from Mr. West, with a check for twenty-five dollars for "the correspondent who knows how to nose out news when he smells it." Every detail of how the old blood in the horse had called him back to the strenuous life was depicted in such a graphic style as to bring every false fact home to the reader's heart.

Several nights after this episode occurred, Fuzzy staggered into the office. He was drunk, disgustingly drunk. "Demon Rum"as he jokingly called it had him again. He wouldn't stay at his desk that night. And the next morning his chair was empty and his little two-column space was profaned by a pagan hand. Even now, perhaps, a despondent managing editor and a discouraged circulation manager are halfway hoping for Fuzzy's return. But the little obituary notice, brief as it is, will tell an old, old story to the friends who had warned him long ago that some night he would be unable to survive the tremens. A martyr to the nervous strain of Yellow Journalism, Fuzzy has faked his last story. And when yesterday I read the unceremonious announcement of his death, I could not help thinking what a story he could have written about his own obituary notice.

THE COLLEGE SPRINGTIME: A "NOW"

Now the moment we wake in the morning, though we be John Sluggards all, we feel no other desire than to leap up, seeing our tennisracquet or a baseball, or through the window a strip of gold-blue sky or a patch of leaves, and feeling the vicinity of books and walls an oppression. Now we hasten to get outdoors, and are impatient of the things necessary and unnecessary that restrain us, objecting on new grounds to the rigor of the early bath, and to fresh linen, and indifferent even to breakfasting upon fruit and the news. Now the day is not too long, nor the morning too fresh, nor the noon too hot, nor the evening too languorous, and we think the man who says merely "Fine Weather" a very fool for doing it no greater justice. Now we feel less like a student than anything else in the world, and more like a young animal, especially in those moments when we consider going barefoot upon the turf. Now we wish to do a score of things at once, and end by doing the best of all, which is nothing. Now a bookstrap is a sore abomination, and the sluggish river of students that periodically carries us down to classes a torturing stream, though it be full of back-slapping friends; and now it is nettling to see that current of youth vitiated at entrance to the campus by even

a thread of bespectacled instructors. Now ivy-covered halls look cold and dark, and their air, as the sun strikes into it, misty, and as you breathe it, unwholesome.

But now everything outside flushes with the same life that is in our veins, and warms quickly into activity. Now the engineer's existence, as with surveyor's tape he paces the sunny sward beneath literary windows, seems blithe and vigorous. Now between classes you know not what to do and so do nothing but wander, like the argosy clouds above, for all desk occupations are beyond consideration. Now the notes from the cavernous music school slip out unmelodiously, as so much of the lugubrious poured upon a world brimming with the song of birds. Now the chorus of the physical director's protégés comes softened from afar. Now the courts are a long vista of scurrying figures and of white spheres flashing over white nets, and the athletes trot past them in squads to the open field, where is the crack of the struck ball and the slow glint of the falling discus. Now in buildings the entries and halls seem echoingly wooden and dusty; and the lecturer's voice somnolent; and our attention wanders; and the question in oral quiz comes like lightning out of a cloud at your heart; and notebooks are as mournful as their black covers, and a pen as heavy as the burden of Atlas. Now we all pity the teacher for seeming to take a real interest in his subject; and we feel as angry in seeing others labor as if a spoken reproach were addressed to ourselves. Now the haunts of the studious are beautiful only at night, with the play of the sparkling arc lights among the fairy green.

Now the student thinks with dread of the summer and the hot streets or laborious fields; and prefers to let his mind wander over the diversions that crowd the college May. Now his steps are drawn as if magnetically to the scene of ball practice. Now the empty bleachers become black in the space of thirty minutes, and mutter thunder for an hour, and disintegrate again. Now the lower classmen, in fiendishly designed regimentals, seek out the weather forecasts in hope, and blaspheme among themselves; but as their gray columns wind over the southern lawns, or come, in long lines, to a glittering present before the Armory as the band plays, the spectator forgets their obvious discomfort. Now the constant interest in sports is broken by ebullitions of political activity, and at the heads of the campus walks gather lobbying groups.

Now the dances are over, and social evenings in curtained parlors or on shining waxed floors until midnight seem as distasteful as they were once glamorous; but the swish of a light skirt on the steps or

Now

the sight of it across the green campus is as irresistible as ever. we are amazed on opening our purses to find them full of confectionery rebate checks and nothing else; and still we cannot curb our tastes for ever-new neckwear. Now in the early evening the streets are full of ball-playing men; now in the after-dinner dusk the fraternity porches are massed solidly and banjos and mandolins are in requisition, and the swings are hung from chains that they may bear the weight of nine men at once. Now songs that contain allusions to the much adjectivized moon are shrilled or bawled everywhere. Now fellows with automobiles are most popular, and appear surrounded by flocks, while those without such friends go strolling with a camera. Now on Sunday afternoons the streets about the University are parading avenues, and the south campus is more and more variegated, and the cemetery stones see wonderful sights. Now the smartstepping darkies who bear pressed clothes, and the urchins who sell Posts, and the wandering Jews who buy garments multiply and become ubiquitous.

