cloak, we too traveled with very little impedimenta. We carried no orchestra with the comic-opera company, and seldom found town musicians who could 1 play the scores. As a rule, I had to play the entire operetta on a piano, usually of a strange, weird vintage, or on a cottage organ when its more noble brother was not to be had. Once the scores themselves were left behind or misplaced-lost probably, I don't remember -and I had to play the opera of "Martha" from memory.

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We carried very little scenery for the most part; just enough to give an illusion-disillusion, one town called it. Finally, we lost all the scenery we had in one fell swoop made upon our assets by an irate landlord, and thereafter were forced to fall back on what scenery the town resources afforded. There was generally just an "interior set," in Salt which case we simply played the "Mikado" or friend "Fra Diavolo" in a parlor scene throughout. We managed to hang onto our costumes.

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On the other hand, with the other Tel company, the grand opera one, when a playing "Madame Butterfly," "Herodiade," "Lohengrin,” "Carmen," or "Bohème," we whiled away a month or two in big Middle Western cities frequently, and on these occasions I had torchestras of thirty or forty first-class town musicians to conduct. Then our tenor-manager, he with the big black cigar, spread himself and augmented our personnel with a large chorus of mixed voices, all of them good singers.

led

He was lavish with scenery, too. He is now behind a famous and authoritative grand opera organization featuring the English language.

What has become of those little strolling stock comic-opera companies? Nearly every section of these United States saw them ten or fifteen years ago, but only in the smallest towns and cities. Nowadays the movie seems to have absorbed them too. The four or five famous grand-opera companies of to-day have followed those first pioneers into the musical frontiers, which they enlarged as opera appreciation spread and grew. With them a number of my former fellow-artists. One of them was in "The Girl of the Golden West." Another one is reaping her reward in London, Brussels, and Paris. Still another is favorably known in Italy. Two

or three of our former Carmens or Marthas you may hear this season in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and elsewhere. One of them, a "Sharpless" scorning his one-time vocal triumphs, is a prominent moving-picture director out on the Pacific coast. Our other baritone, who explained by the light of the lantern, is a head-liner in first-class vaudeville; and the tenor who listened to that same explanation with me returned to the South, settled down, and became the Mayor of the town!

I have had occasion to revisit many of those scenes of our long-ago musical vagabondage, and have been pleasantly gratified to greet townspeople who earnestly tell me that our unconscious missionary work in music has never been forgotten and that our efforts years ago have borne substantial artistic fruit. The growth of those towns themselves proves to me that musical appreciation is largely developed. Local symphony and choral societies are now acreaged over the modest flower gardens we planted nearly twenty years ago.

The strolling minstrel has indeed vanished. Fra Diavolo has been shot on the "bridge," never to arise again. The bells of the modern suburban trolley cars have tolled a requiem for "The Chimes of Normandy." Alas for pretty Olivette! The pirates of "Giroflé-Girofla" have slunk back, impotently fierce, over their stage sea-wall and joined the ghostly remains of Morgan and Kidd.

The pioneer minnesinger has passed into history once more.

OOTBALL is the great game of our educational institutions. The financial support of field and track, aquatic and other teams, has been made possible in many schools by the balance remaining from the gate receipts of the football season. And football is peculiarly a "school" game. The hazard attached to it should remove it, in its present form, from the professional group. Mr. Roosevelt, in one of those notable "Letters to His Children," insists, with all his love for vigorous sports, that the question whether a young man should run the risk of temporary or permanent physical injury in a football game should be determined by the significance of the game to his school.

Although it has been pretty well demonstrated that the physical risk has been reduced to the minimum where there is competent training, it still holds that whatever warrant there is for the game is to be found in that intangible thing known as "school spirit" which prompts a high idealism and guarantees a clean game.

