reputation when America entered the

war.

As is the case with every hero, real and fictional, the war proved a turning-point. Our third person singular masculine pronoun enlisted, spent ninety days in an O. T. C. learning how to apply his civilian engineering to war-time emergencies, and just had time to buy two gold-plated shoulder-bars before being shipped overseas from an "Atlantic port" whose waterfront he had trod as a college student.

His war career was brief and tragic. A burst of flame and steel before he had learned how to pronounce "Deux cognacs encore," but not before the single gold bar on each shoulder had become twin oblongs of silver, and the subject of these annals was entered at a French base hospital as "blessé et reformé." For him the

war was over.

America, on the hero's unheralded return, was dry. Personal libertarians were still bashful about mentioning bootleggers, but local stocks were already running low. Liquor cost more than it does to-day and was harder to get. But the invalided captain was indifferent to that. Two major worries gripped him. One was the regaining of his health, the other gaining recognition from the government of his incapacitation as an income-amassing engineer. Neither was gaining success when, in the fall of 1919, the veteran selected the Atlantic coast as the area of his convalescence.

In a shack on the sand-dunes the physically broken man wooed health. When the breezes grew sharp he sought exercise by oaring a small boat along the ocean's fringe, pretending to catch fish, but actually trying to escape the mounting worries relating to food, rent, medical attention, and other things wounded veterans know about.

Perhaps he is only embroidering his own experiences when he leans back in an armchair these days and confides to a friend that "I looked at all that ocean and I remembered some scientist had extracted gold from sea-water once. And I wished I had studied chemistry, because gold, no matter how minute the quantity, was one thing I hadn't, but needed badly."

And then gold-minted gold-leaped out of the waves and tumbled into his lap. One day a boatman rowed over to the solitary, idling figure and cautiously offered him a bottle of liquor.

"It's good stuff," he argued. "Just off the ship." Immortal phrase!

The ex-captain and king-to-be at first refused. He was a good citizen, and anyhow he didn't like drinking for drinking's sake. Besides, his condition forbade indulgence. Besides that, to heap up reasons, he didn't have the money. But neither had he companionship, so he encouraged conversation.

He learned that the bottle, and a few companion bottles, had been obtained from a Bahamas schooner anchored outside the harbor. Individual boatmen, clammers, and fishermen were buying liquor in broken lots and selling it at a comfortable profit to less daring lawbreakers on shore. "Fishin's about over," the boatman concluded, “and it's anything to turn an honest penny."

The veteran inquired more pointedly about the schooner, lone forerunner of the rum-fleet-to-be, but the boatman was shrewd. What a loss to history that the identity of that pioneer vessel was not learned!

But such things as he had learned stuck in the mind of the convalescent soldier. It was a finely trained mind, from which the war had not blasted the lessons of coordination, efficiency, and business on a quantity basis which he had learned in his profession. The poverty-stricken, brokenbodied ex-soldier turned and tossed on his reclaimed army cot that night, and came to certain conclusions.

These conclusions were laid before the competing boatmen. The business and army executive pointed out the value of co-operation, of applied efficiency, of this and that long-phrased dogma of big business. And the simple boatmen listened. If this "slick, edjucated feller" was right, then the clams and fish could wallow unmolested hereafter, they reasoned. The sea held bigger spoils. Instead of cutthroat competition for haphazard customers, a vision was conjured before their puckered eyes of team-work to supply an inexhaustible market.

The fishermen had friends in the

trucking business. And truckmen knew saloon-keepers. All the raw materials were at hand. All that was needed was to insure a source and to co-ordinate the machinery.

Business was begun in a small way, which makes this story the perfect parallel of any in the Go-Getter Magazine. The next schooner to linger off the coast was cleaned out in one operation by a crew of budding rum-runners in a hired motor-boat, captained by the ex-army officer and crony of Presidents. The liquor was run ashore in daylight-the augmented coast-guard was not yetand loaded on automobile trucks which smelled strongly of fish. Now, what with what's dumped into sewers and carted in trucks, fish are more apt to smell like liquor.

The Jamaica captain of the schooner was amazed. When he reached his home port he told of his adventure, and immediately the wholesale stocks of two or three distillers were sold out to seamen who revelled at the thought of a tidy, tractable cargo to be discharged without port fees and pilotage at a swift and appreciable profit.

Meantime, in the arid States, half a dozen truckmen, an equal number of coastwise fishermen, and a wounded veteran were dividing the profits of their first venture and planning a second coup. When two schooners and a tramp steamer lately in the asphalt trade out of Trinidad dropped anchor within sight of the summer colony on the dunes, the machinery formed by the ex-engineer out of simple minds, strong bodies, and gasoline motors was beginning to function handsomely. The British boats were cleaned out in half a dozen trips, and turned back to the South without having so much as hailed a tug or grated against a dock.

