law and order in the rural sections of the state. The
+history of this organization was told by Katherine Mayo in a book called
+<i>Justice to All</i>. In a later book, <i>The Standard Bearers</i>, she tells
+various incidents which show how these men do their work. The book is
+not fiction&mdash;the story here told happened just as it is set down, even
+the names of the troopers are their real names.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>1. Do you get a clear picture of Drake from the description? Why
+are several pages given to telling his past career?</p>
+
+<p>2. Where does the real story begin?</p>
+
+<p>3. Who was the tramp at the Carlisle Station? When did you guess
+it?</p>
+
+<p>4. What are the principles of the State Police, as you see them in
+this story?</p>
+
+<p>5. Why was such an organization necessary? Is there one in your
+state?</p>
+
+<p>6. What new words did you find in this story? Define aura,
+primeval, grisly.</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3>THE STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPH OF ISIDRO</h3>
+
+<p>In this story the author introduces a number of unfamiliar words,
+chiefly of Spanish origin, which are current in the Philippines. The
+meanings are given below.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>
+<i>baguio</i>, hurricane.<br />
+<i>barrio</i>, ward; district.<br />
+<i>carabao</i>, a kind of buffalo, used as a work animal.<br />
+<i>cabo</i>, head officer.<br />
+<i>cibay</i>, a boys' game.<br />
+<i>daledale</i>, hurry up!<br />
+<i>de los Reyes</i>, of the King.<br />
+<i>de la Cruz</i>, of the cross.<br />
+<i>hacienda</i>, a large plantation.<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span><i>ladrones</i>, robbers.<br />
+<i>maestro</i>, teacher.<br />
+<i>nipa</i>, a palm tree or the thatch made from it.<br />
+<i>palay</i>, rice.<br />
+<i>pronto</i>, quickly.<br />
+<i>pueblo</i>, town.<br />
+<i>que barbaridad!</i>&mdash;what an atrocious thing!<br />
+<i>volador</i>, kite.<br />
+</p></blockquote>
+
+<blockquote><p>1. Why does the story end with Isidro's crying? What did this
+signify? What is the relation of this to the beginning of the
+story?</p>
+
+<p>2. Has this story a central idea? What is it?</p>
+
+<p>3. This might be called a story of local color, in that it gives in
+some detail the atmosphere of an unfamiliar locality. What are the
+best descriptive passages in the story?</p>
+
+<p>4. Judging from this story, what are some of the difficulties a
+school teacher meets with in the Philippines? What must he be
+besides a teacher?</p>
+
+<p>5. What other school stories are there in this book? The pupils in
+Emmy Lou's school, (in Louisville, Ky.) are those with several
+generations of American ancestry behind them; in Myra Kelly's
+story, they are the children of foreign parents; in this story they
+are still in a foreign land&mdash;that is, a land where they are not
+surrounded by American influences. The public school is the one
+experience that is common to them all, and therefore the greatest
+single force in bringing them all to share in a common ideal, to
+reverence the great men of our country's history, and to comprehend
+the meaning of democracy. How does it do these things?</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3>THE CITIZEN</h3>
+
+<blockquote><p>1. During the war, President Wilson delivered an address at
+Philadelphia to an audience of men who had just been made citizens.
+The quoted passages in this story are taken from this speech. Read
+these passages, and select the one which probably gave the author
+the idea for this story.</p>
+
+<p>2. Starting with the idea, that he would write a story about
+someone who followed a dream to America, why should the author
+choose Russia as the country of departure?</p>
+
+<p>3. Having chosen Russia, why does he make Ivan a resident of a
+village far in the interior? Why not at Libau?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span></p><p>4. Two incidents are told as occurring on the journey: the charge
+of the police at Bobrinsk, and the coming on board of the apple
+woman at Queenstown. Why was each of these introduced? What is the
+purpose of telling the incident on Fifth Avenue?</p>
+
+<p>5. What have you learned about the manner in which this story was
+written? Compare it with the account given by Dorothy Canfield as
+to how she wrote her story.</p>
+
+<p>6. What is the main idea in this story? Why do you think it was
+written? Edward Everett Hale wrote a story called "A Man without a
+Country." Suggest another title for "The Citizen."</p>
+
+<p>7. Has this story in any way changed your opinion of immigrants? Is
+Big Ivan likely to meet any treatment in America that will change
+his opinion of the country?</p>
+
+<p>8. The part of this story that deals with Russia affords a good
+example of the use of local color. This is given partly through the
+descriptions, partly through the names of the villagers&mdash;Poborino,
+Yanansk, Dankov; partly through the Russian words, such as verst
+(about three quarters of a mile), ruble (a coin worth fifty cents),
+kopeck (a half cent), muzhik (a peasant). How is local color given
+in the conversations?</p>
+
+<p>9. For a treatment of the theme of this story in poetry, read "Scum
+o' the Earth," by Robert Haven Schauffler, in Rittenhouse's <i>Little
+Book of Modern Verse</i>. This is the closing stanza:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Newcomers all from the eastern seas,</div>
+<div>Help us incarnate dreams like these.</div>
+<div>Forget, and forgive, that we did you wrong.</div>
+<div>Help us to father a nation, strong</div>
+<div>In the comradeship of an equal birth,</div>
+<div>In the wealth of the richest bloods of earth."</div>
+</div></div>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Americans All, by Various
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Americans All, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Americans All
+       Stories of American Life of To-Day
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Benjamin A. Heydrick
+
+Release Date: October 26, 2007 [EBook #23207]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMERICANS ALL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+AMERICANS ALL
+
+STORIES OF AMERICAN LIFE OF TO-DAY
+
+EDITED BY
+BENJAMIN A. HEYDRICK
+Editor "Types of the Short Story," etc.
+
+[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
+
+NEW YORK
+HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
+HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.
+
+PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
+THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
+RAHWAY. N. J.
+
+
+
+
+ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
+
+
+For permission to reprint the stories in this volume, acknowledgement is
+made to the owners of the copyrights, as follows:
+
+For "The Right Promethean Fire," to Mrs. Atwood, R. Martin and
+Doubleday, Page & Company.
+
+For "The Land of Heart's Desire," to Messrs. Doubleday, Page & Company.
+
+For "The Tenor," to Alice I. Bunner and to Charles Scribners' Sons.
+
+For "The Passing of Priscilla Winthrop," to William Allen White and The
+Macmillan Company.
+
+For "The Gift of the Magi," to Messrs. Doubleday, Page & Company.
+
+For "The Gold Brick," copyright 1910, to Brand Whitlock and to The
+Bobbs, Merrill Company.
+
+For "His Mother's Son," to Edna Ferber and the Frederick A. Stokes
+Company.
+
+For "Bitter-Sweet," to Fannie Hurst and Harper & Brothers.
+
+For "The Riverman," to Stewart Edward White and Doubleday, Page &
+Company.
+
+For "Flint and Fire," to Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Messrs. Henry Holt
+& Company.
+
+For "The Ordeal at Mt. Hope," to Mrs. Alice Dunbar, Mrs. Mathilde
+Dunbar, and Messrs. Dodd, Mead & Company.
+
+For "Israel Drake," to Katherine Mayo and Messrs. Houghton Mifflin
+Company.
+
+For "The Struggles and Triumph of Isidro," to James M. Hopper.
+
+For "The Citizen," to James F. Dwyer and the Paget Literary Agency.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+In the years before the war, when we had more time for light pursuits, a
+favorite sport of reviewers was to hunt for the Great American Novel.
+They gave tongue here and there, and pursued the quarry with great
+excitement in various directions, now north, now south, now west, and
+the inevitable disappointment at the end of the chase never deterred
+them from starting off on a fresh scent next day. But in spite of all
+the frenzied pursuit, the game sought, the Great American Novel, was
+never captured. Will it ever be captured? The thing they sought was a
+book that would be so broad, so typical, so true that it would stand as
+the adequate expression in fiction of American life. Did these tireless
+hunters ever stop to ask themselves, what is the Great French Novel?
+what is the Great English Novel? And if neither of these nations has
+produced a single book which embodies their national life, why should we
+expect that our life, so much more diverse in its elements, so
+multifarious in its aspects, could ever be summed up within the covers
+of a single book?
+
+Yet while the critics continued their hopeless hunt, there was growing
+up in this country a form of fiction which gave promise of some day
+achieving the task that this never-to-be written novel should
+accomplish. This form was the short story. It was the work of many
+hands, in many places. Each writer studied closely a certain locality,
+and transcribed faithfully what he saw. Thus the New England village,
+the western ranch, the southern plantation, all had their chroniclers.
+Nor was it only various localities that we saw in these one-reel
+pictures; they dealt with typical occupations, there were stories of
+travelling salesmen, stories of lumbermen, stories of politicians,
+stories of the stage, stories of school and college days. If it were
+possible to bring together in a single volume a group of these, each one
+reflecting faithfully one facet of our many-sided life, would not such a
+book be a truer picture of America than any single novel could present?
+
+The present volume is an attempt to do this. That it is only an attempt,
+that it does not cover the whole field of our national life, no one
+realizes better than the compiler. The title _Americans All_ signifies
+that the characters in the book are all Americans, not that they are all
+of the Americans.
+
+This book then differs in its purpose from other collections of short
+stories. It does not aim to present the world's best short stories, nor
+to illustrate the development of the form from Roman times to our own
+day, nor to show how the technique of Poe differs from that of Irving:
+its purpose is none of these things, but rather to use the short story
+as a means of interpreting American life. Our country is so vast that
+few of us know more than a small corner of it, and even in that corner
+we do not know all our fellow-citizens; differences of color, of race,
+of creed, of fortune, keep us in separate strata. But through books we
+may learn to know our fellow-citizens, and the knowledge will make us
+better Americans.
+
+The story by Dorothy Canfield has a unique interest for the student, in
+that it is followed by the author's own account of how it was written,
+from the first glimpse of the theme to the final typing of the story.
+Teachers who use this book for studying the art of short story
+construction may prefer to begin with "Flint and Fire" and follow with
+"The Citizen," tracing in all the others indications of the authors'
+methods.
+
+                                               BENJAMIN A. HEYDRICK.
+
+NEW YORK CITY,
+    March, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+   I. IN SCHOOL DAYS
+        THE RIGHT PROMETHEAN FIRE              _George Madden Martin_  3
+        Sketch of George Madden Martin                                16
+
+  II. JUST KIDS
+        THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE             _Myra Kelly_           21
+        Sketch of Myra Kelly                                          37
+
+ III. HERO-WORSHIP
+        THE TENOR                              _H. C. Bunner_         41
+        Sketch of H. C. Bunner                                        54
+
+  IV. SOCIETY IN OUR TOWN
+        THE PASSING OF PRISCILLA WINTHROP      _William Allen White_  59
+        Sketch of William Allen White                                 73
+
+   V. A PAIR OF LOVERS
+        THE GIFT OF THE MAGI                   _O. Henry_             79
+        Sketch of O. Henry                                            86
+
+  VI. IN POLITICS
+        THE GOLD BRICK                         _Brand Whitlock_       91
+        Sketch of Brand Whitlock                                     111
+
+ VII. THE TRAVELLING SALESMAN
+        HIS MOTHER'S SON                       _Edna Ferber_         117
+        Sketch of Edna Ferber                                        130
+
+VIII. AFTER THE BIG STORE CLOSES
+        BITTER-SWEET                           _Fannie Hurst_        135
+        Sketch of Fannie Hurst                                       166
+
+  IX. IN THE LUMBER COUNTRY
+        THE RIVERMAN                           _Stewart Edward White_173
+        Sketch of Stewart E. White                                   185
+
+   X. NEW ENGLAND GRANITE
+        FLINT AND FIRE                         _Dorothy Canfield_    191
+        HOW "FLINT AND FIRE" STARTED AND GREW  _Dorothy Canfield_    210
+        Sketch of Dorothy Canfield                                   221
+
+  XI. DUSKY AMERICANS
+        THE ORDEAL AT MT. HOPE                 _Paul Laurence Dunbar_227
+        Sketch of Paul Laurence Dunbar                               249
+
+ XII. WITH THE POLICE
+        ISRAEL DRAKE                           _Katherine Mayo_      255
+        Sketch of Katherine Mayo                                     273
+
+XIII. IN THE PHILIPPINES
+        THE STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPH
+          OF ISIDRO DE LOS MAESTROS            _James M. Hopper_     279
+        Sketch of James M. Hopper                                    295
+
+ XIV. THEY WHO BRING DREAMS TO AMERICA
+        THE CITIZEN                            _James F. Dwyer_      299
+        Sketch of James F. Dwyer                                     318
+
+  XV. LIST OF AMERICAN SHORT STORIES                                 321
+        Classified by locality
+
+ XVI. NOTES AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY                                  325
+
+
+
+
+IN SCHOOL DAYS
+
+_Are any days more rich in experiences than school days? The day one
+first enters school, whether it is the little red schoolhouse or the big
+brick building that holds a thousand pupils,--that day marks the
+beginning of a new life. One of the best records in fiction of the world
+of the school room is called_ EMMY LOU. _In this book George Madden
+Martin has traced the progress of a winsome little maid from the first
+grade to the end of high school. This is the story of the first days in
+the strange new world of the school room._
+
+
+
+
+THE RIGHT PROMETHEAN FIRE
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE MADDEN MARTIN
+
+
+Emmy Lou, laboriously copying digits, looked up. The boy sitting in line
+in the next row of desks was making signs to her.
+
+She had noticed the little boy before. He was a square little boy, with
+a sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of the nose and a cheerful
+breadth of nostril. His teeth were wide apart, and his smile was broad
+and constant. Not that Emmy Lou could have told all this. She only knew
+that to her the knowledge of the little boy concerning the things
+peculiar to the Primer World seemed limitless.
+
+And now the little boy was beckoning Emmy Lou. She did not know him, but
+neither did she know any of the seventy other little boys and girls
+making the Primer Class.
+
+Because of a popular prejudice against whooping-cough, Emmy Lou had not
+entered the Primer Class until late. When she arrived, the seventy
+little boys and girls were well along in Alphabetical lore, having long
+since passed the a, b, c, of initiation, and become glibly eloquent to a
+point where the l, m, n, o, p slipped off their tongues with the liquid
+ease of repetition and familiarity.
+
+"But Emmy Lou can catch up," said Emmy Lou's Aunt Cordelia, a plump and
+cheery lady, beaming with optimistic placidity upon the infant populace
+seated in parallel rows at desks before her.
+
+Miss Clara, the teacher, lacked Aunt Cordelia's optimism, also her
+plumpness. "No doubt she can," agreed Miss Clara, politely, but without
+enthusiasm. Miss Clara had stepped from the graduating rostrum to the
+schoolroom platform, and she had been there some years. And when one has
+been there some years, and is already battling with seventy little boys
+and girls, one cannot greet the advent of a seventy-first with acclaim.
+Even the fact that one's hair is red is not an always sure indication
+that one's temperament is sanguine also.
+
+So in answer to Aunt Cordelia, Miss Clara replied politely but without
+enthusiasm, "No doubt she can."
+
+Then Aunt Cordelia went, and Miss Clara gave Emmy Lou a desk. And Miss
+Clara then rapping sharply, and calling some small delinquent to order,
+Emmy Lou's heart sank within her.
+
+Now Miss Clara's tones were tart because she did not know what to do
+with this late comer. In a class of seventy, spare time is not offering
+for the bringing up of the backward. The way of the Primer teacher was
+not made easy in a public school of twenty-five years ago.
+
+So Miss Clara told the new pupil to copy digits.
+
+Now what digits were, Emmy Lou had no idea, but being shown them on the
+black-board, she copied them diligently. And as the time went on, Emmy
+Lou went on copying digits. And her one endeavor being to avoid the
+notice of Miss Clara, it happened the needs of Emmy Lou were frequently
+lost sight of in the more assertive claims of the seventy.
+
+Emmy Lou was not catching up, and it was January.
+
+But to-day was to be different. The little boy was nodding and
+beckoning. So far the seventy had left Emmy Lou alone. As a general
+thing the herd crowds toward the leaders, and the laggard brings up the
+rear alone.
+
+But to-day the little boy was beckoning. Emmy Lou looked up. Emmy Lou
+was pink-cheeked and chubby and in her heart there was no guile. There
+was an ease and swagger about the little boy. And he always knew when to
+stand up, and what for. Emmy Lou more than once had failed to stand up,
+and Miss Clara's reminder had been sharp. It was when a bell rang one
+must stand up. But what for, Emmy Lou never knew, until after the others
+began to do it.
+
+But the little boy always knew. Emmy Lou had heard him, too, out on the
+bench glibly tell Miss Clara about the mat, and a bat, and a black rat.
+To-day he stood forth with confidence and told about a fat hen. Emmy Lou
+was glad to have the little boy beckon her.
+
+And in her heart there was no guile. That the little boy should be
+holding out an end of a severed india-rubber band and inviting her to
+take it, was no stranger than other things happening in the Primer World
+every day.
+
+The very manner of the infant classification breathed mystery, the sheep
+from the goats, so to speak, the little girls all one side the central
+aisle, the little boys all the other--and to over-step the line of
+demarcation a thing too dreadful to contemplate.
+
+Many things were strange. That one must get up suddenly when a bell
+rang, was strange.
+
+And to copy digits until one's chubby fingers, tightly gripping the
+pencil, ached, and then to be expected to take a sponge and wash those
+digits off, was strange.
+
+And to be told crossly to sit down was bewildering, when in answer to c,
+a, t, one said "Pussy." And yet there was Pussy washing her face, on the
+chart, and Miss Clara's pointer pointing to her.
+
+So when the little boy held out the rubber band across the aisle, Emmy
+Lou took the proffered end.
+
+At this the little boy slid back into his desk holding to his end. At
+the critical moment of elongation the little boy let go. And the
+property of elasticity is to rebound.
+
+Emmy Lou's heart stood still. Then it swelled. But in her filling eyes
+there was no suspicion, only hurt. And even while a tear splashed down,
+and falling upon the laboriously copied digits, wrought havoc, she
+smiled bravely across at the little boy. It would have made the little
+boy feel bad to know how it hurt. So Emmy Lou winked bravely and smiled.
+
+Whereupon the little boy wheeled about suddenly and fell to copying
+digits furiously. Nor did he look Emmy Lou's way, only drove his pencil
+into his slate with a fervor that made Miss Clara rap sharply on her
+desk.
+
+Emmy Lou wondered if the little boy was mad. One would think it had
+stung the little boy and not her. But since he was not looking, she felt
+free to let her little fist seek her mouth for comfort.
+
+Nor did Emmy Lou dream, that across the aisle, remorse was eating into a
+little boy's soul. Or that, along with remorse there went the image of
+one Emmy Lou, defenceless, pink-cheeked, and smiling bravely.
+
+The next morning Emmy Lou was early. She was always early. Since
+entering the Primer Class, breakfast had lost its savor to Emmy Lou in
+the terror of being late.
+
+But this morning the little boy was there before her. Hitherto his tardy
+and clattering arrival had been a daily happening, provocative of
+accents sharp and energetic from Miss Clara.
+
+But this morning he was at his desk copying from his Primer on to his
+slate. The easy, ostentatious way in which he glanced from slate to book
+was not lost upon Emmy Lou, who lost her place whenever her eyes left
+the rows of digits upon the blackboard.
+
+Emmy Lou watched the performance. And the little boy's pencil drove with
+furious ease and its path was marked with flourishes. Emmy Lou never
+dreamed that it was because she was watching that the little boy was
+moved to this brilliant exhibition. Presently reaching the end of his
+page, he looked up, carelessly, incidentally. It seemed to be borne to
+him that Emmy Lou was there, whereupon he nodded. Then, as if moved by
+sudden impulse, he dived into his desk, and after ostentatious search
+in, on, under it, brought forth a pencil, and held it up for Emmy Lou to
+see. Nor did she dream that it was for this the little boy had been
+there since before Uncle Michael had unlocked the Primer door.
+
+Emmy Lou looked across at the pencil. It was a slate-pencil. A fine,
+long, new slate-pencil grandly encased for half its length in gold
+paper. One bought them at the drug-store across from the school, and one
+paid for them the whole of five cents.
+
+Just then a bell rang. Emmy Lou got up suddenly. But it was the bell for
+school to take up. So she sat down. She was glad Miss Clara was not yet
+in her place.
+
+After the Primer Class had filed in, with panting and frosty entrance,
+the bell rang again. This time it was the right bell tapped by Miss
+Clara, now in her place. So again Emmy Lou got up suddenly and by
+following the little girl ahead learned that the bell meant, "go out to
+the bench."
+
+The Primer Class according to the degree of its infant precocity was
+divided in three sections. Emmy Lou belonged to the third section. It
+was the last section and she was the last one in it though she had no
+idea what a section meant nor why she was in it.
+
+Yesterday the third section had said, over and over, in chorus, "One and
+one are two, two and two are four," etc.--but to-day they said, "Two and
+one are three, two and two are four."
+
+Emmy Lou wondered, four what? Which put her behind, so that when she
+began again they were saying, "two and four are six." So now she knew.
+Four is six. But what is six? Emmy Lou did not know.
+
+When she came back to her desk the pencil was there. The fine, new, long
+slate-pencil encased in gold paper. And the little boy was gone. He
+belonged to the first section, and the first section was now on the
+bench. Emmy Lou leaned across and put the pencil back on the little
+boy's desk.
+
+Then she prepared herself to copy digits with her stump of a pencil.
+Emmy Lou's were always stumps. Her pencil had a way of rolling off her
+desk while she was gone, and one pencil makes many stumps. The little
+boy had generally helped her pick them up on her return. But strangely,
+from this time, her pencils rolled off no more.
+
+But when Emmy Lou took up her slate there was a whole side filled with
+digits in soldierly rows across, so her heart grew light and free from
+the weight of digits, and she gave her time to the washing of her desk,
+a thing in which her soul revelled, and for which, patterning after her
+little girl neighbors, she kept within that desk a bottle of soapy water
+and rags of gray and unpleasant nature, that never dried, because of
+their frequent using. When Emmy Lou first came to school, her cleaning
+paraphernalia consisted of a sponge secured by a string to her slate,
+which was the badge of the new and the unsophisticated comer. Emmy Lou
+had quickly learned that, and no one rejoiced in a fuller assortment of
+soap, bottle, and rags than she, nor did a sponge longer dangle from the
+frame of her slate.
+
+On coming in from recess this same day, Emmy Lou found the pencil on her
+desk again, the beautiful new pencil in the gilded paper. She put it
+back.
+
+But when she reached home, the pencil, the beautiful pencil that costs
+all of five cents, was in her companion box along with her stumps and
+her sponge and her grimy little slate rags. And about the pencil was
+wrapped a piece of paper. It had the look of the margin of a Primer
+page. The paper bore marks. They were not digits.
+
+Emmy Lou took the paper to Aunt Cordelia. They were at dinner.
+
+"Can't you read it, Emmy Lou?" asked Aunt Katie, the prettiest aunty.
+
+Emmy Lou shook her head.
+
+"I'll spell the letters," said Aunt Louise, the youngest aunty.
+
+But they did not help Emmy Lou one bit.
+
+Aunt Cordelia looked troubled. "She doesn't seem to be catching up," she
+said.
+
+"No," said Aunt Katie.
+
+"No," agreed Aunt Louise.
+
+"Nor--on," said Uncle Charlie, the brother of the aunties, lighting up
+his cigar to go downtown.
+
+Aunt Cordelia spread the paper out. It bore the words:
+
+"It is for you."
+
+So Emmy Lou put the pencil away in the companion, and tucked it about
+with the grimy slate rags that no harm might befall it. And the next day
+she took it out and used it. But first she looked over at the little
+boy. The little boy was busy. But when she looked up again, he was
+looking.
+
+The little boy grew red, and wheeling suddenly, fell to copying digits
+furiously. And from that moment on the little boy was moved to strange
+behavior.
+
+Three times before recess did he, boldly ignoring the preface of
+upraised hand, swagger up to Miss Clara's desk. And going and coming,
+the little boy's boots with copper toes and run-down heels marked with
+thumping emphasis upon the echoing boards his processional and
+recessional. And reaching his desk, the little boy slammed down his
+slate with clattering reverberations.
+
+Emmy Lou watched him uneasily. She was miserable for him. She did not
+know that there are times when the emotions are more potent than the
+subtlest wines. Nor did she know that the male of some species is moved
+thus to exhibition of prowess, courage, defiance, for the impressing of
+the chosen female of the species.
+
+Emmy Lou merely knew that she was miserable and that she trembled for
+the little boy.
+
+Having clattered his slate until Miss Clara rapped sharply, the little
+boy rose and went swaggering on an excursion around the room to where
+sat the bucket and dipper. And on his return he came up the center
+aisle between the sheep and the goats.
+
+Emmy Lou had no idea what happened. It took place behind her. But there
+was another little girl who did. A little girl who boasted curls, yellow
+curls in tiered rows about her head. A lachrymosal little girl, who
+affected great horror of the little boys.
+
+And what Emmy Lou failed to see was this: the little boy, in passing,
+deftly lifted a cherished curl between finger and thumb and proceeded on
+his way.
+
+The little girl did not fail the little boy. In the suddenness of the
+surprise she surprised even him by her outcry. Miss Clara jumped. Emmy
+Lou jumped. And the sixty-nine jumped. And, following this, the little
+girl lifted her voice in lachrymal lament.
+
+Miss Clara sat erect. The Primer Class held its breath. It always held
+its breath when Miss Clara sat erect. Emmy Lou held tightly to her desk
+besides. She wondered what it was all about.
+
+Then Miss Clara spoke. Her accents cut the silence.
+
+"Billy Traver!"
+
+Billy Traver stood forth. It was the little boy.
+
+"Since you seem pleased to occupy yourself with the little girls, Billy,
+_go to the pegs_!"
+
+Emmy Lou trembled. "Go to the pegs!" What unknown, inquisitorial terrors
+lay behind those dread, laconic words, Emmy Lou knew not.
+
+She could only sit and watch the little boy turn and stump back down the
+aisle and around the room to where along the wall hung rows of feminine
+apparel.
+
+Here he stopped and scanned the line. Then he paused before a hat. It
+was a round little hat with silky nap and a curling brim. It had
+rosettes to keep the ears warm and ribbon that tied beneath the chin. It
+was Emmy Lou's hat. Aunt Cordelia had cautioned her to care concerning
+it.
+
+The little boy took it down. There seemed to be no doubt in his mind as
+to what Miss Clara meant. But then he had been in the Primer Class from
+the beginning.
+
+Having taken the hat down he proceeded to put it upon his own shock
+head. His face wore its broad and constant smile. One would have said
+the little boy was enjoying the affair. As he put the hat on, the
+sixty-nine laughed. The seventieth did not. It was her hat, and besides,
+she did not understand.
+
+Miss Clara still erect spoke again: "And now, since you are a little
+girl, get your book, Billy, and move over with the girls."
+
+Nor did Emmy Lou understand why, when Billy, having gathered his
+belongings together, moved across the aisle and sat down with her, the
+sixty-nine laughed again. Emmy Lou did not laugh. She made room for
+Billy.
+
+Nor did she understand when Billy treated her to a slow and
+surreptitious wink, his freckled countenance grinning beneath the
+rosetted hat. It never could have occurred to Emmy Lou that Billy had
+laid his cunning plans to this very end. Emmy Lou understood nothing of
+all this. She only pitied Billy. And presently, when public attention
+had become diverted, she proffered him the hospitality of a grimy little
+slate rag. When Billy returned the rag there was something in
+it--something wrapped in a beautiful, glazed, shining bronze paper. It
+was a candy kiss. One paid five cents for six of them at the drug-store.
+
+On the road home, Emmy Lou ate the candy. The beautiful, shiny paper she
+put in her Primer. The slip of paper that she found within she carried
+to Aunt Cordelia. It was sticky and it was smeared. But it had reading
+on it.
+
+"But this is printing," said Aunt Cordelia; "can't you read it?"
+
+Emmy Lou shook her head.
+
+"Try," said Aunt Katie.
+
+"The easy words," said Aunt Louise.
+
+But Emmy Lou, remembering c-a-t, Pussy, shook her head.
+
+Aunt Cordelia looked troubled. "She certainly isn't catching up," said
+Aunt Cordelia. Then she read from the slip of paper:
+
+
+     "Oh, woman, woman, thou wert made
+     The peace of Adam to invade."
+
+
+The aunties laughed, but Emmy Lou put it away with the glazed paper in
+her Primer. It meant quite as much to her as did the reading in that
+Primer: Cat, a cat, the cat. The bat, the mat, a rat. It was the jingle
+to both that appealed to Emmy Lou.
+
+About this time rumors began to reach Emmy Lou. She heard that it was
+February, and that wonderful things were peculiar to the Fourteenth. At
+recess the little girls locked arms and talked Valentines. The echoes
+reached Emmy Lou.
+
+The valentine must come from a little boy, or it wasn't the real thing.
+And to get no valentine was a dreadful--dreadful thing. And even the
+timidest of the sheep began to cast eyes across at the goats.
+
+Emmy Lou wondered if she would get a valentine. And if not, how was she
+to survive the contumely and shame?
+
+You must never, never breathe to a living soul what was on your
+valentine. To tell even your best and truest little girl friend was to
+prove faithless to the little boy sending the valentine. These things
+reached Emmy Lou.
+
+Not for the world would she tell. Emmy Lou was sure of that, so grateful
+did she feel she would be to anyone sending her a valentine.
+
+And in doubt and wretchedness did she wend her way to school on the
+Fourteenth Day of February. The drug-store window was full of
+valentines. But Emmy Lou crossed the street. She did not want to see
+them. She knew the little girls would ask her if she had gotten a
+valentine. And she would have to say, No.
+
+She was early. The big, empty room echoed back her footsteps as she went
+to her desk to lay down book and slate before taking off her wraps. Nor
+did Emmy Lou dream the eye of the little boy peeped through the crack of
+the door from Miss Clara's dressing-room.
+
+Emmy Lou's hat and jacket were forgotten. On her desk lay something
+square and white. It was an envelope. It was a beautiful envelope, all
+over flowers and scrolls.
+
+Emmy Lou knew it. It was a valentine. Her cheeks grew pink.
+
+She took it out. It was blue. And it was gold. And it had reading on it.
+
+Emmy Lou's heart sank. She could not read the reading. The door opened.
+Some little girls came in. Emmy Lou hid her valentine in her book, for
+since you must not--she would never show her valentine--never.
+
+The little girls wanted to know if she had gotten a valentine, and Emmy
+Lou said, Yes, and her cheeks were pink with the joy of being able to
+say it.
+
+Through the day, she took peeps between the covers of her Primer, but no
+one else might see it.
+
+It rested heavy on Emmy Lou's heart, however, that there was reading on
+it. She studied it surreptitiously. The reading was made up of letters.
+It was the first time Emmy Lou had thought about that. She knew some of
+the letters. She would ask someone the letters she did not know by
+pointing them out on the chart at recess. Emmy Lou was learning. It was
+the first time since she came to school.
+
+But what did the letters make? She wondered, after recess, studying the
+valentine again.
+
+Then she went home. She followed Aunt Cordelia about. Aunt Cordelia was
+busy.
+
+"What does it read?" asked Emmy Lou.
+
+Aunt Cordelia listened.
+
+"B," said Emmy Lou, "and e?"
+
+"Be," said Aunt Cordelia.
+
+If B was Be, it was strange that B and e were Be. But many things were
+strange.
+
+Emmy Lou accepted them all on faith.
+
+After dinner she approached Aunt Katie.
+
+"What does it read?" asked Emmy Lou, "m and y?"
+
+"My," said Aunt Katie.
+
+The rest was harder. She could not remember the letters, and had to copy
+them off on her slate. Then she sought Tom, the house-boy. Tom was out
+at the gate talking to another house-boy. She waited until the other boy
+was gone.
+
+"What does it read?" asked Emmy Lou, and she told the letters off the
+slate. It took Tom some time, but finally he told her.
+
+Just then a little girl came along. She was a first-section little girl,
+and at school she never noticed Emmy Lou.
+
+Now she was alone, so she stopped.
+
+"Get any valentines?"
+
+"Yes," said Emmy Lou. Then moved to confidence by the little girl's
+friendliness, she added, "It has reading on it."
+
+"Pooh," said the little girl, "they all have that. My mamma's been
+reading the long verses inside to me."
+
+"Can you show them--valentines?" asked Emmy Lou.
+
+"Of course, to grown-up people," said the little girl.
+
+The gas was lit when Emmy Lou came in. Uncle Charlie was there, and the
+aunties, sitting around, reading.
+
+"I got a valentine," said Emmy Lou.
+
+They all looked up. They had forgotten it was Valentine's Day, and it
+came to them that if Emmy Lou's mother had not gone away, never to come
+back, the year before, Valentine's Day would not have been forgotten.
+Aunt Cordelia smoothed the black dress she was wearing because of the
+mother who would never come back, and looked troubled.
+
+But Emmy Lou laid the blue and gold valentine on Aunt Cordelia's knee.
+In the valentine's center were two hands clasping. Emmy Lou's forefinger
+pointed to the words beneath the clasped hands.
+
+"I can read it," said Emmy Lou.
+
+They listened. Uncle Charlie put down his paper. Aunt Louise looked over
+Aunt Cordelia's shoulder.
+
+"B," said Emmy Lou, "e--Be."
+
+The aunties nodded.
+
+"M," said Emmy Lou, "y--my."
+
+Emmy Lou did not hesitate. "V," said Emmy Lou, "a, l, e, n, t, i, n,
+e--Valentine. Be my Valentine."
+
+"There!" said Aunt Cordelia.
+
+"Well!" said Aunt Katie.
+
+"At last!" said Aunt Louise.
+
+"H'm!" said Uncle Charlie.
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE MADDEN MARTIN
+
+
+In the South it is not unusual to give boys' names to girls, so it
+happens that George is the real name of the woman who wrote _Emmy Lou_.
+George Madden was born in Louisville, Kentucky, May 3, 1866. She
+attended the public schools in Louisville, but on account of ill health
+did not graduate. She married Atwood R. Martin, and they made their home
+at Anchorage, a suburb of Louisville. Here in an old house surrounded by
+great catalpa trees, with cardinals nesting in their branches, she was
+recovering from an illness, and to pass the time began to write a short
+story. The title was "How They Missed the Exposition"; when it was sent
+away, and a check for seventy-five dollars came in payment, she was
+encouraged to go on. Her next work was the series of stories entitled
+_Emmy Lou, Her Book and Heart_. This at once took rank as one of the
+classics of school-room literature. It had a wide popularity in this
+country, and was translated into French and German. One of the pleasant
+tributes paid to the book was a review in a Pittsburgh newspaper which
+took the form of a letter to Emmy Lou. It ran in part as follows:
+
+
+     Dear Little Emmy Lou:
+
+     I have read your book, Emmy Lou, and am writing this letter to tell
+     you how much I love you. In my world of books I know a great
+     assembly of lovely ladies, Emmy Lou, crowned with beauty and
+     garlanded with grace, that have inspired poets to song and the
+     hearts of warriors to battle, but, Emmy Lou, I love you better than
+     them all, because you are the dearest little girl I ever met.
+
+     I felt very sorry for you when the little boy in the Primer World,
+     who could so glibly tell the teacher all about the mat and the bat
+     and the black rat and the fat hen, hurt your chubby fist by
+     snapping an india-rubber band. I do not think he atoned quite
+     enough when he gave you that fine new long slate pencil, nor when
+     he sent you your first valentine. No, he has not atoned quite
+     enough, Emmy Lou, but now that you are Miss McLaurin, you will
+     doubtless even the score by snapping the india-rubber band of your
+     disdain at his heart. But only to show him how it stings, and then,
+     of course, you'll make up for the hurt and be his valentine--won't
+     you, Emmy Lou?...
+
+     And when, at twelve years, you find yourself dreaming, Emmy Lou,
+     and watching the clouds through the schoolroom window, still I love
+     you, Emmy Lou, for your conscience, which William told about in his
+     essay. You remember, the two girls who met a cow.
+
+     "Look her right in the face and pretend we aren't afraid," said the
+     biggest girl. But the littlest girl--that was you--had a
+     conscience. "Won't it be deceiving the cow?" she wanted to know.
+     Brave, honest Emmy Lou!
+
+     Yes, I love you, Emmy Lou, better than all the proud and beauteous
+     heroines in the big grown-up books, because you are so sunshiny and
+     trustful, so sweet and brave--because you have a heart of gold,
+     Emmy Lou. And I want you to tell George Madden Martin how glad I am
+     that she has told us all about you, the dearest little girl since
+     Alice dropped down into Wonderland.
+
+                                                       George Seibel.
+
+
+The book is more than a delightful piece of fiction. Through its
+faithful study of the development of a child's mind, and its criticism
+of the methods employed in many schools, it becomes a valuable
+contribution to education. As such it is used in the School of Pedagogy
+of Harvard University.
+
+George Madden Martin told more about Emmy Lou in a second book of
+stories entitled _Emmy Lou's Road to Grace_, which relates the little
+girl's experience at home and in Sunday school. Other works from her pen
+are: _A Warwickshire Lad_, the story of William Shakespeare's early
+life; _The House of Fulfillment_, a novel; _Abbie Ann_, a story for
+children; _Letitia; Nursery Corps, U. S. A._, a story of a child, also
+showing various aspects of army life; _Selina_, the story of a young
+girl who has been brought up in luxury, and finds herself confronted
+with the necessity of earning a living without any equipment for the
+task. None of these has equalled the success of her first book, but that
+is one of the few successful portrayals of child life in fiction.
+
+
+
+
+JUST KIDS
+
+_That part of New York City known as the East Side, the region south of
+Fourteenth Street and east of Broadway, is the most densely populated
+square mile on earth. Its people are of all races; Chinatown, Little
+Hungary and Little Italy elbow each other; streets where the signs are
+in Hebrew characters, theatres where plays are given in Yiddish, notices
+in the parks in four or five languages, make one rub his eyes and wonder
+if he is not in some foreign land. Into this region Myra Kelly went as a
+teacher in the public school. Her pupils were largely Russian Jews, and
+in a series of delightfully humorous stories she has drawn these little
+citizens to the life._
+
+
+
+
+THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE
+
+BY
+
+MYRA KELLY
+
+
+Isaac Borrachsohn, that son of potentates and of Assemblymen, had been
+taken to Central Park by a proud uncle. For weeks thereafter he was the
+favorite bard of the First Reader Class and an exceeding great trouble
+to its sovereign, Miss Bailey, who found him now as garrulous as he had
+once been silent. There was no subject in the Course of Study to which
+he could not correlate the wonders of his journey, and Teacher asked
+herself daily and in vain whether it were more pedagogically correct to
+encourage "spontaneous self-expression" or to insist upon "logically
+essential sequence."
+
+But the other members of the class suffered no such uncertainty. They
+voted solidly for spontaneity in a self which found expression thus:
+
+"Und in the Central Park stands a water-lake, und in the water-lake
+stands birds--a big all of birds--und fishes. Und sooner you likes you
+should come over the water-lake you calls a bird, und you sets on the
+bird, und the bird makes go his legs, und you comes over the
+water-lake."
+
+"They could be awful polite birds," Eva Gonorowsky was beginning when
+Morris interrupted with:
+
+"I had once a auntie und she had a bird, a awful polite bird; on'y
+sooner somebody calls him he _couldn't_ to come the while he sets in a
+cage."
+
+"Did he have a rubber neck?" Isaac inquired, and Morris reluctantly
+admitted that he had not been so blessed.
+
+"In the Central Park," Isaac went on, "all the birds is got rubber
+necks."
+
+"What color from birds be they?" asked Eva.
+
+"All colors. Blue und white und red und yellow."
+
+"Und green," Patrick Brennan interjected determinedly. "The green ones
+is the best."
+
+"Did you go once?" asked Isaac, slightly disconcerted.
+
+"Naw, but I know. Me big brother told me."
+
+"They could to be stylish birds, too," said Eva wistfully. "Stylish und
+polite. From red und green birds is awful stylish for hats."
+
+"But these birds is big. Awful big! Mans could ride on 'em und ladies
+und boys."
+
+"Und little girls, Ikey? Ain't they fer little girls?" asked the only
+little girl in the group. And a very small girl she was, with a softly
+gentle voice and darkly gentle eyes fixed pleadingly now upon the bard.
+
+"Yes," answered Isaac grudgingly; "sooner they sets by somebody's side
+little girls could to go. But sooner nobody holds them by the hand they
+could to have fraids over the rubber-neck-boat-birds und the water-lake,
+und the fishes."
+
+"What kind from fishes?" demanded Morris Mogilewsky, monitor of Miss
+Bailey's gold fish bowl, with professional interest.
+
+"From gold fishes und red fishes und black fishes"--Patrick stirred
+uneasily and Isaac remembered--"und green fishes; the green ones is the
+biggest; and blue fishes und _all_ kinds from fishes. They lives way
+down in the water the while they have fraids over the
+rubber-neck-boat-birds. Say--what you think? Sooner a
+rubber-neck-boat-bird needs he should eat he longs down his neck und
+eats a from-gold fish."
+
+"'Out fryin'?" asked Eva, with an incredulous shudder.
+
+"Yes, 'out fryin'. Ain't I told you little girls could to have fraids
+over 'em? Boys could have fraids too," cried Isaac; and then spurred by
+the calm of his rival, he added: "The rubber-neck-boat-birds they
+hollers somethin' fierce."
+
+"I wouldn't be afraid of them. Me pop's a cop," cried Patrick stoutly.
+"I'd just as lief set on 'em. I'd like to."
+
+"Ah, but you ain't seen 'em, und you ain't heard 'em holler," Isaac
+retorted.
+
+"Well, I'm goin' to. An' I'm goin' to see the lions an' the tigers an'
+the el'phants, an' I'm goin' to ride on the water-lake."
+
+"Oh, how I likes I should go too!" Eva broke out. "O-o-oh, _how_ I likes
+I should look on them things! On'y I don't know do I need a ride on
+somethings what hollers. I don't know be they fer me."
+
+"Well, I'll take ye with me if your mother leaves you go," said Patrick
+grandly. "An' ye can hold me hand if ye're scared."
+
+"Me too?" implored Morris. "Oh, Patrick, c'n I go too?"
+
+"I guess so," answered the Leader of the Line graciously. But he turned
+a deaf ear to Isaac Borrachsohn's implorings to be allowed to join the
+party. Full well did Patrick know of the grandeur of Isaac's holiday
+attire and the impressionable nature of Eva's soul, and gravely did he
+fear that his own Sunday finery, albeit fashioned from the blue cloth
+and brass buttons of his sire, might be outshone.
+
+At Eva's earnest request, Sadie, her cousin, was invited, and Morris
+suggested that the Monitor of the Window Boxes should not be slighted by
+his colleagues of the gold fish and the line. So Nathan Spiderwitz was
+raised to Alpine heights of anticipation by visions of a window box "as
+big as blocks and streets," where every plant, in contrast to his lanky
+charges, bore innumerable blossoms. Ignatius Aloysius Diamantstein was
+unanimously nominated as a member of the expedition; by Patrick, because
+they were neighbors at St. Mary's Sunday-school; by Morris, because they
+were classmates under the same rabbi at the synagogue; by Nathan,
+because Ignatius Aloysius was a member of the "Clinton Street gang"; by
+Sadie, because he had "long pants sailor suit"; by Eva, because the
+others wanted him.
+
+Eva reached home that afternoon tingling with anticipation and
+uncertainty. What if her mother, with one short word, should close
+forever the gates of joy and boat-birds? But Mrs. Gonorowsky met her
+small daughter's elaborate plea with the simple question:
+
+"Who pays you the car-fare?"
+
+"Does it need car-fare to go?" faltered Eva.
+
+"Sure does it," answered her mother. "I don't know how much, but some it
+needs. Who pays it?"
+
+"Patrick ain't said."
+
+"Well, you should better ask him," Mrs. Gonorowsky advised, and, on the
+next morning, Eva did. She thereby buried the leader under the ruins of
+his fallen castle of clouds, but he struggled through them with the
+suggestion that each of his guests should be her, or his, own banker.
+
+"But ain't you got _no_ money 't all?" asked the guest of honor.
+
+"Not a cent," responded the host. "But I'll get it. How much have you?"
+
+"A penny. How much do I need?"
+
+"I don't know. Let's ask Miss Bailey."
+
+School had not yet formally begun and Teacher was reading. She was
+hardly disturbed when the children drove sharp elbows into her shoulder
+and her lap, and she answered Eva's--"Miss Bailey--oh, Missis Bailey,"
+with an abstracted--"Well, dear?"
+
+"Missis Bailey, how much money takes car-fare to the Central Park?"
+
+Still with divided attention, Teacher replied--"Five cents, honey," and
+read on, while Patrick called a meeting of his forces and made
+embarrassing explanations with admirable tact.
+
+There ensued weeks of struggle and economy for the exploring party, to
+which had been added a chaperon in the large and reassuring person of
+Becky Zalmonowsky, the class idiot. Sadie Gonorowsky's careful mother
+had considered Patrick too immature to bear the whole responsibility,
+and he, with a guile which promised well for his future, had complied
+with her desires and preserved his own authority unshaken. For Becky,
+poor child, though twelve years old and of an aspect eminently
+calculated to inspire trust in those who had never held speech with her,
+was a member of the First Reader Class only until such time as room
+could be found for her in some of the institutions where such
+unfortunates are bestowed.
+
+Slowly and in diverse ways each of the children acquired the essential
+nickel. Some begged, some stole, some gambled, some bartered, some
+earned, but their greatest source of income, Miss Bailey, was denied to
+them. For Patrick knew that she would have insisted upon some really
+efficient guardian from a higher class, and he announced with much heat
+that he would not go at all under those circumstances.
+
+At last the leader was called upon to set the day and appointed a
+Saturday in late May. He was disconcerted to find that only Ignatius
+Aloysius would travel on that day.
+
+"It's holidays, all Saturdays," Morris explained; "und we dassent to
+ride on no cars."
+
+"Why not?" asked Patrick.
+
+"It's law, the rabbi says," Nathan supplemented. "I don't know why is
+it; on'y rides on holidays ain't fer us."
+
+"I guess," Eva sagely surmised; "I guess rubber-neck-boat-birds rides
+even ain't fer us on holidays. But I don't know do I need rides on birds
+what hollers."
+
+"You'll be all right," Patrick assured her. "I'm goin' to let ye hold me
+hand. If ye can't go on Saturday, I'll take ye on Sunday--next Sunday.
+Yous all must meet me here on the school steps. Bring yer money and
+bring yer lunch too. It's a long way and ye'll be hungry when ye get
+there. Ye get a terrible long ride for five cents."
+
+"Does it take all that to get there?" asked the practical Nathan. "Then
+how are we goin' to get back?"
+
+Poor little poet soul! Celtic and improvident! Patrick's visions had
+shown him only the triumphant arrival of his host and the beatific joy
+of Eva as she floated by his side on the most "fancy" of boat-birds. Of
+the return journey he had taken no thought. And so the saving and
+planning had to be done all over again. The struggle for the first
+nickel had been wearing and wearying, but the amassment of the second
+was beyond description difficult. The children were worn from long
+strife and many sacrifices, for the temptations to spend six or nine
+cents are so much more insistent and unusual than are yearnings to
+squander lesser sums. Almost daily some member of the band would confess
+a fall from grace and solvency, and almost daily Isaac Borrachsohn was
+called upon to descant anew upon the glories of the Central Park. Becky,
+the chaperon, was the most desultory collector of the party. Over and
+over she reached the proud heights of seven or even eight cents, only to
+lavish her hoard on the sticky joys of the candy cart of Isidore
+Belchatosky's papa or on the suddy charms of a strawberry soda.
+
+Then tearfully would she repent of her folly, and bitterly would the
+others upbraid her, telling again of the joys and wonders she had
+squandered. Then loudly would she bewail her weakness and plead in
+extenuation: "I seen the candy. Mouses from choc'late und Foxy Gran'pas
+from sugar--und I ain't never seen no Central Park."
+
+"But don't you know how Isaac says?" Eva would urge. "Don't you know how
+all things what is nice fer us stands in the Central Park? Say, Isaac,
+you should better tell Becky, some more, how the Central Park stands."
+
+And Isaac's tales grew daily more wild and independent of fact until the
+little girls quivered with yearning terror and the boys burnished up
+forgotten cap pistols. He told of lions, tigers, elephants, bears, and
+buffaloes, all of enormous size and strength of lung, so that before
+many days had passed he had debarred himself, by whole-hearted lying,
+from the very possibility of joining the expedition and seeing the
+disillusionment of his public. With true artistic spirit he omitted all
+mention of confining house or cage and bestowed the gift of speech upon
+all the characters, whether brute or human, in his epic. The
+merry-go-round he combined with the menagerie into a whole which was not
+to be resisted.
+
+"Und all the am'blins," he informed his entranced listeners; "they goes
+around, und around, und around, where music plays und flags is. Und I
+sets a lion und he runs around, und runs around, und runs around.
+Say--what you think? He had smiling looks und hair on the neck, und
+sooner he says like that 'I'm awful thirsty,' I gives him a peanut und I
+gets a golden ring."
+
+"Where is it?" asked the jealous and incredulous Patrick.
+
+"To my house." Isaac valiantly lied, for well he remembered the scene in
+which his scandalized but sympathetic uncle had discovered his attempt
+to purloin the brass ring which, with countless blackened duplicates, is
+plucked from a slot by the brandishing swords of the riders upon the
+merry-go-round. Truly, its possession had won him another ride--this
+time upon an elephant with upturned trunk and wide ears--but in his mind
+the return of that ring still ranked as the only grief in an otherwise
+perfect day.
+
+Miss Bailey--ably assisted by AEsop, Rudyard Kipling, and Thompson
+Seton--had prepared the First Reader Class to accept garrulous and
+benevolent lions, cows, panthers, and elephants, and the exploring
+party's absolute credulity encouraged Isaac to higher and yet higher
+flights, until Becky was strengthened against temptation.
+
+At last, on a Sunday in late June, the cavalcade in splendid raiment met
+on the wide steps, boarded a Grand Street car, and set out for Paradise.
+Some confusion occurred at the very beginning of things when Becky
+Zalmonowsky curtly refused to share her pennies with the conductor. When
+she was at last persuaded to yield, an embarrassing five minutes was
+consumed in searching for the required amount in the nooks and crannies
+of her costume where, for safe-keeping, she had cached her fund. One
+penny was in her shoe, another in her stocking, two in the lining of her
+hat, and one in the large and dilapidated chatelaine bag which dangled
+at her knees.
+
+Nathan Spiderwitz, who had preserved absolute silence, now contributed
+his fare, moist and warm, from his mouth, and Eva turned to him
+admonishingly.
+
+"Ain't Teacher told you money in the mouth ain't healthy fer you?" she
+sternly questioned, and Nathan, when he had removed other pennies, was
+able to answer:
+
+"I washed 'em off--first." And they were indeed most brightly clean.
+"There's holes in me these here pockets," he explained, and promptly
+corked himself anew with currency.
+
+"But they don't tastes nice, do they?" Morris remonstrated. Nathan shook
+a corroborative head. "Und," the Monitor of the Gold Fish further urged,
+"you could to swallow 'em und then you couldn't never to come by your
+house no more."
+
+But Nathan was not to be dissuaded, even when the impressionable and
+experimental Becky tried his storage system and suffered keen discomfort
+before her penny was restored to her by a resourceful fellow traveler
+who thumped her right lustily on the back until her crowings ceased and
+the coin was once more in her hand.
+
+At the meeting of Grand Street with the Bowery, wild confusion was made
+wilder by the addition of seven small persons armed with transfers and
+clamoring--all except Nathan--for Central Park. Two newsboys and a
+policeman bestowed them upon a Third Avenue car and all went well until
+Patrick missed his lunch and charged Ignatius Aloysius with its
+abstraction. Words ensued which were not easily to be forgotten even
+when the refreshment was found--flat and horribly distorted--under the
+portly frame of the chaperon.
+
+Jealousy may have played some part in the misunderstanding, for it was
+undeniable that there was a sprightliness, a joyant brightness, in the
+flowing red scarf on Ignatius Aloysius's nautical breast, which was
+nowhere paralleled in Patrick's more subdued array. And the tenth
+commandment seemed very arbitrary to Patrick, the star of St. Mary's
+Sunday-school, when he saw that the red silk was attracting nearly all
+the attention of his female contingent. If Eva admired flaunting ties it
+were well that she should say so now. There was yet time to spare
+himself the agony of riding on rubber-neck-boat-birds with one whose
+interest wandered from brass buttons. Darkly Patrick scowled upon his
+unconscious rival, and guilefully he remarked to Eva:
+
+"Red neckties is nice, don't you think?"
+
+"Awful nice," Eva agreed; "but they ain't so stylish like high-stiffs.
+High-stiffs und derbies is awful stylish."
+
+Gloom and darkness vanished from the heart and countenance of the Knight
+of Munster, for around his neck he wore, with suppressed agony, the
+highest and stiffest of "high-stiffs" and his brows--and the back of his
+neck--were encircled by his big brother's work-a-day derby. Again he saw
+and described to Eva the vision which had lived in his hopes for now so
+many weeks: against a background of teeming jungle, mysterious and alive
+with wild beasts, an amiable boat-bird floated on the water-lake: and
+upon the boat-bird, trembling but reassured, sat Eva Gonorowsky, hand in
+hand with her brass-buttoned protector.
+
+As the car sped up the Bowery the children felt that they were indeed
+adventurers. The clattering Elevated trains overhead, the crowds of
+brightly decked Sunday strollers, the clanging trolley cars, and the
+glimpses they caught of shining green as they passed the streets leading
+to the smaller squares and parks, all contributed to the holiday
+upliftedness which swelled their unaccustomed hearts. At each vista of
+green they made ready to disembark and were restrained only by the
+conductor and by the sage counsel of Eva, who reminded her impulsive
+companions that the Central Park could be readily identified by "the
+hollers from all those things what hollers." And so, in happy watching
+and calm trust of the conductor, they were borne far beyond 59th Street,
+the first and most popular entrance to the park, before an interested
+passenger came to their rescue. They tumbled off the car and pressed
+towards the green only to find themselves shut out by a high stone wall,
+against which they crouched and listened in vain for identifying
+hollers. The silence began to frighten them, when suddenly the quiet air
+was shattered by a shriek which would have done credit to the biggest of
+boat-birds or of lions, but which was--the children discovered after a
+moment's panic--only the prelude to an outburst of grief on the
+chaperon's part. When the inarticulate stage of her sorrow was passed,
+she demanded instant speech with her mamma. She would seem to have
+expressed a sentiment common to the majority, for three heads in Spring
+finery leaned dejectedly against the stone barrier while Nathan removed
+his car-fare to contribute the remark that he was growing hungry.
+Patrick was forced to seek aid in the passing crowd on Fifth Avenue, and
+in response to his pleading eyes and the depression of his party, a lady
+of gentle aspect and "kind looks" stopped and spoke to them.
+
+"Indeed, yes," she reassured them; "this is Central Park."
+
+"It has looks off the country," Eva commented.
+
+"Because it is a piece of the country," the lady explained.
+
+"Then we dassent to go, the while we ain't none of us got no sickness,"
+cried Eva forlornly. "We're all, all healthy, und the country is for
+sick childrens."
+
+"I am glad you are well," said the lady kindly; "but you may certainly
+play in the park. It is meant for all little children. The gate is near.
+Just walk on near this wall until you come to it."
+
+It was only a few blocks, and they were soon in the land of their
+hearts' desire, where were waving trees and flowering shrubs and
+smoothly sloping lawns, and, framed in all these wonders, a beautiful
+little water-lake all dotted and brightened by fleets of tiny boats. The
+pilgrims from the East Side stood for a moment at gaze and then bore
+down upon the jewel, straight over grass and border, which is a course
+not lightly to be followed within park precincts and in view of park
+policemen. The ensuing reprimand dashed their spirits not at all and
+they were soon assembled close to the margin of the lake, where they got
+entangled in guiding strings and drew to shore many a craft, to the
+disgust of many a small owner. Becky Zalmonowsky stood so closely over
+the lake that she shed the chatelaine bag into its shallow depths and
+did irreparable damage to her gala costume in her attempts to "dibble"
+for her property. It was at last recovered, no wetter than the toilette
+it was intended to adorn, and the cousins Gonorowsky had much difficulty
+in balking Becky's determination to remove her gown and dry it then and
+there.
+
+Then Ignatius Aloysius, the exacting, remembered garrulously that he had
+as yet seen nothing of the rubber-neck-boat-birds and suggested that
+they were even now graciously "hollering like an'thing" in some remote
+fastness of the park. So Patrick gave commands and the march was resumed
+with bliss now beaming on all the faces so lately clouded. Every turn of
+the endless walks brought new wonders to these little ones who were
+gazing for the first time upon the great world of growing things of
+which Miss Bailey had so often told them. The policeman's warning had
+been explicit and they followed decorously in the paths and picked none
+of the flowers which as Eva had heard of old, were sticking right up out
+of the ground. But other flowers there were dangling high or low on tree
+or shrub, while here and there across the grass a bird came hopping or a
+squirrel ran. But the pilgrims never swerved. Full well they knew that
+these delights were not for such as they.
+
+It was, therefore, with surprise and concern that they at last
+debouched upon a wide green space where a flag waved at the top of a
+towering pole; for, behold, the grass was covered thick with children,
+with here and there a beneficent policeman looking serenely on.
+
+"Dast _we_ walk on it?" cried Morris. "Oh, Patrick, dast we?"
+
+"Ask the cop," Nathan suggested. It was his first speech for an hour,
+for Becky's misadventure with the chatelaine bag and the water-lake had
+made him more than ever sure that his own method of safe-keeping was the
+best.
+
+"Ask him yerself," retorted Patrick. He had quite intended to accost a
+large policeman, who would of course recognize and revere the buttons of
+Mr. Brennan _pere_, but a commander cannot well accept the advice of his
+subordinates. But Nathan was once more beyond the power of speech, and
+it was Morris Mogilewsky who asked for and obtained permission to walk
+on God's green earth. With little spurts of running and tentative jumps
+to test its spring, they crossed Peacock Lawn to the grateful shade of
+the trees at its further edge and there disposed themselves upon the
+ground and ate their luncheon. Nathan Spiderwitz waited until Sadie had
+finished and then entrusted the five gleaming pennies to her care while
+he wildly bolted an appetizing combination of dark brown bread and
+uncooked eel.
+
+Becky reposed flat upon the chatelaine bag and waved her still damp
+shoes exultantly. Eva lay, face downward beside her, and peered
+wonderingly deep into the roots of things.
+
+"Don't it smells nice!" she gloated. "Don't it looks nice! My, ain't we
+havin' the party-time!"
+
+"Don't mention it," said Patrick, in careful imitation of his mother's
+hostess manner. "I'm pleased to see you, I'm sure."
+
+"The Central Park is awful pretty," Sadie soliloquized as she lay on her
+back and watched the waving branches and blue sky far above. "Awful
+pretty! I likes we should live here all the time."
+
+"Well," began Ignatius Aloysius Diamantstein, in slight disparagement of
+his rival's powers as a cicerone; "well, I ain't seen no lions, nor no
+rubber-neck-boat-birds. Und we ain't had no rides on nothings. Und I
+ain't heard no hollers neither."
+
+As if in answer to this criticism there arose, upon the road beyond the
+trees, a snorting, panting noise, growing momentarily louder and
+culminating, just as East Side nerves were strained to breaking point,
+in a long hoarse and terrifying yell. There was a flash of red, a cloud
+of dust, three other toots of agony, and the thing was gone. Gone, too,
+were the explorers and gone their peaceful rest. To a distant end of the
+field they flew, led by the panic-stricken chaperon, and followed by Eva
+and Patrick, hand in hand, he making show of bravery he was far from
+feeling, and she frankly terrified. In a secluded corner, near the
+restaurant, the chaperon was run to earth by her breathless charges:
+
+"I seen the lion," she panted over and over. "I seen the fierce, big red
+lion, und I don't know where is my mamma."
+
+Patrick saw that one of the attractions had failed to attract, so he
+tried another.
+
+"Le's go an' see the cows," he proposed. "Don't you know the po'try
+piece Miss Bailey learned us about cows?"
+
+Again the emotional chaperon interrupted. "I'm loving much mit Miss
+Bailey, too," she wailed. "Und I don't know where is she neither." But
+the pride of learning upheld the others and they chanted in sing-song
+chorus, swaying rhythmically the while from leg to leg:
+
+
+     "The friendly cow all red and white,
+         I love with all my heart:
+     She gives me cream with all her might,
+         To eat with apple-tart Robert Louis Stevenson."
+
+
+Becky's tears ceased. "Be there cows in the Central Park?" she
+demanded.
+
+"Sure," said Patrick.
+
+"Und what kind from cream will he give us? Ice cream?"
+
+"Sure," said Patrick again.
+
+"Let's go," cried the emotional chaperon. A passing stranger turned the
+band in the general direction of the menagerie and the reality of the
+cow brought the whole "memory gem" into strange and undreamed reality.
+
+Gaily they set out through new and always beautiful ways; through
+tunnels where feet and voices rang with ghostly boomings most pleasant
+to the ear; over bridges whence they saw--in partial proof of Isaac
+Borrachsohn's veracity--"mans und ladies ridin'." Of a surety they rode
+nothing more exciting than horses, but that was, to East Side eyes, an
+unaccustomed sight, and Eva opined that it was owing, probably, to the
+shortness of their watch that they saw no lions and tigers similarly
+amiable. The cows, too, seemed far to seek, but the trees and grass and
+flowers were everywhere. Through long stretches of "for sure country"
+they picked their way, until they came, hot but happy, to a green and
+shady summerhouse on a hill. There they halted to rest, and there
+Ignatius Aloysius, with questionable delicacy, began to insist once more
+upon the full measure of his bond.
+
+"We ain't seen the rubber-neck-boat-birds," he complained. "Und we ain't
+had no rides on nothings."
+
+"You don't know what is polite," cried Eva, greatly shocked at this
+carping spirit in the presence of a hard-worked host. "You could to
+think shame over how you says somethings like that on a party."
+
+"This ain't no party," Ignatius Aloysius retorted. "It's a 'scursion. To
+a party somebody _gives_ you what you should eat; to a 'scursion you
+_brings_ it. Und anyway, we ain't had no rides."
+
+"But we heard a holler," the guest of honor reminded him. "We heard a
+fierce, big holler from a lion. I don't know do I need a ride on
+something what hollers. I could to have a fraid maybe."
