dates, and facts. I haven't a good verbal memory, and such things escape me. But my mind does carry impressions. I don't lose them, and there's no apparent fading until I get them on paper. Then they are gone. I seem to discharge myself of them, and if I were to read my books now they would be as new to me as to any one.

"For picturesqueness in nature there are some parts of the West that have a peculiar individuality. For one thing, there's the prairie country; only this, with the coming of settlers, is entirely disappearing. I lived for two years on the rolling prairies of upper Missouri. That was in 1853 and 4. It was a beautiful country, with oak groves that made it look like an English park. Yes, it was noble landscape before any one got in there to spoil it. At that time, below Chicago, the country was pretty much all bare, flat prairie. There were no trees except for now and then a line of cottonwoods along the streams, and no houses save a few dismal huts. If I were to make a picture of Illinois as I saw it then, I would make the main feature a shanty with a lone man leaning up against the door-post shaking with fever and ague. But the country lutely since then. The settlers planted trees, beginning with the locusts and others that grow quickly; farms multiplied, villages grew, and now the country is covered with verdure and you see the church spires peeping out here and there, and get a very pleasant impression of it as you whirl through on the train.

has been transformed abso-.

a withered bush sticking up in the waste. In the wind the gritty sand drifts like snow. But you like it. There's the fascination of desolation, and you joy in the freedom of it, in its big horizon and in the power of its black hills.

"Yet I've never seen anything so grand, so exquisite in color, as the Arizona desert. Color is the wonderful thing about the great Cañon. The Cañon is a world in itself-full of mountains, chasms-full of everything. But its color! The rocks hold every tint you know. Photographs or paintings never show what it really is. You can't catch its atmosphere. The only way to get a proper realization of it is to go there and see it. The artists can't get it. Their efforts amount to about the same as those of the amateur who goes out to paint a tree. He gets the tree as green as green can be, and you can't say but what it is the color of the tree. Yet it doesn't give you the right impression. So with the fellows who picture the Grand Cañon. They sit down and copy the rocks, and the result looks like a spilled paint-box.

"That reminds me of a very curious fellow we found up in the Yellowstone. He kept an eating station there. The Yellowstone Park is all full of bubbling devilment, you know, and among other things there's a spring of mineral paint. Well, this fellow had just taken that mineral paint and painted a picture of the Gate to the Yellowstone.' You enter the valley through buttes or towers of colored rock, and he had drawn these correctly and painted them with the very colors of which they were made. It was a match, you couldn't dispute that, but it made a very That picture is one of the nicest comments on realism you could have,

“In a broad sort of way-in a very broad sort of way-you can generally tell an American from a European. There is a difference in physiognomy and manner. There is

civilization. But except for this the difference between us and other peoples is much smaller than the differences you can find within our own country. It's not easy to say what a

is not a

and go out around Boston. How different the people from those you see under like conditions about New York! Culture is a marked feature of the public you see about Boston, and it isn't of the people you see about New York.

The

"In speech the Americans have a good many local peculiarities. You know there's a lot of talk about our dialect, but I've heard in London all the varieties of speech you can discover here. Yes, in England you can find all our dialects, nasal twang and all, and a number of others that we haven't imported. They have a more distinctive character there, too, for they have hung on to the dialects more than we have. English are settled, and they are so staid that they don't change habits and manners as we do. Our people are continually moving around. We're in a state of fluidity yet. But we'll develop, and then we'll have a new kind of people here. Just what it will be we don't know-it's a fusion of so many distinct elements. In a way we are following in the steps of England. England is made up of many different races very much mixed. But the mixing was begun when the peoples were still in the savage state, and it's taken a thousand years for the original Britons to assimilate these elements and get a distinct type.

"We are trying fusion here on an entirely new plan. The different peoples that make our nation are all from old countries, and they have been acted on and molded by centuries of civilization. They start much further apart than would members of races of half-developed savages. Notice those ignorant Italians that come here from Calabria— but they are not barbarians. Their race is not in its childhood. They are the product of a very old civilization. They are dyed through and through with feelings and customs peculiar to their race. Take the Arabs there are enough in New York to publish a newspaper-they have their ways, and they are very set in them; and this is as true of the lowest grades as it is of the higher. Take any of the Oriental peoples and it is the same.

"There is an aristocracy of vice even. We haven't reached that point in America yet. You see the people on the race-track at Henley, and they are people who are set apart for racing, betting, and that sort of thing. There's a kind of tribe of them, and a continuous perpetuation of ways and tra

ditions. You find this lineage among the fellows who run the peep-shows in Vienna ; and this is true all over Europe of those who run the coarser amusements or pander to vice. But you take our Coney Island, and it's decidedly different. The vice is not simply vulgar-it's that, but it's rustic, too.

