sky. It is really a group of character-sketches, not a story, and the chief character is Mrs. Todd, a woman with a tragic past, fighting for her daily bread, yet brisk, hopeful, romantic to the last degree. Skilled in the lore of healing herbs, she seems like one of the Fates, endowed with portentous wisdom, stooping to pick sprigs of fragrant pennyroyal, in a sunshiny green pasture. Slowly, and with most delicate humor, Miss Jewett makes clear Mrs. Todd's endless curiosity, high-mindedness, and shrewd, inexhaustible kindness.

Another character is Captain Littlepage, whose experience on the deep waters of the Seven Seas has carried him into strange adventures. Many, in older days, were the men who had been around the world and had settled down in primitive seclusion to think over the scènes and events of a dramatic lifetime. This old man had a knowledge of foreign parts, his imagination was filled with brilliant pictures of the world; he was a thorough cosmopolitan, worldly-wise, efficient, yet an eternal child of mystery and romance; a mute, inglorious Marco Polo.

Joanna, in this story, was a young woman who, crossed in love, had gone to a lonely hermitage on a solitary island to spend her life, a combination of Ariadne and a medieval anchoress. The book is sheer reality both in setting and in character-study. The scattered bits of description give one the very look of green pastures, the scent of aromatic herbs, the fragrance of sunsmitten spruce-trees, the sting of the cool salt air, and the milder aspects of blue, sunshiny, safe harbors.

All through the casual recital of unimportant incidents the reader finds a spirit of gentle, appreciative humor. There is satire here, of the most charming sort, never unkind, never malicious, never condescending, but always quietly penetrating. Miss Jewett saw well the ironies, the whimsies of life, she watched with sympathy the interplay of human emotions; she knew how vanity, selfishness, obstinacy, and complacent virtue fail to recognize themselves in the tragi-comedy of social life. Her pages are full of keen pleasant enjoyment of the caprices of personality, the self-secured defeats, the amusing ignorance that calls itself knowledge. This humor cannot be illustrated by quotation, it must be recognized in the context, and is always the unspoken reflection of one

silently pondering over the range of human life from the Age of Pericles to the day when the Bowden Family had a reunion.

Other stories have their individual charm, always preëminently the charm of character delineation. Mrs. Bonney in Deephaven is a tragic figure of Poverty, Labor, and Courtesy. The White Heron is a study of loyalty to Nature, a record of faithfulness to the wild, beautiful life which surrounds a little country girl. Repudiating money that would relieve her poverty, she keeps the White Heron's secret, sharing the bird's mysterious, lonely freedom, and remaining true to the primitive brotherhood between man and winged creature.

The Neighbor's Landmark, in the same volume, encloses in itself a picture of another sort of loyalty to Nature and tradition. This concerns a man's balancing of beauty, association, sentiment, over against a profit which would greatly ease the struggle of an impoverished family. In these two stories are presented moral problems of absorbing interest to those who resent man's useless despoiling of the beauty of the natural world.

The Queen's Twin is a very subtly humorous study of a New England woman gravely concerned about the inner fortunes of her twin (by chronology), Queen Victoria. Here is a recognition of the fact that circumstances are accidental, that character, ideals, inward dignity are the realities of life. A sort of democracy of inner understanding and sympathy is pictured in this suggestive story of the bare, unlovely surroundings of one whose imagination carried her beyond space and courtiers.

Dozens of other stories, collected in various volumes, exist, and several more extended works make up the list of Miss Jewett's achievement. These stories have varying degrees of appeal. Some are frankly trivial, others are interpretations of the human 'predicament' where decisions must be made which involve surrender of personal desires, for the sake of some faith in the larger values of life. Through her record of interminable endurance, courageous patience, Miss Jewett has shown that in all the fluctuations of selfishness, something exists more stable than self, some sense of the coercion exercised by ideals, some knowledge of the superiority of will over matter. A reader once attracted will wander on through these tales with increasing responsive

ness. She arouses the reader to reflection, stimulates his curiosity, defies his conventionality and modernness, contributes to his faith in the worth of experience. The rugged and picturesque life of hardship is always a tonic to the jaded products of urbanity.