There are certain tendencies, however, in amateur football which, unless checked, may bring the game into dis

repute and might even lead to its banishment from our schools. No one with open eyes and ears is unaware of the Nation-wide gambling associated with football to-day. The popular cigar stores display lists of bets offered on the games between the better-known universities and colleges, and the sporting editors of our dailies invariably report the odds offered on teams all the way from the Eastern Big Three (or is it Four?) to the local academy or high school game. Gambling can't be stopped? If folks gamble over the flight of birds, you can hardly prevent them betting on the fight of gridiron heroes? But what say you when players themselves are numbered among the gamblers? Twice in last year's football season the writer's attention was called to cases where players won and lost money on their own games. It may not be an immediate step, but it is a natural and direct road from gambling on the part of players to "White Sox" scandals.

A peril not so fully recognizedtherefore the more insidious-is the gradual acceptance of unethical standards in the game. Only recently the father of a husky young high school

player whose team had been defeated in a district championship contest said to the writer: "I don't see why they didn't lay out that half-back in the early part of the game. They came near 'getting him;' if they only had, they might have won the game!" If such ideas were the exclusive property of spectators, the results would not be so serious; but this same father of a "star" reported that he had said to his sixteen-year-old son, "Why didn't you tie into your man and lay him out?" And the son of his father replied, "Gee, dad, I had him crying all the time; what more could I do?" And then, to demonstrate that such ideals (?) were not confined to one team, the lad continued: "And he said to me, 'You just wait; I'm going to be in football two years more, and I'll get you yet.' In one game which the writer witnessed in another city a citizen of the "home town" was hooted by the high school students because he called the referee's attention to one of their own players who was "slugging." In another State we have seen a college player with his neck in a plaster cast for weeks, and one of his opponents confessed that he had jumped on his neck

"

"because he was a good player and I wanted to put him out of the game." In a championship high school contest we saw a player put out of the game for slugging and his team penalized half the distance to the goal line. When he returned to the bench, his schoolmates gave three cheers for the banished player, accompanied by the indorsement, "He's all right."

We see some one arising at once to voice his indignant protest against the charges herein implied. He tells us that these are but isolated cases; that players, as a body, play a clean game; that the spectators do not want anything except playing that is square; and that real sportsmanship is to be found practically everywhere where scholastic gladiators face each other on the gridiron.

Nor are we inclined to dispute our agitated friend. If any one is insisting that football ought to be prohibited as a very unladylike game, it is not the present writer. He has played the game; has attended games repeatedly when they were within the reach.of his spare time, his home, and his pocketbook; has kept fairly well in touch with the "dope" on the greater teams of the country; is dubbed by his friends a football "fan;" and his concern is not for the elimination but for the preservation of the game. This is simply a reminder of conditions that exist, that can be found in more than one community and in more than one section of the country, and of the fact that these conditions are accepted and these unworthy ideals given audible expression again and again without meeting with any positive challenge from any large number of

people. The very fact that some followers of the game, if they should chance to read this article, would smile in a knowing way, and others would say, "We do not get you"-even as some spectators say when they hear a protest against "rough stuff," "What do you think this is, a game of marbles?"-is indicative of the lowered standards that prevail with a lot of players and with their supporters. Along this way lies the discrediting of football.

Attention has frequently been called to the contrast between the objective of the average American and his English cousin in athletic contests. The American, it is said, plays to win; the Englishman, for the fine points of the game. Of course we typical Americans will deny, with typical American vigor, any implication that we would resort to dishonesty to win. But it must be manifest, on reflection, that just as surely as we go into the game with winning as our objective, just as surely as student body and townsfolks are insistent upon our winning, just as surely as our rooters and, above all, our players have money up on the outcome of the game, there is grave danger of our falling into methods of playing that hardly measure up to the highest ethical standards.

