"ANOTHE

SIGNING PETITIONS

NOTHER petition!" exclaimed the banker. "No, I never sign them offhand not any more. I used to do so once to my sorrow and to the amusement of my friends. Leave yours with me till day after to-morrow and I'll consider it. I have at least four more now on the wait-5 ing list, ranging in subject from the Removal of a Soap Factory to a Bridge Across the Pacific. Every business man is hounded week in and week out with petitions."

I reluctantly surrendered my long scroll with its formidable list of signatures. "But the one that you once signed - what of that?"

ΙΟ

"Oh, that one? Well, there was a bright newsboy down on the square whose booth had been removed from a street corner because of a petition to the Police Commissioner. Of course everybody had signed the petition; for signing 15 petitions was considered the proper thing if certain names headed the list. It came to be a roster of the best families in town. This newsboy retaliated — in kind. He drafted and circulated a petition that was in due form. Everybody, including myself, signed it. Next day it was published in 20 full with the names of its signers, by all our city papers, and by night everybody in the state was laughing at us.

"The petition recited that a sundial in Central Park, the gift of a wealthy citizen, was weathering badly. It should be protected. That sounded reasonable, so everybody 25 signed just below the name of everybody else. And what had we petitioned for? A roof to cover that sundial!

"You'll get no hasty signatures to a petition in this city we remember the sundial!"

BY FRAZIER HUNT

The armies of the world were contending on the battlefields of France in a death struggle, known in history as the World War. It was a mighty clash of ideas and ideals. Frazier Hunt, a war correspondent and journalist, selected the Little Rivers of France as a subject to carry his theme: that little things sometimes set apart great differences; and that littleness and greatness are not matters of physical size.

OR miles along the hard white road that had helped

FOR

save France a tiny river ran. But it was such a quiet race with life and time. It had no steep banks; only gentle, green, silent slopes that fell gracefully back from its edges. Is Here and there fragrant woods wandered almost to its drowsy waters.

A cuckoo sounded its call, and far off its mate sent back the echo. On sun-splashed mornings the thrush came, and in the moonlight the nightingale sang to To this little stream.

It was a tiny river, and if in great America, only the countryside that knew its winding ways could have told its name. It was a brook for poets to dream by. Little islands of willows, weeping for France, slept in its heart. 15 One could almost whisper across it, and as a French schoolgirl of fourteen wrote, "Birds could fly over it with one X sweep of their wings. And on the two banks there were millions of men, the one turned towards the other, eye to eye. But the distance which separated them was greater

than the stars in the sky; it was the distance which separates right from injustice."

It was a tiny river; it was the Yser.

Oxen drawing the cultivating plows that will help feed France and win the war almost splash into its shallow edges s as they turn the furrow. And on hot July days, the old man who prods them with his pointed stick and the sturdy woman who handles the plow let them drink their fill of its cooling waters - not plunging their noses deep like thirsty horses but gently drawing in the water with the lips, after the manner of oxen.

ΙΟ

It is a quiet stream that a child could ford without danger. It flows slowly and sweetly from the mother hills to the X embracing sea. A few arched bridges leap from one low bank to another. It has not cut deep into the land of I5 France but it has cut deep into the heart of France. It is one of the ribbons of victory and glory that France will always wear across her breast. And it is a ribbon made red by the blood of the men of France who have died for France.

And yet we of America would call it a little stream, and 20 old men would fish all day in it from a shaded velvet point, and boys swimming would hunt some favorite Devil's Hole where they might dive.

It is the Marne.

For four years now it has flowed peacefully on while 25 burrowmen have fought to scar its banks with trenches ing themselves into the earth as only the muskrat had done in the forgotten days of peace. Strong, unafraid men came from the ends of the world to die by its side. And it would have gladly sung them a sweet, low lullaby, crooning a song 30