The new letters of David Livingstone were presented to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions by Charles Livingstone, of Denver, the nephew of the great missionary and the son of that other Charles to whom the letters were written. The Atlantic prints them through the courtesy of the American Board. For many months the friends of Madame Emma Ponafidine feared that her silence would never be broken again; that she and her family had been blotted out in the Russian Terror. But, late in 1921, tidings came through of her escape to Finland with two of her sons; and she and they are now in America. Baron Ponafidine and the eldest son have died, victims of the Revolution. Madame Ponafidine is an American, and could have left Russia earlier if she had been willing to leave her sons behind. Her story of life under Bolshevist rule was begun for Atlantic readers in July, 1918, and February, 1919, when we printed her early letters. In ‘ Peasant Masters ’ and two successive papers, she will carry that courageous story to its triumphant conclusion. Katharine Fullerton Gerould brings to her essay on conservatism a provocative and stimulating point of view. Edith Kennedy has made a study of the happiness of working girls, in a questionnaire answered by four hundred girls, upon the query, ‘Are you Happy, and Why? ’ ‘ Glamour,’ is one of several sketches written from her experience as Stamps-Saving Visitor in the South End House Settlement in Boston. Again Frances Lester Warner refreshes us with what one of her admirers has called, ‘ a keen dissertation upon the little things that irritate.’

The suggestive letters from the Reverend H. W. Kellogg of the Ohio State Reformatory, and the Reverend Oliver C. Laizure of San Quentin, are proof, if proof were needed, that no one comes closer to the prison problem than the prison chaplain. Viola C. White writes of ' the other side of clearness,’ a companion piece to Fannie Stearns Gifford’s sonnet in the Atlantic for March. Miss White’s volume of verse, Horizons, appeared last year in the Yale Series of younger poets. Robert M. Gay adds to his pleasant interpretations this sketch of Mrs. Noah. Charles Rumford Walker, who works the ‘ twenty-four-hour shift’ in this number, is a Yale graduate who went to work in a steel mill to learn the steel business. In this and other industries Mr. Walker put in a year in overalls, on all kinds of jobs, from roller to hot-blast man. Subsequently, he has done personnel work for a large brass and copper company and written on labor for government publications.

William Trufant Foster, who gives us the paper on the gold standard, will be remembered for his indictment of intercollegiate athletics in an earlier number of the Atlantic. Formerly president of Reed College, Oregon, he is now devoting his time to the study of economic questions for the Pollak Foundation. Letters have come to us from Alabama, Louisiana, Maryland, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., hi praise of ‘Cunjur and ’Suasion,’ and we think the admirers of Eleanor C. Gibbs will take equal delight in ‘The Bible Quilt.’ Joseph Auslander, one of the younger poets of America has been spending the past year in Europe. Lucy Furman of the Hindman School, in her third story of the ’Quare Women,’ gives us a vivid picture of a ‘ safe and sane ’ Fourth of July in the Kentucky mountains. Channing Frothingham, a wellknown Boston physician, is on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School and the staff of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. During the war he was Lieutenant-Colonel, Medical Corps, U.S.A.; at one time Commanding Officer, Base Hospital, Camp Devens; at another, Chief of Medical Service, Walter Reed Hospital, Washington, D.C. Gamaliel Bradford needs no introduction to Atlantic readers.

Claude Halstead Van Tyne is the head of the Department of History in the University of Michigan. His opinions and reflections upon the Indian situation are the fruit of a leave of absence from his university, during the past winter, when he went to India, on the invitation of Sir Frederick Whyte, the President of the new Legislative Assembly of India. He writes us: —

In India I talked with representatives of all points of view, from Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest of Indian leaders, to Lord Reading, the Viceroy of India. It was my privilege to sit at the Council table with the bitterest enemies of the British régime, to listen to the most seditious talk about it, and then, midst the pomps and vanities of Government House, to sit with governors of provinces and with their ministers of state, and to get their ‘angle of vision.’ In Alli— pore jail, in Calcutta, I enjoyed two hours of confidential talk with C. R. Das, the great Bengal leader of the Extremists, and not long after, I sat in the Bengal Legislative Council watching at their work the lawmakers for forty millions of people. In Delhi I listened for two weeks to the debates in the Legislative Assembly, and held converse with members of every faction in it. I talked with rajahs and maharajahs and nawabs. I went with collectors and subdivisional officers into villages, and there, through the munsif, or some other local officer, asked questions of the assembled villagers. Into courts, high and low, into offices of collectors and commissioners, wherever Government touched the people, I pried, in the hope that I might learn for myself the facts in the strangely complex problem of Indian politics.

