between the mass and the educated as there was between the educated monk and the peasant in the Middle Ages. Nearly all that the adult of our generation has of living contact with science, art, thought, and the larger issues of civilization, he gets from us. The professors reach but a handful; the preachers not many more; the poets scarcely any. We are the living and actual teachers of our generation. We keep under the eyes and remain masters of the imagination of our pupils long after they have lost respect for or contact with any other teacher. We follow your average man into the subway, catch his eye at the breakfasttable, or after dinner. On Sundays between breakfast and church or golf, we get a chance to insinuate into his mind a little of the meaning and background of the hasty head-lines he has read during the week.

"You all like to prate of the life of reason which is some day going to be actually got going in the world. Richard has introduced me to the works of Santayana, who sits in quiet gardens in Europe in the cool of his life writing about it. But if the life of reason is ever got going, it will be newspaper men, not people like him, who will have brought it about. You intellectuals sit around in your little closed groups talking about the abolition of war, but it is the daily newspapers with their constant ticking of cable despatches and their daily iteration of item after item-it is they who are going to hammer that conception home. Truth, goodness, and beauty are going to remain mere words, and even those words are going to be silenced unless we newspaper men make them prevail. If we left it to the poets and professors and artists, the waves

of misunderstanding and hatred would swell and grow until bombs and poison gas would destroy libraries and universities and concert-halls together with the rest of the planet. It is through the constant rat-tat, as the major calls it, of head-lines that democracy, social justice, and world unity can be translated from the lingo of abstractions into the language of daily practice. Except for us the voices of the learned would be a silence in a void. Every idealistic program would be an irrelevant soliloquy. I know of no group of men with less of buncombe and pretentiousness than the group in a good newspaper office. I know of no group of men that with less talk about themselves or their service are more honest and intelligent servants of the public good."

Simon Flint started again puffing at his pipe.

The poet had been wincing. He hardly waited for Flint to finish.

"Bliss to be advertised to the millions. Truth, goodness, and beauty to be elected by popular vote. Never, never, in the past or future history of the world. Flint himself admits that to become news to the multitude truth must be jazzed, beauty spiced, and the good made noisy and thrilling. A philosophical faker who goes in for religion can win all the newspaper space he wants by beating the drums and cymbals in a loud life of Christ. A lonely thinker with a profound, quiet thought is lost in the racket. It's no use feeding ourselves and fooling ourselves with the thought of spreading the divine fire like thin treacle over the half-baked bread of the world. The news that is news to a civilized mind will always bore the majority; it will be interesting only to

those whom Arnold Bennett justly calls the 'passionate few.' 'The Freeman,' which tried to live exclusively on the nutriment of interesting and important things, languished after four years with a handful of readers. The cleft between the barbarians and the intellectuals will always be what it was. It is simply widened by the picture paper, the yellow sheets, and the radio. The head-line, the comic strip, and the Sunday article simply universalize barbarism for the semi-literate. Saving the world or spreading the light by head-lines! Light worth spreading

never be spread. The world worth saving lives on quietly and unquenchingly above wars and rumors of wars, and always will. You may be sure when truth, beauty, and goodness become pabulum for the millions, they will have been completely denatured in the process."

$4

Fervint, the Californian, had kept still too long for his own comfort. He was already restlessly walking about the room.

"Here comes the rhapsody in blue," Richard whispered to me as Fervint began:

"One cannot find coherence in the newspapers. That's not a complaint against journalism. It's a complaint against life. What you are objecting to is the fact that the newspapers accurately reflect the wildness, the strident tempo, the hurry and disorder of our time, our country, and our generation. As for me, I turn to the paper with my morning coffee as to any great adventure. The newspaper is not a formal summary of a directors' meeting in which the program has been laid out in advance. It is as loud, as

trumpery, as miscellaneous, and as vulgar as the life of this sprawling continent itself. Havelock Ellis says somewhere that crime is the index of a civilization. Well, anything is, and everything is. Murders in Chicago, Marathon dancing in Delaware, bicycle races in New York, prima donna divorces, typhoid epidemics, international house parties on Long Island— they all interest me as the sprawling phantasmagoria of life interested Walt Whitman. If you have a weak digestion, it is a nightmare. But if you are healthy, it is a show, a circus, a mad delight. Who cares what it means or if it means anything so long as there is passion and gusto in it?

