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blackberry wine is used for a "chaser." This the women make, and they turn out an excellent product.

It will be apparent that a large flow of money is thus being sent through the mountains from the lowlands. Instead of being hunted as outlaws, the mountaineers are rapidly becoming a favored class. Of course, none can hope for limousines and other fixings of the metropolitan bootlegger. Still it is progress. The National Government does not bother with them very much, the situation being left in the main to local sheriffs, some of whom have zeal; others lack of it to the nth degree. Now and then a "special" dry agent drops in. They tell this tale anent one of the latter who came into the Powell's Fort country not long since to tread a "moonshine" trail. He called at the house of the suspect and found a boy at home.

"Is pap at the still?" he inquired genially.

"He is," said the boy. "Could you show me the way to it?" "I could for a dollar," replied the canny youth.

"All right," replied the agent, "come along."

"Where's my dollar?"

"Oh, I'll give you that when we come back."

Mountain Folks

"Give it to me now," was the response. "You ain't comin' back!"

No further details were given. The anecdote is in shining contrast, however, with that Corsican tale of Prosper Mérimée's where the boy betrayed a bandit who was hiding in a fodder stack when the chief of the gendarmes promised him a silver watch. In this case the boy's father took him some way down the road and, commanding the youth to pray, killed him with a shot from his carbine, adding: "We will have no traitors in our family."

Southern mountain boys do not need guardians. The little chaps of ten or twelve are fine, handsome lads. It seems a pity that they do not live in surroundings that will preserve their early manliness. To grow old in the mountains is to become "queer" at the same time. I have cultivated the theory that wherever you find rattlesnakes there dwell poor whites of the self-outcasting type. It is so in the Southern hills, the Alleghanies, and the Ramapo and Schaghticoke regions near New York. In all these the serpents abound. Note the buxom appearance of the young in the family group herewith, when contrasted with their elders.

It will perhaps be considered shocking to say that moonshine money is going to

improve things in the mountains. Bear in mind, these people, for two centuries, have had no opportunity to get money in any quantity in any honest way. Oldfashioned moonshining was perilous and poor in pay. The modern business is just the reverse. The rich people who once despised the "hill-billies" are now their patrons and protectors.

Ambitious young folks from the mountains begin to see chances of escape. Some were always getting away. The trickle is now growing into a stream. The benefits from the fast-coming changes will be large. Remember this is a 100-per-cent American stock that has long lain fallow, choked in industrial competition by conditions it could not overcome, and lodged on such poor lands as to give no chance for prosperity through agriculture. The roll of "mountain folks" who are making good on the plain is constantly growing, while the work of schools like Berea and its kind continue to work unending good.

In spite of their chief avocation, the mountain folks are sternly pious. They are Fundamentalists who take their religion as they do their liquor-straight! Mountain preachers are men of power. A revival is a foaming piece of excitement. Here are our last Primitives!

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Genius at the Guarded Gate

OT very long ago there came to
Ellis Island from the overflow-

ing National archives at Washington an unexpected consignment of public records. When the score or more of bags and bundles were opened, it was found that they contained the original enrollments of immigrants who came to this country away back in the days when Madison, Monroe, and several other early Presidents were in office.

The ancient chronicles, long out of date in so far as legal limitations were concerned, had been crowded out by more modern documents and, being of value solely as relics, had been shipped for permanent storage to the Nation's gateway, very near the place where they were first inscribed. There, at the threshold of the New World and in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, were fittingly buried forever in the Government vaults a partial muster of the men, women, and children who have joined in the making of America.

There is no story to write about the old records. Almost at touch they would. crumble to pieces. But they suggest a story of immense interest to-day in the bearing they have upon the question that has been raised, "Has Ellis Island failed?" The new plan of weeding out or hand-picking our immigrants in Europe, tried as an experiment since August, 1925, the higher officials at Washington say, has proved a success. They say that Ellis Island and old Castle Garden before it have had their day, and that the ten-million-dollar plant which nestles close beside the Liberty Statue in New York Harbor will in future times be used only as a place of temporary detention, mainly for the "undesirables" on their way out of the country.

When one reflects that the Carnegies

By REMSEN CRAWFORD

"The Singing Lad from Scotland "

came near failing to gain entry to the land which made little freckle-faced Andy, then a boy of thirteen, one of the most renowned men of the modern world; that Joseph Pulitzer, the great editor and pioneer in militant journalism, swam ashore at Boston because of some hindrance; that Charles Proteus Steinmetz, master of the electric motor and wizard of the alternating currents, was excluded or detained upon landing here; that Michael Pupin, conqueror of elec

tric intrigues called inductance and teacher of sciences, was held up at Castle Garden as likely to become a public charge when all these close calls of our truly great men are considered, with the thousands of others not mentioned here, it must be acknowledged that Castle Garden and Ellis Island have failed prodigiously, absurdly, in assizing genius at their guarded gates.

