new shingles on its roof-marking the place where people driven to their attics by the water had at last been forced to knock a hole aad crawl through.

We could hear 'em yelling down there in the dark," said the man who joined me, as we tramped through the mud, "and shooting off guns, and the water and houses floating off and smashing up-it was the damnedest noise you ever heard in your life. Believe me, that was some night!"

The low horseshoe covered with flimsy frame houses, the river absurdly jammed in between the railway embankment and the town and capped by a bridge-this is typical of what one finds in these river towns. Many have a canal, too, no longer used for its original purpose, but serving as a flume for water power, perhaps-indifferently kept up and protected, and offering, as it did at Dayton, a path straight into the heart of the town. No practicable man-made devices, probably, could completely have controlled such a flood as this, but it was clumsy and preventable topography which assisted in desolating thirty towns, as if so many hostile armies had thrown up intrenchments in their suburbs and bombarded them for a week, and cutting off four hundred and fifty lives.

in

They were talking, while we were Piqua, of condemning the low land and bringing the river straight across the horseshoe to the point where it passes now under the railway bridge. Similar suggestions have been made for the Scioto at Columbus. The building of dwellings on land subject to flood might be prohibited, and the space used for gardens, playgrounds, or parks; and there are Utopian schemes for river bank boulevards which could be used nine years out of ten, perhaps, the year round, and serve, after such a rain as this, as an extension, not easily harmed, of the river's natural channel.

The practicability of such schemes depends, of course, on local conditions-turning rivers into new beds is no child's play, and land apparently level may have differences of elevation and an amount of rock that would make canal-digging difficult and expensive. These are questions for engineers to work out, but the great rain of 1913 has at least set the people of Ohio to thinking of them.

Of the desirability of reforestation there is scarcely need to speak, although it may be news to some that not a few learned students of the ways of water dispute the

popular belief that clearing away of the forests has increased floods. The director of the United States Weather Bureau at Columbus, Professor J. Warren Smith, for instance, I found to be one of these; and Professor Smith has studied the relation between precipitation and stream-flow along the Ohio's watershed and written a pamphlet about it. The argument is that a forest holds rain as a piece of blotting-paper placed on an inclined board holds water-to its point of saturation that only an abnormal rain can produce a serious flood, and that the difference in the amount of an abnormal rain which can be held by cleared and forestcovered land is not important. The benefits of reforestation, apart from the specific business of flood prevention, are so obvious, however, that arguments against it would seem to have scarcely more than academic interest.

Storage reservoirs in the head-waters to supply power, to regulate navigation in the dry season, and to catch the spring rains, are enthusiastically urged and opposed. They were advocated after a lengthy investigation by the Pittsburgh Flood Commission; Chief Hydrographer Leighton, of the United States Geological Survey, has pleaded vigorously for them, and Mr. H. E. Talbott. an engineer of wide experience at the head of the reconstruction work in Dayton I found to be another advocate. The Government engineers, on the contrary, are likely to oppose storage reservoirs, and with almost more than warmth.

The objections are the cost of the land, the danger of dams breaking, the difficulty of using a reservoir for power and yet keeping it empty enough to be useful for catching heavy rains. Those who favor reservoirs deny that the cost is prohibitive in comparison with the staggering losses from floods, or that reservoirs cannot be made as safe. They think that a minimum supply could be maintained for power purposes with large possible expansion for times of flood, and in any case the reservoir would not be expected to hold all the rain. All they wish is to hold back enough of it to keep down the dangerous crest of floods.

Professor Charles E. Sherman, head of the Engineering Department of Ohio University, I found an especially interesting advocate of storage reservoirs, both because of his knowledge of the subject and his willingness to look at both sides of the argument. Because the reservoir system is insufficient to

prevent floods on the lower Mississippi is no proof, in his opinion, that it may not be advantageously used in favorable situations on smaller streams.

Such, for instance, may be the watershed of the Scioto above Columbus, which contains only about fifteen hundred square miles. Thus, a one-inch rain on 500 square miles of watershed could be contained in a reservoir forty square miles in area and twelve inches deep. Six inches of rain would fill the same reservoir six feet deep. If the watershed area were one thousand square miles, the water would be twelve feet deep, and if it were made twenty-four feet deep the reservoir would need to have an area of only twenty square miles. A reservoir of that size is by no means impracticable, and with it the floods of the Scioto could be controlled.

