without a doubt much threaten mine, for the jail has been condemned some two years now, and does itself threaten to collapse should it be so much as shaken by an oath. So I will not turn Socialist; nor need I, for in the country town where I 'belong' no one except the dogs regards it as a crime to walk across a neighbor's fields, to pick his daisies, or sample his raspberries, so long as one will use discretion and never overdo it.

The sensation properly begins before you have arrived at home at all. It starts when your mind is made up to reappear there, and it grows unconsciously along the route of your return. As miles are cast off like stitches in a knitted blanket, the spell is cast on you as if these stitches went to weave an unseen net, to drag your heart out of your sea of travels into the harbor 'where you would be.' Unlike most train-journeys, you find that your last hour by rail is a delight; and if it be that your lot has fallen in a local, Fate is forgiven in anticipation of the end. Besides, here is sweet opportunity to lend superfluous good-humor to others; and who would miss the chance of being kind when kindness is no effort? Your book has been abandoned, for you have recognized trees, houses, lanes, 'the old familiar faces' hurrying by; and soon there will be paths that you have walked along, and hills that you have ridden over, so that it well behooves your eyes to keep their watchfulness.

They say that love makes poets of us all. You find the collector of tickets on a homebound train a fascinating fellow - a very Apollo, with gold teeth scattered in his upper jaw, which glitter through his smile with kindlier rays than ever the stars cast on Ulysses' course to Ithaca. And also, is it not he who shouts at last, in a voice that calls your heart into your mouth for very admiration. 'R! R--!' You

The Beauty which old Greece or Rome
Sung, painted, wrought, lies close at home.

My last arrival came just as the clock struck three, in June. This is the hour when country people 'finish up,' and there was no one anywhere about except the stationmaster, Jim. Now, Jim and I are friends, and have been ever since our worlds began. We keep our intimacy bright by tales of ghastly railroad accidents and horrid pictures of poor mortals all de-limbed; for Jim's a pessimist and revels in this sort of thing. He greets me this way:

'Well, well,' he says, 'I 'spect you 're kinder sick at gettin' back to this old burg after all the places you bin.'

'Oh, not so very sick, Jim,' I say; and cast a sidelong glance into the soft, sweet, rustling shade of maples, which makean archèd alley of the villagestreet.

'Ah, well, you don't work for the railroad, that's what,' he answers dismally; and then, 'Wantcher bag?'

'Yes; please put it in the carriage?' For the carriage is there, and the old black horse, whom haughty ladies of the kitchen have refused to drive behind that mighty steed who 'can trot all day in the shade of a tree.' And the old coachman is there too he is, than anyone I know; so old that he had white hairs in my grandfather's time, and can remember the last potato famine in Ireland. He is the purveyor of the first edition of news.

older,

'How are the dogs? and the horses? Is Ponzi still there?' (Ponzi is a pigeon, so called because he came, a foreigner, unannounced, and stole our grain from the loft.) When is the strawberry festival? Has old man Sawyer died?'

The questions go on, endlessly, all up the avenue. Elm trees bend down their feathery branches to try to catch the

gossip; and you take note how the hedge has grown on either side, just shutting out the sight of kitchen gardens, which you know are there because there comes the smell of fresh, damp earth, and early vegetables.

There are so many pleasant things that happen with arrivals. The dogs come racing up, shattering quiet dignity to broken echoes of confusion; old servants must be shaken hands with; and after you have teaed and bathed and looked with friendliness upon your books, relatives come pouring in to say 'Hello.' Most of these are whiskered, and all of them stand waiting to be kissed; and you must tell about 'the lovely places you have been, my dear.'

Not quite so pleasant, this; but there are compensations, for Virginia is with them. Virginia is only an aunt by marriage, and is called just Virginia, without a preface, because her youth levels any rank she has attained by wedding with a bearded uncle. She will ride out with you, and seek adventure down lanes lit by the moon that spills in through the overhanging boughs; and she will talk of anything you like, from England to the China Seas. She has a face like old Madonnas, and eyes as gray and fathomless as that deep mist which holds the secrets of the sea from which it's born.

Presently they go, and you are left alone again. This is the best part. There are so many things to do. You can wander about, touching things to, feel the solid happiness of their mere presence; you can sit on the terrace, and eat supper of cold eggs and coffee jelly, while the sun goes down and makes the old line of spectres stand out on the far-off hills; or you can go about announcing your arrival to your friends, or read your letters by the river, or pick flowers from a garden that you know of in the valley, and come back with the foaming torrent of

them enveloping your mouth and nose and all but putting out your eyes.

