-and the chances are you haven't anything to talk about, to boot.

"For instance, as soon as I had promised to speak here tonight Mrs. Taft asked: 'Why, what can you do? You can't sing or dance. You can't play any musical instrumentremember this is a concert, not a political convention.'

"I might tell them about my travels,' said I.

"Why those people aren't interested in your travels; they are all travelers themselves!' she answered. 'What! Not interested in the time I-"" and here he went off into a long and amusing story of his adventures in the Filippines. "And not interested in the time we had at the Imperial Palace in Tokio, when I-"" and here he detailed some of his experiences while in Japan. "And wouldn't they be glad to hear how, when I was at Tsarskoe-Selo I-"" and here he went off into an intimate account of some of his Russian adventures.

The crowd was laughing and following him with great interest through it all; it took something like twenty-five minutes or half an hour, and only at the end did every one realize that the Secretary, while ostensibly deploring the fact that we would not be interested in hearing the story of his travels, had actually been giving it to us all the time!

D

CHAPTER VI.

R. TAFT is far and away the greatest traveler of any man now holding

public office in the United States, and what is more remarkable, he is the greatest family man, of all our statesmen. To hold this double record seems impossible, but the impossible has been natural and inevitable for Mr. Taft almost from the beginning of his career. His life of continuous achievement illustrates this.

Most public men of the day have no home life at all. The demands of government service make it difficult for a man to be more than a lodger in his home after his career in Washington begins. For this reason many

public men do not take their families with them to Washington, but leave them behind, preferring to have a few uninterrupted days of visiting with them from time to time, rather than the succession of peeps which is all that Washington affords.

But Mr. Taft has always managed to have his family with him ever since he had a family to care for. Wherever he has been, there has been his home; not off in some distant town or city, separated from him by days of railway travel. His family has kept him company from Cincinnati to Washington and Murray Bay to the North West, to Panama, Cuba and Porto Rico, to Honolulu, Tokio, Manila, Vladivostok, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin and Paris.

Two of the children, Helen and Robert, have been to college, but vacation time has always found them with their father again wherever he might be; which means, of course, that they were with their mother, too, and that Charlie, the irrepressible, was there also.

When one has come to see something of the Taft viewpoint, to have a glimpse of life as he sees it, one realizes that he must be a family man. It is his nature, it is inherent-as much a part of him as his smile and his capacity for friendship and for hard work. The members of his family are not only blood relations, they are his friends, his chums.

He has been making friends, loyal, constant friends for half a century now, but one does not hear of his losing any, and his friends for the most part come to know his family, too, for some of the other Tafts are always near.

Any one that is a friend of a friend of Mr. Taft is Mr. Taft's friend, and therefore, the family's friend-but a friend does not signify with him a man with a pull, or a man in the axe-grinding business. There are no strings on the word friend as Mr. Taft uses it. All his family know this too, even if it never consciously occurs to them. They act up to it instinctively and without premeditation. It is the Taft way.

Obviously the Taft family could not be the unit it is, were it scattered and not well in hand. That is why Mr. Taft takes his family with him, even though doing so requires no little planning and contriving, much simplicity

Miss Marjorie Colton