savings accounts of $10 or more to their credit. As soon as the child's credit account reaches $20 it is taken out of the school bank and placed to the child's credit in one of the regular savings banks where it begins to draw 3% interest.

EVAPORATED CRANBERRIES

FIVE years ago a resident of Man

chester, New Hampshire, took a small kitchen knife, a few bread pans, and a quart of cranberries and started the evaporated cranberry industry. Today he is the only man in that line. The berries are cut and dried; that is all there seems to be to it. It is really a simple process, yet it has taken the manufacturer several years to discover what he has learned.

The dried fruit is put up into small packages holding an ounce each, and shipped, ready to be sold at any time of year, when the real berries are out of the market. At Harwichport, Massachusetts, right in the middle of the cranberry growing area of Cape Cod, a factory runs day and night during the cranberry season. It is asserted that evaporated cranberries will keep forever-that is the chief point in their favor. It makes no difference whatever about the temperature, the climate, or the weather. The past winter packages of the berries were sent out that were put up two years ago. The average price paid to the growers is five dollars a barrel with fifteen cents additional allowed for transportation. The empty barrels are sold to cultivators, who pay thirty cents each for them. The evaporated fruit is sent almost everywhere to all parts of the United States, to Canada and even to the Hawaiian Islands and Panama.

A PHOTO OF THE DECEASED IS PLACED IN THE OPENING IN THE TOMBSTONE

PHOTO GALLERY IN
CEMETERY

NORRIDGEWOCK, Maine, has an

original way of marking the graves of its dead, in the cemeteries. The ordinary tombstones are made with a place for the photograph of the person who lies beneath. A hole is chiseled into the granite or marble and the photograph, usually a tintype, is inserted and a cover is then placed over the opening. Any one wishing to see the likeness of the person who has died has merely to lift the cover.

This is an old custom in Norridgewock; there is one monument, placed in 1865, on which the photograph is as plain as though it were but a year or two old.

The Norridgewock cemetery was the first to adopt the method; it is said to be proving popular with other towns.

Evidently, there still lingers in some communities, the old-fashioned but healthy sentiment, of wishing to keep in touch by direct material means, with one's dead. The latter-day practice of cremation certainly would not meet with favor with the good citizens of Norridgewock. Science can not uproot all old time notions, nor is it best that it should.

quest of Mexico by Cortez would seem, in its life, things of only a few months ago.

The last scientific measurement of the Santa Maria del Tule cypress was made by Dr. Von Schrenk in 1903, a century after Humboldt discovered it, while on his famous tour of equatorial America. Dr. Von Schrenk found that its trunk, four feet from the ground, had the astounding girth of 126 feet.

Dr. Von Schrenk, now an arboricultural expert with a laboratory at the Missouri Botanical Garden in

St. Louis, was, in 1903, connected with the United States Forestry Service. While traveling through southern Mexico, he determined to inspect the Santa Maria del Tule cypress. Arriving at the village, he introduced himself as an official of the United States Government who wished to examine the famous tree. The Mayor welcomed him with elaborate ceremony.

Before the broad and towering bulk

trees had declared the discovery of the approximate age of this cypress to be one of the most important problems in arboriculture. They had expressed a hope that the next scientist who should visit the ancient living monument would not fail to complete the evidence needed.

The Mayor of Santa Maria de Tule, however, opposed a barrier of adamant. Measure the circumference of the tree? Surely. Photograph it? Indeed, yes. But to take an instrument and bore from the trunk a plug two feet deep and one-half an inch in diameter? Horrors, no.

In vain Dr. Von Schrenk

of this one life, which has persisted without interruption since the date of the dawning of history, the visitor halted in awe. Had the foliaged creature possessed eyes and a tongue, what treasures of information could it have added to the annals of man! What revolutions in Mexico it could have related; what rises and falls of monarchies and civilizations in tropical America!

But flights of fancy gave way to immediate scientific duties. Authorities on

States official. should not.

great scientific

problems

the world. The

Mayor was all humility and submissiveness. Anything he possessed was at the disposition of the distinguished United

But touch the tree he

So Dr. Von Schrenk was compelled to content himself with measuring the bole, and with taking from the roof of the city hall the photographs which accompany this article. He also observed a wood tablet which Humboldt, one hundred years before, had nailed to the tree, the unimpaired vitality of which, for all its fifty centuries, had been shown by a growth of bark covering the tablet.

Ο

NE-THIRD of a million dollars! As much as a man could earn at three dollars a day in about three centuries, and more than a motor speed-king earns in a lifetime; yet a motorcycle rider is worth this princely sum to the orange growers of southern California. He is the advance guard of smudge pots.

Hitherto the fibrebrand has stood for arson and destruction. But the modern night-rider and

the torch have united to combat the devastating elements that threaten the citrus groves with a heavy tribute of golden fruit.

But the men who have placed a third-of-a million-dollar valuation upon the services of a motor-rider do not seem to realize that they have done anything remarkable.

Three years ago it was proposed that the orange growers

of southern California unite to fight their common enemy, Frost. But as no such stand had ever been made before, the orange and lemon men hesitated. After repeated defeats, one by one, despite their best efforts, the citrus farmers scarce dared to hope that they might, even side by side, overthrow the great chill monster of the night. Then, emboldened . by his successes, J. Frost levied a tribute heavier than ever before upon the beleaguered forces of the orange belt. It was in sheer desperation that the million-dollar motorcycle team was organized. Three men cover almost three thousand acres of bearing orange and lemon groves at intervals of from one to two hours during the night. Each man rides alone through the dark, stopping at intervals to write a few figures on a small card that he carries. Each card represents the temperature of the

particular locality from which it was taken, and at headquarters is placed on a corresponding section of a large wall map of the territory, covered by the Citrus Protective Association.

Should a cold wave of air threaten the groves, it can be seen on this map in time for the orange and lemon farmers to rally to their "smudge pots" before the fruit freezes. The smudge pots are nothing more than large sheet iron lamps that burn low-grade oil. One of these pots, burning by every tree, raises the temperature of the entire grove.

The fruit on the orange trees begins to freeze when the temperature drops below about twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit. Consequently when the milliondollar motorcycle team brings in a report

of "twenty-eight and going down," the alarm is sent out from the Protection Headquarters. Every orange rancher springs quickly from bed when the telephone bell rings five times in the night. Slipping on his clothes and grasping his torch, Mr. Rancher soon lights every smudge-pot that stands waiting by the side of each precious tree of golden fruit.

Then the weird sight of a hundred flames in every acre of the sombre green groves announces the defeat of Jack Frost. The spell of the chill god of the night is broken by the burnt offering of the sordid incense distillate. The nightriders having done their work, the torchbrigade fares silently out into the night, and leaves a trail of ruddy fires behind to mark its passing.