habits. The still for the confection of "corn" is outlawed and destroyed whenever found, but the ciderpress is left in peace. Both beverages are produced in great quantities in Harford County, and I assert as a physician with thirty years' experience that there is little choice between them as agencies of drunkenness. Quantity for quantity, the distillate, of course, packs a wickeder punch; but it is as easy to procure and to imbibe a quart of cider as a pint of corn, and I have frequently encountered cider a quart of which would do as much execution as a pint of any corn liquor that ever dripped out of a worm. ONE NE day I was driving along a country road with a professional colleague. We approached a mill, and my friend suggested that we pay the miller a call, explaining that he usually had some good cider. So we went in and I was introduced to a lean, solemn individual with a long, serious horse face. The doctor explained our visit by saying that he had told me he thought we might get a drink of cider. "Well, yes," said the miller, after a long, anxious wait, "I've got some cider. I made it yesterday." Long pause. Then, "and I've got some a little bit older." Another long pause. "And I've got some that's still older." Pause. And some that's a great deal older! Now, which would you like to try?" I said that for my part, I thought I'd prefer the cider a great deal older, my friend the other doctor felt the same way, and so the miller broached a keg that had been sealed up for a whole year; and I will state here and now that it was a noble drink! 66 One very serious consequence of the of the present régime, of course, is the breaking down of respect for law in general on the part of the young and the unthinking, and the loosening in particular of regard for property rights, in other words, for common honesty. It is certainly not safe or wise to allow valuable property to be stolen with impunity because by an arbitrary law that form of property is outlawed. NE evening a large truck full of bootleg whiskey broke down on the road in Harford County. The two men in charge asked permission of a farmer to store their truck in his barn. It took them all the next day to make repairs to the truck, which had to spend another night in the barn. At midnight, while the two tired custodians slept, the farmer, who had smelt a rat, sneaked out, got the truck open and stole several cases of whiskey which he hid in the hay mow. Bright and early next morning the unsuspecting truckmen, having paid the farmer well for his hospitality, went on their way. It happened that the farmer's wife had the misfortune that evening to fall and break her leg, and her husband had to take her to Baltimore to a hospital. He was afraid of leaving his loot where it lay in the hay mow, so he confided in his closest friend, another farmer, asking him to remove the whiskey that night to a safer place. The friend did so! He removed it to his own house and hid it safely, and defied the man who first stole it to try to get it back! He told him that he kept a loaded gun by his bed, that he was a light sleeper and that a trespasser would be in danger of his life! The second thief finally watered and sold the whiskey, clearing several hundred dollars by his treach FIRST story had to do with whis M'key prescriptions. To a self respecting physician who honors his profession, this aspect of Prohibition is the hardest to endure with patience. The insolence that presumes to limit my right to prescribe what in my judgment my patient needs, I can never forgive. To dictate to a doctor who is responsible for a human life just how much alcohol he may be permitted to exhibit, to tell him that he may not give more than a pint in ten days to any one patient under any circumstances, because, forsooth, the doctor or his patient might divert a larger quantity to beverage purposes this is grossly to insult the medical profession! And were the limit respected, many cases of pneumonia, typhoid and septicæmia that are saved by the liberal use of whiskey would be sacrificed. Pwill, of course, ROHIBITIONISTS who read this article of course, place me in one of two categories. They will know that either (a) I am hired by the Liquor Interests, or (b) I am a slave to the appetite for alcohol. Merely for the sake of the record, for Prohibition— - I assert (a) that I am not hired by the Liquor Interests, and (b) while I am not a total abstainer, I am one of the most abstemious men I know. It is no credit to me; I simply have little desire for alcohol, and if I never tasted it again, it would not matter ists, of course, will not believe me, to me. I am totally opposed to Prohibition, because I try to be a patriotic American and a Christian. Prohibition is equally abhorrent to the genius of this free nation and to Christianity. I Tin Can Paradise BY DON KNOWLTON Who does not recall boyhood adventures like these in that Is your city gamin who finds "books in the running brooks". Your street urchin may not know the names of flowers, but he picks them and takes them home. He may stone birds, but he is curious as to their varieties and their habits. He ruins trees and despoils shrubs, but not so much in the spirit of destruction as in that of experimentation. He pokes his nose into every growing thing, to see what will happen. How deep is this muckhole? Can you whittle this branch easily? What sort of flowers are these? What kind of a bug is this? Do spiders really bite? Will this ice break through? So city boys of each generation discover nature anew, and forthwith pursue the thrills of exploration. Those writers who, in the easy comfort of their steam heated apartments, apostrophize the barefoot boy on the dear old farm, should be sentenced to be such a boy for a period of the stables, weeded the garden, turned the churn, helped his mother with the washing, picked the beans and watered the horses, his leisure, if any, is spent more in wishing he were a city boy and in dreaming about the city, than in wiggling his toes in the traditional mud or watching the dear little butterfly. What time the farm boy does have for himself, he must perforce spend within an environment as familiar to him as is your own living room to you. He knows the trees, the flowers, the brook and the pasture, because they are a part of the family workshop. He accepts the glorious out-of-doors as casually as your boy accepts electric lights. His vegetable world is divided into crops and weeds, his animal world into domestic, game and