ernor Club or Bryan for President Club proposed, he immediately gave his whole-hearted support. I do not think I have ever known a more pathetic figure in the life of a community.

In spite of my anger and some disgust, my sympathy went out to Maggie in her new affliction; I waited to see how hard it would go with her this time. Imagine my astonishment, if you can, when I learned that the whole community was laughing. Maggie was at last beyond the pale even of scandal. Her performances had ceased to be an outrage and were now regarded as a habit. Nowhere did I hear any bitterness; no one suggested a committee. When she appeared in public, people smiled involuntarily and somewhat shyly, as though to say, "I'm trying not to hurt your feelings, but, really, you are so droll." And Maggie joined in their amusement with as much heartiness and as much readiness as she would have joined them in a foot-race. She always relished a joke on herself just a little more than a joke on some one else.

I think Maggie had achieved just about what she felt she was honestly entitled to in being regarded as funny. She had always seemed amusing to herself. Whenever any one expressed admiration for her arm or leg, as I did several times in the old days when she and Howard and I were together, she would toss it out with a clumsy gesture and laugh, as much as to say: "Glad you like it, pal. All I've ever noticed is that it 's big." I do not recall that she had any vanity. I suppose that was because she had never failed to please, and therefore had not felt it necessary to appraise, assemble, and mobilize her charms.

I went to see Maggie again, and she welcomed me as usual with gingerbread and buttermilk. To her I never grew up. I recall how clean and pretty the house was. The children were well behaved. She still called each boy by his father's full name, and they quite naturally called each other in the same way. She asked a great many questions about the little college, and said she wanted all the boys to go there if I recommended it.

I told her I had seen Hodge working on a farm near the college. He was employed as a laborer, probably at about ten dollars a month. I asked him what became of the money he got for his farm. He merely grunted. He had become more silent and sullen than ever. I think he indulged in a drunken orgy to exhaust the pent-up anguish of self-accusation and spent all his money.

In after years, whenever I came across the statement in print, "The woman always pays," I could n't help thinking of Maggie and laughing. That does n't prove that the statement is n't true, but it certainly was not in her case. Maggie had other love affairs in the years that followed, but no more children. I twitted her about it one day, and she expressed sincere regret that she did n't have any more.

"The only trouble it ever caused me," she said, "was that I could n't get enough to eat. I used to eat four or five times a day." Any other trouble it had caused her was by that time totally forgotten.

I used to try to find out if she realized what had happened to the fathers of her three illegitimate boys, but she did n't. Hodge's failure was accounted for by the unexplained loss of his money. Wickwire was "too

fond of hunting to pay enough attention to his business." The change in Stanton which made him ridiculous she attributed to "fool notions" of his wife. Any one of them could have come to her for help and would have got it.

8 5

As we talked that day about Hodge and the little college I kept thinking of the ordeal that awaited those pretty, innocent, babbling children when they should face a public-school playground. I had heard my mother say so often, "What will become of those poor children?" that the thought became very painful to me as I sat among them and heard the music of their baby talk and frequent laughter. I wanted to beg Maggie to send them away; but it would have done no good, so I said nothing. I remembered a little boy whose life was made miserable in school because his father had been sent to the county jail for six months. But Maggie's luck descended to the boys also. Howard Blake, being the eldest, was first to go to school and he, of course, had no bar sinister. He was popular. As the others came on, he had prepared the way for them. They were his devoted admirers and followed him like shadows. I learned that jail was a perfectly understandable disgrace, but illegitimacy was not. Some of the children had been told not to play with the Blake boys, but no reason was given, and the order seemed unjust. The Blake boys had two tremendous assets that parental objection to their society could not overcome. They were good base-ball players, and Maggie had the only apple-orchard in that part of the State. The Blake

boys were a power on any base-ball team, and to avoid them was to lock oneself out of that irresistible appleorchard. I suppose it would have been very different if one of the children had been a girl. School-boys are barbarians, but girls are cannibals. That phase of the problem rarely occurred to me, however, because it was scarcely possible to imagine Maggie Blake being the mother of a girl. Her children would inevitably be boys. Even the names of the boys caused no comment. Howard Blake came first; when Sam Hodge appeared, the boys took it for granted his name was Sam Hodge Blake. They always called him Sam Hodge, and I think many of them were under the impression it was one word. Godfrey Wickwire was an impossible name, and he became "Bunny" even before school-days. Carl Stanton was called by his full name, but the words were run together as Sam Hodge had always been. The boys inherited Maggie's indifference to education. None went to the little college I had recommended.

