But still they pushed on and on, carrying supplies and their precious instruments, together with the records of their observations and experiences, until at last the goal was reached.

The South Pole at last! But here after all they had dared and endured another great trial awaited them just at the moment of seeming success. There at the goal toward which they had struggled with such high hopes was a tent and a mound over which floated the flag of Norway. The Norse explorer, Amundsen, had reached the Pole first. A letter was left telling of his work of discovery. He had happened on a route shielded from the terrific winds against which Scott had fought his way mile by mile, and had arrived at the Pole a month earlier.

Now, indeed, Scott showed that “the soul of a brave man is stronger than anything that can happen to him.” Cheerfully he built a cairn near the spot to hold up their Union Jack, which flapped sadly in the freezing air as if to reproach them with not having set it as the first flag at the Farthest South of the earth. Then before they started back with the news of Amundsen’s success, Scott wrote these lines in his diary:

“Well, we have turned our back now on the goal of our ambition and must face 800 miles of solid dragging—and good-by to most of the day dreams.”

But it was for Scott to show the world that defeat might be turned into the greatest victory of all. When you hear any one say that a man is too weak or fearful to bear hardship and ill-success to the end, think of Captain Scott and say, “The brave soul is stronger than anything that can happen.”

On he struggled, on and on, though delayed again and again by blizzards that raged about in the most terrible fury as if determined to make this little party give up the fight. At last they came, weak and nearly frozen (for the supplies of food and fuel had run short), almost within sight of a provision camp where comfort and plenty awaited them. At this moment came the most terrible storm of all, that lasted for more than a week.

One morning Lieutenant Oates, who was ill and feared that his friends might lose their last chance of reaching safety by staying to care for him, walked out into the blizzard with these words:

“I am just going outside and may be some time.”

Scott wrote that they “realized he was walking to his death and tried to dissuade him, but knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman. We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit,” he added.

A little later Scott wrote in his diary:

“Every day we have been ready to start for our depot eleven miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.”

Eight months after when a rescue party succeeded in reaching the tent, they found the bodies of Wilson and Bowers lying with their sleeping bags closed over their heads. Near them was Captain Scott, with the flaps of his sleeping bag thrown back. Under his shoulder were his note-books and letters to those at home, which he had written up to the very last when the pencil slipped from his fingers. His thought in dying was not for himself but for those that would be left to grieve.

On the spot where they died, their friends left the bodies of these brave men covered with the canvas of their tent, and over them they piled up a great cairn of ice in which was placed a wooden cross made of snow-shoes. On the cross were carved these words of a great poet, which no one better than Captain Scott had made living words:

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Now we can see why this tale of Captain Scott is truly an undying story. As long as true hearts beat those words will find an echo, and also those other words which he so nobly proved by his life and death:

“The soul of a brave man is stronger than anything that can happen to him.”

A MODERN VIKING: JACOB RIIS

WOULD you like to hear about a viking of our own time? Listen to the story of this Northman, and see if you will not say that the North Sea country can still send forth as staunch and fearless men as those who sailed in their dragon ships the “whale roads” of the uncharted seas, found a new world and forgot about it long before Columbus dreamed his dream.

Near the Danish coast where the sea and the low-lying fields grapple hand to hand in every storm, and where the waves at flood tide thunder against the barrows beneath which the old vikings were buried, is the quaint little town of Ribe. This is the sea’s own country. It seems as if the people here, who never fear to go down to the sea in ships, have scorned to pile up dikes between them and their greatest friend, who can, in a moment of anger, prove their greatest enemy. It is as if they said, “We are of the sea; if it chooses to rise up against us, who are we to say, ‘Thus far and no farther!’ ”

There was a boy born in this town whose name was Jacob Riis. The call of the sea-birds was the first sound he knew; the breath of the sea was like the breath of life to him. On bright, blue-and-gold days when the waves danced in rainbow hues and scattered in snowy foam, his heart “outdid the sparkling waves in glee.” At evening, when the sea-fogs settled down over the shore and land and water seemed one, something of the thoughtful strength and patience of that brave little country came into his face.

