edy which is worked out with genuine strength in "The Secret Woman." Ann Redvers has ceased to be swayed by the young passion of love before she comes upon the scene; she is the wronged wife and the suffering mother at the threshold of the story. "The Secret Woman" is the most coherent of Mr. Phillpotts's Moor tales. It pursues the problem of Ann's life with a psychological carefulness which is sometimes wanting in his stories. Its composition shows just values and unity of design. The details of workmanship are subservient to the theme, not opportunities to escape from it, as so often seems the case. Even the descriptions of the nature he loves so well are attuned to the harmonies of the soul-struggle which proceeds relentlessly.

The really sublime picture of Ann struggling between her desire to save her own soul by confession and punishment, and the mother love which will not let her sacrifice her sons, is drawn with compelling dis. tinctness. For their sakes she will bear the daily torment of doing what she believes to be wrong; for their sakes she will face even eternal punishment. The adoring devotion of Michael, the younger son, is also drawn with great strength and beauty. His strong young nature finds all its fulfillment in the complete surrender of his whole being toward the saving of his mother, first by compelling her to hide her guilt and then by helping her to her

atonement.

The one woman whom Mr. Philipotts has portrayed as stronger than her own passions is a mother. One cannot fail to note the beautiful reverence with which the love of Michael for his mother is expressed. Modern fiction has nowhere a more exquisite portrayal of the love of mother and son than the picture of Ann and Michael Redvers.

When Ann, sanctified by years of penal servitude, seeks to lead, in her whitesouled forgiveness, Salome, her husband's mistress and her son's destruction, back to the light, she urges her to go to the early sacrament on Christmas morning.

"Turn, Salome. I, that be sixty years, speak to your forty. There's the only road

the frost on these dear graves-be the thought-out invention of our God. . . . Be your sad soul a small thing to Him? 'Twas for you the Little Child opened His eyes this day. . . . Believe there's no darkness on earth that God an' man working together can't turn into light. I've learned that; an' I've learned what God's forgiveness means. Ours be but the shadow of His. He comes three parts of the way. . . . Oh, Salome! not for all the past us have suffered, but for all the future us may dare to hope. An' if not for me, do it for them."

They stood together in Belstone churchyard, Michael and Ann and Salome, the only ones left on earth after the whirlwind of love and hate; of passion, with its fruitage of sorrow; of vengeance and atonement; Anthony and Jesse at their feet-dead twenty years before, but never gone out of the lives of the two women who stood above them in the dawn of Christmas morning. Salome's earthly, sluggish nature never aroused to the spiritual ideal, only to her longing, her hungry longing, for the dead. Now she answered to that last appeal only. "If not for me, do it for them." For a moment Salome knelt by the old church door, then the dead arrested her. “He'd have said, 'Bide and do what she told you.' "Presently she followed those who approached the table and knelt before it, where it stood immaculate above, draped in a festal cloth below. Light rained down and quenched the candles and touched the petals of exotic flowers; the air of the sanctuary was sweet with them, but Salome's thoughts harbored in the dust." She had learned but one reverence in all her life, and that was for Ann, the woman whose life she had ruined; the woman who in all her public trial had shielded the name of the "secret woman "who was her husband's mistress, and for whose sake she had nurdered him. Yet with her reverence for Ann there mingled neither shame nor contrition; only regret that love had so short a fulfillment. ""Twas never no sin," she said of her past with Anthony, "unless undyin' love be a sin." In her there was no possibility of spiritual suffering. A beautiful, sensuous, "sleepyeyed" animal, impassioned only for happiness, happiness immediate and personal!

Devonshire humor has its own flavor, irresistible, subtle, and delicious. It is

everywhere present in Mr. Phillpotts's stories when he lets the people speak for themselves. One grows very friendly with those old peasants who sweeten life with their homely banter. Leaning over Tavy's bridge, or sitting in the sun as one climbs the steep hill out of Chagford, you will find them, shrewd and quaint and ever ready to talk. Their wisdom, their fine philosophy, is shown in old Churdles Ash's statement of his policy: "An' when you come up to my ripe years, Jonah, you'll go limpin' to meet the li'l' pleasures that be left to 'ee half way. As for the pains, Fegs they meets you half way.

Mr. Phillpotts has lived so close to his people, has been so intimate a companion of the hedges and the ferns and the flowers, that he has woven his Dartmoor stories out of his own inner life. The two novels, "The American Prisoner" and "The Poacher's Wife," which have least

of the Moor life, are the most commonplace of his writings. Even his humor, which is very genuine and charming as one sees it in "Folly and Fresh Air" and the sketches of his school life near Moreton Hampstead, is not remarkable for its originality. It is very delightful, and quite British, but it might have been the work of any one of several modern Englishmen.

