who motor through from the White Mountains or Boston, is certainly not less than 140,000.

Of no hesitant, diffident temperament are these resorters. They want what they want when they want it. The last of them having been heard patiently, the last bill collected, Portland might be expected to stick her feet up to the fender and take a real rest.

Instead, she begins to hustle. I have been there in October and have seen it with my own eyes.

The frost glistened on the sides of the trees and the faces of the bowlders away from the sun. The steam clanked in the pipes of the hotel. The store windows displayed new furs. Through the hotel window I could see brisk figures hurrying along a little street with a modestly beautiful church tower at the end.

It was so like Dickens I exclaimed aloud. Only better. It was like Dickens when he permits his readers to be happy. The setting was ready for a gathering of the clans to see that Uriah should get his, good and plenty, or to sit down to a Dickens dinner with Martin Chuzzlewit, now that Mark has married the widow and Martin is to be prosperous again.

That is the air of all Maine, outside the months of the resort season. Her people are happy, their color is good, they have crow's-feet at their eyes. They are little caught by frothy thinking. They keep to the solid things.

When Maine is left to her own people I venture there is less tickle-toeing there than in any equally populous area of the continent. They get along without paying $4.50 a seat for the "Follies." They read more than they go to the movies. "Authors" is still played up there among the pines, and checkers in Maine is a man-size test of seeing ahead.

You that think of the State as buried underneath the snow, and frozen in its winter sleep, could hardly credit a true account of Maine hospitality. The cold is easier to bear than farther south along the coast, and the snow is one of the best blessings the calendar brings. In Portland, Lewiston, Bangor, and Augusta I have found, in winter, a welcome so warm that it lives in my memory like the welcome I knew in the '90's in Maryland and Virginia.

The State has long been dry, but not in its hospitality. It believes in fortifying you within against the cold without. It is one place where my appetite has grown young and I have feasted on turkey and lobster and pie and preserves as I did in my teens.

W

THAT Maine is, Portland is. The city lives through serving the State. The State turns to the city for service through long experience.

One reason for the turning is the working of economics upon geography. Map the trade area of your own town and you will find it to be an ellipse reaching east and west. That is the case with nearly all the cities of our continent. Portland was the first exception that came to light in our study of the early 1910's.

Portland has an ellipse comprehending the whole State. It is like an egg standing on its small end, widening to the west to include eastern New Hampshire, rounding through the north woods and the Aroostook potato country to the international boundary of New Brunswick on the east.

Portland-Built on a Rock

Continued from page 9

From this north-and-south ellipse there flows a rich volume of supplies down to Portland; to the ellipse there returns an equally rich volume of sup

plies out of Portland. The two streams,

I have long thought, ought to provide for a city considerably larger than Portland without reckoning at all upon the summer colony or her shipping.

Think of a score of millions of bushels of wheat coming down the eastern side of that ellipse, every winter, over the tracks of the Grand Trunk, seeking an ice-free port during the months when the St. Lawrence is frozen. Think of some twoscore million bushels of potatoes, rolling through Portland on their way from the east

bers if not ahead of it. She makes window screens for half of America, ship chandlery and marine hardware for a large part of the north Atlantic Coast, sewer pipe, flavoring essences, shoes, doll houses, sleighs, women's underwear, leather, general foundry products, and a whole catalogue of small wares from envelope sealers and ice cream to billiard balls and chewing gum.

Her distinctive industrial character is due primarily to the fact that she is a great port in New England waters. A harbor completely landlocked, clearing bottoms of 35 feet draft at mean

The ocean at Portland is the ocean as you dream of it. Tides running strong. Rocks standing high in the water

N many respects Portland's retail trade is also unusual. The sum of it is large, though it does not appear to me to be as large as it might be. It is handled by stores rather smaller than the volume of their business suggests. The establishments specialize with "leaders" more than in the Middle West. They offer a range of selection wide enough to include luxuries for the summer trade that are too delicate to be practical and wearevers for the home trade that are too heavy to be delicate.

It is told of the colony folk in the summer that they do buying in Portland because they can find what they seek more easily than in the great emporiums back home. I accept the fact that they buy in Portland, but question the explanation. I buy there too, whenever I can. The reason in my case is that courtesy is almost unfailing among the store folk, the clerks know their business as proprietorsalesmen nearly always do, and there is a conscience behind the prices.

