Act IV, Scene I. _Henry, with lute, singing.

Ope, throw ope thy bower door, And come thou forth, my sweet! 'Tis morn, the watch of love is o'er, And mating hearts should meet. The stars have fled and left their grace In every blossom's lifted face, And gentle shadows fleck the light With tender memories of the night. Sweet, there's a door to every shrine; Wilt thou, as morning, open thine? Hark! now the lark has met the clouds, And rains his sheer melodious flood; The green earth casts her mystic shrouds To meet the flaming god! Alas, for me there is no dawn If Glaia come not with the sun.

[_Enter Glaia. The king kneels as she approaches._]

_Gla._ 'Tis you!

_Hen._ [Leaping up] Pardoned! Queen of this bowerland, Your glad eyes tell me that I have not sinned.

_Gla._ How cam'st thou here? Now who plays Hubert false? Nay, I'm too glad thou'rt come to question so. 'Tis easy to forgive the treachery That opes our gates to angels.

_Hen._ O, I'm loved?

_Gla._ Yes, Henry. All the morn I've thought of you, And I rose early, for I love to say Good-by to my dear stars; they seem so wan And loath to go away, as though they know The fickle world is thinking of the sun And all their gentle service of the night Is quite forgot.

_Hen._ And what didst think of me?

_Gla._ That you could come and see this beauteous wood, Fair with Spring's love and morning's kiss of grace, You'd be content to live awhile with me, Leave war's red step to follow living May Passing to pour her veins' immortal flood To each decaying root; and rest by springs Where waters run to sounds less rude than song, And hiding sibyls stir sweet prophecies.

_Hen._ The only springs I seek are in your eyes That nourish all the desert of myself. Drop here, O, Glaia, thy transforming dews, And start fair summer in this waste of me!

_Gla._ Poor Henry! What dost know of me to love?

_Hen._ See yon light cloud half-kirtled with faint rose? What do I know of it but that 'tis fair? And yet I dream 'twas born of flower dews And goes to some sweet country of the sky, So cloud-like dost thou move before my love, From beauty coming that I may not see, To beauty going that I can but dream. O, love me, Glaia! Give to me this hand, This miracle of warm, unmelting snow, This lily bit of thee that in my clasp Lies like a dove in all too rude a cote-- Wee heaven-cloud to drop on monarch brows And smooth the ridgy traces of a crown! Rich me with this, and I'll not fear to dare The darkest shadow of defeat that broods O'er sceptres and unfriended kings.

_Gla._ Why talk Of crowns and kings? This is our home, dear Henry, For if you love me you will stay with me.

_Hen._ Ah, blest to be here, and from morning's top Review the sunny graces of the world, Plucking the smilingest to dearer love, Until the heart becomes the root and spring Of hopes as natural and as simply sweet As these bright children of the wedded sun And dewy earth!

_Gla._ I knew you'd stay, my brother! You'll live with me!

_Hen._ But there's a world not this, O'er-roofed and fretted by ambition's arch, Whose sun is power and whose rains are blood, Whose iris bow is the small golden hoop That rims the forehead of a king,--a world Where trampling armies and sedition's march Cut off the flowers of descanting love Ere they may sing their perfect word to man, And the rank weeds of envies, jealousies, Push up each night from day's hot-beaten paths--

_Gla._ O, do not tell me, do not think of it!

_Hen._ I must. There is my world, and there my life Must grow to gracious end, if so it can. If thou wouldst come, my living periapt, With virtue's gentle legend overwrit, I should not fail, nor would this flower cheek, Pure lily cloister of a praying rose, E'er know the stain of one despoiling tear Shed for me graceless. Will you come, my Glaia?

_Gla._ Into that world? No, thou shalt stay with me. Here you shall be a king, not serve one. Ah, The whispering winds do never counsel false, And senatorial trees droop not their state To tribe and treachery. Nature's self shall be Your minister, the seasons your envoys And high ambassadors, bearing from His court The mortal olive of immortal love.

_Hen._ To man my life belongs. Hope not, dear Glaia, To bind me here; and if you love me true, You will not ask me where I go or stay, But that your feet may stay or go with mine. Let not a nay unsweet those tender lips That all their life have ripened for this kiss. [_Kisses her_] O ruby purities! I would not give Their chaste extravagance for fruits Iran Stored with the honey of a thousand suns Through the slow measure of as many years!

_Gla._ Do brothers talk like that?

_Hen._ I think not, sweet

_Gla._ But you will be my brother?

_Hen._ We shall see.

_Gla._ And you will stay with me? No? Ah, I fear All that you love in me is born of these Wild innocences that I live among, And far from here, all such sweet value lost, I'll be as others are in your mad world, Or wither mortally, even as the sprig A moment gone so pertly trimmed this bough. Let us stay here, my Henry. We shall be Dear playmates ever, never growing old,-- Or if we do 'twill be at such a pace Time will grow weary chiding, leaving us To come at will.

_Hen._ No, Glaia. Even now I must be gone. I came for this----to say I'd come again, and bid you watch for me. A tear? O, love! One moment, then away!

[_Exeunt. Curtain_]

FOOTNOTE:

[65] Copyright, 1906, by Charles Scribner's Sons.

HARRY L. MARRINER

Harry Lee Marriner, newspaper poet, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, March 24, 1871, the son of a schoolman. He was educated by his father and in the public schools of his native city. He engaged in a dozen different businesses before he suddenly discovered that he could write, which discovery caused him to accept a position on the now defunct _Chicago Dispatch_, from which he went to _The Evening Post_, of Louisville, remaining with that paper for several years. In 1902 Mr. Marriner went to Texas and became assistant city editor of the _Dallas News_; and he has since filled practically all the editorial positions, being at the present time Sunday editor of both the _Dallas News_ and the _Galveston News_, which are under the same management. In 1907 Mr. Marriner originated a feature consisting of a daily human interest poem, printed on the front page of his two papers. For some time he concealed his identity under the title of "The News Staff Poet," but in 1909 he discarded his cloak and came out into the sunlight of reality in order that his hundreds of admirers throughout the Southwest might be content. Mr. Marriner's "poetry" is rather homely verse based upon the everyday things and thoughts and experiences of everyday people. This verse has had a wonderful vogue in Texas and Oklahoma, and the surrounding States. Dealing with dogs and "kids," with sore toes and sentiment, with joys and griefs, dolls and ball gowns, country stores and city life, street cars and prairie schooners, mint-fringed creeks and bucking bronchos, it is a medley of everything human. The cream of his verse has been brought together in three charming little books: _When You and I Were Kids_ (New York, 1909); _Joyous Days_ (Dallas, 1910); and _Mirthful Knights in Modern Days_ (Dallas, 1911). Mr. Marriner has written the lyrics for two musical comedies; and he has had short-stories in the periodicals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mr. Marriner to the Author; _The Dallas News_ (December 2, 1911).

WHEN MOTHER CUTS HIS HAIR[66]

[From _When You and I Were Kids_ (New York, 1909)]

How doth the mind of man go back to when he was a boy; When feet were full of tan and dust, and life was full of joy; But many a man looks back in fear, for in a time-worn chair, He sees himself draped in a sheet, while Mother cuts his hair.

The scissors drag, and sniffles rise when ears lop in the way, And on the porch rain locks of hair like tufts of prairie hay, 'Til in the glass a little boy, his anguish scarcely hid, Looks on himself and views with pain the job that Mother did.

The mule may shed in summertime the felt that Nature grew, The rabbit may lose bits of fur, and look like blazes, too; But neither bears that patchwork look, that war map of despair, That zigzags on the small boy's head when Mother cuts his hair.

SIR GUMSHOO[67]

[From _Mirthful Knights in Modern Days_ (Dallas, 1911)]

Sir Gumshoo, known as Wot d'Ell, a noble Knight from Spain, Was one who was so strong a Pro he'd water on the brain. He would not drink a dram at all, or even sniff at it, And just the sight of lager beer would throw him in a fit.

It chanced one day Sir Gumshoo rode upon a noble quest-- His lady had acquired a cold that settled on her chest, And to the rural districts he repaired, for it was plain He must secure some goosegrease that she might get well again.

He found a rude, bucolic rube who had goosegrease to sell; Sir Gumshoo bought about a quart, and all was going well When he who rendered geese to grease made him a stealthy sign And led him to a bottle filled with elderberry wine.

The Knight declined; he was a Pro, which fact he did explain; The farmer, sore disgusted, took his goosegrease back again, Whereat the Knight in anguish sore gave up himself for lost And took a fierce and fiery drink with all his fingers crossed.

That night he rode as rides a pig upon a circus steed; He clutched his charger 'round the neck, for he was stewed indeed, And, bowing to his lady fair, as bows the wind-tossed pine, He handed her part of a quart of elderberry wine.

FOOTNOTES:

[66] Copyright, 1909, by the Author.

[67] Copyright, 1911, by the Author.

LUCIEN V. RULE

Lucien V. Rule, poet, was born at Goshen, Kentucky, August 29, 1871. He spent one year at State College, Lexington, when he went to Centre College, Danville, from which he was graduated in 1893. Mr. Rule studied for the ministry, but he later engaged in newspaper work, in which he spent six or seven years. During the last few years he has devoted his time to writing and speaking upon social and religious subjects. His first book of poems, entitled _The Shrine of Love and Other Poems_ (Chicago, 1898), is his best known work. He is also the author of a small pamphlet of social and political satires, entitled _When John Bull Comes A-Courtin'_ (Louisville, 1903). This contains the title-poem, the sub-title of which reads: "Sundry Meditations on the Rumored Matrimonial Alliance between J. Bull, Bart., and his cousin, Lady Columbia;" and several shorter poems. Those inscribed to Tolstoi, Whittier, and Walt Whitman are very strong. Mr. Rule's latest book is _The House of Love_ (Indianapolis, 1910). In 1913 he will probably publish a group of poetic dramas-in-cameo for young people, and a brief collection of biographical studies. Mr. Rule resides at his birthplace, Goshen, Kentucky.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Southern Writers_, by W. P. Trent (New York, 1905); letters from Mr. Rule to the Author.

WHAT RIGHT HAST THOU?[68]

[From _When John Bull Comes A Courtin'_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1903)]

What right hast thou to more than thou dost need While others perish for the want of bread? What right hast thou upon a palace bed To idly slumber while the homeless plead; A vicious and voluptuous life to lead, While millions struggle on in rags and shame? What right hast thou thus vilely to inflame Thy fellow men with hate, O fiend of greed? What right hast thou to take the hallowed name Of God upon thy lips, or Christ's, who came To save the race from sorrows thou dost cause? Not always helpless 'neath thy cruel paws, O Beast of Capital, shall Labor lie; Thy doom this day is thundered from the sky!

THE NEW KNIGHTHOOD

[From the same]

Arise, my soul, put off thy dark despair; Say not the age of chivalry is gone; For lo, the east is kindling with its dawn, And bugle echoes bid thee wake to wear Majestic moral armour, and to bear A worthy part in truth's eternal fray. Say not the muse inspires no more to-day, Nor that fame's flowers no longer flourish fair. Live thou sublimely and then speak thy heart, If thou wouldst build an altar unto art. Stand with the struggling and the stars above Will shower celestial thoughts to thrill thy pen. Put self away and walk alone with Love, And thou shalt be the marvel of all men!

FOOTNOTE:

[68] Copyright, 1903, by the Author.

EVA WILDER BRODHEAD

Mrs. Eva Wilder (McGlasson) Brodhead, novelist and short-story writer, was born at Covington, Kentucky, in 187-. Her parents were not of Southern origin, her father having been born in Nova Scotia, and her mother at Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She was educated in New York City and in her native town of Covington. She began to write when but eighteen years of age, and a short time thereafter her first novel appeared, _Diana's Livery_ (New York, 1891). This was set against a background most alluring: the Shaker settlement at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, into which a young man of the world enters and falls in love with a pretty Shakeress. Her second story, _An Earthly Paragon_ (New York, 1892), which was written in three weeks, ran through _Harper's Weekly_ before being published in book form. It was a romance of the Kentucky mountains, laid around Chamouni, the novelist's name for Yosemite, Kentucky. It was followed by a novelette of love set amidst the salt-sea atmosphere of an eastern watering place, _Ministers of Grace_ (New York, 1894). Hildreth, the scene of this little story, is anywhere along the Jersey coast from Atlantic City to Long Branch. _Ministers of Grace_ also appeared serially in _Harper's Weekly_, and when it was issued in book form Col. Henry Watterson called the attention of Richard Mansfield to it as a proper vehicle for him, and the actor promptly secured the dramatic rights, hoping to present it upon the stage; but his untimely death prevented the dramatization of the tale under highly favorable auspices. It was the last to be published under the name of Eva Wilder McGlasson, as this writer was first known to the public, for on December 5, 1894, she was married in New York to Mr. Henry C. Brodhead, a civil and mining engineer of Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania. Mrs. Brodhead's next novelette, _One of the Visconti_ (New York, 1896), the background of which was Naples, the hero being a young Kentuckian and the heroine of the old and famous Visconti family, was issued by the Scribner's in their well-known Ivory Series of short-stories. Her last Kentucky novel, _Bound in Shallows_ (New York, 1896), originally appeared in _Harper's Bazar_. That severe arbiter of literary destinies, _The Nation_, said of this book: "No such work as this has been done by any American woman since Constance Fenimore Woolson died." It was founded on material gathered at Burnside, Kentucky, where Mrs. Brodhead spent two summers. Her most recent work, _A Prairie Infanta_ (Philadelphia, 1904), is a Colorado juvenile, first published in _The Youth's Companion_. Aside from her books, Mrs. Brodhead won a wide reputation as a short-story writer and maker of dialect verse. More than fifty of her stories have been printed in the publications of the house of Harper, the publishers of four of her books; in _The Century_, _Scribner's_, and other leading periodicals. Many of her admirers hold that the short-story is her especial forte. Five of them may be mentioned as especially well done: _Fan's Mammy_, _A Child of the Covenant_, _The Monument to Corder_, _The Eternal Feminine_, and _Fair Ines_. She has written much dialect verse which appeared in the Harper periodicals, _The Century_, _Judge_, _Puck_, and other magazines. Neither her short-stories nor her verse has been collected and issued in book form. Since her marriage Mrs. Brodhead has traveled in Europe a great deal, and in many parts of the United States, traveled until she sometimes wonders whether her home is in Denver or New York, and, although she is in the metropolis more than she is in the Colorado capital, her legal residence is Denver, some distance from the mining town of Brodhead, named in honor of her husband's geological discoveries and interests. In 1906 she was stricken with a very severe illness, followed by her physician's absolute mandate of no literary work until her health should be reëstablished, which has been accomplished but recently. She has published but a single story since her sickness, _Two Points of Honor_, which appeared in _Harper's Weekly_ for July 4, 1908. At the present time Mrs. Brodhead is quite well enough to resume work; and the next few years should witness her fulfilling the earnest of her earlier novels and stories, firmly fixing her fame as one of the foremost women writers of prose fiction yet born on Kentucky soil.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Harper's Weekly_ (September 3, 1892); _The Book-buyer_ (September, 1896).

THE RIVALS[69]

[From _Ministers of Grace_ (New York, 1894)]

As the days merged towards the end of August, Hildreth was packed to the very gates. The wiry yellow grasses along the neat walks were trampled into powder. The very sands, for all the effacing fingers of the tides, seemed never free of footprints, and by day and night the ocean promenade, the interior of the town, lake-sides, hotels, and the surf itself, were a press of holiday folk.

In these times Mr. Ruley seldom went forth in his rolling-chair, except early of a morning, when the beach was yet way-free, and the sands unfrequented save for a few barelegged men, who, with long wooden rakes, cleaned up the sea-verge for the day.

Sometimes Wade pushed the chair. But since the night when he gave Elizabeth the honeysuckles he had in some measure avoided the old preacher's small circle. There had been, on that occasion, a newness of impulse in his spirit which made him feel the advisability of keeping himself out of harm's way, however sweet that way might seem. Graham was the favored suitor. He, Wade, having no chance for the rose, could at least withhold his flesh from the thorn.

"So," said Gracie Gayle, "you're out of the running?"

"Ruled off," smiled Wade.

"Don't you make any mistakes," wisely admonished Miss Gayle. "I've seen her look at him, and I've seen her look at _you_."

"This is most surprising," indicated Wade, with a feigned accent. "You will pardon me, Gracie, if I scarcely credit your statement."

"Be sarcastic if you want to," said Gracie. "If you knew anything at all, you'd know that straws show which way the wind blows. When a woman regards a man with a kind of flat, frank sincerity, it's because her heart's altogether out of his reach. When she looks _around_ him rather than _at_ him, it's because----" Gracie lifted her shoulders suggestively.

"Grace," breathed Wade, gravely, "I am hurt to the quick to see you developing the germs of what painfully resembles thought. For Heaven's and your sex's sake, pause while there is yet time! Women who form the pernicious habit of thinking lose in time the magic key which unlocks the hearts of men."

Grace sniffed.

"Men's hearts are never locked," she said, sagaciously. "The heavier the padlock the smoother the hinges." She shook her crisp curls as she tripped away with her airy, mincing, soubrette tread.

Notwithstanding the inconsequent nature of this talk, it set Wade to thinking. Perhaps he had carried his principle of self-effacement too far. At all events, when he next saw Miss Ruley, he went up to her and stopped for a moment's conversation.

It chanced to be on the sands. Elizabeth was sitting by herself under the arch of a lace-hung sunshade, which cast shaking little shadows on her face, sprigging it with such delicate darkness as lurk in the misty milk of moss-agate.

"You are going in, then?" she asked, smiling up rather uncertainly, and noticing his flannel attire. "Mr. Graham is already very far out. That is he, I think, taking that big breaker. What a stroke!"

Wade, focussing an indulgent eye, saw a figure away beyond the other bathers, rising to the lift of a great billow. The man swam with a splendid motion. Whether he dived, or floated, or circled his arms in that whirling stroke of his, he seemed in subtle sympathy with the sea, possessed of a kinship with it, and in an element altogether his own.

Wade expressed an appropriate sentiment of admiration.

Just then Gracie Gayle came gambolling along, a childish shape, kirtled to the knee in bright blue, and turbaned in vivid scarlet. Among the loose-waisted figures on the sands she was like a humming-bird scintillating in a staid gathering of barnyard fowls. Bailey was with her, having returned after a fortnight's absence.

The two paused beside Elizabeth, and Wade went on, confused by the singular way in which that small fair face, shadow-streaked and faintly smiling, lingered in his vision. He was still perplexed with a half-pleasant, half-pained consciousness of it as he plunged into the pushing surf and felt a dizzy world of water heave round him. The surge was strong to-day, and the splashing and screaming of the shore bathers sent him farther and still farther out. Gradually their cries lessened in his ear, and there was with him presently only the hollow thud of the waves and the rushing hiss of the crestling foam.

Once, as he rose to a sea-lift, it seemed to him that he heard a sound that was not the boom of the breakers nor the song of the slipping froth. It came again, whatever it was, and as he gave ear he took in a human intonation, sharp and agonized. It was a cry for help.

Wade shook the brine from his hair, freeing his gaze for an outlook. In the glassy mound of water to his right a face, lean and white with alarm, gleamed and faded. That the sinking man was Graham came instantly to Wade's mind--Graham, a victim to some one of the mischances which the sea reserves for those who adventure too confidently with her.

Wade struck out instantly for the spot where Graham's appalled features had briefly glimpsed. Shoreward he could note an increasing agitation among the multitudes. Evidently the people had noticed the peril of the remote swimmer whose exploits had so lately won admiring comment. The beachguard no doubt was buckling to his belt the life-rope coiled always on the sands for such emergencies. Cries of men and women rang stifled over the water--exclamations of fear and advice and excitement, mingled in a long continuous wail.

Graham's head rose in sight, a mere speck upon the dense green of the bulging water. Wade, fetching nearer in wide strokes, suddenly felt himself twisted violently out of his course, and whirled round in a futile effort with some mysterious current. He was almost near enough to lay hold of Graham when this new sensation explained lucidly the cause of Graham's danger. They were both in the claws of an undertow, which, as Wade realized its touch, appeared as if wrenching him straight out to the purring distance of the farther sea.

Even in the first consternation of this discovery he felt himself thrust hard against a leaden body, and in the same instant Graham's hands snatched at him in a desperate reach for life.

"For God's sake don't hold me like this!" Wade expostulated. "Let go. Trust me to do what I can. You're strangling me, man!"

But Graham was past sanity. He only clutched with the more frenzy at the thing which seemed to keep him from the ravenous mouth of the snarling waters.

Wade, in a kind of composed despair, sent a look towards the beach. They were putting out a boat, a tiny sheel which frisked in the surf, and seemed motionless in the double action of the waves. Men laid hard at the oars. The little craft took the first big wave as a horse takes a hurdle. It dropped from the glassy height, and Wade saw it sink into a breach of the sea. Then flashing with crystal, it bore up again and outward.

The figures running and gesticulating on the beach had a marvellous distinctness to Wade's submerging eyes. He noticed the blue sky, flawed with scratches of white, the zigzag roof-lines of the great town, the twisting flags and meshes of the dark wire. Everything oppressed him with a sort of deadly clearness, as if a metal stamp should press in melting wax.

He was momently sinking, drawn ever outward by the undercurrent, and downward by the weighty burden throttling him in its senseless grasp. He looked once more through a blinding veil of foam, and saw the boat dipping far to the left. A phantasm of life flickered before him. Unsuspected trivialities shook out of their cells, and amazed him with the pygmy thrift of memory. Then came a sense of confusion, as if the spiritual and corporal lost each its boundary and ranged wild, and Wade felt the sea in his eyes, stroking them down as gently as ever any watcher by the dying.

FOOTNOTE:

[69] Copyright, 1894, by Harper and Brothers.

CORDIA GREER PETRIE

Mrs. Cordia Greer Petrie, a talented writer of very great promise and of decided performance, was born near Merry Oaks, Kentucky, February 12, 1872. When she was a child her parents removed to Louisville, Kentucky, and in the public schools of that city she was educated, after which she spent a half-year at old Eminence College, Eminence, Kentucky. In July, 1894, Miss Greer was married to Dr. Hazel G. Petrie, of Fairview, Kentucky, who, for the past ten years, has been mine physician in various sections of eastern Kentucky. At the present time he is serving six mines and making his home at Chenoa, near Pineville, Kentucky. In her writings Mrs. Petrie has created a character of great originality in Angeline Keaton, an unlettered inhabitant of a remote Kentucky hamlet. "Of the original Angeline," Mrs. Petrie once wrote, "I know but little. She and her shiftless, 'no-erkount' husband, Lum, together with her son, Jeems Henry, lived in Barren county, not far from Glasgow. Angeline supported the family by working on the 'sheers,' 'diggin one half the taters fur tother half!' She was very anxious for her boy to 'git an edjycation' and no sooner would he get comfortably settled in a 'cheer' until she would exclaim, 'Jeems Henry! Git up offen them britches, you lazy whelp! Git yer book and be gittin some larnin in your head!' Without a word Jim Henry would climb up the log wall and from under the rafters abstract his blue back speller." Characterization is Mrs. Petrie's chief strength; and she is a positive refutation of the masculine dictum that women lack humor. With her friend, Miss Leigh Gordon Giltner, the short-story writer, she collaborated on an Angeline sketch, entitled "When the Bees Got Busy," which was published in the _Overland Monthly_ for August, 1904; and the prize story reprinted at the end of this note is the only other Angeline story that has been published so far. She has won several prizes with other stories, but a group of the Angeline sketches are in manuscript, and they will shortly appear in book form. _Angeline Keaton_, "with her gaunt angular form clad in its scant calico gown," is sure to "score" when she makes her bow between the covers of a book. She is every bit as cleverly conceived as _Mrs. Wiggs_, _Susan Clegg_, or any of the other quaint women who have recently won the applause of the American public.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mrs. Petrie to the Author; Miss Leigh Gordon Giltner's study in _The Southern Home Journal_ (Louisville).

ANGELINE JINES THE CHOIR

[From _The Evening Post_ (Louisville, Kentucky)]

She sat upon the edge of the veranda, fanning herself with her "split" sunbonnet, a tall, angular woman, whose faded calico gown "lost connection" at the waist line. Her spring being dry, she came to our well for water. Discovering that Angeline Keaton was a "character," I invariably inveigled her to rest awhile on our cool piazza before retracing her steps up the steep, rocky hillside to her cabin home.

"I missed you yesterday," I said as a starter.

"Yes'm," she answered in a voice harsh and strident, yet touched with a peculiar sibilant quality characteristic of the Kentucky backwoodsman, "and thar wuz others that missed me, too!"

Settling herself comfortably, she produced from some hidden source a box of snuff and plied her brush vigorously.

"We-all have got inter a wrangle over at Zion erbout the church music," she began. "I and Lum, my old man, has been the leaders ever since we moved here from Lick-skillet. We wuz alluz on hand--Lum with his tunin' fork and me with my strong serpraner. When it come to linin' off a song, Lum wuz pintedly hard to beat. Why, folks come from fur and near to hear us, and them city folks, at Mis' Bowles' last summer, 'lowed thar warn't nothing in New York that could tech us. One of 'em offered us a dollar to sing inter a phonygraf reckerd, but we wuz afeerd to put our lives in jopperdy by dabblin' in 'lectricerty. But even celebrerty has its drawbacks, and a 'profit is not without honor in his own country,' as the saying is. A passel of 'em got jellus, a church meeting was called, unbeknownst to us, and ermong 'em they agreed to make a change in the music at old Zion. That peaked-faced Betty Button wuz at the bottom of it. Ever since she tuk that normal course at Bowling Green she's been endeverin' to push herself inter promernence here at Bear Waller. Fust she got up a class in delsarty, but even Bear Waller warn't dull ernough to take to that foolishness! Then she canvassed the county with a cuttin' system and a book called 'Law at a Glance.' Now she's teaching vokle culshure. She orter know singers, like poits, is born, not made! Jest wantin' to sing won't do it. It takes power. It's give up mine's the powerfullest voice in all Bear Waller. I kin bring old Brindle in when she's grazing in the woods, back o' Judge Bowles' medder, and I simply step out on the portico and call Lum to dinner when he's swoppin' yarns down to the store quarter o' mile away. Fur that matter, though, a deef and dum man could fetch Lum to _vittles_.

