say, young man, a good deal of the map of Europe has been changed since those buildings were painted last. We've been fighting the war over here, you know, too," and he glanced at Larry's overseas equipment.

"Over here?" repeated the returned Larry, mystified.

Surest thing you know," said the man. "We haven't painted because the Government needed paint and labor for ships. We haven't builded because the Government needed building materials and carpenters and plasterers and plumbers. We've worn our old clothes because wool was needed for uniforms, and we've taken money that we'd ordinarily spend on the upkeep of our property to buy bonds and Thrift Stamps. You bet, we're shabby! It doesn't take you chaps to discover it. We know it."

After that Larry had ample food for thought. It was all clear enough once it had been put up to him, though it wouldn't have occurred to him in exactly that light if his fellow-passenger hadn't started the train of thought.

Of course that was it shabby! Here he'd been away for upwards of two years, seeing a land laid waste by the devastating hand of war, and it had not occurred to him that another devastating hand, commonly called wear and tear, had been at work in his own country.

Larry was perplexed. It was right that the country should have saved and sacrificed for its Army. It was right that the people at home should have fought in their way to back the men in khaki who fought otherwise. He was proud of the honestly won shabbiness, and yet—well, should a great Nation in the flush of a great victory be shabby?

His reverie was broken in upon by the slowing down of the train and the groaning of brakes. With a start he came to. He was home.

He jumped to the platform of the familiar station and was greeted with hilarious exclamations and much backthumping on the part of the stationmaster. So cordial was that individual and so absorbed was Larry that he did not notice the gaping hole in the floor of the platform until he tripped over it.

66 I guess I'll have to see about fixin' that up," the station-master commented. "Couldn't do nothin' before-lumber's been so hard to get an' labor's harder. Y'see, it rotted out from the rain-spout gettin' a leak an' makin' a steady drip on it. I calc'lated to have the spout fixed right off, but, Lord bless you, there wan't a tinner left in town. Then the floor got to rottin' in consequence of the spout leakin'. If somethin' ain't done soon, I don't know what we'll do. Certainly is funny the way one thing leads to another."

When Larry swung into his own street, the shock was not so great as it might have been two days earlier had he suddenly been set down there. The trip from the East and the experience at the station had more or less prepared him.

Just as he had hoped, the peach trees in the front yard were in blossom-soft,

fluffy, delicately pink. The odor of them came to him as he paused to take in the scene. But the house, through them, was not the gleaming white house of other springs. Obviously there had been no painting done since before Larry went away, and the yellowing walls, streaked with the storms of two winters, had a look of almost pathetic dilapidation. The picket fence had certainly not been whitewashed since Larry himself had last performed the rites; two of the green shutters on the second floor of the house had blown down, and nobody had put them up again.

It was several hours before Larry caught his breath again. From the moment his "Hello, everybody!" had brought both his parents running to the porch there had been a constant flow of questions and answers, of exclamations and joyous nonsense.

But when supper was over the returned soldier noticed that the usually crisp curtains of the dining-room were anything but up to their old standard. They weren't exactly dirty; draggled was perhaps a better word. Looking through the open door into the parlor beyond, he saw the same neglected hangings there. His mother caught his gaze.

gone

"The spring house-cleaning hasn't amounted to much this year," she said, half apologetically. "It is so hard to get anybody to do anything. All the girls have into factories since the war. I can't get anybody to help me, so a great deal is neglected. And that reminds me, Larry, I do wish you'd look up that man who used to do caning. He was drafted after you went away, but he may be back by this time, and as soon as he can come I want to have these dining-room chairs caned. Four out of the six," she went on, picking up one and displaying it to her son's gaze, "have broken through completely, and I haven't been able to get a soul in town to mend 'em. It didn't seem right to spend all that money when the country was at war and needed it for more important things. But I really must have 'em fixed now things are getting normal again."

That was the beginning. The pumphandle was wobbly and the very mischief to use it had broken in the fall, his father explained, but it had not been replaced.

"Iron was so scarce, account of needing it for ships," the head of the house of Gill vouchsafed, "that your ma and I couldn't get anything that would fit at the hardware store and they told us they didn't expect any more in. So we just mended it up with wire and managed that way, though it's been pretty inconvenient."

When he asked about the shabbiness of the house, he was told that nobody in town had had their houses painted during the war-paint was needed for ships and camouflage, which made the price prohibitive, and painters were scarcer than hens' teeth.

