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didn't miss him none. There was more room though. The house was too big, just Mom an' me. I missed the kids. It got terrible.

22

I went to see Sadie. It was hard to get to go.

I thought she'd be glad to see me. She ain't married, nor so young no more neither, an' we has always knew each other. I done it right too. I I went up there a Wednesday.

Sadie done nothin'. She talked o' this an' that, like women will. But it come to me there in Sadie's parlor that there weren't no likely woman on the whole mountain would have me. An' I'm a big feller, an' strong, an' a good worker. Her house is white painted, an' lots o' new furniture. Got a new roof, got a victrola.

It's these summer people. They have changed everything but me. I been too busy, doin' for my girls, so's they'd be like the summer people.

I'm awful rough. The pretty girls won't have me. Lots o' the plain ones got good hearts, I guess, if you get to know 'em-but you don't get to know 'em.

It was terrible stayin', but it was terrible to get to leave. I set there. After a while I come away.

I made up my mind then I was a old feller. But I felt bad.

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was it: "Can we work him." I felt awful funny. An' after, too, when they come an' asked me, so pretty. Like always, it was, only I felt different. I ain't never felt the same since, someway. It's too bad. Pourin' out for 'em all these years-an' then that.

This last year to Dalleytown has took every cent. I thought when June come, things would ease up. But I should 'a' remembered last summer. I didn't, but I should 'a'. The city folks, an' all. The boys to the military camp-by Gar, the kids needs a lot.

"They won't wear blue no more, I thought. "Everything else, seems, but blue, like that artist said. So their eyes look different."

An' their little wispy curls-I miss them curls. They're just a pair o' skinny boys, now.

21

When I come in, the night o' the accident, an' there was the crowd to supper, I was proud an' happy. "Them city fellers likes it to my house," I thought. I stood there by the sink, washin', an' combin' my hair.

I wasn't goin' in. I was dirty— tired too. But by Gar, it is my house. An' then Glen come out, when she heard me, an' says to be quiet, an' not let on, the boys was in there—well, I had a funny feelin'. An' not come in, she says-I could have supper after-they was nearly through.

I set there in the dark. I didn't want no supper. After a while I

went out.

It was a grand night. Stars, an' the noise o' little bugs, like always on nice nights in August.

I felt like I'd lost somethin'. It

come to me then my girls was gone from me.

I was stewin' over it in my mind there in the dark, when I slipped on the ledge an' fell. An' the rock come after, an' pinned me down.

I lay there quite a while. But it got so I had to call to 'em. I couldn't stand it no longer.

They got me out, an' to the house. Doc Gordon come. He fixed me fine. It was terrible.

Doc stops by. He says to me: "You got to get goin', Jamie. It's time you stepped out."

But I tell him: "Oh, I step about a bit. I got to get the use back, o' course. It comes slow."

"Keep at it, Jamie," Doc says. But I'm doin' fine.

Don't the wind blow outside there! Lately he's been comin' in 'most every day. He's naggin' at me. He used to nag at Pop, I remember.

I must stop thinkin' o' that. I He shouldn't speak to me like he can't stand it, even now.

Well-this all is right comfortable anyway. I never was rested before. Yes, the city fellers got me out an' up to the house an' helped Doc too. An' I been here ever since.

Mom took care o' me good. But it was hard on Mom.

The girls started in when the schools opened, a couple weeks after. By Gar, that was six months ago. Don't time fly!

Glen there to the Ridge school, an' Molly to the Center. Twelve dollars a week week apiece they makes. Twelve dollars a week, startin' in. Next year they figger to get more,

even.

They ain't so brash spendin' of it neither, now they see how it's come by-an' Mom an' me to do for. They is lookin' ahead, like me.

done.

"By God, Barlow!" he says this morning-different, he sounded. "Can't you see what's happenin' to you? Get up, man, an' do for yourself. I can't help you no more.” "I got to take it easy," I says. He made me feel bad, speakin' like that

to me.

"You big fool," he says, like I never heard him; an' then he says, "I never would 'a' believed it o' you, Jamie." He's different someway, an' I feel bad. I like Doc fine.

I kind o' wish Pop was here, now I'm in the house this way. Six months. I got to take it easy. It would be comp'ny, even though he never was one to talk neither. Only there ain't hardly space for two good chairs, an' this one o' his is right comfortable.

I

THE MENACE OF LEISURE

What to Do with the Sixteen-Hour Day

HELEN MCAFEE

N THE good old times before Labor was capitalized, the "twelvehour day," which then prevailed, quite naturally meant the working half of man's existence. The other half was hardly worth mentioning. Among the workers, there was little energy left over for discussing it; and among the capitalists, little interest-only a few visionaries bothered their heads about a division of their employees' lives so perfectly balanced that it was easy to accept it as a part of God's plan for the universe.

Then we awoke one morning (no longer ago than yesterday in the scheme of history) and found that the workday had been cut to eight hours. Here was a true revolution in human affairs. But this was not all. Talk was at once let loose about a still further reduction of the "day." An eminent English industrialist ventured the prophecy that if every one of his fellowcountrymen did his part, none need labor more than four hours out of the twenty-four. And Mr. Santayana, alarmed by the idea of overproduction, went so far as to suggest that "in a world composed entirely of philosophers, an hour or two a day of manual labor . . . would provide for material wants."

