that he had taken refuge with Mrs. Adis. It was all up. He was not really hidden; there was no place for him to hide. Directly they opened the inner door they would see him. Why could n't he think of things better? Why was n't he cleverer at looking after himself, like other men? His legs suddenly refused to support him, and he sat down on the pile of sacks. The man in the kitchen seemed to have some difficulty in saying what he wanted to Mrs. Adis. He stood before her silently, twisting his cap. "Well, what is it?" she asked. "I want to speak to you, ma'am." Peter Crouch listened, straining his ears, for his thudding heart nearly drowned the voices in the next room. Oh, no, he was sure she would not give him away, if only for Tom's sake. She was a game sort, Mrs. Adis.

"Well," she said sharply, as the man remained tongue-tied.

"I have brought you bad news, Mrs. Adis."

Her expression changed. "What? It ain't Tom, is it?" "He's outside," said the keeper. "What do you mean?" said Mrs. Adis, and she moved toward the door. "Don't, ma'am, not till I 've told you."

"Told me what? Oh, be quick, man, for mercy's sake!" and she tried to push past him to the door.

"There's been a row," he said, "down by Cinder Wood. There was a chap there snaring rabbits, and Tom was walking with the Boormans and me and old Crotch down from the castle. We heard a noise in the spinney, and there-it was too dark to see who it was, and directly he saw us he made off. But we'd scared him, and he let fly with his gun."

He stopped speaking and looked at her, as if beseeching her to fill in the gaps of his story. In his corner of the lean-to Peter Crouch was as a man of wood and sawdust.

"Tom-" said Mrs. Adis.

The keeper had forgotten his guard, and before he could prevent her she had flung open the door.

The men outside had evidently been waiting for the signal, and they came in, carrying something on a hurdle, which they put down in the middle of the kitchen floor.

"Is he dead?" asked Mrs. Adis, without tears.

The men nodded. They could not find a dry voice, like hers.

In the lean-to Peter Crouch had ceased to sweat and tremble. Strength had come with despair, for he knew he must despair now. Besides, he no longer wanted to escape from this thing that he had done.

"O Tom! and I thinking it was one of them demmed keepers! Tom! and it was you that got it-got it from me! Reckon I don't want to live." And yet life was sweet.

Mrs. Adis was sitting in the old basket arm-chair by the fire. One of the men had helped her into it. Another, with rough kindness, had poured her out something from a flask he carried in his pocket.

"Here, ma'am, take a drop of this. It 'll give you strength. We'll go around to Ironlatch Farm and ask Mrs. Gain to come down to you. Reckon this is a tur'ble thing to have come to you, but it's the will o' Providence, as some folks say, and as for the man who did it, we 've a middling good guess who he is, and he shall swing."

"We did n't see his face," said

Vidler, "but we 've got his gun. He threw it into an alder when he bolted, and I swear that gun belongs to Peter Crouch, who's been up to no good since the day when Mus' Scales got shut of him for stealing his corn."

"Reckon, though, he did n't know it was Tom when he did it," said the other man, "he and Tom always being better friends than Crouch deserved."

Peter Crouch was standing upright now, looking through the crack of the door. He saw Mrs. Adis struggle to

her feet and stand by the table, looking down on the dead man's face. A whole eternity seemed to roll by as she stood there. He saw her put her hand into her pocket, where she had thrust the key of the lean-to.

"The Boormans have gone after Crouch," said Vidler, nervously breaking the silence. "They'd a notion as he 'd broken through the woods Ironlatch-way. There's no chance of his having been by here? You have n't seen him to-night, have you, ma'am?"

Do not know why brass tacks are supposed to move in a more realistic world than other tacks; but, assuming that they deserve their reputation, I should say that large numbers of them will have to come into existence before the enraged taxpayers of the United States will get any really realistic view of the subject of our national expenditures. There are many arguments for a national budget. Perhaps the best argument for it is that it will increase the output of brass tacks and diminish the output of dreams and myths regarding the uses to which the National Government devotes the taxpayers' moneys.

