CON

ONSTABLE GRANTON BUDD of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment at Waterton Lakes woke from a dream just in time to escape being swallowed by a circle of growling dogs. The growling curiously seemed to continue, though the dogs had faded, but finally resolved into the roar of rain on the roof a few inches above his head.

"That's rum!" he muttered, "this is no day to persuade a girl to hang around!"

His thoughts being too uncomfortable to lie with, he leaped from bed, splattered under the shower, and rubbed himself into electric spirits with a towel. As he caught sight of himself in the mirror he could not help admiring his shoulders,-broad, brown, canoe-carrying shoulders, and his arms, too,-brown and tireless at the paddle, and his shapely shanks with lean legs that carried him up mountains without fatigue. He ran his hands down them, and something in the feel of his firm, cool flesh broke through the cloud of his melancholy.

"But I'll do it, I will persuade her," he said aloud, and began to dress flannel shirt, rather smart ridingbreeches, brown boots, scarlet coat with the gold badges and glittering buttons, and last, the Stetson hat, concealing the head of hair just venturing on auburn, and shading the eyes. They were dark eyes, brown, and capable of being austere or dreamy or bright with gaiety; the eyes of a boy just twenty, but whose career had made him feel much older. It would be a strange girl, one would think, who could refuse to be friends with them!

But Edith Arlington was strange, or at least unusual. It was her independence made her so. She had been born to be a Chicago society girl, and a strong, delightful beauty had already made her, at eighteen, much sought after for social activities. But neither teas nor dancing found favor in her sight, and the day she had first seen Waterton was the day she had come most nearly to knowing her chief desire. She wished to be an artist, to put upon canvas the beauty of cliff and curving shore which entranced her on every hand. Her mother, who was not a very profound soul, objected at first, but finding her daughter consumed with her new delight, finally concluded that it

would do no harm for a few weeks, and left her with their friends, the aristocratic Cressons who had a cottage on the Lake.

"If you get bored, dear, drop those foolish paints and come to Hot Springs. Lord Watkins will be there, they say."

"If Lord Watkins paints, send him up here, Mother. Otherwise keep him for yourself. I'm through with these idle men."

"I suppose I couldn't leave you here if you were in any other state of mind," laughed the handsome mother. "You won't wander about these dreadful mountains by yourself, will you dear! They're filled with terrible characters, they say! Good-by, dear! Good-by, Adonis!" And she let the wire-haired terrier kiss her gloved fingers.

Edith turned from the gliding car with an air of relief. "Come, Adonis, let's run." The terrier, whose every moment was an expressed devotion, scampered with her, leaped, lurched, and whirlwinded in a careless gaiety with her around a house-corner and plumped square into a tall, uniformed constable. The shock was speechtaking. Only Adonis kept his wits. He thought that his mistress was being attacked, and sailed into the very conspicuous villain, seizing the expensive riding-breeches and working in toward the leg. Budd did not like strange dogs, and he did like his breeches. He cuffed the terrier.

Those whom a favorite dog has put asunder it would be difficult for anybody to bring together again. Indeed, only Adonis himself could have succeeded. Budd's "Clear out!" still rang petulantly in Edith's ears, and in the fortnight that succeeded, the constable was not encouraged to hear the dog bark derisively in the distance once or twice. So the gods called in an ally.

Above the Cresson's camp extended a broad ledge backed by a mountain and fronted by the lake. Spruces grew there, and white birches, and porcupines. And there Edith went with Adonis and her divine discontent at not being able to reduce all the outward seeming of shore and mountain-side to her few inches of canvas.

They were a happy pair, the one being supplied with sights, the other with smells. While Edith worked she forgot the city and its pitiful employments. And so did Adonis, whose active nose gave nightmares to the rodents of the neighborhood. Chipmunks, wood-mice, and the smaller vermin fled before him, and it was then, when inflated with an erroneous belief in his own invincibility, that he came upon the porcupine. It halted before him and sat unbudgeable as a medieval castle. But Adonis had grown intolerant of anything that did not run from him. In a moment he had stormed the castle, and his howls of repentance Edith's speech returned. "Adonis, cut Edith to the heart. Art requires let go! Adonis, do you hear?" patience, but nothing like the patience "Clear out!" added Budd with a needed to extract porcupine quills, swish of the riding-crop.

"That's enough! He won't hurt you," said the girl curtly. "I'm very sorry that we met you. Come, Adonis!"

His glance caught hers for a clipped second, then she was gone, leaving him standing half irritated, half elated.

"Adonis," he said aloud, "you lucky dog! Venus and Adonis! The first time I ever saw them together. Why didn't I say that to her instead of playing the donkey!" He laughed without mirth. "You fool, you tongue-forsaken fool!"

