apiece."

"I see it all now," exclaimed the boy, "you have to punch two holes for
age for every person. For a boy of ten, you would have to punch the '0'
as well as the '10,' I suppose, to make sure he isn't older and the
extra years forgotten."

"That's the reason exactly."

"The meaning of the section next to the age is easy, too," Hamilton
continued. "'S' for Single, 'M' for Married, 'Wd' for Widowed, 'D' for
Divorced, 'Un' for unknown, any one could guess. But this 'Mother
Tongue' business has me going."

"I thought it would," was the reply. "But it's not so hard if you
remember a few things, particularly that the language of a country is
not always spoken by the greatest number of its inhabitants. Now the
mother tongue of Wales is Welsh, but a large proportion of the people do
not speak Welsh. Thus an English-speaking Welshman's card would be
punched 'OL,' meaning Other Language, or the language next in
importance to the mother language of the country."

"On that basis," said Hamilton, "if the second most important language
of Denmark is German a card that was punched 'Den' for the country would
have to be punched 'OL' if the person whose census was registered had
spoken German as his native tongue, but 'LC' if he had spoken Danish,
which is the native tongue of the country. But I should think there
would be some cases that would not come under that rule."

"There are--a few," the foreman replied, "but the way in which those are
to be punched will be noted on the schedule by the schedule editors."

"Some schedules need a good deal of editing, I suppose," exclaimed
Hamilton thoughtfully.

"You may be sure of that," the other answered. "If you think for a
moment how impossible it would be to have all the supervisors and
enumerators work exactly in the same style, you can see how necessary it
must be for some group of persons to go over them to make them all
uniform. Besides which, there are a lot of obvious mistakes that the
editors remedy before the card is punched ready for tabulation. But go
on with your explanation, so that I can see if you really do understand
it."

"The parent columns run the same way, of course," Hamilton continued,
"'U.S.' meaning any one born in the United States, and 'Un.' cases in
which the parentage is unknown. Then 'NP' means native-born parents, and
'FP' foreign-born parents. Further on, 'Na' means Naturalized, 'Al'
stands for Alien, 'Pa' that first papers have been taken ou