coffee, it included a little more. As I remember those 'coffees,' I want to gloat like the boys in Stalky and Co., not only because the coffee included wine, whiskey and soda, and all the 'makings,' but because it also included talk.

For this talk was talk that amounted to something. I have had some wonderful talks in America; but into one winter in England there was crowded a long series of never-to-be-forgotten evenings. One night a distinguished American scholar, who had lectured before the college in the afternoon, was entertained. In our company there was a man who had been an English administrator in India and in Africa; a young American who had served with the marines in San Domingo; a Scotsman with an uncanny knowledge of unexpected things, who enlightened us on the Icelandic sagas; another Scotsman, who once lived in China and who is an authority on modern psychology; and others, each knowing his own subject well enough to see its bearing on the subjects we talked of. We spent most of our time talking of the treatment by Europeans of the primitive races; and then, somehow, we slipped over to the psychology of the primitive races themselves. Of course information was exchanged, but not a man was dull or pedantic. There was anecdote, repartee, wit, and sociability. We went our several ways with new life in us. I know that I lectured on Catullus much better next day because of this mental stimulant. My time was far more profitably spent in a whole evening of talk, than it would have been in reading Robinson Ellis or even Elmer Truesdale Merrill.

I was in one of the 'Provincial' universities. At Oxford and Cambridge, the staff of each college usually dines together in Hall, and after dinner goes to the Combination Room for coffee

and talk. The power to take part in the talk that goes on is almost an essential qualification for a fellow of a college. I heard of one man, a brilliant scholar, who was seriously thinking of resigning his fellowship because he felt that he had no gift for conversation. His colleagues won't let him resign, but it is significant that he should consider it on grounds like these. As a result of this constant clashing of wits, these men can talk and write entertainingly. They have learned in the Combination Room to be simple, free from pedantry, and never polysyllabic. A surprising number, even of their technical books, are readable. I have often been told that, in the narrow fields they choose, our American scholars are more accurate. But, let me whisper it here in the intimacy of our own family, that we Americans are not always accurate. We make many slips. I think, on the whole, we make full as many as our English colleagues, and there are comparatively few among us who can convey misinformation so delightfully. It would help us here on this side of the water to have our brains mutually picked and our polysyllabicisms

hooted. We need more talk.

I am aware that the way to get things done in America is to form an organization, with committees, an office, and a paid secretary. Too often, it is true, we think that the work is done when we have organized to do it; and it has happened that, concentrating on our organization, we have forgotten our original aim altogether. But, in spite of the danger, I am tempted to start an organization to make professors talk. The meetings might have to be held in Montreal, or in Cuba, for reasons that should be obvious; but, if we could only keep our aim in sight and remember that we were organized to talk, it would pay. We really are polysyllabic. Some of us are afraid

that, if we write intelligibly, we may be regarded as popular, and popularity is damnation.

We have another fault, worse, if possible, then polysyllabicism. We are narrow. We fear the man who can write, or even talk, intelligently on more than one theme. We are like the German scholar my English friends told me of. He came one winter to an English university which has grown up about an ancient cathedral. In the chapter library there is a collection of priceless old manuscripts, and he came to collate one of them, I think a manuscript of Piers Plowman. The members of the Faculty thought they should in some way recognize his presence, so they gave a dinner in his honor. After dinner in one of the college halls, they adjourned to the Combination Room for the usual talk. The German visitor would not be drawn. They tried him on all sorts of questions without result. Finally, he explained that Piers Plowman was his special field and he did not wish to talk except on his own subject. The saddest part of the story is that, so far as they could judge, he gloried in his shame. We are not quite as bad as he, but too often we have little interest outside our own field, and no knowledge whatever. We should know more of our own field if we knew something of others. We might learn much by occasionally picking a colleague's brains.

But perhaps we should not have an organization. If we had, then our female colleagues would come in. I be lieve in women's rights. I believe that before the sex there still lie heights which they shall some day reach. Some of them, while mere males still do sleep, are toiling upward in the night. Some of them are experts at picking brains, and would be useful at a picking bee. Many of them are good fellows, and would not object to their male associates

'solemnizing Nicotina's rites' while in deep discussions they spend ambrosial nights. But somehow the women are few who can fit into a group where men are in the majority and not bring with them some slight restraint. I urge, therefore, that in the case of professors, coeducation be abandoned, and that parallel courses be given to small groups of each sex.

And here I turn to the wives of professors, to their sisters and their cousins and their aunts. Women, spare your man. Let him loose for a time, more often than you do, from his smug domestic comfort, even from the training of his children, momentous as this is, and make him a boy again, just for a night. Let him go and talk and smoke and drink non-alcoholic beverages. Your country calls you to this high duty; for American scholarship will never achieve its high destiny until American professors talk more.

