CHAPTER XXXV

SOME ATLANTA INSTITUTIONS

There has been great rejoicing in Atlanta over the raising of funds for the establishment there of two new universities, Emory and Oglethorpe. Emory was founded in 1914, as the result of a feud which developed in Vanderbilt University, located at Nashville, Tennessee, over the question as to whether the institution should be controlled by the Board of Bishops of the southern Methodist Episcopal Church, or by the University trustees, who were not so much interested in the development of the sectarian side of the university. The fight was taken to the courts where the trustees won. As a result, Methodist influence and support were withdrawn from Vanderbilt, which thenceforward became a non-sectarian college, and Emory was started—Atlanta having been selected as its home because nearly a million and a half dollars was raised in Atlanta to bring it there.

Oglethorpe is to be a Presbyterian institution, and starts off with a million dollars.

This will give Atlanta three rather important colleges, since she already has the technical branch of the University of Georgia, the main establishment of which located at Athens, Georgia, is one of the oldest state universities in the country, having been founded in 1801. (The University of Tennessee is the oldest state university in the South. It was founded in 1794. The University of Pennsylvania, dating from 1740, is the oldest of all state universities. Harvard, founded in 1636, was the first college established in the country; and the only other American colleges which survive from the seventeenth century are William and Mary, at Williamsburg, Virginia, established in 1693, and St. John's College, at Annapolis, dating from 1696.)

There is a tendency in some parts of the South to use the terms "college" and "university" loosely. Some schools for white persons, doing little if anything more than grammar and high-school work, are called "colleges," and negro institutions doing similar work are sometimes grandiloquently termed "universities."

Atlanta has thirteen public schools for negroes, but no public high school for them. There are, however, six large private educational institutions for negroes in the city, doing high-school, college, or graduate work, making Atlanta a great colored educational center. Of these, Atlanta University, a non-sectarian co-educational college with a white president (Mr. Edward T. Ware, whose father came from New England and founded the institution in 1867), is, I believe, the oldest and largest. It is very highly spoken of. Atlanta and Clark Universities are the only two colored colleges in Atlanta listed in the "World Almanac's" table of American universities and colleges. Clark also has a white man as president.

Spelman Seminary, a Baptist institution for colored girls, has a white woman president, and is partially supported by Rockefeller money. Morehouse College, for boys, has a colored president, an able man, is of similar denomination and is also partially supported by Rockefeller funds. Spelman and Morehouse are run separately, excepting in college work, on which they combine. Both are said to be excellent. Morris Brown University is not a university at all, but does grammar and high-school work. It is officered and supported by colored people, all churches of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination subscribing funds for its maintenance. Gammon Theological Seminary is, I am informed, the one adequately endowed educational establishment for negroes in Atlanta. It would, of course, be a splendid thing if the best of these schools and colleges could be combined.

Citizens of Atlanta do not, generally, take the interest they ought to take in these or other institutions for the benefit of negroes. To be sure, most Southerners do not believe in higher education for negroes; but, even allowing for that viewpoint, it is manifestly unfair that white children should have public high schools and that negro children should have none, but should be obliged to pay for their education above the grammar grades. Perhaps there are people in Atlanta who believe that even a high-school education is undesirable for the negro. That, however, seems to me a pretty serious thing for one race to attempt to decide for another—especially when the deciding race is not deeply and sincerely interested in the uplift of the race over which it holds the whip hand. Certainly intelligent people in the South believe in industrial training for the negro, and equally certainly a negro high school could give industrial training.

Negroes are not admitted to Atlanta parks, nor are there any parks exclusively for them. Until recently there was no contagious-disease hospital to which negroes could be taken, and there is not now a reformatory for colored girls in the State of Georgia. Neither is there any provision whatsoever in the State for the care of feeble-minded colored children. And there is one thing even worse to be said. Shameful as are Georgia's frequent lynchings, shameful as is the State's indifference to negro welfare, blacker yet is the law upon her statute books making the "age of consent" ten years! Various women's organizations, and individual women, have, for decades, worked to change this law, but without success. The term "southern chivalry" must ring mocking and derisive in the ears of Georgia legislators until this disgrace is wiped out. Standing as it does, it means but one thing: that in order to protect some white males in their depravity, the voters of Georgia are satisfied to leave little girls, ten, eleven, twelve years of age, and upward, white as well as colored, utterly unprotected by the law in this regard.

I have heard more than one woman in Georgia intimate that she would be well pleased with a little less exterior "chivalry" and a little more plain justice. Aside from their efforts to change the "age of consent" law, leading women in the State have been working for compulsory education, for the opening of the State University to women, for factory inspection and decent child-labor laws. The question of child labor has now been taken in hand by the National Government—as, of course, the "age of consent" should also be—but in other respects but little progress has been made in Georgia.

From such cheerless items I turn gladly to a happier theme.

As I have said elsewhere in this book, many colored people in Atlanta are doing well in various ways. At Atlanta University I saw several students whose fathers and mothers were graduates of the same institution. Higher education for the negro has, thus, come into its second generation. More prosperous negroes in Atlanta are doing social settlement work among less fortunate members of their race, and have started a free kindergarten for negro children. Many good people in Atlanta are unaware of these facts, and I believe their judgment on the entire negro question would be modified, at least in certain details, were they merely to inform themselves upon various creditable negro activities in the city. The northern stranger, attempting to ascertain the truth about the negro and the negro problem, has to this extent the advantage of the average Southerner: prejudice and indifference do not prevent his going among the negroes to find out what they are doing for themselves.

* * * * *

At various times in my life chance has thrown me into contact with charities in great variety, and philanthropic work of many kinds. I have seen theoretical charities, sentimental charities, silly charities, pauperizing charities, wild-eyed charities, charities which did good, and others which worked damage in the world; I have seen organized charities splendidly run under difficult circumstances (as in the Department of Charities under Commissioner Kingsbury, in New York City), and I have seen other organized charities badly run at great expense; I have seen charities conducted with the primary purpose of ministering to the vanity of self-important individuals who like to say: "See all the good that I am doing!" and I have seen other personal charities operated (as in the case of the Rockefeller Foundation) with a perfectly magnificent scope and effectiveness.

Nevertheless, of all the charities I have seen, of all the efforts I have witnessed to improve the condition of humanity, none has taken a firmer hold upon my heart than the Leonard Street Orphans' Home, for negro girls, in Atlanta.

The home is a humble frame building which was used as a barracks by northern troops stationed in Atlanta after the Civil War. In it reside Miss Chadwick, her helpers, and about seventy little negro girls; and it is an interesting fact that several of the helpers are young colored women who, themselves brought up in the home and taught to be self-supporting, have been drawn back to the place by homesickness. Was ever before an orphan homesick for an orphans' home?

Miss Chadwick is an Englishwoman. Coming out to America a good many years ago, she somehow found Atlanta, and in Atlanta somehow found this orphanage, which was then both figuratively and literally dropping to pieces. Some one had to take hold of it, so Miss Chadwick did. How successful she has been it is hard to convey in words. I do not mean that she has succeeded in building up a great flourishing plant with a big endowment and all sorts of improvements. Far from it. The home stands on a tiny lot, the building is ramshackle and not nearly large enough for its purpose, and sometimes it seems doubtful where the money to keep it going will come from. Nevertheless the home is a hundred times more successful than I could have believed a home for orphans, colored or white, could be made, had I not seen it with my own eyes. Its success lies not in material possessions or prosperity, not in the food and shelter it provides to those who so pitifully needed it, but in the fact that it is in the truest and finest sense a home, a place endowed with the greatest blessings any home can have: contentment and affection. What Miss Chadwick has provided is, in short, an institution with a heart.

How did she do it? That, like the other mystery of how she manages to house those seventy small lively people in that little building, is something which only Heaven and Miss Chadwick understand.

But then, if you have ever visited the home and met Miss Chadwick, and seen her with her children, you know that Heaven and Miss Chadwick understand a lot of things the rest of us don't know about at all!



CHAPTER XXXVI

A BIT OF RURAL GEORGIA

To walk with the morning and watch its rose unfold; To drowse with the noontide lulled in its heart of gold; To lie with the night-time and dream the dreams of old.

—MADISON CAWEIN.

A man I know studies as a hobby something which he calls "graphics"—the term denoting the reaction of the mind to certain words. One of the words he used in an experiment with me was "winter." When he said "winter" there instantly came to me the picture of a snowstorm in Quebec. I saw the front of the Hotel Frontenac at dusk through a mist of driving snow. There were lights in the windows. A heavy wind was blowing and as I leaned against it the front of my overcoat was plastered with sticky white flakes. The streets and sidewalks were deep with snow, and the only person besides myself in the vision was a sentry standing with his gun in the lee of the vestibule outside the local militia headquarters.

If my friend were to come now and try me with the word "spring," I know what picture it would call to mind. I should see the Burge plantation, near Covington, Georgia: the simple old white house with its rose-clad porch, or "gallery," its grove of tall trees, its carriage-house, its well-house, and other minor dependencies clustering nearby like chickens about a white hen, its background the rolling cottonfields, their red soil glowing salmon-colored in the sun. For, as I was never so conscious of the brutality of winter as in that evening snowstorm at Quebec, I was never so conscious, as at the time of our visit to the Burge plantation, of the superlative soft sweetness of the spring.

In seasons, as in other things, we have our individual preferences. Melancholy natures usually love autumn, with its colorings so like sweet sad minor chords. But what kind of natures they are which rejoice in spring, which feel that with each spring the gloomy past is blotted out, and life, with all its opportunities, begins anew—what kind of natures they are which recognize April instead of January as the beginning of their year I shall not attempt to tell, for mine is such a nature, and one must not act at once as subject and diagnostician.

