Imagine the psychological effect on the plastic consciousness of scores of thousands. of boys and girls who have been taught to regard the station-house as a place to be feared and shunned. In this one departure Commissioner Woods may be building better than he realizes for the future of law and order in New York. It may be a momentous step which he is taking; time alone can decide.

DURING the last decade the old-time type of criminal has largely passed away-the burly, desperate hold-up man, the cracksman of banks, the burglar as formerly known. A number of these survive, as may be seen by the newspapers, but their efforts are sporadic. To-day society has to deal more and more with the mental and moral defective, especially with the weakling poisoned by drugs that deprive him of all moral instinct, render him possibly insane for the time being, and incite him to commit the most vicious crimes. In 1915, through coöperation with members of the faculty of Columbia University and other scientific men, the police department set up a psychopathic laboratory for the purpose of studying criminals who are feeble-minded or defective, and separating them from those who are normal. During the first two months twentynine suspected of abnormality were picked out of a total of 409 prisoners at the daily

line-up; and when careful medical examination had been made of the twenty-nine, it was found that twenty-one were mentally incompetent. Many of these, ranging in age from twenty to thirty-five, were found to have the brain development of children of seven or eight. To-day, instead of being sent to prison, where many of them had already served terms for previous crimes, such unfortunates are taken to insane-asylums, institutions for the feeble-minded, and other places of restraint. the incurable cases being distinguished from those that might recover.

In rigorous effort to suppress the illegal sale and use of habit-forming drugs the New York police are now arresting annually about 900 persons, and securing 700 convictions. Of these fully seventy-five per cent. have had previous police records, which include every crime in the statutes. This is an official statement, one of sinister portent. It means that law-abiding society is facing a human element new and exceedingly dangerous; so grave, in fact, that one of the most important duties of the police lies in stamping out this traffic. The danger is by no means confined to large cities like New York; it is probably growing in towns and villages all over the country. Police investigations have revealed an appalling increase of drug-addicts; more than one half of those confined in the city prison, the

Tombs, were victims. Men and women following virtually every business, trade, and profession were included. Even school-children became addicted to the habit of using these drugs.

It is with full knowledge of such occurrences that the police are doing everything possible to stop illegal traffic in drugs. Criminals of this class present a problem even more difficult than the oldtime bank robber and general crook. The police may arrest a thousand offenders annually, but the problem will not be solved until boys and girls are taught the terrible

results which follow upon the use of habit-forming drugs. It is at this point that teachers of physiology and personal hygiene must lend powerful coöperation.

The competent policeman of to-day should be sanitary officer, thief-chaser, peace officer, soldier, and counselor in citizenship, all rolled into one. This manysided man is being developed by the New York police department. The work of the department furnishes a lesson in city government which should be carefully studied in every municipality in the, United States.

MARY arranged her skirt carefully and

sat down on a patch of heather at the edge of the cliff. She did not do this to admire the view, though it was a singularly fine view. She despised views, and thought them the perquisites of visitors, a despicable people.

The Cornish headland, bold and rough, stood out into the sea like some carved figurehead fronting a ship. Heather and bracken and gorse flamed to the land's edge, and the cliff, formed of black ironstone, dropped sheer into green waters.

Heather, sea, and clean, keen wind as sweet as wild honey were parts of Mary's existence. She never noticed them, because she had never been without them. She lived at Trelinnock, which has a popula

tion of one hundred and twenty people, sees a newspaper once a week, and generally has a post in the course of twentyfour hours unless there should be too heavy a gale blowing. Mary sat on the edge of the cliff because it was a quiet place in which to think about David. David was also a part of Mary's existence, and it is not until things go wrong that you begin to think about your existence.

It was the close of a late-summer day. The light rested upon the world like a spell; it held the luminous, green edges of the sea, the single ghostlike spires of the ling, the robust, bright heather, Mary herself, in her twentieth year, burned brown by the sun, in a deep-golden glow.

Mary had never heard of Giorgione,

but Giorgione would have known in a moment what to do with the glow. He would have made the color of it on Mary's heavy, brooding face shine through her flesh as light strikes through water. He would have got languor and pleasure and youth into Mary, and then he would have got the weight of a deep, mysterious sorrow, and with that he would have left her.

Mary sat quite still and gazed down into the green waters; she looked as if she were searching for something lost. But she did not see any green waters; she saw only David.

Mary was not one of those who wish the world to be wide. She wished it to be much narrower; she wanted it to hold only herself and David.