Even the girl, now down by the lake, was not as comfortable as her self-possession implied. "Did he hurt you, Adonis?" she asked, "the stupid! We'll not go near him, again. That's certain!"

and in the midst of the operation Constable Budd appeared. He had come from investigating an ugly rumor, and wore his side-arms and looked very capable; and to Edith, nearly in tears from sympathy and tedium, his appearance was a godsend. Budd's first impulse on seeing these two who disliked him so was to vanish like smoke. But smoke only vanishes upward while Budd weighed a hundred and sixty. And besides he heard a very clear but very matter-of-fact voice calling, "Do you know anything about taking out porcupine quills?"

"I certainly do!" and seating himself beside her, he realized that he was profoundly grateful to the porcupine for this opportunity.

Wire-haired terriers are comparatively sensible beings. Adonis, though

Twenty minutes later, dripping, Budd returned with the dog in his arms. His hatred for the quivering beast in his embrace would have consumed in flame anything less wet. He thrust Adonis at her. She pressed her lovely lips on the matted hair of the dog's imbecile nose, saying, "I wish you liked Adonis a little better, Mr. Budd. Somehow I feel as if you didn't."

to. But you wouldn't want him. You don't really like him, you know. And I'm not sure that he likes you."

"How do either of us know?" he said skilfully. I het Adonis will be con tent, especially if we're with you some. Try us a week. Or, I know, try us the few days till the Cressons go." "Well, I'll see. I'll phone Mother by long distance tonight, if you're sure."

"I'm sure," he said, eyeing Adonis lying damply in her lap.

But the arrangement didn't seem to work. Adonis had eaten nothing for three days, and looked it.

"I'm afraid he's too unhappy," said Edith. "Does he eat, Mr. Budd?"

"You just ought to see him," said the constable, but that night he paid a worried call on the butcher. The butcher advised chicken-livers, regardless of price, and for two days Adonis feasted. The bill came to something slightly more than Budd's pay-check, but Adonis was satisfied, therefore Edith was satisfied. It was a pity that Mrs. Arlington couldn't be fed something to keep her satisfied, but she insisted in a long and peremptory telegram that Edith return to Chicago for the opening of the season.

"That's just the opening of ours," said Budd disconsolately, "the ski season. I did so want to take you up to Sentinel Pond where the falls come from!"

"Winter may come early," said Edith; "we've three weeks yet."

The two chief dangers in friendship are that it will end, or that it will never get started, and the last is the greater. So many pass who, for a word, or even a nod, might find that interchange. But two weeks had

"Of course not."

But intuitively he knew that he had hit on something, and a sudden wild scheme leaped into his brain. He would be friends with the dog. He would make himself attractive to the beast.

"You see," she was saying, "when the Cressons go, I have no place to stay unchaperoned except the club, and they don't allow dogs."

"The dog again, the dog, the dog, always the dog!" he moaned to himself; but to her he said, "I'll keep Adonis at the detachment, if he'll ere." P

stay, of course, if I tell him

ceived an affection for Adonis, one cannot live a week with a wire-haired terrier without doing it, and Adonis had found the same to be true of Budd. Night after night the constable would say to the dog the things he desired to say to the girl, and, absurdly enough, it gave him confidence. He seemed to have an ally now, and when it snowed for three days he was happier than he had been since he joined the Force. He would have that trip to Sentinel Pond. Beyond that he did not care to look.

Edith skied easily, and Adonis rode, Budd having constructed a dog-pack, as he called it, in which the wire-haired dog could be comfort

ably carried. The day before Edith was to return was proper for their great excursion. Edith was sufficiently skilful to try the long climb. Her weeks of outdoors had brought her to a pitch of health inconceivable to the city girl, and all three were impressed to silence by the beauty of the day. They slid along in an atmosphere steeped in ozone and delicious with the sighs of pines. An unclouded sun flooded a world of white, and green, of heaven purple and blue.. Their great domain of mountain and valley was as solitary as the moon. But they were silent, not for the reason of a bare fortnight ago, because they had awkwardly met, but because they must now awkwardly part. Each time the thought came to the girl she put it out of her head. Each time it came to the boy he said to himself, "in three hours now," or "in two hours now," for he intended to talk things out and have an understanding. As long as she called him Mr. Budd, as long as he had to call her Miss Arlington, they were not friends exactly. And he wanted that bar to fall.

"Adonis seems to have grown quite fond of you," she said at a pause in the ascent.

"Give a dog what he likes and he's bound to."

"Not at all. Adonis has been petted all his life, and I never saw him take to any one before. I hate to separate you."

"Don't then," formed in Budd's mouth, but he held in. He had a better time planned at which to ask her friendliness. So he said, "I must be a nice dog. Adonis and I have so much in common."

