last by far the hardest of all, for the spirit of unrest-many times fomented by German agencies has greatly delayed our ship program this winter; at times greatly endangered it. Strikes have been all too frequent. No criticism should be given to the national labor leaders. Mr. Gompers and the men who are closely associated with him at Washington have been unswerving in their patriotism and unflagging in their endeavors, but, as one of them once expressed it to me, they do not own their men. A ship-builder owns his yard. When he signs a contract on its behalf he is responsible and generally able to keep the contract. But the other party to the paper knows when he signs that he has no way of enforcing the men whom he represents to abide by the spirit or the text of the document. The most he can do is to plead or to threaten

-to use all the diplomacy and wits at his command. And then he sometimes loses.

In my opinion, the only way in which the situation may be worked out definitely and permanently is by drafting all the shipyard workers into Government service. They would be entitled to receive the high wages and excellent treatment which men working at hard labor and under great pressure need. They would have the right of protest if these conditions were not fulfilled, and their protests would come before properly constituted arbitrators whose decision would be final. But there would be no strikes. If the men refused to abide by the decisions of the arbitrators and refused to work, they would be sent into the cantonment or into the frontline trenches. A similar penalty could be held over the heads of the owners of the yards. But up to the present time not one of them has failed in his patriotic duty. They have met increased wage costs and every one of their perplexing war-time problems with great serenity and faith and loyalty.

The English editor who called attention so vividly to our necessity for transport ships spoke of 6,000,000 tons as our program for this year. And the steel ship figures quoted in the paragraph that followed fell somewhat short of 5,000,000

VOL. CXXXVI.-No. 812.-25

tons.

The difference is found in the wooden ship construction, a picturesque phase of our maritime revival that is worthy of a little passing attention. Some 270 wooden vessels of widely varying types, and aggregating more than 1,000,000 tons, are under construction or under contract for completion before December 31st at various points upon our seaboard. Old yards, shriveled or perhaps entirely abandoned for more than half a century, have come back into the full flush of busy existence, and there are a hundred new yards along both the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts. There is, unfortunately, a great dissimilarity in the construction of these vessels. Already we have seen the need, the vast economy, of standardization in the construction of our steel vessels. It has been one of the largest of our construction problems, and the fact that almost all of the privately given contracts to our shipyards before our entrance into the world conflict called for specialized ships was a great factor in slowing the production of those yards. The wooden ships are less important, yet even in their construction steps are now being taken toward standardization, and a definite effort is being made toward not only a solidity of construction that will withstand both the buffetings of the sea and the strain of an engine, but toward speed. It has been found that one of the best ways to dodge a submarine is by having a genuinely fast ship-already men are talking of carriers capable of making, under pressure, thirty-five knots an hour. And the City of Orange, a wooden cargo-carrier completed a short time ago at a little Texas town down on the Gulf Coast, ran sixteen knots upon her trial trip.

The Norwegian experiments in the molding of concrete ships have not escaped the attention of our ship-builders in the United States. A concrete

vessel is now under construction at San Francisco. The hold is built in an inverted position, only an inner mold being used. When the concrete is set and hard the hold is reversed by an elaborate pneumatic_process-and the vessel is launched. The method seems. both economical and efficient. But

the concrete ship still remains an experiment

All this time and we have only considered the building of ships-in great tonnage so as not only to offset the depredations of enemy submarines, but also to give us the great permanent merchant marine that our national heart is now set upon possessing. The operation of ships is a problem hardly second to that of their construction. Already the United States possesses some 2,875,ooo tons of ocean-going merchant ships; a very creditable showing, despite the obstacles against which our marine has struggled in recent years, but not nearly enough. The addition of 675,000 tons of German vessels interned in American harbors at the very beginning of the Great War, but released to us upon our entrance into it, was a very great help― particularly at a time when we needed vessels to carry our fast-forming army and its vast quantities of supplies overseas. The damage wrought by the German crews upon these ships during the period of their internment was found to be almost negligible-far less than the most optimistic had dared to hope.

