Defenders of Democracy / Contributions from representative men and women of letters and other arts from our allies and our own country, edited by the Gift book committee of the Militia of Mercy

by Militia of Mercy . Gift Book Committee

CENTRAL AMERICA

As we have seen above, four of the Central American Republics have aligned themselves with the United States since her entry into the war, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras breaking off diplomatic relations with Germany very shortly after the definite action of the United States was known, the statement of Don Joaquin Mendez representing the prevalent feeling: "The rupture has aligned Guatemala 'ipso facto' with those who are the defenders of the modern ideas of democracy and freedom." Small in size and limited in resources, it is not likely that any active part will be taken by Central America in the war; she is removed from the most dangerous zones and will not suffer, it is to be hoped, more than the inevitable and temporary economic embarrassments due to dislocation of the world's industrial systems. But her spirit is reflected in such announcements as this notice from the front page of a little daily paper published in S. Pedro Sula, Honduras:

"This periodical is Latin and as such professes its sympathy in favor of the Allied nations now struggling so nobly in defense of Liberty with, as their aim, the establishment of a lasting peace which will render impossible the future development of schemes of conquest."

The position of Costa Rica, informally aligned with the Allies and the United States, is peculiar in that she cannot formalize her position until her new government has received the recognition of these countries. Don Ricardo Fernandez Guardia, the foremost writer of Costa Rica, says that, "The fact that we have offered the use of our ports, since April 9, 1917, to the navy of the United States, undoubtedly constitutes a breach of neutrality, and in consequence Costa Rica considers herself as enlisted in the ranks of the Allies 'de facto.' There is an overwhelming sentiment of sympathy with the Allies both on the part of the government and the great majority of the people of Costa Rica."

Panama, immediately following the news of the United States' breach with Germany, declared herself "ready to do all within her power to protect the Panama Canal"; Uruguay, although making no breach of relations with the Central Powers, supported United States action and denounced submarine warfare as carried on by Germany; Paraguay, too, expressed her sympathy with the United States which she said "was forced to enter the war to establish the rights of neutrals."

Thus the only Latin American nations which have rigidly preserved a neutral attitude are Mexico, whose own internal problems form an entirely sufficient reason; Ecuador, Venezuala and Colombia. They are still political neutrals, but no one who knows the Latin soul can doubt that there is in each of these lands a strong feeling of admiration for the vindication of Latin elasticity which France and Italy and Portugal have show, and for the dogged might of England whose naval skill has prevented the strangulation of the commerce of the world; in this matter all these lands are interested, since all are raw-material producers shipping their products abroad. This sentiment was concisely expressed by Ruy Barbosa, the Brazilian orator, when on August 5 the "Liga pelos Alliados" held a meeting of "homage to England" on the third anniversary of her entry into the war, and he declared it "an honor and pleasure to salute the great English nation to whom we owe in this war the liberty of the seas and the annihilation of German methods upon the ocean, without which European resistance to the German attack and the preservation of the independence of the American continent would be impossible."

Nothing would, I think, be more improper than that any nation should be urged to enter the war against her own feelings; but for those who have taken or may yet take that step there is one very high consideration which cannot be forgotten—the effect upon the national spirit of To-morrow of a gallant and decisive attitude Today. Who has more finely expressed this sense of the formation of the heritage of ideas than the modern Portuguese poet Quental?

Even as the winds the pinewood cones down cast
Upon the ground and scatter by their blowing
And one by one, down to the very last,
The seeds along the mountain ridge are sowing.
Even so, by winds of time, ideas are strewn
Little by little, though none see them fly—
And thus in all the fields of life are sown
The vast plantations of posterity.

["Odes Modernas, by Anthero de Quental, translated by George Young.]

[signed] Lilian E. Elliott.

October 20, 1917.

Drill

Williams College, April, 1917

One! two, three, four!
One! two, three, four!
One, two!…
It is hard to keep in time
Marching through
The rutted slime
With no drum to play for you.
One! two, three, four!
And the shuffle of five hundred feet
Till the marching line is neat.

Then the wet New England valley
With the purple hills around
Takes us gently, musically,
With a kindly heart and willing,
Thrilling, filling with the sound
Of our drilling.

Battle fields are far away.
All the world about me seems
The fulfillment of my dreams.
God, how good it is to be
Young and glad to-day!

One! two, three, four!
One, two, three!…

Now, as never before,
From the vastness of the sky,
Falls on me the sense of war.
Now, as never before,
Comes the feeling that to die
Is no duty vain and sore.
Something calls and speaks to me:
Cloud and hill and stream and tree;
Something calls and speaks to me,
From the earth, familiarly.
I will rise and I will go,
As the rivers flow to sea,
As the sap mounts up the tree
That the flowers may blow—
God, my God,
All my soul is out of me!

God, my God,
Your world is much too beautiful! I feel
My senses melt and reel,
And my heart aches as if a sudden steel
Had pierced me through and through.
I cannot bear
This vigorous sweetness in your air;
The sunlight smites me heavy blow on blow,
My soul is black and blue
And blind and dizzy. God, my mortal eyes
Cannot resist the onslaught of your skies!
I am no wind, I cannot rise and go
Tearing in madness to the woods and sea;
I am no tree,
I cannot push the earth and lift and grow;
I am no rock
To stand unmovable against this shock.
Behold me now, a too desirous thing,
Passionate lover of your ardent Spring,
Held in her arms too fast, too fiercely pressed
Against her thundering breast
That leaps and crushes me!

One! two, three, four!
One! two, three, four!
One, two, three!…

So it shall be
In Flanders or in France. After a long
Winter of heavy burdens and loud war,
I will forget, as I do now, all things
Except the perfect beauty of the earth.
Strangely familiar, I will hear a song,
As I do now, above the battle roar,
That will set free my pent imaginings
And quiet all surprise.
My body will seem lighter than the air,
Easier to sway than a green stalk of corn;
Heaven shall bend above me in its mirth
With flutter of blue wings;
And singing, singing, as to-day it sings,
The earth will call to me, will call and rise
And take me to its bosom there to bear
My mortal-feeble being to new birth
Upon a world, this world, like me reborn,
Where I shall be
Alive again and young again and glad and free.

One! two, three, four!
One! two, three, four!
One, two, three!…

All the world about me seems
The fulfillment of my dreams.

[signed] Salomon De La Selva.

The People's Struggle

"Let no free country be alien to the freedom of another country."

"Portugal is going solemnly to affirm on the field of battle her adhesion to this precept, though uttered by German lips. In defense of it, Portuguese will fight side by side with Englishmen, as they fought with them at Aljubarrota, side by side with Frenchmen, who fought with them at Montes Claros. Were it necessary to appeal to a motive less disinterested than the noble ideal proclaimed by Schiller, we have this: the payment of an ancient debt to which our honor binds us. Let us go forward to defend territories of those who defended ours, let us maintain the independence of nations who contributed to the salvation of our own independence.

"But the objective is a higher one, I repeat. This has been made quite clear within the last few months, through the revolution in Russia, the participation of the United States, and the solidarity, more or less effective, of all the democracies. It is the people's struggle for right, for liberty, for civilization against the dark forces of despotism and barbarism. Portugal would betray her historic mission were she now to fold her arms, the arms which discovered worlds. When the earth was given to man, it was not that it should be peopled by slaves. The sails of Portuguese ships surrounded the globe like a diadem of stars, not as a collar of darkness to strangle it."

Henrique Lopes De Mendonca

of the Academy of Science of Lisbon, speaking at Lisbon in May, 1917.

Translation by L. E. Elliott.

Portugal

Lisbon, 18th August, 1917

I have received your letter of August 2nd, in which you ask me, as representing Portugal, to send a message to the American people to be printed in the book "Defenders of Democracy," and state that a distinguished Portuguese official has been good enough to mention my name to you as that of "an authoritative writer on Portuguese affairs."

I am sensible of the honor done me, but not being a citizen of
Portugal, I dare not presume to speak for that country.

A foreigner however, with friends in both the camps in which Portuguese society is divided, may perhaps be able to state some facts unknown to the American public and of interest at the present time.

And first let me remark that the entry of America into the war, which is a pledge of victory for the Allies, has been a surprise and a relief to the Portuguese, who are by nature pessimists. We Anglo-Saxons are considered to be mainly guided in our conduct by material considerations—did not Napoleon call the English "a nation of shopkeepers"?—and the saying "Time is money" is frequently quoted against us; hence hardly any Portuguese imagined that America would abandon the neutrality which seemed commercially profitable, and even after the decision had been taken, few though that the United States were capable of raising a large army and of transporting it overseas.

Now that America and Portugal are fighting side by side, in a common cause, it is well that they should understand one another. For all their differences of race, religion and language, their ideas are similar. The Portuguese being kindly, easy-going folk, hate militarism and the reign of brute force which is identified with German "Kultur." As they prize their independence and know their weakness, both inclination and necessity lead them to the side of the powers who may be supposed to favor the continuance of their separate existence and the retention by them of their colonies; as they have a keen sense of justice, and respect their engagements, they feel and have shown their sympathy with violated and outraged Belgium and with the other victims of German aggression. Why then, it may be asked, did they not support whole-heartedly the Government of the Republic when it determined to take part in the war? The answer is simple.

They felt that their first duty was to protect their colonies, threatened by the enemy, and that in a war where the combatants are counted by millions, the small contingent that Portugal could furnish would be of little weight on the battlefields of Europe. Unless treaty obligations and considerations of honor forced them to be belligerents, they considered that as Portugal was poor and had relatively to population almost the heaviest public debt of any European Country, they ought to remain neutral—that this view was mistaken is daily becoming clearer to them, thanks in part to the propaganda of the Catholic paper "Ordem" and the official Monarchist journal "Diario Nacional," which have insisted as strongly as the Republican press on the necessity of Portuguese participation in the war, in accord with her ancient traditions. He who risks nothing, gains nothing. By her present heavy sacrifices for a great ideal, Portugal wins a fresh title to universal consideration, and by helping to vanquish Germany she defends her oversea patrimony, which the Germans proposed to annex.

I have said that the ideas of the United States and Portugal are similar. But the pressing needs of Portugal are a competent administration, public order and social discipline, which Germany possesses to a remarkable degree, and admiration of these has laid Portuguese Conservatives open to the charge of being pro-German. Many of them judge from experience that the desiderata I refer to cannot be secured in a democracy, while a few of them have gone so far as to desire a German triumph, because they foolishly thought that the Kaiser would restore the monarchy. None of them, I think, sympathize with German methods; but they have suffered from a century of revolutions, dating from 1820, and attribute these disasters to the anti-Christian ideas of the French Revolution. In America that great movement had beneficent results, as I understand, which only shows that one man's drink is another's poison.

Divergent ideals and other considerations led Portuguese Conservatives to throw their influence into the scale in favor of neutrality, but now that their country is at war they have accepted the fact and can be trusted to do their duty. At the front political and other differences are forgotten and the soldiers, whatever their creed, are honoring the warlike traditions of their race and reminding us of the days when Wellington spoke of Portuguese troops as the "fighting-cocks" of his army.

By organizing with great efforts and sending a properly trained and equipped expeditionary force to France, the Government of the Republic has deserved well of the country and the Allies, and I believe that it has unconsciously been the agent of Divine Providence. The men, when they return will bring with them a firmer religious faith, the foundation of national well-being, and a higher standard of conduct than prevails here at present; they may well prove the regenerators of a land which all who know it learn to love, a land, the past achievements of whose sons in the cause of Christianity and civilization are inscribed on the ample page of history. Portugal which produced so many saints and heroes, which founded the sea road to India and discovered and colonized Brazil, cannot be allowed longer to vegetate, for this in the case of a country means to die.

[signed] Edgar Prestage

Roumania

An Interpretation

A Serbian politician, conversing with a traveler from Western Europe, mentioned the words "a nice national balance;" and when the other, bored to death with the everlasting wrangle of the turbulent Balkans, tried to lead the conversation to Shakespeare and the Musical Glasses, away from Macedonia and Albania and "komitadjis" and Kotzo-Vlachs, the Serbian remarked with a laugh that the nice national balance of which he was speaking was not political, but economic and social.

"You see," he said, "we Serbians are born peasants, born agriculturists, men of the glebe and the plow. The Roumanian, on the other hand, is a born financier. Gold comes to his hand like fish to bait. He comes to Serbia to make money—and he makes it."

"But," said the Western European, "isn't that rather hard on the
Serbian?"

"No! Not a bit! For it is the young Serbian who marries the
Roumanian's daughter, and the young Serbian girl who marries the
Roumanian's son. Thus the Serbian money, earned by the Roumanian,
is still kept in the country. You know," he added musingly, "the
Roumanians are a singularly handsome, a singularly engaging people.
I myself married a Roumanian."

"A rich Roumanian's daughter, I suppose?"

"Heavens, no! A poor girl."

And he added with superb lack of logic:

"Who wouldn't marry a Roumanian—be she rich—OR poor!"

WHO WOULDN'T MARRY A ROUMANIAN?

The secret of the Balkans is contained in that simple rhetoric question.

For, clear away from the days when the Slavs made their first appearance in Southern Europe and, crossing the Danube, came to settle on the great, green, rolling plain between the river and the jagged frowning Balkan Mountains, the proceeded southwards and formed colonies among the Thraco-Illyrians, the Roumanians, and the Greeks, to the days of Michael the Brave who drove the Turks to the spiked gates of Adrianople and freed half the peninsula for a span of years; from the days when gallant King Mirtsched went down to glorious defeat amongst the Osmanli yataghans to the final day when the Russian Slav liberated the Roumanian Latin from the Turkish yoke, the Roumanian has held high the torch of civilization and culture.

Latin civilization!

Latin culture!

Latin ideals!

Straight through, he has been the Western leaven in an Eastern land.

Geographically, the Fates were unkind to him.

For he stood in the path of the most gigantic racial movements of the world. His land was the scene of savage racial struggles. His rivers ran red with the blood of Hun and Slav, of Greek and Albanian, of Osmanli and Seljuk. His fields and pastures became the dumping-ground of residual shreds of a dozen and one nations surviving from great defeats or Pyrrhic victories and nursing irreconcilable mutual racial hatreds.

But the old Latin spirit proved stronger than Fate, stronger than numbers, stronger than brute force. It proved strong enough to assimilate the foreign barbarians, instead of becoming assimilated by them. It was strong enough to wipe out every trace of Asian and Slavic taint. It was strong enough to keep intact the Latin idea against the steely shock of Asian hordes, the immense, crushing weight of Slave fatalism, the subtleties of Greek influence.

The Roumanian is a Roman.

His cultural ideal was, and is, of the West, of Rome of France—AND of Himself; and he has kept it inviolate through military and political disaster, through slavery itself.

Roumania has remained a window of Europe looking toward Asia as surely and as steadily as Petrograd was a window of Asia looking toward Europe.

The Roumanian is proud of his Latin descent; and he shows his ancestry not only in his literature, his art, and his every day life, but also, perhaps chiefly, in his government which is practically a safe and sane oligarchy, modeled on that of ancient Florence, and, be it said, fully as successful as that of the Florentine Republic.

Latin, too, is his diplomacy. It is clean—AND clever. It is the big stick held in a velvet glove. It is supremely able. He seeks a great advantage with a modest air, in contrast to the Greek who seeks a modest advantage with a grandiloquent air.

He seeks no "réclame," but goes ahead serenely, unfalteringly, sure in his knowledge that he is the torch-bearer of ancient Rome in the savage Balkans.

[signed] Achmed Abdullah

The Soul of Russia

There is a strange saying in Russia that no matter what happens to a man, good results to him thereby. No matter what hair-breadth escapes he has, what calamities he faces, what hardships he undergoes, he emerges more powerful, more experienced from the ordeal. Danger and privation are more beneficial in the long run than peace and joy. A nation of some fifty different races gradually melting into one, a country covering a territory of one-sixth of the surface of the earth and a population of 185,000,000, the Russians have remained to the outside world the apaches of Europe, wild tribes of the steppes. In the imagination of an average American or Englishman, Russia was something Asiatic, something connected with the barbaric East, a country beyond the horizon. It was considered as lacking in culture and civilization, and as a menace to the West. "Nichevo, sudiba!"—(It doesn't matter, everything is fate) replies a Russian, crossing himself. The whole psychology of the Slavic race is crystallized in these two impressionistic words.

What John Ruskin said in his famous historic essay applies to Russia: "I found that all the great nations learned their truth of word and strength of thought in war." Every great Russian reform has taken place suddenly as a consequence of some nation-wide calamity. The Tartar invasion united Russia into one powerful nation; the Crimean War abolished the feudal system; the Russo-Turkish War gave the judicial reforms and abolished capital punishment; the Russo-Japanese War gave the preliminary form of Constitutional government in the Duma; the present war is opening the soul of Russia to the world by giving an absolute democratic form of government to the united Slavic race. The present war will reveal that Russia the known has been the very opposite extreme of Russia the unknown.

The outside world is wondering how the Russian character will fit in with the aspirations of democracy. They cannot reconcile the Russia of pogroms and Serbia with the Russia of wonderful municipal theaters, great artists, writers, musicians and lovers of humanity. The world has known the tyrants like Plehve, Trepoff, Orloff and Stolypin, or others like Rasputin, Protopopoff and forgets that Russia has also produced geniuses like Dostoyewsky, Turgenieff, Tchaikowsky, Tolstoy, Moussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Mendeleyeff and Metchnikoff. The world has looked at Russia as a land of uncultivated steppes, of frozen ground, hungry bears and desperate Cossacks, and forgets that in actuality this is the Russia of the past very extreme surface and next to it is a Russia of great civilization and the highest art, unknown yet to the West generally.

One of the strangest peculiarities of Russian life is that you will find the greatest contrasts everywhere. Here you will see the most luxurious castles, cathedrals, convents, villas and estates; there you will find the most desolate huts of the moujiks and lonely hermit caves in the wilds of Siberia. Here you will meet the most selfish chinovnik, the most fanatic desperado or reckless bureaucrat; there you face the noblest men and women, supermen, physically and mentally. You will find that all Russian life is full of such mental and physical contrasts.

This is the dualism that confronts like a sphinx the foreigners. In the same way you will find that the Russian homes are full of contrasting colors, bright red and yellow, white and blue. The Russian music is the most dramatic phonetic art ever created; it reaches the deepest sorrow and the gayest hilarity and joy. Dreamy, romantic, imaginary, simple, hospitable and childlike as an average moujik, is the soul of the people. Nowhere is there a hint of those qualities which are thrown up as dark shadows on the canvas of his horizon. While with one hand Russia has been conquering the world, with the other she has been creating the most magnificent masterpieces of humanity. In the same generation she produces a Plehve and a Tolstoy, both in a way, true to national type.

In the popular American imagination, which invariably seizes upon a single point, three things stand out as representative of Russia: the moujiks, the Cossacks and the Siberian penal system. The vast unknown spaces between these three have been filled in with the dark colors of poverty and oppression, so that a Russian is looked upon as an outcast of evolution, an exile of the ages.

the Russia of the dark powers is past; thus soon will pass the Russian chinovnik, the Russian spy and the Russian gloom, who have been a shadow of the Slavic race. From now all the world will listen to the majestic masterpieces of the Russian composers, see the infinite beauty of the Russian life and feel the greatness of the Russian soul. Not only has Russia her peculiar racial civilization, her unique art and literature, and national traditions, but she has riches of which the outside world knows little, riches that are still buried. The Russian stage, art galleries, archives, monastery treasuries and romantic traits of life remain still a sealed book to the outsiders. Take for instance, Russian music, the operas of Rimsky-Korsakoff, the plays of Ostrowsky and the symphonies of Reinhold Gliere or Spendiarov and you will have eloquent chapters of a modern living Bible. No music of another country is such a true mirror of a nation's racial character, life, passion, blood, struggle, despair and agony, as the Russian. One can almost see in its turbulent-lugubrious or buoyant-hilarious chords the rich colors of the Byzantine style, the half Oriental atmosphere that surrounds everything with a romantic halo.

