on the lever, and his eyes fixed ahead. He worked and he will work when he gets his first engine. But the old engineer, surer, with tried attention and a nicer, idler hand, so controlled that machine that, though he gave no sign of effort, physical or mental, we finished the last mile of our distance in the last minute of our time.

Well, perhaps the night trip would bear out the story teller. The darkness seemed to me to be absolute. "That makes the signals plain," the engineer said. It did, indeed; only I saw too many till he explained how to distinguish "ours" from the galaxies that confounded me. We rushed faster and faster into the dark. A light ahead floated across the track, back again, then seemed to shoot up into the air on the right; a white signal; another light on the right slid diagonally down across the track, and then headed, flying straight for my window. "Bang!" it struck, and I dodged

a passing up train. We seemed to be going twice as fast as at any time in the morning, and I asked the fireman what speed we were making. He spoke to the engineer, who leaned far over to see his watch in the light of the furnace. Sitting up again, he was still, till I forgot. By and by he bent over, again looked at his watch and spoke to the fireman, who reported: "We made that last seven miles in five minutes and twenty seconds." If this rough estimate was correct, it meant eighty miles an hour. The engineer was lying back, with his arm resting idly on the lever his eyes not "glued to the track," but simply keeping him informed. For a while during the trip I stood up beside him, and we chatted quietly about lights and locomotives and runs, all in an easy conversational tone, and I noticed that his eyes, ready enough to turn into the cab to pull out a gauge or a screw, habitually turned back every other moment to the track. His vigilance was as subconscious as the movements of a man dressing in the morning. His mind could be on what he was saying to me, while his eyes were attending to their own business. He was not driving his machine by will-power, but machine-like, yet with his brain and senses so constantly on the lookout that they would react like clockwork to any sign meant for them. And

there were many he himself forgot to mention. Thus, while we were talking, when he was interested, he let her off a little, and I asked, as if by the way, whether we were on time. "Three-quarters of a minute ahead," he said; but he had already acted before I put his mind on it. Just as in any other art, it isn't industry, but inspiration, that counts.

As I climbed back on my seat and took the rush of air and the roar of sounds I looked across at the man who was doing it and thought how little of it was his doing-how much was his parents'. He was simply a well-made human being, perfectly adjusted to his craft.

a part of his locomotive. He and the machine together were like a great man -a serene soul possessing a powerful body, and directing forces out of all proportion to his effort.

When we stopped in the station, our pilot three feet from the buffer, the clock stood 9.59. That was time, and I recalled what this man had said the first day I met him, when I asked what was the art, the trick, of running an engine.

"You've got so many miles to go in so many minutes. There are so many slowdowns, sure-so many clear streaks of track. You know your engine and your track; you know just what you can dowhere, when, and how. Now, then, the trick is to keep your train up to a certain point. If you use too much speed here, she'll run down on you later, so you keep her balanced on a fine edge till you're near home; then you can draw her down all you want."

That's the thing you feel then ?” "Exactly; and that's the fun of the job. It's easy when you do it by feeling, and a pleasure."

of their job, whatever it may be, and, whether the reward for labor in their craft be wages or wealth, the compensation that keeps them at work is the delight of the craftsman in the exercise of his skill. If this is not the spirit of a man's labor he is not an artist he is a painter or a merchant or a workingman. Artists don't work for money.

Not that money is a mean thing, and not that artists do not care for it. My motorman admitted the value of that, but money has simply nothing to do with the art, no matter how much it may influence artists. The same spirit manifests itself sometimes in a purely moneymaking business. I knew a merchant worth many millions who has it so highly developed that he grieves over it, and his expression of the feeling came out in the course of a warning to me to guard against it. He was advising me to take a post-graduate college course. "Take it," he said; take all the education you can get. I had just enough to make me aware there were lots of sources of pleasure in the world-art, music, letters, the drama, sports-but I had to go to work before I had learned to enjoy these things before I had acquired the need of them. This enabled me to work for

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the pleasure of work alone, and all my pleasure centered in my own particular business. Well, I did enjoy that; but when I tried to quit, and went abroad, I got no pleasure out of my travels. the beautiful things that I knew were beautiful bored me. I had to come back, and, to this day, with more money than I know what to do with, I find satisfaction only in the details-the details, mind youof my business, which piles up the money people think is all I'm working for."