What would a man buy in Portland, you wonder, who lives a thousand miles

off? "Plates made by French peasants,

strong, good-looking winter shoes, a lovely picture, half a year's supply of Christmas presents.

So in Portland the stream of retail trade flows right evenly through the

year, from colony buyers in the summer, from trolley buyers up from Biddeford and down from LewistonAuburn, from railroad buyers and mail-order buyers throughout the State, from 70,000 buyers at home.

The city's development in industry

is abreast of her growth in num

low tide, so accessible that captains sail to the docks under steam and have no need for pilots-here, logically, is the second port of our Northeast.

In the year before Germany frightened traffic off the seas, the gangplanks of this landing place sounded to the scurrying feet of 1,480,422 seagoers. The commerce of that year, largely water-borne, had an estimated value of $129,000,000. Six governments maintain consuls there. If you think that, somehow, shipping isn't what it used to be, stand on the Eastern Promenade and look over Casco Bay!

When the wind blows freshly, see the fishing schooners come rounding in, their sails bellying, their crews taking it all as it comes.

Little steamers ply to the house where Mrs. Stowe wrote "The Pearl of Orr's Island"; to Eagle Island, which Admiral Peary owned; to Peak Island, where there is a resort for Portland folk with a theatre; to Great Chebeague, with ten miles of road; to little masses of rock barely big enough for a single cottage.

Rarely does the wind not blow, at least softly. When that does happen the harbor is just as busy. The same craft come in with cargoes of fish, under auxiliary power. The same little steamers put from island to island. The same coast steamers and oceangoing vessels come slowly up to the

wharves.

A

They have rebuilt Portland after four fires. They have made her history an inspiration to the most loyal of Americans. They have kept beautiful the shrines of their most admired townsmen, the gentle Longfellow, the zealous Neal Dow, the incisive, patriotic, sadly disappointed Thomas B. Reed. They have made of the streets which the visitor sees a fine series of vistas of old New England homes, white or cream, behind archways of noble elms.

The unhappy things they have made must be set down, too, though I would rather have a tooth pulled than do it.

The fundamental difficulty is a maddening, serene sort of deliberativeness. Not conservatism. No conservative city would have built Portland's magnificent city auditorium, or designated by ordinance nineteen streets for children to coast on in winter, or provided ten playgrounds with eighteen supervisors, or published a report telling the whole regrettable truth as to the dumping of refuse in the parks, the lack of sewers, and the ill-smelling waste when the tide runs out from the docks.

What sets Portland leaders apart from others is their attitude:

"Our city has its problems, of course. Some of them are very serious. When we have solved them we shall find others quite as serious. We are spending now more than most American cities of our class. We shall not gain anything by hurrying."

Sth

O it has come to pass that one of the best school systems I have studied is about half housed and has outrageous deficiencies in plumbing; that miles of streets have cesspools or worse; that the resident death rate is higher than that of either New York or Chicago; that there is an area of congestion not for summer visitors to see, but for the rest of us to contemplate with heartache.

This area of congestion appears to contradict one of the ablest of commercial secretaries when he writes of Portland: "If, as a city to live in, it is noted for one thing more than another, it is for its American population." What is meant by "American"? The native-born children of native-born parents? In that sense Portland is "American" to the extent of fifty-three families out of a hundred.

The forty-seven families that are not "American" in that sense are largely Irish, Scotch, Canadian, and English, and, speaking English as they do, are classed as "Americans." The remainder are Italians, Scandinavians, and Russian Jews; and the last-named are effectively segregated, to Portland's shame, in the worst housing the city affords.

deed. From it he gains a record alike of flaw and strength in his materials; and from it gathers, too, a knowledge, definite and certain, of the structural compositions with which he deals. Of like import is it to the worker in textiles, paper, foods and similar products.

So stronger bridges, safer rails and steamships, sounder business structures, better clothes and purer food result from these surprising images which, revealed by the microscope, recorded by the photographic camera, illustrate in yet another field of wide and important application how Optics renders its vital service.

So, too, does Photomicrography solve for Industry the problems of efficient production, while granting a greater measure of safety to mankind.

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Every mail brings letters from I. C. S. students telling of promotions or increases in salary as the rewards of spare time study.