So long as I endure, spring can never come again without turning my thoughts to northwestern Georgia; to the peculiar penetrating warmth which passed through the clothing to the body and made one feel that one was not surrounded by mere air, but was immersed in a dry bath of some infinitely superior vapor, a vapor volatile, soothing, tonic, distilled, it seemed, from the earth, from pine trees, tulip trees, balm-of-Gilead trees, (or "bam" trees, as they call them), blossoming Judas trees, Georgia crabapple, dogwood pink and white, peach blossom, wistaria, sweet-shrub, dog violets, pansy violets, Cherokee roses, wild honeysuckle and azalia, and the evanescent green of new treetops, all carried in solution in the sunlight. By day the brilliant cardinal adds his fine note of color and sound, but at night he is silent, and when the moon comes out one hears the mockingbird and, it may be also, two whippoorwills, one in the grove near the house, one in the woods across the road, calling back and forth. Then one is tempted to step down from the porch, and follow the voices of the birds into the vague recesses of a night webbed with dark tree shadows outlined in blue moonlight.

Small wonder it is, if, as report says, no houseparty on a southern plantation is a success unless young couples become "sort of engaged," and if in a region so provocative in springtime under a full moon, a distinction is recognized between being merely "engaged," and being engaged to be married.

One Georgia belle we met, a sloe-eyed girl whose reputation not only for beauty but for charm reached through the entire South, had, at the time of our visit, recently become engaged in the more grave and permanent sense.

"How does it seem?" a girl friend asked her.

"I feel," she answered, "like a man who has built up a large business and is about to go into the hands of a receiver."

Such ways as those girls have! Such voices! Such eyes! And such names, too! Names which would not fit at all into a northern setting, relatively so hard and unsentimental, but which, when one becomes accustomed to them, take their place gracefully and harmoniously in the southern picture. The South likes diminutives and combinations in its women's names. Its Harriets, Franceses, Sarahs, and Marthas, become Hatties, Fannies, Sallies and Patsies, and Patsy sometimes undergoes a further transition and becomes Passie. Moreover, where these diminutives have been passed down for several generations in a family, their origin is sometimes lost sight of, and the diminutive becomes the actual baptismal name. In one family of my acquaintance, for example, the name Passie has long been handed down from mother to daughter. The original great-grandmother Passie was christened Martha but was at first called Patsy; then, because her black mammy was also named Patsy, the daughter of the house came to be known, for purposes of differentiation, as Passie, and when she married and had a daughter of her own, the child was christened Passie. In this family the name May has more recently been adopted as a middle name, and it is customary for familiars of the youngest Passie, to address her not merely as Passie, but as Passie-May. The inclusion of the second name, in this fashion, is another custom not uncommon in the South. In Atlanta alone I heard of ladies habitually referred to as Anna-Laura, Hattie-May, Lollie-Belle, Sally-Maud, Nora-Belle, Mattie-Sue, Emma-Belle, Lottie-Belle, Susie-May, Lula-Belle, Sallie-Fannie, Hattie-Fannie, Lou-Ellen, Allie-Lou, Clara-Belle, Mary-Ella, and Hattie-Belle. Another young lady was known to her friends as Jennie-D.

The train from Atlanta set us down at Covington, Georgia, or rather at the station which lies between the towns of Covington and Oxford—for when this railroad was built neither town would allow it a right of way, and to this day each is connected with the station by a street car line, either line equipped with one diminutive car, a pair of disconsolate mules, and a driver. Covington is the County seat, a quiet southern town, part old, part new, with a look of rural prosperity about it. Stopping at the postoffice to inquire for mail we saw this peremptory sign displayed:

When the window is down don't bang around and ask for a stamp or two.

—J.L. CALLAWAY, Postmaster.

As the window was down we tiptoed out and went upon our way, driving through Oxford before going to the plantation. This town was named for Oxford, England, and is, like its namesake, a college town. A small and very old Methodist educational institution, with a pretty though ragged campus and fine trees, is all there is to Oxford, save a row of ante-bellum houses. One of them, a pleasant white mansion, half concealed by the huge magnolias which stand in its front yard, was at one time the residence of General Longstreet. The old front gate, hanging on a stone post, was made by the general with his own hands—and well made, for it is to-day as good a gate as ever. Corra Harris lived at one time in Oxford; her husband, Rev. Lundy H. Harris, having been a professor at the college.

* * * * *

Though plantation life has necessarily changed since the war, I do not believe that there is in the whole South a plantation where it has changed less than on the Burge plantation. In appearance the place is not as Sherman's men found it, for they tore down the fences and ruined the beautiful old-fashioned garden, and neither has been replaced; nor, of course, is it run, so far as practical affairs are concerned, as it was before the War; that is to say, instead of being operated as a unit of nine-hundred acres, it is now worked chiefly on shares, and is divided up into "one mule farms" and "two mule farms," these being tracts of about thirty and sixty acres, respectively, thirty acres being approximately the area which can be worked by a man and a mule.

Practically all the negroes on the place—perhaps a hundred in number—are either former slaves of the Burge family, or the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of slaves who lived on the plantation. That is one reason why the plantation is less changed in spirit than are many others. The Burges were religious people, used their slaves kindly, and brought them up well, so that the negroes on the plantation to-day are respectable, and in some instances, exemplary people, very different from the vagrant negro type which has developed since the War, making labor conditions in some parts of the South uncertain, and plantation life, in some sections, not safe for unprotected women.

The present proprietors of the Burge plantation are two ladies, granddaughters of Mrs. Thomas Burge, who lived here, a widow, with a little daughter, when General Sherman and his hosts came by. These ladies frequently spend months at the plantation without male protectors save only the good negroes of their own place, who look after them with the most affectionate devotion. True, the ladies keep an ugly looking but mild mannered bulldog, of which the negroes are generally afraid; true also they carry a revolver when they drive about the country in their motor, and keep revolvers handy in their rooms; but these precautions are not taken, they told me, because of any doubts about the men on their place, their one fear being of tramp negroes, passing by.

Of their own negroes several are remarkable, particularly one old couple, perfect examples of the fine ante-bellum type so much beloved in the South, and so much regretted as it disappears.

During the period of twenty years or more, while the owners were absent, growing up and receiving their education, the whole place, indoors and out, was in charge of Uncle George and Aunt Sidney. The two lived, and still do live, in one wing of the house—over which Aunt Sidney presides as housekeeper and cook, as her mother, Aunt Liddy, did before her. Aunt Liddy died only a short time ago, aged several years over a hundred. Uncle George supervises all the business of the plantation, as he has done for thirty or forty years. He collects all rents, markets the crops and receives the payments, makes purchases, pays bills, and keeps peace between the tenants—nor could any human being be more honorable or possess a finer, sweeter dignity. As for devotion, when the little girls who were away returned after all the years as grown women, every ribbon, every pin in that house was where it had been left, and the place was no less neat than if the "white folks" had constantly remained there.

Before Georgia went dry it was customary for negroes of the rougher sort to get drunk in town every Saturday night. Drunken negroes would consequently be passing by, all night, on their way to their homes, yelling and (after the manner of their kind when intoxicated) shooting their revolvers in the air. Every Saturday night, when the ladies were at home, Uncle George would quietly take his gun and place himself on the porch, remaining there until the last of the obstreperous wayfarers had passed.

Uncle Abe and Uncle Wiley are two other worthy and venerable men who live in cabins on the place. Both were there when Sherman's army passed upon its devastating way, and both were carried off, as were thousands upon thousands of other negroes out of that wide belt across the State of Georgia, which was overrun in the course of the March to the Sea.

"Ah was goin' to mill wid de ox-caht," Uncle Abe told me, "when de soljas dey kim 'long an' got me. Dey tol' me, 'Heah, nigga! Git out dat caht, an' walk behin'. When it moves you move; when it stops you stop!' An' like dat Ah walk all de way to Savannah [two hundred and fifty miles]. Den, after dat, dey took us 'long up No'th—me an' ma brotha Wiley, ovah deh."

I asked him what regiment he went with. He said it was the Twenty-second Indiana, and that Dr. Joe Stilwell, of that regiment, who came from a place near Madison, Indiana ("Ah reckon de town was name Brownstown"), was good to him. An officer whom he knew, he said, was Captain John Snodgrass, and another Major Tom Shay.

"All Ah was evvuh wo'ied about aftuh dey kim tuck me," he declared, "was gittin' somep'n t' eat. Dat kinda put me on de wonduh, sometahmes, but dey used us all right. Dr. Pegg—him dat did de practice on de plantation befo' de Wah—he tol' de niggas dat de Yankees would put gags in deh moufs an' lead 'em eroun' like dey wuz cattle. But deh wa' n't like dat nohow. I b'longed to de Secon' Division, Thuhd B'gade, Fou'teenth Co' [corps]. Cap'n Snodgrass, he got to be lieutenant-cuhnel. He was de highes' man Ah evuh hel' any convuhsation wid, but I saw all de gennuls of dat ahmy."

Uncle Wiley is older than Uncle Abe. He was already a grown man with three children when taken away by some of Sherman's men. He told me he was with the Fifty-second Ohio, and mentioned Captain Shepard.

The two brothers got as far as Washington, D.C.

"We got los' togedduh in de U.S. buildin' in dat city," said Uncle Wiley. "De President of de U.S. right at dat tahme he was daid. He was kill', Ah don' s'pose it wuz a week befo' we got to Wash'n, D.C."

"How did you happen to come all the way back?" I asked.

"Well-l," ruminated the old man, "home was always a-restin' on mah min'. Ah kep' thinkin' 'bout home. So aftuh de Wah ceasted Ah jus' kim 'long back."

