romances beautiful. At a time when business, politics, social reform, and sex-perplexities give a good deal of current fiction the atmosphere of social or economic studies, it is refreshing to come on a story of so uncompromising romantic temper and interest as "A Heroine in Bronze." There is no plot, there are only two characters, there are no dramatic incidents; there are, on the other hand, an intellectual problem which is also an artistic problem, and a very finely sketched background; a luminous picture of New York as the home of a vast and varied humanity; and the drama of dawning love, moving slowly to confession and surrender, is enveloped in an atmosphere as warm and fragrant as the atmosphere which envelops A Kentucky Cardinal" and "Aftermath." There are phrases of such pure verbal music in this story that one re-reads it for sheer delight in the beauty of its English.

66

And there is the same quiet reassertion of the reality of interest in the romantic novel in Mr. Maurice Hewlett's Mrs. Lancelot " (Century Company). The situation is highly characteristic: an English Prime Minister whose practical efficiency and detestation of idealism in all forms reminds one of Robert Walpole, a colorless husband with the habits and temper of a high-class Government clerk, a poet whose soul is all song and for whom conventions are base compromises, and "between them that tender, conscientious, pale, and slim woman, Mrs. Lancelot . . . listening now to her heart, now to her conscience, distracted, worn thin, pitiful, but always lovely and kind; a woman, not a saint, a martyr, but not a champion."

It is a very pretty problem, and Mr. Hewlett deals with it after his usual fashion, and so confuses our sympathies with our convictions that we are ready to welcome any solution of a situation which has been impossible from the beginning. The Duke is drawn to the life; but poor Mrs. Lancelot gets no chance for her soul with the three men, and in the end disapproval dies in the sense of what awaits her when the Poet has an unlimited chance to talk to her.

It is a relief to turn from Mr. Hewlett's deeply designed complication to Mr. E. V. Lucas's delightfully normal and familiar story of every-day incident, told with charming ease in

London Lavender" (Macmillan). The very title brings the streets of the old town before the imagination, with fragrant sug

gestion of the sounds of ancient fields and woods that humanize its " central roar." This book is not a novel, any more than "Over Bemerton's was a novel, but both are chapters out of that human experience of which novels are made, selected and reported by a delightful essayist who knows how to stick to his text even when he is most discursive. There is always a suggestion of romance in the air, and love stories now and again look in for a moment and then go their happy ways, leaving an aroma behind them. The reporter nods occasionally, but when author and reader are on such friendly terms that is only an incident of intimacy.

The lack of art in Richard Dehan's story "Between Two Thieves" (Stokes) is em phasized by its unusual power. It has the proportions, the frankness and fullness of detail, and much of the compelling vigor of some of the Russian novels. It is epical in scale and often epical in the rhapsody into which the style runs on slight provocation. It is a lurid panorama of the relations of France and England prior to and during the Crimean War, with brilliant but partisan studies of half a dozen historical characters: Napoleon III, the Duc de Morny, Raglan, Palmerston, the Duke of Cambridge, and other actors in the field of European politics. The thieves are Napoleon and an English army contractor; and the victim is England, fooled by an adroit intrigue and betrayed by an unscrupulous trader. The plot is worked out on a colossal scale; the style veers sometimes towards Carlyle and sometimes towards Dickens, and runs into pages of fierce invective, of brutally frank descriptions of orgies and amours. The story shows great research and appalling labor; it overflows with vigor and leaves reticence out of account; it is overcrowded and overheated; it is packed with vitality and contains the substance of half a dozen novels. Some English critics put it beside" Marriage" and give the two stories the first place among the novels of the season. But Between Two Thieves" is powerful rather than great; it is a mass of rich material rather than an organized work of art.

It is a relief to get away from the atmosphere of crime and greed and animal satiety into the pure though rather thin air of Mrs. Mary S. R. Andrews's "The Marshal" (BobbsMerrill), the romantic tale of the little boy on whose head the hand of the great Napoleon rested long enough to dub him a marshal of

If the strain of faith imposed by Mrs. Andrews's charming idyl of knightly devotion is a little too severe, one finds the quality of humor in Mr. W. J. Locke's "The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol (Bobbs-Merrill). The author of these lightly touched tales is a gift of Providence to an age so beset with problems that it almost fears to smile. But no one need fear the contamination of frivolity from Mr. Locke's stories; they are as full of gentle integrity and pure human kindness as if they had been put out by the Society for the Promotion of Happiness. They fill the reader with envy of the charm of unconventional goodness of heart.