Many changes had come to the coast since the sea-rovers of old pulled their pirate galleys on the beach, took down their square, gaily striped sails, and gave themselves over to feasting in the great mead-hall, where the smoking boar’s-flesh was taken from the leaping flames and seized by the flushed, triumphant warriors, while skalds chanted loud the joys of battle and plunder. The quaint little town where Jacob Riis lived sixty-odd years ago had nothing but the broom-covered barrows and the changeless ocean that belonged to those wild times, and yet it was quite as far removed from the customs and interests of to-day.

I wish that I could make you see the narrow cobblestone streets over which whale-oil lanterns swung on creaking iron chains, and the quaint houses with their tiled roofs where the red-legged storks came in April to build their nests. The stillness was unbroken by the snort of the locomotive and the shrill clamor of steam-boat and steam factory whistles. The people still journeyed by stagecoach, carried tinder-boxes in place of matches, and penknives to mend their quill pens. The telegraph was regarded with suspicion, as was the strange oil from Pennsylvania that was taken out of the earth. Such things could not be safe, and prudent people would do well to have none of them.

In this town, where mill-wheels clattered comfortably in the little stream along which roses nodded over old garden walls and where night-watchmen went about the streets chanting the hours, all the people were neighbors. There were no very rich and few very poor. How Jacob hated the one ramshackle old house by the dry moat which had surrounded the great castle of the mighty Valdemar barons in feudal days! This place seemed given over to dirt, rats, disease, and dirty, rat-like children. Jacob’s friends called it Rag Hall, and said it was a shame that such an ugly, ill-smelling pile should spoil the neighborhood of Castle Hill, where they loved to play among the tall grass and swaying reeds of the moat.

Rag Hall came to fill a large place in Jacob’s thoughts. It was the grim shadow of his bright young world. Surely the world as God had made it was a place of open sky, fresh life-giving breezes, and rolling meadows of dewy, fragrant greenness. How did it happen that people could get so far away from all that made life sweet and wholesome? How had they lost their birthright?

As Jacob looked at the gray, dirty children of Rag Hall it seemed to him that they had never had a chance to be anything better. “What should I have been if I had always lived in such a place?” he said to himself.

One Christmas, Jacob’s father gave him a mark,—a silver coin like our quarter,—which was more money than the boy had ever had

before. Now it seemed to him that he might be able to do something to help make things better in Rag Hall. He ran to the tenement—to the room of the most miserable family who lived there.

“Here,” he said to a man who took the money as if he were stunned, “I’ll divide my Christmas mark with you, if you’ll just try to clean things up a bit, especially the children, and give them a chance to live like folks.”

The twelve-year-old boy little thought that the great adventure of his life really began that day at Rag Hall. But years after when he went about among the tenements of New York, trying to make things better for the children of Mulberry Bend and Cherry Street, he remembered where the long journey had begun.

It was no wonder that Christmas stirred the heart of this young viking, and made him long for real deeds. Christmas in Ribe was a time of joy and good-will to all. A lighted candle was put in the window of every farm-house to cheer the wayfarer with the message that nobody is a stranger at Christmas. Even the troublesome sparrows were not forgotten. A sheaf of rye was set up in the snow to make them the Christmas-tree they would like best. The merry Christmas elf, the “Jule-nissen,” who lived in the attic, had a special bowl of rice and milk put out for him. Years afterward, when this Danish lad was talking to a crowd of New York boys and girls, he said, with a twinkle in his eyes:

“I know if no one else ever really saw the Nissen that our black cat had made his acquaintance. She looked very wise and purred most knowingly next morning.”

If Christmas brought the happiest times, the northwest storms in autumn brought the most thrilling experiences of Jacob’s boyhood. Then, above the moaning of the wind, the muttered anger of the waves, and the crash of falling tiles, came the weird singing of the big bell in the tower of the Domkirke—the cathedral, you know.

