As a teacher and writer, Rollo Walter Brown has always been a champion of the individual, the rebel, the man whose talent does not fall into orthodox grooves. Somewhat like June Forsyte, he has lavished his friendship upon ‘lame ducks’ of all sorts, but, unlike her, he has reserved his admiration, not for the misfits and failures of our social order, but for those rare souls who, with Emersonian sell-reliance, hew their sturdy way in defiance of the crowd. This was the unifying theme of the eight biographies in his volume, Lonely Americans, and it supplies a clue to the present paper, ‘The Crime against Youth,’ for, in these difficult times, youth presents a spectacle of courageous lame-duckery in the mass. Not everyone will agree with Mr. Brown’s arraignment of middle age; lest his point of view be misunderstood, it should be remembered that he is preferring charges against his own generation. ▵ In ’Vienna and I,’A. Edward Newton is more himself than ever. We would have given a king’s ransom — kings’ ransoms do not run to large figures these days, but let that pass—to see him kicking up his heels in the Bingstrasse. Milton Steinberg (’How the Jew Did It’) graduated with highest honors from the College of the City of New York in 1924. Though just turned thirty, he has for five years been rabbi of the Congregation Beth-El-Zedeck in Indianapolis. M. Beatrice Blankenship (‘A Mother’s Creed’) gives the following account of herself: ’My mother is a New England woman, my father an Englishman, the grandson of an Archbishop of Canterbury. I was born in Colorado and educated school and college—in the West. Went through the war at Camp Funston in Kansas, married an ex-moonshiner in 1920, and shortly afterward settled in California. I have three children, all boys — and three dogs, unfortunately not all boys.’

He who knows how to read between the printed lines will not need to be told that ’When We Were Very Young,’with its characteristically oblique subtitle, is a chapter from the autobiography of Gertrude Stein. Purists will please notice that Miss Stein gets her effects in her own way. Julia Davis spent lasi summer in Nevada, where the judge in ‘White Justice’ told her the true story of Imyo. She has published five books, among them Swords of the Vikings and Mountains Are Free. ▵ As Secretary for Student Employment at Harvard, Russell T. Sharpe (’College and the Poor Boy’) sees daily evidence of the stresses and strains undergone by students who must work their way. To him come the men who are ill-clad and hungry, the men who are fighting for their degrees against insuperable economic odds; and his is the impossible task of trying to find enough jobs to go round at a time when the whole business world is out of joint. The problem is not peculiar to Harvard; every college in the land is faced with the same diffculties. ▵ Though Dudley Fitts (‘Couplets for the Thirtieth Year’) gives us leave to improvise a biography for him, we cannot improve on the facts. He is a poet whose work has been widely published, a musician whose art includes mastery of the pipe organ, a teacher of English at the Choate School, whose students have an uncanny habit of winning the prizes in the Atlantic Essay Contests, and a lover of all things Spanish, including the language, in which he has acquired such fluency that he is now translating into Castilian the Conquistador of Archibald MacLeish. Surely this is career enough for any man. ▵ The first rule of scientific investigation, as laid down and practised by Sherlock Holmes, is that one thing leads to another. Literary detective work is no exception. Thus when Leslie Hotson was collecting evidence for Shakespeare versus Shallow, printed by the Atlantic in 1931, he ran upon various collateral scents which he has since followed to the end of the trail. The result is ‘Shakespeare and Mine Host of the Mermaid’ and a second paper to appear next month. Arthur Pound lives in a small town in upstate New York where he has observed at first hand the trek toward economic security described in ’Land Ho!' ▵ Most fiction is true in the sense that it is made up of bits of experience pieced together in a new pattern and woven into a coherent whole by the creative imagination. The story of ‘Frieda’ has an even broader base of truth. Josephine Young Case lives in the foothills of New Jersey with her husband and the small daughter whose birth is here recorded. Mary Ellen Chase (‘She’s Had the Doctor!) is Professor of English Literature at Smith (College. Her autobiography, A Goodly Heritage, came out last fall. H. A. Batten (‘The Slave Complex’) is an officer and director of a large advertising agency — not, it should be said, Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn. ▵ Frankly confessing that he is ‘hipped on the subject’ embodied in ‘A Squire’s Complaint,’ Walter Prichard Eaton writes, ’It does seem like a good time now to stop building “good roads" for a while, and plan so to build them when we resume construction that all our former beauty will not be ruined. ▵ Though Lupton A. Wilkinson (‘Daddy Isaac’s Prayer’) comes from Louisiana, the tidewater section of South Carolina has captured his affections. A business man by profession, his leisure time is given to writing. He has published two volumes of verse. Frederick P. Keppel (‘President Lowell and His Influence’) is an educator of wide experience. Through two decades he was at Columbia University, where for eight years he was Dean of the College. Since 1923 he has been President of the Carnegie Corporation.

