Kustorino, and then launched a series of offensives that proved to be one of the most stubborn battles ever fought in the Balkans. Early one morning a regiment from Philippolis scaled the Golash, and after a frightful hand-tohand encounter dislodged the British. During the night the French had been driven from their positions, and with that the campaign of the Allies in the Balkans was a stalemate.

There is only one route that will permit an advance upon Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, and that lies through the valley of the Struma. It is a safe route, moreover, being protected in the east by the Perim Dagh and the Rila Planina, and in the west by the Plashkavica Mountains, all three of which ranges are insurmountable barriers to large bodies of troops.

way

The one difficulty in the of an advance through the Struma Valley is the narrowness of the opening between the Belasica and Cengel Daghs, which was made by the river, and which the Bulgars had fortified in a haphazard manner. There was bound to be some severe fighting at that point, but since the Allied troops had the necessary artillery, and favorable maneuver ground, they could have done what in the Blagusa Mountains was impossible. A fight such as they put up near Kustorino would have brought them through the defile, and after that the Struma and Strumnitza valleys were open to them -the former for an advance upon Sofia, if that seemed advisable, the latter for a flank maneuver upon the Bulgarian forces in the Vardar Valley. At the same time one of the important lines of communication of the Bulgars and Germans in Macedonia would have been cut.

The Balkans' fate hung on a very slender thread just then. That thread was military information of the right

sort.

Almost a year later General Falkenhayn, one evening at dinner in Kronstadt, Transylvania, was reviewing the progress of his campaign against the Rumanians. He had executed a most daring plan, and had succeeded beyond his own expectations. With the German Ninth Army and some Austro

Hungarian troops he had pushed_on Hermannstadt, driven the Second Rumanian Army into the Vörös Torony defile, and then had advanced through the valley of the Alt in the direction of the Geisterwald, which was then in the hands of the invading Rumanians. Instead of enveloping the enemy's right wing, formed by the Rumanian First Army, he pushed his way into the very center of that force, and two days before taking Kronstadt found that he was almost surrounded. The Rumanians, instead of closing in on Falkenhayn's flank and rear, elected to fall back on their line of communication, Kronstadt-Predeal; they abandoned everything and lost what they had gained in so short a time. They would have obliged the German Ninth Army to fall back had they held their positions in the Geisterwald, the very opportunity the Russian commander in the Carpathians, General Brussiloff, was looking for. There can be no doubt that disaster would have overtaken the Germans and Austro-Hungarians had the Rumanians been endowed with enough sense to close in on them in the direction of Fogaras.

I suggested to General Falkenhayn that his plan had been daring enough, and that it could not have been carried out with a better army than the Rumanian as an opponent.

"I am fully aware of that," he said. "But I took the character of that army into consideration. The Rumanian army is not bad by any means, but it has its weak spots. I was lucky enough to discover some of them."

That does not invalidate the fact that the Rumanians had a fine chance to inflict upon the Germans and AustroHungarians a crushing defeat, but their leaders made up their mind that two could play the risky game General Falkenhayn was playing.

Thus are spun the slender threads. upon which the life of a nation may depend. The surprising part of it is that they do not seem to tear often. The thinnest of them all, however, was the one that held the fate of Turkey suspended throughout the summer, fall, and winter of 1915. An empire never before hung by so slim a spider's thread.

OR twoscore years and ten Amos Owens really had something to worry about. In the first part of the first score he had to worry about his pants, for his mother made them out of his father's pants. He had to worry about not having the guns and bats and boats that make for popularity among one's fellows. He even had to worry about getting his school-books -not that he really wanted them, but his mother's tone in speaking of his not being able to have them led him to associate this possibility with catastrophe too great to look in the face. And then from the time he was ten years old he began to worry about getting up early enough-at ten he got a route and began carrying morning papers. Perhaps if in those years which might have been tenderer he had just once looked the worst that could happen straight in the eye, and with bold reasonableness inquired, "Well, what if it does happen?"-if just one morning a little boy of ten had done that, maybe the life of a man would have been different. Maybe. But his mother's voice shaped his years. She couldn't say, "What a beautiful sunny morning!" sunny morning!" without giving you a sense of impending doom. And when she said, "Amos, you get to bed and right to sleep, or you'll not be able to wake up when I call you," he couldn't any more have taken a good look at the possibility of not being able to wake up than he could have struck a match and looked at the monstrous figure which must be there when a door creaked in the night.

And then, from the first, he saw things from the early-morning angle. There is that about the world when people are not up to make it seem something is bound to happen to them when they do get up. The cats were too queer in the dawn. Many houses with pulled-down shades do something to you. When he

got to the office and crowded in with all the other fellows the world was itself again-a place of loud voices and much edging of you out of line, but there was a certain three blocks-whistling didn't help and running made it worse.

