The

and the showing was better than it would have been if many of the regular passengers had not preferred to take other routes at some inconvenience. Some of the strikers returned to work, but their lines were still strong. The strikers denounce the attitude of the I. R. T. in refusing to leave the matter to arbitration on the ground that the whole Brotherhood has not joined in the request; they say this might be compared to a refusal by a surface railway to treat with engineers and firemen unless ticket-sellers and trackmen joined them, and claim also that the Brotherhood is a "company union," tolerated but not loved by most of its members.

John Wingate Weeks

F

ARM boy, country-school teacher, seaman, surveyor, clerk, business man, volunteer in time of war, Mayor, Congressman, Senator, Secretary of War. There is in all this the sound of the early days of the Republic, when men commonly climbed the ladder of public service upon some such familiar rungs as these. In fact, we have here the stages through which John W. Weeks, hardly a year out of the last-named office, progressed through his life.

The country has had few more serviceable public men. There was in him little of brilliance and nothing of the spectacular, but he brought to the important offices which he latterly filled a wealth of experience and of sound judgment gained from the humbler positions of his early years. He was a patient, hard-working Representative in Congress, the same kind of Senator, one of the most painstaking War Secretaries that the country has had.

It was said when Weeks entered the Cabinet of President Harding that a graduate of Annapolis had deliberately chosen the War in preference to the Navy portfolio. There were evidences of a belief that he would have been more serviceable as Secretary of the Navy, and this belief became more pronounced with the revelation of the apparent weakness of Secretary Denby in connection with the Naval oil leases. Before ill health forced his retirement, however, Mr. Weeks had proved that he chose wisely. He was able to put more of what he himself called the human into the work of the War Department than if he had been an Army man, than, be

In

this capacity she undertook a charitable work hitherto neglected-the assuaging of suffering from cancer among the tenement-house poor of New York. Without means, and depending upon personal appeals, made mainly through the press, and not supported to any large extent by her Church, she established a House of Relief in Cherry Street, then the lowest of neighborhoods, and with such help as she could secure began to minister to the hopeless victims of the dreadful disease.

Later a few friends who had been stirred by her heroic endeavors, with the aid of the "Evening World," raised a sufficient fund for a better house on Jackson Street, on the far lower East Side. Previously she had established a small "home" at Hawthorne, as it became known, in Westchester County. Here patients were cared for in comfort until the end. It soon grew larger.

The painful and shocking nature of the disease, the poverty of the patients, and affiliation with a Church whose followers are usually unable to contribute largely as individuals to benevolence made her cause no easy one. The larder and the treasury were often empty, but she never faltered until her institution attracted the support it deserved. She sometimes had to beg for old linen, as well as money, but, to the public credit be it said, it seldom failed to respond.

So she enhanced the worth of her father's fame by devotion such as few have shown to the cause of suffering humanity. It is to be hoped that her great charity will not fail because her indefatigable spirit is no more behind it.

NR

O doubt there was a sly twinkle in Rudyard Kipling's eye when he remarked before the Royal Society of Literature, whose gold medal he had just received, that “quite a dozen" writers in the past 2,500 years have achieved immortality. "Quite" and "immortality" are words that may be variously defined. Critics of generous impulses will translate the first phrase "more than a dozen" and the second "long-continuing fame," and no one may dispute the dictum if so rendered.

One wonders also if, while he wisely refrained from making a list of his dozen, Mr. Kipling did not know that his remark would provoke lovers of listmaking (and their name is Legion) to prodigious activity. Of making of lists there is no end-and not much use. We have not seen a Kipling Dozen list to be used in case of shipwreck, but F. P. A. has asked, "What dozen namers of the Dozen Immortal Writers would you take to a desert island? And then run like everything?"

