Stories from Everybody's Magazine

by Various

II

As they grew older, the association of the two girls, in spite of the affection between them—perhaps because of it—began to present almost daily problems and embarrassments. Ellen's health was worse, her nerves were shattered, and she clung with more and more insistence to this one healthy companion, who responded with a tireless devotion. Coming in from her wholesome outdoor life and her triumphs at school—where she always stood high—Ma'Lou brought to the sick room a very wind of comfort and cheer, which Mrs. Kendrick had not the heart to deny her pining young invalid. Once, when she spoke apprehensively of the matter to her husband, Scott Kendrick answered with astonishment:

"Why, Fanny, it's only a question of health—a little bodily improvement. We'd break it off to-morrow if Ellen was well. You'll see; there would never be any more of it if I could send her away for that operation."

But the white people had not, as they supposed, this anxiety all to themselves. The timid, conservative, colored mother regarded the friendship with growing anxiety. And before Scott Kendrick got together the money to send Ellen to Baltimore, Ezra Jackson's wife had coaxed her husband into letting Mary Louise go North to school. The Watauga public schools, with a term or two of Fiske, at Nashville, afterward, had been good enough for the other children. But the mother craved wider opportunities for this, her youngest; money was freer with them now; and Mary Louise went to a preparatory school, then to Oberlin.

Ellen Kendrick returned from the hands of the surgeons in Baltimore much improved in health. She was sent back twice afterward for treatment. Finally she walked as well as other girls, and hastily made up her arrears of education, as best she might, at a private school in Watauga. She would always be frail; the invalid habit had gotten into both mind and body; she would continue dependent, demanding; and somewhat irritable; yet there was a fragile prettiness about her, and her very childishness had its own charm.

Mary Louise Jackson passed one of two vacations at home; but, as time went on, there were opportunities for her to have trips of an educational nature, and one summer was spent at a Chautauqua taking a special course, so that after the first break in their association the two girls saw almost nothing of each other till they were women grown. There had been some letters; yet what the white girl had always demanded and received from her friend could not come through the mails, and the neglected correspondence finally died a natural death.

There was one person in Watauga, however, to whom Mary Louise wrote, and from whom she received letters regularly—Ulysses Grant Payson, the washerwoman's son, with whom she had gone to school. Grant Payson was a sober, ambitious, industrious fellow, who seemed to feel from childhood the weight of responsibility for his people. A widow's only boy, he had worked hard and studied hard. With a very fair mental endowment, he was able to get what the Watauga public schools could give him, secure a few years training at Nashville, then read law.

And, when, after her graduation, Mary Louise returned to her father's home, a very well-educated young lady indeed, wearing glasses and looking older than her years, she found Grant established in a good practice, and with some other prospects that were, for a colored man, flattering. Both families knew that Grant wanted Ma'Lou. Whether the girl would marry him and settle down in Watauga had been a matter of anxiety, often talked over between the two mothers. For they also knew of and discussed Ma'Lou's opportunity to take a position as private secretary to one of the instructors in her college. They understood that it was a situation which would pay fairly well, and give her associates who gained an added glory in the minds of these humble folk by their distance. In short, it would be a foothold in the white people's world; and Grant Payson's mother trembled for her son, while the mother of Mary Jackson feared to lose, once for all, her daughter. The two Southern-bred black women could see in such things as the girl reported only the wiping out of all race barrier, the sudden achievement of equality. Had Mary Louise been asked, no doubt she could have told them of a social ban at the North quite as definite as that in Watauga, if different; but her father's daughter kept a silence that was not without dignity over what she found irremediable, in the North as in the South.

To warm-hearted Mary Louise, Watauga meant, of course, father and mother; but directly after them—perhaps before them, in the calendar of youth—it meant Ellen Kendrick and Grant Payson. And the colored elders, looking on, felt that as these twin idols of the girl turned out, so rose or fell the chances of keeping her with them in Watauga.

Grant instituted at once a courtship as ardent and eager as it was open and avowed. His people, florid and colorful in temperament, are natural wooers, free of the language of affection and adroit in its use. Grant was very much in love with the girl, and she meant even more to him than that, since in aspiring to her his ambition stepped hand in hand with his affections.

Mary Louise received his advances with curious reservations, as though there were positions and premises she defended against him.

It was when the girl's visit was three weeks old that the fine-looking, broad-shouldered, young colored man in his well-fitting business suit—a goodly figure in the eyes of the mother watching from her own room across the hall—left the parlor where he and Mary Louise had been sitting all evening, with so doleful a countenance that the older woman had a quickly suppressed impulse to go to him and speak. She did open the subject to the girl next morning, approaching it obliquely. In her own day a very progressive person, she felt that her daughter had far outstripped her, and she offered advice but timidly to this tall, perfectly dressed young woman who seemed so competent in all the affairs of life, and who knew so much more than she did upon many subjects. But after a little profitless skirmishing she came out with:

"Looks like you must have said something hard to Grant last night—he never came in to say good-by to me. Ain't you going to have him, Ma'Lou? Don't you care anything about him?"

"I care a great deal about Grant," Mary Louise told her, in a voice of pain. "I could love him dearly—if I'd let myself. But, mother, I just can't settle down to live here in Watauga. There's nobody and nothing here for me."

The woman looked at her child, and her mind misgave her sorely that she had done wrong to send the girl away among an alien people, where she would learn to despise her own.

"You're still grievin' about Ellen Kendrick," she said finally. "If I were you I wouldn't let that go the way it has. Don't—" she hesitated, with eyes full of helpless solicitude upon her daughter's face—"honey, don't wait for any sign from Ellen, because you won't get it. You just take those postal cards that you got for her on your Canadian trip, and some morning you step over to the side door and ask for her, if you want to see her. I know she thinks a great deal of you. She's stopped me on the street more than once and asked all about you and what you were doing. I don't see why you shouldn't go to the side door and go in and have a nice little visit with her."

Mary Louise considered this suggestion at some length. She had the wider outlook which some travel gives, and, in Oberlin, she had been where the race question was relatively negligible. Her mother's way of putting it jarred on her; yet the hungry craving she felt at this time for a touch of companionship with a girl of her own age, her longing for the beloved Ellen of her childhood, overbore all shrinking. That afternoon she brought the cards down in her hand, and, full of an unwelcome timidity, made her way to the side door of the Kendrick house and rapped. Mrs. Kendrick answered and received her with a certain thin cordiality that suggested reservations. The fact was that Ellen was having a little party that evening, and the colored girl would perhaps be in the way. Among the guests bidden were two young men, upon either one of whom Mrs. Kendrick looked with a hopeful maternal eye, and nothing could be less desirable than for her daughter to seem to "even herself with negroes" in the eyes of these possible suitors.

"Shall I stop and see Ellen a minute, or may I just leave these with you, Mrs. Kendrick?" asked the tall, brown-skinned young woman finally.

"Oh, come in—come right in here to the dining room and sit down," said the mistress of the house, remembering with a twinge how much she owed to this girl. "Ellen will be crazy about these. She's got a postal card album, and she hasn't anything in it from Canada. Ellen! Come downstairs, honey; Ma'Lou Jackson has brought you something pretty."

But even as she called up the stairway, and heard the quick response from above, it crossed Mrs. Kendrick's mind that her daughter would not be willing to put these postal cards in her album, for she would be ashamed to tell from whom they came.

She was annoyed when Ellen came flying down the stairs, her thin, blond hair all about her shoulders, and caught both the newcomer's hands—the mother feared for a moment that she would kiss her old playmate.

"And then if somebody saw it through the window, and went and told young Emery Ford or Mr. Hyatt, I don't know what on earth I should do," reflected the careworn matron.

"Mamma, do come and look at these lovely postals," Ellen cried effusively a little later, as her mother, plainly ill at ease, passed through the room. "I'm going to pull out those that Cousin Rob sent me from Texas, and put these in right after the California ones. See here, mamma; isn't this one beautiful? Ma'Lou was there a week. She's put a little cross over the hotel where they stayed."

Mrs. Kendrick looked at the strong, well-developed figure of her guest, and a certain dull anger arose in her mind. Why did health and money both go to this inferior creature, when they were lacking in higher quarters? Perhaps this prompted her query; "That hotel? It's a big one, isn't it? Did they—could you——?"

She broke off, and Mary Louise supplied, innocently enough: "Oh, they didn't let us travel during school term. This was a vacation trip."

She had been long away from the South; in the protective conditions of Oberlin she had been measurably free from the wounding of race prejudice; and now she failed to realize that Mrs. Kendrick's curiosity was as to whether she had been permitted to go to a hotel with white people.

Old Dicey's place in the kitchen had long been supplied by a negress of the newer generation—"the worst gossip and tattler in town," if you might take her mistress's word for it. Mrs. Kendrick now made her way thither, ostensibly to superintend the preparation of the evening's refreshments, but in reality to try to fix up an explanation of why Ezra Jackson's daughter sat visiting in the dining room with the young lady of the house. "Because if Penny goes out and tells her friends, every darky in town'll be retailing the story to the folks that hire them, and it'll soon be all over the place."

She came back into the dining room to find Ellen glowing with enthusiasm. Yes, her mind was still that of a sick child; she had dropped back into her old-time attitude toward Mary Louise.

"Mamma, Ma'Lou says that they used to give lunches at the college, and fix the floral centerpiece so it would all come apart, and each guest could draw a bunch of it with a ribbon. Oh, I don't understand very well, but she can tell you—it's just beautiful, and we could make it out of the chrysanthemums in the side yard, she says."

Mrs. Kendrick looked uneasy. But there was no window in the dining room which commanded the street except the side light of the bay, and at it Ellen herself sat. Nobody passing would be apt to see Mary Louise over in the room.

"I reckon we can't go into those things," she objected, a little irritably. "I suppose Ma'Lou has seen a heap of fine doings up North that we couldn't possibly attempt."

"But she's promised to make me a lot of cute little candies—like potatoes, and put them in paper baskets—to go at each plate," put in Ellen, jealously.

The brown-faced girl nodded and laughed, with a quick flash of white teeth. It was plain she was taking the attitude of an older person talking to a child about a juvenile party to which there could be no question of invitation, and Mrs. Kendrick's fears rather subsided. She was safe, if only Ellen would show some sense and judgment.

"Well, I must go on home, now, if I'm to make those candies and have them ready by this evening," said Ezra Jackson's daughter, getting to her feet. "They take a good while to harden properly."

Ellen went with her to the side door, clinging to her arm and insisting on some last remark. Mrs. Kendrick, in an agony of apprehension, hovered in the background.

"Oh, well," said the daughter of the house finally, "I won't bother you any more about it now, Ma'Lou. It's hard for you to explain just how to fix it, but you can show me when you come over this evening. I'll have the chrysanthemums ready. You come a little early—won't you, please?"

Mary Louise, in the doorway, glanced from mother to daughter in some confusion. Would this do? Her own mother had cautioned her to be certain to go to the side door.

"I—I don't know," she hesitated doubtfully. "I'll bring the candies over, if you like, and I might be able to show you a little about the table then." And again she looked from the face of the girl who had been her childhood's most intimate friend and associate to that of the woman who had accepted so much at her childish hands.

"Why, I supposed you'd be here when I was giving the party, Ma'Lou," argued Ellen petulantly. "I don't see why not! Isn't it all right, mother?" she appealed sharply. "Shouldn't Ma'Lou come over this evening?"

For one desperate moment Mrs. Kendrick sought to shape a policy; Ellen's words sounded frightfully like an invitation to the party. Would Mary Louise accept them so? Her worried, resentful glance traveled over the tall, dignified figure, the correct, quiet costume. Oh, it had no business to be as hard as this! But she must make the girl understand; she could not run the risk of injury to Ellen's belated social opportunities.

"Why—you see—we—" she began, in an agony of embarrassment, "we can't—we can't—" Her voice failed her. She looked fleetingly at Mary Louise, who returned the gaze with a look hurt, accusing, difficult to meet. She drew her breath sharply, and began again with more resolution. "We'll have an extra maid in to help with the serving. If you don't mind staying in the dining room with her—" She ceased and waited hopefully, to see if the girl understood. There was an uncertain silence. She must finish. "Ma'Lou, if you'd stay in the dining room with Tillie, and wouldn't mind wearing a—cap—and apron like she does, why you could come over and look on."

Ellen Kendrick had seen somebody coming down the street. It was Emory Ford, and she flushed and dimpled and smiled as she bowed to him, forgetting everything else, including the departing Mary Louise, who, after one mute look at Mrs. Kendrick's flushed, disturbed face, turned and walked with hanging head toward the house on the corner.