After such a night the morning would dawn on a strange world where storm-lashed waves covered the meadows and streets for miles about, and on the causeway, high above the flood-level, cattle, sheep, rabbits, grouse, and other frightened creatures of the fields huddled together in pitiful groups.

One night, when the flood had risen before the mail-coach came in and the men of the town feared for the lives of the passengers, Jacob went out with the rescue-party to the road where the coach must pass. Scarcely able to stand against the wind, he struggled along on the causeway where, in pitchy blackness, with water to his waist and pelting spray lashing his face like the sting of a whip, he groped along, helping to lead the frightened horses to the lights of the town a hundred yards away. It was hard that night to get warmed through; but the boy’s heart glowed, for had not the brusk old Amtmand, the chief official of the country, seized him by the arm and said, while rapping him smartly on the shoulders with his cane, as if, in other days, he would have knighted him, “Strong boy, be a man yet!”

Jacob’s father, who was master of the town school, was keenly disappointed when this alert, promising son declared his wish to give up the ways of book-learning and master the carpenter’s trade. The boy felt that building houses for people to live in would be far better than juggling with words and all the unreal problems with which school and school-books seemed to deal. Thinking that it would be useless to try to force his son into a life distasteful to him, the father swallowed his disappointment and sent him to serve his apprenticeship with a great builder in Copenhagen. The boy should, he determined, have the best start in his chosen calling that it was in his power to give him.

Soon after his arrival in the capital, Jacob went to meet his student brother at the palace of Charlottenborg, where an art exhibition was being held. Seeing that he was a stranger and ill at ease, a tall, handsome gentleman paused on his way up the grand staircase and offered to act as guide. As they went on together, the gentleman asked the boy about himself and listened with ready sympathy to his eager story of his life in the old town, and what he hoped to do in the new life of the city. When they parted Jacob said heartily:

“People are just the same friendly neighbors in Copenhagen that they are in little Ribe—jolly good Danes everywhere, just like you, sir!”

The stranger smiled and patted him on the shoulder in a way more friendly still. Just at that moment they came to a door where a red-liveried lackey stood at attention. He bowed low as they entered and Jacob, bowing back, turned to his new friend with a delighted smile:

“There is another example of what I mean, sir,” he said. “Would you believe it, now, that I have never seen that man before?”

The gentleman laughed, and, pointing to a door, told Jacob he would find his brother there. While the boy happily recounted his adventures, particularly the story of his kindly guide, the handsome gentleman passed through the room and nodded to him with his twinkling smile.

“There is my jolly gentleman,” said Jacob, as he nodded back.

His brother jumped to his feet and bowed low.

“Good gracious!” he said, when the stranger had passed out. “You don’t mean to say he was your guide? Why, boy, that was the King!”

So Jacob learned that in Denmark even a king, whom he had always thought of as wearing a jeweled crown and a trailing robe of velvet and ermine held by dainty silken pages, could go about in a plain blue overcoat like any other man, and be just as simple and neighborly.

In Copenhagen the king of his fairy-book world was a neighbor, too. Hans Christian Andersen was a familiar figure on the streets at that time. Jacob and his companions often met him walking under the lindens along the old earthen walls that surrounded the city.

“Isn’t he an ugly duck, though!” said Jacob one evening, as the awkward old man, with his long, ungainly neck and limbs and enormous hands and feet, came in sight. Then the merry young fellows strung themselves along in Indian file, each in turn bowing low as he passed, and saying with mock reverence, “Good evening, Herr Professor!”

But when the gentle old man, with the child’s heart, seized their hands in his great grasp and thanked them delightedly, they slunk by shamefacedly, and, while they chuckled a little, avoided meeting each other’s eyes. For in their hearts they loved the old man whose stories had charmed their childhood, and they knew that the spirit within the lank, awkward body was altogether lovely.