The fundamental purpose of the pathfinders of Russian art, music, literature and poetry was to create beauties that emanated, not from a certain class or school, but directly from the souls of the people. Their ideal was to create life from life. Though profound melancholy seems to be the dominant note in Russian music and art, yet along with the dramatic gloom go also reckless hilarity and boisterous humor, which often whirl one off one's feet. This is explained by the fact that the average Russian is extremely emotional and consequently dramatic in his artistic expressions. Late Leo Tolstoy said to me on one occasion: "In our folksong and folk art is evidently yearning without end, without hope, also power invisible, the fateful stamp of destiny, and the fate in preordination, one of the fundamental principles of our race, which explains much that in Russian life seems incomprehensible for the foreigners."

Thus the Russian art and soul in their very foundations are already democratic, simple, direct and true to the ethnographic traits of the race. In the same way you will find the Russian home life, the peasant communities, the zemstvoe institutions, offsprings of an extremely democratic tendency, perhaps far more than any such institution of the West. Instead of the rich or noblemen absorbing the land of the peasants, we find in Russia the peasant commune succeeding tot he property of the baron. An average Russian peasant is by far more democratic and educated, irrespective of his illiteracy than an average farmer of the New World. He has the culture of the ages in his traditions, religion and national folk-arts. Russia has more than a thousand municipal theaters, more than a hundred grand operas, more than a hundred colleges and universities or musical conservatories. Russia has a well-organized system of cooperative banks and stores and a marvelous artelsystem of the working professional classes which in its democratic principles surpasses by far the labor union systems of the West. Herr von Bruggen, the eminent German historian writes of the Russian tendency as follows: "Wherever the Russian finds a native population in a low state of civilization, he knows how to settle down with it without driving it out or crushing it; he is hailed by the natives as the bringer of order, as a civilizing power."

I have always preached and continue to do so in the future, that Russia and the United States should join hands, know and love each other, the sooner the better. Russia needs the active spirit, the practical grasp of the things, which the people of the United States possess. Nothing will help and inspire an average Russian more than the sincere democratic hand of an American. A dose of American optimism and active spirit is the best toxin for free Russia. On the other hand, the American needs just as much Russian emotionalism, aesthetic culture and mystic romanticism, as he can give of his racial qualities.

The old system having gone, Russia is free to open her national, spiritual and physical treasures. For some time to come neither Germany nor other European countries, will be able to go to Russia, for even if the war does not last long, its havoc will take years to repair. Endless readjustments will have to take place in each country affected by the war. Russia, being more an agricultural, intellectual-aristocratical country, will fell least of all the after effects of the past horrors, therefore has the greatest potentialities. There is not only a great work, adventure and romance that waits an American pioneer in Russia, but a great mission which will ultimately benefit both nations. It should be understood that the Russian democracy will not be based upon the economic-industrial, but aesthetic-intellectual principles of life. It is not the money, the financial power that will play the dominant role in free Russia, but the ideal, the dramatic, the romantic or mystic tendency. Money will never have that meaning in Russia which it has in the West. It will be the individual, the emotional, the great symbol of the mystic beyond, that will speak from future democratic Russia only in a different and more dynamic form, as it has been speaking in the past.

As Lincoln is the living voice of the American people, thus Tolstoy is and remains the glorified Russian peasant uttering his heart to the world. The voice of this man alone is sufficient to tell the outside world that the Russian democracy is a creation not of form and economics but of spirit and aesthetics.

[signed]Ivan Narodny

Author of "Echoes of Myself," "The Dance," "The Art of Music," X
Volume, etc.

The American Bride

Petka had been for years a village tailor but he had never been able to save enough money to open a grocery-store. He hated his profession and hated to think that he could never get anything higher in the social rank of the place than what he was. While the name of a tailor sounded to him so cheap, that of a merchant flattered his ambition immensely. But there was no chance to earn the five hundred rubles, which, he thought, was necessary to change the profession.

"If I marry a poor peasant girl like Tina or Vera, I'll never get anywhere," soliloquized Petka and made plans for his future.

Petka knew a girl with two hundred ruble-dowry, but she was awfully homely and deaf; and he knew a widow with three hundred rubles, but she was twenty years older than himself. It was a critical situation.

One day Petka heard that the daughter of an old peddler had a dowry of five hundred rubles, exactly the amount he needed. After careful planning of the undertaking he hired a horse and drove to the lonely cottage of the rag peddler to whom he explained as clearly as he could, the purpose of his visit.

"My Liz ain't at home," the old man replied. "She is in that distant country called America. Good Lord, Liza is a lady of some distinction. If you should see her on the street you would never take her for my daughter. She wears patent-leather shoes, kid-gloves, corsets and such finery. Why, I suppose she has a proposal for every finger, if not more. She is some girl, I tell you."

Petka listened with throbbing heart to the thrilling story of the old man, scratched his head and said:

"I suppose that she is employed in some high class establishment or something like that?"

"Of course, she is," grunted the peddler proudly. "She might be employed or she might not. She has written to me that she is a lady all right."

"What is her special occupation?"

"She is employed as the waitress in a lunch-room on the so called Second Avenue corner at New York. And her salary reaches often thirty dollars a month, which represents a value in our money of something over sixty rubles. Now that is not a joke. She has all the food and lodging free. Why, it's a real gold-mine."

"Has she saved already much?"

"She has five hundred dollars in the savings bank, and she has all the hats and shoes, and gloves and such stuff that would make our women faint. So you see she is the real thing."

The happy father pulled the daughter's letter from the bottom of his bed and reached it over to the visitor. Petka read and reread the letter with breathless curiosity. In the letter which was also a small snap-shot picture of the girl. Petka looked at the picture and did not know what to say. To judge from her photograph, she was a frail spinster, with high cheekbones, a long neck and a nose like a frozen potato. But the trimming of her hair, her city hat with flowers, and her whole American bearing made her interesting enough to the ambitious tailor. For a long time he was gazing at the picture and thinking.

"Do you think that Liza would marry a man like me? I am a well known tailor. But I have now a chance to become a merchant in our village. I need some money to make up the difference, and why not try the luck? Liza might be a well known waitress in New York, but to be a merchant's wife is a different thing. Don't you think she might consider my proposal seriously?"

The old peddler puffed at his pipe, walked to the window and back as if measuring the matter most seriously.

"It all depends—you know Liza is a queer girl—it all depends on how you strike her with a strong letter. You could not go to New York and make the proposal personally. It has to be done by mail. It all depends how well the letter is written, how everything is explained and how the idea of being a merchant's wife strikes her. She is a queer girl, like all the American women are."

"Can your Liza read and write letters?"

"Of course, she can. Liza is a lady of some standing. She can write and read like our priest. She is a highly educated girl."

"So you think a strong letter will fix her up?"

"Exactly. And tell her everything you plan to do."

Petka took Liza's address, drank a glass of vodka to the success of the plan and left the old peddler still harping on his daughter. All the way home and many days afterwards Petka could think of nothing else. It seemed to him the greatest opportunity in the world to marry a girl from America. But now and then he got skeptical of his ability to get such a prize. However, he decided to try. He admitted that the whole success lay in the shaping of a strong and convincing letter and sending it to her properly. Petka knew how to write letters, but the question was would his style be impressive enough to influence a girl in America to come to Russia and marry a man whom she had never seen? However, Petka knew Platon, the village saloon-keeper, as the most gifted man for that purpose. But in a case like this he hated to take anybody into his confidence.

After arriving home Petka began to practice, writing a love letter every day. But nothing came of it. One letter was too mild, the other too extravagant. Finally he gave it up, and whispered his secret to the inn-keeper, saying:

"Now, old man, do me the great favor and I'll fix you up when I get her dowry. I want the letter to be strong and tender at the same time."

The inn-keeper consented. But Petka had to tell all the details and the specifications. Evan Platon admitted that it required some skill to write the letter. When he had thought the matter over carefully, made some notes and discussed the subject with Petka from every angle, he took a long sheet of paper, glued a rose in the corner and wrote as follows:

"Highly respected Mademoiselle Liza:—You have never been in our village, but it is a peach. I am the cream of the place. I have here all the girls I need. I have a house and my business. But the point is I want to open a store and need a wife with experience. We have all the money. But I need some capital to begin. As you have all that and besides, I have fallen in love with you, I lay the offer before your tender feet. Your beautiful image has haunted me day and night, and your wonderful eyes follow me in my dreams, oh, you lovely rose! If you are ready to marry a merchant like myself, do not waste any time, but come over and let's have a marriage ceremony as the world has never seen here. However, before you do come, send me an early reply with a rosy yes. Most affectionately and respectfully, Petka Petroff."

"It's bully, it's superb," praised the tailor. "But it lacks the tender touch. It lacks that style which the city women like."

"I put in the punch, but you can add a love poem from some school-book if you like," protested the inn-keeper. "The city girls are funny creatures. Sometimes they like the finger, other times the fist. Who knows the taste of your Liza! The waitresses of big cities are usually broad-minded and highly educated."

After the poem was added and another rose glued on the corner of the letter, it was mailed, registered, with a note "highly urgent," and Petka breathed freely, like one who had survived a great ordeal.

Two months of heavy waiting passed and still no reply from Liza. Petka was like one on thorns. His strange romance was already known to his neighbors and now everybody was expecting the letter from America to furnish the most sensational news in all the world.

One afternoon as the tailor was sewing a pair of trousers the alderman of the village brought him a registered letter from America. Nearly half the village population had gathered outside, curious to hear the content of the letter. Petka took tremblingly and greatly excited the letter and rushed to Platon, the inn-keeper, all the time followed by the crowd. All the audience gathered in the inn and Platon was instructed to read it aloud to the gathering. As it was a ceremonial event of rare occasion, the inn-keeper stood up, and began in a solemn voice:

"My dear Petka: I am most happy to reply to your valued letter of the fifteenth of July, that I am glad to accept your proposal. But everything must be all right. I can marry only a man of the merchant class. I know the business and I can supply you with the capital you need. But you must remember that I do not like to be fooled and marry a man beneath me. No peasant or tailor for me. I stand here very high and cannot ruin my name. You have not told me your age, but I suppose you are not an old fogey. I will follow this letter next month, so you fix the wedding ceremony, secure all the musicians and manage the meals, drinks and such necessities. If this is not agreeable cable me. Your Liza."

While Platon was reading the letter Petka gazed dreamily out of the window and built, not an air castle, but a large grocery store, with showy windows. It seemed as if he saw his store already opened, the people going and coming, the shelves filled with cans and packages. The sign "Merchant Petka" hung in his eyes.

The letter was like a bomb in the idyllic village. Plans were made of the wedding date and elaborate ceremony. The village Luga had never witnessed yet a marriage ceremony of this magnitude. The American bride was like a fairy princess of some ancient times. Petka was like one in a trance. But Vasska, the blacksmith, opposed to the idea of such a strange marriage, pounded his hand against the bar, exclaiming:

"Liza may be all right, but Petka should not marry her. What do we know about an American woman? What do we know about her habits? I've been told funny stories about such strange women. I've heard that nearly every American woman paints her cheeks, dyes her hair, wears false teeth, puts up bluffs and does everything to deceive a man. Spit at her capital. Besides, this American Liza is a woman whom nobody here knows."

The blacksmith's arguments were taken seriously by the others and a gloom came over the gathered gossips. But the inn-keeper, who was always optimistic, replied:

"American Liza must be a refined girl, and she has the money. That's what Petka wants, and that's what he will get. So we better let the wedding take place and see what will happen. I've heard that an American woman looks at the marriage as a business proposition, so we let her do what she pleases."

"Business or no business, but we take the marriage seriously. If a man makes up his mind that he likes a woman, he must marry her, and once he has married her, no ax or pike shall separate them. No monkeying with married men or women thereafter," argued the serious blacksmith.

Petka turned the conversation to the subject of the wedding meals and music. The whole program of the ceremony was analyzed and discussed in detail, some maintaining that the American custom was to eat with forks and knives from the plates, others that only uncooked meat was eaten and frogs served as delicacies. Finally the entertainment was arranged and the blacksmith remarked:

"All city women like fun and don't care about serious affairs. They have the theaters and operas for amusements, so we better get a real amusement for American Liza. The best fun would be a huge hurdy-gurdy or something of that kind, an instrument with sensation. Our village violins and harps are too mild for women like that Liza."

After discussing the matter at length, the inn-keeper agreed to take care of the entertainment. A short cable was composed and sent to Liza and the wedding date clearly explained. All the village got alive with the news that Petka was to marry an American girl by mail.

The three weeks of preparation for the wedding festival passed like a dream. The Sunday, that was to be the final date, began bright and cheerful. Petka was hustling to and fro in his newly rented house, the front of which was to be arranged for the grocery store, strutted like a big rooster preparing the affairs of his flock. At the entrance of the house was hung a big flag. Long tables were arranged in all the rooms, covered with meats, drinks and delicacies, all prepared in the village. Women were still busy baking other foods, frying meats and boiling water for tea or drinks. Everybody was busy and everything looked most solemn and impressive. The host was dressed in a picturesque new suit of clothes with a silk scarf around his neck.

While the groom was busy with preparing his heart for joy, the inn-keeper was solving the problem of the entertainment. He had constructed, what he thought to be distinctly American, a huge music-box, which was to produce the most wonderful tones ever heard. This instrument had the appearance of a big wine-cask and yet a street-organ at the same time, and was an invention of the ingenious inn-keeper. It was practically a barrel, covered with illustrations of old Sunday newspapers and county-fair posters. To its side was fastened an improvised lever, made from a broken cart-wheel. Under this barrel, concealed so that no one could see within, were placed three most prominent musicians of the village, Ivan with his violin, Semen with his concertina and Nicholas with his drum. As soon as the conductor outside pulled a string, the lever began to turn around and the musicians in the barrel had to start to play. In the corner of the house this strange instrument looked like a mysterious engine, one knew not whether to expect it to develop into a flying or moving picture machine.

At last everything was ready. The guests began to arrive and the carriage was sent to the town to bring the bride. Everybody was in festival attire and all tuned to expect the utmost excitements the village had ever had. One could see the people in groups of three or four, discussing in a high pitch of voice the wonders of the wedding festival or venturing various guesses about the American bride. The village girls, who were not a little jealous, nudged each other and exchanged meaning glances, that Petka was to get in a fix he had never been before. All were anxious to see the arrival of the two thousand-ruble bride. The blacksmith and the inn-keeper were discussing something excitedly.

"Say what you want, but this kind of matrimonial affair is the limit," argued the blacksmith, pushing back his hat. "I can't see how a woman comes such a distance and so many weeks to marry Petka, whom she has never seen, and how Petka gets the crazy thought to marry a city woman whom he does not know. Something is wrong somewhere. This is going to bust sooner or later."

"My dear Vasska, it's the education, the refinement and all that which I and you can do without," grunted the inn-keeper.

Vasska rubbed his fists and spat vigorously. The inn-keeper tried to mollify him by saying that he should not take the matter so seriously.

Suddenly the dogs began to bark and the boys shouted:

"The American bride! Here comes the lady from abroad!"

All the guests rushed out to see her. And there she was, in a big flower-trimmed hat, with a silk parasol, and all the wonderful fineries. She looked so elegant, so superior that the village women, accustomed to their rural simplicity, felt overawed. The groom hurrying with throbbing heart to open the gates of the front-yard bowed almost to the ground to the dazzling reality of his romantic dreams. He was so confused by this apparition that he did not know whether to shout or cry.

"My gracious, how she is made up!" whispered the women.

"What a wonderful dress!" whispered the girls.

"Ain't you Petka? You deary!" exclaimed the bride, affecting a foreign accent.

"Yes, mademoiselle, gracious yes," stammered the groom nervously, wiping the tears of joy from his eyes.

"Gee, Petka, you are a nice boy!" gushed the bride, trying to show the quality of her refinement.

She took his both hands and whispered that he should kiss them gracefully in the American manner. Then she leaned her head on his shoulder and sighed. These American manners so embarrassed the groom that he blushed and dropped his eyes. But after all, was she not a highly educated American lady? And of course, she knew what was proper.

Though Liza looked ten years older than Petka, yet she had all the city air, the American manners and style, and most important of all, she had the capital. The first question Liza asked was whether they had a manicure, hair-dresser and boot-black in the village. No one had ever heard that such functionaries existed, so the groom explained excitedly that he would take her after the wedding to the town where she could get what she wanted. Petka carried the trunk and the five suit-cases into he house, implements which on one had ever seen. All the novelties and sensations were so great that the guests and the groom felt dazed for a moment.

"Have you got here champagne?" asked the bride, entering the house.

"We do not have such American drinks. We have kvas, beer, vodka and all the home-made cordials," stammered the groom.

"But you must have some high-balls or cocktails at least," went on the bride with an affected gesture.

"My gracious, there we are!" groaned the groom, and shrugged denyingly his shoulders. "We've never handled those things here, so you must forgive us."

"Mademoiselle Liza, I beg your pardon," interrupted the inn-keeper seriously. "We can arrange the balls and the tails, but you see we are simply country people and keep our bowels in order. City amusements put our stomachs in a bad fix and don't agree with us."

The groom felt embarrassed and did not know what to do. He bowed apologetically before his bride and tried to please her in every possible way. He imitated her gestures and manners, her shrugs and voice. He even kept his hands on his breast, as was Liza's manner. Finally the bride asked whether there was any entertainment prepared as she had asked. The groom gave the inn-keeper a hint and the latter said that he would do his best. The three musicians were already concealed with their instruments in a big barrel and the imposing organist began his function. Strains of an unique music issued from the decorated music-box. Everybody at once rushed into the room. All stared amazed at the strange contrivance which played at one and the same time concertina, violin and drum. It was like a miracle, gripping and inspiring.

"I bet you this would interest your American audiences," remarked the inn-keeper to the bride.

"It beats the Coney Island noise," stammered Liza, and took up the conversation with a village woman.

All the house now was jollity. The room was bursting of the powerful music, the laughter and the loud conversation of the guests. How it happened no one knows, but one of the women had placed a bowl with hot punch on the music box. Whether through an accident, or the excitement of the organist, the vessel broke, and the punch leaked through the cracks and holes into the instrument. Suddenly the music stopped, although the conductor was still industriously turning the lever. Then were heard mysterious voices and sounds as if of muffled exclamations. Everybody looked at the music-box, which began to quake and tremble as if a ghost were within. Then arose fierce yells and agonizing cries, mixed with loud curses. Before anybody could realize what had happened, three angry musicians leaped from the music instrument, the steaming punch dropping from their heads.

"Good Lord, what's this?" gasped the men while the women shrieked and fled. One of the musicians put his fist under the frightened organist and shouted:

"I'll pay for this joke, you scoundrel!"

"Semen, don't be a fool. I didn't do it. By Jove, I didn't do it," exclaimed apologetically the organist, trembling.

"Damn, who did it?" asked the groom excited.

No one replied. And when the people realized what had happened, everybody roared. No one who glanced at the overturned music instrument and at the musicians, with their punch-dropping heads could restrain their laughter. Even the pompous bride found it so funny that she laughed with the rest.

When the excitement was over and the dessert was ready the wedding guests once more took their seats at the table. The inn-keeper, thinking that this was the moment to settle the matter of dowry, before the actual marriage act could be performed by the priest, knocked on the table for quiet. Then he arose, wiped his beard and began:

"Friends, this is a very unusual ceremony, our best known citizen and friend Petka, marrying a girl from America. Petka loves Liza, it is all right. But I know and so all our guests know, that Petka expected the bride to bring a fat dowry. Now we all would like to see the bride place her dowry upon the table before she is declared the wife of our friend, Petka. We think that in justice to the guests she ought to do that, because it was understood that she bring the money and we give her the husband. Don't you think, friends and guests, that I am right?"

Everybody shouted "Bravo, inn-keeper," only the groom and the bride sat silent with downcast eyes. Finally the bride glanced at Petka, pulled a bag from her dress, opened it and laid a bunch of green bills on the table. All eyes stared in awe at the money, and the guests were so silent that one could hear the beating of their hearts. Only the purring of the cats, looking curiously down from the big stove, was to be heard.

"Here is the dowry, right here. It is in American money, one thousand dollars, which is equal to two thousand rubles in your money. It's all in cash," exclaimed the bride proudly.

The inn-keeper took the bills, looked at them curiously, turned them over and over and shook his head. The blacksmith took one bill after the other, and did the same. For several minutes everybody was quiet. The "organist" who sat next to the inn-keeper, took the money, looked at it still more closely and then smelled it. Taking one of the bills in his hand, he rose and showed it to all the guests and asked:

"Friends, have you ever seen this kind of money?"

"No," was the unanimous reply of the guests.

