THE first difficulty was the title. It was felt that Seeing Things at Night might suggest theatrical essays to the exclusion of anything else. That was not the author's intention. He meant to suggest rather newspaper articles of any sort done more or less on the spur of the moment for next day's consumption. There was also some question as to the order in which the various "pieces" should be arranged. The author was tempted to follow the example of Adolf Wolff, a free verse poet who published a volume some years ago called Songs, Sighs and Curses, and explained in a foreword, "When asked in what sequence he would arrange his poems, Wolff threw the manuscripts in the air, saying 'Let Fate decide.' They now appear in the order in which they were picked up from the floor."

Broun, however, feared that some of his essays might crash through the floor like the mistakes of a cannonball juggler and that others would prove so lacking in weight when put to the test that it would be necessary to pluck them from the ceiling rather than the floor. The arrangement, therefore, is premeditated though haphazard. In respect to his age the author also wishes to explain that the character, H. 3rd, who appears from time to time is his son and not his grandson. He also wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of The New York Tribune, Vanity Fair, McCall's, Collier's Weekly and The Nation in permitting him to reprint various articles which first appeared in their pages.

Of all the pupils at the knight school Gawaine le Coeur-Hardy was among the least promising. He was tall and sturdy, but his instructors soon discovered that he lacked spirit. He would hide in the woods when the jousting class was called, although his companions and members of the faculty sought to appeal to his better nature by shouting to him to come out and break his neck like a man. Even when they told him that the lances were padded, the horses no more than ponies and the field unusually soft for late autumn, Gawaine refused to grow enthusiastic. The Headmaster and the Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce were discussing the case one spring afternoon and the Assistant Professor could see no remedy but expulsion.

"No," said the Headmaster, as he looked out at the purple hills which ringed the school, "I think I'll train him to slay dragons."

"He might be killed," objected the Assistant Professor.

"So he might," replied the Headmaster brightly, but he added, more soberly, "We must consider the greater good. We are responsible for the formation of this lad's character."

The Ways of the Circus is a decidedly readable book, rich in anecdotes of the life of circus folk and circus animals. The narrator is an old lion tamer and Harvey W. Root, who has done the actual writing, has managed to keep a decidedly naÏve quality in the talk as he sets it down. There is a delightful chapter, for instance, in which Conklin tells how he first became a lion tamer. By gradual process of promotion he had gone as far as an elephant, but his salary was still much lower than that of Charlie Forepaugh, the lion man. There were three lions with the circus, but Charlie never worked with more than one in the cage at the time. Conklin got the notion that an act with all the lions in action at once would be a sensational success. He was not sure that it could be done, as he had had no experience with lions. The only way to find out was to try. Accordingly Conklin sneaked into the menagerie alone, late at night, to ascertain whether or not lions lay along his natural bent.

H. G. Wells in his Outline of History seldom seems just an Englishman. He fights his battles and makes most of his judgments alone and generally in defiance of the traditions of his countrymen, but he is not bold enough to face Napoleon Bonaparte all by himself. The sight of the terrible little Corsican peeping over the edge of the thirty-eighth chapter sends Wells scurrying from his solitude into the center of a British square. It must be that when Wells was little and bad his nurse told him that if he did not eat his mush or go to bed, or perform some other necessary function in the daily life of a child, Old Bony would get him. And Wells is still scared. He takes it out, of course, by pretending that Napoleon has been vastly overrated and remarks that it was pretty lucky for him that he lost Trafalgar and never got to England, where troops would have made short work of him.

"I am one of those people," says the flapper in Beauty and Mary Blair, "to whom life is a very great puzzle. So many people seem to get used to living, but I don't. I can't seem to get up any really satisfactory philosophy or find anybody or anything to help me about it. I want everything, little or big, fixed up in mind before I can proceed.

"Even as a very small child I always wanted my plans made in advance. Once, when mother had a bad sick headache, I sat on the edge of her bed and begged her to tell me if she thought she was going to die, so if she was I could plan to go and live with my Aunt Margaret. I was an odious infant, but all the same, I really wanted to know, and that's the way I am to this day! I want to know what the probabilities are, in order to act accordingly."

"The moment, now, had arrived for a Daiquiri," writes Joseph Hergesheimer in his San Cristobal de la Habana. "Seated near the cool drip of the fountain, where a slight stir of air seemed to ruffle the fringed mantone of a bronze dancing Andalusian girl, I lingered over the frigid mixture of Don Bacardi, sugar and a fresh, vivid green lime.

"It was a delicate compound, not so good as I was to discover later at the Telegrafo, but still a revelation, and I was devoutly thankful to be sitting at that hour in the Inglaterra with such a drink. It elevated my contentment to an even higher pitch, and, with a detached amusement, I recalled the fact that farther north prohibition was now in effect. Unquestionably the cocktail on my table was a dangerous agent, for it held in its shallow glass bowl slightly incrusted with undissolved sugar the power of a contemptuous indifference to fate; it set the mind free of responsibility; obliterating both memory and to-morrow, it gave the heart an adventitious feeling of superiority and momentarily vanquished all the celebrated, the eternal fears."

