out in th' yard hangin' over th' fence doin' nothin', as usual. Louizy Ann! What you twistin' your eyes after Mis' Dunham's old nag for? Ain't you ever seen anybody ridin' along a road before? Come into th' house an' sweep up th' litter that Beveridge man made with his whittlin'; then put th' potatoes over for dinner." And as the little waif scurried to do her bidding she added to herself: "No fool like an old fool! Mis' Dunham's fifty if she's a day, an' he gray as a rat. They'll both be tired of their bargain before the year's out, I venture.”

T

Along the narrow, bush-fringed highway rode two with such eternal freshness in their hearts that gray hairs mattered nothing. Ahead of them up the slope crept the tin peddler's cart, a spot of sunny color on the damp brown road, and the driver was still whistling: "Doan yo' cry, mah honey !" About them everywhere were the sight and scent of budding life; and italicizing the silence of a content too deep for words sounded from across field, clear and sweet and strong, a meadow-lark's jubilant iteration: "Spring of the year! Spring of the year!"

HERE has been issued recently a very unusual book, the story of the life of a young man, not widely known, who died at thirty-seven, and who in the ten brief years of his professional endeavor accomplished more than falls to the lot of most men who live out their threescore years and ten. The book is as remarkable in its making as in its matter. The title-page reads:

CHARLES ELIOT

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT

A LOVER OF NATURE

AND OF HIS KIND

WHO TRAINED HIMSELF FOR A NEW

PROFESSION

PRACTICED IT HAPPILY

AND THROUGH IT WROUGHT MUCH GOOD.

And on the dedication page are these words:

FOR THE DEAR SON

WHO DIED IN HIS BRIGHT PRIME
FROM THE FATHER.

The "father" is President Eliot, of Harvard, who himself prepared the material for the press, and wrote what was necessary to connect the letters, extracts from journals, reports, and newspaper articles of his son, which make up most of the seven hundred and sixty pages of the volume.

President Eliot's work has been done in perfect taste, and while enough is given of the personal and home side of

Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect, Houghton,

Mifflin & Co., Boston.

his son's life to satisfy a reader who may have been his friend, all this has been subordinated to the professional side, and to the story of Mr. Eliot's work.

Charles Eliot was born with a taste for out-of-door nature and art. His training in drawing and sketching began early, and in the summers he lived much in the open air, often spending the vacation months in camp on the coast of Maine. For two summers during his college years he organized and managed a club of student campers-an experience that was of great service. "He found that he could plan and perform executive work, exercise authority over a considerable party, some of whom were older than himself, and do business and give orders in a manner which satisfied the interested persons and led to success in a somewhat complicated undertaking. He saw that his authority was respected, and that the participants all enjoyed the camp and did some serious work."

He was at the end of his senior year in college before having any distinct idea of the profession which he was to adopt and for which he was so peculiarly fitted. In the year of his graduation he pasted into one of his scrap-books these lines from the "Taming of the Shrew:" "No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en ;In brief. sir, study what you most affect."

In one of his senior forensics he thus defined "success:" "I define success in college to be the attainment of two things, namely, high standing as a scholar, and

influence as an example of right living. I define success in the world at large to be the attainment of a sufficient competency, combined with the largest amount of usefulness to one's fellow-men." He made few friends in college; he was physically incapable of being an athlete (though very tall, of great length of leg, and a good walker), nor was he a member of any society. "He went his way comparatively unknown in a crowd, and when he graduated, neither he nor his classmates knew what there was in him."

His choice of a profession was made in 1882, soon after graduation. There was then no school of landscape architecture in America, and it was not until seventeen years later (and largely through Mr. Eliot's influence) that a four years' course in this art was begun in the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard, in association with the course in architecture.

The distinction between the study of forestry, gardening, and engineering, and that of landscape architecture, is one which Frederick Law Olmsted, the master of his profession in America, established in 1856, and taught all his life by precept and example. Mr. Eliot wrote in 1896: "The popular notion that my profession is chiefly concerned with gardens and gardening is utterly mistaken. Landscape architecture is an art of design, and in a very true sense covers agriculture, forestry, gardening, engineering, and even architecture (as ordinarily defined) itself."

He began his studies in the Bussey Institution, the Department of Agriculture and Horticulture at Harvard University, but it was not very long before he had the opportunity to enter Mr. Olmsted's office as an apprentice; and as the work then in hand was of great variety and as he traveled much with his employer, he was able to acquire more practical information than the schools could have taught him.

