department, said: "If it were within the province of this court to decide the point, I should hold that there is not now and never has been a case of plague in this city." In the mean time, members of the Federal Health Service persevered in publishing the facts and in safeguarding foreign and interstate commerce. By 1907, when a fresh outbreak of the disease occurred in San Francisco, public opinion was ripe for an appeal to Washington. Immediately the Federal Service took charge of the situation, and organized a campaign that has not only eradicated the plague, but has also revolutionized methods of public sanitation along the entire Western coast.

As a civil army for combating disease, the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service needs nothing but increased appropriations to meet every demand that can constitutionally be made upon it. It has thoroughly mastered the technique of handling epidemics, and the work of its medical-research laboratories has a unique international reputation. If it had more money at its command, it would gladly make itself the center of information on the best methods devised for the handling of conventional public health problems. But the ablest minds in the service keenly realize that the conquest of infectious and communicable diseases, while the large, crude, immediate task, hardly more than skims the surface. They, too, have been led by the peculiar character of their responsibilities to visualize the community as a whole; for them, too, the aggregate life of the nation has acquired a heightened value as the material God has intrusted to the people to build a civilization with. They clearly foresee the time when medical research will have increasingly to be directed to those adverse social and economic conditions that stand back of all disease, undermine the national vigor, and make disease possible. They understand that the problems that the new knowledge is bringing to the front will require the co-operation of a new type of socialized statesmanship for their solution.

To the observer in Washington, nothing is so remarkable as the apparently total obliviousness of our politicians to the newer social and economic questions that

have arisen in our national life. The issues that are principally debated in Congress are essentially the same as those that have filled Congressional Records for generations. It is a strange anachronism that of a little less than six and one-half hundred millions appropriated by Congress in 1910, more than five hundred and nine millions should have been for military pensions and preparations for war. An examination of the Federal budget, of current legislation, indeed of Presidential messages, gives little hint that our public men are aware that we have ceased to be a nation of small farmers, merchants, and independent mechanics; or that there are such things in the United States as a criminally high infant mortality, ruinous child labor, the sweating of women, an increasing prevalence of poverty, unemployment, and crime. Except for the "trust" investigations and an interminable wrangle over the tariff, Congressmen and Senators take little cognizance of the fact that the nationalization of our industrial machinery has made these social problems matters of Federal concern.

In England, Germany, and other European countries, the nationalization of industry has been attended with the development of national health programmes in the form of insurance against sickness, invalidism, unemployment, and old age. In the light of experience with legislation in America, it is doubtful whether any similar action will be taken by our government except under the pressure of an enlightened public opinion. To-day we are grossly ignorant of the state of our human resources. Even the national birth and death rates are unknown. Sporadic investigations by philanthropic societies and various Federal departments make it certain that tuberculosis and kindred diseases, child labor, unemployment, and the like are impairing the national vitality; but our information is too scattered and imperfect to compel remedial action. The attitude of our statesmen toward human conservation is as complacent as it formerly was toward the conservation of our material resources. And it is probable that this ruinous complacency will continue until a department has been created with facilities adequate to the continuous accumulation of facts for the public.

F

EW, comparatively, are the Federal district attorneys in the United States. This makes it necessary in telling about the adventure of the girl with the gazelle eyes-whose story, by the way, is much more true than untrueto conceal the identity of one of them in a makeshift way by calling him Everett Edwards Brevoort.

If any think for a moment that this Brevoort showed the slightest trace of his Dutch ancestry in his appearance, they merely show their ignorance of America. America cuts men out of her own pattern, all forebears to the contrary notwithstanding. America made Brevoort tall, and not only angular, but also rectangular. He was so rectangular that he seemed to be just the sort of a creature that America so often likes to mold by tamping the soft, plastic material into the rectangles of streets, such as Wall and Nassau, for instance, or down a Chicago elevator shaft, or a Philadelphia mail chute. He was the adamantine, rectangular product of an adamantine, rectangular American city. He was the pattern of American success. He was the form of clear, cold, selfish thought. His head worked so well that he could raise one of his long fingers and argue an anti-trust law into an automobile speed regulation by pure logic. Twenty thousand dollars had meant very little to him as a fee. He paid that much for rent of his winter-quarters. And, after all, when he was fifty a year or so ago, he was a somewhat attractive, middle-aged bachelor. His skin, for example, always seemed to have emerged a moment before from bitterly cold water. His features were somewhat Greek. His ordinary smile was satanic, and his eye thrust," as the young Harvard man who was assistant attorney said, was simply-what shall we say?

