The Contributors' Column

FOR many years Alfroda Withington (‘ The Mountain Doctor’) practised medicine in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. When America entered the World War, she enlisted in the Red Cross and was sent to France, where she had charge of a hospital in the war zone. After the Armistice she remained abroad another year as Medical Director for the Rockefeller tcommission in the Department of the Marne, and returned home only to embark upon the new adventures which she relates here. John T. Flynn (‘Why Corporations Leave Home’) is (In’ author of numerous books and magazine articles on business problems. Lord David Cecil (‘Sir Walter Scott’) is a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, where he lectures on English literature. In 1930 he published a life of Cowper, entitled The Stricken Deer. He is a member of a family which has served the Crown in the highest offices of state since the days of Lord Burleigh. His grand!at her, the Marquis of Salisbury, was Prime Minister to Queen Victoria, his father has been a member of the Cabinet, and his uncle, Lord Robert Cecil, has been intimately identified with the League of JNations since its inception. ▵A Though his name bears witness to his Irish ancestry, Morley Callaghan (‘ A Sick Call’ ) was born in Toronto and is several generations removed from Old Erin. He is a member of the Canadian bar, but is best known as a writer, having issued two novels, Strange Fugitive and It’s Sever Over, and a volume of short stories, A Native Argosy.A. Edward Newton (‘The Course of Empire’) is the man inside the famous checked suit that bohs back and forth across the Atlantic and turns up conspicuously wherever men gather to admire or acquire rare books. ▵ Living in far-away Tahiti, James Norman Hall (‘At Forty-live’ and The Return to Flanders’) occasionally sends us selections of prose and verse which demonstrate that one may dwell on the fringe of civilization yet hold his spirit to the main current of the classical tradition in English letters. ▵A As a school-teacher, Alice Day Pratt (‘I Take to the Woods’) is a living textbook of geography, for she has taught all over the map, in sections as widely separated as North Carolina and South Dakota, Arkansas and Oregon. Bernard hidings Bell Universities and Religious Indifference’) is Professor of Religion at Columbia University and Warden of St. Stephen’s College.

Having served through the war as a captain in the British Army, Owen Tweedy (‘Want a Lift? ) has since spent most of his time traveling extensively in the Near East. The present paper reflects conditions as he found them upon his recent return to England. Virginia Hersch (‘Landscape with Figures’) has published two historical novels and has a third in preparation, to be brought out in the spring by Houghton Mifflin. William Orton (’The Rebound from Prosperity’) is Professor of Economics at Smith College. A Closely associated with the Atlantic Monthly through more than a quarter of a century, M. A. DeWolfe Howe (‘The Leader’) is the author of a score of volumes in both prose and verse. Farnsworth Crowder (’Nimrods and Stuffed Animals’) writes: ‘As one who has held jobs on newspapers, in mills, factories, and offices, with a detective agency and a theatrical company; who non teaches school, cultivates a one-acre “ranch” in California, and has a son of his own to worry about, I have a ready sympathy for Brinsley Norton’s philosophy of the lull life and the wide-open eye.’ ▵ The experiences of ‘A Plantation Boyhood started Archibald Rutledge along the path of the amateur naturalist, stimulating interests which are reflected in all his books, and which, in 1930, won for him the John Burroughs Medal for ‘the best nature writing of the year.’ ▵ Scientific research has been a lifelong hobby with George W. Gray (‘Roof of the World ), whose literary education and journalistic training prepared him to make the mysteries of the laboratory intelligible to laymen. James E. Baum (’ Experience ) has ranged the wilds of three continents as a biggame hunter and collector of specimens for the Field Museum in Chicago. ▵A Formerly Assistant Professor of Economics at McGill University, B. K. Santlwell (‘The Declining Disrepute of Murder’) has devoted himself to writing and lecturing since he retired from academic work in 1925.

THE PASSIONATE BROKER TO HIS LOVE

In the brave days of I wenty-nine.
Ere stocks had lost their bone and sinew,
I daily bragged you to be mine,
And offered golden gauds to win you,

But now that times have sterner grown,
My plea is sterner, more heroic:
Come, love me for myself alone,
Came, live with me and be a stoie.

You’ll dress in simple gingham frocks.
You’ll walk, or al the besl you’ll bike il.
You’ll cook my food and darn my socks.
You’ll live on beans, my love, and like it.

WILIAM HTUSE, JR.

Pasadena, California

What became of Toll.

Dear Atlantic, —
It seems rather difficult for us who are residenl in Sw eden to realize that Paul Toll can be of any interest at all. He was, to be sure, a director of kreuger & Toll, but he took no active pari in this company’s business, he knew nothing whatever about finance, and the only reason why he was included among the kreuger & Toll directorate was that he was kreuger’s old partner. His main occupation is in connect ion with the building industry, and he runs Kreuger & Toll Bygnadsaktiebolag (kreuger & Toll Building Company), which since the crisis has changed its name to Toll’s Bygnadsaktiebolag.
T. G. BARMAN
Stockholm, Sweden

A movement gains momentum.

