Chapter XVI: Part II (1)

AN OUTLINE FOR THE ANALYSIS OF SPECIAL FEATURE ARTICLES

I. SOURCES OF MATERIAL

1. What appears to have suggested the subject to the writer?

2. How much of the article was based on his personal experience?

3. How much of it was based on his personal observations?

4. Was any of the material obtained from newspapers or periodicals?

5. What portions of the article were evidently obtained by interviews?

6. What reports, documents, technical periodicals, and books of
reference were used as sources in preparing the article?

7. Does the article suggest to you some sources from which you might
obtain material for your own articles?

II. INTEREST AND APPEAL

1. Is there any evidence that the article was timely when it was
published?

2. Is the article of general or of local interest?

3. Does it seem to be particularly well adapted to the readers of
the publication in which it was printed? Why?

4. What, for the average reader, is the source of interest in the
article?

5. Does it have more than one appeal?

6. Is the subject so presented that the average reader is led to
see its application to himself and to his own affairs?

7. Could an article on the same subject, or on a similar one, be
written for a newspaper in your section of the country?

8. What possible subjects does the article suggest to you?

III. PURPOSE

1. Did the writer aim to entertain, to inform, or to give practical
guidance?

2. Does the writer seem to have had a definitely formulated
purpose?

3. How would you state this apparent purpose in one sentence?

4. Is the purpose a worthy one?

5. Did the writer accomplish his purpose?

6. Does the article contain any material that seems unnecessary
to the accomplishment of the purpose?

IV. TYPE OF ARTICLE

1. To which type does this article conform?

2. Is there any other type better adapted to the subject and
material?

3. How far did the character of the subject determine the
methods of treatment?

4. What other methods might have been used to advantage in
presenting this subject?

5. Is the article predominantly narrative, descriptive, or expository?

6. To what extent are narration and description used for expository
purposes?

7. Are concrete examples and specific instances employed
effectively?

8. By what means are the narrative passages made interesting?

9. Do the descriptive parts of the article portray the impressions
vividly?

V. STRUCTURE

1. What main topics are taken up in the article?

2. Could any parts of the article be omitted without serious
loss?

3. Could the parts be rearranged with gain in clearness, interest,
or progress?

4. Does the article march on steadily from beginning to end?

5. Is the material so arranged that the average reader will
reach the conclusion that the writer intended to have him reach?

6. Is there variety in the methods of presentation?

7. Is the length of the article proportionate to the subject?

8. What type of beginning is used?

9. Is the type of beginning well adapted to the subject and the
material?

10. Would the beginning attract the attention and hold the interest
of the average reader?

11. Is the beginning an integral part of the article?

12. Is the length of the beginning proportionate to the length of
the whole article?

13. Is the beginning skillfully connected with the body of the article?

VI. STYLE

1. Is the article easy to read? Why?

2. Is the diction literary or colloquial, specific or general, original
or trite, connotative or denotative?

3. Are figures of speech used effectively?

4. Do the sentences yield their meaning easily when read rapidly?

5. Is there variety in sentence length and structure?

6. Are important ideas placed at the beginning of sentences?

7. Are the paragraphs long or short?

8. Are they well-organized units?

9. Do the paragraphs begin with important ideas?

10. Is there variety in paragraph beginnings?

11. Is the tone well suited to the subject?

12. Do the words, figures of speech, sentences, and paragraphs
in this article suggest to you possible means of improving
your own style?

VII. TITLES AND HEADLINES

1. Is the title attractive, accurate, concise, and concrete?

2. To what type does it conform?

3. What is the character of the sub-title, and what relation
does it bear to the title?

(_Boston Herald_)

TEACH CHILDREN LOVE OF ART THROUGH STORY-TELLING

"----And so," ended the story, "St. George slew the dragon."

A great sigh, long drawn and sibilant, which for the last five minutes had been swelling 57 little thoraxes, burst out and filled the space of the lecture hall at the Museum of Fine Arts.

"O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!" said 27 little girls.

"Aw-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w, gosh!" said 30 little boys. "Say, Mis' Cronan, there wasn't no real dragon, was they?" A shock-headed youngster pushed his way to the platform where Mrs. Mary C. Cronan, professional story teller, stood smiling and wistfully looked up at her. "They wasn't no really dragon, was they?"

"'Course they was a dragon! Whadd'ye think the man wanted to paint the picture for if there wasn't a dragon? Certn'y there was a dragon. I leave it to Mis' Cronan if there wasn't."

Steering a narrow course between fiction and truth, Mrs. Cronan told her class that she thought there certainly must have been a dragon or the picture wouldn't have been painted.

It was at one of the regular morning story hours at the Museum of Fine Arts, a department opened three years ago at the museum by Mrs. Cronan and Mrs. Laura Scales, a department which has become so popular that now hundreds of children a week are entertained, children from the public playgrounds and from the settlement houses.

On this particular day it was children from the Bickford street playground under the guidance of two teachers from the Lucretia Crocker School, Miss Roche and Miss Hayes, who had, in some mysterious manner, convoyed these 57 atoms to the museum by car without mishap and who apparently did not dread the necessity of getting them back again, although to the uninitiated it appeared a task beside which grasping a comet by the tail was a pleasant afternoon's amusement.