+
+"Ye wouldn't be afraid on the boats when I hold yer hand, would ye?"
+Patrick anxiously inquired, and Eva shyly admitted that, thus supported,
+she might not be dismayed. To work off the pride and joy caused by this
+avowal, Patrick mounted the broad seat extending all around the
+summerhouse and began to walk clatteringly upon it. The other pilgrims
+followed suit and the whole party stamped and danced with infinite
+enjoyment. Suddenly the leader halted with a loud cry of triumph and
+pointed grandly out through one of the wistaria-hung openings. Not De
+Soto on the banks of the Mississippi nor Balboa above the Pacific could
+have felt more victorious than Patrick did as he announced:
+
+"There's the water-lake!"
+
+His followers closed in upon him so impetuously that he was borne down
+under their charge and fell ignominiously out on the grass. But he was
+hardly missed, he had served his purpose. For there, beyond the rocks
+and lawns and red japonicas, lay the blue and shining water-lake in its
+confining banks of green. And upon its softly quivering surface floated
+the rubber-neck-boat-birds, white and sweetly silent instead of red and
+screaming--and the superlative length and arched beauty of their necks
+surpassed the wildest of Ikey Borrachsohn's descriptions. And relying
+upon the strength and politeness of these wondrous birds there were
+indeed "mans und ladies und boys und little girls" embarking,
+disembarking, and placidly weaving in and out and round about through
+scenes of hidden but undoubted beauty.
+
+Over rocks and grass the army charged towards bliss unutterable,
+strewing their path with overturned and howling babies of prosperity
+who, clumsy from many nurses and much pampering, failed to make way.
+Past all barriers, accidental or official, they pressed, nor halted to
+draw rein or breath until they were established, beatified, upon the
+waiting swan-boat.
+
+Three minutes later they were standing outside the railings of the
+landing and regarding, through welling tears, the placid lake, the sunny
+slopes of grass and tree, the brilliant sky and the gleaming
+rubber-neck-boat-bird which, as Ikey described, "made go its legs," but
+only, as he had omitted to mention, for money. So there they stood,
+seven sorrowful little figures engulfed in the rayless despair of
+childhood and the bitterness of poverty. For these were the children of
+the poor, and full well they knew that money was not to be diverted from
+its mission: that car-fare could not be squandered on bliss.
+
+Becky's woe was so strong and loud that the bitter wailings of the
+others served merely as its background. But Patrick cared not at all for
+the general despair. His remorseful eyes never strayed from the bowed
+figure of Eva Gonorowsky, for whose pleasure and honor he had striven so
+long and vainly. Slowly she conquered her sobs, slowly she raised her
+daisy-decked head, deliberately she blew her small pink nose, softly she
+approached her conquered knight, gently and all untruthfully she
+faltered, with yearning eyes on the majestic swans:
+
+"Don't you have no sad feelings, Patrick. I ain't got none. Ain't I told
+you from long, how I don't need no rubber-neck-boat-bird rides? I don't
+need 'em! I don't need 'em! I"--with a sob of passionate longing--"I'm
+got all times a awful scare over 'em. Let's go home, Patrick. Becky
+needs she should see her mamma, und I guess I needs my mamma too."
+
+
+
+
+MYRA KELLY
+
+
+Is it necessary to say that she was Irish? The humor, the sympathy, the
+quick understanding, the tenderness, that play through all her stories
+are the birthright of the children of Erin. Myra Kelly was born in
+Dublin, Ireland. Her father was Dr. John E. Kelly, a well-known surgeon.
+When Myra was little more than a baby, the family came to New York City.
+Here she was educated at the Horace Mann High School, and afterwards at
+Teachers College, a department of Columbia University, New York. She
+graduated from Teachers College in 1899. Her first school was in the
+primary department of Public School 147, on East Broadway, New York,
+where she taught from 1899 to 1901. Here she met all the "little
+aliens," the Morris and Isidore, Yetta and Eva of her stories, and won
+her way into their hearts. To her friends she would sometimes tell of
+these children, with their odd ideas of life and their dialect. "Why
+don't you write these stories down?" they asked her, and at last she sat
+down and wrote her first story, "A Christmas Present for a Lady." She
+had no knowledge of editorial methods, so she made four copies of the
+story and sent them to four different magazines. Two of them returned
+the story, and two of them accepted it, much to her embarrassment. The
+two acceptances came from _McClure's Magazine_ and _The Century_. As
+_McClure's_ replied first she gave the story to them, and most of her
+other stories were first published in that magazine.
+
+When they appeared in book form, they were welcomed by readers all over
+the country. Even the President of the United States wrote to express
+his thanks to her, in the following letter:
+
+
+                                                     Oyster Bay, N. Y.
+                                                       July, 26, 1905.
+
+     My dear Miss Kelly:--
+
+     Mrs. Roosevelt and I and most of the children know your very
+     amusing and very pathetic accounts of East Side school children
+     almost by heart, and I really think you must let me write and thank
+     you for them. When I was Police Commissioner I quite often went to
+     the Houston Street public school, and was immensely impressed by
+     what I saw there. I thought there were a good many Miss Baileys
+     there, and the work they were doing among their scholars (who were
+     largely of Russian-Jewish parentage like the children you write of)
+     was very much like what your Miss Bailey has done.
+
+                                    Very sincerely yours,
+                                               Theodore Roosevelt.
+
+
+After two years of school room work, Miss Kelly's health broke down, and
+she retired from teaching, although she served as critic teacher in the
+Speyer School, Teachers College, for a year longer. One of the persons
+who had read her books with delight was Allen Macnaughton. Soon after he
+met Miss Kelly, and in 1905 they were married. They lived for a time at
+Oldchester Village, New Jersey, in the Orange mountains, in a colony of
+literary people which her husband was interested in establishing. After
+several years of very successful literary work, she developed
+tuberculosis. She went to Torquay, England, in search of health, and
+died there March 31, 1910.
+
+Her works include the following titles: _Little Citizens_; _The Isle of
+Dreams_; _Wards of Liberty_; _Rosnah_; _the Golden Season_; _Little
+Aliens_; _New Faces_. One of the leading magazines speaks of her as the
+creator of a new dialect.
+
+
+
+
+HERO WORSHIP
+
+_Most of us are hero-worshippers at some time of our lives. The boy
+finds his hero in the baseball player or athlete, the girl in the
+matinee idol, or the "movie" star. These objects of worship are not
+always worthy of the adoration they inspire, but this does not matter
+greatly, since their worshippers seldom find it out. There is something
+fine in absolute loyalty to an ideal, even if the ideal is far from
+reality. "The Tenor" is the story of a famous singer and two of his
+devoted admirers_.
+
+
+
+
+THE TENOR[1]
+
+BY
+
+H. C. BUNNER
+
+
+It was a dim, quiet room in an old-fashioned New York house, with
+windows opening upon a garden that was trim and attractive, even in its
+wintry days--for the rose-bushes were all bundled up in straw ulsters.
+The room was ample, yet it had a cosy air. Its dark hangings suggested
+comfort and luxury, with no hint of gloom. A hundred pretty trifles told
+that it was a young girl's room: in the deep alcove nestled her dainty
+white bed, draped with creamy lace and ribbons.
+
+"I was _so_ afraid that I'd be late!"
+
+The door opened, and two pretty girls came in, one in hat and furs, the
+other in a modest house dress. The girl in the furs, who had been afraid
+that she would be late, was fair, with a bright color in her cheeks, and
+an eager, intent look in her clear brown eyes. The other girl was
+dark-eyed and dark-haired, dreamy, with a soft, warm dusky color in her
+face. They were two very pretty girls indeed--or, rather, two girls
+about to be very pretty, for neither one was eighteen years old.
+
+The dark girl glanced at a little porcelain clock.
+
+"You are in time, dear," she said, and helped her companion to take off
+her wraps.
+
+Then the two girls crossed the room, and with a caressing and almost a
+reverent touch, the dark girl opened the doors of a little carven
+cabinet that hung upon the wall, above a small table covered with a
+delicate white cloth. In its depths, framed in a mat of odorous double
+violets, stood the photograph of the face of a handsome man of forty--a
+face crowned with clustering black locks, from beneath which a pair of
+large, mournful eyes looked out with something like religious fervor in
+their rapt gaze. It was the face of a foreigner.
+
+"O Esther!" cried the other girl, "how beautifully you have dressed him
+to-day!"
+
+"I wanted to get more," Esther said; "but I've spent almost all my
+allowance--and violets do cost so shockingly. Come, now--" with another
+glance at the clock--"don't let's lose any more time, Louise dear."
+
+She brought a couple of tiny candles in Sevres candlesticks, and two
+little silver saucers, in which she lit fragrant pastilles. As the pale
+gray smoke arose, floating in faint wreaths and spirals before the
+enshrined photograph, Louise sat down and gazed intently upon the little
+altar. Esther went to her piano and watched the clock. It struck two.
+Her hands fell softly on the keys, and, studying a printed program in
+front of her, she began to play an overture. After the overture she
+played one or two pieces of the regular concert stock. Then she paused.
+
+"I can't play the Tschaikowski piece."
+
+"Never mind," said the other. "Let us wait for him in silence."
+
+The hands of the clock pointed to 2:29. Each girl drew a quick breath,
+and then the one at the piano began to sing softly, almost inaudibly,
+"les Rameaux" in a transcription for tenor of Faure's great song. When
+it was ended, she played and sang the _encore_. Then, with her fingers
+touching the keys so softly that they awakened only an echo-like sound,
+she ran over the numbers that intervened between the first tenor solo
+and the second. Then she sang again, as softly as before.
+
+The fair-haired girl sat by the little table, gazing intently on the
+picture. Her great eyes seemed to devour it, and yet there was something
+absent-minded, speculative, in her steady look. She did not speak until
+Esther played the last number on the program.
+
+"He had three encores for that last Saturday," she said, and Esther
+played the three encores.
+
+Then they closed the piano and the little cabinet, and exchanged an
+innocent girlish kiss, and Louise went out, and found her father's coupe
+waiting for her, and was driven away to her great, gloomy, brown-stone
+home near Central Park.
+
+Louise Laura Latimer and Esther Van Guilder were the only children of
+two families which, though they were possessed of the three "Rs" which
+are all and more than are needed to insure admission to New York
+society--Riches, Respectability and Religion--yet were not in Society;
+or, at least, in the society that calls itself Society. This was not
+because Society was not willing to have them. It was because they
+thought the world too worldly. Perhaps this was one reason--although the
+social horizon of the two families had expanded somewhat as the girls
+grew up--why Louise and Esther, who had been playmates from their
+nursery days, and had grown up to be two uncommonly sentimental,
+fanciful, enthusiastically morbid girls, were to be found spending a
+bright Winter afternoon holding a ceremonial service of worship before
+the photograph of a fashionable French tenor.
+
+It happened to be a French tenor whom they were worshiping. It might as
+well have been anybody or any thing else. They were both at that period
+of girlish growth when the young female bosom is torn by a hysterical
+craving to worship something--any thing. They had been studying music
+and they had selected the tenor who was the sensation of the hour in New
+York for their idol. They had heard him only on the concert stage; they
+were never likely to see him nearer. But it was a mere matter of chance
+that the idol was not a Boston Transcendentalist, a Popular Preacher, a
+Faith-Cure Healer, or a ringleted old maid with advanced ideas of
+Woman's Mission. The ceremonies might have been different in form: the
+worship would have been the same.
+
+M. Hyppolite Remy was certainly the musical hero of the hour. When his
+advance notices first appeared, the New York critics, who are a
+singularly unconfiding, incredulous lot, were inclined to discount his
+European reputation.
+
+When they learned that M. Remy was not only a great artist, but a man
+whose character was "wholly free from that deplorable laxity which is so
+often a blot on the proud escutcheon of his noble profession;" that he
+had married an American lady; that he had "embraced the Protestant
+religion"--no sect was specified, possibly to avoid jealousy--and that
+his health was delicate, they were moved to suspect that he might have
+to ask that allowances be made for his singing. But when he arrived, his
+triumph was complete. He was as handsome as his picture, if he _was_ a
+trifle short, a shade too stout.
+
+He was a singer of genius, too; with a splendid voice and a sound
+method--on the whole. It was before the days of the Wagner autocracy,
+and perhaps his tremolo passed unchallenged as it could not now; but he
+was a great artist. He knew his business as well as his advance-agent
+knew his. The Remy Concerts were a splendid success. Reserved seats, $5.
+For the Series of Six, $25.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the following Monday, Esther Van Guilder returned her friend's call,
+in response to an urgent invitation, despatched by mail. Louise
+Latimer's great bare room was incapable of transmutation into a cosy
+nest of a boudoir. There was too much of its heavy raw silk
+furniture--too much of its vast, sarcophagus-like bed--too much of its
+upholsterer's elegance, regardless of cost--and taste. An enlargement
+from an ambrotype of the original Latimer, as he arrived in New York
+from New Hampshire, and a photograph of a "child subject" by Millais,
+were all her works of art. It was not to be doubted that they had
+climbed upstairs from a front parlor of an earlier stage of social
+development. The farm-house was six generations behind Esther; two
+behind Louise.
+
+Esther found her friend in a state of almost feverish excitement. Her
+eyes shone; the color burned high on her clear cheeks.
+
+"You never would guess what I've done, dear!" she began, as soon as they
+were alone in the big room. "I'm going to see _him_--to speak to
+him--_Esther!_" Her voice was solemnly hushed, "to _serve_ him!"
+
+"Oh, Louise! what _do_ you mean?"
+
+"To serve him--with my own hands! To--to--help him on with his coat--I
+don't know--to do something that a servant does--anything, so that I can
+say that once, once only, just for an hour, I have been near him, been
+of use to him, served him in one little thing as loyally as he serves
+OUR ART."
+
+Music was THEIR art, and no capitals could tell how much it was theirs
+or how much of an art it was.
+
+"Louise," demanded Esther, with a frightened look, "are you crazy?"
+
+"No. Read this!" She handed the other girl a clipping from the
+advertising columns of a newspaper.
+
+
+     CHAMBERMAID AND WAITRESS.--WANTED, A NEAT and willing girl, for
+     light work. Apply to Mme. Remy, The Midlothian, ... Broadway.
+
+
+"I saw it just by accident, Saturday, after I left you. Papa had left
+his paper in the coupe. I was going up to my First Aid to the Injured
+Class--it's at four o'clock now, you know. I made up my mind right
+off--it came to me like an inspiration. I just waited until it came to
+the place where they showed how to tie up arteries, and then I slipped
+out. Lots of the girls slip out in the horrid parts, you know. And then,
+instead of waiting in the ante-room, I put on my wrap, and pulled the
+hood over my head and ran off to the Midlothian--it's just around the
+corner, you know. And I saw his wife."
+
+"What was she like?" queried Esther, eagerly.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. Sort of horrid--actressy. She had a pink silk wrapper
+with swansdown all over it--at four o'clock, think! I was _awfully_
+frightened when I got there; but it wasn't the least trouble. She hardly
+looked at me, and she engaged me right off. She just asked me if I was
+willing to do a whole lot of things--I forgot what they were--and where
+I'd worked before. I said at Mrs. Barcalow's."
+
+"Mrs. Barcalow's?"
+
+"Why, yes--my Aunt Amanda, don't you know--up in Framingham. I always
+have to wash the teacups when I go there. Aunty says that everybody has
+got to do _something_ in _her_ house."
+
+"Oh, Louise!" cried her friend, in shocked admiration; "how can you
+think of such things?"
+
+"Well, I did. And she--his wife, you know--just said: 'Oh, I suppose
+you'll do as well as any one--all you girls are alike.'"
+
+"But did she really take you for a--servant?"
+
+"Why, yes, indeed. It was raining. I had that old ulster on, you know.
+I'm to go at twelve o'clock next Saturday."
+
+"But, Louise!" cried Esther, aghast, "you don't truly mean to go!"
+
+"I do!" cried Louise, beaming triumphantly.
+
+"_Oh, Louise!_"
+
+"Now, listen, dear," said Miss Latimer, with the decision of an
+enthusiastic young lady with New England blood in her veins. "Don't say
+a word till I tell you what my plan is. I've thought it all out, and
+you've got to help me."
+
+Esther shuddered.
+
+"You foolish child!" cried Louise. Her eyes were sparkling: she was in a
+state of ecstatic excitement; she could see no obstacles to the
+carrying out of her plan. "You don't think I mean to _stay_ there, do
+you? I'm just going at twelve o'clock, and at four he comes back from
+the matinee, and at five o'clock I'm going to slip on my things and run
+downstairs, and have you waiting for me in the coupe, and off we go. Now
+do you see?"
+
+It took some time to bring Esther's less venturesome spirit up to the
+point of assisting in this undertaking; but she began, after a while, to
+feel the delights of vicarious enterprise, and in the end the two girls,
+their cheeks flushed, their eyes shining feverishly, their voices
+tremulous with childish eagerness, resolved themselves into a committee
+of ways and means; for they were two well-guarded young women, and to
+engineer five hours of liberty was difficult to the verge of
+impossibility. However, there is a financial manoeuvre known as
+"kiting checks," whereby A exchanges a check with B and B swaps with A
+again, playing an imaginary balance against Time and the Clearing House;
+and by a similar scheme, which an acute student of social ethics has
+called "kiting calls," the girls found that they could make Saturday
+afternoon their own, without one glance from the watchful eyes of
+Esther's mother or Louise's aunt--Louise had only an aunt to reckon
+with.
+
+"And, oh, Esther!" cried the bolder of the conspirators, "I've thought
+of a trunk--of course I've got to have a trunk, or she would ask me
+where it was, and I couldn't tell her a fib. Don't you remember the
+French maid who died three days after she came here? Her trunk is up in
+the store-room still, and I don't believe anybody will ever come for
+it--it's been there seven years now. Let's go up and look at it."
+
+The girls romped upstairs to the great unused upper story, where heaps
+of household rubbish obscured the dusty half-windows. In a corner,
+behind Louise's baby chair and an unfashionable hat-rack of the old
+steering-wheel pattern, they found the little brown-painted tin trunk,
+corded up with clothesline.
+
+"Louise!" said Esther, hastily, "what did you tell her your name was?"
+
+"I just said 'Louise'."
+
+Esther pointed to the name painted on the trunk,
+
+
+                             LOUISE LEVY
+
+
+"It is the hand of Providence," she said. "Somehow, now, I'm _sure_
+you're quite right to go."
+
+And neither of these conscientious young ladies reflected for one minute
+on the discomfort which might be occasioned to Madame Remy by the
+defection of her new servant a half-hour before dinner-time on Saturday
+night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Oh, child, it's you, is it?" was Mme. Remy's greeting at twelve o'clock
+on Saturday. "Well, you're punctual--and you look clean. Now, are you
+going to break my dishes or are you going to steal my rings? Well, we'll
+find out soon enough. Your trunk's up in your room. Go up to the
+servant's quarters--right at the top of those stairs there. Ask for the
+room that belongs to apartment 11. You are to room with their girl."
+
+Louise was glad of a moment's respite. She had taken the plunge; she was
+determined to go through to the end. But her heart _would_ beat and her
+hands _would_ tremble. She climbed up six flights of winding stairs, and
+found herself weak and dizzy when she reached the top and gazed around
+her. She was in a great half-story room, eighty feet square. The most of
+it was filled with heaps of old furniture and bedding, rolls of carpet,
+of canvas, of oilcloth, and odds and ends of discard of unused household
+gear--the dust thick over all. A little space had been left around three
+sides, to give access to three rows of cell-like rooms, in each of which
+the ceiling sloped from the very door to a tiny window at the level of
+the floor. In each room was a bed, a bureau that served for wash-stand,
+a small looking-glass, and one or two trunks. Women's dresses hung on
+the whitewashed walls. She found No. 11, threw off, desperately, her hat
+and jacket, and sunk down on the little brown tin trunk, all trembling
+from head to foot.
+
+"Hello," called a cheery voice. She looked up and saw a girl in a dirty
+calico dress.
+
+"Just come?" inquired this person, with agreeable informality. She was a
+good-looking large girl, with red hair and bright cheeks. She leaned
+against the door-post and polished her finger-nails with a little brush.
+Her hands were shapely.
+
+"Ain't got onto the stair-climbing racket yet, eh? You'll get used to
+it. 'Louise Levy,'" she read the name on the trunk. "You don't look like
+a sheeny. Can't tell nothin' 'bout names, can you? My name's Slattery.
+You'd think I was Irish, wouldn't you? Well, I'm straight Ne' York. I'd
+be dead before I was Irish. Born here. Ninth Ward an' next to an engine
+house. How's that? There's white Jews, too. I worked for one, pickin'
+sealskins down in Prince Street. Most took the lungs out of me. But that
+wasn't why I shook the biz. It queered my hands--see? I'm goin' to be
+married in the Fall to a German gentleman. He ain't so Dutch when you
+know him, though. He's a grocer. Drivin' now; but he buys out the boss
+in the Fall. How's that? He's dead stuck on my hooks, an' I have to keep
+'em lookin' good. I come here because the work was light. I don't have
+to work--only to be doin' somethin', see? Only got five halls and the
+lamps. You got a fam'ly job, I s'pose? I wouldn't have that. I don't
+mind the Sooprintendent; but I'd be dead before I'd be bossed by a
+woman, see? Say, what fam'ly did you say you was with?"
+
+The stream of talk had acted like a nerve-tonic on Louise. She was able
+to answer:
+
+"M--Mr. Remy."
+
+"Ramy?--oh, lord! Got the job with His Tonsils? Well, you won't keep it
+long. They're meaner'n three balls, see? Rent their room up here and
+chip in with eleven. Their girls don't never stay. Well, I got to step,
+or the Sooprintendent'll be borin' my ear. Well--so long!"
+
+But Louise had fled down the stairs. "His Tonsils" rang in her ears.
+What blasphemy! What sacrilege! She could scarcely pretend to listen to
+Mme. Remy's first instructions.
+
+The household _was_ parsimonious. Louise washed the caterer's dishes--he
+made a reduction in his price. Thus she learned that a late breakfast
+took the place of luncheon. She began to feel what this meant. The beds
+had been made; but there was work enough. She helped Mme. Remy to sponge
+a heap of faded finery--_her_ dresses. If they had been _his_ coats!
+Louise bent her hot face over the tawdry silks and satins, and clasped
+her parboiled little finger-tips over the wet sponge. At half-past three
+Mme. Remy broke the silence.
+
+"We must get ready for Musseer," she said. An ecstatic joy filled
+Louise's being. The hour of her reward was at hand.
+
+Getting ready for "Musseer" proved to be an appalling process. First
+they brewed what Mme. Remy called a "teaze Ann." After the _tisane_, a
+host of strange foreign drugs and cosmetics were marshalled in order.
+Then water was set to heat on a gas-stove. Then a little table was
+neatly set.
+
+"Musseer has his dinner at half-past four," Madame explained. "I don't
+take mine till he's laid down and I've got him off to the concert.
+There, he's coming now. Sometimes he comes home pretty nervous. If he's
+nervous, don't you go and make a fuss, do you hear, child?"
+
+The door opened, and Musseer entered, wrapped in a huge frogged
+overcoat. There was no doubt that he was nervous. He cast his hat upon
+the floor, as if he were Jove dashing a thunderbolt. Fire flashed from
+his eyes. He advanced upon his wife and thrust a newspaper in her
+face--a little pinky sheet, a notorious blackmailing publication.
+
+"Zees," he cried, "is your work!"
+
+"What _is_ it now, Hipleet?" demanded Mme. Remy.
+
+"Vot it ees?" shrieked the tenor. "It ees ze history of how zey have
+heest me at Nice! It ees all zair--how I have been heest--in zis sacre
+sheet--in zis handkairchif of infamy! And it ees you zat have told it to
+zat devil of a Rastignac--_traitresse!_"
+
+"Now, Hipleet," pleaded his wife, "if I can't learn enough French to
+talk with you, how am I going to tell Rastignac about your being
+hissed?"
+
+This reasoning silenced Mr. Remy for an instant--an instant only.
+
+"You _vood_ have done it!" he cried, sticking out his chin and thrusting
+his face forward.
+
+"Well, I didn't," said Madame, "and nobody reads that thing, any way.
+Now, don't mind it, and let me get your things off, or you'll be
+catching cold."
+
+Mr. Remy yielded at last to the necessity of self-preservation, and
+permitted his wife to remove his frogged overcoat, and to unwind him
+from a system of silk wraps to which the Gordian knot was a slip-noose.
+This done, he sat down before the dressing-case, and Mme. Remy, after
+tying a bib around his neck, proceeded to dress his hair and put
+brilliantine on his moustache. Her husband enlivened the operation by
+reading from the pinky paper.
+
+"It ees not gen-air-al-lee known--zat zees dees-tin-guished tenor vos
+heest on ze pob-lic staidj at Nice--in ze year--"
+
+Louise leaned against the wall, sick, faint and frightened, with a
+strange sense of shame and degradation at her heart. At last the tenor's
+eye fell on her.
+
+"Anozzair eediot?" he inquired.
+
+"She ain't very bright, Hipleet," replied his wife; "but I guess she'll
+do. Louise, open the door--there's the caterer."
+
+Louise placed the dishes upon the table mechanically. The tenor sat
+himself at the board, and tucked a napkin in his neck.
+
+"And how did the Benediction Song go this afternoon?" inquired his
+wife.
+
+"Ze Benediction? Ah! One _encore_. One on-lee. Zese pigs of Ameericains.
+I t'row my pairls biffo' swine. _Chops once more!_ You vant to mordair
+me? Vat do zis mean, madame? You ar-r-re in lig wiz my enemies. All ze
+vorlt is against ze ar-r-r-teest!"
+
+The storm that followed made the first seem a zephyr. The tenor
+exhausted his execratory vocabulary in French and English. At last, by
+way of a dramatic finale, he seized the plate of chops and flung it from
+him. He aimed at the wall; but Frenchmen do not pitch well. With a ring
+and a crash, plate and chops went through the broad window-pane. In the
+moment of stricken speechlessness that followed, the sound of the final
+smash came softly up from the sidewalk.
+
+"Ah-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ah!"
+
+The tenor rose to his feet with the howl of an anguished hyena.
+
+"Oh, good gracious!" cried his wife; "he's going to have one of his
+creezes--his creezes de nare!"
+
+He did have a _crise de nerfs_. "Ten dollair!" he yelled, "for ten
+dollair of glass!" He tore his pomaded hair; he tore off his bib and his
+neck-tie, and for three minutes without cessation he shrieked wildly and
+unintelligibly. It was possible to make out, however, that "arteest" and
+"ten dollair" were the themes of the improvisation. Finally he sank
+exhausted into the chair, and his white-faced wife rushed to his side.
+
+"Louise!" she cried, "get the foot-tub out of the closet while I spray
+his throat, or he can't sing a note. Fill it up with warm water--102
+degrees--there's the thermometer--and bathe his feet."
+
+Trembling from head to foot, Louise obeyed her orders, and brought the
+foot-tub, full of steaming water. Then she knelt down and began to serve
+the maestro for the first time. She took off his shoes. Then she looked
+at his socks. Could she do it?
+
+"Eediot!" gasped the sufferer, "make haste! I die!"
+
+"Hold your mouth open, dear," said Madame, "I haven't half sprayed you."
+
+"Ah! _you!_" cried the tenor. "Cat! Devil! It ees you zat have killed
+me!" And moved by an access of blind rage, he extended his arm, and
+thrust his wife violently from him.
+
+Louise rose to her feet, with a hard set, good old New England look on
+her face. She lifted the tub of water to the level of her breast, and
+then she inverted it on the tenor's head. For one instant she gazed at
+the deluge, and at the bath-tub balanced on the maestro's skull like a
+helmet several sizes too large--then she fled like the wind.
+
+Once in the servant's quarters, she snatched her hat and jacket. From
+below came mad yells of rage.
+
+"I kill hare! give me my knife--give me my rivvolvare! Au secours!
+Assassin!"
+
+Miss Slattery appeared in the doorway, still polishing her nails.
+
+"What have you done to His Tonsils?" she inquired. "He's pretty hot,
+this trip."
+
+"How can I get away from here?" cried Louise.
+
+Miss Slattery pointed to a small door. Louise rushed down a long
+stairway--another--and yet others--through a great room where there was
+a smell of cooking and a noise of fires--past white-capped cooks and
+scullions--through a long stone corridor, and out into the street. She
+cried aloud as she saw Esther's face at the window of the coupe.
+
+She drove home--cured.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] From "Stories of H. C. Bunner," copyright, 1890, 1896, by Alice L.
+Bunner; published by Charles Scribner's Sons. By permission of the
+publishers.
+
+
+
+
+H. C. BUNNER
+
+
+Henry Cuyler Bunner was his full name, H. C. Bunner was the way he
+always signed his writings, and "Bunner" was his name to his friends,
+and even to his wife. He was born in Oswego, New York, August 3, 1855.
+His parents soon moved to New York City, and Bunner was educated in the
+public schools there. Then he became a clerk in a business house, but
+this did not satisfy him, and he began to write for newspapers, finally
+getting a position on the _Arcadian_, a short-lived journal. In 1877 the
+publishers of _Puck_, a humorous weekly printed in the German language,
+decided to issue an edition in English, and made Bunner assistant
+editor. It was a happy choice. He soon became editor-in-chief, and under
+his direction the paper became not only the best humorous journal of its
+time, but a powerful influence in politics as well. Bunner wrote not
+only editorials, humorous verse, short stories, and titles for pictures,
+but often suggested the cartoons, which were an important feature of the
+paper.
+
+Outside the office he was a delightful conversationalist. His friends
+Brander Matthews, Lawrence Hutton and others speak of his ready wit, his
+kindness of heart, and his wonderfully varied store of information. He
+was a constant reader, and a good memory enabled him to retain what he
+read. It is said that one could hardly name a poem that he had not read,
+and it was odds but that he could quote its best lines. Next to reading,
+his chief pleasure was in wandering about odd corners of the city,
+especially the foreign quarters. He knew all the queer little
+restaurants and queer little shops in these places.
+
+His first literary work of note was a volume of poems, happily entitled
+_Airs from Arcady_. It contains verses both grave and gay: one of the
+cleverest is called "Home, Sweet Home, with Variations." He writes the
+poem first in the style of Swinburne, then of Bret Harte, then of Austin
+Dobson, then of Oliver Goldsmith and finally of Walt Whitman. The book
+also showed his skill in the use of French forms of verse, as in this
+dainty triolet:
+
+
+            A PITCHER OF MIGNONETTE
+
+     A pitcher of mignonette
+       In a tenement's highest casement:
+     Queer sort of flower-pot--yet
+     That pitcher of mignonette
+     Is a garden in heaven set,
+       To the little sick child in the basement--
+     The pitcher of mignonette
+       In the tenement's highest casement.
+
+
+The last poem in the book, called "To Her," was addressed to Miss Alice
+Learned, whom he married soon after, and to whom, as "A. L. B." all his
+later books were dedicated. Soon after his marriage he moved to Nutley,
+New Jersey. Here he was not only the editor and man of letters but the
+neighbor who could always be called on in time of need, and the citizen
+who took an active part in the community life, helping to organize the
+Village Improvement Society, one of the first of its kind.
+
+He followed up his first volume by two short novels, _The Midge_ and
+_The Story of a New York House_. Then he undertook the writing of the
+short story, his first book being _Zadoc Pine and other Stories_. The
+title story of this book contains a very humorous and faithful
+delineation of a New Englander who is transplanted to a New Jersey
+suburb. Soon after writing this he began to read the short stories of
+Guy de Maupassant. He admired them so much that he half translated, half
+adapted a number of them, and published them under the title _Made in
+France_. Then he tried writing stories of his own, in the manner of de
+Maupassant, and produced in _Short Sixes_ a group of stories which are
+models of concise narrative, crisply told, artistic in form, and often
+with a touch of surprise at the end. Other volumes of short stories are
+_More Short Sixes_, and _Love in Old Cloathes_. _Jersey Street and
+Jersey Lane_ was a book which grew out of his Nutley life. He also wrote
+a play, _The Tower of Babel_, which was produced by Marie Wainwright in
+1883. He died at Nutley, May 11, 1896. He was one of the first American
+authors to develop the short story as we know it to-day, and few of his
+successors have surpassed him in the light, sure style and the firmness
+of construction which are characteristic of his later work.
+
+
+
+
+SOCIETY IN OUR TOWN
+
+_Life in a small town, which means any place of less than a hundred
+thousand people, is more interesting than life in a big city. Both
+places have their notables, but in the small town you know these people,
+in the city you only read about them in the papers._ IN OUR TOWN _is a
+series of portraits of the people of a typical small city of the Middle
+West, seen through the keen eyes of a newspaper editor. This story tells
+how the question of the social leadership of the town was finally
+settled._
+
+
+
+
+THE PASSING OF PRISCILLA WINTHROP
+
+BY
+
+WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
+
+
+What a dreary waste life in our office must have been before Miss
+Larrabee came to us to edit a society page for the paper! To be sure we
+had known in a vague way that there were lines of social cleavage in the
+town; that there were whist clubs, and dancing clubs and women's clubs,
+and in a general way that the women who composed these clubs made up our
+best society, and that those benighted souls beyond the pale of these
+clubs were out of the caste. We knew that certain persons whose names
+were always handed in on the lists of guests at parties were what we
+called "howling swells," but it remained for Miss Larrabee to sort out
+ten or a dozen of these "howling swells," who belonged to the strictest
+social caste in town, and call them "howling dervishes." Incidentally it
+may be said that both Miss Larrabee and her mother were dervishes, but
+that did not prevent her from making sport of them. From Miss Larrabee
+we learned that the high priestess of the howling dervishes of our
+society was Mrs. Mortimer Conklin, known by the sisterhood of the mosque
+as Priscilla Winthrop. We in our office had never heard her called by
+that name, but Miss Larrabee explained, rather elaborately, that unless
+one was permitted to speak of Mrs. Conklin thus, one was quite beyond
+the hope of a social heaven.
+
+In the first place, Priscilla Winthrop was Mrs. Conklin's maiden name;
+in the second place, it links her with the Colonial Puritan stock of
+which she is so justly proud--being scornful of mere Daughters of the
+Revolution--and finally, though Mrs. Conklin is a grandmother, her
+maiden name seems to preserve the sweet, vague illusion of girlhood
+which Mrs. Conklin always carries about her like the shadow of a dream.
+And Miss Larrabee punctuated this with a wink which we took to be a
+quotation mark, and she went on with her work. So we knew we had been
+listening to the language used in the temple.
+
+Our town was organized fifty years ago by Abolitionists from New
+England, and twenty years ago, when Alphabetical Morrison was getting
+out one of the numerous boom editions of his real estate circular, he
+printed an historical article therein in which he said that Priscilla
+Winthrop was the first white child born on the town site. Her father was
+territorial judge, afterward member of the State Senate, and after ten
+years spent in mining in the far West, died in the seventies, the
+richest man in the State. It was known that he left Priscilla, his only
+child, half a million dollars in government bonds.
+
+She was the first girl in our town to go away to school. Naturally, she
+went to Oberlin, famous in those days for admitting colored students.
+But she finished her education at Vassar, and came back so much of a
+young lady that the town could hardly contain her. She married Mortimer
+Conklin, took him to the Centennial on a wedding trip, came home,
+rebuilt her father's house, covering it with towers and minarets and
+steeples, and scroll-saw fretwork, and christened it Winthrop Hall. She
+erected a store building on Main Street, that Mortimer might have a
+luxurious office on the second floor, and then settled down to the
+serious business of life, which was building up a titled aristocracy in
+a Kansas town.
+
+The Conklin children were never sent to the public schools, but had a
+governess, yet Mortimer Conklin, who was always alert for the call,
+could not understand why the people never summoned him to any office of
+honor or trust. He kept his brass signboard polished, went to his office
+punctually every morning at ten o'clock, and returned home to dinner at
+five, and made clients wait ten minutes in the outer office before they
+could see him--at least so both of them say, and there were no others in
+all the years. He shaved every day, wore a frock-coat and a high hat to
+church--where for ten years he was the only male member of the
+Episcopalian flock--and Mrs. Conklin told the women that altogether he
+was a credit to his sex and his family--a remark which has passed about
+ribaldly in town for a dozen years, though Mortimer Conklin never knew
+that he was the subject of a town joke. Once he rebuked a man in the
+barber shop for speaking of feminine extravagance, and told the shop
+that he did not stint his wife, that when she asked him for money he
+always gave it to her without question, and that if she wanted a dress
+he told her to buy it and send the bill to him. And we are such a polite
+people that no one in the crowded shop laughed--until Mortimer Conklin
+went out.
+
+Of course at the office we have known for twenty-five years what the men
+thought of Mortimer, but not until Miss Larrabee joined the force did we
+know that among the women Mrs. Conklin was considered an oracle. Miss
+Larrabee said that her mother has a legend that when Priscilla Winthrop
+brought home from Boston the first sealskin sacque ever worn in town she
+gave a party for it, and it lay in its box on the big walnut bureau in
+the spare room of the Conklin mansion in solemn state, while
+seventy-five women salaamed to it. After that Priscilla Winthrop was the
+town authority on sealskins. When any member of the town nobility had a
+new sealskin, she took it humbly to Priscilla Winthrop to pass judgment
+upon it. If Priscilla said it was London-dyed, its owner pranced away on
+clouds of glory; but if she said it was American-dyed, its owner crawled
+away in shame, and when one admired the disgraced garment, the martyred
+owner smiled with resigned sweetness and said humbly: "Yes--but it's
+only American-dyed, you know."
+
+No dervish ever questioned the curse of the priestess. The only time a
+revolt was imminent was in the autumn of 1884 when the Conklins
+returned from their season at Duxbury, Massachusetts, and Mrs. Conklin
+took up the carpets in her house, heroically sold all of them at the
+second-hand store, put in new waxed floors and spread down rugs. The
+town uprose and hooted; the outcasts and barbarians in the Methodists
+and Baptist Missionary Societies rocked the Conklin home with their
+merriment, and ten dervishes with set faces bravely met the onslaughts
+of the savages; but among themselves in hushed whispers, behind locked
+doors, the faithful wondered if there was not a mistake some place.
+However, when Priscilla Winthrop assured them that in all the best homes
+in Boston rugs were replacing carpets, their souls were at peace.
+
+All this time we at the office knew nothing of what was going on. We
+knew that the Conklins devoted considerable time to society; but
+Alphabetical Morrison explained that by calling attention to the fact
+that Mrs. Conklin had prematurely gray hair. He said a woman with
+prematurely gray hair was as sure to be a social leader as a spotted
+horse is to join a circus. But now we know that Colonel Morrison's view
+was a superficial one, for he was probably deterred from going deeper
+into the subject by his dislike for Mortimer Conklin, who invested a
+quarter of a million dollars of the Winthrop fortune in the Wichita
+boom, and lost it. Colonel Morrison naturally thought as long as Conklin
+was going to lose that money he could have lost it just as well at home
+in the "Queen City of the Prairies," giving the Colonel a chance to win.
+And when Conklin, protecting his equities in Wichita, sent a hundred
+thousand dollars of good money after the quarter million of bad money,
+Colonel Morrison's grief could find no words; though he did find
+language for his wrath. When the Conklins draped their Oriental rugs for
+airing every Saturday over the veranda and portico railings of the house
+front, Colonel Morrison accused the Conklins of hanging out their stamp
+collection to let the neighbors see it. This was the only side of the
+rug question we ever heard in our office until Miss Larrabee came; then
+she told us that one of the first requirements of a howling dervish was
+to be able to quote from Priscilla Winthrop's Rug book from memory. The
+Rug book, the China book and the Old Furniture book were the three
+sacred scrolls of the sect.
+
+All this was news to us. However, through Colonel Morrison, we had
+received many years ago another sidelight on the social status of the
+Conklins. It came out in this way: Time honored custom in our town
+allows the children of a home where there is an outbreak of social
+revelry, whether a church festival or a meeting of the Cold-Nosed Whist
+Club, to line up with the neighbor children on the back stoop or in the
+kitchen, like human vultures, waiting to lick the ice-cream freezer and
+to devour the bits of cake and chicken salad that are left over. Colonel
+Morrison told us that no child was ever known to adorn the back yard of
+the Conklin home while a social cataclysm was going on, but that when
+Mrs. Morrison entertained the Ladies' Literary League, children from the
+holy Conklin family went home from his back porch with their faces
+smeared with chicken croquettes and their hands sticky with jellycake.
+
+This story never gained general circulation in town, but even if it had
+been known of all men it would not have shaken the faith of the
+devotees. For they did not smile when Priscilla Winthrop began to refer
+to old Frank Hagan, who came to milk the Conklin cow and curry the
+Conklin horse, as "Francois, the man," or to call the girl who did the
+cooking and general housework "Cosette, the maid," though every one of
+the dozen other women in town whom "Cosette, the maid" had worked for
+knew that her name was Fanny Ropes. And shortly after that the homes of
+the rich and the great over on the hill above Main Street began to fill
+with Lisettes and Nanons and Fanchons, and Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington
+called her girl "Grisette," explaining that they had always had a
+Grisette about the house since her mother first went to housekeeping in
+Peoria, Illinois, and it sounded so natural to hear the name that they
+always gave it to a new servant. This story came to the office through
+the Young Prince, who chuckled over it during the whole hour he consumed
+in writing Ezra Worthington's obituary.
+
+Miss Larrabee says that the death of Ezra Worthington marks such a
+distinct epoch in the social life of the town that we must set down
+here--even if the narrative of the Conklins halts for a moment--how the
+Worthingtons rose and flourished. Julia Neal, the eldest daughter of
+Thomas Neal--who lost the "O" before his name somewhere between the
+docks of Dublin and the west bank of the Missouri River--was for ten
+years principal of the ward school in that part of our town known as
+"Arkansaw," where her term of service is still remembered as the "reign
+of terror." It was said of her then that she could whip any man in the
+ward--and would do it if he gave her a chance. The same manner which
+made the neighbors complain that Julia Neal carried her head too high,
+later in life, when she had money to back it, gave her what the women of
+the State Federation called a "regal air." In her early thirties she
+married Ezra Worthington, bachelor, twenty years her senior. Ezra
+Worthington was at that time, had been for twenty years before, and
+continued to be until his death, proprietor of the Worthington Poultry
+and Produce Commission Company. He was owner of the stockyards,
+president of the Worthington State Bank, vice-president, treasurer and
+general manager of the Worthington Mercantile Company, and owner of five
+brick buildings on Main Street. He bought one suit of clothes every five
+years whether he needed it or not, never let go of a dollar unless the
+Goddess of Liberty on it was black in the face, and died rated "at
+$350,000" by all the commercial agencies in the country. And the first
+thing Mrs. Worthington did after the funeral was to telephone to the
+bank and ask them to send her a hundred dollars.
+
+The next important thing she did was to put a heavy, immovable granite
+monument over the deceased so that he would not be restless, and then
+she built what is known in our town as the Worthington Palace. It makes
+the Markley mansion which cost $25,000 look like a barn. The
+Worthingtons in the life-time of Ezra had ventured no further into the
+social whirl of the town than to entertain the new Presbyterian preacher
+at tea, and to lend their lawn to the King's Daughters for a social,
+sending a bill in to the society for the eggs used in the coffee and the
+gasoline used in heating it.
+
+To the howling dervishes who surrounded Priscilla Winthrop the
+Worthingtons were as mere Christian dogs. It was not until three years
+after Ezra Worthington's death that the glow of the rising Worthington
+sun began to be seen in the Winthrop mosque. During those three years
+Mrs. Worthington had bought and read four different sets of the best
+hundred books, had consumed the Chautauque course, had prepared and
+delivered for the Social Science Club, which she organized, five papers
+ranging in subject from the home life of Rameses I., through a Survey of
+the Forces Dominating Michael Angelo, to the Influence of Esoteric
+Buddhism on Modern Political Tendencies. More than that, she had been
+elected president of the City Federation clubs and being a delegate to
+the National Federation from the State, was talked of for the State
+Federation Presidency. When the State Federation met in our town, Mrs.
+Worthington gave a reception for the delegates in the Worthington
+Palace, a feature of which was a concert by a Kansas City organist on
+the new pipe-organ which she had erected in the music-room of her house,
+and despite the fact that the devotees of the Priscilla shrine said that
+the crowd was distinctly mixed and not at all representative of our best
+social grace and elegance, there is no question but that Mrs.
+Worthington's reception made a strong impression upon the best local
+society. The fact that, as Miss Larrabee said, "Priscilla Winthrop was
+so nice about it," also may be regarded as ominous. But the women who
+lent Mrs. Worthington the spoons and forks for the occasion were
+delighted, and formed a phalanx about her, which made up in numbers what
+it might have lacked in distinction. Yet while Mrs. Worthington was in
+Europe the faithful routed the phalanx, and Mrs. Conklin returned from
+her summer in Duxbury with half a carload of old furniture from Harrison
+Sampson's shop and gave a talk to the priestesses of the inner temple on
+"Heppelwhite in New England."
+
+Miss Larrabee reported the affair for our paper, giving the small list
+of guests and the long line of refreshments--which included
+alligator-pear salad, right out of the Smart Set Cook Book. Moreover,
+when Jefferson appeared in Topeka that fall, Priscilla Winthrop, who had
+met him through some of her Duxbury friends in Boston, invited him to
+run down for a luncheon with her and the members of the royal family who
+surrounded her. It was the proud boast of the defenders of the Winthrop
+faith in town that week, that though twenty-four people sat down to the
+table, not only did all the men wear frock coats--not only did Uncle
+Charlie Haskins of String Town wear the old Winthrop butler's livery
+without a wrinkle in it, and with only the faint odor of mothballs to
+mingle with the perfume of the roses--but (and here the voices of the
+followers of the prophet dropped in awe) not a single knife or fork or
+spoon or napkin was borrowed! After that, when any of the sisterhood had
+occasion to speak of the absent Mrs. Worthington, whose house was filled
+with new mahogany and brass furniture, they referred to her as the
+Duchess of Grand Rapids, which gave them much comfort.
+
+But joy is short-lived. When Mrs. Worthington came back from Europe and
+opened her house to the City Federation, and gave a colored
+lantern-slide lecture on "An evening with the Old Masters," serving
+punch from her own cut-glass punch bowl instead of renting the
+hand-painted crockery bowl of the queensware store, the old dull pain
+came back into the hearts of the dwellers in the inner circle. Then just
+in the nick of time Mrs. Conklin went to Kansas City and was operated
+on for appendicitis. She came back pale and interesting, and gave her
+club a paper called "Hospital Days," fragrant with iodoform and Henley's
+poems. Miss Larrabee told us that it was almost as pleasant as an
+operation on one's self to hear Mrs. Conklin tell about hers. And they
+thought it was rather brutal--so Miss Larrabee afterward told us--when
+Mrs. Worthington went to the hospital one month, and gave her famous
+Delsarte lecture course the next month, and explained to the women that
+if she wasn't as heavy as she used to be it was because she had had
+everything cut out of her below the windpipe. It seemed to the temple
+priestesses that, considering what a serious time poor dear Priscilla
+Winthrop had gone through, Mrs. Worthington was making light of serious
+things.
+
+There is no doubt that the formal rebellion of Mrs. Worthington, Duchess
+of Grand Rapids, and known of the town's nobility as the Pretender,
+began with the hospital contest. The Pretender planted her siege-guns
+before the walls of the temple of the priestess, and prepared for
+business. The first manoeuver made by the beleaguered one was to give a
+luncheon in the mosque, at which, though it was midwinter, fresh
+tomatoes and fresh strawberries were served, and a real authoress from
+Boston talked upon John Fiske's philosophy and, in the presence of the
+admiring guests, made a new kind of salad dressing for the fresh lettuce
+and tomatoes. Thirty women who watched her forgot what John Fiske's
+theory of the cosmos is, and thirty husbands who afterward ate that
+salad dressing have learned to suffer and be strong. But that salad
+dressing undermined the faith of thirty mere men--raw outlanders to be
+sure--in the social omniscience of Priscilla Winthrop. Of course they
+did not see it made; the spell of the enchantress was not over them; but
+in their homes they maintained that if Priscilla Winthrop didn't know
+any more about cosmic philosophy than to pay a woman forty dollars to
+make a salad dressing like that--and the whole town knows that was the
+price--the vaunted town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with its old
+furniture and new culture, which Priscilla spoke of in such repressed
+ecstasy, is probably no better than Manitou, Colorado, where they get
+their Indian goods from Buffalo, New York.
+
+Such is the perverse reasoning of man. And Mrs. Worthington, having
+lived with considerable of a man for fifteen years, hearing echoes of
+this sedition, attacked the fortification of the faithful on its weakest
+side. She invited the thirty seditious husbands with their wives to a
+beefsteak dinner, where she heaped their plates with planked sirloin,
+garnished the sirloin with big, fat, fresh mushrooms, and topped off the
+meal with a mince pie of her own concoction, which would make a man
+leave home to follow it. She passed cigars at the table, and after the
+guests went into the music-room ten old men with ten old fiddles
+appeared and contested with old-fashioned tunes for a prize, after which
+the company danced four quadrilles and a Virginia reel. The men threw
+down their arms going home and went over in a body to the Pretender. But
+in a social conflict men are mere non-combatants, and their surrender
+did not seriously injure the cause that they deserted.
+
+The war went on without abatement. During the spring that followed the
+winter of the beefsteak dinner many skirmishes, minor engagements,
+ambushes and midnight raids occurred. But the contest was not decisive.
+For purposes of military drill, the defenders of the Winthrop faith
+formed themselves into a Whist Club. _The_ Whist Club they called it,
+just as they spoke of Priscilla Winthrop's gowns as "the black and white
+one," "the blue brocade," "the white china silk," as if no other black
+and white or blue brocade or white china silk gowns had been created in
+the world before and could not be made again by human hands. So, in the
+language of the inner sanctuary, there was "The Whist Club," to the
+exclusion of all other possible human Whist Clubs under the stars. When
+summer came the Whist Club fled as birds to the mountains--save
+Priscilla Winthrop, who went to Duxbury, and came home with a brass
+warming-pan and a set of Royal Copenhagen china that were set up as holy
+objects in the temple.
+
+But Mrs. Worthington went to the National Federation of Women's Clubs,
+made the acquaintance of the women there who wore clothes from Paris,
+began tracing her ancestry back to the Maryland Calverts--on her
+mother's side of the house--brought home a membership in the Daughters
+of the Revolution, the Colonial Dames and a society which referred to
+Charles I. as "Charles Martyr," claimed a Stuart as the rightful king of
+England, affecting to score the impudence of King Edward in sitting on
+another's throne. More than this, Mrs. Worthington had secured the
+promise of Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, Vice-President of the National
+Federation, to visit Cliff Crest, as Mrs. Worthington called the
+Worthington mansion, and she turned up her nose at those who worshiped
+under the towers, turrets and minarets of the Conklin mosque, and played
+the hose of her ridicule on their outer wall that she might have it
+spotless for a target when she got ready to raze it with her big gun.
+
+The week that Ellen Vail Montgomery came to town was a busy one for Miss
+Larrabee. We turned over the whole fourth page of the paper to her for a
+daily society page, and charged the Bee Hive and the White Front Dry
+Goods store people double rates to put their special advertisements on
+that page while the "National Vice," as the Young Prince called her, was
+in town. For the "National Vice" brought the State President and two
+State Vices down, also four District Presidents and six District Vices,
+who, as Miss Larrabee said, were monsters "of so frightful mien, that to
+be hated need but to be seen." The entire delegation of visiting
+stateswomen--Vices and Virtues and Beatitudes as we called them--were
+entertained by Mrs. Worthington at Cliff Crest, and there was so much
+Federation politics going on in our town that the New York _Sun_ took
+five hundred words about it by wire, and Colonel Alphabetical Morrison
+said that with all those dressed-up women about he felt as though he was
+living in a Sunday supplement.
+
+The third day of the ghost-dance at Cliff Crest was to be the day of the
+big event--as the office parlance had it. The ceremonies began at
+sunrise with a breakfast to which half a dozen of the captains and kings
+of the besieging host of the Pretender were bidden. It seems to have
+been a modest orgy, with nothing more astonishing than a new gold-band
+china set to dishearten the enemy. By ten o'clock Priscilla Winthrop and
+the Whist Club had recovered from that; but they had been asked to the
+luncheon--the star feature of the week's round of gayety. It is just as
+well to be frank, and say that they went with fear and trembling. Panic
+and terror were in their ranks, for they knew a crisis was at hand. It
+came when they were "ushered into the dining-hall," as our paper so
+grandly put it, and saw in the great oak-beamed room a table laid on the
+polished bare wood--a table laid for forty-eight guests, with a doily
+for every plate, and every glass, and every salt-cellar, and--here the
+mosque fell on the heads of the howling dervishes--forty-eight
+soup-spoons, forty-eight silver-handled knives and forks; forty-eight
+butter-spreaders, forty-eight spoons, forty-eight salad forks,
+forty-eight ice-cream spoons, forty-eight coffee spoons. Little did it
+avail the beleaguered party to peep slyly under the spoon-handles--the
+word "Sterling" was there, and, more than that, a large, severely plain
+"W" with a crest glared up at them from every piece of silver. The
+service had not been rented. They knew their case was hopeless. And so
+they ate in peace.
+
+When the meal was over it was Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, in her
+thousand-dollar gown, worshiped by the eyes of forty-eight women, who
+put her arm about Priscilla Winthrop and led her into the conservatory,
+where they had "a dear, sweet quarter of an hour," as Mrs. Montgomery
+afterward told her hostess. In that dear, sweet quarter of an hour
+Priscilla Winthrop Conklin unbuckled her social sword and handed it to
+the conqueror, in that she agreed absolutely with Mrs. Montgomery that
+Mrs. Worthington was "perfectly lovely," that she was "delighted to be
+of any service" to Mrs. Worthington; that Mrs. Conklin "was sure no one
+else in our town was so admirably qualified for National Vice" as Mrs.
+Worthington, and that "it would be such a privilege" for Mrs. Conklin to
+suggest Mrs. Worthington's name for the office. And then Mrs.
+Montgomery, "National Vice" and former State Secretary for Vermont of
+the Colonial Dames, kissed Priscilla Winthrop and they came forth
+wet-eyed and radiant, holding each other's hands. When the company had
+been hushed by the magic of a State Vice and two District Virtues,
+Priscilla Winthrop rose and in the sweetest Kansas Bostonese told the
+ladies that she thought this an eminently fitting place to let the
+visiting ladies know how dearly our town esteems its most distinguished
+townswoman, Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington, and that entirely without her
+solicitation, indeed quite without her knowledge, the women of our
+town--and she hoped of our beloved State--were ready now to announce
+that they were unanimous in their wish that Mrs. Worthington should be
+National Vice-President of the Federation of Women's Clubs, and that
+she, the speaker, had entered the contest with her whole soul to bring
+this end to pass. Then there was hand-clapping and handkerchief waving
+and some tears, and a little good, honest Irish hugging, and in the
+twilight two score of women filed down through the formal garden of
+Cliff Crest and walked by twos and threes in to the town.
+
+There was the usual clatter of home-going wagons; lights winked out of
+kitchen windows; the tinkle of distant cow-bells was in the air; on Main
+Street the commerce of the town was gently ebbing, and man and nature
+seemed utterly oblivious of the great event that had happened. The
+course of human events was not changed; the great world rolled on, while
+Priscilla Winthrop went home to a broken shrine to sit among the the
+potsherds.
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
+
+(Written by Mr. White especially for this book.)
+
+
+I was born in Emporia, Kansas, February 10, 1868, when Emporia was a
+pioneer village a hundred miles from a railroad. My father came to
+Emporia in 1859 and my mother in 1855. She was a pioneer school teacher
+and he a pioneer doctor. She was pure bred Irish, and he of Yankee
+lineage since 1639. When I was a year old, Emporia became too effete for
+my parents, and they moved to El Dorado, Kansas. There I grew up. El
+Dorado was a town of a dozen houses, located on the banks of the Walnut,
+a sluggish, but a clear and beautiful prairie stream, rock bottom, and
+spring fed. I grew up in El Dorado, a prairie village boy; went to the
+large stone school house that "reared its awful form" on the hill above
+the town before there were any two-story buildings in the place.
+
+In 1884, I was graduated from the town high school, and went to the
+College of Emporia for a year; worked a year as a printer's devil;
+learned something of the printer's trade; went to school for another
+year, working in the afternoons and Saturdays at the printer's case;
+became a reporter on the _Emporia News_; later went to the State
+University for three years. After more or less studying and working on
+the Lawrence papers, I went back to El Dorado as manager of the _El
+Dorado Republican_ for State Senator T. B. Murdock.
+
+From the _El Dorado Republican_, I went to Kansas City to work for the
+_Kansas City Journal_, and at 24 became an editorial writer on the
+_Kansas City Star_. For three years I worked on the _Star_, during which
+time I married Miss Sallie Lindsay, a Kansas City, Kansas, school
+teacher. In 1895 I bought the _Emporia Gazette_ on credit, without a
+cent in money, and chiefly with the audacity and impudence of youth. It
+was then a little paper; I paid three thousand dollars for it, and I
+have lived in Emporia ever since.
+
+In 1896, I published a book of short stories called _The Real Issue_; in
+1899, another book of short stories called _The Court of Boyville_. In
+1901, I published a third book of short stories called _Stratagems and
+Spoils_; in 1906, _In Our Town_. In 1909, I published my first novel, _A
+Certain Rich Man_. In 1910, I published a book of political essays
+called _The Old Order Changeth_; in 1916, a volume of short stories
+entitled _God's Puppets_. A volume half novel and half travel sketches
+called _The Martial Adventures of Henry & Me_ filled the gap between my
+two novels; and the second novel, _In the Heart of a Fool_ was published
+in 1918.
+
+I am a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters; the Short
+Ballot Association; the International Peace Society; National Civic
+Federation; National Academy of Political Science; have honorary degrees
+from the College of Emporia, Baker University, and Columbia University
+of the City of New York; was regent of the Kansas State University from
+1905 to 1913. Politically I am a Republican and was elected National
+Republican Committeeman from Kansas in 1912, but resigned to be
+Progressive National Committeeman from Kansas that year. I am now a
+member of the Republican National Committee on Platforms and Policies
+appointed by the National Chairman, Will S. Hays. I am a trustee of the
+College of Emporia; a member of the Congregational Church, and of the
+Elks Lodge, and of no other organization.
+                                            WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE.
+
+
+To the above biography a few items about Mr. White's literary work may
+be added. It was through an editorial that he first became famous. This
+appeared in the _Emporia Gazette_ in 1896, with the title, "What's the
+matter with Kansas?" It contained so much good sense, and was written
+in such vigorous English that it was copied in newspapers all over the
+country. Perhaps no other editorial ever brought such sudden recognition
+to its author. In the same year he published his first book, _The Real
+Issue_, a volume of short stories. Some of them pictured the life of a
+small town, some centered about politics, and some were stories of small
+boys. These three subjects were the themes of most of Mr. White's later
+books.
+
+_Stratagems and Spoils_, a volume of short stories, dealt chiefly with
+politics, as seen from the inside. _In Our Town_, from which "The
+Passing of Priscilla Winthrop" is taken, belongs to the studies of
+small-town life. His first novel, _A Certain Rich Man_, was published in
+1909. Its theme is the development of an American multi-millionaire,
+from his beginning as a small business man with a reputation for close
+dealing, his success, his reaching out to greater schemes, growing more
+and more unscrupulous in his methods, until at last he achieves the
+great wealth he had sought, but in winning it he loses his soul.
+
+This book was written during a vacation in the Colorado mountains. His
+family were established in a log cabin, and he set up a tent near by for
+a workshop. This is his account of his method of writing:
+
+
+     My working day was supposed to begin at nine o'clock in the
+     morning, but the truth is I seldom reached the tent before ten.
+     Then it took me some time to get down to work. From then on until
+     late in the afternoon I would sit at my typewriter, chew my tongue,
+     and pound away. Each night I read to my wife what I had written
+     that day, and Mrs. White would criticise it. While my work was
+     redhot I couldn't get any perspective on it--each day's installment
+     seemed to me the finest literature I had ever read. She didn't
+     always agree with me. When she disapproved of anything I threw it
+     away--after a row--and re-wrote it.
+
+
+In his next book, _The Old Order Changeth_, Mr. White turned aside from
+fiction to write a series of papers dealing with various reform
+movements in our national life. He shows how through these much has been
+done to regain for the people the control of municipal and state
+affairs. The material for this book was drawn largely from Mr. White's
+participation in political affairs.
+
+In 1917 he was sent to France as an observer by the American Red Cross.
+The lighter side of what he saw there was told in _The Martial
+Adventures of Henry and Me_. His latest book is a long novel, _In the
+Heart of a Fool_, another study of American life of to-day.
+
+All in all, he stands as one of the chief interpreters in fiction of the
+spirit of the Middle West,--a section of our country which some
+observers say is the most truly American part of America.
+
+
+
+
+A PAIR OF LOVERS
+
+_The typical love story begins by telling us how two young people fall
+in love, allows us to eavesdrop at a proposal, with soft moonlight
+effects, and then requests our presence at a wedding. Or perhaps an
+elopement precedes the wedding, which gives us an added thrill. The
+scene may be laid anywhere, the period may be the present or any time
+back to the Middle Ages, (apparently people did not fall in love at any
+earlier periods), but the formula remains the same. O. Henry wrote a
+love story that does not follow the formula. He called it "The Gift of
+the Magi."_
+
+
+
+
+THE GIFT OF THE MAGI
+
+BY
+
+O. HENRY
+
+
+One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it
+was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the
+grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned
+with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied.
+Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the
+next day would be Christmas.
+
+There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch
+and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that
+life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles
+predominating.
+
+While the mistress of the house is gradually subsiding from the first
+stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per
+week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that
+word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.
+
+In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go,
+and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring.
+Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. James
+Dillingham Young."
+
+The "Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of
+prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the
+income was shrunk to $20, the letters of "Dillingham" looked blurred, as
+though they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and
+unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and
+reached his flat above he was called "Jim" and greatly hugged by Mrs.
+James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all
+very good.
+
+Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag.
+She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a
+gray fence in a gray backyard. To-morrow would be Christmas Day, and she
+had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving
+every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a
+week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated.
+They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a
+happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something
+fine and rare and sterling--something just a little bit near to being
+worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.
+
+There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have
+seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may,
+by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips,
+obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender,
+had mastered the art.
+
+Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. Her
+eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within
+twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its
+full length.