Her laugh was so infectious that he thought well of his speech and continued, "I shall miss my pal."

She wished he had said pals. For the first time in her life she admitted to herself that this fine, athletic, quiet boy whom she had been looking at through her mother's social glasses might be an equal of hers, a possible friend. "When did you find out that Adonis was your pal, really?" she asked.

"When he first ate out of my hand," Budd replied impishly. He wanted to postpone seriousness. Anticipation was sufficiently delightful.

"I don't believe you know what friendship is," she retorted. "O, don't I!"

"Well, what is it, seriously?" "It's a wilderness, like this," he said, quietly, "with mountains and valleys, mountains up which we have to flounder in trackless snow, and all at once we stand on some (Continued on page 160)

THE

HE life of an astronomer has one unusual and very pleasant aspect, for every once in a while duty calls him to make long journeys in order to observe an eclipse of the sun. If duty calls particularly strongly, or rather, when the land of the eclipse is far away and the trip promises to be interesting, the astronomer gets himself ready for a voyage of several months, purely for the privilege of not seeing the sun for a minute or so.

This past summer a total eclipse of the sun was scheduled to come off on June 29, and it offered the unusual feature that it could be observed in the land of the midnight sun. Some time before the eclipse I had planned to join a party of observers sent out by the Observatory at Hamburg, who, after careful consideration of the weather conditions, had decided to locate at Jokkmokk, in Lapland, just above the arctic circle.

Since I was not taking any equipment along, I was able to leave this country toward the end of May, and after an uneventful trip arrived in Sweden on June 17. When I crawled out of my sleeper that morning, after having been ferried across the Baltic Sea from Sassnitz to Trelleborg, the first look was not very encouraging. It was raining hard. Not a very auspicious sign, when one is out to observe an eclipse. However, I had not yet reached my destination, and I still had practically the whole length of it-1400 miles to travel before I reached the eclipse-station. Fortunately I had to make a stop in Stockholm, to obtain my Russian visé, necessary because I wanted to travel through Soviet Russia on my way

By WILLEM J. LUYTEN Astronomer in the Harvard Observatory

back, and thus had a chance of seeing the Swedish capital. One of the cleanest cities of Europe, and a delightful place to stay before one leaves civilization and invades the wilds of Lapland.

From Stockholm, where I joined some Swedish astronomers, also eclipse-bound, we traveled to Boden, a twenty-four-hour run. Traveling in Sweden is cheap, and the pleasant thing about it is, that the further you go the cheaper it gets. It is a pity, as some one remarked, that Sweden is not a little longer, for then one would ultimately be subsidized for traveling further. Travel in Sweden is also very fast and very comfortable, for the railway-carriages (even the thirdclass ones) are as comfortable inside as they are hideous looking on the outside; and that is going some. The whole journey, from where I landed in Sweden, to the eclipse-camp in Jokkmokk, a distance of 1100 miles, cost me only twelve dollars.

On June 23, six days before the eclipse, I arrived in Jokkmokk, the capital of the Lapps, but found that things had been sadly exaggerated, for there were no Lapps. In summer they all go into the mountains, in search of snow; only a few are left behind, and these mainly for parade purposes, like the Indians on the Santa Fé railroad.

The first night, of course, I sat up all night, watching the miraculous midnight sun. It was only two days after the sun had reached its highest position in the sky, and since we were a little inside the arctic circle, the sun was well visible, even at midnight. It is a most fascinating thing to

watch, and it is entirely impossible to have an idea beforehand of what the thing really looks like, even for an astronomer, who, of all people, ought to know. The fact that even at midnight it is quite light outside, not twilight, but broad daylight,-at least as light as at seven o'clock on a summer evening,-is hard to conceive without having seen it. Also, one sees the sun crawling along the horizon for several hours, apparently on the point of setting; but it never does, merely getting a little yellower as midnight approaches. Naturally, being an astronomer, I tried to get a picture of it, using the largest camera I could find, and making an exposure of one one-hundredth of a second every fifteen or twenty minutes. Unfortunately it clouded up just after midnight, so the picture printed does not show the full arc.

Life under such conditions is quite different from what it is here. In the village of Jokkmokk, nobody seemed to go to bed before 3 A.M., and accordingly not a soul stirred in the village before ten or eleven. For us this was rather trying, as we had to be up every morning at five to focus and adjust our instruments. Since the eclipse was taking place at halfpast six in the morning, we had to try out our cameras and telescopes at that same time every day. Then we had to wait till noon before breakfast appeared, and could loaf the rest of the day. And for people who are not used to it, this perpetual light of the midnight sun gets on the nerves. It is all right the first night, but the second night the novelty has worn off and the third one feels uncomfor