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MODEL BROCKTON HOMES, INTERVALE PARK

A BEAUTIFUL RESIDENCE SECTION BUILT BY THE ANGLIM BROTHERS IN FIVE YEARS FROM WASTE LAND

With the exception of the first five months the Times has been under the sole direction of its present publisher, William R. Buchanan, and to-day enjoys a circulation of nearly thirteen thousand daily. Its managing editor is Arthur J. Chase.

The Times was first published from the Church block, which was called the Times building during the occupancy of the concern, until the present handsome Times building was completed in 1897. The removal into the new home was on

is still in the prime of life. Many there are who are less than forty. It is a young man's city, in business and professional life.

A young man who is making a wonderful success in a new line of Y. M. C. A. work is George S. Paine, boys' secretary of the Brockton Y. M. C. A., organizer and director of the Brockton Boys' Club. He came here from New Bedford to do some big work for the imperiled boys. He had been told by the organizer of the National Federa

tion of Boys' Clubs that the Y. M. C. A. could not do boys' work. He organized a club with twelve boys and the present membership is two hundred and sixty. In various lines it has made a wonderful record and the "Brockton plan," which he originated, has a national reputation.

Brockton is not an exotic dropped from heaven by angel hands. It did not spring like Aphrodite, from the sea, there is no sea, not even a lake or river. It is not a city which cannot be hidden because built on a hill, such as the Scriptures describe, there is no hill.

Nature left Brockton like so much "free raw material," but somehow the right kind of men have fashioned it and their work needs no apology.

Labor which is unintelligent, men who are "brothers to the ox," are unknown in Brockton and always have been. "The will to do, the soul to dare" have been characteristic of the community, and the intelligence to go ahead and achieve has brought about a world-famous city in Plymouth county.

"I will" is the motto of Chicago. "I do" is the explanation of Brockton.

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Books As I See Them

By KATE SANBORN

Among the many mysteries and melodies of life and literature, some refuse to be caught and labelled and soar beyond our grasp. A host of definitions fail to catch and hold the evanescent rainbow of humor, the electric flash of wit, the auroral and intermittent display of genius, the real source and cause of inspiration. What is music? it expresses the unexpressed; it is a bond between earth and heaven: but has it been ever satisfactorily defined, or its power over mortals explained?

And among authors, why is it that some writers however gifted and widely read in their lifetime, vanish down "the back entry of time," or only live in libraries, in extra good bindings; like the cardinal virtues, "well spoken of, but seldom used," while others with no more ability, possibly not so much, stick fast to Fame's wings in the winnowing of the centuries, retaining and increasing the charmed atmosphere that is immortal? From Dan Chaucer to Stevenson, you know how few make a place for themselves in your inmost heart.

Jane Austen had this wondrous power of perpetuating her personality and the fascination of her character sketches; and reverent scholars make pilgrimages every year to her home and her last resting place to get if possible one little bit more of unpublished Ana. Lamb, the one and only Charles Lamb, with his marvellous head and angel face; the whimsical, moody, slim-legged, splay-footed, stammering darling, gains each year a stronger hold on the reading world. He was the ideal brother, his courage was heroic, his friendship a precious gift; he gave delightful card parties with "puns at nine" and beer or wine all the time. But beyond all that his mind and soul are with us more vividly if possible than when he was in the body, struggling with trials, handicaps and literary and romantic disappointments.

Mr. E. V. Lucas, who is recognized as the final authority on the Lambs, has already given us seven octavo volumes containing all their works and correspondence and now offers two volumes with fifty illustrations including eleven pictures of the two whom only the demon of insanity could separate.

.

He calls his hero "the most lovable figure in all English literature" and proves this claim. We, who love him too and are so familiar with every year of his existence, value most the quips and phrases that we have not seen. He describes at length "one Rickman"; "the finest fellow to drop in a' nights, about nine or ten o'clock, cold bread and cheese time, just in the wishing time of the night, when you wish for some one to come in, without a distinct idea of a probable body. A fine rattling fellow, has gone through life laughing at solemn apes; a species in one; a new class, an exotic, any slip of which I am proud to put in my garden pot."

Mary Lamb wrote to Mrs. Coleridge of a nice little girl "who is so fond of my brother that she stops strangers in the street to tell them when Mr. Lamb is coming to see her." And the biographer adds, "I know of no incident in Lamb's life, or in any one's life, that is prettier than this."

When dreamy philosophers were discussing "man as he is and man as he ought to be" "Give me," interjected Lamb, "man as he ought not to be." When brain weary he once took a room away from his home just to avoid his nocturnal, or knocketernal visitors, but he soon longed for the old comrades again.

How delicious to those of us who find human nature as exemplified in ourselves; how "very human," this confession of frailty: "This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realized."

