IV.

Love is always young and fair,-- What to us is silver hair, Faded cheeks or steps grown slow, To the hearts that beat below? Since I kissed you, mine alone, You have never older grown, Since I kissed you, mine alone, You have never older grown.

Chorus to last verse. Darling, we are growing old, Silver threads among the gold, Shine upon my brow today;-- Life is fading fast away.

WHEN SILVER THREADS ARE GOLD AGAIN

Words by Eben E. Rexford; music by H. P. Danks. Copyright, 1915, by Estate of Hamilton S. Gordon.

You tell me we are growing old, And show the silver in your hair, Whence time has stolen all the gold, That made your youthful tresses fair; But years can never steal away The love that never can grow old. So what care we for tresses gray,-- Since love will always keep its gold.

Oh, darling, I can read today, The question in your thoughtful eyes; You wonder if I long for May,-- Beneath the autumn's frosty skies. Oh, love of mine, be sure of this: For me no face could be so fair As this one that I stoop to kiss Beneath its crown of silver hair.

Oh, darling, though your step grows slow, And time has furrowed well your brow, And all June's roses hide in snow, You never were so dear as now. Oh, truest, tend'rest heart of all, Lean on me when you weary grow, As days, like leaves of autumn, fall About the feet that falter so.

Oh, darling, with your hand in mine, We'll journey all life's pathway through, With happy tears your dear eyes shine Like sweet blue blossoms in the dew. The sorrows of the passing years Have made us love each other more, And every day that disappears I count you dearer than before.

Chorus.

Oh, love, I tell you with a kiss, If heav'n gives back the youth we miss Your face will be no fairer then When silver threads are gold again.

CARL SCHURZ.

Carl Schurz was born at Liblar, Prussia, 1829. He was educated in the gymnasium of Cologne, and the University of Bonne. He entered the revolutionary army in 1848, and was likewise the editor of a revolutionary paper. He was obliged to flee to Switzerland, and his accounts of his narrow escapes in getting across the border, as given in his Reminiscences, are intensely thrilling. He came to America in 1852, and after three years' residence in Philadelphia, he settled in Watertown, in our own state. Though he was later a resident of Michigan, Missouri, and New York, and indeed represented the second-named state in the Senate of the United States, yet throughout his Reminiscences he frequently speaks of Wisconsin in a manner that shows he thought of it as his home.

His life as an American citizen was full of honor and responsibility. He was made Minister to Spain by President Lincoln, but soon resigned to come back home and serve in the Civil War. He was a brigadier-general of volunteers and took

## part in the battles of Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and

Chattanooga. During all the rest of his life he was active in the service of his country, both in and out of office. He was strongly on the side of reconciliation with the South, and he hoped and worked for a re-united country. His addresses and his letters show his intense faith in Civil Service reform. His Reminiscences indicate how thoroughly American this man became, and how deeply he appreciated, and how jealously he wished to guard, the freedom which he had failed to find in his mother country, and which he had risked so much to obtain here.

The first selection here given is from Volume I of his Reminiscences. It relates the escape from the prison at Spandau of his dear friend, Professor Kinkel, in which Schurz played an important part. We see here how closely organized this band of revolutionists was, and the intensity of their love for each other, together with the sense of fun and adventure in all they did.

The second selection is characteristic of the oratory of Mr. Schurz during his later years. It shows an intense patriotism, and emphasizes the fact that though he was not born here, for him but one country had the slightest claim upon his devotion.

THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ

From Vol. I--1829-1852. Chapter X, p. 311. Copyright, 1907, by the McClure Co.

Shortly before midnight I stood, equipped as on the night before, well hidden in the dark recess of the house door opposite the penitentiary. The street corners right and left were, according to agreement, properly watched, but our friends kept themselves, as much as possible, concealed. A few minutes later the night watchman shuffled down the street, and, when immediately in front of me, swung his rattle and called the hour of twelve. Then he slouched quietly on and disappeared. What would I have given for a roaring storm and a splashing rain! But the night was perfectly still. My eye was riveted to the roof of the penitentiary building, the dormer windows of which I could scarcely distinguish. The street lights flared dimly. Suddenly there appeared a light above, by which I could observe the frame of one of the dormer windows; it moved three times up and down; that was the signal hoped for. With an eager glance I examined the street right and left. Nothing stirred. Then on my part I gave the signal agreed upon, striking sparks. A second later the light above disappeared and I perceived a dark object slowly moving across the edge of the wall. My heart beat violently and drops of perspiration stood upon my forehead. Then the thing I had apprehended actually happened: tiles and brick, loosened by the rubbing rope, rained down upon the pavement with a loud clatter. "Now, good heaven, help us!" At the same moment Hensel's carriage came rumbling over the cobblestones. The noise of the falling tiles and brick was no longer audible. But would they not strike Kinkel's head and benumb him? Now the dark object had almost reached the ground. I jumped forward and touched him; it was indeed my friend and there he stood alive and on his feet.

"This is a bold deed," were the first words he said to me.

"Thank God," I answered. "Now off with the rope and away."

I labored in vain to untie the rope that was wound around his body.

"I cannot help you," Kinkel whispered, "for the rope has fearfully lacerated both my hands." I pulled out my dirk, and with great effort I succeeded in cutting the rope, the long end of which, as soon as it was free, was quickly pulled up. While I threw a cloak around Kinkel's shoulders and helped him get into the rubber shoes, he looked anxiously around. Hensel's carriage had turned and was coming slowly back.

"What carriage is that?" Kinkel asked.

"Our carriage."

Dark figures showed themselves at the street corners and approached us.

"For heaven's sake, what people are those?"

"Our friends."

At a little distance we heard male voices sing, "Here we sit gayly together."

"What is that?" asked Kinkel, while we hurried through a side street toward Kruger's hotel.

"Your jailers around a bowl of punch."

"Capital!" said Kinkel. We entered the hotel through a back door and soon found ourselves in a room in which Kinkel was to put on the clothes that we had bought for him--a black cloth suit, a big bear-skin overcoat, and a cap like those worn by Prussian forest officers. From a room near by sounded the voices of the revelers. Kruger, who had stood a few minutes looking on while Kinkel was exchanging his convict's garb for an honest man's dress, suddenly went out with a peculiarly sly smile. When he returned carrying a few filled glasses, he said, "Herr Professor, in a room near by some of your jailers are sitting around a bowl of punch. I have just asked them whether they would not permit me to take some for a few friends of mine who have just arrived. They had no objection. Now, Herr Professor, let us drink your health first out of the bowl of your jailers." We found it difficult not to break out in loud laughter. Kinkel was now in his citizen's clothes, and his lacerated hands were washed and bandaged with handkerchiefs. He thanked his faithful friends with a few words which brought tears to their eyes. Then we jumped into Hensel's vehicle. The penitentiary officers were still singing and laughing around their punch bowl.

THE TRUE AMERICANISM

By Carl Schurz. From "MODERN ELOQUENCE." Vol. IX, p. 1025. Copyright, 1900, by The University Society.

(Address delivered in New York City at a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, January 2, 1896, Mr. Schurz rising to second the resolutions embodied in a report to the Chamber by its Committee on Foreign Commerce and the Revenue Laws upon the then pending Venezuelan question).

... What is the rule of honor to be observed by a power so strongly and so advantageously situated as this Republic is? Of course I do not expect it meekly to pocket real insults if they should be offered to it. But, surely, it should not, as our boyish jingoes wish it to do, swagger about among the nations of the world, with a chip on its shoulder, shaking its fist in everybody's face. Of course, it should not tamely submit to real encroachments upon its rights. But, surely, it should not, whenever its own notions of right or interest collide with the notions of others, fall into hysterics and act as if it really feared for its own security and its very independence. As a true gentleman, conscious of his strength and his dignity, it should be slow to take offense. In its dealings with other nations it should have scrupulous regard, not only for their rights, but also for their self-respect. With all its latent resources for war, it should be the great peace power of the world. It should never forget what a proud privilege and what an inestimable blessing it is not to need and not to have big armies or navies to support. It should seek to influence mankind, not by heavy artillery, but by good example and wise counsel. It should see its highest glory, not in battles won, but in wars prevented. It should be so invariably just and fair, so trustworthy, so good tempered, so conciliatory, that other nations would instinctively turn to it as their mutual friend and the natural adjuster of their differences, thus making it the greatest preserver of the world's peace.

This is not a mere idealistic fancy. It is the natural position of this great republic among the nations of the earth. It is its noblest vocation, and it will be a glorious day for the United States when the good sense and the self-respect of the American people see in this their "manifest destiny." It all rests upon peace. Is not this peace with honor? There has, of late, been much loose speech about "Americanism." Is not this good Americanism? It is surely today the Americanism of those who love their country most. And I fervently hope that it will be and ever remain the Americanism of our children and our children's children.

MRS. HONORÉ WILLSIE.

Mrs. Honoré McCue Willsie is a young woman who received her collegiate training in the writing of English at the University of Wisconsin, she being a graduate of that institution with the class of 1902. Since her graduation she has written many things that have claimed the attention of readers in all parts of our country. She has traveled widely. She writes intimately and understandingly of the Indians of our Southwest, as well as of society folk of New York. Many readers of this volume have, no doubt, read her story, "Still Jim," recently published in Everybody's Magazine. Aside from the story here published, perhaps the best-known work of Mrs. Willsie is "We Die, We Die--There is No Hope," a plea for the Indians of the Southwest.

The editors of this book are very proud to be permitted to publish "The Forbidden North." It impresses them as being one of the great dog stories of all time. No doubt Mrs. Willsie got some of her inspiration in writing it from a Great Dane puppy, Cedric, who was her constant companion during her upper classman years at the University of Wisconsin. Indeed, this pair--the tall, dark-haired girl and the great, dun-colored dog--were a familiar sight to the students of the University and the residents of Madison. The reader may be sure that all the love expressed for Saxe Gotha is genuine.

[Illustration: HONORÉ WILLSIE]

THE FORBIDDEN NORTH--THE STORY OF A GREAT DANE PUPPY

Reprinted, by permission, from the Youth's Companion.

One hot morning, a year or so ago, an Uncle Tom's Cabin Company arrived in a small Arizona town. On the platform of the blistered station the members of the company learned that the hall in which they were to play had just burned to the ground. That was the last straw for the company. They were without money; they stood, disconsolately staring at the train, which waited for half an hour while the tourists ate breakfast in the lunchroom of the station.

The stage-manager held in leash three dogs--the dogs that the bill-posters displayed as ferocious bloodhounds, pursuing Eliza across the ice. As a matter of fact, Coburg and Hilda were two well-bred, well-trained Great Danes. The third dog, Saxe Gotha, a puppy of ten months, was their son.

A well-dressed tourist eyed the dogs intensely; finally, he came up and felt them over with the hand of the dog-fancier.

"Give me fifty dollars for the three of them!" said the manager suddenly.

The stranger stared at the manager suspiciously. Fifty dollars was a low price for such dogs. The stranger did not believe that so poor a company could have come by them honestly. However, he shrugged his shoulders and drew a roll of bills from his pocket.

"All right," he said. "Only I don't want the pup. He's bad with distemper. I haven't time to fuss with him."

The manager in turn shrugged his shoulders, took the fifty dollars, and, while the new owner led Coburg and Hilda toward the baggage-car of the train, the Uncle Tom's Cabin Company boarded the day coach.

Thus it happened that a thorough-bred Great Dane puppy, whose father and mother had been born in the soft green dusk of a German forest--a young boarhound--was left to fight for his sick life on the parching sands of an alien desert.

There had been no need to tie Saxe Gotha. When the puppy had started down the platform after his father and mother, the manager had given him a hasty kick and a "Get back, you!" Saxe Gotha sat down on his haunches, panting in the burning sun, and stared after the receding train with the tragic look of understanding common to his kind. Yet, in his eyes there was less regret than fear. The Dane is a "one-man dog." If he is given freedom of choice, he chooses for master a man to whom he gives his heart. Other men may own him; no other man except this choice of his heart ever wins his love. Saxe Gotha had yet to find his man.

The station-master started toward the dog, but Saxe Gotha did not heed him. He rose and trotted toward the north, through the little town, quite as if he had business in that direction. The pup was not handsome at this period of his life. He was marked like a tiger with tawny and gray stripes. His feet and his head looked too large for him, and his long back seemed to sag with the weight of his stomach. But, even to the most ignorant observer, he gave promise of distinction, of superb size, and strength, and intelligence.

At the edge of the little town, Saxe Gotha buried his feverish head in the watering-trough at the Wrenn rancho, drank till his sides swelled visibly, then started on along the trail with his business-like puppy trot. When he got out into the open desert, which stretched thirty miles wide from the river range to the Hualpai, and one hundred miles long from the railway to the Colorado River, he found the northern trail with no apparent difficulty.... Saxe Gotha was headed for the north, for the cool, sweet depth of forest that was his natural home.

He took fairly good care of himself. At intervals he dropped in the shade of a joshua-tree, and, after struggling to bite the cholla thorns from his feet, he would doze for a few minutes, then start on again. His distemper was easier in the sun, although his fever and the desert heat soon evaporated the moisture that he had absorbed at the Wrenn's.

About three o'clock he stopped, wrinkled his black muzzle, and raised his finely domed head. The trail now lay along the foot of the Hualpai. He turned abruptly to the right, off the main trail, and trotted into a little cañon. On the other side of a rock that hid it from the main trail was Jim Baldwin's tent. Jim came to the door, at the sound of Saxe Gotha drinking up his little spring. Jim was a lover of dogs. He did not know Saxe Gotha's breed, but he did recognize his promise of distinction.

"Howdy, old man!" said Jim. "Have a can of beef!"

Saxe Gotha responded to the greeting with a puppy gambol, and devoured the beef with gusto. Jim went into the tent for a rope. When he returned, the pup was a receding dot on the north trail.

* * * * *

About four o'clock, the tri-weekly stage from the Happy Luck camp met Saxe Gotha. Dick Furman, the driver, stopped the panting horses and invited the huge puppy to ride with him. Saxe Gotha wriggled, chased his tail round once with a bark like the booming of a town clock, and with this exchange of courtesies Dick drove on southward, and the pup continued on his way to the north.

* * * * *

As darkness came on, he slowed his pace, paused and sniffed, and again turned off the main trail to a rough path up the side of the mountain. Before a silent hut of adobe, he found a half-barrel of water. Saxe Gotha rose on his hind legs, thrust his nose into the barrel and drank lustily. Then he stood rigid, with uncropped ears lifted and nose thrust upward, sniffing. After a minute he whined. The business to the north was pressing; the pup did not want to stop; yet he still stood, listening, sniffing. At last, he started back to the main trail; when he reached it, he stopped once more, and once more sniffed and listened and whined; then he deliberately turned back to the silent hut, and trotted along the narrow trail that led up behind it to the west.

A short distance up the mountain, clear in the light of the Moon, a tiny spring bubbled out of the ground, forming a pool the size of a wash-basin. A man lay beside the pool. Saxe Gotha walked up to him, whining, and then walked round and round him, sniffing him from head to foot. He licked his face and pawed at his shoulder with his clumsy paw. But the man lay in the heavy slumber of utter exhaustion. He was a tall, lean, strong young fellow, in his early twenties. His empty canteen, his pick and bar beside him, with a sack of ore, showed that he was just back from a prospecting trip. He had evidently run short of water and, after a forced march to the spring, where he had relieved his thirst, had dropped asleep on the spot.

At last Saxe Gotha lay down with his nose on the young man's shoulder, and his brown eyes were alert in the moonlight. Saxe Gotha had found his man!

* * * * *

Saxe Gotha had found his man! A discovery as important as that, of course, delayed the journey toward the north. All through the desert night the Great Dane pup lay shivering beside his man. What he saw beyond the silent desert, what vision of giant tree trunks, gray-green against an age-old turf, lured his exiled heart we cannot know. To understand what sudden fealty to the heedless form he guarded forbade him his north would solve the riddle of love itself.

Little by little the stars faded. At last dawn lighted the face of the sleeping man; he stirred, and suddenly sat up. Saxe Gotha bounded to his feet with a bark of joy. Startled, the young man jumped up, staggering with weakness, and scowled when he saw the big puppy chasing his tail. Hunger and a guilty conscience are richly productive of vicious moods. Saxe Gotha's man picked up a rock and hurled it at him.

"Git! You blamed hound, you!"

In utter astonishment, Saxe Gotha paused in his joyous barking, and stood staring at the young fellow's sullen face. It was unbelievable! The young man did not in the least realize that he had been found! And yet, despite the eyes inflamed by the glare of the desert, his face was an intelligent one, with good features. He glared at the pup, and then walked weakly down the trail to his hut. Saxe Gotha followed, and sat on his haunches before the door, waiting. After a long time, the young man came out, washed and shaved, and with fresh clothes. He picked up his sack of ore, and as he did so, a haunted look came into his gray eyes. Such a look on so young a face might have told Saxe Gotha that the desert is bad for youth. But Saxe Gotha would not have cared. He kept his distance warily and wagged his tail. When the young man's glance fell on the dog, he saw him as something living on which to vent his own sense of guilt. Again he threw a stone at Saxe Gotha.

"Get out! Go back where you belong!"

The pup dodged, and stood waiting. Strangely dense his man was! The young man did not look at him again, but fell to sorting samples of ore. Certain tiny pieces he gloated over as he found them, and he put them in a sack that he hid behind the door.

Now, Saxe Gotha never meant to do it, but he was young, and his distemper made him very ill, and he had not slept all night. When he saw his man safely absorbed in his work, he curled up in the shade of a rock and went off into the heavy sleep of a sick dog.

When he awoke, his man was gone! Saxe Gotha ran round and round through the adobe. The house was thick with scents of him, but whither he had gone was not to be told, for desert sands hold no scents. On the door-step lay an old vest of the man's. The dog sat down on this, and lifted his voice in a howl of anguish. There was only one thing to do, of course--wait for the man's return.

* * * * *

All day Saxe Gotha waited. He drank deeply from the barrel of water, but he went without food, although the remains of the young man's breakfast lay on the table. It was not in Saxe Gotha's breed to steal. All day and all night he waited. Now and again, he lifted his great voice in grief. With his face to that north which he had forbidden himself to seek, even though he was but a dog, he might have been youth mourning its perennial discovery that duty and desire do not always go hand in hand. Saxe Gotha might have been all the courage, all the loneliness, all the grief of youth, disillusioned.

The morning of the second day, a man rode up the trail. He was not Saxe Gotha's man. He dismounted, and called, "Hey, Evans!"

Saxe Gotha, a little unsteady on his legs, sat on his haunches and growled.

"Where's your boss, pup?" asked the man. "I didn't know he had a dog."

Saxe Gotha growled.

"Humph!" said the man. "Off stealing ore again, I suppose."

The stranger prowled round the outside of the hut, and then came to the door.

"Get out of the way, dog! I'm going to find out where this rich claim is that he's finding free gold in. He's a thief, anyhow, not to report it to his company."

As he put his foot on the door-step, Saxe Gotha snapped at him. The stranger jumped back.

"You brute hound!" he cried. "What do you mean? If I had a gun, I'd shoot you!"

Saxe Gotha's anger gave him strength to rise. He stood lurching; his lips were drawn back over his fangs, his ears were flat to his head. The stranger walked back a few steps.

"He must weigh nearly a hundred pounds!" he muttered. "Come on, old pup. Here, have some of my snack! Here's a piece of corned beef! Come on, old fellow!"

Cajolery and threats were alike futile. Saxe Gotha was guarding for his man. After a while the dog's dumb fury maddened the stranger. He began to hurl rocks at the pup. At first the shots were harmless; then a jagged piece of ore caught the dog on the cheek and laid it open, and another slashed his back. With the snarl of a tiger, Saxe Gotha made a leap from the door at the stranger's throat. The man screamed, and jumped for his horse so hastily that Saxe Gotha caught only the shoulder of his coat and ripped the back out of the garment. Before the pup could gather his weakened body for another charge, the stranger was mounted. He whipped his snorting horse down the trail, and disappeared.

Saxe Gotha feebly worried at the torn coat, then dragged himself back to the door and lay down on the vest, too weak to lick his wounds. The rest of the morning he lay quiet. At noon he suddenly opened his eyes. His ears pricked forward, and his tail beat feebly on the floor. His man rode up. He had a sack of fresh supplies thrown across his saddle. He turned his horse into the corral, then came toward the hut. The vicious mood seemed still to be with him.

"You still here?" he growled.

Then he caught sight of the piece of cloth, picked it up, and looked at the mauled and blood-stained muck on it. He stared at Saxe Gotha curiously.

"Johnson was here, eh? I'd know that check anywhere. The thief! What happened?"