This is a detective story, even though true, and there is something feminine in it, which calls for haste, but if one

cannot have a picture of Brevoort, one will miss the point. The truth was that Brevoort was a curious tragedy himself. He might have had a Supreme Court seat, or even the Vice-Presidency, if it had not been for his record.

A record at middle age, when the vision clears, is the confounded thing! To have been brilliantly successful in advising promoters how to keep ahead of the legislators-which is not such a great achievement when one comes to think of it-is success which lasts until the plain people of inferior mental equipment stupidly insist in vulgar terminology that you have been running an expensive school in the gentle art of playing dirty tricks. Brevoort, along with others, said that he had "done the thing customary and current in big business and big law." No one had ever outwitted him, anyhow. He said so to the man who had married the one woman he had wanted. He said it at the University Club on the eve of the Republican Convention, when the machine would have given him gladly anything he wanted, if it had not been for the way plain folks insisted, in spite of all logic, in looking upon his record. The windows of his apartment were high above the street, and that night, when Le realized that his party did not dare even to mention his name for elective office, he would have slipped out of one of them as if by accident, if pure logic had not overcome, as usual, the coarser yearnings of his heart.

This was Brevoort, who suddenly threw over all his old practice, all the lucrative clients, all the fascinating sway of the largest American affairs, and, to all intents and purposes, said to executive authority: "Here's my ability. Here's my logic. Here's my law. If you want me to bring my gifts to the public service, appoint me wherever you dare to do it. There has been something empty in my life. Perhaps I've lacked an ideal. Now at any rate I am ready to work per an

num for a sum rather less than my club bills. Give me a chance at Service, with a big S."

So when C. B. D. was served with a warrant in the Industrial Shippers rebate cases, he had exclaimed involuntarily to the deputy sheriff: "It's Brevoort, of course. He served me once loyally at a pretty price; now he's serving the government with the same perfect mind for twenty-five dollars a day. Always somebody's servant, anyhow! All head and no heart." The sheriff was surprised to hear so great a man so described; he was, however, familiar with the prosecution of the Atlantic Fidelity Trust Company's banking-law case; he had seen the wife of Morton O. Par soner, with red eyes, trying to get signatures on a petition for Parsoner's pardon, and he had listened to the crossexamination in the traction cases. Brevoort, he knew, did the Federal attorney's job without need of blinders; he did not shy at old friendships. He had no prejudice. His was a terrible prosecuting pounce. And he played with witnesses-a jaguar with rabbits. Servant, perhaps; the devil himself, anyhow!

This was Brevoort who stayed in the city through the hot spell in August, working like a dog on some investigation, the subject of which no one yet has been able to guess, because even those who get the crop reports and the President's message first cannot foretell the thing Brevoort will do. And it was on August 30th that Brevoort pressed a button of the panel of his desk and looked up when Cooley, the second assistant, who does the small criminal work-the mail-fraud, immigration, eight-hour-law, and postalrobbery prosecutions-came in. Brevoort held a letter in his right hand and touched the tips of his stiff, white, clerical collar with the tips of his stiff, white, clerical, satanic fingers.

"The Senator from this district writes me," he said, letting his words fly like chips of porcelain. "He writes me about one Peter Schmolz, a pensioner-and political creditor of the good Senator. There was a theft of the last pension draft and voucher. The draft was forged and collected. What has this office done?"

The second assistant looked nervous.

"Janis has been on the case," he said. "Janis! He considered it game of his size?" asked the man of little greatness. "What has he found?"

