they can come in touch with its variety. Paris, it seems, is the paradise where old ladies can get their innings in polite society, but only a few of them can live in Paris. In America, alas, old age is not popular. Birds of a feather are expected to flock together; and the farther west you go the worse it gets. I heard some one in a small hotel say: "In this house the women are divided into three sets-the old ladies, the young girls, and the Ladies. Just now the Ladies are having it all their own way."

I think that the very young have more liking for the old than those who are farther along the road. Age is so far from youth that youth can regard it with a stout heart; can amuse and be amused. Of course there are any number of dull old women-t -the dull young ones grown old-but, on the whole, it always seems to me that there are more amusing old women than old men. Good luck to them all, the clever and the simple, and long may they take their ease in their inn!

On Going for the Mail

I asked him what he considered the greatest felicity of his visit.

"To go to the door in the morning and find a daily paper!" he replied.

He recalled the experience with all the wistfulness of the children of Israel murmuring against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. For him, at the moment, a prebreakfast paper and a city mail delivery were the flesh-pots of Egypt.

But I find it otherwise. I would not for anything return to the days of the postman's shrill whistle; I will, if you please, carry my own mail as I would wish to carry my own burdens. There has come to be, for me, something effeminate in the feebleness which finds a task in the greatest joy of the daygoing for the mail. One who resents getting his own letters, will expect breakfast in bed, is no companion on a tramp and sees in Christmas nothing but a survival of a pagan festival. Even the very errands which the lady who presides inevitably remembers just as I am closing the door on my way out

take on a sort of sanctity from their association with the ritual. A yeast-cake or a spool of thread become less terrible purchases, and seem almost as essential to the welfare of the home as the packages which come from the mail-order house-when they are bought on trips for the mail.

And then there are all the neighborly greetings of friends and acquaintances whom one meets on the way. There is a sort of post-office affableness or sincerity. So effectively is one's day brightened by a pilgrimage for his letters that I have seriously thought of passing about among my friends a petition to the government requesting that the office schedule be arranged with the idea of postponing the evening boxing of the mail until the next morning after breakfast. A social-welfare worker might even draw a cunning chart to show just how crimes would decrease, and police-court procedures be dispensed with, could one but start the day by getting his mail in the morning. Expectancy and hopefulness, gratification and disappointment; these are the emotions which one discovers on the faces of his friends about the post-office entrance. Even when one is glum at the failure to receive the baby's photographs, or the plans of the new house from Uncle Bert, the architect; still there is cheerfulness in one's greeting to his friend who has, he hopes, been more fortunate. "Those blueprints will come on the evening train," we say, and there we have the happy conviction that the after-supper trip will be justified.

This geniality of the commoners has its influence on the character of the deities who preside within the post-office. Forget your key, and the god of the general-delivery window will willingly step back to the boxes to spring the lock for you. If you are buying a stamp and find that you must rely on a personal check, Mr. Lynum will cash it for you graciously and deduct your two-cent purchase without a regret. That there are certain hours when the windows are presumably open for business every one knows, but what those hours are no one ever thinks of finding out. When the photographs of the baby do finally come, it is only necessary to present the claim slip and, I believe, Mr. Robin would leave his sundae at the drugstore that you might have them.

My own box is number 592, and is located on the bottom tier of the long, glass-fronted

stack. I approach it with a feeling of trepidation. Casting about for an analogy, I can think of nothing equal to it except, perhaps, that of the June afternoon when I gave the gavel to the lady who presides. To secure its charms I must kneel, and what I have found I do not know until I have again stood erect and safely regained my balance. But then I am, and was, rewarded. With what eagerness one sorts pamphlets from letters and family mail from business correspondence! There are, I understand, men who receive such a press of mail that they must needs have clerks to arrange it for them; men who willingly give up to hirelings the pleasure of slitting an envelope with a long, cool letter-opener and forego the joy of the crinkle of good bond paper between their fingers. It is time that something were done to suppress big business.