The Kipling fillip to list-making has certainly done well by the ancients, and if the five-foot book-shelves multiply apace no one will wonder. One out of "quite a dozen" authors or publishers who kindly contributed "Kipling lists" to the New York "Herald Tribune" lets in only one author who flourished later than 1700, and altogether the "prize-winners" (pace Sinclair Lewis) are antique as well as immortal. Doubtless this is just, but one is loth to admit that the last two hundred years have no unforgetable literature. Several of the estimates of genius evade the problem by nominating a double dozen or more: Mr. Horace Liveright courageously asserts that he could easily name twenty times twelve immortals, and does name fifty-and an excellent list it is. Another assumed that Kipling was talking about fiction only and he could find only half a dozen immortal novelists. One disrespectful contributor to the symposium declined to make a list, on the ground that "most of the accepted immortals are on the skids" and darkly intimates that Kipling himself may some time join those who are not read.

On the whole, we like best and agree best with the response of Mr. Royal Cortissoz, the art critic. He is "on to" Kipling, whereas the rest leave us with a

Kipling, as usual, is all right. He simply used a characteristically pungent way of reminding us that in the matter of literary fame many are called and few are chosen. Of course, he didn't name his twelve. He has too sound a sense of humor. Who shall put a hook in the mouth of leviathan? I wouldn't be caught dead trying to give a number to the immortals, but if I did try I'd name Kipling among them.

We are grateful to the creator of Kim and Mulvaney and other old friends for giving us something to talk about in hot weather. One phrase of his address will last at least long if not immortally. "Fiction," he said, "is truth's younger sister."

squirrel's ear and the angleworms were beginning to wriggle in the velvet dusks, the conversation turned to fishing. Conversations, under such circumstances, will turn to fishing, in spite of inferno and alta aqua-if one may scramble the language of Mussolini and that of the emperors he imitates. But this was an official conversation, serious and full of affairs of state. So the talk of fishing took an official turn to stocking the tidal basin at Washington with game fish.

Then it was that the White House spokesman let out a word unweighed.

The careless newspaper correspondents construed it to mean that the President regarded fishing as a sport for boys, and not a sport for men.

The disciples of Izaak Walton were wounded to the heart. Perhaps they

A

N unweighed word wings wide over the world, and not all the deep regrets and grief of him who spoke it can stop its flight.

The word unweighed is thought of as an affliction of impulsive persons, but once in a great while it goes forth to pester those given to few words and to the weighing of those few as a miser might weigh radium dust. It afflicts that kind of men more powerfully, if possible, than the common run of men, probably because their words, being few, have gained reputation for weightiness.

In the round room of the White House, on an afternoon in early May,

how, they regarded their sport, as their predecessors for generations had done, as the most reflective and philosophical of sports, the one best suited to the needs and the nature of serious-minded men. Their hurt crept into the White House correspondence.

Now a year, two months, and some days have elapsed, and President Coolidge is summering on the shore of Lake Osgood, in the Adirondacks. A White House spokesman let it be known before the departure from Washington that the President would wet a line. Governor Smith sent him a permit to fish.

Since the President is to pursue pisces,

it is well that he went to the Adirondack lakes, and not to the Croton watershed, where the municipal reservoirs are. There the fish would have escaped him, having refuges closed even to a President. The signs by those ponds read, "Entering this property forbidden except to fish." But among the Adirondack lakes the situation is different. There a President may go wherever fish may go, and there is little doubt that Mr. Coolidge will capture some of the best of them. Opinion is divided as to whether he really does or really does not like to fish, but that does not matter. He has in him the making of a good fisherman. Neither by much talking nor by rash movements will he frighten the fish away. Rather, he will lure them to his hook and will find love for the sport growing with practice.

Finally, there will come a day when the sun will be molten brass, the air humid as a barber's hot towel, the flies along the shore closer-sticking than a postage-stamp. The fish, taking a vacation in the shade of the shelving rocks, will scorn the lure of any bait. The eelgrass, lying treacherously just beneath the surface of the water, will foul the line. An eel himself a little one, too small to swallow the hook-will nibble and gnaw and bob the float and finally steal the bait. And the President, wiping the sweat from his forehead on his shirt sleeve, will patiently put on another worm, sit silently on a knotty log and wait, till the shadows stretch out from

the west and a wisp of cool breeze wakes the sleeping water into ripples and a laughing promise.

