5. Name two of the factors which have made New York the largest city in the New World.

6. Tell the journey.of the broiled halibut. From what source come the fresh fish which your mother occasionally buys?

7. Why did many railroad leaders object to the compulsory use of the air-brake and the automatic safety-coupler? Were their reasons similar to those of the farm-hands who objected to McCormick's reaper (p. 116)? What are the chief advantages of the air-brake? Of the automatic safety-coupler?

8. Explain how railroad improvements at a point hundreds of miles distant from where you live may benefit your community. 9. Give examples showing how farmers are benefited by improvements in the railroads.

10. Tell what would happen to your community if it were cut off from all effective means of transportation.

11. Volunteer reports (consuit the encyclopedia or the references below):

a. The effect of the Erie Canal on New York City.

b. George Stephenson and the first locomotive.

c. George Westinghouse and the air-brake.

d. Automatic safety coupling.

e. The fastest freight-train to or from our community; where it comes from, where it goes.

12. Of what part of the selection does this poem by Carl Sandburg remind you?

BOX CARS

Box cars run by a mile long.

And I wonder what they say to each other
When they stop a mile long on a side-track.

Maybe their chatter goes:

I came from Fargo with a load of wheat up to the danger line. I came from Omaha with a load of shorthorns and they splintered my boards.

I came from Detroit heavy with a load of flivvers.

I carried apples from the Hood River last year and this year bunches of bananas from Florida; they look for me with watermelons from Mississippi next year.

ADDITIONAL READINGS. 1. "Getting the Apples to Market," E. P. Powell, in Outing, 59: 303–308. 2. "A Seaport as a Center of Con

centration of Population and Wealth," J. P. Goode, in Lessons in Community and National Life, Series C, 201-208. 3. "By Mail," V. I. Paradise, in Scribner's Magazine, 69:473–480. 4. "Railway Brakes,” A. Williams, How It Works, 187-199.

3. A DEAL IN WHEAT

FRANK NORRIS

One of the chief risks in farming or business is the uncertainty about prices in the future. If a farmer or a manufacturer knew in advance just what he would have to pay for labor and materials and just what he could sell his product for, he would usually be able to avoid loss. But no one knows the future.

This fact plays an important part in buying and selling. People who buy or sell merely for the sake of making a profit by a change in the future price of a commodity are speculating. Speculation in "futures" the buying or selling of goods at a given price for delivery at some future time goes on in most cities, usually at the stock exchange or the board of trade.

Those who sell goods which they do not own at the time of the sale are called "bears"; they hope to make a profit by a fall in the price before the time for delivery comes; they do all they can to force prices down. The activities of the "bears" and the "bulls" the name given to those who buy for future delivery - play an important part at times in causing changes in prices. These changes, as the following story will show, frequently bring hardship and suffering to people who are in no way engaged in speculation.

I. THE LOSS OF THE FARM

As Sam Lewiston backed the horse into the shafts of his buckboard, his wife came out from the kitchen door of the house and drew near. For some time she stood at the horse's head, her arms folded and her apron rolled around them. For a long moment neither spoke. They had talked over the situation so long the night before that there seemed to be nothing more to say.

The time was late in summer, the place a ranch in southwestern Kansas, and Lewiston and his wife were two of a vast population of farmers, wheat growers, who at that moment

were passing through a crisis—a crisis that at any moment might culminate in tragedy. Wheat was down to sixty-six cents a bushel.

At length Emma Lewiston spoke.

"Well," she hazarded, looking vaguely out across the ranch toward the horizon; "well, Sam, there's always that offer of Brother Joe's. We can quit and go to Chicago - if the worst comes."

"And give up!" exclaimed Lewiston, running the lines through the rings. "Leave the ranch! Give up! After all these years!"

His wife made no reply for a moment. Lewiston climbed into the buckboard and gathered up the lines. "Well, here goes for the last try, Emmie," he said. "Good-by, girl. Maybe things will look better in town to-day."

"Maybe," she said gravely. She kissed her husband goodby and stood for some time looking after the buckboard traveling toward the town in a moving pillar of dust.