As Evans came up, Saxe Gotha tried to give the old gambol of joy, but succeeded only in falling heavily. The young fellow strode into the hut, and walked slowly about. The sack of nuggets was still behind the door. The map that he had long ago prepared for the company for which he was investigating mines still lay covered with dust. On the table were the hunk of bacon, the fried potatoes, the dry bread. A number of jagged rocks were scattered on the floor. The dog was bloody.

* * * * *

Slowly young Evans turned his whole attention to Saxe Gotha, who lay watching him with passionate intentness. Evans took a handful of raw potato skins from the table and offered them to the pup. Saxe Gotha snatched at them and swallowed them as if frenzied with hunger. Evans looked at the food on the table, then at the famished, emaciated dog. He stood gripping the edge of the table and staring out at the desert. A slow red came up from his neck and crossed his face; it seemed a magic red, for it wiped the vicious lines from his face and left it boyish and shamed. Suddenly his lips trembled. He dropped down in the doorway and ran his hand gently along the pup's sensitive back. His bloodshot eyes were blinded with tears.

"Old man," he whispered to Saxe Gotha, "I wasn't worth it!"

The dog looked up into the young man's face with an expression eager and questioning. And then, summoning all his feeble strength, he crowded his long, awkward body into the young man's lap....

After a moment he set Saxe Gotha on the floor and fed him a can of evaporated milk, carefully warmed, with bits of freshly fried bacon in it. He washed out the dog's cuts, then put him to bed in his own bunk. All that afternoon, while the dog slept, Evans paced the hut, fighting his fight. And, like all solitary desert-dwellers, he talked aloud....

"They promised to pay me regularly, to raise me, to give me a job in the home office after a year. It's been two years now. Yes, I know, I made some promises. I was to report all finds and turn in all valuable ore to them. But they haven't treated me right."

Then he turned to the sleeping dog, and his face softened.

"Wouldn't that beat you, his not eating the stuff on the table! Goodness knows I'd treated him badly enough! It seems as if even a dog might have a sense of honor; as if it didn't matter what I was, the fool pup had to keep straight with himself; as if--"

Suddenly Evans stopped and gulped. Again came the slow, agonizing blush. For a long time he stood in silence. Finally, he squared his shoulders and moistened his lips.

"I can send the maps and what ore I have left by stage tomorrow. But it will take another year to get the whole thing straightened up, and get them paid back--another year of loneliness, and sand-storms, and sweltering. No snowy Christmas or green spring or the smell of burning leaves in the fall this year for me. I guess the pup will stay by me, though."

As if he realized that there was need of him, Saxe Gotha woke, and ambled over to the man's side. Evans sat down in the door, and the dog squatted beside him. Evans turned, took the dog's great head between his hands, and looked into the limpid eyes.

"I guess, old man, that there are more ways than one of making a success of yourself, and money-making is the least of them."

In Evans's eyes were the loneliness and grief of disappointed youth. But the rest of his face once more was clear and boyish with the wonderful courage of the young.

Saxe Gotha pawed Evans's knee wistfully. Perhaps across the stillness of the desert he caught the baying of the hunting pack in some distant, rain-drenched woodland. Yet he would not go. The dog leaned warmly against his man, who slid an arm across the tawny back. Then, with faces to their forbidden north, man and dog watched the desert night advance.

EDNA FERBER.

Among those who are striving for a permanent place among short story writers is Edna Ferber, a young woman who makes her stories interesting through her own keen observation of character traits revealed in the everyday life about her. Miss Ferber's work deserves mention among any group of Wisconsin writers quite as much from the promise of what may still come as from that already accomplished. Her ability to see the real in character and the truth in real life is the strong characteristic of her work. She has attempted to follow somewhat closely the language of the everyday life she portrays.

Edna Ferber's short stories, many of which have appeared in various magazines, have been collected into books published under the titles of "Buttered Side Down," "Dawn O'Hara," "Roast Beef Medium," and "Personality Plus." These stories are unified through the two characters portrayed, Dawn O'Hara and Mrs. Emma McChesney. It is probable that much of her own struggle and much of her aspiration for women is portrayed in these two characters. She hopes to show that women may make an undisputed place for themselves in the professional and business life.

The first of these characters is a young Irish woman who has devoted her energies to the mastering of the city newspaper reporter's work. Through the story of Dawn O'Hara's struggles, Edna Ferber has been able to give many interesting comments upon the toil and thrills of this nerve-racking work. At the same time she has been able to paint the struggle of the young writer to produce the first book, to picture German Milwaukee in a most interesting manner, and to make some interesting comments upon mutual helpfulness.

Emma McChesney is an example of the extraordinarily successful business woman. Despite the most discouraging conditions, she works her way from the beginning of a firm's least inviting employment to the complete management of its affairs. All the time she is inspired by the desire to give her son the best education and the best start in life and to assist him to the most manly character possible. The author rewards Emma McChesney with the full realization of her ambitions.

Edna Ferber was born in Appleton, Wisconsin. Her home was a humble one, but was able to provide her with the opportunity for high school education and a very little work in Lawrence College. After graduating from high school, she did work for the Appleton Crescent in the capacity of news collector and reporter. Through this work she began to realize her powers and at the same time she trained herself to that keen observation of character which constitutes one of the greatest pleasures in her work. Appleton's stores, hotels, newspapers, and working life in general became her laboratory in which to study the characteristics, defects, and aspirations of human life as she finds it. As she has achieved greater success in her writing she has widened her sphere of acquaintanceship and of helpfulness. Her present home is Chicago.

The selection from her writings which we are permitted to give here is chosen because it illustrates her style and at the same time gives a vivid picture of one phase of the life of Wisconsin's metropolis. It is a chapter taken from her book, "Dawn O'Hara," and is entitled, "Steeped in German."

STEEPED IN GERMAN

From "DAWN O'HARA." Copyright, 1911, by Frederick Stokes Publishing Co.

I am living in a little private hotel just across from the court house square with its scarlet geraniums and its pretty fountain. The house is filled with German civil engineers, mechanical engineers, and Herr Professors from the German academy. On Sunday mornings we have Pfannkuchen with currant jelly, and the Herr Professors come down to breakfast in fearful flappy German slippers. I'm the only creature in the place that isn't just over from Germany. Even the dog is a dachshund. It is so unbelievable that every day or two I go down to Wisconsin Street and gaze at the stars and stripes floating from the government building, in order to convince myself that this is America. It needs only a Kaiser or so, and a bit of Unter den Linden to be quite complete.

The little private hotel is kept by Herr and Frau Knapf. After one has seen them, one quite understands why the place is steeped in a German atmosphere up to the eyebrows.

I never would have found it myself. It was Doctor von Gerhard who had suggested Knapf's and who had paved the way for my coming here.

"You will find it quite unlike anything you have ever tried before," he had warned me. "Very German it is, and very, very clean, and most inexpensive. Also I think you will find material there--how is it you call it?--copy, yes? Well, there should be copy in plenty; and types! But you shall see."

From the moment I rang the Knapf door-bell I saw. The dapper, cheerful Herr Knapf, wearing a disappointed Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, opened the door. I scarcely had begun to make my wishes known when he interrupted with a large wave of the hand, and an elaborate German bow.

"Ach, yes! You would be the lady of whom the Herr Doktor has spoken. Gewiss Frau Orme, not? But so a young lady I did not expect to see. A room we have saved for you--aber wunderhübsch. It makes me much pleasure to show. Folgen Sie mir, bitte."

"You--speak English?" I faltered with visions of my evenings spent in expressing myself in the sign language.

"English? But yes. Here in Milwaukee it gives aber mostly German. And then, too, I have been only twenty years in this country. And always in Milwaukee. Here is it gemütlich--and mostly it gives German."

I tried not to look frightened, and followed him up to the--"but wonderfully beautiful" room. To my joy I found it high-ceilinged, airy, and huge, with a vault of a clothes closet bristling with hooks, and boasting an unbelievable number of shelves. My trunk was swallowed up in it. Never in all my boarding-house experience have I seen such a room nor such a closet. The closet must have been built for a bride's trousseau in the days of hoop-skirts and scuttle bonnets. There was a separate and distinct hook for each and every one of my most obscure garments. I tried to spread them out. I used two hooks to every petticoat, and three for my kimono, and when I had finished there were rows of hooks to spare. Tiers of shelves yawned for the hat-boxes which I possessed not. Bluebeard's wives could have held a family reunion in that closet and invited all of Solomon's spouses. Finally, in desperation, I gathered all my poor garments together and hung them in a social bunch on the hooks nearest the door. How I should have loved to show that closet to a select circle of New York boarding-house landladies!

After wrestling in vain with the forest of hooks, I turned my attention to my room. I yanked a towel thing off the center table and replaced it with a scarf that Peter had picked up in the Orient. I set up my typewriter in a corner near a window and dug a gay cushion or two and a chafing-dish out of my trunk. I distributed photographs of Norah and Max and the Spalpeens separately, in couples, and in groups. Then I bounced up and down in a huge yellow brocade chair and found it unbelievably comfortable. Of course, I reflected, after the big veranda, and the tree at Norah's, and the leather-cushioned comfort of her library, and the charming tones of her Oriental rugs and hangings--

"Oh, stop your carping, Dawn!" I told myself. "You can't expect charming tones and Oriental doo-dads and apple trees in a German boarding house. Anyhow there's running water in the room. For general utility purposes that's better than a pink prayer rug."

There was a time when I thought that it was the luxuries that made life worth living. That was in the old Bohemian days.

"Necessities!" I used to laugh, "Pooh! Who cares about necessities. What if the dishpan does leak? It is the luxuries that count."

Bohemia and luxuries! Half a dozen lean, boarding-house years have steered me safely past that. After such a course in common sense you don't stand back and examine the pictures of a pink Moses in a nest of purple bull-rushes, or complain because the bureau does not harmonize with the wall paper. Neither do you criticize the blue and saffron roses that form the rug pattern. 'Deedy not! Instead you warily punch the mattress to see if it is rock-stuffed, and you snoop into the clothes closet; you inquire the distance to the nearest bath room, and whether the payments are weekly or monthly, and if there is a baby in the room next door. Oh, there's nothing like living in a boarding-house for cultivating the materialistic side.

But I was to find that here at Knapf's things were quite different. Not only was Ernest von Gerhard right in saying it was "very German, and very, very clean;" he recognized good copy when he saw it. Types! I never dreamed that such faces existed outside of the old German woodcuts that one sees illustrating time-yellowed books.

I had thought myself hardened to strange boarding-house dining rooms, with their batteries of cold, critical women's eyes. I had learned to walk unruffled in the face of the most carping, suspicious and the fishiest of these batteries. Therefore, on my first day at Knapf's, I went down to dinner in the evening, quite composed and secure in the knowledge that my collar was clean and that there was no flaw to find in the fit of my skirt in the back.

As I opened the door of my room I heard sounds as of a violent altercation in progress downstairs. I leaned over the balusters and listened. The sounds rose and fell, swelled and boomed. They were German sounds that started in the throat, gutturally, and spluttered their way up. They were sounds such as I had not heard since the night I was sent to cover a Socialist meeting in New York. I tip-toed down stairs, although I might have fallen down and landed with a thud without being heard. The din came from the direction of the dining-room. Well, come what might, I would not falter. After all, it could not be worse than the awful time when I had helped cover the teamsters' strike. I peered into the dining-room.

The thunder of conversation went on as before. But there was no blood shed. Nothing but men and women sitting at small tables, eating and talking. When I say eating and talking, I do not mean that those acts were carried on separately. Not at all. The eating and talking went on simultaneously, neither interrupting the other. A fork full of food and a mouthful of ten-syllabled German words met, wrestled, and passed one another, unscathed. I stood in the doorway, fascinated until Herr Knapf spied me, took a nimble skip in my direction, twisted the discouraged mustaches into temporary sprightliness, and waved me toward a table in the center of the room.

Then a frightful thing happened. When I think of it now I turn cold. The battery was not that of women's eyes, but that of men's. And conversation ceased! The uproar and the booming of vowels was hushed. The silence was appalling. I looked up in horror to find that what seemed to be millions of staring blue eyes were fixed on me. The stillness was so thick that you could cut it with a knife. Such men! Immediately I dubbed them the aborigines, and prayed that I might find adjectives with which to describe their foreheads.

It appeared that the aborigines were especially favored in that they were all placed at one long, untidy table at the head of the room. The rest of us sat at small tables. Later I learned that they were all engineers. At meals they discuss engineering problems in the most awe-inspiring German. After supper they smoke impossible German pipes and dozens of cigarettes. They have bulging, knobby foreheads and bristling pompadours, and some of the rawest of them wear wild-looking beards, and thick spectacles, and cravats and trousers that Lew Fields never even dreamed of. They are all graduates of high-sounding foreign universities and are horribly learned and brilliant, but they are the worst mannered lot I ever saw.

In the silence that followed my entrance a red-cheeked maid approached me and asked what I would have for supper. Supper? I asked. Was not dinner served in the evening? The aborigines nudged each other and sniggered like fiendish little school-boys.

The red-cheeked maid looked at me pityingly. Dinner was served in the middle of the day, natürlich. For supper there was Wienerschnitzel and kalter Aufschnitt, also Kartoffelsalat, and fresh Kaffeekuchen.

The room hung breathless on my decision. I wrestled with a horrible desire to shriek and run. Instead I managed to mumble an order. The aborigines turned to one another inquiringly.

"Was hat sie gesagt?" they asked. "What did she say?" Whereupon they fell to discussing my hair and teeth and eyes and complexion in German as crammed with adjectives as was the rye bread over which I was choking, with caraway. The entire table watched me with wide-eyed, unabashed interest while I ate, and I advanced by quick stages from red-faced confusion to purple mirth. It appeared that my presence was the ground for a heavy German joke in connection with the youngest of the aborigines. He was a very plump and greasy looking aborigine with a doll-like rosiness of cheek and a scared and bristling pompadour and very small pig-eyes. The other aborigines clapped him on the back and roared:

"Ai Fritz! Jetzt brauchst du nicht zu weinen! Deine Lena war aber nicht so huebsch, eh?"

Later I learned that Fritz was the newest arrival and that since coming to this country he had been rather low in spirits in consequence of a certain flaxen-haired Lena whom he had left behind in the Fatherland.

An examination of the dining room and its other occupants served to keep my mind off the hateful long table. The dining room was a double one, the floor carpetless and clean. There was a little platform at one end with hardy-looking plants in pots near the windows. The wall was ornamented with very German pictures of very plump, bare-armed German girls being chucked under the chin by very dashing mustachioed German lieutenants. It was all very bare, and strange and foreign to my eyes and yet there was something bright and comfortable about it. I felt that I was going to like it, aborigines and all.

After my first letter home Norah wrote frantically, demanding to know if I was the only woman in the house. I calmed her fears by assuring her that, while the men were interesting and ugly with the fascinating ugliness of a bulldog, the women were crushed looking and uninteresting and wore hopeless hats. I have written Norah and Max reams about this household, from the aborigines to Minna, who tidies my room and serves my meals, and admires my clothes. Minna is related to Frau Knapf, whom I have never seen. Minna is inordinately fond of dress, and her remarks anent my own garments are apt to be a trifle disconcerting, especially when she intersperses her recital of dinner dishes with admiring adjectives directed at my blouse or hat. Thus:

"Wir haben roast beef, und sparribs mit sauerkraut, und schicken--ach wie schoen, Frau Orme! Aber ganz pracchtvoll?" Her eyes and hands are raised toward heaven.

"What's prachtful?" I ask, startled. "The chicken?"

"Nein; your waist. Selbst gemacht?"

I am even becoming hardened to the manners of the aborigines. It used to fuss me to death to meet one of them in the halls. They always stopped short, brought heels together with a click, bent stiffly from the waist, and thundered: "Nabben', Fräulein!"

I have learned to take the salutation quite calmly, and even the wildest, most spectacled and knobby-browed aborigine cannot startle me. Nonchalantly I reply, "Nabben'," and wish Norah could but see me in the act.

When I told Ernst von Gerhard about them, he laughed a little and shrugged his shoulders and said:

"Na, you should not look so young, and so pretty, and so unmarried. In Germany a married woman brushes her hair quite smoothly back, and pins it in a hard knob. And she knows nothing of such bewildering collars and fluffy frilled things in the front of the blouse. How do you call them--jabots?"

GEORGE L. TEEPLE.

Mr. George L. Teeple was born in Champaign, Illinois, in 1864, and at the age of nine came to Whitewater to live with his aunt and uncle. He was graduated from the old "Academic Department" of the Whitewater Normal, about which school he writes so charmingly in the sketch here given.

Mr. Teeple planned his collegiate career in preparation for the profession of engineering. He was graduated from Cornell University in 1889, and was engaged in active engineering work and instructural duties in this line until 1895. But at this time he felt the call to the field of English, and he gave special study to this subject for two years at Harvard. From 1897 to 1899 he was instructor in English in the State Normal School at Stevens Point, but at this time the demands of his health made it necessary that he resume active outdoor work, so, since the latter date, he has been more or less closely identified with his first-chosen profession. But in all these years he has never lost his interest in creative literary activities. He writes very slowly and carefully, with infinite pains and almost endless revision. His work, as represented in "The Battle of Gray's Pasture," fully repays his effort, for, though the phrases seem to have come easily and readily, they show the fitness and grace that are the result of no other thing than rigorous care.

His home is in Whitewater, which, as will be noted, has sheltered many Wisconsin writers, notably President Albert Salisbury and Dr. Rollin Salisbury, George Steele and Julius Birge. The selection here given is an account of a real football battle. But "Gray's Pasture" has now been transformed into a modern athletic field, and the "spreading oak" has been replaced by a concrete grandstand.

THE BATTLE OF GRAY'S PASTURE

From the Century Magazine, September, 1903.

... You will find no such "Normalities" nowadays. The old breed is gone. The greenest I see look quite correct and starched and tailor-made. No originality of costume now. No "high-water pants," such as refreshed the eye in the old days. No pitifully insufficient coat, stretching its seams across some great fellow's back, button struggling with buttonhole to hold in his expanding chest, showing by its very insufficiency what a Hercules he was. You will see none of these now. They have disappeared; the old sap and individuality quite, quite gone.

* * * * *

There is no such spirit in the school today. They have a football eleven, it is true, and it holds its head well up among its mates; a little above 'em, too, most of the time; the old school's the old school yet, I tell 'em; but, after all, it isn't the old game, nor the old spirit. I go out sometimes to watch them, and think: "Well, it's a queer game they play now, and call football!" They trot out in such astonishing toggery; padded and guarded from shin to crown--welted, belted, strapped, and buckled beyond recognition. And there's no independence in the play; every move has to be told 'em. It's as if they weren't big enough to run alone; and so they hire a big stepmother of a university "coach," who stands around in a red sweater, and yells, and berates them. Not a man answers back; he doesn't dare to. They don't dare eat plain, Christian food, but have a "training table," and diet like invalids. I've seen 'em at a game not dare to take a plain drink of water; when they got thirsty they sucked at a wet sponge, like babes at the bottle!

It was not so in our day. No apron strings of a university coach were tied to us. We were free-born men. When we wanted to play we got together and went down to the old pasture, to the big oak tree that stood near the middle of it; and there we would "choose up," and take off our coats and vests and neckgear, and pile them round the oak, and walk out on the field and go at it--_everybody_--not a pitiful dozen or so, while the rest stood with their hands in their pockets and looked on--but _everybody_! And it was _football_: no playing half an hour without seeing the ball in the air once; we kicked it all the time--except when we missed it, and then we kicked the other fellow's shins! And when we got thirsty we went down to the spring and took an honest drink out of an honest tin cup.

And what a fine, free, open game it was--the old game! What art you could put into its punting, and running, and dodging, and creeping, and drop-kicking! And what a glorious tumult in the old-fashioned scrimmage, especially the scrimmages in the old ditch. It was a rather broad and shallow ditch, and into it the ball would often roll, a dozen excited fellows dashing after it; and there in the ditch bottom, in mad mêlee, frantic foot to foot, naked shin against sole leather, we would fight to drive the ball through the opposing mob. There might the rustic Normalite, with implacable cowhides, the bigger now the better, sweeten his humiliation with revenge, and well I remember the fearful devastation he sometimes wrought among our Academic shins!

But we were used to that. Indeed, we youngsters gloried in it. It was a spot upon your honor not to have a spot upon your shin. We compared them as soldiers brag of their wounds in battle, and he who could exhibit the largest and most lurid specimen was the best man. Those discolored patches were our "V. C.'s" and "Crosses of the Legion of Honor"; seals attesting our spirit, stamped with a stamp of good, stiff sole leather, painfully enough, it was true, but who cared for that? We were only sorry we could not exhibit them in public. To be obliged to carry such decorations under your trouser leg was hard.

