quite as marked as its physical remoteness. The founders of the town had come, I believe, from Virginia; and if the people who lived there in my day were not largely English in their customs and social inheritances, they were certainly not typically American. I believe they viewed with misgivings the government at Washington, and regarded all the Northern States as being peopled by unconsciously comical human beings who did not speak good English and who were characterized chiefly by an overdeveloped acquisitive instinct. They were almost incredibly intolerant of certain forms of pleasure, novel-reading being a particularly heinous offense.

Lawlessness, even from the Cleburne standpoint, had few visible forms in the community, and the only habitually idle man to be found was old Judge Ligon, who personified the law in that section of the Ozarks. How he attained his office I never learned. To me he seemed to have become a judge by some natural process. I had the feeling that he had always been a judge and would always remain one, though my mind became hazy when I tried to picture him as a judge at fourteen -which was my own age. Judging by his appearance I thought it extremely improbable that he had ever been as young as fourteen.

If there had really been no lawlessness in Cleburne there ought to have been no suffering: yet I remember that the town (and its surrounding territory) had three physicians, one of whom was a delightfully picturesque figure. He used to ride out to distant settlements on a horse which was never known to go faster than a walk, with his healing materials and apparatus in his saddle-bags.

Perhaps an additional sense of the town's quality may be conveyed by a brief mention of Cleburne's one eccentric "character"-old Uncle Willum, who never failed to win applause when he stoutly declared that if ever a railroad came to Cleburne he would turn his back on the town forever. I am in doubt to this day whether Uncle Willum derived greater satisfaction or chagrin from the fact that at the time he was gathered to his fathers, long ago, the atmosphere about Cleburne had never been (as it has

never been to this day) disturbed by the smoke and noise of a locomotive.

About the time my father went to Cleburne to take charge of the weekly newspaper and to give his family the benefit of the town's moral influence, there came into the community a young lawyer.

That last clause might well be printed in italics; for Slaydon Powell, the lawyer in question, was destined to effect a strange revolution in Cleburne. He did not state definitely where he had come from; and as if this were not a sufficiently suspicious circumstance in itself, he made matters worse by declaring frankly that he had come to the Ozarks for his health.

Young Powell was plainly a physical weakling; but Cleburne attributed an entirely figurative meaning to the saying: "He went away for his health." It meant, they very well knew, that the person of whom it was spoken was a criminal in hiding. And thus Powell was a marked man immediately.

He lost no time in casting fuel upon the fires of the town's suspicions. He succeeded in becoming acquainted with the minister's wife and with the two or three ladies who were of the college faculty; and when he met any of them on Main Street he removed his hat with an elaborate gesture which was absolutely a new thing in Cleburne. Not that there was anything the matter with the salute, considered from any but the Cleburne standards, but the mountain men regarded the mere act in itself as a thing savoring of cunning and low morals and a generally insidious mind.

He also produced a guitar in the little signal-house of an office in which he established himself, and played on it, and sang dialect songs and old ballads. Within a week he had taught two or three boys, who ventured into his office, how to play chords in the key of D. He went so far as to try to teach one of the boys a song in which Satan was represented as surveying mankind and declaring that they "all wore cloaks."

The town's musical literature had been comprised almost wholly, theretofore, of "Darling Nellie Gray," "Larboard Watch," and a morally rigorous song called "The Stepmother." Thus, when

Satan was permitted, unrebuked, to ridicule worthy men and women, as he was in "They All Wear Cloaks," Cleburne alertly awoke to the fact that it had at last an evil influence. But the lightnings were not really loosed until it developed that Slaydon Powell gave full rein to an ungovernable passion for reading novels.

To be quite frank, there had been in Cleburne, prior to the arrival of the invalid lawyer, two classes of literature (both sparsely represented) to choose be

tween.

One of these was located in the college "library," a dusty room up-stairs in the college building. This seemed to me a very holy place. No one dusted it; few entered it. Only one of my schoolmates whom I can now recall shared my reverence for that divinely ghost-haunted room. His name was Doremus. During the noon hour, after we had eaten the luncheon we had brought to school with us, Doremus would say to me, in what we both conceived to be the manner of a truc scholar: "Let us go up into the library." And I, anxious not to introduce a jarring note, would incline my head politely and reply: "Good!" And together we would mount the stairs and enter the presence of those ancient calfskin bindings on which, in faint gilt, there could still be traced such names as Kirke White and Edward Young and John Milton. The collection was not extensive, and there was not a single work of fiction in it.

