largely in the traditional bookishness of scholars. The terms in which they think, and in which, naturally, they speak, are like:

"Even the planetary satellites share in the peculiarities of the solar system." Hear the man with "platform power": "You may call it The Great First Cause'! You may call it 'Nature'! You may call it anything you like! I call it God-who holds the least of the stars in the hollow of His hand!"

Trouble lies also in the undersurface contempt of the representative scholar for the concessions required to hold the attention of general audiences. They hear the more successful lecturers slide vocally up hill and down. They hear some of them ask themselves questions and answer themselves wittily. They hear practically all of them state a principle, amplify it, and illustrate it, cycle after cycle. And they groan as they hear every speaker who "makes good" tell stories at intervals of not more than five minutes.

Classrooms and laboratories do not train men in such methods. Undergraduates who do not listen merely punish themselves. Story-telling is for entertainers, not scholars.

A jurist who failed at lecturing is, I venture, speaking for hundreds who might serve the Chautauqua admirably but do not, when in deprecation of his own failure he says:

"You know how impossible it is to relieve a subject like penal and correctional reform with anecdote."

A subject like "The Yoke of the Law" beyond anecdote! Lincoln would not find it so, or Lord Erskine, or Cicero.

In a single day, in a court like that of this man, I myself have heard sentence passed on a weak-mouthed girl for sending threatening letters to a rich woman she had never seen, an Italian boy for mailing an infernal machine to an American girl because she would not marry him, and half a dozen youthful river-rats

for poaching on the preserves of a rich men's gun club!

Some twenty men and women, as a guess, are now succeeding in this new type of Chautauqua service. Some are lecturers of the old type glad to escape the slavery of the "rapid fire." Some are editors who find the perspective of their desk work helpful in the new focus and the response of the audience helpful to the desk. Some, like Doctor William A. Colledge, of Chicago, have been "information lecturers" for years. The remainder are specialists in various fieldswith "platform power."

The Chautauqua is moving, I fancy, toward an approximately even division of its programmes between such entertainment as magic and music, "mother, home, and heaven" lectures, nine days' sensations, and "information lectures." As this change progresses the thinking of the American home guard will change.

There will hardly be more music, but much of it will be of better quality; and there will be more attention to other arts. There will be more candid speaking on social problems and more candid listening. There will be a rapid advance in independence of party lines and a slower advance in thought upon taxes, the direction being away from the political philosophy of the Ohio valley and toward that of the Pacific coast. Even the sensations will come from new fields, so that the man who fills an art institute with children in Toledo may some day draw as big a crowd as the man who quells a riot in Seattle.

Yet, how far soever the thinking of America away from the urban centres may respond to more definite and more liberal social teaching, I do not perceive, any reason to expect it to change fundamentally. It promises to continue, I believe, to be conventional, moral, conservative, in the most old-fashioned sense. This fifth part of America organizes itself intuitively into ranks of conservatism.

HEY had had no lunch. "The minute the World War ended, I stopped being cheerful when hungry," complained Mrs. Perry Jones, from behind her rust-colored motorveil. "No lunch, and it's half past four!" "They say that the Armenians are still-" began Mrs. Bromfield.

"Don't remind me of suffering Syrians! I was so swayed by that humorist I heard speak for them that I handed over a cool ten thousand. Why 'cool'? Why 'cool'? There's nothing cool about money! I'm restless before I've spent mine and angry afterward. That same ten thousand would have bought a comfy little hydroplane, and if we were hydroplaning we could see a dozen leading hotels at a glance, instead of poking along on lonely wood roads, lost. This cheap, common motoring is suited only to lovers, children, and old people." Nick Everso lolled luxuriously on the front seat of his car. Whenever he wanted a perfectly gorgeous week-end, with no exertion other than laughter, he invited the Perry Joneses and the Tom Bromfields motoring and let them plan the trip.

"Which way?" growled Everso's chauffeur, who was the only one present not having the time of his life.

"Which way?" repeated Mrs. Perry blandly. "How much every road looks just like every other road, when you're motoring! My feeling is that the left-hand road leads to the Blue Bird Tea-Room, but I'm always wrong, so we'd better take the right-hand road. The tea-room is the second house beyond the church, and you'll recognize it because there's a cage out over the road, in which dwells a celluloid bluebird."

They came eventually to a church, because, if you motor long enough, you

usually do come to a church. The second house beyond was one of those old New England mansions which every one, unless he wanted to boast that he was up from the dust, would like to claim as his ancestral home. It had the usual assets, from classic doorways, a sun-dial, a walled garden, and a terrace, to an ever-shifting arabesque laid upon it by the shadows of the elms.