"Can any one here read American?" asked the blacksmith.

No one replied.

"The money is all right. I rushed to reach the train so I had no time to exchange it into your rubles," replied the bride.

"It might be all right," replied the inn-keeper, "but what do we know about the American money and its value? I've been told many stories of American girls boasting they have money enough to buy their husband, but heaven knows. It's a country too far away and a language too complicated for us to understand. We like to have our stuff on the table before everything is all right."

The bride glanced at the groom. The groom took silently her hand, assuring her that he cared nothing for what her dowry was worth, if he had only her as his wife.

"What nonsense! I came on Petka's invitation, and I'll stay with him, do you let the priest marry us or not. We can go both to America and marry there, but never here," exclaimed the bride, tossing her head and snorting her indignation. As she rose, she took Petka by his hand and gave this parting thrust:

"Do you want or not, but I'll stay with Petka here. We don't care for your priest. I keep the American law and know what's what."

"Liza, Liza, listen. Don't make a scandal like that here. Let's better harness our horses and get to the priest as fast as we can," shouted the excited guests, all following the couple.

[signed]Ivan Narodny

The Insane Priest

A priest insane went many days without repose or sleep,
"My visions are a shadow world but love is real and deep."
He, like a prophet, staff in hand, sought out a distant shrine.
"As sacred ash are all my dreams, and fateful love is mine."
Long, long he knelt and prayed alone, his tears fell unrestrained.
"My visions are the snow-crowned heights, my love the flood unchained."
A sacrifice he laid upon that altar far away.
"My visions are a dream of dawn, my love the radiant day."
A knife he thrust into his heart, to seal the holy rite.
"My visions all resplendent glow, my love is like the night."
And on the altar falling prone, he then gave up his soul.
"My visions are the lightning's flash, my love the thunder's roll."
Upon the altar poured his blood, it formed a crimson pall.
"As his deliriums are my dreams, as death my love my all."

Sergey Makowsky
Translation by Constance Purdy

Note: To this poem Mr. Reinhold Gliere has composed a magnificent musical setting with piano and orchestra accompaniment and dedicated it to a prominent Russian revolutionist.

Without a Country

One thought awakes us early in the morning,
One thought follows us the whole day long,
One thought stabs at night our breast:
Is my father suffering?

One sorrow awakes us at dawn like an executioner,
One sorrow is persecuting us ceaselessly,
One sorrow is swelling our breast the whole night long:
Is my mother alive?

A longing awakes us at daybreak,
A longing is continually hidden in our heart,
A longing is burning at night in our breast;
What of my wife?

A fear awakes us early like a funeral mass,
A fear persecutes us and darkens our eyes,
A fear fills at night our breast with hatred:
Our sisters are threatened with shame.

A pain awakens us in the morning like a trumpet,
With pain is filled every glass we drink
With pain is secretly weeping our breast:
Where are our children?

…Only one way will give an answer:
Through a river of blood and over a bridge of dead!
Woe! you will reach your home where the mother, who died of sorrow,
Does not wait for her son any more.

M. Boich

Note: M. Boich is a young Serbian poet, now about twenty-six years old, who already has a recognized place in modern Serbian Literature. The poem "Without a Country" was written after the well-known Serbian tragedy of 1915, and was published last year (March 28) in the official Serbian journal "Srpske Novine," which now appears at Corfu.

Indian Prayer to the Mountain Spirit

Lord of the Mountain,
Reared within the Mountain
Young Man, Chieftain,
Hear a young man's prayer!

Hear a prayer for cleanness.
Keeper of the strong rain,
Drumming on the mountain;
Lord of the small rain
That restores the earth in newness;
Keeper of the clean rain,
Hear a prayer for wholeness.

Young Man, Chieftain.
Hear a prayer for fleetness.
Keeper of the deer's way,
Reared among the eagles,
Clear my feet of slothness.
Keeper of the paths of men,
Hear a prayer for straightness.

Hear a prayer for braveness.
Lord of the thin peaks,
Reared amid the thunders;
Keeper of the headlands
Holding up the harvest,
Keeper of the strong rocks
Hear a prayer for staunchness.

Young Man, Chieftain,
Spirit of the Mountain!

Interpreted by [signed] Mary Austin

To America—4 July, 1776

When England's king put English to the horn[1],
To England thus spake England over sea,
"In peace be friend, in war my enemy";
Then countering pride with pride, and lies with scorn,
Broke with the man[2] whose ancestor had borne
A sharper pain for no more injury.
How otherwise should free men deal and be,
With patience frayed and loyalty outworn?
No act of England's shone more generous gules
Than that which sever'd once for all the strands
Which bound you English. You may search the lands
In vain, and vainly rummage in the schools,
To find a deed more English, or a shame
On England with more honor to her name.

[written] Respectfully submitted to the Defenders of Democracy

[signed] M. Hewlett

(Westluilaruig[illegible, this is a guess], Chichester, England)

[1] To "put to the horn" was to declare an outlawry. [2] The "man" is George III, his "ancestor," Charles I.

The Need of Force to Win and Maintain Peace

Must, then, gentle and reasonable men and women give over their sons to the National Government to be trained for the devilish work of war? Must civilized society continue to fight war with war? Is not the process a complete failure? Shall we not henceforth contend against evil-doing by good-doing, against brutality by gentleness, against vice in others solely by virtue in ourselves?

There are many sound answers to these insistent queries. One is the policeman, usually a protective and adjusting force, but armed and trained to hurt and kill in defense of society against criminals and lunatics. Another is the mother who blazes into violence, with all her might, in defense of her child. Even the little birds do that. Another is the instinctive forcible resistance of any natural man to insult or injury committed or threatened against his mother, wife, or daughter. The lions and tigers do as much. A moving answer of a different sort is found in words written by Mme. le Verrier to the parents of Victor Chapman on her return from his funeral in the American Church in Paris—"It…has brought home to me the beauty of heroic death and the meaning of life."

The answer from history is that primitive Governments were despotic, and in barbarous societies might makes right; but that liberty under law has been wrung from authority and might by strenuous resistance, physical as well as moral, and not by yielding to injustice and practising non-resistance. The Dutch Republic, the British Commonwealth, the French Republic, the Italian and Scandinavian constitutional monarchies, and the American republics have all been developed by generations of men ready to fight and fighting.

So long as there are wolves, sheep cannot form a safe community. The precious liberties which a few more fortunate or more vigorous nations have won by fighting for them generation after generation, those nations will have to preserve by keeping ready to fight in their defense.

The only complete answer to these arguments in favor of using force in defense of liberty is that liberty is not worth the cost. In free countries to-day very few persons hold that opinion.

[signed] Charles W. Eliot

Woman and Mercy

Woman and Mercy—to think of one is to think of the other, and yet the suggestion of ideas is purely Christian. The ancient world knew of a few great women who transcended the conditions of society in those days and helped, each one her country, in some extraordinary way. Thus Deborah helped the people of God in a time of terrible difficulty. And even the Pagan world was not without its Semiramis and its Portia. When mercy came into the world with Christianity the dispensation of it was largely committed to the gentle hands of women, for since men have believed that God has taken a woman to be His human mother, the position of every woman has been that of a mother and of a queen. The wife has become the guardian of the internal affairs of the home as the husband is of its external affairs.

Whenever women have acted up to the noble ideals of womanhood preached by the Christian religion, they have received honor, respect, deference and almost worship from the ruder sex.

It gives me great pleasure to think that in our own country so many women have banded themselves together for such a noble ideal as that embodied in the very name of "The Militia of Mercy." Here in her true sphere, as nurse, woman will shed the gentle light of mercy over the gory battle field and amid the pain and wounds of the hospital wards; or, if she is not called to such active participation she will find means to hold up the hands of those more actively engaged, and in countless ways will she be able to mitigate the evils of this most terrible of all wars, and not least of all because of the gift of piety with which Almighty God has so generously endowed her. Her unceasing prayers will ascend to the throne of God for those engaged in this terrible struggle, and mercies and blessings will be drawn down upon multitudes of people whom she has never seen.

I bid Godspeed to The Militia of Mercy, and I hope that every American woman who can will take part in this most womanly and most patriotic work.

[signed] J. Cardinal Gibbons

Joan of Arc—Her Heritage

I saw in Orleans three years ago the celebration of the 487th
Anniversary of the deliverance of the ancient city by Joan of Arc.

The flower of the French army passed before me, the glorious sunlight touching sword and lance and bayonet tip until they formed a shimmering fretwork of steel. Then came the City Fathers in democratic dress—and following them, the dignitaries of the Church, in purple and crimson and old lace, and a host of choir boys singing Glory to God in the Highest, and finally in his splendid scarlet robe, a cardinal symbolical of power and majesty and dominion.

In whose honor was all this gorgeous pageantry? In honor of a simple peasant girl, who saw or thought she saw visions—it is perfectly immaterial whether she did or not—and who heard or fancied she heard—it matters not—voices calling to her out of the silences of the night to go forth and save France. Soldiers and clergy and populace, Catholics and Protestants and pagans united in paying homage to the courage of a woman. And I thought as I watched the brilliant spectacle in the shadow of the old cathedral, that thousands of women in the twentieth century in England and America, and France and Germany and all the Nations are serving in a different way, it is true, from the way in which Joan of Arc served France, but none the less effectively. Aye, even more so, as they go forth clad not in mail, but in Christian love to help mankind. In the very forefront of this shining host are the trained nurses, following the standard uplifted by Florence Nightingale.

When I see a trained nurse in her attractive cap and gown I always feel that a richer memory, a finer intention has been read into life. Wherever they go they carry healing with them.

To maintain this army of militant good will and helpfulness, and to increase it as occasion requires is an obligation so imperative that it cannot be evaded.

Never was it as urgent as it is to-day, that there should be generous response to the appeal for nurses.

If we are often discouraged in our philanthropic work, it is not because we consider what we are doing in a detached way, independent of its world relationships. If we could only realize that we are part of the mighty army composed of all nationalities and races and creeds, an army of life, not of death, marching past disease and suffering and misery and sin, we would be inspired to wage the conflict with greater vigor, until our vision of the world freed from suffering, was realized.

When the realization comes, it will not come with shouting and tumult, but will come quietly and beautifully as the sun makes its triumphant progress through the heavens, gradually conquering the night until at last the earth is flooded with glorious warmth and light and all the formless shapes that loved darkness rather than light silently steal away and are forgotten.

John Lewis Griffiths

Note: Although the above selection was part of an address delivered in
London in 1911, its truth is more apparent today than ever before.

Things Which Cannot Be Shaken

There are season in life when everything seems to be shaking. Old landmarks are crumbling. Venerable foundations are upheaved in a night, and are scattered abroad as dust. Guiding buoys snap their moorings, and go drifting down the channel. Institutions which promised to outlast the hills collapse like a stricken tent. Assumptions in which everybody trusted burst like air-balloons. Everything seems to lose its base, and trembles in uncertainty and confusion.

Such seasons are known in our personal life. One day our circumstances appear to share the unshaken solidity of the planet, and our security is complete. And then some undreamed-of antagonism assaults our life. We speak of it as a bolt from the blue! Perhaps it is some stunning disaster in business. Or perhaps death has leaped into our quiet meadows. Or perhaps some presumptuous sin has suddenly revealed its foul face in the life of one of our children. And we are "all at sea!" Our little, neat hypotheses crumple like withered leaves. Our accustomed roads are all broken up, our conventional ways of thinking and feeling, and the sure sequences on which we have depended vanish in a night. It is experiences like these which make the soul cry out with the psalmist, in bewilderment and fear,—"My foot slippeth!" His customary foothold had given way. The ground was shaking beneath him. The foundations trembled.

And such seasons are known in the life of nations. An easy-going traditionalism can be overturned in a single blast. Conventional standards, which seemed to have the fixedness of the stars are blown to the winds. Political and economic safeguards go down like wooden fences before an angry sea. The customary foundations of society are shaken. We must surely have had such experiences as these during the past weeks and months. What was unthinkable has become a commonplace. The impossible has happened. Our working assumptions are in ruins. Common securities have vanished. And on every side men and women are whispering the question,—Where are we? We are all staggered! And everywhere men and women, in their own way, are whispering the confession of the psalmist,—"My foot slippeth!"

Well, where are we? Amid all these violations of our ideals, and the quenching of our hopes, in this riot of barbarism and unutterable sorrow, where are we? Where can we find a footing? Where can we stay our souls? Where can we set our feet as upon solid rock? Amid the many things which are shaking what things are there which cannot be shaken?

"Things which cannot be shaken." Let us begin here: THE SUPREMACY OF SPIRITUAL FORCES CANNOT BE SHAKEN. The obtrusive circumstances of the hour shriek against that creed. Spiritual forces seem to be overwhelmed. We are witnessing a perfect carnival of insensate materialism. The narratives which fill the columns of the daily press reek with the fierce spectacle of labor and achievement. And yet, in spite of all this appalling outrage upon the sense, we must steadily beware of becoming the victims of the apparent and the transient. Behind the uncharted riot there hides a power whose invisible energy is the real master of the field. The ocean can be lashed by the winds into indescribable fury, and the breakers may rise and fall in crushing weight and disaster; and yet behind and beneath all the wild phenomena there is a subtle, mystical force which is exerting its silent mastery even at the very height of the storm. We must discriminate between the phenomenal and the spiritual, between the event of the hour and the drift of the year, between the issue of a battle and the tendency of a campaign. All of which means that "While we look at the things which are seen, we are also to look at the things which are not seen." Well, look at them.

THE POWER OF TRUTH can never be shaken. The force of disloyalty may have its hour of triumph, and treachery may march for a season to victory after victory; but all the while truth is secretly exercising her mastery, and in the long run the labor of falsehood will crumble into ruin. There is no permanent conquest for a lie. You can no more keep the truth interred than you could keep the Lord interred in Joseph's tomb. You cannot bury the truth, you cannot strangle her, you cannot even shake her! You may burn up the records of the truth, but you cannot impair the truth itself! When the records are reduced to ashes truth shall walk abroad as an indestructible angel and minister of the Lord! "He shall give His angels charge over thee," and truth is one of His angels, and she cannot be destroyed.

There was a people in the olden days who sought to find security in falsehood, and to construct a sovereignty by the aid of broken covenants. Let me read to you their boasts as it is recorded by the prophet Isaiah: "We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement: when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us, for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves." And so they banished truth. But banished truth is not vanquished truth. Truth is never idle; she is ever active and ubiquitous, she is forever and forever our antagonist or our friend. "Therefore thus saith the Lord God…your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand…and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding-places." Thus said the Lord! We may silence a fort, but we cannot paralyze the truth. Amid all the material convulsions of the day the supremacy of truth remains unshaken. "The mouth of the Lord hath spoken it."

"Things which cannot be shaken!" What is there which cannot be shaken? THE PASSION OF FREEDOM is one of the rarest of spiritual flames, and it can not be quenched. Make your appeal to history. Again and again militarism has sought to crush it, but it has seemed to share the very life of God. Brutal inspirations have tried to smother it, but it has breathed an indestructible life. Study its energy in the historical records of the Book or in annals of a wider field. Study the passion of freedom amid the oppressions of Egypt, or in the captivity of Babylon, or in the servitude of Rome. How does the passion express itself? "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, and may my right hand forget her cunning!" Study it in the glowing pages of the history of this country, that breath of free aspiration which no power of armament, and no menace of material strength was ever able to destroy. The mightiest force in all those days was not the power of threat, and powder, and sword, but that breath of invincible aspiration which was the very breath of God. And when we gaze upon stricken Belgium to-day, and look upon her sorrows, and her smitten fields, and her ruined cities, and her desolate homes, we can firmly and confidently proclaim that the breath of that divinely planted aspiration, her passion of freedom, will prove to be mightier than all the materialistic strength and all the prodigious armaments which seem to have laid her low. It is a reality which cannot be shaken.

There are other spiritual forces which we might have named, and which would have manifested the same incontestable supremacy: there is the energy of meekness, that spirit of docility which communes with the Almighty in hallowed and receptive awe: there is the boundless vitality of love which lives on through midnight after midnight, unfainting and unspent: there is the inexhaustible energy of faith which hold on and out amid the massed hostilities of all its foes. You cannot defeat spirits like these, you cannot crush and destroy them. You cannot hold them under, for their supremacy shares the holy sovereignty of the eternal God. "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord;" and these spirits, the spirit of truth, the spirit of freedom, the spirit of meekness and love, are in fellowship with the divine Spirit, and therefore shall they remain unshaken.

[signed]J.H. Jowett

Somewhere in France

"Somewhere in France"—the day is tranquil, the sky unvexed, the green earth without a wound as I write; yet "somewhere in France" the day is torn with clamors, the sky is soiled with man's mounting hatred of man, and long, open wounds lie cruelly across the disputed earth. "Somewhere in France"—my mind goes back to remembered scenes: the crowd blocking the approach to a depot; white faces and staring eyes, eyes that alternately fear and hope, and in the crush a tickling gray line of returning PERMISSIONAIRES. "Somewhere in France"—on such a perfect day as this I see a little village street nestled among the trees, and hear the sound of the postman's reluctant feet tapping over the cobblestones—the postman that comes with the relentlessness of Fate—and at every house the horror of the black envelope. "Somewhere in France" the great immemorial cathedrals and the dotted, cool, moss-covered churches are filled with supplicating women and the black-framed, golden locks of children lifting their eyes before the Great Consoler as the sun breaks through the paling candle-flames. "Somewhere in France"—in its crowded stations I remember a proud womanhood, gray in the knowledge of sorrow, speeding its young sons and speaking the Spartan words. "Somewhere in France," in its thousand hospitals, the ministering white-clad angels are moving in their long vigils, calm, smiling, inspired. "Somewhere in France"—I see again imperishable fragments of remembered emotions; the women working in the vineyards of Champagne, careless of fate or the passing shells; the orphan children playing in the ruins of Rheims; a laughing child in bombarded Arras running out to pick up an exploded shell, a child in whom daily habits has brought fear into contempt; a skeleton of a church in far-flung Bethany, that still lives in a sea of fire, where a black-coated priest of the unflinching faith was holding his mass among kneeling men before an altar hidden in the last standing corner from which the shredded ruins had been swept.

"Somewhere in France"—I remember the volcanic earth, the strewn ruin of all things, the prostrate handiwork of man mingled with the indignant bowels of the earth, and from a burrowed hole a POILU laughing out at us in impertinent greeting, with a gaiety which is more difficult than courage.

"Somewhere in France"—in bombarded Arras, was it not?—I remember an old woman, a very old woman, leaning on her cane as she peered from her cellar door within a hundred yards of the smoldering cathedral. I wonder if she still lives, for Arras will be struggling back to life now.

"Somewhere in France"—what thronged memories troop at these liberating words! And yet, through all the passing drama of remembered little things, what I see always before my eyes is the spiritual rise of Verdun. Verdun, heroic sister of the Marne; Verdun, the battling heart of France—whose stained slopes are anointed by the blood of a million men. Verdun! The very name has the upward fury and descending shock of an attacking wave dying against an immemorial shore. To have seen it as I was privileged to see it in that historic first week of August, 1915, at the turning of the tide, at the moment of the retaking of Fleury and Thiaumont, was to have stood between two great spectacles: the written page of a defense such as history has never seen, and the future, glowing with the unquenchable fire of undying France. When I think of the flaming courage of that heroic race, my imagination returns always to the vision of that defense—not the patient fortitude before famine of Paris, Sebastopol or Mafeking, but that miracle of patience and calm in the face of torrential rains of steel which for months swept the human earth in such a deluge as never before had been sent in punishment upon the world. This was no adventure such as that gambling with fate which in all times and in all forms has stirred the spirit of man. Regiment after regiment marched down into the maw of hell, into the certainty of death. They went forward, not to dare, but to die, in that sublimest spirit of exultation and sacrifice of which humanity is capable, that the children of France might live free and unafraid, Frenchmen in a French land. They went in regiment after regiment, division after division—living armies to replace the ghostly armies that had held until they died. Days without nights, weeks without a breathing spell—five months and more. They lie there now, the human wall of France, that no artillery has ever mastered or ever will, to prove that greater than all the imagined horror of man's instinct of destruction, undaunted before the new death that rocks the earth beneath him and pollutes the fair vision of the sky above, the spirit of man abides superior. Death is but a material horror; the will to live free is the immortal thing.

