M

OST mothers are evidently too busy with "must-be-dones" for story-telling, for it is Father or Grandmother who figure most often in these childhood reminiscences. Frances's Grandmother was the real story-book kind-little and dear and humorous, with a head full of jokes and a trunk full of surprises for the busy household in which her room made an oasis of peace. She was always ready to tuck a small girl into bed with a story, and afterwards Frances lay awake, looking at the stars and wondering to herself. Nowadays. Granddaughter in turn charms Grandmother by bringing her the curious surprises of the modern world.

The King and the Magician

T

As remembered by Frances Ober,
an Outlook reader

HERE was once a great black castle on a high mountain, where an old king lived alone. Once the halls had been gay with lords and ladies; every night lighted windows told of dancing and feasting and revelry, but that was before the death of the beautiful young queen. When she died, the king dismissed his court, locked the great iron door, and shut himself up with his grief. His cellars, people said, overflowed with gold and silver and jewels, but for that the king cared nothing, spending his days and nights mourning for his lost bride.

One day a clever young magician chanced to pass, and heard the tale of the old king and his wealth. So climbing the high hill to the castle, he knocked boldly on the great iron door. There was no answer. Again he knocked, and again, until the echoes rang. At last the door swung open a crack and the old white-haired king stood glaring at him from fierce, unhappy eyes.

"What do you want?" he rumbled in a voice like a rusty hinge.

"I am a magician," smiled the young man, "and I have come to show you your wife again."

The king's eyes lighted. He opened the door a crack wider.

"Ah," " he rumbled, "show me my wife once more, and I will repay you with gold, but" and he frowned blackly "should you fail, I will cast you from the highest tower of this castle, till you roll down the mountainside into the river. Come!"

The magician entered the bleak old halls. In a vast room hung with gold and velvet, thick now with the dust of years, the king took his place on his golden throne, and waited.

From his knapsack the magician brought forth an iron pot, and under it he kindled a fire. Then from bottles of strange shapes he poured colored liquids, one by one, stirring them with a great silver spoon and muttering words of magic. Suddenly the pot began to boil. A puff of smoke arose, and gradually from the mist a woman took shape, until at last there stood the dead queen, smiling sadly at her husband.

Weeping, the old king fell on his knees.

"Wife, dear wife," he cried, "come back to me!" but the vision neither moved nor spoke, only smiled sadly, until slowly she and the cloud began to fade.

Beside himself with grief, the old king seized a coffer of jewels and threw it at her feet, imploring her to stay, but in another moment smoke, queen, and jewels had vanished, leaving only the empty room, with the smiling magician and his iron pot.

"Come again on the morrow," cried the king, giving him five bags of gold, "and you shall have the same reward."

So every night, for six months, the

magician came, and every night the king watched his dear wife appear, and every night, in his grief, as she began to fade, he threw more jewels at her feet, which vanished mysteriously with the cloud of smoke. And every night the magician pocketed his five bags of gold, and prom ised to return on the morrow.

But one day the king had no treasure left but his crown and scepter.

"My coffers are emptied of gold. have given you everything," he told the magician. "But will you not at least leave me your secret to comfort me?"

"That," smiled the young man," impossible, but promise me your crow and scepter, and I will show you you wife once more." With crown and scepter in his hands, he plotted to banish the king and rule in his stead.

But the heart-broken husband co sented, and next night, sick with gri and love, he mounted his golden thro and waited. As usual, the magician poured in the colored liquids, as usu the pot boiled, and from the cloud of smoke appeared the form of the beaut ful queen. But instead of smiling sadly at her husband, the vision fixed her ey upon the young man with such fiery anger that he began to tremble.

Suddenly the pot boiled over, and o poured gold and jewels, piling about the floor in a great glittering mass. To th king's surprise, he recognized the ver treasures he had thrown at his queen's feet and the same gold pieces the magician had carried away with him each night. Under the fierce glare of th queen's eyes, the young man lay moaning on the floor in terror.

