and loose-jointed, posed his patrician personality in an attitude of deep sympathy. It was necessary to head off opposition within the League of Nations commission, where Léon Bourgeois, Baron Makino, and other delegates were pushing amendments contrary to the Wilson-Cecil concordat.

"Leave that to me, Mr. President," said Lord Robert. The President, very gladly, did that little thing. Lord Robert engineered through the commission a very select drafting committee to mull over contentious motions, including Mr. Wilson's own Monroe Doctrine clause. Later, this committee presented to the full commission of nineteen a small scrap of paper containing the following words:

Nothing in this Covenant shall be deemed to affect the validity of international engagements such as treaties of arbitration or regional understandings like the Monroe Doctrine for securing the maintenance of peace.

It

M. Bourgeois asked for the paper. was handed to him. The whiskered savant of France poised his pince-nez on the tip of his broad nose. He rumpled his hair. He scratched his left cheek. He pulled at his beard. He read aloud the thirty-two words twice over.

"But what does it mean?" he asked smiling Mr. Wilson.

Lord Robert yawned, stretched his six-feet-six, and observed, with the nearest thing to a grin:

"Oddly enough, it means just what it says."

A few days later a communiqué, is

sued privately by the British delegation to the British press, volunteered the following interpretation:

Article XXI makes it clear that the Covenant is not intended to abrogate or weaken any other agreements, so long as they are consistent with its own terms, into which the Members of the League may have entered, or may enter hereafter, for the further assurance of peace. Such agreements include special treaties for compulsory arbitration, and military conventions that are purely defensive. In so far as the Monroe Doctrine tends to the same end, whatever validity it possesses cannot be affected by the Covenant.

The Monroe Doctrine was proclaimed in 18131 in order to prevent the extension of European absolutist principles to South America, but while it forbids interference by individual European States in American affairs, it can never be invoked to limit the action of the League of Nations, which is in its nature world-wide, and therefore no more European than American. The principles of the League, as expressed in Article X, are in fact the extension to the whole world of the principles of President Monroe; while. should any dispute as to the meaning of the latter ever arise between American and European Powers, the League is there to settle it.

How I love it!

May cover you.

"She was free! she need not cry.

F you drive east or south or north from Alden, it will be a long time before you leave behind you all trace of the great city; but if you go west, you come quickly to the open country. For twenty miles you pass through beautiful suburbs, and then you come to the land of farms, and only at long intervals will a factory mar the beauty of the landscape. Forty miles from Alden you will come to hills, which people there call mountains, and when you reach the crest you will, if the day be clear, see before you the village of Millford, five miles away in the valley. You will see, shining white in the sun, the steeple of Millford's church. What church it is, what beliefs its members hold, is not important. Let it suffice that its members are God-fearing folk and pious, and as far removed from the evil influence of the great city of Alden as though it were a thousand miles away instead of fifty.

As you come into Millford you will discover that it is lazy, that its one broad street is very quiet, that the houses along it are large, and that many of them are of excellent architecture; you will see few people about; you will see no one on the piazza of the shabby hotel unless it be near meal-time; you will notice not more than one or two automobiles and half a dozen wagons along the curb; you will see five or six stores doing no apparent business; and you will see the Millford National Bank Building, which will have about it no more activity than the rest of Millford.

Pass on, and you will come to the village green, with its soldiers' monument and its drinking-fountain, and on

the right you will see the white church, the tower of which you saw five miles back, when you reached the top of the hill.

If by chance you had taken this journey on a certain day of a certain June, you would have seen about the church the first real signs of life that you had encountered in Millford, and you might have put two and two together and remembered that the bank building was swathed in black. If you had been curious, you would have discovered that Millford was burying Isaac Rund, who had been its most prominent citizen.

MILLFORD is the center of a large farming country, and Millford's church and bank and stores exist for the farmers. Isaac Rund had been a farmer to the day he died, but had been more than a farmer; he had been the strongest prop of the white church, he had been president of the national bank, he had been chairman of the board of village trustees, and he had been a lot of other things that a town's most prominent citizen must be. His loss would be hard indeed for Millford to bear.

But Millford was used to death in both high and low estate; it was a thing to be expected, the will of God, to be accepted calmly and without complaint. So all Millford came to pay its last respects to Isaac Rund, solemnly and reverently; but many of those who came to the church saw there Emily, his daughter, and their thoughts were more upon her, the living, than upon the Rund who was dead and gone.

For fifteen years Emily had lived alone in the big house with her father, and for five years before that only her brother