THIS is about as far as the old song should be carried. Perhaps it is too far. Our plea to-day is for something of abatement in the intensity of the rivalry between Harvard and Yale. To be sure we realize that the plea has been made before unsuccessfully by mightier men. Indeed it was Charles W. Eliot himself, president of Harvard, who rebuked the students when first they began to sing, "Three cheers for Harvard and down with Yale." This, he said, seemed to him hardly a proper spirit. He suggested an amendment so that the song might go, "Three cheers for Harvard and one for Yale." Such seventy-five percent loyalty was rejected. Yale must continue to do its own cheering.

IT is evening in the home of Peter J. Cottontail. The scene is a conventional parlor of a rabbit family of the upper middle class. About the room there is the sort of furniture a well-to-do rabbit would have, and on the shelves the books you would naturally expect. Leaves of Grass is there, of course; possibly Cabbages and Kings, and perhaps a volume or two of The Winning of the West, with a congratulatory inscription from the author. The walls have one or two good prints of hunting scenes and an excellent lithographic likeness of Thomas Malthus, but most of the space is given over to photographs of the family.

COTTONTAIL—But I'm afraid it wasn't a dream.

DOCTOR—What wasn't a dream?

THE scene is a sickroom. It is probably in a hospital, for the walls are plain and all the corners are eliminated in that peculiar circular construction which is supposed to annoy germs. The shades are down and the room is almost dark. A doctor who has been examining the sick man turns to go. The nurse at his side looks at him questioningly.

THE DOCTOR (briskly)—I don't believe he'll last out the day. If he wakes or seems unusually restless, let me know. There's nothing to do.

He goes out quietly, but quickly, for there is another man down at the end of the corridor who is almost as sick. The nurse potters about the room for a moment or two, arranging whatever things it is that nurses arrange. She exits l. c., or, in other words, goes out the door. There is just a short pause in the dark, quiet room shut out from all outside noises and most outside light. When the steam pipes are not clanking only the slow breathing of the man on the bed can be heard. Suddenly a strange thing happens.

THE responsibilities of a book reviewer, always heavy, sometimes assume a gravity which makes it quite impossible for them to be borne on any single pair of shoulders. We have received a letter to-day upon which so much depends that we hesitate to answer without requesting advice from readers. It is from a young man in Pittsburgh who identifies himself merely by the initials X. Q., which we presume to be fictitious. He writes as follows:

JOHN ROACH STRATON died and went to his appointed kingdom where he immediately sought an audience with the ruler of the realm.

"Let New York be destroyed," shouted Dr. Straton as he pushed his way into the inner room. The king was engaged at the moment in watching a sparrow fall to earth and motioned the visitor to compose himself in silence, but there was an urgency in the voice and manner of the man from earth which would not be denied. "Smite them hip and thigh," said Dr. Straton and the king looked down at him and asked, "Is the necessity immediate?"

"Delay not thy wrath," said Dr. Straton, "for to-day on thy Sabbath sixty thousand men, women, and children of New York have gathered together to watch a baseball game."

The ruler of the realm looked and saw that 11,967 persons were watching the Yankees and the White Sox at the Polo Grounds.

"A good husky tidal wave would confound them," urged Straton, but the king shook his head.

"Remember the judgment you heaped upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah," suggested Straton.

ONCE there lived near Bethlehem a man named Simon and his wife Deborah. And Deborah dreamed a curious dream, a dream so vivid that it might better be called a vision. It was not yet daybreak, but she roused her husband and told him that an angel had come to her in the vision and had said, as she remembered it, "To-morrow night in Bethlehem the King of the World will be born." The rest was not so vivid in Deborah's mind, but she told Simon that wise men and kings were already on their way to Bethlehem, bringing gifts for the wonder child.

"When he is born," she said, "the wise men and the kings who bring these gifts will see the stars dance in the heavens and hear the voices of angels. You and I must send presents, too, for this child will be the greatest man in all the world."

MARCH 1, 1919.—"Do you know how to keep the child from crying?" began the prospectus. "Do you know how always to obtain cheerful obedience?" it continued. "To suppress the fighting instinct? To teach punctuality? Perseverance? Carefulness? Honesty? Truthfulness? Correct pronunciation?"

We pondered. Obviously, our rejoinder must be: "In reply to questions NOS. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 the answer is in the negative."

The prospectus said that all this would be easy if you bought the book.

"Instead of a hardship," the advertisement said, "child training becomes a genuine pleasure, as the parent shares every confidence, every joy and every sorrow of the child, and at the same time has its unqualified respect. This is a situation rarely possible under the old training methods. And what a source of pride now as well as in after years! To have children whose every action shows culture and refinement—perfect little gentlemen and gentlewomen."

SEPTEMBER 3, 1919.—H. 3rd lay back in his carriage with his arms folded across his stomach and said nothing. I tried to make conversation. I pointed out objects of interest, but met no response. He smiled complacently and was silent. Even carefully rehearsed bits of dialogue such as "Who's a good boy?" to which the answer is "Me," and "Is your face dirty," to which the answer is "No," failed to move him to speech. I tried him in new lands with strange sights and pointed out the camels, and buffaloes and rhinoceri of the zoo, hoping that he would identify some one of them in his all-embracing "dog," which serves for every member of the four-footed family. But still he smiled complacently and was silent. I began to feel as if I were an Atlantic City negro wheeling a tired business man down the Boardwalk.

