[T]he teacher elevates patriotism to the rank of a motive and proceeds to organize all the school activities in consonance with this conception. Actuated by this high motive the pupils, in time, come to look upon correct spelling not only as a comfort and a convenience, but also as a form of patriotism in that it is an exponent of intelligent observation and as such wins respect and commendation from people at home and people abroad. Or, to put the case negatively, if we were all deficient in the matter of spelling, the people of other lands would hold us up to ridicule because of this defect; but if we are expert in the art of spelling, they have greater respect for us and for our schools. Hence, such a simple matter as spelling tends to invest the flag of our country with better and fuller significance. Thus spelling becomes woven into the life processes, not as a mere task of the school, but as a privilege vouchsafed to every one who yearns to see his country win distinction.

These golfers are strange creatures, rabbit-coloured, except that many are bright red about the middle, and they repel and yet are ever attracted by a devil in the shape of a little white ball, which leads them on through toothed briars, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns; cursing the thing, weeping even, and anon laughing at their own foolish rambling; muttering, heeding no one to the right or left of their career,–demented creatures, as though these balls were their souls, that they ever sought to lose, and ever repented losing. And silent, ever at the heel of each, is a familiar spirit, an eerie human hedgehog, all set about with walking-sticks, a thing like a cylindrical umbrella-stand with a hat and boots and a certain suggestion of leg.

… Indeed, for lurid and somewhat pessimistic narrative, there is nothing like the ordinary currant bun, eaten new and in quantity. A light humorous style is best attained by soda-water and dry biscuits, following café-noir. The soda-water may be either Scotch or Irish as the taste inclines. For a florid, tawdry style the beginner must take nothing but boiled water, stewed vegetables, and an interest in the movements against vivisection, opium, alcohol, tobacco, sarcophagy, and the male sex.

For contributions to the leading reviews, boiled pork and cabbage may be eaten, with bottled beer, followed by apple dumpling. This effectually suppresses any tendency to facetiousness, or what respectable English people call double entendre, and brings you en rapport with the serious people who read these publications. So soon as you begin to feel wakeful and restless discontinue writing. For what is vulgarly known as the fin-de-siècle type of publication, on the other hand, one should limit oneself to an aërated bread shop for a week or so, with the exception of an occasional tea in a literary household. All people fed mainly on scones become clever. And this regimen, with an occasional debauch upon macaroons, chocolate, and cheap champagne, and brisk daily walks from Oxford Circus, through Regent Street, Piccadilly, and the Green Park, to Westminster and back, should result in an animated society satire.

… For short stories of the detective type, strong cold tea and hard biscuits are fruitful eating, while for a social science novel one should take an abundance of boiled rice and toast and water.

However, these remarks are mainly by way of suggestion. Every writer in the end, so soon as his digestion is destroyed, must ascertain for himself the peculiar diet that suits him best–that is, which disagrees with him the most. If everything else fails he might try some chemical food. “Jabber’s Food for Authors,” by the bye, well advertised, and with portraits of literary men, in their drawing-rooms, “Fed entirely on Jabber’s Food,” with medical certificates of its unwholesomeness, and favourable and expurgated reviews of works written on it, ought to be a brilliant success among literary aspirants. A small but sufficient quantity of arsenic might with advantage be mixed in.

Old Doctor Sobersides, the minister of Pumpkinville, where I lived in my youth, was one of the metaphysical divines of the old school, and could cavil upon the ninth part of a hair about entities and quiddities, nominalism and realism, free-will and necessity, with which sort of learning he used to stuff his sermons and astound his learned hearers, the bumpkins. They never doubted that it was all true, but were apt to say with the old woman in Molière: “He speaks so well that I don’t understand him a bit.”

