'I'm shot through the stomach, matey! Can't you get me back to the ambulance? Ain't they some way you can take me back out o' this?'

'Stick it, old lad! You won't 'ave much longer to wyte. They'll be some o' the Red Cross along 'ere in a jiffy now.'

'Give me a lift, boys, can't you? Look at my leg! Do you think it will 'ave to come off? Maybe they could save it if I could get back to 'ospital in time. Won't some of you give me a lift? I can 'obble along with a little 'elp.'

'Don't you fret, sonny! You're ago'n' to ride back in a stretcher presently.'

Some of the men, in their suffering, forgot everyone but themselves, and it was not strange that they should do so. There were others with more iron in their natures, who endured fearful agony in silence. During memorable half hours, filled with danger and death, many of my gross misjudgments of character were made manifest to me. Men whom no one had credited with

heroic qualities revealed them. Others failed rather pitiably to live up to one's expectations. The most startling and unexpected revelations were made. It seemed clear to me that there was strength or weakness in men for which they were in no way responsible; but doubtless it had always been there, waiting to be called forth at just such crucial times.

During the afternoon I heard the hideous, hysterical laugh of the soldier whose nerve is gone. One of the men picked up an arm and threw it far out in front of the trenches, shouting as he did so in a way that made my blood run cold. I knew what had happened. Then he sat down and started crying and moaning. He was taken back to the rear one of the most pitiable victims of a war of unspeakable horrors. I heard of many instances of nervous breakdown, but I witnessed surprisingly few of them. Frequently I saw men trembling from head to foot; they pulled themselves together, however, under the taunts of less susceptible Tommies.

SMOKING

My complaints against smoking are not those of the Puritan outsider. My innocence, in fact, was early lost. Already at thirteen my friends and I were guiltily aware of the joys of corn-silk cigarettes and catalpa-bean cigars. Our bravest would even confess the voluptuous delights he found in strange

stogies compounded of dried autumn leaves, and he would wistfully wonder if any nicotinish weed could ever seduce him from their discovered charm. I remember our going far out of our way to find illicit smokes. Opium and hashish were out of the range of our New Jersey town, but there were the thick fumes of ground coffee which I smoked in a pipe with hot and blinding relish, and

there were less happy experiments for which I was jeered by my more conventional friends.

We came to tobacco, therefore, with some slight boredom from these weird and exotic pleasures. At first the neat little packages of cigarettes appealed to our æsthetic taste. My dried-leaf friend had a long debauch of twirling cigarettes with one hand out of a thin sheet of Rizla and a pinch of tobacco. We never succumbed to cigars, and the innocent novelty of cigarettes finally palled, so that I think we never smoke now except for purely social and gregarious reasons, especially when ladies press tobacco upon us and we yield for fear of mollycoddledom. Most burdensome is the cigarette-smoking lady who forces you into an unholy competition of numberless cigarettes, merely to keep up the reputation of your sex. Masculine solicitation I can refuse with a wearied air. The only time I find I really crave a smoke is as the crowning touch to an unusually bad dinner. The stale and strident taste which smoking always leaves with one is the healthiest reminder to avoid all those occasions which make one crave it.

The cigar I always look upon as the most manifest symbol of blatant maleness. It can apparently be held in the teeth only at a certain angle, and this angle always gives a peculiarly rakish expression to the most benevolent faces. The cigar has a tendency to bring out unconsciously in a man's expression all of those saloon-keeper and tough-politician traits which are latent, I suppose, in every man. I am often amused to see how the faces of devout clergymen or cultivated lawyers change as soon as they get a cigar into their mouths. The hat unconsciously slips back on the head, the cheeks unconsciously become jowlish, the eye sly and beery. An estimable human being has, with the cigar as a

pencil, drawn a caricature of himself as a predatory male. The cigar-smoker leaves a trail behind him. His staleness is ever with you. About every smoker there clings an atmosphere of noisomeness. Odor follows everywhere like the rumor of graft or the fact of a prison sentence.