The Great Lakes also have contributed liberally of their vast tonnage. Through the entire autumn the coming of heavy ice and the closing of navigation upon our inland seas was forecasted by a steady procession of their craft down the River St. Lawrence. Nor was that as easy as it reads, for the passageways from the four upper lakes-upon which the greatest traffic rides-to the blue waters of the salt seas is barred by great natural impediments. But long years ago the Canadians passed them by means of canals. And the determining factor in navigation from Lake Erie to the sea has been the chambers of the canal locks, about 265 feet in length, 45 feet in width, and 14 feet in depth. Long ago the lake craft that conformed to these dimensions were found by searching eyes and taken out to the Atlantic, and other craft were built at the abundant and efficient steel and wooden shipyards along the upper lakes.

And between fifteen and twenty modern steel vessels, averaging from 350 to 385 feet in length-almost the extreme for a cargo-vessel of less than 45 feet beamwere taken through the Welland Canal and the canals of the upper St. Lawrence this last autumn.

The process was simple, although not particularly easy. The vessels were sawed in half. Gangs of men in the dry-docks at Cleveland and Buffalo, equipped with acetylene torches, did the job in a time to be measured in hours rather than in days. Temporary watertight bulkheads were installed and the vessel towed in two sections to the deepwater harbor of Montreal. It was another job of hours rather than days to join the hull together at the dry-docks of that port and to fit the fresh-water tramp with condensers and other equipment necessary for a craft who digs her heels into salt water for the first time.

To correlate this work and give it the full attention which its importance demands the Shipping Board has appointed a keen executive. It is his job to find ships for the cargoes which pile themselves up upon the wharves at our seaports, great and little. The new executive is a clearing-house and a train-despatcher in addition. He moves the ships by telegraph or long-distance telephone or wireless. And the comic commercial tragedy of peace days-when ships ran frantically to one port and left begging cargoes behind at others should not be repeated in our time of greatest stress and anxiety-and necessity.

These problems are perplexing, but not beyond solution. Our ships, after many vexatious trials and disappointments, are taking the water. Others are replacing them upon the launchways, and still others will be coming there when these, in turn, take the water. We are going to have the ships-God and the labor unions permitting and they are going to be good ships-our mainstay through the war and a full measure of our commercial triumph in the long years that are to follow it.

E were sitting-three Frenchmen, a young American named Homan, and I—in the café of one of those small Paris hotels much frequented, even then, by officers on leave. It was the winter of 1912, when the Balkans were playing out their colorful little curtain-raiser to the great drama which followed-playing it, as they say in the theater, "in one," using only the very smallest part of the stage, and failing even in their most climactic moments to completely conceal the ominous sounds from behind the curtain where the stage was being set for the real business of the play.

At the tables a sprinkling of English and Americans of the usual transient type mingled with French from the provinces, and here and there a swarthy Balkan in uniform accented the room.

It was the presence of those other Americans-two or three, I should say, besides Homan and myself, though I hadn't noticed particularly that gave the special significance to Homan's exclamation when he discovered Corey.

I saw him pause with his glass half raised-he was gazing straight past me over my shoulder-and a smile, meant for me, came into his eyes.

"Look!" he said, "at the American!" I turned, because his manner indicated clearly enough that I might, squarely round in my chair, and immediately it was clear to me why he had said just that. Any one would have said it-any other American, I mean-which makes it more striking-and said it involuntarily, too. You couldn't have helped it. And yet you would encounter a dozen perfectly unmistakable Americans every day in Paris without feeling the necessity for any remark. It was simply that Corey was so typically the kind of American you wouldn't encounter in Paris, or any other place, you felt,

outside his own country. The curious thing about him was that instantly on seeing him, almost before you thought of America, you thought of a particular and localized section of America. You thought of the Middle West. There was something wholesome and provincial and colloquial about him. He was like a boy you'd gone to grammar school with-the kind of fellow to succeed to his father's business and marry and settle down in his home town, with New York City his farthest dream of venture and romance.