+
+Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which
+they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch that had been
+his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair. Had the
+Queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have
+let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her
+Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all
+his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his
+watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from
+envy.
+
+So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her, rippling and shining like
+a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself
+almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and
+quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or
+two splashed on the worn red carpet.
+
+On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of
+skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered
+out the door and down the stairs to the street.
+
+Where she stopped the sign read: "Mme. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All
+Kinds." One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame,
+large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the "Sofronie."
+
+"Will you buy my hair?" asked Della.
+
+"I buy hair," said Madame. "Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at
+the looks of it."
+
+Down rippled the brown cascade.
+
+"Twenty dollars," said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.
+
+"Give it to me quick," said Della.
+
+Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed
+metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present.
+
+She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else.
+There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all
+of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain, simple and chaste in
+design, properly proclaiming its value by substance and not by
+meretricious ornamentation--as all good things should do. It was even
+worthy of The Watch.
+
+As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim's. It was like him.
+Quietness and value--the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars
+they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With
+that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in
+any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the
+sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a
+chain.
+
+When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence
+and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went
+to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is
+always a tremendous task, dear friends--a mammoth task.
+
+Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls
+that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at
+her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
+
+"If Jim doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second
+look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what
+could I do--oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?"
+
+At seven o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back
+of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
+
+Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on
+the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she
+heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight and she turned
+white for just a moment. She had a habit of saying little silent prayers
+about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered:
+
+"Please God, make him think I am still pretty."
+
+The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and
+very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two--and to be burdened
+with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
+
+Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of
+quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in
+them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger,
+nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments
+that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with
+that peculiar expression on his face.
+
+Della wriggled off the table and went to him.
+
+"Jim, darling," she cried, "don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut
+off and sold it because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without
+giving you a present. It'll grow out again--you won't mind, will you? I
+just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say 'Merry Christmas!'
+Jim, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice--what a beautiful,
+nice gift I've got for you."
+
+"You've cut off your hair?" asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not
+arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.
+
+"Cut it off and sold it," said Della. "Don't you like me just as well,
+anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?"
+
+Jim looked about the room curiously.
+
+"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with an air almost of idiocy.
+
+"You needn't look for it," said Della. "It's sold, I tell you--sold and
+gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you.
+Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with a sudden
+serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I
+put the chops on, Jim?"
+
+Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to awake. He enfolded his Della.
+For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some
+inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a
+million a year--what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would
+give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was
+not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.
+
+Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.
+
+"Don't make any mistake, Dell," he said, "about me. I don't think
+there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that
+could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package
+you may see why you had me going a while at first."
+
+White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an
+ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to
+hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of
+all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
+
+For there lay The combs--the set of combs, side and back, that Della had
+worshipped for long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise
+shell, with jewelled rims--just the shade to wear in the beautiful
+vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had
+simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of
+possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have
+adorned the coveted adornments were gone.
+
+But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up
+with dim eyes and a smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Jim!"
+
+And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, "Oh, oh!"
+
+Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him
+eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with
+reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.
+
+"Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have
+to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I
+want to see how it looks on it."
+
+Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands
+under the back of his head and smiled.
+
+"Dell," said he, "let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em a
+while. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get
+the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on."
+
+The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men--who brought
+gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving
+Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones,
+possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And
+here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two
+foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other
+the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of
+these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the
+wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest.
+Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
+
+
+
+
+O. HENRY
+
+
+He came to New York in 1902 almost unknown. At his death eight years
+later he was the best known writer of short stories in America. His life
+was as full of ups and downs, and of strange turns of fortune, as one of
+his own stories. William Sidney Porter, who always signed his stories as
+O. Henry, was born in Greenboro, North Carolina, September 11, 1862. His
+mother died when he was but three years old; and an aunt, Miss Evelina
+Porter, cared for him and gave him nearly all his education. Books, too,
+were his teachers. He says that between his thirteenth and nineteenth
+years he did more reading than in all the years since. His favorite
+books were _The Arabian Nights_, in Lane's translation, and Burton's
+_Anatomy of Melancholy_, an old English book in which bits of science,
+superstition and reflections upon life were strangely mingled. Other
+books that he enjoyed were the works of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray,
+Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. He early showed ability as a
+cartoonist, and was noted among his friends as a good story teller.
+After school days he became a clerk in his uncle's drug store, and here
+acquired that knowledge which he used to such good effect in stories
+like "Makes the Whole World Kin" and "The Love Philtre of Ikey
+Schoenstein."
+
+His health was not robust, and confinement in a drug store did not
+improve it. A friend who was going to Texas invited him to go along, and
+from 1882 to 1884 he lived on a ranch, acting as cowboy, and at odd
+moments studying French, German and Spanish. Then he went to Austin,
+where at various times he was clerk, editor, bookkeeper, draftsman, bank
+teller, actor and cartoonist. In 1887 he married Miss Athol Roach. He
+began contributing short stories and humorous sketches to newspapers,
+and finally purchased a paper of his own, which he called _Rolling
+Stones_, a humorous weekly. After a year the paper failed, and the
+editor went to Houston to become a reporter on the _Daily Post_. A year
+later, it was discovered that there were serious irregularities in the
+bank in which he had worked in Austin. Several arrests were made, and O.
+Henry was called to stand trial with others. He had not been guilty of
+wrong doing, but the affairs of the bank had been so loosely managed
+that he was afraid that he would be convicted, so he fled to Central
+America. After a year there, he heard that his wife's health was
+failing, and returned to Austin to give himself up. He was found guilty,
+and sentenced to five years in the Ohio penitentiary. His wife died
+before the trial. His time in prison was shortened by good behavior to a
+little more than three years, ending in 1901. He wrote a number of
+stories during this time, sending them to friends who in turn mailed
+them to publishers. The editor of _Ainslie's Magazine_ had printed
+several of them and in 1902 he wrote to O. Henry urging him to come to
+New York, and offering him a hundred dollars apiece for a dozen stories.
+He came, and from that time made New York his home, becoming very fond
+of Little Old-Bagdad-on-the-Subway as he called it.
+
+He had found the work which he wished to do, and he turned out stories
+very rapidly. These were first published in newspapers and magazines,
+then collected in book form. The first of these volumes, _Cabbages and
+Kings_, had Central America as its setting. He said that while there he
+had knocked around chiefly with refugees and consuls. _The Four Million_
+was a group of stories of New York; it contained some of his best tales,
+such as "The Gift of the Magi," and "An Unfinished Story." _The Trimmed
+Lamp_ and _The Voice of the City_ also dealt with New York. _The Gentle
+Grafter_ was a collection of stories about confidence men and "crooks."
+The material for these narratives he had gathered from his companions in
+his prison days. _Heart of the West_ reflects his days on a Texas
+ranch. Other books, more or less miscellaneous in their locality, are
+_Roads of Destiny_, _Options_, _Strictly Business_, _Whirligigs_; and
+_Sixes and Sevens_. He died in New York, June 5, 1910. After his death a
+volume containing some of his earliest work was published under the
+title _Rolling Stones_.
+
+His choice of subjects is thus indicated in the preface to _The Four
+Million_:
+
+"Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only
+'Four Hundred' people in New York who were really worth noticing. But a
+wiser man has arisen--the census taker--and his larger estimate of human
+interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little
+stories of the 'Four Million.'"
+
+It was the common man,--the clerk, the bartender, the policeman, the
+waiter, the tramp, that O. Henry chose for his characters. He loved to
+talk to chance acquaintances on park benches or in cheap lodging houses,
+to see life from their point of view. His stories are often of the
+picaresque type; a name given to a kind of story in which the hero is an
+adventurer, sometimes a rogue. He sees the common humanity, and the
+redeeming traits even in these. His plots usually have a turn of
+surprise at the end; sometimes the very last sentence suddenly
+illuminates the whole story. His style is quick, nervous, often slangy;
+he is wonderfully dextrous in hitting just the right word or phrase. His
+descriptions are notable for telling much in a few words. He has almost
+established a definite type of short story writing, and in many of the
+stories now written one may clearly see the influence of O. Henry.
+
+
+
+
+IN POLITICS
+
+_Politics is democracy in action. If we believe in democracy, we must
+recognize in politics the instrument, however imperfect, through which
+democracy works. Brand Whitlock knew politics, first as a political
+reporter, then as candidate for mayor in four campaigns, in each of
+which he was successful. Under his administration the city of Toledo
+became a better place to live in. In_ THE GOLD BRICK _he describes a
+municipal campaign, as seen from the point of view of the newspaper
+office._
+
+
+
+
+THE GOLD BRICK
+
+BY
+
+BRAND WHITLOCK
+
+
+Ten thousand dollars a year! Neil Kittrell left the office of the
+_Morning Telegraph_ in a daze. He was insensible of the raw February
+air, heedless of sloppy pavements, the gray day had suddenly turned
+gold. He could not realize it all at once; ten thousand a year--for him
+and Edith! His heart swelled with love of Edith, she had sacrificed so
+much to become the wife of a man who had tried to make an artist of
+himself, and of whom fate, or economic determinism, or something, had
+made a cartoonist. What a surprise for her! He must hurry home.
+
+In this swelling of his heart he felt a love not only of Edith but of
+the whole world. The people he met seemed dear to him; he felt friendly
+with every one, and beamed on perfect strangers with broad, cheerful
+smiles. He stopped to buy some flowers for Edith--daffodils, or tulips,
+which promised spring, and he took the daffodils, because the girl said:
+
+"I think yellow is such a spirituelle color, don't you?" and inclined
+her head in a most artistic manner.
+
+But daffodils, after all, which would have been much the day before,
+seemed insufficient in the light of new prosperity, and Kittrell bought
+a large azalea, beautiful in its graceful spread of pink blooms.
+
+"Where shall I send it?" asked the girl, whose cheeks were as pink as
+azaleas themselves.
+
+"I think I'll call a cab and take it to her myself," said Kittrell.
+
+And she sighed over the romance of this rich young gentleman and the
+girl of the azalea, who, no doubt, was as beautiful as the young woman
+who was playing _Lottie, the Poor Saleslady_ at the Lyceum that very
+week.
+
+Kittrell and the azalea bowled along Claybourne Avenue; he leaned back
+on the cushions, and adopted the expression of ennui appropriate to that
+thoroughfare. Would Edith now prefer Claybourne Avenue? With ten
+thousand a year they could, perhaps--and yet, at first it would be best
+not to put on airs, but to go right on as they were, in the flat. Then
+the thought came to him that now, as the cartoonist on the _Telegraph_,
+his name would become as well known in Claybourne Avenue as it had been
+in the homes of the poor and humble during his years on the _Post_. And
+his thoughts flew to those homes where tired men at evening looked for
+his cartoons and children laughed at his funny pictures. It gave him a
+pang; he had felt a subtle bond between himself and all those thousands
+who read the _Post_. It was hard to leave them. The _Post_ might be
+yellow, but as the girl had said, yellow was a spiritual color, and the
+_Post_ brought something into their lives--lives that were scorned by
+the _Telegraph_ and by these people on the avenue. Could he make new
+friends here where the cartoons he drew and the _Post_ that printed them
+had been contemned, if not despised? His mind flew back to the dingy
+office of the _Post_; to the boys there, the whole good-natured,
+happy-go-lucky gang; and to Hardy--ah, Hardy!--who had been so good to
+him, and given him his big chance, had taken such pains and interest,
+helping him with ideas and suggestions, criticism and sympathy. To tell
+Hardy that he was going to leave him, here on the eve of the
+campaign--and Clayton, the mayor, he would have to tell him, too--oh,
+the devil! Why must he think of these things now?
+
+After all, when he had reached home, and had run up-stairs with the news
+and the azalea, Edith did not seem delighted.
+
+"But, dearie, business is business," he urged, "and we need the money!"
+
+"Yes, I know; doubtless you're right. Only please don't say 'business
+is business;' it isn't like you, and--"
+
+"But think what it will mean--ten thousand a year!"
+
+"Oh, Neil, I've lived on ten thousand a year before, and I never had
+half the fun that I had when we were getting along on twelve hundred."
+
+"Yes, but then we were always dreaming of the day when I'd make a lot;
+we lived on that hope, didn't we?"
+
+Edith laughed. "You used to say we lived on love."
+
+"You're not serious." He turned to gaze moodily out of the window. And
+then she left the azalea, and perched on the flat arm of his chair.
+
+"Dearest," she said, "I am serious. I know all this means to you. We're
+human, and we don't like to 'chip at crusts like Hindus,' even for the
+sake of youth and art. I never had illusions about love in a cottage and
+all that. Only, dear, I have been happy, so very happy, with you,
+because--well, because I was living in an atmosphere of honest purpose,
+honest ambition, and honest desire to do some good thing in the world. I
+had never known such an atmosphere before. At home, you know, father and
+Uncle James and the boys--well, it was all money, money, money with
+them, and they couldn't understand why I--"
+
+"Could marry a poor newspaper artist? That's just the point."
+
+She put her hand to his lips.
+
+"Now, dear! If they couldn't understand, so much the worse for them. If
+they thought it meant sacrifice to me, they were mistaken. I have been
+happy in this little flat; only--" she leaned back and inclined her head
+with her eyes asquint--"only the paper in this room is atrocious; it's a
+typical landlord's selection--McGaw picked it out. You see what it means
+to be merely rich."
+
+She was so pretty thus that he kissed her, and then she went on:
+
+"And so, dear, if I didn't seem to be as impressed and delighted as you
+hoped to find me, it is because I was thinking of Mr. Hardy and the
+poor, dear common little _Post_, and then--of Mr. Clayton. Did you think
+of him?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You'll have to--to cartoon him?"
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+The fact he had not allowed himself to face was close to both of them,
+and the subject was dropped until, just as he was going down-town--this
+time to break the news to Hardy--he went into the room he sarcastically
+said he might begin to call his studio, now that he was getting ten
+thousand a year, to look for a sketch he had promised Nolan for the
+sporting page. And there on his drawing-board was an unfinished cartoon,
+a drawing of the strong face of John Clayton. He had begun it a few days
+before to use on the occasion of Clayton's renomination. It had been a
+labor of love, and Kittrell suddenly realized how good it was. He had
+put into it all of his belief in Clayton, all of his devotion to the
+cause for which Clayton toiled and sacrificed, and in the simple lines
+he experienced the artist's ineffable felicity; he had shown how good,
+how noble, how true a man Clayton was. All at once he realized the
+sensation the cartoon would produce, how it would delight and hearten
+Clayton's followers, how it would please Hardy, and how it would touch
+Clayton. It would be a tribute to the man and the friendship, but now a
+tribute broken, unfinished. Kittrell gazed a moment longer, and in that
+moment Edith came.
+
+"The dear, beautiful soul!" she exclaimed softly. "Neil, it is
+wonderful. It is not a cartoon; it is a portrait. It shows what you
+might do with a brush."
+
+Kittrell could not speak, and he turned the drawing-board to the wall.
+
+When he had gone, Edith sat and thought--of Neil, of the new position,
+of Clayton. He had loved Neil, and been so proud of his work; he had
+shown a frank, naive pleasure in the cartoons Neil had made of him. That
+last time he was there, thought Edith, he had said that without Neil the
+"good old cause," as he called it, using Whitman's phrase, could never
+have triumphed in that town. And now, would he come again? Would he ever
+stand in that room and, with his big, hearty laugh, clasp an arm around
+Neil's shoulder, or speak of her in his good friendly way as "the little
+woman?" Would he come now, in the terrible days of the approaching
+campaign, for rest and sympathy--come as he used to come in other
+campaigns, worn and weary from all the brutal opposition, the
+vilification and abuse and mud-slinging? She closed her eyes. She could
+not think that far.
+
+Kittrell found the task of telling Hardy just as difficult as he
+expected it to be, but by some mercy it did not last long. Explanation
+had not been necessary; he had only to make the first hesitating
+approaches, and Hardy understood. Hardy was, in a way, hurt; Kittrell
+saw that, and rushed to his own defense:
+
+"I hate to go, old man. I don't like it a little bit--but, you know,
+business is business, and we need the money."
+
+He even tried to laugh as he advanced this last conclusive reason, and
+Hardy, for all he showed in voice or phrase, may have agreed with him.
+
+"It's all right, Kit," he said. "I'm sorry; I wish we could pay you
+more, but--well, good luck."
+
+That was all. Kittrell gathered up the few articles he had at the
+office, gave Nolan his sketch, bade the boys good-by--bade them good-by
+as if he were going on a long journey, never to see them more--and then
+he went.
+
+After he had made the break it did not seem so bad as he had
+anticipated. At first things went on smoothly enough. The campaign had
+not opened, and he was free to exercise his talents outside the
+political field. He drew cartoons dealing with banal subjects, touching
+with the gentle satire of his humorous pencil foibles which all the
+world agreed about, and let vital questions alone. And he and Edith
+enjoyed themselves: indulged oftener in things they loved; went more
+frequently to the theater; appeared at recitals; dined now and then
+downtown. They began to realize certain luxuries they had not known for
+a long time--some he himself had never known, some that Edith had not
+known since she left her father's home to become his bride. In more
+subtle ways, too, Kittrell felt the change: there was a sense of larger
+leisure; the future beamed with a broader and brighter light; he formed
+plans, among which the old dream of going ere long to Paris for serious
+study took its dignified place. And then there was the sensation his
+change had created in the newspaper world; that the cartoons signed
+"Kit," which formerly appeared in the _Post_, should now adorn the broad
+page of the _Telegraph_ was a thing to talk about at the press club; the
+fact of his large salary got abroad in that little world as well, and,
+after the way of that world, managed to exaggerate itself, as most facts
+did. He began to be sensible of attentions from men of prominence--small
+things, mere nods in the street, perhaps, or smiles in the theater
+foyer, but enough to show that they recognized him. What those children
+of the people, those working-men and women who used to be his unknown
+and admiring friends in the old days on the _Post_, thought of
+him--whether they missed him, whether they deplored his change as an
+apostasy or applauded it as a promotion--he did not know. He did not
+like to think about it.
+
+But March came, and the politicians began to bluster like the season.
+Late one afternoon he was on his way to the office with a cartoon, the
+first in which he had seriously to attack Clayton. Benson, the managing
+editor of the _Telegraph_, had conceived it, and Kittrell had worked on
+it that day in sickness of heart. Every line of this new presentation of
+Clayton had cut him like some biting acid; but he had worked on, trying
+to reassure himself with the argument that he was a mere agent, devoid
+of personal responsibility. But it had been hard, and when Edith, after
+her custom, had asked to see it, he had said:
+
+"Oh, you don't want to see it; it's no good."
+
+"Is it of--him?" she had asked.
+
+And when he nodded she had gone away without another word. Now, as he
+hurried through the crowded streets, he was conscious that it was no
+good indeed; and he was divided between the artist's regret and the
+friend's joy in the fact. But it made him tremble. Was his hand to
+forget its cunning? And then, suddenly, he heard a familiar voice, and
+there beside him, with his hand on his shoulder, stood the mayor.
+
+"Why, Neil, my boy, how are you?" he said, and he took Kittrell's hand
+as warmly as ever. For a moment Kittrell was relieved, and then his
+heart sank; for he had a quick realization that it was the coward within
+him that felt the relief, and the man the sickness. If Clayton had
+reproached him, or cut him, it would have made it easier; but Clayton
+did none of these things, and Kittrell was irresistibly drawn to the
+subject himself.
+
+"You heard of my--new job?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," said Clayton, "I heard."
+
+"Well--" Kittrell began.
+
+"I'm sorry," Clayton said.
+
+"So was I," Kittrell hastened to say. "But I felt it--well, a duty, some
+way--to Edith. You know--we--need the money." And he gave the cynical
+laugh that went with the argument.
+
+"What does _she_ think? Does she feel that way about it?"
+
+Kittrell laughed, not cynically now, but uneasily and with
+embarrassment, for Clayton's blue eyes were on him, those eyes that
+could look into men and understand them so.
+
+"Of course you know," Kittrell went on nervously, "there is nothing
+personal in this. We newspaper fellows simply do what we are told; we
+obey orders like soldiers, you know. With the policy of the paper we
+have nothing to do. Just like Dick Jennings, who was a red-hot
+free-trader and used to write free-trade editorials for the _Times_--he
+went over to the _Telegraph_, you remember, and writes all those
+protection arguments."
+
+The mayor did not seem to be interested in Dick Jennings, or in the
+ethics of his profession.
+
+"Of course, you know I'm for you, Mr. Clayton, just exactly as I've
+always been. I'm going to vote for you."
+
+This did not seem to interest the mayor, either.
+
+"And, maybe, you know--I thought, perhaps," he snatched at this bright
+new idea that had come to him just in the nick of time; "that I might
+help you by my cartoons in the _Telegraph_; that is, I might keep them
+from being as bad as they might--"
+
+"But that wouldn't be dealing fairly with your new employers, Neil," the
+mayor said.
+
+Kittrell was making more and more a mess of this whole miserable
+business, and he was basely glad when they reached the corner.
+
+"Well, good-by, my boy," said the mayor, as they parted. "Remember me to
+the little woman."
+
+Kittrell watched him as he went on down the avenue, swinging along in
+his free way, the broad felt hat he wore riding above all the other hats
+in the throng that filled the sidewalk; and Kittrell sighed in deep
+depression.
+
+When he turned in his cartoon, Benson scanned it a moment, cocked his
+head this side and that, puffed his briar pipe, and finally said:
+
+"I'm afraid this is hardly up to you. This figure of Clayton, here--it
+hasn't got the stuff in it. You want to show him as he _is_. We want the
+people to know what a four-flushing, hypocritical, demagogical
+blatherskite he is--with all his rot about the people and their damned
+rights!"
+
+Benson was all unconscious of the inconsistency of having concern for a
+people he so despised, and Kittrell did not observe it, either. He was
+on the point of defending Clayton, but he restrained himself and
+listened to Benson's suggestions. He remained at the office for two
+hours, trying to change the cartoon to Benson's satisfaction, with a
+growing hatred of the work and a disgust with himself that now and then
+almost drove him to mad destruction. He felt like splashing the piece
+with India ink, or ripping it with his knife. But he worked on, and
+submitted it again. He had failed, of course; failed to express in it
+that hatred of a class which Benson unconsciously disguised as a hatred
+of Clayton, a hatred which Kittrell could not express because he did not
+feel it; and he failed because art deserts her devotees when they are
+false to truth.
+
+"Well, it'll have to do," said Benson, as he looked it over; "but let's
+have a little more to the next one. Damn it! I wish I could draw. I'd
+cartoon the crook!"
+
+In default of which ability, Benson set himself to write one of those
+savage editorials in which he poured out on Clayton that venom of which
+he seemed to have such an inexhaustible supply.
+
+But on one point Benson was right: Kittrell was not up to himself. As
+the campaign opened, as the city was swept with the excitement of it,
+with meetings at noon-day and at night, office-seekers flying about in
+automobiles, walls covered with pictures of candidates, hand-bills
+scattered in the streets to swirl in the wild March winds, and men
+quarreling over whether Clayton or Ellsworth should be mayor, Kittrell
+had to draw a political cartoon each day; and as he struggled with his
+work, less and less the old joy came to cheer and spur him on. To read
+the ridicule, the abuse, which the _Telegraph_ heaped on Clayton, the
+distortion of facts concerning his candidature, the unfair reports of
+his meetings, sickened him, and more than all, he was filled with
+disgust as he tried to match in caricature these libels of the man he so
+loved and honored. It was bad enough to have to flatter Clayton's
+opponent, to picture him as a noble, disinterested character, ready to
+sacrifice himself for the public weal. Into his pictures of this man,
+attired in the long black coat of conventional respectability, with the
+smug face of pharisaism, he could get nothing but cant and hypocrisy;
+but in his caricatures of Clayton there was that which pained him
+worse--disloyalty, untruth, and now and then, to the discerning few who
+knew the tragedy of Kittrell's soul, there was pity. And thus his work
+declined in value; lacking all sincerity, all faith in itself or its
+purpose, it became false, uncertain, full of jarring notes, and, in
+short, never once rang true. As for Edith, she never discussed his work
+now; she spoke of the campaign little, and yet he knew she was deeply
+concerned, and she grew hot with resentment at the methods of the
+_Telegraph_. Her only consolation was derived from the _Post_, which of
+course, supported Clayton; and the final drop of bitterness in
+Kittrell's cup came one evening when he realized that she was following
+with sympathetic interest the cartoons in that paper.
+
+For the _Post_ had a new cartoonist, Banks, a boy whom Hardy had picked
+up somewhere and was training to the work Kittrell had laid down. To
+Kittrell there was a cruel fascination in the progress Banks was making;
+he watched it with a critical, professional eye, at first with
+amusement, then with surprise, and now at last, in the discovery of
+Edith's interest, with a keen jealousy of which he was ashamed. The boy
+was crude and untrained; his work was not to be compared with
+Kittrell's, master of line that he was, but Kittrell saw that it had the
+thing his work now lacked, the vital, primal thing--sincerity, belief,
+love. The spark was there, and Kittrell knew how Hardy would nurse that
+spark and fan it, and keep it alive and burning until it should
+eventually blaze up in a fine white flame. And Kittrell realized, as the
+days went by, that Banks' work was telling, and that his own was
+failing. He had, from the first missed the atmosphere of the _Post_,
+missed the _camaraderie_ of the congenial spirits there, animated by a
+common purpose, inspired and led by Hardy, whom they all loved--loved as
+he himself once loved him, loved as he loved him still--and dared not
+look him in the face when they met!
+
+He found the atmosphere of the _Telegraph_ alien and distasteful. There
+all was different; the men had little joy in their work, little interest
+in it, save perhaps the newspaper man's inborn love of a good story or a
+beat. They were all cynical, without loyalty or faith; they secretly
+made fun of the _Telegraph_, of its editors and owners; they had no
+belief in its cause; and its pretensions to respectability, its parade
+of virtue, excited only their derision. And slowly it began to dawn on
+Kittrell that the great moral law worked always and everywhere, even on
+newspapers, and that there was reflected inevitably and logically in the
+work of the men on that staff the hatred, the lack of principle, the
+bigotry and intolerance of its proprietors; and this same lack of
+principle tainted and made meretricious his own work, and enervated the
+editorials so that the _Telegraph_, no matter how carefully edited or
+how dignified in typographical appearance, was, nevertheless, without
+real influence in the community.
+
+Meanwhile Clayton was gaining ground. It was less than two weeks before
+election. The campaign waxed more and more bitter, and as the forces
+opposed to him foresaw defeat, they became ugly in spirit, and
+desperate. The _Telegraph_ took on a tone more menacing and brutal, and
+Kittrell knew that the crisis had come. The might of the powers massed
+against Clayton appalled Kittrell; they thundered at him through many
+brazen mouths, but Clayton held on his high way unperturbed. He was
+speaking by day and night to thousands. Such meetings he had never had
+before. Kittrell had visions of him before those immense audiences in
+halls, in tents, in the raw open air of that rude March weather, making
+his appeals to the heart of the great mass. A fine, splendid, romantic
+figure he was, striking to the imagination, this champion of the
+people's cause, and Kittrell longed for the lost chance. Oh, for one day
+on the _Post_ now!
+
+One morning at breakfast, as Edith read the _Telegraph_, Kittrell saw
+the tears well slowly in her brown eyes.
+
+"Oh," she said, "it is shameful!" She clenched her little fists. "Oh, if
+I were only a man I'd--" She could not in her impotent feminine rage say
+what she would do; she could only grind her teeth. Kittrell bent his
+head over his plate; his coffee choked him.
+
+"Dearest," she said presently, in another tone, "tell me, how is he? Do
+you--ever see him? Will he win?"
+
+"No, I never see him. But he'll win; I wouldn't worry."
+
+"He used to come here," she went on, "to rest a moment, to escape from
+all this hateful confusion and strife. He is killing himself! And they
+aren't worth it--those ignorant people--they aren't worth such
+sacrifices."
+
+He got up from the table and turned away, and then realizing quickly,
+she flew to his side and put her arms about his neck and said:
+
+"Forgive me, dearest, I didn't mean--only--"
+
+"Oh, Edith," he said, "this is killing me. I feel like a dog."
+
+"Don't dear; he is big enough, and good enough; he will understand."
+
+"Yes; that only makes it harder, only makes it hurt the more."
+
+That afternoon, in the car, he heard no talk but of the election; and
+down-town, in a cigar store where he stopped for cigarettes, he heard
+some men talking mysteriously, in the hollow voice of rumor, of some
+sensation, some scandal. It alarmed him, and as he went into the office
+he met Manning, the _Telegraph_'s political man.
+
+"Tell me, Manning," Kittrell said, "how does it look?"
+
+"Damn bad for us."
+
+"For us?"
+
+"Well, for our mob of burglars and second story workers here--the gang
+we represent." He took a cigarette from the box Kittrell was opening.
+
+"And will he win?"
+
+"Will he win?" said Manning, exhaling the words on the thin level stream
+of smoke that came from his lungs. "Will he win? In a walk, I tell you.
+He's got 'em beat to a standstill right now. That's the dope."
+
+"But what about this story of--"
+
+"Aw, that's all a pipe-dream of Burns'. I'm running it in the morning,
+but it's nothing; it's a shine. They're big fools to print it at all.
+But it's their last card; they're desperate. They won't stop at
+anything, or at any crime, except those requiring courage. Burns is in
+there with Benson now; so is Salton, and old man Glenn, and the rest of
+the bunco family. They're framing it up. When I saw old Glenn go in,
+with his white side-whiskers, I knew the widow and the orphan were in
+danger again, and that he was going bravely to the front for 'em. Say,
+that young Banks is comin', isn't he? That's a peach, that cartoon of
+his to-night."
+
+Kittrell went on down the hall to the art-room to wait until Benson
+should be free. But it was not long until he was sent for, and as he
+entered the managing editor's room he was instantly sensible of the
+somber atmosphere of a grave and solemn council of war. Benson
+introduced him to Glenn, the banker, to Salton, the party boss, and to
+Burns, the president of the street-car company; and as Kittrell sat down
+he looked about him, and could scarcely repress a smile as he recalled
+Manning's estimate of Glenn. The old man sat there, as solemn and
+unctuous as ever he had in his pew at church. Benson, red of face, was
+more plainly perturbed, but Salton was as reserved, as immobile, as
+inscrutable as ever, his narrow, pointed face, with its vulpine
+expression, being perhaps paler than usual. Benson had on his desk
+before him the cartoon Kittrell had finished that day.
+
+"Mr. Kittrell," Benson began, "we've been talking over the political
+situation, and I was showing these gentlemen this cartoon. It isn't, I
+fear, in your best style; it lacks the force, the argument, we'd like
+just at this time. That isn't the _Telegraph_ Clayton, Mr. Kittrell." He
+pointed with the amber stem of his pipe. "Not at all. Clayton is a
+strong, smart, unscrupulous, dangerous man! We've reached a crisis in
+this campaign; if we can't turn things in the next three days, we're
+lost, that's all; we might as well face it. To-morrow we make an
+important revelation concerning the character of Clayton, and we want to
+follow it up the morning after by a cartoon that will be a stunner, a
+clencher. We have discussed it here among ourselves, and this is our
+idea."
+
+Benson drew a crude, bald outline, indicating the cartoon they wished
+Kittrell to draw. The idea was so coarse, so brutal, so revolting, that
+Kittrell stood aghast, and, as he stood, he was aware of Salton's little
+eyes fixed on him. Benson waited; they all waited.
+
+"Well," said Benson, "what do you think of it?"
+
+Kittrell paused an instant, and then said:
+
+"I won't draw it; that's what I think of it."
+
+Benson flushed angrily and looked up at him.
+
+"We are paying you a very large salary, Mr. Kittrell, and your work, if
+you will pardon me, has not been up to what we were led to expect."
+
+"You are quite right, Mr. Benson, but I can't draw that cartoon."
+
+"Well, great God!" yelled Burns, "what have we got here--a gold brick?"
+He rose with a vivid sneer on his red face, plunged his hands in his
+pockets, and took two or three nervous strides across the room. Kittrell
+looked at him, and slowly his eyes blazed out of a face that had gone
+white on the instant.
+
+"What did you say, sir?" he demanded.
+
+Burns thrust his red face, with its prognathic jaw, menacingly toward
+Kittrell.
+
+"I said that in you we'd got a gold brick."
+
+"You?" said Kittrell. "What have you to do with it? I don't work for
+you."
+
+"You don't? Well, I guess it's us that puts up--"
+
+"Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" said Glenn, waving a white, pacificatory hand.
+
+"Yes, let me deal with this, if you please," said Benson, looking hard
+at Burns. The street-car man sneered again, then, in ostentatious
+contempt, looked out the window. And in the stillness Benson continued:
+
+"Mr. Kittrell, think a minute. Is your decision final?"
+
+"It is final, Mr. Benson," said Kittrell. "And as for you, Burns," he
+glared angrily at the man, "I wouldn't draw that cartoon for all the
+dirty money that all the bribing street-car companies in the world could
+put into Mr. Glenn's bank here. Good evening, gentlemen."
+
+It was not until he stood again in his own home that Kittrell felt the
+physical effects which the spiritual squalor of such a scene was certain
+to produce in a nature like his.
+
+"Neil! What is the matter?" Edith fluttered toward him in alarm.
+
+He sank into a chair, and for a moment he looked as if he would faint,
+but he looked wanly up at her and said:
+
+"Nothing; I'm all right; just a little weak. I've gone through a
+sickening, horrible scene--"
+
+"Dearest!"
+
+"And I'm off the _Telegraph_--and a man once more!"
+
+He bent over, with his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and
+when Edith put her calm, caressing hand on his brow, she found that it
+was moist from nervousness. Presently he was able to tell her the whole
+story.
+
+"It was, after all, Edith, a fitting conclusion to my experience on the
+_Telegraph_. I suppose, though, that to people who are used to ten
+thousand a year such scenes are nothing at all." She saw in this trace
+of his old humor that he was himself again, and she hugged his head to
+her bosom.
+
+"Oh, dearest," she said, "I'm proud of you--and happy again."
+
+They were, indeed, both happy, happier than they had been in weeks.
+
+The next morning after breakfast, she saw by his manner, by the
+humorous, almost comical expression about his eyes, that he had an idea.
+In this mood of satisfaction--this mood that comes too seldom in the
+artist's life--she knew it was wise to let him alone. And he lighted his
+pipe and went to work. She heard him now and then, singing or whistling
+or humming; she scented his pipe, then cigarettes; then, at last, after
+two hours, he called in a loud, triumphant tone:
+
+"Oh, Edith!"
+
+She was at the door in an instant, and, waving his hand grandly at his
+drawing-board, he turned to her with that expression which connotes the
+greatest joy gods or mortals can know--the joy of beholding one's own
+work and finding it good. He had, as she saw, returned to the cartoon of
+Clayton he had laid aside when the tempter came; and now it was
+finished. Its simple lines revealed Clayton's character, as the
+sufficient answer to all the charges the _Telegraph_ might make against
+him. Edith leaned against the door and looked long and critically.
+
+"It was fine before," she said presently; "it's better now. Before it
+was a portrait of the man; this shows his soul."
+
+"Well, it's how he looks to me," said Neil, "after a month in which to
+appreciate him."
+
+"But what," she said, stooping and peering at the edge of the drawing,
+where, despite much knife-scraping, vague figures appeared, "what's
+that?"
+
+"Oh, I'm ashamed to tell you," he said. "I'll have to paste over that
+before it's electrotyped. You see, I had a notion of putting in the
+gang, and I drew four little figures--Benson, Burns, Salton and Glenn;
+they were plotting--oh, it was foolish and unworthy. I decided I didn't
+want anything of hatred in it--just as he wouldn't want anything of
+hatred in it; so I rubbed them out."
+
+"Well, I'm glad. It is beautiful; it makes up for everything; it's an
+appreciation--worthy of the man."
+
+When Kittrell entered the office of the _Post_, the boys greeted him
+with delight, and his presence made a sensation, for there had been
+rumors of the break which the absence of a "Kit" cartoon in the
+_Telegraph_ that morning had confirmed. But, if Hardy was surprised, his
+surprise was swallowed up in his joy, and Kittrell was grateful to him
+for the delicacy with which he touched the subject that consumed the
+newspaper and political world with curiosity.
+
+"I'm glad, Kit," was all that he said. "You know that."
+
+Then he forgot everything in the cartoon, and he showed his instant
+recognition of its significance by snatching out his watch, pushing a
+button, and saying to Garland, who came to the door in his shirtsleeves:
+
+"Tell Nic to hold the first edition for a five-column first-page
+cartoon. And send this up right away."
+
+They had a last look at it before it went, and after gazing a moment in
+silence Hardy said:
+
+"It's the greatest thing you ever did, Kit, and it comes at the
+psychological moment. It'll elect him."
+
+"Oh, he was elected anyhow."
+
+Hardy shook his head, and in the movement Kittrell saw how the strain of
+the campaign had told on him. "No, he wasn't; the way they've been
+hammering him is something fierce; and the _Telegraph_--well, your
+cartoons and all, you know."
+
+"But my cartoons in the _Telegraph_ were rotten. Any work that's not
+sincere, not intellectually honest----"
+
+Hardy interrupted him:
+
+"Yes; but, Kit, you're so good that your rotten is better than 'most
+anybody's best." He smiled, and Kittrell blushed and looked away.
+
+Hardy was right. The "Kit" cartoon, back in the _Post_, created its
+sensation, and after it appeared the political reporters said it had
+started a landslide to Clayton; that the betting was 4 to 1 and no
+takers, and that it was all over but the shouting.
+
+That night, as they were at dinner, the telephone rang, and in a minute
+Neil knew by Edith's excited and delighted reiteration of "yes," "yes,"
+who had called up. And he then heard her say:
+
+"Indeed I will; I'll come every night and sit in the front seat."
+
+When Kittrell displaced Edith at the telephone, he heard the voice of
+John Clayton, lower in register and somewhat husky after four weeks'
+speaking, but more musical than ever in Kittrell's ears when it said:
+
+"I just told the little woman, Neil, that I didn't know how to say it,
+so I wanted her to thank you for me. It was beautiful in you, and I wish
+I were worthy of it; it was simply your own good soul expressing
+itself."
+
+And it was the last delight to Kittrell to hear that voice and to know
+that all was well.
+
+But one question remained unsettled. Kittrell had been on the
+_Telegraph_ a month, and his contract differed from that ordinarily made
+by the members of a newspaper staff in that he was paid by the year,
+though in monthly instalments. Kittrell knew that he had broken his
+contract on grounds which the sordid law would not see or recognize and
+the average court think absurd, and that the _Telegraph_ might legally
+refuse to pay him at all. He hoped the _Telegraph_ would do this! But it
+did not; on the contrary, he received the next day a check for his
+month's work. He held it up for Edith's inspection.
+
+"Of course, I'll have to send it back," he said.
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"Do you think me quixotic?"
+
+"Well, we're poor enough as it is--let's have some luxuries; let's be
+quixotic until after election, at least."
+
+"Sure," said Neil; "just what I was thinking. I'm going to do a cartoon
+every day for the _Post_ until election day, and I'm not going to take a
+cent. I don't want to crowd Banks out, you know, and I want to do my
+part for Clayton and the cause, and do it, just once, for the pure love
+of the thing."
+
+Those last days of the campaign were, indeed, luxuries to Kittrell and
+to Edith, days of work and fun and excitement. All day Kittrell worked
+on his cartoons, and in the evening they went to Clayton's meetings. The
+experience was a revelation to them both--the crowds, the waiting for
+the singing of the automobile's siren, the wild cheers that greeted
+Clayton, and then his speech, his appeals to the best there was in men.
+He had never made such speeches, and long afterward Edith could hear
+those cheers and see the faces of those working-men aglow with the hope,
+the passion, the fervent religion of democracy. And those days came to
+their glad climax that night when they met at the office of the _Post_
+to receive the returns, in an atmosphere quivering with excitement, with
+messenger boys and reporters coming and going, and in the street outside
+an immense crowd, swaying and rocking between the walls on either side,
+with screams and shouts and mad huzzas, and the wild blowing of
+horns--all the hideous, happy noise an American election-night crowd can
+make.
+
+Late in the evening Clayton had made his way, somehow unnoticed, through
+the crowd, and entered the office. He was happy in the great triumph he
+would not accept as personal, claiming it always for the cause; but as
+he dropped into the chair Hardy pushed toward him, they all saw how
+weary he was.
+
+Just at that moment the roar in the street below swelled to a mighty
+crescendo, and Hardy cried:
+
+"Look!"
+
+They ran to the window. The boys up-stairs who were manipulating the
+stereopticon, had thrown on the screen an enormous picture of Clayton,
+the portrait Kittrell had drawn for his cartoon.
+
+"Will you say now there isn't the personal note in it?" Edith asked.
+
+Clayton glanced out the window, across the dark, surging street, at the
+picture.
+
+"Oh, it's not me they're cheering for," he said; "it's for Kit, here."
+
+"Well, perhaps some of it's for him," Edith admitted loyally.
+
+They were silent, seized irresistibly by the emotion that mastered the
+mighty crowd in the dark streets below. Edith was strangely moved.
+Presently she could speak:
+
+"Is there anything sweeter in life than to know that you have done a
+good thing--and done it well?"
+
+"Yes," said Clayton, "just one: to have a few friends who understand."
+
+"You are right," said Edith. "It is so with art, and it must be so with
+life; it makes an art of life."
+
+It was dark enough there by the window for her to slip her hand into
+that of Neil, who had been musing silently on the crowd.
+
+"I can never say again," she said softly, "that those people are not
+worth sacrifice. They are worth all; they are everything; they are the
+hope of the world; and their longings and their needs, and the
+possibility of bringing them to pass, are all that give significance to
+life."
+
+"That's what America is for," said Clayton, "and it's worth while to be
+allowed to help even in a little way to make, as old Walt says, 'a
+nation of friends, of equals.'"
+
+
+
+
+BRAND WHITLOCK
+
+
+Brand Whitlock, lawyer, politician, author and ambassador, was born in
+Urbana, Ohio, March 4, 1869. His father, Rev. Elias D. Whitlock, was a
+minister of power and a man of strong convictions. Brand was educated
+partly in the public schools, partly by private teaching. He never went
+to college, but this did not mean that his education stopped; he kept on
+studying, and to such good purpose that in 1916 Brown University gave
+him the degree of Doctor of Laws. Like many other writers, he received
+his early training in newspaper work. At eighteen he became a reporter
+on a Toledo paper, and three years later was reporter and political
+correspondent for the Chicago _Herald_. While in Chicago he was a member
+of the old Whitechapel Club, a group of newspaper men which included F.
+P. Dunne, the creator of _Mr. Dooley_; Alfred Henry Lewis, author of
+_Wolfville_; and George Ade, whose _Fables in Slang_ were widely popular
+a few years ago.
+
+He was strongly drawn to the law, and in 1893 went to Springfield,
+Illinois, and entered a law office as a student. He was admitted to the
+bar, and shortly after went to Toledo, Ohio, to practice. In eight years
+he had established himself as a successful lawyer, and something more.
+He was recognized as a man of high executive ability, and as being
+absolutely "square." Such men are none too common, and Toledo decided
+that it needed him in the mayor's chair. Without a political machine,
+without a platform, and without a party, he was elected mayor in 1905,
+reelected in 1907, again in 1909, again in 1911--and could probably have
+had the office for life if he had been willing to accept it. In the
+meantime he had written several successful novels; he wanted more time
+for writing, and when in 1913 he was offered the post of United States
+Minister to Belgium, he accepted, thinking that he would find in this
+position an opportunity to observe life from a new angle, and leisure
+for literary work. In August 1914 he was on his vacation, and had begun
+work on a new novel. In his own words:
+
+
+     I had the manuscript of my novel before me.... It was somehow just
+     beginning to take form, beginning to show some signs of life; at
+     times some characters in it gave evidence of being human and alive;
+     they were beginning to act now and then spontaneously, beginning to
+     say and to do things after the manner of human beings; the long
+     vista before me, the months of laborious drudging toil and pain,
+     the long agony of effort necessary to write any book, even a poor
+     one, was beginning to appear less weary, less futile; there was the
+     first faint glow of the joy of creative effort.
+
+
+and then suddenly the telephone bell rang, and announced that the
+Archduke of Austria had been assassinated at Sarajevo.
+
+The rest of the story belongs to history. How he went back to Brussels;
+how when the city seemed doomed, and all the government officials left,
+he stayed on; how when the city was preparing to resist by force, he
+went to Burgomaster Max and convinced him that it was useless, and so
+saved the city from the fate of Louvain; how he took charge of the
+relief work, how the King of Belgium thanked him for his services to the
+country; how the city of Brussels in gratitude gave him a picture by Van
+Dyck, a priceless thing, which he accepted--not for himself but for his
+home city of Toledo; how after the war, he went back, not as Minister
+but as Ambassador,--all these are among the proud memories of America's
+part in the World War.
+
+Brand Whitlock is so much more than an author that it is with an effort
+that we turn to consider his literary work. His first book, _The
+Thirteenth District_, published in 1902, was a novel of American
+politics; it contains a capital description of a convention, and shows
+the strategy of political leaders as seen by a keen observer. In _Her
+Infinite Variety_ he dealt with the suffrage movement as it was in
+1904, with determined women seeking the ballot, and equally determined
+women working just as hard to keep it away from them. _The Happy
+Average_ was a story of an every-day American couple: they were not
+rich, nor famous, nor divorced,--yet the author thinks their story is
+typical of most American lives. _The Turn of the Balance_ is a novel
+that grew out of his legal experiences: it deals with the underworld of
+crime, and often in a depressing way. It reflects the author's belief
+that the present organization of society, and our methods of
+administering justice, are the cause of much of the misery in the world.
+Following these novels came two volumes of short stories, _The Gold
+Brick_ and _The Fall Guy_: both deal with various aspects of American
+life of to-day. In 1914 he published an autobiography under the title
+_Forty Years of It_. This is interesting as a picture of political life
+of the period in Ohio. His latest book, _Memories of Belgium under the
+German Occupation_, tells the story of four eventful years. In all that
+trying time, each night, no matter how weary he was, he forced himself
+to set down the events of the day. From these records he wrote a book
+that by virtue of its first-hand information and its literary art ranks
+among the most important of the books called forth by the Great War.
+
+
+
+
+THE TRAVELING SALESMAN
+
+_The traveling salesman is a characteristic American type. We laugh at
+his stories, or we criticise him for his "nerve," but we do not always
+make allowance for the fact that his life is not an easy one, and that
+his occupation develops "nerve" just as an athlete's work develops
+muscle. The best presentation of the traveling salesman in fiction is
+found in the stories of Edna Ferber. And the fact that her "salesman" is
+a woman only adds to the interest of the stories. When ex-President
+Roosevelt read Miss Ferber's book, he wrote her an enthusiastic letter
+telling her how much he admired Emma McChesney. We meet her in the first
+words of this story_.
+
+
+
+
+HIS MOTHER'S SON
+
+BY
+
+EDNA FERBER
+
+
+"Full?" repeated Emma McChesney (and if it weren't for the compositor
+there'd be an exclamation point after that question mark).
+
+"Sorry, Mrs. McChesney," said the clerk, and he actually looked it, "but
+there's absolutely nothing stirring. We're full up. The Benevolent
+Brotherhood of Bisons is holding its regular annual state convention
+here. We're putting up cots in the hall."
+
+Emma McChesney's keen blue eyes glanced up from their inspection of the
+little bunch of mail which had just been handed her. "Well, pick out a
+hall with a southern exposure and set up a cot or so for me," she said,
+agreeably, "because I've come to stay. After selling Featherloom
+Petticoats on the road for ten years I don't see myself trailing up and
+down this town looking for a place to lay my head. I've learned this one
+large, immovable truth, and that is, that a hotel clerk is a hotel
+clerk. It makes no difference whether he is stuck back of a marble
+pillar and hidden by a gold vase full of thirty-six-inch American Beauty
+roses at the Knickerbocker, or setting the late fall fashions for men in
+Galesburg, Illinois."
+
+By one small degree was the perfect poise of the peerless personage
+behind the register jarred. But by only one. He was a hotel night clerk.
+
+"It won't do you any good to get sore, Mrs. McChesney," he began,
+suavely. "Now a man would----"
+
+"But I'm not a man," interrupted Emma McChesney. "I'm only doing a
+man's work and earning a man's salary and demanding to be treated with
+as much consideration as you'd show a man."
+
+The personage busied himself mightily with a pen, and a blotter, and
+sundry papers, as is the manner of personages when annoyed. "I'd like to
+accommodate you; I'd like to do it."
+
+"Cheer up," said Emma McChesney, "you're going to. I don't mind a little
+discomfort. Though I want to mention in passing that if there are any
+lady Bisons present you needn't bank on doubling me up with them. I've
+had one experience of that kind. It was in Albia, Iowa. I'd sleep in the
+kitchen range before I'd go through another."
+
+Up went the erstwhile falling poise. "You're badly mistaken, madam. I'm
+a member of this order myself, and a finer lot of fellows it has never
+been my pleasure to know."
+
+"Yes, I know," drawled Emma McChesney. "Do you know, the thing that gets
+me is the inconsistency of it. Along come a lot of boobs who never use a
+hotel the year around except to loaf in the lobby, and wear out the
+leather chairs, and use up the matches and toothpicks and get the
+baseball returns, and immediately you turn away a traveling man who uses
+a three-dollar-a-day room, with a sample room downstairs for his stuff,
+who tips every porter and bell-boy in the place, asks for no favors, and
+who, if you give him a halfway decent cup of coffee for breakfast, will
+fall in love with the place and boom it all over the country. Half of
+your Benevolent Bisons are here on the European plan, with a view to
+patronizing the free-lunch counters or being asked to take dinner at the
+home of some local Bison whose wife has been cooking up on pies, and
+chicken salad and veal roast for the last week."
+
+Emma McChesney leaned over the desk a little, and lowered her voice to
+the tone of confidence. "Now, I'm not in the habit of making a nuisance
+of myself like this. I don't get so chatty as a rule, and I know that I
+could jump over to Monmouth and get first-class accommodations there.
+But just this once I've a good reason for wanting to make you and myself
+a little miserable. Y'see, my son is traveling with me this trip."
+
+"Son!" echoed the clerk, staring.
+
+"Thanks. That's what they all do. After a while I'll begin to believe
+that there must be something hauntingly beautiful and girlish about me
+or every one wouldn't petrify when I announce that I've a six-foot son
+attached to my apron-strings. He looks twenty-one, but he's seventeen.
+He thinks the world's rotten because he can't grow one of those fuzzy
+little mustaches that the men are cultivating to match their hats. He's
+down at the depot now, straightening out our baggage. Now I want to say
+this before he gets here. He's been out with me just four days. Those
+four days have been a revelation, an eye-opener, and a series of rude
+jolts. He used to think that his mother's job consisted of traveling in
+Pullmans, eating delicate viands turned out by the hotel chefs, and
+strewing Featherloom Petticoats along the path. I gave him plenty of
+money, and he got into the habit of looking lightly upon anything more
+trifling than a five-dollar bill. He's changing his mind by great leaps.
+I'm prepared to spend the night in the coal cellar if you'll just fix
+him up--not too comfortably. It'll be a great lesson for him. There he
+is now. Just coming in. Fuzzy coat and hat and English stick. Hist! As
+they say on the stage."
+
+The boy crossed the crowded lobby. There was a little worried, annoyed
+frown between his eyes. He laid a protecting hand on his mother's arm.
+Emma McChesney was conscious of a little thrill of pride as she realized
+that he did not have to look up to meet her gaze.
+
+"Look here, Mother, they tell me there's some sort of a convention here,
+and the town's packed. That's what all those banners and things were
+for. I hope they've got something decent for us here. I came up with a
+man who said he didn't think there was a hole left to sleep in."
+
+"You don't say!" exclaimed Emma McChesney, and turned to the clerk.
+"This is my son, Jock McChesney--Mr. Sims. Is this true?"
+
+"Glad to know you, sir," said Mr. Sims. "Why, yes, I'm afraid we are
+pretty well filled up, but seeing it's you maybe we can do something for
+you."
+
+He ruminated, tapping his teeth with a penholder, and eying the pair
+before him with a maddening blankness of gaze. Finally:
+
+"I'll do my best, but you can't expect much. I guess I can squeeze
+another cot into eight-seven for the young man. There's--let's see
+now--who's in eighty-seven? Well, there's two Bisons in the double bed,
+and one in the single, and Fat Ed Meyers in the cot and----"
+
+Emma McChesney stiffened into acute attention. "Meyers?" she
+interrupted. "Do you mean Ed Meyers of the Strauss Sans-silk Skirt
+Company?"
+
+"That's so. You two are in the same line, aren't you? He's a great
+little piano player, Ed is. Ever hear him play?"
+
+"When did he get in?"
+
+"Oh, he just came in fifteen minutes ago on the Ashland division. He's
+in at supper."
+
+"Oh," said Emma McChesney. The two letters breathed relief.
+
+But relief had no place in the voice, or on the countenance of Jock
+McChesney. He bristled with belligerence. "This cattle-car style of
+sleeping don't make a hit. I haven't had a decent night's rest for three
+nights. I never could sleep on a sleeper. Can't you fix us up better
+than that?"
+
+"Best I can do."
+
+"But where's mother going? I see you advertise 'three large and
+commodious steam-heated sample rooms in connection.' I suppose mother's
+due to sleep on one of the tables there."
+
+"Jock," Emma McChesney reproved him, "Mr. Sims is doing us a great
+favor. There isn't another hotel in town that would----"
+
+"You're right, there isn't," agreed Mr. Sims. "I guess the young man is
+new to this traveling game. As I said, I'd like to accommodate you,
+but-- Let's see now. Tell you what I'll do. If I can get the housekeeper
+to go over and sleep in the maids' quarters just for to-night, you can
+use her room. There you are! Of course, it's over the kitchen, and there
+may be some little noise early in the morning----"
+
+Emma McChesney raised a protesting hand. "Don't mention it. Just lead me
+thither. I'm so tired I could sleep in an excursion special that was
+switching at Pittsburgh. Jock, me child, we're in luck. That's twice in
+the same place. The first time was when we were inspired to eat our
+supper on the diner instead of waiting until we reached here to take the
+leftovers from the Bisons' grazing. I hope that housekeeper hasn't a
+picture of her departed husband dangling life-size on the wall at the
+foot of the bed. But they always have. Good-night, son. Don't let the
+Bisons bite you. I'll be up at seven."
+
+But it was just 6.30 A.M. when Emma McChesney turned the little bend in
+the stairway that led to the office. The scrub-woman was still in
+possession. The cigar-counter girl had not yet made her appearance.
+There was about the place a general air of the night before. All but the
+night clerk. He was as spruce and trim, and alert and smooth-shaven as
+only a night clerk can be after a night's vigil.
+
+"'Morning!" Emma McChesney called to him. She wore blue serge, and a
+smart fall hat. The late autumn morning was not crisper and sunnier than
+she.
+
+"Good-morning, Mrs. McChesney," returned Mr. Sims, sonorously. "Have a
+good night's sleep? I hope the kitchen noises didn't wake you."
+
+Emma McChesney paused with her hand on the door. "Kitchen? Oh, no. I
+could sleep through a vaudeville china-juggling act. But--what an
+extraordinarily unpleasant-looking man that housekeeper's husband must
+have been."
+
+That November morning boasted all those qualities which November-morning
+writers are so prone to bestow upon the month. But the words wine, and
+sparkle, and sting, and glow, and snap do not seem to cover it. Emma
+McChesney stood on the bottom step, looking up and down Main Street and
+breathing in great draughts of that unadjectivable air. Her complexion
+stood the test of the merciless, astringent morning and came up
+triumphantly and healthily firm and pink and smooth. The town was still
+asleep. She started to walk briskly down the bare and ugly Main Street
+of the little town. In her big, generous heart, and her keen, alert
+mind, there were many sensations and myriad thoughts, but varied and
+diverse as they were they all led back to the boy up there in the
+stuffy, over-crowded hotel room--the boy who was learning his lesson.
+
+Half an hour later she reentered the hotel, her cheeks glowing. Jock was
+not yet down. So she ordered and ate her wise and cautious breakfast of
+fruit and cereal and toast and coffee, skimming over her morning paper
+as she ate. At 7:30 she was back in the lobby, newspaper in hand. The
+Bisons were already astir. She seated herself in a deep chair in a quiet
+corner, her eyes glancing up over the top of her paper toward the
+stairway. At eight o'clock Jock McChesney came down.
+
+There was nothing of jauntiness about him. His eyelids were red. His
+face had the doughy look of one whose sleep has been brief and feverish.
+As he came toward his mother you noticed a stain on his coat, and a
+sunburst of wrinkles across one leg of his modish brown trousers.
+
+"Good-morning, son!" said Emma McChesney. "Was it as bad as that?"
+
+Jock McChesney's long fingers curled into a fist.
+
+"Say," he began, his tone venomous, "do you know what
+those--those--those----"
+
+"Say it!" commanded Emma McChesney. "I'm only your mother. If you keep
+that in your system your breakfast will curdle in your stomach."
+
+Jock McChesney said it. I know no phrase better fitted to describe his
+tone than that old favorite of the erotic novelists. It was vibrant with
+passion. It breathed bitterness. It sizzled with savagery. It--Oh,
+alliteration is useless.
+
+"Well," said Emma McChesney, encouragingly, "go on."
+
+"Well!" gulped Jock McChesney, and glared; "those two double-bedded,
+bloomin', blasted Bisons came in at twelve, and the single one about
+fifteen minutes later. They didn't surprise me. There was a herd of
+about ninety-three of 'em in the hall, all saying good-night to each
+other, and planning where they'd meet in the morning, and the time, and
+place and probable weather conditions. For that matter, there were
+droves of 'em pounding up and down the halls all night. I never saw such
+restless cattle. If you'll tell me what makes more noise in the middle
+of the night than the metal disk of a hotel key banging and clanging up
+against a door, I'd like to know what it is. My three Bisons were all
+dolled up with fool ribbons and badges and striped paper canes. When
+they switched on the light I gave a crack imitation of a tired working
+man trying to get a little sleep. I breathed regularly and heavily, with
+an occasional moaning snore. But if those two hippopotamus Bisons had
+been alone on their native plains they couldn't have cared less. They
+bellowed, and pawed the earth, and threw their shoes around, and yawned,
+and stretched and discussed their plans for the next day, and reviewed
+all their doings of that day. Then one of them said something about
+turning in, and I was so happy I forgot to snore. Just then another key
+clanged at the door, in walked a fat man in a brown suit and a brown
+derby, and stuff was off."
+
+"That," said Emma McChesney, "would be Ed Meyers, of the Strauss
+Sans-silk Skirt Company."
+
+"None other than our hero." Jock's tone had an added acidity. "It took
+those four about two minutes to get acquainted. In three minutes they
+had told their real names, and it turned out that Meyers belonged to an
+organization that was a second cousin of the Bisons. In five minutes
+they had got together a deck and a pile of chips and were shirt-sleeving
+it around a game of pinochle. I would doze off to the slap of cards, and
+the click of chips, and wake up when the bell-boy came in with another
+round, which he did every six minutes. When I got up this morning I
+found that Fat Ed Meyers had been sitting on the chair over which I
+trustingly had draped my trousers. This sunburst of wrinkles is where he
+mostly sat. This spot on my coat is where a Bison drank his beer."
+
+Emma McChesney folded her paper and rose, smiling. "It is sort of
+trying, I suppose, if you're not used to it."
+
+"Used to it!" shouted the outraged Jock. "Used to it! Do you mean to
+tell me there's nothing unusual about----"
+
+"Not a thing. Oh, of course you don't strike a bunch of Bisons every
+day. But it happens a good many times. The world is full of Ancient
+Orders and they're everlastingly getting together and drawing up
+resolutions and electing officers. Don't you think you'd better go in to
+breakfast before the Bisons begin to forage? I've had mine."
+
+The gloom which had overspread Jock McChesney's face lifted a little.
+The hungry boy in him was uppermost. "That's so. I'm going to have some
+wheat cakes, and steak, and eggs, and coffee, and fruit, and toast, and
+rolls."
+
+"Why slight the fish?" inquired his mother. Then, as he turned toward
+the dining-room, "I've two letters to get out. Then I'm going down the
+street to see a customer. I'll be up at the Sulzberg-Stein department
+store at nine sharp. There's no use trying to see old Sulzberg before
+ten, but I'll be there, anyway, and so will Ed Meyers, or I'm no skirt
+salesman. I want you to meet me there. It will do you good to watch how
+the overripe orders just drop, ker-plunk, into my lap."
+
+Maybe you know Sulzberg & Stein's big store? No? That's because you've
+always lived in the city. Old Sulzberg sends his buyers to the New York
+market twice a year, and they need two floor managers on the main floor
+now. The money those people spend for red and green decorations at
+Christmas time, apple-blossoms and pink crepe paper shades in the
+spring, must be something awful. Young Stein goes to Chicago to have his
+clothes made, and old Sulzberg likes to keep the traveling men waiting
+in the little ante-room outside his private office.
+
+Jock McChesney finished his huge breakfast, strolled over to Sulzberg &
+Stein's, and inquired his way to the office only to find that his mother
+was not yet there. There were three men in the little waiting-room. One
+of them was Fat Ed Meyers. His huge bulk overflowed the spindle-legged
+chair on which he sat. His brown derby was in his hands. His eyes were
+on the closed door at the other side of the room. So were the eyes of
+the other two travelers. Jock took a vacant seat next to Fat Ed Meyers
+so that he might, in his mind's eye, pick out a particularly choice spot
+upon which his hard young fist might land--if only he had the chance.
+Breaking up a man's sleep like that, the great big overgrown mutt!
+
+"What's your line?" said Ed Meyers, suddenly turning toward Jock.
+
+Prompted by some imp--"Skirts," answered Jock. "Ladies' petticoats."
+("As if men ever wore 'em!" he giggled inwardly.)
+
+Ed Meyers shifted around in his chair so that he might better stare at
+this new foe in the field. His little red mouth was open ludicrously.
+
+"Who're you out for?" he demanded next.
+
+There was a look of Emma McChesney on Jock's face. "Why--er--the Union
+Underskirt and Hosiery Company of Chicago. New concern."
+
+"Must be," ruminated Ed Meyers. "I never heard of 'em, and I know 'em
+all. You're starting in young, ain't you, kid! Well, it'll never hurt
+you. You'll learn something new every day. Now me, I----"
+
+In breezed Emma McChesney. Her quick glance rested immediately upon
+Meyers and the boy. And in that moment some instinct prompted Jock
+McChesney to shake his head, ever so slightly, and assume a blankness of
+expression. And Emma McChesney, with that shrewdness which had made her
+one of the best salesmen on the road, saw, and miraculously understood.