Dear Atlantic, —
May I be enrolled in Dr. Wingale M. Johnson’s Away-from-Nature Movement ? Nature is a cheat. When we plant gardens, the color scheme, will not flower at the right time, and every summer there is a new kind of predatory insect.
If we step outside, the garden, what do we find? Caverns underground with waterfalls in the darkness crashing from the roof; the smiling sea which is nothing but salt water; landslides grinding down the mountain, shearing the forest to the bone. Nature is horrible, pagan, indifferent, unkind. I don’t, like it. There is too much of it.
Your author quotes Mr. John Powys on ‘The Meaning of Culture’: ‘Cultured people are thrilled through and through by the shadow of a few waving grass-blades,’ etc. It is true that Wordsworth walked the hills and came home and wrote poetry, and that Emerson walked the woods and came home and did likewise, but I think it was the walking that did it. The muscular rhythm quickens the pulse of the brain.
Myself, I amble humbly on the lower slopes of culture; but take someone higher up. Take Dr. Johnson the original, I mean, He was well educated. He wrote letters in Batin about his diseases. Did he thrill to grass-blades? He did not. Hear him boom, ' No wise man will go to live in the country. . . . The town is my element; there, arc my friends, there are my books, to which I have not yet bid farewell, and there are my amusements.’ ‘Act, sir.’ said Boswell, There are many people who are content to live in l lie counI ry
Phillips Brooks was a cultured man, lie accepted the country, but he did not endorse it. lie said, ‘The Bible shows how the world progresses, for it begins with a garden but ends with a Holy City.’
MARY ELEANOR ROBERTS
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Dear Atlantic, —
You have brightened the entire month of July for me by your publication of Dr. Wingate M. Johnson’s ‘An Away-from-Nat tire Movement.’ August will be more tolerable— I shall not need to watch the grow ing duckweed, finger on pulse, and blush because I find no quickened throb. When October comes, I can sit unashamed ‘by the gire with a good book’ and let my more selfconsciously cultivated friends catch cold. Nor shall they make me feel myself lacking in sensitiveness of soul when they come home to tea.
Birds — I wish he had said more about birds — nasty, insistent little creatures, untidy in their habits, How do my friends find elevation of spirit by leaving home in the chill of early dawn camera, spyglass, and folding stool in hand — to pry into the domestic intimacies of the birds? Is it because, in addition to being Cultured, in addition to being Lovers of Nature, they are the world’s third worst bane— Early Kisers?
Yours, moving swiftly and happily away from Natare,
MRS. ALFIIED H. TERRY
Fairfield, Connecticut

The psychology of advertising.

Dear Atlantic,
Mr. Batten’s article in the July number, ‘An Advertising Man Looks at Advertising,’ strikes a true note. As one of another profession, but an interested observer of various forms of advertising. I have been led to wonder at its methods of approach.
Advertising is both an art and a science; therefore its effect can be annulled by poor taste or false psychology on the part of those who formulate it. To imply that prospective buyers have disagreeable habits and offensive personalities is certainly the wrong kind of approach; and the appeal to fear, as Mr. Batten indicates, is most, deplorable.
Intelligent readers don’t like the implication that they are minors or morons. The frantic efforts of these advertisers to outdo their rivals have been so apparent as to be ridiculous.
Very truly yours,
ALLLEN JACOBS
Duxbury, Massachusetts

Shakespeare’s hare.

Dear Atlantic,
In his remarks on rabbits in the July lthiidtc, Mr. Sand well says: ’So long as the readers and writers of poetry were to any extent familiar with farm life, the rabbit was excluded from all possible hope of sympathetic treatment in verse..’ Since he stretches the term ’rabbit’ to include the hare, let me do the same and call his attention to what Shakespeare, brought up in a country town and generally considered robust, says of the hare in his Venus and Adonis, at line 697: —
‘By this, poor Wat, far off upon a hill.
Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear,
To hearken if his foes pursue him still:
Anon their loud alarums he doth hear;
And now his grief may be compared well
To one sore sick that hears the passing-bell.
‘Then shall thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch
Turn, and return, indenting with the way;
Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch.
Each shadow makes him slop, each murmur stay:
For misery is trodden on by many.
And being low never reliev’d by any.’
JOHN RICHARDS
Concord,New Hampshire

The rabbit and the pendulum.