The writer of this article once said banteringly, but good-naturedly, to an old immigrant inspector whom he had known for years on Ellis Island: "Why do you make so many mistakes about that thing we call genius here at the gateway? I suppose if Shakespeare were to come here you would rule him out because of that unpleasant little incident about stealing a neighbor's deer which for a time made him persona non grata around his home town."

Drawing out his chest until his bald head looked down from behind, the old inspector, whose lifetime had been spent in sorting out humanity at the Nation's gateway and assizing the character of our future citizens, wheeled around and said: "The law says that any alien who has ever been convicted of or who has admitted committing a crime involving moral turpitude shall be excluded from the United States. Mr. Shakespeare or any other sheep-stealer would have to go back, that's all. Besides, no mortal has ever yet been endowed with the gift of discovering the virtues or the vices of a man by a look in the eye. Men's faults are not written on their foreheads. Genius hides from the gaze of the curious and is often embedded in a physique which any doctor would exclude, just as in the case of Steinmetz."

A very worthy colored preacher who spends his week-days scrubbing floors on

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The Man Who Painted the President's Son

Ellis Island and his Sundays sermonizing before a suburban colored congregation had been listening in upon our conversation. He clarified the situation somewhat by observing that "Cain was the first immigrant in this world when he crossed over into the land of Nod; but Cain couldn't come in here at Ellis Island wid all dat criminal record behind 'im, no, sah, and I doubts very much, sah, whether Adam and Eve could make it without making mighty good explanations, sah."

It just happened that my old friend, the immigrant inspector, and I were both late in leaving the Island that night. We were strolling along the sea wall waiting for the next ferry-boat. An unusual quietude reigned about the place as the hour of twilight came on. The babel of voices from over the seven seas had died from the detention quarters, where hundreds of hapless wanderers upon the face of the earth were housed awaiting deportation or, mayhaps, a favorable action upon their appeals down in Washington. The lights flashed on throughout the great immigration buildings and the hospital where six hundred physical or mental defectives awaited the verdict of the doctor's observations.

At such a moment and amid such weird, creepy sensations there was a sudden burst of music from the dilapidated old piano in the Red Cross loungingroom, close by the hospital. Several

crippled marines had been playing billiards in the room, but the noisy slapping of their ivories soon stopped. It was real. music that most impressive air which will immortalize Franz Schubert as long as there is a soul to be soothed by "concord of sweet sounds"-Schubert's "Serenade." Never has the melody seemed so appealing to the writer of this article as it did that night with its earnestness of tone, its bewildering modulations, shifting from major to minor keys.

At my suggestion, we strolled back down the sea wall to the Red Cross reception-room, and found to our utter astonishment that the person who sat at the piano sending dreams from his finger tips afloat over New York Harbor was a totally blind immigrant-blind since boyhood.

The old immigrant inspector was flabbergasted. "That's how genius stumps us," he finally observed. "How in thunderations is a board of special inquiry going to tell that a stone-blind man like this can make such music? We can't have pianos strung along the line of inspection to test such aliens, no more than they could have had an electrical laboratory for Steinmetz, nor a newspaper plant for Pulitzer."

When the pathetic story of the blind pianist was printed next morning through press associations in every city in the United States, the American sense of fair play and a free hand to talent was fair play and a free hand to talent was

reflected in hundreds of letters pleading for the musician's admittance to the country. Exercising his discretionary powers, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis directed that the Ellis Island authorities release him in custody of his brother in a bond of $500 to guarantee ,expense of deportation in case he ever became a public charge. This he has never done. The last heard of him by the writer of this article was to the effect that "Professor" Camillone is on the concert stage.

Michele Califano came from Naples, hoping to gain entry to the United States under the exemption granted then to artists. He had been excluded as likely to become a public charge because of partial deafness, and also because he had not satisfied a board of special inquiry that he was, indeed, an artist.

Michele Califano's lucky star began rising when his appeal fell upon such a state of congestion of business before the National Board of Immigrant Appeal in Washington, for if he had not been kept waiting in the crowded detention. room at Ellis Island long enough to paint a real picture from life and thus prove himself a real artist he might have been sent back to Naples, where artists are as numerous as taxicabs in New York City.

When the full story of Califano's genius was laid before Secretary of Labor James J. Davis, little time was lost by the big-hearted Cabinet member in letting him come into the United States. Recent inquiry by the writer of this article of his friends as to his accomplishments here brought out the fact that he established a studio in New York, and later went to Washington. There he painted a portrait of the son of the President who died soon after the family went to the White House and presented it to Mrs. Coolidge, who introduced the young painter in artistic circles of Washington to great advantage to himself.

