the outset with a family of four he found that after paying for his farm, gradually stocking and equipping it, he had almost precisely seven-tenths of his time on his hands for the next problem of life.

"He set up a small printing press and sought to get more unemployed people into farming. To this end he published a small five cent magazine, partly as a missionary organ. The printing press enterprise paid, because altogether it served an unique purpose of substantial as well as growing popular interest.

"A chapel was fitted up in the wing of the factory beautiful. Not a thing within or without it had been machine work, but everything was done by hand. Within were all the aids to devotion, including all the devotional and spiritual literature of the world, carefully bound, in cases along the walls, interspersed with statuary of fine character and inspiring pictures. Sometimes they had lectures here upon Ruskin, William Morris, Carlyle, Emerson, Tolstoy, or some other prophet of the heavenly this world life, the eternity of now.

"A prophet's chamber had been fitted up in the tower over the factory and chapel entrances. Here there almost always abode a visit ing speaker of most any denomination or race, provided it was only some one who seemed to have something special lying at his or her heart to say to the public. The prophet's chamber soon found friends to especially endow it.

"In the course of a few years a great many small industries and handicrafts were added to New Clairvaux. There was practical sympathy here for every commercially unsuccessful talent. It became a

special resort for skilled mechanics, artists and authors. It became a training school for many professions. It was a church, a discipline, a new idea of society that was to come."

This reads like a story of accomplished facts, but mind you it is not, it is Mr. Pressey's original vision as described by himself. I have cut much of the pink out of the atmosphere and sawed the rainbow edges off many things, but the gist of the vision stands as built in the words of the dreamer.

It is nearly five years since Mr. Pressey began to work to the fulfillment of his vision. He found his farm at Montague, Massachusetts, a beautiful town on the banks of the Connecticut River. He succeeded, in part by his own efforts and in part through the generosity of friends of his "movement," in getting it paid for. In the same way he has built in the village his first New Clairvaux workshop where is printed the magazine which is the missionary organ of his idea. "This is occupied so far," says Mr. Pressey, "by the New Clairvaux press, which is doing excellent work; by the New Clairvaux wood workers, who are making simple and serviceable furniture of excellent workmanship; by Country Time and Tide, the monthly publication of the new country movement here represented; by the Arts and Crafts society, which holds meetings and permanently exhibits wares made in the village and in shops on the farms in this and neighboring towns, and by several of the young men who at times have chambers here. There is some floor space still unoccupied."

In the summer issue of Country Time and Tide, Mr. Pressey says:

"A number of families and individuals amounting at times to more than thirty souls have come to Montague in response to a common feeling with regard to work and a better social life. Most of these have planned to stay. At the very least a hundred individuals have actively co-operated with us in our activities in the town."

Now this sounds pretty prosperous and hopeful. I took the afternoon train to Montague and this is what I found.

In the first place that man who calls Montague a "decadent" town should, and probably would, incur the just wrath of the villagers. It has a population of seven or eight thousand-perhaps more-and this population is steadily increasing in two active manufacturing centres, Miller's Falls and Turner's Falls. Montague Centre is a little farming centre of four or five hundred, as pretty a country village as you will find in the state. Its buildings are well painted, its lawns are green, its fields well kept, and everywhere you see thrift and neatness, schoolhouses. churches and a general air of prosperity. Decadence is the last thing you would lay up against it. It has an excellent hotel, roomy, well painted and well kept, also well patronized. I asked the villagers how much of this prosperity was due to the Clairvaux movement and they gave me an indulgent smile; told me to hunt up the Clairvaux people and find out. At 9 A.M. I found the New Clairvaux shop padlocked and showing no signs of life. Half an hour later I had found the printer at his home, he had unlocked the shop and showed me the dusty and cluttered interior. Back numbers of the maga zine lay scattered about in careless

grace, mingled with the artistic debris of partly finished hand made. furniture. The current issue was wrapped and piled waiting, as it had been for days, to be sent out. The printer was of the opinion that it would be sent out some time-when the chief got good and ready. himself showed more lack of prosperity than any villager I had seen, and when I heard his hard luck story I did not wonder at his discouraged manner and the fringe on his garments.

He

The printer is a socialist and a scholar and he went from Boston back to nature last spring. His idea was that he could avail himself of the printing opportunity offered in the New Clairvaux workshop to earn a modest living and have all the delights of dwelling in a beautiful country place amid men of high ideals who like him had repudiated the city. This was iridescent, but it was but a dream. True, he got twenty-five dollars per month for printing the magazine, but when ink, rent of water power, press and other matters was taken from this he found his profits to be about eight dollars per month. About that time the magazine was changed from a monthly to a quarterly and he found his eight dollars divided by three. Two dollars and sixty-six and twothirds cents per month was too little for even a country life philosopher, especially one with a wife and three children, and he tried working on the farm. He put in some days on the farm of the head of the movement, but when he asked for his wages he was told that this was co-operation and that he ought not to expect money for it. Since then he has worked for the other farmers who don't co-operate in that tone of

voice, and has been able to stay on the Montague earth but not to get away from it-by rail at least. He likes Montague and is still of the opinion that the country air is good. What he thinks of the New Clairvaux vision will, however, hardly get printed in Country Time and Tide.

Such was the story of the New Clairvaux printer. It was not such as to tempt me to join the movement but it would seem to account for the cheerful smile with which the villagers greet you when you ask them about it. Many philanthropists have aided New Clairvaux. So far as I know none of this aid has been in the form of railway tickets back to the city where printing is plentiful and co-operation is a thing talked of in the socialist meetings. There is one New Clairvauxant, however, who would gladly welcome philanthropy of that sort.