[signed] Owen Johnson

The Associated Press

It is worth while to explain how the world's news is gathered and furnished in a newspaper issued at one cent a copy. First, as to the foreign news, which is, of course, the most difficult to obtain and the most expensive. In normal times there are the four great agencies which, with many smaller and tributary agencies, are covering the whole world. These four agencies are, as above noted, the Reuter Telegram Company, Ltd., of London, which assumes responsibility for the news of the great British Empire, including the home land, every colony except Canada, and the Suzerain, or allied countries, as Egypt, Turkey, and even China and Japan; and the Agency Havas of Paris, taking care of the Latin countries, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland and South America as well as Northern Africa; and the Wolff Agency of Berlin, reporting the happening in the Teutonic, Scandinavian, and Slav nations. These three organizations are allied with The Associated Press in an exclusive exchange arrangement. Subordinate to these agencies is a smaller one in almost every nation, having like exchange agreements with the larger companies.

Thus it happens that there is not a place of moment in the habitable globe that is not provided for. Moreover, there is scarcely a reporter on any paper in the world who does not, in a sense, become a representative of all these four agencies. Not only are there these alliances, but in every important capital of every country, and in a great many of the other larger cities abroad there are "A.P." men, trained by long experience in its offices in this country. This is done because, first, the organization is naturally anxious to view every country with American eyes; and, second, because a number of the agencies spoken of are under the influence of their Governments and, therefore, not always trustworthy. They are relied upon for a certain class of news, as for instance, accidents by flood and field, where there is no reason for any misrepresentation on their part. But where it is a question which may involve national pride or interest, or where there is a possibility of partisanship or untruthfulness, the "A.P." men are trusted.

Now, assume that a fire has broken out in Benares, the sacred city of the Hindus, on the banks of the Ganges, and a hundred or a thousand people have lost their lives. Not far away, at Allahabad or at Calcutta, is a daily paper, having a correspondent at Benares, who reports the disaster fully. Some one on this paper sends the story, or as much of it as is of general rather than local interest, to the agent of the Reuter Company at Calcutta, Bombay, or Madras; and thence it is cabled to London and Hongkong, and Sydney and Tokio. At each of these places there are Associated Press men, one of whom picks it up and forwards it to New York.

The wide world is combed for news, and an incredibly short time is delivered and printed everywhere. When Pope [Leo] XIII died in Rome the fact was announced by an Associated Press dispatch in the columns of a San Francisco paper in nine minutes from the instant when he breathed his last. And this message was repeated back to London, Paris, and Rome, and gave those cities the first information of the event. When Port Arthur was taken by the Japanese in the war of 1896 it came to us in New York in fifty minutes, although it passed through twenty-seven relay offices. Few of the operators transmitting it knew what the dispatch meant. But they understood the Latin letters, and sent it on from station to station, letter by letter.

When Peary came back from his great discovery in the Arctic Sea he reached Winter Harbor, on the coast of Labrador, and from there sent me a wireless message that he had nailed the Stars and Stripes to the North Pole. This went to Sydney, on Cape Breton Island, and was forwarded thence by cable and telegraph to New York.

The organization is cooperative in its character. As a condition of membership, each one belonging agrees to furnish to his fellow-members, either directly or through the Association, and to them exclusively, the news of his vicinage, as gathered by him for his own paper. This constitutes the large fountain from which our American news supply is drawn. But, as in the case of the foreign official agencies, if there be danger that an individual member is biased, or if the matter be one of high importance, our own trained and salaried staff men do the reporting. For this purpose, as well as for administrative work, there is a bureau in every leading city.

For the collection and interchange of this information we lease from the various telephone and telegraph companies, and operate with our own employees, something like fifty thousand miles of wires, stretching out in every direction through the country and touching every important center. To reach smaller cities, the telephone is employed. Everywhere in every land, and every moment of every day, there is ceaseless vigil for news.

People frequently ask what it costs thus to collect the news of the world. And we cannot answer. Our annual budget is between three and four million dollars. But this makes no account of the work done by the individual papers all over the world in reporting the matters and handling the news over to the agencies. Neither can we estimate the number of men and women engaged in this fashion. It is easy to measure the cost of certain specific events; as, for instance, we expended twenty-eight thousand dollars to report the Martinique disaster. And the Russo-Japanese war cost us over three hundred thousand dollars.

Such is an outline of our activities in what we call normal times. But these are not normal times. When the great European war broke on us, eighteen months ago, all of the processes of civilization seemed to go down in an hour. And we suffered in common with others. Our international relations for the exchange of news were instantly dislocated. We had been able to impress the governments abroad with the value of an impartial and unpurchasable news service, as opposed to the venal type of journalism, which was too common on the European continent. And in our behalf they had abolished their censorships. They had accorded us rules assuring us great rapidity in the transmission of our messages over their government telegraph lines. They had opened the doors of their chancelleries to our correspondents, and told them freely the news as it developed.

All the advantages ceased. The German news agency was prohibited from holding any intercourse with the English, French, or Russian organizations. Simultaneously, like commerce was interdicted in the other countries. The virtue of impartial news-gathering at once ceased to be quoted at par. Everywhere, in all of the warring lands the Biblical rule that "he that is not with me is against me," became the controlling view. Government telegrams were obviously very important and there was no time to consider anywhere any of the promised speed in sending our dispatches. Finally, censorships were imposed. This was quite proper in principle. Censorships are always necessary in time of war. But it is desirable, from every point of view, that they be intelligent, and that is not always the case.

Nevertheless, we have fared pretty well in the business of reporting this war. We have made distinct progress in teaching the belligerents that we hold no brief for any one of them, and, while each would much rather have us plead his cause, they are coming to see why we cannot and ought not do so. And our men are everywhere respected and accorded as large privileges as, perhaps, in the light of the tension of the hour, could be reasonably asked.

[signed] Melville E. Stone

Pan and the Pot-Hunter

They are not many who are privileged to learn that the forces of the Wilderness are as gods, distributing benefits, and, from such as have earned them, taking even handed reprisals. Only the Greeks of all peoples realized this in its entirety, and them the gods repaid with the pure joy of creation which is the special prerogative of gods.

But Greenhow had heard nothing of the Greeks save as a symbol of all unintelligibility, and of the gods not at all. His stock was out of England by way of the Tennessee mountains, drifting Pacific coastward after the war of the Rebellion, and he was a Pot Hunter by occasion and inclination. The occasion he owned to being born in one of the bays of the southerly Sierras where the plentitude of wild life reduced pot hunting to the degree of easy murder.

A Pot Hunter, you understand, is a business man. He is out for what he can get, and regards game laws as an interference with the healthful interactions of competition. Greenhow potted quail in the Temblors where by simply rolling out of his blanket he could bag two score at a shot as they flocked, sleek and stately blue, down the runways to the drinking places. He took pronghorn at Castac with a repeating rifle and a lure of his red necktie held aloft on a cleaning rod, and packed them four to a mule-back down the Tejon to Summerfield. He shot farrow does and fished out of season, and had never heard of the sportsmanly obligation to throw back the fingerlings. Anything that made gunning worth while to the man who came after you was, by Greenhow's reckoning, a menace to pot hunting.

There were Indians in those parts who could have told him better—notable hunters who never shot swimming deer nor does with fawn nor any game unaware; who prayed permission of the Wuld before they went to hunt, and left offal for their little brothers of the Wilderness. Indians know. But Greenhow, being a business man, opined that Indians were improvident, and not being even good at his business, fouled the waters where he camped, left man traces in his trails and neglected to put out his fires properly.

Whole hillsides where the deer had browsed were burnt off bare as your hand in the wake of the pot hunter. Thus in due course, though Greenhow laid it to the increasing severity of game laws framed in the interests of city sportsmen, who preferred working hard for their venison to buying it comfortably in the open market, pot hunting grew so little profitable that he determined to leave it off altogether an become a Settler. Not however until he had earned the reprisal of the gods, of whom in a dozen years he had not even become aware.

In the Spring of the year the Tonkawanda irrigation district was opened, he settled himself on a spur of San Jacinto where it plunges like a great dolphin in the green swell of the camissal, and throws up a lacy foam of chaparral along its sides. Below him, dotted over the flat reach of the mesa, the four square clearings of the Homesteaders showed along the line of the great canal, keen and blue as the cutting edge of civilization. There was a deep-soil level under the nose of San Jacinto—rabbits used to play there until Greenhow took to potting them for his breakfast—and a stream bubbled from under the hill to waste in the meadow.

Greenhow built a shack under a live oak there and fancied himself in the character of a proprietor. He reckoned that in the three years before his vineyard came into bearing, he could pot-hunt in the hills behind his clearing for the benefit of the Homesteaders.

It was altogether a lovely habitation. Camise grew flush with the meadow and the flanks of San Jacinto shivered and sparkled with the wind that turned the thousand leaves of the chaparral. Under the wind one caught at times the slow deep chuckle of the water. Greenhow should have been warned by that. In just such tones the ancient Greeks had heard the great god Pan laughing in the woods under Parnassus,—which was Greek indeed to the Pot Hunter.

Greenhow was thirty-four when he took out his preemption papers and planted his first acre of vines. For reasons best known to the gods, the deer kept well away from that side of the San Jacinto that year. Greenhow enlarged the meadow and turned up ground for a garden; he became acquainted with his neighbors and learned that they had prejudices in favor of game regulations, also that one of them had a daughter. She had white, even teeth that flashed when she laughed; the whole effect of her was as sound and as appetizing as a piece of ripe fruit. Greenhow told her that the prospect of having a home of his own was an incentive such as pot-hunting held out to no man. He looked as he said it, a very brother to Nimrod, for as yet the Pot had not marked him.

He stood straight; his eyes had the deep, varying blueness of lake water. Little wisps and burrs, odors of the forest clung about his clothing; a beard covered his slack, formless mouth. When he told the Homesteader's daughter how the stars went by on heather planted headlands and how the bucks belled the does at the bottom of deep canons in October, she heard in it the call of the trail and young Adventure. Times when she would see from the level of her father's quarter section the smoke of the Pot Hunter's cabin rising blue against the glistening green of the live oak, she thought that life might have a wilder, sweeter tang there about the roots of the mountain.

In his second Spring when the camissal foamed all white with bloom and the welter of yellow violets ran in the grass under it like fire, Greenhow built a lean-to to his house and made the discovery that the oak which jutted out from the barranca behind it was of just the right height from the ground to make a swing for a child, which caused him a strange pleasant embarrassment.

"Look kind o' nice to see a little feller playin' round," he admitted to himself, and the same evening went down to call on the Homesteader's daughter.

That night the watchful guardians of the Wild sent the mule-deer to Harry the man who had been a pot-hunter. A buck of three years came down the draw by the watercourse and nibbled the young shoots of the vines where he could reach them across the rabbit proof fencing that the settler had drawn about his planted acres. Not that the wire netting would have stopped him; this was merely the opening of the game. Three days later he spent the night in the kitchen garden and cropped the tips of the newly planted orchard. After that the two of them put in nearly the whole of the growing season dodging one another through the close twigged manzanita, lilac, laurel and mahogany that broke upward along the shining bouldered coasts of San Jacinto. the chaparral at this season took all the changes of the incoming surf, blue in the shadows, darkling green about the heads of the gulches, or riffling with the white under side of wind-lifted leaves. Once its murmurous swell had closed over them, the mule-deer would have his own way with the Pot Hunter. Often after laborious hours spent in repairing the garden, the man would hear his enemy coughing in the gully behind the house, and take up his rifle to put in the rest of the day snaking through the breathless fifteen foot cover, only to have a glimpse of the buck at last dashing back the late light from glittering antlers as he bounded up inaccessible rocky stairs. This was the more exasperating since Greenhow had promised the antlers to the Homesteader's daughter.

When the surface of the camissal had taken on the brown tones of weed under sea water and the young clusters of the grapes were set—for this was the year the vineyard was expected to come into bearing—the mule-deer disappeared altogether from that district, and Greenhow went back hopefully to rooting the joint grass out of the garden. But about the time he should have been rubbing the velvet off his horns among the junipers of the high ridges, the mule-deer came back with two of his companions and fattened on the fruit of the vineyard. They went up and down the rows ruining with selective bites the finest clusters. During the day they lay up like cattle under the quaking aspens beyond the highest, wind-whitened spay of the chaparral, and came down to feast day by day as the sun ripened the swelling amber globules. They slipped between the barbs of the fine wired fence without so much as changing a leg or altering their long, loping stride; and what they left the quail took.

In pattering droves of hundreds they trekked in from the camise before there was light enough to shoot by, and nipped once and with precision at the ripest in every bunch. Afterward they dusted themselves in the chaparral and twitted the proprietor with soft contented noises. At the end of the October rut the deer came back plentifully to the Tonkawanda District, and Greenhow gave up the greater part of the rainy season to auditing his account with them. He spent whole days scanning the winter colored slope for the flicker and slide of light on a hairy flank that betrayed his enemy, or, rifle in hand, stalking a patch of choke cherry and manzanita within which the mule-deer could snake and crawl for hours by intricacies of doubling and back tracking that yielded not a square inch of target and no more than the dust of his final disappearance. Wood gatherers heard at times above their heads the discontented whine of deflected bullets. Windy mornings the quarry would signal from the high barrens by slow stiff legged bounds that seemed to invite the Pot Hunter's fire, and at the end of a day's tracking among the punishing stubs of the burnt district, Greenhow returning would hear the whistling cough of the mule-deer in the ravine not a rifle shot from the house.

In the meantime rabbits burrowed under the wire netting to bark his young trees, and an orchardist who held the job of ditch tender along the Tonkawanda, began to take an interest in the Homesteader's daughter. Seldom any smoke went up now from the cabin under the Dolphin's nose. Occasionally there rose a blue thread of it far up on the thinly forested crest of San Jacinto where the buck, bedded in the low brush between the bosses of the hills, kept a look out across the gullies from which Greenhow attempted to ambuscade him. Day by day the man would vary the method of approach until almost within rifle range, and then the wind would change or there would be the click of gravel underfoot, or the scrape of a twig on stiff overalls, and suddenly the long oval ears would slope forward, the angular lines flow into grace and motion and the game would begin again.

Greenhow killed many deer that season and got himself under suspicion of the game warden, but never THE deer; and a very subtle change came over him, such a change as marks the point at which a man leaves off being hunter to become the hunted. He began to sense, with vague reactions of resentment, the personality of Power.

It was about the end of the rains that the DITCH TENDER who was also an orchardist, took the Homesteader's daughter to ride on his unoccupied Sunday afternoon. He had something to say to her which demanded the wide, uninterrupted space of day. They went up toward the roots of the mountain between the green dikes of the chaparral, and he was so occupied with watching the pomegranate color of her cheeks and the nape of her neck where the sun touched it, that he failed to observe that it was she who turned the horses into the trail that led off the main road toward the shack of the Pot Hunter. The same change that had come over the man had fallen on his habitation. through the uncurtained window they saw heaps of unwashed dishes and the rusty stove, and along the eaves of the lean-to, a row of antlers bleaching.

"There's really no hope for a man," said the ditch tender, "once he gets THAT habit. It's worse than drink."

"Perhaps," said the Homesteader's daughter, "if he had any one at home who cared…" She was looking down at the bindweed that had crept about the roots of a banksia rose she had once given the Pot Hunter out of her own garden, and she sighed, but the ditch tender did not notice that either. He was thinking this was so good an opportunity for what he had to say that he drew the horses toward the end of the meadow where the stream came in, and explained to her particularly just what it meant to a man to have somebody at home who cared.

The Homesteader's daughter leaned against the oak as she listened, and lifted up her clear eyes with a light in them that was like a flash out of the deep, luminous eye of day, which caused the ditch tender the greatest possible satisfaction. He did not think it strange, immediately he had her answer, to hear the titter of the leaves of the lilac and the sudden throaty chuckle of the water.

"I am so happy," laughed the ditch tender, "that I fancy the whole world is laughing with me."

All this was not so long as you would imagine to look at the Pot Hunter. As time went on the marking of the pot came out on him very plainly. He acquired the shifty, sidelong gait of the meaner sort of predatory creatures. His clothes, his beard, his very features have much the appearance that his house has, as if the owner of it were distant on another occupation, and the camise has regained a considerable portion of his clearing. Owing to the vigilance of the game warden his is not a profitable business; also he is in disfavor with the homesteaders along the Tonkawanda who credit him with the disappearance of the mule-deer, once plentiful in that district. A solitary specimen is occasionally met by sportsmen along the back of San Jacinto, exceedingly gun wary. But if Greenhow had known a little more about the Greeks it might all have turned out quite differently.

[signed] Mary Austin

Men of the Sea

The afternoon sun etched our shadows on the whitewashed wall behind us. Acres of grain and gorse turned the moorland golden under a windy blue sky. In front of us the Bay of Biscay burned sapphire to the horizon.

"You men of the sea," I said, "attain a greater growth of soul than do we whose roots are in the land. You are men of wider spiritual vision, of deeper capacity than are we."

The coastguard's weather-beaten visage altered subtly.

"How can that be, Monsieur? Our sins stalk us like vast red shadows.
We live violently, we men of the sea."

"But you really LIVE—spiritually and physically. You attain a spiritual growth, a vision, an understanding, a depth seldom reached by us:—a wide kindness, a charity, a noble humanity outside the circumference of our experience."

He said, looking seaward out of vague, sea-gray eyes: "We drink too deeply. We love too often. We men of the sea have great need of intercession and of prayer."

"Not YOU."

"There was a girl at Rosporden…. And one at Bannalec…. And others…from the ends of the earth to the ends of it…We Icelanders drank deep. And afterwards…in the China seas…."

His gray Breton eyes brooded on the flowing sapphire of the sea; the low sun painted his furrowed face red.

"Not one among you but lays down his life for others as quietly and simply as he fills his pipe. From the rocking mizzen you look down calmly upon the world of men tossing with petty and complex passions—look down with the calm, kindly comprehension of a mature soul which has learned something of Immortal toleration. The scheme of things is clearer to you than to us; your pity, wiser; our faith more logical."

"We are children," he muttered, "we men of the sea."

I have tried to say so—in too many words," said I.

My dog looked up at me, then with a slight sigh settled himself again beside the game bag and tucked his nose under his flank. On the whitewashed walls of the ancient, ruined fort behind us our shadows towered in the red sunset.

I turned and looked at the roofless, crumbling walls, then at the coast where jeweled surf tumbled, stained with crimson.

These shores had been washed with a redder stain in years gone by: these people were forever stamped with the eradicable scar of suffering borne by generations dead. The centuries had never spared them.

And, as I brooded there, watching two peasants, father and son, grubbing out the gorse below us to make a place for future wheat, the rose surf beyond seemed full of little rosy children and showy women, species of the endless massacres that this sad land had endlessly endured.

"They struck you hard and deep," I said, thinking of the past.

"Deep, Monsieur," he replied, understanding me. "Deep as your people's hatred."

"Oh, poor ça"—he made a vague gesture. "The dead are dead," he said, leaning over and opening my game bag to look into it and sort and count the few braces of partridge, snipe and widgeon.

Presently, from below, the peasants at work in the gorse, shouted up to us something that I did not understand.

They were standing close together, leaning on mattock and spade, grouped around something in the gorse.

"What do they say?" I asked.

"They have found a soldier's body."

"A body?"

"Long dead, Monsieur. The skeleton of one of these who scourged this coast in the old days."

He rose and started leisurely down through the flowering gorse. I followed, and my dog followed me.

In the shallow excavation there lay a few bones and shreds and bits of tarnished metal.

I stooped and picked up a button and a belt buckle. The royal arms and the Regimental number were decipherable on the brasses. One of the peasants said:

"In Quimper lives a rich man who pays for relics. God, in his compassion, sends us poor men these bones."

The coastguard said: "God sends them to you for decent internment.
Not to sell."

"But," retorted the peasant, "these bones and bits of brass belonged to one of those who came here with fire and sword. Need we respect our enemies who slew without pity young and old? And these bones are very ancient."

"The living must respect the dead, Jean Le Locard."

"I am poor," muttered Le Locard. "We Bretons are born to misery and sorrow. Life is very hard. Is it any harm if I sell these bones and brasses to a rich man, and buy a little bread for my wife and little ones?"

