MEN WANTED FOR THE UNITED STATES ARMY

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TALL, gaunt farmer boy with a very dirty face and huge gnarled hands. stood open-mouthed before the brilliant poster displayed before the small town recruiting office. In his rather dull mind he pictured himself as he would look, straight and dignified, in the khaki uniform, perhaps even with the three stripes of the sergeant on his arm.

"Fifteen dollars a month," he thought to himself, "and board and clothes and lodgings and doctor's bills. Why, that's more than I'm gettin' now on the farm! I'd see the world; I might even get to learn a regular trade." He scratched his chin thoughtfully. "Well, I ain't gettin' nowhere now, that's sure," he concluded, and slowly climbed the stairs.

This boy had not come to his decision in a moment. His untrained but thoroughly honest mind worked slowly. He had been pondering the opportunities of army life for many weeks. The idea had come to him by chance, he thought.

Over a month ago he had been plowing the lower forty of Old Man Huggins's farm. The road to the mountains lay along one side of the field, and as the boy turned and started to plow his furrow toward the road he noticed that a motor cycle had stopped just beyond the fence. "Broke down," the boy commented to himself, as he saw the tan-clad rider dismounting. Over the mule's huge back he watched as he drew nearer. 66 Why, the rider was in uniform; he must be a soldier !"

Sure enough, when the fence was reached the boy saw that the stranger was dressed in the regulation khaki of Uncle Sam, with the U. S. in block letters at the vent of the collar and two stripes on the left sleeve.

"Broke down?" the boy queried, dropping his plow-handles.

The corporal grunted and continued to potter with his machine.

"You in the army?" the boy continued, leaning on the fence.

"Fine life." The motor cycle was attracting little of the recruiting officer's attention now, for he was a recruiting officer, and engaged in one of the most practical phases of his work.

"Them soldiers have a pretty easy life, don't they?" Evidently the boy was becoming interested.

The recruiting officer laid down his tools, pulled out a pipe, and sat down comfortably under a small sycamore tree at the roadside.

"Not so very easy," he replied, "but interesting and exciting." He paused for a minute to scrutinize the prospective recruit more closely. To his experienced eye the boy appeared desirable. Slouchy, dirty, and lazy-looking perhaps; but there were nevertheless good muscles and a strong body under those ragged overalls. The corporal launched into his story.

For twenty minutes the boy listened openmouthed to the stories of post life, where baseball, football, and boxing divided the time with drilling; of mess-halls where a fellow could eat all he wanted to, free; of good-fellowship and fraternal pride in the organization; of the pleasant evenings in the amusement rooms in quarters. And then of the life of the big world, of which the boy had only dreamed; of the Western plains; of Texas, the snowy ridges of the great Rockies, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, the Philippines, Hawaii, the strange glamour of the tropics, the great wildernesses of the frozen North.

"It seems 'most like as I'd like to join," was the timid venture.

Nor did the farmer boy think to wonder at the sudden recovery of the apparently stalled machine.

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Missionary work," explains the corporal. "We never beg 'em to join; but we do sort of give 'em the idea. Like joinin' the Masons, you know," he winked, giving me the grip.

So it happened that Steve Bishop mounted the stairs that day, resolved to join the army if they would take him.

In the small, bare, but immaculately clean room at the head of the stairs he found his friend the corporal banging away at a typewriter. "How are you, Steve? Glad to see you," was the welcome. "Sit down a min

Unconsciously the boy appreciated the compliment; it was flattering to be considered on a basis of equality with this cleancut, rugged man of the wide world.

"I reckon so," he replied, almost timidly. "Well, how old are you, Steve?"

"Twenty-one." The corporal nodded approval. That was all right, then; no tedious formality of securing signed permission. from parent or guardian was necessary.

Then began a string of personal questions as to previous employment, education, details of physical condition, moral record (for the army will have no ex-jailbirds), etc., and finally the question, "Why do you want to join?"

"They don't know why I ask that," says the corporal, "but I have a mighty good reason. From the way a boy answers I can decide which branch of the service he ought to be connected with. If he wants to be a soldier just for travel and adventure, I advise the infantry or the cavalry; but if he seriously. wants to learn and study, I recommend him to the coast artillery or the engineers."

Then comes the physical examination, a vigorous but not exacting course of sprouts designed to find out if the applicant is capable of violent exertion and to discover any minor weaknesses; an examination of eyes, ears,

You'll eat and

"Don't worry about that. sleep at Mrs. Barrows's "-naming a good, clean boarding-house in the town, the owner of which has a yearly contract with the Government to take care of just such embryo recruits; "in the daytime you can hang around town, and the police won't bother you if you behave yourself. If they call you for loafin', tell them you're waitin' to get into the army."

In a week the district recruiting officer, a young lieutenant. drops in on his regular circuit. The men who have been accepted by the non-commissioned officer are put through their paces again, and so expert is the corporal in judging good material that none of Steve's group of eight are rejected.

"All right, says the corporal when the lieutenant has gone; "here's your tickets to the training station at Columbus, Ohio, and twenty-eight cents apiece for coffee on the way. In these boxes you'll find four big, healthy lunches for each one of you. That'll keep you until you get to Columbus."

One of the new recruits is given charge of the form ticket issued by the railway expressly for the Government; is told that when meal-time comes he can get off the train with the others and for fifty cents buy a big pail of hot coffee for the bunch at the station 'unch-room. Then the corporal takes them all down to the train, tells them briefly but plainly what is expected in the way of conduct from a soldier, and winds up with the admonition: "And, boys, remember this first of all; the first duty of a soldier is this: do what you're told to do, do it without question, and do it quick. Good-by."

