chair. Next the chair is a stand for a single electric light, with many feet of extra cord, so that the bulb itself can be carried about the room. As Barrie talks, he winds and unwinds the loose electric cord very systematically about the stand.

"One thing that always amuses me," he may be saying, "is that the scientist thinks he is the only person who has anything to say; but I've observed that he is usually the only person who can't say it"; and all the while his eyes will be soberly riveted on the cord, which is meantime pretty well around the light-stand.

On the wall, at the end of the sofa, hangs a charmingly delicate, vivid oil-portrait of George Meredith. Not once in the last ten years of Meredith's life did Barrie ever miss a birthday dinner at Flint Cottage, Box Hill; usually he journeyed there once or twice every week.

"I had barely a shilling when I first came to London," Barrie says of his first sight of Meredith; "but if I did nothing else, I determined I should see Box Hill and Dorking. I got out there, a good long journey, partly by bus, partly on foot, and at last I stood in front of the house. It was a fine, bright afternoon. I leaned over the fence, gazing at the house within, and presently a white-bearded figure appeared at the door, stopped a moment, and then saw me, and started forward as if to greet me, though I was strange to his eyes. I stood still until the figure nearly reached me, then I turned and ran. Long afterward I told Meredith of our first sight of each other."

Barrie's attachment for Meredith, one of his earliest, naturally remains one of his strongest; but there is never sadness or a lament, but always gaiety and the fine play of the "comic spirit," in his reminiscences of his chief literary idol.

"Meredith got very deaf and frail in his later years," says Barrie. "His last novels were written not in the little Swiss chalet on the grounds where most of them had been written, but in the study to the right of the door as you enter the house. He had an old housekeeper who bossed the place, and would say to me in his presence, perhaps counting on his deafness. 'They tell me he writes endless books about men and women; but, man, he knows nothing at all about women.' A favorite

game with us was to sit together vying with each other improvising imaginary autobiographies. It was good fun, each knowing that the other was making it up. Meredith was always grateful to the young men in America for their recognition and appreciation of his books, things he could not thank England for. Much of his time he gave gladly to young, struggling writers.1 I have seen heaps of their manuscripts at Box Hill. He would read them from first page to last, and always in the end find something for which to commend the writer, 'that this chapter is good or that one, though the whole can be bettered by revision; by developing this idea or that special character.""

XI

UNACCOUNTABLE silences in the midst of Barrie conversations and Barrie shyness are popular exaggerations, if not myths. He has his silences, but they are significant silences. His own countrymen would call him a grand man to be silent with. As for the Barrie seclusiveness, it is best explained by Barrie himself as a trait typical of his race.

"You only know the shell of a Scot," he says, "until you have entered his homecircle. In his office, in clubs, at social gatherings, where you and he seem to be getting on so well, he is really a house. with all the shutters closed and the door locked. He is not opaque of set purpose; often it is against his will. It is certainly against mine; I try to keep my shutters open and my foot in the door, but they will bang to.'

If he is seated in his brown easy-chair for a talk, Barrie is pretty sure to be holding a well-filled, well-lighted brier pipe, "a hanger," beside his left cheek. Every now and then it is taken out of his mouth, as when he says: "These books around us are books of favorite writers of mine or gift books. They accumulate, you see. I have only one book of reference; that 's 'Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.' I like that by me. If ever I am tempted to use a quotation, I look to see if it is in Bartlett; and if it is, I don't use it."

XII

BRONZE STATUE OF "PETER PAN" IN KENSINGTON GARDENS FROM THE SCULPTURE BY SIR GEORGE FRAMPTON

there has been no escaping, or the rehearsal of a new play that has tempted him. Within recent years he has appeared more frequently than ever at public gatherings, though, however public the gathering, Barrie is privacy itself. Ralph Connor tells how he was once invited to a reception at Free St. George's, Edinburgh, which was given by the young people of the church in honor of the rising novelist. Coming in late, the Canadian met Henry Drummond.

"Have you seen Barrie?" asked Drummond.

"No. I should like to see him," was the reply.

"Well," said Drummond, smiling, "look around till you find a hole, look down in the hole, and you will see Barrie." Ralph Connor found Barrie later in

a quiet corner, evidently looking for a good hole, and somewhat distressed at not finding it.

Journalistic banquets are most apt to attract Barrie. It was at one of these when he made, for him, an extremely long speech. This is the way it went:

"Weel, this is the verry furst time I 've ever had dinner with three editors." Then he sat down.

