the bag. A big rudder hangs from the stern for steering and two fins at each side of the car serve the same purpose as the steadying fins of a fish. Mounted with the engine is a 220-volt dynamo which takes care of the ship's lighting; there being altogether four hundred Tungsten candlepower lamps. The Captain Wild has a speed of twenty miles per hour in

a twelve mile

regard it as the uncertain, dangerous project of the theorist. To them it seems a jumble of unwieldy bulk, of ropes, frail spars, and intricate parts; but to the little man at the wheel, it is the actual craft of the new age.

And so confident is he in its possibilities that disappointments and difficulties but make the thing more real. Is it not so with every man whose life work knows no ending hours or fixed scale; who risks life and fortune, firm

in the confidence of his work? So is "Captain Wild"-a true frontiersman of the air. What a grand scheme for an advertising campaign is this idea of utilizing the huge, formidable-appearing bags of dirigibles! A business man with nerve and imagination

the

two do not always go together-could make a reputation for himself and his goods in a single night, and, like Lord Byron, rubbing the sleep from his eyes on the morning following,

he too would find himself truly fa

mous.

The pedestrian wending his way homeward through the dark streets, possibly thinking of footpads, suddenly would

have his steps stayed and his attention fixed by the vast illuminated poster, staring down upon him and urging him to "Buy Brown's guns and avoid Holdups."

The free advertising that would follow so original a departure would probably pay for the flying monster.

JACK FROST'S SPRING

PLOWING

to it as the frost coming out of the ground. Undoubtedly it has an economic benefit for the farmer and for nature in

spring are familiar with the crunching sounds that our steps make as we tread on the leaves and débris. The thoughtless will, of course, pass on without stopping to examine the beauty beneath their feet, but the nature student will investigate. When he has removed. the leaves, he will find under them, or perhaps extending through them or mingled with them, wonderful perpendicular blocks of silvery crystals. Sometimes these glittering forms will be found almost entirely separated from the surrounding soil, but more frequently they will be more or less thoroughly mingled with particles of earth. As the frost is formed it lifts some soil with it, and has thus suggested the common saying that this is Jack Frost's method of doing his spring plowing. A farmer often refers

and keeps it from settling down into a too solid condition, thus probably aiding in the preparation of the ground for the germination of the seeds. These silvery threads will be found extremely interesting when examined by the aid of a pocket microscope. They also afford excellent subjects for the camerist. To obtain the best effects the camera should have a tilting top so that it may be pointed directly downward from the tripod. Or a dark cloth may be laid against a stone on top of a stone wall, and the pieces of ice placed against it, and thus, in an extemporized gallery, the camerist may take beautiful portraits that will show the silvery details of these wonderful forms.

The results thus secured, if the work be done properly, will be more than gratifying to the photographer.

T

WENTY-FIVE minutes from the heart of the business district of Boston, a community of pleasant homes-"Forest Hills" is now rising. These houses range in price from $3,400 to $5,400. The buyer may come into ownership without seriously disturbing the normal living expenses of a small family on a moderate income. We have long had model housing arrangements for the very poor; now the middle classes are getting their chance. Twenty-nine acres are, at present, being put to this use. That the enterprise is a practical business venture, from which interest is expected to be returned on the investment, by no means lessens the value of the project to the purchasers.

At present only thirty-five per cent of the homes in Massachusetts are owned by those who live in them, and this opportunity to acquire real homes under excellent conditions is hardly likely to be neglected. The project is the first step toward other similar ones in Massachusetts.

In England and Germany the practical advantages, from every point of view, of community building are now well demonstrated. Letchworth, England, for example, is a complete city, developed on this principle, and growing in seven years from a population of four hundred to

seven thousand. The Boston project, however, is more closely akin to the village development of Hamstead Garden Suburb, half an hour's ride from London, where inexpensive homes in a charming environment have in six years attracted a population of about five thousand people.

To understand this Boston development, the first thing necessary is to get the right meaning of the term "community building". To most of us the expression "community" is not altogether attractive. It suggests an undesirable. uniformity, each of us as much as possible like his next-door neighbor, and all of us interested in some idea that the greater part of the world regards as faddish or impractical. It suggests straight streets, square corners, houses of the same pattern, and a general monotony of daily existence.

But this, as a matter of fact, is just what happens without community building, and exactly the condition that community building successfully works to obviate. As any good architect will tell you, the hardest architectural problem is to build an attractive, moderately expensive house on a small lot, especially when several architects are trying to do it independently on several small lots in immediate juxtaposition. Yet if these small lots are all considered together as one great lot, on which a certain number

of houses are to be placed in such manner that each house shall have the greatest available amount of outlook and sunlight, and so that no two adjacent houses shall swear at each other in paint and architecture, the problem becomes altogether different. More than that, it now becomes possible to build the houses in quantity more economically than they could be built separately, with the final result that a better house, a far more individual house, in fact, in a far more attractive environment, can be sold to the ultimate owner at a considerably smaller price than it would have cost him to build it. And having purchased his house, he is further assured that no one will be later allowed to erect a house near him that will be out of harmony with the general architectural and landscape character of the neighborhood. Such an owner, in short, does not join a "community"; he simply reaps the advantage, financial and æsthetic, of acquiring a private dwelling in a neighborhood that has been developed by vastly larger capital than could otherwise have been invested.

The Boston Association, composed of

financiers, business men, and other important citizens, has adapted its groups of prospective homes to the natural elevations and depressions of its property. The land was well wooded and the retention of many of the trees gives to the community, from the beginning, the air of having been long established. The laying out of the roads, parks, and shrubbery was placed in the hands of an expert in town planning, who would hardly be within the means of the individual citizen with no more than $5,000 to spend in building his house. And in laying out the tract from the point of view of landscape architecture, the unpleasant, rectangular uniformity, that has characterized so many town plans in the past, has been altogether eliminated.

The roads ramble, turning no sharp corners, are shaded by well-grown trees, and are soon to be bordered by pleasant little flower gardens and bits of green lawn. These roads, moreover, are designed with an eye to the sidewalk and traffic needs of the adjacent dwellings in order to prevent any purely residential street from becoming a thoroughfare for the traffic of vehicles-an arrangement