Jews. He stated with some assurance that all Jews had black hair and dark complexions, while my father was blond and blue-eyed.

My father sent Nathan and myself to a Sunday school at this time. Here we heard the Bible read and were taught principally from the Old Testament. Our teacher was a gunsmith who had more piety than knowledge. What he lacked in erudition he made up in good intentions. But long talks with my father formed the backbone of my religious instruction.

FIRST LESSONS IN ORATORY

In 1863 our family moved to Columbus, Georgia. A great, a tremendous city, I thought-blocks of brick houses, a broad Main Street, 12,000 inhabitants. The public school had not yet been established in Georgia. Off I was sent to schoolmaster Flynn's private institution of learning, where I was taught the three R's, Latin, and elocution-a great Ideal of the last. For, South and North, it was the great oratorical period. Like the rest, I practiced before the mirror and under the trees. Though my first piece before the school assembly was an avowal of undying courage, a recital of John Adams's "Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I am for the Constitution," I could not resist stage fright. I sank and swam-lived and died-survived and perished-with shaky knees.

Flynn was no rod-sparer and childspoiler, so I was not sorry, a year later, when his school was discontinued, to study under Dr: Dewey, who was less severe and had wider sympathy and culture. Under him I began Virgil and afterwards 'Horace.

There were no public libraries there, and few individuals excepting professional men had many books. The standard assortment consisted of the Bible, Josephus, Burns. A few had Shakespeare's works.

Aside from my school readings I was not bookish. Boys of my age led an outdoor life there. Barefoot nine months of the year, each of us the possessor of a shotgun, we hunted wild fowl and rabbits in season and out and indulged passionately in all the seasonable sports, top-spinning, marbles, ball-playing the last not in the form to-day, but a game called town ball.

seen

COFFEE MADE OF SWEET POTATOES

Our home was comfortable, wholesome, hospitable, and our wants so few and simple that I felt as happy and independent as any child of the richest. My mother was an excellent manager, and on very moderate resources the house shone with cheerfulness.

Life in the South, except among the owners of large plantations who entertained on a lavish scale, was simple. A simple life has its advantages in inducing self-help and in not making one unhappy because of the absence of those things which are regarded as luxuries.

I recall that in our part of the country coffee was unobtainable except when a few bags arrived on a ship that had run the blockade. Our mothers found a palatable substitute by cutting sweet potatoes in little cubes, drying them in the sun, then roasting and grinding them as one would the ordinary bean. This made a palatable drink colored like coffee, and without the harmful stimulant of caffeine. When salt gave out and candles became scarce, ingenuity came into play. Every family had its smoke-house for curing meats, and the earth floors of the smoke-houses were found to be permeated considerably with salt from previous curings; so a method of extraction was devised. Candleseach family knew how to make them from a mixture of fat and beeswax melted and poured into tin molds. We children helped our mothers make those candles. They gave a soft light for our living-room and for our studies at night.

Looking backward and making comparisons between my observations as a boy in the South and later in the North, I find there was much more freedom of expression in the North than in the South. Few people in the South would venture to express themselves against the current of dominant opinion upon matters of sectional importance. The institution of slavery with all that it implied seemed to have had the effect of enslaving, or, to use a milder term, checking, freedom of expression on the part of the master class only in lesser degree than among the slaves themselves.

In our town, as in all Southern communities, the better families were kind, especially to their household slaves, whom they regarded as members of the family requiring guardianship and protection, as if they were children. And the slaves addressed their masters by their first names and their mistresses as "Miss." My mother, for instance, was "Miss Sara." I recall one of our servants pleading with my mother:

"Miss Sara, won't you buy me? I want to stay here. I love you and the white folks here, and I am afraid my master will hire me out or sell me to some one else."