Many of the old plantation customs still survive. A little before noon the bell is rung to summon the hands from the cotton fields. Over the red plowed soil you hear a darky cry, a melodious "Oh-oh-oh!" as wild and musical as the cries of the south-Italian olive gatherers. The planters cease their work, mules stand still, traces are unhooked from singletrees, and chain-ends thrown over the mules' backs; then the men mount the animals and ride in to the midday meal, the women trudging after. Those who rent land, or work on shares, go to their own cabins, while those employed by the hour or by the day (the rate of pay is ten cents an hour or seventy-five cents a day) come to the kitchen to be fed. Nor is it customary to stop there at feeding negroes. As in the old days, any negro who has come upon an errand or who has "stopped by" to sell supplies, or for whatever purpose, expects to stay for "dinner," and makes it a point to arrive about noon. Thus from sixteen to twenty negroes are fed daily at the Burge plantation house.

The old Christmas traditions are likewise kept up. On Christmas day the negroes come flocking up to the house for their gifts. Their first concern is to attempt to cry "Christmas gift!" to others, before it can be said to them—for according to ancient custom the one who says the words first must have a gift from the other.



CHAPTER XXXVII

A YOUNG METROPOLIS

An observer approaching a strange city should be "neutral even in thought." He may listen to what is said of the city, but he must not permit his opinions to take form in advance; for, like other gossip, gossip about cities is unreliable, and the casual stranger's estimate of cities is not always founded upon broad appreciations. But though it is unwise to judge of cities by what is said of them, it is perhaps worth remarking that one may often judge of men by what they say of cities.

I remember an American manufacturer, broken down by overwork, who, when he looked at Pompeii, could think only of the wasted possibilities of Vesuvius as a power plant, and I remember two traveling salesmen on a southern railroad train who expressed scorn for the exquisite city of Charleston because—they said—it is but a poor market place for suspenders and barbers' supplies. There are those who think of Boston only as headquarters of the shoe trade, others who think of it only in the terms of culture, and still others who regard it solely as an abode of negrophiles.

In the case of the chief city of Alabama, however, my companion and I noticed, as we journeyed through the South, that reports were singularly in accord. Birmingham is too young to have any Civil War history. Her history is the history of the steel industry in the South, and one hears always of that: of the affluence of the city when the industry is thriving, and hard times when it is not. One is invariably told that Birmingham is not a southern city, but a northern city in the South, and the chief glories of the place, aside from steel, are (if one is to believe rumors current upon railroad trains and elsewhere), a twenty-seven story building, Senator Oscar Underwood, the distinguished Democratic leader, and the Tutwiler Hotel. Even in Atlanta it is conceded that the Tutwiler is a good hotel, and when Atlanta admits that anything in Birmingham is good it may be considered as established that the thing is very, very good—for Birmingham and Atlanta view each other with the same degree of cordiality as is exchanged between St. Louis and Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Having been, in the course of our southern wanderings, in several very bad hotels, and having heard the Tutwiler compared with Chicago's Blackstone, my companion and I held eager anticipation of this hostelry. Nor were our hopes dashed by a first glimpse of the city on the night of our arrival. It was a modern-looking city—just the sort of city that would have a fine new hotel. The railroad station through which we passed after leaving the train was not the usual dingy little southern station, but an admirable building, and the streets along which we presently found ourselves gliding in an automobile hack, were wide, smooth, and brightly illuminated by clustered boulevard lights.

True, we had long since learned not to place too much reliance upon the nocturnal aspects of cities. A city seen by night is like a woman dressed for a ball. Darkness drapes itself about her as a black-velvet evening gown, setting off, in place of neck and arms, the softly glowing facades of marble buildings; lights are her diamond ornaments, and her perfume is the cool fragrance of night air. Almost all cities, and almost all women, look their best at night, and there are those which, though beautiful by night, sink, in their daylight aspect, to utter mediocrity.

Presently our motor drew up before the entrance of the Tutwiler—a proud entrance, all revolving doors and glitter and promise. A brisk bell boy came running for our bags. The signs were of the best.

The lobby, though spacious, was crowded; the decorations and equipment were of that rich sumptuousness attained only in the latest and most magnificent American hotels; there was music, and as we made our way along we caught a glimpse, in passing, of an attractive supper room, with small table-lights casting their soft radiance upon white shirt fronts and the faces of pretty girls. In all it was a place to make glad the heart of the weary traveler, and to cause him to wonder whether his dress suit would be wrinkled when he took it from his trunk.

Behind the imposing marble "desk" stood several impeccable clerks, and to one of these I addressed myself, giving our names and mentioning the fact that we had telegraphed for rooms. I am not sure that this young man wore a braided cutaway and a white carnation; I only know that he affected me as hotel clerks in braided cutaways and white carnations always do. While I spoke he stood a little way back from the counter, his chin up, his gaze barely missing the top of my hat, his nostrils seeming to contract with that expression of dubiousness assumed by delicate noses which sense, long before they encounter it, the aroma of unworthiness.

"Not a room in the house," he said. Then, as though to forestall further parley, he turned and spoke with gracious lightness to one of his own rank and occupation who, at the request of my companion, was ascertaining whether letters were awaiting us.

"But we telegraphed two days ago!" I protested desperately.

"Can't help it. Hardware Convention. Everything taken."

Over my shoulder I heard from my companion a sound, half sigh, half groan, which echoed the cry of my own heart.

"I felt this coming!" he murmured. "Didn't you notice all these people with ribbons on them? There's never any room in a hotel where everybody's wearing ribbons. It's like a horse show. They get the ribbons and we get the gate."

"Surely," I faltered, "you can let us have one small room?"

"Impossible," he answered brightly. "We've turned away dozens of people this evening."

"Then," I said, abandoning hope, "perhaps you will suggest some other hotel?"

I once heard a woman, the most perfect parvenu I ever met, speak of her poor relations in a tone exactly similar to that in which the clerk now spoke the names of two hotels. Having spoken, he turned and passed behind the partition at one end of the marble counter.

My companion and I stood there for a moment looking despondently at each other. Then, without a word, we retreated through that gorgeous lobby, feeling like sad remnants of a defeated Yankee army.

Again we motored through the bright streets, but only to successive disappointments, for both hotels mentioned by the austere clerk were "turning 'em away." Our chauffeur now came to our aid, mentioning several small hotels, and in one of these, the Granada, we were at last so fortunate as to find lodgings.

"It begun to look like you'd have to put up at the Roden," the chauffeur smiled as we took our bags out of the car and settled with him.

"The Roden?"

"Yes," he returned "Best ventilated hotel in the United States."

Next day when the Hotel Roden was pointed out to us we appreciated the witticism, for the Roden is—or was at the time of our visit—merely the steel skeleton of a building which, we were informed, had for some years stood unfinished owing to disagreements among those concerned with its construction.

As for the Granada, though a modest place, it was new and clean; the clerk was amiable, the beds comfortable, and if our rooms were too small to admit our trunks, they were, at all events, outside rooms, each with a private bath, at a rate of $1 per day apiece. Never in any hotel have I felt that I was getting so much for my money.

Next morning, after breakfast, we set out to see the city. Having repeatedly heard of Birmingham as the "Pittsburgh of the South," we expected cold daylight to reveal the sooty signs of her industrialism, but in this we were agreeably disappointed. By day as well as by night the city is pleasing to the eye, and it is a fact worth noting that the downtown buildings of Atlanta (which is not an industrial city) are streaked and dirty, whereas those of Birmingham are clean—the reason for this being that the mills and furnaces of Birmingham are far removed from the heart of the town, whereas locomotives belch black smoke into the very center of Atlanta's business and shopping district.

Moreover, the metropolis of Alabama is better laid out than that of Georgia. The streets of Birmingham are wide, and the business part of the city, lying upon a flat terrain, is divided into large, even squares. From this district the chief residence section mounts by easy, graceful grades into the hills to the southward. Because of these grades, and the curving drives which follow the contours of the hills, and the vistas of the lower city, and the good modern houses, and the lawns and trees and shrubbery and breezes, this Highlands region is reminiscent of a similar residence district in Portland, Oregon—which is to say that it is one of the most agreeable districts of the kind in the United States.

Well up on the hillside, Highland Avenue winds a charming course between pleasant homes, with here and there a little residence park branching off to one side, and here and there a small municipal park occupying an angle formed by a sharp turn in the driveway; and if you follow the street far enough you will presently see the house of the Birmingham Country Club, standing upon its green hilltop, amidst rolling, partly wooded golf links, above the road.

Nor is the Country Club at the summit of this range of hills. Back of it rise other roads, the most picturesque of them being Altamont Road, which runs to the top of Red Mountain, reaching a height about equivalent to that of the cornice line of Birmingham's tallest building. The houses of this region are built on streets which, like some streets of Portland, are terraced into the hillside, and the resident of an upper block can almost look down the chimneys of his neighbors on the block below. The view commanded from these mountain perches does not suggest that the lower city runs up into the Highlands. It seems to be a separate place, down in a distant valley, and the sense of its remoteness is heightened by the thin veil of gray smoke which wafts from the tall smokestacks of far-off iron furnaces, softening the serrated outlines of the city and wrapping its tall buildings in the industrial equivalent for autumn haze.

At night the scene from the Highlands is even more spectacular, for at brief intervals the blowing of a converter in some distant steel plant illuminates the heavens with a great hot glow, like that which rises and falls about the crater of a volcano in eruption. Thus the city's vast affairs are kept before it by day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in a pillar of fire. Iron and steel dominate Birmingham's mind, activities and life. The very ground of Red Mountain is red because of the iron ore that it contains, and those who reside upon the charming slopes of this hill do not own their land in fee simple, but subject always to the mineral rights of mining companies.