Wellesley College.

MARTHA HALE SHACKFORD.

NOVEMBER FROST

Austerity of autumn evenings!

The sunset in the stubble is aglow;

There is no wind beneath, but, deep and slow,
The pines are stirring with vague murmurings:
They hear the beating of far northern wings,

And brace them 'gainst the unseen, hurrying foe:
Soon we shall hear them laboring in the snow,
And groaning in the dark as the storm sings.

My restlessness is passing; I descry

The calmer passion of the eternal world,

The mother-kindness of the pearl-grey sky.

My changeful thoughts were with the dry leaves whirled;

But all their intricate desires are lost

Beneath the fierceness of the unyielding frost.

Smith College.

ISABEL WESTCOTT HARPER.

FRANCE BEFORE THE WAR

Now that France has triumphed over Germany, the eyes of all nations are turned toward her and all tongues are ready to do her homage. To a certain extent this courtship is doubtless to be set down to the world-old custom of acclaiming the victor irrespective of the cause. How clearly we saw this in Germany's case after the war of 1870-1871! But if it be true that her rival got something more than her due of the world's applause after that war, surely France got something less. We Anglo-Saxons, in particular, were apt to think too lightly of French manhood and to question whether the French possessed the deeper moral and ethical qualities which command our respect. At the bottom of this injustice done to the French was, above all, our inability to get close to a shy and elusive people, who do not, as we may think, carry their hearts on their sleeves, and whose ready speech and facile manners only serve the better to disguise their inner selves.

It is the present writer's desire to tell something of what he has seen around him in the France after the war. What has interested him most is the reconstruction going forward there, a reconstruction not merely in houses, factories and railways, but also in business and industrial methods. For the Great War has made the French conscious as never before that their civilization might be first in producing humanists, artists and pure scientists, and yet that it is lagging behind that of other nations in developing captains and organizers of industry, enterprising and resourceful merchants, and a laboring class both well cared for and efficient. The French, in short, are alive to the fact that their organization of society, brilliant as it is, is inharmoniously developed, and that with its present imperfections it cannot maintain them where they have the right and duty to be, among the most progressive of the great nations. It is greatly to the credit of the French that, having ascertained their shortcomings, they are fearless and unsparing in publicly acknowledging and denouncing them. Look through French publications appearing both during and after the war, and you will

find a large proportion devoted to criticism of French defects, real or supposed. Follow the debates in the legislature or the speeches of the ministers. Note the laws passed or proposed: everywhere you will perceive a desire to remedy and to reform. in all things.

There is no more hopeful or more healthful symptom in the morale of a nation than this willingness to confess its faults, together with a determination to prepare the way for better things. The French have known in the very midst of war how to improvise efficiency out of inefficiency, so that they could meet and conquer the Germans. Surely they will know in like manner how to meet and conquer the great industrial and economic problems that beset their future.

This is the first of three papers. It will briefly discuss the genius and the characteristics, the qualities and the defects of the race; in other words, the human factors in reconstruction. The second will be devoted to the changes brought about by the Great War and to the problems created by it. The final paper will deal with France's material and moral resources as assets in the work of rebuilding and as promises for the future.

In area France is smaller than our State of Texas, but surpasses that country or any other country of like size and compactness in the remarkable diversity of her agricultural and food products, and also in the excellence yet variety of her climate. Indeed France, with her exceptional resources of soil and climate, will, regardless of any industrial revolution she may undergo, remain until the end of time an agricultural country relying upon the rich output of her soil. To be sure, the average French farmer is a backward, ignorant peasant who has hitherto made little use of improved cultivating machinery and of those fertilizers best adapted to the soil. Judged by the high agricultural standards of old Europe, he has much to learn, for he draws from better ground less than the well-trained German from poorer, not to mention the results achieved by the model farmers of Denmark or Holland. All the more reason, however, for looking forward to a bright agricultural future for France when scientific farming comes into more general use. Signs of this are not wanting. And certainly where standardizing of methods