incidental. Beauty, to him, is signified by a movie sign or an asphalt pavement. IT is the city lad who is your one year. They would learn that the N true disciple of Thoreau. He farm boy has less leisure than any other type of boy under the sun. They would find, too, that after he has chopped the wood, fed the chickens, the pigs and the calves, cleaned out makes a Walden Pond of a puddle, and a Mount Katahdin of a sandbank. His wilderness is that strange bad land of broken bottles and goldenrod, the city dump. When our town is small, we ignore our ravines. As it grows, we avoid them; the builders of the better residences seek districts where the land is politely level. But hovels spread to their edges, overhang their slopes. Soon the city flows around and about them. Anon a railway utilizes their easy grades, and factories and mills spring up on their erstwhile marshy bottoms. UT upon their hillsides, and within BUT B corners, nature patheir corners, nature remains patiently firm. Here she digs into the trenches, and makes her last dogged stand against that peculiar phenomenon which we label civic progress. And in the sector between the tenements and the sycamores, between the sidewalk and the swamp, we find a No Man's Land. Nature loses. Inch by inch, yard by yard, the dumps close in upon the valleys, the streams are confined within concrete tubes. At last the washboiler, and look down through the smoke. A narrow ravine, extending to our right, opens below us upon a river valley. At our feet is a slide of cinders, like a talus slope beneath a canyon cliff. Beyond, all is light green, to the railroad track. Further, lies a gray waste, out of which rise scraggly skeletons of trees; it is cold slag. Smell the sulphur! There is the furnace, away off yonder -see, where the dull red glow flares angrily, even at midday? Smoke, orange, blue, and gray, twists above it. Stacks and cupolas, their bases invisible, float in a sea of grimy mist. If you will put your hand upon the washboiler, you will find, beside dirt and rust and soot, fine glass-like particles that scratch. They settle from the steel mill smoke. That other smell that is the garbage disposal plant. Up the ravine, beneath the perpetual hood of smoke, lies foliage of a darker green. Woods! THE "flats", across the railroad ravines are completely filled, and I tracks (where only the big boys go), houses and shops rise where once waved the tops of the cottonwoods. But nature never surrenders. She merely retreats, and the perpetual battle goes on and on. The ashmen lay down their barrage, and fling their tin cans into the trenches; nature strangles the cans with vines and hides the ashes beneath willows. An avalanche of gravel buries the willows and the vines; dock and yarrow and ragweed spring into the breach, and the sunflower waves a brave banner. But a few feet have been lost. Nature is gallant, but the ashman conquers. Meanwhile small boys colonize the dump, as if they were a little people native to its terrain. Stand, with me, upon a broken there is a bottom land called the "bluebells". It is beyond the blast furnace. There is a fence around it, and a man with a club guards the fence. To get inside, two of you start through the fence hole next to the river. When the man with the club chases you, the rest of the "gang" run in through the fence hole by the railroad signal tower. Then the man chases them. They hide in the slag heaps, or in the buckeye trees. Then the two "teasers" can sneak in. You all meet down next to the river's edge, out of sight of the furnace, around the bend. When the man with the club gives up the chase and goes back to guard the fence, you can pick flowers. There are groves of buckeye trees, their light green leaves fully unfolded, though the other trees are yet in bud. And bluebells! Wild hyacinths, some call them. Broad lush leaves, and clusters of bell shaped, purple and lavender flowers. Addertongue leaves everywhere, and now and then a blossom-white! The ones you sometimes find on the hillsides, up the gully, are yellow. And the purple violets! You could pick all day. But every blossom is flecked with white specks. The blast furnace does that. Pull up that bunch of grass you didn't know they were wild onions, did you? Leeks, they call them. Wash them off in the river and eat them they're good! The buckeyes and the bluebells, the addertongues and the elderberries, are bounded by a line as definite as a sea shore. Across this line, all is gray and hard. It is slag. It slopes from the spur track of the railroad down toward the "bluebells". Every year it grows wider. Soon the "bluebells" will be gone. The cold slag still shows the tortuous twistings of its slow flow. There are bubbles and queer glass-like slivers. In some places the surface is cracked into thousands of little squares. It is still hot, over there by that dead elm tree. little flames, of all colors, play upon it. See the "heat" in the air! The molten stuff flows on, to the edge of the cold slag, on over the edge, upon the violets, around the trunks of the buckeye trees. They snap and steam and burst into flame. That is what volcanoes do. The flow stops, hardens, glows glows turns gray, while you watch. Tomorrow it will be hard enough to walk upon, but you must run to keep from burning your shoes. THAT's new on the dump today? WHAT'S Old daffodil bulbs from the greenhouse greenhouse take them home and plant them, they'll come up next year. No, let's save them for a fight. They squash on a fellow's head. Those shelllike imprints on that crushed stone are fossils; a man who knows told me. Come on, jump on these bed springs! Here's a barrel - how far can you walk on a barrel? We'll take it up to the sidewalk. No, let's see how far down the hill it will roll. Bet I can smash a bottle on that rock before you can. An inner tube- slingshots! Here's a busted umbrella. Save the ribs, they're swell to shoot paper wads with. Hey, come back with that old tire pump! We can squirt water with it. Some boys scavenge to destroy still further all that they find; some, merely because of normal curiosity; but certain youngsters there are who haunt the dumps because of a perverse thriftiness, and gain a mean joy at getting something for nothing. They collect the old iron, and tote it home to sell to the rag man; they gather broken dolls, "busted" toys, planks, bottles, a vast assortment of junk, which they guard jealously, and over which they gloat with a peculiar pride. The fathers of these boys count the |