The Dartmoor of "The River" and "The Secret Woman" and "The Sons of the Morning" is Mr. Phillpotts's own field, where he is master. No one else can portray the Moorman, with his carefully concealed superstition and his frank common sense, with his humor and his uncompromising manliness, and no other writer can make one know the wonderful blending of beauty and wildness and mystery which is Dartmoor itself, as he has done it.

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O runs the exploiting motto used by the Board of Commerce : "In Detroit, Life is Worth Living." The inquirer may well ask why this assertion is made; he may properly turn it into a question, and proceed to seek an answer amid the homes, the work-places, and the institutions of the Michigan metropolis.

An ancient, picturesque, and interesting histor, such as is presented by the city which has resulted because Cadillac liked the shores of the short but lovely river through which he boated in 1701, does not give an adequate answer to the living question. Indeed, this same Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac was as thoughtlessly willing to make the future Detroit unfit to live in as have been thousands of other city founders who wrote glowingly of the beauty they were about to destroy. "Where the living and crystal waters keep the banks always green . . . where the woods are full of game and the waters of fish, and where the swans in the river are so numerous that one might take for lilies the reeds in which they crowd," rhapsodizes the impressionable Frenchman; but the careless and sordid village which he established inside the stockade of Fort Detroit was as unnecessarily ugly as are too many American cities to-day. I cannot avoid the parenthetical and pessimistic reflection that the average American is always ready to boast of such beauty pertaining to his city as he and his fellowcitizens have not yet had power or time thoughtlessly to destroy, while obtusely overlooking the definite financial value of both natural and created beauty in or about any inhabited community.

Nor can volume of business, nor vast ness of manufactured product, nor political importance, make a community worth living in, it seems to me. Necessary is the trade, and desirable is the importance; but to have a place in which life is worth living, there must also be the home spirit, expressing itself in dwelling and street,

and in the harmony of beautiful surroundings.

One

So one may examine Detroit, and be promptly convinced that its forty-one square miles include an unusual proportion of pleasant and separate homes, each claiming a bit of green as its own. always expects and usually with reason -to find the well-to-do housed in ample space, and with pleasant trees and flowers to refresh from the sterner sights of business; but to find the cheaper labor in such average comfort as in Detroit is a surprise. The streets for which South Europe has furnished the population, and the localities where Africans congregate, are not crowded, nor as sordid as in far too many cities. Dirt is there, but less than I have seen in prouder communities. The laborer, whom I found to be well paid in Detroit, is likewise fairly well housed. For him, Detroit more nearly makes good her boast than one might expect.

In checkerboard-planned American cities the streets are too often narrow and of senseless rectilinearity. To find here in Detroit even a little evidence of sane planning, and to find that the Father of his Country, the many-sided Washington, was indirectly responsible for this condition, was another surprise. Fire wiped out in 1805 almost every vestige of Cadillac's ugly town, and Judge Woodward, the master spirit of the hurt community, wisely introduced the ideas he had seen being worked into the great plan for the Federal City under Washington's eye by Major L'Enfant. Only a part of his propositions were made effective; but three fine radial avenues and a central half-circle, the "Grand Circus," remain as monuments to his wisdom. There are also two other open spaces, the Campus Martius and Cadillac Square, which might have been made valuable focal points for harmonious architecture if foresight had not been in early Detroit days as absent as in other American cities.

But many of the streets are wide, and most of them have grass-plots and beautiful trees, being thus made distinctly "livable" upon. There is scarcity of enough available and convenient recreation parks and playgrounds, so that this frequency of tree and grass-plot is doubly useful.

But Detroit is especially proud of her "Grand Boulevard," inclosing in its open square, of which the river forms the southern boundary, the most of the city. Twelve miles of a wide green ribbon, set with great trees, thus distinguish this city, and strengthen its claim as to life being here worth living. Not less than one hundred and fifty feet wide anywhere, and expanding to two hundred feet in places;

wisely diversified in its treatment; lined all along with homes, humble as well as stately, and with dignified manufacturing establishments in view from some of its broad reaches, I do not know its equal in America. That it is ill kept in part is incidental and temporary; the essential thing is that it takes a place for eye-resting down into the smoky business heart of a bustling city, and that it is so much the pride of Detroit as to be an institution not to be assailed.

Described as "the backbone of Detroit," and starting ingloriously at what might well have been a superbly beautiful water entrance to the city at the blue-flowing river, Woodward Avenue cuts through the very heart of the city, touching the Campus