And so does another correspondent writing from Lake Placid.

DEAR EDITOR: When I came here for my vacation, I brought my July SCRIBNER'S with me, of course.

As is my custom, I read "As I Like It" first, then I started at the first page to go through to the last.

When I reached "Dickens Defended," by my neighboring townswoman, Miss Marquette, I wanted to applaud and say "Amen" to every word she said. As I read your comment, I could not help thinking of what our good friend, the old Quaker lady, said: "Everybody's queer but thee and me and I sometimes think even thou art a little queer.' If you have only finished two of Dickens's novels of your "own free will" truly thou seemest a little queer. I have read and reread "David Copperfield" numberless times and no book can give me greater pleasure for pure recreation.

What sense of humor must the person have who fails to enjoy the "Pickwick Papers"?

Even granting many characters are caricatures, their very names, like Uriah Heep, mean a volume when used as descriptive of our associates. In these days of condensed knowledge why slight this excellent source of descriptive material?

Dickens and Thackeray may be gods of a past age but Dickens will still be a god of many in this age and ages to come when even the revival of the Trollope tradition will be lost in antiquity.

"To him who knoweth to do good and doeth it not, it is a sin," and I refuse to sin by refraining from expressing my opinion, worthless as it may seem to you, in defense of my beloved novelist, Charles Dickens.

Media, Pa.

HELEN M. FERREE.

UPLIFTERS PREVENT HER VOTING We've heard both the old parties condemned as reactionary, but this is the first time we have seen them rated for their socialism.

DEAR EDITOR: Mrs. Katherine Fullerton Gerould states in your May number that she does not like to vote. Perhaps not any two women will give the same reasons for disliking to vote. My reason is that all this voting seems useless, since both the old parties have indorsed most of the ideas of socialism. I'm willing to study the party platforms and choose the one which offers the best service to the nation. But I am not willing to vote for that party if its leaders are too cowardly to stand or fall by a good platform.

If I must vote for socialism I want to do it with my eyes open. I want to put my (X) in the circle above the party marked plainly Socialistic Ticket. I do not want to deceive myself by voting for a conservative platform adulterated by socialistic measures put therein by so-called welfare workers. The Socialists are keener planners than the managers of the old parties seem to know, for the Socialists work through the sentiment of Club Women and other uplift organizations to gain those ends which would be otherwise defeated. And so I feel this voting is all a gamble. The voter has no way of knowing which is which with the parties; each of them indorses the same socialistic "welfare" planks which tend to erase all the good of the original platforms.

825 E. State St., Boise, Idaho.

MRS. E. R. HANFORD.

VIVE UNCLE TOM

DEAR EDITOR: A somewhat belated reading of the June SCRIBNER'S last night disclosed to me for the first time the correspondence you have had concerning Uncle Tom's Cabin shows. It seems surprising that a man who would undertake to write the history of the so-called "Tom" shows would state baldly that these shows are extinct, the last one having died years ago.

I reside in the village of Naples, five miles from here. Not only do we have every season one or more "Tom" shows, but they are of both varieties-tent and town hall. You say that Mark Sullivan wants data concerning any existing shows. We are so accustomed to these shows that I never even thought to identify the entrepreneurs, but I think the most ambitious of them is conducted by a man named Stetson, who is by no means a newcomer in the field.

Not only do we have the "Tom" shows regularly, but in

Naples they draw the largest audiences of any theatrical tractions that come to the village. It is astonishing boa populace turn out en masse to these performances, and haven't any doubt that this pronounced taste for Mas Stowe's opus will make them a permanent institution ke years to come. ROSCOE PEACOCK

North Cohocton, New York.

Others have sent us handbills of floating theatre on the Ohio River. Mr. Davis wasn't quite so “baid as our correspondents imply. He merely spoke with regret of Uncle Tom's death, not stating when ny where that took place.

TEXAS TOUCHED

A native Texan writes about Texas and M Plumb.

DEAR EDITOR: "Each should in his home abide, therein is the world so wide." These lines came to me after readi Laura Kirkwood Plumb's account of her experience with Texas Twister. All that she describes is as foreign to asy thing I have ever seen or experienced as I presume it is t you, and I am a native Texan of mature years-who h never even considered entering a "storm-cave," as t calls it.

It seems to me that Elizabeth Nail Carstairs, whose story "The Rich Man's Son," was published in the Novembe SCRIBNER'S, is far better qualified to attempt a descriptions the "great open spaces" and of conditions generally previ ing in ranch life than the Kansas contributor, since Mrs. Car stairs is the daughter of a successful ranchman, and I gather from her writing that Mrs. Plumb is the wife of an unsuitful ranchman. Mrs. Carstairs has the added advantage being a "native Texan."

