WO ways of investing family savings were illustrated in the case of a single family in New Hampshire. With apologies to venturesome husbands,

this case is related in the words of the wife. "May I ask your advice in the matter of investments?" she wrote. "I am a married woman of sixty-five with a husband who has earned a fair salary all his life, but who spent it as fast as he received it, in oil, copper, rubber, or any stock that he could buy for a few cents per share. In consequence he is at that age where he cannot expect to work many years longer and with less than $2,000 invested in any legitimate stock."

A case where the husband and wife coöperated to better purpose was presented by a man in New Jersey. He wrote: "Please outline a grouping of kinds of bonds to make up a $25,000 'retirement fund' for a man and wife who will in two or three years be sixty and would like this fund then to bring in about $100 a month by having the interest dates divided evenly throughout the year."

The bonds suggested to this man may be of interest to others who are building up retirement funds. With the prices at which they were selling at the time suggested, they were:

Interest Payments April and October:

Baltimore & Ohio 1st 4s due 1948 at 871 American Chain 6s due 1933 at 967 American Smelting & Refining 1st 5s due 1947 at 94

American Waterworks & Electric 5s due 1934 at 923

Interest Payments May and November:

Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburgh consolidated 4s due 1957 at 871

Brooklyn Union Gas 1st consolidated 5s due 1945 at 992

Illinois Central col trust 4s due 1953 at 833 American Tel. & Tel. 54s due 1943 at 102 U. S. Steel 58 due 1963 at 104

Interest Payments June and December:
Armour & Co. 1st 41s due. 1939 at 843
Tennessee Elec. Power 1st and ref 6s due
1947 at 98

E. I. du Pont de Nemours Powder Co. 41s due 1936 at 89

Illinois Bell Tel. 5s due 1956 at 97

Interest Payments February and August:
Liggett & Myers 5s due 1951 at 981
State of Queensland 6s due 1947 at 103
United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland
5s due 1937 at 104

Anaconda Copper Consolidated 6s due 1953 at 98

Interest Payments January and July:

Niagara Falls Power 1st 5s due 1932 at 101 Hocking Valley 1st consolidated 4s due 1999 at 88

Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific gen 4s due 1988 at 83

Chicago & Western Indiana Consolidated 4s due 1952 at 76

Western Union 55 due 1938 at 100

Interest Payments March and September: Chesapeake & Ohio gen 43s due 1992 at 881 Dutch East Indies 6s due 1962 at 954 Detroit Edison 1st and ref 5s due 1940 at 991 West Penn Power 5s due 1946 at 94

In such an investment there might well be included $5,000 or $6,000 real estate mortage bonds bought from houses of the highest standing in that field. And in the selection of the entire list the services of the best investment banking houses would be helpful in selecting securities that might be more suitable than those suggested above.

T

HE cowboy or boyero, vaquero, or buckaroo, by which ever term his range in the vast comprehensively termed cattle

country determined that he should be known, has become the great enlivener of the imagination of the American public. For the last prodigious decade or two, because of, and despite, the mummers who have played his role in the motion pictures he has been the hero of much fiction; and far more significantly, though less widely, the subject of authentic historical commentary. It is possible that in a hundred years or two the facts of his existence and activities will have become so blurred as to be transplanted by a conception, popular, and fed by tradition and some history, that in turn may crystallize into something that will correspond in American life and letters to the cycle of Arthurian legend. For he is the representative of an order as defined and as unique in its functioning as that of the mailed and crested horsemen of Crecy and Poictiers. He has been driven off the ranges and in all save a few cases, out of this twentieth century, but he does not go without a Malory or a Froissart to echo his valediction and to chronicle what American history in a later day will signally rejoice to have. As

Malory and Froissart were themselves trained in a chivalric school whose deeds they recorded, so is Will James, the most recent and most readable of the cowboys chroniclers, himself a cowboy, versed in every phase of his work and a veteran of those days now lamented by an older generation for their hardy freedom and by a younger, for their fecundity in a virile wild romance. In "Cowboys North and South"* James has salvaged a large bit of the fast fading drama of the West in a way so interesting and with a style so direct and so magnificently ungrammatical that one is apt to lose sight of the fact that the book is practically in commemoration of an American type if not passed then rapidly disappearing. And when one does so realize one laments this passing as heartily as did ever ranchman evicted from his range by the crawling fences and squalid shanties that foretold the coming of the towns. James has a style that is, unconsciously ungrammatical or consciously so, admirably lucid and direct and entirely free from that brash buoyance that many of us connect with the speech and prose of the West of the cattle country. Doubtless it is a connection as inaccurate as are the posters outside

