fine Pliegos to show how well you work, and then you tell me you don't really need that good cement, and you will take the other! And I—I, because I am caballero, and have made you the offer of a caballero, I believe you and conform me to one half! It looks so respetable, that white bigote, that I deceive myself! Honor! You haven't even vergüenza, you Americanos! You think to rob me, boy? Go see your jefe―ask him about the cement! And then pay me my money! Mira! Mira!' and he waved a bit of paper in the air and slammed it down on the desk.

"All this time Jack had been sitting like he was frozen, but just then he thawed out! He's pretty tall, you know, and he's so much wider than Peña! Well, he took him by the scruff of the neck and led him to the door. Peña had shut up like a clock that's run down, and he looked pretty sick. Jack opened the door and then at the head of the stairs he turned loose just once! It was the prettiest punt you ever saw! Peña never hit a thing till he got to the landing.

"Jack went back to his desk, and, somehow, he looked about a thousand years old. That little paper-he showed it to me-was the chief's receipt for fifteen hundred dollars, received of Peña! Jack read it again, very carefully, and then tore it into tiny pieces and dropped them on the floor.

"He filled his pipe carefully, but it took four matches to light it, his hand shook

So.

And when I got up again he said, 'Sit down!' just the same way. Didn't want to be alone, I guess!

"Then he began to talk-not to me, but to himself. It was getting dark, too, and I could just see his face like a white blur-and one white patch on the floor where the moonlight came in.

"He saw it all at once, I guess, and after a while so did I. All the nasty little things Levor, of the bank, had said at the club, and the gossip that newspaper man -the red-faced one-had brought from home-it all fitted in, like pieces in one of those jig-saw puzzles.

"Here was the chief, getting an old man. He'd had a hard sort of life, after all, I guess. His wife had gotten herself talked about in Callao, I heard once, and the

chief had left there only job he ever quit. Then she died the next year, and all he had left was Bab-she was just a tiny thing then. He worked all over, and Bab went with him. He got to be a big man, professionally, but he never saved much. Engineers don't get very big pay, even the big ones, and it costs to live down there. But he did good work, and he was straight-and I can tell you, it's not always easy to be straight, down there in the hot places!

"Finally, he had a little something ahead-enough for him and Bab to live on. I heard he had something to do with that vanadium discovery at Oroya. So he said he was going to retire. I know Bab told me once about a little place they were going to buy, up in Vermont.

"Then the panic came along, and the trust company, where his money was, smashed-and there he was, just where he was to start with, and nothing left but his reputation, and his brains an old man now, with a daughter he worshipped, and nothing to give her when he went. That was why he came to Santa Marta. The pay was pretty good. So when that snake Peña came along, the poor old chief was easy prey. It meant thirty thousand dollars to him, for we used over a hundred thousand barrels of cement. How it must have hurt his pride, and how he must have squirmed under the idea that it was only his reputation that made it possible! There was some mistake, of course. We were only to have tested some selected barrels of cement and bundles of steel, I suppose.

"But don't you see Jack's fix? He was in love with Bab, you see, and the chief was her father. He was an old man, and his reputation for squareness was the dearest thing in the world to her. There was no use going to him-he couldn't break with Peña if he wanted to. If Jack put the thing up to the company, it would break the chief, and it would about kill Bab. And if he didn't, he was throwing away every principle of professional honor he had, and which Bab preached. Even if he just resigned, that wouldn't alter matters any. The stuff would be in the job just the same, and it would be he who put it there. It looked like his own honor or the chief's, and Jack to lose either way.

million of any one ever finding out. Only the company wouldn't be getting what they paid for, and were entitled to and what Jack was there to see that they got. It only meant cutting the safety factor from four to two and a half, say. There wasn't a chance once in a hundred years of a flood like last year's, and if it did come, wasn't a factor of two and a half enough? But-the plans and the specifications said it was to be four, and Jack had pledged his honor as an engineer to see that it was four. It was his honor or the chief's

could fill in. At last he seemed to have made up his mind to something, for he dropped his pipe on the desk, turned on the light, and sat down at the typewriter. I thought he would never get done. He wrote a long time, looking at his notebook from time to time. Finally he signed the last sheet, addressed an envelope, stamped it and sealed it. Then he wrote another letter, a short one this time, signed and sealed that, and got up from the machine. He moved heavily, like an old man, as he walked into the

chief's office and laid the short letter on his desk.