Arrived at home, she went methodically to work upon the promised candies and the little baskets that were to contain them. Ezra Jackson's wife, noting the face of set misery, forbore long to question her as she brought out the novel materials and pursued her work.

The afternoon wore on. Mrs. Jackson was at work at her sewing-machine in the front hall; but she could not keep out of the kitchen, she made continual futile errands through it, giving anxious, sidelong glances at the child over whom her heart yearned.

Finally, when she could bear it no more, "Did—did something hurt your feelings over there, Ma'Lou?" she asked huskily.

She spoke behind her daughter's shoulder. The girl set the last finished basket in its place in the row before she turned to answer. Then she showed a face so much more cheerful and composed than the elder woman had dared hope for that the relief was almost revulsion.

"Sit down, mother," said Mary Lou, pushing a chair with her foot.
"Sit there while I fill the baskets, and I'll tell you about it."

The mother sat and watched the deft brown fingers, and marveled at the girl's collected manner, her quiet, even voice. For Ezra Jackson's wife was shaken by alternate gusts of anger and hurt pride, of shame and fear, as, with a judicial fairness extraordinary in one of her years and sex, the girl went over the details of that unhappy visit. The old teamster had given his child a heritage of rare good sense. Early in the recital the woman broke in bitterly with:

"And yet you're making candies for her party? Such as that is all they want of you. I wouldn't do it. And I'd never step foot in their house again!"

"Why, mother, I'd certainly make these. I promised them," said Mary Louise mildly. She put the last tiny candy potato in place, pushed back the basket, wiped her hands, and turned fully to her mother. "But you're exactly right about not entering Judge Kendrick's house again," she said, with increasing emphasis. "I can't go in at the front door as a friend—that's true; I can't. I certainly sha'n't go in at the back door as a servant—and—I've thought it all out now—I see it plain—our people make a great mistake when they hang around the side doors of white folks. There's no way but——"

"Don't say it, honey!" gasped the mother "Wait a minute." This was the end, and she could not quite face it. She was to lose her youngest and dearest. Mary Lou was going back North to live among the white people. Her head went down on the table the convulsed face hidden in her arms. Then broke forth the cry of the blood:

"Oh, Lord! I reckon I'm just another fool nigger woman that's raised a child too good for her own color. I wish I was dead—I wish I was dead!"

"Mother—mother!" The girl flung herself on her knees beside the chair, and caught at the other's dress. "Don't take on that way. You don't understand. I'm—look around here—I'm glad of what happened over there to-day. It's shown me the truth about a good many things. We're all black people together. It's the only way for us now. I'm not going back to be Professor Sheridan's secretary—a black woman among white people. I'm going to marry Grant—he's everything to me; these people are nothing—and settle right down here in Watauga with him—and be happy and useful. Mother, you didn't make any mistake in the way you brought me up. I'll be a credit and a comfort to you yet."

***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII No. 1 JULY 1910

THE TRIAL BALANCE {pages 83-94}

By MAXIMILIAN FOSTER

Author of "Corrie Who?" etc.

Like so many others of her class, Stella Willoughby was a satisfied, confident woman, placidly aware of the station her husband's money assured to her. For Willoughby was accounted wealthy even in this lake town, where riches were so much in evidence; and if the wife betrayed a cool superiority because of his money, it was only natural, perhaps, since she and most of her associates knew no other means of gauging success, or worth, or the individual's place in life. Looking over her shoulder now, she glanced nonchalantly across the club dining-room.

"You mean those people—the Severances, Mrs. Kinsman?" There was a bland indifference in her tone that made the guest beside Mrs. Willoughby look at her curiously, for she knew that Severance had once been a suitor for Mrs. Willoughby's hand. "I believe we did know them before they dropped out. He lost everything, didn't he?—went to smash, as I vaguely remember."

Still with the same air of unconcern, she dipped the tips of her fingers in the finger-bowl, and prepared to rise. "Queer they should come back here, isn't it?" she commented idly; and then, as if the subject had passed from her mind with the observation, Mrs. Willoughby pushed back her chair in signal to her guests, and led the way from the room. In the hall, while the maid was putting on her wraps, she turned and looked back, still idly as before. Her eyes, traveling about, rested a moment on the man sitting at the distant table, and then, when he half rose from his place as if to bow, they journeyed on again, coolly unconcerned. A moment later, smiling gayly, she walked down the steps to her carriage, and, with her guests, was driven away to the theatre.

Yet, somehow, in spite of this sureness of speech and manner, the sight of her old-time suitor had wakened in Mrs. Willoughby the subtle discontent that occasionally affected her—the discontent of women who have only themselves to think about. One might have said that at these times she was subconsciously wearied of her form of life; that, in so many words, though ignorant of the fact, though, consciously, her vacuous life immensely satisfied her, she was BORED. But to-day, bluntly speaking, it was about her husband that her vague dissatisfaction centered; and when she had glanced coolly at her former suitor, it was for the purpose of comparison.

Willoughby was a fair type of the money-getter. Furthermore, what he had built had been raised by his own hands unaided; he was a self-made man, whose one boast was that he owed nothing to any one, not even so little as a debt of gratitude. One realized the fact, too, in the way he carried on his affairs; for in his business he was alert and determined, implacably pursuing his money-making as if it were a warfare, and considerate of none but those joined with him in the moment's harvesting venture. Perhaps his reasons were sufficient—who knows? Perhaps Willoughby was as well aware as they that the friends of to-day might reasonably become the enemies of to-morrow.

But at home the money gathered so ruthlessly elsewhere was thrown about with a lavish hand. Nothing that wealth could provide was denied Mrs. Willoughby or her boy; and though she had been poor when she married, money, in the mere crudity of having it to spend, had long since lost its novelty. To-day, beyond the pride of having it, and beyond the luxury and ostentation it could buy, money possessed for her a far greater significance in its power to make one powerful. In that she had already tasted the illogical enjoyment of one that can obtain power in no other way. And it was because of this place that his money had bought her that Mrs. Willoughby began to look on her husband with a critical eye.

For she was an ambitious woman, though one with definite limitations. Among different surroundings and in an atmosphere less sordidly striving and commonplace, she was fitted to have become, with some encouragement, an admirable and utterly inconspicuous wife and mother. But here, in this narrow, money-getting environment, many things prevented; among them, primarily, the way in which she had been brought up. For her father, too, had been driven by this lust for riches; and though he had failed, to the last he had been goaded on by his one eager, grasping hope. He had drummed into her head the single lesson that without money one is nothing.

In itself it suggested to the few a plausible reason why she had married Willoughby. There had been nothing openly unhappy in their life together. Still, as others saw, Willoughby was much older than his wife, radically without her social instincts, and, furthermore, when she had accepted him, it had been pretty generally understood that Severance had won her heart.

And now, as she sat back in her carriage, remembrance came rapping like an unwelcome, unadmitted visitant. She tried to put it away by chattering smartly; the theatre-wagon rolled along to the clicking of hoofs on the asphalt; but through it all the troublous knocking persistently recurred. For this was one of the few times when she had lingered upon a thought of that first romance of hers; and now, coupled with her hardening criticism of Willoughby, it brought forth insistent questions.

Whether she had really loved her husband when she married him, or whether she had not instead been dazzled by his peculiar abilities remained in doubt.

Severance had come first; he had a little money to begin, and he was doing well with it and seemed on the road to do better. Therefore, her friends were secure in the belief that she would marry him, when Willoughby had made his appearance.

He went at this love-making of his as he went at all his affairs—implacably bold and ruthlessly sweeping aside whoever or whatever came into his way. The fact that he and Severance were considered friends seemed to have counted little; and when, a few months later, it was learned that she had dropped one to take the other, it was also learned that Severance had played at ducks and drakes with his money. Briefly, he had become bankrupt in a mining deal. He and others, Willoughby among them, had gone into a Wyoming copper prospect—the Teton Sisters Company—and while Willoughby apparently got off without damage, Severance had dropped everything. How, was never clearly understood. Severance and his sister had parted with their home to satisfy his creditors, and then moved away.

In the twelve years of the Willoughbys' married life, the tide of money had kept steadfastly on the flood. Nothing his hands touched seemed to fail him. He had his fingers in every kind of venture—mines and mills, foundries and furnaces, steam roads, trolley lines and public utilities; and to each and every one of these promotions, the name of Willoughby affixed the hall-mark of success. Now his dollars jingled in every state of the Union—and they jingled in his own home, too, almost as the only evidences that the home was his. For Willoughby, pursuing money everywhere, seemed to have lost interest in all else but his money-grubbing, just as Willoughby's wife, excepting for the same money-grubbing, seemed to have lost all interest in him.

And now she had looked at Severance; her eyes had rested on him long enough to make comparisons—Severance much improved, cool, suave, presentable, and deferential; her husband big and masterful, a brooding, preoccupied man, and a kind of Orson to be kept denned in his money caves. She sighed to herself regretfully.

Some minutes after Mrs. Willoughby had found her seat in the theatre box she was aware of another party coming down the aisle. "Hello!" exclaimed the man beside her, "here come Hudson Mills and his wife with Case Severance. I didn't know he was in town."

Mrs. Willoughby laid a gloved finger to her lips and affected to yawn, though she stole a glance out of the corner of her eye. Her guest was now nodding over her shoulder at the arrivals in the seats below.

"Severance has made a ten-strike, I hear," he volunteered, in an expressive, if inelegant, idiom of the money game; "there's a story going the rounds that Mills and Severance have been gunning together and that some one else got burned. Anyway, I hear they've lined their pockets. Severance is rich again."

This mixed metaphor affected Mrs. Willoughby with a curious interest. "Oh, is he!" she exclaimed, and, glancing down, she looked unexpectedly into Severance's watching eyes.

But she seemed not in the least disconcerted. Severance was just turning away, mindful of the previous snub, when, with a reassuring smile, she bowed, and then smiled again. For why not? Severance's position had been reestablished in her world.

It was late that night when Mrs. Willoughby returned home. There was a light in her husband's library, and before going to her room she stopped and tapped at the door. Willoughby, with a pile of papers stacked before him, sat with his chin in his hand, staring absently at the wall. As the door opened, he turned for a moment, and then, seeing who it was, thrust his hands into his pockets and slouched down in his chair. "Well?" he murmured, absently.

Mrs. Willoughby, slipping out of her wrap, dropped into a convenient seat.

"Are you still at it? It's nearly one o'clock, Harmon." Yawning slightly, she wriggled her feet out of her carriage slippers and kicked them under her chair. Willoughby looked up, silently watching her, and a momentary small shadow crept into his face. Yet the shadow, small as it was, could not have been because of any flaw in his wife's appearance. Mrs. Willoughby was still young and fair to look upon, clear-eyed and almost girlish, her rounded, regular features set off picturesquely by her hat and its flowing purple plumes, even though both hat and plumes were extravagant in size. Willoughby must have known another reason to frown.

"Where've you been?" he demanded, heavily, his voice bare of any interest. He was a large, florid man, heavily built, square-jawed, and with the deep, scrutinous eyes of one aware of his own power and accustomed to enforce it. But now his eyes seemed listless, as if weary of the strain that had kept them so long on the alert.

"I? At the club," she answered, briefly. Though her own home was large and amply appointed, few were ever asked there to anything more formal than a luncheon or an afternoon at bridge. Home hospitality and the housekeeping it involved had long since become a bore to her; like many others in her set, she had learned to square her obligations through the convenience of her husband's club. The hospitality there entailed no other bother than paying the bills. "Just dinner at the club, and the theatre afterward."

She stripped off her long gloves and dropped them to the floor beside her carriage slippers. Again her husband studied her, almost covertly, one might have thought.

"Any one there?" Willoughby began absently to pick at the edges of the papers on his desk.

She shook her head. "No one you'd care about, I think. There were only three tables besides mine. Mrs. Chardon and her daughter with some of her young friends, and then—" Mrs. Willoughby closely inspected one of her rubies. "The Severances are back in town, Harmon. He and his sister were there with Hudson Mills and his wife."

"Severance—with MILLS!" cried her husband, lifting his head alertly. It was not often that Mrs. Willoughby's talk with him evoked such instant attention. "See here, Stella, are you sure it was Severance?"

"Sure? Sure whether it was Severance? Why, of course I am!" she answered petulantly. She and her husband had never discussed the man, and it seemed a late day now to begin. "What in the world is—?" she began, and then desisted. Willoughby, slouched down in his chair again, had dropped his chin on his breast and was nervously gnawing his lip.

His wife leaned over and gathered up slippers and gloves. "I think I'll go to bed," she murmured carelessly, and wandered toward the door. Willoughby made no response, and she turned and slowly came back. A calendar hanging from the gas bracket had fallen a little aslant, and she reached up and critically straightened it. "Harmon, I hear Case Severance is rich again. I wonder how he managed it."