The only other industry of Birmingham which is to be compared, in magnitude or efficiency, with the steel industry is that of "cutting in" at dances. All through the South it is carried on, but whereas in such cities as Memphis, New Orleans and Atlanta, men show a little mercy to the stranger—realizing that, as he is presumably unacquainted with all the ladies at a dance, he cannot retaliate in kind—Birmingham is merciless and prosecutes the pestilential practice unremittingly, even going so far as to apply the universal-service principle and call out her highschool youths to carry on the work. Before I went to certain dances in Birmingham I felt that high-school boys ought to be kept at home at night, but after attending these dances I realized that such restriction was altogether inadequate, and that the only way to deal with them effectively would be to pickle them in vitriol.

Where, in other cities of the South, I have managed to dance as much as half a dance without interruption, I never danced more than twenty feet with one partner in Birmingham. Nor did my companion.

Our host was energetic in presenting us to ladies of infinite pulchritude and State-wide terpsichorean reputation, but we would start to tread a measure with them, only to have them swiftly snatched from us by some spindle-necked, long-wristed, big-boned, bowl-eared high-school youth, in a dinner suit which used to fit him when it was new, six months ago.

As we would start to dance the lady would say:

"You-all ah strangehs, ahn't you?"

We would reply that we were.

"Wheh do you come from?"

"New York."

Then, because the Hardware Convention was being held in town at the time, she would continue:

"Ah reckon you-all ah hahdware men?"

But that was as far as the conversation ever got. Just about the time that she began to reckon we were hardware men a mandatory hand would be laid upon us, and before we had time to defend ourselves against the hardware charge, the lady would be wafted off in the arms of some predatory youth who ought to have been at home considering pons asinorum.

Had we indeed been hardware men, and had we had our hardware with us, they could have done with fewer teachers in the high schools of that city after the night of our first dance in Birmingham.

* * * * *

Up in the hills, some miles back of the Country Club, on the banks of a large artificial lake, stands the new clubhouse of the Birmingham Motor and Country Club, and around the lake runs the club's two-and-a-half-mile speedway. Elsewhere is the Roebuck Golf Club, the links of which are admitted ("even in Atlanta!") to be excellent—the one possible objection to the course of the Birmingham Country Club being that it is suited only to play with irons.

I mention these golfing matters not because they interest me, but because they may interest you. I am not a golfer. I played the game for two seasons; then I decided to try to lead a better life. The first time I played I did quite well, but thence onward my game declined until, toward the last, crowds would collect to hear me play. When I determined to abandon the game I did not burn my clubs or break them up, according to the usual custom, but instead gave them to a man upon whom I wished to retaliate because his dog had bitten a member of my family.

Small wonder that all golf clubs have extensive bars! It is not hard to understand why men who realize that they have become incurable victims of the insidious habit of golf should wish to drown the thought in drink. But in Birmingham they can't do it—not, at least, at bars. Alabama has beaten her public bars into soda fountains and quick-lunch rooms, and though her club bars still look like real ones, the drinks served are so soft that no splash occurs when reminiscent tears drop into them.

When we were in Alabama each citizen who so desired was allowed by law to import from outside the State a small allotment of strong drink for personal use, but the red tape involved in this procedure had already discouraged all but the most ardent drinkers, and those found it next to impossible, even by hoarding their "lonesome quarts," and pooling supplies with their convivial friends, to provide sufficient alcoholic drink for a "real party."

We met in Birmingham but one gentleman whose cellars seemed to be well stocked, and the tales of ingenuity and exertion by which he managed to secure ample supplies of liquor were such as to lead us to believe that this matter had become, with him, an occupation to which all other business must give second place.

It was this gentleman who told us that, since the State went dry, the ancient form, "R.S.V.P.," on social invitations, had been revised to "B.W.H.P.," signifying, "bring whisky in hip pocket."

To the "B.W.H.P." habit he himself strictly adhered. One night, when we chanced to meet him in a downtown club, he drew a flask from a hip pocket, and invited us to "have something."

"What is it?" asked my companion.

"Scotch."

When my companion had helped himself he passed the flask to me, but I returned it to the owner, explaining that I did not drink Scotch whisky.

"What do you drink?" he asked.

"Bourbon."

"Here it is," he returned, drawing a second flask from the other hip pocket.

How well, too, do I remember the long, delightful evening upon which my companion and I sat in an Atlanta club with a group of the older members, the week before Georgia went bone dry. There, as in Alabama before 1915, there had been pretended prohibition, but now the bars of leading clubs were being closed, and convivial men were looking into the future with despair. One of the gentlemen was a justice of the Supreme Court of the State, and I remember his wistful declaration that prohibition would fall hardest upon the older men.

"When a man is young," he said, "he can be lively and enjoy himself without drinking, because he is full of animal spirits. But we older men aren't bubbling over with liveliness. We can't dance, or don't want to, and we lack the stimulus which comes of falling continually in love. My great pleasure is to sit of an evening, here at a table in the cafe of this club, conversing with my friends. That is where prohibition is going to hurt me. I shall not see my old friends any more."

The others protested at this somber view, but the judge gravely shook his head, saying: "You don't believe me, but I know whereof I speak, for I have been through something like this, in a minor way, before. A good many years ago I was one of a little group of congenial men to organize a small club. We had comfortable quarters, and we used to drop in at night, much as we have been doing of late years here, and have the kind of talks that are tonic to the soul. Of course we had liquor in the club, but there came a time when, for some reason or other—I think it was some trouble over a license—we closed our bar. We didn't think it was going to make a great difference, but it did. The men began to stop coming in, and before long the club ceased to exist.

"It won't be like that here. This club will go on. But we won't come here. We won't want to sit around a table, like this, and drink ginger ale and sarsaparilla; and even if we do, the talk won't be so good. The thing that makes me downcast is not that liquor is going, but that we are really parting this week.

"Every one knows that the abuse of drink does harm in the world, but these pious prohibitionists are not of the temperament to understand how alcohol ministers to the esthetic side of certain natures. It gives us better companions and makes us better companions for others. It stimulates our minds, enhances our appreciations, sharpens our wit, loosens our tongues, and saves brilliant conversation from becoming a lost art."

My sympathies went out to the judge. It has always seemed to me a pity that the liquor question has resolved itself into a fight between extremists—for I think the wine and beer people might survive if they were not tied up with the distillers, and I do not believe that any considerable evil comes of drinking wine or beer.

Nevertheless it must be apparent to every one who troubles to investigate, that prohibition invariably works great good wherever it is made effective. Take, for example, Birmingham.

There was one year—I believe it was 1912—when there was an average of more than one murder a day, for every working day in the year, in the county in which Birmingham is located. On one famous Saturday night there were nineteen felonious assaults (sixteen by negroes and three by whites), from which about a dozen deaths resulted, two of those killed having been policemen.

All this has changed with prohibition. Killings are now comparatively rare, arrests have diminished to less than a third of the former average, whether for grave or petty offenses, and the receiving jail, which was formerly packed like a pigpen every Saturday night, now stands almost empty, while the city jail, which used continually to house from 120 to 150 offenders, has diminished its average population to 30 or 35.



CHAPTER XXXVIII

BUSY BIRMINGHAM

The fact that a man may shut off his motor and coast downhill from his home to his office in the lower part of Birmingham, is not without symbolism. Birmingham is all business. If I were to personify the place, it would be in the likeness of a man I know—a big, powerful fellow with an honest blue eye and an expression in which self-confidence, ambition, and power are blended. Like Birmingham, this man is a little more than forty years of age. Like Birmingham, he has built up a large business of his own. And, like Birmingham, he is a little bit naive in his pride of success. His life is divided between his office and his home, and it would be difficult to say for which his devotion is the greater. He talks business with his wife at breakfast and dinner, and on their Sunday walks. He brings his papers home at night and goes over them with her, for, though her specialty is bringing up the children, she is deeply interested in his business and often makes suggestions which he follows. This causes him to admire her intensely, which he would not necessarily do were she merely a good wife and mother.

He has no hobbies or pastimes. True, he plays golf, but with him golf is not a diversion. He plays because he finds the exercise increases his efficiency ("efficiency" is perhaps his favorite word), and because many of his commercial associates are golfers, and he can talk business with them on the links.

His house is pleasant and stands upon a good-sized city lot. It is filled with very shiny mahogany furniture and strong-colored portieres and sofa cushions. It is rather more of a house than he requires, for his tastes are simple, but he has a feeling that he ought to have a large house, for the same reason that he and his wife ought to dress expensively—that is, out of respect, as it were, to his business.

One of his chief treasures is an automatic piano, upon which he rolls off selections from Wagner's operas. He likes the music of the great German because, as he has often told me, it stirs his imagination, thereby helping him to solve business problems and make business plans.

The thing he most abhors is general conversation, and he is never so amusing—so pathetically and unconsciously amusing—as when trying to take part in general conversation and at the same time to conceal the writhings of his tortured spirit. There is but one thing which will drive him to attempt the feat, and that is the necessity of making himself agreeable to some man, or the wife of some man, from whom he wishes to get business.

The census of 1910 gave Birmingham a population of 132,000, and it is estimated that since that time the population has increased by 50,000. Birmingham not only knows that it is growing, but believes in trying to make ready in advance for future growth. It gives one the impression that it is rather ahead of its housing problems than behind them. Its area, for instance, is about as great as that of Boston or Cleveland, and its hotels may be compared with the hotels of those cities. If it has not so many clubs as Atlanta, it has, at least, all the clubs it needs; and if it has not so many skyscrapers as New York, it has several which would fit nicely into the Wall Street district. Moreover, the tall buildings of Birmingham lose nothing in height by contrast with the older buildings, three or four stories high, which surround them, giving the business district something of that look which hangs about a boy who has outgrown his clothing. Nor are the vehicles and street crowds, altogether in consonance, as yet, with the fine office buildings of the city, for many of the motors standing at the curb have about them that gray, rural look which comes of much mud and infrequent washing, and the idlers who lean against the rich facades of granite and marble are entirely out of the picture, for they look precisely like the idlers who lean against the wooden posts of country railroad station platforms.

