"Nevertheless," said Mary, "I want John."

John had finished being engineer for the electric railway company.

Out of his two years' experience he had saved a few hundred dollars. No, he hadn't. That isn't probable. The way he made his start into the next phase of his career was not by having any ready money. Having ready money is far from being characteristic of the young man of to-day.

John opened his office as a consulting electrical engineer not on his own resources but as an agent for an electrical supply company. Being agent for that company assured him enough money to pay the office rent and stenographer. For the rest, for his meals and his bed, he depended on his clients. Whom he didn't have. But he started out to get them.

He opened his office in the city in which Mary was.

And then a strange but normal thing occurred. They spent enough money on theatres and boat rides and candy in the next three months to have paid the rent on a flat. It is true John's net income was too small and uncertain to have justified the founding of a family. But it was also true that they spent every cent they had. The celibate life is an extravagant life. One of the innumerable sources of modern extravagance is found just there.

Mary reflected on it. She didn't like it. And she began to see other things she didn't like in this protraction of the period of singleness.

Her work for the Bureau of Labor had taken her into many places, among all sorts of women. She began to observe the irregular living which is inevitably associated with a system of late marriages.

Mr. Lester F. Ward has learnedly and elaborately informed us that if we go back to the origin of life on this planet we shall find that the female was the only sex then existent, being original life itself, reproducing itself by division of itself, and that the male was created as an afterthought of nature's for the purpose of introducing greater variation into the development of living things. The male, to begin with, had only one function. That was to be a male. He was purely a sex-thing.

Whether this biological theory stands or falls, it is certain that it squares with the present character of the sexes. The sex which originated as a sex-thing remains the more actively sexed.

There was once a very good sociologist called Robert Louis Stevenson who made many researches into the psychology of the human race. While on his "Inland Voyage" he observed in this matter that "it is no use for a man to take to the woods; we know him; Anthony tried the same thing long ago and had a pitiful time of it by all accounts. But there is this about some women, that they suffice to themselves and can walk in a high and cold zone without the countenance of any trousered being."

The celibate life is more possible for most of them by nature. If it were not for that fact, the postponement of marriage would by this time have demolished the ethical code.

Even as things stand, Mary was quite willing to admit, when she saw it, that there are two kinds of women greatly increasing in modern days. Both have always existed, but now they are increasing very rapidly and in parallel lines of corresponding development.

In one column is the enormous army of young women who remain unmarried till twenty-five, till thirty, till thirty-five. Even at that latter age, and beyond it, in a well-developed city like, say, Providence, Rhode Island, in the age period from thirty-five to forty-five, twenty out of every hundred women are still single.

In the other column is the enormous army of young women who, outside of the marriage relation altogether, lead a professional sex life, venal, furtive, ignoble, and debasing; an army which has existed since the beginning of time but which every postponement of the age of marriage causes to increase in relative numbers and to gain new strength for poisoning the blood of life.

Love, denied at the front door, flies in by the cellar window. Angel or bat, it is always with us. Our only choice is between its guises.

Mary looked at the army of women celibates in offices and in stores and in their apartments and in their boarding houses, women celibates five and ten and fifteen and twenty years into the period when nature has by irrepealable edict ordained love. It was surely unnatural, for the mass of them. They were not vowed nuns. They were not devoted to any Great Cause. They were just ordinary, normal young women, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of them.

Then, on the other side, Mary looked at the great army of women in the midnight restaurants, in the streets, in their segregated quarters—women who, however they may be sentimentalized about and however irresponsible they may be for their own condition, are, as a matter of fact, ignorant, stupid, silly, and dirty. Yet on them was squandered the emotional life of millions of young men.

On the one side—intelligent, capable, effective young women, leading lives of emotional sterility. On the other side—inferior women blasted and withered by their specialization in the emotional life of youth!

The connection between postponement of marriage and irregularity of living will be admitted by everybody who is willing to face facts and who is optimist enough to believe that if, instead of letting facts lie, we face them and fight them we can make a better race.

The great Russian scientist, Metchnikoff, successor to Pasteur in the Pasteur Institute, mentions the postponement of marriage as one of the biological disharmonies of life. It is a disharmony that "among highly civilized peoples marriage and REGLULAR unions are impossible at the RIGHT TIME."

And Mr. A. S. Johnson, writing in the authoritative report of the Committee of Fifteen on the Social Evil, notes the parallel increase of "young unmarried men" and of a city's "volume of vice."

He goes on to make, without comment, a statement of the economic facts of the case.

"As a rule," he says, "the income which a young man earns, while sufficient to secure a fair degree of comfort for himself, does not suffice for founding a family."

He cannot found a family at the right time. He goes unmarried through the romantic period of his development, when the senses are at their keenest and when the other sex in its most vividly idealized perfection, is most poignantly desired.

Then, later on, he may begin to get a larger income. Then marriage may become more feasible. But then romance is waning. Then, as Mr. Johnson says, "his standard of personal comfort rises." Romance has been succeeded by calculation. "Accordingly he postpones marriage to a date in the indefinite future or abandons expectation of it altogether."

Celibacy through the age of romance! It's emotionally wrong. Sexlessness for a score of years after sex has awakened! It's biologically wrong. It's a defiance of nature. And nature responds, as she does to every defiance, with a scourge of physical and social ills.

"But what of all that?" thought Mary. "Those things are just observations. What I am going to act on is that I want John."

At which point she stopped being a typical modern young woman.

SHE BECAME A WOMAN OF THE FUTURE.

"Look here," she said to John, "I'm working. You're working. We're single. Very well. We'll change it. I'm working. You're working. We're married. Have we lost anything? And we've gained each other."

Two years later she stopped working.

In those two years she had helped John to start a home. She couldn't operate soap-kettles and candle-molds and looms and smokehouses and salting-tubs and spinning-wheels for him. But she brought him an equivalent of it in money. She earned from $900 to $1000 a year.

Being married, they were more thrifty. They saved a large part of her earnings. John was still spending a large part of his on extending his business, on traveling, on entertaining prospective clients, on making acquaintances. Sometimes she had to contribute some of her own money to his expense accounts. That was the fortune of war. She helped him pursue success.

"I wouldn't give up the memory of these two years," Mary used to say, as she sat and stitched for her children, "for anything. I shared at least a part of my husband's youth."

By sharing it, she won a certain happiness otherwise unattainable. They had come to know each other and to help form each other's characters and to share each other's difficulties in the years when only there is real joy in the struggle of life. They had not postponed their love till, with a settled income, John could support her in comfort and they could look back like Browning's middle-aged estranged lovers to say:

We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired,—been happy.

"It used to take two to start a home in colonial days," Mary would say. "I am really an old-fashioned woman. I helped to make this home. We had twelve hundred dollars in the bank when I stopped working, and John was pretty well established.

"I don't regret it," she went on, still speaking as a woman of the future, "even for the children. Of course I do wish we had started earlier. But I would have wanted to wait a while for the children in any case. People risk too much when they start a family before they become sufficiently used to marriage and to each other to know that they can keep on loving each other and to know that they have in them through their mutual, continued happiness the power to make a happy home, a noble home, for children to live in."

As for the number of children she will have—we reserve that subject to a future article. We call attention here only to this:

That the facts which were cited from the Smith College records are harmonious with many other facts and records tending to show that the fertility of the modern wife has been considerably underrated, just as the fertility of the colonial wife has been considerably exaggerated.

And this:

That Mary got to her childbearing period sooner than she would have if she hadn't insisted on marrying John before he was ready to support her. Those two years would have been childless years in any case. But they would probably, if it hadn't been for Mary's money, have been lengthened into four or five.

Of course, later marriages in themselves tend to reduce the number of children. As to quality, however, the evidence is not clear. There is even some reason to think that a moderate postponement is conducive to an improvement in quality.

Did you ever read Havelock Ellis's book called "A Study of British Genius"?

He made a list of the most distinguished of Eminent British Persons and studied everything about them from their religious opinions to the color of their hair.

In the matter of the age of their parents, he finds that the average age of the father at the birth of the person of genius was thirty-seven years, while the average of the mother was thirty-one. His conclusion is: "On the whole it would appear, so far as the evidence goes, that the fathers of our eminent persons have been predominantly middle-aged and to a marked extent elderly at the time of the distinguished son's birth; while the mothers have been predominantly at the period of greatest vigor and maturity and to a somewhat unusual extent elderly. There has been a notable deficiency of young fathers and, still more notably, of young mothers."

And did you ever see the study which Mr. R. S. Holway made for the Department of Education of Leland Stanford University on "The Age of Parents: Its Effects upon Children"? His conclusions are:

"In most physical qualities the children of mature parents tend to come out best.

"In mental ability the children of young parents show best at an early age but rapidly lose their precocity.

"The elder children who show best tend to be the children of mature and old parents.

"The children of elderly mothers show a tendency to superiority throughout."

Mary did not know about all this, but she had a very strong opinion to the effect that, in so far as the quality of her children could be affected by their home training, she was glad she had spent at least a few years earning her living.

"Every woman," said Mary, "ought to have some little time for developing into an individual. Home won't do it altogether. Not nowadays. The colonial home did, being part of the working world. But what is the modern home? It is a nest, an eddy, a shelf, a nook. It's something apart from the world. If a woman is going to prepare her son for a knowledge of the real world, if she's going to be able to give him a training which has in it an understanding and an appreciation of the real world, if she's going to be able to educate him into real living, she must nowadays and increasingly in the future have some experience of her own on her own account in the real world before she becomes a mother. There's no getting away from that. A reasonable postponement of motherhood till the future mother becomes a competent individual is a good thing."

"The trouble about that," said John, "is that it makes you too independent of me. Your proposition is to start in and earn your living till you're pretty good at it. That is, you wouldn't marry me till you were sure you could chuck me. How about that?"

