The legs and arms are often beautiful, but to show the legs by cutting off the dress at the hips is immensely awkward, and seems chiefly to serve to display the drawers, which are not a beautiful garment, and should be entirely hidden. Besides this, in winter our climate is wholly inappropriate for any such exposure, and we shall best see the beauty of a healthy child in its easy, untrammelled motion as it moves about in a simple dress (of as handsome a material as you like, provided that it is untrimmed), which is long enough to be warm and loose enough to be comfortable. If you want your children to be graceful, let them be unconscious; if you want them to be healthy, let them be sufficiently warm. No woman can have a fine complexion who as a child has been habitually chilled, and we see in the winter many children who seem literally to have nothing on from the waist down. They could much bet-quency with which he had drank at the ter afford to put it the other way, and wear nothing from the waist up, the lungs and heart being at less expense to warm the upper portion of the body than the legs, which are further away from them.

who, in Germany, most likely, had to struggle for life, with the wolf of poverty forever upon the threshold. Certainly his farm experiences had deepened and hardened in him any such tendencies. Indulging now in none of the tempta│tions of the town, he gave himself diligently to getting the highest price in the market for his wares, and persisted until he had sold the last skin, and buckled the last cent obtained therefor about his waist, and next his person, in a belt which he had himself made for the purpose.

A HELPMEET FOR HIM.

I.

But his long-anticipated object in coming to town was a something beyond even that. He had been born with, or had in some queer fashion developed within himself, an appetite which money was but a means toward appeasing. When he first came, he had put up at the cheapest tavern he could learn of, and the clerk thereof had been greatly amused at the fre

water faucet, drawing cup after cup thereof for himself. After that it seemed as if he would never be done washing his face and hands, filling and emptying the tin pan, and filling it again. Greatly refreshed, he went out to make his sales. Immediately upon his return to the tavern he again exhibited a strange fondness for water, considering how cold the weathIS name was John Detmold. Judg- er was. Again he washed his hands and ing by his name, he must have been face at the sink in the little room adjoining of German descent, and he was merely a the bar, turning on the water for the purcountry boy, living a hard life upon a pose from the brass faucet. He took a farm in what was then the wild interior long time at it, letting the water off and of Ohio. For years he had grubbed and on, off and on, as if he never would get ploughed, had hoed and reaped, with eyes through. When he had dried his face fastened upon a harvest beyond that of and hands upon the brown roller-towel, his corn and yellow pumpkins, more than he found himself obliged to take yet anthat of his summer hunting and his mid- other drink, holding the pewter mug unwinter trapping. And now the long-look-der the faucet, and watching the rush ed-for Christmas had come at last, and he was on a visit to the town which was at that date the metropolis of all that region. He was nothing but a coarsely clad rustic, as thickset, sunburned, utterly uncouth and awkward, as could be found, and he had driven to town in a cart laden with the carefully dried skins of many a squirted, until, having climbed the hill which rel and rabbit, raccoon and deer. Ignorant as the lad was, he had, where money was concerned, a skill which amounted to science. His lumpy hand had a hunger for cash which was surpassed only by the grip with which it closed upon and kept whatever coins came within its grasp. Possibly he inherited this from parents

and foam of the liquid as a toper might have done the pouring out of whiskey. "How far is it to whar it comes from?" he asked the office clerk. But that gentleman was too busy with his cigar to do more than reply, "Up street"; and John Detmold hastened in the direction indica

overlooked the town, he found and lingered long upon the banks of the reservoir which supplied the fluid in which he seemed to find such pleasure.

As he came back at last he hardly looked in at the windows of the stores. There were signs along the street telling where, to judge from the delineations thereof

up.

was.

said afterward. Anyhow, he paid his bet | was a god, only it was a god which he like a gentleman, if I hadn't taken him wished to worship by handling. If metaThat was the way it began. You phor may be heaped upon metaphor, this see, Jim was off on a drunk-Jim had been country lad had as his ruling instinct a my fireman-on a Christmas drunk, Jim certain feeling after motive power: only Well, Detmold, he talked me into less blind this instinct of his than that of it. I took him on only for a day or two, a root after moisture. To-day the same but it went on from that. He never left instinct in multitudes of more ingenious town after that day. One thing led to natures has shot up above the soil into a another. All he cared for was machin- forest of scientific seeking after the same ery. He never gave up until-oh, it was thing. But John Detmold was not to be years and years afterward-he took my without his successes also, by the wholly place. I got tired, and went down the riv- unlooked - for re-enforcement of effort er on a boat instead. Never knew a man within him, in virtue of the arrival of a so fond of an injin as he was. John species of Force of which he had never loved it more than he did his wife when dreamed. he married her, or rather when she managed to marry him. They were the queerest couple you ever saw."

II.

The

As his predecessor at the engine remarked, John Detmold did not go back to his country life. The orphan of forgotten parents, there was no reason that he should do so. Henceforth his days were devoted to the Power House. great fly-wheel exerted upon him a centripetal as well as centrifugal force, and drew him back to itself with an energy greater even than that with which it had hurled him away. From the beginning of their friendship the wheel itself did not confine its round of labor more exclusive

John. For years he toiled as fireman, shovelling in coal beneath the boilers, and shovelling out ashes, oiling the machinery, never happier than when, under the orders at first of the engineer, monkey-wrench in hand, he was screwing iron nuts on or off. Very slowly, but surely, it came to pass that the entire charge of the works was intrusted to him.