+
+"How do, Mrs. McChesney," grinned Fat Ed Meyers. "You see I beat you to
+it."
+
+"So I see," smiled Emma, cheerfully. "I was delayed. Just sold a nice
+little bill to Watkins down the street." She seated herself across the
+way, and kept her eyes on that closed door.
+
+"Say, kid," Meyers began, in the husky whisper of the fat man, "I'm
+going to put you wise to something, seeing you're new to this game. See
+that lady over there?" He nodded discreetly in Emma McChesney's
+direction.
+
+"Pretty, isn't she?" said Jock, appreciatively.
+
+"Know who she is?"
+
+"Well--I--she does look familiar, but----"
+
+"Oh, come now, quit your bluffing. If you'd ever met that dame you'd
+remember it. Her name's McChesney--Emma McChesney, and she sells T. A.
+Buck's Featherloom Petticoats. I'll give her her dues; she's the best
+little salesman on the road. I'll bet that girl could sell a ruffled,
+accordion-plaited underskirt to a fat woman who was trying to reduce.
+She's got the darndest way with her. And at that she's straight, too."
+
+If Ed Meyers had not been gazing so intently into his hat, trying at
+the same time to look cherubically benign he might have seen a quick and
+painful scarlet sweep the face of the boy, coupled with a certain tense
+look of the muscles around the jaw.
+
+"Well, now, look here," he went on, still in a whisper. "We're both
+skirt men, you and me. Everything's fair in this game. Maybe you don't
+know it, but when there's a bunch of the boys waiting around to see the
+head of the store like this, and there happens to be a lady traveler in
+the crowd, why, it's considered kind of a professional courtesy to let
+the lady have the first look-in. See? It ain't so often that three
+people in the same line get together like this. She knows it, and she's
+sitting on the edge of her chair, waiting to bolt when that door opens,
+even if she does act like she was hanging on the words of that lady
+clerk there. The minute it does open a crack she'll jump up and give me
+a fleeting, grateful smile, and sail in and cop a fat order away from
+the old man and his skirt buyer. I'm wise. Say, he may be an oyster, but
+he knows a pretty woman when he sees one. By the time she's through with
+him he'll have enough petticoats on hand to last him from now until
+Turkey goes suffrage. Get me?"
+
+"I get you," answered Jock.
+
+"I say, this is business, and good manners be hanged. When a woman
+breaks into a man's game like this, let her take her chances like a man.
+Ain't that straight?"
+
+"You've said something," agreed Jock.
+
+"Now, look here, kid. When that door opens I get up. See? And shoot
+straight for the old man's office. See? Like a duck. See? Say, I may be
+fat, kid, but I'm what they call light on my feet, and when I see an
+order getting away from me I can be so fleet that I have Diana looking
+like old Weston doing a stretch of muddy country road in a
+coast-to-coast hike. See? Now you help me out on this and I'll see that
+you don't suffer for it. I'll stick in a good word for you, believe me.
+You take the word of an old stager like me and you won't go far--"
+
+The door opened. Simultaneously three figures sprang into action. Jock
+had the seat nearest the door. With marvelous clumsiness he managed to
+place himself in Ed Meyers' path, then reddened, began an apology,
+stepped on both of Ed's feet, jabbed his elbow into his stomach, and
+dropped his hat. A second later the door of old Sulzberg's private
+office closed upon Emma McChesney's smart, erect, confident figure.
+
+Now, Ed Meyers' hands were peculiar hands for a fat man. They were
+tapering, slender, delicate, blue-veined, temperamental hands. At this
+moment, despite his purpling face, and his staring eyes, they were the
+most noticeable thing about him. His fingers clawed the empty air,
+quivering, vibrant, as though poised to clutch at Jock's throat.
+
+Then words came. They spluttered from his lips. They popped like corn
+kernels in the heat of his wrath; they tripped over each other; they
+exploded.
+
+"You darned kid, you!" he began, with fascinating fluency. "You
+thousand-legged, double-jointed, ox-footed truck horse! Come on out of
+here and I'll lick the shine off your shoes, you blue-eyed babe, you!
+What did you get up for, huh? What did you think this was going to be--a
+flag drill?"
+
+With a whoop of pure joy Jock McChesney turned and fled.
+
+They dined together at one o'clock, Emma McChesney and her son Jock.
+Suddenly Jock stopped eating. His eyes were on the door. "There's that
+fathead now," he said, excitedly. "The nerve of him! He's coming over
+here."
+
+Ed Meyers was waddling toward them with the quick light step of the fat
+man. His pink, full-jowled face was glowing. His eyes were bright as a
+boy's. He stopped at their table and paused for one dramatic moment.
+
+"So, me beauty, you two were in cahoots, huh? That's the second low-down
+deal you've handed me. I haven't forgotten that trick you turned with
+Nussbaum at DeKalb. Never mind, little girl. I'll get back at you yet."
+
+He nodded a contemptuous head in Jock's direction. "Carrying a packer?"
+
+Emma McChesney wiped her fingers daintily on her napkin, crushed it on
+the table, and leaned back in her chair. "Men," she observed,
+wonderingly, "are the cussedest creatures. This chap occupied the same
+room with you last night and you don't even know his name. Funny! If two
+strange women had found themselves occupying the same room for a night
+they wouldn't have got to the kimono and back hair stage before they
+would not only have known each other's names, but they'd have tried on
+each other's hats, swapped corset cover patterns, found mutual friends
+living in Dayton, Ohio, taught each other a new Irish crochet stitch,
+showed their family photographs, told how their married sister's little
+girl nearly died with swollen glands, and divided off the mirror into
+two sections to paste their newly-washed handkerchiefs on. Don't tell
+_me_ men have a genius for friendship."
+
+"Well, who is he?" insisted Ed Meyers. "He told me everything but his
+name this morning. I wish I had throttled him with a bunch of Bisons'
+badges last night."
+
+"His name," smiled Emma McChesney, "is Jock McChesney. He's my one and
+only son, and he's put through his first little business deal this
+morning just to show his mother that he can be a help to his folks if he
+wants to. Now, Ed Meyers, if you're going to have apoplexy, don't you go
+and have it around this table. My boy is only on his second piece of
+pie, and I won't have his appetite spoiled."
+
+
+
+
+EDNA FERBER
+
+
+A professor of literature once began a lecture on Lowell by saying: "It
+makes a great deal of difference to an author whether he is born in
+Cambridge or Kalamazoo." Miss Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, but it
+hasn't made much difference to her. The date was August 15, 1887. She
+attended high school at Appleton, Wisconsin, and at seventeen secured a
+position as reporter on the Appleton _Daily Crescent_. That she was
+successful in newspaper work is shown by the fact that she soon had a
+similar position on the _Milwaukee Journal_, and went from there to the
+staff of the _Chicago Tribune_, one of the leading newspapers in the
+United States.
+
+But journalism, engrossing as it is, did not take all of her time. She
+began a novel, working on it in spare moments, but when it was finished
+she was so dissatisfied with it that she threw the manuscript into the
+waste basket. Here her mother found it, and sent it to a publisher, who
+accepted it at once. The book was _Dawn O'Hara_. It was dedicated "To my
+dear mother who frequently interrupts, and to my sister Fannie who says
+Sh-sh-sh outside my door." With this book Miss Ferber, at twenty-four,
+found herself the author of one of the successful novels of the year.
+
+Her next work was in the field of the short story, and here too she
+quickly gained recognition. The field that she has made particularly her
+own is the delineation of the American business woman, a type familiar
+in our daily life, but never adequately presented in fiction until Emma
+McChesney appeared. The fidelity with which these stories describe the
+life of a traveling salesman show that Miss Ferber knew her subject
+through and through before she began to write. Her knowledge of other
+things is shown in an amusing letter which she wrote to the editor of
+the _Bookman_ in 1912. He had criticized her for writing a story about
+baseball, saying that no woman really knew baseball. This was her reply,
+in part:
+
+
+     You, buried up there in your office, or your apartment, with your
+     books, books, books, and your pipe, and your everlasting
+     manuscripts, and makers of manuscripts, don't you know that your
+     woman secretary knows more about baseball than you do? Don't you
+     know that every American girl knows baseball, and that most of us
+     read the sporting page, not as a pose, but because we're interested
+     in things that happen on the field, and track, and links, and
+     gridiron? Bless your heart, that baseball story was the worst story
+     in the book, but it was written after a solid summer of watching
+     our bush league team play ball in the little Wisconsin town that I
+     used to call home.
+
+     Humanity? Which of us really knows it? But take a fairly
+     intelligent girl of seventeen, put her on a country daily
+     newspaper, and then keep her on one paper or another, country and
+     city, for six years, and--well, she just naturally can't help
+     learning some things about some folks, now can she?...
+
+     You say that two or three more such books may entitle me to serious
+     consideration. If I can get the editors to take more stories, why I
+     suppose there'll be more books. But please don't perform any more
+     serious consideration stuff over 'em. Because me'n Georgie Cohan,
+     we jest aims to amuse.
+
+
+Her first book of short stories was called _Buttered Side Down_ (her
+titles are always unusual). This was followed by _Roast Beef, Medium_,
+in which Mrs. McChesney appears as the successful distributor of
+Featherloom skirts. _Personality Plus_ tells of the adventures of her
+son Jock as an advertising man. _Cheerful--by Request_ introduces Mrs.
+McChesney and some other people. By this time her favorite character had
+become so well known that the stage called for her, so Miss Ferber
+collaborated with George V. Hobart in a play called _Our Mrs.
+McChesney_, which was produced with Ethel Barrymore in the title role.
+Her latest book, _Fanny Herself_, is a novel, and in its pages Mrs.
+McChesney appears again.
+
+Her stories show the effect of her newspaper training. The style is
+crisp; the descriptions show close observation. Humor lights up every
+page, and underlying all her stories is a belief in people, a faith that
+life is worth while, a courage in the face of obstacles, that we like to
+think is characteristically American. In the structure and the style of
+her stories, Miss Ferber shows the influence of O. Henry, or as a
+newspaper wit put it,
+
+
+     O. Henry's fame, unless mistaken I'm
+     Goes ednaferberating down through time.
+
+
+
+
+AFTER THE BIG STORE CLOSES
+
+_We all go to the Big Store to buy its bargains, and sometimes we
+wonder idly what the clerks are like when they are not behind the
+counter. This story deals with the lives of two people who punched the
+time-clock. When the store closes, it is like the striking of the clock
+in the fairy tales: the clerks are transformed into human beings, and
+become so much like ourselves that it is hard to tell the difference._
+
+
+
+
+BITTER-SWEET
+
+BY
+
+FANNIE HURST
+
+
+Much of the tragical lore of the infant mortality, the malnutrition, and
+the five-in-a-room morality of the city's poor is written in statistics,
+and the statistical path to the heart is more figurative than literal.
+
+It is difficult to write stylistically a per-annum report of 1,327
+curvatures of the spine, whereas the poor specific little vertebra of
+Mamie O'Grady, daughter to Lou, your laundress, whose alcoholic husband
+once invaded your very own basement and attempted to strangle her in the
+coal-bin, can instantly create an apron bazaar in the church
+vestry-rooms.
+
+That is why it is possible to drink your morning coffee without nausea
+for it, over the head-lines of forty thousand casualties at Ypres, but
+to push back abruptly at a three-line notice of little Tony's, your
+corner bootblack's, fatal dive before a street-car.
+
+Gertie Slayback was statistically down as a woman wage-earner; a typhoid
+case among the thousands of the Borough of Manhattan for 1901; and her
+twice-a-day share in the Subway fares collected in the present year of
+our Lord.
+
+She was a very atomic one of the city's four millions. But after all,
+what are the kings and peasants, poets and draymen, but great, greater,
+or greatest, less, lesser, or least atoms of us? If not of the least,
+Gertie Slayback was of the very lesser. When she unlocked the front door
+to her rooming-house of evenings, there was no one to expect her, except
+on Tuesdays, which evening it so happened her week was up. And when she
+left of mornings with her breakfast crumblessly cleared up and the box
+of biscuit and condensed-milk can tucked unsuspectedly behind her
+camisole in the top drawer there was no one to regret her.
+
+There are some of us who call this freedom. Again there are those for
+whom one spark of home fire burning would light the world.
+
+Gertie Slayback was one of these. Half a life-time of opening her door
+upon this or that desert-aisle of hall bedroom had not taught her heart
+how not to sink or the feel of daily rising in one such room to seem
+less like a damp bathing-suit, donned at dawn.
+
+The only picture--or call it atavism if you will--which adorned Miss
+Slayback's dun-colored walls was a passe-partout snowscape, night
+closing in, and pink cottage windows peering out from under eaves. She
+could visualize that interior as if she had only to turn the frame for
+the smell of wood fire and the snap of pine logs and for the scene of
+two high-back chairs and the wooden crib between.
+
+What a fragile, gracile thing is the mind that can leap thus from nine
+bargain basement hours of hairpins and darning-balls to the downy
+business of lining a crib in Never-Never Land and warming No Man's
+slippers before the fire of imagination.
+
+There was that picture so acidly etched into Miss Slayback's brain that
+she had only to close her eyes in the slit-like sanctity of her room and
+in the brief moment of courting sleep feel the pink penumbra of her
+vision begin to glow.
+
+Of late years, or, more specifically, for two years and eight months,
+another picture had invaded, even superseded the old. A stamp-photograph
+likeness of Mr. James P. Batch in the corner of Miss Slayback's mirror,
+and thereafter No Man's slippers became number eight-and-a-half C, and
+the hearth a gilded radiator in a dining-living-room somewhere between
+the Fourteenth Street Subway and the land of the Bronx.
+
+How Miss Slayback, by habit not gregarious, met Mr. Batch is of no
+consequence, except to those snug ones of us to whom an introduction is
+the only means to such an end.
+
+At a six o'clock that invaded even Union Square with heliotrope dusk,
+Mr. James Batch mistook, who shall say otherwise, Miss Gertie Slayback,
+as she stepped down into the wintry shade of a Subway kiosk, for Miss
+Whodoesitmatter. At seven o'clock, over a dish of lamb stew _a la_ White
+Kitchen, he confessed, and if Miss Slayback affected too great surprise
+and too little indignation, try to conceive six nine-hour week-in-and
+week-out days of hairpins and darning-balls, and then, at a heliotrope
+dusk, James P. Batch, in invitational mood, stepping in between it and
+the papered walls of a dun-colored evening. To further enlist your
+tolerance, Gertie Slayback's eyes were as blue as the noon of June, and
+James P. Batch, in a belted-in coat and five kid finger-points
+protruding ever so slightly and rightly from a breast pocket, was hewn
+and honed in the image of youth. His the smile of one for whom life's
+cup holds a heady wine, a wrinkle or two at the eye only serving to
+enhance that smile; a one-inch feather stuck upright in his derby
+hatband.
+
+It was a forelock once stamped a Corsican with the look of emperor. It
+was this hat feather, a cock's feather at that and worn without sense of
+humor, to which Miss Slayback was fond of attributing the consequences
+of that heliotrope dusk.
+
+"It was the feather in your cap did it, Jimmie. I can see you yet,
+stepping up with that innocent grin of yours. You think I didn't know
+you were flirting? Cousin from Long Island City! 'Say,' I says to
+myself, I says, 'I look as much like his cousin from Long Island City,
+if he's got one, as my cousin from Hoboken (and I haven't got any) would
+look like my sister if I had one.' It was that sassy little feather in
+your hat!"
+
+They would laugh over this ever-green reminiscence on Sunday park
+benches and at intermission at moving pictures when they remained
+through it to see the show twice. Be the landlady's front parlor ever so
+permanently rented out, the motion-picture theater has brought to
+thousands of young city starvelings, if not the quietude of the home,
+then at least the warmth and a juxtaposition and a deep darkness that
+can lave the sub-basement throb of temples and is filled with music with
+a hum in it.
+
+For two years and eight months of Saturday nights, each one of them a
+semaphore dropping out across the gray road of the week, Gertie Slayback
+and Jimmie Batch dined for one hour and sixty cents at the White
+Kitchen. Then arm and arm up the million-candle-power flare of Broadway,
+content, these two who had never seen a lake reflect a moon, or a slim
+fir pointing to a star, that life could be so manifold. And always, too,
+on Saturday, the tenth from the last row of the De Luxe Cinematograph,
+Broadway's Best, Orchestra Chairs, fifty cents; Last Ten Rows,
+thirty-five. The give of velvet-upholstered chairs, perfumed darkness,
+and any old love story moving across it to the ecstatic ache of Gertie
+Slayback's high young heart.
+
+On a Saturday evening that was already pointed with stars at the
+six-o'clock closing of Hoffheimer's Fourteenth Street Emporium, Miss
+Slayback, whose blondness under fatigue could become ashy, emerged from
+the Bargain Basement almost the first of its frantic exodus, taking the
+place of her weekly appointment in the entrance of the Popular Drug
+Store adjoining, her gaze, something even frantic in it, sifting the
+passing crowd.
+
+At six o'clock Fourteenth Street pours up from its basements, down from
+its lofts, and out from its five-and-ten-cent stores, shows, and
+arcades, in a great homeward torrent--a sweeping torrent that flows full
+flush to the Subway, the Elevated, and the surface car, and then spreads
+thinly into the least pretentious of the city's homes--the five flights
+up, the two rooms rear, and the third floor back.
+
+Standing there, this eager tide of the Fourteenth Street Emporium, thus
+released by the six-o'clock flood-gates, flowed past Miss Slayback.
+White-nosed, low-chested girls in short-vamp shoes and no-carat gold
+vanity-cases. Older men resigned that ambition could be flayed by a
+yard-stick; young men still impatient of their clerkship.
+
+It was into the trickle of these last that Miss Slayback bored her
+glance, the darting, eager glance of hot eyeballs and inner trembling.
+She was not so pathetically young as she was pathetically blond, a
+treacherous, ready-to-fade kind of blondness that one day, now that she
+had found that very morning her first gray hair, would leave her ashy.
+
+Suddenly, with a small catch of breath that was audible in her throat,
+Miss Slayback stepped out of that doorway, squirming her way across the
+tight congestion of the sidewalk to its curb, then in and out, brushing
+this elbow and that shoulder, worming her way in an absolutely supreme
+anxiety to keep in view a brown derby hat bobbing right briskly along
+with the crowd, a greenish-black bit of feather upright in its band.
+
+At Broadway, Fourteenth Street cuts quite a caper, deploying out into
+Union Square, an island of park, beginning to be succulent at the first
+false feint of spring, rising as it were from a sea of asphalt. Across
+this park Miss Slayback worked her rather frenzied way, breaking into a
+run when the derby threatened to sink into the confusion of a hundred
+others, and finally learning to keep its course by the faint but
+distinguishing fact of a slight dent in the crown. At Broadway, some
+blocks before that highway bursts into its famous flare, Mr. Batch, than
+whom it was no other, turned off suddenly at right angles down into a
+dim pocket of side-street and into the illuminated entrance of Ceiner's
+Cafe Hungarian. Meals at all hours. Lunch, thirty cents. Dinner, fifty
+cents. Our Goulash is Famous.
+
+New York, which expresses itself in more languages to the square block
+than any other area in the world, Babylon included, loves thus to dine
+linguistically, so to speak. To the Crescent Turkish Restaurant for its
+Business Men's Lunch comes Fourth Avenue, whose antique-shop patois
+reads across the page from right to left. Sight-seeing automobiles on
+mission and commission bent allow Altoona, Iowa City, and Quincy,
+Illinois, fifteen minutes' stop-in at Ching Ling-Foo's Chinatown
+Delmonico's. Spaghetti and red wine have set New York racing to reserve
+its table d'hotes. All except the Latin race.
+
+Jimmie Batch, who had first seen light, and that gaslight, in a block in
+lower Manhattan which has since been given over to a milk-station for a
+highly congested district, had the palate, if not the purse, of the
+cosmopolite. His digestive range included _borsch_ and _chow main_;
+_risotta_ and "ham and."
+
+To-night, as he turned into Cafe Hungarian, Miss Slayback slowed and
+drew back into the overshadowing protection of an adjoining
+office-building. She was breathing hard, and her little face, somehow
+smaller from chill, was nevertheless a high pink at the cheek-bones.
+
+The wind swept around the corner, jerking her hat, and her hand flew up
+to it. There was a fair stream of passers-by even here, and occasionally
+one turned for a backward glance at her standing there so frankly
+indeterminate.
+
+Suddenly Miss Slayback adjusted her tam-o'-shanter to its flop over her
+right ear, and, drawing off a pair of dark-blue silk gloves from over
+immaculately new white ones, entered Ceiner's Cafe Hungarian. In its
+light she was not so obviously blonder than young, the pink spots in her
+cheeks had a deepening value to the blue of her eyes, and a black velvet
+tam-o'-shanter revealing just the right fringe of yellow curls is no
+mean aid.
+
+First of all, Ceiner's is an eating-place. There is no music except at
+five cents in the slot, and its tables for four are perpetually set each
+with a dish of sliced radishes, a bouquet of celery, and a mound of
+bread, half the stack rye. Its menus are well thumbed and badly
+mimeographed. Who enters Ceiner's is prepared to dine from barley soup
+to apple strudel. At something after six begins the rising sound of
+cutlery, and already the new-comer fears to find no table.
+
+Off at the side, Mr. Jimmie Batch had already disposed of his hat and
+gray overcoat, and tilting the chair opposite him to indicate its
+reservation, shook open his evening paper, the waiter withholding the
+menu at this sign of rendezvous.
+
+Straight toward that table Miss Slayback worked quick, swift way,
+through this and that aisle, jerking back and seating herself on the
+chair opposite almost before Mr. Batch could raise his eyes from off the
+sporting page.
+
+There was an instant of silence between them--the kind of silence that
+can shape itself into a commentary upon the inefficacy of mere speech--a
+widening silence which, as they sat there facing, deepened until, when
+she finally spoke, it was as if her words were pebbles dropping down
+into a well.
+
+"Don't look so surprised, Jimmie," she said, propping her face calmly,
+even boldly, into the white-kid palms. "You might fall off the Christmas
+tree."
+
+Above the snug, four-inch collar and bow tie Mr. Batch's face was taking
+on a dull ox-blood tinge that spread back, even reddening his ears. Mr.
+Batch had the frontal bone of a clerk, the horn-rimmed glasses of the
+literarily astigmatic, and the sartorial perfection that only the rich
+can afford not to attain.
+
+He was staring now quite frankly, and his mouth had fallen open. "Gert!"
+he said.
+
+"Yes," said Miss Slayback, her insouciance gaining with his
+discomposure, her eyes widening and then a dolly kind of glassiness
+seeming to set in. "You wasn't expecting me, Jimmie?"
+
+He jerked up his hand, not meeting her glance. "What's the idea of the
+comedy?"
+
+"You don't look glad to see me, Jimmie."
+
+"If you--think you're funny."
+
+She was working out of and then back into the freshly white gloves in a
+betraying kind of nervousness that belied the toss of her voice. "Well,
+of all things! Mad-cat! Mad, just because you didn't seem to be
+expecting me."
+
+"I--There's some things that are just the limit, that's what they are.
+Some things that are just the limit, that no fellow would stand from any
+girl, and this--this is one of them."
+
+Her lips were trembling now. "You--you bet your life there's some things
+that are just the limit."
+
+He slid out his watch, pushing back. "Well, I guess this place is too
+small for a fellow and a girl that can follow him around the town like
+a--like----"
+
+She sat forward, grasping the table-sides, her chair tilting with her.
+"Don't you dare to get up and leave me sitting here! Jimmie Batch, don't
+you dare!"
+
+The waiter intervened, card extended.
+
+"We--we're waiting for another party," said Miss Slayback, her hands
+still rigidly over the table-sides and her glance like a steady drill
+into Mr. Batch's own.
+
+There was a second of this silence while the waiter withdrew, and then
+Mr. Batch whipped out his watch again, a gun-metal one with an open
+face.
+
+"Now look here. I got a date here in ten minutes, and one or the other
+of us has got to clear. You--you're one too many, if you got to know
+it."
+
+"Oh, I do know it, Jimmie! I been one too many for the last four
+Saturday nights. I been one too many ever since May Scully came into
+five hundred dollars' inheritance and quit the Ladies' Neckwear. I been
+one too many ever since May Scully became a lady."
+
+"If I was a girl and didn't have more shame!"
+
+"Shame! Now you're shouting, Jimmie Batch. I haven't got shame, and I
+don't care who knows it. A girl don't stop to have shame when she's
+fighting for her rights."
+
+He was leaning on his elbow, profile to her. "That movie talk can't
+scare me. You can't tell me what to do and what not to do. I've given
+you a square deal all right. There's not a word ever passed between us
+that ties me to your apron-strings. I don't say I'm not without my
+obligations to you, but that's not one of them. No, siree--no
+apron-strings."
+
+"I know it isn't, Jimmie. You're the kind of a fellow wouldn't even talk
+to himself for fear of committing himself."
+
+"I got a date here now any minute, Gert, and the sooner you----"
+
+"You're the guy who passed up the Sixty-first for the Safety First
+regiment."
+
+"I'll show you my regiment some day."
+
+"I--I know you're not tied to my apron-strings, Jimmie. I--I wouldn't
+have you there for anything. Don't you think I know you too well for
+that? That's just it. Nobody on God's earth knows you the way I do. I
+know you better than you know yourself."
+
+"You better beat it, Gertie. I tell you I'm getting sore."
+
+Her face flashed from him to the door and back again, her anxiety almost
+edged with hysteria. "Come on, Jimmie--out the side entrance before she
+gets here. May Scully ain't the company for you. You think if she was,
+honey, I'd--I'd see myself come butting in between you this way,
+like--like a--common girl? She's not the girl to keep you straight.
+Honest to God she's not, honey."
+
+"My business is my business, let me tell you that."
+
+"She's speedy, Jimmie. She was the speediest girl on the main floor, and
+now that she's come into those five hundred, instead of planting it for
+a rainy day, she's quit work and gone plumb crazy with it."
+
+"When I want advice about my friends I ask for it."
+
+"It's not the good name that worries me, Jimmie, because she ain't got
+any. It's you. She's got you crazy with that five hundred, too--that's
+what's got me scared."
+
+"Gee! you ought to let the Salvation Army tie a bonnet under your
+chin."
+
+"She's always had her eyes on you, Jimmie. Ain't you men got no sense
+for seein' things? Since the day they moved the Gents' Furnishings
+across from the Ladies' Neckwear she's had you spotted. Her goings-on
+used to leak down to the basement, alrighty. She's not a good girl, May
+ain't, Jimmie. She ain't, and you know it. Is she? Is she?"
+
+"Aw!" said Jimmie Batch.
+
+"You see! See! Ain't got the nerve to answer, have you?"
+
+"Aw--maybe I know, too that she's not the kind of a girl that would turn
+up where she's not----"
+
+"If you wasn't a classy-looking kind of boy, Jimmie, that a fly girl
+like May likes to be seen out with, she couldn't find you with
+magnifying glasses, not if you was born with the golden rule in your
+mouth and had swallowed it. She's not the kind of girl, Jimmie, a fellow
+like you needs behind him. If--if you was ever to marry her and get your
+hands on them five hundred dollars----"
+
+"It would be my business."
+
+"It'll be your ruination. You're not strong enough to stand up under
+nothing like that. With a few hundred unearned dollars in your pocket
+you--you'd go up in spontaneous combustion, you would."
+
+"It would be my own spontaneous combustion."
+
+"You got to be drove, Jimmie, like a kid. With them few dollars you
+wouldn't start up a little cigar-store like you think you would. You and
+her would blow yourselves to the dogs in two months. Cigar-stores ain't
+the place for you, Jimmie. You seen how only clerking in them was nearly
+your ruination--the little gambling-room-in-the-back kind that you pick
+out. They ain't cigar-stores; they're only false faces for gambling."
+
+"You know it all, don't you?"
+
+"Oh, I'm dealing it to you straight! There's too many sporty crowds
+loafing around those joints for a fellow like you to stand up under. I
+found you in one, and as yellow-fingered and as loafing as they come, a
+new job a week, a----"
+
+"Yeh, and there was some pep to variety, too."
+
+"Don't throw over, Jimmie, what my getting you out of it to a decent job
+in a department store has begun to do for you. And you're making good,
+too. Higgins teld me to-day, if you don't let your head swell, there
+won't be a fellow in the department can stack up his sales-book any
+higher."
+
+"Aw!"
+
+"Don't throw it all over, Jimmie--and me--for a crop of dyed red hair
+and a few dollars to ruin yourself with."
+
+He shot her a look of constantly growing nervousness, his mouth pulled
+to an oblique, his glance constantly toward the door.
+
+"Don't keep no date with her to-night, Jimmie. You haven't got the
+constitution to stand her pace. It's telling on you. Look at those
+fingers yellowing again--looka----"
+
+"They're my fingers, ain't they?"
+
+"You see, Jimmie, I--I'm the only person in the world that likes you
+just for what--you ain't--and hasn't got any pipe dreams about you.
+That's what counts, Jimmie, the folks that like you in spite, and not
+because of."
+
+"We will now sing psalm number two hundred and twenty-three."
+
+"I know there's not a better fellow in the world if he's kept nailed to
+the right job, and I know, too, there's not another fellow can go to the
+dogs any easier."
+
+"To hear you talk, you'd think I was about six."
+
+"I'm the only girl that'll ever be willing to make a whip out of herself
+that'll keep you going and won't sting, honey. I know you're soft and
+lazy and selfish and----"
+
+"Don't forget any."
+
+"And I know you're my good-looking good-for-nothing, and I know, too,
+that you--you don't care as much--as much for me from head to toe as I
+do for your little finger. But I--like you just the same, Jimmie.
+That--that's what I mean about having no shame. I--do like you so--so
+terribly, Jimmie."
+
+"Aw now--Gert!"
+
+"I know it, Jimmie--that I ought to be ashamed. Don't think I haven't
+cried myself to sleep with it whole nights in succession."
+
+"Aw now--Gert!"
+
+"Don't think I don't know it, that I'm laying myself before you pretty
+common. I know it's common for a girl to--to come to a fellow like this,
+but--but I haven't got any shame about it--I haven't got anything,
+Jimmie, except fight for--for what's eating me. And the way things are
+between us now is eating me."
+
+"I---- Why, I got a mighty high regard for you, Gert."
+
+"There's a time in a girl's life, Jimmie, when she's been starved like I
+have for something of her own all her days; there's times, no matter how
+she's held in, that all of a sudden comes a minute when she busts out."
+
+"I understand, Gert, but----"
+
+"For two years and eight months, Jimmie, life has got to be worth while
+living to me because I could see the day, even if we--you--never talked
+about it, when you would be made over from a flip kid to--to the kind of
+a fellow would want to settle down to making a little two-by-four home
+for us. A little two-by-four all our own, with you steady on the job and
+advanced maybe to forty or fifty a week and----"
+
+"For God's sake, Gertie, this ain't the time or the place to----"
+
+"Oh yes, it is! It's got to be, because it's the first time in four
+weeks that you didn't see me coming first."
+
+"But not now, Gert. I----"
+
+"I'm not ashamed to tell you, Jimmie Batch, that I've been the making
+of you since that night you threw the wink at me. And--and it hurts,
+this does. God! how it hurts!"
+
+He was pleating the table-cloth, swallowing as if his throat had
+constricted, and still rearing his head this way and that in the tight
+collar.
+
+"I--never claimed not to be a bad egg. This ain't the time and the place
+for rehashing, that's all. Sure you been a friend to me. I don't say you
+haven't. Only I can't be bossed by a girl like you. I don't say May
+Scully's any better than she ought to be. Only that's my business. You
+hear? my business. I got to have life and see a darn sight more future
+for myself than selling shirts in a Fourteenth Street department store."
+
+"May Scully can't give it to you--her and her fast crowd."
+
+"Maybe she can and maybe she can't."
+
+"Them few dollars won't make you; they'll break you."
+
+"That's for her to decide, not you."
+
+"I'll tell her myself. I'll face her right here and----"
+
+"Now, look here, if you think I'm going to be let in for a holy show
+between you two girls, you got another think coming. One of us has got
+to clear out of here, and quick, too. You been talking about the side
+door; there it is. In five minutes I got a date in this place that I
+thought I could keep like any law-abiding citizen. One of us has got to
+clear, and quick, too. Gad! you wimmin make me sick, the whole lot of
+you!"
+
+"If anything makes you sick, I know what it is. It's dodging me to fly
+around all hours of the night with May Scully, the girl who put the tang
+in tango. It's eating around in swell sixty-cent restaurants like this
+and----"
+
+"Gad! your middle name ought to be Nagalene."
+
+"Aw, now, Jimmie, maybe it does sound like nagging, but it ain't, honey.
+It--it's only my--my fear that I'm losing you, and--and my hate for the
+every-day grind of things, and----"
+
+"I can't help that, can I?"
+
+"Why, there--there's nothing on God's earth I hate, Jimmie, like I hate
+that Bargain-Basement. When I think it's down there in that manhole I've
+spent the best years of my life, I--I wanna die. The day I get out of
+it, the day I don't have to punch that old time-clock down there next to
+the Complaints and Adjustment Desk, I--I'll never put my foot below
+sidewalk level again to the hour I die. Not even if it was to take a
+walk in my own gold-mine."
+
+"It ain't exactly a garden of roses down there."
+
+"Why, I hate it so terrible, Jimmie, that sometimes I wake up nights
+gritting my teeth with the smell of steam-pipes and the tramp of feet on
+the glass sidewalk up over me. Oh, God! you dunno--you dunno!"
+
+"When it comes to that, the main floor ain't exactly a maiden's dream,
+or a fellow's, for that matter."
+
+"With a man it's different. It's his job in life, earning, and--and the
+woman making the two ends of it meet. That's why, Jimmie, these last two
+years and eight months, if not for what I was hoping for us,
+why--why--I--why, on your twenty a week, Jimmie, there's nobody could
+run a flat like I could. Why, the days wouldn't be long enough to putter
+in. I--Don't throw away what I been building up for us, Jimmie, step by
+step! Don't, Jimmie!'
+
+"Good Lord, girl! You deserve better'n me."
+
+"I know I got a big job, Jimmie, but I want to make a man out of you,
+temper, laziness, gambling, and all. You got it in you to be something
+more than a tango lizard or a cigar-store bum, honey. It's only you
+ain't got the stuff in you to stand up under a five-hundred-dollar
+windfall and--a--and a sporty girl. If--if two glasses of beer make you
+as silly as they do, Jimmie, why, five hundred dollars would land you
+under the table for life."
+
+"Aw--there you go again!"
+
+"I can't help it, Jimmie. It's because I never knew a fellow had what's
+he's cut out for written all over him so. You're a born clerk, Jimmie."
+
+"Sure, I'm a slick clerk, but----"
+
+"You're born to be a clerk, a good clerk, even a two-hundred-a-month
+clerk, the way you can win the trade, but never your own boss. I know
+what I'm talking about. I know your measure better than any human on
+earth can ever know your measure. I know things about you that you don't
+even know yourself."
+
+"I never set myself up to nobody for anything I wasn't."
+
+"Maybe not, Jimmie, but I know about you and--and that Central Street
+gang that time, and----"
+
+"You!"
+
+"Yes, honey, and there's not another human living but me knows how
+little it was your fault. Just bad company, that was all. That's how
+much I--I love you, Jimmie, enough to understand that. Why, if I thought
+May Scully and a set-up in business was the thing for you, Jimmie, I'd
+say to her, I'd say, if it was like taking my own heart out in my hand
+and squashing it, I'd say to her, I'd say, 'Take him, May.' That's how
+I--I love you, Jimmie. Oh, ain't it nothing, honey, a girl can come here
+and lay herself this low to you----"
+
+"Well, haven't I just said you--you deserve better."
+
+"I don't want better, Jimmie. I want you. I want to take hold of your
+life and finish the job of making it the kind we can both be proud of.
+Us two, Jimmie, in--in our own decent two-by-four. Shopping on Saturday
+nights. Frying in our own frying-pan in our own kitchen. Listening to
+our own phonograph in our own parlor. Geraniums and--and kids--and--and
+things. Gas-logs. Stationary washtubs. Jimmie! Jimmie!"
+
+Mr. James P. Batch reached up for his hat and overcoat, cramming the
+newspaper into a rear pocket.
+
+"Come on," he said, stalking toward the side door and not waiting to see
+her to her feet.
+
+Outside, a banner of stars was over the narrow street. For a chain of
+five blocks he walked, with a silence and speed that Miss Slayback could
+only match with a running quickstep. But she was not out of breath. Her
+head was up, and her hand where it hooked into Mr. Batch's elbow, was in
+a vise that tightened with each block.
+
+
+You who will mete out no other approval than that vouched for by the
+stamp of time and whose contempt for the contemporary is from behind the
+easy refuge of the classics, suffer you the shuddering analogy that
+between Aspasia who inspired Pericles, Theodora who suggested the
+Justinian code, and Gertie Slayback who commandeered Jimmie Batch, is a
+sistership which rounds them, like a lasso thrown back into time, into
+one and the same petticoat dynasty behind the throne.
+
+True, Gertie Slayback's _mise en scene_ was a two-room kitchenette
+apartment situated in the Bronx at a surveyor's farthest point between
+two Subway stations, and her present state one of frequent red-faced
+forays down into a packing-case. But there was that in her eyes which
+witchingly bespoke the conquered, but not the conqueror. Hers was
+actually the titillating wonder of a bird which, captured, closes its
+wings, that surrender can be so sweet.
+
+Once she sat on the edge of the packing-case, dallying with a hammer,
+then laid it aside suddenly, to cross the littered room and place the
+side of her head to the immaculate waistcoat of Mr. Jimmie Batch,
+red-faced, too, over wrenching up with hatchet-edge a barrel-top.
+
+"Jimmie darling, I--I just never will get over your finding this place
+for us."
+
+Mr. Batch wiped his forearm across his brow, his voice jerking between
+the squeak of nails extracted from wood.
+
+"It was you, honey. You give me the to let ad. and I came to look,
+that's all."
+
+"Just the samey, it was my boy found it. If you hadn't come to look we
+might have been forced into taking that old dark coop over on Simpson
+Street."
+
+"What's all this junk in this barrel?"
+
+"Them's kitchen utensils, honey."
+
+"Kitchen what?"
+
+"Kitchen things that you don't know nothing about except to eat good
+things out of."
+
+"What's this?"
+
+"Don't bend it! That's a celery-brush. Ain't it cute?"
+
+"A celery-brush! Why didn't you get it a comb, too?"
+
+"Ah, now, honey-bee, don't go trying to be funny and picking through
+these things you don't know nothing about! They're just cute things I'm
+going to cook something grand suppers in, for my something awful bad
+boy."
+
+He leaned down to kiss her at that. "Gee!"
+
+She was standing, her shoulder to him and head thrown back against his
+chest. She looked up to stroke his cheek, her face foreshortened.
+
+"I'm all black and blue pinching myself, Jimmie."
+
+"Me too."
+
+"Every night when I get home from working here in the flat I say to
+myself in the looking-glass, I say, 'Gertie Slayback, what if you're
+only dreamin'?'"
+
+"Me too."
+
+"I say to myself, 'Are you sure that darling flat up there, with the new
+pink-and-white wall-paper and the furniture arriving every day, is going
+to be yours in a few days when you're Mrs. Jimmie Batch?'"
+
+"Mrs. Jimmie Batch--say, that's immense."
+
+"I keep saying it to myself every night, 'One day less.' Last night it
+was two days. To-night it'll be--one day, Jimmie, till I'm--her."
+
+She closed her eyes and let her hand linger up to his cheek, head still
+back against him, so that, inclining his head, he could rest his lips in
+the ash-blond fluff of her hair.
+
+"Talk about can't wait! If to-morrow was any farther off they'd have to
+sweep out a padded cell for me."
+
+She turned to rumple the smooth light thatch of his hair. "Bad boy!
+Can't wait! And here we are getting married all of a sudden, just like
+that. Up to the time of this draft business, Jimmie Batch, 'pretty soon'
+was the only date I could ever get out of you, and now here you are
+crying over one day's wait. Bad honey boy!"
+
+He reached back for the pink newspaper so habitually protruding from his
+hip-pocket. "You ought to see the way they're neck-breaking for the
+marriage-license bureaus since the draft. First thing we know the whole
+shebang of the boys will be claiming exemption of sole support of wife."
+
+"It's a good thing we made up our minds quick, Jimmie. They'll be
+getting wise. If too many get exemption from the army by marrying right
+away, it'll be a give-away."
+
+"I'd like to know who can lay his hands on the exemption of a little
+wife to support."
+
+"Oh, Jimmie, it--it sounds so funny. Being supported! Me that always did
+the supporting, not only to me, but to my mother and great-grandmother
+up to the day they died."
+
+"I'm the greatest little supporter you ever seen."
+
+"Me getting up mornings to stay at home in my own darling little flat,
+and no basement or time-clock. Nothing but a busy little hubby to eat
+him nice, smelly, bacon breakfast and grab him nice morning newspaper,
+kiss him wifie, and run downtown to support her. Jimmie, every morning
+for your breakfast I'm going to fry----"
+
+"You bet your life he's going to support her, and he's going to pay back
+that forty dollars of his girl's that went into his wedding duds, that
+hundred and ninety of his girl's savings that went into furniture----"
+
+"We got to meet our instalments every month first, Jimmie. That's what
+we want--no debts and every little darling piece of furniture paid up."
+
+"We--I'm going to pay it, too."
+
+"And my Jimmie is going to work to get himself promoted and quit being a
+sorehead at his steady hours and all."
+
+"I know more about selling, honey, than the whole bunch of dubs in that
+store put together if they'd give me a chance to prove it."
+
+She laid her palm to his lips.
+
+"Shh-h-h! You don't nothing of the kind. It's not conceit, it's work is
+going to get my boy his raise."
+
+"If they'd listen to me, that department would----"
+
+"Sh-h-h! J. G. Hoffheimer don't have to get pointers from Jimmie Batch
+how to run his department store."
+
+"There you go again. What's J. G. Hoffheimer got that I ain't? Luck and
+a few dollars in his pocket that, if I had in mine, would----"
+
+"It was his own grit put those dollars there, Jimmie. Just put it out of
+your head that it's luck makes a self-made man."
+
+"Self-made! You mean things just broke right for him. That's two-thirds
+of this self-made business."
+
+"You mean he buckled right down to brass tacks, and that's what my boy
+is going to do."
+
+"The trouble with this world is it takes money to make money. Get your
+first few dollars, I always say, no matter how, and then when you're on
+your feet scratch your conscience if it itches. That's why I said in the
+beginning, if we had took that hundred and ninety furniture money and
+staked it on----"
+
+"Jimmie, please--please! You wouldn't want to take a girl's savings of
+years and years to gamble on a sporty cigar proposition with a card-room
+in the rear. You wouldn't, Jimmie. You ain't that kind of fellow. Tell
+me you wouldn't, Jimmie."
+
+He turned away to dive into the barrel. "Naw," he said. "I wouldn't."
+
+The sun had receded, leaving a sudden sullen gray; the little square
+room, littered with an upheaval of excelsior, sheet-shrouded furniture,
+and the paper-hanger's paraphernalia and inimitable smells, darkening
+and seeming to chill.
+
+"We got to quit now, Jimmie. It's getting dark and the gas ain't turned
+on in the meter yet."
+
+He rose up out of the barrel, holding out at arm's-length what might
+have been a tinsmith's version of a porcupine.
+
+"What in-- What's this thing that scratched me?"
+
+She danced to take it. "It's a grater, a darling grater for horseradish
+and nutmeg and cocoanut. I'm going to fix you a cocoanut cake for our
+honeymoon supper to-morrow night, honey-bee. Essie Wohlgemuth over in
+the cake-demonstrating department is going to bring me the recipe.
+Cocoanut cake! And I'm going to fry us a little steak in this darling
+little skillet. Ain't it the cutest!"
+
+"Cute she calls a tin skillet."
+
+"Look what's pasted on it. 'Little Housewife's Skillet. The Kitchen
+Fairy.' That's what I'm going to be, Jimmie, the kitchen fairy. Give me
+that. It's a rolling-pin. All my life I've wanted a rolling-pin. Look
+honey, a little string to hang it up by. I'm going to hang everything up
+in rows. It's going to look like Tiffany's kitchen, all shiny. Give me,
+honey; that's an egg-beater. Look at it whiz. And this--this is a pan
+for war bread. I'm going to make us war bread to help the soldiers."
+
+"You're a little soldier yourself," he said.
+
+"That's what I would be if I was a man, a soldier all in brass buttons."
+
+"There's a bunch of the fellows going," said Mr. Batch, standing at the
+window, looking out over roofs, dilly-dallying up and down on his heels
+and breaking into a low, contemplative whistle.
+
+She was at his shoulder, peering over it. "You wouldn't be afraid, would
+you, Jimmie?"
+
+"You bet your life I wouldn't."
+
+She was tiptoes now, her arms creeping up to him. "Only my boy's got a
+wife--a brand-new wifie to support, ain't he?"
+
+"That's what he has," said Mr. Batch, stroking her forearm, but still
+gazing through and beyond whatever roofs he was seeing.
+
+"Jimmie!"
+
+"Huh?"
+
+"Look! We got a view of the Hudson River from our flat, just like we
+lived on Riverside Drive."
+
+"All the Hudson River I can see is fifteen smokestacks and somebody's
+wash-line out."
+
+"It ain't so. We got a grand view. Look! Stand on tiptoe, Jimmie, like
+me. There, between that water-tank on that black roof over there and
+them two chimneys. See? Watch my finger. A little stream of something
+over there that moves."
+
+"No, I don't see."
+
+"Look, honey-bee, close! See that little streak?"
+
+"All right, then, if you see it I see it."
+
+"To think we got a river view from our flat! It's like living in the
+country. I'll peek out at it all day long. God! honey, I just never will
+be over the happiness of being done with basements."
+
+"It was swell of old Higgins to give us this half-Saturday. It shows
+where you stood with the management, Gert--this and a five-dollar gold
+piece. Lord knows they wouldn't pony up that way if it was me getting
+married by myself."
+
+"It's because my boy ain't shown them down there yet the best that's in
+him. You just watch his little safety-first wife see to it that from now
+on he keeps up her record of never in seven years pushing the time-clock
+even one minute late, and that he keeps his stock shelves O. K. and
+shows his department he's a comer-on."
+
+"With that bunch of boobs a fellow's got a swell chance to get
+anywheres."
+
+"It's getting late, Jimmie. It don't look nice for us to stay here so
+late alone, not till--to-morrow. Ruby and Essie and Charley are going to
+meet us in the minister's back parlor at ten sharp in the morning. We
+can be back here by noon and get the place cleared up enough to give 'em
+a little lunch, just a fun lunch without fixings."
+
+"I hope the old guy don't waste no time splicing us. It's one of the
+things a fellow likes to have over with."
+
+"Jimmie! Why, it's the most beautiful thing in the world, like a garden
+of lilies or--or something, a marriage ceremony is! You got the ring
+safe, honey-bee, and the license?"
+
+"Pinned in my pocket where you put 'em, Flirty Gertie."
+
+"Flirty Gertie! Now you'll begin teasing me with that all our life--the
+way I didn't slap your face that night when I should have. I just
+couldn't have, honey. Goes to show we were just cut and dried for each
+other, don't it? Me, a girl that never in her life let a fellow even bat
+his eyes at her without an introduction. But that night when you winked,
+honey--something inside of me just winked back."
+
+"My girl!"
+
+"You mean it, boy? You ain't sorry about nothing, Jimmie?"
+
+"Sorry? Well, I guess not!"
+
+"You seen the way--she--May--you seen for yourself what she was, when we
+seen her walking, that next night after Ceiner's, nearly staggering, up
+Sixth Avenue with Budge Evans."
+
+"I never took no stock in her, honey. I was just letting her like me."
+
+She sat back on the box edge, regarding him, her face so soft and wont
+to smile that she could not keep its composure.
+
+"Get me my hat and coat, honey. We'll walk down. Got the key?"
+
+They skirmished in the gloom, moving through slit-like aisles of
+furniture and packing-box.
+
+"Ouch!"
+
+"Oh, the running water is hot, Jimmie, just like the ad. said! We got
+red-hot running water in our flat. Close the front windows, honey. We
+don't want it to rain in on our new green sofa. Not till it's paid for,
+anyways."
+
+"Hurry."
+
+"I'm ready."
+
+They met at the door, kissing on the inside and the outside of it; at
+the head of the fourth and the third and the second balustrade down.
+
+"We'll always make 'em little love landings, Jimmie, so we can't ever
+get tired climbing them."
+
+"Yep."
+
+Outside there was still a pink glow in a clean sky. The first flush of
+spring in the air had died, leaving chill. They walked briskly, arm in
+arm, down the asphalt incline of sidewalk leading from their
+apartment-house, a new street of canned homes built on a hillside--the
+sepulchral abode of the city's trapped whose only escape is down the
+fire-escape, and then only when the alternative is death. At the base of
+the hill there flows, in constant hubbub, a great up-and-down artery of
+street, repeating itself, mile after mile, in terms of the butcher, the
+baker, and the every-other-corner drug-store of a million dollar
+corporation. Housewives with perambulators and oilcloth shopping bags.
+Children on roller-skates. The din of small tradesmen and the humdrum of
+every city block where the homes remain unboarded all summer, and every
+wife is on haggling terms with the purveyor of her evening roundsteak
+and mess of rutabaga.
+
+Then there is the soap-box provender, too, sure of a crowd, offering
+creed, propaganda, patent medicine, and politics. It is the pulpit of
+the reformer and the housetop of the fanatic, this soap-box. From it the
+voice to the city is often a pious one, an impious one, and almost
+always a raucous one. Luther and Sophocles and even a Citizen of
+Nazareth made of the four winds of the street corner the walls of a
+temple of wisdom. What more fitting acropolis for freedom of speech
+than the great out-of-doors!
+
+Turning from the incline of cross-street into this petty Bagdad of the
+petty wise, the voice of the street corner lifted itself above the
+inarticulate din of the thoroughfare. A youth, thewed like an ox,
+surmounted on a stack of three self-provided canned-goods boxes, his
+in-at-the-waist silhouette thrown out against a sky that was almost
+ready to break out in stars; a crowd tightening about him.
+
+"It's a soldier-boy talkin', Gert."
+
+"If it ain't!" They tiptoed at the fringe of the circle, heads back.
+
+"Look, Gert, he's a lieutenant; he's got a shoulder-bar. And those four
+down there holding the flag are just privates. You can always tell a
+lieutenant by the bar."
+
+"Uh-huh."
+
+"Say, them boys do stack up some for Uncle Sam."
+
+"'Shh-h-h, Jimmie!"
+
+"I'm here to tell you that them boys stack up some."
+
+A banner stiffened out in the breeze, Mr. Batch reading: "Enlist before
+you are drafted. Last chance to beat the draft. Prove your patriotism.
+Enlist now! Your country calls!"
+
+"Come on," said Mr. Batch.
+
+"Wait. I want to hear what he's saying."
+
+" ... there's not a man here before me can afford to shirk his duty to
+his country. The slacker can't get along without his country, but his
+country can very easily get along without him."
+
+Cheers.
+
+"The poor exemption boobs are already running for doctors' certificates
+and marriage licenses, but even if they get by with it--and it is
+ninety-nine to one they won't--they can't run away from their own
+degradation and shame."
+
+"Come on, Jimmie."
+
+"Wait."
+
+"Men of America, for every one of you who tries to dodge his duty to
+his country there is a yellow streak somewhere underneath the hide of
+you. Women of America, every one of you that helps to foster the spirit
+of cowardice in your particular man or men is helping to make a coward.
+It's the cowards and the quitters and the slackers and dodgers that need
+this war more than the patriotic ones who are willing to buckle on and
+go!
+
+"Don't be a buttonhole patriot! A government that is good enough to live
+under is good enough to fight under!"
+
+Cheers.
+
+"If there is any reason on earth that has manifested itself for this
+devastating and terrible war it is that it has been a maker of men.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen, I am back from four months in the trenches with
+the French army, and I've come home, now that my own country is at war,
+to give her every ounce of energy I've got to offer. As soon as a hole
+in my side is healed up I'm going back to those trenches, and I want to
+say to you that them four months of mine face to face with life and with
+death have done more for me than all my twenty-four civilian years put
+together."
+
+Cheers.
+
+"I'll be a different man, if I live to come back home after this war and
+take up my work again as a draftsman. Why, I've seen weaklings and
+self-confessed failures and even ninnies go into them trenches and come
+out--oh yes, plenty of them do come out--men. Men that have got close
+enough down to the facts of things to feel new realizations of what life
+means come over them. Men that have gotten back their pep, their
+ambitions, their unselfishness. That's what war can do for your men, you
+women who are helping them to foster the spirit of holding back, of
+cheating their government. That's what war can do for your men. Make of
+them the kind of men who some day can face their children without
+having to hang their heads. Men who can answer for their part in making
+the world a safe place for democracy."
+
+An hour they stood there, the air quieting but chilling, and lavishly
+sown stars cropping out. Street lights had come out, too, throwing up in
+ever darker relief the figure above the heads of the crowd. His voice
+had coarsened and taken on a raw edge, but every gesture was flung from
+the socket, and from where they had forced themselves into the tight
+circle Gertie Slayback, her mouth fallen open and her head still back,
+could see the sinews of him ripple under khaki and the diaphragm lift
+for voice.
+
+There was a shift of speakers then, this time a private, still too
+rangy, but his looseness of frame seeming already to conform to the
+exigency of uniform.
+
+"Come on, Jimmie. I--I'm cold."
+
+They worked out into the freedom of the sidewalk, and for ten minutes,
+down blocks of petty shops already lighted, walked in a silence that
+grew apace.
+
+He was suddenly conscious that she was crying, quietly, her handkerchief
+wadded against her mouth. He strode on with a scowl and his head bent.
+
+"Let's sit down in this little park, Jimmie. I'm tired."
+
+They rested on a bench on one of those small triangles of
+breathing-space which the city ekes out now and then; mill ends of land
+parcels.
+
+He took immediately to roving the toe of his shoe in and out among the
+gravel. She stole out her hand to his arm.
+
+"Well, Jimmie?" Her voice was in the gauze of a whisper that hardly left
+her throat.
+
+"Well, what?" he said, still toeing.
+
+"There--there's a lot of things we never thought about, Jimmie."
+
+"Aw!"
+
+"Eh, Jimmie?"
+
+"You mean _you_ never thought about."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I know what I mean alrighty."
+
+"I--I was the one that suggested it, Jimmie, but--but you fell in. I--I
+just couldn't bear to think of it, Jimmie--your going and all. I
+suggested it, but--you fell in."
+
+"Say, when a fellow's shoved he falls. I never gave a thought to
+sneaking an exemption until it was put in my head. I'd smash the fellow
+in the face that calls me coward, I will."
+
+"You could have knocked me down with a feather, Jimmie, looking at it
+his way, all of a sudden."
+
+"You couldn't me. Don't think I was ever strong for the whole business.
+I mean the exemption part. I wasn't going to say nothing. What's the
+use, seeing the way you had your heart set on--on things? But the whole
+business, if you want to know it, went against my grain. I'll smash the
+fellow in the face that calls me a coward."
+
+"I know, Jimmie; you--you're right. It was me suggested hurrying things
+like this. Sneakin'! Oh, God! ain't I the messer-up!"
+
+"Lay easy, girl. I'm going to see it through. I guess there's been
+fellows before me and will be after me who have done worse. I'm going to
+see it through. All I got to say is I'll smash up the fellow calls me
+coward. Come on, forget it. Let's go."
+
+She was close to him, her cheek crinkled against his with the frank kind
+of social unconsciousness the park bench seems to engender.
+
+"Come on, Gert. I got a hunger on."
+
+"'Shh-h-h, Jimmie! Let me think. I'm thinking."
+
+"Too much thinking killed a cat. Come on."
+
+"Jimmie!"
+
+"Huh?"
+
+"Jimmie--would you--had you ever thought about being a soldier?"
+
+"Sure. I came in an ace of going into the army that time after--after
+that little Central Street trouble of mine. I've got a book in my trunk
+this minute on military tactics. Wouldn't surprise me a bit to see me
+land in the army some day."
+
+"It's a fine thing, Jimmie, for a fellow--the army."
+
+"Yeh, good for what ails him."
+
+She drew him back, pulling at his shoulder so that finally he faced her.
+"Jimmie!"
+
+"Huh?"
+
+"I got an idea."
+
+"Shoot."
+
+"You remember once, honey-bee, how I put it to you that night at
+Ceiner's how, if it was for your good, no sacrifice was too much to
+make."
+
+"Forget it."
+
+"You didn't believe it."
+
+"Aw, say now, what's the use digging up ancient history?"
+
+"You'd be right, Jimmie, not to believe it. I haven't lived up to what I
+said."
+
+"Oh Lord, honey! What's eating you now? Come to the point."
+
+She would not meet his eyes, turning her head from him to hide lips that
+would quiver. "Honey, it--it ain't coming off--that's all. Not
+now--anyways."
+
+"What ain't?"
+
+"Us."
+
+"Who?"
+
+"You know what I mean, Jimmie. It's like everything the soldier boy on
+the corner just said. I--I saw you getting red clear behind your ears
+over it. I--I was, too, Jimmie. It's like that soldier boy was put there
+on that corner just to show me, before it was too late, how wrong I been
+in every one of my ways. Us women who are helping to foster slackers.
+That's what we're making of them--slackers for life. And here I been
+thinking it was your good I had in mind, when all along it's been mine.
+That's what it's been, mine!"
+
+"Aw, now, Gert----"
+
+"You got to go, Jimmie. You got to go, because you want to go
+and--because I want you to go."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"To war."
+
+He took hold of her two arms because they were trembling. "Aw, now,
+Gert, I didn't say anything complaining. I----"
+
+"You did, Jimmie, you did, and--and I never was so glad over you that
+you did complain. I just never was so glad. I want you to go, Jimmie. I
+want you to go and get a man made out of you. They'll make a better job
+out of you than ever I can. I want you to get the yellow streak washed
+out. I want you to get to be all the things he said you would. For every
+line he was talking up there, I could see my boy coming home to me some
+day better than anything I could make out of him, babying him the way I
+can't help doing. I could see you, honey-bee, coming back to me with the
+kind of lift to your head a fellow has when he's been fighting to make
+the world a safe place for dem--for whatever it was he said. I want you
+to go, Jimmie. I want you to beat the draft, too. Nothing on earth can
+make me not want you to go."
+
+"Why, Gert--you're kiddin'!"
+
+"Honey, you want to go, don't you? You want to square up those shoulders
+and put on khaki, don't you? Tell me you want to go!"
+
+"Why--why, yes, Gert, if----"
+
+"Oh, you're going, Jimmie! You're going!"
+
+"Why, girl--you're crazy! Our flat! Our furniture--our----"
+
+"What's a flat? What's furniture? What's anything? There's not a firm in
+business wouldn't take back a boy's furniture--a boy's
+everything--that's going out to fight for--for dem-o-cracy! What's a
+flat? What's anything?"
+
+He let drop his head to hide his eyes.
+
+
+Do you know it is said that on the Desert of Sahara, the slope of
+Sorrento, and the marble of Fifth Avenue the sun can shine whitest?
+There is an iridescence to its glittering on bleached sand, blue bay,
+and Carrara facade that is sheer light distilled to its utmost.
+
+On one such day when, standing on the high slope of Fifth Avenue where
+it rises toward the Park, and looking down on it, surging to and fro, it
+was as if, so manifest the brilliancy, every head wore a tin helmet,
+parrying sunlight at a thousand angles of refraction.
+
+Parade-day, all this glittering midstream is swept to the clean sheen of
+a strip of moire, this splendid desolation blocked on each side by
+crowds half the density of the sidewalk.
+
+On one of these sun-drenched Saturdays dedicated by a growing tradition
+to this or that national expression, the Ninety-ninth Regiment, to a
+flare of music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned
+into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable
+row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw
+if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were,
+for the great primordial mire of war.
+
+There is no state of being so finely sensitized as national
+consciousness. A gauntlet down, and it surges up. One ripple of a flag
+defended can goose-flesh a nation. How bitter and how sweet it is to
+give a soldier!
+
+To the seething kinetic chemistry of such mingling emotions there were
+women who stood in the frontal crowds of the sidewalks stifling
+hysteria, or ran after in terror at sight of one so personally hers,
+receding in that great impersonal wave of olive drab.
+
+And yet the air was martial with banner and with shout. And the ecstasy
+of such moments is like a dam against reality, pressing it back. It is
+in the pompless watches of the night or of too long days that such dams
+break, excoriating.
+
+For the thirty blocks of its course Gertie Slayback followed that wave
+of men, half run and half walk. Down from the curb, and at the beck and
+call of this or that policeman up again, only to find opportunity for
+still another dive out from the invisible roping off of the sidewalk
+crowds.
+
+From the middle of his line, she could see, sometimes, the tail of
+Jimmie Batch's glance roving for her, but to all purports his eye was
+solely for his own replica in front of him, and at such times, when he
+marched, his back had a little additional straightness that was almost
+swayback.
+
+Nor was Gertie Slayback crying. On the contrary, she was inclined to
+laughter. A little too inclined to a high and brittle sort of dissonance
+over which she seemed to have no control.
+
+"'By, Jimmie. So long! Jimmie! You-hoo!"
+
+Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp.
+
+"You-hoo! Jimmie! So long, Jimmie!"
+
+At Fourteenth Street, and to the solemn stroke of one from a tower, she
+broke off suddenly without even a second look back, dodging under the
+very arms of the crowd as she ran out from it.
+
+She was one and three-quarter minutes late when she punched the
+time-clock beside the Complaints and Adjustment Desk in the
+Bargain-Basement.
+
+
+
+
+FANNIE HURST
+
+
+"I find myself at twenty-nine exactly where at fourteen I had planned I
+would be." So Miss Hurst, in a sketch written for the _American
+Magazine_ (March, 1919), sums up the story of a remarkable literary
+career.
