To adapt his own words, there is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with some Greek and Latin, a knack of good form and social dexterity, a more than competent physique, enough money to enable them to spend a few of their best years in rather laborious idleness, and no notion of giving the world a full equivalent of what they propose to take out of it. The number of young women in much the same case is scarcely less disquieting. The real moral of Wilde's tragedy is not the obvious one. It is rather that even highly gifted people should have some honest trade to begin with, and leave 'art' and 'literature' (apart from such branches as are really trades and handicrafts) until, mayhap, they find themselves positively impelled thereto. If that were the rule, the world would be poorer by some millions of bad pictures and unpleasant novels, but indefinitely richer in human cleanliness and honesty.

[The New Statesman]

IN THE AIR

BY ARCHDALL REID

'COME along,' said the youthful Major who was also a very famous airman.

I followed as to slaughter, and presently stretched elderly legs up the high sides of the Avro. The mechanic in front and the Major in the pilot's seat exchanged incantations. Contact,' barked the one. 'Contact,' responded the other. Thereupon the devil that dwelt in the machine awoke, roaring. The mechanic slipped aside. We rushed forward, and up, and away. I had been told by all who loved and trembled for me to keep my mind and my eyes concentrated on my boots on

pain of being catastrophically sick. As well tell a boy to keep his tongue from the hole whence a tooth has been extracted. I looked over instantly. Nothing happened, not even a sense of giddiness or danger. One sat up to the neck in a well and gazed, as it were, from a high window. Whoever can do that with comfort may fly with happiness. The platform, not the vehicle, seemed to move. The ground fell away. For a moment I had an intimate view of the tops of trees and the roofs of sheds. A moment later, and they were remote and toylike.

On the left, with hills and woods beyond, was the great sea inlet, reflecting cloud and sky, and dotted with ships to which their triangular wakes gave an appearance of enormous speed. On the right was England, vividly green, financially neat, miraculously beautiful, cut into irrationally small fields no bigger seemingly than backyards, and utterly empty of life. The narrow, twisting roads stretched vacant, for one looked on the heads of men and from that height inexperienced eyes saw them not. It was a day of thick but broken clouds. Those above flung lakes of traveling shadow. Those below, of thinner texture, white as sunlight snow, but fleecy and transparent, crept, so it seemed, among the very hedgerows.

We had no speaking tube. The pilot turned his grave young face in scrutiny. Had he the impudence to suppose that I, a rational being, in charge of a man who had been described as 'one of the three or four finest fliers in the world' was afraid? I waved ecstatically. Incontinently, he plunged into a cloud and banked steeply. Up, in the semiobscurity, rose one wing, down sank the other; and one stared through drifting mist at dim fields directly below. For a moment terror gripped one. Then came recollection of the fame of

the pilot. If I had only one life, he had no more, and he would be unlikely to risk his only neck for the pleasure of frightening me. We emerged into clear air on level wings, and presently were over a country town, a neat red patch in a neat green land. And it was void and nothing moved thereon. The engine was shut off, and the Avro planed like a seagull, silently over the silent fields to the aerodrome miles away.

'Found it exciting?' said the Major. 'Well, most interesting. But about as exciting as a cab-drive,' said I, chaffing.

the ground. 'Chap in trouble. Must help a brother airman.' In a long field was a smiling youth beside an undamaged plane. Engine failure, help was coming. Reassured, we sought to rise again. But at some remote period that field had been trenched, and at every few yards were depressions into which the plane bumped. The pilot drew close to one long side, rushed between furrows at the opposite hedge, jumped it as prettily as a dog, swayed between flashing, ancient trees, and so reached the upper air.

A fortnight later I went.

At first, we watched a 'formation' about to start for a practice flight. At word of command each plane took on a dreadful semblance of insect life. Propellers waved like monstrous antennæ; engines buzzed a gigantic threat; machines ran forward cocking their tails with gestures shockingly animate. They took the air; and, as they passed above, one shrank from the imminent pounce of long legs which would bear the victim to Heaven knows what awful feast. So I had seen flies in the inhuman clutch of wasps, and, in the distance, seaplanes bearing their floats like prey beneath them. One machine remained behind, buzzing intermittently, cocking and uncocking its tail, crawling hither and thither, like a wounded, furious hornet. It had engine troubles.

