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the trouble to present him with anything.  Tears filled his eyes and he could not speak.  He could only gasp and look at the cup, clutching it to his bosom as if afraid it would take flight. Then, as suddenly as it began, the ceremony was over, and Mr. and Mrs. Henson were again left to their meditations.  

  Almost two years have passed since that date, and Matthew Henson again takes his place among the men "nobody knows."  Day be day he plods his way to the Customs House, does his chore, and carries out his routine assignments.  At eventide he returns to his wife and his dreams.  That is his life.  

  And through it all, Matthew Henson remains the only living soul who has set food on the North Pole and has surveyed it. Commander Richard Byrd, brother to the Governor of Virginia, has flown over it as well as over the South Pole.  Sir Hubert Wilkins, noted British explorer, has done the same.  But neither of these dared bring their planes down to the surface of the Polar ice.  They dared not do what Admiral Peary, Matthew Henson, and four Eskimos dared do.  They did in one day what required Henson and Admiral Peary nine months to do.  Admiral Byrd, with his companion and pilot, Bernt Balchen, circled the Pole as they dropped a flag from from their comfortable cockpit; Peary and Henson stood on the ice and drove their flagpole deep into the frozen Arctic sea.

THERE is quite a difference in method and in accomplishment.  In 1891 when Admiral Peary made his first trip to the North, he took Henson along as a personal servant.  He had met the bright young chap in Washington, and had liked his appearance from the first.  Henson went to New York with him, and was one of the happy, carefree group that set sail so blithely that one would have supposed they were on a pleasure jaunt.  They soon learned, however, that they had launched one of the most hazardous undertakings ever attempted by man, more hazardous, by far, than Columbus' first trip to the New World!

  It was during the winter of 1894 that Henson decided that, in order to be of real service to such expeditions as this one, he would have to learn the language of the Eskimos.  While Peary was studying charts and maps, and laying plans, Henson was studying the Eskimo language, and the methods of handling dogs for the long jaunts over the ice after the boat had been left behind.  

  How well Henson learned his lesson was described a few years ago by Commander Donald McMillan in a radio talk.  I remember how enrapt I listened to the "true story" of what happened on that memorable run to the Pole - how, one by one, Peary told his assistants to return to the camp; how some of them died before they could make it - died of starvation and privation - and how, finally, Captain Bartlett grasped Henson's hand and told him that he would have to go ahead without him.  

  "It has been said", declared Commander McMillan in his radio talk, "that Admiral Peary selected Matthew Henson because he did not want another white man to reach the Pole with him.  I want to take this opportunity to spike his infamous slander.  Matt Henson was selected for one reason, and one reason only: He was the better man.  Henson knew more about Eskimos and Eskimo dogs than any other person in the expedition.  He knew better how to look after this most essential feature of the work than any other person there.  I feel certain that the expedition owed its complete success as much to Henson as to any other person who was on the trip."

  Quite a tribute to the man who has remained "unknown" for all these years, wasn't it?  But we are ahead of our story.  Four efforts to reach the Pole had failed. Peary was beginning to be discouraged, but far from downhearted.
 
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- Two Men Meet in the Prize Ring - a Woman Sits at the Ringside and Screams for Her Boy Friend to Kill His Opponent and Then He Made a Discovery-!

- A woman's shrill hysterical scream curved through the muffled darkness like a scimitar of woe!- "Kill him, Jimmy! For God's sake, kill him!" It was Jimmy O'Grady's Gal!

JIMMY O'GRADY'S GAL

Early autum in New York.  In her small furnished room in Twenty-eighth Street, Miss Jean La Dore was hastily ironing some fresh underthings.  Jean was tall, twenty-four, nicely formed, and strikingly blonde of hair - a bit too blonde, in fact - with one of those strong square-cut faces.  You know the type - handsome rather than pretty.  Her eyes were a greenish grey.  Tonight she was bitter.

  "Hell," she complained to her girl friend, Charlotte, "why can't I meet some guy with money, like you do! Let's take another slant at the diamond, will ya'?"

  Charlotte, sprawled on the bed, proudly held out a slim well manicured hand, on which sparked a moderate-sized diamond.

  "Ho-lee Cripes!" sighed Jean, frankly envious.  "Honest to Gawd, kid, I'd give my right ear to own a hunk 'a ice like that!  But a helluva chance I got 'a meetin' them kinda fellas," she added disgustedly, "and me slingin' hash in a restaurant!"

  Charlotte stifled a forced yawn with her diamond ringed hand.  "Oh you can't tell, dearie," she encouraged, with just a hint of condescension. "Remember I met this bozo in the five-and-ten!"  She laughed noisily.  Charlotte's face was a startling splash of scarlet and mascare, from which a pair of cold blue eyes stared

By WALTER ARNETT SIMMONDS