himself. Only in the arrival of a new prisoner did the prison yield a break in the monotony. While all of the boys

bore the brand of humiliation, it was, of course, in the nature of things that some should be temperamentally meek and submissive and some bold and belligerent. Sputts, the pugnacious, the sturdy physiqued, freckle faced, mangy headed, was one of the bold ones, and he ruled with tyrannical injustice. But Sputts became monotonous even to himself, and the arrival of a new victim was hailed as an infusion of new life. That was why the boys paid particular attention to the single window, in the far end of the shop, from which could be seen the dusty road leading from the city, and that was why, at a propitious hour every morning, Sputts peered out the window and scanned the road, as an ancient pirate might have scanned a highway of the sea.

Sputts had gazed out the window for half an hour when he climbed back and excitedly faced the other boys, a volley of "Ho!'s" issuing from his mouth like bullets from a battery.

"T' wagon's comin', fellers. Ho! t' wagon's comin'! She's comin'! She's

The new comer was a lean, angular boy. The oppressive strangeness of the place seemed to have filled him with an inarticulate misery. As he hazarded sly, mistrustful glances at the other boys, he trembled shrinkingly; and when he turned again toward the wall in front of him gullies of dirty tears streaked down his pallid cheeks and fell in wet spats on the bench and on his hands. Something like a sob, a guttural convulsion half smothered in his throat, escaped him. Yet he did not speak.

Sputts had his eye on the new prisoner. He began to amuse the other boys by shaking his fist behind the stranger's back. Then he gave gesticulatory demonstrations of how he would castigate the new boy, how he would flounce the new boy, and how, finally, he would tramp. the new boy on the floor and silence him in the dust of ignominy. His pantomime caused general tittering; and when the guard had gone and Sputts began to deploy in a sidewise direction up the shop, all eyes turned toward the new prisoner.

One by one the boys fell into a circle about the stranger. Sputts, in the center, kept moving in, but the singular part of it was that the new prisoner, with his back toward them, appeared oblivious to their presence. Sputts had expected easy assault on a cringing, helpless, timid gazelle. So the indifference of the new comer angered him. He moved closer and nudged the stranger on the elbow.

"Say," said Sputts; "wutcheinfer?" But the stranger remained silent, his back toward them.

tormentors with a blank stare. Sputts, disconcerted, slipped his foot out and kicked the stranger's shoe.

"Say, wutcheinfer?”

"Punch him in t' ribs, Sputts. Oh, punch him in t' ribs!"

But the look of patient endurance, of glum stolidity, of almost pathetic superiority, with which the new prisoner drew himself aloof, gave Sputts a keen sense of astonishment; and, as the superintendent inopportunely passed through the shop just then, and the boys, perforce, scattered, Sputts went back reluctantly, with gnawing consciousness that his mates had cause secretly to ridicule him. Sputts had been used to exert an authority that aroused in him an inordinate conception of his worldliness, and he lived in the assumption that he had traversed the whole travail of life from nonage to dotage, and he was not one to be balked. Now here was a stranger, inscrutable, who refused to expose himself to submission.

Already the boys were beginning to make fun of Sputts. Jimmie Szag was turning surreptitious somersaults. From other quarters came insinuating grimaces.

"Oh, youse fellers jes' wait till I git t' chance, t'en I'll lam 'im," cried Sputts. "Oh, won't I lam 'im!"

The new prisoner, though he must have heard the threat, paid no heed to it. He worked now with less timidity. He seemed preoccupied with that which. was within him rather than with that which surrounded him. He was as one who was nursing a secret. His every movement became an act of importance; a gesture of his arm, a twitch of his head, a wink of his eye, fell under scrutiny, and in the next few days he was regarded as one shrouded in dense, fuliginous mystery.

"Oh, youse fellers jes' wait till I git t' chance," reiterated Sputts; "t'en I'll lam 'im. Oh, won't I lam 'im!"

III.

One evening, at sundown, when the prisoners were allowed to play in the recreation grounds, they pressed from the building in streams, assorting themselves into their respective clans. The new prisoner, emerging into the open, slinked through the crowd, a figure of immutable silence, and, seeking to avert the scrutiny that had been laid upon him, slipped close to the wall to sit down finally on a bench beneath a lone tree that seemed to be as solitary as he.

He kept silent company with the silent tree, and watched coyly.

Soon the boys began to discover that the only attractive part of the ground was where the new prisoner sat, and, Sputts in the lead, they congregated tauntingly about the tree. Toward them from the prisoner came the same blank Jimmie Szag was in for prompt action and Sputts, fearing derision. twisted himself into a pose of combat and said:

stare.

"Say, wutcheinfer?"

The new prisoner arose and braced up against the tree trunk, defiantly.

"Wutcheinfer?" "Punch him in t' ribs," shouted Jimmie Szag. “Oh, punch him in t' ribs!"'

With this Sputts stumbled forward as if by accident. "Wut's yer name?”

The new prisoner pushed his assailant forward. "My name's Billy Smejkalan' I kin lick yeh."

The crowd, electrified by this first parting of the stranger's lips, went wild. "Oh, Sputts, he sez he kin lick yeh. He sez he kin lick yeh!"

