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and pain! No matter. Neither justifies excitement. Both are with us always. No child arrives without them. Whoever sets out, as I am doing in this old, misused orchard, to repair the neglects of the past, will escape neither.

Two catégories of opponents confront me. Suckers on bole and limb. Viciousness is not in them; they are merely in the way and wasting sap needed for fruitful purposes. In these respects they resemble many persons and institutions, with whom one must deal firmly but gently. I have a sportsman's axe — a tiny thing of goodly steel that takes almost a razor edge. A quick blow from beneath with this sends many a light stick to the ground. Where there is no room for that decisive stroke, or when the offending wood is too robust, the saw's the thing! And for the upper limbs there is the pruning hook symbol of peace, into which Micah and Isaiah agree the spear shall be beaten at last.

Not so deftly does one deal with the suckers springing from the base. Light tools are useless against those tough stringy shoots. With patience the saw will serve; but that kills time. Besides, the stubbornness of the things rouses the fighting spirit. I fall to with a broad-blade hatchet, built more for weight than edge. The sweat drips. from the forehead; this is real work, close to the ground. After a trial of it, few would disagree with Charles Dudley Warner that the crying need of agriculture is a cast-iron backbone with a hinge in it. Mere twists of the wrists no longer serve; put your back and shoulder in it or you might as well quit.

For this is no scientific surgery among the tame, but a battle royal against the wild. These thorny thickets are no lush degenerate shoots of domesticity but tough volunteers from the wild root through which, all these years, the tree has been drawing nutriment and with

out whose virile contribution it would have perished. Valuable quality, wildness in its place, below ground, fighting for life against clod and stone and worm. But a cruel, expensive quality out here in the open. It is as if some elder Adam should rise from the grave and run amuck in the sunlight, never again to be put decently out of sight save by slaughter. Hack, hack, hack hack and mind you grasp warily the fallen foe; even in defeat the wild has power to punish.

Once upon a time a primitive progressive ate a small, bitter pear, and had visions of better, fatter, sweeter pears, of plucking noble pears from thornless trees. No doubt his neighbors laughed at him and his family thought him queer. Nevertheless he started the pear civilization. But his descendants overdid it, as they discovered when their thornless pear trees began to degenerate. Whereupon another unsung genius grafted the tame pear shoot on the wild root, thereby providing strength where needed and quality where wanted. Tend well this hybrid, and it bears good fruit easy to gather; but relax your guard against this virile, indispensable thing at its root, and presently you must march against chaos in your orchard.

Is n't that life? The dual nature of these trees has its counterpart in the dual nature of individuals and societies. At bottom there is the will to live, to possess, to dominate; at top the power to die, to give, to serve - tame, orderly, fruitful processes depending upon the victory of primitive forces below stairs. Eliminate the wild root; throttle too closely the instincts which drive men, families, and states to compete

civilization falls through decay. Neglect to keep the primitive in its place and a thorny tangle takes the place of orderly fruitfulness. A dilemma here: must intelligent beings, or

chardists and statesmen alike, hang themselves on either horn? Not so; let the statesmen follow the husbandman's example.

The time came when men thought the blessings of civilization would be ever with us. Safe to let lusts for wealth and empire flourish; safe to give Old Adam, unseen for long, an opportunity to get loose if he could. Gazing at our wealth, conveniences, glories, few noted the wild growths springing above ground. At length the latter had to be attended to, gorily. This holy day is one result.

The struggle between life and civilization, instinct and order, individual appetites and social needs, proceeds without end. The day never comes when an orchardist can look upon his trees and truly say, 'There is nothing more to be done here.' And the time shall never come when those who heed the common weal can say the social adjustment is perfect.

Here and now it is the industrial orchard that bears the golden apples. Its roots are tremendously strong; that is well. But be on your guard, husbandmen, that this power shall minister only to improving fruitage aloft. Easy for such roots to send up their murderous thorns. There is an orchard worth the watching in all truth.

The sun has dipped beyond the Helderberg as I turn away toward the house. Time for chores. Nevertheless I pause a moment by the gate to watch the changing tints on cloud and hill, and to note the order brought this day to one tiny corner of this great country for which so many of my generation died.

A PIECE OF STRING Ir was an indifferent length of string, scarcely more than a yard. Rather

ordinary string. To my untutored vision it was not unlike some string that I had at that very moment in the pantry cabinet. But the string of my title was not in my pantry cabinet at the crucial minute. It had remained in a plumbing shop five blocks away.

Five blocks! In most cases not a formidable distance, but if it happens to stretch between your lavatory which needs repairing and the shop where the journeyman plumber has inevitably left something vital to the mending, it is at once an impressive

space.