Such curious contrasts as these may be noted everywhere. For instance, Birmingham has been so busy paving the streets that it seems quite to have forgotten to put up street signs. Also, not far from the majestic Tutwiler Hotel, and the imposing apartment building called the Ridgely, the front of which occupies a full block, is a park so ill kept that it would be a disgrace to the city but for the obvious fact that the city is growing and wide-awake, and will, of course, attend to the park when it can find the time. Here are, I believe, the only public monuments Birmingham contains. One is a Confederate monument in the form of an obelisk, and the other two are statues erected in memory of Mary A. Cahalan, for many years principal of the Powell School, and of William Elias B. Davis, a distinguished surgeon. Workers in these fields are too seldom honored in this way, and the spirit which prompted the erection of these monuments is particularly creditable; sad to say, however, both effigies are wretchedly placed and are in themselves exceedingly poor things. Art is something, indeed, about which Birmingham has much to learn. So far as I could discover, no such thing as an art museum has been contemplated. But here again the critic should remember that, whereas art is old, Birmingham is young. She is as yet in the stage of development at which cities think not of art museums, but of municipal auditoriums; and with the latter subject, at least, she is now concerning herself.

Even in the city's political life contrasts are not wanting, for though the town is Republican in sentiment, it proves itself southern by voting the Democratic ticket, and it is interesting to note further that the commission by which it is governed had as one of its five members, when we were there, a Socialist.

Another curious and individual touch is contributed by the soda-fountain lunch rooms which abound in the city, and which, I judge, arrived with the disappearance of barroom lunch counters. In connection with many of the downtown soda fountains there are cooking arrangements, and business lunches are served.

The roads leading out of the city in various directions have many dangerous grade crossings, and accidents must be of common occurrence. At all events, I have never known a city in which cemeteries and undertaking establishments were so widely advertised. In the street cars, for instance, I observed the cheerful placards of one Wallace Johns, undertaker, who promises "all the attention you would expect from a friend," and I was informed that Mr. Johns possesses business cards (for restricted use only) bearing the gay legend: "I'll get you yet!"

As to schools the city is well off. Dr. J.H. Phillips, superintendent of public schools, has occupied his post probably as long as any school superintendent in the country. He organized the city school system in 1883, beginning with seven teachers, as against 750 now employed. The colored schools are reported to be better than in most southern cities.

Of the general status of the negro in Birmingham I cannot speak with authority. As in Atlanta, negroes are sometimes required to use separate elevators in office buildings, and, as everywhere south of Washington, the Birmingham street cars give one end to whites and the other to negroes. But whereas negroes use the back of the car in Atlanta, they use the front in Birmingham. It was attempted, at one time, to reverse this order, for reasons having to do with draft and ventilation, but the people of Birmingham had become accustomed to the existing arrangement and objected to the change. "After all," one gentleman said to me, in speaking of this matter, "it is not important which end of the car is given to the nigger. The main point is that he must sit where he is told."

The means by which the negro vote is eliminated in various Southern States are generally similar, though Alabama has, perhaps, been more thorough in the matter than some other States. The importance of this issue to the southern white man is very great, for if all negroes were allowed to vote the control of certain States would be in negro hands. To the Southerner such an idea is intolerable, and it is my confident belief that if the State of Alabama were resettled by men from Massachusetts, and the same problems were presented to those men, they would be just as quick as the white Alabamans of to-day to find means to suppress the negro vote. With all my heart I wish that such an exchange of citizens might temporarily be effected, for when the immigrants from Massachusetts moved back to their native New England, after an experience of the black belt, they would take with them an understanding of certain aspects of the negro problem which they have never understood; an understanding which, had they possessed it sixty or seventy years ago, might have brought about the freeing of slaves by government purchase—a course which Lincoln advocated and which would probably have prevented the Civil War, and thereby saved millions upon millions of money, to say nothing of countless lives. Had they even understood the problems of the South at the end of the Civil War, the horrors of Reconstruction might have been avoided, and I cannot too often reiterate that, but for Reconstruction we should not be perplexed, to-day, by the unhappy, soggy mass of political inertia known as the Solid South.

I asked a former State official how the negro vote had been eliminated in Alabama. "At first," he said, "we used to kill them to keep them from voting; when we got sick of doing that we began to steal their ballots; and when stealing their ballots got to troubling our consciences we decided to handle the matter legally, fixing it so they couldn't vote."

I inquired as to details. He explained.

It seems that in 1901 a constitutional convention was held, at which it was enacted that, in order to be eligible for life to vote, citizens must register during the next two years. There were, however, certain qualifications prescribed for registration. A man must be of good character, and must have fought in a war, or be the descendant of a person who had fought. This enactment, known as the "grandfather clause," went far toward the elimination of the negro. As an additional safeguard, however, an educational clause was added, but the educational requirement did not become effective at once, as that would have made illiterate whites ineligible as voters. Not until the latter were safely registered under the "grandfather clause," was the educational clause applied, and as, under this clause, the would-be voter must read and write to the satisfaction of his examiner, the negro's chance to get suffrage was still more reduced.

The United States Supreme Court has, I believe, held that the educational clause does not constitute race discrimination.

As though the above measures were not sufficient, it is further required that, in order to vote at November elections in Alabama, voters must pay a small voluntary poll tax. This tax, however, must be paid each year before February first—that is, about nine months before elections actually take place. The negro has never been distinguished for his foresightedness with a dollar, and, to make matters harder for him, this tax is cumulative from the year 1901, so that a man who wishes to begin to vote this year, and can qualify in other respects, must pay a tax amounting to nearly twenty dollars.

These measures give Alabama, as my informant put it, a "very exclusive electorate." With a population of approximately two millions, the greatest number of votes ever cast by the State was 125,000. Of this number, 531 votes were those of negroes, "representing" a colored population of 840,000!

The gentleman who explained these matters also told me a story illustrative of the old-time Southerner's attitude toward the negro in politics.

During Reconstruction, when Alabama's Legislature was about one-third white and two-thirds negro, a fine old gentleman who had been a slaveholder and was an experienced parliamentarian, was attempting to preside over the Legislature. In this he experienced much difficulty, his greatest bete noir being a negro member, full of oratory, who continually interrupted other speakers.

Realizing that this was a part of the new order of things, the presiding officer tried not to allow his irritation to get the better of him, and to silence the objectionable man in parliamentary fashion. "The member will kindly come to order!" he repeated over and over, rapping with his gavel. "The member will kindly come to order!"

After this had gone on for some time without effect, the old gentleman's patience became exhausted. He laid down his gavel, arose to his feet, glared at the irrepressible member, and, shaking his finger savagely, shouted: "Sit down, you blankety-blank black blankety-blank!"

Whereupon the negro dropped instantly to his seat and was no more heard from.



CHAPTER XXXIX

AN ALLEGORY OF ACHIEVEMENT

To visit Birmingham without seeing an iron and steel plant would be like visiting Rome without seeing the Forum. Consequently my companion and I made application for permission to go through the Tennessee Coal, Iron, & Railroad Company's plant, at Ensley, on the outskirts of the city. When the permission was refused us we attacked from another angle—using influence—and were refused again. Next we called upon a high official of the company, and (as we had, of course, done in making our previous requests for admission to the plant) explained our errand.

Though this gentleman received us with the utmost courtesy, he declared that the company desired no publicity, and plainly indicated that he was not disposed to let us into the plant.

"I'll tell you what the trouble is," said my companion to me. "This company is a part of the United States Steel Corporation, and in the old muckraking days it was thoroughly raked. They think that we have come down here full of passionate feeling over the poor, downtrodden workingman and the great, greedy octopus."

"What makes you think that?"

"Well, we are a writer and an artist. Lots of writers and artists have made good livings by teaching magazine readers that it is dishonest for a corporation, or a corporation official, to prosper; that the way to integrity is through insolvency; that the word 'company' is a term of reproach, while 'corporation' is a foul epithet, and 'trust' blasphemy."

"What shall we do?"

"We must make it clear to these people," he said, "that we have no mission. We must satisfy them that we are not reformers—that we didn't come to dig out a red-hot story, but to see red-hot rails rolled out."

Pursuing this course, we were successful. All that any official of the company required of us was that we be open-minded. The position of the company, when we came to understand it, was simply that it did not wish to facilitate the work of men who came down with pencils, paper, and preconceived "views," deliberately to play the great American game of "swat the corporation."

* * * * *

Surely there is not in the world an industry which, for sheer pictorial magnificence, rivals the modern manufacturing of steel. In the first place, the scale of everything is inexpressibly stupendous. To speak of a row of six blast furnaces, with mouths a hundred feet above the ground, and chimneys rising perhaps another hundred feet above these mouths, is not, perhaps, impressive, but to look at such a row of furnaces, to see their fodder of ore, dolomite, and coke brought in by train loads; to see it fed to them by the "skip"; to hear them roar continually for more; to feel the savage heat generated within their bodies; to be told in shouts, above the din, something of what is going on inside these vast, voracious, savage monsters, and to see them dripping their white-hot blood when they are picked by a long steel bar in the hands of an atom of a man—this is to witness an almost terrifying allegory of mankind's achievement.