"Do you know Bear Waller owes its muserkil educashun to me? Mine wuz the fust accordyon brought to the place, and I wuz allus ready to play fur my nabers. I didn't hafter be _begged_. I orgernized the Zobo band, I lent 'em my ballads, but whar's my thanks? At the battin' of an eye they're ready to drop me for that quavery-voiced Button gal and them notes o' hern that's no more'n that many peryids and commers.

"When the committee waited on me and Lum we jest flew mad and 'lowed we'd quit. Maybe we wuz hasty, but it serves 'em right. Besides, these Bear Wallerites ain't compertent to appreshiate a voice like mine, nohow. I decided I'd take my letter to Glasgow and jine that brag choir of their'n. It did me good to think how it 'ud spite some folks to see me leadin' the singin' at the county seat!

"Lum wuz dead set ergin it, but armin' myself with the rollin' pin and a skillet o' bilin grease, I finally pervailed on him to give in. Lum is of a yieldin' dispersishun if a body goes at 'im right.

"Jim Henry, that's my boy, an' I tuk a early start. We had tied up the colt in the cow shed and I wuz congratulatin' myself on bein' shet of the pesky critter when I heerd him nicker. Lookin' back, I saw him comin' in a gallerp, his head turned to one side, while he fairly obscured the landscape with great clouds o' pike dust!

"We wuz crossin' the railroad when old Julie heered that nicker, an' right thar she balked. Neither gentle persuasion from the peach tree switch which I helt in my hand, nor well-aimed kicks of Jim Henry's boots in her flanks could budge her till that colt come up pantin' beside her. We jest did clear the track when the accomerdashun whizzed by. Well, sir, when old Julie spied them kyars she began buck-jumpin' in a manner that would'er struck terror to a less experienced hosswoman. Jim Henry, who wuz gazin' at the train with childlike pleasure, wuz tuk wholly by suprise, and before he knowed what wuz up he wuz precippytated inter the branches o' a red-haw tree. He crawled out, a wreck, his face and hands scratched and bleedin' and his britches hangin' in shreds, and them his Sundays, too! I managed to pin 'em tergether with beauty pins, and cautionin' him not to turn his back to the ordiance, we finally resumed our journey. That colt alluz tries hisself, and jest as we reached the square, in Glasgow, his appertite began clammerin', and Julie refused to go till the pesky critter's wants wuz appeased. Them Glasgowites is dear lovers of good hoss flesh, and quite a crowd gethered to discuss the good pints of the old mare and that mule colt.

"Some boys mistook Jim Henry for somebody they knowed and hollered, 'Say, Reube!' 'Hey, Reube!' at him. Jim Henry wuz fur explainin' to 'em their mistake, till one of 'em began to sing, 'When Reuben comes to town, he's shore to be done brown!' 'Jim Henry,' says I, sternly, 'you're no child o' mine ef you take _that_! Now, if you don't get down and thrash him I'm agoin' to set you afire when I get you home.'

"Jim Henry needed no second biddin'. He wuz off that nag in a jiffy, and the way he did wallerp that boy wuz a cawshun! He sellerbrated his victry by givin' the Bear Waller war-whoop. Then crawlin' up behind me, he said he wuz _now_ ready fur meetin'. That boy's a born fiter. He gets it honest, for me and Lum are both experts, but then practice makes perfect, as the sayin' is.

"Our arrival created considerable stir in meetin'. Why is it that when a distinguished person enters a church it allus perduces a flutter? Owin' to the rent in Jim Henry's britches, I shoved him inter the back seat. Cautionin' him not to let me ketch him throwin' paper wads, I swept merjestercally up the ile and tuk a seat by the orgin. A flood of approvin' glances fastened themselves on my jet bonnet and fur-lined dolman. I wuz sorry I didn't know the fust song. It must have been a new one to that choir. Thar wuz four of 'em and each one wuz singin' it to a different tune, and they jest couldn't keep tergether! The coarse-voiced gal to my rear lagged dretfully. When the tall blonde, who wuz the only one of 'em that knowed the tune, when she'd sing,

"'Wake the song!'

that gal who lagged would echo,

"'Wake the song!'

in a voice as coarse as Lum's. She 'peared to depend on the tall gal for the words, for when the tall 'un would sing,

"'Song of Ju-ber-lee,'

the gal that lagged, and the two gents, would repeat, 'Of Ju-ber-lee.'

"I passed her my book, thinkin' the words wuz tore out o' hern, but, la! she jest glared at me, and she and them gents, if anything, bellered louder'n ever. I looked at the preacher, expecting to see him covered with shygrin, but, la! he wuz takin' it perfectly cam, with his eyes walled up at the ceilin' and his hands folded acrost his stummick like he might be havin' troubles of his own.

"I kept hopin' that tryo would either ketch up with the leader or jest have the curridge to quit. Goodness knows, I done what I could fur 'em, by beatin' time with my turkey wing.

"Somebody must have give 'em a tip, for the next song which the preacher give out as 'a solo,' that tryo jest pintedly giv it up and set thar is silent as clambs. The tall gal riz and commenced singin' and that tryo never pertended to help her out! My heart ached in symperthy fur her as she stood thar alone, singin' away with her voice quaverin', and not a human bein' in that house jined in, not even the _preacher_! But she had _grit_, and kept right on! Most people would'er giv right up. She's a middlin' good singer, but is dretfully handercapt by that laggin' tryo and a passel o' church members that air too triflin' to sing in meetin'. The song wuz a new 'un to me, but havin' a nacheral year for music, I soon ketched the tune and jined in on the last verse with a vim. Of course I could only hummit, not knowin' the words, but I come down on it good and strong and showed them folks that Angeline Keaton ain't one to shirk a duty, if they wuz. After the sermon the preacher giv out 'Thar Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.' Here wuz my chanct to show 'em what the brag-voice of Bear Waller wuz like!

"With my voice risin' and falling and dwellin' with extry force on the fust syllerbles of foun-tin and sin-ners, in long, drawn-out meeter, I fairly lost myself in the grand old melerdy. I wuz soarin' inter the third verse when I discovered I wuz the only one in the house that knowed it! The rest of 'em wuz singin' it to a friverlous tune like them Mose Beasley plays on his fiddle! What wuz more, they wuz titterin' like I wuz in errer! The very idy! That wuz too much fur me, and beckernin' Jim Henry to foller, I marched outer meetin'!

"We found the old mare had slipped the bridle and gone home, so thar wuz nothin' left fur us to do but foot it. The last thing I heered as we struck the Bear Waller pike and set out fur home wuz that coarse-voiced gal, still lagging behind, as she sang,

"'The Blood of the Lamb!'"

MARIA THOMPSON DAVIESS

Miss Maria Thompson Daviess, author of _The Melting of Molly_, was born at Harrodsburg, Kentucky, in October, 1872, the descendant of the famous Joseph Hamilton Daviess, the granddaughter of the historian of Harrodsburg, whose full name she bears, and the niece of Mrs. H. D. Pittman and Miss Annie Thompson Daviess, the Kentucky novelists. Miss Daviess was graduated from Science Hill Academy, Shelbyville, Kentucky, in 1891, after which she studied English for a year at Wellesley College. She then went to Paris to study art at Julien's, and several of her pictures have been hung in the Salon. As a miniature painter she excelled. At the conclusion of her art course, Miss Daviess returned to America, making her home at Nashville, Tennessee, where she resides at the present time. She taught at Belmont College, Nashville, for a year or more, and set up as a painter of miniatures for a public that demanded values in their portraits that she could not see fit to grant, so she finally decided to write. Miss Daviess's first book, and the one that she is still best known by, was _Miss Selina Lue and the Soap-Box Babies_ (Indianapolis, 1909). Miss Lue, spinster, tucks babies into a row of soap-boxes, maintaining sort of a free day-nursery, and the reader has much delicious humor from her duties. _Miss Selina Lue_ was followed by _The Road to Providence_ (Indianapolis, 1910), dominated by the character of Mother Mayberry, guide, philosopher, and friend to a Tennessee town; _Rose of Old Harpeth_ (Indianapolis, 1911), was a love story "as ingenuous and sweet as a boy's first kiss under a ruffled sunbonnet." Selina Lue and Mother Mayberry were both past their bloom; Rose possessed the power and glory of youth. _The Treasure Babies_ (Indianapolis, 1911), was a delightful children's story, which has been dramatized and produced, but Miss Daviess's most charming novel, _The Melting of Molly_ (Indianapolis, 1912), was "the saucy success of the season," for eight months the best selling book in America. Molly must melt from the plumpest of widows to the slenderest of maidens in just three months because the sweetheart of her girlhood days, now a distinguished diplomat, homeward bound, demands a glimpse of her in the same blue muslin dress which she wore at their parting years ago. The melting process, with the O. Henry twist at the end, is the author's business to narrate, and she does it in the most fetching manner. The little novel is "gay, irresistible, all sweetness and spice and everything nice." Miss Daviess's latest story, _Sue Jane_ (New York, 1912), has for its heroine a little country girl who comes to Woodlawn Seminary (which is none other than the author's _alma mater_, Science Hill), is at first laughed at and later loved by the girls of that school. She is as quaint and charming a child as one may hope to meet in the field of juvenile fiction. _The Elected Mother_ (Indianapolis, 1912), the best of the three short-stories tucked in the back of the Popular edition of _Miss Selina Lue_ (New York, 1911), was a rather unique argument for woman's equal rights. It proves that motherhood and mayoralties may go hand and hand--in at least one modern instance. _Harpeth Roses_ (Indianapolis, 1912), were wise saws culled from the pages of her first four books, made into an attractive little volume. Just as the year of 1912 came to a close Miss Daviess's publishers announced that her new novel, _Andrew the Glad_, a love story, would appear in January, 1913. _Phyllis_, another juvenile, will also be issued in 1913, but will first be serialized in _The Visitor_, a children's weekly, of Nashville. That Miss Daviess has been an indefatigable worker may be gathered at a glance. She has the "best seller touch," which is the most gratifying thing a living writer may possess. The present public demands that its reading shall be as light as a cream puff and sparking as a brook, and, in order to qualify for _The Bookman's_ monthly handicap, a writer must possess those two requisites: deftness of touch and brightness. These Miss Daviess has. And so, when the summer-days are over-long and the winter's day is dull, Maria Thompson Daviess and her brood of books will be found certain dispellers of earthly woes and bringers of good cheer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Bookman_ (December, 1909); _The Bookman_ (July, 1912).

MRS. MOLLY MORALIZES[70]

[From _The Melting of Molly_ (Indianapolis, 1912)]

Why don't people realize that a seventeen-year-old girl's heart is a sensitive wind-flower that may be shattered by a breath? Mine shattered when Alfred went away to find something he could do to make a living, and Aunt Adeline gave the hard green stem to Mr. Carter when she married me to him. Poor Mr. Carter!

No, I wasn't twenty, and this town was full of women who were aunts and cousins and law-kin to me, and nobody did anything for me. They all said with a sigh of relief, "It will be such a nice safe thing for you, Molly." And they really didn't mean anything by tying up a gay, dancing, frolicking, prancing colt of a girl with a terribly ponderous bridle. But God didn't want to see me always trotting along slow and tired and not caring what happened to me, even pounds and pounds of plumpness, so he found use for Mr. Carter in some other place but this world, and I feel that He is going to see me through whatever happens. If some of the women in my missionary society knew how friendly I feel with God, they would put me out for contempt of court.

No, the town didn't mean anything by chastening my spirit with Mr. Carter, and they didn't consider him in the matter at all, poor man. Of that I feel sure. Hillsboro is like that. It settled itself here in a Tennessee valley a few hundreds of years ago and has been hatching and clucking over its own small affairs ever since. All the houses set back from the street with their wings spread out over their gardens, and mothers here go on hovering even to the third and fourth generation. Lots of times young, long-legged, frying-size boys scramble out of the nests and go off to college and decide to grow up where their crow will be heard by the world. Alfred was one of them.

And, too, occasionally some man comes along from the big world and marries a plump little broiler and takes her away with him, but mostly they stay and go to hovering life on a corner of the family estate. That's what I did.

I was a poor, little, lost chick with frivolous tendencies and they all clucked me over into this empty Carter nest which they considered well-feathered for me. It gave them all a sensation when they found out from the will just how well it was feathered. And it gave me one, too. All that money would make me nervous if Mr. Carter hadn't made Doctor John its guardian, though I sometimes feel that the responsibility of me makes him treat me as if he were my step-grandfather-in-law. But all in all, though stiff in its knees with aristocracy, Hillsboro is lovely and loving; and couldn't inquisitiveness be called just real affection with a kind of squint in its eye?

And there I sat on my front steps, being embraced in a perfume of everybody's lilacs and peachblow and sweet syringa and affectionate interest and moonlight, with a letter in my hand from the man whose two photographs and many letters I had kept locked up in the garret for years. Is it any wonder I tingled when he told me that he had never come back because he couldn't have me and that now the minute he landed in America he was going to lay his heart at my feet? I added his honors to his prostrate heart myself and my own beat at the prospect. All the eight years faded away and I was again back in the old garden down at Aunt Adeline's cottage saying good-by, folded up in his arms. That's the way my memory put the scene to me, but the word "folded" made me remember that blue muslin dress again. I had promised to keep it and wear it for him when he came back--and I couldn't forget that the blue belt was just twenty-three inches and mine is--no, I _won't_ write it. I had got that dress out of the old trunk not ten minutes after I had read the letter and measured it.

No, nobody would blame me for running right across the garden to Doctor John with such a real trouble as that! All of a sudden I hugged the letter and the little book up close to my breast and laughed until the tears ran down my cheeks.

Then before I went into the house I assembled my garden and had family prayers with my flowers. I do that because they are all the family I've got, and God knows that all His budding things need encouragement, whether it is a widow or a snowball-bush. He'll give it to us!

And I'm praying again as I sit here and watch for the doctor's light to go out. I hate to go to sleep and leave it burning, for he sits up so late and he is so gaunt and thin and tired-looking most time. That's what the last prayer is about, almost always,--sleep for him and no night call!

FOOTNOTE:

[70] Copyright, 1912, by the Bobbs-Merrill Company.

CALE YOUNG RICE

Cale Young Rice, poet and dramatist, was born at Dixon, Kentucky, December 7, 1872. He graduated from Cumberland University, in Tennessee, and then went to Harvard University, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1895, and his Master's degree in the following year. In 1902 Mr. Rice was married to Miss Alice Caldwell Hegan, whose _Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_ had been published the year before. Mr. Rice has been busy for years as a lyric poet and maker of plays for the study, though several of them, indeed, have received stage presentation. His several books of shorter poems are: _From Dusk to Dusk_ (Nashville, Tennessee, 1898); _With Omar_ (Lebanon, Tennessee, 1900), privately printed in an edition of forty copies; _Song Surf_ (Boston, 1901), in which _With Omar_ was reprinted; _Nirvana Days_ (New York, 1908); _Many Gods_ (New York, 1910); and his latest book of lyrics, _Far Quests_ (New York, 1912). Mr. Rice's plays have been published as follows: _Charles di Tocca_ (New York, 1903); _David_ (New York, 1904); _Plays and Lyrics_ (London and New York, 1906), a large octavo containing _David_, _Yolanda of Cyprus_, a poetic drama, and all of his best work; _A Night in Avignon_ (New York, 1907), a little one-act play based upon the loves of Petrarch and Laura, which was "put upon the boards" in Chicago with Donald Robertson in the leading _role_. It was part one of a dramatic trilogy of the Italian Renaissance. Next came a reprinting in an individual volume of his _Yolanda of Cyprus_ (New York, 1908); and _The Immortal Lure_ (New York, 1911), four plays, the first of which, _Giorgione_, is part two of the trilogy of one-act plays of which _A Night in Avignon_ was the first part. The trilogy will be closed with another one-act drama, _Porzia_, which is now announced for publication in January, 1913. Mr. Rice has been characterized by the _New York Times_ as a "doubtful poet," but that paper's recent and uncalled for attack upon Madison Cawein, together with many other seemingly absurd positions, makes one wonder if it is not a "doubtful judge." After all is said, it must be admitted that Mr. Rice has done a small group of rather pleasing lyrics, and that his plays, perhaps impossible as safe vehicles for an actor with a reputation to sustain, are not as turgid as _The Times_ often is, and not as superlatively poor as some critics have held. Of course, Mr. Rice is not a great dramatist, nor a great poet, yet the body of his work is considerable, and our literature could ill afford to be rid of it. The Rices have an attractive home in St. James Court, Louisville, Kentucky.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Critic_ (September, 1904); _The Atlantic Monthly_ (September, 1904); _The Bookman_ (December, 1911); _Lippincott's Magazine_ (January, 1912).

PETRARCA AND SANCIA[71]

[From _A Night in Avignon_ (New York, 1907)]

_Petrarca._ While we are in the world the world's in us. The Holy Church I own-- Confess her Heaven's queen; But we are flesh and all things that are fair God made us to enjoy-- Or, high in Paradise, we'll know but sorrow. You though would ban earth's beauty, Even the torch of Glory That kindled Italy once and led great Greece-- The torch of Plato, Homer, Virgil, all The sacred bards and sages, pagan-born! I love them! they are divine! And so to-night--I-- (_Voices._) They! it is Lello! Lello! Lello! Sancia!--

(_Hears a lute and laughter below, then a call, "Sing, Sancia"; then Sancia singing:_)

To the maids of Saint Rèmy All the gallants go for pleasure; To the maids of Saint Rèmy-- Tripping to love's measure! To the dames of Avignon All the masters go for wiving; To the dames of Avignon-- That shall be their shriving!

(_He goes to the Loggia as they gayly applaud. Then Lello cries:_)

_Lello._ Ho-ho! Petrarca! Pagan! are you in? What! are you a sonnet-monger?

_Petrarca._ Ai, ai, aih! (_Motions_ Gherhardo--_who goes_.)

_Lello._ Come then! Your door is locked! down! let us in! (_Rattles it._)

_Petrarca._ No, ribald! hold! the key is on the sill! Look for it and ascend! (Orso _enters_.) Stay, here is Orso!

(_The old servant goes through and down the stairs to meet them. In a moment the tramp of feet is heard and they enter--_Lello_ between them--singing_:)

Guelph! Guelph! and Ghibbeline! Ehyo! ninni! onni! onz! I went fishing on All Saints' Day And--caught but human bones!

I went fishing on All Saints' Day, The Rhone ran swift, the wind blew black! I went fishing on All Saints' Day-- But my love called me back!

She called me back and she kissed my lips-- Oh, my lips! Oh! onni onz! "Better take love than--bones! bones! (Sancia _kisses_ Petrarca.) Better take love than bones."

(_They scatter with glee and_ Petrarca _seizes_ Sancia _to him_.)

_Petrarca._ Yes, little Sancia! and you, my friends! Warm love is better, better! And braver! Come, Lello! give me your hand! And you, Filippa! No, I'll have your lips!

_Sancia._ (_interposing_). Or--less? One at a time, Messer Petrarca! You learn too fast. Mine only for to-night.

_Petrarca._ And for a thousand nights, Sancia fair!

_Sancia._ You hear him? Santa Madonna! pour us wine, To pledge him in!

_Petrarca._ The tankards bubble o'er! (_They go to the table._) And see, they are wreathed of April, With loving myrtle and laurel intertwined. We'll hold symposium, as bacchanals!

_Sancia._ And that is--what? some dull and silly show Out of your sallow books?

_Petrarca._ Those books were writ With ink of the gods, my Sancia, upon Papyri of the stars!

_Sancia._ And--long ago? Ha! long ago?

_Petrarca._ Returnless centuries!

_Sancia._ (_contemptuously_). Who loves the past, Loves mummies and their dust-- And he will mould! Who loves the future loves what may not be, And feeds on fear. Only one flower has Time--its name is Now! Come, pluck it! pluck it!

_Lello._ Brava, maid! the Now!

_Sancia._ (_dancing_). Come, pluck it! pluck it!

_Petrarca._ By my soul, I will: (_Seizes her again._) It grows upon these lips--and if to-night They leant out over the brink of Hell, I would. (_She breaks from him._)

_Flippa._ Enough! the wine! the wine!

_Sancia._ O ever-thirsty And ever-thrifty Pippa! Well, pour out! (_She lifts a brimming cup._) We'll drink to Messer Petrarca-- Who's weary of his bed-mate, Solitude. May he long revel in the courts of Venus!

_All (drinking)._ Aih, long!

_Petrarca._ As long as Sancia enchants them!

_Flippa._ I'd trust him not, Sancia. Put him to oath.

_Sancia._ And, to the rack, if faithless? This Flippa! Messer Petrarca, should not be made High Jurisconsult to our lord, the Devil, Whose breath of life is oaths?... But, swear it!--by the Saints! Who were great sinners all! And by the bones of every monk or nun Who ever darkened the world!

_Lello._ Or ever shall! (_A pause._)

_Petrarca._ I'll swear your eyes are singing Under the shadow of your hair, mad Sancia, Like nightingales in the wood!

_Sancia._ Pah! Messer Poet-- Such words as those you vent without an end-- To the Lady Laura!

_Petrarca._ Stop! (_Grows pale._) Not _her_ name--here! (_All have sat down; he rises._)

_Sancia._ O-ho! this air will soil it? and it might Not sound so sweet in sonnets ever after? (_To the rest--rising._) Shall we depart, that he may still indite them? "To Laura--On the Vanity of Passion?" "To Laura--Unrelenting?" "To Laura--Whose Departing Darkens the Sky?" (_Laughs._) "To Laura--Who Deigns Not a Single Tear?" (Orso _enters_.) Shall we depart?

FOOTNOTE:

[71] Copyright, 1907, by McClure, Phillips and Company.

ROBERT M. McELROY

Robert McNutt McElroy, author of the best of the recent histories of Kentucky, was born at Perryville, Kentucky, December 28, 1872. He took the three degrees conferred by Princeton University; and since 1901 he has been assistant professor of American history in that institution. For the _Metropolitan Magazine_ of New York Dr. McElroy wrote an excellent _History of the Mexican War_, but this work has not yet appeared in book form. His _Kentucky in the Nation's History_ (New York, 1909), gave him an honorable place among the younger generation of American historians, and certainly a high place in Kentucky literature. Upon his history of Kentucky Dr. McElroy labored for many years, no sacrifice was too great for him to make, no journey too long for him to undertake, provided a better perspective were to be obtained at the end of his travels. He spent many months with Colonel Reuben T. Durrett at Louisville, working in his library, and sitting at his feet drinking from the well of Western history which the Colonel has kept undefiled. This, too, was what so sadly mars his work: he does in the discussion of several great questions, hardly more than serve as amanuensis for Colonel Durrett and the late Colonel John Mason Brown. Their opinions and conclusions are accepted _carte-blanche_, and all other authorities are ruthlessly set aside. Dr. McElroy accepts Colonel Brown's book upon the Spanish Conspiracy, and writes a single line concerning Thomas Marshall Green's great work! He brings his narrative down to the commencement of the Civil War, which probably indicates that a second volume is in preparation in order that the entire field may be surveyed. His work is most scholarly, the latest historical procedure is sustained throughout, and the pity is that he so slavishly followed one or two authorities, though both of them were wholly excellent and profound, to the exclusion of all others. Originality of opinion is what the work lacks, a lack which it might have easily possessed with the author's undoubted ability, had he not lingered so long in literary Louisville.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Dr. McElroy to the Author; _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913).

GEORGE ROGERS CLARK[72]

[From _Kentucky in the Nation's History_ (New York, 1909)]

It was at this critical moment that George Rogers Clark, the future conqueror of the Northwest territory, took up his permanent abode among the Kentucky pioneers. Clark had visited Kentucky, on a brief tour of inspection, during the previous autumn (Sept., 1775), and had been placed in command of the irregular militia of the settlements. He had returned to Virginia, filled with the importance of establishing in Kentucky an extensive system of public defence, and with the firm conviction that the claims of Henderson & Company ought to be disallowed by Virginia. His return to Kentucky, in 1776, marks the beginning of the end of the Transylvania Company. In spite of his youth (he was only twenty-four) he was far the most dangerous opponent that Henderson & Company had in the province. A military leader by nature, he had served in Lord Dunmore's war with such conspicuous success that he had been offered a commission in the British Army. This honor he had declined, preferring to remain free to serve his country in the event of a revolt from British tyranny.

Shortly after his arrival, Clark proposed that, in order to bring about a more certain connection with Virginia, and the more definitely to repudiate the authority of the Transylvania Company, a regular representative assembly should be held at Harrodsburg. His own views he expressed freely in advancing his suggestion. Agents, he said, should be appointed to urge once more the right of the region to be taken under the protection of Virginia, and, if this request should again be unheeded, we should "employ the lands of the country as a fund to obtain settlers, and establish an independent state."

The proposed assembly convened at Harrodsburg on the 6th of June. Clark was not present when the session began, and when he arrived, he found that the pressing question of the day had already been acted upon, and that he himself, with Gabriel John Jones, had been elected a delegate to represent the settlements in the Virginia Assembly. Clark knew that such an election would not entitle them to seats, but he agreed to visit Williamsburg, and present the cause of his fellow pioneers. Provided with a formal memorial to the Virginia Assembly, he started, with Jones, for Virginia and, after a very painful journey, upon which, Clark declared, I suffered "more torment than I ever experienced before or since," they reached the neighborhood of Charlottesville, only to learn that the Assembly had adjourned. Jones set off for a visit to the settlements on the Holston; but Clark, intent upon his mission, pushed on to Hanover County, where he secured an interview with Patrick Henry, then Governor of Virginia.

After listening to Clark's report of the troubles of the frontier colony, and doubtless enjoying his denunciation of the Transylvania Company, Governor Henry introduced him to the executive Council of the State, and he at once requested from them five hundred pounds of powder for frontier defence. He had determined to accomplish the object of his mission in any manner possible, and he knew that if he could induce the authorities of Virginia to provide for the defence of the frontier settlements, the announcement of her property rights in them would certainly follow, to the destruction of the plans of Henderson and his colleagues.

