During the fall and winter months, Miss Farmer has a special class for cooks on Wednesday evenings, at which there is an average attendance of seventy-five to a hundred women; the cost of each lesson being fifty cents, which is sometimes defrayed by the girls, sometimes by their employers. In Pratt Institute there is a like class from October to April, with an average attendance of seventy-five. A similar one is connected with Drexel Institute, and many others may be scattered through the land; but the fact is that they are not patronized by those who most need the lessons.

Take the immigrant. What is the use of going even to a free school when she can obtain employment instantly, and begin to refund the passage money which in nine cases out of ten has been advanced to her? The girl born upon American soil usually has early grasped the American axiom that the way to do a thing is to do it, and she takes a place and does it. Why should she go to school? If she can learn at some one's else cost rather than her own, and be paid for the trouble, why not take that way? Going to an employment bureau in Boston, and showing my references, I asked for work. The matron in charge questioned me: "What have you been doing?"

One of the pleasantest classes I ever taught was in San Francisco under the principalship of Mr. James G. Kennedy. The boys and girls often had to leave school at an early age to help take care of the family. Cooking was introduced into the course of study. I was delighted, for I thought it would not only help the girls to make their homes more attractive, but provide a sure way of self-support when it became necessary for them to leave school. The following conversation took place one afternoon in my classroom:

"Do you know, girls, I am surprised. We have all been so interested in that kitchen upstairs, and yet Do you not like the cooking lessons?"

"Oh yes, Miss Klink."

"Yet here we have been talking for half an hour. You have been telling me what you intended to be and to do in life, and not one has mentioned cooking. I had not expected it of the boys, they will be cooked for, I hope; but girls, not one single one has said that she was going to do housework. Tell me why."

There was a chorus of responses.

"It is nicer to work in a store; you are let off evenings, so you can go out and

'And you don't have no work on Sun

"Can you cook ?"

"Yes, I am a good plain cook." "Can you cook meats, make soups, salads, hot breads, pies, and cakes?"

"Yes, I can do all that."

"Well, why don't you go out as a cook, then? I can get you a good place right away."

"I cannot make puff paste nor timbales; besides, I do not know whether I could cook well enough. I have never gone out just as a cook."

"If you're a servant there is n't any place where your beau can come to see you, but just the kitchen."

"And our mothers want us at home at night." This from a dear little Minna whose ambition had been to "just get married and keep house like mother."

"It is awful lonely, nobody comes to see you hardly ever." As Bella was an inveterate talker, her objection carried weight.

"Yes, Miss Klink, and your work is never done; you are always busy all the

"We are not training servants" in our

But in every rank of life homemakers might be trained either to make their own or other homes better. The problem is largely one of supply and demand, and the best source of supply is the American girls, many of whom are growing up to poverty, and worse, because they do not get the right training when they need it.

Perhaps it may be wise to state that all the illustrations used in these articles are those which have occurred in my own observation and experience in those cities which I considered to be typical. People have said to me, "But, Miss Klink, people would see you were different from the ordinary maid, and treat you accordingly." That may be true, but I do not think so. I believe we are all nearer the commonplace than we think we are, and given a different dress, a different style of wearing the hair, above all, a different environment, and few of us rise so completely above these things as to be particularly noticeable. Take many a maid, dress her in her mistress's clothes, and could a casual observer tell who was who? Turn the case the other way. One lady said to me, "You seem to be above your position." I replied that I had not always "lived out.” Another employer, of whom I shall always think with pleasure, said, "It has been so nice to have you with me; you are educated, and yet you keep your place." Did I not "keep my place" because of my education? One employer corrected herself in the use of "Miss Jane" nearly every time she asked me to do anything. However, I cannot say that I impressed the majority of my employers as being anything else than I represented myself to be, a woman eager for work, and anxious to do it just as well as she knew how.

VOL. 95- NO. 2

When I first determined to undertake this investigation, while endeavoring to preserve an open mind, I must say that my sympathies were with the maid; and, commiserating her, I put myself as far as possible in her place. I felt that she was a downtrodden creature. Going out as a domestic employee, I expected to be lonely. Well, I was. I experienced to the full the loneliness of one who is a member of the household but not of the family, the isolation of the stranger in a strange land. I expected to wear caps and aprons, and I did; it was a small matter. I was prepared to have every one call me by my first name, and was seldom disappointed.

But for one thing I was not prepared, and that was that I should pity my mistress. My experiences as a domestic employee led me to see the difficulties of the employer, more clearly than I had ever imagined, through the light of my own mistakes, contrasting the service I was giving with what I felt I should give. When I made a meat pie with a crust that might have been a blanket, do you not suppose I imagined what my feelings would have been, had any one placed that creation before me? I was as sorry that it had to be eaten as I was that it had been made. When, one day, in a wild hurry, I took the wrong jar from the cold closet and filled the water glasses with gasoline, was I sorrier for myself or for my employer when my offense "smelt to heaven"?

