André Maurois (‘Advice to a Frenchman Going to America’) served as a liaison officer between the French and English armies during the World War. Since that time his distinguished biographies of Shelley, Disraeli, Dickens, and Byron, written with sympathetic understanding and a Gallic gift of clarity, have made him the outstanding interpreter of British genius to the world at large. Now he essays the same rôle for America, having prepared himself by residing last year at Princeton University, where he gave a course of lectures and collected material for a life of Woodrow Wilson. Ernest Jerome Hopkins (‘The Lawless Arm of the Law’) is a newspaper man of more than twenty years’ experience. The present article is the result of a coast-to-coast investigation of police methods which he undertook for the Wickersham Commission. He will shortly publish a book, Our Lawless Police, based upon his survey. Roderick MacEachen (‘The Church and Social Justice’) is a Roman Catholic priest whose devoted labors among his parishioners in the coalmining section of West Virginia have made him loved and respected. ▵ Born in Lancashire, James Stanley Hart (‘The Cart’ ) leads a double life as a journalist in Providence, Rhode Island, and a promising writer of fiction.

One of America’s best-known essayists, Agnes Repplier (‘Actor and Audience’) will soon bring out a new volume, Times and Tendencies, in which the present paper is included. Lord Dunsany (‘The Father of Earth,’ ‘The Wider Lands ') is both a poet and the author of many plays and novels. Simeon Strunsky (‘Jones, His Machines’) is a member of the editorial staff of the New York Times. ▵ A sportsman and collector of specimens for the Field Museum in Chicago. James E. Baum (‘His Own Medicine’) has hunted big game on three continents. Helena Maxwell Brownell (‘Workless Days’) is an American student and writer who has been living for several years in Germany. Lincoln Hutchinson (’A Hope’) was for many years Professor of Economic Geography at the University of California. He was a member of the War Industries Board Mission sent to Europe to coöperate with the Interallied Munitions Council and later was special investigator for the American Relief Administration in Russia and Germany. He has published several noteworthy books on economic problems. Alice D. Kelly (Too Much Mother’) is an authority on child psychology, a subject which she studied academically at the University of Toronto and checked by practical experience in the mothering of her own five children. Bill Adams (‘The Sailmaker’s Yarn’) is an old salt who, after sailing the Seven Seas for many a year, has settled down with his memories in a small California town. The Atlantic’s letter accepting his story drew from him the characteristic response which is reprinted in full below. Ellery Sedgwick, editor of the Atlantic (‘A Castle in Spain’), recently returned from a trip abroad which took him through the fringes of the Spanish Revolution. George P. Auld (‘That International Millstone’) was Assistant Financial Advisor to the American Commission to Negotiate Peace in 1919. He worked with Owen D. Young in installing the Dawes Plan and has written numerous articles on reparations and international finance. Ralph E. Flanders (‘The Tariff and Social Control’) is a mechanical engineer who, like many other members of his profession, has lately given much thought to economic matters. He now has in preparation a book entitled Taming Our Machines.Mazo de la Roche is the author of Jalna and Whiteoaks of Jalna, to which Finch’s Fortune is a sequel.