"I think our people are more sharp-angled than those of other countries. Maybe that's partly due to the climate, but it is more due to our envy of our neighbors who dress better or have finer houses than we have-to our feverish desire to get rich. Now, in Tuscany, for instance, the people live on their farms from generation to generation in the same condition. They never have any strikes there, or labor troubles of any sort. The farmer has just as much right as the landlord. He is a tenant at will really, but he belongs there and he stays-there are no evictions.

"In a general way, these Tuscan characteristics apply to much of Europe and to Mexico as well. Life in Mexico is at present more European than American, and the people, in spite of small wages and cheap houses, are satisfied with their lot. Whether the railroads which have been building so rapidly down there and the multiplication of schools will change all this is a question. Some districts of Europe are very much ground down by taxes, or are otherwise handicapped, but there is more modest, well-to-do contentment among the poorer classes than with us.

"One thing very peculiar in most of the European countries, from the American point of view, is the division of society into ranks. With all its advance, there's no feeling of equality in England. The idea hasn't come with democracy so far. How funny it would seem to us to be addressed as the Queen did the English in her recent Jubilee letter, My subjects-my people-I am touched by your loyalty to me.' She talks as if she owned them. It strikes us as ridiculous. But they accept these class lines over there. The populace wouldn't do without the gentry if they could. Even in an election they prefer to send a gentleman to Parliament rather than one of their own class. A man runs the political race all the better if he has a little blood in him.

"Class lines do not stop even outside the doors of their churches. The Church has been a curious solvent in the mixture of things. You know, long ago here in New England, they used to seat the congregation

according to rank. Those highest in the social scale had the best seats, while at the tail end there was the riffraff that had to go up in the gallery with the negroes. That is the plan in England still. The front pews are reserved for the gentry as their right. "The tendencies of our American life at present lead away from picturesqueness. Certainly in New England, much of the picturesqueness I used to know is gone. When I was a boy up in the little hill-town of Plainfield, our ways of farm

ing were much more interesting than they are now. There was the old sugar camp, for one thing, in the maple orchard. There couldn't be anything more picturesque than that camp at night.

"I think, too, they' built more picturesquely then. Even their churches-some of them were about as bare and ugly as they well could be, but there was a certain kind of sincerity about them that these little gimcrack churches they build now haven't. It's a pity we don't build more permanently. Suppose, up in the hills, they had built their farmhouses of stone, as the English do. Then, with the vines climbing the walls and the old garden and the trees round. about, the house would be all the time growing more beautiful.

"In our manner of

living there's very little that's really picturesque. About all we attain to is the mediocre and the commonplace. Our houses are so much alike, so uninteresting. They are more comfortable-better to live in-than the Europeans' houses, no doubt, but they are far less attractive. They haven't charm. You strike that the minute you land across the Atlantic, I don't care where it is.

"The ways and the homes of the European are comparatively mellow in aspect. Their life, national and local, has been continuous.

Their art instincts have kept straight on. But our people in settling here made an absolute break. They left their pleasant English villages and went into the wilderness to build a shanty with a hole in it to shoot the wolf from. You go to Spain and you see the town halls dating back for generations. The cottages are old, too, and the churches.

"Climate has something to do with the lack of architectural beauty in our homes.

MR. WARNER AT HOME

You can see that as soon as you go down South far enough. They don't build so smugly down there. They run galleries around their dwellings, and the square old houses with these galleries are far more picturesque than they would be without them. They may not be so neat as our New England homes, but artists like them. Artists have a pretty tough time with our Northern houses. They are as ugly as sin-all of them. Yet there are some of our old farm-houses that are attractive. But our village houses are

almost uniformly petty and offensive. You'd think they were hacked out with a jig-saw.

"Architectural smartness seems to be what the average person admires and aspires to now. Still, there are signs that we shall grow into better conditions. A great deal better taste is being shown in interiors, and you can see out in the country that they are making some real improvement in the farmhouses. The girls who have been off to school, or the city man buying a country home, have a good influence. They throw out a piazza, put in a bay window, or make some such simple change that transforms plain severity into attractiveness.

"In its life our New England is probably the most picturesque section we have. But I would have to except the colored element in the South. You take a half-clothed darkey with a banana and you get something right off. But you take old Nantucket, and Plymouth, and the other early coast towns, and there's a quaintness about them and an interest in their colonial background, with its pioneering, its seafaring, its buccaneers, etc., that other sections haven't. Then, almost every New England village has among its inhabitants some curious type. You get that in Miss Wilkins's writings, only she exaggerates so that you get the impression that our country folk are all oddities.

"One might think that the material for novelists in this country was rather barren, and that they would be at a disadvantage as compared with their fellow-craftsmen abroad. But this is not so. Just as good work can be done here as anywhere, if we only have an artist to do it. Nothing could be more vulgar than the characters in Dickens's Pickwick Papers.' But there is genius to picture the vulgarity, and that makes the work delightful.

