ferent, and as usual in such cases, the only way to determine which has the proper view is for the proponents to fight it out. In this contest the sympathies of some will be extended to the miners for the sake

of political effect; a few will prudently withhold their moral support. It is safe to say, however, that the miners will hear the grandstand cheering if they win the game.

Did you ever come across anything quite out of the ordinary while you were canvassing in the summer vacation? I have, I can assure you. Those old paintings I saw last summer were-well, words fail to express it. I'll just leave it to you to decide upon the fitting adjective after I have finished my story. In the first place, it was a most unheard of thing that I should ever have been canvassing at áll.

Williams thought himself a born agent, but I never had much confidence in what nature had done for me along that line. However, I was convinced of his ability to persuade a person into almost anything, when after a five-minutes talk with him, I found myself all at once an agent.

It was one sultry afternoon just after the final examinations when he sauntered in with an inoffensive looking box under his arm. He tossed it down on a chair, throwing himself on the lounge, and asked me how I was going to spend the summer vacation. I hadn't any idea and he continued:

"I've run across the nicest little thing here. It's a regular find. Why, I saw a fellow who made twenty-five dollars a week with it last summer and didn't half work either." As he was undoing the box he went on enthusiastically: "You see, it's stereopticon views. Now,

there isn't a good stereopticon and views in the country, and there is a demand for something fresh and up-to-date of that make."

He

He handed me the glass with a view adjusted. It was the same view of Niagara by winter that was lying on the worsted mat on my grandmother's marble top parlor table, only that was dark with age. slipped one card in behind the other and whirled me through woods, gorges, cities and domestic scenes at a surprising rate of rapidity. Then he stood off and looked at me blandly.

"I hate the things," I sneered. “I wouldn't have one in a house of mine."

"Oh, but that doesn't have anything to do with it. Your taste in art and that of Farmer Brown may differ radically. That doesn't affect your wanting to do well and make a handsome sum this vacation."

"Is there really money in it, Williams?" I suggested doubtingly.

"Money? Why, man alive! There's money to burn. I sold three sets myself this morning out on a little spin for fun on that road north of town. Had my spin just the same and it brought me in a neat sum too. We can go on our wheels, see the country, have a lark, and make a good haul, all at the same time. I'm going to have southern

Michigan. It will be a rare chance to see these northerners."

Two weeks from that day I found myself with a stereopticon outfit out in the country on my wheel, with Williams selling views. It was not intentionally that I wrote that phrase, “with Williams selling views," but it happens to be the truth. Williams did sell views. He sold them everywhere he went. We were supposed to make a second trip to deliver them, but he would make a man feel it was the chance of a lifetime, so he would lay down his last cent to obtain one of those views on the spot.

The people I visited were different. Some of them seemed to be on the lookout for an escaped prisoner or suspicious character and, taking me to be the man, refused me admittance. When I did get in I found them to be a very industrious class. They were too busy to see my views. And yet despite their industry it was hard times. There seemed to be a sort of financial panic, for in an otherwise prosperous district, there was not a cent of money in circulation. The sales I might have made but for that hindrance

were enormous.

Sometimes Williams would trade routes with me, but it made no difference. Wherever I went, hard times, urgent business, or escaped convicts had gone before me. Williams told me some stories about neighborhoods being like the people who moved into them, but I failed to see the application, for I was not suspicious, nor over industrious, even if I was somewhat deficient in purse. But then Williams had never taken a course in logic and I was not at all surprised that his illustration had no application to the case in hand.

Every day, as the funds I started with grew less and less, I would get

more and more discouraged. "I tell you what," I ventured to him one night, "it will only be the matter of a few days, when I shall have to give up showing the public my stereopticon views for nothing."

"It isn't for nothing. It is to sell them."

"Sell the folks? Yes, but I can't do that as you can."

"Well, I'll give up. It's a case of arithmetical retrogression, I take it. No wonder they think you're a suspicious character."

"But I don't see the point."

"No. You never do. The money in your pocket grows less in direct ratio as your faith in mankind and in your co-laborer becomes less."

"Maybe that's it," I said. "But what are you going to do? Here we are, stranded in this little burg, ten miles from nowhere, with the hotel full of horse jockies and the whole populace mad over the races. Even you couldn't sell a view here, let alone getting a place to pitch our tent for the night."