"Hey? Who?" Willoughby jerked up his head as if startled from a dream—and not a very pretty dream, either, if one might judge from his countenance. "Oh, you mean HIM," he uttered thickly. "How do I know. I suppose he's been up to some of his games again." An almost savage dislike and contempt evidenced themselves in his tone, and pushing back his chair, he picked up his papers and arose. "You'd better go to bed Stella," he suggested brusquely, averting his eyes from her quick scrutiny; "I've got a lot of work here."

She laid a hand on his arm. "What's wrong with you?" she asked intently. There was alertness in the question, rather than responsive softness. Willoughby drew a hand across his mouth. "Nothing's wrong Stella. I've had a hard day. Aren't you going?"

"Yes—in just a moment." She had moved toward the door again, and now was standing with her hand on the knob. "It's Willard's birthday next Wednesday." Willard was their boy. "He'll be eleven, an he wants an electric runabout. The Doane boys have one, and he's just crazy about it We'd better let him have it."

Willoughby frowned, and irritably ruffled the papers in his hand. "A runabout. No; he sha'n't have it. He's too young, and besides——"

"Oh, nonsense, Harmon!"

Willoughby fluttered his papers more irritably than before.

"Well, he can't have it; that's all I have to say." Ordinarily, he gave to her and the boy what they wished, never questioning the cost or character of what they bought "Eleven, and wants an automobile!" he commented, sullenly. "When I was his age I was working day and night to support my——"

"Yes, I know, Harmon," interrupted Mrs. Willoughby, affecting to stifle a yawn "but Willard, fortunately, doesn't have to think of that."

Mrs. Willoughby gave her gloves a disdainful, careless twirl, and went on her way to her room. To her astonishment, a few moments later, she heard the front door slam. Willoughby had gone out.

He was away for nearly a week; and when he returned, his eyes were heavy and blood-shot, his face was pallid and wearily drawn.

"Well, so you are back. What have you been doing?" Mrs. Willoughby asked, perfunctorily. Though it was late in the morning she was still in bed, sitting up in a dressing sack, and turning the pages of a weekly publication that dealt in news of local high life. Its chief item, to-day, was the announcement of a dance she was to give shortly—at the club, as usual—and she had just finished for the second time the commentator's glib and unctuous phrasing.

He answered evasively, "Oh, just away on business." As he walked to the window and looked out, she carelessly turned the pages. "Stella, what did you do for the boy's birthday?" he asked, slowly pacing back to the foot of the bed.

She turned another page. "The boy? Oh, I gave him some money, and sent him down-town with the coachman. I was too busy." Smiling lightly, she went on glancing through the paper. "I suspect he stuffed himself on candy."

But there was no answering smile on Willoughby's face. "On candy?
How much did you give him?"

Without looking up, she answered as lightly as before. "Oh, I can't remember now. Let me think." Then she vaguely named an amount, and Willoughby pressed his lips together.

"Stella," he said slowly, after a moment's darkening of his eyes, "do you know that amounts to a week's salary of more than one of my clerks? Don't you think it was a great deal to give a boy?"

She looked up now, astonished—a little vexed, too; for this was the second time he had questioned her use of money. "Well, what of it? It seems of little consequence." She buried her face in the paper again after this shot, and Willoughby stared at her.

"No," he murmured, reflectively, an alarming bitterness in his voice; "nothing seems of any consequence."

As she glanced casually over the top of her paper, she saw him draw a hand across his face; but, still vexed, she took no warning from the sign. "Well, there's no need of making a fuss, is there?" she asked, rebukingly. Thus showing how distasteful the subject had become, and, having had her say, she instantly changed the topic. "You're coming home Thursday night, aren't you?"

Willoughby watched her absorbedly. "I don't know. Why?"

"Oh, I just wanted to find out. It's the night of my dance, you know."

"A dance? Your dance?" He drew in his breath, and his hands, gripping the bed's footboard, closed a little tighter. "I'd forgotten that. Yes, your dance, and I——"

He broke off wearily, his lips framing a mere wraith of a smile, and in its gravity she still saw no warning of deep waters stirring troublously. "A dance—you're giving a dance!" he repeated, and there came into his eyes a subtle hint of mockery that, coupled with the words, gave them almost the significance of a jeer.

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Harmon!" Mrs. Willoughby threw down her paper irritably, aware only of the unspoken protest in his manner, and disdaining to analyze it. "See here—are you going to make a fuss about that, too? Or are you still growling about the boy? I should think a man with your money would be above——"

It seemed unnecessary to round out the sentence; in itself the fragment, sharply uttered, peevish and fretful, conveyed more than enough. "You wouldn't let him have what he wanted; so what's the use of making it any worse? He swallowed his disappointment; but if you're getting ready to complain about me now, I'll——"

"Yes, I've thought there was good stuff in the boy," he interrupted, the slow words cutting short her vehement protest. "Where is he now?" he added abruptly. " I think I'd like to see him."

Mrs. Willoughby flounced down among the pillows. "I don't know—at school, I suppose. Aren't you going to your office to-day?"

Willoughby shook his head. He turned to the door, moving heavily; and there, at last, in his sunken head, his shoulders wearily bent, she caught some hint of the man's hidden emotion. Astonishment at first ousted all else from her thought, and she gaped at him in wonder. Then came a small, chilling touch of fear.

"HARMON!" At the swift call he looked back at her. "Harmon! Has anything happened?"

His answer was an evasion, and she knew it. "I'm staying home to see some men. That's all."

But the moment's fear was too stressful to be so easily set at rest. "Wait—do you hear?" She slipped from the bed, and, with her eyes still fastened on him she groped about till she found her down slippers. Willoughby had slowly opened the door, but his wife angrily reached over his shoulder and pushed it shut. "You SHALL tell me!" she insisted, fiercely determined. "I want to know what's happened."

Willoughby shook off her hand, and renewed his effort at the door. "I've nothing to tell you," he rumbled sullenly; and then—"What do you want to know for?"

She caught her breath, certain now of the fear that shook her like an ague. He was in trouble, and trouble, to her, meant but the one thing—a money trouble. It was the first time in her years of placid, self-possessed vanity that any terror like this had come to jar her. To lose it now—this bought and paid-for complacency, this counterpart of happiness, struck her to the heart with a keener, more convincingly human emotion than she had known for many a day in her negligent, shallow existence.

"You want to know?" he answered, and smiled at her in grim, accusing mockery. "All right, then; I'll tell you. You'd better be ready for it, too." In his brutality there was a guarded note of self-pity, as if to see her suffer would somehow rejoice him in his own trouble. "Well, I'm smashed up—that's all. I'm ruined!"

Mrs. Willoughby, shrinking away, laid a hand on her lips and stared with distended eyes. "RUINED?" she gasped, unable to believe him—incredulously, as if at some barbaric jest. "Ruined?" She had turned quite white. "Oh," she cried, wetting her lips, "does it mean there is nothing left? How did it happen? Oh, it can't be true!"

"How did it happen?" Willoughby had thrust both hands into his pockets, and his head was turned sideways, as if the better to study the depths of her emotion. "Oh, the usual way—flying too many kites, I suppose. Poor?" he growled savagely. "Yes; we're poor as Job's turkey! They've cleaned me out of everything—their——Teton Sisters, too!"

In her mind's bewilderment of distress she caught at the name; it was the property in which Severance had lost his money; and she recalled ugly rumors that, before, had not affected her. Now that his money was gone, they attached to themselves a newer significance, accusing and indefensible. "The Teton Sisters! What do you mean?" For was the shame of losing his wealth to be coupled with the shameful admission that he had taken a hand in gouging her former suitor? It was singular she hadn't thought of it before; now it struck home with redoubled poignancy.

"Mean, hey? I mean they've got it away from me—Mills and that fellow Severance. It was the prettiest thing I owned, too," he groaned, careless of what he was saying, and blurting out the acknowledgment. "But that ain't the worst—no, not by a long chalk! Do you know what they're going to do?" he demanded, hoarsely, and with an almost weeping resentment, yet as if glad to find some one to whom to pour it out. "They're going to sue for the money, too!"

"What money?" she persisted, hollowly, determined now to know all. It might be dreadful to lose one's money—it was dreadful; but to have this man drag her down into his own shame, too—ah!

Willoughby threw up both hands in a gesture of ungovernable petulance. "Oh, what's the use of talking about it?" he growled, and then instantly his voice dropped. "Stella, I'm sorry for your sake. We'll have to begin all over again, dear."

"But you shall talk of it!" she directed, with a cruel and cutting significance in her voice. "You can't hide it from me now."

His mouth opened dumbfoundedly. Then he thrust out his jaw with a reawakened truculency, now aimed at her.

"Well, then—it was the money I took from that fellow—from your old friend, Severance. He was——"

"You took it from him!" she cried. "You mean you STOLE it!"

Willoughby's mouth twitched, as if she had struck him a blow. "So that's the way you look at it now, is it?" he said, his voice quietly effective. "All right, then! I came in here hoping to get a word of sympathy from you—perhaps a little kindness. But I knew it was only a hope." He drew a deep breath. "Now don't work yourself up over him, I warn you, my dear. I won't tell you why I ruined him, years ago, but I'll tell you how. You've called me a thief, so I'll give you some more facts before you jump at conclusions."

"I don't want excuses—it's explanations!"

It was another taunt that struck home, but Willoughby again mastered himself grimly. "Any one of us would have done it," he answered, ignoring the remark. "Severance made it easy. I did to him only what he tried to do to others. When he saw how good the mine was, he wanted me to help him rook them out of their stock, so that we could get it. Simple enough, of course, but they'd been square with me. No, I refused—but I did accommodate him to the extent of doing him out of his own block. He'd mortgaged everything to buy shares, and when he was where I wanted him, all tied up with loans and not able to borrow another cent, I told the mine people what Severance was trying to do. So they put in a ruinous report, and every one from whom he'd borrowed a cent just called his loans and foreclosed on him right and left. He went down and out—and that's all there was to it. Nobody else got hurt, and we divided his stock among us. Can't you see how it was, Stella?" he asked quietly, and stood awaiting her verdict.

"Yes! I see how it was!" she flashed. "It was robbery—you can't excuse yourself."

If she had wished to sting him again, the attempt seemed to become fruitful. "Excuses! I make none, do you hear?" he retorted, incensed. " I ruined him to get him out of your way—yes!—oh, you needn't say it!—out of mine, too. Look here!" he cried, passionately; "don't you think I didn't know you? All you looked for or lived for was—" But he broke off there, and surveyed her with an affronted dullness, as if it were only wasted effort. "Oh, well, what's the use?" he muttered, and with morose and glowering eyes slouched through the doorway.

Mrs. Willoughby lay among the pillows, her arms flung out and her face half hidden by her disordered hair. TO BE POOR! Her mind seized on that as the one incalculable shame that had befallen her—on that, rather than on her view of his dishonesty. Curiously enough, it was not only the loss of the money itself and the imminent surrender of her ease and luxury and ostentation that dismayed her. She was anguished, as well, by the stigma of being poor. She was able to see only the mean side of it; the pity of her friends already rang in her ears like scorn, mocking her because the one thing that had made her was now stripped away. Hers was not the nature to see the other side of it—the helpful nobility of self-denial, the heroism of unselfishness, the courage that stoically faces the narrow and sordid effort whose rewards are only in the future. No, indeed!—there was only a savage resentment in her mind, the inexplicable sense that somehow she had been tricked and cheated, and that he alone was to blame.

Though she accused him of dishonesty in the Severance affair, the charge was only secondary. Given another time, she might carelessly have acquitted him, taking his own say-so as enough; but Willoughby now had chosen a poor hour for his acknowledgment, when he linked it to the tidings of his ruin. All that day she kept to her bed, her mind absorbed with the catastrophe that had swept out from under her the unsolid prop of her arrogant money pride. For, again, without money what was left?

She showed herself the day following, wan and silent. Willoughby was away; the news of his failure was public property, and she writhed when she read of it in the daily prints. But in the following days she suffered other pangs that were a healthy counter-irritant—she learned to pick and number her FRIENDS, and to know, among so large a list of acquaintances, how very few they were. Though she was prepared for this, well aware what befalls the one with broken playthings, nevertheless she was filled with bitter exasperation against those who were no more careless than she had been herself. So she left orders with the servants that none was to be admitted.

Her husband was not so easily evaded. He returned, three days later, and, walking straight to her, laid a hand on her shoulder. "Stella, I'm mighty sorry; but if you'll help me, I can get on my feet again."