Although Mr. Santayana's world does not does not seem imminent, "overproduction" has become a bugbear of the hour, and it is already possible to see a good deal of truth in these speculations. Despite a temporary reaction here and there, as in Fascist Italy, the work period in many activities and in many countries has fallen well below the classic eight hours, if an average be taken for the whole year, and especially if time be taken out, as in football matches, for breaks in routine-like relighting tobacco and waiting for Central. This decrease in working hours in the formal employments is, of course, due to the new organization of industry, with its "mass production" and its machinery-so abhorred by the Butlerites. But the picture is nearly as impressive when one turns to the less organized and more informally employed. Think of the housewife of to-day and the comparative nothingness to which laborsaving devices and electrical appliances, antiseptics and contraceptics, have transformed her once endless. drudgery. No wonder we have on our hands a Woman Problem, although this-to come straight to the point is merely a part of the larger problem of human leisure.

Considering the dramatic fashion

in which it has overtaken us, one might have thought that this problem of leisure would be everywhere recognized. One might have supposed, too, that the revolutionary reduction in work time which caused it would have led to a revolution in terms. It is patently absurd to keep on calling the scant third of the earth's spin that we now devote to wage-earning a "day." It is equally absurd to keep on centering our discussions, as we do, almost wholly about work, when what Western countries are being more and more confronted with is the prospect of its disappearance. Business men, it is true, are beginning to realize the dilemma to which production of an increasing amount of unused goods is giving rise; but, except for a handful of sociologists and philosophers, few people seem to realize the dilemma of its alternative, the production of an increasing amount of unused time. Indeed the majority of us, living in an age when men have more leeway than ever before, frequently insist that we have "no time." How are we to get rid of this strange delusion? The first step is to abandon the obsolete phrases of a bygone age when a man's employment consumed at least half of his life, and to throw the emphasis where it now belongs, on the sixteen-hour day. Let us cease to worry exclusively about the bare third of existence that is devoted to work and take thought for the remaining two thirds that are devoted to leisure.

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may be true, but it is true of only a small part. The great masses in England as elsewhere in the West must reckon up all their present resources and then proceed to improve and extend them if they are to solve their problem of the long non-working day.

How well provided are we with the wherewithal to fill it profitably? At the moment, reading, riding, and radio would seem to be the three fundamental R's in the modern program of leisure. Outside of eating, which offers fewer possibilities as a diversion in countries where it is divorced from genial drinking, and sleeping, which appears to grow less attractive as artificial lighting increases in efficiency, these are the voluntary activities on which the masses must mainly depend for aid in the consumption of spare time. Sports and games, and social occupations that exist for the betterment of mankind, such as "charities," or for the stimulation of the individual, such as the arts, are, after all, only for the chosen few. Formerly talk was one of the great human recreations, but we have been warned that talk, except of the most desultory telephone type, is, like letter-writing, on the decline. Our restless TimeSpirit is all against the revival of conversations of the comfortable Gargantuan proportions with which Dr. Johnson and his friends used to pass an evening. (The same decline seems to have begun in thinking, beyond the confines of the job. Prolonged contemplation, always more popular in the Orient than on our side of the world, is apparently alien to the nervous nature of the modern Occidental.)

But although we cannot, as we frequently say, "stop to talk," we can and do stop to read-perhaps because this requires less constructive effort. The growing demand for reading-matter has generally been put down to the spread of literacy; but, like literacy itself, it should primarily be credited to the spread of leisure. Naturally it is being everywhere exploited. The good talkers and thinkers whom we are still fortunate enough to have with us are reserving their expressions more and more for print. So it is to books, magazines, and newspapers that we must go for one of the really solid substances with which to fill our unemployed time. Probably most people would agree that the modern newspaper is the greatest ameliorative device that civilization has yet provided for the victims of the sixteen-hour day. If you take the daily journals with all their feature stories and signed columns, and the Sunday editions with all their sections, not forgetting Real Estate and Finance, Advertisements, Sports, and the Funnies, you certainly have a time-filler of no mean importance.

But the magazines are also doing their part to lighten the load of leisure. The number and variety of current covers would dazzle a visitor who had not seen a newsstand since the nineties. And how rapidly they are still multiplying! A magazine that exists to-day only inside the brain of some ingenious pioneer may in six months be traveling around the globe in half a million gay bindings. The size of the editions is one of the outstanding economic wonders of the age.

Nor has the older and more conservative book trade been unresponsive to the sive to the pressure exerted by mounting leisure for greater abundance of matter. The day of the small biography, the compact novel, the slim duodecimo of verse is over. We want bulk. No Life can expect to attain a great sale unless it makes a thick volume-preferably two of them. Mr. Page's "Letters" may have been too long for a burdened chief executive, but they are not too long to please a public with sixteen vacant hours to get through. No abbreviated editions of copious memoirs for us; we cannot afford to miss a word. The classics must be reprinted with all the original text restored, and a generous introduction thrown in. Miss Rebecca West's suggestion that stories should be made both longer and harder was a straw to show the way the wind is blowing. Recently Mr. Wells, always a generous entertainer, has heartened his readers by executing a novel in two volumes-an adventure for which we were well prepared by the group-novels of Proust and Rolland, Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Bromfield, from each of whom we have already had many volumes, with the end not yet in sight. Bigger novels and more of them has been the slogan of successful publishers. Houses that insist upon issuing works in pocket size are obliged to placate the public by guaranteeing in advance a whole series or library in one field. So fearful are we of being left high and dry, with nothing to read. Choice collections of lyrics of the "Out, out brief candle" kind no longer satisfy We must have verse, preferably

us.

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