That night Larry lay awake a long time and thought it all out. Just what had he

come back to? He remembered the nights in the trenches and those weary, painracked days in hospital when he had lived on the thought of home. He remembered how he had pictured it-in all the fresh spick-and-spanness in which he had left it. Yet he was back, and nothing was as he had left it. Everything looked down and out, run to seed, depressing.

"We certainly don't look like winners." he said, again taking up the train of thought that had first occurred to him on the train. "It was right to put everything we had into the war while it lasted, but I'm hanged if it isn't time somebody got fixing up, now that the war's won. Our next job is to spruce upthat's it, spruce up."

Which soliloquy was the reason why, a week later, Larry Gill made the first speech of his life.

As he had feared, they gave him a "blow-out," just as his mother had written they were doing for all the boys who came back from France. There was a

spread" in the Town Hall to which a score of the most prominent citizens lent the dignity of their presence. Larry's Croix de Guerre with palms was passed round and his arm pumped and his back slapped until he wondered if being caught in a barrage had anything on being caught in the midst of admiring friends. After the banquet a lot more people came and there was a dance under the auspices of the local auxiliary of the Red Cross.

Toward the end of the evening somebody asked for a speech. "Tell us all about it, Larry," was the general request. Whereupon the returned warrior took the bit in his teeth. He stood up on the little platform at the end of the hall where he used to recite his "piece" at school commencements.

"You don't want me to tell you about the fighting," he said, slowly. "There've been a lot of war correspondents that have done that already. I dare say you know more about it than I do. But there is something I would like to say, and I think I can tell you about it in five minutes. Most of you know about the condition already. Perhaps you know more about it than I do, but you've got used to it gradually, while I, coming back suddenly after a long absence, can see it better."

There was a little stir among his hearers; everybody was beginning to wonder what Larry Gill was getting at, anyhow. What did he mean by condition?

"You people who know business methods and business terms," the returned soldier went on, "know that there are three general ways to spend money. A business man spends for construction, for operation, for maintenance. Since the United States went to war there have been billions of dollars spent in construetion. Shoving everything else aside, the country has spent money and produced results in a way that has made the Old World sit up and take notice. We have put all our money, all our energy, all our labor, into construction and operation.

We've worked like a house afire. But in the way of maintenance we have done nothing. What wasn't aimed directly at winning the war we refused to do. And we were right. While the war lasted it was our job to make every resource of the country active for victory.

"Now the war is over, but patriotism isn't. The fighting has stopped and the need for wholesale and unheard-of production is over, but that doesn't mean that our duty to our country is over. On the contrary, in winning the war our duty has been only half done. If we stop here, we are leaving ragged ends, frayed out, that ought to be finished off.

"That finishing off process," the boy in khaki went on, gathering enthusiasm as the interest of his audience grew, "that finishing-off process means keeping on with work. It means maintenance. It means the help of every man Jack of you. Your houses, your public buildings, fences, roads, and civic improvements, have been neglected in order to win the war. Now the war is over, it's just as much your duty to turn to these neglected things and put them on their feet again as it was to save and buy bonds and wear old clothes the last two years. The good old U. S. A. needs one as much as it did

the other.

"I didn't know about these things when I landed in New York less than two weeks ago. I had pictured America as I left it. I pictured this town and my home as I left them. A lot of my time over there was spent in thinking about things back here. And then I came back, and found that things weren't the same. Our country hasn't been desecrated and violated and laid waste, like France and Belgium. We have no such reconstruction to face as those nations have. But our country has in some degree gone to seed, has run down at the heel, has become hopelessly shabby.

"We haven't spent a thing on maintenance in more than two years, and we are paying the penalty by loss of value in property and the things we own. How are we going to make up?"

There was a moment's silence in the Town Hall and everybody looked at Larry. Perhaps nobody was so surprised as he himself at his sudden oratorical turn. He'd never made a speech before, and certainly nobody had ever accused him of the ability to do so. But now he was holding his audience without effort, and he explanation was that Larry had found out something which he wanted these other people to know, and when a man as anything on his mind that he very nuch believes and very much wants other people to believe, two things usually folow: first, he finds it surprisingly easy to ell about his belief, and, secondly, he inds it still more surprisingly easy to nake other people listen. Larry went on:

"We can make up for the neglect of the ast two years by an after-the-war camaign that'll be just as vigorous and just s far-reaching as were any of the emerency campaigns that took place during

the fighting days. Then it was our patriotic duty to save. Now it is just as much a duty to patriotism to spend. Then you didn't buy new clothes because your Government needed wool for uniforms and money for bonds. Now you should buy new clothes. Your Government's fighting men need jobs, and it is your purchase and the purchase of your next-door neigh bors and the purchases of all the millions of individual men and women in the United States that supply those jobs. It is the little driblets of trade and business that, taken together, make a great stream the stream of National prosperity.