All the time that Jacob was working with hammer and saw, he was, like that first Jacob of whom we read, serving for his Rachel. From the time he was a clumsy lad of twelve he knew that his playmate Elizabeth, with the golden curls and the fair, gentle looks, was the princess of his own fairy-tale. Like all good fairy-tales, it simply had to turn out happily.

When his apprenticeship was over and he had learned all about building houses for people to live in, he hurried at once to Ribe to build his own house. It seemed, however, that nobody realized that he was the hero who was to marry the princess. Why, Elizabeth’s father owned the one factory in town, and they lived in a big house, which some people called a “castle.” Small chance that he would let his pretty daughter marry a carpenter!

Since working faithfully for long, busy years had not brought him to his goal, Jacob threw aside his tools and decided to seek his fortune in a new country. In America, surely, a true man might come into his own. The days of high adventure were not dead. He would win fame and fortune, and then return in triumph to the old town—and to Elizabeth.

It was a beautiful spring morning—surely a prophecy of fair beginnings—when this young viking sailed into New York Harbor. The dauntless Northmen, who pushed across the seas and discovered America, could not have thrilled more at the sight of their Vineland than did this Dane of our own day when he saw the sky-line of the great city. This must indeed be a new world of opportunity for strong men.

It took only a day of wandering about the crowded streets, however, to convince this seeker that a golden chance is as hard to find in the New York of to-day as gold was in those disillusioning days of the early explorers. The golden chance, it seemed, was to be won, if at all, as is the precious metal—only after intelligent prospecting and patient digging.

How utterly alone he felt in that crowd of hurrying strangers! Very different it all was from his cozy little country where every one was a neighbor, even the king himself.

Out of sheer loneliness and the desire to belong to somebody he threw in his lot with a gang of men who were being gathered together to work in a mining-camp on the Allegheny River. Perhaps the West was his Promised Land, and Pennsylvania would be a start on the way.

The young carpenter was set to work building houses for the workers in the mines. He could not content himself, however, in this shut-in country. To one used to the vastness of a level land stretching as far as eye could see, it seemed as if the hills and forests hedged him in on every side—as if he could not breathe. To ease the restlessness of his homesick spirit, he determined to try his fortune at coal-mining. One day was enough of that. In his inexperience he failed to brace the roof properly, and a great piece of rock came down on him, knocking the lamp from his cap and leaving him stunned and in utter darkness. When at last he succeeded in groping his way out, it was as if he had come back from the dead. The daylight had never before seemed so precious. Nothing could have induced him to try coal-mining again.

At this time, 1870, news came of the war between Germany and France. It was expected, moreover, that Denmark would come to the assistance of the French, since only a few years before, in 1864, Germany had seized some of the choicest territory of the little North Sea kingdom—Schleswig-Holstein, the section through which the important Kiel Canal has been built. Every Dane longed to avenge the wrong. Jacob Riis at once left his tools and his work. He would win glory as a soldier.

He reached New York with but a single cent in his pocket, only to find that no one was fitting out volunteer companies to send to France. Here he was longing to offer his life for the cause, and it was treated like a worthless trifle. Clothes and every cherished possession that his little trunk contained were soon pawned to pay for food and a roof over his head.

There followed months when the young man wandered about the great city, homeless, hungry, vainly seeking employment. Too proud to beg, he yet accepted night after night a plate of meat and rolls which a French cook in a large restaurant handed him from a basement window. It seemed as if that was a part of the debt France owed her would-be soldier.

He was part of a weary army of discouraged men hunting for work. He knew what it meant to sleep on park benches, in doorways, in empty wagons, and even on the flat stone slabs of a graveyard. There were, in New York, friends of his family who might have helped him, but he was too proud to make himself known in his present sorry plight. He even destroyed the letters to them, lest in a moment of weakness he might be tempted to appeal to their charity.

This time of hardship, however, was destined to bear fruit. Jacob Riis came to know the shadows of the great city—all the miserable alleys and narrow courts of the East Side slums. Then and there, weak and starving though he was, the boy who had given his Christmas money to help Rag Hall vowed that he would some day work to remove those plague-spots from the city’s life. “How true it is,” he said, “that one half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives! If they only knew, things would be different.”