"Oh, yes, I can. I'll have a place to stay, and a good place, too.

While I was grumbling, Williams had boldly marched up to a pompous looking house, which held its head in lordly disdain above the trees and neighboring houses, crouching away in their shade. In a short time he returned. "Got a place for the night. Fine old family. Got a son in Yale. Interested in college boys. Have the spare room, if we will be kind enough to accept. I set their minds at rest on that point, however.

After supper, during which we had been entertained by track records and bets on the various horses, and Williams had taken two orders for views, we sauntered over to the house where we were to stay. Williams, elated by success I suppose, stalked proudly up the path and

smiled almost condescendingly at the grand old house with its patrician pillars, and patronizingly inviting porches. But I felt a trifle depressed.

An old gentleman, seated in his great armchair reading, adjusted his glasses and sat a trifle more erect as he became aware of our approach. He arose and asked us to be seated in a manner that conferred an honor, both upon himself and upon us. Williams soon led the conversation to pictures and would probably have sold a set of views if I had not looked daggers, and if our host had not fallen to talking about rare, old paintings. "We have the pleasure of possessing some portraits by the early painters of this country," he said. "They are valuable, not only as examples of the work of the pathfinders in American art, but as paintings, for they are quite exceptional pictures. You may never have seen the like."

I never have; I can assure you of that. And I can safely say, without doubt, that you never have. For of all the pictures I have ever seen, and of all the wild stories I have ever heard or read about pictures, those pictures are the most remarkable. But I'll go on with my story. As we wanted to get a start by sunrise we went to our room early. We found it a box of a place, with the air as stuffy and old as the furniture. So we opened the windows wide, and sat by the lamp telling yarns, waiting for it to cool off. As I didn't laugh heartily at all the jokes Williams perpetrated, the conversation lagged, and we fell to looking round the room. Some of the furniture was modern enough, but there was a desk with carved legs, which couldn't have been found in a store, no matter how second handed it might have been. The ancestor's pictures hung on the wall

in queer oval frames a century out of date. They were wonderfully natural, I should judge, as they were exact counterparts of the old gentleman down stairs. Indeed, on opening the room I had been startled to see our host, whom we had left on the porch below, staring at me from across the room, and I took a step over the threshhold before I discovered my mistake. I tried to look one old fellow, in a ruffled shirt front and powdered wig, full in the face, but a haunting suspicion came over me that he thought I had designs on him.

I turned away and Williams slapped me on the shoulder and said: "Now, aren't those the most lifelike paintings you ever saw? That old boy in that wig there, looks as though he might speak.'

"Hush!" I whispered. "Maybe he may."

Just then we heard a far off, melancholy sound. It was not a shriek, nor a wail, but the cry of a mean, peevish soul, whining at its own littleness. I said something of the kind to Williams. "Oh, that's a mosquito, you chump," he sneered, "and that lamp had better be blown out or there will be a whole roomful of his friends in here in a minute." So he puffed vigorously at the lamp. It struggled at first with a fine show of spirit, but shortly it realized the futility of resisting Williams, and gave up the attempt.

I was just making money in my dreams, when Williams darted up and gave somebody a hard cuff. Ì fumbled for the revolver and asked him if I should come to his assistance, and who dared strike him.

"No, you needn't," he shouted angrily. "That was a mosquito." "That struck you?"

"No, that I struck. Go to sleep, you."

I could not have been asleep long,

when a fiend, with a high shrill voice, grabbed me in the back, and several minor officials, crooning a querulous, crack-voiced friendliness, which drove me wild, came at me. I struck out vainly left and right, trying to keep them off, and they would laugh a shrill, grating shriek in mockery. Then a dentist they knew came in to help. The wheel of the infernal machine they bore out teeth with went buzzing round and round as he treaded, and the little whining, complaining auger bored through the tooth, the roof of my mouth, right on up through my skull, out into the air. The buzzing was faster and louder. The auger would soon reach the ceiling. Just then the fellow let go and it came down and ploughed over my face.

"Come," somebody said, "haven't you had enough of this?"

"Yes, yes," I muttered. "I am not particular. I never ordered any as I remember of."