"If every man and woman here in this hall, and every man and woman through out this country, would buy and spend as wisely and as carefully as they saved and invested during the war, the country would have a different look inside of three months. If you people could only see that you owe it to your country to

66

spruce up" as much as you owed it to her to buy Liberty Bonds, there would be her to buy Liberty Bonds, there would be no shabbiness left, and the men who are coming out of the Army would not have coming out of the Army would not have to hunt for jobs. Just by seeing the situation and doing your best, each one of you, to meet it, you will do away with anything like a labor problem. If men and women everywhere will start to repair the damages that time and neglect have made in two years, there will be enough immediate work to give every returning soldier something to do-in point of fact, there will be more work than workers.

"A man on the train told me," Larry continued, "that eighty per cent of the discharged soldiers of our Army have gone back to their old jobs, which were kept waiting for them. That means that jobs are needed for twenty per cent. I should say that twenty per cent won't go awfully far if the people begin in earnest to spruce up.' In other words, it will be a case of first come, first served,' and the men and women who aren't on the job pretty soon will find a scarcity of labor, and that will mean greater deterioration of property for every added month that they are obliged to put off repairs. If you've got a hole in your roof and the rain comes through, it may cost you $20 to fix it to-day. But if you let it run another month and there is a heavy storm. in the meantime, the plaster of the ceiling and the wall-paper will be affected, and that will very likely mean double the amount of money in repairs.

66

Some people say materials are expensive now and labor is high, and so they'll wait until these things come down. That sounds all right; but are they counting on the fact that for every week they wait their property is getting that much shabbier and repairs will cost that much more? For instance, if it costs $300 to fix up your house to-day and you allowed it to go without repairs until next fall, your putting off would very likely add $100 to the cost of fixing it then. The cost of plumbing and painting, of wall-paper and hardware and the like, would certainly not be decreased $100 even by falling

prices. Consequently, it's a lot better business to tackle the job here and now before your property runs down any more rather than put the thing off in the uncertain hope that labor and materials may be less expensive in six months or two years or any other time limit you set. The country can't afford to wait. We're winners, and winners we've got to look. And, believe me, we don't look it now."

66

Well, they made all kinds of a fuss over Larry after that, and everybody predicted that he was a "coming man," and that it was young fellows of his type who made towns sit up and take notice," and what a fine thing foreign experience had been for the young generation, and so on. They said, in point of fact, all the things that small towns do say about promising young men.

Fortunately for the town, however, its inhabitants didn't take it all out in talk. Then and there, when Larry's speech ended, it was suggested that a " Spruce Up Campaign " be inaugurated and that Larry be made chairman of the Committee on Organization. This the returned hero modestly declined, and the president of the National Bank, a much more suitable incumbent for the office, was duly appointed.

It took about two weeks to get things under way. The whole town was placarded with posters in red, white, and blue ink which read, "SPRUCE UPLOOK LIKE A WINNER." The two newspapers lent their aid and gave columns to publicity. Shopkeepers made window displays that showed you what you needed to "spruce up" with, the Merchants' Association got down to brass tacks and used all its machinery to further the campaign, and the women's clubs-there were two-united with all the war work organizations and fairly buzzed with activity.

After that it was plain sailing. The town had caught the idea, which was all that was necessary. The particular modest domicile that Larry Gill had dreamed about through training camp, in the trenches, in hospital, and on shipboard was transformed into the object of his vision and made to fit into the picture that he had painted for himself. It looked at last as he had imagined it during his army life-precisely as he left it in the spring of 1917.

Of course it all happened very lately, and for the most part the "sprucing up in that particular Iowa town is still going on. They are, so to speak, in the throes of a long-neglected spring house-cleaning.

They are pioneers, those people, and they're practicing an exceedingly wholesome sort of patriotism. They're working for prosperity precisely as they worked for victory. Is it likely that any city or town or village or rural settlement in the United States is less interested in the Nation's achievement than is Larry Gill's town? The way they gave their men and their dollars, the way they sacrificed their time and their comforts, would not indicate it. Nor are they apt to be behind Larry's people in "sprucing up."