* * * * *

Football Night at the "Lincolnian Literary," and Laury Thompson's speech there I must tell about. If any of the old boys ever read this--and it is for them I am writing it--they will wonder if I leave that out. For it marked an epoch in the Normal preparation for the game. And coming from Laury Thompson it was so unexpected. He always looked so cheerful in his high-water pants. His clothes were such a harmonious misfit. And he got off his absurdities with such a grave, humorous-innocent face; only the veiled twinkling in the eyes to show that it was not the most solemn matter in the world.

He "wore his pants high-water a-purpose," he told us; "had 'em made so for hot weather; coolin', ye know; refreshin'; lets the air in; breeze of heaven playin' up and down your pant-leg." And when one of the boys cracked some joke on his big shoes, he gravely remonstrated, assuring us that he "had those shoes made sort of _in memoriam_; hide of a heifer calf of his'n that got killed by the cars: a rosebud of a little critter; he kind o' wanted something to remember her by; tarnation good leather, too." He had "writ a poem" on that calf, he said, but refused to recite it; "felt delikit about exposin' his feelin's."

The old Lincolnian Literary Society is dead now, and its room has been turned into a shop for the Manual Training Department. It is a long, narrow room on the third floor, and was crowded that night to the very door. The meeting, called "to rouse public spirit in the matter of the coming game," grew spirited and hilarious as the speaking proceeded, and when Thompson was called on, and his tall, odd figure rose up in the midst, there was great thundering of boots along the floor.

"Boys," he began, "our Academic friends, raised, most of 'em, in this _proud metropolis_, seem to 'a' got the notion that because we haven't just stepped out of a fashion plate we can't play football. They tell us to 'thrash the hayseed out of our hair,' and to 'slack off on our galluses, and see if we can't get some o' that high-water out of our pants;' they've been 'tryin' to figure out our combined acreage o' boot leather,' they say, 'and had to give it up; Arabic notation wa'n't equal to it.'

"Well, let 'em laugh. I reckon we're duck-backed enough to shed whole showers o' that kind o' stuff; and when the game comes off they'll find that what wins a game o' football ain't pants, nor hair, nor shoe-leather, but what's in and under 'em. They'll find _men's_ feet in those shoes, and _men's_ legs in those trousers, and the brains o' men under that hair!

"For I tell you, we're goin' to win that game; and we're goin' to win it just because o' what gave us the hayseed an' the high-water and the boot-leather; because we've got on our side the men with muscle hardened on the old farm; men who've swung an axe from mornin' till night in the wood-lot, and cradled two acres of oats a day, and who'll go through 'em in a scrimmage like steers through standin' corn!

"Yes, boys, it's true; we're 'hayseeds' and 'country jakes.' All the better for that. Grass don't grow down, and go where you will, you'll find the hayseed at the top. Why, what was he?"--he turned and extended a long arm and forefinger toward a picture of Daniel Webster that hung behind him on the wall of the room,--"what was he? A hayseed, and son of a hayseed!"

Yes, there's a hayseed in our hair; Proud it's there! And our boots are big an' square; So they air! And when you hear 'em thunderin' On the Academic shin, Back them cowhide boots to win! Academs, beware!

Hooray then for hayseed hair! It gits there! And for cowhides big and square; Every pair! And when you hear 'em thunderin' On the Academic shin, Back them cowhide boots to win! Academs, take care!

* * * * *

But the morning of the great day came with a broad, red sun rolling and tumbling in mist, which blew away with rising wind and let the sun in to dry the field.

* * * * *

And _we_ were the heroes; the great observed of all observers. We trod the earth with a large, heroic tread. I, the smallest, last, and youngest of the company, walked with the lordiest stride of all. The season long I had fought for a "place on the team," and I had won, and Annie was there to see. Never mind who Annie was. I am telling now about a football team.

"Look at Banty, here," I heard a Normalite say, "captain o' the team, ain't he? Hull thing, an' dog under the wagon."

Even Annie smiled, and just then my cousin Teddy came up.

"What are you lookin' so red an' savage about?" says Teddy.

"Achin' to jump into that Normal team," says I.

Under the big oak Rob Mackenzie and Tom Powell, with the big fellows around them, were settling the last preliminaries. The referee pitched the coin.

"Heads it is," called Tom quietly. "We'll take the north goal." The wind by this time was stiff out of the north, and the Normals had won the toss.

* * * * *

Now, too, we saw the meaning of the mysterious practice in Normal Hall. Along the lower edge of the pasture, and forming the eastern side-line, there ran a "tight board" fence, and next it, the entire length of the pasture, the shallow ditch I have already spoken of. In that ditch we used to fight half of our scrimmages, and in that ditch the Normals concentrated their strategy and strength. In massive formation, the ball in the midst, protected by the fence on one side and by a moving stockade of stout legs and sturdy shoulders on the other, down the ditch they would drive, sweeping away our lighter fellows like leaves as they went, on and on, to what seemed an inevitable goal.

But right there the weakness of the play developed. The goal posts stood, as in the modern game, midway the ends of the field. No "touch-downs" counted, only goals; and to make a goal they must leave their ditch and protecting fence and come out into the open. And there Rob Mackenzie gathered his heavy men for the defense. With Whitty, and Nic, and Jim Greening, and the others, he would ram the Normal formation until it broke; then unless someone had done it before him, he would go in himself, capture the ball, and with Whitty, his team-mate, rush away with it toward the Normal goal.

* * * * *

The second half began, and the Normal pace grew faster. Those endurin' muscles, "hardened on the old farm," that "had cradled two acres of oats a day, day in day out, under the July sun," were beginning to tell. Like a sledge-hammer at a shaking door the Normal formation pounded at our defence. When the door should fall seemed but a matter of time. The Normalite roar along the side-line grew louder. Again and again, while the scrimmage thickened, with John Hicks and Scott and Simpson hurling into it, would burst out their thundering refrain:

Hooray for our hayseed hair; It gits there! An' our boots so big an' square; Every pair! And when you hear 'em thunderin' On the Academic shin, Back them cowhide boots to win! Academs, beware!

And only for Rob Mackenzie we should again and again have gone down. How through our darkening fortunes shone the unconquerable spirit and energy of his play! Like that kind of ancient Bedouins who, "when Evil bared before them his hindmost teeth, flew gaily to meet him, in company or alone!" Again and again the Normal formation rolled along the ditch sweeping our out-fighters before it, and again and again, as it reached the critical point and swung out into the field to make the goal, would Rob hurl against it his heavy attack,--Whitty, and Rhodes, and Limp, and Jim Greening, and big Nic, and finally himself,--till the Normal mass went into chaos; out of which, through some unguarded gap, the ball would come tumbling, Rob and Whitty behind it; then down the field together they would dart, the ball before them, we youngsters yelling madly in the rear, the battle-fire in us, which had flagged with fear, bursting up again in yells of exultation like a flame.

Yet not to score; again neither side could score. The second half approached its end, and it seemed as if the game would remain a tie. As the two sides suddenly realized this, there came, as if by common consent, a pause. The Babel-roar along the side-line dropped into a hum. Then a voice called out,--it was Tom Powell; you could hear him all over the field:

"How much more time?"

And the answer came clear and clean-cut through the dead silence:

"One minute and a half!"

The Academics yelled with joy; no hope now of winning, but in so short a time the Normals cannot score; we escape defeat; it will be a drawn battle. Then they stilled again, not so sure.

For the Normal "sledge-hammer" was uplifting for a last blow. One chance remained, and Tom Powell staked all on a final cast. He left only Van Lone to guard his goal. Every other man of his team he would build into the breaks of his formation in a last determined attack. Wave after wave he had hurled against us; now this last, "a ninth one, gathering all the deep," he would hurl.

The attack came on, and our out-fighters as usual went down before it. In practically perfect order, with Simpson and John Hicks in flank, and Tom Powell himself at the centre, it turned out of the ditch for the goal. Whitty and Jim Greening went down; then big Nic. The Normal uproar gathered and swelled and burst, and swelled and burst again as they swept on. In front, Rob Mackenzie, with a last handful, stood yet. He spoke a few low, sharp words, and they went forward, not in mass, but in _line_.

The cooler heads looked and wondered. What did it mean? What could a thin line do against that massive-moving squad of men? but just wrap round it like a shred of twine, and like twine again, break, while the mass swept on.

So the line moved forward; but just as it was on point to strike, it stumbled apparently, the whole line together, and went down. The Normal yell rose again. But it rose too soon; the line was not down, but crouching there, a barricade across the Normal path. The stroke of strategy was too sudden to be met. Driven on by its very mass and the blind momentum of the men in the rear, the Normal formation struck our crouching line, toppled momentarily, as a wave topples over a wall of rock; then, self-destroying, its van tumbling over the Academic line, its rear plunging on over its broken front, it crumbled, broke, and stopped.

Then, while the Academics along the side-line went mad with exultation, the fallen chaos struggled to its feet, a wilder chaos than ever, a score of boots slamming for the ball at once, which bounded back and forth like a big leathern shuttlecock in the midst.

So, for a long-drawn moment, then it leaped out clear and free, and a player after it like a cannon-flash, down the field toward the Normal goal. Well may the Academics yell! It is Rob Mackenzie,--fastest man on the ground, and away now with a free field! Hard after him John Hicks, with every sinew at the stretch, and teeth grim-set, and the whole Normal team streaming in a wild tail of pursuit behind. The side-line, which, until now, had held the surge of spectators, burst like a dam in flood, and poured a yelling torrent toward the Normal goal.

There stood big Van Lone, sole guardian bulldog at that gate; an honest bulldog, but terribly bewildered, all pandemonium storming in on him at once. He started forward, but what could he do against Rob Mackenzie? The ball rises over his head, hovers an instant at top flight, or seems to; then shoots forward between the goal posts. The game was won!

And who that was there will ever forget the celebration that followed? Rob Mackenzie tossed skyward on a hundred shoulders, with mighty shouts, till the old pasture rocked and swam; the great, ruddy face of John Hicks, shining through the press, undimmed by defeat, as he came to greet his victorious foe; the meeting and hand-grasp of the two heroes, amid tremendous tumult, all lesser yells upborne on the oceanic roar of Nic; the wild processional through the town, tramping tumultuous to the roar of John Brown's Body, with Rob in triumphal chariot, rolling on down Main Street toward the west, where the clouds of sunset flamed into bonfires and the firey sun itself seemed a huge cannon's mouth hurling a thunder salute in honor of the event.

Well, all that happened years ago. Those old days can never come back. Even the old pasture I cannot see as I saw it then. It was only the other day, drawn by old thoughts revived, that I walked out to see it, through the still summer afternoon, down the old familiar road, so well known but so strangely quiet now, with its few scattered old white oaks and maples, that seem to nod sleepily in a kind of old friendliness, till you come to the turn by the burr oak grove where the pasture opens.

There they lay,--the long, tranquil slope, the green level that had been one field, the ditch along the fence,--under the quiet sunshine, in sleep and silence. Great, peaceful-looking white clouds, like great white cattle asleep, lay along the blue heaven overhead. The old oak where we were used to choose up stood motionless, as if it dreamed over the old days. Could this be indeed the old pasture, scene of our stormy uproar, this field asleep? I turned away with a half lonely feeling.

The old boys are gone, too, most of them, scattered I don't know where. Do they ever, I wonder, after the day's work is done, sit in the evening by the warm firelight, while the soft pipe-smoke wraps them in its tranquil cloud, and dream foolishly, as I do, over those old days? I like to think they do.

GEORGE BYRON MERRICK

The editors of this volume have been struck many times with the element of grouping that seems to have asserted itself in Wisconsin literary efforts, as in those of America, or England, or perhaps any country. Centers seem to be formed from which radiate light and glow of literary activities. Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the great literary center of our country in the middle fifty years of the nineteenth century. The Lake Region was such a center for English production in the preceding fifty years. In Wisconsin, naturally enough, the University has been the fountain from which has flowed much that is most worth-while in the literature of our state. It should be noted that not only those who are formally grouped here with the University as their center may justly be thought to be vitally indebted to that institution for the impulse to write. Among the authors first mentioned in this book, John Muir, Zona Gale, Mrs. Willsie, and Professor Sanford all were students at the University, and no doubt were profoundly influenced by their Alma Mater.

The next most important source of inspiration to our authors seems to have been our rivers. The beautiful bluffs bordering the Mississippi; the charm and grace of the sweeping lines of Lake Pepin; the tumbling, rushing waters of the Wisconsin, with their thickly-wooded hills and their green slopes of prairie and their October sunsets, seen through crimson oak and maple leaves; or the numerous falls of the upper Fox,--all have stirred the hearts of the fortunate people privileged to live within their influence. Hence, at Stevens Point, La Crosse, Appleton, and a few other cities in the state with similar surroundings, we have a literature with charming local flavor.

Elsewhere we quote Mr. Howard M. Jones's "When Shall We Together," which faithfully depicts the "river feeling" of those who love the Father of Waters.

We desire to acquaint our readers, at this point, however, with a brief excerpt from what is perhaps the most careful and faithful depiction of the Mississippi itself,--Mr. Merrick's "Old Times on the Upper Mississippi." The author lived for many years amid the scenes that he depicts, and for nine years was a pilot on an upper Mississippi boat. The romance and adventure of that life helped more to rouse and challenge the imagination than any other single feature of early pioneer days, and Mr. Merrick, though now what many would consider "pretty well along in years," is still young enough in the remembrance of those days. Like many another hard-working pioneer, he caught the spirit of his work, and he here has faithfully set down the most careful record of river annals in existence, from a historical standpoint, and at the same time one which grips the interest of the reader.

OLD TIMES ON THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI

The recollections of a steamboat pilot from 1854 to 1863, by George Byron Merrick. Copyright, 1909, by the author. From

## Chapter XXX, pp. 241-247.

I knew that I had not yet been weaned from the spokes, and doubted if I ever should be. I said that I would try, and I did. I filed an application for the first leave of absence I had ever asked for from the railroad company, and it was granted. I found a man to assist the "devil" in getting out my paper, he doing the editing for pure love of editing, if not from love of the editor. We set our house in order, packed our trunk and grips, and when the specified fortnight was ended, we (my wife, my daughter, and myself) were comfortably bestowed in adjoining staterooms in the ladies' cabin of the "Mary Morton," and I was fidgeting about the boat, watching men "do things" as I had been taught, or had seen others do, twenty years ago or more.

The big Irish mate bullied his crew of forty "niggers," driving them with familiar oaths, to redoubled efforts in getting in the "last" packages of freight, which never reached the last. Among the rest, in that half hour, I saw barrels of mess pork--a whole car load of it, which the "nigger" engine was striking down into the hold. Shades of Abraham! pork _out_ of St. Paul! Twenty years before, I had checked out a whole barge load (three hundred barrels) through from Cincinnati, by way of Cairo. Cincinnati was the great porkopolis of the world, while Chicago was yet keeping its pigs in each back yard, and every freeholder "made" his own winter's supply of pork for himself. The steward in charge of the baggage was always in the way with a big trunk on the gangway, just as of old. The engineers were trying their steam, and slowly turning the wheel over, with the waste cocks open, to clear the cylinders of water. The firemen were coaxing the beds of coal into the fiercer heats. The chief clerk compared the tickets which were presented by hurrying passengers with the reservation sheet, and assigned rooms, all "the best," to others who had no reservations. The "mud" clerk checked his barrels and boxes and scribbled his name fiercely and with many flourishes to the last receipts. The pilot on watch, Mr. Burns, sat on the window ledge in the pilot house, and waited. The captain stood by the big bell, and listened for the "All ready, Sir!" of the mate. As the words were spoken, the great bell boomed out one stroke, the lines slacked away and were thrown off the snubbing posts. A wave of the captain's hand, a pull at once of the knobs of the wheel-frame, the jingle of a bell far below, the shiver of the boat as the great wheel began its work, and the bow of the "Mary Morton" swung to the south; a couple of pulls at the bell-rope, and the wheel was revolving ahead; in a minute more the escape pipes told us that she was "hooked up," and with full steam ahead we were on our way to St. Louis. And I was again in the pilot house with my old chief, who bade me "show us what sort of an education you had when a youngster."

Despite my forty years I was a boy again, and Tom Burns was the critical chief, sitting back on the bench with his pipe alight, a comical smile oozing out of the corners of mouth and eyes, for all the world like the teacher of old.

The very first minute I met the swing of the gangplank derrick (there is no jack staff on the modern steamboat, more's the pity), with two or three strokes when one would have been a plenty, yawing the boat around "like a toad in a hailstorm," as I was advised. I could feel the hot blood rushing to my cheeks, just as it did twenty years before under similar provocation, when the eye of the master was upon me. I turned around and found that Mr. Burns had taken it in, and we both laughed like boys--as I fancy both of us were for the time.

But I got used to it very soon, getting the "feel of it," and as the "Mary Morton" steered like a daisy I lined out a very respectable wake; though Tom tried to puzzle me a good deal with questions as to the landmarks, most of which I had forgotten save in a general way....

A mile or two below Hastings I saw the "break" on the surface of the water which marked the resting-place of the "Fanny Harris," on which I had spent so many months of hard work, but which, looked back upon through the haze of twenty years, now seemed to have been nothing but holiday excursions.

At Prescott I looked on the familiar water front, and into the attic windows where with my brother I had so often in the night watches studied the characteristics of boats landing at the levee. Going ashore I met many old-time friends, among whom was Charles Barnes, agent of the Diamond Jo Line, who had occupied the same office on the levee since 1858, and had met every steam boat touching the landing during all those years. He was the Nestor of the profession, and was one of the very few agents still doing business on the water front who had begun such work prior to 1860. Since then, within a few years past, he also has gone, and that by an accident, while still in the performance of duties connected with the steamboat business.

Dropping rapidly down the river, we passed Diamond Bluff without stopping, but rounded to at Red Wing for passengers and freight, and afterward headed into a big sea on Lake Pepin, kicked up by the high south wind that was still blowing. We landed under the lee of the sandpit at Lake City, and after getting away spent the better part of an hour in picking up a barge load of wheat, that was anchored out in the lake....

I turned in at an early hour, and lay in the upper berth, listening to the cinders skating over the roof a couple of feet above my face, and translating the familiar sounds that reached me from the engine-room and roof--the call for the draw at the railroad bridge, below the landing; the signal for landing at Wabasha; the slow bell, the stopping-bell, the backing bell, and a dozen or twenty unclassified bells, before the landing was fully accomplished; the engineer trying the water in the boilers; the rattle of the slice-bars on the sides of the furnace doors as the firemen trimmed their fires; and one new and unfamiliar sound from the engine-room--the rapid exhaust of the little engine driving the electric generator, the only intruder among the otherwise familiar noises, all of which came to my sleepy senses as a lullaby.

MRS. HATTIE TYNG GRISWOLD.

Hattie Tyng was born in Boston in 1840, and came with her parents to Columbus, Wisconsin, in 1850, where, in course of time, she was married to Mr. Griswold, and it was in this delightful village that much of her work as an author was done. Here she died in 1909.

The books by which she is best-known are: "Apple Blossoms," "Waiting on Destiny," "Lucile and Her Friends," and "The Home Life of Great Authors." It is from the last named book that our selection is taken. As its title would indicate, the book aimed to give a more personal and intimate view of men and women well-known to fame than is to be found in most reference works. The young readers of this volume will know that mere dates and statistics do not enable them to know people; they like to have some personal details as to the habits and daily lives of the people about whom they read. Mrs. Griswold was so filled with the true teaching instinct that she realized this. She says in one of her works that since she had such a hard time when she was a little girl getting any picture in her mind of the great people about whom she read, that she determined to make it easier for other boys and girls to get these mental pictures; that is why she wrote "The Home Life of Great Authors."

JOHN G. WHITTIER

From "HOME LIFE OF GREAT AUTHORS." Copyright, 1886, A. C. McClurg & Co.

The poet Whittier always calls to mind the prophet-bards of the olden time. There is much of the old Semetic fire about him, and ethical and religious subjects seem to occupy his entire mind. Like his own Tauler, he walks abroad, constantly

"Pondering the solemn Miracle of Life; As one who, wandering in a starless night, Feels momently the jar of unseen waves, And hears the thunder of an unknown sea Breaking along an unimagined shore."