"In one respect we've led off in this country that is in the use of nature in our stories. Cooper did a great thing in making the prairies and the woods a background for the action of his novels. But there's danger of overdoing. It shouldn't be dragged in or forced. Burroughs is right about that when he says he doesn't want nature to pose. After all, what attracts in a story is the human interest. You mustn't tire with details and geographic descriptions. But a certain amount is all right. I feel a tempest, I feel the influence of sunshine, clouds, cold; and I ought in my stories to bring in the weather as a part of the life of my characters. Thackeray

says very little about nature, but what he does say is very much to the point. He opens the window when he rises and looks out, and in three sentences he sets before you all the sweetness of the morning.

6

"Have you ever noticed that in The Arabian Nights' and that class of books there is no weather whatever? They go right along with the story. That isn't our way. You can't have a picnic without a thunder-storm. Here you get a fellow and a girl alone together on a rock, and there would be a declaration only a thunder-clap stops them. Perhaps we feel the effect of the weather that we live in. We have a greater variety of it than they have anywhere else; changes are sudden, and no particular sort lasts long.

"There is an impression that the Americans excel in humor, that our wit has an unequaled picturesqueness. But I doubt it. Such interest as our early humorists have all comes from the use they made of the raw conditions of a new country. Our rude life and manners in contrast with something more finished and civilized was an entertaining subject for contemplation. Any strokes of real wit are probably as old as the Sanscrit, but the details, the situations, grow out of conditions. I think we have a little exaggerated conceit of our humor. There is something individual about it, but it's a question whether it is at all superior to that produced abroad. A friend got off a good bit of true American wit the other day. I've lived in Hartford thirty years, and our public ways have been in a state of turmoil all that time. It's nothing but dig up and dig up continually. Well, this friend said, “Hartford was settled in 1636, and it has never been settled since." Now there's something a little diferent in that from what a European would have said a little different turn in it.

"Of course we hope, as time passes, we shall develop an increased appreciation for what is beautiful and harmonious, and in ourselves a sturdier character. Naturally we look to our schools for help in our problems. But the present effect of education is to produce the commonplace. The machin- . ery of it hampers. We get into a groove, and the result is mediocrity. Each person should be himself, should form himself. But people don't take the trouble to make up their own minds-if they have any. They accept opinions ready made. That's the way it is in politics. They all go in a lump, or slump. Something catches them, and off they go.

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The more isolated people of fifty years ago used to make up their minds. They were hard thinkers. Now we don't take the time, or haven't the patience. But education will have to change this. Education doesn't con

sist in giving encyclopædic information. It isn't anything in the world but the training of a man's own mind. Then it becomes an instrument that he can bring to bear on things."

I

N a dingy corner of a dark room in a quaint old building hard by the central portion of the city of Stockholm I saw not long ago a series of ancient utensils which were interesting not only because of their antiquity but because of their definite illustration of the fundamental principle of one of the most important educational movements of the last half of this century. They were homely, crude, semi-savage in their suggestiveness if you will; they were stained by the sweat and grime of peasant hands; they were, mayhap, two centuries old and possibly three, or, if not that old, they were precisely like those which had been in use for perhaps s half

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a thousand years. They were, if you will, uninteresting from some points of view, but they were intensely interesting as illustrative of the prehistoric days of sloyd. In the sloyd which has distinguished Sweden among the other nations of the world in educational progress one may find the spirit of those who made these ancient utensils; or, if one would precise, the same spirit in more primitive type. I think it is quite fair to say that. Speaking broadly, the sloyd of to-day has evolved itself by a natural and legitimate law out of these coarse tools, these humble flour-mills grinding for a family, these homemade plows and looms and child's queer cradles, and the whole gamut of kitchen and living-room objects.

It would be hard to say how or where

or when the word sloyd originated, and I do not find any very satisfactory lexicographical foundation for it. The people have been sloyders for the centuries. Only in a circumscribed sense have they wielded influence, however, and it has been set for the task of modern Sweden to develop that which they so stubbornly wrested from their surroundings. But while we may not trace the word sloyd nor know much of its history, we can take it as it stands to-day in the stir and strife and tremendous energy of modern eduIcation and call it in truth one of the most potent factors in modern life. Perhaps that should be qualified somewhat in so far as extent is considered, for sloyd has but recently, comparatively speaking, set out on its conquering career.

It would be difficult to express in words the tremendous influence of Swedish sloyd. It is an influence quite like some of the other great influences that have moved mensilent, subtle, it may be, always unpretentious, never wearying. It takes the boy and the girl in that precious formative age when God alone knows how great the influences of environment and example and suggestion are, and it leads them steadily and consistently and with many a pleasant fascination past many of the deadly blight-spots of young life. It makes the boy busy; it takes up a corner of his heart and his mind where many a meaner thing might dwell; it trains