At that time we hired our servants from their masters, whom we paid an agreed price. But, as the result of such constant pleadings, my father purchased household slaves one by one from their masters, although neither he nor my. mother believed in slavery. If we children spoke to the slaves harshly or disregarded their feelings, we were promptly checked and reprimanded by our parents. My father also saw to it that our two men-servants learned a trade; the one learned tailoring and the other how to make shoes, though it was regarded as disloyal-at any rate, looked upon with suspicion-if a master permitted a slave boy or girl to be taught even reading and writing. When later we came North, we took with us the two, youngest servants, one a boy about my age, and the other a girl a little older. They were too young to look out for themselves, and, so far as they knew, they had no relatives. We kept them with us until they grew up and could look out for themselves.

BY HAROLD VINAL

I

T seemed a trifle cocky and amusing for a flivver to turn into Million aires' Row. The house in question,

a club-like block of buff brick, with garage to match, stood cool and impressive behind a formal lawn.

As a matter of fact, the man in the flivver was neither cocky nor a millionaire, although the number of servants in his house proclaimed the latter. He was merely Martin, of Martin & Co., jobbers in paper and twine; a stocky, round-headed man who wore his hair clipped in summer and his overcoat in winter.

Every one at the office swore by him. There were few who at one time or another had not been given a lift home in his flivver sedan.

But he was in no such favor at the house he was now approaching. Peter, his wife's chauffeur, rolled the garage doors for him with a superior expression. The same indefinable something lurked in the bland face of the butler as he unchained the side door.

"The lady about, Oliver?" queried Martin, in his cheerful, business-bred democracy.

"Madame is not down as yet, I think,

sir."

ARTIN nodded a chin chiseled by

M long arguments with competition,

hung his inexpensive hat on the glittering newel lamp, and started vigorously up the wide padded stairs. Behind him with a shrug, Oliver lifted the hat gingerly to the antlered rack overhanging the massive hall table.

At the same moment in the upper hall the door to a bedroom opened and Mrs. Elisabeth Martin emerged, suited, hatted, and gloved. She stopped, a trifle surprised to see her husband home from the office before five-thirty. He met her glance of modulated doubt with hearty enthusiasm.

"Got some news, Bess. Came home a little early to celebrate. Saved around twelve thousand to-day on a rotten market! The way things are now, that's something to brag about."

BY CONRAD RICHTER

His wife's face showed perfunctory appreciation.

"That is-something." She hesitated, her eyes revealing first the thought behind them. "I must confess I have felt like a beggar recently. The Steeses have bought the Temple antiques. They are going to store their own lovely furniture. Imagine that wonderful old home furnished with those priceless things!" Her voice became bitter. "And we do not even own a stamp collection."

Her husband glanced soberly past her into the bedroom beyond, from which the perfume of her bath came luxu riantly. Certain of the eagerness had left his eyes. His voice, however, remained strong.

"You've got to realize, Bess, that a jobber doesn't have margin enough to make a million. In fact, just now, with his warehouse full and the market going the wrong way, his margin is against him." His eyes forcibly regained their buoyancy. "But nobody can say it isn't a great spring day. They called it summer down at the office. What do you say to running out to the farm a couple days and loaf around, I've been plugging pretty hard. Guess you have, too. Do us good."

Mrs. Elisabeth Traylor Martin's face revealed traces of slight irritation.

"I cannot understand, George, why you persist in remaining so stubbornly attached to that place when you know how it annoys me. We are really quite beyond the 'farm stage,' although you don't seem aware of it. I have been always thankful Mrs. Steese has never seen it. I can imagine her secret amusement at your red barn and whitewashed house. There is no effort to keep it from being terribly common."

"Why, that's the best part of it," protested her injured husband. "It lets us get this house and the help off our back. We're free. Nobody expects us to dress up or not to chop wood or help milk the COWS or feed the stock-or dry the dishes, if we want to."

For a second he thought he had aroused a latent spark in his wife's eyes.

HOUSE"

"Remember," he pleaded on, "when we started housekeeping in that two-room apartment on Second Street. Remember how our writing-table couldn't hold all the dinner dishes, so you had to put the bread-plate and sugar-bowl on the footboard of the bed. Remember how when company came somebody had to sit on the fancy cushion on the high trunk and somebody had to sit on the bed. Those were happy days, Bess!"