"Oh, don't bother me!" she retorted, flinging off his hand. Willoughby flushed, seemed about to make a bitter retort, and apparently changed his mind. "Stella, I'm in a good deal of trouble. A kind word or two would help." But the wife maintained a sullen dumbness, her eyes turned away from him; and Willoughby retired, shaking his head.

At the week end he tried again, hopefully. "Stella, it's not so bad as we first thought. I think we'll save enough to live on—maybe enough to keep our home. But you'll have to lend a hand."

She looked up from her packing. "What do you say?" she demanded, with a rekindled interest, and at the sight of it his eyes lightened.

"Why, if you're willing to go slowly, and put up with a few things, we might be able to do it."

"Humh!" Mrs. Willoughby bent over her trunk again. "I suppose that means you'd make me a kind of drudge. Thank you; I prefer the other way."

"The other way?" he inquired, looking at her closely. "What do you mean by that?"

She affected to show her carelessness by smoothing the clothes in the trunk tray. "Oh, I'm going to take the boy and go away somewhere for a while."

It was not unexpected. Willoughby came a step nearer, his brow wrinkled ominously. "You shall not!" he said, with a slow distinctness, every syllable rapped out decisively. Then his anger, righteous enough in its way, got the better of him. "Listen to me, Stella!' he gritted, clenching his hands beside him. "I can see clear through you. You haven't the nerve to face this down, so you're going to sling me overboard. That's it, isn't it? Well, you sha'n't. I've handled you like a fool, these years, and now I'm going to take charge. You'll stay here—not because of yourself or me—but for the boy!" he cried; and Mrs. Willoughby arose, quiet, but white.

"No," she answered, clearly; "we've played this farce too long, Harmon. I don't think I'm suited to you, and I'm sure you're not suited to me. We married under false ideas of each other."

Willoughby turned white, too, but, restraining himself, he peered at her from under his heavy brows. "No, we didn't!" he retorted, solemnly. "YOU did, but I didn't! You married me thinking my money would buy you what you wanted. I question whether you thought of ME at all. But I married you, Stella, knowing exactly what you were, and, since I've paid for it, I intend you shall stick to your bargain."

"Oh, yes," she answered, smiling a little in scorn, "it would be like you to call it a bargain. But you can't prevent my leaving." "No—perhaps not; but I can give you a good, strong argument why you shouldn't. Don't think I'm the only one that knows you—why, good Lord, Stella, I've no monopoly on the knowledge! Do you know what they'll say of you, all these fair weather friends that've dropped you like a smashed toy? I DO—they'll say you've wrung me dry, and that now I'm ruined you've chucked me just as they thought you would. If you care to know, I've heard whispers of it already; so I'm going to save my boy, if I can."

Mrs. Willoughby stood with a hand at her throat, gasping; the shot had struck home. "How dare you?" she whispered. "How dare you, after what I know of you? You say that, after cheating me into marrying you?"

Willoughby tossed his head. "Do you still refer to Severance?" he inquired, caustically; and then his face darkened. "I'll tell you why I cheated you into marrying me. It was because I loved you, I think," he said, and there came a wistfulness into his voice that almost startled her. But she put it away scornfully.

"You mean you stole his money to get me!" she retorted, unequivocally.

"I did—you're quite right!" he answered quickly. "And do you know what became of the money?" he demanded, pausing long enough to wet his lips, but giving her no time to reply "Well, it bought the clothes you wore—your hats—your gloves—your jewels. It's paid for your extravagances—or a part of them. It bought you the carriage you wanted; your string of pearls too. My soul!" he cried in a kind of fierce wonderment, "it bought nearly all there is of you, I think! It bought you, besides—that money did—his, with a lot more added to it!"

Mrs. Willoughby stared at him confounded—the situation had become reversed. She found herself impugned and called to defend when she had thought only to attack. It was a bitter reflection that he had, all along, hidden his contempt, while she had been idly picking flaws in him.

"Oh, yes!" he cried, going on; "all you looked for or lived for was money. I'd heard your father drum it into your head, and I'd seen the way you took it in!" He threw up his hand with a gesture of intolerable regret, this man who had been only a money-grubbing automaton. "I was ashamed, at first, but as you'd seemed to take a fancy to me, I deluded myself into thinking you cared. I knew Severance, too. He was clever and shrewd, but crooked as a fish-hook. At the time he was making love to you, there was another. But, never mind, I won't talk of that. I saw you, and it didn't take long to turn my head." He smiled wistfully, as before. "I'd never seen a woman like you, you know. I'd been too busy trying to keep alive. But there was this Severance, and—oh, well, what's the use?" he muttered again thickly. "You got your money, and I got the woman I loved. Yes, I got her—my soul!" he protested; "and it's a pretty trial balance, isn't it, to cast up on a day like this?"

Silenced, she stood and watched him, waiting for the next storm of his passion. But Willoughby's rage seemed to have burned itself out. He drifted across the room and reached his hand for the bell-pull. "Put away that trunk," he ordered quietly, facing her; "I'm going to run things now. If you're determined to leave me, you'll have to put it off a while. I'm going to save the boy. When I'm on my feet again, I'll give you what money you want; but there shall be no open scandal." Still silent, she was watching him, when the maid came in answer to the bell. "Help Mrs. Willoughby with these," he said curtly, denoting the half-packed trunk; "we're not going away." And in the presence of the servant she dared make no rejoinder. Later in the day he looked in again; Mrs. Willoughby and the maid were rearranging the room, and the trunk had been whisked away. He smiled grimly, and withdrew.

There could be but two results from a conflict like this: she would either scorn him the more or she would come to respect him. For days the outcome wavered in the balance. They met at the table only—she sitting preoccupied, he talking quietly with the boy. At the week end he brought her a roll of bills. "For the house money," he said briefly; and when she would not reach out a hand for it, he dropped it in her lap, and went away. But that night she entered into the talk at the table, a little quiet, still repressed, and showing her hurt. Willoughby, quietly deferential, kept to his part of the conversation exactly as if nothing ugly had occurred between them. His bantering with his son was genial and affectionate, and once she thought he tried to include her in this camaraderie. The few last shreds of her vanity, however, still waved distressing signals of the hurt, and she evaded it. But she felt strangely alone, notwithstanding; with an almost unconquerable self-pity she reflected on the fair-weather friends that had deserted her. A little sense of comfort trickled into her heart, though, when she thought of her boy. HE, at all events, had not been affected by the rumble of drums that had beaten her out of the worldly camp where once she had commanded. That night Willoughby looked in at her, while she sat musing over a book, and when she would not look up at him he went away again. A more complete sense of her loneliness came over her as the hours passed in the big, silent house. So she laid down her book, and went up-stairs to her boy's room.

"Who's there?" he cried, awakening from a doze.

"Just I, Willard. I came up to see whether you were all right."

"Oh, yes, I am!" he answered, a little perplexed; it had not been often that she had found time from her busy affairs for a visit like this. The boy took her hand in his and snuggled down in the pillows. "It's nice to have you, mumsy," he mumbled, comfortably.

Willoughby, coming home the next evening, heard her talking to the cook. "You mustn't be so wasteful, Annie. Unless you can do better, I shall have to get some one else." Her voice was peevish, but to Willoughby it sounded full of inexplicable melody. Nor when she carried her complaint to him later, at the dinner-table, was he less affected with a secret joy. "Harmon—we'd better take a smaller house. I can't do it any longer on what we have."

"You needn't," he answered lightly; "I can let you have more. Things are working out better than I expected. Just let me know what you're short at the end of the week. I can manage it."

That night, too, he came and sat in the room where she was reading. He said nothing, and picked up another book. But she knew what he wished, and resolutely steeled herself. The next night he was there again. "Good night, dear," he said cheerfully, daring the added word when she arose to go.

"Good night," she answered.

But on the evening following they talked together, each evading the shoals of past regret, and threading only the safe channels of the commonplace. "Good night, Stella dear," he said, unaffectedly, as she picked up her things; and she answered: "Good night, Harmon."

He came close to her, and looked down into her face. "Stella," he said, quietly; "Stella, it would make me very happy if you—if I might—why, kiss you good night."

Mrs. Willoughby gathered up the remainder of her things, and then slowly shook her head.

"No, we won't talk of that—yet!" she answered, and went away up the stairs. Willoughby bit his lip, looking silently after her.

"Why, mumsy!" exclaimed the boy, his hand touching his mother's cheek as she leaned over him. "What's wrong?"

She shook her head vehemently in the dark. "Nothing at all, dear.
You must go to sleep now."

The next day, Willoughby, on his return from down-town, found her busily superintending the two servants while they cleaned up his room. It was an unexpected attention on her part. He withdrew quietly. A little while later, leaning over the balusters, she saw Willard whispering to him earnestly. "Did she, my boy?" she heard the man cry under his breath. "Why, now, mumsy must just have been a little tired. I don't think it was anything else." Willoughby's smile seemed enough at the moment to reassure almost any one.

At dinner his lightness, good-nature, geniality became infectious. Even Mrs. Willoughby suffered herself to smile at his whimsical jollity with the boy. Later there was the little comedy of the good night; and then they parted again. But Willoughby did not go out as usual.

It was very late that night when Mrs. Willoughby awoke with the conviction that some one was in her room. Her first impulse was to cry out in alarm; then, in terror she lay quiet, peering from beneath her half-closed lids. Across the lighter background of the curtained window a figure moved, big and familiar in its bulk. She knew then, and there seemed a greater reason than ever why she should remain quiet.

Nor was she wrong in her surmise. A moment later Willoughby leaned over, and she felt his lips lightly brush her cheek. A little sigh followed, and then he was gone, tiptoeing cautiously. Mrs. Willoughby sat up in bed, her face in her hands, and reflected in the stillness that presages the storm. But loneliness no longer pained her; the solitude had become suddenly peopled with vivid, poignant regrets, shouting loudly their indictment and their appeal.

Then, with the curious informality of a woman's emotion—whether of grief or of joy, whether of pleasure or of pain—she rocked down her head to her knees, while through her fingers poured the scalding tears. Mrs. Willoughby had become sincere at last.

***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII No.1 JULY 1910

The Painter of "Diana of the Tides" {pages 95-103}

By WALTER PRICHARD EATON

Author of "The American Stage of To-day," etc.

Given nearly three hundred square feet of blank wall space, and it takes something of an artist to fill it up with interesting paint. Probably you would not pick a miniature painter for the task. Yet, curiously, John Elliott, creator of "Diana of the Tides," the great mural painting which adorns the large gallery to the right of the entrance of the new National Museum at Washington, also paints on ivory. He works, likewise, in silver point, that delicate and difficult medium; he draws pastel illustrations for children's fairy tales; he works in portraiture with red chalk or oils. And, when the need comes, he has shown that he can turn stevedore, carpenter, and architect, to slave with the relief party at Messina, finally to help design and build, in four months, an entire village for the stricken sufferers, including a hotel, a hospital, three schoolhouses, and a church. The too frequent scorn of the "practical man of affairs" for the artist and dreamer, the world's sneaking tolerance for the temperament which creates in forms of ideal beauty rather than in bridges or factories or banks, finds in the life and work of such a man as John Elliott such complete, if unconscious, refutation, that his story should have its place in the history of the day.

John Elliott was born on Good Friday, 1859, one of a famous Scottish border family. His residence is now in Boston, Massachusetts, at the home of his mother-in-law. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. Robert Louis Stevenson had Elliott blood in his veins. "Parts of me," he once wrote, "have shouted the slogan of the Elliotts in the debatable land." If Stevenson's Homeric account of the Four Black Elliotts in "Weir of Hermiston" is historically veracious, we might fancy that one of their descendants would feel his activities somewhat cramped on Beacon Street, Boston. The Elliotts were a wild lot, and some of them did not escape the hangman. Their family tree appears to have been the gallows. But Stevenson tells us they were noted for their prayers, and at least one of them wrote poetry, and declaimed it, drunk, to Walter Scott, who retaliated in kind.

But the present John Elliott, artist, though he is of the kin of Stevenson, and bears the dark hair and rather prominent, melancholy eyes of the traditional Elliott stock, yet physically much more closely resembles Edgar Allan Poe. If you press him hard, he will confess that he began life by studying for the stage, and "almost played Romeo," before painting drew him away. Reaching Italy, he aspired to enter the studio of Don Jose di Villegas, now director of the Prado Museum in Madrid, but then in Rome. Villegas took no pupils. But "Jack" Elliott is Scotch. He made a bargain. He would teach the master English, in return for instruction in painting. At the end of two years, young Elliott had learned much about art, but the master, he says, had acquired only one English phrase—"I haf no money!"

