Henry Dwight Sedgwick, essayist, biographer, and historian, has a long shelf of books to his credit. His last volume was the story of Dan Chaucer. The Right Reverend Edward L. Parsons, Bishop of California, was recognized at the triennial convention of the Episcopal Church as a leader of sane counsel who appreciated that on each side of the bottomless fissure which divides the Catholic from the Protestant minded there is Christian feeling, and a great desire for the unity of the Church. ▵ It is fortunate that Glanville Smith is not a commercial traveler. We warn all possible employers that he has no talent for drumming. But as a sympathetic and unobtrusive observer of other men’s morals, manners, and predilections, few there are who can be so confidently trusted as he. For our readers’ pleasure he is now gallivanting through the Antipodes. Henry S. Pritchett has his reward in California’s perpetual summer after a distinguished career as an educator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Carnegie Foundation. Edward Carrington Venable is a Baltimorean long known to Atlantic readers. H. S. V. Jones is professor of English in the University of Illinois, Harry Levin is one of the company ol Junior Fellows of Harvard Universitv — young men of exceptional promise who have been called to Harvard to pursue their own chosen tasks without let or hindrance. It will be noticed that Mr. Levin strikes Dr. Zinsser’s shield with the sharp point of his lance. Catherine Drinker Bowen shall have music wherever she goes, and is musically at home in Philadelphia. Dorothy Tyler is a graduate of Michigan, but needs no degrees to certify to her scholarship. In 1932 she was a winner of the Avery Hopwood contest. Charlotte Kellogg is the wile of the distinguished biologist, Vernon Kellogg, and in her own right a biographer and a worker in useful fields. Herbert W. Horwill is a journalist of experience and tradition living in London. Raymond Holden is an industrial economist — and a poet — which is saying a good deal in a short space. George E. Sokolsky’s dispassionate and illuminating papers on labor lend especial interest to this discussion of wages in the light of common experience and common sense. ▵ Of all historians of nature, the editor knows none now writing to whom lovers of English pure and undefiled owe a more natural fealty than to Charles D. Stewart, From the front porch of Mr. Stewart’s farm in Hartford, Wisconsin, the whole world is plain to see. Berwin Kaiser finds New York an excellent vantage in studying the seamy side of business. ▵ Civilized men cannot live without cooks, as (lie mother of Della T. Lutes knew when, on a Michigan farm, she brought her family up on a diet that epicures might envy. It has been Mrs. Lutes’s profession to make daily tests of food with scientific accuracy, but cooking is an art and not a science, as her gustatory reminiscences will testify. Arthur Pound, a philosopher of the industrial era, never forgets his facts in order to prove his theory. Gilbert Harold is instructor in finance at Ohio State.

Ever since Mrs. Rose’s first papers appeared in theAtlanticfriends of that brave little family tucked away in the fastnesses of Alberta have been rolling up like a snow ball. Our latest news comes from Karl, who shows signs of growing up. His letter is forwarded ns by a friend whose Christian name is Frank, but whose family name we are requested to withhold.