For the most part the story of St. George and the Dragon was a new thing to these children. They might stand for St. George, although his costume was a little out of the regular form at Jamaica Plain, but the Dragon was another thing.

"I don't believe it," insisted an 8-year-old. "I seen every animal in the Zoo in the park and I don't see any of them things." But the wistful little boy kept insisting that there must be such an animal or Mrs. Cronan wouldn't say so.

"That is the way they nearly always take it at first," said Mrs. Cronan. "Nearly all of these children are here for the first time. Later they will bring their fathers and mothers on Sunday and you might hear them explaining the pictures upstairs as if they were the docents of the museum.

"The object of the story hour is to familiarize the children with as many as possible of the pictures of the Museum and to get them into the way of coming here of themselves. When they go away they are given cards bearing a reproduction of the picture about which the story of the day has been told, and on these cards is always an invitation to them to bring their families to the Museum on Saturday and Sunday, when there is no entrance fee."

The idea of the story hour was broached several years ago and at first it was taken up as an experiment. Stereopticon slides were made of several of the more famous pictures in the Museum, and Mrs. Cronan, who was at the time achieving a well earned success at the Public Library, was asked to take charge of the story telling. The plan became a success at once.

Later Mrs. Scales was called in to take afternoon classes, and now more than 1000 children go to the Museum each week during July and August and hear stories told entertainingly that fix in their minds the best pictures of the world. Following the stories they are taken through the halls of the Museum and are given short talks on some art subject. One day it may be some interesting thing on Thibetan amulets, or on tapestries or on some picture, Stuart's Washington or Turner's Slave Ship, or a colorful canvas of Claude Monet.

It is hoped that the movement may result in greater familiarity with and love for the Museum, for it is intended by the officials that these children shall come to love the Museum and to care for the collection and not to think of it, as many do, as a cold, unresponsive building containing dark mysteries, or haughty officials, or an atmosphere of "highbrow" iciness.

"I believe," says Mrs. Cronan, "that our little talks are doing just this thing. And although some of them, of course, can't get the idea quite all at once, most of these children will have a soft spot hereafter for Donatello's St. George."

At least some of them were not forgetting it, for as they filed out the wistful little boy was still talking about it.

"Ya," he said to the scoffer, "you mightn't a seen him at the Zoo. That's all right, but you never went over to the 'quarium. Probably they got one over there. Gee! I wish I could see a dragon. What color are they?"

But the smallest boy of all, who had hold of Miss Hayes's hand and who had been an interested listener to all this, branched out mentally into other and further fields.

"Aw," said he, "I know a feller what's got a ginny pig wit' yeller spots on 'im and he--" And they all trailed out the door.

* * * * *

(_Christian Science Monitor_)

One illustration, a half-tone reproduction of a photograph showing the interior of the greenhouse with girls at work.

WHERE GIRLS LEARN TO WIELD SPADE AND HOE

To go to school in a potato patch; to say one's lessons to a farmer; to study in an orchard and do laboratory work in a greenhouse--this is the pleasant lot of the modern girl who goes to a school of horticulture instead of going to college, or perhaps after going to college.

If ever there was a vocation that seemed specially adapted to many women, gardening would at first glance be the one. From the time of

"Mistress Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?"

down to the busy city woman who to-day takes her recreation by digging in her flowerbeds, gardens have seemed a natural habitat for womankind, and garden activities have belonged to her by right.

In various parts of the country there have now been established schools where young women may learn the ways of trees and shrubs, vegetables and flowers, and may do experimental work among the growing things themselves. Some of these schools are merely adjuncts of the state agricultural colleges, with more or less limited courses of instruction; but, just out of Philadelphia, there is a school, to which women only are admitted, that is located on a real farm, and covers a wide range of outdoor study.

One begins to feel the homely charm of the place the moment instructions are given as to how to reach it.

"Out the old Lime-kiln road," you are told. And out the old Lime-kiln road you go, until you come to a farm which spells the perfection of care in every clump of trees and every row of vegetables. Some girls in broad-brimmed hats are working in the Strawberry bed--if you go in strawberry time--and farther on a group of women have gathered, with an overalled instructor, under an apple tree the needs of which are being studied.

Under some sedate shade trees, you are led to an old Pennsylvania stone farmhouse--the administration building, if you please. Beyond are the barns, poultry houses, nurseries and greenhouses, and a cottage which is used as a dormitory for the girls--as unlike the usual dormitory as the school is unlike the usual school. A bee colony has its own little white village near by.

Then the director, a trained woman landscape gardener, tells you all that this school of horticulture has accomplished since its founding five years ago.

