problem-a new person in the dramaarrived.

The college had been doing very well for a year or two and it had been decided that a music-teacher might be added to the faculty; and so one was engagedfrom out of town.

I do not remember where Miss Leafgreen came from. I only recall the fact that on a certain summer day when the Cleburne hack, coming back from its weekly journey, turned the corner two blocks from the post-office and whined its way along the main street toward its stopping-point, the whole town was instantly aware that Miss Leafgreen had arrived.

Certainly she was from some city. There was an air of sophistication about her that fairly shouted of metropolitanism. I have no doubt that some of the wiser heads of Cleburne suspected her of having come, directly or indirectly, from Paris. She wore a veil and gloves; and, as if this were not enough to arouse the town's suspicions, she refused to look demurely ahead, as all the Cleburne ladies did when they returned from a journey, but glanced boldly about her with black eyes which fairly snapped with vitality. And when she arose from her seat in the hack, when the lumbering vehicle stopped at the post-office platform and revealed what I may call her form, she compelled the men of Cleburne to stare as helplessly as ever the Lady Godiva did on that informal ride with which she is associated.

Her waist was not merely a connecting part of her body-a length of skin and bone and ligament merging on equal terms with that which came above and below. It was, I think, the first waist ever seen in Cleburne. You could have spanned it with your two hands-or almost. And it seemed all the smaller because of the disproportionate abundance of bust and hips. I really believe Miss Leafgreen would have attracted a certain amount of attention anywhere. She touched the platform with a foot which was scandalously pretty and well shod, from the Cleburne point of view; and in an instant she was standing erect and putting her veil back over her hat, and smiling at all and sundry who happened to come within the radius of her eyes. I think she regarded Cleburne as a family rather than as a town. It re

mained a mystery to Cleburne (as it has remained to me) how this plump creature could ever have ridden thirty miles in Enos Philbrick's hack, around mountain shoulders and over interminable boulders, with those tiny shoes on her feet and only that wasp-like waist to support her upper body. Yet here she was, as "fit" as an apple on its bough. And the town stood on the post-office platform and stared while Professor Tucker escorted her up the hill and to the select boardinghouse close to the college. There was something about Professor Tucker's carriage, as he walked beside Miss Leafgreen, which made the boys on the platform wish to yell; but they restrained themselves. That expression, "a moral influence," could not have been wholly a figure of speech.

Cleburne would have lost the chance of its life had it not sat in judgment upon Miss Leafgreen and turned its thumbs down. The general indictment was expressed in the words "worldly" and "frivolous." But in its heart Cleburne attributed deadlier sins to her and cherished its dark suspicions.

I can describe only briefly how this extraordinary creature had all the bigger boys of Cleburne following her about, within a week or so, precisely as the Pied Piper was followed. If she had elected to walk into the country the town might have burned down and the catastrophe would not have interested a single boy over the age of eight. She moved from point to point like some extraordinary sort of wheel with a perpendicular hub. Spokes of boys revolved around her. The youth of Cleburne learned how to lift its hat and how to run and bring flowers as if for a shrine. A more vital influence than the Seaside had come to the town.

I may succeed in conveying something of the impression she created on the juvenile mind of Cleburne when I refer to a discovery which was not made until some time afterward.

"Ivanhoe" was lost.

Some one inquired for the book after Miss Leafgreen ceased (as a result of circumstances still to be explained) to trouble the minds of Cleburne, and the fact was developed that it had completely disappeared. Some one remembered that

its latest last page was just where the picture, "Death of Bois-Guilbert," had been. But this information was quite without value as a means of locating the lost treasure. Perhaps there was no mystery at all about the disappearance of the book. In all probability some boy, reading it, espied Miss Leafgreen at a distance, and made for her without taking the precaution of putting the book under a mattress or in a loft or under a cupboard. In such a case any unconverted mother would have put the book in the stove, and smiled grimly, and brushed her hands. But the fact remains that if Miss Leafgreen had been a more ordinary kind of person, "Ivanhoe" would probably have been in Cleburne to this day. Its sacrifice was appropriate enough, perhaps a proof that the knighthood it depicted was still in the world: in a new form, perhaps, but with the old essence.

From the first it was one of Miss Leafgreen's duties to play the piano in the chapel for the Sunday services; and it should be recorded that the very neatness of her performance, on an instrument against which a deep-seated prejudice prevailed, struck all the elders as a sort of insidious sin. She sang as she played, and the mere fact that her voice arose easily and beautifully, by a mysterious artifice rather than by sheer lung power, was ground for a new indictment against her. One sage who had journeyed as far as the railroad years ago, and who had been thought to have escaped its wicked influences, now betrayed himself in a measure by declaring that Miss Leafgreen did not sing like a Christian woman, but that she had, rather, an opery voice.

The town forgot the Seaside Library for the moment; and Miss Leafgreen was the agency which brought Cleburne's consciousness back to this original menace.