At the end of two years, Elliott wished to leave, because he despaired of painting like his master. "That is why I keep you," said Villegas; "you have retained your own manner and choice of subjects." So the pupil stayed on in Rome for five years, sharing his studio later with Aristide Sartorio, now a leading Italian painter. Here, in the Via Flaminia, he painted his first important mural decoration, for the dining room of Mrs. Potter Palmer's Chicago Lake Shore mansion. This work, called "The Vintage," is decorously inebriate, a vinous riot of little cupids. It led, shortly after his marriage in 1887 to Miss Maud Howe, a daughter of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, to his establishing himself in Chicago, where he did many decorations and portraits. In 1894, he went back to Rome to execute a commission for a huge ceiling piece for the Boston Public Library. The piece was for a room later converted into a children's room, and after the canvas was placed, in 1901, the incongruity of the adult painting and the purposes of the room caused unfavorable comment. But the room has been recently readjusted. It is now lined with high oak shelves, almost to the cornice, filled with musty old books of a beautiful brown—perhaps the most effective decoration in the world—and the ceiling tells at its true value.

This ceiling, fifty feet square, divided into two equal panels, represents the twenty Christian centuries, as horses, led by the hours (winged female figures) out of the mists of the past into the illumination of the present. The models for the horses were the undersized nags of the Roman Campagna, which are "small but decorative beasties," as Mr. Elliott puts it, and lend themselves to a slightly conventional treatment. They sweep two by two, out of a cool mistiness, round the ceiling past the suggestion of a pale moon, into the full radiance of the golden orb of the sun. The triumph of the picture is its handling of the problem of light. This golden daybreak pierces the mists whereon the horses gallop, touches here a flank, there a wing feather on one of the hours, and warms to rosy glow the tip of a cloud. It appears in unexpected places, grows where only shadow seemed to be, and surprises you anew each time you look up. Painted in the flat—that is, with no part of the picture telling as farther from the eye than another, to distort the proportions of the room—the ceiling yet has great depth, distance, airy lightness. It is a true decorative painting.

While at work upon it, Mr. Elliott painted many portraits, including the well-known red chalk heads of the "Soldiers Three," Lord Ava, the Marquis of Winchester, and General Wauchope; the portrait of His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge; and that of Lady Katherine Thynne, now Lady Cromer, a celebrated English beauty. Indeed, he made her the model for the second hour in the Boston ceiling, the figure next to the leader in the procession. Three studies of her head for this figure, well known from reproduction, are now in the possession of Thomas W. Lawson.

In Rome the Elliotts occupied for some time the apartments of Mrs. Elliott's cousin, the late F. Marion Crawford, in the Palazzo Santa Croce. In writing "With the Immortals," Mr. Crawford had collected many death masks, including one of Dante, which fascinated Mr. Elliott. Two pictures of "Dante in Exile" were the result. One of them now hangs in the living room of Queen Margherita of Italy, the other in the house of Mrs. J. Montgomery Sears of Boston. A third pastel study was made, an unfinished head of the poet, and thrown into a wastebasket. By a curious fatality, it is now better known than either of the paintings. Mrs. Elliott rescued the drawing, smoothed it out, framed it, and was allowed to hang it in her chamber. Later it was seen and purchased by Mrs. David Kimball of Boston, and in reproduction has gone all over the world, receiving honors in Japan and the higher honor of a place over the desk of many Dante students. Yet few who possess the reproduction know anything of the artist.

Mr. Elliott, receiving his commission to do a great mural painting for the new National Museum in Washington, again went to Rome four years ago. "Diana of the Tides" was completed and signed on Christmas day, 1908. Three days later came the awful news of the Messina earthquake, and the Hon. Lloyd Griscom, then American Ambassador to Italy, at once called for volunteers for his relief expedition. John Elliott was among the first to respond. He went south officially as an interpreter. Actually, he played the part of stevedore as well for ten days on the relief ship.

"I have dropped my last knuckle down the hold this morning," he wrote back, "and I have only two fingers left that I can wash."

After a few weeks, he hastened back to Rome, to give a promised public exhibition of "Diana of the Tides," and, as soon as the exhibition was over, rushed down to Messina again.

There Commander Belknap, who was at the head of the American relief forces, put him to work, as architect, on the erection of the American village, in the lemon groves on the outskirts of the stricken city. "I had never been trained as an architect," he says, "but I once made over a house up in Cornish, New Hampshire, and that gave me a practical experience which came in remarkably handy."

Most of the lumber had been cut for the erection of small houses, and the door and window frames were stock pieces. It became his task to design and build, as quickly as could be done, not only comfortable houses for many thousand people, but a church, a hotel, three schools, a hospital, all out of these small lumber units. He combined the units for the larger buildings, so grouping the small stock window frames as to give a pleasing effect of size, even constructing a kind of rose window for the church. He helped lay out the streets in such a way as to preserve all the trees possible. And, in spite of the haste with which the work had to he done, and the sixteen-hour-a-day strain under which the workers labored, the Zona Americana emerged an attractive and sanitary, as well as practical, village. Queen Helena, as soon as the American village was under way, got Mr. Elliott to go over the drafts for the plans of the American quarter in her village near by, working them up along the same lines. So, in four months, he designed and superintended the erection of houses, churches, schools, and hospitals for a town of several thousand inhabitants.

Commander Belknap's report spoke of him as "the first to volunteer, and the most devoted worker, sharing every hardship with unfailing good humor and leaving his beautifying touch on every part of the work."

On June 12, 1908, having built his town and recovered his lost knuckles, John Elliott returned to Rome, where the soil did not rock, and set quietly about making twenty-four small pastel drawings to illustrate a fairy story! From building houses for the wretched homeless sufferers, he turned to the play tales of childhood. He laid down the T square and the hammer for a piece of pastel crayon. But he had triumphantly refuted the scorn of the "practical man" for the artist. He had shown the stuff that dreams are really made of. Incidentally, he had won for himself a decoration from the King of Italy, and the medal of the American Red Cross Association.

"Diana of the Tides," which now covers the end wall of the right-hand gallery of the new National Museum at Washington, is akin to the Boston Library ceiling in its employment of horses symbolically, its light, luminous color, and its subtle play of illumination. This charm of illumination is unfortunately lost in reproduction. Mr. Elliott has made symbolic use of Diana, the Moon Goddess. in a way obvious enough, but hitherto, oddly, untried by artists. It is a way singularly appropriate in a museum of scientific character—a combination of ancient myth and modern science. As the Moon Goddess, Diana controls the four tides, which, in the shape of horses, draw her erect and jubilant figure on a great seashell. They are without guiding reins and harness, to suggest the unseen channels of her sway. If the reader will note an advancing wave, he will see that, just before the crest curls over, the foam is tossed back. Then the wave bows and breaks. So the nearest horse raises his head slightly, the next higher, the third tosses his head back, and the last has bowed his neck. In their motion and grouped attitudes. as they gallop up on the beach, is the rhythm of an oncoming wave. Farther than that Mr. Elliott wisely did not go. "Let them suggest more obviously a wave," he says, "and you have a trick picture. After a while, you wouldn't see anything in it but the trick." The wave motion is repeated on a comber out at sea, and, to the left, against a rock on the shore.

Diana stands behind the horses, against the great, golden moon—a radiant halo. She has just unloosed an arrow from her bow. Her draperies are of indefinite color, the rose and lilac and amber of sunset. Her face, it will be noted, though she stands against the moon, is lighted from in front. In that fact lies the secret of the illumination. For this picture was supposedly painted at that one Byronic hour of the year when

The sun was setting opposite the moon.

Turner, in a small water color, has worked out a similar problem, with the cool copper of the harvest moonlight bathing one side of an old stone tower, the warm rose of sunset the other. In Mr. Elliott's great canvas the mutual lights kill all shadows, and out toward the great yellow disk of the moon the invisible sun floods its lilac and pink, kindling the waves, the draperies of the goddess, the wet flanks of the horses, and suffusing the whole painting with its delicate, bright warmth, which is yet kept too cool for gaudiness by the twilight of the moon.

While this canvas was being unpacked in Washington last winter, Mr. Elliott was exhibiting in Boston his portrait of his mother-in-law, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. It was begun and nearly finished at Newport four or five years ago; but Mr. Elliott has not cared to complete it, for during the interval the "Grand Old Lady" has considerably changed in appearance. She is now more than ninety years old. When the sittings began, Mrs. Howe had just recovered from an illness, and could read or talk only for brief periods. Mostly she sat looking out of her window at a bird which had a nest in a nearby tree. In this attitude, the eyes raised, the face quiet yet alert, the artist has caught her; calm, patient, but with one hand characteristically clenched on the arm of her chair, showing a touch of hidden force and commanding will. She is dressed in light green. The background is an indistinguishable brown. Her eyes have that very delicate light blue of advanced age, wistful yet prophetic. The skin, too, has the rare ivory delicacy of old age, of old age gently dealt with and protected. The light is unobtrusive yet luminous—morning sunshine. The picture is utterly simple; the more so for its touch of incompleteness. The masses are broad, artless. It is tender, reverential, a sweet and solemn glorification of old age, and of the old age of a distinguished spirit.

And at the exhibition in Boston one of the women visitors complained to the artist: "But you know, Mr. Elliott, when Mrs. Howe comes to the Woman's Club, she always looks so bright and animated, and always has something smart to say!"

To which the artist replied: "No doubt, my dear lady. But I was not painting a president of the New England Woman's Club, but the author of `The Battle Hymn of the Republic.' "

Queen Margherita of Italy made a truer comment when she saw the portrait in Mr. Elliott's studio in Rome. "That portrait deserves to go into any collection in the world," she said, "not because it is a good portrait of a distinguished old woman, but because it is a portrait of Old age as it ought to be."

Can it be that a mere Continental Queen is a better judge of art than a member of a Boston Woman's Club? Such thoughts are very disturbing!

Queen Margherita, ever since she first visited Mr. Elliott's studio in Rome ten years ago, has been his warm patron. It was for her he made his well known silver-point portrait of the late King Humbert, which she carries with her on all journeys. It has, indeed the boldness of line inseparable from good silver-point drawing, where a stroke once laid on is indelible and no "working over" is possible. When "Diana of the Tides " was exhibited in Rome in February, 1909, the Queen was one of the first visitors. She was not the first, the Chinese Minister arriving ahead of all others, on the stroke of ten—the opening hour—attended by all his suite, to signify his profound Celestial veneration for the Fine Arts. The Queen, seeing the picture, expressed delight and volunteered to tell her son, King Victor Emmanuel, about it.

A few days later, at seven thirty in the morning, there came a knocking at the door, with the announcement, "A message from the King."

The King, said the messenger, would follow in an hour. Presumably there was some hurry of preparation in the Elliott family. A New York artist, at any rate, at seven thirty A. M. would be in no condition to receive a crowned head—or any other! Promptly at eight thirty—punctuality being a royal virtue—King Victor Emmanuel drove up in a motor car with two aides. He remained half an hour. Being fond of horses, he found much in the picture genuinely to interest him. The artist accompanied the monarch to the door of his car, where he thanked him for the honor of his visit.

"Not at all," said the King, in his excellent English. "My mother told me to come."

Which shows, at least, that the Fifth Commandment is honored in
Italy.

The twenty-four pastel drawings made to illustrate Mrs. Anderson's fairy tale, "The Great Sea Horse," were also exhibited in America last winter. Made immediately after Mr. Elliott's heartbreaking labor on the rocking soil of Sicily, they are none the less quiet, childish, and fanciful in their charm. Only one of them might have been inspired by the turning over in his uneasy sleep of the giant buried beneath Etna—the picture of the naked giant sitting on a headland and emptying his hot pipe ashes into the sea, where they form a volcano. The grim, grotesque old fellow is carefully drawn, with a fine rhythm of line in the seated limbs. His bulk dwarfs the headland, and his head and shoulders grow blue and pale in the sky. One questions why the ashes do not fall farther out to sea; they seem to lie in the shallow tide water on the beach. Barring this note of smallness, the picture is a true grotesque in miniature.

Mr. Elliott also works in genuine miniature. He has painted several portraits—of Mrs. Potter Palmer, the Chanler sisters of New York, and many more. He has painted landscapes, as well. Professor Barrett Wendell possesses a charming example. Most recently he has been engaged on a large mural decoration, best fitted, perhaps, for a music room, showing Pan seated on a tree trunk by a lake, making into a pipe the broken reeds in his hand after Syrinx eluded him. No horizon line shows. Pan and his tawny leopard skin (his automobile coat, the artist calls it) tell against the high purple banks across the lake. The god is making the best of his loss—making music of it, in fact. He was the eternal boy, before Mr. Barrie rediscovered him and surnamed him Peter.