Now seniors at times remember, and a shade passes over their brows as they glance slowly at the time-old sights; and their hands clench, and their step quickens as they seem to catch the music of conflict and the call to arms from the world upon which they are impinging. Now the atmosphere of the college, just fitting about the freshman, gay upon the sophomore, and intoxicating in the breast of the junior, is passing from them. Yet to senior and all alike, the world and the fulness thereof is brightness. Now Now - Now it is spring!

THE FEAR OF PEW

WHY is it that I dread and hate David Pew? The very name is ghastly. Wickedness, craftiness, bloodiness, power, and the devil himself seem bound up in it. I cannot think of him without a shudder and whenever I recall his "vice-like grip" and the "tap-tap-tapping of his stick," the blood rushes in little whirls through my breast.

Stevenson doubles the horridness and supernaturalness of Pew by making him blind. Blindness itself carries a tragic, fearsome atmosphere with it. The blind are both pitied and held in awe, because we imagine that they live in a world different from ours, a world of black, heavy shadows and dark, whirling winds, and that they are, to some extent, of this world of phantoms. It is uncanny to see a blind man do a seeing man's work and ghost like when he hears

sound to which we are deaf. To know that when a blind man touches us a stream of information, which seems out of all proportion, rushes up to his brain, to know that he marks every tremor and inflection of our tones is to have for him a respect tinged with fear. But invest a hateful villain with these unusual powers, as Stevenson has invested David Pew with them, and we have an infernal spirit whose very image makes the feverish sweat burst out at the temples.

USE OF DIALOGUE IN "THE YOUNG MAN WITH THE CREAM TARTS"

STEVENSON makes much use of dialogue in almost all of his stories. In "The Young Man with the Cream Tarts" he lives up in every way to his established custom. There is much conversation, but it is all pertinent, all useful. He does not bring in conversation because he prefers that method of writing, or because he feels that the story needs some conversation somewhere, but because it is natural. None of the dialogue - a bold statement to make concerning such a long story is superfluous or irrelevant. He makes the dialogue between Mr. Malthius and Colonel Geraldine the medium through which the methods of the Suicide Club are explained. The Young Man with the Cream Tarts tells the story of his own financial excesses in a few natural words, which give a very much better sense of realism to the story than if the facts were simply written down by the author. Almost the entire development of the plot rests in the dialogue, yet the plot moves quickly and without hesitation.

It is hard to say whether Stevenson's dialogue is natural in the sense that it is the dialogue of real flesh-and-blood people. To me there is that same inherent beauty and nobility of style in Stevenson that there is in Scott, a beauty and nobility which cannot alike be given to Prince Florizel and the President, of the Suicide Club. Without a question the conversation of the Prince is entirely in character. The sentences are noble and contain that certain sense of quiet royalty and power which it is so difficult to command. Prince Florizel's character is told completely by his dialogue. We know, admire, love, and respect him immediately. But the dialogue of Mr. Malthius and the President is it not a bit too fine, too noble, too carefully conceived? Whatever may be the effect of these baser characters, it is entirely due to Stevenson's wonderful descriptions (how skilful they are!) rather than to their conversations. Little of the character is unfolded in the style and structure, though, of course, much in the literal mean

ing of the sentence. However, I still maintain that we remember the President not from any especial points in his conversation, but because of "his mouth, which embraced a large cigar, which he constantly kept screwing round and round and from side to side," and because of many like pictorial descriptions. It is so with Mr. Malthius, and so on down the list, with the exception of the Prince. Yet I would rather have the story as it is than lose any of these superb sentences to gain what after all would prove but a trifling benefit.

JOHN MASEFIELD

DURING the past dozen years John Masefield has been supplementing an earlier career in maritime vagabondia by an intensely busy and varied literary life. He has written review upon review, edited volume upon volume; has gone back with characteristic zest to live in sixteenth and seventeenth century England, that land of salt sea gods and rich discoveries; has turned out dashing prose tales of the sea; has written epigrammatically upon Shakespeare; and has made four books of poetry. Always he has written too swiftly. Like his poetic contemporaries he has composed with a silly rapidity that has not been gauged "for all time," and strikes you best at its first reading. He rarely is eminently quotable; he has attended less to the single line or to the single stanza than to the breathing spirit, the force and motion and necessity of the theme as a whole. But for all that he emerges from his activity the most successful, as the North American Review would have it, of all English poets since Stephen Phillips in his prime.

It is to be feared that a great proportion of this success has to be inferred from the popular exclamations over the least unobjectionable traits in Masefield's poetry. Thirteen years ago Stopford A. Brooke wrote this:

"What we want for the sake of a noble literature, and especially for the sake of a lasting school of poetry, is a great social conception, carrying with it strong and enduring emotions, appealing to the universal heart of man and woman."

And the fact is inescapable that to-day, when social needs are receiving warmer attention than in any previous period of civilization, we are seeing the best poetry brought close to common life, to the common individual. There is no way out of understanding that a new note of mysticism is lighting up our philosophy and our literature a mysticism that seeks to make its wonted leap away from