His poems are so thoroughly imbued with this religious spirit that they seem to us almost like the sacred writings of the different times and nations of the world. They come to the lips upon all occasions of deep feeling almost as naturally as the Scriptures do. They are current coin with reformers the world over. They are the Alpha and Omega of deep, strong religious faith. Whoever would best express his entire confidence in the triumph of the right, and his reliance upon God's power against the devices of men, finds the words of Whittier upon his lips; and to those who mourn and seek for consolation, how naturally and involuntarily come back lines from his poems they have long treasured, but which perhaps never had a personal application until now! To the wronged, the down-trodden, and the suffering they appeal as strongly as the Psalms of David. He is the great High Priest of Literature. But few priests at any time have had such an audience and such influence as he. The moral and religious value of his work can scarcely be overstated. Who can ever estimate the power which his strong words have had throughout his whole career in freeing the minds of other millions from the shackles of unworthy old beliefs? His blows have been strong, steady, persistent. He has never had the fear of man before his eyes. No man has done more for freedom, fellowship and character in religion than he. Hypocrisy and falsehood and cant have been his dearest foes, and he has ridden at them early and late with his lance poised and his steed at full tilt. Indeed, for a Quaker, Mr. Whittier must be said to have a great deal of the martial spirit. The fiery, fighting zeal of the old reformers is in his blood. You can imagine him as upon occasion enjoying the imprecatory Psalms. In his anti-slavery poems there is a depth of passionate earnestness which shows that he could have gone to the stake for his opinions had he lived in an earlier age than ours. That he did risk his life for them, even in our own day, is well known. During the intense heat of the anti-slavery conflict he was mobbed once and again by excited crowds; but he was not to be intimidated by all the powers of evil, and continued to speak his strong words and to sing his inspiring songs, whether men would hear or whether they would forbear. And those Voices of Freedom, whatever may be thought of them by mere critics and litterateurs, will outlast any poems of their day, and sound "down the ringing grooves of Time" when much that is now honored has been forgotten. He will be known as the Poet of a great Cause, the Bard of Freedom, as long as the great anti-slavery conflict is remembered. He is a part, and an important part, of the history of his country, a central figure in the battalions of the brave. Those wild, stirring bugle-calls of his cheered the little army, and held it together many a time when the cause was only a forlorn hope, and they came with their stern defiance into the camp of the enemy with such masterful power that some gallant enemies deserted to his side. They were afraid to be found fighting against God, as Whittier had convinced them they were doing. There is the roll of drums and the clash of spears in these stirring strains; there are echoes from Thermopylae and Marathon, and the breath of the old Greek heroes is in the air; there is a hint of the old Border battle-cries from Scotland's hills and tarns; from Jura's rocky wall we can catch the cheers of Tell; and the voice of Cromwell can often be distinguished in the strain.

There is also the sweep of the winds through the pine woods, and the mountain blasts of New England, and the strong, fresh breath of the salt sea; all tonic influences, in short, which braced up the minds of the men of those days to a fixed and heroic purpose, from which they never receded until their end was achieved. It has become the fashion in these days of dilettanteism to say that earnestness and moral purpose have no place in poetry, and small critics have arisen who claim that Mr. Whittier has been spoiled as a poet by his moral teachings. To these critics it is only necessary to point to the estimation in which Mr. Whittier's poetry is held by the world, and to the daily widening of his popularity among scholars and men of letters, as well as among the people, to teach them that this ruined poetry is likely to live when all the merely pretty poetry they so much admire is forgotten forever. The small poets who are afraid of touching a moral question for fear of ruining their poems would do well to compare Poe, who is the leader of their school and its best exponent, with Mr. Whittier, and to ask themselves which is the more likely to survive the test of time. Let them also ponder the words of Principal Shairp, one of the finest critics of the day, when he says of the true mission of the poet, that "it is to awaken men to the divine side of things; to bear witness to the beauty that clothes the outer world, the nobility that lies hid, often obscured, in human souls; to call forth sympathy for neglected truths, for noble and oppressed persons, for down-trodden causes; and to make men feel that through all outward beauty and all pure inward affection God himself is addressing them." They would do well also to ponder the words of Ruskin, who believes that only in as far as it has a distinct moral purpose is a literary work of value to the world.

ALBERT H. SANFORD.

Professor Albert H. Sanford, of the La Crosse State Normal School, is best known as an author of text books and pamphlets on history and related subjects. But he is, like all the other school men whose works are represented here, interested in other fields besides his specialty.

Born in the southwestern part of Wisconsin, he naturally became interested in farming, and in the development of agriculture in the agricultural section. From this interest and his natural bent toward anything historical grew his desire to picture briefly and attractively the development of this most important industry of our country from its early beginnings in colonial times to the present day. His book is filled with narratives and expositions which will hold the interest of any boy or girl who likes to read stories of adventure or trial, of hardship, and of final success.

The most noteworthy feature of Professor Sanford's style is clarity, coupled with logical sequence and organization. The brief selection here given illustrates these qualities, and represents very fairly the remainder of the book.

THE STORY OF AGRICULTURE IN THE UNITED STATES

Copyright, 1916, by D. C. Heath & Co. From Chapter X.

When farms were scattered, life became lonely and monotonous; the people therefore took advantage of every possible occasion to have social gatherings. House raisings and log-rollings gave opportunity for such meetings. The women met in sewing and quilting bees and apple-parings; the men came for the evening meal and remained for the country dance. The husking-bee was the most exciting of these events. The long pile of corn was divided equally between two leaders, who first "chose sides" for the contest. Then the men fell to the work with a will, each side determined to finish its portion first. Sometimes the rivalry ran into rough play and even fighting; but the spirit of good nature prevailed at the supper that had been prepared by the women in the meantime.

To these "frolics" were added, in later years, the spelling matches and singing schools, attended by both old and young. The coming of the backwoods "circuit rider" to hold a religious service in some log cabin or in the schoolhouse was an event of importance. The summer "camp meetings" were attended by hundreds of families, and here a chance was given for those who had forgotten the ways of civilized life in the midst of the rough frontier conditions to be "converted" and to return to better ways. The preaching, singing, and praying were all done by main strength, both of voice and of muscle.

The frontier farmer boy had no lack of occupation. He split the kindling and the wood for the fire-place and gathered the chips used for lighting the cabin when tallow dips were scarce. He fed and drove the cows, but let his sister do the milking. He took part in the work of washing and shearing the sheep. He helped in churning and soap-making, and ran the melted tallow into the tin candle-molds. He looked forward to butchering day as to a celebration. In the fall he chopped the sausage meat and the various ingredients of mince pies. On stormy days and winter evenings he might help his mother clean and card the wool, wind the yarn, and hetchel flax. Later she might call upon him for help in dyeing the homespun and bleaching the linen.

The boy was useful to his father when he searched the woods for good trees from which special articles were to be made, such as ax-helves and ox-yokes. From hickory saplings he could make splint brooms and cut out the splints used in making chair bottoms and baskets. He guarded the corn fields from squirrels and crows and set traps for wolves. He went on horse-back to the grist mill, which was generally some miles away, and waited there for his turn to have his sack of corn ground into meal. Along with these duties were some pleasures, such as going nutting and berrying and hunting for grapes. Bee-hunting gave its rich reward in the hollow trunk full of honey. "Sugaring off" twice in the spring was a special time of delight, though it brought its tasks in the making of wooden spouts, the carrying of buckets of sap and water, and the tending of fires.

CHARLES D. STEWART

Charles D. Stewart was born at Zanesville, Ohio, in 1868, and came with his people to Wisconsin when but a young boy. He received his elementary education in the public schools of Milwaukee, after which he attended Wayland Academy at Beaver Dam. Like many others of our authors, Mr. Stewart has had considerable connection with newspapers, but it is as an author of stories, poems, and critical articles, both in magazines and in published volumes, that he is best known. Perhaps the readers of this book are already familiar with his "The Fugitive Blacksmith," "Partners of Providence," "Essays on the Spot," "The Wrong Woman," etc. He is now executive clerk in Governor Philipp's office.

Mr. Stewart is an author with whom the reader frequently finds himself in disagreement. This is particularly true of his critical work, which has itself received severe criticism at the hands of some other critics, while in the opinion of still others Mr. Stewart has made distinct contributions to the field of English criticism, particularly with respect to Shakespeare. His style is rich and at times diffuse. He has a wealth of illustrative material at hand, and one might be inclined to say that at times Mr. Stewart allows himself to stray too far from his main theme in drawing upon these resources. On the other hand, the reader is constantly interested and frequently challenged, so that his intelligence is always brought into play in reading this author's work; and it is well to remember, as Ruskin says, that if we never read anything with which we disagreed we should never grow. It is the author who makes us think who does us the greatest service.

The selection here given is from "On a Moraine." It illustrates all the points of which we have spoken. To the editors it appeals as a piece of useful, patriotic Wisconsin literature. The whole article will well repay reading for anyone who loves the Badger state and wishes to know it better. It shows a keen appreciation of the beautiful, and ready imagination in making comparisons where one least expects to find them, as in the suggestion of likeness between the freshly exposed surfaces of a newly split rock, on the one hand, and the wings of a moth on the other.

The article also well illustrates the treatment of a somewhat technical and supposedly dry subject in a delightful and imaginative manner.

ON A MORAINE

Upon the shoulder of a terminal moraine was a barley-field whose fence was to furnish me with stone; and I prospected its beauties with a six-pound sledge. "Hardheads" many of them [the stones] were called, and they let fly enough sparks that summer to light the fire for a thousand years. They were igneous rocks, and they responded in terms of fire.

Such rocks! Rag-carpets woven in garnet and topaz; petrified Oriental rugs; granites in endless designs of Scotch mixture, as if each bowlder were wearing the plaid of its clan; big, uncouth, scabiose, ignorant-looking hardheads that opened with a heart of rose,--each one a separate album opening to a sample from a different quarry. I have seen cloven field-stone that deserved a hinge and a gold clasp; I have one in sight now which is such a delicate contrast of faintest rose and mere spiritual green that it is like the first blush of dawn. Imagine smiting a rock until the fragments sting you in the face, and then seeing it calmly unfold the two wings of a moth! I have broken into a rock which pleased me so well that I held it in mind in order to match it; but though I had the pick of a hundred and sixty loads that summer I never found another. There is "individuality" for you.

Some of them are "niggerheads." These are the hardest rock known to practical experience. There are those that have refused to succumb to the strongest hitters in the country. Some of them will break and others will not; the only way is to try. Fortunately I had had some early training as a blacksmith; but this was as if the smith were trying to break his anvil. I have seen the steel face of a hammer chip off without making a mark on one. And yet the glaciers wore them off to make soil and left them rounded like big pebbles! I never realized what ground is, till I became acquainted with the stones that did the grinding.

My fence was eight to ten feet in thickness and shoulder high; and similar windrows of rock ran over the moraine in all directions, like a range upon a range. It is, of course, valuable land that warrants a wall like that. The barley-field might easily have defied a siege-gun on all four sides, for it had had so many bowlders on it that they had been built up into more of a rampart than a windrow. On a near-by field from which the timber had been removed, but which, notwithstanding, was far from "cleared," it looked as if it had hailed bowlders. You could have forded your way across it without putting a foot to ground. I have seen places where the glaciers had deposited rocks in surprising uniformity of size, and as thick as the heads of an audience (a comparison that means no harm, I trust).

Because of my encounters with "niggerheads," and other layerless or massive rock, I had difficulty in getting a handle which would not give out. Not that I broke them with mislicks, but the sudden bounce of the steel jolts the grain of the wood apart, and then a split begins to work its way up the handle. After this happens a man will not try to crack many bowlders, for the split hickory vibrates in a way that hurts. That sudden sting and numbing of the arm is the only sensation I ever came across that resembles the sting of a Texas scorpion; and that is an injection of liquid lighting that suffuses the membranes from hand to shoulder, and dwells a while and fades away. I might say here that the sting of the dreaded scorpion is harmless, like that of the tarantula, as any one with a few experiences knows. A wrong-headed bowlder that has kept itself intact for ages and spits fire at you, and then takes measures to protect itself, is far more dangerous. One of them shot off a piece with such force that it went through my clothing and made a respectable wound. This, however, is just what is needed to rouse you up and make you hit back; and when you have had success with this one you are sure to pass on to another.

There is an enticement in their secret, locked-up beauty that lures you on from rock to rock till nightfall. Thus you are kept at it, till some day you find you have become a slave of the exercise habit; you are addicted to sunshine and sweat and cool spring water; your nose, so long a disadvantage to you, comes to life and discovers so many varieties of fresh air that every breath has a different flavor to it. As for myself, I rather prefer to take wild plum or clover in my atmosphere--or a good whiff of must off the barley-field. Along in July it is excellent to work somewhere in the jurisdiction of a basswood tree. Compare this with the office-building or the street-car, where the only obtainable breath is second-hand. Nobody could now coax you back to where people have eyes that see not, tongues that taste not, and noses that smell not unless they have to. I _have_ experienced smells in a city that would make a baby cry....

And this reminds me to conclude--where possibly I should have begun--with the remarkable pedigree of the state itself. Stretching across Canada, north of the St. Lawrence, and ending in the regions about the source of the Mississippi, is a range of low granite hills called the Laurentian Highlands. These hills are really mountains that are almost worn out, for they are the oldest land in America, and, according to Agassiz, the oldest in the world. In the days when there was nothing but water on the face of the globe, these mountains came up--a long island of primitive rock with universal ocean chafing against its shores. None of the other continents had put in their appearance at the time America was thus looking up. The United States began to come to light by the gradual uplifting of this land to the north and the appearance of the tops of the Alleghanies, which were the next in order. Later, the Rockies started up. The United States grew southward from Wisconsin and westward from Blue Ridge. An early view of the country would have shown a large island which is now northern Wisconsin, and a long, thin tongue of this primitive rock sticking down from Canada into Minnesota, and these two growing states looking out over the waters at the mere beginnings of mountain-ranges east and west. They were waiting for the rest of the United States to appear.

As the heated interior of the earth continued to cool and contract, and the water-covered crust sank in some places, and kept bulging up higher in others, the island of northern Wisconsin continued to grow, and the Alleghanies came up with quite a strip of territory at their base. The western mountains made no progress whatever; it was as if they had some doubt about the matter. A view at another stage of progress would have shown Wisconsin and Minnesota entirely out, and pulling up with them the edges of adjoining states, and a strip along the Atlantic about half as wide as New York or Pennsylvania. Still no United States. There was water between these two sections and some islands scattered about in the south. The western mountains had not been progressing at all; they lagged behind for aeons. These two sections, beginning with Wisconsin and Minnesota in the west and the Alleghanies in the east, kept reaching out till they made continuous land; and thus Ohio and all those states between are some ages younger. But they are much older than the west; for at a time when the whole eastern half of the continent had long appeared, the Gulf Stream was flowing across the west, and the waters were depositing the small sea-shells which make the calcareous matter under Kansas loam. All that country is much younger, and the western mountains are as big as they are simply because they have not had time to become worn down. As to Florida, it was a mere afterthought, an addition built on by coral insects.

The whole story of those east-central and southern states--how Pennsylvania and Ohio and Illinois got their coal, and Michigan her salt--would make a lengthy narrative; I have mentioned just enough to show the age of Wisconsin and the still greater age of some of that glacial matter that came down from the direction of the Laurentian Highlands. It is the oldest land in the world; and the other states, I am sure, will not resent my taking out the state's pedigree and showing it. Wisconsin took part with the east in what geologists call the Appalachian Revolution,--is a veritable Daughter of the Revolution. I mention it merely because I think it greatly to the credit of a dairy state that, at a time so early in the world's morning, she was up and doing.

ELLIOTT FLOWER

Elliott Flower is another of Wisconsin's writers who came into the field of literature through newspaper work. He was born at Madison in 1863, and after receiving a common school education there, he went to Phillips Academy at Massachusetts. He was editor of the Rambler in 1885 and 1886, and after that he was for some years engaged in editorial work on Chicago papers. Since 1899, however, most of his work has been of a purely literary nature, and his residence has been in Madison for some time. He is the author of "Policeman Flynn," "The Spoilsman," "Nurse Norah," "Delightful Dog," and other books.

The story from which we quote is "The Impractical Man." It is fairly representative of a considerable portion of his work. It shows a keen sense of humor, a skillful handling of conversation, and considerable knowledge of human nature. Our selection embraces the first and last portions of the story. Between these selections many experiences fall to the lot of the "impractical man." There is an adventure in the woods, in which the men are lost, and there are many laughable experiences in a canoe. In this story, as is frequently the case in Mr. Flower's work, the unexpected happens, and the character whom the reader has been inclined to pity because of his inability to take care of himself suddenly proves to be shrewd enough to outwit those with whom he is dealing.

THE IMPRACTICAL MAN

From the Century Magazine, Vol. 64, p. 549.

"I am sorry to inform you," said Shackelford, the lawyer, "that you have been to some trouble and expense to secure a bit of worthless paper. This--" and he held up the document he had been examining--"is about as valuable as a copy of last week's newspaper."

It is possible that Shackelford really regretted the necessity of conveying this unpleasant information to Peter J. Connorton, Cyrus Talbot, and Samuel D. Peyton; but, if so, his looks belied him, for he smiled very much as if he found something gratifying in the situation.

Connorton was the first to recover from the shock.

"Then it's a swindle!" he declared hotly. "We'll get that fellow Hartley! He's a crook! We'll make him--"

"Oh, no," interrupted Shackelford, quietly, "it's no swindle. According to your own story, you prepared the paper yourself and paid him for his signature to it."

"We paid him twenty-five thousand dollars for his patent," asserted Connorton.

"But you didn't get the patent," returned Shackelford. "He has assigned to you, for a consideration of twenty-five thousand dollars, all his rights, title, and interest in something or other, but the assignment doesn't clearly show what. There are a thousand things that it might be, but nothing that it definitely and positively _is_. Very likely he doesn't know this, but very likely somebody will tell him. Anyhow, you've got to clear an unquestioned title before you can do anything with the patent without danger of unpleasant consequences."

Deeper gloom settled upon the faces of the three, and especially upon the face of Connorton, who was primarily responsible for their present predicament.

"What would you advise?" asked Connorton at last.

"Well," returned the lawyer, after a moment of thought, "you'd better find him. As near as I can make out, he had no thought of tricking you."

"Oh, no, I don't believe he had," confessed Connorton. "I spoke hastily when I charged that. He's too impractical for anything of the sort."

"Much too impractical, I should say," added Talbot, and Peyton nodded approval.

"In that case," pursued the lawyer, "you can still clinch the deal easily and quickly--if you get to him first. I see nothing

## particularly disturbing in the situation, except the possibility that

somebody who _is_ practical may get hold of him before you do, or that he may learn in some other way of the value of his invention. Do you know where he is?"

"No," answered Connorton. "That's the trouble."

"Not so troublesome as it might be," returned the lawyer. "He is not trying to hide, if we are correct in our surmise, and his eccentricities of dress and deportment would attract attention to him anywhere. I have a young man here in the office who will get track of him in no time, if you have nothing better to suggest."

They had nothing better to suggest, so Byron Paulson was called in, given a description of Ira Hartley, together with such information as to his associates and haunts as it was possible to give, and sent in quest of news of him.

"Meanwhile," observed the lawyer, "I'll prepare something for his signature, when we find him, that will have no loopholes in it."

* * * * *

Connorton and Paulson had no difficulty in securing permission to talk with Hartley, and they approached with considerable confidence the cell in which he was detained. It had occurred to them, upon reflection, that they were now in a most advantageous position in the matter of their business relations with the inventor. He was friendless in a strange city. He was believed to be of unsound mind, and his actions had been erratic enough to give color to that belief. He could hardly hope to secure his release without their help, and if so, they could impose their own terms before extending that help.

To their surprise, they found him quite cheerful and apparently indifferent or blind to the seriousness of his predicament.

"Hullo, Connorton!" he cried, when he saw them approaching. "Any other proposition to make now?"

"Why, no, certainly not," replied Connorton. "We came to see about you."

"Awfully good of you," laughed Hartley. "How you do love me, Connorton!"

Connorton's face reddened, but he ignored the thrust. "You've got yourself in a nice fix, Hartley," he remarked.

"Oh, it's of no consequence," exclaimed Paulson.

"Not to me," asserted Hartley. "It may be to you, of course."

The impractical man appeared to be able to take a very practical view of some matters, and Connorton was the more perturbed and uneasy in consequence.

"They say you're crazy," suggested Connorton.

"And I guess they can prove it, too," rejoined Hartley, cheerfully. "You've said the same thing yourself, and I know you wouldn't lie about a mere trifle like that. Then, the conductor, the engineer, and the fireman of the train we came down on will swear to it ... not to mention the cooper, the hotel clerk, a few bell-boys, and the policeman who arrested me. Yes, I guess I'm crazy, Connorton. Too bad, isn't it?"

"It's likely to be bad for you," said Connorton.