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My Lords, I have submitted to you, with the freedom and truth which I think my duty, my sentiments on your present awful situation. I have laid before you the ruin of your power, the disgrace of your reputation, the pollution of your discipline, the contamination of your morals, the complication of calamities, foreign and domestic, that overwhelm your sinking country. Your dearest interests, your own liberties, the Constitution itself totters to the foundation. All this disgraceful danger, this multitude of misery, is the monstrous offspring of this unnatural war. We have been deceived and deluded too long. Let us now stop short. This is the crisis–the only crisis of time and situation, to give us a possibility of escape from the fatal effects of our delusions. But if, in an obstinate and infatuated perseverance in folly, we slavishly echo the peremptory words this day presented to us, nothing can save this devoted country from complete and final ruin. We madly rush into multiplied miseries, and “confusion worse confounded.”

“You have embarked on a new study—anthropology. What characteristic strikes you most forcibly in connection with it? Cunning? The necklace might be where the skeleton is. Why not begin at the beginning?”

“Drop all investigation. The hands that return these jewels command it.”

“Pitted against the inherited cunning of the ages, you have no chance. I will take compassion upon you. Look in the right-hand drawer of your desk.”

“In the great scheme of things, the Supreme Ruler of the Universe divided an inheritance amongst His children. To one He gave power, to another strength, to another beauty, but to His favourites He gave cunning.”

“You will fail here as you have failed before. Better go back. There is more danger for you in this country than you dream of.”

“To Sanford Quest.

“You have escaped this time by a chance of fortune, not because your wits are keen, not because of your own shrewdness; simply because Fate willed it. It will not be for long.”

“There is not one amongst you with the wit of a Mongar child. Good-bye!”

“The Hands!”

“Fools, all of you! The cunning of the ages defeats your puny efforts at every turn.

“The Hands!”

“You have all lost again. Why not give it up? You can never win.

“The Hands.”

“Even time fights you. It loses that you may lose.

“The Hands.”

“Fools! Tongues of flame will cross Quest’s path. He will never reach the depot alive.”

“You have been a clever opponent, Sanford Quest, but even now you are to be cheated. The wisdom of the ages outreaches yours, outreaches it and triumphs.”

Not a little has been written regarding the rapid destruction of the vast white-pine forests with which nature has covered large districts of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. It is true that this denudation has progressed at a rate with which nothing of a like character in the history of the world is comparable. It is also true, doubtless, that the clearing away of dense forest areas has been attended with some inconvenient climatic results, and particularly with some objectionable effects upon the even distribution of rainfall and the regularity of the flow of rivers. But most persons who have been alarmed at the rapidity of forest destruction in the white-pine belt have wholly overlooked the great compensating facts. It happens that the white-pine region is not especially fertile, and that for some time to come it is not likely to acquire a prosperous agriculture. But adjacent to it and beyond it there was a vast region of country which, though utterly treeless, was endowed with a marvelous richness of soil and with a climate fitted for all the staple productions of the temperate zone. This region embraced parts of Illinois, almost the whole of Iowa, southern Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and parts of Montana–a region of imperial extent. Now, it happens that for every acre of pine land that has been denuded in Michigan, northern Wisconsin, and northern Minnesota there are somewhere in the great treeless region further south and west two or three new farm-houses. The railroads, pushing ahead of settlement out into the open prairie, have carried the white-pine lumber from the gigantic sawmills of the Upper Mississippi and its tributaries; and thus millions of acres of land have been brought under cultivation by farmers who could not have been housed in comfort but for the proximity of the pine forests. The rapid clearing away of timber areas in Wisconsin has simply meant the rapid settlement of North and South Dakota, western Iowa, and Nebraska.

The settlement of these treeless regions means the successful growth on every farm of at least several hundred trees. Without attempting to be statistical or exact, we might say that an acre of northern Minnesota pine trees makes it possible for a farmer in Dakota or Nebraska to have a house, farm buildings, and fences, with a holding of at least one hundred and sixty acres upon which he will successfully cultivate several acres of forest trees of different kinds. Even if the denuded pine lands of the region south and west of Lake Superior would not readily produce a second growth of dense forest–which, it should be said in passing, they certainly will–their loss would be far more than made good by the universal cultivation of forest trees in the prairie States. It is at least comforting to reflect, when the friends of scientific forestry warn us against the ruthless destruction of standing timber, that thus far at least in our Western history we have simply been cutting down trees in order to put a roof over the head of the man who was invading treeless regions for the purpose of planting and nurturing a hundred times as many trees as had been destroyed for his benefit! There is something almost inspiring in the contemplation of millions of families, all the way from Minnesota to Colorado and Texas, living in the shelter of these new pine houses and transforming the plains into a shaded and fruitful empire.

