woods with such instructors in nature's ways as John Burroughs, E. P. Powell or C. E. Hodge. Professor Hiram Corson will discourse to them on English literature, George W. Cable will read to them from "The Grandissimes" or other books written by his own delicately manipulated pen, and Edwin Markham and Dr. Henry Van Dyke, Mrs. Cynthia Westover Alden and Bishop Vincent are among those who will give from the abundance of their experience. Physical culture, singing, Bible reading and the cultivation of peace of spirit will be included. This may amuse folk who are addicted to being amused. And there is, of course, no objection to any one's being amused. The qualification for entrance is nothing more than sympathy with the ideals of the camp —but that is, after all, quite a consideration. The aim of the school is so to strengthen the fiber of the pupils that they will have the courage to pursue the simple life after they have quitted the guidance of their teachers. Every member of the camp will be required to assist in the labor of the community. The life will be in the open, and the essence of the community, so to speak, may be indicated by Archibald Lampman's sonnet, "On the Companionship with Nature."

"Let us be much with Nature; not as they That labor without seeing, that employ Her unloved forces blindly, without joy; Nor those whose hands and crude delights obey

The old brute passion to hunt down and slay;

But rather as children of one common birth,
Discerning in each natural fruit of earth
Kinship and bond with this diviner clay.
Let us be with her wholly at all hours,
With the fond lover's zest, who is content
If his ear hears, and if his eye but sees;
So shall we grow like her in mould and bent,
Our bodies stately as her blessed trees,
Our thoughts as sweet and sumptuous as her
flowers."

MARY Tappan Wright is the wife of

Professor John Henry Wright, of Harvard, and it is thus that she writes about the higher education for women in her latest novel, "The Tower":

their self-respect," she makes one of her professorial characters say. "It is morally disintegrating! Women emanate a spiritual X-ray to which no man-not even one encased in triple armor can expose himself. *** How can you expect to come out from those those emotional greenhouses [the girls' schools] fit fiber for the society of any wholesome, sane, good, common-sense woman? Those girls-those miserable moonfaced, sheep-eyed girls! They make everything personal, from the binomial theorem to the Punic wars; they weep if they can't remember the answers, and expect you to stop and take up their individual problems when the class is dismissed; they-but the subject is one which should not be discussed! There is not a man of you here that doesn't agree with me. The place for the ordinary school girl is a--is a nunnery! Shakespeare knew!"

As Mrs. Wright put the words in the mouth of her hero, of whom she manifestly approves, and as she caused no other character to gainsay him, it is safe to suppose that she expresses through this medium the opinion she really holds-which is also, perhaps, the opinion that represents a consensus of conviction on the part of some of the faculty of the leading colleges. It is difficult to tell precisely what she means to imply by saying that the subject is one which can not be discussed. Every reader will be able to call to mind a goodly company of college women who can be discussed in all their actions, moods, purposes and meanings to the credit of the critic and the glory of the protagonist. It may be suggested-quite frankly in the way of argumentative retaliation that college women must be curiosities indeed if they can excel in pettiness, stupid secretiveness and smallness of spirit the non-college women who figure in "The Tower," and who, presumably, represent true femininity and charm to the author. For making a mountain out of a molehill, exhibiting morbid egotism, and interfering with the sane and natural course of things, these women are unrivaled. If they had taken a little more interest in the Punic wars, and a degree less in their neighbors' affairs, the community-let us hope it was not meant to typify Cambridge—would have been a better and happier place than it was,

T is not an invariable rule that the sons of distinguished fathers bear witness in their lives to the excellence of their breeding; but a fine example of such continuance of family power is shown in the Darwins. Charles Darwin had four sons, Francis, George, Horace and Leonard. The eldest took a course in medicine, but did not practise it. He became his father's assistant, and later his father's biographer and literary executor. He has written extensively upon the physiology of plants, and is foreign secretary of the Royal Society. The second son, now a baronet, is Plumian professor of as

Cambridge. He has inherited much of his father's power of original experimentation, and has written on such subjects as periodic orbits, the mechanical condition of a swarm of meteorites, the tides, and kindred phenomena in the solar system, tidal friction on the earth and moon, et cetera, et cetera. He was a wrangler and prizeman at college, is now president of the British Astronomical Association, and a member of the Council of Meteorological Office. Horace Darwin, the third son, who is chairman of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, assists Sir George in his work. The youngest of Charles

who has brought to the service his geographical training. He has served on several scientific expeditions, and as member of Parliament, and is the author of books on bimetallism and municipal trade.