"No. of course you didn't," screamed Williams, and I became aware that the lamp was lighted and there was a legion of mosquitoes in the room.

"Come, how are you going to get rid of these?" he asked in an annoyed tone, as though I was to blame for the whole affair.

"You might make a smudge," I suggested.

"In the washbowl out of our clothes?" he said.

"No, out of my outfit."

"Oh! now, don't get discouraged," and he began in glowing oratory the beauties of stereopticon views. He evidently was not going to make a smudge. A bright thought came to me. "Why not try sticky fly paper?" I said. Hang it up around the bed like curtains and

"Whoever heard of catching mos

quitoes on fly paper, and besides we haven't any. Oh, I tell you, though, what we have got. We can suspend the sheets from the headboard like tents." So he proceeded to fasten the sheets to the pillowsham holders and we crawled under. That random remark of mine about pitching our tents had, like some other idle remarks which have passed into history, been literally fulfilled.

The rest of the night passed in quiet, that is, comparative quiet. The mosquitoes at first came in packs and droves, and perched on that canopy and howled. But it did no good, and finally the defiant, earth-shaking snore of Williams frightened them away.

In the morning as I was packing up my things I happened to look up at one of those ancestors. I was aghast. The paint all over his face lay in blisters and in places it was peeled off. He looked down at me with an almost ghastly grin. Williams, standing amazed before another picture, I saw, had made the same discovery. Then we ran over the whole collection. The night before they had been a lot of well preserved old paintings and wonderfully lifelike. This morning, although the background and clothes seemed as fresh as ever, the faces were covered with blisters or patches where the paint had fallen off. Williams looked at me and I at him.

"What in the land of goodness did it?" he asked, eyeing me wildly.

I sat down a moment and stared blankly at them. Then the truth came over me like a flash. It was the mosquitoes. Those paintings were so lifelike that the bites had swelled and the paint was peeling off.

I suggested rubbing on ammonia, as that is good for mosquito bites, but Williams wouldn't listen to it. He said the scent would be in the

room and the people down stairs might suspect us of having tampered with those heirlooms. So we went down stairs, mounted our wheels and were off to sell views.

Once afterward when I referred to those pictures he said something

about not seeing very well the night before, and my being a ninny; but then he is always trying to be funny, so I didn't take it very much to heart. Besides one must believe what he has seen with his own eyes.

"Oh! for that reckless fire men had
When it was witty to be mad."
-Edmund Gosse.

To make a literary impression, all a writer needs, or has ever needed, is a keen insight into life. At present, the impression is the deeper and popularity the more sudden if the observations burst forth from a cynical attitude toward the world in language not too fine. We like to have our inmost impulses pointed out, whether they be pure or not, but we are relieved to have the cynic cast his cloud of unreality over them.

Rudyard Kipling came before the world with an insight which struck wholesome fear into the hearts of a multitude. The first production convinced the world that certain phases of life are unusually transparent to him, and succeeding productions opened up life still further. The idea has sometimes made way that it is the bizarre in Kipling's writing which awoke so responsive a public; but rereading must convince us that the lines which really startle are those bits of satire which have to do with our ordinary life and business. The devil is interesting because he greets us so naiurally, not because he wears the costume of India. Kipling's insight is so keen and his impulse so

strong that he makes cross-sections of the stream of life instead of following along. In other words, he lacks the great element of artistic restraint, and so must stop short at cleverness with greatness well in the distance. This cutting insight makes Kipling a master of the short narrative, and it must be conceded that with this weapon he makes brilliant sorties into the sanctity of Anglo-Saxon civilization.

That this insight is not only into personalities but also into the international jumble of things is shown in those bold verses of "Recessional" and "The Truce of the Bear." It is testimony to the perception of one man that shortly after "Recessional" came the beleaguring of British forces in Ladysmith, Kimberly and Mafeking, and the second charge of the Light Brigade at Glencoe. The recent conduct of Russia's forces about Peking proves that "The Truce of the Bear" is true as well as vulgar.

The feeling has been growing of late that Kipling went into versifying in an unhappy hour. His insight has served him well, he has human life for his theme,

"And Life some think Is worthy of the Muse."

but for some reason his lines are