often spoken together; and became, as he had loved to think, 'a portion of that loveliness,' which his life, for those at least who knew him well, had made more lovely. This event, so sorrowful to his friends, does not, however, mark the end of my story; nor perhaps of his, but I will proceed with mine. His excellent sister remained at Halfway House, though it was several years before I had the heart to visit her there. One day, however, she wrote that she wished to consult me on some matter connected with the disposal of his photographic patents, and I took advantage of a brief Easter vacation to go to her.

I found the house and grounds very much as he had left them. His books, his portfolios, his laboratory, the Chinese lodge and its quaint garden, had been preserved with an exact and pious care. The beeves and the roses, or their descendants, were as large and beautiful as ever, for of the beeves, at least, his sister had always known as much as, or more than, he. But in the neighborhood, beyond the pale of the sanctuary, heart-rending change had been at work. The rude mountain track below the house had become a metaled road, where periodic motor cars ran dustily. Above the trees that fringed the northern rim of the valley basin could be seen some of the roofs of the military settlement of Marlborough, which had grown up around the new cordite factory beyond. Worst of all, they had dammed the stream above the fall, and taken the water away to drive the factory engines.

Its naked cataract I would rather say, its empty throne - still shone across the valley, a very metaphor of desolation, but beautiful still in its dumb suggestiveness - the tall embrasure of yellow rock whorled and rounded by the corrosion of its vanished waters, the tumultuous fringe of trees

and creepers as thick, and almost as green, as when they trembled in the breeze and thunder of the fall. Few mere sights could be more poignant than the aspect of this void rock as I saw it between the pines from the balcony of the Chinese apartment on the morning after my arrival. The waterfall had always seemed to dominate the valley, to be the high altar, as it were, of an open-air cathedral; rather it had seemed a living presence, which had governed the orientation of that populous chapel of the cathedral which was Halfway House. The hills, the house itself, seemed strangely silent now, for although the sound of the great fall had come to us muffled from afar, and sweetened, as it were, with atmosphere, its pervasive murmur was the only silence that we knew. This hard and utter numbness, like the naked gash in the green heart of the hillside opposite, into which the morning sunlight now shone so pitilessly, was like the palpable and hopeless absence of my friend an absence now raised to the power of a tragedy in nature.

But that evening at sundown, as I sat in the same place, the place and hour wherein the master of the house was wont to keep his ritual contemplation, sat and dreamed of him and of the days that were gone with him, almost suddenly the valley was filled with the familiar murmur, and lifting my eyes I saw the streams come down over the rock as of old. For more than an hour I watched and heard them, for it was as if my friend himself had appeared and spoke with me. I saw the long, throbbing veils of silver fade into the twilight. I could even see, with a strength beyond my usual vision, with a sharpness which reminded me of that eagle eyesight upon which my friend himself was wont, even to the last, to pride himself, the white plumes of the water overlap and follow one another into the gulf, like the breast of a great swan, the bird of creative Brahma, sinking forever through the void; and when at last I rose and went into the house the chant of the cataract still rang clear out of the darkness. My spirit was deeply moved, and my emotion, perhaps, made me refrain from speaking of the matter to my hostess that night. Afterward I wondered more prosaically that the people at the factory should allow so much water to run to waste. But when I was told by the old butler, after my hostess had retired, that no great quantity of water ever came over the old way now, and when I went out later and found the night all black and silent, a different kind of awe came upon me, and a conviction drew to light which was confirmed next day by the information given me at the factory - a conviction which I had perhaps subconsciously entertained from the first, but in the hour of deep feeling had regarded as based upon a distinction of no moment; the conviction, namely, that those were no material waters that I had seen and heard.

When I waited in the twilight the next evening, and when again, only a little later, the vision, the voice and the vision, were vouchsafed me, and again with that strange sensuous distinctness, my courage for a moment quailed, until the love and memory of my dead friend overshadowed every other feeling. That night I waited until the voice of the waterfall failed upon the darkness as softly as it came.

An illusion of the mind, you will say - the work of memory and overwrought regret. But wait.

Afterward, when I was bidding my hostess good-night and good-bye, she held my hand and said to me, 'You have seen it, then?' I said yes, I had seen it.

