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use of the loose-leaf system. For instance, it makes possible typewritten accounts, as the entries may be made on the machine before the leaves are filed. These accounts are neater, more legible, and more compact than those written by hand. Another advantage of the system is that its speed makes possible monthly statements of the business instead of the dangerously slow and infrequent annual statements that were formerly made out. another advantage is the ability to distribute the records among the bookkeepers so that all may be at work at once, if necessary, on the current accounts—an impossibility with bound volumes.

Still

So widely various are the uses to which the general principle of the loose-leaf system has been adapted that a complete list of them is impossible. But their variety may be suggested by the following examples: sales-book, ledger, cash-book, journal, household accountbook, price-book, scrap-book, memorandumbook, physicians' record, dentists' record, timebook, collections account, inventory, library index, stock account, etc., etc. Its applications are as general as the old-fashioned bound books, and its advantages in increased speed, reduced labor, and greater compactness seem to recommend it to a much wider general use.

AMONG THE WORLD'S WORKERS

HOME T

A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN MUIR OME is the most dangerous place I go to," remarked Mr. John Muir, the famous geologist and naturalist. He was on the train returning from Arizona to his home in Martinez, Cal., after the earthquake. "As long as I camp out in the mountains, without tent or blankets, I get along very well; but the minute I get into a house and have a warm bed and begin to live on fine food, I get into a draft and the first thing I know I am coughing and, sneezing and threatened with pneumonia, and altogether miserable. place for a man."

Outdoors is the natural

The train was passing through the San Francisco Mountains in northwestern Arizona. The conversation was left to Mr Muir, in acknowledgment of his superior powers of entertainment and instruction. It drifted naturally on to mountain tramping, and Mr. Muir told of a walk he took around Mt. Shasta several years ago. "I was stopping at Sisson's," he said, "and one morning I thought I'd take a walk, so I put on my hat and started. As I went down the path to the gate, Mrs. Sisson called after me to ask how long it would be before I would be back. 'O, I don't know,' I said, 'not very long, I guess.' 'Will you be back to luncheon?' she asked. 'I expect so,' I said, and went on. After I had got along a bit I concluded to walk up to the timber

line and back again. So I started off up the mountain side. I soon found that I could not go up directly, as I had expected, as there were long gulches full of snow ahead, around which I had to make detours before I could proceed. I kept repeating this performance, intent on getting up, until it was growing dusk before I realized what time it was. But I was used to being caught out so I simply got on the lee side of a big log, made a fire, and went to sleep on a pile of leaves. In the morning I soon reached the timber-line. Then I noticed some new snow formations near the summit, and I concluded to go on up. I made the ascent and got back to the timber-line again by about nightfall of the second day. It was snowing, so I made a bigger fire and lay up closer to my log shelter. When I awoke in the morning I was covered with snow, but I wasn't uncomfortably cold. But I concluded I would work down to a little lower level and continue on around the mountain. By this time I began to feel a little 'gone' from lack of food. I've often spent two days without anything to eat and even felt better for it; but the third day is getting toward the point of being too much. As I tramped along I thought I saw smoke. I stopped and watched it for a long time to make sure that it wasn't a ribbon of cloud. When I was sure it was smoke, I worked toward it, and in about an hour I came on a Mexican sheep-herders' camp. After a lot of

signaling and gesticulating, I made them understand that I was very hungry, and at last they got me up a meal. I spent the night with them, and the next day continued my march around the mountain, taking some bread and coffee from the camp. For three days I went on without seeing anybody. On the seventh day I completed the circuit of the mountain, and about noon I sauntered up the walk to Sisson's, as if I had just come in from a half-hour's stroll. Mrs. Sisson saw me and called out, 'Well, Mr. Muir, do you call this a short walk? Where have you been? I've had a guide out searching for you.' 'O, I just took a little walk: I went around the base of the mountain. But I got back in time for lunch, didn't I?' I had been gone seven days and had walked a hundred and twenty miles.