And those hard-headed people who want to drive Santa Claus. back to a region as cold as their own hearts, and who resent Christmas cheer and bells and lights as survivals of a superstitious age, will find much to enlighten them in the story of the attempt of a little Western town to abolish Christmas as a matter of economy, told with much quiet humor in Miss Zona Gale's "Christmas" (Macmillan), an old-fashioned tale set in a new environment and told with fresh feeling. The literal-minded who feel that the realities of life are symbolized by "butter and eggs and a pound of cheese," and that sentiment and poetry are the refuge of the weak and self-deceived, will do well not to read this unassuming and winning tale of human nature getting the better of Mr. Gradgrind in a community that set out to be worldly wise and was saved by a sudden outbreak of human instincts as deep as life itself.

The collection of short stories and of "half-told tales" which comes from the hand of Dr. Henry van Dyke in a very companionable volume, under the title "The Unknown Quantity" (Scribners), commands. attention both for its substance and its form. There is a background of larger life behind all Dr. van Dyke's work; there is always a sky over his landscapes; there is always the play of spiritual laws and forces in his world.

In these tales the element of mystery, which envelops daily experience like an atmosphere, becomes a determining element, and appears as a definite factor in the unfolding of character or the working out of events. The thread which unites these stories, the preface tells us, is the sense of mystery that runs through life and constitutes the unknown quantity, the incalculable element. The something around and within us which baffles and surprises us Dr. van Dyke brings before the imagination in a series of dramatic incidents which tell their own story, and, with the instinct of the artist, are not blurred with suggestion or solution. The two Canadian tales are in Dr. van Dyke's happiest vein of telling characterization by phrases of condensed descriptive force. The half-told tales are new expressions of the gift for paraphrasing life in terms of spiritual suggestion which have imparted to much of the work of this accomplished writer the quality of interpretation. In point of workmanship these stories deserve special commendation; they are models of the style which gains as much by restraint as by fullness of phrase; every word contributes to the general effect.

Those who read stories for the excitement of watching the play without the trouble of going to the theater will sit until the curtain falls on Mr. George Barr McCutcheon's latest story, "In the Hollow of Her Hand" (Dodd, Mead & Co.), a novel which does not stop until it reaches its destination, and which has the distinction of presenting a situation which is new to this generation of fiction readers. And Mr. Lincoln Colcord spins a sea tale of extraordinary vivacity and vividness in "The Drifting Diamond" (Macmillan), an impossible tale told with a vigor of phrase which promises well for the future of this young writer. Miss Mary Johnston's "Cease Firing" (Houghton Mifflin) will not escape the attention of those who found "The Long Roll" overloaded as a story but eloquent with an epical quality as a narrative of great events associated with great figures.

Among the new American writers, Mr. Jeffery Farnol has already found a large place among the lovers of spirited, adventurous stories, unconventional in tone and acted out of doors. His story of the adventures of "The Amateur Gentleman," now being published in serial form, promises to justify the reputation which may be said to have been established at the publication of "The Broad Highway."

Be

EVENTY-FIVE years ago, when the trustees of Mount Holyoke met to discuss important questions as to the policy of the institution which was for the first time in history to offer girls the same education that their brothers had, Mary Lyon, the author and instigator of the whole venture, was not present. She waited near at hand, in an anteroom, ready for consultation. cause she was a woman it was not seemly that her guidance should be too plainly seen. This fall, before an audience of thousands, seven hundred young women gave a pageant on the campus at South Hadley that was more significant than most of them dreamed. The College was celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary, and all the great universities and colleges of this country and many from abroad were bringing their cordial acceptance of woman's scholarship and their honor

to the college whose founder made it all possible. The whole celebration, with its academic processions, the choirs, and the addresses, was impressive and worthy of the occasion, yet what one remembers is the pageant. It was the living representation of what every one was feeling.

