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ephemeral field of journalism has claimed too rare a gift; but who can be sure that the newspaper at its best is not as important a thing to the community as any other kind of printed page? I came away from New York with a new debt of gratitude to "F. P.A." I could not feel wholly away from home in the town where the Conning Tower stands.

V

I SUSPECT that visitors who are oldtimers find more interest in the southern end of the island than in the upper end. Of course there is the famous Riverside Drive up the Hudson with its two immortal dead: Grant, first, and then the "Amiable Child," who slumbers not far distant from him. (What other great city is there that would cherish this humble plot generation after generation?) And there are the great parks with their zoos, and the magnificent homes along the avenues, and the Palisades.

But I think the imagination of an older generation is more accurately touched by the monuments and memories of those neighborhoods embracing Battery Park and the historic regions near by: Wall Street, which has afforded so much material for earnest Western reformers to write about, and Trinity churchyard, with its suggestion of Wordsworth and his "We Are Seven," and the great skyscrapers, and the statue standing in the seaward mists.

On my last day's ramble in New York I sat down in Battery Park, and watched the shuttle-like movements of the boats plying between Manhattan and Ellis Islands and weaving their ways about the harbor. Presently I found myself listening to two rather unkempt men who occupied a near-by bench.

They had revived the familiar jest which has it that the Statue of Liberty ought to be removed now in favor of a monument to Mr. Volstead, or something of the sort. One of them remarked in a disgruntled tone: "There's gettin' to be too many cranks in America." I gathered that he meant our liberties are being too much encroached upon in recent years. But that word crank awoke in my mind a long-dimmed memory. I remembered where I had first heard it. I remembered how, as a small boy, I had seen

my father come with white face and trembling hands into the home circle to announce the news that President Garfield had been assassinated. It was thought, he said, that the deed had been that of a crank. A sinister word, that, which was long applied to unwashed and untutored malefactors. But the old wind which blew the word from the polite world to the submerged world has turned now, and men of low brows-together with a goodly company of others are stigmatizing the professional moralists with the same old useful word.

I sauntered away into the lower East Side, and presently I found myself, at sight of some familiar word or other, removing my hat and standing reverently, lost in fond memories. Here I was amid scenes made familiar to my youthful mind and heart long years ago by "Old Sleuth" and Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller and Mrs. Sumner Hayden, and other magic taletellers for the old New York Fireside Companion. Do you remember those names? Did you ever read "Little Goldie; or, The Story of a Woman's Love"? Ah, well, I'm sorry. I'm not saying what a good story it is; but oh, what a magic story it was!

In justice to my guardians of those days I ought to relate how another type of book was placed within my reach: Charles Kingsley's and Miss Mulock's and a little blue-and-gold edition of Tennyson. But who is not the better for a period of literary wild oats? At any rate, in more than one little Western town I found the tales of New York's East Side and revelled in them as I do not nowalas-in the best books I can find. I sometimes wonder what was in those stories; or was it, perhaps, that I had just entered a new kingdom? At any rate, there was always a girl in them, a girl who was strangely beautiful and innocent and persecuted. She was not uncommonly an orphan, and often she had an older sister who was either an invalid or blind. She was often to be found down about the water-front, along East River, at about two o'clock in the morning, in very dangerous company. She lapsed into terrible predicaments with an absolute profligacy of readiness. I do not recall why she should have been abroad so late quite habitually, since she was always

a working girl by trade, and ought to have been in bed. But there was always an unfailing charm in her story, and now that I am by way of being an humble story-teller myself, I often sigh with regret because I cannot command an East River, and a hapless heroine, and, above all, the magic of those old tales.

I could not contentedly hurry away from that neighborhood where yet the ghost of a little boy hovered near den and attic and dock and trembled for the perils of the heroine he could not rescue. Yet I could view the scene complacently, now that the long years had passed; for I recalled how the hapless girl of the old tale, after being beset by perils by flood and fire and evil agencies of the night, was always saved by a tardily arriving hero in about Chapter XLVI, and borne into a domestic eddy which must have seemed a bit tedious after all she had passed through.

Not to be too soon through with the neighborhood I stopped into a dingy inn and ordered a bottle of beverage. It was promptly forthcoming: a bottle of a deliciously sinister color, yet of no very sinful potency.

As I drank I derived yet one more vivid impression of a typical New Yorkerthis time of one of the lowest strata. Three men sat sweltering at a table, eating a boiled dinner. They were remarkable for only one thing: their extraordinary vehemence. Where men of a similar type elsewhere would have been indolently cynical, they were savagely in earnest and perilously energetic, in view of the high temperature. They were discussing the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, which was then about to take place.