"Women are naturally fitted for gardening, and for some years past there have been many calls for women to be teachers in school gardens, planners of private gardens, or landscape gardeners in institutions for women. Very few women, however, have had the practical training to enable them to fill such positions, and five years ago there was little opportunity for them to obtain such training. At that time a number of women in and about Philadelphia, who realized the need for thorough teaching in all the branches of horticulture, not merely in theory but in practice, organized this school. The course is planned to equip women with the practical knowledge that will enable them to manage private and commercial gardens, greenhouses or orchards. Some women wish to learn how to care for their own well-loved gardens; some young girls study with the idea of establishing their own greenhouses and raising flowers as a means of livelihood; still others want to go in for fruit farming, and even for poultry raising or bee culture.

"In other countries, schools of gardening for women are holding a recognized place in the educational world. In England, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Denmark and Russia, such institutions have long passed the experimental stage; graduates from their schools are managing large estates or holding responsible positions as directors of public or private gardens, as managers of commercial greenhouses, or as consulting horticulturists and lecturers. In this country there is a growing demand for supervisors of home and school gardens, for work on plantations and model farms, and for landscape gardeners. Such positions command large salaries, and the comparatively few women available for them are almost certain to attain success."

Already one of the graduates has issued a modest brown circular stating that she is equipped to supply ideas for gardens and personally to plant them; to expend limited sums of money to the best advantage for beauty and service; to take entire charge of gardens and orchards for the season and personally to supervise gardens during the owners' absence; to spray ornamental trees and shrubs, and prune them; and to care for indoor plants and window boxes.

"She is making a success of it, too. She has all she can do," comments one of the women directors, who is standing by.

A smiling strawberry student, who is passing, readily tells all that going to a garden school means.

"Each one of us has her own small plot of ground for which she is responsible. We have to plant it, care for it, and be marked on it. We all have special care of certain parts of the greenhouse, too, and each has a part of the nursery, the orchard and the vineyard. Even the work that is too heavy for us we have to study about, so that we can direct helpers when the time comes. We have to understand every detail of it all. We have to keep a daily record of our work. This is the way to learn how long it takes for different seeds to germinate, and thus we watch the development of the fruits and flowers and vegetables. You see, the attendance at the school is limited to a small number; so each one of us receives a great deal of individual attention and help.

"We learn simple carpentry, as part of the course, so that we shall be able to make window boxes, flats, cold frames and other articles that we need. We could even make a greenhouse, if we had to. We are taught the care and raising of poultry, we learn bee culture, and we have a course in landscape gardening. There is a course in canning and preserving, too, so that our fruits and berries can be disposed of in that way, if we should not be able to sell them outright, when we have the gardens of our own that we are all looking forward to."

In the cozy cottage that serves as a dormitory, there is a large classroom, where the lectures in botany, entomology, soils and horticultural chemistry are given. There is a staff of instructors, all from well-known universities, and a master farmer to impart the practical everyday process of managing fields and orchards. Special lectures are given frequently by experts in various subjects. In the cottage is a big, homelike living-room, where the girls read and sing and dance in the evening. Each girl takes care of her own bedroom.

The costumes worn by these garden students are durable, appropriate and most becoming. The school colors are the woodsy ones of brown and green, and the working garb is carried out in these colors. Brown khaki or corduroy skirts, eight inches from the ground, with two large pockets, are worn under soft green smocks smocked in brown. The sweaters are brown or green, and there is a soft hat for winter and a large shade hat for summer. Heavy working gloves and boots are provided, and a large apron with pockets goes with the outfit.

All in all, you feel sure, as you go back down the "old Lime-Kiln road," that the motto of the school will be fulfilled in the life of each of its students: "So enter that daily thou mayst become more thoughtful and more learned. So depart that daily thou mayst become more useful to thyself and to all mankind."

* * * * *

(_Boston Transcript_)

BOYS IN SEARCH OF JOBS

BY RAYMOND G. FULLER

One morning lately, if you had stood on Kneeland street in sight of the entrance of the State Free Employment Office, you would have seen a long line of boys--a hundred of them--waiting for the doors to open. They were of all sorts of racial extraction and of ages ranging through most of the teens. Some you would have called ragamuffins, street urchins, but some were too well washed, combed and laundered for such a designation. Some were eagerly waiting, some anxiously, some indifferently. Some wore sober faces; some were standing soldierly stiff; but others were bubbling over with the spirits of their age, gossiping, shouting, indulging in colt-play. When they came out, some hustled away to prospective employers and others loitered in the street. Disappointment was written all over some of them, from face to feet; on others the inscription was, "I don't care."

Two hundred boys applied for "jobs" at the employment office that day. Half the number were looking for summer positions. Others were of the vast army of boys who quit school for keeps at the eighth or ninth grade or thereabouts. Several weeks before school closed the office had more than enough boy "jobs" to go around. With the coming of vacation time the ratio was reversed. The boy applicants were a hundred or two hundred daily. For the two hundred on the day mentioned there were fifty places.

Says Mr. Deady, who has charge of the department for male minors: "Ranging from fourteen to nineteen years of age, of all nationalities and beliefs, fresh from the influence of questionable home environment, boisterous and brimful of animation, without ideas and thoughtless to a marked degree--this is the picture of the ordinary boy who is in search of employment. He is without a care and his only thought, if he has one, is to obtain as high a wage as possible. It is safe to say that of the thousands of boys who apply annually at the employment office, two-thirds are between sixteen and eighteen years of age. Before going further, we can safely say that twenty per cent of the youngest lads have left school only a few weeks before applying for work. Approximately sixty per cent have not completed a course in the elementary grammar schools."

