The Economist.

of speculative

courageous buyer stocks for a lock-up. The edifice has reached skyscraping heights, and not Mr. Harriman himself could have prophesied with certainty what would be the condition of its foundations a year or even a few months hence.

William Bellamy's "More Charades" will receive a joyous welcome from all who have found delight in puzzling over and unravelling the three "centuries" of charades which have preceded it. No one else does this sort of thing so well as Mr. Bellamy. His verse is clever, his use of words is not strained and he plays no unworthy tricks upon those whom he beguiles to the reading of his riddles. His charades provide a keen diversion for appreciative souls, a kind of intellectual solitaire which is well worth while. This new volume is a boon indeed. The Houghton Mifflin Co.

An admirable idea is skilfully carried out in the series of books bearing the general title "Little People Everywhere." The authors, Etta Blaisdell McDonald and Julia Dalrymple, have undertaken to depict the life of boys and girls in different countries in story form. Manuel in Mexico, Umé San in Japan, Rafael in Italy and Kathleen in Ireland, who give the first four books their titles, are real children, not dummies, and their experiences are delightfully told. Incidentally, young readers will derive from the stories a vivid idea of the countries mentioned, their customs and scenery, and something of their history. Rarely has profitable information been more successfully sugar-coated. Each volume has a colored frontispiece and eight full-page pictures in black and white. Eight other volumes are projected, and

it is to be hoped that the series may be still further extended. Little, Brown & Co.

The Rev. Charles F. Dole's "The Ethics of Progress" is the somewhat remodelled and carefully revised substance of a series of lectures delivered before the Brooklyn Institute three years ago, and is even better to read than it was to hear. The author's chief topics are good will, the treatment of moral evil, casuistry, the problems of human nature, conscience, ethics and evolution, and problems in practice, and he treats all of them in such a manner as to give both pleasure and edification to his readers. If he seems to go far beyond the professional casuists in his insistence upon virtue, there is no fear that he will tempt a very great multitude to ascend to those heights at which one may surmise the atmosphere to be too rarefied to sustain the human soul. Young readers will be especially stimulated and benefited by his enthusiasm. Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.

Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. add this season to their pretty booklets known as the "What is Worth While Series" five books in the familiar white leatherette binding: Why Grow Old? a cheerful little essay by Orison Swett Marden; Homespun Religion, five direct and forceful little preachments by Elmer Ellsworth Higley, D.D.; Until the Evening, eight characteristic reflec

tions reprinted from Arthur C. Benson's "The Thread of Gold"; What They Did with Themselves, a series of brief studies by Ernest Hamlin Abbott of the after-history of the chief figures in the tragedy of the Crucifixion; and The Master's Friendships, a devout study of this phase of the life of Christ by J. R. Miller, D.D. Dr. Miller also is the author of volume of helpful and inspiring religious meditations,-"The Gate Beautiful," which contains twenty or more brief chapters charged with spiritual earnestness, and dealing suggestively and sympathetically with practical problems of the religious life.

a

The gigantic hero who came into English fiction with John Ridd is always a trifle comic and Mr. Wilson Vance has not tried to make the hero of his "Big John Baldwin" otherwise, but to the natural conceit of a man too big and too strong to be coerced into submission, has added the self-righteousness of the Puritan convinced that he knows the will of God. It is a type at this moment not favored either by authors or by readers, but when the self-righteousness is accompanied by earnest desire and strong intention to be really good, pious, and brave, the possessor of the rare combination becomes extraordinarily attractive. In the story, he is beloved both by Charles First and Cromwell, but goes his own way in spite of both, assuring each that it is for his good not to be obeyed, and when he leaves England despairing of peace he pursues his way as lord of a manor in Virginia in much the same fashion, ruling it with a rod of iron that it may have liberty and peace. Perceiving it to be his duty, he gives up his life in ministering to a group of worthless settlers afflicted with small pox, and the woman whom he has loved and who has loved him from their childhood follows him and dies with him. He tells his life story, in

a journal meant for his grandchildren. His sister adds the tale of his death in a chapter which brings to mind the "Adsum" of Col. Newcome, the "Jesu" of Margaret. Both as a study of character shaped by the physical being and as a reflector of history the book is excellent. Henry Holt & Co.

All readers who have become acquainted with Denis A. McCarthy's sincere and buoyant verse will welcome a second and enlarged edition of his first volume "A Round of Rimes," from the press of Little, Brown & Co. Few verse-writers of the present day have Mr. McCarthy's lyric power. His verses sing themselves. They are upon simple themes. No note of decadence sounds through them. They are not painfully elaborated. convey genuine feeling,-pure, sunny and sympathetic. Listen to this from "The Fields o' Ballyclare."