"Oh, no," returned Hartley, easily, "I'm not violent, you know, just mentally defective; unable to transact business, as you might say. They'll find that out and let me go; but there will be the taint, the suspicion, the doubt. Very likely a conservator will be appointed when I get back home--some shrewd, sharp fellow, with a practical mind."

Such a very impractical man was the inventor, and so very troublesome in his impracticality! Connorton could only begin at the beginning again, and go slow.

"Suppose we get you out," he ventured, "what would you be willing to do?"

"What would you be willing to do?" retorted Hartley.

"What do you mean by that?" demanded Connorton.

"I'm sure I don't know," replied Hartley, with an air of the utmost frankness. "I seldom mean anything, of course, and it is such a lot of trouble to find out what I do mean when I mean anything that I usually give it up. But you are so deeply interested in me--so much more interested in me than I am in myself--that I thought you might want to keep me sane; that you might not like to feel that you had driven me crazy."

Paulson was about to interrupt, but Connorton motioned to him to be silent. Connorton was in the habit of handling his own business matters, and he wanted his lawyer to speak only when a legal proposition was put directly up to him. It may be admitted that he was sorely perplexed now; but he found nothing in the inventor's face but a bland smile, and he did not think Paulson could help him to interpret that.

"Hartley," he said at last, "I'll get you out of here and add five thousand to what you've already had the moment that patent is properly transferred to me."

"Connorton," returned the inventor, "I believe I'm crazy. When I think of the events of the last few days--of your more than brotherly interest in me, which I have pleasurably exploited during our delightful association--I believe I am crazy enough to say, come again!"

Connorton drew a long breath and conceded another point. "Hartley," he proposed, "you may keep the money I have already given you--"

"Thank you," said Hartley; "I shall."

"--and you may also have a quarter interest in the patent," concluded Connorton.

"It's all mine now," suggested Hartley.

"If so," argued Connorton, who well knew that much of the money had been spent, "you owe me twenty-five thousand dollars."

"If so," returned Hartley, the impractical man, "I infer from your anxiety and extraordinary generosity that I can sell it for enough to pay you and make a little margin for myself. Besides, you can't collect from a crazy man, Connorton; and I'm getting crazier every minute. Business always goes to my head, Connorton. You must have noticed that up in the woods. I'm really becoming alarmed about myself. But perhaps, you'd rather do business with a conservator, Connorton."

"A half interest," urged Connorton, desperately, as he mentally reviewed the weakness of his own position in view of the unsuspected perspicacity of the inventor. "Consider that I have paid you twenty-five thousand dollars for a half interest, and the other half is yours. I'll defray whatever expense is incurred in marketing the invention, too."

Hartley reflected, seeming in doubt. "Connorton," he said at last, "I think I am still getting the worst of it somewhere, but an impractical fellow like me deserves to get the worst of it. Go ahead! Have that agreement put in legal form, and then you may get me out while there is yet time to save my reason."

* * * * *

Connorton had finished his appeal for the release of Hartley. "Of course," he was told, "if you and Mr. Paulson will assume the responsibility and will immediately take him away, we shall be glad to let you have him; but he is undoubtedly demented."

"Demented!" snorted Connorton. "Say! you try to do business with him, and you'll think he's the sanest man that ever lived!"

JENKIN LLOYD JONES.

Jenkin Lloyd Jones is one of the best-known Wisconsin ministers. We say "Wisconsin," for, though he is now a resident of Chicago, his parents moved from South Wales to Wisconsin in 1843 when Jenkin Lloyd Jones was an infant. During his boyhood he worked on the home farm; then in 1862 he enlisted, and served for three years in the Sixth Wisconsin Battery in the Civil War. He is a graduate of the Meadville, Pennsylvania, theological seminary of the class of 1870. He holds an honorary degree of LL. D. granted by the University of Wisconsin in 1909. He was pastor of All Souls Church, Janesville, from 1871 to 1880. He established, with others, "Unity," a weekly paper, now organ of the Congress of Religion, and has been its editor since 1879. He organized All Souls Church in Chicago, and has been its pastor since 1882. He is the author of almost countless pamphlets and several books, among the latter being "Love and Loyalty," "What Does Christmas Really Mean," "On the Firing Line in the Battle for Sobriety," and his creative instinct has shown itself in the organization of many societies and institutions for the uplift of mankind.

NUGGETS FROM A WELSH MINE

Copyrighted by Olive E. Weston, 1902.

THE HOME (Page 14).

Love is the only safe and justifiable basis for a home. All Bibles, as well as all stories, all philosophy and all experience assert this.

Go to housekeeping, and, if possible, to house-building. Do not be outdone by the beaver. Do not sink lower than the bird, who builds its own nest, making it strong without and beautiful within.

That home alone is home where love generates generous impulses, noble purposes. True love will breed heavenly plans, nurse world-redeeming schemes, and enlist all the forces of earth in the interests of heaven.

There is no home where there is no common toil.

The world is the larger home. The child must early learn to feel its dependence on and its obligation to this larger home circle if it is to grow noble.

There are no furnishings to a house that really convert it into a home, which have not won their places, one by one, in the heart and brain of the housewife.

Civilization rests, not primarily on the court-house, or the college, or the public school building, or the post-office, or the railway station, or yet in the club, but in the home.

The trouble with our young people is not that they are too poor in material things to make for themselves a home, but that they are too poor in spiritual things to confess the poverty which might enable them to lay the foundations of a home, humble but altogether holy....

The beautiful heron, mad with a maternal love, blind to all dangers from without, bent only on protecting her brood, giving her life to her little ones, was killed by the woman who wears the graceful aigrette--that marvel of Nature's embroidery woven for a nuptial robe to the gracious bird. She, and none other, is responsible for that life, for it was for her sake that the bloody deed was done.

THE SCHOOL (Page 29).

The highest task that life holds for men and women is the choosing of an ideal to grow toward. It should be sufficiently far away to require a whole lifetime to pursue it.

It has taken a hundred years of agony and study to prove even in advanced America a man's right to his own body; a woman's right to her old soul; and the child's right to the development of his mind as of his muscle.

I plead for the true perspective in the training of your children. I believe, of course, in good bodies, comfortable and beautiful clothing, generous houses, and all the learning of the schools; I believe in intellectual joy and all the powers of thought, but only when they are subordinated to high affections and strong wills.

There is a power at work in the world that estimates gifts, not by the amount, but by the purpose that dictated them.

The kindergarten contains the seed of the gospel for children in its terminology when it seeks to develop the child by its "occupations."...

WORK (Page 111).

There can be no development, mental, spiritual, or physical, except by exercise.

Through labor we became creators, co-workers with God. Labor can be transfigured into a habit.

In the scales of the universe, a day's work will always weigh more than the dollar that pays for that day's work.

The tradesman who strives to know all about his own business and cares but little about any other, will not have much business of his own to absorb his attention after a while.

Blessed word is that,--"occupation." The new education is bound up in it. The health of the child is contained in it. The safety of the saint is represented by it, and the progress of humanity is dependent upon it.

When labor becomes the pride of the laborer, then he becomes fit object for the envy of kings.

The most disordered explosions of pent-up passions and unreleased power follow in the wake of enforced idleness.

There is no release from toil, and the only escape from the burdens of labor must come, not by its cessation, but by its glorification.

There is an overwork that is killing, but the danger from work, any work, all work, is trifling compared to the greater dangers of indolence.

There is always a large physical element in distances. It is always farther from the breakfast table to the field than it is from the field to the dinner table.

When the wheels of life bear me down for the last time, I ask for no higher compliment, I seek no truer statement of the work I have tried to do, than that which the white-headed old negress gave the beardless boy on the hot Corinth cornfield in 1862. Then, if I deserve it, let some one who loves me say, "Here is a Linkum soldier who has done got run over," one who, like his leader, tried to "pluck a thistle and plant a flower wherever a flower would grow."

EVERETT McNEIL.

MOTHER'S WOLF STORY

By Everett McNeil, for many years a resident of Stoughton, Wis., now living in New York. Taken from St. Nicholas, Vol. XXX, p. 387. Copyright by The Century Co.

(For many years a resident of Stoughton; now living in New York. Author of The Cave of Gold, In Texas with Davy Crockett, The Totem of Black Hawk, Fighting with Fremont, The Boy Forty-Niners, etc.)

When I was a boy there was one story which my sisters and brothers and I were never tired of hearing mother tell; for our own mother was its heroine and the scene of the thrilling chase was not more than a mile and a half from our own door. Indeed, we often went coasting on the very hill down which she took her fearful ride, and skated on the pond which was the scene of her adventure. I can still distinctly remember how, when the long winter evenings came and the snow lay deep on the ground and the wind whistled stormily without, we children would gather around the great sheet-iron stove in the sitting-room of the old farm-house and beg mother to tell us stories of the perils and hardships of her pioneer days; and how, invariably, before the evening was over some one of us would ask: "Now, mother, please do tell us, just once more, how you escaped from the wolves, when a girl, by coasting down Peek's Hill."

Mother would pause in her knitting, and, with a smile, declare that she had already told us the story "forty-eleven times"; but, just to please so attentive an audience, she would tell it even once more. Then, while we children crowded closer around her chair, she would resume her knitting and begin:

"When your grandfather settled in this part of Wisconsin I was a little girl thirteen years old. We moved into the log house father had prepared for us early in the spring, and by fall we had things fixed quite comfortable. The winter which followed was one of unusual severity. The snow fell, early in November, to the depth of three feet on the level; and the greater part of it remained on the ground all winter. This, of course, made grand coasting. Father made for me a sled with strong, hard, smooth hickory runners, and big enough for two to ride on. I declare, I don't believe there ever was such another sled for speed"; and mother's eyes would sparkle at the memories the thought of her faithful sled recalled.

"At this time the country was very thinly populated. Our nearest neighbor was Abner Jones, who lived some three miles away, over on the other side of Peek's Hill. Abner Jones had a little girl, named Amanda, about my own age, and we two children soon became great chums. After a big snow-storm, Amanda and I would go coasting on Peek's Hill whenever we could gain the permission of our parents. She would come over to my house, or I would go over to her house, and together we would go to the hill. Amanda had no sled; but we could both ride down on my sled, and then take turns pulling it up the hill.

"The first week in January there was a two-days' thaw, followed by a sharp freeze. This caused a thick, icy crust to form on top of the remaining snow, which, by the next day, became so hard and strong that it would bear the weight of a man. The water from the melted snow ran into the hollow at the foot of Peek's Hill, and made a large, deep pond, which was soon covered over with a sheet of gleaming ice. So, you see, Peek's Hill had become an ideal coasting-place; for we could slide down its steep side at lightning speed, and out upon the ice, and even clear across the pond, a good three-quarters of a mile from the top of the hill.

"On one Saturday afternoon following a thaw and a freeze-up, I secured the permission of my parents to go over to Amanda's and get her to come sliding with me down the hill. Father cautioned me to be sure and be home early, because the wolves, which at that time infested all this section of the country, were said to be getting very bold and fierce, especially at night time; and they had been known, when driven by hunger, to run down and kill horses and cattle and even human beings. Doubtless the cold and the deep snow had forced many southward from the great woods in the northern part of the State. But the caution fell on idle ears. I considered all wolves cowards; besides, I was not going to hunt wolves; I was bent upon coasting down-hill; and I did not believe any wolf would be foolish enough to take the trouble to run down a little girl when there were plenty of chickens and cattle to be had.

"I bundled up warmly, and, drawing my sled behind me, started 'cross lots over Peek's Hill to Amanda's house. Peek's Hill stood about half-way between our two homes. I left the heavy sled at the top of the hill to wait our return. When I reached the house I found Amanda laid up with a bad cold, and of course her mother would not allow her to go coasting; so I took off my things to stay in the house and play with her. Amanda had two rubber dolls, and we had such a jolly time playing with them that I did not notice how fast the time was passing until Mrs. Jones said, 'Come, my dear; it is time you were going!' Then she helped to bundle me up, gave me a doughnut hot from the kettle, and saw me safely started on my way home.

"The sun was nearing the western horizon. I glanced at it and hurried on. The first part of my way lay through heavy woods; then came an opening, in the midst of which rose Peek's Hill. The brow of the hill was perhaps forty rods from the edge of the woods, the steep incline down which we coasted being on the opposite side. There was no road, only a path worn through the snow by our neighborly feet.

"I had passed about half-way through the woods, when suddenly a great shaggy wolf bounded out into the path in front of me. The wolf stopped and glared hungrily at me for a moment, then dashed away into the brush. A moment after, I heard him howling a few rods in the rear. To my inexpressible horror, the howl was quickly answered by another, and then another, and still another, until to my terrified ears the woods seemed full of the ferocious beasts.

"There was no need of telling me what this meant. I was old enough and familiar enough with wolf-nature to know that the first wolf was calling to his mates to come and help him run down and kill his quarry.

"For a moment I stood still in my tracks, listening in trembling horror to the hideous howlings; then I gathered myself together and ran. Fear lent me wings. My feet seemed hardly to touch the snow. And yet it was but a minute before I heard the rapid pit-pat of the feet of the wolves on the hard crust of the snow behind me, and knew that they were drawing near. I reached the edge of the woods; and, as I dashed into the opening, I cast a hurried glance to the rear. Several great, gaunt wolves, running neck and neck, were not five rods behind me. They ran with their heads outstretched, making great bounds over the hard snow.

"At that time I was tall for my age, and could run like a deer. The sight of the wolves, so close behind me, caused me to redouble my efforts; but, in spite of my speed, as I reached the brow of the hill, I could hear their panting breaths, so near had they come. With a quick movement of my hands I threw off my heavy cloth cape and woolen hood. At the same instant my eyes caught sight of the sled, which I had left at the top of the hill. Fortunately it was standing facing the steep incline. If I could reach it before the wolves caught me, possibly I might yet escape! My hood and cape delayed the animals for an instant; but they were again upon me just as I, without slacking my speed in the least, caught the sled up into my hands and threw myself upon it.

"I think the sudden change in my position, just as they were about to spring on me, must have disconcerted the wolves for an instant; and before they recovered I was sliding down the hill. The wolves came tumbling and leaping after me, howling and snarling. At the start, the hill was very steep, and the frozen snow was as smooth and as slippery as ice. The sled kept going faster and faster, and soon I had the inexpressible delight of seeing that I was beginning to leave the wolves behind. Far below I saw the gleaming ice on the pond. About half-way down the hill the incline was considerably less steep, becoming nearly level just before reaching the pond. When I came to this part of the hill I again glanced behind, and, to my horror, saw that the wolves had begun to gain on me, and were now not more than two rods away. Evidently the sled was slowing up. There was nothing I could do to quicken its motion. My fate seemed certain. At last the sled reached the pond, and, while still but a few feet from the bank, I suddenly felt the ice bend and crack beneath me; but either my speed was too rapid or my weight too light, or both, for I did not break through, but sped swiftly on to stronger ice and to safety. For a moment the slippery ice delayed the wolves, then they came on swifter than ever, their sharp claws scratching the ice like knives. Finally I heard a crash, and glancing back, I saw a struggling jumble of heads and paws, and I knew in a moment that the combined weight of the wolves had broken through the ice at the weak place that had cracked as I passed over it.

"I left the sled at the margin of the pond, and hurried home, where, girl-like, I fell fainting into my mother's arms.

"There, children; that is how your mother escaped from the wolves by coasting down Peek's Hill; and that great wolfskin robe in the corner is one of the very hides that father took from the six bodies after he had dragged them out of the pond the next morning"; and mother, with a flush on her dear face, would point to the familiar wolfskin robe.

Then we children would bring the great robe from its place, spread it out on the floor before the fire, and, seating ourselves upon it, talk in low voices of the terrible ride our dear mother took down Peek's Hill when she was a girl and was chased by the wolves.

THE UNIVERSITY GROUP

The selections here placed together under the head, "The University Group," are taken from the works of authors who have taught or who are now teaching in the University of Wisconsin, and who may, therefore, be said both to have influenced it in its ideals and to have been influenced by it. The work of the editors in this section of the volume has been at once peculiarly pleasant and difficult. It has been pleasant because, under the shadow of Wisconsin's greatest institution of learning, there has come into birth a large body of interesting, instructive, and thoroughly worth-while literary material. The task has been difficult because the line between technical and special material treated in a literary way, and what may be styled pure literature, is very hard to draw. The editors realize thoroughly their fallibility in the making of these selections. So many books have been written, and so many contributions to both popular and technical magazines have been made by teachers in the University, that it is a physical impossibility even to scan them with any sure result of fairness or equity in the selection of real literature from the great mass that has been produced. The most that is claimed for the present selections is that at least they are thoroughly worth-while. No doubt a search covering sufficient time and dealing with a sufficiently large portion of the output of the University would reveal other works and other men worthy of representation in this volume.

There is another consideration that should be mentioned as rendering the task of the present editors peculiarly difficult: All but one of the men whose works are mentioned here are now living. Aside from the impossibility of wholly pleasing any man by a selection from or a criticism of his work, there is the inevitable fact that since most of these men are young, their actual relative standing as producers of literature is constantly and rapidly changing. As one reads the selections in the following pages, he is impressed most of all by the spirit of buoyancy and youth that pervades them. Scarcely a single selection here, even those by the older men, bears the imprint of satiety or completion. All are pulsing with life, hopefulness, buoyancy, and promise.

Again, in a book of this nature, selections must necessarily be brief. It is not possible to give really adequate representation to any one of these men, since the laws of space are inexorable.

Perhaps the one thing common to all sections in this group--the thing which will most readily and profoundly impress even the youngest reader--is a feeling of breadth of experience, wide observation, earnest, keen, and insatiable desire for truth,--in fact, all the opposites of narrowness, prejudice, provincialism. One feels at once that the writers here have read widely and well, that they have a fund of facts gained both from books and at first hand through travel and observation, and that their emotions and their judgments spring from this well of truth as they see it.

PRESIDENT VAN HISE

Charles Richard Van Hise needs no introduction to Wisconsin readers, nor indeed to readers in any part of America. He is a man whom our state may proudly call her own. He was born in Fulton in 1857, took his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering at his own State University in 1879 and his Ph. D. there in 1892, and throughout his whole life, since receiving his first degree, he has been in the faculty of his own Alma Mater. In 1903 he was made its president, which position he now holds.

He is recognized by all as the peer of any man in our country as an authority on geology. His face, through photographs appearing from time to time in public prints, is familiar to us all: while in Madison, and indeed in most cities of the state, his slightly bent figure, with the face peering forward as though seeking some new truth, would be readily recognized by any schoolboy.

When at Madison one of his favorite diversions is riding horseback, and no doubt in many of his geological trips horses have been his most dependable friends.

Needless to say, his interests are wide and varied. Nothing that affects the welfare of his country and its people is outside the field of his attention. Through his membership in many learned societies and his connection with various educational bodies and institutions he wields an influence for the spirit of truth and enlightenment second to almost none in the United States.

We quote here a brief passage from his writings to indicate something of the range of interests the mind and heart of Wisconsin's most active citizen find time in which to interest themselves. While President Van Hise's interests are not primarily literary, any man of fine sensibilities and intelligence, placed as he is, at the center of momentous events, is bound to have a message of vital import; and any such message, clearly and suitably delivered, is literature.

THE FUTURE OF MAN IN AMERICA

By Charles R. Van Hise, published in the World's Work, Vol. XVIII, p. 11718.

... It is clear that the problem of the conservation of our natural resources is an interlocking one. If the forests are conserved in the rough lands and mountains, the streams will have an even flow, their navigability will be easily maintained, they will give a uniform water-power; the erosion of the soil will be lessened; the bottom lands along the stream will not be flooded. If the water-powers are developed, the consumption of coal will be lessened. If the elements which are changed from ore to metals are carefully saved--not being allowed to rust or to be lost--and thus utilized again and again, it will not be necessary to take from the mines so large an amount of ore, and thus less coal and power will be required for their extraction. The conservation of one resource assists in the conservation of all others. We should work with the agents of the earth rather than reverse their work, as we have been doing since American settlement began.

Intimately connected with the conservation of the natural resources is the conservation of humanity itself. Just as we have been reckless in the use of our natural resources, so as a nation have we been reckless of human life. We now know enough in reference to the prevention and cure of communicable diseases, we know enough in reference to improving the conditions under which the industries are carried on, so that, according to Professor Irving Fisher, the average human life might be lengthened by a third.

So far as we permit human beings to be created, it is plainly our duty to conserve them and, so far as possible, produce a happy environment for them. This great problem of the conservation of humanity is mentioned merely to put it in relation with the problems of the conservation of our natural resources, rather than to discuss it.

