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had come out to Idaho from the Middle West. He knew nothing about farming, never milked a cow nor fed a hog," but he took up his claim, "got interested," and-"here I am!" He had proved up, then started his lumber business, and built a bungalow for his young family and himself in the village, and now, by working one man slowly all the time, was burning off the stumps on his claim at what he thought was the economical cost of $24 an acre.

The incandescent lamps blinked palely above the street corners, although it was bright sunlight. The village got its light from a power company and the rate was reckoned on the "peak load," which came, of course, at night. There was power to waste during the day and the lights therefore burned all the time-it saved extra wiring and the cost of some one to attend to turning on and off the lights. House owners, however, had their own wires and paid the village for their light.

We first went to the fair ground, where they had put up a stand and built a track and held a successful fair a few weeks before. The school track team was now practicing there. And then we made a tour of the neighborhood and visited half a dozen homesteads. Compared with farms in the finished East or Middle West, they were, naturally, not much to see; but when one took into account the work and pluck and patience that had gone into them before the pines were cleared, the stumps blown or burned out, the soil “civilized," and the raw land beaten into fruitfulness, the homesteads themselves, and particularly the homesteaders, meeting us with a bashful grin and taking us round to see their handiwork, were not only interesting, but positively exciting.

Where the forest had been, one young Iowa man a thorough farmer of the modern sort-had raised a big barn and an attractive house, and he and his family, with their automobile, seemed to be as comfortable already as they could have been in the old neighborhood they

had left behind. He talked of the possibility of sending their certified potatoes over into the Yakima country for seed, for the proud Yakima people, with all their wealth, could not, he said, go on using their own potatoes for seed in their own soil. They had to send out to some non-irrigated neighborhood. He was a member of the Plummer School Board and as active in the village lifealthough living miles from it-as the townspeople themselves.

Another showed us his orchard; the first apples and plums, on the first branches of the first trees that had ever been brought out of that earth by the hand of man-things that he was as proud of as if they had been children, and, indeed, that he had quite as literally created. In another place we leaned over the fence and admired the lines of some pedigreed hogs-lines that have their beauty, like anything else, when one understands the relation of these lines to usefulness. All these men had pioneered just as literally as if they had come across the continent in prairie schooners instead of Pullmans, and tanned and sewed their own buckskins instead of ordering their clothes from Sears, Roebuck. They were real farmers -the sort of pioneers who "stick."

Back in the town again, we looked in at a general store. The proprietor had lived in the neighborhood, waited for the opening of the reservation for years, and then not drawn a homestead! But he came in at once, took up what he thought might some day be a busy corner in the noble city of Plummer, and now, as one of the young city fathers whispered, "he's probably worth forty thousand dollars!" Then we called on Bush, the drug-store mayor. Bush was from Minnesota and he had been a drugstore clerk when he drew his claim.

"I didn't know what a broad-ax was," he said, "nor one end of a cross-cut saw from the other. But we built a log house -oh, we had to have our log house! Some one suggested that the logs ought to be smoothed off on the inside—that

they all did it. So we smoothed 'em off. Well, we learned about a broad-ax, all right." He looked round his store, a regular drug store now, with phonograph records, and a miniature ice-cream parlor curtained off at one end,'in addition to the usual perfumes and painkillers. "It's a good experience, but unless you're a born farmer. well, one day you get the smell of the drugs, and back you come!"

McFadden took me home to dinner with him. It was a good dinner, and a snug little home, and as he and his bright, capable young wife and I gossiped of all sorts of things, many miles away from Idaho, it was interesting to think that everything there not only the house and the warm, bright room we sat in, but that young family itselfhad sprung, so to speak, from the primeval forest. For Mrs. McFadden, as she explained as we got better acquainted, had lived on the homestead next to her husband's. Some relatives had written her to come out to Idaho and visit them, and mentioned that there was a nice young man on the claim adjoining theirs.

"I won't do a thing to that nice young man!" she wrote, and came.

We couldn't talk as long as we should have liked, for McFadden had to go to council meeting, and as the school board was also meeting that night, I hurried over to that first. There was the principal himself; the tall young Iowa farmer already mentioned; a slow, humorous homesteader, who explained, on being presented, that "I'm what they call a typical Missourian"; a business man from the village; and one or two others. The business consisted in putting through various bills for expenses.

The principal was desirous, for instance, of adding $10 to the monthly salary of one of the women teachers so that, in addition to what she already did, she might give the girls physical training. Somebody wanted to know if $5 wouldn't be enough. No, the principal didn't think it would; it wouldn't be right to ask her to do it for that.

