ing idiosyncrasy of a sound and sane population. We shall outgrow it. Most of our people, down in the bottoms of their hearts, are not ambitious, are not greedy for gold, are not frenziedly strenuous in the quest for wealth. Rather they strive for security, for surcease from toil and anxiety, for a serene life. More and more they study how peacefully to accumulate happi

ness.

If the captains of industry of America can contrive to guarantee their daily bread, the humble masses will yet learn to be content, will labor loyally, and spurn the agitator and the unionorganizer. This is no supposition, but the experience of directors in many sagacious institutions. It is an experiment whose effects have been demonstrated and verified. Men are glad to be directed by genuinely superior intelligence. They defer with piteous humility to real authority. They revere the laws of the land so long as these govern all men equally, and they consider the wishes of their fellow-men even to the detriment of their own interests. The humble masses have character, personal integrity, and an unspoiled straightforwardness. Labor unrest arises primarily from the laborer's insecurity of tenure, and it is worthy of note that this unrest causes an annual labor turnover, a shifting from job to job, the cost of which to the entire commonwealth is fabulous. Colonel Arthur Woods, after an exhaustive investigation, estimated the other day that it costs the United States $2,500,000,000 in wasted time every year to hire and fire the workers who must shift from job to job precariously to gain a livelihood.

Then, having contrived to guarantee security, the leading citizens of America must preach a new gospel. They must preach that ambition is folly; that greedy, pushing, discontented people are ill-bred; that those who can become rich do so; and that those who cannot become rich do not do so by taking thought. Thinking will not make you the equal of your betters, but it may make you wretched. In the days when Adam and Eve wore fig

leaves there were no gentle-folk, unless Lucifer be counted in some sort a cultivated person; but the days of Adam and Eve are past, and now the world holds many grades of humankind. We all arrive in the world equally naked, and we all depart equally dead, but in the interim we reveal the most sundering differentiation. Each man in his rank fulfils his part in the whole of nature, but no man can rise from his class except by growth, and even growth is limited. The pigmy cannot stretch his stature by wishing. This is a truth to be welcomed, not railed at.

We must point out the comfort and the joy of knowing one's place. We must condemn the bounder who struts on borrowed stilts above his plane. Shall the turtle long to be a tortoise? Shall the Guernsey be encouraged to become a Hereford? Shall the feebleminded be urged to claim the sage's sapience? In our preaching of the new-old gospel, we must point out how envy was the sin of Satan, and for it he was flung from paradise. Let no man envy another. Let no poor man envy the rich their automobiles, which jounce and cramp the kidneys and induce Bright's disease; nor their expensive diet, which destroys the liver and brings gout to the feet; nor their cellars of costly vintages whose alcohol poisons the blood and makes the offspring anemic and mentally deficient. There was once a command of God, "Thou shalt not covet anything that is thy neighbor's," and has not the Man of Galilee said, "Blessed are the meek"?

A rich man is harassed by his possessions in this life, and, according to Holy Writ, is shut out from heaven by them. What peace of mind can he enjoy? What reward has he? He is the trustee of the people's goods, the people's food, the people's fate. He is responsible. There is no escape from his responsibilities, and proudly be it said, he rarely wishes to shirk, to heave the crushing weight from his back. He is lordly in the wilderness of human life, and imperturbably he faces the eternal fire. But I promised not to praise him.

N the thriving oil-boom town of Winfield, Kentucky, there is a trolleycar. This is, of course, not a unique distinction. There are in other towns other trolleycars, even of the one ewe-lamb variety; but one does not find them manned and captained by a Mr. Allerby.

He is a person to be remembered, a rotund, rosy, weather-beaten little gentleman who looks as if he might have stepped down out of one of the Fallowfield sporting-prints which adorn the walls of many American homes, and it seems incongruous that, instead of hunting-pink, he should be wearing, like most of his passengers, merely an alpaca coat that needs pressing, with, for badge of office, a blue, vizored cap whose gold lettering proclaims him an official-in fact, the only official-of the Winfield Street Railway Company. Indeed, as the little car leaves the station with an unexpected leap, and goes bounding away over the hills and dales of the Winfield streets, the stranger finds himself peering eagerly forward, ready to shout, "Yoicks!" or "Tally-ho!" or whatever it is one does shout at first sight of the quarry. Mr. Allerby gets as much speed out of his trolley as an experienced horseman gets out of a green hunter.

