commissioners and a committee of the women to assemble the nucleus of a library. And the hope was, they made clear, that there would be an appropriation from the city to house that library. They waited for no reply. They rose, bade the men, with their thanks, a good morning, and turned to the door. But first Miss Granger paused by Mr. Shadd, seated comfortably in his chair. "Did you find what you wanted in our library? Yes? I was so sorry to have been engaged that day, when you came. Won't you come again?"

"Sure," said Arpeggio, graciously. She was beyond the threshold before it occurred to him to scramble to his feet. Stack, the beau, was showing them out.

Stack, the beau, came back from the door, and he was rubbing his hands. "Nice, sensible lot of ladies," said he. "Up and down sort. No nonsense. Real ladies, each and every one. And this is what I call puttin' up a proposition.' He fondled the check.

Mr. Purcell was caressing his nose with his five fingers. "Do you know," said he, sometimes I think some ladies does some things as good as some men could."

Their look consulted Arpeggio. He had sunk back in his chair, and was staring at nothing at all. At their "How about it?" he gave no sign.

"Everything's different from what I supposed," he said, heavily. He went and gazed out the window. So she had been in the house that day when he had waited for her in the library! But had he waited for her?

For the first time he perceived that it was not for her that he had waited.

They were to hold a mass meeting in the town hall to discuss the public

library. Stack and Dodd and Arpeggio were to sit on the platform. Miss Edith Granger was to preside.

As Mr. Arpeggio Shadd left his home on the evening of the meeting and walked down the long, quiet street, golden in the slanting, after-supper light, he was aware that the faint sweetness of the spring was merging into the green depths of June. June always stirred him. June was no mere promise. It was as if something had come to pass.

His house was on the edge of town, and where the road forked-part to know what it was to be a street, and the rest to keep on forever as a country highway-he divined a figure idling.

"Mamie!" he said.

She did him the exquisite deference of a smile, a flush, a Âuttering of the hands.

"Where you goin' to?" he demanded.

Oh, she was on her way to the meeting. Miss Granger had been afraid that there might not be many out. But first she, Mamie, had just had to run awayand smell the country.

"I'm glad you run this way," said Arpeggio.

Mamie, looking guilty, covered it with a laugh. She had to run some way, didn't she? Was he going to the meeting?

Yes, he was going. Or was he going? He looked up at the soft masses of the trees in the westering light, green giving back gold in the slant sun. He looked along the country highway and he sighed. Mamie was silent. He looked at her. A catbird sang out from the thicket and mysteriously this seemed to decide him.

"Mamie," he said, "let's not go to that meeting."

T

HERE has been much talk of late of poetry

and the technique of it. Of course, in every age, there has always been such talk by men who were not poets. The poets themselves, in every age, have gone on practising their "mystery," knowing scarcely at all how it was done, and leaving it to the pedants to explain their masterpieces. They knew this much, at all events, that, whatever effects they were able to produce, while accountable up to a certain point, maybe, beyond that, at the moment when what we can only call "magic" steps in, were not for the reason to explain. It has been known to certain select spirits for some time that the reason explains nothing, never can explain anything and never has. But latterly this somewhat aristocratic opinion has become democratically diffused, and it will soon be a commonplace that man is not, as had been previously supposed, a reasonable being. There is nothing whatsoever that he takes instinctive delight in, from Chopin to a dog-fight, that can be "explained by the analysis of reason; for all man's honest pleasures are those which reason repudiates as either ridiculous or gross. Happily, there is something absurd in humanity which baffles, and will always baffle, the denatured professional mind. Now, while the pleasure we receive from poetry and all the arts is essentially mysterious, yet we can, at all events, make a show of explaining why we care for Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

or for:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree, Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

or, once more, for:

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,

A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.

We know, anyhow, that great poets have written these familiar immortalities, and that to praise them is necessary to persons claiming the possession of intelligence. On the other hand, it is much less easy to justify our taste for such lines as these, which are certainly no less immortal, and have attained a still wider popular currency:

The Queen of Hearts,
She made some tarts,

All on a summer's day;
The Knave of Hearts,

He stole those tarts,

And with them ran away.

Now, unless one is a very superior person, one must, I think, admit that these lines give one a high degree of satisfaction. We love to say them over; we have probably known them all our lives, and are more than likely to carry

them from the cradle, where we first heard them, to the grave, where it may be that we shall still remember them. They have that lasting quality which belongs to great poetry, they haunt one, they satisfy certain needs; yet, of course, the that they are great poetry. Sublimity, wildest paradoxer could hardly claim. beauty, magic, pathos, are among the

terms which we employ to explain our pleasure in great poetry, but these terms are obviously inapplicable to "The Queen of Hearts," which, in fact, possesses perhaps but one quality, besides its attractive jingle, that of being sheer nonsense. But, in allowing it that, how much, indeed, do we allow it? For perhaps man's delight in beauty is less strange than his mysterious love of nonsense-nonsense in all its forms, but

nonsensical verses. The greatest poets have indulged in the making of themsuch an "occult, withdrawn" poet as Rossetti, for example,

was addicted to

"limericks"-though they have seldom

in

approached in success the achievements of such unknown masters as those who, a mystery of authorship great as that of the Homeric poems, gave us "Mother Goose," and our other nursery rhymes. The charm of nonsensical rigmaroles, preposterous rhymings, marvelously meaningless words of strange shapes and sounds, is one of the first to captivate us in our earliest infancy. Why should the tiniest mite of a newborn being break out into convulsions of baby laughter, pathetically revealing its yet toothless gums, because its "NuNu" chants over its cradle:

Qui gardait ses moutons. American babies, no less than French, have been brought up on these_and other such darling French nonsense. They have shaken their little sides over them, just as if they understood what they were laughing at which is precisely what, even as they have grown up and loved them still, they have never understood. The human love of nonsense is a divine mystery. We have often heard pessimists declare that we come into the world weeping. It is truer, I think, to say that we come into it laughing. For laughter in a baby seems to be its first

outside its small needs and pains. It may cry merely because a pin is sticking into it, but it laughs because already it sees something that makes it laugh, it knows not why, something that catches its eye or ear and seems irresistibly funny to it. There is nothing more mysterious than a baby's sense of humor. It frequently loses it as it grows. up, together with the other trailing clouds of glory, but most babies are born with it. To satisfy it nursery rhymes were invented, and to satisfy the same instinct in grown people "The Hunting of the Snark," that incomparable classic, came into being; and Calverly and Gilbert and Lear stood on their heads, so to speak, and performed such verbal antics before high heaven as must have made the very angels laugh. When the Owl and the Pussy-Cat, having "dined on mince and slices of quince," "hand in hand, on the edge of the sand," "dance by the light of the moon," there is something which, as Stevenson was fond of saying, delights the great heart of man. But, of course, with these modern artists of nonsense there is usually a deliberate attempt at the grotesque and the absurd. We know why are laughing, but with the oldfashioned rhymes of which I am chiefly thinking, we laugh-or, for that matter, cry, perhaps without having any reason to give. The old immemorial catches are just picturesquely meaningless, and jingle quaintly, and that is enough. One would like to ask that denatured professional mind the reason of the immortality of these lines:

we

Polly put the kettle on, Polly put the kettle on, And we'll all have tea;

and these:

Cross-Patch, draw the latch,
Sit by the fire and spin,
Take a cup and drink it up,
And let your neighbors in;

and again these:

Curly Locks, Curly Locks, wilt thou be mine? Thou shalt not wash dishes, nor yet feed

the swine;

But sit on a cushion and sew a white seam, And feed upon strawberries, sugar, and

cream.