PETER

'WILL the stranger trade? I have garlic. Thou hast bread!'

I looked up from the notes I was writing, puzzled by the voice. For a moment I saw only the incomparable Siberian summer day, and my horse grazing. Then I saw a small boy, looking at me with the unspoiled gaze of a five-year-old.

'You spoke?' I asked.

He nodded and waved a fist full of wild garlic, freshly gathered. "Thou hast bread I have garlic. Wilt thou trade?'

He wore only a sleeveless shift that by no means came to his knees, and he followed his suggestion by coming round the fire and laying his offering on my knee, where it smelled to high heaven.

I divided my bread fairly. 'Now that we have broken bread together, is it permitted to ask your name?' I inquired.

'I am Peter, son of Franz the hishnik. And thou,' he added, 'art the Foreigner.'

A hishnik, I knew, was a gold thief, and therefore an outlaw. I passed over his ancestry.

'Why do you call me "the Foreigner"?' I asked.

that person,' I admitted, and we formally shook hands.

A year later his father had gone where all good hishniks go, and Peter's mother was established in my kitchen as cook. I had forgotten Peter's existence until, one night, he broke the law of the Medes and Persians and walked into my private office uninvited.

He began without unnecessary verbiage: 'Barin, now that I eat thy bread, I would serve.'

'And how wilt thou serve?' I asked. 'It is thus that I have thought: Thou art wise; thou canst read; but thou canst not talk. The people laugh when thou dost not hear.' He gulped in his eagerness. 'Can it not be that I teach thee to talk and thou teach me to read?' His eyes wandered to my bookshelf and stayed there.

'I will talk to thy mother—' I said.

He interrupted me with vigor: 'And she will certainly beat me for chattering. Nay, Barin, thou must not tell.'

That interview set me thinking, and in due course I established a school. I also established Peter as my valet, to fetch and carry my boots and run errands. He was a most engaging imp, but a liability as a valet. Nevertheless, though I often failed to find my boots, in other respects Peter kept his bargain. He most assiduously taught me Russian of a highly colloquial variety and had worn out all the Russian books on the mine by the time he was eight.

In the usual course of events I made several trips a year to Chita, the capital of the province. It was my

custom to bring back little gifts to my household, and about this time I brought Peter a pair of boots - not the ordinary, rough shoepacks that the moujiks wear, but a pair of properly fashioned, high-topped Russian boots. I knew, of course, that to a boy in Peter's position such a gift would redate the calendar. Therefore, with becoming ceremony and in the presence of his mother, I presented them, on Christmas Eve. His delight was dramatic speechless. He kissed my slippers.

Late that night, as I was about to go to bed, a woebegone Peter, draped only in one of my old shirts, appeared in my doorway, hugging his new boots. "Why, Peter,' I asked, 'what is the matter? Don't they fit?'

"They fit, Barin,' he answered bravely, 'but, Barin, — ' he spoke breathlessly, 'I-I-I want books, Barin. Surely for such boots one can buy many books?'

I had difficulty with my Adam's apple, but, knowing Peter, I took him on his own ground. 'What kind of books?' I asked.

Peter's eyes smouldered. 'Books about America. About Europe. Like thou dost read. Enough to last a long time. Would the Barin mind?'

We looked at each other across the top of the fateful boots and were silent. Words are sometimes such little things.

'As you will,' I said at last. 'Wrap them up, and at Easter, when I return, I will bring you books.'

'Peter,' I said over my shoulder, 'your parcel is in the corner.'

As the paper began to rustle I turned and watched. Peter was kneeling, struggling with the fastenings. I was utterly forgotten. As the wrappings fell away, the pair of boots again appeared. They were tied somewhat carefully together across the top and were stuffed with paper, as is usual, to keep their shape when traveling.

Peter sat back on his heels, and, in a silence that hurt, I went to him. Once more we looked at each other, silently, over the boots.

'Ah, Barin,' he said, a world of tragedy in his voice, 'ah, Barin-it was not kind

I leaned over and cut the string. 'Shake out the paper,' I ordered, ‘and take them away.'

Peter knelt up, his head very straight. He avoided looking at me. Making it very plain that it was an order, he picked up the first boot to shake out the paper. A cascade of books slid out between his knees. In the silence that ensued I returned to my chair.