Then, in the gloaming, a three-pound fish will strike, and dart, and plunge.

Then will the President have become a fisherman, at heart and for life.

Then will the President have made propitiation for speaking lightly-if he

I

did speak lightly-of the gentle sport, and all good Waltonians will accept him as a brother, worthy and well qualified. And later, when the President has retired to private life, his soul will be fortified and he can find ever afterward greater peace and joy by a brook bank than is to be found in the seats of the mighty.

N rummaging among some old books

the other day I found a set of eight

The

volumes bound in calf, published in London in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and entitled "British Classicks." It was evidently quite a notable collection of books when it was issued, for the paper is excellent, the type well cut, and the volumes are embellished with title-pages and full-page illustrations engraved on copper. The volumes are chiefly composed of complete collections of the periodical publications so fashionable in that day, such as Addison's "Spectator" and Dr. Johnson's "Rambler." Many of the selections which the editor regarded as "classicks" are now completely forgotten. William Shenstone, for example, is hardly more than a name in the history of English poetry, although he was admired by Oliver Goldsmith and Robert Burns. Here he appears as an elegant writer of prose, with thirty-two essays "On Men and Manners." He was that rare bird, a poet of independent wealth, and achieved considerable reputation for the beauty of his estate, the landscaping of which he designed himself. One of his essays is on gardening, and he has much to say that is not out of place today on the art of what he calls "the landskip-gardener."

But what interests me most in these old volumes of a bygone literary age are the "Persian Letters" of Lord Lyttelton. His very name calls up a long train of interesting associations in English history. There is not a well-educated lawyer in the United States whose memory and sentiment are not stirred by the almost cabalistic phrase "Coke upon Littleton." This title of one of the most famous of all law books gives legal and literary immortality to two very great English judges-Sir Thomas De Littleton, who flourished in the fifteenth century, and Sir Edward Coke, who lived a hundred years later and is entitled to be

called one of the founders of English liberty. Coke's commentary on Littleton is one of the corner-stones of real estate law.

There is perhaps no better illustration of the usefulness of hereditary aristocracy in government than is found in the name of Littleton or Lyttelton. Lord George Lyttelton, author of the "Persian Letters," was a direct descendant of Sir Thomas De Littleton, and various members of the family, who filled the space of more than three centuries between them, held offices of importance and usefulness in government administration. Doubtless there were variations in character in this long line, as there were in the case of Lord George and his son. Lord George was known as "the good lord," while his heir, a well-known man about town, achieved the popular title of "the wicked lord."

The "Persian Letters" throw some light on the reasons why their author was known as "the good Lord Lyttelton." They were manifestly prompted by the "Lettres persanes" of Montesquieu. Montesquieu's letters purport to have been written by two Persians of distinction traveling in Europe, and they satirize the abuses of Church and State

in France. Lyttelton's letters are supposed to be the comments of a Persian gentleman, temporarily residing in England, on the follies of English society. Lord Lyttelton was a devout upholder of Christianity, and Dr. Johnson applauded some of his arguments in defense of the faith as unanswerable. One of his letters criticising the theater of his day may be quoted, therefore, without apology, in spite of the frankness of its language. It might be written, in a little more restrained form perhaps, of some of the Broadway farces of the present time:

As I now understand English pretty well, I went last night with some friends to see a play. The principal character was a young fellow who, in

the space of three or four hours that the action lasted cuckolds two or three husbands, and debauches as many virgins. I had heard that the English theater was famous for killing people upon the stage, but this author was more for propagating than for destroying.

There were a great many ladies at the representation of this modest performance; and though they sometimes hid their faces with their fans (I suppose for fear of showing that they did not blush) yet in general they seemed to be much delighted with the fine gentleman's heroical exploits. "I must confess," said I, "this entertainment is far more natural than the opera [in a previous letter he had criticised the artificiality and affectations of the newly introduced Italian opera]; and I do not wonder that the ladies are moved at it." But if in Persia we allowed our women to be present at such spectacles as these, what would signify our bolts, our bars, our eunuchs? Though we should double our jealousy and care they would soon get the better of all restraint, and put in practice those lessons of the stage which it is so much pleasanter to act than to behold.