And there is something of the eternal boy about John Elliott. He plays with a paint box on a fifty-foot ceiling or a twenty-seven- foot end wall, turns aside to paint a miniature on ivory, drops all his paints when a great national calamity comes and is converted into an architect overnight, building a whole town in four months and making it as beautiful as he can in the process, though the "practical" man would say that utility alone was demanded; and then, when this work is over, turning blithely back again to make pictures for a fairy book. He is strong, through his fresh imagination, to combine ancient myth with modern science in a huge decorative canvas, to reflect the dignity and loveliness and spiritual power of an exalted old age, to do practical work in a practical crisis—and to joy, at the same time, with the moon baby dancing on the beach!

"Jack Elliott," they will tell you who know him, "has an artistic temperament." Well, if this be the artistic temperament, what a pity there is not more of it in the world! It is not the temperament that is self-centered, whining, ineffectual. It is the temperament that does whatever comes to hand as well as it can, for sheer love of the task, and of beautiful workmanship that through imagination wins to sympathy, and through imagination grasps the opportunity to do practical work beautifully, where others would only do it practically. It is the temperament eternally boyish and buoyant, which is on the side of sweetness and light.

Perhaps it is not what the world means by the artistic temperament. But it is the temperament of the true artist. "Never do a pot-boiler," said Mr. Elliott to a young painter the other day. "Let one of your best things go to boil the pot." In these words is a rule of conduct that all of us—artists or artisans brokers or clerks, men or women—might well walk by toward the light of a more beautiful and cooperative society.

***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII No.2 AUGUST 1910

THE HEATHEN {page 193-204}

By JACK LONDON

Author of " The Call of the Wild," "Martin Eden," etc.

I met him first in a hurricane. And though we had been through the hurricane on the same schooner, it was not until the schooner had gone to pieces under us that I first laid eyes on him. Without doubt I had seen him with the rest of the Kanaka crew on board, but I had not consciously been aware of his existence, for the Petite Jeanne was rather overcrowded. In addition to her eight or ten Kanaka sea men, her white captain, mate, and supercargo, and her six cabin passengers, she sailed from Rangiroa with something like eighty-five deck passengers—Paumotuans and Tahitians, men, women, and children, each with a trade-box, to say nothing of sleeping-mats, blankets, and clothes-bundles.

The pearling season in the Paumotus was over, and all hands were returning to Tahiti. The six of us cabin passengers were pearl-buyers. Two were Americans, one was Ah Choon, the whitest Chinese I have ever known, one was a German, one was a Polish Jew, and I completed the half-dozen. It had been a prosperous season. Not one of us had cause for complaint, nor one of the eighty-five deck passengers either. All had done well, and all were looking forward to a rest-off and a good time in Papeete. Of course the Petite Jeanne was overloaded. he was only seventy tons, and she had no right to carry a tithe of the mob she had on board. Beneath her hatches she was crammed and jammed with pearl shell and copra. Even the trade-room was packed full of shell. It was a miracle that the sailors could work her. There was no moving about the decks. They simply climbed back and forth along the rails. In the night-time they walked upon the sleepers, who carpeted the deck, two deep, I'll swear. Oh, and there were pigs and chickens on deck, and sacks of yams, while every conceivable place was festooned with strings of drinking cocoanuts and bunches of bananas. On both sides, between the fore and main shrouds, guys had been stretched, just low enough for the fore-boom to swing clear; and from each of these guys at least fifty bunches of bananas were suspended.

It promised to be a messy passage, even if we did make it in the two or three days that would have been required if the southeast trades had been blowing fresh. But they weren't blowing fresh. After the first five hours, the trade died away in a dozen gasping fans. The calm continued all that night and the next day—one of those glaring, glossy calms when the very thought of opening one's eyes to look at it is sufficient to cause a headache. The second day a man died, an Easter Islander, one of the best divers that season in the lagoon. Smallpox, that is what it was, though how smallpox could come on board when there had been no known cases ashore when we left Rangiroa is beyond me. There it was, though, smallpox, a man dead, and three others down on their backs. There was nothing to be done. We could not segregate the sick, nor could we care for them. We were packed like sardines. There was nothing to do but die—that is, there was nothing to do after the night that followed the first death. On that night, the mate, the supercargo, the Polish Jew, and four native divers sneaked away in the large whaleboat. They were never heard of again. In the morning the captain promptly scuttled the remaining boats, and there we were.

That day there were two deaths; the following day three; then it jumped to eight. It was curious to see how we took it. The natives, for instance, fell into a condition of dumb, stolid fear. The captain—Oudouse, his name was, a Frenchman—became very nervous and voluble. The German, the two Americans, and myself bought up all the Scotch whisky and proceeded to drink. The theory was beautiful—namely, if we kept ourselves soaked in alcohol, every smallpox germ that came into contact with us would immediately be scorched to a cinder. And the theory worked, though I must confess that neither Captain Oudouse nor Ah Choon was attacked by the disease either. The Frenchman did not drink at all, while Ah Choon restricted himself to one drink daily.

We had a week of it, and then the whisky gave out. It was just as well, or I shouldn't be alive now. It took a sober man to pull through what followed, as you will agree when I mention the little fact that only two men did pull through. The other man was the Heathen—at least that was what I heard Captain Oudouse call him at the moment I first became aware of the Heathen's existence.

But to come back. It was at the end of the week that I happened to glance at the barometer that hung in the cabin companion-way. Its normal register in the Paumotus was 29.90, and it was quite customary to see it vacillate between 29.85 and 30.00, or even 30.05; but to see it, as I saw it, down to 29.62, was sufficient to chill the blood of any pearl-buyer in Oceania.

I called Captain Oudouse's attention to it, only to be informed that he had watched it going down for several hours. There was little to do, but that little he did very well, considering the circumstances. He took off the light sails, shortened right down to storm canvas, spread life-lines, and waited for the wind. His mistake lay in what he did after the wind came. He hove to on the port tack, which was the right thing to do south of the Equator, IF—and there was the rub—IF one were NOT in the direct path of the hurricane. We were in the direct path. I could see that by the steady increase of the wind and the equally steady fall of the barometer. I wanted to turn and run with the wind on the port quarter until the barometer ceased falling, and then to heave to. We argued till he was reduced to hysteria, but budge he would not. The worst of it was that I could not get the rest of the pearl-buyers to back me up. Who was I, anyway, to know more about the sea and its ways than a properly qualified captain?

Of course, the sea rose with the wind, frightfully, and I shall never forget the first three seas the Petite Jeanne shipped. She had fallen off, as vessels do when hove to, and the first sea made a clean breach. The lifelines were only for the strong and well, and little good were they even for these when the women and children, the bananas and cocoanuts, the pigs and trade-boxes, the sick and the dying, were swept along in a solid, screeching, groaning mass.

The second sea filled the Petite Jeanne's decks flush with the rails, and, as her stern sank down and her bow tossed skyward, all the miserable dunnage of life and luggage poured aft. It was a human torrent. They came head-first, feet-first, sidewise, rolling over and over, twisting, squirming, writhing, and crumpling up. Now and again one or another caught a grip on a stanchion or a rope, but the weight of the bodies behind tore such grips loose. I saw what was coming, sprang on top the cabin, and from there into the mainsail itself. Ah Choon and one of the Americans tried to follow me, but I was one jump ahead of them. The American was swept away and over the stern like a piece of chaff. Ah Choon caught a spoke of the wheel and swung in behind it. But a strapping Rarotonga vahine[1]—she must have weighed two hundred and fifty—brought up against him and got an arm around his neck. He clutched the Kanaka steersman with his other hand. And just at that moment the schooner flung down to starboard. The rush of bodies and the sea that was coming along the port runway between the cabin and the rail, turned abruptly and poured to starboard. Away they went, vahine, Ah Choon, and steersman; and I swear I saw Ah Choon grin at me with philosophic resignation as he cleared the rail and went under.

[1] woman

The third sea—the biggest of the three—did not do so much damage. By the time it arrived, nearly everybody was in the rigging. On deck perhaps a dozen gasping, half-drowned, and half-stunned wretches were rolling about or attempting to crawl into safety. They went by the board, as did the wreckage of the two remaining boats. The other pearl-buyers and myself, between seas, managed to get about fifteen women and children into the cabin and battened down. Little good it did the poor creatures in the end.

Wind? Out of all my experiences I could not have believed it possible for the wind to blow as it did. There is no describing it. How can one describe a nightmare? It was the same way with that wind. It tore the clothes off our bodies. I say TORE THEM OFF, and I mean it. I am not asking you to believe it. I am merely telling something that I saw and felt. There are times when I do not believe it myself. I went through it, and that is enough. One could not face that wind and live. It was a monstrous thing, and the most monstrous thing about it was that it increased and continued to increase. Imagine countless millions and billions of tons of sand. Imagine this sand tearing along at ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, or any other number of miles per hour. Imagine, further, this sand to be invisible, impalpable, yet to retain all the weight and density of sand. Do all this, and you may get a vague inkling of what that wind was like. Perhaps sand is not the right comparison. Consider it mud, invisible, impalpable, but heavy as mud. Nay, it goes beyond that. Consider every molecule of air to be a mud-bank in itself. Then try to imagine the multitudinous impact of mud-banks—no, it is beyond me. Language may be adequate to express the ordinary conditions of life, but it cannot possibly express any of the conditions of so enormous a blast of wind. It would have been better had I stuck by my original intention of not attempting a description.

I will say this much: The sea, which had risen at first, was beaten down by that wind. More—it seemed as if the whole ocean had been sucked up in the maw of the hurricane and hurled on through that portion of space which previously had been occupied by the air. Of course, our canvas had gone long before. But Captain Oudouse had on the Petite Jeanne something I had never before seen on a South Sea schooner a sea-anchor. It was a conical canvas bag, the mouth of which was kept open by a huge hoop of iron. The sea-anchor was bridled something like a kite, so that it bit into the water as a kite bites into the air—but with a difference. The sea-anchor remained just under the surface of the ocean, in a perpendicular position. A long line, in turn, connected it with the schooner. As a result, the Petite Jeanne rode bow-on to the wind and to what little sea there was.

The situation really would have been favorable, had we not been in the path of the storm. True, the wind itself tore our canvas out of the gaskets, jerked out our topmasts, and made a raffle of our running gear; but still we would have come through nicely had we not been square in front of the advancing storm-center. That was what fixed us. I was in a state of stunned, numbed, paralyzed collapse from enduring the impact of the wind, and I think I was just about ready to give up and die when the center smote us. The blow we received was an absolute lull. There was not a breath of air. The effect on one was sickening. Remember that for hours we had been at terrific muscular tension, withstanding the awful pressure of that wind. And then, suddenly, the pressure was removed. I know that I felt as though I were about to expand, to fly apart in all directions. It seemed as if every atom composing my body was repelling every other atom, and was on the verge of rushing off irresistibly into space. But that lasted only for a moment. Destruction was upon us.

In the absence of the wind and its pressure, the sea rose. It jumped, it leaped, it soared straight toward the clouds. Remember, from every point of the compass that inconceivable wind was blowing in toward the center of calm. The result was that the seas sprang up from every point of the compass. There was no wind to check them. They popped up like corks released from the bottom of a pail of water. There was no system to them, no stability. They were hollow, maniacal seas. They were eighty feet high at the least. They were not seas at all. They resembled no sea a man had ever seen. They were splashes, monstrous splashes, that is all, splashes that were eighty feet high. Eighty! They were more than eighty. They went over our mastheads. They were spouts, explosions. They were drunken. They fell anywhere, anyhow. They jostled one another, they collided. They rushed together and collapsed upon one another, or fell apart like a thousand waterfalls all at once. It was no ocean any man ever dreamed of, that hurricane-center. It was confusion thrice confounded. It was anarchy. It was a hell-pit of sea water gone mad.

The Petite Jeanne? I don't know. The Heathen told me afterward that he did not know. She was literally torn apart, ripped wide open, beaten into a pulp, smashed into kindling wood, annihilated. When I came to, I was in the water, swimming automatically, though I was about two-thirds drowned. How I got there I had no recollection. I remembered seeing the Petite Jeanne fly to pieces at what must have been the instant that my own consciousness was buffeted out of me. But there I was, with nothing to do but make the best of it, and in that best there was little promise. The wind was blowing again, the sea was much smaller and more regular, and I knew that I had passed through the center. Fortunately, there were no sharks about. The hurricane had dissipated the ravenous horde that had surrounded the death ship.

