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BY HERMANN HAGEDORN

Between the windy dusk and the first pale light,

Spring came with breezes and fragrance. Tiptoe through the night Into the city she came. The city lay dumb.

Its millions of eyes saw not the light Spring come.

They saw not the light feet dance with quick, sharp tread,
They saw not the twinkling fingers, the arms outspread,
The eyes half
open, the lips half open, the hair

Blown back and about on the frolicsome April air.

The millions slept with their tumult of hammers and wheels.
They saw not the Spring nor the troop that danced at her heels,
Singers and fiddlers and pipers and children with lyres,
Painters with brushes and colors, and kindlers of fires,
Maidens with lutes and citherns and youths with harps,
Clowns with parody-melodies' flats and sharps,
Men with horns and boys with trumpets that rang,
Babies with bells that tinkled and twinkled and sang,
Spring with her orchestra, Spring with her rollicking choir,
Spring with her band fluting to dead desire,

Fiddling to hope past hoping, piping to pain,

Love, laugh, and sing! Spring, Spring has come again!"
The millions slept. They saw not the blithe rout sway
With the flutes' high twiddledeedee up stern Broadway.
The towers looked down, the windows stared in surprise,
The arc-lights sputtered and winked their soulless eyes,
For wherever the stony desert showed a tree
Spring and her covey stopped, and ardently
Spring blessed the boughs and bade the cold sap run;
And at each tree, in parting, at each one,
She left a fiddler or a cithern-player

To lure the leaves out with some magic air.
Ah, but the parks were scenes of revelry!

The crocus buds threw back their quilts to see,

The grass awoke, the worms and beetles heard,

And down the corridors sent the wonderful word,

Down the corridors winding through cool brown earth

They sent the echoing, rapturous gospel of mirth.

-"Heigh-ho!" cried Spring. "Lay your ear to the ground, and hark! The grubs are stirring and stretching down there in the dark.

Listen! The voice of the slug-king, calling to war:

'Awake, O slugs! and pillage the world once more!'"

"Awake!" echoes the hollow, "Awake!" the sky,

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Awake!" cries Spring, and " Awake!" her minions cry.

"Awake!" sing the fiddles in music richer than words,
"Awake!" to the sparrows chirp the returning birds;

And the sparrows that hate themselves and despise their kind,
Cheep, hop, and turn in the warm, low, cleansing wind.
"Ai-ah!" cries Spring, and " Ai-ah!" echoing purr
Rebeck and fife and gittern and dulcimer.
And "Ai-ah!" in swelling murmur, first soft,
"Ai-ah!" then louder, "Ai-ah!" surges aloft.
"Ai-ah! Oh, earth, forget the pain and the storm!
Ai-ah! Ai-ah! Oh, cold, white stars, grow warm!
Ai-ah!" What music of psaltery, oboe and flute,
What rapturous risings and fallings of viol and lute,
What calls of one to another, what jubilant hails,
What sparkling of eyes and teeth, what flowing of veils,
What bendings of bodies in laughter, what impudent skips,
What jubilant cartwheels, undulant snap-the-whips,
What rushing of feet, what flame-like blowing of hair,
What rampant revel let loose in Madison Square!
The millions slept. The millions were deaf and blind.
But into their turbulent dreams the new warm wind
Brought far-off flute notes and faint echoings
Of tremulous, bewitching cithern strings,

That traveled strangely into their dreams' waste places,
Waking new hope, old love, and dear lost faces.

All night the fiddles poured clear, silver streams

Across a weary city's arid dreams,

And when the last note fell, all quavering,

The millions woke, tingling, and whispered, "Spring!"

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SOME ADVENTURES OF THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE POLICE

III-GET YOUR MAN

BY KATHERINE MAYO

AUTHOR OF "JUSTICE TO ALL," THE STANDARD AUTHORITY ON STATE POLICE

When once you start after a man, you must get him.-John C. Groome, Super intendent Pennsylvania State Police.

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T began toward the end of January, when the snow lay deep on the hillsides, and when as the smut-faced miners came out of the shafts at night bitter winds caught and belabored them, wearily floundering along their homeward way. Winter up there in western Pennsylvania strikes hard, and it is all a man can do to earn his daily bread and take his meager comfort of it. He needs no extra burden. Life itself weighs heavily enough.