My new pilot was an airman no less famous than the Major, and this time there was a speaking tube. We flew over the town wherein I dwell; on the ground no mean city, from the air an inconsiderable collection of huts among which it was impossible to identify the hovel which is my home. Returning, the pilot spied an accustomed speck on

very smoothly. And, as it seemed, the universe, not the plane turned. The skies swirled away, and there, hanging awfully in high heaven, were the fields

an unforgettable enormity. At that moment my stomach was just behind my teeth, and at the exact centre of the universe. The fields whirled away, and there were the spinning skies again. Thereafter came confusion. Events followed so fast that, as with men in ardent battle, they left no memory. I am told we looped several times, and that, with my consent, we rolled- that is, looped sideways. But of all this nothing lingers.

I remember, however, the beginning of the spinning dive which commenced before my astonished stomach had quite recovered its ancient seat. The nose of the machine dipped vertically, and the fields began to spin from right to left. Faster and faster they spun till we looked down on a vast top in which objects merged, and the limits of which were at the dazzling horizon. The end of that also is lost. Again we floated on level wings at a moderate heightmoderate as air heights go, two thousand feet or so. We were about to perform the 'falling leaf.' I had heard of this as provocative of prodigious sick

ness, and reflected bitterly on man's inhumanity to man. The engine was shut off, the plane tipped sideways, and one stared on the fields over the right shoulder. It rolled back, and one stared at the fields over the left shoulder. Again, and again, and yet again. Nausea gripped me, disaster threatened, humiliation was at hand. But, happily, before the dread consummation, the limits of safety were reached.

We were getting too low. It was necessary to start the engine and for that speed was required. As in the spinning dive, the nose was turned down, and we fell as a stone falls, but, if I remember rightly, with a dramatic inclination backwards so that the pilot's head and all the front part of the plane seemed clear behind the passenger. Yet, I sat firm in my seat. Already we were falling as fast as gravity could compass. The wind we made roared in my ears and turned the propellers, the engine picked up, and we rushed at mother earth, less than three hundred yards away, at an infernal pace. Objects on the ground swelled as balloons swell; but instantly, and magically, and awfully. Instinct shrieked that I was about to die, but reason still whispered that I was safe.

Zoop. We had turned, we had curved, we were soaring upward, and I was filled with enormous exultation. The pilot turned in laughter. Afterward, he said that my unconscious warwhoopings had nearly ruptured his

[La Démocratie Nouvelle] THE ROMANCE OF GUÉNOLÉ LE CLINCH

BY JEAN KERDHUN

His heart bounding with joy, Guénolé Le Clinch stepped off the little puffing train which all that April evening had been carrying him onward through the sweeping moorlands of Morbihan, his native country.

Guénolé Le Clinch, a sailor of the French Merchant Marine, was returning from a tour of the world, but he was not foolishly proud of it, for he had seen little beyond sailors' hostels and cafés. A philosopher at heart, he was quite aware that men are men everywhere, no matter what their clime may be, and that as long as one has one's bottle of wine assured, there is no need of making a fuss about strange lands. He was quite certain that in the South lived black people and in the North men who were tall, taciturn, and blond.

Guénolé that evening was happy; he sang our national hymn, not the one that you mean, but our real national hymn, Madelon, a Breton Madelon, however, full of lingering and plaintive quavers. For Guénolé had no hopes of finding his old folk; they had died long before. It was his, that evening, to seek out his girl, Jeanne-Marie Le Bozec, a fine blonde-strong as a man. In the days of the Pardon, the thumps which she gave to the village youths who seized her and hugged her too tightly knocked them head over heels to the grass. But she was a fine girl, yes a fine girl, and once married to Guénolé, oh! what a fine couple they would be!

The air, that April night in Brittany, was of a singular softness. A wood of pines planted on the cliff, torn and twisted by the ocean winds, appeared phantasmal under the moon, and from

the moors there came sweeping a honeylike odor which, for Guénolé, was the very breath of his native land.

Presently, he found himself at the door of the first house in his village.

It was, you will understand, a 'pub.' There, a village worthy, one Picot, sold food and drink, and lodged man and beast. Guénolé entered and ordered a glass. The little common room was low ceilinged and smoky, and the niggardly light of an oil lamp scarcely penetrated to the corners. There were faces there, which Rembrandt would have liked to draw. The sailor was swiftly recognized, but a kind of uneasiness seemed to haunt his old companions. Alas, Guénolé was not long in discovering its reason, for at the first allusion which he made to his fianceé, all his neighbors shut up like clams. Finally, one of them, more courageous or perhaps more ill-natured than the others, broke to him the sad truth. Weary of waiting for him, and charmed by the Louis d'ors which she liked, La Jeanne-Marie had yielded to the solicitations of Le père Gourju, the waggoner of the village, a little wretch with a pointed beard which made him look like one of the three kings.