At last the chance for which he had been longing came. Hearing that a new reporter was wanted by the News Association, he applied for the position. After looking the haggard applicant over for a moment doubtfully, the editor was moved to give him a trial. The starving man was sent to report a political banquet. When he turned in his “copy” at the office the editor said briefly:

“You will do. Take that desk and report at ten every morning, sharp.”

So began his life as a reporter.

Perhaps you know something of his success as a newspaper man. He knew how to gather news; and he knew how to find the words that make bare facts live. The days and nights of privation had been rich in experience. He was truly “a part of all that he had met.” Something of his intimate acquaintance with all sorts and conditions of existence, something of his warm, understanding sympathy for every variety of human joy and sorrow, crept into his work. Besides, the young man had boundless enthusiasm and tireless industry.

“That chap just seems to eat work,” said his fellow-reporters.

One day a very special letter came from Denmark, which told him that his gentle Elizabeth was quite convinced that he was indeed the prince of her life story. So, as it turned out, he didn’t have to make a fortune before he was able to bring her to share his home in New York. With her it seemed that he brought the best of the old life into the new—

The only homesick times that he knew now were the days when his work as a reporter took him to the streets of the miserable tenements. All his soul cried out against these places where the poor, the weak, and the wicked, the old, the sick, and helpless babies were all herded together in damp, dingy rooms where the purifying sunlight never entered. During his years of wandering in search of work he had gained an intimate knowledge of such conditions. He knew what poverty meant and how it felt. Afterward, when he saw this hideous squalor, he shared it. These people were his neighbors.

“Over against the tenements of our cities,” he said, “ever rise in my mind the fields, the woods, God’s open sky, as accusers and witnesses that his temple is being defiled and man dwarfed in body and soul.”

He knew that the one way to remove such evils and to force people to put up decent houses for the poor was to bring the facts out in the open. When he described what he had seen, the words seemed to mean little to many of the people that he wanted to reach. Then he hit upon the plan of taking pictures. These pictures served to illustrate some very direct talks he gave in the churches. Later, many of them made an important part of his book, “How the Other Half Lives.”

“These people are your neighbors,” said Jacob Riis. “It is the business of the fortunate half of those who live in our great cities to find out how the other half lives. No one can live to himself or die to himself—

Through his persistent campaigning, one of the very worst parts of New York, known as Mulberry Bend, a veritable network of alleys which gave hiding to misery and crime untold, was bought by the city, the buildings torn down, and the spot converted into a public park.

Several years later, when Roosevelt was President, he asked Mr. Riis to investigate the conditions of streets and alleys in Washington. It developed that within three squares of the Capitol there was a system of alleys honeycombing a single block where a thousand people were crowded together under conditions that made a hotbed of misery, crime, and disease. The good citizens of the National Capital, who had read with horror about the evils of New York and Chicago, were rudely shaken out of their self-complacency. That square is now one of Washington’s parks.

Jacob Riis early learned the power of facts. His training as a reporter taught him that. He was also willing to work early and late, when the need arose, to gather them. At one time when there was a cholera scare in New York, he happened to look over the Health Department analysis of the water from the Croton River, and noticed that it was said to contain “a trace of nitrites.”

“What does that mean?” he asked of the chemist.

The reply was more learned than enlightening. The reporter was not satisfied. He carried his inquiry farther and discovered that “nitrites” meant that the water had been contaminated by sewage from towns above New York. Riis then took his camera and explored not only the Croton River to its source, but also every stream that emptied into it, taking pictures that proved in the most convincing way the dangers of the city. As a result, money was appropriated to buy a strip of land along the streams, wide enough to protect the people’s water-supply.