It was about midday when the Petite Jeanne went to pieces, and it must have been two hours afterward when I picked up with one of her hatch-covers. Thick rain was driving at the time, and it was the merest chance that flung me and the hatch-cover together. A short length of line was trailing from the rope handle, and I knew that I was good for a day at least, if the sharks did not return. Three hours later, possibly a little longer, sticking close to the cover and, with closed eyes, concentrating my whole soul upon the task of breathing in enough air to keep me going and, at the same time, to avoid breathing in enough water to drown me, it seemed to me that I heard voices. The rain had ceased, and wind and sea were easing marvelously. Not twenty feet away from me, on another hatch-cover, were Captain Oudouse and the Heathen. They were fighting over the possession of the cover—at least the Frenchman was.

"Paien noir!" I heard him scream, and at the same time I saw him kick the Kanaka.

Now, Captain Oudouse had lost all his clothes except his shoes, and they were heavy brogans. It was a cruel blow, for it caught the Heathen on the mouth and the point of the chin, half-stunning him. I looked for him to retaliate, but he contented himself with swimming about forlornly, a safe ten feet away. Whenever a fling of the sea threw him closer, the Frenchman, hanging on with his hands, kicked out at him with both feet. Also, at the moment of delivering each kick, he called the Kanaka a black heathen.

"For two centimes I'd come over there and drown you, you white beast!" I yelled.

The only reason I did not go was that I felt too tired. The very thought of the effort to swim over was nauseating. So I called to the Kanaka to come to me, and proceeded to share the hatch-cover with him. Otoo, he told me his name was (pronounced <O'm>-t<o'm>-<o'm>); also he told me that he was a native of Bora Bora, the most westerly of the Society Group. As I learned afterward, he had got the hatch-cover first, and, after some time, encountering Captain Oudouse, had offered to share it with him, and had been kicked off for his pains.

And that was how Otoo and I first came together. He was no fighter. He was all sweetness and gentleness, a love-creature though he stood nearly six feet tall and was muscled like a gladiator. He was no fighter, but he was also no coward. He had the heart of a lion, and in the years that followed I have seen him run risks that I would never dream of taking. What I mean is that, while he was no fighter, and while he always avoided precipitating a row, he never ran away from trouble when it started. And it was " 'Ware shoal!" when once Otoo went into action. I shall never forget what he did to Bill King. It occurred in German Samoa. Bill King was hailed the champion heavyweight of the American navy. He was a big brute of a man, a veritable gorilla, one of those hard-hitting, rough-housing chaps, and clever with his fists as well. He picked the quarrel, and he kicked Otoo twice and struck him once before Otoo felt it to be necessary to fight. I don't think it lasted four minutes, at the end of which time Bill King was the unhappy possessor of four broken ribs, a broken fore-arm, and a dislocated shoulder-blade. Otoo knew nothing of scientific boxing. He was merely a man-handler, and Bill King was something like three months in recovering from the bit of man-handling he received that afternoon on Apia beach.

But I am running ahead of my yarn. We shared the hatch-cover between us. We took turn and turn about, one lying flat on the cover and resting, while the other, submerged to the neck, merely held on with his hands. For three days and nights, spell and spell, on the cover and in the water, we drifted over the ocean. Toward the last I was delirious most of the time, and there were times, too, when I heard Otoo babbling and raving in his native tongue. Our continuous immersion prevented us from dying of thirst, though the sea water and the sunshine gave us the prettiest imaginable combination of salt pickle and sunburn. In the end, Otoo saved MY life; for I came to, lying on the beach twenty feet from the water, sheltered from the sun by a couple of cocoanut leaves. No one but Otoo could have dragged me there and stuck up the leaves for shade. He was lying beside me. I went off again, and the next time I came around it was cool and starry night and Otoo was pressing a drinking cocoanut to my lips.

We were the sole survivors of the Petite Jeanne. Captain Oudouse must have succumbed to exhaustion, for several days later his hatch-cover drifted ashore without him. Otoo and I lived with the natives of the atoll for a week, when we were rescued by a French cruiser and taken to Tahiti. In the meantime, however, we had performed the ceremony of exchanging names. In the South Seas such a ceremony binds two men closer together than blood-brothership. The initiative had been mine, and Otoo was rapturously delighted when I suggested it.

"It is well," he said, in Tahitian. "For we have been mates together for three days on the lips of Death."

"But Death stuttered," I smiled.

"It was a brave deed you did, master," he replied, "and Death was not vile enough to speak."

"Why do you `master' me?" I demanded, with a show of hurt feelings. "We have exchanged names. To you I am Otoo. To me you are Charley. And between you and me, forever and forever, you shall be Charley and I shall be Otoo. It is the way of the custom. And when we die, if it does happen that we live again, somewhere beyond the stars and the sky, still shall you be Charley to me and I Otoo to you."

"Yes, master," he answered, his eyes luminous and soft with joy.

"There you go!" I cried indignantly.

"What does it matter what my lips utter?" he argued. "They are only my lips. But I shall think OTOO always. Whenever I think of myself I shall think of you. Whenever men call me by name I shall think of you. And beyond the sky and beyond the stars always and forever you shall be Otoo to me. Is it well, master?"

I hid my smile and answered that it was well.

We parted at Papeete. I remained ashore to recuperate, and he went on in a cutter to his own island, Bora Bora. Six weeks later he was back. I was surprised, for he had told me of his wife and said that he was returning to her and would give over sailing on far voyages.

"Where do you go, master?" he asked, after our first greetings.

I shrugged my shoulders. It was a hard question. "To all the world, "was my answer. "All the world, all the sea, and all the islands that are in the sea."

"I will go with you," he said simply. "My wife is dead."

I never had a brother, but from what I have seen of other men's brothers I doubt if any man ever had one who was to him what Otoo was to me. He was brother, and father and mother as well. And this I know—I lived a straighter and a better man because of Otoo. I had to live straight in Otoo's eyes. Because of him I dared not tarnish myself. He made me his ideal, compounding me, I fear, chiefly out of his own love and worship; and there were times when I stood close to the steep pitch of hell and would have taken the plunge had not the thought of Otoo restrained me. His pride in me entered into me until it became one of the major rules in my personal code to do nothing that would diminish that pride of his. Naturally, I did not learn right away what his feelings were toward me. He never criticised, never censured, and slowly the exalted place I held in his eyes dawned upon me, and slowly I grew to comprehend the hurt I could inflict upon him by being anything less than my best.

For seventeen years we were together. For seventeen years he was at my shoulder, watching while I slept, nursing me through fever and wounds, aye, and receiving wounds in fighting for me. He signed on the same ships with me, and together we ranged the Pacific from Hawaii to Sydney Head and from Torres Strait to the Galapagos. We blackbirded from the New hebrides and the Line Islands over to the westward, clear through the Louisiades, New Britain, New Ireland, and New Hanover. We were wrecked three times—in the Gilberts, in the Santa Cruz group, and in the Fijis. And we traded and salved wherever a dollar promised in the way of pearl and pearl shell, copra, beche de mer, hawkbill turtle shell, and stranded wrecks.

It began in Papeete, immediately after his announcement that he was going with me over all the sea and the islands in the midst thereof. There was a club in those days in Papeete, where the pearlers, traders, captains, and South Sea adventurers foregathered. The play ran high and the drink ran high, and I am very much afraid that I kept later hours than were becoming or proper. No matter what the hour was when I left the club, there was Otoo waiting to see me safely home. At first I smiled. Next I chided him. Then I told him flatly I stood in need of no wet-nursing. After that I did not see him when I came out of the club. Quite by accident, a week or so later, I discovered that he still saw me home, lurking across the street among the shadows of the mango trees. What could I do? I know what I did do. Insensibly I began to keep better hours. On wet and stormy nights, in the thick of the folly and the fun, the thought would come to me of Otoo keeping his dreary vigil under the dripping mangoes. Truly, he made me a better man.

Yet he was not strait-laced. And he knew nothing of common Christian morality. All the people on Bora Bora were Christians. But he was a heathen, the only unbeliever on the island, a gross materialist who believed that when he died he was dead. He believed merely in fair play and square-dealing. Petty meanness, in his code, was almost as serious as wanton homicide, and I am sure that he respected a murderer more than a man given to small practices. Concerning me, personally, he objected to my doing anything that was hurtful to me. Gambling was all right. He was an ardent gambler himself. But late hours, he explained, were bad for one's health. He had seen men who did not take care of themselves die of fever. He was no teetotaler, and welcomed a stiff nip any time when it was wet work in the boats. On the other hand, he believed in liquor in moderation. He had seen many men killed or disgraced by squareface or Scotch.

Otoo had my welfare always at heart. He thought ahead for me, weighed my plans and took a greater interest in them than I did myself. At first, when I was unaware of this interest of his in my affairs, he had to divine my intentions, as, for instance, at Papeete, when I contemplated going partners with a knavish fellow countryman on a guano venture. I did not know he was a knave. Nor did any white man in Papeete. Neither did Otoo know; but he saw how thick we were getting and found out for me, and that without my asking. Native sailors from the ends of the seas knock about on the beach in Tahiti, and Otoo, suspicious merely, went among them till he had gathered sufficient data to justify his suspicions. Oh, it was a nice history, that of Randolph Waters! I couldn't believe it when Otoo first narrated it, but when I sheeted it home to Waters he gave in without a murmur and got away on the first steamer to Auckland.

At first, I am free to confess, I resented Otoo's poking his nose into my business. But I knew that he was wholly unselfish, and soon I had to acknowledge his wisdom and discretion. He had his eyes open always to my main chance, and he was both keen-sighted and far-sighted. In time he became my counselor, until he knew more of my business than I did myself. He really had my interest at heart more than I did. Mine was the magnificent carelessness of youth, for I preferred romance to dollars, and adventure to a comfortable billet with all night in. So it was well that I had some one to look out for me. I know that if it had not been for Otoo, I should not be here to-day.

Of numerous instances, let me give one. I had had some experience in blackbirding before I went pearling in the Paumotus. Otoo and I were on the beach in Samoa—we really were on the beach and hard aground—when my chance came to go as a recruiter on a blackbird brig. Otoo signed on before the mast, and for the next half-dozen years, in as many ships, we knocked about the wildest portions of Melanesia. Otoo saw to it that he always pulled stroke-oar in my boat. Our custom, in recruiting labor, was to land the recruiter on the beach. The covering boat always lay on its oars several hundred feet off shore, while the recruiter's boat, also lying on its oars, kept afloat on the edge of the beach. When I landed with my trade goods, leaving my steering sweep apeak, Otoo left his stroke position and came into the stern sheets, where a Winchester lay ready to hand under a flap of canvas. The boat's crew was also armed, the Sniders concealed under canvas flaps that ran the length of the gunwales. While I was busy arguing and persuading the woolly-headed cannibals to come and labor on the Queensland plantations Otoo kept watch. And often and often his low voice warned me of suspicious actions and impending treachery. Sometimes it was the quick shot from his rifle, knocking a nigger over, that was the first warning I received. And in my rush to the boat his hand was always there to jerk me flying aboard.

Once, I remember, on Santa Anna, the boat grounded just as the trouble began. The covering boat was dashing to our assistance, but the several score of savages would have wiped us out before it arrived. Otoo took a flying leap ashore, dug both hands into the trade goods, and scattered tobacco, beads, tomahawks, knives, and calicoes in all directions. This was too much for the woolly heads. While they scrambled for the treasures, the boat was shoved clear and we were aboard and forty feet away. And I got thirty recruits off that very beach in the next four hours.

The particular instance I have in mind was on Malaita, the most savage island in the easterly Solomons. The natives had been remarkably friendly; and how were we to know that the whole village had been taking up a collection for over two years with which to buy a white man's head? The beggars are all head-hunters, and they especially esteem that of a white man. The fellow who captured the head would receive the whole collection. As I say, they appeared very friendly, and this day I was fully a hundred yards down the beach from the boat. Otoo had cautioned me, and, as usual when I did not heed him, I came to grief. The first thing I knew a cloud of spears sailed out of the mangrove swamp at me. At least a dozen were sticking into me. I started to run, but tripped over one that was fast in my calf and went down. The woolly heads made a run for me, each with a long-handled, fantail tomahawk with which to hack off my head. They were so eager for the prize that they got in one another's way. In the confusion I avoided several hacks by throwing myself right and left on the sand. Then Otoo arrived—Otoo the man-handler. In some way he had got hold of a heavy war-club, and at close quarters it was a far more efficient weapon than a rifle. He was right in the thick of them, so that they could not spear him, while their tomahawks seemed worse than useless. He was fighting for me, and he was in a true Berserker rage. The way he handled that club was amazing. Their skulls squashed like overripe oranges. It was not until he had driven them back, picked me up in his arms, and started to run, that he received his first wounds. He arrived in the boat with four spear-thrusts, got his Winchester, and with it got a man for every shot. Then we pulled aboard the schooner and doctored up.