The boy of foreign parentage seems to be more in earnest, more ambitious, than the American boy (not to quibble over the definition of the adjective "American"). Walter L. Sears, superintendent of the office in Kneeland street, tells this story:

An American youngster came in.

"Gotta job?" he asked.

"Yes, here is one"--referring to the card records--"in a printing office; four dollars a week."

"'Taint enough money. Got anything else?"

"Here's a place in a grocery store--six dollars a week."

"What time d'ye have to get to work in the morning?"

"Seven o'clock."

"Got anything else?"

"Here's something--errand boy--six a week, mornings at eight."

"Saturday afternoons off?"

"Nothing is said about it."

"W-ell-l, maybe I'll drop around and look at it."

American independence!

An Italian boy came in, looking for work. He was told of the printing office job.

"All right. I'll take it."

For what it is worth, it may be set down that a large proportion of the boy applicants carefully scrutinize the dollar sign when they talk wages. Moreover, they are not unacquainted with that phrase concocted by those higher up, "the high cost of living." The compulsion of the thing, or the appeal of the phrase--which?

The youthful unemployed, those who seek employment, would cast a good-sized vote in favor of "shoffer." A youngster comes to Mr. Sears. He wants to be a "shoffer."

"Why do you want to be a chauffeur?"

"I don't know."

"Haven't you any reasons at all?"

"No, sir."

"Isn't it because you have many times seen the man at the wheel rounding a corner in an automobile at a 2.40 clip and sailing down the boulevard at sixty miles an hour?"

The boy's eyes light up with the picture.

"Isn't that it?"

And the boy's eyes light up with discovery.

"Yes, I guess so."

"Well, have you ever seen the chauffeur at night, after being out all day with the car? Overalls on, sleeves rolled up, face streaming with perspiration? Repairing the mechanism, polishing the brass? Tired to death?"

"No, sir."

The boy applicants seldom have any clear idea of the ultimate prospects in any line of work they may have in mind--as to the salary limit for the most expert, or the opportunities for promotion and the securing of an independent position. Many of them have no preconceived idea even of what they want to do, to say nothing of what they ought to do.

Here is an instance.

"I want a position," says a boy.

"What kind of a position?"

"I don't know."

"Haven't you ever thought about it?"

"No."

"Haven't you ever talked it over at home or at school?"

"No."

"Would you like to be a machinist?"

"I don't know."

"Would you like to be a plumber?"

"I don't know."

Similar questions, with similar answers, continue. Finally:

"Would you like to be a doctor?"

"I don't know--is that a good position?"

Sometimes a boy is accompanied to the office by his father.

"My son is a natural-born electrician," the father boasts.

"What has he done to show that?"

"Why, he's wired the whole house from top to bottom."

It is found by further questions that the lad has installed a push-bell button at the front door and another at the back door. He had bought dry batteries, wire and buttons at a hardware store in a box containing full directions. It is nevertheless hard to convince the father that the boy may not be a natural-born electrician, after all.

In frequent cases the father has not considered the limitations and opportunities in the occupation which he chooses for his son.

Mr. Deady has this to say on the subject of the father's relation to the boy's "job": "The average boy while seeking employment in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is unaccompanied by either parent. Such a condition is deplorable. It not only shows a lack of interest in the boy's welfare on the part of the parents, but also places the youthful applicant in an unfair position. Oftentimes, owing to inexperience, a boy accepts a position without inquiring into the details and nature of the same. His main thought is the amount of the wage to be received. Consequently there is but one obvious result. The hours are excessive, the work is beyond the boy's strength or is hazardous, and finally the lad withdraws without notice. It is this general apathy on the part of the parents of a boy, combined with over-zealousness on the part of an ordinary employer to secure boy labor for a mere trifle, that accounts for the instability of juvenile labor."

The coming of vacation invariably brings a great influx of boys to the State employment office, some looking for summer work, others for permanent employment. Most of them show lack of intelligent constructive thought on the matter in hand. Few of them have had any counsel, or any valuable counsel from their parents or others. To Mr. Sears and his assistants--and they have become very proficient at it--is left the task of vocational guidance, within such limitations as those of time and equipment. What can be done to get the boy and his sponsors to thinking intelligently about the question of an occupation for the boy, with proper regard to their mutual fitness?

Superintendent Sears has some suggestions to offer. In his opinion the subject of occupational choice should be debated thoroughly in the public schools. He favors the introduction of some plan embodying this idea in the upper grades of the grammar school, under conditions that would give each boy an opportunity to talk, and that would encourage him to consult his parents and teachers. The debates might be held monthly, and preparation should be required. Experts or successful men in various occupations might be called in to address the pupils and furnish authoritative information. The questions debated should involve the advisability of learning a trade and the choice of a trade, and the same considerations with respect to the professions, the mercantile pursuits, and so on. The pupils should be allowed to vote on the merits of each question debated. By such a method, thinks Mr. Sears, the boys would gain the valuable training which debating gives, would devote considerable thought to the question of their future employment, would acquire much information, and would get their parents more interested in the matter than many of them are.