The rewards of yarning. DUTCH FLAT, CALIFORNIA
DEAR ATLANTIC,—
I thank you very much for the check for ’The Sailmaker’s Yarn.’ I should like to keep it to frame and hang on my wall beside the painting of an old squarerigger in which I spent what I am given to looking back upon as ray best days. I see the boatswain, and Chips the carpenter, and Sails, and the able seamen, sitting on the fore hatch in the dogwatch. I hear them yarning again. I hear the gentle slap of the bow wash and the drowsy patter of the reef points, and from far aloft the low complaining of a block that needs a little fresh black lead upon its sheave pin. The sun is setting and the little fleecy tradewind clouds pass slowly o’er the mastheads. The western glory fades and a star gleams. The boatswain takes his old pipe from his bearded lips and, with a blunt, tarred thumb, pokes at my chest. ‘Some day, me boy,’ says the bos’n, ‘some day maybe ye’ll be able to spin a bit of a yarn for yer shipmates, too.'
A matter of twelve dollars or so a month was the wage that able seamen drew in those days. And devil a penny, of course, did they get for their yarning. An apprentice drew no pay at all for four years, barring the three dollars a year that the owners allowed him for his laundry. Such a one was I. Four full years of it. Pea soup and salt pork were a sailor’s faring in those days. Once in a while, maybe, a feast of harpooned porpoise, or for breakfast a flying fish that had landed on the deck in the darkness — the prize of the man who was lucky enough to get to it first. And once in a while, perhaps, a good taste of pineapples, or of green coconuts, or bananas, mummy apples, sweet oranges, brought off in calm weather from some little gem of an island by the brownskinned people of the middle seas.
In 1918, when I was a Y.M.C.A. secretary in an army camp (What a job for a shellback!), I was taken very ill. A kind-hearted old lady to whom I was a total stranger took me in and nursed me and saved my life. She told me, after f had read her some scribblings, that I must write. I told her that if ever I did so I should write under the name that I was known by amongst my comrades at sea—Bill Adams. She was a bit high-toned in her notions and was vastly shocked. No magazine of any standing would ever take anything by a man who wrote under such a terribly common name, she assured me. I told her that if I wrote under the old name some shipmate of my youth might see it and that that would be worth all the world to me. She was adamant, and so was I.
In later days I had a letter from an old sailor who had known me and had come across something of mine. He was sailing from Antwerp to China on the morrow and he begged me to drop him a line. He was very old and had been taken on by a kind-hearted skipper — signed on in a liner as ‘sailmaker.’ I wrote him to Suez, to Colombo, to Singapore, to Hongkong — to each port at which his vessel would stop. The letters came back. The old chap had died and been buried at sea. Blow high or blow low, I like to think that that old sailor’s hand and mine had touched ere he passed.
Did you ever see a sailor’s funeral? With a ship under lower topsails? With a thunderous sea running and the decks all awash?
‘Our Father which art in Heaven,’ reads the old skipper from his little book. Then a lifted finger, a gesture, and we drop our comrade to the sea.
‘Our Father which art in Heaven’ — no more. No chance for more with each man clutching to a lifeline. And was there ever need of any more, after all?
BILL ADAMS

The riddle of the cow.

PROVIDENCE, R. I.
DEAR ATLANTIC,—
In the July Atlantic William T. Foster and Waddill Catchings give a very lucid and intelligent explanation of the depression. It is so very clear that all the bankers of the ‘not enough deflation’ school ought to be compelled to read it.
Unfortunately, however, the article is not at all definite as to what we ought to do about it. Like their own story of the cow, Foster and Catchings state that the animal won’t give milk because she does n’t get enough to eat. Give her more fodder, they say. But where is the extra food to come from? Well, the food we are talking about is, of course, money. People must have more purchasing power. They must have more jobs, or higher wages for the jobs they now have. We might give the theory of shorter hours or a threeor four-day week a try.
My own belief, however, is that our production is not along the right lines. We go out to get fodder, but we bring back straw instead of hay. More radios, automobiles, electric refrigerators, if produced cheaply enough, could be consumed all right. I could use another automobile and a summer home at the shore right now. The tobacco business holds up pretty well even in a depression. What we seem to need is more production of luxury goods, which lots of people totally lack but want more and more.
Ah, well, I was brought up to believe that thrift is virtuous. Now they tell me that spending is more patriotic.
PHILIP C. GIFFORD

Expert testimony on the disadvantages of blindness and deafness.

ONTARIO SCHOOL FOR THE BLIND BRANTFORD, ONTARIO
DEAR ATLANTIC,—
It is true, as Earnest Elmo Calkins says in his interesting discussion with Gordon Lathrop in your July number, that it is the unconscious but unanimous judgment of humanity that deafness is preferable to blindness. But, strange to say, those who have suffered from both handicaps, having previously enjoyed hearing and sight, do not always agree with this opinion.
The personal experience of the late Earl of Leicester, as given in the following quotation from Sir Arthur Pearson’s Victory over Blindness, may be of interest to your readers: —
‘ People often ask me my views on the comparative disadvantages of blindness and deafness. A friend of the late Earl of Leicester once told me an interesting fact about him. Lord Leicester was at one time of his life quite blind for five years. He recovered his sight as the result of an operation, but unfortunately, in his later days, he lost his hearing. His friend said to me that Lord Leicester had often told him that, from his personal experience of both handicaps, he considered the loss of sight much the lighter of the two. I am sure there is no doubt at all about this. Deaf people are cut off from the world in a manner which, fortunately, does not apply at all to us, and they are in many ways far less fitted to carry on normal life than are blind folk.’
I have heard a similar opinion expressed by a blind deaf man of this city, who formerly had both sight and hearing. Are they not, after all, the only ones who can really make the comparison?
W. B. RACE

Consolation for Mr. Calkins.

