self-control; show some knighthood. And for everyone to Do as Mr. Oldham says: 'Not merely in matters of greatness, but in matters of spirit.'

Very Truly Yours,

PETER NEWHALL

The lawyer's son wrote:

DEAR MISS CARR:

I do not think we ought to give up the club because the President said we would have to adjourn the meeting for half an hour to get weighed. Therefore it was n't a Civics Club meeting.

ROBERT HOLMES

The next day a formal apology duly signed by thirty-one boys was laid on Miss Carr's desk. But the end was not yet. By afternoon peace offerings began to arrive. Miss Carr found a russet apple on her desk, donor unknown, also a calendar and a purple pencil. Timmy Cooley sheepishly laid a broken croquet mallet on the desk. 'It could be used for a gavel,' he explained.

Not until the following afternoon, however, came the pièce de résistance. Michael Casey brought it proudly and with no attempt at concealment. It was in a bottle and Miss Carr had never seen its like before.

'What is it, Michael?' she asked, pleasantly curious.

'Me mother's appendix. She had

it out last summer and she don't want it no more. You can have it.'

The sixteenth meeting of the Sir Galahad Civics Club was held last Thursday, 'Timmy Cooley presidin'.'

THE FLESHPOTS OF CHINA

THE menus of a lonely missioner in China are subject to many vicissitudes. Mission fare was always plain, though I recall one occasion of wild extravagance when pâté de foie gras graced my halfcentury birthday spread. I soon got used to buffalo milk and butter, the

latter perfectly white like lard, with a slightly sweetish taste, but better than the tinned article. Milk is not regarded as a beverage in Eastern lands.

Once at a medical mission in China, after several weeks of almost uneatable bread, the housekeeper, who lacked experience and interest in her mission job, grew desperate and implored the assembled workers to produce a dependable recipe for bread. I remained modestly in the background until the silence on the part of ten busy women

doctors, Bible workers, everything but cooks- became painful; then I

said that I could make rolls without a recipe. I was joyfully escorted to the kitchen and set to work, while the Chinese cook critically observed my operative technique. Domestic episodes had to be sandwiched in between medical and surgical duties. I hoped to finish the rolls before an impending consultation with a physician about some surgical work which I was to do for him next day, but the doctor arrived before the baking was quite finished, and as we sat and talked over the case he sniffed hungrily at the oven fragrance; finally he cast pride to the winds and asked for rolls. Our family was too large to permit generosity, but he bore off in triumph the one roll bestowed upon him. He was rash enough to spread the good news, and while we were at dinner we had to surrender a roll apiece to two homesick American youths who came to the door a-begging. I know the incident would have delighted my mother.

It was in Te chow that I saw a free distribution of food at a Buddhist temple. That day thirty-one hundred were fed with yellow millet mush, cooked in sixteen vats about five feet across, and served in any vessel presented by the recipients. There were baskets, pots, pans, tubs, buckets, broken dishes, and even Standard Oil tins. In another part of China, Kushan, I saw the

delightful kitchen of a Buddhist monastery. It was a great heavy-beamed room, open on one side, in which were chopping blocks, enormous cauldrons, and copper troughs for washing dishes. The priests were busy preparing vegetables, and later we had a very good vegetarian meal served on a verandah.

In Canton there were many ways of purveying and cooking food which I found curious, and in some instances harrowing. Live fish were carried about the streets in tubs of water to ensure their freshness. If a customer wanted a small piece, some nonvital part — perhaps a portion near the tail-would be cut out and sold. The fish went on swimming and didn't seem to mind. The chow or edible dog was in evidence, only the cheaper breeds being sold for food. Two dainties which I did not try were silkworms, thriftily fried after finishing their life work as spinners, and beautiful large brown beetles, also fried. Street kitchens on poles, with a table and condiments at one end and cooking apparatus at the other, seemed to be well patronized.

On long mule-cart trips in northern China stops were made for food, but I always carried my spirit lamp and a few private supplies, such as tea, bread, rice, and jam. Sometimes the doctor I was going to visit would send the cart, carter, and food. Usually a little cabinet with drawers for the various kinds of food was fastened on the back of the cart. After an overnight stop the coolies brought hot water for tea at about 3 A.M., before the early start, and the prudent traveler did well to have the bread spread the night before, for time was short. The day was begun thus early, often in utter darkness, cold, and weariness, in order to accomplish what in China is a day's journey-about thirty miles and reach safe quarters well before four in the afternoon, for, according to custom, robbers did not

begin their activities before that hour. Life in America might be simplified if bandits would keep to a definite schedule!