+
+Fannie Hurst was born in St. Louis, October 19, 1889. She attended the
+public schools, and began to write--with the firm intention of becoming
+an author--before she was out of grammar school. "At fourteen," she
+tells us in the article just referred to, "the one pigeon-hole of my
+little girl's desk was already stuffed with packets of rejected verse
+which had been furtively written, furtively mailed, and still more
+furtively received back again by heading off the postman a block before
+he reached our door." To this dream of authorship--the secret of which
+was carefully guarded from her family--she sacrificed her play and even
+her study hours. The first shock to her family came on St. Valentine's
+Day. There was to be a party that night, her first real party. A new
+dress was ready for the occasion, and a boy escort was to call for her
+in a cab. It happened that Valentine's day fell on Saturday, and
+Saturday was her time for writing. That day she turned from poetry to
+fiction, and was just in the middle of her first story when it came time
+to get ready for the party. She did not get ready. The escort arrived,
+cab and all; the family protested, but all to no purpose. She finished
+the story, mailed it, three weeks later received it back, and began her
+second story. All through her high school days she mailed a manuscript
+every Saturday, and they always came back.
+
+After high school she entered Washington University, St. Louis,
+graduating in 1909. And still she kept writing. To one journal alone
+she sent during those four years, thirty-four short stories. And they
+all came back--all but one. Just before graduation she sold her first
+article, a little sketch first written as a daily theme, which was
+published in a local weekly, and brought her three dollars. This was the
+total result of eight years' literary effort. So quite naturally she
+determined to go on.
+
+She announced to her family that she was going to New York City to
+become a writer. There was a stormy discussion in the Hurst family, but
+it ended in her going away, with a bundle of manuscripts in her trunk,
+to brave the big city alone. She found a tiny furnished room and set
+forth to besiege the editors' offices. One evening she returned, to find
+the house being raided, a patrol wagon at the curb, and the lodgers
+being hustled into it. She crossed the street and walked on, and never
+saw her bag or baggage again. By the help of the Young Women's Christian
+Association she found another room, in different surroundings, and set
+out again to make the round of the editorial offices.
+
+Then followed months and months of "writing, rewriting, rejections, and
+re-rejections." From home came letters now beseeching, now commanding
+her to return, and at length cutting off her allowance. So she returned
+her rented typewriter and applied at a theatrical agency. She secured a
+small part in a Broadway company, and then came her first acceptance of
+a story, with an actual check for thirty dollars. She left the stage and
+rented another typewriter,--but it was six months before she sold
+another story.
+
+In all this time she dipped deeply into the great stream of the city's
+life. To quote her own account:
+
+
+     For a month I lived with an Armenian family on West Broadway, in a
+     room over a tobacconist's shop. I apprenticed myself as a
+     sales-girl in New York's most gigantic department store. Four and
+     one-quarter yards of ribbon at seven and a half cents a yard proved
+     my Waterloo, and my resignation at the end of one week was not
+     entirely voluntary. I served as waitress in one of New York's most
+     gigantic chain of white-tiled lunch rooms. I stitched boys' pants
+     in a Polish sweatshop, and lived for two days in New York's most
+     rococo hotel. I took a graduate course in Anglo Saxon at Columbia
+     University, and one in lamp-shade making at Wanamaker's: wormed
+     into a Broadway musical show as wardrobe girl, and went out on a
+     self-appointed newspaper assignment to interview the mother of the
+     richest baby in the world.
+
+
+All these experiences yielded rich material for stories, but no one
+would print them. Her money was gone; so was a diamond ring that had
+been a Commencement present; it seemed as if there was nothing left but
+to give up the struggle and go back home. Then, just as she had struck
+bottom, an editor actually told her she could write, and followed up his
+remark by buying three stories. Since that time she has never had a
+story rejected, and her checks have gone up from two figures into four.
+And so, at the end of a long fight, as she says, "I find myself at
+twenty-nine exactly where at fourteen I had planned I would be. And best
+of all, what popular success I am enjoying has come not from pandering
+to popular demand or editorial policy, but from pandering to my own
+inner convictions, which are like little soul-tapers, lighting the way."
+
+All her work has been in the form of the short story. Her first book,
+_Just Around the Corner_, published in 1914, is a collection of stories
+dealing with the life of working girls in a city. _Every Soul Hath Its
+Song_ is a similar collection; the title suggests the author's outlook
+upon life. Some one has said that in looking at a puddle of water, you
+may see either the mud at the bottom or the sky reflected on its
+surface. Miss Hurst sees the reflection of the sky. The _Boston
+Transcript_ said of this book: "Here at last is a story writer who is
+bent on listening to the voices of America and interpreting them."
+_Gaslight Sonatas_, from which "Bitter-Sweet" is taken, showed an
+advance over her earlier work. Two of the stories from this volume were
+selected by Mr. O'Brien for his volume, _Best Short Stories_, for 1916
+and 1917. _Humoresque_, her latest work, continues her studies of city
+types, drawn from New York and St. Louis. The stories show her insight
+into character and her graphic descriptive power. Miss Hurst is also the
+author of two plays, _The Land of the Free_ and _The Good Provider_.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE LUMBER COUNTRY
+
+_The men of the woods are not as the men of the cities. The great open
+spaces where men battle with the primeval forest set their mark upon
+their inhabitants, not only in physique but in character. The
+lumberman,--rough, frank, independent, humorous, equally ready for a
+fight or a frolic, has been portrayed at full length by Stewart Edward
+White in_ THE BLAZED TRAIL _and_ THE RIVERMAN. _In the following sketch,
+taken from his_ BLAZED TRAIL STORIES, _he shows the lumberman at work
+and at play._
+
+
+
+
+THE RIVERMAN
+
+BY
+
+STEWART EDWARD WHITE
+
+
+I first met him one Fourth of July afternoon in the middle eighties. The
+sawdust streets and high board sidewalks of the lumber town were filled
+to the brim with people. The permanent population, dressed in the
+stiffness of its Sunday best, escorted gingham wives or sweethearts; a
+dozen outsiders like myself tried not to be too conspicuous in a city
+smartness; but the great multitude was composed of the men of the woods.
+I sat, chair-tilted by the hotel, watching them pass. Their heavy
+woollen shirts crossed by the broad suspenders, the red of their sashes
+or leather shine of their belts, their short kersey trousers "stagged"
+off to leave a gap between the knee and the heavily spiked "cork
+boots"--all these were distinctive enough of their class, but most
+interesting to me were the eyes that peered from beneath their little
+round hats tilted rakishly askew. They were all subtly alike, those
+eyes. Some were black, some were brown, or gray, or blue, but all were
+steady and unabashed, all looked straight at you with a strange humorous
+blending of aggression and respect for your own business, and all
+without exception wrinkled at the corners with a suggestion of dry
+humor. In my half-conscious scrutiny I probably stared harder than I
+knew, for all at once a laughing pair of blue eyes suddenly met mine
+full, and an ironical voice drawled,
+
+"Say, bub, you look as interested as a man killing snakes. Am I your
+long-lost friend?"
+
+The tone of the voice matched accurately the attitude of the man, and
+that was quite non-committal. He stood cheerfully ready to meet the
+emergency. If I sought trouble, it was here to my hand; or if I needed
+help he was willing to offer it.
+
+"I guess you are," I replied, "if you can tell me what all this outfit's
+headed for."
+
+He thrust back his hat and ran his hand through a mop of closely cropped
+light curls.
+
+"Birling match," he explained briefly. "Come on."
+
+I joined him, and together we followed the crowd to the river, where we
+roosted like cormorants on adjacent piles overlooking a patch of clear
+water among filled booms.
+
+"Drive just over," my new friend informed me. "Rear come down last
+night. Fourther July celebration. This little town will scratch fer th'
+tall timber along about midnight when the boys goes in to take her
+apart."
+
+A half-dozen men with peavies rolled a white-pine log of about a foot
+and a half in diameter into the clear water, where it lay rocking back
+and forth, three or four feet from the boom piles. Suddenly a man ran
+the length of the boom, leaped easily into the air, and landed with both
+feet square on one end of the floating log. That end disappeared in an
+ankle-deep swirl of white foam, the other rose suddenly, the whole
+timber, projected forward by the shock, drove headlong to the middle of
+the little pond. And the man, his arms folded, his knees just bent in
+the graceful nervous attitude of the circus-rider, stood upright like a
+statue of bronze.
+
+A roar approved this feat.
+
+"That's Dickey Darrell," said my informant, "Roaring Dick. He's hell
+_and_ repeat. Watch him."
+
+The man on the log was small, with clean beautiful haunches and
+shoulders, but with hanging baboon arms. Perhaps his most striking
+feature was a mop of reddish-brown hair that overshadowed a little
+triangular white face accented by two reddish-brown quadrilaterals that
+served as eyebrows and a pair of inscrutable chipmunk eyes.
+
+For a moment he poised erect in the great calm of the public performer.
+Then slowly he began to revolve the log under his feet. The lofty gaze,
+the folded arms, the straight supple waist budged not by a hair's
+breadth; only the feet stepped forward, at first deliberately, then
+faster and faster, until the rolling log threw a blue spray a foot into
+the air. Then suddenly _slap! slap!_ the heavy caulks stamped a
+reversal. The log came instantaneously to rest, quivering exactly like
+some animal that had been spurred through its paces.
+
+"Magnificent!" I cried.
+
+"Hell, that's nothing!" my companion repressed me, "anybody can birl a
+log. Watch this."
+
+Roaring Dick for the first time unfolded his arms. With some appearance
+of caution he balanced his unstable footing into absolute immobility.
+Then he turned a somersault.
+
+This was the real thing. My friend uttered a wild yell of applause which
+was lost in a general roar.
+
+A long pike-pole shot out, bit the end of the timber, and towed it to
+the boom pile. Another man stepped on the log with Darrell. They stood
+facing each other, bent-kneed, alert. Suddenly with one accord they
+commenced to birl the log from left to right. The pace grew hot. Like
+squirrels treading a cage their feet twinkled. Then it became apparent
+that Darrell's opponent was gradually being forced from the top of the
+log. He could not keep up. Little by little, still moving desperately,
+he dropped back to the slant, then at last to the edge, and so off into
+the river with a mighty splash.
+
+"Clean birled!" commented my friend.
+
+One after another a half-dozen rivermen tackled the imperturbable Dick,
+but none of them possessed the agility to stay on top in the pace he set
+them. One boy of eighteen seemed for a moment to hold his own, and
+managed at least to keep out of the water even when Darrell had
+apparently reached his maximum speed. But that expert merely threw his
+entire weight into two reversing stamps of his feet, and the young
+fellow dove forward as abruptly as though he had been shied over a
+horse's head.
+
+The crowd was by now getting uproarious and impatient of volunteer
+effort to humble Darrell's challenge. It wanted the best, and at once.
+It began, with increasing insistence, to shout a name.
+
+"Jimmy Powers!" it vociferated, "Jimmy Powers!"
+
+And then by shamefaced bashfulness, by profane protest, by muttered and
+comprehensive curses I knew that my companion on the other pile was
+indicated.
+
+A dozen men near at hand began to shout. "Here he is!" they cried. "Come
+on, Jimmy." "Don't be a high banker." "Hang his hide on the fence."
+
+Jimmy, still red and swearing, suffered himself to be pulled from his
+elevation and disappeared in the throng. A moment later I caught his
+head and shoulders pushing toward the boom piles, and so in a moment he
+stepped warily aboard to face his antagonist.
+
+This was evidently no question to be determined by the simplicity of
+force or the simplicity of a child's trick. The two men stood
+half-crouched, face to face, watching each other narrowly, but making no
+move. To me they seemed like two wrestlers sparring for an opening.
+Slowly the log revolved one way; then slowly the other. It was a mere
+courtesy of salute. All at once Dick birled three rapid strokes from
+left to right as though about to roll the log, leaped into the air and
+landed square with both feet on the other slant of the timber. Jimmy
+Powers felt the jar, and acknowledged it by a spasmodic jerk with which
+he counterbalanced Darrell's weight. But he was not thrown.
+
+As though this daring and hazardous manoeuvre had opened the combat,
+both men sprang to life. Sometimes the log rolled one way, sometimes the
+other, sometimes it jerked from side to side like a crazy thing, but
+always with the rapidity of light, always in a smother of spray and
+foam. The decided _spat, spat, spat_ of the reversing blows from the
+caulked boots sounded like picket firing. I could not make out the
+different leads, feints, parries, and counters of this strange method of
+boxing, nor could I distinguish to whose initiative the various
+evolutions of that log could be ascribed. But I retain still a vivid
+mental picture of two men nearly motionless above the waist, nearly
+vibrant below it, dominating the insane gyrations of a stick of pine.
+
+The crowd was appreciative and partisan--for Jimmy Powers. It howled
+wildly, and rose thereby to even higher excitement. Then it forgot its
+manners utterly and groaned when it made out that a sudden splash
+represented its favorite, while the indomitable Darrell still trod the
+quarter-deck as champion birler for the year.
+
+I must confess I was as sorry as anybody. I climbed down from my
+cormorant roost, and picked my way between the alleys of aromatic piled
+lumber in order to avoid the press, and cursed the little gods heartily
+for undue partiality in the wrong direction. In this manner I happened
+on Jimmy Powers himself seated dripping on a board and examining his
+bare foot.
+
+"I'm sorry," said I behind him. "How did he do it?"
+
+He whirled, and I could see that his laughing boyish face had become
+suddenly grim and stern, and that his eyes were shot with blood.
+
+"Oh, it's you, is it?" he growled disparagingly. "Well, that's how he
+did it."
+
+He held out his foot. Across the instep and at the base of the toes ran
+two rows of tiny round punctures from which the blood was oozing. I
+looked very inquiring.
+
+"He corked me!" Jimmy Powers explained. "Jammed his spikes into me!
+Stepped on my foot and tripped me, the----" Jimmy Powers certainly could
+swear.
+
+"Why didn't you make a kick?" I cried.
+
+"That ain't how I do it," he muttered, pulling on his heavy woollen
+sock.
+
+"But no," I insisted, my indignation mounting. "It's an outrage! That
+crowd was with you. All you had to do was to _say_ something----"
+
+He cut me short. "And give myself away as a damn fool--sure Mike. I
+ought to know Dickey Darrell by this time, and I ought to be big enough
+to take care of myself." He stamped his foot into his driver's shoe and
+took me by the arm, his good humor apparently restored. "No, don't lose
+any hair, bub; I'll get even with Roaring Dick."
+
+That night, having by the advice of the proprietor moved my bureau and
+trunk against the bedroom door, I lay wide awake listening to the taking
+of the town apart. At each especially vicious crash I wondered if that
+might be Jimmy Powers getting even with Roaring Dick.
+
+The following year, but earlier in the season, I again visited my little
+lumber town. In striking contrast to the life of that other midsummer
+day were the deserted streets. The landlord knew me, and after I had
+washed and eaten approached me with a suggestion.
+
+"You got all day in front of you," said he; "why don't you take a horse
+and buggy and make a visit to the big jam? Everybody's up there more or
+less."
+
+In response to my inquiry, he replied:
+
+"They've jammed at the upper bend, jammed bad. The crew's been picking
+at her for near a week now, and last night Darrell was down to see about
+some more dynamite. It's worth seein'. The breast of her is near thirty
+feet high, and lots of water in the river."
+
+"Darrell?" said I, catching at the name.
+
+"Yes. He's rear boss this year. Do you think you'd like to take a look
+at her?"
+
+"I think I should," I assented.
+
+The horse and I jogged slowly along a deep sand road, through wastes of
+pine stumps and belts of hardwood beautiful with the early spring, until
+finally we arrived at a clearing in which stood two huge tents, a
+mammoth kettle slung over a fire of logs, and drying racks about the
+timbers of another fire. A fat cook in the inevitable battered derby
+hat, two bare-armed cookees, and a chore "boy" of seventy-odd summers
+were the only human beings in sight. One of the cookees agreed to keep
+an eye on my horse. I picked my way down a well-worn trail toward the
+regular _clank, clank, click_ of the peavies.
+
+I emerged finally to a plateau elevated some fifty or sixty feet above
+the river. A half-dozen spectators were already gathered. Among them I
+could not but notice a tall, spare, broad-shouldered young fellow
+dressed in a quiet business suit, somewhat wrinkled, whose square,
+strong, clean-cut face and muscular hands were tanned by the weather to
+a dark umber-brown. In another moment I looked down on the jam.
+
+The breast, as my landlord had told me, rose sheer from the water to the
+height of at least twenty-five feet, bristling and formidable. Back of
+it pressed the volume of logs packed closely in an apparently
+inextricable tangle as far as the eye could reach. A man near informed
+me that the tail was a good three miles up stream. From beneath this
+wonderful _chevaux de frise_ foamed the current of the river,
+irresistible to any force less mighty than the statics of such a mass.
+
+A crew of forty or fifty men were at work. They clamped their peavies to
+the reluctant timbers, heaved, pushed, slid, and rolled them one by one
+into the current, where they were caught and borne away. They had been
+doing this for a week. As yet their efforts had made but slight
+impression on the bulk of the jam, but some time, with patience, they
+would reach the key-logs. Then the tangle would melt like sugar in the
+freshet, and these imperturbable workers would have to escape suddenly
+over the plunging logs to shore.
+
+My eye ranged over the men, and finally rested on Dickey Darrell. He
+was standing on the slanting end of an upheaved log dominating the
+scene. His little triangular face with the accents of the quadrilateral
+eyebrows was pale with the blaze of his energy, and his chipmunk eyes
+seemed to flame with a dynamic vehemence that caused those on whom they
+fell to jump as though they had been touched with a hot poker. I had
+heard more of Dickey Darrell since my last visit, and was glad of the
+chance to observe Morrison & Daly's best "driver" at work.
+
+The jam seemed on the very edge of breaking. After half an hour's
+strained expectation it seemed still on the very edge of breaking. So I
+sat down on a stump. Then for the first time I noticed another
+acquaintance, handling his peavie near the very person of the rear boss.
+
+"Hullo," said I to myself, "that's funny. I wonder if Jimmy Powers got
+even; and if so, why he is working so amicably and so near Roaring
+Dick."
+
+At noon the men came ashore for dinner. I paid a quarter into the cook's
+private exchequer and so was fed. After the meal I approached my
+acquaintance of the year before.
+
+"Hello, Powers," I greeted him, "I suppose you don't remember me?"
+
+"Sure," he responded heartily. "Ain't you a little early this year?"
+
+"No," I disclaimed, "this is a better sight than a birling match."
+
+I offered him a cigar, which he immediately substituted for his corn-cob
+pipe. We sat at the root of a tree.
+
+"It'll be a great sight when that jam pulls," said I.
+
+"You bet," he replied, "but she's a teaser. Even old Tim Shearer would
+have a picnic to make out just where the key-logs are. We've started her
+three times, but she's plugged tight every trip. Likely to pull almost
+any time."
+
+We discussed various topics. Finally I ventured:
+
+"I see your old friend Darrell is rear boss."
+
+"Yes," said Jimmy Powers, dryly.
+
+"By the way, did you fellows ever square up on that birling match?"
+
+"No," said Jimmy Powers; then after an instant, "Not yet."
+
+I glanced at him to recognize the square set to the jaw that had
+impressed me so formidably the year before. And again his face relaxed
+almost quizzically as he caught sight of mine.
+
+"Bub," said he, getting to his feet, "those little marks are on my foot
+yet. And just you tie into one idea: Dickey Darrel's got it coming." His
+face darkened with a swift anger. "God damn his soul!" he said,
+deliberately. It was no mere profanity. It was an imprecation, and in
+its very deliberation I glimpsed the flare of an undying hate.
+
+About three o'clock that afternoon Jimmy's prediction was fulfilled.
+Without the slightest warning the jam "pulled." Usually certain
+premonitory _cracks_, certain sinkings down, groanings forward,
+grumblings, shruggings, and sullen, reluctant shiftings of the logs give
+opportunity for the men to assure their safety. This jam, after
+inexplicably hanging fire for a week, as inexplicably started like a
+sprinter almost into its full gait. The first few tiers toppled smash
+into the current, raising a waterspout like that made by a dynamite
+explosion; the mass behind plunged forward blindly, rising and falling
+as the integral logs were up-ended, turned over, thrust one side, or
+forced bodily into the air by the mighty power playing jack-straws with
+them.
+
+The rivermen, though caught unaware, reached either bank. They held
+their peavies across their bodies as balancing-poles, and zig-zagged
+ashore with a calmness and lack of haste that were in reality only an
+indication of the keenness with which they fore-estimated each chance.
+Long experience with the ways of saw-logs brought them out. They knew
+the correlation of these many forces just as the expert billiard-player
+knows instinctively the various angles of incident and reflection
+between his cue-ball and its mark. Consequently they avoided the centers
+of eruption, paused on the spots steadied for the moment, dodged moving
+logs, trod those not yet under way, and so arrived on solid ground. The
+jam itself started with every indication of meaning business, gained
+momentum for a hundred feet, and then plugged to a standstill. The
+"break" was abortive.
+
+Now we all had leisure to notice two things. First, the movement had not
+been of the whole jam, as we had at first supposed, but only of a block
+or section of it twenty rods or so in extent. Thus between the part that
+had moved and the greater bulk that had not stirred lay a hundred feet
+of open water in which floated a number of loose logs. The second fact
+was, that Dickey Darrell had fallen into that open stretch of water and
+was in the act of swimming toward one of the floating logs. That much we
+were given time to appreciate thoroughly. Then the other section of the
+jam rumbled and began to break. Roaring Dick was caught between two
+gigantic millstones moving to crush him out of sight.
+
+An active figure darted down the tail of the first section, out over the
+floating logs, seized Darrell by the coat-collar, and so burdened began
+desperately to scale the very face of the breaking jam.
+
+Never was a more magnificent rescue. The logs were rolling, falling,
+diving against the laden man. He climbed as over a treadmill, a
+treadmill whose speed was constantly increasing. And when he finally
+gained the top, it was as the gap closed splintering beneath him and the
+man he had saved.
+
+It is not in the woodsman to be demonstrative at any time, but here was
+work demanding attention. Without a pause for breath or congratulation
+they turned to the necessity of the moment. The jam, the whole jam, was
+moving at last. Jimmy Powers ran ashore for his peavie. Roaring Dick,
+like a demon incarnate, threw himself into the work. Forty men attacked
+the jam in a dozen places, encouraging the movement, twisting aside the
+timbers that threatened to lock anew, directing pigmy-like the titanic
+forces into the channel of their efficiency. Roaring like wild cattle
+the logs swept by, at first slowly, then with the railroad rush of the
+curbed freshet. Men were everywhere, taking chances, like cowboys before
+the stampeded herd. And so, out of sight around the lower bend swept the
+front of the jam in a swirl of glory, the rivermen riding the great boom
+back of the creature they subdued, until at last, with the slackening
+current, the logs floated by free, cannoning with hollow sound one
+against the other. A half-dozen watchers, leaning statuesquely on the
+shafts of their peavies, watched the ordered ranks pass by.
+
+One by one the spectators departed. At last only myself and the
+brown-faced young man remained. He sat on a stump, staring with
+sightless eyes into vacancy. I did not disturb his thoughts.
+
+The sun dipped. A cool breeze of evening sucked up the river. Over near
+the cook-camp a big fire commenced to crackle by the drying frames. At
+dusk the rivermen straggled in from the down-river trail.
+
+The brown-faced young man arose and went to meet them. I saw him return
+in close conversation with Jimmy Powers. Before they reached us he had
+turned away with a gesture of farewell.
+
+Jimmy Powers stood looking after him long after his form had
+disappeared, and indeed even after the sound of his wheels had died
+toward town. As I approached, the riverman turned to me a face from
+which the reckless, contained self-reliance of the woods-worker had
+faded. It was wide-eyed with an almost awe-stricken wonder and
+adoration.
+
+"Do you know who that is?" he asked me in a hushed voice. "That's
+Thorpe, Harry Thorpe. And do you know what he said to me just now, _me_?
+He told me he wanted me to work in Camp One next winter, Thorpe's One.
+And he told me I was the first man he ever hired straight into One."
+
+His breath caught with something like a sob.
+
+I had heard of the man and of his methods. I knew he had made it a
+practice of recruiting for his prize camp only from the employees of his
+other camps, that, as Jimmy said, he never "hired straight into One." I
+had heard, too, of his reputation among his own and other woodsmen. But
+this was the first time I had ever come into personal contact with his
+influence. It impressed me the more in that I had come to know Jimmy
+Powers and his kind.
+
+"You deserve it, every bit," said I. "I'm not going to call you a hero,
+because that would make you tired. What you did this afternoon showed
+nerve. It was a brave act. But it was a better act because your rescued
+your enemy, because you forgot everything but your common humanity when
+danger----"
+
+I broke off. Jimmy was again looking at me with his ironically quizzical
+grin.
+
+"Bub," said he, "if you're going to hang any stars of Bethlehem on my
+Christmas tree, just call a halt right here. I didn't rescue that
+scalawag because I had any Christian sentiments, nary bit. I was just
+naturally savin' him for the birling match next Fourther July."
+
+
+
+
+STEWART EDWARD WHITE
+
+
+There are some authors whom we think of as bookmen; there are others
+whom we think of as men first, and as writers secondarily. Lowell, for
+example was a bookman; Roosevelt was a man of action who wrote books.
+Stewart Edward White, far more of a literary artist than Roosevelt,
+gives like him the impression of a man who has done things, of one who
+lives a full life, and produces books as a sort of by-product: very
+valuable, but not the chief end of existence.
+
+Mr. White was born in a small town near Grand Rapids, Michigan, March
+12, 1873. His parents had their own ideas about bringing up children.
+Instead of sending him to school they sent for a teacher to instruct
+him, they encouraged him to read, they took him traveling, not only to
+cities but to the silent places, the great forests, and to the lumber
+camps. He spent four years in California, and became a good horseman,
+making many trips in the saddle to the picturesque old ranches. When
+finally, he entered high school, at sixteen, he went in with boys of his
+own age, and graduated at eighteen, president of his class. And what he
+was most proud of was that he won and still holds, the five-mile running
+record of his school. He was intensely interested in birds at this time,
+and spent all his spare hours in the woods, studying bird-life. The
+result was a series of articles on birds, published in various
+scientific journals,--papers whose columns are not usually open to high
+school contributors.
+
+Then came a college course at the University of Michigan, with vacations
+spent in cruising about the Great Lakes in a twenty-eight-foot cutter
+sloop. After graduation he worked for a time in a packing house, then
+hearing of the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, he set off with
+the other gold-diggers. He did not find a mine, but the experience gave
+him a background for two later novels, _The Claim Jumpers_, and _The
+Westerners_.
+
+He went east for a year of graduate study at Columbia University. Like
+many other students, he found a friend in Professor Brander Matthews,
+who encouraged him to write of some of his western experiences. He sold
+a few short stories to magazines, and his first novel, _The Claim
+Jumpers_ was accepted by Appleton's. _The Westerners_, his next book,
+brought him $500 for the serial rights, and with its publication he
+definitely determined upon making authorship his calling. But it was not
+authorship in a study. _The Blazed Trail_ was written in a lumber camp
+in midwinter. He got up at four o'clock, wrote until eight, then put on
+his snowshoes and went out for a day's work. When the story was finished
+he gave it to the foreman of the camp to read. The man began it after
+supper, and when White got up next morning at four, he found him still
+reading, so he felt that the book would succeed.
+
+Another year he made a trip to the Hudson Bay country, and on his return
+wrote _Conjurer's House_. This was dramatized by George Broadhurst, and
+was very successful on the stage. With Thomas Fogarty, the artist, he
+made a long canoe trip, and the resulting book, _The Forest_, was
+illustrated by Mr. Fogarty. A camping trip in the Sierra Mountains of
+California was followed by the writing of _The Mountains_. His next
+book, _The Mystery_, was written jointly by Mr. White and Samuel Hopkins
+Adams. When it was finished they not only divided the proceeds but
+divided the characters for future stories, White taking Handy Solomon,
+whom he used again in _Arizona Nights_, and Darrow, who appeared in _The
+Sign at Six_.
+
+Then without warning, Mr. White went to Africa. His explanation was
+simple:
+
+
+     I went because I wanted to. About once in so often the wheels get
+     rusty and I have to get up and do something real or else blow up.
+     Africa seemed to me a pretty real thing. Let me add that I did not
+     go for material. I never go anywhere for material; if I did I
+     should not get it. That attitude of mine would give me merely
+     externals, which are not worth writing about. I go places merely
+     because for one reason or another they attract me. Then if it
+     happens that I get close enough to the life, I may later find that
+     I have something to write about. A man rarely writes anything
+     convincing unless he has lived the life; not with his critical
+     faculty alert, but whole-heartedly and because, for the time being,
+     it is his life.
+
+
+Naturally he found that he had something to write about on his return.
+_The Land of Footprints_, _African Camp Fires_, _Simba_, and _The
+Leopard Woman_ were books that grew out of his African trip. Mr. White
+next planned to write a series of three novels dealing with the romantic
+history of the state of California. The first of these books, _Gold_,
+describes the mad rush of the Forty-Niners on the first discovery of
+gold in California. _The Gray Dawn_, the second of the series, tells of
+the days of the Vigilantes, when the wild life of the mining camps
+slowly settled down to law and order. The coming of the World War was a
+fresh challenge to his adventurous spirit, and he saw service in France
+as a major in the U. S. Field Artillery.
+
+From this sketch it is apparent that Mr. White's books have all grown
+out of his experience, in the sense that the background is one that he
+has known. This explains the strong feeling of reality that we
+experience as we read his stories.
+
+
+
+
+NEW ENGLAND GRANITE
+
+_From the day the Pilgrims landed on a rockbound coast, the name New
+Englander has suggested certain traits of character. It connotes a
+restraint of feeling which more impulsive persons may mistake for
+absence of feeling; a reserve carried almost to the point of coldness; a
+quiet dignity which to a breezy Westerner seems like "stand-offishness."
+But those who come to know New England people well, find that beneath
+the flint is fire. Dorothy Canfield suggests the theme of her story in
+the title--"Flint and Fire."_
+
+
+
+
+FLINT AND FIRE
+
+BY
+
+DOROTHY CANFIELD
+
+
+My husband's cousin had come up from the city, slightly more fagged and
+sardonic than usual, and as he stretched himself out in the big
+porch-chair he was even more caustic than was his wont about the
+bareness and emotional sterility of the lives of our country people.
+
+"Perhaps they had, a couple of centuries ago, when the Puritan
+hallucination was still strong, a certain fierce savor of religious
+intolerance; but now that that has died out, and no material prosperity
+has come to let them share in the larger life of their century, there is
+a flatness, a mean absence of warmth or color, a deadness to all
+emotions but the pettiest sorts----"
+
+I pushed the pitcher nearer him, clinking the ice invitingly, and
+directed his attention to our iris-bed as a more cheerful object of
+contemplation than the degeneracy of the inhabitants of Vermont. The
+flowers burned on their tall stalks like yellow tongues of flame. The
+strong, sword-like green leaves thrust themselves boldly up into the
+spring air like a challenge. The plants vibrated with vigorous life.
+
+In the field beyond them, as vigorous as they, strode Adoniram Purdon
+behind his team, the reins tied together behind his muscular neck, his
+hands grasping the plow with the masterful sureness of the successful
+practitioner of an art. The hot, sweet spring sunshine shone down on
+'Niram's head with its thick crest of brown hair, the ineffable odor of
+newly turned earth steamed up about him like incense, the mountain
+stream beyond him leaped and shouted. His powerful body answered every
+call made on it with the precision of a splendid machine. But there was
+no elation in the grimly set face as 'Niram wrenched the plow around a
+big stone, or as, in a more favorable furrow, the gleaming share sped
+steadily along before the plowman, turning over a long, unbroken brown
+ribbon of earth.
+
+My cousin-in-law waved a nervous hand toward the sternly silent figure
+as it stepped doggedly behind the straining team, the head bent forward,
+the eyes fixed on the horses' heels.
+
+"There!" he said. "There is an example of what I mean. Is there another
+race on earth which could produce a man in such a situation who would
+not on such a day sing, or whistle, or at least hold up his head and
+look at all the earthly glories about him?"
+
+I was silent, but not for lack of material for speech. 'Niram's reasons
+for austere self-control were not such as I cared to discuss with a man
+of my cousin's mental attitude. As we sat looking at him the noon
+whistle from the village blew and the wise old horses stopped in the
+middle of a furrow. 'Niram unharnessed them, led them to the shade of a
+tree, and put on their nose-bags. Then he turned and came toward the
+house.
+
+"Don't I seem to remember," murmured my cousin under his breath, "that,
+even though he is a New-Englander, he has been known to make up errands
+to your kitchen to see your pretty Ev'leen Ann?"
+
+I looked at him hard; but he was only gazing down, rather cross-eyed, on
+his grizzled mustache, with an obvious petulant interest in the increase
+of white hairs in it. Evidently his had been but a chance shot. 'Niram
+stepped up on the grass at the edge of the porch. He was so tall that he
+overtopped the railing easily, and, reaching a long arm over to where I
+sat, he handed me a small package done up in yellowish tissue-paper.
+Without hat-raisings, or good-mornings or any other of the greetings
+usual in a more effusive civilization, he explained briefly:
+
+"My stepmother wanted I should give you this. She said to thank you for
+the grape-juice." As he spoke he looked at me gravely out of deep-set
+blue eyes, and when he had delivered his message he held his peace.
+
+I expressed myself with the babbling volubility of one whose manners
+have been corrupted by occasional sojourns in the city. "Oh, 'Niram!" I
+cried protestingly, as I opened the package and took out an exquisitely
+wrought old-fashioned collar. "Oh, 'Niram! How _could_ your stepmother
+give such a thing away? Why, it must be one of her precious old relics.
+I don't _want_ her to give me something every time I do some little
+thing for her. Can't a neighbor send her in a few bottles of grape-juice
+without her thinking she must pay it back somehow? It's not kind of her.
+She has never yet let me do the least thing for her without repaying me
+with something that is worth ever so much more than my trifling
+services."
+
+When I had finished my prattling, 'Niram repeated, with an accent of
+finality, "She wanted I should give it to you."
+
+The older man stirred in his chair. Without looking at him I knew that
+his gaze on the young rustic was quizzical and that he was recording on
+the tablets of his merciless memory the ungraceful abruptness of the
+other's action and manner.
+
+"How is your stepmother feeling to-day, 'Niram?" I asked.
+
+"Worse."
+
+'Niram came to a full stop with the word. My cousin covered his
+satirical mouth with his hand.
+
+"Can't the doctor do anything to relieve her?" I asked.
+
+'Niram moved at last from his Indian-like immobility. He looked up under
+the brim of his felt hat at the sky-line of the mountain, shimmering
+iridescent above us. "He says maybe 'lectricity would help her some. I'm
+goin' to git her the batteries and things soon's I git the rubber
+bandages paid for."
+
+There was a long silence. My cousin stood up, yawning, and sauntered
+away toward the door. "Shall I send Ev'leen Ann out to get the pitcher
+and glasses?" he asked in an accent which he evidently thought very
+humorously significant.
+
+The strong face under the felt hat turned white, the jaw muscles set
+hard, but for all this show of strength there was an instant when the
+man's eyes looked out with the sick, helpless revelation of pain they
+might have had when 'Niram was a little boy of ten, a third of his
+present age, and less than half his present stature. Occasionally it is
+horrifying to see how a chance shot rings the bell.
+
+"No, no! Never mind!" I said hastily. "I'll take the tray in when I go."
+
+Without salutation or farewell 'Niram Purdon turned and went back to his
+work.
+
+The porch was an enchanted place, walled around with starlit darkness,
+visited by wisps of breezes shaking down from their wings the breath of
+lilac and syringa, flowering wild grapes, and plowed fields. Down at the
+foot of our sloping lawn the little river, still swollen by the melted
+snow from the mountains, plunged between its stony banks and shouted its
+brave song to the stars.
+
+We three middle-aged people--Paul, his cousin, and I--had disposed our
+uncomely, useful, middle-aged bodies in the big wicker chairs and left
+them there while our young souls wandered abroad in the sweet, dark
+glory of the night. At least Paul and I were doing this, as we sat, hand
+in hand, thinking of a May night twenty years before. One never knows
+what Horace is thinking of, but apparently he was not in his usual
+captious vein, for after a long pause he remarked, "It is a night almost
+indecorously inviting to the making of love."
+
+My answer seemed grotesquely out of key with this, but its sequence was
+clear in my mind. I got up, saying: "Oh, that reminds me--I must go and
+see Ev'leen Ann. I'd forgotten to plan to-morrow's dinner."
+
+"Oh, everlastingly Ev'leen Ann!" mocked Horace from his corner. "Can't
+you think of anything but Ev'leen Ann and her affairs?"
+
+I felt my way through the darkness of the house, toward the kitchen,
+both doors of which were tightly closed. When I stepped into the hot,
+close room, smelling of food and fire, I saw Ev'leen Ann sitting on the
+straight kitchen chair, the yellow light of the bracket-lamp bearing
+down on her heavy braids and bringing out the exquisitely subtle
+modeling of her smooth young face. Her hands were folded in her lap. She
+was staring at the blank wall, and the expression of her eyes so
+startled and shocked me that I stopped short and would have retreated if
+it had not been too late. She had seen me, roused herself, and said
+quietly, as though continuing a conversation interrupted the moment
+before:
+
+"I had been thinking that there was enough left of the roast to make
+hash-balls for dinner"--"hash-balls" is Ev'leen Ann's decent Anglo-Saxon
+name for croquettes--"and maybe you'd like a rhubarb pie."
+
+I knew well enough she had been thinking of no such thing, but I could
+as easily have slapped a reigning sovereign on the back as broken in on
+the regal reserve of Ev'leen Ann in her clean gingham.
+
+"Well, yes, Ev'leen Ann," I answered in her own tone of reasonable
+consideration of the matter; "that would be nice, and your pie-crust is
+so flaky that even Mr. Horace will have to be pleased."
+
+"Mr. Horace" is our title for the sardonic cousin whose carping ways are
+half a joke, and half a menace in our family.
+
+Ev'leen Ann could not manage the smile which should have greeted this
+sally. She looked down soberly at the white-pine top of the kitchen
+table and said, "I guess there is enough sparrow-grass up in the garden
+for a mess, too, if you'd like that."
+
+"That would taste very good," I agreed, my heart aching for her.
+
+"And creamed potatoes," she finished bravely, thrusting my unspoken
+pity from her.
+
+"You know I like creamed potatoes better than any other kind," I
+concurred.
+
+There was a silence. It seemed inhuman to go and leave the stricken
+young thing to fight her trouble alone in the ugly prison, her
+work-place, though I thought I could guess why Ev'leen Ann had shut the
+doors so tightly. I hung near her, searching my head for something to
+say, but she helped me by no casual remark. 'Niram is not the only one
+of our people who possesses to the full the supreme gift of silence.
+Finally I mentioned the report of a case of measles in the village, and
+Ev'leen Ann responded in kind with the news that her Aunt Emma had
+bought a potato-planter. Ev'leen Ann is an orphan, brought up by a
+well-to-do spinster aunt, who is strong-minded and runs her own farm.
+After a time we glided by way of similar transitions to the mention of
+his name.
+
+"'Niram Purdon tells me his stepmother is no better," I said. "Isn't it
+too bad?" I thought it well for Ev'leen Ann to be dragged out of her
+black cave of silence once in a while, even if it could be done only by
+force. As she made no answer, I went on. "Everybody who knows 'Niram
+thinks it splendid of him to do so much for his stepmother."
+
+Ev'leen Ann responded with a detached air, as though speaking of a
+matter in China: "Well, it ain't any more than what he should. She was
+awful good to him when he was little and his father got so sick. I guess
+'Niram wouldn't ha' had much to eat if she hadn't ha' gone out sewing to
+earn it for him and Mr. Purdon." She added firmly, after a moment's
+pause, "No, ma'am, I don't guess it's any more than what 'Niram had
+ought to do."
+
+"But it's very hard on a young man to feel that he's not able to marry,"
+I continued. Once in a great while we came so near the matter as this.
+Ev'leen Ann made no answer. Her face took on a pinched look of
+sickness. She set her lips as though she would never speak again. But I
+knew that a criticism of 'Niram would always rouse her, and said: "And
+really, I think 'Niram makes a great mistake to act as he does. A wife
+would be a help to him. She could take care of Mrs. Purdon and keep the
+house."
+
+Ev'leen Ann rose to the bait, speaking quickly with some heat: "I guess
+'Niram knows what's right for him to do! He can't afford to marry when
+he can't even keep up with the doctor's bills and all. He keeps the
+house himself, nights and mornings, and Mrs. Purdon is awful handy about
+taking care of herself, for all she's bedridden. That's her way, you
+know. She can't bear to have folks do for her. She'd die before she'd
+let anybody do anything for her that she could anyways do for herself!"
+
+I sighed acquiescingly. Mrs. Purdon's fierce independence was a rock on
+which every attempt at sympathy or help shattered itself to atoms. There
+seemed to be no other emotion left in her poor old work-worn shell of a
+body. As I looked at Ev'leen Ann it seemed rather a hateful
+characteristic, and I remarked, "It seems to me it's asking a good deal
+of 'Niram to spoil his life in order that his stepmother can go on
+pretending she's independent."
+
+Ev'leen Ann explained hastily: "Oh, 'Niram doesn't tell her anything
+about--She doesn't know he would like to--he don't want she should be
+worried--and, anyhow, as 'tis, he can't earn enough to keep ahead of all
+the doctors cost."
+
+"But the right kind of a wife--a good, competent girl--could help out by
+earning something, too."
+
+Ev'leen Ann looked at me forlornly, with no surprise. The idea was
+evidently not new to her. "Yes, ma'am, she could. But 'Niram says he
+ain't the kind of man to let his wife go out working." Even while she
+dropped under the killing verdict of his pride she was loyal to his
+standards and uttered no complaint. She went on, "'Niram wants Aunt
+Em'line to have things the way she wants 'em, as near as he can give
+'em to her--and it's right she should."
+
+"Aunt Emeline?" I repeated, surprised at her absence of mind. "You mean
+Mrs. Purdon, don't you?"
+
+Ev'leen Ann looked vexed at her slip, but she scorned to attempt any
+concealment. She explained dryly, with the shy, stiff embarrassment our
+country people have in speaking of private affairs: "Well, she _is_ my
+Aunt Em'line, Mrs. Purdon is, though I don't hardly ever call her that.
+You see, Aunt Emma brought me up, and she and Aunt Em'line don't have
+anything to do with each other. They were twins, and when they were
+girls they got edgeways over 'Niram's father, when 'Niram was a baby and
+his father was a young widower and come courting. Then Aunt Em'line
+married him, and Aunt Emma never spoke to her afterward."
+
+Occasionally, in walking unsuspectingly along one of our leafy lanes,
+some such fiery geyser of ancient heat uprears itself in a boiling
+column. I never get used to it, and started back now.
+
+"Why, I never heard of that before, and I've known your Aunt Emma and
+Mrs. Purdon for years!"
+
+"Well, they're pretty old now," said Ev'leen Ann listlessly, with the
+natural indifference of self-centered youth to the bygone tragedies of
+the preceding generation. "It happened quite some time ago. And both of
+them were so touchy, if anybody seemed to speak about it, that folks got
+in the way of letting it alone. First Aunt Emma wouldn't speak to her
+sister because she'd married the man she'd wanted, and then when Aunt
+Emma made out so well farmin' and got so well off, why, then Mrs. Purdon
+wouldn't try to make up because she was so poor. That was after Mr.
+Purdon had had his stroke of paralysis and they'd lost their farm and
+she'd taken to goin' out sewin'--not but what she was always perfectly
+satisfied with her bargain. She always acted as though she'd rather have
+her husband's old shirt stuffed with straw than any other man's whole
+body. He was a real nice man, I guess, Mr. Purdon was."
+
+There I had it--the curt, unexpanded chronicle of two passionate lives.
+And there I had also the key to Mrs. Purdon's fury of independence. It
+was the only way in which she could defend her husband against the
+charge, so damning to her world, of not having provided for his wife. It
+was the only monument she could rear to her husband's memory. And her
+husband had been all there was in life for her!
+
+I stood looking at her young kinswoman's face, noting the granite under
+the velvet softness of its youth, and divining the flame underlying the
+granite. I longed to break through her wall and to put my arms about
+her, and on the impulse of the moment I cast aside the pretense of
+casualness in our talk.
+
+"Oh, my dear!" I said. "Are you and 'Niram always to go on like this?
+Can't anybody help you?"
+
+Ev'leen Ann looked at me, her face suddenly old and gray. "No, ma'am; we
+ain't going to go on this way. We've decided, 'Niram and I have, that it
+ain't no use. We've decided that we'd better not go places together any
+more or see each other. It's too--If 'Niram thinks we can't"--she flamed
+so that I knew she was burning from head to foot--"it's better for us
+not----" She ended in a muffled voice, hiding her face in the crook of
+her arm.
+
+Ah, yes; now I knew why Ev'leen Ann had shut out the passionate breath
+of the spring night!
+
+I stood near her, a lump in my throat, but I divined the anguish of her
+shame at her involuntary self-revelation, and respected it. I dared do
+no more than to touch her shoulder gently.
+
+The door behind us rattled. Ev'leen Ann sprang up and turned her face
+toward the wall. Paul's cousin came in, shuffling a little, blinking his
+eyes in the light of the unshaded lamp, and looking very cross and
+tired. He glanced at us without comment as he went over to the sink.
+"Nobody offered me anything good to drink," he complained, "so I came in
+to get some water from the faucet for my nightcap."
+
+When he had drunk with ostentation from the tin dipper he went to the
+outside door and flung it open. "Don't you people know how hot and
+smelly it is in here?" he said, with his usual unceremonious abruptness.
+
+The night wind burst in, eddying, and puffed out the lamp with a breath.
+In an instant the room was filled with coolness and perfumes and the
+rushing sound of the river. Out of the darkness came Ev'leen Ann's young
+voice. "It seems to me," she said, as though speaking to herself, "that
+I never heard the Mill Brook sound so loud as it has this spring."
+
+
+I woke up that night with the start one has at a sudden call. But there
+had been no call. A profound silence spread itself through the sleeping
+house. Outdoors the wind had died down. Only the loud brawl of the river
+broke the stillness under the stars. But all through this silence and
+this vibrant song there rang a soundless menace which brought me out of
+bed and to my feet before I was awake. I heard Paul say, "What's the
+matter?" in a sleepy voice, and "Nothing," I answered, reaching for my
+dressing gown and slippers. I listened for a moment, my head ringing
+with all the frightened tales of the morbid vein of violence which runs
+through the character of our reticent people. There was still no sound.
+I went along the hall and up the stairs to Ev'leen Ann's room, and I
+opened the door without knocking. The room was empty.
+
+Then how I ran! Calling loudly for Paul to join me, I ran down the two
+flights of stairs, out of the open door, and along the hedged path which
+leads down to the little river. The starlight was clear. I could see
+everything as plainly as though in early dawn. I saw the river, and I
+saw--Ev'leen Ann.
+
+There was a dreadful moment of horror, which I shall never remember
+very clearly, and then Ev'leen Ann and I--both very wet--stood on the
+bank, shuddering in each other's arms.
+
+Into our hysteria there dropped, like a pungent caustic, the arid voice
+of Horace, remarking, "Well, are you two people crazy, or are you
+walking in your sleep?"
+
+I could feel Ev'leen Ann stiffen in my arms, and I fairly stepped back
+from her in astonished admiration as I heard her snatch at the straw
+thus offered, and still shuddering horribly from head to foot, force
+herself to say quite connectedly: "Why--yes--of course--I've always
+heard about my grandfather Parkman's walking in his sleep. Folks _said_
+'twould come out in the family some time."
+
+Paul was close behind Horace--I wondered a little at his not being
+first--and with many astonished and inane ejaculations, such as people
+always make on startling occasions, we made our way back into the house
+to hot blankets and toddies. But I slept no more that night.
+
+Some time after dawn, however, I did fall into a troubled
+unconsciousness full of bad dreams, and only woke when the sun was quite
+high. I opened my eyes to see Ev'leen Ann about to close the door.
+
+"Oh, did I wake you up?" she said. "I didn't mean to. That little Harris
+boy is here with a letter for you."
+
+She spoke with a slightly defiant tone of self-possession. I tried to
+play up to her interpretation of her role.
+
+"The little Harris boy?" I said, sitting up in bed. "What in the world
+is he bringing me a letter for?"
+
+Ev'leen Ann, with her usual clear perception of the superfluous in
+conversation, vouchsafed no opinion on a matter where she had no
+information, but went downstairs and brought back the note. It was of
+four lines, and--surprisingly enough--from old Mrs. Purdon, who asked me
+abruptly if I would have my husband take me to see her. She specified,
+and underlined the specification, that I was to come "right off, and in
+the automobile." Wondering extremely at this mysterious bidding, I
+sought out Paul, who obediently cranked up our small car and carried me
+off. There was no sign of Horace about the house, but some distance on
+the other side of the village we saw his tall, stooping figure swinging
+along the road. He carried a cane and was characteristically occupied in
+violently switching off the heads from the wayside weeds as he walked.
+He refused our offer to take him in, alleging that he was out for
+exercise and to reduce his flesh--an ancient jibe at his bony frame
+which made him for an instant show a leathery smile.
+
+There was, of course, no one at Mrs. Purdon's to let us into the tiny,
+three-roomed house, since the bedridden invalid spent her days there
+alone while 'Niram worked his team on other people's fields. Not knowing
+what we might find, Paul stayed outside in the car, while I stepped
+inside in answer to Mrs. Purdon's "Come _in_, why don't you!" which
+sounded quite as dry as usual. But when I saw her I knew that things
+were not as usual.
+
+She lay flat on her back, the little emaciated wisp of humanity, hardly
+raising the piecework quilt enough to make the bed seem occupied, and to
+account for the thin, worn old face on the pillow. But as I entered the
+room her eyes seized on mine, and I was aware of nothing but them and
+some fury of determination behind them. With a fierce heat of impatience
+at my first natural but quickly repressed exclamation of surprise she
+explained briefly that she wanted Paul to lift her into the automobile
+and take her into the next township to the Hulett farm. "I'm so shrunk
+away to nuthin', I know I can lay on the back seat if I crook myself
+up," she said, with a cool accent but a rather shaky voice. Seeming to
+realize that even her intense desire to strike the matter-of-fact note
+could not take the place of any and all explanation of her extraordinary
+request, she added, holding my eyes steady with her own: "Emma Hulett's
+my twin sister. I guess it ain't so queer, my wanting to see her."
+
+I thought, of course, we were to be used as the medium for some
+strange, sudden family reconciliation, and went out to ask Paul if he
+thought he could carry the old invalid to the car. He replied that, so
+far as that went, he could carry so thin an old body ten times around
+the town, but that he refused absolutely to take such a risk without
+authorization from her doctor. I remembered the burning eyes of
+resolution I had left inside, and sent him to present his objections to
+Mrs. Purdon herself.
+
+In a few moments I saw him emerge from the house with the old woman in
+his arms. He had evidently taken her up just as she lay. The piecework
+quilt hung down in long folds, flashing its brilliant reds and greens in
+the sunshine, which shone so strangely upon the pallid old countenance,
+facing the open sky for the first time in years.
+
+We drove in silence through the green and gold lyric of the spring day,
+an elderly company sadly out of key with the triumphant note of eternal
+youth which rang through all the visible world. Mrs. Purdon looked at
+nothing, said nothing, seemed to be aware of nothing but the purpose in
+her heart, whatever that might be. Paul and I, taking a leaf from our
+neighbors' book, held, with a courage like theirs, to their excellent
+habit of saying nothing when there is nothing to say. We arrived at the
+fine old Hulett place without the exchange of a single word.
+
+"Now carry me in," said Mrs. Purdon briefly, evidently hoarding her
+strength.
+
+"Wouldn't I better go and see if Miss Hulett is at home?" I asked.
+
+Mrs. Purdon shook her head impatiently and turned her compelling eyes on
+my husband. I went up the path before them to knock at the door,
+wondering what the people in the house would possibly be thinking of us.
+There was no answer to my knock. "Open the door and go in," commanded
+Mrs. Purdon from out her quilt.
+
+There was no one in the spacious, white-paneled hall, and no sound in
+all the big, many-roomed house.
+
+"Emma's out feeding the hens," conjectured Mrs. Purdon, not, I fancied,
+without a faint hint of relief in her voice. "Now carry me up-stairs to
+the first room on the right."
+
+Half hidden by his burden, Paul rolled wildly inquiring eyes at me; but
+he obediently staggered up the broad old staircase, and waiting till I
+had opened the first door to the right, stepped into the big bedroom.
+
+"Put me down on the bed, and open them shutters," Mrs. Purdon commanded.
+
+She still marshaled her forces with no lack of decision, but with a
+fainting voice which made me run over to her quickly as Paul laid her
+down on the four-poster. Her eyes were still indomitable, but her mouth
+hung open slackly and her color was startling. "Oh, Paul, quick! quick!
+Haven't you your flask with you?"
+
+Mrs. Purdon informed me in a barely audible whisper, "In the corner
+cupboard at the head of the stairs," and I flew down the hallway. I
+returned with a bottle, evidently of great age. There was only a little
+brandy in the bottom, but it whipped up a faint color into the sick
+woman's lips.
+
+As I was bending over her and Paul was thrusting open the shutters,
+letting in a flood of sunshine and flecky leaf-shadows, a firm, rapid
+step came down the hall, and a vigorous woman, with a tanned face and a
+clean, faded gingham dress, stopped short in the doorway with an
+expression of stupefaction.
+
+Mrs. Purdon put me on one side, and although she was physically
+incapable of moving her body by a hair's breadth, she gave the effect of
+having risen to meet the newcomer. "Well, Emma, here I am," she said in
+a queer voice, with involuntary quavers in it. As she went on she had it
+more under control, although in the course of her extraordinarily
+succinct speech it broke and failed her occasionally. When it did, she
+drew in her breath with an audible, painful effort, struggling forward
+steadily in what she had to say. "You see, Emma, it's this way: My
+'Niram and your Ev'leen Ann have been keeping company--ever since they
+went to school together--you know that 's well as I do, for all we let
+on we didn't, only I didn't know till just now how hard they took it.
+They can't get married because 'Niram can't keep even, let alone get
+ahead any, because I cost so much bein' sick, and the doctor says I may
+live for years this way, same's Aunt Hettie did. An' 'Niram is
+thirty-one, an' Ev'leen Ann is twenty-eight, an' they've had 'bout's
+much waitin' as is good for folks that set such store by each other.
+I've thought of every way out of it--and there ain't any. The Lord knows
+I don't enjoy livin' any, not so's to notice the enjoyment, and I'd
+thought of cutting my throat like Uncle Lish, but that'd make 'Niram and
+Ev'leen Ann feel so--to think why I'd done it; they'd never take the
+comfort they'd ought in bein' married; so that won't do. There's only
+one thing to do. I guess you'll have to take care of me till the Lord
+calls me. Maybe I won't last so long as the doctor thinks."
+
+When she finished, I felt my ears ringing in the silence. She had walked
+to the sacrificial altar with so steady a step, and laid upon it her
+precious all with so gallant a front of quiet resolution, that for an
+instant I failed to take in the sublimity of her self-immolation. Mrs.
+Purdon asking for charity! And asking the one woman who had most reason
+to refuse it to her.
+
+Paul looked at me miserably, the craven desire to escape a scene written
+all over him. "Wouldn't we better be going, Mrs. Purdon?" I said
+uneasily. I had not ventured to look at the woman in the doorway.
+
+Mrs. Purdon motioned me to remain, with an imperious gesture whose
+fierceness showed the tumult underlying her brave front. "No; I want you
+should stay. I want you should hear what I say, so's you can tell folks,
+if you have to. Now, look here, Emma," she went on to the other, still
+obstinately silent; "you must look at it the way 'tis. We're neither of
+us any good to anybody, the way we are--and I'm dreadfully in the way
+of the only two folks we care a pin about--either of us. You've got
+plenty to do with, and nothing to spend it on. I can't get myself out of
+their way by dying without going against what's Scripture and proper,
+but----" Her steely calm broke. She burst out in a screaming, hysterical
+voice: "You've just _got_ to, Emma Hulett! You've just _got_ to! If you
+don't I won't never go back to 'Niram's house! I'll lie in the ditch by
+the roadside till the poor-master comes to get me--and I'll tell
+everybody that it's because my own twin sister, with a house and a farm
+and money in the bank, turned me out to starve--" A fearful spasm cut
+her short. She lay twisted and limp, the whites of her eyes showing
+between the lids.
+
+"Good God, she's gone!" cried Paul, running to the bed.
+
+I was aware that the woman in the doorway had relaxed her frozen
+immobility and was between Paul and me as we rubbed the thin, icy hands
+and forced brandy between the placid lips. We all three thought her dead
+or dying, and labored over her with the frightened thankfulness for one
+another's living presence which always marks that dreadful moment. But
+even as we fanned and rubbed, and cried out to one another to open the
+windows and to bring water, the blue lips moved to a ghostly whisper:
+"Em, listen----" The old woman went back to the nickname of their common
+youth. "Em--your Ev'leen Ann--tried to drown herself--in the Mill Brook
+last night.... That's what decided me--to----" And then we were plunged
+into another desperate struggle with Death for the possession of the
+battered old habitation of the dauntless soul before us.
+
+"Isn't there any hot water in the house?" cried Paul, and "Yes, yes; a
+tea-kettle on the stove!" answered the woman who labored with us. Paul,
+divining that she meant the kitchen, fled down-stairs. I stole a look at
+Emma Hulett's face as she bent over the sister she had not seen in
+thirty years, and I knew that Mrs. Purdon's battle was won. It even
+seemed that she had won another skirmish in her never-ending war with
+death, for a little warmth began to come back into her hands.
+
+When Paul returned with the tea-kettle, and a hot-water bottle had been
+filled, the owner of the house straightened herself, assumed her
+rightful position as mistress of the situation, and began to issue
+commands. "You git right in the automobile, and go git the doctor," she
+told Paul. "That'll be the quickest. She's better now, and your wife and
+I can keep her goin' till the doctor gits here."
+
+As Paul left the room she snatched something white from a bureau-drawer,
+stripped the worn, patched old cotton nightgown from the skeleton-like
+body, and, handling the invalid with a strong, sure touch, slipped on a
+soft, woolly outing-flannel wrapper with a curious trimming of zigzag
+braid down the front. Mrs. Purdon opened her eyes very slightly, but
+shut them again at her sister's quick command, "You lay still, Em'line,
+and drink some of this brandy." She obeyed without comment, but after a
+pause she opened her eyes again and looked down at the new garment which
+clad her. She had that moment turned back from the door of death, but
+her first breath was used to set the scene for a return to a decent
+decorum.
+
+"You're still a great hand for rick-rack work, Em, I see," she murmured
+in a faint whisper. "Do you remember how surprised Aunt Su was when you
+made up a pattern?"
+
+"Well, I hadn't thought of it for quite some time," returned Miss
+Hulett, in exactly the same tone of everyday remark. As she spoke she
+slipped her arm under the other's head and poked the pillow to a more
+comfortable shape. "Now you lay perfectly still," she commanded in the
+hectoring tone of the born nurse; "I'm goin' to run down and make you up
+a good hot cup of sassafras tea."
+
+I followed her down into the kitchen and was met by the same refusal to
+be melodramatic which I had encountered in Ev'leen Ann. I was most
+anxious to know what version of my extraordinary morning I was to give
+out to the world, but hung silent, positively abashed by the cool
+casualness of the other woman as she mixed her brew. Finally, "Shall I
+tell 'Niram--What shall I say to Ev'leen Ann? If anybody asks me----" I
+brought out with clumsy hesitation.
+
+At the realization that her reserve and family pride were wholly at the
+mercy of any report I might choose to give, even my iron hostess
+faltered. She stopped short in the middle of the floor, looked at me
+silently, piteously, and found no word.
+
+I hastened to assure her that I would attempt no hateful picturesqueness
+of narration. "Suppose I just say that you were rather lonely here, now
+that Ev'leen Ann has left you, and that you thought it would be nice to
+have your sister come to stay with you, so that 'Niram and Ev'leen Ann
+can be married?"
+
+Emma Hulett breathed again. She walked toward the stairs with the
+steaming cup in her hand. Over her shoulder she remarked, "Well, yes,
+ma'am; that would be as good a way to put it as any, I guess."
+
+
+'Niram and Ev'leen Ann were standing up to be married. They looked very
+stiff and self-conscious, and Ev'leen Ann was very pale. 'Niram's big
+hands, bent in the crook of a man who handles tools, hung down by his
+new black trousers. Ev'leen Ann's strong fingers stood out stiffly from
+one another. They looked hard at the minister and repeated after him in
+low and meaningless tones the solemn and touching words of the marriage
+service. Back of them stood the wedding company, in freshly washed and
+ironed white dresses, new straw hats, and black suits smelling of
+camphor. In the background among the other elders, stood Paul and Horace
+and I--my husband and I hand in hand; Horace twiddling the black ribbon
+which holds his watch, and looking bored. Through the open windows into
+the stuffiness of the best room came an echo of the deep organ note of
+midsummer.
+
+"Whom God hath joined together----" said the minister, and the epitome
+of humanity which filled the room held its breath--the old with a wonder
+upon their life-scarred faces, the young half frightened to feel the
+stir of the great wings soaring so near them.
+
+Then it was all over. 'Niram and Ev'leen Ann were married, and the rest
+of us were bustling about to serve the hot biscuit and coffee and
+chicken salad, and to dish up the ice-cream. Afterward there were no
+citified refinements of cramming rice down the necks of the departing
+pair or tying placards to the carriage in which they went away. Some of
+the men went out to the barn and hitched up for 'Niram, and we all went
+down to the gate to see them drive off. They might have been going for
+one of their Sunday afternoon "buggy-rides" except for the wet eyes of
+the foolish women and girls who stood waving their hands in answer to
+the flutter of Ev'leen Ann's handkerchief as the carriage went down the
+hill.
+
+We had nothing to say to one another after they left, and began soberly
+to disperse to our respective vehicles. But as I was getting into our
+car a new thought suddenly struck me.
+
+"Why," I cried, "I never thought of it before! However in the world did
+old Mrs. Purdon know about Ev'leen Ann--that night?"
+
+Horace was pulling at the door, which was badly adjusted and shut hard.
+He closed it with a vicious slam "_I_ told her," he said crossly.
