was

landed aristocracy in the South, because he made possible the cultivation of extensive areas of land. But in the course of a few years he became a free citizen and owner of a small estate. Thus wa developed a yeoman class, a muchneeded democratic element in the Southern colonies, while at the same time settlers were secured for the back-lands, where they were needed to protect the frontier. Nevertheless, they did not form a distinct class after becoming freedmen. Some were doubtless the progenitors of the "poor white trash" of the South, but it is likely that environment rather than birth was the main factor in producing this class. While comparatively few rose to prominence, yet there are some notable examples to the contrary. Two signers of the Declaration of Independence, George Taylor and Mathew Thornton; Charles Thompson, the Secretary of the Continental Congress; and General Sullivan, of Revolutionary War fame, had all been white servants.

It is certain also that many became successful planters, and perhaps the majority respectable and desirable citizens. On the whole, the effects of the institution were beneficial. Great Britain was relieved of her undesirable citizens; many German peasants were given the opportunity to better their condition; the colonies were supplied with laborers. for the rougher work, and servant-artisans supplied wants impossible to meet in any other way. That the white servant was useful, even after the Revolution, is seen by the fact that large numbers continued to come to Pennsylvania, where the institution existed until 1831. By that time various causes were leading to its abolition. Opposition developed in Europe because of the drain of the labor supply to America. In the South the negro slave had tended to supplant the white servant, while in the North labor-saving machinery was doing so much of his work that he was no longer needed.

R. MICHAELIS was being piloted down Fifth Avenue through the fog. His little limousine, swung by big springs on a long and heavy running-gear, moved forward gently with the southbound line, which was checked at intervals as trucks and carriages crossed the Avenue or melted in the stream of traffic. He sat in a corner, relaxed and introspective, with one elbow half out of the open window, for although it was January, the afternoon was very warm. During a momentary gap in the compact procession a yellow taxicab, launched by an ambitious driver, shot in abreast of him, grazing his mud-guards and, squeaking, stopped short as the whole line halted obedient to the blue Colossus at Forty-second Street. It carried a woman with black eyes, who suggested youth freed from the trammels of its inexperience. She wore a fur-trimmed cloak, and black hat with white feather curling down one side, and this feather trembled when she saw Michaelis so close to her; but, pressing her lips together, she leaned across the short space which separated her from him, and touched his arm with a little air of ownership. It was the free act of a moment, quickly ended, and before he fully took her in she was drifting away from him; for a trilling whistle had pierced the mist, gears were clanking everywhere, and all cars but his and a huge limousine ahead of it, one of whose tires had exploded with a pistol-shot report, were moving south. Leaning out of the window, he cried: "Sylvia! Sylvia!" but the yellow taxicab, like a log in the stream, drew relentlessly away, as she stood, dim in the growing darkness, turning and looking back, waving half reluctantly; he heard her call, "Bon chien chasse de race," and she was gone.

He motioned his driver excitedly,

but they were pocketed by the crippled car ahead, and the vehicles moving past were too jealously closed up to be broken into. After several minutes of restless, fuming delay, he was free and across Forty-second Street, but then the other cars had scattered. His machine, wakened from its lethargy, started in swift pursuit, dodged in and out, skidding at times for yards, overtook a dozen other cars, and just below Thirtyfourth Street missed a fat policeman by a hair. But the taxicab had been swallowed up by the great city, and at the Farragut monument he canceled a visit in Ninth Street from his daybook, turned, and went slowly uptown again, still searching from both winddows.

Sylvia Dare! It was fifteen years ago that he saw her last, like a speck on the upper deck of the steamer, with her "swarthy man" towering over her. She must have a master, she always used to say, and had hit on this Rumanian prince just as Michaelis finished his year of being a needy student in Vienna. Her last fluttering good-by, as the great vessel warped from the pier, seemed to carry to him a reproach and a promise, but as they had both agreed that everything should stop then and there, he had not heard directly from her since, except perhaps once, five years ago, when a postal card from one of the cafés that brighten the river at Budapest came to him, bearing the single line, "Bon chien chasse de race." He had not been sure that it was in her handwriting. But now she was here in the same place with him; free, perhaps; anyway, plainly inviting as it flashed over him-she must have been before.

After years of observation in stifling dispensaries, packed with those ill and those who fancied themselves so, of learning in laboratories what trace the microscope can show of the real reason why things go wrong, of analysis of

ill-directed human motives which create the half of all disease, he had finally won out, as far as his profession was concerned. He was established and even sought for in those disorders where self-consciousness betrays itself, and where ugly spots in character may be washed away by a properly directed stream of interest. He had learned the way to make fluttering hearts march evenly, and to put neurotic women on their feet without sacrificing the approval of their husbands, by methods. made public in his book on Relapsing Personalities, which was in its third edition and had been translated into French. But he had never ceased to think of Sylvia Dare, and she had found him, after all these years, distinguished, somber, and impersonal, still brooding on the blunder of his life in letting her, who had so much to give and who gave so generously, escape him.

