gave a housewifely look to the fire in the stove, turned the lamp low, and lay down on the bed beside the sleeping baby to wait for Jim. In a few moments she was fast asleep.

When he burst from the house, Jim had turned his sullenly bent head toward Fraser's. He was a product of that reserved race which holds the bleak coasts of the North Atlantic. His father had kept the lighthouse on an island which the sailing directions, gotten out by the Hydrographic Office, describe as "not permanently inhabited." There Jim had been born. To his young eyes, the octagonal seventy-foot lighthouse had loomed huge and high, and he had felt a pride in its indomitability. It was painted a sheer white, and the red lantern had glowed with a vivid warmth. Between the end of the island and Menadou Head on the mainland raced a tide-rip so savage and strong that the kelp on the easily seen bottom stretched like rubber ropes and writhed like fathom-long eels, seeming always to make headway against the fierce current, yet never gaining a hair's breadth. On the rocks, gulls built their nests so close together that one almost over-lapped another, and the silverwhite birds rose cumbrously whenever a ship passed, flinging down on her from heavy beaks harsh cries as of desolation and despair.

THE lighthouse, the diaphone, the gulls and the waves were the only companions the boy had known. His father never took him to the mainland. The only woman he had ever seen had been the mother he could scarcely remember. His father had taught him to read and write and given him a little arithmetic.

"That's all you'll be needin' to know fer to tend th' light," Colin McKenzie had said laconically. And, inheriting his father's taciturnity, the boy had said nothing. But in a seaman's chest, salvaged from a wreck on the northern end of the island, he had found a book called "General Navigation," and it had fascinated him. The obstinate father had taken the book away, but the obstinate son had searched for the book until he had recovered it; and on long nights when the North East gales tried to tear the lighthouse from its base on the trap rock, then, foiled in that, hauled to the South East and tried to choke the revolving white light with fog, Jim, snug in his blankets, had grounded himself in navigation. He had begun at the book's very beginning, that is, with the

note:

The directions of the winds are given for the points from which they blow; the directions of the currents, for the points toward which they set.

References to Mercator's chart had puzzled him. He knew nothing of the loxodromic curve. But he learned that sound, when travelling against the wind, often is thrown upward, so that a man aloft may hear a fog signal inaudible on deck; of the use of oil for modifying the effect of breaking waves; he learned that when at anchor in an open roadstead he must suspend his oil bags from the jibboom or haul them ahead of the vessel by means of an endless rope rove through a tail-block secured to the anchor chain.

These and innumerable other odd bits of information his book gave him, fragments, all valuable, of the accumulated wisdom of men who from the beginning had answered the subtle summons of the sea. Tingling he read, and thrilled he dreamed. By the time he was twenty, straight as a spar and wide as the door of the lighthouse, the summons had become irresistible. The Charming Lass, trying to keep her course through a flat calm, had glided one glistening, blue day close to the island, and Jim had rowed out and stepped eagerly over her rail into the life for which he had longed.

They had put in for water that afternoon at Menadou and to Jim, all of whose magnificent, untried young energies cried out for temptation, the town was a marvel. The crew said they'd take him through. But before they could keep their promise Fortune had stepped in and showed him young womanhood in all its perfection in Nora Tavish. A storm had kept the schooner in the harbor for four days, and when she tore out through the white water for Placentia, Newfoundland, Jim

went with her, celibate as a monk, his one desire to make money enough to marry Nora.

Captain Murdick, who had thrown the two together, was grim, oblivious, and delighted. The crew jeered Jim, but he turned laconic. When one of the men grew bolder, Jim knocked him cold. After that, they respected him and his love affair. Tireless as the tide and obstinate as drift ice, he worked to learn the schooner and what she required of him. This, added to his ability to handle the crew, settled it: Captain Murdick put Jim in as mate. Jim rented and furnished a little house just outside the town of Menadou, and married Nora.

A short year, that marriage, the coming

seemed to him now a memory vague and concluded as a dream. For the glare and the heat in Fraser's saloon, and still more the fact and the cause of his coming; fixed him motionless before the crowd. He knew almost none of them. Though he was a sailor, he was not a drinking

man. He had always despised the longshoremen who hung about Fraser's. And his face showed this and the crowd gave way, watching him diffidently. But when he ordered whiskey, they pressed. around him, claiming him familiarly as one of themselves. "You'll have a fair wind fer yer run out in th' mornin'," said Duncan McClave, wiping his scraggly mustache with the back of his hand. He was a cod-scrubber in a fish-packing house on the dock and could neither swim nor sail; he was a dirty, ineffective complainer, who never tried either to better his lot or stay sober. "Come over 'ere. 'ere's Jim McKenzie," McClave called to the gabby stranger in the tight-cut checked suit. "Jim McKenzie's mate o' th' Charmin' Lass, th' best three-sticker in any harbor between 'ere an' Placentia, Newf'undland."

