of going to the city that I need not know who my neighbors are. Material crowding of men has brought evils in its train against which the city must defend itself. To prevent vehicles from sticking in the mud of heavily traveled streets, the streets must be paved, and as further defenses we must now have city lighting, policing, sewerage, and water supply, all because there are now so many of us so near together.

The blessings of the village become curses with.further growth, unless'city' remedies are applied. The very crowding brings a thinning out at the centre. In the heart of the great modern cities nobody lives but janitors and caretakers of store and office buildings. While each of the twenty-odd square miles of Manhattan Island has more than a hundred thousand residents, the business centre, in Wards Two and Three near the southern tip of the island, has less than seven thousand to the mile. The great example of course is London, with its old 'City' steadily dwindling; but more than that, the central fifth of the whole County of London has fewer inhabitants with each decade, as shops and offices take the place of homes.

Country people live in isolated homes, village homes are neighborly, and the city defends its inmates from neighbors who may not be desired. The line cannot be sharply drawn between them; the best thing to use is the average from the facts of many large cities. We learn from that how people do live in large cities.

From studies of many large cities in

Europe as well as in America, it appears that a reasonable lower limit of density of population for a city is ten thousand people to a square mile. This is not far from the official average for American great cities.1 All areas continuously settled at the rate of over ten thousand to the mile are cities; all areas less densely settled, villages, until the houses come to be isolated, when we have reached the country. This throws Charlottenburg in with Berlin, Hoboken and Jersey City with New York, and makes Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea, and Brookline essential parts of Boston, with a total population this year, 1913, of nine hundred thousand people.

Most of our cities contain City part, Village part, and Country part. does Vienna, but most European cities have expanded beyond their limits and citified their suburbs. London has invaded several counties.

The land has been settled, population has been developed slowly in the country, as befits the sparse agricultural occupation of the land; in the cities, rapidly, at the demand and under the stimulus of country development. No exodus from the country has occurred except as the country, exuberant and life-giving, brings forth a population in excess of agricultural needs. This it is always doing, and with this surplus it creates the cities that supplement and crown the life of the land.

1 Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, September, 1909: Anthropography of Great Cities.' - THE AUTHOR.

THE idea was John's originally; but Henry annexed it so promptly that in a minute or two it seemed to have been his all the time. That was no unusual occurrence. John and Henry presented, in practical matters, the relation of a colony and a mother countrywith constant taxation of ideas and grudgingly allowed representation in results. It did seem in those days as if Henry had the making of a statesman in him, his sense of relations was so clear and practical.

This time John's notion concerned finance, an unheard-of thing in John. Henry was hypothetically the financier of our body, although, as our resources rarely passed out of his hands, that made little difference to the rest of us. All our pecuniary transactions seemed to take much the same form, a magnificent conception on Henry's part, his gracious permission to the rest of us to fill subordinate places in its execution, and then a gathering in the fruits by Henry himself. Not being entirely inexpressive, we sometimes demurred at this; but there always seemed to be a good masculine reason why this conclusion should be quite just and legal. John, with his dreamy head somewhere in the sky, did n't care much for money anyway, and I, being feminine, was quite unconvincing, and Mary was too young to command much attention. So the spending of our small common profits, as well as the laying of our united financial schemes, remained in Henry's hands.

the heads of the family, or some of the adult members of the household — all adults seemed to be loaded with money, often having whole dollars in their pockets at once- and our processes were rather industrial than commercial. Hence John's sudden proposal was fascinating enough from its very novelty. He suggested, in fact, that we should go out into the public mart and engage in trade. We all held our breath for a moment at the enterprise of the plan. And then Henry, recovering his, made the scheme his own in two sentences; and John immediately became a subordinate, a mere fetchand-carry. Mary and I waited to be assigned places in the plan of things.

The notion was so simple yet so adventurous in its way that it is a wonder none of us had ever thought of it before. Out in the orchard were ripe apples and grapes and some peaches, more of all than the household needed; at the end of our drive ran the county road, along which passed the hungry public. Could there be a more suggestive juxtaposition of supply and demand? Henry visualized it instantlythe road a public mart, the eager passer hungrily demanding, the immense profits certainly consequent upon trade. He was out in the world, a merchant, a financier, a capitalist. He expanded visibly before us visibly before us as we eyed him. Awhile he mused, then assumed active command of us all.