Edmund Candler, an English traveler and author, has a long record of service with the Indian Government, in educational work. He accompanied the Tibet Expedition of 1904, and was severely wounded at Tuna. He was Correspondent in France, 1914-15, and Official Eyewitness in Mesopotamia, 1915—18. Among his books are The Unveiling of Lhasa, and The Mantle of the East. Although Europe is again at peace, and the Oriental Express running uninterrupted across its length from Stamboul to Cherbourg, there is one corner of the globe by whose people the war was unasked and to whom it brought as much suffering as to anyone, and where it still continues with apparently unabated fury. As a result of the hatreds which it fanned and did not appease, there occurred in the little-known and less-frequented city of Souj-Boulagh, Persia, on October 7 last, a massacre unequaled by any of the atrocities of the late war, in which between seven hundred and a thousand Persians were shot down in cold blood, an American mission was looted, four American women were maltreated, and George Bachimont, an American missionary of French citizenship, was murdered. Our account of this massacre was written by Elgin G. Groseclose from the vivid details given him by Augusta Gudhart on her arrival at Tabriz, after her terrible experience. Mr. Groseclose is a native of Oklahoma, now engaged in missionary work in Persia. Miss Gudhart was born in Russian Poland and came to America at the age of sixteen. She received her nurse’s certificate from St. John’s Hospital, Pittsburgh, and entered the mission field in 1912. Of the five missionaries in Souj-Boulagh at the time of the massacre, she was the only one who had mastered the Kurdish dialect.

The Ku Klux Klan is a continuing menace, but it is difficult for those who are beyond the radius of its activities to grasp their seriousness to a great section of our country. The Honorable LeRoy Percy, was United States Senator from the state of Mississippi. Mary Prescott Hatch lives near Boston. Her piquant description of a great and memorable event makes history live for us.

To Samantha Whipple Sharp, of San José, we owe this recondite information on the late Queen’s petticoat: —

I have been waiting for some one of my contemporaries to explain to Atlantic readers what a balmoral was, ever since reading the story of the New England lady who owned one, but knew not its purpose nor the reason of the name. The balmoral petticoat was the outing-costume of the girl of the later eighteen-sixties, as khaki knickers are of the girl of the early nineteen-twenties. It was — or was reputed to be — the invention of Queen Victoria, and was named for Balmoral Castle, her favorite summer home in the Highlands. The balmoral was voluminous, of necessity — it was worn over a hoop three or more feet in diameter. Its adaptation to mountainclimbing consisted in the fact that it was very short — it came only to the ankles. The dress was looped at half-mast above it, in a series of festoons.

When, her mountain-climbing over, the fair athlete returned to the village pave, one pull at the cord of the ingenious appliance that did the looping, released the dress-skirt, and its hem fell decorously to one-half inch from the sidewalk. Thus the lady was enabled to proceed along the street with dignity and modesty.

Anyone who owns a copy of Leslie Goldthwaite, with the original illustrations, can see the counterfeit presentment of a fifteen-year-old girl, properly ballooned and festooned for ascending a mountain.

In response to numerous requests, the Pollak Foundation for Economic Research has reprinted an article from the February number of the Atlantic Monthly, by Waddill Catchings, entitled: ’Our Common Enterprise : One Way Out for Labor and Capital.’ Copies may be obtained upon application to the Pollak Foundation, Newton 58, Massachusetts.

The ‘Anecdote for Authors’ still brings in recruits for the Club of the Hoodwinked.

The Oxford Street gentleman of bookish tastes, whose manipulation of his ‘sister’s hungry children,’ waiting in the railroad station, andof the innate vanity of writers more or less ’well known’ was so cleverly described in the May Atlantic, scored on me also.

In my case he got no cash, because I never have on hand enough money to feed a hungry family; but he did get my endorsement on a check of his for ten dollars, which came back from the New York bank with the report ‘No Funds.’ Inasmuch as it is obvious that this man, Alan Cooke, is a perfectly definite person, it would seem as if the time had come for charges to be preferred against him.

Apparently he got all he could out of Boston authors. I wonder how many writing people in other states helped him work his way back to the middle New York town where he apparently receives his mail. I know that the Oxford Street address is not fictitious, because I have since written to him there in an envelope which would otherwise have come back.
MARY CAROLINE CRAWFORD.

Miss Repplier never fails to promote discussion:

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
No one more readily grants the charm and authority of most of the words of the distinguished contributor who, in your April number, gives us her views on ‘Education.’ And my pained amazement is therefore the greater when I read: ‘ . . . too many boys are taught too long by women. ... A boy is destined to grow into a man and, for this contingency, no woman can prepare him. Only men, and men of purpose and principle, can harden him into the mould of character.'

For sixteen years I heard and accepted such statements; they sounded so reasonable — like the Chinese dictum that a pea in the centre of a blown-up bladder will be found exactly in the bladder’s centre, maintained there by the atmospheric pressure, equal upon all sides.