One of the three had a mouth of tragic masklike irregularity, as if from a more or less harmless incorrigibility and a habit of making eccentric pronouncements. Thus handicapped he was trying at once to eat heartily and to dominate the conversation among his fellows. I did not gather which of the two fighters he was championing, a fact which need not be regretted now, since the "fight of the ages" is beyond the reach of prophecy.

VI

It was when I was returning to my hotel that afternoon from a ramble

through Brooklyn that I came upon the crowning picture of my journeyings.

Toward the Long Island end of the Brooklyn Bridge I came within the shadow of a tower, and here I found a seat beside two boys who were reading and discussing a book.

Was it some history by "Old Sleuth"? Yes, in a way: it was the greatest tale by the Old Sleuth of his day. They were reading the "Odyssey."

They were so absorbed, so wholly removed from our own world, that I regarded them wonderingly and almost at will. The great Hall of Odysseus, and the Suitors, and the wise swineherd, and the fascinating Calypso whose tale is left untold-these held them spellbound. They did not dream how Ulysses a thousand times multiplied and greater than him of Ithaca had built the very bridge upon which they rested from the heat, and that even greater Manhattan Bridge less than half a mile away. They did not realize that New York is in itself romance infinitely greater than the tale of Troy. They were enraptured by the swingpaced cattle, the rosy-fingered dawn-the tale of an ancient Muse. They were of foreign heritages, that I could see, yet their faces were in process of being restored, as the art-phrase has it.

Is it too much to believe that the American face at its best is the normal face?— the face which is the product of equal rights, and an unembittered humor, and untroubled wide horizons, and individuality of thought and deed and choice? The face of Europe is a cunning face, or stupid, or despondent, or bitter, or oppressed, or dominating, or arrogant. This is the face which comes to America from across the ocean. This was the face these two boys' parents had brought.

But these two young faces were subtly yielding to new influences. They held a strange commingling of the old and the new. There was in them the dawning of a pleasant candor, of a soul no longer fearfully on guard, of unsuspicious enthu

siasms.

I slipped away unobserved, fearful of checking the pleasure of these two boys. I turned my back on the kingly house of Odysseus.

A mist covered the river before me and the farther end of the bridge. For a mo

ment I thought I could see nothing of New York. And then there was a thinning of the upper mists, and I saw as in a vision the tops of high houses. They filled the distant sky-the Municipal Building and the towering Singer and Woolworth piles, cloud-high and strangely pure. The mists washed them, and ebbed and flowed. Faint distant sunlight touched them softly.

I thought: "If the old theologians could stand here now as I do the Wesleys and Richard Baxter and the rest— how their eyes would stare incredulously, and how, as the reality of it dawned upon them, they would exclaim in an ecstasy of relief:

"Then heaven is!"

VII

NEW YORK is not an isolated unit. It is part and parcel of all the nation, of all the world. Certainly much of the best in America has gone into its making. It is the work of our sons and daughters, of our brothers and sisters. It is the apex of our Western civilization. It would be a stupid pose to deny this. It has in greater abundance than any other American city the best in painting, in sculpture, in music, in all manner of art-treasures. And are not these the agencies by which we measure civilization? Its people are more richly endowed than we of the inland. It has the stored treasure, it is the gateway to all the seas. The American family-whether it will or no-sends the best of its children to Manhattan Island, and it follows them with the best of its bread and meat, the best of its apples and corn, the best of its songs and prayers.

Not Washington, but New York, is our real capital-the capital, the head, of our best achievement. Of old it was the fashion for rustic minds to speak contemptuously of New York: to magnify its wickedness, to invent evil garments for it to wear, to belittle its wit and wisdom. The new fashion is better. This inclines toward candor and praise. We are learning to value that which we have helped to make, that which is in part our own. We go to New York for inspiration, and to be gratified, to be made larger. We go as to an exposition, to see the wonders of our time.

And we are abundantly rewarded.

T

HE door of the English Hospital at Hwai Yuen opened a cautious inch, and Niles Page, busy over a bundle of delayed home newspapers, raised his head in time to catch the first glimpse of a wonderfully lovely face; loveliness of a kind he had never become quite used to. The skin was a creamy tint with deep rose showing beneath the cream, the mouth like a scarlet flower, and the dark eyes, startled now, which were raised to his, were large and luminous and indescribably tender. Then, out of the brilliance of the sunshine beyond the doorway, emerged the rest of the slim figure of a Chinese girl dressed in trousers and jacket of mauve satin. The high collar about her neck was stiff with gold embroidery cunningly picked out with bits of jade and seed pearls, and from the top button of her jacket drooped a lotus blossom of white jade so perfect on its skilfully hidden wires, that Niles, pausing only long enough to throw away his cigarette as he came to meet her, fancied he caught its illusive perfume.