The Council, however, doubtless also foreseeing these consequences, declared that its powers could not be so construed as to give it authority to grant such a request. But Clark was insistent, and urged his case so effectively that, after considerable discussion, the Council announced that, as the call appeared urgent, they would assume the responsibility of lending five hundred pounds of powder to Clark, making him personally responsible for its value, in case their assumption of authority should not be upheld by the Burgesses. They then presented him with an order to the keeper of the public magazine, calling for the powder desired.

This was exactly what Clark did not want, as the loan of five hundred pounds of powder to George Rogers Clark, could in no sense be interpreted as an assumption by Virginia, of the responsibility of defending the western frontier, and his next act was most characteristic of the man. He returned the order with a curt note, declaring his intention of repairing at once to Kentucky, and exerting the resources of that country to the formation of an independent State, for, he frankly declared, "a country which is not worth defending is not worth claiming."

This threat proved instantly successful. The Council recalled Clark to their presence and, on August 23, 1776, delivered him another order calling for five hundred pounds of gunpowder, which was to be conveyed to Pittsburg by Virginia officials, there "to be safely kept and delivered to George Rogers Clark or his order, for the use of the said inhabitants of Kentucky."

With this concession Clark was completely satisfied, for he felt that by it Virginia was admitting her obligation to defend the pioneers of the West, and that an open declaration of sovereign rights over the territory must soon follow. He accordingly wrote to his friends in Kentucky, requesting them to receive the powder at Pittsburg, and convey it to the Kentucky stations, while he himself awaited the opening of the autumn session of the Virginia Assembly, where he hoped to procure a more explicit verdict against the claims of Henderson's Company.

At the time appointed for the meeting, Clark, accompanied by his colleague, Gabriel John Jones, proceeded to Williamsburg and presented his petition to the Assembly, where again his remarkable personality secured a victory. In spite of the vigorous exertions of Henderson and Campbell in behalf of the Transylvania Company, the Virginia Assembly (December 7, 1776) passed an act dividing the vast, ill-defined region, hitherto known as Fincastle County, into three sections, to be known as Kentucky County, Washington County, and Montgomery County, Virginia. The County of Kentucky, comprising almost the same territory as is contained in the present State of Kentucky, was thus recognized as a political unit of the Virginia Commonwealth, and as such was entitled to representation.

This statute decided the fate of the Transylvania Company, as there could not be two Sovereign Proprietors of the soil of Kentucky County. And so passed, a victim to its own lust of gain, the last attempt to establish a proprietary government upon the free soil of the United States; and George Rogers Clark, as founder of Kentucky's first political organization, became the political father of the Commonwealth, even as Daniel Boone had been the father of her colonization.

FOOTNOTE:

[72] Copyright, 1909, by Moffat, Yard and Company.

EDWIN D. SCHOONMAKER

Edwin Davies Schoonmaker, poet, was born at Scranton, Pennsylvania, February 1, 1873. He removed from Ohio to Kentucky in 1886, and he lived at Lexington almost continuously until 1904. Mr. Schoonmaker was educated at old Kentucky (Transylvania) University; and in 1904 he married a Kentucky woman, who has published a play and a novel. For the last several years he and his wife have lived at Bearsville, New York, high up in the Catskills. Mr. Schoonmaker's first book was a verse play, entitled _The Saxons--a Drama of Christianity in the North_ (Chicago, 1905). This was based upon the attempt on the part of Rome to force the religion of Christ upon the pagans in the forests of the North, and it was a very strong piece of work. His second work, another verse drama, will appear in 1913, entitled _The Americans_. It will be published by Mr. Mitchell Kennerley, for whom Mr. Schoonmaker is planning two other plays. Mr. Schoonmaker has had short lyrics in many of the leading magazines.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Arena_ (May, 1906); _Hampton's Magazine_ (June, 1910); _The Forum_ (August, 1912).

THE PHILANTHROPIST[73]

[From _The American Magazine_ (October, 1912)]

I neither praise nor blame thee, aged Scot, In whose wide lap the shifting times have poured The heavy burden of that golden hoard That shines far off and shall not be forgot.

I only see thee carving far and wide Thy name on many marbles through the land, Or flashing splendid from the jeweler's hand Where medaled heroes show thy face with pride.

Croesus had not such royal halls as thou, Nor Timon half as many friends as crowd Thy porches when thy largesses are loud, Learning and Peace are stars upon thy brow.

And still thy roaring mills their tribute bring As unto Cæsar, and thy charities Have borne thy swelling fame beyond the seas, Where thou in many realms art all but king.

Yet when night lays her silence on thine ears And thou art at thy window all alone, Pondering thy place, dost thou not hear the groans Of them that bear thy burdens through the years?

FOOTNOTE:

[73] Copyright, 1912, by the Phillips Publishing Company.

CREDO HARRIS

Credo Harris, novelist, was born near Louisville, Kentucky, January 8, 1874. He was educated in the schools of Louisville and finished at college in the East. He settled in New York as a newspaper man and the following ten years of his life were given to that work. In 1908 Mr. Harris abandoned daily journalism in order to devote himself to fiction. Only a few of his short-stories had gotten into the magazines when his first book, entitled _Toby, a Novel of Kentucky_ (Boston, 1912), appeared. In spite of the fact that the author's literary models were, perhaps, too manifest, _Toby_ was well liked by many readers. Mr. Harris's second story, _Motor Rambles in Italy_ (New York, 1912), was cordially received by those very critics who assailed his first volume with vehemence. It is both a book of travels and a romance, the recital being in the form of love letters to his sweetheart, Polly, and also descriptive of the country from Baden-Baden to Rome seen from the tonneau of a big touring-car. Mr. Harris has a new story well under way, which will probably appear in 1913. He resides at Glenview, Kentucky, with his father, but his work on _The Louisville Herald_ takes him into town almost every day.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mr. Harris to the Author; _The Courier-Journal_ (November 30, 1912).

BOLOGNA[74]

[From _Motor Rambles in Italy_ (New York, 1912)]

Bologna! Home of the sausage! Does not your mouth water at just the thought of it! I can see your pretty nose turn up in a curve that simply screams "Disgusting"--but you have never been quite fair to this relic of menageries.

To-day at luncheon our waiter first pranced up with a dish I did not recognize. It has long been a rule of mine--especially in Italy--that when I do not recognize a dish I wave it by. But rules are sent broadcast before the Bolognese spirit of patriotism. Would I be permitted to refuse this dish? No. He poked it still nearer and gave me a polite look. "No," I said, "not any." He poked it still nearer and his look became troubled. "No," I said again. This time his look was indignant as he exclaimed: "But, signor, it is _mortadella_!" Indeed, we found his persistence quite justifiable.

I could be satisfied to linger here. It is a pleasant mixture of cosmopolitan and mediaeval, blending a touch of geniality which adds much to its charm. The people are happier, perhaps it would be best to say more smiling, in Bologna than farther north. If one can be reconciled to the incongruity of living in a hotel that was a fifteenth century palace overlooking the solemn tombs of jurists, and then stepping to the corner for a twentieth century electric car, he can steel himself to put up with many other temperamental contradictions to be found in this capital of the Emilia.

But because of its cosmopolitanism I shall tell you little. In big places like this there is so much to see, so much to digest, so much to read out of guide books, that--what's the use? My letters are permitted, you have threatened, only so long as I tell an occasional thing which may serve you and the Dowager when you come through next year by motor, and while I do not believe you quite mean this, or would throw it down if you saw me heading toward the tender realms of nothingness, your wish shall, nevertheless, constitute my aim. Should I digress, it will be because my love for you is stronger than myself--an assertion of doubtful value at the present time.

So if you want to know Bologna, read your guide books. Here, you shall have only the more untrodden paths, which, if you follow as I have done, you may be fortunate. For you must know that all I have seen has been discovered by your eyes alone. Many a day has passed since you brought and taught me the things truly beautiful in this world. Great sculptures, rich paintings, magnificent architecture, are in the well worn paths of every one's progress which those who pass cannot help seeing, but a changing leaf, the sweep of a bird, a child's laugh at the roadside, ah, those are the bounties your hands have poured into my lap! Thousands pass along this way, piled high with perishable treasures, and never dream that they are trampling a masterpiece with every crunch of their bourgeoise boots.

FOOTNOTE:

[74] Copyright, 1912, by Moffat, Yard and Company.

HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES

Mrs. Hallie Erminie Rives-Wheeler, maker of mysteries, was born near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, May 2, 1874, the daughter of Colonel Stephen T. Rives. She is a cousin of Princess Troubetzkey, the celebrated Virginia novelist. Miss Rives, to give her her old name, was educated in Kentucky schools, after which she went to New York with her mother. In 1896 Miss Rives's mother died and she and her father moved to Amherst county, Virginia, which is her present American home. Her literary labors fall naturally into two periods: the first, which included five "red-hot" books, as follows: _The Singing Wire and Other Stories_ (Clarksville, Tennessee, 1892), the "other stories" being four in number and nameless here; _A Fool in Spots_ (St. Louis, 1894); _Smoking Flax_ (New York, 1897); _As the Hart Panteth_ (New York, 1898); and _A Furnace of Earth_ (New York, 1900). Miss Rives's second period of work began with _Hearts Courageous_ (Indianapolis, 1902), a romance of Revolutionary Virginia, and continues to the present time. This was followed by _The Castaway_ (Indianapolis, 1904), based upon the career of Lord Byron; and the great poems of the Englishman are made to swell the length of the story. In _Tales from Dickens_ (Indianapolis, 1905), Miss Rives did for the novelist what Lamb did for Shakespeare--made him readable for children. _Satan Sanderson_ (Indianapolis, 1907), a wild and thrilling tale of today, one of the "six best sellers" for many months, was followed by what is, perhaps, her best book, a story set in Japan, entitled _The Kingdom of Slender Swords_ (Indianapolis, 1910). Her latest novel is _The Valiants of Virginia_ (Indianapolis, 1912), the action of which begins in New York, but is transferred to Virginia. Miss Rives was married in Tokyo, Japan, December 29, 1906, to Mr. Post Wheeler, writer and diplomat, now connected with the American embassy at Rome. While none of her novels is set against Kentucky backgrounds, several of her short stories published in the magazines are Kentucky to the core.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The American Review of Reviews_ (October, 1902); _The Nation_ (August 11, 1904).

THE BISHOP SPEAKS[75]

[From _Satan Sanderson_ (Indianapolis, 1907)]

Inside the study, meanwhile, the bishop was greeting Harry Sanderson. He had officiated at his ordination and liked him. His eyes took in the simple order of the room, lingering with a light tinge of disapproval upon the violin case in the corner, and with a deeper shade of question upon the jewel on the other's finger--a pigeon-blood ruby in a setting curiously twisted of the two initial letters of his name.

There came to his mind for an instant a whisper of early prodigalities and wildness which he had heard. For the lawyer who had listened to Harry Sanderson's recital on the night of the making of the will had not considered it a professional disclosure. He had thought it a "good story," and had told it at his club, whence it had percolated at leisure through the heavier strata of town-talk. The tale, however, had seemed rather to increase than to discourage popular interest in Harry Sanderson. The bishop knew that those whose approval had been withheld were in the hopeless minority, and that even these could not have denied that he possessed desirable qualities--a manner by turns sparkling and grave, picturesqueness in the pulpit, and the unteachable tone of blood--and had infused new life into a generally sleepy parish. He had dismissed the whisper with a smile, but oddly enough it recurred to him now at sight of the ruby ring.

"I looked in to tell you a bit of news," said the bishop. "I've just come from David Stires--he has a letter from Van Lennap, the great eye-surgeon of Vienna. He disagrees with the rest of them--thinks Jessica's case may not be hopeless."

The cloud that Hugh's call had left on Harry's countenance lifted.

"Thank God!" he said. "Will she go to him?"

The bishop looked at him curiously, for the exclamation seemed to hold more than a conventional relief.

"He is to be in America next month. He will come here to examine, and perhaps to operate. An exceptional girl," went on the bishop, "with a remarkable talent! The angel in the chapel porch, I suppose you know, is her modelling, though that isn't just masculine enough in feature to suit me. The Scriptures are silent on the subject of woman-angels in Heaven; though, mind you, I don't say they're not common on earth!"

The bishop chuckled mildly at his own epigram.

"Poor child!" he continued more soberly. "It will be a terrible thing for her if this last hope fails her, too! Especially now, when she and Hugh are to make a match of it."

Harry's face was turned away, or the bishop would have seen it suddenly startled. "To make a match of it!" To hide the flush he felt staining his cheek, Harry bent to close the safe. A something that had darkled in some obscure depth of his being, whose existence he had not guessed, was throbbing now to a painful resentment. Jessica to marry Hugh!

"A handsome fellow--Hugh!" said the bishop. "He seems to have returned with a new heart--a brand plucked from the burning. You had the same _alma mater_, I think you told me. Your influence has done the boy good, Sanderson!" He laid his hand kindly on the other's shoulder. "The fact that you were in college together makes him look up to you--as the whole parish does," he added.

Harry was setting the combination, and did not answer. But through the turmoil in his brain a satiric voice kept repeating:

"No, they don't call me 'Satan' now!"

FOOTNOTE:

[75] Copyright, 1907, by the Bobbs-Merrill Company.

EDWIN CARLILE LITSEY

Edwin Carlile Litsey, author of _The Love Story of Abner Stone_, was born at Beechland, Kentucky, June 3, 1874. He was educated in public and private schools, but he did not go to college. At the age of seventeen years Mr. Litsey entered the banking business, and he is now connected with the Marion National Bank, of his present home, Lebanon, Kentucky. His first novel, _The Princess of Gramfalon_ (Cincinnati, 1898), was a daring piece of imagination, creating impossible lands and peoples, and it has been forgotten by author and public alike. Mr. Litsey's strongest and best work so far is a beautiful tale of Nature, entitled _The Love Story of Abner Stone_ (New York, 1902). This novelette made the author many friends, as it is a charming story. In 1904 he won first prize in _The Black Cat_ story-contest, over ten thousand competitors, with _In the Court of God_. His stories of wild animals in their haunts were brought together in _The Race of the Swift_ (Boston, 1905). This contains some of his best work, the first story being especially fine and strong. Mr. Litsey's latest novel, _The Man from Jericho_ (New York, 1911), was not up to the standard set in his earlier works, and in no sense is it a noteworthy production. It shows a decided falling off, and it brought disappointment to many admirers of _The Love Story of Abner Stone_ and _The Race of the Swift_. In 1912 Mr. Litsey contributed several short-stories to _The Cavalier_, and next year he will issue another novel, to be entitled _A Maid of the Kentucky Hills_.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Book Buyer_ (July, 1902); _Munsey's Magazine_ (April, 1903).

THE RACE OF THE SWIFT[76]

[From _The Race of the Swift_ (Boston, 1905)]

The next morning, near midday, her merciless offsprings teased and worried her so that the she-fox crept forth in spite of the warning of the day before, and set her sharp muzzle towards the crest of the range, with the intention of invading territory which hitherto her feet had never pressed. There were wild turkeys back in the hills, and wary and suspicious as she knew them to be, they were no match for her wily woodcraft. But scarcely had her noiseless feet gone over the top of the knob, when a sharp yelp immediately behind her caused her to jump and turn quickly. They were there--her enemies--and their noses were smelling out her trail, for as yet they had not seen her. Even as she leaped for the nearest cover like a yellow flash, her first thought was of the little ones biding at home. She must lead her foes away from that cleft in the rocks where her love-children lay awaiting her return. And though her life should be given up, yet would she die alone, and far away, before she would sacrifice her young.

It was a hard and stubborn race which she ran for the next six hours. At times her loyal, loving heart seemed ready to burst from the strain she thrust upon it. At times fleet feet were pattering almost at her heels, and pitiless jaws were held wide to grasp her; then again only the echo of the stubborn cry of her pursuers reached her. She had doubled time and again. Once a brief respite was granted her when she dashed up a slanting tree-trunk which, in falling, had lodged in the branches of another tree. Eight tawny forms dashed hotly, furiously by, then she descended and took the back track. Only for a moment, however, were the cunning dogs deceived. They discovered the artifice almost as soon as it was perpetrated, and came harking back themselves with redoubled zeal. So the long hours of the afternoon wore away. Not a moment that was free from effort; not an instant that death did not hover over the mother fox, awaiting the least misstep to descend. Back and forth, around and across, and still the subtlety of the fox eluded the haste and fury of the hounds. All were tired to the point of exhaustion, but none would give up. The sun went down; tremulous shadows, like curtains hung, were draped among the trees. The timid stars came out again and the halfed moon arose, a little larger than the night before. And still, with inveterate hate on the one side, and the undying strength of despair on the other, the grim chase swept through the night. At last the blood-rimmed eyes of the reeling quarry saw familiar landmarks. Unconsciously, in her blind efforts, she had come to the neighborhood of her den. Perhaps the love within her heart had guided her back. She found her strength quickly failing, and with a realization of this her scheming brain awoke as from a trance, and drove her to deeper guile. Two rods away was the creek. To it she staggered, splashed through the low water for a dozen yards, and hid herself beneath the gnarled roots of a tree from the base of which the stream had eaten away the soil. She listened intensely. She heard the pack lose the scent, search half-heartedly for a few minutes, for they, too, were weary to dropping, then withdraw one at a time, beaten. But for half an hour the brave animal lay against the tree roots, waiting and resting. Then she came out cautiously, looked around her, and with difficulty gained the mouth of her den. Casting one keen glance over her shoulder through the checkered spaces of the forest, she glided softly within, and lying down, curled her tired body protectingly around her sleeping little ones.

FOOTNOTE:

[76] Copyright, 1905, by Little, Brown and Company.

MILTON BRONNER

Milton Bronner, literary critic and journalist, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, November 10, 1874. He was graduated from the University of Virginia, in 1895, when he returned to his home to join the staff of the old _Louisville Commercial_. In 1900 Mr. Bronner removed to Covington, Kentucky, to become city editor of _The Kentucky Post_, of which paper he is now editor-in-chief. Mr. Bronner's first book, called _Letters from the Raven_ (New York, 1907), was a work about Lafcadio Hearn with many of Hearn's hitherto unpublished letters. His second and most important volume so far, _Maurice Hewlett_ (Boston, 1910), is the first adequate discussion of the novels and poems of the celebrated English author. His method was to treat the works in the order of their publication, together with a brief word upon Mr. Hewlett's life. His little book must have pleased the novelist as much as it did the public. Mr. Bronner seems to have a _flair_ for new writers who later "arrive." Thus years ago _Poet-Lore_ published his paper on William Ernest Henley, before Henley's fame was so firmly established. Some years later _The Independent_ had his essay on Francis Thompson, whom all the world now declares to have been a great and true poet. Still later _The Forum_ printed his criticism of John Davidson, in which high estimates were set upon the unfortunate fellow's works; and _The Bookman_ has printed a series of his critical appreciations of such men as John Masefield, Ezra Pound, Wilbur Underwood, W. H. Davies, W. W. Gibson, and Lionel Johnson, which introduced these now celebrated poets to the American public.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Forum_ (September, 1910); _The Bookman_ (August; November, 1911); _The Bookman_ (April; October, 1912).

MR. HEWLETT'S WOMEN[77]

[From _Maurice Hewlett_ (Boston, 1910)]

Mr. Hewlett is mainly interested in his women. They are the pivots about whom his comedies and tragedies move. And his treatment of them differs from all the great contemporary novelists. Kipling gives snapshot photographs of women. He shows them in certain brief moments of their existence, in vivid blacks and whites, caught on the instant whether the subjects were laughing or crying. Stevenson's few women are presented in silhouette. Barrie and Hardy give etchings in which line by line and with the most painstaking art, the features are drawn. But Meredith and Mr. Hewlett give paintings in which brush stroke after brush stroke has been used. The reader beholds the finished work, true not only in features, but in colouring.

* * * * *

Now Mr. Hewlett is purely medieval. The Hewlett woman is forever the plaything of love. She is always in the attitude of the pursuing who is pursued. She is forever the subject of passion, holy or unholy. Men will fight for her, plunge kingdoms and cities in war or ruin for her, die for her. Sometimes, as in "The Stooping Lady," she is the willing object of this love and stoops to enjoy its divine benison; sometimes she flees from it when it displays a satyr face as in "The Duchess of Nona;" sometimes she is caught up in its tragic coil as in "The Queen's Quair," and destroyed by it. Hewlett's women, like Hardy's, are stray angels, but like Meredith's they are creatures of the chase. And, note the difference from Meredith!--this, according to the gospel of Mr. Hewlett, is as it should be.

Since it is woman's proper fate to be loved, it would seem to be impossible for Mr. Hewlett to write a story in which there is not some romantic love interest. And in each case there is a stoop on the part of one. The stoop may be happy or the reverse, but it is there. He recurs to the idea again and again, but each time with a difference that prevents monotony.

In the main, Mr. Hewlett's women are good women. They are loyal and loving, ready alike to take beatings or kisses. There is no ice in their bosoms which must needs be thawed. Nor are Mr. Hewlett's women "kind" after the manner of the Stendhal characters. They are not women who make themselves common. For the most part, they are Rosalinds and Perditas of an humbler sort, with the beauty of those immortal girls, but without their supreme wit and high spirits. They are girls who are stricken down with love's dart and who make no effort to remove the dear missiles. They are true dwellers in romance-land, beautiful creatures who give themselves to their chosen lords without thought of sin or of the future.

FOOTNOTE:

[77] Copyright, 1910, by L. E. Bassett.

A. ST. CLAIR MACKENZIE

Alastair St. Clair Mackenzie, author of _The Evolution of Literature_, was born at Inverness, Scotland, February 17, 1875. "Blue as a molten sapphire gleams the Moray Firth below Culloden Moor, under whose purple heather sleep some of the warrior ancestors of Alastair St. Clair Mackenzie, near which he was born." The University of Glasgow conferred the degree of Master of Arts upon him in 1892. He then did graduate work in English at the University of Edinburgh for a year, after which he studied for some months under Sir Richard C. Jebb of the University of Cambridge, and Edward Caird of Oxford University. Mackenzie met S. R. Crockett, Henry Drummond, William Black, Alfred Tennyson, and many other distinguished men of letters, before he came to America. After a brief residence in Philadelphia he came to the State University of Kentucky, at Lexington, in September, 1899, as head of the department of English, and under his supervision the curriculum has been extended from three courses to thirty. Among Kentucky educators he has been the pioneer in introducing Journalism, Comparative Philology, and Comparative Literature. In 1911 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Kentucky Wesleyan College, the only degree of the kind ever conferred by that institution. In 1912 Dr. Mackenzie was Ropes Foundation lecturer at the University of Cincinnati. He is now dean of the Graduate School of the University of Kentucky. Besides contributing many articles to periodicals, Dr. Mackenzie wrote, in 1904, the first history of Lexington Masonic Lodge, No. 1, the earliest in the West; and, in 1907, the article on Hew Ainslie, the Scottish-Kentucky poet, published in the _Library of Southern Literature_, and pronounced by many competent critics to be the finest essay in that great collection. His _The Evolution of Literature_ (New York, 1911), the English edition of which was issued by John Murray, London, deals with the origins of literature, as its title indicates, and it has placed Dr. Mackenzie at the head of Southern students of this subject. Into this work went the researches and deliberate judgments of a lifetime; and that a scholar should produce such a work in the West or South, without a great library near at hand, is in itself remarkable. Dr. Mackenzie has done what will probably come to be regarded as the most scholarly production of a Kentucky hand, although the work is more suggestive than it is conclusive.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1910, v. xv); _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913).

A KELTIC TALE[78]

[From _The Evolution of Literature_ (New York, 1911)]

Here is an old Keltic tale of farewell. It was a night of mist, a low moon brooding over the braes, the heathery braes. The man sat by the seashore, as he sang quaint ballads of a land across the water, where men never see death. There was none to reveal the secrets of the glens, nor could any one tell him what the eagle cried to the stag at the corrie, while the burn wimpled on with its song of sobbing. He sat and listened, but he was knowing naught of sadness. To his ears came only the accents of the fairies of joy, and they called him to seek the fountain where song had its birth. Away from the sea he climbed till its voice came faint, faint across the bracken. At last, full weary, he slept. The night passed, and a leveret stood up, gazing upon his face without fear. A deer came to the stream, beheld the sleeping figure, and fled not. A grey linnet perched upon the pale hand lying across the bosom; it looked the sun in the face, and sang, but the man did not awake. Again the shadows melted into the night of stars, and the hills said to one another, "He has found Death and Life. For we know, and God knows, all his dreams. He has found the secret of the sea, the message of all the streams, and the fountain-head of song."

In quest of literary strivings and achievements, lowly as well as exalted, we have journeyed through all the principal lands of the globe. The forests of Africa have shaded us from the scorching sun, and the tang of the salt sea has smitten us off Cape Horn. Visions of scenes familiar have mingled with sights and sounds of cities that flourished forty centuries ago. Wherever we have gone, we have noticed that vitality is the quality which gives permanent value to all true art. Popular opinion, blind perhaps to the qualities of art as art, caring nothing about the more elusive charms of verse and prose, is quick to detect the presence or absence of a vital relationship between literature and humanity. Literary art voices life and gives life. The higher the art the more effectively does it fill the onlooker with a sense of life, personal and racial, dignified, wholesome, inexhaustible. Apparently it is the ideal within the real that becomes ever more manifest in the course of the evolution of literature.

FOOTNOTE:

[78] Copyright, 1911, by Thomas Y. Crowell and Company.