SEPTEMBER 5, 1919.—W. H. Hudson points the way to an interesting field of speculation in one of the early chapters of Far Away and Long Ago, in which he speaks of his mother.

DECEMBER 17, 1919.—We read Floyd Dell's Were You Ever a Child? to-day and found him remarking: "People talk about children being hard to teach and in the next breath deplore the facility with which they acquire the 'vices.' That seems strange. It takes as much patience, energy and faithful application to become proficient in a vice as it does to learn mathematics. Yet consider how much more popular poker is than equations! But did a schoolboy ever drop in on a group of teachers who had sat up all night parsing, say, a sentence in Henry James, or seeing who could draw the best map of the North Atlantic states? And when you come to think of it, it seems extremely improbable that any little boy ever learned to drink beer by seeing somebody take a tablespoonful once a day."

Most of this is true. The only trouble with all the new theories about bringing up children is that it leaves the job just as hard as ever.

JANUARY 21, 1920.—When the rest went out and left me alone in the house, they said that H. 3rd would surely sleep through the evening. Nobody remembered that he had ever waked up to cry. But he did this night. I didn't quite know what to do about it. I sang "Rockabye Baby" to him, but that didn't do any good, and then I said "I wouldn't cry if I were you." This, too, had no effect, and, in fact, no sooner had I uttered it than I recognized it as a piece of gratuitous impertinence. How could I possibly tell whether or not I would cry if the safety pins were in wrong or anything else of that sort was not quite right?

JANUARY 24, 1920.—"My attention has been called," writes John S. Sumner, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, "to a paragraph of your article in the Tribune of January 21, wherein you refrain from blaming H. 3rd for crying, because among other things, he 'lives in a state which has recently suspended five duly elected assemblymen, and in which as fine a book as Jurgen has aroused the meddlesome attention of the Society for the Suppression of Vice.'

"I assume that H. 3rd is too young to appreciate the contents of any publication, but some day he will be old enough, and no doubt his character will be molded and his conduct controlled, in a measure, by what he reads and the thoughts suggested by such reading. That is the usual thing.

MARCH 10, 1920.—Some little time ago we were asked what method we were going to use to instil moral ideas into the head of H. 3rd. We said then that we rather hoped that he would be able to get along, for a while at any rate, without any. We felt that it was the last thing in the world concerning which we wanted to be dogmatic. Unfortunately, the moral sense seems to arise early. Already H. 3rd is constantly inquiring "Good boy, dada?" Usually this comes after he has chipped the furniture or broken some of the china.

MARCH 12, 1920.—"Your troubles are just beginning," writes M. B. "H. 3rd knew he was a bad boy when he broke that lamp. He has simply been testing your moral sense, which for some months he has suspected of being inadequate. I foresee that you will be a great disappointment to him as time goes on. In twelve years or so he will find your political views unsound and your literary tastes decadent. I doubt whether he will approve of the way you spend Sunday.

"You may think you can retain his affection, if not his respect, by keeping clear of the arbitrary methods of a bygone generation. Alas! I don't think there is even that hope for the radical parent of a conservative child. By the time H. 3rd has grown to adolescence he will feel that dogmatism is a sine qua non of parenthood, and he will wish that he had had a real father. He may even resolve to have military discipline in his home.

APRIL 18, 1920.—The nurse said that H. 3rd had a fight in the park with one of his little playmates and won it. She was proud and partisan.

"Woodie," she said, using the fearful nickname which has fastened itself upon the child, "wanted to play with Archie's fire engine, and Archie wouldn't let him. Woodie hit him in the mouth and made it bleed, and Archie cried."

I said "Tut, tut."

"I think it's right," said the nurse. "I think children ought to stand up for their rights."

"But, after all," I reminded her, "it was Archie's fire engine."

APRIL 21, 1920.—Although we don't know the exact legal form, we think we have seen announcements of somewhat the same sort. At any rate, we want to advertise the fact that on and after this date we will not be responsible for persons who may be injured by falling objects while passing the apartment house on the west side of Seventh Avenue between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth streets. Our first hint of the danger came when the hairbrush disappeared and could not be found. That was only circumstantial evidence, but on Monday we caught him in the act of tossing out a hand mirror.

MAY 5, 1920.—This is the story of the low-cut lady and the lisping tot. It is contained in The Menace of Immorality, by the Rev. John Roach Straton, in a chapter entitled "Slaves of Fashion":

"I once heard one of the most famous reform workers of this city explain why she gave up low-cut gowns," writes Dr. Straton. "She explained how she was ready to start for the theater one night in such a dress, when her little boy of five said to her, 'But, mother, you are not going that way? You are not dressed.' And then, with trembling voice, she told us how all the evening through, as she sat in the playhouse she kept hearing that sweet childish voice saying 'Not dressed! Not dressed! Not dressed!' until at last, with the blush of shame mantling to her cheeks, and with the realization that a Christian mother should dress differently from the idle and godless women of the world, she drew her cloak about her and went home, dressed—or rather undressed—for the last time in such a costume!"

