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In considering how the German people may keep up their production of food, the authors find that various factors will work against such a result. In the first place, there is a shortage of labor, nearly all the able-bodied young and middle-aged men in the farming districts being in the war. There is also a scarcity of horses, some 500,000 head having already been requisitioned for army use, and the imports of about 140,000 head (chiefly from Russia) have almost wholly ceased. The people must therefore resort more extensively to the use of motor plows, and the State Governments must give financial assistance to insure this wherever necessary; and such plows on hand must be kept more steadily in use through company ownership or rental. It may be remarked here, again, that the Prussian Government is also assisting agricultural organizations to buy motor plows. The supply of fertilizers has also been cut down by the war. Nitrate has just been mentioned. The authors recommend that the Government solve this problem by having many of the existing electrical plants turn partly to recovering nitrogen from the atmosphere.

Of course the Chapmans were entirely satisfied. Indeed Mr. Gusher so turned his guns on Mr. Romer as to make his position extremely uncomfortable. Both were guests at the old City Hotel, where Gusher was a great favorite with all the young ladies, and to whom he related his difficulty with Romer. In short, he so enlisted their sympathies in his behalf that they were ready to join him in ejecting Romer from the house as a slanderer. One said what a mean thing he must be to slander the handsome young foreigner in that way. A second tossed and turned her head aside when she met him, and pouted her pretty lips to let him know what she meant. A third refused to return his bow, while a fourth gave him the cut direct. There was no standing up against such a storm of female indignation as he now found blowing about his ears. He saw, also, that to have attempted to sustain his charges with proof would only be sheer folly. In short, there was nothing for the plain young outspoken American to do but surrender the field to the handsome young foreigner and his female admirers, seek respectful treatment beyond the sound of their voices--and wait.

And so the mood of evening is the larger and the wiser mood, because we must think less of ourselves and more of God. In the dawn it seems to us that we have our part to play, and that nothing, not even God, can prevent us from exercising our will upon the life about us; but in the evening we begin to wonder how much, after all, we have the strength to effect; we see that even our desires and impulses have their roots far back in a past which no restlessness of design or energy can touch; till we end by thankfulness that we have been allowed to feel and to experience the current of life at all. I sat the other day by the bedside of an old and gracious lady, the widow of a great artist, whose works with all their shapely form and dusky flashes of rich colour hung on the walls of her room. She had lived for many years in the forefront of a great fellowship of art and endeavour; she had seen and known intimately all the greatest figures in the art and literature of the last generation; and she was awaiting with perfect serenity and dignity the close. She said to me with a deep emotion, "Ah, the only thing that I desire is that I may continue to FEEL--that brings suffering in abundance with it, but while we suffer we are at least alive. Once or twice in my life I have felt the numbness of anguish, when a blow had fallen, and I could not even suffer. That is the only thing which I dread--not death, nor silence, but only the obliteration of feeling and love." That was a wonderful saying, full of life and energy. She did not wish to recall the old days, nor hanker after them with an unsatisfied pain; and I saw that an immortal spirit dwelt in that frail body, like a bird in an outworn cage.

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