The second assistant, being a young man desirous to please, imitated the incisive brevity of his superior in his reply.

"Schmolz lives on West Twentyninth Street," he said. "It is a boarding-house kept by Mrs. Kohlan, a Russian. The first postal inspector on the case absolved the carrier. Mrs. Kohlan admits that the letter was seen by her on the hall-stand. None but the boarders had access that day to the letter. Janis says it was stolen by one of them or by Dosia Kohlan, the twelve-year-old daughter of the landlady. The little girl admits cashing the draft at the bakery where she is known. This was discovered, confessed, and then substantiated. But it is impossible to discover who directed the child's action or received the money from her. She could not have conceived and carried out the criminal transaction alone. Even the forgery, which is awkward, probably is not hers. There must be a principal."

Obvious!" asserted Brevoort, who did not even scent the interest of the case. "Whom does the child accuse?"

"Nobody."

"Nobody? You mean to tell me that Janis, with his bulldog, bulldozing, thirddegree face has met his match in a twelve-year-old girl?"

The second assistant reddened.

"You've talked to her?" asked Brevoort.

The other nodded.

"It is a blank wall-a stone wall-a wonderful thing-that-that-er-child," he stammered.

"Hm!" said Brevoort, exuding the chill of pure reason. "Have I to go into a puny little matter like this? Where's Janis?"

"Waiting to testify in the Cooperative Gold-mining Securities fraudorder case."

"Send him in."

Janis, who came, is a great man himself. He has a bull neck, fat jowls. sleepy eyes. The bull neck is on chunky shoulders, the fat jowls are on a broad, almost criminal face, and the sleepy

eyes are fastened onto a brain that works like a rat-trap. His whole appearance, however, is that of a lazy sealer of weights and measures, owing an appointment to ward politics. And, by the way, he has one affectation; he wears tortoiseshell eye-glasses.

Janis, like others of his kind, will not often tell how he does his work. Only now and then it is discovered that he caught a thieving postal clerk by pretending to be the father of the woman for whose love of gifts the thefts were committed, or that he picked out the murderer who had killed the postmaster at Hollinsworth by reciting to five suspects the scenario of the crime, step by step, while he watched their individual faces. "If not by one means, then by another," is his motto, and he founds his method of nailing the guilty upon the theory that no human being is a good liar.

"A man named Schmolz-" began Brevoort, looking up blackly at the inspector.

Bill Janis ran his fingers around his collar, coughed, blushed slightly, and scraped his feet.

"Well, why don't you arrest somebody?" snapped the Federal attorney. "That's not the business of this office to get evidence."

"Does your office want to prosecute, as it were, a twelve-year-old girl with pink cheeks and black pigtails-what?" inquired the sleuth, sarcastically.

"Wasn't there any one back of her? Wasn't there an older person? Why don't you make the child disclose? You're a past-master of the third degree. What's the matter?"

Janis grinned sheepishly.

(6 Sullivan, who first had the case, tried his hand, and Martin tried his," he said. "We had the girl under arrest and in a cell, and tried threats, and Sullivan took her for a trip to some openair theater and tried entertainment, and your young Cooley gave her a examination for two hours and tried flattery, and I tried threats, bribery, flattery, and cross-examination, and then some."

cross

Cry, you say? Cry? She has soft brown eyes and smiling lips. She never

VOL, CXXIV.-No. 743.-87

"The men in the service have been sneering a bit over the story, sir-at me, sir. They say that if the Old One himself-beggin' your pardon-had the girl in hand, something would come of it. Of course, it's no work for you, sir. I know that. Only, of course, if all you got from her-wit against wit, as it were -was what we get-why-"

The great lawyer pulled down his waistcoat.

"I think I will look into this myself," he said, confidentially. "It is interesting." "Shall I bring the child here as it were?"

"No. You and Sullivan get together and dictate the facts to my stenographer. That will be all."

