Genre Fiction. Page - 196

tel isn't much; but the piano is better thanthat fearful old thing at the Sebago House. Sometimes I godownstairs and talk to the lady who keeps the books--a French lady,who is remarkably polite. She is very pretty, and always wears ablack dress, with the most beautiful fit; she speaks a littleEnglish; she tells me she had to learn it in order to converse withthe Americans who come in such numbers to this hotel. She has givenme a great deal of information about the position of woman in France,and much of it is very encouraging. But she has told me at the sametime some things that I should not like to write to you (I amhesitating even about putting them into my journal), especially if myletters are to be handed round in the family. I assure you theyappear to talk about things here that we never think of mentioning atBangor, or even of thinking about. She seems to think she can tellme everything, because I told her I was travelling for generalculture. Well, I DO want to know so much that it

hile life as a whole, history, character, and destiny are objects unfit for imagination to dwell on, and repellent to poetic art? I cannot think so. If it be a fact, as it often is, that we find little things pleasing and great things arid and formless, and if we are better poets in a line than in an epic, that is simply due to lack of faculty on our part, lack of imagination and memory, and above all to lack of discipline.

This might be shown, I think, by psychological analysis, if we cared to rely on something so abstract and so debatable. For in what does the short-winded poet himself excel the common unimaginative person who talks or who stares? Is it that he thinks even less? Rather, I suppose, in that he feels more; in that his moment of intuition, though fleeting, has a vision, a scope, a symbolic something about it that renders it deep and expressive. Intensity, even momentary intensity, if it can be expressed at all, comports fullness and suggestion compressed into that intense moment. Yes, ev

climate of more abundant moisture, the ivywould have mantled it from head to foot in a garment that might, bythis time, have been centuries old, though ever new. In the dryItalian air, however, Nature had only so far adopted this old pile ofstonework as to cover almost every hand's-breadth of it withclose-clinging lichens and yellow moss; and the immemorial growth ofthese kindly productions rendered the general hue of the tower softand venerable, and took away the aspect of nakedness which would havemade its age drearier than now.

Up and down the height of the tower were scattered three or fourwindows, the lower ones grated with iron bars, the upper ones vacantboth of window frames and glass. Besides these larger openings, therewere several loopholes and little square apertures, which might besupposed to light the staircase, that doubtless climbed the interiortowards the battlemented and machicolated summit. With thislast-mentioned warlike garniture upon its stern old head and brow, thet

r a moment Bill stood over him, nostrils flaring, his whole body tense and waiting. But Tom was too groggy to get up.

"Oh, Bill, how could you!" Christy cried out, dropping to her knees beside Tom.

Bill strode with measured step to the door. There he turned, and looking back with a sneer, said, "Sweet dreams, Dream Boy!"

* * * * *

In a luxurious office of Asteroid Mining Corporation on the twenty-third floor of a Manhattan skyscraper a furious official of the corporation faced an uncomfortable underling.

"I've heard of some pretty crude tricks in my time, Heilman, but breaking into the Staker Company's office like a common house thief takes the tin medal for low grade brains!" the official ranted, pounding his desk. "I suppose you thought that was an excellent way to advance yourself in the corporation, eh? Finesse, Heilman, finesse. That's what it takes in matters like this. Asteroid Mining, before it got the monopoly, stopped competition, but not by common housebreaking--"

bunch grass in the miles of red shaggy prairie that stretched before his cabin. He knew it in all the deceitful loveliness of its early summer, in all the bitter barrenness of its autumn. He had seen it smitten by all the plagues of Egypt. He had seen it parched by drought, and sogged by rain, beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in the grasshopper years he had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones that the vultures have left. After the great fires he had seen it stretch for miles and miles, black and smoking as the floor of hell.

He rose slowly and crossed the room, dragging his big feet heavily as though they were burdens to him. He looked out of the window into the hog corral and saw the pigs burying themselves in the straw before the shed. The leaden gray clouds were beginning to spill themselves, and the snow flakes were settling down over the white leprous patches of frozen earth where the hogs had gnawed even the sod away. He shuddered and began to walk, trampling heavily with his ungainly

hink of Prometheus chained to the rock. His flesh that came from the earth was the prey of the vulture, but the seed of the gods which was hidden in every mortal, gave him strength to resist what he believed to be wrong and bear suffering.