THE WORM TURNS

the

YESTERDAY I sat on the front gallery, enjoying the Sabbatical fragrance of gumbo and fried chicken which floated from Mammy's kitchen, and gazing appreciatively upon PhyllisAnne in a rocking-chair much too big for her: a little girl in white frock, pink sash, and patent leather shoes conventional picture of a good child reading a Sunday School paper. Suddenly an expression of outraged justice crossed the small countenance, and an indignant forefinger pointed to an innocent-looking photograph of an arbutus plant in blossom. Underneath was the inscription, 'A Flower that Every Good American Knows.'

Now Phyllis-Anne's eight years have all been passed in the land of magnolia and jasmine. I, her mother, was born, as it were, in the shade of a Middle Western sunflower. Therefore I quite

understood the italics of her pronunciamento: 'I am a perfectly good American, and I do not know that flower.'

I hesitate before making my confession, realizing that it will put me outside the cultural pale, but I have never seen an arbutus.

I know it academically, of course. My principal association with it is as one of a list of 'words commonly mispronounced.' I have met it frequently in literature, and have heard its virtues extolled. I believe it to be a worthy flower. The dictionary tells me that 'it has oblong, hairy leaves and fragrant pink-and-white blossoms.' I realize that the soupçon of prejudice that I feel against it, on account of its hairy leaves, is unreasonable and inconsistent with the fact that I don't like Mexican dogs, who have no hair at all. And in any event the fragrant pink-and-white flowers no doubt more than compensate for the hirsute foliage. Indeed, I have nothing against the arbutus per se. The dictionary further informs me that 'it is especially abundant in New England.' (Did I say that Phyllis-Anne's Sunday School paper is published in New England?)

Now poppies are especially abundant in the Far West, dandelions gild the pastures in the corn-belt, and the trumpet-honeysuckle drapes itself on every fence-post in the Blue Grass country; but would it occur to any of these sections to specify acquaintance with its particular flora as a condition of good Americanism?

The arbutus, I am told, is a modest plant. Can it be - this is mere speculation that its pink blossoms are

white ones, which are blushing at having been made the emblem of sectional complacency?

California is conceited, and it is necessary to treat all Californians with firmness, or they will tell you ad nauseam that the geraniums reach the second-story windows. The Northwest is blatant, but not provincial. Dixie is rather vain, but, like most vain people, has a wholesome underlying sense of her own shortcomings. But New England is complacent with the complacency of ignorance. It simply has not penetrated to her consciousness that there is any nation to speak of west of the Alleghanies. Corn, certainly and beef. But culture!

'Oh, yes,' said a New England lady to the man from Montana; 'I have a friend in the West. She lives in Buffalo.'

'June,' says a Boston magazine intended for national circulation, 'is the best-loved month.' Of course, the editor means best loved in New England. Here in the South we regard Lowell's 'What is so rare as a day in June?' as mere poetic license.

But the worm has turned. For many years we have swallowed New England morals and New England culture, and have felt apologetic because we did not care for baked beans and could not learn to say 'kimoner.' Sundrenched California and Louisiana have patiently taught their children to read 'I have a new red sled' out of New England primers.

But what is the use? In imagination I feel the New England lorgnette turned upon me, and I am shaking in my shoes.

FROM time to time inquiries reach this office concerning the 'sale' of the Atlantic. In any and every case we should like to state that such rumors are utterly without foundation. We ask our readers to deny upon our authority that there is a vestige of truth in any such report.

THE casualties among the artistic conventions of the stage in the last few years have been enormous. Soliloquies have been replaced by the choppy speech of the subway; real rain, real horses, real Chinamen have invaded the stage. For some time a tide of reaction has been causing critics to cry out that inRealism' there is no real life. No one can dissect the realistic movement and the present streams and eddies in the stage world better than George Arliss who began his professional career in the days of the soliloquy and has witnessed the rise and fall, perhaps the culmination, of realism on the American stage. He remarks, "The art of the actor is to learn how not to be real on the stage, without being found out by the audience.' The Very Reverend W. R. Inge, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, London, one of the most incisive thinkers on social as well as Church problems in England to-day, takes up from a different point of view the subject of Catholicism and the AngloSaxon, treated in the March Atlantic by Hilaire Belloc. George Moore, author of the Confessions of a Young Man, Esther Waters, The Brook Kerith, and many other books that lovers of good writing know, talks to Mr. Gosse in this number of the Atlantic.