Then the king understood. Not sat fied with his gold, the magician ha taken advantage of his weeping and his excitement to gather up the jewels he threw at his wife's feet and hide them in the iron pot. Seizing the tremblin wretch, the king dragged him to the highest tower of the castle and hurle him, yelling, down the mountainsid where he dropped with a splash into th river and was never heard of more,

H

ter

dations, the Boston booksellers are scared to death. They are afraid of the Watch and Ward Society, afraid of antagonizing the more powerful booksellers, afraid ci of Catholic sentiment, afraid of offendbeing their customers, afraid some one will say, "Boo!" Besides the dread of going to jail, there is also a true Bostonian terror of that mysteriously awful thing called a criminal record. This thing descends on the victim even in the event of a hundred-dollar fine. And in Boston today people don't have criminal records, in no matter how good a cause. Poor Boston! How it has changed!

One dealer, after a long dissertation on the impracticability of the Sedgwick bill, finally admitted to me that he would be in favor of it if he thought it had anything approaching a chance of passage. But he added that to support it would be to lose the friendship of the Watch and Ward Society, and then if the bill didn't pass where would he be? The same man confessed a lively horror of being arrested, even though he should be acquitted or upheld in a higher court. All Boston, he complained, would know of his arrest; his exoneration, if any, would receive brief notices on inside pages. He had a nightmare vision of all his customers departing in a body, saying: "We will not buy any more books of that horrid dealer who was arrested for selling obscene literature; we will buy our books of a good, pure bookseller." Possibly that could happen in the neighborhood of Back Bay, but I doubt if even Boston is as different from other cities as that.

Mingled with these fears and tremors on the part of the book-handling gentry is a little moral sentiment and a good deal of simple, old-fashioned hypocrisy. Several dealers assured me with varying degrees of conviction that they thought little was lost by suppressing "that sort of book," as it did nobody any good to read it, anyway. Considering the range of "that sort of book" on the banks of the Charles, it is a little difficult to know

what was meant.

One man assured me with pious horror that he had no desire to handle the kind of books that were banned, and he

June 6 1928

delivered a long lecture on the alleged indecencies of "Bad Girl." At his shoulder as he talked was a whole shelf of Rabelais, in a new edition filled with ingeniously pornographic illustrations by Frank Pape.

U

Spring Reading

NDER the playful influence of

spring we have invented a new way of selecting books. We shut our eyes, pick from the rows of new

ones

"Five Murders," by Edmund L. Pearson (Doubleday, Doran & Co.), who

Edited by FRANCES LAMONT ROBBINS

modern history is fascinating and should please many readers.

"Dragons and Dragon Lore," by Ernest Ingersoll. Payson & Clarke. This is the sort of book we like. It is all about the ancestry, personal characteristics, and romantic careers of dragons

compiled from the lists of the ten

following book-shops each week:

New York-Brentano's;
Rochester-Scrantoms Inc.;
Cleveland-Korner & Wood;

St. Louis-Scruggs, Vandevoort, & Barney;
Denver-Kendrick Bellamy Company;
Houston-Teolin Pillot Company;
San Francisco-Paul Elder & Co.;
Baltimore-Norman, Remington Company;
Kansas City-Emery Bird Thayer;
Atlanta-Miller's Book Store;

Los Angeles-Bullock's;

needs no introduction to Outlook read- THIS list is comunes sent us by wire by the ers or, indeed, to any one interested in books or in crime. As in other books of Mr. Pearson's, Lizzie Borden shines as the most intriguing of modern murderesses. We suspect Mr. Pearson of cherishing for her the same feeling which Elinor Wylie has for Shelley. If you like detective stories, you will like this book. For one thing, it is true. It is well, sometimes, to check up with the facts the ideas you get from fiction. The detectives of fiction are not the detectives of reality. We refuse to believe that Philo Vance, for instance, would be allowed by a long-suffering society to walk this earth for any length of time, in spite of the fact that he is the hero of some wellconstructed yarns.