They

"I've known the Spring in England-
And, oh, 'tis pleasant there
When all the buds are breaking

And all the land is fair.
But all the time the heart of me,
The better, sweeter part of me,
Was sobbin' for the robin

In the fields of Ballyclare." And to this more serious note from "A Song for the Child-Workers," than which there have been few lines more poignant since Mrs. Browning's "The Cry of the Children":

"Shall we cheat them of their childhood? Shall we rob them of their right?

Shall we bind them to the chariot of
Gain?

Shall the childish brain be blunted, shall the little face grow white

In the crowded hives of Industry— and Pain?

Ah, my brothers! Ah, my sisters, you had better turn away

From your ledgers and your dividends and toys,

For a menace to the future is the thrift that thrives to-day

On the bodies and the souls of girls and boys!"

KNITTING.

E'en though her tongue may by its force

Leave me as helpless as a horse,
When barks a saucy pup at him-
I'll love her better for that whim.
No steady summer's love for me,
But let her still uncertain be;

Like spring, whose gusts, and frowns, and showers,

Do grow us fresher, lovelier flowers.
No substances on earth can make
The joy I from her shadow take;
When first I saw her face, I could
Not help draw near her where she
stood;

I felt more joy than when a Bee
Sees in a garden a Plum-tree
All blossoms and no leaves, and he
Leaps o'er the fence immediately.
I like to see her when she sits-
Not dreaming I look on-and knits;
To see her hands, with grace so light,
Stabbing the wool that's red or white,
With shining needles, sharp and long,
That never seem to go far wrong.
And that sight better pleases me
Than green hills in the Sun: to see
The beach, what time the Tide goes
out

And leaves his gold spread all about.
William H. Davies.

The Nation.

LIGHT AT EVENING TIME.

From dawn till eve thick mist had veiled the sky;

The ancient hills were shrouded; ceaseless rain

Obscured the fields, and now the light was fain,

Scarce having lived, to steal away and die;

The hours in prayerless gloom had drifted by

For prayers but woke old memories again

Of dear ambitions laid aside as vain

And faith long since had failed in things not nigh.

But in that last dark hour, once bringing rest,

Eighty years ago, in a period of which some of the general characteristics appear to us almost as remote as those of palæolithic man, the Liverpool to Manchester Railway was opened, and the new age was begun. How many of those who officiated at that ceremony, the harbinger of the conditions of the modern world, realized the vastness of the change, the all-penetrative quality of the effect, which steam was to apply to the evolution of man? Could they have seen, as in a vision, the gigantic alterations, direct and indirect, which were to accrue politically, socially, economically, even mentally and morally, through the mere development of a mechanical device, how should they have contained their amazement, or how been able to continue the even tenor of their previous way?

But, in the nature of things, no such conception was possible. The human imagination cannot grasp the aspect of the future, even though logical thought might tear the curtain back and grant a glimpse into the dim vistas of the time to come.

So now, in 1909, the human race stands, certainly and obviously, at the portals of a changed world. The surfaces of sea and land suffice mankind no more. No longer doomed to disport themselves only in the lowest stratum of the ocean of air which enwraps our globe, men shortly shall be free to move upward and downward, to and fro, in its viewless depths, and its paths, unlaid save by the chemistry of nature and of time, shall give them passage to new destinies and new conditions.

Is this prospect assured? Is it the case, some will ask, that aerial navigation already offers these possibilities

to the nations of the earth? The re

ply is "No," if we confine our survey to that which has been as yet achieved. If we choose to leave out of account the entire promise of coming time; if we ignore the march of mechanical invention; if we resolutely assume that that conquest of the air, which is being effected visibly and with increasing rapidity week by week and day by day, will suffer sudden and permanent arrest at the moment when this article is written or is read; if we clothe ourselves with infallibility like to that of those men of science who, in the third decade of the nineteenth century, declared it to be impossible that any ship should ever cross the Atlantic under steam-then, in that case, these forecasts are vain, and, for us, the shadow of a new future does not lie across the earth.

But if we decline to ignore the obvious; if we grasp the fact that the best brains of the world will soon be engaged (if they are not engaged already) in the solution of the problems of aerial flight, and that a large part of the difficulties which have long delayed that solution has already been removed; then the question of the effects which this portentous change in human affairs is calculated to produce will acquire immediate and painful interest. Amidst the crowds of rejoicing English people who witnessed at Dover the gallant and all but successful attempt of M. Latham to cross the Channel in a flying machine, one wonders if any reflected that they were assisting at the first stage of the funeral of the sea power of England.

Already the dirigible balloon of the Zeppelin type can traverse a thousand miles without replenishment of fuel; already, according to a reported interview with one of the Wright brothers, it would be possible to construct an