"They were ridiculously silly," replied his wife. "We were so simple-minded we didn't know what pleasures we were missing. Any one can be happy if they wish to be ignorant. If you feel an incurable tendency toward the country, George, why not buy a place like the Merrils'? You remember the big hedge along River Road. The house is Elizabethan, with a wonderful casino for teas. There is room for the servants and quarters for the gardeners. The Riverside Country Club is right aside. You can golf. The greenhouse and flowers are simply gorgeous. I am sure, if we bought, Mrs. Merril would propose my name to the Garden Club. George, Junior, should never feel ashamed to invite his friends there."

"Good Lord!" said her husband. "He isn't ashamed to ask them out to the farm, is he?"

"Let us hope so," devoutly commended his wife.

"I can't believe that, Bess. There's fifty times more fun for a boy on our farm than the slick Merril place."

"Perhaps for a boy when you were one," informed his wiser half. "Not for a boy to-day."

"If there's an animal that doesn't change," declared Martin positively, "it's a boy."

Downstairs on the library's white mantel a clock chimed. His wife drew back a hurried coat sleeve, then has tened to the head of the stairs.

George, Junior." She plucked a hair from her skirt. "If you care to run out, to the Merril place next week, I will try to go along. I know you will rave when you see it." At the sound of the rolling garage door she gave a dainty gesture of gloved adieu and gracefully descended the noiseless stairs.

THE car door clashed. The noise of the

T"

motor was subsequently lost in the stream of traffic on the street. Martin remained glancing out of the three slender landing windows to the grim graystone wall of the old Muhlenberg house next door. Mary, the upstairs girl, came blundering in from the back hall, humming a little Gaelic song she had learned in County Clare thirty years before. He did not glance up or around.

Later the sound of fresh young voices from the drive roused him. They were in the front hall by the time he descended the stairs-George, Junior, and another boy from the Select Hill School; Herbert, his first name was. He lived a few doors away in a brand-new Colonial pile. Martin greeted them with unaffected heartiness.

"Well, boys, how does a day like this strike your blood? How'd you fellows like to run out with me to the farm to-morrow morning?"

There was little of the expected boyish whoop. Martin saw the other youth inspect him almost brazenly from head to foot.

"How'd we go?" wondered his own boy without much enthusiasm.

"Well," replied his father, jocularly, "my Rolls-Royce ought to hold a couple lightweights like us."

Now he was nearly certain it was insolence in the eyes of the strange boy. His own son scorned him passively.

"I don't see what you want us to get shook up in a tin lizzie all the way out there for! There's nothing special going on, is there? I'm not crazy over just hiking around some old fields. Are you, Herbert?"

"I'm not!" observed that youth with cold finality.

Martin looked slightly jolted.

"You don't want to drive horses, or jump in the haymow, or go fishing, or chew birch bark, or look for a phoebe's nest on a day like this!" he demanded, incredulously.

George, Junior, looked to his friend. That young man slightly curled the corner of his mouth. The father played his last card.

"Well, look here. How about getting Mrs. Hopple to make fresh strawberry ice-cream. How's that?"

"Oh, Lord, dad," said George, Junior, "I had only two ice-cream sodas to-day! Besides, I'm going out to Herbert's country place to-morrow. They have a garage with four cars and a boat-house with a thirty-foot launch." He turned with sudden interest to his companion. "You said you'd make Thomas show me how to run the electric!" The Herbert boy assented. They hurried out by the

"This is Martin," he answered in the little booth at the end of the hall, an upright coffin that reeked with expensive cigarette incense. "Oh, howdy, Ed? . . . Six wires in one hour, Ed! They must have had a powwow. I'll say so. Six cents is some drop. I guess we'll have to let her drop. What's the loss? . . . I said, what's the loss if we do lose something? What's a hundred thousand dollars? . . . No, I'm not crazy, Ed. I I said, I was crazy. I'm not

was.

now.

