A GEORGIA PEACH

THE Belles of Georgia were passées. But there still remained those too ripe for shipment. And if you have never eaten a rejected Belle of Georgia in the orchard, you have never eaten a peach! But we saw that they were picking the Elbertas; so we pushed Sisyphus, our Chinese wheelbarrow, up the mountain, and stopped before the caretaker's cabin to ask for work. Not that we

1 especially desired work; but we desired peaches in such quantity, and for so long a period, that work seemed the best way to acquire them.

The caretaker's dog, disregarding our beloved mongrel's pathetic friendliness, and utterly ignoring the usual sign of amity, growled an insulting remark about our appearance, which John, our dog, resented. The pickers were passing from their day's work, and we were at once divided into conscientious objectors and jingoes. Peter seized John by the tail, the caretaker seized his dog in a like manner, and there was an enforced armistice. It seemed an inauspicious moment in which to ask for work, but we did. The mountaineer grinned, and said: "The fo'eman, he's gone ter town, but youall kin move inter the shack next mine, and I reckon he'll take you-all on in the mornin'. Ever pick er pack?'

Peter replied that we were experienced, as indeed we are. For Peter has experienced the orange industry, and I have paid off several installments of my karma owning and operating alone a large commercial apple orchard wished on me in the Middle West.

So we borrowed a broom, put John on his chain, and pushed Sis into the cabin, where in the rock fireplace the kettle boiled cheerfully before nightfall.

The next morning at sunrise we climbed the steep rocky path to the packing shed. The great, clean, open

pavilion sat on the very pinnacle of the mountain, overlooking one hundred acres of peach trees en talus, each rocky terrace just wide enough for a footing below its row of trees. On every side the sun glinted on blue billows of distant mountains, their summits gleaming with rainbow mists forever dissolving in the serene air. Spring comes late up this way, and in a few short weeks works, with tremendous fervor, her creative will. And early the drowsy earth croons her summer song of enchantment and tranced calm. We sat before a packing table, and in the brooding quiet listened expectantly for the pipe of a shepherd on a hillside.

Suddenly Peter glared at me with an anxious eye. "Those Elbertas!' he cried. "They are not colored. They are picking too green!' And he hurried down to inspect the fruit. I was not moved to vicarious anxiety, and remained to reflect that after all these weeks of idle wandering along the open road, like happy gypsies of an older day, we had deliberately turned aside into this disquieting avenue of trade.

Peter returned with his worst fears confirmed. But I gently reminded him that this orchard was not ours, and invited him to watch the workers who were assembling. For there entered a grande dame with a regal air, followed by other grandes dames equally queenly. A bevy of girls in gowns of blue, and gold, and pink, and lavender, with little aprons daintily embroidered, flitted in like butterflies, followed by slim youths in clean blouses, with old-fashioned faces like Civil War daguerreotypes. The grandes dames sat in comfortable corners and opened books or magazines. Someone played a fox trot on a harmonica, and presently the young people were dancing. They danced happily, with grace and decorum, and it was a sweet sight in the summer morning.

'No poor whites here,' said Peter. "These are the old-time aristocrats, eaten out by the boll weevil. I'm glad I'm not the fo'eman!'

The foreman appeared. He was a plump, blonde, pompous young man, and I fancied these people called him a Yankee. For at once the dancing stopped, and an air almost of sullenness settled upon us. Peter was hired as a picker, but I hesitated and did not apply, though I am rather an expert packer. But without, under the trees, there were too many conferences, with some show of unpleasantness, between the owner and the buyer, and the foreman seemed irritated and confused. At noon Peter told me he had at once discovered the trouble. The brown rot had suddenly developed, and the owner was forcing green peaches on the buyer, in the hope of saving his crop. The poor foreman was at his wit's end, attempting to teach these experienced pickers to pick green, and to force the packers to make a dishonest pack. His attempts at pleasantry, in his crisp Northern voice, were met with respectful silence, and his sharp reprimands with quiet scorn.