The cigarette, on the other hand, shared by both sexes, has an undeniable æsthetic charm. It is friendly, sociable, light. Its odor does not cling boorishly to every curtain and garment. It passes with the light thoughts which it creates. Of a man it tends to make a poet, just as the cigar tends to make a dive-keeper of him. For a woman it is the symbol of emancipation, the temporary substitute for the ballot.

The pipe, warmly defended as the true smoke, is the most amusing of all the smoking manifestations. To see men smoking pipes is a spectacle irresistibly funny. If the cigar brings out their latent, blatant maleness, the pipe puts it all to sleep. Pipe-smokers always invest the act with a religious solemnity. They refer to it as an aid to calm contemplation. Meditative thought is supposed to be the undercurrent of the long and fragrant pipe. But if the smoker is conscious of his smoking, how can he use his attention for thought? And if he is unconscious, what is the use of doing it? One decides that smoking is really a substitute for thought, and that it is this that accounts for its perennial popularity. At the best, it may be the fixation means for a hypnotic reverie, the bowl of the pipe taking the place of that navel which the East Indian saint is supposed to contemplate. But normally it is a mere escape from care, a harmless submersing of the mind in sensuous and tobaccoish fog.

To see a man peacefully smoking a pipe is to witness a triumph over nature. It is to see aggressive masculinity

soothed and pacified to an idyllic harmlessness. Fierce and lustful man rendered as tame as a tabby-cat! For pipe-smoking does always make me think of cats. Women smoke with nervous alertness. They have something of the air of the kitten putting up the electric back at this puppy of a world. But the pipe-smoking man is the blinking, dozing domestic tabby. Pipesmoking is merely the way men purr. One can almost hear the murmur of their contented souls. The rising smoke registers the gentle gurgle of their nicotinish purr. Blessed be the civilizing pipe, which brings out the tabby in otherwise unbridled man!

THE PASSING OF EMILY
RUGGLES'S

AUTUMN has come and school has opened, yet no tops have appeared in our town. These be degenerate days! In the New England village where I live there is not a top to be had. Neither are there marbles in the spring, nor hoops, nor paper soldiers, nor slingshot elastic, nor- but let us simply say we have no Emily Ruggles's.

Miss Emily Ruggles kept the little notion store in the Massachusetts town where my boyhood was spent. She was almost as terrifying as her store was alluring. She must have been nearly six feet tall, and she had a deep bass voice and a forbidding manner. It was said that she wore a ramrod in the back of her dress, and on Sunday when she was sitting very straight in her pew across the aisle from ours, wrapped in her best Paisley shawl, I used furtively to watch for some visible confirmation of this rumor. I thought the ramrod might slip up and show at the back of her neck. It was also said, I believe on sound authority, that she sent a substitute to the Civil War, and was highly indignant that she was n't allowed to go her

self. For us youngsters who scrambled every Memorial Day for the cartridgeshells ejected by the G.A.R. firing squad after the salute, this was a thrilling fact about Miss Emily.

Her little store was in Lyceum Hall Block, close to the Post Office, and you climbed four steps to enter it, by a single heavy door without any slam-absorber. When you had pushed open this door and entered the somewhat dim interior, you looked toward the back of the room between two parallel counters, and behind a third counter which connected them at the rear you saw Miss Emily sitting, swathed in her weekday shawl. She looked at you sternly, to see if you were going to shut the door, and shut it quietly, and after you had done so, she demanded, in her deep bass voice, 'Which side, young man?'

This question had much point, for on the right side of the store, both in the counter and on the shelves behind it, were the notions-spools, needles, calico, garter elastic, and a hundred other things your mother was always wanting; while on the left side were kept marbles, paper soldiers, lead soldiers, slingshot elastic, air-guns, bows and arrows, slates, whistles, school pencils, compasses, paint-boxes, and a hundred other things you were always wanting. Miss Emily sat strategically at the rear of the store, and did not move till she knew for certain what it was you were after. Nowadays this would be called efficiency. In those days our parents called it crankiness.