Dear Atlantic, —
Is it not possible to slop the similizers from comparing the ups and downs of the markets with the swing of a pendulum, as if the pendulum needed restraint from swinging too far? Why disturb the rest of Seth Thomas and Galileo in that way? Mr. Royle does it again in the Financial Counselor, and he is only the latest of many. The pendulum will not swing at all until it is pushed to one side and released. Then what I believe the clockmakers call the stirrup gives a new impulse at the lop of each swing.
This is just as bad as a Plague of Rabbits posed as pacifists, just as false. Rabbits have been known to bite the hand of man, and Mr. Sandwell also errs if he supposes that rabbits do not fight. Anyone who has seen two buck rabbits lighting would contradict that flatly. Theirs is a grand fight, full of action, kicking, and fur.
What Mr. Royle and Mr. Sandwell wrote is choicely good, but similes, like pendulums, will swing too far when pushed.
GEORGE F. LONGSDORF
Oakland, California

Bill Adams bumps into Fame.

Dear Allantic,
I was just down to the store to get the day’s mail. Dutch Flat is full of summer vacation people — a mob of them. There must be sixty here, and that’s a big crowd. Being a grouchy old slick. I become annoyed by the dust of their goings and comings.
This evening, however, as I had just come from the store and was passing a large car, a small boy, looking from the car’s open door, accosted me. He is the child of some stranger: I had never set eyes on him before, and had no notion who he might be. And here’s what he said to me: —
‘Say, Bill, did you write that story, “Aye, Aye, Mister Mate”?’ And he pronounced it correctly, not with the ’Eh, Eh’ of the landsman.
I said, ' I did.'
Said he then, ’ Do you write them all the time?
To which I replied, ‘Heaven help me, no! Just once in a while.’
He ey ed me all up and down, child fashion, and nodded his head.
Now when a lit t le lad such as that addresses a full-grown man in a manner so straightforward and comradely, well, God bless my soul, it ’s a line world, is n’t it ?
How I wish that a tall clipper were pulling to sea from the Golden Gate this morning with me as her mate and with half-a-dozen striplings in her half deck! For if there is anything on earth to give a man satisfaction it is having young lads to order, to teach, and to lead. It’s a line thing to have the confidence of youth, is it not?
Fair winds and a fat pay day!
BILL ADAMS
Dutch Flat, California

Boner.

Dear Atlantic, —
I have been informed that the editor of Ballyhoo is the same identical person as the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Please let me know if this is true.
I have tried to discover the name of your editor by looking through a current issue of the Atlantic, but could not find his name listed.
WILLIAM ALDEN
Decatur, Georgia

The farmers’ dilemma.

Dear Atlantic,
I read with interest Jared van Wagenen’s article, ’A Farmer Counts His Blessings, in the July Atlantic. Mr. van Wagenen is one of the Empire Stale’s agricultural leaders, whose knowledge of rural New York is extensive and accurate, However, the statement in the last paragraph of his article, to the effect that the Eastern farmer does not expect any legislation to help him, is, I am sure, not in line with the facts.
Dr. G. F. Warren of Cornell University, whose reputation as an economist is not confined to the Empire State, has shown again and again that the farmer’s only hope is the restoration of the price level that existed about 1926. The method to be used is that of revaluation, the way in which France averted bankruptcy some six years ago. Of course Dr. Warren proposes to follow up revaluation with stabilization of the dollar, by means ql commodity index numbers. This material has been presented on many occasions in Farm Economics, published by the Department of Rural Economics at Cornell University, 10,000 copies of this publication being sent to farmers and other interested people each issue. It has become, without question, the gospel of most rural leaders in New York, many of whom would like to sec Dr. Warren in charge of the monetary system of the country.
For Mr. van Wagenen calmly to suggest that, agriculture can survive, on other than a peasant basis, by meekly taking what may come is strange indeed. With the rise of new and younger farm leaders, agriculture will undoubtedly wage a much more aggressive and forceful fight to obtain her share of the wealth of the world.
Before I close I should like to point out the fallacy of the cry for tax reduction. Important as this is, a very small rise in the price level would enable us to pay our taxes easily. My neighbor. Gilbert Prole, one of New York’s first master farmers, raised 12,000 bushels of potatoes last year. If the price he obtained had been raised two cents a bushel, the entire tax levy against

his farm would base been taken care of. Fluctuations of ten cents a bushel are normal, so a twocent rise is really very slight.
T. A. BUHL
Stafford, New York

Time on shipboard.

Not everyone who carries a watch can tell time aboard ship, For the benefit of the landsmen who have attempted to take Captain George H. Grant to task for his chronology in the story. In Line of Duty,’ we have asked him to supply the following information.

Dear Atlantic, —

Here is the schedule:

You will notice that at 7.20 A.M. 7 bells are struck. This is to give the men going on watch at tJ bells time to get their breakfast. In the forenoon watch (8 A.M. TO noon) 7 bells are struck at 11.20 A.M. for the men going on watch to get their dinner. In the afternoon watch the hells are struck in their regular rotation, for the men gel their supper in the dog watches.

Dog Watches

At 6 P.M. the watches are changed, so that each watch has eight hours in (off watch) on alternate nights.

GEORGE H. GRANT

Belmont, Massachusetts