Well, it has that side. But it has its other side, too.

Isn't there, after all, something rather pleasant for John in knowing, KNOWING, that Mary isn't cleaving unto him simply because she can't shift for herself? Something exquisitely gratifying in being certain, CERTAIN, that it isn't just necessity that keeps her a home woman?

"If I were a man living in wedlock," said Mary, "I should want the door of the cage always wide open, with my mate fluttering straight by it every minute to still nestle by me. And I should want her wings to be strong, and I should want her to know that if she went through the door she could fly.

"For keeping her," said Mary, "I should want to trust to my own wings and not to bars.

"However," said Mary, going farther into the future, "the process isn't complete. Freedom is not yet completely acquired. Children! We want them! We must have them! Yet how often they tie us to unions which have come to be unholy, vile, full of all uncleanness. Women will never be completely free till, besides being able to earn their bread when they are NOT bearing children, they are relieved of dependence on the individual character of another human person while they ARE. Mr. H. G. Wells is clearly right about it. When women bear children they perform a service to the state. Children are important to the state. They are its future life. To leave them to the eccentricities of the economic fate of the father is ridiculous. The woman who is bringing up children should receive from the state the equivalent of her service in a regular income. Then, and then only, in the union of man and woman, will love and money reach their right relationship—love a necessity, money a welcome romance!

"It's remote, very remote," said Mary. "And we can't dream it out in detail. But when it comes it won't come out of personal sentiment. It will come because of being demanded by the economic welfare of the community. It will come because it is the best way to get serviceable children for the state. It will come because, after all, it is the final answer to the postponement of marriage."

In the November instalment of "The Women of To-morrow," Mr. Hard will discuss "The Wasters."

***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII October 1910 No. 4

The Poison Bugaboo {pages 518-525}

By SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS

AUTHOR OF "THE GREAT AMERICAN FRAUD," "THE MYSTERY" (WITH STEWART EDWARD WHITE), ETC.

ROMANCE revels in the peril of the unknown. Lapped about with the armor-plate of civilization, the modern citizen muses relishingly, like a child beguiling himself with ogre tales, upon the terrors which lie just beyond his ken. To his mind,

A stone's throw out on either hand, And all the world is wild and strange.

Avid for sensation, he peoples the remoteness of forest and mountain with malign and destructive creatures, whence has grown up an extensive and astonishing literature of snake and insect poison lore.

"Deadly" is the master word of the cult. The rattlesnake is "deadly." The copperhead and moccasin are "deadly." So is the wholly mythical puff adder. In hardly less degree is the tarantula "deadly," while varying lethal capacities are ascribed to the centipede, the scorpion, the kissing-bug, and sundry other forms of insect life. The whole matter is based upon the slenderest foundations. I don't mean, by this, that these ill-famed species are wholly innocuous. It would be highly inadvisable to snatch a kiss from a copperhead or to stroke a tarantula's fur the wrong way. But one could do it and live to boast of the achievement. Pseudoscience to the contrary notwithstanding, there is no living thing within the boundaries of the United States of America whose bite or sting is sure death or (with one possible exception) even probable death.

There are five varieties of venomous serpents in this country: three of them Crotalids, and two belonging to the Elaps family. The Elaps are rather rare. The Crotalids (rattlesnake, moccasin, and copperhead) are common, and of the widest geographical distribution. Yet, on the basis of actual evidence, the amazing fact stands out that only about eighty persons, so far as is ascertainable, have ever died from snake bite in the United States. Nowhere in the Civil War records does a death from this cause appear, though hundreds of thousands of men were living "on the country," and at a time when the serpent clan was much more numerous than now.

Estimates vary as to the proportion of deaths to bites. Prentiss Willson believes that something over ten per cent. of all persons bitten by venomous snakes in the United States die. As to how many of these succumb, not to the venom, but to the misdirected efforts of misguided friends at treatment—an extremely important differentiation—he lacks the data upon which to base a reckoning. S. Weir Mitchell's figures indicate 8.7 per cent. mortality for rattlesnake bite. This would make the venom about as dangerous as the toxin of typhoid fever, which is not generally regarded as a necessarily "deadly" disease. Other writers go as high as fifteen per cent. for the rattlesnake and as low as one per cent. for the copperhead.

All general estimates seem to me to leave one basic element out of consideration—the unnoted, non-fatal snake bites. That a bite resulting in death will eventually get itself reported is reasonably certain. On the other hand, I am satisfied, from talking with plantation owners in the South, with ranchmen in the West, and with woodsmen and hunters all over the country, that, in the remoter regions, many instances of poisoning by copperheads and the smaller rattlesnakes never attain the dignity of being listed, so insignificant are they in their effects. Were all these to be recorded, I believe that the mortality ratio would fall notably.

Although I have been interested in the subject for many years, I have never met a man who has seen a fatal case of snake bite. More than this, my friend Mr. Stewart Edward White, a noted hunter and explorer of untrodden ground in regions infested by reptiles, has known of but one case terminating in death which he believes to be authentic. Dr. J. A. Mitchell, of Victoria, Texas, one of the most experienced of field observers, has never met with an instance of fatality from this cause. Dr. Mitchell believes that horses always, and dogs almost always, recover from rattlesnake bite. He confirms, from observation, the mysterious fact that hogs exhibit absolute immunity from the venom.

WHISKY VS. SNAKEBITE

Be it remembered always that death following snake bite is not necessarily the same thing as death from snake bite. Error in treatment plays no small part in vitiating the statistics. For "error" read "whisky." Whoever is primarily responsible for the hoary superstition that liquor in huge doses is useful in snake poisoning has many a life to answer for. Apart from any adventitious aid whatsoever, whether from a snake or any other source, a whole bottle of raw whisky forced down the throat of a man unaccustomed to alcohol is pretty likely to kill him, and is absolutely certain to cause grave poisoning. Add to this that it is given, often, in such a manner that the reaction from it comes contemporaneously with the heart collapse caused by the venom, and a telling commentary upon the method is suggested. It is a question whether alcohol should ever be given in such cases without the advice of a physician. Certain it is that it should not be poured into the victim in quantities limited only by the flask-contents of the bystanders.

Several years ago I saw two interestingly contrasted cases of copperhead bite. The first patient was a powerful, full-blooded, temperate, Irish day-laborer who, while road-mending, was bitten on the back of the hand between two fingers. His fellows hustled him off to a room over a neighboring saloon, where they proceeded to administer the classic treatment. Before the doctor arrived they had introduced a quart and a half of whisky into a stomach unused to anything stronger than beer in small quantities. Six hours later, when I saw the man through the wreckage of chairs, tables, and bedding, four battered friends were trying to hold him down. They thought he was having convulsions from the snake venom. He wasn't. He was having delirium tremens from the whisky. His arm and shoulder were purple and swollen. Later he collapsed.

"Will he die?" I asked the doctor.

"He won't die of the bite, but I think he will of the whisky," replied the disgusted practitioner.

But he didn't. His splendid physique pulled him through. It was long, however, before he wholly recovered from the effects of the two poisons.

This was in a Hudson River town. Only a few miles away a negro boy, shortly after, was struck by a copperhead on the bare leg. The wound was a deep, double-fanged puncture. While the boy's father rushed for whisky, his mother ran for the doctor. The doctor got there first. He opened up the wound and rubbed in permanganate of potash to oxidize the venom and destroy its toxic properties. When I talked with the boy, two days later, he was hobbling about on a crutch, and the swelling had almost subsided. Setting the boy's lesser age and resistant power against the fact of the laborer's being bitten in a worse place (for crotaline venom is much more effective in an upper limb or extremity than in a lower), we have a fairly illustrative instance of the relative merits of alcoholic and non-alcoholic measures.

WHEN RATTLESNAKES KILL

Thirteen cases of death following rattlesnake and copperhead bite in which satisfactory clinical data were obtainable, are given by Prentiss Willson. Of the victims, five were young children, one was a fourteen-year-old boy, one a chronic drunkard, and one a leper who submitted to the stroke of a captive rattlesnake in the mad hope that it would cure his affliction. It did—in twenty-four hours. Of the remaining five, three were dosed with alcohol in large quantities. In several of the cases, notably those of the children, there seemed to be at least an even chance of recovery, when the ligatures binding the affected limb were loosened to relieve the pain, with quickly fatal results. Two of the fatalities were attributed, not immediately to the venom, but to the secondary blood-poisoning, this being the case with the only copperhead bite in the list.

Death resulting typically from crotaline poisoning occurred in two instances, one the fourteen-year-old boy, who was struck by a large rattlesnake and died in six hours, despite skilled and prompt medical attendance; the other, a Dr. Post, into whose veins, it would appear, the poison entered immediately, since a jet of blood spurted from the wound inflicted by the captive rattlesnake. The man passed from great agony into coma, from which he never rallied, death ensuing in five hours after the bite. There is nothing in these data to indicate that a full-grown man in normal health, and with proper treatment, will succumb to crotaline poisoning unless the venom enters a vein, direct.

In the matter of the comparative potency of snake poisons, there are apparent contradictions. In the order of recorded fatalities, the rattlesnake ranks easily first, with the water moccasin a rather distant second, and the copperhead a very poor third. Yet experiments upon animals indicate that moccasin venom is five times as powerful as rattlesnake, though only three times as powerful as copperhead. Taking the cobra as the basis of estimate, it requires only twice as much moccasin venom as it does cobra poison to kill a guinea pig, whereas it requires six times as much copperhead and ten times as much rattlesnake virus. Why, then, is the rattler pre-eminent over its more virulent cousins? Probably for two reasons—the greater amount of venom secreted, and the superior power with which the rattler drives its fangs home.