At about 11 A.M., when the men stopped to feed the mules and themselves, the drawers of the cabinet usually revealed some food that could be cooked on charcoal braziers or the spirit lamp. When the animals had eaten and the men were satisfied, they would call to me to get into the cart, and when I was seated cross-legged, ready for a start, they would take off the wheels, grease them, and put them on again. As the cart in action was none too comfortable, with its elliptical wheels that did n't keep time, I protested against being put in before these preparations were made; but I was told that it was necessary to make a quick start after greasing the wheels, as the starved, mangy scavenger dogs waited in droves, ready to swarm around us and lick off the grease if given an opportunity.

Some of the Chinese delicacies celebrated in travelers' tales, such as birdnest soup, shark's fins, and other oddities, I did not often taste. They are not easy to get everywhere, and are reserved for special occasions. I liked many of the Chinese dishes, and, as I learned to use chopsticks without difficulty, I got along very well when I was a guest at Chinese meals.

One dish which I saw served in various parts of China is called the 'Eight Precious,' and has a symbolic significance. It is made at the table. A great copper chafing dish is brought in, blue with spirit flames, and flanked by the eight ingredients, each in its own dish. I could not understand what was said as the dish was prepared, but it seemed to be in the nature of a formula or an incantation. In Soochow the ingredients which I identified were a mound of sweetened rice, lotus seeds, chestnuts, water chestnuts, almonds, and bamboo.

The articles vary somewhat in different cities. In Yünnan, one dish-apparently a local specialty - served at a feast was made of the tongues and kidneys of ducks; another tidbit was pigeons' brains.

At Dong kau, in the south, the food was not especially attractive. At the hospital, where I worked for some weeks, we had native tea, plain, at six in the morning. Breakfast came at eight, with more tea, jam, possibly bacon if the courier had brought any, and eggs with a musty taste not from age, the Chinese explained, but because the mosquitoes had stung them. I can believe it, for they were malignant malarial mosquitoes, and if the eggs escaped they were the only things immune.

Even Charles Lamb's succulent essay on roast pig did not make me a pork lover in China. In spite of the familiar assertion, 'Pigs is pigs,' the porkers in the different parts of the country have such varying characteristics that a book could be written about them. In the north are the horrible scavenger pigs, which have achieved more notoriety in foreign lands than their better-behaved brethren. In Hankow pigs are chiefly associated with the factory there, where they are made into pork for the English market, and where it is said

much 'Wiltshire' bacon originates. In Nanchang, the pigs I saw were stately and intelligent-looking, and they sauntered slowly about with brows wrinkled in thought. In Dong kau they are of a lively temperament and trot briskly. They have delightful mud wallows and come out quite yellow with clay, and when rain begins they squeal wildly and scuttle and scamper to cover. They wander over the mountains for food, and come trotting home at night when their owners call them. In the mountains the small pigs wear sandals to protect their soft hoofs from the rocks, and it is a funny sight to see a whole litter of baby pigs trotting along in their little grass sandals. In Canton pigs are precious possessions and are not allowed to walk, but are carried by coolies with poles, in baskets woven to fit them. They dwell 'in marble halls'

in other words, pens fastened with teakwood bars. In Yünnan they are led by halters. At the entrance to the precincts of one village I saw a monumental pig of granite, who knelt on the wooded dike of a wide irrigation ditch, apparently as guardian angel of the village. Here in America the pork barrel looms large as a national figure, but we have not yet immortalized it in stone!

In her lifelike letters to her friends, Hilda Rose has written a record of contemporary pioneering equal to any in American annals. Living in the bleak shadow of the Rockies, this little woman she tips the scales at eighty-six pounds-pitted her strength against the elements in an effort to support her aged husband, her young son, and two deserted little girls. Mrs. Rose is forty-seven years old. 'If readers should ask whether the events of "Hardscrabble Hellas" are true,' writes Lucien Price, you may tell them that everything in it is fact. A few proper names only have been changed out of courtesy to living people. But not Mrs. Slaughter's! That joke was too good to spoil.' As every faithful reader knows, Mr. Price is the author of Olympians in Homespun,' which we published in the Atlantic for April 1926. ¶One of the younger literary generation, Joseph Wood Krutch is an associate editor of the Nation and a biographer of Poe. ¶ Familiarized with the Indian scene during

his late services as the Principal of Rajahmundry College, Oswald Couldrey has returned to his native Berkshire, where he devotes himself to prose and painting. Certain of his narratives appeared in the English Beacon, a magazine of small circulation now extinct. Home from an eighteen-month pilgrimage through the Buddhist East, India, Ceylon, Java, and Japan, --Dr. Kenneth J. Saunders resumes his lecturing at the University of California. Cambridge University has lately conferred upon him the degree of Litt.D., in recognition of his study in Buddhism.

