more difficult, perplexing, and uncertain.

Then comes the perfect day and the dream is reality. We sail lazily on warm, smooth waters under a warm, clear sky, by fairy shores. The air is filled with bird song and myriad fragrances. The radiant yellow shoals in the dazzling green inlet keep their distance. We go on and on to still, moonlit anchorage, forgetting winter and the clock and work and even the faithful log.

Ashore there awaits us an imperative telegram. It is the call of the desk. To-morrow we must turn back, and soon POLLYWOG will be left dark and silent under the palm-trees, to await uncomplaining our uncertain return.

What matter? We have known true vagabondage.

One hundred days of it, indeed, with 1,475 miles covered, seventy for the longest run and two miles for the shortest. In a drive with a full crew and reasonably good weather POLLYWOG could, if she wanted to, make the voyage in a month. But she would not want to. That would be sport, not vagabondage. She was willing to leave speed to her friends of the road who were also money-spenders, and who had no knowledge of the thrill in keeping such an expense account as POLLYWOG'S.

The total expenditures during the hundred days of the cruise were $500, a limitation imposed by the income in the same period. The largest item of expense is for food, $130, or $1.30 a day. This would have been lower if canned goods had not been used so largely. They are very convenient and often necessary, but they cost much more than fresh goods.

The second largest item was for labor, $105, the smallness of which is accounted for by my engineer's youth and enthusiasm.

When he saw where the wind lay, he met me handsomely half-way.

Pilotage and towage totaled $85, the largest item of which was the $50 tow down the outside. Canal fees were $18. Boat equipment and maintenance together were $30, and this includes a new tender to replace the first Little Polly, lost in a Chesapeake blow, besides all the paint we used.

The item that will be the envy of fellow yachtsmen is the fuel bill. It was but $45, and this includes not only engine fuel, but coal, wood, lighting, and lubricant. My kerosene engine used a fifth of a gallon a mile-less than 300 gallons for the cruise at an average price of ten cents. And twenty gallons of lubricant lasted out the entire 1,400 miles.

A POSTSCRIPT

Five months from the day I left POLLYWOG in Daytona, dismantled and ready for hauling out, I wrote to the captain of the shipyard where she is, asking for news of her. I did this because in the five months no word had come from her. True, there was no reason to expect any word. To the captain of the shipyard she is probably just a boat and I am a mere owner. He could not know that I was missing her sorely; that every time there was a bit of weather from the s'uth'ard or a both-anchor breeze to fluster the small shipping on the North River, visible from my twelfth-story window, I was one big hunger for POLLYWOG.

So I wrote, and there came a reply, brief but appealing:

"In regards to the POLLWOG is in fine condision as could be expected."

I wish he had added that Little Polly was doing well.

The GAME of

LIGHT

by

RICHARD WASHBURN

CHILD

AUTHOR OF "JIM HANDS,"

W

"THE MAN IN

THE SHADOW, ETC.

ILLUSTRATIONS by

FRANK SNAPP

E HAD a man in our office whose name was Jimmy Birch, and Great Scott, he was middle-class! Most of the men in the Union Light, Heat & Power Company came from colleges. The old man believed in 'em. He knew they went slowly in the first few years, but he had faith in the finish they made. Jimmy Birch was not a college man.

Some of the men had started in as solicitors in the residence districts and then taken up commercial lighting in the down-town section; and most of them were always fighting to get over into the power department because electric-power contracts mean large sales and in the main are the profitable business of an electric company.

Furthermore, the assistant managers of the company had always been picked from the power department, and the men who sold power had private offices on the second floor of the Union Light Building, with mahogany desks and sectional bookcases, while the lighting men were down-stairs behind the golden-oak counter and the silvery, coppery display of Electrical Appliances for the Home. In these days, which the head stenographer, who has headaches, calls the days of externals, the wood your desk is made of counts!

"IT MAKES VERY LITTLE DIFFERENCE WHETHER SHE KISSES ANYBODY OR NOT. I THINK SHE TRIES TO LOOK AS IF SHE WOULD."

"But I'll stick to the lighting end," said Jimmy when you asked him. "I'll stick to the lighting end because I know it and because it's a great field. Making night a mighty agreeable time for folks is my game. When I get through, they'll be bound to say, 'Jimmy Birch lit!' You get the idea?" In a vague way we got it. Jimmy was probably five feet six, and it must be admitted that he had very little style. He was not exactly roly-poly, because he had a chunky hardness about him which developed, no doubt, because he was active eternally and had a busy-bee manner about him.

"He walks around with his head plugged forward and those surprised, searching eyes looking for bad lighting," the head of the meter department once said. "Jimmy has got drive. Must have had it to come along so fast. Down from a farm in Michigan, elevator boy, correspondence school, reading books propped up on the pillows at night, moving fast by day to keep warm instead of wearing an overcoat. Anybody who gets that habit never shakes it."

It was evident that Jimmy Birch never would. One felt that he would go through the whole of life hustling-not hustling in a mean, get-ahead-of-your-neighbor, worriedto-death hustling way, but the smile, whistle, and hustle hustling that comes from inside a man and shows he is chasing life and is not being chased by it.

Of course Jimmy was successful, for him -about three thousand dollars a year. Customers liked him. One woman with an electric flatiron or a drop-light for a parlor was just the same to him as Stein Company, or Harris, or Buxbaum, the big departmentstore men, or Culver of the Culver Chain Drug Stores. Jimmy used to say to the new solicitors:

"Remember the only sale worth making is the one that puts the new customer on your no-cost, works-while-you-sleep sales staff. When you've got the whole town working for you on no salary, then you're entitled to draw some salary yourself."

