"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.'

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.'

"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.

(Milwaukee Journal)

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.

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.

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

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!

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?

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:

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.

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."

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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!"

"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.

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—"

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!

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!

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.

"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?

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)

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

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.

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.

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!

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!

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

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!