There is a tradition, however, that Barrie once came within touching distance of standing for Parliament; but, greatly to his amusement, the arrangements became frightfully bungled and eventually went completely awry. Subsequently it has become known that what then chiefly spoiled Barrie's chances for Parliament was Barrie. By way of assisting him to public attention he was induced to preside over a Burns celebration in Scotland. He took the chair as presiding officer, and then kept to it firmly. Throughout the entire proceedings he did not utter a single word; but remained as if glued to the horribly conspicuous chair, loathing his predicament, but inwardly thoroughly. amused at the expressions on the faces of all about him, which told dismally of his failure as a presiding officer. When the occasion was almost half-way finished, Barrie took advantage of a talkative group standing in front of him, and quietly stole away before anybody had a chance to miss him. But the next week a well-known Saturday review printed a satirical article called "Mr. Barrie in the Chair." The thing was simply withering in its ironical account of the dumb presiding officer who eventually fled, leaving a meeting to preside over itself. The greatest regret was naturally expressed by those who had persuaded Barrie to come to the Burns celebration, and among his friends tremendous indignation was felt and vented. But some day they will know, if they have not already found out, that the article was written by Barrie himself.

Barrie's best-beloved London, it must finally be confessed, is not along Adelphi Terrace, or the Victoria Embankment, or in any of his clubs, but on the shores of a wondrous lake. It is easily found, any fair morning, not far beyond a gate that opens on a lovely world of gardens.

Barrie's own directions are the best for reaching it.

"Before you go in at the gate," he says, "you speak to the lady with the balloons, who sits just outside. This is as near being inside as she may venture, because, if she were to let go her hold of the railings for one moment, the balloons would lift her up, and she would be flown away. She sits very squat, for the balloons are always tugging at her, and the strain has given her quite a red face."

All perambulators lead past the lady with the balloons, and then enter the Broad Walk. Presently the Broad Walk is met by the Baby's Walk, and, by following this, you come to the lake on the shores of which is Barrie's best-beloved London.

"It is a lovely lake," says Barrie, "and there is a drowned forest at the bottom of it. If you peer over the edge, you can see the trees all growing upside down, and they say that at night there are drowned stars in it. If so, Peter Pan sees them when he is sailing across the lake in the Thrush's Nest. A small part only of the Serpentine is in the gardens, for soon it passes beneath a bridge to far away where the island is on which all the birds are born that become baby boys and girls. No one who is human, except Peter Pan, and he is only half human, can land on the island; but you may write what you want, boy or girl, dark or fair, on a piece of paper, and then twist it into the shape of a boat, and slip it into the water, and it reaches Peter Pan's island after dark."

Like the lady with the balloons, Barrie had to be content outside the railings of Kensington Gardens for years, tugged at

A SNAP-SHOT OF BARRIE AND GEORGE MEREDITH

SIR J. M. BARRIE AND HENRY JAMES

by an empty pocket, declined stories, rejected plays, and a total want of worldly push. But he persisted in living within sight of the railings at least, and as things got better with him and his funds began to justify it, he moved around the railings to within a better view of the gardens. Dame Fortune came suddenly and plentifully laden when she finally made up her mind to visit Barrie at all. One of his books quickly sang its way round the world, and he became the chief figure in the theater as well as in the book world. Then he moved around the railings of Kensington Gardens once more until he was in sight of the gate by which sits the lady with the balloons. It was then London gave Barrie the golden key to his beloved Kensington Gardens, and now on the shores of its lovely lake stands Peter Pan in bronze, like a thing that has sprung up spontaneously from its native soil.

XIII

NEAR Licenza, Italy, on a tiny plateau. among the Sabine Mountains, there once

lived a quaint little Roman who had a good liver's taste for fine wines, a gallant gentleman's soft heart for fair ladies, and a true poet's gift for song. Everybody has read at least three words he wrotein medias res. He used the phrase to define the first principle of sound writing; get to the heart of your subject quickly; "go to it," as we say even to-day. The quaint little Roman was Horace.

Near Kirriemuir, Scotland, there once lived a quaint little Scotchman who had a great affection for the quaint little Roman, and though he had not the purse or the taste for fine wines or the folly of a

soft heart for fair ladies, urbanity early marked his style-a more than Roman, a human, urbanity.

It was in pencil, on both sides of the two fly-leaves torn from his pocket edition of Horace, that he first wrote copy for a printer. Labuntur anni: but at the age of thirty-four he "got to it"; at last he was in medias res. He had worked out the Horatian principle in composing his life as skilfully as in composing his writings. The other day a nation, through its king, called him a baronet; but it was a misprint. print. The distinction should have read, J. M. Barrie, Horatian.

SOME