"Charles continued to profit very much by casual but fruitful suggestions which he received from Mr. Olmsted during the inspection tours on which he accompanied him. Thus, when visiting Easton's Pond at Newport in 1883-a shallow lagoon behind the bathing-beach, largely overgrown with sedges, and partly filled with blown sand from the beach-Mr. Olmsted suggeste eatment of the unsightly

pond which foreshadowed the method afterward so admirably used at the Chicago Fair. He proposed to the city to dredge an irregular water-basin, and with the material so obtained to raise the level of the remaining area, thus making land and water of a place then neither the one nor the other. On the same occasion Mr. Olmsted pointed out that any large structure, like a city bathing-house, on the sandy and surf-beaten beach would appear wholly incongruous and out of place. This hint bore fruit in Charles's mind thirteen years afterward on Revere Beach, one of the Boston Metropolitan Reservations. A visit to the Capitol grounds at Washington was very instructive. Charles here noted that an immense, massive building requires visibly firm and broad ground-support, and adequate and dignified approaches; that curved drives and foot-paths must be justified by some necessity of climbing by easy grades; that there should be no curves for the curves' sake, unless in absolutely formal gardening on a small scale; that single conifers tend to betray the small size of a piece of ground, acting as exclamation marks or measuringpoles; that the scheme of planting round a building should consider the permanent visibility of the best aspects of the building on the one hand, and, on the other, should provide for the obscuring of the necessary spaces of gravel and asphalt.

"By reading Mr. Olmsted's printed writings, by listening to his conversation, and going over the letters he wrote about new undertakings, Charles soon absorbed the fundamental principles which had long guided Mr. Olmsted in his landscape work. Mr. Olmsted always desired to emphasize in park work the antithesis between the objects seen in city streets and the objects of vision in the open country. He thought that trimmed trees, flowers in pots, clipped grass, and variegated flower or foliage beds savored of the city, or at least of the suburb; and he preferred for the purpose of refreshing a city population undulating meadows fringed with trees, quiet, far-reaching pastoral scenery, and groves which preserved the underbrush and the rough surface of the natural forest. Paths, roads, resting places, and restaurants were always to be regarded as the necessary facilities for enabling the population to enjoy the

essentially restful elements of park scenery. These artificial features were not the objects of any landscape undertaking, but its necessary impediments."

In 1885 he left Mr. Olmsted's office, and, after visiting such of the important parks in the United States as he was not already familiar with, and the mountains and forests of the Appalachian Range, he started for nine months of travel and study in Europe, at first seeing England thoroughly, then visiting every important Continental park, even as far as Russia. Nowhere will the nature-lover find more entertainment than in the journal of this healthy-minded, observing young man's travels. He was chiefly bent on seeing the great parks, gardens, and recreation-grounds, but when the weather was unfit he resorted to the galleries and

museums.

In a letter to his father he says: "I am astonished at the French work in the smaller city squares and places. Their formal work-fountains, parterres, etc.—I like well; but artificial rocks, cascades, streams (all edged with concrete!) and cement stalactites in concrete caves, seem somewhat childish.”

At Versailles he gave hardly any attention to the palace and its contents, "but passed straight through to Le Nôtre's great gardens, where I soon discovered there was very much to be seen. I looked at numbers of varied parterres, and walked round and about for two hours; but then found my way into the gardens of the Petit Trianon. What pleasantness, what delight, what romantic charm, is here, particularly to one coming directly from the formalities and eccentricities of the great gardens. Plainly, this Petit Trianon is the better sort, but what a simple sortnothing but grass and trees and a little water, and a very little undulation of surface; but grassland and woodland run in and out of each other, and water appears unexpectedly; and there is the charm of not knowing what the next turn may bring you to; and the great trees are of many sorts. The mixing of them is ever varied, and sometimes the wood is open and grassy, and sometimes dense with low branches and shrub thickets. The roads and paths are no longer parts of the scene, but only the means of arriving on the scene. They go about unobtru

sively. In this little space-perhaps a tenth or twentieth of the area of the large garden-there is a great variety of quiet, peaceful, soul-refreshing scenery. I think it the best thing of its sort I have seen on the Continent. Whoever designed the few buildings in it did well. The hamlet where the Court and Marie Antoinette used to play at being peasants is very pretty; so is a group of buildings called the Swiss cow-house, and the farm gate behind these. The picturesqueness of these things is a little too much of the stage, but only a little; most of it is a real, that is a reasonable, picturesqueness."

