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THE GOOD SPORT HERO © Lawrence Perry

THE THIRD CHICKEN A Short Story by Thomas Moult

PORTRAIT OF A PRESS AGENT Ernest Boyd 33

A BLESSING IN DISGUISE Mrs. Joseph Conrad

/ OTHER CONTRIBUTORS Ralph Henry Barbo ry Barbour Thomas Boyd Untermeyer Mark Van Doren

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VOL. LIX, NO. 5

THE B®KMAN

Edited by John Farrar

Contents

The Good Sport Hero Supper Silence. A Poem

James Joyce. . With a Drawing from Life ie y Ivan Opffer

Chapters from Unwritten en V: A Hero Passes .

Cooling Song. A Poem .

Coming! Courtney Ryley r Cooper Coming!

Away. A Poe m

The Sketch Book

Essays by Mrs. Joseph Conrad, Ernest Brennecke, Vera Palmer

The Literary Spotlight XX XI: Don Marquis

With a Caricature by William Gropper A Golden (10 Karat) Treasury The Third Chicken. A Story

With Sketches by F. H. Barkley The Library of Congress

Portrait of a Press Agent With Sketches by Dwight Taylor

Soliloquy in an Insane Asylum. A Poem The Londoner

The Insidious Bookworm Illustrated from Photographs

The Spring in the Pantry. A Poem

To See or Not to See Plays and Motion Pictures of the Month

Rhyme of the Straight and Narrow. A Poem The Bookman’s Guide to Fiction .

Two Poems

The Editor Recommends

The Book of the Month

A Shelf of Recent Books

Reviews by Alerander Woollcott, T. R. Goward, Kenneth M. Gould, Thomas

Boyd, H. L. Pangborn, John Donelson Bread and Fire. A Poem Recent Books in Brief Review The Bookman’s Monthly Score In The Bookman’s Mail

Lejwe ae Florence S. Small, Rebe

Eas

The Tree. A Poem

Foreign Notes and C omment By Alien W. Porterfield, Ethel Talbot Schefauer, Pierre de Lanuz

The Bookman’s Literary Club Service The Gossip Shop

a Weat, Claude L. Peake, J. Lawren

With Caricatures by B. T. Middieditch, Morin Tudury, Frank Hanley, Will

Coyne

Lawrence Perry Genevieve Taggard Malcolm Cowley

Ralph Henry Barbour Hazel Hall

Grant Overton

Robert McAlmon

Anonymous

Louts Untermeyer Thomas Moult

Henry Litchfield West Ernest Boyd

Harold Lewis Cook Simon Pure William R. Reinicke

Mark Van Doren David Carb and J. F.

Basil Thompson Thomas Kennedy J.F.

Frank Swinnerton

Louise Morey Bowman

+

Dana Hill

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tLy 1924 Ni ile rie ( ) port : } } he nel w?ators at ik a ec ' neat ne or t? t of thre far y lalities of sports? hip « endered t | or t ry | D W | i in Wat rioo-f. tor Harro nalog e recalled as the a , , , 10 of the YY oder triputh of post-athleti rtue to the graduate career of an athlete, let his fact, rather than diminis} the force ol the cor cept, be held i r? parting to it that sturdy warrant which comes of distinguished genealogy As a matter of truth, however, it bears in its modern signification a ealth of connotation undreamed by the Iron

who, as it seems, could turn a all the with which he t

The banker, sits at his desk in his private overborne by the weight His plan his his reorganization, his gigantic flotation trembles upon the brink of

Duke

phrase with ease and aplomb

urned a flank. graduate now

oarsman, a

office of opposition. merger,

project

VOLUME LIX NU rs Ty er a of pre

tige rupt« inytl g dreadful t the maginative reader may op laateens imminent

Suddenly the years pa irom him, \ 1} present cares Hle straight ( ! chair The furrows upon I rehead disappear. His muscles ex His eyes grow stern and his lips move

A breast the navy yard Two miles

to go. Never give up. Pull! Pull your heart out!”