Mr. Cullum, the fat stranger, caught Jim's hand between two soft, hot palms. "Yes," he said, "I've

seen your skimming dish. And," he went on familiarly, "I wouldn't mind looking her over when you take me aboard of her. You'll find me here, right where I am, any day or night for another week."

Jim tore his hand free.

"I'm a city man," Cullum went on, "here on business. So you're sailing your schooner up to Newfoundland? Lots of pretty girls there, I guess," he added playfully. Then, seeing Jim's frown grow blacker and blacker, Cullum resumed, "You're not a married man; I cantell that! Girls are all right, but when it comes to wives and children-! As I was telling the boys here..."

Jim gulped down the contents of his glass, flung himself into a chair by the wall, and stared savagely about

girlhood. And against the background of her daintiness, her devotion, her loyalty, and her self-denial, he saw his obstinacy, the fault which had been his.

He got to his feet without formulating what he should say to her. He was as direct and as simple as his Scotch ancestors who had "told the time of day by the shadows in the glen"; but he had as well all the intensity of his strong, Northern blood and the passion of superb

"You know, or you ought to," said the Captain, shaking off Jim's hand. "What'd you go in there fer an' get likker onto yer breath? My wife don't like to smell likker onto a man, an' neither do I, when th' man's mate o' my schooner an''s got a nice wife an' a nice little babby!"

In shame Jim looked across the level be tween his eyes and the captain's, and said haltingly, "Cap'n Murdick, I-bin-a-" "You bin," said the Captain. "That's what you bin."

"An'." Jim went on huskily, "she won't never have th' like o' it again from me. I'm goin' home now an tell her so."

"Not now," said the Captain gruffly. "Not like you are now. You're not right toto-night."

"But I got to say good-bye to 'em before we clear in th' mornin'," Jim said, then looked away, tormented and trembling at the memory of his last words to Nonie: his threat and her promise. "I'm goin' home now," he said: "I got to go home and see 'em now."

Captain Murdick brought his face close to Jim's, and said; "I tell you you're not fit to say good-bye to 'em to-night, an' neither are you, not with likker onto your breath. Go down to th' schooner an' turn in. I'll have one o' th' hands wake you afore we clear in th' mornin' so you can run up home an' say good-bye."

Captain Murdick turned abruptly and faced off to his house. He said to his wife as he hung up his dripping sou'wester, "I'm thinkin' Nora'll be lonely: she's young, an' with Jim off on th' schooner-Likely you'd best go up an' see her in th' morning."

him. This was Fraser's. Here was the fun he had boasted to Nora would be his so readily. These were the friends he'd told her would be waiting to welcome him, these dirty, blear-eyed sweeps! For this, he had... Cold with fury at himself now, he got to his feet, looked threateningly about, forced down another drink of the fiery cheap whiskey, then went back to the chair he had left, and sat forbidding and still for a long time.

Through the close air, dimly lighted by the smoking lamp, he looked about that foul room and pictured his own snug little home, comfortable and sweet and clean because Nonie made and kept it so. That was it: it was Nonie. They had little enough money: the mate, even of a three-sticker, is not paid overmuch, but she made his earnings serve, and more than serve; and though many girls he knew seemed content, on becoming wives and mothers, to sink into slovenliness, Nonie had preserved the daintiness of her

physical vigor; and even in his humility he hungered to hold her in his arms.

As he charged the swinging door, making for the street, the door swung in, and Captain Murdick faced him, saying evenly, "Lochie Buchanan told me you'd gone in 'ere, but I didn't believe 'im. My wife an' I figgered we 'd go an' see you an' Nora, to-night. Goin' to be home?"

"Why, yes, Cap'n. Course!" Jim began eagerly and stumblingly. He put his hand to his head and moistened his lips. "Nonie 'll be glad to see you. We'll both be." But when they reached the sidewalk, Captain Murdick said slowly, "We'll come an' see Nonie another night."

"Come to-night," Jim urged. "Come now!" He tried to lead the captain along. But Captain Murdick held back, saying, "No, Jim, not to-night; it wouldn't be best."

"Why not?" Jim asked, putting his hand on the captain's sleeve. "Why not to-night, Cap'n?"

"I think likely, I think likely," his wife said, "an' I'll go."

