"Life flows into it from the potter's palm and fingers," explained the master. "The clay is ready and willing; you feel that it is anxious to do your bidding and make swift and faithful response; yet the clay preserves its own qualities for all my handiwork. There's great dignity in matter, you must know. It obeys in the measure of its power, but it imposes its own conditions on the potter. If the ignorant or clumsy hand asks the clay to do more than it is able, it refuses. It can only respond within its own capabilities, and we who are skilled know them, and lift the clay to its own highest powers of expression, as the wise father trains a child gently to his finest possibility."

He worked awhile, and then spoke again.

"There's this difference, however: a wise workman knows his own clay, but the wisest father doesn't know his own child, so that likeness breaks down."

He proceeded, moulding his own severe sense of beauty into one inert mass after another. There woke, as it seemed, a close, observant, taut sympathy between him and his material from the moment it began to spin and the ball was trued. A wondrous trinity of intellect, motion, and matter worked here together.

Easterbrook put it differently, however.

"There's three things go to making pots, just as there's three things go to making all else," he said. "And they are matter, life, and mind. So at least I hold, though many wiser men than me deny the mind. But it looks like that to my eyes, and in the business of potting the matter's the red mud here; the life is the spinning wheel; the mind is the craftsman's, who brings wheel and earth together and creates the pot."

He finished eighteen pieces in the space of an hour, and when the work was ended he gave the boy a crumb of praise.

"You've done all that was needful. Joanna will be jealous," he said. "Now fetch me clean water and a towel, and tell me which you like best."

He pointed to the vases, and the boy would have given much to know what specially to praise. He considered, then he selected a bold piece of somewhat opulent and involved design. Mr. Easterbrook shook his head.

"Many will think the same, and many will think wrong. When many people agree about a thing, they're generally wrong."

Then he pointed to a small and severe model some eight inches high.

"That's the best," he said.

"What will Mr. Pitts do to it, sir?" ventured Porter.

"He'll do nothing to it if I know him," answered the partner of Paul. Anyway, I hope he won't. When Mr. Pitts happens to be properly pleased with a pot of my making, he doesn't touch it. That's his way of saying 'Well done!' to me."

THE RIVERMAN

BY STEWART EDWARD WHITE

I FIRST met him one Fourth of July afternoon in the middle eighties. The sawdust streets and high board sidewalks of the lumber town were filled to the brim with people. The permanent population, dressed in the stiffness of its Sunday best, escorted gingham wives or sweethearts; a dozen outsiders like myself tried not to be too conspicuous in a city smartness; but the great multitude was composed of the men of the woods. I sat, chair-tilted, by the hotel, watching them pass. Their heavy woolen shirts crossed by the broad suspenders, the red of their sashes or leather shine of their belts, their short kersey trousers, "stagged" off to leave a gap between the knee and the heavily spiked" cork boots "-all these were distinctive enough of their class, but most interesting to me were the eyes that peered from beneath their little round hats tilted rakishly askew. They were all subtly alike, those eyes. Some were black, some were brown, or grey, or blue, but all were steady and unabashed, all looked straight at you with a strange humorous blending of aggression and respect for your own business, and all without exception wrinkled at the corners with a suggestion of dry humor. In my half-conscious scrutiny I probably stared harder than I knew, for all at once a laughing pair of the blue eyes suddenly met mine full, and an ironical voice drawled:

Say, bub, you look as interested as a man killing snakes. Am I your long-lost friend?"

The tone of the voice matched accurately the attitude of the man, and that was quite non-committal. He stood cheerfully ready to meet the emergency. If I sought trouble, it was here to my hand; or if I needed help, he was willing to offer it.

"I guess you are," I replied, "if you can tell me what all this outfit's headed for."

He thrust back his hat and ran his hand through a mop of closely cropped light curls.

"Birling match," he explained briefly. "Come on."