Resisting a primitive impulse to touch her, he bowed with necessary ceremonial politeness while his heart beat a reveille of tattoos against his ribs. The girl, with the most hurried of salutations, broke into a soft volubility in which expressive Chinese phrases persisted in mixing themselves with her carefully learned English. "Honorable doctor must come! Man burn, ver' bad in road!" "Where?"

When they were alone he drew the only other chair the room contained in front of her, and easing his six feet of length into its not over-solid structure, gave a sigh of lazy content and smiled at her with half-closed eyes. But after a moment he ran his fingers nervously through his hair that would have had a decided ripple in it, had it not been so mercilessly groomed-finding it more difficult than he had imagined to begin a conversation with this slip of a girl. The smile with which she regarded him was quite friendly, Niles even fancied there was sympathy in it; yet she offered no remark. His knowledge of her relationship to the big man calling himself Been Sin Lowwho had brought a mysteriously wounded man to the hospital a month ago—had been rather in the nature of a coincidence. Niles had been standing at the time on the veranda of the hospital, gazing idly at a closed palanquin at the steps, when the curtains parting had disclosed the face of this girl beside him, and a suave voice at his elbow had murmured, “My sister." He remembered now the start with which he turned to confront the owner of the voice-for he had fancied himself alone and found himself gazing with veiled hostility into the inscrutable eyes of Been Sin Low. Later Niles had been at pains to find out that the fellow had no settled business in town; yet he carried himself with a conscious air of authority, and paid with a lavish hand. It was Hsin Tsao, after all, who broke the silence that threatened to become

on his feet now. In imagination he saw her robbed, ill-treated perhaps, and left to unspeakable agony along some unfrequented roadway, or tossed, a thing of no account, into some swampy rice-field

"I came alone," she reminded him demurely, but her eyes were roguish. Then, evidently deeming some explanation necessary, she added:

"It happened so: A heron, with much flapping of his strong white wings, flew over the house. This means happiness to all the dwellers in that house. So I went into the courtyard to kiss my hand to him, where he sailed against the blue of the sky. But, even as I looked, another came into view and, following him, a third. I watched them, circling on lazy wings, long yellow legs stretched out behind them, until all three had passed over the house, flying toward the south; and I stepped outside the gate-unguarded at the moment to watch until they dwindled to three dots and vanished in the purple haze. You see," she went on naïvely, "unless one watch them out of sight, they bring death. But when one does it's only trouble to the master of the house." "Which is bad enough," Niles sympathized. "Chinese birds know a lot, don't they?"

He watched her nose crinkle into a smile. "But it's a very sure sign," she assured him. "And you see the trouble has begun already, for as I started to go back, I saw the burned man."

"Sure he is burned?" Niles questioned. She closed her eyes, and white palms crossed against her breast swayed back and forth. "His hands! His feet!" she shuddered.

"You shouldn't have come!" he admonished her. He wanted to take her hands and assure her of his vigorous protection; instead, in a manner he strove to make only professional, he added:

"This burning case is not the first we have had. The work of Spotted Tom, likely, or some of his followers."

From the edge of the big chair where she perched, Hsin Tsao lifted scared eyes to his.

"Spotted Tom!" she repeated in awe. "He thinks nothing of burning his victims when they refuse to reveal the hid

ing-places of their treasures," Niles explained further, glad to be started on something at last. Then, with a petulance wholly beside the subject: "Why don't you Chinese put your money in banks? You invite trouble by keeping it about you!"

Hsin Tsao's smile was indulgent.

"Money belt more good," she assured him. "Besides, no one trouble Been Sin Low."

"How do you know that? What's his business? Merchant?" with a comprehensive glance at her rich satins.

Hsin Tsao shook her head. "He not tell me. Very much he goes away." "And leaves you alone?"

"There are the house boys and the Amah," proudly; "also Se Woo at the gate. But he grows old," she added honestly.

"A pack of sheep to run at the first alarm!" Niles dismissed them. "Why does your brother leave you at a time like this, with Spotted Tom's atrocities being perpetrated in the very district?"

Again Hsin Tsao shook her head. "He never say. Sometimes he comes home early in the morning very tired and dusty, with mud on his shoes. But Se Woo said I should not speak of that," she added as an afterthought.

Doctor Page frowned; then his eyes widened at a thought which had sprung full-grown into his mind. Could Hsin Tsao's brother be one of the followers of the notorious robber? It was so natural to suspect evil of anything mysterious. But at the moment it was too preposterous to admit of more than scant consideration.

The stretcher-bearers passed the window with their sheeted burden. Niles resisted an impulse to prolong this moment that had promised so much of very real satisfaction, and had been productive of so little; this moment alone with the girl whose face had been with him almost constantly since that first chance glimpse. Making her possible danger an excuse, he would accompany her and warn her brother. And, too, although he could hardly be said to be conscious of it, in the back of his mind, where he had thrust it to wait the time when he could give it his full consideration, the thought of