You have an uncanny presentiment of the unbelievable length of time it will take for the mender to get that particular piece of string which he declares is necessary, and you hasten to offer him every substitute in your ménage from dental floss to the clothesline. Candlewick! How about that? You've heard somewhere that it was wont to figure in plumbing. At once, and in accents of slithering scorn, you are set right. Candlewick is used in fitting a slip joint, but what has that to do with setting a bowl? Nothing. See?

Um! There is the hard wiry string that came around the new dishpan. What? Not limber enough? Then what about this fuzzy hemp that secured the lately laundered curtains? Too linty! Well, maybe it is. But here is a limber one, without lint, which bound the last purchase of sheets. Not just hardly it! W-well! The clothesline is too thick, the grocery cord too thin. La la!

After all, what did he need with string? The string? The journeyman plumber stiffens with hauteur. You would n't understand if he told you. This is a pertic'lar job, and to go on with it he must have a string, the nearest specimen of which reposes in the boss's shop. And now, with things tore up

and all, why, you'd want the job finished, would n't you? Anyways, he'd had to loosen that bowl a lot worse 'n it was so 's to make it tight later. See? Left like this, it 'd always be leaking, and mebbe run through to the ceiling of the apartment below and stir up a row with the folks down there. It'd be too bad to have all that happen when all that was needed was a piece of string.

He talks fervently. On your time. Two dollars and a quarter an hour. Heavens! Fifteen minutes gone in talk! One quarter of two-twenty-five islet's see. But even as you calculate the minutes tick off at the rate of 334 cents apiece. (You compute that later when the plumber-meter is n't counting against you.)

'I know!' You beam with inspiration born of desperation. 'I'll send William on his bicycle for it so you won't have to stop work.'

The journeyman treats you to a startled glance, but at once regains his poise. 'Now, lady, I gotta go for that string myself. See? The boss might send the wrong kind and hold up the job longer 'n ever. Anyways, I can't do nothin' till I get it.'

He goes. You look at the clock and fatuously hope his car will not suffer any untoward accident at your expense. He ought to be back in ten minutes, but your psychic antennæ gather that he will not.

And he is not. But how 'd he know he was goin' to have a blow-out and the spare tire back at the shop? (What tenaciously home-staying creatures plumbers' possessions are!) It took him only twenty-five minutes to fix that tire O.K., while anybody but a plumber'd had to spend three quarters of an hour. One dollar and eight cents' worth of alleged puncture and seventy-five cents' worth of trip. You calculate it while you sort of hang around to find out

what on earth he is going to do with that string.

But you never know. The telephone rings and, during the two minutes you are silencing it, the string does its part, if ever. For on your return to the scene of damage, there it lies-just an ordinary piece of string; as like that piece that came around the laundered curtains as one pea is like his brother. There it lies in the litter of plaster of Paris where the master-mender flung it, feebly coiled, trying to look important and expensive.

I may be accounted bitter about that string. (For I have been using the more intimate 'you' to indicate the universality of the episode.) Perhaps I am. It hurt my pride and swept away my confidence. For, before that string happened to me, I thought I had acquired, by experience with the same slight mishap to the same lavatory, sufficient data anent the eccentricities of plumbing supplies in being 'left at the shop' to forestall any possible hitch by any such phenomena.

To begin with, the bowl was only slightly loose at one side, a screw having fallen out underneath, carrying with it a lump of hard white substance. A laboratory test, consisting of scraping the white substance over the kitchen sink with a knife, analyzed the lump as plaster of Paris. There! I'd do one plumber the unheard-of good turn of apprising him of just exactly what he would need to bring, saving him that invariable trip back to the shop which I had heard my friends deplore. How expensive the poor plumbers must find these trips!

So, on generosity bent, I called one of the first names in the part of the telephone directory devoted to the plumber persuasion. Later I came to choose plumbers by their proximity to the job in question. This first one held sway thirty-seven blocks away. I told

him the nature and material of the bowl, and the extent of the accident; that I had the screw, but he would have to bring the plaster of Paris.

'I'll be right out, madam,' came promptly over the wire.

He brought it. But failed to bring a certain highly specialized tool. I offered him everything from the screwdriver to the meat-grinder, but he had to go back to the shop. Our adieus were final, and it was here that the

He came, but he brought no plaster five-blocks man and the string came of Paris. into my life.

'And you'll have to go all the way back for it? That will be expensive for you,' I sympathized with reservations.

'For me! We don't do nothin' on our own time onst we leave the shop. Our pay begins when we start to go on a job and it keeps right up till the work's finished.'