But bad hearts ignore chivalry. Out of some cave of slime had crept men mean enough to rob the poor. For four weeks running, on pay-day night, unidentified scoundrels had waylaid the workmen on the lonely roads and, at the point of knife or gun, had taken their envelopes from them. Or, missing their prey in the open, they had entered and rifled the bare little homes. Sometimes, even, they had boldly done their work in the very streets of the villages, snatching the whole fruits of the week's hard toil and departing before their paralyzed victim could recover wit to resist.

United Mine Workers men and laborers in the zinc and chemical plants were the principal sufferers. For a while they bore it sheep fashion, in the thought that the curse would pass. But when week after week their all was taken from them, and it became clear that the thing had settled to a steady gait, then they revolted, demanded protection under the law, called for help-help from the State police.

Adams, Captain of A troop, received their complaint and acted according to the way of the force. Determining at once the practical center of trouble, he fixed a sub-station there. The little town of Langeloth was the point that he chose. To that town he sent three men-Corporal Mauk, with privates Nicholson and McCormick, under orders to catch the robbers, and, while they were at it, to clean up the place.

The three officers settled themselves in their new quarters very much as a bird lights on a new branch. Then they jumped into their job.

Entirely aside from the robberies, they found, the place would take quite a bit of cleaning up. It was interesting to see how many citizens, whether of the villages or of the open country round about, brought to their door tales of wrong and pleas for redress, knowing that succor lay now within reach. This one complained of a purveyor of cocaine, that other of a disorderly house, a third reported a butcher who sold diseased beef to the people. And so on, with pleas and responses, until Saturday came-pay day, bringing with it its special occasion.

Now what the three troopers did in Langeloth on that particular Saturday, the 26th of February, mattered a good deal to the people of Langeloth, but matters to this story not at all. This story begins with the evening of February 27, Sunday, when the news came screaming over the sub-station wire that Mary O'Hagan, a Langeloth miner's wife, had been brutally assaulted and afterwards beaten by a man unknown, and that she now lay in her own home near death.

Corporal Mauk and his two comrades were sitting at supper when the telephone rang. McCormick jumped up to answer, taking the message in the steady, methodical way that the force employs. But as he returned to report to his corporal his eyes gleamed with a cold fire.

Without a word Mauk and Nicholson sprang up, leaving the half-finished meal. Snatching their caps, all three men tramped out of the room. Five minutes later the drum of their horses' feet had died on the outer dark.

They might have waited to finish their meat? But they wait for nothing, these lads of the "Black Hussars." And, besides, the one crime in all the catalogue of crimes that stands out

The first of these stories, "John G.," appeared in The Outlook of March 20, and the second, "Hot Weather," in that of March 27.

sharpest for their deadly enmity is the crime against womenfouler, as they hold, even than murder itself.

The moon was mounting a sparkling sky. The snow sang under flying hoofs. The keen, dry cold made almost a perfume in the air.

"She mustn't die before we get there, boys," exclaimed Mauk, and, as his words smoked a cloud behind his head, the three lifted their hardy little range horses into greater speed.

Into the open country they rode, over routes where few had passed before them since the last deep fall of snow, and so into the street of a tiny "mine-patch" settlement, and to O'Hagan's door.

It was a ramshackle door in a ramshackle" company house," down at heel, out at elbow, dirty-faced, and unashamed after a long succession of tenants who cared for none of these things. But Mary O'Hagan, decent woman that she was, had kept her place clean within, and the room into which the troopers stepped was as tidy as one pair of hard-working hands could make it.

That room was full now-full of keening women, crouching with their aprons over their heads; of men, silent, stiff-mouthed, stormy-faced; of frightened children, staring from their mothers' knees.

"Where's O'Hagan?" asked Corporal Mauk, as he crossed the threshold.

It was a gray-haired Scottish foreman who answered. "O'Hagan's ben th' hoose wi' his wife,” said he. “Hurry doon, mon. He's wearied waitin' on ye.'

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Mauk strode across and knocked at the inner door. It opened quickly and closed after him. Twenty minutes passed before he emerged. Then, with a nod of farewell, he would have left the house.

But women caught at his blouse skirt, men laid hand on his arm. Doctor and soldier in one they knew all State troopers to be. They must hear the word.

"Will Mary die?" cried a girl.

The corporal looked at her strangely. "Maybe it would be better so," said he.

From the women a long, low wail went up. From the men a sort of shapeless curse.

"Div yez know who done ut? Can yez find um?" a burly Celt rapped out.

"That's my job," the trooper replied, and with the ring of his speech every man in the room was his brother.

Once outside and alone with his comrades the corporal repeated the description that he had been able to draw from Mary O'Hagan's tormented mind.