lie sits back, a smile slowly stealing over his face. His nerve has returned The situation is saved He will fight

and win, as once upon the Thames River he fought and won when all seemed lost

This is not fiction. Once in a Wall

lice a Yale oarsman,

street of emerging triumphantly from a fight at one stage all but lost, told the writer that the old analogy of the two mile mark at New had the fulerum upon

which he had raised a sodden morale to

London been

victorious temper. 513

514

THE BOOKMAN

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Even had assurance been given that this little incident was not fiction, no reader of the more popular novels current in the past few years would have been likely to mistake it as such. The good sport hero is not the fiction mode these days, if only because in all his characteristics, habits, mental and physical reactions, and points of view, he is unfitted to the prevailing novel- istic genre. By no conceivable pos- sibility could he meet requirements of plot and incident that the average postwar protagonist must meet.

By a curious error— at any rate it may be assumed to have been an error —the hero of a novel which has excited much enthusiasm among the younger intelligentsia and, in fact, admiration quite generally, is permitted by his creator to make his preparatory school eleven and to play in at least one highly important

game wherein he distinguishes himself greatly.

In his collegiate career he turns from the athletic field to belles lettres, an occupation seemingly better adapted both to his talents and characteristics. Later he burgeons into the world

anything but a good sport. He fawns and whines like a spaniel upon a heartless, golden haired inamorata when she breaks a wholly unwarranted engagement to be married. Under the guise of love he seduces the daughter of his host at a country house and in the morning proposes for her hand in a lame, forced manner which no girl of any spirit whatever could have tolerated and which the girl in question did not tolerate. He lures a stenographer to-the brink and then vents his illicit passion upon a girl of the streets, leaving his little typist, if a contradiction in terms be pardoned, cold.

Yet, in the end, having married an

adorable wife, he meets the golden haired charmer who had jilted him, at whose feet, as above recorded, he had groveled and wept. Her husband is in an insane asylum and the noc- turnal hours in her company are open to him. He revolves in the throes of the mightiest passion his life has ever known. He lies to his wife. At length, beaten down, he sets forth for the tryst.

But neither he nor the author reckoned upon his preparatory school football career, lying so many zons in the past. For, halfway to the loved one’s cottage, upon the top of a hill,. he throws himself to the earth and wrestles even as Jacob wrestled in sacred writ; and in the end rises and returns to his wife, never, presumably, to be tempted from her side again.

Football did it in particular that climactic game against a rival school team when he came upon the field with a sagging nausea and triumphed over physical dread and mental appre- hension. The author does not admit this; it is likely he never knewit. The fact, however, remains. Without ra- tiocinative processes, as it were auto- matically, the pencil or typewriter —that brought Jeffrey Dwyer into being and developed him, moved ruthlessly at right angles to the logical, the Slavonic, the artistic dé- nouement and at one swoop straight- ened out a warped life and sent him hurrying into the safe arms of pro- priety.

Even granting the novel could not have been written had this protagonist been a genuine sportsman, at the same time there is no alternative to the conclusion that it could not have ended as it does had he not suddenly become one. Wherefore we turn to that grueling struggle upon the preparatory school field and, applying a psycholog-

THE GOOD SPORT HERO

ical throwback theory to Jeffrey’s ninth hour and (upon the surface) not too logical redemption, we come upon a true note of convincingness as well as a beautiful moral pointing the tenacious virtues of competitive play.

Jeffrey Dwyer was a Yale man, and the indicated time of his four years within the precincts of Old Eli makes him contemporaneous with a number of young men of a type whose sort seems automatically to render them ineligible to bear literary companion- ship with young Dwyer or, indeed, to appear prominently in a majority of the more popular English and American novels that come to mind.

In his capacity as scribe and chron- icler upon the field of sport, the writer has known them, some of them very wellindeed. Is there no place for them between the more or less enduring covers of a modern book? Johnny Overton, forinstance. Adequately and accurately to draft a type from this man among men, this sterling athlete, this superb soldier, would require a theme that falls without the accepted formula. Primarily it would have to be minus a discussion of com- plexes. A tall order at the outset.

