Equally rare has been the spirit of those who as trustees and members of the governing Association have given, with their money, their effort and the prestige of their names. None have posed as connoisseurs or patrons of art, or sought to direct the Director of the orchestra. They have been content quietly to do collectively for good music in Chicago what Major Higginson has done singly in Boston, and indeed they could not have had a better exemplar either in deed or in manner. Conspicuous among them, besides those already mentioned, have been the Glessners, the McCormicks, the Adamses, Messrs. Lawson, Brown, Otis, and Baird. With them should be named, as a heavy contributor from the first, Thomas himself. For his established business in and near New York yielded him about $10,000 per annum more than he came to Chicago for. That was his yearly sacrifice for good art. Our business managers also have deserved all praise for unselfish, discriminating, and dignified work.

We are now buying some fine old violins, to equip the rank and file of our string choir withal; and we hope to lie back in peace and enjoy their mellow tone, after the strenuous years recounted above. We believe that the possession of its Hall has indeed made the Theodore Thomas Orchestra " 'permanent." Never since it was occupied have we had to ask a dollar of assistance. Naturally, we shall not feel quite safe until our debt is paid off. Other halls will be built, doubtless, and take away some of our rents. Opera will be established in Chicago, with its appeal to the eye and its inevitable lowering of standards, and may cost us some of our fashionable supporters. But eighteen

years' hearing of the great master works, given with a perfection of technique and interpretation practically impossible in opera, "the greatest music given in the greatest way," have surely laid in the hearts of ten or twelve thousand Chicagoans, and of their children after them, a firm foundation for the immortality of our Orchestra.

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For beauty means immortality in this world. Karnak and Corinth have been in ruins for centuries, but the mystery of the sphinx and the revelation of the column are our living heritage. Vikings and Skalds are legendary now, their long ships buried in the drifted sands, their very language dead" for ages; old Omar's empty glass has been turned down for near a thousand years; yet never, I suppose, did Nibelungenlied or Rubáiyát fly so far and wide-vivus per ora virorum-as in this our day. Year by year canvas and mar ble, casket and jewel, carpet and tapestry, quit the palaces for the museums, the changeful possession of the few for the enduring ownership of the many. palaces themselves, the lovely parks and stately castles, the one-time cradles of luxury and fortresses of privilege, are become the holiday places of the peoples, the transmittenda of the world. By a sort of glorified survival of the fittest, almost all that long outlives the generations, that they seem able to transmit to the race, is that which they have contributed to beauty and tradition.

So, for Bach and Beethoven and the rest, those great poets of the universal language which will never die—those mighty architects in sound, from whose airy battlements and cloud-capped towers, rising ever fresh and glorious, time cannot throw down one glittering pinnacle—I can conceive of no century, of no race, that will reject them. He that hath ears to hear will always hear. With confidence, therefore, we can commit the Theodore Thomas Orchestra for all time to our city of Chicago, for its delight and in loving mem ory of the great man whose name it bears.

T

WO unexpected guests drop in at luncheon-time. The hostess is in despair.

"What in the world shall we give them to eat, Nora ?" she asks the cook. "There's absolutely nothing in the house." "Why, yis, mum; there's the salmon." And Nora brings forth two white-papered tins labeled "Best Columbia River Salmon" and sets them on the kitchen table.

"Saved!" cries her mistress; and she goes back to the drawing-room smiling.

Now this kitchen conversation may have occurred in Boston, in Bombay, or in Melbourne. There is almost as much universality in it as there is in a talk about sugar or shoe-laces or of the man whom the other woman is going to marry. For, safely packed in those little white-labeled tins, Pacific Coast salmon goes all over the world. The daily average consumption of canned salmon on this fish-eating planet is eleven thousand cases of fortyeight pounds each, or a little over half a million pounds a day, or about 182,500,000 pounds a year. The demand grows steadily, and new markets are being developed all the time.

Because of this tremendous consumption is there likely to be any immediate diminution of this particular fish product?

No; and for these reasons: New fishinggrounds are being exploited, and artificial propagation, already carried on to an enormous extent, is being increased from year to year. In Atlantic waters, it is true, there has been a considerable falling off in the yearly takes of fish, but in the past forty years the Pacific Coast salmon pack has increased over fiftyfold, or, in actual figures, from one hundred thousand cases in 1869 to over five million cases in 1909. So it is not likely that during her natural lifetime our despairing hostess will call upon Nora in vain for something for luncheon if the provident cook has been beforehand in her orders for canned salmon.

The marvelous development of the salmon fisheries of the Pacific Coast, and particularly of Puget Sound and the Alaskan inlets, is something to ponder

From the mouth of the Sacramento River to the mouth of the Yukon I have seen the fishers hauling their nets; on the Inland Channel, from Victoria to Skagway, I have seen them; on the blue Columbia and on the smoke-hazed waters of Puget Sound. Fascinating it is to see the nets pulled in and the gleaming, flapping fish come aboard and be heaped in silvery piles in the bottom of the boat, or to see the long, baying seine come slowly shoreward, the fish churning and frothing the water within it, and to see the scramble, the inrush, and the wild flipflap of the fish as they are forced into the shallows and are seized upon by eager hands that fight for a hold upon their slippery bodies, often losing it when the scurrying salmon breaks for deep water and liberty.

For my own part, one reason for this enchantment is that I have borne a hand at the shore seine and fought with the fishers for an uncertain hold upon many a blueback or steelhead when the water in the incoming seine was alive with fish and their frenzied flappings filled the ear like the claps of a palm grove in a gale.

But while I have a fond eye for the Homeric sweep of the net and trap fishing because of the rich harvests where

twenty thousand to fifty thousand salmon often are taken by a small fishing crew in a day, and this sort of thing appeals to the imagination of one who, blinding himself to the butchery of it, thinks only that it adds millions to the world's wealth and the world's food supply, I confess that, when it comes to the real thrill of the thing, there's nothing like having a single salmon at the end of a hundred-foot line, fighting for his life, leaping high into the air, diving deep into the sea, and darting far and wide, or running toward the boat while I joyously pull in the slack, ready to let out more line on the instant that he turns, but all the while playing him nearer and nearer. When I am doing this there always comes a flash from Kipling: "There be several sorts of success in this world that taste well in the moment of enjoyment, but I question whether the stealthy theft of line from an able-bodied salmon who knows exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it is not sweeter than any other victory within human scope."

And then the fight by the boatside, when the circle of the splendid fellow's thrashing struggle is growing smaller and smaller, the crucial moment when he