*"" Cowboys North and South." By Will James. Scribner's. $3.50.

the motion picture houses on days of a touted Western "feature", for there is in James's prose a reflective character and a genuine dignity perhaps not entirely expected. One reads his book with respect and a great deal of well-warranted interest, and his drawings, which form a precious part, one is apt to consider with a clamant admiration and joy.

The picturing of the West and its ways and men on canvas and paper achieved its early and brilliant development with Remington, but it has assuredly continued to develop with the strictly native genius of C. M. Russell, "Montana's Cowboy Artist," and Will James. For a perfect expression of volcanic muscle-packed energy James's broncos are inimitable. They run, buck, and swerve across the page in a dizzying arpeggio of action calculated, we breathlessly assure ourselves, to pound their riders, nonchalantly and miracu

lously still astride of them, into mere bags of bruised flesh and broken bones. They are invincible, merciless, superb. And they are horses, not the incredible creatures bred by fancy out of Pegasus that sometimes pass in illustrations as the cow ponies of the West.

In addition to the broncos there are the long-horns. Alas that they, too, like the men that once herded them, have gone on down the trail and out of our times. There are two sketches, one of a long-horn mother and calf, shoulder deep in snow, facing a pair of self-congratulatory and chop-licking wolves and one of just such another mother and child facing a grizzly about to charge that are accomplished little dramas in themselves. The calves are especially delightful, with ears flopped enquiringly forward and uneasy astonishment growing in distressingly infantine eyes. The drawing betokens sympathy, and there is another thing that delights one in James; his understanding of horses and

cattle and, oh rare and admirable, of those cowboys who blithely set about collecting herds aided only by subtlety and handy running irons. Years and experience in the country whereof he writes have given James, we feel, that tolerance that is the ultimate bequest of wisdom.

"Cowboys North and South" covers in eight chapters every significant aspect of the life once led in the West, known then by the one term cattle country." As a genuine bit of history by a man who has assisted in its making it is the most important type of contribution to the Cowboy Cycle. Philip Ashton Rollins in

a splendid piece of work, "The Cowboy" is far less picturesque but extraordinarily interesting and sound. Those cowboys who like James are graduates of the old school owe Rollins a debt of gratitude for his accurate and enthralling portrait of them and for dispelling as much as is possible many of the woolly and weird myths that the world has insisted on weaving about them. An instance of Rollins's characterization that displays his powers of sympathetic observation is this monologue between a cowboy and his bronco when the former contemplates saddling up for the day's work. It must be explained that these kindly riders in order to save their horses discomfort, warmed their bits before the fire before going out to the corral and once there made generous statements as to their horses' talents in order to convince the broncos that all was friendly. The man has vanished inside the corral. His monologue, carefully censored, runs, as Mr. Rollins hears it, like this:

"Good morning, Pete. Hope you're well. Got a little piece of iron candy for you. Stop fooling, Pete. Stop your kidding. Stop that, I tell you. Pete, stop that, Stop it,

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ear.

I say. Look here, you dodgasted, pale pink, wall-eyed, glandered, spavined cayuse, pull down that injur rubber neck of yourn, or I'll skin you alive and mash in your sides to hell and gone. Hold still, pony, and I'll fix your Is that comfortable? Now Pete, here comes the saddle. Whoa, pony, stop twitching your fool back. Now Pete, the front cinch's fixed. All we've got left is the hind one. Pete, you dog-goned, inflated, lost soul, let out that wind and do it quick or I'll bust you wide open. Quit that, Pete. Quit it, I say. Good, old Pete,

you sure are some horse."

We love that cowboy. We covet Pete.

Charles Wellington Furlong in "Let 'er Buck" wrote interestingly of the latest phase of the fenced West, the competitive riding at rodeos and exhibition round-ups, but

it lacks, of course, the reality of James or Rollins. Still it belongs to the cycle and it is reassuring to know that there are still men who yearn to ride as James remarks, "a head-fighting, limber-back cross between greased lightning and where it hits."

