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THE BOY I HIRED IN MEXICO.

and hush for a moment the joyous festivities. And then, in the twinkling of an eye, what a transformation into this scene that I look upon!

At the far end of the corridor stands the withered Loreto Samano, dead but thirty years, a former scribe and clerk of good repute in this mining center. Ranged against the wall, these two rows stretch away from his either hand. Shrunken shanks and shriveled arms, teeth that protrude and eyes that glare, and lips that never part in laughter-such is the ghoulish, gruesome spectacle. Half-stifled, I brush past the Mexican with the grunts, and breathe again the clear, sweet air of the mountain tops.

Enough of bones and mummies for me! I descend the embowered hillside in gigantic leaps like a billy-goat on a Flying Dutchman errand, and seeking my hotel, I unpack my trunk in the record-breaking time of eleven minutes by the town pump. "What's up?" you ask in wonder. Ah, but that's a secret, my secret, if you please. Yet I shall share it with you, and with you alone. Listen. She lives in the pink-colored house with the rare bougainvillea vine on the west side. It is but two blocks from the Calle Puente del Rastro, which, as you well know, is hard by the Plaza de la Union. She is passionately fond of azaleas and oleanders. So am I, most passionately. She can use her tiny fan to better advantage than any wire

A Mexican belle.

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less telegraph system that Marconi ever dreamed about. I have engaged my hotel rooms for two months, and have hired Manuel as a messengerboy and valet de correspondence.

If I cannot transform him from a peach consumer to a peripatetic Cupid, who can?

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What Next in Tripoli?

By Warwick James Price

F

ROM OUT the dust and smoke that has only just begun to settle down after the international imbroglio in North Africa, a new fact is beginning to appear. The Giolitti ministry has awakened to a realization that the agreement with Constantinople has not written finis to the medieval story of their Tripolitan adventure. Else why such quantities of railway material now being put ashore along the Gulf of Sidra? Obviously, Rome designs to throw a road back into the desert stretches, quite as Kitchener constructed his line of advance upon Khartoum in 1897..

The best informed students of present day affairs in the Levant are as one in believing that Italy has a long, costly, troublesome campaign on her hands. The best laid plans of Christian nations, as well as of mice and men gang aft aglee. King Victor's government, when first its troops were despatched southward, contemplated that little more would be required than the occupation of the sea-coast. There the army should rather peacefully await the surrender of the Ottoman

forces, after which the inland sheikhs should be "bought" in the usual way, and so the absorption of the hinterland be proceeded with slowly; perhaps, but safely.

The Turk, however, is an unreasonable and stubborn beast. All history has shown him that, and as if the world was not to learn it anew in the Balkans, Italy was taught it in Tripoli. For there he did not do one thing he was expected to do, with the result that twenty thousand men did not "picnic it" in a pleasant climate,

but nearly fifty thousand fought hard and often to hold what they had seized. Now there is good prospect of quite twice as many being needed for some such slow-dragging "pacification" as for a score of years has kept French hands full in Algeria. Italy, when she took Tripoli with the Arabs loose behind it, assumed the position of a person buying a law suit of long standing and infinite intricacies. What surprises the hinterland may hold in store for her she does not know, and she will be wise to make haste slowly in finding out.

To put the matter another way, the gravamen of the situation lies in what may be attempted by the Saracenic semi-subjects of the Porte. This is the "Moslem Menace" that is being not a little talked of and written about. How will the Mohammedan world take so wholesale an attack upon its people as is involved in the Italian, that is "Christian," seizure of Tripoli? In its broadest sense, the question is of no two nations, but of East and West. As Lord Curzon lately said in the House of Peers: "We cannot lose sight of the tremendous law of inter-action in the world of the 'True Believers.' If we strike at one part of it, the nervous shock we set up runs through the whole frame, and is very likely perceptible on the other side of the globe."

As these words of a recognized authority imply, the faith of Mohammed is far from being dead or dying. The annual report of the International Missionary Alliance, dated from Lucknow in the spring of 1912 declares that "the Orient must recognize that the Koran

MY LADY'S COLORS.

is to-day gaining on the Holy Bible." That conference, also, was told that the total of the world's Moslems had risen now above two hundred millions, and it is a matter of common knowledge that the Turkish Sultan Sultan is "Father" to this multitude.

Will all Islam, then, take up the cudgels in a general defense of Mohammed V, twice insulted within twenty months? Will that mystic but powerful Arabian Masonic order, the Senussi, with its ten millions of members, trained to arms, inaugurate a general attack on the white "infidel dogs?"

Alexander Powell, F. R. G. S., who is thoroughly at home in this whole. picturesque and immensely important subject, after debating the pros and cons at length, comes to the considered conclusion that a "general" attack is not to be anticipated. He knows the Senussi leaders to be men of shrewdness and intelligence, as well

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as of fanatical loyalty to their religion, and declares they are too well advised of what would be the eventual outcome of a general crusade against, the European to enter upon any such course. But he adds that, so far as Italy in Tripoli is concerned, he has no doubt that these leaders will surely encourage all those of their bond that can join the forces in opposing his advance southward to do so, and that these men will fight on as long as a hardy handful of them can be mustered.