Let us not ask our American athletes to turn English overnight-nor before this football season gets under way. But they are indeed a provincial people who cannot learn some profitable lessons from their neighbors; and we Americans surely need to learn, and then to insist, that to play a fine game and to do one's honest best in any kind of a contest means far more than being able to hang up the larger figures on the score

board. If this is to be attained, it means that thinking people in every walk of life must make known their disapproval of victories or advantages of any kind gained by questionable methods; they must insist that for themselves and their home town or their Alma Mater they prefer honorable defeat to ques tionable victories. Professionalism of every kind, even of the paying of board bills and the conceding of part tuition to students who may help make up a championship team, must be absolutely condemned. Students who are proved guilty of slugging or other unsportsmanlike conduct, instead of being given ovations by their supporters, must have made manifest to them the disapproval of anything but the cleanest kind of playing, and must be subjected upon repetition of the offense to drastic punishment-even to removal from all athletic contests.

Some time ago a high school principal stood before his pupils on the day before the big game of the season and said: "Boys, we want you to win, and we expect you to win. But remember, we had rather lose the game than have you win by dirty football. Go into it for all you are worth. Go in to win. But, whatever you do, wear your opponents out; don't you dare try to knock them out." d Undoubtedly there are educational lead-an ers and football coaches in every part of the the country who are saying the same blad thing-and meaning it. But it is only as the sentiment of the supporters of s football is united on such a basis as a this, and such sentiments as these are t crystallized into rigid laws protecting the the game, that we can be comfortably i assured of the preservation of football.

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T dawn on a Monday morning in January Henry Ketchum and his family were seated at table, as they thought, engaged in breakfasting. While Ketchum endeavored to absorb simultaneously the day's news from his paper and enough nutriment to sustain him until luncheon, a sleet storm, freezing as it fell, kept him subconsciously speculating how many extra minutes he must allow, on account of the ice, to catch the 8:12. His wife was busy suppressing the children and anticipating his wants, or rather capacity-supplying him food in quantities never so great as to cause congestion, but always sufficient to forestall a hiatus in the process of absorption. A call to the telephone interrupted this blissful domesticity; in a surprisingly few moments Mrs. Ketchum returned, looking grave, and announced: "Mrs. Doolittle says Fred Train has just died."

"Too bad," said Ketchum, thickly, his mouth full of ham and eggs; "but he's been all in for a good while and couldn't

be expected to last any longer-heart gave out, I s'pose."

"Yes," answered his wife, "it's very distressing. I guess they'll have the funeral on Wednesday."

By this time Ketchum, still chewing, had left the table and was putting on his arctics.

"You'll have to go," she added.

"Oh, no, I won't. I never knew Fred well." (A pause while Ketchum rushed to the dining-room and gulped some coffee.) "He traveled on the 7:58."

"But you and he always came home on the 5:19," replied Mrs. Ketchum, "and he was a member of the Shakespeare Club too. Anyhow, Mary would never forgive us if you weren't there, and her tongue's so sharp we can't afford to give offense."

"All right, all right," moaned Ketchum with a resigned inflection while he pulled on his coat. "I guess I'll have to go. Find out as quick as you can when the funeral's to be and telephone the office what train I can make after it, so

I may make my arrange-" The last word was cut short by the door slamming as he began to slide toward the depot.

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UESDAY'S papers announced Train's funeral would be at eleven Wednes-in day morning, and one of them printed his complete biography, as follows:

FREDERICK TRAIN died on Monday at his home in Carrville, aged 54. He was connected with the First National Bank and had commuted to this City regularly for 36 years.

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the imminent risk of colds or worse, until the casket should be placed in the hearse. It was generally agreed that this observance might be dispensed with by slipping out of the side door unobserved by the chief mourners. But on discovery that people from the city were expected on the train due at 10:55, it became certain that there would be delay, and the prospects of the 11:35 grew gloomy. The officiating clergyman was called to the telephone four times that evening to answer inquiries about the duration of the service.

In response to the formal, "Isn't there something we can do for you?" the family borrowed the motors of their friends. Three separate syndicates of commuters, therefore, were formed to nest hire taxis, under instructions to stand at the side of the church with noses pointed toward the station and power on, in the hope that the essential conventions would be over by 11:31.