"It should be fairly easy," was Nicholson's comment. "Thank God it's no easier!" Mauk rejoined. "Or O'Hagan would be a murderer before this night is done."

No need to tell in detail how they sifted their matter down, or how, within two hours, they had learned to a practical certainty that one Adolph Ofenloch, an Austrian miner, was the man they sought. The thing is a method-a science. They are doing it all the time. You can pick your man out of a community as a conjurer picks a card from the pack-once you

know how.

Ofenloch lived in a miner's boarding-house in a settlement some few miles beyond. Thither the troopers betook themselves. "Ofenloch ain't in yet," said the sleepy landlord, standing in his doorway, candle in hand.

“But I'll just take a look all the same," said Mauk. "Sure!" the other assented, leading the way.

Search revealed that the man had told the truth. Ofenloch was not in that house. But it revealed another point of more cheering character: Ofenloch's trunk was in the house, and in that trunk the sum of three hundred dollars in United States currency.

"He's hiding out, now," remarked the corporal. "And he'll

try to make his getaway. But he'll never leave without this roll. He'll be here after it later in the night."

So the three settled down in the boarding-house kitchen to wait.

The place was wretched enough. A faint feather of steam rising from the spout of a rusty iron kettle on the dilapidated stove made its single livelier note. Otherwise the battered table with its dirty cloth, the crippled chairs, the few ruinous dishes that shared the shelf with the sharp-voiced clock, the foul floor, the scrawled and grimy walls, and two glaring, naked chromos in fly-specked frames, composed its graceless whole. A sootsmudged reflector lamp, its wry wick feebly smoking, revealed the scene; but, as the visitors at once made certain, the window curtains, wrecks though they were, effectively shut it away from the outer world.

Silently the three men watched while their host slept, his head on the table, buried in his arms. Now and again came a shuffle on the step. Each trooper, at the sound, would spring to the sharp edge of readiness. Then the door would open while some drunken miner stumbled in, half blindly seeking his accustomed bed.

Most of them were submerged too far to notice the presence of strangers in the room. Some floundered upstairs to their mattresses. The rest, unequal to that effort, dropped where they stood, succumbed to the heat of the room, and slept. Little by little the air choked with thick, sickening odors and strange unhuman noise.

It was the ancient, accustomed finale of the thing that begins on "good old Saturday night." In its midst the three clean-cut young soldiers stood out like three bright steel lances against a heap of mud.

Mauk, almost six feet tall, heavily built, and fine-looking, had been a school-teacher in earlier days, after the famous old Lincolnian plan by which a man delves in the lumber camps or on the farm between school sessions and sits up half the night to read law and the classics the whole year through. Now the force had contributed soldierly discipline to the making of an all-round man. Nicholson and McCormick were sturdy variants of the type. And there they sat, watching and waiting, while the clock on the shelf ticked into the smallest hour.

Now and again some sleeper, waking and dimly troubled by the presence of strange guests, would pull himself up and stumble toward the door.

"Better go to sleep again," Mauk would advise, laying a friendly hand on his shoulder. "None of us are quitting here just yet."

And so the half-stupefied man, soothed out of his hazy notion, would once more subside. Outward-bound news was contraband that night.

The sharp-voiced clock marked a quarter after one. "He'll be along soon," muttered McCormick. "Click-click-click-click," snapped the clock; “click

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The door opened. In the threshold stood a man -not Ofenloch, not the worse-than-murderer, but a very big Negro, swinging a most portentous gun.

"Hands up, everybody!" he shouted.

In the first instant, light-dazzled, the newcomer had seen only the sleepers groveling on the floor.

But as all three troopers jumped to grapple with him, Nicholson first, he looked up with an oath, fired point-blank, and sprang backward into the dark.

Two paces distant, and the aim at the heart! Poor Nicholson sank down without even a groan.

The corporal, behind, scarcely glanced at him.

"Mack, you stay back here and get the man," he called to

McCormick as he leaped over the body and out through the door.

But the corporal's eyes needed also their second of time to adjust themselves. Passing so suddenly from lamplight into darkness, he tripped on some miserable thing in the ash-pile by the steps, stumbled, and fell. As he fell and rolled, his holster ripped away from his belt, the revolver dropped out, and in the moment of fumbling that followed he could not lay hand on the weapon among the rubbish into which it had plunged. Meantime he heard the beat of the Negro's steps flying farther and farther into the night.

"Better get the darky than the gun!" argued Mauk, and forthwith suited his action to the thought.

