even known them to forget the names of some of these invited professional entertainers from town. And they may never see them again; for there are professional guests in our much-vaunted civilization, just as there are professional hosts. One group breeds the other, you see- -a natural progression; and, the process once started, there seems to be no stopping it.

AST week some five thousand

66

L gobs," from the American fleet

that is now in the harbor, visited New York City every day.

"You can buy the movies and the theaters, but you can't buy a home." So said one of them.

"Gee! We had a glorious time last night," said another.

66

"What was the play?" he was asked. Why, we didn't go to the theater at all. It was too wonderful where we were. Mrs. asked whether we wanted to go to the theater or stay where we were, and we all wanted to stay."

Sixty per cent of the present gobs are younger than has hitherto been the case. They come from afar, for the most part from Western and Southern homes-little country towns. While they are waiting for their ships or when the ships come back the boys are given shore liberty.

Movies are surely interesting; but after the movies, what next?

It is right there where something good should face something bad. It is right there where those who stand for the " something good" should realize the need of these boys for absorbing recreation and

"Pitiful? Of course. To stay in town for the summer, even if one cannot afford to go away-unthinkable! What would the other fellow say!

"And there it is in a nutshell-the other fellow, eternally; a fear of him and his stupid opinions. For he is the kind who would forget, since he has no more brains than you, as soon as he turned the

SHORE LEAVE

yet their need to have the nearest thing possible to home. What better influence can they have than a club which they can call their own, where they have their own committees to make house rules; a club paid for by the members and free from all unnecessary restraint and regulation; a club to provide home environment with sleeping and canteen facilities for men on liberty; a refuge from the street; a safeguard against disease; a place providing beds and meals at reasonable prices; a headquarters for men where they can find their mail, meet their friends, ascertain what is going on, even to which they can bring their troubles?-in other words, a kind of repair shop and home.

Accordingly in July, 1917, the Navy Club was started for the enlisted men of the Navy and Marine Corps. A floor of an office building on Fifth Avenue was taken. The crowd grew. Eight hundred to three thousand men came in every day. So another floor was taken.

There was never any drunkenness there. There was no disorderly element. When the war came to an end, officers of the Navy were asked: "Is it your

next corner, whether the shutters were up at your abode or not. And why should you care what he thinks, anyhow! You are the other fellow to some one; and you know, as well as I do, how little you amount to!"

With which polite statement the Young-Old Philosopher took his leave, a smile upon his lips.

wish that the Navy Club go on?" Their opinion was voiced by Captain Robinson: "There have been hundreds and hundreds of boys saved right here. You don't know it. They don't know it. Their mothers will never know it. But we officers know it must go on, for the sake of our boys and the Navy."

Housing was then found at 13-15 East Forty-first Street.

The present activity of the Club has been concentrated on the visit of the fleet, so that not one boy will have to walk the streets at night if it can be prevented. And that to him means not only having a comfortable bed to sleep in but protection to his health and morals.

Who is not moved to help the Navy Club in its $700,000 "drive" for building and endowment purposes? Its reve nue from its canteen and dormitories and dues covers most of its running expenses, but it needs adequate and permanent headquarters. It has cared for over eight hundred thousand men. Who will not be moved to send some check, no matter how small, to the Club's treasurer, Edward C. Delafield, Navy Club, 13-15 East Forty-first Street, New York City?

N my reading this morning I came upon the following story of the conversion of Jacopone da Todi, a Franciscan monk of the thirteenth century:

The story is that Jacopone's young wife, whom he passionately loved, was fatally injured by the collapse of a platform at a marriage feast. She was magnificently dressed, as he wished her always to be, but when her splendid robes were taken off for treatment, or in preparation for the grave, it was found that this fair young woman wore a hair shirt. She had taught him his lesson-the vanity of all earthly things -and henceforth he essayed to conform his life to it.

