purpose. Water, air, chemicals of many sorts are piped about the whole plant in bewildering complexity. In some of these pipes enormous pressures are maintained, in others the chemicals are so deleterious as to require piping of special chemical composition. To the layman much of it looks alike, but not to the alert system. All the different kinds are scheduled, and arrangements are made so that the area superintendents are notified of the difference, and definitely put on notice as to the uses to which the different kinds are to be put. We went with the materials superintendent to a part of the plant where much brickwork was being done. The general manager noticed that the brick unloaded were in two piles, separated by quite a distance; they all looked about alike. "That further pile," explained the materials superintendent, "is acid-proof brick-we unload them over there because they are only used for certain purposes. Besides," he observes reflectively, "they cost a dollar or so more a thousand, and we don't want to waste them." Another phase of the system. Fifty million dollars being spent, and yet we can stop to take account of the economy to be obtained by differentiating between two kinds of brick where a few hundred dollars are involved.

At the pipe-shop we found an activity that was more manufacturing than building. Schedules of pipe to be cut for different buildings in the different areas are received by a competent staff of clerks, recorded, and turned over to the shop foreman as things to be manufactured. Trucks from the different parts of the job load at the ample shipping doors. Through the shop order and industry prevail. It seemed as though not an inch of pipe was wasted. All the short pieces were saved to be threaded up for short nipples. Back in the buildings we had noticed the absence of pipe-cutting benches, the fitters only screwing pipe together; in other words, we only recalled assembling. The piping foreman greeted us. "Yes, we have plenty of stock ahead-thought we would be short on large sizes, but the traffic people had some of our Pittsburgh orders brought through on special freight, and we are unloading it now." So the system was complete

enough to handle bulk commodities not specially consigned to any given area, simply a variation of the general excellence of the system.

Back in the general office the stodgy charts and maps commenced to take on a new meaning. Now that we had seen that they really worked, they commenced to be live, vital forces in the scheme of things. . . We passed from department to department. Here the plans were delivered by the government to the contractor. Immediately they went to the scheduling department where the bills of material were drawn off. Then orders were placed, and automatically the controllers and the traffic men and the materials superintendent were notified. This opened up a perfect maze of activity, both on the job and throughout the country. It was all so orderly and all so complete. Nothing was left to chance, and with it all there was no lost motion. Systems are not hard to conceive, but they are hard to work. It takes great organizations of experienced men to work them, and it is in the refinement and application of the system that results are obtained. That the system was working perfectly, and being worked effectively, was evident on every hand, and on the work it came to its fruition. The orderliness of it all was amazing.

Figures are always bewildering, and are generally used to emphasize some incomprehensible contrast. Perhaps the most striking figure that came to my attention was that on that day over nineteen thousand people were at work on the plant, and yet I was impressed with the few men I saw in any given place. They all seemed to be working so naturally, with ample materials at hand, and with an evident purpose. The delegation and subdelegation of authority was complete. More figures: One hundred million feet of lumber are used in the buildings, twice as much as was used in a cantonment; from two hundred and fifty to four hundred and fifty cars of material are unloaded every day. In fact, the railroad traffic of that great plant was so great that the contractors had, in effect, taken over the management of the railroad that served it. Imagine it! A contractor using a railroad as an adjunct. Surely the world is

upside down. Mike the builder in all probability would have succumbed under this last straw.

I went out to ride around the work with the materials superintendent. He drove a strong, docile mare over ditches and across lots and among piles of lumber and pipe and across railroad yards. "What do you think of it all?" I asked him. "Oh, it's all right as long as we keep it in hand, but God help us if we ever let it get away from us." The observation had a deep meaning. It meant that the thing was simply too large for the compass of the human mind; that only through the agency of the system could it be kept in hand. Herein lay the crux of all the anxiety on the part of the general manager. I was reminded of his comparing himself to the casual spectator so far as the physical aspect of the work was concerned, and then I was aware that his great anxiety was in the scheme of operation; to keep it functioning well and smoothly was his concern, so that when things showed the least sign of going wrong they could be checked and corrected. And going wrong does not mean the caving of a bank, or the bursting of a water-main, or any other casual occurrence of a great operation. Such things are all in a day's work with the contractor. Going wrong means going not in accordance with a great preconceived scheme of operation whereunder certain definite steps must be accomplished every day, where, through its experience, the organization sets out the milestones of the progress it must make and the barometer must gauge and warn of impending failure of that schedule.

The materials superintendent had many anecdotes of the job; he lived the human part of it and was a familiar figure everywhere he went. There was much damning of this and of that as he conversed with the area superintendents, but the fact was noticeable that all this damning was because fate was not allowing these men to do as much as they wanted to do. Here we had the spirit of the job, the evident straining for better achievement, the sense of personal loss if things went wrong. It was remarkable how those men took to heart the miring of a truck or the breaking of some needed tool or piece

of machinery. I stopped a great line of oxen hauling a heavy piece of machinery to take their photograph. The incident didn't please the teaming superintendent, and he came up, mad all over, wanting to know what the delay was all about.