"But that is the way to enjoy the mountains. Walk where you please, when you like, and take your time. The mountains won't hurt you, nor the exposure. Why, I can live out for $50 a year, for bread and tea and occasionally a little tobacco. All I need is a sack for the bread and a pot to boil water in, and an axe. The rest is easy."

quarantine at Joppa. To fill in the time I
went over in the Transcaucasus to see some
American copper concessions that are being
worked there. When I got back to Constan-
tinople the quarantine was still on, and I took
a run up the Nile to see Assouan and the old
temples at Karnak. Then I came back and
went into Palestine, and saw the Cedars of
Lebanon at last. Then Professor Sargent
came along, and we went through the Red Sea.
together, and around to India. I had always
wanted to get into the high Himalayas, so I
took six weeks to go back into them about
600 miles. After I got back to Calcutta I de-
600 miles.
cided to see some of the trees in Ceylon, and that
took several weeks. Then we went on around
to Hong Kong. I had a letter from President
Roosevelt to Conger at Peking, but when we
got to Hong Kong I didn't want to get into
the hot, dusty city, so I told Sargent to take
the letter and go on up there. 'Why don't
you want to go?' says he. 'O, there aren't
any trees there.' 'Well, where are you going,
then?' he says. 'Never you mind,' says I.
'You go ahead. I'm going to buy a map of
the world and figure out a little trip.""
That "little trip" was to Australia, and in-

Some one mentioned the " Boole," reputed cluded a 2,600-mile excursion into the interior

to be the biggest "big tree."

"Yes," remarked Mr. Muir, "I measured it. I'd been fooled so often with yarns about these biggest trees that I wouldn't go until the engineer who had measured it told me himself that he had used a steel tape. Then I made a three days' journey to the tree. When I measured it, though, the most I could make its girth was fifty feet less than the engineer's figures. But I learned afterward that a lumberman who had helped him had held out that much slack of the tape as a joke. Later, when looking over some of my old note-books, I found memoranda on this very tree, which I had made years before.

66

But," ," added Mr. Muir, "I would go three times around the world to see a tree as big as they said that was."

Then the subject branched off. Later Mr. Muir told of a trip which he and Professor Sargent of Brookline, Mass., took together to study trees in Siberia. "We went out there and saw them all right, and then I wanted to see the Cedars of Lebanon that old Solomon used to build the temple. So while Professor Sargent went back to Petersburg I ran down that way, but was headed off by the smallpox

by rail, boat, stage, and afoot, solely to see the great eucalyptus forests. "And," concluded Mr. Muir, "I'd have gone on from there to Chile, to see the Araucaria imbricata, if I hadn't found out that the nearest way was to go back home to San Francisco and start over again."

The reference to the Araucaria imbricata was to an earlier part of the conversation, about the petrified forests of Arizona. For twenty years the Santa Fé has advertised these forests as a side-trip to be made from either Holbrook or Adamana. "And do you know," said Mr. Muir, "those fellows had waited all that time for me to come down there to find three more forests that not even the people in that country knew about-and one of them is the biggest one there. But what strikes me most about these forests is that there is not a solitary one of their species of trees in the North American continent. These petrified trees were carbon millions of years ago and yet in Chile to-day there are magnificent forests of this identical species, the Araucaria imbricata. And if I live long enough I'm going to make a trip to Chile just to see them."

WALTER H. PAGE, EDITOR

CONTENTS FOR DECEMBER, 1906

Frontis piece 8253

FULL-PAGE PORTRAIT OF HON. OSCAR S. STRAUS
THE MARCH OF EVENTS-AN EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION
(With full-page portraits of the late Charles Duncan McIver, Commander Robert Edwin Peary, Mr. Henry
M. Alden, and Mr. William Vaughn Moody)

A WORD FOR CHRISTMAS

THE TASKS BEFORE CONGRESS

MEANING OF THE NOVEMBER ELECTIONS
THE PANAMA CANAL BY CONTRACT
PEARY'S FARTHEST NORTH

OUR REAL TASK IN CUBA

THE WORLD-WIDE RACE QUESTION
THE TRUE VOICE OF THE SOUTH
SOME INTERESTING PERSONALITIES
WAS PROFESSOR BURGESS RIGHT?