The Negro, a limber six-footer, was running for his life. And he had a long start. But the trooper, as it happened, was run ning for something just a little dearer than life-for the honor of the force. And he gained on that darky.

The Negro struck a clean, straight-away course over the moon-flooded plain. Perforce he must trust to speed, for nowhere did any cover offer.

On they raced, the two of them. And, though he took no precious time to look behind, the fugitive knew that his pursuer was gaining.

Suddenly he wheeled. "Surrender!" called Mauk-Mauk with empty hands to the blood-stained criminal aiming a gun. "No!" shouted the black man.

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I've killed one State trooper to-night. I'll never be taken alive. You go next!" and he fired. Mauk dropped to the ground as the trigger fell. The bullet sang over his head. Once more the Negro was running. "He'll have loaded every chamber before he knocked at the door," thought Mauk. "Four shots left." And the race began again.

Steadily, steadily, the trooper crept up, with each jump nearing a little. But the big black, though he could not keep his lead, was good for yet much distance. Nearer, yet a trifle nearer, the voice of the singing snow rose on his ear.

A second time he swung round, threw his gun down at aim, and fired, his loutish figure outlined clearly by the moon and the luminous snow. A second time, helped by the brilliant light, Mauk seized the nick of the instant to drop, eluding death.

"Three left," the trooper counted, and sped again after his speeding quarry.

But now, with the distance between them ever lessening, came sooner the moment when the quarry dared risk no more. He fired from a range of fifteen paces. But the corporal, Heaven favoring, dodged and escaped as before.

"Two," reckoned Mauk, scarcely losing his stride's length. Up to this point their course had lain straight outward from its starting-place. Now, however, across the otherwise featureless field, showed a long, low inequality, the shape of a fence, weed-draped and clogged with snow. And the line of that fence, running at right angles with the course, formed the second side of a triangle.

"He'll take to that for cover," muttered the corporal. With the notion he somehow let out another link, speeding up. "If only I can get my two hands on him," he thought, never mind that I have no gun !"

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Close to the fence the black man turned again. Mauk, now so near that the powder splashed his cheek, jerked aside, avoiding the bullet. In a flash the fugitive cleared the rail. But the trooper, leaping after, and almost at grips, by evil fortune caught his foot in a sprawling tangle of snow-hidden barbed wire. He fell heavily.

After the manner of barbed wire everywhere, the tangle spread itself out, wreathed itself, crawled like a live thing, clutching and holding with its myriad impish claws, while the victim struggled in the midst of it. When at last he broke free, the Negro had already established an ominous lead.

"Which we'll cut again," thought Mauk, and chased after. Meantime, back in the boarding-house, Private McCormick no small honor to discipline, sat alert and alone among the pro trate and snoring crew. How little, how very little, he wanted to sit there, Heaven knew! But orders are orders. And, more over, he, too, had to get his man. Afterwards he thought that

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A TEST TO DETERMINE THE PROSPECTIVE AVIATOR'S SENSE OF BALANCE AND DIRECTION Candidates for admission to the Aviation Corps go through a strenuous examination as to their fitness for the service. The picture shows one of the tests. The candidate is whirled about in the chair ten times in ten seconds, his eyes blindfolded. Then he must try to touch the examiner's hand with his forefinger. The manner in which he performs this feat indicates his sense of balance and direction, which must be keen and unimpaired in aerial flight

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PUBLIC SCHOOL CHILDREN MAKING SCRAP-BOOKS TO AMUSE OUR SOLDIERS IN FRANCE The picture shows some of the children of a public school in Cincinnati at work on a Saturday afternoon in a printing establishment where they have gathered to prepare scrap-books for their big brothers in France. During the week the members of this Scrap-Book Unit clip out interesting pictures and articles from newspapers and magazines, and on Saturday afternoon they paste them in large scrap-books. They are reported to have sent more than three hundred of these books to Franc for the entertainment of convalescent soldiers in hospitals

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(c) UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD

COLLECTING BOOKS FOR THE MEN IN CAMPS AND TRENCHES

The photograph shows a group of girls who have brought their contribution of books for the soldiers at the entrance of the Public Library on Fifth Avenue, in New York City. Good reading matter is always welcome in the camps, and everybody who can spare an interesting book can help to win the war by giving it to make our soldiers' leisure time profitable and enjoyable. The widespread movement to provide good books for our men is indicated in the above picture, and also in the illustrated article "The Book and the Soldier," on page 548

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