During the Blake boys' school-days other children were tortured because they had red hair or big freckles or queer clothes or because of some unfavorable publicity touching their parents; but the Blake boys never were. I happen to know that several children were spanked for being friendly with them, but the punishment failed of its purpose. The lure of base-ball, apples, gingerbread, and good company was too strong. The boys who were whipped suppressed the news and failed to mend their ways.

Maggie still liked to go to the dances and fairs or any other public entertainment where she did not feel that she was intruding. She would fre

quently be accompanied home by from six to ten young men. As her sons grew to young manhood, they seemed to take the same delight in her company. None of the boys moved away. Farms were growing smaller by the time they were ready to marry, so she gave each a piece of land to settle on. Every one of her boys married in that community. I cannot properly say that they amounted to a great deal, but as that community judged success, they had a very fair measure of it.

They knew their fathers, but did n't pay much attention to them. I don't think the information interested them a great deal more than it interested Maggie herself. They had a full share of her indifference to social conventions. I choose the word indifference with care, because it was not contempt.

The town began to grow very rapidly when Howard Blake, Junior, was about twenty-one years old. Maggie would talk enthusiastically on that subject, and several times told me that it was about the best community in the world and certainly deserved to grow.

The many new families coming both to farm and town offered to establish neighborly relations with Maggie, and she always extended the delightful hospitality of her home. Some weeks Some weeks or months later the new-comers would hear Maggie's life story. They did n't believe it. Having been taught all their lives what sort of women did such things, they could see for themselves that Maggie was not that sort. Bluff and hearty she was, to be sure, but not immoral. Well, they were right, in a way. Maggie was n't immoral; she was unmoral.

The time came when there were more new settlers than old residents.

Whenever I was asked about the story, I said I did n't know, until one day I heard my father reply to the same question, "She was a good neighbor for more than twenty years." That struck me as much better, so I adopted it. I suppose many others sidestepped in the same way. At any rate, the story of Maggie simply fell down. There were more people who did n't believe it than did.

One of the strangest phases of the controversy about Maggie (it was waged for some three years between the new-comers who liked her and the older residents who felt she should be ostracized) was that none of the newcomers ever asked her directly to explain her children's names, and none of the older residents was clever enough to prove his or her story by Maggie's own testimony. She would not have denied it. Neither would any of the boys; but they were not asked, even after her death.

I have never known of another case in which Bacon's comment on death was so strikingly proved true. It was he who said, "Death closeth the door to envy and is a passport to good fame."

There was a little creek which ran through our pasture and Maggie's. Usually it was about ten feet wide, but sometimes it disappeared. After a heavy rain it became a torrent fifty yards wide and tore down fences. There was a cloud-burst in the hills up-stream the year Carl Stanton was married. He was then twenty years of age. As the country became more thickly settled, people had encroached on the bed of this innocent-looking stream. After the cloud-burst it became half a mile wide in some places. Houses, barns, wagons, and fences

were tumbling along its boiling waters, together with pigs, goats, sheep, horses, and cows. This strange and fearful procession was moving through Maggie's pasture at an astonishing speed when she saw a little boy about six years old clinging to the top of what remained of his home. Maggie waded into the water at once. Those who saw her said she was swept away before she had reached a depth of four feet. She and the child were both drowned. Their bodies were washed ashore together at a bend in the creek in our pasture.