The coastguard shook his head gravely: "We Bretons may go hungry and naked, but we cannot traffic in death. Here lies a soldier, a hundred years hidden under the gorse. Nevertheless—"

He touched his cap in salute. Slowly the peasants lifted their caps and stood staring down at the bones, uncovered.

"Make a grave," said the coastguard simply. He pointed up at the old graveyard on the cliff above us. Then, touching my elbow, he turned away with me toward the little hamlet across the moors.

"Let us find the Curé," he murmured. "We men of the sea should salute the death God sends with the respect we owe to all His gifts to man."

Our three gigantic shadows led us back across the moor,—my dog, myself, and the gray-eyed silent man who knew the sea,—and something perhaps, of the sea's Creator:—and much of his fellow men.

[signed] Robert W. Chambers

Jim—A Soldier of the King

We were machine gunners of the British Army stationed "Somewhere in France" and had just arrived at our rest billets, after a weary march from the front line sector.

The stable we had to sleep in was an old, ramshackle affair, absolutely over-run with rats. Great, big, black fellows, who used to chew up our leather equipment, eat our rations, and run over out bodies at night. German gas had no effect on these rodents; in fact, they seemed to thrive on it.

The floor space would comfortably accommodate about twenty men lying down, but when thirty-three, including equipment, were crowded into it, it was nearly unbearable.

The roof and walls were full of shell holes. When it rained, a constant drip, drip, drip was in order. We were so crowded that if a fellow was unlucky enough (and nearly all of us in this instance were unlucky) to sleep under a hole, he had to grin and bear it. It was like sleeping beneath a shower bath.

At one end of the billet, with a ladder leading up to it, was a sort of grain bin, with a door in it. This place was the headquarters of our guests, the rats. Many a stormy cabinet meeting was held there by them. Many a boot was thrown at it during the night to let them know that Tommy Atkins objected to the matter under discussion. Sometimes one of these missiles would ricochet, and land on the upturned countenance of a snoring Tommy, and for about half an hour even the rats would pause in admiration of his flow of language.

On the night in question we flopped down in our wet clothes, and were soon asleep. As was usual, No. 2 gun's crew were together.

The last time we had rested in this particular village, it was inhabited by civilians, but now it was deserted. An order had been issued, two days previous to our arrival, that all civilians should move farther back of the line.

I had been asleep about two hours when I was awakened by Sailor Bill shaking me by the shoulder. He was trembling like a leaf, and whispered to me:

"Wake up, Yank, this ship's haunted. There's some one aloft who's been moaning for the last hour. Sounds like the wind in the rigging. I ain't scared of humans or Germans, but when it comes to messin' in with spirits it's time for me to go below. Lend your ear and cast your deadlights on that grain locker, and listen."

I listened sleepily for a minute or so, but could hear nothing. Coming to the conclusion that Sailor Bill was dreaming things, I was again soon asleep.

Perhaps fifteen minutes had elapsed when I was rudely awakened.

"Yank, for God's sake, come aboard and listen!" I listened and sure enough, right out of that grain bin overhead came a moaning and whimpering, and then a scratching against the door. My hair stood on end. Blended with the drip, drip of the rain, and the occasional scurrying of a rat overhead, that noise had a super-natural sound. I was really frightened; perhaps my nerves were a trifle unstrung from our recent tour in the trenches.

I awakened "Ikey" Honney, while Sailor Bill roused "Happy" Houghton and "Hungry" Foxcroft.

Hungry's first words were, "What's the matter, breakfast ready?"

In as few words as possible, we told them what had happened. By the light of the candle I had lighted, their faces appeared as white as chalk. Just then the whimpering started again, and we were frozen with terror. The tension was relieved by Ikey's voice:

"I admint I'm afraid of ghosts, but that sounds like a dog to me.
Who's going up the ladder to investigate?"

No one volunteered.

I had an old deck of cards in my pocket. Taking them out, I suggested cutting, the low man to go up the ladder. They agreed. I was the last to cut. I got the ace of clubs. Sailor Bill was stuck with the five of diamonds. Upon this, he insisted that it should be the best two out of three cuts, but we overruled him, and he was unanimously elected for the job.

With a "So long, mates, I'm going aloft," he started toward the ladder, with the candle in his hand, stumbling over the sleeping forms of many. Sundry grunts, moans, and curses followed in his wake.

As soon as he started to ascend the ladder, a "tap-tap-tap" could be heard from the grain bin. We waited in fear and trembling the result of his mission. Hungry was encouraging him with "Cheero, mate, the worst is yet to come."

After many pauses, Bill reached the top of the ladder and opened the door. We listened with bated breath. Then he shouted:

"Blast my deadlights, if it ain't a poor dog! Come alongside mate, you're on a lee shore, and in a sorry plight."

Oh, what a relief those words were to us.

With the candle in one hand and a dark object under his arm, Bill returned and deposited in our midst the sorriest-looking specimen of a cur dog you ever set eyes on. It was so weak it couldn't stand. But that look in its eyes—just gratitude, plain gratitude. Its stump of a tail was pounding against my mess tin and sounded just like a message in the Morse code. Happy swore that it was sending S O S.

We were a lot of school children, every one wanting to help and making suggestions at the same time. Hungry suggested giving it something to eat, while Ikey wanted to play on his infernal jew's harp, claiming it was a musical dog. Hungry's suggestion met our approval, and there was a general scramble for haversacks. All we could muster was some hard bread and a big piece of cheese.

His nibs wouldn't eat bread, and also refused the cheese, but not before sniffling it for a couple of minutes. I was going to throw the cheese away, but Hungry said he would take it. I gave it to him.

We were in a quandary. It was evident that the dog was starving and in a very weak condition. Its coat was lacerated all over, probably from the bites of rats. That stump of a tail kept sending S O S against my mess tin. Every tap went straight to our hearts. We would get something to eat for that mutt if we were shot for it.

Sailor Bill volunteered to burglarize the quartermaster's stores for a can of unsweetened condensed milk, and left on his perilous venture. He was gone about twenty minutes. During his absence, with the help of a bandage and a capsule of iodine, we cleaned the wounds made by the rats. I have bandaged many a wounded Tommy, but never received the amount of thanks that that dog gave with its eyes.

Then the billet door opened and Sailor Bill appeared. He looked like the wreck of the HESPERUS, uniform torn, covered with dirt and flour, and a beautiful black eye, but he was smiling, and in his hand he carried the precious can of milk.

We asked no questions, but opened the can. Just as we were going to pour it out, Happy butted in and said it should be mixed with water; he ought to know, because his sister back in Blighty had a baby, and she always mixed water with its milk. We could not dispute this evidence, so water was demanded. We could not use the water in our water bottles, as it was not fresh enough for our new mate. Happy volunteered to get some from the well—that is, if we would promise not to feed his royal highness until he returned. We promised, because Happy had proved that he was an authority on the feeding of babies. By this time the rest of the section were awake and were crowding around us, asking numerous questions, and admiring our newly found friend. Sailor Bill took this opportunity to tell of his adventures while in quest of the milk.

"I had a fair wind, and the passage was good until I came alongside the quartermaster's shack, then the sea got rough. The porthole was battened down, and I had to cast it loose. When I got aboard, I could hear the wind blowing through the rigging of the supercargo (quartermaster sergeant snoring), so I was safe. I set my course due north to the ration hold, and got my grappling irons on a cask of milk, and came about on my homeward-bound passage, but something was amiss with my wheel, because I ran nose on into him, caught him on the rail, amidships. Then it was repel boarders, and it started to blow big guns. His first shot put out my starboard light, and I keeled over. I was in the trough of the sea, but soon righted, and then it was a stern chase, with me in the lead. Getting into the open sea, I made a port tack and have to in this cove with the milk safely in tow."

Most of us didn't know what he was talking about, but surmised that he had gotten into a mix-up with the quartermaster sergeant. This surmise proved correct.

Just as Bill finished his narration, a loud splash was heard, and
Happy's voice came to us. It sounded very far off:

"Help, I'm in the well! Hurry up, I can't swim!" Then a few unintelligible words intermixed with blub! blub! and no more.

We ran to the well, and way down we could hear an awful splashing. Sailor Bill yelled down, "Look out below; stand from under; bucket coming!" With that he loosed the windlass. In a few seconds a spluttering voice from the depths yelled up to us, "Haul away!"

It was hard work, hauling him up. We had raised him about ten feet from the water, when the handle of the windlass got loose from our grip, and down went the bucket and Happy. A loud splash came to us, and grabbing the handle again, we worked like Trojans. A volley of curses came from that well which would have shocked Old Nick himself.

When we got Happy safely out, he was a sight worth seeing. He did not even notice us. Never said a word, just filled his water bottle from the water in the bucket, and went back to the billet. We followed. My mess tin was still sending S O S.

Happy, though dripping wet, silently fixed up the milk for the dog. In appetite, the canine was close second to Hungry Foxcroft. After lapping up all he could hold, our mascot closed his eyes and his tail ceased wagging. Sailor Bill took a dry flannel shirt from his pack, wrapped the dog in it, and informed us:

"Me and my mate are going below, so the rest of you lubbers batten down and turn in."

We all wanted the honor of sleeping with the dog, but did not dispute Sailor Bill's right to the privilege. By this time the bunch were pretty sleepy and tired, and turned in without much coaxing, as it was pretty near daybreak.

Next day we figured out that perhaps one of the French kiddies had put the dog in the grain bin, and, in the excitement of packing up and leaving, had forgotten he was there.

Sailor Bill was given the right to christen our new mate. He called him "Jim." In a couple of days Jim came around all right, and got very frisky. Every man in the section loved that dog.

Sailor Bill was court-martialed for his mix-up with the quartermaster sergeant, and got seven days field punishment No. 1. This meant that two hours each day for a week he would be tied to the wheel of a limber. During those two-hour periods Jim would be at Bill's feet, and no matter how much we coaxed him with choice morsels of food, he would not leave until Bill was untied. When Bill was loosed, Jim would have nothing to do with him—just walked away in contempt. Jim respected the king's regulations, and had no use for defaulters.

At a special meeting held by the section, Jim had the oath of allegiance read to him. He barked his consent, so we solemnly swore him in as a soldier of the Imperial British Army, fighting for king and country. Jim made a better soldier than any one of us, and died for his king and country. Died without a whimper of complaint.

From the village we made several trips to the trenches; each time Jim accompanied us. The first time under fire he put the stump of his tail between his legs, but stuck to his post. When "carrying in" if we neglected to give Jim something to carry, he would make such a noise barking that we soon fixed him up.

Each day Jim would pick out a different man of the section to follow. He would stick to the man, eating and sleeping with him until the next day, and then it would be some one's else turn. When a man had Jim with him, it seemed as if his life were charmed. No matter what he went through, he would come out safely. We looked upon Jim as a good-luck sign, and believe me, he was.

Whenever it came Ikey Honney's turn for Jim's company, he was over-joyed, because Jim would sit in dignified silence, listening to the jew's-harp. Honney claimed that Jim had a soul for music, which was more than he would say about the rest of us.

Once, at daybreak, we had to go over the top in an attack. A man in the section named Dalton was selected by Jim as his mate in this affair.

The crew of gun No. 2 were to stay in the trench for over-head fire purposes, and, if necessary, to help repel a probably counter-attack by the enemy. Dalton was very merry, and hadn't the least fear or misgiving as to his safety, because Jim would be with him through it all.

In the attack, Dalton, closely followed by Jim, had gotten about sixty yards into No Man's Land, when Jim was hit in the stomach by a bullet. Poor old Jim toppled over, and lay still. Dalton turned around, and, just as he did so, we saw him throw up his hands and fall face forward.

Ikey Honney, who was No. 3 on our gun, seeing Jim fall, scrambled over the parapet, and through that rain of shells and bullets, raced to where Jim was, picked him up, and, tucking him under his arm, returned to our trench in safety. If he had gone to rescue a wounded man in this way he would have no doubt been awarded the Victoria Cross. but he only brought in poor bleeding, dying Jim.

Ikey laid him on the fire step alongside of our gun, but we could not attend to him, because we had important work to do. So he died like a soldier, without a look of reproach for our heartless treatment. Just watched our every movement until his lights burned out. After the attack, what was left of our section gathered around Jim's bloodstained body. There wasn't a dry eye in the crowd.

Next day, we wrapped him in a small Union Jack belonging to Happy, and laid him to rest, a soldier of the king.

We put a little wooden cross over his grave which read:

PRIVATE JIM MACHINE-GUN COMPANY KILLED IN ACTION APRIL 10, 1916 A DOG WITH A MAN'S HEART

Although the section has lost lots of men, Jim is never forgotten.

[signed] Arthur Guy Empey

Heel and Toe

That man—it could only have been a man—who invented the Klinger darning and mending machine struck a blow at marriage. Martha Eggers, bending over her work in the window of the Elite Hand Laundry (washing delivered same day if left before 8 A.M.) never quite evolved this thought in her mind. When one's job is that of darning six bushels of socks a day, not to speak of drifts of pajamas and shirts, there remains very little time for philosophizing.

The window of the Elite Hand Laundry was a boast. On a line strung from side to side hung snowy, creaseless examples of the ironer's art. Pale blue tissue paper, stuffed into the sleeves and front of lace and embroidery blouses cunningly enhanced their immaculate virginity. White piqué skirts, destined to be grimed by the sands of beach and tee, dangled like innocent lambs before the slaughter. Just behind this starched and glistening ambush one glimpsed the bent head and the nimble fingers of Martha Eggers, first aid to the unwed.

As she sat weaving, in and out, in and out, she was a twentieth century version of any one of the Fates, with the Klinger darner and mender substituted for distaff and spindle. There was something almost humanly intelligent in the workings of Martha's machine. Under its glittering needle she would shove a sock whose heel bore a great, jagged, gaping wound. Your home darner, equipped only with mending egg, needle, and cotton, would have pronounced it fatal. But Martha's modern methods of sock surgery always saved its life. In and out, back and forth, moved the fabric under the needle. And slowly, the wound began to heal. Tack, tack, back and forth. The operation was completed.

"If I see you many more Mondays," Martha would say, grimly, tossing it into the heap at her side, "there won't be anything left of the original cloth. I should think people would realize that this laundry darns socks, but it doesn't manufacture 'em."

Before the advent of the ingenious mending machine I suppose more men than would care to admit it married largely because they grew so tired of seeing those eternal holes grinning back at them from heel and toe, and of feeling for absent buttons in a hastily donned shirt. The Elite laundry owed much of its success to the fact that it advertised alleviation for these discomforts.

If you had known Martha as I know her you would have found a certain pathos in the thought of this spare spinster performing for legions of unknown unseen men those homely, intimate tasks that have long been the duty of wife or mother. For Martha had no men-folks. Martha was one of those fatherless, brotherless, husbandless women who, because of their state, can retain their illusions about men. She had never known the tragedy of setting forth a dinner only to have hurled at her that hateful speech beginning with, "I had that for lunch." She had never seen a male, collarless, bellowing about the house for his laundry. She had never beheld that soul-searing sight—a man in his trousers and shirt, his suspenders dangling, his face lathered, engaged in the unbecoming rite of shaving.

Her knowledge of the home habits of the male biped she gleaned from the telltale hints of the inanimate garments that passed through her nimble hands. She could even tell character and personality from deductions gathered at heel and toe. She knew, for example, that F.C. (in black ink) was an indefatigable fox trotter and she dubbed him Ferdy Cahn, though his name, for all she knew, might have been Frank Callahan. The dancing craze, incidentally, had added mountainous stacks to Martha's already heaped up bins.

The Elite Laundry served every age and sex. But Martha's department was, perforce, the unwed male section. No self-respecting wife or mother would allow laundry-darned hose or shirts to reflect on her housekeeping habits. And what woman, ultra-modern though she be, would permit machine-mended stockings to desecrate her bureau drawers? So it was that Martha ministered, for the most part, to those boarding house bachelors living within delivery-wagon proximity to the Elite Laundry.

It was early in May that Martha first began to notice the white lisle socks marked E.G. She picked them from among the great heap at her work table because of the exquisite fineness of the darning that adorned them. It wasn't merely darning. It was embroidery. It was weaving. It was cobweb tapestry. It blended in with the original fabric so intimately that it required an expert eye to mark where darning finished and cloth began. Martha regarded it with appreciation unmarred by envy, as the artisan eye regards the work of the artist.

"That's his mother's darning," she thought, as she smoothed it with one work-scarred finger. "And she doesn't live here in Chicago. No, sir! It takes a small town mother to have the time and patience for that kind of work. She's the kind whose kitchen smells of ginger cookies on Saturday mornings. And I'll bet if she ever found a moth in the attic she'd call the fire department. He's her only son. And he's come to the city to work. And his name—his name is Eddie."

And Eddie he remained for the months that followed.

Now, there was nothing uncanny in Martha Eggers' deduction that a young man who wears white hose, miraculously darned, is a self-respecting young man, brought up by a worshiping mother who knows about ginger cookies and winter underwear, and whose Monday washing is fragrant with the clean-smelling scent of green grass and sunshine. But it was remarkable that she could pick this one needle from the haystack of socks and shirts that towered above her. She ran her hand through hundreds of garments in the day's work. Some required her attention. Some were guiltless of rent or hole. She never thought of mating them. That was the sorter's work. But with Eddie's socks it was different. They had not, as yet, required the work of her machine needle. She told her self, whimsically, that when the time came to set her crude work next to the masterly effects produced by the needle of Eddie's ma every fiber in her would shrink from the task. Of course Martha did not put it in just that way. But the thought was there. And bit by bit, week by week, month by month, the life, and aims, and ambitions, and good luck and misfortunes of this country boy who had come to the call of the city, were unfolded before the keen eye of the sparse spinster who sat stitching away in the window of the Elite Laundry.

For a long, long time the white hose lacked reinforcements, so that they began to grow thin from top to toe. Martha feared that they would go to pieces in one irremediable catastrophe, like the one-hoss shay. Evidently Eddie's job did not warrant unnecessary expenditures. Then the holes began to appear. Martha tucked them grimly under the glittering needle of the Klinger darner and mender but at the first incision she snapped the thread, drew out the sock, and snipped the stitches.

"His ma'd have a fit. I'll just roll 'em up, and take 'em home with me to-night and darn 'em by hand." She laughed at herself, a little shame-faced laugh, but tender, too.

She did darn them that night, in the twilight, and in the face of the wondering contempt of Myrt. Myrt dwelt across the hall in five-roomed affluence with her father and mother. She was one of the ten stenographers employed by the Slezak Film Company. There existed between the two women an attraction due to the law of opposites. Myrt was nineteen. She earned twelve dollars a week. She knew all the secrets of the moving picture business, but even that hideous knowledge had left her face unscarred. Myrt's twelve was expended wholly upon the embellishment of Myrt. Myrt was one of those asbestos young women upon whom the fires of life leave no mark. She regarded Martha Eggers, who dwelt in one room, in the rear, across the hall, with that friendly contempt which nineteen, cruelly conscious of its charms, bestows upon plain forty.

She strolled into Martha Eggers' room now to find that lady intent upon a white sock, darning needle in hand. She was working in the fast-fading light that came through her one window. Myrt, kimono-clad, stared at her in unbelief.

"Well, I've heard that when actors get a day off they go to the theater. I suppose it's the same idea. I should think you'd get enough darning and mending from eight A. M. to six P. M. without dragging it home with you."

"I'm doing it for a friend," said Martha, her head bent over her work.

"What's his name?"

"Eddie."

"Eddie what?"

Martha blushed, pricked her finger, bent lower. "Eddie—Eddie
Grant."

At the end of the next six weeks every pair of Eddie Grant's hose, heel and toe, bore the marks of Martha's workmanship. Then, quite suddenly, they ceased to appear. Had he gone back home, defeated? Had he moved to another neighborhood? Had he invested in a fresh supply of haberdashery? On Tuesday of the seventh week E. G.'s white hose appeared once more. Martha picked them from among the heap. Instantly she knew. Clumsily, painstakingly, they had been darned by a hand all unaccustomed to such work. A masculine hand, as plucky as it was awkward.

"Why, the poor kid! The poor little kid! Lost his job for six weeks, and did his own washing and mending."

That night she picked out the painfully woven stitches and replaced them with her own exquisite workmanship.

