Read again, for the third time at least, Miss Austen's finely written novel of "Pride and Prejudice." That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any one now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me.

This is handsomely spoken. And it is the feeling lesser men than Sir Walter must have in returning to "Pride and Prejudice." The other day I took the novel up after neglecting it for seven long years, and the charm was, if anything, stronger than at the last reading. Is there anything in literature more restful than Jane Austen's stories? Certainly this quality of theirs is not wholly due to the sense we have of the final and definitely ordered society which they reflect; and they have never impressed me as being restful by reason of dullness. Dullness is very far from restful to any one fairly widely read, and therefore fairly hard to please.

Despite homely passages that are undeniably wanting in action (in "Emma," for instance), I do not feel the temptation to skip that I succumb to in renewing acquaintance with Sir Walter. Religion without spirituality, duty without enthusiasm, affection without the heat of passion, virtue without a grimace-all that is what one finds in this country-side annalist. Yet one enjoys her as one enjoys a glass of mild ale and a seat in an inn after an all-afternoon walk in some English country-side, or a place by the fire and at cup of hot tea with an understanding woman to pour it (clever, but not too clever) after a day spent in crowded

streets.

True, these similes are unworthy. Jane Austen is Jane Austen. One either de

Lewes and Charlotte Brontë, one just does n't. But if once you do delight, you do not get tired of her repetitions of plot and characteristics. You do not get tired, either, of your own occasional re-readings. John Ruskin was a good deal of a fool, especially when he asked some one, presumably his reader, "Will you go and gossip with your housemaid or your stableboy when you may talk with kings and queens?" The correct answer is YES. It is not wholesome to live too much with royalty; the fare is too rich for the untitled stomach. Moreover, you often learn more by talking with the stable-boy than by interviewing the college professor.

That is,

But I am, alas! no nearer than before to determining what is the secret of the books eternally young, what the secret of their power of endlessly pleasing and stimulating us. Other books that we are compelied to set high in any rank-list of literature are for once only. Charm, that indefinable gift of style and spirit, counts for much; but that is not all. A certain serenity of temper, an economy of passion and gesticulation, counts for much. In welcoming Anatole France to England not many months ago, Thomas Hardy commented upon the fact that M. France maintains even in his lighter works "the emphasis of understatement." after all, a great part of the secret. Nowadays there is more stylishness in the magazines than style. We will never reread the "stylish" novels and poems the authors of which seem endlessly to bawl at us at the top of their lungs. As in conversation the most persuasive talker is not he who is most urgently shrill, so in this matter of companionable volumes-volumes always welcome as table-books, armchair books, pillow-books-it is those whose authors command backgrounds and middle-distances as well as vivid foregrounds, painters whose palettes command cool whites (like Chardin's) as well as burning tints of sunset and fire, that we love unendingly, and from which we draw refreshment and repose.

SUN

UNBURN stenciling is now the reigning fad of Newport. It started in this way: Mrs. Harry Fitz-Carrington, the well-known society leader, appeared at a tennis-match one afternoon in an elegant bodice of Porto Rican drawn-work. That evening at a dance her décolletée gown revealed a charming pattern of lines and squares, stenciled in pink upon the snowwhite of her neck. It was ravishing. She was the object of the admiration of every man present.

Next morning the linen shops of Newport were ransacked for stencil designs, rosettes, arabesques, geometric figures, flowers, birds, -anything that would make an attractive red-print. The telegraph wires to New York were kept busy with orders for new and wonderful patterns.

Women of artistic talent canceled their bridge engagements to sketch original subjects. Those who were less gifted sent far and wide for book-plate designers and other skilled draftsmen. Meanwhile they went about thickly veiled and parasoled, carefully avoiding the sun except when they needed it for their red-printing, which process was accomplished by means of scientific time exposures, with the advice of able photographers.

The next dance was a glory of pink and white. New steps and colored wigs lost their attraction before the fascination of the stenciling. Every woman was a work of art.

But the crowning affair of the early season was the "Tattoo Ball" given by Mrs. Tidley-Cholmondeley. At this brilliant

HE cave-man

no longer

The dauntless the lilting ichthyosaur

from Rocky to Rocky, the valiant redskin. no longer pursues the whiffling buffalo from prairie to prairie; but the intrepid flat-dweller still hunts the buzzing fly from room to room. The paleolithic clubwallop survives as the sanitary swat.

From mastodon-hunting to fly-hunting, such, in brief, has been the progress of civilization. The man of to-day, accustomed to plowing with a can-opener and raising vegetables with a dumb-waiter, leaves jungle-roaming to ex-Presidents and moving-picture producers, preferring to enjoy the pleasures of the chase at home. His delight is an intellectual one: he does not value game according to mere vulgar bulk; shooting a dinosaur with a cannon would seem to him an extremely crass performance. Even his great-grandfathers realized that trout afforded greater sport than cod.

Primitive man hunted merely to obtain food. Modern man, believing in sport for sport's sake, swats for the swatting alone, for the glory of it. He scorns the use of sticky paper, classing such snares with seines and bird-lime; he will have nothing but the clean swat in the open. He can point to the trophies of the chase that adorn his walls, and tell you that every one of those flies was killed in a sportsmanlike manner.

Yet it is not purely sport for sport's sake that actuates him: there is a moral impulse as well. In swatting a creature that is hygienically undesirable, whose private life compels social ostracism, he satisfies his instinct for reform. Every down swat is an uplift, giving vent to the "Excelsior!" with which his head is stuffed.

On with sweetness and light! (Swat, swat! Missed him.) Sanitation forever! (There he goes under the table:) The morally unfit must be eliminated! (Swat!