All Trelinnock had welcomed visitors except Mary; she had set her face against them from the first. Trelinnock had pandered to their strange tastes; it had sold picture post-cards to them, morbid in color and structurally impossible; it had put up bathing-tents on the strand, where rocks had always done; it had let lodgings, and given way to unnatural instincts for hot water at unreasonable hours.

In the first rush of their enthusiasm over these money-bringing hordes, the inhabitants of Trelinnock had even let out their boats to visitors who had thought they could sail boats, apparently under the impression that winds were malleable and could be kept quiet while one tried experiments; but this had proved expensive. Trelinnock winds blew where they listed and blew hard; boats were lost, and incidentally visitors (not enough of them, Mary thought) were lost with them. Boats at Trelinnock are more important than houses, and when visitors began losing boats, they were stopped hiring them without a fisherman. They could easily, if they wished to be drowned, bathe. A good many visitors were drowned all along the coast; they seemed to expect the sea to put itself out for them.

The sea behaved, just as Mary would have done in its place, precisely as it was accustomed to behave. When it had

formed the habit of swirling round a rock with dangerous swiftness, it swirled round the rock, and if it carried some one out to sea with it who did n't know that where there is a swirl there is an undertow, that one was drowned (very rightly, Mary thought) for not knowing it. The natural laws were against visitors and on the side of Mary.

Mary's father had a small farm. A good deal of it was granite, but there was enough grass for half a dozen cows, and Mary was very knowing about all animals-cart-horses, cows, pigs, and poultry. She worked hard from early morning till the dews fell, but on Sundays she only fed the animals, went twice to church, and took a walk with David. The walk with David was also a religious institution. She had walked with him for four years; she would walk with him for another, and then she would marry him. She had meant to marry him all her life.

She was only six years old when the word "sweetheart," flung at her as a taunt, sank burning into the bottom of her heart. From the earliest years she and David had shared the same pools, the same rocks, the same punishments. The same waves wet the same portions of their persons insisted upon by parents as portions which must, in all circumstances, be kept dry. They went to the same school, and wept uncomprehendingly over the same

sums.

As the years advanced, some vague, invincible law stepped in and swept them apart, but there was nothing personal or permanent in it. It was nature's method of keeping a sharper significance for their companionship later on.

David retired into groups of boys and killed whatever he could find to kill, and Mary retired into groups of girls and giggled at whatever she could find to giggle at; behind the accomplished deaths of small animals and the wall of feminine laughter their attachment progressed invisibly, as Nature herself progresses, without noise and without haste.

Theoretically David despised girls, but knew that Mary was different; and Mary

thought boys nasty and rough, but made, even while the assertion was on her lips and her head tossed to accentuate it, a mental reservation in favor of David.

Then Mary was confirmed, in white muslin, with her hair up. This settled David. He was seventeen, and girls suddenly ceased to be to him as trees walking. He knew that they were girls, and he wanted to walk with them.

He did not know how to put it into words; for though he was a carpenter of quite exceptional skill for his years, words had always evaded him. But he knew when Mary would come home from milking the cows, and at this hour he met her in the fields, by a gray stone covered with golden lichen, and said:

"Hullo, Mary!"

Mary knew in an instant that she had been waiting all her life to hear David say just those words in just that voice, and she replied, after a moment's pause, in which both their hearts stood still:

"Hullo, David!"

Their hearts went on again after that, but they went on differently; they went on together, and they had gone on together ever since.

The golden glow faded from the cliffs. It left Mary's face first, and little by little the ling became more ghostly, and the red heather burned on with a light of its own; a shadow fell to the land's edge and left all the color on the sea. The sinking sun lit up the waters into fiery emerald, and the spray flung up its white, tossed veil, shining like drops of morning dew.

Mary shivered as she sat there, but it was not with cold. She took a stone that lay under her hand and let it drop over the edge. She did not throw it; she let

it drop.

It did not fall sheer into the boiling surf. It rattled through the heathery fringe, and then struck on the ironstone, and sprang back, like something affrighted, into the air, and struck again lower down, and then once more; and Mary, leaning over, saw the surf take it. A moment's gap, and the waters closed again. Nothing was any different. A gull, flying high

above her, came down on easy wings to look at her more closely. It passed so near her head that she heard the hiss of the air cleaved by its passage.

""T is a gull," she said to herself, defensively; " 't is but a gull."

The color withdrew from the waters into the sky; the whole arch of the heavens became a deep-rose color, and beneath its screen of fire the sea turned black and very cold. Mary got up and went home.