JUNE 3, 1920.—Of late I am beginning to notice with perturbation a distinctly sentimental streak in H. 3rd. Nothing else will account for his tenderness toward Goliath. When we first began to talk about him he was treated by common consent rather scornfully. He was known to us as "Ole Goliath he talks too much." Even in those early days it cannot be said that Goliath was treated with special spite, for as the story grew in the telling he fared not much worse than David. Somehow or other I eventually came into the incident myself. Just now I can't remember whether it was at the special invitation of H. 3rd or my own egotistic urge.

JUNE 11, 1920.—"Perhaps you can answer the challenge to American educational institutions contained in this letter from H. G. Wells," writes Floyd Dell. "I can't (neither am I able to think of anything to reply to the question which he counters to my 'Were You Ever a Child?'—'Were You Ever a Parent?' But that won't embarrass you)."

I'm afraid that by dint of writing now and again about H. 3rd I have managed to pass myself off as a chronic parent. For all the assurance with which I have put forth certain theories on the care and education of the young, many of them mere reflections of Dell's book, I admit at the outset no qualification to answer the challenge of Wells even if I were sure that an answer were possible. For all I know H. 3rd will grow up to rob a bank and curse me that he was not spanked with due moralizing and ceremony three times a week. However, the letter from Wells is as follows:

Our text to-day is from the fifteenth verse of the third chapter of the Book of Judges, in which it is written: "And afterwards they cried out to the Lord, who raised them up a saviour called Aod, the son of Gera, the son of Jemini, who used the left hand as well as the right."

As a matter of fact, it seems probable that the old chronicler was simply trying to spare the feelings of Aod by describing him merely as an ambidextrous person, for there is later evidence, in the Book of Judges, that Aod actually favored his left hand and was—to be blunt and frank—just a southpaw.

Aod, as you may remember, was sent to Eglon, the king of Moab, ostensibly to bear gifts from the Children of Israel, but, in reality, to kill the oppressor. "Aod," continues the vivid scriptural narrative, "went in to him: now he was sitting in a summer parlor alone, and he said: I have a word from God to thee. And he forthwith rose up from his throne. And Aod put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly with such force that the haft went in after the blade into the wound, and was closed up with the abundance of fat."

The man who gave us Michael said that he was a Shetland terrier. Frankly, I don't believe there is any such thing; unless Michael is it. But there is no denying a Scotch strain of some sort. There is a good deal of John Knox about Michael. He recognizes no middle ground. There was no difficulty, for instance, in convincing Michael of the wickedness of some manifestations of the grossness which is mortality, but it has been impossible to make him accept any working compromise such as those by which men and dogs live. He can see no reason why there should be any geographical limits or bounds to badness.

There is a certain fierce democracy in that. Michael thinks no less of a backyard or a sidewalk than he does of a parlor. Or perhaps it would be better to say he thinks no more of a parlor. Repentance comes to him more easily than reformation. And yet I have an enormous respect for Michael's point of view as I understand it. He doesn't want to burn, of course, but he has no patience with dogs who blandly hope to attain salvation by leading lamp-post lives.

It began as "a farm," but even before the catalogues arrived it was "the farm." Now we call it "our farm," although the land is still in Spain abutting on the castle. Chiefly, the place is for Michael. The backyard is much too small for him, and too formal. He regards the house with affection, no doubt, but with none of that respect which he has for the backyard. He is, as you might say, thoroughly yard-broken. When he puts his paws against the front door and barks for freedom he would be a harsh person indeed who would refuse to plan a plantation, a large one, for him. Of course, there was H. 3rd to consider, also, but he seemed less restive. Things beyond the borders of a pram are so foreign.

Whenever a man remarks "I've had a mighty adventurous life, I have," we usually set him down as a former king of the Coney Island carnival or a recently returned delegate from an Elks' convention in Kansas City. It has been our somewhat bitter experience that the man who pictures himself as a great adventurer is almost invariably spurious. As a matter of fact, the rule holds good for great wits, great lovers and great drinkers. But it applies with particular pertinence to romantic folk.

A wise professor at Harvard once remarked that he didn't believe that the ancients realized that they were ancients. We have somewhat the same feeling about quaint people and romantic people and adventurous people.

Hans Christian Andersen once wrote a story about the tailors who made a suit for a King out of a magic cloth. The quality of the cloth was such, so the tailors said, that it could be seen by nobody who was not worthy of the position he held. And so all the people at court declared that they could see the cloth and admired it greatly, but when the King went out to walk a little boy cried: "Why, he hasn't got anything on." Then everybody took up the cry, and the King rushed back to his palace, and the two tailors were banished in disgrace. Information has recently been discovered which casts new light on the story. According to this information there was only one tailor, and his adventure with the King was about as follows:

AN IMPERIAL FOOTMAN—There's a man at the gate who says he's a tailor and that he wants to see your majesty.

THE LEADING DEMOCRAT—It all gets down to this, your majesty: do you trust the people, or don't you?

