It seemed a pity to have to give our charming friend over to the clutches of the law. Personally, I should not have grieved altogether at an escape; but Morley was of the British sternness all compact; he was not displeased that our prisoner should fare as easily and comfortably as might be, nor that we should all join in friendly converse by the way; but after all, Morley was really, as I have said before, for the time the Police Force of the Commonwealth, and he would guard his captive though the heavens should fall. He kept his rifle across his saddle, and never let Selvey come within interfering distance. There would be no jail delivery that day.

We came into North Star about half an hour before noon, striking out of the sagebrush and on the road just before. The jail lies on the outskirts of the town, or what indeed had once been its outskirts, but was now rapidly being absorbed in the town's encroachment upon the sage-brush waste. In the streets of North Star, Morley again arranged his calvacade in order, and we entered in state. The bank robber really lent a dignity to the procession, as he walked in advance, his arms pinioned behind his back. There were but few in the streets; we were away from the business quarter. But as we approached the jail, the news of our coming seemed to spread, and a casual throng, mostly of women and children, followed along the sidewalk.

Before we turned in at the driveway at the county buildings, Morley ordered the party in close formation, putting the prisoner between our horses. In this fashion we halted before the jail steps.

"We'll turn him over, and then go to the hotel and have a bit of a wash and brush - -up. Then we can hunt up the Governor this afternoon, and I'll give him my letters. I hope he won't be too hard on the sheriff for letting this fellow escape."

We did not have to wait long. Officials came piling out of the jail and from the Court House across the square. Ancient clerks appeared, attendants, stenographers, turnkeys, and finally Sheriff Frank himself.

"Well, well, boys, I got back afore ye. We got our man at nine o'clock this

mornin'. We fired and signalled, but you was too fur off."

"What's that? Oh, I say now," cried Morley, turning inquiringly, amazement depicted on his face. "Are there two of them? We've got your man-got him by your photograph, and a pleasant enough prisoner he's been, and that's a fact.”

The Englishman pulled his horse aside, and disclosed to the astonished throng of officials our charming prisoner, dusty with his long walk, his clothes torn by the chapparal and sage-brush, his hands ignominiously bound behind him.

"Mr. Sheriff," said Morley, slowly and impressively, "in the name of President Roosevelt and the United States Constitution, I deliver into your hands George Selvey, alias Peter Dowling, and-and—” Morley hesitated a moment, till a phrase of judicial import came to his relief-“and may the Lord have mercy on his soul. God save the United States!"

There had been a murmur of surprise in the crowd at the apparition of the prisoner then a titter from an aged clerk with a pen behind his ear; the titter had spread and become a vague ripple of wonderment; some of the officials had fled back into the jail; men jabbed their neighbors; the crowd fell a little away from the centre, and we all turned inquiringly to the sheriff. Morley's face was stern with the pride of duty well performed; the Police Force of the Commonwealth was again in the hands of its legitimate custodian, and the Englishman turned to the sheriff for his discharge. The sheriff's face was a fiery red, but I fancied I saw a twinkle in his eye.

"Boys," he said, "ye meant well; ye meant well. Ye must have got my coat instead of Tom's. Now boys, get out o' North Star jest as fast as ye know how—as fast as ye know how, boys. You've got the Governor of the State. I told him he'd get into trouble with that way o' his, goin' off by himself in the mountains; but he will do it. There's somebody that'll never hear the end o' this; but whether its him or me, I ain't quite clear."

And that was why Mr. Robert Morley never presented his letters of introduction to the Governor. But we found the Over land an excellent train.

O

An Open Letter to Authors and Editors

NE of the most deeply rooted of human passions is the desire of every man to say his say whensoever he feels himself bursting with something that he must utter. He wants a hearing; and he is willing to submit to many things if he may only thereby gain the privilege of the platform. It is this deep-rooted desire which is probably responsible for the popularity of the Open Letter, a most ingenious device for enabling anybody to say anything to anybody else. If Mr. White wishes to communicate his adverse opinion to Mr. Black (whom he does not know) he can indite an Open Letter to Mr. Black, and perhaps some paper will print it. Perhaps, indeed, Mr. Black may be thin-skinned enough to answer it. But this is more than Mr. White really expected; it is even more than he really desired; all he wanted was a chance to express his own views and to place himself for a brief moment in the spot-light of publicity. Although the Open Letter has come into popularity lately, it is not a new device. The letters of Junius were really Open Letters, even though they were not so entitled. And although the Open Letter is generally addressed only to a single person it is sometimes addressed to a group. If Mr. Brown has reason to dislike Mr. Green's management of the Weissnichtwo and Ultima Thule Railroad, he can address an Open Letter to the stockholders of the W. & U. T. R. R. asking them to turn Mr. Green out of the presidency. An Open Letter to any one person is pretty sure to reach him, either through the "kindness of friends" or through the enterprise of clipping bureaus. But to address an Open Letter to a group is like firing with a shotgun: the best you can do is to bang away and take your chances, knowing in advance that some of your moving targets are certain to be out of range.