'I too saw it once,' she said, with

tears in her eyes, but I thought there was gladness in the voice. 'That was two years ago. But you have seen it twice within three days. You were a dear friend of his.' And thus, with shining eyes, and a certain sweetness in our hearts, we parted, and I never saw her again; for she too went forth finally from Halfway House not long after, but not until she had seen the phantom waterfall once more, for she wrote of it in one of her last letters.

That is all I have to tell. I am no mystic and a poor metaphysician, and I have searched in vain in my own mind and among current psychological and philosophical theories, aye, and ransacked the ancient wisdom of the East, for an explanation of that beloved and lovely mystery of the South Indian mountains. That it was in some way a manifestation, a unique and intimate manifestation, of the personality of our dear dead comrade, neither his sister nor myself had ever a doubt. She at least was content to leave the matter there; but Postlethwaite himself, in similar case, would not have been so, and I would willingly follow, if I could, the example of that fervent searcher of the spirit. My old friend neither greatly desired nor expected a personal survival other than objective, and I for one still see no clear reason to suppose that he now holds another opinion; but we cannot exclude the possibility that his disembodied spirit directly spoke to us in the garden house that he loved. Or had the repeated ardors of past contemplation established nomes and rhythms of the world-stuff thereabout that shook like an echo along the years, and played upon the sympathetic brain, as upon an instrument attuned, a symphony that spoke with all the subtle organ stops of sense? Or had our own poignant emotion induced in us a state, as it were, of backward clairvoyance, which for a time brought us into touch once more, not only with the virgin waterfall, but with the mind of the sage for whom it had ever been a symbol of such heart-uplifting sanctities? I write only in vague suggestion, feeling as I do that these conjectures are at best but parts and aspects of the solution that I seek. I have long suspected, however, that the past and the future alike exist, in a sense, now, and are perhaps even accessible to the living sense and mind of us, had we but strength and skill to find our way to

them, or, if you wish, to summon them to us.

Marlborough has grown apace of late, I am told, and hill villas, with pretty posy names, have begun to grow up along the road by Halfway House, and to stare into the vacant cataract. I wonder whether any of their inmates ever see the phantom waterfall!

For myself, circumstances have borne me far, but I still hope to go back there again before I die, to see whether my old friend will remember me.

THE other day I attended a luncheon at the Civic Centre. It had been planned in the interest of law enforcement, which in this instance, as in most others, meant enforcement of the Volstead Act. This luncheon was not intended as a woman's affair, but was open to the general public; and men would have been even more welcome than women, since it is, on the whole, the men rather than the women who need to be convinced that the necessity for enforcing this particular act is imperative. But of an audience of between fifty and sixty only two were men. I scrutinized them carefully. They were not clergymen or newspaper men; from their expressions I hardly judged them to be Volstead enthusiasts, and so I concluded that they were just husbands.

Their faces showed complete uninterest tinged with hostility as we listened to the various speeches, most of which were more or less openly

triumphing. Almost every speaker recapitulated the history of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and described the Prohibition Amendment as woman's great political achievement - a statement which is at least partly true. It is certain that this is the first time in the history of any known civilization that the women of a nation, working together, have promulgated a far-reaching law to which the men as a whole are more or less opposed. The thrill felt by the women at the luncheon as they realized some of them, perhaps, for the first time - the enormous political power of women working as a group was obviously not shared by the men.

Perceiving this, it seemed to me that I perceived also the underlying reason why the relatively unimportant question of 'to drink or not to drink' has suddenly resolved itself into the paramount issue in America to-day an issue all discussion of which is

characterized by a bitterness scarcely transcended by that of the slavery discussions before the Civil War. That this increasing bitterness results from a clash between very powerful forces, no one, I think, will deny, although he may not be prepared to define their alignment. To my mind it is not simply a case of Reformers versus the Rest of Us, or Puritans versus Pagans, as at first sight may appear. The division is less complex than this, but more ominous. It is, quite simply, a clash between women as a group and men as a group, and the reason for the clash is as old as Eden and as new as the Nineteenth Amendment.

