The city of Scranton lies in the centre of the Lackawanna coal-field, in the State of Pennsylvania.

Robert Burnham sat in his office on Lackawanna Avenue, busy with his afternoon mail.

Lackawanna Avenue is the principal thoroughfare in the city of Scranton.

It was a beautiful autumn morning, and the nature-loving boy enjoyed greatly the changing views from the car window, as the train bore them swiftly on through the picturesque valley of the Lackawanna.

But they had not taken two steps around the corner into Lackawanna Avenue, when they came face to face with the missing boy.

Lackawanna County had not yet been erected out of the northern part of Luzerne, with Scranton as its county seat.

Ralph hurried down the street until he reached Lackawanna Avenue, and there he stopped, wondering which way to turn.

But when summer came, and the cool breeze floated across through the open places at the head, and one could look down always on the green fields far below, and the blossoming gardens, and the gray-roofed city, and the shining waters of the Lackawanna, winding southward, and the wooded hills rising like green waves to touch the far blue line of mountain peaks, ah, then it was a pleasant place to work in.

Mitchell, in the days that followed, proceeded to become acquainted with the Big Four, and in a short time was so close to the Lackawanna that he called her Phoebe Snow.

It transpired also that his attentions toward the Lackawanna had been misconstrued, for one night when Phoebe bade him adieu in the vestibule she broke down and wept upon his shoulder, saying that his coldness hurt her.

But before he had worked the matter out in his own mind that rate clerk of whom Miss Lackawanna had spoken dropped in at Comer & Mathison's, introduced himself to Mitchell and told him, with a degree of firmness which could not be ignored, that his attentions to Miss Phoebe Snow were distasteful.

Then came a mission hall-clock in the original package, redirected in the hand of Miss Gratz, of the C. & E.I., and one day the office-boy from the Lackawanna brought him a smoking-set for which Miss Phoebe Snow had no use.

In desperation he finally went to Murphy begging quick promotion to a traveling position, but the Sales Manager told him there was no chance before the first of the year, then asked him why he had lost his grip on the Lackawanna business.

As a matter of fact, since Miss Phoebe's rate clerk had declared himself Mitchell had slipped a few Wednesday nights, trusting to hold the Lackawanna trade by virtue of his past performances, but he realized in the light of Murphy's catechism that eternal visiting is the price of safety.

Coming victorious to Miss Lackawanna's door to have his knuckles collodionized he had made known in coarse, triumphant language the base commercialism of his rival.

At the time of Mendenhall's interview with the president he was speeding southward across country in a livery rig, catching the Lackawanna local for Binghamton about the time the wires were working and he was being searched for on all Lehigh Valley trains.

SCRANTON (102), capital of Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, on the Lackawanna River, 144 m. NW. of New York; does a large trade in coal, and is the centre of a busy steel, iron, and machinery industry.

SCRANTON (102), capital of Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, on the Lackawanna River, 144 m. NW. of New York; does a large trade in coal, and is the centre of a busy steel, iron, and machinery industry.