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"I tell you, boys," said he, "you don't realize what that girl does. She's loaded up awful heavy, already. She's got two whole grades to take care of and all she gets is a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. There's nobody more loyal to the school than she is-and strong! Why, those kids would take off their shirts for her!"

The board passed the account. "All right," said the clerk, setting it down in his record. "Ten dollars more for physical torture!"

Then there was a long argument about the advisability of paying $30 a month to hire another stage to bring in the children from a neighborhood "over the ridge" not yet included in the consolidated district. For the teamster it meant going over the ridge four times to get the children, carry them home, and come home himself; he wouldn't do it for less than $30. The tall young farmer wondered why the kids couldn't walk to and from the top of the ridge, but he was overruled. Too much mud and snow in winter. The kids must be brought in. Moreover, if they weren't, their parents would like enough form another district and then Plummer would lose the taxes which the railroad paid on that part of its right of way, which amounted to something like $2,500. The bill for $30 a month for another stage was passed.

My train left at about ten o'clock and there was just time to hurry across town and get a glimpse of the council meeting. McFadden's office was hotter than ever and packed with men. George, himself, as everybody called him, sat at his desk, in front of his yellow-bound books. Across from him, facing the crowd, was Bush, the druggist mayor, or, to be quite accurate, chairman of the board of trustees. Jaeger squatted on the floor behind the stove at the other end of the room. All three were plainly white-collar, town men; the others, strung down the sides of the little room, ranged from local merchants to homesteaders in mackinaws who spoke broken English, but here, as

at the school-board meeting, all called one another by their first names. They were all the "boys."

The problem at the moment was peddlers and mail-order agents and what to do with them-more directly how to keep the womenfolk from buying everything these fascinating visitors offered and thus ruining their husbands and local trade. The subject was one that offered many opportunities for pleasantry; those who had not been greatly troubled could gibe the more excited with being jealous of the gentlemen from abroad, etc., but there was a real difficulty as well.

In a community like this, where the money comes in largely at the end of the harvest, most merchants have to be good fellows and carry their customers over, as everybody knows. They have their invested capital, rent and taxes to pay, and then along comes some one who pays no rent, or rents a room for a day or two, does nothing toward building up the town or carrying its burdens, and takes away in a few hours orders for more stuff than the man on the corner sells in a month.

The precedent of St. Maries and other towns in the neighborhood was cited. Some of the more irate were for taxes that would have shut up little Plummer within its own limits like a mediæval city behind its walls and moat, or as some of the new little European nations shut themselves from their neighbors today.

McFadden would sit there calmly, playing with a pencil or something, or perhaps looking up a precedent in one of his yellow-bound books, and come out presently with a quiet, "That's all right, boys, but we couldn't do that," and then he would explain why, in law and common sense, they couldn't do it. Often the "boys" turned to him first, with a "How about it, George?"

It was the old town meeting come back again. These were the real "city fathers"-the homesteaders in overalls and the townsfolk in boiled shirts-and

municipal politics not yet a mere game for professionals buzzing about the City Hall. Without any demagogy, the young lawyer pioneer found a real place for his education and broader knowledge, and it was not difficult to understand that he might, like that distinguished Italian many centuries before him, prefer to be first in his village to being second in Rome.

I could not wait until the peddler problem had been settled, but had to leave them still discussing it and hurry for my train. Looking back on it all as the train rolled eastward, it seemed to me that Plummer, and the brand-new farms about it, and the high school and council meeting, and the healthy, hopeful, humorous young men I had met that day were something very valuable in American life, and that, taking this little township and its surroundings as a sample, Cœur d'Alene had quite literally made good.

While writing this report I came across a review in the New Republic of Mr. Victor Murdock's Folks. The reviewer, quoting Mr. Thorstein Veblen, seemed inclined to take the magic of pioneer town building somewhat lightly.

The dreaming builders, as he sees them [she observed], are no other than a group of real-estate speculators, usurers, merchants, brokers, and finally lawyers acting in the interest of the group. Their dream is the hope of engrossing the increment of land values due to the development of the surrounding country; their vision, the expectation of marketing the farmer's product, controlling his credit, and selling to him at a high profit. And finally the mystic exaltation of the builders is nothing but pecuniary interest speaking with the thrilling voice of public spirit, civic pride, and local patriotism.

If this is what Mr. Veblen thinks, I should say that his thoughts on this particular subject are rather silly. They are silly, as are so many of the attempts of clever iconoclasts to destroy illusions by trying to reduce them to a chemical formula, and by endeavoring to fit life

into a theory which disregards actual human nature. From the laboratory point of view a cup of coffee may be a cup of coffee, wherever you get it, but you know, and I know, and anybody who has ever tried so elementary a form of pioneering as the ordinary picnic knows, that the cup of coffee pushed across the counter by some inarticulate Jugo-Slav in the Eatmore Lunch at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Hullaballoo Street, Manhattan, is a very different thing from the cup of coffee which you drink out of doors in some Sierra mountain meadow-or by the side of the Gowanus Glue Factory, for that matter -after gathering your own sticks and making it over your own fire.