One winter's day while Ellis Island was overflowing with detained immigrants a slim, gawky young fellow from Armenia was found in the back yard beside the detention quarters building up the bust of a woman in the snow-bank of heavy drift. He was of Italian parentage, but had come from that legendary land near Ararat. This fellow, too, had claimed exemption from the quotas as an artist, but his proof had not been very convincing. That morning, while the letter-carrier was going through the daily program of calling out the names of immigrants for whom he had brought mail, this fellow took advantage of the

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moment when attention was diverted to steal out of the back door and into the snow-drift. He was going to build up a woman in the snow and show those doubting Thomases of the special inquiry that he was a bona fide sculptor. With no tools save his long, slender, snakelike fingers, the lad soon shaped the fea-, tures of a Greek goddess and squared off the shoulders in quite a professional way. He was admitted.

None of us will ever forget the day that brought little Alexander Milne, the singing lad from Scotland, to Ellis Island, nor the day he left there to sing his way into the hearts of America. The youngster had come over with his father, mother, older brother, and younger sister. The family had no particular plans for the future--just packed up and left braw and bonnie Scotland because times grew hard and it was difficult for Papa Milne, a cab driver in Edinburgh, to educate the wee ones and at the same time keep the wolf from the door. Arriving in New York, the Milnes were all sent to Ellis Island because of some slight physical defect discovered in the father and the really critical illness of the mother. Clearly, the whole family might become public charges here, so they were all ordered deported, the children as "accompanying aliens."

Alexander slyly approached one of the immigration inspectors one day during the long, tedious period of waiting for their appeal to be answered from Washington and asked him if he wouldn't arrange it so that a few songs might be sung during the noon-hour recess in the big hall of inspection, close to the Commissioner's office. He was told to cut loose, and began with:

So, they sent me off to school
For to learn the golden rule

In the troosers that me fither used to wear.

Instantly the song was a hit. Five hundred eager, anxious immigrants sitting in rows awaiting their turn for inspection for the moment forgot their complicated misery and misfortune and cheered the boy rapturously and uproariously. And then he sang "Me Ain Wee Hoose," and those who knew of the broken-up home of the Scotch family, now excluded and sent back to face the bitter pangs of poverty after such high hopes of prosperity in this land of opportunity, felt a lump in their throats. The Commissioner at that time heard the boy as he stood in his kilties, his clear, sweet, far-reaching voice casting a spell over the multitude gathered from everywhere, and approached him.

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Lauder, just tell him that he has got a rival," said the boy from Edinburgh, winking one eye as he looked up at the official. The next Sunday Alexander was invited to sing on the platform at the regular concert given then for the hundreds of detained immigrants. Among the talent appearing for that day's program was Gus Edwards, actor and theatrical producer. He went to Washington and made a personal appeal as champion of the child's genius and talent, and won out. Under the stage name of Sandy, Alexander has been singing on one of the largest of the vaudeville circuits.

And so it goes at Ellis Island when Genius comes knocking at the door.

Hundreds have been held up as likely to become public charges who have grown rich-become millionaires in the United States. George West, the man who owned fifteen or twenty paper mills, spent some time waiting at the gates. Finally admitted, he got a job in a paper mill in New Jersey, and walked three miles every morning to go to work, "Gin you're acquent wi' Sir Harry earning seven dollars a week. Later he

invented at Berkshire, Massachusetts, some process of putting a gloss on paper. He died a millionaire, after serving in Congress two terms from an up-State district of New York. Morris Gest, who puts on the most prodigious theatrical productions, was held up at Boston when two aunts had brought him here because he was a "headstrong child, and refused to go to school in Russia."

Libraries are filling with such narratives of how celebrities surmounted the immigration barriers.

Not long before he died the late Andrew Carnegie, while in a sociable mood, told the writer of this article about the difficulties of his father's family when they came to America. There was really nothing very much the matter, surely nothing to complain of, but Andy never forgot that waiting around Battery Park and remembered to the day he died the glass of sarsaparilla a sailor treated him to at a soft-drink stand presided over by an elderly woman. He said that in later years sometimes when he would be in the financial district of New York City attending directors' meetings, having

then grown to be a millionaire, he would steal away from the plutocrats and the great captains of industry and go down.

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to the Battery and gaze fondly once more upon the spot where he had drunk that glass of sarsaparilla-"for," he said,

"it was the best drink, the most buoyant and gladsome drink, I have ever tasted."

The Old Gray Cat

Peking, China, April 23, 1926.