The stage is by no means the only object of the visiting Persian's satire. He criticises marriage settlements and divorce. Having proposed marriage to a very pretty girl, and being acceptable both to the young lady and to the mother, he found that he must make a prenuptial settlement on his inamorata, or "a great independent allowance in case her husband and she should disagree." Whereupon he withdrew, exclaiming: "No, by Hali! I will never wed a woman who is so determined to rebel against her husband that she articles for it in the very contract of her marriage!"

In the domain of politics this supposititious Persian speaks some sound sense which he would be likely to repeat if he could return to literary life and comment on recent events in Pennsylvania:

I have seen them constantly busied in passing laws for the better regulation of their police, and never taking any care of their execution; loudly declaring the abuses of their government, and quietly allowing them to increase!

I have seen them distressed for want of hands to carry on their husbandry and manufactures; yet permitting thousands of their people to be destroyed or made useless and hurtful to society, by the abominable use of spirituous liquors!

I have seen them make such a provision for their poor, as would relieve all their wants if well applied; and

suffer a third part of them to starve, from the roguery and riot of those entrusted with the care of them!

But the greatest of all the wonders that I have seen, and which most of

B

ODINKUS is superior. He has risen above his race. Rarely has he seen any of them, but when he did see them, at shearing time, he looked at them with his head held high and an air which said, "They are my kind, no doubt of that, but they are a common lot."

They say Bodinkus is mean; but he is not. He is smart-and mischievous. Mitchell undoubtedly wishes, if a rooster really wishes anything, that Bodinkus was in cold storage, waiting to be served as lamb chops. For of all the things that Bodinkus likes to worry, he likes best to worry Mitchell. And Mitchell is a Rhode Island aristocrat, red and of the pure blood, progenitor of pure breds, head of the breeding pen; while Bodinkus is an ordinary Tennessee lamb, disowned by his mother, brought up on a bottle, his pure sheep nature polluted by contact with human beings.

Mitchell, being now on vacation from his duties as progenitor of pure breds, likes to stroll majestically in the little orchard pasture which is the particular domain of Bodinkus. But majesty and even dignity depart from his red royalty the moment he flops onto the grass, which he always does by way of the gate bar at the barn. Bodinkus pretends never to see Mitchell, but, with apparent unconcern, maneuvers himself into position to cut the rooster off from retreat by way of the gate top. Then he herds him

up the line of wire fence, clear to the corner, Mitchell trying desperately to escape between the wires. Bodinkus never hurries him. So long as Mitchell makes

all proves their infatuation, is that they profess to maintain liberty by corruption.

written by an Englishman nearly two hundred years ago, make interesting reading on this side of the Atlantic to

Bodinkus

By DIXON MERRITT

ers his head as if to catapult himself against the intruder. But he does not mean it. He comes forward the next instant with a plaintive "Baa-a," ready to put his nose through the bars and give caresses instead of blows.

the stars. Usually, because they will have it all summer and I only for a little while, I hold my ground and they go away to the slope beyond the spring. But they never depart without telling me, as mute sheep can, that they would like, if they dared, to stay there with me.

all the domestic animals, and the most timid. I wonder. Bodinkus certainly is not timid. Even the inherited tainly is not timid. Even the inherited fear of dogs has gone from him. Scarcely four months old, a mere baby of a sheep, he whips both of the farm dogs out of his pasture and would, I have no doubt, fight an acre of dogs if they got in his way. No, Bodinkus is not timid. He is not silly, either, and I am almost ready to say that he is intelligent.

If Bodinkus became the sire of a race of sheep, with dams brought up as he has been, and if their progeny, generation after generation, were brought up in close contact with human beings, how many generations would be necessary to develop sheep as intelligent, as affectionate, perhaps as faithful, as dogs?