A systematic analysis of the titles of works of fiction, if undertaken in a scientific spirit, might lead to some interesting, if not positively valuable, re-suits. A collection, classification, and comparison of the products of the mental energy—we had almost said agony—expended in thinking up appropriate names for stories might possibly come within the scope of the work of the Society for Psychical Research. So serious an undertaking as a matter of scientific or philosophical speculation, however, is out of place here. But, nevertheless, it may interest the readers of this department to have called to their attention a few curiosities in the titles of recent novels which, possibly, have escaped them. To be sure, nothing of any very profound significance is disclosed, nothing more, perhaps, than a series of coincidences. The title of Mrs. Wharton’s book, “The House of Mirth,” was a striking one, though if it had not been the name of the most successful book of the winter, it might have attracted little notice of itself. But the very popularity of the book, the talk it created, put its name into the mouth of everybody, and so the reiteration of the title began to attract attention; it was even used, we believe, to describe a house in Albany dedicated to the entertainment of members of the legislature. Next appeared another popular book, “The House of a Thousand Candles,” and it is easy to see how curiosity was stimulated to discover other titles of novels with similar names. No great effort or research was required to make up this list:

• “The House of Cards,”
• “The House of Hawley,”
• “The House of Dreams,”
• “The House of Sin,”
• “The House of Fulfilment,”
• “The House of Merrilees,”
• “The House of Mystery,”
• “The House of the Black Ring,”
• “The House of Mirth,”
• “The House of a Thousand Candles,”
• “The House of a Hundred Lights,”
• “The House in the Mist.”

In the same way other names with a key word, so to speak, were suggested, hearts, for instance, being as popular as houses. Here are some of them:

• “Heart’s Haven,”
• “Heart’s Desire,”
• “Hearts and Masks,”
• “Hearts in Exile,”
• “Brave Hearts,”
• “Contrite Hearts,”
• “The Heart of Lady Anne,”
• “The Heart of a Girl,”
• “The Heart of Hope,”
• “The Heart of the World,”
• “The Heart of Happy Hollow,”
• “The Heart of Rome,”
• “Jules of the Great Heart.”

More curious than these, however, is the attraction that colors seem to have for title-makers, and in this list the degree of popularity of each color is noticeable:

• “The Black Motor-Car,”
• “The Black Barque,”
• “The House of the Black Ring,”
• “Black Friday,”
• “Black Beauty,”
• “The Black Arrow,”
• “The Black Spaniel,”
• “The Red Cravat,”
• “The Red Triangle,”
• “The Red Book of Romance.”
• “The Red Window,”
• “The White Terror and the Red,”
• “For the White Christ,”
• “White Aprons,”
• “The White Cat,”
• “The Yellow Cat,”
• “The Yellow Journalist,”
• “The Yellow Holly,”
• “Purple Peaks Remote,”
• “The Purple Parasol,”
• “Purple and Fine Linen,”
• “Green Mansions,”
• “The Green Shay,”
• “The Gray World,”
• “The Blue Cockade,”
• “The Scarlet Pimpernel,”
• “The Scarlet Empire.”

It may be considered doubtful whether “Freckles” should be included in this list, but our readers can take their choice according to their tastes.

If space permitted, this sort of thing could be carried on almost indefinitely. Flowers, fruits, and precious stones, man, woman, girl, are made to do duty, as well as all the family relatives, except “father.” Mother, daughter, and brother are to be found.

The selection of a name for a story has a good deal to do with its success, as authors and publishers know, sometimes to their cost. Just how much careful forethought is given to the problem in individual cases is indicated to some extent by the showing that these titles make.