Photograph by Arthur Hewit, N. Y. ROBERT COLLIER

Owner and directing genius of Collier's Weekly

IT is difficult to associate the idea of death with certain people; and there are cities so gay, so gallant, so insouciant, that to think of them under a cloud of disaster is well nigh an impossibility. This is the case with San Francisco. The spirit of Forty-nine has never been eradicated from her. She has never taken life too seriously. She has developed a magnificent ambition, but she never was of a mind to have all work and no play. With the sun forever shining upon her hills and her lovely bay, with her great line of wharves teeming with men from countries far and curious, with her settlements of aliens, her precipitous streets, her quality of

questionably, the most debonnaire city in the Union. To think of her was to think of the wharves with their strange spicy odors, of her gardens of roses, of her love of the theater and the brilliantly-lighted night streets, which inspired her people to a Latin-like gaiety. The breezes swept from ocean to bay and purified her thoroughfares; gold seemed always to be plentiful, and no one appeared to be in hopeless poverty. If one was poor to-day, one might fare better on the morrow! A gambler's optimism infected even the most discouraged, once he set foot in her streets. And now, swiftly, doom has come. The solid earth has failed, fire has devastated the elements have wrought primordial destruction. The achievements of busy, eager, hopeful years are swept out of existence. The San Franciscans, so proud, so ingenious, so hospitable and so prosperous, are bowed as with an ancient Job-like grief. They have a right to their sacred lamentations; they are entitled to indulge, for a time, an epic despair. There is a certain medicine in noble sorrow, and it sits better on the wounded spirit than the fictitious lightness. Yet the despair will be brief. The rebound of a young and elate spirit, such as dwells in that great though stricken City of the West, must come. Expectancy is a vital part of her, and this, the first great sorrow of her history, can not make her old. That "gray disastrous morn" which saw San Francisco changed, as by the stroke of some hideous Afrit's enchantment, from a happy city to one of blood and tears, is not to be forgotten, but it will not overcome the intrinsic gallantry of the place.

"In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud, Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

"Beyond this place of wrath and tears, Looms but the horror of the shade; And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid."

It is characteristic of Americans that they fight as long as they have power to do so. The catastrophe that might have driven the citizens of one of the old world fatalistic cities fleeing with prayers and tears to a

fighting for their property and their homes. Their disaster had not yet become a realization before a committee of safety was organized, martial law established and relief undertaken. The fight against the flames was valorous if futile. And the courage with which this great grief and loss is faced is still the robust and indomitable spirit of forty-nine! May it never grow less! May the city of the Argonauts be built again in beauty! As no word or set of words can put a measure to such grief as San Francisco has known, so no word or no set of words can indicate the loftiness of the pride, or the extremity of the need which will cause her to arise from it. If in nature lies the measureless power of destruction, in man's spirit is the eternal ability of construction, and man is never worthier of the name or of his destiny than when he brings triumph out of defeat.