THE KING—I trust them as much as you do, but I don't go to excess. I don't see any good reason why I shouldn't wear an ordinary business suit under this magic royal robe. A King can't take chances, you know. He must play it safe.

THE TAILOR—Don't say that, your majesty. You're a King, your majesty. Think of that. You mustn't tap in front of you, like a blind man with a stick. You mustn't fear to bump your head. If you hold it high, you know, there'd be nothing to fear but the stars.

THE KING—You are eloquent, O stranger from a far country, and what do you mean?

THE TAILOR—Only this: if you wear my robe you must cast off compromise and expediency.

"Margaret Fuller's father was thirty-two when she was born," writes Katharine Anthony in her biography of the great feminist. "A self-made man, he had been obliged to postpone marriage and family life to a comparatively advanced age."

The paragraph came to us like a blow in the face. For years and years we had been going along buoyed up by the comments of readers who wrote in from time to time to say: "Of course, you are still a young man. You will learn better as you grow older." And now we find that we have grown older. We have reached a comparatively advanced age, and the problem of whether or not we have learned better is present and persistent. It can no longer be put off as something which will work out all right in time.

"Some day," says the young man to himself, "I'm going to sit down and write a novel, or the great American drama, or an epic poem." Then some day comes and the young man finds that his joints are stiff and he can't sit down.

When Adam delved and Eve span, the fiction that man is incapable of housework was first established. It would be interesting to figure out just how many foot-pounds of energy men have saved themselves, since the creation of the world, by keeping up the pretense that a special knack is required for washing dishes and for dusting, and that the knack is wholly feminine. The pretense of incapacity is impudent in its audacity, and yet it works.

Men build bridges and throw railroads across deserts, and yet they contend successfully that the job of sewing on a button is beyond them. Accordingly, they don't have to sew buttons.

It might be said, of course, that the safety of suspension bridges is so much more important than that of suspenders that the division of labor is only fair, but there are many of us who have never thrown a railroad in our lives, and yet swagger in all the glory of masculine achievement without undertaking any of the drudgery of odd jobs.

Everybody said it was a great opportunity for Hans. The pay was small, to be sure, but the hours were short and the chance for advancement prodigious. Already the boy could take a pair of rabbits out of a high hat, or change a bunch of carrots into a bowl of goldfish. Unfortunately, the Dutchmen of Rothdam were vegetarians, and Hans was not yet learned enough in magic to turn goldfish back to carrots. Many times he had asked his master, Kahnale, for instruction in the big tricks. He longed to go in for advanced magic, such as typhoons, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. He even aspired to juggle planets and keep three stars in the air at once.

Kahnale only smiled and spoke of the importance of rudiments. He pointed out that as long as inexperience made mistakes possible it would be better to mar a carrot or two than the solar system.

We have received The Literary Digest Parents' League Series, in which the training of children is discussed in seven volumes by William Byron Forbush. Much of it seems sound and shrewd, but it also seeks, by implication at any rate to encourage parents to maintain with their children the old nonsense of parental infallibility. Thus, in one volume, which suggests the manner in which a father may impart certain information to his son, he is quoted as saying, "I tell you this, Frank, because I know all about it." And in another volume mothers are urged to hold before their children the ideals of the Light Brigade, "Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die."

Now there is no denying that this is a comfortable doctrine for parents, if they can put it over, but they must make up their minds that sooner or later they will be found out.

It is difficult for us to tell how accurately Philip Gibbs has pictured Fleet Street in his novel The Street of Adventure; for, externally at least, there is little resemblance to Park Row. We cite, for instance, a description of the city room of The Star as Francis Luttrell found it on his first day:

"It was a large room, with a number of desks divided by glass partitions and with a large table in the center. At the far end of the room was a fire burning brightly in the grate, and in front of it were two men and a girl, the men in swing chairs with their legs stretched out, the girl on the floor in the billows of a black silk skirt, arranging chestnuts on the first bar of the grate."

We find the difference in spirit not so great. There is a great deal about the terrific strain of newspaper work and how a brutal city editor will drive a finely tempered reporter until he has had the best of his brains and then toss him aside like a withered violet.

"Fleet Street," says Gibbs, who tells the story partly in the first person, "would kill you in a year—it is very cruel, very callous to the sufferings of men's souls and bodies."

Again, the heroine, who is a press woman, complains: "We women wear out sooner. Five years in Fleet Street withers any girl. Then she gets crow's feet round her eyes and becomes snappy and fretful, or a fierce creature struggling in an unequal combat with men. I am just reaching that stage."

The novels of Leonard Merrick go a long way in reconciling us to the constitutional establishment of the single standard of morals proposed by William Jennings Bryan. Merrick's world is a hard one for women. His men starve romantically in a pretty poverty. Their dingy haunts are of the gayest. Bad luck only adds to their merriment. So it is, too, with the Kikis and Mignons, but Merrick's good women are of much more fragile stuff. Although invariably English, they grow pale and woebegone just as easily in London as in Paris. The author never gives them any fun at all. A harsh word makes them tremble, but they fear kindness even more. When they are not starving they are fluttering confoundedly because somebody has spoken to them.