This night I chose the terrace, letters, and the flowers. There would be time for all. The ghosts were there in wild array, flinging their arms out to the crimson sky in desperate pleading for some boon no man could guess at, yet frantic with their efforts to make the heavens understand. As I sat Turk-fashion, with my tray across my knees, there blew down the path of one of summer's breezes the smell of strawberries. It was just a hint, just the merest breath of a suspicion, but I followed it and found them just around the corner. Sun-warmed fruit, so red and ripe that it did not wait for picking, but fell off in my fingers as I touched the leaves to look beneath. So big they were that even the widest mouth would have to take two trys to get around one. And the gems, the jewels, the very queens, and kings, and gods of strawberrydom I found, as my grandfather taught me, in those sun-feathered berries just pecked by the robin. Whoever does not know that these outshine all others, as diamonds outshine paste, must needs go back to school again, for his learning is a feeble thing.

When my hands were deep-dipped in scarlet, and my mouth was but a ruby stain, I took my letters to the riverbank, and sat me down to read. They had accumulated into mountains, and some of them were dry and old, so that the dust of their disinterest flew down my throat to choke me, and I threw them in the water and watched 'the ink turn pale, and run away in very shame' at having written such stupidities.

Yet others sang phrases like the wood thrush, and the wind left gardens to attend their words, and brought me scents of flowers in the evening light. It hummed so many pretty songs of things it had seen that I was forced to go and search for them. To leave the

slow, black water, to push a hawthorn hedge apart, to climb a wall, and walk across a lawn, until I found myself in what I knew of old to be the home, beginning, gathering-place of flowers, and where I saw fair myriad ghosts of them shine through the dark. I threw myself beneath a tree that stood on a small patch of grass in the middle of this hiding-place for moonbeams. I lay on my back, and let the grass-blades trickle up between my fingers. I stayed quite still, and listened to my welcome back as sung among the tree toads. 'Mine, mine, mine,' it goes, 'all mine. I am a part of this. I too grew here.' And then an echo of it is heard from the bold-throated frogs in distant ponds. 'Yours, yours,' they boom, 'all yours. You are a part of this because you too grew here.'

Oh, those fairy noises that haunt homecoming nights in May and June; the witcheries that stir, the magic scents of lilac, honeysuckle, and syringa, the warmth of grasses, the coolness of leaves, the robes of gold wherewith the fields adorn themselves, the laughing brown of water, and the damp graciousness of earth! All, all for you, fashioned for you, growing for you, beautiful beyond the telling just for you, because your heart has found the key to Nature's hills, and these, these hundred blossoming faces that she turns to you, are all your first loves, your adored ones, your friends since the first day you tottered after daisies and pulled their heads off ruthlessly.

There ought to be some old pagan god that one could worship on a summer's eve. Some moss-grown statue of a satyr, who would chase with you the moonbeams that run down between the flower-stalks. Some laughing Panhorned creature, to rush with you among the flower-beds and help fling off in that tumultuous riot of aban

doned motion the pain of beauty that has shut the heart in. Someone, partfaerie, part-fawn, and part-mortal, to run a breathless race with; to dash down rose-decked paths from; to yet beguile, by swift agility of bending body, with Terpsichore's art; to charm by springing into life in untamed gracefulness, until the whole green-painted world is sent careening round the stars in the sweet mad motion of a dance. And then, to finish, panting, under some bloom-starred hedge, with the clover tickling your eyelids, and drawing in with hurried breaths perfumed night air. Thus ought we to worship summer's advent to our own hills in June. And then, the statue turned back into stone again, you should go to sleep across its cloven hoofs, until dawn pushed your eyelids open and the birds sang with the morning stars to wake you. So it should be, I thought, as I lay there; so could I pour my adoration out of body, brain, and heart, and loose the suffocating weight of it until next spring came round again.

Instead, I went to all the flowerbeds and pulled a hundred blown buds from their places, to carry back with me and help me make a festival for beauty. I held them up against my cheeks and pushed their petals open with my lips. I kissed their tinted faces, and I drank the dew they still held in their delicate becolored cups. I wound them in my hair, and clustered them about my neck; and then I held up in my arms a solid, dripping, trailing mass of bloom.

Thus I walked home, and made my room a paradise for honeybees. And for myself I slipped down into linen sheets that came from cedar boxes, and dreamed that every day was June, and in each one of them I should be 'getting home.'

The army mental tests have shown that there are, roughly, forty-five million people in this country who have no sense. Their mental powers will never be greater than those of twelve-year-old children. The vast majority of these will never attain even this

meagre intelligence. Besides the forty-five millions who have no sense, but a majority of votes, there are twenty-five millions who have a little sense. Their capacity for mental and spiritual growth is only that of thirteen- or fourteen-year-old children, and your education can add nothing to their intelligence. Next, there are twenty-five millions with fair-to-middling sense. They have n't much, but what there is, is good. Then, lastly, there are a few over four millions who have a great deal of sense. They

have the thing we call 'brains.'