Oh no, the present writer makes no pretense of underestimating the diffi- culties. Yet there would be action, plenty of it; bold, stirring action; multiplied incident and a wind blowing through the pages even as the wind that flows between high mountain peaks. There might be a more obvious psychology, but not necessarily. Not at all necessarily, I have the suspicion, in the case of Jeffrey Dwyer’s sponsor. For, when all is said and done, that little prep school football game lingers ineradicably in mind.

Is there not as much to be done with the hero who in an emergency of sex

515

if haply sex emergencies must stand as the motif of our longer fiction is fine and true to his inherited virtues and his acquired standards? Certainly the tone of time has placed its stamp upon Sir Galahad rather than upon Lothario, who today stands as a connotative term rather than as a remembered personality.

Gumbril, who danced so ineptly the antic hay when he had gummed upon his chin a blond beard, might have danced more heroically to a more stately measure had he carried from college with him as guerdon for the future a track or aquatic or football blue, or even the memory of brave days sport for the sheer sake of sport in a torpid or slogger eight.

But then, what would have become of his book if he had? A more virile, cleanlier book surely if any at all.

Di Gates of Yale, the dashing tackle of 1916, the gallant gentleman, the true sportsman, and in 1917-18 the naval aviator with the cold waters of the North Sea tumbling beneath him if he had shortcomings, those who were in college with him and those who knew him in the service have no recollections of any. Withal he pos- sessed one very material shortcoming; he lacked every qualification that would have inspired the average author of the average type of novel we are reading these days to accept him, or his sort, as the leading character. Yet again, why should this be so?

Are Gates and Johnny Overton and Hobey Baker and Tim Callahan and all the rest of those who in their strong and beautiful prime walked in lofty places, artistically outlawed as fic- tional types?

It is greatly to be doubted. In truth, so far as artistic achievement is concerned, let it stand as an axiom or at least as a sound and legitimate

516

THE BOOKMAN

——wrwrrreeeee ee —eeeeeeeeEeEey——————=&=&ere

subject for argument that there is far greater difficulty in devising a clean and uplifting theme and thereupon carrying it forward through some three hundred or more pages in a decent and wholesome and, of course, salable manner, than there is in formulating situations that bear upon the triumph of illicit love and other tangents of unrestrained youth and unregenerate middle age.

Or place the hero in this milieu if such seasoning fall more readily to the creative impulse and at the same time endow him with the sporting qualities of at least a rattlesnake, to which are attributed by naturalists rather surprising characteristics in the way of playing the game. The result will be wholesome and antiseptic, as Kipling says; surprising perhaps to the author, certainly gratifying to many readers of best sellers.

Another question: Is the hero or heroine possessed of a salacious mind, or puerile powers of resistance to evil, any more real in terms of life than a hero or heroine who is not? Is the hero with matted hair upon his chest, who reacts to life in a matted and hairy manner, any less real than the hero not thus adorned and who does notso react?

The writer needed no reminder from Rose Macaulay that one generation of youth differs very little, if at all, in reactions, impulses, and tendencies, from another. At least he can speak with positiveness concerning the so called golden Nineties. Our only point of differentiation seems to have been the failure to produce a Cyril Hume, a Scott Fitzgerald, a Ben Hecht, a Sherwood Anderson, and so on, unless perchance the brilliantly febrile Stephen Crane be regarded as redeeming our gilded epoch in the sense of literary artistry as at present conceived and executed.

But for the most part the seamy side of life nowadays, apparently, inter- preted as the sum and essence of living reality and abandoned eroticism and rampant individualism were not the vogue. These things existed; of course they did. Humanity doesn’t change. But possibly we were still under the Victorian spell and disinclined to put into print things that were not then, and still are not, regarded as suitable topics for drawing room conversation.

At any rate, Van Bibber and his friend Travers, who, if anything, leaned backward in their sporting predilections, and Clay, of ‘‘ Soldiers of Fortune’, and Rupert of Hentzau and all the rest of the gallant train were the ones whom the flappers of our period adored and whom we tried more or less vainly, or more or less success- fully, to emulate.