What are you doing with the hours after supper? Can you afford to let them slip by unimproved when you can easily make them mean so much? One hour a day spent with the I. C. S. will prepare you for the position you want in the work you like best.

Yes, it will! More than two million have proved it. For 30 years men and women in every line of technical and commercial work have been winning promotion and increased salaries through the I. C. S. More than 130,000 are getting ready right now with I. C. S. help for the bigger jobs ahead.

social topics with the girls, sprang from the bench and stared in astonishment a dead-centered moment. Then he leaped into a run for his rival. "Hey, Goggy, y' young snip," he bawled like a slave driver, "hold up there a minute. What you up to?" Goggles only accelerated his gait. He scorned even to look over his shoulder. Milky, angrily increasing his own speed, soon grabbed him.

"Say," whooped Goggles in a storm of indignation, "who you grabbin' so fresh?" He jerked away. All teeth and bristles, he faced his late friend. "I want to know what you're up to, that's what."

"What you suppose?" cried Goggles, his temper in violent eruption again, "I'm going to Venus's. What's it to you? D'you think you own her? Your date ain't till 'leven. What you buttin' in for? Hey?"

"Like the blue blazes you are!"

"Do you own her, y' poor stew? Don't know as you have a date with her for now. I'm goin' to call on her too." bawled Goggles savagely. "You got your gall! Go back where you belong. I always knew you were a hog-that's all. Darn you, y' think you're the pretty what I said-Hog-a girl hog, most of boy-think all you got to do is look 'em over and pick 'em out. You-you-"

Right here Goggles abruptly discontinued his character reading to duck and run. At the rank libel Milky had lashed out at him unsuccessfully, and away streamed the two lads, Goggles a rod ahead, straight under the oaks and elms for Venus's house. Since Goggles's height was largely legs, he could run like a wild Zulu and at the first he forged well ahead.

"Aw, hold up," bawled Milky, "and let's talk this out. A fine mess chasin' right into Venus's. Hain't y' got any sense?"

"Drop out, then," yelled Goggles. "I didn't ask you to come along."

Continued from page 13

aspersion. Here he laughed at her as if she were a joke, while he did his best to slip Goggles a warning jab of eye. "Where'd you get that idea? Naw! Goggy, he just bet me he could beat me over here after you. And did you really think we were in earnest?"

"We were, too, fighting!" cried Goggles in a sudden froth of indignation. "And just because he's jealous of you, too. He saw me walking in this direction and chased after me and ordered me to keep away from here. That's how it happened. Aw, y' needn't hand me any o' them looks, Milky. I ain't afraid of you."

"Say," growled Milky, abashed and further incensed by such turning of his own guns against him, "you're a gentleman, I must say! Startin' it up again in her presence!" It was only by great effort that he withheld himself

from taking the law into his own hands.

"Here! Here!" interposed Venus authoritatively, but with a perturbed laugh. "Stop it-both of you. Why, You two aren't you ashamed?" how will this look!

"Well," declared Milky, regarding Goggles with aggrieved disappointment, "if Goggy ain't, he ought to be. He-" "Me?" whooped Goggles, white and glittering behind his spectacles. "What about yourself? You're a peach to talk about 'gentlemen.' Y' don't know what it means."

"Say, y' poor stew, you cut that out!" snarled Milky, taking a threatening attitude. "D' you know what that little runt is?" He was now addressing Venus. "He's the one that's jealous. He's plumb dippy about you that's plain, now. And you want to watch out or he'll be hanging around here like a sick cat and'll be proposin' to you-the

poor nut!"

"I am not!" shouted Goggles, raging almost to the tear mark and in a veritable whirlwind of embarrassment. "I -I-" Here he gulped under a sickening compression, as he realized that he was denying his love in her very presence and cutting himself off from all hope forever.

Milky caught him.

est?" Goggles simply couldn't
believe in such fairylands.
"It certainly is. I'm not
fooling. Be around at eight."

Yes, Venus was sincere. He looked at Milky. How Milky had changed, as folks say of some one who has returned after an absence of years! Yes, Venus was in earnest. Milky's looks proved it.

"D' you get that, Milky?"

"Aw, bugs!" retorted Milky. And then he dropped Goggles and saw only Venus. "I've made a deal for a court at 'leven, Venus. Get your racket and come over now, so we'll be sure to have it."

