more punishment is meted out, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in the average college football game than in the prize ring, at least when high-class opponents are involved.

The knockout punch is the cleanest sort of a blow. It strikes a man anywhere between the chin and the point of the jaw, temporarily shutting off consciousness and motor impulse. Ninetyeight times out of a hundred the man knocked out is upon his feet, his head cleared, within fifteen or twenty seconds. Blood often flows from cut lips, damaged noses, but there is nothing serious about such injuries. Where blood flows so freely as to give the bout a sanguinary appearance experienced seconds usually can check bleeding between rounds or where blood flows into a fighter's eyes affecting his vision, a bout invariably is

stopped by the referee and the opponent awarded a technical knockout.

But it must be said that blows delivered forthright by boxers of intriguing personality are what the fans pay to see. The champions are men of science, to be sure, but more especially are they men who can deliver telling blows and withstand them. Cleverness per se is not relished and boxers of rare expertness, who can elude the fists of any opponent and yet are unable themselves to deal dazing blows, languish for engagements.

Rival fighters do not care to meet them because of their distaste for being "shown up," as they say, and spectators have no patience with mere skill and finesse.

It is the "wallop" that brings in the gold-especially when that wallop is applied with all due deference to the drama and color of the occasion.

N the very day when George Kinkead first came down from general practitioner Clay in Boston to neurologist Adams in New York I began to hear his story. Adams described it from the start as a case made to my order, and Adams has an indubitable instinct for the dramatically morbid. He bursts upon me with a grisly humor in his eyes, and I know just what to expect even before he begins his "I had a chap to-day who actually believes that he . . ." I am grateful, too, and with good reason, however I might question Adams's ethics of the medical confessional. I might add, too, that were my own imagination less morbidly inclined, I should long since have discontinued our chamber of horrors friendship. But that is Adams himself and not at all the story of George Kinkead.

As

George Kinkead's peculiar illness broke suddenly in upon his middle forties, upon a lifetime of uninterrupted good health. It amazed and humiliated him by its fantastic, almost absurd, character. Adams said, he spoke of it, after many weeks of real physical suffering, with the shamefaced irritability of a man who tells of his first encounter with a bedbug.

George Kinkead's illness was simply this. One night, a few months after his wife's death-months of no more strain than the most formal considerations of mourning absolutely demanded - while George Kinkead was enjoying the very sound sleep upon which he always prided himself, he was startlingly awakened. The morning after he laughed about it.

"It was just like one of those silly psychic experiences," he said to his sister at breakfast. "You wouldn't take me for a medium, would you, Minna? It just

shows what fakers these spiritist people are."

Miss Minna, who had studied up on spiritism just to keep abreast and see what might be got from it, looked up with quite a flash of interest.

"I always sleep on my right side, you know," George pursued, "but I must have rolled over on my back for once. One does dream on one's back, I believe. I've never been the dreaming type. We discussed that, you remember, when you were so interested in poor Ellen's dreams after you had been reading all that trash about that dream fellow.'

"Freud," said Miss Minna.

"Yes. Just the sort of thing a German would think of. Well, anyway, when I woke up. I don't remember my dream; there wasn't any dream... I just woke up and I was sitting bolt upright in bed and-it sounds so damnably silly-I was clapping both hands together like a child. Quite hard, too. My palms both smarted and my elbows felt strained. I must have had my arms straight out and perfectly rigid."

"How amusing!" cried Miss Minna.

George thought so, too, and went to the office and told a few of his cronies about it while he lunched at the Somerset Club. But a week after it happened again and, a little later, twice in the same night. And that amazed him and, when it became a nightly occurrence, he spoke to the doctor about it.

Was there no more to it? Think of what it meant! A substantial, hundred per cent New England aristocrat, supervising the investment of half the unearned increment of Boston, responsible to his Vermont forebears for their historical society, a widower, no longer young, a man of vaunted self-control, a public character and never a night but he must waken himself at least once, sitting up in

bed and clapping his hands together so violently that his palms smarted!

He got to the point of being afraid to go to bed. His dark-browed, pinkcheeked health turned sallow. His curly hair streaked with gray. He tried sitting up into the small hours, on the theory that the less he slept the more would his slumber resist intrusion. He took to nightcaps of ale and of medical prescription, too. And the thing went on and grew more and more frequent with every week. Modernistic nerve men, called in by Clay, tested and questioned him. "There's no dream," he insisted. "There's not a vestige of a dream. I just wake up like that, clapping my hands, and it really feels as though some one had hold of my wrists and beat them together. I have to make a real effort to stop."

Adams came in upon the heels of a dozen consultants, Adams the radical so often rejected by medical journalism and so often acknowledged right in the end. Even Adams could learn no more than the others and avowed himself as baffled as they.

"No dreams," he said to me early in the story. "No hallucinations. No quirk that I can lay my finger on. None of your complexes to any such extremity. The mind and conscience of a baby with the constitution and nerves of a porpoise. Even now, if you please! And yet there's a twist somewhere. There must be. By Jove, it's a funny one!"

The hero or victim or blundering villain, as you please, of this neurotic romance began life as the only son of a Boston broker to whose substance and circumstance he presently succeeded as the third president of Kinkead & Co. He was nominated for the Somerset Club immediately the attending physician had established his sex as of the eligible variety. He went to the proper prep school and graduated from Harvard in 1900 with the degree of B. A. and a gentleman's amount of education and a gentleman's outlook upon the business of living.

