exquisite that it would drive poets to rhapsodies, But the poets belong to the second class; they are on their uppers.

On a sleeper, if at no other time, I fall in the same category with the poets. I never get to the ticket-office until the day of departure, and the answer is always the same.

"A lower on the midnight to New York," I say, just as if I expected to get it. The clerk consults a chart.

"Nothing but uppers to-night," he says. It is as inevitable as the tides.

But as I climb to my exalted place I have this consolation: I am one of the vagabond class, the army of the care-free and improvident. Those whose hats nod to the jolting of the train on the hooks about me are people like myself, who never can keep their accounts up, and never pack their trunks till the last moment, and know what it is to eat a whole restaurant dinner and then find they left their money in their other trousers. Below us the prudent lie behind their petticoat-curtains; we belong to the fellowship of unpreparedness.

The ascent to an upper is an art in itself; and as one would expect of an art, it is long. I do not mean the ascent by step-ladder. There are those who climb mountains by railroad, who let minions put on their bait, who require caddies to tee their golf-balls, who hunt with beaters to drive the game toward them; there are also those who reach their uppers on carpeted steps. Yet the heroic breed, thank Roosevelt, is not extinct. Luxury has not yet completely sapped our national virility. Some of us are made of sterner stuff. We climb unassisted and alone.

The porter leads us down the green alley to our place. We open our bag, and select those articles which we shall need on our adventure. These we throw into the berth. The porter pushes our bag far into the twilight recesses behind the spittoon and the suitcase of the gentleman in the lower and the golf-bag of the gentleman in the next berth. We are ready for the adventure.

What follows happens very quietly.

There are no heroics. No rope is used in the ascent; no guides help us over the difficult places. There is even nothing distinctive about our attire to catch the casual eye: we wear a simple gray climbing-suit, stout, black climbing-shoes, an unostentatious climbing-collar, and a useful climbing-necktie. Quietly we bid good-by to our trusty guide.

"Nonsense, man," we say heartily, "there will be no accident. Still, if anything should go wrong, perhaps it would be easier for you to bear if you had something to remember us by." Tenderly we take off our shoes and hand them to him. His eyes fill with tears. "Keep these until we return. Carry them off with you to your little room; and if in the long night watches you should ever think of us, take out your little brush and black them. Farewell."

We are off. Quickly we assume position A, with both hands grasping the horizontal bar and with our right foot firmly planted on the chest of the old gentleman in the lower. We push off vigorously. If the old gentleman's chest be of a proper firmness and resiliency, this push brings us to position B, with the left knee in the sharp knee-hold on the edge of the upper berth and the right leg at large. The right leg is then brought convulsively upward and forward and laid carefully in the upper berth, and the left leg is at liberty to follow it. From this point on all is plain squirming.

Perfect technic under proper climatic conditions will now have brought us to position C, that is, balancing on the ninth vertebra, with the feet waving gently above us. We have arrived. We are at liberty to enjoy the unrivaled scenic effects which our fatiguing journey has enabled us to secure. And then-we discover that we have left behind an important half of our pajamas.

Let us pass hurriedly over the humiliation of our descent and reascent. Let us modestly draw the curtains—and button them-over the busy scene which follows. Let us suppose the battle ended; the victor prone upon his berth, panting with

triumph; the defeated underwear hanging limply in their little hammock. Now begins the true joy of the Pullman life.

Sleep? Bless you, no, I don't mean that. Sleep is too prosaic. Why, at home you can sleep any night in a civilized bed; anybody who would want to sleep on a sleeper would be a stupid. I mean lying with the light shining in your eyes and feeling yourself quiver like a chocolate blanc-mange with the vibration of the car. I mean listening to the person in the next upper, who made the ascent in his evening clothes, gasp with the exertion of trying to throw the claw-hammer without stepping out of the circle. I mean poking your head out through the curtain like an African dodger and watching the porter make up a berth, which reminds you of that little game where you say, "Think of a number, and add so-and-so to it, and subtract so-and-so, and add so-and-so, and subtract the number you first thought of, and that leaves 5" (Cheers, and cries of, "I don't see how he does it. Do you, Mr. Nesbit?"). The porter starts with all the blankets and things in one berth, and transfers virtually all of them to the other, and then transfers virtually all of them back again, and so on indefinitely; and the answer is two beds. I mean tasting the excitement of the trainmen's car-shunting gymkhana, which takes place at every station along the journey, and the object of which is to see which can be more successful in waking the porter whom the lady in Upper 12 has been ringing for steadily during fifteen minutes: Team A, which draws off its locomotive to a distance and then charges your car, relying for its success on one prodigious bump; or Team B, which attaches its locomotive to your car

stealthily, and then yanks repeatedly and unexpectedly. At the end of fifteen minutes the contest is usually declared a draw, and passengers are permitted to doze while the train proceeds to the next shunting-ground.

Later, when morning comes, you will take scientific interest in the revelations of the wash-room, in arrangements and abbreviations of attire which, like the bromide's sunsets, you would n't believe if you saw them in a picture. You will find a brisk excitement in washing your face with cold water from the hot-water faucet between two shavers who are virtually certain to commit either suicide or manslaughter when the car hits the next curve. You will be moved to pity and terror by the sight of the banker in Lower 4 trying. to heave himself into his trousers without divesting himself of his protecting curtains or entirely losing sight of the berth he started in. Globe-trotters tell me that the struggles of a semi-submerged whale under the harpoon are, if anything, more stupendous; but, then, these globe-trotters are notoriously big talkers; you have to take them with a grain of salt.