"His face looked wet, and his lips were tight shut when he came out, but he spoke almost in his ordinary voice. 'Come on, Russ, let's go home,' was all he said.

"I was just putting on my coat when we heard a horse come down the street on a run. Then some one ran up the stairs and fell against the door. Jack opened it, and it was Manuel, the peon, who had been with the chief.

"Don Juan-' he gasped between breaths. The man was pretty near all in. 'Don Juan- ven! El Jefe está malo! Se muere! Ven!'

"Jack picked him up, and I gave him a drink from the flask in my desk, and finally he talked intelligibly. The chief had gotten home half an hour before, he said, and was just going up the steps at the house when Peña's boy came up with a note. The chief opened it and read it. Manuel said he got very white and tore it up into tiny pieces. 'Está bien,' he told the boy, and then just fell in a heap. Manuel and the boy carried him into the house, and Bab sent for Jack and the doctor.

"We grabbed the first coach we saw

there was a nigger in it, but Jack threw him out and just about killed the horse. The chief was still alive, and when we went in he opened his eyes. 'Jack,' he said quite plainly. 'For Bab. Too late! Sorry!' and then the doctor said he was dead.

"There isn't much more. He was buried the next day-fancy being buried in Santa Marta! And Bab and Jack were married very quietly at the Legation the next week. They made Jack chief, too, and, oh yes! Peña cabled for cement by the Benson. It was just a little deal of his own, you see. The government wasn't in on it at all."

Miss Parmalee's eyes were bright with tears, and she said nothing for a time. Then she asked:

"And what did Mr. Seabright mean to do about the cement before the chief died?" "Why, don't you see?" asked her nephew, filling his pipe. "The long letter was the report to the company, and the short one was his resignation. What else could he do?"

And Miss Parmalee for she was romantic murmured, "I could not love thee, dear, so much

D

The Returning American

EEPLY, perhaps too deeply, interested as we have always been in the first impressions of our distinguished visitors, we seldom trouble to ask the effect that his native land makes on the returning American. Yet an eye, at once fresh and intimate, ought to see further than a foreigner's. For my own part, I never come home without receiving the same vivid effect-one which I have never heard commented on-the effect of the acute awareness of American faces. By this sign more than by any other you recognize your countrymen abroad; and when on your return you see them once more in the mass, you realize the extraordinary difference between them and the nations you have just left.

Ours is not the hard, childlike, almost hostile stare of the Latin, nor the complete indifference of the English. The veil is never over our eyes; our ears are never deaf, however meaningless the sounds that beat upon them; nothing is excluded from our attention, which ripples like a pool to every breeze. There is a peace-like solitude in entering an English restaurant, for not a single pair of eyes will be turned on you; and as for an English railway carriage, one almost feels one has lost all corporeal presence as one enters it. But in America we seem to react automatically to each other. Notice, for instance, the expression of pointless amiability with which the average American enters a public conveyance, and if you doubt it is occasioned by his consciousness of his fellow travellers, compare it with the same face in solitude. Nor does the audience awaiting him fail to respond. They are aware of his every gesture; all eyes are directed to the vacant seat which he has not yet perceived; every one follows his debate between giving his last five-cent piece or having a dollar bill changed; no one really relaxes until he has paid his fare and settled back in his place. In any crowd you may see five or six watching faces illuminated by reflex smiles because some

VOL. LIV.-60

where in sight two utter strangers are hailing each other.

An old English novel speaks of "that blank expression of eye which is said to belong to the high and the low, but which is a finesse of countenance entirely beyond the intervening classes." As good democrats perhaps we ought to be content with the abilities suited to the "intervening classes," and yet we must admit that this is one of the less agreeable results of our friendly equality. In fact, so wearing is the effect of this mutual action and reaction on those fresh from the crowded solitudes of Europe, that we find ourselves asking this question: Is it a high state of nervous tension that renders us all so aware of each other? or is it rather this eternal self and other-self consciousness that has reduced us to our unstable nervous condition?