"Good! All right," exclaimed Venus with a pleasure that cut a gash in Goggles. She turned for the house, Milky following her. "I'll look for you at eight," she called back to Goggles. Milky, who had bounded blithely ahead and up the steps, gave in pantomime one of his exaggerated horse laughs.

MOGGLES turned a lofty back upon

Ghin him and started homeward. The

walk home was a ride through dreamland, for he was gliding with Venus over the country pikes in the balmy, fragrant_night.

Before he reached home he was drunk with dreams. And he lay in the swing until luncheon, his begoggled gaze off in the clouds, and composed the top half of a poem.

The afternoon dragged and dragged. Now and then a lucid interval would try to intrude. At such moments the Milky of his boyhood's love would beckon back to the old days and afflict him with a cold, sinking sensation. It was the heartache. And this lucid interval would somehow ask: "Is she worth the Milky whom you've cast aside for her? It was all your fault this morning." Whereupon for relief he would rush like a drug addict back to his anodyne of dreams.

But at last the afternoon had passed and it was ten to eight. Goggles drove his dad's high-power, green touring car through the evening shadows of the park. The sun had set. A pale halfmoon was sliding past the openings in the branches. The west was done in vermilion. All was romance and the violins of love. Goggles was dressed and squeaking with high collar and best shoes, and, like most candidates for initiation, excited, frightened, shivery. He had ten dollars in his pocket. He was to bring back the change.

The winding drive through the park bit into the avenue a short distance above Venus's home, and as at low and slowing speed he curved into view of the veranda, his heart grabbed his spine for help.

Untold numbers of young men were congregated on the steps, and seemingly all over the front of the house. This was the hum of voices he had heard. He stopped the car as if avoiding a collision and, dumfounded, stared in a panic of diffidence.

"Hoi! there he is!" he heard Milky's bass at its best shout gleefully. The whole veranda poured en masse out upon the lawn. With Milky's voice as a key he recognized enough of the shapes and faces to know that every high-school soph, junior, and senior for blocks and blocks around was there. He threw in his clutch and was curving away in flight, when he saw Venus White, on the steps waving to him. glassy-eyed, trembling, yet beginning to get mad-it was Milky's dirty work he backed and came down to Venus's curb.

The laughing, yelling mob rushed about the car, Milky in the lead.

"Come on, Venus," shouted Goggles at his frantic loudest, trying to ignore the imps who were assailing him with witty questions and smart advice. Some were howling lament that they were not Goggles, lucky Goggles; others offering him fabulous inducement to take them along. The hubbub aroused the neighborhood.

was opened by the Oriental chauffeur, and Brinn descended upon the steps of a shadowed porch. The house door was open, and, although there was no light within, "Come this way," said a voice, speaking out of the darkness. Nicol Brinn entered a hallway, the

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"Allow me to take your hat and coat," continued the voice.

He was relieved of these, guided along a dark passage, and presently, an inner door being opened, he found himself in a small, barely furnished room where one shaded lamp burned upon a large writing table.

His conductor, who did not enter, closed the door quietly, and Nicol Brinn found himself looking into the smiling face of a Hindu gentleman who sat at a table.

The room was decorated with queerlooking Indian carvings, pictures upon silk, and other products of Eastern craftsmanship. The table and the sev

in character,

but the articles upon the tables were very European and businesslike in appearance. Furthermore, the Hindu gentleman, who wore correct evening dress, might have been the representative of an Eastern banking house, as, indeed, he happened to be, among other things.

"Good evening, sir," he said, speaking perfect English-"won't you sit down?"

He pointed with a pen which he was holding in the direction of a heavily carved chair which stood near the table. Nicol Brinn sat down, regarding the speaker with lack-luster eyes. "A query has arisen respecting your fraternal rights," continued the Hindu. "Am I to understand that you claim to belong to the Seventh Kama?"

"Certainly," replied Brinn, in a toneless voice.

The Hindu drew his cuff back from a slender, yellow wrist, revealing a curious mark which appeared to be branded upon the flesh. It was in the form of a torch or flambeau surmounted by a tongue of flame. He raised his black brows, smiling significantly.

Nicol Brinn stood up, removing his tight dinner jacket. Then, rolling back his sleeve from a lean, sinuous forearm, he extended the powerful member, having his fist tightly clenched.

Upon the inside of his arm, just above the elbow, an identical mark had been branded!