And, as the president of an impecunious Board of Education, I deeply deplored ’the difficulty of obtaining male teachers,’ and the resulting loss to our boys.

Then, for a year and one month, I was with those same boys overseas and saw them face death. I had the opportunity of comparing them, amid conditions as trying as one could ask for, with the man-trained boys of England, and France, and (later) of Germany. And I felt then, as many another man did, that the behavior of our boys had banished forever, banished and buried, the notion that they were less manly, or less strong of character, than were the boys of any other nation on earth.

Does the war record of these two million boys offer no light on the solution of this vexed question?
FREDERICK HALL.

Not often, even among those who ‘would not want to be anything else, but an American,’ does one find an application for naturalization papers with a footnote as significant and beautiful as this letter sent in by a contributor.

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
As you have set forth the views of a number of the strangers within our gates, I enclose the following. It was writ ten by a woman, now in the thirties, whose birthplace was in the Tirol. Strange to say, in contrast to Anna’s enthusiasm, ever since the beginning of the late war, one of the American ladies active in bringing her to these shores has seen nothing good in our Constitution, government, or institutions, and she speaks of them only to blame. She has drawn these views largely from the so-called ‘progressive’ periodicals, whose outlook, in the opinion of some, is most selfish and narrow.
Yours truly,

VERT DEAR AND KIND LADIES, —
To-day I come to ask you for a favor.
You have helped me to come to America, and now I beg you to help me to become an American. God will surely bless you for this kindness. I filed my petition, and I will not get my second papers unless I have the statement of two persons which will testify that they have known me since my arrival in America. You and your relatives know me the longest.

I love to thank you with my needlework, as with my poor words I am not able to express what my grateful heart wishes to tell you. You gave me the start to the road of success, all I owe to you, and I would oftener write to you, but fear it would annoy you. Since July, 1920, I have a position where I just have to work 8 hours a day — each week I get a day off — I get all laundered, am fed and boarded and my salary is $70 a month. I got twice a raise, and they are lovely to work for. I am surely thankful for the high wages as it enables me to help my people and my friends on the Alps.

I would not want to be anything else, but an American, and with God’s help I’ll be a good one. I have all the reasons to stand by America, it is a great country and it has done more for me in a few years as Tirol all my life; but I am proud just the same that I was born in I —, which surely is the nicest spot on earth. I also love my country people, but since I lived in America, I would not want to live in any other place, and I want to be what they are, as I eat the daily bread with them. I can assure you that I am anxious to become an American with heart and soul. I only wish I came here when I was young, but better late than never.
Yours forever thankfully,
ANNA E.

Against portions of Mr. Peattie’s paper on the oil fields, Tulsa, Oklahoma, has risen as one man. Some others feel quite properly that an article by the oldest inhabitant might paint a truer picture.

We should have been glad to read in manuscript the article by a provincial correspondent, during his few weeks spent in the Cushing oil fields, which ‘so entertainingly described the life that he peopled a small city within a short time. The glamour of romance which he threw around the oil-field teamster and his horses caused the son of an eastern millionaire to come west for the purpose of becoming a teamster in the oil fields.’

Anecdotes about the Atlantic sometimes remind us of the lady who thought Botticelli was a cheese.

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I teach English in a high school. A few days ago it became necessary to test the attainments of a class which had been studying Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales. In answer to a question regarding other products of the author’s pen, I received the startling information that Hawthorne wrote The Purple Letter, The Scarlet Faun, and the Great Atlantic Monthly.
HATTIE L. HAWLEY.

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Apropos of the ‘plain but estimable woman’ and the ‘yellow-back novels,’ I am moved to relate the following incident: a pretty and ‘estimable’ neighbor of mine was wandering about my library one afternoon recently, when she came upon a narrow niche containing shelves filled with Atlantics of the past dozen years; glancing from ceiling to floor in apparent consternation, and at me with unveiled suspicion as to my taste in literature, she exclaimed, ‘Mercy! look at all the novels!’

But praise from Pine Mountain pleases us best!

Not everyone views the Atlantic Monthly with the high favor of those correspondents whose letters so frequently appear in the ‘Contributors’ Column.’ A small boy who had had to dust the living-room table morning after morning had drawn up his own notions of that periodical, and was quite surprised to be interested by the story ‘ Pioneers’ when it was read to a group of children one night. ’Why, that book is some ’count, haint hit? I ’ve studied ’bout th’owin’ hit away a heap o’ times, when I ’ve seed hit a-layin’ on the table, ’cause hit never had no pictures, but hit’s some ’count after all, haint hit?’

Many readers have been puzzled by the ‘wayward girl’ in the ‘Masque of Loved Ladies.’ They seem to have missed the clue that her lover’s name was ‘writ in water.’ It may help them further to know that he loved his love with a B, because ‘a thing of beauty is a joy forever.’