But

Having accepted, their mother's ostracism all their lives, the boys prepared for a funeral at which they would be the only mourners. the procession to the cemetery was more than a mile long. It was now absolutely safe for the first time to make public confession of that love for Maggie which all felt and which had tortured them through all the years when they bowed to their duty to hate her. There was something inexpressibly pathetic in the fact that Maggie had done the community such a signal service by her death. At last a burden was lifted from their hearts. They could henceforth claim her memory as they had never been able to claim her. It was now perfectly clear that she had caused them much more anguish then they had ever caused her.

For a long time I had wanted to find out exactly how the boys estimated their mother, aside from the fact that they loved her devotedly. It was some months after the funeral that I had an opportunity to talk with Howard Blake for a whole afternoon.

"Mother was elemental, like the weather or the moon," he said. "I

never judged her at all. Whatever she did was inevitable, without plan or design. You could n't quarrel with her ideas, because she was not conscious of having a philosophy of life. Yet she had as definite a philosophy as the world has ever known. Her utter lack of self-consciousness was her strength. All her life she gave and never asked anything. We boys loved her for the same reason and in very much the same way that you did. She won our love as honestly as any stranger might. She never claimed it as a mother's due. She took it by the very simple method of giving us her love so abundantly."

I have since known many famous women, good, bad, powerful, wise, or brilliant, but she remains the most remarkable personality I have ever encountered. I doubt if she had either education or imagination enough to enjoy a dime novel. I am not certain that she knew long division. But this I do know of her: she was incapable of envy, malice, or revenge. Her sublime faith in men was never diminished. I do not believe she was ever worried, even for a minute. The only unfulfilled wish I ever heard her express was for more babies. Such a person would quite naturally be able to perform miracles, and Maggie certainly performed one. She practised something akin to polyandry in a strictly orthodox, puritanical, farming community for more than a decade, named three illegitimate sons after their fathers, wrecked all three of the fathers, flourished as probably no green bay-tree ever dreamed of flourishing, and finally in her mature years chased those who wanted to tell the truth about her to evasion, silence, or actual falsehood.

T

HE population question looms before us, as the fuel question

must have loomed before our skin-clad ancestors at the beginning of the last glacial epoch. Science's foiling of disease has caused some peoples to register a greater natural increase, and their thinkers blench before the stealthy approach of over-population. France, on the other hand, worries over baby deficit. Her birth-rate, which Her birth-rate, which began to decline noticeably about seventy years ago, in 1911 was exceeded by her death-rate. In 1922 births exceeded deaths by only seventy thousand.

Population shortage is the very last thing we Americans have to fear. We can sit in security whether the middle of this century finds us with a hundred and thirty millions of inhabitants or a hundred and fifty. We fill two cradles for one coffin, and the cradle margin is growing. What we have to worry about is quality.

Realizing that immigration has brought us much chaff, we are putting up the bars. But what of those already here? Aside from fugitives from racial or religious oppression, immigrants have come here to get on. This motive does not set in motion the educated, the propertied, the well connected, for they have fair prospects in their home land. Hence few scions of the gifted families have sought our

shores. The migrant stream from Great Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, or southern Europe in the last sixty years has not been a fair sample of its peoples in respect to natural talents. A dreadful lot of nonsense has been uttered about the foreign-born by politicians after their votes, but the hard fact remains that Europe has let us have few of her élite, but has been relieved of millions of her common and sub-common. Since three eighths of us have one or both parents foreign-born, it is fateful that of the two elements, foreign parentage and native, the former is contributing nearly twice as freely to the future make-up of the American people as the latter.

Bar aliens, and still we need to swivel a watchful eye on what is happening to the native fiber of our people, for a nation may fall without noise. This is because, as Pearson shows, a quarter of one generation is parent to about half the next. In other words, the most fruitful fourth of a people will produce well nigh as many children as the remaining three fourths. What if this fateful fourth should include most of the pinheads and oafs!

In the last two decades there has been some inquiry into the biological fate of our superior strains. College graduates are presumably members of the brightest fifth of the population,