How long shall this nation endure? Or, more exactly, how long shall human beings occupy this land? It is only within the past two centuries that the lands of the country have been subject to agriculture upon an extensive scale, and the main drafts upon the soil of this country have been within the last century. We should think, not of a hundred years, or of a thousand years, but of hundreds of thousands, or of millions of years of development of the human race. There is no reason, from a geological point of view, why human beings may not live upon this earth for millions of years to come, perhaps many millions of years, and, so far as we are concerned, such periods are practically infinite.

These considerations impose upon us as our most fundamental duty the transmission of the heritage of our natural resources to our descendants as nearly intact as possible. This is an individual responsibility, as well as a state and a national responsibility. There's a strongly developed opinion at the present time that the owners of great wealth, and especially those who control great natural resources, should act as trustees for the nation. This is easy to see; but every man who owns a farm is equally a trustee to the nation for his small property. If at the end of his life the farm goes to his son depleted in richness, he is as truly faithless to his trust as are the great interests, some of which think only of present gain, and wastefully exploit the natural resources of the country. Each in proportion to his own responsibility is a traitor to the nation. At the present time, fortunately, this sense of stewardship is gaining possession of those who control some of the great resources of the nation. As yet, there is scarcely a glimmering of responsibility in the case of the smaller holder of natural resources. But the future of the nation is safe only when small and large holder alike, from the man who owns forty acres of land to the groups of men who control the anthracite of the nation, shall administer their trust primarily for the benefit of the people now living and for succeeding generations rather than for themselves.

I do not hesitate to assert that, from the point of view of our descendants, this question of conservation of our natural resources is more important than any political or social question, indeed, more important than all political or social questions upon the solution of which we are now engaged. Not only is it more important, but it is more pressing, for already our unnecessary losses are irremediable, and the situation is growing steadily worse.

It is necessary that a great campaign of education be inaugurated at once with reference to the conservation of the soil, just as there has been a campaign of education with reference to the conservation of the forests. The task is an enormous one, indeed vastly greater than that carried on with reference to our other resources, because of the fact that the land holdings are so subdivided; but the campaign of education must be carried on, and, as a part of it, the laws must be developed, until we reach the situation where no man dares so to handle his land as to decrease its fertility. If present methods are allowed to continue, it is certain that in the not distant future this country will be able to support only a relatively sparse population. Only by the conservation of our soil, undiminished in its fertility, can we hope to be able to provide for the hundreds of millions of people who, in the near future in the United States, will be demanding food and clothing. The conservation of the soil is the conservation of the basal asset of the nation.

Similarly, the campaign of education in reference to the forests must be continued, and that with reference to the coal and mineral resources inaugurated; for only second in importance to the conservation of the soil is the economic mining and use of coal, the conservation of the forests, and the use of metals with the minimum waste.

DEAN BIRGE

Edward Asahel Birge was born in Troy, New York, in 1851. He received his collegiate training at Williams and Harvard and was made instructor in natural history at the University of Wisconsin in 1875, professor in 1879, and Dean of the College of Letters and Science in 1891, which position he has held down to the present time, except for three years when he served as Acting President.

No one among all the professors is better known to the students of the University of Wisconsin than Dean Birge. His

## active figure, his firm step, his (now) white hair, which,

when the writer went to school, was but iron-gray, his keen eye, have all come to be institutional and fundamental at the University of Wisconsin. No undergraduate who has gone tremblingly before Dean Birge to get his excuse for being late to his first class after the Christmas holidays will need a description of Dean Birge's eye. No one ever thinks of trying to deceive the Dean.

But withal, nothing could be more unfair than to give the notion that keenness is the only quality in that eye. Kindness is there, too, and above all, justice. We who were undergraduates at Madison, always think of Dean Birge as a scholar in his chosen line and as a school administrator. It will be a surprise to many to know of his keen interest in literature. The writer ventures to say that one will look some time before he finds, from the pen of the best-trained specialist in English, a fairer estimate of Milton than the one here given by this biologist.

MILTON

Introductory remarks at the celebration of the tercentenary anniversary of Milton's birth, held at the University of Wisconsin, December 9, 1908.

Perhaps I am wrong in permitting myself to say anything beyond the formal words which belong to my office tonight. I am sure that I have no right to join in the tribute which today the world offers to Milton, beyond that which belongs to every one who did not need to knock the dust from his copy of the poems when this tercentenary anniversary approached. Yet if I had the power to praise, I should attempt the task.

"If my inferior hand or voice could hint Inimitable things"

I would add my words to those of more discriminating praise. But if I speak at all, it must be as one of Milton's readers, not as his critic, still less as his judge; not even as his eulogist. Perhaps I may speak also as a descendant of the men and women who made up that Puritan commonwealth from which he was born and to which at bottom he belonged; as a descendant of men and women, stern, god-fearing, theology-loving, yet very human; mostly commonplace people; not sensitive to art or caring much about it, yet capable of being profoundly moved by the greatest poetry. I may speak in the name of those who for generations kept Milton second only to the Bible in their knowledge and as belonging to a generation which today finds Milton next beyond the Bible in its ignorance. I may represent in some sort that public which long cherished him but which today leaves him to the few lovers of poetry on the one side, and on the other, must have converted him to a post-mortem belief in purgatory by condemning him to a place among the authors assigned for "intensive study" in secondary schools.

I cannot find it in my heart to blame my fellows severely for their present neglect of Milton. When we read the introductory lines of the Aeneid--for our small Latin extends so far as this--and the triumphant final words: "_atque altae moenia Romae_" "burst out into sudden blaze," then in that quick vision of the walls of lofty Rome we catch some hint of that spirit which made the poem the bible of the Roman state. And when we find the introduction to Paradise Lost closing with the promise that the author will "justify the ways of God to man," we feel that temper in the poem which made it at once the holier bible of the Puritan and prevented it from becoming the bible of the English speaking race for all time.

But we of the stock from which Milton came have not all deserted the poet. Some of us still read his verse, though not for the poem so much as for the poetry, which in his hands became the

"golden key That opes the palace of eternity."

We do not find our Milton in his earlier poems; for, charming as they are, they lack that note of strong personality and endless power which our ear first catches in Lycidas:

"Ay me! Whilst thee the shores and sounding seas Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurled, Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, Where thou, perhaps, under the whelming tide Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world; Or whether thou to our moist vows denied, Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great vision of the guarded Mount Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold--"

Here is the true music of Milton's verse; a deep, long-drawn note, a solemn cadence; far from the "wanton heed and giddy cunning" of the music which untwists the chains of harmony, and equally distant from heaven's calm serenity of choral symphonies and "undisturbed song of pure content." This music sounds in the Paradise Lost, less emotional perhaps, but purer and higher; appealing to ear and soul in complex and interwoven harmonies of thought and verse. We hear it still in the Samson; austere, intellectualized; the scheme of music rather than music itself; still resonant though not resounding. We have no skill to compare this music with that of other poets; but this we know, that while its harmonies linger in our ears all other verse rings poor and thin. We hear no voice but Milton's which can bear the praise of his own words: "_praesentem sonat vox ipsa Deum_"--its very note proclaims the present God.

Nor is this all. Milton's verse moves us as does that of no other poet. I do not mean that it moves us to laughter or even to tears. I mean rather that it moves our souls bodily, if such a thing may be. As we read it, we find ourselves committed to a power not so much buoyant as illimitable. The verse bears us aloft and carries us forward; not swiftly, slowly rather; advancing, to our increased happiness, not directly, but with many a pause and turn; yet steadily and powerfully pressing on toward a goal certain and far-seen. We know not whether Milton's poetry accomplished

"Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme";

but at least we must confess for ourselves that it illumines our darkness and raises and supports us as does no other verse.

And so we, who in some far off sense belong to Milton's people, join tonight with you who have the right to praise his name. Yet it may be that in so doing we are thinking rather of ourselves than of any tribute that you or we can bring to him. We know that your commemorative words will renew our knowledge and quicken our hearts. We hope that, hearing them, we may feel the presence of those

"immortal shades Of bright aerial spirits"

who ever attend Milton's verse; perhaps we even hope that our clearer vision may catch some new glimpse of Milton himself--our poet--wearing "the crown that Vertue gives" and sitting

"Amongst the enthroned gods on sainted seats."

RASMUS BJÖRNE ANDERSON

"Rasmus B. Anderson" is a name that has been familiar to all University of Wisconsin students and to all people of Scandinavian parentage throughout the Northwest for at least two score years. This fine old man is a true son of Wisconsin. He was born in Albion, Wisconsin, of Norwegian parents, in 1846. He received an honorary A. B. from the University of Wisconsin in 1885, and the title of L. L. D. from the same institution in 1888. He was professor of Scandinavian languages and literature here from 1875 to 1883, when he resigned to serve as minister to Denmark. He has translated scores of selections from Scandinavian languages into English, and is the editor of almost countless articles of an historical, linguistic, literary, and philosophical nature. Now, at the age of seventy, his friends know him as a kindly, busy man with an active and keen interest in all about him. He is at present serving in an editorial capacity on the boards of different journals and encyclopedias.

The selection here given was one of the earliest that he published. It breathes the spirit of enthusiasm and love for the land of his fathers, but at the same time shows his careful citation of evidence to support his every assertion.

BJARNE HERJULFSON, 986

From "AMERICA, NOT DISCOVERED BY COLUMBUS." Chapter X. By Rasmus B. Anderson. Copyright, 1883, by S. C. Griggs & Co.

In the year 986, the same year that he returned from Greenland, the above-named Erik the Red moved from Iceland to Greenland, and among his numerous friends, who accompanied him, was an Icelander by name Herjulf.

Herjulf had a son by name Bjarne, who was a man of enterprise and fond of going abroad, and who possessed a merchant-ship, with which he gathered wealth and reputation. He used to be by turns a year abroad and a year at home with his father. He chanced to be away in Norway when his father moved over to Greenland, and on returning to Iceland he was so much disappointed on hearing of his father's departure with Erik, that he would not unload his ship, but resolved to follow his old custom and take up his abode with his father. "Who will go with me to Greenland?" he said to his men. "We will all go with you," replied the men. "But we have none of us ever been on the Greenland Sea before," said Bjarne. "We mind not that," said the men,--so away they sailed for three days and lost sight of Iceland. Then the wind failed. After that a north wind and fog set in, and they knew not where they were sailing to. This lasted many days, until the sun at length appeared again, so that they could determine the quarters of the sky, and lo! in the horizon they saw, like a blue cloud, the outlines of an unknown land. They approached it. They saw that it was without mountains, was covered with wood, and that there were small hills inland. Bjarne saw that this did not answer to the description of Greenland; he knew he was too far south; so he left the land on the larboard side and sailed northward two days, when they got sight of land again. The men asked Bjarne if this was Greenland; but he said it was not, "For in Greenland," he said, "there are great, snowy mountains; but this land is flat and covered with trees." They did not go ashore, but turning the bow from the land, they kept the sea with a fine breeze from the southwest for three days, when a third land was seen. Still Bjarne would not go ashore, for it was not like what had been reported of Greenland. So they sailed on, driven by a violent southwest wind, and after four days they reached a land which suited the description of Greenland. Bjarne was not deceived, for it was Greenland, and he happened to land close to the place where his father had settled.

It cannot be determined with certainty what parts of the American coast Bjarne saw; but from the circumstances of the voyage, the course of the winds, the direction of the currents, and the presumed distance between each sight of land, there is reason to believe that the first land that Bjarne saw in the year 986 was the present Nantucket, one degree south of Boston; the second Nova Scotia, and the third Newfoundland. Thus Bjarne Herjulfson was the first European whose eyes beheld any part of the present New England.

REUBEN GOLD THWAITES

Reuben Gold Thwaites was born in Massachusetts in 1853. When twenty-three years of age he came to Madison, Wisconsin, to act as editor of the Wisconsin State Journal. Just ten years later he was made secretary and superintendent of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, in which capacity he served until his death in 1913.

All students of history in the University of Wisconsin knew Mr. Thwaites, for no doubt partly through his influence, instructors in history impressed upon the young men and women in their classes the conception of history as being always in the making. To many a student who had always thought of history as being something written in books this new conception came as a great awakening. He urged upon all with whom he came in contact the importance of recording local events, and he had an extraordinarily keen sense of tendencies and activities in his state that were really vital and significant.

The State Historical Library at Madison contains thousands of newspaper clippings, little pamphlets, letters by obscure people, apparently unimportant legal or official documents that were gathered by Reuben Gold Thwaites, and that now form the priceless sources of the history of the state. The services of such a man to his community cannot be reckoned commercially. The state knows itself better, understands its ideals more thoroughly, and furnishes to its students a fund of incontrovertible facts on which to base their study, because it possessed a citizen like Reuben Gold Thwaites.

THE DISCOVERY OF WISCONSIN

From "STORIES OF THE BADGER STATE," pp. 27-32. By Reuben Gold Thwaites. Copyright, 1900, by the author.

Among the many queer stories brought [to Quebec] by these fierce, painted barbarians [the Indians] was one which told of a certain "Tribe of the Sea" dwelling far away on the western banks of the "upper waters," a people who had come out of the West, no man knew whence. In those early days, Europeans still clung to the notion which Columbus had always held, that America was but an eastern projection of Asia. This is the reason that our savages were called Indians, for the discoverers of America thought they had merely reached an outlying portion of India; they had no idea that this was a great and new continent. Governor Champlain, and after him Governor Frontenac, and the great explorer La Salle, all supposed that they could reach India and China, already known to travelers to the east, by persistently going westward. When, therefore, Champlain heard of these strange Men of the Sea, he at once declared they must be the long-sought Chinese. He engaged Nicolet, in whom he had great confidence, to go out and find them, wherever they were, making a treaty of peace with them, and secure their trade.

Upon the first day of July, 1634, Nicolet left Quebec, a passenger in the second of two fleets of canoes containing Indians from the Ottawa valley, who had come down to the white settlements to trade. Among his fellow passengers were three adventurous Jesuit missionaries, who were on their way to the country of the Huron tribe, east of Lake Huron. Leaving the priests at Allumettes Island, he continued up the Ottawa, then crossed over to Lake Nipissing, visited old friends among the Indians there, and descended French Creek, which flows from Lake Nipissing into Georgian Bay, a northeastern arm of Lake Huron. On the shores of the great lake, he engaged seven Hurons to paddle his long birch-bark canoe and guide him to the mysterious "Tribe of the Sea."

Slowly they felt their way along the northern shores of Lake Huron, where the pine forests sweep majestically down to the water's edge, or crown the bold cliffs, while southward the green waters of the inland sea stretch away to the horizon. Storms too severe for their frail craft frequently detained them on the shore, and daily they sought food in the forest. The savage crew, tiring of exercise, and overcome by superstitious fears, would fain have abandoned the voyage; but the strong, energetic master bore down all opposition. At last they reached the outlet of Lake Superior, the forest-girt Strait of St. Mary, and paddled up as far as the falls, the Sault Ste. Marie, as it came to be called by the Jesuit missionaries. Here there was a large village of Algonkins, where the explorer tarried, refreshing his crew and gathering information concerning the "Tribe of the Sea." The explorers do not appear to have visited Lake Superior; but, bolder than before, they set forth to the southwest, and passing gayly through the island-dotted Straits of Mackinac, now one of the world's greatest highways, were soon upon the broad waters of Lake Michigan, of which Nicolet was probably the first white discoverer.

Clinging still to the northern shore, camping in the dense woods at night or when threatened by storm, Nicolet rounded far-fetching Point Detour and landed upon the shores of Bay de Noquet, a northern arm of Green Bay. Another Algonkin tribe dwelt here, with whom the persistent explorer smoked the pipe of peace, and they gave him further news of the people he sought. Next he stopped at the mouth of the Menominee River, now the northeast boundary between Wisconsin and Michigan, where the Menominee tribe lived. Another council was held, more tobacco was smoked, and one of Nicolet's Huron companions was sent forward to notify the Winnebagoes at the mouth of the Fox River that the great white chief was approaching; for the uncouth Winnebagoes were the far-famed "Tribe of the Sea" whom Nicolet had traveled so far to find....

By this time, Nicolet had his doubts about meeting Chinese at Green Bay. As, however, he had brought with him "a grand robe of China damask, all strewn with flowers, and birds of many colors," such as Chinese mandarins are supposed to wear, he put it on; and when he landed on the shore of Fox River, where is now the city of Green Bay, strode forward into the group of waiting, skin-clad savages, discharging the pistols which he held in either hand. Women and children fled in terror to the wigwams; and the warriors fell down and worshipped this Manitou (or spirit) who carried with him thunder and lightning.

"The news of his coming," says the old Jesuit chronicler, "quickly spread to the places round about, and there assembled four or five thousand men. Each of the Chief men made a feast for him, and at one of these banquets they served at least six-score Beavers."...

For various reasons, it was nearly thirty years before another visit was made by white men to Wisconsin. Nicolet himself soon settled down at the new town of Three Rivers, on the shores of the St. Lawrence, between Quebec and Montreal, as the agent and interpreter there of the great fur trade company. He was a very useful man both to the company and to the missionaries; for he had great influence over the Indians, who loved him sincerely, and he always exercised this influence for the good of the colony and of religion. He was drowned in the month of October, 1642, while on his way to release a poor savage prisoner who was being maltreated by Indians in the neighborhood.

FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER

Born in Portage, Wisconsin, in 1861, Frederick J. Turner was graduated from the State University in 1884, and six years later he received his Ph. D. from Johns Hopkins. Meantime he had spent some of the years in teaching in his Alma Mater. He was made full professor of history in 1892, which position he held until 1910, when Harvard University called him.

Few men on "The Hill" were more beloved by the students than "Freddie" Turner. His courses were crowded, and his lectures were exceedingly popular. Perhaps if his students had known that from 1885 to 1888 he served as tutor in rhetoric and oratory at Wisconsin, they would not have wondered so much at the eloquence of his lectures.

But eloquence was not the main feature of his lectures, nor yet the quality he most desired in the recitations of his students. Woe betide the young man who had spent too little time upon the "constitutional period," and who tried to give this argus-eyed instructor the impression of deep and careful study. The bubble was sure to be pricked, and the discomfiture of the ambitious one was, while frequently laughable, always unmistakable. One never knew when he was going to be "quizzed" in "Freddie's" class. But one thing was certain: that was that he would be asked a question, and when that question came it was best, from every point of view, to be able to do good, clear, straight thinking, based on a fund of religiously acquired information. One quality that Professor Turner exacted of himself and others was that assertions must be backed up by evidence. Perhaps that is not the least important reason why the article from which a selection is here made created as profound a change in the general attitude toward American history as any single word on that subject that has ever been spoken.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY

From "THE ANNUAL REPORT OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION" for 1893, pp. 199-227. By Professor Frederick J. Turner, then of the University of Wisconsin.

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: "Up to and including 1880, the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it cannot, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports." This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people--to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economical and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, "We are great, and rapidly--I was about to say fearfully--growing!" So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic Coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, has furnished the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic Coast, it is the Great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention by writers like Professor von Holst, occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion.

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave--the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.

The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier--a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement which has a density of two or more to the square mile. The term is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not need sharp definition. We shall consider the whole frontier belt, including the Indian country and outer margin of the "settled area," of the census reports. This paper will make no attempt to treat the subject exhaustively; its aim is simply to call attention to the frontier as a fertile field for investigation, and to suggest some of the problems which arise in connection with it....

The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and

## activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to

the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

PAUL SAMUEL REINSCH

Professor Reinsch was born in Milwaukee in 1869. He received his A. B. from the University of Wisconsin in 1892 and his doctorate in 1898. He had the advantage of studying at the University of Berlin and at Rome and Paris. He was assistant professor of political science at his Alma Mater from 1899 to 1901, and full professor from 1901 to 1913, except for two years, 1911 and 1912, when he held the Roosevelt professorship at the Universities of Berlin and Leipzig. Since 1913, he has been Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to China. His present address is the American Legation, Peking, China.

Few men have had the advantages both in study and experience that have come to Dr. Reinsch, and few have met these advantages with keener love for truth and desire for knowledge. He is a member of several learned societies of law and political science, and is the author of many books on these and related subjects. Some of these books have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and German. The selection given here is taken from "Intellectual Currents in the Far East," and well illustrates the fact that deep learning and perfect clearness of expression may well go together in a literary production.

THE NEW EDUCATION OF CHINA

From "INTELLECTUAL AND POLITICAL CURRENTS IN THE FAR EAST."

## Chapter V. By Paul S. Reinsch. Copyright, 1911, by the

author.