It should be understood from the beginning that the central and final figure in the national budget system which we have begun to operate is the President of the United States. The gentleman who took the legislative lead in promoting and enacting our budget system was Medill McCormick, the gentleman who is gallantly and vivaciously incurring the pains and penalties of giving our budget system its first experimental turn is Charles G. Dawes; but the gentleman who will carry the final burden, and the final risk, is Warren Gamaliel Harding.

In December Mr. Harding will become the first President of the United States to present to the Congress of the United States, and to the taxpayers, a legally required schedule of proposed national expenditures con

stituting the taxpayers' national outlay for a year and bearing a Presidential official and personal signature and sanction.

Formerly the Treasury Department transmitted to Congress without revision the estimates of national expenditures drafted and requested by the Government's various and numerous departments and establishments. The "book of estimates" was the work of the President's uncontrolled and unconcerted subordinates. In respect to executive proposals for executive expenditures by his own executive departments and establishments the President of the United States could sit aloof like a Lucretian god without intervention and without care.

The budget act compels his intervention. Its directive sections begin with the words, "The President shall transmit," and its section creating a bureau of the budget is careful to say that the bureau shall prepare the budget "under such rules and regulations as the President may prescribe."

Further, its section empowering the Bureau of the Budget to examine the "methods of business" of the departments and establishments is extremely careful to say that the bureau shall examine these methods "when directed by the President," and that its purpose in examining them shall be that of "enabling the President to determine what changes should be made."

Mr. Harding will now have an execu

tive life in which the cares of a British Chancellor of the Exchequer will be happily mingled with the cares of the supervisory officials of the British Treasury, joined to all the multiplying and harassing cares of previous American Presidents.

However, if Mr. Harding will only be as passionate about "balances of appropriations," "ensuing fiscal years," "the assembling, correlating and revising of estimates," "the activities of departments and establishments," "the assignments of particular activities to particular services," and "the re-grouping of services" as his young friend Medill McCormick, he will perhaps be able to elicit from them, as McCormick seems to, an atmosphere not of care, but of romantic excitement.

Thus equipped with a great enthusiasm for the interesting complexes of the human mind and for the complicated dullnesses of public finance, he arrived in Washington as congressman at large from Illinois in 1917, and, having already largely and leadingly helped to insert the idea of a budget into the legislation of Illinois, at once settled down into a campaign for becoming a large and leading helper in inserting the idea of a budget into the legislation of the United States.

For some time this campaign seemed to have no result beyond that of transforming his secretary, Elisha Hanson, into America's most ardent budget expert. There was a war happening with Germany. Legislation other than budget legislation was on top. McCormick was attentive to that other legislation, but underneath it he nourished the unconquerable conviction that when the war was over the principal legislation required by peace would be a budget, and he continued to col

Of course there were budgeteers before McCormick in Washington, and there were budgeteers contemporaneous with him; but none of them displayed through all distractions, such as the Treaty of Versailles, the concentration of mind and the perseverance of effort which McCormick gave to all projects touching on the efficient and economical reorganizing of executive departments and executive methods, and he became fully entitled not only to be named as the joint-author of the McCormick-Good budget act, but also to be named as the principal national legislative promoter of the general idea of governmental reorganization on the business principle of logically located functions and relentlessly located responsibilities.

In our form of governmental structure those responsibilities have now become fairly well located in the White House. The next stage is that the taxpayers will expect Mr. Harding to step out on the White House lawn and perform a few efficient and economical miracles.

If Mr. Harding had ever given himself out to be a miracle-man, there might be pleasure in watching him trying to meet expectations that cannot be met. The first and fundamental error in the mind of the taxpayer regarding national expenditures is one which, as a taxpayer, I hated to lose. I hated to lose the feeling that in every department of the Government there were increasing multitudes of taxeaters eating my taxes with an appetite quite unjustified by the cost of living and the value of money.