Joe Beckett, an' a sledge-hammer all rolled into one had got in beneath his guard.

"Stop it, Josh," I yells. "Stop it." Then I opens the door quick, an' Josh, takin' the Professor by his imitation tail, swung him round and chucked him on to a heap of mangold-wurzels.

'Well, we loaded the Professor up with half a bottle of brandy, put him in

a cab, an' sent him home. -Now I must be gettin' back.'

'Wait a minute. What happened to the Professor?'

'Oh, nothin'. It had all happened. Wonderful things is monkeys.'

'Not half so wonderful as showmen,' I retorted, reaching for my umbrella. 'I'll leave a drink behind the counter. Good-morning.'

DURING the entire summer of 1887, I worked on a section of Dalrymple's immense ranch, in the Red River Valley of the North.

Our gang consisted of two other Norwegians besides myself, a Swede, ten or twelve Irishmen, and a few Americans altogether, I think, about twenty persons; a mere fraction of the hundreds employed on the farm.

Golden-green, illimitable, the prairie stretched before us like some ocean in movement. Except for our little shelter, not a house was visible, as far as the eye could reach across the sunlit prairie. Not a tree, not a bush, nothing but wheat and grass were within the sweep of our vision. Nor were there flowers; the only thing in bloom at this season was the yellow wild mustard, which we tore up by the roots and burned, for it was regarded as a pest.

No birds flew above us. No life, except the sea of wheat that rolled like waves before the wind. The only sound

came from the millions of grasshoppers, the eternal music of the prairie.

We suffered intensely at times from the blazing sun. When the provision wagon came at noon, we lay under it for the sake of its scanty shade, and thus took our meals. But in spite of the heat, we worked in hat, shirt, trousers, and shoes; with less clothing, the sun would have fairly burned us up. If a shirt was torn during work, the sun's rays would strike through the rent and quickly raise a blister.

During the harvest season, we often toiled sixteen hours at a stretch. Day after day, ten self-binders monotonously followed each other in a long slanting procession through the ripened wheat. When one quarter-section was finished, we went to the next, ten men following up the machines to stack the grain. And there, sitting on horseback, his revolver in his belt, was the foreman, his eyes roaming everywhere and keeping track of us. Each day he wore out

'Old Josh,' I interrupted. "That's right, but Consul was his stage name-a performin' monkey what ain't named Consul might as well take a job with an organ-grinder - he would n't draw a cent. But no one knew how to buy bernarners to suit him. He'd skin one, grousin' all the time: "Call this a bernarner-five a penny off a barrer! Half a mind not to eat the bloomin' thing." An' that was the way all through the piece. Human bein's was rank outsiders as far as he was concerned.

'Well, it come about that we put up for the winter in Bumblepark, a little town in the Midlands, an' there I met the Professor. That was the name we gave him. He was a decent sort of cuss, with more forehead than waistcoat, an' he took quite an interest in the animals, especially Old Josh. He studied Old Josh as keen as some men study 'osses. He'd sit down with a pencil an' paper jottin' down an' takin' notes until my head ached with watchin' 'im. At last he comes to me excited like.

""I've got it," ses he. "I've got a full an' complete knowledge of his langwidge. Do you understand what he ses?"

""Well, no," ses I. "I understand what he means to some extent same as when he wants a match to light his pipe, or the door of his cage openin' things like that, you know."

""Ha, ha," he ses triumphantly. "Well, I know every word he utters. This is a discovery that will make me famous. I want to talk to him, to get at all his secrets. To find out what he thinks. P'raps in the traditions of his race there's some folk-lore which'll shed a new light on the origin of man. Darwin! I've got Darwin in a bag."

""That's all right," ses I, tryin' to soothe him. "When are you goin' to begin gettin' famous? Now?"

picious. He won't talk much. I shall have to disguise myself. Look out for me on We'n'sd'y."

'Well, We'n'sd'y come, an' so did the Professor, only more so. He had a big parcel under his arm, which he took into a caravan. When he came out, I found he had got himself up to look exactly like Old Josh. An' I will say this for the Professor, he'd made the most of his natural gifts. He was dressed in a skin rug with a tail, just as if he'd dropped off a tree in Africa.

'I opens the door of the cage, an' in he hops. Old Josh takes his pipe out of his mouth an' just takes stock of the Professor. Then he ses somethin'.

""What does he say?" I asks.

""Wants to know what my name is," ses the Professor. "I told him it was Mongolite. Ses he never heard of them

must be no class. He's one of the Highlities. His family owned thousands of cokernut trees.

'Well, they went on just like two old pals. As far as I could make out Josh pulled the old man's leg for all he was worth. He stuffed him up with all sorts of bunkum, an' tipped me the wink from time to time. He cracked himself up to have been no end of a nut in his own country; filled up the Professor chockful; even took him on as valet at a couple of bernarners a week. Then the Professor sed somethin' which took Old Josh on the raw. I comin'. ""What's that?" "I told him h a human bein lookin' quit wants me complim

two horses. Whenever anything went wrong, he was immediately on the spot, repairing the machine in the field if possible, or else sending it to the shop.

