THE SUNDAY FICTION. MAGAZINE, JUNE 18, 1916.
many of whom secretly admired and liked
M:rk, gathered about with horrified yet
fnscinated eyes. Nero was about to give
their jaded Roman nerves a fresh fillip.
As for Mark, he struggled impotenfly
against his bonds. A black roughly
quelled his writhings.
"It's a long, long way to Tipperary,"
said he to himself. "I'm going back
home!"
He fastened his eyes upon the great
"crystal lens of Nero, which he had left In
his golden platter on the citrus-wood
table.
"I'm In New York; the year Is 1915," he
repeated, while the giant black held him
fast and another turned the key in the
metal box.
VIII.
THE kneadings and proddings con
tinued. It seemed to Mark as if a million
needles were being driven into his body.
Languidly he opened his eyes and gazed
into the pallid face of Oscar Swenson of
Swenson's Turkish Baths, whose muscles
had been developed in the rubbing-room.
"You bane come to?" Oscar emlled.
Where you get It, such a bad one?"
Hark Forrest closed his eyes wearily.
"In Rome," said he.
"Rome!" exclaimed Oscar. "Now, If
you say L'tica or Syracuse, I feenot sur
prise. But Rome! I never know they
bane even have a barroom in Rome!"
Two hours later Mark Forrest ambled
down Sixth avenue with much on his mind.
The least of his troubles was the new
sample line of the Novelty Neckwear Com
pany. Presently he stared curiously at
the weather-worn sign of "Professor Bal
thazar, Crystal Gazer." Across the street
he beheld a florist's shop and bought a
huge bunch of Roman lilies.
Then, of course, he went into the pas-
11
ttccerii. The pretty Italian girl was there,
fortunately without custom. With a cour
age formerly foreign to him, Mark pre
sented 'the lilies to her.
"Oh!" she cried. "You have been a
strangrr! And now you come with Ro
man "lilies. For so long I have not seen
them .' " x
She smiled, and again Mark noted her
perfect teeth, and the dimple.
"Toll me, please," he said, "what ia
your same?"
"My name?" She smiled at him again.
"My name is Simonetta."
Copyright by The Frank A. Munsey Co.
four do:
ARS
A
WEEK
(ConUnued from Page 5)
He was the first down in the morning.
He was the youngest child and the young
est employe who had ever been trusted
with a key to the outer door. He worked
like a soldier. He loved his work. He did
a man's toil and then looked about for
more and found it and did it and did it
better than it had ever been done before.
And all the while he was cheerful and
occupied and enthusiastically interested.
He invented a new and a better system
for keeping count of the Incoming rolls of
cloth and the outgoing consignments to
the cutters, which saved time and money.
He assumed, not arrogantly, but authori
tatively, direction and colonelcy over
branches of the routine surrounding his
department. He had personality and push.
He made his circle larger. He carried con
viction. He was a natural born success in
commerce.
He didn't look down on the tired, list
less boy who WTote the tickets. He didn't
haye mudh time for him. But he did him
a fine turn by stopping five minutes at his
table one day and discovering that 50 per
cent of the ticket work could be shortened
by ordering a few rubber stamps.
When the young failure was sick for a
day or two the wildfire boy did his work.
And it was a revelatlorf. For that day or
two the ticket writing department took on
a blaze of energy and an importance it
had never been dreamed to enfold. And
the day's job was done in about an hour,
In addition to all his other work, and the
tickets were written as they had never
been written in beautiful figures, abso
lutely accurate, legible, clean, prompt.
Then he went on a two weeks' vacation
and the ticket boy did his work while he
was gone. And never had there been as
much trouble in a year with the "piece
goods" as there was in those two weeks.
The figures never tallied. Pieces of cloth
recorded as In stock were nowhere. Bolts
of cloth scheduled out and credited as dis
membered by the knife, vivisected into
Sunday suits for the country trade, stood
insolently on their bottom-ends and said:
"Cut up, are we? Well, we don't feel that
way."
And when the eat-'em-up stock boy
came back he found everybody verging on
dementia tailorino and his beloved depart
ment edgewise. He cast a not unsympa
thetic, but entirely pitying, smile on the
confused young bookworm, rolled up bis
sleeves, buzzed and whirled and spun
about and, in two hours, had his stock as
pick and span and regular and balanced
as it had been before he went away.