Another great work that Jacob Riis was enabled to carry through had its beginnings in that stormy chapter of his life when he found himself a vagrant among vagrants. He learned at first hand what the police lodging-houses for the homeless were like. At that time this charity was left in the hands of the police, who had neither the ability nor the desire to handle these cases wisely and humanely and to meet the problems of helping people to help themselves. Jacob Riis worked shoulder to shoulder with Theodore Roosevelt, who was then police commissioner of New York, to make the organized charity of the city an intelligent agency for relieving suffering and putting on their feet again those who were, for some reason, “down and out.” Many were brought back to wholesome living through the realization that they had “neighbors” who cared.

In the same way he worked for parks and playgrounds for the children. He saw that the city spoils much good human material.

“We talk a great deal about city toughs,” he says in his autobiography. “In nine cases out of ten they are lads of normal impulses whose possibilities have all been smothered by the slum. With better opportunities they might have been heroes.”

Many honors came to Jacob Riis. He was known as a “boss reporter”; his books gave him a nation-wide fame; the King of Denmark sent him the Crusaders’ Cross, the greatest honor his native land could bestow; President Roosevelt called him the “most useful American” of his day. But I think what meant more to him than any or all of these things was the real affection of his many “neighbors,” especially the children.

Many times he gathered together boys and girls from the streets to enjoy a day with him in the country.

“This will help until we can give them trees and grass in their slum,” he would say, “and then there will be no slum.” His eyes grew very tender as he added, “No, there will be no slum; it will be a true City Beautiful—and the fairest blossoms there will be the children.”

Riis called the story of his life, “The Making of an American.” While his life was in the making he helped to make many others. He was in truth a maker of Americans.

Do you not think that he lived a life as truly adventurous as the vikings of old—this viking of our own day? They lived for deeds of daring and plunder; he lived for deeds every whit as brave—and for service.

A PIONEER OF THE OPEN: EDWARD L. TRUDEAU

WHEN you read in your history the stories of the men who discovered America, did you ever think that not one of them found that for which he searched when he sailed unknown seas and braved the perils of an unbroken wilderness? Columbus tried to find a sea-way to the Indies, and stumbled upon a new world. Henry Hudson, in seeking a short cut to the Pacific, found New York. De Soto, hunting in vain for gold, was little comforted by the sight of the muddy waters of the Mississippi. And so with Ponce de León, Balboa, La Salle, and all the rest. Each journeyed in search of one thing and found another.

Nor did any of these discoverers know what he had found. De Soto had no vision of great plains of golden grain, food for millions of men, along the shores of his river. Henry Hudson never dreamed of the city of New York. These men only blazed the trail. It was for those who came after to understand and use what they had found.

Each year men were finding, and helping others to find, a new land. Some of these men were the pioneers who cleared the ground and planted farms; some were those who built roads and bridges; some were those who took iron, coal, and oil from the ground; some were those who taught the children of the new land in the little bare school-houses. All of these people helped to discover our America.

Did you know that the work of discovery is still going on? Ten years from now many changes will have come to pass; in a hundred years a new world will have been found.

This is the story of one of the greatest discoverers of our day—the story of a man who found a new world in the North Woods of New York. But like the other discoverers, he searched for one thing and found another, and he spent many years of patient work in trying to understand and use in the best way what he had found.

Edward Livingston Trudeau was born with a love of the woods and the life of the open. In his father, Dr. James Trudeau, the call of the wild was so strong that again and again he would leave the city and his work to lose himself in the great forests of the West far from the world of men. He used to say that it was only when he could lose himself in this way that he seemed to find himself. Once he lived for two years with the Osage Indians, learning their woodcraft and their skill in riding and hunting. In 1841 he went with Frémont, the explorer, on his great expedition to the Rocky Mountains. And it was never hard for his friend Audubon, the famous naturalist, to persuade him to shut up his office and fare forth with him into the wilds. He was always restless and ill at ease within walls; only when out under the open sky did he feel fully alive.

