"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.