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everybody in Canfranc. Not the slightest interest in Madrid, or New York, or the League of Nations.

The mail bus left at 6.30, two hours late.

Any guidebook, or history, or newly baked tripper from Spain will tell you slyly that the key to Spanish character is mañana. Nonsense. It's perfectly true that the Spaniard puts off till tomorrow such things as business appointments, the building of railroads, or the conquest of the Riff. What of it! All matters of real importance, like singing or worshiping God or making love to his señorita, he attends to without a wasted minute- to-day.

CLOUDS

He comes from Texas and his eyes have kept the blue innocence of its skies. He is over six feet, sparing of gesture, conceals the stump of his amputated forefinger. From the corner of the right eye to the base of the skull runs a purplish scar, and his face is a network of wrinkles and lines that make him appear almost forty; but he is eight years younger, and when I looked in the candid, shadowless eyes I knew that I was talking to a boy.

It was pleasant to sit on the deck and listen to his low voice. Oh yes, he was telling me his troubles. They were like all agonies, for men suffer in much the same way. The fog drifted in past the islands, the wind grew chilly; we went to the lower deck where the seaplanes rest on their catapults.

He explained carefully how they were shot off by compressed air, going in forty feet from perfect stillness to sixty miles an hour, and how it was necessary to guide them straight and then up into the air, not letting them touch the water, and this was not easy. He had been flying for nine years. Yes, he was 'pretty good.' One bad crash. Only

two men in the Navy had more 'hours in the air. Sorry he could not show me the engine. It was a lovely engine.

I looked up at the seaplanes and I wondered what characteristics were imperative for the man that flew in that tiny, deadly seat. Elegant as a wasp; small and cruel and fascinating; what was it in men's brains that made them capable of flying, or hopelessly incapable of even the first violent rush from the catapult? There are born artists, engineers, lawyers - what was an aviator? That flying aged men prematurely, I saw; that they were, all I had met, very quiet in manner, I remembered and observed. Courage — but what kind of nerves? Imagination? What did he think of death? Death that flew with him, did it grin or smile, promise or end all things? Or did he not see the companion that soared with him? I could not ask. Only observe carefully, listen patiently, and hope for the unconscious revelation.

We left the ship, came to the house. He talked- of Texas, of his family, of his life, of the war, and of the problem that was consuming him; but still I did not hear the words that would tell me of his inner and secret attitude toward the invisible companion. Did he, like a Regular Army man I know, have to chew gum to control fear? No man is without fear, and by now I knew that he had nerves.

We went for a drive. The ocean, the hills, the glowing beauty of the evening sky, he seemed hardly to observe. There were fifteen minutes left, and I should probably never see him again. I decided to take the risk of indirect attack. Money, root of all evil, would be the Navy's criterion of his risk. To my discreet inquiries he said simply: 'I get almost as much as the captain of the ship.'

I brought it out very simply: 'Are you ever afraid?'

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understood; that I could tell you. Listen, don't you ever write comedies. You write about men as they really are. You know better than any other woman I've met.'

We were almost at the village. Had I heard all that there was to hear? He was silent again, evidently thinking. "The Yosemite,' he drawled, ‘is the best there is on earth. It can't be beat.' 'So I have heard.'

'But when you get to foolin' round with clouds, you're sort of less interested down here.'

My heart almost stopped beating. There it was, all of it! At last the words that expressed everything. Had I searched a hundred years for them I could not have found them. That phrase would have made hours of boredom worth while! He had said it absolutely. Perfectly. There was nothing more, nothing less, to be said. But he continued, slowly. 'I'd like to take you up, to show them to you- big white ones their canyons, colors, shapes up there. With the earth beneath you. Nothing much makes any difference. Will you come?'

'Yes.'

--

"This is a mighty pretty place,' he said politely. 'You've been very, very kind; I've enjoyed the drive.'

I'd shown him my place, my corner of the world; he'd do the same, show me his: 'I'll take you up, and we'll dive into a big white one with canyons.' Then he added slowly: 'We'll fool around with the clouds.'

