It strikes me as a good estimate of our Commander in Chief, whose abilities are very fairly evaluated.

But may I, a former subaltern in the A. E. F., present a criticism of Captain Hart's principal criticism of General Pershing's training of the army in France? Captain Hart rather insists that the Americans placed too great an emphasis upon the offensive when in action, due to the fact that General Pershing closed his eyes to the obvious lessons of three years of actual warfare. He goes on to say that the German machine-gun defense in the Argonne took a disproportionate toll in casualties before being pushed back, which may be conceded. But I think that Captain Hart is wrong in his implications.

If he was ever among American troops in 1918, he would have been struck, as were other British as well as French officers, by the youth, the superior physique, and the superior intelligence of those troops. Those qualities were always apparent when comparison with men of the Allied or enemy armies was possible. Moreover, the Americans were painfully ignorant of things military, except perhaps in the regular divisions.

The last point is the important one, for we all had to be trained somehow, and quickly, and we could not possibly learn everything in the time allotted by the Allies. Since we were restricted to a few aspects of the military art, what better ones could have been chosen than those understood in the words 'open warfare' and 'the offensive'? If we had tried to learn all in the brief time at our disposal, we should have learned nothing.

Captain Hart implies that General Pershing made a deliberate choice of an outworn mode of tactics, and only beginner's luck prevented his being found out. It seems to me that a more correct attitude would be shown in saying that General Pershing, considering the average American temperament combined with the state of hopeless unpreparedness this country found itself in in 1917, and also considering the low state of morale in both the British and French armies in 1918, made the only possible choice of tactics for the American Expeditionary Forces.

In closing, I cannot resist quoting the justly famous remark made by one British general to another: 'By God, sir, I hope that if we ever have another war, it will be conducted without any damned allies!'

I was in the A. E. F. for fifteen months, and I had unusual opportunities to talk with members of all the principal armies. I was in a division with the British; I speak French and German well enough to converse. And finally, I had the

I have just turned the August Atlantic face down at 'Something in the Eye.' I am laughing. Let me tell you my story. Crossing by ferry from New Jersey to New York City, I took into my left eye an atom- - a cinder - a boulder! By the time we docked I had tried all the simple methods known to me and to my very near and kind neighbors. I covered the bad eye, rushed for a cross-town train, and was soon in front of the Eye and Ear Infirmary. I darted in past the doorman and met in the office the office force and some others three women, not yet distributed, and a doctor. There was no need to explain. By that time both eyes were dropping mad tears.

I was not listed, card-catalogued, or directed. The women looked at the doctor; the doctor looked at the clock. I was early. Oh! that unkind and hasty boulder! 'I can wait,' I said. He could not let that pass. 'I can do nothing for you. This is a charitable institution.' Where was his charity? It peeped for a moment. 'You'd better go to one of the practising physicians around here.' 'I won't pay you,' I said. ‘I could n't take your money if you offered it; it's against our rules.' Rules against a cinder in one's eye! 'Who is nearest?' I asked. 'You know I can't see.' 'That I can't tell you; it's against our rules to recommend -' I left quickly. I was mad, mad as a hornet. Rules, indeed!

On the sidewalk I stopped. Which way to turn? I wanted to cry. Close to me, stepping along briskly, came a young man and woman. She stopped. She spoke: 'If you'll trust me, I'll take it out.' 'Trust,' I said, and then I did cry. 'Charley, give me your pencil.' It came out. 'Now I'll try not to hurt.' The red lid slid up over the blessed pencil, her own handkerchief followed it (with no apologies), and all was over in a minute. The doctor could probably have done it in half a minute, but his mind evidently worked slowly-perhaps not. Why could he not have thought of the cinder first and the rules last?

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E. H. MORRISON

It is evident that Jack, the freedman, wandered into this Vermont town. He was without a family name, and no native Vermonter refers to the Empire State except as York State. Accordingly the newcomer became Jack York.

With satisfaction we note the evidences of humility. York was a notable personage, the only man of color in many towns. He might well have taken advantage of his position to reject the attentions of the common villagers, to move with hauteur among his neighbors, and to assume a lordly attitude in the presence of the Morrills, the Proctors, and the Coolidges. Fortunately there was nothing 'high hat' about York. He complacently shook hands with all who sought this privilege.

Very truly yours,

E. W. BUTTERFIELD

'Why, where have you lived all your life, if you ain't never seen a tempest?'

'I've lived most of my life near Boston.' 'Why, they do too have tempests in Boston! There, it's beginning to lighten now; do you mean to say you never saw no lightnin'?'

'Oh, do you mean a thunderstorm? Of course I've seen them, but I never heard them called tempests.'

A few weeks later another neighbor was describing the trouble her husband had had as a result of scratching his hand with a rusty nail. She told me how many incisions had to be made as the poison spread, and how often the doctor came one day. The account ended dramatically, 'Well, he'd like to have lost his arm!'

'He would!' I exclaimed, marveling at the man's strange taste. The good lady took my surprise as evidence that I was impressed by her husband's narrow escape.

This use of 'would like to have' must be a perversion of the obsolete form, 'was like to,' but, being generally used in connection with some unpleasant possibility, has a very bizarre effect upon the unaccustomed ear. One housekeeper, using a fuel new to her, 'would like to have burnt her pies up,' and another, driving a horse which ran away, 'would like to have got thrown out and killed.'

'Common,' to my mind synonymous with 'vulgar,' is used hereabouts to express a desirable quality. 'Yes, they 've got plenty of money, but you'll like her - she's just as common!'

But alas, these local idioms are dying with the older generation. We shall soon be all so cosmopolitan that there will be left no more isolated communities with any smack of originality in their speech.

MRS. WENDELL B. PHILLIPS

***

Cape Cod-erisms.

DEAR ATLANTIC,

A recent article by one of the Contributors, concerning her confusion over the indeterminate manner of speech among New Englanders, reminded me of one or two amusing experiences at the beginning of my residence at the root of Cape Cod.

One summer day, as a dark cloud began to lower, a neighbor asked me, ‘Are you afraid in a tempest?'

Now to my mind that word implied a storm in which a high wind was the distinguishing feature - such a storm as one reads of in stories of the tropics. So I answered, honestly enough, 'I don't believe I ever was in one.'

There are seven such colleges alike enough in history, in development, and in present interests to be pondered on and discussed by their friends as a unit, and a composite picture of them may be used to illustrate the general situation in which many others share. They are not far from one another, four in Massachusetts, the other three within a radius of a hundred miles of New York, all in the northeastern corner of the country. Their nearness in age corresponds with their geographical nearness. Though Mount Holyoke's history as a seminary begins just short of a hundred years ago, as colleges they are

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none of them far from fifty: Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley have passed the half-century line; Radcliffe, Bryn Mawr, and Barnard will cross it shortly. And as they all of them represented the same period of American educational history in their founding, they arose from not dissimilar conditions and dealt with the same difficulties.

For the early years at least they made bricks with little straw. They had first to create their clientele, for communities on the whole looked on at the initial processes of this new education with little sympathy and no imagination, and discreet parents hesitated to trust their daughters to so untried a venture. The girls' schools and seminaries of the day had devised their own courses of study to prepare their pupils for careers as wives or maiden aunts with perhaps a year's fling at teaching; and it was a slow process either to persuade the older schools to change their ways or to encourage new schools which should lay the foundation for a further defined and difficult course and leave the fewest possible chinks of