LITMIR.BIZ

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      "Gee!" he exclaimed, "he's early today. Can I have my dinner right off?"

      "Yes," replied his mother, "but remember not to go in until three o'clock. I'm sure I don't see what keeps all you boys from dying! And how you can stand the blood suckers and turtles up there in that mud hole! Goodness! Come, dear, I've cooled off your soup so you can hurry. I knew you'd want to."

      Will Endicott dropped in at the Mannings' that evening. Will was a short, florid man, younger than Big Jim. Little Jim, his hair still damp and his fingers wrinkled from water soak, laid down his Youth's Companion. Usually when Will Endicott came there were some lively discussions on the immigration question and the tariff. Even had Little Jim wanted to talk, he would not have been allowed to do so. Among the New Englanders in Exham the old maxim still obtained, "Children are to be seen and not heard." But Little Jim always listened eagerly.

      Endicott looked excited tonight. But he had no news about the tariff.

      "There's a boy at my house!" he exclaimed. "He just came. Nine pounds! Annie is doing fine."

      "Oh!" cried Mrs. Manning, while Big Jim shook Will's hand solemnly. "Oh, goodness! I didn't know—Why I thought tomorrow—Well, I guess I'll go right over now. Goodness——" and still exclaiming, she hurried out into the summer dusk.

      "That's great, Will!" said Big Jim. "I wish I could afford to have a dozen. But they cost money, these kids. I suppose you'll be like me, never be able to afford but the one."

      "He's awful strong," said Will, abstractedly. "To hear him yell, you'd think he was twins. Looks like me, too. Red as a beet and fat."

      "Must be a beauty," said Big Jim. "That Wop that works with me has seven children about a year apart. Doesn't worry him at all. He just moves into a cheaper place, cuts down on food and clothes and takes another one out of school and sets him to work. They're growing up like Indians, lawless little devils. A fine addition to the country! I was reading the other day that by the law of averages a man has got to have four children to be pretty sure of his line surviving. And it said that we New Englanders have the smallest birth rate in the civilized world except France, which is the same as ours. And we've got the biggest proportion of foreigners of any part of America now, up here."

      Will came out of the clouds for a moment. "I've been telling you that for years. What's the matter with us, anyhow?"

      Big Jim shrugged his shoulders. "All like you and me, I suppose. If we can't give a child a decent chance, we won't have 'em. And these foreigners have cut down wages so's we can hardly support one, let alone two."

      Endicott rose. "I just happened to think. I'm going to borrow Chadwick's scales and weigh him again. They're better than mine."

      Big Jim chuckled and filled his pipe. Then he sighed. "We've got to go, Jimmy. The old New Englander is as dead as the Indian. We are has-beens."

      "But why?" urged Little Jim. "I don't feel like a has-been. What's made us this way? Why don't you and the rest do something?"

      "You'd have to change our skins," replied his father, "to make us fight these foreigners on their own level. I'm going to bed. No use waiting for Mama. There's a hard day ahead in the quarry tomorrow. That break set us back on a rush order. The boss was crazy. I told him as I told him forty times before that he'd have to get a new derrick, but he won't. Not so long as he's got me to piece and contrive and make things do.

      "I tried to talk 'Masso and the rest into striking for it today, but they don't care anything about the equipment. It's something bigger than I can get at. It isn't only this quarry. It's everywhere I work. Always these foreigners are willing to work in such conditions as we Americans can't stand. Everywhere twenty of 'em waiting to undercut our pay. And the big men bank on this very thing to make themselves rich. You'd better go after your mother, Jimmy. This village ain't safe for a woman after dark the way it was before the Italians came. I'm going to bed."

      The next night at supper Big Jim was very silent. When he had eaten his slice of cake he said in his slow way, "No more cake for a while, I guess, Mama."

      Mrs. Manning looked up in her nervous, startled manner.

      "What's the matter, Jim?"

      "Well, I went with my usual kick to the boss about the derrick and he told me to take it or leave it. That work was slacking up so he'd decided on a ten per cent. cut in wages. I don't know but what I'd better quit and look for something else."

      "Oh, no, no!" exclaimed Mrs. Manning. She had been through many, many periods of job hunting since her marriage. "Keep your job, Jim. Next week is September and winter will be here before we know it. We'll manage somehow."

      "I'll not go to school," cried Little Jim. "I'll get a job. Please, Dad, let me!"

      "You'll stay in school," replied Big Jim in his best stone chisel drawl, "as long as I have strength to work. And if I can send you through college, you'll go. Don't you ever think of anything, Jimmy, but that you are to have a thorough education? If anything happens to me you are to get an education if you have to sweep the streets to do it. That's the New England idea. Educate the children at whatever cost. I had a high school education and you'll have a college course if I live. And if I don't live, get it for yourself. I'll have another cup of tea, please, Mama."

      "Well, it makes me sick!" exclaimed Little Jim with one of his rare outbursts of feeling, "to have you and mama working so hard and me do nothing but feed the chickens and chop wood. I'll give up the Youth's Companion, anyhow."

      Mrs. Manning looked horrified. The Companion was as much a family institution as the dictionary. "How do you think you are going to be really educated, Jimmy, unless you read good things? Your father and I were brought up on the Companion and you'll keep right on with it. I'll get cheaper coffee, Papa, and we can give up cream. Ten per cent. That will make a difference of twenty cents a day. I'll turn my winter suit."

      "I'll give up tobacco for a while," said Big Jim. "I was thinking about it, anyhow. It's got so it bites my tongue. I don't need any new winter things, but Jimmy's got to look decent. My father would turn over in his grave if he thought I couldn't keep the last Manning dressed decent. Maybe we ought to give up this cottage, Mama. The Higgins cottage is pretty good but it hasn't got any bathroom."

      "If you think I'm going to let Jimmy grow up without a bathroom, you're mistaken," replied Mrs. Manning. "I've got a chance to send jelly and preserves to Boston and I'm going to do it. Don't worry, Papa. We'll make it."

      When Little Jim took his father's dinner to him the next day, 'Masso's boy Tony was sharing 'Masso's lunch. His face was dust smeared.

      "I gotta job," announced Tony.

      'Masso nodded. "He bigga kid now. Not go da school any more. Boss, he giva da cut. I bringa da Tony, getta da job as tool boy. Boss, he fire da Yankee boy. Tony, he work cheaper."

      "He's too small to work," said Big Jim. "You'd ought to keep him in school and give him a chance."

      "Chance for what?" asked 'Masso.

      "Chance to grow into a decent American citizen," snarled Big Jim with the feeling he had had so often of late, the sense of having his back to the wall while the pack worried him in front.

      Tony looked up quickly. He was a brilliant faced little chap. "I am an American!" he cried. "I'll be rich some day."

      Big Jim looked from 'Masso's child to his own. Then he looked off over the browning summer fields, beyond the quarry. There lay the land that his fathers had held in grant from an English king. But the fields that had built Big Jim's flesh and blood were dotted with Italian huts. The lane in which Big Jim's mother had met his father, returning crippled from Antietam, was blocked by a Polish road house.

      Little Jim didn't like the look on his father's face. He spoke his first thought to break the silence.

      "Can't I stay for a while, Dad, and watch you load the big stones?"

      "If your mother won't worry and you'll keep out of the way,"

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