All through the latter part of September and October the sun continued to be oppressively hot by day, but the nights were actually cold. Often we shivered; and we never got enough sleep. It was not unusual for us to be called at three o'clock in the morning, when everything was still pitch-dark. By the time we had fed our horses and breakfasted, and driven the long distance to the field, it was light enough to work. We would set fire to a sheaf of wheat, to heat the oil-cans with which to 'tune' up the harvesters; and incidentally, to get a little warmth for ourselves.

One Irishman in our gang was a great puzzle to us. No one seemed to know where he came from or who he was. Rainy days he would read novels, of which he had a large supply. He was a big, clever fellow, somewhere in the thirties, who spoke cultivated English and also knew German.

This man came to our farm wearing a silk shirt, and he always worked in that kind of garment. When one silk shirt wore out, he put on another of the same material. He was a good worker but a curious individual. His name was Evans.

During the threshing season we tried to get as far away from the machines as possible. Around them the air was fairly dark with dust and dirt. For a few days I was right in the midst of it, and then I asked the foreman for something to do elsewhere. Thereupon he sent me to the fields, to help load the wagons.

That foreman never forgot a favor I once did him. It was this way. The coat I wore when I arrived had shining buttons, a relic of my outfit when I drove a street-car in Chicago. The foreman was fascinated with this coat and its buttons, thinking it the finest thing he ever saw. He was a real child when it came to finery, of which there was not much in our little settlement.

So, when I told him one day that he could have the coat, he was quite willing to pay me a good price for it; but I insisted on presenting it to him. He was tremendously pleased with it, and when the harvesting was over, insisted on giving me another coat, so that I should not go away without any.

I recall an incident that occurred soon after I began loading wagons in the field. One Swede wagon-hand was a fellow who worked like a horse, and he kept me so busy pitching that finally I got mad and fired the wheat up to him until he was snowed under. Suddenly I heard an unearthly shriek, and the next moment we saw the Swede dive headforemost from the wagon, with a snake dangling from one of his boots. I had pitched so fast that I did not notice the snake among the wheat. When the Swede came down, the snake fell out of his boot and escaped, so that we never caught it. Then and there we agreed to work a little more moderately. I can still hear that shriek, and see that Swede diving through the air.

After we had ploughed and sown and harvested and threshed the wheat, we were through and ready for our money. With happy hearts and bulging pockets, the twenty of us hastened to the nearest prairie town, where we could get a train to take us still farther west.

SEVEN thousand feet or so above sealevel, somewhere on the upper slopes of the Burnt Rock, one of the giants of the range that guards the storied pass of Predeal, we have found a cozy nook, sheltered by a huge overhanging rock from the wind and the mist that swirls all around. We are, for the moment, stuck; indeed, if it were not for my companion, -who knows every blade of grass upon these mountains, I should say we were lost. At any rate, it is idle at present to think of advancing; we cannot see five yards in any direction. There is nothing for it but to sit and wait. Lunch is over, and I have just lit a pipeful of the dusty cigarette-tobacco bad for the health and bad for the temper which is all their grandmotherly government allows these poor Rumanians to smoke.

Altogether the situation is one that calls for philosophy. But it has its compensations, both for body and soul. The low-growing juniper on which I am lying makes a luxurious couch; my stout pre-war Harris tweed takes the bitterness from its spines and jagged edges. And the rock-face beside me is a marvel to behold, with its silver saxifrages (tall and dwarf), its campanulas (just bursting), its pinks and forget-menots and, peeping round the corner, a single shoot of Daphne, still bearing on its naked stem a belated fading bloom. The sun shone brightly this morning in Sinaia, when we set out for the summit. A short hour's climb through the forests brought us to the Poiana Re

ginei, the Queen's Mead-an Alpine pasture, where the grass grows lush and the cows fat, and where there breaks on you a view of towering buttresses and footless pinnacles, outworks of Caraiman and the Om, with the massive Schuler, that looks down on Transylvanian Kronstadt, looming in the background. It was high summer on the Poiana. The meadows were gay with purple violet and dark mauve hare-bell, with marguerite, trollius, and sweet William. A few hundred metres higher up, where the woods began to close in again, we were back into spring. Demure little soldanellas were lingering under the bushes. Primulas, yellow and pink, covered the sunny banks. Here and there, in the choice places (for even on these hills it is an exacting plant), gleamed a colony of gentian - the common acaulis and the rarer and finer verna fragments of sapphire both, lustrous and pulsating.

But we stayed not to pluck, for already the clouds were gathering round the Burnt Rock. Onward we pressed, until the forest, gradually grown sparser, finally ceased, and we were out among the gray boulders and green fells that stretch away to this rugged peak. And here tragedy overtook us. I do not speak of the drizzling rain that began to fall, though that was bad enough, but the sheep had been before us.

Every spring, you must know, the mountains are invaded by hordes of this hungry animal. The shepherds, after wintering on the plains, drive their