And yet an Open Letter may afford the only means of reaching even a few of the collective body whom you desire to reach. Supposing, for example, that a certain Gentle Reader wished to make a suggestion to authors and editors, how could he get their attention? How could he make sure that even a fair proportion of them had the privilege of listening to his words of wisdom? Authors are now in

number as the sands of the sea; and even if this Gentle Reader knew all their names, he has not the wherewithal to pay the postage on a circular letter addressed to them severally.

This, then, is an Open Letter to Authors and Editors, calling their attention to a crying need and asking them to remedy an unsatisfactory condition. It is not addressed to all Authors, but only to those who may hereafter gather into volumes articles and tales from the magazines. It is not addressed to all Editors, but only to those who are responsible for the publication of collections of essays, of stories, and of poems. It is a request that these contributions to periodical literature shall each of them be dated with the year of its writing. When this Gentle Reader takes up a volume of essays recently issued and finds a reference to "the last century," he would like to be able to turn to the date of the particular essay containing this reference to discover whether it was originally written before or after the last day of December, 1900. When he is reading Matthew Arnold's discussion of Celtic influences he would like to know whether this article was written before or after Renan's discussion of the same subject. But Matthew Arnold did not date his articles nor did Renan. The latter's "Essais de Morale et de Critique" is now in its fifth edition; and only by a correction here and there in a foot-note can we guess that the first edition was published before 1860.

Even more important is it that every separate contribution should be dated in any scholarly edition of a classic, ancient or modern. When we are reading the works of any one of the New England poets, for example, it is interesting to see at once that a certain lyric was written before the Civil War or afterwards. In an edition of Poe's "Tales," the date on his grewsome "The Pit and the Pendulum" has a certain importance, if we happen also to be familiar with "The Iron Shroud" of William Mudford; and which was written first, "The Cask of Amontillado" or the "Grande Bretèche"? Balzac, it may be noted, often dated his novels, as M. Paul Bourget is now careful to do. It is satisfactory to find the date at the end of every one of Merimée's ironic tales; and it would be pleasant to find at the end of the several

It is the habit to say that such a result was tolerably easy to the Greeks because their life was so much simpler than ours; because their acquirements were so much more limited and their knowledge was so much less extended. We know nowadays a great deal more than we can act up to and we feel a great deal more than we can express. The contrast with the ancient life is great. Still, it need not be exaggerated. The old Greeks did not start with a perfectly clean slate. There had been other civilizations, life-problems had been agitated, and were become in their time quite complicated enough. But while we moderns are torn in two by the feeling, on one side, that it is incumbent on man to learn everything that he possibly can about everything, and the doubt, on the other, whether the sources of knowledge that make the highest human type be not really very few, the Greeks did not trouble themselves so much but decided at once for the few essentials with a firmness that puts our vacillations to the blush.

The best minds occupied with our schools are particularly alive to the necessity of establishing some sort of ranking among modern studies, so that those may be put first that are capable of giving, along with the desired practical preparation for worldly success, that discipline to the whole nature that forms the better type of man. There are therefore new systems of teaching constantly arising, and each founded on some different idea of "educational values." How to simplify, and yet to heighten and deepen,

education for the general life, while at the same time so much attention must be given to some highly specialized technical equipment or other in order that the individual may hold his own in our fierce modern rivalry, is a question extremely complex. Much as we pride ourselves on our educational machinery, there is nothing like a solution of it even in sight. And well may some people ask themselves of what use are more and more accurate conceptions of the universe to men and women who are not gaining correspondingly in internal balance, in wisdom, or in a light, sure way of using all their powers to the best advantage and with the least waste!