The mail in hand, if one is a good citizen of Hope Chapel, he will sidle up to the wall or find a seat on the steps and read his personal letters.

"Whoopee! George is coming down for the week-end," shouts seventeen-year old Sally-Louise to Mary Potter across the

room.

"Young Kent isn't doing so poorly up at Johns Hopkins," confides Doctor Wilton to the registrar of our own university, who is reading his letters at my shoulder.

"Here's that sample I've been waiting for," says Mrs. Gray, the wife of the undertaker to the young bride of the minister. And so it goes on any week-day.

But if it is an event to go for the mail six days a week, on Sunday it is a ceremony. It is the boast of the village that among the two hundred families there is not one unhappy marriage, and Sunday afternoon gives color to the statement. All Hope Chapel and his wife, together with the perambulator, make the pilgrimage about five o'clock. Sally-Louise, sedate on the arm of George; Doctor Wilton with his two daughters; Mrs. Gray in a new blue silk, watching her youngest shaking his rattle as her husband, in funereal garb, disappears within the swinging doors: these are the things which make the Sunday going for the mail a ceremony de luxe.

On this day the lady who presides is with As I rise from my genuflections before box 592 she is as curious as I to know

me.

whether or not the editor of the thinks his readers will be interested in those who go for the mail in this Southern college town.

A

T first thought, nothing would seem more useless to a man than a guidebook to a city he never hopes to visit. The very picture of him gazing at its mapsthe maze of streets his feet may never untangle, the buildings whose splendor his eye may never see, the little patches of park whose restful green he may never know-might be taken as the symbol of the ironies which destiny has played upon the human race from before the days of Egypt. Surely, here is the cynic's perfect figure for the life of man.

Castles inAmerica

Yet, for pure joy, for sheer recreationwhether or not during the next twenty years you intend to stir a stone's throw from your fireside I bid you open a guide-book. Never did a writer conjure up a romance more diverting. Never was there a magic carpet of legend that could lift you more swiftly to other lands. I do not mean the kind of guide-books that inspirational travellers write and call "Beautiful Brussels" or "Patagonia, the Land of Out-of-Doors." Take a regular handbook for travellers "with nineteen maps and forty-two plans" and pages and pages of closely printed type that you would never think of reading through (even though you were going there) about first-class hotels and second-class hotels and pensions and cafés and hairdressers and motor-buses and tramways and doctors-the kind that is always so full of information its pages bristle with abbreviations you are never quite sure of.

You scarcely have it open before the spell begins to work. Your very first sensation is of being set down in the midst of a strange city and feeling hopelessly lost. Suddenly, you are homesick-you don't know which way to turn. You think of the familiar corner of Main and Chestnut Streets and, in a moment of weakness, you would relinquish everything to be strolling along the dusty. sidewalks you know.

But don't-don't close the book. Every traveller feels that way when he first steps into the foreign din of a strange city. Wander on a few pages-here is a map. Your eye rests upon a path of snaky gray in a wil

derness of pink-across it runs SEINE FLEUVE; why, of course, that is the river Seine, and in the middle of it here is the Ile de la Cité and Notre Dame (I didn't know Notre Dame was on an island). A dozen streets running together into a roundish white spot draws you to it-Place de la Bastille. Now you can begin to "get your bearings."

At last you are in Paris; you may never have dreamed that you would be there, but here you are. If you don't believe me, wander about. No end of adventures are waiting for you. Don't think you can get about too easily if you don't know French, but what would Paris be without it?

Unexpectedly, names which have dangled for years in mid-air in your brain tumble down to earth and fix themselves to perfectly definite places-Pont Neuf, "Boul. Mich.," Champ de Mars. Half an hourbefore you know it, you are driving in the Bois, parading down the Champs Elysées, or loitering in the Quartier Latin.