Constrained by the situation, Sputts plunged in. There was a tumbling of two tightly embraced bodies, a splutter of gravel, a widening of the circle of spectators; frequently there were pauses, during which two irate faces looked savagely at each other; then more jeers from the crowd, and another mass of inextricably mixed arms and limbs

rolled over the ground. Finally the tocsin voice of Sputts sounded a peal of imploring-it could be seen that Sputts was the nether one; and in another moment Sputts lay flat on his back, flayed as he had never been flayed before. Billy, the new prisoner, displayed majestic dignity in getting up to shake the gravel from his clothes; and Sputts skulked ingloriously to quieter parts.

After this the stranger relapsed into his former taciturnity. But it was evident that he had gained prestige. When, in response to the bedtime gong, they sauntered back to the building, Jimmie Szag loitered near the stranger and took occasion once to remark: "Say, Billy, yeh laid him out great, yeh did-jes' great." But to all external appearance Billy was voiceless.

In the dormitory the dishevelled condition of Sputts' bed coverings indicated that he had retired without much loss of time. He had covered himself up, head and all. The other boys, with some awe, watched the new prisoner as he got into his cot. After the lights were turned out, animated whispering continued until sleep intervened and the place was in quiet.

IV.

Admiration for the new prisoner and surprise at the defeat of Sputts, the bully, aroused in Jimmie Szag such conflicting emotions that he found it difficult to sleep. Several times he had fallen into oblivious dozes only to wake up again and consider over the whole situation. The whipping of Sputts had appealed to him as the accomplishment of an impossibility; also, what was the reason of the stranger's speechlessness? Throughout the day all the new prisoner had said was: "My name's Billy Smejkal-an' I kin lick yeh." Not a word after a glorious victory, not a quiver of pride, nothing but the humble, retreating muteness.

Late in the night Jimmie became conscious that he had heard a sob. At first it affected him as only a part of a dream, but the sobbing, rising and falling as if the sufferer were enduring extreme anguish, awakened him at last and he sat up. All the sleepers lay quietly; but across the room, in the light of a window, stood the figure of a boy.

Throwing aside his coverings, Jimmie leaped out of bed and stole stealthily through the room toward the window. The boy was weeping with heart broken bitterness, burying his face in his hands and sniffling convulsively. It was the new prisoner. Instinctively Jimmie laid. his hand on him, who, at the touch, turned.

"Wut yeh cryin' at?" asked Jimmie. Jimmie's sympathetic tone seemed to console the stranger. He checked his tears, dried his face and looked out the window. "I ain't cryin' at nuttin," he said.

"Oh, ut's sumpthin'. Yeh wouldn't cry fer nuttin'."

66

"Tain't nuttin' much—jes' kind of— say, wut's t'em lights down there?"

"T'em on t' top of t' wall? Thet's t' watchmen, t' guards wut keeps t' pris'ners from 'scapin' over t' wall at nights. They'll pot yeh if they ketch yeh tryin' t' 'scape,-blow yer head off. Bang!-jes' like thet."

Jimmie's confidential impartations stirred comfort and loquacity in the new prisoner. He was beginning to feel that his tongue was his own. "Gee! I wouldn't try teh climb over t' wall at nights," he said; "would you? not at nights! 'cause they're watchin' all 'round, ain't they?"

With little relevance, with almost no relevance at all, the new prisoner deviated, as if to the sole question of his existence, "Say, is tyferd fever ketchin'?" "I dunno," said Jimmie. "Is ut a sickness?"

The electric arc light in the courtyard

TLANTA has the unique distinction

AT

For many years she has been the honored president of the Woman's Press Club of Georgia, one of the strongest and most influential clubs in the South, and is Georgia's vice president of the International Woman's Press Union, the International Sunday School Primary Union, the National Congress of Mothers, and is president of the Primary Sunday School Union of Georgia. Among the progressive women of Georgia, Mrs. King is as typical as was her son-in-law, the peerless Grady, among

of having on her leading papers a group of great-grand-mothers who are doing regular editorial work. These women were born to wealth and reared in what was known as the "lap of luxury days" in the South, yet they braved the storm of the sixties and have blossomed in a literary way into as much importance as they have always been socially. Twenty-three years ago, at the suggestion of her son-in-law, the renowned Henry Grady, Mrs. King began her editorial work on the Weekly Constitution, which has by far the largest circulation of any Southern publication. In all these years she has never failed to furnish her two pages of good copy, and there is, perhaps, no Southern woman of the day more generally beloved than "Aunt Susie" of the Constitution. Mrs. King inherited her literary talent from her father, Judge Augustine Smith Clayton, who was an author of importance in the early part of the nineteenth century.

men. More could not be said. That in her are combined the best elements of the old as well as the "new" woman is exemplified in the fact that, despite her multifarious duties, she is an ideal wife, mother, grandmother, and greatgrand-mother to the third Henry Grady.

Georgia's "grand old woman," Mrs. Rebecca Latimer Felton, has made more impress on the political life, character and history of the state, these past thirty years, than

many of our best known men. Mrs.