The gas generated by blast furnaces is used in part in the hot-blast stoves—gigantic tanks from which hot air, at very high pressure, is admitted to the furnaces themselves, and is also used to develop steam for the blowing engines and other auxiliaries. In the furnaces the molten iron, because of its greater specific gravity, settles to the bottom, while the slag floats to the top. The slag, by the way, is not, as I had supposed, altogether worthless, but is used for railroad ballast and in the manufacture of cement.

The molten iron drawn from the blast furnaces runs in glittering rivulets (which, at a distance of twenty or thirty feet, burn the face and the eyes), into ladle cars which are like a string of devils' soup bowls, mounted on railroad trucks ready to be hauled away by a locomotive and served at a banquet in hell.

That is not what happens to them, however. The locomotive takes them to another part of the plant, and their contents, still molten, is poured into the mixers. These are gigantic caldrons as high as houses, which stand in rows in an open-sided steel shed, and the chief purpose of them is to keep the "soup" hot until it is required for the converters—when it is again poured off into ladle cars and drawn away.

The converters are in still another part of the grounds. They are huge, pear-shaped retorts, resembling in their action those teakettles which hang on stands and are poured by being tilted. But a million teakettles could be lost in one converter, and the boiling water from a million teakettles, poured into a converter, would be as one single drop of ice water let fall into a red-hot stove.

In the converters the metalloids—silicon, manganese, and carbon—are burned out of the iron under a flaming heat which, by means of high air pressure, is brought to a temperature of about 3400 degrees. It is the blowing of these converters, and the occasional pouring of them, which throws the Vesuvian glow upon the skies of Birmingham at night. The heat they give off is beyond description. Several hundred feet away you feel it smiting viciously upon your face, and the concrete flooring of the huge shed in which they stand is so hot as to burn your feet through the soles of your shoes.

The most elaborate display of fireworks ever devised by Mr. Pain would be but a poor thing compared with the spectacle presented when a converter is poured. The whole world glows with golden heat, and is filled with an explosion of brilliant sparks, and as the molten metal passes out into the sunlight that light is by contrast so feeble that it seems almost to cast a shadow over the white-hot vats of iron.

Next come the tilting open-hearth furnaces, where the iron is subjected to the action of lime at a very high temperature. This removes the phosphorus and leaves a bath of commercially pure iron which is then "teemed" into a hundred-ton ladle, wherein it is treated in such a way as to give it the properties required in the finished steel. What these properties may be, depends, of course, upon the purpose to which the steel is to be put. Rails, for example, must, above all, resist abrasion, and consequently have a higher carbon content than, say, reinforcing bars for concrete work. To obtain various qualities in steel are added carbon, ferro-manganese, or ferro-silicon in proportions differing according to requirements.

In the next process steel ingots are made. I lost track of the exact detail of this, but I remember seeing the ingots riding about in their own steel cars, turning to an orange color as they cooled, and I remember seeing them pounded by a hammer that stood up in the air like an elevated railroad station, and I know that pretty soon they got into the blooming mill and were rolled out into "blooms," after which they were handled by a huge contrivance like a thumb and forefinger of steel which—though the blooms weigh five tons apiece—picked them up much as you might pick up a stick of red candy.

Still orange-hot, the blooms find their way to the rolling mill, where they go dashing back and forth upon rollers and between rollers—the latter working in pairs like the rollers of large wringers, squeezing the blooms, in their successive passages, to greater length and greater thinness, until at last they take the form of long, red, glowing rails; after which they are sawed off, to the accompaniment of a spray of white sparks, into rail lengths, and run outside to cool. And I may add that, while there is more brilliant heat to be seen in many other departments of the plant, there is no department in which the color is more beautiful than in the piles of rails on the cooling beds—some of them still red as they come from the rollers, others shading off to rose and pink, and finally to their normal cold steel-gray.

Presently along comes a great electromagnet; from somewhere in the sky it drops down and touches the rails; when it rises bunches of them rise with it, and, after sailing through the air, are gently deposited upon flat cars. Here, even after the current is shut off, some of them may try to stick to the magnet, as though fearing to go forth into the world. If so, it gives them a little shake, whereupon they let go, and it travels back to get more rails and load them on the cars.

Iron ore, coal, and limestone, the three chief materials used in the making of steel, are all found in the hills in the immediate vicinity of Birmingham. I am told that there is no other place in the world where the three exist so close together. That is an impressive fact, but one grows so accustomed to impressive facts, while passing through this plant, that one ceases to be impressed, becoming merely dazed.

If I were asked to mention one especially striking item out of all that welter, I should think of many things—things having to do with vastness, with gigantic movements and mutations, with Niagara-like noises, with great bursts of flame suggesting fallen fragments from the sun itself—but above all I think that I should speak of the apparent absence of men.

There were some four thousand men in the plant, I believe, at the time we were there, but excepting when a shift changed, and a great army passed out through the gates, we never saw a crowd; indeed I hardly think we saw a group of any size. Here and there two or three men would be doing something—something which, probably, we did not understand; in the window of a locomotive cab, or that of a traveling crane, we would see a man; we kept passing men as we went along; and sometimes as we looked from a high perch over the interior of one of the great sheds, we would be vaguely conscious of men scattered about the place. But they were very small and gray and inconspicuous dots upon the surface of great things going on—going on, seemingly by themselves, with a sort of mad, mechanical, majestic, molten sweep.

* * * * *

At this time, when the great efficient organization started by Bismarck is being devoted entirely to destruction, it is interesting to recall that the idea of industrial welfare work originated in Germany during the period of Bismarckian reorganization. So, paradoxically, the very forces which, on one hand, were building towards the new records for the extinction of life established in the present war, were, upon the other hand, developing plans for the safeguarding of life and for making it worth living—plans which have enormously affected the industrial existence of the civilized world.

The broad theory of industrial welfare work was brought to this country by engineers, chemists, and workmen who had resided in Germany; but, where this work developed over there along cooeperative lines, it has remained for Great Britain and the United States to work it out in a more individualistic way.

In this country welfare work has come as a logical part of the general industrial development. The first step in this development was the assembling of small, weak industrial units into large, powerful, effective units—that is to say, the formation of great corporations and trusts. The second step was the cooerdination of these great industrial alliances for "efficiency." The third step was the achievement of material success.

When our great corporations were in their formative period, effort was concentrated on making them successful, but with success came thoughts of other things. It began to be seen, for example, that whereas the old small employer of labor came into personal contact with his handful of workmen, and could himself supervise their welfare, some plan must now be devised for doing this work in a large, corporate way.

Thus welfare work developed in the United States, and it is interesting to observe, now, that many of our great corporations are finding time and funds to expend upon purely aesthetic improvements, and that, in the construction of the most modern American industrial plants, architects, landscape gardeners, and engineering men work in cooeperation, so that, instead of being lopsided, the developments are harmonious and oftentimes beautiful.

On work calculated to prevent accidents in mines, not only the Tennessee Coal, Iron, & Railroad Company, but all the leading mining companies in the State join for conference. As a result the number of accidents steadily decreases. Nine years ago one man was killed, on an average, for every 100,000 tons of iron ore raised. The record at the time of our visit was one man to 450,000 tons. In the coal mines, where nine years ago one man was killed for every 75,000 tons raised, the recent record is one man for 650,000 tons.

In 1914, 126 men were killed in the coal mines of Alabama. In 1915, though the tonnage was about the same, this number was reduced to 63, which was a record. All this is the result of safety work.

"Aside from humane considerations," said an official of the Tennessee Company, "this concern realizes that the man is the most valuable machine it has."

This gentleman was one of the ablest men we met in the South. While taking us through the company's plant, and explaining to us the various operations, he was interesting, but the real enthusiasm of the man did not crop out until he took us to the company's villages and showed us what was being done for the benefit of operatives and their families, and, of course, for the benefit of the company as well—for he was a corporation official of the modern school, and he knew that by benefiting its men a corporation necessarily benefits itself.

The story of the Tennessee Company's work among its employees, which began about five years ago, some time after the company was taken over by the United States Steel Corporation, is too great to be more than touched on here. In the department of health thirty-six doctors, sixteen nurses, and a squad of sanitary inspectors are employed. The department of social science covers education, welfare, and horticulture. To me the work of these departments was a revelation. Each camp has a first-rate hospital, each has its schools and guildhall, and everything is run as only an efficiently managed corporation can run things.

The Docena Village is less like one's idea of a coal "camp" than of a pretty suburban development, or a military post, with officers' houses built around a parade. The grounds are well kept; there is a tennis court with vine-clad trellises about it, a fine playground for children, pretty brick walks, with splendid trees to shade them; and there is a brick schoolhouse which is a better building, better equipped, better lighted, and, above all, better ventilated than the schools I attended in my boyhood.

Near the school is the guildhall, which is used for religious services, meetings, and entertainments. And best of all, perhaps, the houses are not the rows of sad, unpainted cabins one remembers having seen in western mining camps, but are pretty cottages, touched with a slight architectural variety, and with little variations of color, so that each home has individuality.

The schools are financed partly by the company and partly by the parents of the three thousand scholars. The teachers are, for the most part, graduates of leading colleges—Smith, Wellesley, Vassar, the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin—and educational work of great variety is carried on, including instruction in English for foreign employees, and domestic-science classes for women—separate establishments, of course, for whites and blacks, for the color line is drawn in southern mining camps as elsewhere. Negroes are, however, better provided for by the corporation than by most southern municipalities, both in the way of living conditions and of education.

On the whole, I believe that a child who grows up in the Docena Village, and is educated there, has actually a better chance than one who grows up in most Alabama towns, or, for the matter of that, in towns in any other State which has not compulsory education. Moreover, I doubt that there is in all Alabama another kindergarten as truly charming as the one we visited at Docena, or that there is, in the State, a schoolhouse of the same size which is as perfect as the one we saw in that camp.