You are curious to see what is inside the buildings. You pick one near the Jardin du Luxembourg, and the index says, page 291:

The PANTHEON (Pl. R, 19; V) stands on the highest ground on the left bank (the 'Mont de Paris'; 197 ft.) the site of the tomb

For two pages you hear of its history, its domes, its vaults, and decorations. When you finish, the Pantheon may still be only a bit of red splashed on the pink background of a map in your mind's eye, but it has become every bit as real to you as it was to the crowd of tourists that hurried through its portals this morning-when you meet it again in print, you may have forgotten every word of its description, but you will feel a thrill of recognition-you have been there.

If you should leave France for a little trip across the Channel, do not think the atmosphere of England will be anything like

France just because you are travelling in a guide-book. After the bewildering web of rues and places, the streets and circuses of London with their good old English names seem ridiculously easy to master. Charing Cross, Pall Mall, Hyde Park-having explored Paris, you could conduct a party around London on almost a moment of notice, for English is spoken here and you cannot get lost.

A journalist who won both fame and fortune during the war and has become one of the most respected authorities upon it in America, hinted to me that he was able to make the coup d'état of his career because he had travelled in a guide-book. When the war first burst with the invasion of Belgium, day by day he wrote editorials which amazed all his colleagues because they told with unerring accuracy just the valleys, the villages, almost the cow-paths, through which the German army would pass. Every one wondered where he was getting his uncanny information. The secret was

long ago, in 1907, he had planned a walking tour over the invaded region. He never took the trip except in his guidebook, but every knoll, every depression and stream were familiar to him-with a knowledge of strategy, the rest was easy.

When you come in after a hard day's work, there is something delightfully diverting to learn from the guide-book just the proper way to present a letter of introduction, if you were in England and had one. There is something very comfortable in knowing just how to go about getting a doctor, and what you ought to pay him, if you have the toothache. Before now London may have seemed far away, but the toothache is no mystery and, somehow, connecting the two has made London a nearer reality.

When Mahomet first made his rash remark about the mountain, I am sure he must have been studying guide-books.

AM

MONG other misconceptions in regard to the Japanese is the belief held by many foreigners that they are a stolid people. One might search the dictionary and not find an adjective less applicable to them. They have, it is true, attained a self-control that deceives superficial observers, but under this restraint is all the fire and emotion and effervescence of the Latin races or the Celts. One expression of this volatile and effervescing spirit is a quick wit and a keen humor. A very slight acquaintance with Japanese art will reveal this quality expressed in many forms-in designs for fabrics, lacquer work, fans, carvings, bronzes, screens, and kakemono, and, last but by no means least, in many of their delightful illustrated books. Comic pictorial work probably goes back in Japan to the first immature sketches of her earliest artists, and if the greater part

of this work has been lost in the serious religious art that followed the advent of Buddhism into the country, there are still fragments that indicate the humor which animated even the men of the Yamato-ryū. Among these early examples are some drawings discovered a few years ago on the pedestal of one of the carved wooden figures in the Nara Museum. The work belongs to the Tempyō period (eighth century), and was found when repairs necessitated the removal of the figure from its base. Slight as the drawings are, having been dashed off in a moment of waiting, perhaps, by some old artist-priest-the technic in them is by no means crude or primitive.

The comic drawings of the eleventh-century priest, Toba Sōjō, are known the world over, and since his time all caricatures have gone by the name of toba-ye among the Japanese.

In the late seventeenth century there arose a galaxy of wits and caricaturists in Osaka. The first of these irrepressible spirits was Hanabusa Itchō, who lived between 1651 and 1724. Although he went to Yedo before his twentieth year, and entered the Kanō school as a pupil of Yasunobu, no amount of classical training could kill his love of fun. This tendency was expressed in caricature once too often, and

after some outrageous drawings of the Shōgun and one of the latter's fair favorites, Itchō was banished to the island of Hachijō, some five hundred miles south of Yokohama-there to repent and grow in wisdom and seriousness. Delightfully humorous sketches are found in the many books containing his drawings-the "Hanabusa Itchō Hyaku-gwa" (5 vols., c. 1760); the "Itchō Gwafu" (3 vols., 1770); the "Gun

حمد