Guénolé's heart fell with an emotional crash, though to tell the truth he had not given much time to thinking of La Jeanne-Marie during his voyages; sailors are poetic only in novels, but this news, learned so brusquely, left him standing shaken before his glass of brandy, while the company about him, as if relieved from a great weight, broke out into cries and oaths.

Without saying a word, the sailor rose from his place. His love had changed into anger. He would find him and pull him by the beard, that wretched Judas! They should see! He went out and made his way down the village street. A flood of moonlight fell

on the roofs of the houses, and here and there, he had glimpses of the moonlight on the sea. A tide of old memories surged about him, and as he thought over things, he realized that he loved La Jeanne-Marie less for herself than because of the fact that she was part of his own youth and its memories. And this bit of self-analysis really astounded the honest fellow. Presently, the house of the waggoner rose before him. In the courtyard, ghostly waggon shafts, lifted in air, stood before him; on the ground lay a wheel resembling a spectral spider. The door of the house was open, and a voice, the loud voice of a scolding woman, cried: 'So, you good-for-nothing! You have left the carriage with those rascals without seeing to your pay. It is going to be exactly as it was with the Rouzecs who owe us ten francs, and mock at you and me!'

A man's voice grumbled out vague excuses. Presently, the woman's voice continued in a louder vein: 'Keep still, good-for-nothing! You shall have no soup to-night, because you went to the pub after your meeting!'

'I have n't had a single drink,' wept the waggoner.

'Not a single drink? Oh, you! you! you!' Slap! A formidable slap broke the silence of the night, a slap so soundly applied that Guénolé could almost feel it burn his own cheek.

And suddenly an immense joy took possession of him. He would not need to pull that Judas by the beard, for if it had not been for Gourju, he himself, Guénolé Le Clinch, a good sailor and a fine fellow, would have received the blows of La Jeanne-Marie. With a lift of his shoulder, he caught up his sack, and the chorus of Madelon came singing to his lips. How good it would be at the 'pub' to which he now would be able to return with a safe conscience and without reproach.

Thus it was that an April night, sweet with the odor of the blossoming land, beheld the end of the romance of Guénolé Le Clinch, of the Merchant Marine.

[The Manchester Guardian] THE STORY OF A GREAT MOUN.

TAINEER

BY LORD BRYCE

It is creditable to this country that the first full and systematic Life of Saussure, a biography long overdue, should come from an English pen, nor could anyone be better fitted than Mr. Freshfield, by tastes and knowledge, to undertake the duty. Of those many who think they are familiar with the name of Saussure as the first man of science who accomplished a feat which was regarded a century and a half ago very much as we now regard the discovery of the Arctic or the Antarctic Pole, few know how varied were his accomplishments, how interesting his career, how attractive his personal character.

A born naturalist who, beginning from botany, went on to meteorology, orography, and geology, making valuable contributions to the three latter sciences, he was also a bold and ardent mountain climber in days when expeditions were deemed impossible, which even second-rate mountaineers to-day think little of. He was a student, and for some time a professor, of philosophy, an enlightened educational reformer, and the master of a finished style. And he was, withal, a man of the world in what he would himself have thought the best sense of the word, one whom the most cultivated circles of Paris and London welcomed for the refinement of his mind, the polish of his manners, the modest dignity of his demeanor. Saussure, scion of a Protestant

family of Lorraine which had sought shelter in Geneva when driven from France, was born in 1740, and showed from his earliest years a passion for mountains and for the study of natural history. As a boy, he loved to climb the Salève, four miles from the

city, and the Dole, the highest neighboring summit of the Jura. When two English tourists—many Englishmen went to Geneva even in those days had made what one might almost call the discovery of Chamouni, till then a very secluded valley of Savoy unvisited by Genevese, and approachable by a road which was not fit for carriages and was infested by brigands, Saussure began in 1760 his exploration of the Mont Blanc region. Forming at once the hope of one day ascending the great mountain on which he had gazed lovingly from the shore of his own lake Leman, he offered a reward to anyone who should discover a route to the summit.

The afflux of strangers desiring to reach and walk on the glaciers was just beginning to create a class of professional guides, and in 1775 a serious reconnaissance of the possible routes was attempted. In 1786, further explorations were made, and Saussure himself succeeded, in spite of bad weather, in reaching a point higher than had ever previously, so far as authentic records go, been attained by any climber. Early next year, Jacques Balmat, a Chamouni guide, along with a local doctor named Paccard, found their way to the highest peak of the mountain. In the early autumn of the year following (August, 1787), Saussure made a fresh effort, this time with a large and well-equipped party and under favorable weather conditions. Success at last rewarded him: the long siege, comparable to the siege which the indefatigable Parrot laid to Ararat forty years later, ended in victory, and