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ETCHUM and his fellows of the. 8:12 awoke at the usual time on Wednesday and had difficulty in becoming composed for a late, Sunday-morning-like have breakfast. If they dreamed of a restful hour, disappointment was their doom; in each household there developed a surprising demand for a man to do odd chores, and Ketchum, in addition, was sent to the widow's with the loan of his wife's black fur coat. After standing ing to inspection by their wives to insure adequate som berness of costume—many neckties and a few suits had to be changed-the men repaired to the church, where they were careful to select pews opening on the aisle leading to the side door. There was an exception: a lawyer, the only one of independent practice traveling regularly on the 7:58. He conveyed the impression that this was from habit, but it was shrewdly suspected that he profited by the absence of his professional brethren, who frequented the more dignified 8:12. He took this day off, sat directly behind the family and accompanied them to the cemetery, thus keeping within call in case he should be wanted "to read the will."

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Two elderly bachelors served as ushers, attired in frock coats of at least twenty-year-old vintage and imposing severe strain on the buttons near the waist-line. By 10:55 the entire suburthe ban population was sedately seated, the men restless and wondering how late the train from town would be, and the women concerned as to how their husbands would behave. A stranger entered, and while leading him down the aisle the usher audibly inquired if he had "come on the train." A hopeless expression crossing the usher's face indicated a negative reply.

spectfully still, with thoughts centered

on the 11:35, bitterly critical of the slowness of the minister's delivery as he droned the ritual.

In the course of time the undertaker reappeared; he had ostentatiously eliminated himself at the commencement of the service. Instantly the commuters stirred like horses champing at the bit and set themselves for a spring, with the same tenseness as when standing in the aisles upon the train's entering the terminal of a morning. Slowly the family withdrew, following the casket borne on the shoulders of familiar characters, among them the news-vender at the depot, the ex-bartender at the golf club, and the furnace man of several exclusive households. The men's selfrestraint was admirable; no one moved, not a watch was brought into sight. All waited until an elderly lady, who obviously had no reason to hurry, started toward the door. Then they glided along the pews and into the aisle, agilely, rapidly, yet without appearance of haste, in the way commuters do but no others can. On reaching the vestibule each pulled out his watch preparatory to a sprint for the waiting taxis. Alas! all hands pointed to 11:36 and a

The

cover, and opened conversation. friend was to spend the week-end with the widow, and, partly by way of preparation for what must be said to her, but also out of the fullness of his heart, spoke highly of Train, while Ketchum nervously fingered his paper and surreptitiously glanced at the headlines.

"Fred was not robust and carried considerable responsibility in the bank, no doubt, besides being under a strain because of demands at home," concluded the friend; "still, he might have held out a good while longer had he ever known leisure at either end of a business day."

Ketchum's attention was focused momentarily, as he realized for the first time that this death had a significance distinct from the inconvenience and disturbance of his own routine entailed by attendance at the funeral. The impression passed instantly, however, for they were then a mile from Carrville, the point at which Ketchum always put on his overcoat and began walking through the train, so he could alight at the spot in the station nearest the exit.

notice that the 11:35 was on time.

The next train was the 12:21. As the mourners settled themselves in its smoker the conductor remarked, cheerily: "You've picked the slowest on the run, but it's our most respectable train; only the best people ride on it."

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RAIN was buried in the cemetery ten miles down the line, in a plot close to the track, where his eternal slumber will be lulled by the roar of passing traffic. His grave adjoined that of Mrs. Spring, wife of the dean of the 5:19, who chose the site so he could view it twice daily from the car window. The interment was announced to be "at the convenience of the family;" its privacy certainly was to the convenience of his friends. To them, without more, the funeral was disturbing enough. Two regulars missed the 5:19 that night, and a bridge game had to be called off in consequence.