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Hunting through mythology, astronomy, and the classics, Lilian White Spencer has collected a menagerie the like of which was never seen on sea or land and we include Noah's. Ralph Linton, Captain of the Marshall Field Expedition to Madagascar, writes us as follows from the bush:

I have just completed a trip across the northern part of the island, from Maroantsetra to Analalava, which took me through a good deal of wild and almost unknown territory. I had no adventures comparable to my experience with the Sihanaka wizard, but there were a good many interesting happenings. We got into famine country where the people belonged to a tribe hostile to that of our bearers, and had to make an eighteen-hour forced march to a French military post to escape a fight.

We publish his narrative by courtesy of the Field Museum of Natural History. D. H. Lawrence is one of the most individual and distinguished writers of the modern school. As will be seen from other chapters of his autobiography, Carl Christian Jensen has come a long way from that fervent period when he believed that Doomsday was at hand. A Saga of To-day, containing all that has appeared in the magazine and more than as much again, will be published in the spring as an Atlantic

publication. Mary Ellen Chase, professor of English at Smith College, reassures our belief in the intellectual attainments of Balaam's ass. Edward A. Thurber, a resident of Colorado Springs, is an occasional contributor to American periodicals. Isabel Hopestill Carter, who from the Maine coast sends us sea stories full of salt and savor, remarks that her latest yarn is 'almost exactly as it was told to me by a woman who used to go to sea.'

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Had Elizabeth Choate stayed at her home in Southborough, Massachusetts, she would never have known the force of the Florida winds and waves - and never have written her essay. It is a wise writer who disregards her own advice. Dr. Hans Zinsser is in the front rank of the world's bacteriologists. He is now a professor at the Harvard Medical School. It is not too much to say that the progress of American medicine is intimately connected with the solution of the question here candidly

discussed. A recent graduate of Harvard, endowed with a traveling fellowship, John Finley, Jr., has been studying in the American School at Athens. Born in Williamstown, John Carter, an editor of the literary supplement of the New York Times, declares that he has lived in the slums, in the apartments, and in the suburbs of New York City. Deaconess in the Episcopal Church, Margaret Stuart Lloyd is in charge of settlement work in Boston. Her paper, as one may see, was not designed for publication.

'Unfinished Jobs,' in the November issue, I have read twice and expect to read twice again. The writer has duplicated so many of my own experiences that the parallel is startling.

About nineteen years ago I started as bookkeeper with a very old firm of importers in a city not far from New York. Four years later I was made the treasurer of the company, and, as required by law, given one share of stock. It was a close corporation. Just about this time the son of the founder, who was then about sixtythree, wanted to retire from active participation. With his retirement some of the old traditions retired, so to speak, automatically, and a moneyed young man just out of college was taken into the organization and made the secretary. From the very start his salary was just two and one half times the amount of my salary. As he was unfitted both by inability and inexperience to do the work of the secretary, I did that as well as the duties of treasurer. About two years later, owing to some internal matters, it was found necessary to start liquidation with the hope that

later the business could be resumed. Two of the best-known banking houses in this country had the liquidation in hand. It went along in this manner for about two years, when the bankers awoke to the fact that something radical had to be done. They dismissed the president, the secretary, and the salesmen in the New York office, and retained me alone. Our importations were raw materials. One of the bankers asked me if I thought I could make weekly trips to New York and try to sell the remaining merchandise, valued at about $100,000. I sold it all at better prices and within a shorter period than all my predecessors had done. I recall when I made a sale aggregating $40,000 to a competing firm, at a very good figure, the same banker remarked he could hardly wait until he would see the former president to tell him that Miss X had done the big thing. He then turned around to me and said in substance: 'I know what your obligations have been in your home and family for several years, and that you have outclassed the men in this business by far, but because you are a woman I cannot give you any more money.' I was so angry 'within myself' that I could not reply.

Just about the time I completed this liquidation the war was at its height, and owing to family obligations I was obliged to do 'war work.' It was again a man's job, at a starvation wage, literally not figuratively, but it was my meagre contribution to my country and I make no complaint.

The day the Armistice was signed I started back into my old business, which I had learned to love. After the most discouraging setbacks, I finally landed something at a wage that any young man just out of high school would consider.

I was sent to the Orient three times, remaining the second time about a year and a half as a resident buyer. The merchandise I buy is raw material and of a highly specialized character. I not only have gone out there and bought, but have come home and sold to the manufacturers both in the United States and Canada. I have been told by many of the manufacturers that the merchandise I personally selected in the Orient was the best they have ever purchased for gradings and qualities.

Another firm with whom I later became associated had me go to the Orient, buy the merchandise, instruct one of their foreign employees there in the selecting and buying of the goods, come back to the United States, open the department here, sell the goods, instruct another person, of course a man, in the intricacies of this specialized but profitable merchandise — then politely told me they did n't need my services after a certain date!

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