THESE statements, which I venture to quote from a popular magazine, are typical of much that has been written about 'army mental tests.' Are they true? No. Is there any truth in them? Just enough to make them worse than false. They discredit psychology and mislead the reader in important matters of fact. This is my excuse for turning from my scientific tasks to write a would-be popular article on the results of psychological examining in the

army.

Two types of statement appear repeatedly in popular and general accounts of the army work. The one is that the draft was but thirteen years old mentally; the other that some 12 per cent of the soldiers were of very superior, or superior, intelligence, as indicated by the grades A or B; some 64 per cent, of medium ability, grades

C+, C, and C-; and the remaining 24 per cent, of poor, or very poor, mental alertness, and therefore graded D or D-. Unfortunately, both of these ways of expressing the general results of army mental examining are seriously misleading. It is my task to point out the chief reasons for misunderstanding, and to offer some more intelligible and reliable form of statement.

I

old mentally? There are at least two Is our population only thirteen years possible grounds for dissatisfaction with the thirteen-year statement. On the one hand, it may be misunderstood or misinterpreted by most of us, and on the other hand it may be unreliable or inaccurate. Let me mention first a few possible grounds for misinterpretation.

It is well known that most of us commonly overestimate the intelligence of our fellows. This is primarily because of our limited contact and familiarity with persons of low-grade ability. I would not flatter the Atlantic circle, but it is undoubtedly true that its average intelligence is far above the median ability of the population! Inevitably we estimate the intelligence of mankind from that of the individuals whom we know.

Similarly we underestimate the native intelligence of the average thirteenyear-old child. For we are greatly impressed by the maturing influence of education and experience beyond the

age of thirteen, and we tend to attribute to inborn intelligence what, instead, is purely acquisition. A child of thirteen years ordinarily is well advanced in growth, and may well have attained maximum intelligence, although still capable of vast improvement in the use of intellect. Children are sexually mature at from ten to sixteen years, according to race, and climatic conditions. It would not be very surprising, in view of these facts, were it proved that intelligence is fully developed in some individuals by the age of thirteen, and in the majority before sixteen. Such considerations make the thirteen-year statement more credible.

Or, again, it is entirely possible that the draft was not a fair and representative sample of the men of the country. To a certain extent those of low-grade intelligence were shielded by parents or guardians, and were rejected by draft boards. And to a far greater extent, probably, men of first-rate intelligence were reserved for the conduct of essential occupations, or were trained as officers. This heavy elimination at the top probably reduced the mental age of the drafted army by at least one year.

Nor can we safely overlook the effect of men of foreign birth on the intellectual status of the army. Altogether they are markedly inferior in mental alertness to the native-born American. In the group of soldiers especially studied by the psychologists, about 18 per cent were foreign-born. The United States Census reports for the total population about 14 per cent of foreign birth; so the draft was somewhat more heavily weighted than is the total population. Whereas the mental age of the American-born soldier is between thirteen and fourteen years, according to army statistics, that of the soldier of foreign birth serving in our army is less than twelve years. To claim, then, that

the inclusion of foreigners lowers the average mental age of the group by one half-year certainly is conservative.

If we should sum up these various considerations, we might say that the mental age of the native-born American male within the age-range of the draft probably approximates fifteen years. Such a result of army mental tests would not have caused general surprise, alarm, or skepticism.

Turning now from the possibilities of misinterpretation to those of error, we should remember that the trustworthiness of the mental-age statement issued by army psychologists depends upon the value of the standards of judgment available from civilian sources. Now, it is definitely known that the mentalage standards for ages from five years to ten or twelve are fairly reliable, and that beyond twelve years they are of uncertain value. This casts serious doubt on the trustworthiness of the thirteen-year statement. So also does the fact that the average age of maximum native intelligence probably is nearer sixteen than thirteen years. It is but fair to say that mental age was not generally used by army psychologists as a method of stating the result of examination. Instead, the actual score made in examination was recorded and used as a basis for recommendation.

I confess that I am not at all concerned, much less alarmed, by the statement that the average mental age of the draft was but slightly more than thirteen years. In view of all the possibilities of adverse selection, of the inclusion of a large percentage of men of foreign birth, of the probable unreliability of mental-age standards for adolescents and adults, and the near certainty that intelligence does not reach its maximum, on the average, much before sixteen years, it seems to me that thirteen years is a very respectable showing for our army.