Dr. Keppel, as becomes his training and position, paints his portrait in cool and quiet shades. A Harvard man, with crimson blood still running in his veins, sees the picture with higher lights and in warmer colors. May it not be that the author of ‘President Lowell and His Influence’ is thinking more of the development of American universities and less of the importance of Harvard College? It was in the nature of things that the great Graduate Schools, founded or brought to maturity by President Eliot, should, after this interval, have lost not their leadership but at least the distance whereby, barring Johns Hopkins alone, they have from the outset led the field. The Law School may still be primus inter pares, but its leadership is no longer far beyond question. The Medical School has its rivals. In Science at least three great universities might claim preëminence with as clear a title. Yet is not this as it should be? Is it not of itself meed of praise to the University which sowed the seed and quickened it?

But it is for something other than this that Harvard men are grateful to their President of a quarter of a century. We revere our University, but our College we love, and Harvard College stands there visibly President Lowell’s work. Perhaps it was never the loafers’ Paradise which sentimental oldsters remember, but the spirit of earnestness, of emulation, of responsibility, and of attainment, startling to graduates of an earlier day, is his handiwork. True it is, he found a college physically meagre and inadequate, and leaves it permanently and nobly housed. It is still more true that he found a School of Boys, and leaves behind him a School for Men.

E. S.

Nomination.

Gertrude Stein’s autobiography, which begins serial publication in the May Atlantic. will be a serious candidate for the 1933 (Pulitzer) biography prize.
LEWIS GANNETT in the New York Herald Tribune

Mark Twain and the ants.

Dear Atlantic.—
In Mark Twain’s America, Bernard DeVoto says: ’In Samuel Clemens, the private citizen, the public has no interest that Mr. Paine is bound to respect. But Mark Twain, the literary artist, is, in some degree, a public possession, and the public is not bound to suppose that Mr. Paine declared all the truth about him to eternity. I am afraid that he must encounter the skepticism of people who share my opinion until much material now buried in bank vaults has been made public. Now it so happens that I am in a position to anticipate for the reader, in some small measure, the time when those bank vaults will In’ opened. ‘Dr. Jim,’ said Mr. Clemens to me one day. ’I have in a bank vault some manuscript which is the best thing I ever did, and I give you the following excerpts as samples of its quality.’ And this is what he told me: -
’Being last summer in Germany, in the company of a crowd of German research scholars, I was fired by their example to do a little research of my own. The piece of work I attempted was to answer the question as to whether or no ants had intelligence. To this end I first made about a dozen tiny toy churches and labeled them Presbyterian, Catholic. Methodist, and so on. Then I rang a bell of one of my churches and turned loose a parcel of ants I had caught. I found that the ants paid no attention whatsoever to my churches. This was Experiment No. 1. Experiment No. 2 consisted in placing some honey in the Episcopal church and ringing the bell. Before its notes had ceased, every last one of the ants had entered the Episcopal church! Experiment No. 3 was to transfer the honey to the Methodist church and ring for service. The former devout Episcopalians now went over in a body to the Methodist church. In short, in whatever church I placed the honey, there I would find I he ants before I had finished ringing the bell. From these experiments there could be but one conclusion: namely, that ants have intelligence.’
The second excerpt which Mr. Clemens gave me described an even more delicate experiment. ‘Catching a whole family of ants and establishing them in a smart little cottage on the bank of a thread of running water, spanned by a straw for bridge, I painted the back of the eldest son a bright blue for purposes of identification, and, after making him drunk, turned him loose. As he was staggering home over the bridge, he was met by the old folks and put to bed. Again the experiment was repeated, with like results. But the third time the prodigal was caught on the bridge, zigzagging homewards, his old dad, losing all patience, took him by the scruff of the neck and the slack of his pants and threw him into the water — which went to show that ants have not only intelligence but also darned good judgment.’
J. R. CLEMENS
Webster Groves, Missouri

