of being swung aloft among mountains which sweep in a circle from Mexico to the north. Here and there on the mountainside and in the canyons she points to a young pine or wild oak which she has planted, or among the boulders to a baby fern.

"I have to fight and fight and fight" she says, "to keep people from gardening and planting city flowers on this mountain. If only they would let it be as nature made it, with just a few things added that belong on a mountainside, how much more beautiful it would be."

If, within a few years, as many predict, Kate Sessions is a rich woman, none who know her will grudge her her wealth, for none could imagine her so rich as to lose interest in her children, or wearing a gown too costly for her to go down on her knees to loosen the earth about a struggling flower. BERTHA H. SMITH.

A

The Big Dipper of Washington BLEAK day on Prince Edward Island forty years ago. Within a comfortable house a Scotch farmer sits surrounded by his wife and thirteen children, all raised on oatmeal porridge, herring, a little good Scotch and the ten commandments. The minister and the deacons, regular Sunday guests, are also gathered at the hospitable. board. At a signal mother and children leave. One of the boys, sneaking back, slips beneath the table, where he is later discovered and ignominiously ejected by a deacon who has been a little indiscreet with the toddy.

Up in an apple tree the boy with the investigative turn of mind sits thinking intently. He is fifteen years old and has finished the district school. His father appears in the orchard. The boy drops down and an earnest talk ensues. Then the farmer harnesses the horses. The mother packs the boy's grip. A kiss goodbye. Father and son drive to a railroad contractor's office.

A railroad construction camp near Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. From a heavy wooden pail carried on his arm a boy is ladling out water with a gourd dipper to the thirsty toilers. He is the best ladler on the job.

Now the pail has disappeared. The boy is learning the stonecutter's trade from start to finish.

Become a man, the boy is back on the railroad as section foreman. A party of engineers induce him to start west with them. On the journey he picks up quite a practical knowledge of engineering. At Cheyenne he picks up a job as brakeman. He has been on six months when the conductor marked up for the run is taken sick. Before the dispatcher knows that a green man has taken out the train, it nears the end of a division. At headquarters they grimly await the brakeman-with a promotion.

Then he tries accident insurance and there is no element of accident that in a couple of years he is northwest agent at Seattle for his company. Next he is selling real estate at North Yakima. Only after twenty years does he find his real work and go back to packing water-with canals.

Up to this point the tenor of the story of Lauchlin MacLean, the rolling stone from Prince Edward Island, is, with a few variations, that of a thousand rolling stones who have achieved success in the West. The rolling stones knock about the world long enough to take off the rough edges and get shaped up, when they are ready to accomplish something really worth while.

Gaze on this picture: The silent, whitecapped mountains, lifting away from a vast expanse of sagebrush, broken only by the sinuous rivers feeling their way to the sea

And then on this: The flow of melted snows from the majestic mountains impounded in reservoirs; the rivers dammed; the land denuded of sagebrush; the thirsty soil drinking in moisture brought by little ditches and speaking its gratitude in terms of blossoming trees and other green living things.

Such a metamorphosis as that pictured above has been wrought in Washington by Lauchlin MacLean, who learned in boyhood to put water where it would do the most good, how stones should be placed, and the management of men. Again the story, in its larger sense, is not individual: it is the history, with variations, of irrigation everywhere. Tush for your Aladdin, that silly ignorant boy who gathered diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires and amethysts from the trees in the magic cave and rubbed an old lamp for a genie to come do his work! Real wealth is created now by real men: real agricultural jewels are to be picked from real trees-apple, peach, pear, plum, cherry. MacLean's mark is written all over eastern

Washington in ripening orchards and profitable farms. His high line irrigation project at Wenatchee is one of the wonders of the West: the land there has gone from nothing to from $1,500 to $3,000 an acre. All through the Big Bend country, around Coulee City and Wilbur, in fact wherever water was needed, there MacLean has been with his pail and gourd dipper. He built the Mathow Canal; laid out Chelan Falls; installed the irrigation system in the Garden valley district. He also put under irrigation a thousand acres near Lion Lake; (

thousand at Kettle Falls; twelve thousand at Otis, fifteen miles east of Spokane.

Mr. MacLean lives at Otis and does business in Spokane, traversing the fifteen miles in a swift machine. As president of the Spokane Canal Company, the Fruitland Irrigation Company and the Sheep Land Company, and attending to his own private interests, he is kept tolerably busy.

The only rolling stone of the MacLean family of thirteen born on Prince Edward T could today buy that island. His nd sisters who stayed at home and

good sports," says Miss Nell in her soft voice. Can you blame her?