Dear Frank: —
I have a cousin named Frank that I have never seen and your name makes me think of him. He’s a graduate of Amherst. I guess it is hard to be a boy in a city — there is so little a kid can do after school that is any fun and just listening and looking would not suit me. I like to read and that is what I do whenever I sit down.
I don’t ever intend to go to any school, but I do want to be educated and I’m going to read books to find out all the things I want to know. I can’t spare the time to work my way through a school because I have to run this farm and Dad is too old now.
Sure, there is a big scar on my face, but it is growing smaller and whiter so it won’t show much in a few years. Dad did an awful good job, but he sure took his time. He knows how. because he’s done it before. It look the lop oil one of my back teeth, hut that’s all the damage and that was good. Some day a dentist can fix things up.
I’ve seen those beacons before I came to live in here. There is one at Post Falls, Idaho. They look something like our Northern Lights. Only ours are mostly in colors and we like them beller.
Some day I’m going to make a wind motor and get a storage battery and have electricity to study by all winter. I’ll bet it can be done. I read about it somewhere.
Joe went home to his folks last fall. He had been with us nearly three years. At first I could n’t do a thing, but now I’m getting used to working alone again. It was too bad for me, but his folks needed him. They have a big farm. He run away from home when he got out of high school. We belonged to a baseball team last year. Nearly all the men in here play ball. There ain’t no movies, but we have six ball teams, Every time we play ball we have a picnic because everybody comes so far. I have to go from 20 to 75 miles to play ball.
We’ll be out of meat pretty soon and I’ll have to go on a hurt. I have n’t any big gun, Joe took his with him, but I can shoot deer with my twenty-two and after the snow goes in the spring I’ll shoot ducks with my shotgun. The rabbits we never touch, because they have the sickness.
Sometimes a city man comes in here, but he don’t last long. He cusses the country and the flies and everything and goes out again, It’s hard to make a living in here for city people. They have to have store things. An old squaw made my moccasins and moosehide pants.
We are snowbound this winter and I have to fetch the mail home on my back in a pack sack. I snowshoe after it. We get only four mails in the winter. It took a month nearly for the first mail to come, but since then we have had airmail. It’s been awful cold, 75 below zero in January. I nearly froze my lungs going after the mail. But it’s nearly alright now.
I have three collie dogs and a dog sled, but the drifts were too deep and bad for dogs. Then it made a thick crust too on top and it cuts up their feet. There are plenty of wolves. They’ve been hanging round all winter. I guess they smell our sheep. We have seven.
Mother knows all about Chicago and loves it there. She’s told me a lot about it, and I guess it’s different now. That was nearly thirty years ago when she was there. Are the cobblestones still there on the streets?
Lots of people have radios in here. I have one I just, got from a trapper in a trade. It hasn’t any batteries with it. We don’t have any money in here, but we trade with anybody and pick up some queer things sometimes. I may trade it on a horse. Our work horse died this winter and we have to have one for the spring plowing. It’s a six-tube Atwater Kent table mode! about four years old and only used one winter. Since then it’s been changing hands at least once a year. It’s something to trade, but when a fellow finds that it takes money to make it talk he trades it. Mother and Dad want me to keep it and maybe some day get it to talk. I’ve got to have a horse and I don’t know what else to trade off. I’ve listened to radios at the Fort and don’t think much of them. I like a book better. I want to make my own music and some day I’ll get me a violin. I guess in the cities people need radios because they have so little they can do. I’m busy all the time.
What good does it do to make-believe a trip? I do it sometimes when I’m hunting, but then I ’m digging gold in the Clondike or something like that. Are they ever going to sail on the trip? Some day maybe I ’ll go to the Clondike and find gold. And build Mother a real house and get a car. I have to quit now and go to bed.
Yours very truly,
KARL ROSE
Forl Vermilion, Alberta, Canada

A sailor’s tribute.
Dear Atlantic, —
Some, time ago you acknowledged a letter of mine telling how much a half-blind old sea captain had enjoyed my reading to him, word for word, Mutiny on the Bounty.
To our delight, Men against the Sea was even better. The old gentleman had come up along the Barrier Reef, had touched at Pitcairn Island, knew Timor, and had met J. Conrad in Capetown. He said: ’ It has given me some of the happiest hours in my life. Can you not tell the author so?’
Well, I have Pitcairn’s Island, but the old boy will not know it. He has dropped anchor in the last harbor. When the bell rang, he answered, ‘Adsum.’
His priest asked me for some words to cannon his stone. These be the ones I chose: —

POST TOT NAUFRAGIA SALUS

Some things are too sacred to write. But at the last he smiled at me and said: ‘ You have been more than a son to me. What larks! (Pip) What books we’ve read! . . . Well, what about the future? . . . I can trust the Pilot. . . .‘
The old fellow ‘ fell on sleep’ with his hand in mine, comforted and cheered in his last, days by the heroism and splendor of that epic tale. Men against the Sea.
JOHN W . LETHABY
Portland, Oregon

We are, as you all know, proud of our collection of Signs of the Times second to none. Mere are a few recent exhibits: —

dear Atlantic, —
In the first block east on 14th Street. New York, there is a sign reading: SHOES SHINED I INSIDE. Perhaps you have heard too of the notice in a German railway carriage: ‘The Outleaning of the Body from the Windows is on account of the therewith connected grave Lifedanger strictly forbidden.’ And there was another, said to have been in the railway station at Quebec, which, being translated into our language, announced: IT IS DEFENDED TO FEME IN THE SALOON OF ATTENTION.
MYRON H. BROOMEEL
Urbana, Ohio

Dear Atlantic, —
How is this, near the main entrance to the Zoölogical Gardens at Washington. D. C.?
LOST CHILDREN
WILL BE TAKEN TO THE
LION HOUSE
GEORGE S. HUMPHREY
Staten Island, New York

Dear Atlantic, —
Have you failed to note the sign at Roseoe, Nebraska, a small station near Ogallala, which invites the tourist to ‘ Eat Gas and Pop’?
ARTHUR C. MAYER
Grand Island, Nebraska

Dear Atlantic, —
Still another! Some years ago I often passed a small graveyard which lay on the outskirts of the city. On the adjoining lot stood a barn the weathered side of which, just over the graveyard, bore the familiar advertisement: ‘Eventually! Why not now?’
E. M.
Poughkeepsie, New York

In morals, and ethics too, Atlantic readers are our jury. Listen, ladies and gentlemen.