Street-corner economics.

Dear Atlantic,—
Say, that friend of Jasper Jarrow’s by the name of Slocum ’pears to be a right bright feller. I wisht I could ask his idee ’bout a economic solution I heard the other day. I suppose you’ve read in the papers ’bout how we’re comin’ to the front out here and had a kidnappin’. Well, I ’us right proud when our police caught one o’ them fellers, and I ast John Brown, just to be sociablelike, if he was n’t glad. He sez, ‘Well, in a way, yes.’ I sez, ‘What yuh mean —“in a way”?' Brown took a long puff on his pipe and sez, ‘Them kidnappers ’ud put that ransom money in circulation. ’stead o’ hoardin’ if like that there banker, the father of the kidnapped man, did.’ I sez, ‘How d’ yuh know he ’us hoardin’ it?’ He sez, ‘Well, he would n’t a had it to pay, would he, if he had n’t been hoardin’?’
SY JONES Denver, Colorado

The child is father of the man.

We pass along this letter, recently received by Mr. Earnest Elmo Calkins, and call attention to its double bearing upon ‘The Lost Art of Play’ in the April Atlantic and upon Mr. Eaton’s paper in this issue.

Dear Mr. Calkins,—
I have just been reading with delight your Atlantic article on play, in part because you are preaching what, so far as opportunity offers, I try to preach, and in part because something you said recalled to me an episode in my childhood which I had quite forgotten, and which now seems, on reflection, to have a direct bearing upon your contention.
I must have been between eight and eleven, probably nearer eight. We went somewhere one summer, and there I not only played on a farm, but saw, to my delight, a sort of model or toy farm, covering about ten square feet, as I recall, laid out by some boy boarders. It had a tiny brook flowing through it, a tiny mill wheel, and all sorts of delightful things. One of these boys must have been a craftsman, and most ingenious. Anyhow, when I got home to the town near Boston where we lived, with an acre of back yard, including some outcropping ledge, I look a section of the ledge, where it lay flat and almost flush with the ground, and where it was seamed with strips of shallow soil, and made thereon, as best I could, my idea of a model farm. I must have spent a month of toil on this project. I used all my Noah’s Ark animals, of course. I made barns of small wooden boxes. I dragged in soil and planted grass seed on it, for pastures. My roads were excellent, being stone! Beside them I erected two-inch-high stone walls of gravel pebbles, and also built fences of little sticks. Alas, I had no brook, but I built a bridge over a crack in the rock which I called a brook.
And the point is that after eight years in New York I could stand the town no longer, and fled to the Berkshires. After seven years in a village, I fled that, and bought an old farm of two hundred acres here in Sheffield. I should n’t like to press the point too far. My father’s early kindness in letting me climb mountains with him (I climbed Monadnock at the age of five), and my mother’s encouragement of my early attempts to raise radishes and seedling trees, and in fact all my childhood in the country, must have had a deep influence. But it is strange, now that you wake the memory in me, that I should now be doing, so far as time and income permit, and with my own hands, the very things which I played at doing with such joy in my far-off childhood. I ought also to add that my father generally gave me, as presents, some kind of tools, and to this day I can and do use tools, practically and for my soul’s good.
This is a long letter for a stranger to inflict upon you, but I could not refrain from passing on what seems to be evidence for your contention.
WALTER PRICHARD EATON Sheffield, Massachusetts