it would not have become us to find fault with Mecklenburg, and we will ingly endured the extra labor for the pleasure of basking in the affability of the lock-keepers, so different from the officious self-importance of the Prussian and Saxon officials.

At Schwerin we took a day's holiday, leaving the boat at a restaurant at the entrance to the beautiful lake, which we could not cross on account of the strong wind. I met some people in a café in the town who had been prisoners of war in the hands of Canadian and English troops, and they told me another side to the picture of the fighting that I had gleaned from my own countrymen. I did not need to believe all they said to realize that, for men in the trenches, it does not much matter which army you are in or whom you are fighting against; when men see red, they behave horribly to their opponents. I noticed, however, that the old German notion that the war was caused by the wickedness of the Allies had passed away from most of them; they held instead that every one was equally to blame, which is as great an improvement in outlook as one can reasonably expect.

We had a rough passage across one of the lakes, in which, we were informed, several fishermen had been drowned a week before-"in just such weather as this," the natives kindly added. But we got across at last. Exhausted, we put in at the only piece of shore that was free from stones. But before we could land and take out our hungrily desired victuals, an excited man rushed up with a gun and ordered us off. We argued with him, but in vain. We had to struggle on another half-mile to a village, where we learned that our unkind acquaint

ance was a rabid monarchist ex-officer whose nerves had been badly offended recently by the local Communists' successfully objecting to his wearing his uniform in public.

Although few people in northern Germany to-day have much respect for the young republic, they do not like this type of Junker, and my loud complaints against him were sympathetically received by the population. While we were talking, the villain himself walked by, and it was evident that the feeling against him was strong. He appeared to know this, for he held himself with an absurd air of aloofness. I thought there was going to be a scene, when an automobile drew up at an inn, and this extraordinary occurrence attracted the attention of the simple peasants.

Eleven years before I had crossed Lake Müritz, the largest in Germany, on the way back from a rowing expedition from Berlin to the Baltic Sea; but it had been wonderful summer weather, and we had got across without a splash. But this time the weather was likely to be bad; we had had a foretaste of lake conditions the previous day, and the outlook was unpleasant. unpleasant. Seventeen miles seems a short distance, but the history of the Müritz, with its sudden squalls, is sufficiently tragic to make its dangers seem very real to us. Our only hope was to set out as early as possible in the morning, to hug the shore all the way round,-which meant that the seventeen miles became nearer thirty, -and to pray for the best. If we had luck, we might get around without trouble. If we were unlucky and a wind sprang up, we might be able to scull ashore before the boat filled.

We were lucky. A long, exhausting

pull of three and a half hours brought us within sight of the outlet of the lake; we sculled into the shelter of the mole just as the breeze got up and turned the calm expanse of water into a white froth of foam.

For the next few days we sculled pleasantly through the minor lakes of Mecklenburg and the winding, greenbanked canals. We stopped at sleepy little towns, innocent of railways and automobiles, and watched the dollar exchange rise daily in the papers and the price of provisions jump up proportionately.

Then one morning we crossed the border back into Prussia. If our tattered copy of "Hip Hip Hurra," which we studied like a parson his Bible, had not warned us, we should have guessed the fact from the behavior of the lock-keepers. They shouted at us and stormed and yelled and shook their fists and bullied us for doing what they had previously told us to do and had not told us to do. We suffered patiently, thinking with regret of the cheerful, fat Mecklenburg officials who let us sleep in their haylofts and brought in the local foresters to look at the Englishman who had so

unexpectedly descended upon them. But even the Prussian lock-keepers disclosed a human side sometimes. I was being stormed at by one of them for some innocent transgression of a preposterous by-law, when suddenly he demanded to know my nationality. "Oh, I 'm an Englishman," I said cheerily, hoping that this would further annoy him.

But, to my surprise, his expression softened into a grin. He ran up and clasped my hand.

"I used to be a police sergeant in German Southwest Africa," he cried, "and the English troopers on the border were my best friends."

We went off and had a drink on the strength of this, my companions in the boat, who had watched us talking without knowing what was passing, being much alarmed for fear I was being haled away under arrest.

"Ah, yes," said the lock-keeper, wiping his mustache, "we ought never to have fought against each other. We ought to have joined forces and smashed the French and the Russians." I demurred politely, for it is unpleasant to win popularity at the expense of an ally.

"Well, perhaps you 're right," he said at last. "There were faults on all sides. We were all somewhat to blame. But that 's over now. Prosit!"

I was content to leave the matter at that, and we drank another glass of foaming, gassy Weissbier.

Then at last we came to an industrial region. We had a day or two of this, and then, so wonderfully is Berlin situated, we passed through an enchanting belt of forest and came within sight of home.