Jim walked blindly down the black path to the wharf. The Charming Lass now lay at her moorings a hundred yards off shore. Lochie Buchanan was just putting out in a dory, and Jim hailed him, clambered in, and sank down on the after thwart.

"Looks as if we was in for a howler," Lochie began awkwardly. "We won't need to scrub down no decks to-morrow or next day, likely."

Jim said nothing. He felt numbed, unable to endure the merciless insistence of his thoughts. He kept his weary eyes on the green riding-light of the schooner, boarded her the moment the dory bumped her side, then crept below and stretched himself just as he was on his bunk.

It was long before he slept: even the

T

HE newest theory about humor

(which is also oldest) is

the

that every joker has it in for something-chiefly for himself-and that his jokes are merely the way he slips by his politeness censor and gets in his licks at the old world without shocking anybody.

If this is so, every colyum conductor must carry around a staggering burden indeed, yearning for some confessional whereat to ease his

soul unfacetiously. Judging by the fun he has at the expense of the world in the songs and sallies that make up that dearly beloved American institution "the colyum," and by the enthusiasm with which his fans root him on-Heaven knows what terrible hidden things rankle in his bosom.

Most of us who laugh with these punchinellos of the press know them little and would be glad to get a line on what sort they are; what they think of their jobs; how they came to be in them, and what of their own work they like best.

That's why we've opened this colyumist's corner, where every month one of them may take off his motley, ease his hammer and tell us about himself without restraint. We don't care a hang what they say; we don't even demand that they be funny. Was there ever a humorist who took himself humorously?

I

THE EDITORS.

ONCE asked a negro, who was waiting to be quite legally hanged in a county jail down South, how he had happened to commit the crime which had brought him to the shadow of the gallows. He gave the question some moments of intense thought I could almost see his skull rising and falling in billows as the inquiry moved underneath it, through the mazes of his convoluted cerebrum; and the unusual mental effort brought the streams of sweat down his face. Finally he answered: "Well, I dunno, boss."

At an earlier period of my newspaper experience I inquired of Mr. Booth Tarkington how he had happened to write a certain play. I was a cub reporter on a Washington, D. C., newspaper; "Monsieur Beaucaire" was being tried out there, and Mr. Tarkington was on hand to see it. I had never interviewed a playwright before. The city editor had said: "Go and

interview Booth Tarkington about his play," and I went. But when Mr. Tarkington received me, I didn't know what to ask him. Finally I broke a silence that was becoming distressing, to me at least, by saying:

"This is your first play, isn't it, Mr. Tarkington?"

"Yes," he said, "this is my first play." The silence gathered again, and after a while Mr. Tarkington offered me a cigarette, or something. By the time it was consumed I had thought of another question.

"Do you like the play, Mr. Tarkington?" I inquired, brightly and cheerily.

"Oh, yes, I like the play." During the next period of silence Mr. Tarkington, who had been feeling sorry for me, began to feel sorry for the entire human race; he felt sorry for the human race because it contained a person as stupid

as I; I perceived this sorrow working in Mr. Tarkington and determined to make one final effort to redeem myself-and I did achieve a third question. I projected, with a false vivacity:

"How did you happen to write this play, Mr. Tarkington?"

Mr. Tarkington had answered the former questions easily-in an offhand manner-almost trippingly, one might say-but this gave him pause. I could see that he had never had it asked him before; that he had never asked it of himself. He fell into profound thought, which continued minute after minute, and grew momentarily more profound. I could feel that his consciousness and his subconsciousness had leapt apart, startled, and were now standing and staring at one another, each begging the other for the answer. At last he broke down and confessed:

"Well I don't know-I don't know."

I had never realized how I had made these two victims suffer-Mr. Tarkington, who was to see the curtain go up on his first act that night, and the negro who was waiting for the final drop to fall-until recently, when I received a letter from EVERYBODY'S asking me:

"How did you come to be a column conductor?"

After twenty-four hours of anguished self-examination I am forced to reply: "I don't know-I don't know."

The idea has been ad

vanced in the Evening Sun office that the thing came about because I got too fat to do anything else anything useful, at least. Fat men have always been suspected of geniality and good-humor, frequently without justification. It was nearly ten years ago that I began to notice that some of my most serious remarks were received with smiles. I chafed under it at first. But as my girth increased, and my casual words grew wiser, and my habit of mind became more earnest, my reputation as a humorist, among a little group of friends, likewise waxed. I ceased to struggle, after a while; I ignobly allowed myself to seem what the world evidently wished me to be; I pretended to a joviality of disposition that is foreign. to my nature; I began to affect an external frivolity which is really revolting to me.