Yet there he sat across the table from a dark-visaged Balkan officer, who was carrying on the conversation in careful English-it would have been unimaginable that he should speak in anything but English to him-and it may have been the brilliance of this man's uniform which kept one, just at first, from seeing that he, too, our American, was wearing some sort of uniform, khaki color, very workman - like and shipshape, which might, if there had been the least chance of throwing us off, have thrown us. But his round, good-natured, uncomplicated face, his light brown hair and the way it was brushed-the very way it grew, like a school-boy's-the comfortable set of his broad shoulders, his kind of energetic inclination to stoutness, and even the way he sat at the table, were pure American Middle West and nothing else, no matter what his uniform proclaimed. He was as American as the flag, as the opening bars of "The StarSpangled Banner," as American as Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa.

And when, at young Homan's exclamation, I had turned and found him looking straight toward me, the twinkle of his eyes had the effect of a friendly wave of his hand. He had, of course, as he said afterward, "spotted us," too. Then he had seen-and it amused himthe little play of our discovery.

I was just turning back to applaud to Homan the obviousness of his designa

tion, and to wonder, with him, what the uniform meant, when my eye was caught by a thin, brilliantly colored line drawn, it seemed, just above the left breast pocket of his coat, and about the same length.

My first impression of the man, of the familiarity of his type, had, I suppose, been so strong as to dull for a moment my reaction to this discovery. I had seen that vari-colored line often enough before, on the uniforms of British officers, or French; I had perhaps seen it on an American, but certainly I had never seen it on an American like this. No wonder the connection was slow to establish itself. It was a decoration bar, and there must have been six ribbons at least, if not more.

For sheer incongruous association, I doubt if you'd find a more pat example in a lifetime than the man I had, on sight, conceived this one to be—the man I may as well say now he actually wasand that bar of ribbons pinned on his khaki-colored coat.

Young Homan had caught it, too, and was sending past me his deliberate stare of amazement.

It was not exactly as if we thought he hadn't come by them honestly, but more as if we suggested to each other that he couldn't surely have got them in the way decorations were usually got; it seemed somehow impossible that he understood their importance. And there was still something of that in our attitude when, later on, after dinner, we had drifted into the salon with the rest for our coffee, and by a kind of natural gravitation had found ourselves in conversation with our compatriot, whose jocose friendliness led young Homan to ask, half in fun to be sure, where he had got all the decorations. He showed certainly no very proper appreciation of their importance by his answer:

"Bought 'em, at the Galleries Lafayette. Get any kind you want there, y' know."

We laughed, all of us, for everybody had seen the cases of medals and decorations at the Galleries. I believe for an instant the youngster was half inclined to think he had bought them. I know I was. As some kind of outlandish practical joke, of course. It seemed, ab

surd as the idea was, so much likelier than that he could have been through the kind of experiences which result in being decorated by foreign governments. And such an imposing array! The scarlet ribbon of the Legion of Honor, the green of the Japanese "Rising Sun," the brilliant stripes of Russian and English decorations, and strange ones I had never seen before!

You see, he had turned out much more Middle West than we had imagined. In the first ten minutes of our conversation he had spoken of "home," and mentioned the name of the townDubuque, Iowa! And a few minutes later he gave us, by the merest chance phrase or two, involving the fact that his married sister lived "a block and a half down the street" from his mother's house, a perfectly complete picture of that street-broad and shady and quiet, of his mother's yellow frame house, and the other, white with a green lawn round it, where his sister lived. And the point was that he was making no effort toward such an effect. He was only being himself.