When his father died of injuries sustained in a polo game, at the age of fiftyfive, George transferred the Transcript subscription to his own name, and Kinkead & Co. began to specialize in the bond

issues of hydro-electric developments. His sister Minna and he continued to live in the brownstone house in Marlborough Street, with Who's Who and The Living Age on the library table, purple glass in the dining-room windows, Arundel prints on the drawing-room walls, and hook rugs on the bedroom floors.

George interested himself in his forebears, thought (and Miss Minna agreed with him) that he strikingly resembled his great-uncle Richard, occasionally copied something out of the Kinkead book for the genealogical page of the aforementioned Transcript, and always wore a rosette of ribbons in his button-hole just exactly as the aristocrats of ancient Rome stood lares and penates about the atria of their columned homes. George collected wooden clocks and had them repaired, too, so that they really ran now and then. In the Middle West, he (and his father as well) would certainly have been eminent Rotarians. Because they were New Englanders and Kinkeads the one succeeded the other as president of the Phipps's Crossing Historical Society in Vermont, where the old Kinkead mansion still stands, and every year presided over the Phipps's Crossing Historical Pageant, with the local chapter of Redmen as Indians in burnt-orange union suits. Once George played old Colonel Kinkead (who married Betty Phipps) in the revolutionary episode, but he never repeated the effort, because the wig gave him a headache and then Miss Minna thought that with the garage man playing General Greene (and so commanding him) it might be just as well, perhaps, if . . .

His financial position was Herculean and his politics black Republican, tinged with bitterness whenever he heard the name of Theodore Roosevelt. A successful life, so regular that its single deviation seemed a waterspout in a world of millponds.

The deviation occurred in 1907. In 1907 George Kinkead married Ellen Steele. Miss Steele was an actress. You can imagine.

Miss Minna Kinkead, diminutive in the grand manner, peers at life over the little shelf of her bosom with very keen interest and very little approval. Her

popular actress. I could tell Adams, who had not been so fortunate as I, all about her.

She was small and chiselled and she had a wild elegance and a gentility of charm, together. She was like a cameo sometimes, and sometimes like a crystal statuette. Not hard, though. Her beauty, for all the cleanness of its edges, was too flowerlike to be hard. She made you think of the lady in the nursery rhyme who will have music wherever she goes. Music was Ellen Steele's due wherever she went. She was herself so strangely like music.

She came from London, I believe, from what is called "old theatrical stock." One never knew much about her.

Those were the transition days between the theatre of the old school and our playground for press agents and sex appeal. The outside world would have held few fetishes for Ellen Steele. She would, I think, have harked back to the great departed goddesses, done her work hard, and slept soundly after. She would have had little time and less thought for beau monde or fourth estate.

I fancy the impresarios of her day captured her to make Shakespeare profitable. I saw her Beatrice and her Viola. Many years afterward my roommate (for this part is a college memoir) named his daughter Juliet in her honor, even though he never met her as I did. New York loved her for three winters. At the end of the third she went on tour. She got no further than Boston. There, while she was playing Juliet, she met Kinkead and married him. She announced that her marriage would not in anywise interrupt her career, but she never acted again. She died a year ago, ageless as such women should be, after sixteen years of marriage. Why do "such women" do it? When an actress marries-there is a difference, isn't there, between an actress and a woman merely on the stage?-it is as though some one had plucked a rose in the garden and stuck it in a vase. They are defenseless creatures, I think, such women; in a strange way, quite like flow ers. Unlike flowers, too, I grant you. There isn't much fanaticism about a flower, and one wouldn't think twice of an actress who wasn't a fanatic. But it

seems a special kind of fanaticism, a passive kind, that permits, rather than seeks, obsession by a single-minded emotion. And, once obsessed, the very passivity is galvanized into a force capable of leaping the gap between its source and its—well, its audience. As electric current leaps the unwired spaces between tower and tower. . . . But so easily, so very easily destroyed, too... quite like flowers. . . .

Ellen Steele, now. She bloomed to be enjoyed, if ever woman did, and then came the man who could not enjoy her without cutting her off from all that gave her life. He might have made her happy, you say? But did he? He hardly consulted her about the vase in which she was to sink so safely and forlornly to oblivion. She came to live in the Boston house in Marlborough Street with her husband and his sister (who, of course, continued to manage everything just as she always had), and summers she went to the farm at Phipps's Crossing and watched the historical pageant and, after sixteen years of that, she died with no more issue than the faint echo of a voice and the vague shadow of a gesture to move through a generation's memories of Beatrice and Viola and Juliet. . . .

"It turned out far better than we expected." So Miss Minna to Adams, concluding what, together with my own reminiscence and rumination, I have just summarized. "She was a gentle thing, not unamenable, and, though she had no background of any sort, her natural adaptability really made things quite easy. Of course, very few people called at first, but I made the best of things. One must make the best of things, if they are humanly possible, don't you think? When George steadfastly refused to put her aside-and, I must say, I did not myself greatly like the idea of divorce-I was clever enough to point out to our friends the difference between a Shakespearian actress and the ordinary theatrical person. Eventually every one had to recognize her undeniable charm. There were moments in the first year or two when a dreadful manager used to come from New York. After those interviews she would talk, quite wildly at times, of this rôle or that, quite as though she intended to continue