Eddie's new job was evidently a distinct advance. The old socks disappeared altogether. They had been darned until each one resembled a mosaic. In their place appeared an entirely new set, with nothing but the E. G. inked upon them by the laundry to distinguish them from hundreds of others. Sometimes Martha missed them entirely. then, suddenly, E. G. blossomed into silk, with clocking up the side, and Martha knew that he was in love. She found herself wondering what kind of girl she was, and whether the woman in the little town that was Back Home to Eddie would have approved of her. One day there appeared a pair of lovesick lavenders, but they never again bloomed. Evidently she was the kind of a girl who would be firm about those. Then, for a time—for two long weeks—E. G.'s hose were black; somber, mournful, unrelieved black. They had quarreled. After that they brightened. They became numerous, and varied. There was about them something triumphant, ecstatic. They rose to a paean.

"They're engaged," Martha told herself. "I hope she's the right kind of a girl for Eddie."

Then, as they sobered down and even began to require some of Martha's expert workmanship she knew that it was all right. "She's making him save up."

Six months later the Elite Laundry knew E. G. no more.

Myrt, strolling into Martha's room one evening, as was her wont, found that severe-faced lady suspiciously red-eyed. Even Myrt, the unimaginative, sensed that some unhappiness had Martha in its grip.

"What's the matter?"

"Oh, I don't know. Kinda lonesome, I guess. What's the news down at your place?"

"News! Nothing ever happens in our office. Honestly, some days I think I'll just drop dead, it's so slow. I took three hours dictation from Hubbell this morning. He's writing the 'Dangers of Dora' series, and I almost go to sleep over it. He's got her now where she's chained in the cave with the tide coming up, on a deserted coast, and nobody for miles around. I was tickled to death when old Slezak called me away to fill out the contract blanks for him and Willie Kaplan. Kaplan's signed up with the Slezak's for three years at a million and a half a year. He stood over me while I was filling it out—him and his brother Gus—as if I was going to put something over on 'em when they weren't looking."

"My land! How exciting! It must be wonderful working in a place like that."

Myrt yawned, and stretched her round young arms high above her head.

"I don't see anything exciting about it. Of course it isn't as bad as your job, sitting there all day, sewing and mending. It isn't even as if you were sewing on new stuff, like a dressmaker, and really making something out of it. I should think you'd go crazy, it's so uninteresting."

Martha turned to the window, so that her face was hidden from Myrt. "Oh, I don't know. Darning socks isn't so bad. Depends on what you see in 'em."

"See in 'em!" echoed Miss Myrtle Halperin. "See! Well for the love of heaven what can you see in mending socks, besides holes!"

Martha didn't answer. Myrt, finding things dull, took herself off, languidly. At the door she turned and looked back on the stiff little figure seated in the window with its face to the gray twilight.

"What's become of your friend What's-his-name that you used to darn socks for at home? Grant, wasn't it? Eddie Grant?"

"That was it," answered Martha. "He's married. He and his wife, they've got to visit Eddie's folks back home, on their wedding trip. I miss him something terrible. He was just like a son to me."

[signed] Edna Ferber

Those Who Went First

A distant bugle summoned them by day,
A far flame beckoned them across the night.
They rose—they flung accustomed things away,—
The habit of old days and new delight.
They heard—they saw—they turned them over-seas,—
Oh, Land of ours, rejoice in such as these!

This was no call that sounded at their door,
No wild torch flaming in their window space,—
yet the quick answer went from shore to shore,
The swift feet hastened to the trysting place,
Laughing, they turned to death from peace and ease,—
Oh, Land of ours, be proud of such as these!

High hearts—great hearts—whose valor strikes for us
Out of the awful Dissonance of war
This perfect note,—in you the chivalrous
YOUNG SEEKERS OF THE GRAIL RE-LIVE ONCE MORE,—
Acclaimed of men, or fallen where none sees,
Oh, Land of ours, be glad of such as these!

[signed]Theodosia Garrison

A Summer's Day

Once I wrote a story of a woman's day in Paris, a Perfect Day. It had to do with the buying of all the lovely trappings that are the entrappings of the animal which Mr. Shaw believes woman endlessly pursues. One of the animals was in the story, and there was food and moonlight, music and adventure.

I never sold that marvelous tale. For years it has peeked out at me from a certain pigeon hole in my desk with the anguish of a prisoner in the Black Hole of Calcutta, and with as little hope for its liberation into the glad air of a free press. Yet it is with me now in Paris. In that last distracted moment of packing, when all sense of what is needed has left one, it was thrust into a glove case like contraband cigarettes. There may have been some idea of remolding it with a few deceiving touches—make a soldier of the hero probably—but with the "love interest" firmly remaining. There was only one Perfect Day to a woman, I thought.

That was some weeks ago. I am now writing on the back of that romance for lack of paper, writing of another day, wondering as I work if the present day's adventures will have any quality that might hold the reader's eye. I dare not ask for the reader's heart when love does not stalk through the pages.

Paris is now an entrenched camp but one is not awakened by bugles, and the beat of drums is unheard as the troops march through the city. It was the regular "blump-blump" of military boots past my window which possibly aroused me into activity, although the companies crossing from station to cantonment no longer turn the head of the small boy as he rolls his hoop along the Champs Élysées. This troubles me, and I always go to the curb to watch them when I am in the street.

There was an instant's hesitation before I pulled up the refractory Venetian blind—the right rope so eager to rise, the left so indifferent to its improvement—an instant's dread. I was afraid "they" would be hopping about even this early in the morning, hopping, hopping—the jerking gait of the mutilated—the little broken waves of a sea of "horizon blue." But they must have been just getting their faces washed at the Salon, where once we went to see pictures and now find compositions more dire than the newest schools of painting.

On the other side the stretch of chestnuts, the taxicabs, returned to their original mission, were already weaving about in their effort to exterminate each other. Battling at the Marne had been but a slight deviation in their mode of procedure, yet when a cab recently ran down and killed a bewildered soldier impeded by a crutch strange to him, Paris raised its voice in a new cry of rage. Beyond the Champs Élysées, far beyond, rose the Eiffel tower. Capable, immune so far from the attacks of the enemy, its very outlines seem to have taken on a great importance. Once the giant toy of a people who frolicked, it now serves in its swift mission as the emblem of a race more gigantic than we had conceived.

It is not a relieving thought to such of us as still can play, that spirit, whether in the bosom of the boulevardier or his country cousin playing bowls in the cool of the evening, is the same that projects itself brilliantly across the battlefield; that the flash of a woman's eye as she invites a conquest is the flame upon the alter when sacrifice is needed; that the very gaiety which makes one laugh is a force to endure the deepest pits that have been dug for mankind. Even as I continually struggle with a lump in my throat which I often think should remain with me forever, I dare claim that of all the necessitous qualities in life the spirit of play must be the last to leave a race. Its translation to the gravities of living needs no bellows for the coaxing of the fire. It is ever burning upon the hearth of the happy heart.

The gilded statuary of the bridge of Alexander III, like flaming beacons in the sun's rays, waved us out and on to the Invalides to see the weekly awarding of medals. It is presumably the gay event of the week as the band plays, and there is some color in the throngs who surge along the colonnades to look into the court of honor. A portion of the great space is now accommodating huge shattered cannon and air craft of the enemy, their massiveness suggesting, as the little glittering medals are pinned upon the soldiers' breasts, that it is not so easy to be a hero and go a-capturing.

By the judicious wavings of famous autographs we were permitted the upper balcony to sketch the heroic ones within the hollow square formed by soldiers and marines. Directly beneath us stood the band with the brassard of the red cross on their arms, for they are still the stretcher bearers at the front. In the center of the square was a little group of men, seventy perhaps but the space was vast. Some were standing, some seated with stiff stumps of legs sticking out queerly. Here and there a nurse stood by a blind man, and there were white oblong gaps in the line which designated the beds of the paralyzed.

I had set my teeth and said that I must stand it when across the courtyard like a liquid stream of some spilled black portion came the mothers and the wives, who were to wear the ribbon their soldiers had earned in exchange for their lives. Or should there be little sons or daughters they received this wondrous emblem of their fathers' sacrifice. We could see the concerted white lift of handkerchiefs to the eyes of the black line of women as the general bestowed the honors. But the little children were tranquil.

With the beginning of the distribution the band, for which I had longed that it might give a glow to the war, swung into a blare of triumph. It was the first note of music we had heard in France. And as we all expressed our emotion with abandonment throughout the enlivening strains of "The Washington Post," I appreciated the infinite wisdom of marching drumless through the streets—of the divine lack of the bugles' song. For music, no matter its theme, makes happy only those who are already happy. To those who suffer it urges an unloosening of their grief—and grief must not go abroad in France.

There was an end to the drama. The guard of honor marched through the porte, banners flying. It was a happy ending, I suppose, though one might not think so by the triumphal chariots that entered the court to bear away the heroes—chariots with that red emblem emblazoned upon a white disc which would have mystified an early Caesar. But my thoughts were not entirely with the chief actors in the play, rather with the squad of soldiers who had surrounded them, the supers who would have enjoyed medals, too, and upon whom opportunity had not smiled; whose epic of brave deeds may never be read, and who, by chance, may go legless yet ribbonless up the Champs Élysées.

"They" were hopping up the Avenue when we crossed it again, yet we all went on about our daily tasks as one passes the blind man on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Thirty-third Street. He may receive a penny, a twang of the heart strings, but he must be passed to go into the shop. My list was in my purse bearing but a faint resemblance to the demands of other years. I thought as I took it out what confusion of mind would have been my portion had I found it in my purse three summers ago, in what state of madness could any one prepare for a day in Paris such a program as: "Gloves, Hospital 232, furs, workshop for blind, shell combs, see my baby at Orphelinat, hair nets, cigarettes to my soldier, try on gowns, funeral of Am. airman," and on and on through each day's great accomplishment to the long quiet night.

Yet to buy freely and even frivolously in France need harass nothing more soulful than a letter of credit, and it was with less of guilt than of fear that I entered the courtyard of my furrier. I turned the button ever so gently with the same dread in my heart that I had suffered in going back to all of my shop keepers of previous summers. Would he still be there? Two years is a long time, and he was a young man. But he was there, wounded in the chest but at work in the expectation of being recalled. He did not want to go back, but of course if he was needed—

And I must lay stress on the magnificence of this hope that he might not have to return to the trenches. I have found many who do not want to go back. Fierce partisans of French courage deny this, reading in my contention a lack of bravery, but to me it is valor of a glorious color. For they do return without resentment, and, what is more difficult in this day of monumental deeds and minute bickerings, without criticism.

Like most of the men who came out of the trenches he had very little to say about them. It amused him to hear that my new fur coat purchased in America is of so fleeting a dye that I must dart into the subway whenever the sun shines. He was laughing quietly as he wished me a cloudy winter upon my descending the broad stone steps into the empty, echoing courtyard. The unexpected appreciation of my doubtful humor set me musing over the possibility of a duty new to Americans. It is the French who have stood for gaiety. We have warmed ourselves in their quick wit. Perhaps it is time for us to do our little clownish best to set them laughing.

Having made the resolve I failed meanly to put it into execution. I knew I was going to fail as the motor stopped before the great house in the rue Daru—the lordly house of exquisitely tinted walls although the colors are not seen by those who dwell within. There is a paved COUR beyond the high wall with great steps leading up to the hotel. At the right are the stables, where delicate fabrics are woven—the workmen with heads erect; where are special looms for those who, by the sad demands of this war, are denied hands as well as their two eyes. At the left is another building and here the men play in a gymnasium, even fence with confidence. In an anteroom is a curious lay figure that the most sensitive of the students may learn massage—it is the blind in Japan who give their understanding fingers to this work—and in the rooms above is a printing press, silent for lack of funds, but ready to give a paper of his own to the sightless. Only, at "The Light House" they will not accept that a single one of their guests is without vision. "Ah GUARDIENNE," cried one of the students to the American woman who has established our Light House methods over there, "you do not see the unevenness of this fabric for your eyes are in your way."

I was standing in the room where the plan of the house is set upon a table. It is the soldier's first lesson that he may know the turns and steps, and run about without the pitiful outstretching of arms. There were other callers upon the GUARDIENNE. A blind graduate who had learned to live (which means to work) had returned with his little old father, and both were telling her that he had enough orders for his sweaters from the "Trois Quartiers" to keep him occupied for two years. The family felt that he was established—so there was nothing more to fear. And then because we were all happy over it the old man and the woman and myself began to cry noiselessly. Only the blind boy remained smiling through the choking silence.

I went to the window and glared down into the gardens where other soldiers were studying at little tables with a professor for each, and I asked myself why, in this great exigency, I was not being funny and paying my debt to France. But there was nothing to be funny about. The thing that dried my tears was the recollection of the blind asylum of my youth, where the "inmates" never learned to walk without groping, where we were shown hideous bead furniture, too small for dolls, which was the result of their eager but misspent lives.

There was a gown to be ordered before noon and as I drove back through the Faubourg St. Honoré I found myself looking fondly, thirstily into the shop windows, lifting my free eyes to the charming vagaries of old buildings, and again I made a vow although it had nothing to do with humor. On my dressing table rests a cushion of brocade and I shall carry it about as one who may yield to temptation carries a pledge, for the card which is attached chants out to me whenever my eyes rest upon it: "Soldat Pierre. Aveugle de la guerre. Blessé à Verdun." And as long as Soldier Pierre. Blind from the war. Wounded at Verdun can go on weaving his fabrics I pray that I may carry whatever burden may be mine with the unrebellious spirit.

Ah well! The robe took its place in the curriculum of my new Parisian day. It was to be a replica in color of that worn by the head of the house—her one of mourning was so bravely smart—for the business must go on and only the black badge of glory in fashionable form show itself in the gay salon. "Yes, we must go on," she said, "though every wife may give her mate. It is of an enormity to realize before one dies that he can be done without—that there are enough little ones to keep France alive and we women in the meantime can care for the country. Our men may die glad in that thought, but I think there must be a little of grief, too. It is sad not to be needed. Yes, Madame, blue for you where mine is black, and in place of the crêpe something very brilliant. It is only Americans that we can make gay now, and it keeps the women in the sewing room of good cheer to work in colors. Too dear you think? Ah, no, Madame, observe the model!"

Conscious that she had taken the basest advantage of my sympathy, and glad that she had done so I went to déjeuner with a feeling that I had deserved it which I might not otherwise have enjoyed. We were lunching at the restaurant on the Seine which felt for a short time the upheaval of war. Among the first called to the front had been the proprietor, and the august deputies whose custom it was to take their midday meal at this famous eating place had suffered from an unevenness of the cuisine. He is back at his establishment now, an ammunition maker on the night shift and the excellent and watchful patron at noon.

Our guests came promptly, for France still eats, although, if I can say anything so anomalous, does not stop to do so. The war talk continues albeit one carries it more lightly through a meal. A French officer arrived in the only automobile of his garage which the government had not commandeered. We looked down upon it stealthily that we might not give offense to his chauffeur, for the car is a Panhard in the last of its teens—which holds no terrors to a woman but is a gloomy age for a motor. An American architect from our Clearing House bowed over my hand a little more Gallic in these days than the Gaul himself. He has a right to the manners of the country. He had come over at the beginning of the war for a month and is determined to stick it out if he never builds another railway station. "To see the troops march through the Arc de Triomphe!" is the cry of the Americans, but the French do not express themselves so dramatically.

There is drama enough, though, even in the filing of papers at every American relief society. That and the new sensation of work serves to hold the dilettante of our country to his long task. "This is the president's office," you will be told in a hushed voice outside some stately door. Then one discovers in Mr. President a playmate of Mayfair or Monte Carlo or Taormina who may never previously have used a desk except as a support for the signing of checks.

Our friend had been engaged that morning upon the re-ticketing of the Lafayette Kits which had come back from the front because there was no longer a Gaspard to receive them. I put this down that any young girl of our country who does not hear from "her soldier" may understand the silence. And sometimes the poilu is a little confused, writing a charming letter of thanks to "Monsieur Lafayette" himself.

A man takes coffee at déjeuner but finishes his cigar en route to work. We were at the edge of Paris before the Illustrator had thrown his away. We were not in the car of ancient lineage but in that relic of other days a real automobile without the great white letters of the army upon its sides and bonnet. Yet we were going into the heart of the Army. We would not be among the derelicts of battle that afternoon but with men sound of mind and body, and the thought was grateful that there would be nothing to anguish over. We were to visit two cantonments, rough barracks, in one of which the men gathered after their "permission" for a re-equipment; while at the second one were those soldiers who had become separated from their regiments, and who were sent there until the companies—if they existed—could be found, and the "isolated" again dispatched to the front.

I had anticipated a very relieving afternoon. The sun shone, the long road led to open country, and many circling aeroplanes over an aviation field nearby gave the air of a fête. Only the uniforms of the English and American women who are attached to each of these many cantonments suggested any necessitous combating of the grim reaper.

Yet they are not nurses of the body but of the spirit. From modest little vine covered sheds erected in each ugly open space they disperse good cheer augmented by coffee and cigarettes (and such small comforts as we Americans send them) after the regulation army rations are served by the commissary. They hear the men's stores, comfort the unhappy ones, chaff the gloomy ones, and when they have a moment's breathing space write letters to such of those as have asked for a correspondent.

One of these women—an American—was intent upon this occupation at the first canteen we visited. She admitted that she was tired but she must answer her letters. She was rather grave about it, "I write to sixty-eight," she said, "and I'll tell you why. At least I will tell you a little of it and you can read the rest. I was on night duty. There is always one of us here. The men have just come from visiting their homes and some of them are blue and cannot sleep. Rude to us? Oh, never! I had written letters almost all night and it was time to make the morning coffee, yet there was still one to do. I was tempted to put it aside. I didn't remember the man, but he had sent me a word of thanks. Well, somehow I did answer it between the moment of filling the cauldron and getting ready for the day. Here is his reply—it came this morning—"

Translating crudely from the letter I read aloud to our little circle: "Dear Madame, you have saved my life. I have no friends and no people left for I am from the invaded districts, so on one writes me. To-day I was on duty as the officer came into our trench with the mail. He called my name. He gave me permission to leave the listening post to receive your valued letter. While at his side a shell tore up entirely my post. I think you, Madame, that I am spared to fight for France—"

I regarded her with longing. She had been the controller of a destiny. I suppose we are all that when we bend our best efforts, but seldom are we so definitely apprised of the reward of untiring duty.

A petty officer passed by the shack with a paper in his hands. There were no sounding trumpets, but the men recognized the paper and rose from the ground where they had been lounging to hear him read the list of those who were to return immediately to the front. As the names were called each one summoned turned without comment or exclamation or expletive, picked up his kit dumped in a corner, slung on the heavy equipment, saw that the huge loaf of bread was secure—the extra shoes—refilled his canteen and moved over to the barred gate. Occasionally one shook hands with a comrade and all saluted the women of the little flower-bedecked hut. An order was given and the gate was opened. They filed out into the dusty road on their march to the railway station. The gate was closed. A little hill rose higher than the ground of the barracks and we could see them once again—stout little men in patched uniforms—bending unresistingly under their burdens, the heavy steel helmets gleaming but faintly in the sun. Another detachment entered the barracks.

It was coffee time now. The soldiers were lingering politely about with their tin cups in hand—not too expectantly, so as to assure the ladies that if by any chance there was no coffee they would not be disappointed. The gentlewoman in attendance had recently come from a canteen near the front where soup is made and often eight thousand bowls of it served in a day. The skin of her arms and hands is, I fear, permanently unlovely from the steam of the great kettles—or perhaps I should say permanently lovely now that one knows the cause of the branding. I offered to pour in her place and she assented.

The men came up to the little bar. I began to pour. I had thought I was about to do them a service. I knew with the first cup that it was they who were doing me one. All the unrest and misery of my idle if observing days in France was leaving me. I was pushing back the recollection with the sweetness of physical effort. I was at work. There is no living in France—or anywhere now—unless one is at work. I served and served and urged fresh cups upon them. They thought I was generous—I could not tell them that I had not known a happy instant till this coffee pouring time. I had not recognized that it was toiling with the hands that would bring a surcease to the beating of queries at my bewildered brain. There are no answers to this war. One can only labor for it and so, strangely, forget it.

Late that afternoon I had a cup of tea in a ground floor room of a big Parisian hotel which has been freely assigned to an American woman for the least known of all our relief work. I had come that I might argue with her into giving up her long task for a brief rest. My contention was to have been that she could stop at any time as her work is never recognized. I found her doing up a parcel of excellent garments for a man and three women. They were to be assigned to the family of a respected painter of the Latin Quarter. They will never know who is the middleman, and it has chanced that she has dined in company with her day's donation.