I joined him, and together we followed the crowd to the river,

where we roosted like cormorants on adjacent piles overlooking a patch of clear water among the filled booms.

"Rear come

"Drive's just over," my new friend informed me. down last night. Fourther July celebration. This little town will scratch fer th' tall timber along about midnight when the boys goes in to take her apart."

A half-dozen men with peavies rolled a white-pine log of about a foot and a half diameter into the clear water, where it lay rocking back and forth, three or four feet from the boom piles. Suddenly a man ran the length of the boom, leaped easily into the air, and landed with both feet square on one end of the floating log. That end disappeared in an ankle-deep swirl of white foam, the other rose suddenly, the whole timber, projected forward by the shock, drove headlong to the middle of the little pond. And the man, his arms folded, his knees just bent in the graceful, nervous attitude of the circus-rider, stood upright like a statue of bronze.

A roar approved this feat.

"That's Dickey Darrell," said my informant; "Roaring Dick. Watch him."

The man on the log was small, with clean beautiful haunches and shoulders, but with hanging baboon arms. Perhaps his most striking feature was a mop of reddish-brown hair that overshadowed a little triangular white face accented by two reddish-brown quadrilaterals that served as eyebrows and a pair of inscrutable chipmunk eyes.

For a moment he poised erect in the great calm of the public performer. Then slowly he began to revolve the log under his feet. The lofty gaze, the folded arms, the straight supple waist budged not by a hair's breadth; only the feet stepped forward, at first deliberately, then faster and faster, until the rolling log threw a blue spray a foot into the air. Then suddenly slap! slap! the heavy caulks stamped a reversal. The log came instantaneously to rest, quivering exactly like some animal that had been spurred through its paces.

"Magnificent!" I cried.

"That's nothing! " my companion repressed me; "anybody can birl a log. Watch this."

Roaring Dick for the first time unfolded his arms. With some appearance of caution he balanced his unstable footing into absolute immobility. Then he turned a somersault.

This was the real thing. My friend uttered a wild yell of applause which was lost in a general roar.

A long pike-pole shot out, bit the end of the timber, and towed it to the boom pile. Another man stepped on the log with Darrell. They stood facing each other, bent-kneed, alert. Suddenly with one accord they commenced to birl the log from left to right. The pace grew hot. Like squirrels treading a cage their feet twinkled. Then it became apparent that Darrell's opponent was gradually being forced from the top of the log. He could not keep up. Little by little, still moving desperately, he dropped back to the slant, then at last to the edge, and so off into the river with a mighty splash. "Clean birled!" commented my friend.

One after another a half-dozen rivermen tackled the imperturbable Dick, but none of them possessed the agility to stay on top in the pace he set them. One boy of eighteen seemed for a moment to hold his own, and managed at least to keep out of the water even when Darrell had apparently reached his maximum speed. But that expert merely threw his entire weight into two reversing stamps of his feet, and the young fellow drove forward as abruptly as though he had been shied over a horse's head.

The crowd was by now getting uproarious and impatient of volunteer effort to humble Darrell's challenge. It wanted the best, and at once. It began, with increasing insistence, to shout a name. "Jimmy Powers! " it vociferated; "Jimmy Powers."

And then by shamefaced bashfulness, by profane protest, by muttered and comprehensive curses, I knew that my companion on the other pile was indicated.

A dozen men near at hand began to shout. "Here he is! they cried. "Come on, Jimmy." "Don't be a high banker." "Hang his hide on the fence."

Jimmy, still red and swearing, suffered himself to be pulled from his elevation and disappeared in the throng. A moment later I caught his head and shoulders pushing toward the boom piles, and so in a moment he stepped warily aboard to face his antagonist.

This was evidently no question to be determined by the simplicity of force or the simplicity of a child's trick. The two men stood half-crouched, face to face, watching each other narrowly, but making no move. To me they seemed like two wrestlers sparring for an opening. Slowly the log revolved one way; then slowly the