And the rising young monarch and his merrie men? They took on a few recruits and bought pianos and talking-machines without the embarrassment of time payments. That is, the merrie men did. The monarch made a first payment on a capacious speed boat.

The word spread. Other ships arrived and Rum Row, by spring, was an actuality. Pretenders to the king's throne appeared, but already our hero was above compe

tition. He commanded a sea fleet of several speedy motor-boats and a land fleet of powerful trucks. Both fleets were manned by men who could drive onehanded, without lights-but trustworthy and loyal.

The word spread to official circles, also. Federal cognizance of the smuggling was followed by the beginning of hostilities which are still being waged, even with the man who brought it all about snug in retirement.

War was declared on land and sea, and the king and his henchmen found things less of a sinecure. War councils were held.

The king was not ready to quit. He had purchased three steamships and was ready to eliminate one item of cost by bringing his supplies from Scotland in his own bottoms. So he accepted the gage of battle.

"But I warned my men-no roughhouse," he declares now. "When we were greeted with lead we answered with gold, and that stopped the guns more readily than a reply in kind. But with the hijackers-" A quiet smile on a bronzed face.

Rum Row and competition grew apace, and the king ruled on. Even the pretenders to the throne treated him with respect. He met the coast-guard's speed boats with speedier vessels. He enlisted an aviator or two, not as carriers but as scouts. For weeks his speed boats rolled idly at the wharfs while competitors drew the gun-fire and harrying of the coastguard. Then, on a favorable night, the king ordered out his army and navy and by dawn a few thousand more potential drinks were speeding inland.

Last year the king decided that he had had enough. The outdoor life had brought health to his body; the keen, swift thinking had brought health to his mind. And his ships and trucks had brought him wealth beyond that which he could have amassed in the lifetime of a dozen successful mechanical engineers.

He relaxed. And his cohorts, also beyond financial worry, did not balk at the vacation.

Then the government announced that it had put a stop to rum-running. It was truthfully reported that Rum Row was about dried up. It would go hard with

New Yorkers who expected to toast in the New Year, or who envisioned plum puddings blazing in brandy-real brandy -for the Yule.

It was a challenge, a sporting challenge. The king yawned, stretched, and summoned his couriers. The cables carried certain unintelligible words. For a few brief nights, a week or two later, one section of the wintry coast seethed with invisible life. Lights flashed momentarily. Motors chugged far out at sea. Sharpnosed boats drifted against the shingle, silently. On back roads throttled engines purred, then roared into life.

Sixteen thousand bags of uncut liquor are reputed to have poured into the metropolitan area for Christmas, which means that, by the time the middleman completed his miracles of converting water and burned sugar into rare old Scotch, nearly three-quarters of a million families were assured of a bottle apiece for the holidays.

The underworld heard of the coup, and rushed to the king with certain proposals to smuggle in dope, jewels, and what-not while his organization was hitting on all twelve. But the king, for all his sinfulness, had scruples.

"Why, I was offered $20,000 to bring in a boat-load of Chinese," he relates. "Hell! A quart of good liquor on the sideboard will make Christmas the merrier, I told 'em, but who the devil wants a Chinaman for Christmas?"

That was the king's last big job. In the spring, when the universal absence of the sign of the bock signalled the time to resume rum-running, the monarch announced to his subjects that he had retired.

"There's a lot of fellows trying to carry on where I left off," he told them. "And I see by the papers that the twelve-mile limit won nine miles by the decree of the Supreme Court. You've only got to go out the old three miles now. Hop to it. But I'm through."

He lives now surrounded by every comfort a cultured mind and luxury-attuned body can demand. His fortune is invested in mortgages. He is backing a huge commercial enterprise. He was one of the fortunate few who took profits out of Florida real estate in cash, not paper. His homes were built to plans of his own drawing: a glorified Cape Cod cottage on the New England coast for summer use; a Spanish bungalow under the palms for winter; and a cosey bachelor bungalow for in-between times. He will talk about Picasso and Sloan, Joyce and Dos Passos, but would rather not discuss Martel or Hennessey or Old Smuggler.

"You see," says he, "it's time I was thinking of getting married, and you can't go to courting or raising a family with the smell of liquor on your coat-tails, or a gang of Federal agents reaching after that part of your attire. It really isn't done in the very best of families."