Formerly professor of economics and sociology in Smith College, and later at Leland Stanford Junior University and at Cornell, H. H. Powers is best known as a lecturer and publicist. His last Atlantic paper, 'The Drug Habit in Finance,' appeared in January of this year. Alice Hegan Rice is the much loved author of Mrs. Wiggs

of the Cabbage Patch. She proves she has not forgotten the art of telling a story in this number of the Atlantic. George Villiers, a new English poet, now appears in America for the first time. To Americans, the life of the man who built that ubiquitous institution, the Saturday Evening Post, must be of keen interest. Edward W. Bok, for many years editor of the Ladics' Home Journal, continues his intimate biography of Cyrus H. K. Curtis in this number. Jean Kenyon Mackenzie has become so familiar to Atlantic readers as a poet, that some have perhaps forgotten that she began as a missionary in the African Cameroon, and wrote perhaps the most penetrating and alluring letters ever penned by a missionary. Later readers will remember her as a biographer of her own father who came as a boy to America from Scotland with but a shilling or two in his pocket. (The Fortunate Youth.) In this number of the Atlantic she is an essayist.

A missionary and the daughter and granddaughter of missionaries, Charlotte Chandler Wyckoff was born in South India and has spent all her life there except for nine years in school in this country. George A. Gordon, pastor of the New Old South Church of Boston, is the author of Humanism in New England Theology, and other books dealing in a very human way with religion and theology. ¶A wellknown British scholar, E. Barrington, is known to Atlantic readers as the author of romances with authentic and entertaining eighteenth-century backgrounds. A late volume, The Ladies! has recently been published by the Atlantic Monthly Press. Joseph Auslander, the young American poet, is now teaching English in Harvard University. John Sterling, New England born and bred, desires to avoid biographical attention. Elizabeth A. Drew was graduated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, with First Class Honors in English Language and

Literature. From 1919 to 1921 she was head of the Women's Staff of the Department of Education of the British Army of the Rhine.

***

Langdon Mitchell, son of the novelist, S. Weir Mitchell, is a member of the New York bar, but the profession he has practised for many years is that of author and playwright. Theatre-goers will remember especially 'Becky Sharp' and 'The New York Idea.' He has just returned from extensive travel in Europe. He writes the editor: 'I am interested in the new Europe -the younger Europe-Europe in the bud. Not so much touching politics, as culture, ideas, and art.' It is of especial interest to Americans to learn how other nations are dealing with their color problem. We have already published a paper by Pierre Khorat on French relations with the Negro in North Africa, and a companion article appears in this number on Britain's Negro problem. John H. Harris is a wellknown English student of 'Colonial Mandates' and of Britain's Negro affairs in Africa. For many years in English public life, he recently contested a seat in the House of Commons with a Cabinet minister. H. E. Wortham, a British student of the Mohammedan situation, formerly on the staff of the Times is now a correspondent of the London Outlook.

business and pour a beautiful flood of sensible publicity into every nook and corner of it.

I bid the Atlantic 'Godspeed' in the fine work it is doing in publishing such articles as Fishman's. Frankly, that's the best and most genuine thing you've published. Tannenbaum was too one-sided; his prejudices were all with the prisoner, and between you and me they do not all deserve such consideration. Fishman says truly that some of them would literally murder their own mothers for a few coppers, and there are a greater number of such cattle' in jails and prisons than the public is allowed to believe by some lopsided writers. It's only the minority in any jail or prison that's worth saving, and of whom any sane man can entertain any hope whatever. But, even the guilty man is entitled to a square deal; and, no matter what he has done, we (the Public) should have too much self-respect to allow our servants- the police, the jailer, and the sheriff to abuse, cuff, mistreat, or beat him up. Sincerely,

A READER.

It is always interesting to us to know 'Who reads the Atlantic?' - and where. The following might be entitled 'Literature vs. Rubbish.'

DEAR ATLANTIC,

Last fall, while traveling through the South, our train was detained in a small city of Kentucky, either to wait for another train, or to change engines. Our coaches were switched on to a track which overlooked a piece of low land that was being filled in with all the rubbish that the town could collect. There was already a hard gray tableland on which the wagons moved to throw over their contents.

It was late afternoon and the day's work seemed finished.

Suddenly my attention was drawn to a young boy coming across the flat surface, pushing a wheelbarrow. He was, prematurely, in long trousers. Something around the waist held them in, and something across the shoulders held them on. They were rolled around the feet. He came to the edge of the débris and looked down. He found a stick and fished up the clothing. There was only one piece that he considered — this he shook and held up to the light. It was a shirt. He turned it slowly over several times, and looked at it carefully. Then he threw it behind him.

The removal of the clothing had uncovered a pile of magazines. Their gayly colored covers caught his eye. He cautiously took a few steps down and pulled them up to him.

He gave these a little more consideration than