cers of the State Police. There are four of them now the lieutenant, the trooper, the recruit, and the first sergeant of the troop, who will conduct the prosecution.

The justice is rather a ponderous man, perhaps sixty-five years old, with a kindly, painstaking face and a big, honest nose bestridden by a pair of steel-bowed spectacles. His right sleeve hangs empty, pinned to his shoulder.

The prisoners are now seated before him. The first two are middle-aged men; the third, the giant, is in his late twenties. One has the face of a drunkard, one is twin to an ox, and the last, more clearly cut, is in a primitive way handsome. Yesterday's beard bristles on their chins, and their thick curly locks are tousled. Each man of them must weigh two hundred pounds, variously distributed; and in their stiff, yellow canvas hunting suits and their big water-boots, they look colossi, hulking, shambling, colossi, - all of them. Eyes on the floor, elbows on knees, they sprawl in their chairs, glumly contemplating the battered tin pail planted in their midst.

That pail is full of expiring fish, calling with their last gasps for vengeance! Attracted by the glimpse afforded through the uncurtained windows, a passing citizen stops, stares, and then abandons his errand for the entertainment of the moment. He pushes open the door, nods to the justice and to the State Police officers, and silently vaults to a seat on the counter, where he settles himself to observe, swinging his legs comfortably.

Next, the village clergyman and his theologue son, on their way to the postoffice, are caught by the scene and enter. The divine bows first to the justice. Then he goes over and claps the lieutenant on the shoulder, as he grasps his hand.

'Always at the good work, I see,' he

VOL. 121 - NO. 4

whispers, and ranges himself beside the officer.

But the theologue, with a cheerful anticipatory grin, joins the leg-swinger on the counter. They say that the lad already preaches good sermons, and that he likes to draw his sub-texts from points nearer home than Palestine.

A small boy slips in. A farmer, glancing down from the box of his Conestoga as he drives by, reins up, hitches his team to the maple tree at the door, and joins the assembly. Two interested citizens follow him, and the room is full. Dead silence reigns, persistent, extraordinary. Is it the four stern young figures, grave of face, perfect of bearing, faultless of dress, wearing the sombre uniform of the State, who by their mere presence impose it?

The trial opens. The first sergeant, quiet, erect, soldierly, and utterly competent, stands at the justice's side. Thomas Stone, Henry Landulik, and William Haddon are duly charged with using unlawful devices in a trout stream. 'Guilty,' pleads Stone, of the drink-sodden countenance. 'Guilty,' pleads Landulik, twin to the ox. 'Not guilty,' growls Haddon, the giant.

The lieutenant does not even look bored. The first sergeant calls him to testify. He tells his tale very briefly and with exceeding clarity both of statement and of diction. But the good old justice, plodding after him with laborious pen, loses the thread after the first two phrases. Therefore the officer, with respectful courtesy, goes back to the beginning and repeats his statement, four or five words at a time, pausing at each interval for the gray head bending over the stiff fingers to nod release. The story, as completed, presents all the facts essential to conviction, and presents them in the most terse and consecutive shape.

'Do you wish to ask me any ques

'No, sir.'

Then the first sergeant calls the trooper, who, duly sworn, testifies as ably as did his officer while the justice, prompted from point to point by the quiet suggestions of the first sergeant in his capacity of prosecutor for the State, asks questions whose answers again underscore the vital incriminating facts. This complaint will never fail in a court of record on certiorari.

Then comes the turn of the fledgling recruit. Rigid, and blushing furiously under his superior's eyes, the lad yet shows how well he is learning his lessons. He tells his story like the clear thinker he is bound to make of himself, without one extra or reconsidered word, and answers all questions as straight and clear as a bell answers its clapper.

The lieutenant cannot repress a movement of pride. 'What do you think of my little recruit?' he whispers. 'Promising?'

But now Haddon is being sworn and takes the oath and fulfills the succeeding formalities with a correct anticipation of requirements that tells its own story. Never, he testifies, notwithstanding-never before has he been under arrest in all his blameless existence. He went out with these his friends for a little lawful fishing. He fished with his hands and with a pole. He never saw or heard of a fyke. And when the fish stopped biting, he laid himself down by the fire and slept soundly till morning. At dawn he rose, went down to the stream and examined his poles; and was quietly returning to camp again, when, behold! the State Police jumped out from nowhere, without shadow of provocation, and inexplicably arrested him.