* * * * *

(_New York Evening Post_)

GIRLS AND A CAMP

NOW IT IS THAT MANY COVEYS OF STUDENTS ARE HEADED TOWARD LAKE AND MOUNTAIN--JUST HOW IT PAYS

With the sudden plunge into a muggy heat, more suggestive of July than of the rare June weather of poets, there has begun the exodus of summer camp folk, those men and women who add to the slender salary of the teaching profession the additional income made by running camps for boys and girls during the long vacation. They stretch, these camps, in rapidly extending area from Canada through Maine and northern New England, into the Adirondacks and the Alleghenies, and then across toward the Northwest and the Rockies. It is quite safe to assert that there is not a private school of importance that does not take under its protection and support at least one such institution, while large numbers of teachers either own camps or assist in their management as instructors.

One group, unmistakably the advance guard of a girls' camp, assembled at the Grand Central Station on Wednesday. There were two alert, dignified women, evidently the co-principals; a younger woman, who, at least so the tired suburban shopper decided, was probably the athletic instructor; two neat colored women, and a small girl of twelve, on tiptoe with excitement, talking volubly about the fun she would have when they got to the lake and when all the other girls arrived. Her excited chatter also revealed the fact that father and mother had just sailed for Europe, and, while she thought of them with regret, there was only pleasure in prospect as she started northward. There was much baggage to be attended to, and consultation over express and freight bills, with interesting references to tents, canoes, and tennis nets.

Success is an excellent testimonial, and there is no longer any need to point out the advantages of such camps for boys and girls. They fill a real place for the delicate, the lazy, or the backward, who must needs do extra work to keep up with their school grade, for those who otherwise would be condemned to hotel life, or for the children whose parents, because of circumstances, are compelled to spend the summer in cities. Even the most jealously anxious of mothers are among the converts to the movement. As one said the other day of her only son, "Yes, David will go to Mr. D.'s camp again this summer. It will be his third year. I thought the first time that I simply could not part with him. I pictured him drowned or ill from poor food or severe colds. Indeed, there wasn't a single terror I didn't imagine. But he enjoyed it so, and came home so well and happy, that I've never worried since."

From the child's point of view, summer camps are a blessing, and, as such, they have come to stay. But there are those who doubt their benefits, even the financial ones, for the teachers, who mortgage their vacations to conduct them. Unfortunately, as every one knows, almost every teacher has to mortgage her spare time in one way or another in order to make a more than bare living. Call the roll of those whom you may know, and you will be surprised--no, scarcely surprised; merely interested--to find that nine-tenths of them do some additional work. It may be extra tutoring, hack writing, translating, the editing of school texts or the writing of text-books, taking agencies for this, that, or the other commodity, conducting travel parties, lecturing at educational institutes, running women's clubs, or organizing nature classes. Some outside vocation is necessary if the teacher is to enjoy the advantages her training makes almost imperative, or the comforts her tired, nervous organism demands. So, as one philosopher was heard to remark, it is perhaps best to run a summer camp, since in the doing of it there is at least the advantage of being in the open and of leading a wholesomely sane existence.

Two good friends and fellow-teachers who have conducted a camp in northern Maine for the last five years have been extremely frank in setting forth their experiences for the benefit of those who are standing on the brink of a similar venture. And their story is worth while, because from every point of view they have been successful. Any pessimistic touches in their narrative cannot be laid at the door of failure. Indeed, in their first year they cleared expenses, and that is rare; and their clientèle has steadily increased until now they have a camp of forty or more girls, at the very topmost of camp prices. Again, as there were two of them and they are both versatile, they have needed little assistance; the mother of one has been house mother and general camp counsellor. With all this as optimistic preamble, let us hear their story.

Perhaps their first doubt arises with regard to the wear and tear of camp life upon those most directly responsible for its conduct. "For years we even refused to consider it," said the senior partner, "although urged by friends and would-be patrons, because we realized the unwisdom of working the year around and living continuously with school girls--but the inevitable happened. Our income did not keep pace with our expenses, and it was start a camp or do something less agreeable. Just at the psychological moment one of our insistent friends found the right spot, we concluded negotiations, and, behold, we are camp proprietors, not altogether sure, in our most uncompromisingly frank moments, that we have done the best thing."

That a girls' camp is a far more difficult proposition than one for boys is evident on the face of it. Mother may shed tears over parting with Johnny, but, after all, he's a boy, and sooner or later must depend upon himself. But Sister Sue is another matter. Can she trust any one else to watch over her in the matter of flannels and dry stockings? Do these well-meaning but spinster teachers know the symptoms of tonsilitis, the first signs of a bilious attack, or the peculiarities of a spoiled girl's diet? And will not Sue lose, possibly, some of the gentle manners and dainty ways inculcated at home, by close contact with divers other ways and manners? She is inclined to be skeptical, is mother. "And so," acknowledged the senior partner, "the first summer we were deluged by visits long and short from anxious ladies who could not believe on hearsay evidence that we knew how to care for their delicate daughters. They not only came, but they stayed, and as the nearest hotel was distant many devious miles of mountain road, we were forced to put them up; finally the maids had to sleep in the old barn, and we were camping on cots in the hall of the farmhouse which is our headquarters. Naturally we had to be polite, for we were under the necessity of making a good impression that first year, but it was most distracting, for while they stayed they were unconsciously but selfishly demanding a little more than a fair share of time and attention for their daughters."