On Wednesday there would be a meeting at the little county-seat, the

purpose was negligible-politics, probably; we had not even thought of asking to be allowed to go. But we had gathered from talk at the table that many men would be there. The meeting would begin in the early afternoon; that meant that from ten o'clock on there would be a constant passing by our gate. Some of these travelers would come from the far west of the county, some from the scantily settled expanse to the northwest. They would all be hungry. Henry laid his plans.

Mary was sent to spread the scheme, in its most meagre outlines, before my father and mother. Mary's participation in an enterprise often ended with that. But somehow, in Mary's serious and honest telling, any exploit seemed to take on not only plausibility but positive merit. This time, however, my mother looked dubious, my father amused. Maldy lingered on a passing foot at the open door, and looked at Mary with the complacence which Mary alone won from her. She recovered from that, however, to frown at Henry, skulking in dignified indifference outside the open window, and to express unsolicited disapproval — Maldy's opinion often outran solicitation of the whole scheme.

'I want to make some money,' said Mary gently but persistently. Mary was guileless as the rising moon, but it was wise for her to say I instead of we. 'Huuf!' said Maldy, and went on. 'Oh, let them do it,' said my father in answer to my mother's look of reluctance. My father was in a hurry to be off somewhere. It was a truly venturous one who went to ask a favor when the authority was in a hurry. The decision was instantaneous, but one could never tell whether the necessity for haste would work for or against the petitioner. 'It won't do them any harm so long as people are going toward

back the children must come in. Do you understand?' My father raised his voice, and Henry's head now appeared at the window.

I heard that injunction regretfully, not because it curtailed the profits, but because it limited the experience. If men the kind of men who went by on the road were in any way different when they came back from a political meeting, I should like to see them. That mysterious thing called drunkenness, of which we read in temperance stories, along with its well-detailed symptoms, I had never had a chance to observe. Henry submitted with a less impersonal reluctance; he saw nickels slipping past him.

But a 'stand' at the roadside we were to have. Henry promptly issued orders certain duties for me, certain others for John, minor ones for Mary. On Monday the stand was to be built, on Tuesday the fruit gathered and our minds prepared, on Wednesday the great transaction would begin, about ten o'clock. Henry was so busy giving orders that the time seemed to fly. He came out several times to help me get the baskets of grapes, but he always remembered something else that must be superintended, and hurried off abruptly. The first time I heard the term captain of industry I knew instantly what it meant, remembering Henry.

As

Tuesday night everything was ready. Inside the screened porch was our stockin-trade, scores of apples and early peaches, baskets of grapes, a few of the ripest pears. A serious question had arisen while we gathered them. connoisseurs in fruit, within the limits of our own orchards, we knew to the last, finest degree, the palatability of every variety. There are people to whom an apple is an apple, and a peach, a peach. But we were none of that sort. We recognized delicate

gradations of toothsomeness, and balanced nicely the relative allurements of choice varieties. A man might as well call himself frankly Philistine and barbarian at once, as voluntarily eat a Ben Davis and call it good. As amateurs of apples we could hardly bear the thought of offering a customer any but what we knew to be the best. It was a betrayal of our own good taste. But, on the other hand, would it pay to sacrifice our cherished General Grants or our last, high-in-the-tree Benonis, when the cottony Sops of Wine or the flat saccharine Ramsdale's Reds would suit the undiscriminating public quite as well, and were bigger and rosier at that? Henry considered the matter and settled it from the point of view of commercialism rather than that of art. It would be an insult to give any one a Sops of Wine-we always had difficulty with that plural—but there would be no offense in selling them, if we could do it.

So our rosy baskets, which looked so enticing, really contained many of what we small epicures regarded as the discards of the orchards, refused by our finer taste. If these did not prove enticing enough - if our customers had better taste than we expected - Mary and I could hurry back and hastily gather some of the others, Henry said. 'Anyway,' he added, 'we're not going to try to sell to them when they come back.'

We sat in the dark, considering prospects. A vague expectation of unsatisfaction disturbed me, but I postponed formulating it.

'I wish we had some watermelons,' said Henry, raising his voice but the least degree.

Maldy was sitting, also in the dark, just inside the kitchen window, and we knew it. But Maldy said nothing.