I guess I don't understand myself, Ed. Cheer up. If I'm not worried, you got no reason to be. See you to-morrow. Good-night." He hung up. Somehow the world seemed better, his back a bit eased from the long unsuspected strain.

M

RS. Elisabeth Traylor Martin re turned to the buff-brick home in Millionaires' Row a day earlier than she had anticipated. Her husband heard her soprano voice greet Oliver briefly at the front door. He was surprised to find himself so calm. A week ago, under a similar crisis, he would have been wanting to pace the room. Now as he heard the quick steps to the library he had to force himself to lay down his magazine.

"Hello, Bess!" he greeted kindly, rising. "Have a nice time?"

There was no reply from the white, frightened-looking woman. Swiftly she closed the door to the broad hall, then advanced unsteadily to the other side of the richly lighted birch table.

"It can't the paper this morning couldn't-if you're taking it like this!" He bowed his head in simple emotion. "Martin & Company's failed, Bess. My fault principally. Paper's been too high. We carried too much stock. When the drop came, we couldn't unload." He made a crude reluctant gesture. got to be brave, Bess. I asked Harry Trine to buy the farm, so the Hopples would have a decent landlord."

"You

"Not everything, George?" agonized his wife, piteousness in her eyes.

He brought down his head the infinitesimal part of an inch that was necessary. With a little cry she dropped into the high wing-chair by the white fireplace. Daze, horror, humiliation, reproach, self-pity chained her face. Presently she rose and managed to walk from the room. Standing by the library table, he could hear the key turn in her lock upstairs.

She did not come down at any time during the following day, but, to his eminent relief, appeared for breakfast the third morning, pale, bitterly resigned to the inevitable. The meal, for

the most part, was eaten in silence. The father never remembered seeing George, Junior's, young quantity of self-assurance so scattered and subdued. It was as if he had suddenly become aware of higher powers in the world than his

own.

In the hall, later in the morning, she asked whether they could not leave the city. It did not matter where just so they should meet no one she knew. She also wished she might be permitted to escape the harrowing details of the sale, the humiliation before the servants and neighbors.

He assured her on both counts earnestly. Without comment she started upstairs. As if on second thought, she turned on the landing and gave him the ghost of a rallying smile. It lightened for him much of that gray day.

To his slight surprise, George, Junior, instead of accompanying her, preferred to remain by the sinking ship. It was to be the first auction of his young life, and his intimate rôle in the proceedings was too rare to be wasted. The red flag especially excited his boyish interest. Young Herbert from the Colonial pile was not in evidence.

The servants in a body attended. Peter, the only married one of the group, bought a few trifles, to the whispered applause of the others. Once Martin thought he saw Mary dab at her eyes, but he wasn't sure. She stood a little apart from her companions. The prices paid seemed like some harsh burlesque. He was thankful Bess was not there to be tortured.

It was late when he and Junior said a final good-by to the house, now cold and unfamiliar in bare walls and floors. The boy had insisted upon remaining without supper until the end. His unfevered young eyes had missed nothing. As piece after piece of furniture, long intimates of his young life, were knocked down to strangers and carried out, he seemed to grasp the deeper meaning and extent of his family's misfortune. Once or twice Martin found his eyes on him with that mute understand ing that comes from the unknown to grip the hearts of companions in distress.

"What are you going to do now?" he whispered in the trolley en route to the small hotel where his mother awaited them.

"Oh," said his father, with an effort toward his old heartiness, "I guess I can find a job some place."

THEY unearthed a small, sordidly furnished apartment in Elverson, a thriving little city thirty-two miles east. The apartment was on the third floor. When the wind was from the east, it brought to their nostrils the acrid taste of a cigar factory; from the west, smoke from a tall stack several squares distant. The apartment curtains and bed-linen were hardly immaculate in consequence, and the window-sills persisted in cinders. But George, Junior's, mother informed her husband, far rather this than

the hourly dread of being pitied or snubbed in Pennver.