And, indeed, all this maternal anxiety is not entirely misplaced. Sue is a good deal harder to take care of than Johnny. She needs a few more comforts, although camp life aims at eliminating all but the essentials of simple living. Her clothes, even at a minimum, are more elaborate, which increases the difficulty of laundering, always a problem in camping. She is infinitely more dependent upon her elders for direction in the veriest A B C's of daily existence. "Even the matter of tying a hair-ribbon or cleaning a pair of white canvas shoes is a mountain to a good many of my girls," said the successful camp counsellor.

Homesickness is "a malady most incident to maids." Boys may suffer from it, but they suffer alone. If tears are shed they are shed in secret, lest the other fellows find it out. Except in the case of the very little chaps, the masters are not disturbed. But girls have no such reserves; and the teachers in charge of twenty-five strange girls, many in the throes of this really distressing ailment, are not to be envied. "Frankly speaking," went on the confession, "there isn't a moment of the day when we can dismiss them from our thoughts. Are they swimming in charge of the director of athletics, a most capable girl, one of us must be there, too, because, should anything happen, we, and not she, are directly responsible. When the lesson hour is on, we not only teach, but must see that each girl's work is adapted to her needs, as they come from a dozen different schools. There are disputes to settle, plans for outings and entertainments to be made, games to direct, letters to the home folks to be superintended, or half the girls would never write at all, to say nothing of the marketing and housekeeping, and our own business correspondence, that has to be tucked into the siesta hour after luncheon. Indeed, in the nine weeks of camp last summer I never once had an hour that I could call my very own."

"And that is only the day's anxiety," sighed her colleague reflectively. "My specialty is prowling about at night to see that everybody is properly covered. Not a girl among them would have sense enough to get up and close windows in case of rain, so I sleep with one ear pricked for the first patter on the roof. Occasionally there are two or three who walk in their sleep, and I'm on pins and needles lest harm come to them, so I make my rounds to see that they're safe. Oh, it is a peacefully placid existence, I assure you, having charge of forty darling daughters. Some of them have done nothing for themselves in their entire lives, and what a splendid place camp is for such girls. But while they're learning we must be looking out for their sins of omission, such, for instance, as throwing a soaking wet bathing suit upon a bed instead of hanging it upon the line."

These are some of the few worries that attach to the care of sensitive and delicately brought up girls that the boys' camp never knows. But if the financial return is adequate there will naturally be some compensation for all these pinpricks. Here again the Senior Partner is inclined to hem and haw. "Given a popular head of camp," says she, "who has been fortunate enough to secure a desirable site and a paying clientèle, and she will certainly not lose money. Her summer will be paid for. However, that is not enough to reward her for the additional work and worry. Camp work does not confine itself to the nine weeks of residence. There are the hours and days spent in planning and purchasing equipment, the getting out of circulars, the correspondence entailed and the subsequent keeping in touch with patrons."

Her own venture has so far paid its own way, and after the first year has left a neat margin of profit. But this profit, because of expansion, has immediately been invested in new equipment. This year, for example, there has been erected a bungalow for general living purposes. A dozen new tents and four canoes were bought, and two dirt tennis courts made. Then each year there must be a general replenishing of dishes, table and bed linen, athletic goods, and furniture. The garden has been so enlarged that the semi-occasional man-of-all-work has been replaced by a permanent gardener.

Naturally, such extension does mean ultimate profit, and, given a few more years of continued prosperity, the summer will yield a goodly additional income. But the teacher who undertakes a camp with the idea that such money is easily made, is mistaken. One successful woman has cleared large sums, so large, indeed, that she has about decided to sever her direct connection with the private school where she has taught for years, and trust to her camp for a living. She has been so fortunate, it is but fair to explain, because her camp is upon a government reserve tract in Canada, and she has had to make no large investment in land; nor does she pay taxes. Desirable locations are harder to find nowadays and much more expensive to purchase. A fortunate pioneer in the movement bought seven acres, with five hundred feet of lake frontage, for three hundred dollars six years ago. That same land is worth ten times as much to-day.

And the kind of woman who should attempt the summer camp for girls as a means of additional income? First of all, the one who really loves outdoor life, who can find in woods and water compensation for the wear and tear of summering with schoolgirls. Again, she who can minimize the petty worries of existence to the vanishing point. And, last of all, she who has business acumen. For what does it profit a tired teacher if she fill her camp list and have no margin of profit for her weeks of hard labor?

* * * * *

_(Saturday Evening Post)_

Two half-tone reproductions of wash-drawings by a staff artist.