I joined the materials superintendent at a mess composed of himself and a dozen area superintendents. We sat down in our shirt-sleeves to an old-fashioned boiled dinner. Good-natured bandying ran around the table, but it was all about the work. Everybody was intensely interested in his job, and the conversation turned on ways and means of doing things. It was spirited, and there were disagreements, but the burden of it all was how to get things done better and cheaper. There was nothing staged or artificial. Evidently I was seeing a cross-section of the work-a-day lives of these men. They were so obviously and evidently out to get the government full value for its dollars, it was truly refreshing.

There is a romance about great building enterprises that is greatly enhanced by the prodigious size of these war undertakings, and the enormous consequences that depend upon their successful conclusion. If the reader has received any impression of the complexity and magnitude of it all, and the orderliness that must control the execution of the work, he will naturally inquire what manner of men these are that are engaged in this wonderfully spectacular and constructive work. The question is a hard one, for in fact they are all manner of men, and, if they are successful, then all have one characteristic in common, and that is a love for their work. Its very essence requires constructiveness and ingenuity. The outdoor life together with the constructive nature of the thing they do exhilarates them. They have a fighting spirit that is our nearest peace-time equivalent to the spirit of the soldier, and out in the open their work of battling with the elements gives them the military leader's point of view. Such is the similarity of occupations that these builders have often been called the soldiers of fortune of peace. They are many of them engineers, for, after all, their work is nothing but the practical application of engineering, and in this great crisis they quickly catch the spirit of service. It

was, therefore, only natural that in going over the work we heard so much discussion of the economies and saw the fighting everywhere to keep costs down.

And these are of the type that went forward to our first battle, a battle against the elements. A battle to erect, almost overnight, the great construction projects that were needed all over the country that our army could be called, that our munitions could be made, that our aviators could be trained, and that our supplies could be handled.

In these vast undertakings we have heard of slothfulness and waste. The stories have been distorted and exaggerated and dwelt upon until in some quarters chronic criticism obscures the whole horizon. That there was waste is ad

mitted, but that this waste would occur was most clearly seen by these, our soldiers of fortune of peace. They saw this problem and met it squarely, not in the fatuous hope that they would in all cases produce one hundred per cent efficiency, but rather with the practical realization that they would give their best in stemming to the utmost the waste that was inevitable. Beyond that, they went in with high resolve that they would deliver to the government on time, and adequately, the vast building programme upon which our very existence depended.

They are willing to abide by the result, and stand with clean hands before the country, offering what they have done as the best that was in them-ready to be judged by their accomplishment.

T was a February evening, so it seems, about five o'clock, and old Mr. VanCosen, having left his hat and uister in the coatroom, had retraced his steps slong the entrance hall of the St. Dunstan Chub to the wide doorway that led into the first-door Trim. He usually sought the Cherry at this time of day a Ittle group a men, ul a viem be stew well, were as a rue de be found there, and they were Seach, not very rimentative, rest

Now i used beveen the heavy VILÈRS My trivi isice, and peered er a moment no the room. The light on the tal bead im made a pool of am flumazon at his feet, but beyond there was only a brown darkness, coned vi de sueil of books in leather Sundling in which the gures of several pon, la vez out in big chairs before the wow, weve any visible. The window vest, a square of blank fog-blurred dusk, erved meres æ beighten the obscurity. V Vancuson, 3 sinali, plump shadow in be surrounding shadows, found an unocSpan: Ólar & his into it silently.

In aust it," said Maury sudgend, we as if he was picking up the of a conversation dropped but * Rough Setore: "and that's just the and his usually gentle voice was Kays with a didacticism unlike itself

alects most deeply a man of my scary scament and generation. Nemesis whatever you choose to call it. the rear that perhaps it doesn't exist at that there is no such thing; or worse ver, that in some strange, monstrous way ma be made himself master of it-has no longer to fear it. And man isn't fit to be altogether master of anything as yet; how still too much half devil, half ape. there's this damned choked feeling that the world's at loose ends. I don't know as it, that is, we, with all the devilish new knowledge we've acquied within the past fifty years, the dev dost new machines we've invented,

have all at once become stronger than God; taken the final power out of the hands of the authority, whatever it is, toward which we used to look for a reckoning and balancing in the end, no matter what agony might lie between. Perhaps it's all right-I don't know. But it's an upsetting conclusion to ask a man of my generation offhandedly to accept. I was brought up-we all were to believe in an ordered, if obscure, philosophical doctrine that evil inevitably finds its own punishment, and now!"

"But-" began Tomlinson.