The thing has gone so far now, that there are certain persons who would be (Continued on page 85)

T

V

TOMMY was wondering, as he commenced to dress, if a train had been robbed at Baker's Junction, or merely if the postoffice safe had been looted.

Both these theories he dismissed, however, on psychological grounds. Certainly an ordinary robber would not receive such personal treatment as that proffered by the threatened tar-brush. At all events, he had little to fear now from the sheriff. He had been purchased without the expenditure of a penny! Tommy's feeling of uneasiness went away completely after he had soaped his face and hands and splashed in the bowl of icy water. Inwardly and outwardly he was glowing. He was finding the situation interesting, and he wanted to see the darkeyed girl again; wanted to find out what it was about her that seemed to appeal to him so strongly.

When he went downstairs and into the garage he was surprised to find in Andy Smith's eye a look that was neither friendly nor easy. This puzzled him, because he had overheard most of the sheriff's second conversation with Andy. He wondered if the garage owner still retained his suspicions and, if so, why he had not taken the pains to urge his beliefs on the easily persuaded officer.

"How does she look this morning?" Andy Smith shook his head surlily. "Rotten. Mebbe I can tell better later on. See if the blacksmith'll straighten out that front axle. Guess I c'n prob❜ly hammer out the fender. Haven't looked her over inside yet," he added gloomily. "Can't tell. Mebbe you'll need a whole new engine in her."

Tommy steered clear of the other's

SYNOPSIS

TOMMY BENNETT, a wealthy young playwright, gives Gwendolyn Playfair, a talented chorus girl, a leading part in his new play. The night of its production, excited by their joint success, he enters her dressing room at the theatre, enthusiastically

kisses her, and invites her to a celebration supper in his rooms, to which he is asking the entire cast. Gwendolyn, frightened, leaves for Chicago on the Green Diamond Express and Tommy pursues the train by motor, hoping to overtake it at Baker's Junction.

Near Baker's Junction, he passes a young woman trying to repair her car. He refuses to help her, and she in return directs him to the wrong road. His car is wrecked a little later and the same young woman, Dorothy Miller, comes up in time to haul him to the village, where her friend Andy Smith gives him a bed. Next morning he is surprised to find that the town is in hot pursuit of him, and that, though no one knows him by sight, he is evidently regarded as a dangerous character. Tommy is ignorant of the reason for this, and, when cross-examined by the sheriff, represents himself as L. A. Burbank, a steamtractor salesman.

In this story Mr. Worts has made his first appearance before EVERYBODY'S eaders. They will be glad to know that there are at least four more stories of his to look forward to during 1920.

touchiness. "Shucks. I need a car right away. How far away from here is Wilkinsville?"

Andy Smith gave him a startled look. "Leven miles," he growled. "Next station on the railroad past the junction. Goin' to sell one of them Steam Star tractors b'fore breakfast?"-this with a trace of sarcasm.

Tommy laughed softly, but he was irritated. "That's the idea! Going to make hay while the sun shines. Have to see a man over there first thing."

"I can't see what in Sam Hill an undertaker wants a tractor for!" was the equally testy rejoinder.

They seemed to have arrived at an impasse. "Well, anyhow," Tommy said briskly, "I've got to get to Wilkinsville. Haven't you a car I can rent by the day until mine is fixed?"

Andy Smith's disapproval of the plan was thorough.

"I don't know. I don't like to rent out cars unless I drive 'em myself."

"How about that old Gorgon runabout in there?"

"Well, I don't know. She ain't so old as you mebbe think she is." "How much by the day?"

"Well, I don't know. My price would prob❜ly strike you as bein' pretty stiff. Have to have a deposit, anyhow."

Tommy said to himself that twenty-five dollars ought to be fair to all concerned. Andy Smith was wondering if he dared advance his price to ten dollars.

"Nine-fifty," said Andy, with a take-itor-leave-it air. "An' you buy your own gas."

"That's fair enough."

"Fifty dollars' deposit," the garage owner added sulk ly.

"What's the matter with my Dulcier? It's worth two dozen Gorgons."

"How do I know she's yours?"

"What say his name was?" "Brown"-thoughtfully. "What Brown? Brown?"

"That's the one."

Andy Smith eyed him narrowly. "What in Sam Hill does Jake Brown want a tractor for?"

"What do people generally want tractors for?" Tommy came back testily.

Andy Smith accepted the money and went across the floor to the runabout, growling under his breath. Tommy, watching him, tried hard to decide what had happened to embitter the pleasant