Janis hesitated at the door, brushed off his sleeve, lifted one eyebrow, and looked about the old room of the Federal Building, with all its bookcased walls and high, plaster - molded ceiling, apparently as innocent and unconcerned as a tourist from Keokuk.

"Say, Mr. Brevoort, you never seen this girl, have you?" he asked, nonchalantly.

The attorney shook his square-jawed head. Thereupon Janis closed the door and stood outside in the corridor, with the point of his tongue appearing from one extreme corner of his mouth and one eyelid drawn down.

then ag'in

"And

as it were," said he. as it were." Of course, the real interest centers around the attempt of Brevoort to accomplish, playfully and as a piece of recreation, the mastery of the girl with the gazelle eyes. It was, he appreciated fully, an experiment in vanity. What more it was to be, though he knew it not on that Saturday morning in August, makes this story worth telling and reminds the conscience that there must

be as close an adherence to the true details as exigencies will permit.

On Sunday, then, Everett Edwards Brevoort left his apartment in an unpressed suit of clothes which he had laid aside to give to Jimmy Bernard, his personal attendant. Instead of stretching, as usual, at the University Club, with its great hall of empty breakfasttables, his broomstick legs took a long and brisk walk through the deserted business district, where the rap-tap-tap of his feet reverberated logically, and at last found themselves under a table in the "Epicure Lunch Room, Open At All Hours." However unaccustomed this performance of his legs, his mind remained as it had grown so perfectly. True to habit, he bought a copy of every newspaper on the counter, and in five minutes had bathed himself in the ample wallow of print, a process which some years ago he named "Saturating the mood of the people's day."

After finishing a perfunctory cup of coffee he went to the telephone booth and took from its stuffy interior the directory of well-thumbed pages.

"Kohlson, Kohlsberg, Kohldig," he read, half aloud, and moving a lean, precise finger up the page. Kohlan, A. D., Physician. Kohlan, Mrs. B. Ah, she has one!"

He stepped into the closet and delivered the number into the mouthpiece, not so much to, as at, the operator.

Almost at once a voice answered. Even Brevoort, whose artistic sense is maintained by logic, felt the charm in this voice.

"Well, I want to speak with little Miss Kohlan," he said.

"She expected you to call," came the soft reply. "She wants you to leave the message."

Brevoort rubbed his chin.

"Janis couldn't have- Oh no!" he exclaimed, under his breath.

"Please tell her to come around the corner to the Epicure Lunch Room. She will learn something of the greatest importance," he said, aloud.

A gentle, soft, scarcely audible, rippling laugh came back through the receiver.

"Wait there for me," said the voice. "I'm only a girl, you know."

The great man stepped back from the instrument, smoothed one eyebrow with. a cool finger-tip, and smiled at the position in which a national figure found himself. He thought of Janis, however, and squared his jaw. Then he became the famous Brevoort-in-Action, suave but alert, smiling like a satanic majesty who might devise legal schemes for wealthy underwriters, ready to pounce like a hawk of a Federal attorney zealous in the public welfare.

Not three minutes later, the door having opened, a twelve-year-old girl came up the aisle between the two rows of tables and sat down calmly, quite at her ease, directly opposite the great prosecuting attorney.

Many centuries of peasantry were in her somewhere, yet her young skin was of the finest texture, her eyes were indeed as soft as the gazelle's and seemed always to be on the point of seeing some marvelous, unbelievable happening, and her features, though large and mature, were delicately turned, not unlike those modeled by the Greeks. Two braids of black, black hair fell far down her back.

Brevoort observed her, thrusting toward her fresh, youthful countenance darts of fire from under his thick eyebrows.

"What's the matter?" she said, with a pout. "You aren't nice to me. Don't you shake hands-ever?"

The Federal attorney shrugged his shoulders, extended his long fingers, and felt the contact of the warm, soft hand of the child under whose skin the blood raced with the merriment of youth.

"You do not know me," he said, mysteriously, looking about as if fearful that the walls had ears.

"Yes, I do, if you please. You're the man who telephoned.”

Brevoort glanced up quickly. The brown, gazelle eyes were fairly dripping innocence.