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assembling of discriminating decisions. I think Great Britain will float on ice-rafts in the Gulf Stream for a long time yet. And I cannot help adding that I think so partly because I think that some day there will be a Lord Milner for Ireland as well as for Egypt. And I cannot help adding further that one of the reasons why I think there will be a Lord Milner for Ireland is because I think Ireland will insist on it. I think, however, that in any case it is Great Britain within itself that is complicated and ingenious and amazing beyond any conceivable settlement of Ireland. While I was diligently sojourning in Great

Britain there were two young men who were most especially getting on and growing as national figures. One was Mr. Hodges; the other was the Prince of Wales. Proletarian influence was growing. Royal popularity was growing. I left for America with no better final thought than the one that I suppose occurs to every departing American traveler; namely, that if a social fabric is strong that uses as many as possible of all known human instincts and impulses and developments, then perhaps Great Britain is still weaving a social fabric that is strong with a most exceptionally accumulated and accumulating strength.

The Travel Bureau

By RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL

All day she sits behind a bright brass rail

Planning proud journeyings in terms that bring Far places near; high-colored words that sing, "The Taj Mahal at Agra," "Kashmir's Vale," Spanning wide spaces with her clear detail, "Sevilla or Fiesole in spring,

Through the fiords in June." Her words take wing; She is the minstrel of the great out-trail.

At half past five she puts her maps away,

Pins on a gray, meek hat, and braves the sleet,

A timid eye on traffic. Dully gray

The house that harbors her in a gray street,
The close, sequestered, colorless retreat

Where she was born, where she will always stay.

Jack London's Last Days

From "THE BOOK OF JACK LONDON "

By CHARMIAN LONDON

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N the Thursday before Jack's death, when Ernest Hopkins and

two camera men had been photographing him both for movies and “stills," I had suddenly, in one or two of the poses, noticed something in Jack's face, an accession of something more than dimly felt of late, that struck fear into me. It can only

be described as a deadness or an absence of life; something that no face, upon an erect figure, should have.

Sometimes when I gallop along the blossoming ways of Jack's mountain meadows, missing my strong traveler, it takes little effort still to hear his

blithe, companionable "Toot! Toot!" I should feel no startling did he emerge, reining the Outlaw from the shadows of the trees, laughing from under the cow-boy hat.

He had been radiant in his hope that had no horizon. "I want to live a hundred years!" was his lusty slogan, repeated within a fortnight of his death. "See the dozens of boxes of notes filed away? Why, writers I know are looking about for plots, and I 've enough here to keep me busy

with twice a hundred novels."

It was the expression of just such exuberance that Jack felt in this stanza, which was a favorite with him:

blood!

Let me lie drunken with the dreamer's wine!

Let me not see this soul-house built of mud

Go toppling to the dust a vacant shrine!

When he was gone, I smiled with appreciation of an enthusiastic, but uninformed, reviewer who, despite Jack's fifty-odd books written within seventeen years, credited him with more than double that number, "to say nothing of other forms of literature."

And there was also a letter that

pleased me, written on November 20, and never read by Jack.

I have just seen your picture, driving two huge draft-horses to a manurespreader. This is the picture of a man. with a wagon-load of fertilizer. He is going to spread it over an acre of ground and make it fertile. In reality the man has an inexhaustible supply of mental pabulum which he spreads over the whole world, the dark spots are made lighter, the sloughs of despond are drained and made to blossom, the weary and heavy laden are lifted up. In reality you are subsoilplowing the world, preparing it for the seeds of Universal Brotherhood, the while you dream dreams.

It would not be hard to imagine

Let me live out my years in heat of him a happy ghost revisiting his beloved lands or the running tides of

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And I could but think, viewing the excellence he left behind, the purity of his purpose, the way he went straight to his goal, that he made a shining exception to the rule that

The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.

I was sad when, on Saturday the nineteenth, our tenth wedding anniversary, I was unable to join Jack and a quaint woman guest at dinner. Jack brought her in to meet me, and later, having settled her somewhere with a book, returned to stroke my throbbing head. I remember reminding him of the fact that I was born and married in the same month, and that eight days hence, the twenty-seventh, would be my birthday. How little I imagined that there would intervene the date of my widowhood! Yet doom was in the air. Subtly I felt its clutch, and this was all my malady.

Jack wrote with unabated industry on Monday morning, and in the afternoon he came and coaxed me in a cheery and loving way to pull myself together and accompany him up-mountain. He wanted to see again a piece of land that adjoined the ranch, which he recalled as being well watered by springs.

"I may buy it," he said. "I could develop the springs, and that would mean bigger crops, bigger and better cattle and horses, life, more life, Mate Woman. Oh, it 's big, and I have so

many plans and so much to do! Come on up with me."

It hurt to refuse, but I felt too weak and tired to face the long ride; so he went out alone, looking uncommonly disappointed. Yet what strength was mine but half a hundred hours later to meet the worst and not fail! So strangely are we constituted!

Upon his return he came breaking through the house with his merriest step to tell me every detail of his exploration.

We

"I found the trail without any trouble," he told me, "and when I came to the field I had in mind, there was a young fellow plowing. talked quite a while, and I got off old Fritz to handle the soil myself. I found it of very good quality. It ran through my fingers so friable, you know. I've discovered who owns it, and I 'm going to take up the matter as soon as I can land the prospect of some money in New York. Maybe that autobiographical stuff will pay for it." Then further: "I'm planning to go on the twenty-ninth. And you 're still not coming with me?" he finished wistfully. Then he resumed the tale of his projects for increasing the abundance upon his acres.