NO VIPERS IN THIS COUNTRY

Fully as much terror attaches, in the country districts, to the puff adder or sand viper as to the rattlesnake or copperhead. This is a suggestive bit of superstition, since there's no such thing as an adder or viper on the Western hemisphere and never has been one, unless it came, carefully pickled, in a jar. What passes for the supposedly deadly reptile is the common hog-nosed or bull snake. It is about as dangerous as an infuriated rabbit. But it puts up one of the best "bluffs" known to natural history. When caught at its favorite occupation of basking in the open, without convenient avenue of escape, it flattens its head, and strikes right and left, blowing and hissing with an aspect much more terrifying than that of the truly venomous species. Then, when the objects of its fury have taken to trees or adjacent fences, it glides quietly away into the grass and effaces itself. Any one who has the nerve to look it between the eyes may uncover its pretense. For by this token may be known the real Crotalids from the mock: a small but distinct pit between eye and nostril. Lacking this mark, no ventral crawler in the land of the free need cause a flutter in the most timid breast, with one notable exception.

BEWARE THE ELAPS

Shun, as you would a rabid dog, a pretty little red-and-black banded serpent about as thick as your thumb. If any living creature whose habitat is the United States deserves the epithet "deadly," it is the Elaps. Two species are known; the harlequin snake, which ranges throughout the Gulf states to Texas and up the Mississippi River to Ohio, and the Sonoran coral snake, found in the Southwest only. By a strange perversion of facts, while the harmless hog-nosed snake enjoys a repute of terror, the Elaps, most dangerous of all American reptiles, is commonly regarded as harmless. Partly this is due to its slight and graceful prettiness, partly to its innocent-appearing head, which shows no flattening (the popularly understood mark of the venomous species), and partly to its lethargic and peaceful disposition. Experimenters wishing to secure the venom of the Elaps often find it difficult to rouse the snake to striking wrath.

Very few instances are known of Elaps bite, but those few unquestionably set this ornamental creature in a class by itself, among American Ophidia, for "results." Out of eight well-authenticated cases of Elaps bite, six of the victims died. This is believed to indicate a falsely large percentage, however, the scientific estimate of mortality being somewhere between twenty-five and fifty per cent.

A government scientist tells me of a curious result from coral-snake bite which came under his notice. The victim, who was handling the reptile preparatory to photographing it, apparently overstepped the bounds of its habitual forbearance, for it fastened upon his finger with such determination that it had to be pried off. The man soon became unconscious, but rallied, and, after three days of dubious condition, recovered. Every year since, at about the anniversary of the bite, an ulcer forms upon the finger and the nail sloughs off. I have heard of similar recurrent effects from crotaline poisoning, but none scientifically attested, as is this phenomenon.

Before passing from the subject of snakes, let me make one point clear. While the venomous snakes of this country are by no means "deadly" in the ordinary sense of the term, their bite is always serious, both in its immediate effects and in the possibility of after effects. The bitten person should get to a physician at once. The immediate treatment is prompt incision and sucking of the wound. Permanganate of potash for rubbing into the bitten place should always be carried by persons traveling in a snake-infested country. If the bite is on a limb, a light ligature will check the spread of the venom. Use whisky sparingly, if at all, and then only in case of complete collapse.

The local treatments are most effective while the venom is still around the site of the bite, and will reduce the injurious effects considerably. But after half an hour or so the absorption of the venom becomes more general and the local treatments ineffective. When the venom once enters into general circulation no chemicals or medication can neutralize its effects, except a specific antivenin, such as has been prepared by Dr. Noguchi at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Antivenin is the only antidote that can counteract the action of venom anywhere in the body. It finds the venom wherever it is present and neutralizes it there, without producing any ill effects on the system.

GILA MONSTER NOT SO MONSTROUS

Dissension and discussion have raged for years about the hideous head of the Gila monster. This great lizard of the Southwest has been pronounced absolutely deadly by one set of partisans, and absolutely harmless by another. Somewhere between lies the truth. If any human being has actually been bitten by a heloderma, the event has either escaped notice or has been so hedged about with obstructive legend as to have forfeited scientific credence. But the saurian itself has been studied and dissected, and its venom has been analyzed. The venom is related to snake poison, but is neither crotaline nor elapine. From animal experiments it is thought that it might be fatal to man under unfavorable conditions. There are no fangs proper. The poison gland is in the lower jaw, instead of in the upper, as in snakes, and its product is projected through small ducts which open in the gums outside the teeth. The Gila monster has the grip of a bulldog. Torture will not loosen its hold, once fastened on. It is through this intimate contact that the venom works into the wounds.

Fortunately, the lizard is slow to anger, and prefers flight to battle, so it is likely to be long before science has an opportunity of studying the effect of its envenomed jaw-clamp upon man. There are a few vaguely rumored reports of prospectors having perished, in the desert, of Gila monster poison, but these are so confused with symptoms suspiciously resembling alcoholic poisoning as to lead Dr. R. W. Shufeldt, an authority upon the Reptilia, to remark that "a quart of raw whisky, practically given at one dose, may prove more fatal than the bite of ten helodermas."

Almost any kind of an insect bite or sting MAY prove fatal. So may a pin scratch, if the blood of the subject be in bad enough condition. There is a well-substantiated case of a trained nurse who died from blood poisoning following a mosquito bite. Ant bite has resulted fatally, as has a single sting from the common wasp. No one, however, considers these everyday insects as "deadly." But substitute "scorpion" for "ant," and "centipede" for "wasp," and shrieks of dismay rise from the general throat. Yet perhaps there is no other variety of harmful creature whose reputation rests upon so meager a foundation as that of these two.

True, an El Paso report claims that a man stung by a whip scorpion died in twelve hours; but the details are so vague as to be in a high degree unconvincing. Dr. Eugene Murray-Aaron, a witness of unimpeachable scientific competency, describes the sting, after several personal encounters with the vigorous tropical species, as no worse than that of a large hornet. Dr. L. B. Rowland, of Florida, says: "My wife has been stung several times [by the common scorpion]. It is like a wasp sting, only."

THE SCORPION'S STING

The Mexican scorpion enjoys an evil repute, which, from personal observation, I consider greatly exaggerated. Stewart Edward White was so obliging as to afford me excellent opportunity of judging, in the course of a recent hunting trip which we took together in a hot and remote Mexican desert. Mr. White, in the process of disrobing, sat down upon a brown scorpion, an inch and a half long. The scorpion punctured Mr. White twice. I noted his symptoms. They were chiefly surprise and indignation. Within half an hour he was asleep, and on the following day he was riding a mule. The scorpion, however, died.

With respect to the centipede, satisfactory data are difficult to obtain. Some scientists whose observations are worthy of note state that the legs of this curious creature secrete a poison, and that their trail over human flesh is marked by a sort of rash, sometimes followed by fever. As showing that this is not an invariable phenomenon, I may set the circumstantial account given me by Captain Robert Kemp Wright, who, at his place at Pitch Lake, Trinidad, saw a good-sized centipede crawl across the forehead of his sleeping son. Not daring to make a move, as the centipede is supposed to strike very swiftly, Captain Wright was compelled to stand still while it slowly made its way to the pillow and thence to the floor, where it was killed. The boy, who had neither waked nor moved, showed absolutely no trace of the reptile's course.

THE DEADLY TARANTULA—IN PRINT

The only direct evidence which has come to me regarding the bite of the hundred-legged crawler was from an English naturalist whom I met in Venezuela. He was bitten on the ankle by a centipede nearly a foot long. So severe was the laceration that his sock was clotted with blood before he could get it off. The two punctures were marked. Almost immediately the ankle began to swell. The pain he describes as being equal to a bad toothache. It kept him awake all that night. He had some fever, which, however, he attributes rather to the loss of sleep than to any specific action of the poison, as there were no other general symptoms. In the morning the pain had abated a good deal, and he believes that he could have gone about his pursuits had he been able to get his sock and shoe on. He noted some discoloration about the wound. Late in the afternoon he was hobbling about. A week in a carpet slipper was the extent of disability which he suffered. On these evidences it would seem just, for the present, to set down the scorpion and the centipede as painful, rather than dangerous, assailants.

Diseased imagination could invent no creature more horrific of appearance than the tarantula. Its bristling and hostile aspect, the swift ferocity of its rush, its great size, and its enthusiastic preference for combat as against flight, are sufficient to account for the fear and respect in which it is generally held. But, though several species of the huge spider are native to the United States, and others frequently drop out of banana bunches from South or Central America, to the discomfiture of the unsuspecting grocer, no authentic instance of death from tarantula poison in this country is obtainable. St. Louis papers please copy, particularly that one which, several years ago, announced in appropriately black headlines:

IN TWO WEEKS Three Men Have Died From Bites of Tarantulas,

proceeding to explain that the victims were banana handlers in the wholesale fruit district. No names were supplied—a common phenomenon in this class of obituary notice. Search in the coroner's records failed to bring to light any case of the sort, and an exhaustive inquiry in the fruit district was equally unproductive. The report was a pure fake.

Apparently of the same nature is the "news story" of a Californian who, presumably mistaking a tarantula for a fragrant floweret, was bitten on the nose and "died in great agony." That, of course, is the proper way to die under such circumstances. They all do it—in print.

Now let us see about the "agony." Herbert H. Smith, the naturalist and collector, saw a man bitten on the bare foot by a tarantula (Mygale) so hard as to draw blood. There was very little swelling, and the man paid no heed to the occurrence, but went on with his work.

I have talked with a Southern Pacific Railroad fireman who was jabbed on the wrist by a large tarantula. Some years before, he had been stung on the cheek by a "bald" hornet. He wasn't inclined to make any choice between the two except that the tarantula (not the wound) "looked a d——sight more scary." He didn't let the bite interfere with his job, even for the day.

