PREFATORY NOTE

To the reader of this volume who is not acquainted with The Midland, a word of comment in regard to that magazine may be acceptable. The Midland was founded in 1915 in the hope that it might encourage sincere and competent writers, especially in the middle west, by giving them a hearing too often denied in the existing magazines. It was not conceived as a commercial undertaking, but as an adventure in publishing, for its own sake, work which had been written for its own sake. It has paid no salaries or profits, and has made no payment for contributions. Its writers and its editors have worked in comparative freedom, unhampered by any purpose of attracting large circulation or by any necessity of conciliating advertisers. In their choice of stories for publication in the magazine the editors have always tried to apply, rather than any standard of popular taste or any academic rule of thumb, the canons of the art of story writing itself.

It has been a difficult task to select from the files of nine annual volumes a group of stories so small as the present collection which should yet represent the full range of the work published in The Midland. Probably any regular reader of the magazine will miss from this volume some stories which he would have chosen, and hence will be no more wholly satisfied than is the editor himself of the stories which I selected as probably the

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,

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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

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