In another camp old houses have been remodeled, giving practical demonstration of what can be done in the way of making a hovel into a pretty home by the intelligent use of a little lattice-work, a little paint, and a few vines and flowers. Old boarding-houses in this neighborhood have been converted into community houses, with entertainment halls, shower baths, and other conveniences for the men and their families. Thus tests are being made to discover whether it is possible to encourage among certain classes of foreign laborers, whose habits of life have not, to put it mildly, been of the tidiest, some appreciation of the standard of civilization represented by clean, pretty cottages, pleasant meeting houses, and shower baths.

I have not told about the billiard tables, bowling alleys, and game rooms of the clubs, nor about the model rooms fitted up to show housewives how they may make their homes attractive at but slight expense, nor about the annual medical examination of the children, nor about the company dentists who charge their patients only for the cost of gold actually used, nor about the fine company store at Edgewater Mine, nor about the excellent meats supplied by the company butchers, nor about the low prices of supplies, nor about the effort to discourage employees from buying cheap furniture at high prices on the installment plan, nor, above all, about the clean, decent, happy look of the families we chanced to see.

Even had I the space in which to tell of these things, it is perhaps wiser that I refrain from doing so. For I am aware that in speaking anything but ill of a great corporation I have scandalously outraged precedent. Nor does it argue well for my powers of observation, or those of my companion. I feel confident that where our limited visions perceived only prosperity and contentment, certain of my brother writers, and his brother illustrators would, in our places, have rent the thin, vaporish veil of apparent corporate kindliness, and found such foul shame, such hideous malignity, such grasping, grubby greed, such despicable soul-destroying despotism, as to shock the simple nature of a chief of the old-time Russian Secret Police.

It shames me to think what my friend Lincoln Steffens could have done had he but enjoyed my opportunities. It shames me to think what John Reed or other gifted writers for "The Masses" could have done. And I should think that Wallace Morgan would writhe with shame. For, where Art Young would have seen heavy-jowled, pig-eyed Capital, in a silk hat and a checked suit, whirling a cruel knout over the broad and noble (but bent and shuddering) back of Labor—where Boardman Robinson would have found a mother, her white, drawn face half hidden by the shoddy shawl of black, to which cling the hands of her emaciated brood—what has Wallace Morgan seen?

A steel-plant in operation. A company steel-plant! A corporation steel-plant! A TRUST steel-plant.

Yet never so much as a starving cat or a pile of garbage in the foreground!



CHAPTER XL

THE ROAD TO ARCADY

Before we saw the train which was to take us from Birmingham to Columbus, Mississippi, we began to sense its quality. When we attempted to purchase parlor car seats of the ticket agent at the Union Station and were informed by him that our train carried no parlor car, it seemed to us that his manner was touched with cynicism, and this impression was confirmed by his reply to our further timid inquiry as to a dining car:

"Where do you gentlemen reckon you're a-goin' to, anyhow?"

Presently we passed through the gate and better understood the nature of the ticket agent's thoughts. The train consisted of several untidy day coaches, the first a Jim Crow car, the others for white people. The negro car was already so full that many of its occupants had to stand in the aisle, but this did not seem to trouble them, for all were gabbling happily, and the impression one got, in glancing through the door, was of many sets of handsome white teeth displayed in as many dark grinning faces. There are innumerable things for which we cannot envy the negro, but neither his teeth nor his good nature are among them.

It was Saturday afternoon, and the two or three other cars, though not overcrowded, were well filled with people from the neighboring mining towns who were going home after having spent the morning shopping in the city. Almost all our fellow passengers carried packages, many had infants with them, and we were struck with the fact that the complexions of these people suggested a diet of pie—fried pie, if there be such a thing—that a peculiarly high percentage of them suffered from diseases of the eye, and that the pervading smell of the car in which we sat was of oranges, bananas, babies, and overheated adults.

A young mother in the seat in front of us had with her three small children, the youngest an infant in arms. She was feeding a banana to the second child, who looked about two years old. Behind us a clean, capable-looking woman talked in a broad Scottish dialect with another housewife whose jargon was that of the mountaineers.

The region through which the train presently began to wind its way was green and hilly, and there were many stops at villages, all of them mining camps apparently, made up of shabby little cabins scattered helter-skelter upon the hillsides. In many of the cabin doorways mothers lingered with their broods watching the train, and on all the station platforms stood crowds of idlers—men, women, and children, negro and white—many of the men stamped, by their coal-begrimed faces, their stained overalls, and the lamps above the visors of their caps, as mine workers.

After a time my companion and I moved to the exceedingly dirty smoking room at the end of the car, where we sat and listened to the homely conversation of a group of men who seemed not only to know one another, but to know the same people in towns along the line. Between stations they gossiped, smoked, chewed, spat, and swore together like so many New England crossroad sages, but when the train stopped they gave encouraging attention to the droll performances of one of their number, a shaggy, unshaven, rawboned man, of middle age, gray-haired and collarless, who sat near the window and uttered convincing imitations of the sounds made by chickens, roosters, pigs, goats, and crows.

The platform crowds, the negroes in particular, were mystified and lured by this animal chorus coming from a passenger coach. On hearing it they would first gaze in astonishment at the car, then edge up to the windows and doors, and peer in with eyes solemn, round, and wondering, only to be more amazed than ever by the discovery that the car housed neither bird nor beast. This bucolic comedy was repeated at every station until we reached Wyatt, Alabama, where our gifted fellow traveler arose, pointed his collar button toward the door, bade us farewell, and departed, saying that he was going to "walk over to Democrat."

Presently the conductor dropped in for a chat, in the course of which he informed the assembly that a certain old lady in one of the towns along the way had died the night before, whereupon our companions of the smoking room, all of whom seemed to have known the old lady well, held a protracted discussion of her history and traits.

After a time my companion and I put in a few questions about the State of Mississippi. Boiled down, the principal information we gathered was as follows:

By the 1910 census Mississippi had not one city of 25,000 inhabitants. Meridian, with 23,000, was (and probably still is) her metropolis, with Jackson and Vicksburg, cities of about 20,000 each, following. The entire State has but fifteen cities having a population of 5000 or more, so that, of a total of about a million and three-quarters of people in the State (more than half of them colored), only about one-tenth live in towns with a population of 5000 or over.

After a little visit the conductor went away. Now and then a man would leave us and get off at a station, or some new passenger would join our group. Presently I found myself thinking about dinner, and asked a man wearing an electric-blue cap if he knew what provision was made for the evening meal.

Before he could reply the train boy, who had come into the smoking room a few minutes before, piped up. He was a train boy of a type I had supposed extinct: the kind of train boy one might have encountered on almost any second-rate train twenty years ago,—a bold, impudent young smartaleck, full of insistent salesmanship and obnoxious conversation. He declared that dinner was not to be had, and that the only sustenance available en route consisted in the uninviting assortment of fruit, nuts, candy, and sweet tepid beverages contained in his basket.

Fortunately for us, the man we had addressed knew better.

"What do you want to lie like that for, boy?" he demanded. "You know as well as I do that the brakeman takes on five boxes of lunch at Covin."

"Well," said the boy, with a grin, "I gotta sell things, ain't I? The brakeman hadn't oughta have that graft anyhow. I'd oughta have it. He gets them lunches fer two bits and sells 'em for thirty-five cents." Far from feeling abashed, he was pleased with himself.

"Folks is funny people," remarked a man with a weather-beaten face who sat in the corner seat, and seemed to be addressing no one in particular. "I know a boy that's going to git hung some day. And when they've got the noose rigged nice around his neck, and everything ready, and the trap a-waitin' to be sprung, why, then that boy is goin' to be so sorry for hisself that he won't hardly know what to do. He'll say: 'I ain't never had no chance in life, I ain't. The world ain't never used me right.' ... Yes, folks is funny people."

After this soliloquy there occurred a brief silence in the smoking room, and presently the train boy took up his basket and went upon his way.

"You say they take on the lunches at Covin now?" one of the passengers asked of the man in the electric-blue cap.

"Yes."

"What's become of old man Whitney, over to Fayetteville?"

"They used to git lunches off of him," replied the other, "but the old man wasn't none too dependable. Now and then he'd oversleep, and folks on the 5 A.M. out of Columbus was like to starve for breakfast."

"Right smart shock-headed boy the old man's got," put in another. "The old man gives 'im anything he wants. He wanted a motorcycle, and the old man give 'im one. Then he wanted one of them hot-candy machines; they cost about two hundred and fifty dollars, but the old man give it to 'im just the same."

"The kid went to San Francisco with it, didn't he?" asked the man with the electric-blue cap.

"He started to go there," replied the former speaker, "but he only got as fur as Little Rock; then he come on back home, and the old man bought 'im a wireless-telegraph plant. Yeaup! That boy gets messages right outa the air—from Washington, D.C., and Berlin, and every place. The Govamunt don't allow 'im to tell you much of it. He tells a little, though—just to give you a notion."

So, through the five-hour ride the conversation ran. Several times the talk drifted to politics and to the European War, but the politics discussed were local and lopsided, and the war was all too clearly regarded as something interesting but vague and remote. On the entire journey not one word was spoken indicating that the people of this section had the least grasp on any national question, or that they were considering national questions, or that they realized what the war in Europe is about—that it is a war for freedom and democracy, a war against war, a war to prevent a few individuals from ever again plunging the world into war. Nor, though the day of our entry into the war was close at hand, had the idea that we might be forced to take part in the conflict so much as occurred to any of them.