The Muskingum, with its 6,000 square miles above Zanesville, offers a harder task, but even here it must be borne in mind that the purpose is not to store all the water, but only to hold back the last straw which breaks the bridge's and the levee's back. The frequently quoted statement of opponents of storage reservoirs that it would have taken a reservoir as big as the States of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to hold the water that flowed past Cairo during flood time last year is misleading. No one proposes to hold it back. That is what the river channels were made for. All that is suggested is that enough be held back to clip the crest of the flood.

All

A cold rain was falling when we reached Hamilton that afternoon, and a more desolate sight it would be hard to imagine. the bridges were gone; the one leading across from the main street, with its heavy masonry abutments, had been torn out, lock, stock, and barrel, and a rowboat ferry was poking over through the rain. One whole street with its houses, near the water's edge, had disappeared. Acres of other houses had been gouged away down to the gravel. The river was still brimming, the whole country soaked, and to the prospect of re-entering houses dripping and plastered with mud was added the dismal thought that the river might rise again. On a corner of the main street, however, dripping in the downpour, hung a large cloth sign with a verse borrowed from a newspaper poet much esteemed in these parts:

"We've had our time of flood and gloom, We've neared the awful gates of doom, And some have entered in.

But now the sun of hope peers out, Old trouble we can put to rout;

So grin, gosh dern it, grin!"

And they were smiling in Hamilton that afternoon, and everywhere in the flooded district one finds the same stout spirit. A great deal has been written about the horrors and gloom of this disaster, and more might be written. The hardest trial comes after the excitement is over and the long, slow fight back to normal begins-going back to damp and filthy houses with new furniture and clothes to buy and nothing to buy with; to small shopkeepers, whose stores and stocks have been destroyed, leaving them still owing the money they had borrowed on their stock; to drivers of delivery wagons, small clerks, and the like, who had put the savings of years into a house and bought furniture and a piano-all that vast army which, in the best of times, is only a few weeks or months from poverty.

And yet southern Ohio, at this moment, is in anything but a state of gloom. Already civic pride is convincing nearly every man one meets that his flood was bigger and worse than others, and he is ready to maintain that against all comers. The great rain will never be forgotten, and those who went through it are in somewhat the happy case of those who have been through a war. There was no lack, even during the thick of it, of things to smile over-the antics of usually solemn citizens panic-struck at the whisper that a dam had broken; the authentic adventures-rather more in the vein of de Maupassant, perhaps, than of Mr. Howells-of pillars of society overtaken by the flood in regions they were not supposed to frequent, and marooned there with the queerest company for days.

Thousands of humdrum lives have been enriched with a thrill they will never forget. There was Arline Barnell, for instance, the long-distance night telephone operator at Zanesville. She was sitting at her switchboard in the quiet exchange, with the local wires down, the river booming over the "Y" bridge and spreading up Main Street a block. away, when there came a faint call from the East. It was from the "Sun" office in New York, and they wanted to know what had happened to Zanesville. All telegraph wires. were down. Arline told what she could, the story was quickly strung out to several columns and put on the wire, and the next morning Arline Barnell, of Zanesville, Ohio, was "spe

cial correspondent" of all the papers taking the "Sun's" service. She was that for two nights, while the torrent divided the town, talking directly into the New York office; and that was an adventure which even a night telephone operator doesn't have every day.

There was Bell, plant chief at Dayton, whose office was surrounded by water. He couldn't get out; all local wires were down, but there was long-distance connection, and, by some magic hocus-pocus which plant chiefs know, he felt round the State until he had hooked up a connection with Columbus. The Governor was in the State House, sitting at his desk with a candle, the only light to be had. The Governor comes from Dayton, and for two days and nights he kept the wire open, while Bell, in his office island, reported what was happening, and the Governor sent word to the outside world.

There was poor young Ridgeley, of Dayton-one of dozens like him-who saved seventeen families, and then, his boat hit by wreckage, went down. "It was too bad for Ridg," said the fireman whose enginehouse had been turned into a temporary morgue. "He worked hard. He was a damned nice kid, Ridg was." There was Vernon Patterson at Zanesville-a "snakehunter," as they call the boatmen from Buckeye Lake, a little to the west of the town-who went out into a current into which it seemed no boat could live, and took people off of roofs and wreckage before they hit the "Y" bridge. He left his name and address with the people on shore because it seemed likely he would never come back, but he did come back, nevertheless, and they have his name and address in Zanesville now for evermore.

Those who go through such an experience are friends, and work together, for a time at least, as people shipwrecked on a desert island raise a shelter for the night. The same torrent that smashes houses sweeps away all the piffling jealousies, the acrid vulgarities, of a crowded city's life. Every train creeping in over newly made trestles brings help from

new friends. Stockbrokers, hundreds of miles away, smoking fat cigars as they drive down town in their limousines, send their thousands, and some little town in Florida, that nobody ever heard of, wires to ask what it may do. It is a strange air people breathe for a time, which one curiously misses on returning to "civilization" and the constant vaudeville of city streets.