It is less simple to speak of the second class of literature represented in this circumspect town. Let me say that there were two books in general but irregular circulation. One of these was "Ivanhoe," the other was "True as Steel." It was destiny that juxtaposed those titlesnot I.

While I shrink from betraying any facts which seem to place in question the genuineness of the town's famous moral influence, I am compelled to say that "True as Steel" was in theory the forbidden fruit of the girls of Cleburne, while "Ivanhoe" played a corresponding part in the lives of the boys. As a matter of practice the two books were interchangeable in their places between the sexes, and I read "True as Steel" almost if not quite as often as I read "Ivanhoe." When "Ivan

hoe" was "out," to employ the term of the circulating libraries, and "True as Steel" happened to be "in," then Marion Harland became for the moment my rod and staff instead of Sir Walter.

Both books had to be kept completely under cover. The girls were charged with the responsibility of concealing "True as Steel" from relentless mothers and fathers. The boys looked after the welfare of "Ivanhoe."

The course of "Ivanhoe" through the town was furtive to the last degree. If you had lost track of it you would accost some likely boy in a mysterious manner and conduct him up into the church belfry, or into the loft of the flour-mill, which "ground" only one day in the week and was delightfully ghostly six days out of the seven. You would lower your voice to a whisper. "Where's "Ivanhoe'?" you would ask. And the other boy would look darkly over his shoulder and whisper, "Lee's got it!"—or it might be Marvin, or Guy, or Jack. And then both of you would emerge into the open again and spend a minute or two trying to look quite unconscious or unconcerned before permitting the eyes of the world to rest upon. you at close range.

In the course of its travels "Ivanhoe" suffered deplorably. No one could remember when it had had a back; and as time passed it lost its last leaf, and again and again its successive last leaves. Unregretted the glossary went. The notes went, page by page, unmourned. There was no great outcry when page 493, on which the death of Cœur de Lion was noted, slipped from its place. The last words of Rebecca and Rowena disappeared, yet it was not thought that any real harm had been done. In truth, the story had sunk deep into all our consciences, and we knew the end without reading it.

The last time I saw "True as Steel" it was beautifully intact-a fact which may consist of real criticism in its essence if not in form.

And so for a time I drew solace from two novels, and only a prescient unction from the leather-bound Kirke White.

And then the invalid lawyer cameand with him the Seaside Library. Quite unashamed and unabashed he sat in his

office and read large, paper-backed novels. (The later pocket edition had not, I think, come into existence at that time.) With perfect frankness he offered to lend them. He had a most liberal supply of them, and new numbers arrived every week, unless something happened to Enos Philbrick.

I rejoice to say that my mother not only borrowed "Seasides" from Slaydon Powell, but that she read them and permitted me to read them. (When I meet her again in the land to which she has journeyed I hope I shall remember to thank her for that act of kindness and wisdom-that proof of her faith that in a world of many sorrows there is a predominating good.)

The first of the Seaside novels that came into my hands was "Bleak House." I had never heard the title spoken; and I cannot describe the effect it had on me, there on the cover of that bulky volume, with a picture of tragic suggestion on the first page. I did not read "Bleak House" then. It may have been monopolized by other members of the family until it had to be returned. Perhaps it was a little "old" for me. But its title I made my own-a kind of sinister song to sing to myself as I pursued my boyhood's labors and recreations.

What I did absorb from that first volume was the list of titles in the back pages -and it was with a new rapture that I realized what a world of books there was within my reach, or that would be within my reach when I grew older. Dickens had been dead fourteen years at that time, and all his books were listed in those back pages. And not only Dickens, but many another great story-teller had his name represented on those lists: Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Lever, George Eliot, Thackeray, Dumas, Hugo-magic names all.

If I realized that these were the names of the larger figures in the literature of that day it was because my mother designated them as such. For myself there was equal magic in a score of names which seem almost never heard in these days. These names acquired a radiance in my eyes which the names of generals or statesmen or even martyrs never could have possessed. "Ivanhoe"--and perhaps the

enthusiasms of my mother-had made me look with peculiar reverence upon the names of all tale-tellers. I invested them with almost sacred qualities. I built up personalities for many of the authors represented on those Seaside lists. I was inclined to like Mrs. Annie Edwards better than Amelia B. Edwards, for example. (I am speaking now of personalities, rather than books.) Amelia B. Edwards, as I saw her, wore glasses and a veil which was no longer new, and her complexion was somewhat sallow. Mrs. Annie Edwards, on the other hand, was charmingly gay and youthful. She seemed rather frivolous, but this was to conceal sorrows which she unselfishly refused to permit any one to share with her.