... The zeal of the older teachers in trying to catch up with the foreign-trained men is at times almost pathetic. In most towns a "teachers' discussion class" has been organized. These classes were established by the initiative of the teachers themselves, in order that they might acquire the knowledge necessary for elementary instruction in the new branches. With great eagerness these men, varying in age from thirty-five to fifty-five years, will follow the instruction given by some youngster in the early twenties who has been fortunate enough to have had a course in Japan or the West. While the necessary superficiality of such a system must be deplored, the mere fact of this instruction being so eagerly sought by the teachers is the best proof that the old order, recognizing its inevitable fate, has abandoned the hope of regaining its former supremacy and is hurrying to adapt itself to the new conditions.

This enthusiasm also finds expression in great individual sacrifices, and even in martyrdom. Private gifts are made in large numbers, even without the solicitation of officials or the hope of rewards. Within the last few years, it has frequently happened that some person desirous of founding a school, and lacking the means to do so, has in truly Oriental fashion appealed to his or her townsmen by committing suicide, after writing out a touching request for aid in the new cause. A Tartar lady at Hankow who had founded a school for girls was unable to secure sufficient money for carrying on the work of the institution. In order to secure her object, she determined to commit suicide. In her farewell letter, she stated that she felt the need of the school so much that she would sacrifice her own life and thus impress the need upon those who were able to give money. Her act had the result desired, as after her death money came flowing in from many sources. In most cases, fortunately, the appeals for assistance are successful without going to such extremes. Thus, the wife of a district magistrate in Honan, having decided to establish a school for girls, wrote a circular setting forth that a girl, if uneducated, brings six kinds of injury to herself and three kinds to her children. The subtlety of her arguments fascinated the city folk, and sufficient funds for her purpose were soon provided.

The introduction of female education, which militates against the most deep-seated prejudices of the Chinese race, has called for greater personal sacrifices than any other part of educational reform. Some powerful patrons have indeed arisen. H. E. Tuan Fang urged the importance of this reform upon the Empress herself, with the result that, before her death, the great lady established a school for female education in the capital. Educated women are making a strong plea for the education of their sisters. Doctor King Ya-mei, herself educated in the West, points out that those who lament the superficial nature of the present reforms forget that "half the nation, whose special function it is to put into practice the ideas governing the world in which she lives, has not yet been touched; that the strong impressions of childhood are the lasting ones, and that man is but an embodiment of the ideas of the mother." But in the case of female education, it is not primarily the provision of funds that causes difficulties. The desire of women to share in the advantages of education is of itself looked upon by the majority of the Chinese as scandalous and not at all to be encouraged. Many heartrending tragedies have been brought about by insoluble conflicts of duty toward the old and the new. A short time ago, in an interior village in Kiang Su, a woman, ambitious to become educated, killed herself after bad treatment from her husband's relatives. Her farewell letter was everywhere copied by the Chinese press. It has become a national document, and almost a charter of the new movement. In it occur the following sentences: "I am about to die today because my husband's parents, having found great fault with me for having unbound my feet, and declaring that I have been diffusing such an evil influence as to have injured the reputations of my ancestors, have determined to put me to death. Maintaining that they will be severely censured by their relatives, once I enter a school and receive instruction, they have been trying hard to deprive me of life, in order, as they say, to stop beforehand all the troubles that I may cause. At first they intended to starve me, but now they compel me to commit suicide by taking poison. I do not fear death at all, but how can I part from my children who are so young? Indeed, there should be no sympathy for me, but the mere thought of the destruction of my ideals and of my young children, who will without doubt be compelled to live in the old way, makes my heart almost break."

The blood of such martyrs is beginning to make its impression upon the Chinese people, and is turning them to favor more liberal popular customs. A nation in which a spirit of such ruthless self-sacrifice is still so common may bring forth things that will astonish the world. It has been said that "China contains materials for a revolution, if she should start one, to which the horrors of the French revolution would be a mere squib;" but if turned into different channels, this spirit of self-sacrifice may, as it did in the case of Japan, bring about a quick regeneration of national life and national prestige, through the establishment of new institutions, that correspond to the currents of life thus striving to assert themselves.

GEORGE C. COMSTOCK

Professor George C. Comstock was born in Madison in 1855, and after an education obtained at various colleges and universities, including the institutions of Ann Arbor and Madison, and after considerable and varied experience in engineering and astronomical work, he became professor of astronomy in our own University in 1887, and Director of Washburn Observatory two years later. Since 1906 he has been Director of the Graduate School. He is the member of many learned societies, and has been highly honored in numerous ways by institutions of learning. The stories that are told, and truly told, of his mathematical prowess, such as memorizing tables of logarithms, have excited wonder in the heart of many a student at Madison. His lectures, even on the most abstruse subjects, are notably clear. His illustrations are timely, and his English is of the very purest. He is a representative of the regular classical education that is now comparatively rarely elected by university undergraduates.

ASTROLOGY IN LIFE AND LITERATURE

... The modern philosopher and historian alike deride and marvel at astrology as the most persistent disease with which the minds of men have ever been afflicted but from which they are now happily freed by the advance of science. I must confess my inability to share this view as to the patent folly of the art. The careful student of astrology cannot fail to be impressed with the logical coherence of its doctrines and their necessary relation to the fundamental postulates from which they spring. While these postulates can no longer be maintained they seem in no way inappropriate as stages in the development of human knowledge and their wide spread acceptance is sufficient evidence of their seeming reasonableness to nascent society. Indeed it is only the upper strata of European civilization that has now outgrown the beliefs above considered. Asia still teems with them, from Seoul to Bagdad, and even in the heart of Europe astrological calendars are current and find enormous circulation among the lower classes. The practicing astrologer who seeks business through advertising in the daily press is with us in America, and to judge by the persistence of his advertisements they bring response. I find upon the shelves of the principal scientific library of Chicago a manual of applied astrology whose dirty and dog's eared leaves, together with recent date upon its title page, are additional testimony that American cultivation of the occult is not limited to Boston. Even nearer home we all know people who will plant or sow, or cut their hair only at the right phase of the moon or who have an abiding faith that the planetary weather predictions of Mr. Hicks are sound, in theory at least. I venture to assert that within range of the reader's acquaintance there is a considerable number of persons who firmly believe that in case of premature birth a seven months baby has a better chance of life than one of eight months--an ancient doctrine, for which excellent reasons were adduced by the Greek astrologers but which seems to find little support in current medical theory.

But assuredly our best memorial of the part astrology has played in human affairs lies not in such paltry superstitions but in its incorporation into the great literatures of Europe. Casual illustrations of this fossilized relationship have been given in this essay, but far more impressive than these instances are those cases in which astrologic doctrine permeates and dominates the whole structure of a great work. Chaucer's treatise on the Astrolabe was avowedly written as an exposition of the astrologic art, and in Dante's Divine Comedy the whole moral structure of the Paradiso, with its successive heavens allotted to beatitudes of varying degrees, finds its key in the astrology that Dante knew and followed. The sequence of these heavens accords with that of the spheres allotted by astrologic doctrine to the several planets, arranged in the order of their increasing distance from the earth, the order of their altitude as Dante would have said. The lowest heaven, that of the moon, is allotted by the poet to virgins because forsooth they best typify those qualities of cold and moist with which astrologic doctrine endows the moon. They who have fought with fire and sword in defence of the Church militant are placed in a higher heaven than are those saints and theologians whose service has been intellectual in its nature; an impropriety in our eyes and doubtless little congenial to Dante's mode of thought. But astrologically it must be so, for Mars, who typified the warrior, is higher, i. e., more distant from the earth, than is the sun whose light and warmth are alike the symbol and the source of intellect and spirituality. But ancient and modern ideas are equally satisfied when the poet placed God and the Redeemer in the empyrean, the region of the fixed stars, alike the most exalted and by reason of its distance, the purest part of the universe.

Although far from extinct, the old faith in the influence of the heavens is waning and it is hard to believe that any mutations of human thought can ever restore it to a status comparable with that it enjoyed in classical and mediaeval times. As a factor in the conduct of life among enlightened people its power is gone, but the marks of its old time influence are dyed in the social fabric, imprinted alike upon language and literature and so long as that literature abides, astrology cannot sink below the horizon of man's intellectual interests.

JAMES FRANCIS AUGUSTINE PYRE

Professor Pyre is another teacher whom Wisconsin can claim as wholly her own. He was born in 1871 in Rock County, and graduated at our University in 1892. While teaching English in his Alma Mater, he continued his graduate study, and was given his Ph. D. in 1897. He continued to serve his University, though for a brief space of time pursuing his study elsewhere, and became associate professor in 1909, which position he now holds.

No former student of the University reading this volume will be content with this sketch of Mr. Pyre without reference to his undergraduate football days, and to the nickname "Sunny," which will cling to him as long as he lives. Furthermore, no one who has sat in his classes and been inspired by his reading and his interpretation, and felt the optimism of his philosophy will need to have it explained to him how Mr. Pyre acquired his nickname.

The outstanding feature of his literary criticism, whether in the form of magazine article, or lecture, or informal talk, is clarity. In his class you could always understand what he was getting at. The reader of this brief selection from "Byron in Our Day," will sense that quality readily. The sentences are crisp and well formed. Their structure is not involved. The plan and organization are evident. At the same time there is dignity and distinction in every paragraph.

BYRON IN OUR DAY

By J. F. A. Pyre. From the Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XCIX, p. 547.

And with Byron passion was not merely a gift; it was a doctrine. In one of his letters to Miss Milbanke, there is an observation which comes very near to expressing the central principle of his existence. "The great object of life is sensation--to feel that we exist--even though in pain." To him, one of the chief curses of society was its ennui, the futility of its conventional pursuits, which all recognize, but most endure. He was for fanning the coal of life into a blaze. The vitality of his emotions demanded this. Hence, when friendship stagnated, when love lapsed into the inevitable mediocrity and torpor, he fretted or fled. In ordinary terms, he was fundamentally and abnormally impatient of being bored.

A being thus constituted, and cherishing so dangerous a doctrine, naturally found no peace in this life, but was goaded on from pleasure to pleasure, or from one violence to another. Passionate friendships, savage quarrels, gaming, carousing, travel and adventure, hard reading, hard riding, flirtations, and intrigues of varying intensity and duration, playing the social and literary lion, parliament, marriage, occupied but did not satisfy him. Avid of sensation, avid of power, he threw himself impetuously into his pursuits, lavished his life with the reckless waste of a cataract, and seemed as inexhaustible. He was too clear-sighted not to perceive the triviality of many of his occupations, and though too willful to change his ways, or employ his ample will power in self-restraint, he was not sordid enough to be happy so. Hence, he became a malcontent. Love soothed him, nature appeased him for a time; and in the presence of either, he soared into realms of serene delight and contemplation. But "he could not keep his spirit at that height;" say, perhaps, he was not a dreamer; his passion called for outlet in action, in enterprise; and he became--a writer!

EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS

Edward Alsworth Ross is nationally one of the best-known men here represented. He was born at Virden, Illinois, in 1866; was graduated from Coe College, Iowa, in 1886; and then continued his education in Berlin and Johns Hopkins. He has been professor of economy, sociology, and kindred subjects at many universities, including Indiana University, Cornell, Leland Stanford, Junior, the University of Nebraska, and, since 1906, the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of many books and magazine articles, among the most noteworthy of the former, perhaps, being "Sin and Society," "Social Psychology," "Latter Day Sinners and Saints," and "The Changing Chinese."

The selection here chosen is from the last named book. The style is like the man, forceful, trenchant, and abounding in life. Mr. Ross's tall, rugged, muscular figure and forceful gestures are familiar to the lovers of lectures in Wisconsin, and all who have been fortunate enough to hear him, whether in regular classes at the University, or in extension or other lecture work, will recall his striking appearance as they read the clear, clean-cut statements in this selection.

THE CONFLICT OF ORIENTAL AND WESTERN CULTURES IN CHINA

From "THE CHANGING CHINESE." Chapter I. Copyright, 1911, by the Century Co.

China is the European Middle Ages made visible. All the cities are walled and the walls and gates have been kept in repair with an eye to their effectiveness. The mandarin has his headquarters only in a walled fortress-city and to its shelter he retires when a sudden tempest of rebellion vexes the peace of his district.

The streets of the cities are narrow, crooked, poorly-paved, filthy, and malodorous. In North China they admit the circulation of the heavy springless carts by which alone passengers are carried; but, wherever rice is cultivated, the mule is eliminated and the streets are adapted only to the circulation of wheel-barrows and pedestrians. There is little or no assertion of the public interest in the highway, and hence private interests close in upon the street and well-nigh block it. The shopkeeper builds his counter in front of his lot line; the stalls line the streets with their crates and baskets; the artisans overflow into it with their workbenches, and the final result is that the traffic filters painfully through a six-foot passage which would yet be more encroached on but for the fact that the officials insist on there being room left for their sedan chairs to pass each other.

The straightened streets are always crowded and give the traveler the impression of a high density and an enormous population. But the buildings are chiefly one story in height, and, with the exception of Peking, Chinese cities cover no very great area. For literary effect their population has been recklessly exaggerated, and, in the absence of reliable statistics, every traveler has felt at liberty to adopt the highest guess.

Until recently there was no force in the cities to maintain public order. Now, khaki-clad policemen, club in hand, patrol the streets, but their efficiency in time of tumult is by no means vindicated. A slouching, bare-foot, mild-faced _gendarme_ such as you see in Canton is by no means an awe-inspiring embodiment of the majesty of the law.

There is no common supply of water. When a city lies by a river the raw river water is borne about to the house by regular water-carriers, and the livelong day the river-stairs are wet from the drip of buckets. When the water is too thick it is partially clarified by stirring it with a perforated joint of bamboo containing some piece of alum.

There is no public lighting, and after nightfall the streets are dark, forbidding, and little frequented. Until kerosene began to penetrate the Empire the common source of light was a candle in a paper lantern or cotton wick lighted in an open cup of peanut oil. Owing to the lack of a good illuminant the bulk of the people retire with the fowls and rise with the sun. By making the evening of some account for reading or for family intercourse, kerosene has been a great boon to domestic life.

Fuel is scarce and is sold in neat bundles of kindling size. Down the West River ply innumerable boats corded high with firewood floating down to Canton and Hong Kong. Higher and higher the tree destruction extends, and farther and farther does the axman work his way from the waterways. Chaff and straw, twigs and leaves and litter are burned in the big brick bedsteads that warm the sleepers on winter nights, and under the big, shallow copper vessels set in the low brick or mud stoves. Fuel is economized and household economy simplified among the poor by the custom of relying largely on the food cooked and vended in the street. The portable restaurant is in high favor, for our prejudice against food cooked outside the home is a luxury the common people cannot afford to indulge in.

Proper chimneys are wanting and wherever cooking goes on the walls are black with the smoke that is left to escape as it will. Chinese interiors are apt to be dark for, in the absence of window glass, the only means of letting in light without weather is by pasting paper on lattice. The floors are dirt, brick, or tile, the roof tile or thatch. To the passer-by private ease and luxury are little in evidence. If a man has house and grounds of beauty, a high wall hides them from the gaze of the public. Open lawns and gardens are never seen, and there is no greenery accessible to the public unless it be the grove of an occasional temple.

In the houses of the wealthy, although there is much beauty to be seen, the standard of neatness is not ours. Cobwebs, dust, or incipient dilapidation do not excite the servant or mortify the proprietor. While a mansion may contain priceless porcelains and display embroideries and furniture that would be pronounced beautiful the world over, in general, the interiors wrought by the Chinese artisan do not compare in finish with those of his Western _confrere_....

No memory of China is more haunting than that of the everlasting blue cotton garments. The common people wear coarse, deep-blue "nankeen." The gala dress is a cotton gown of a delicate bird's-egg blue or a silk jacket of rich hue. In cold weather the poor wear quilted cotton, while the well-to-do keep themselves warm with fur-lined garments of silk. A general adoption of Western dress would bring on an economic crisis, for the Chinese are not ready to rear sheep on a great scale and it will be long before they can supply themselves with wool. The Chinese jacket is fortunate in opening at the side instead of at the front. When the winter winds of Peking gnaw at you with Siberian teeth, you realize how stupid is our Western way of cutting a notch in front right down through overcoat, coat and vest, apparently in order that the cold may do its worst to the tender throat and chest. On seeing the sensible Chinaman bring his coat squarely across his front and fasten it on his shoulder, you feel like an exposed totem-worshipper.

Wherever stone is to be had, along or spanning the main roads are to be seen the memorial arches known as _pailows_ erected by imperial permission to commemorate some deed or life of extraordinary merit. It is significant that when they proclaim achievement, it is that of the scholar, not of the warrior. They enclose a central gateway, flanked by two, and sometimes by four, smaller gateways, and conform closely to a few standard types, all of real beauty. As a well-built _pailow_ lasts for centuries, and as the erection of such a memorial is one of the first forms of outlay that occur to a philanthropic Chinaman, they accumulate, and sometimes the road near cities is lined with those structures until one wearies of so much repetition of the same thing, however beautiful.

GRANT SHOWERMAN

Professor Showerman is another author-teacher whom Wisconsin may claim as her own. He was born at Brookfield in 1870, was graduated from the University in 1896, and took his doctorate in 1900. He had the advantage of two years' study at Rome, where he was Fellow of the Archaeological Institute of America in the American School of Classical Studies. Since returning, he has been Professor of Latin Literature at his Alma Mater. He is member of many learned societies, and is the author of "With the Professor" and "The Indian Stream Republic and Luther Parker," besides many articles which are familiar to readers of the Atlantic Monthly and other leading periodicals.

His style will be noted at once by the careful reader as being different from that of most other prose writers whose works we quote here. It is more leisurely. He brings to the common things about us in Nature the kindly, alert intelligence of one who has seen many things in many lands, but who has the memory to re-create truthfully the days of youth.

A LAD'S RECOLLECTIONS OF HIS BOYHOOD HAUNTS AND EXPERIENCES IN THE EARLIER DAYS

"IN OCTOBER." From the Sewanee Review.

... On a late October Saturday morning, after a week in school at the village, you take your gun and a favorite play, whistle to already eager Billy, and follow the path to the Brush. You traverse its quiet length by the winding road that is always mysterious and full of charm, however often you tread it, you cross the stubbled barley-field that borders Lovers' Lane, and cross the lane itself and enter the Woods. You feel the friendly book in your pocket, and pat the friendly dog at your side, restfully conscious that you will spend neither profitless nor companionless hours. To be sure, you have in the back of your mind a thought or two about fox squirrels, or even red squirrels, and of a stew-pie--the savor of it is in your sensitive nostrils; but these thoughts are only vague. Your eyes are not greedily watchful--only moderately so; you have already begun to outgrow the barbarous boyhood delight of mere killing. Good will reigns in your breast.

You advance cautiously, the breech-loader resting in the bend of your left arm, every step causing pleasant murmurs among the autumn leaves. When you pause, the sound of your heart-beats is audible. The genial golden tone of Indian Summer pervades the air.

When you have penetrated to the heart of the Woods, you sit down on a familiar log, the gun caressingly across your knees, and drink in the fine wine of woodland enjoyment! Ah, the silence of the Woods! How deep and how full of mystery! And how deeper whenever some note of life emphasizes the stillness--the knocking of a woodpecker, the cry of a sapsucker, the scream of a jay, the caw of a crow aloft on some decayed topmost branch in the distance!

A distant barking note makes you start. There is a fox squirrel over yonder somewhere, beyond the ruins of the old arch. You strain your attention toward the sound. Billy sits bolt upright, with round eyes, questioning ears, and suspended breath.

But just as you are thinking of getting up, a nut drops with a thump on the log beside you and bounds lightly into the leaves at your feet. You know what that means! You look up instantly and catch just a glimpse of a sweeping foxy tail as it vanishes along a big branch and around the thick stem of a tree. He goes up forty or fifty feet, and then, far out on the big oak branch, lies close to the bark, out of sight.

Billy whines uneasily; he shivers with excitement. You say: "Sit still, Billy!"

There is only the least bit of the foxy tail visible. You tread softly to one side and another, slowly circle the tree, and all the while the owner of the tail subtly shifts his position so that you always just fail to get a shot.

Finally, you resort to stratagem; you pick up a nut and throw it with all your might to the other side of the tree. He hears it fall, and, suddenly suspicious, shifts to your side of the branch. But you are not quick enough; by the time you have raised the gun, he has become satisfied that you are the greater danger of the two, and has shifted back to safety.

And now you resort to more elaborate stratagem. You say: "Sit down, Billy!" and Billy obeys, keeping his eye on you, and dropping his ears from time to time, as he catches your glance, in token of good-will. You circle the big tree again, and as you go the tail shifts constantly.