This was Jimmy, and the only clubs to which he belonged were the Y. M. C. A. and the National Electric Light Association. You might find him at the Art Museum Sunday afternoons looking at the pictures with a squint under his glasses and seeming perplexed by something in the Barbizon School, or the like of that. Friday night

he had a boys' class in the Marredon Settlement, and the tough ones were for him. At thirty he was still like a child about the sound of a military band and would follow a parade for blocks. And Saturday evenings he used to go into the back room of Schultz's and play dominoes with an old white-top who, we heard, was a veteran of Balaklava or Austerlitz or the Battle of the Nile, and who, with his hump - backed daughter, for six days in the week made spun-glass and silver-wire ornaments for the coiffures of high-browed and high-heeled ladies.

You can see he would not be entered as a favorite in any race for the Grand Prix when it came to marriage.

There was no picturing him in love, beforehand. The best one could figure out, if one were trying to draw a picture, would be that Jimmy Birch would make a botch of it; and that, were his heart ever to turn from light to love, there would be a man or a woman made in the process, but misery, tragedy, woe, and calamity for Jimmy. That would have been a good guess. Only a part of it came about.

The Tyng Day Nursery Trustees held a bazaar. They engaged the ballroom of the Forsyth Hotel. The next day the old man sent from the president's office of the Union Light, Heat & Power for Jimmy.

The old man is one of these Directory of Directors figures. He is in a lot of things, but his real plaything is the Company. Everybody knows that his attitude toward it is a little different from the financier idea. He has given some good parks to the city out in the Edgewood Addition, and a statue of Lincoln in Marredon Square, and he was the man who was general when the panic hit us and signed the scrip we used to trade in while the depression lasted.

Likewise it is his notion to give good public service to the city, and when the Ledger screams to the skies for lower rates and better service and "less greed for dividends," as they call it, old Sutton smiles a dry smile and stands the gaff without a word of protest. He's red and gray. That is the old man. Winters he wears the handsomest fur overcoat you ever set your eyes on.

"Jimmy," said he, "this is a personal favor. My daughter is back from some years in school and Europe and New York, and I don't know where else, with her mother. The girl belongs to this town now and

if she shows any inclination to be serious I want to help. She wanted to go on the Board of Trustees of the Day Nursery, and she has a hand in this bazaar you see advertised with these window-cards."

"That's right," said Jimmy. "I've seen 'em."

"Well, what I have in mind for you is an illuminating job," the boss said. "I want to give the prettiest effect ever done in this town, so that her affair will be a success, and you might want to do the trick." "I'd eat it!"

It

This interview began the trouble. was not that Jimmy Birch fell short in filling the bill. On the contrary, the work he did was a triumph of modern art and a glory to the illuminating profession.

The ceiling of the ballroom did not please Jimmy, so for the occasion he painted it over with a more delicate color which would receive and diffuse the indirect effects. In the middle of the room he built a white fountain surrounded by little pine-trees which some of our linemen got for him in the Bayberry Woods, and it was from this fountain, by a system of concealed, highrated lamps, that the main illuminating value came, and was distributed by an ingenious, white reflecting-dome hung in the ceiling. Along the walls baskets of flowers were swung on ornamental brackets, and in each basket a two-hundred-candle-power lamp was hidden beneath an oval cover of yellow glass.

"There is a blend!" said Jimmy. "The light from the middle-the color from the walls! You know the kind of sunlight you see at five in the afternoon after there has been a thunder shower and the birds are beginning to preen their feathers and sing again. Well, nothing to it! I've got it beat! People would have a good time at a funeral with this light!"

Miss Sutton, the boss's daughter, thought so too. Her name was Naomi, and everything frivolous was her greatest pleasure. For her, we thought, the world was a playground with women's apparel shops on one side and a space for the tango in the middle. George Trent, the junior partner of Colgate & Trent, the brokers, an ornamental young man, looked at the world the same way when he was not making money. He was her particular playmate, and we thought even then that he was booked to marry her so that the two could go on lead

ing a faintly perfumed, polo-pony, six-cylinder, dining-out, low-necked, and dress-suit sort of existence.

Naomi was a little too tall for a bacchante, but she dressed as much as possible in that general style at the rate of two or three thousand dollars for clothes allowance. Her black hair and big gray eyes helped the picture. The head stenographer in our office disapproved of the president's daughter on the ground that, being conspicuous, her duty to set a good example was larger than most young, irresponsible persons' duties, and that she failed to fulfil it.

"It makes very little difference whether she kisses anybody or not," said Miss Dolan. "I think she tries to look as if she would. That's just as bad in these days when boys and girls are giving so much attention to solving the problem-plays and our best families are rigging out their children to look like things that have got by the censors."

Perhaps Jimmy Birch meant to disapprove of Naomi, too. We would have said So. But he never carried it far because Naomi began the acquaintance by approving of his lighting effects, and he forgot everything else just then.

That afternoon she arrived at the Forsyth House in George Trent's car. It was the season when winter covers the ground while spring fills the air with haunting odors, and she brought some of this spring into the empty, echoing ballroom where Jimmy, thrilled with his own power to create, stood alone, his glasses off, his short, stocky figure leaning upon one outstretched hand against the wall, and the same smile of triumph on his face that Columbus wore when land had been sighted.

"It is lovely," said Naomi's voice back of him. "Did you do it?"

"Yes," J. Birch admitted, and then, always loyal to the corporation, he added: "It is the work of the commercial department of the Union Light, Heat & Power."

"This is art-not commerce," the girl replied, slowly pulling a long Sitka fox skin from around her bare neck. "I shall tell my father so. It is too lovely for words!"

"What is your name?" she asked, a moment later, dropping into one of the delicate, gilded chairs and looking up at him with a childish perplexity and curiosity in her large eyes.

He told her. "I designed the lighting in