§ 2

There followed a wakeful night for Jack, and he rose very late, frankly blue and complaining of fatigue. The dysentery was so much worse that I protested at his taking no measures to check an alarming condition. He worked but a short time, and the few pages of manuscript were the last he ever set hand to. The several letters he dictated to the machine were transcribed afterward by his secretary, and the very last letter

he ever talked into the horn was the ing of Jack's brain. As far as possible

following:

Editor Every Week, My dear sir:

Curses on you, "Every Week"! You keep a busy man busy over-time trying to get rid of you while unable to tear himself away. I wish the man who writes the captions for your photographs had never been born. I just can't refrain from reading every word he writes. And the rest of your staff bothers me the same way.

Hereby registering my complaint,
Sincerely yours,

JACK LONDON.

He did not go out all day, and slept in the afternoon, rousing himself with an effort. Eliza came over to talk ranch business, and they were still at it when the first and then the second gong sounded for our supper. Having shaken off the half-stupor in which he had awakened, he had become very excited outlining his immediate intention to erect on the ranch a general store, a school, and a post-office. I heard him wind up:

"There are enough children on the ranch to open a school. The ranch people can have their homes here, trade here at better prices, be born here, grow up here, get their schooling here, and if they die, they can be buried on the Little Hill, where the two Greenlaw children's graves are. No, I have n't in mind a community in the usual sense of a reform colony. I only look forward to making the place self-sustaining for every soul upon it."

Five days after that utterance, Jack London's own ashes were laid there on the whispering ridge.

Eliza told me later that in those days she worried about the overwork

she met him, yet wondered how he expected her to put the enormous tasks he prepared into prompt execution. A lesser man, in the throes of the toxemia that was destroying him, would have evinced a lesser "mania." Jack's mental vigor was spent logically along the lines of his ambition.

When Jack at length parted from Eliza that night of the twenty-first, he brought with him into the warm and cozy veranda the sweeping current of his fervor, and talked in the same vein. But I saw that he was strung to a breaking pitch of excitement.

"Your duck was perfection half an hour ago," I said, "but I 'm afraid it is far from that by now."

But he was not interested in ducks, and spoke much more than he ate, roving into a future heyday of the ranch. I distinctly recall one part of his conversation:

"There's a big slump coming in real estate, country, not city. Recollect that man who came the other day to interest me in some of the land among the little hills north of us? I did n't like the looks of his speculation. But if I cared to play the dirty business game, I could buy in largely when the slump comes, cut up the property, and later on sell, as that man expects to do, to poor people at big profit. But I don't care to make money that way, Mate Woman," he broke off earnestly. "My hands are pretty clean, are n't they?"

I could thankfully respond to that. His business was clean: his vocation, the making of books; his avocation, agriculture.

He did not ask for music, nor did he frolic with the fox-terrier Possum, as he had done much of late, testing

that keen little brain and great heart in a hundred ways. In half an hour Jack's exuberance had worn out; and with an apprehension to which I had been no stranger of late, I saw that he was getting argumentative, as if looking for trouble lest he fall into melancholy. He picked up two wooden box-trays of reading matter that he had brought with him, and lifted them to the table on which stood his almost untasted supper.

"Look," he said, his voice low and lifeless, "see what I 've got to read to-night."

"But you don't have to do it, Mate," I said, trying to stir his spirit. "Always remember that you make all this work and overwork for yourself, and it must be because you choose to do it rather than to rest. My ancient argument, you know!"

There followed a colloquy upon relative values, and then he stood up abruptly, came around the small table, and flung himself on the couch, into my arms.

"Mate Woman, Mate Woman, you 're all I 've got, the last straw for me to cling to, my last bribe for living. You know. I have told you before. You must understand. If you don't understand, I'm lost. You 're all I've got."

"I do understand," I cried. "I understand that there 's too much for you to do, and that you 're straining too hard to get it done. Are you so bound on the wheel that you cannot ease up a little, both working and thinking? You are going too fast. You are too aware. And you are ill. Something will snap if you don't pull

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his face, and I could not see his eyes. But the corners of his mouth drooped pathetically. Poor lad, my poor boy! he was, indeed, tired to death.

We lay there for an hour, he resting, sometimes sighing, saying little. He put his arms around my neck.

"I'm so tired for lack of sleep. I'm going to turn in." Rising, he gave voice to something that startled me.

"Thank God, you 're not afraid of anything!"

Never shall I know why that came from him unless it was that he knew the unthinkable was upon him, that I would very shortly lose his dear comradeship, and felt that I would be gallant to cope with that disaster.

§ 3

When in the days to follow Jack's holographic will was read, first in the family circle, next by Judge T. C. Denny in court, and tacit responsibilities were made known, I could not help reverting to that fervent exclamation. Or was it an entreaty, a supplication? If a prayer, at least he had answered it by his own passive action in neglecting, during the half-decade the will had lain in deposit, to alter a line of it. In effect it is a love-letter, written by a wise man who knew our metal, and he named Eliza Shepard and my cousin Willard L. Growall as executors. But Jack gave loophole for discontent and criticism in that, beyond trifling provision for various beneficiaries, he stipulated, "Whatever additional may be given them shall be a benefaction and a kindness from Charmian K. London and shall arise out of Charmian K. London's goodness and desire."

Having not forfeited his trust, I am proud to append his closing paragraph:

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