Slaydon Powell, looking over the top of the latest issue of the library one fine day, caught sight of Miss Leafgreen-and immediately dropped the book to the floor of his office. It was his first glimpse of her. Before the sun had set he had obtained an introduction to her. Before another day had ended he had gained the side of the music-teacher, by thrusting aside several phalanxes of boys, and had walked in public with her.

And then the unexpected happened. Miss Leafgreen did not wish to cultivate the acquaintance of the lawyer. She did not wish to receive any visits from him. She avoided him. She permitted the whole town to perceive all this.

And again Cleburne found occasion to turn its thumbs down. She would not associate with one who should have been a suitable associate. No, she preferred to lure a lot of innocent boys into the paths of evil. The town judged her again, and now its secret characterization was put into words. She was fast.

Here the Seaside Library appears again. The invalid lawyer was simply bewildered by Miss Leafgreen's indifference toward him. He could not understand. He concluded that perhaps she did not understand. And one day he collected a bundle of novels and put them into the hands of a passing youth-a youth who, it chanced, was in a dejected mood because he had never been permitted to get any closer than a position in the tire around that wheel of which Miss Leafgreen was the hub. "Take them to Miss Leafgreen, with my compliments," said Powell to this youth.

Half an hour later the messenger returned and announced vindictively, and in the presence of witnesses: "She says she don't care about them. She says she haint got time for such trash.”

And when it became generally known that Miss Leafgreen disapproved of the Seaside Library the result was instant as well as curious. The town espoused the cause, not of Miss Leafgreen, but of the hated Seaside. By a reductio ad absurdum process it reached the conclusion that there must be something in the "storytales," after all.

And thereafter you could see issues of the Seaside Library on the front porches of Cleburne, and in the Cleburne sittingrooms, and in the hands of idlers who leaned back in straight-backed chairs in front of the general merchandise stores of Cleburne. I know of one patient citizen who spent six months over "The Initials," and then announced regretfully, "Derned if I kin git the hang of it!"-but it is to be noted that he did not put the book aside on moral grounds.

Before the end of the summer literary

discussion became the fashion in the town. You could meet "The Duchess" on croquet-grounds, and the Brontë sisters at lawn parties, and Victor Hugo or Balzac or Dumas in the drug-store. One delegation of young people called on Professor Tucker and asked him how to pronounce Björnson.

The invalid lawyer, restored to health, went away and was heard of no more. Miss Leafgreen went home for the winter holidays and did not return. It was an open secret in the town that she had not been asked to come back.

The new books which we have all about us now do not seem to me quite so magical as the old. There seems to be an artificial quality in many of the stories which are recommended to me now-as if their authors did not believe in them very implicitly.

But I comfort myself with the conclu

sion that I am older than I was when the Seaside came to the Ozarks. And I have no doubt that there is a larger army of young people than there was in the old days who look with shining eyes at the new titles and carry the good news from house to house when a good new book has been discovered.

I am sure, too, that the younger generation hold in reverent hands the books of an army of new writers: Wells and Galsworthy and Bennett and Snaith and Phillpotts and Hichens and Thurston and De Morgan and Mariott, and our own Mrs. Rinehart and Meredith Nicholson and Jack London and Francis Lynde and Henry Sydnor Harrison and Will N. Harben and Mrs. Deland and Rex Beach; and that on occasion they tap a printed page and declare, with the same old generous truculence (and perhaps with larger justification): "This is literature."

St. Thomas ringed by high, steep hills; Cruz, St. Kitts, and Antigua, of mountainwe lay off the open roadsteads of Santa ous Dominica, and brilliant, multicolored Guadeloupe and Martinique, and of Barbados, whose people have the energy of the North. We moored alongside the quay in St. Lucia. On the way back we spent ten days in Trinidad, with its witchery of landscape, full of the loveliness of the mountain tropics and of the tropics of the plain. Finally we touched at Grenada.

After leaving New York in a snowstorm, we drove south through the Gulf Stream into the warmth of sapphire seas where the trade-wind blew steadily. In the hot nights the stars blazed above us: Orion was overhead, the Dipper lay behind us; it was not until we were near the turning-point of our journey that we

reached the low latitudes where, well after nightfall, the Southern Cross rose slantingly above the horizon. Beneath a waning moon we left the Antilles on our journey southward; and the next moon was nearing full when we steamed northward from Trinidad and Grenada.

St.Thomas Santa Cruz Saba

St. Martin

tropic vegetation, stood little towns, clusters of low white or red houses. After nightfall the town gallants sat at small tables on the sidewalks outside the taverns or under the trees in the open squares. Powerful, finely built black women, and lithe comely brown women strode along the paths and highroads, erect and supple,

(St. Kitts)

Guadeloupe Basse Terte

CARIBBEAN

Everywhere Danish, French, and British officials, American officials, and Creole, British, French, and American nonofficial friends were more than kind and hospitable. The glimpse into the social and industrial life of the islands was enthralling. But we were on a holiday, our stay was short, and we did not seek to see more than the picturesque outward charm of the scenery and of that human life that was patent to the passerby.