Not without a feeling of venture- someness the opinion herewith is hazarded that in ghostly array in a not distant, even if nebulous, foreground, ‘prototypes of Di Gates and Hobey Baker and Johnny Poe and Hack McGraw are awaiting the summons to the printed page; and that when they are drafted they will be greeted by combined frog choruses and locomo- tives and long drawn Puritan rahs, not to mention a susurrus of feminine sighs, that will relegate prevalent modes of the pen to the lumber room of things that are no longer done. Not only that, we may with some confidence look for antiphonal applause from the earnest Elizabethan Club and its sisters in places far flung from New Haven.

Of one thing the writer is certain; the youthful genius who blazes the new and cleanlier trail will not lack for the complete attention of at least one valued reviewer, to wit, the critic in Cyril Hume’s “‘ Wife of the Centaur”,

SUPPER SILENCE

517

eGEqVZ*kK_em@Vq0QVQV057V0Cc<Q_] ”07q[q0,0q0,0,q,q,qQ"“““_______—_z_z_xx—x>>_{z>_*x»_<—{_»_{_>_>{_~c@x<_>_>_*&£{z{*_><cx*c*—*~i~yx>x_>_z=x<{_~~E>~qx&—&*=&{_—iYE@[>q—=q{q[{&{&[{[—~K~~x&xx&x&x&z&z:EEE&2_—

Howard Brown (Heywood Broun), who gave the hero’s postwar book “not a cigarette’s worth of time’’, thus reviewing it sloppily, albeit ably. I speak thus confidently, having seen Brown (Mr. Broun) in football stands, at ringsides, in observation trains, for not a few years now. I have yet to encounter in his outgivings upon these subjects one single indication of flagged interest, of flawed observation, or sloppy diction. All of which those who may be interested in doing so may take as a sign and a symbol.

Right now, in a Gothic dormitory at Yale, the writer knows of two rooms where students who have contributed much to Old Eli’s athletic resurgence may be found almost any evening.

Concerning their interests, their activ- ities, their reactions toward life, no seeker after theme suggestions or character material, in accordance with the postwar mode, would be enlivened, interested, or in any way stirred.

On the other hand, the assertion is confidently made that right here among these young stalwarts in Harkness —as in other dormitories throughout the intercollegiate world is to be found the material as well as the inspiration for a literature of a new manhood that is just as real as the swampy transcriptions of human life we are asked to accept as the whole of the fabric of reality—and a thousand times more normal and thrilling and generally compelling; and sporting.

SUPPER SILENCE

By Genevieve Taggard

OW they would marvel, all those silly lovers Who could not keep her, called her cruel, hard, To see her watching, in her little kitchen Beside the window, hidden by the curtain Watching her man go striding in the yard;

To see the face that wore the cryptic, cruel Smile that would baffle all the boys who came, Tense with her brooding on his secret trouble, (Some little anguish not yet ripe for telling).

She lifts the curtain and half says his name,

Then back with all her tasks she bends to wonder Over and over what the trouble is;

And when he turns the knob and comes to supper, Offers him mutely, this his favorite salad,

And keeps the supper silence that is his.

JAMES JOYCE

By Malcolm Cowley

With a Drawing from Life by Ivan Opffer

HEN “Ulysses” was first pub- lished it was like a stone dropped heavily into a shallow pool. The stone, incidentally, weighed three pounds and three ounces. It caused a wave which marched to the shore, receded. There was a moment of amazed silence, then all the frogs who inhabited the pool began to talk at once, and more and louder than they had ever talked be- fore. They had only praise at first for the dimensions of the stone, but later, as the wave fell back, drenched critics began to be heard; soon their voices were even louder than the rest. “Ulysses”? was published two years ago in February, yet everybody in Paris continues to talk about James Joyce. “Hello, Bill ...So you're just over from the States? . . . Have you read ‘Ulysses’?”’

