There is not much in the literary life that would interest an outdoor dog. I felt somewhat like a dry-as-dust professor married to a young and attractive wife who is being taken to all the routs and parties throughout the neighborhood by a disgustingly youthful and handsome cavalier. I know nothing quite so shriveling to the soul as jealousy, nor anything so hard to fight against. I reasoned that Viola's expeditions were doing her good, that I ought to be grateful for them, and I repeated the antediluvian fallacy that my jealousy was only indicative of my love. Nothing that I could say to myself made any difference; and if I were in danger of forgetting how I felt, there were plenty of other persons to remind

me.

'Well,' said the fishman, 'I guess you don't know whether that dog is yours or Lysander's!' And my most intimate friend remarked genially, 'If I had a dog, I'd want it to be my dog, or I would n't want to have any.'

It was bad enough to bear the sympathy of the community; it was worse to witness the triumph of my rival. Often, after I had brought home the drooping Viola, Lysander would follow after her. Instantly she revived like flowers in water. She smiled, she was even coquettish. They began a lengthy conversation I could not understandlittle sounds from him, little grunts from her. If, by any chance, through a belated sense of duty, she happened to remain beside my chair, he surreptitiously snapped his fingers and made little sucking sounds that he fancied were inaudible, and then she sidled over to his chair.

If jealousy is an index of one's love, it is strange that, the more jealous I became of Lysander, the less I loved Viola. 'Well, let her stay with him,' I said to myself. 'I guess he won't object to having me pay the license.'

She did stay; she sometimes stayed all night; and few things in my life have been more humiliating than my visits to get her.

Lysander was glad to see me, oh, my, yes! He welcomed me with a crooked sardonic smile that I understood thoroughly. Viola knew just as well as he did why I had come, and pretended to take an interest in the wall-paper. As we walked home along the path, I scolded her, and she slunk to the ground and asked my pardon. Was there anything in her life that could make her conscious of any evil? Of course not. Without realizing it, I was exercising a sort of spiritual coercion over her. I was really condemning her for what was a true expression of collie life; but she accepted my suggestion of evil. I have often wondered since, how many persons in the human realm are suffering from a sense of sin as false as hers was. Of course, I did not philosophize the situation at the time. I simply felt disquietude when I was with her. This disquietude increased rapidly until I apparently disliked her; and I suppose that in my feeling for her there was actually an element of hate.

'Very well,' I said to myself in effect, 'there are better dogs in the world than ever were licensed. The next one I get, I'll keep for my very own.'

a

I had now reached my low spot centre of indifference; and if this were fiction, the reader might expect an ever-increasing objective crescendo from this point onward, culminating in a stirring climax. Possibly Viola would rescue me from a burning building, thus showing that she really loved me, after all. Unfortunately I am dealing with facts of a rather intangible nature. I have noticed that in life coffee and pistols for two are not called for so often as in literature. We pass the time of day with an acquaintance, discuss the play, and what not, little dreaming

that behind that smiling exterior a spiritual crisis may be taking place.

My crisis was rather interesting because it seemed almost physical. Not so much in the sub-conscious brain ganglia as in the sympathetic nervecentres, the process was taking place

the reverse process of what had taken place during my period of jealousy. I could almost hear a spiritual clicking going on inside me, as if I were composed of children's blocks which had become disarranged and were being replaced in a symmetrical pattern. One by one, the filaments of possession were being broken- that sense which in its grossest terms is really a sort of fatuous pride. Say what we will, most of us feel that we deserve praise and tribute for having selected so attractive a wife, for having begotten such charming children. Having no longer any more of a proprietary interest in Viola than I had in the wild flowers, or the sea, or sky, I got a fresh eye on her. I could not help admiring her, and I could not help admiring her for herself alone. Having no longer any taint of possession, it was impossible for me to impose my will on her, so I adopted unconsciously the courtesy one shows to some one else's wife.

'Well, Viola,' I would say, 'do you want to come home to-night? You don't have to.'