They were not stupid people; on the contrary, some of them possessed a homely and picturesque philosophy; but they were not informed, and the reason they were not informed has to do with one of the chief needs of our rural population—especially the rural population of the South.

What they need is good newspapers. They need more world news and national news in place of county news and local briefs. In the whole South, moreover, there is need for general political news instead of biased news written always from inside the Democratic party, and sandwiched in between patent medicine advertisements.



CHAPTER XLI

A MISSISSIPPI TOWN

It was dark when, after a journey of one hundred and twenty miles at the rate of twenty miles an hour, we reached Columbus, a city which was never intended to be a metropolis and which will never be one.

Columbus is situated upon a bluff on the east bank of the Tombigbee River, to the west of which is a very fertile lowland region, filled with plantations, the owners of which, a century ago, founded the town in order that their families might have churches, schools, and the advantages of social life. As the town grew, a curious but entirely natural community spirit developed; when a gas plant, water works, or hotel was needed, prosperous citizens got together and financed the enterprise, not so much for profit as for mutual comfort.

In these ante bellum times the planters used to make annual journeys to Mobile and New Orleans, going by boat on the Tombigbee and taking their crops and their families with them. After selling their cotton and enjoying themselves in the city, they would load supplies for the ensuing year upon river boats and return to Columbus, where the supplies were transferred to their vast attic storerooms.

Though their only water transportation was to the southward, they did not journey invariably in that direction, but sometimes made excursions to such fashionable watering places as the Virginia Springs, or Saratoga, to which they drove in their own carriages.

When, in the early days of railroad building, the Mobile & Ohio Railroad was being planned, the company proposed to include Columbus as one of its main-line points and asked for a right of way through the town and a cash bonus in consideration of the benefits Columbus would derive from railroad service. Both requests were refused. The railroad company then waived the bonus and attempted to obtain a right of way by purchase. But to no purpose. The citizens would not sell. They did not want a railroad. They were prosperous and healthy, and they contended that a railroad would bring poor people and disease among them, besides killing farm animals and causing runaways. The company was consequently forced to make a new survey, and when the line was built it passed at a distance of a dozen miles or more from the city.

Gradually dawned the era of speed and impatience. People who had hitherto been satisfied to make long journeys in horse-drawn vehicles, and had refused the railroad a right of way, now began to complain of the twelve-mile drive to the nearest station, and to suggest that the company build a branch line into the town. But this time it was the railroad's turn to say no, and Columbus was informed that if it wished a branch line it could go ahead and build it at its own expense. This was finally done at a cost of fifty thousand dollars.

With the construction of the branch line, carriages fell into disuse and dilapidation, and many an old barouche, landau, and brett passed into the hands of the negro hackmen who were former slaves of the old families. Among these ex-slaves the traditions of the first families of Columbus were upheld long after the war, and it thus happened that when, a few years since, a young New Yorker, arriving for a visit in the town, alighted from his train, he was greeted by an ancient negro who, indicating an equally ancient carriage, cried: "Hack, suh! Hack, suh! Ain't nevah been rid in by none but the Billupses."

Not every young man from the North would have understood this reference, but by a coincidence it was at the residence of Mrs. Billups that this one had come to visit.

Neither as to hack nor habitation were my companion and I so fortunate as the earlier visitor. Our conveyance was a Ford, and the driver warned us, as we progressed through shadowy tree-bordered streets, that the Gilmer Hotel was crowded with delegates who had come to attend the State convention of the Order of the Eastern Star. Nor was his warning without foundation. The wide old-fashioned lobby of the Gilmer was hung with the colors of the Order and packed with Ladies of the Eastern Star and their ecstatic families; we managed to make our way through the press only to be told by the single worn-out clerk on duty that not a room was to be had.

Unlike the haughty clerk who had dismissed us from the Tutwiler Hotel in Birmingham, the clerk at the Gilmer was not without the quality of mercy. Overworked though he was, he began at once to telephone about the town in an effort to secure us rooms. But if this led us to conclude that our problem was thereby in effect solved, we discovered, after listening to his brief telephonic conversations with a series of unseen ladies, that the conclusion was premature. Though there were vacant rooms in several private houses, strange stray males were not desired as lodgers.

Concerned as we were over our plight, my companion and I could not help being aware that a young lady who had been standing at the desk when we came in, and had since remained there, was taking kindly interest in the situation. Nor, for the matter of that, could we help being aware, also, that she was very pretty in her soft black dress and corsage of narcissus. She did not speak to us; indeed, she hardly honored us with a glance; but, despite her sweet circumspection, we sensed in some subtle way that she was sorry for us, and were cheered thereby.

After a time, when the clerk seemed to have reached the end of his resources, the young lady hesitantly ventured some suggestions as to other houses where rooms might possibly be had. These suggestions she addressed entirely to the clerk—who, upon receiving them, did more telephoning.

"Have you tried Mrs. Eichelberger?" the young lady asked him, after several more failures.

He had not, but promptly did so. His conversation with Mrs. Eichelberger started promisingly, but presently we heard him make the damning admission he had been compelled repeatedly to make before:

"No, ma'am. It's two men."

Then, just as the last hope seemed to be fading, our angel of mercy spoke again.

"Wait!" she put in impulsively. "Tell her—tell her I recommend them."

Thus informed, Mrs. Eichelberger became compliant; but when the details were arranged, and we turned to thank our benefactor, she had fled.

Mrs. Eichelberger's house was but a few blocks distant from the Gilmer. She installed us in two large, comfortable rooms, remarking, as we entered, that we had better hurry, as we were already late.

"Late for what?" one of us asked.

"Didn't you come for the senior dramatics?"

"Senior dramatics where?"

"At the I.I. and C."

"What is the I.I. and C?"

At this question a look of doubt, if not suspicion, crossed the lady's face.

"Where are you-all from?" she demanded.

The statement that we came from New York seemed to explain satisfactorily our ignorance of the I.I. and C. Evidently Mrs. Eichelberger expected little of New Yorkers. The I.I. and C., she explained, was the Mississippi Industrial Institute and College, formerly known as the Female College, a State institution for young women; and the senior dramatics were even then in progress in the college chapel, just up the street.

To the chapel, therefore, my companion and I repaired as rapidly as might be, guided thither by frequent sounds of applause.

From among the seniors standing guard in cap and gown at the chapel door, the quick artistic eye of my companion selected a brown-eyed auburn-haired young goddess as the one from whom tickets might most appropriately be bought. Nor did he display thrift in the transaction. Instead of buying modest quarter seats he magnificently purchased the fifty-cent kind.

The dazzling ticket seller, transformed to usher, now led us into the crowded auditorium and down an aisle. A few rows from the stage she stopped, and, fastening a frigid gaze upon two hapless young women who were seated some distance in from the passageway, bade them emerge and yield their place to us.

Of course we instantly protested, albeit in whispers, as the play was going on. But the beautiful Olympian lightly brushed aside our objections.

"They don't belong here," she declared loftily. "They're freshmen—and they only bought quarter seats."

Then, as the guilty pair seemed to hesitate, she summoned them with a compelling gesture and the command: "Come out!"

At this they arose meekly enough, whereupon we redoubled our protests. But to no purpose. The Titian-tinted creature was relentless. Our pleas figured no more in her scheme of things than if they had been babblings in an unknown tongue. To add to our discomfiture, a large part of the audience seemed to have perceived the nature of our dilemma, and was giving us amused attention.

It was a crisis; and in a crisis—especially one in which a member of the so-called gentle sex is involved—I have learned to look to my companion. He understands women. He has often told me so. And now, by his action, he proved it. What he did was to turn and flee, and I fled with him; nor did we pause until we were safely hidden away in humble twenty-five cent seats at the rear of the chapel, in the shadow of the overhanging gallery.

It is not my intention to write an extended criticism of the performance. For one thing, I witnessed only a fragment of it, and for another, though I once acted for a brief period as dramatic critic on a New York newspaper, I was advised by my managing editor to give up dramatic criticism, and I have followed his advice.

The scene evidently represented a room, its walls made of red screens behind which rose the lofty pipes of the chapel organ. On a pedestal at one side stood a bust of the Venus de Milo, while on the other hung an engraving of a familiar picture which I believe is called "The Fates," and which has the appearance of having been painted by some-one-or-other like Leighton or Bouguereau or Harold Bell Wright.

After we had given some attention to the play my companion remarked that, from the dialect, he judged it to be "Uncle Tom's Cabin." I had been told, however, that for certain reasons "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is never played in the South; I therefore asked the young man in front of me what play it was. He replied that it was Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson's comedy, "The Man From Home," and as he made the statement openly, I feel that I am violating no confidence in repeating what he said—especially since his declaration was supported by the program which he showed me.

He was a pleasant young man. Perceiving that I was a stranger, he volunteered the additional information that the masculine roles, as well as the feminine ones, were being played by girls; and I trust that I will not seem to be boasting of perspicacity when I declare that there had already entered my mind a suspicion that such was indeed the case.

Behold them! Gaze upon the character called Daniel Voorhees Pike! See what long strides he takes, and with what pretty tiny feet! Observe the manliness with which he thrusts his pink little hands deep in the pockets of his—or somebody's—pantaloons!

Look at the Grand Duke Vasili of Russia, his sweet oval face and rosy mouth partly obscured by mustache and goatee of a most strange wooliness.

Observe the ineradicable daintiness of the Honorable Almeric St. Aubyn, but more particularly attend to that villain of helpless loveliness, the Earl of Hawcastle. The frightful life which, it is indicated, the Earl has led, leaves no tell-tale marks upon his blooming countenance. His only facial disfigurement consists in a mustache which, by reason of its grand-ducal lanateness, seems to hint at a mysterious relationship between the British and Russian noblemen.