It is a new year and a new editor to be introduced at the same time. The new season of work is here after summer interruptions, change of employment, vacation, or whatever may have broken the continuity of things. The new editor is here because unhappily the man who founded the Bay View Reading Club and gave his life to it, has laid down his pen forever.

The work must go on. Firmly grounded as it is in the hearts of thousands, nationwide, after the lifetime devotion of John M. Hall, its service is too great to be neglected because of his passing. The one who undertakes the work now has a task indeed ahead of him to maintain the standards and justify the loyalty of the past. The task is lightened, however, by the sturdiness of the building done by the founder, and by the expressions of good will that have come to hand since the announcement of the successor was made.

Promises need not be written. If quality and value are displayed in the MAGAZINE they will be recognized by our discriminating members fast enough without proclamation from its own columns. It is fair to mention, however, at this time, that the present writer enjoys one detail of preparation particularly bearing on the problem at hand. For more than twenty years he has been admitted to the close friendship and fellowship of John M. Hall in a personal way, in touch with the progress and aspirations of the Bay View Reading Club. So at this time he feels himself asking kindly admission to an enlarged circle of friends rather than seeking shelter as a stranger. Every effort will be made to maintain and increase the service to be rendered by the Bay View Reading Club. The old courses available will be continued, or re-issued, year by year in fresh form. New courses will be added with regularity, in some directions extending the field of work hitherto occupied. The MAGAZINE will continue to furnish selections of the best in literature and illustration. The office staff, as in the past, will be at the command of members seeking suggestions or help in specific ways. We wish to feel that the personal equation between home office and members, always so cherished, may continue to exist with the same warmth of feeling, as in the past.

THE MAGAZINE FOR 1915-16 Because of the peculiar conditions of the present year, the field of the current volume of THE BAY VIEW MAGAZINE is somewhat enlarged.

Heretofore, as all members know, each

whatever specific course of study it accompanied. For this year such will not be the case. Since no new book course of study is offered for 1915-16, the MAGAZINE is enabled to touch subjects wherever they seem of special service, to correlate with all the courses of study.

Whatever course of study a prospective member may select out of the eight that are now available for distribution will be supplemented in current material bringing it up to date in the pages of the new volume. This new volume of the MAGAZINE will be furnished month by month as a part of the regular supplies to all members who select and purchase one of the courses of study at the usual price of $3.50 each.

Those who subscribe for the MAGAZINE alone, at the usual subscription price, $1.50 for the year, will find in it program material, examination questions and other help sufficient to inspire and occupy successful club meetings even without a more formalized course of study. It is always our recommendation. however, that members choose a full course of study, and thereby greatly increase the value of their work with slight increase of

cost.

THE MAGAZINE AND THE WAR

Many have asked, and more, no doubt, have wondered, what is to be the course of the MAGAZINE as to the great war. In a preliminary announcement made last spring it was said that this first number of the new volume would probably include a résumé of events up to the date of issue.

Afterthought and the lapse of time have changed this intention. For one thing, it may surely be assumed that members of the B. V. R. C. have kept currently informed as to the purely political and military events of this historic year. For another, a mere summary of what has happened in the course of the war would require all the pages of a single issue. and more, if it were to do justice to the situation and present background, facts and atmosphere in just proportion.

No, we shall not relate the history and the course of the war even in summary. The daily papers will have to serve that function. until it is all over, and with the lapse of years a truer perspective can be obtained.

But the war will be of constant influence on the contents of the MAGAZINE. From its turmoil come events and personalities thrown into stronger light, brought into relationship with world affairs and with Bay View Reading Club work, and these become the natural material for our use. The international and interdependent side of world affairs, not merely in the war, but in what the war touches at every point is the real field of the year for the MAGAZINE and the readers.

Few are better prepared to read and understand these new developments than the faithful students of the Bay View Courses.

Leschetizky was overrun with American pupils until last year when he was obliged to renounce all further pedagogic work because of his advanced age.