He spoke of asking some rather dubious persons to supper: "You would not sit with them?" asked Talfourd.

"Yes," said Lamb. "I would sit with anything but a hen or tailor."

And who cares what he said of the writing "female." Of L. E. L. Lamb said, "Letitia was only just tinted; she was not what the she-dogs now call an intellectual woman." We remember how proud he was of his sister's poems.

To a man who said something he considered witty. "Ha! very well; very well indeed!" said Lamb. "Ben Jonson has

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the inevitable; some get higher but soon all succumb and De been re-reading Gail Hamilshe was apt to exwhat many others would and she rebelled at this life if a cruel tragedy. She says, is a real old-fashioned God er you and follows you up There is no all about you.

fort in thinking of yourself a protoplasm floating vaguely

The Universe."

some

and Howard Griggs, the eloquent and setter forth of Dante, Oatespeare, Browning, has thought much enigmas of life and in his recently Shed "Book of Meditations" he writes sev, at times in the strain Miss Whitdwells on, as "Why can we not realize constantly that to-day is the opportunity Consecrate sublime living? tragment of time every day to the quiet effort to see things in relation: do not depend upon the mere accident of distance to give truth. How different 'modern thought' will look five hundred years from now! But keep open to truth in the certainty that there is a deep below our last sounding, and a height from which our petty hill of vision will be lost in the level plain." But he adds. "If there is no eternity of the subject for whom change exists, as well as of the process of change, it seems to me to be hopeless to attempt any understanding of the farce of life: unless there is this eternity, there can be no rational basis of morals, no motive for living."

I cannot agree to that. I am glad to have lived, and if this be all I still desire to do my best.

By the way, here is his definition of genius: "To affirm always, the best and renounce the lower, that is genius." Satisfactory?

Publisher, B. W. Huebsch, New York.

The "Kasidah" by Sir Richard F. Burton is a most depressing, unforgetable poem; a grand effort from an undoubted genius, but O, so hopeless, so helpless!

"So hard, blunt, crude and purposely inelegant are these couplets, that under the spell and bewilderment of their powerful influence, the Rubaiyat seems, in comparison, almost sophomoric, In Memoriam

attainted with sentimentality, while Omar or Fitzgerald gently numbs the being into despair; Burton forces us to face the vacant, affrighting death's head of fact, though yet bidding us to be manful to the end. Verily the Kasidah is writ in blood and tears with a pen of iron."

Here is a reme 'y for egotism. What knowest thou, man, of life? and yet forever twixt the womb, the grave,

Thou pratest of the Coming Life; of Heaven and Hell thou fain must rave;

The world is old and thou art young; the world is large and thou art small;

Cease, atom of a moment's span to hold thyself an All-in-All.

How Thought is impotent to divine the secret which the Gods defend, The Why of birth and life and death, that Isis-veil no hand may rend.

Dost not, O Maker, blush to hear, amid the storm of tears and blood, Man say, Thy mercy made what is,

and saw the made and said, "'Twas good."

The Marvel is that man can smile dreaming his ghostly, ghastly dream:

Better the heedless atom that buzzes in the morning beam!

O the dread pathos of our lives! How durst thou, Allah, thus to play With Love, Affection, Friendship, all that shows the god in mortal clay!

Thomas B. Mosher of Portland, Maine, has shown his perfect taste in the make up of this.

*

As my allotted space is dwindling let me present a brief list of new books worth reading; a few worth owning. For a novel

that has real live men and women and an engrossing plot give me Ellen Glasgow's "The Wheel of Life"; Arnold Kemper, an athletic, fascinating, selfish, love-compelling man with splendid virtues to balance his grave faults, is a character creation that is strong clear through.

Doubleday, Page and Company.

Books of Places:

Picturesque Sicily, by William A Paton. Harpers.

Brittany, pictures by Mortimer Menpes; text by Dorothy Menpes. A. and C. Black, London.

London Films. Howells. Harpers. More Queer Things About Japan. Selden and Lorrimer.

Two in Italy. Maud Howe. Illustrations by her artist husband, John Elliot. Little, Brown and Company. A Levantine Log Book. Jerome Hart of the Argonaut. Longmans, Green and Company, New York, London, Bombay. (This is super-excellent!) Biography:

With Walt Whitman in Camden, by Horace Traubel. Small, Maynard and Company, Boston.

A Life of Whitman, by Henry Bryan Binns. E. P. Dutton and Company, New York.

Sidney Lanier, by Edwin Mims. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. (The first complete and adequate life of this poet.)

Lincoln: Master of Men, by Alonzo Rothschild. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. (If anything new can be said or told of that great man, one more life will be welcome.)

Poems:

Songs of America, by Edna Dean Proctor. Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

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