I sat near the foreman's desk, and heard him say to a youth who arrived late, 'We're picking as green as we can to-day,' and he gave him a sample peach to carry. It was very green indeed. When this particular youth returned with his basket, the buyer happened in, and both he and the foreman stepped quickly to examine the fruit. Before the buyer could speak, the foreman cried, 'What do you mean by picking green peaches! Ain't you got no sense! Take these out to the culls!' The young man produced his sample peach. 'Your own sample that you gave me to pick by,' he said. 'It's no such thing!' yelled the foreman. 'What are you talking about?' and he seized the peach and threw it outside.

The youth's face turned as white as death, and every woman stopped packing. But he said in a controlled voice, 'My time, if you please.'

'You bet you can have your time, and anybody else can that don't pick honest!' And he went to his desk, where he was a long time making out the check, for every packer arose and walked to the trembling youth.

'Aunt Louise,' he said firmly, 'take the girls and go back to work. You too, Cousin Carrie-all of you. This is my affair. Just business, you know.' He accepted his check with a bow, and the foreman scrawled on the signboard:

I am the foreman of this orchard and no back talk aloud-Harry Watson.

The pickers filed by the sign with lowered eyes; only Peter laughed.

That evening, in the village, a young man challenged the foreman to fight. He refused, and was gently spanked before an admiring audience. (No doubt Uncle Jeff or Cousin Lee remitted the fine; for all these people seem related.) The next day there was another foreman. No doubt the Northern foreman returned with vivid tales of the lawless South. The new foreman was a Southerner, less efficient, but with the leisurely executive ability that somehow gets things done. The Southerner knows what to slight and the one to slight! Still, with every truckload starting to the railway, there was bickering between the owner and the buyer. I was sorry for the owner, who stood to lose his crop. And, after all, a peach is considered ripe when it splits from the seed, and these did. But flavor comes with color on the tree. The orange grower openly gases his fruit for color, and the apple orchardist trusts the apples to color in the box or barrel. They may. But the consumer misses the delicate flavor.

'DURING recent years,' writes William B. Munro, professor of government at Harvard, 'I have been a college professor during half the year and a college trustee the other half. In both capacities I hear very little discussion of anything except the urgent need for more money and the ways of getting it.' In other words, when such a man attacks the 1 subject of financing higher education, he knows whereof he speaks. Robert Dean Frisbie continues his South Sea Island chronicle, describing his experiences as the only white man on an atoll full of natives. The Right Reverend Charles Fiske, whose article in the June Atlantic, 'A Bishop Looks at the Church,' aroused widespread interest, follows up his criticism with a constructive defense and frank confession of faith in the =Church. The Bishop's book of last year, The Christ We Know, is being followed this fall by a collection of essays entitled The Confessions of a Puzzled Parson.

Two more sonnets by R. S. maintain the same extraordinarily high poetic level that he reached in our last issue. A Talented daughter of a distinguished father, Margaret Munsterberg works in the editorial room of the Boston Public Library. ▲ Our mania for giving prizes receives short shrift from Miss Repplier, who buttresses her case with many adroit quotations. A It is one of the satisfying ironies of life to find in Paul Shorey, first of American humanists, the most effective defender of William Jennings Bryan. Evolution has been enjoying such a consistently good press that it is a pleasure to hear from a gentleman and a scholar who finds Plato more satisfying than Darwin. Samuel Scoville, Jr., lawyer and nature lover, gives a description of his recent adventures in southern Georgia and northern Florida that sends a tickle along the spine. Robert Hillyer's seventh book of verse, appropriately entitled The Seventh Hill, appeared this spring.

Readers of "The Sea Boy' will find no difficulty in believing Captain William Outerson's statement that his life has been 'varied and intensely interesting.' Born in Edinburgh in 1875, he left school at fourteen and shipped on a four-masted barque from Liverpool to Calcutta and back. Six months in a law office in the Scotch capital were followed by a voyage to San Francisco, round the Horn. Most of the next ten years was spent in the United States, in whose navy the young man enlisted during the Spanish War. Then came more education, a little journalism, and globe-trotting, from Alaska to the Orient. The Great War naturally attracted this adventurous spirit and he received a commission in the Black Watch, with which he served in India until 1920, when he retired with a captain's commission. A young Outerson is already following in his father's footsteps, having entered the Naval Academy at Annapolis. A The second and concluding installment of Hilda Wetherill's letters from an Indian trading post shows how the redskin meets such great emergencies as war and illness. ▲ All the way from Italy come Bernice Kenyon's verses on a theme that has always exercised a peculiar fascination over the poetic mind.