As I observed her tired tranquility I felt my argument growing pointless. Whether it was coffee or the unacknowledged dispenser of clothing to the uncrying needy it was service, and though my arm muscles ached I could understand that it is the idle boy in Paris which does not rest at night.

And so I come tot he last sheet of the romance which is serving so humbly my war-time needs. There is space for the dinner and the closing in of the gentle night thanks to the repeated, fervid declarations of the lovers on the other side of the paper. We had been with the men that afternoon. We were among the officers that evening. We dined at one of the great restaurants which has timorously reopened its doors to find eager families ready to feast honored sons. At one table sat three generations, the father of the boy concealing his pride with a Gallic interest in the menu, but the grandfather futilely stabbed the snails as his gleaming old eyes kept at attention upon the be-medalled lad. Pretty women, too, were there, subdued in costuming but with that amiable acceptance of their position which is not to be found among the more eager "lost ones" of other countries. And I enjoyed some relief in their evidence once more, and some inward and scarcely to-be-expressed solace in the thought that those soldiers who henceforth must go disfigured through a fastidious world can every buy companionship.

There was a theater attached to the restaurant. Through the glass doors we could see an iridescence of scant costumes, but the audience was light, and we ourselves preferred, as a more satisfactory ending to our day, to walk quietly toward the Arc de Triomphe which is waiting, waiting for fresh glories. On the other side of this last sheet of paper my lovers had so walked together. But upon looking over their passionate adventures I have discovered, at last, why the romance has never found a market. On one side and then on the other I have read and reread the two experiences. Yes, I find the LOVE-story curiously lacking in love.

[signed] Louise Closser Hale

Children of War

Not for a transient victory, or some
Stubborn belief that we alone are right;
Not for a code or conquest do we fight,
But for the crowded millions still to come.

This, unborn generations, is your war,
Although it is our blood that pays the price.
Be worthy, children, of our sacrifice,
And dare to make your lives worth fighting for.

We give up all we love that you may loathe
Intrigue and darkness, that you may disperse
The ranks of ugly tyrannies and, worse,
The sodden languor and complacent sloth.

Do not betray us, then, but come to be
Creation's crowning splendor, not its slave;
Knowing our lives were spent to keep you brave,
And that our deaths were meant to make you free.

[signed] Louis Untermeyer

Courtesy "Collier's Weekly."

Khaki-Boy

Where the torrent of Broadway leaps highest in folly and the nights are riddled with incandescent tire and chewing gum signs; jazz bands and musical comedies to the ticket speculators' tune of five dollars a seat, My Khaki-Boy, covered with the golden hoar of three hundred Metropolitan nights rose to the slightly off key grand finale of its eighty-first matinée, curtain slithering down to the rub-a-dud-dub of a score of pink satin drummer boys with slim ankles and curls; a Military Sextette of the most blooded of Broadway ponies; a back ground of purple eye-lidded privates enlisted from the ranks of Forty-Second Street; a three hundred and fifty dollar a week sartorial sergeant in khaki and spotlight, embracing a ninety pound ingénue in rhinestone shoulder-straps. The tired business man and his lady friend, the Bronx and his wife, Adelia Ohio, Dead heads, Bald heads, Sore heads, Suburbanites, Sybarites; the poor dear public making exit sadder than wiser.

On the unpainted side of the down slithering curtain, a canvas mountain-side was already rumbling rearward on castors. An overhead of foliage jerked suddenly higher, revealed a vista of brick wall. A soldiers' encampment, tents and all, rolled up like a window shade. The ninety pound ingénue, withholding her silver-lace flouncings from the raw edges of moving landscape, high-stepped to a rearward dressing room; the khaki clad hero brushing past her and the pink satin drummer boys for first place down a spiral staircase.

Miss Blossom De Voe, pinkest of satin drummer boys, withdrew an affronted elbow, the corners of her mouth quivering slightly, possibly of their own richness. They were dewy, fruit-like lips, as if Nature were smiling with them at her own handiwork.

"Say, somebody around here better look where he's going or mama's khaki-boy will be calling for an arnica high-ball. What does he think I yam, the six o'clock subway rush?"

Miss Elaine Vavasour wound down the spiral ahead of Miss De Voe, the pink satin blouse already in the removing.

"Go suck a quince Blos. It's good for crazy bone and fallen arch."

"If you was any funnier, Elaine, you'd float," said Miss De Voe withdrawing a hair pin as she wound downward, an immediate avalanche of springy curls released.

Beneath the stage of the Gotham Theater a corridor of dressing rooms ran the musty subterranean length of the sub cellar. A gaseous gloomy dampness here; this cave of the purple lidded, so far below the level of reality.

At the door of Miss De Voe's eight by ten, shared by four, dressing room, one of the back drop of privates, erect, squarebacked, head thrown up by the deep-dipping cap vizor, emerged at sight of her, lifted hat revealing a great permanent wave of hair that could only be born not bought.

"H'lo, Hal."

"Hello, Blossum."

"Whose hot water bottle did you come to borrow?"

"Hot water bottle?"

"Yeh, you look like you got the double pneumonia and each one of the pneumonia's got the tooth ache. Who stole your kite, ikkie boy?"

Mr. Hal Sanderson flung up a fine impatient head, the permanent hair-wave lifting,

"We'll can the comedy, Blossum," he said.

She lowered to a mock curtsey, mouth skewed to control laughter, arms akimbo.

"We will now sing psalm twenty-three."

"Come to supper with me, Blos? You been dodging me pretty steady here lately."

She clapped her hand to her brow, plastering a curl there.

"Migaw, I am now in the act of dropping thirty cents and ten cents tip into my Pig Bank. Will I go to supper with him? Say, darling, will the Hudson flow by Grant's monument to-night at twelve? On a Saturday matinée he asks me to supper with a question mark."

"Honest, Bloss, you'd hand a fellow a ha ha if he invited you to his funeral."

She sobered at that, leaning against the cold plastered wall, winding one of the shining curls about her fore finger.

"What's the matter—Hal?"

He handed her a torn newspaper sheet, blue penciled.

She took it but did not glance down.

"Drafted?"

"Yes," he said.

The voice of a soubrette trilling snatches of her topical song as she creamed off her make-up, came to them through the sulky gloom of the corridor. Behind the closed door of Miss De Voe's dressing room, the gabble of the pink satin ponies was like hash in the chopping. Overhead, moving scenery created a remote sort of thunder. She stood looking up at him, her young mouth parted.

"I—oh, Hal—well—well, whatta you know about that—Hal
Sanderson—drafted."

He stepped closer, the pallor coming out stronger in his face, enclosed her wrist, pressing it.

"Grover's drafted too."

"Grover—too?"

"He's three thousand and one. Ten numbers before me."

Her irises were growing, blackening.

"Well, whatta you know about that? Grover White, the world's dancing tenor, and Hal Sanderson the world dancing tenor's understudy, drafted! The little tin soldiers are covered with rust and Uncle Sam is going to—"

"Hurry, Bloss, get into your duds. I want to talk. Hurry. We'll eat over at Ramy's."

She turned but flung out an arm, grasping now his wrist.

"I—oh, Hal—I—I just never was so—so sad and so—so glad!"

The door opened to a slit enclosing her. In his imitation uniform, hand on empty carriage belt, Mr. Hal Sanderson stood there a moment, his face whitening, tightening.

In Ramy's glorified basement, situated in one of the Forties which flow like tributaries into the heady waters of Broadway, one may dine from soup to nuts, raisins and regrest for one hour and sixty cents. In Ramy's, courses may come and courses may go, but the initiated one holds on to his fork forever. Here red wine flows like water, being ninety-nine per cent., just that.

Across a water tumbler of ruby contents, Miss Blossom De Voe, the turbulent curls all piled up beneath a slightly dusty but highly effective amethyst velvet hat, regarded Mr. Sanderson, her perfect lips trembling as it were, against an actual nausea of the spirit which seemed to pull at them.

"Whadda you putting things up to me for, Hal? You're old enough to know your own business."

Blue shaved, too correct in one of Broadway's black and white checked Campus Suits, his face as cleanly chiseled and thrust forward as a Discobolus, Mr. Sanderson patted an open letter spread out on the table cloth between them, his voice rising carefully above the din of diners.

"There's fellows claiming exemption every hour of the day that ain't got this much to show, Bloss. I was just wise enough to see these things and get ready for 'em."

"You ain't your mother's sole support. What about them snapshots of the two farms of hers out in Ohio you gave me?"

"But I got to be in this country to take charge of her affairs for her—my mother's old, honey—ain't I the one to manager for her? Only child and all that. Honest, Bloss, you need a brick house."

"Well, that old lawyer that wrote that letter has been doing it all the time, why all of a sudden should you—"

He cast his eyes ceilingward, flopping his hands down loosely to the table in an attitude of mock exhaustion.

"Oh, Lord, Bloss, lemme whistle it, maybe you can catch on the. Brains, honey, little Hal's brains is what got that letter there written. I seen this coming from the minute conscription was in the air. Little Hal seen it coming, and got out his little hatchet. Try to prove that I ain't the sole one to take charge of my mother's affairs. Try to prove it. That's what I been fixing for myself these two months, try to—"

"Sh-h-h-h, Charley—"

"Brains is what done it,—every little thing of my mother's is in my care. I fixed it. Now little Blossy-blossum will you be good?"

He regarded her with cocked head and face receptive for her approval.
"Now will you be good!"

She sat loosely, meeting his gaze, but her face as relaxed as her attitude. A wintry stare had set in.

"Oh," she said, "I see." And turned away her head.

He reached closer across the table, regardless of the conglomerate diners about, felt for her hand which lay limp and cold beside her plate, and which she withdrew.

"Darling," he said, straining for her gaze.

"Don't, Hal."

"Darling, don't you see? It's fate knocking at our door. There's not a chance rover can get exemption. He ain't eve got a fifth cousin or a flat-foot!"

"Maybe he could claim exemption on dandruff."

"I'm serious, honey. It's going to be one of those cases where an understudy wakes up to find himself famous. I can't fail if I get this chance, Bloss. It's the moment I have been drudging for, for five solid years. I never was in such voice as now, I never was so fit. Not an ounce of fat. Not a song in the part I don't know backwards. I tell you it's the hand of fate, Bloss, giving us a hand-out. I can afford now, darling, to make good with you. On three fifty a week I can ask a little queen like you to double up with me. From thirty-five to three fifty! I tell you honey, we're made. I'm going to dress my little dolly in cloth of gold and silver fox. I'm going to perch her in the suite de luxe of the swellest hotel in town. I'm—"

She pushed back from the table, turning more broadly from him.

"Don't," she said pressing her kerchief against her lips.

"Why—why what's the matter, Bloss? Why—why, what's the matter?"

"Don't talk to me for a minute," she said, still in profile; "I'll be all right, only don't talk."

"Why, Bloss, you—sick?"

She shook her head. "No. No."

"You ain't getting cold feet now that we got the thing before us—in our hand?"

"I dunno. I dunno. I—don't want nothing. That's all, nothing but to be left alone."

He sucked his lips inward, biting at them.

"Don't—don't think I ain't noticed, Bloss, that you—you ain't been the same—that you been different—for weeks. Sometimes I think maybe you're going cold on—on this long engagement stuff. That's why this thing is breaking just right for us, honey. I felt you slippin' a little. I'm ready now, Peaches, we can't go taxi-cabbing down for that license none too soon to suit me."

She shook her head, beating softly with one small fist into her other palm.

"No, Hal," she said, her mouth tightening and drawing down.

"Why—why, Bloss!"

Suddenly she faced him, her hands both fists now, and coming down with a force that shivered the china.

"You—you ain't a man, you ain't. You ain't a man, you—you're a slacker! You're a slacker, that's what you are, and Gawd, how I—how I hate a slacker!"

"Bloss—why, girl—you—you're cra—-"

"Oh, I've known it. Deep down inside of me I've known it since the day we found ourselves in the mess of this war. I knew it, and all those months kept kidding myself that maybe—you—wasn't."

"You—"

"Thought maybe when you'd read the newspapers enough and heard the khaki-boys on the street corners enough, and listened to—to your country pleading enough that—that you'd rise up to show you was a man. I knew all these months down inside of me that you was a slacker, but I kept hopin'. Gawd how I kept hopin'."

"You—you can't talk to me that way! You're—-"

"Can't I! Ha! Anybody can talk any old way to a slacker he wants to and then not say enough. You ain't got no guts you—you're yellow, that's what you are, you—"

"Blossum!"

"You, sneaking up to me with trumped up exemption stuff when your country's talking her great heart out for men to stand by 'er! Gawd! If I was a man—If was a man she wouldn't have to ask me twice, but before I went marching off I'd take time off to help the street cleaning department wipe up a few streets with the slackers I found loafing around under a government they were afraid to fight for. I'd show 'em. I'd show 'em if a government is good enough to live under it's good enough to fight under. I'd show 'em."

"If you was a man, Blossum, you'd eat those words. By God, you'd eat 'em. I'm no coward—I—"

"I know you're not, Hal—that's why I—I—"

"I got the right to decide for myself if I want to fight when I don't know what I'm fighting for. This ain't my war, this ain't America's war. Before I fight in it I want a darn sight to know what I'm fighting for, and not all the street corner rah rah stuff has told me yet. I ain't a bull to go crazy with a lot of red waved in my face. I've got no blood to spill in the other fellow's battle. I'm—-"

"No, but you—"

"I'm at a point in my life that I've worked like a dog to reach. Let the fellows that love the hero stuff give up their arms and their legs and the breath that's in them for something they don't know the meaning of. Because some big-gun of a Emperor out in Austria was assassinated, I ain't going to bleed to death for it. It's us poor devils that get the least out of the government that right away are called on to give the most, it's us—-"

"Hal, ain't—ain't you ashamed!"

"No. I ain't ashamed and I ain't afraid. You know it ain't because I'm afraid. I've licked more fellows in my time than most fellows can boast. I—I got the Fifty-fifth Street fire rescue medal to my credit if anybody should ask you. I—I—ask anybody from my town if any kid in it ever licked me. But I ain't going to fight when I ain't got a grudge against no man. Call that being a coward if you like, but then you and me don't speak the same language."

Her silence seemed to give off an icy vapor.

"That's what they all say," she said. "It's like hiding behind a petticoat, hiding behind a defense like that. Sure you ain't got a grudge. Maybe you don't know what it's all about—God knows who does. Nobody can deny that. There ain't nothing reasonable about war, if there was there wouldn't be none. That talk don't get you nowheres. The proposition is that we're at war, whatever you or anybody else may think of it."

"That's just it—we didn't have no say-so."

"Just the same, Hal Sanderson, this great big grand country of ours is at war, and needs you. It ain't what you think any more that counts. Before we was in war you could talk all you wanted, but now that we're IN, there's only one thing to do, only one, and not all your fine talk about peace can change it. One thing to do. Fight!"

"No government can make me—"

"If you want peace now it's up to you to help make it, a new peace and a grander peace, not go baying at the moon after a peace that ain't no more."

"You better get a soap box. If this is the way you got of trying to get out of something you're sorry for, I'll let you off easier—you don't need to try to—-"

She regarded him with her lips quivering, a quick layer of tears forming, trembling and venturing to the edge of her lashes.

"Hal—Hal—a—a fellow that I've banked on like I have you! It ain't that—you know it ain't. I could have waited for ten times this long. It's only I—I'm ashamed, Hal. Ashamed. there ain't been a single gap in the chorus from one of the men enlisting that my heart ain't just dropped in my shoes like dough. I never envied a girl on my life the way I did Elaine Vavasour when she stood on the curb at the Battery the other day crying and watching Charlie Kirkpatrick go marching off. Charlie was a pacifist, too, as long as the country was out of war, and there was something to argue about. The minute the question was settled, he shut up, buckled on his belt and went! That's the kind of a pacifist to be. The kind of fellow that when he sees peace slipping, buckles on and starts out for a new peace; a realer peace. That's the kind of a fellow I thought you—you—-"

Her voice broke then abruptly, in a rain of tears, and she raised the crook of her arm to her face with the gesture of a child. "That—that's the kind of a fellow I—I—-"

His cigarette discarded and curling up in a little column of smoke between them, he sat regarding her, a heave surge of red rising above the impeccable white of his collar into the roots of his hair. It was as if her denouncement had come down in a welt across his face.

"Nobody ever—nobody ever dared to talk like this to me before. Nobody ever dared to call me a coward. Nobody. Because it ain't so!"

"I know it ain't, Hal. If it was could I have been so strong for you all these months? I knew the way you showed yourself in the Fifty-fifth Street fire. I read about it in the papers before I ever knew you. I—I know the way you mauled Ed Stein, twice your size, the night he tried to—to get fresh with me. I know you ain't a slacker in your heart, Hal, but I—I couldn't marry a man that got fake exemption. Couldn't, no matter how it broke my heart to see him go marching off! Couldn't! Couldn't!"

"That's what it means, Blossum—marching off!"

"I know it, but how—how could I marry a man that wasn't fit to war his country's uniform even in a show. I—I couldn't marry a man like that if it meant the solid gold suite in the solid goldest hotel in this town. I couldn't marry a—a fake khaki-boy!"

"Ain't there no limit, Bloss, to the way you can make a fellow feel like dirt under your feet? My God! ain't there no limit?"

"There—there's nothing on earth can make a man of you, Hal, nothing on God's earth but War! Every once in a while there's some little reason seems to spring up for there bein' a war. You're one of them reasons, Hal. Down in my heart I know it that you'll come back, and when I get a hunch it's a hunch! Down in my heart I know it, dear, that you'll come back to me. But you'll come back a man, you'll come back with the yellow streak pure gold, you'll-you'll come back to me pure gold, dear. I know it. I know it."

His head was back as if his throat were open to the stroke of her words, but there was that growing in his face which was enormous, translucent, even apogean.

He tore up the paper between them, slowly, and in criss crosses.

"And you, Blossom?" he said, not taking his eyes, with their growing lights, off her.

"Why, I'll be waiting, Hal," she said, the pink coming out to flood her face, "I'll be waiting—Sweetheart."

[signed] Fannie Hurst

The Married Slacker

[This is a comic strip in three panels. I'll do my best to describe each panel and then put the text which comes beneath the panel.]

[Panel 1: A man and woman sit at a meal with pictures of Washington and Lincoln glowering from the wall in the man's full view behind the woman. The woman is reading a paper. The man is listening, but not looking at the woman, rather at his meal in front of him. A maid brings coffee cups on a platter.]

SHE (reading)—"At 5:15, the barrage was raised, and the Americans advanced to attack. The long line moved forward like the steady on-sweep of the tide—unwavering, irresistible, implacable." Oh, isn't it perfectly wonderful! I knew our men would fight gloriously! And just listen to this:

[Panel 2: The images of Washington and Lincoln have doubled in size and the eyes clearly glare at the man. The man now shows beads of sweat around his head and wears an expression of distress. The woman continues to read the paper. The maid departs the scene having delivered the coffee cups.]

SHE (reading)—"The Germans fought desperately but the American lines never wavered in their onward course. Sometimes the broad stretch of the battlefield was enveloped in great volumes of smoke, but a moment later, as the air cleared, the same lines were to be seen moving onward. At 6:45, the sound of cheering was heard amidst the din of the battle and a few moments later, the message was sent back that the American troops had captured the great German position."

[Panel 3: The images of Washington and Lincoln are now almost fully the size of the wall and marks of consternation and anger are clear on their brows as they glare at the man. The woman continues to read the paper without looking up. The man is fleeing the room in great haste with his arms in the air. He has knocked over his chair in his haste and has bumped into the maid who was returning with a coffee pot and biscuits. The man's face is obscured by raised hands and his overcoat, but he is clearly fleeing.]

SHE (reading)—"The American victory of yesterday may well mark the beginning of the end of the war. London and Paris are ringing with the praises of the American soldiers. President Wilson has proclaimed a national holiday in celebration of the triumph, and the American soldier has won imperishable glory as a fighting man."

[The last panel is signed] McCutcheon

Hymn for America

Air: "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled"

Where's the man, in all the earth—
Man of want or man of worth—
Who shall now to rank or birth
Knee of homage bend?
Though he war with chance or fate,
If his heart be free of hate,
If his soul with love be great,
He shall be our friend.