His early-morning life did not stop with the papers. He got a job in the fish-market and it was his business to meet the four-o'clock train and get the stuff right on ice. If he missed that train He never finished that sentence more's the pity.

He began working in the fish-market at sixteen and he bought it at thirty-two. From the time he was twenty-eight he was afraid old Doe would die, or give up the business, before he had enough saved to buy it. Amos's savings-account ran a race with old Doe's kidneys, and there is something hounding about an opponent you can't measure. In the second year Mr. Doe had an acute attack and was taken to the hospital-that was what made Amos an investor. To get money faster he lent the savings which were bringing him four per cent. to a Iman who wanted to build a house and would pay eight per cent. He never would have risked this if he could have had an accurate report on the kidneys. Having risked it was anguishing as he walked through still, gray streets; securities became as thin and unreal as that light which fills in between night and day. Of course he was going to lose his money. Money became to him a thing you are practically certain to lose. He did not lose it, and he found out how to make it, but that light which is never seen in night or day became the light in which he saw things.

When he bought the fish-market he thought how nice it was going to be to sleep mornings. For years, as he walked past those drawn shades, he had envied the people warm and unaware in their beds. But when you have done an unpleasant thing for twenty-two years it

isn't so easy to leave off doing it. Of course he continued to wake at half past three, and as that was the hour when things had long seemed all wrong, of course they continued to seem so. He could hear the whistle of the fouro'clock train, and he was sure Fred Long had not been there to meet it. It got so he couldn't bear to lie abed and listen for that whistle. After a month of knowing Fred would not be there-a month in which Fred never once failed to be there he told him he'd meet the train himself.

His wife told him he was crazy; when he acquired the fish-market he acquired as wife Josie Smith, bookkeeper in the grocery-store next door. "You don't "You don't have to do it," she told him again and again. And he couldn't explain to her, not being able to explain it to himself, that he did have to.

There was a great deal he was never able to explain to Josie-or to himself. There were things in him that fought with other things, and his make-up brought him pain. With all his terror about his pennies he had that quite special romantic sense which points some men to money. He was a 'fraid-cat and a gambler, and all through his life the gambler tortured the 'fraid-cat. He borrowed money up to the hilt, and made money on the borrowed money. His capital was never big enough for his business. This consigned him to years most men will understand better than most women. Josie was one of the women who didn't understand it at all. She had a tidy little bookkeeping mind which would have things balance no matter what the balance might be. Those were dreadful days in the Owens household when he had to pull out of his pocket a note for Josie to sign. Josie thought it all quite simple. They could get along very well if it weren't for that terrible interest. She never could see that they moved from a flat on Third Street to a home on River Heights out of what the borrowed money made. She wanted what it made, but her mindand her judgments-never got past what it cost.

And as he carried away Josie's signature he always carried with it a nervous chill. It was true he was bearing

a fearful burden of interest. Suppose the bank came down on him-as she said it would—as something in him felt sure it must. He suffered, but he went on. He had to suffer, and he had to go on. He was like that.

And then one day he made his pile He was one of three men who financed a young inventor. The 'fraid-cat had been more tortured by this than by anything he had. done-and the gambler more intrigued. It was a new sort of motorengine, and there was a fortune in it. The man who every morning met the four-o'clock train was the richest man in

town.

But he went right on meeting it. When Josie complained about its looking queer, he said there was nothing else to do at that hour in the morning. She spoke of sleep. What was the good of sleep if you couldn't sleep? They bought an imposing house called The Manor-an edifice erected by a man with a romantic sense which had played him false, and at twenty minutes of four every morning this heavy mahogany door opened and there slunk out of it the master of the house, the richest man in town, Amos Owens on his old hard way to get his fish.

As he went out he sometimes met his son coming in-Walter was less inept than his father in taking his place among the wealthy. One morning, in the lower hall, he met his daughter, just home from a fancy-dress Christmas ball. Edna put out her arm, not unkindly, and cried, "Father!" at the thought of his going out in the storm. Her arm was bare and some gold thing was wound round and round it. All the way to the train it bothered him. It must have cost a great deal. Why need she have her arm bound like that? While absorbed in figuring out what the adornment must have cost he slipped on the ice and broke his ankle.

That night Josie and Walter and Edna gathered round his bed and read him the evening papers. They all had the story of how Amos Owens, on his way to the four-o'clock train from which he had long taken his fish, had slipped on the ice. Josie and Edna cried and not over his broken ankle. Walter said it would set them back they weren't well