LAURA SPENCER PORTOR

Miss Laura Spencer Portor, poet and short-story writer, was born at Covington, Kentucky, in 1875. She lived at Covington until ten years old, when she was taken to Paris, France, where she attended private schools for two years. She returned to Kentucky, and attended school at Cincinnati, but she afterwards entered the old Norwood Institute, Washington. Her education being finished, Miss Portor again made her home at Covington, where she resided until a few years ago, when she went to New York, her home at the present time. She has worked in many literary fields. Children's work; essays; short-stories; feature and editorial work of all kinds; and verse for children and "grown-ups." Miss Portor is now children's editor of _The Woman's Home Companion_. She has been so very busy with her magazine work that she has found time to publish but one book, _Theodora_ (Boston, 1907), a little tale for children, done in collaboration with Miss Katharine Pyle, sister of the famous American artist, the late Howard Pyle, and herself an artist and author of ability and reputation. The next few years will certainly see several of Miss Portor's manuscripts published in book form. Among her magazine stories and verse that have attracted attention may be mentioned her purely Kentucky tales, such as "A Gentleman of the Blue Grass," published in _The Ladies' Home Journal_; "The Judge," which appeared in _The Woman's Home Companion_; "Sally," a Southern story, printed in _The Atlantic Monthly_; and "My French School Days," an essay, also printed in _The Atlantic_, are thought to be the best things in prose Miss Portor has written so far. Her poems, "The Little Christ" (_Atlantic Monthly_), and "But One Leads South" (_McClure's Magazine_), are her most characteristic work in verse. She has written much for children in both prose and poetry. Miss Portor is one of Kentucky's proudest hopes in fiction or verse, and the books that are to be published from her pen will bring together her work in a manner that will be highly pleasing to her admirers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Harper's Magazine_ (August, 1900); _St. Nicholas Magazine_ (October, 1912).

THE LITTLE CHRIST[79]

[From _The Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1905]

Mother, I am thy little Son-- Why weepest thou?

_Hush! for I see a crown of thorns, A bleeding brow._

Mother, I am thy little Son-- Why dost thou sigh?

_Hush! for the shadow of the years Stoopeth more nigh!_

Mother, I am thy little Son-- Oh, smile on me. The birds sing blithe, the birds sing gay, The leaf laughs on the tree.

_Oh, hush thee! The leaves do shiver sore That tree whereon they grow, I see it hewn, and bound, to bear The weight of human woe!_

Mother, I am thy little Son-- The Night comes on apace-- When all God's waiting stars shall smile On me in thy embrace.

_Oh, hush thee! I see black starless night! Oh, could'st thou slip away Now, by the hawthorn hedge of Death,-- And get to God by Day!_

BUT ONE LEADS SOUTH[80]

[From _McClure's Magazine_, December, 1909]

So many countries of the earth, So many lands of such great worth; So stately, tall, and fair they shine,-- So royal, all,--but one is mine.

So many paths that come and go, Busy and freighted, to and fro; So many that I never see That still bring gifts and friends to me; So many paths that go and come, But one leads South,--and that leads home.

Oh, I would rather see the face Of that dear land a little space Than have earth's richest, fairest things My own, or touch the hands of kings.-- I'm homesick for it! When at night The silent road runs still and white,-- Runs onward, southward, still and fair, And I know well it's going there, And I know well at last 'twill come To that old candle-lighted home,-- Though all the candles of heaven are lit, I'm homesick for the sight of it!

FOOTNOTES:

[79] Copyright, 1905, by Houghton, Mifflin Company.

[80] Copyright, 1909, by S. S. McClure Company.

LEIGH GORDON GILTNER

Miss Leigh Gordon Giltner, poet and short-story writer, was born at Eminence, Kentucky, in 1875. She is the daughter of the Rev. W. S. Giltner, who was for many years president of Eminence College, from which the future writer was graduated. She later pursued a course in English at the University of Chicago, and studied Shakespeare and dramatic art with Hart Conway of the Chicago School of Acting. Miss Giltner's book of lyrics, _The Path of Dreams_ (Chicago, 1900), brought her many kind words from the reviewers. This little book contained some very excellent verse, but, shortly after its appearance, the author abandoned poesy for the short-story. Her stories and sketches have appeared in the _New England Magazine_, _The Century_, _Munsey's Overland Monthly_, _The Reader_, _The Era_, and several other periodicals. Within the last year or so she has had quite a number of short-stories in _Young's Magazine_ "of breezy stories." At the present time Miss Giltner has a Kentucky novel and a comedy in preparation, both of which should appear shortly. She is one of the most beautiful of Kentucky's writers: her frontispiece portrait in _The Path of Dreams_ is said to have disarmed many carping critics who untied the little volume with malice aforethought. But back of her personal loveliness, is a mind of much power, cleverness, and originality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Nation_ (September 6, 1900); _Munsey's Magazine_ (October, 1902); _The Overland_ (October, 1910).

THE JESTING GODS[81]

[From _Munsey's Magazine_ (July, 1904)].

From the first it had been, in the nature of things, perfectly patent to every member of the party gathered at Grantleigh for the shooting that Tompkins' bride cared not a whit for Tompkins--which, if one happened to know the man, was scarcely a matter for surprise.

Tompkins, though a good fellow on the whole, was an unmitigated idiot. Not a mere insignificant unit in the world's noble army of fools, but a fool so conspicuous and of so infinite a variety as to be at all times the cynosure of the general gaze.

When a man is a fool and knows it, his folly not infrequently attains the measure of wisdom. Let him but conceal his motley beneath a cloak of weighty silence and he will presently acquire a reputation for solid intelligence and a wise conservatism. But Tompkins was not one of these. He joyously jangled his bells and flourished his bauble, wholly unaware the while of the spectacle he was making of himself. If he could have been persuaded to take on a neutral tint and keep himself well in the background, inanity might, in time, have assumed the dignity of intellectuality: but he lacked the sense of proportion, of values. He was always in the foreground and always a more or less inharmonious element in the _ensemble_.

Tompkins had published an impossible volume of prose, followed by a yet more impossible volume of verse: his crudely impressionistic essays at art made the judicious grieve: he dabbled in music and posed as a lyric tenor, though he had neither voice nor ear. A temperament essentially histrionic kept him constantly in the centre of the stage. With no remote realization of his limitations, he aspired to play leads and heavies, when Fate had inexorably cast him for a line of low comedy. He contrived to make divers and sundry kinds and degrees of an idiot of himself on all possible occasions--and even when there was no possible occasion therefor. He had a faculty for doing the wrong thing which amounted to inspiration.

We had been wont to speculate at the Club as to whether Tompkins would ever find a woman the measure of whose folly should so far exceed his own as to impel her to marry him. We wondered much when we heard that he had at last achieved this feat. We wondered more when we saw the woman who had made it a possibility.

"_Titania_ and _Bottom_, by Jove!" whispered Ronalds to me as Tompkins followed his wife into the drawing-room on the evening of their arrival at Grantleigh Manor. (Tompkins is asked everywhere on account of his relationship to old Lord Wrexford.) My fancy, which I had allowed to play freely about the lady of Tompkins' choice since I had heard of his marriage, had wavered between a spinster of uncertain age who had accepted him as a _dernier resort_ and a simpering school girl too young to know her own mind. I now glanced at the bride--and gasped.

She was one of those women whose beauty is so absolute, so compelling, as to admit of neither question nor criticism. It quite took away one's breath. Every man in the room was gaping at her, but she bore the ordeal with all grace and calm, though she was the daughter of a struggling curate in some obscure locality remote from social advantages. She was of a singularly striking type: the beauty of her face was almost tragic in its intensity: the ghost of some immemorial sorrow seemed to lurk in the depths of her dark eyes: but when her too sombre expression was irradiated by the transient gleam of her rare smile, she was positively dazzling. (I am aware that I shall seem to "promulgate rhapsodies for dogmas" so to speak, but my proverbial indifference to feminine charm should endorse me.)

* * * * *

As the days passed--we were at Grantleigh for a fortnight--I found myself watching for some flaw in her conception, some inaccuracy in her interpretation of her _role_. But I watched in vain. There was always a perfect appreciation of the requirements of the situation, always the perfection of taste in its treatment. Evidently she had thrown herself into the part and was playing it--would play it, perhaps, to the end--with artistic _abandon_, tempered by a fine discretion and discrimination. If her yoke galled, this proud woman made no sign. But even the subtlest artiste has her unguarded moment, and it was in such a moment that I chanced to see her the night before the last of our stay.

The men had come in late from a day's shooting over the moors and were on their way to their rooms to dress for dinner. Tompkins had gone up stairs just ahead of me (his apartments were next mine) and had carelessly left a door opening on the corridor slightly ajar. In passing I unconsciously glanced that way and my eyes fell full upon the mirrored face of Elinor Tompkins as her husband crossed toward where she sat at her dressing table. The flash of feeling that crossed her countenance held me for a moment transfixed. Such a look, such an unbelievable complex of shrinking, repugnance, utter loathing and self-contempt I had never seen or imagined.... Like a flash it came and went. The next instant she had forced herself to smile and was lifting her face for her husband's caress, while Tompkins, physically and mentally short-sighted, bent and inclined his lips to hers. I caught my breath sharply. A choking sensation in my throat paid tribute to her art. Not even Duse was more a mistress of emotional control, expression, and repression. But this was something more than the perfection of acting: it was courage, the courage of endurance long drawn out--a greater than that which impels men to the cannon's mouth and a swift and sure surcease from suffering.

That evening at dinner, Villars, who had run up to town for the day, and found time for a gossip at the Club, proceeded to open his budget. He had had the satisfaction of surprising us with the rumored engagement of Lady Agatha Trelor to the scapegrace son of an impoverished peer: he had hinted delicately at a scandal in high official life: and had made his climax with the announcement of the sudden demise of old Lord Ilverton and the consequent succession of Delmar to his title and estates--when I glanced, by purest chance, at Mrs. Tompkins. (I had fallen into a way of looking at her often--she was certainly an interesting study.) Her face was white, even to the lips. Chancing to turn, she found my eyes upon her. In an instant she had somehow compelled the color to her cheeks and recovered her wonted perfect poise and calm.

That night in the smoking room, Villars shed light upon the subject. Tompkins was presumably haunting his wife's footsteps at the moment. In his unconscious egotism he never spared her: there was seldom a moment when she might drop her smiling mask: the essence of his personality pervaded her whole atmosphere.

"I met old Waxby at the Club to-day," Villars was saying, "and--_apropos_ of Delmar's succession to the title--he mentioned that there had been a serious affair of the heart between him and our fellow-guest, Mrs. Tompkins, then Elinor Barton. It seems one of Ilverton's innumerable country places was near the village where the Bartons lived and Delmar met the girl there last Autumn. The affair soon assumed serious proportions: Ilverton heard of the engagement: cut up an awful shindy: had a scene with Del, and finally bundled him off to India post haste. The girl had grit, though. She sent her compliments to Lord Ilverton with the assurance that he need have given himself no uneasiness, as she had already twice refused his son and heir, and was prepared to repeat the refusal should occasion arise. They say his Lordship, who had cooled down a bit, chuckled mightily over the message and vowed that had it only been one of his younger sons, she should have had him, by Jupiter!... But things weren't easy for the girl at home. She had an invalid mother, a nervous, nagging creature, who dinned it into her ears that she'd lost the chance of a lifetime: that she was standing in the light of three marriageable younger sisters: that with her limited social advantages few matrimonial opportunities might be expected to come her way--and more to the same effect till the poor girl was nearly driven frantic."

"Why not have tried the stage--with her voice and presence any manager would have been glad to take her on," Landis suggested.

"She considered it, they say, but her reverend father turned a fit at the bare suggestion. At this juncture, Tompkins presented himself as a suitor: it was duly pointed out to Miss Barton by her loving parents that he was rather an eligible _parti_: rich, not bad looking, and a nephew of Wrexford's, and that she would better take the goods the gods provided, which, in sheer desperation, she ultimately did. You can see she loathes him, but she's evidently made up her mind to be decent to him--and by Jove, she doesn't do it by halves! She's got sand, all right, and I honor her for the way she makes the best of a bad bargain--though it's not a pleasant thing to see."

"It's a beastly pity!" broke in Ronalds warmly. "It makes me ill to see her wasting herself and her subtleties on a dolt like Algy. What a splendid pair she and Del would have made, and what a shame his Lordship didn't obligingly die a few months sooner--since it had to be!"

At this precise moment I caught sight of Tompkins standing just without the parted portierres. How long he had been there I could not guess, but doubtless quite long enough. He looked like a man who had had a facer and was a bit dazed in consequence. I think I gasped, for on the instant he looked my way with a glance that held an appeal, which I must somehow have answered. In an instant he was gone and the other men, all unaware of his proximity, pursued their theme.

I did not see Tompkins at our hurried buffet breakfast next morning, and I began to hope he would not go out with the guns that day, thus sparing me the awkward necessity of meeting him again. But he presently appeared on the terrace in his shooting togs, and I knew I was in for it. His manner, however, which was entirely as usual, reassured me. Either he had heard less than I had feared or the callousness of stupidity protected him. He chatted with his wonted gayety with the men: he made the ladies at hand to see us off a labored compliment or two, and met my eye without consciousness or embarassment. I wondered if it were stolidity or stoicism? All day he was in the best of spirits: he was positively hilarious when we gathered at the gamekeeper's cottage for luncheon--and I decided upon the former with a sense of relief, for the thing had somehow got on my nerves.

But later, as we returned to the field, he so palpably waited for me to come up with him (we always put Tompkins in the van for safety's sake--he did such fearful and wonderful things with his gun) that I was forced to join him. After a moment he said, with an effort:

"Sibley, I want to ask, as a very great personal favor, that you will never, under any circumstances, mention to anyone--to _any one_," he repeated, with a curious effect of earnestness, "about--last night."

I hastened to give him my assurance. It was the least I could do.

"Thank you," he said simply. "I felt I might depend upon you." Then, because we were men--and Englishmen--we spoke of other things.

Late that afternoon, as we bent our steps homeward, Tompkins and I found ourselves again together. We had somehow strayed from the rest, and under the guidance of a keeper, striding ahead, laden with trappings of the hunt, were making our way toward Grantleigh. Tompkins' manner was entirely simple and unconstrained. A respect I had not previously accorded him was growing upon me. We were both dead tired, and when we spoke at all it was of the day's sport.

As we neared the Manor, the keeper, far in the lead, vaulted lightly over a stile in a hedgerow. I followed less lightly (my enemies aver that I am growing stout) with Tompkins in the rear.... Suddenly a shot, abnormally loud and harsh in the twilight hush, rang out at my back. Blind and deaf--fatally blind and deaf as I had been--I realized its import on the instant. Even before I turned I knew what I should see.

Tompkins was lying in a huddled heap at the foot of the stile, and as I bent over him I saw that it was a matter of moments. He had bungled things all his life, poor fellow, but he had not bungled this.

"An accident, Sibley," he gasped, as I knelt beside him. "I was--always--awkward--with a gun, you know. _An accident_--you'll remember, old man? Elinor must not--"

Speech failed him for an instant. An awful agony was upon him, but no moan escaped his lips. His life had been a farce, a failure, but if he had not known how to live, assuredly he knew how to die.... The shadows were closing round him. He put out a groping hand for mine.

"I think I'm--going, Sibley," he whispered. "Tell Elinor--" And with her name upon his lips, he went out into the dark.

FOOTNOTE:

[81] Copyright, 1904, by the Frank A. Munsey Company.

MARGARET S. ANDERSON

Miss Margaret Steele Anderson, poet and critic, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1875. She was educated in the public schools, with a short special course at Wellesley College. Since 1901 Miss Anderson has been literary editor of _The Evening Post_, of Louisville, having a half-page of book reviews and literary notes in the Saturday edition. From 1903 to 1908 she was "outside reader" for _McClure's Magazine_; and since quitting _McClure's_, she has been a public lecturer upon literature and art in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Memphis, and Lake Chautauqua. Miss Anderson's fine poems have appeared in _The Atlantic Monthly_, _The Century_, _McClure's_, but the greater number of them have been published in _The American Magazine_. She has also contributed considerable verse to the minor magazines. The next year will witness Miss Anderson's poems brought together in a charming volume, entitled _The Flame in the Wind_, which form they very certainly merit. No Kentucky woman of the present time has done better work in verse than has she.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _McClure's Magazine_ (August, 1902); _The Century_ (September, 1904).

THE PRAYER OF THE WEAK[82]

[From _McClure's Magazine_ (September, 1909)]

Lord of all strength--behold, I am but frail! Lord of all harvest--few the grapes and pale Allotted for my wine-press! Thou, O Lord, Who holdest in Thy gift the tempered sword, Hast armed me with a sapling! Lest I die, Then hear my prayer, make answer to my cry: Grant me, I pray, to tread my grapes as one Who hath full vineyards, teeming in the sun; Let me dream valiantly; and undismayed Let me lift up my sapling like a blade; Then, Lord, Thy cup for mine abundant wine! Then, Lord, Thy foeman for that steel of mine!

NOT THIS WORLD[83]

[From _McClure's Magazine_ (November, 1909)]

Shall I not give this world my heart, and well, If for naught else, for many a miracle Of spring, and burning rose, and virgin snow?-- _Nay, by the spring that still shall come and go When thou art dust, by roses that shall blow Across thy grave, and snows it shall not miss, Not this world, oh, not this!_

Shall I not give this world my heart, who find Within this world the glories of the mind-- That wondrous mind that mounts from earth to God?-- _Nay, by the little footways it hath trod, And smiles to see, when thou art under sod, And by its very gaze across the abyss, Not this world, oh, not this!_

Shall I not give this world my heart, who hold One figure here above myself, my gold, My life and hope, my joy and my intent?-- _Nay, by that form whose strength so soon is spent, That fragile garment that shall soon be rent, By lips and eyes the heavy earth shall kiss, Not this world, oh, not this!_

Then this poor world shall not my heart disdain? Where beauty mocks and springtime comes in vain, And love grows mute, and wisdom is forgot? _Thou child and thankless! On this little spot_ _Thy heart hath fed, and shall despise it not; Yea, shall forget, through many a world of bliss, Not this world, oh, not this!_

WHISTLER (AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM)[84]

[From _The Atlantic Monthly_ (August, 1910)]

So sharp the sword, so airy the defense! As 'twere a play, or delicate pretense; So fine and strange--so subtly-poisèd, too-- The egoist that looks forever through!

That winged spirit--air and grace and fire-- A-flutter at the frame, is your desire; Nay, it is you--who never knew the net, Exquisite, vain--whom we shall not forget!

FOOTNOTES:

[82] Copyright, 1909, by S. S. McClure Company.

[83] Copyright, 1909, by S. S. McClure Company.

[84] Copyright, 1910, by the Atlantic Monthly Company.

ABBY MEGUIRE ROACH

Mrs. Abby Meguire Roach, "the very cleverest of the Louisville school of women novelists," was born at Philadelphia in 1876. She was educated in the schools of her native city, finishing her training with a year at Wellesley College. In 1899 she was married to Mr. Neill Roach, of Louisville, Kentucky, and that city has been her home since. Mrs. Roach wrote many stories of married life for the New York magazines, which were afterwards collected and published as _Some Successful Marriages_ (New York, 1906). These have been singled out by the reviewers as "charming" and "most beautiful"; and her work has been compared to Miss May Sinclair's, the famous English novelist. One of Mrs. Roach's most recent stories was published in _The Century Magazine_ for July, 1907, entitled "Manifest Destiny," but this has not been followed by any others in the last year or so. "Unremembering June," one of the best of the tales in _Some Successful Marriages_, relates the love of Molly-Moll for her invalid husband, after whose death she falls in love with Reno, the father of Lola, "who had been his salvage from the wreck of his marriage."

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Harper's Magazine_ (May, 1907); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1909, v. xv), contains Miss Marilla Waite Freeman's excellent study of Mrs. Roach.

UNREMEMBERING JUNE[85]

[From _Some Successful Marriages_ (New York, 1906)]

"And you will let me have word of you? Surely? And give me a chance to be of use? Won't you?" he persisted, taking leave. She swept his face swiftly with a glance of inquiry, intelligence. "Won't you?"

"O-h--perhaps," with just the faintest puckering of the mouth.

But spring passed without word from her, until there were times when Reno's impatience seethed like a colony of bees at hiving-time.

At last he wrote.

With unpardonable deliberation a brief answer came: Molly's son was a couple months old, but not yet finished enough to be much to look at.

He wrote again: Lola was pale from the city, and bored with herself and her maid; a farm with other children on it sounded like fairyland to her. Could some arrangement be made...?

Lola had been there a month before he had any word but her own hard-written and naturally not very voluminous love-letters, letters in which the homesickness was an ever fainter and fainter echo of the first wild cry, and in which the references to "Dandie" made it plain that she had adopted the other children's auntie into a peculiar relationship with herself. At last a postscript from Mrs. Loring herself:

"Wouldn't you like to come to see her? It's worth a longer trip."

"Of course I would. You're uncommon slow asking me. What kind of father, and man, do you think me?"

Molly was standing with the baby in her arms, chewing its chub of fist. In the warm wind soft wisps of blown brown hair curled all around forehead and neck. Her flesh was firm, transparent, aglow; her skin as clear, satiny, pink as the baby's. And what generous, sweet plumpness! She was at perhaps the most beautiful time of a woman's life--in the glamour of first young motherhood, with the beauty of perfect health and uncoarsened maturity.

And in the black-and-white of her shirt-waist suit there was no more suggestion of mourning than there is thought of winter in full June--rich, warm, full of promise, "unremembering June," the present and future tenses of the year's declension.

As she stood biting the baby, Reno understood why. His look devoured her.

Seeing him, her eyes only gave greeting, and, smiling, directed his to the group of animated children's overalls in a sand-pile in front of her. One particular occupant of one particular pair of overalls spied him. Lola flew. He held her off, brown, round, rosy. "Why, who is this? Whose little girl--or boy--are you?"

Her head dropped; she dropped from his hand like a nipped flower.

"Whose little girl _are_ you?" coached a rich voice with an undercurrent of laughter.

Like a flower again, the child swayed at the breath of that elemental nature. "Dandie's little girl," ventured a small voice. At sight of the father's face, Molly laughed, a laugh of many significances. And with a flood of recollected loyalty, "_Papa's!_" gasped the child, and smothered him with remorse.

"Wouldn't you like to be Dandie's and papa's little girl all at once?"

("Well! I like that!")

"Why, yes. Ain't I? Can't I?"

"I think you can."

("Oh, you do?")

"No?" His grip on her wrist hurt, and forced her to look up. ("Is it only a mother you want for Lola--and yourself?"); and, looking, she was satisfied; and, looking, she flushed slowly from head to foot, answering him.

"The most loyal, affectionate woman in the world!" he added, after a little.

"Oh, never mind the fairy tales!" she scoffed, pleased, waiting.

He spoke none of the time-honored commonplaces that belittle or dignify or mask the real individual feeling under the stereotype of what it is assumed love ought to be. He could foresee her amusement. Besides, it would have been about as appropriate as trying to capture a bird with a smile.

"But I would never marry any woman that I wasn't sure would be kind to Lola and fond of her."

"Oh, Lola!" Her whole look was soft and sweet. "I am fond of her now." Then a mischievous laugh bubbled in her throat. "And could be of you, too, if you insist." Even with the laugh her eyes were deeper than words, grave and tender.

"As to that, also, Molly-Moll, what you will be to me I am quite satisfied, quite."

FOOTNOTE:

[85] Copyright, 1906, by Harper and Brothers.

IRVIN S. COBB

Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb, humorist and short-story writer, was born at Paducah, Kentucky, June 23, 1876. He was educated in public and private schools, but the newspaper field loomed large before him, and at the age of nineteen he became editor of the Paducah _Daily News_. For three years he conducted the "Sour Mash" column in the Louisville _Evening Post_, when he returned to Paducah to become managing editor of the _News-Democrat_, which position he held from 1901 to 1904. Late in the year of 1904 Mr. Cobb went to New York, and for a year he was editor of the humorous section and special writer for _The Evening Sun_. In 1905 he became staff humorist for _The World_, and for the following six years he remained with that paper. Mr. Cobb has written several plays, none of which have been published in book form, but they have been produced upon the stage. They include: _The Campaigner_, _Funabashi_, _Mr. Busybody_, _The Gallery God_, _The Yeggman_, and _Daffy-Down-Dilly_. He has written many humorous stories, among which may be mentioned: _New York Through Funny Glasses_, _The Hotel Clerk_, _Live Talks with Dead Ones_, _Making Peace at Portsmouth_, _The Gotham Geography_, and _The Diary of Noah_.

Then, one day, the daily grind racked his nerves, he rebelled and bethought himself of the good old days in Kentucky years agone. Ah, what a fine chapter was added to the history of our native letters when Cobb looked backward! Now, when he was but twenty-four years of age, he had written a story, a horror tale of Reelfoot Lake, which he named "Fishhead" and immediately forgot, but which he had brought on East with him. On this he made some minor revisions and started it on its round of the magazine editors. But Cobb didn't wait for the fate of "Fishhead"; and it's a good thing that he didn't! He wrote what he now regards as his first fiction story, The Escape of Mr. Trimm; and _The Saturday Evening Post_ accepted it so quickly, printing it in the issue for November 27, 1909, that Cobb gleefully cashed the cheque and sent them another shortly thereafter. The editor of _The Post_, George Horace Lorimer, whom many competent judges considered the greatest editor in the United States, realized that a new literary planet had swam into his ken; and in 1911 he asked Cobb to become a staff contributor, which the Kentuckian was delighted to do. All of his stories have appeared in that publication, all save _Fishhead_, which Mr. Lorimer regarded as a bit too strong medicine for his subscribers. Mr. Cobb's next big story in _The Post_ was one that he has come to regard as the best thing he has done hitherto, "An Occurrence Up a Side Street," which appeared in the issue for January 21, 1911. This was a real horror tale, a "thriller," making one couple the name of Cobb with Poe, a comparison which has gathered strength with the passing of the months. For _The Post_ Mr. Cobb created Judge Priest, a character that has made him famous. He did a group of tales about and around this leading citizen of a certain Southern town--which town was none other than his own Paducah; and which character was none other than old Judge Bishop, whom many Kentuckians recall with pleasure. Cobb is a great realist and he has never had any patience with the romanticists. He painted the old town and the old judge and the judge's friends and enemies--if he had any--just as he remembered them. The best of these yarns, perhaps, was "Words and Music," printed in the issue for October 28, 1911; and when they were collected the other day and published under the title of _Back Home_ (New York, 1912), that story, in which the old judge "rambles," was the first of the ten tales the book contained. Some reviewers of this work have rather loosely characterized it as a novel, and in a certain big sense it is; but the sub-title is a better description: "the narrative of Judge Priest and his people." The book is really a series of pictures; and what Francis H. Underwood did so well in his Kentucky novel, _Lord of Himself_, and what William C. Watts did much better in his _Chronicles of a Kentucky Settlement_, Irvin S. Cobb has done in a manner superior to either of them in his _Back Home_. Judge Priest is a worthy and welcome addition to the gallery of American heroes of prose fiction, hung next to Bret Harte's highest heroes. Cohan and Harris have acquired the dramatic rights of his book, and it is to be made into play-form by Bayard Veiller, author of _Within the Law_, the great "hit" of the 1912 New York season, in collaboration with the Kentuckian, who once wrote of his original plays, which have already been listed: "One was accidentally destroyed, one was lost, and one was loaned out and never returned." Let us hope that none of these things may overtake the present work; and that, when Thomas Wise struts across the boards in the autumn of 1913 as Judge Priest he may receive a bigger "hand" than he ever drew in _The Gentleman from Mississippi_.