On the other hand, Dr. Murray-Aaron records serious symptoms following two bites upon the hand by a large female trapdoor tarantula; pain comparable to that of the worst earache, involuntary twitching of arms, legs, lips, and tongue, great swelling and discoloration of the hand and forearm, and considerable suffering for four days, with occasionally recurrent pains for a month. This, however, was in Haiti. And even there, he believes, death never follows tarantula bite unless the subject is in a depleted state of resistance from blood-disease or other cause.

Under the heading "Fatal Spider Bite" there is a considerable and interesting newspaper bibliography. The details do not analyze well. Often the name of the supposed victim doesn't appear; and where names and specifications are given, the evidence is hardly sufficient, as a rule, to convict the insect of any crime more serious than mayhem. For example, a young woman in Brooklyn awoke one morning to find a swollen spot on her body. On the bed was (according to allegation) a spider. Some ten days later she died. For a long period she had been in ill health. Yet the death was credited to the spider, though specific symptoms of venomous poisoning were lacking.

The instance of a young woman in an Eastern state is significant. Thrusting her foot into an old slipper, she felt a sharp jab upon the point of her index digit. Upon hasty removal of the footgear, she saw, or supposed she saw, a large and ferocious spider dart forth. This, to her mind, was evidence both conclusive and damning. Seizing upon the carving knife, she promptly cut off her perfectly good toe, bound up the wound, and sent for the doctor, thereby blossoming out in next day's print as a "Heroine who had Saved her own life by her Marvelous Presence of Mind." The thoughtful will wonder, however, whether the lady wouldn't have got at the real root of the matter by cutting off her head instead of her toe.

SPIDER HYSTERIA

Imagination and terror undoubtedly account for certain general symptoms in this class of injury. Colonel Nicholas Pike, a competent observer, records a case of a man slapping his hand down upon a window sill and feeling a lively stab in the palm. At the same moment a small spider ran across the back of his fingers and was captured. There was a distinct puncture in the hand. Here, then, was a definite case, where the wound and the insect were both in evidence. But examination of the arachnid's fangs satisfied Colonel Pike that they were far too small and weak to penetrate the tough skin where the wound was. Meantime the victim exhibited the classic symptoms of venomous poisoning: numbness, nausea, chills, and threatened collapse. A physician, being summoned, examined both the victim and the accused, and took Colonel Pike's view that the spider was innocent. The man was wrathful, with the indignation of terror. He said he guessed he knew whether he was bitten or not, and that the physician's business was to eschew idle speculations and go ahead and save his life if it wasn't already too late. Thereupon the doctor opened up the wound and extracted a section of a fine needle. The other half was found sticking in the window sill where a careless seamstress had fixed it. The spider had been a fortuitous arrival. The man made one of the quickest recoveries recorded.

THE "RED-SPOT"—DANGEROUS

Strangely enough, the one really dangerous spider on the American continent is small, obscure, and practically unknown to popular or journalistic hysteria. Latrodectus mactans is its scientific name. It is about the size of a large pea, black with a red spot on the back—a useful danger signal—and spins a small web in outhouses or around wood-piles. So far as is known, its poison is the most virulent and powerful, drop for drop, secreted by any living creature. Cobra virus, in the minute quantity which the Latrodectus's glands contain, would probably have no appreciable effect upon man; whereas the tiny spider's venom, in the volume injected by the cobra's stroke, would slay a herd of elephants. Were this little-known crawler as large as the common black hunting spider of our gardens and lawns, its bite would be almost invariably fatal. Happily, the "red-spot's" fangs, being small and weak, can with difficulty penetrate the skin, and are able to inject venom in dangerous quantity only when the bite is inflicted upon some tender-skinned portion of the body. Nevertheless, fatalities consequent upon the bite of this insect are sufficiently well attested to take rank as established scientific facts.

One of the most detailed comes from an intelligent farmer of Greensboro, North Carolina. A workman in his employ, while hauling wood, brushed at something crawling upon his neck and felt a sharp, stinging sensation. He found a small, black spider with a red spot. This was at 8.30 A.M. Presently, ten small white pimples appeared about the bitten spot, though no puncture was visible and there was no swelling. The pain soon passed, but returned in three hours and became general, finally settling in the abdomen and producing violent cramps. At one o'clock the man had a spasmodic attack. Two hours later he had so far recovered as to be able to go back to work, for an hour. Then the spasms took him again; he sank into coma, and died between ten and eleven o'clock that evening, about fourteen hours after the bite. At no time were there local symptoms or swelling, other than the slight eruption, but the neck, left arm, and breast are reported as having assumed a stonelike hardness.

The same farmer had seen, three years previous, a negro who had been bitten upon the ankle by a "red-spot" and who suffered from diminishingly severe spasmodic attacks for three weeks. The white pimples appeared in this case also. The negro recovered, but the eruption reappeared for years thereafter whenever he was overheated.

Recoveries from Latrodectus bite are much more common, in the records, than deaths. Dr. Corson, of Savannah, Georgia, reports six cases, characterized by agonizing pains, spasmodic contractions like those of tetanus, and grave general symptoms. All recovered. From Anaheim, California, a fatal case is reported by Dr. Bickford, death occurring twenty hours after the bite. William A. Ball, of San Bernardino, California, gives a vivid account of his sensations after being bitten on the groin by a red-spotted spider, the data being attested by his physician. Shortly after being bitten, he began to suffer great agony, with convulsive contractions of the muscles.

"The pains in my hip-joints, chest, and thighs grew rapidly more violent, until it seemed that the bones in these parts of my body were being crushed to fragments." He was seriously ill for ten days.

WORSE TEXAN THE "DEADLY" COPPERHEAD

It may be that only under certain uncomprehended conditions is the venom of the Latrodectus effective. Inoculation of guinea pigs with the poison has been without any resultant symptoms. Scientific experimenters have suffered themselves to be bitten and have experienced no ill effects. The foreign cousins of the American species, however, have as evil a repute as the "mactans." The "katipo," found in sedges on the beach of New Zealand, is dreaded by the Maoris, who traditionally refuse to sleep nearer than half a stone's throw from the water, that being the extent of range of the spider. The Latrodecti of Corsica, Algeria, and France are infamous in the lore of the country folk, which fact must be regarded as strongly evidential, when their insignificant appearance is taken into account.

Only in America is there no popular fear of this really formidable little creature. Yet it is found in almost every part of the United States, though by no means one of the commoner spiders. In the past five years I have seen two specimens at my country place in central New York, and have heard of a dozen others. If people understood generally that this rather ornamental insect is both more perilous to life and health, and rather more prone to attack human beings, than the superstitiously dreaded "deadly" copperhead, there would probably be a heavy mortality in the Latrodectus family at the hands of energetic house-cleaners.

THE RISE OF THE KISSING-BUG

Years ago the United States Bureau of Entomology received from an exasperated clergyman in Georgia a dead insect, enclosed in this note:

"Prof. Riley: What is this devil? He sailed down on my hedge. I took hold of his lone front leg, and as quick as lightning he speared me under my thumb nail and I dropped him. My thumb and whole arm are still paining me . . . "

The miscreant was a fine specimen of Reduvius personatus, the cone-nosed blood-sucker, soon thereafter to achieve heights of newspaper notoriety together with its cousin, Melanolestes picipes, as the "kissing-bug." How many persons died (in type) from kissing-bug bites in the year of enlightened civilization, 1899, will never be known. But from far and near, from California and Connecticut and the Carolinas, from Minnesota and Maryland and Maine, came startling reports of this hitherto unfamed creature's depredations upon the human countenance. Thereby the spider family was relieved of much unmerited odium, for it is more than suspected by entomologists that a large proportion of so-called spider bites are really the work of the more vicious but less formidable-appearing kissing-bug, as is often evidenced by the nature of the puncture.

The kissing-bug is about half an inch in length, flat-backed, shaped in geometrically regular angles, and armed with a large, hard beak. It is this beak which does the damage, for the kissing-bug is a fighter and will risk a prod at anything that gives it cause of offense. Testimony is not lacking that it sometimes punctures the human epidermis with a view to obtaining blood at first hand instead of from its natural prey.

But the curious feature of the kissing-bug's bite is its after effect. Neither the southern Reduvius nor the northern Melanolestes possesses any venom apparatus. Now, an insect without fangs (or sting), duct, and poison gland, can no more envenom the object of its attack than a fish can kick a man to death. Yet we find such authorities as Dr. L. O. Howard, the United States Entomologist, Professor Le Conte, Mr. Charles Drury, of Cincinnati, and others, including a mass of medical witnesses, declaring from first-hand observation that the kissing-bug bite causes much swelling and severe pain. Le Conte, indeed, compares the effect to snake bite, and states that people are seriously affected for a week. A case is recorded from Holland, South Carolina, where there were vomiting and marked weakness. Mr. Schwartz, an expert of the Bureau of Entomology at Washington, was bitten twice upon the hand and testifies to the painful effects. In 1899, when the species was very common in Washington, the Emergency Hospital had a long list of patients who appeared on the records under the heading, "Insect Bite."

THE DECLINE OF THE KISSING-BUG

Thus was started the general "scare," a reporter with a keen nose for news having made a legitimate "sensation" from the repeated entries on the hospital roster. From Washington it spread over the country, and became the topic of the day, until any insect bite or sting—mosquito, hornet, bedbug, or whatnot—was magnified by the hysteria of the patient and the credulousness of the public into a "dangerous" instance of kissing-bug poisoning. Reports of fatal cases, however, invariably proved to be canards.

For explanation of the marked local symptoms resultant upon attack by the insect, science has been hard put to it. The general symptoms, observed in a few cases, where violent, may probably be ascribed to shock and nervousness. But the marked swelling and pain cannot be thus dismissed. Medical men believe that the insect, in its various prowlings for food, thrusts its exploring beak into decaying animal and vegetable matter and thus, in a sense, so poisons it that when it comes into contact with human blood, a rapid local infection is set up—not through any specific poison, as in spider bite or bee sting, but by the agency of the putrefactive germs collected on the weapon.

