MARTHA?" "Yes, Tom?" She thought with pity, as old Dr. Whalen spoke, how clearly pain came over the phone. As she listened she had the hope that when his tired heart came to rest it would be in his sleep. For one thing she was grateful: he was calling upon her more and more to help him.By GEORGE ARMIN SHAFTEL
THE SAILER’S SON, with the colored boy we call Boll Weevil low over his neck, came in like a tawny flame. As they flashed by Colonel Gresham clicked the stop watch. Requardt, the trainer, sucked a short pipe impassively, but a shadowy smile curved his mouth corners.By EDWIN RUTT
SCHRIEBER-HAUPTGEFRIETER Helmut Keune was busy over the teleprinter in the radio room of the unsinkable Bismarck the glory of the Nazi Navy—that day she slipped out of the Baltic under a grey, storm-filled sky. Code messages from headquarters in Kiel clacked out of the machine.By IAN MACKENZIE
IN THE golden city of Edmonton, Alberta, fortune’s guises are legion and her smile is allencompassing. Every day, including Sundays, $100,000 in oil bubbles up from the rich black earth around the town. Every day 300 planes roar into Canada’s busiest airport.By PIERRE BERTON
THIS FALL, as every autumn for the last 20 years, the florist at New York’s Hotel Roosevelt will get an order to deliver 16 dark-red carnations nightly to the grill room. These flowers will be neatly placed in the lapels of the Burgundy dinner jackets worn by the most phenomenal band in popular music—Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians.By JOSEF ISRAELS II
WE CAME OUT of the still, warm woods and crossed the newly plowed black - earth field to the trail. The cottage was at the winding end of it, on a bluff by the lake. Blue hepatica were out in the cracks of the stone steps. My host flipped a stone lightly into the shore waters.By EVA-LIS WUORIO
LATE LAST YEAR Toronto’s Margaret Hyndman was asked to figure in a nationwide radio hookup as the most successful Canadian businesswoman of 1948. The well-proportioned, volatile 47-year-old lawyer, who weighs more than 200 lbs. and frankly admits she is stout, refused on the grounds she was a professional woman.By MCKENZIE PORTER
THE FORTUNETELLER was an untidy old woman in a cheap dress. Her eyes were shrewd and calculating and her mouth was held in a loose smile intended to be benign. Her hands dealt the filthy cards expertly, but she didn’t look at them. Chattering about the weather she watched her subject across the table, her glance flicking only once to the girl’s engagement ring.By JUNE CALLWOOD
BEFORE we were married my wife and I had a little joke. We’d have a car, we used to say, a summer cottage and six boys. I got the car and the summer cottage, but I didn’t get the six boys. I got two. It seems now that is two too many. I’ve found that the ideal number of children, if you want to get along with your neighbors, is none unless it's one quiet little girl who stays two years old forever.By JOHN BEDFORD
HOLLYWOOD could not have prepared a more dramatic script. The scene was the grand ballroom of New York’s WaldorfAstoria Hotel. The audience was 500 doctors, including 28 Canadian specialists, assembled for a session last May of the Seventh International Congress on Rheumatic Diseases.By JOHN E. PFEIFFER
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