BY LYMAN ABBOTT

They wore high heels, like the "donne contigiate" of Cacciaguida, and hid them with trailing robes; they rouged if they were pale, and used washes if they were dark-to the damnation of many.

The rich bands of hair upon their heads never grew there. They polish their faces with pomades; they shape their noses. They say they do it all for their husbands. They do not. It is to attract others, or to "show off" and crush rivals with superior splendor and perhaps with poisonous words.

This reads very much like a picture of modern "high society." Fashion is the same cruel and mocking mistress in all ages of the world. The fine dresses vary infinitely, but beneath them is worn the same hair shirt. Thackeray with no gentle hand in "Vanity Fair" tears off the disguising robes from the masqueraders; Maria Edgeworth, more preacher than artist, discloses the hair shirt beneath the fine dresses that she may point the moral; Jane Austen gently disarranges the concealing garments just enough to give us a glimpse of the hair shirt which they cover.

Must we then discard all beauties, all flowers and jewels, all silks and satins, 1 go in drabs and grays? No! I sushe Quaker ladies sometimes wore

hair shirts under their drabs and grays. Beauty in garments worn to gratify the love of beauty may be as legitimate as beauty in paintings, sculpture, or architecture. But beneath beautiful garments worn "to show off and crush rivals with superior splendor" there is, I suspect, always a hair shirt.

A multi-millionaire once said to me, "Dr. Abbott, you doubtless have observed that millionaires rarely laugh." I had not observed that fact, for I have not any such acquaintance with millionaires as would have enabled me to observe it. He himself was a merry soul, who had a contagious laugh, and his principal care when I knew him was to get rid of his superfluous wealth in such a way as would do the least evil to society and the greatest good to the greatest number. To do good and not harm by gifts of money is no easy task.

But I have known enough of successful business men to be quite sure that the hair shirt is a more common garment than most of us suppose. We hear a good deal of profiteers, and doubtless there are Shylocks willing to coin money out of their neighbor's misfortune. But to one such profiteer there are, I am sure, scores of captains of industry who during the past six years have been hard at work by day and lying awake by night, perplexed if not tormented by the problem how they can so adjust their business to the constantly changing business conditions as to involve the least possible damage to the employees who are dependent upon them for their livelihood. Croesus has not the lazy and luxurious time which so many attribute to him. The strongest argument for the democracy of industry is not that it would divide more evenly the rewards of industry, but that it would divide more evenly the heavy responsibilities of wealth.

If there is any profession which might be thought immune from the necessity of wearing a hair shirt it would be that of a hair shirt it would be that of the ministry; but it is a garment that is often worn beneath the preacher's frock

coat.

A young man graduates from college at twenty-two. If he goes into medicine, law, or engineering, he must devote three or four years to professional study and three or four more to apprentice work in his profession before he can earn enough to support a family. He will be fortunate if he can marry before he is thirty years of age. And unless his father can support him during this prolonged preparatory period, he must beg, borrow, or earn money for his support and for an expensive education.

But if he goes into the ministry the theological seminary will give him his

three years of professional education, and it is not improbable that some educational society or some benevolent friend will provide the necessary funds for his support. At the end of the three years he will find a parish which will insure him, not perhaps a comfortable support, but a possible livelihood. He can marry at once and get a home and be reasonably sure of a position in the community. As a lawyer or a doctor he will have to earn public respect; as a minister it will be accorded to him.

But he will find in his profession a hair shirt which he will wear but his congregation will not see.

