best we have published, less than half appear here. The others remain, possibly for a second series.

I wish to express my gratitude for help in the preparation of the volume to Percival Hunt, now of the University of Pittsburgh, in whose course in the short story given at the University of Iowa for many years, some of these stories were written.

Iowa City, Iowa.

JOHN T. FREDERICK,

T

WASTED

BY MARY ARBUCKLE

HE social organization of Glendale, in the era before "movies" and motors, was a spiritual

aristocracy with rank directly proportional to degrees of sanctity. In that community of the zealous, Mrs. Embree held high place. She was a quiet woman whose face had the worn fragility of a delicate fabric too roughly used. At meeting, its look of gentle abstraction was replaced by one of beaming rapture. She was the widow of Brother Embree, of sainted memory, an itinerant preacher whose lifelong headquarters had been a small rented farm near Glendale, whence he sallied forth at frequent intervals "on the Lord's business," leaving his wife, four girls, and a small son, Tom, to run the business of the farm. Tom was twelve when his father was called to forsake his earthly itinerancy for a celestial abiding place, and, as the girls had married and gone, the widow moved to town and put Tom in school, supporting herself and him by taking in washing and doing plain sewing.

Her life was a forcible demonstration of the text: "Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth." She had always had to work cruelly hard; she had lost three children in their infancy; and all her girls had married unwisely-godless men-two of them swearing western ranchers with tempestuous energies devoted solely to the

I

accumulation of the root of all evil. The youngest girl, Callie, well, the least said about Callie, the better! She had taken up with the village disgrace, Amos Lawson, drunkard and professional loafer who at one time in his worthless career had served a term in the "pen" for stealing a calf. In a tumbledown shack on the outskirts of Glendale, she and her unmentionable spouse dragged: on an outcast existence, the maintenance of which was shrouded in obscurity. But then, allowance should be made for Callie; she was never quite right—as a child, she had been called "simple."

It was a subject of continual wonderment in Glendale that with the arrival of Tom's maturity and the consequent increase in his money-getting powers, his mother's toil did not slacken nor the number of garments fluttering from her lines diminish. She worked just as hard when he was twenty-two and clerking regularly in Dixon's Drug Store as she had when he was a small boy in school, picking up an occasional quarter by running errands. This was the one thing on the spotless and otherwise open page of "Sister" Embree's life that savored of mystery-that Glendale did not understandher silent, concentrated, unremitting toil; needless, surely, since Tom made enough to support them both. On this subject, she kept her own counsel even under pressure of direct inquiry. But she was a liberal giver to the cause of foreign missions and contributed her full quota to the preacher's salary, and whatever her reasons for wearing out her life at the washtub, they were godly

reasons.

It seemed a sort of sacrilegious incongruity that Mrs. Embree's next-door neighbor and closest friend should be Mrs. Murray, for Mrs. Murray was the village