Though times were none of the best, Martin's experience found him a ready job, covering city and outlying suburbs for a local house of paper jobbers handling everything from scented stationery to butcher paper. His commissions were small at first, and several of his wife's gowns disappeared into the maw of a second-hand dealer. She deprecated the act with the assurance that she would not need them now. Nevertheless her husband knew that under any woman's skin the parting with dainty loveliness would hurt. The following Saturday noon he stopped at a little white candy kitchen on the avenue. When she glimpsed the unmistakable box under his arm, she gave an impulsive little girlish cry. Later he noticed George, Junior, with a lump of caramel in his cheek, regarding him with a degree of respect never quite attained before.

Their first pay barely met expenses. The mother of the household announced with traces of bridal resourcefulness that something would have to be done. Why not let George, Junior, help, at least for the summer? Martin nodded. He might be able to land the boy a job in the paper house at eight dollars a week. At the sound of eight dollars a week the eyes of the boy's mother gleamed.

George, Junior, himself was not averse to the idea. The romance and adventure of a daily job palled after a little, but he confided to his mother he "would rather work any day than lay around that hot apartment."

June grew steadily warmer. Now they knew why their apartment had been so fortunately found vacant. No other on their floor caught such a blast from the afternoon sun, and there were no awnings to shield. On the Fourth of July they packed a lunch and ate it by the goldfish pond in City Park. Their sense of appreciation, it seemed, had never been so keen, the shade of cool trees so grateful, the green freshness of grass such a miracle. They stayed until dark to see the fireworks. A shower deluged the trolley on the way home. The breeze felt like paradise when they got off at the corner. It was good to open the apartment windows and let through the fresh, rain-washed air.

J'

ULY remained hot, and the early days of August in the city grew unbearable. The fourth evening Martin came home early. As he stepped from the trolley he had the feeling of having lived this moment before. As he mounted the last flight of stairs the sensation persisted. His wife, in shirt-waist, bareheaded, pocketbook in hand, had emerged from the apartment, visibly intent on grocer or delicatessen. She stopped, surprised to see him before six o'clock. He met her glance of doubt with open enthusi

asm.

"Got some news for you, Bess.

Couldn't resist coming home a little early to celebrate. I sold two tons of super to a printer not four blocks from here, and eighteen reams of M. F. My commission alone's forty dollars. Boss was so tickled he gave it to me in cash."

"Forty dollars, George!" She retreated in excitement to the apartment and counted the four ten-dollar bills he placed in her hands. "We'll put it away at once toward the house!" She gave a little girlish cry of admiration. "How did you do it, George?"

"Oh, I talked up our paper like a Dutch preacher." His eyes shone. One arm imprisoned her. "What do you say to taking a run out in the country for a little vacation, Bess? I've been plugging pretty hard. So have you. It'll do us both good. Junior can go along."

She strove to resist the instant glow that had appeared in her eyes.

"I know it would be heaven to get away. But the house"

"Don't you be afraid of the house!" enthused her husband. "I promise you we'll be able to afford a little one by next summer. Waiting till then'll only make us appreciate it right. Besides," he added, "we can't very well get out of it now. I called Hopple up this afternoon, and he and his wife made me promise to bring you and Junior out. They didn't want to take anything, but I insisted on seven dollars a week. They've had blankets on their bed every night this week. He's going to start cutting oats about Friday. They've got four fresh Jersey cows and their garden's full of green peas and new potatoes."

"Oh, George!" weakly capitulated his wife.

"Maybe he'll knock off some board if George and I help him in the field," speculated Martin.

T had been a torrid day, and Junior looked washed out as he came in at five-thirty. Some interest appeared, however, when he found his father home before him, talking portentously to his mother over the supper stove.

"How

"Well, kid!" greeted Martin. does a day like this strike you? How'd you like to run out to the farm with your mother and me?"

There was a skeptical stare from the youth.

"Your boss ought to leave you off if you call him up at the house to-night," suggested his father. "That is, if you want to drive horses, or chew tea leaves, or look for wild hens' nests-and maybe go in swimming."

The boy's tiredness magically vanished.

