worth in the lead wildly swinging his stripped coat. At the same instant the fireman on the freight engine set the canyon échoes clamoring with a shrill call for brakes.

"What's that?" demanded Upham, starting up out of his love reverie at Miss Hazleton's side.

The answer came up out of the dust whirl under the rear trucks of the flying car in the shape of a green flag, tattered and with a broken staff. Upham jumped for the platform brakecord, and the whistle of the air was exactly coincident with a plunging shock from the big engine. Then he swung far out over the hand-rail for a look ahead. What he saw, as the car slowed to safety under its own air-brake, was the great engine, free and apparently beyond control, thundering down upon a gap in the rails.

"Good God!" he gasped, as the car stopped jerkily, and the big engine, having reached the gap, reeled and toppled over into the river. And then: "Don't look, Kate-it's too horrible! Stay where you are till I come back!" Whereupon he cleared the hand

"'Tis no use at all, at all, Misther Upham!" he wailed. ""Twould cook the meat off your bones!"

Upham shook him off roughly and turned to Brice, who had just come up with the entire private-car party at his heels.

"Take charge here, Dick," he snapped. "I'm going to dive for him. Get the men in line to help us out."

"You will be scalded to death!" said the president, trying, as Shannon had, to dissuade him.

"It's a man's life," said Upham coolly, and with that he picked his place and plunged.

It was a terrible interval before he reappeared, some distance below the boiling caldron, but he was gripping a bruised and disfigured, but still struggling Bloodgood, when the human lifeline formed quickly and drew him out. What happened afterward was told graphically by Hollingsworth to an eager audience in the round-house toolroom that same night. "It's just as I'm telling you, boys; he was about as near dead as Bloodgood when we snaked 'em out of the river, but he was hangin' on to Bart's collar so't we had to prize his fingers apart to get 'em loose. Then that little gal came flutterin' down the bank and-oh, my! it made me wisht I was young and pretty againpitched her arms around 'Little Millions' and cried over him right there and then, before the whole kit and b'ilin' of us; and there wa'n't anybody snickerin' now, you bet!

rail at a bound and ran to join the little group of train- and section-men at the point of disaster.

"Where are the enginemen? Did they jump?" he cried.

It was Hollingsworth who answered, shouting to make himself heard above the hissing, spluttering din of the half-submerged engine.

"Johnny Shovel got off; but Bart went down with her. He's in the cab."

Upham had drawn off his shoes and was struggling out of his coat. Pat Shannon, crying like a child, laid hold of him.

"Soon as he could stand up and get his breath he laughed like it was a piece in play. See here,' says he, 'you're all daffy over the wrong man. Bloodgood is your hero. Don't you see he broke loose from

that car because he knew he couldn't hold it and his hundred tons of locomotive, too? Get him up into the car, men, and we'll take that freight engine and hunt a doctor. He's pretty badly hurt.""

There was little said by the listeners. There be some deeds too large for comment. But that night into every telegraph office on the line there trickled, between the business clickings of the sounders, the story of "Little Millions's" plunge into the boiling pot; and plain-faced men in overclothes, hearing the wire talk, banged their fists on the operators' tables and swore fealty to the man they had derided. And Jerry Lafferty was not the only man who walked his section after working hours.

And Upham? Two men sat late that night in the smoking-room of the Cliffs. Inn at Castle Cliff; sat long after the president and Arthur and Reddick and the deputation of welcoming citizens had departed.

"I suppose it's you to quit us and go home, Gebby-now that you know Miss Hazleton's sentiments at large," said Brice when the bedtime pipes were gurgling in the bowl.

Upham rose and put his back to the fire in the great stone arch.

"Do I?" he queried. "You think I'd better quit while my record is good? Not for a farm in paradise, Dick. I've had it out with Kate, you know, and here I stay until I've made good with the rank and file. I'll get the hang of it, after a while."

"Ah," said Brice, "I think you've got it now, Gebby. Do you know what they call you?"

Upham made a wry face. "Little Millions,' isn't it?"

"Yes; and from this day it will be 'our Little Millions' and you'd be foolish to swap it for a title. Your troubles are over." And they were.