You overhear everywhere such dialogues as this shouted out one afternoon in the Riverdale section of Dayton, as I passed, from opposite sides of the street.

"I told my wife I never had so many friends before in my life."

"That's right. We're all friends now. We gotta stick together."

"Sure-stick together. There ain't no use getting discouraged."

"Sure not. There ain't nothing to that. We'll come out all right."

A little further along, in the same neighborhood, a young couple, in front of a house freshly scrubbed of mud, were washing with a hose the caked silt from their little strip of grass. The wife wore a pair of her husband's trousers and rubber boots. They had lost their furniture, and practically every other house in the neighborhood, being rented, had been deserted. I ventured the somewhat jocular suggestion that there were times when it was better not to own your own house.

"I don't think so," said the young woman, promptly. "I'd rather have a stake of my own and something to lose. We own our house. My husband can always get more furniture and we'll be good as new."

"Sure we will," grunted the young husband, without looking up from his hydraulic mining operations on the mud-caked grass.

People like this, in a State as rich and resourceful as Ohio, will not be long in getting on their feet. Recovering from the flood is only part of the task, however. These highly civilized and nervous rivers must be civilized still further, bitted and broken, until such a disaster cannot happen again.

The complexity of some of the characters in "The Judgment House" (and especially of the heroine), and the struggles of some of the men and women of the story to "realize themselves (a favorite phrase of the author) to the reader's understanding, contrast with the perfect simplicity and singleness of the few and clear-cut characters in "The Mating of Lydia." Both are notable novels of the season, and neither of them is a book that readers of fiction can afford to ignore.

England in the shadow of the Boer War is the theme of "The Judgment House." We see a crisis for British world-influence and imperial power, and its reactions on society, financial undertakings, and individual character. National and international aspects are presented; historical and diplomatic backgrounds are sketched with fullness of knowledge and a broad sweep of dramatic writing. Byng, a forceful, big-hearted, but coarsegrained capitalist with a fortune at stake in Oom Paul's land, is strongly depicted; and even more so is his half-Boer, half-Hottentot servant Krool, who is at once a Boer spy and the devoted slave of his English master, so that he takes as his just due the half-killing with a sjambok (native whip) which follows the discovery by his master of his perfidy. Krool is perhaps the most vivid, certainly the most striking, person of the plot. The later scenes of the book are laid in South Africa and have fine descriptive quality, bringing close to our apprehension the atmosphere of the veldt and the tragedy and revolting nature of war. This part of the romance, and equally so the earliest chapters, in which news of the Jameson raid is made the center of interest about which men and mo tives are made to group themselves, are admirably wrought out and show the author at his very best. Not so successful, it seems to us,

is the elaborate working out of the temperament of Jasmine, Byng's wife; it is here that the author aims at subtlety and depth, but he does not succeed in reconciling the woman's conduct with her own nature as she reveals it she seems neither perverted nor weak enough to be guilty of the combination of folly and dishonor into which she so easily slips.

Mrs. Ward's theme in "The Mating of Lydia" is the personal view-point of wealth. As she, or rather her Cyril Boden, says: "How you get it, how you use it, whether you dominate it or it dominates you; whether it is the greater curse or the greater blessing to men: it was the question in Christ's day; it's the question now. But it has never been put with such intensity as to this generation !" So we have Melrose, the selfish eccentric, whose soul is ruined by wealth; Faversham, the young man whose honest desire to do good things with money in the future makes him bow temporarily to Melrose's tyranny and fail to stand against his cruelty; Tatham, indifferent to wealth because he has always had it; Lydia, indifferent to wealth because she has never had it and even over-despises its power-and so on, with a constant under-play around the topic of the evil and good, the power and possibilities, of wealth. All this may sound ultra-economic, but in fact the book is essentially romantic. Above all, it is agreeable and cheerful; as always, it is a pleasure to follow Mrs. Ward's lucid prose and listen to the talk of her well-bred people. There is a melodramatic side to the plot, to be sure, but it is not salient enough to disturb the antisensationalist. In Melrose, the shrewd, brilliant, hateful collector of antiques, who values his treasures more than wife and child, Mrs. Ward has given us a distinct reality, not the less actual and believable because he is so far out of common experience. The picture of English country life is pleasing; the current of narrative runs smoothly; the book ends a trifle conventionally but agreeably.