She would look up and listen, cock her ears, consider the matter. Sometimes she would decide to stay with Lysander, and sometimes, strangely enough, she would decide to go home with me. If she came, she came happiily, because she was exercising the prerogative of an independent creature. Her sense of sin or shame left her; and somehow we were all gainers, Lysander, Viola, and myself. He no longer snapped his fingers or made little sucking noises. These had been psychical reactions from my jealous emanations when

we were struggling for Viola's favor; but we were now united in doing what we could to make her happy; and our friendship, which had suffered previously, in this new office became confirmed. What expansive talks we had about her! How he rushed over to tell me the latest example of her wisdom or affection; and when one expects nothing from a dog, it is rather pleasant to feel suddenly, while struggling with a sentence, a damp delightful nose inside your hand.

Sometimes I fancy that Viola, in forming her friendship for Lysander, had a prevision; for the time came when we had to leave her, and in whose hands could it be better to leave her than Lysander's and his wife's?

Most dog stories end with the death of the dog, but I can assure the reader that Viola is still very much alive. Not agile any longer, she has become a privileged parlor guest, for the stairs are too much for her. Sometimes she even finds it impossible to bury a bone, and then she goes through the pantomime of burying it. She knows we know she hasn't really done it. Her assumption of achievement is ludicrous. Who says dogs have n't a sense of humor?

She is beautiful as old ladies are beautiful. If she wore a lace stomacher, she would make a magnificent Rembrandt rich browns, tawny gold, and, in the heart of the picture, the spirit of her personality as mellow and pervasive as a flame.

I don't see Viola often nowadays, but what I gained by renouncing a purely personal interest in her has extended itself somehow beyond what we know as the realm of time and space. This sounds rather esoteric, but what I mean is that I am very happy whenever I think of her, whether I am with her or not. I feel very near her though we are separated by a hundred miles; and I should not be surprised if, in the muf

fled 'Woof! Woof!' of her dreams, she often lives again what I happen to be thinking of at the moment -wonderful runs with Teddy, the cocker spaniel, or the homeric combat with the woodchuck beside Simon Brook.

As I sit thinking of Viola, there happens to come into my mind, by one of those odd associations that have so little logic in them, an apparently trivial incident that took place a day or so ago. A couple of little girls stopped me on Arlington Street, Boston, and asked the way to Marlboro Street. It chanced that I was going to Marlboro Street myself, and I offered to conduct them there, but they were walking in the leisurely way of children, taking in everything on the way, and I soon outstripped them. At the corner of Marlboro Street, however, I turned and waved to them to indicate that this was the street they wanted, and they waved back to show that they understood.

That was apparently the end of the incident; but two or three blocks up Marlboro Street, something impelled me to turn. The children had found the street, they were following safely, they were evidently watching me; for as soon as I turned, they waved again. As I went up the steps of the house where I had an appointment, I looked back for the third time. The children, now

become almost fairy-like figures, were still watching me. Up went their hands and up went mine, and across the long length of city street, we waved in greeting and farewell.

I don't know why the incident should have seemed to contain an element of real beauty. I was reminded of George E. Woodberry's poem in which a somewhat similar incident is celebrated. A boy, you remember, while playing, ran heedlessly into the poet, and the poem ends,—

It was only the clinging touch
Of a child in a city street;

It hath made the whole day sweet.

What struck me even more than the beauty of my adventure was the quality of permanence that it seemed to wear. In my under-consciousness, there was something immortal about it. Can it be possible that our casual relations, where love is, our relations with children, or with strangers whom we shall never see again, or with the lower animals whose span of life is necessarily very limited, can it be possible that these relations are less ephemeral than we think? Would it be too much to hope that the relation between Viola and myself is a small but permanent addition to the store of worthwhile things?

I

THE fall of the Asquith Ministry and the accession of Mr. Lloyd George to supreme power is a momentous event in more senses than one. It expresses a phase of anxiety in regard to the war that is new, general, and very deeply felt. Neither Parliament nor the country, it is true, had any direct part in the crisis that led to the bouleversement. The disruption came from within the Cabinet, but it could not have succeeded had there not been both in Parliament and in the country a general sense of disquiet.

