UCK was with us-and against us.

LUC

We had taken a gambler's chance on the weather-and we had won. Early May was transported into February. The prim New England houses, often centuries old, shone cleanly white in the sunlight. The road danced and gleamed before us. It was just the time for a later-winter's hitchhike. The world was ours.

Or, it would have been ours had we not forgotten our magic book. That was the wand with which we lured the wary traveler into picking us up and aiding us along our way toward Fall River.

"That's a great stunt, that book," had said a knight of the road with whom we had ridden one cold December day through the midlands of New Jersey. "Yes, that's a great stunt."

The book had made a deep impress on his mind. Rightly so. It might be the latest gruesome tale of murder by Souvestre or the blithesome recital of how Christian and toothless Socialism really is, by Ramsay MacDonald. Its contents mattered not. Sit on a log and wait. Wave the book at the passing traveler. It was a surety of respectability. No lowly hobo would carry such with him.

In our haste to leave New York and its pomps behind, we had forgotten this invaluable aid on this particular Springy February morning. Progress was accordingly slow. Caution is the chief attribute. of the New England character. Our attempts to "sell" ourselves as rider-companions of automobilists were largely scorned. By night we had only gone as far-or near-as the summer resort town of Madison, Conn.

In the quiet evening of that almost deserted place, listening to the radio "as far West as Cleveland," and hearing in a vague way the boss of the inn tell of his exploits as a contractor, we resolved to ourselves to reach Fall River the next day or "bust." "Double-Double-Double"

The resolve made for good fortune. Through quaint old New England villages, with families intermarried until they could call themselves "DoubleDouble-Double," past teams of oxen drawing loads of timber (in the oldest part of America!), over the long depressing road that carries you through Rhode Island, we made our way as far as Providence. From there it was mere child's play to reach our goal, Massachusetts' southern textile city.

We halted a short time at Warren, just over the Rhode Island border, to allow our temporary chauffeur, a lingerie salesman, to display his wares. Fate thereupon threw us into the arms and presence of Howard De Wolfe, the talkative and likeable drug gist of that town. With a merry twinkle in his eye, but with a certitude that many religionists might envy, he proclaimed the Nordics to be a race divine, with the Scots at the top of the Nordic pile, Coolidge to be the model president, Jefferson "a demogague and agitator”-firing an amazing list of quotations at us as he waited upon his customers. For Fall River and its "foreigners" he had but faint praise. The saving thing about the place, apparently, were the Nordic owners of the mills.

With that introduction we entered the city that lays upon the Taunton. Mills! Mills! MILLS! From the River to Watuppa Pond, everywhere they greet you. "Depression," they say, is the ailment of the textile industry. Depressing in the best of times must be this cotton city.

You saunter down to the water-front, to see the boat that will leave tonight for Newport, the home of the millionaires, and for Gotham. To your right and to your left, huge piles of white rock rise above you. They pursue you to the very water's edge. Built of the same material as many prisons, on the very plan that prisons follow the country over, they startle you with their likeness to those Houses of the Living Dead.

Watch-towers at the entrance to many of them heighten the resemblance. Therein sits the watchman, eyeing you as you approach. Most of them are good chaps "this is a hard-boiled place," one of them volunteered, "they wouldn't let you see anything."

Denied Admission

about many others. The American Linen Company's mill stands, walled about, near the river front. Being neither a gentleman nor a war-hero, I had taken one along. He presented the card of the milling brokerage firm with which his family are connected. The superintendent smelled a mouse somewhere. Even that passport would not take us within the sacred walls. Outsiders were not wanted there, we were curtly told.

But we took the situation by the horns, or the nape of the neck, or however you might want to put it, and walked through the archway leading to the courtyard which the mill shuts in. Were those gray figures, there? No, it was an illusion-a memory of Sing Sing. There were merely painters working on the inner-outer walls. The prisoners were withinat the machines, covered with cotton lint, working monotonously in the high temperature that would produce "T. B.," if the laws of Nature were at work there as they are in the rest of the world.

Our credentials and our eloquence were equally fruitless in the far-reaching hulk of the American Printing Company's plant. The watch-tower let us into the office sanctum. Beyond that, we did not pass. It was not until noon hour that our opportunity came.

Near the stroke of twelve, little children were scurrying through the prison walls. They carried dinner pails and newspaper-wrapped lunches in their arms. Some brought hot coffee in steaming cans. Here and there came an old man with the package and the can. A girl or young man would come to the entrance and take these from him. A few figures, covered with cotton lint, would dash out of the mill, overcoat-enwrapped, rush to the corner to a lunch wagon nearby and dash back again.

As one old man, bent and vacant-eyed, entered the sacred portals, we pressed along with him and invaded the forbidden land. The name of the mill we will forget, for the watchman might get into trouble, if the Lords or Ladies or Honorable Doormats in charge of the plant were to learn of his serious omission in not hurling us out into the sidewalk on our

ears.

Losing Their Souls