While performing the duties of the maid, I have instinctively put myself in the place of the mistress, and for that reason I shall discuss this matter of domestic service again, to see how the present tendencies can be shaped into policies which may induce action leading to some result.

XXV

IN WHICH MASCADO HEARS NEWS

THE keepers of the camp lay supine in the late yellow light, on beds of skins or heaped brown needles of the pines, following the shade around. The women, of whom there were three or four with the renegades, stooped at their interminable puttering housewifery by the cold ashes of their careless hearths.

Isidro lay apart from the camp. He had his back to the Indians, and stared into the hot sunshine lying heavily on the fern beginning to curl brownly at the edges. Fading torches of castillea stood up here and there, and tall yellow lilies running fast to seed. The air above the meadow was weighted with the scent of the sun-steeped fern; small broken winds wafted it to him, palpable, like wisps of blown hair. It recalled a day when a gust of warm sweet rain had sent him and the lad to shelter under a madroño on the hill above Monterey. They had to run for it, crowding against the tree bole shoulder to shoulder, with the boy's hair blown across his cheek. He was conscious of a thrill that flew to his heart at the recollection and settled there.

Arnaldo lay on the earth the full width of the camp from Escobar. He seemed asleep, and now drew up a limb and now thrust it out in the abandon of drowsing indolence. Every move carried him an inch or two nearer the edge of the rose thickets and deep fern. Arnaldo was, in fact, widest awake of any at Hidden Waters, bent upon a series of experiments to discover how far and by what means he could get away from the camp without exciting suspicion. For the tracker had made up his mind to escape. Devotion to

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Escobar, in whose service he held himself to be, had kept him faithful to his bonds, but now the virtue was gone out of patience. He understood better than Escobar how the campaign went against the renegades, and in the event of Urbano's absence at any critical moment of defeat, doubted if Mascado would have the ability or the wish to save his prisoners. Besides, the tracker was greatly bored by the company of the renegades; the food was poor, and Isidro had no more cigarettes, and though he managed to win all the young man's coin at cards one day, Escobar as regularly won it back the next. The escape must be made good in broad day, when the prisoners had the freedom of the camp, being bound at night and placed between watchers. Therefore he lay awake and experimented while the camp dozed. Being so alert, he caught the first motion of approach, and guessed what it augured by the manner of it. The noise of battle had not penetrated so far in the thick wood; the panic of flight, sobered by distance, brought the refugees up at nearly their normal discretion. They came noiselessly enough, dropping from the trackless stony rim of the hollow, or by secret trails through the manzanita. They cast down their arms as they came, and trod upon them with moccasined feet; they dropped to earth by the unlit hearths and turned their backs upon their kind. One who had broken his bow across his knee stood up and made a song of it, treading upon the fragments as he sang.

This is the bow, the war-weapon,

The heart of a juniper tree.
False, false is the heart,

For it answered not to the cord,
For it spake not truly the will of the bow-

man.

"Ai, ai, ai !" rose the wail of the women; they beat upon their breasts and cast ashes on their unbound hair. “Ai, ai!-false is the bow," they chanted.

The voice of the singer rose bleak and bitterly, and this was the sense of his broken words, sighs, gesticulations, and wild intoning:

It is the arrow, - slender reed of the river,
The feathered reed, the swift-flier,
The reed that stings like a snake,
That speaks of death to the foeman,
Like a snake it is false to the bowstring,
Like the snake of two tongues it speaks falsely.

Mascado came haltingly into the isle of pines, and held up his hand; the song and the wailing ceased.

"Faugh!" he said; "ye sing and ye weep, but ye will not fight, frightened at the sound of guns as children at thunder, beaten upon your own ground! Weep, then, for ye cannot fight!"

The men took the whips of his scorn in silence, but Marta's motherliness was proof against the occasions. "Neither will you fight any more, my son, if you lie not down and let me tend your wound."

He turned from her and dropped sullenly upon the ground.

Isidro had drawn in toward the group of wounded with the natural motion of curiosity and concern. The prolonged dribble of fugitives over the rim of the hollow, the distress of their hurts, the noiseless effect of hurry and disaster, involved him in the sense of defeat. Being so fine as to feel that, he was too fine not to be conscious of the isolation made for him, as a party of the enemy, by the indrawing of their thoughts upon their own concerns. The best help he could offer was the turning of his back upon their shameful hour.