"Jiminy, dad! Where'd we get the coin?"

"I talked with Mrs. Hopple over the phone to-day," went on the father. "She said maybe she'd make fresh peach icecream."

"Gosh!" sputtered the boy. "Say, you call up Old Man Earl, will you, dad? Tell him I got to go-just got to! I'll

go along down to the drug-store and give you his number. Come on. Be a sport! Will you, dad?"

Martin did. Later, after supper, they gathered around the ironing-boardMother Martin actively to prepare, the useless male members of the household to talk of the morrow. Movies were forgotten. For nearly an hour Martin enlarged on his boyhood adventures on the farm. It was late when the bags were packed. The last thing Martin heard as he fell asleep was the sleepless voice of his son wanting to know if Kettle Creek was "over your head."

Seven-thirty the next morning the Martin family ensconced itself luxuriously on a pair of blue-plush seats in a day coach bound for Pennver. Junior sat ahead at an open window, hair and wash tie flying in the breeze. Frequently he turned to radiate on some passing sight. He need have no fear of his mother missing anything. Her window also was open, her shirt-waist fluttering deliciously in the grateful draft. The fresh odors of midsummer fields and woods, the romantic spice of railway ties simmering in an August sun, came even as far as Martin, who sat beside her. Before them passed a vision of God's cool green hills dotted with hardy upland homesteads. The faint blue wall of a mountain stood far beyond.

IVE priceless days in the fresh Eden

FIV

of Hopple Farm had already passed when Mr. Trine, the owner, drove up. After dinner the two old friends, Trine and Martin, sallied out for a walk to Big Sandy Spring. They had hardly reached the rear of the barn when the attorney turned to his companion with pent-up feeling.

"I want to take back that fool promise I made not to come up to Elverson to see you."

"What's the matter with you?" demanded Martin, with slow wrath hardly befitting his station. "You have my power of attorney, haven't you?"

"Your blamed Government bonds!" complained the other. "They touched par last week. I sold them, as you said, and the money's been lying in the bank at a measly three per cent."

"Three!" swallowed Martin. "Well, that's good. Just let it stay there-unless you know some place you can get two."

"Listen, George-" began the attorney. "Doggone it, Harry! The proposition was that you'd do the worrying over the money. That's what you're getting paid for."

"That's all right. I'm not complaining," hastened the lawyer. "I just want to give you my free honest opinion that it's over my head and ears when a man comes and pays seven dollars a week board on his own farm."

"I never knew it was criminal to be happy," asserted Martin, unmoved. "Maybe you are," granted Trine, re luctantly. "How about your wife? What

arm.

"Don't you worry about him,

Harry. I'm not any more myself. He's got a first-rate show now to be a man. God willing, he's going to get the rest of it." With a steady hand he lighted the cigar Trine had given him. "And the wife's going to get the finest little onewoman house in the suburbs you ever saw. She's crazy for it. So am I. Stick around till to-morrow, Harry, and I'll show you how a young man like me can pitch oats."

I

N the vast field of inquiry into the processes of Americanization (a field of numberless incognita and not a few mirages) Europe-bound shipping at this time of the year offers interesting opportunities for study. Especially is this true of an Italian transatlantic liner, such as the one that brought us here from New York, with its long passenger list of Americani returning to their native land or on a pleasant tour of Italy; for these Americani are not at all secretive in their views and opinions, and whatever they have acquired of good or bad through transplantation to America is easily observable. It need hardly be said that such a ship-load is in no way an "immigrant cargo" presenting scenes of pathos; far from this, steerage and stateroom decks seemed to sparkle with an atmosphere of success and contentment.