Similarly, I drew all those other far-off people about me: B. L. Farjeon, Rosa Nouchette Carey, the author of "My Ducats and My Daughter," Emile Gaboriau, Miss Mulock, Miss M. E. Braddon, Mary Cecil Hay, the author of "Dora Thorne," Mrs. Henry Wood, M. Betham-Edwards, James Payn, F. W. Robinson, "The Duchess," "Rita," Anthony Trollope, T. Adolphus Trollope, G. P. R. James, Wm. Harrison Ainsworth, George Macdonald, Mrs. Oliphant, W. Clark Russell, "Ouida," Mrs. Molesworth, William Black, David Christie Murray, Robert Buchanan, Besant and Rice, E. Marlitt-I recall the names affectionately even now. There were long lists of books by Cooper and Jules Verne. There were even a few of Thomas Hardy's earlier novels. Indeed, one of the shorter tales of this master, and one of the most plausibly ironic of them all, "FellowTownsmen," I have never seen since I read it in the Seaside.

I do not mean to create the impression that I read all the books by all these authors. In a number of cases I read only one or two. But I familiarized myself with all the titles, in most cases, and I made the authors my friends. William Black went with me to fish in the Cadron, a mountain stream not far from Cleburne. B. L. Farjeon and Miss Braddon were my guests on Christmas Day, one sitting on either side of me at table. Miss Mulock was secretly pleased when I learned my lessons well at school-and so was Mrs. Wood. George Macdonald walked some

what sedately with me across a fallow field which was one of my playgrounds, and was politely interested in all I could tell him about the birds of the Ozark region. Charles Dickens shared my garret bedroom with me at night, and G. P. R. James went with me for many a lonely walk along deserted roads.

Some of the books I read during that year made a wonderful impression on me. There was a glamour which I cannot define in "By the Gate of the Sea," with its allusions to the philosopher's stone and its final declaration that this stone may be found "at the head of every peasant's grave." If David Christie Murray did not make the glamour of his story quite comprehensible to me, Robert Buchanan. created equal glamour-and fuller comprehension-in "Come Ashore"; and there were a score of other narratives which became woven into my mental fabric, never to disappear.

But to return to the first days of the Seaside's invasion of Cleburne.

The novel with which I made my beginning ought not to have impressed a sturdy boy of fourteen; but it did so. I name the title reluctantly: "The Shadow of a Sin." It opened with a poetical quotation:

"She is coming, my own, my sweet;
Were it ever so airy a tread
My heart would hear it and beat

Had it lain for a century dead."

And then the story launched itself with these words "Had it lain for a century dead"... I do not remember whether an interrogation or an exclamation point followed here. I only remember that I was sitting under an oak-tree, with a dim, blue ridge of mountains showing far away between two hilltops, and that it was May. I tapped the page with the back of my hand, lightly, yet with authority. "This is literature," I said. My brother, two years my senior, heard me. "What is the fool talking about?" he asked. It was his way to address me in the third person when there was no one about but him and me. I handed him the book. He glanced at the title derisively and then at the opening lines. Then he grunted and put "The Shadow of a Sin" back into my hands. But I was unshaken

in my conviction, and I doubt if I knew that "this is literature" had ever been said before. I have seen the phrase often since and often it has been quite as far astray as when I tapped the Tennysonian quotation and the passage beneath with the back of my hand and gave voice to my ardent judgment.

The book fascinated me to such a degree that I took it to school with me. I had a physical geography which would just cover it in case of danger. I was trying to finish a chapter during an hour when I should have been mastering the Massachusetts law as applied to partial payments, and I forgot myself completely.

A looming presence appeared from behind me, leaning over me. The principal, a forbidding man with a black beard and a mustache "cropped" at a time when a cropped mustache indicated, clearly, a harsh and unbending personality, laid his long finger on the title of the book, which I had closed in a panic.

His index finger rested on the word "Sin."