A

The Final PackingOf Things Material

SI jog on in years, by comfortable stages and slow, more and more often the old figure, favorite of poets and of moralists, comes back to me, of life as a journey wherein, whether one will or no, one must keep moving on. This increasing sense of perpetual adventure brings its own delight; on the other hand, more troublesome becomes that deep feeling of possession of things that impede a journey and hamper one in the eternal wayfaring. If I recapture at times something of that joyous mood with which I undertook my first journey to Italy, with an absurd, illogical intimation of likeness in the destination, there comes back too that old realization of the need of minimizing my personal possessions-taking then, I remember, the form of a conviction that, for the brief journey, I must carry nothing that would not go into a huge extension bag. It is good to pack and travel now and then the ways of earth, because one must perforce sort over old possessions, letting the less worthy go; even here one cannot take one's all. If this task proves

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puzzling, what of the final sifting and selecting, the spiritual house-cleaning that must come before the ultimate packing?

At the outset I find myself hampered in my setting forth; I have lived so long with this earthly furniture, have grown so fond of it, that I am loath to start for any region whatsoever to which I cannot take it. My father's desk, my mother's great gilt mirror, my grandmother's rush-bottomed rockingchair-the passing years and the care I give these things but tighten their hold upon me. I sit and watch my treasures, wondering. The Baluchistan rug, with the leopard-skin pattern; the Herati; the hangings with the pomegranate pattern, deep red and deeper blue, secretly darned in many places by my devoted fingers-how shall I let them go? What those do who really have great possessions I can but conjecture, yet I suppose that, as the number increases, the intensity of the grasp lessens; the human hand, after all, cannot hold more than it can hold. These insistent household furnishings-it would not do to sell them, or to give them away; they would but trouble me the more, for nothing looms so large as joy or possession foregone. Here, I sometimes forget them, but were they gone beyond my walls I could not get them out of my mind with longing for them back.

There is the trouble-they get into the wrong place! I leave them in living-room and dining-room; I find them in the secret, inner chambers of immaterial me. My house of wood was built large enough for all that it must shelter; house room I have; my difficulty is in finding mind room for my good and chattels, for they take more space than I would have them. Amphibian as we are between flesh and spirit, as old Sir Thomas Browne used to say, what shall I do when the time draws near when I must choose my element? I cannot go carrying my rugs, like an old Armenian pedler, along that narrowest way, yet my mind is full of these things, and I hope to take that with me. I do not like the way my fingers cling to the little mahogany table; there will be difficulty in making them let go. The thought of the high-boy at the gates of heaven troubles me; tug and tug as I will, I cannot get it through.

There is some excuse for these prepossessions, for many of these articles have, through long association, ceased to be mere

bits of furniture and have become embodied emotions, memories, states of mind. That aforesaid desk-it is not its deep rich redbrown of old black walnut that holds me, nor its fine, severe contours; it is the personality that called it into being; its dignity, its silences are my father's own. It gives the same infrequent, grave reproofs; it seems now and then to burst into deep, uncontrollable, shaking laughter, the unquenchable laughter of the Homeric gods. It is no mere object, but a something fashioned for my father's needs, something that became himself!

The old daguerreotypes-it is easy to think of them as half-way between the spirit world and the material, in their elusive charm, face, expression, evading you always in whimsical fashion until just the right light, just the right angle, wins a moment's vision. Slim-waisted, erect, with parted waving hair demurely brushed behind their ears, in charming, old-fashioned, surpliced gowns of flowered muslin that they made themselves, my mother and her sister, smiling out upon the world, before trouble came, before we came is this a mere material property, may I ask, or is it strange that I should hate to leave it behind? Or this, which is no daguerreotype, but always a moment's fit of mirth-this now triumphant and masterful leader in the suffrage movement, at six years old, in low-necked dress, curls hanging at each side of her pretty head, her bashful finger in her mouth? And that old mirror, which has reflected the few weddings, the many funerals, is to me no mere object; it is a record of faces, illumined faces, grief-stricken it may be, but holding the high expression of fine insight that comes, perhaps, but seldom, and most surely through sorrow. If we are amphibian between flesh and spirit-what, pray, is this, with its unfading reflection of pure soul?

And these books-they seem to be tangible things upon my shelves; I turn the yellowing leaves and see quaint pictures, fragrances of old days come to me. They seem to be tangible things, but they are breathless moments of wonder at new beauty. The Coleridge, the Keats are indeed

"Magic casements opening on the foam

Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn."

They are whole enchanted days of mirth, of tragic suffering, for the old leather-bound