thought. "Fill it for you, oh my God!" He writhed a moment and then leaned back and all his tense muscles relaxed. Hard to keep eyes open, sleepy, so sleepy, up! Wake with a jerk! Was that the bell, no, no, sleepy, dreaming, five aces. Up! No, no, can't be five, so sleepy.

On the left of the dealer Jimmy Sprague passed and Chuck Giles next him threw out a chip. Hartshorne laid the nine, ten, jack, and queen of clubs along with a two of hearts face down and picked up his glass.

"Damn that boy," he said. "Thanks for the drink, Chuck. Twice two much fizz." But Chuck was raising the limit and only the click of his chips answered. Through all the play little words came out thus; no one answered, no one heard. Barton Darrow next the window said, "It's getting cold," and Bill Winslow next him said, "Funny how it runs tonight," and Harvey Jones said, "Three. That's queer, it's empty," and shook his flask, and then every one heard Jimmy Sprague say, "Dealer takes two cards." Cards fell, round the table, two chips raised, one called, Sprague threw down three fives and then every one looked up and saw Judge Milliken.

"Good evening, Judge. Sit in awhile?" The judge was a large man with straight, heavy black eyebrows and thin, straight lips. He spoke seldom and men listened to him. He had a trick of clearing his throat and then every one listened. It was a resounding noise his throat made when he cleared it; not a long rasp; a kind of monosyllabic throat-clearing like a gong or a gavel on a large empty desk.

But now he stood silent with his hands in his pockets.

"I believe you were opposed to this new rule, Judge."

"Not in the least. I take no part in club legislation."

Several men at the next table looked over at the sudden sound of the judge's voice. Sprague stopped shuffling the cards and looked up, a little embarrassed. The others moved their glasses about and one of them was disordering his chips into piles of mixed colors. Sprague put down his cards and took a long drink. It was his seventh so he put the glass down carefully.

"Judge Milliken, what is your feeling?"

The judge cleared his throat. "It's a form of profanity," he said. There was a short silence. The boy slid by with a tray. A gust of wind came sharp at the window and one loose pane vibrated like a siren. One of the men at the table by the fire said, "It's getting late," and there was a moving back of chairs and a buzz of talk, then silence again while they counted chips.

"Profanity?" said Sprague. The gavel boomed again.

"Irreverence. Money is the exchange of life. We must, eventually, translate everything into terms of it. The attitude of the gambler is a contempt for money. He treats it with disrespect. Money must command respect and must be treated with reverence as a symbol and as a fact. You men, passing it back and forth in these games, are thumbing your noses, to use a vulgar expression, at a term of life, a symbol of life, and an inseparable fact of life."

"But after all," said Sprague, "it's all relative. I mean it's not wrong if you can afford it."

"The fact of money is absolute," said the judge his voice mounting to its court-room resonance, "right and wrong are relative in most cases and we can judge only by the law. The facts are thus and the law is thus and our judgment in court is based on the relation of the facts to the law. But the law does not consider what I am speaking of here. I am speaking of an attitude. Real right and wrong which transcend the law are matters of attitude. Contempt for money; should I say, perhaps, irreverence for money is an attitude of blasphemy. It is, in a manner of speaking, a sin against the Holy Ghost. Good evening, gentlemen.

The men looked at the table and, when the judge was gone, smiled at each other.

Sprague cut the cards, slamming half the pack down and the baize muffled the sound. "The Holy Ghost," said Darrow. "Hum."

"Fine chap, the judge," said Chuck Giles.

Sprague thought, 'That'll be a good thing to tell my boy when he grows up. I'll be through with all this, then.'

Harvey Jones thought, 'The old fool. Men when they get rich think money is God.'

Bill Winslow was running his eyes up and down the piles of his chips trying to count them without appearing to count them. He had been doing this while the judge had talked, taking advantage of the others' diversion. Four hundred,' he thought, 'and a hundred to start with and there's at least two hundred in the whites; it's a clean-up, that's what it is, a clean-up, if I just go easy for the rest of the evening now. . . .'

The men next the fire left early and

gradually the other tables were deserted; the fire died down, and the play at the window table went on dimly in the haze of smoke. The spots on the cards danced before the players' eyes. The boy came in and handed about checks to sign. The whiskey gave out and the boy was sent to the telephone and after a time an old man came in with packages and looked eagerly at the piles of chips and shuffled out again smoothing crumpled bills in his rough hands.

Darrow said, "Let's move over by the fire," but no one heard him and after a time he said it again and no one heard him, so he poured out a stiff drink and drank it neat. The smoke was so heavy over the table they could hardly see across it, and every little while a narrow thrust of wind moved the curtains and bored a little tunnel through the smoke. When the checks came back for the second signing, Sprague looked at his watch and whistled.

"Let's make it five hands more," he said, and Chuck Giles cupped his single pile of chips in his hand and grunted and looked round the table to see if any one had noticed his gesture.

