The Albanian parliament, which depends wholly on his whim, and which he treats with arrogance, is only a civilized cloak for a fanatical Moslem administration which, following its anti-Christian sentiments, does not stop at political murder, deportation, or the internment of its foes, and which is used by Ahmet's clique for its own ends. Side by side with the growth of his power and his absolute domination of the state has gone an increase in his wealth; but while he has been introducing gold-braided uniforms and courtly ceremonial into his own surroundings, the people of Albania have grown constantly poorer, and, the country, in spite of its nominal prestige, has lost both its political and its economic independence. No wonder the people grow more and more discontented, and that the bayonets of his troops alone keep Ahmet's government from tottering.

At the time when Fan Noli (the Harvard-trained bishop of Albania) drove him from power in 1924, Ahmet had already been head of the government and a dominant figure in Albania; but he lived in a plain and unpretentious manner and made open efforts to win popularity. Since he has returned to power and since he has consolidated his position and strengthened his authority, his pride and ambition have both increased, until he seems to think that his future is

secure.

During the first period of Ahmet's rule, everybody had access to him at any time. He was courteous and approachable, always dressed in civilian clothes, lived the life of a simple private citizen,

without luxury or ceremony, amid his family circle. All this won him sympathy and admiration at a time when he was scarcely known to a majority of the people, as did also his honest and energetic efforts to establish peace and order and to build up the country. Then he had every prospect of becoming popular among the people. He went fearlessly about the streets of the little capital at any hour of the day or night, untouched and unenvied, and went strolling with his ministers in the cool of the evening. To-day all this is changed.

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HEAVY armed military guard attends him and the formality of a regular court surrounds him. He appears only in uniform or in pompous official attire, maintains a special household of his own, receives only on official occasions. travels in an automobile, delights in display and high living. He is, indeed, his own prisoner. Every change from one place to another means peril to his life and requires elaborate police cordons designed to protect him.

Usually Ahmet Zogu wears the field uniform to which he is entitled by his rank as military commander-in-chief. At receptions and on special occasions when he shows himself to the people, he wears a parade uniforma fantastic official dress which in the main he adapted from that worn by his princely predecessor, William of Wied, Albania's pre-war King whose rule lasted so short a time. This underwent a number of transformations before it was standardized. Ahmet Zogu first experimented with a white military

tunic, white trousers, and white riding boots. For the last two he presently substituted red trousers and black boots. Later he added a black cloak lined with red. One must admit that though he presents in his uniform somewhat the appearance of a musical comedy hero, it is, nevertheless, very becoming and has a tremendous effect upon the ladies. His bodyguard the men in red uniform with black braid, the officers in black tunics with gold braid and red trousers look like Hungarian hussars. Ahmet no longer lives with his mother and his four sisters, but they have their home in a palace near his own, with a military guard in front of it. His sisters are pretty girls, uncultured but elaborately dressed, who spend incredible sums on gowns and personal adornment and who, as members of the ruler's family, take precedence of high dignitaries on official occasions. He has also an older brother, who was compelled to give up his rights as first-born because of his addiction to strong drink. Of his family, the most congenial with Ahmet is his mother, a vigorous, unpretentious, remarkably shrewd woman, tenderly devoted to her powerful son, who has brought so much distinction to his family. To his credit, it is said of Ahmet that he is always ready to heed the counsels of his mother, to whom he publicly defers.

There is no doubt that he regards Napoleon Bonaparte as a model for his own career, keeping a Napoleonic biography constantly on his writing desk and reading it assiduously. His dream of being king, as was predicted, is drawing near fulfilment. Rich, powerful, resplendent, he holds court at Tirana or at his villas in Scutari or Durazzo, high above the cities. Credible information has it that a great hall with a throne had been secretly prepared in advance, and that he had had himself photographed by the court photographer in royal robes. For the last year his picture, decorated with laurel wreaths, has adorned all government offices and public places in the country, not to mention coins and bank notes; and toadies have painted his initials on rocky hillsides and near watering places. He distributes orders, offices, favors not to mention an occasional warrant for execution - and has created a corps of officers which is loyal and courageous, but which imitates its war lord by going about in gold-braided uniforms which rival King Solomon in all his glory.

But in spite of all this, a gesture from his patron and protector, Mussolini, would be enough to end all of Ahmet's power before his ambitious dreams reach their fulfilment.

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HE power that some passing sensations have to bring back the past

is a curious one; the satisfying cry of seagulls, or a train shunting; the scent of broom, hot under the May sun, or of new-baked bread and the present is gone; and one is in the past again, a wan ghost, struggling sometimes with emotions too strong for comfort. For my own part, I can never encounter stale cake without thinking of Miss Murchison; and then I must needs think of Miss Smale.