AN ELEEMOSYNARY INCIDENT

Ar twilight, as I was walking hurriedly through the Latin-American city on the street called 'Gracious' and thinking whimsically of the effect such a name might possibly have upon its frequenters, much in the style of the 'Great Stone Face,' - a shuffling man

in rags, very melancholy as to his looks, fumbled awkwardly ahead so as to hinder my passing him. He was evidently too twisted with some lifelong deformity or paralysis to be able to bend his body, and at the instant that I realized this as an explanation of his meandering walk the accident occurred.

About each foot was wrapped a quantity of cloth in lieu of shoes, and the bandages on the bulky left were working loose. Suddenly the rotten cloth on the dragging foot broke, and from it there rolled in every direction, to the gutter, over the pavement, toward my feet, dozens, scores of pieces of money!

The Midas of this quite respectable horde could do nothing to save his gold from flooding the street to land in the pockets of numerous ragged newsboys who seemed literally to spring from everywhere and nowhere, scrambling and shouting and chasing his wealth. Of coppers there were surprisingly few; lesser silver and nickel coins, worth about ten and two cents by exchange at the time, predominated, but there were various dollar values also, and even some dirty, torn, crumpled bills of larger denominations.

The beggar-millionaire looked anxiously about, but, whether normally dumb or merely stricken so temporarily by his torture, it is certain that he said no word, nor made any desperate effort to reach his rolling stock himself - he simply looked at all of us. Within less than a minute so numerous were his helpers that I desisted, to remain watching the original half-dozen boys in tatters, other passers-by, and a welldressed professional man who had been waiting for his car, as I now recalled, when the run on the bank began.

Thus it is my pleasure, as an unoccupied witness, to affirm that apparently there was not a penny of that cash but was restored to the beggar by each finder directly or placed in the old felt hat the fellow held till it was weighty enough to burst in its turn! Its owner's face was so wrinkled and expressionless that one was not sure of any smile or look of pathos, gratitude, or wonder illuminating it especially; but when the last coin that sharper eyes than ours had found was turned in he stayed the boys and men about him with an odd hitch of a hunched-up shoulder and solemnly proceeded to repay each with a single coin. He began by offering a very tiny copper to the prosperous-looking professional man and went all the way around until every helper had had the chance to accept or reject tangible evidence of his thanks. Several took what he gave; the rest, with utmost courtesy, as if transacting matters of diplomacy with an ambassador of vast prestige, thanked him with perfect gravity, but suavely waved off his aid among these being, of course, the well-dressed gentleman, who departed tipping his hat to my beggar acquaintance as must one true to courtesy acknowledge a favor.

It was curious to note that to the ragged who had scrambled in his aid he chose to proffer coins of greater worth than those intended for me and others waiting for cars toward the suburbs. Perhaps it was his theory of greater recompense for greater temptation resisted. As my car, marked 'Paradise,' clanged into sight, drowning the voluble chatter of the witnesses, he was shuffling along again without a backward glance, as one too big to pay attention to trifles after his own generous distribution of largess.

THE CONTRIBUTORS' COLUMN

Madame Balascheff, born Princess Marie Cantacuzene, daughter of Prince Cantacuzene, Russian Minister to Washington during Cleveland's administration, is the wife of Pierre Balascheff, a prominent party leader in the Duma before the war. For several years following the Revolution she and her five sons did their best to make a new home for themselves on a swampy little duck farm in France. But the odds were too great, and Madame Balascheff is now working for a Parisian notary-eight hours a day in the office, two to four hours copying at home in the evening. Our account is drawn from letters written to an old American friend, Mrs. Foster Stearns of Worcester. William B. Munro is the first appointee to the Jonathan Trumbull Professorship of American History and Government at Harvard University. ¶Editor, critic, and professor, Bliss Perry goes lecturing every autumn so that he may go fishing every spring. To the knowledge of an economist and sociologist H. H. Powers adds a wide acquaintance with European affairs. Formerly professor of economics at Smith College and Cornell, of late years he has been identified with the Bureau of University Travel. Vincent Sheean, who spent last summer in Persia, now sends us from Paris a story redolent of New York. ¶Certain notorious political trials, familiar to us all, are cases in point for F. Lyman Windolph's discussion of legal ethics. Mr. Windolph is a practising lawyer of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