The train arrives. Dirty, mussy, sleepy, covered with a fine cinder-dust that the porter has brushed to and fro, but not removed, you go to your club. What a soul-satisfying shave! Hot-water faucets. that give hot water; real soap, instead of the kind that squirts; a porcelain basin. that you 're not in danger of falling into bodily. Your bath is entrancing; each clean garment you put on with a separate delight. And as you go to breakfast you offer a little prayer of thanks to the good Mr. Pullman, who put back the savor in the salt of civilization.

The largest debtor is the United Kingdom, with France a close second, followed, in the order of indebtedness, by Canada, Russia, Argentina, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Yucatan, Norway, Greece, Chile, Sweden, Panama, Bolivia, and Uruguay.

A broad public market for foreign securities has not yet developed here, but a certain volume of trading is carried on, and prices of the leading issues are published daily. It is probable that in time. the flotation of foreign loans will become a matter of course, and then underwriters will reach a larger market among private investors. Great blocks of Anglo-French bonds were taken by two industrial corporations engaged in the manufacture of war-supplies. One of these companies originated an able policy by distributing the bonds to shareholders in lieu of cash dividends.

Probably not more than two thirds of the whole seventeen hundred millions was outstanding at any one time, as a number of the shorter loans have already been liquidated. Ninety per cent. of the amount current will mature and likely require long-term refunding within the next five years.

In nearly every case where loans were granted to neutral borrowers they had turned to this market for the reason that old connections in Europe were no longer in a position to supply the need. The time was most opportune for America; with its new banking system, greatly increased fluid capital, and expanding industries, at least temporary leadership in exports and foreign loans was easily assumed. These terms are almost synonymous, for it is the common experience of all creditor nations that borrowers coming from other countries want goods, not money. If the goods are not produced in the country to which the borrower applies, but must be purchased in a third country, the problem is the same, with an additional angle. The source of foreign loans is always traceable to exports of goods, no matter how indirect and unrelated transactions may appear. This elementary fact is very clearly illustrated by statistics of American banking and exports for the last two years. A glance at these will show a great foreign loan account built up without sending money abroad. Late in 1914, before any of the seventeen hundred millions had been loaned, the gold holdings in the United States amounted to $1,835,000,000. Now, after making the loans, besides paying several billions for things imported and buying back American securities, the gold stock stands at $2,548,000,000, or an increase of more than seven hundred million dollars. Had the loans been made in money, virtually no gold would be left in the country. On the

the assurance with a smile. What! Louis! so simple, kindly, natural; so all-round a good fellow; so like all the rest of us, only nicer!

And I am quite sure that in his inmost heart at this period he could never really have looked forward to or expected the fame which later came to him, and which grows and expands as time gives us the perspective wherewith to view it in all its roundness and bigness and essential simplicity. In fact, in introducing himself to me, he remarked simply that he was writer-chap," or hoped to be one.

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I was told of another rainy afternoon "blague party," at which I did not chance to be present, during which Bob Stevenson amused himself by forecasting the future careers of those present. When he came to his cousin he remarked with a satirical little smile: "There sits Louis, as smug and complacent as any old type de bourgeois. I have not the least doubt that he fondly imagines that one of these days they will be publishing all of his dinky, private correspondence-'the letters of R. L. S.'-in boards." And Louis joined as heartily as any one in the laugh which the sally raised. Bob, at least, did live to see the publication of the "Vailima Letters," and I have often wondered if he remembered this little incident as he thumbed their leaves.

a

either for or against the accused, preferring to leave the decision in such matters to the Maker of all laws.

But if he heard of anything mean or underhand, any tricky blow beneath the belt, he was a very firebrand, flaming with a fury which nothing could quell. I remember one case in which he forced two very unwilling opponents to accept a duel as the only possible solution of an entanglement involving an unmanly act on the part of one of the pair. Fortunately the duel was never fought, the chief offender considering discretion the better part of valor and deciding that the woods. about Barbison at that particular season of the year offered better material for the painter than the river at Grez.

I would not, however, by any means have it understood that there was in the colony no sense of decency or morality in the ordinary acceptance of those terms, for that would be a misstatement as manifestly unfair and untrue as to claim a standard of rigid puritanism for the whole region. If there was a fair sprinkling of the grisette and the model element, which had followed the painters down from Paris, there were also a certain number of very serious women-painters who were studying hard, and some of whom were destined to make an enviable place for themselves later on. Among these I may mention Mlles. Loestadt and Lilienthal, Swedish painters of genuine talent, and more particularly the lady "Trusty, dusky, vivid, and true" to whom Robert Louis Stevenson inscribed the most beautiful love-song of our time, and who later on was destined to become his wife. Mrs. Osbourne could not at the time have been more than thirty-five years of age, a grave and remarkable type of womanhood, with eyes of a depth and a somber beauty which I have never seen equaled-eyes, nevertheless, that upon occasion could sparkle with humor and brim over with laughter. Yet upon the whole Mrs. Osbourne impressed me as first of all a woman of profound character and serious judgment, who could, if occasion called, have been the leader in some great movement. But she