Besides these tales of Judge Priest, Cobb wrote several detached short-stories, and many humorous articles for _The Post_ during 1912. The best of this humor appeared simultaneously with _Back Home_, in a delightful little book, called _Cobb's Anatomy_ (New York, 1912). This contained four essays on the following subjects: "Tummies," perhaps the funniest thing he has done so far; "Teeth;" "Hair;" "Hands and Feet." The only adverse criticism to make of the work was its length: it was too short. Its sequel will appear in 1913 under the title of _Cobb's Bill of Fare_, containing four humorous skits. Aside from his Judge Priest yarns, which began in _The Post_ in the autumn of 1911 and ran throughout the year of 1912, and his humorous papers which also appeared from time to time, Cobb wrote the greatest short-story ever written by a Kentuckian (save that first book of stories by James Lane Allen), entitled "The Belled Buzzard" (_The Post_, September 28, 1912). This, with "An Occurrence Up a Side Street," and "Fishhead," which is to be published in _The Cavalier_ for January 11, 1913, after having been rejected by almost every reputable magazine in America, form a trio of horror tales of such power as to compel comparison with the best work of Edgar Poe, with the "shade" going to the Kentuckian in many minds. All three of them, together with "The Escape of Mr. Trimm"; "The Exit of Anse Dugmore," a Kentucky mountain yarn; and four unpublished stories, called "Another of Those Cub Reporter Stories"; "Smoke of Battle"; "To the Editor of the Sun;" and "Guilty as Charged," will appear in book form in the autumn of 1913, entitled _The Escape of Mr. Trimm_.

In summing up Cobb's work for the New York _Sun_, Robert H. Davis, editor of the Munsey magazines, wrote: "Gelett Burgess, in a lecture at Columbia College, said that Cobb was one of the ten great American humorists. Cobb ought to demand a recount. There are not ten humorists in the world, although Cobb is one of them.... Thus in Irvin Cobb we find Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Edgar Allan Poe at their best.... If he uses his pen for an Alpine stock, the Matterhorn is his." And George Horace Lorimer holds that Cobb is "the biggest writing-man ever born in Kentucky; and he's going to get better all the time." This is certainly high praise, but that it voices the opinions of many people is beyond all question. "The great 'find' of 1912" may be the trade-mark of his future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Everybody's Magazine_ (April, 1911); _Hampton's Magazine_ (October, 1911); _The American Magazine_ (November, 1912); _Who's Cobb and Why_, by R. H. Davis (New York, 1912, a brochure).

THE BELLED BUZZARD[86]

[From _The Saturday Evening Post_ (Philadelphia, September 28, 1912)]

There was a swamp known as Little Niggerwool, to distinguish it from Big Niggerwool, which lay nearer the river. It was traversable only by those who knew it well--an oblong stretch of yellow mud and yellower water, measuring, maybe four miles its longest way and two miles roughly at its widest; and it was full of cypress and stunted swamp oak, with edgings of cane-break and rank weeds; and in one place, where a ridge crossed it from side to side, it was snaggled like an old jaw with dead tree-trunks, rising close-ranked and thick as teeth. It was untenanted of living things--except, down below, there were snakes and mosquitoes, and a few wading and swimming fowl; and up above, those big woodpeckers that the country people called logcocks--larger than pigeons, with flaming crests and spiky tails--swooping in their long, loping flight from snag to snag, always just out of gunshot of the chance invader, and uttering a strident cry which matched those surroundings so fitly that it might well have been the voice of the swamp itself.

On one side Little Niggerwool drained its saffron waters off into a sluggish creek, where summer ducks bred, and on the other it ended abruptly at a natural bank of high ground, along which the county turnpike ran. The swamp came right up to the road, and thrust its fringe of reedy, weedy undergrowth forward as though in challenge to the good farm lands that were spread beyond the barrier. At the time I am speaking of it was midsummer, and from these canes and weeds and waterplants there came a smell so rank as almost to be overpowering. They grew thick as a curtain, making a blank green wall taller than a man's head.

Along the dusty stretch of road fronting the swamp nothing living had stirred for half an hour or more. And so at length the weedstems rustled and parted, and out from among them a man came forth silently and cautiously. He was an old man--an old man who had once been fat, but with age had grown lean again, so that now his skin was by odds too large for him. It lay on the back of his neck in folds. Under the chin he was pouched like a pelican and about the jowls was wattled like a turkey-gobbler.

He came out upon the road slowly and stopped there, switching his legs absently with the stalk of a horseweed. He was in his shirtsleeves--a respectable, snuffy old figure; evidently a man deliberate in words and thoughts and actions. There was something about him suggestive of an old staid sheep that had been engaged in a clandestine transaction and was afraid of being found out.

He had made amply sure no one was in sight before he came out of the swamp, but now, to be doubly certain, he watched the empty road--first up, then down--for a long half minute, and fetched a sighing breath of satisfaction. His eyes fell upon his feet and, taken with an idea, he stepped back to the edge of the road and with a wisp of crabgrass wiped his shoes clean of the swamp mud, which was of a different color and texture from the soil of the upland. All his life Squire H. B. Gathers had been a careful, canny man, and he had need to be doubly careful on this summer morning. Having disposed of the mud on his feet, he settled his white straw hat down firmly upon his head, and, crossing the road, he climbed a stake-and-rider fence laboriously and went plodding sedately across a weedfield and up a slight slope toward his house, half a mile away, upon the crest of the little hill.

He felt perfectly natural--not like a man who had just taken a fellowman's life--but natural and safe, and well satisfied with himself and his morning's work. And he was safe--that was the main thing--absolutely safe. Without hitch or hindrance he had done the thing for which he had been planning and waiting and longing all these months. There had been no slip or mischance; the whole thing had worked out as plainly and simply as two and two make four. No living creature except himself knew of the meeting in the early morning at the head of Little Niggerwool, exactly where the squire had figured they should meet; none knew of the device by which the other man had been lured deeper and deeper in the swamp to the exact spot where the gun was hidden. No one had seen the two of them enter the swamp; no one had seen the squire emerge, three hours later, alone. The gun, having served its purpose, was hidden again, in a place no mortal eye would ever discover. Face downward, with a hole between his shoulderblades, the dead man was lying where he might lie undiscovered for months or for years, or forever. His pedler's pack was buried in the mud so deep that not even the probing crawfishes could find it. He would never be missed probably. There was but the slightest likelihood that inquiry would ever be made for him--let alone a search. He was a stranger and a foreigner, the dead man was, whose comings and goings made no great stir in the neighborhood, and whose failure to come again would be taken as a matter of course--just one of those shiftless, wandering dagoes, here to-day and gone to-morrow. That was one of the best things about it--these dagoes never had any people in this country to worry about them or look for them when they disappeared. And so it was all over and done with, and nobody the wiser. The squire clapped his hands together briskly with the air of a man dismissing a subject from his mind for good, and mended his gait.

He felt no stabbings of conscience. On the contrary, a glow of gratification filled him. His house was saved from scandal; his present wife would philander no more--before his very eyes--with these young dagoes, who came from nobody knew where, with packs on their backs and persuasive, wheedling tongues in their heads. At this thought the squire raised his head and considered his homestead. It looked pretty good to him--the small white cottage among the honey locusts, with beehives and flowerbeds about it; the tidy whitewashed fence; the sound outbuildings at the back, and the well-tilled acres roundabout.

At the fence he halted and turned about, carelessly and casually, and looked back along the way he had come. Everything was as it should be--the weedfield steaming in the heat; the empty road stretching along the crooked ridge like a long gray snake sunning itself; and beyond it, massing up, the dark, cloaking stretch of swamp. Everything was all right, but----. The squire's eyes, in their loose sacs of skin, narrowed and squinted. Out of the blue arch away over yonder a small black dot had resolved itself and was swinging to and fro, like a mote. A buzzard--hey? Well, there were always buzzards about on a clear day like this. Buzzards were nothing to worry about--almost any time you could see one buzzard, or a dozen buzzards if you were a mind to look for them.

But this particular buzzard now--wasn't he making for Little Niggerwool? The squire did not like the idea of that. He had not thought of the buzzards until this minute. Sometimes when cattle strayed the owners had been known to follow the buzzards, knowing mighty well that if the buzzards led the way to where the stray was, the stray would be past the small salvage of hide and hoofs--but the owner's doubts would be set at rest for good and all.

There was a grain of disquiet in this. The squire shook his head to drive the thought away--yet it persisted, coming back like a midge dancing before his face. Once at home, however, Squire Gathers deported himself in a perfectly normal manner. With the satisfied proprietorial eye of an elderly husband who has no rivals, he considered his young wife, busied about her household duties. He sat in an easy-chair upon his front gallery and read his yesterday's Courier-Journal which the rural carrier had brought him; but he kept stepping out into the yard to peer up into the sky and all about him. To the second Mrs. Gathers he explained that he was looking for weather signs. A day as hot and still as this one was a regular weather-breeder; there ought to be rain before night.

"Maybe so," she said; "but looking's not going to bring rain."

Nevertheless the squire continued to look. There was really nothing to worry about; still at midday he did not eat much dinner, and before his wife was half through with hers he was back on the gallery. His paper was cast aside and he was watching. The original buzzard--or, anyhow, he judged it was the first one he had seen--was swinging back and forth in great pendulum swings, but closer down toward the swamp--closer and closer--until it looked from that distance as though the buzzard flew almost at the level of the tallest snags there. And on beyond this first buzzard, coursing above him, were other buzzards. Were there four of them? No; there were five--five in all.

Such is the way of the buzzard--that shifting black question-mark which punctuates a Southern sky. In the woods a shoat or a sheep or a horse lies down to die. At once, coming seemingly out of nowhere, appears a black spot, up five hundred feet or a thousand in the air. In broad loops and swirls this dot swings round and round and round, coming a little closer to earth at every turn and always with one particular spot upon the earth for the axis of its wheel. Out of space also other moving spots emerge and grow larger as they tack and jibe and drop nearer, coming in their leisurely buzzard way to the feast. There is no haste--the feast will wait. If it is a dumb creature that has fallen stricken the grim coursers will sooner or later be assembled about it and alongside it, scrouging ever closer and closer to the dying thing, with awkward outthrustings of their naked necks and great dust-raising flaps of the huge, unkempt wings; lifting their feathered shanks high and stiffly like old crippled grave-diggers in overalls too tight--but silent and patient all, offering no attack until the last tremor runs through the stiffening carcass and the eyes glaze over. To humans the buzzard pays a deeper meed of respect--he hangs aloft longer; but in the end he comes. No scavenger shark, no carrion crab, has chambered more grisly secrets in his digestive processes than this big charnel bird. Such is the way of the buzzard.

* * * * *

The squire missed his afternoon nap, a thing that had not happened in years. He stayed on the front gallery and kept count. Those moving distant black specks typified uneasiness for the squire--not fear exactly, or panic or anything akin to it, but a nibbling, nagging kind of uneasiness. Time and again he said to himself that he would not think about them any more; but he did--unceasingly.

By supper-time there were seven of them.

* * * * *

He slept light and slept badly. It was not the thought of that dead man lying yonder in Little Niggerwool that made him toss and fume while his wife snored gently alongside him. It was something else altogether. Finally his stirrings roused her and she asked drowsily what ailed him. Was he sick? Or bothered about anything?

Irritated, he answered her snappishly. Certainly nothing was bothering him, he told her. It was a hot-enough night--wasn't it? And when a man got a little along in life he was apt to be a light sleeper--wasn't that so? Well, then? She turned upon her side and slept again with her light, purring snore. The squire lay awake, thinking hard and waiting for day to come.

At the first faint pink-and-gray glow he was up and out upon the gallery. He cut a comic figure standing there, in his shirt in the half light, with the dewlap at his throat dangling grotesquely in the neck-opening of the unbuttoned garment, and his bare bowed legs showing, splotched and varicose. He kept his eyes fixed on the skyline below, to the south. Buzzards are early risers too. Presently, as the heavens shimmered with the miracle of sunrise, he could make them out--six or seven, or maybe eight.

An hour after breakfast the squire was on his way down through the weed field to the country road. He went half eagerly, half unwillingly. He wanted to make sure about those buzzards. It might be that they were aiming for the old pasture at the head of the swamp. There were sheep grazing there--and it might be that a sheep had died. Buzzards were notoriously fond of sheep, when dead. Or, if they were pointed for the swamp he must satisfy himself exactly what part of the swamp it was. He was at the stake-and-rider fence when a mare came jogging down the road, drawing a rig with a man in it. At sight of the squire in the field the man pulled up.

"Hi, squire!" he began. "Goin' somewheres?"

"No; jest knockin' about," the squire said--"jest sorter lookin' the place over."

"Hot agin--ain't it?" said the other.

The squire allowed that it was, for a fact, mighty hot. Commonplaces of gossip followed this--county politics, and a neighbor's wife sick of breakbone fever down the road a piece. The subject of crops succeeded inevitably. The squire spoke of the need of rain. Instantly he regretted it, for the other man, who was by way of being a weather wiseacre, cocked his head aloft to study the sky for any signs of clouds.

"Wonder whut all them buzzards are doin' yonder, squire," he said, pointing upward with his whipstock.

"Whut buzzards--where?" asked the squire with an elaborate note of carelessness in his voice.

"Right yonder, over Little Niggerwool--see 'em there?"

"Oh, yes," the squire made answer. "Now I see 'em. They ain't doin' nothin, I reckin--jest flyin' round same as they always do in clear weather."

"Must be somethin' dead over there!" speculated the man in the buggy.

"A hawg probably," said the squire promptly--almost too promptly. "There's likely to be hawgs usin' in Niggerwool. Bristow, over the other side from here--he's got a big drove of hawgs."

"Well, mebbe so," said the man; "but hawgs is a heap more apt to be feedin' on high ground, seems like to me. Well, I'll be gittin' along towards town. G'day, squire." And he slapped the lines down on the mare's flank and jogged off through the dust.

He could not have suspected anything--that man couldn't. As the squire turned away from the road and headed for his house he congratulated himself upon that stroke of his in bringing in Bristow's hogs; and yet there remained this disquieting note in the situation, that buzzards flying, and especially buzzards flying over Little Niggerwool, made people curious--made them ask questions.

He was halfway across the weedfield when, above the hum of insect life, above the inward clamor of his own busy speculations, there came to his ear dimly and distantly a sound that made him halt and cant his head to one side the better to hear it. Somewhere, a good way off, there was a thin, thready, broken strain of metallic clinking and clanking--an eery ghost-chime ringing. It came nearer and became plainer--tonk-tonk-tonk; then the tonks all running together briskly.

A cowbell--that was it; but why did it seem to come from overhead, from up in the sky, like? And why did it shift so abruptly from one quarter to another--from left to right and back again to left? And how was it that the clapper seemed to strike so fast? Not even the breachiest of breachy young heifers could be expected to tinkle a cowbell with such briskness. The squire's eye searched the earth and the sky, his troubled mind giving to his eye a quick and flashing scrutiny. He had it. It was not a cow at all. It was not anything that went on four legs.

One of the loathly flock had left the others. The orbit of his swing had carried him across the road and over Squire Gathers' land. He was sailing right toward and over the squire now. Craning his flabby neck the squire could make out the unwholesome contour of the huge bird. He could see the ragged black wings--a buzzard's wings are so often ragged and uneven--and the naked throat; the slim, naked head; the big feet folded up against the dingy belly. And he could see a bell too--an ordinary cowbell--that dangled at the creature's breast and jangled incessantly. All his life nearly Squire Gathers had been hearing about the Belled Buzzard. Now with his own eye he was seeing him.

Once, years and years and years ago, some one trapped a buzzard, and before freeing it clamped about its skinny neck a copper band with a cowbell pendent from it. Since then the bird so ornamented has been seen a hundred times--and heard oftener--over an area as wide as half the continent. It has been reported, now in Kentucky, now in Florida, now in North Carolina--now anywhere between the Ohio River and the Gulf. Crossroads correspondents take their pens in hand to write to the country papers that on such and such a date, at such a place, So-and-So saw the Belled Buzzard. Always it is the Belled Buzzard, never a belled buzzard. The Belled Buzzard is an institution.

There must be more than one of them. It seems hard to believe that one bird, even a buzzard in his prime, and protected by law in every Southern state and known to be a bird of great age, could live so long and range so far, and wear a clinking cowbell all the time! Probably other jokers have emulated the original joker; probably if the truth were known there have been a dozen such; but the country people will have it that there is only one Belled Buzzard--a bird that bears a charmed life and on his neck a never-silent bell.

* * * * *

Squire Gathers regarded it a most untoward thing that the Belled Buzzard should have come just at this time. The movements of ordinary, unmarked buzzards mainly concerned only those whose stock had strayed; but almost anybody with time to spare might follow this rare and famous visitor, this belled and feathered junkman of the sky. Supposing now that some one followed it to-day--maybe followed it even to a certain thick clump of cypress in the middle of Little Niggerwool!

But at this particular moment the Belled Buzzard was heading directly away from that quarter. Could it be following him? Of course not! It was just by chance that it flew along the course the squire was taking. But, to make sure, he veered off sharply, away from the footpath into the high weeds. He was right; it was only a chance. The Belled Buzzard swung off, too, but in the opposite direction, with a sharp tonking of its bell, and, flapping hard, was in a minute or two out of hearing and sight, past the trees to the westward.

Again the squire skimped his dinner, and again he spent the long, drowsy afternoon upon his front gallery. In all the sky there were now no buzzards visible, belled or unbelled--they had settled to earth somewhere; and it served somewhat to soothe the squire's pestered mind. This does not mean, though, that he was by any means easy in his thoughts. Outwardly he was calm enough, with the ruminative judicial air befitting the oldest justice of the peace in the county; but, within him, a little something gnawed unceasingly at his nerves like one of those small white worms that are to be found in seemingly sound nuts. About once in so long a tiny spasm of the muscles would contract the dewlap under his chin. The squire had never heard of that play, made famous by a famous player, wherein the murdered victim was a pedler, too, and a clamoring bell the voice of unappeasable remorse in the murderer's ear. As a strict church goer the squire had no use for players or for play-actors, and so was spared that added canker to his conscience. It was bad enough as it was.

That night, as on the night before, the old man's sleep was broken and fitful, and disturbed by dreaming, in which he heard a metal clapper striking against a brazen surface. This was one dream that came true. Just after daybreak he heaved himself out of bed, with a flop of his broad bare feet upon the floor, and stepped to the window and peered out. Half seen in the pinkish light, the Belled Buzzard flapped directly over his roof and flew due south, right toward the swamp--drawing a direct line through the air between the slayer and the victim--or, anyway, so it seemed to the watcher, grown suddenly tremulous.

* * * * *

Kneedeep in yellow swamp water the squire squatted, with his shotgun cocked and loaded and ready, waiting to kill the bird that now typified for him guilt and danger and an abiding great fear. Gnats plagued him and about him frogs croaked. Almost overhead a logcock clung lengthwise to a snag, watching him. Snake-doctors, insects with bronze bodies and filmy wings, went back and forth like small living shuttles. Other buzzards passed and repassed, but the squire waited, forgetting the cramps in his elderly limbs and the discomfort of the water in his shoes.

At length he heard the bell. It came nearer and nearer, and the Belled Buzzard swung overhead not sixty feet up, its black bulk a fair target against the blue. He aimed and fired, both barrels bellowing at once and a fog of thick powder smoke enveloping him. Through the smoke he saw the bird careen, and its bell jangled furiously; then the buzzard righted itself and was gone, fleeing so fast that the sound of its bell was hushed almost instantly. Two long wing feathers drifted slowly down; torn disks of gunwadding and shredded green scraps of leaves descended about the squire in a little shower.

He cast his empty gun from him, so that it fell in the water and disappeared; and he hurried out of the swamp as fast as his shaky legs would take him, splashing himself with mire and water to his eyebrows. Mucked with mud, breathing in great gulps, trembling, a suspicious figure to any eye, he burst through the weed curtain and staggered into the open, his caution all gone and a vast desperation fairly choking him--but the gray road was empty and the field beyond the road was empty; and, except for him, the whole world seemed empty and silent.

As he crossed the field Squire Gathers composed himself. With plucked handfuls of grass he cleaned himself of much of the swamp mire that coated him over; but the little white worm that gnawed at his nerves had become a cold snake that was coiled about his heart, squeezing it tighter and tighter!

* * * * *

This episode of the attempt to kill the Belled Buzzard occurred in the afternoon of the third day. In the forenoon of the fourth, the weather being still hot, with cloudless skies and no air stirring, there was a rattle of warped wheels in the squire's lane and a hail at his yard fence. Coming out upon his gallery from the innermost darkened room of his house, where he had been stretched upon a bed, the squire shaded his eyes from the glare and saw the constable of his own magisterial district sitting in a buggy at the gate waiting for some one.

The old man came down the dirtpath slowly, almost reluctantly, with his head twisted up sidewise, listening, watching; but the constable sensed nothing strange about the other's gait and posture; the constable was full of the news he brought. He began to unload the burden of it without preamble.

"Mornin', Squire Gathers. There's been a dead man found in Little Niggerwool--and you're wanted."

He did not notice that the squire was holding on with both hands to the gate; but he did notice that the squire had a sick look out of his eyes and a dead, pasty color in his face; and he noticed--but attached no meaning to it--that when the Squire spoke his voice seemed flat and hollow.

"Wanted--fur--whut?" The squire forced the words out of his throat.

"Why, to hold the inquest," explained the constable. "The coroner's sick abed, and he said you bein' the nearest jestice of the peace should serve."

"Oh," said the squire with more ease. "Well, where is it--the body?"

"They taken it to Bristow's place and put it in his stable for the present. They brought it out over on that side and his place was the nearest. If you'll hop in here with me, squire, I'll ride you right over there now. There's enough men already gathered to make up a jury, I reckin."

"I--I ain't well," demurred the squire. "I've been sleepin' porely these last few nights. It's the heat," he added quickly.

"Well, such, you don't look very brash, and that's a fact," said the constable; "but this here job ain't goin' to keep you long. You see it's in such shape--the body is--that there ain't no way of makin' out who the feller was, nor whut killed him. There ain't nobody reported missin' in this county as we know of, either; so I jedge a verdict of a unknown person dead from unknown causes would be about the correct thing. And we kin git it all over mighty quick and put him underground right away, suh--if you'll go along now."

"I'll go," agreed the squire, almost quivering in his newborn eagerness. "I'll go right now." He did not wait to get his coat or to notify his wife of the errand that was taking him. In his shirtsleeves he climbed into the buggy, and the constable turned his horse and clucked him into a trot. And now the squire asked the question that knocked at his lips demanding to be asked--the question the answer to which he yearned for and yet dreaded.

"How did they come to find--it?"

"Well, suh, that's a funny thing," said the constable. "Early this mornin' Bristow's oldest boy--that one they call Buddy--he heared a cowbell over in the swamp and so he went to look; Bristow's got cows, as you know, and one or two of 'em is belled. And he kept on followin' after the sound of it till he got way down into the thickest part of them cypress slashes that's near the middle there; and right there he run acrost it--this body.

"But, suh, squire, it wasn't no cow at all. No, suh; it was a buzzard with a cowbell on his neck--that's whut it was. Yes, suh; that there same old Belled Buzzard he's come back agin and is hangin' round. They tell me he ain't been seen round here sence the year of the yellow fever--I don't remember myself, but that's whut they tell me. The niggers over on the other side are right smartly worked up over it. They say--the niggers do--that when the Belled Buzzard comes it's a sign of bad luck for somebody, shore!"

The constable drove on, talking on, garrulous as a guinea-hen. The squire didn't heed him. Hunched back in the buggy he harkened only to those busy inner voices filling his mind with thundering portents. Even so, his ear was first to catch above the rattle of the buggy wheels the faraway, faint tonk-tonk! They were about halfway to Bristow's place then. He gave no sign, and it was perhaps half a minute before the constable heard it too.

The constable jerked the horse to a standstill and craned his neck over his shoulder.

"Well, by doctors!" he cried, "if there ain't the old scoundrel now, right here behind us! I kin see him plain as day--he's got an old cowbell hitched to his neck; and he's shy a couple of feathers out of one wing. By doctors, that's somethin' you won't see every day! In all my born days I ain't never seen the beat of that!"

Squire Gathers did not look; he only cowered back farther under the buggy-top. In the pleasing excitement of the moment his companion took no heed, though, of anything except the Belled Buzzard.

"Is he followin' us?" asked the squire in a curiously flat voice.

"Which--him?" answered the constable, still stretching his neck. "No, he's gone now--gone off to the left--jest a-zoonin', like he'd forgot somethin'."

And Bristow's place was to the left! But there might still be time. To get the inquest over and the body underground--those were the main things. Ordinarily humane in his treatment of stock, Squire Gathers urged the constable to greater speed. The horse was lathered and his sides heaved wearily as they pounded across the bridge over the creek which was the outlet to the swamp and emerged from a patch of woods in sight of Bristow's farm buildings.

The house was set on a little hill among cleared fields, and was in other respects much like the squire's own house, except that it was smaller and not so well painted. There was a wide yard in front with shade trees and a lye-hopper and a well-box, and a paling fence with a stile in it instead of a gate. At the rear, behind a clutter of outbuildings--a barn, a smokehouse and a corncrib--was a little peach orchard; and flanking the house on the right there was a good-sized cowyard, empty of stock at this hour, with feeding racks ranged in a row against the fence. A two-year-old negro child, bareheaded and barefooted, and wearing but a single garment, was grubbing busily in the dirt under one of these feedracks.