Not the least interesting phase of the kissing-bug scare is the rapidity and completeness of its decadence. It is but ten years ago that the newspapers rang with it; that victims of the bite, in every city, were fleeing, white-faced and racked with forebodings, to doctor or hospital. To-day, both the Melanolestes and the "conenose" are abroad in the land. Doubtless, upon provocation, they are "spearing" others as they speared the outraged clergyman. But that's all. The bepunctured ones do not seek the consolations of medical or journalistic attention. They put a little wet mud or peroxide on the place and let it go at that. Exit another bogy!

OUR REAL POISON PERIL

One venomous creature there is in this country which may justly be termed a public peril, in the widest sense. Proportionately to population, more victims fall to it yearly in the United States than to the dreaded cobra in India. Some twelve thousand Americans are killed every year by its bite. Three hundred thousand more are made seriously ill from the after effects. Unfortunately, the virus works so slowly that alarm is stilled. The victims do not sicken at once. The bite is forgotten; but ten days or two weeks after, the subject falls into a fever. His blood is poisoned within him. Eventually, in extreme cases, he becomes delirious, succumbs to a stupor, and dies.

Yet, because there is nothing horrific to the sensation-loving imagination in the malaria-bearing mosquito, public inertia or ignorance tolerates it with a grin and permits it to breed in city and country alike throughout the length and breadth of the nation. Compared with it, as a real menace, all the combined brood of snakes, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, and other pet bugaboos of our childish romanticism are utterly negligible; are as figment to reality, as shadow to substance. It is perhaps characteristic of our wryly humorous American temperament that we should have invested the unimportant danger with all the shuddering attributes of horror, and have made of the real peril a joke to be perennially hailed with laughter in a thousand thoughtless prints.

***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII October 1910 No. 4

Lassoing Wild Animals In Africa {pages 526-538}

By GUY H. SCULL

Field Manager of the Buffalo Jones African Expedition

II

SOMEHOW everything seemed to happen on moving day with the Buffalo Jones Expedition in East Africa. Exactly why this should have been it is impossible to tell. Perhaps the reason may be found in the fact that a considerable part of our time was occupied in moving. No doubt the circumstance could be traced to some such perfectly reasonable cause. But we chose to look upon it otherwise.

When an outfit like ours has been working for a while in the open country—especially when the undertaking has no precedent and the outcome is decidedly uncertain—the little happenings of each day gradually grow to have a peculiar significance of their own, and finally a brand-new set of superstitions is formed and half jokingly believed in by every one concerned. In this way an expedition comes to be regarded as lucky or unlucky, or lucky on certain days, or at certain hours of the day, or at certain periods of the moon. The wide reaches of the African veldt have something to do with it, perhaps.

These superstitions are temporary, local, and often purely personal affairs. Means, being a cowboy, believed that when he rode his big-boned bay the drive would be successful. The native dog-boy insisted that when the long-eared bloodhound and the little white terrier were coupled together on the march, the rest of the pack would come through without mishap. Loveless swore by a particular piece of rope, and Mac—which is short for Mohammed—discovered propitious omens on every conceivable occasion.

It was on the first day's march into the Kedong Valley that we had roped the wart-hog. On the journey from Sewell's Farm to Rugged Rocks we had rounded up and photographed the eland. Again, it was on the trek of March 8 to the Wangai River that we had caught our only glimpses of rhinoceros and lion—faint chances of making a capture, but still chances, and better than no signs at all.

And thus, merely because it had turned out so in the past every member of the expedition had come to entertain a semi-serious belief that something momentous was bound to happen on moving day.

A general feeling of expectancy pervaded the entire safari when we broke camp at the Wangai River at dawn of a hazy morning. The sky was clear of clouds, but behind the hills of the Mau escarpment a veldt fire had been burning for several days, so that a veil of smoke was seen hanging in the air as the dawn broadened into day. The smell of the burning veldt and the nearness of the fire lent an oppressive warmth to the still morning.

"You two boys had better carry your heavy ropes," the Colonel said at starting. "We might meet something."

We had finished with the Kedong and Rift valleys. We had hunted every corner of the district within striking distance of the water. And we had had success of a kind. Cheetah, eland, hartebeest, and serval-cat we had roped and tied and photographed. But the really big game had so far escaped us. For this reason we had decided to take the road over the Mau, where the smoke haze hung heavy, and so on into the Sotik country, where both lion and rhino were said to abound.

For the first ten miles of the march our way led across untraveled country, toward the two deep ruts in the veldt that were known as the wagon road. We had an extra ox-wagon with us now, in charge of Mr. Curry, an Africander, who lived with his partner on a farm on the border of the Sotik, and who on his return journey home with his wagon had agreed to help us carry supplies. Curry was slight and round-shouldered, with light yellow hair. His face was burned a bright red, excepting his nose, which was white where the skin was peeling. He had a peculiar, slow, drawling way of talking—when he talked at all, which was seldom. Being an inhabitant of the district into which we were going, he was naturally subjected at first to a number of questions in regard to the big game there.

"Plenty of rhino in your part of the world, I suppose?"

"Y—as," drawled Curry.

"And lion, too, I imagine?"

"Y—as."

"Ought to get some giraffe on the way, hadn't we?"

"Y—as."

"Rhino pretty scarce just now, though, aren't they?"

"Y—as," Curry answered placidly.

Thus it soon became apparent that Curry's chief ambition was to agree pleasantly with whatever anybody said, which tended to discredit any information he had to impart. So, as a matter of course, the questions ceased, and when no more were asked him Curry's conversation ceased also.

It was rough going for the ox-wagons those first ten miles, and they made slow time of it along the base of the hills. According to our custom on the march, the Colonel and the two cowboys, the picture department (composed of Kearton and Gobbet), and Ulyate (the white hunter) and myself rode in a widely extended line in front of the safari, sweeping the country for game. It was hot at the base of the hills—so hot that when your bridle hand dropped inadvertently to the pommel of the saddle, the brass mounting there seemed to burn you. Not a breath of air was stirring, and the sun shone down blazing through the wisps of smoke haze, and the heat waves rose from the dead, parched veldt so that the distant southern volcano looked all quivering.

Then from out the blurred vista in front little by little a clump of comparatively large trees began to take definite shape. Another half mile farther, and we saw that something was moving among the trees as high up as the topmost branches.

"Giraffe," said Ulyate, and no sooner had he spoken the word than the great, towering animals wheeled and fled from their shelter with that long-legged gallop of theirs which looks so easy and slow, but which carries them over the ground as fast as a speedy horse can run.

The Colonel and the two cowboys set off at a hand gallop in a vain attempt to round them up and drive them back to the cameras. The race was a hopeless one for the horsemen from the start. But, according to the general method of operations adopted by the Colonel from the very beginning, no chance of a capture, however slim it might appear, was to remain untried so long as men and horses could endure.

The two ruts of the wagon road led close by the grove of trees, and when the rest of us reached this spot and dismounted to await results, the three leading horsemen had disappeared long ago into the scrub-grown country to the south.

As noon approached, the heat became more and more oppressive. The cameras had been screwed to the tripods and covered with our coats to protect them from the sun. The horses grazed near by. Mac was sent up one of the trees to warn us of the approach of anything like a giraffe, and the rest of us sat on the ground round the bole in the small circle of thin shade and lazily watched the black ants always crawling and climbing and zigzagging back and forth over the network of fallen twigs and leaves. It was too hot to talk—it was too hot to sleep or think. And by and by the ox-wagons came up, and the oxen brought the flies. For a time then the only sounds were the slow crunching of the feeding horses and an occasional inarticulate snarl from some one or other who foolishly tried to brush the flies away from his face.

Eventually, after a long time had passed, Means rode into the grove of trees, un-heralded by Mac and alone. The bay horse had fallen badly, wrenching his rider's back where once he had been hurt before. Means took his saddle off, threw it on the ground, and sat on it.

"He dropped into a pig hole," he explained, "an' hopped out again as neat as could be. But in hoppin' out he hopped into another, an' that just naturally discouraged him an' he come down with me."

No comments were made, nor did Means expect any. But evidently he had considered it only justice to the bay that the mishap should receive from him the proper explanation.

Then Loveless returned, also alone. He made a few grumbling remarks about its being all nonsense to run the horses to death when there was no chance at all. But as his listeners showed not the slightest interest in the matter, he, too, relapsed into silence.

The Colonel was the last to come in. He rode straight to the tree where the company were gathered, dismounted, and sat down. Then he spoke to the world at large.

"They must be about here somewhere," he said. "And being about here somewhere, we'll get 'em yet."

When the shadow beneath the tree began to lengthen toward the east, the safari shook itself together and prepared to move on once more. But this time, instead of occupying his customary position at the head of the column, the Colonel lagged behind.

Immediately after leaving the grove of trees, the road commenced to climb the first rises of the Mau escarpment. As we mounted higher up the hillside, the view behind us opened out into a grand panorama of the two valleys and their sentinel volcanoes, with the smoke haze hanging over all. For a time, those of us who were in front rode half sideways in the saddle, looking back over the way we had come and over the district we had grown to know so well. Then we crossed a small, level park that formed the crest of the first hill, and as we moved down the western slope the view behind us disappeared and the new country spread before us.

Kearton was riding with his head sunk on his chest like a sick man. Gobbet asked if anything was wrong with him.

"Nothing bad; too much heat this morning, likely."

"Want to hunt a bit of shade and lie up awhile? "

"No, I'll go on."

Gobbet shrugged his shoulders. "You're the judge," he said.

Hill after hill stretched away in front to the one upstanding kopje that marked the top of the Mau. The district was wooded with small, twisted trees, and the fire had crossed here, so that the ground was black and the air smelled stronger of burning.