Muskau, a type of a German country park, on which Mr. Eliot afterwards wrote a newspaper article, he thus noted in his journal: "This is landscape gardening on a grand scale, and the resulting scenery is extremely lovely. Altogether it is the most remarkable and lovable park I have seen on the Continent. [This was after his visit to Versailles.] There are no ledges; but steep, irregular slopes of river bluffs, and hills beyond. The woods have an almost American variety of species, and many American plants are very com

mon.

The distant parts are wholly naturalesque, with well-designed capes of highland over the river valley and roads and paths, and charming views from the almost hidden Muskau village. By sunset the clouds were all broken, and the light from the low sun was very beautiful. . . . The work of Fürst Pückler is of a sort to make me very proud of my profession! For here, in a land of dull, almost stupid, scenery, Nature has been induced to make a region of great beauty, great variety, and wonderful charm.”

Of Mr. Eliot's observations while in Europe Mr. Olmsted wrote to President Eliot

They are " "keen and sound, and show (without looking further) that he can easily be a better critic and commentator on landscape-gardening works than any whom we have had for a long time."

In December, 1886, Mr. Eliot started in practice in Boston. His profession was not only unrecognized in name, but its function was hardly understood, nor was it clear how a "landscape architect" should charge for his services. Should it be by a commission on the work he advises? Should he take contracts for

executing what he plans? Mr. Eliot decided "not to undertake surveying of any sort, not to take contracts for the execution of his plans, and not to take commissions on labor or material, or on the amount of a contract, as architects habitually do, but to be in all cases strictly a professional adviser like a lawyer."

And so began a professional career which lasted for only ten years, but which coming generations may well be thankful for. He wrote constantly for papers like "Garden and Forest," his first printed article being a plea for the planting of suburban homes with shrubbery so that the yards would be less bare and colorless in the spring months. "We expend from $3,000 to $20,000 and upwards upon the shell of our abode, and indefinite sums upon its interior appointments and decorations, but outside we leave it all bare and unbeautiful, and spend only for the gaudy brightness of geraniums in summer. No wonder March is ugly in the suburbs." He wrote constantly of the need of parks and open spaces. In a paper on "Parks and Squares of United States Cities," written in 1888, he showed that the little city of Macon, Ga., had 18 inhabitants per acre of park, New York had 1,400 inhabitants per acre, and Boston 3,424.

In the spring of 1893 Mr. Eliot joined the Olmsted firm. For many reasons he would have preferred professional independence, but Mr. Olmsted's junior partner, Mr. Harry Codman, had died suddenly at Chicago, where he had been directing the admirable work planned by the Olmsted firm for the World's Fair, and Mr. Eliot's help was sought..

Some of Mr. Eliot's important works are the grounds in front of the Longfellow house at Cambridge, the improvement of the Common at Newburyport, the "White Park" at Concord, N. H., the park at Youngstown, O., the Keney Park at Hartford, Conn. (where he contracted the cold which caused his death), a great number of private estates, and, chief of all, the establishment of the Metropolitan Park Commission of Boston. A third of the book is devoted to the work of this

Commission, to which Mr. Eliot gave the greater part of his professional life. The various open spaces now or soon to be controlled in the park system around Boston "include more numerous large public pleasure grounds than are governed by any other public authority in northern America, excepting the Governments of the United States and Canada. Blue Hills Reservation is five miles long; Middlesex Fells Reservation, two miles square; Stony Brook Reservation, two miles long," etc. Mr. Eliot advocated the acquisition for the public of practically all of the bank of the Charles River. Much of this land has been acquired, and it seems not unlikely that his design will eventually be carried out in its entirety.

The maps of the public reservations and holdings of the Metropolitan Park Commission which accompany the book tell at a glance the story of Mr. Eliot's great work for Boston. The book is beautifully and thoroughly illustrated with such maps and with a great number of typogravure reproductions of photographs, as well as by Mr. Eliot's pen-sketches. It has also a full index, and it is so written as to be of great suggestive value to all who have homes with grounds around them, or even a bit of a yard-little paragraphs like: "All the walls about the estate were to be vine-clad-English ivy on the shady side of the house and in other sunless corners, Virginia creeper on the brick walls, and Japanese ivy on the stone posts "--just what one may be very glad to know.

The value of this memorial volume is twofold: it is the lesson of a sweet and noble life, successful because of its moral qualities-" gentle though persistent, and modest though confident;" and it has a very great interest to nature-lovers, for it describes many of the most beautiful parks and gardens of the world as seen by an appreciative, cultured critic, and it tells in detail of some of the most important public improvements of our generation. Here in a most intimate and personal way is revealed the art of arranging land and landscape for human use, convenience, and enjoyment.