"There's some boy," said the foreman
of the cutters. "Gold and dynamite, that
youngster. He'll own a factory some day
or I'll eat my knife. He's got pep and
horse-sense and his eyes open. Watch
him walk can that kid travel? He don't
hit the floor at all. Say he's bossing me
already. And the funny part f it is he
tells me right. "
And, as the film placards say, so it
went on.
Four years went on like that.
At the end of that time the Ty Cobb of
the plant was manager of the stockroom,
assistant buyer of all the cloth, buttons,
linings, tapes., hooks and eyes and thread,
was drawing $18 a week, had a rolltop
desk, wore patent leather shoes and was
""engaged to the niece of the boss.
The other lad was what do you sup
pose? He was still writing tickets; and
no better than before. And he was still
drawing $4 a week and biting his lip in
silence as the foreman of the cutters pelt
ed him with anathemas and called down
the wrath of the God of Broadcloth upon
his book-stufEed head.
And the long-suffering boy, who had
grown pale and tall and morose, who had
forgotten what free week day daylight
looked like, who still read literature late
into the tired nights and who had never
known what it was to have 50 cents for
his own, resigned.
His father had found a position for
himself which paid enough to support his
whole family. And the no-gcod boy, who
had grown to be a disappointed old man,
was told that he might now return to
school and take up his life where he had
resigned it where he had broken off the
thread to write pasteboard tickets and
hear himself reviled by a coarse workman
for four years 1,400 working days for $4
a week $800.
Everybody in the factory wished him
well when he left. Every pne agreed that
school was a good place for the overgrown
child. Every one agreed that any place
was better for him than a place where
there was serious and important work to
bo done.
The rising boy who was now superin
tending the stockroom shook him by the
hand heartily. He wasn't a bad sort at all.
He knew his superiority and made no ef
fort to hide either it or the fact that he
knew it. But he wasn't cocky over it. He
was merely wonderfully assured of him
self. So he gave the departing brother some
crisp, sage, sane advice about industry
and bucking the line, advised him to be
come an undertaker or a barber or a
school-teacher, and hurried back to feel of
some new beaver that had just come up
the freight elevator.
And the boy, with no regrets and al
most with a fear that it wasn't really true,
walked out and went home.
Next day he was bewildered when he
felt the pressure dissipated. The sodden,
sordid, sickening drill was over. He didn't
have to rise by 6, take his bundle of lunch
eon in a paper bag and ride with laborers
and yawning shop girls and white-faced
counter snappers in foul, packed car's to
the smelly, smoky wholesale region, to
take up the endless hours of muggy toil
that began with punching a galling time
clock and ended with the searching of his
book by the timekeeper to see that he
hadn't concealed a stolen yard of sleeye
lining in it.
He went to school instead.
There he found other boys and girls.
They were merry and mischievous and
young and free. They knew "nothing of
factories, nothing of tickets and cutters
and weird institutions like timekeepers
and foremen.
They started the day easily. They got
to school in time to hear the big bell ring
cheerily for the opening of classes. Polite
and dignified tutors greeted them genially
and talked to them of the mysteries of
geometry, the beauties of rhetoric, the se
crets of science, the intricacies of Latin
constructions, the wonders of history.
Some four years older than his class
fellows, our boy absorbed more readily
than the others. Besides, he had learned
much from his readings. Furthermore, he
was hungrily eager. Every moment was a
honeyed joy, doubly so for what It was and
for what it was not. So he became the
foremost scholar of his class. He leaped a
grade here and another there, he doubled
his studies and overtook pupils several
years ahead, and when he was graduated
he had made up two of the fruitless, use
less, driven, exiled years that he had
served in the black hole of cloth cutters.
Not only had he won the credits and
the diploma in shorter time and with more
brilliant honors than had ever been known
in that school before, but he was pro
claimed a marvel; he was promulgated a
prodigy; he was prophesied the career of
a geniusT" '
Nobody in the factory kept track of
him through the two school years. Now
and then he met, one of the hands and told
him briefly that he was still at his studies.
But in the same school was a grandson of
the foreman of cutters, and he told at
home with envy and respect of the bril
liant work which our young uncaged bird
was achieving.
"Don't tell me about that loafer," his
grandfather used to say, as he sat in a
rocker, a pipe between his jaws and his
stocking feet propped against the radiator.