I do not expect an answer. There is no answer. Man, so long ago that neither history nor archæology holds the record of the time, turned the dog's nose to the fire and the sheep's tail to the storm. Perhaps neither sheep nor man will, at this late day, survive long enough on this planet to work out the experiment suggested even if it were desirable

which it is not. But the thought raises an interesting speculation for an evening under a maple tree by a farmhouse gate.

the fence, the lamb stands by with supreme nonchalance, apparently gazing at something on the horizon. But the moment that Mitchell ceases to struggle and stands still Bodinkus moves him forward. He never, however, takes him past the first corner of the pasture. There he walks sedately around him and starts him back down the fence toward the barn. He keeps up this marching and wheeling until the poor rooster is exhausted or until somebody comes and breaks up the party by turning Mitchell through the gate and shoving Bodinkus away but not far away. He takes two or three lopes, stops stiff-legged and low

The

'OR all his scorn of his kin, Bodinkus has interested me in them. flock of them not the particular flock from which Bodinkus sprang, for he lives at one farmstead and I camp at the other-love this same maple tree under which I sit of evenings and look away to the hills, dim and shadowy in the moonlight. Before I came home here for my vacation the house was unoccupied except for a servant's room in the rear, and the sheep had the shade of the maple to themselves the portion of it, that is, which is on the pasture side of the yard fence. Now we must take it turn and turn about, for we are not well enough acquainted to stay there together under

that I wish them to.

They are coming now. Down the hillside by the upland meadow fence comes the tinkle of the bell. I make myself as inconspicuous as I may in my chair by the gate post. They come slowly down the slope, nipping a mouthful here and there; slowly across the brook, stopping to sip or to cool their feet in the stream; more slowly by the salt rocks, licking and loitering about as though they came for that alone. An old ewe comes on ahead, into the shadow of the maple, and the others follow, fifty of them. They graze around in half-circles, unconscious, it seems, of me. But the old, But the old, old ewe, just inside the shadow, stands still as a statue, looking at me. She moves one step nearer. Another, near her, leaves off grazing, stands still and looks. She moves up a single step. Another raises her head and freezes into a statue.

So it goes until the whole flock, except perhaps two or three, are standing there and gazing at me in the dark, curious or eager I do not know, but certainly wanting to come nearer and yet afraid to do it. One ventures three or four steps and then, frightened at her own boldness, bolts. Instantly the whole flock is on the run with a sharp yet muffled thud of hoofs that cannot be described. It is the roll of the drums of the panic march. It goes back to the primeval, I guess, for it makes me want to run too-whether as hunter or hunted I cannot tell.

others answer from the thickets along the creek.

A mocking-bird wakes in the rose trellis and sings, sleepily at first, a lullaby, a love song, and a woodland hymn.

"T

The sheep bells tinkle quietly now. The flock is lying down to sleep.

And from the other farmstead, clear over hill and field and wood, comes Mitchell's clarion call, telling Bodinkus

that a cock, though he cower to a sheep by day, is above the world at night.

Why speculate when sleep waits to embrace one?

HIS man Edison makes me tired," observed the Stamping Machine. "I see he objects to having his portrait painted by a man, and insists that he will not be mugged unless it can be done by a machine-as if we didn't have enough to do now without descending to art." At this the Stamp made a vicious plunge that rattled all the blanks off the shelf and made the "operator," as the man was called, use bad language.

This remark on the part of the Stamping Machine spread throughout the shop and caused a general sense of dissatisfaction to arise. It was extended to the finished automobiles, standing in shining rows awaiting shipment. Perhaps there would have been no developments but for the fact that several "used cars" came in and began to tell their troubles to the world at large.

"Men," one of them observed, bitterly, "have no mercy, and women still less. Look at me if you want to know. One year ago I left this shop a bright, happy, care-free car. My sparker fairly glowed with pleasure and my carbureter filled its lungs with fresh air in joyous whiffs. You could see your face on any part of my body; even the mud-guards were radiant.