His dinner companion, the Balkan officer, came in presently and addressed Corey as "Doctor" (I adjusted myself to that, still with the Dubuque setting, however), and it was in the conversation following upon the new introduction that the object of his being in Paris came out. He told us, quite by the way, though not in the least depreciating the importance of his mission-that he was in Paris for a few days looking up anesthetics for the Serbian army. He had been working, he said, down in the Balkans since shortly after the outbreak of the war, in charge of a sanitary section. They'd been out of anesthetics for some time now-impossible to get them in-and they'd been operating, amputating the poor devils' legs and arms, without anesthetics; and now at last he'd left things long enough to come up to Paris himself and see what could be done. He was starting back the next day or the day after that.

Corey, from Dubuque! In a makeshift Serbian field hospital, in that terrible cold, performing delicate and difficult operations-wholesale, as they must have been performed-on wounded Bal

kan soldiers; probing for bullets in raw wounds-that was a picture to set up beside the one we had of him in Dubuque!

And yet it wasn't at all a question of doubt (we'd read it all in the papers day after day); it wasn't that we didn't believe Corey was telling the truth; his evidence was too obvious for thatthe picture didn't somehow succeed in painting itself—I can't to this day say why. Surely the Balkans just thenoperations without anesthetics, the pageantry and blood-red color of warsurely there was pigment of more brilliant hue than any contained in the mere statement that his married sister lived a block and a half down the street from his mother's. But the picture wasn't painted. Corey wasn't the artist to do it. Not, mind you, that he tried; he was as far from trying to impress one, from affectation, as a boy of four

teen.

I do remember my imagination taking me far enough to think that if I were a soldier, and wounded, and had to have a leg or an arm off, I couldn't think of a man I'd rather have do it than Corey. Oh yes, I believed him; I knew he'd been down there in the Balkans, as he said, and was going back again tomorrow-but I went right on seeing him in Dubuque, practising his quiet, prosperous profession in the same suite of offices his father had used before him.

He himself lent, by the things he said, force and reality to the illusion. He'd like nothing better, he declared, than settling down in Dubuque for the rest of his life, and enjoying a home of his own. He intended, in fact, to do just that when he had finished the Balkan busi

ness.

"I'm that type," he said. "I never was meant to knock around the world like this."

And he was that type, so much the type that it seemed hardly credible he shouldn't turn out the exception to prove the rule. He had already, one would think, made a sufficient divergence.

And that, I suppose the feeling that no personality could follow so undeviating a line, so obviously its own pathwas responsible for my impression, when I came later to hear how completely he

had followed it, of his being because of it much more unique than he could ever have made himself by turning aside. True enough, there are people who, if they heard the tale, might maintain that he could hardly have accomplished a more striking divergence from type. I'll have to confess I thought so myselfat the first; certainly I thought so all the while I listened, long afterward, to the quiet, though somewhat nasal, and thoroughly puzzled voice of the gentle old man from Dubuque, who seemed, as he recounted the story, to be seeking in me some solution of Corey's phenome

non.

I thought it even afterward, until, sitting there where he had left me, I began slowly to orient the facts in relation to Corey's character. And then, all at once, it came to me that it was exactly because Corey hadn't diverged that he did what he did. He went straight through everything to his predestined end. Any other man would have had stages, subtleties, degrees of divergence. But Corey knew none of those things.

It was from old Mr. Ewing of Dubuque that I had my first news of Corey after that night in the Paris hotel.

He must have gone back to his army in the Balkans the next day, for we were to have seen him that night again in case he had to stay over, and when I asked I was told that Monsieur had gone.

Things kept reminding me of him. The names of streets and places in Paris recalled his flat American mispronunciation of them-mispronunciations which sounded half as if he were in fun and half as if he didn't know any better, or hadn't paid enough attention to learn them correctly. I believe he saw, or was subconsciously aware of, his own incongruity. Still, one would think he'd have become, so to speak, accustomed to himself in the strange rôle by then.

I think I must have spoken of him rather often to people, so long as I remained in Paris; and it was, if not exactly curious, at least a little less than one would expect, that I never came in contact with any one else who knew him, until that day, a little while ago, when I met, in the smoking-car of a westbound train out of Chicago, the man who