With half of When Love Flies Out o' the Window behind us, we are entirely out of patience with Meenie Weston. There is no denying, of course, that Meenie had a hard time. Well-paid singing teachers told her that she possessed a great voice, but when her father died she found that the best she could do was an engagement in the chorus, and not always that.

We sometimes wonder just how and what Joseph Conrad would have written if he had never gone to sea. It may be that he would never have written at all if he had not been urged on by the emotion which he felt about ships and seas and great winds. And yet we regret sometimes that he is so definitely sea-struck. After all, Conrad is a man so keen in his understanding of the human heart that he can reach deep places. It is sometimes a pity, therefore, that he is so much concerned with researches which take him down into nothing more than water, which, even at its mightiest, is no such infinite element as the mind of man.

Virtue, good health, efficiency and all the other subjects which are served up in the numberless thick volumes with a purpose seldom seem desirable when the propagandist has finished his say about them. For instance, we began the day with a firm determination never to smoke again—that is, not for some time—and then we ran across Efficiency Through Concentration, by B. Johnston. Since then we light the new cigarette from the dying embers of the old. The passage which enraged us most occurs in a chapter called "Personal Habits," in which the author writes:

"If you are a gentleman always ask a lady's permission before smoking, and if you find that her statement that it is disagreeable to her is a disappointment to you, and that your observance of her wishes causes you real discomfort, then you may know that the time has come to give up the habit entirely."

Gordon Craig's new book is called The Theatre Advancing, but we rather hope that when it reaches his goal line we will be elsewhere. To our mind the theater is the place where Art should beam upon the multitude and cry loudly, "Find out what everybody will have and don't forget the boys in the back room." Mr. Craig's theater is much too special for our taste. It will do away with everything that is boisterous and vulgar and broadly human. Consider, for instance, Mr. Craig's short chapter entitled "A Note on Applause" set down in the form of a dialogue between the Reader and the Writer:

"In the Moscow Art Theatre applause plays a very minor role. In general no play can live without it. In Moscow no actor takes a call before the curtain; hence, there is no applause."

"Reader: Isn't that very dull?"

Just when everything seems to be moving more or less smoothly somebody comes along and raises the entrance requirements for dramatic critics. Clayton Hamilton is the latest to suggest a new standard. His test for reviewers consists of three point-blank questions, as follows:

One—Have you ever stood bareheaded in the nave of Amiens?

Two—Have you ever climbed to the Acropolis by moonlight?

Three—Have you ever walked with whispers into the hushed presence of the Frari Madonna of Bellini?

Our grade on the test is thirty-three and one-third per cent, which is not generally regarded as a pass mark.

A railroad train is bearing down upon the hero, or maybe it is a sawmill, or a band of savage Indians. Death seems certain. And if there is a heroine, something worse than death awaits her—that is, from the Indians. Sawmills draw no sex distinctions. At any rate, things look very black for hero and heroine, but curiously enough, even at the darkest moment, I have never been able to get a bet down on the outcome. Somehow or other the relief party always arrives just in time, on foot, or horseback, or even through the air. The worst of it is that everybody, except the hero and the heroine and the villain, knows that the unexpected is certain to happen. It is not a betting proposition and yet it remains one of the most thrilling of all theatrical plots. William Archer proves in The Green Goddess that he is what Broadway calls a showman, as well as being the most famous technician of his day. He has taken the oldest plot in the world and developed it into the most exciting melodrama of the season.

Every little while some critic or other begins to dance about with all the excitement of a lonely watcher on a peak in Darien and to shout, as he dances, that Charlie Chaplin is a great actor. The grass on that peak is now crushed under foot. Harvey O'Higgins has danced there and Mrs. Fiske and many another, but still the critics rush in. Of course, a critic is almost invariably gifted with the ability not to see or hear what any other commentator but himself writes about anything, but there is more than this to account for the fact that so many persons undertake to discover Chaplin. As in the case of all great artists, he is able to convey the impression, always, of doing a thing not only for the first time but of giving a special and private performance for each sensitive soul in the audience. It is possible to sit in the middle of a large and tumultuous crowd and still feel that Charlie is doing special little things for your own benefit which nobody else in the house can understand or enjoy.

Pollyanna died and, of course, she was glad and went to Heaven. It is just as well. The strain had become a little wearing. We had Liberty Loan orators, too, and Four-Minute men and living in America came to be something like being a permanent member of a cheering section. All that is gone now. Pointing with pride has become rude. The interpretation of life has been taken over by those who view with alarm. Pick up any new novel at random and the chances are that it will begin about as follows:

"Hugh McVey was born in a little hole of a town stuck on a mud bank on the western shore of the Mississippi River in the State of Missouri. It was a miserable place in which to be born. With the exception of a narrow strip of black mud along the river, the land for ten miles back of the town—called in derision by rivermen 'Mudcat Landing'—was almost entirely worthless and unproductive. The soil, yellow, shallow and stony, was tilled, in Hugh's time, by a race of long, gaunt men, who seemed as exhausted and no-account as the land on which they lived."