As a lecturer in astrophysics at McGill University, Professor A. Vibert Douglas is qualified to discuss the energy of starlight and even to draw the surprising conclusion that we are such stuff as stars are made on. Vincent C. Bonnlander, a New Jersey clergyman, offers an appealing reconciliation between Nature and Man. A As military correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, Captain B. H. Liddell Hart enjoys a distinguished reputation as an expert on the science and history of warfare. His studies have ranged from classical times down to the Great War, and several of his books on military subjects have appeared in this country.

After graduating from Vanderbilt University and taking a master's and a doctor's degree at Yale, Howard Douglas Dozier became head of the School of Commerce at the University of Georgia and later professor of economics at Dartmouth. He is now serving in an advisory capacity to one of the government departments at Washington. Purists who may take offense at his title of 'Hamstringing Insurance' are referred to a distinguished authority. 'So have they,' wrote John Milton, 'hamstrung the valor of the subject.' Maurice Holland is Director of the Division of Engineering and Industrial Research of the National Research Council. His investigations of scientific research methods abroad have taken him to many foreign countries, including Japan, which he visited in 1926 as a delegate to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress. Although some of the material in his present article is drawn from the report he made to the National Research Council and some from a privately printed brochure, Out of Kimono into Overalls, most of the substance and all of the form are entirely new.

It had been the Atlantic's intention to invite an immediate reply to Mr. Scharff's interesting discussion of public utilities, but, since the Federal Trade Commission is at the moment actively investigating power companies throughout the country, the natural spokesmen for the industry feel that they should not be called on to reply to charges or even comment upon suggestions until the government report is made and published.

We are indebted to Mrs. Marion G. Hartness, of Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, for the following Korean proverbs she assembled on a recent trip to that part of the world and passed on to us apropos of our little papers on Chinese Proverbs:

Spare the tile and let the main beam rot. Why put jewels on straw shoes? Straw shoes should have strings of their own kind.

Even three pecks of gems are not gems until strung on a string.

Horseshoes for the feet of a dog!

However pressed you may be for time, you

must thread the needle through the eye, not tie it round the middle.

Even a tiger, if he is spoken of, appears. Like putting fresh meat in a tiger's mouth. Trying to drive an ox through a rat hole. What you tell a cow is kept a secret; what you tell your wife is published abroad.

A daughter-in-law grows up to be a motherin-law and acts the mother-in-law in even worse

measure.

Even a state cannot relieve its own poor.

Gifts to the king may be strung on a string, but the bribes that go with it must be carried by a horse.

Even a sheet of paper is lighter when lifted by two.

A witch cannot do her own exorcising, nor a sorcerer foretell the day of his own death. One must go up to Heaven if he would pick

stars.

Like a white crane flying across a black cloud. Water may be known a thousand fathoms deep, but a single fathom of a man's heart it is impossi ble to know.

Christian counsel for campaigners.

DEAR ATLANTIC,

BEAUMONT, TEXAS

In Mr. George Wharton Pepper's fine paper, 'From Nadir to Zenith,' in the Atlantic Monthly for August 1928, is this admirable statement, which should be constantly borne in mind by all men, including us Protestants, and particularly during this Presidential campaign: 'As far as belief is concerned, there are fixed stars in the Christian firmament. . . . Around these are clustered many bright but lesser stars by which devout Catholics, Protestants, and Roman Catholics alike steer their course. These are the high lights of the Christian tradition.'

A list, reasonably complete, of those 'fixed stars' was given one hundred years ago by Charles Butler, a devout Roman Catholic, an eminent English lawyer, an author of distinction on legal and religious subjects, in his Reminiscences, published in 1822.

In that book he says: 'Eleven articles of religious belief, in which all denominations of Christians believe, are:

'(1) That there is one God.

(2) That He is a Being of infinite perfection. (3) That He directs all things by His Provi dence.

(4) That it is our duty to love Him with all our hearts and our neighbors as ourselves.

(5) That it is our duty to repent of the sins we commit.

'(6) That He pardons the truly repentant. '(7) That there is a future state of rewards and