**And what do you think about it?” You must be ready to reply; your reputation hangs by a thread. In Berlin ‘‘it’’ means the last drop in the exchange. “It” in New York prob- ably still means prohibition. In Paris “it”? can refer to nothing else than “Ulysses”. Poor Bill prepares his answer. All the victims in unison give their answer. If you listened to their nightly conversation in the Café du Dome, you would hear something like this:

“IT never read ‘Ulysses’, only in ‘The Little Review’, but now I suppose I'll have to.” ... “It may be good but why, write eight hundred pages of it?” ... “Isn’t it disgusting!” ...

‘‘Now what J like is the restraint of it.” . . . ‘‘As soon as I saw the cover I just knew I wouldn’t read it.” ... “‘A great psychological document but would you really call it literature, Mr. Pound?” . . . “Too melodious, if any- thing.” . .. ‘Joyce has exhausted a method and an age; he is like the red seal on an official document; now it can be filed away. Personally I never read official documents.” ... ‘‘Say, I’m awful dry.”’

From opinions about the book the conversation tapers into more personal judgments of the man. ‘He is the most monumental egoist of modern times.’”’ ‘‘How fine and generous he is.’ “He has cold hands.” “Evi- dently he believes in literature’’, says Georges Duthuit, who has criticized too many books and believes in them no longer. Tristan Tzara has never forgiven Joyce for singing Italian opera; like most of the others his judgment is hostile. Perhaps it is because Joyce has none of the social ability which Paris demands. Perhaps the true reason is that genius is rarely tolerated in this city of almost universal talent.

However, after inhabiting half a dozen cities, Joyce has fixed his resi- dence in Paris, and he published “Ulysses” there. He sometimes win- ters in Nice, but when summer comes you can see him of a Paris evening on the terrace of some café, probably La Rotonde. He drinks placidly. His one companion glances round like an

518

Drawn from life for Taz BooxkMAN and autographed by Mr. Joyce

James Joyce

520

THE BOOKMAN

—eeeeeeEeEeEeeEeeeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeE——=>=>===>=>=>=>==E=EE_EE

angry watchdog to prevent strangers from sitting at the table. Joyce does not permit himself to be interviewed.

He talks willingly, however, and at times even to journalists; there is a subtle distinction here which only a literary mind can comprehend. He tells you, probably, about his struggle to write ‘‘Ulysses”. ‘I worked on it the eight years from 1914 to 1922. Toward the end of it I often wrote as much as twelve or sixteen hours a day.”’ He estimated once, during a long period of inactivity caused by his blindness, that to compose “‘ Ulysses”’ cost him twenty thousand working hours at least. He was so anxious to make every word perfect that he used up the royalties from the first edition to pay for corrections in the proof. Un- like his other books it had the fortune to be published as soon as it was ready for the press.

His first novel, “‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’’, waited two years for publication. When London compositors refused to set the type, the first sheets had to be printed in New York. “Isn’t it a shame”’, an admir- ing young lady from Chicago tells him, “that they should be so hard just on the picture of a man.”” Evidently she thinks that Joyce is a painter.

“‘Dubliners”’, his one book of short stories, had an even harder fate. It was written in 1904 and published in 1914. During the ten years which intervened at least three publishers accepted it. The second went so far as to have it printed. On the morning that Joyce was to receive the first edition, he was informed that it had been bought from the printer privately and destroyed. There were a thou- sand copies; 999 were burned and the last was given to the author. Prob- ably, by a turn of fortune, it is now worth as much as all the rest. The

book is not licentious or even obscene, but somehow it possesses that faculty of antagonizing people which is the modern proof of genius.

Joyce talks about the books that he has written but never about the books that he will write. More willingly he talks about himself: about his youth and his recent attacks of blindness. He suffers from iritis or, as he explains © it more simply, a malignant rheuma- tism of the eye. He pauses for a mo- ment to remove his smoked glasses and to pass the back of his hand across his lids.