Mr. J. C. Snaith's “An Affair of State" (Doubleday, Page & Co.) is, in point of reserved power, the best novel he has written. When his " Broke of Covenden " appeared several years ago, it gave the impression of tumultuous genius, ability of a high order, but lack of restraint and literary judgment on the other hand, his 66 Araminta" was a joyous piece of humor, immensely amusing, but

without attempt at dealing strongly with large ideas. Other of his books have given the impression of an author who had not yet fully "found himself." But "An Affair of State" deserves to rank with the best fictionproduction of the decade; it is balanced, ripe in judgment, and dramatic in the sense opposed to theatrical. A political crisis in an imagined near future furnishes the topic, but at bottom the story is not of political methods nearly as much as of a conflict of character and purpose between two public men-a leader toward the promise of the future and a reactionary nobleman of the old school. The human interest element soon comes to the front, and once developed is clear and passionate.

Mr. Laurence Housman combines light comedy and political satire in "King John of Jingalo" (Holt). The struggles of King

Concert Pitch. By Frank Danby.

The Mac

millan Company, New York. $1.35. The lady who writes under the name of Frank Danby has the knack of creating interesting human beings and telling interesting stories about their experiences of the heart. In the present tale the interest is of the same kind as in "The Heart of a Child" and Pigs in Clover," but the temptation to turn the phrase is too strong to be resisted-here it is not quite up to concert pitch.

Maxwell Mystery (The). By Carolyn Wells. The J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia. $1. Miss Carolyn Wells as humorist and writer of vers de société and as author of a detective story are two quite different people. It is unfortunate that in going from one field to the other she left her sense of humor behind her. Nest (The). By Anne Douglas Sedgwick. The Century Company, New York. $1.25.

A volume of short stories by the author of "Tante," "Franklin Winslow Kane," and "A Fountain Sealed." Miss Sedgwick's treatment of not very profound human problems is as far removed as possible from the impressionistic. Not a detail is missing from her pictures. Their creation may have involved exercise of the imagination; their reading does not. John O' Jamestown. By Vaughan Kester. The

Bobbs- Merrill Company, Indianapolis, Ind. $1.35. This is an early novel by the author of "The Prodigal Judge." It seems to us well worth reprinting, although it is entirely different in its subject and treatment from Mr. Kester's later work. It is, as the title indicates, essentially the story of John Smith. The narrative is put in the mouth of a young Englishman who was beaten senseless and put on board one of the ships going to Virginia by private enemies. The narrative is told in a simple and direct way, and

John to find out what rights, if any, he has as a constitutional monarch have their evident bearings on present-day British politics, and there are many clever side hits at certain inconsistencies and conventions which excite the author's derision. Both the King and his too independent daughter land in the police station, but escape from their misadventures with untarnished dignity. The book is an admirable piece of fooling, and it has a positive story-telling ability that holds the reader much more closely than might be expected from the theme. Social welfare, the cause of the suffragettes, and the nullification of royalty by ministries, are among the subjects taken up by King John; but his temerity turns out to be the result of temporary abnormal excitement caused by a blowno really sane King, it is intimated, would ever dream of doing anything independently!

the history of the early struggles and dissensions in Virginia is made thoroughly readable. John Smith himself stands out as a fine, heroic, and human figure. It is the fashion to pass by historical novels as a little out of the present-day taste for fiction; but where a romance is in itself as strong and clear as this, the imaginary objection disappears at once. The book is not a large piece of literary work; but it is well written, well knit together, and deserves recognition as a sound and true example of its class. Inferno (The). By August Strindberg. Translated by Claud Field. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. $1.25.

Of pathological rather than literary interest is this expanded extract from Strindberg's diary. His insane suspicions, his morbid superstitions, detailed with pitiful minuteness and pitiable egotism, furnish neither a fit subject for art nor a fair picture of life. Strindberg's mind, exposed like the flayed body of Marsyas to public view, is not a pleasant nor a profitable thing to gaze upon.

Mere Literature. By Woodrow Wilson. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. $5.

Three essays, written by Woodrow Wilson in other days, have been put together by the publishers in a volume of which to say that it is one of the Riverside Press Editions is to say that it is an example of the finest book-making, a delight to the heart of the lover of books as "things in themselves." The essays are " mere literature," dealing in a genial, penetrating, thought-provoking way with conditions in the Republic of Letters. We cannot forbear to give two selections from the essay "On an Author's Choice of Company." They give too good a taste of the author's quality. He is writing of the Republic of Letters:

But there is a better phrase, namely, the Community of Letters; for that means intercourse and comradeship and