I'

and Fiction

N one aspect, at least, that of the reporter's method of treatment, the journalistic form of novel is sufficiently familiar. Many a modern story of "local color "has been written in the manner of the correspondent "on a foreign assignment." The out-ofthe-way place is visited, and a study made with painstaking accuracy for the setting of the tale. Or perhaps some provincial author sets himself down to describe the home from which he has seldom strayed and its people as he has always known them, minutely depicting peculiarities, and producing often an admirable bit of genre work. Or once more, the story-teller may belong to the school of realism, which seeks to apply the The Newspaper scientific method to "noveling," as Howells calls it. In such a case, as Professor Cross says in his little treatise on "The Development of the English Novel," "the story or groundwork of the novel must never be invented out of one's head; it must be taken from direct observation, the newspaper, or some well-authenticated report." For example, "it may be supposed that Zola reads of a young woman who, when about to leap into the Seine, is rescued by the police. He has an interview with her, finds out all he can about her, the surroundings under which she has grown up, and the character and occupation of her parents. He studies similar cases, let us say ten or twelve; then he makes his generalizations." The process is identical, only carried infinitely further, with that of the reporter "assigned” to describe such an incident for his paper.

But quite beyond any surface likeness there is a subtle interplay of relation between journalism and fiction of which little account is currently taken. The story quality of much that passes for news modifies the reading habits of a constituency including almost all the reading public. This is a quality peculiarly American. The American newspaper, as an acute French observer has said, "is a huge collection short stories." The aptness of the description finds justification in the accepted slang term of "story," applied,

in newspaper parlance, without discrimination to whatever may be printed at length, be it serious, sensational, or humorous, an affair of state, a catastrophe, or a street incident. Reciprocally, such is the automatic working of habit, even the reader who takes his newspaper seriously may often find himself passing over a matter of moment for the "story" of some triviality amusingly sketched. This encroachment of the newspaper on the province of ordinary story-telling, vitiating the popular taste and to some extent that of the more thoughtful, has also had its part in delimiting the sphere of fiction as art. It has led to emphasis on the difference between the clever photography of journalism and that suggestiveness of impressionism which distinguishes the picture from the photograph; all the more if the subject be an episode, as in some short stories of the great masters. The natural trend toward this latter has been undoubtedly strengthened by the revolt from the Philistinism of a newspaper age; and appears in various breaks from the old conventions; for example, in the matter of the traditional "happy ending," and the endeavor to reproduce, sometimes dramatically, sometimes incidentally, the incompleteness of life. Then, too, the newspaper usually depicts life as it is embodied in a constantly shifting series of individuals, selected haphazard; a fact which has something to do with sending the contemporary novelist to seek for study of life in the large, as it is embodied in groups or classes-if possible, some group or class, the individual habits of whose members have not been made too familiar through the all-gathering gossip of the press. This was unconsciously illustrated the other day by a chance remark of Mr. Howells that some novel of the future should tell the story of the loneliest class in New York-the rich people who drift from early provincial homes into New York. There they go through the motions of doing what the rich and fashionable do around them, keep establishments, dine at expensive restaurants, and attend the opera, but live in reality detached lives so far as

social relationships are concerned. Even the reporter does not unbidden invade their lonely privacy.

There is still another and more serious side on which journalism touches current fiction and shares its spirit. That spirit has been called by Prof. Charlton M. Lewis "the vaudeville spirit," the spirit in which disillusionment "takes refuge in the easy carelessness of sceptical humor," thus "losing, or half unconsciously letting go, the habit of seriousness." The significance of this is brought home in the saying of Mr. Corey in "Silas Lapham": "All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read, or we must barbarize."

W

E have been told all our lives that the "grand manner" is fast disappearing from the face of the earth, and have tried to console ourselves by reflecting that this ill news must have been heard quite as often by our great-grandparents. But what of consolation this act of retrospection affords is more for not living in the consulship of Plancus than for anything else; for the disappearance of the "grand manner" itself it can hardly console us. Yet, supposing the bad news to be true, which it really seems to be, may there not be compensations? It is worth thinking of.

I suppose the supreme exemplar of the "grand manner" known to history was Louis XIV; at least, he is the most intimately associated with it in the minds of most of us. The stories that have come down to us of his bow are overwhelming to our self-conceit when we mentally compare that magnificent act of courtliness with anything of the sort of which we ourselves are capable. And that bow may safely be taken as a culminating point, not

fection, we may not unprofitably consider what this jewel of deportment cost.