A plasterer, fitting a false marble front to the thirty-seventh story of the Amalgamated Gum Trust Building, along with a hundred other workmen, may be "creating" just as much as he is when raising a roof over his own house, with logs hewn by his own hands from his own trees, but you can't make him think so, even though his strictly pecuniary interests are no more secure in Idaho than in New York.

All wealth comes from the land-or sea and all towns, and particularly towns in remote, thinly settled agricultural neighborhoods, live, in one sense or another, on the country round about them. The men who start to build these towns expect, naturally, that they will grow, and they hope and expect that the

near-by farmers will prosper and that they will share in that prosperity. If they did not have this hope, and work diligently to realize it, they would not be of much use as pioneers. That is what makes towns.

Some of them are narrow-spirited and selfish, just as some city men are broadspirited and idealistic, but the essential difference of their situation-leaving out fresh air, the chance to hunt, fish, and so on-is that they start with a clean slate. The cards are dealt afresh. The old and inevitable barriers are momentarily brushed away. They start out on their great adventure with a fair field and no favor. Everyone is needed; there is work for all; and it is of such a simple and visible character that every man can see what he does, and feel that he, personally, counts.

That is the main magic of the new country, and it does fire men's spirits and make them dream dreams. There is nothing to prevent a man with sufficient strength, luck, or imagination from dreaming similar dreams in a crowded city, nor is it impossible to pioneer, at least intellectually and morally, in London or New York. Roosevelt would have been unwise, for instance, to have remained on his Montana ranch. Not all men can do likewise, however, and if not all men can feel the new country's magic, the answer of those who do is the simple pragmatic proof-that for them it works.

amethyst-tinted Mediterranean that afternoon Sara sighed. She could see, far to the west, and of a faintly darker purple, the outline of Monte Carlo and Cap Martin against the pale glamour of the horizon. She was sitting alone, upon a little wrought-iron balcony overhanging the garden of the villa they had taken for the winter, her hands folded quietly in her lap, her lips half parted, her eyes fixed gravely on that distant view-wistful, fair, immobile.

She was very simply dressed in white; the contours of her body were slim and delicate; her intent oval face was untouched by either time or trouble, yet she possessed an illusive air of supreme sophistication which suggested the listlessness of one who has savored all but the last curiosity-indeed, as she sat drenched in the sunshine streaming through the gaily-striped inadequate awnings of the balcony, the loveliness of adolescence and the languor of experience seemed to meet in her and intermingle, like oil miraculously mixing with water. As a matter of fact, she was nineteen and a source of some anxiety to her father. General Beckwith liked girls to be English and unchangeably fond of tennis, but it was Sara's chief decision to become one of those gay celebrities who are the continuing ornament of the illustrated weeklies, who go everywhere and do everything, superbly haughty, reckless, radiant, beyond all good and evil, like Lady Ann Bentinck-Browne, or Mrs. de Lisle. Consequently, Sara entertained only a certain vague reluctant toleration for tennis and the business of being exceedingly English.

A spicy scent of carnations came up through the afternoon with a rumor of voices and the muffled silvery murmuring of a fountain-thin, drowsy, evanescent ghosts of sound haunting the illimitable sunshine. Beneath the balcony and beyond the garden walls, the streets of Bordighera preserved inviolate their treasured quiet and content-but then that was the worst of Bordighera! Except for a few elderly invalids hobbling from the Club to the Casino, who found perhaps some fleeting souvenir of their lost youth in that warm scented sunlight, it was deserted, uneventful, dull. The distinguished and adventurous sought the more exciting delights of Cannes, or Monte Carlo.

Sara sighed again as she thought of it; certainly, it was a discouraging prospect for a young lady whose first employment of the future was to be the immediate manufacture of a past. It was necessary to be in things, of course: the delicious scandals, the scampish gaieties and glitter of smart society; she stared out over the Mediterranean as if gazing into a mirror; she could see herself suave, disdainful, brilliant, talked about, as she made a triumphant appearance at some tremendous gala night in Covent Garden, or sailed through the Rooms at Monte Carlo, trailing clouds of rather excitingly tarnished glory behind her. But one trailed merely a tennis racquet in Bordighera; elderly gentlemen who are suffering from gout, or cirrhosis of the liver, are not the most gaily compromising of companions. There was simply Mr. Macquisten. Mr. Macquisten was not elderly, as a matter of fact, and neither was he suffering from gout, or cirrhosis of the