I suppose my mother never guessed how I hated those visits to Miss Murchison; if she had, I am sure that they would have been far less frequent. She lived in a large house off the High Street at Loddington, the country town where I was born and bred. It was a Queen Anne house, separated from the road by only a railing, and it was called 'Marsh House' for some reason that has always puzzled me, for it stood on the top of a hill. This discrepancy between the name of the house and its situation had, however, its appropriateness, for the air in Marsh House always seemed to me like the air that puffs out when one opens a long-closed drawer or cupboard, dry and disillusioned, and yet in some way the whole house felt damp.

The small garden at the back certainly was damp, perhaps because of the two large chestnut trees that grew there, shutting out the sun and air. There was an ornamental pond in the middle of it that had long since ceased to be ornamental, covered as it was with green mould and duckweed, and half choked with dead leaves. I had a horror of this pool, born, I expect, from the endless warnings I had received against going too close to it, when I was sent into the garden to amuse myself while my mother and Miss Murchison talked together; and it, and a story of Hans Andersen's, helped me to come to the decision about Miss Murchison which for years I held as a 'child truth.' I coin the phrase not knowing how else to express those strange beliefs and opinions which a child invents for itself, and holds in some sense as a plain truth, while realizing that they differ fundamentally from the world in which its grown-ups

concur.

Stale Cake

By D. M. Thornton

From the English Review (London)

MORE critical' ink has been

spilled over the works of the 'stream-of-consciousness' novelists than over any other modernistic school of fiction. Among that group of writers who disregard 'plot' in order to concentrate on the alluring task of following the human mind through all its vagaries are figures so various as James Joyce, the late Marcel Proust, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf.

Stale Cake has especial interest because it is the first work to appear in the United States by a new writer employing a similar technique. It shows obvious traces of 'stream-of-consciousness' influence; but its originality is equally obvious.

daytime; when Miss Smale and her two elderly maid-servants were safely in their rooms, she would blow out the lamp I always visualized this practical detail very clearly and then turn instantly into a large toad, and make her way with vast leaps to the pond in the garden. Her appearance was, too, in some degree, responsible for this decision of mine: she was short and stout, with powerful limbs; she always seemed to squat, rather than sit; her skin was dark and damp-looking, her mouth enormous, her eyes surprisingly bright, and there was a baleful forcefulness, too, about her whole personality, which has always seemed to me a characteristic of toads.

My mother, I think, was sorry for her, and used to send me sometimes to pay her a visit, giving me some flowers to take, or perhaps a missionary magazine would have to be delivered. I would go, obediently, and be ushered into the room at the back of the house, that was filled in summer with a green light from the chestnut trees which grew so close to the window. Miss Murchison would be squatting in a large armchair; Miss Smale sitting very upright on another, reading aloud or sewing; I would deliver reading aloud or sewing; I would deliver the flowers or magazine with the ac

She was, I held, only a woman in the companying message.

Then would follow a quarter of an hour's misery for me, and, I dare say, of boredom for Miss Murchison. As for Miss Smale, any interruption, of however feeble a nature, of the endless tête-àtête must have been a relief. Looking back, it seems to me that the conversation on these occasions never varied; I suppose in reality it must have done so. Miss Murchison would ask me many questions as to the health of the dear Rector, my father, who was never, by any chance, anything but well; of my mother, 'poor thing, with that brood of children;' of my lessons. And then, when the visit was near its end, she would say: 'Humph-little girl . . . cake,' and I knew that the worst was still before me.

A silence, and then: 'Little girls like cake, don't they, Miss Smale?'

Miss Smale would titter sycophantly, 'I know I did when I was a little girl.'

'Well, that was a long time ago, wasn't it? But perhaps you will be so good as to fetch me the key of the cake cupboard.'

She kept her cakes, strangely enough, in this, the back sitting-room.' And when this cupboard was opened, there would be disclosed a large selection, magnificent to the outward view. I was, undoubtedly, fond of cake, and the first time the cupboard was opened, I felt that there might prove to be some point in these terrifying visits. But the piece that I was given proved so deprived by long keeping of any of its cakely virtues that I used to dread the coming of this gift; still, come it did, and, seated on a small chair, with a plate on my knees, and many admonitions as to crumbs, I had to get through its difficult dryness as best I might.