When I looked up next, Peter had an armful of books and boots and was standing, facing me.

"They are all yours, Petrushka,' I said. 'And I wish you a happy Easter.'

For the third time we looked at each other across the fateful boots. Peter's eyes were smouldering with a new kind of emotion.

He let his burden slide to the floor, books and boots alike, then threw up

again between us.

Three days before Easter I returned again from Chita. All the evening of my return I kept Peter busy until I was clear of interruptions. Then I sent for him.

I was busy at my desk when he

came.

childish dignity, placed the fingertips of his two hands against his forehead, palms inward, in the peasants' salute of fealty.

'My Barin!' he said gently. Just that and nothing more. It is said in that way only on rare occasions, to one who is to be a blood brother.

And I answered in kind: 'My Child!' I put my hand on his head, thus completing the rite.

And because Peter's eyes were full of tears, which threatened to brim over and undo him, I dropped on my heels.

'Come, Parnishka,' I said casually, 'help me pick up these books.'

I CONSIDER WRITING SOMETHING

'Now,' said Bradley, 'that you are going to have lots of time, why don't you write something?'

Those were my husband's first words after we had partially recovered from the shock of the doctor's order that I must rest, mostly in bed, for several months. I gave him all the reasons I could, on the spur of the moment, invent. Just because I happened to have plenty of time and writing material, it did not automatically follow that the two would combine with some sort of chemical combustion and result in a pleasant literary product. Besides, the words I write scare me. Spoken words have a comforting way of floating off into oblivion, while written ones remain to stare me out of countenance!

This is what happens when I try to write. I lie in the stilly darkness and think many thoughts, or I read a brief newspaper item that sets imagination or memory winging. Finally the impulse grows irresistible; I seize pad and and 'lo!' as the crossword pen, puzzles say what happens? All the what happens? All the brisk thoughts, all the fantasies and imageries, flitter away like tiny minnows from a net laid for large salmon. There remain only the commonplace empty shells and river-bottom litter of reminiscence, and who cares for those? It is easier to catch reminiscences than ideas, just as it is easier to draw up weeds than fish.

admonitions of a certain clever person whom I had the amazing good fortune to draw from an assortment of college instructors of English. She would add zest to our dry daily diet of themes by occasionally and anonymously slipping one of her own into the pile with ours, to have it discussed and criticized, though instantly identified. Imagine the courage, humility, and good sportsmanship of a teacher who would do that! Recognizing the same sketch later spread upon the pages of the Atlantic itself always brought a thrill to us and our increased respect to her.

Her advice? It was this: Always be sure you have something to write about (an admirable check on aimless wordiness); make sure of your beginning and your conclusion, then fill in the rest with the subject nearest to you. That is the real stumblingblock the simple little matter of writing about the subject nearest to you. That is the thing that takes initiative and daring, the thing I am too cowardly to do, for I fear dire consequences. I have often wondered how a writer manages to keep his friends. What woman would dare be other than self-conscious in Booth Tarkington's presence?

'Know the people you write about so well that you can tell instinctively what they would eat for breakfast,' she would say, this person with the gift of planting her words deeply. My nearest subject is my husband and, needless to

insists, and when I try to remove the obsession by threats of exposure he declines to have it removed and simply adjusts his willing-to-be martyr's crown more firmly to his head.

Secretly, however, I am almost tempted, for it would be great fun to romanticize a bit about an engineer who designs and executes great sewer systems for the relief of overcrowded cities instead of building bridges across great open spaces, and who deals with problems concerning pipe diameters and activated sludge instead of I-beams and rivets. We grow so accustomed, through our patronage of the movies, to thinking of an engineer as a lean, immaculately groomed individual, putteed and tailored according to the latest decrees of 'what the young engineer should wear,' standing behind a transit high up on some perilous mountain crag, that it is hard to recognize him, garbed in hip boots and an old slicker, prowling through dark, clammy, subterranean passages that have the mystery of an Alice-in-Wonderland setting grown sinister.

Here is a bit of a tale. There once was a medium-sized town where a few well-established industries enabled the citizens to live mildly and comfortably and where the Chamber of Commerce convened mainly for sociability's sake. A small river meandered through the town, furnishing drinking water as it entered and carrying off all the waste as it departed an obliging stream, to say the least.