Of course, this uncertain, wandering life ruined his chances of success in his profession. He gave up his office in New York, and, leaving his children with their grandfather, returned to his earlier home in New Orleans, thinking that perhaps it would be easier to settle down there to a more regular and ordered life. But he was never able to resist for long at a time the craving for the freedom of the great outdoors.

Edward Trudeau’s childhood was spent in large cities—New York first, and then Paris; he never knew his father, and yet he shared his strong love for a wild, outdoor life. He used often to say that it was strange how the trait which in his father had wrecked his career as a physician saved the life of his son, at a time when he was so ill that he could live only in the open air, and really led to his success as a doctor by showing him that fresh air and sunshine are often a sure cure where medicines fail.

Did you know that only a very few years ago many people were afraid to open their windows? That was the time when so many were dying of tuberculosis that it was called “the great white plague.” It was as mysterious and terrible as the Black Death, which, we read, once carried off half the people of England, because this “white plague” was an enemy that never withdrew. No one knew what caused the trouble, but they thought it must be due to a chill of some kind, so they carefully shut out the fresh air. Every child to-day knows that they were shutting out the one thing that could cure them. But do you know that it was Edward Trudeau who taught us that? He was really the discoverer of the importance of fresh air as a cure for many ills, and, still better, as a means of keeping well. Besides this, he lived the life of a true hero. Listen to his story and see if you will not say with me that his was as brave a fight as that of any hero of battle. And his victory was one in which the whole world has a share.

Though Edward Trudeau was born with his father’s love of the open, most of his early life, as we have said, was spent in big cities. When he was a child of three, his grandfather, Dr. Berger, a French physician who had earned renown not only in his own country but also in New York, took him and his older brother to Paris, where they lived for fifteen years. Here he was like a wood-bird in a cage, looking at a strange life and strange people through the bars.

Sometimes the bits of life he saw were very gay and fascinating, for this was the time of the Second Empire, when the capital was always a-flutter over some occasion of royal pomp or brilliant celebration. Napoleon III (whom Victor Hugo wittily dubbed “Napoleon the Little” in contrast with his uncle, Napoleon the Great) tried to make the splendor and glitter of extravagant display take the place of the true glory of great deeds. One of his “big brass generals,” who was always quite dazzling in gold lace and gleaming decorations, lived on the first floor, immediately below Dr. Berger’s apartment, and Edward Trudeau felt, as he watched from the window this ideal figure of military power dash up to the porte-cochère on his spirited horse, all splendid, too, in gold trappings, that here truly was one of the great race of heroes. He trembled with delight when the great man took notice of his small, hero-worshiping self, and they became friends after a fashion. But General Bazaine was, as events proved, much more within his capabilities when sitting tall on a prancing, gold-caparisoned horse at a royal review of the troops than when leading the forces of France against the German army. When the Franco-Prussian War came in 1870 it was largely through his tactical blunders, and cowardly treachery, perhaps, that Sedan was surrounded and the French army obliged to surrender to the victorious Germans. When Edward Trudeau read in the papers the news of the French defeat his heart was sad over the fall of his boyish idol, but the truth entered his soul that the real victors of real battles are not always those magnificent ones who look most unconquerable.

Another vivid memory of his childhood days in Paris brought home the same truth. One day, as he watched at the window, he was thrilled to see a gorgeous equerry from the Palais Royal ride up in state to his door and hand a parcel to the butler. This package, he learned, contained the Cross of the Legion of Honor which the emperor had sent to his grandfather. Afterward, he noticed that his grandfather always wore a little red ribbon in his buttonhole. But when the small boy questioned him in regard to the reason for his wearing the decoration, he only smiled quizzically and said, “Pour faire parler les curieux, mon enfant” (“To give the curious a chance to talk, my child”). As for himself, this modest French physician preferred to let his deeds alone speak of what he had done.

The small boy who could scarcely remember the time when he did not live in France and whose relatives were all French did not forget for a moment that he was an American. The toy boats which he sailed in the fountains of the Tuileries all bore the Stars and Stripes. And his favorite playmates at the Lycée Bonaparte, where he went to school, were hardy American boys whose parents were living in Paris.