"Boys know too much about that word already," he said harshly-and passed on! He did not confiscate the book, after all.

I was disturbed to my very foundations. I had committed Cleburne's unpardonable sin—and the walls had not fallen about my head. I concluded that punishment, in my case, would have to be made a matter of long consideration and peculiar ingenuity and that it would descend another day. But as a matter of fact nothing happened at all, save that the principal kept his black eyes on me almost unremittingly for a day or two.

I tried to fathom this break in the natural order of things. I realized rather clearly that the principal's had been the ecclesiastical point of view, whereas the novel in hand-any novel-should have been approached as a work of art. If he had said, "This is trash," I should have been interested and respectful, though I might never have agreed with him. But I felt the fundamental ineptitude of his moralizing unfavorably with a book as a text. And it seemed to me singularly appropriate that, if he had been going to say, "Boys know too much about that

word already," he should have slipped up on me from behind.

In my mind I convicted him of inconsistency, too; for had it not been only a few weeks earlier that he had required me to memorize and recite "The Barefoot Boy," with its line

"Quick and treacherous sands of sin"?

However, I soon outgrew the "Dora Thorne" novels, though I have always believed that the earlier books in that interminable series were just what they purported to be: the work of a woman, writing with perfect conviction and earnestness, and not the product of a onetime Brooklyn male citizen, writing in London under a variety of names.

The name of R. E. Francillon next attracted my attention. It seemed to me a particularly appropriate name for a writer of stories, and I liked his titles, with their ingenious subtitles-"A Yarn in Seven Knots" and (I think) “A Fact in Seven Fables." Now that something of perspective is given me, I realize that thirty years ago Francillon was a not unfamiliar figure in the literary world of London, moving in and out of that group which had welcomed to their midst the youthful William Sharp, who was to find and reverence Dante Gabriel Rossetti-and then lose him. Even Rossetti was unknown in Cleburne, but the shadowy figure of R. E. Francillon came up through the abysses and across the passes and was at home.

I found somewhat more congenial material presently in the stories of Miss Braddon. I still wonder if "Henry Dunbar" was not a really first-rate story. At any rate I know I was fascinated by "Sir Jasper's Tenant," and I enjoyed the Braddon titles inordinately-"Dead-Sea Fruit," "To the Bitter End," "Birds of Prey," and the rest. The ceaseless rush of the world of books is impressed upon me now when I reflect that the author of these books died only the other day, and that Mr. W. B. Maxwell, her son, is already established as an author of vigorously melodramatic tales.

There was almost equal delight to be derived from "East Lynne" and "The Mysteries" and "Red-Court Farm," by Mrs. Henry Wood; and I am not sure

that the stories of school life we read today, with their criticisms of the policies of the universities, are quite as good art as some of Mrs. Wood's frankly emotional tales of English boys at school.

The Seaside novels did not get into other households as openly and easily as they did into the one in which I lived; but at least they were made entirely visible to all who passed Slaydon Powell's office, or who watched that young man when he walked abroad-for he habitually carried a novel in his hand. And the effect upon the community's leaders was marked.

There was a gasp of resentment and astonishment at first; and I am sure some of the men and women who had most thoroughly a realizing sense of the town's "moral influence" were genuinely distressed. It was as if the invalid lawyer (whose health began to mend rather rapidly) had justified the dark looks which had been cast at him when he lifted his hat to the elderly ladies of the town and spent much of his time playing a guitar.

I think my mother's attitude had much to do with the final outcome of the matter. To the good women who called on her she explained tactfully that the mistrusted paper-backed books really contained some of the world's masterpieces; and my mother, as the wife of the town's editor, was not a person to be disregarded lightly.

Next, a dear old lady who was of the college faculty, and who had come to this distant eyry among the mountains on a day when the roads were frozen and rough, took up the battle-on my mother's side. She was a slight, snowy-haired creature who liked to declare in season and out that her home was in Macon, Ga., and that this city was the South's chief centre of culture. She spoke more distinctly than any other person I ever knew, though what I admired as an acquired excellence was, I now believe, due in a measure to the false teeth the good creature wore. She found "The Light of Asia" in the Seaside, and afterward she would hear nothing against the practice of importing and reading any or all of the books bearing the Seaside imprint.

There were, certainly, remaining reservations in the minds of the town's most expert moralists, when a new factor in the