There is another story of the print shop at New Clairvaux, and it is only fair to tell it. One enthusiast sometimes succeeds where another fails. That is the story of Carl Rollins, who preceded the present incumbent. Rollins is a Harvard Harvard graduate, and also is a socialist and a believer in the vision of a life beautiful at Montague. For a year or more he dwelt at the print shop, working and sleeping there. In obedience to the vision he refused cheap job work and common printing and did only the work which he could conscientiously recommend as artistic in design and finish. In a year he had done over a thousand dollars' worth of this when his eyes gave out from over-work and he was obliged to give up and take an European tour for his health. Rollins made a game fight

for success in his share of the New Clairvaux community. Samples of his work show him to have been artistic and painstaking, though whether, without the aid of outside funds, he could have lived on the income the work furnished is still a mooted question. Nobody at New Clairvaux knows whether or not Rollins is to come back to stay, and it is a pity, for he seems to me to have come nearer the success of the ideal of the community than any one else.

"On the books," as you might say, there are three other settlers at New Clairvaux besides the founder. All these occupy old farmhouses and two of them are also Harvard graduates, teachers and ministers by profession. Both teach and preach elsewhere when they have opportunity and the life at the settlement seems to me to be entirely a secondary issue with them. I do not find that they or their farms have half the air of success and neatness that those of the country people possess, and in very truth it seems to me that the New Clairvaux settlement workers need to learn of the country people instead of being in a position to raise them out of their "decadence."

The "head wood worker of the New Clairvaux shops" is a carpenter

and joiner. There being no wood working done in the shops at present he is working out at his trade of carpentry, though the title of joiner is distinctly due him, for in the last few years he has joined many communities. He and his family were pioneers in Dakota, Later they were with the Christian Commonwealth. with Albertson and Gibson in their Georgia community, then in another at Mystic, Connecticut, and about a

year ago they came to New Clairvaux. Last winter some wood working was done at the shop. One of the ministers made a clock, a beautiful clock of stained hard wood in imitation of Gothic stone work. I saw it, still standing in his study, waiting for the works to arrive. A few chairs and tables of excellent plain pattern-a pattern as good as that turned out by the thousand in the Michigan furniture factories were made but I understand found no sale, and the wood working has since languished.

Mr. Pressey himself lives on "Prospect Point" farm, a beautiful estate of seventy-five acres. Here, through his own work and the cooperation of his fellow settlers, he is rebuilding and furnishing a fine old time farmhouse. Here, like Tolstoy, clad in rough garments, he works part of the time in his fields and among his crops, putting in the balance in his cosy library writing his message to the city-pent thousands of the joy and peace of an ideal country life. Here, too, he boards orphan boys and girls, sending them to the village school during its sessions and teaching them the theory and practice of healthful farm life. Mr. Pressey is still enthusiastic as to the ultimate success of his vision of New Clairvaux, though the vision changes as the years progress. As he told it to me the other day he no longer considers that New Clairvaux is a church, a factory, a college, all in one, a community beautiful, bound in bonds of fellowship. The village shop is no longer to bear the Clairvaux name

but to be simply the Village Shop. New Clairvaux is bounded now by Prospect Point farm and his own family. There he plans to teach, to carry on intensive farming as a guide to the other farmers of the community, to aid and uplift them through the medium of his quarterly magazine, and to follow his vision. in clearer if narrower paths.

Whatever my opinion of the success of the other followers of the New Clairvaux vision, and it is not a good one-there is no doubt of Mr. Pressey's success. His farm is a beautiful one in situation and in itself. He holds the title of the village shop as well, and his plan of life as last explained seems to me to be the normal one of the average man who wants to own his own "place," to be successful in his own calling, and to aid and uplift any neighbor who may need aid and uplifting.

It seems to me that New Clairvaux, as he saw it in his original vision, in fact in any plan as a community, has vanished into dreamland again, and the last state of the other followers of the vision is a good deal worse than the first.

Whether the country "College Settlement" is needed in New England seems to be a mooted question. Whether it can be of real use to decadent communities-if there are such here-remains to be seen. It does not seem to me that "New Clairvaux has been any step in that direction. But then, the Montague people deny that they are decadent, and I am inclined to agree with them.

THE•

A

N article on ceramics would be incomplete without some brief account of the porcelain makers in Europe where the most famous China has been and is now made. Among these Dresden, Sevres, Bow, Derby and Chelsea deserve special mention. Dresden comes first, as hard white ware was fabricated there earlier than elsewhere in Europe.

In 1865 there was born in Schleiz, in the principality of Reuss, a man whose fate it was to be the discoverer of the material by which genuine hard white china ware could be manufactured in Europe. This man was Friedrich Böttger who was for many years virtually held prisoner by Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland.

At Meissen, the capital of Saxony the "Royal Saxon Porcelain Works" were established under Böttger's direction in the year 1710 and Dresden china immediately became fa

mous.

The salesroom of the factory is in Schloss-Strasse, nearly opposite the entrance to the King's palace, and potters, molders and model

ers are busy from one end of the year to the other in the factory where enormous quantities of the ware are fashioned. Since 1764 there has been an art school connected with the works where the "retouchers" are trained for their delicate and difficult part of the work. The figures, flowers, leaves and vines which so beautifully decorate Dresden ware, are made separately with the most painstaking care and infinite skill, and the work is usually assigned to women who are compelled to sit in rooms where the atmosphere is actually stifling. The veils that are so frequently seen on Dresden figures are made by covering fine tulle with the fluid "mass" and draping it, while it is yet moist, on the figure.

The glaze used is a composition of pure and finely pulverized feldspar mixed with enough lime to make a rapid fusion. This is called petunse, a word often encountered in articles on porcelain.

The demand for every conceivable sort of ornamentation made in china ware kept the Meissen works busy. Buttons, combs, powder boxes, seals, dagger-hilts were ordered by