At the door they exclaimed at the sharp blows of the wind and one of them ran up the street shouting "taxi" after a big limousine. Bill Winslow came out last, having stopped to wake up the boy and buy a cigar, and drifted slowly down the pavement with his hands in the pockets of his fur coat. The tingle of the whiskey was in his feet. 'It isn't so cold,' he thought. 'Seven hundred and fifty; good evening. Funny, I was going to stay out of those last hands regardless. Funny thing, never pays to be cautious. Oh well, easy come, easy go. What was it the judge said? Thumb your nose. Thumb it at the world. Money be damned.'

At the corner a man was bent over the curb, poking in the gutter with his stick. Winslow moved by him and turned to look back. The man had no overcoat on, and one hand was in his trousers-pocket and the other with the stick was shaking in a regular rhythm. Winslow stopped at the curb and watched him. After a moment the man looked up and saw Winslow.

"Got good eyes, brother?" he said.
"Have you lost something?"

"Not much," said the man. “Just a dime. 'Tain't worth botherin', I guess. I can't see very good. It was right here it must have fell. I had it in the wrong pocket and I heard it clink. Must have been about here somewheres. I stopped as soon as I heard it clink.”

Winslow unbuttoned his coat and pulled out a bill from his trousers pocket. "Here, don't bother," he said.

The man straightened up as far as the chronic curve of his spine would permit and looked sharply into Winslow's eyes. His face was an odd mass of unsymmetrical little bones with curved lines in his skin circling about them. His chin was very round and red and bristled with hairs of uneven length and color. It was a face that had intended to be fat and genial and had undergone a series of failures in this intention. It was an ugly face and, at the moment, more than necessarily distorted.

Bill Winslow shoved back the bill abruptly and shifted his eyes from the old man's steady anger.

"I beg your pardon," he said.

"I may look poor," said the man and stopped. Winslow looked slowly up him from the split toe of his right shoe to the missing button at his stomach where frayed black worsted stuck through.

"That's why I-I beg your pardon." "I may look poor," said the man, “but I ain't no beggar. I earned that dime. And I earned this one too." He fumbled a long time at all his pockets, and Winslow waited uncomfortably because he could not make his feet move away. After much fumbling the man brought out a hand with a coin shining in it. He had meant to show it on his open palm but the fingers would not open. Now they closed further for the hand was shaking, dangerously. "I earned this one," he said, “and I'll earn the next one."

And he turned sharply and walked, too briskly for his age, down a side street and his stick clicked for a long time on the pavement while Winslow stood with the whiskey mounting into his head. "Disagreeable bird," he said aloud. "Was only trying to-" He stumbled toward the curb and, as he passed, a sharp glint in the gutter stopped him. He stooped slowly and picked up a bright dime and looked about him, but the long streets ran

He looked a moment at the coin in his hand as he moved on up the avenue. He slid the dime in his overcoat pocket, then, after a block or so of walking, he stopped.

"It'll bring me bad luck," he said. He pulled out a handful of change. "Which one was it?" He stood poking over the coins with a cold finger. One of them dropped and then with a sweeping gesture he threw the handful broadcast.

laugh rang loud and lonely in the vacant street. He thrust his hand into his trousers pocket among the crisp hard bills. "Just as soon throw it all away. What was it the judge said? Irreverence. No, I'll keep it. Might as well get some fun out of it. I'll keep it and play it. Keep it and play it. Keep it and play it."

The words kept time to his step for a while and then the wind came sudden and hard in his face and frightened him a little.

of women.

T happens that by the operation of choice and circumstance I bear the title "Professor of English." So do a great number of other men and a considerable number We are perhaps not a large body in comparison with lawyers and bricklayers and realtors, but in the academic world we are relatively numerous. There are more of us, for example, than there are professors of Greek, or professors of art, or professors of electrical engineering, and quite as many, probably, as in any of the so-called departments into which our American love of system has divided the field of knowledge. Academically speaking, we are important.

Yet we are as recently invented as are the professors of natural science. English is a comparatively new "subject," to use the technical parlance of the schools. First there appeared in our colleges professors of rhetoric and oratory-retired clergymen, most of them; on their heels came professors of the English language and literature; and presently the great company of professors of English-English neat, one might have said in other days-was established in the land.

I am not proposing to attack or de

VOL. LXXXII.- -20

fend in any way this eminently useful and, on the whole, rather distinguished body of citizens. Association with them and with their work for some thirty years convinces me that they are perhaps quite as sensible and efficient in their way as any other set of men that could be cited for examination. Although they are given more gratuitous advice by outsiders than any other group I can think of, they seem to me very capable of managing their own affairs. Only-and here is the question I wish to put-what, precisely, is their business? What are they supposed to do for and with the hordes of students to whom they minister? They are called professors of English. But what, exactly, do they teach?

To begin with, they are expected to train their pupils to write. For some reason a little difficult to get at, since the use of the mother tongue ought, one would think, to be a matter of concern to all professors alike, the department of English is held responsible not only for instruction in writing but for any correction of his faults as a writer that the student ever receives. In some institutions, to be sure, the teachers of rhetoric and composition form a separate staff; but such professors certainly regard themselves and with good right-as professors of English. Only in rare cases, more