Dear Atlantic, —
I was surprised to read ‘The $10,000 Gallon of Oil’ in your January number.
In outline the story is this: Contractor A proposes to sell the government a standard article of commerce, which will not meet specifications, at 100 per cent over the market price, thereby making $10,000 for doing exactly nothing at all. Manufacturer B, after heaven knows how much research and experiment and use of inventive skill, has perfected a material superior to anything the finest laboratory in the United States can produce and makes a legitimate bid, on specifications he can meet, on which he proposes to make $2,0.000. A is caught in his crooked bid and through trickery and lying steals B’s formula and sells it to the government for $10,000. Thereupon B is held up as the Wicked Grafter and A as the. Model of VirTue.
A companion story would be about the Grafting Author who at tempted to get $500 for a mere dollar’s worth of paper and ink. The Noble Reformer comes along, gets hold of the manuscript, and sells a copy of it to the Atlantic for $250, thereby illustrating the Triumph of Virtue and the Downfall of Avarice.
DUDLEY CLAPP
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Dear Atlantic, —
Reading ‘The $10,000 Gallon of Oil’ leaves me. indignant and upset.
Who is the ‘grafter’? The mushroom oil concern discovering the elements of a mixture meeting severe specifications and therefore entitled to whatever price the buyers would pay in an openly competitive market? Or the ‘free lance’ living by his wits who stole the performing formula and, a fugitive from his hotel bill, hid with his booty in a lavatory in order to make ‘good’ a contract originally concocted to pay him 90 per cent profit in return for no more service than selling Standard Oil to the government? It is startling that a publication of your standing should present to readers an account of such shady ethics parading as public-spirited ‘saving’ of taxpayers’ money.
HARRISON SERRELL
Dobbs Ferry, New York

And Mr. Kaiser has this to say for himself.

The moralists who question my remembrance of the Ten Commandments are, I think, entirely right in their feelings, but not so right in their judgment. I envy their feeling that business — even the business of a Graft Adventurer — must be without any offside play. But reality simply does n’t work that way.
The Adventurer is, of course, dealing with Monopoly of the less obvious sort, and in the, days of Roosevelt the First his work might have been called Trust-Busting — at least by anyone who recognized that, for every monopolistic abuse which the legislators curb, there are ten which a perverse human nature puts beyond the law and protects by graft.
So here it ’s the Biblical ‘eye for an eye’ that succeeds, in a measure, in checking what the Ten Commandments are intended to correct, and what the moralists and preachers would like to correct. Their moralizing would be amusing were it not so pathetically ineffective before the facts.
As an ineffective business man, I think I speak from experience!
BERWIN KAISER

When we cannot answer a question, we like to pass it on. Here’s matter to corrugate the brow of woman.

Dear Atlantic, —
How can we save our men? They are dying of at a more than average, rate from heart failure, and so forth, from fifty to sixty to sixty-five. It seems to me too fast. The old saying, ‘The young men for action — the old men for wisdom,’ will soon sound odd, I fear, for there soon will be no old men, at least among those who are not so worn out as to be senile.
A CONSTANT READER
Bryn Mawer, Pennsylvania

In regard to a widely read paper in the February Atlantic,Miss Montague asks us to state that over a long period of years the city jail in Richmond has been disgracefully overcrowded, quite as she relates. Since she sent the article to us, however, for some unexplained reason conditions have been very much improved in this respect, and at present there is no overcrowding. It is only fair to make this comment.

Seldom does Mrs. Blankenship’s seed fall on stony ground.

Dear Atlantic, —
‘Death Is a Stranger.’ in the December issue, touches deep chords. Although I stand in silent sympathy before the deep experience that caused these thoughts, and in respect to the author, I feel moved to express a few other thoughts on the same theme.
Every earnest soul, in looking back over ‘the way already trod,’no doubt sees so many rescues, such unexpected shelter and guidance in the little crises, he is encouraged to trust to proportionately more at the Great Crisis. This trust Mother Nature teaches through the apparent ‘death’ of the seed, the grub, and in countless ways. As with her the beginnings of all forms of life are miracles of mercy, may not her children expect even more at the end? Constantly she leads us toward the victory of faith over fear.
Another reader of the New Testament sees there not so much the promise of ‘a brand-new soul,’ exchanged suddenly, as a gradual growth toward a perfected form: as implied in connection with the thief on the cross and in the figures of seed and grain employed in I Corinthians xv.
My own experience in the presence of this deepest of mysteries is that love is greater than grief and answers all its questioning.
L. E. RICAUD

Is this from an Old Boy or a Young One?