PHILADELPHIA, PA.
DEAR ATLANTIC,—
Reading the recent exchange of opinions concerning the comparative disadvantages of blindness and deafness, it occurred to me that your readers might be interested in the conclusions of Voltaire, whose eyesight was impaired in his old age. He writes, in his seventy-fourth year (February 26, 1767): ‘As one always envies his neighbor, I am jealous of Milord Chesterfield who is deaf. Reading appears to me more necessary ill seclusion, than conversation. It is certain that a good book is worth much more than all that is said by chance. It seems to me that he who wishes to instruct himself must prefer his eyes to his ears; but for him who only wishes to amuse himself, I consent with all my heart that he be blind, and that he listen to bagatelles all day long.’
ISABEL WAIT ALLAN

Hearing with a dog’s ears.

NEW YORK CITY
DEAR ATLANTIC,—
If I had known that Mr. Lathrop was going to run in a dog story in his reply to me, I could have countered with an instance in my own experience. I had a dog, an Airedale, and a perfect gentleman, named Septimus because he suggested that character in Locke’s novel (who was sufficiently amused at the name to write the canine Septimus a letter), who learned—the dog, that is, not Locke — to accommodate himself to my lack of hearing with supercanine intelligence. When I would go out at night in the dark to call him, he learned by experiment that it was not sufficient to answer with a friendly bark. It became his habit to come and put his muzzle in my hand to announce his presence. He always accompanied me on my walks and warned me of approaching motor cars, especially those behind me. In the house, when a bell rang, he always pointed in the direction of the sound, whether telephone or doorbell. I am sure he must have had some conception of my difference from other men and in his doggish mind evolved ways of adapting himself to my deafness.
EARNEST ELMO CALKINS

Yes, but Mr. Hall would be the last man in the world to enjoy reviewing the army of the unemployed.

MONTREAL, CANADA
DEAR ATLANTIC,—
I have just read ‘The Art of Loafing’ by James Norman Hall in your July issue. This is to suggest that a cable be sent to Mr. Hall, who moved from America to Tahiti because it annoyed him to see so many people working, that he can safely return now.
LLOYD C. DOUGLAS

Charles D. Stewart sends in these letters to show that the ancients were more careful observers of nature than is commonly supposed.

MOUNT KISCO, N.Y.
DEAR MR. STEWART,—
Your very interesting article, ‘The History of the King Bee,’ in the May Allantic, raises a point that I have long wished to consult someone about. In Aristotle’s History of Animals there is the following passage: ‘With respect to the generation of bees, however, there are various opinions. For some say that bees neither bring forth nor copulate, but bring their offspring from the honeysuckle. . . . Others, again, assert that drones bring their offspring from some one of the above-mentioned flowers, but that honeybees derive their origin from their leaders, i.e. from the kings. By some likewise they are called mothers, because they are thought to produce the honeybees.’
I believe this last theory was due directly to Aristotle’s own brilliant genius. Curiously enough, I have never seen it referred to by any authority ancient or modern, and of course it was not established until after the invention of the microscope in the seventeenth century. I think it quite remarkable and thrilling that the truth was hidden away in records made three hundred years before Virgil wrote the Georgics and ignored by everyone down to almost modern times. How do you account for it, and do you not think that more credit should be given to Aristotle?
HELEN A. SCRIBNER

HARTFORD,WISCONSIN
DEAR MRS. SCRIBNER,—
In your quotation from Aristotle you have brought forth a new and interesting point in the history of the honeybee. I have read all the more lengthy works on bees and I have not seen this passage mentioned. The conjecture that honeybees (excluding the drones) derive their being from the hive leaders, who properly would be called mothers, is almost in line with Scientific fact. From this it is evident that Virgil had several theories before him in making choice of one to use in his great poem, and he let the true one slip in favor of the more fanciful and picturesque.
Aristotle, as is evident from your quotation, does not favor one theory above another, simply placing them all on record; but he shows plainly that there were some fairly scientific observers of bee life several centuries before Christ. But under the conditions it was impossible for them to bring their theory to the proof.
CHARLES D. STEWART

That Dickens incident.