Louis XIV's bow has not inaptly been called the blossom of feudalism. Verily it took centuries of feudalism, with all its slowly waning good and rapidly waxing evil, to produce it. Without the previous history of France and of Europe, from Charlemagne down to Louis himself, exactly as it was, that bow would have been impossible. Tout se tient in this world, and nothing can come of nothing. Moreover, the bow would have been equally impossible in any other state of society than that in France in Louis's day. So great an actor implies an intelligently appreciative audience; he was not the man to waste his sweetness on the desert air and cast pearls before swine. What would all those subtile indications of rank and court standing have profited him with a court unable to apprehend them? The feudalism that produced the actor had to produce the audience, too; the one is inconceivable without the other. And when we consider that it had taken centuries of feudalism to produce all this; that when it had once been produced in all its imposing perfection it was actually all of virtue that was left in feudalism itself and in the French monarchy; that all the social and political forces that had contributed to produce it had exhausted themselves in the effort, and, as in the century-plant, the blossom had killed the tree, we may be pardoned for asking: Was it, after all, worth the price?

We may even ask, by the way, price apart, what was the intrinsic worth of the thing itself? Let us consider for a moment to what use this "supreme blossom of feudalism" was primarily put. In plain English, to letting everybody know his or her place. And looked at in this light, was Louis le Grand's bow the act of what we should nowadays call a gentleman? Hardly; in the last analysis it was the act of a bully and a snob, it embodied sheer domineering insolence-gracefully cured of its deformity, no doubt, as far as lay within human power to cure it, but sheer domineering insolence, for all that. "L'État, c'est moi!" had twice the bluster, but not half the ingrained depravity of that impeccably discriminating bow. A jewel of deportment, perhaps, but rather a poor bauble to be paid for with centuries of tyranny, oppression, cheating, and misery. And intrinsically valuable or not to Louis, it was

surely of no value whatever to those who paid for it. A pure case of sic vos non vobis!

I think, too, that to leave this supreme example, it will be found that wherever and whenever the "grand manner" has become generally noticeable in the great of this earth -for the rank and file of humanity have seldom had much of it-the social structure has been considerably rotten at its base. The necessary conditions for the development of the "grand manner" are such that the one can hardly go without the other. I have said that without the French court and the whole structure of French society as they were in Louis's day he himself would have been nothing. I maintain that wherever you find the "grand manner" to be the rule, not the exception, in what are called the upper strata of society, you will find a corresponding rottenness in the lower.

me.

Here is another significant example. Probably some of the finest and most striking exemplars of the "grand manner" to-day are to be found among the Arabs. Egypt and Arabia itself I do not know; but I think any. one who has looked through Tunisia and Algeria with an observing eye will agree with I certainly have never seen human beings more completely sublime in look, carriage, and general bearing than Arabs of the better class in the last-named two countries. No doubt, their wondrous flowing drapery contributes to the impression they produce; but it does not take very keen observation to see that their majesty is really singularly independent of outside accessories. It can hold its own amid what would be to others exceed ingly damaging conditions. When you see a superb six-footer, in by no means particularly fine raiment, seated carelessly crosswise on the hind quarters of a very small and scrubby ambling donkey, and looking positively like Solomon in all his glory, you begin to feel how much this impressive majesty is inherent in the man himself. Simplicity is doubtless an important factor; the Arab is perfectly simple, and exhibits no trace of self-conscious

ness. It is only in the Bedouin of the desert, who is more than half savage, that you find any show of contemptuous haughtiness, of feeling his oats as one of the faithful. The town-bred Arab is not only majestic, but exquisitely and unforcedly courteous to boot. His gracious, beautifully simple civility to us foreigners seems to me the finest practical application of the noblesse oblige principle I know of; for, considering his real utter contempt for us uncircumcised giaours, one would expect him to be about as courteous to us as an antebellum Southern planter to a “nigger." Yet his civility betrays no effort, neither is there a visible trace of condescension in it. In short, the Tunisian and Algerian Arab is the finest and most complete incarnation I know of to-day of the "grand manner" in its best estate-in a phase far higher than was ever dreamt of in Louis XIV's philosophy.

And of what is the Arab's "grand manner" the blossom? Unquestionably of El Islam. And in what coin is it paid for, where is the "corresponding rottenness"? It is paid for in the rather poor theoretical creed and the infinitely poorer and meaner actual life of the Mussulman; the rottenness is in the civilization that has resulted from both, a civilization so poor, so terribly limited in intellectual and ethical horizon, that to us Occidentals it seems more like barbarism. Truly the price the Arab pays for his “grand manner" is no light one; though it must be conceded to him that he pays the better part of it himself. In this he is surely superior to Louis XIV, who personally paid nothing.

When we think what this so bitterly regretted "grand manner” has cost the world from first to last-in tyranny, class inequality, oppression, stunted growth, infamy, wretchedness, and blood-we may well be consoled for its "fast disappearing from the face of the earth." Beautiful blossom, so fair, so stately, so gracious, but reared and brought to perfection by what awful gardening!