Maury interrupted him. "Yes, yes," he said, “I know all that; I know what you are going to say. I am perfectly aware of the fact that the ways of Nemesis are supposed to be slow ways-exceedingly. I am aware of the fact that in the Christian doctrine the process is not usually completed until after death, but nowadays things are different. How, since all else moves so swiftly, can a just God afford any longer to be patient? Time has been obliterated in the last four years; space and centuries telescoped; the sufferings of a century compressed into a few cycles of months. No, there is something wrong, some break in the rhythm of the universe, or those grotesque ghouls who started the whole thing, those fullbodied, cold-blooded hangmen, who for forty years have been sitting back planning the future of men and women as they planned the cards of their sniggering skat games, would awake to a sun dripping blood." He paused for a moment. "And as for that psychiatric cripple, their mouthpiece," he concluded sombrely, "that maimed man who broods over battle-fields, he would find a creeping horror in his brain like death made visible."

"And you think he will not?"

In the darkness Mr. Vandusen suddenly sat up very straight and tried to pierce with his eyes the shadows to the right of him.

Again the chair creaked.

"And you think he will not?" asked the voice again.

The words fell one by one into the silence, like stones dropped into a pool by a precise hand. As the ripples of sound they created died away in the brown dusk, the room seemed for a moment to hold a hushed expectation that made ordinary quiet a matter of movement and sound. From the drab street outside the voice of a newsboy, strident and insistent, put a further edge to the sharp minute. "N'extra!" he shouted. "N'extra! 'Nother big raid on west'n front!"

It was Torrance who asked the question. "What-" he said. "But, butwhy-!" And then his wheezing inarticulateness broke like a dislocated bellows.

Mr. Vandusen, leaning forward in his chair, did not realize at the time the unreasonableness of the sharp blaze of irritation that at the interruption burned within him. It was not until much later, indeed, that he realized other odd circumstances as well: Torrance's broken amazement, for instance; the silence of Maury, and Wheeler, and, above all, of Tomlinson. At the moment he realized nothing, except an intense curiosity to hear what the man who had just sat down next to him had to say. "An extraordinary voice! Altogether extraordinary! Like a bell, that is, if a bell could by any chance give a sense of an underlying humor." And yet, even considering all this, when one is old and has heard so many voicesBut here he was quite rigid in the darkness. "Do be quiet!" he whispered sharply. "Can't we be quiet!"

"Thanks!" said the voice, with its cool, assured inflections. "There is nothing so very extraordinary. Men's brains are not unalike. Merely-shall I go on?"

And before Mr. Vandusen's hurried assent could be uttered, the quiet tones assumed the accent of narration. "Good," they said. "Very well, then. But first I must ask of you a large use of your imagination. I must ask you, for instance, to imagine a scene so utterly unlike this February night that your eyes will have to close themselves entirely to the present and open only to my words. I must ask you to imagine a beech forest in early November; a beech forest dreaming beneath the still magic of warm, hazy days; days

that come before the first sharp cold of winter. Will you imagine that?"

"Yes!" murmured Mr Vandusen; and he noticed that the other men did not answer at all.

"The mild sunlight," continued the voice, "filters through the naked boughs and touches the smooth silver trunks and the moss about their feet with a misty gold as iridescent as the wings of dragonflies. And as far as you can see on every side stretch these silver boles, dusted with sunlight; in straight lines, in oblique columns, until the eye loses itself in the argent shadows of the distance.

"In the hidden open places, where the grass is still green toward its roots, wild swine come out of the woods and stare with small red eyes; but save for the crackling of the twigs beneath their feet it is very quiet. Marvellously so. Quiet with the final hush of summer. Only rarely a breeze stirs the legions of the heaped-up gray leaves, and sometimes, but rarely, one hears far off the chattering of a squirrel. So!-that is my forest.

"Through it runs like a purple ribbon a smooth, well-kept road. And it, too, adds to the impression of stillness, as the untenanted handiwork of man always does. On the rolled, damp surface are the marks of the cloven feet of the swine.

"Now there is a snapping of dead wood, a rustling of leaves, and an immense tusker-a grizzled leader of a herdcomes ponderously through the sun-dappled aisles to the edge of the road. For a moment he stands there, secure and unperturbed, and then suddenly he throws up his head, his little eyes wide and startled, and, wheeling, charges back to where his satellites are browsing. There is a breathless scurrying of huge bodies; then utter silence again, except that far away a limb cracks. But only for a moment is the road deserted. It seems as if the shadow of the great tusker was still upon it when, beyond the bend, a horn, sweet as a hunting-horn, blows once, twice, ends in a fanfare of treble notes, and a long, gray motor-car sweeps into view, cutting the sunlight and the pooled shadow with its twinkling prow. Behind it is another, and another, and another, until six in all are in sight; and as they flash past one has a glimpse, on the seats of the landaulets, of a number of men in long cloaks and hel