During the silence you observe him more closely, noting his abnormally high forehead and silky beard, but especially the gestures of these long, soft, white hands, these cold and astonishing hands. There is little else remarkable about the person of this outcast and expatriate against whom all the forces of custom and decorum and propriety thunder daily. Heisa slim, bearded Irishman of forty. He bears less resemblance to Mephis- topheles than to the portrait of the typical Caucasian in the Century Dictionary.

There is

something professional about his look, although he seems

in no wise a professional writer. You would take him rather for a doctor; as a matter of fact he studied medicine in Paris twenty years ago. At times his manner has even a touch of the clerical, and no wonder. He owes the greater part of his education to the Jesuits. The instruction they gave him in ritual and the classics is deeply embedded in his mind.

They say in Paris that Joyce owes his frankness not to his imitation of the French naturalists but to the example of the great Jesuit casuists of the seventeenth century. They point to the example of Voltaire, who received

JAMES JOYCE

much the same education. At other times they point to Swift, who was influenced in the same way by the atmosphere of Dublin. They say that no one can understand Joyce perfectly except a Dubliner or a Catholic, and perhaps they are right. Certainly there is no one else who has even claimed to understand him.

Once he confided to Valéry Larbaud a story which may go a long way toward explaining his book. It hap- pened while he was still attending a Jesuit academy. The instructor asked, “Who is your favorite hero?” The pupils gave their response in terms of great names: Cesar, St. Patrick, St. Francis, Brian Boru, Napoleon. Joyce answered simply, “‘ Ulysses.’’ The good priest, who knew his Greek and his Ulysses, was less than moderately

pleased with the reply. Twenty years later the favored hero of Joyce was still this same Ulysses,

with his craft, his talent, and his eminent human failings. Only, the wily Odysseus had moved from Ithaca to Dublin and was known as Leopold Bloom. Joyce records his wanderings in eighteen chapters which correspond roughly to the books of the Odyssey. Both epics (I use the name advisedly, for ““Ulysses’”’ is more an heroic poem than a novel) begin with the adven-

521

tures of Telemachus. Both heroes sojourn too long a while in the house of Circe and both return to Penelope at the end. By his imitation of Homer Joyce makes a deliberate challenge to comparison; either his book is the Odyssey of modern times or it is pre- sumption. Even to one who takes the latter view, the very presumption is so bold as to partake of genius.

**Well, Joyce is the limit”, says the young lady from Chicago. There is a profound judgment in her words. He is the limit not alone of the epic novel but of naturalism and frankness; even, in the true sense, of romanticism. Along the path that he has followed no one can go further; it is suicide for anybody, even for Joyce himself, to imitate ‘‘ Ulysses”’.

*““And what will he do now?’’ they ask at the Dome. ‘“‘ Why, just think, he’s got nearly half his life in front of him. Will he write another big novel like ‘Ulysses’, only just the opposite? Will he begin all over again and write nice poems like ‘Chamber Music’? Will he live on his reputation all the rest of his life?’”’ Joyce answers noth- ing. He promenades his intolerable genius under the palms of Nice, with unseeing eyes which stare ahead like those of another poet whom seven cities claimed.

CHAPTERS FROM UNWRITTEN AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

V: A HERO PASSES

By Ralph Henry Barbour

Y second year at boarding school

presents to memory three out- standing events: my emancipation from Eton collars, the arrival of my thir- teenth birthday, and my first appear- ance in competitive sports. The change in neck attire, at least, should have increased my self respect, yet it seems not to have done so. Doubtless it improved my appearance, but I still remained a small, thin youth with an abashed air and manners so apologetic that, compared with me, Uriah Heep was an arrogant bully. I think it was during that year that my shyness reached its peak. Yet shyness is scarcely the word. To say that I was shy is like referring to a whale as a large minnow. Just as in those days folks died of appendicitis without knowing the correct name of their malady, so numerous unfortunates suffered from inferiority complexes without ever having heard of the things. I am convinced that any competent judge of complexes would have awarded me the palm in the inferiority class.