After a pause crowded with suggestion, Henry pursued, with the manner

of one filling time and ears with pleasant conversation, 'Everybody likes watermelon this time of year.'

There was still no sound from within the kitchen, and conversation lapsed.

All the watermelons on the place belonged to Maldy; I don't know why, but this was the custom. My father said it was because she was the only one who could protect them adequately. Certain it was that no man or child interfered twice with Maldy's watermelons, even though they were the first to ripen and the finest to taste in the whole country. Maldy always made a show of being very stingy with them, and ended by being so generous that her own profits were scanty. Certainly these earliest ripe watermelons would be a great attraction on our stand. But Maldy said nothing.

Henry, by feeling, counted his change, the combined capital of all four of us. It was conveniently all in small pieces.

'I,' said Mary dreamily, 'am going to buy a gold bracelet with my money.' She ran imaginative fingers about her round little wrist. 'Aunt Ella will get it for me when she goes back to New York.'

'And,' I broke in enthusiastically, 'I'll get a new David Copperfield with mine.' David Copperfield had come to us already old, and its choicest sections had long since been read into annihilation.

'We're not going to divide up the money,' said Henry with simple authority. 'We're going to take it all and get a new gun with it.' Then to our silence he added, 'We need a new saddle because mine is getting too small. But I guess we'll get the gun.'

After a pause I spoke out. My spirit was Patrick Henry's, but my words were my own. I have forgotten them now, but at the time they seemed eloquent and should have been convincing. That they were not was due to the

limitations of the language, not to any lack of spirit behind them. But Henry's position was unchanged.

'Anyway,' he said, 'John and I are going to do all the selling. You will have to keep back in the grove when there is anybody there.'

I paused abruptly in my rush of argument and contumely. This was a fresh blow. I had already had visions of myself in the new and attractive rôle of sales-person, and had practiced little graces and urbanities among the .grape-vines, combining, as nearly as I could, my mother's gracious manner with her poorer visitors, and that of a shoe-clerk who had sometimes fitted me and whose ease I greatly admired. I had expected to add largely to our sales by my charm and who knew what further it might all lead to?

'Well, I guess not, Mr. Henry!' I burst out, with indignation which fettered expression.

'When there's nobody passing,' went on Henry, now fully committed to setting forth his policy, 'you can come out. And you can bring rags and keep the dust wiped off everything — and things like that. But it ain't the place for girls.'

I was meditating a sufficient answer for this when Mary spoke.

'You are a mean thing,' she said. She rose and said it again with greater emphasis, 'You 're a thing!'

mean

Vituperation was foreign to Mary's tongue, and her phrases were limited. She felt around on the dark floor for the prim elderly doll still dear to her eight-year-old heart, and took her departure. Just beyond the door she paused again and her serious little voice came back to us out of the darkness with less of indignation in it than of sober conviction. 'You're a mean thing!' she repeated once more.

I heard Maldy's chair scrape on the

kitchen floor and her solid step on the back-stairs as she followed Mary, to see her to bed. Old as we were, Maldy had no faith in our putting of ourselves to bed; and her vesper visit to us was as certain as my mother's. We could not help thinking, however, that there was a precautionary element in Maldy's final look at us which my mother's lacked.

While we continued to sit there, in an uncomfortable, unadjusted silence, I could hear the distant murmur of her voice in Mary's little room above, and I knew that she was comforting Mary. When Mary was in trouble she rarely said anything; but every one in the house-except the cause of her distress wanted to comfort her. I used to wonder how she accomplished it; there were times when I went without comforting.

The silence downstairs continued, unimpaired by conciliatory remark, until we were once more called from our musings to go to bed. In harassed moments life sometimes seemed to consist entirely of regretful retirings and reluctant arisings.

In the morning Mary seemed to melt away from the breakfast-table without any one's noting her departure. That was not surprising. When Mary was at outs with the world she simply disappeared-usually to my mother's room

- until either her mood or the situation was readjusted. My own policy was different. I was accustomed to remain active on the field of battle. It was not considered technically correct to call in a higher authority to arbitrate differences. This time my method was, I confess, inartistic, but it accomplished something. A dinner-pail full of strong brine, poised in unsteady hands over the finest baskets of grapes, brought Henry to a compromise. All the money we made above what the gun cost I could have. As I appeared in