+
+
+
+
+HOW "FLINT AND FIRE" STARTED AND GREW
+
+BY
+
+DOROTHY CANFIELD
+
+
+I feel very dubious about the wisdom or usefulness of publishing the
+following statement of how one of my stories came into existence. This
+is not on account of the obvious danger of seeming to have illusions
+about the value of my work, as though I imagined one of my stories was
+inherently worth in itself a careful public analysis of its growth; the
+chance, remote as it might be, of usefulness to students, would outweigh
+this personal consideration. What is more important is the danger that
+some student may take the explanation as a recipe or rule for the
+construction of other stories, and I totally disbelieve in such rules or
+recipes.
+
+As a rule, when a story is finished, and certainly always by the time it
+is published, I have no recollection of the various phases of its
+development. In the case of "Flint and Fire", an old friend chanced to
+ask me, shortly after the tale was completed, to write out for his
+English classes, the stages of the construction of a short story. I set
+them down, hastily, formlessly, but just as they happened, and this
+gives me a record which I could not reproduce for any other story I ever
+wrote. These notes are here published on the chance that such a truthful
+record of the growth of one short story, may have some general
+suggestiveness for students.
+
+No two of my stories are ever constructed in the same way, but broadly
+viewed they all have exactly the same genesis, and I confess I cannot
+conceive of any creative fiction written from any other beginning ...
+that of a generally intensified emotional sensibility, such as every
+human being experiences with more or less frequency. Everybody knows
+such occasional hours or days of freshened emotional responses when
+events that usually pass almost unnoticed, suddenly move you deeply,
+when a sunset lifts you to exaltation, when a squeaking door throws you
+into a fit of exasperation, when a clear look of trust in a child's eyes
+moves you to tears, or an injustice reported in the newspapers to
+flaming indignation, a good action to a sunny warm love of human nature,
+a discovered meanness in yourself or another, to despair.
+
+I have no idea whence this tide comes, or where it goes, but when it
+begins to rise in my heart, I know that a story is hovering in the
+offing. It does not always come safely to port. The daily routine of
+ordinary life kills off many a vagrant emotion. Or if daily humdrum
+occupation does not stifle it, perhaps this saturated solution of
+feeling does not happen to crystallize about any concrete fact, episode,
+word or phrase. In my own case, it is far more likely to seize on some
+slight trifle, the shade of expression on somebody's face, or the tone
+of somebody's voice, than to accept a more complete, ready-made episode.
+Especially this emotion refuses to crystallize about, or to have
+anything to do with those narrations of our actual life, offered by
+friends who are sure that such-and-such a happening is so strange or
+interesting that "it ought to go in a story."
+
+The beginning of a story is then for me in more than usual sensitiveness
+to emotion. If this encounters the right focus (and heaven only knows
+why it is the "right" one) I get simultaneously a strong thrill of
+intense feeling, and an intense desire to pass it on to other people.
+This emotion may be any one of the infinitely varied ones which life
+affords, laughter, sorrow, indignation, gayety, admiration, scorn,
+pleasure. I recognize it for the "right" one when it brings with it an
+irresistible impulse to try to make other people feel it. And I know
+that when it comes, the story is begun. At this point, the story begins
+to be more or less under my conscious control, and it is here that the
+work of construction begins.
+
+"Flint and Fire" thus hovered vaguely in a shimmer of general emotional
+tensity, and thus abruptly crystallized itself about a chance phrase and
+the cadence of the voice which pronounced it. For several days I had
+been almost painfully alive to the beauty of an especially lovely
+spring, always so lovely after the long winter in the mountains. One
+evening, going on a very prosaic errand to a farm-house of our region, I
+walked along a narrow path through dark pines, beside a brook swollen
+with melting snow, and found the old man I came to see, sitting silent
+and alone before his blackened small old house. I did my errand, and
+then not to offend against our country standards of sociability, sat for
+half an hour beside him.
+
+The old man had been for some years desperately unhappy about a tragic
+and permanent element in his life. I had known this, every one knew it.
+But that evening, played upon as I had been by the stars, the darkness
+of the pines and the shouting voice of the brook, I suddenly stopped
+merely knowing it, and felt it. It seemed to me that his misery emanated
+from him like a soundless wail of anguish. We talked very little, odds
+and ends of neighborhood gossip, until the old man, shifting his
+position, drew a long breath and said, "Seems to me I never heard the
+brook sound so loud as it has this spring." There came instantly to my
+mind the recollection that his grandfather had drowned himself in that
+brook, and I sat silent, shaken by that thought and by the sound of his
+voice. I have no words to attempt to reproduce his voice, or to try to
+make you feel as I did, hot and cold with the awe of that glimpse into a
+naked human heart. I felt my own heart contract dreadfully with helpless
+sympathy ... and, I hope this is not as ugly as it sounds, I knew at the
+same instant that I would try to get that pang of emotion into a story
+and make other people feel it.
+
+That is all. That particular phase of the construction of the story
+came and went between two heart-beats.
+
+I came home by the same path through the same pines along the same
+brook, sinfully blind and deaf to the beauty that had so moved me an
+hour ago. I was too busy now to notice anything outside the rapid
+activity going on inside my head. My mind was working with a swiftness
+and a coolness which I am somewhat ashamed to mention, and my emotions
+were calmed, relaxed, let down from the tension of the last few days and
+the last few moments. They had found their way out to an attempt at
+self-expression and were at rest. I realize that this is not at all
+estimable. The old man was just as unhappy as he had been when I had
+felt my heart breaking with sympathy for him, but now he seemed very far
+away.
+
+I was snatching up one possibility after another, considering it for a
+moment, casting it away and pouncing on another. First of all, the story
+must be made as remote as possible from resembling the old man or his
+trouble, lest he or any one in the world might think he was intended,
+and be wounded.
+
+What is the opposite pole from an old man's tragedy? A lover's tragedy,
+of course. Yes, it must be separated lovers, young and passionate and
+beautiful, because they would fit in with the back-ground of spring, and
+swollen shouting starlit brooks, and the yearly resurrection which was
+so closely connected with that ache of emotion that they were a part of
+it.
+
+Should the separation come from the weakness or faithlessness of one of
+the lovers? No, ah no, I wanted it without ugliness, pure beautiful
+sorrow, to fit that dark shadow of the pines ... the lovers must be
+separated by outside forces.
+
+What outside forces? Lack of money? Family opposition? Both, perhaps. I
+knew plenty of cases of both in the life of our valley.
+
+By this time I had come again to our own house and was swallowed in the
+usual thousand home-activities. But underneath all that, quite steadily
+my mind continued to work on the story as a wasp in a barn keeps on
+silently plastering up the cells of his nest in the midst of the noisy
+activities of farm-life. I said to one of the children, "Yes, dear,
+wasn't it fun!" and to myself, "To be typical of our tradition-ridden
+valley-people, the opposition ought to come from the dead hand of the
+past." I asked a caller, "One lump or two?" and thought as I poured the
+tea, "And if the character of that opposition could be made to indicate
+a fierce capacity for passionate feeling in the older generation, that
+would make it doubly useful in the story, not only as part of the
+machinery of the plot, but as indicating an inheritance of passionate
+feeling in the younger generation, with whom the story is concerned." I
+dozed off at night, and woke to find myself saying, "It could come from
+the jealousy of two sisters, now old women."
+
+But that meant that under ordinary circumstances the lovers would have
+been first cousins, and this might cause a subconscious wavering of
+attention on the part of some readers ... just as well to get that stone
+out of the path! I darned a sock and thought out the relationship in the
+story, and was rewarded with a revelation of the character of the sick
+old woman, 'Niram's step-mother.
+
+Upon this, came one of those veering lists of the ballast aboard which
+are so disconcerting to the author. The story got out of hand. The old
+woman silent, indomitable, fed and deeply satisfied for all of her hard
+and grinding life by her love for the husband whom she had taken from
+her sister, she stepped to the front of my stage, and from that moment
+on, dominated the action. I did not expect this, nor desire it, and I
+was very much afraid that the result would be a perilously divided
+interest which would spoil the unity of impression of the story. It now
+occurs to me that this unexpected shifting of values may have been the
+emergence of the element of tragic old age which had been the start of
+the story and which I had conscientiously tried to smother out of sight.
+At any rate, there she was, more touching, pathetic, striking, to my
+eyes with her life-time proof of the reality of her passion, than my
+untried young lovers who up to that time had seemed to me, in the full
+fatuous flush of invention as I was, as ill-starred, innocent and
+touching lovers as anybody had ever seen.
+
+Alarmed about this double interest I went on with the weaving back and
+forth of the elements of the plot which now involved the attempt to
+arouse in the reader's heart as in mine a sympathy for the bed-ridden
+old Mrs. Purdon and a comprehension of her sacrifice.
+
+My daily routine continued as usual, gardening, telling stories, music,
+sewing, dusting, motoring, callers ... one of them, a self-consciously
+sophisticated Europeanized American, not having of course any idea of
+what was filling my inner life, rubbed me frightfully the wrong way by
+making a slighting condescending allusion to what he called the mean,
+emotional poverty of our inarticulate mountain people. I flew into a
+silent rage at him, though scorning to discuss with him a matter I felt
+him incapable of understanding, and the character of Cousin Horace went
+into the story. He was for the first day or two, a very poor cheap
+element, quite unreal, unrealized, a mere man of straw to be knocked
+over by the personages of the tale. Then I took myself to task, told
+myself that I was spoiling a story merely to revenge myself on a man I
+cared nothing about, and that I must either take Cousin Horace out or
+make him human. One day, working in the garden, I laughed out suddenly,
+delighted with the whimsical idea of making him, almost in spite of
+himself, the _deus ex machina_ of my little drama, quite soft and
+sympathetic under his shell of would-be worldly disillusion, as
+occasionally happens to elderly bachelors.
+
+At this point the character of 'Niram's long-dead father came to life
+and tried to push his way into the story, a delightful, gentle, upright
+man, with charm and a sense of humor, such as none of the rest of my
+stark characters possessed. I felt that he was necessary to explain the
+fierceness of the sisters' rivalry for him. I planned one or two ways to
+get him in, in retrospect--and liked one of the scenes better than
+anything that finally was left in the story. Finally, very
+heavy-hearted, I put him out of the story, for the merely material
+reason that there was no room for him. As usual with my story-making,
+this plot was sprouting out in a dozen places, expanding, opening up,
+till I perceived that I had enough material for a novel. For a day or so
+I hung undecided. Would it perhaps be better to make it a novel and
+really tell about those characters all I knew and guessed? But again a
+consideration that has nothing to do with artistic form, settled the
+matter. I saw no earthly possibility of getting time enough to write a
+novel. So I left Mr. Purdon out, and began to think of ways to compress
+my material, to make one detail do double work so that space might be
+saved.
+
+One detail of the mechanism remained to be arranged, and this ended by
+deciding the whole form of the story, and the first-person character of
+the recital. This was the question of just how it would have been
+materially possible for the bed-ridden old woman to break down the
+life-long barrier between her and her sister, and how she could have
+reached her effectively and forced her hand. I could see no way to
+manage this except by somehow transporting her bodily to the sister's
+house, so that she could not be put out on the road without public
+scandal. This transportation must be managed by some character not in
+the main action, as none of the persons involved would have been willing
+to help her to this. It looked like putting in another character, just
+for that purpose, and of course he could not be put in without taking
+the time to make him plausible, human, understandable ... and I had just
+left out that charming widower for sheer lack of space. Well, why not
+make it a first person story, and have the narrator be the one who takes
+Mrs. Purdon to her sister's? The narrator of the story never needs to be
+explained, always seems sufficiently living and real by virtue of the
+supremely human act of so often saying "I".
+
+Now the materials were ready, the characters fully alive in my mind and
+entirely visualized, even to the smoothly braided hair of Ev'leen Ann,
+the patch-work quilt of the old woman out-of-doors, and the rustic
+wedding at the end, all details which had recently chanced to draw my
+attention; I heard everything through the song of the swollen brook, one
+of the main characters in the story, (although by this time in actual
+fact, June and lower water had come and the brook slid quiet and
+gleaming, between placid green banks) and I often found myself smiling
+foolishly in pleasure over the buggy going down the hill, freighted so
+richly with hearty human joy.
+
+The story was now ready to write.
+
+I drew a long breath of mingled anticipation and apprehension, somewhat
+as you do when you stand, breathing quickly, balanced on your skis, at
+the top of a long white slope you are not sure you are clever enough to
+manage. Sitting down at my desk one morning, I "pushed off" and with a
+tingle of not altogether pleasurable excitement and alarm, felt myself
+"going." I "went" almost as precipitately as skis go down a long white
+slope, scribbling as rapidly as my pencil could go, indicating whole
+words with a dash and a jiggle, filling page after page with scrawls ...
+it seemed to me that I had been at work perhaps half an hour, when
+someone was calling me impatiently to lunch. I had been writing four
+hours without stopping. My cheeks were flaming, my feet were cold, my
+lips parched. It was high time someone called me to lunch.
+
+The next morning, back at the desk, I looked over what I had written,
+conquered the usual sick qualms of discouragement at finding it so
+infinitely flat and insipid compared to what I had wished to make it,
+and with a very clear idea of what remained to be done, plodded ahead
+doggedly, and finished the first draught before noon. It was almost
+twice too long.
+
+After this came a period of steady desk work, every morning, of
+re-writing, compression, more compression, and the more or less
+mechanical work of technical revision, what a member of my family calls
+"cutting out the 'whiches'". The first thing to do each morning was to
+read a part of it over aloud, sentence by sentence, to try to catch
+clumsy, ungraceful phrases, overweights at one end or the other,
+"ringing" them as you ring a dubious coin, clipping off too-trailing
+relative clauses, "listening" hard. This work depends on what is known
+in music as "ear", and in my case it cannot be kept up long at a time,
+because I find my attention flagging. When I begin to suspect that my
+ear is dulling, I turn to other varieties of revision, of which there
+are plenty to keep anybody busy; for instance revision to explain facts;
+in this category is the sentence just after the narrator suspects
+Ev'leen Ann has gone down to the brook, "my ears ringing with all the
+frightening tales of the morbid vein of violence which runs through the
+characters of our reticent people." It seemed too on re-reading the
+story for the tenth or eleventh time, that for readers who do not know
+our valley people, the girl's attempt at suicide might seem improbable.
+Some reference ought to be brought in, giving the facts that their
+sorrow and despair is terrible in proportion to the nervous strain of
+their tradition of repression, and that suicide is by no means unknown.
+I tried bringing that fact in, as part of the conversation with Cousin
+Horace, but it never fused with the rest there, "stayed on top of the
+page" as bad sentences will do, never sank in, and always made the
+disagreeable impression on me that a false intonation in an actor's
+voice does. So it came out from there. I tried putting it in Ev'leen
+Ann's mouth, in a carefully arranged form, but it was so shockingly out
+of character there, that it was snatched out at once. There I hung over
+the manuscript with that necessary fact in my hand and no place to lay
+it down. Finally I perceived a possible opening for it, where it now is
+in the story, and squeezing it in there discontentedly left it, for I
+still think it only inoffensively and not well placed.
+
+Then there is the traditional, obvious revision for suggestiveness, such
+as the recurrent mention of the mountain brook at the beginning of each
+of the first scenes; revision for ordinary sense, in the first draught I
+had honeysuckle among the scents on the darkened porch, whereas
+honeysuckle does not bloom in Vermont till late June; revision for
+movement to get the narrator rapidly from her bed to the brook; for
+sound, sense proportion, even grammar ... and always interwoven with
+these mechanical revisions recurrent intense visualizations of the
+scenes. This is the mental trick which can be learned, I think, by
+practice and effort. Personally, although I never used as material any
+events in my own intimate life, I can write nothing if I cannot achieve
+these very definite, very complete visualizations of the scenes; which
+means that I can write nothing at all about places, people or phases of
+life which I do not intimately know, down to the last detail. If my life
+depended on it, it does not seem to me I could possibly write a story
+about Siberian hunters or East-side factory hands without having lived
+long among them. Now the story was what one calls "finished," and I made
+a clear copy, picking my way with difficulty among the alterations, the
+scratched-out passages, and the cued-in paragraphs, the inserted pages,
+the re-arranged phrases. As I typed, the interest and pleasure in the
+story lasted just through that process. It still seemed pretty good to
+me, the wedding still touched me, the whimsical ending still amused me.
+
+But on taking up the legible typed copy and beginning to glance rapidly
+over it, I felt fall over me the black shadow of that intolerable
+reaction which is enough to make any author abjure his calling for ever.
+By the time I had reached the end, the full misery was there, the
+heart-sick, helpless consciousness of failure. What! I had had the
+presumption to try to translate into words, and make others feel a
+thrill of sacred living human feeling, that should not be touched save
+by worthy hands. And what had I produced? A trivial, paltry, complicated
+tale, with certain cheaply ingenious devices in it. I heard again the
+incommunicable note of profound emotion in the old man's voice, suffered
+again with his sufferings; and those little black marks on white paper
+lay dead, dead in my hands. What horrible people second-rate authors
+were! They ought to be prohibited by law from sending out their
+caricatures of life. I would never write again. All that effort, enough
+to have achieved a master-piece it seemed at the time ... and this,
+_this_, for result!
+
+From the subconscious depths of long experience came up the cynical,
+slightly contemptuous consolation, "You know this never lasts. You
+always throw this same fit, and get over it."
+
+So, suffering from really acute humiliation and unhappiness, I went out
+hastily to weed a flower-bed.
+
+And sure enough, the next morning, after a long night's sleep, I felt
+quite rested, calm, and blessedly matter-of-fact. "Flint and Fire"
+seemed already very far away and vague, and the question of whether it
+was good or bad, not very important or interesting, like the chart of
+your temperature in a fever now gone by.
+
+
+
+
+DOROTHY CANFIELD
+
+
+Dorothy Canfield grew up in an atmosphere of books and learning. Her
+father, James H. Canfield, was president of Kansas University, at
+Lawrence, and there Dorothy was born, Feb. 17, 1879. She attended the
+high school at Lawrence, and became friends with a young army officer
+who was teaching at the near-by Army post, and who taught her to ride
+horseback. In 1917 when the first American troops entered Paris, Dorothy
+Canfield, who had gone to Paris to help in war work, again met this army
+officer, General John J. Pershing.
+
+But this is getting ahead of the story. Dr. Canfield was called from
+Kansas to become president of Ohio State University, and later to be
+librarian at Columbia University, and so it happened that Dorothy took
+her college course at Ohio State and her graduate work at Columbia. She
+specialized in Romance languages, and took her degree as Doctor of
+Philosophy in 1904. In connection with Professor Carpenter of Columbia
+she wrote a text book on rhetoric. But books did not absorb quite all of
+her time, for the next item in her biography is her marriage to John R.
+Fisher, who had been the captain of the Columbia football team. They
+made their home at Arlington, Vermont, with frequent visits to Europe.
+In 1911-1912 they spent the winter in Rome. Here they came to know
+Madame Montessori, famous for developing a new system of training
+children. Dorothy Canfield spent many days at the "House of Childhood,"
+studying the methods of this gifted teacher. The result of this was a
+book, _A Montessori Mother_, in which the system was adapted to the
+needs of American children.
+
+_The Squirrel Cage_, published in 1912, was a study of an unhappy
+marriage. The book was favorably received by the critics, but found only
+a moderately wide public. A second novel, _The Bent Twig_, had college
+life as its setting; the chief character was the daughter of a professor
+in a Middle Western university. Meantime she had been publishing in
+magazines a number of short stories dealing with various types of New
+England country people, and in 1916 these were gathered into a volume
+with the title _Hillsboro People_. This book met with a wide acceptance,
+not only in this country but in France, where, like her other books, it
+was quickly translated and published. "Flint and Fire" is taken from
+this book. _The Real Motive_, another book of short stories, and
+_Understood Betsy_, a book for younger readers, were her next
+publications.
+
+Meantime the Great War had come, and its summons was heard in their
+quiet mountain home. Mr. Fisher went to France with the Ambulance Corps;
+his wife as a war-relief worker. A letter from a friend thus described
+her work:
+
+
+     She has gone on doing a prodigious amount of work. First running,
+     almost entirely alone, the work for soldiers blinded in battle,
+     editing a magazine for them, running the presses, often with her
+     own hands, getting books written for them; all the time looking out
+     for refugees and personal cases that came under her attention:
+     caring for children from the evacuated portions of France,
+     organizing work for them, and establishing a Red Cross hospital for
+     them.
+
+
+Out of the fullness of these experiences she wrote her next book, _Home
+Fires in France_, which at once took rank as one of the most notable
+pieces of literature inspired by the war. It is in the form of short
+stories, but only the form is fiction: it is a perfectly truthful
+portrayal of the French women and of some Americans who, far back of the
+trenches, kept up the life of a nation when all its people were gone. It
+reveals the soul of the French people. _The Day of Glory_, her latest
+book, is a series of further impressions of the war in France.
+
+It is not often that an author takes us into his workshop and lets us
+see just how his stories are written. The preceding account of Dorothy
+Canfield's literary methods was written especially for this book.
+
+
+
+
+DUSKY AMERICANS
+
+_Most stories of Negro life fall into one of two groups. There is the
+story of the Civil War period, which pictures the "darky" on the old
+plantation, devoted to "young Massa" or "old Miss,"--the Negro of
+slavery. Then there are stories of recent times in which the Negro is
+used purely for comic effect, a sort of minstrel-show character. Neither
+of these is the Negro of to-day. A truer picture is found in the stories
+of Paul Laurence Dunbar. The following story is from his FOLKS FROM
+DIXIE._
+
+
+
+
+THE ORDEAL AT MT. HOPE
+
+BY
+
+PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
+
+
+"And this is Mt. Hope," said the Rev. Howard Dokesbury to himself as he
+descended, bag in hand, from the smoky, dingy coach, or part of a coach,
+which was assigned to his people, and stepped upon the rotten planks of
+the station platform. The car he had just left was not a palace, nor had
+his reception by his fellow-passengers or his intercourse with them been
+of such cordial nature as to endear them to him. But he watched the
+choky little engine with its three black cars wind out of sight with a
+look as regretful as if he were witnessing the departure of his dearest
+friend. Then he turned his attention again to his surroundings, and a
+sigh welled up from his heart. "And this is Mt. Hope," he repeated. A
+note in his voice indicated that he fully appreciated the spirit of keen
+irony in which the place had been named.
+
+The color scheme of the picture that met his eyes was in dingy blacks
+and grays. The building that held the ticket, telegraph, and train
+despatchers' offices was a miserably old ramshackle affair, standing
+well in the foreground of this scene of gloom and desolation. Its
+windows were so coated with smoke and grime that they seemed to have
+been painted over in order to secure secrecy within. Here and there a
+lazy cur lay drowsily snapping at the flies, and at the end of the
+station, perched on boxes or leaning against the wall, making a living
+picture of equal laziness, stood a group of idle Negroes exchanging rude
+badinage with their white counterparts across the street.
+
+After a while this bantering interchange would grow more keen and
+personal, a free-for-all friendly fight would follow, and the newspaper
+correspondent in that section would write it up as a "race war." But
+this had not happened yet that day.
+
+"This is Mt. Hope," repeated the new-comer; "this is the field of my
+labors."
+
+Rev. Howard Dokesbury, as may already have been inferred, was a
+Negro,--there could be no mistake about that. The deep dark brown of his
+skin, the rich over-fullness of his lips, and the close curl of his
+short black hair were evidences that admitted of no argument. He was a
+finely proportioned, stalwart-looking man, with a general air of
+self-possession and self-sufficiency in his manner. There was firmness
+in the set of his lips. A reader of character would have said of him,
+"Here is a man of solid judgement, careful in deliberation, prompt in
+execution, and decisive."
+
+It was the perception in him of these very qualities which had prompted
+the authorities of the little college where he had taken his degree and
+received his theological training, to urge him to go among his people at
+the South, and there to exert his powers for good where the field was
+broad and the laborers few.
+
+Born of Southern parents from whom he had learned many of the
+superstitions and traditions of the South, Howard Dokesbury himself had
+never before been below Mason and Dixon's line. But with a confidence
+born of youth and a consciousness of personal power, he had started
+South with the idea that he knew the people with whom he had to deal,
+and was equipped with the proper weapons to cope with their
+shortcomings.
+
+But as he looked around upon the scene which now met his eye, a doubt
+arose in his mind. He picked up his bag with a sigh, and approached a
+man who had been standing apart from the rest of the loungers and
+regarding him with indolent intentness.
+
+"Could you direct me to the house of Stephen Gray?" asked the minister.
+
+The interrogated took time to change his position from left foot to
+right and shift his quid, before he drawled forth, "I reckon you's de
+new Mefdis preachah, huh?"
+
+"Yes," replied Howard, in the most conciliatory tone he could command,
+"and I hope I find in you one of my flock."
+
+"No, suh, I's a Babtist myse'f. I wa'n't raised up no place erroun' Mt.
+Hope; I'm nachelly f'om way up in Adams County. Dey jes' sont me down
+hyeah to fin' you an' tek you up to Steve's. Steve, he's workin' to-day
+an' couldn't come down."
+
+He laid particular stress upon the "to-day," as if Steve's spell of
+activity were not an every-day occurrence.
+
+"Is it far from here?" asked Dokesbury.
+
+"'T ain't mo' 'n a mile an' a ha'f by de shawt cut."
+
+"Well, then, let's take the short cut, by all means," said the preacher.
+
+They trudged along for a while in silence, and then the young man asked,
+"What do you men about here do mostly for a living?"
+
+"Oh, well, we does odd jobs, we saws an' splits wood an' totes bundles,
+an' some of 'em raises gyahden, but mos' of us, we fishes. De fish bites
+an' we ketches 'em. Sometimes we eats 'em an' sometimes we sells 'em; a
+string o' fish'll bring a peck o' co'n any time."
+
+"And is that all you do?"
+
+"'Bout."
+
+"Why, I don't see how you live that way."
+
+"Oh, we lives all right," answered the man; "we has plenty to eat an'
+drink, an' clothes to wear, an' some place to stay. I reckon folks ain't
+got much use fu' nuffin' mo'."
+
+Dokesbury sighed. Here indeed was virgin soil for his ministerial
+labors. His spirits were not materially raised when, some time later, he
+came in sight of the house which was to be his abode. To be sure, it was
+better than most of the houses which he had seen in the Negro part of
+Mt. Hope; but even at that it was far from being good or
+comfortable-looking. It was small and mean in appearance. The weather
+boarding was broken, and in some places entirely fallen away, showing
+the great unhewn logs beneath; while off the boards that remained the
+whitewash had peeled in scrofulous spots.
+
+The minister's guide went up to the closed door, and rapped loudly with
+a heavy stick.
+
+"G' 'way f'om dah, an' quit you' foolin'," came in a large voice from
+within.
+
+The guide grinned, and rapped again. There was a sound of shuffling feet
+and the pushing back of a chair, and then the same voice asking: "I bet
+I'll mek you git away f'om dat do'."
+
+"Dat's A'nt Ca'line," the guide said, and laughed.
+
+The door was flung back as quickly as its worn hinges and sagging bottom
+would allow, and a large body surmounted by a face like a big round full
+moon presented itself in the opening. A broomstick showed itself
+aggressively in one fat shiny hand.
+
+"It's you, Tom Scott, is it--you trif'nin'----" and then, catching sight
+of the stranger, her whole manner changed, and she dropped the
+broomstick with an embarrassed "'Scuse me, suh."
+
+Tom chuckled all over as he said, "A'nt Ca'line, dis is yo' new
+preachah."
+
+The big black face lighted up with a broad smile as the old woman
+extended her hand and enveloped that of the young minister's.
+
+"Come in," she said. "I's mighty glad to see you--that no-'count Tom
+come put' nigh mekin' me 'spose myse'f." Then turning to Tom, she
+exclaimed with good-natured severity, "An' you go 'long, you scoun'll
+you!"
+
+The preacher entered the cabin--it was hardly more--and seated himself
+in the rush-bottomed chair which "A'nt Ca'line" had been industriously
+polishing with her apron.
+
+"An' now, Brothah----"
+
+"Dokesbury," supplemented the young man.
+
+"Brothah Dokesbury, I jes' want you to mek yo'se'f at home right erway.
+I know you ain't use to ouah ways down hyeah; but you jes' got to set in
+an' git ust to 'em. You mus'n' feel bad ef things don't go yo' way f'om
+de ve'y fust. Have you got a mammy?"
+
+The question was very abrupt, and a lump suddenly jumped up in
+Dokesbury's throat and pushed the water into his eyes. He did have a
+mother away back there at home. She was all alone, and he was her heart
+and the hope of her life.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I've got a little mother up there in Ohio."
+
+"Well, I's gwine to be yo' mothah down hyeah; dat is, ef I ain't too
+rough an' common fu' you."
+
+"Hush!" exclaimed the preacher, and he got up and took the old lady's
+hand in both of his own. "You shall be my mother down here; you shall
+help me, as you have done to-day. I feel better already."
+
+"I knowed you would," and the old face beamed on the young one. "An' now
+jes' go out de do' dah an' wash yo' face. Dey's a pan an' soap an' watah
+right dah, an' hyeah's a towel; den you kin go right into yo' room, fu'
+I knows you want to be erlone fu' a while. I'll fix yo' suppah while you
+rests."
+
+He did as he was bidden. On a rough bench outside the door, he found a
+basin and a bucket of water with a tin dipper in it. To one side, in a
+broken saucer, lay a piece of coarse soap. The facilities for copious
+ablutions were not abundant, but one thing the minister noted with
+pleasure: the towel, which was rough and hurt his skin, was,
+nevertheless, scrupulously clean. He went to his room feeling fresher
+and better, and although he found the place little and dark and warm, it
+too was clean, and a sense of its homeness began to take possession of
+him.
+
+The room was off the main living-room into which he had been first
+ushered. It had one small window that opened out on a fairly neat yard.
+A table with a chair before it stood beside the window, and across the
+room--if the three feet of space which intervened could be called
+"across"--stood the little bed with its dark calico quilt and white
+pillows. There was no carpet on the floor, and the absence of a
+washstand indicated very plainly that the occupant was expected to wash
+outside. The young minister knelt for a few minutes beside the bed, and
+then rising cast himself into the chair to rest.
+
+It was possibly half an hour later when his partial nap was broken in
+upon by the sound of a gruff voice from without saying, "He's hyeah, is
+he--oomph! Well, what's he ac' lak? Want us to git down on ouah knees
+an' crawl to him? If he do, I reckon he'll fin' dat Mt. Hope ain't de
+place fo' him."
+
+The minister did not hear the answer, which was in a low voice and came,
+he conjectured, from Aunt "Ca'line"; but the gruff voice subsided, and
+there was the sound of footsteps going out of the room. A tap came on
+the preacher's door, and he opened it to the old woman. She smiled
+reassuringly.
+
+"Dat' uz my ol' man," she said. "I sont him out to git some wood, so's
+I'd have time to post you. Don't you mind him; he's lots mo' ba'k dan
+bite. He's one o' dese little yaller men, an' you know dey kin be
+powahful contra'y when dey sets dey hai'd to it. But jes' you treat him
+nice an' don't let on, an' I'll be boun' you'll bring him erroun' in
+little er no time."
+
+The Rev. Mr. Dokesbury received this advice with some misgiving. Albeit
+he had assumed his pleasantest manner when, after his return to the
+living-room, the little "yaller" man came through the door with his
+bundle of wood.
+
+He responded cordially to Aunt Caroline's, "Dis is my husband, Brothah
+Dokesbury," and heartily shook his host's reluctant hand.
+
+"I hope I find you well, Brother Gray," he said.
+
+"Moder't, jes' moder't," was the answer.
+
+"Come to suppah now, bofe o' you," said the old lady, and they all sat
+down to the evening meal of crisp bacon, well-fried potatoes, egg-pone,
+and coffee.
+
+The young man did his best to be agreeable, but it was rather
+discouraging to receive only gruff monosyllabic rejoinders to his most
+interesting observations. But the cheery old wife came bravely to the
+rescue, and the minister was continually floated into safety on the flow
+of her conversation. Now and then, as he talked, he could catch a
+stealthy upflashing of Stephen Gray's eye, as suddenly lowered again,
+that told him that the old man was listening. But as an indication that
+they would get on together, the supper, taken as a whole, was not a
+success. The evening that followed proved hardly more fortunate. About
+the only remarks that could be elicited from the "little yaller man"
+were a reluctant "oomph" or "oomph-uh."
+
+It was just before going to bed that, after a period of reflection, Aunt
+Caroline began slowly: "We got a son"--her husband immediately bristled
+up and his eyes flashed, but the old woman went on; "he named 'Lias, an'
+we thinks a heap o' 'Lias, we does; but--" the old man had subsided, but
+he bristled up again at the word--"he ain't jes' whut we want him to
+be." Her husband opened his mouth as if to speak in defense of his son,
+but was silent in satisfaction at his wife's explanation: "'Lias ain't
+bad; he jes' ca'less. Sometimes he stays at home, but right sma't o' de
+time he stays down at"--she looked at her husband and hesitated--"at de
+colo'ed s'loon. We don't lak dat. It ain't no fitten place fu' him. But
+'Lias ain't bad, he jes' ca'less, an' me an' de ol' man we 'membahs him
+in ouah pra'ahs, an' I jes' t'ought I'd ax you to 'membah him too,
+Brothah Dokesbury."
+
+The minister felt the old woman's pleading look and the husband's
+intense gaze upon his face, and suddenly there came to him an intimate
+sympathy in their trouble and with it an unexpected strength.
+
+"There is no better time than now," he said, "to take his case to the
+Almighty Power; let us pray."
+
+Perhaps it was the same prayer he had prayed many times before; perhaps
+the words of supplication and the plea for light and guidance were the
+same; but somehow to the young man kneeling there amid those humble
+surroundings, with the sorrow of these poor ignorant people weighing
+upon his heart, it seemed very different. It came more fervently from
+his lips, and the words had a deeper meaning. When he arose, there was a
+warmth at his heart just the like of which he had never before
+experienced.
+
+Aunt Caroline blundered up from her knees, saying, as she wiped her
+eyes, "Blessed is dey dat mou'n, fu' dey shall be comfo'ted." The old
+man, as he turned to go to bed, shook the young man's hand warmly and in
+silence; but there was a moisture in the old eyes that told the minister
+that his plummet of prayer had sounded the depths.
+
+Alone in his own room Howard Dokesbury sat down to study the situation
+in which he had been placed. Had his thorough college training
+anticipated specifically any such circumstance as this? After all, did
+he know his own people? Was it possible that they could be so different
+from what he had seen and known? He had always been such a loyal Negro,
+so proud of his honest brown; but had he been mistaken? Was he, after
+all, different from the majority of the people with whom he was supposed
+to have all thoughts, feelings, and emotions in common?
+
+These and other questions he asked himself without being able to arrive
+at any satisfactory conclusion. He did not go to sleep soon after
+retiring, and the night brought many thoughts. The next day would be
+Saturday. The ordeal had already begun,--now there were twenty-four
+hours between him and the supreme trial. What would be its outcome?
+There were moments when he felt, as every man, howsoever brave, must
+feel at times, that he would like to shift all his responsibilities and
+go away from the place that seemed destined to tax his powers beyond
+their capability of endurance. What could he do for the inhabitants of
+Mt. Hope? What was required of him to do? Ever through his mind ran that
+world-old question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" He had never asked, "Are
+these people my brothers?"
+
+He was up early the next morning, and as soon as breakfast was done, he
+sat down to add a few touches to the sermon he had prepared as his
+introduction. It was not the first time that he had retouched it and
+polished it up here and there. Indeed, he had taken some pride in it.
+But as he read it over that day, it did not sound to him as it had
+sounded before. It appeared flat and without substance. After a while he
+laid it aside, telling himself that he was nervous and it was on this
+account that he could not see matters as he did in his calmer moments.
+He told himself, too, that he must not again take up the offending
+discourse until time to use it, lest the discovery of more imaginary
+flaws should so weaken his confidence that he would not be able to
+deliver it with effect.
+
+In order better to keep his resolve, he put on his hat and went out for
+a walk through the streets of Mt. Hope. He did not find an encouraging
+prospect as he went along. The Negroes whom he met viewed him with
+ill-favor, and the whites who passed looked on him with unconcealed
+distrust and contempt. He began to feel lost, alone, and helpless. The
+squalor and shiftlessness which were plainly in evidence about the
+houses which he saw filled him with disgust and a dreary hopelessness.
+
+He passed vacant lots which lay open and inviting children to healthful
+play; but instead of marbles or leap-frog or ball, he found little boys
+in ragged knickerbockers huddled together on the ground, "shooting
+craps" with precocious avidity and quarreling over the pennies that made
+the pitiful wagers. He heard glib profanity rolling from the lips of
+children who should have been stumbling through baby catechisms; and
+his heart ached for them.
+
+He would have turned and gone back to his room, but the sound of shouts,
+laughter, and the tum-tum of a musical instrument drew him on down the
+street. At the turn of a corner, the place from which the noise emanated
+met his eyes. It was a rude frame building, low and unpainted. The panes
+in its windows whose places had not been supplied by sheets of tin were
+daubed a dingy red. Numerous kegs and bottles on the outside attested
+the nature of the place. The front door was open, but the interior was
+concealed by a gaudy curtain stretched across the entrance within. Over
+the door was the inscription, in straggling characters, "Sander's
+Place;" and when he saw half-a-dozen Negroes enter, the minister knew
+instantly that he now beheld the colored saloon which was the
+frequenting-place of his hostess's son 'Lias; and he wondered, if, as
+the mother said, her boy was not bad, how anything good could be
+preserved in such a place of evil.
+
+The cries of boisterous laughter mingled with the strumming of the banjo
+and the shuffling of feet told him that they were engaged in one of
+their rude hoe-down dances. He had not passed a dozen paces beyond the
+door when the music was suddenly stopped, the sound of a quick blow
+followed, then ensued a scuffle, and a young fellow half ran, half fell
+through the open door. He was closely followed by a heavily built
+ruffian who was striking him as he ran. The young fellow was very much
+the weaker and slighter of the two, and was suffering great punishment.
+In an instant all the preacher's sense of justice was stung into sudden
+life. Just as the brute was about to give his victim a blow that would
+have sent him into the gutter, he felt his arm grasped in a detaining
+hold and heard a commanding voice,--"Stop!"
+
+He turned with increased fury upon this meddler, but his other wrist was
+caught and held in a vise-like grip. For a moment the two men looked
+into each other's eyes. Hot words rose to the young man's lips, but he
+choked them back. Until this moment he had deplored the possession of a
+spirit so easily fired that it had been a test of his manhood to keep
+from "slugging" on the football field; now he was glad of it. He did not
+attempt to strike the man, but stood holding his arms and meeting the
+brute glare with manly flashing eyes. Either the natural cowardice of
+the bully or something in his new opponent's face had quelled the big
+fellow's spirit, and he said doggedly, "Lemme go. I wasn't a-go'n to
+kill him no-how, but ef I ketch him dancin' with my gal any mo', I----"
+He cast a glance full of malice at his victim, who stood on the pavement
+a few feet away, as much amazed as the dumfounded crowd which thronged
+the door of "Sander's Place." Loosing his hold, the preacher turned,
+and, putting his hand on the young fellow's shoulder, led him away.
+
+For a time they walked on in silence. Dokesbury had to calm the tempest
+in his breast before he could trust his voice. After a while he said:
+"That fellow was making it pretty hot for you, my young friend. What had
+you done to him?"
+
+"Nothin'," replied the other. "I was jes' dancin' 'long an' not thinkin'
+'bout him, when all of a sudden he hollered dat I had his gal an'
+commenced hittin' me."
+
+"He's a bully and a coward, or he would not have made use of his
+superior strength in that way. What's your name, friend?"
+
+"'Lias Gray," was the answer, which startled the minister into
+exclaiming,--
+
+"What! are you Aunt Caroline's son?"
+
+"Yes, suh, I sho is; does you know my mothah?"
+
+"Why, I'm stopping with her, and we were talking about you last night.
+My name is Dokesbury, and I am to take charge of the church here."
+
+"I thought mebbe you was a preachah, but I couldn't scarcely believe it
+after I seen de way you held Sam an' looked at him."
+
+Dokesbury laughed, and his merriment seemed to make his companion feel
+better, for the sullen, abashed look left his face, and he laughed a
+little himself as he said: "I wasn't a-pesterin' Sam, but I tell you he
+pestered me mighty."
+
+Dokesbury looked into the boy's face,--he was hardly more than a
+boy,--lit up as it was by a smile, and concluded that Aunt Caroline was
+right. 'Lias might be "ca'less," but he wasn't a bad boy. The face was
+too open and the eyes too honest for that. 'Lias wasn't bad; but
+environment does so much, and he would be if something were not done for
+him. Here, then, was work for a pastor's hands.
+
+"You'll walk on home with me, 'Lias, won't you?"
+
+"I reckon I mout ez well," replied the boy. "I don't stay erroun' home
+ez much ez I oughter."
+
+"You'll be around more, of course, now that I am there. It will be so
+much less lonesome for two young people than for one. Then, you can be a
+great help to me, too."
+
+The preacher did not look down to see how wide his listener's eyes grew
+as he answered: "Oh, I ain't fittin' to be no he'p to you, suh. Fust
+thing, I ain't nevah got religion, an' then I ain't well larned enough."
+
+"Oh, there are a thousand other ways in which you can help, and I feel
+sure that you will."
+
+"Of co'se, I'll do de ve'y bes' I kin."
+
+"There is one thing I want you to do soon, as a favor to me."
+
+"I can't go to de mou'nah's bench," cried the boy, in consternation.
+
+"And I don't want you to," was the calm reply.
+
+Another look of wide-eyed astonishment took in the preacher's face.
+These were strange words from one of his guild. But without noticing the
+surprise he had created, Dokesbury went on: "What I want is that you
+will take me fishing as soon as you can. I never get tired of fishing
+and I am anxious to go here. Tom Scott says you fish a great deal about
+here."
+
+"Why, we kin go dis ve'y afternoon," exclaimed 'Lias, in relief and
+delight; "I's mighty fond o' fishin', myse'f."
+
+"All right; I'm in your hands from now on."
+
+'Lias drew his shoulders up, with an unconscious motion. The preacher
+saw it, and mentally rejoiced. He felt that the first thing the boy
+beside him needed was a consciousness of responsibility, and the lifted
+shoulders meant progress in that direction, a sort of physical
+straightening up to correspond with the moral one.
+
+On seeing her son walk in with the minister, Aunt "Ca'line's" delight
+was boundless. "La! Brothah Dokesbury," she exclaimed, "wha'd you fin'
+dat scamp?"
+
+"Oh, down the street here," the young man replied lightly. "I got hold
+of his name and made myself acquainted, so he came home to go fishing
+with me."
+
+"'Lias is pow'ful fon' o' fishin', hisse'f. I 'low he kin show you some
+mighty good places. Cain't you, 'Lias?"
+
+"I reckon."
+
+'Lias was thinking. He was distinctly grateful that the circumstances of
+his meeting with the minister had been so deftly passed over. But with a
+half idea of the superior moral responsibility under which a man in
+Dokesbury's position labored, he wondered vaguely--to put it in his own
+thought-words--"ef de preachah hadn't put' nigh lied." However, he was
+willing to forgive this little lapse of veracity, if such it was, out of
+consideration for the anxiety it spared his mother.
+
+When Stephen Gray came in to dinner, he was no less pleased than his
+wife to note the terms of friendship on which the minister received his
+son. On his face was the first smile that Dokesbury had seen there, and
+he awakened from his taciturnity and proffered much information as to
+the fishing-places thereabout. The young minister accounted this a
+distinct gain. Anything more than a frowning silence from the "little
+yaller man" was gain.
+
+The fishing that afternoon was particularly good. Catfish, chubs, and
+suckers were landed in numbers sufficient to please the heart of any
+amateur angler.
+
+'Lias was happy, and the minister was in the best of spirits, for his
+charge seemed promising. He looked on at the boy's jovial face, and
+laughed within himself; for, mused he, "it is so much harder for the
+devil to get into a cheerful heart than into a sullen, gloomy one." By
+the time they were ready to go home Harold Dokesbury had received a
+promise from 'Lias to attend service the next morning and hear the
+sermon.
+
+There was a great jollification over the fish supper that night, and
+'Lias and the minister were the heroes of the occasion. The old man
+again broke his silence, and recounted, with infinite dryness, ancient
+tales of his prowess with rod and line; while Aunt "Ca'line" told of
+famous fish suppers that in the bygone days she had cooked for "de white
+folks." In the midst of it all, however, 'Lias disappeared. No one had
+noticed when he slipped out, but all seemed to become conscious of his
+absence about the same time. The talk shifted, and finally simmered into
+silence.
+
+When the Rev. Mr. Dokesbury went to bed that night, his charge had not
+yet returned.
+
+The young minister woke early on the Sabbath morning, and he may be
+forgiven that the prospect of the ordeal through which he had to pass
+drove his care for 'Lias out of mind for the first few hours. But as he
+walked to church, flanked on one side by Aunt Caroline in the stiffest
+of ginghams and on the other by her husband stately in the magnificence
+of an antiquated "Jim-swinger," his mind went back to the boy with
+sorrow. Where was he? What was he doing? Had the fear of a dull church
+service frightened him back to his old habits and haunts? There was a
+new sadness at the preacher's heart as he threaded his way down the
+crowded church and ascended the rude pulpit.
+
+The church was stiflingly hot, and the morning sun still beat
+relentlessly in through the plain windows. The seats were rude wooden
+benches, in some instances without backs. To the right, filling the
+inner corner, sat the pillars of the church, stern, grim, and critical.
+Opposite them, and, like them, in seats at right angles to the main
+body, sat the older sisters, some of them dressed with good
+old-fashioned simplicity, while others yielding to newer tendencies were
+gotten up in gaudy attempts at finery. In the rear seats a dozen or so
+much beribboned mulatto girls tittered and giggled, and cast bold
+glances at the minister.
+
+The young man sighed as he placed the manuscript of his sermon between
+the leaves of the tattered Bible. "And this is Mt. Hope," he was again
+saying to himself.
+
+It was after the prayer and in the midst of the second hymn that a more
+pronounced titter from the back seats drew his attention. He raised his
+head to cast a reproving glance at the irreverent, but the sight that
+met his eyes turned that look into one of horror. 'Lias had just entered
+the church, and with every mark of beastly intoxication was staggering
+up the aisle to a seat, into which he tumbled in a drunken heap. The
+preacher's soul turned sick within him, and his eyes sought the face of
+the mother and father. The old woman was wiping her eyes, and the old
+man sat with his gaze bent upon the floor, lines of sorrow drawn about
+his wrinkled mouth.
+
+All of a sudden a great revulsion of feeling came over Dokesbury.
+Trembling he rose and opened the Bible. There lay his sermon, polished
+and perfected. The opening lines seemed to him like glints from a bright
+cold crystal. What had he to say to these people, when the full
+realization of human sorrow and care and of human degradation had just
+come to him? What had they to do with firstlies and secondlies, with
+premises and conclusions? What they wanted was a strong hand to help
+them over the hard places of life and a loud voice to cheer them through
+the dark. He closed the book again upon his precious sermon. A something
+new had been born in his heart. He let his glance rest for another
+instant on the mother's pained face and the father's bowed form, and
+then turning to the congregation began, "Come unto me, all ye that labor
+and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you,
+and learn of me: for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find
+rest unto your souls." Out of the fullness of his heart he spoke unto
+them. Their great need informed his utterance. He forgot his carefully
+turned sentences and perfectly rounded periods. He forgot all save that
+here was the well-being of a community put into his hands whose real
+condition he had not even suspected until now. The situation wrought him
+up. His words went forth like winged fire, and the emotional people were
+moved beyond control. They shouted, and clapped their hands, and praised
+the Lord loudly.
+
+When the service was over, there was much gathering about the young
+preacher, and handshaking. Through all 'Lias had slept. His mother
+started toward him; but the minister managed to whisper to her, "Leave
+him to me." When the congregation had passed out, Dokesbury shook 'Lias.
+The boy woke, partially sobered, and his face fell before the preacher's
+eyes.
+
+"Come, my boy, let's go home." Arm in arm they went out into the street,
+where a number of scoffers had gathered to have a laugh at the abashed
+boy; but Harold Dokesbury's strong arm steadied his steps, and something
+in his face checked the crowd's hilarity. Silently they cleared the way,
+and the two passed among them and went home.
+
+The minister saw clearly the things which he had to combat in his
+community, and through this one victim he determined to fight the
+general evil. The people with whom he had to deal were children who must
+be led by the hand. The boy lying in drunken sleep upon his bed was no
+worse than the rest of them. He was an epitome of the evil, as his
+parents were of the sorrows, of the place.
+
+He could not talk to Elias. He could not lecture him. He would only be
+dashing his words against the accumulated evil of years of bondage as
+the ripples of a summer sea beat against a stone wall. It was not the
+wickedness of this boy he was fighting or even the wrong-doing of Mt.
+Hope. It was the aggregation of the evils of the fathers, the
+grandfathers, the masters and mistresses of these people. Against this
+what could talk avail?
+
+The boy slept on, and the afternoon passed heavily away. Aunt Caroline
+was finding solace in her pipe, and Stephen Gray sulked in moody silence
+beside the hearth. Neither of them joined their guest at evening
+service.
+
+He went, however. It was hard to face those people again after the
+events of the morning. He could feel them covertly nudging each other
+and grinning as he went up to the pulpit. He chided himself for the
+momentary annoyance it caused him. Were they not like so many naughty,
+irresponsible children?
+
+The service passed without unpleasantness, save that he went home with
+an annoyingly vivid impression of a yellow girl with red ribbons on her
+hat, who pretended to be impressed by his sermon and made eyes at him
+from behind her handkerchief.
+
+On the way to his room that night, as he passed Stephen Gray, the old
+man whispered huskily, "It's de fus' time 'Lias evah done dat."
+
+It was the only word he had spoken since morning.
+
+A sound sleep refreshed Dokesbury, and restored the tone to his
+overtaxed nerves. When he came out in the morning, Elias was already in
+the kitchen. He too had slept off his indisposition, but it had been
+succeeded by a painful embarrassment that proved an effectual barrier to
+all intercourse with him. The minister talked lightly and amusingly, but
+the boy never raised his eyes from his plate, and only spoke when he was
+compelled to answer some direct questions.
+
+Harold Dokesbury knew that unless he could overcome this reserve, his
+power over the youth was gone. He bent every effort to do it.
+
+"What do you say to a turn down the street with me?" he asked as he
+rose from breakfast.
+
+'Lias shook his head.
+
+"What! You haven't deserted me already?"
+
+The older people had gone out, but young Gray looked furtively about
+before he replied: "You know I ain't fittin' to go out with
+you--aftah--aftah--yestiddy."
+
+A dozen appropriate texts rose in the preacher's mind, but he knew that
+it was not a preaching time, so he contented himself with saying,--
+
+"Oh, get out! Come along!"
+
+"No, I cain't. I cain't. I wisht I could! You needn't think I's ashamed,
+'cause I ain't. Plenty of 'em git drunk, an' I don't keer nothin' 'bout
+dat"--this in a defiant tone.
+
+"Well, why not come along then?"
+
+"I tell you I cain't. Don't ax me no mo'. It ain't on my account I won't
+go. It's you."
+
+"Me! Why, I want you to go."
+
+"I know you does, but I mustn't. Cain't you see that dey'd be glad to
+say dat--dat you was in cahoots wif me an' you tuk yo' dram on de sly?"
+
+"I don't care what they say so long as it isn't true. Are you coming?"
+
+"No, I ain't."
+
+He was perfectly determined, and Dokesbury saw that there was no use
+arguing with him. So with a resigned "All right!" he strode out the gate
+and up the street, thinking of the problem he had to solve.
+
+There was good in Elias Gray, he knew. It was a shame that it should be
+lost. It would be lost unless he were drawn strongly away from the paths
+he was treading. But how could it be done? Was there no point in his
+mind that could be reached by what was other than evil? That was the
+thing to be found out. Then he paused to ask himself if, after all, he
+were not trying to do too much,--trying, in fact, to play Providence to
+Elias. He found himself involuntarily wanting to shift the
+responsibility of planning for the youth. He wished that something
+entirely independent of his intentions would happen.
+
+Just then something did happen. A piece of soft mud hurled from some
+unknown source caught the minister square in the chest, and spattered
+over his clothes. He raised his eyes and glanced about quickly, but no
+one was in sight. Whoever the foe was, he was securely ambushed.
+
+"Thrown by the hand of a man," mused Dokesbury, "prompted by the malice
+of a child."
+
+He went on his way, finished his business, and returned to the house.
+
+"La, Brothah Dokesbury!" exclaimed Aunt Caroline, "what's de mattah 'f
+you' shu't bosom?"
+
+"Oh, that's where one of our good citizens left his card."
+
+"You don' mean to say none o' dem low-life scoun'els----"
+
+"I don't know who did it. He took particular pains to keep out of
+sight."
+
+"'Lias!" the old woman cried, turning on her son, "wha' 'd you let
+Brothah Dokesbury go off by hisse'f fu? Why n't you go 'long an' tek
+keer o' him?"
+
+The old lady stopped even in the midst of her tirade, as her eyes took
+in the expression on her son's face.
+
+"I'll kill some o' dem damn----"
+
+"'Lias!"
+
+"'Scuse me, Mistah Dokesbury, but I feel lak I'll bus' ef I don't
+'spress myse'f. It makes me so mad. Don't you go out o' hyeah no mo'
+'dout me. I'll go 'long an' I'll brek somebody's haid wif a stone."
+
+"'Lias! how you talkin' fo' de ministah?"
+
+"Well, dat's whut I'll do, 'cause I kin outth'ow any of 'em an' I know
+dey hidin'-places."
+
+"I'll be glad to accept your protection," said Dokesbury.
+
+He saw his advantage, and was thankful for the mud,--the one thing that
+without an effort restored the easy relations between himself and his
+protege.
+
+Ostensibly these relations were reversed, and Elias went out with the
+preacher as a guardian and protector. But the minister was laying his
+nets. It was on one of these rambles that he broached to 'Lias a subject
+which he had been considering for some time.
+
+"Look here, 'Lias," he said, "what are you going to do with that big
+back yard of yours?"
+
+"Oh, nothin'. 'Tain't no 'count to raise nothin' in."
+
+"It may not be fit for vegetables, but it will raise something."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Chickens. That's what."
+
+Elias laughed sympathetically.
+
+"I'd lak to eat de chickens I raise. I wouldn't want to be feedin' de
+neighborhood."
+
+"Plenty of boards, slats, wire, and a good lock and key would fix that
+all right."
+
+"Yes, but whah 'm I gwine to git all dem things?"
+
+"Why, I'll go in with you and furnish the money, and help you build the
+coops. Then you can sell chickens and eggs, and we'll go halves on the
+profits."
+
+"Hush man!" cried 'Lias, in delight.
+
+So the matter was settled, and, as Aunt Caroline expressed it, "Fu' a
+week er sich a mattah, you nevah did see sich ta'in' down an' buildin'
+up in all yo' bo'n days."
+
+'Lias went at the work with zest and Dokesbury noticed his skill with
+tools. He let fall the remark: "Say, 'Lias, there's a school near here
+where they teach carpentry; why don't you go and learn?"
+
+"What I gwine to do with bein' a cyahpenter?"
+
+"Repair some of these houses around Mt. Hope, if nothing more,"
+Dokesbury responded, laughing; and there the matter rested.
+
+The work prospered, and as the weeks went on, 'Lias's enterprise became
+the town's talk. One of Aunt Caroline's patrons who had come with some
+orders about work regarded the changed condition of affairs, and said,
+"Why, Aunt Caroline, this doesn't look like the same place. I'll have to
+buy some eggs from you; you keep your yard and hen-house so nice, it's
+an advertisement for the eggs."
+
+"Don't talk to me nothin' 'bout dat ya'd, Miss Lucy," Aunt Caroline had
+retorted. "Dat 'long to 'Lias an' de preachah. Hit dey doin's. Dey done
+mos' nigh drove me out wif dey cleanness. I ain't nevah seed no sich
+ca'in' on in my life befo'. Why, my 'Lias done got right brigity an'
+talk about bein' somep'n."
+
+Dokesbury had retired from his partnership with the boy save in so far
+as he acted as a general supervisor. His share had been sold to a friend
+of 'Lias, Jim Hughes. The two seemed to have no other thought save of
+raising, tending, and selling chickens.
+
+Mt. Hope looked on and ceased to scoff. Money is a great dignifier, and
+Jim and 'Lias were making money. There had been some sniffs when the
+latter had hinged the front gate and whitewashed his mother's cabin, but
+even that had been accepted now as a matter of course.
+
+Dokesbury had done his work. He, too, looked on, and in some
+satisfaction.
+
+"Let the leaven work," he said, "and all Mt. Hope must rise."
+
+
+It was one day, nearly a year later, that "old lady Hughes" dropped in
+on Aunt Caroline for a chat.
+
+"Well, I do say, Sis' Ca'line, dem two boys o' ourn done sot dis town on
+fiah."
+
+"What now, Sis' Lizy?"
+
+"Why, evah sence 'Lias tuk it into his haid to be a cyahpenter an' Jim
+'cided to go 'long an' lu'n to be a blacksmiff, some o' dese hyeah
+othah young people's been trying to do somep'n'."
+
+"All dey wanted was a staht."
+
+"Well, now will you b'lieve me, dat no-'count Tom Johnson done opened a
+fish sto', an' he has de boys an' men bring him dey fish all de time. He
+gives 'em a little somep'n fu' dey ketch, den he go sell 'em to de white
+folks."
+
+"Lawd, how long!"
+
+"An' what you think he say?"
+
+"I do' know, sis'."
+
+"He say ez soon 'z he git money enough, he gwine to dat school whah
+'Lias and Jim gone an' lu'n to fahm scientific."
+
+"Bless de Lawd! Well, 'um, I don' put nothin' pas' de young folks now."
+
+Mt. Hope had at last awakened. Something had come to her to which she
+might aspire,--something that she could understand and reach. She was
+not soaring, but she was rising above the degradation in which Harold
+Dokesbury had found her. And for her and him the ordeal had passed.
+
+
+
+
+PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
+
+
+The Negro race in America has produced musicians, composers and
+painters, but it was left for Paul Laurence Dunbar to give it fame in
+literature. He was of pure African stock; his father and mother were
+born in slavery, and neither had any schooling, although the father had
+taught himself to read. Paul was born in Dayton, Ohio, June 27, 1872. He
+was christened Paul, because his father said that he was to be a great
+man. He was a diligent pupil at school, and began to make verses when he
+was still a child. His ability was recognized by his class mates; he was
+made editor of the high school paper, and wrote the class song for his
+commencement.
+
+The death of his father made it necessary for him to support his mother.
+He sought for some employment where his education might be put to some
+use, but finding such places closed to him, he became an elevator boy.
+He continued to write, however, and in 1892 his first volume was
+published, a book of poems called _Oak and Ivy_. The publishers were so
+doubtful of its success that they would not bring it out until a friend
+advanced the cost of publication. Paul now sold books to the passengers
+in his elevator, and realized enough to repay his friend. He was
+occasionally asked to give readings from his poetry. Gifted as he was
+with a deep, melodious voice, and a fine power of mimicry, he was very
+successful. In 1893 he was sought out by a man who was organizing a
+concert company and who engaged Paul to go along as reader. Full of
+enthusiasm, he set to work committing his poems to memory, and writing
+new ones. Ten days before the company was to start, word came that it
+had been disbanded. Paul found himself at the approach of winter without
+money and without work, and with his mother in real need. In his
+discouragement he even thought of suicide, but by the help of a friend
+he found work, and with it courage. In a letter written about this time
+he tells of his ambitions: "I did once want to be a lawyer, but that
+ambition has long since died out before the all-absorbing desire to be a
+worthy singer of the songs of God and nature. To be able to interpret my
+own people through song and story, and to prove to the many that we are
+more human than African."
+
+A second volume of poems, _Majors and Minors_, appeared in 1895. Like
+his first book it was printed by a local publisher, and had but a small
+sale. The actor James A. Herne happened to be playing _Shore Acres_ in
+Toledo; Paul saw him, admired his acting, and timidly presented him with
+a copy of his book. Mr. Herne read it with great pleasure, and sent it
+on to his friend William Dean Howells, who was then editor of _Harper's
+Weekly_. In June, 1896, there appeared in that journal a full-page
+review of the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, quoting freely from his
+poems, and praising them highly. This recognition by America's greatest
+critic was the beginning of Paul's national reputation. Orders came for
+his books from all over the country; a manager engaged him for a series
+of readings from his poems, and a New York firm, Dodd Mead & Co.,
+arranged to bring out his next book, _Lyrics of Lowly Life_.
+
+In 1897 he went to England to give a series of readings. Here he was a
+guest at the Savage Club, one of the best-known clubs of London. His
+readings were very successful, but a dishonest manager cheated him out
+of the proceeds, and he was obliged to cable to his friends for money to
+come home.
+
+Through the efforts of Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, the young poet obtained
+a position in the Congressional Library at Washington. It was thought
+that this would give him just the opportunity he needed for study, but
+the work proved too confining for his health. The year 1898 was marked
+by two events: the publication of his first book of short stories,
+_Folks From Dixie_, and his marriage to Miss Alice R. Moore. In 1899 at
+the request of Booker T. Washington he went to Tuskeegee and gave
+several readings and lectures before the students, also writing a school
+song for them. He made a tour through the South, giving readings with
+much success, but the strain of public appearances was beginning to tell
+upon his health. He continued to write, and in 1899 published _Lyrics of
+the Hearthside_, dedicated to his wife. He was invited to go to Albany
+to read before a distinguished audience, where Theodore Roosevelt, then
+governor, was to introduce him. He started, but was unable to get
+farther than New York. Here he lay sick for weeks, and when he grew
+stronger, the doctors said that his lungs were affected and he must have
+a change of climate. He went to Colorado in the fall of 1899, and wrote
+back to a friend: "Well, it is something to sit under the shadow of the
+Rocky Mountains, even if one only goes there to die." From this time on
+his life was one long fight for health, and usually a losing battle, but
+he faced it as courageously as Robert Louis Stevenson had done. In
+Colorado he wrote a novel, The _Love of Landry_, whose scene was laid in
+his new surroundings. He returned to Washington in 1900, and gave
+occasional readings, but it was evident that his strength was failing.
+He published two more volumes, _The Strength of Gideon_, a book of short
+stories, and _Poems of Cabin and Field_, which showed that his genius
+had lost none of its power. His last years were spent in Dayton, his old
+home, with his mother. He died February 10, 1906.