The virtue if it is a virtue of pity develops late; and it was not until I was more or less grown up that I began to feel any for Miss Smale. Till then, she was just 'Miss Smale;' a long, thin woman whose drab clothes seemed to be dropping off her; Miss Smale, an appendage, an annex, as it were, of Miss Murchison. But I came at long last to feel a very passion of pity for her; greater, I almost think, than any other person ever roused in me; pity and wonder, as to how she could have survived those long years she spent as Miss Murchison's companion. Thirty years,

it must have been, before her release came to her; thirty years of petty tyranny and she seemed to change so little through all that time.

My mother, I remember, was strangely blind to this tragedy; for to me, at least, it appeared as little less. I spoke to her once about it, and she answered, in a practical tone of voice: 'Well, my dear, I think she is very fortunate to have such a good home. She has nothing of her own, and she is neither very attractive nor in any way clever - if she was not with Miss Murchison, I really don't know what would become of her.' What would become of her! As if the workhouse, as if death itself, would not be infinitely better, I remember thinking bitterly; and I never spoke to my mother again on the subject.

Thirty years of polite baiting! For if only Miss Murchison had ever been openly rude to her, it would have been more bearable. But she was always polite; often showed her, at least before visitors, a sort of twisted considerateness. I came to think that they were never out of each other's mind; that the tie between them was as strong as love

stronger than one had thought mere hate could ever be.

a

Miss Murchison used to give missionary tea parties; she was a great missionary. Somewhere in Central Africa there existed a tribe for whose conversion to Christianity she seemed to hold herself amost personally responsible. A photograph of the king of this tribe, cheerful-looking rascal with a shock of white hair, hung over the dining-room mantelpiece; and by chance, or possibly in recognition of the fact that they were spiritually united in the wish for the welfare of the tribe, a photograph of Miss Murchison, toad-like and sinister, flanked it; it was as though she was a sort of absentee queen. The house was full of the handiwork of these natives; baskets and uncomfortable articles of apparel, made mostly of beads, and tortured-looking gourds, all singularly lacking in the charm that is usually so apparent in the handiwork of the less sophisticated peoples.

Miss Murchison, freed from all responsibility of dispensing tea to her visitors by the labors of Miss Smale, would become engrossed in long conversation, conducted on her part in powerful whispers, with the more elderly people, about the shameless and immoral orgies indulged in by those natives who had not yet been persuaded to embrace Christianity; but never for a moment, however thrilling the subject might be, did she forget, or become unconscious of, Miss Smale. Sometimes,

when tea was dispensed and finished with, the poor woman would begin a more or less cheerful talk with someone; and instantly Miss Murchison would break off her own discourse and, leaning forward, direct her voice towards her victim. I expect,' she would say, with a horrible travesty of a smile on her face, 'I expect, Miss Smale, that you have letters that you would like to get written?' The formula never varied, and Miss Smale, with a muttered apology to the person to whom she was speaking, would get up and leave the room.

Sometimes the poor thing would try to circumvent the advent of this form of dismissal by attempting to creep from the room on her own account, but she was never successful in this plan. 'Oh, you're not leaving us, I hope, Miss Smale?' would come in that hateful voice that used to send cold shivers down my back; and Miss Smale would down my back; and Miss Smale would creep back again, trying to look as if she had never tried to escape.

Of all the varying forms which Miss Murchison's tyrannous hatred took, and they were many, this form always seemed to me the worst; used, for some reason, to rouse me to the highest pitch of shuddering pity.

It was not until after we left Loddington that Miss Smale's release came.

I was abroad at the time, and I got the news in a letter from my mother. 'I hear that Miss Smale has been left quite a little fortune; it comes from an uncle, I believe. It will mean a yearly income of about six hundred. She seems to be going to leave Miss Murchison almost at once; I should have thought that she would have waited a bit, seeing how long the place has been her only home. She intends to settle, so I hear, at Brockington, on the south coast.' I don't think any piece of news unconnected with myself or those nearest to me has ever given me such pure joy.

It was some months before I got back to England; and after that weeks passed before I found myself within a short journey of Brockington, and arranged by letter to go over and lunch with Miss Smale. Heaven knows what manifestations of a liberated spirit I had not anticipated; for what signs of a belated flowering I had not hoped.

Ferndean, the small house that Miss Smale had settled in, was on the outskirts of Brockington. I walked out to it from the railway station. Soon, after noticing the word 'Ferndean' neatly painted in black on a white gate, I saw a figure in the garden, and felt a pang of disappointment. It was Miss Smale, I thought; and how little she had altered! In a moment I saw my mistake; this was

not Miss Smale; and inspection at closer range caused me to wonder that I ever thought it was, for this woman did not resemble Miss Smale in any particular. Except that. . . . What was it? A listlessness of movement? A limpness about the hang of her clothing?