That disquiet was the inevitable consequence of the singular turn of events which followed on the intervention of Roumania in the war. The uninterrupted story of failure on the part of the Allies in 1915 had been followed in 1916 by an almost equally uninterrupted story of success. The German failure at Verdun, the Austrian failure in the Trentino, the Russian advance in Galicia, and the Anglo-French offensive on the Somme seemed together to give an absolute assurance of ultimate and even speedy victory. The Central Powers, to all appearance, were at last securely held. The Allies had overtaken them in equipment and more than overtaken them in man-power; the pressure of British sea-power was exercising an increasing influence upon the economic position of Germany, and all the evidence went to show that the temper of the enemy had been seriously lowered. The announcement that

Roumania, after trembling on the brink of war for nearly two years, had at last joined the Allies seemed to complete the hopefulness of the outlook. When Roumania comes in, said every one, the end will be in sight. And for a moment the forecast seemed assured of fulfillment. The advance into Transylvania apparently added a new and formidable threat to the Central Powers, and the retirement of Bulgaria from the struggle was anticipated, nowhere so strongly as in Roumania itself. But the promise was extraordinarily delusive. There is no doubt that Roumania intervened in a rather headlong fashion, on her own initiative, with her own strategic conceptions, and at a moment when the Germans, after checking the Russian advance in Galicia, were in a position to release men and material for the Roumanian theatre.

Hindenburg, who at this moment superseded Falkenhayn as head of the German General Staff, seized his opportunity with a masterly grip. He had always been the advocate of a policy of action in the East and of defense in the West, and with the German failure at Verdun he was given a free hand. He used it to crush the newcomer. Material, military, and political considerations alike sanctioned the stroke. The defeat of Roumania would make the Balkan position secure and strengthen Constantine's hand in Greece; it would revive the drooping prestige of German arms; it would threaten the Russian left and the position of Russia on the Black Sea, and it would give Ger

new

many what she badly needed supplies of corn and oil. The stroke was brilliantly planned and brilliantly executed. It created a profound reaction in the mind of England, which had come to regard the tide of the war as having finally turned. At the same time, the renewal of the submarine campaign on a new and more menacing plan added to the public disquiet, and the general complaint that the government were slow to act gathered volume and impetus and prepared the way for Mr. Lloyd George's coup.

That that coup had been long contemplated is matter of common knowledge. In the early months of the war Mr. George, like all the statesmen and politicians, had been overshadowed by the prestige of Lord Kitchener; but with the 'shell' episode of May, 1915, he emerged into prominence as the active and bustling spirit of the struggle. His genius accommodated itself to a world in convulsion more readily than that of any of his colleagues. That world gave him the conditions of free action which appealed most to a mind imperious, wayward, empirical, impatient of tradition and restraint. During the four years preceding the war he had made politics in England a thrilling and unprecedented drama of action. The impetus of his genius, at once emotional, supple, and incalculable, had swept the Liberal chariot out of its traditional path across new and virgin territory. The old school, attached to their doctrines and their principles, watched the astonishing adventurer with admiration qualified by many disquiets; but the agility of the performer overcame all resistance. It was the very necromancy of politics.

But the disquiets continued, and there were plenty who saw party disruption approaching. Mr. George saw it more clearly than any one. He hated the restraints of party and his impa

tient sciolism chafed under the dominance of theories, precedents, and tradition. His political heroes were the adventurers like Chamberlain, the rude invaders of the comfortable parlors of thought, not the Burkes and Gladstones who reverenced the past and saw society as an august growth of liberty, widening out from precedent to precedent, but always true to the spirit of its ancient root. His touch with historic Liberalism was casual and superficial, the product of his Welsh upbringing, of the hatred of a village boy brought up under the shadow of an agrarian tyranny, and of a Nonconformist resentment against the pretensions of a privileged Church. It was alien alike to the Whiggism of Burke and the modern conceptions of Liberalism of which Charles James Fox was the author and inspirer. It was equally remote from the doctrinairism of the Socialists. Anything like theory, in short, was the very east wind to his spirit of impulsive opportunism, and it was observed during the fiscal controversy that he was the least convinced and least convincing exponent among the Liberals of the free-trade position which rested upon a foundation of economic thought and upon principles rather than expedients. In a word, his conception of politics was revolutionary and empirical, and it was characteristic of him that the one historical period on which his mind dwelt was the French Revolution, particularly the years from 1793 to 1797.

Even before the war there had been much speculation about a new alignment of parties, the break-up of the old party system, and the emergence of a new National Party which was to be neither Tory nor Liberal, neither Socialist nor Monopolist, but a mixture of all interests, based on practical necessities and bargainings rather than upon principles, with 'business' as its watch