The Hindu stood up and saluted Nicol Brinn in a peculiar manner. That is to say, he touched the second finger of his right hand with the tip of his tongue, and then laid the finger upon His forehead, at the same time bowing deeply.

Nicol Brinn repeated the salutation, and quietly put his coat on.

"We greet you," said the Hindu. "I am Rama Dass of the Bengal Lodge. Have you Hindustani?"

"When, and by whom, may I ask?" "By Rûhmâni, November 23, 1914." "Strange," murmured Rama Dass. "Brother Rûhmâni died in that year; which accounts for our having lost touch with you. What is your grade?" "The fifth."

DAMA

are

"You are

"Every little drop swells the ocean," returned Nicol Brinn.

"You speak well," the Hindu said. "We have here your complete record. It shall not be consulted. To do so were unnecessary. We are satisfied. We only regret that one so happily circumstanced to promote the coming of the Fire should have been lost sight of. Last night there were three promotions and several rejections. You were expected."

"But I was not summoned." "No," murmured Rama Dass. "We had learned of you, as I have said. However, great honor results. You will be received, alone. Do you desire to advance?"

"No. Give me time." Rama Dass again performed the strange salutation, and again Nicol Brinn returned it.

"Wisdom is a potent wine," said the latter gravely.

"We respect your decision."

The Hindu rang a little silver bell upon his table, and the double doors which occupied one end of the small room opened silently. evealing a large shadowy apartment beyond.

Rama Dass stood up, crossed the room, and, standing just outside the open doors, beckoned to Nicol Brinn to advance.

"There is no fear," he said, in a queer, chanting tone.

"There is no fear," repeated Nicol Brinn.

BSOLUTE

A Nicol Brinn.

darkness

well imagined. It was perhaps theatrical, but that by such means great ends had already been achieved he knew to his cost.

The introduction of Maskelyne illusions into an English country house must ordinarily have touched his sense of humor, but knowing something of the presence in which he stood in that darkened chamber, there was no laughter in the heart of Nicol Brinn, but rather an unfamiliar coldness, the nearest approach to fear of which this steelnerved man was capable.

"Temporarily," the sweet voice continued, "you will be affiliated to the London Lodge, to which you will look for instructions. These will reach you work to be done in England. It has been decided, however, that you shall be transferred as quickly as possible to our New York Lodge. You will await orders. Only Fire is eternal." Again the voice ceased. But, Nicol Brinn remaining silent:

"Your reply is awaited."

"Fire is life," replied Nicol Brinn. The blue tongue of flame subsided, lower and lower, and finally disappeared, so that the apartment became enwrapped in absolute darkness. A faint rustling sound suggested that a heavy curtain had been lowered, and almost immediately the doors behind Nicol Brinn were opened again by Rama Dass.

"We congratulate you, brother," he said, extending his hand. "Yet the ordeal was no light one, for all the force of the Fire was focused upon you."

N

TICOL BRINN reentered the room where the shaded lamp stood upon the writing table. In the past he had moved unscathed through peril unknown to the ordinary man. He was well acquainted with the resources of the organization whose agents, unseen, surrounded him in that remote country house, but that their pretensions were extravagant his present immunity would seem to prove.

If the speaker with the strangely arresting voice were indeed that FireTongue whose mere name was synonymous with dread in certain parts of the East, then Fire-Tongue was an impostor. He who claimed to read the thoughts of all men had signally failed in the present instance, unless

Nicol Brinn stared dully into the smiling face of Rama Dass. Not yet must he congratulate himself. Perhaps the Hindu's smile concealed as much as the mask worn by Nicol Brinn.

"We congratulate you," said the Hindu. "You are a worthy brother."

He performed the secret salutation, which Nicol Brinn automatically acknowledged. Then, without another word, Rama Dass led the way to the door.

Out into the dark hallway Nicol Brinn stepped, his muscles taut, his brain alert for instant action. But no one offered to molest him. He was assisted into his coat, and his hat was placed in his hands. Then, the front door being opened, he saw the headlights of the waiting car shining on a pillar of the porch.

A minute later he was seated again in the shuttered limousine, and as it moved off, and the lights leaped up above him, he lay back upon the cushions and uttered a long sigh.

Already he divined that, following a night's sleep, these scenes would seem like the episodes of a dream. Taking off his hat, he raised his hand to his forehead and discovered it to be slight