"Maybe he is good at Latin. I guess that's
what he wrote most of them tickets in
nobody couldn't read them."
Our boy was now nearly 20. A college
career was out of the question. He had
already cost more than his father's purse
could weather. So he had to find work.
But now he sought work of more con
genial nature. He found it in a newspa
per office, the editorial room. Fancy not
that a reporter's work, especially a young
and new reporter's work, is all romance
and big words and fine excitement and
fame. But it is nothing like the stock
room of a clothing factory, either.
And here, strangely, no one complained
that he was lacking in energy or fire or
resourcefulness or even in accuracy. He
struck that newspaper office like a meteor.
He brought to it vim and talent and skill
and foresight and an appetite for work
and a natural inventiveness and a ready
flow of words and a refined and rarely
matured viewpoint on daily life that sent
thrills up the nerves of withered editors.
They couldn't believe it. Again and
again they sent him against the phalanxes
of the difficult, the trying, the impossible.
He stormed them, he leaped them. In a
year he was the most efficient "getter"
and at the same time the most telling
writer on the sheet. His salary hurdled
the accustomed barriers.
He reported great national and inter
national conventions and events of his
toric importance. He wrote poetry for
the feature pages and comedy for the
comic section. He became a subeditor.
He grew into the city editor's post before
he was 23. He tired of desk work and be
came a critic, then a special writer,ythen
an editorialist, then a star correspondent
who touched nothing but the high spots of
the world's affairs.
And then he wrote a play a play about
a factory, with all the pathos of poverty
and the fallacies of fictional freedom.
The play hit that town like he bad hit
that newspaper office. In one day word
seemed to spread to every corner of the
community of millions that it was a classic
"hit," a smashing success.
Every newspaper wrote of him. His
photograph, his biography, his antecedents
even, became matters of public attention
and general curiosity.
He was 30 now. He was the hero of the
literary circles and the lion of those soirees
and functions that he chose to attend out
of the many that were sent at him. Men
went home and woke their sleepy wives
to boast that they had shaken his hand.
II is royalties carao in in waves. His
income was $1,000 a week, with more and
more in prospect. He had two automobiles
and a secretary and was called by name
by tile head waiters.
Tile author stood near the theater at
the height of the gratifying run. A taxi
drew to the curb and a man and a woman
alighted. The man wore evening clothes
of perfect pattern. The author glanced at
the trim of the coat and recognized it as
No. $77. The; man in it had been the boy
of phenomenal promise in the almost for
gotten factory.
Tne man dropped his wjfe's arm with a
jolt when he saw the author. He walked
over and extended his hand. The author
took it with joy, for the fellow had been
an amiable and decent chap long ago,
when the author had been an anemic fail
ure, a crawling disappointment, a weed In
an alley-patch cultivating commercial veg
etables for market.'
"It's the first night I could get away,'
said the man. "We're busy over to the
factory. You know, I'm general manager
now four thou' a year."
"Good," sajd the author. "I'm proud
you are and I'm glad you are. I bet you're
the best manager that plant ever had.
And you'll own it yet."
"Thanks," said the manager. "Who
am you should be proud of me? You're
a great man now. The whole town is talk
ing about yoii. When I tell people I knew
you years ago they laugh in my face
When I heard you wrote this big hit I
made up 'my mind to see it. I admit I
never believed in the old days you had
that kind of stufT in you."
"The shop wasn't conducive to it," said
the author With a smile.
"No, you "were a long ways from home
there."
"Oh, by the way," said the author, "is
the foreman of cutters still alive?"
"Sure," said the manager. "And still
on the job."
"Here," said the author, writing on a
card, "give him this it's a pass for two.
I want him to see the play."
"He's seen it." said the manager. "He
was here the opening night In the gal
lery."' "What did he think of It?" asked the
author, rather eagerly.
"Swore you never wrote it said yo
couldn't even write tickets."
Copyright, 916, by J. Keeley .
Adam at tHe Front
Here is a true story from Paris. A
batch of conscripts were to be examined
by the army doctor. The Utter, after see
ing that everything was ready In the room,
cVHed out to the soldier attendant:
"Send in the first man."
Tb attendant shouted: "Adam!" A ad
in walked a man whose name it was, and
who happened to be- the first on the list