YOUR PORTER

BY EDWARD HUNGERFORD

He stands there at the door of his car, dusky, grinning, immaculate--awaiting your pleasure. He steps forward as you near him and, with a quick, intuitive movement born of long experience and careful training, inquires:

"What space you got, guv'nor?"

"Lower five," you reply. "Are you full-up, George?"

"Jus' toler'bul, guv'nor."

He has your grips, is already slipping down the aisle toward section five. And, after he has stowed the big one under the facing bench and placed the smaller one by your side, he asks again:

"Shake out a pillow for you, guv'nor?"

That "guv'nor," though not a part of his official training, is a part of his unofficial--his subtlety, if you please. Another passenger might be the "kunnel"; still another, the "jedge." But there can be no other guv'nor save you on this car and trip. And George, of the Pullmans, is going to watch over you this night as a mother hen might watch over her solitary chick. The car is well filled and he is going to have a hard night of it; but he is going to take good care of you. He tells you so; and, before you are off the car, you are going to have good reason to believe it.

Before we consider the sable-skinned George of to-day, give a passing thought to the Pullman itself. The first George of the Pullmans--George M. Pullman--was a shrewd-headed carpenter who migrated from a western New York village out into Illinois more than half a century ago and gave birth to the idea of railroad luxury at half a cent a mile. There had been sleeping cars before Pullman built the Pioneer, as he called his maiden effort. There was a night car, equipped with rough bunks for the comfort of passengers, on the Cumberland Valley Railroad along about 1840.

Other early railroads had made similar experiments, but they were all makeshifts and crude. Pullman set out to build a sleeping car that would combine a degree of comfort with a degree of luxury. The Pioneer, viewed in the eyes of 1864, was really a luxurious car. It was as wide as the sleeping car of to-day and nearly as high; in fact, so high and so wide was it that there were no railroads on which it might run, and when Pullman pleaded with the old-time railroad officers to widen the clearances, so as to permit the Pioneer to run over their lines, they laughed at him.

"It is ridiculous, Mr. Pullman," they told him smilingly in refusal. "People are never going to pay their good money to ride in any such fancy contraption as that car of yours."

Then suddenly they ceased smiling. All America ceased smiling. Morse's telegraph was sobering an exultant land by telling how its great magistrate lay dead within the White House, at Washington. And men were demanding a funeral car, dignified and handsome enough to carry the body of Abraham Lincoln from Washington to Springfield. Suddenly somebody thought of the Pioneer, which rested, a virtual prisoner, in a railroad yard not far from Chicago.

The Pioneer was quickly released. There was no hesitation now about making clearances for her. Almost in the passing of a night, station platforms and other obstructions were being cut away, and the first of all the Pullman cars made a triumphant though melancholy journey to New York, to Washington, and back again to Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, in the hour of death--fifty years ago this blossoming spring of 1915--had given birth to the Pullman idea. The other day, while one of the brisk Federal commissions down at Washington was extending consideration to the Pullman porter and his wage, it called to the witness stand the executive head of the Pullman Company. And the man who answered the call was Robert T. Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln.

When Pullman built the Pioneer he designated it A, little dreaming that eventually he might build enough cars to exhaust the letters of the alphabet. To-day the Pullman Company has more than six thousand cars in constant use. It operates the entire sleeping-car service and by far the larger part of the parlor-car service on all but half a dozen of the railroads of the United States and Canada, with a goodly sprinkling of routes south into Mexico. On an average night sixty thousand persons--a community equal in size to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, or South Bend, Indiana--sleep within its cars.

And one of the chief excuses for its existence is the flexibility of its service. A railroad in the South, with a large passenger traffic in the winter, or a railroad in the North, with conditions reversed and travel running at high tide throughout the hot summer months, could hardly afford to place the investment in sleeping and parlor cars to meet its high-tide needs, and have those cars grow rusty throughout the long, dull months. The Pullman Company, by moving its extra cars backward and forward over the face of the land in regiments and in battalions, keeps them all earning money. It meets unusual traffic demands with all the resources of its great fleet of traveling hotels.

Last summer, when the Knights Templars held their convention in Denver, it sent four hundred and fifty extra cars out to the capital of Colorado. And this year it is bending its resources toward finding sufficient cars to meet the demands for the long overland trek to the expositions on the Pacific Coast.

The transition from the Pioneer to the steel sleeping car of today was not accomplished in a single step. A man does not have to be so very old or so very much traveled to recall the day when the Pullman was called a palace ear and did its enterprising best to justify that title. It was almost an apotheosis of architectural bad taste. Disfigured by all manner of moldings, cornices, grilles and dinky plush curtains--head-bumping, dust-catching, useless--it was a decorative orgy, as well as one of the very foundations of the newspaper school of humor.

Suddenly the Pullman Company awoke to the absurdity of it all. More than ten years ago it came to the decision that architecture was all right in its way, but that it was not a fundamental part of car building. It separated the two. It began to throw out the grilles and the other knickknacks, even before it had committed itself definitely to the use of the steel car.

Recently it has done much more. It has banished all but the very simplest of the moldings, and all the hangings save those that are absolutely necessary to the operation of the car. It has studied and it has experimented until it has produced in the sleeping car of to-day what is probably the most efficient railroad vehicle in the world. Our foreign cousins scoff at it and call it immodest; but we may reserve our own opinion as to the relative modesty of some of their institutions.

