I woke all my men, and, armed with shovels and pickaxes, we went to prepare a battery-position in a spot on the summit of a ridge which I noticed during the day. From there we would have a marvelous command of all the Boche lines which were to be attacked.

By three o'clock in the morning all was ready. There was nothing left to do except to hide the cannon with bags of dirt. It was the first time that I had tried to conceal it, and it did not bring

me success.

At dawn we were preparing our battery. As fast as the men filled the bags with dirt, I piled them up in such a way as to form a sort of wall in front of the cannon, with a loop-hole in the middle through which to shoot. I was taking no precaution, but was going about my work as usual, standing up straight, without worrying whether the Boches could see me or not. My whole body was exposed.

All of a sudden, Clack! Poumm! I felt as if some one had given me a hard blow on the upper left arm. Then, immediately, something warm was slipping down my sleeve, and, at last, I saw the blood trickling along my hand. Quickly I stretched out my arm, I drew it in again, I moved my fingers. Everything worked all right, nothing was broken. Then I turned to my comrades and said,

'I am wounded. They've got me this time, but I think I've cost them dear, just the same.'

On hearing that, and on seeing my blood run, they all rushed toward me. They love me well, and have in me a blind, unlimited confidence. I have never sent them anywhere without going with them, leading the way. I saw on their anxious faces all the regret which they felt at losing me. They dressed my wound, and I bade them au revoir, embracing each one of them before leaving. I could not help crying

when I thought that I was going to be separated from these brave comrades with whom I had passed through so many dangers. I felt terribly broken up. I saw the tears flow down their wrinkled cheeks, so thin and dirty. Poor friends!

One of them went with me as far as Combles, to the surgical relief station. There I embraced him and said goodbye, and, sad at heart, with my eyes full of tears, yet with a feeling of profound joy that I had done my duty, I passed slowly through the village of Combles in the direction of Maurepas, where the evacuation automobiles were waiting.

That night I slept in a good hospital bed. Forty-eight hours later I was in Paris, and several days after that, it was with intense emotion that I read the following notice, which appeared in all the newspapers of France:

"The Eighth Regiment of Infantry. Under the energetic command of its chief, Lieutenant Colonel R-————, during a series of bloody struggles carried on without interruption from the 12th to the 20th of September, 1916, it took possession by main force of a strongly organized wood, and of two lines of trenches. Then, carrying out a change of direction on a field swept with shells from all sides and bristling with enemy defenses, it organized a new line two hundred metres in advance of its original trenches. Brought back into the first-line trenches, it again carried, between the 1st and 5th of October, a whole enemy defensive organization, giving proof to the very end, in spite of losses, in spite of the harrowing fatigues of two periods of combat, of an irresistible courage, and an indomitable tenacity. Has made more than 400 prisoners and taken 20 machine-guns.' It was a new citation of my regiment in the ordre du jour of the whole French army.

THE GENTLE THEME-READER

THERE are times in every man's life when, in an extravagance of sympathy for his fellow sufferers, he casts an eye about him for one most deserving of his fraternal love. It lights on the laborer in red shirt bent over his cobblestones, on the shop-girl scurrying under the orders of an officious manager, on the young reporter describing fires as a preliminary so he hopes to dramatic criticism, on the theatrical usher at a long-run house, on newsboys, applewomen, street-car conductors, stokers, miners, weavers, all worthy of sympathetic attention and some organized to demand it. Yet all these folk have their compensations, if not immediate and material, at least prospective and ideal. The laborer may become a ward politician, the shop-girl a buyer, the reporter oh, it's barely possible - a city editor, the usher a ticket-seller. Let such then be contented and vote the Republican ticket. I record a man whose posture attracts no roving eye, who is bent over a task totally devoid of compensation, immediate or remote, who has no time to indulge in hopes, had he any to entertain.

He is the theme-reader. His work consists in criticizing the daily literary productions of about one hundred college freshmen. Could you talk to a college freshman for let us be generous six minutes, you would realize the horror of the task. And yet a freshman's talk is somewhat removed from banality by the eagerness which invests it. His writing is not so choicely arrayed. No boyish enthusiasm lifts its thoughts to the skies. No youthful

abandon carries them along on skipping feet. The bacchic dance which we usually attribute to the emotions of our juniors is quite absent. Contrariwise, his thoughts are solemn and staid; they tramp heavy-shod over roads macadamized with platitudes; dully they sound their note of inherited wisdom; ponderously they traffic in levity.

A freshman leaves no subject, however quotidian, without the imprint of his personality, a trait which he shares with the Greeks. But his personality has itself been impressed. It has been impressed with a die used uniformly upon all his fellows. Speculate upon the number of freshmen in the United States from Harvard to Pomona, and you will see what this means.