Theatergoers who have lived through two or more generations invariably complain that the stage isn't what it used to be. Mostly they mourn for a school of drama in which emotion flowered more luxuriantly than in the usual run of plays to-day about life in country stores and city flats. The one thought in which these playgoers of another day take comfort is that even if we had such drama now there would be no one who could act it. But Deburau is such a play, and Lionel Atwill must be some such one as those who figure in the speeches of our older friends when they say: "Ah, but then you never saw—". Sacha Guitry, who wrote Deburau, is alive; yes, indeed, even more than that, for he lives in Paris, and Lionel Atwill is a young actor whose greatest previous success in New York was achieved in the realistic drama of Ibsen. Now, it is possible for us to turn upon the elders and to say to them: "It is not for want of ability that this age of ours doesn't do your old-style plays. We could if we would. Go and see Deburau and Lionel Atwill."

There is an amazing simplicity about great events. Creation week was clear, calm and quiet. Hardly a ripple was on the Rubicon the afternoon that CÆsar crossed. Even Babylon fell softly and bounced only once. In the same spirit Pierre V. R. Key started John McCormack: His Own Life Story.

"It was a summer's day, with the sun shining," writes Mr. Key, "when we began. McCormack sat on the veranda of Rocklea, his Noroton, Connecticut, villa, gazing out upon the waters of Long Island Sound. He had sat that way for some minutes, in a suit of tennis flannels, his stalwart body relaxed in an armchair. I waited for his opening words. 'What a debt a man owes to his mother and father,' he said."

Mr. Key's admiration for McCormack we found later on rests on unassailable grounds. "He began to sing," Key writes, "he sings to-day—and will go on singing until he dies—for just one reason alone: God meant that he should sing."

Nothing in the world dies quite as completely as an actor and the greater the actor the more terrifying becomes the sudden transition from radiance to darkness. One day he is there with all his moods and complexities and curious glints of this and that, and the next day there is nothing left but a few wigs and costumes; perhaps a volume of memoirs, and a scrapbook of clippings in which we learn that the dead player was "majestic in presence" that "the poise of his head was stag-like" that he had "a great voice which boomed like a bell," that he was "regal, subtle, pathetic," and that "every one who was ever associated with him loved and respected him."

A good deal of whitewash has flowed past the fence, but Tom Sawyer's trick still holds good. Even to-day it is possible to get hard work done by making people think of it as a privilege. In looking over an autumn catalogue, we came across a series of books for young persons in which we were struck by the titles, When Mother Lets Us Help and When Mother Lets Us Cook. We trust that the series will be extended along these lines. If so, we intend to use as birthday gifts for H. 3rd, When Father Lets Me Stoke the Furnace, When Father Lets Me Shine His Shoes, and When Father Lets Me Lend Him Money.

We rushed in blithely the other day to talk to a woman's club up New York State on how to bring up children. Quoting from W. H. Hudson, we said firmly that they should never be spanked or even chided very much. "Let them run about and shift for themselves," we said airily. "The instinct of the child is often more sound than that of the grown-up. He is closer to old race instincts and memories than his parent." Then we finished up with our mule story and asked for questions.

We expected that somebody would ask whether Ethel Barrymore was a good actress, and did we like the novels of H.G. Wells, or one or two other easy questions like that, to which a lecturer need say nothing more than "yes" or "no" or "assuredly." Instead of that somebody said, "How many children have you brought up?"

Some of the political friends insist dolefully, a few gleefully, that if certain candidates, laws, economic schemes, or what not, fail of speedy adoption we shall have a revolution. We are even told that the scenes of the French Revolution will be enacted here. We don't believe it for a moment. At any rate, not if Dickens painted a true picture in A Tale of Two Cities because none of the radical ladies of our acquaintance could possibly perform the required knitting.

Not the least interesting part of William Byron Forbush's seven volumes in The Literary Digest Parents' League Series is the section devoted to questions and answers.

"I have a child," writes Esther P., "who already seems to be cut out for a business man. He refuses to play with dolls, balls, or even soldiers. This seems to restrict the range of toys for him. What can I provide?"

We like John Galsworthy a great deal better than we ever did before after reading his Addresses in America, 1919, for it seems to us that this man of lofty wisdom shows in this book a certain human tendency to fall into poppycock occasionally, like all the rest of us. In urging a closer comradeship between the English-speaking nations Mr. Galsworthy writes: "For unless we work together, and in no selfish or exclusive spirit—Good-by to Civilization! It will vanish like dew off the grass. The betterment not only of the British nations and America, but of all mankind, is and must be our object."

Germany, in all truth, has enough to answer for without also being made responsible for the charges implied in humorous anecdotes. Margaret Deland, in rounding off her case against the Hun in Small Things, writes, "And I recall here the revealing remark of a German, a member of a commission which, before the war, was traveling in America: 'Yes,' he said, 'we found your railroad cars very comfortable—except the sleeping cars. Our wives don't like to climb into the upper berths.'"

It may be remembered that one of the attacks made against England during the war by a famous German propagandist was contained in the story of the English woman who went to the hospital with a badly wounded face and upon being asked whether she had been bitten by a dog, replied, "No, another lady."