* * * * *

This, however, is not the story of the Pullman car. It is the story of that ebony autocrat who presides so genially and yet so firmly over it. It is the story of George the porter--the six thousand Georges standing to-night to greet you and the other traveling folk at the doors of the waiting cars. And George is worthy of a passing thought. He was born in the day when the negro servant was the pride of America--when the black man stood at your elbow in the dining rooms of the greatest of our hotels; when a colored butler was the joy of the finest of the homes along Fifth Avenue or round Rittenhouse Square. Transplanted, he quickly became an American institution. And there is many a man who avers that never elsewhere has there been such a servant as a good negro servant.

Fashions change, and in the transplanting of other social ideas the black man has been shoved aside. It is only in the Pullman service that he retains his old-time pride and prestige. That company to-day might almost be fairly called his salvation, despite the vexing questions of the wages and tips of the sleeping-car porters that have recently come to the fore. Yet it is almost equally true that the black man has been the salvation of the sleeping-car service. Experiments have been made in using others. One or two of the Canadian roads, which operate their own sleeping cars, have placed white men as porters; down in the Southwest the inevitable Mexicano has been placed in the familiar blue uniform. None of them has been satisfactory; and, indeed, it is not every negro who is capable of taking charge of a sleeping car.

The Pullman Company passes by the West Indians--the type so familiar to every man who has ridden many times in the elevators of the apartment houses of upper New York. It prefers to recruit its porters from certain of the states of the Old South--Georgia and the Carolinas. It almost limits its choice to certain counties within those states. It shows a decided preference for the sons of its employees; in fact, it might almost be said that to-day there are black boys growing up down there in the cotton country who have come into the world with the hope and expectation of being made Pullman car porters. The company that operates those cars prefers to discriminate--and it does discriminate.

That is its first step toward service--the careful selection of the human factor. The next step lies in the proper training of that factor; and as soon as a young man enters the service of the Pullmans he goes to school--in some one of the large railroad centers that act as hubs for that system. Sometimes the school is held in one of the division offices, but more often it goes forward in the familiar aisle of a sleeping car, sidetracked for the purpose.

Its curriculum is unusual but it is valuable. One moment it considers the best methods to "swat the fly"--to drive him from the vehicle in which he is an unwelcome passenger; the next moment the class is being shown the proper handling of the linen closet, the proper methods of folding and putting away clean linen and blankets, the correct way of stacking in the laundry bags the dirty and discarded bedding. The porter is taught that a sheet once unfolded cannot be used again. Though it may be really spotless, yet technically it is dirty; and it must make a round trip to the laundry before it can reenter the service.

All these things are taught the sophomore porters by a wrinkled veteran of the service; and they are minutely prescribed in the voluminous rule book issued by the Pullman Company, which believes that the first foundation of service is discipline. So the school and the rule book do not hesitate at details. They teach the immature porter not merely the routine of making up and taking down beds, and the proper maintenance of the car, but they go into such finer things as the calling of a passenger, for instance. Noise is tabooed, and so even a soft knocking on the top of the berth is forbidden. The porter must gently shake the curtains or the bedding from without.

When the would-be porter is through in this schoolroom his education goes forward out on the line. Under the direction of one of the grizzled autocrats he first comes in contact with actual patrons--comes to know their personalities and their peculiarities. Also, he comes to know the full meaning of that overused and abused word--service. After all, here is the full measure of the job. He is a servant. He must realize that. And as a servant he must perfect himself. He must rise to the countless opportunities that will come to him each night he is on the run. He must do better--he must anticipate them.

Take such a man as Eugene Roundtree, who has been running a smoking car on one of the limited trains between New York and Boston for two decades--save for that brief transcendent hour when Charles S. Mellen saw himself destined to become transportation overlord of New England and appropriated Roundtree for a personal servant and porter of his private car. Roundtree is a negro of the very finest type. He is a man who commands respect and dignity--and receives it. And Roundtree, as porter of the Pullman smoker on the Merchants' Limited, has learned to anticipate.

He knows at least five hundred of the big bankers and business men of both New York and Boston--though he knows the Boston crowd best. He knows the men who belong to the Somerset and the Algonquin Clubs--the men who are Boston enough to pronounce Peabody "Pebbuddy." And they know him. Some of them have a habit of dropping in at the New Haven ticket offices and demanding: "Is Eugene running up on the Merchants' to-night?"

"It isn't just knowing them and being able to call them by their names," he will tell you if you can catch him in one of his rarely idle moments. "I've got to remember what they smoke and what they drink. When Mr. Blank tells me he wants a cigar it's my job to remember what he smokes and to put it before him. I don't ask him what he wants. I anticipate."

And by anticipating Roundtree approaches a sort of _n_th degree of service and receives one of the "fattest" of all the Pullman runs.

George Sylvester is another man of the Roundtree type--only his run trends to the west from New York instead of to the east, which means that he has a somewhat different type of patron with which to deal.