"I don't know," she murmured at length; "I don't know just how we're going to make out.”

When Lewiston reached town, he tied his horse to the iron railing in front of the Odd Fellows' Hall, and went across the street and up the stairway of a building of brick and granite and knocked -the most pretentious structure of the town at a door upon the first landing. The door was furnished with a pane of frosted glass, on which, in gold letters, was inscribed "Bridges & Co., Grain Dealers."

Bridges himself, a middle-aged man who wore a velvet skullcap and who was smoking a cigar, met the farmer at the counter and the two exchanged perfunctory greetings.

"Well," said Lewiston, tentatively, after a while.

"Well, Lewiston," said the other, "I can't take that wheat of yours at any better than sixty-two."

"Sixty-two!"

"It's the Chicago price that does it, Lewiston. Truslow is bearing the stuff for all he is worth. It's Truslow and the

bear clique that stick the knife into us. The price broke We've just got a wire." murmured Lewiston, looking vaguely "That — ruins me. I can't carry my

again this morning. "Good heavens," from side to side. grain any longer

with storage charges and and—

Bridges, I don't see just how I'm going to make out.

Sixtytwo cents a bushel! Why, man, it's cost me nearly a dollar a bushel to raise that wheat, and now Truslow

He turned away abruptly with a gesture of infinite discouragement.

He went down-stairs and, making his way to his buckboard, got in, and, with eyes vacant, the reins slipping and sliding in his limp, half-open hands, drove slowly back to the ranch. His wife had seen him coming, and met him as he drew up before the barn.

"Well?" she demanded.

"Emmie," he said as he got out of the buckboard, laying his arm across her shoulder, "Emmie, I guess we'll take up with Joe's offer. We'll go to Chicago. We're cleaned out!"

II. THE BREAD LINE

It was a district not far

The street was dark and deserted. from the Chicago River, given up largely to wholesale stores, and after nightfall was empty of all life. The echoes slept but lightly hereabouts, and the slightest footfall, the faintest noise, woke them upon the instant and sent them clamoring up and down the length of the pavement between the ironshuttered fronts. The only light came from the side door of a bakery, where at one o'clock in the morning loaves of bread were given away to any who might ask for them.

Every evening about nine o'clock the outcasts began to gather about the side door. The stragglers came in rapidly, and the line the "bread line," as it was called began to form. By midnight it was usually some hundred yards in length, stretching almost the entire length of the block.

Toward ten in the evening, his coat collar turned up against

the fine drizzle that filled the air, his hands in his pockets, his elbows gripping his sides, Sam Lewiston came up and silently took his place at the end of the line.

Unable to conduct his farm on a paying basis at the time when Truslow, the "Great Bear," had sent the price of grain down to sixty-two cents a bushel, Lewiston had turned over his entire property to his creditors, and, leaving Kansas for good, had abandoned farming, and had left his wife at his sister's boarding-house in Topeka with the understanding that she was to join him in Chicago as soon as he had found a steady job. Then he had come to Chicago and turned work

man.

His brother Joe conducted a small hat factory, and for a time he found there a meagre employment. But difficulties had occurred, times were bad, the hat factory was involved in debts, and in the end his brother had given up.

Thrown out of work, Lewiston drifted aimlessly about Chicago, from pillar to post, working a little, earning here a dollar, there a dime, but always sinking, sinking, till at last a park bench became his home and the "bread line" his chief source of food.

He stood now in the enfolding drizzle, stupefied with fatigue. Before and behind stretched the line. There was no talking. There was no sound. The street was empty. It was so still that the passing of a street-car in the adjoining street grated like prolonged rolling explosions. The drizzle descended incessantly. After a long time midnight struck.

There was something ominous in this line of dark figures, close-pressed, soundless; a crowd, yet absolutely still; a closepacked, silent file, waiting in the deserted, night-ridden street; waiting without a word, without a movement, under the night and under the slow-moving mists of rain. Few in the crowd were professional beggars. The most were workmen, long since out of work, forced into idleness by the long-continued "hard times," by ill-luck, by sickness. To them the “bread line" was a godsend. At least they would not starve.

Be