Then one day someone discovered that beneath the town lay untold quantities of oil. What happened next

was so inevitable that I need not describe it. Within the briefest possible space of time the town became a city.

But there were two especially noticeable results. A great change came over the Chamber of Commerce and the river. The former suddenly came into its own, but the latter became so desecrated that no one guessed that it ever had been called anything but 'Hog Creek.' It was no longer an obliging public utility, but a downright nuisance, and soon, as its burden of waste grew and grew, it became a real menace to life.

Of course nothing was done until the revengeful stream had fulfilled its threat. Then the Chamber of Commerce took steps. Thus it happened that engineers came and labored and finally evolved a plan for carrying all the dangerous wastes, flat though the country was, to a huge disposal plant, never to be seen, smelled, or heard of again.

Now the river has a beautiful name and pleasant green banks; it is clear and health-giving. The Chamber of Commerce lists it among the city's chief assets.

It is a flippant tale, but it is true, and it has been true so many times that it might be a fable. Be that as it may, it is romance- or perhaps it is something even greater than that!

So it may be that one day I shall 'write something,' and on that same day perhaps my husband will be surprised to find himself packing that martyr's crown neatly in camphor balls and storing it away on a very high shelf.

Institutions die very slowly. Dr. Ewer, in the middle of the last century, forecast the present situation in his Failure of Protestantism, and analyzed the fundamental weaknesses. The break-up is the economic result of these. Rome may be the residuary legatee so far as the ignorant masses are concerned and in IrishAmerica, but as the world becomes educated she too is doomed. Christianity itself then becomes but one of the great world religions - the best, but possibly not the final one, the organizations breaking up and changing and the doctrines and practices being altered. Ecclesiastical tyranny cannot be reëstablished ever.

The old and new orders are personified in Mary Agnes Hamilton, who while at Cambridge University took a double first in classics and economics. A novelist of half a dozen titles, assistant editor of the New Leader, and, as 'Iconoclast,' the author of two recent volumes on Ramsay MacDonald, Mrs. Hamilton in her spare moments is an active member of the Independent Labor Party. The writings of the Right Reverend Charles Fiske, Bishop Coadjutor of Central New York, have brought comfort to many beyond his diocese. Perhaps his most influential volume is The Faith by Which We Live. A young Englishman of the war generation, R. H. Mottram has brought to his books, the war trilogy of The Spanish Farm, a versatile understanding of French and British character. The entries in the secret journal of Jane Steger mark days of suffering and exaltation above pain. The complete journal, containing several chapters which have been printed in the

Atlantic, will be published between covers this autumn as an Atlantic Monthly Press publication.

**

Amory Hare, a Philadelphia poet pleasantly familiar to our readers, is a granddaughter of the late Bishop William Hobart Hare, apostle to the Sioux. ¶Despite his lawyer's caution, no bean stalk is too hazardous to discourage Samuel Scoville, Jr., from an intimate observation of birds and their nests. Louis I. Dublin is chief statistician of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and a specialist on the problems of race and occupational mortality. Professor John Dewey, of Columbia University, is a philosopher of whom Americans have had frequent occasion to be proud. We note that his present paper defending animal experimentation is incorporated in the record of Congressional hearings on a bill to prohibit the use of dogs for experimental purposes in Federal territory. In the fields and woods of England Sir W. Beach Thomas has observed with what instinct and courage animals do and die. It will surprise some readers to learn that Lord Dunsany has discovered a London club whose members, instead of sleeping, tell marvelous tales.

An Atlantic critic, Ethel Wallace Hawkins is exploring the fresh and esoteric arts of the Continent. It is predicted that Humbert Wolfe's poems, "The Unknown Goddess' and 'Humoresque,' lately published in England, will soon make their way in the United States. During the thirty-five years that have identified C. E. Montague with the Manchester Guardian his dramatic criticism and leaders have become an almost essential part of an English middle-class breakfast. Archibald L. Bouton is Dean of the College of Arts and Pure Science at New York University. A. Cecil Edwards has resumed his London residence after thirteen years in Persia. In the January