hat is?

"In any case, you lost $8,000 of the easiest money that ever
happened. Why not have tied me up somewhere till you got a boat,
or, after getting me as far as you did, why not have taken me the
rest of the way?

"But I bear you no grudge. I am sure no one but you could make
being kidnapped so amusing. It was great. I am exceedingly sorry,
however, that I lost your suspenders. Please accept, in their
place, the eleven dollars you have already taken from me. Would
enclose more, but feel that the experience alone was worth a
fortune to you. You needed the practice. You were right, though,
in refusing to set my ransom at $10,000, for in that case you
would now be out $2,000 more of easy money.

"Life would be far easier, wouldn't it, if we could judge a book
by its covers?

"Very truly yours,

"Courtney Delevan Schwartz.

"P.S.--It may interest you to know that before I came down from my
roost in those ruins, I concealed my watch and $840 under some of
the bricks you threw at me. I found them there this morning.

"C. D. S."

ARCTIC COLOR

THE ADVENTUROUS EXPEDITIONS OF ALEXANDER BORISSOFF, THE PAINTER OF THE
FAR NORTH

BY STERLING HEILIG

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PAINTINGS BY ALEXANDER BORISSOFF

[Illustration: "MIDNIGHT IN THE KARA SEA"

IN THE POSSESSION OF THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT]

About twenty-five years ago, the Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia, making
a journey into the northern part of the Empire, chanced to visit the
lonely Solovetski Monastery on the shores of the White Sea. Among the
sacred painters of this monastery he found a young peasant who had
been sent there by his parents as a boy of fifteen. Duke Vladimir,
struck with his talent, shipped him off to St. Petersburg to study in
the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. The young Russian peasant was
Alexander Borissoff, the adventurous painter whose work in the last
few years has made the wonderful color scheme of the Arctic Circle for
the first time accessible to the eyes of the world.

His early years on the edge of the Arctic fired the imagination of the
youth, and directed the course of his whole future life. While he was
still a student he made a trip to England. "There," he says, "an idea
that had long been shaping itself in my brain took hold of me. The
polar regions fascinated me. My forefathers, I knew, hunted bears at
Spitzbergen; and as a boy I had heard all about the Arctic. I wanted
to se