The three "educational values" which the Greeks pitched upon as most surely making for that end, to us, at first thought, seem almost infantile. They were the practice of music, the practice of right diction, and the practice of noble and appropriate gesture and posture. All faith in the importance of the latter scheme of training has (it need not be said) gone from us utterly. We cannot be brought even to give it a serious thought. What do we care for the fact that a Bedouin chief, ignorant and fanatical and probably brutal, will look and move like a member of a higher species by the side of a great and really good German man of science or an Englishspeaking philanthropist? A Greek would have thought it humiliating; not we. We think a great deal of gymnastics and athletic sports nowadays, to be sure; but only because of the aid that they are to health. And that which, of recent years, has come into some vogue among us under the name of physical culture we leave to the tough mercies of faddists, ladies of mature years who desire to reduce their waist measurements, and "drawing-room entertainers" in search of effective attitudes. And yet, is it too much to predict that sooner or later our present education will be compelled (with modifications, of course) to return to the ancient Greek idea of the ethical ends to be served by a free, genial control of all the muscles, by physical harmony?

As to one of the other two means of training by which the Greeks set so great store, we are too close to the matter to have the right perspective now; but we shall see in time that the endeavor to raise the musical drama to the ethical function of the old Greek stage was one of the very greatest achievements of the nineteenth century.

I'

SINCE 1898

IN The Field of Art, January, 1899, a brief list was given of the more important mural paintings executed in this country by American artists since Mr. La Farge's in Trinity Church, Boston, not including those destroyed, as William Morris Hunt's large panels in the State Capitol at Albany, and those of the Chicago Exposition of 1893. Among the few suggestions made in the introductory remarks preceding this list was one emphasizing the necessity of a real feeling for mural decoration-of "nobility of color and the great gift of flatness"-to supplement the painter's usual technical training; and, in connection with this, the advisability of including in this training the designing of frames, or borders, for his pictorial panels or friezes, and also of his having a somewhat complete control of his whole interior, or, at least, of the wall on which he works.

So greatly has this mural art expanded within the last eight years that a similar list of painters and paintings would now fill the whole four pages to which The Field of Art is rigorously confined. It cannot be said that in this development every great principle has been finally settled; on the contrary, among the painters themselves, the diversity of opinions is as wide as ever, and even a few of those once generally accepted seem now to be wide open to controversy.

Not unlike the discussion of technical methods is that over the allegorical vs. the rest of the field, historical, realistic, commercial, didactic, and that very old assertion that "the mission of art is to record" something or other. Even the generally considered first requirement of decorative art, "that it should decorate," is, it is thought, frequently lost sight of.

Mr. Joseph Lauber says: "The cry has been raised that too much of our work in the past has been allegorical; that we had a history which ought to be depicted on our walls. That allegory was rot, anyway, etc., etc. There is no objection to a historical painting on the walls provided it can be made to fulfil the first condition, namely, to decorate; to have that balance in composition, scale, and color that will make it a part of the

picture." Mr. Low says: "It behooves us all in these cases, if we wish to make the decoration of public monuments general, to avoid the obvious and the commonplace. It is evident that to be duly governed by the architectural style in which a room is conceived we cannot all go back to our meagre history; for one, I own I am almost as tired of the 'early settlers' as I am of 'Justice,' 'Science,' and 'Art'; but there is a rich field in the myths and history which we have inherited in common with all the modern world. The business of the artist is of course to treat his subject in as modern a manner as he pleases, so as to preserve the inherent human intcrest which has not changed since the birth of time, when these legends were grafted on natural human roots." Mr. Childe Hassam writes: "I should like to see more pure decoration; the figures and landscape idyllic in all that the term implies. The historical subject is the thing that is usually done-all very well, too, I admit —but I should like to see other things done." Mr. Du Mond regrets that "the beauty which should prevail in mural decoration is usually a minor feature compared with the illustrative, symbolic, academic or story-telling side." Mr. Daingerfield writes that, in his opinion, "in mural decoration, wherever placed, the theme should never be the merely illustrative but, per contra, should be of the loftiest significance, speaking rather through the spirit of the theme than by any objective realization."

On the other side, Mr. Turner, while in complete unity with his fellow-practitioners in their claim that in the execution of the mural work of this country, the native artists are entitled to first consideration, a claim which has recently received the powerful support of Mr. La Farge and Mr. St. Gaudens, and while admitting that the choice of theme is largely a matter of personal temperament, is inclined to the opinion that the figurative and allegorical can scarcely be considered the language of our day, that something more direct and practical, more nearly adapted to the limitations and requirements of the people, is required. This, he thinks, applies particularly to the decoration of public build