Nor is the quarry itself often lacking to complete the illusion. Sometimes it is a small boy on a wheel, who just in front, between the tracks, courts death jeeringly, with inciting grins over his

shoulder at the pursuing Juggernaut. Or it may be one of the prosperous new oil ladies learning to drive her limousine, a sight that adds daily uncertainty to life in Winfield byways. Or it may be, and usually is, the Prewitt pony, which, having manipulated his cart into the smoother going of the rails, is not to be deterred from his fat course by any pleadings from his family, or yet by clangings and loud words from Juggernaut behind. Often male passengers have to turn out en masse to persuade the Prewitt pony bodily from its determination to clog the wheels of progress.

A ride in the Winfield trolley-car is rarely without a certain sense of adventure, what with its racing starts, its disconcerting stops, and the rattling, reckless speed of its general conduct. But it has its leisure moments, too; plenty of these. Always in the heated portion of the day it is to be found drawn up somewhere about town in the shade of the maples, no longer Juggernaut, but a peaceful playhouse for little girls and their dolls, with fowls hopping domestically about its steps, perhaps, and a dog snoring in the warm dust under it. Sometimes Mr. Allerby may be discovered within, as the writer once discovered him, stretched out on one of the long seats, his cap of office removed to give the breeze access to an incipient bald spot, a book propped open upon his person, which proved, surprisingly, to be the "Poems of Tennyson." It was open at "The Lotos-Eaters."

It should be explained that in order

to keep its franchise from the town of Winfield, it is only necessary that the Street Railway Company operate a car upon its streets once a day. But Mr. Allerby is both conscientious and obliging in the performance of his office.

He rarely fails to meet the trains; and on a rainy day, for instance, one may expect to hear the loud approach of Juggernaut at least once an hour, with the welcome call of its conductor: "Here we are, ladies! Step in out of the wet." Or, if you happen to get out of the Louisville express feeling stiff-kneed and stuffy, and inclined to walk to your destination along the pleasant, tree-lined, sun-flecked streets, there is Mr. Allerby, with whom you may leave your luggage (paying its fare, of course; five cents for suitcases, three for small satchels), sure to find it waiting on your door-step.

However, it is palpably a disappointment to him if the luggage rides and you do not, for, like Abou Ben Adhem, Mr. Allerby may be written as one who loves his fellow-men. Particularly if his fellow-man be a woman and a stranger. It is through strangers that he keeps in touch with what he calls "the world out there." And as for women, any plump, middle-aged, poetry-loving

bachelor whose sole feminine experience is in the rôle of temporary guardian and protector is apt to develop sentiments toward the sex which are only too rare. Always in slippery weather Mr. Allerby hurries from his platform to help wouldbe women passengers down their steps and out to his car in safety; and once when unfortunate Mrs. Moore, who happened to be what the town calls "addicted," fell asleep on her way home, it was Mr. Allerby who carried her indoors and up to her bed, and who even telephoned the doctor before he resumed his professional duties, somewhat to the annoyance of certain passengers who had hoped to catch the train for Cincinnati. But of course there were other trains for Cincinnati.

Life in Winfield would be difficult to conceive without Mr. Allerby. All along his route mothers entrust him with their young to take to school or to the dentists; harassed housekeepers give him important commissions to execute at the grocer's; pretty girls at the post-office; and there are certain regular passengers who ride their five or six squares simply in the interests of good fellowship. Chief among these is, or was, old Miss Sara Truman.

Several times in the week, if the day was fair, Miss Sara might be seen in her bonnet and her beaded dolman, waiting on her porch for the rumble of the trolley. And Mr. Allerby, observing her there, would descend from his platform, and usher her with due empressement to her accustomed seat just inside the front door. Down town as far as the turn-table, and up again, they conversed steadily, he standing sidewise at his wheel, with one eye on the traffic. She made no pretense of errands to be done.

"Why at my age should I go to the shops? Let the shops come to me," she said. Miss Sara was by way of being rather an autocrat in her gentle fashion. And when she came in from these excursions with Mr. Allerby, her cheeks would be quite pink with excitement.

"What in the world," teased her married niece, "do you find to talk about with that funny old fellow?"

"Men and affairs and the world at