"This is it!" declared Mrs. Perry. Nicholas regarded her with a satisfied smile.

"Of course! There being neither a cage nor a bluebird, it must be the place you described! I adore the law of opposites which governs your mentality."

Before Everso's chauffeur could drive through the substantial ivy-covered stone gateway, round the corner from the stable puffed a pair of fat chestnut horses drawing a carriage such as royalties use in illustrated weeklies and driven by a proud, bumptious old coachman, with white hair and mahogany-colored cheeks. As soon he reined up at the front door there emerged from the house an angry dowager in purple mohair and a toque of bilious pansies. Although she walked with apparent ease, her feet looked as if they were deformed.

When she had driven away, conspicuously not noticing mere tourists, Everso ran up the steps and rang the bell. The girl must have been standing directly behind the door, for she opened it at once, and stood before him, tall, slender, blond, with her violet-blue eyes slightly but not unbecomingly red-rimmed. She was dressed in mourning, and carried in her hand a crumpled cobweb which had formerly been a handkerchief.

"Is this the Blue Bird Tea-Room?" inquired Nicholas. Seasoned bachelor though he was, he found himself breathless.

The girl hesitated briefly, and it seemed as if the universe had halted with her.

put down the cake and almonds at all, and you should have charged more for your coffee. I never heard of such a price for olives."

"But your chauffeur ate two bottles," she explained. "And I never calculate the sandwiches when I serve more than one kind, because it gets me all mixed up. You must know yourself how awfully they charge for ice-cream at hotels. I didn't put down the cake and almonds, because they were presents and didn't cost me anything. I have never"-she tried to look severe "had any one object to a bill before!"

"I don't object, except that you don't charge enough."

"If you argue, I shall charge nothing!" "Don't you enjoy argument?"

"I refuse to do it, where money is concerned."

Meekly Nicholas handed her a fivedollar bill and a one-dollar bill.

"I haven't a bit of change!" she said. "So you'd better keep the one-dollar bill. Five dollars is a plenty, and will do very nicely. I wish I had thought to say five dollars at once, instead of getting excited over the arithmetic. What did I do with your pencil? I suppose it's lost! They ought to sell papers of pencils the way they sell papers of pins. Then you could tear off rows at a time."

"I wish I might know your name," purred Mrs. Perry.

"My name," said the Burne-Jones girl, "is Sylvia Lee."

It was exactly as if she had struck a chord on a harp.

"Mundane as it is to mention it, the Aspinwalls dine at eight," said Tom Bromfield, breaking the spell. "And considering that we invited ourselves to dinner with them, and that we are now seventy-five miles away and that it is a quarter after six-"

"Just a minute!" said Nicholas. "I want to get Miss Lee to show me those day-lilies in her garden. They are a rare variety!" The resourceful and deeply smitten Everso tried to look horticultural.

"Five minutes is all we can spare!" said Perry, sinking back in his chair in response to his wife's "Can't you see that he wants to speak to her alone? Have you lost all your sense of romance?"

"I want to know your password," be

gan Nicholas, as he stood with Sylvia Lee among the tall day-lilies. "My password?"

"I want to be sure and get in-the next time I come."

"I will let you in, no matter when. But I shan't serve your friends unless you bring them. I am very particular, you see.

"Once I started to have a garden," said Everso, talking against time. "But it was not successful because I planted the lily-bulbs upside down. And now, having exhausted the subject of gardens, let's talk about you. You had been crying just before we came!"

"Mrs. Meserole had been scolding me. You must have seen her drive away. She's the only woman multimillionaire in the State, and she was my mother's best friend."

"What's the matter with her feet?" "Nothing, except that she wears her right shoe on her left foot, and vice versa, because shoes worn that way last longer." "What was she scolding you about?" "She wants me to do something I can't."

"What is it? Marry her son?"
"Mercy to goodness, she has no son!"
Does she want you to marry some one

else?"

"I don't see why you think my unhappiness has anything to do with marriage."

"It is absurd of me. What I ought to be thinking about is the great number of people who are going to be unhappy because you can marry only one person."

"How easily you talk of marriagejust as if it were the weather and you were hard up for a subject. Do run along, please. I'm dining out, myself."

Everso drove away from Sylvia Lee with imprecations for dear old friends who ask you to dine. Why was it that whenever you really wanted to do anything there was always something else that had to be done? And, conversely, whenever you had nothing to do there was never anything interesting going on anywhere! How lovely she had looked among the lilies!

II

Ir was barely a week later when Everso asked Margaret Cameron to motor out to