The expression for it is not a plurality of these souls, then, is what the theme-reader has to read. Not only must he read, he must judge. He must mark in the margins cautions about repetitions, reprimands for mis-spellings, suggestions for improvement, commendation for those rare and, one must think, accidental notes of sincerity so voiced as to sound sincere. To be sure, he does not carry out his programme too faithfully as he grows in service. In the beginning of his career his finished work is as red as it is black. Its texts are pools amid reeds of comment, its covers brilliant in ink and sentiment. As he goes on, however, he treads a passage from English to abbreviation; a question mark does what a sentence did before; a vertical wavy line substitutes for a paragraph. The critical aphorisms he used to display give way to exclamation points; his notes of approval have shrunk to a 'Good!'

In this manner also his soul, even as its utterance, shrinks and shrivels, until at last it invigorates the thin-haired, thick-spectacled nonentity known as the 'Assistant in English.' He is so tired of professional criticism that he no longer judges at all. He is so busied with reading nth-rate literature that he has no time for anything else. He is so used to thinking in grammatical terms that life has become the index to his Rhetoric and all its pleasures the categories of mood and tense. When he is asked to converse he is at a loss, until set upon the track of his work. Then, if he be not too old, he will recite for a whole sitting anecdotes of the conference and class-room. He will give you story after story of freshmen's bulls. This is his stock of humor, seldom exhausted, for each day brings a new supply. If he is trapped into real conversation, he will discuss the ignorance of the American college student who does not know that Wordsworth was born after Milton or that the Gothic novel was not written in Gothic. Such matters irritate him immensely. He does not see how irrelevant they are to a freshman's needs and interests. They make up a theme-reader's life.

Left to himself, the theme-reader is well-behaved. When angered he becomes petulant. There is nothing so pathetic and yet so amusing as a petulant theme-reader. He walks rapidly back and forth, he talks in a falsetto, he wags his fingers, he damns. What is more pathetic than a falsetto damn? He wastes this temper over a poor freshman who cares more for his health than for his speech.

The theme-reader when calm is less amusing and more human than the theme-reader furioso. It is then that he deserves sympathy. For there is in him at such moments the spirit of non-resistance in the face of unconquerable powers. He knows that he is in the fell

clutch of circumstance and has not the strength to escape. There is no use in talking about a head bloody but unbowed: he ducks and is done. Thus he manages to survive, not in glory, not in fame, but in mere acquiescence, content to read the poorest literature there is and happy in the ability to recognize a quotation.

The usher may become a ticket-seller if he lives long enough. I have heard of one theme-reader who at the end of his days was an assistant professor. It was like sending a wreath to a funeral, for in a year or two the fellow died out of gratitude. After his promotion he continued to haunt his old post where so many miserable hours were spent, like a faithful dog who sniffs at his dead master's carpet-slippers. There was always interrogation in his look; he could never apprehend the situation. But he, as I say, was unique. No other themereader need fear his fate. He had an indomitable strength of physique.

The theme-reader, for all that, should be satisfied. As I was told by one college president whose attention I vainly tried to draw to their plight, 'Why don't they study and rise to scholarly eminence? They cannot expect to attain academic promotion simply because they are faithful. That would be rank sentimentalism. What have they done for learning? That is the decisive question.' Ah, yes, what have they done for learning? They have thrown away their years on the rubbish heaps of mediocrity.

If they abandon scholarship and go in for literature, they are in as bad a fix. At first sight it would appear undeniable that a critic knows how to write. Since he knows the rules, why should n't he apply them? But even were this gross error a truth, the matter would be no clearer than before. A man may have all the ability in the world and yet have no opportunity to test it. Not only may

he not have the opportunity, he may not have the will. When you are surveying the worst possible specimens of an art as all teachers, theme-readers, or not, must you soon come to that point where you would prefer a martyr's death to the guilt of having added to the store. You are content to let artists do the work. One crime at any rate you will be free of.

But should you be willing, what is the result? A man who lives on rules becomes so self-conscious that he can never perform any act described by the rules he lives on. Realizing their economic importance, he attributes to them an æsthetic importance, and what was originally a mere description becomes in the end a law. Consequently the theme-reader cannot express his gentle emotions without seeing-before his pen touches paper gression more awful than that of Nebuchadnezzar. Straightway he sets out to correct the error. And the result is that his pen never does touch paper.

a trans

Should he by any chance achieve a completed piece of work, it is sure to be so embalmed in accuracy that it is worthless. If its author has by the grace of God retained his powers of discrimination, he will curse and tear the monster to pieces. If he has not, if he is desperate for publicity and thence. promotion, he will have it typed and submit it to some editor. The rest of his days he will employ his petulance against 'the American magazine.' He knows that his article is as good rhetor

ly as Dryden or Burke. That is indisputable; did not a theme-reader write it? If so, he who refused it had not the good taste to prefer literature to rubbish. Therefore the American magazine is on the decline. It never occurs to one who knows the rules that rules are not imagination, not ideas.