Naturally I was fairly unhappy much of the time. When I wasn’t unhappy I was usually asleep or reading. That year I read “‘The Three Guardsmen”’ for the third or fourth time, gulped down ‘‘Under Two Flags” an inter- dicted book which had much vogue while its pages held together and grew sentimental with ‘‘ the Duchess’’.

And I read all the poetry I could lay hands on, including Byron, surrepti- tiously filched from a locked bookcase in the parlor. (It was no trick at all with a knife blade.) My taste was catholic but inclined toward the ro- mantic. “Lalla Rookh” and “Don Juan” pleased me about equally, but I liked “‘ Hiawatha” better still. (Long- fellow was very well thought of then, although considered by the intelli- gentsia of today as “‘the bunk”. I have always been glad of that mistaken appreciation of Longfellow.) Reading, I forgot self consciousness and timidity and became for the time the hero of the romance. Such periods possibly saved my ego from utter disintegration. Perhaps, after all, I wasn’t nearly so unhappy as I thought I was; one seldom is; for, besides the joy of read- ing, I was experiencing my first ro- mantic attachment.

The subject of that attachment was Nicoll. It is something of a shock to me to find that I cannot recall his first name. But that is excusable, since, in the English public school fashion, we called each other by our surnames. Nicoll was the oldest boy in our house; probably seventeen, but seeming older by reason of a long, serious countenance and a deep voice. He had, I fancy, discovered something of what life was all about, and was a bit depressed thereby. He was the only one of us who enjoyed a room to himself; a small

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room at one end of the first floor from which he played the—I have since suspected self suggested rdéle of mon- itor. Outwardly he fell far short of the ideal hero, for he was tall and spare, with long legs and arms and bony hands, the knuckles of which he cracked engagingly when absorbed in conversation. In build somewhat on the Abraham Lincoln type. I doubt that the likeness extended further. However, I didn’t select Nicoll as an object of secret worship on the score of beauty. He became my hero be- cause he possessed the qualities I lacked. He was absolutely self con- fident; I can say self assured without exaggeration; and was to me a marvel of poise and dignity. One day he criticized unfavorably the pudding; not, mind you, as others would, and often did, outside, but from his place at the foot of the table and in a per- fectly audible voice. I disliked the matron, but I thought she took it very well. I found courage to leave most of my pudding uneaten that day, and Nicoll became to me more the hero than ever.

I don’t think he ever suspected the state of affairs. For one thing, I’d as soon have jumped into the pond as made any show of my fealty. For another, Nicoll seemed to move in a state of self communion, rather deaf and blind to the commonplace affairs that interested the rest of us. No one resented it, for he had the faculty of making others take him at his own valuation; and to himself, at least, Nicoll was rather an important person. Even the principal appeared to accept that estimate, and the matron of our house was always a little in awe of him.

Not that Nicoll held always aloof. He had his lighter moments, and at such times we gathered in his room he called it his study and filled his

chairs and bed and basked in his affability and harkened more or less unquestioningly to his words of wis- dom. On such occasions I occupied some uncomfortable niche and, striving for invisibility, was excitedly happy. Then, too, when affairs were afoot, Nicoll stepped down from his higher plane and took charge of them. He didn’t even have to be asked to do it. It was so in the spring, when the school held its first athletic meeting. The idea originated with others, but Nicoll approved it and took it in hand, and, in the end, gravely accepted credit for it. Under his management the affair became, by the addition of a tennis tournament and a ball game, a Field Day. Tennis was Nicoll’s one re- laxation, and he played the game exceedingly well.

We youngsters had no choice in the matter of participating in the proceed- ings. Nicoll drafted all who could run, jump, hurdle, or handle a racket, and exacted twenty five cents for each entry. I, willy nilly, was put down for the 100 yard dash, the broad jump, and tennis; and was forced to borrow fifteen cents from my roommate to make up the requisite seventy five. I summoned sufficient courage to declare that I didn’t want to compete in any- thing, but I was overruled. The tennis tournament was, of course, a handicap affair, since the entrants there were only seven in the end ranged from very good to very bad. Nicoll super- vised the handicapping and placed himself at scratch. The rest of us were