During the years at the French school the vague, inner yearning for a freer, more natural life, found vent in many pranks and covert rebellion not only against the class routine, but also, more openly, against the established order of things on the playground. Here some of the delicately aristocratic French boys were much disconcerted by the blunt and wholly effectual way in which Edward Trudeau and his chums, the Livingston lads, settled questions by argument straight from the shoulder.

When he returned to New York at eighteen, Edward could speak only broken English, but he felt so truly American that he wondered why his cousins laughed when he said, “Ze English is so hard a language to prononciate.”

Then came his “wander years” in which he tried, with a deep, unsatisfied longing after he knew not what, to find his proper niche in life. Something of the memory of the stirring day when the American lads in Paris had thrilled over the news of the capture of the privateer Alabama by the United States cruiser Kearsarge off the coast of France led him to think that he wanted to enter the Navy. So he went to a preparatory school at Newport, as the United States Naval Academy had been, on account of the war, removed from Annapolis to that city, together with the historic old ship Constitution, which furnished quarters for the cadets.

At the very moment when he was prepared to enter the academy, Fate decided otherwise. His only brother, Francis, whose delicate health had always been a cause of much anxiety, became alarmingly ill. Though Edward was several years younger, he had always, as far back as he could remember, tried, at school and on the playground, to take care of this frail brother. He learned to know by the signs of the paling face and blue lips when the weak heart was missing its proper beat, and he was always at hand to say: “Steady, old fellow, steady! Let’s drop out of the game and rest up a bit.”

Most of the thrashings that he had dealt out to the school bullies were given on his brother’s account. But if Frank was not able to hold his own when it came to fisticuffs, in other encounters Edward learned to rely on the strong character and high ideals of this brother, who seemed a tower of strength when it came to battles of the spirit against doubts, fears, and wild gusts of temptation.

Now these two, who were so closely united by the strong double bond of mutual dependence and protection, had come to the great parting of the ways. The white plague had Francis in its terrible grip. During the last months of the hopeless struggle Edward watched with him night and day, drinking strong green tea to keep himself awake, and, by the doctor’s orders, carefully keeping all the windows closed, since the outside air was supposed to aggravate the painful cough.

The man who was to cure many by the simple means of fresh air learned his first lesson in that sick-room where he watched the one he loved best struggle for breath, and where he himself caught the seeds of the dread disease. This first great sorrow was really the first stage on his great journey of discovery—the discovery of a new world of life, restored to many who believed that they were nearing the “Valley named of the Shadow.” But how often is it true that the seeker after El Dorado searches for one thing and finds another. How often must the fortunate ones who at last arrive at the great goal travel by ways they know not.

Edward Trudeau had not yet found his lifework. He studied for a few months at the school of mines before he realized that he was not destined to be an engineer. This was but one of many false starts. Indeed, his early path was strewed with so many bits of wreckage from his spasmodic trials and failures that when one of his friends announced to a group at the Union Club that he had entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons, a fellow-member said, “I bet five hundred dollars he never graduates.” And not one of the companions who knew and loved him so well was ready to take up the bet.

These merry companions of his youth, who thought they knew Edward Trudeau better than he knew himself, loved him well; for he ever had the gift of friendship with man and beast. Dogs and horses at once felt his comprehending hand and heart. And as for the human kind—were they great masters of finance like Edward H. Harriman, gay young men about town like the Livingstons, or sturdy mountain guides like Paul Smith and Fitz-Greene Halleck—all and each were not only boon companions when the opportunity served, but lifelong friends whom neither time nor circumstance could change. When Dr. Trudeau used to say with feeling, “No one ever had better friends than I have,” we always thought, as we looked into his kindly eyes, so alive with understanding sympathy and ready cheer, “How true it is that the best way to win a friend is to be one.”

The best friend of all from beginning to end, however, was Miss Charlotte Beare, who became his wife as soon as he had graduated from the medical school and had spent six months as