Her home had never been in New York, and thinking of the quickest way to get news of her, Dangerfield occurred to him.

Dangerfield, just back from three years at the French embassy, fleckless at 6 P. M., true test of the man of leisure, was in the club's big foyer, drinking a long glass of apple brandy. He was bubbling over with reawakened patriotism, and it took Michaelis several minutes to get him on to Continental topics. But he was led there finally.

"Whom do you suppose I saw last month in Paris?" he said. "The Princess Marinesco-you know, Sylvia Dare; you remember that little forceful way of hers. Poor Sylvia! She found her mas

ter.

The fellow was a brute, like most of those royalized Rumanians. Let's see, how long has she been gone? Fifteen years? Gad! time flies! She doesn't look it. She hasn't turned a hair. She might have, for they say the prince pulled her about the house by it before he finished. His valet shot him, finally. 'Self-defense,' the valet said. They hung him, anyway."

That was all Dangerfield knew, and as the club was filling up with cocktaildrinkers, Michaelis left it, forgot his car, and walked home through the misty night. Fifth Avenue, almost stripped now of its panting engines, stretched

silently before him, dim and glistening, lined with a double row of violet lights, the farthest floating in the air like twin balloons. Soon he was at the spot where she had called to him an hour before, with the well-remembered quickness and defiance, and, as always, lurking behind them a whispered promise of surrender. He was bound for the evening by professional obligations he could not shirk, but which he met mechanically, saved from error only by a long habit of being right. Through a dreary interview over a wheezing millionaire, at which the physician who called him in consultation did the talking, and through a three-hour meeting of a medical society, over which he presided by the ill-luck of being its vicepresident, he kept picturing to himself what his life might have been with her warm sympathy; and imagining, with her vigorous personality to fire his energies, a far different success from the material one he had.

The next morning a hand-delivered. letter, topping the pile that awaited him, did away with his plans for finding her. "Dear Carl," it ran, "I need you sorely. Come to me. Till then I am here and yours, Sylvia."

He had read it twice, standing up, before he called his assistant, Lynnhart, an intense young man with round shoulders and deep-set eyes.

"Busy day, Doctor," Lynnhart said, holding out the appointment card.

"Can't see any one," Michaelis jerked out. Lynnhart looked at him sidewise. "Let me see," Michaelis muttered, scanning the lined paper. "Schenck? Tell him the solution isn't ready. Mrs. Gildersleeve-that awful woman-telephone her I am sick-out of townanything. I'll see Watrous for two minutes. Mrs. Sniffens-oh! you see her, Lynn."

He did away with all of them and half a dozen others, and in a few minutes was humming up Fifth Avenue to her hotel, through a sparkling atmosphere, for the hopeless fog of the day before had vanished.

At the open door of her little salon. he stood for a moment, wavering, powerless, paying the penalty of years of repression, while she, gasping his

name, pushing aside her breakfast-table, came running to him. He met her half-way and caught her wrists, pulling them to his sides, looking down into her face.

"Sylvia," he whispered, "the same Sylvia, and free again, thank God."

She trembled and ceased smiling. "The prince is dead," she said. This from her lips fired him still further, and tightening his grasp, he drew her toward him, but she was in a different mood and turned away, shaking her head.

"No, no-not now," she said; "there is something else first-something different. Oh, my dear, why should something always come between us?"

He did not seem to understand at first, and tried to put his arm around her, but she freed herself and put her black-bordered handkerchief to her her face, leaving him nonplussed, uncertain, till she turned, metamorphosed, smiling again, the handkerchief crumpled in her hand.

"Oh, come," she said, "truce-for a moment, anyway," and led him playfully to a chair beside a divan into which she nestled. She launched a battery of questions at him, about his friends, his way of living, his daily routine. She knew pages of Relapsing Personalities by heart, and had heard of many of his famous cures. He did not try to keep up with her, feeling his way, worried, the lover lost in the physician who could not help speculating as to why she was so restless, so ill at ease, with fingers interwining and strong limbs never still under her morning gown.

"But why so nervous?" he asked at last, quieting her ring hand which had no rings on it. "It surely isn't thatI can't flatter myself?"

"Flatter yourself?" she interrupted. "How could I flatter a career like yours, a great name like yours

"What there is of it you have done!" "I have done? I? Why, what do you mean?"