But it was a mistake to suppose that it was merely the machinery John Detmold loved so well. Really he cared no more for it than he had done for the faucets through which the water rushed into his greedy hands when he came first to town. Nor was it the steam any more than it had been the water which so seized upon and perpetually fed, if it did not satisfy, his craving. Some boys are fond of good eating and of nothing else. Others are eager, as they grow older, after whis-ly within the walls of its abode than did key, fine horses, the dice-box, land, money. Many a man finds his pleasure in society, in dress, in reputation, in woman, in art, in books. This man cared nothing for any of these, and I am certain that I know why. By some twist in his nature, the one thing he cared for was -not machinery. No, that is not it; his ruling appetite was as natural to him as yours is to you, as mine is to me; it was no more a morbid appetite than is thirst or hunger, except that it was a craving desire to know, to handle, to control Force. For the mere machinery he cared as much, and as little, as one does about the trap which catches or the cage which holds a bird; or, I should rather say, the glass tank which at once confines and exhibits a boa-constrictor, for it was the subtle, snake-like mystery of Force which gives to it its chief charm. Not that John Detmold had any definite name for this secret omnipotence which lies coiled inside the heart of the universe, like, to change the figure, the mainspring of a watch, which drives every wheel therein, great and small. Concerning it he had no theory, no definite thought, even. To him it

During all these years he made his home with Peter Johnson, a provision dealer across the street, exercising a stern economy, having his own peculiar hours of eating and sleeping. And all along he remained the same thickset, shock-haired, square-headed, slow-spoken country fellow. Plodding, indifferent to the delights of the rum-shop or the perennial circus, occupied in and wholly satisfied with his work, he came at last to seem but a mere movable part of the machinery. Only it was little people imagined that his satisfaction lay in a certain vague but persistent grasping after that which came within the very palms of his hands merely to show him what it could do if he could hold it, and then in chief measure eluded his grip, and escaped from him. He said not a

way of trapping the fox-like force which | out chance tunes, playing only by ear.

stole uncaught through cylinder and valve, he could not keep awake unless Matilda was bothering him with questions, for which she waited for no answers, herself telling him a thousand nothings.

Really that was one reason he went with her to church whenever he did go. It was little, alas! of a religious nature that John got out of the services; but somehow the singing, praying, preaching, aroused and stimulated him in devising new traps for the defiant steam. Just as the benediction was pronounced, he seemed to be on the point of succeeding.

It was very rarely, however, that John could get away from his engine to go to church, but on Sundays he would shave and brush and wash and dress with special reference to not soiling her Sabbath calico when Matilda should sit in his lap and tell him, in her piping eagerness, of everything she could think of. People accepted the malaria which brooded over the part of the town in which they lived as they did the river which dragged its slow current so near them, but the engineer had no touch of the chills and fever which, as she grew up, so seized upon and shook the girl. It was matter of course that Matilda should become thinner as she became taller, that her face should waste in consequence of the ague which alternately fevered it to scarlet or Ichilled it to ashes. As long, however, as propriety permitted, she continued to perch herself in the lap of her one chief friend, and afterward to sit as near John as possible while she talked, talked, talked to him.

A good-hearted, shallow-brained, feeblebodied, sentimental girl, she set her heart in the end upon going off to a female institute in another State. Her surly father had put into strong and often repeated adjectives his ideas concerning his daughter; but the engineer had one day a private conversation with Peter Johnson, as the result of which Matilda departed according to her wish, and was gone for two years. To do her justice, she loved the grimy machinist with all her feeble nature, and wrote him many a long letter. John cherished the epistles as they came with all respect, but, to do him also stern justice, he rarely read and never answered them. The frequent letters looked so clean, the writing upon them was of so spidery a character, that he was embarrassed. His fingers were too oily just then; something had broken about the machinery, and it must be mended right away; when he came for his meals he was so hungry; at night he was so dead tired. Besides, the poor girl had fallen unresisting into the mysterious peculiarity of her sex, and under the working of its gloomy law she could not write except with a needle-pointed pen, in the palest of ink, the longest of letters, and with every page crossed and recrossed at that. Moreover, when John did open a letter under pressure of conscience, there was no particular date thereto, nor was it possible for him to tell upon which page the document began, any more than where it ended.

But, all along, the girl was, I am sure, as nothing to the engineer in comparison to the longed-for improvement in his engine. She was little more to him at last For while the sober, stolid, monoto- than a blue-jay would have been had it nously motioned man had nothing what- perched of a summer's day, chirping and ever to say, she had very much to chat- preening its feathers, upon the rafter over ter about. The truth is, the homely girl the boiler. John would not have scolded developed from her earliest days an amaz- the bird, nor driven it away by a jet of ing love for books and for music. Find- steam, but he would not have cared had ing her way almost from infancy to the it been killed there without his knowing school-house, she skipped everything like it. So of his school-girl friend. He had hard study to read instead any and every never permitted her to show her sallow story-book or volume of poems she could face at the door, even, of his Power House. lay her hands upon. So of music, it was If she had come into it, and been struck useless to try to confine Matilda to the and slain by the great wheel, he would severe study and practice thereof, even have grieved over it; but the wheel would when her friend, to the astonishment of have been in the right of it, and he would those who knew his parsimony, hired a have said so. What show of force was piano for her. When she was not read- there in the puny damsel to allow him to ing novels or poetry, she was thrumming | care for her as he did for his engine!