st the rocks she was able to get
them. But each and every melon--and she patiently tried scores of
them--had been spoiled by a sharp gash that let in the salt water.
She could not understand. She asked an old Portuguese woman gathering
driftwood.

"They do it, the people who have too much," the old woman explained,
straightening her labor-stiffened back with such an effort that almost
Saxon could hear it creak. The old woman's black eyes flashed angrily,
and her wrinkled lips, drawn tightly across toothless gums, wry with
bitterness. "The people that have too much. It is to keep up the price.
They throw them overboard in San Francisco."

"But why don't they give them away to the poor people?" Saxon asked.

"They must keep up the price."

"But the poor people cannot buy them anyway," Saxon objected. "It would
not hurt the price."

The old woman shrugged her shoulders.

"I do not know. It is their way. They chop each melon so that the poor
people cannot fish them out and eat anyway. They do the same with the
oranges, with the apples. Ah, the fishermen! There is a trust. When
the boats catch too much fish, the trust throws them overboard from
Fisherman Wharf, boat-loads, and boat-loads, and boatloads of the
beautiful fish. And the beautiful good fish sink and are gone. And no
one gets them. Yet they are dead and only good to eat. Fish are very
good to eat."

And Saxon could not understand a world that did such things--a world in
which some men possessed so much food that they threw it away, paying
men for their labor of spoiling it before they threw it away; and in
the same world so many people who did not have enough food, whose babies
died because their mothers' milk was not nourishing, whose young men
fought and killed one another for the chance to work, whose old men and
women went to the poorhouse because there was no food for them in the
little shacks they wept at leaving. She wondered if all the world were
that way, and remembered Mercedes' tales. Yes; all the world was that
way. Had not Mercedes seen ten thousand families starve to death in
that far away India, when, as she had said, her own jewels that she wore
would have fed and saved them all? It was the poorhouse and the salt
vats for the stupid, jewels and automobiles for the clever ones.

She was one of the stupid. She must be. The evidence all pointed that
way. Yet Saxon refused to accept it. She was not stupid. Her mother had
not been stupid, nor