The theme-reader thus cannot publish. He cannot study. He can do

nothing but sit and read themes until he dies. If he is wise he stops being a theme-reader. And our graduate schools are well punctuated with theme-readers in rebellion. All souls have not this fire, however, and many are doomed to a life in the shadows. They silently go on and on and on as if they were treadmills. One would not mind that too much, if they did n't so rapidly get contented with their lot. It is bad enough to be an underling, but to be one wittingly is immoral. 'Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.'

Here then is the gentle theme-reader, an object much more worthy of your sympathy than laborer or stoker or shop-girl. The visitor to a university is taken to see chapels and clubs and libraries-stained glass and soft leather, oak pews and memorial tablets; now let him see the men who are beneath all this, at whose pain these things are bought. They are too crushed to speak for themselves, too proud to welcome a spokesman. Theirs is the sorriest plight of all because it is unknown.

THE PASSING OF THE SPAREROOM

Of course, there still are guest-rooms. People in the country have them, and rich people have them in the city. There are guest-rooms ordinary and guest-rooms extraordinary-modest little corners in which to tuck away a transient friend or relative, and imposing suites fit for the entertainment of a royal family. There are guest-rooms with secluded marble temples of Hygeia attached, and guest-rooms with moveable wash-bowls. But I contend that the spare-room, as an institution, is passing from our national life. As a nation of a hundred millions, we don't spare rooms.

As a family, we have none. A spareroom in a city flat means a tiny family.

Mother and father settled the question for us in the good old Brierly days by having eleven children. Even now that John and Tryphena are married and the twins are away at college, we are entitled to be called an old-fashioned family, and an extra empty room would be a riotous extravagance now that we pay for space by the cubic inch. When people spend the night with us, Caroline moves in with Frances. Thanks to the fact that mother has never outgrown the habit of inviting acquaintances to 'make this house their home while they are in the city,' we have come to refer to 'Caroline's guestroom.'

So I meditate on the changes of life as they have affected us among the millions.

We did n't pay for space by the cubic inch in the Brierly days, but we paid in countless sacrifices, little and big, to keep that one room clean and empty. And it was mother who paid the most. From the beginning of her married life she was determined to have a spareroom. Before her honeymoon was over she had instilled something of this desire into father, and together they knocked down the partition between the two little rooms that opened off the parlor. They sawed through the beams, stripped off the lathing, and made one splendid 'parlor bedroom.' Through all our life at Brierly this remained mother's spare-room. Our respect for its sanctity was so great that Bartlett pears could be stored in the spare-room closet to ripen and reach mellow perfection undiminished in quantity.

The spare-room! By shutting my eyes I can see it again in all its wistful and aspiring hospitality. I can see the red cherry furniture, with brown marble tops on the bureau and the washstand; the Nottingham lace at the windows, the fawn-colored Brussels, neatly tacked down over layer on layer

of folded newspapers; the cross-stitched canvas wall-pockets, and cornucopia hair-receivers. Sometimes we put things in the spare-room because they were too nice for the children to play with, and sometimes because we did not know exactly what else to do with them. But mother censored all our contributions, and so great was her zeal for its perfection that I remember hearing John say to her, 'Mother, I miss the new hair-brush from my dresser. I suppose you put it in the spare-room?' I can see the intricately embroidered pillow-sham, and the sheet-sham, so elaborately starched and fluted that on the day a guest arrived it was lifted gingerly by two of us and carried into the parlor, where we draped it over the square piano. There was an elaborate splasher behind the cherry washstand. A motto 'After Clouds, Sunshine'

hung behind the bed, just over the cluster of fat pears that was carved in the headboard. This was worked on canvas in worsted yarn, the clouds being done in gray, and the sunshine in yellow, shading to orange.

And just as the word 'October' brings its hint of wood-smoke; just as certain religious phrases used by father in family prayers bring to me, whenever I hear them, the faint smell of the pillow in which I buried my nose when we all knelt down together, so 'spareroom' brings the odor of starched window-curtains, of castile soap, of sulphur, that was after John's diphtheria, — of matting, and of mother's rose-jar. And there steals over me an old familiar emotion the awe that always took possession of me when I stepped across the threshold of that

room.

One reason for my awe is that mother's babies all arrived there. The nurse could keep the children out by locking the parlor doors, and could bathe the baby by the coal stove in the parlor.