Peace with the Porte, then, has not set the period to North African warfare. Italy must face and conquer physical difficulties of a serious sort, but far more than this, she must master a people who know no law save force, and who successfully defied Great Britain in the Soudan for thirteen years. Here lies the great unknown quantity in the Tripolitan future.

MY LADY'S COLORS

The days are over long ago
When gallant knights in shining mail,
Their white plumes nodding all a-row,
Their banners flaunting in the gale,
Went forth to War, by Valor pressed.
With gay farewell, grown tender now,
Their ladies' colors at their crest,
Their ladies' love kiss on their brow.
Alas for Romance! Sweetheart mine,
Soft sleep the faithful Loves of Old,
And never maiden's fingers twine
The lovers' knots of blue and gold.
But 'mid Life's stress in soberer guise
Love rules. So in my heart I wear
The azure of your smiling eyes,
The glamor of your golden hair.
ELEANOR DUNCAN WOOD.

The Log Cabin

AN EXPENSIVE LUXURY

By Arthur H. Dutton

O

H, LET US have a log cabin
by all means! It is so pic-
turesque and
SO easy to
build. And so cheap-with

our own trees on the spot!"

So say about ninety per cent of those who contemplate building a dwelling in the wilderness, for a vacation resort, hunting lodge or permanent home. Of course, a log cabin is picturesque. It is entirely in harmony with the environment of the wilds. It is durable and may be made highly artistic.

But do not run away with the idea that it is either easy to build, or cheap, even if the logs are standing nearby, ready for the cutting. I know whereof I speak, for I have had experience, right in the timber region of Northern California. There, of all places, is the spot where the log cabin is eminently desirable.

It did not take me long to find that the log cabin is a somewhat more serious undertaking than would seem at first thought. With a view of getting some exact statistics on the subject, I kept careful record of an addition I put this year to my old house in the woods. It was a single room, 14 feet by 16 feet, inside measurement. The conditions were about average, and my experience may fairly be taken as illustrative of log cabin building. The logs were all taken from the. immediate vicinity of the house; also the rocks for the big fireplace.

Yes, the logs were free-in first cost. But here is what happened: I hired a builder, at $3 a day, with his board, who was an expert woodsman and skilled carpenter. I asked him once why a man so competent as he as

a carpenter should work ten hours a day in the country for $3 when he could easily make $5 or $6 a day in the city, working eight hours.

"My $3 a day up here goes farther than $6 a day in the city," was his reply. "It is velvet. I own my farm, and it supports me. In the city my $6 would go for rent, board, clothes and carfares."

Well, he was an industrious worker. He never loafed on the job, yet it took him twenty-six working days to build that house, with the help of myself and another man regularly in my employ. The builder did most of the work, for I and the other fellow had to do many other things about the place. Still, he could not have done it all by himself.

There was $78 for the 14 by 16 foot room at the outset. It included building the chimney, of my own rocks and mud, with two sacks of cement for the three-foot fireplace and hearth.

The logs, as I say, were all in the immediate vicinity, but they had to be hauled to the site, for distances varying from 50 to 200 yards. Some of them were huge fellows. The bottom ones were 18 inches in diameter, after peeling-for you must always peel your logs, else they will hold moisture and quickly rot, besides becoming homes for worms and insects. The hauling was expense item number two, $5 for another man and a pair of horses to drag the logs up. Then expense item number three, $7.50 for the same teamster and his animals, with a sled, to haul up rocks from the nearby creek and mud from about 100 yards away.

There went $90.50 the first dash out

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of the box. The logs were not so "free" and "cheap" after all. It took 71 logs all told for that one-room addition. They ranged in size all the way from the small saplings-whole young trees-for the rafters, to the big foot-and-a-half bottom logs of the walls. From that size, the wall logs decreased in size to 8 inches for the top ones.

The heavy labor, which took so much time, was felling the trees, and, still more, hewing the logs to fit. Each log had to be notched at both ends, and smoothed on the top and bottom, to make snug fits for the adjoining logs. My builder made a fine job of it, for he was careful and accurate, an expert with axe and timber saw, but it took time. The erection of those walls seemed to me the most tedious kind of work, as in other log house building I had seen. Then there had to be careful measurements, cuttings and fittings for the two doors, three windows and the fireplace. The fireplace itself was three feet wide in the open, with a foot and a half of rock on each side, making six feet altogether.

Putting up the walls was finally completed, and the roof was comparatively easy. The rafters were made of the "free" trees; so were the floor joists.

We now strike the other items of expense. Even if you use your own logs for walls, joists, rafters and every other thing possible, you are compelled, nevertheless, to buy a lot of lumber and other material. It will astonish you to see how much lumber is needed for floors, shakes, door and window casings and the plating to which to nail the shakes of roof and at the gable ends, above the log walls. I had two floors, the lower one of redwood, the upper of pine, faced on one side. In round numbers it was 250 feet of each kind of wood for the floor. It took, also in round numbers, 500 feet of one-inch redwood, 6 inches wide, for casings, plating and miscellaneous things inside the room. I cannot give the exact amounts, for I bought much more lumber than this, using some of it for other purposes, outside the house, but the estimates given are accurate enough, and err, if at all, on the side of cheapness.

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