Everywhere aboard the "language of the country" was "Newyorkese," the imperfections in English being due, not to alienage, but to a very rapid assimilation of the American tongue "as she is spoke." The clothes also, though they varied from Grand Street to Fifth Avenue cuts, were all indubitably of American make. Indeed, the Americanization had proceeded so far that one even heard an occasional request at breakfast for grapenuts and shredded wheat, and when an order for pancakes resulted in the presentation of an omelet practically the entire first-class laughed at the tenebrous ignorance of the ship's Sicilian cook. There was one Americano in the "swell set" who might have served as the perfect model of "Material Success" for a poster artist, so happily satisfied did he seem with his diamond-bespangled life and his cabinful of American trophies. Here was an illiterate but wealthy contractor on a triumphal tour of Italy, with well-laid plans to dazzle and jazz the little village of his birth by an exposition of all he carried from America. Each day he and his family donned new clothes; each day our eyes would rest on some new object of luxury taken out of Stateroom No. 1 (how he loved to have stateroom Number ONE!); one day a brand-new

BY GINO SPERANZA

phonograph with all the Caruso disks, and the next day an endless succession of the latest American song and jazz hits; or the new sun would rise on an impeccably perfect smoking set-the longest amber cigarette-holder on the American market, followed by a meerschaum pipe with a bowl to hold a thou sand dreams; and on every other day— a little tentatively this, as if one were slowly training for "the grand manner” -the latest evidence of American success: large, round-rimmed glasses such as stare at us from the oculists' shop windows. Years ago the Italian resorted to gold teeth to prove at least to his countrymen-that he was completely Americanized; to-day the oculist's art supplants or co-operates with the dentist's in the decorative Americanization of the alien.

The

All this was evident on shipboard; all this, and much more; for there were many of the second and a few of the third generation with us, including high school boys who could play baseball but who had never heard of the game of pallone and high school girls from suburban towns rigged out in perfect similitude of the real New York flapper. And yet, after all is said, only a self-illuding optimist could be convinced by this Americanization. substratum, the underlying personality, the real character of ninety-nine per cent of these Americani was distinctly Italic; more than that, it was individually Genoese, Sicilian, or Neapolitan, as the local strain might be, persisting, often unconsciously, from generation to generation, in outlook and manner of thought. Nature works slowly, though it occasionally jumps, and even the span of several generations of American environment is as but a moment in the process of assimilation. Environment makes surface changes, remarkable surface changes, but these are as nothing to the persistence of inherited racial and ethnic qualities and tendencies. This is the basic fact so often neglected by professional "Americanizers" who want "quick effects" from their labors. Take the matter of loyalty to America, for example; it would be hard to find such unassailable patriotism for the United

States as filled the hearts of the people on that ship, a patriotism almost overbearingly proud of everything American; yet indefinitely, or even darkly in the back of almost every mind there, the idea of the patria-that vague yet tremendously cohesive sentiment which binds large groups of men into nations and which constitutes the imponderable force of a well-knit state the idea of the patria as an intellectual and historical patrimony in all of them was Italia, not America. This does not mean disloyalty or any lack of the sense of allegiance to the United States, but it confirms the unescapable fact of racial instinct which Americanization cannot overcome except, possibly, in decades of assimilative processes, if at all. "You are an American?" asked a New York born Italo-American of an old New Yorker who was on the same ship. And to an assenting reply came the further query: "But you are a real American, are you not?" And that, somehow and indefinably, made all the difference for the others on board. The old New Yorker, though a fellow-citizen, was at once, and almost instinctively, recognized as not "in the family;" as one who could not be counted on to always "understand," not even if the old New Yorker spoke Italian and knew Italy a hundredfold better than the high school boy born in Passaic of Genoese parents! Indeed, the New Yorker, however estimable and agreeable, was a "false note" in the ship's harmony, a restraining factor on the rest, who had hoped that, on an Italian ship at least, they could be "themselves again."

Among the other passengers there was a Sicilian family of the well-to-do agricultural class: silent, proud, and wellmannered in a fine primitiveness. The father was returning from a three years' visit to his Americani sons in Ohio; with him were a daughter in good American clothes, and her mother and a maiden aunt. I asked this proud, somewhat medieval character his impressions of America. "Grande paese," he said, adding ungrudgingly, despite his insular pride: "I really believe that in civilta' America is ahead of Sicily." The greatness of the country, its democ