Then came the turn of the prosecuting officer. Without any raising of the voice, without any extra emphasis or

whole being flamed subtly trenchant, poised to win. His questions, quiet and seemingly simple, drove sharp, direct, incisive, obviously aimed straight at some clearly sighted goal. His material feet assuredly remained on the same spot by the justice's side, yet you could have sworn that, with each closeclipped phrase, there was not a dozen words in the longest of them,he crowded the prisoner one pace farther toward the wall. Then came three bullet-like demands, three answering statements well foreseen-and bang! fell the trap. Caught beyond struggle in a hopelessly incriminating lie.

The justice raises his eyes to the officer with the unquestioning confidence of a child. His spectacles slip down on his nose while, without a word, the first sergeant turns to the shelf, takes down a law book, and lays it, open, before the magistrate, with his finger on paragraph and line.

'In regard to Stone and Landulik,' says he, 'I would ask, they having pleaded guilty, that you impose a fine of twenty dollars on each of them, for one violation of the law. In regard to Mr. Haddon, there are three counts the using of an illegal device in a trout stream, the operating of a net without a metallic tag attached, and the using of a spear out of season in a trout stream. I ask twenty dollars on each charge, or a sixty-dollar fine.'

The squire turned to the prisoners, addressing them.

'Mr. Haddon,' said he, 'you are found guilty by the evidence given against you on three charges, and fined twenty dollars on each. If you are not prepared to pay the fine and costs, then you are committed to the jail of this county, one day for each dollar, or sixty days in jail. Stone and Landulik are fined twenty dollars and costs each, or twenty days in jail.'

The first sergeant, the while, had been observing the giant with a critical eye. Now he asked him a question aside, then addressed himself once more to the justice.

'Mr. Haddon wishes to reopen the case and to be allowed to change his plea from not guilty to guilty. If you allow his request, I would ask that he pay the same fine as that laid upon the other two prisoners.'

'On your plea of guilty, Mr. Haddon, I fine you twenty dollars,' the squire responded without hesitation.

'Now,' says the first sergeant, dropping his state prosecutor's manner, 'what do you men choose, jail or pay?' The three look dolefully at their boots, speechless.

At last Stone sighs, 'I ain't got no twenty dollars. Guess I hafter take jail.' 'S'pose so,'-'Same here,' groan the others.

A pause. Not one sign of sympathy on the part of the powers of the law.

'Well, Stone,' observes the lieutenant, dryly, ‘if you and Landulik have both invested all your money in cash registers and corner property, I think the least Haddon can do is save you from jail. He keeps the saloon!'

At which destructive home truth the masks of all three break down. They grin sheepishly.

'Can I go home and get the cash for us?' asks Haddon.

As the canvas-clad trio, now entirely restored to good humor, lumbered off down the road under the shepherding care of the trooper, I turned to the lieutenant with a question or two.

'Why did you threaten to come down so hard on the giant?'

'Because he lied and tried to escape us; to show him that we were perfectly willing and ready to take our case to court if he desired it; to show that we will fight if they drive us to it; to remind them that we present no charge that we cannot sustain.'

'Why were you so easy with them all in the end?'

'Because these three, as it happens, are not really bad men, and the penalty we asked was severe enough for them.'

'Why did you keep the woman entirely out of the matter? Was n't she equally guilty with the rest? And you never even spoke of her!'

The lieutenant's face took on a look of patient martyrdom.

'Yes,' said he, 'I'll answer that, too. It's like this: we figure that you should spare the women wherever it's possible; and that you can use sense. One in a family is enough to strike. You need n't rub it in.'

Later, down at barracks, he took from his desk a sheaf of manuscript, the first examination papers of the newest probation men. The lieutenant had framed the questions himself, to test the calibre of his lads.

'Look here,' he said, singling out a sheet, 'perhaps this will help.'

Under the typewritten question: 'What are the first essentials required of an officer of the Pennsylvania State Police Force?' stood the following words, in the loose, boyish script of the fledgling recruit: "To know the law exactly. To do your whole duty and do it quick. To be gentle and courteous always. And never take any one's bluff.'

over

AFTER my controversy with the boss, I impatiently awaited the lunch, when the machines stopped. I ran to the union office. With tears in my eyes, I told them of what happened. The complaint clerk made out a complaint to the association against my boss. He advised to call the girls to a meeting. With meeting cards in my hand, without any lunch, I returned back to the shop. It was early enough to go in. I looked for the girls downstairs. No one was around. I went upstairs. There on the cutting-table sat the foreman, all the girls around him, and he amused them with his tales.