I asked her if this was Miss Smale's house, and she answered in a nervous flurried way that it was. Her politeness seemed to come to meet me, a thin wavering thing; unsupported by any self-assurance, any hint of the dignity of self-possession. She took me into a room on the ground floor, and left me to tell Miss Smale of my arrival.

I looked around me eagerly. Here was a room that must surely be, in some measure, the realization of a dream. Miss Smale must sometimes, during the long years she spent in Marsh House, have planned, with however much apparent futility, the room she would have liked to call her own. It was very bright. Roses, pink roses, seemed to spring at me from everywhere. The carpet, the wallpaper, the chintzes were covered with them. On the walls were many engravings of the pictures of a well-known woman artist. Within their gilded frames lovers met, parted, dreamed, pined, quarreled, and kissed among the recognized symbols of romance waterfalls, and ruined castles, and again, more roses. The one hint of the existence of a less sugary world was an exact replica of the photograph of the old Black King, Miss Murchison's consort, as I used to think of him. Perhaps it had been a parting present.

I was only alone for a few moments when Miss Smale came in.

She was changed; she had grown stouter, and was dressed in pale grey, which did not suit her, for she was much sallower than she used to be. Her manner was curious; the old feebleness, that had suggested the weak growth of a creeper without means of support, was evidently being gradually altered by the self-importance that a comfortable and assured income gives. But the alteration showed itself in fitful gusts; for most of the time she was as she had always been. It showed itself most, perhaps, when she addressed Miss Thompson, the woman I had seen in the garden, and who came into the room soon after Miss Smale, and whose presence began to cause me a vague, unaccountable depression.

Luncheon was an important affair; the food was of the richest description. Mayonnaise of salmon; boiled fowl, with an accompanying ham; and a trifle, smothered in cream and rich with hidden cherries. Miss Smale ate enormously; (Continued on page 160)

In my opinion no historical event has ever been so grotesquely and perversely distorted.' DEAN INGE.

T

THE CAREFUL student knows how difficult it often is to arrive at sound and correct conclusions with regard to the facts and incidents of history. It is often very much easier to show that popularly accepted views of historic events are wrong than to set forth right ones. Probably there is no chapter of British history that has suffered so much, not only from false conclusions, but also from the distortion of facts, as the one that deals with the revolt of our American colonies. This revolt has usually been represented as that of a righteous and God-fearing people of British origin, deeply imbued with the British love of freedom and sense of justice, against the cruel oppression and extortion of an insane King and a corrupt aristocracy, under the sagacious leadership of the greatest of all patriots, a man who was first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his own countrymen. That is the historical faith in which Americans have been nurtured, and which has been unhesitatingly accepted by a large proportion of the British race for the last hundred and fifty years. But this view, except by that type of politician who always holds his own country to be in the wrong, is not now so freely accepted among ourselves as it used to be, and some learned students of history, even in America, are making a careful study of the whole question, and beginning to see and to admit that the rights of the great quarrel which led to their secession from the British Empire were not all on one side.

It was in 1492 that Christopher Columbus discovered America, but although England was even then rising into importance as a sea power, it was not until 1607 that the English, after more than one failure, succeeded in founding a colony on the American mainland. This settlement was made on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, on territory which had previously received from Sir Walter Raleigh the name of Virginia, in honor of Queen Elizabeth. The founding of other colonies speedily followed, and at the outbreak of the Seven Years' War in 1756, there were in all thirteen.

2. Maryland was founded in 1632, as a Roman Catholic colony, by Lord Baltimore.

3 and 4. North and South Carolina were settled about the same time, largely by landless adventurers.

5. Georgia was founded in 1632 by James Oglethorpe for debtors from English prisons and for a set of persecuted German Protestants called Moravians.

6 and 7. New York and New Jersey were founded by the Dutch and taken by the English in 1667, after the first Dutch War in the reign of Charles II.

8 and 9. Pennsylvania and Delaware were founded in 1682 by the Quaker, William Penn, with the object of providing a place of refuge and toleration for his co-religionists, who were being persecuted in the other colonies. It prospered greatly, and, to the credit of the Quaker influence, it was said to be the most desirable of all the colonies to live in. A portion of the original Pennsylvania was separated from it to form the colony of Delaware.

10, 11, 12, and 13. The New England Colonies (viz. Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island) were founded by Puritans who had left England to avoid molestation for their religious principles. The first New England settlers were the Pilgrim Fathers, who sailed from Plymouth in the Mayflower in 1620 to seek a new home, where they hoped to realize their own austere ideal of the City of God. They were Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Baptists, hostile to the Church of England, and deeply imbued with the religious and political ideals of the extremists among Cromwell's followers. It was they from the very first who, either for better or for worse, have given its distinctive character to American life.