In an open-air amphitheater that slopes away to a wide lawn bordered with stately maples in their most beautiful autumn red and orange the students came in procession down from the hill, across the bridge, to the green, where two fairy sentinels sat at the foot of twin elm trees. The pageant represented the liberal arts and sciences, and each department of the College had a section. First came a master of ceremonies and a troop of fiddlers in jolly countrymen's garb and then the groups of girls, each preceded by heralds and standard-bearer, passed slowly,

but with no breaks or interruptions, before the audience. For the Bible Department was the Queen of Sheba, gorgeous with her slaves, and the three Magi and their attendants. Then some graceful Greek figures, from Homer and Sappho to modern soldiers, posed and went on. Suddenly loud trumpeting announced a marching crowd of thirty or forty Roman boys and girls, who escorted Augustus and Agrippa to the center of the stage and solemnly chanted the rhythmic cadences of the "Carmen Sæculare."

For hours the audience sat rapt, too interested even to applaud, as the young figures, lithe and graceful in their perfect ease and lack of self-consciousness, posed and danced or sang or stepped slowly across the greensward. The beauty of the spectacle was not only in the color and grace of the tableaux and dances. It was a remarkably intelligent whole. One felt that each girl knew just why she wore the costume she did and pulled with the rest of her college to make the pageant a success. Yet there was in the atmosphere a happy abandon and a friendliness that let the audience into the spirit of holiday-making that dominated the College.

The fact that the whole institution had worked on the plans, instead of making the pageant a mere heterogeneous display, only gave it variety and vitality. It was well held together by the colors of the standards and heralds, and yet diversely interesting at every step. Miss Louise Jewett, of the Art Department, should have much credit for the original idea and for the effect of the whole. Yet to the combined and co-operating ingenuity of different members of the faculty much of the individual effectiveness was due.

Chemistry, for instance, does not seem much of an inspiration for pageantry, but one of the most charming moments of the afternoon was when thirty or forty "elements," clad in pale colors, came dancing gayly on the field in confused and rollicking groups till at a gesture from Mendelejeff, the discoverer of the periodic law, they formed into groups of solid colors and danced in the harmony that has become a commonplace in our conception of matter. When Radium, in her dance, suddenly threw away her scarfs of glittering silver and was transmuted into Helium, the charm of science had its most beautiful expression. The scene was real poetry.

For the Mathematics Department were long files of scholars, all perfectly costumed

Ahmes, an Egyptian priest of the fifteenth century B.C., Hypatia herself, Hindus, Arabian philosophers, and mediæval friars. Physics and Astronomy were also presented historically, from fire-worshipers and Chaldeans to Benjamin Franklin stolidly bearing his kite and followed by personifications of the material and intellectual gifts of these sciences to humanity. Loveliest of them was a fairylike little figure in green, who represented the "swift messenger of thought," and stood smiling at the audience with her model of a telegraph pole over her shoulder.

Next came a crowd of creatures that depicted Geology, Botany, and Zoology. There were orchids, algæ, fungi, and ferns attending Flora, straight from Botticelli's "Primavera," and a curious group of fruit flies. which actually, said the programme, illustrated Mendel's law "concerning the appearance of characteristics, dominant and recessive, in successive generations." The characteristics to be noted here were red and white eyes!

The English Department, which at Mount Holyoke concerns itself chiefly with writing courses, presented a graceful tableau of modern Muses, surrounded by groups personify. ing rhythmical prose and meter. They were followed by the Department of English Literature, with a long procession of characters from our literature and its history, beginning with Deor, the Anglo-Saxon bard, whose lament over his master's neglect of him still lasts from heathen times. Arthur and a lovely Guinevere, Tristan and Iseult, Sir Galahad and a Grail maiden, Robin Hood and some of his merry men with falcons on their wrists, moved side by side with the Canterbury Pilgrims, several Shakespeare people, and the whole rout from Comus, persecuting the ringleted and shrinking Lady and her gallant brother.

Famous portraits then began to appear, delightfully picturesque and remarkably like the originals, from Van Eycks to Sorollas. After them paraded many dignified ecclesiastics and potentates of history, ending with a stern, fat little Napoleon, who came and stood with folded arms and mournfully sank her head on her breast. Then to the strains of "Die Wacht am Rhein " was given in spirited dumb show the apple scene from "Wilhelm Tell." When the hat of Austria had gone past, a chorus of English country maidens in costumes of lovely dull colors danced on to the music of their smocked minstrels, and tripped gayly through several old glees and