The farm was a quarter of a mile from the cliffs. It lay in a fold of moor; a copse of small and shuddering beech-trees, with their backs bent double by the wind, softened the outline of its granite walls.

It was there that Mary and David picked beechnuts together in the autumn. Below the farm was a small wind-blown orchard. Mary's heart contracted in sudden pain when her eyes fell on it. She had meant to have her pain out on the cliffs, but some of it was waiting for her under the apple-trees. Last night she and David had had words in the orchard.

They had had singularly few words, but this is the most terrible form that words can take. Torrents of temper burst like surf and seldom drown, but when words are few, meaning is deep. Mary had seen David from the house, and had gone out to meet him; but she had known that he was not there for her.

She had gone straight to him under the small trees, noticing carefully as she went that the apples were forward for the time of year, and when she had reached him she had said breathlessly and as if the words hurt her:

"'T is me, not her. You can't have the two of us; you must choose. Choose now, David!"

David had n't wanted to choose, and he was taken by surprise. He had naturally supposed that Mary had noticed nothing; he was not sure how much there was to notice. He was suddenly not sure of anything. He said:

"Hullo, Mary, what 's wrong?"

He wanted her to put it into words, so that he could look at it; this was usually the way they arranged life. But Mary

was not arranging life now; she was destroying it. Her eyes blazed at him, and she said:

"You know what's wrong well enough."

"There's no harm in looking at a maid," said David, cautiously. "Her 's different."

And Mary, stung beyond endurance, cried:

"Then take her!" and went back as swiftly as she had come, with the word "different" sticking in her heart like a sword.

She

Of course Lizzie was different. was almost a visitor; she would have been a visitor if she had not been a relative. She was Mary's first cousin, come from London, a place which Mary saw vaguely as larger than Plymouth, filled with vast crowds of people in muslin and highheeled shoes, buying picture post-cards, and drinking inordinate quantities of ginger-beer. Lizzie had come from this. place for a holiday. She worked in a shop in Oxford Street, and wore brown. boots every day and a silk sport-jacket. She had several muslin frocks, left over from sales, and she had brought large hats, unsuitable for windy cliffs, and ribbons that Mary rejoiced to know would have the color taken out of them by the sea. Lizzie would have told you that she meant no harm, a phrase which prepares the conscience for an unearned repose after the harm has happened; but she generally did a little just to keep her hand in, and because, if other girls want to keep their young men, they ought to look sharp about it.

Mary had n't looked sharp. David came in on the evening of Lizzie's arrival. Lizzie, who had been previously told about David, looked at him, during the course of an hour or two, perhaps three times. David was an extremely goodlooking young fellow, but he did not know that, possibly because Mary, who was quite used to his appearance, did not know it either. The first time Lizzie looked at him it occurred to David that he was handsome; the second time that Lizzie

looked at him he wondered if by any chance he could be clever, too; and the third time she looked at him he hoped that Mary had n't seen.

Mary had seen every time, but she supposed that London ways might be different and Lizzie might not mean any harm by it. She never supposed anything at all about David. She took for granted that he would dislike everything in Lizzie that differed from Trelinnock, and yet, since she was Mary's cousin, he would consent to overlook the objects of his dislike. They would include, Mary supposed, an affected voice, very movable, provocative eyes, a great deal of wholly unnecessary conversation, and an appalling ignorance of the simplest natural laws.

When Lizzie asked David how many tides there are in a day, Mary colored with shame and confusion for her. She did not dream that David was pleased at being asked idiotic questions, or that men in general enjoy imparting what they know to conversational young women with provocative eyes, whose knowledge, however circumscribed in one direction, is quite sufficient in another.

But Mary learned this lesson; she learned very silently and reluctantly half a dozen other lessons in the course of a few weeks, and all she asked while she was learning them was that neither her father nor her mother might see the accumulation of her knowledge. The farm was some distance out of the village, so that the prying eyes and sharp tongues of neighboring gossips could be kept at bay; but those tender spies of love in her par ents' hearts, how long could she mislead them by artificial laughter or hide from them the traces of her secret tears?

David fell into the habit of bringing his friend the blacksmith up to the farm, and the four young people behaved as much like visitors as Mary would consent to behave. They went for walks on the cliff, and made expeditions to neighboring coves and villages. Mary had never seen so much of the country in her life as she saw with Lizzie, and it confirmed in her the desire to remain at Trelinnock and