This sort of man is rare, even among artists," in the narrow sense. Think how many young painters draw until middle age-even all their lives-because they cannot resist the immediate money illustrating brings in. In business, money is usually the object of effort-money first, then the position and luxuries it brings; after that the excitement of the gambler, and, finally, the love of power which often furnishes a noble spectacle in finance, terrible, but magnificent. But I am not decrying any human motives. All I wish to recall-what we all know and forget-is that the art spirit thrives in commonplace surroundings, among all crafts alike, and that there are great men among the wage-earners, where we all can see and enjoy them.

I

FIRST met him one Fourth of July afternoon in the middle eighties. The sawdust streets and high board sidewalks of the lumber town were filled to the brim with people. The permanent population of the town, dressed in the stiffness of its Sunday best, escorted gingham wives or sweethearts; a dozen outsiders like myself tried not to be too conspicuous in a city smartness; but the great multitude was composed of the men of the woods. I sat, chair-tilted by the hotel, watching them pass. Their heavy woolen shirts crossed by the broad suspenders, the red of their sashes or leather shine of

their belts, their short kersey trousers "stagged" off to leave a gap between the knee and the heavily spiked "cork boots"-all these were distinctive enough of their class, but most interesting to me were the eyes that peered from beneath their little round hats tilted rakishly askew. They were all subtly alike, these eyes. Some were black, some were brown, or gray, or blue, but all were steady and unabashed, all looked straight at you with a strange humorous blending of aggression and respect for your own business, and all without exception wrinkled at the corners with a suggestion of dry humor.

In my half-conscious scrutiny I probably stared harder than I knew, for all at once a pair of the blue laughing eyes suddenly met mine full, and an ironical voice drawled,

"Say, bub, you look as interested as a man killing snakes. Am I your long-lost friend?"

The tone of the voice matched accurately the attitude of the man, and that was quite non-committal. He stood cheerfully ready to meet the emergency. If I sought trouble, it was here to my hand; or if I needed help, he was willing to offer it.

"I guess you are," I replied, "if you can tell me what all this outfit's headed for."

He thrust back his hat and ran his hand through a mop of closely cropped light curls.

"Birling match," he explained briefly. "Come on."

I joined him, and together we followed the crowd to the river where we roosted like cormorants on adjacent piles overlooking a patch of clear water among the filled booms.

"Drive's just over" my new friend informed me. "Rear come down last night. Fourther July celebration. This little town will scratch fer th' tall timber along about midnight when the boys goes in to take her apart."

A half dozen men with peavies rolled a white-pine log of about a foot and a half

"rested .ike cormorants on

diameter into the clear water, where it lay rocking back and forth three or four feet from the boom piles. Suddenly a man ran the length of the boom, leaped easily into the air, and landed with both feet square on one end of the floating log. That end disappeared in an ankle-deep swirl of white foam, the other rose suddenly, the whole timber, projected forward by the shock, drove headlong to the middle of the little pond. And the man, his arms folded, his knees just bent in the graceful nervous attitude of the circus rider, stood upright like a statue of bronze.

A roar approved this feat.

"That's Dicky Darrell," said my informant, "Roaring Dick. Watch him."

The man on the log was small, with clean, beautiful haunches and shoulders but with hanging baboon arms. Perhaps his most striking feature was a mop of reddish-brown hair that overshadowed a little triangular white face, accented by two reddish-brown quadrilaterals that served as eyebrows, and a pair of inscrutable chipmunk eyes.

For a moment he poised erect in the great calm of the public performer. Then slowly he began to revolve the log under his feet. The lofty gaze, the folded arms, the straight supple waist budged not by a hair's breadth; only the feet stepped forward, at first deliberately, then faster and faster, until the rolling log threw a blur of spray a foot into the air. Then sud