that I would have to wait till they had time to look for it. At the end of the second thirty minutes, and seeing that no effort was being made to get the contract, I remarked that perhaps it might be just as well for me to call on the clerk of the district court while waiting.

Simple as that statement may seem, it had a surprising effect on the paymaster. Hurrying to the door of his enclosure he urged me to enter, sit down, and wait for the manager. The manager, he assured me, kept all contracts locked in a safe of which he alone knew the combination. On my persisting he followed me along the passageway, begging me "as a friend" to have a little patience. Another odd feature of the performance was that the housekeeper of the Belgrave, though she had held the position for more than ten years, could not direct me to the city hall.

Once on the streets every passer-by was able to point out the city hall and tell me in just which corner I would find the clerk of court. This man was or pretended to be as ignorant of Sea Foam as the housekeeper had been of him. When I first stated my case he had some difficulty in recalling that there was such a hotel in Atlantic City-it is one of the largest on the boardwalk and less than five blocks from his office. His negro man-of-all-work was so well informed that he was able not only to locate it exactly but to give the names of the stockholders.

"Leastways they call 'em stockholders," the old negro man added. "But everybody knows old Miss Dorset done built the Sea Foam with the money she made out the Jonquil House. Yes'm, that old white 'oman owns both them hotels. She's that stingy she'd skin a flea for its hide and tallow."

The reputation given Mrs. Dorset by this negro man was not borne out by the employees of the Sea Foam. Two waitresses who had been longest in the service of the hotel, when boasting of Mrs. Dorset's wealth, had added that she gave large sums to the support of the Atlantic City branch of the Florence Crittenden mission.

"Indeed!" I replied. "Quite evidently she is doing her best to keep it supplied

with patients." And I meant exactly what I said.

The clerk of court, when warning me against "invoking the law" for such a small sum, informed me:

"The judge is all right, of course, but when it comes to a case against one of our large hotels there's never any telling which way the cat will jump. I strongly advise you to go back to the hotel and see the manager. Maybe they will have found your contract and will be willing to pay you at the rate of sixteen a month.” Then he added, as he handed me his card: "I wouldn't be surprised you'd find them with the money all counted out ready for you."

"Neither would I," I answered, keeping tight hold on the muscles of my face to prevent myself from returning his smile.

And it proved even as he said. Not only was the money ready for me but the paymaster's manner had undergone a complete change. Telling me that the manager wished to speak to me, he held open the office-door and politely ushered me in.

The manager of the Sea Foam is, or was at that time, a square-built man with red hair. As we stared at each other across the broad top of his mahogany office-table our eyes were on a level. It was quite evident that he expected to stare me out of countenance. He made a mistake. His eyes were the first to give way. "Won't you sit down?" he said, motioning to a chair.

"Thank you. I have neither the time nor the inclination," I told him. "What is it you wish to say to me?"

"To ask you why you went to the clerk of court."

"To prove to the Sea Foam waitresses that they can force the hotel to live up to its contracts."

Then I told him of the way little Beulah had been treated. He listened as though hearing of such an incident for the first time. Judging by what I had heard it had been the policy of the hotel toward waitresses for years.

At lunch, my last meal at the Belgrave, when describing my experience I distributed copies of the clerk of court's business cards.

not fail, so many and so zealous are the organizations in which they associate themselves for this laudable purpose.

A little while ago we had a nationwide better-English week to encourage respect among the youth of this jazzy age for the poor old English language. I shall express without apology my opinion that in these free States we are making no marked headway in the attempt to improve spoken or written English. Hardly a day passes that I do not hear graduates of colleges confuse their pronouns; evil usages are so common as to arouse a suspicion that propriety and exactness of speech are regarded by many as more highly honored in the breach than the observance. And yet grammar and rhetoric are taught more or less intelligently by a vast army of overworked and underpaid teachers, according to text-books fashioned by specialists who really do try to make themselves intelligible.