Not merely will his income be too small to provide for his reasonable desires for himself and his loved ones, not merely will his opportunity for a change to a larger field and a better salary probably be denied to him, not only will he not improbably find himself with few or no literary or scholarly companions in his parish and he himself shut out by an invisible and impenetrable wall from congenial companions who are in the community but not in his church, not only will his profession, if he is conscientious, impel him to be the friend of the ignorant, the uncultured, and the uncongenial, but he will have experiences in his church which will lead him at times to say to his wife, My dear, I sometimes think that the Lord's patience must be more tried by the saints than by the sinners. He will find in his church a doubting Thomas who is determined not to believe; an ambitious James and John more eager to see what they can get out of their church connections than what service they can render; an impulsive but unreliable Peter, eager in professions of loyalty but hesitating and timid in practice; and not impossibly a highly influential Judas who is ready to sell out his principles if he can get a good price for them. He will get more compliments for his sermons than evidences of a changed life, and he will want evidences of a changed life, not compliments. Often he will say of his hearers what Jesus said to his hearers, "Why is it that ye do not understand?" And sometimes he will wonder, as Jesus sometimes wondered, whether there is any faith on the earth. In short, he will often be called upon, like Ezekiel, to preach to a valley of dry bones, but, unlike Ezekiel, he will get from the dry bones no response to his preaching.

I suspect that we all have to wear at times a hair shirt, and that the problem for us is, not how to get rid of it, but how to make it minister to our humility, our patience, and our human sympathy with others who, unknown to us, are wearing a similar garment.

W

AY back in Vermont, on the farm, wasn't it good to shove the chairs a little closer to the big fireplace, along in October, when the woods were all painted reds and yellows and soft browns and we had the chores done, and had been to church in the morning, and the neighbors that had just taken the Brown house with the story and a half and an ell walked across the meadow and dropped in to talk a while, and mother said, "Just you stay to Sunday night supper!"

Do you remember what there was in the big iron kettle on the back of the stove in the kitchen-the kitchen that would hold half the houses nowadays? Oh, but it was good, Sunday night-corn meal mush, and lots of it. And there was a blue pitcher full of milk, so rich with cream it was almost as yellow as the leaves that rustled against the east window. And gingerbread-the old-fashioned sort, made of sour milk and just a little mite heavy, because father liked it that way; and a pan of rosy fall apples, not a basket, just a lovely shiny tin pan, and the white bowls, and great-grandmother's solid silver spoons that " over."

came

And everybody talked a little. About

the minister's sermon that was just a "bit harsh," or the choir that wasn't quite up to mark because the regular soprano had gone down to Boston to see her cousins who had come on a visit from Illinois, and the supply did "real well, considering "-and how the new fashion of having a choir wasn't so sort of dignified as "congregation singing," and the organ did get out of fix.

About the weather outlook, hard winter predicted; and the doings in Washington, where it looked as if some of the men were trying to set themselves up above the rest of us. Never do at all. This was a real democracy, we allowed; and just about the time when politics threatened to divert the conversation threatened to divert the conversation from topics then considered more proper for Sunday night, mother comes back from the kitchen with half a pumpkin pie, to tempt the guests who were a little new to our country hamlet ways.

How that mush did hold out, and how mellow those apples felt! And sister had to explain that she never got any lumps in the mush when she made it because she sifted in the meal before the water quite boiled; while on our side of the fireplace there was nursed an idea that the vigorous stirring given by the boy

YOUTH

from the village by way of "not being in the way" helped a lot.

Then somebody carried out the bowls on the great tin-no "japanned "-tea tray, and father opened the melodeon for a little "sing." Sister played, and of course "the boy" helped find the places and hold the book open, and he sang a nice second to the pretty soprano notes in the lead, while the others "chimed in," some in tune and some in triumphant discord.

The new young neighbors went home early, as they should, and "the boy' didn't stay long; just talked over the afternoon walk through the maple woods, and planned for another next Sunday. In the old red brick farmhouse where generations of children had satisfied hungry appetites on Sunday night mush and milk and gingerbread, the youngsters dreamed of adventure, and the elders turned in contentment to their beds, welcoming sleep to fit them for the week of work ahead.

Simplicity, sincerity, nobility in unexpected places, high hopes-these are the visions that a Sunday night supper of mush and milk, apples and gingerbread, bring to a city wayfarer, weary of the road, camped in a "single" apartment in California.