Just a fortnight after we had set out, our double-sculler, somewhat impaired by its adventures, drew up

at the landing-stage of the boat-house beneath the flag of our club. I went in and weighed myself.

How many pounds have I lost, I wondered as I stepped upon the scales. But, to my astonishment, they showed exactly the same figure as when, fat and badly out of training, I had embarked on the journey. Still, if there was no reduction, it meant only that I had exchanged flesh for muscle. And I had certainly re-acquired an appetite and the ability to sleep anywhere, at any time, in any discomfort, things well worth a fortnight's hard work.

There is already much more in literature of the social and esthetic history of Americans than hasty generalizers realize. Our critics have discussed American literature in terms of greatness. The question has been, Who can be put beside Carlyle or Maupassant, Dickens or Matthew Arnold, as a literary figure of great magnitude? But the historian sees things differently. He looks for the imagination of a race and the facts of their behavior, and sometimes a second-rate book will tell him more than a masterpiece. He will get most from the masterpieces, but lesser works concern him also.

American literature has never been thoroughly studied for the history of the American mind and for light on the American character. It will prove to be rich.

It will prove to be rich; and in the meantime the question, What sort of information do American books yield most readily about America and the Americans? inspires new questions, and suggests some interesting reflec

One conclusion which any shelf of American fiction chronologically arranged will drive home is that if we did not invent local color, we have carried it as far as any modern nation. Here was a country geographically very much the same through vast areas, and a population which despite its diverse sources had to face very much the same difficulties of life and livelihood in the North, South, East, and West. As the old charter for the settlement of the "Western Lands" of Connecticut on the Housatonic had it, a settler must "subdue and fence" six acres before he could get valid title to his tract. Americans at the beginning were all subduers of land, and many have remained so until this day. Nevertheless, in many of our most famous books, and in all the histories of literature, there appears from a very early period a notable sectionalism which has made it fatally easy to classify American authors. The first thing to do, of course, with an author is to classify him for ready reference; many seem to think that it is also the last. We had our New England school, our stories of the Southern cavaliers, our Indiana group, our pioneer narratives, and we are now in the midst of an attack of the Wild West.

This sectional literature is useful to

the historian when it is not too much sentimentalized, and it has given us some great books; but it is no longer promising. The Wild West film of the movies and the novel of "the great open spaces" in brilliant slip cover are examples of literature gone to seed. There is little truth and no health, but only crude excitement and fabricated sentiment, in most of them. The sectional stories were great only when they struck beneath environment into something of the mind which was valuable entirely apart from the influences that helped a little to mold it. Hawthorne did this for New England, Melville and Cooper for the American sea, Mark Twain for the Mississippi Valley. Willa Cather for the plains, Sinclair Lewis for the Western town or city, are doing it to-day.

In the South, so it seems to me, local color went to seed before it was ripe. It was richer and more glamourous there, but it remained just local color. The great poet of the South, Poe, was inspired by sectionalism not at all; his second, Lanier, was scarcely more Southern than he; the novelists and short-story writers who have given us a dozen Souths, all equally picturesque, have stayed upon the level of manners. The great Southern story is yet to be written, and it will have to be more than a Southern story to succeed.

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The rather thin cream of local color (a better figure than seed-time) has been skimmed, and racial fiction promises no better returns. It is our habit to say, "Look at the immigrants, the wonderful richness of their native minds and spirits, the dramatic contrasts between them and new environment!" A born writer cannot see a

booted Russian peasant woman in a subway car without desiring to write a story about her. And yet there has been very little really important written about our immigrants. Their differences from us are picturesque; but in themselves they touch us and become part of us through their resemblances, and after the first generation the resemblances outweigh the differences ten to one. It may be true that the second and third generation Italians will have something new to contribute to American life, but as material for fiction they are most interesting as would-be Americans struggling to become standardized. Their strain too closely resembles our own to hold its difference long. I doubt if any one ever writes a great novel, for example, where the major interest is the Germanness of a German emigrant or the essential Russianism of the Russian Americans. The alien will provide a background, a sub-plot for fiction, which is as yet only glanced at in our literature. But as a subject for American literature our immigrants of the present flow are likely to be just picturesque in the first generation, commonplace in the second, the period of adaptation, and in the third best written of as American.

The exception among racial aliens, of course, is the negro, whose literature is just beginning. Special circumstances make him more at home in America than the rest, and yet keep him further apart. He has appeared in our literature as propaganda, as folk-lore, as comic relief, and as sentiment. His nature is rich, his situation always somewhat tragic, his experience unexampled in the history of barbarians quickly civilized. The appearance of Stribling's "Birthright" and