***

Aquah Laluah is a young African who has studied for several years in Europe. She is a member of an ancient African family and the granddaughter of a native king. ¶English author of seven novels, assistant editor of the New Leader, and an active member of the Independent Labor Party, Mary Agnes Hamilton is a frequent and dark-haired visitor to New York City.

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Not till the spring thaws are over can we expect to hear the results of Hilda Rose's venture into the promised northlands. Last summer she gave up an unequal struggle on a Western stump farm, as recounted in her earlier letters in our two preceding numbers, and moved her family north to the virgin country on the shore of Peace River, Alberta. Once a month a dog sledge brings the mails. Kenneth Griggs Merrill, vice president and manager of a Chicago manufacturing concern, has found an ingenious way out' of the mental doldrums that beset a commercial traveler. JA young Russian officer who served in Galicia and in Flanders, Nahum Sabsay first came to this country in 1918, where, after a year spent in shops and factories, he entered the Harvard Mining School. Following graduation he joined the staff of Dr. Augustus Locke of California, whose encouragement and criticism in ‘off hours' aided Mr. Sabsay in his mastery of English. Dr. Gustav Eckstein is an associate of the Cincinnati College of Medicine. Because

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It is an awful thing to question an editor's judgment, but I don't like the title of an interesting article in the February Atlantic. It is called "The Modern Temper,' but that does not properly describe it, for it is not representative of the modern temper in general, but only of a particular segment of modern thinking. It ought to be called "The Temper of Me and My Friends,' or perhaps better 'A New Ecclesiastes,' for it represents exactly the spirit of the Greek skepticism which manifested itself in the book Ecclesiastes, saturated with pessimism and holding all things to be vanity and vexation of spirit.

The Hebrew writer left a little place for God, for whom your author has no use whatever. He curiously enough sets up an altar to Science, for which alone of all human activities he seems to have great respect. He dismisses lightly art, poetry, literature, history, and religion as the offspring of imagination engendered upon de

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When Joseph Wood Krutch, exponent of the 'Modern Temper,' hands down a verdict in 1927 that the whole universe is without meaning, I feel he is acting prematurely and on insufficient data.

In spite of the Copernican Theory and Darwin's Origin of Species, in spite of modern chemistry and psychology, the modern intellect, it seems to me, is comparatively as far from compassing the essence macrocosm as the original cave man. The human imagination balks at the conception of infinity. Space and time are inconceivable for us without a beginning and an end. How, then, can intelligence solve the riddle of the universe, which is hopelessly akin to the problem of infinity? If after thousands of years of speculation and science we are still but a step from total ignorance, in what respect should the modern temper differ from that of 5000 B.C.?

In the face of such absolute mystery I prefer to stand like the first man and live. When my intellectual curiosity says, 'Is there a meaning in life?' my intellectual honesty replies, 'I do not know,' and in this dilemma I accept Professor James's memorable advice and 'Will to Believe' that life is worth while.

Life on these terms is not robbed of its poetry by modern biology and psychology, as Mr. Krutch affirms. Because we discover a flower has its roots in the mould, is the blossom any less fragrant? Is the fine symmetry and rhythm of an athlete any less worthy of Pindaric Ode because we suddenly discover his biological kinship with the 'humblest insect that crawls'?

Metabolism in the amoeba may be an elemental act of 'stomach' in which the organism folds itself about a lump of food, but that does not destroy the human conception of eating which has evolved into the rites of hospitality. Sex in the earthworm may be a primordial function involving physical proximity and secretion, but the mating of birds is just as truly a scientific fact, accompanied by lyrical flights which furnish excellent precedent for the love songs of the troubadours. Perhaps to the Freudian mind of the earthworm the average

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