ΑΝ

N educational enthusiast went to see a play called "Lincoln," and he came away imbued with the idea that it would be an excellent move on the part of a manager to present a cycle of American plays, cut after this pattern, and all revivifying crises in our history. The play in question is written and acted by Benjamin Chapin; all told, it is a dignified presentation of a closestudied character-portrait of the President during war time. When Lincoln comes upon the stage, when Stanton follows, so faithful the detail in dress and speech that one feels a momentary shock at the lifelikeness. But the four acts, compressed, form nothing but a sketch, after all. Without detracting from the commendable way in which Mr. Chapin retains the real dignity and color of a stage Lincoln, we do not feel "Lincoln" to be a moving drama. The educational enthusiast scouted the idea; he thought history was moving; he named Shakespeare's historical plays, notably "Henry V"; he mentioned the one of those plays least dramatic-almost a monologue-set in pageantry. Our heroes. were men of the soil; they did not speak heroics. Place them in dramas, and we have spectacular. For there was little opportunity of displaying private passions playing upon public welfare; in foreign countries, life, love and death-the whole gamut of a man's or woman's emotions-could become entan

American Shakespeare may write an historical drama, but until the time comes when our hero can be placed in a poetic frame worthy of our idealizing, we prefer to have our history, without picturing our great men. The difference between "Lincoln" and "Secret Service" is that in the latter an exciting story is told at the same time that all the atmosphere of war is aroused, while in the former one is made to feel that the author is following biography faithfully and nothing more. The thing that saved Mr. Chapin's "Lincoln" was the fact that Lincoln himself was a man of infinite humor and sadness.

good sense, when read, the manner of their presentation is such as to prejudice the best readers against everything bearing Mrs. Wilcox's name. But "Mizpah" has changed all that. The woman who could write the verses of that play is a poet indeed, and as such we must bare the head to her, no matter how many "poems of passion" she turns out per month, no matter how much trite "advice to other people's sons and daughters" she produces per day. For not only does "Mizpah" treat scriptural material with decided dramatic intelligence, but it also gives us a convincing picture of life in ancient Persia, and shows with animating realism life as it was lived in the palace of the "Great King." Yet, after all, the verse was the thing. Well fitted in every case to the theme, the lines ran smoothly, even melodiously, and at times there came a quatrain of real exaltation. The story of the play is, of course, that of Esther, the Jewish maiden, who captivated the heart of the Persian king Ahasuerus. In a moonlit garden which readily lends itself to music and poetry there passes one love scene of such exquisite quality that one need not apologize for naming it in the same breath with the balcony scene of "Romeo and Juliet," or that moment in "Cyrano de Bergerac" when the Lover Born lends magical words to speed poor Christian's wooing. Says Ahasuerus to Esther:

"With each passing hour

Thou dost reveal new beauties to my mind.
Yea, thou art like

The heavens at early evening, when we see
A single star and then a brighter star,
And then a cluster, till upon the night
Unfolds the glory of the firmament.
To watch thee, Esther, and to study thee,
To love thee and to know thee as thou art,
Is occupation for a man's whole life—
Aye, occupation for eternity;

He needs no heaven who dwells on earth with thee."

Afterward, when the king thinks Esther does not fully return his love, he says:

"Thou wouldst have me go-
So soon thy heart hath wearied?"

To which the Jewish maiden replies in

A

PARIS cart, recklessly driven, put out the cunning brains of Professor Pierre Curie, the discoverer of radium. Thus has ended a life modest, yet brilliant, useful and consecrated; happy, yet in a way humble. Professor Curie and his wife, who stood equal to him in scientific experiment and achievement, have known a quiet and arduous life. They first became acquainted as master and pupil at a municipal workingclass laboratory, where Madame Curiethen Miss Skidowska-was studying because she could not afford to pay tuition at one of the higher class schools. So intelligent was the interest in science of this young woman that Professor Curie begged her to become his assistant in the laboratory, and soon after made her his wife. Madame Curie had been interested for some time in the discoveries of Henry Becquerel concerning some as yet unclassified intrinsic illuminating power in certain metals, and she and her husband for six years lived in poverty while they pursued their investigations of what they called the Becquerel rays. In 1898 their long and concentrated labor met with its reward and recognition. They had discovered that marvelous example of conserved energy known as radium, a discovery which they hope may yet revolutionize the lighting systems of the world. Immediately Monsieur and Madame Curie were placed among the leading scientists of their time. In 1903 they were awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry, and Madame Curie was given twelve thousand dollars from the Osiris prize of France. These industrious and hap