"Oh, well," said Store-Hans indifferently. "I suppose I can be that too. Don't you think we can get a shotgun pretty soon?”

Per Hansa was a different man when he walked home; the spring had come back to his step. Entering the house, he sat down by his wife, who was still reading the Bible, and said abruptly, "You'd better read us a chapter." Then he cleared his throat and looked around the room. "No more nonsense, boys! Come here and sit down quietly while mother reads to us."

Ole Edvart Rölvaag, born in a lonely fishing hamlet far up on the coast of Norway, became a fisherman at fourteen years of age. At twenty he gave up the sea and came to America, landing in New York City in July, 1896, with little money and unable to speak or understand a word of English. For five years he shared the experiences of the Scandinavian pioneers of the Northwest, and at twenty-five he entered St. Olaf College at Northfield, Minnesota. He is now a professor of Norse literature in that institution. He is the author of six novels of Norwegian-American life, a volume of essays, and other books.

The book which has given him greatest fame in America is Giants in the Earth, first written in Norse and later translated into English. It is a realistic tale of the prairie pioneers from the Old World, with vivid pictures of the hard life and the virile men and women who lived it. "The First Crop on the Prairie" is a chapter from this book.

Per Hansa had taken his little family — Beret, his wife, the two boys and a little girl - and with all his belongings had moved out far beyond the line of settlements into the unplowed prairies. Here he had taken his claim, put up his sod house and stable, broken the ground, and become a farmer on his own farm. In this selection you may catch a hint of the eager hopes and the thrill of accomplishment which made men willing to brave the deprivations of the frontier to build their own homes.

ANIMAL ALLIES

ERNEST HAROLD BAYNES

THE day of cavalry may have passed, but you cannot tell that to men who fought at Vimy, and you cannot tell it to those who saw the immortal Scots Greys go through at Mons, as they went through at Waterloo. And they would laugh in your face who saw Allenby loose his whirlwind over the plains of Palestine like the scourge of God, and plow the soil beneath the hoofs of his galloping horses in such fashion that the seed of the Turk will never sprout there again. Horses were not only a factor, but a very great factor in the winning of the World War. The Allies used perhaps ten millions of them on all fronts, and about half of them died that we might win.

Mules, too, played a wonderful part. The best of them came from this country, and they served with the Americans in all operations. In fact, they were a feature of the transport in practically every Allied army, and for their general usefulness, common sense, and steadiness under fire they won respect and gratitude wherever they hauled a gun or shouldered a pack. In the Alps their importance can hardly be overestimated. One enthusiastic Italian officer said of them, "The mule won the war for Italy." Another declared, "If Italy had been deprived of her mules, the war would have been over for Italy."

Their blood relatives, the little, long-eared donkeys, also marched and worked and died with the patience for which they are famed. Eight thousand of them, carrying baskets of stones on their backs, helped General Allenby to build his roads along the front from Jaffa to Jericho. They served with all the Allied armies in France and made friends with the soldiers wherever they went. Sometimes the men took them into the dugouts for mutual warmth. Long strings of them might have been seen trotting through the French villages and out into the country on their way to the battlefields, with panniers laden with food for the

blue-clad men at the front. Because they were small, their drivers could lead them into the trenches and distribute the rations as they went along.

The Italians used them especially in mountain transport. An Italian officer told me that one of the most comical incidents he ever witnessed occurred in the Alps as a train of ammunition donkeys arrived at one of the peaks. It happened that at that very moment the Austrians on another peak began an intense bombardment. The startled and excited donkeys, with ears cocked forward, trotted over to the edge of a precipice and, looking toward the enemy, began to bray in chorus. It sounded like derisive laughter, and the Italians waved their hats and yelled with delight.

The most picturesque animals used in the war were undoubtedly the camels. Whether they were strung out in a long black frieze against a sunset sky in Palestine, or lying at dusk munching grain from their feed cloths on the sand, or speeding in looselimbed flight across the desert that their Arab riders might destroy a Turkish railway train - wherever there were camels, there was a picture.