A strange old story, is it not? But it is also a story of to-day. Ours is the same earth with its fertile fields and wide forests, its rich mines and its wealth of flocks and herds. They are all given to us, just as the gods gave them to the first men, for the development of peace and plenty. And man, himself, is still a mixture of earth stuff and something else, too, that Prometheus called heavenly seed and we call soul. When selfishness and greed guide our uses of land and food and the metals there is apt to be pretty nearly as bad a time on the earth as when Jupiter and Neptune flooded it. But there is always a chance to be a Prometheus who can forget about everything except the right, and so help in bringing again the Golden Age of the gods to the world.

[Turning apologetically to VERA] I beg your pardon, Miss Andrews, I mean Miss--er----

VERA Revendal.

MENDEL [Slightly more interested] Revendal? Then you must be the Miss Revendal David told me about!

VERA [Blushing] Why, he has only seen me once--the time he played at our Roof-Garden Concert.

MENDEL Yes, but he was so impressed by the way you handled those new immigrants--the Spirit of the Settlement, he called you.

VERA [Modestly] Ah, no--Miss Andrews is that. And you will tell him to answer her letter at once, won't you, because there's only a week now to our Concert. [A gust of wind shakes the windows. She smiles.] Naturally it will not be on the Roof Garden.

MENDEL [Half to himself] Fancy David not saying a word about it to me! Are you sure the letter was mailed?

VERA I mailed it myself--a week ago. And even in New York---- [She smiles. Re-enter KATHLEEN with the recovered candlestick.]

z, as he walked in, throwing his umbrella in Gluck's face.

"Aye! what for, indeed, you little vagabond?" said Hans, administering an educational box on the ear as he followed his brother into the kitchen.

"Bless my soul!" said Schwartz when he opened the door.

"Amen," said the little gentleman, who had taken his cap off and was standing in the middle of the kitchen, bowing with the utmost possible velocity.

"Who's that?" said Schwartz, catching up a rolling-pin and turning to Gluck with a fierce frown.

"I don't know, indeed, brother," said Gluck in great terror.

"How did he get in?" roared Schwartz.

"My dear brother," said Gluck deprecatingly, "he was so VERY wet!"

The rolling-pin was descending on Gluck's head, but, at the instant, the old gentleman interposed his conical cap, on which it crashed with a shock that shook the water out of it all over the room. What was very odd, the rolling-pin no sooner touched the cap than it flew out of Schwartz's hand

r. It came to me suddenly that I had the kind of feeling one has in the aisle of a large cathedral. There was a sort of echo in the night--an incredibly faint reduplicating of the noise of our oars.

"Hark!" I said, audibly; not realizing at first that I was speaking aloud. "There's an echo--"

"That's it!" the Captain cut in, sharply. "I thought I heard something rummy!"

. . . "I thought I heard something rummy," said a thin ghostly echo, out of the night. . . "thought I heard something rummy" . . . "heard something rummy." The words went muttering and whispering to and fro in the night about us, in a rather a horrible fashion.

"Good Lord!" said the Old Man, in a whisper.

We had all stopped rowing, and were staring about us into the thin mist that filled the night. The Skipper was standing with the bull's-eye lamp held over his head, circling the beam of light round from port to starboard, and back again.

Abruptly, as he did so, it came to me that the mist was thinner.

uestion is put in the forefront. The politicians of Ireland and Wales have realized the importance of language in asserting nationality, but such engineered language-agitation offers but a feeble reflex of the vitality of the question in lands where the native language is as much in use for all purposes as is English in England. These lands will fight harder and harder against the claims to supremacy of a handful of Western intruders. A famous foreign philologist,[1] in a report on the subject presented to the Academy of Vienna, notes the increasing tendency of Russian to take rank among the recognized languages for purposes of polite learning. He is well placed to observe. With Russia knocking at the door and Hungary waiting to storm the breach, what tongue may not our descendants of the next century have to learn, under pain of losing touch with important currents of thought? It is high time something were done to standardize means of transmission. Owing to political conditions, there are linguistically dis