To the front fence a dozen or more riding horses were hitched, flicking their tails at the flies; and on the gallery men in their shirtsleeves were grouped. An old negro woman, with her head tied in a bandanna and a man's old slouch hat perched upon the bandanna, peeped out from behind a corner. There were hound dogs wandering about, sniffing uneasily.

Before the constable had the horse hitched the squire was out of the buggy and on his way up the footpath, going at a brisker step than the squire usually traveled. The men on the porch hailed him gravely and ceremoniously, as befitting an occasion of solemnity. Afterward some of them recalled the look in his eye; but at the moment they noted it--if they noted it at all--subconsciously.

For all his haste the squire, as was also remembered later, was almost the last to enter the door; and before he did enter he halted and searched the flawless sky as though for signs of rain. Then he hurried on after the others, who clumped single file along a narrow little hall, the bare, uncarpeted floor creaking loudly under their heavy farm shoes, and entered a good-sized room that had in it, among other things, a high-piled feather bed and a cottage organ--Bristow's best room, now to be placed at the disposal of the law's representatives for the inquest. The squire took the largest chair and drew it to the very center of the room, in front of a fireplace, where the grate was banked with withering asparagus ferns. The constable took his place formally at one side of the presiding official. The others sat or stood about where they could find room--all but six of them, whom the squire picked for his coroner's jury, and who backed themselves against the wall.

The squire showed haste. He drove the preliminaries forward with a sort of tremulous insistence. Bristow's wife brought a bucket of fresh drinking water and a gourd, and almost before she was out of the room and the door closed behind her the squire had sworn his jurors and was calling the first witness, who it seemed likely would also be the only witness--Bristow's oldest boy. The boy wriggled in confusion as he sat on a cane-bottomed chair facing the old magistrate. All there, barring one or two, had heard his story a dozen times already, but now it was to be repeated under oath; and so they bent their heads, listening as though it were a brand-new tale. All eyes were on him; none were fastened on the squire as he, too, gravely bent his head, listening--listening.

The witness began--but had no more than started when the squire gave a great, screeching howl and sprang from his chair and staggered backward, his eyes popped and the pouch under his chin quivering as though it had a separate life all its own. Startled, the constable made toward him and they struck together heavily and went down--both on all fours--right in front of the fireplace.

The constable scrambled free and got upon his feet, in a squat of astonishment, with his head craned; but the squire stayed upon the floor, face downward, his feet flopping among the rustling asparagus greens--a picture of slavering animal fear. And now his gagging screech resolved itself into articulate speech.

"I done it!" they made out his shrieked words. "I done it! I own up--I killed him! He aimed fur to break up my home and I tolled him off into Niggerwool and killed him! There's a hole in his back if you'll look fur it. I done it--oh, I done it--and I'll tell everything jest like it happened if you'll jest keep that thing away from me! Oh, my Lawdy! Don't you hear it? It's a-comin' clos'ter and clos'ter--it's a-comin' after me! Keep it away----" His voice gave out and he buried his head in his hands and rolled upon the gaudy carpet.

And now they heard what he had heard first--they heard the tonk-tonk-tonk of a cowbell, coming near and nearer toward them along the hallway without. It was as though the sound floated along. There was no creak of footsteps upon the loose, bare boards--and the bell jangled faster than it would dangling from a cow's neck. The sound came right to the door and Squire Gathers wallowed among the chairlegs.

The door swung open. In the doorway stood a negro child, barefooted and naked except for a single garment, eying them with serious, rolling eyes--and, with all the strength of his two puny arms, proudly but solemnly tolling a small, rusty cowbell he had found in the cowyard.

FOOTNOTE:

[86] Copyright, 1912, by the Curtis Publishing Company.

ISAAC F. MARCOSSON

Isaac Frederick Marcosson, editor and author, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, September 13, 1876, of Jewish ancestry. He was educated in the public schools of Louisville, and attended High School for a year. In 1894 he entered journalism, joining the staff of the Louisville _Times_, of which he was subsequently literary and city editor. In 1903 Mr. Marcosson went to New York, and became associate editor of _The World's Work_; and in connection with this work he served its publishers, Doubleday, Page and Company, as literary adviser. While with _The World's Work_ he wrote many articles on topics of vital interest. From March, 1907, to 1910, Mr. Marcosson was financial editor of _The Saturday Evening Post_ of Philadelphia. For _The Post_ he conducted three popular departments: "Your Savings"; "Literary Folks"; and "Wall Street Men." Every other week he had a signed article upon some subject of general interest. Some of his articles upon "Your Savings" have been collected and published in a small book, called _How to Invest Your Savings_ (Philadelphia, 1907). Mr. Marcosson's latest book, _The Autobiography of a Clown_ (New York, 1910), written upon an unusual subject, attracted wide attention. A part of it was originally published anonymously as a serial in _The Post_, and the response it evoked encouraged Mr. Marcosson to make a little book of his hero, who was none other than Jules Turnour, the famous Ringling clown. Jules furnished the facts, or part of them, perhaps, but Mr. Marcosson made him more attractive in cold type than he had ever been under the big tent. _The Autobiography of a Clown_ deserved all the kind things that were said about it. Since 1910 Mr. Marcosson has been associate editor of _Munsey's Magazine_ and the other periodicals that are owned by Mr. Munsey. His articles usually lead the magazine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Bookman_ (April; June; December, 1910).

THE WAGON CIRCUS[87]

[From _The Autobiography of a Clown_ (New York, 1910)]

All the circuses then were wagon shows. They traveled from town to town in wagons. The performers went ahead to the hotel in 'buses or snatched what sleep they could in specially built vans. The start for the next town was usually made about three o'clock in the morning. No "run" from town to town was more than twenty miles, and more often it was considerably less. At the head of the cavalcade rode the leader, on horseback, with a lantern. Torches flickered from most of the wagons, and cast big shadows. The procession of creaking vehicles, neighing horses, and sometimes roaring beasts was an odd picture as it wound through the night. Many of the drivers slept on their seats. The elephant always walked majestically, with a sleepy groom alongside. The route was indicated by flaming torches left at points where the roads turned. Sometimes these torches went out, and the show got lost. More than once a farmer was rudely aroused from his slumbers, and nearly lost his wits when he poked his head out of his window and saw the black bulk of an elephant in his front yard. It was, indeed, the picturesque day of the circus.

My first engagement was with the Burr Robbins circus, which was a big wagon show. The night traveling in the wagons was new to me, and at first strange. But I got to like it very much. It was a great relief to lie in the wagons, out under the stars, and feel the sweet breath of the country. Often the nights were so still that the only sounds were the creaking of the wagons, and occasionally the words, "Mile up," that the elephant driver always used to urge his patient, plodding beast.

The circus arrangement then was much different from now. Then the whole outfit halted outside the town, which was never reached until after daylight. The canvas men would hurry to the "lot" to put up the tents while we remained behind to spruce up for the parade. Gay flags were hoisted over the dusty wagons; the tired and sleepy performers turned out of tousled beds to put on the finery of the Orient. A gorgeous howdah was placed on the elephant's back, and a dark-eyed beauty, usually from some eastern city, was hoisted aloft to ride in state, and to be the envy and admiration of every village maiden. No matter how long, wet, or dusty had been our journey from the last town, everybody, man and beast, always braced up for the parade. Of course, by this time we were surrounded by a crowd of gaping countrymen. Often the triumphant parade of the town was made on empty stomachs, for there was to be no let-up until the people of the community had had every bit of "free doing" that the circus could supply. The clowns always drove mules in the parade. When the parade reached the grounds, the performers changed clothes, hastened back to the village hotel, and ate heartily. If there was time, we snatched a few hours of sleep. But sleep and the circus man are strangers during the season. Ask any circus man when he sleeps, and he will say, "In the winter time."

FOOTNOTE:

[87] Copyright, 1910, by Moffat, Yard and Company.

GERTRUDE KING TUFTS

Mrs. Gertrude King Tufts, author of _The Landlubbers_, was born in Boone county, Kentucky, in 1877, the daughter of Col. William S. King. She was educated in Kentucky and at private schools in Philadelphia, after which she took a library course and went to New York to work. The property she had inherited had been squandered, so she was compelled to seek her own fortune. For a while she did well, but her struggle for success was most severe. For nearly two years Miss King knew "physical pain and the utter want of money." Finally, however, in 1907, she became editor of the educational department of the Macmillan Company, and then she set to work upon her novel, _The Landlubbers_ (New York, 1909), which was first conceived as a short story, and was finished in the hot summer of 1908. Polly, heroine, is a school teacher out West, who hates her job, saves her money, and decides to see the world. On the trip across the Atlantic, she falls in with Flossie, confidence queen, and she is soon "broke." Suicide seems to be the only way out of her predicament and, at midnight, she quits her state-room to silently slip into the ocean. She is no sooner on deck, however, than she is confronted with cries from the crew and captain that the ship has struck an iceberg and is sinking. The next day Polly finds herself and Dick, hero-lover, on the old battered ship and alone. They, then, are "the landlubbers," and their experiences on the drifting, water-soaked craft, is the story. Miss King dramatized her novel, as she is anxious to become famous as a playwright, "not as a mere yarn-spinner." She also prepared a wonderful human document of her struggles in New York that was most interesting as an excellent piece of writing, and as an advertisement for her book. At the present time Miss King is said to be engaged upon a "long novel----a leisurely, picturesque thing into which I want to put a good deal of life." Miss King was married on February 26, 1912, to Mr. Walter B. Tufts, a New York business man. She is a kinswoman of Mr. Credo Harris, the Kentucky novelist.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Bookman_ (May, 1909); _Lexington Leader_ (May 16, 1909).

SHIPWRECKED[88]

[From _The Landlubbers_ (New York, 1909)]

I woke, not roused by any unusual sound or motion, but disturbed by a sense of hovering evil, a horror imminent and unescapable. I sat up, looked at my watch--for I had not turned off the light--and saw that it was toward half-past eleven o'clock. The great ship was silent, save for the throbbing of her iron pulses. As I listened, the fog-horn moaned out its warning, and as the deep note died away seven bells rang faintly from above. My watch, then, was right--and it was time!

I remembered what I had to do, and obeyed the decision of my more wakeful self, though I was far more influenced by the sense of vague, impersonal fear. Still muffled in the stupor of sleep, and shaken from head to foot by a nervous trembling, I rose, put on my long cloak, and flung a scarf over my disordered hair, for if I were to meet anyone I must seem merely a restless passenger seeking a breath of fresh air. I moved rapidly as I grew more wakeful, and tried not to think. From habit I folded my rugs neatly, and plumped up the pillow on which I had been lying. My throat and lips were dry, and I drank a glass of water before I unlocked my door and stepped out into the passage.

There rose above me a long, horrible cry, a shout blent discordantly of the voices of two-score men, a fearful sound as of the essence of brute fear. Many feet pattered upon the deck. There were wordless shouts, shrieked oaths, sharp commands, the boatswain's whistle piercing through the whole mass of confused sound. The great horn boomed just once more--I heard it through my hands upon my ears as I cowered against the wall.

Then the deck quivered under my feet as a horrible, grinding, rending crash shut out every other sound, and the great ship trembled throughout her length, and began to reel drunkenly from side to side, settling over, with every swing, further and further to port.

A new, more deafening clamour arose all about me, as the sleepers were aroused, and in half a minute the corridor was filled with whitefaced people in all sorts of dress and undress, carrying all kinds of queer treasures, weeping, shrieking, cursing; there was even laughter, hysterical and uncontrollable, and strange stammered words of blasphemy, prayer, reassurance, were shaken out between chattering teeth. A fat steward ran by, shoving rudely aside those whom till now he had lovingly tended as the source of tips. Now he struck away the trembling hands which clutched at his white jacket, ignoring the shivering inquiries as to "What was the matter?" The rapid passage of him gave the excited crowd the impulse it needed, and as one man they surged toward the stair--I with the rest.

But at the foot of the stair reason returned to me, and I reflected that it was absurd for me to join in the struggle for that life which I had just prepared to renounce. Here was death held out to me in the cold hand of Fate, as I could not doubt--and here was I pitiably trying to thrust away the gift!

I wrenched myself out of that frantic crowd, and made my way back to my stateroom with some difficulty, owing to the ship's unusual motion and the increasing list to port. She quivered no longer, indeed, but there passed through her from time to time a long, waving shudder, like the throe of a dying thing, unspeakably fearful and very sickening. As I passed beyond the close-packed crowd the sounds of their terror became more awful. I could discern the cries of little children, the quavering clamour of the very old. The pity of it overcame me, and I staggered into my stateroom and closed the door upon it all. But overhead there was still the swift tramp of feet, the harsh sound of voices--steadier now, and less multiplied, the tokens of a brave and awful preparation.

The next quarter of an hour--for I am sure that the time could not have been as much as twenty minutes, though it seemed that I sat with clenched hands for several days--was spent in a struggle with myself which devoured all my strength. I had heard much, and, in the folly of my peaceful, untempted youth, had often spoken of the cowardice of suicide. But now it required more courage and strength of will than I had ever believed myself capable of just to sit upon that divan, passively waiting to give back my warm, vigorous life to the infinity whence it came. Several times I gave in, and rose and laid my hand upon the doorknob--and conquered myself and went back to the divan and sat down again. Meanwhile, the noise went on above and about me; the fat steward, his face green with fear, flung my door open without knocking. "To the boats, Miss--captain's orders--no luggage----" He went on to the next room: "To the boats, sir!" The room was empty, and he passed to the next: "To the boats----" His teeth knocked against each other, tears of fright glittered down his broad face, but I heard him open doors faithfully the length of the starboard passage. It was, I suppose, his great hour.

I went to close the door, and found myself confronted by a man, barefooted, clad in shirt and trousers. It was Champion. "You awake, miss? I came to call you--All right? I'm going to get Mr. Darragh on deck," and he vanished.

His friendly, anxious look broke down something in me, and I was on a sudden overwhelmed by the passion of life; my humanity awoke again, and I longed for life, for life however stern, painful, hardwrung from peril and deprivation, for life snatched with bleeding hands out of the fanged jaws of the universe. I stood irresolute, the handle of the door in my hand, for I know not how long. The swaying of the ship became less regular, and the sounds of her straining, wrenched framework sickened me. I stepped over the threshold--the ship gave a last long trembling lurch from which it seemed she could not right herself; there rose a mighty hissing roar and the shriek of the steam from the hold, louder cries from the deck, the lights went out. I stumbled in the dark and fell, striking my head, and something warm and wet trickled down my face as a huge silence settled down upon me, swift and gentle as the wing of a great brooding bird, and I was very peaceful and very happy, for was I not being rocked--no, I was swinging, "letting the old cat die" in the big backyard at Carsonville, Illinois. No, it was better than that--I was dying, for the dark was shot by flashes of golden light, throbbing and raying painfully from my head, and then everything ebbed quietly, gently away.

FOOTNOTE:

[88] Copyright, 1909, by Doubleday, Page and Company.

CHARLES HANSON TOWNE

Charles Hanson Towne, poet of New York's many-sided life, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, February 2, 1877, the son of Professor Paul Towne. He left Kentucky before he was five years old, and he has been living in New York practically ever since. Mr. Towne was educated in the public schools of New York, and then spent a year at the College of the City of New York. He was editor of _The Smart Set_ for several years, but he resigned this position to become literary editor of _The Delineator_. At the present time Mr. Towne is managing editor of _The Designer_, one of the Butterick publications. With H. Clough-Leighter he published two song-cycles, entitled _A Love Garden_, and _An April Heart_; and with Amy Woodforde-Finden he collaborated in the preparation of three song-cycles, entitled _A Lover in Damascus_, _Five Little Japanese Songs_, and _A Dream of Egypt_. His original and independent work is to be found in his three volumes of verse, the first of which was _The Quiet Singer and Other Poems_ (New York, 1908), a collection of lyrics reprinted from various magazines; _Manhattan: a Poem_ (New York, 1909), an epic of New York City; and _Youth and Other Poems_ (New York, 1911), a metrical romance of domestic happiness, with a group of pleasing shorter poems. _Manhattan_ is the best thing Mr. Towne has done so far. The poem is the life of the present-day New Yorker, the rich and the poor, the famous and the infamous, from many points of view. The poet has turned the most commonplace events of every-day life into verse of exceptional quality and much strength. As the singer of the passing show in New York City, Mr. Towne has done his best work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Bookman_ (March, 1910); _The Forum_ (June, 1911); _Cosmopolitan Magazine_ (December, 1912).

SPRING[89]

[From _Manhattan, a Poem_ (New York, 1909)]

Spring comes to town like some mad girl, who runs With silver feet upon the Avenue, And, like Ophelia, in her tresses twines The first young blossoms--purple violets And golden daffodils. These are enough-- These fragile handfuls of miraculous bloom-- To make the monster City feel the Spring! One dash of color on her dun-grey hood, One flash of yellow near her pallid face, And she and April are the best of friends-- Benighted town that needs a friend so much! How she responds to that first soft caress, And draws the hoyden Spring close to her heart, And thrills and sings, and for one little time Forgets the foolish panic of her sons, Forgets her sordid merchandise and trade, And lightly trips, while hurdy-gurdies ring-- A wise old crone upon a holiday!

SLOW PARTING[90]

[From _Youth and Other Poems_ (New York, 1911)]

There was no certain hour Wherein we said good-bye; But day by day, and year by year We parted--you and I; And ever as we met, each felt The shadow of a lie.

It would have been too hard To say a swift farewell; You could not goad your tongue to name The words that rang my knell; But better that quick death than this Glad heaven and mad hell!

OF DEATH

(To Michael Monahan)

[From the same]

Why should I fear that ultimate thing-- The Great Release of clown and king?

Why should I dread to take my way Through the same shadowed path as they?

But can it be a shadowy road Whereon both Youth and Genius strode?

Can it be dark, since Shakespeare trod Its unknown length, to meet our God;

Since Shelley, with his valiant youth, Fared forth to learn the final Truth;

Since Milton in his blindness went With wisdom and a high content;

And Angelo lit with white flame The pathway when God called his name;

And Dante, seeking Beatrice, Marched fearless down the deep abyss?

Where Plutarch went, and Socrates, Browning and Keats, and such as these,

Homer, and Sappho with her song That echoes still for the vast throng;

Lincoln and strong Napoleon, And calm, courageous Washington;

Great Alexander, Nero--names That swept the world with deathless flames--

I need not fear that I shall fall When the Lord God's great Voice shall call;

For I shall find the roadway bright When I go forth some quiet night.

FOOTNOTES:

[89] Copyright, 1909, by Mitchell Kennerley.

[90] Copyright, 1911, by Mitchell Kennerley.

WILLIAM E. WALLING

William English Walling, writer upon sociological subjects, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, March 14, 1877. When twenty years of age he was graduated from the University of Chicago with the B. S. degree; and he subsequently did graduate work in economics and sociology for a year at the same institution. Since 1902 Mr. Walling has been a resident at the University Settlement in New York. He has contributed to many of the high-class magazines, but he is best seen as a writer in his two books, entitled _Russia's Message_ (New York, 1908); and _Socialism As It Is_ (New York, 1912). The first title, _Russia's Message_, is one of the authoritative works upon that race; and it has been received as such in many quarters. And the same statement may be made of his excellent discussion of socialism. Mr. Walling is a member of many political and social societies. He has an attractive home at Cedarhurst, Long Island. In the early spring of 1913 the Macmillan Company will issue another book for Mr. Walling, entitled _The Larger Aspects of Socialism_.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Nation_ (August 6, 1908); _Review of Reviews_ (August, 1908); _The Independent_ (May 16, 1912).

RUSSIA AND AMERICA[91]

[From _Russia's Message_ (New York, 1908)]

Russia, like the United States, is a self-sufficient country; more than a country, a world. Like the new world, the Russian world forms an almost complete economic whole, embracing under a single government nearly all, if not all, climates and nearly all the raw products used in modern life; both countries are large exporters of agricultural products, both are devoted more to agriculture than to manufacturing industry. Both of these worlds are composed largely of newly acquired and newly settled territory; though both are inhabited by very many races, in each a single race prevails numerically and in most other respects over all the rest, and keeps them together as a single whole. As the result of the mixture of races and the recent settlement of large parts of both countries, their culture is international, world-culture, unmarked by the comparatively provincial nationalistic tendencies of England, Germany, or France. We may look, according to a great German publicist, Kautsky, to America for the great economic experiments of the near future and to Russia for the new (social) politics.

America is essentially a country of rapid economic evolution, while Russia is undeveloped, economically and financially dependent. America is the country of economic genius, a nation whose conceptions of material development have reached even a spiritual height. The great American qualities, the American virtues, the American imagination, have thrown themselves almost wholly into business, the material development of the country. Americans are the first of modern peoples that have learned to respect the repeated failures of enterprising individuals with a genius for affairs, knowing that such failures often lead to greater heights of success. They have learned how to excuse enormous waste when it was made for the sake of economics lying in the distant future. They can appreciate the enterprise of persons who, instead of immediately exploiting their properties, know how to wait, like some of our most able builders that, foreseeing the brilliant future of the locality in which they are situated, are satisfied with temporary structures and poor incomes until the time is ripe for some of the magnificent modern achievements in architecture, in which we so clearly lead. All three of these types of men we admire are true revolutionists, who prefer to wait, to waste, or to fail, rather than to accept the lesser for the greater good.

So it is with Russians in their politics. There seems no reason for doubting that the near future will show that the political failures now being made by the Russians are the failures of political genius, that the waste of lives and property will be repaid later a hundredfold, and that the hopeful and planful patience with which the Russians are looking forward and working to a great social transformation promises the greatest and most magnificent results when that transformation is achieved. Already the political revolution of the Russian people, though not yet embodied in political institutions, is becoming as rapid, as remarkable, as phenomenal, as the economic revolution of the United States.

FOOTNOTE:

[91] Copyright, 1908, by Doubleday, Page and Company.

THOMPSON BUCHANAN

Thompson Buchanan, novelist and playwright, was born at New York City, June 21, 1877. Before he was thirteen years of age his family settled at Louisville, Kentucky; and from 1890 to 1894 he attended the Male High School in that city. Being the son of a retired clergyman of the Episcopal church, it was fitting that he should select the University of the South as his college, and in September, 1895, he reached the little town of Sewanee, in the Tennessee mountains, and matriculated in the University. He left college without a degree in July, 1897, and returned to his home at Louisville, where he shortly afterwards became police court reporter for the now defunct _Louisville Commercial_. Mr. Buchanan was connected with the _Commercial_ until 1900, save six months of service as a private in the First Kentucky Volunteer Infantry during the Spanish-American War. He saw service in the Porto Rico campaign with his regiment and, after peace was declared, returned to his home and to his position on the paper. In 1900 Mr. Buchanan went with _The Courier-Journal_; and during the same year he was dubbed a lieutenant in the Kentucky State Guards. In 1902 he left Colonel Watterson's paper for _The Louisville Herald_, of which he was dramatic critic for more than a year. The year of 1904 found Mr. Buchanan in New York on _The Evening Journal_, with which he was connected for four years, when he abandoned journalism in order to devote his entire attention to literature. Mr. Buchanan's first book, _The Castle Comedy_ (New York, 1904), a romance of the time of Napoleon, which many critics compared to Booth Tarkington's _Monsieur Beaucaire_, was followed by _Judith Triumphant_ (New York, 1905), another novel, set in the ancient city of Bethulia, with the Judith of the Apocrypha as the heroine. His dramatization of _The Castle Comedy_ was so generally commended, that he decided to desert the field of fiction for the writing of plays. His first effort, _Nancy Don't Care_, was met with a like response from the public, and the young playwright presented _The Intruder_, which certainly justified belief in his ultimate arrival as a dramatist, if it did nothing more. The play that brought Mr. Buchanan wider fame than anything he has done hitherto was _A Woman's Way_, a comedy of manners, in which Miss Grace George created the character of the wife with convincing power. _Marion Stanton_ is quite unfortunately in love with her exceedingly rich, but bored, husband, Howard Stanton, who seeks the society of other women, one of whom happens to be with him when his motor car is wrecked near New Haven at a most unseemly hour. The New York "yellows" are advised of the accident and they, of course, desire details--which desire precipitates the action of the play. "Scandal," in type the size of an ordinary country weekly, is flashed across the "heads" of the big dailies, extras are put forth hourly, a family conference is called at the home of the Stantons, a rich young widow from the South is regarded by the papers as Stanton's partner in the accident, and a very merry time is had by all concerned. The way the woman took out of her difficulties is unfrequented by many, although it should have been well-worn long before _Marion_ made it famous. The drama was one of the authentic successes of 1909, and it certainly established its author's reputation. A novelization of _A Woman's Way_ (New York, 1909), was made by Charles Somerville, and accorded a large sale, but how infinitely better would have been a publication of the play as produced! Quite absurd novelizations of plays are at the present time one of the literary fads which should have been in at the birth and death of Charles Lamb. _The Cub_, produced in 1910, a comedy with a mixture of melodrama and farce, was concerned with a young Louisville newspaper man, "a cub," who is assigned to "cover" a family feud in the Kentucky mountains. That he finds himself in many situations, pleasant and otherwise, we may be sure. A celebrated critic called _The Cub_ "one of the wittiest of plays"--which opinion was shared by many who saw it. _Lula's Husbands_, a farce from the French, was also produced in 1910. _The Rack_, produced in 1911, was followed by _Natalie_, and _Her Mother's Daughter_, all of which were given stage presentation. Mr. Buchanan spent most of the year of 1912 writing and rehearsing his new play, _The Bridal Path_, a matrimonial comedy in three acts, which is to be produced in February, 1913. None of his plays have been issued in book form, but, besides his first two romances and the novelization of _A Woman's Way_, two other novels have appeared, entitled _The Second Wife_ (New York, 1911); and _Making People Happy_ (New York, 1911). That Thompson Buchanan is the ablest playwright Kentucky has produced is open to no sort of serious discussion; with the exception of Mr. Dazey and Mrs. Flexner he is, indeed, quite alone in his field. Kentucky has poetic dramatists almost without number, but the practical playwright, whose lines reach his audience across the footlights, is a _rara avis_. Augustus Thomas, the foremost living American playwright, resided at Louisville for a short time, and his finest drama, _The Witching Hour_, is set wholly at Louisville, although written in New York, but Kentucky's claim upon him is too slender to admit of much investigation. Mr. Buchanan has done so much in such a short space of time that one is tempted to turn his own favorite shibboleth upon him and exclaim: "Fine!"