Leschetizky is one of the few remaining links connecting our day with a great past musical epoch. The venerable master is a capital raconteur and upon one occasion when a Musical Courier scribe spent an evening with him at his studio, from ten in the evening until five in the morning, the master entertained him with fascinating personal recollections of Liszt, Rubenstein, Wieniawski, his teacher Carl Czerny, who also had been Liszt's teacher, of the time when Chopin's compositions began to be popular. and of the rise of Schumann, Brahms and Wagner. He told how Wieniawski composed his "D Minor Concerto" at the Leschetizky house in St. Petersburg. because the great violinist could not find the necessary tranquillity in his own home. Leschetizky showed the visitor how Rubenstein produced his tone on the piano, declaring that Schuhoff was the first pianist to discover Rubenstein's secret, a secret which he said was not known to great pianists of our day.

When Leschetizky was twelve years old, Czerny his teacher, had him play for Liszt. That was in 1842 when Liszt was at the very height of his virtuoso career. The piano stool was too low for the boy, so Liszt gave him a large, thick book to sit on saying: "My boy, take a look at the name on the cover of this book. That name means nothing to you now but it will mean much later." Leschetizky looked and read : "Rienzi, by Richard Wagner."

The well known Dutch writer, Mynheer Van Der Schwartz, whose pseudonym of Maarten Maartens is much more familiar to us all died recently at his home in Holland. Born at Amsterdam in 1858, he attended a few terms of preparatory school both in his native city and in England though he spent the really formative period of his life as a scholar at the Prussian Gymnasium in Bonn. “In those days," he confesses. "I was violently anti-German, from fear of annexation after the FrancoPrussian war." The chief value of this sojourn was the acquiring of catholic sympathies due to the varied elements infused into the social life of Bonn, together with several winters spent at the cosmopolitan resorts on the Riviera. A law course at Utrecht later served him in satirizing the chicaneries of much that goes by the name of civil or criminal justice. In many of Maarten's novels, indeed, the statutory laws are made to seem unutterably little when brought into conflict with the higher unwritten laws of the soul.

More than a score of volumes stand to the credit of this author including two books of short stories, the sketches of "Women I Have Known" and "The New

Religion", the only one of his books that is frankly autobiographical, not in actual incident but in its revelation of his spiritual growth. Recognized by critics and public alike, this author has been hailed by one of the former as "the one great epic writer since the death of Tolstoy," while his popularity with the latter is attested by a collected edition of his works. His was a clear, vigorous and picturesque English that in purity and forcefulness was surpassed by few living English authors. In spirit, however, Mr. Maartens remained a Dutchman, always retaining his home at Doorn in Holland, while his stories with only one or two exceptions are studies of Dutch life and character. His first novel, "The Sin of Joost Avelingh," was published in 1890.

Partly due perhaps to a physical breaking down the past few years, Maarten Maartens had taken a decided antipathy to writing and would remain away from his desk long stretches at a time until an insistent idea would again urge him to the pen and lo, a new novel was soon under way. Since the announcement of his death, there have been many comments on the international features of his work. It is indeed a rare achievement to write in the language of another country and then retranslate one's own works. Such in a measure has been true of both Joseph Conrad, who, though English by adoption, is a Pole by birth and education, and of the poet, Tagore.

Maurice Barrés. the famous French academician, describes in the Echo de Paris a visit to Canadians at the front.

He pays an eloquent tribute to the courage and resource of the men, but somewhat fantastically works out the theory that this is the outcome of trapper and Redskin strains among the Canadian people.

"I know well," Barrés says, "among these volunteers there are many new Canadians born in England, or sons of emigrants. All are not sons of trappers or Redskins. That is understood, but around these types mentioned are grouped their differences, their varieties and their mixtures."

Barrés opens by describing how the sight of Canadian huts in Flanders recalled the description of the great village of Natchez which Rene saw on the shores of Meschacebe:

"The colors of this page have faded, the fashion has changed, but one finds in the Canadian army the survival of the old romance of the prairies. They have shown me trappers who use against the German bear a thousand little tricks of their craft. They chase the Boche with the astuteness of the scalp-hunters of old, or at any rate of fur hunters with astuteness tempered by English humanity.

"One Canadian camp officer told me they established immediately material and moral ascendency beyond dispute over the enemy as patrols and he gave many convincing details.