The history of civilization is also in no slight measure the history of the relationship between the sexes. In the beginning, so diverse were the activities of men and women that there could be no more antagonism between them than between Fiji Islanders and Eskimos, who are not even aware of each other's existence. Later, when man finally began to attain mastery over the fullness of the earth, and the struggle to live became less all-absorbing, the supremacy of purely physical strength began to wane and antagonism gradually developed. For some time we have been conscious of its undercurrent below the surface relationship, but now, I think, it is manifesting itself openly for the first time in history and its first act is to hoist man with a petard constructed by himself.

sex

For a sufficient number of generations women had it drilled into the innermost recesses of their conscious and subconscious minds by men that self-sacrifice, principally for the sake of husbands and sons, was not only the station in life, as we say in the Catechism, to which they had been called by God, but also the highest ideal to which they could attain. Even so recently as thirty years ago literature

was crammed with heroines whose sole claim to be thus described lay in their powers of self-denial and renunciation. It is hardly exaggeration to say that woman was taught - again by men - that the world's path to its goal lay over her prostrate form.

When the absurdity of this idea at last percolated through society, woman, emerging from the background of which she had so long been a part, brought with her the best of the old way of thought - a thorough comprehension of the necessity, power, and beauty of self-denial. Society no longer considered so admirable a quality ideal for women only, but showed a growing tendency to set it up as a standard for men.

If self-denial on woman's part was good for the world, self-denial on the part of both men and women must be twice as good. At any rate this assumption sounded logical to the women, and the men with some slight reluctance agreed. Eventually America turned herself into a huge psychological laboratory to see how the theory worked out in practice.

For a year or two after the war it seemed that the woman's solution was correct. Drunkenness, and the crime and disease attendant thereon, markedly decreased, but before the women could say, 'I told you so,' something happened. With very little warning a reaction set in, so violent and so complete that to-day we are confronted with a state of affairs which is little short of appalling. I think it is fair to say that this reaction was principally among the men, who, as a group, were never whole-heartedly enthusiastic over Prohibition. Self-denial is at best a negative virtue, and the psychological make-up of man desires something more positive as his ideal. This reaction to an ideal too uninteresting or too imponderable for his continued

loyalty brought the ever-mounting wave of sex antagonism to a climax, and for the first time men and women openly confront each other across the line of sex. That women as a whole are either actively or passively for Prohibition, while men either actively or passively are against it, is abundantly proved when we consider the undeniable fact that, if men ardently upheld and strove for the enforcement of the Volstead Act in the same proportion as do women, Prohibition would for some time have been a well-established fact. The W. C. T. U. is correct, then, when it says that if the Eighteenth Amendment is to be enforced it must be done by the women, aided by the clergy (the only great masculine group which has been especially trained to the woman's ideal of self-denial). Such enforcement can be brought about only at the price of ever-increasing bitterness. Bad as conditions are now, I believe that this clash on Prohibition may be only a skirmish in a sex war which will probably be bloodless, - except incidentally, but which nevertheless may prove subversive of civilization, old style.

Since men and women are alike necessary to each other and to the world, it is difficult at first glance to see why sex antagonism should ever have arisen and still more difficult to understand why it should have developed its present intensity. A little thought, however, soon shows us that through the ages the ideals which urged forward men and women were not the same. Just as women, from time immemorial, have been trained to selfdenial, so men have been taught to regard personal liberty as their most precious attribute. Now we are discovering that the two are not necessarily compatible; and the clash is not only between men and women, but between the two different ideals toward

which the two groups have struggled for uncounted generations.

What the end will be, who can say? Unfortunately there seems little common ground between the two sides. The increasing similarity between the sexes of which we have heard so much is after all a recent and superficial growth. The ideal self-denial which is almost a sex trait in woman is a recent development in man, and while he can, on occasion, sacrifice himself with the best woman who ever lived or died for others, yet when it comes to the little self-denials of every day he violently reacts and reverts to the old and hardly won ideal of personal liberty.

In spite of her much discussed freedom, equal in every respect to man's, so used is woman to sacrificing her personal liberty to the welfare, first, of the family (and as long as there are families this sacrifice must be made), second, of the community, that she is utterly out of sympathy with the attitude of man. She cannot even understand it. Where the average man sincerely feels that denying him his right to take it or let it alone strikes at the very root of a liberty which in past ages has been dearly bought, woman can only see that man in order to avoid denying himself what she considers a very trivial gratification is willing to connive at almost any crime. Under the conditions of the present day, physical strength no longer counts as in past ages. Differences of opinion are settled by ballot boxes more often than by bayonets. Thus woman's power to control modern life so nearly matches man's that to me it looks as if the irresistible force of woman's desire to protect humanity even against itself had encountered the immovable obstacle of man's inherent objection to being protected. Out of the resulting chaos, who can tell what new social system may evolve?