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Theatre Magazine_ (April; May, 1909); _The American Magazine_ (November, 1910); _The Green Book_ (January, 1911).

THE WIFE WHO DIDN'T GIVE UP[92]

[From _A Woman's Way_ (_Current Literature_, New York, June, 1909)]

_Act III, Scene I. Mr. Lynch, the reporter, enters, joining General Livingston, Mrs. Stanton's father, and Bob, Morris, and Whitney, all of whom have had escapades with the winsome widow._

_General Livingston._ I represent Mr. Stanton, and I tell you, sir, I do not propose to have him hounded in this damnable fashion any longer. I shall hold you personally responsible.

_Lynch._ General, you're the fifth man who's said that to me since three o'clock.

_General Livingston._ (_Sharp._) What!

_Lynch._ And if you do physically assault me, General, I shall certainly land you in the night court, and collect space on the story spread on the front page, sure--"Famous old soldier fined for brutally assaulting innocent young newspaper man."

(_General Livingston stands completely dumbfounded, his hands twitching, quivering with rage._)

_General Livingston._ (_Gasps almost tearfully._) Have you newspaper men no sense of personal decency, personal dignity?

_Lynch._ Don't be too hard on us, General. During business hours, our associations are very bad.

_General Livingston._ What do you mean?

_Lynch._ We have the name of the lady who was with Mr. Stanton in his car at the time of his accident. We have learned all about the trip and we have the woman's name. So I have come to give Mr. Stanton a----

_General Livingston._ (_Interrupting._) Would the papers print that?

_Lynch._ Would they print it? Well--(_Smiles significantly._)

_General Livingston._ Then I shall say nothing, but our lawyers will take action.

_Lynch._ They'd better take it quick. You'll have fifty reporters up here by to-morrow night. If Mr. Stanton refuses to say anything, we will simply send out the story that the woman in the car with him at the time of his automobile accident was----(_Pauses, then with dramatic emphasis._) Mrs. Elizabeth Blakemore.

_General Livingston._ (Starting back in amazement.) Good gracious!!

_Bob and Morris._ (_Turn, face each other, absolute amazement showing on their faces, speak together._) Well, what do you think of that? (_Whitney alone is not surprised. The situation is held a moment, then Stanton enters. He does not see Lynch at first._)

_Stanton._ (_As he comes on._) General, I wish to apologize----(_Stops short, seeing Lynch._)

_General Livingston._ (_Whirling on Stanton._) Apologize! Apologize! How dare you, sir! (_Losing his self-control._) My great-grandfather killed his man for just such an insult----

[_Marion enters to save the situation. The reporter withdraws for a moment, while the general informs her that Mrs. Blakemore must leave the house at once. Marion demurs._]

_Marion._ Father, I told you once what concerns my own life I must settle my own way. I don't want to appear disrespectful, but you cannot coerce me in my own house. (_Walks past him to the door and opens it._) Good evening, Mr. Lynch.

_Lynch._ (_Sincere tone._) I hope you will believe me, Mrs. Stanton, when I tell you it is not a pleasure to me to have to come on this errand.

_Marion._ Thank you, Mr. Lynch.

_Lynch._ I'd rather talk to Mr. Stanton.

_Marion._ Sorry, but----(_Her manner is pleasant and friendly, but firm. Lynch evidently likes her and with a shrug he accepts situation._)

_Lynch._ Then please understand my position, and how I regret personally the question that, as a newspaper man, I must put. (_Marion bows._) Bluntly, Mrs. Stanton, we have the name of that woman.

_Marion._ Yes.

_Lynch._ And we are going to publish it unless it can be proven wrong.

_Marion._ I'd expect that. Who is she?

_Lynch._ Mrs. Elizabeth Blakemore. (_Lynch pronounces the name regretfully. Marion stares at him a moment in amazement, then throws back her head and gives way to a peal of laughter. The men on the stage stare at Marion amazed._)

_Marion._ Oh, this is too good! Too good! Forgive me, Mr. Lynch. (_Goes off into another peal of laughter, turns to the men._) Howard, Dad, all of you, did you hear that? What a splendid joke! (_The men try awkwardly to back her up._)

_General Livingston._ Splendid! Haw! Haw!

_Bob._ Fine, he, he!

_Morris._ (_At head of table._) Ho, ho. I never knew anything like it.

_Whitney._ I told Mr. Lynch he was on a cold trail.

_Lynch._ (_Grimly._) You can't laugh me off.

_Marion._ (_Struggling for self-control._) Of course not. But you must forgive my having my laugh first. I'll offer more substantial proof. (_Opens door, letting in immediately the sound of women's talking and laughter which stop short as though the women had looked around at the opening of the door. Calling in her most dulcet tone._) Elizabeth!

_Mrs. Blakemore._ (_Her voice heard off stage._) Yes, Marion, dear. (_An amazed gasp from the men. Mrs. Blakemore appears at the door._)

_Marion._ Come in! (_Mrs. Blakemore enters, looks about quickly, almost fearfully. Marion slips her arm about Mrs. Blakemore's waist in reassuring fashion, laughing, but at the same time giving Mrs. Blakemore a warning pressure with her arm._) Don't say a word, dear. The greatest joke you ever heard! Come! (_Mrs. Blakemore, following suit, slips her arm about Marion. They come down stage to Lynch, their arms about each other's waist most affectionately. The men are staring at them dumfounded. Marion and Mrs. Blakemore stop opposite Lynch. Marion speaks gaily._) Mr. Lynch, of the City News, may I present Mrs. Elizabeth Blakemore?

_Lynch._ (_In amazement._) Mrs. Blakemore!

_Mrs. Blakemore._ (_Bowing pleasantly._) Glad to meet you, Mr. Lynch.

_Lynch._ (_Repeating, dazed._) Mrs. Blakemore!

_Marion._ (_Gaily._) And you see she's not lame a bit from her broken leg.

_Mrs. Blakemore._ What's the joke?

_Marion._ (_Taunting._) You would not expect, Mr. Lynch, to find plaintiff and corespondent so friendly.

_Mrs. Blakemore._ (_Gasping._) Plaintiff! Corespondent!

_Marion._ Yes, dear. Mr. Lynch came all the way up from down town to tell me that I am going to bring a divorce suit against Howard, naming you as corespondent. Now wasn't that sweet of him? (_She keeps her warning pressure about Mrs. Blakemore's waist._)

_Mrs. Blakemore._ (_Taking the cue._) This is awful! Horrible!

_Marion._ Now, dear, don't lose your sense of humor. (_To Lynch._) Are you satisfied, Mr. Lynch?

_Lynch._ Forgive me. Mrs. Stanton, but you are so confounded clever you might run in a "ringer." (_Reaches in his pocket, brings out a picture, holds it up and compares the picture with Mrs. Blakemore. Finally looks up._) Guess you win, Mrs. Stanton.

_Marion._ Thanks. (_Bows satirically._)

_Lynch._ Yes, you must be right I don't believe even you could put your arm about the _other woman_. (_A suppressed, gasping exclamation from the men._)

_Marion._ That observation hardly requires an answer, Mr. Lynch.

_Lynch._ Sorry to have disturbed you. Good night!

_All._ (_With relief._) Good night.

[_The flabbergasted reporter withdraws, but Marion still keeps her arm about Mrs. Blakemore. When he re-opens the door, as if he had forgotten something, he finds the picture undisturbed. Mrs. Blakemore thanks Marion for her generosity, and goes out, followed by the others._ "Good night, my friend," the widow remarks, "you'll get all that is coming to you." _Stanton calls back Marion who has also deserted the room._]

_Stanton._ Marion! Marion!

_Marion._ (_Enters._) Has she gone?

_Stanton._ Who?

_Marion._ Puss?

_Stanton._ Oh, she's not my Puss.

_Marion._ Not your Puss, Howard? Then whose Puss is she?

_Stanton._ God knows--maybe. Marion. I've loved you all the time. I've been a fool, a weak, dazzled fool. I love you. Won't you forgive me and take me back?

_Marion._ Take you back? Why, I've never even given you up. Do you think I could stand for that cat--Puss, I mean--in this house and me off to Reno?

CURTAIN.

FOOTNOTE:

[92] Copyright, 1909, by the Current Literature Publishing Company.

WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

Will Levington Comfort, "the new style novelist," was born at Kalamazoo, Michigan, January 17, 1878. He was educated in the grammar and high schools of Detroit, and was at Albion College, Albion, Michigan, for a short time. Mr. Comfort was a newspaper reporter in Detroit for a few months, but, in 1898, he did his first real reporting on papers in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Covington, Kentucky. During the Spanish-American War he served in the Fifth United States Cavalry; and in 1899 he was war correspondent in the Philippines and China for the "Detroit Journal Newspaper Syndicate;" and in 1904 he was in Russia and Japan during the war for the "Pittsburgh Dispatch Newspaper Syndicate." Thus he followed the war-god almost around the world; and out of his experiences he wrote his anti-war novel, _Routledge Rides Alone_ (Philadelphia, 1909). This proved to be one of the most popular of recent American novels, now in its ninth edition. It was followed by _She Buildeth Her House_ (Philadelphia, 1911), his quasi-Kentucky novel. In order to get the local color for this book, Mr. Comfort spent some months at Danville, Kentucky, the _Danube_ of the story, and of his stay in the little town, together with his opinion of the Kentucky actress in the book, Selma Cross, he has written: "I always considered Selma Cross the real thing. I had quite a wonderful time doing her, and she came to be most emphatically in Kentucky. It was a night in Danville when some amateur theatricals were put on, that I got the first idea of a big crude woman with a handicap of beauty-lack, but big enough to win against every law. She had to go on the anvil, hard and long. I was interested to watch her in the sharp odor of decadence to which her life carried her. She wabbles, becomes tainted a bit, but rises to shake it all off. I did the Selma Cross part of _She Buildeth Her House_ in the Clemons House, Danville.... I also did a novelette while I was in Kentucky. The Lippincotts published it under the caption, _Lady Thoroughbred, Kentuckian_." No critic has written nearer the truth of Selma Cross than the author himself: "She was a bit strong medicine for most people." Mr. Comfort has made many horseback trips through Kentucky, and he has "come to feel authoritative and warmly tender in all that concerns the folk and the land." His latest novel, _Fate Knocks at the Door_ (Philadelphia, 1912), is far and away the strongest story he has written. Mr. Comfort has created a style that the critics are calling "new, big, but crude in spots;" and it certainly does isolate him from any other American novelist of today. Whatever may be said for or against his style, this much is certain: he who runs may read it--some other time! His work is seldom clear at first glances. Mr. Comfort devoted the year 1912 to the writing of a new novel, _The Road of Living Men_, which will be issued by his publishers, the Lippincotts, in March, 1913. He has an attractive home and family at Detroit.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Lippincott's Magazine_ (March, 1908); _Lippincott's Magazine_ (March; April; August, 1912).

AN ACTRESS'S HEART[93]

[From _She Buildeth Her House_ (Philadelphia, 1911)]

Selma Cross was sick for a friend, sick from containing herself. On this night of achievement there was something pitiful in the need of her heart.

"New York has turned rather too many pages of life before my eyes, Selma, for me to feel far above any one whose struggles I have not endured."

The other leaned forward eagerly. "I liked you from the first moment, Paula," she said. "You were so rounded--it seemed to me. I'm all streaky, all one-sided. You're bred. I'm cattle.... Some time I'll tell you how it all began. I said I would be the greatest living tragedienne--hurled this at a lot of cat-minds down in Kentucky fifteen years ago. Of course, I shall. It does not mean so much to me as I thought, and it may be a bauble to you, but I wanted it. Its far-away-ness doesn't torture me as it once did, but one pays a ghastly price. Yes, it's a climb, dear. You must have bone and blood and brain--a sort of brain--and you should have a cheer from below; but I didn't. I wonder if there ever was a fight that can match mine? If so, it would not be a good tale for children or grown-ups with delicate nerves. Little women always hated me. I remember one restaurant cashier on Eighth Avenue told me I was too unsightly to be a waitress. I have done kitchen pot-boilers and scrubbed tenement-stairs. Then, because I repeated parts of plays in those horrid halls--they said I was crazy.... Why, I have felt a perfect lust for suicide--felt my breast ache for a cool knife and my hand rise gladly. Once I played a freak part--that was my greater degradation--debased my soul by making my body look worse than it is. I went down to hell for that--and was forgiven. I have been so homesick, Paula, that I could have eaten the dirt in the road of that little Kentucky town.... Yes, I pressed against the steel until something broke--it was the steel, not me. Oh, I could tell you much!"...

She paused but a moment.

"The thing so dreadful to overcome was that I have a body like a great Dane. It would not have hurt a writer, a painter, even a singer, so much, but we of the drama are so dependent upon the shape of our bodies. Then, my face is like a dog or a horse or a cat--all these I have been likened to. Then I was slow to learn repression. This a part of culture, I guess--breeding. Mine is a lineage of Kentucky poor white trash, who knows, but a speck of 'nigger'? I don't care now, only it gave me a temper of seven devils, if it was so. These are some of the things I have contended with. I would go to a manager and he would laugh me along, trying to get rid of me gracefully, thinking that some of his friends were playing a practical joke on him. Vhruebert thought that at first. Vhruebert calls me _The Thing_ now. I could have done better had I been a cripple; there are parts for a cripple. And you watch, Paula, next January when I burn up things here, they'll say my success is largely due to my figure and face!"

FOOTNOTE:

[93] Copyright, 1911, by J. B. Lippincott Company.

FRANK WALLER ALLEN

Frank Waller Allen, novelist, was born at Milton, Kentucky, September 30, 1878, the son of a clergyman. He spent his boyhood days at Louisville, and, in the fall of 1896, he entered Kentucky (Transylvania) University, Lexington, Kentucky. While in college he was editor of _The Transylvanian_, the University literary magazine; and he also did newspaper work for _The Louisville Times_, and _The Courier-Journal_. Mr. Allen quit college to become a reporter on the Kansas City _Journal_, later going with the Kansas City _Times_ as book editor. He resigned this position to return to Kentucky University to study theology. He is now pastor of the First Christian (Disciples) church, at Paris, Missouri. Mr. Allen's first stories were published in _Munsey's_, _The Reader_, and other periodicals, but it is upon his books that he has won a wide reputation in Kentucky and the West. The first title was a sketch, _My Ships Aground_ (Chicago, 1900), and his next work was an exquisite tale of love and Nature, entitled _Back to Arcady_ (Boston, 1905), which has sold far into the thousands and is now in its third edition. A more perfect story has not been written by a Kentuckian of Mr. Allen's years. _The Maker of Joys_ (Kansas City, 1907), was so slight that it attracted little attention, yet it is exceedingly well-done; and in his latest book, _The Golden Road_ (New York, 1910), he just failed to do what one or two other writers have recently done so admirably. His Nature-loving tinker falls a bit short, but some excellent writing may be found in this book. Mr. Allen has recently completed another novel, _The Lovers of Skye_, which will be issued by the Bobbs-Merrill Company in the spring of 1913.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Reader Magazine_ (October, 1905); _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913).

A WOMAN ANSWERED

[From _The Maker of Joys_ (Kansas City, Missouri, 1907)]

At this moment the servant lifted the tapestries and announced: "The lady, sir."

This time, before he could stop her, she took his hand and kissed it.

"There was little use in my coming today," she said, "except to thank you."

"Why, I do not quite understand you. What for?" asked the rector in surprise.

"For answering my question."

"Tell me?" he replied.

"You've known me a long time," she answered, "and being Jimmy Duke, it isn't necessary for me to tell you how I've lived. But you and me--once youth is gone, sir, and people are a long time old. I've thought of this a great deal lately, and I've been trying to decide what's right and what's wrong.... Then I read in the papers about you. About the things you preach and the like, and I knew you could tell me. I knew you'd know whether good people are faking, and which life is best. You see, I'd never thought of it in all my life before until just a little while ago. Just a month or such a matter."

"And now?" asked the Shepherd of St. Mark's.

"I could have left the old life years ago if I had wanted to," she continued, ignoring his question. "There is a man--well, there's several of them--but this a special one, who, for years, has wanted me to marry him. I always liked him better than anybody I knew, but I just couldn't give up the life. He is a plain man in a little village in Missouri, and I thought I'd die if I went. He offered to move to the city and I was afraid for him. You see I just didn't know what was good and what was bad, yet I didn't want this man to become like other men I knew."

"Tell me, what are you going to do?" he asked eagerly. He had almost said, "Tell me what to do."

"Well," she answered, "since I have been thinking it all over, things as they are have become empty. There is no joy in it, and I am weary of it all.... Yesterday I came to you. I wanted to ask you whether it was best or not to leave the old life. But I did not have to ask you. I saw how it was when you told me what you had done. And O, how I thank you for straightening it all out for me. Besides," she added with hesitancy, "after I left you last night I telegraphed for the man in the little village out west."

When she had gone he gazed out of the window after her as she walked buoyant and happy through the night.

"Perhaps," softly said the Maker of Joys, "it is the memory of the old days that is sweetest after all."

VENITA SEIBERT

Miss Venita Seibert, whose charming stories of German-American child life have been widely read and appreciated, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, December 29, 1878. Miss Seibert was educated in the Louisville public schools, and almost at once entered upon a literary career. She contributed short stories and verse to the leading periodicals, her first big serial story being published in _The American Magazine_ during 1907 and 1908, entitled _The Different World_. This dealt with the life and imaginings of a little German-American girl, a dreamy, sensitive child, and showing the poetry of German home life and the originality of childhood. The story was highly praised by Miss Ida M. Tarbell and other able critics. Under the title of _The Gossamer Thread_ (Boston, 1910), Miss Seibert brought these tales together in one volume. There "the chronicles of Velleda, who understood about 'the different world,'" may be read to the heart's desire. Miss Seibert, who resides at Louisville, Kentucky, promises big for the future, and her next book should bring her a wider public, as well as greater growth in literary power.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _McClure's Magazine_ (September, 1903); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1910, v. xv).

THE ORIGIN OF BABIES[94]

[From _The Gossamer Thread_ (Boston, 1910)]

Oh, it was a puzzling world. Not the least puzzling thing was babies. Mrs. Katzman had come several times with a little brown satchel and brought one to Tante--a little, little thing that had to be fed catnip tea and rolled in a shawl and kept out of draughts. The advantage of having a new baby in the house was that it meant a glorious period of running wild, for of course one did not pretend to obey the girl who came to cook. Also, there was much company who brought nice things to eat for Tante, who naturally left the biggest part for the children.

Of course God sent the little babies, but how did he get them down to Mrs. Katzman? She averred that she got them out of the river, but this Velleda knew to be a fib, for of course they would drown in the river. Tante said they fell down from Heaven, but of course such a fall would kill a little baby. Gros-mamma Wallenstein said a stork brought them, and for a time Velleda thought Mrs. Katzman must be a stork; but when she saw a picture of one she knew that it was only a bird. Then she decided that the stork carried the babies to Mrs. Katzman's and she divided them around; but Mrs. Katzman's little boy, questioned in the most searching manner, declared that he had never seen a sign of any stork about the premises.

Just after Baby Ernest's coming, Velleda and Freddy went all the way to Mrs. Katzman's house--and it was quite a long way, fully three blocks--to beg her to exchange him for a girl.

"We've only used him two days and he's just as good as new," stated Velleda, guiltily concealing the fact that he cried a great deal. But Mrs. Katzman said she really couldn't think of it, as God settled all those matters himself. It was on this occasion that Velleda had cross-examined Mrs. Katzman's little boy regarding the stork. There was no doubting the truth of Georgie's statements, for he told Velleda dolefully that he himself had long desired a brother or a sister, but never a baby had he seen in that house. Evidently Mrs. Katzman fetched them from somewhere else in the brown satchel.

"You might have had ours," said Velleda. "We didn't want him. We prayed for a girl."

"Oh, you'll soon find out _that_ don't do any good." Georgie kicked gloomily at a stone. "I used to pray, too, but God's awful stubborn when it comes to babies."

Velleda wondered at the strangeness of things. All the little girls and some of the little boys who had no baby brother or sister to take care of, thought it a great treat to be allowed to wheel the baby-buggy up and down the square, really a most irksome task, as Velleda could testify. At Velleda's house they believed with the poet that "Time's noblest offspring is the last," so the baby reigned king, which was not always pleasant for his smaller slaves. Therefore she wondered at Georgie's taste. However, since he evidently regarded his brotherless state as a deep misfortune, she was full of sympathy and would do what she could for him.

"You just pray a little harder," she advised; "and," struck by a brilliant thought, "look in the brown satchel every night! Maybe you'll find one left over."

She and Freddy went home feeling very sorry for Georgie. He was only another illustration of the old saying which Onkel often commented on--the shoemaker's children wear ragged shoes, the painter's own house is the last to receive a fresh coat, and the stork woman has no baby of her own.

Regarding this great question there was one point upon which everybody agreed. Velleda had her own system of deciding questions; she sifted the versions of her various informants, retained those points upon which all agreed, and upon this common ground proceeded to erect the structure of her own reasoning. Grown-ups, she knew, had a weakness for mild fibbing, which was not lying and not wrong at all, but was naturally very disconcerting when one burned to learn the real truth about a thing. The stork theory, the river theory, the falling from Heaven theory--all possessed one mutual starting point: God sent the little babies. There was of course no doubt in that regard, and Velleda finally decided that God placed them in the woods in a certain spot, marked where they were to go, and then vanished into Heaven (for of course no one had ever seen God), whereupon Mrs. Katzman approached with the brown satchel.

This was a most satisfactory theory, with no flaws in its logic, reasonable and probable, and conflicting with no known law. The question was shelved.

Velleda, going up to the third floor room of Nellie Johnson with a pitcher of milk which the dairywoman had asked her to deliver, found the girl huddled up before a small stove, looking so white and miserable that Velleda's heart ached for her, although she knew that Nellie was a very wicked person and nobody in the neighborhood spoke to her. Across her knees lay a white bundle. Velleda considered the matter.

"I guess God loves you anyway, Nellie," she concluded. "He has sent you a little baby."

The girl tossed the bundle upon the bed with a fierce gesture.

"God?" she said bitterly. "It ain't God sent that baby. The Devil sent him!"

Velleda fled down the stairs.

It is indeed a puzzling world.

FOOTNOTE:

[94] Copyright, 1910, by Small, Maynard and Company.

CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK

Charles Neville Buck, novelist and short-story writer, was born near Midway, Kentucky, April 15, 1879. He spent the first fifteen years of his life at his birthplace, save the four years he was in South America with his father, the Hon. C. W. Buck, who was United States Minister to Peru from 1885 to 1889, and the author of _Under the Sun_, a Peruvian romance. At the age of fifteen years, Charles Neville Buck went to Louisville to enter the high school; and, in 1898, he was graduated from the University of Louisville. He studied art and joined the staff of _The Evening Post_, of Louisville, as cartoonist, which position he held for a year, when he became an editorial writer on that paper. Mr. Buck studied law and was admitted to the bar, but he did not practice. In 1908 he quit journalism for prose fiction. His short-stories were accepted by American and English magazines, but he won his first real reputation with a novel of mental aberration, entitled _The Key to Yesterday_ (New York, 1910), the scenes of which were set against Kentucky, France, and South America. Mr. Buck's next novel, _The Lighted Match_ (New York, 1911), was an international love romance in which a rich young American falls in love with the princess, and about-to-be-queen, of a bit of a kingdom near Spain. Benton, hero, has a rocky road to travel, but he, of course, demolishes every barrier and proves again that love finds a way. _The Lighted Match_ is a rattling good story, and it contains many purple patches between the hiss of the revolutionist's bomb and lovers' sighs. Mr. Buck's latest novel, _The Portal of Dreams_ (New York, 1912), was a very clever story. His first Kentucky novel, and the finest thing he has done, he and his publisher think, is _The Strength of Samson_, which will appear in four parts in _The Cavalier_, a weekly magazine, for February, 1913, after which it will be almost immediately published in book form under the title of _The Call of the Cumberlands_. Mr. Buck's home is at Louisville, Kentucky, but he spends much of his time in New York, where he lives at the Hotel Earle, in Waverly Place, a stone's throw from the apartments of his friend, Thompson Buchanan, the Kentucky playwright.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Harper's Weekly_ (October 8, 1910); _Cosmopolitan Magazine_ (August, 1911); _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913).

THE DOCTRINE ACCORDING TO JONESY[95]

[From _The Lighted Match_ (New York, 1911)]

Despite the raw edge on the air, the hardier guests at "Idle Times" still clung to those outdoor sports which properly belonged to the summer. That afternoon a canoeing expedition was made up river to explore a cave which tradition had endowed with some legendary tale of pioneer days and Indian warfare.

Pagratide, having organized the expedition with that object in view, had made use of his prior knowledge to enlist Cara for the crew of his canoe, but Benton, covering a point that Pagratide had overlooked, pointed out that an engagement to go up the river in a canoe is entirely distinct from an engagement to come down the river in a canoe. He cited so many excellent authorities in support of his contention that the matter was decided in his favor for the return trip, and Mrs. Porter-Woodleigh, all unconscious that her escort was a Crown Prince, found in him an introspective and altogether uninteresting young man.

Benton and the girl in one canoe, were soon a quarter of a mile in advance of the others, and lifting their paddles from the water they floated with the slow current. The singing voices of the party behind them came softly adrift along the water. All of the singers were young and the songs had to do with sentiment.

The girl buttoned her sweater closer about her throat. The man stuffed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe and bent low to kindle it into a cheerful spot of light.

A belated lemon afterglow lingered at the edge of the sky ahead. Against it the gaunt branches of a tall tree traced themselves starkly. Below was the silent blackness of the woods.

Suddenly Benton raised his head.

"I have a present for you," he announced.

"A present?" echoed the girl. "Be careful, Sir Gray Eyes. You played the magician once and gave me a rose. It was such a wonderful rose"--she spoke almost tenderly--"that it has spoiled me. No commonplace gifts will be tolerated after that."