In twenty-four hours Steve and his companions are at the training station, have taken the oath of allegiance, and are safely and well on their way to full membership in the family of Uncle Sam.

G

I

OD go with you, Father Hippo!"

piped up an affable tousle-head, who had just scuttled back to his mother out of the path of the broad, black figure of the approaching priest.

The mother, a buxom young woman who, in orange-colored shawl and pomegranatecolored skirt, looked like a peasant embodiment of Spain, crossed herself in embarrassed apology, but the big priest lumbered on, vaguely smiling. It was no news to him that "the Thursday" had nicknamed him after the hippopotamus. It was not personal reverence that he was looking for in the Rag Fair, but something infinitely dearer to his silent soul-something that brought him there, often the earliest customer, every Thursday morning and kept him there till midday, peering through his round, protruding eyes at the varied displays upon the stalls

and bending double to study the miscellanies of hardware and the like spread out upon the ground.

An hour later Father Hippo, having plodded across the city, turned into a narrow street whose rough paving was filthy from the donkeys and goats that had traversed it since the last rain. Picking his way as best he could, he reached a stately stone doorway with a dimmed, defaced escutcheon above, and passed through the arched zaguan into what once had been a lordly patio. It was now a bare court where unkempt children and flea-tormented dogs were doing their pitiful best to enjoy the gift of life. The old palace had been clumsily converted into a tenement-house by partitions that cut large rooms into small and by the addition of three tiers of continuous wooden balconies, running about the four sides of the court. These cheap balconies were already sagging and

showed dangerous breaks here and there in floor and railing. On some of them linen was hung out to dry; on others old people were crouching in a spot of sunshine, babies sleeping in baskets, and women gossiping over their work, for the windowless rooms received so little light that the more fastidious household tasks, as mixing the puchero and mending, not to mention the more critical operations of the toilet, as shaving and hairdressing, had to be done in the open.

The corner stairway that gave access to the balconies creaked under the priest's ponderous tread, and heads of rich black tresses, few of them without a gay paper flower worn above the left ear, popped out over the upper rails.

"Only the Padre!

But any excuse for idling was welcome, and a score of bright eyes followed the progress of that slow figure in the broad black hat and voluminous cassock until it disappeared within one of the open doors leading off from the lowest balcony.

Father Hippo, asked on one occasion by an unmannerly person as to whom his household consisted of. had tranquilly replied, "An old fox, a kicking mule, and a white lamb," and changed the subject. They were all in the long, shallow kitchen as he lumbered in-his sister, Concepcion, in the mid fifties; her widowed daughter, Concha, in the mid thirties; and Concha's only surviving child, seventeen-year-old Conchita.

A parish priest, with no income beyond his pittance of two pesetas a day for saying mass at seven o'clock every morning in a usually empty chapel attached to an ancient collegiate foundation, Father Hippo would not have chosen to maintain a family. He had no choice in the matter. Concepcion had been a burr on his skirts ever since her husband sailed to make a fortune in South America. Perhaps he was still making it. At all events, he had not returned, and no letter nor message nor any news of him had come their way for a quarter of a century. He had been a man of furious temper, which he had bequeathed, together with his wild, dark beauty, to Concha. The beauty had won her a well-to-do husband, a master carpenter, but the temper had driven the carpenter to the tavern, and he was giddy with the after-effects of a carouse the day he fell from a high scaffolding and broke his neck. There had been five children then, but four little coffins, all pink and blue and yellow, had' presently relieved Father Hippo, whose scanty

resources were strained to the utmost, of four hungry mouths. Only Conchita remained, timid Conchita with the wistful smile. Father Hippo had bowed his back to his burden, and, except for that one caustic characterization to the busybody, no outsider had ever heard from his lips censure or complaint.

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"At last!" scolded Concha. "And without the water-jar that you forgot last Thursday and the Thursday before !"

"Shh, Concha mine!" protested Concepcion's oily tones. "Your uncle's dignity as a priest would suffer if he should carry a water-jar through the streets. It is natural that he should care more for his dignity than for our comfort."

"So much for his dignity!" screamed Concha, snatching up Father Hippo's favorite soup bowl and hurling it against the wall, where the pretty dish of peasant earthenware, faintly flushed with the rose-color that had often conso'ed the priest during his stormy meals, was shattered into a score of pieces. Perhaps now he will remember to buy pottery."

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And the black-browed virago rushed out upon the balcony, biting her fingers as she ran, while Concepcion, sighing ostentatiously, and Conchita, hurrying nervously, gathered up the fragments.

It was a bad beginning of the luncheon, which Father Hippo proceeded to gulp in silence, but, as Concha had betaken herself and her furies down into court. Concepcion felt that the opportunity, such as it was, must not be lost.

"Conchita's novio was here again last night."

A protesting murmur came from Conchita, and her great-uncle, glancing in her direction. noticed that the girl's delicate cheeks had taken on almost the very tint of his lamented bowl.

He says he will marry her right away, our little one, if-if you can arrange to give her a dowry of-of only five hundred pesetas." "Umph!"

"I suspect he would come down to fourperhaps even to three fifty."

"And where am I to find three hundred and fifty pesetas-or fifty, for the matter of that? It was all I could do to pay the quarter's rent last week, as you know very well. I hoped to be left in peace for a little. But when a man believes his tooth is safe, then it hits on something hard."

Yet even as he protested the priest's eyes