Presently Means stopped. "I'd better wait till the Colonel comes along," he explained. "The Colonel don't carry any weapons."

Loveless stopped with him, and, as Ulyate was somewhere behind with the ox-wagons and porters, this left Kearton, Gobbet, and myself to ride on by ourselves. For a mile or more the road lifted and dipped with monotonous regularity, and the burnt land was still on either hand, without a sign of life anywhere to be seen. So when the sun really began to decline toward the west, Gobbet, who had once been assistant manager of the Alhambra Music Hall in Brighton, told the story of Harry Lauder and the liquid air biscuits, and it seemed to do Kearton good. Kearton had just told Gobbet to quit his lying, when all three of us realized that for the last half minute we had been unconsciously listening to the beat of a galloping horse on the road behind.

The next instant Ulyate pulled up in a cloud of dust.

"Colonel wants you," he said. "They've rounded up a giraffe."

We wheeled the horses and started back on the run.

"About—three—miles! Left—of the—road!" Ulyate shouted after us.

There were various reasons that called for haste. How long the ropers could keep the giraffe rounded up was especially uncertain, and then, besides, it was near the end of the day and soon the light would be too far gone for a picture.

We met the line of porters and they scattered right and left. Farther on, the ox-teams crowded one side to give us room. Then we came upon the four special porters with the cameras. Kearton took his machine on the saddle with him, and Gobbet caught up the tripod from another pair of outstretched arms.

When we reached the bit of clearing and looked to the left of the road, we saw the long neck and head of a giraffe sharply outlined against the sky.

The giraffe stood motionless. His feet were spread a little apart as though he was prepared to dash away again at the first opportunity, and he gazed in a curious way first at one, then at another of the three ropers that surrounded him and now sat their horses, waiting. There was still enough light left for a picture, but Kearton was nearly done.

"Give him a minute's breather," said the Colonel. " We'll hold the critter till he's ready."

We took Kearton off his horse and stretched him on the ground and poured the lukewarm water from a canteen on his head. Meanwhile Cobbet screwed the camera to the tripod and set it up.

By the time Gobbet had finished, Kearton was on his feet again. From his position near by, Means ventured the opinion that it was too much excitement that had knocked him over, and Kearton swore back at him pleasantly and went to work.

A high-pitched yell from the Colonel sent the giraffe away across the open with that clumsy-looking, powerful gallop that is all his own, and with his long neck plunging slowly back and forth.

Loveless's black, one of the fastest horses in the string, had hard work to gain on the giraffe, expecially as the animal swerved quickly at the last moment and fled down the eastern slope of the hill through the scrub where the going was none too good.

It was a difficult throw—and a new one for a Western cowboy—to send the noose so far up into the air over the head perched high on the long, swaying neck.

But at the first attempt Loveless succeeded, and then reined in gently so as not to throw the beast, because a giraffe would fall heavily, and would very likely break his neck or a leg if tumbled over.

Finally he was brought to a standstill, his feet spread apart as before, and for a while the two stood facing each other—the cowboy and the towering giraffe, with the rope from the saddle horn leading up at a considerable angle to the shoulders of the prize. The rest of the hunt soon gathered about them. Although the light was rapidly failing, Kearton finished what was left of his roll of film. The whir of the camera ended with a peculiar flapping sound.

"That's all," said Kearton, and sank down on a near-by stone.

But Loveless and the giraffe continued to face each other undisturbed.

"Well?" said Loveless, presently.

"Well?" echoed the Colonel.

"Well, how are we going to take this rope off him? We've got none to spare, you know."

"Get a ladder," suggested Means.

"No, we won't need a ladder," said the Colonel seriously, "but we'll have to throw him, after all. We can do it gently, I guess, without hurting him."

Accordingly, Means roped the giraffe by one hind leg and pulled it out from under him, so that he sank easily to the ground and both the ropes were loosened and freed.

The sun had set and the short twilight was rapidly deepening. The ox-wagons and porters were several miles ahead. So we packed up the camera, coiled up the ropes, mounted, and rode away, and the giraffe raised himself on his haunches among the bushes and watched us go.

We camped at a water hole that night, and started on again the next morning in the darkness before the dawn, with a porter ahead carrying a lantern to show the way. With ox-wagons it is a three days' journey from that water hole to the Guas Nyiro River at the border of the Sotik. The country through which we passed continued to be the same as that of the Mau escarpment—a succession of low hills and shallow valleys covered with the small, twisted trees. And there was plenty of water on the way. But there was no game in the district.

We had been told before starting that we need not expect to see anything on the way, because antelope, zebra, and such like animals avoid the wooded section so as not to be caught unaware by lions, and, since the prey seek the safety of the open plains, the lions are compelled to follow.

In spite of this fact, and although the dense woods and broken ground generally forced the safari to keep to the road, the cowboys were always ready and the cameras, always loaded with film. But the land on either side remained silent and deserted.

And each day's journey was the same as the one before; the start in the gray of the morning, the long, hot ride, with the road gently rising and falling over the hills, and the sudden cool of the evening when the sun went down. At times the camera department would take moving pictures of the wagons and porters crossing a river, where an especially picturesque bit of scenery offered an attractive setting. Occasionally Means, as he rode along, would commence singing one of the songs of our Western plains, verse after verse, seemingly without end, recounting in detail some local historical event, such as an Indian attack on an army post, a shooting affair at a dance, or a train-robber's hanging. He would sing more to himself than to anybody else, and if this began to bore him at all, he would stop in the middle and leave the story untold.

Then sometimes, when we outspanned for an hour at noon, the four special camera porters would give imitations of Kearton and Gobbet taking pictures, of Loveless shoeing horses, or of Means in the act of roping. And in the evenings, when the day's march was done and the outpost fires had been lighted, the talk of the company would turn to our chances of finding luck in the Sotik country that lay ahead.

In the afternoon of March 16 we reached Webb's Farm, in the Guas Nyiro valley, which lies at the edge of the big plains. In this neighborhood there were three farms—Webb's, Curry's, and Agate's—and on the evening of our arrival some of their men paid a visit to the camp. They had heard of the expedition, and each in turn examined the horses, the dogs, the ropes, and the saddles, and then, like the hunters at Nairobi, asked the inevitable question:

"But how are you going to do it?"

"Oh, we'll do it somehow," the Colonel replied good-naturedly. And the visitors shook their heads a little and smiled and changed the subject.

But to attempt to rope a rhinoceros or a lion required fresh horses, and ever since we had left Nairobi, nearly a fortnight ago, we had worked our horses hard every day. Now that we had reached the land of the big game, the Colonel for the first time called a day of rest. So we loafed about camp from sunrise to sunset and by evening were heartily sick of it all.

Perhaps we had expected too much of this Sotik country; perhaps the expedition was running, temporarily, in a streak of bad luck; but the fact remains that when we resumed hunting on March 18, disappointment only followed disappointment.

As we had done in the Rift Valley, so here we adopted the method of sweeping the country with a widely extended line. The first day we rode far to the southward, to the Hot Springs and back, and found nothing, and an unreasoning depression settled upon the expedition. The next day we rode still farther, to the westward this time, and again found nothing, and so the depression deepened. Also on the afternoon of this day it rained heavily, and Curry agreed with Ulyate that this probably meant the beginning of the rainy season, which was already overdue.

That night at the supper table the Colonel spoke his mind. The rain was dripping through the canvas fly overhead, and the Colonel wore his broad-brimmed hat to help keep the water off his plate.

"There's no use hanging round here any longer," he said, "not a bit of use. We haven't seen anything, nor a sign of anything. When the rains begin in earnest, this ground will soften fast an' the horses will get bogged an' we'll have to quit. So from now on we've got to work fast. Now Ulyate says there's water about twelve miles from here to the north—called the Soda Swamp. We'll start for the Soda Swamp in the morning."

Again it was moving day. The morning dawned fine after the rain, and the air was clear, and the country looked greener and fresher than it had ever looked before. By the time the sun rose, the first wagon was packed, so the safari set out on the journey, leaving the second wagon to load and follow our tracks, for there was no road to the Soda Swamp.

At the last moment the Colonel decided that he and the cowboys might just as well make a circuit to the westward of the line of march on the off chance of finding game.

"We covered that district pretty thoroughly yesterday," he said. "But still, you never can tell."

Yet nobody thought it worth while for the camera department to go with them, and so Kearton and Gobbet and the four special porters trailed along with the slow, plodding wagon. In the first place, the wagons would follow the shortest route and the horses would be none the worse for an easy day; in the second, if by the remotest chance the Colonel flushed anything worth while, he could more easily find the cameras.

Curry had remained behind to bring on the second load, and soon Ulyate left us to make a detour past Agate's farm to procure another sack of rice that was badly needed. Ours was a large safari, and the details of transportation required close attention.

The morning wore on. The sky remained clear and the heat became intense. The direction in which we were traveling led us along the border of the plains, through small green parks, scattered groves of trees, and scrub.

So far as the mounted men were concerned, the march was a succession of rides and halts. The heavily laden ox-wagon traveled slowly, and it soon became our custom to dismount in a bit of shade and let the wagon pass ahead about a mile, when we would mount again and catch up with it and then repeat the process.

At one of these places there was a grass-grown mound against which we sat, leaning comfortably, and speculated on the distance we had come and the distance we had to go. When, after a while, it became evident that we should never agree in the matter, the conversation altered to a sort of spasmodic affair.

"I thought this district was so full of big game that you couldn't sleep at night for the lions roaring around you," Gobbet remarked lazily.

"Wait till you get among them," said Kearton. "Sais, keep that horse farther away; he'll be walking on us next."

"Well, I haven't been kept awake any yet," Gobbet replied.

"I wonder where that wagon's got to," and Kearton raised himself on one elbow and peered ahead from beneath the down-tilted brim of his helmet. Then he lay back again and shut his eyes.