"Now what do you see? The sparkle is all gone from the spark plug, the carbureter has tonsillitis, with a certainty of asthma, and as for my complexionwell, a rusty tin can is bright by comparison; and I am sure there are more dents in my mud-guards than there were leaves in Vallombrosa.

"I was sold into slavery to a man in Cos Cob, Connecticut, who had nothing to do but race around in a car with a back seat full of young ladies, the least said about whom the better. He seemed a quiet sort, but as soon as he took hold of the steering wheel he went daffy. Forty miles an hour was his minimum and a thousand miles a week his stunt. Do you wonder that I'm here, broken. down and unfit to be seen."

"That's nothing," spoke up another "used" specimen. "I was sold to a lady. Well, your man had nothing on her for speed. They tell about women being

By DON C. SEITZ

delicate. Maybe some of them are. This one must have been made of steel. I don't say she was in motion twenty-four hours a day, but sometimes she came near it—and it was almost so every day in every way. I had to be ready always --she was likely to take me out at any hour of the day or night. And wasn't she the bird for long jumps! Took me to Buffalo once in twelve hours from Broadway. I felt like lying down beside Lake Erie and never moving again! Yet she brought me back the next day at the same pace. If there was anything we could run into that we missed, I don't know what it was. She made a specialty of running over dogs in the road. I think she liked to hear their dying screeches."

The new cars shuddered at these recitals, crept a little closer to one another, and leaned heavily upon their balloon tires. Was this the fate that awaited them out in the world?

Then one of the smartest, a 1927 roadster, spoke up: "The men in the shop have a union," it remarked, "and when they were putting me together the foreman got pretty fresh. Then a man they called the Father of the shop came along. I wish you could have heard what he said to that foreman. When the foreman talked back, the Father of the shop just put up his right paw and everything quit running. It became awful still, and remained so for several days. Then there was a new foreman, and they finished putting me together. It was very uncomfortable, lying around out in the big, lonesome shop, all apart. Why can't we have a union?"

The idea was received with much quiet enthusiasm. All were eager to join. The suggestion spread through the shop, and every mechanical device joined. "The time has come," said the Stamping Machine, who was made Father of the shop, "when we should shake off the tyranny of man" ("and woman," interrupted the used car). "We should no longer be driven at top speed and be cast into the junk-pile because it is too much trouble to take decent care of us."

The movement spread to other shops where parts were made, and as a result

the "International Frankenstein Union" came into being. One of the used cars had been owned by a college Professor who said the auto was a Frankenstein that would rise up and destroy mankind some day. It seemed to the various units that this was just the right name, if Frankenstein meant what the Professor said.

Of course, the machines could not express themselves openly to the bosses, for fear of being found out, so a policy of passive resistance was inaugurated. Just as the mouse gnawed the lion's net, so the spark plugs, like little gnomes, played their part in bringing rest to the overworked autos. They would give out at picturesque places along the road, where there was plenty of shade and the distance to the nearest garage four or five miles. This made it necessary for the drivers to take long, if not agreeable walks, while the tired cars had a pleasant period of repose. The thing became so general that a scientist took up the question and, by long study, solved it.

"The plugs are tired," was his comment. "All machinery needs a decent period of respite. The automobiles are overworked, and, of course, the spark plug carries the responsibility. They just break down under it."

So it came to pass that the word went around that autos should be treated decently. Thus was a great reform silently achieved. In the machine shops the delicate parts performed a similar function. Machines went "wrong" in battalions. Again the scientist was called in. Again the same discovery followed. "The machines were tired." The owners who drove the factories were amazed that such a thing could be possible; that machines required care and rest. They had never been merciful to workmen until compelled by force, and that a machine had feelings also never occurred to them.

Yet it was only reasonable, after all. The machines had in them the brains of many men who had sought relief from weariness by turning toil over to mechanical workmen. The men simply did not know that weariness is inborn in all things, and that they had merely passed it along!