Finally, when you are opposite Billy, you raise the gun with careful calculation. You call out quietly but sharply to your ally: "Speak, Billy, quick!"

Billy is tense with excitement at sight of the raised gun. He speaks out sharply, at the same time giving a couple of little leaps. The squirrel shifts again to your side, suddenly.

And now comes your opportunity! As he sits there a moment, his attention divided between you and the new alarm, the breech-loader belches its charge. A brownish-red body with waving tail comes headlong to the ground with a crash among the leaves, which rustle and crackle for a moment or two at your feet as you watch the blind kicks of the death struggle. You pick him up, with no very great eagerness, and go on your way--regretfully, for you are enjoying the life of the Woods, and are enough of a philosopher and sentimentalist to wonder what, after all, is your superior right to the enjoyment, and whether the contribution to the sum total of happiness in the universe through you is enough to compensate it for the loss through the squirrel.

You ask Billy about it and get no help. He simply says that whatever you think best is bound to be all right, and leads the way toward the old arch.

WILLIAM ELLERY LEONARD

William Ellery Leonard was born in New Jersey in 1876. He has been a professor of English in the University of Wisconsin only since 1909, so he is not, as yet, so closely connected with the state in the thought of the alumni of the University as are most of the men whose works have just been discussed and illustrated. But if what he has produced may fairly be taken as an earnest of his future work, his name will be one which all lovers of our University will be proud to associate with that institution. One needs read scarcely more than a paragraph at almost any point in his published works to realize that Mr. Leonard is a man of keen and kindly interest in all things that he hears and sees, and that he has traveled and studied and lived widely and wisely. He has published several volumes, both of poems and prose,--notable among them being "Sonnets and Poems," "The Poet of Galilee," "Aesop and Hyssop," "The Vaunt of Man and Other Poems," and "Glory of the Morning." The selections given are taken from the last two volumes mentioned.

One acquainted with modern English poetry may sense a marked likeness between Mr. Leonard's poems and those of Swinburne, though the former says he is not conscious of any such resemblance. There is a warmth of passion, a fluid quality in the rhythm, markedly like those elements in the great English poet. The selection from "Glory of the Morning" here given begins at that point in the play where Half Moon, the Chevalier, the white trapper, comes back to his Indian wife to bid her farewell and to take their two children with him to his home in France. The reader will feel, even in this brief extract, the sweep toward a climax of emotion, and will be impelled to read the whole play at his first opportunity.

(One of the most interesting features of the editorial work of this volume has been the adjustment of the choice of selections respectively of the editors and authors. The editors' choice of the poems from Mr. Leonard's volume, "The Vaunt of Man," was "Love Afar"; the author, on the other hand, tells us that he thought so little of this poem that he even considered omitting it from the volume. His preference is "A Dedication." What does the reader say?)

GLORY OF THE MORNING

Copyright, 1912, by the author.

The Chevalier: I will take care of the children. They are both young. They can learn.

Glory of the Morning: They can learn?

The Chevalier: Oak Leaf is already more than half a white girl; and Red Wing is half white in blood, if not in manners--_ca ira_.

Glory of the Morning (Beginning to realize): No, no. They are mine!

The Chevalier (Reaching out his arms to take them): No.

Glory of the Morning: They are mine! They are mine!

The Chevalier: The Great King will give them presents.

Glory of the Morning: No, no!

The Chevalier: He will lay his hands on their heads.

Glory of the Morning: He shall not, he shall not!

The Chevalier: I have said that I will tell him you were their mother.

Glory of the Morning: I am their mother--I am their mother.

The Chevalier: And he will praise Glory of the Morning.

Glory of the Morning: They are mine, they are mine!

The Chevalier: I have come to take them back with me over the Big Sea Water.

Glory of the Morning (The buckskin shirt falls from her hands as she spreads her arms and steps between him and her children): No, no, no! They are not yours! They are mine! The long pains were mine! Their food at the breast was mine! Year after year while you were away so long, long, long, I clothed them, I watched them, I taught them to speak the tongue of my people. All that they are is mine, mine, mine!

The Chevalier (Drawing Oak Leaf to him and holding up her bare arm): Is that an Indian's skin? Where did that color come from? I'm giving you the white man's law.

Glory of the Morning (Struggling with the Chevalier): I do not know the white man's law. And I do not know how their skin borrowed the white man's color. But I know that their little bodies came out of my own body--my own body. They must be mine, they shall be mine, they are mine! (The Chevalier throws her aside so that she falls.)

The Chevalier: Glory of the Morning, the Great Spirit said long before you were born that a man has a right to his own children. The Great Spirit made woman so that she should bring him children. Black Wolf, is it not so?

Black Wolf: It is so.

The Chevalier (To Glory of the Morning, standing apart): Black Wolf is the wise man of your people.

Black Wolf: And knows the Great Spirit better than the white men.

The Chevalier: Indeed, I think so.

Black Wolf: And the Great Spirit made the man so that he should stay with the squaw who brought him the children,--except when off hunting meat for the wigwam or on the warpath for the tribe.

Glory of the Morning (With some spirit and dignity): The white man Half Moon has said that he believes Black Wolf.

The Chevalier: The white man has not come to argue with the Red Skin, but to take the white man's children.

Black Wolf (In his role of practical wisdom): The Half Moon will listen to Black Wolf.

The Chevalier (With conciliation): If the Black Wolf speaks wisely....

Black Wolf: Neither Oak Leaf nor Red Wing is a mere papoose to be snatched from the mother's back.

The Chevalier: The Half Moon shares Black Wolf's pride in the Half Moon's children.

Black Wolf (Pointing to the discarded cradle-board): The mother long since loosened the thongs that bound them to the cradle-board, propped against the wigwam.

The Chevalier: And when she unbound the thongs of the cradle-board they learned to run toward their father.

Black Wolf: But invisible thongs may now bind them round, which even the Half Moon might not break, without rending the flesh from their bones and preparing sorrows and cares for his head.

The Chevalier: Let us have done, Black Wolf.

Black Wolf: Thongs which none could break, unless Oak Leaf and Red Wing themselves should first unbind them. (To the children.) Will Oak Leaf, will Red Wing unbind the mystic thongs of clan and home? Let the children decide.

The Chevalier: Black Wolf is wise. My children are babes no longer. They can think and speak.

Black Wolf: Let them speak....

Glory of the Morning: Yes. Let the children decide.

Black Wolf: Oak Leaf, do you want to leave Black Wolf and Glory of the Morning to go with Half Moon over the Big Sea Water?

Oak Leaf (Looking up at her mother): O _do_ I, mother?

Glory of the Morning: I cannot tell. I love you, Oak Leaf.

Oak Leaf (Withdrawing toward her father): Mother, make father Half Moon take you with us too.

Glory of the Morning: The Half Moon has told you that he no longer needs Glory of the Morning.

The Chevalier (Taking Oak Leaf's hand caressingly): Oak Leaf, you are too beautiful to wither and wrinkle here digging and grinding and stitching, though the handsomest brave of the Winnebago bought you for his squaw. Beyond the Big Sea Water you won't have to dig and grind and stitch. And sometime a noble brave of my nation will come in a blue suit with gold braid to the chateau and say: "I love Oak Leaf; will you give Oak Leaf to me?"

Oak Leaf (Gladly): And you'll give me to him, father! ... (Oak Leaf leans against her father, with a half frightened glance at Glory of the Morning.)

The Chevalier: You see, Glory of the Morning.

Glory of the Morning (With restraint): I will say good-bye to Oak Leaf.

Black Wolf: Red Wing, are you going with your sister and with Half Moon over the Big Sea Water?

Red Wing: Sister, _are_ you really going?--You are always making believe.

Oak Leaf: O, father,--tell him.

The Chevalier: She is going, Red Wing.

Red Wing: There is nothing for me beyond the Big Sea Water.

The Chevalier: Over there your father is a famous chief, and you might wear a sword and fight beside the Great King.

Red Wing: I shall not fight beside the Great King; and I shall not wear the white man's sword.

The Chevalier (Takes his arm, coaxingly): Little chief, why not? Why not, my son?

Glory of the Morning (Coldly and firmly): Because he is _my_ son.

Red Wing (Standing off; to the Chevalier with boyish pride): Because I am a Winnebago.

LOVE AFAR

From "THE VAUNT OF MAN AND OTHER POEMS," p. 75. Copyright, 1912, by B. W. Huebsch.

I dare not look, O Love, on thy dear grace, On thine immortal eyes, nor hear thy song, For O too sore I need thee and too long, Too weak as yet to meet thee face to face. Thy light would blind--for dark my dwelling place-- Thy voice would wake old thoughts of right and wrong, And hopes which sleep, once beautiful and strong, That would unman me with a dread disgrace:

Therefore, O Love, be as the evening star, With amber light of land and sea between, A high and gentle influence from afar, Persuading from the common and the mean, Still as the moon when full tides cross the bar In the wide splendor of a night serene.

THE IMAGE OF DELIGHT

O how came I that loved stars, moon, and flame, An unimaginable wind and sea, All inner shrines and temples of the free, Legends and hopes and golden books of fame; I that upon the mountain carved my name With cliffs and clouds and eagles over me, O how came I to stoop to loving thee-- I that had never stooped before to shame?

O 'twas not Thee! Too eager of a white, Far beauty and a voice to answer mine, Myself I built an image of delight, Which all one purple day I deemed divine-- And when it vanished in the fiery night, I lost not thee, nor any shape of thine.

A DEDICATION

(For a privately printed collection of verse.)

Ye gave me life for life to crave: Desires for mighty suns, or high, or low, For moons mysterious over cliffs of snow, For the wild foam upon the midsea wave; Swift joy in freeman, swift contempt for slave; Thought which would bind and name the stars and know; Passion that chastened in mine overthrow; And speech, to justify my life, ye gave.

Life of my life, this late return of song I give to you before the close of day; Life of your life! which everlasting wrong Shall have no power to baffle or betray, O father, mother!--for ye watched so long, Ye loved so long, and I was far away.

THOMAS HERBERT DICKINSON

Thomas Herbert Dickinson was born in Virginia in 1877, and after a wide and thorough scholastic preparation was made associate professor of English in the University of Wisconsin in 1909. Mr. Dickinson is known to thousands of the citizens of Wisconsin as a friend of the drama. He believes that the drama is one of the most legitimate and natural means for the expression of the sentiments, tendencies, activities, and ideals of any people. No doubt he has done much to raise the standard of dramatic judgment and criticism among the citizens of Wisconsin. However, he would not want it said that he is trying primarily "to raise people's dramatic ideals." His mission rather has been to encourage communities to express themselves legitimately and wholesomely through their own dramatic productions. He has won much distinction both as an editor and an author of plays, but perhaps his greatest service to Wisconsin in this direction is his work in editing the little volume, "Wisconsin Plays," containing one play each by Zona Gale, Professor Leonard, and himself.

The following selection is taken from his play, "In Hospital," in the volume just mentioned. It depicts just such a scene as takes place in our hospitals every day of the year. The wife is about to undergo a serious operation. The husband is trying to keep cheerful in anticipation of the ordeal. That is the sort of scene which, Mr. Dickinson wants us to realize, can be wholesomely and pleasantly represented by the drama.

IN HOSPITAL

Copyright, 1909, by the author.

A Wife. A Husband. A Surgeon. An Interne. A Nurse.

Wife: Tell me about the children.

Husband: Oh, they are getting on--so, so.

Wife: I know they will.

Husband: But you should see them! (Turning toward her. She nods without speaking.) They're trying hard to be good, but it's a stiff pull for the little rascals. Well, I don't blame them. Freddie put me in quite a hole the other day. "What's the use of being good when mother's away?" he asked. (She smiles.) For the life of me I couldn't think of an answer. What would you say?

Wife: I'd be as bad off as you were.

Husband: But Robert wasn't. He had an answer. "So mother will be happy when she comes back," he said. Wasn't that good?

Wife: Just like Robert.

Husband: I don't know what we should have done without Robert. He serves at the table. He answers the door and the telephone. He ties the baby's bib. How he thinks of everything I don't know. I--I'm so helpless. Why didn't you ever teach me to take charge of the house?

Wife: Fancy teaching you anything you didn't want to learn.

Husband (After a moment's deep silence): All the kiddies send you their love.

Wife: Even Freddie?

Husband: Oh, Freddie, to be sure. Guess you know about what he's doing. Upstairs and downstairs. Outdoors and in.

Wife: I hope he won't get hurt.

Husband: Trust him for that. But how do you keep him in aprons? They're all dirty already. Yesterday he got all scratched up trying to put Kitty to bed and make him say his prayers. He has fallen in the flour bin, put the telephone out of commission, pulled the table-cloth and dishes off the table. There isn't anything he hasn't done. Freddie will welcome you back with a dish-pan band, when you come home.

Wife (Closing her eyes): Yes--

Husband (Pretending not to notice, though it is clear that he does): Did I tell you about night before last?

Wife: No.

Husband: Well, that night he slept over at Cousin, Ruthie's house. All his nightgowns were dirty so Aunt Ella made him wear one of Ruthie's. But she had the hardest time making him wear it. The next morning he said to me, "I'm glad I ain't a woman, ain't you, Paw?" "Yes, I suppose so," said I. "Why?" "Oh, they're all right, I guess," he said, "but before I'll wear another of those women's nightgowns, I'll go to bed raw."

Wife (Smiling): Little man. Does he ask for me much?

Husband: Just this morning he said, "Pop, you tell mamma to come back quick or I'll elope with the ice man."... Well, they're good children. I don't think any one ever had better. And that's something, isn't it?

Wife: That's everything. They make me very happy.... You know, dear, I have been doing a good deal of thinking since I came here. I've seen things very clearly, clearer than even at home. I think I've been able to tell why I've been so happy. You find out what's really worth while in a time like this, don't you? (Husband nods.)

Wife: I won't say anything about you. You know. But the children. (She smiles.) Yes, I know why I've been happy.

WILLIAM J. NEIDIG

Iowa and Illinois may rightly contest the claim of Wisconsin for a proprietary interest in Mr. William Jonathan Neidig. He was born in the first-named state, and is at present living in Chicago, where he is engaged in business, though he still finds time for an occasional story or poem. He was a member of the faculty in the English Department of the University of Wisconsin from 1905 to 1911, and it was during approximately this period of his life that his literary activity was greatest. "The First Wardens," which was nominated for the Nobel prize in idealistic literature, was published in 1905, and several critical works that attracted wide attention came from his pen during his Wisconsin residence.

The one poem which we quote here shows an evenness of power and an assurance of touch that mark real poetry. It also would be generally recognized, the editors feel, as having been written by a University man.

THE BUOY-BELL

From "THE FIRST WARDENS." Copyright, 1905, The Macmillan Co.

Bell! Bell! Bell that rideth the breakers' crest, Bell of the shallows, tell, O tell: The swell and fall of foam on the sand, Storm in the face from sea to land, Roar of gray tempest: these, O bell, What say these of the West? Tell! O tell!

Bell! Bell! Crowding the night with cries, O tell: What of the moorings in the silt? What of the blooms that drift and wilt? What of the sea-chest wrenched wide? Is it safe harbor by thy side? Bell that rideth the breakers' crest, What say these of the West? Tell! O tell!

Bell! Bell! It is a dirge the bell is tolling, A dirge for the silent dead,-- With the cold sea rolling, rolling, rolling, Rolling each restless head. Bell that rideth the breakers' crest, O, when will they lie all quietly, Untossed by the slow sea-swell: Nor breakers brave on the great sea-beach, Nor ceaseless crash of the cresting sea, Nor booming headland's sullen knell, Nor bell, for elegy? When is the last tide out of the West, And the last restless dream for each? Tell! O tell!

Toll! toll! toll! Toll for the ebbing tide: Toll for the lives that outward ride: Toll for the deep-delved cold sea-seat: Night in the West at every beat! Toll! toll!

BRAYLEY--WINSLOW--JONES.

In this group of young writers, the editors present what seems to them to be the best work done by students or young graduates of the University while unquestionably under her influence. They wish there were work by more such writers to present. Possibly there is more that has not yet been brought to their attention.

Berton Brayley has written extensively for newspapers. He has facility in rhyme and the knack of "hitting off" a verse that well fits an occasion. One has the feeling, however, that there is a power and seriousness to the man that have not yet found adequate expression. Perhaps in the next ten years the qualities of ease, leisureliness, and reflection will assert themselves more in his poetry. But from the first there has been a wholesome tone about his work.

Horatio Winslow, son of Chief Justice J. B. Winslow, showed marked ability while an undergraduate. He was a collaborator in the writing of a play which was presented by University students. As with Mr. Brayley, we would say of him that his best work has not yet been published. There is power and strength and grace latent in him that have not yet found expression, but that are unmistakably foretold in the things he has already produced.

Howard Mumford Jones is the youngest of these three men, and comes from the spirit-haunted region of the Mississippi. While his poems have not yet attained absolute surety of touch and evenness of movement, yet of those presented in this group they probably evince the most grace and music, together with the highest and warmest poetic feeling. "When Shall We Together" has real sweep and atmosphere and glow. It is the production of a poet who loved the subject he was writing about.

SOMETIMES

Sometimes I long for a lazy isle, Ten thousand miles from home, Where the warm sun shines and the blue skies smile And the milk-white breakers foam-- A coral island, bravely set In the midst of the Southern sea, Away from the hurry and noise and fret Forever surrounding me!

For I tire of labor and care and fight, And I weary of plan and scheme, And ever and ever my thoughts take flight To the island of my dream; And I fancy drowsing the whole day long In a hammock that gently swings-- Away from the clamorous, toiling throng, Away from the swirl of things!

And yet I know, in a little while, When the first glad hours were spent, I'd sicken and tire of my lazy isle And cease to be content! I'd hear the call of the world's great game-- And battle with gold and men-- And I'd sail once more, with a heart of flame, Back to the game again!

--Berton Braley. Saturday Evening Post, January 15, 1916.

THE PIONEERS

Current Opinion. Volume LIV. Page 497. (First published in The Coming Nation.)

We're the men that always march a bit before Tho we cannot tell the reason for the same; We're the fools that pick the lock that holds the door-- Play and lose and pay the candle for the game. There's no blaze nor trail nor roadway where we go; There's no painted post to point the right-of-way, But we swing our sweat-grained helves, and we chop a path ourselves To Tomorrow from the land of Yesterday.

It's infrequent that we're popular at home, (Like King David we're not built for tending sheep,) And we scoff at living a la metronome, And quite commonly we're cynical and cheap. True--we cannot hold a job to save our lives; We're a dreamy lot and steady work's a bore-- 'Til the luring of the Quest routs us out from sleep and rest And we rope and tie the world and call for more.

Well, they try to hold us back by foolish words-- But we go ahead and do the thing we've planned; Then they drive us out to shelter with the birds-- And the ravens bring our breakfast to our hand. So they jail us and we lecture to the guards; They beat us--we make sermons of their whips; They feed us melted lead and behold the Word is said. That shall burn upon a million living lips.

Are we fighters?......By our fellows we are fanged. Are we workers?......Paid with blows we never earned. Are we doctors?......Other doctors see us hanged. Are we teachers?......Brother teachers have us burned. But through all a Something somehow holds us fast 'Spite of every beast-hung brake and steaming fen; And we keep the torch on high till a comrade presses by When we pass it on and die--and live again!

A LITTLE BOOK OF LOCAL VERSE

Author of "The Masque of Marsh and River." Copyright, 1915, by the Author. Pages 13-14.

When shall we together Tramp beneath the sky, Thrusting through the weather As swimmers strive together, You and I?

How we ranged the valleys, Panted up the road, Sang in sudden sallies Of mirth that woke the valleys Where we strode!

Glad and free as birds are, Laughter in your eyes, Wild as poets' words are, You were as the birds are, Very wise.

Not for you the prison Of the stupid town; When the winds were risen, You went forth from prison, You went down,

Down along the river Dimpling in the rain, Where the poplars shiver By the dancing river, And again

Climbed the hills behind you When the rains were done; Only God could find you With the town behind you In the sun!

Don't you hear them calling, Blackbirds in the grain, Silver raindrops falling Where the larks are calling You in vain?

Comrade, when together Shall we tramp again In the summer weather, You and I together, Now as then?

JOSEPH P. WEBSTER.

No one who reads this book is unfamiliar with "The Sweet Bye and Bye." But how many of us, as we sang that song, realized that both its words and music were written by a Wisconsin man,--Joseph P. Webster?

He was born in New Hampshire in 1819, but he lived most of his life at Elkhorn, where he died in 1875. He was a member of many musical societies, and was the composer of many other songs, the best known of the latter being "Lorena."

SWEET BYE AND BYE

Composed by Joseph Philbrick Webster, February, 1868.