GREENSBURGORO, PA.
DEAR ATLANTIC,—
A story of the expulsion of Charles Dickens from the Galt House in Louisville on the occasion of the visit of the great novelist to that city is related by Dr. Flexner in his interesting article, ‘A Vanishing Profession,’ in the July Atlantic. That story, with variations, has been current around the falls of the Ohio since Dickens’s visit. As Dr. Flexner relates it, Major Throckmorton, proprietor of the hotel, finding his distinguished guest had been assigned to an inferior room, hastened to apologize and offer him a better room. His apologies were repulsed and he was told that when Dickens wanted him he would send for him. Naturally indignant, Major Throckmorton ordered Dickens out of his house, bag and baggage, and the novelist went to the Louisville Hotel.
Another version which I once read was that Throckmorton kicked the novelist out of the room. ‘In his American Notes,’ adds Dr. Flexner, referring to Dickens, ‘he speaks of the Louisville Hotel, but he does not mention the Galt House and his mortifying encounter with Major Throckmorton.’
A reference to Dickens’s ,American Notes shows that what he really wrote was this: ‘We slept at the Galt House, a splendid hotel, and were as handsomely lodged as though we had been in Paris rather than hundreds of miles beyond the Alleghenies. There is no reference to the Louisville Hotel. Dickens must have been of a very magnanimous nature to have given the (Hi It House the best advertisement it ever had, or the story of his incivility and expulsion from the hotel must have been greatly magnified from some trifling incident.
C. L. GOODWIN

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
DEAR ATLANTIC,—
I am in receipt of your letter enclosing a copy of Mr. Goodwin’s comment upon the Dickens incident. I am confined to bed at St. Luke’s Hospital here, hence my delay in answering.
It did not occur to me to verify the Dickens story. I have always thought it a true one and, knowing it to be so held by many people in Louisville, really did not think it necessary. I do believe the story to be true, for I heard it not only from Major Throckmorton’s son, John, but from many people who were aware of the incident at the time it occurred. The possibility exists that in publishing his American Notes Dickens preferred to ignore the whole affair and did not state the full facts.
JACOB A. FLEXNER

A purely feminine ‘racket.’

DETROIT, MICHIGAN
DEAR ATLANTIC,—
‘They Want Their Money Back,’ in the August Atlantic, gives an excellent picture of a situation which no self-respecting merchant should ever tolerate.
I have looked on aghast as one woman insisted on returning a negligee in which she laid obviously breakfasted, while another endeavored to convince a polite saleswoman that, although a pack of cards had been opened, it had not been used. As one of those who look upon shopping as a necessary evil rather than a pastime, I should not be sorry to see the shops take drastic action to stop the return of articles once purchased.
Nevertheless I must confess that in one Way I should be a distinct loser by such action. While I rarely return an article which I have selected, I have had considerable pleasure and profit in returning bridge prizes and useless gifts. There is a sense of pleasant adventure in starting out with a white elephant under your arm and wondering with what you may return.
In the last few years I have made the following advantageous exchanges: a heavy iron dog (probably meant to be a doorstop, but too large for the purpose) for one dozen attractive iced-tea glasses; a gilded dressing-table tray for six packs of cards; a knocker, embossed with the seal of my sister’s college, for a graceful crystal vase; a mat made of light blue China beads for an attractive bit of pottery; a flask of white-rose perfume for two-dozen bars of Pears’ soap.
PAULA HENZE

Pleasant fiction.

BAY ST. LCUIS, MISS.
DEAR ATLANTIC,—
Allow me to congratulate you on the excellence of the two short stories in your July issue. Most of the fiction that appears in magazines these days fills me with rage and disgust. The authors and editors would think me mentally unbalanced were they to see me take an armful of cushions and go to spend a lovely summer afternoon in a pigpen or on a garbage dump; yet the mental atmosphere of the stories which are so generally published lately is more fetid than that of either of these places.
But here is the July Atlantic with two short stories neither of which has a trace of indecency, tragedy, or morbidness. The threatened disaster of the sea story is swallowed up by a happy rescue. Even Mr. Bunting’s embarrassing predicament is treated with such light and delicate humor that it could not offend the most squeamish reader. Both stories are as delightfully refreshing as a drink of mountain spring water.
Thank you.
MARGARET FLINT JACOBS