'At what rate?' I managed weakly. "Two dollars and a quarter an hour,' grimly.

I sat up late that night. Taking the number of go-back-and-getters shown in the directory and dividing them into the town's population, I was able to estimate the plumber census of the whole country.

I computed that the number of highly remarkable tools left behind at the shop in a single year would equip every Ford turned out at the Detroit factory since 1921, includ

'I asked you to bring that plaster of ing trucks. And that pieces of string Paris with you.'

'I had to come look at the job first.' 'Did n't you know exactly what had

to be done?'

fetched by special trip, if laid end to end, would reach from Bangor, Maine, to Bozeman, Montana.

I took these figures to a neighbor

'Yes 'm, but I hadda come look who declared the tool estimate confirst,' doggedly.

servative enough, but the string com

'Do you ever fasten marble bowls putation somewhat high. It was only up without plaster of Paris?'

'No 'm, but I hadda come look at it,' more doggedly.

'Well, go on back to the shop and stay!' I flipped cattishly. And he did.

The next plumber held court twelve blocks distant the five-blocks one could not be roused. He would fly at once to my aid, but I held him dangling until I minutely described to him my needs. Sternly I declared that if he did not bring plaster of Paris we could not deal.

in extreme cases that it factored. But take wire, he said. Why, the wire which had to be used to open stopped drains, and which was always left in the shop, in a single year would bale the nation's hay crop from Syracuse to Sacramento.

As for my case, it was just a piece of string. But it has tripped my optimism about democracy and disturbed my faith in liberty, equality, and fraternity. America harbors at least one highly favored class.

THE CONTRIBUTORS' COLUMN

Samuel Strauss, long editor of the New York Globe, now publishes and writes a little paper of personal philosophy very stimulating to those who follow it. Recalling Emerson's phrase, he observes how in America things have climbed into the saddle and with a flaunting standard of living are now riding mankind at breakneck speed. ¶In the din of accusative campaigning, we accept with pleasure the opportunity of printing something really agreeable on the oil question. John H. Thacher is an oil producer in Oklahoma who won his Majority in the war. Charles Magee Adams lost his sight completely at the age of eleven. Continuing, however, at the public schools, he graduated and entered Ohio State University, where he prepared for his successful career in journalism. From his sensitive experience Mr. Adams writes to clarify and freshen our appreciation of the senses. ¶Returning from the Mediterranean, Lyman Bryson makes his first appearance in the Atlantic with a dramatic account of his meeting with Aphrodite on her beloved isle.

some

Wilfrid Gibson's Northumbrian verse has all the tang and pucker of a local fruit. ¶Writing from long experience as President of the Board of the Detroit House of Correction, E. S. Hitchcock discusses the folly of our penal theories and the inadequacy of the institutions which embody them. Will C. Barnes is in charge of all livestock 9,776,000 head-grazing in our national forests. A ranger for twenty-six years, Mr. Barnes served as an Indian fighter in Arizona and was awarded the Congressional medal for breaking through the Apache lines and bringing help to a besieged armypost. Charles M. Sheldon is editor of the Christian Herald and author of In His Steps, one of the few books to have sold over a hundred million copies. Years after publication, Mr. Sheldon had an opportu

nity of realizing the theory of his famous story. For these days of marital difficulties, when one wife is often too few or too many, E. Barrington describes that happy solution which was enjoyed by a witty bachelor of another century.

One hundred years ago Samuel and Nancy Ruggles were teaching missionaries in the Sandwich Islands. Mr. Ruggles, one of the scholars whose work was to form a written language of the Hawaiian tongue, so won the favor of the royal convert, Queen Kapiolani, that he was adopted as her son and was presented with her feather cape and wash towel. Fullerton Waldo, for sixteen years an editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, recounts the happiest hour of his life. With clear and incisive judgment, Clifford H. Farr, Professor of Botany at the University of Iowa, separates two different but exceedingly tangled lines of thought. ¶Of remarkable influence in Anglo-Indian missions, C. F. Andrews is now in Bengal studying the opium and labor problems on the rubber estates. His friendship with Gandhi is old and intimate.

In his dubious estimate of the politiconaval developments since the winter of 1921-22, Hector C. Bywater takes occasion to correct the Japanese criticism directed against his Atlantic paper of last February. Mr. Bywater is regarded by progressive opinion in England as the best of the naval critics. Ambrose Paré Winston is AssociateProfessor of Economics at the University of Texas. We regard the anonymous author of the paper on the Lausanne Treaty as both impartial and informed. Robert Glass Cleland, Professor of Hispanic-American Relations in Occidental College, Los Angeles, is editor of the Mexican Year Book, and the author of a standard history of California.

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