The sun, sloping far to seaward, parted the shadows of the pines in slender files by long paths of light that led the eye away from the prone and sullen fighting men toward the lonely wood. Isidro let his gaze rove down the yellow lane, walked toward the outskirts of the camp, leaned his back against a tree, looking into

the shadowy hollow of Hidden Waters, thinking homesickly of El Zarzo, and turning presently, obedient to the instinct which warns of approaching presence, saw her there. She stood beyond him in the shadow, where the sunbeams filtering through the boughs of pines spread a vapor thin and blue,- the erect young figure and the level, unfrightened gaze. He could have touched her where she stood, but made no motion; his pulse leaped toward her with the tug of his startled spirit.

"Lad, lad,” he whispered.
"Señor," she breathed.

A long flight of time went over them while they stood in the shadow and each grew aware, without so much as daring to look, what absence and circumstance had wrought upon the other. A keen and sudden whistling shocked their spirits back to the sense of things, as the naked blade of a knife flashed between them and sank to the hilt in the earth at their feet. Back in the camp Mascado had half raised himself from his bed to throw it, and now leaned upon his elbow watching them with keen darts of hate. They saw the weary and sullen braves turn toward him with momentary amazement, and Marta running to ease him to the ground with a steady flow of talk, presenting her broad back as a screen between the pair and him. The knife handle still quivered in the sod.

"Now if he were not already a fallen man I could kill him for that," said Isidro. "Let him be," said the girl; "Marta has much to say to him."

"And I to you, Lady Wife; I left you safe at San Antonio; how comes it that you are here?"

It was a long story, and the best telling of it would have left something wanting to a full understanding. Jacintha lifted up her eyes and laid it bare. Isidro could not escape the conviction that this detached young spirit loved him, and for a man who meant to make a priest of himself took it light-heartedly.

"I did wrong," he said, "to leave you

so; wrong, again, not to go straight to you from Peter Lebecque's. Will you sit? There is much to tell."

They sat down on the strong roots of the redwood. Mascado's knife stuck in the ground between them. They told their story in concert, capping each other's adventures with coincidences of time and occasion, with now and then a shy hint of explanation of motive or impulse, not clear but wonderfully satisfactory. They thrilled together over the fact of their nearness on the night of the raid at Soledad, and discovered in themselves on that occasion presentiments that should have warned each of the other's proximity. They touched lightly on the reasons for Jacintha's flight toward Hidden Waters. She was afraid, she said, lest Mascado should do him harm, and only Marta could persuade Mascado; this did not quite account for Jacintha, but they let it go at that.

The light failed out of the hollow, and little fires began to glow among the dead leaves. An Indian woman brought them food heaped on a piece of bark. Pungent odors of night-blooming plants came out of the meadow, and the wind creaked the drowsy redwoods. Jacintha told of her night's sally from Monterey, the long strain of riding, the shock of the battle and retreat. Isidro's hand crept out along the gnarly roots; another hand fluttered toward it and lay softly in its grasp.

"Oh, my Briar, Wild Rose of the Mountain, was it worth while to endure so long, to risk so much?"

"It was worth," she whispered.

An Indian came up and plucked Isidro silently from the earth and led him to his bonds. The girl crept away to Marta. Mascado's knife stuck still in the ground.

The first thing Isidro did in the morning, when he had his freedom, was to pull up the blade and carry it to Mascado. The renegade's face was set in its usual lines of severity, but the rage and sweat of battle, the drain of his wound, more than all, the fever of his night's musing on Marta's news, had not left him without

traces. He sat with his back to a tree, and his eyes were dull; he dropped the knife in its sheath, and turned away. Marta and Escobar exchanged glances. "He knows?" questioned one. "Knows all," answered the other.

The young man turned back to Mascado. "Madam my wife," he said, “the Commandante's daughter, comes to no harm?" It was put as a question, but appeared a threat.

Mascado, who was at the ebb of spirit and strength, made a motion of negative.

"I am surety for that," said Marta. Urbano's lieutenant roused; he was not yet at the point of letting a woman speak for him.

"She needs no surety," he said. He rose up stiffly, hesitated, and turned. "Even now we hold a council; it will be as well she remains a boy in the eyes of the camp, and is not seen too much with the prisoners."

"You know best," said Escobar with no trace of raillery. It was the first word that had passed between them concerning the girl, since Las Chimineas. Once spoken it bound them together for her protection, and they began to grow in each other's esteem.

Maybe Mascado's wound had drained a little of the graceless savage out of him. As the affair stood it was too big for him. He believed Jacintha to be a wife in fact and Castro's daughter. Escobar had beaten him, and so had the Commandante. He felt the girl immeasurably removed from him; if it came to that, in her dispassionate contempt she had beaten him worst of all. What he might have thought had he been whole and his men undaunted is another matter,- one does not often think unharnessed by conditions.

Isidro saw the force of Mascado's warning in the sour looks he had from the defeated renegades drawing in to council. It threatened open hostility at the discovery that Arnaldo the tracker was missing. It was surmised that in the confusion he had slipped away to bring