Friday evening found Ketchum with his equanimity quite restored, although he did look with more than usual suspicion and resentment at old Spring, whose high color, shortness of breath, and excitability threatened another funeral. He sank naturally into his usual seat, the second one behind the center on the left side of the third car, and immediately became absorbed in "Percy and Ferdie" or "The Toonerville Trolley" (whichever paper it was he invariably opened first). Peace was his for only a moment, when the departed Train's memory was again thrust upon him. A mutual friend-a city dweller, ignorant of or indifferent to the mores of commutation-spied Ketchum, thrust himself into the small fraction of the seat which, in spite of every effort, Ketchum had never quite been able to

E strode rapidly home, despite the

ily, dressed in a hurry, and rushed to the Bells, next door, ten minutes late for a seven-o'clock dinner. Of the four couples in the party, two of the men were regular traveling companions of Ketchum's; the other was an outsider— rather a wet blanket, as is any stranger in an intimate circle, for he always took the 7:58 and frequently missed the 5:19, and unpopular too, because early in his residence at Carrville he was reported as saying that he had been there long enough to learn that commutation is correctly spelled with four letters, ending in "double 1." The conversation at dinner and during the bridge game afterward consisted of narratives of the women's experiences with domestics, interspersed with jokes by the men growing out of occurrences on the train and remarks concerning business aside among themselves. Some gossip about how Train left his family provided for was the only diversion from these customary topics. The church clock around the corner struck a doleful twelve as Ketchum, worn out, sank into bed, after having arranged his clothes, as a fireman does, in serial order from inside outward, so as to be most expeditiously got into on rising, and he lapsed into unconsciousness with the thought that his sleep would be eighty minutes short of normal.

I

N a recent number of the "New Republic" there is a review by Miss Amy Lowell of "Punch," Conrad Aiken's latest volume of poetry. This is not to be a study of Aiken's "Punch" or a study of Miss Lowell's study of "Punch." It has only to do with a bit of literary philosophy contained in the last paragraph of Miss Lowell's review. Here is her dictum: "That 'Punch' is miles over the heads of the public need scarcely be stated, but-and possibly even for that reason-I am willing to suppose that it holds the future firmly in its grasp."

Perhaps I am mistaken, but I have always been under the impression that food was something to be eaten. The battlemented pastry in a caterer's windows may be a delight to the eye, likewise the rented fruit piece on an English dining table, but somehow these specimen pieces contribute little to the nourishment of the human race. I wonder if there is not a parallel to be drawn between such pastry, such fruit, and poetry which is "miles over the heads of the public."

The search for an answer to this question opens up long avenues for thought. One might begin by trying to compile a list of unread books of poetry which have really lived. I do not mean books which have lived only in the theses of Doctors of Philosophy. I mean books which enter directly into the spiritual fabric of our present thought. When I ask for the names of these books, I feel very much like assuming the attitude of a Congressman, conscious of the irrefutability of his arguments, who is about generously to remark, "I pause for a reply." That phrase is seldom used by speakers who expect any other answer than the echo of their own voices.

If you will grant my premise that books which are unread can hardly be said to live, I should like to amble for a while down some of the other avenues of thought opened to view by Miss Lowell's pontification.

I think Miss Lowell was attempting to praise Aiken's last volume when she said, "Punch' is miles over the heads of the public," but I doubt extremely whether a poet should feel flattered by such a statement. Whether or not he does, of course, depends upon his own definition of poetry and its function.

Some years ago Joyce Kilmer asked me, on about two hours' notice, to take over his evening class in the writing of poetry at New York University. I assented with misgivings which were more than justified by the result. The best I could do was to prolong the agony of comment and interpretation for some three-quarters of an hour. In desperation I finally called for questions from the class. There was silence for a mo ment, and then a lady of the severest

mien rose and asked: "Mr. Pulsifer, what is poetry?" I did not know the answer to her question then; I do not know it now, although I do know that a great many of the rhymed and unrhymed lucubrations which drift into the Outlook office do not fall within that mysterious category. I should, for one, be quite happy if I could believe that I always recognized poetry when I saw it, even though I might not be able to define and describe the qualities that differentiated the false from the true.