"This is a different sort of present," he assured her. "This is a god."

"A what!" Cara was at the stern with the guiding paddle. The man leaned back, steadying the canoe with a hand on each gunwale, and smiled into her face.

"Yes," he said, "he is a god made out of clay with a countenance that is most unlovely and a complexion like an earthenware jar. I acquired him in the Andes for a few _centavos_. Since then we have been companions. In his day he had his place in a splendid temple of the Sun Worshipers. When I rescued him he was squatting cross-legged on a counter among silver and copper trinkets belonging to a civilization younger than his own. When you've been a god and come to be a souvenir of ruins and dead things--" the man paused for a moment, then with the ghost of a laugh went on "--it makes you see things differently. In the twisted squint of his small clay face one reads slight regard for mere systems and codes."

He paused so long that she prompted him in a voice that threatened to become unsteady. "Tell me more about him. What is his godship's name?"

"He looked so protestingly wise," Benton went on, "that I named him Jonesy. I liked that name because it fitted him so badly. Jonesy is not conventional in his ideas, but his morals are sound. He has seen religions and civilizations and dynasties flourish and decay, and it has all given him a certain perspective on life. He has occasionally given me good council."

He paused again, but, noting that the singing voices were drawing nearer, he continued more rapidly.

"In Alaska I used to lie flat on my cot before a great open fire and his god-ship would perch crosslegged on my chest. When I breathed, he seemed to shake his fat sides and laugh. When a pagan god from Peru laughs at you in a Yukon cabin, the situation calls for attention. I gave attention.

"Jonesy said that the major human motives sweep in deep channels, full-tide ahead. He said you might in some degree regulate their floods by rearing abutments, but that when you tried to build a dam to stop the Amazon you are dealing with folly. He argued that when one sets out to dam up the tides set flowing back in the tributaries of the heart it is written that one must fail. That is the gospel according to Jonesy."

He turned his face to the front and shot the canoe forward. There was silence except for the quiet dipping of their paddles, the dripping of the water from the lifted blades, and the song drifting down river. Finally Benton added:

"I don't know what he will say to you, but perhaps he will give you good advice--on those matters which the centuries can't change."

Cara's voice came soft, with a hint of repressed tears.

"He has already given me good advice, dear--" she said, "good advice that I can't follow."

FOOTNOTE:

[95] Copyright, 1911, by W. J. Watt and Company.

GEORGE BINGHAM

George Bingham ("Dunk Botts"), newspaper humorist, was born near Wallonia, Kentucky, August 1, 1879. He quit school at the age of ten years to become "the devil" in a printing office at Eddyville, Kentucky. Two years later he removed to Mayfield, Kentucky, and accepted a position on _The Mirrow_. Shortly afterwards he wrote his first ficticious "news-letter" from an imaginary town called Boney Ridge, Kentucky, and submitted it to the critical eye of a tramp printer. This nomad at once saw the boy's design: to burlesque the letters received from the _Mirrow's_ crossroad correspondents; and he encouraged him. Mr. Bingham remained at Mayfield until he was twenty years of age, at which time he felt important enough to go out and see the world. Like most prodigals homesickness seized him for its very own; and he started home perched high on a freight train. Homeward bound he first had the name of his future paper suggested to him. Battling through a tiny town in Tennessee he enquired of the brakeman as to its name.

"Walhalla," answered the "shack."

"Hogwallow?" repeated the young Kentuckian.

"Hell no! Who ever heard of a place called 'Hogwallow'?"

Upon reaching home Mr. Bingham decided to put the village of Hogwallow, Kentucky, on the map. His first letter from that town was printed in the old _Mayfield Monitor_, under the pen-name of "Dunk Botts," which he has retained hitherto. After having written several Hogwallow letters, he was compelled to accept a position on a small newspaper; then nothing more was heard of Hogwallow until 1901, when he wrote a letter every few weeks, for a year, and then went to California. He "arrived back home on June 1, 1905, had a chill a week later, and launched _The Hogwallow Kentuckian_ on July 15." He took the public into his confidence, telling them that his object was to conduct a burlesque newspaper, or, rather, a parody on one. He peopled his imaginary town and its environs with forty or more characters whose names summed them up without further ado; and he founded such important places as Rye Straw, Tickville, Hog Hill church and graveyard, Wild Onion schoolhouse, Gander Creek, and several other necessary hamlets and institutions. On May 15, 1909, Mr. Bingham suspended publication in order to make another trip to California. Two years later he returned to Kentucky for the sole purpose of resurrecting his paper. He resumed publication on June 17, 1911, at Paducah, but Irvin Cobb's town seemingly got on his nerves and, after three months, he tucked his "sheet" under his arm and returned to his first love, Mayfield, where he has remained ever since. _The Hogwallow Kentuckian_ is published every Saturday night, read in thirty-seven states, and copied by the leading newspapers of America and England. Mr. Bingham has written more than five thousand "news items" for the paper, besides some five hundred short-stories, sketches, and paragraphs. He contributes considerable Hogwallow news to Charles Hamilton Musgrove's[96] page in _The Evening Post_ of Louisville; but he is an "outside contributor," doing his work at Mayfield.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mr. Bingham to the Author; the St. Louis _Post-Dispatch_ (January 14, 1912).

HOGWALLOW NEWS

[From _The Hogwallow Kentuckian_ (December 21, 1912)]

Atlas Peck can't see why his left shoe wears out so much quicker than his right one, when his right one does just as much walking as his left.

Until times get better and the financial questions of the nation gets fully settled the Old Miser on Musket Ridge will live on two hickorynuts per day.

Sim Flinders has brought back with him from the Calf Ribs neighborhood a feather bed made of owl feathers. While coming home with it on his back the other night it was so soft and downy he fell to sleep while walking along the road.

Yam Sims appeared in public last Sunday with a new pair of pants and a striped necktie. They have made a wonderful change in his appearance, and until they wear out he will rank among our best people.

A dawg fight attracted a lot of attention and broke up the conversation at the Hog Ford moonshine still house the other day. One of the dawgs belonged to Poke Eazley and the other to Jefferson Potlocks, and the difficulty came up over some misunderstanding between their owners.

Ellick Hellwanger is fixing to celebrate his wooden wedding next week with a quart of wood alcohol.

Tobe Moseley's mule is able to walk around again after being propped up against a persimmon tree for several days.

Tobe Moseley took his jug over to the sorghum mill early Tuesday morning of last week after some molasses, and has not yet returned. No grave fears, however, are entertained on account of his protracted absence, as sorghum molasses run slow in cold weather.

Bullets have been falling in Hogwallow for the past few days. They are thought to be those Raz Barlow fired at the moon a few nights ago.

Luke Mathewsla has a good hawg pen for sale cheap. It would make a good front yard, and Luke may move his house up behind it.

Cricket Hicks has gone up to Tickville to get an almanac, as he is on the program for a lot of original jokes at Rye Straw Saturday night.

Isaac Hellwanger fell off of a foot lawg while watching a panel of fence float down Gander creek the other morning. He says it don't pay to get too interested in one thing.

Slim Pickens has received through the mails a bottle of dandruff cure, and he is taking two teaspoonfuls after each meal.

Poke Eazley has been puny this week with lumbago, and had to be excused from singing at the Dog Hill church Sunday, being too weak to carry a tune, or lift his voice.

Fit Smith is having his shoes remodeled, and will occupy them next week.

Columbus Allsop's head has been itching for several days. He says that is a sign Christmas is coming.

The Dog Hill Preacher will be surprised by his congregation next Sunday morning when they will give him a Christmas present, which they have already bought. The preacher is greatly surprised every time his congregation gives him anything.

Fletcher Henstep's geese are being fattened for Christmas, and have been turned loose in the Musket Ridge corn patches. They all wear lanterns as it is late before they get in at night.

FOOTNOTE:

[96] Mr. Musgrove, who is to leave _The Post_ at the end of 1912 to become humorist editor of _The Louisville Times_, was born in Kentucky, and is the author of a charming volume of verse, _The Dream Beautiful and Other Poems_ (Louisville; 1898). He is to issue in 1913 another book of poems, through a Louisville firm, to be entitled _Pan and Aeolus_. When Mr. Musgrove joins _The Times_ he will take _The Post's_ clever cartoonist, Paul Plaschke, with him; and they will occupy an office next to Colonel Henry Watterson's in the new Courier-Journal and Times building.

MABEL PORTER PITTS

Miss Mabel Porter Pitts, poet, was born near Flemingsburg, Kentucky, January 5, 1884. Her family removed to Seattle, Washington, when she was a girl, and her education was received at the Academy of the Holy Names. Miss Pitts lived at Seattle for a number of years, but she now resides at San Francisco. Her verse and short-stories have appeared in several of the eastern magazines, and they have been read with pleasure by many people. Her first book of poems, _In the Shadow of the Crag and Other Poems_ (Denver, Colorado, 1907), is now in its third edition, five thousand copies having been sold so far. This seems to show that there are people in the United States who care for good verse. Miss Pitts is well-known on the Pacific coast, where she has spent nearly all her life, but she must be introduced to the people of her native State, Kentucky. Her short-stories are as well liked as her poems, a collection of them is promised for early publication, and she should have a permanent place in the literature of Kentucky.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Overland Monthly_ (January; December, 1904; April, 1908).

ON THE LITTLE SANDY[97]

[From _In the Shadow of the Crag and Other Poems_ (Denver, 1907)]

Just within the mystic border of Kentucky's blue grass region There's a silver strip of river lying idly in the sun, On its banks are beds of fragrance where the butterflies are legion And the moonbeams frame its glory when the summer day is done.

There's a little, rose-wreathed cottage nestling close upon its border Where a tangled mass of blossoms half conceals an open door, There's a sweet, narcotic perfume from a garden's wild disorder, And the jealous poppies cluster where its kisses thrill the shore.

From across its dimpled bosom comes the half-hushed, careful calling Of a whippoorwill whose lonely heart is longing for its mate, And the sun aslant the sleepy eyes of fox-gloves gently falling Tells the fisherman out yonder that the hour is growing late.

From the branches of the poplars a spasmodic sleepy twitter Comes, 'twould seem, in careless answer to the pleading of a song, And perhaps the tiny bosom holds despair that's very bitter For his notes are soon unheeded by the little feathered throng.

Then the twilight settling denser shows a rush-light dimly burning-- Ah, how well I know the landing drowsing 'neath its feeble beams, And my homesick heart to mem'ries of the yesterday is turning While I linger here, forgotten, with no solace but my dreams.

FOOTNOTE:

[97] Copyright, 1907, by the Author.

MARION FORSTER GILMORE

Miss Marion Forster Gilmore, the young Louisville poet and dramatist, was born at Anchorage, Kentucky, November 27, 1887. She was educated at Hampton College, Louisville, and at a private school in Washington, D. C. At the age of fourteen years she wrote a poem while crossing the Rocky Mountains that attracted the attention of Joaquin Miller and Madison Cawein, and won her the friendship of both poets. When but fifteen years old she had completed her three-act tragedy of _Virginia_, set in Rome during the days of the Decemvirs. This is purely a play for the study, and hardly fitted for stage presentation, yet it has been praised by William Faversham, the famous actor. Miss Gilmore contributed lyrics to the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_ and _Leslie's Weekly_, which, with her play, she published in a charming book, entitled _Virginia, a Tragedy, and Other Poems_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1910). _The Cradle Song_, originally printed in the _Cosmopolitan_ for May, 1908, is one of the best of her shorter poems. Miss Gilmore has recently returned to her home at Louisville, after having spent a year in European travel and study.[98]

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Cosmopolitan Magazine_ (January, 1909); _Current Literature_ (August, 1910).

THE CRADLE SONG[99]

[From _Virginia, a Tragedy, and Other Poems_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1910)]

Adown the vista of the years, I turn and look with silent soul, As though to catch a muted strain Of melody, that seems to roll In tender cadence to my ear. But, as I wait with eyes that long The singer to behold--it fades, And silence ends the Cradle Song.

But when the shadows of the years Have lengthened slowly to the West, And once again I lay me down To sleep, upon my mother's breast, Then well I know I ne'er again Shall cry to God, "How long? How long?" For, to my soul, her voice will sing A never-ending Cradle Song.

FOOTNOTES:

[98] There are two other young women poets of Louisville who should be mentioned in the same breath with Miss Gilmore: Miss Ethel Allen Murphy, author of _The Angel of Thought and Other Poems_ (Boston, 1909), and contributor of brief lyrics to _Everybody's Magazine_; and Miss Hortense Flexner, on the staff of _The Louisville Herald_, whose poems in the new _Mammoth Cave Magazine_ have attracted much attention. Miss Flexner is to have a poem published in _The American Magazine_ in 1913.

[99] Copyright, 1910, by the Author.

APPENDIX

MRS. AGNES E. MITCHELL

Dr. Henry A. Cottell, the Louisville booklover, is authority for the statement that Mrs. Agnes E. Mitchell, author of _When the Cows Come Home_, one of the loveliest lyrics in the language, lived at Louisville for some years, and that she wrote her famous poem within the confines of that city. The date of its composition must have been about 1870. Mrs. Mitchell was the wife of a clergyman, but little else is known of her life and literary labors. It is a real pity that her career has not come down to us in detail. She certainly "lodged a note in the ear of time," and firmly fixed her fame with it.

WHEN THE COWS COME HOME

[From _The Humbler Poets_, edited by S. Thompson (Chicago, 1885)]

With Klingle, Klangle, Klingle, 'Way down the dusty dingle, The cows are coming home; Now sweet and clear, and faint and low, The airy tinklings come and go, Like chimings from some far-off tower, Or patterings of an April shower That makes the daisies grow; Koling, Kolang, Kolinglelingle, 'Way down the darkening dingle, The cows come slowly home; And old-time friends, and twilight plays And starry nights and sunny days, Come trooping up the misty ways, When the cows come home.

With Jingle, Jangle, Jingle, Soft sounds that sweetly mingle, The cows are coming home; Malvine and Pearl and Florimel, DeCamp, Red Rose and Gretchen Schnell, Queen Bess and Sylph and Spangled Sue, Across the fields I hear her OO-OO, And clang her silver bell; Goling, Golang, Golinglelingle, With faint far sounds that mingle, The cows come slowly home; And mother-songs of long-gone years, And baby joys, and childish tears, And youthful hopes, and youthful fears, When the cows come home.

With Ringle, Rangle, Ringle, By twos and threes and single, The cows are coming home; Through the violet air we see the town, And the summer sun a-slipping down; The maple in the hazel glade Throws down the path a longer shade, And the hills are growing brown; To-ring, to-rang, to-ringleingle, By threes and fours and single, The cows come slowly home. The same sweet sound of wordless psalm, The same sweet June-day rest and calm, The same sweet scent of bud and balm, When the cows come home.

With a Tinkle, Tankle, Tinkle, Through fern and periwinkle, The cows are coming home. A-loitering in the checkered stream, Where the sun-rays glance and gleam, Starine, Peach Bloom and Phoebe Phyllis Stand knee-deep in the creamy lilies In a drowsy dream; To-link, to-lank, to-linkleinkle, O'er banks with buttercups a-twinkle, The cows come slowly home; And up through memory's deep ravine Come the brook's old song--its old-time sheen, And the crescent of the silver queen, When the cows come home.

With a Klingle, Klangle, Klingle, With a loo-oo and moo-oo and jingle. The cows are coming home; And over there on Morlin hill Hear the plaintive cry of the whippoorwill; The dew drops lie on the tangled vines, And over the poplars Venus shines. And over the silent mill; Ko-link, ko-lang, ko-lingleingle; With a ting-a-ling and jingle, The cows come slowly home; Let down the bars; let in the train Of long-gone songs, and flowers and rain, For dear old times come back again When the cows come home.

INDEX

Ainslie, Hew, I, 87-91

Allen, Frank Waller, II, 366-368

Allen, James Lane, II, 4-17

Allison, Young E., II, 53-56

Altsheler, Joseph A., II, 144-149

Anderson, Miss Margaret S., II, 318-320

Andrews, Mrs. Mary R. S., II, 104-110

Aroni, Ernest, II, 206

Audubon, John J., I, 45-51

Audubon, John W., I, 185-187

Badin, Stephen T., I, 30-34

Banks, Mrs. Nancy Huston, II, 17-20

Barnett, Mrs. Evelyn S., II, 119-122

Bartlett, Elisha, I, 147-150

Barton, William E., II, 126-129

Bascom, Henry B., I, 98-102

Baskett, James Newton, II, 1-4

Bayne, Mrs. Mary Addams, II, 202-205

Beck, George, I, 23-26

Betts, Mary E. W., I, 237-239

Bingham, George, II, 375-378

Bird, Robert M., I, 135-139

Birney, James G., I, 91-95

Blackburn, J. C. S., I, 232

Bledsoe, Albert T., I, 169-172

Bolton, Mrs. Sarah T., I, 228-230

Bradford, John, I, 5-7

Breckinridge, John C., I, 231-234

Breckinridge, Robert J., I, 112-114

Breckinridge, W. C. P., I, 319-323

Brodhead, Mrs. Eva Wilder, II, 267-273

Broadus, John A., I, 261-265

Bronner, Milton, II, 303-305

Brown, John Mason, I, 240

Browne, J. Ross, I, 200-204

Bruner, James D., II, 184-186

Buchanan, Thompson, II, 355-362

Buck, Charles Neville, II, 371-375

Burton, George Lee, II, 222-228

Butler, Mann, I, 59-62

Butler, William O., I, 84-87

Caldwell, Charles, I, 34-37

Call, Richard E., I, 240

Cawein, Madison, II, 187-198

Childs, Mrs. Mary F., I, 356-359

Chivers, Thomas H., I, 152-156

Clay, Henry, I, 39-44

Clay, Mrs. Mary R., I, 240

Cobb, Irvin S., II, 323-342

Collins, Lewis, I, 104-106

Collins, Richard H., 244-247

Comfort, Will Levington, II, 363-366

Connelley, Wm. E., II, 63-67

Conrard, Harrison, II, 236-237

Corwin, Thomas, I, 95-98

Cosby, Fortunatus, Jr., I, 119-123

Cottell, Dr. Henry A., II, 384

Cotter, Joseph S., II, 115-116

Crittenden, John J., I, 71-74

Crittenden, William L., I, 238

Crockett, Ingram, II, 77-80

Cutter, George W., I, 176-179

Dargan, Mrs. Olive Tilford, II, 255-262

Davie, George M., I, 363-364

Daviess, Miss Maria Thompson, II, 279-283

Davis, Jefferson, I, 156-160

Dazey, Chas. Turner, II, 67-71

Dinsmore, Miss Julia S., I, 295-297

Dixon, Mrs. Susan B., I, 220

Doneghy, George W., I, 146

Doty, Douglas Z., II, 239

Drake, Daniel, I, 65-68

Duke, Basil W., I, 323-325

Durbin, John P., I, 117-119

Durrett, Reuben T., I, 239-243

Ellis, James Tandy, II, 228-230

Filson, John, I, 1-4

Filson Club, I, 240-241

Finck, Bert, II, 254-255

Flagg, Edmund, I, 194-196

Fleming, Walter L., I, 158

Flexner, Mrs. Anne Crawford, II, 239

Flexner, Miss Hortense, II, 381

Ford, Mrs. Sallie R., I, 272-275

Foster, Stephen C., I, 255-257

Fox, John, Jr., II, 172-181

Frazee, Lewis J., I, 216-218

Fruit, John Phelps, II, 72-74

Furman, Miss Lucy, II, 247-253

Gallagher, Wm. D., I, 160-163

Geppert, Mrs. Hester Higbee, II, 57-60

Gilmore, Miss Marion F., II, 380-381

Giltner, Miss Leigh Gordon, II, 311-317

Goodloe, Miss Carter, II, 217-222

Green, Thomas M., I, 310-313

Griffin, Gilderoy W., I, 331-333

Gross, A. Haller, I, 151

Gross, Samuel D., I, 150-152

Harney, John M., I, 74-78

Harney, Will Wallace, I, 291-292

Harris, Credo, II, 295-297

Hatcher, John E., I, 276-278

Hentz, Mrs. Caroline L., I, 114-116

Herrick, Mrs. Sophia, I, 171

Holley, Horace, I, 52-56

Holley, Mrs. Mary A., I, 69-71

Holmes, Daniel Henry, II, 36-47

Holmes, Mrs. Mary J., I, 265-269

Imelda, Sister, II, 233-235

Imlay, Gilbert, I, 11-16

Jeffrey, Mrs. Rosa V., I, 269-272

Johnson, Thomas, Jr., I, 19-23

Johnston, Mrs. Annie Fellows, II, 165-169

Johnston, J. Stoddard, I, 292-294

Johnston, William P., I, 288-290

Kelley, Andrew W., II, 49-53

Ketchum, Mrs. Annie C., I, 247-249

Kinkead, Miss Eleanor T., II, 175

Knott, J. Proctor, I, 282-284

Lampton, Will J., II, 96-101

Leonard, Miss Mary F., II, 142-144

Litsey, Edwin Carlile, II, 300-302

Lloyd, John Uri, I, 364-368

Lorimer, George Horace II, 230-233

Lyon, Matthew, I, 8-11

McAfee, Mrs. Nelly M., I, 353-356

McClung, John A., I, 139-142

McElroy, Mrs. Lucy Cleaver, II, 139-142

McElroy, Robert M., II, 289-293

McKinney, Mrs. Kate S., II, 85-86

Macaulay, Mrs. Fannie C., II, 181-184

MacKenzie, A. S., II, 305-307

Madden, Miss Eva A., II, 170-172

Magruder, Allan B., I, 37-39

Marcosson, Isaac F., II, 343-345

Marriner, Harry L., II, 262-264

Marriott, Crittenden, II, 211-217

Martin, Mrs. George M., II, 198-202

Marshall, Humphrey, I, 26-29

Marshall, Thomas F., I, 123-126

Marvin, William F., I, 145-147

Mason, Miss Emily V., I, 191-193

Menefee, Richard H., I, 173-175

Mulligan, James H., I, 348-352

Murphy, Miss Ethel Allen, II, 381

Musgrove, Charles Hamilton, II, 377

Mitchel, Ormsby M., I, 166-169

Mitchell, Mrs. Agnes E., II, 385-386

Morehead, James T., I, 102-104

Morehead, Mrs. L. M., I, 103

Morris, Rob, I, 205-207

Navarro, Mary Anderson de, II, 101-104

Norris, Mrs. Zoe A., II, 135-139

Obenchain, Mrs. Eliza Calvert, II, 81-84

O'Hara, Theodore, I, 218-228

O'Malley, Charles J., II, 86-91

Patterson, John, II, 123-125

Pattie, James O., I, 142-144

Penn, Shadrach, I, 82-83

Perrin, William H., I, 240

Perry, Bliss, I, 252

Peter, Dr. Robert, I, 240-241

Petrie, Mrs. Cordia G., II, 273-279

Piatt, Mrs. Sarah M. B., I, 303-307

Pickett, Thomas E., I, 241

Pirtle, Alfred, I, 240

Pitts, Miss Mabel Porter, II, 379-380

Plaschke, Paul, II, 377

Polk, Jefferson J., I, 126-128

Portor, Miss Laura S., II, 308-310

Prentice, George D., I, 129-135

Price, Samuel W., I, 240

Price, William T., I, 359-362

Quisenberry, A. C., II, 27-28

Rafinesque, C. S., I, 56-58

Ranck, George W., I, 240

Rankin, Adam, I, 17-19

Rice, Mrs. Alice Hegan, II, 238-243

Rice, Cale Young, II, 284-289

Ridgely, Benj. H., II, 129-135

Rives, Mrs. Hallie Erminie, II, 297-300

Roach, Mrs. Abby Meguire, II, 320-323

Robertson, George, I, 78-82

Robertson, Harrison, II, 74-77

Robins, Miss Elizabeth, II, 156-162

Rouquette, Adrien E., I, 187-191

Rule, Lucien V., II, 265-266

Schoonmaker, E. D., II, 293-294

Seibert, Miss Venita, II, 368-371

Semple, Miss Ellen C., II, 162-165

Shaler, Nathaniel S., I, 336-342

Sherley, Douglass, II, 110

Shindler, Mrs. Mary P., I, 179-180

Shreve, Thomas H., I, 163-166

Slaughter, Mrs. Elvira M., II, 110-114

Smith, Langdon, II, 91-96

Smith, William B., II, 20-26

Smith, Z. F., I, 258-261

Spalding, John L., I, 334-335

Spalding, Martin J., I, 181-184

Speed, Thomas, I, 240

Stanton, Henry T., I, 297-302

Taylor, Zachary, I, 62-65

Tevis, Mrs. Julia A., I, 107-111

Towne, Charles Hanson, II, 350-353

Tufts, Mrs. Gertrude King, II, 345-349

Underwood, Francis H., I, 250-254

Underwood, Oscar W., II, 150-155

Verhoeff, Miss Mary, I, 241

Vest, George G., I, 285-287

Visscher, William L., I, 342-344

Walling, W. E., II, 353-355

Waltz, Mrs. Elizabeth Cherry, II, 205-209

Walworth, Miss Reubena H., II, 209-211.

Warfield, Mrs. Catherine A., I, 197-200

Warfield, Ethelbert D., II, 116-118

Watterson, Henry, I, 325-331

Watts, William C., I, 279-282

Webber, Charles W., I, 211-215

Weir, James, Senior, I, 234-237

Welby, Mrs. Amelia B., I, 207-211

Whitsitt, William H., I, 240

Willson, Forceythe, I, 313-319

Wilson, Richard H., II, 244-247

Wilson, Robert Burns, II, 29-35

Winchester, Boyd, I, 307-310

Wood, Henry Cleveland, II, 60-63

Woods, William Hervey, II, 47-49

Young, Bennett H., I, 344-348

Transcriber's Notes

Obvious punctuation and spelling errors fixed throughout.

The oe ligature in this etext has been replaced with oe.

Inconsistent hyphenation is as in the original.

Page 106: The title and italicization has been changed from (... little story, _With A Good Samaritan_ ...) to this (... little story, with _A Good Samaritan_ ...) to match the title in the rest of the text.

Page 392: In the Index Mulligan, Murphy and Musgrove are entered out of alphabetic order as in the original.