HOW TO WRITE SPECIAL FEATURE ARTICLES part 7

_(McClure's Magazine)_

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


THE BRENNAN MONO-RAIL CAR

BY PERCEVAL GIBBON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"There, now," said Brennan.

* * * * *

(_Everybody's Magazine_)

A NEW POLITICAL WEDGE

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

BY INIS H. WEED

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

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


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


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

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

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

"With Briddie?"

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

And the two girls went on to the next tenement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But how?" asked a more timid officer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

(_The Delineator_)

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

THE JOB LADY

GIVES THE YOUNG WAGE-EARNER A FAIR WORKING CHANCE

BY MARY E. TITZEL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

_(Kansas City Star)_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She quoted it this way:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

(_Milwaukee Journal_)

FOUR MEN OF HUMBLE BIRTH HOLD WORLD DESTINY IN THEIR HANDS

BY WILLIAM G. SHEPHERD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

_(Saturday Evening Post)_

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

THE CONFESSIONS OF A COLLEGE PROFESSOR'S WIFE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We saw no comedy in what followed.

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

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

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

"I can wait," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being a man he did not see it.

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

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

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

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

So much for _otium_.

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

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

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

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

He stopped to mop his brow, looking perfectly dignified.

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

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

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

And so much for dignity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But I tell you--"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

I wonder!

* * * * *

(_Boston Transcript_)

A PARADISE FOR A PENNY

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

By WALTER PRICHARD EATON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

WANTED: A HOME ASSISTANT

(_Pictorial Review_)

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

WANTED: A HOME ASSISTANT

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

BY LOUISE F. NELLIS

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

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

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

Let us look more closely at the first notice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

(_New York Sun_)

SIX YEARS OF TEA ROOMS

BUSINESS CAREER OF A WOMAN COLLEGE GRADUATE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

(_Country Gentleman_)

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

BY PARCEL POST

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

By A. L. SARRAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A. L. SARRAN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * *

_(Saturday Evening Post)_

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

SALES WITHOUT SALESMANSHIP

BY JAMES H. COLLINS

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

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

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

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

"Suppose I wanted to buy them anyway?"

"We could not accept your order."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Camouflage? No; simply better expression of broader functions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Good work! Drive 'em in!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

_(Munsey's Magazine)_

THE ACCIDENT THAT GAVE US WOOD-PULP PAPER

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

BY PARKE F. HANLEY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

(_Providence Journal_)

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

CENTENNIAL OF THE FIRST STEAMSHIP TO CROSS THE ATLANTIC

(7-column head)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London, July 3,1819.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

(A syndicate Sunday magazine section of the _Harrisburg Patriot_)

SEARCHING FOR THE LOST ATLANTIS

By GROSVENOR A. PARKER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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