Dere atlantic i read that there ladies letter about kelchin that big wast in a glass under an orange tree and i reckon i caught a lot of insects in my time some of which was wasts and i tell her that there wasnt no miracle of vitality like you put forth maam only that there insect didnt git a big enough a dose of cyanide it was only put to sleep and woke up later if it had staid in that there bottle longer it would of died for fare now i tell this lady with my most respectful complements lady that the bigger the insect is an the harder its crust i refer to insects like big beetles an particularly them that move slow the harder they are to kill an the more they can take it i mean the cyanide they can stay in it longer an come out alive like bro. Jennings used to say about uncle dickey woodruff a habtist preacher that i knowed he said uncle dickey could dive deeper into the see of theoligy stay under longer an come up dryer than any animal he knowed well maam them hard beetles is jest like uncle dickey woodruff now if you take an insect which is little or a fast movin and quick insect it will be nocked cold in no time in a cyanide bottle ive seen them there long billed Hies that hover over flowers like hummin birds when they git a whif of cyanide they lye on there, backs and wiggle there legs fast, two more whifs an they pass out for fare now dere lady if you ever have another wish to ketch another similar insect, here is how you should procede to do it when you have got him in a glass blow a little cigarette smoke in there through a straw this here will cool him down so as you can git your hands on him holdin him in a hankerchef if you got one handy then git a little nickotine out of your husbands pipe or any other husband will do on the point of a pin or else from a cigarette if nobody smokes a pipe and pearce the insects chest from above you can jest run the pin clear through his body an pin him on the wall or on a tree or in a box he will be so sick he will die in no time with out disturbance and it is painless. i would also add and i know you wont gitmad lady that it aint jest right to speke of an insects belly they aint got no bellies lady they call them abdomens i bet that there specimen you saw would of made a fine example yes maam it shore would
CHESTER GREAVES
Proustville, Texan

The French mother of American boys applies to the Attlantic’s discussion of progressive schools the sound test of personal experience.

Dear Atlantic, —
I have read with interest the articles of both Professor Friedrich and Professor Mursell.
The term ‘progressive school’ has been so much bandied about, and so often misapplied, that it has lost its original, full significance and only connotes, in the mind of many, a lack of discipline, a modern Abbaye de Thélème. That attitude of ‘Dear little children, shall we play the game of the multiplication tables.’ said by the teacher in a cheerful voice with a gurgle of delight, is not all there is to the progressive school.
My two young sons, very close in years, are totally different in character. The elder, probably taking after his forbears who cleared the wilderness of New Hampshire and Maine, enjoys hard tasks for the satisfaction of the accomplishment. His dark-eyed brother, if left to himself, would be too easily content to rely upon his intuitive grasp and neglect the routine work necessary to perfect technique, perhaps inheriting, on the maternal side, the qualities of a people described until recently in American geography books as ‘fond of dancing and light wines.’ These two boys attend the same progressive, coeducational school, are both doing well in their various studies, and both happy. In a copy of the school paper they brought home at Christmas time, I found not only the reasons for their happiness and success, but also what seems to be the essential difference between a progressive school and one of the formal type, in an interview given by the head of the school.
This educator, while teaching in Boston, spent much of her spare time at the Judge Baker Foundation, studying the technique of the clinic handling the cases of the Boston Juvenile Court. ‘ It seemed to me,’ she is reported as saying, ‘that the technique of the clinic . . . was based upon a more thorough understanding of each individual child, his innate equipment, his motives, his environment, and his possibilities, I concluded that the same technique, applied to well-born children, whose environments were more complete and more adjustable to individual needs, might result in a more complete human. The — School means to know what the special abilities and disabilities of each pupil are, watches the kind of experience that each child is accumulating and his reaction to it, and makes sure that his school, experience, both academic and social, is genuine and wholesome.’
A discipline fitted to the need of each child will foster self-discipline, build character, and assure, for the future, social adjustment and usefulness.
HENRIETTE R. VOLKMAR
Bedford Village, New York

A boy that knew.