OU may be interested to know how we reached Peking, and why we wanted to reach Peking just now, when there is fighting all about and the contending armies have made travel to the capital uncertain and disagreeable, if not impossible. We were going home home to Peking. After a year's visit in our native land, the call to return to the great wonder city of China was too strong to be resisted. We were not lured so much by the thought of the temples and palaces and gardens and busy streets, as by the persistent vision of a little bright-red door in a long gray wall and the knowledge that when we let fall the shining brass knocker we should hear the wooden bar drawn back, see the door swing open, and, standing there smiling, would be our comfortable old "boy" in his nice white coat, and behind him the cook and the rickshaw man, eagerly welcoming and helpful-three trusty caretakers.

We had left the little Chinese house in the care of the old gray cat, but the "boy" was there to tend the cat and the cook to feed him and the rickshaw man to take him a ride if he wanted to go, which he never did, being fat and lazy and rather nervous. We could imagine

the thrill we should feel when we passed through the red door into the first courtyard, then into the house with its quaintly patterned windows, carved arches, and familiar treasures of years of gleaning; then on to the main courtyard with its trees and bushes and stands of flowers, its rockeries and stone basin of goldfish, its wicker chairs and table laid for tea, and in the center of all, basking in the eternal sunshine, the old gray cat himself, calm, serene, unmoved by rumors of turmoil and war.

Such imaginings were not to be resisted, and recklessly, as it seemed to our family and friends, we bought our

tickets and fared forth on the long jour

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And the Road to Peking

By BERTHA S. ALLEN

pleasant thought indeed, so we thought of something else. Later came radios telling of nineteen foreign war-vessels gathered about Taku. This was reassuring. With special wisdom, we had decided not to go on to Shanghai, as is usual, but to change at Kobe to a small Japanese boat going straight to Tientsin -via Taku and those mines, to be sure, but there was, in any case, no other way of entry. Travel agencies in America take no account of small Japanese boats, so we had only our previous experience to go upon; but friends were expecting us, and radios began to fly between Tientsin and Kobe on our behalf, and passage was secured on the little Hokurei Maru, and, with only a day to spare, we started on our last lap of five days, with six other Anglo-Saxon passengers. Then came two perfect days in the Inland Sea, with a stop for cargo and coal at Moji, lying in the narrow strait between Moji and Shimonoseki.

Passengers are not encouraged to go.

winding Peiho between its flat shores, cultivated to the river's edge and looking their best in the sunny April morning. Fruit trees in blossom everywhere; not in stiff rows, but in lovely groups and dotted about singly among other trees which were still gray-all but the

willows, brilliantly green; patches of blue-green and yellow-green vegetables in the tiny gardens; quaint little houses clustered together, plastered over with the yellow earth from which they rose and scarcely distinguishable from the ground itself. This was the China we loved. We had hoped for five hours of it, but within the first few minutes we were conscious of a thickening of the air, a yellow veil over everything, a rising wind. Inside of half an hour a genuine dust-storm, those torments of North China, was in full force. The landscape was obscured and finally obliterated, and we were driven from the deck. Now, indeed, we knew we were at home.

ashore at Moji. Nobody forbids it. By the time Tientsin was reached the

One is told courteously that one may go by the launch. There it lies gleaming white alongside; but there is only a rope ladder dangling in the air from which we might leap aboard over a considerable width of water. Watching some of the crew perform the feat, one decides promptly that Moji is not worth seeing.

After the Inland Sea comes the day

along the Korean islands. We were fortunate in having a perfectly smooth sea -oily smooth-on which the islands seemed to float, light as clouds, in a delicate shimmering mist. Then came a half-day of roughish sea as we passed the Shantung promontory; then more quiet weather, and on the morning of the fifth day we knew we were all but at the Taku Bar; but so flat does the land thereabout lie upon the water that one cannot see it. Boats of all kinds rode at anchor or went sailing by; then quite suddenly one saw a long, flat tongue of yellow mud-China! Tales of mines were forgotten; we thought only of getting over the bar. Then we were over and steaming slowly up the narrow,

dust-storm had moderated. As we

moved slowly past the foreign concessions, foreign gunboats, little and natty, were lined up along the Bund. There is no room for larger craft in the narrow river.

Friends to meet us and all the usual bustle of landing.

What was the chance of getting on to Peking? Peking? That was the important question. No trains running; but a friend going up with a truck-load of goods and two new Fords was ready to fill them with passengers willing to risk the daylong ride through soldier-infested country over the worst kind of road or no road at all, and take the chance of not getting through, after all, and having to turn back or sleep in Chinese hovels. Here was real adventure for any one with red blood and high spirit. We were all agog for it, and sent a wire to friends in Peking to say we were coming and please to notify our servants. After several hours a message came from the telegraph office in Tientsin, asking if we really wished to send the wire, saying

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