Where's the man, of wealth or wage,
Dare be traitor to his age,
To the people's heritage
Won by war and woe,—
Counting but as private good
All the gain of brotherhood
By the base so long withstood?
He shall be our foe.

Where's the man that does not feel
Freedom as the common weal,
Duty's sword the only steel
Can the battle end?
Comrades, chant in unison
Creed the noblest 'neath the sun:
"One for all and all for one,"
Till each foe be friend.

[signed] Robert Underwood Johnson

The Breaking Out of the Flags

It is April,
And the snow lingers on the dark sides of evergreens;
The grass is brown and soggy
With only a faint, occasional overwash of green.
But under the leafless branches
The white bells of snowdrops are nodding and shaking
Above their green sheaths.
Snow, fir-trees, snowdrops—stem and flower—
Nature offers us only white and green
At this so early springtime.
But man gives more.

Man has unfurled a Nation's flags
Above the city streets;
He has flung a striped and starry symbol of bright colors
Down every curving way.
Blossoms of War,
Blossoms of Suffering,
Strange beautiful flowers of the New Year:
Flags!

Over door lintels and cornices,
Above peaked gables and flat mansard-roofs
Flutter the flags.
The avenues are arcaded with them,
The narrow alleys are bleached with stripes and stars.
For War is declared,
And the people gird themselves
Silently—sternly—
Only the flags make arabesques in the sunshine,
Twining the red of blood and the silver of achievement
Into a gay, waving pattern
Over the awful, unflinching Destiny
Of War.

The flags ripple and jar
To the tramp of marching men,
to the rumble of caissons over cobblestones.
From seaboard to seaboard
And beyond, across the green waves of the sea,
They flap and fly.
Men plant potatoes and click typewriters
In the shadow of them,
And khaki-clad soldiers
Lift their eyes to the garish red and blue
And turn back to their khaki tasks
Refreshed.

America,
The clock strikes.
The spring is upon us,
The seed of our forefathers
Quickens again in the soil,
And these flags are the small, early flowers
Of the solstice of our Hope!

Thru suffering to Peace!
Thru sacrifice to Security!
Red stripes,
Turn us not from our purpose,
Lead us up as by a ladder
To the deep blue quiet
Wherein are shining
The silver stars.

Soldiers, sailors, clerks, and office boys,
Men, and Women—but not children,
No! Not children!
Let these march
With their paper caps and toy rifles
And feel only the panoply of War—
But the others,
Welded and forged,
Seared, melted, broken,
Molded without flaw,
Slowly, faithfully pursuing a Purpose,
A Purpose of Peace,

Even into the very flame of Death.
Over the city,
Over all the cities,
Flutter flags.
Flags of spring,
Flags of burgeoning,
Flags of fulfillment.

[signed] Amy Lowell

Our Day

London, April 20, 1917

It was the evening of our Day; that young April day when in the solemn vastness of St. Paul's were held the services to mark America's historic entrance into the Great World War. Across the mighty arch of the Chancel on either side hung the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack.

From the organ pealed those American songs to which half a century ago, in another war for Freedom, men marched to battle, and, even if by ways of defeat and death, to ultimate Victory. How many there were that April day for whom the sight of the Stars and Stripes was blurred with tears. How the familiar airs and simple words pained us with the memory of our distant homes. Perhaps for the first time we understood the solemn significance of this dedication to war of what we hardly knew was so unspeakably dear.

In the Crypt of St. Paul's, Mausoleum of England's greatest soldier and sailor heroes, their ashes rest who once fought and conquered. If it is given to those who have gone before to hear our human appeal, perhaps the immortal spirits of Nelson, of Wellington, of Kitchener, whose tragic fate is its unfulfilled destiny, may have rested like an inspiration on that kindred nation offering the sacrifice of all it holds most sacred to the cause of Divine Justice.

After the solemn benediction thousands streamed slowly out to mingle with the multitudes gathered before the great Entrance where Queen Anne in crown and scepter keeps majestic guard, and where in peaceful days doves flit and flutter down to peck at the grain strewn about her royal feet.

Stern and momentous times have passed over that old, gray Cathedral; times of a Nation's grief and a Nation's rejoicing. But of all such days, in its centuries of existence, none has been so momentous for the destiny of the Empire as that sunny April day. And yet—and yet—perhaps more touching, more solemn, even than the High Service at St. Paul's, that which stirred Americans even more who love England with only a lesser love, and made us realize as never before what America stands for, joint defender now of the new Civilization, was the silent symbol of her dedication to the Cause of Human Freedom, for all London to see and on which, seeing, to reflect. It was the symbol of that for which Statesmen who were also prophets, have lived and toiled.

It rose against the glowing West, never to be forgotten by those who saw it at the close of Our Day, for it marked the new Epoch.

Now at last "Let the dead Past bury its Dead."

Along Whitehall, down Parliament Street, and where towards the left
Westminster Bridge spans its immortal river, stand the Houses of
Parliament, their delicate tracery of stonework etched against the
sunset sky.

Hurrying crowds, released from the day's toil, stopped here, as if by a common impulse, to gaze upwards, and, gazing in silent wonder, they saw such a sight as London has never seen before. On the highest pinnacle of the Victoria tower where the flag of another nation has never before shared its proud eminence there floated together from one flagstaff Old Glory and the Union Jack.

That was America's supreme consecration.

[signed] Annie E. Lane (Mrs. John Lane)

Pour La Patrie

They were brothers, Louis and François, standing in the presence of the Prussian commander, looking hopelessly into his cold, unsmiling eyes. For the third time in as many days he was bargaining with them for that which God had given them and they in turn had promised to France: their lives.

"Do not make the mistake of thinking that we exalt you for what you may call courage, or that your country will sing your praises," said the general harshly. "Your country will never know how or when you die. You have nothing to gain by dying, not even the credit of dying."

François allowed his hot, dry eyes to sweep slowly around the group.
He was pale, his forehead wet.

"You are soldiers," said he, his voice low and steady. "Is there one among you who would do the thing we are asked to do? If there is one man here who will stand forth in the presence of his comrades and say that he would betray Germany as you are asking us to betray France,—if there is such a man among you, let him speak, and the,—then I will do what you ask of me."

A dozen pairs of hard implacable eyes returned his challenge. No man spoke. No man smiled.

"You do not even pretend," cried the little poilu. "well, I too am a soldier. I am a soldier of France. It is nothing to me that I day to-day or to-morrow, or that my country knows when or how. Take me out and shoot me," he shouted, facing the commander. "I am but one poor soldier. I am one of millions. What is my little life worth to you?"

"Nothing," said the commander. "Ten such as you would not represent the worth of one German soldier."

"We say not so over there," said François boldly, jerking his thumb in the direction of Pont-a-mousson.

And now for the first time the Prussians about him smiled.

"What is it, pray, that you do say over there?" inquired the general mockingly.

"That the worst of the Frenchmen is worth five of your best," said
François, unafraid. Why should he be afraid to speak the truth?
He was going to die.

"And one of your frog-eating generals is the equal of five of me, I suppose?" The commander's grim face relaxed into a smile. "That is good! Ha-ha! That is good!"

"So we say, excellency," said François simply. "Our Papa Joffre—ah, he is greater than all of you put in one."

The Prussian flushed. His piggish eyes glittered.

"Your Papa Joffre!" he scoffed.

"He is greater than the Kaiser,—though I die for saying it," cried the little poilu recklessly.

The commander turned his eyes from the white, impassioned face of François and looked upon the quivering, ghastly visage of the brother who stood beside him. The fire that glowed in the eyes of François was missing in those of Louis.

The grizzled Prussian smiled, but imperceptibly. What he saw pleased him. Louis, the big one, the older of the two, trembled. It was only by the supremest effort that he maintained a pitiable show of defiance. His face was haggard and blanched with fear; there was a hunted, shifty look in his narrowed eyes. The general's smile developed. It proffered comfort, consolation, encouragement.

"And you," he said, almost gently, "have not you profited by the reflections of your three days of grace? Are you as stubborn as this mule of a brother, this foolish lad who spouts even poorer French than I address to you?"

François shot a quick, appealing glance at his big brother's face.
There were tiny rivulets of slaver at the corners of Louis's mouth.

"Louis!" he cried out sharply.

Louis lifted his sagging shoulders. "I have nothing to say," he said thickly, and with the set of his jaws François breathed deeply of relief.

"So!" said the general, shrugging his shoulders. "I am sorry. You are young to die, you two. To die on the field of battle,—ah, that is noble! To die with one's back to a wall, blindfolded, and to be covered with earth so loosely that starving dogs may scratch away to feast—But, no more. You have decided. You have had many hours in which to consider the alternative. You will be shot at daybreak."

The slight figure of François straightened, his chin went up. His thin, dirt-covered hands were tightly clenched.

"For France!" he murmured, lifting his eyes above the head of the
Prussian.

A vast shudder swept over the figure of Louis, a hoarse gasp broke through his lips. The commander leaned forward, fixing him with compelling eyes.

"For France!" cried François again, and once more Louis lifted his head to quaver:

"For France!"

"Take them away," said the commander. "But stay! How old are you?" He addressed François.

"I am nineteen."

"And you?"

Louis's lips moved but no sound issued.

"My brother is twenty-one," said François, staring hard at Louis.

"He has a sweetheart who will grieve bitterly if he does not return for her caresses, eh? I thought so. Oh, you French! But she will soon recover. She will find another,—like that! So!" He snapped his fingers. "She will not wait long, my good Louis. Take them away!"

Louis's face was livid. His chin trembled, his lips fell apart slackly; he lowered his eyes after an instant's contact with the staunch gaze of his brother.

"You have until sunrise to change your minds," said the Prussian, turning on his heel.

"Sunrise," muttered Louis, his head twitching.

They were led from the walled-in garden and across the cobblestones of the little street that terminated in a cul de sac just above. Over the way stood the shattered remnants of a building that once had been pointed to with pride by the simple villagers as the finest shop in town. The day was hot. Worn-out German troopers sprawled in the shade of the walls, sound asleep, their mouths ajar,—beardless boys, most of them.

"Poor devils," said François, as he passed among them. He too was very young.

They were shoved through the wrecked doorway into the mortar-strewn ruin, and, stumbling over masses of débris, came to the stone steps that led to the cellar below. Louis drew back with a groan. He had spent centuries in that foul pit.

"Not there—again!" he moaned. He was whimpering feebly as he picked himself up at the bottom of the steps a moment later.

"Dogs!" cried François, glaring upward and shaking his fist at the heads projecting into the turquoise aperture above. Far on high, where the roof had been, gleamed the brilliant sky. "Our general will make you pay one of these days,—our GREAT general!"

Then he threw his arms about his brother's shoulders and—cried a little too,—no in fear but in sympathy.

The trap door dropped into place, a heavy object fell upon it with a thud, and they were in inky darkness. There was no sound save the sobs of the two boys, and later the steady tread of a man who paced the floor overhead,—a man who carried a gun.

They had not seen, but they knew that a dead man lay over in the corner near a window chocked by a hundred tons of brick and mortar. He had died some time during the second century of their joint occupance of the black and must hole. On the 28th he had come in with them, wounded. It was now the 31st, and he was dead, having lived to the age of nine score years and ten! When they spoke to their guards at the beginning of the third century, saying that their companion was dead and should be carried away, the Germans replied:

"There is time enough for that," and laughed,—for the Germans could count the time by hours out there in the sunshine. But that is not why they laughed.

A hidden French battery in the wooded, rocky hills off to the west had for days kept up a deadly, unerring fire upon the German positions. Shift as he would, the commander could not escape the shells from those unseen, undiscovered guns. They followed him with uncanny precision. His own batteries had searched in vain, with thousands of shrieking shells, for the gadfly gunners. They could find him, but he could not find them. For every shell he wasted, they returned one that counted.

Three French scouts fell into his hands on the night of the 28th.
Two of them were still alive. He had them up before him at once.

"On one condition will I spare your lives," said he. And that condition had been pounded into their ears with unceasing violence, day and night, by officers high and low, since the hour of their capture. It was a very simple condition, declared the Germans. Only a stubborn fool would fail to take advantage of the opportunity offered. The exact position of that mysterious battery,—that was all the general demanded in return for his goodness in sparing their lives. He asked no more of them than a few, truthful words.

They had steadfastly refused to betray their countrymen.

François could not see his brother, but now and then he put out a timid hand to touch the shaking figure. He could not understand. Why was it not the other way about? Who was he to offer consolation to the big and strong?

"Courage," he would say, and then stare hard ahead into the blackness. "You are great and strong," he would add. "It is I who am weak and little, Louis. I am the little brother."

"You have not so much to live for as I," Louis would mutter, over and over again.

Their hour drew near. "Eat this," persuaded François, pressing upon Louis the hunk of bread their captors had tossed down to them.

"Eat? God! How can I eat?"

"Then drink. It is not cold, but—"

"Let me alone! Keep away from me! God in heaven, why do they leave that Jean Picard down here with us—"

"You have seen hundreds of dead men, Louis. All of them were heroes. All of them were brave. It was glorious to die as they died. Why should we be afraid of death?"

"But they died like men, not like rats. They died smiling. They had no time to think."

And then he fell to moaning. His teeth rattled. He turned upon his face and for many minutes beat upon the stone steps with his clenched hands, choking out appeals to his Maker.

François stood. His hot, unblinking eyes tried to pierce the darkness. Tears of shame and pity for this big brother burnt their way out and ran down his cheeks. He was wondering. He was striving to put away the horrid doubt that was searing his soul: the doubt of Louis!

The dreary age wore on. Louis slept! The little brother sat with his chin in his hands, his heart cold, his eyes closed. He prayed.

Then came the sound of the heavy object being dragged away from the door at the top of the steps. They both sprang to their feet. An oblong patch of drab, gray light appeared overhead. Sunrise!

"Come! It is time," called down a hoarse voice. Three guns hung over the edge of the opening. They were taking no chances.

"Louis!" cried François sharply.

Louis straightened his gaunt figure. The light from above fell upon his face. It was white,—deathly white,—but transfigured. A great light flamed in his eyes.

"Have no fear, little brother," he said gently, caressingly. He clasped his brother's hand. "We die together. I have dreamed. A vision came to me,—came down from heaven. My dream was of our mother. She came to me and spoke. So! I shall die without fear. Come! Courage, little François. We are her soldier boys. She gave us to France. She spoke to me. I am not afraid."

Glorified, rejoicing, almost unbelieving, François followed his brother up the steps, there was comfort in the grip of Louis's hand.

"This general of yours," began Louis, facing the guard, a sneer on his colorless lips, his teeth showing, "he is a dog! I shall say as much to him when the guns are pointed at my breast."

The Germans stared.

"What has come over this one?" growled one of them. "Last night he was breaking."

"There is still a way to break him," said another, grinning. "Hell will be a relief to him after this hour."

"Canailès!" snarled Louis, and François laughed aloud in sheer joy!

"My good,—my strong brother!" he cried out.

"This Papa Joffre of yours," said the burliest German,—"he is worse than a dog. He is a toad." He shoved the captives through the opening in the wall. "Get on!"

"The smallest sergeant in Germany is greater than your Papa Joffre," said another. "What is it you have said, baby Frenchman? One frog-eater is worth five Germans? Ho-ho! You shall see."

"I—I myself," cried François hotly,—"I am nobler, braver, greater than this beast you call master."

"Hold your tongue," said a third German, in a kindlier tone than the others had employed. "It can do you no good to talk like this. Give in, my brave lads. Tell everything. I know what is before you if you refuse to-day,—and I tremble. He will surely break you to-day."

They were crossing the narrow road.

"He is your master,—not ours," said François calmly.

Louis walked ahead, erect, his jaw set. The blood leaped in
François' veins. Ah, what a brave, strong fellow his brother was!

"He is the greatest commander in all the German armies," boasted the burly sergeant. "And, young frog-eater, he commands the finest troops in the world. Do you know that there are ten thousand iron crosses in this God-appointed corps! Have a care how you speak of our general. He is the Emperor's right hand. He is the chosen man of the Emperor."

"And of God," added another.

"Bah!" cried François, snapping his fingers scornfully. "His is worth no more than that to me!"

François was going to his death. His chest swelled.

"You fool. He is to the Emperor worth more than an entire army corps,—yes, two of them. The Emperor would sooner lose a hundred thousand men than this single general."

"A hundred thousand men?" cried François, incredulously. "That is a great many men,—even Germans."

"Pigs," said Louis, between his teeth.

They now entered the little garden. The Prussian commander was eating his breakfast in the shelter of a tent. The day was young, yet the sun was hot. Papers and maps were strewn over the top of the long table at which he sat, gorging himself. The guard and the two prisoners halted a few paces away. The general's breakfast was not to be interrupted by anything so trivial as the affairs of Louis and François.

"And that ugly glutton is worth more than a hundred thousand men," mused François, eyeing him in wonder. "God, how cheap these boches must be."

Staff officers stood outside the tent, awaiting and receiving gruff orders from their superior. Between gulps he gave out almost unintelligible sounds, and one by one these officers, interpreting them as commands, saluted and withdrew.

François gazed as one fascinated. He WAS a great general, after all. Only a very great and powerful general could enjoy such respect, such servile obedience as he was receiving from these hulking brutes of men.

Directions were punctuated,—or rather indicated,—by the huge carving-knife with which the general slashed his meat. He pointed suddenly with the knife, and, as he did so, the officer at whom it was leveled, sprang into action, to do as he was bidden, as if the shining blade had touched his quivering flesh.

Suddenly the great general pushed his bench back from the table, slammed the knife and fork down among the platters, and barked:

"Well!"

His eyes were fastened upon the prisoners. The guards shoved them forward.

"Have you decided? What is it to be,—life or death?"

He was in an evil humor. That battery in the hills had found its mark again when the sun was on the rise.

"Vive la France!" shouted Louis, raising his eye to heaven.

"vive la France!" almost screamed François.

"So be it!" roared the commander. His gaze was fixed on Louis. There was the one who would weaken. Not that little devil of a boy beside him. He uttered a short, sharp command to an aide.

The torturing of Louis began….

"End it!" commanded the Prussian general after a while. "The fool will not speak!"

And the little of life that was left to the shuddering, sightless Louis went out with a sigh—slipped out with the bayonet as it was withdrawn from his loyal breast.

Turning to François, who had been forced to witness the mutilation of his brother,—whose arms had been held and whose eyelids were drawn up by the cruel fingers of a soldier who stood behind him,—he said:

"Now YOU! You have seen what happened to him! It is your turn now. I was mistaken. I thought that he was the coward. Are you prepared to go through even more than—Ah! Good! I thought so! The little fire-eater weakens!"

François, shaken and near to dying of the horror he had witnessed, sagged to his knees. They dragged him forward,—and one of them kicked him.

"I will tell! I will tell!" he screamed. "Let me alone! Keep your hands off of me! I will tell, God help me, general!"

He staggered, white-faced and pitiful, to the edge of the table, which he grasped with trembling, straining hands.

"Be quick about it," snarled the general, leaning forward eagerly.

Like a cat, François sprang. He had gauged the distance well. He had figured it all out as he stood by and watched his brother die.

His fingers clutched the knife.

"I will!" he cried out in an ecstasy of joy.

To the hasp sank the long blade into the heart of the Prussian commander.

Whirling, the French boy threw his arms on high and screamed into the faces of the stupefied soldiers:

"Vive la France! One hundred thousand men! There they lie! Ha-ha!
I—I, François Dupré,—I have sent them all to hell! Wait for me,
Louis! I am coming!"

The first words of the "Marseillaise" were bursting from his lips when his uplifted face was blasted—

He crumpled up and fell.

[signed] George Barr McCutcheon

Sonnet

Thou art not lovelier than lilacs,—no,
Nor honeysuckle,—thou art not more fair
Than small white single poppies,—I can bear
Thy beauty; though I bend before thee, though
From left to right, not knowing where to go,
I turn my troubled eyes, nor here nor there
Find any refuge from thee, yet I swear
So has it been with mist,—with moonlight so.

Like him who day by day unto his draught
Of delicate poison adds him one drop more
Till he may drink unharmed the death of ten,
Even so, inured to beauty, who have quaffed
Each hour more deeply than the hour before,
I drink,—and live—what has destroyed some men.

[signed] Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Idiot