"Means is coming," he said.

The announcement occasioned no surprise. Undoubtedly Means had some reason for returning over the trail, and when he reached the mound we should probably learn what he wanted.

Means dismounted and sat down beside us. "We've found a rhino over in the next valley yonder," he remarked, and nodded his head toward the west.

"A rhino is no matter to joke about," said Gobbet. "Please remember that in future."

"I'm not jokin'," said Means. "Colonel's watchin' him. Loveless stopped halfway here, about three miles off. Colonel sent me to bring the rest of you and get the heavy rope."

"Is that right, Means?" Kearton asked sharply.

"Sure."

"Come on, then."

In five minutes we had overtaken the wagon and stopped it, and while Means clambered up on to the load to hunt for the heavy rope, Kearton collected the camera porters and started ahead with them in the direction Means pointed out.

But Means could not find the rope he wanted. He threw off half the load without success.

"It's on the other wagon. There's where it is," he finally concluded. "No time to wait now. Other wagon likely hasn't started yet. We'll have to do with what we've got."

We rode on at an easy jog to keep the horses fresh, and at the end of half an hour we came upon Loveless waiting for us just beneath the crest of a rise. He had off-saddled his horse and had turned him loose to graze a bit before the coming work, and a few minutes were occupied while Loveless saddled up again and Kearton and Gobbet adjusted their cameras and took them on their horses.

Finally every one was ready, and we set forth once more on a wide detour to the north to approach the beast from down the wind.

Loveless gave us the latest news: "The Colonel came over the rise a half hour ago and said the rhino was laying down resting quiet. The Colonel went back again at once to keep watch."

As we proceeded farther on the circuit and began to ride down the gentle slope into the adjacent valley, we slowed down the pace to a cautious walk. No one spoke, and on the grass of the veldt the tread of the horses made scarcely any sound.

Suddenly the Colonel appeared, walking toward us, bent low. He had backed out o' his hiding-place behind a clump of scrub.

"He's laying down over there about a hundred yards away," he whispered. "Now we want to catch the start of the show. You boys ready?"

Means tightened his cinch, and shook his rope loose and coiled it up again. Loveless said he was ready. One of the saises produced the Colonel's horse from behind another clump of scrub, and Kearton dismounted and began creeping forward with his camera.

"Don't start him up till I get my position," he cautioned. "I'll wave my hand."

On account of the growth of low bushes, we could not see the rhino, but in silence we watched Kearton tiptoeing farther and farther ahead toward the spot where the Colonel had said the beast was lying down. The time was approximately a little after noon. The wind that was blowing was light, and same to us hot over the sunny reaches of veldt. The sky was cloudless.

Then the three ropers commenced maneuvering forward, swinging out a little to the right. Kearton stopped. He set up his camera and sighted it, and took out his handkerchief and carefully wiped the lens.

When Kearton waved his hand, the Colonel's yell shattered the stillness and the great beast heaved up out of the grass and tossed his head and sniffed the air and snorted. The horsemen rode full tilt at him, and with surprising quickness the rhino wheeled and broke away south down the valley.

For a good three miles the rhino ran straight and fast. Finally he came into more open country, which was dotted here and therewith small thorn trees. Here, also, in one place there was a fair-sized pool of water, left over from the rains of the night before. The rhino selected this pool as a good position from which to act on the defensive. He splashed into the water, stopped, and faced the horsemen.

Then followed a few minutes' respite for all concerned. The horses were panting heavily after the sharp run, and the rhino's position in the pool rendered it difficult to approach him for a chance to throw a rope. Evidently considering himself safe for the moment, the beast rolled once or twice in the water and then stood on guard as before, but with his black sides dripping.

"We've got to get him out of that," said the Colonel. "A horse wouldn't stand a show there. Now when I get him to charge me, you boys stand by."

Before the Colonel finished speaking, he was already edging toward the pool. For fifteen yards the rhino watched him coming. Then with a great snort he charged out of the water, sending the white spray flying in every direction, and the Colonel had to ride hard to keep ahead of the tossing horn. But Means was after the rhino like a flash, and with a quick throw caught him round the neck. The big bay fell back on his haunches and the rope snapped like twine.

"We'll miss that heavy rope to-day," Means said.

"We'll tie him up with what we've got," the Colonel replied. "Only we've got to tire him out some first. What we'll do is to make him charge us one after the other, so he'll run three times to the horses' running once."

It was a full half hour before the next attempt was made to throw a rope. Time after time the rhino came plunging out of the water to charge the nearest horseman. Our Western horses proved to be only just a trifle faster than the rhino, so that each time the beast nearly caught them. Besides, here and there, the ground was bad with ant-bear holes, which had to be avoided, for a fall would mean disaster. But little by little it became apparent that the rhino's continual charging was beginning to produce an effect.

In the meanwhile the rest of the chase was coming up. In the distance we could see them hurrying down the valley—horsemen and porters considerably scattered, as if each one followed a route of his own choosing Kearton led on his big chestnut. He was carrying the heavy camera under his arm, the tripod over his shoulder. The reins were hanging loose over his saddle horn, his heels were thumping the horse's sides, and the perspiration was streaming down his face.

"We lost you," he panted. "How's it going? What a picture!"

Mac, the Mohammedan, and Aro, the Masai warrior, took the apparatus from him, and he dismounted and went to work.

At the second attempt to rope the beast, Loveless caught him by one hind leg, and the rhino decided to shift his base of operations to an ant-hill in the neighboring clearing. His mode of progression was to walk on three legs and to drag the black horse after him with the other. He reached the ant-hill and demolished it and paused for a breathing spell.

The chase followed after, and Kearton went into action on the north and Gobbet on the south, near a small thorn tree, with a negro porter beside him. The rhino caught sight of Gobbet's camera and charged. The porter went up the tree like a flash. Gobbet was bent over, looking through his view-finder, which, of course, gave him no idea of how fast the beast was bearing down on him nor how close he had already come.

"Look out!" yelled the Colonel.

Gobbet glanced up over the top of the camera and made a jump for the tree. But the porter was already in the branches, and the tree was so small there was not room for two, and Gobbet had to run for it. The next second, with a powerful upward stroke of his horn, the rhino sent the apparatus flying. Then Means succeeded in attracting his attention and he charged the horseman instead. Gobbet picked up the debris, found that the tripod-head was split clean in two as with an axe, found the camera itself undamaged, found there was enough head left to support the camera, quickly mounted his machine again, and was just in time to catch the end of the rhino's chase after Means.

And all the while Kearton had his camera trained upon the scene in which his assistant was playing the conspicuous part.

"I hope I got that good," he said; "it'll make fine action—fine."

From one position to another, from ant-hill to thorn tree and back to ant-hill once more, the fight went on through the long, hot afternoon. Ropes were thrown and caught and broken, mended and thrown again. The horses were pulled, all standing, one way and another. Rolls of film were exposed and replaced by fresh ones. The rhino sulked and stormed and charged in turn.

At the end of the fourth hour Loveless had one short length of light line left. The rest of the ropes were dangling, broken, from the rhino's legs and neck as he stood at bay over the ruins of the ant-hill.

The sun was rapidly canting toward the west. The continual work in the intense heat, without food or water, was beginning to tell on both horses and men. The rhino was weakening faster. But only one hour of daylight remained, and if the beast could hold out till dark we should lose him.

There was the dead stump of a tree with the roots protruding lying in the grass near by. The Colonel told Means to fasten the stump to the last piece of line, and Loveless rode toward Kearton's machine, past the rhino, dragging the stump behind him. As the Colonel had foreseen, the beast charged at the stump, and the loose ropes hanging from him became entangled in the roots.

So on they went at a run, first Loveless, then the stump, bounding over the ground, then the charging rhino, headed straight for Kearton's camera. The Masai warrior stood by the tripod with his long spear poised high, and Kearton turned the handle and shouted at Loveless:

"How many times have I got to tell you not to come straight into the lens? Bring him on at an angle! . . . I don't want to be unreasonable," he added, when the rhino stopped, "but you ought to have learned better by this time."

Then, by hauling in gently, Loveless succeeded in recovering two of the ropes, and they were pieced together and thrown again, catching the rhino by one hind leg. Both the cowboys put their horses to work pulling forward on the rope, and they lifted that one hind leg ahead. The tired beast shifted his great body after it, and thus step by step the horses dragged him up to a tree, where Loveless passed the end of the rope two turns around the bole and made it fast.

The rhino charged once just before the knot was tied, and Loveless had to jump into the branches through the thorns to escape. He charged again, rather feebly this time, trying to get free, but the rope held well and tripped him up. After that he stood quietly at the end of his tether, watching the camera in a sullen way while Kearton took his picture with the last few feet of film.

By this time the light was almost gone, the films were finished, horses and men were nearly done, and, besides, it was moving day and high time we resumed the march.

In the November number Mr. Scull will relate the adventures of the Buffalo Jones African Expedition in Lassoing Lion.

***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII No. 5 NOVEMBER, 1910

The Homely Heroine {pages 602-608}

By EDNA FERBER

MILLIE WHITCOMB, of the fancy goods and notions, beckoned me with her finger. I had been standing at Kate O'Malley's counter, pretending to admire her new basket-weave suitings; but in reality reveling in her droll account of how, in the train coming up from Chicago, Mrs. Judge Porterfield had worn the negro porter's coat over her chilly shoulders in mistake for her husband's. Kate O'Malley can tell a funny story in a way to make the after-dinner pleasantries of a Washington diplomat sound like the clumsy jests told around the village grocery stove.

"I wanted to tell you that I read that last story of yours," said Millie, sociably, when I had strolled over to her counter, "and I liked it, all but the heroine. She had an 'adorable throat' and hair that 'waved away from her white brow,' and eyes that 'now were blue and now gray.' Say, why don't you write a story about an ugly girl?"