"It's often made me think that the paragraphers and cartoonists are far more subtle and wise commentators on life than the learned editorial writers. Life is explosive, not logical, as Richard believes; not lyrical, as the poet does. What you can get out of it is not a meaning, but a quip, a grin, or a sob. The wits on the papers seem to me the most authentic commentators on our life because they take it for just what it is a series of amusing episodes in the crazy-quilt life of our day. A man who tries to make sense of that madness is himself mad. He is foisting his dream logic on the facts, and missing the wild fun of the facts themselves."

"Edward 's gone into Dionysiacs again," said Richard, "and without even a single cocktail. What you want, Edward, is a nice large insane asylum to roam around in. I cannot help thinking that the interest in the fripperies, the madness, and the absurd scintillation of things is one of the signs of the decadence of our times. There are people I know who turn to

their favorite columnist's comments on news before they turn to the news itself. They are not really interested in the incendiary fact that Poland is to Europe. They rejoice in the columnist who tells them that "France and Germany are Poles apart." Give them an eclipse of the sun, and they think the eclipse itself is eclipsed by the wit who gets off a line about it. It is the symptom of the nervous decay of our time. What I want out of the newspapers is not a constant assault by epigram: I want a sober record on which I can frame a picture of the prospects of the civilization of which I am a part."

As Richard concluded, we heard, breaking against the silence that followed, the muffled voice of a newsboy raucous in the soft spring air: "Extra! extra!" then some indistinguishable hoarse mumbling. Tommy Keenan, always pleased with a chance for physical distraction, went to the window and thrust his head out in inquiry. The rest sat listening attentively.

"I wonder what it can be," said Mrs. Spellman, with anxiety in her always tender eyes.

"Probably just a half-wit murdering a moron," suggested the poet.

"You can never tell what it is from what those fellows say," said Tommy, turning from the window disgustedly. "Those chaps always mumble their words so that you have to buy the paper."

"I have a notion something's broken loose in Italy," said Flint, gravely. "The despatches from Rome yesterday sounded pretty ominous."

"I'll run down and get a paper," said Tommy, seizing his hat.

As the door closed behind him, Richard looked at us curiously.

"Here in one way or another we 've been damning the papers, but whenever there is the rumor of news, how we all wake up! Murder, wreck, revolution-anything just so we know what it is."

"Something has broken loose all right," Tommy said as he returned, waving a pink sheet. "It 's Mount Etna." And we all listened as Tommy read in his delicious Irish cadences the story of the havoc that ancient mountain was wreaking among those remote and doomed Sicilian villages.

A little buzz of gossip and speculation, then Tommy's voice.

"I must see if the Giants have won." "Look what kind of weather it 's going to be to-morrow, Tommy," Helen suggested.

"Fair and warmer. But here 's something for you, Mr. Poet, or whatever you are: 'Prince of Wales Dines with Thomas Hardy.'"

"In some countries that would have been considered an honor for the prince," said the poet.

"What are the new plays announced for the week?" asked Fervint, he of the Little Theater Movement.

"I'll let you have the paper in a moment, Eddie. But look here: 'Philosopher Hangs Himself.' Don't let that put any ideas in your head, Professor."

"Well," said Richard, "I don't think newspapers need any defense in this company. We'll all be reading them and looking forward to them until the five-star final edition on the day of judgment. We'll turn to the celestial arrivals and the infernal departures to see which column we 're in. Maybe on the last page among the city brevities there will be a short editorial by Dr. Frank Crane telling the meaning of it all."

Y

You must know that there is a certain day in the year on which

the saints may leave the courts of heaven and come down upon earth for the space between daylight and dark. That day we call All Saints' day. Then St. Peter opens the gate, and the saints who would have their day upon earth come down.