LANDMARKS IN CORPORATION RESTRAINT
A DARK SIDE OF CHRISTMAS

THE NEW WONDERS OF COMMUNICATION

McIVER, A LEADER OF THE PEOPLE
THE CHILDREN'S SONG

ABOUT BUYING BONDS ARE THEY NOW CHEAP? (Illustrated)

EXPERIENCES IN BALLOONS (Illustrated)
THE CONQUEST OF THE AIR (Illustrated)
THE SOUTH AFRICAN CONSTITUTION
A NEW NEW YORK

WALTER H. PAGE

8265

RUDYARD KIPLING

8268

8270

DR. JULIAN P. THOMAS

8275

BERNARD MEIKLEJOHN

8283

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AN AMERICAN PORTRAIT PAINTER OF THREE HISTORICAL
EPOCHS (Illustrated)

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A TEMPLE OF PREVENTIVE MEDICINE
PRACTICALLY CIVIL WAR IN RUSSIA -
STATE OWNERSHIP IN NORTH CAROLINA
STATE OWNERSHIP OF RAILROADS IN MISSOURI AND PENN-
SYLVANIA

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THE ADVANTAGE OF PULLING TOGETHER

8360

A LESSON IN ADVERTISING

AMONG THE WORLD'S WRITERS

TWENTY NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR-F. W. HALSEY
AN ACTIVE YEAR FOR THE NOVELISTS
SOME INTERESTING NEW BOOKS

TERMS: $3.00 a year; single copies, 25 cents. Published monthly. Copyright, 1906, by Doubleday, Page & Company
All rights reserved. Entered at the Post-office at New York, N. Y., as second-class mail matter.

Country Life in America

Farming

The Garden Magazine

NEW YORK

1515 Heyworth Building DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY, 133 East Sixteenth Street

[graphic]

From stereograph, copyright 1906, by Underwood & Underwood, New York HON. OSCAR S. STRAUS, OF NEW YORK, THE NEW SECRETARY OF COMMERCE AND LABOR

"HE KNOWS BOTH HIS COMMERCE AND HIS LABOR-BY CLOSE STUDY, BY PERSONAL EX-
PERIENCE AND BY A SYMPATHETIC INTEREST IN THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF EACH"

[See page 8261]

THE

DECEMBER, 1906

VOLUME XIII

NUMBER 2

The March of Events

E DO not live on any Utopian planet,

WR

nor has our own world yet swung into the millennium. There is much our prosto be done, therefore, before even perous and pleasant part of the earth becomes a perfect home, and before we ourselves become an ideal society.

Still, as Christmas comes, we have as many reasons to be content, to take good cheer, to feel kindly toward all men and all nations, as any people under the sun-perhaps more such reasons than any other people; and it is a good exercise to think of these reasons now instead of the misfortunes and struggles that engage us overmuch during the rest of the year.

We have had bountiful crops; we have such a volume of traffic as was never dreamed of before, an era of good dividends, of plenty of work, of high wages, and (in spite of our masters, the trusts and corporations,) abundant opportunity yet for initiative and ambition.

Let us pray to be delivered from all class hatred and uncharitableness and to be at peace with ourselves and our neighbors, bearing good will to all.

THE TASKS BEFORE CONGRESS

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Senate deposited it while its wrath was yet hot over the informal way in which the Administration had negotiated the preliminaries. The wrath has had time to cool, and the delay has perhaps sufficiently vindicated the Senate's dignity to permit the treaty to be made, if President and Senate can agree on terms. The Philippine tariff is due to come up again to meet once more the determined opposition of the "Interests."

For our domestic comfort, Congress will consider the setting off of great forest reserves in the Appalachian and the White Mountains, and the reduction of tariff duties on works of art. These are two proposals that deserve to be carried out. An effort will be made to have authorized a system of swamp reclamation similar to the admirable irrigation service. The moot question of restricting immigration is also in a fair way to be settled by the imposition of more rigid qualifications for entrance. The session is more likely to go down in history, however, as the one in which an American "corrupt practices act" was passed than for any other reason that can be foreseen. The laws prohibiting political contributions from corporations and requiring publicity about campaign funds are in a way to be passed.

The recent Cuban revolution may have some effect on the chances of the bill to give citizenship to the Porto Ricans. Prospects are less bright for its passage then they were a year ago. year ago. It still remains for Congress to decide whether we shall build a battleship even larger than the new British leviathan, the Dreadnought. But the most ticklish problem

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