cy has a gramophone, and some of them have small
menageries, including pet bears. In the summer, after hours, the men
have outdoor games such as baseball and tennis. They have been able on
several occasions to secure a sufficiently large attendance of women to
have a dance. It may happen that the engineer is married and that his
wife has girl-visitors, which party may be augmented by a visiting
contingency from the residency twelve miles further down the grade, or
some such fortunate happening as this. It is a heyday, I can tell you,
when this happens.

They do not quarrel in the residencies as missionaries do at their
posts, although a man sometimes gets moody. All through the winter
they talk over everything they did when last in town, and what every
one else did. Between times, they can watch the married engineers and
declare how much better the bachelors are situated. Purple grapes were
ever sour. They told me about other things, but I forget them;
besides, they are secrets.

One of the engineers gathers me some flowers at a wayside station,
concerning which the others, with full-throated laughter, propounded
riddles.

"When did he ast-er?" "How much did the rose raise?" "Who gave Susan
her black eye?" These, and other problems of peculiar interest to
young bloods, the solution of which we shall never know till flowers
learn to speak plainer.

The riddle, "Why does the willow weep?" elicits a discussion on music,
and on the sound of the wind in the pines. One man says he has read
somewhere that violin makers construct their instruments out of the
north sides of trees. He does not know if this be true, but I think it
must be, for the urging of the north wind in the trees and the soft
calling of the violin, are one and the same. They both allure to a
land where no one lives. You must have observed this yourself.

One rueful rascal with no civic conscience, and an overweening
appreciation of his sex, gives it as his opinion that this is an
ill-reasoned theory. He declares the sound to be a screeching
crescendo that has its origin in an implacable quarrel between the wind
and the pines. The wind is a suffragette, a woman of determined
grievance, who would be better of bit and bridle and possibly of gag.
She makes the pine a butt for her insult and ridicule and a target
against which she lashes the hail and drives her shrewish snow. When
not grappling his throat with her plaguing, pestilent fingers,