In August of this year Miss Schmidt set a woman's record for speed and endurance across San Francisco bay, on a course between the Vallejo street wharf and Oakland mole. When, in September, Miss Schmidt put herself around all four of the Seal Rocks, a feat never before performed by man or woman, the sporting editors sat up and took notice, the swimmers of the men's athletic clubs sweated admiration and blood, and all the bay cities, especially Alameda, acclaimed Miss Schmidt a wonder of the world. No one said, "Pretty good for a woman!" Walter Pomeroy, crack of the Olympics, had previously encompassed three of the rocks in 32 minutes, 5 seconds. Miss Schmidt included the fourth in 34 minutes, 54 seconds. Her admirers began freely to predict she could beat out Pomeroy at a straightaway race. And the lady herself confessed she would not mind a try.

Since Miss Schmidt's Seal Rocks swim, the waters about San Francisco have been considerably stirred up. The very next Sunday Robert Beck beat her Seal Rocks record by over four minutes, a second man by over one minute, and a third equaled her time; Pomeroy showed remarkable class by doing the bay from Vallejo street wharf to Alameda mole in 1 hour, 51 minutes, 13 seconds; and Mrs. Beulah Soderer started out to "get" Miss Schmidt's bay record. She ended at Long wharf, three-quarters of a mile from Oakland mole, making a record of her own, but not smashing Miss Schmidt's. Mrs. Soderer is what the Alameda girl is looking for-a foe-woman worthy of her steel.

Miss Nell, who is nineteen years old, says she has just begun her career and is now seriously going into training. "Why, until I swam the gate I never thought of myself as speedy or enduring. There are eight of us, four boys and four girls, and we all swam as a matter of course. I was put into the water when I was six weeks old, and

I've been paddling around in it ever since. Yes, right out here, in front of the cottage where I was born. My father started this business (the Cottage Baths) just about that time, and my mother is a former swimming teacher. So I didn't think so much of my swimming. I did think I was a diver, though. Oh, yes, I hold the woman's world record for high diving. Seventy-five feet. Here's a photograph."

The mousey voice! She might have been saying, "I had my picture taken yesterday, in my bathing suit, on the wharf. Here's the photograph."

Miss Schmidt was dressed in red sweater, knitted cap and all the other toggery civilization demands-on land. "Here are some pictures," she said, "before I took 'em off." "'Em" means bathing skirts. "Then I adopted the long union suit introduced by Miss Kellermann; but it held water and didn't permit the freest use of the limbs. So I had to put on a man's suit. I hope I don't look bold."

"No," she was assured. "Nor modest. Just a swimmer."

Some space might be devoted to Miss Schmidt's "pestiferous admirers," and her offers matrimonial, theatrical and other kinds. Of course she will have to have a trainer, and there are many willing. And there are those who would like her to train them. One illiterate gentleman, of Joplin, Missouri, has rashly thanked her in advance for giving him correspondence lessons in swimming. And of course the "movies" have been after her. She shies at them, and at theatrical engagements. "All I want is the honor," she quietly says.

Our subject has been called "Mermaid," "The Diving Venus," "Sea Nymph," and all the rest of that slop. They don't call a man swimmer "Merman," "The Diving Apollo," or "Sea-faun." Apollo," or "Sea-faun." So here's a toast to Nell Schmidt: May this splendid human being read her title clear, around the globe, to the name she likes best-"Champion." FRANCES A. GROFF.

N

O sooner had Congress decided, by that memorable vote, that the Exposition commemorative of the opening of the Panama Canal should be held in San Francisco than the thoughts of many officials in various branches of the national government instinctively turned to the subject of Uncle Sam's exhibits at the show to which all the world has been bidden. The federal officials who thus felt an interest, from the very outset, in this significant celebration are, for the most part, members of what might be termed Uncle Sam's corps of exposition experts. Consequently, the formal endorsement by the national legislature of this latest exhibition project, meant, in effect, that they would have further opportunities for achievement in a favorite field of work.

Many persons who take only a superficial interest in the great international exhibitions held from time to time in the United States have marveled that men could be found to plan and create each successive exposition with that celerity and perfection of detail which has characterized most of the world's fairs held in this country during the past decade and a half. The explanation is found, of course, in the rise of a new profession-that of the exposition maker. Under the system, that has gradually been evolved by reason of the exigencies of an exposition era, a successful show of all nations requires the coöperation, in harmony, of two main forces, diametrically opposite in some respects.

On the one hand we have the enthusiasm that secures local municipal, state and national sanction for an exposition project;