They were as useful as they were picturesque. It is certain that General Allenby would have found his campaign in Palestine much harder even than it was, if it had not been for the grunting, grumbling "oont." He used forty thousand camels in his transport alone. Thirty thousand assisted in his first great attack on the Turks, who were occupying strongly fortified positions on the line from Gaza to Beersheba. The nearest railhead was then from fifteen to twenty-one miles behind the troops engaged, and all the food, water, and ammunition had to be brought up through the desert. There were no good roads, and no reliance could therefore be placed on motor transport. The country between the railroad and the British front was intersected by wadis, the steep banks of which were in most places impassable for wheeled vehicles. So it was pack animals chiefly which did the job, and of these the camels were easily the most important. The tall,

ungainly beasts supplied the troops with water long before the great pipe line was laid from Kantara to the battlefield near Beersheba - one hundred and forty-seven miles.

Camels have a strange psychology, which as yet is little understood. They are true Orientals, and fatalists as well, if we may judge by their indifference to their own wounds and the death of their companions. They have a fasting season, which comes in the winter and during which many of the males go "magnoon," or mad. A mad camel is very dangerous, for he is apt to break away from his picket and run amuck. He will then chase the first man he sees, and may bite off an arm or a foot. Such an animal is usually muzzled, but he must also be securely anchored with several stout ropes; otherwise he will knock his victim flat and then lie down on him, a most unpleasant way of inflicting death. Sometimes he will vary his athletic exercises by bringing his hind foot around with a semicircular sweep and kicking a man a considerable distance toward the horizon. This madness sometimes lasts for several weeks, and until it passes a camel does his best to live up to Kipling's description of him.

The war dogs were the keenest, the most intelligent, the most anxious to help, of all the animals used by the Allies. They were the only four-footed beasts who could be trusted to do a piece of work strictly on their own. Each one knew his job and did it, not because he was made to, but because of the love which is the impelling motive for everything a free dog does for a man.

Dogs served in many capacities -as messengers, sentries, and patrolmen, and occasionally as combatants; as draught animals with the machine guns, in the transport, and in the mail service; and as pack animals to carry food and ammunition to points difficult or impossible for other animals to reach. As detectives they were valuable assistants, and as watchmen they were easily superior to men. Not the least important of their many services to the Allies they rendered as mascots to the troops. By their merry pranks and the keen interest they showed in everything that was going on; by their readiness to respond

to every kind word and to every friendly act; by their courage, loyalty, and everlasting good nature they helped to relieve the feverish strain of war and to keep up the morale of the men in the trenches.

They were not used up to the limit of their mental capacity, but only to the limit of what is practical in time of war. Most of the stories we have read of their wonderful work for the Red Cross of their searching for and finding wounded men after battle, and of guiding stretcher bearers to the scene - are fiction. That the Germans used dogs with more or less success in Red Cross work I am aware, but I am informed on the best authority that, so far as the Allies are concerned, not a single life was saved in France by a Red Cross dog. It was not that it was impossible to train dogs to do any of the feats required for such duties, but that it would take too much of the time of too many good men to establish and maintain an efficient Red Cross dog service in time of war. General Joffe, by a general order, abolished the Red Cross dog in the French army in September, 1915. But the fame of the war dogs may well rest on the splendid work they actually did; it needs no support from the stories of what some of the sentimentalists would like to believe they did.

Of all the Allies, the French used dogs the most and in the greatest number of ways. The French war-dog service was established after the beginning of hostilities, and its success was due largely to the untiring efforts of Sergeant Paul Mégnin, who later became a lieutenant and assistant chief of the service. The prejudice he had to overcome is well illustrated by the following story, which was told me by Monsieur Mégnin himself.

One afternoon, about the time when dogs were being introduced in the army, Sergeant Mégnin and an assistant appeared in the front-line trenches with Za and Helda, two Alsatian sheep dogs, trained to sentry duty. They had come to offer the services of the quartet for night work at the front, but the captain to whom the matter was referred was merely amused. Mégnin politely pressed his offer, and at last the captain said, "Well, there's a