Advanced First Reader. By Ellen M. Cyr. Illustrated. Ginn & Co., Boston. 5×71⁄2 in. 104 pages. 30c.

Biblical Love-Ditties: A Critical Interpretation and Translation of the Song of Solomon. By Paul Haupt. The Open Court Publishing Co., Chicago. 6x94 in. 11 pages. 5c.

Chanticleer. By Violette Hall.

Illustrated.

The Lothrop Publishing Co., Boston. 5x71⁄2 in. 304 pages. $1.50.

This is a simply written story of rural life, as seen by a young married couple, one of whom is an artist and the other an author. Their home in the woods is in some degree in the nature of an experiment, an attempt to "go back to nature." Several interesting friends gather about them, and the outcome contains both romance and character development. The nature descriptions are prettily done. The book is illustrated with color-plates. Flight of Rosy Dawn (The). By Pauline Bradford Mackie. (Cozy Corner Series.) Illustrated. L. C. Page & Co., Boston. 5x7 in. 98 pages. 40c., net.

The novels of Mrs. Hopkins (Pauline Bradford Mackie) have hitherto been historical in character, dealing with the life of the early settlers in New England and in the Mohawk Valley, also with later official life in Washington. She now publishes a charming little story of the Chinese in California, which is well worth reading, first because of its intrinsic merit as a specimen of style, and, secondly, because of its graphic presentation of the dependence of Californians upon the Chinese as domestics, and yet the necessity that they should educate those domestics out of their stubborn superstitions, sometimes dangerous to society.

In Quest of the Quaint. By Eliza B. Chase. Illustrated. Ferris & Leach, Philadelphia. 5×8 in. 253 pages.

Kathlamet Texts. By Franz Boas. Illustrated. (Bureau of American Ethnology: Bulletin 26.) The

Government Printing Office, Washington. 72x112

in. 261 pages.

Literary Boston of To-Day. By Helen M. Winslow. (Little Pilgrimages Series.) Illustrated. L. C. Page & Co., Boston. 42x7 in. 444 pages. $1.20, net.

At the outset the author bravely faces the common declaration that there is no literary Boston of to-day, and truly says that if indeed Boston has now no such group of authors as she had when Holmes, Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Fields were writing, it might well be asked what other city in America or even in the world does to-day have such a group. In point of fact she is able to present a long list of Boston writers of whom a fair proportion may be classed among the literary leaders of the Nation; while the

number of minor writers of Boston or the vicinity included or not included in this book is legion. The object of the book is not crit ical, but rather to present pleasant personal sketches of the authors discussed, together with such details of their literary life and work as may be presumed to be of interest to the general public. There are many portraits of decidedly uneven value.

Nathan der Weise. By G. E. Lessing. Edited by Tobias J. C. Diekhoff, Ph.D. The American Book Co., New York. 5x7 in. 358) pages. 80c. Peace with Honour. By Sydney C. Grier. L. C. Page & Co., Boston. 5×7% ín. 413 pages

$1.50.

Let no one be discouraged at the rather unpromising and commonplace beginning of this novel. The author warms to his work after a few chapters and produces an extremely readable story, reminding one in its character somewhat of his "Like Another Helen." The scene of that novel was laid in Greece. The scene of the present book is evident, and yet the author tries to mask the actual geography by unfamiliar names. At all events, the incidental information_concerning life in Oriental countries, as well as the plot of the book itself, gives to the reader a clearer idea than ever of the enormous difficulties which have beset the British on the outlying borders of their great empire. The plot recalls the scenes graphically described by Mr. Justin McCarthy in his "History of Our Own Times," when, in 1841, at Kabul, the British embassies to the Amir of Afghanistan, headed by Sir Alexander Burnes and Sir William Macnaghten, were successively assassinated, and when, most terrible of all, in the Khyber Pass, the following year, of sixteen thousand British soldiers and camp-followers, only one Englishman and four or five natives escaped massacre. The similar but less tragic circumstances related by Mr. Grier are evidently founded on fact. ticularly those of Georgia Keeling, the heroine, The author's characters are well drawn, parSir Oswald Haigh, the leader of the expedition, and Elkanah B. Hicks, of the "Empire City Crier," an irrepressible American newspaper correspondent. The style is brisk and full of movement; there is plenty of English, Yankee, and Oriental colloquialism. But this romance is also a problem novel-the problem of the New Woman. The heroine is this New Woman-a physician, and one whose sturdy independence, energy, and goodness win the reader's instant respect. Liked as a woman, as a professional" she is hampered by those who consider her an "unsexed female," or at least one who " apes men." The heroine gradually triumphs over these prejudices.

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