Seventeen years we were together. He made me. I should to-day be a supercargo, a recruiter, or a memory, if it had not been for him.

"You spend your money, and you go out and get more," he said, one day. "It is easy to get money, now. But when you get old, your money will be spent and you will not be able to go out and get more. I know, master. I have studied the way of white men. On the beaches are many old men who were young once and who could get money just like you. Now they are old, and they have nothing, and they wait about for the young men like you to come ashore and buy drinks for them.

"The black boy is a slave on the plantations. He gets twenty dollars a year. He works hard. The overseer does not work hard. He rides a horse and watches the black boy work. He gets twelve hundred dollars a year. I am a sailor on the schooner. I get fifteen dollars a month. That is because I am a good sailor. I work hard. The captain has a double awning and drinks beer out of long bottles. I have never seen him haul a rope or pull an oar. He gets one hundred and fifty dollars a month. I am a sailor. He is a navigator. Master, I think it would be very good for you to know navigation.

Otoo spurred me on to it. He sailed with me as second mate on my first schooner, and he was far prouder of my command than was I myself. Later on it was:

"The captain is well paid, master, but the ship is in his keeping and he is never free from the burden. It is the owner who is better paid, the owner who sits ashore with many servants and turns his money over."

"True, but a schooner costs five thousand dollars—an old schooner at that," I objected. "I should be an old man before I saved five thousand dollars. "

"There be short ways for white men to make money," he went on, pointing ashore at the cocoanut-fringed beach.

We were in the Solomons at the time, picking up a cargo of ivory-nuts along the east coast of Guadalcanar.

"Between this river mouth and the next it is two miles," he said. "The flat land runs far back. It is worth nothing now. Next year—who knows!—or the year after—men will pay much money for that land. The anchorage is good. Big steamers can lie close up. You can buy the land four miles deep from the old chief for ten thousand sticks of tobacco, ten bottles of squareface, and a Snider, which will cost you maybe one hundred dollars. Then you place the deed with the commissioner, and the next year, or the year after, you sell and become the owner of a ship."

I followed his lead, and his words came true, though in three years instead of two. Next came the grass-lands deal on Guadalcanar—twenty thousand acres on a governmental nine hundred and ninety-nine years' lease at a nominal sum. I owned the lease for precisely ninety days, when I sold it to the Moonlight Soap crowd for half a fortune. Always it was Otoo who looked ahead and saw the opportunity. He was responsible for the salving of the Doncaster—bought in at auction for five hundred dollars and clearing fifteen thousand after every expense was paid. He led me into the Savaii plantation and the cocoa venture on Upolu.

We did not go seafaring so much as in the old days now. I was too well off. I married and my standard of living rose; but Otoo remained the same old-time Otoo, moving about the house or trailing through the office, his wooden pipe in his mouth, a shilling undershirt on his back, and a four-shilling lava-lava about his loins. I could not get him to spend money. There was no way of repaying him except with love, and God knows he got that in full measure from all of us. The children worshiped him, and if he had been spoilable my wife would surely have been his undoing.

The children! He really was the one who showed them the way of their feet in the world practical. He began by teaching them to walk. He sat up with them when they were sick. One by one, when they were scarcely toddlers, he took them down to the lagoon and made them into amphibians. He taught them more than I ever knew of the habits of fish and the ways of catching them. In the bush it was the same thing. At seven, Tom knew more woodcraft than I ever dreamed existed. At six, Mary went over the Sliding Rock without a quiver—and I have seen strong men balk at that feat. And when Frank had just turned six he could bring up shillings from the bottom in three fathoms.

"My people in Bora Bora do not like heathen; they are all Christians; and I do not like Bora Bora Christians," he said one day, when I, with the idea of getting him to spend some of the money that was rightfully his, had been trying to persuade him to make a visit to his own island in one of our schooners—a special voyage that I had hoped to make a record-breaker in the matter of prodigal expense.

I say one of OUR schooners, though legally, at the time, they belonged to me. I struggled long with him to enter into partnership.

"We have been partners from the day the Petite Jeanne went down," he said at last. "But if your heart so wishes, then shall we become partners by the law. I have no work to do, yet are my expenses large. I drink and eat and smoke in plenty—it costs much, I know. I do not pay for the playing of billiards, for I play on your table; but still the money goes. Fishing on the reef is only a rich man's pleasure. It is shocking, the cost of hooks and cotton line. Yes, it is necessary that we be partners by the law. I need the money. I shall get it from the head clerk in the office."

So the papers were made out and recorded. A year later I was compelled to complain.

"Charley," said I, "you are a wicked old fraud, a miserly skinflint, a miserable land-crab. Behold, your share for the year in all our partnership has been thousands of dollars. The head clerk has given me this paper. It says that during the year you have drawn just eighty-seven dollars and twenty cents."

"Is there any owing me?" he asked anxiously.

"I tell you thousands and thousands," I answered.

His face brightened as with an immense relief.

"It is well," he said. "See that the head-clerk keeps good account of it. When I want it, I shall want it, and there must not be a cent missing. If there is," he added fiercely, after a pause, "it must come out of the clerk's wages."

And all the time, as I afterward learned, his will, drawn up by Carruthers and making me sole beneficiary, lay in the American consul's safe.

But the end came as the end must come to all human associations. It occurred in the Solomons, where our wildest work had been done in the wild young days, and where we were once more—principally on a holiday, incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida Island and to look over the pearling possibilities of the Mboli Pass. We were lying at Savo, having run in to trade for curios. Now Savo is alive with sharks. The custom of the woolly heads of burying their dead in the sea did not tend to discourage the sharks from making the adjacent waters a hang-out. It was my luck to be coming aboard in a tiny, overloaded, native canoe, when the thing capsized. There were four woolly heads and myself in it, or rather, hanging to it. The schooner was a hundred yards away. I was just hailing for a boat when one of the woolly heads began to scream. Holding on to the end of the canoe, both he and that portion of the canoe were dragged under several times. Then he loosed his clutch and disappeared. A shark had got him.

The three remaining niggers tried to climb out of the water upon the bottom of the canoe. I yelled and cursed and struck at the nearest with my fist, but it was no use. They were in a blind funk. The canoe could barely have supported one of them. Under the three it up-ended and rolled sidewise, throwing them back into the water.

I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner, expecting to be picked up by the boat before I got there. One of the niggers elected to come with me, and we swam along silently, side by side, now and again putting our faces into the water and peering about for sharks. The screams of the men who stayed by the canoe informed us that they were taken. I was peering into the water when I saw a big shark pass directly beneath me. He was fully sixteen feet in length. I saw the whole thing. He got the woolly head by the middle and away he went, the poor devil, head, shoulders, and arms out of water all the time, screeching in a heart-rending way. He was carried along in this fashion for several hundred feet, when he was dragged beneath the surface.

I swam doggedly on, hoping that that was the last unattached shark. But there was another. Whether it was one that had attacked the natives earlier, or whether it was one that had made a good meal elsewhere, I do not know. At any rate, he was not in such haste as the others. I could not swim so rapidly now, for a large part of my effort was devoted to keeping track of him. I was watching him when he made his first attack. By good luck I got both hands on his nose, and, though his momentum nearly shoved me under, I managed to keep him off. He veered clear and began circling about again. A second time I escaped him by the same maneuver. The third rush was a miss on both sides. He sheered at the moment my hands should have landed on his nose, but his sandpaper hide—I had on a sleeveless undershirt—scraped the skin off one arm from elbow to shoulder.

By this time I was played out and gave up hope. The schooner was still two hundred feet away. My face was in the water and I was watching him maneuver for another attempt, when I saw a brown body pass between us. It was Otoo.

"Swim for the schooner, master," he said, and he spoke gayly, as though the affair was a mere lark. "I know sharks. The shark is my brother."

I obeyed, swimming slowly on, while Otoo swam about me, keeping always between me and the shark, foiling his rushes and encouraging me.

"The davit-tackle carried away, and they are rigging the falls," he explained a minute or so later, and then went under to head off another attack.

By the time the schooner was thirty feet away I was about done for. I could scarcely move. They were heaving lines at us from on board, but these continually fell short. The shark, finding that it was receiving no hurt, had become bolder. Several times it nearly got me, but each time Otoo was there just the moment before it was too late. Of course Otoo could have saved himself any time. But he stuck by me.

"Good by, Charley, I'm finished," I just managed to gasp.

I knew that the end had come and that the next moment I should throw up my hands and go down.

But Otoo laughed in my face, saying:

"I will show you a new trick. I will make that shark damn sick."

He dropped in behind me, where the shark was preparing to come at me.

"A little more to the left," he next called out. "There is a line there on the water. To the left, master, to the left."

I changed my course and struck out blindly. I was by that time barely conscious. As my hand closed on the line I heard an exclamation from on board. I turned and looked. There was no sign of Otoo. The next instant he broke surface. Both hands were off at the wrist, the stumps spouting blood.

"Otoo," he called softly, and I could see in his gaze the love that thrilled in his voice. Then, and then only, at the very last of all our years, he called me by that name.

"Good by, Otoo," he called.

Then he was dragged under, and I was hauled aboard, where I fainted in the captain's arms.

And so passed Otoo, who saved me and made me a man, and who saved me in the end. We met in the maw of a hurricane and parted in the maw of a shark, with seventeen intervening years of comradeship the like of which I dare to assert have never befallen two men, the one brown and the other white. If Jehovah be from his high place watching every sparrow fall, not least in His Kingdom shall be Otoo, the one heathen of Bora Bora. And if there be no place for him in that Kingdom, then will I have none of it.

***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII No.2 AUGUST 1910

THE QUESTION "HOW?" {page 205-208}

By WILLIAM HANNA THOMSON, M.D., LL.D.

Author of " Brain and Personality," "What is Physical Life?" etc.

Physician to the Roosevelt Hospital; Consulting Physician to the
New York State Manhattan Hospital for the Insane; formerly
Professor of the Practice of Medicine and Diseases of the Nervous
System, New York University Medical College; Ex-President of the
New York Academy of Medicine, etc.

IN one of Carlyle's earliest productions, dealing with the philosophy of Clothes, he showed that a man quite plainly reveals his inner self by what he wears. So we would now discuss what the being, Man, reveals about himself by his eternal question, "How?"

As language is a lofty endowment and, moreover, on this earth exclusively human, we would lead up to the subject by stating what the parts of speech are.

According to the Arabs, who surpass all other peoples in the study of language—for they claim that they have twenty-five thousand books on grammar in their literature—the parts of speech are three; and, as one of their old scholars states, this threefold division of speech is not confined to one language, but is universal, because human speech does not differ with the difference of human tongues. These three parts are: first, nouns—the names of things; second, verbs—the names of events; and, third, the partitives—or the words which express the relations of things to events. Thus the most abstract of verbs, "to be," refers to an event; for when a man says, "I am," he is mentioning an event in the history of the universe which did not occur till he existed.

This division, however, necessitates that the adjectives should be regarded as nouns; and so they are classed in all Semitic languages, as the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Syriac, etc. The writers of the New Testament, therefore, could not write Greek without continually falling into their native Hebrew idiom; so that if the passages were translated literally, some modern expositions would have to be much modified. Thus, "Who created the worlds by the word of his power" means "Who created the worlds by his powerful word." "The body of our humiliation" is "our humiliating body." "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" is "from this deadly body," as the context of the passage clearly shows. In each case the second noun is the adjective modifying the first.

Moreover, the most interesting deduction from this division of the parts of speech is that the partitives are far the highest in rank among words, because they express pure relations, which only the royal mind of man can so distinctly perceive as to make words for them. Thus, a dog can learn his own name, and understand the verbs "go" and "come," especially with the imperative tone of his master; but he could never understand the words "outgoing year" or "incoming year."

Prepositions belong to the partitives, and, with different prepositions attached to one and the same thing or noun, the human mind can step through the vast regions of thought as easily as the ether can vibrate through space. Thus the Latin scriptio, the name of a thing, a writing, gives us the following changes, according to the preposition: An Ascription is not a CONscription, by any means; nor does a conscription mean anything like a DEScription; nor is that the same thing with an INscription; nor when we PREscribe for a man are we PROscribing him; and every one of us knows, when the agent of a worthy cause enters, what the difference is between a SUBscription and a SUPERscription.

To the adverbs, however, must be given the preeminence among all human words. But even here there are gradations in rank. Thus the adverb, "Why?" may be nothing but a question of curiosity, and hence its idea may be suggested to an inquisitive monkey. But it is not so with the question, "How?" "Why?" may be answered by an affirmation, but "How?" can be answered only by a demonstration. Now, as our object is to call speech to witness as to what is in man, or, in other words, what man is himself, we will proceed to analyze the testimony of this word, "How?"