'Come on here,' said he to me, 'you may also listen to it. When I was in the contracting business for the cloak manufacturers, I had to deal with the Union. Once, when a business agent came around to find out if everything was in order, I invited him out to have lunch with me. There in a saloon I treated him with a few beers, so that after lunch he was not able to walk out. When he stepped outside, he fell like a dead one on the sidewalk. Then I called my workers to show them who their leader was. I also told them that for one beer he would sell the Union. That's what a union is,' he concluded.

But I stopped him. I could not stand any more.

'A thing like that never happened. If it did, you played a very mean trick on that poor man!' I cried out. 'Girls, don't listen to him—he wants to poison your minds, that is his only aim!'

It's hard to describe how I spent the

rest of that day. He called me a damn liar.' He wanted to make the girls believe that I was an agent from the Union, that I was paid by the union leaders in order to press out money from the girls for union books.

Such a mean lie! I could not control myself any longer. Tears burst out of my eyes. I took my hat and coat and wanted to run, run away to the end of the world, so excited was I; but the girl Mollie held me back.

'We don't believe him, we know his aims all right,' she said. 'Don't go; this place will remain as it was. The girls will stay with you.'

Half an hour before the power stopped, the foreman called me and Mollie over to his table. He was all changed. His manners, his voice was so soft, so polite, that made us wonder. In a begging tone, he began,

-

'You see, girls, the boss does not care to keep up his shop. If he is to pay higher wages to the girls, he is not able to keep up a foreman, and as his son is not able to run a shop, he'll give up the business altogether. He can make a nice living without these few machines. The one to suffer will be I! I'm only a poor man, I have to support my family. What am I to do, if he does give up?'

'Poor man!' I pitied him. After all, he was only a tool in the hands of the boss. He also worked very hard. The boss's son would walk around all day long from one table to the other, without knowing what's what. He did not even know where a spool of thread was to be got when a girl asked him for it.

And he was the one to get the profits. The foreman who had managed the shop, and who has done the cutting also, only got as much as it could be taken off from the girls' 'worth.'

After work I waited for the girls, to take them to the meeting. Sadie, the forelady, fearing to spoil her future career by going to the meeting, refused to go. Another girl followed her; the three Italian finishers were also afraid to go; so that we only had nine girls at the meeting.

I succeeded in explaining to them the situation as it was. I assured them that, if the boss gave up the business, it would not be for the reason that we want too much, but for the simple reason that his son is not able to manage the business; so let him do it. Such brilliant jobs they could always get.

They elected me as shop delegate, also in the price committee, together with Mollie.

The next morning when we came in to work, the old boss was already in. He also changed his policy in talking. He already was informed that we had a meeting. Without addressing anybody, he began to talk.

'Oh, I have nothing against the girls selecting a chairlady. Let them also select a price committee, but they could do all that without a union. They need not belong to the Union and spend their money."

I came over to him and introduced myself as the shop chairlady. I told him that we also have a price committee, and are ready to settle prices, but with a man of the Union, because we want to have an expert in settling prices for the first few styles, for we never settled prices before, and are liable to make mistakes.

The boss realized that further argument was useless, and he finally agreed. Until a man from the Union could come up, we continued with the work.

On Sunday, when we came in to work, I asked the foreman to give me some work that I could work on it without interruption. I wanted to time myself, to make a sort of a test, and see if I could possibly settle the prices myself without any help from the Union. I wanted to do justice to both sides. The girls should be able to go on with the work, without any loss of time, and the boss should have his work done in time.

On Monday, when I had the work finished, I came over to the foreman to speak about the price. Somehow we agreed on the price of the style I tried out. All were satisfied. The day passed very happily. On the settled work, I made ten cents more, according to my former day's wages; my two helpers made much more than their regular day's wages.

In the evening the foreman told me to remain to settle some more work. I did so, but instead of prices, he spoke to me of something else.

'Listen, miss!' I was the only one whom he addressed as miss. 'I know you are a very sensible girl, and you deserve to get more than the others. You need not bother with the Union. I myself will give you a chance to work yourself up. See, as you are on piece-work now, you can keep your two girl-helpers as before. You'll pay them as much as I paid them till now. Think what you can make on them: the work will all go through you, and they'll work through your hand! You need not be afraid that they'll refuse. If they refuse, I'll get other girls there are always plenty of them!'

Would any one throw stones at me, I would not feel as much pain as I felt while he spoke. It was the worst kind of an insult I could ever feel. He wanted to give me a chance to advance myself! In what a way! In a way of cheating the girls! In the same way as I was and still am cheated!