+
+One of the finest tributes to him was paid by his friend Brand Whitlock,
+then Mayor of Toledo, who has since become famous as United States
+Minister to Belgium during the Great War. This is from a letter written
+when he heard that the young poet was dead:
+
+
+     Paul was a poet: and I find that when I have said that I have said
+     the greatest and most splendid thing that can be said about a
+     man.... Nature, who knows so much better than man about everything,
+     cares nothing at all for the little distinctions, and when she
+     elects one of her children for her most important work, bestows on
+     him the rich gift of poesy, and assigns him a post in the greatest
+     of the arts, she invariably seizes the opportunity to show her
+     contempt of rank and title and race and land and creed. She took
+     Burns from a plough and Paul from an elevator, and Paul has done
+     for his own people what Burns did for the peasants of Scotland--he
+     has expressed them in their own way and in their own words.
+
+
+
+
+WITH THE POLICE
+
+_Not all Americans are good Americans. For the lawbreakers, American
+born or otherwise, we need men to enforce the law. Of these guardians of
+public safety, one body, the Pennsylvania State Police, has become
+famous for its achievements. Katherine Mayo studied their work at first
+hand, met the men of the force, visited the scenes of their activity,
+and in_ THE STANDARD BEARERS, _tells of their daring exploits. This
+story is taken from that book_.
+
+
+
+
+ISRAEL DRAKE
+
+BY
+
+KATHERINE MAYO
+
+
+Israel Drake was a bandit for simple love of the thing. To hunt for
+another reason would be a waste of time. The blood in his veins was pure
+English, unmixed since long ago. His environment was that of his
+neighbors. His habitat was the noble hills. But Israel Drake was a
+bandit, just as his neighbors were farmers--just as a hawk is a hawk
+while its neighbors are barnyard fowls.
+
+Israel Drake was swarthy-visaged, high of cheek bone, with large, dark,
+deep-set eyes, and a thin-lipped mouth covered by a long and drooping
+black mustache. Barefooted, he stood six feet two inches tall. Lean as a
+panther, and as supple, he could clear a five-foot rail fence without
+the aid of his hand. He ran like a deer. As a woodsman the very deer
+could have taught him little. With rifle and revolver he was an expert
+shot, and the weapons he used were the truest and best.
+
+All the hill-people of Cumberland County dreaded him. All the scattered
+valley-folk spoke softly at his name. And the jest and joy of Israel's
+care-free life was to make them skip and shiver and dance to the tune of
+their trepidations.
+
+As a matter of fact, he was leader of a gang, outlaws every one. But his
+own strong aura eclipsed the rest, and he glared alone, in the thought
+of his world, endued with terrors of diverse origin.
+
+His genius kept him fully aware of the value of this preeminence, and it
+lay in his wisdom and pleasure to fan the flame of his own repute. In
+this it amused him to seek the picturesque--the unexpected. With an
+imagination fed by primeval humor and checked by no outward
+circumstances of law, he achieved a ready facility. Once, for example,
+while trundling through his town of Shippensburg on the rear platform of
+a freight train, he chanced to spy a Borough Constable crossing a bridge
+near the track.
+
+"Happy thought! Let's touch the good soul up. He's getting stodgy."
+
+Israel drew a revolver and fired, neatly nicking the Constable's hat.
+Then with a mountaineer's hoot, he gayly proclaimed his identity.
+
+Again, and many times, he would send into this or that town or
+settlement a message addressed to the Constable or Chief of Police:--
+
+"I am coming down this afternoon. Get away out of town. Don't let me
+find you there."
+
+Obediently they went away. And Israel, strolling the streets that
+afternoon just as he had promised to do, would enter shop after shop,
+look over the stock at his leisure, and, with perfect good-humor, pick
+out whatever pleased him, regardless of cost.
+
+"I think I'll take this here article," he would say to the trembling
+store-keeper, affably pocketing his choice.
+
+"Help yourself, Mr. Drake! Help yourself, sir! Glad we are able to
+please you to-day."
+
+Which was indeed the truth. And many of them there were who would have
+hastened to curry favor with their persecutor by whispering in his ear a
+word of warning had they known of any impending attempt against him by
+the agents of peace.
+
+Such was their estimate of the relative strength of Israel Drake and of
+the law forces of the Sovereign State of Pennsylvania.
+
+In the earlier times they had tried to arrest him. Once the attempt
+succeeded and Israel went to the Penitentiary for a term. But he emerged
+a better and wilier bandit than before, to embark upon a career that
+made his former life seem tame. Sheriffs and constables now proved
+powerless against him, whatever they essayed.
+
+Then came a grand, determined effort when the Sheriff, supported by
+fifteen deputies, all heavily armed, actually surrounded Drake's house.
+But the master-outlaw, alone and at ease at an upper window, his
+Winchester repeating-rifle in his hand and a smile of still content on
+his face, coolly stood the whole army off until, weary of empty danger,
+it gave up the siege and went home.
+
+This disastrous expedition ended the attempts of the local authorities
+to capture Israel Drake. Thenceforth he pursued his natural course
+without pretense of let or hindrance. At the time when this story
+begins, no fewer than fourteen warrants were out for his apprehension,
+issued on charges ranging from burglary and highway robbery through a
+long list of felonies. But the warrants, slowly accumulating, lay in the
+bottom of official drawers, apprehending nothing but dust. No one
+undertook to serve them. Life was too sweet--too short.
+
+Then came a turn of fate. Israel chanced to bethink himself of a certain
+aged farmer living with his old wife near a spot called Lee's
+Cross-Road. The two dwelt by themselves, without companions on their
+farm, and without neighbors. And they were reputed to have money.
+
+The money might not be much--might be exceedingly little. But, even so,
+Israel could use it, and in any event there would be the fun of the
+trick. So Israel summoned one Carey Morrison, a gifted mate and
+subordinate, with whom he proceeded to act.
+
+At dead of night the two broke into the farmhouse--crept into the
+chamber of the old pair--crept softly, softly, lest the farmer might
+keep a shotgun by his side. Sneaking to the foot of the bed, Israel
+suddenly flashed his lantern full upon the pillows--upon the two pale,
+deep-seamed faces crowned with silver hair.
+
+The woman sat up with a piercing scream. The farmer clutched at his
+gun. But Israel, bringing the glinting barrel of his revolver into the
+lantern's shaft of light, ordered both to lie down. Carey, slouching at
+hand, awaited orders.
+
+"Where is your money?" demanded Israel, indicating the farmer by the
+point of his gun.
+
+"I have no money, you coward!"
+
+"It's no use your lying to me. _Where's the money?_"
+
+"I have no money, I tell you."
+
+"Carey," observed Israel, "hunt a candle."
+
+While Carey looked for the candle, Israel surveyed his victims with a
+cheerful, anticipatory grin.
+
+The candle came; was lighted.
+
+"Carey," Israel spoke again, "you pin the old woman down. Pull the quilt
+off. Clamp her feet together. So!"
+
+Then he thrust the candle-flame against the soles of those gnarled old
+feet--thrust it close, while the flame bent upward, and the melting
+tallow poured upon the bed.
+
+The woman screamed again, this time in pain. The farmer half rose, with
+a quivering cry of rage, but Israel's gun stared him between the eyes.
+The woman screamed without interval. There was a smell of burning flesh.
+
+"Now we'll change about," remarked Israel, beaming. "I'll hold the old
+feller. You take the candle, Carey. You don't reely need your gun--now,
+do ye, boy?"
+
+And so they began afresh.
+
+It was not a game to last long. Before dawn the two were back in their
+own place, bearing the little all of value that the rifled house had
+contained.
+
+When the news of the matter spread abroad, it seemed, somehow, just a
+straw too much. The District Attorney of the County of Cumberland blazed
+into white heat. But he was powerless, he found. Not an officer within
+his entire jurisdiction expressed any willingness even to attempt an
+arrest.
+
+"Then we shall see," said District Attorney Rhey, "what the State will
+do for us, since we cannot help ourselves!" And he rushed off a
+telegram, confirmed by post, to the Superintendent of the Department of
+State Police.
+
+The Superintendent of the Department of State Police promptly referred
+the matter to the Captain of "C" Troop, with orders to act. For
+Cumberland County, being within the southeastern quarter of the
+Commonwealth, lies under "C" Troop's special care.
+
+It was Adams, in those days, who held that command--Lynn G. Adams, now
+Captain of "A" Troop, although for the duration of the war serving in
+the regular army, even as his fathers before him have served in our
+every war, including that which put the country on the map. Truer
+soldier, finer officer, braver or straighter or surer dealer with men
+and things need not be sought. His victories leave no needless scar
+behind, and his command would die by inches rather than fail him
+anywhere.
+
+The Captain of "C" Troop, then, choosing with judgment, picked his
+man--picked Trooper Edward Hallisey, a Boston Irishman, square of jaw,
+shrewd of eye, quick of wit, strong of wind and limb. And he ordered
+Private Hallisey to proceed at once to Carlisle, county seat of
+Cumberland, and report to the District Attorney for service toward
+effecting the apprehension of Israel Drake.
+
+Three days later--it was the 28th of September, to be exact--Private
+Edward Hallisey sent in his report to his Troop Commander. He had made
+all necessary observations, he said, and was ready to arrest the
+criminal. In this he would like to have the assistance of two Troopers,
+who should join him at Carlisle.
+
+The report came in the morning mail. First Sergeant Price detailed two
+men from the Barracks reserve. They were Privates H. K. Merryfield and
+Harvey J. Smith. Their orders were simply to proceed at once, in
+civilian clothes, to Carlisle, where they would meet Private Hallisey
+and assist him in effecting the arrest of Israel Drake.
+
+Privates Merryfield and Smith, carrying in addition to their service
+revolvers the 44-caliber Springfield carbine which is the Force's heavy
+weapon, left by the next train.
+
+On the Carlisle station platform, as the two Troopers debarked, some
+hundred persons were gathered in pursuance of various and centrifugal
+designs. But one impulse they appeared unanimously to share--the impulse
+to give as wide a berth as possible to a peculiarly horrible tramp.
+
+Why should a being like that intrude himself upon a passenger platform
+in a respectable country town? Not to board a coach, surely, for such as
+he pay no fares. To spy out the land? To steal luggage? Or simply to
+make himself hateful to decent folk?
+
+He carried his head with a hangdog lurch--his heavy jaw was rough with
+stubble beard. His coat and trousers fluttered rags and his toes stuck
+out of his boots. Women snatched back their skirts as he slouched near,
+and men muttered and scowled at him for a contaminating beast.
+
+Merryfield and Smith, drifting near this scum of the earth, caught the
+words "Four-thirty train" and the name of a station.
+
+"Right," murmured Merryfield.
+
+Then he went and bought tickets.
+
+In the shelter of an ancient, grimy day-coach, the scum muttered again,
+as Smith brushed past him in the aisle.
+
+"Charlie Stover's farm," said he.
+
+"M'm," said Smith.
+
+At a scrap of a station, in the foothills of ascending heights the tramp
+and the Troopers separately detrained. In the early evening all three
+strayed together once more in the shadow of the lilacs by Charlie
+Stover's gate.
+
+Over the supper-table Hallisey gave the news. "Drake is somewhere on the
+mountain to-night," said he. "His cabin is way up high, on a ridge
+called Huckleberry Patch. He is practically sure to go home in the
+course of the evening. Then is our chance. First, of course, you fellows
+will change your clothes. I've got some old things ready for you."
+
+Farmer Stover, like every other denizen of the rural county, had lived
+for years in terror and hatred of Israel Drake. Willingly he had aided
+Hallisey to the full extent of his power. He had told all that he knew
+of the bandit's habits and mates. He had indicated the mountain trails
+and he had given the Trooper such little shelter and food as the latter
+had stopped to take during his rapid work of investigation. But now he
+was asked to perform a service that he would gladly have refused; he was
+asked to hitch up a horse and wagon and to drive the three Troopers to
+the very vicinity of Israel Drake's house.
+
+"Oh, come on, Mr. Stover," they urged. "You're a public-spirited man, as
+you've shown. Do it for your neighbors' sake if not for your own. You
+want the county rid of this pest."
+
+Very reluctantly the farmer began the trip. With every turn of the
+ever-mounting forest road his reluctance grew. Grisly memories, grisly
+pictures, flooded his mind. It was night, and the trees in the darkness
+whispered like evil men. The bushes huddled like crouching figures. And
+what was it, moving stealthily over there, that crackled twigs? At last
+he could bear it no more.
+
+"Here's where _I_ turn 'round," he muttered hoarsely. "If you fellers
+are going farther you'll go alone. I got a use for _my_ life!"
+
+"All right, then," said Hallisey. "You've done well by us already.
+Good-night."
+
+It was a fine moonlight night and Hallisey now knew those woods as well
+as did his late host. He led his two comrades up another stiff mile of
+steady climbing. Then he struck off, by an almost invisible trail, into
+the dense timber. Silently the three men moved, threading the fragrant,
+silver-flecked blackness with practised woodsmen's skill. At last their
+file-leader stopped and beckoned his mates.
+
+Over his shoulder the two studied the scene before them: A clearing
+chopped out of the dense tall timber. In the midst of the clearing a log
+cabin, a story and a half high. On two sides of the cabin a straggling
+orchard of peach and apple trees. In the cabin window a dim light.
+
+It was then about eleven o'clock. The three Troopers, effacing
+themselves in the shadows, laid final plans.
+
+The cabin had two rooms on the top floor and one below, said Hallisey,
+beneath his breath. The first-floor room had a door and two windows on
+the north, and the same on the south, just opposite. Under the west end
+was a cellar, with an outside door. Before the main door to the north
+was a little porch. This, by day, commanded the sweep of the
+mountain-side; and here, when Drake was "hiding out" in some neighboring
+eyrie, expecting pursuit, his wife was wont to signal him concerning the
+movements of intruders.
+
+Her code was written in dish-water. A panful thrown to the east meant
+danger in the west, and _vice versa_; this Hallisey himself had seen and
+now recalled in case of need.
+
+Up to the present moment each officer had carried his carbine, taken
+apart and wrapped in a bundle, to avoid the remark of chance observers
+by the way. Now each put his weapon together, ready for use. They
+compared their watches, setting them to the second. They discarded their
+coats and hats.
+
+The moon was flooding the clearing with high, pale light, adding greatly
+to the difficulty of their task. Accordingly, they plotted carefully.
+Each Trooper took a door--Hallisey that to the north, Merryfield that to
+the south, Smith that of the cellar. It was agreed that each should
+creep to a point opposite the door on which he was to advance, ten
+minutes being allowed for all to reach their initial positions; that at
+exactly five minutes to midnight the advance should be started, slowly,
+through the tall grass of the clearing toward the cabin; that in case of
+any unusual noise or alarm, each man should lie low exactly five minutes
+before resuming this advance; and that from a point fifty yards from the
+cabin a rush should be made upon the doors.
+
+According to the request of the District Attorney, Drake was to be taken
+"dead or alive," but according to an adamantine principle of the Force,
+he must be taken not only alive, but unscathed if that were humanly
+possible. This meant that he must not be given an opportunity to run and
+so render shooting necessary. If, however, he should break away, his
+chance of escape would be small, as each Trooper was a dead shot with
+the weapons he was carrying.
+
+The scheme concerted, the three officers separated, heading apart to
+their several starting-points. At five minutes before midnight, to the
+tick of their synchronized watches, each began to glide through the tall
+grass. But it was late September. The grass was dry. Old briar-veins
+dragged at brittle stalks. Shimmering whispers of withered leaves echoed
+to the smallest touch; and when the men were still some two hundred
+yards from the cabin the sharp ears of a dog caught the rumor of all
+these tiny sounds,--and the dog barked.
+
+Every man stopped short--moved not a finger again till five minutes had
+passed. Then once more each began to creep--reached the fifty-yard
+point--stood up, with a long breath, and dashed for his door.
+
+At one and the same moment, practically, the three stood in the cabin,
+viewing a scene of domestic peace. A short, square, swarthy woman, black
+of eye, high of cheek bone, stood by a stove calmly stirring a pot. On
+the table besides her, on the floor around her, clustered many jars of
+peaches--jars freshly filled, steaming hot, awaiting their tops. In a
+corner three little children, huddled together on a low bench, stared at
+the strangers with sleepy eyes. Three chairs; a cupboard with dishes;
+bunches of corn hanging from the rafters by their husks; festoons of
+onions; tassels of dried herbs--all this made visible by the dull light
+of a small kerosene lamp whose dirty chimney was streaked with smoke.
+All this and nothing more.
+
+Two of the men, jumping for the stairs, searched the upper half-story
+thoroughly, but without profit.
+
+"Mrs. Drake," said Hallisey, as they returned, "we are officers of the
+State Police, come to arrest your husband. Where is he?"
+
+In silence, in utter calm the woman still stirred her pot, not missing
+the rhythm of a stroke.
+
+"The dog warned them. He's just got away," said each officer to himself.
+"She's _too_ calm."
+
+She scooped up a spoonful of the fruit, peered at it critically,
+splashed it back into the bubbling pot. From her manner it appeared the
+most natural thing in the world to be canning peaches at midnight on the
+top of South Mountain in the presence of officers of the State Police.
+
+"My husband's gone to Baltimore," she vouchsafed at her easy leisure.
+
+"Let's have a look in the cellar," said Merryfield, and dropped down the
+cellar stairs with Hallisey at his heels. Together they ransacked the
+little cave to a conclusion. During the process, Merryfield conceived an
+idea.
+
+"Hallisey," he murmured, "what would you think of my staying down here,
+while you and Smith go off talking as though we were all together? She
+might say something to the children, when she believes we're gone, and I
+could hear every word through that thin floor."
+
+"We'll do it!" Hallisey answered, beneath his voice. Then, shouting:--
+
+"Come on, Smith! Let's get away from this; no use wasting time here!"
+
+And in another moment Smith and Hallisey were crashing up the
+mountain-side, calling out: "Hi, there! Merryfield--Oh! Merryfield,
+wait for us!"--as if their comrade had outstripped them on the trail.
+
+Merryfield had made use of the noise of their departure to establish
+himself in a tenable position under the widest crack in the floor. Now
+he held himself motionless, subduing even his breath.
+
+One--two--three minutes of dead silence. Then came the timorous
+half-whisper of a frightened child:
+
+"Will them men kill father if they find him?"
+
+"S-sh!"
+
+"Mother!" faintly ventured another little voice, "will them men kill
+father if they find him?"
+
+"S-sh! S-sh! I tell ye!"
+
+"Ma-ma! Will they kill my father?" This was the wail, insistent,
+uncontrolled, of the smallest child of all.
+
+The crackling tramp of the officers, mounting the trail, had wholly died
+away. The woman evidently believed all immediate danger past.
+
+"No!" she exclaimed vehemently, "they ain't goin' to lay eyes on yo'
+father, hair nor hide of him. Quit yer frettin'!"
+
+In a moment she spoke again: "You keep still, now, like good children,
+while I go out and empty these peach-stones. I'll be back in a minute.
+See you keep still just where you are!"
+
+Stealing noiselessly to the cellar door as the woman left the house,
+Merryfield saw her making for the woods, a basket on her arm. He watched
+her till the shadows engulfed her. Then he drew back to his own place
+and resumed his silent vigil.
+
+Moments passed, without a sound from the room above. Then came soft
+little thuds on the floor, a whimper or two, small sighs, and a slither
+of bare legs on bare boards.
+
+"Poor little kiddies!" thought Merryfield, "they're coiling down to
+sleep!"
+
+Back in the days when the Force was started, the Major had said to each
+recruit of them all:--
+
+"I expect you to treat women and children at all times with every
+consideration."
+
+From that hour forth the principle has been grafted into the lives of
+the men. It is instinct now--self-acting, deep, and unconscious. No
+tried Trooper deliberately remembers it. It is an integral part of him,
+like the drawing of his breath.
+
+"I wish I could manage to spare those babies and their mother in what's
+to come!" Merryfield pondered as he lurked in the mould-scented dark.
+
+A quarter of an hour went by. Five minutes more. Footsteps nearing the
+cabin from the direction of the woods. Low voices--very low.
+Indistinguishable words. Then the back door opened. Two persons entered,
+and all that they now uttered was clear.
+
+"It was them that the dog heard," said a man's voice. "Get me my rifle
+and all my ammunition. I'll go to Maryland. I'll get a job on that stone
+quarry near Westminster. I'll send some money as soon as I'm paid."
+
+"But you won't start _to-night_!" exclaimed the wife.
+
+"Yes, to-night--this minute. Quick! I wouldn't budge an inch for the
+County folks. But with the State Troopers after me, that's another
+thing. If I stay around here now they'll get me dead sure--and send me
+up too. My gun, I say!"
+
+"Oh, daddy, daddy, don't go away!" "_Don't_ go away off and leave me,
+daddy!" "_Don't go, don't go!_" came the children's plaintive wails,
+hoarse with fatigue and fright.
+
+Merryfield stealthily crept from the cellar's outside door, hugging the
+wall of the cabin, moving toward the rear. As he reached the corner, and
+was about to make the turn toward the back, he drew his six-shooter and
+laid his carbine down in the grass. For the next step, he knew, would
+bring him into plain sight. If Drake offered any resistance, the
+ensuing action would be at short range or hand to hand.
+
+He rounded the corner. Drake was standing just outside the door, a rifle
+in his left hand, his right hand hidden in the pocket of his overcoat.
+In the doorway stood the wife, with the three little children crowding
+before her. It was the last moment. They were saying good-bye.
+
+Merryfield covered the bandit with his revolver.
+
+"Put up your hands! You are under arrest," he commanded.
+
+"Who the hell are you!" Drake flung back. As he spoke he thrust his
+rifle into the grasp of the woman and snatched his right hand from its
+concealment. In its grip glistened the barrel of a nickel-plated
+revolver.
+
+Merryfield could have easily shot him then and there--would have been
+amply warranted in doing so. But he had heard the children's voices. Now
+he saw their innocent, terrified eyes.
+
+"Poor--little--kiddies!" he thought again.
+
+Drake stood six feet two inches high, and weighed some two hundred
+pounds, all brawn. Furthermore, he was desperate. Merryfield is merely
+of medium build.
+
+"Nevertheless, I'll take a chance," he said to himself, returning his
+six-shooter to its holster. And just as the outlaw threw up his own
+weapon to fire, the Trooper, in a running jump, plunged into him with
+all fours, exactly as, when a boy, he had plunged off a springboard into
+the old mill-dam of a hot July afternoon.
+
+Too amazed even to pull his trigger, Drake gave backward a step into the
+doorway. Merryfield's clutch toward his right hand missed the gun,
+fastening instead on the sleeve of his heavy coat. Swearing wildly while
+the woman and children screamed behind him, the bandit struggled to
+break the Trooper's hold--tore and pulled until the sleeve, where
+Merryfield held it, worked down over the gun in his own grip. So
+Merryfield, twisting the sleeve, caught a lock-hold on hand and gun
+together.
+
+Drake, standing on the doorsill, had now some eight inches advantage of
+height. The door opened inward, from right to left. With a tremendous
+effort Drake forced his assailant to his knees, stepped back into the
+room, seized the door with his left hand and with the whole weight on
+his shoulder slammed it to, on the Trooper's wrist.
+
+The pain was excruciating--but it did not break that lock-hold on the
+outlaw's hand and gun. Shooting from his knees like a projectile,
+Merryfield flung his whole weight at the door. Big as Drake was, he
+could not hold it. It gave, and once more the two men hung at grips,
+this time within the room.
+
+Drake's one purpose was to turn the muzzle of his imprisoned revolver
+upon Merryfield. Merryfield, with his left still clinching that deadly
+hand caught in its sleeve, now grabbed the revolver in his own right
+hand, with a twist dragged it free, and flung it out of the door.
+
+But, as he dropped his right defense, taking both hands to the gun, the
+outlaw's powerful left grip closed on Merryfield's throat with a
+strangle-hold.
+
+With that great thumb closing his windpipe, with the world turning red
+and black, "Guess I can't put it over, after all!" the Trooper said to
+himself.
+
+Reaching for his own revolver, he shoved the muzzle against the bandit's
+breast.
+
+"Damn you, _shoot_!" cried the other, believing his end was come.
+
+But in that same instant Merryfield once more caught a glimpse of the
+fear-stricken faces of the babies, huddled together beyond.
+
+"Hallisey and Smith must be here soon," he thought. "I won't shoot yet."
+
+Again he dropped his revolver back into the holster, seizing the wrist
+of the outlaw to release that terrible clamp on his throat. As he did
+so, Drake with a lightning twist, reached around to the Trooper's belt
+and possessed himself of the gun. As he fired Merryfield had barely time
+and space to throw back his head. The flash blinded him--scorched his
+face hairless. The bullet grooved his body under the upflung arm still
+wrenching at the clutch that was shutting off his breath.
+
+Perhaps, with the shot, the outlaw insensibly somewhat relaxed that
+choking arm. Merryfield tore loose. Half-blinded and gasping though he
+was, he flung himself again at his adversary and landed a blow in his
+face. Drake, giving backward, kicked over a row of peach jars, slipped
+on the slimy stream that poured over the bare floor, and dropped the
+gun.
+
+Pursuing his advantage, Merryfield delivered blow after blow on the
+outlaw's face and body, backing him around the room, while both men
+slipped and slid, fell and recovered, on the jam-coated floor. The table
+crashed over, carrying with it the solitary lamp, whose flame died
+harmlessly, smothered in tepid mush. Now only the moonlight illuminated
+the scene.
+
+Drake was manoeuvring always to recover the gun. His hand touched the
+back of a chair. He picked the chair up, swung it high, and was about to
+smash it down on his adversary's head when Merryfield seized it in the
+air.
+
+At this moment the woman, who had been crouching against the wall
+nursing the rifle that her husband had put into her charge, rushed
+forward clutching the barrel of the gun, swung it at full arm's length
+as she would have swung an axe, and brought the stock down on the
+Trooper's right hand.
+
+That vital hand dropped--fractured, done. But in the same second Drake
+gave a shriek of pain as a shot rang out and his own right arm fell
+powerless.
+
+In the door stood Hallisey, smoking revolver in hand, smiling grimly in
+the moonlight at the neatness of his own aim. What is the use of killing
+a man, when you can wing him as trigly as that?
+
+Private Smith, who had entered by the other door, was taking the rifle
+out of the woman's grasp--partly because she had prodded him viciously
+with the muzzle. He examined the chambers.
+
+"Do you know this thing is loaded?" he asked her in a mild, detached
+voice.
+
+She returned his gaze with frank despair in her black eyes.
+
+"Drake, do you surrender?" asked Hallisey.
+
+"Oh, I'll give up. You've got me!" groaned the outlaw. Then he turned on
+his wife with bitter anger. "Didn't I tell ye?" he snarled. "Didn't I
+tell ye they'd get me if you kept me hangin' around here? These ain't no
+damn deputies. _These is the State Police!_"
+
+"An' yet, if I'd known that gun was loaded," said she, "there'd been
+some less of 'em to-night!"
+
+They dressed Israel's arm in first-aid fashion. Then they started with
+their prisoner down the mountain-trail, at last resuming connection with
+their farmer friend. Not without misgivings, the latter consented to
+hitch up his "double team" and hurry the party to the nearest town where
+a doctor could be found.
+
+As the doctor dressed the bandit's arm, Private Merryfield, whose broken
+right hand yet awaited care, observed to the groaning patient:--
+
+"Do you know, you can be thankful to your little children that you have
+your life left."
+
+"To hell with you and the children and my life. I'd a hundred times
+rather you'd killed me than take what's comin' now."
+
+Then the three Troopers philosophically hunted up a night restaurant and
+gave their captive a bite of lunch.
+
+"Now," said Hallisey, as he paid the score, "where's the lock-up?"
+
+The three officers, with Drake in tow, proceeded silently through the
+sleeping streets. Not a ripple did their passing occasion. Not even a
+dog aroused to take note of them.
+
+Duly they stood at the door of the custodian of the lock-up, ringing the
+bell--again and again ringing it. Eventually some one upstairs raised a
+window, looked out for an appreciable moment, quickly lowered the window
+and locked it. Nothing further occurred. Waiting for a reasonable
+interval the officers rang once more. No answer. Silence complete.
+
+Then they pounded on the door till the entire block heard.
+
+Here, there, up street and down, bedroom windows gently opened, then
+closed with finality more gentle yet. Silence. Not a voice. Not a foot
+on a stair.
+
+The officers looked at each other perplexed. Then, by chance, they
+looked at Drake. Drake, so lately black with suicidal gloom, was
+grinning! Grinning as a man does when the citadel of his heart is
+comforted.
+
+"You don't understand, do ye!" chuckled he. "Well, I'll tell ye: What do
+them folks see when they open their windows and look down here in the
+road? They see three hard-lookin' fellers with guns in their hands, here
+in this bright moonlight. And they see somethin' scarier to them than a
+hundred strangers with guns--they see _ME_! There ain't a mother's son
+of 'em that'll budge downstairs while I'm here, not if you pound on
+their doors till the cows come home." And he slapped his knee with his
+good hand and laughed in pure ecstasy--a laugh that caught all the
+little group and rocked it as with one mind.
+
+"We don't begrudge you that, do we boys?" Hallisey conceded. "Smith,
+you're as respectable-looking as any of us. Hunt around and see if you
+can find a Constable that isn't onto this thing. We'll wait here for
+you."
+
+Moving out of the zone of the late demonstration, Private Smith learned
+the whereabouts of the home of a Constable.
+
+"What's wanted?" asked the Constable, responding like a normal burgher
+to Smith's knock at his door.
+
+"Officer of State Police," answered Smith. "I have a man under arrest
+and want to put him in the lock-up. Will you get me the keys?"
+
+"Sure. I'll come right down and go along with you myself. Just give me a
+jiffy to get on my trousers and boots," cried the Constable, clearly
+glad of a share in the adventure.
+
+In a moment the borough official was at the Trooper's side, talking
+eagerly as they moved toward the place where the party waited.
+
+"So, he's a highwayman, is he? Good! and a burglar, too, and a
+cattle-thief! Good work! And you've got him right up the street, ready
+to jail! Well, I'll be switched. Now, what might his name be? Israel
+Drake? _Not Israel Drake!_ Oh, my God!"
+
+The Constable had stopped in his tracks like a man struck paralytic.
+
+"No, stranger," he quavered. "I reckon I--I--I won't go no further with
+you just now. Here, I'll give you the keys. You can use 'em yourself:
+These here's for the doors. This bunch is for the cells. _Good_-night to
+you. I'll be getting back home!"
+
+By the first train next morning the Troopers, conveying their prisoner,
+left the village for the County Town. As they deposited Drake in the
+safe-keeping of the County Jail and were about to depart, he seemed
+burdened with an impulse to speak, yet said nothing. Then, as the three
+officers were leaving the room, he leaned over and touched Merryfield on
+the shoulder.
+
+"Shake!" he growled, offering his unwounded hand.
+
+Merryfield "shook" cheerfully, with his own remaining sound member.
+
+"I'm plumb sorry to see ye go, and that's a fact," growled the outlaw.
+"Because--well, because you're the only _man_ that ever tried to arrest
+me."
+
+
+
+
+KATHERINE MAYO
+
+
+Miss Katherine Mayo comes of Mayflower stock, but her birthplace was
+Ridgway, Pennsylvania. She was educated in private schools at Boston and
+Cambridge, Mass. Her earliest literary work to appear in print was a
+series of articles describing travels in Norway, followed by another
+series on Colonial American topics, written for the New York _Evening
+Post_. Later, during a residence in Dutch Guiana, South America, she
+wrote for the _Atlantic Monthly_ some interesting sketches of the
+natives of Surinam. After this came three years wholly devoted to
+historic research. The work, however, that first attracted wide
+attention was a history of the Pennsylvania State Police, published in
+1917, under the title of _Justice To All_.
+
+This history gives the complete story of the famous Mounted Police of
+Pennsylvania, illustrated with a mass of accurate narrative and
+re-enforced with statistics. The occasion of its writing was a personal
+experience--the cold-blooded murder of Sam Howell, a fine young American
+workingman, a carpenter by trade, near Miss Mayo's country home in New
+York. The circumstances of this murder could not have been more
+skilfully arranged had they been specially designed to illustrate the
+weakness and folly of the ancient, out-grown engine to which most states
+in the Union, even yet, look for the enforcement of their laws in rural
+parts. Sam Howell, carrying the pay roll on pay-day morning, gave his
+life for his honor as gallantly as any soldier in any war. He was shot
+down, at arm's length range, by four highway men, to whom, though
+himself unarmed, he would not surrender his trust. Sheriff, deputy
+sheriffs, constables, and some seventy-five fellow laborers available as
+sheriff's posse spent hours within a few hundred feet of the little
+wood in which the four murderers were known to be hiding, but no arrest
+was made and the murderers are to-day still at large.
+
+"You will have forgotten all this in a month's time," said Howell's
+fellow-workmen an hour after the tragedy, to Miss Mayo and her friend
+Miss Newell, owner of the estate, on the scene. "Sam was only a laboring
+man, like ourselves. We, none of us, have any protection when we work in
+country parts."
+
+The remark sounded bitter indeed. But investigation proved it, in
+principle, only too true. Sam Howell had not been the first, by many
+hundreds, to give his life because the State had no real means to make
+her law revered. And punishment for such crimes had been rare. Sam
+Howell, however, was not to be forgotten, neither was his sacrifice to
+be vain. From his blood, shed unseen, in the obscurity of a quiet
+country lane, was to spring a great movement, taking effect first in the
+state in which he died, and spreading through the Union.
+
+At that time Pennsylvania was the only state of all the forty-seven that
+had met its just obligations to protect all its people under its laws.
+Pennsylvania's State Police had been for ten years a body of defenders
+of justice, "without fear and without reproach". The honest people of
+the State had recorded its deeds in a long memory of noble service. But,
+never stooping to advertise itself, never hesitating to incur the enmity
+of evildoers, it had had many traducers and no historian. There was
+nothing in print to which the people of other states might turn for
+knowledge of the accomplishment of the sister commonwealth.
+
+So, in order that the facts might be conveniently available for every
+American citizen to study from "A" to "Z" and thus to decide
+intelligently for himself where he wanted his own state to stand, in the
+matter of fair and full protection to all people, Miss Mayo went to
+Pennsylvania and embarked on an exhaustive analysis of the workings of
+the Pennsylvania State Police Force, viewed from the standpoint of all
+parts of the community. Ex-President Roosevelt wrote the preface for
+_Justice To All_, the book in which the fruits of this study were
+finally embodied, and, in the meantime, Miss Newell devoted all her
+energies to the development of an active and aggressive state-wide
+movement for a State Police. _Justice To All_, in this campaign was
+widely used as a source of authority on which to base the arguments for
+the case. And in 1917 came Sam Howell's triumph, the passage of the Act
+creating the Department of New York State Police, now popularly called
+"the State Troopers".
+
+In the course of collecting the material for this book, Miss Mayo
+gathered a mass of facts much greater than one volume could properly
+contain. From this she later took fifteen adventurous stories of actual
+service in the Pennsylvania Force, of which some, including "Israel
+Drake" appeared in the _Saturday Evening Post_, while others came out
+simultaneously in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and in the _Outlook_. All were
+later collected in a volume called _The Standard Bearers_, which met
+with a very cordial reception by readers and critics.
+
+During the latter part of the World War, Miss Mayo was in France
+investigating the war-work of the Y. M. C. A. Her experiences there
+furnished material for a book from which advance pages appeared in the
+_Outlook_ in the form of separate stories, "Billy's Hut," "The Colonel's
+Lady" and others. The purpose of this book was to determine, as closely
+as possible, the real values, whatever those might be, of the work
+actually accomplished by the Overseas Y, and to lay the plain truth
+without bias or color, before the American people.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE PHILIPPINES
+
+_When the Philippine Islands passed from the possession of Spain to
+that of the United States, there was a change in more than the flag.
+Spain had sent soldiers and tax-gatherers to the islands; Uncle Sam sent
+road-builders and school teachers. One of these school teachers was also
+a newspaper man; and in a book called_ CAYBIGAN _he gave a series of
+vivid pictures of how the coming generation of Filipinos are taking the
+first step towards Americanization._
+
+
+
+
+THE STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPH OF ISIDRO DE LOS MAESTROS
+
+BY
+
+JAMES HOPPER
+
+
+_I--Face to Face with the Foe_
+
+Returning to his own town after a morning spent in "working up" the
+attendance of one of his far and recalcitrant barrio-schools, the
+Maestro of Balangilang was swaying with relaxed muscle and half-closed
+eyes to the allegretto trot of his little native pony, when he pulled up
+with a start, wide awake and all his senses on the alert. Through his
+somnolence, at first in a low hum, but fast rising in a fiendish
+crescendo, there had come a buzzing sound, much like that of one of the
+saw-mills of his California forests, and now, as he sat in the saddle,
+erect and tense, the thing ripped the air in ragged tear, shrieked
+vibrating into his ear, and finished its course along his spine in
+delicious irritation.
+
+"Oh, where am I?" murmured the Maestro, blinking; but between blinks he
+caught the flashing green of the palay fields and knew that he was far
+from the saw-mills of the Golden State. So he raised his nose to heaven
+and there, afloat above him in the serene blue, was the explanation. It
+was a kite, a great locust-shaped kite, darting and swooping in the hot
+monsoon, and from it, dropping plumb, came the abominable clamor.
+
+"Aha!" exclaimed the Maestro, pointing accusingly at the thin line
+vaguely visible against the sky-line in a diagonal running from the kite
+above him ahead to a point in the road. "Aha! there's something at the
+end of that; there's Attendance at the end of that!"
+
+With which significant remark he leaned forward in the saddle, bringing
+his switch down with a whizz behind him. The pony gave three rabbit
+leaps and then settled down to his drumming little trot. As they
+advanced the line overhead dropped gradually. Finally the Maestro had to
+swerve the horse aside to save his helmet. He pulled up to a walk, and a
+few yards further came to the spot where string met earth in the
+expected Attendance.
+
+The Attendance was sitting on the ground, his legs spread before him in
+an angle of forty-five degrees, each foot arched in a secure grip of a
+bunch of cogon grass. These legs were bare as far up as they went, and,
+in fact, no trace of clothing was reached until the eye met the lower
+fringe of an indescribable undershirt modestly veiling the upper half of
+a rotund little paunch; an indescribable undershirt, truly, for
+observation could not reach the thing itself, but only the dirt
+incrusting it so that it hung together, rigid as a knight's iron
+corslet, in spite of monstrous tears and rents. Between the teeth of the
+Attendance was a long, thick cheroot, wound about with hemp fiber, at
+which he pulled with rounded mouth. Hitched around his right wrist was
+the kite string, and between his legs a stick spindled with an extra
+hundred yards. At intervals he hauled hand-over-hand upon the taut line,
+and then the landscape vibrated to the buzz-saw song which had so
+compellingly recalled the Maestro to his eternal pursuit.
+
+As the shadow of the horse fell upon him, the Attendance brought his
+eyes down from their heavenly contemplation, and fixed them upon the
+rider. A tremor of dismay, mastered as soon as born, flitted over him;
+then, silently, with careful suppression of all signs of haste, he
+reached for a big stone with his little yellow paw, then for a stick
+lying farther off. Using the stone as a hammer, he drove the stick into
+the ground with deliberate stroke, wound the string around it with
+tender solicitude, and then, everything being secure, just as the
+Maestro was beginning his usual embarrassing question:
+
+"Why are you not at school, eh?"
+
+He drew up his feet beneath him, straightened up like a jack-in-a-box,
+took a hop-skip-jump, and with a flourish of golden heels, flopped
+head-first into the roadside ditch's rank luxuriance.
+
+"The little devil!" exclaimed the disconcerted Maestro. He dismounted
+and, leading his horse, walked up to the side of the ditch. It was full
+of the water of the last baguio. From the edge of the cane-field on the
+other side there cascaded down the bank a mad vegetation; it carpeted
+the sides, arched itself above in a vault, and inside this recess the
+water was rotting, green-scummed; and a powerful fermentation filled the
+nostrils with hot fever-smells. In the center of the ditch the broad,
+flat head of a caribao emerged slightly above the water; the floating
+lilies made an incongruous wreath about the great horns and the
+beatifically-shut eyes, and the thick, humid nose exhaled ecstasy in
+shuddering ripplets over the calm surface.
+
+Filled with a vague sense of the ridiculous, the Maestro peered into the
+darkness. "The little devil!" he murmured. "He's somewhere in here; but
+how am I to get him, I'd like to know. Do you see him, eh, Mathusalem?"
+he asked of the stolid beast soaking there in bliss.
+
+Whether in answer to this challenge or to some other irritant, the
+animal slowly opened one eye and ponderously let it fall shut again in
+what, to the heated imagination of the Maestro, seemed a patronizing
+wink. Its head slid quietly along the water; puffs of ooze rose from
+below and spread on the surface. Then, in the silence there rose a
+significant sound--a soft, repeated snapping of the tongue:
+
+"Cluck, cluck."
+
+"Aha!" shouted the Maestro triumphantly to his invisible audience. "I
+know where you are, you scamp; right behind the caribao; come out of
+there, _pronto, dale-dale_!"
+
+But his enthusiasm was of short duration. To the commanding
+tongue-click the caribao had stopped dead-still, and a silence heavy
+with defiance met the too-soon exultant cries. An insect in the foliage
+began a creaking call, and then all the creatures of humidity hidden
+there among this fermenting vegetation joined in mocking chorus.
+
+The Maestro felt a vague blush welling up from the innermost recesses of
+his being.
+
+"I'm going to get that kid," he muttered darkly, "if I have to wait
+till--the coming of Common Sense to the Manila office! By gum, he's the
+Struggle for Attendance personified!"
+
+He sat down on the bank and waited. This did not prove interesting. The
+animals of the ditch creaked on; the caribao bubbled up the water with
+his deep content; above, the abandoned kite went through strange
+acrobatics and wailed as if in pain. The Maestro dipped his hand into
+the water; it was lukewarm. "No hope of a freeze-out," he murmured
+pensively.
+
+Behind, the pony began to pull at the reins.
+
+"Yes, little horse, I'm tired, too. Well," he said apologetically, "I
+hate to get energetic, but there are circumstances which----"
+
+The end of his sentence was lost, for he had whisked out the big Colt's
+dissuader of ladrones, that hung on his belt, and was firing. The six
+shots went off like a bunch of fire-crackers, but far from at random,
+for a regular circle boiled up around the dozing caribao. The disturbed
+animal snorted, and again a discreet "cluck-cluck" rose in the sudden,
+astounded silence.
+
+"This," said the Maestro, as he calmly introduced fresh cartridges into
+the chambers of his smoking weapon, "is what might be called an
+application of western solutions to eastern difficulties."
+
+Again he brought his revolver down, but he raised it without shooting
+and replaced it in its holster. From beneath the caribao's rotund belly,
+below the surface, an indistinct form shot out; cleaving the water like
+a polliwog it glided for the bank, and then a black, round head emerged
+at the feet of the Maestro.
+
+"All right, bub; we'll go to school now," said the latter, nodding to
+the dripping figure as it rose before him.
+
+He lifted the sullen brownie and straddled him forward of the saddle,
+then proceeded to mount himself, when the Capture began to display
+marked agitation. He squirmed and twisted, turned his head back and up,
+and finally a grunt escaped him.
+
+"El volador."
+
+"The kite, to be sure; we mustn't forget the kite," acquiesced the
+Maestro graciously. He pulled up the anchoring stick and laboriously,
+beneath the hostilely critical eye of the Capture, he hauled in the line
+till the screeching, resisting flying-machine was brought to earth. Then
+he vaulted into the saddle.
+
+The double weight was a little too much for the pony; so it was at a
+dignified walk that the Maestro, his naked, dripping, muddy and still
+defiant prisoner a-straddle in front of him, the captured kite passed
+over his left arm like a knightly shield, made his triumphant entry into
+the pueblo.
+
+
+_II--Heroism and Reverses_
+
+When Maestro Pablo rode down Rizal-y-Washington Street to the
+schoolhouse with his oozing, dripping prize between his arms, the kite,
+like a knightly escutcheon against his left side, he found that in spite
+of his efforts at preserving a modest, self-deprecatory bearing, his
+spine would stiffen and his nose point upward in the unconscious
+manifestations of an internal feeling that there was in his attitude
+something picturesquely heroic. Not since walking down the California
+campus one morning after the big game won three minutes before blowing
+of the final whistle, by his fifty-yard run-in of a punt, had he been
+in that posture--at once pleasant and difficult--in which one's vital
+concern is to wear an humility sufficiently convincing to obtain from
+friends forgiveness for the crime of being great.
+
+A series of incidents immediately following, however, made the thing
+quite easy.
+
+Upon bringing the new recruit into the schoolhouse, to the perfidiously
+expressed delight of the already incorporated, the Maestro called his
+native assistant to obtain the information necessary to a full
+matriculation. At the first question the inquisition came to a
+dead-lock. The boy did not know his name.
+
+"In Spanish times," the Assistant suggested modestly, "we called them
+"de los Reyes" when the father was of the army, and "de la Cruz" when
+the father was of the church; but now, we can never know _what_ it is."
+
+The Maestro dashed to a solution. "All right," he said cheerily. "I
+caught him; guess I can give him a name. Call him--Isidro de los
+Maestros."
+
+And thus it was that the urchin went down on the school records, and on
+the records of life afterward.
+
+Now, well pleased with himself, the Maestro, as is the wont of men in
+such state, sought for further enjoyment.
+
+"Ask him," he said teasingly, pointing with his chin at the
+newly-baptized but still unregenerate little savage, "why he came out of
+the ditch."
+
+"He says he was afraid that you would steal the kite," answered the
+Assistant, after some linguistic sparring.
+
+"Eh?" ejaculated the surprised Maestro.
+
+And in his mind there framed a picture of himself riding along the road
+with a string between his fingers; and, following in the upper layers of
+air, a buzzing kite; and, down in the dust of the highway, an urchin
+trudging wistfully after the kite, drawn on irresistibly, in spite of
+his better judgment, on and on, horrified but fascinated, up to the
+yawning school-door.
+
+It would have been the better way. "I ought to go and soak my head,"
+murmured the Maestro pensively.
+
+This was check number one, but others came in quick succession.
+
+For the morning after this incident the Maestro did not find Isidro
+among the weird, wild crowd gathered into the annex (a transformed sugar
+storehouse) by the last raid of the Municipal Police.
+
+Neither was Isidro there the next day, nor the next. And it was not till
+a week had passed that the Maestro discovered, with an inward blush of
+shame, that his much-longed-for pupil was living in the little hut
+behind his own house. There would have been nothing shameful in the
+overlooking--there were seventeen other persons sharing the same
+abode--were it not that the nipa front of this human hive had been blown
+away by the last baguio, leaving an unobstructed view of the interior,
+if it might be called such. As it was, the Municipal Police was
+mobilized at the urgent behest of the Maestro. Its "cabo," flanked by
+two privates armed with old German needle-guns, besieged the home, and
+after an interesting game of hide-and-go-seek, Isidro was finally caught
+by one arm and one ear, and ceremoniously marched to school. And there
+the Maestro asked him why he had not been attending.
+
+"No hay pantalones"--there are no pants--Isidro answered, dropping his
+eyes modestly to the ground.
+
+This was check number two, and unmistakably so, for was it not a fact
+that a civil commission, overzealous in its civilizing ardor, had passed
+a law commanding that every one should wear, when in public, "at least
+one garment, preferably trousers?"
+
+Following this, and an unsuccessful plea upon the town tailor who was on
+a three weeks' vacation on account of the death of a fourth cousin, the
+Maestro shut himself up a whole day with Isidro in his little nipa
+house; and behind the closely-shut shutters engaged in some mysterious
+toil. When they emerged again the next morning, Isidro wended his way to
+the school at the end of the Maestro's arm, trousered!
+
+The trousers, it must be said, had a certain cachet of distinction. They
+were made of calico-print, with a design of little black skulls
+sprinkled over a yellow background. Some parts hung flat and limp as if
+upon a scarecrow; others pulsed, like a fire-hose in action, with the
+pressure of flesh compressed beneath, while at other points they bulged
+pneumatically in little foot-balls. The right leg dropped to the ankle;
+the left stopped discouraged, a few inches below the knee. The seams
+looked like the putty mountain chains of the geography class. As the
+Maestro strode along he threw rapid glances at his handiwork, and it was
+plain that the emotions that moved him were somewhat mixed in character.
+His face showed traces of a puzzled diffidence, as that of a man who has
+come in sack-coat to a full-dress function; but after all it was
+satisfaction that predominated, for after this heroic effort he had
+decided that Victory had at last perched upon his banners.
+
+And it really looked so for a time. Isidro stayed at school at least
+during that first day of his trousered life. For when the Maestro, later
+in the forenoon paid a visit to the annex, he found the Assistant in
+charge standing disconcerted before the urchin who, with eyes indignant
+and hair perpendicular upon the top of his head, was evidently holding
+to his side of the argument with his customary energy.
+
+Isidro was trouserless. Sitting rigid upon his bench, holding on with
+both hands as if in fear of being removed, he dangled naked legs to the
+sight of who might look.
+
+"Que barbaridad!" murmured the Assistant in limp dejection.
+
+But Isidro threw at him a look of black hatred. This became a tense,
+silent plea for justice as it moved up for a moment to the Maestro's
+face, and then it settled back upon its first object in frigid
+accusation.
+
+"Where are your trousers, Isidro?" asked the Maestro.
+
+Isidro relaxed his convulsive grasp of the bench with one hand, canted
+himself slightly to one side just long enough to give an instantaneous
+view of the trousers, neatly folded and spread between what he was
+sitting with and what he was sitting on, then swung back with the
+suddenness of a kodak-shutter, seized his seat with new determination,
+and looked eloquent justification at the Maestro.
+
+"Why will you not wear them?" asked the latter.
+
+"He says he will not get them dirty," said the Assistant, interpreting
+the answer.
+
+"Tell him when they are dirty he can go down to the river and wash
+them," said the Maestro.
+
+Isidro pondered over the suggestion for two silent minutes. The prospect
+of a day spent splashing in the lukewarm waters of the Ilog he finally
+put down as not at all detestable, and getting up to his feet:
+
+"I will put them on," he said gravely.
+
+Which he did on the moment, with an absence of hesitation as to which
+was front and which was back, very flattering to the Maestro.
+
+That Isidro persevered during the next week, the Maestro also came to
+know. For now regularly every evening as he smoked and lounged upon his
+long, cane chair, trying to persuade his tired body against all laws of
+physics to give up a little of its heat to a circumambient atmosphere of
+temperature equally enthusiastic; as he watched among the rafters of the
+roof the snakes swallowing the rats, the rats devouring the lizards, the
+lizards snapping up the spiders, the spiders snaring the flies in
+eloquent representation of the life struggle, his studied passiveness
+would be broken by strange sounds from the dilapidated hut at the back
+of his house. A voice, imitative of that of the Third Assistant who
+taught the annex, hurled forth questions, which were immediately
+answered by another voice, curiously like that of Isidro.
+
+Fiercely: "Du yu ssee dde hhett?"
+
+Breathlessly: "Yiss I ssee dde hhett."
+
+Ferociously: "Show me dde hhett."
+
+Eagerly: "Here are dde hhett."
+
+Thunderously: "Gif me dde hhett."
+
+Exultantly: "I gif yu dde hhett."
+
+Then the Maestro would step to the window and look into the hut from
+which came this Socratic dialogue. And on this wall-less platform which
+looked much like a primitive stage, a singular action was unrolling
+itself in the smoky glimmer of a two-cent lamp. The Third Assistant was
+not there at all; but Isidro was the Third Assistant. And the pupil was
+not Isidro, but the witless old man who was one of the many sharers of
+the abode. In the voice of the Third Assistant, Isidro was hurling out
+the tremendous questions; and, as the old gentleman, who represented
+Isidro, opened his mouth only to drule betel-juice, it was Isidro who,
+in Isidro's voice, answered the questions. In his role as Third
+Assistant he stood with legs akimbo before the pupil, a bamboo twig in
+his hand; as Isidro the pupil, he plumped down quickly upon the bench
+before responding. The sole function of the senile old man seemed that
+of representing the pupil while the question was being asked, and
+receiving, in that capacity, a sharp cut across the nose from
+Isidro-the-Third-Assistant's switch, at which he chuckled to himself in
+silent glee and druled ad libitum.
+
+For several nights this performance went on with gradual increase of
+vocabulary in teacher and pupil. But when it had reached the "Do you see
+the apple-tree?" stage, it ceased to advance, marked time for a while,
+and then slowly but steadily began sliding back into primitive
+beginnings. This engendered in the Maestro a suspicion which became
+certainty when Isidro entered the schoolhouse one morning just before
+recess, between two policemen at port arms. A rapid scrutiny of the
+roll-book showed that he had been absent a whole week.
+
+"I was at the river cleaning my trousers," answered Isidro when put face
+to face with this curious fact.
+
+The Maestro suggested that the precious pantaloons which, by the way,
+had been mysteriously embellished by a red stripe down the right leg and
+a green stripe down the left leg, could be cleaned in less than a week,
+and that Saturday and Sunday were days specially set aside in the
+Catechismo of the Americanos for such little family duties.
+
+Isidro understood, and the nightly rehearsals soon reached the stage of:
+
+"How menny hhetts hev yu?"
+
+"I hev _ten_ hhetts."
+
+Then came another arrest of development and another decline, at the end
+of which Isidro again making his appearance flanked by two German
+needle-guns, caused a blush of remorse to suffuse the Maestro by
+explaining with frigid gravity that his mother had given birth to a
+little pickaninny-brother and that, of course, he had had to help.
+
+But significant events in the family did not stop there. After birth,
+death stepped in for its due. Isidro's relatives began to drop off in
+rapid sequence--each demise demanding three days of meditation in
+retirement--till at last the Maestro, who had had the excellent idea of
+keeping upon paper a record of these unfortunate occurrences, was
+looking with stupor upon a list showing that Isidro had lost, within
+three weeks, two aunts, three grandfathers, and five
+grandmothers--which, considering that an actual count proved the house
+of bereavement still able to boast of seventeen occupants, was plainly
+an exaggeration.
+
+Following a long sermon from the Maestro in which he sought to explain
+to Isidro that he must always tell the truth for sundry philosophical
+reasons--a statement which the First Assistant tactfully smoothed to
+something within range of credulity by translating it that one must not
+lie to _Americanos_, because _Americanos_ do not like it--there came a
+period of serenity.
+
+
+_III--The Triumph_
+
+There came to the Maestro days of peace and joy. Isidro was coming to
+school; Isidro was learning English. Isidro was steady, Isidro was
+docile, Isidro was positively so angelic that there was something
+uncanny about the situation. And with Isidro, other little savages were
+being pruned into the school-going stage of civilization. Helped by the
+police, they were pouring in from barrio and hacienda; the attendance
+was going up by leaps and bounds, till at last a circulative report
+showed that Balangilang had passed the odious Cabancalan with its less
+strenuous school-man, and left it in the ruck by a full hundred. The
+Maestro was triumphant; his chest had gained two inches in expansion.
+When he met Isidro at recess, playing cibay, he murmured softly: "You
+little devil; you were Attendance personified, and I've got you now." At
+which Isidro, pausing in the act of throwing a shell with the top of his
+head at another shell on the ground, looked up beneath long lashes in a
+smile absolutely seraphic.
+
+In the evening, the Maestro, his heart sweet with content, stood at the
+window. These were moonlight nights; in the grassy lanes the young girls
+played graceful Spanish games, winding like garlands to a gentle song;
+from the shadows of the huts came the tinkle-tinkle of serenading
+guitars and yearning notes of violins wailing despairing love. And
+Isidro, seated on the bamboo ladder of his house, went through an
+independent performance. He sang "Good-night, Ladies," the last song
+given to the school, sang it in soft falsetto, with languorous drawls,
+and never-ending organ points, over and over again, till it changed
+character gradually, dropping into a wailing minor, an endless croon
+full of obscure melancholy of a race that dies.
+
+"Goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies; goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh
+loidies-ies-ies; goo-oo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies-ies," he
+repeated and repeated, over and over again, till the Maestro's soul
+tumbled down and down abysses of maudlin tenderness, and Isidro's chin
+fell upon his chest in a last drawling, sleepy note. At which he shook
+himself together and began the next exercise, a recitation, all of one
+piece from first to last syllable, in one high, monotonous note, like a
+mechanical doll saying "papa-mama."
+
+"Oh-look-et-de-moon-she-ees-shinin-up-theyre-oh-mudder-she
+look-like-a-lom-in-de-ayre-lost-night-she-was-smalleyre-on-joos
+like-a-bow-boot-now-she-ees-biggerr-on-rrraon-like-an-O."
+
+Then a big gulp of air and again:
+
+"Oh-look-et-de-moon-she-ees-shinin-up-theyre,----" etc.
+
+An hour of this, and he skipped from the lyric to the patriotic, and
+then it was:
+
+
+     "I-loof-dde-name-off-Wash-ing-ton,
+       I-loof-my-coontrrree-tow,
+     I-loof-dde-fleg-dde-dear-owl-fleg,
+       Off-rridd-on-whit-on-bloo-oo-oo!"
+
+
+By this time the Maestro was ready to go to bed, and long in the torpor
+of the tropic night there came to him, above the hum of the mosquitoes
+fighting at the net, the soft, wailing croon of Isidro, back at his
+"Goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies."
+
+These were days of ease and beauty to the Maestro, and he enjoyed them
+the more when a new problem came to give action to his resourceful
+brain.
+
+The thing was this: For three days there had not been one funeral in
+Balangilang.
+
+In other climes, in other towns, this might have been a source of
+congratulation, perhaps, but not in Balangilang. There were rumors of
+cholera in the towns to the north, and the Maestro, as president of the
+Board of Health, was on the watch for it. Five deaths a day, experience
+had taught him, was the healthy average for the town; and this sudden
+cessation of public burials--he could not believe that dying had
+stopped--was something to make him suspicious.
+
+It was over this puzzling situation that he was pondering at the morning
+recess, when his attention was taken from it by a singular scene.
+
+The "batas" of the school were flocking and pushing and jolting at the
+door of the basement which served as stable for the municipal caribao.
+Elbowing his way to the spot, the Maestro found Isidro at the entrance,
+gravely taking up an admission of five shells from those who would
+enter. Business seemed to be brisk; Isidro had already a big bandana
+handkerchief bulging with the receipts which were now overflowing into a
+great tao hat, obligingly loaned him by one of his admirers, as one by
+one, those lucky enough to have the price filed in, feverish curiosity
+upon their faces.
+
+The Maestro thought that it might be well to go in also, which he did
+without paying admission. The disappointed gate-keeper followed him. The
+Maestro found himself before a little pink-and-blue tissue-paper box,
+frilled with paper rosettes.
+
+"What have you in there?" asked the Maestro.
+
+"My brother," answered Isidro sweetly.
+
+He cast his eyes to the ground and watched his big toe drawing vague
+figures in the earth, then appealing to the First Assistant who was
+present by this time, he added in the tone of virtue which _will_ be
+modest:
+
+"Maestro Pablo does not like it when I do not come to school on account
+of a funeral, so I brought him (pointing to the little box) with me."
+
+"Well, I'll be----" was the only comment the Maestro found adequate at
+the moment.
+
+"It is my little pickaninny-brother," went on Isidro, becoming alive to
+the fact that he was a center of interest, "and he died last night of
+the great sickness."
+
+"The great what?" ejaculated the Maestro who had caught a few words.
+
+"The great sickness," explained the Assistant. "That is the name by
+which these ignorant people call the cholera."
+
+
+For the next two hours the Maestro was very busy.
+
+Firstly he gathered the "batas" who had been rich enough to attend
+Isidro's little show and locked them up--with the impresario himself--in
+the little town-jail close by. Then, after a vivid exhortation upon the
+beauties of boiling water and reporting disease, he dismissed the school
+for an indefinite period. After which, impressing the two town
+prisoners, now temporarily out of home, he shouldered Isidro's pretty
+box, tramped to the cemetery and directed the digging of a grave six
+feet deep. When the earth had been scraped back upon the lonely little
+object, he returned to town and transferred the awe-stricken playgoers
+to his own house, where a strenuous performance took place.
+
+Tolio, his boy, built a most tremendous fire outside and set upon it all
+the pots and pans and caldrons and cans of his kitchen arsenal, filled
+with water. When these began to gurgle and steam, the Maestro set
+himself to stripping the horrified bunch in his room; one by one he
+threw the garments out of the window to Tolio who, catching them,
+stuffed them into the receptacles, poking down their bulging protest
+with a big stick. Then the Maestro mixed an awful brew in an old
+oil-can, and taking the brush which was commonly used to sleek up his
+little pony, he dipped it generously into the pungent stuff and began an
+energetic scrubbing of his now absolutely panic-stricken wards. When he
+had done this to his satisfaction and thoroughly to their discontent, he
+let them put on their still steaming garments and they slid out of the
+house, aseptic as hospitals.
+
+Isidro he kept longer. He lingered over him with loving and strenuous
+care, and after he had him externally clean, proceeded to dose him
+internally from a little red bottle. Isidro took everything--the
+terrific scrubbing, the exaggerated dosing, the ruinous treatment of his
+pantaloons--with wonder-eyed serenity.
+
+When all this was finished the Maestro took the urchin into the
+dining-room and, seating him on his best bamboo chair, he courteously
+offered him a fine, dark perfecto.
+
+The next instant he was suffused with the light of a new revelation.
+For, stretching out his hard little claw to receive the gift, the little
+man had shot at him a glance so mild, so wistful, so brown-eyed, filled
+with such mixed admiration, trust, and appeal, that a queer softness had
+risen in the Maestro from somewhere down in the regions of his heel, up
+and up, quietly, like the mercury in the thermometer, till it had flowed
+through his whole body and stood still, its high-water mark a little
+lump in his throat.
+
+"Why, Lord bless us-ones, Isidro," said the Maestro quietly. "We're only
+a child after all; mere baby, my man. And don't we like to go to
+school?"
+
+"Senor Pablo," asked the boy, looking up softly into the Maestro's still
+perspiring visage, "Senor Pablo, is it true that there will be no school
+because of the great sickness?"
+
+"Yes, it is true," answered the Maestro. "No school for a long, long
+time."