"While a German can be tracked by his furrow as he crawls in a wheat field, a Canadian can guide along without moving a single stalk. He will stay hours at a stretch on watch, lying on his back, looking behind him with the help of a little mirror. When the Boche is reassured by long silence and stillness in the field and ventures on his way, he is seized and trussed in two seconds.

"The other day after a series of these merry ambushes the trappers sent a German back to his trench with the simple message, 'No use sending another patrol, you've got Canadians opposite you.'"

Barrés described the death of a "redskin" at the time of his visit: "He was dressed in kahki, but his face showed the ardor of the ancient, dying prairie nations, and his courage was allied with their supreme calm under fire. He had performed numerous acts of most supreme bravery because he wished to win honor for his people. He was recommended for the Victoria Cross, and fell on the field of honor.

"Once again," says Barrés, "the last of the Mohicans came to die."

A remarkable instance of the power of music to render its devotees oblivious even to the horrors of war is recorded in a letter from a French Corporal on the Champagne front, published in The Journal de Génève.

"Last night," the Corporal writes, "I was on guard in a little village. The Prussian tornado had passed that way. I had to take up my quarters with four men in an abandoned house or rather a ruin. I had given my men their orders, and had settled myself in an old fireplace to eat a little supper when suddenly I heard, close to me, someone playing the marvelous 'Moonlight Sonata' of Beethoven. It seemed infinitely strange, in an almost deserted village, in the midst of so much ruin, to hear this divine sonata.

"I immediately arose and took pains to inform myself whence the music could proceed. I was not long in finding out that alongside my den was another ruin from which came the sound of playing. I rapped on the door, and the voice of a woman answered. I apologized, and said to her that the music in her house sounded beautiful. She bade me enter, and said:

"It is my son, who is blind; and if you wish to give him pleasure, come and keep him company.'

"I did not need a second invitation.

"A curious spectacle presented itself. In a room showing the ravages of the plague of war was a piano, still intact, and at the

instrument a tall blond young man, who was blind. Mother and son had been unwilling to leave their home in spite of the shells which had fallen around it, and were still falling, from time to time. The mother presented me, and the young man approached me with his hand extended and at once, to please me, sat down at his cherished piano-a moving sight.

"I listened to Wagner, Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Saint-Säens, Massenet, etc., within two kilometers of the firing line. I could not do otherwise than to stare at the great darkened eyes of this poor, handsome y young man, and in his face, lighted up with enthusiasm, I found something supernatural. And at last he played me something of his own composition. How beautiful it was! What unsuspected talent in this poor lost village!

"But it was time to rejoin my men. When the composer struck the last chords I thought I should have wept."

Because Brand Whitlock is a resident of that city, and because he has made himself the idol of the Belgian people, one of the art treasures of the war-devastated kingdom will soon hang in the Toledo Museum of Art.

As a token of appreciation for what the people of the United States have done for Belgium, Charles Leon Cardon, artist and collector of Brussels, has presented to the people of this country Van Dyck's sketch for his picture, "Saint Martin Partageant son Manteau," according to information just received from Brand Whitlock, American minister to Belgium, by Marshall Sheppey of Toledo.

In a letter to Mr. Sheppey, Mr. Whitlock says that in M. Cardon's home on the Quai au Bois à Bruler, in Brussels, there are the results of two generations of artistic appreciation, and that the gift, "Saint Martin Cutting His Mantle and Sharing it with a Poor Man," is the prize picture of the collection.

In the letter of presentation Mr. Cardon says in part:

"The Belgians have contracted toward the citizens of the Republic of the United States a debt of gratitude from which they can never free themselves. With a generosity, an enthusiasm, a grandeur of soul of which history offers no example, they have come to the aid of our population whom famine was staring in the face.

"Thanks to your noble citizens, thousands and thousands of Belgians have not been victims of horrible hunger and continue still to live and to work for the approaching rebirth of their unhappy country.

"I should be happy if I could be favored by seeing this souvenir of art of the Flemish school find its place among the collections of the museum of art at Toledo, Ohio.

"In that city, the residence of his Excel