"I mean," he said, leaning over her, "that what there is of good in me is you, that my work is really yours; without your image, without the memory of your free spirit breathing life into it mean, Sylvia-"

I

Without questioning, he went as she directed, shook two tiny pellets from a glass cylinder into a spoon, melted them and drew the solution up into a small transparent syringe. In less than a minute he was back again and deftly forced the shining hypodermic needle into the arm which lay bared for him. The effect was magical. She made a low sound of satisfaction, threw her head on her arm like a child going to sleep, while her lips glistened red again, a faint flush tingeing her pallor. Michaelis waited until her restlessness had quieted and her breathing had become regular, and then, putting up his watch, went over to the breakfasttable, pulling his mustache, his forehead wrinkled. He picked up the little vial, turned it to the light, studied its finely printed label, and looked sharply over toward the divan. She was watching him lazily, with half-closed eyes, and seeing the question in his face, nodded yes to it.

"How long have you been taking it?"

She beckoned him to the divan beside her, but he moved reluctantly, and chose the chair, embarrassed and ill at ease, like a man controlled by something beyond himself.

"It did not begin until years after I was married. Oh, years and years! It was only four years ago. What I went through before-but that is neither here nor there. This began it."

"You

She held out her left arm, which was crooked just above the wrist. see, it never got quite straight_again. As he had been drinking, it took some time to get a doctor, and even after it was set the pain was so terrific the doctor gave me an injection. Of course, he repeated it, and-and so the wretched thing went on."

"But you must have known," Michaelis said, like a parent reproving a wayward child.

"I didn't at first. Once, after a week or so, I asked him if so much morphine wasn't dangerous. 'Not in surgery, he laughed. 'We use it all we like." He was an ancien interne des hôpitaux, straight as a string, and I trusted him. Oh, Carl, you know the rest of it."

But he was now distant, formal, impersonal, trying to be the critical clinician who must find the right way and point it, even when it leads away from him.

This dismayed her, and, leaning toward him, she threw her arms about his knees, the wide sleeves of her gown touching the floor. He patted her shoulders, soothed her, and then gently released himself, urging her to tell him everything.

So she continued: "The young doctor came so often the prince became unreasonable, insane (you know what drinking men are), jealous, and forbade him the house. That was when it really began, for then I got my own outfitOh, must I go on? You know the storyevery doctor knows it."

It was the same old story, morphine, comforter, then friend, until it changes to the brutal master, keeping its solitary, friendless slave at its feet in trembling expectation and obedience.

"I often stopped it for a week, once for thirteen days, but then, after some quarrel, the pain at the wrist would. begin again. I would see the little needle shining in its case, so sure to blot out pain and all the other things—”

"Yes, of course," Michaelis said, coldly, "but, now he is dead, why now?"

"I have tried, oh, so many timesand cannot.'

Michaelis muttered, as though to some third person: "That's the brutal part of it. It rots the will so, blots the vision. It kills purpose, honor, truth-" Catching the look of pain in her face, he stopped, while she, getting up impulsively, put both her hands on his broad shoulders, pressing them to the back of his chair, and sat down on his knee.

"Carl Michaelis," she said, "look me in the face. Is untruth there?"

He looked at her with effort, but the desire his muscles rebelled at was

VOL. CXXVII.-No. 761.-94

lurking in his eyes. "Sylvia," he said, slowly, "you might be steeped in lies, and I would never know it.'

"And yet you doubt my truthdoubt me?"

He lifted her gently to the divan and stood over her. "You don't understand -you can't. You can't know or hate this thing as I do. It isn't you I doubt, but you are no longer you. A fiend has got a hold on you, perverted you, and you love him. Can't you see? It is as though you were my wife and were living with some beast who had alienated you, and while you belong to him how can you belong to me? And belonging to him, how can I trust you or believe you?"

"Oh," she said, pushing his arm from the back of the divan and sitting upright, her indignant eyes brilliant against the pallor of her face, "you are cruel, unfair. Why should you treat a physical weakness as though it were something immoral -something unclean?"

"I

His wrists twitched with a gesture half of reproach, half of defense. can't help it; my experience makes me see it so. There is very little physical about it, anyway. You go away with one master, get rid of him, and take another. You haven't missed the first one much, I fancy, but when it comes to this one-❞

Recognizing at last the personal motive behind the change in him, she got up with a little cry of joy and clasped his head with her hands, sinking her slim fingers in his hair, her wrists showing the tendons as she held his head firmly so he could not avoid looking down at her.

Oh,

"You," she said, "a man of science, my lover, and jealous of a drug! Carl, listen! Every word I say is true. This thing has its hold on me in one way only. My character, truth, everything about me, they are not changed; they are as they always were; my visionbut free me, and you shall see the vision. No, the effect is on my body. Why, you have just seen it. It's here. This terrible gnawing anguish here." She released him and sank back on the divan, her hand to her heart.

He leaned over her anxiously, felt