My attitude toward this whole perplexing business is one of the greatest tolerance. I doubt seriously whether I could pass an examination in English grammar. A Japanese waiter in a club in my town used to lie in wait for me, when I visited the house at odd hours in search of seclusion, for the purpose of questioning me as to certain perplexing problems in grammar. He had flatteringly chosen me from the club roster as a lettered person, and it was with astonishment that he heard my embarrassed confession that I shared his bewilderment. To any expert grammarians who, inspired by this revelation, begin a laborious investigation of these pages in pursuit of errors, I can only say that I wish them good luck in their adventure. At times I do manifestly stumble, and occasionally the blunder is grievous. A poem of my authorship once appeared in a periodical of the most exacting standards with a singular noun mated to a plural verb. For proof-readers as a class I entertain the greatest veneration. Often a query courteously noted on the margin of a galley has prevented a violence to my mother tongue which I would not consciously inflict upon it.

To add to the fury of the grammar hounds, I will state that at times in my

life I have been able to read Greek, Latin, Italian, and French without ever knowing anything about the grammar of either of these languages beyond what I worked out for myself as I went along. This method or lack of method is not, I believe, original with me, for there are, or have been, inductive methods of teaching foreign languages which set the student at once to reading and made something rather incidental of the grammar. This is precisely what I should do with English if I were responsible for the instruction of children at the age when it is the fashion to begin hammering grammar into their inhospitable minds. Ignorant of grammar myself, but having-if I may assume so much-an intuitive sense of the proper and effective manner of shaping sentences, there would be no text-books in my schoolroom. All principals, trustees, inspectors, and educational reformers would be excluded from my classes, and I should insist on protection from physical manifestations of their indignation on my way to and from the schoolhouse. The first weeks of my course would be purely conversational. I should test the students for their vulgarities and infelicities, and such instances, registered on the blackboard, would visualize the errors as long as necessary. The reading of indubitably good texts in class would, of course, be part of the programme, and the Bible I should use freely, particularly drawing upon the Old Testament narratives.

I should endeavor to make it appear that clean and accurate speech is a part of good manners, an important item in the general equipment for life. When it came to writing, I should begin with the familiar letter, leaving the choice of subject to the student. These compositions, read in the class, would be criticised, as far as possible, by the students. themselves. I should efface myself completely as an instructor and establish the relation of a fellow-seeker intent upon finding the best way of saying a thing. If there were usages that appeared to be common to a neighborhood, or intrusions of dialect peculiar to a State or a section, I might search out and describe their origin, but if they were flavorsome and truly of the soil I should not discourage

their use. Self-consciousness in these early years is to be avoided. The weaknesses of the individual student are only discernible where he is permitted to speak and write without timidity.

When a youngster is made to understand from a concrete example that a sentence is badly constructed, or that it is marred by a weak word or a word used out of its true sense, the rules governing such instances may be brought to his attention with every confidence that he will understand their point. My work would be merely a preparation for the teaching of grammar, if grammar there must be; but I should resent such instruction if my successor failed to relate my work to his. I consider the memorizing of short passages of verse and prose an important adjunct to the teaching of English by any method. "Learn it by heart" seems to have gone out of fashion in late years. I have recently sat in classes and listened to the listless reading, paragraph by paragraph, of time-honored classics, knowing well that the students were getting nothing out of them. The more good English the student carries in his head the likelier he is to gain a respect for his language and a confidence and effectiveness in speaking and writing it.

Let the example precede the rule! If there is any sense in the rule the example will clarify it; if it is without justification and designed merely to befuddle the student, then it ought to be abolished

anyhow. The idea that children should be seen and not heard belongs to the period when it was believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. Children should be encouraged to talk, to observe and to describe the things that interest them in the course of the day. In this way they will form the habit of the intelligent reporter who, on the way to his desk from an assignment, plans his article, eager to find the best way of telling his story. Instead of making a hateful mystery of English speech it should be made the most natural thing in the world, worthy of the effort necessary to give it accuracy, ease, and charm.