+
+Then Isidro's mouth began to twitch queerly, and suddenly throwing
+himself full-length upon the floor, he hurled out from somewhere within
+him a long, tremulous wail.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES MERLE HOPPER
+
+
+James Merle Hopper was born in Paris, France. His father was American,
+his mother French; their son James was born July 23, 1876. In 1887 his
+parents came to America, and settled in California. James Hopper
+attended the University of California, graduating in 1898. He is still
+remembered there as one of the grittiest football players who ever
+played on the 'Varsity team. Then came a course in the law school of
+that university, and admission to the California bar in 1900. All this
+reads like the biography of a lawyer: so did the early life of James
+Russell Lowell, and of Oliver Wendell Holmes: they were all admitted to
+the bar, but they did not become lawyers. James Hopper had done some
+newspaper work for San Francisco papers while he was in law school, and
+the love of writing had taken hold of him. In the meantime he had
+married Miss Mattie E. Leonard, and as literature did not yet provide a
+means of support, he became an instructor in French at the University of
+California.
+
+With the close of the Spanish-American War came the call for thousands
+of Americans to go to the Philippines as schoolmasters. This appealed to
+him, and he spent the years 1902-03 in the work that Kipling thus
+describes in "The White Man's Burden":
+
+
+     To wait in heavy harness
+       On fluttered folk and wild--
+     Your new-caught sullen peoples,
+       Half devil and half child.
+
+
+His experiences here furnished the material for a group of short stories
+dealing picturesquely with the Filipinos in their first contact with
+American civilization. These were published in _McClure's_, and
+afterwards collected in book form under the title _Caybigan_.
+
+In 1903 James Hopper returned to the United States, and for a time was
+on the editorial staff of _McClure's_. Later in collaboration with Fred
+R. Bechdolt he wrote a remarkable book, entitled "_9009_". This is the
+number of a convict in an American prison, and the book exposes the
+system of spying, of treachery, of betrayal, that a convict must
+identify himself with in order to become a "trusty." His next book was a
+college story, _The Freshman_. This was followed by a volume of short
+stories, _What Happened in the Night_. These are stories of child life,
+but intended for older readers; they are very successful in reproducing
+the imaginative world in which children live. In 1915 and 1916 he acted
+as a war correspondent for _Collier's_, first with the American troops
+in Mexico in pursuit of Villa, and later in France. His home is at
+Carmel, California.
+
+
+
+
+THEY WHO BRING DREAMS TO AMERICA
+
+_"No wonder this America of ours is big. We draw the brave ones from
+the old lands, the brave ones whose dreams are like the guiding sign
+that was given to the Israelites of old--a pillar of cloud by day, a
+pillar of fire by night." "The Citizen" is a story of a brave man who
+followed his dream over land and sea, until it brought him to America, a
+fortunate event for him and for us._
+
+
+
+
+THE CITIZEN
+
+BY
+
+JAMES FRANCIS DWYER
+
+
+The President of the United States was speaking. His audience comprised
+two thousand foreign-born men who had just been admitted to citizenship.
+They listened intently, their faces, aglow with the light of a new-born
+patriotism, upturned to the calm, intellectual face of the first citizen
+of the country they now claimed as their own.
+
+Here and there among the newly-made citizens were wives and children.
+The women were proud of their men. They looked at them from time to
+time, their faces showing pride and awe.
+
+One little woman, sitting immediately in front of the President, held
+the hand of a big, muscular man and stroked it softly. The big man was
+looking at the speaker with great blue eyes that were the eyes of a
+dreamer.
+
+The President's words came clear and distinct:
+
+_You were drawn across the ocean by some beckoning finger of hope, by
+some belief, by some vision of a new kind of justice, by some
+expectation of a better kind of life. You dreamed dreams of this
+country, and I hope you brought the dreams with you. A man enriches the
+country to which he brings dreams, and you who have brought them have
+enriched America._
+
+The big man made a curious choking noise and his wife breathed a soft
+"Hush!" The giant was strangely affected.
+
+The President continued:
+
+_No doubt you have been disappointed in some of us, but remember this,
+if we have grown at all poor in the ideal, you brought some of it with
+you. A man does not go out to seek the thing that is not in him. A man
+does not hope for the thing that he does not believe in, and if some of
+us have forgotten what America believed in, you at any rate imported in
+your own hearts a renewal of the belief. Each of you, I am sure, brought
+a dream, a glorious, shining dream, a dream worth more than gold or
+silver, and that is the reason that I, for one, make you welcome._
+
+The big man's eyes were fixed. His wife shook him gently, but he did not
+heed her. He was looking through the presidential rostrum, through the
+big buildings behind it, looking out over leagues of space to a
+snow-swept village that huddled on an island in the Beresina, the
+swift-flowing tributary of the mighty Dnieper, an island that looked
+like a black bone stuck tight in the maw of the stream.
+
+It was in the little village on the Beresina that the Dream came to Ivan
+Berloff, Big Ivan of the Bridge.
+
+The Dream came in the spring. All great dreams come in the spring, and
+the Spring Maiden who brought Big Ivan's Dream was more than ordinarily
+beautiful. She swept up the Beresina, trailing wondrous draperies of
+vivid green. Her feet touched the snow-hardened ground, and armies of
+little white and blue flowers sprang up in her footsteps. Soft breezes
+escorted her, velvety breezes that carried the aromas of the far-off
+places from which they came, places far to the southward, and more
+distant towns beyond the Black Sea whose people were not under the sway
+of the Great Czar.
+
+The father of Big Ivan, who had fought under Prince Menshikov at Alma
+fifty-five years before, hobbled out to see the sunbeams eat up the snow
+hummocks that hid in the shady places, and he told his son it was the
+most wonderful spring he had ever seen.
+
+"The little breezes are hot and sweet," he said, sniffing hungrily with
+his face turned toward the south. "I know them, Ivan! I know them! They
+have the spice odor that I sniffed on the winds that came to us when we
+lay in the trenches at Balaklava. Praise God for the warmth!"
+
+And that day the Dream came to Big Ivan as he plowed. It was a wonder
+dream. It sprang into his brain as he walked behind the plow, and for a
+few minutes he quivered as the big bridge quivers when the Beresina
+sends her ice squadrons to hammer the arches. It made his heart pound
+mightily, and his lips and throat became very dry.
+
+Big Ivan stopped at the end of the furrow and tried to discover what had
+brought the Dream. Where had it come from? Why had it clutched him so
+suddenly? Was he the only man in the village to whom it had come?
+
+Like his father, he sniffed the sweet-smelling breezes. He thrust his
+great hands into the sunbeams. He reached down and plucked one of a
+bunch of white flowers that had sprung up overnight. The Dream was born
+of the breezes and the sunshine and the spring flowers. It came from
+them and it had sprung into his mind because he was young and strong. He
+knew! It couldn't come to his father or Donkov, the tailor, or Poborino,
+the smith. They were old and weak, and Ivan's dream was one that called
+for youth and strength.
+
+"Ay, for youth and strength," he muttered as he gripped the plow. "And I
+have it!"
+
+That evening Big Ivan of the Bridge spoke to his wife, Anna, a little
+woman, who had a sweet face and a wealth of fair hair.
+
+"Wife, we are going away from here," he said.
+
+"Where are we going, Ivan?" she asked.
+
+"Where do you think, Anna?" he said, looking down at her as she stood by
+his side.
+
+"To Bobruisk," she murmured.
+
+"No."
+
+"Farther?"
+
+"Ay, a long way farther."
+
+Fear sprang into her soft eyes. Bobruisk was eighty-nine versts away,
+yet Ivan said they were going farther.
+
+"We--we are not going to Minsk?" she cried.
+
+"Aye, and beyond Minsk!"
+
+"Ivan, tell me!" she gasped. "Tell me where we are going!"
+
+"We are going to America."
+
+"_To America?_"
+
+"Yes, to America!"
+
+Big Ivan of the Bridge lifted up his voice when he cried out the words
+"To America," and then a sudden fear sprang upon him as those words
+dashed through the little window out into the darkness of the village
+street. Was he mad? America was 8,000 versts away! It was far across the
+ocean, a place that was only a name to him, a place where he knew no
+one. He wondered in the strange little silence that followed his words
+if the crippled son of Poborino, the smith, had heard him. The cripple
+would jeer at him if the night wind had carried the words to his ear.
+
+Anna remained staring at her big husband for a few minutes, then she sat
+down quietly at his side. There was a strange look in his big blue eyes,
+the look of a man to whom has come a vision, the look which came into
+the eyes of those shepherds of Judea long, long ago.
+
+"What is it, Ivan?" she murmured softly, patting his big hand. "Tell
+me."
+
+And Big Ivan of the Bridge, slow of tongue, told of the Dream. To no one
+else would he have told it. Anna understood. She had a way of patting
+his hands and saying soft things when his tongue could not find words to
+express his thoughts.
+
+Ivan told how the Dream had come to him as he plowed. He told her how it
+had sprung upon him, a wonderful dream born of the soft breezes, of the
+sunshine, of the sweet smell of the upturned sod and of his own
+strength. "It wouldn't come to weak men," he said, baring an arm that
+showed great snaky muscles rippling beneath the clear skin. "It is a
+dream that comes only to those who are strong and those who want--who
+want something that they haven't got." Then in a lower voice he said:
+"What is it that we want, Anna?"
+
+The little wife looked out into the darkness with fear-filled eyes.
+There were spies even there in that little village on the Beresina, and
+it was dangerous to say words that might be construed into a reflection
+on the Government. But she answered Ivan. She stooped and whispered one
+word into his ear, and he slapped his thigh with his big hand.
+
+"Ay," he cried. "That is what we want! You and I and millions like us
+want it, and over there, Anna, over there we will get it. It is the
+country where a muzhik is as good as a prince of the blood!"
+
+Anna stood up, took a small earthenware jar from a side shelf, dusted it
+carefully and placed it upon the mantel. From a knotted cloth about her
+neck she took a ruble and dropped the coin into the jar. Big Ivan looked
+at her curiously.
+
+"It is to make legs for your Dream," she explained. "It is many versts
+to America, and one rides on rubles."
+
+"You are a good wife," he said. "I was afraid that you might laugh at
+me."
+
+"It is a great dream," she murmured. "Come, we will go to sleep."
+
+The Dream maddened Ivan during the days that followed. It pounded within
+his brain as he followed the plow. It bred a discontent that made him
+hate the little village, the swift-flowing Beresina and the gray
+stretches that ran toward Mogilev. He wanted to be moving, but Anna had
+said that one rode on rubles, and rubles were hard to find.
+
+And in some mysterious way the village became aware of the secret.
+Donkov, the tailor, discovered it. Donkov lived in one-half of the
+cottage occupied by Ivan and Anna, and Donkov had long ears. The tailor
+spread the news, and Poborino, the smith, and Yanansk, the baker, would
+jeer at Ivan as he passed.
+
+"When are you going to America?" they would ask.
+
+"Soon," Ivan would answer.
+
+"Take us with you!" they would cry in chorus.
+
+"It is no place for cowards," Ivan would answer. "It is a long way, and
+only brave men can make the journey."
+
+"Are you brave?" the baker screamed one day as he went by.
+
+"I am brave enough to want liberty!" cried Ivan angrily. "I am brave
+enough to want----"
+
+"Be careful! Be careful!" interrupted the smith. "A long tongue has
+given many a man a train journey that he never expected."
+
+That night Ivan and Anna counted the rubles in the earthenware pot. The
+giant looked down at his wife with a gloomy face, but she smiled and
+patted his hand.
+
+"It is slow work," he said.
+
+"We must be patient," she answered. "You have the Dream."
+
+"Ay," he said. "I have the Dream."
+
+Through the hot, languorous summertime the Dream grew within the brain
+of Big Ivan. He saw visions in the smoky haze that hung above the
+Beresina. At times he would stand, hoe in hand, and look toward the
+west, the wonderful west into which the sun slipped down each evening
+like a coin dropped from the fingers of the dying day.
+
+Autumn came, and the fretful whining winds that came down from the north
+chilled the Dream. The winds whispered of the coming of the Snow King,
+and the river grumbled as it listened. Big Ivan kept out of the way of
+Poborino, the smith, and Yanansk, the baker. The Dream was still with
+him, but autumn is a bad time for dreams.
+
+Winter came, and the Dream weakened. It was only the earthenware pot
+that kept it alive, the pot into which the industrious Anna put every
+coin that could be spared. Often Big Ivan would stare at the pot as he
+sat beside the stove. The pot was the cord which kept the Dream alive.
+
+"You are a good woman, Anna," Ivan would say again and again. "It was
+you who thought of saving the rubles."
+
+"But it was you who dreamed," she would answer. "Wait for the spring,
+husband mine. Wait."
+
+It was strange how the spring came to the Beresina that year. It sprang
+upon the flanks of winter before the Ice King had given the order to
+retreat into the fastnesses of the north. It swept up the river escorted
+by a million little breezes, and housewives opened their windows and
+peered out with surprise upon their faces. A wonderful guest had come to
+them and found them unprepared.
+
+Big Ivan of the Bridge was fixing a fence in the meadow on the morning
+the Spring Maiden reached the village. For a little while he was not
+aware of her arrival. His mind was upon his work, but suddenly he
+discovered that he was hot, and he took off his overcoat. He turned to
+hang the coat upon a bush, then he sniffed the air, and a puzzled look
+came upon his face. He sniffed again, hurriedly, hungrily. He drew in
+great breaths of it, and his eyes shone with a strange light. It was
+wonderful air. It brought life to the Dream. It rose up within him, ten
+times more lusty than on the day it was born, and his limbs trembled as
+he drew in the hot, scented breezes that breed the _Wanderlust_ and
+shorten the long trails of the world.
+
+Big Ivan clutched his coat and ran to the little cottage. He burst
+through the door, startling Anna, who was busy with her housework.
+
+"The Spring!" he cried. "_The Spring!_"
+
+He took her arm and dragged her to the door. Standing together they
+sniffed the sweet breezes. In silence they listened to the song of the
+river. The Beresina had changed from a whining, fretful tune into a
+lilting, sweet song that would set the legs of lovers dancing. Anna
+pointed to a green bud on a bush beside the door.
+
+"It came this minute," she murmured.
+
+"Yes," said Ivan. "The little fairies brought it there to show us that
+spring has come to stay."
+
+Together they turned and walked to the mantel. Big Ivan took up the
+earthenware pot, carried it to the table, and spilled its contents upon
+the well-scrubbed boards. He counted while Anna stood beside him, her
+fingers clutching his coarse blouse. It was a slow business, because
+Ivan's big blunt fingers were not used to such work, but it was over at
+last. He stacked the coins into neat piles, then he straightened himself
+and turned to the woman at his side.
+
+"It is enough," he said quietly. "We will go at once. If it was not
+enough, we would have to go because the Dream is upon me and I hate this
+place."
+
+"As you say," murmured Anna. "The wife of Littin, the butcher, will buy
+our chairs and our bed. I spoke to her yesterday."
+
+Poborino, the smith; his crippled son; Yanansk, the baker; Dankov, the
+tailor, and a score of others were out upon the village street on the
+morning that Big Ivan and Anna set out. They were inclined to jeer at
+Ivan, but something upon the face of the giant made them afraid. Hand in
+hand the big man and his wife walked down the street, their faces turned
+toward Bobruisk, Ivan balancing upon his head a heavy trunk that no
+other man in the village could have lifted.
+
+At the end of the street a stripling with bright eyes and yellow curls
+clutched the hand of Ivan and looked into his face.
+
+"I know what is sending you," he cried.
+
+"Ay, _you_ know," said Ivan, looking into the eyes of the other.
+
+"It came to me yesterday," murmured the stripling. "I got it from the
+breezes. They are free, so are the birds and the little clouds and the
+river. I wish I could go."
+
+"Keep your dream," said Ivan softly. "Nurse it, for it is the dream of a
+man."
+
+Anna, who was crying softly, touched the blouse of the boy. "At the back
+of our cottage, near the bush that bears the red berries, a pot is
+buried," she said. "Dig it up and take it home with you and when you
+have a kopeck drop it in. It is a good pot."
+
+The stripling understood. He stooped and kissed the hand of Anna, and
+Big Ivan patted him upon the back. They were brother dreamers and they
+understood each other.
+
+Boris Lugan has sung the song of the versts that eat up one's courage as
+well as the leather of one's shoes.
+
+
+     "Versts! Versts! Scores and scores of them!
+     Versts! Versts! A million or more of them!
+     Dust! Dust! And the devils who play in it,
+     Blinding us fools who forever must stay in it."
+
+
+Big Ivan and Anna faced the long versts to Bobruisk, but they were not
+afraid of the dust devils. They had the Dream. It made their hearts
+light and took the weary feeling from their feet. They were on their
+way. America was a long, long journey, but they had started, and every
+verst they covered lessened the number that lay between them and the
+Promised Land.
+
+"I am glad the boy spoke to us," said Anna.
+
+"And I am glad," said Ivan. "Some day he will come and eat with us in
+America."
+
+They came to Bobruisk. Holding hands, they walked into it late one
+afternoon. They were eighty-nine versts from the little village on the
+Beresina, but they were not afraid. The Dream spoke to Ivan, and his big
+hand held the hand of Anna. The railway ran through Bobruisk, and that
+evening they stood and looked at the shining rails that went out in the
+moonlight like silver tongs reaching out for a low-hanging star.
+
+And they came face to face with the Terror that evening, the Terror that
+had helped the spring breezes and the sunshine to plant the Dream in the
+brain of Big Ivan.
+
+They were walking down a dark side street when they saw a score of men
+and women creep from the door of a squat, unpainted building. The little
+group remained on the sidewalk for a minute as if uncertain about the
+way they should go, then from the corner of the street came a cry of
+"Police!" and the twenty pedestrians ran in different directions.
+
+It was no false alarm. Mounted police charged down the dark thoroughfare
+swinging their swords as they rode at the scurrying men and women who
+raced for shelter. Big Ivan dragged Anna into a doorway, and toward
+their hiding place ran a young boy who, like themselves, had no
+connection with the group and who merely desired to get out of harm's
+way till the storm was over.
+
+The boy was not quick enough to escape the charge. A trooper pursued
+him, overtook him before he reached the sidewalk, and knocked him down
+with a quick stroke given with the flat of his blade. His horse struck
+the boy with one of his hoofs as the lad stumbled on his face.
+
+Big Ivan growled like an angry bear, and sprang from his hiding place.
+The trooper's horse had carried him on to the sidewalk, and Ivan seized
+the bridle and flung the animal on its haunches. The policeman leaned
+forward to strike at the giant, but Ivan of the Bridge gripped the left
+leg of the horseman and tore him from the saddle.
+
+The horse galloped off, leaving its rider lying beside the moaning boy
+who was unlucky enough to be in a street where a score of students were
+holding a meeting.
+
+Anna dragged Ivan back into the passageway. More police were charging
+down the street, and their position was a dangerous one.
+
+"Ivan!" she cried, "Ivan! Remember the Dream! America, Ivan! _America!_
+Come this way! Quick!"
+
+With strong hands she dragged him down the passage. It opened into a
+narrow lane, and, holding each other's hands, they hurried toward the
+place where they had taken lodgings. From far off came screams and
+hoarse orders, curses and the sound of galloping hoofs. The Terror was
+abroad.
+
+Big Ivan spoke softly as they entered the little room they had taken.
+"He had a face like the boy to whom you gave the lucky pot," he said.
+"Did you notice it in the moonlight when the trooper struck him down?"
+
+"Yes," she answered. "I saw."
+
+They left Bobruisk next morning. They rode away on a great, puffing,
+snorting train that terrified Anna. The engineer turned a stopcock as
+they were passing the engine, and Anna screamed while Ivan nearly
+dropped the big trunk. The engineer grinned, but the giant looked up at
+him and the grin faded. Ivan of the Bridge was startled by the rush of
+hot steam, but he was afraid of no man.
+
+The train went roaring by little villages and great pasture stretches.
+The real journey had begun. They began to love the powerful engine. It
+was eating up the versts at a tremendous rate. They looked at each other
+from time to time and smiled like two children.
+
+They came to Minsk, the biggest town they had ever seen. They looked out
+from the car windows at the miles of wooden buildings, at the big church
+of St. Catharine, and the woolen mills. Minsk would have frightened them
+if they hadn't had the Dream. The farther they went from the little
+village on the Beresina the more courage the Dream gave to them.
+
+On and on went the train, the wheels singing the song of the road.
+Fellow travelers asked them where they were going. "To America," Ivan
+would answer.
+
+"To America?" they would cry. "May the little saints guide you. It is a
+long way, and you will be lonely."
+
+"No, we shall not be lonely," Ivan would say.
+
+"Ha! you are going with friends?"
+
+"No, we have no friends, but we have something that keeps us from being
+lonely." And when Ivan would make that reply Anna would pat his hand and
+the questioner would wonder if it was a charm or a holy relic that the
+bright-eyed couple possessed.
+
+They ran through Vilna, on through flat stretches of Courland to Libau,
+where they saw the sea. They sat and stared at it for a whole day,
+talking little but watching it with wide, wondering eyes. And they
+stared at the great ships that came rocking in from distant ports, their
+sides gray with the salt from the big combers which they had battled
+with.
+
+No wonder this America of ours is big. We draw the brave ones from the
+old lands, the brave ones whose dreams are like the guiding sign that
+was given to the Israelites of old--a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar
+of fire by night.
+
+The harbormaster spoke to Ivan and Anna as they watched the restless
+waters.
+
+"Where are you going, children?"
+
+"To America," answered Ivan.
+
+"A long way. Three ships bound for America went down last month."
+
+"Our ship will not sink," said Ivan.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because I know it will not."
+
+The harbor master looked at the strange blue eyes of the giant, and
+spoke softly. "You have the eyes of a man who sees things," he said.
+"There was a Norwegian sailor in the _White Queen_, who had eyes like
+yours, and he could see death."
+
+"I see life!" said Ivan boldly. "A free life----"
+
+"Hush!" said the harbor master. "Do not speak so loud." He walked
+swiftly away, but he dropped a ruble into Anna's hand as he passed her
+by. "For luck," he murmured. "May the little saints look after you on
+the big waters."
+
+They boarded the ship, and the Dream gave them a courage that surprised
+them. There were others going aboard, and Ivan and Anna felt that those
+others were also persons who possessed dreams. She saw the dreams in
+their eyes. There were Slavs, Poles, Letts, Jews, and Livonians, all
+bound for the land where dreams come true. They were a little
+afraid--not two per cent of them had ever seen a ship before--yet their
+dreams gave them courage.
+
+The emigrant ship was dragged from her pier by a grunting tug and went
+floundering down the Baltic Sea. Night came down, and the devils who,
+according to the Esthonian fishermen, live in the bottom of the Baltic,
+got their shoulders under the stern of the ship and tried to stand her
+on her head. They whipped up white combers that sprang on her flanks and
+tried to crush her, and the wind played a devil's lament in her rigging.
+Anna lay sick in the stuffy women's quarters, and Ivan could not get
+near her. But he sent her messages. He told her not to mind the sea
+devils, to think of the Dream, the Great Dream that would become real in
+the land to which they were bound. Ivan of the Bridge grew to full
+stature on that first night out from Libau. The battered old craft that
+carried him slouched before the waves that swept over her decks, but he
+was not afraid. Down among the million and one smells of the steerage he
+induced a thin-faced Livonian to play upon a mouth organ, and Big Ivan
+sang Paleer's "Song of Freedom" in a voice that drowned the creaking of
+the old vessel's timbers, and made the seasick ones forget their
+sickness. They sat up in their berths and joined in the chorus, their
+eyes shining brightly in the half gloom:
+
+
+     "Freedom for serf and for slave,
+     Freedom for all men who crave
+     Their right to be free
+     And who hate to bend knee
+     But to Him who this right to them gave."
+
+
+It was well that these emigrants had dreams. They wanted them. The sea
+devils chased the lumbering steamer. They hung to her bows and pulled
+her for'ard deck under emerald-green rollers. They clung to her stern
+and hoisted her nose till Big Ivan thought that he could touch the door
+of heaven by standing on her blunt snout. Miserable, cold, ill, and
+sleepless, the emigrants crouched in their quarters, and to them Ivan
+and the thin-faced Livonian sang the "Song of Freedom."
+
+The emigrant ship pounded through the Cattegat, swung southward through
+the Skagerrack and the bleak North Sea. But the storm pursued her. The
+big waves snarled and bit at her, and the captain and the chief officer
+consulted with each other. They decided to run into the Thames, and the
+harried steamer nosed her way in and anchored off Gravesend.
+
+An examination was made, and the agents decided to transship the
+emigrants. They were taken to London and thence by train to Liverpool,
+and Ivan and Anna sat again side by side, holding hands and smiling at
+each other as the third-class emigrant train from Euston raced down
+through the green Midland counties to grimy Liverpool.
+
+"You are not afraid?" Ivan would say to her each time she looked at him.
+
+"It is a long way, but the Dream has given me much courage," she said.
+
+"To-day I spoke to a Lett whose brother works in New York City," said
+the giant. "Do you know how much money he earns each day?"
+
+"How much?" she questioned.
+
+"Three rubles, and he calls the policemen by their first names."
+
+"You will earn five rubles, my Ivan," she murmured. "There is no one as
+strong as you."
+
+Once again they were herded into the bowels of a big ship that steamed
+away through the fog banks of the Mersey out into the Irish Sea. There
+were more dreamers now, nine hundred of them, and Anna and Ivan were
+more comfortable. And these new emigrants, English, Irish, Scotch,
+French, and German, knew much concerning America. Ivan was certain that
+he would earn at least three rubles a day. He was very strong.
+
+On the deck he defeated all comers in a tug of war, and the captain of
+the ship came up to him and felt his muscles.
+
+"The country that lets men like you get away from it is run badly," he
+said. "Why did you leave it?"
+
+The interpreter translated what the captain said, and through the
+interpreter Ivan answered.
+
+"I had a Dream," he said, "a Dream of freedom."
+
+"Good," cried the captain. "Why should a man with muscles like yours
+have his face ground into the dust?"
+
+The soul of Big Ivan grew during those days. He felt himself a man, a
+man who was born upright to speak his thoughts without fear.
+
+The ship rolled into Queenstown one bright morning, and Ivan and his
+nine hundred steerage companions crowded the for'ard deck. A boy in a
+rowboat threw a line to the deck, and after it had been fastened to a
+stanchion he came up hand over hand. The emigrants watched him
+curiously. An old woman sitting in the boat pulled off her shoes, sat in
+a loop of the rope, and lifted her hand as a signal to her son on deck.
+
+"Hey, fellers," said the boy, "help me pull me muvver up. She wants to
+sell a few dozen apples, an' they won't let her up the gangway!"
+
+Big Ivan didn't understand the words, but he guessed what the boy
+wanted. He made one of a half dozen who gripped the rope and started to
+pull the ancient apple woman to the deck.
+
+They had her halfway up the side when an undersized third officer
+discovered what they were doing. He called to a steward, and the steward
+sprang to obey.
+
+"Turn a hose on her!" cried the officer. "Turn a hose on the old woman!"
+
+The steward rushed for the hose. He ran with it to the side of the ship
+with the intention of squirting on the old woman, who was swinging in
+midair and exhorting the six men who were dragging her to the deck.
+
+"Pull!" she cried. "Sure, I'll give every one of ye a rosy red apple an'
+me blessing with it."
+
+The steward aimed the muzzle of the hose, and Big Ivan of the Bridge let
+go of the rope and sprang at him. The fist of the great Russian went out
+like a battering ram; it struck the steward between the eyes, and he
+dropped upon the deck. He lay like one dead, the muzzle of the hose
+wriggling from his limp hands.
+
+The third officer and the interpreter rushed at Big Ivan, who stood
+erect, his hands clenched.
+
+"Ask the big swine why he did it," roared the officer.
+
+"Because he is a coward!" cried Ivan. "They wouldn't do that in
+America!"
+
+"What does the big brute know about America?" cried the officer.
+
+"Tell him I have dreamed of it," shouted Ivan. "Tell him it is in my
+Dream. Tell him I will kill him if he turns the water on this old
+woman."
+
+The apple seller was on deck then, and with the wisdom of the Celt she
+understood. She put her lean hand upon the great head of the Russian and
+blessed him in Gaelic. Ivan bowed before her, then as she offered him a
+rosy apple he led her toward Anna, a great Viking leading a withered old
+woman who walked with the grace of a duchess.
+
+"Please don't touch him," she cried, turning to the officer. "We have
+been waiting for your ship for six hours, and we have only five dozen
+apples to sell. It's a great man he is. Sure he's as big as Finn
+MacCool."
+
+Some one pulled the steward behind a ventilator and revived him by
+squirting him with water from the hose which he had tried to turn upon
+the old woman. The third officer slipped quietly away.
+
+The Atlantic was kind to the ship that carried Ivan and Anna. Through
+sunny days they sat up on deck and watched the horizon. They wanted to
+be among those who would get the first glimpse of the wonderland.
+
+They saw it on a morning with sunshine and soft wind. Standing together
+in the bow, they looked at the smear upon the horizon, and their eyes
+filled with tears. They forgot the long road to Bobruisk, the rocking
+journey to Libau, the mad buckjumping boat in whose timbers the sea
+devils of the Baltic had bored holes. Everything unpleasant was
+forgotten, because the Dream filled them with a great happiness.
+
+The inspectors at Ellis Island were interested in Ivan. They walked
+around him and prodded his muscles, and he smiled down upon them
+good-naturedly.
+
+"A fine animal," said one. "Gee, he's a new white hope! Ask him can he
+fight?"
+
+An interpreter put the question, and Ivan nodded. "I have fought," he
+said.
+
+"Gee!" cried the inspector. "Ask him was it for purses or what?"
+
+"For freedom," answered Ivan. "For freedom to stretch my legs and
+straighten my neck!"
+
+Ivan and Anna left the Government ferryboat at the Battery. They started
+to walk uptown, making for the East Side, Ivan carrying the big trunk
+that no other man could lift.
+
+It was a wonderful morning. The city was bathed in warm sunshine, and
+the well-dressed men and women who crowded the sidewalks made the two
+immigrants think that it was a festival day. Ivan and Anna stared at
+each other in amazement. They had never seen such dresses as those worn
+by the smiling women who passed them by; they had never seen such
+well-groomed men.
+
+"It is a feast day for certain," said Anna.
+
+"They are dressed like princes and princesses," murmured Ivan. "There
+are no poor here, Anna. None."
+
+Like two simple children, they walked along the streets of the City of
+Wonder. What a contrast it was to the gray, stupid towns where the
+Terror waited to spring upon the cowed people. In Bobruisk, Minsk,
+Vilna, and Libau the people were sullen and afraid. They walked in
+dread, but in the City of Wonder beside the glorious Hudson every person
+seemed happy and contented.
+
+They lost their way, but they walked on, looking at the wonderful shop
+windows, the roaring elevated trains, and the huge skyscrapers. Hours
+afterward they found themselves in Fifth Avenue near Thirty-third
+Street, and there the miracle happened to the two Russian immigrants. It
+was a big miracle inasmuch as it proved the Dream a truth, a great
+truth.
+
+Ivan and Anna attempted to cross the avenue, but they became confused in
+the snarl of traffic. They dodged backward and forward as the stream of
+automobiles swept by them. Anna screamed, and, in response to her
+scream, a traffic policeman, resplendent in a new uniform, rushed to her
+side. He took the arm of Anna and flung up a commanding hand. The
+charging autos halted. For five blocks north and south they jammed on
+the brakes when the unexpected interruption occurred, and Big Ivan
+gasped.
+
+"Don't be flurried, little woman," said the cop. "Sure I can tame 'em by
+liftin' me hand."
+
+Anna didn't understand what he said, but she knew it was something nice
+by the manner in which his Irish eyes smiled down upon her. And in front
+of the waiting automobiles he led her with the same care that he would
+give to a duchess, while Ivan, carrying the big trunk, followed them,
+wondering much. Ivan's mind went back to Bobruisk on the night the
+Terror was abroad.
+
+The policeman led Anna to the sidewalk, patted Ivan good-naturedly upon
+the shoulder, and then with a sharp whistle unloosed the waiting stream
+of cars that had been held up so that two Russian immigrants could cross
+the avenue.
+
+Big Ivan of the Bridge took the trunk from his head and put it on the
+ground. He reached out his arms and folded Anna in a great embrace. His
+eyes were wet.
+
+"The Dream is true!" he cried. "Did you see, Anna? We are as good as
+they! This is the land where a muzhik is as good as a prince of the
+blood!"
+
+
+The President was nearing the close of his address. Anna shook Ivan, and
+Ivan came out of the trance which the President's words had brought upon
+him. He sat up and listened intently:
+
+_We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in
+the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's
+evening. Some of us let those great dreams die, but others nourish and
+protect them, nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the
+sunshine and light which come always to those who sincerely hope that
+their dreams will come true._
+
+The President finished. For a moment he stood looking down at the faces
+turned up to him, and Big Ivan of the Bridge thought that the President
+smiled at him. Ivan seized Anna's hand and held it tight.
+
+"He knew of my Dream!" he cried. "He knew of it. Did you hear what he
+said about the dreams of a spring day?"
+
+"Of course he knew," said Anna. "He is the wisest man in America, where
+there are many wise men. Ivan, you are a citizen now."
+
+"And you are a citizen, Anna."
+
+The band started to play "My Country, 'tis of Thee," and Ivan and Anna
+got to their feet. Standing side by side, holding hands, they joined in
+with the others who had found after long days of journeying the blessed
+land where dreams come true.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES FRANCIS DWYER
+
+
+Mr. Dwyer is an American by adoption, an Australian by birth. He was
+born in Camden, New South Wales, April 22, 1874; and received his
+education in the public schools there. He entered newspaper work, and in
+the capacity of a correspondent for Australian papers traveled
+extensively in Australia and in the South Seas, from 1898 to 1906. In
+1906 he made a tour through South Africa, and at the conclusion of this
+went to England. He came to America in 1907, and since that time has
+made his home in New York City. He has been a frequent contributor to
+_Collier's_, _Harper's Weekly_, _The American Magazine_, _The Ladies'
+Home Journal_, and other periodicals. He has published five books,
+nearly all dealing with the strange life of the far East. His first
+book, _The White Waterfall_, published in 1912, has its scene in the
+South Sea Islands. A California scientist, interested in ancient
+Polynesian skulls, goes to the South Seas to investigate his favorite
+subject, accompanied by his two daughters. The amazing adventures they
+meet there make a very interesting story. _The Spotted Panther_ is a
+story of adventure in Borneo. Three white men go there in search of a
+wonderful sword of great antiquity which is in the possession of a tribe
+of Dyaks, the head-hunters of Borneo. There are some vivid descriptions
+in the story and plenty of thrills. _The Breath of the Jungle_ is a
+collection of short stories, the scenes laid in the Malay Peninsula and
+nearby islands. They describe the strange life of these regions, and
+show how it reacts in various ways upon white men who live there. _The
+Green Half Moon_ is a story of mystery and diplomatic intrigue, the
+scene partly in the Orient, partly in London.
+
+In his later work Mr. Dwyer has taken up American themes. _The Bust of
+Lincoln_, really a short story, deals with a young man whose proudest
+possession is a bust of Lincoln that had belonged to his grandfather;
+the story shows how it influences his life. The story _The Citizen_ had
+an interesting origin. On May 10, 1915, just after the sinking of the
+_Lusitania_, President Wilson went to Philadelphia to address a meeting
+of an unusual kind. Four thousand foreign-born men, who had just become
+naturalized citizens of our country, were to be welcomed to citizenship
+by the Mayor of the city, a member of the Cabinet, and the President of
+the United States. The meeting was held in Convention Hall; more than
+fifteen thousand people were present, and the event, occurring as it did
+at a time when every one realized that the loyalty of our people was
+likely to be soon put to the test, was one of historic importance. Moved
+by the significance of this event, Mr. Dwyer translated it into
+literature. His story, "The Citizen," was published in _Collier's_ in
+November, 1915.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF AMERICAN SHORT STORIES CLASSIFIED BY LOCALITY
+
+
+I. THE EAST
+
+
+NEW ENGLAND
+
+_A New England Nun_; _A Humble Romance_, Mary Wilkins-Freeman.
+_Meadow-Grass_; _The Country Road_, Alice Brown.
+_A White Heron_; _The Queen's Twin_, Sarah Orne Jewett.
+_Pratt Portraits_; _Later Pratt Portraits_, Anna Fuller.
+_The Village Watch Tower_, Kate Douglas Wiggin.
+_The Old Home House_, Joseph C. Lincoln.
+_Hillsboro People_, Dorothy Canfield.
+_Out of Gloucester_; _The Crested Seas_, James B. Connolly.
+_Under the Crust_, Thomas Nelson Page.
+_Dumb Foxglove_, Annie T. Slosson.
+_Huckleberries Gathered From New England Hills_, Rose Terry Cooke.
+
+
+NEW YORK CITY
+
+_The Four Million_; _The Voice of the City_; _The Trimmed Lamp_,
+   O. Henry.
+_Van Bibber and Others_, Richard Harding Davis.
+_Doctor Rast_, James Oppenheim.
+_Toomey and Others_, Robert Shackleton.
+_Vignettes of Manhattan_, Brander Matthews.
+_The Imported Bridegroom_, Abraham Cahan.
+_Little Citizens_; _Little Aliens_, Myra Kelly.
+_The Soul of the Street_, Norman Duncan.
+_Wall Street Stories_, Edwin Le Fevre.
+_The Optimist_, Susan Faber.
+_Every Soul Hath Its Song_, Fannie Hurst.
+
+
+NEW JERSEY
+
+_Hulgate of Mogador_, Sewell Ford.
+_Edgewater People_, Mary Wilkins-Freeman.
+
+
+PENNSYLVANIA
+
+_Old Chester Tales_; _Doctor Lavender's People_, Margaret Deland.
+_Betrothal of Elypholate_, Helen R. Martin.
+_The Passing of Thomas_, Thomas A. Janvier.
+_The Standard Bearers_, Katherine Mayo.
+_Six Stars_, Nelson Lloyd.
+
+
+II. THE SOUTH
+
+
+ALABAMA
+
+_Alabama Sketches_, Samuel Minturn Peck.
+_Polished Ebony_, Octavius R. Cohen.
+
+
+ARKANSAS
+
+_Otto the Knight_; _Knitters in the Sun_, Octave Thanet.
+
+
+FLORIDA
+
+_Rodman the Keeper_, Constance F. Woolson.
+
+
+GEORGIA
+
+_Georgia Scenes_, A. B. Longstreet.
+_Free Joe_; _Tales of the Home-Folks_, Joel Chandler Harris.
+_Stories of the Cherokee Hills_, Maurice Thompson.
+_Northern Georgia Sketches_, Will N. Harben.
+_His Defence_, Harry Stilwell Edwards.
+_Mr. Absalom Billingslea_; _Mr. Billy Downes_, Richard Malcolm Johnston.
+
+
+KENTUCKY
+
+_Flute and Violin_; _A Kentucky Cardinal_, James Lane Allen.
+_In Happy Valley_, John Fox, Jr.
+_Back Home_; _Judge Priest and his People_, Irvin S. Cobb.
+_Land of Long Ago_; _Aunt Jane of Kentucky_, Eliza Calvert Hall.
+
+
+LOUISIANA
+
+_Holly and Pizen_; _Aunt Amity's Silver Wedding_, Ruth McEnery Stuart.
+_Balcony Stories_; _Tales of Time and Place_, Grace King.
+_Old Creole Days_; _Strange True Stories of Louisiana_, George W. Cable.
+_Bayou Folks_, Kate Chopin.
+
+
+TENNESSEE
+
+_In the Tennessee Mountains_; _Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains_,
+  Charles Egbert Craddock. (Mary N. Murfree.)
+
+
+VIRGINIA
+
+_In Ole Virginia_, Thomas Nelson Page.
+_Virginia of Virginia_, Amelie Rives.
+_Colonel Carter of Cartersville_, F. Hopkinson Smith.
+
+
+NORTH CAROLINA
+
+_North Carolina Sketches_, Mary N. Carter.
+
+
+III. THE MIDDLE WEST
+
+
+INDIANA
+
+_Dialect Sketches_, James Whitcomb Riley.
+
+
+ILLINOIS
+
+_The Home Builders_, K. E. Harriman.
+
+
+IOWA
+
+_Stories of a Western Town_; _The Missionary Sheriff_, Octave Thanet.
+_In a Little Town_, Rupert Hughes.
+
+
+KANSAS
+
+_In Our Town_; _Stratagems and Spoils_, William Allen White.
+
+
+MISSOURI
+
+_The Man at the Wheel_, John Hanton Carter.
+_Stories of a Country Doctor_, Willis King.
+
+
+MICHIGAN
+
+_Blazed Trail Stories_, Stewart Edward White.
+_Mackinac and Lake Stories_, Mary Hartwell Catherwood.
+
+
+OHIO
+
+_Folks Back Home_, Eugene Wood.
+
+
+WISCONSIN
+
+_Main-Travelled Roads_, Hamlin Garland.
+_Friendship Village_; _Friendship Village Love Stories_, Zona Gale.
+
+
+
+IV. THE FAR WEST
+
+
+ARIZONA
+
+_Lost Borders_, Mary Austin.
+_Arizona Nights_, Stewart Edward White.
+
+
+ALASKA
+
+_Love of Life_; _Son of the Wolf_, Jack London.
+
+
+CALIFORNIA
+
+_The Cat and the Cherub_, Chester B. Fernald.
+_The Luck of Roaring Camp_; _Tales of the Argonauts_, Bret Harte.
+_The Splendid Idle Forties_, Gertrude Atherton.
+
+
+NEW MEXICO
+
+_The King of the Broncos_, Charles F. Lummis.
+_Santa Fe's Partner_, Thomas A. Janvier.
+
+
+WYOMING
+
+_Red Men and White_; _The Virginian_; _Members of the Family_,
+  Owen Wister.
+_Teepee Tales_, Grace Coolidge.
+
+
+PHILIPPINE ISLANDS
+
+_Caybigan_, James N. Hopper.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY
+
+
+THE RIGHT PROMETHEAN FIRE
+
+In Greek mythology, the work of creating living things was entrusted to
+two of the gods, Epimetheus and Prometheus. Epimetheus gave to the
+different animals various powers, to the lion strength, to the bird
+swiftness, to the fox sagacity, and so on until all the good gifts had
+been bestowed, and there was nothing left for man. Then Prometheus
+ascended to heaven and brought down fire, as his gift to man. With this,
+man could protect himself, could forge iron to make weapons, and so in
+time develop the arts of civilization. In this story the "Promethean
+Fire" of love is the means of giving little Emmy Lou her first lesson in
+reading.
+
+     1. A test that may be applied to any story is, Does it read as if
+     it were true? Would the persons in the story do the things they are
+     represented as doing? Test the acts of Billy Traver in this way,
+     and see if they are probable.
+
+     2. In writing stories about children, a writer must have the power
+     to present life as a child sees it. Point out places in this story
+     where school life is described as it appears to a new pupil.
+
+     3. One thing we ought to gain from our reading is a larger
+     vocabulary. In this story there are a number of words worth adding
+     to our stock. Define these exactly: inquisitorial; lachrymose;
+     laconic; surreptitious; contumely.
+
+     Get the habit of looking up new words and writing down their
+     meanings.
+
+     4. Can you write a story about a school experience?
+
+     5. Other books containing stories of school life are:
+
+     _Little Aliens_, Myra Kelly; _May Iverson Tackles Life_, Elizabeth
+     Jordan; _Ten to Seventeen_, Josephine Daskam Bacon; _Closed Doors_,
+     Margaret P. Montague. Read a story from one of these books, and
+     compare it with this story.
+
+
+THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE
+
+Central Park, New York, covers an era of more than eight hundred acres,
+with a zoo and several small lakes. On one of the lakes there are large
+boats with a huge wooden swan on each side. Richard Harding Davis
+located one of his stories here: See "Van Bibber and the Swan Boats,"
+in the volume called _Van Bibber and Others_.
+
+     1. How is this story like the preceding one? What difference in the
+     characters? What difference in their homes?
+
+     2. How does Myra Kelly make you feel sympathy for the little folks?
+     In what ways have their lives been less fortunate than the lives of
+     children in your town?
+
+     3. What is peculiar about the talk of these children? Do they all
+     speak the same dialect? Many of the children of the East Side never
+     hear English spoken at home.
+
+     4. What touches of humor are there in this story?
+
+     5. What new words do you find? Define garrulous, pedagogically,
+     cicerone.
+
+     6. Where did Miss Kelly get her materials for this story? See the
+     life on page 37.
+
+     7. What other stories by this author have you read? This is from
+     _Little Citizens_; other books telling about the same characters
+     are _Little Aliens_, and _Wards of Liberty_.
+
+     8. Other books of short stories dealing with children are:
+     _Whilomville Stories_, by Stephen Crane; _The Golden Age_, by
+     Kenneth Grahame; _The Madness of Philip_, by Josephine Daskam
+     Bacon; _The King of Boyville_, by William Allen White; _New
+     Chronicles of Rebecca_, by Kate Douglas Wiggin. Read one of these,
+     and compare it with Myra Kelly's story.
+
+
+THE TENOR
+
+     1. Point out the humorous touches in this story.
+
+     2. Is the story probable? To answer this, consider two points:
+     would Louise have undertaken such a thing as answering the
+     advertisement? and would she have had the spirit to act as she did
+     at the close? Note the touches of description and characterization
+     of Louise, and show how they prepare for the events that follow.
+
+     3. One of the most effective devices in art is the use of contrast;
+     that is, bringing together two things or persons or ideas that are
+     very different, perhaps the exact opposite of each other. Show that
+     the main effect of this story depends on the use of contrast.
+
+     4. Read the paragraph on page 43 beginning, "It happened to be a
+     French tenor." Give in your own words the thought of this
+     paragraph. Is it true? Can you give examples of it?
+
+     5. Compare the length of this story with that of others in the
+     book. Which authors get their effects in a small compass? Could any
+     parts of this story be omitted?
+
+     6. Other stories by H. C. Bunner that you will enjoy are "The Love
+     Letters of Smith" and "A Sisterly Scheme" in _Short Sixes_.
+
+
+THE PASSING OF PRISCILLA WINTHROP
+
+     1. Does the title fit the story well? Why?
+
+     2. Notice the familiar, almost conversational style. Is it suited
+     to the story? Why?
+
+     3. Show how the opening paragraph introduces the main idea of the
+     story.
+
+     4. To make a story there must be a conflict of some sort. What is
+     the conflict here?
+
+     5. How does the account of Julia Neal's career as a teacher (page
+     64) prepare for the ending of the story?
+
+     6. Do you have a clear picture in your mind of Mrs. Winthrop? Of
+     Mrs. Worthington? Why did not the author tell about their personal
+     appearance?
+
+     7. Point out humorous touches in the next to the last paragraph.
+
+     8. Is this story true to life? Who is the Priscilla Winthrop of
+     your town?
+
+     9. What impression do you get of the man behind this story? Do you
+     think he knew the people of his town well? Did he like them even
+     while he laughed at them? What else can you say about him?
+
+     10. Other books of short stories dealing with life in a small town
+     are: _Pratt Portraits_, by Anna Fuller; _Old Chester Tales_, by
+     Margaret Deland; _Stories of a Western Town_, by Octave Thanet; _In
+     a Little Town_, by Rupert Hughes; _Folks Back Home_, by Eugene
+     Wood; _Friendship Village_, by Zona Gale; _Bodbank_, by Richard W.
+     Child. Read one of these books, or a story from one, and compare it
+     with this story.
+
+     11. In what ways does life in a small town differ from life in a
+     large city?
+
+
+THE GIFT OF THE MAGI
+
+This story, taken from the volume called _The Four Million_, is a good
+example of O. Henry's method as a short-story writer. It is notable for
+its brevity. The average length of the modern short story is about five
+thousand words; O. Henry uses a little over one thousand words. This
+conciseness is gained in several ways. In his descriptions, he has the
+art of selecting significant detail. When Della looks out of the window,
+instead of describing fully the view that met her eyes, he says: "She
+looked out dully at a grey cat walking a grey fence in a grey backyard."
+A paragraph could do no more. Again, the beginning of the story is
+quick, abrupt. There is no introduction. The style is often elliptical;
+in the first paragraph half the sentences are not sentences at all. But
+the main reason for the shortness of the story lies in the fact that the
+author has included only such incidents and details as are necessary to
+the unfolding of the plot. There is no superfluous matter.
+
+Another characteristic of O. Henry is found in the unexpected turns of
+his plots. There is almost always a surprise in his stories, usually at
+the end. And yet this has been so artfully prepared for that we accept
+it as probable. Our pleasure in reading his stories is further
+heightened by the constant flashes of humor that light up his pages. And
+beyond this, he has the power to touch deeper emotions. When Della heard
+Jim's step on the stairs, "she turned white just for a moment. She had a
+habit of saying little silent prayers about the simplest things, and now
+she whispered, 'Please God, make him think I am still pretty.'" One
+reads that with a little catch in the throat.
+
+In his plots, O. Henry is romantic; in his settings he is a realist.
+Della and Jim are romantic lovers, they are not prudent nor calculating,
+but act upon impulse. In his descriptions, however, he is a realist. The
+eight-dollar-a-week flat, the frying pan on the back of the stove, the
+description of Della "flopping down on the couch for a cry," and
+afterwards "attending to her cheeks with the powder-rag,"--all these are
+in the manner of realism.
+
+And finally, the tone of his stories is brave and cheerful. He finds the
+world a most interesting place, and its people, even its commonplace
+people, its rogues, its adventurers, are drawn with a broad sympathy
+that makes us more tolerant of the people we meet outside the books.
+
+     1. Compare the beginning of this story with the beginning of
+     "Bitter-Sweet." What difference do you note?
+
+     2. Select a description of a person that shows the author's power
+     of concise portraiture.
+
+     3. What is the turn of surprise in this story? What other stories
+     in this book have a similar twist at the end?
+
+     4. What is the central thought of this story?
+
+     5. Other stories of O. Henry's that ought not to be missed are "An
+     Unfinished Story" and "The Furnished Room" in _The Four Million_;
+     "A Blackjack Bargainer" in _Whirligigs_; "Best Seller" and "The
+     Rose of Dixie" in _Options_; "A Municipal Report" in _Strictly
+     Business_; "A Retrieved Reformation" in _Roads of Destiny_; and
+     "Hearts and Crosses" in _Hearts of the West_.
+
+
+THE GOLD BRICK
+
+This story, first published in the _American Magazine_, was reprinted in
+a volume called _The Gold Brick_, published in 1910. The quotation "chip
+at crusts like Hindus" is from Robert Browning's poem "Youth and Art."
+The reference to "Old Walt" at the end of the story is to Walt Whitman,
+one of the great poets of democracy.
+
+     1. To make a story interesting, there must be a conflict. In this
+     the conflict is double: the outer conflict, between the two
+     political factions, and the inner conflict, in the soul of the
+     artist. Note how skilfully this inner struggle is introduced: at
+     the moment when Kittrell is first rejoicing over his new position,
+     he feels a pang at leaving the _Post_, and what it stood for. This
+     feeling is deepened by his wife's tacit disapproval; it grows
+     stronger as the campaign progresses, until the climax is reached in
+     the scene where he resigns his position.
+
+     2. If you knew nothing about the author, what could you infer from
+     this story about his political ideals? Did he believe in democracy?
+     Did he have faith in the good sense of the common people? Did he
+     think it was worth while to make sacrifices for them? What is your
+     evidence for this?
+
+     3. How far is this story true to life, as you know it? Do any
+     newspapers in your city correspond to the _Post_? To the
+     _Telegraph_? Can you recall a campaign in which the contest was
+     between two such groups as are described here?
+
+     4. Does Whitlock have the art of making his characters real? Is
+     this true of the minor characters? The girl in the flower shop, for
+     instance, who appears but for a moment,--is she individualized?
+     How?
+
+     5. Is there a lesson in this story? State it in your own words.
+
+     6. What experiences in Whitlock's life gave him the background for
+     this story?
+
+     7. What new words did you gain from this? Define meritricious;
+     prognathic; banal; vulpine; camaraderie; vilification; ennui;
+     quixotic; naive; pharisaism. What can you say of Whitlock's
+     vocabulary?
+
+     8. Other good stories dealing with politics are found in
+     _Stratagems and Spoils_, by William Allen White.
+
+
+HIS MOTHER'S SON
+
+     1. Note the quick beginning of the story; no introduction, action
+     from the start. Why is this suitable to this story?
+
+     2. Why is slang used so frequently?
+
+     3. Point out examples of humor in the story.
+
+     4. In your writing, do you ever have trouble in finding just the
+     right word? Note on page 123 how Edna Ferber tries one expression
+     after another, and how on page 122 she finally coins a
+     word--"unadjectivable." What does the word mean?
+
+     5. Do you have a clear picture of Emma McChesney? Of Ed Meyers?
+     Note that the description of Meyers in the office is not given all
+     at once, but a touch here and then. Point out all these bits of
+     description of this person, and note how complete the portrait is.
+
+     6. What have you learned in this story about the life of a
+     traveling salesman?
+
+     7. What qualities must a good salesman possess?
+
+     8. Was Emma McChesney a lady? Was Ed Meyers a gentleman? Why do you
+     think so?
+
+     9. This story is taken from the book called _Roast Beef, Medium_.
+     Other good books of short stories by this author are _Personality
+     Plus_, and _Cheerful--by Request_.
+
+
+BITTER-SWEET
+
+     1. Note the introduction, a characteristic of all of Fannie Hurst's
+     stories. What purpose does it serve here? What trait of Gertie's is
+     brought out? Is this important to the story?
+
+     2. From the paragraph on page 139 beginning "It was into the
+     trickle of the last----" select examples that show the author's
+     skill in the use of words. What other instances of this do you note
+     in the story?
+
+     3. Read the sketch of the author. What episode in her life gave her
+     material for parts of this story?
+
+     4. Notice how skillfully the conversation is handled. The opening
+     situation developes itself entirely through dialogue, yet in a
+     perfectly natural way. It is almost like a play rather than a
+     story. If it were dramatized, how many scenes would it make?
+
+     5. What does the title mean? Does the author give us the key to its
+     meaning?
+
+     6. What do you think of Gertie as you read the first part of the
+     conversation in the restaurant? Does your opinion of her change at
+     the end of the story? Has her character changed?
+
+     7. Is the ending of the story artistic? Why mention the time-clock?
+     What had Gertie said about it?
+
+     8. State in three or four words the central idea of the story. Is
+     it true to life?
+
+     9. What is the meaning of these words: atavism; penumbra;
+     semaphore; astigmatic; insouciance; mise-en-scene; kinetic?
+
+     10. Other books of stories dealing with life in New York City are
+     _The Four Million_, and _The Voice of the City_, by O. Henry; _Van
+     Bibber and Others_, by Richard Harding Davis; _Every Soul Hath Its
+     Song_, by Fannie Hurst; _Doctor Rast_, by James Oppenheim.
+
+
+THE RIVERMAN
+
+     1. In how many scenes is this story told? What is the connection
+     between them?
+
+     2. Is there anything in the first description of Dicky Darrell that
+     gives you a slight prejudice against him?
+
+     3. Why was the sympathy of the crowd with Jimmy Powers in the
+     birling match?
+
+     4. Comment on Jimmy's remark at the end of the story. Did he mean
+     it, or is he just trying to turn away the praise?
+
+     5. What are the characteristics of a lumberman, as seen in Jimmy
+     Powers?
+
+     6. Read the sketch of Stewart Edward White, and decide which one of
+     his books you would like to read.
+
+
+FLINT AND FIRE
+
+     1. What does the title mean?
+
+     2. How does the author strike the keynote of the story in the
+     opening paragraph?
+
+     3. Where is the first hint of the real theme of the story?
+
+     4. Point out some of the dialect expressions. Why is dialect used?
+
+     5. What turn of surprise comes at the end of the story? Is it
+     probable?
+
+     6. What characteristics of New England country people are brought
+     out in this story? How does the author contrast them with "city
+     people"?
+
+     7. Does this story read as if the author knew the scenes she
+     describes? Read the description of Niram plowing (page 191), and
+     point out touches in it that could not have been written by one who
+     had always lived in the city.
+
+     8. Read the account of how this story was written, (page 210). What
+     first suggested the idea? What work remained after the story was
+     first written? How did the author feel while writing it? Compare
+     what William Allen White says about his work, (page 75).
+
+     9. Other stories of New England life that you will enjoy reading
+     are found in the following books: _New England Nun_, Mary E.
+     Wilkins; _Cape Cod Folks_, S. P. McLean Greene; _Pratt Portraits_,
+     Anna Fuller; _The Country Road_, Alice Brown; _Tales of New
+     England_, Sarah Orne Jewett.
+
+
+THE ORDEAL AT MT. HOPE
+
+     1. This story contains three characters who are typical of many
+     colored people, and as such are worth study. Howard Dokesbury is
+     the educated colored man of the North. What are the chief traits of
+     this character?
+
+     2. Aunt Caroline is the old-fashioned darky who suggests slavery
+     days. What are her chief characteristics?
+
+     3. 'Lias is the new generation of the Southern negro of the towns.
+     What are his characteristics?
+
+     4. Is the colored American given the same rights as others? Read
+     carefully the opening paragraph of the story.
+
+     5. What were the weaknesses of the colored people of Mt. Hope? How
+     far are they true of the race? How were they overcome in this case?
+
+     6. There are two theories about the proper solution of what is
+     called "The Negro Problem." One is, that the hope of the race lies
+     in industrial training; the other theory, that they should have
+     higher intellectual training, so as to develope great leaders.
+     Which theory do you think Dunbar held? Why do you think so?
+
+     7. Other stories dealing with the life of the colored people are:
+     _Free Joe_, and _Tales of the Home Folks_, by Joel Chandler Harris;
+     _Polished Ebony_, by Octavius R. Cohen; _Aunt Amity's Silver
+     Wedding_, by Ruth McEnery Stuart; _In Ole Virginia_, by Thomas
+     Nelson Page.
+
+
+ISRAEL DRAKE
+
+The Pennsylvania State Police have made a wonderful record for
+maintaining law and order in the rural sections of the state. The
+history of this organization was told by Katherine Mayo in a book called
+_Justice to All_. In a later book, _The Standard Bearers_, she tells
+various incidents which show how these men do their work. The book is
+not fiction--the story here told happened just as it is set down, even
+the names of the troopers are their real names.
+
+     1. Do you get a clear picture of Drake from the description? Why
+     are several pages given to telling his past career?
+
+     2. Where does the real story begin?
+
+     3. Who was the tramp at the Carlisle Station? When did you guess
+     it?
+
+     4. What are the principles of the State Police, as you see them in
+     this story?
+
+     5. Why was such an organization necessary? Is there one in your
+     state?
+
+     6. What new words did you find in this story? Define aura,
+     primeval, grisly.
+
+
+THE STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPH OF ISIDRO
+
+In this story the author introduces a number of unfamiliar words,
+chiefly of Spanish origin, which are current in the Philippines. The
+meanings are given below.
+
+     _baguio_, hurricane.
+     _barrio_, ward; district.
+     _carabao_, a kind of buffalo, used as a work animal.
+     _cabo_, head officer.
+     _cibay_, a boys' game.
+     _daledale_, hurry up!
+     _de los Reyes_, of the King.
+     _de la Cruz_, of the cross.
+     _hacienda_, a large plantation.
+     _ladrones_, robbers.
+     _maestro_, teacher.
+     _nipa_, a palm tree or the thatch made from it.
+     _palay_, rice.
+     _pronto_, quickly.
+     _pueblo_, town.
+     _que barbaridad!_--what an atrocious thing!
+     _volador_, kite.
+
+     1. Why does the story end with Isidro's crying? What did this
+     signify? What is the relation of this to the beginning of the
+     story?
+
+     2. Has this story a central idea? What is it?
+
+     3. This might be called a story of local color, in that it gives in
+     some detail the atmosphere of an unfamiliar locality. What are the
+     best descriptive passages in the story?
+
+     4. Judging from this story, what are some of the difficulties a
+     school teacher meets with in the Philippines? What must he be
+     besides a teacher?
+
+     5. What other school stories are there in this book? The pupils in
+     Emmy Lou's school, (in Louisville, Ky.) are those with several
+     generations of American ancestry behind them; in Myra Kelly's
+     story, they are the children of foreign parents; in this story they
+     are still in a foreign land--that is, a land where they are not
+     surrounded by American influences. The public school is the one
+     experience that is common to them all, and therefore the greatest
+     single force in bringing them all to share in a common ideal, to
+     reverence the great men of our country's history, and to comprehend
+     the meaning of democracy. How does it do these things?
+
+
+THE CITIZEN
+
+     1. During the war, President Wilson delivered an address at
+     Philadelphia to an audience of men who had just been made citizens.
+     The quoted passages in this story are taken from this speech. Read
+     these passages, and select the one which probably gave the author
+     the idea for this story.
+
+     2. Starting with the idea, that he would write a story about
+     someone who followed a dream to America, why should the author
+     choose Russia as the country of departure?
+
+     3. Having chosen Russia, why does he make Ivan a resident of a
+     village far in the interior? Why not at Libau?
+
+     4. Two incidents are told as occurring on the journey: the charge
+     of the police at Bobrinsk, and the coming on board of the apple
+     woman at Queenstown. Why was each of these introduced? What is the
+     purpose of telling the incident on Fifth Avenue?
+
+     5. What have you learned about the manner in which this story was
+     written? Compare it with the account given by Dorothy Canfield as
+     to how she wrote her story.
+
+     6. What is the main idea in this story? Why do you think it was
+     written? Edward Everett Hale wrote a story called "A Man without a
+     Country." Suggest another title for "The Citizen."
+
+     7. Has this story in any way changed your opinion of immigrants? Is
+     Big Ivan likely to meet any treatment in America that will change
+     his opinion of the country?
+
+     8. The part of this story that deals with Russia affords a good
+     example of the use of local color. This is given partly through the
+     descriptions, partly through the names of the villagers--Poborino,
+     Yanansk, Dankov; partly through the Russian words, such as verst
+     (about three quarters of a mile), ruble (a coin worth fifty cents),
+     kopeck (a half cent), muzhik (a peasant). How is local color given
+     in the conversations?
+
+     9. For a treatment of the theme of this story in poetry, read "Scum
+     o' the Earth," by Robert Haven Schauffler, in Rittenhouse's _Little
+     Book of Modern Verse_. This is the closing stanza:
+
+
+     "Newcomers all from the eastern seas,
+     Help us incarnate dreams like these.
+     Forget, and forgive, that we did you wrong.
+     Help us to father a nation, strong
+     In the comradeship of an equal birth,
+     In the wealth of the richest bloods of earth."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Americans All, by Various
+
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+
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