"My land!" protested I. "It's bad enough trying to make them accept my stories as it is. That last heroine was a raving beauty, but she came back eleven times before the editor of Blakely's succumbed to her charms."

Millie's fingers were busy straightening the contents of a tray of combs and imitation jet barrettes. Millie's fingers were not intended for that task. They are slender, tapering fingers, pink-tipped and sensitive.

"I should think," mused she, rubbing a cloudy piece of jet with a bit of soft cloth, "that they'd welcome a homely one with relief. These goddesses are so cloying."

Millie Whitcomb's black hair is touched with soft mists of gray, and she wears lavender shirtwaists and white stocks edged with lavender. There is a Colonial air about her that has nothing to do with celluloid combs and imitation jet barrettes. It breathes of dim old rooms, rich with the tones of mahogany and old brass, and Millie in the midst of it, gray-gowned, a soft white fichu crossed upon her breast.

In our town the clerks are not the pert and gum-chewing young persons that story-writers are wont to describe. The girls at Bascom's are institutions. They know us all by our first names, and our lives are as an open book to them. Kate O'Malley, who has been at Bascom's for so many years that she is rumored to have stock in the company, may be said to govern the fashions of our town. She is wont to say, when we express a fancy for gray as the color of our new spring suit:

"Oh, now, Nellie, don't get gray again. You had it year before last, and don't you think it was just the least leetle bit trying? Let me show you that green that came in yesterday. I said the minute I clapped my eyes on it that it was just the color for you, with your brown hair and all."

And we end by deciding on the green.

The girls at Bascom's are not gossips—they are too busy for that—but they may be said to be delightfully well informed. How could they be otherwise when we go to Bascom's for our wedding dresses and party favors and baby flannels? There is news at Bascom's that out daily paper never hears of, and wouldn't dare to print if it did.

So when Millie Whitcomb, of the fancy goods and notions, expressed her hunger for a homely heroine, I did not resent the suggestion. On the contrary, it sent me home in thoughtful mood, for Millie Whitcomb has acquired a knowledge of human nature in the dispensing of her fancy goods and notions. It set me casting about for a really homely heroine.

There never has been a really ugly heroine in fiction. Authors have started bravely out to write of an unlovely woman, but they never have had the courage to allow her to remain plain. On Page 237 she puts on a black lace dress and red roses, and the combination brings out unexpected tawny lights in her hair, and olive tints in her cheeks, and there she is, the same old beautiful heroine. Even in the "Duchess " books one finds the simple Irish girl, on donning a green corduroy gown cut square at the neck, transformed into a wild-rose beauty, at sight of whom a ball-room is hushed into admiring awe. There's the case of Jane Eyre, too. She is constantly described as plain and mouse-like, but there are covert hints as to her gray eyes and slender figure and clear skin, and we have a sneaking notion that she wasn't such a fright after all. Therefore, when I tell you that I am choosing Pearlie Schultz as my leading lady you are to understand that she is ugly, not only when the story opens, but to the bitter end. In the first place, Pearlie is fat. Not plump, or rounded, or dimpled, or deliciously curved, but FAT. She bulges in all the wrong places, including her chin. (Sister, who has a way of snooping over my desk in my absence, says that I may as well drop this now, because nobody would ever read it, anyway, least of all any sane editor. I protest when I discover that Sis has been over my papers. It bothers me. But she says you have to do these things when you have a genius in the house, and cites the case of Kipling's "Recessional," which was rescued from the depths of his wastebasket by his wife.)

Pearlie Schultz used to sit on the front porch summer evenings and watch the couples stroll by, and weep in her heart. A fat girl with a fat girl's soul is a comedy. But a fat girl with a thin girl's soul is a tragedy. Pearlie, in spite of her two hundred pounds, had the soul of a willow wand.

The walk in front of Pearlie's house was guarded by a row of big trees that cast kindly shadows. The strolling couples used to step gratefully into the embrace of these shadows, and from them into other embraces. Pearlie, sitting on the porch, could see them dimly, although they could not see her. She could not help remarking that these strolling couples were strangely lacking in sprightly conversation. Their remarks were but fragmentary, disjointed affairs, spoken in low tones with a queer, tremulous note in them. When they reached the deepest, blackest, kindliest shadow, which fell just before the end of the row of trees, the strolling couples almost always stopped, and then there came a quick movement, and a little smothered cry from the girl, and then a sound, and then a silence. Pearlie, sitting alone on the porch in the dark, listened to these things and blushed furiously. Pearlie had never strolled into the kindly shadows with a little beating of the heart, and she had never been surprised with a quick arm about her and eager lips pressed warmly against her own.

In the daytime Pearlie worked as public stenographer at the Burke Hotel. She rose at seven in the morning, and rolled for fifteen minutes, and lay on her back and elevated her heels in the air, and stood stiff kneed while she touched the floor with her finger tips one hundred times, and went without her breakfast. At the end of each month she usually found that she weighed three pounds more than she had the month before.

The folks at home never joked with Pearlie about her weight. Even one's family has some respect for a life sorrow. Whenever Pearlie asked that inevitable question of the fat woman: "Am I as fat as she is?" her mother always answered: "You! Well, I should hope not! You're looking real peaked lately, Pearlie. And your blue skirt just ripples in the back, it's getting so big for you."

Of such blessed stuff are mothers made.

But if the gods had denied Pearlie all charms of face or form, they had been decent enough to bestow on her one gift. Pearlie could cook like an angel; no, better than an angel, for no angel could be a really clever cook and wear those flowing kimono-like sleeves. They'd get into the soup. Pearlie could take a piece of rump and some suet and an onion and a cup or so of water, and evolve a pot roast that you could cut with a fork. She could turn out a surprisingly good cake with surprisingly few eggs, all covered with white icing, and bearing cunning little jelly figures on its snowy bosom. She could beat up biscuits that fell apart at the lightest pressure, revealing little pools of golden butter within. Oh, Pearlie could cook!

On week days Pearlie rattled the typewriter keys, but on Sundays she shooed her mother out of the kitchen. Her mother went, protesting faintly: "Now, Pearlie, don't fuss so for dinner. You ought to get your rest on Sunday instead of stewing over a hot stove all morning."

"Hot fiddlesticks, ma," Pearlie would say, cheerily. "It ain't hot, because it's a gas stove. And I'll only get fat if I sit around. You put on your black-and-white and go to church. Call me when you've got as far as your corsets, and I'll puff your hair for you in the back." In her capacity of public stenographer at the Burke Hotel, it was Pearlie's duty to take letters dictated by traveling men and beginning: "Yours of the 10th at hand. In reply would say . . ." or: "Enclosed please find, etc." As clinching proof of her plainness it may be stated that none of the traveling men, not even Max Baum, who was so fresh that the girl at the cigar counter actually had to squelch him, ever called Pearlie "baby doll," or tried to make a date with her. Not that Pearlie would ever have allowed them to. But she never had had to reprove them. During pauses in dictation she had a way of peering near-sightedly over her glasses at the dapper, well-dressed traveling salesman who was rolling off the items on his sale bill. That is a trick which would make the prettiest kind of a girl look owlish.

On the night that Sam Miller strolled up to talk to her, Pearlie was working late. She had promised to get out a long and intricate bill for Max Baum, who travels for Kuhn and Klingman, so that he might take the nine o'clock evening train. The irrepressible Max had departed with much eclat and clatter, and Pearlie was preparing to go home when Sam approached her.

Sam had just come in from the Gayety Theatre across the street, whither he had gone in a vain search for amusement after supper. He had come away in disgust. A soiled soubrette with orange-colored hair and baby socks had swept her practiced eye over the audience, and, attracted by Sam's good-looking blond head in the second row, had selected him as the target of her song. She had run up to the extreme edge of the footlights at the risk of teetering over, and had informed Sam through the medium of song—to the huge delight of the audience, and to Sam's red-faced discomfiture—that she liked his smile, and he was just her style, and just as cute as he could be, and just the boy for her. On reaching the chorus she had whipped out a small, round mirror and, assisted by the calcium-light man in the rear, had thrown a wretched little spotlight on Sam's head.

Ordinarily, Sam would not have minded it. But that evening, in the vest pocket just over the place where he supposed his heart to be, reposed his girl's daily letter. They were to be married on Sam's return to New York from his first long trip. In the letter near his heart she had written prettily and seriously about traveling men, and traveling men's wives, and her little code for both. The fragrant, girlish, grave little letter had caused Sam to sour on the efforts of the soiled soubrette.

As soon as possible he had fled up the aisle and across the street to the hotel writing-room. There he had spied Pearlie's good-humored, homely face, and its contrast with the silly, red-and-white countenance of the unlaundered soubrette had attracted his homesick heart.

Pearlie had taken some letters from him earlier in the day. Now, in his hunger for companionship, he strolled up to her desk just as she was putting her typewriter to bed.

"Gee! This is a lonesome town!" said Sam, smiling down at her.

Pearlie glanced up at him, over her glasses. "I guess you must be from New York," she said. "I've heard a real New Yorker can get bored in Paris. In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world. Ain't they?"

"Oh, now," protested Sam, "quit kiddin' me! You'd be lonesome for the little old town, too, if you'd been born and dragged up in it, and hadn't seen it for four months."

"New to the road, aren't you?" asked Pearlie.

Sam blushed a little. "How did you know?"

"Well, you generally can tell. They don't know what to do with themselves evenings, and they look rebellious when they go into the dining-room. The old-timers just look resigned."

"You've picked up a thing or two around here, haven't you? I wonder if the time will ever come when I'll look resigned to a hotel dinner, after four months of 'em. Why, girl, I've got so I just eat the things that are covered up—like baked potatoes in the shell, and soft boiled eggs, and baked apples, and oranges that I can peel, and nuts."