The scraps of conversation I overhear every day in elevators, across counters, on the street, and in trolley-cars are of a nature to disturb those who view with intense satisfaction the great treasure we pour into education, believing that where the investment is so generous the dividends must be proportionately large. The trouble with our English is that too much is taught and not enough is learned. The child is stuffed, not fed. Rules crammed into him for his guidance in selfexpression are imperfectly assimilated. They never become a part of him. His first contacts with grammar arouse his hostility, and seeing no sense in it he casts it aside with the disdain he would manifest for a mechanical toy that refused to work in the manner prescribed by the advertisement.

their table. My tip was a soiled onedollar bill ungraciously given. It was one hundred cents more than any of their former waitresses had received, and they had been stopping in the hotel for more than four months.

The family occupied five of the most expensive rooms in the hotel and monopolized the services of two chambermaids and a scrubwoman. There was not a week while I was serving them that the wife did not make at least one trip to New York or to Philadelphia. On her return she invariably boasted to any waitress who would listen of the amount of money she had spent and the expensive clothes she had bought. At one dinner she wore a wonderful evening gown, for which she stated she had paid twenty-five hundred dollars.

Knowing the wages paid to working women in New York at that time, I wondered what per cent of that sum had reached the women who had made the gown. What was their weekly wage?

It was not, however, the conduct of this family of millionaires that convinced me before I had been a week at the Sea Foam that domestic service is very different from what I had imagined. In the first place I had always assumed that hotel waiters had the same food as the guests, certainly what was left over. Such, I was assured by the head waiter and the steward, is the custom only in "cheap joints." At the Sea Foam, if a waitress ate so much as a mouthful of food left by a guest she was discharged in disgrace.

Our food—that is, the food prepared in the kitchen of Belgrave House was the worst I have ever tried to swallow. During my second week, the breakfast being more uneatable than usual, I complained to Mary, my roommate. Mary was scrubwoman and maid of all work in the Belgrave kitchen. I asked her why, if they were going to send us scraps of meat over from the Sea Foam, it was not properly cooked?

She assured me that the only food sent from the hotel were the meals for the Belgrave housekeeper. In proof of this she took me down to the kitchen of the dormitory and showed me the box of sliced bacon from which what I had called

"meat scraps" had been taken. It was the best grade.

Mary explained that the cook had emptied half of the contents of a box into a huge pan and put it over the fire. To keep it from burning he stirred it around from time to time, then ladled the mass into dishes and sent it into the diningroom. That bacon is a fair sample of the food served in the waitresses' dining-, room while I worked at the Sea Foam.

What the consequences might have been had the waitresses been supplied with sufficient amount of palatable food may be questioned. As to what actually happened there can be no doubt. "Dog tired" from overwork and a lack of food, a large majority of the waitresses hurried to the boardwalk immediately on leaving the dining-room after dinner. Often this was after nine o'clock at night.

Their first trip was taken in search of food. Accompanied by two of my fellow waitresses, I made such a trip the night after my arrival. Twenty men, in groups of two or more, invited us to eat with them. It is a question easily settled when a girl has money, but when she has no money and is hungry, what then? This is no abnormal appetite created by sea air. It is hard work and lack of food at. our regular meals.

Another of my misapprehensions. I had fancied that the duty of a waiter or a waitress was to serve food three meals a day. Time between meals I assumed they were free to use as they pleased.

When on regular duty a waitress at the Sea Foam reports for breakfast not later than a quarter before seven. To do this I had to rise at five forty-five. In that hour I had to take my bath, dress, make my bed, straighten up my room, eat my breakfast, punch the time-clock in the basement of the hotel, and get in the dining-room before the time mentioned. If so much as a fraction of a second late the door was bolted against me.

Though breakfast was supposed to end at nine, a waitress seldom, almost never, got rid of her guests until a half-hour later. Then came the collection of used napkins and table-cloths and exchanging them for fresh ones. Next the washing and polishing of silver and glass, the cleaning and filling of sugar-bowls, water