He should have tried the dynamite. We understand that it is an excellent cure for headaches when used internally.

At first we were inclined to look at prohibition with tolerance, because it meant a release from all the books which described what would happen to a guinea pig if he were inoculated with Bronx cocktails. The relief was temporary, for we find that it takes just as much time to read the heartrending accounts of the effect of one drop of nicotine placed on the tongue of a dog.

In Habits That Handicap, by Charles B. Towns, we find the following ailments attributed directly or indirectly to the use of tobacco: Bright's disease, apoplexy, chronic catarrh, headache, heart disease, lassitude, dizziness, low scholarship, small lung capacity, predisposition to alcoholic excesses, hardening of the arteries, paralysis of the optic nerve, blindness, acid dyspepsia, insomnia, epilepsy, muscular paralysis, cancer, lack of appetite, insanity and loss of moral tone. Mumps, measles and beri-beri are slighted in the present edition.

"There is nothing to be said in its favor," writes Mr. Towns, "save that it gives pleasure."

It seems to us that Booth Tarkington belongs at the top or thereabouts in American letters. We will be surprised and disappointed if Penrod does not persist for a century or so. And yet much of Tarkington's work is flawed by a curious failing. Almost invariably the novels are carefully thought out to a certain point, and then they weaken. This point occurs, as a rule, within a chapter or so of the end. The story "hangs," as the racetrack reporters express it, in the last few strides. In Ramsey Milholland, for instance, it seemed to us that Tarkington, after a minute development of a theme, cut it off abruptly. He was, according to our impression, a little tired and anxious to have it over with before he had actually reached the finishing mark. To-day we received a story which may provide an explanation. "Booth Tarkington," says a publisher's note, "probably uses more lead pencils than any other writer in America. Always he has disdained a typewriter.

On the other hand, we feel certain that Harold Bell Wright composes on a typewriter, pausing only once every twenty-four hours to oil the machine with a little treacle.

Robert W. Chambers uses an adding machine and Theodore Dreiser favors an ax.

We were discussing the education of H. 3rd the other day, and when we were asked where he was to go, of course we said, "The Rand School."

"No," said the friend who put the question, "I don't believe it. By the time H. is ready to go to school you'll be saying that the Rand School is a reactionary institution and full of snobs."

Perhaps, since he is to be a book reviewer, H. should go to a Montessori school. They teach the children to skip.

It was not enough. A manager read the play and at first seemed favorably inclined. Then he began to think it over and finally he summoned us to a conference.

"Suppose you had been an American officer in France during the war," he said.

The office force got started on a discussion of what character in fiction each of us would take out to dinner if he had his choice. Most of the men spoke for Becky Sharp, although there were scattering bids here and there for ThaÏs. But the night editor, who had put in a long evening of it, said, "My choice would be little Eva."

"Why?" we asked tactfully.

It rather seems to us that the distinct failure of political radicalism in America may be explained in part by its devotion to the concrete as opposed to the abstract. "We are going to make the world over anew at 12:25 o'clock p. m. next Thursday," says the concrete radical. And then Thursday comes and it rains and nothing is done about fixing up the world, and all the followers of the young radical are disappointed, and they go home firmly convinced that the world never will be fixed up. The man who realizes the value of the abstract ideal is shrewder. He says: "The world ought to be scrubbed up a lot, and if we can make a start next Thursday some time after breakfast we will. But if we can't do it then we've just got to keep on plugging away, because the job must be done."

A little abstraction is an excellent thing for the reformer or the revolutionist. It provides, we should say, a sort of reinforced concrete purpose.

At the worst, an abstract ideal is pemmican to carry the voyager through the long nights until the ice begins to break.

Some writers are hardly fair to women, but not so Julian Street. In his new novel, After Thirty, he describes marriage as a canoe trip beginning in the Rapids of Romance, and later he observes: "Presently they come to the first cataract—the birth of their first child—a long, hard portage, with the larger portion of the burden on the wife."

Generous, we call it.

"Mr. Seton's new book of the outdoors," says the jacket of Woodland Tales, "is meant for children of six years and upward. But in the belief that mother or father will be active as leader, those chapters which are devoted to woodcraft are addressed to the parent, who throughout is called 'The Guide.'"

"This history of Wells," said our friend Rollo, "seems to me to confirm the story of creation as told in Genesis. The impression which I gather is that the Creator attempted various life forms again and again, and each time wasn't satisfied and swept them all away. Apparently he was experimenting continually through the ages until finally he got to me and said, 'That's it,' and stopped."

"But you don't know that he's stopped," objected A. W. "What seems to you a pause is only a fraction of a second in infinity. It seems to me more likely that the Creator is just shaking his head and saying, 'Well, I suppose I'd better go back to the Neanderthal man and start all over again.'"

Henry Ford, so the story goes, called upon the editor of his magazine The Dearborn Independent to ascertain how things were going.

"We're too statistical, I'm afraid," said the editor. "Of course we can try and get that sort of stuff over by putting it in the form of how many hours it takes to turn out enough end-to-end Fords to reach from here to Shanghai and back, but that sort of thing has been done before. It doesn't take the curse off. What we need is some good, live fiction."