SEA

LESSE

Margarita

Grand Terre

ATLANTIC

Barbados

Dominica

Martinique

Santa Lucia

St.Vincent

Bridgetown.

Tobago

St. George

OCEAN

Forgetown

In the harbors the negro boatmen swarmed round the ship, and black and brown boys dived like otters after small coins thrown into the water. When the ship was coaled the workers were sometimes men, sometimes strapping women as strong as the men, who chattered and sang as they toiled, while their white teeth flashed in their dark faces. Queer fishing-craft, sometimes with russet sails, danced over the foaming combers which broke the azure of the deep. Rows of tall, slenderstemmed palms stood back of the shining beaches, their fronded tops threshing endlessly in the trade-wind. On the edge of the blue ocean, at the foot of brilliant green mountains, half-hidden in the

In others sharp social lines are drawn not only between white and coloredas all shades of cross-blood are called— but between colored and black. The whites everywhere composed most of the upper class, although it also included many of the colored; the colored folk made up most of the middle class, and just as they extended into the class above them so their class was entered by the blacks below them; and the bulk of the laborers, in the towns and especially in the country, were blacks, although many were browns. At the fringes all the

classes overlapped or merged into one another.

In Martinique the browns outnumbered the blacks. Elsewhere the blacks were in a majority. Together with the white officials were many colored and some black officials. Substantial race justice is done. Friction occurs, of course; yet, on the whole, there is law and order and a real desire to give each man his chance and to treat him fairly. None of these lands have prospered quite as much as Cuba, Porto Rico, and Panama during the last fifteen years, owing to the peculiar relations of these three countries to the United States. But they have prospered far more, they have infinitely better and juster governments, than most of the revolution-ridden "republics" that face on the Caribbean and the Mexican Gulf; from the standpoint of life, liberty, and property they are beyond comparison better living-places for rich men and especially for poor men. They reflect honor on the nations to which they belong: the public servants are upright, fearless, and efficient. The English colonies regard England and the French colonies France with devoted loyalty a loyalty which in each case has been well earned by the mother country. Everywhere we found that the young white men had thronged to the support of the mother country in the war-almost every family we met had kinsmen at the front. Even more striking was the genuine loyalty of the colored men and black men to the flags under which they had found justice. Thousands had volunteered from the British colonies. Martinique and Guadeloupe were under conscription, like France; and these two islands, with less than half a million population, had sent fifteen thousand soldiers across the seas. The houses that we visited, in the towns and on the plantations, were built for coolness, with thin partitions and wide windows-with blinds but without glass panes opening everywhere. Usually they stood on posts above the ground. They were pleasant and comfortable; but it behooved the inmates to speak in low tones and move softly, for otherwise the dwellers therein "had about as much privacy as a goldfish." In the gardens was a wealth of bloom; there were hedges of scarlet hibiscus; the corallita turned the

lattice-work and the fences pink; the purple masses of Bougainvillea were the most conspicuous of all. The fields of sugar-cane made the plains a vast sheet of light green. Elsewhere there were banana groves, groves of cocoanut-palm, lime orchards, plantations of coffee and cocoa. The trees were of many different kinds and some of them bore brilliant blossoms, red or white or yellow. The noble cabbage-palms rose like columns loftier and more beautiful than any made by the hand of man. The mahoganytrees spread their gnarled branches like oaks. Very strange, and very graceful, were the clumps of giant bamboo, bending outward, with feathery crowns of foliage on the strong, pliant stems. The dark-green breadfruit-trees with glossy, deeply incised leaves, and the densely foliaged mangoes were restful to the eyes after the bright, pitiless glare of the open spaces. Here and there, in Martinique and Dominica, we came on ravines or hillsides crowded with beautiful tree-ferns. Many parasitic plants, of various and utterly dissimilar kinds, grew on the trunks and branches of the older trees, some with delicate flowers, some with huge leaves like the ears of elephants; while yet others streamed like gray moss or sprouted like grass tufts on the branches. The orange-flowered immortelle-tree is called the "mother of the cocoa," because it is planted to shield the young cocoas from the sun.

We motored for miles on every island, always amid scenery that was a delight to the eye. Each island had a charm of its own. On Dominica the administrator, a delightful companion, a widely travelled, widely read man, took us on a new road that twisted up a steep valley into the heart of the mountains. The emerald tropic forest crowded on every hand, spangled with flowers. At the ends of deep ravines we saw the blue ocean; while torrents dashed down the mountainsides. The administrator of Antigua, another delightful companion, drove us across the island to English Harbor. In the old days, the days of the white-winged sailing-ships, when the square-rigged, bluff-bowed, wooden war-vessels carried tier upon tier of smooth-bored cannon, this was a famous haven for the fighting