These colonies had been growing up along the Atlantic seaboard, from Nova Scotia to Florida, for a hundred and fifty years, each developing on its own lines, with little interference from the Mother Country; and, as they were so diverse in their origin, it can easily be understood that they were much more at variance than in unity among themselves. Their only geographical tie was their separation from the rest of the civilized world, and their only moral tie their relationship to their common Mother Countryin fact, so bitter were their mutual animosities that they would not unite even for their own common defence against the Red Indians. Not only that, but the spoils taken by the Indians from one colony often found ready buyers in another colony. In short,' says a writer of the period, such is the difference of character, of manners, of religion, of interests of the different colonies that I think, if I am not wholly ignorant of the human mind, were they left to themselves, there would soon be a civil war from one end of the country to the other, while the Indians and the Negroes, with better reason, would impatiently watch the opportunity of exterminating them altogether.' From such a self-inflicted disaster as this they were saved by the Mother Country, whose armies protected them, to whose courts the wronged among them could appeal for justice, and under whose generous treatment they were advancing in material prosperity by leaps and bounds.

There was, however, between the

colonies and the Mother Country one abiding source of irritation in what was called the Navigation Laws. In those days England, like every other country, considered it a duty to regulate her commerce in the interests of her own people. For that purpose all commerce with the colonies was confined to British ships, navigated by crews of whom the majority were British. All colonial exports and imports had to be through the Mother Country. Heavy duties were imposed on various classes of goods at American ports, and colonial exports which competed with home-produced goods were forbidden. However much these regulations might be in accord with the politicoeconomical ideas of the time, it can easily be understood that the colonies regarded them as a grievance. And yet the grievance was not so real as might at first sight appear. The Mother Country did not ignore the interests of the colonies. For instance, in order to provide a market for Virginian tobacco, the cultivation of tobacco at home was forbidden. Every effort was made to provide through the Mother Country a profitable market for colonial produce, and it may be doubted if unrestricted trade would have been any more advantageous to the colonies as a whole than the conditions that obtained, and under which they were rapidly growing in wealth and prosperity.

the whole of the North American continent. It was mainly to protect the colonies against the French that we fought the Seven Years' War (17561763). Under the able and inspiring guidance of the 'Great Commoner, ' William Pitt, the British triumph in that war was complete. In 1759 the French were conquered in Canada by General

the great ministry of Pitt as the American colonies. They felt that as a result of that war they were no longer threatened by any foe, and that no limit except the ocean could be assigned to their expansion. There was among them a great outburst of apparently genuine loyalty, and in an address to the King even the colony of Massachusetts, which was soon to be

On the other hand, there were two reasons that prevented any very pronounced expressions of resentment on the part of the colonies. In the first place there was great laxity in enforcing the restrictions, with the result that an immense smuggling trade had grown up, by which those engaged in it made great fortunes; and, in the second place, the colonies required the protection of the British Army and Fleet against the French, who were pressing upon them on the north, the west, and the south, and endeavoring to gain the mastery over

Wolfe, and by the Peace of Paris, at the close of the war North America became practically a British continent. The colonies had no longer anything to fear from French aggression, and they believed they could defend themselves against the Red Indians without the aid of British soldiers, so that their connection with the Mother Country seemed to be no the Mother Country seemed to be no longer of any great importance to them. No part of the British Empire had gained so much by the Seven Years' War and

come the chief centre of disaffection, pledged itself to show its gratitude by every possible testimony of duty and loyalty.

At the beginning of the Seven Years' War, England was a small nation with some scattered possessions in India and in North America. By the Treaty of Paris she had become an empire of unprecedented greatness, but she had also become burdened with what was then the enormous debt of £140,000,000, and this made necessary a great increase of taxation. To the cost of the war, in which so much blood and treasure had been sacrificed on their behalf, the American colonies were contributing nothing, and to such an extent had the smuggling trade grown that the collection of the American customs cost the British Exchequer about four times as much as the amount collected. It was, of course, unreasonable to expect that this condition of things should be allowed to continue. Accordingly, when George Grenville became Prime Minister in 1763, he began at once to suppress the smuggling trade with a strong hand. Thus then, of the two considerations that had caused the colonies to submit to

the existing trade regulations, the second had been removed, as already stated, by the defeat of the French and the conquest of Canada, and the first was now being removed by the suppression of the smuggling trade.

But this was not all. In 1765 Grenville passed the famous American Stamp Act, requiring all legal documents to bear Government stamps. No sooner, however, was the Stamp Act passed than the colonists, headed by Massachusetts and