Dear Atlantic, —
It was with much interest that I read ‘What a Small Boy Knows,’ in the January issue. To repay the author I should like to enlighten him as to the explanation of Edgar’s belief that the Prince of Wales ‘ lived in the sea.’
This explanation of mine is very simple, and comes from my own childhood. For several years I dubbed the Prince of Wales the ‘ Prince of Whales,’and perhaps Edgar did too. All of us, children and grownups. are a deal alike.
JACK HICKERSON
Commerce, Texas

A former Baltimorean, remembering his poetic youth, has this to say on the Atlantic’s chigger question: —

Dear Atlantic,—
If a chigger were bigger, as big as a cow,
And this digger had the vigor of a sub-soiler plough. Could you figger, Picknicker, where you would be now?

Professor Orton’s survey of the Nazi situation was a matter of moment.

Dear Atlanlic, —
Professor William Orton’s survey of Germany is not quite as bad as those Independence-situation summaries — but almost. He knows Germany as I know Ihe present political situation in Siam. In a letter of this length. I can present only a symbol of what he missed. So I ask Professor Orton to let his naïvely optimistic, starry-eyed gaze fall on the following facts: —
Last year, on June 30, Saturday at 1.30 P.M., — or, for Mr. Hendrik Willem van Loon’s benefit, 13.30.—an Oberführer and his two aides walked into a certain government, building at Berlin, into the private offices of a certain Assistant in the Ministry of Verkehr. The Oberführer told this Assistant he was under arrest. The Assistant asked to know why. Two pistol shots were the answer. At 15.40 the wife of this Assistant was called on the phone and told (1) her husband was dead: (2) in peculiar circumstances; (3) looked like suicide; (4) an investigation was under way. At 17.10 the woman was permitted to see her murdered husband. She was kept at a distance of ten feet from his body, because even in the midst of her grief she might have noticed the two holes in his back. When she asked for the body, she was told that the investigation was not yet over. She would be notified. Sunday passed. Monday dragged along. Tuesday was a nightmare. Wednesday came. At ten o’clock a telephone, message informed her that if she came to such a place near Potsdamer Platz, at three o’clock that afternoon, she could make arrangements for the removal of her husband’s body. The lady arrived at two. In an unpapered, dimly lighted antechamber, she waited one, two, three hours and fifteen minutes, until a large, uniformed figure entered the room carrying something like a cigar box. He placed the thing nervously on a rickety table, turned to the door, paused, turned abruptly to the darkly veiled woman in the corner, and blurted, pointing to the box. ‘Da ist Ihr Mann.‘ I might add that the ‘crime’ of Mr. Klausner, the murdered man, was his leadership of Catholic Action in Berlin.
But no doubt such a symbol leaves Professor Orton unimpressed. After all, what is the individual’s value in balance with the value of the State’s progress? The State is everything. The individual is nothing.
When one stops to reflect on the breadth of the mental horizon displayed in “ New Wine in Germany. one finds reasons lo adopt such a thesis.
HUNTER Boss GUTHRIE
Paris, Prance

A little nosegay all our own.

Dear Atlantic, —
That is a delightful article with which you begin the December number of the Atlantic — ‘The Music Makers.’ Such surprises as this, together with other worth-while feature’s, make the Atlantic a welcome visitor in our house. Besides. I like the type style, the kind and color of the paper, and the very binding of this friendly magazine.
I write to thank you —for all.
H. JEWETT JESCHKE
Benton Harbor,Michigan

So say we all of us.

Dear Atlantic, —
A good many months ago you published an encouragement to wistful writers, suggesting articles on various things, including hobbies. Having recently occupied much time willy-nilly riding my bed, I suppose it may be called a hobby.
I have always felt indebted to the man who invented beds or was it a woman? Yes, it must have been a woman. What man would hav e specified sheets — cool, smooth sheets, two of them, to be frequently changed and clean? So I say, to that woman, all praises be for my bed.
To my bed I bring my weary self for rest, body and soul. In it I can relax, let down all defenses, for there no unsympathetic stranger intrudes. I can cry, I can dream, I can read, I can stretch limbs and thoughts. In heat I can uncover there, in cold I snuggle blankets about my ears. When I am ill my bed holds me gently and is not exhausted by my fretful ness; and who but hopes to breathe his last most tranquilly in his own familiar bed?
Beds are like religious convictions, varied to individuals: we have high beds, low beds, broad beds, and narrow beds, and also the famous soft, medium, and hard beds of three-bear fame; but mostly we prefer the kind Mother made.
My bed is a responsive friend — and forgiving; soothes me when I am weary, gets a little ruffled when I am restless, but, being abandoned and neglected again and again for other attractions, accepts my smoothing ministrations without resentment and ever receives me kindly when I choose to return.
And so, to bed.
MARTHA NEWSOM
Naperville, Illinois