Only a few ever come. These few are the best and the greatest of the saints. And of the few who come among us again, I can tell you of only one St. Martin. I am told that never once has St. Martin missed coming down to earth upon All Saints' day.

And what does St. Martin do between daylight and dark when he comes down upon earth upon All Saints' day? I will tell you. He goes up and down the country that he went up and down when he was upon the earth. He goes up and down upon it seeking for an honest man.

In the shape of a great white horse with wings he goes up and down the country he knew when he was on earth before. For you must know that the saints, when they come down upon earth on All Saints' day, do not have the forms they had when they were on earth before. Oh, no. Each comes down in the form of the bird or beast that they were with most when they were upon the earth as men.

And St. Martin, because he was a high officer and rode a horse, takes the shape of a horse upon All Saints' daya white horse with great wings.

So up and down the land, in the shape of a white horse with wings, St. Martin goes between daylight and dark upon All Saints' day. And when he comes upon an honest man, he gallops around and around him, persuading him to mount upon his back. And when the man mounts upon his back, St. Martin carries him off to the place where honest men, honestly enjoying themselves, are doing the work that their hearts are set upon doing.

There was once a goatherd who lived near the place that St. Martin had lived in. To him was once given a very good riding-boot that the king himself had worn. He had n't received the other boot. The king had ordered the riding-boots to be given him one day when he had stopped at the goatherd's hut. But then he remembered that there was good leather in the sides of the left boot, and he ordered that it be sent to the cordwainer's, so that when his slippers needed repair, there would be good leather to repair them with. So the left boot was taken to the cordwainer's, and the goatherd received the right boot only. It was a good boot and only slightly worn, and it

would have lasted the goatherd many years; that is, if he had had the left boot to go with it.

He took it into his hut and he left it on a shelf above where he lay at night. It was a welcome sight to him in the mornings when he wakened up, that boot standing there so fine and so stately, as if it were waiting for him to put it on. And the goatherd lived, hoping that some time he might come by another boot that would go with it. Then he would have a pair of boots for his feet, and then he would be able to go about in as much style and comfort as any man in the king's dominions.

One day, passing by the cordwainer's and looking sharply out as he always did when he went that way, he found the king's left riding-boot. He picked it up out of the nettles, and, a happy man, he went into his hut and put the left boot beside the right boot upon the shelf. There was a real pair of boots for him to look at when he wakened up in the morning.

This left boot had a very good sole, but the sides of it had been taken out to put patches upon the king's slippers. He would get enough leather some day, the goatherd hoped, to make sides for this boot. Then he would put the king's two riding-boots upon his feet, and he would go in as much style and comfort as any man in the king's dominions.

All that summer he used to sit near the shoemaker's bench while the goats were in the fenced field, and watched him while he cut out the leather and stitched the sides into the boots. He came to know how to do this job just as well as the shoemaker. He had a knife for cutting the leather, an awl for making the holes, a needle and

waxed thread for stitching; he had even a cobbler's ball for rubbing on the leather when it was stitched in. But, the poor goatherd! he could never get a piece of leather that would make sides for the king's riding-boot.

He knew that he would come by so much leather some day, and he lived on in hope, while he had the comfort of seeing the two high boots on the shelf every morning when he wakened up. These two boots he knew would one day go upon his feet, which never had had boots upon them before; then, with the king's boots upon his feet he would go about in as much style and comfort as any man in the king's dominions.

Summer passed, and the days before All Saints' day began. Now the goatherd had two very good pieces of leather. They were given him by a man whose goats he had saved from the flooding river. He was ready now to put sides into the boot that wanted sides. But, the poor goatherd! he could n't get any work for himself done now, night or day.

For it was about this time that the king, by the help of a good law that he himself made, had the ancient tribe shifted from the place they always had had by the edge of the forest. "It will be a good place for my goats to graze," said the king, and thereupon he had orders sent to the goatherd to have his two hundred goats taken to the edge of the forest. The goatherd used to take them there every day. He used to bring the leather and the knife and the awl and the needle and the waxed thread and the king's boot with him, always hoping that he would have an hour or two to cut out and put in the leather. But so it was not to be. The goats were always