The cowboy songs and ballads have been carefully salvaged, as many of them as could be found drifting like lost echoes in corners of the West still comparatively unfenced. John A. Lomax, of the University of Texas and the Sheldon Fellow for the Investigation of American Ballads at Harvard, succeeded in collecting many of them into a volume and they form a vital adjunct to any compilation of cowboy material. These songs are not in themselves of any great interest. Like the sea chanteys of a half-century ago, it is their association with a life of hardihood and vicissitude and, above all, the melodies

to which they were sung that make them so infinitely haunting. The border ballads like the lays of the minstrelsy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, were written apparently on the morrow after some noteworthy achievement of local heroes and sung thereafter whenever two or three were gathered together with their feet upon the brass rail. The heroes of these songs were often enough notorious

bandits and the ballad of Jesse James with its

recurrent and astonishing refrain "But that dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard has laid poor Jesse in his grave" is a thoroughly typical example. And also, as in the lais and virelais of the distinguished troubadours whose glory was the friendship

of Richard the Lion-hearted, Bertran de Born and the historic Blondel, the authorship was sometimes modestly admitted in the last verse. Witness:

This song was made by Bill Gashade
As soon as the news did arrive

He said there was no man with the law in his hand

Who could take Jesse James when alive.

The cowboy has long been the subject of fiction and some of it, apart from the interest of mere plot and characterization, has been of authentic value as history. Owen Wister's "The Virginian" of honorable memory, Alfred Henry Lewis's "Wolfville Days"* and "Wolfville Nights" and his significantly entitled "The Sunset Trail" with its fascinating portrait of the

"Wolfville Days." Stokes. $2. "Wolfville Nights." Stokes. $2. "The Virginian." Macmillan. $2.50.

memorable "Wild Bill" Hickok, are among the best fictional interpretations of the old West. "Whispering Smith"* Frank H. Spearman's gun wizard and the lovable "Lin McLean"t another of Mr. Wister's contributions to this valhalla of the riders of the 'seventies and 'eighties remain in one's mind as unforgettable characters. It is hard to say whether the late Emerson Hough was more interested in the fiction

to be created or the history already made of the West, but in any case both, as they appear in his work, are sound. Read with Will James near at hand as a manual, all these books are purged of casual extravagance and their real merit the easier perceived.

Clemence Dane, an Englishwoman whose ability and distinction as a

WILL JAMES

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critic is unquestioned, has in a recent issue of the International Book Review, written of the present-day fiction of the cowboy with an enthusiasm not always typical of English critics when reviewing American work. She, too, perceives in it a parallel to the heroic cycles of European countries, to the legends of Arthur, and of Beowulf, of Roland and of Siegfried. It is perhaps a pity that she has apparently never read the more authentic stories of the West, those written by men such as Will James or by authors whose interest it has been to combine history with fiction and the study of the life itself with the imaginative interpretation thereof. She knows not Rollins or Hough or Wister. If she does, she does not mention them.

*"Whispering Smith." Scribner's. $2.00. "Lin McLean." Harper's. $1.50.

The

"which blood is my liquor, gents, and I kin lick my weight in wolves" brand of cowboy predominates in the works of the authors that she names and to the lamentable extent of practically excluding the one that was far more in evidence and that made the cow country of the West what it was. The self-contained, athletic, bronzed young man that James from a fund of actual experience draws for

us did not invariably carry two guns worn low nor use them with frantic speed at the drop of a hat. The rider that went thus equipped and whose speech and action came simultaneously cloaked in the acrid reek of a fanned gun was an individual whose demise was sooner rather than later cheerfully accomplished by town marshals reared in the tradition of

Mr. Hickok. None the less, Miss Dane's appreciation is significant.

There will assuredly come a time when all these books, history and fiction and, indeed, everything that has dealt with the cowboy, will be coveted rarities in the libraries of men wise enough in their generation to perceive and appreciate the great qualities of courage and integrity in an American type forced out of existence by progress and the changing times. Such men have laid and will lay hands on everything that commemorates it. Perhaps the cowboy will continue for a score of years yet to constitute the rugged keystone of many a plot, but it is more probable that already he has swung his pony toward a far horizon and, light heartedly enough, is leaving our pages the drabber for his going. Vaya con Dios, Caballero fortunately a literature remains.