When Miss Emily took your pennies for an 'aggie' or a 'snapper' or a big glass 'popper,' she did so sternly, and she always examined them closely as if she expected counterfeits. She never smiled sweetly on you, and called you 'Sonny' or 'Little boy.' She never smiled at all. She called you, invariably, 'Young man,' in her aggressive

bass. But the fact remained that she invariably kept on hand just the kind of marbles and toy soldiers and paper soldiers and dolls and pencils and paints the heart of youth desired, and slingshot elastic of pure rubber, which nobody else ever kept and which is quite unprocurable to-day; and she always put in an extra marble or two with a ten-cent purchase, and she never stretched the elastic on the yard-stick when she measured it, and the steps to her shop were worn hollow by the tread of children's feet. That was her prim New England way of expressing her affection. She studied for weeks to procure a window display which would delight the hearts of all the youngsters, and then she thundered at the first child who entered, 'Shut the door, young man - and don't slam!'

She knew the season for every game. She knew when marble time was due, and the appearance of glittering 'aggies' in her window invariably preceded by one day the drying up of the sidewalk along the Common. She knew when top time had arrived, and when the tops filled her window, then we laid aside our other sports and obeyed the call. At Valentine time her window was full of the most ravishing confections of paper lace and pink cupids and amorous poetry - but never a 'comic.' The nefarious trade in 'comics' was carried on by a druggist who also was suspected of selling something stronger than soda. Miss Emily would have nothing to do with such iniquitous things as 'comics.' And all the time the left-hand window was constantly changing its display, the right-hand window contained the same bales of calico and

boxes of spools, till they were faded and dusty and fly-specked. Miss Emily's real interest was in the children's trade.

Long ago Miss Emily joined her fathers. Her store passed with her. There is none in that town to take its place, nor in other towns, either. No doubt most of the things she sold (except that marvelous sling elastic of pure rubber three quarters of an inch wide) can still be bought, some in one store, some in another. But they cannot be bought from the same counter. They are not assembled together for the eye of childhood to gloat over, not even in the occasional toy store of the large cities. Certainly there are no such shops any more in the villages and smaller towns, their steps worn hollow by the tread of little feet. Spinsters we have with us still, and children, too; but one form of mutual dependence between the two seems to have gone forever.

I have wondered sometimes if that is the reason the boys in the town where I live now never play marbles, or spin tops. In the past five years I have not seen a single game of marbles or once heard the shrill request, 'Gimme a peg at yours!' It is not strange that the slingshot has vanished, for automobile tires use up all the available rubber. But why should tops and marbles vanish from the earth? They have gone the way of the delightful children's matinees at the old Boston Museum. no doubt, and the Kate Greenaway books, and the jack-stones little girls used to toss by the hour, sitting on the front steps. It makes one feel middleaged and mournfully reminiscent.

To get a fair idea of what President Wilson's administration has done, the conditions under which it has had to work should first be considered. This is a matter rarely taken into account, the usual assumption being that as a matter of course settled means exist by which the President can discharge his constitutional functions. This is a common error. The means never have been settled, but have varied from time to time always without attaining permanent system. Administrative policy has been formulated by makeshifts devised from time to time; and it so happened that President Wilson took office at a time when actual practice had been revolutionized and conditions were wavering and confused.

It is the duty of the President to 'give to the Congress information on the state of the Union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.' There is no provision as to the form in which he shall present his measures, or the mode by which he shall get them before Congress. English tradition governed the original practice. There were then no standing committees to intervene between the recommendations of the administration and the action of the House. The House exercised its functions of criticism and VOL. 117 - NO. 5

control through the Committee of the Whole. When the sense of the House was ascertained, a select committee would be appointed to prepare the bill; which usually meant that the select committee's work would be done for it by the administrative department concerned. The system was precarious, as it rested merely on traditional practice; and it soon broke down under pressure of party spirit. In ceasing to rely upon the administration for the drafting of measures, Congress had recourse to committees, and thus originated the peculiar system of standing committees which has had such a monstrous development.

With Jefferson's advent to office, it became party usage to allow the administration to pick the chairmen of important committees. This system of guiding legislation by private arrangement between the administration and the standing committees lasted until John Quincy Adams's administration, when it was ruptured by party violence. With this collapse disappeared from our political system all recognition of the legislative initiative of the President simply as the President. The President may exercise an actual initiative of masterful authority, but he derives it from an extra-constitutional source his position as head of his