"The Innocents of Paris," by C. E. Andrews. D. Appleton & Co. If you have been to Paris and have loved it, you will find the same sort of homesick pleasure in reading this as you would in suddenly hearing, through the clamor of New York rivets, a hoarse voice singing, "Ah, qu'il est beau mon village, mon Paris, mon paradis." The Paris of the Innocents is not the city of the grands boulevards, or of the Sixteenth Arrondissement, or of the tourist's Montmartre. It is a Paris, indeed, which only the fortunate or very persistent foreigner can see. The Innocents are the dirty, happy-go-lucky people of the markets, the quais, the exterior boulevards. Mr. Andrews knows their ways and their language, and his illustrator knows their looks. He is a creator as well as a keen observer, so his book possesses both the color of fiction and the ring of truth.

Chicago-Marshall Field & Co.; Cincinnati-Stewart Kidd.

Fiction

"The Bridge of San Luis Rey," by Thornton Wilder. Albert & Charles Boni. This beautifully written and moving study in the working of God's providence, and of love, the bridge which joins the living and the dead, deserves its popularity. Reviewed January 4. "The Greene Murder Case," by S. S. Van Dine. Charles Scribner's Sons. Plenty of bloodshed, and more than enough persiflage by Philo Vance. Van Dine enthusiasts like it. "The Closed Garden," by Julian Green, translated by Henry Longan Stuart. Harper & Brothers. This insistently harrowing story of an hysterical French girl is interesting particularly because it brings to the general reader's attention a new talent in French letters. viewed last week.

Re

"Behind That Curtain," by Earl Derr Biggers. The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Further exploits of detective Charlie Chan. Reviewed May 16. "Wintersmoon," by Hugh Walpole. Doubleday, Doran & Co. A social comedy in Walpole's Reviewed March 7. best vein.

"Disraeli,'

Non-Fiction

by André Maurois, translated by Hamish Miles. D. Appleton & Co. This strangely romantic figure is touched vividly into life by Maurois's hand. You will find this excellent reading. Reviewed February 22. "Skyward," by Commander Richard E. Byrd. G. P. Putnam's Sons. This stirring story of achievement deserves a place beside "We" on the American book-shelf. Reviewed May 2. "Strange Interlude," by Eugene O'Neill. Boni & Liveright. This play, in which the dramatist steals some of the novelist's best psychological thunder, is as good to read as to see; perhaps better. Reviewed in "Lights Down," February 22.

"Safari," by Martin Johnson. G. P. Putnam's Sons. The interesting and often exciting diary of four years spent in a wild-animal paradise; with wonderful pictures.

"Stonewall Jackson," by Allen Tate. Minton, Balch & Co. An excellent account of Jackson's campaigns and a poet's appreciation of the "good soldier." Reviewed May 16.

from the models who posed for the first Chinese screens to the laidly wurrms of Scotland. You will learn nothing practical from it, but much that may be drawn upon for slightly esoteric dinner-table conversations.

Haiti there is a square modeled after that French civic institution la grande place, and decorated with the statues of Haiti's heroes. The heroes were black mutinied slaves. The statues are those of elegant Spaniards, great men of eight eenth-century Peru, which were salvaged by the provident Haitians from a ship bound from Barcelona to South America which was wrecked some years ago off Port au Prince, and set up and labeled Dessalines, Toussaint L'Ouverture, and so forth. That atmosphere, as of a musical comedy gone wrong, hangs for most of us over the history of Haiti. And it is just and timely that an authentic and comprehensive story of th past and present of that strange, sad island should be now available to those readers to whom Pan-Americanism is more than a phrase.

"The Marsh Arab," by Fulanain. The J. B. Lippincott Company. Lawrence's Arabian adventures and Gertrude Bell's letters are interestingly supple mented by this picturesque and curious. story of the adventurous life of an Arab seer in Iraq. The scene is wild and desolate, and peopled with strang figures.

"Embattled Borders," by E. Alexar der Powell. The Century Company For a popular discussion of the complex problems of eastern Europe you might look far and find no better book than this. The writer is an experienced jou nalist and traveler, and he spreads th good bread of his observation and intell gent comment liberally with the jam d anecdote, picturesque incident, and amusing episode to make an entertaining and informative sandwich of question much discussed and generally little un derstood.

"TH

by HE Voyage of the Norman D.," h Barbara Newhall Follett. A. A Knopf. It is wise that the age of the author of this book (thirteen years should be explained on the jacket Otherwise, so simple a response beauty as the writing displays would an

to

nounce a talent which could find no