It is perhaps less difficult to define one's conception of the function of poetry than to lay down rules for its recognition, just as it is easier for a child, if it is asked, "What is a horse?" to answer, "Why, a horse is something to ride on," than it is for this same child to give a definition which will satisfy a trained scientist.

It is the function of poetry, as I conceive it, to interpret man to man. There are certain experiences, emotions, hungers, and desires which are common to all humanity. They are to be found in the hearts of that public to which Miss Lowell refers just as certainly as they are to be found in the hearts of poets and philosophers. These experiences, emotions, hungers, and desires comprise the fundamentals of life. They have changed little, if any, since the days of Homer. Yet to every generation since that time they have come with the force of a new revelation. To every individual in each generation they have presented a bewilderingly complex mystery, a Cretan labyrinth illumined only by a faint and flickering starlight from the past.

To know that others have lived through these same experiences, that others have felt hatred and love, that others have hungered and desired, is of itself a step towards the understanding of our own aspirations. The world is less lonely when we conceive of it as peopled by spirits who have laughed as we may laugh and who have wept as we must weep.

These fundamentals of life, so common and yet so strange, are the materials from which the poet must work his miracles of understanding. It is his task to clarify human experience and to crystallize his interpretation thereof in a form imperishably beautiful. This conception of the function of poetry excludes nothing which men have found enduringly worth while either in structure or content.

To say that it is the function of the poet to interpret life is not by any means to say that the poet should be didactic in aim or concerned chiefly with moral problems. One of the things that every editor knows is that the verse which is submitted for his consideration with some such introductory appeal as, "I have shown this poem to

my minister and he tells me that it ought to be published because of the Good that it will do," seldom deserves even a cursory reading. The spiritual end of poetry is seldom to be attained by the attack direct. The realization of the finer ambitions of life, like the realization of happiness, is not to be had by those who pursue such realization relentlessly. Poetry finds its opportunity for interpretation of life, not in premeditated exposition, but in illustration and practice. Perhaps it may be possible to make this point clearer by citing a few poems which have been of high service in the world, and which by no possibility can be considered as "over the heads of the public."

It might be well to begin with a writer whose work has supplied many people with an excuse for regarding themselves as intellectually superior to the common run of folk, and yet a writer who, when he chose, spoke with the clearest and simplest of voices. I am thinking of such a poem as Robert Browning's "The Last Ride Together." Certainly such a poem is not didactic in purpose. It is no handbook of conduct for rejected lovers, and yet I think there must have been many thousands who have drawn courage and understanding from that poem, the courage to take up their life again with heads held high, ready to say with Cyrano, "I may have lost everything, but not mon panache." Browning in a single dramatic poem has gone straight to the heart of an experience as old as the world, as new as the youngest flower. He has given the power of his vision to others, and for that reason "The Last Ride Together" will live when the cryptic mazes of "The Ring and the Book" have long ceased to worry any one save thesis writers and historians. The same quality of understanding and illumination is to be discovered in such poems as Wordsworth's "She Was a Phantom of Delight," in Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar," in (here perhaps for a more restricted audience) Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven," and in Poe's "To Helen," and in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." This is a diverse catalogue of poems, covering, if not all the aspirations of life, at least some which have touched every spirit.

It would be a hardy critic who ventured the thought that any of these poets had, in the instances which I have cited, written down to the public in order that he might be understood. There have been poets who have written down, and at times gained a sweeping popularity in their own generation, but they have paid for it by oblivion in the years that followed. They have gained their popularity, not by simpleness of utterance and clarity of understanding, but by riding upon the wave of some temporary enthusiasm. In his own time Tom Moore attained an eminence denied