Mrs. Plumb would do well indeed in “putting over" be description if she could in any way compare with the descrip tive ability of the Texan who wrote "Fix Bayonets!" for the June SCRIBNER'S.

As for Texas-the subject of this controversy-it is vast and possessed of such innumerable resources and soc contrasts in people as well as in localities that a "nativ Texan" would indeed hesitate to describe the people and the rural districts in as few words as Mrs. Plumb uses in her ver positive description of all native Texans and rural districi.

As for the cyclone do not quite as great calamities over take people in the midst of pleasant surroundings?—such – the recent earthquakes and disturbances which are alike pensations of Providence, over which we have no control JO WILSON MILLER GRAVES. Honey Grove, Texas.

No, we do not see how tire people of Texas can be blamed for having a cyclone. And certainly Mrs Plumb set out to describe the cyclone and not Texas neither its architecture nor its people. Likewise w thought we saw a certain humorous cast to her a ticle, which our Texas readers seem to have missed

Stephen P. Mizwa, assistant professor of e> nomics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, ant Casimir Gonski, of Milwaukee, have taken a simi attitude with regard to Emerson Low's story The Man Who Had Been Away." They resent what the term aspersions of ignorance and depravity on the Polish people.

We appreciate their criticism and their pois view, actuated as it is by patriotism. Some of Irish readers did likewise with some of Shaw I mond's stories published some time ago. But we lieve that they take the matter entirely too seriousi A short story is not designed to be a sociolog: geographic, and economic treatise, nor are the chi acters in a story intended to typify an entire people THE OBSERVER

every sketch of him as he appeared before the war. Few Americans had more honest humor than he. Few delighted more in the company of women."

Douglas Freeman has assuredly added that smile and that mirthful light to the countenance of Robert E. Lee. The human touch which escaped more than twenty biographers flashes through the letters here published for the first time.

We can think of no person better fitted than Douglas Freeman for this pleasant task, nor any task more delightful than Roping off showing us mortals that our great Olympus men, who too often escape from us up the slopes of Olympus, are in reality beings whose greatness is a result of the triumph of their own fine qualities over the limitations which keep the rest of us earthbound.

Dr. Freeman has devoted more than ten years to the study of the life and character of Lee. In 1914 he edited Lee's Dispatches. As early as 1908, four years after his graduation from the University of Richmond, when he was a young newspaperman, he edited the Calendar of Confederate Papers. He holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins and an honorary LL.D. from Washington and Lee, William and Mary, and his own alma mater. He has been editor of the Richmond News Leader since 1915 and part owner of the paper since 1922.

The November number will contain the story of Lee's feminine correspondence from the outbreak of the Civil War until his death. In the early numbers of 1926, Dr. Freeman will present further unpublished material showing Lee's relations with Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the Confederacy and further personal aspects of this self-contained and seemingly austere man.

Need we say anything to introduce Edward W. Bok? Through his "Americanization," his "Twice Thirty," and his work as editor of

a

His essay in this number is, in effect, an answer to thousands of his correspondents. Bok knows and loves people. They have been his interest throughout life.

If we were to epitomize his article, we should do so in what comes near to being the shortest bit of verse in the language

You

Do.

As we go on through the number, we find that the human touch predominates. H. C. Sproul, for example, says that his essay, "The Stuff That Dreams Programmes Are Made On," was written "pri- of the marily to clarify in my own mind Thoughtfully a significant and very human ex- Minded perience. It concerns the spiritual experience of the individual, who, poor soul, is generally overlooked in the sweeping social programmes of the thoughtfully minded. I have not attempted a platform, but an explanation, which may make some contribution to the understanding of a certain type of mind." Mr. Sproul has just taken up his duties as a member of the English Faculty at Amherst College. He was formerly a teacher at the University of Minnesota.

Then we have a captain in the navy, Powers Symington, who describes the antics of a battleship in action not from a technical standpoint but from the standpoint of a civilian, more or less incongruously set aboard ship during that exciting time.

Edgar James Swift might have pirated the title of a comedy popular a couple of seasons ago and called his article "Aren't We All?" He awards Barnum a Aren't We Ph.D. in humbugology, and we All? hereby dub Dr. Swift Lord High Detective of Humbugs. He has been a professor of psychology and education at Washington University, St. Louis, since 1903, and this year publishes his book on "Business Power Through Psychology." It is not the usual "success"