W

WHEN old Izaak Walton died in 1683, he left a sum of money to his publisher; in his lifetime he had shown a genius for saying and doing the supergentle thing, and the ruling passion was strong in death. Many authors believe that their publishers do not sufficiently advertise their books, do not give them sufficiently favorable contracts, and when the royalty statement appears, they believe there must be something crooked. "Why, I personally know some individuals who have bought more copies of my book than this!"

Publishers are, and must be, men of affairs; but there is nothing incompatible between artistic genius and practical business ability. There are probably no shrewder business men anywhere than Bernard Shaw and Richard Strauss; and the circumstances of Shakespeare's career seem to indicate that he understood how to make, keep, increase, and invest money. It is not always the poet, playwright, novelist who is a dreamer and his publisher the opposite. I think it is possible that if we could know intimately all the authors in New York, and all the publishers in New York, we should find as much idealism and artistic appreciation in the latter group as in the former.

A playwright told me that in the numerous conversations he had with his successful fellow craftsmen, the subjects of talk were almost never concerned with art, or beauty, or style, or ideals; what they talked about concerned motor-cars, prize-fighters, base-ball, women, summer homes, and various expensive luxuries made possible by the sale of their writings. I think it is possible that if we could know publishers intimately, we should

Anyhow, I have never yet been disappointed or disillusioned in becoming closely acquainted with any publisher. That is an amazing statement, but not more so than the fact.

To talk with William Heinemann, J. M.

Dent, Edwin Ginn, John Lane, Henry Holt-and it was my privilege to enjoy their acquaintance was an illuminating experience. These publishers felt that the name at the foot of the title-page must be kept as honorable as the name in the middle, and they were proud of the reputation established by their respective houses.

I have before my eyes a beautiful volume dedicated to the memory of Thomas B. Mosher, of Portland. It is called "Amphora. A Second Collection of Prose and Verse Chosen by the Editor of the Bibelot." It is embellished with a portrait and contains some original verse by Mosher himself. Mr. Mosher loved good books, and loved to make them. He was an excellent critic with a flair for beauty that enabled him to discern what was worth preservation in the work of writers both living and dead, and he preserved it in a beautiful way. A Mosher book came to mean a book invariably good and invariably well printed. There are thousands of book-lovers who will never forget this man, who will always hold his name in reverence.

Amphora" contains selections from authors living and dead, and tributes to the publisher from Christopher Morley, Professor Frederick Pottle, John L. Foley, and Spencer Miller, Jr. These memorial essays should be read entire, but as only 925 copies were printed, and as it is desirable that 925,000 people should read them, I will now make a few citations for the benefit of the first hundred thousand.

Mr. Morley:

What was there in this hardy sea-bred uncolleged down-easter that made him open so many magic portholes? He had the pure genius of book-fancy; an uneducated man, Conrad; and I like to think that when he as uneducated as Chaucer and Lamb and took Aldus's device for himself there was some memory of the time when an anchor meant more to him than an emblem printed on a title-page.

Mr. Pottle:

Thomas Bird Mosher, publisher of rare and limited editions of books in belles-lettres, died at his home in Portland, Maine, on August 31, 1923, at the age of seventy-one this man, whose name was known in San Francisco and London, in Bombay and Sydney, . . . slipped out of the life of their city without causing so much as a ripple of excitement. The truth is that he never really lived in Portland. He resided there almost continuously for over fifty years, he published his books there from the same address for thirty-two years, but he actually lived in a city of wider horizons. Those exquisite forewords which are the glory of the Mosher editions contain the passion and rapture of his talk, but they do not contain the humor, the sunny irony, the racy colloquial, quality of his conversation. The gleam of his eye is there, but not the twinkle. We talked always of books. Mr. Foley:

But no memorial volume can have any claim to being complete unless it defines Mr. Mosher's position as an editor and publisher, and unless it sets forth his personality among his friends. The former is established by the very individual and creative publishing he achieved and sustained in America over many years; the latter can really be appreciated only by those who knew him in the intimacy of his remarkable library. There he lived in an other-worldliness of ideal beauty-to him the essential reality-and this escape he offered to many other seekers through the exquisite reprints which he put within their reach.

Mr. Miller:

The law of excellence and the law of democracy stand in apparent conflict one with another in our modern age. They seem outwardly to have little in common. Yet Thomas Bird Mosher resolved this conflict through a sharing of enduring prose and poetry with his fellowmen. It was his gift to know what was excellent; it was his passion to share this excellence as widely as possible; it was his destiny to attain the realization of his ideal. He linked beauty which is ageless in art with the desire for the best which is timeless in the spirit of man.

In reading Edna Ferber's "Show Boat" I had supposed I was reading an historical romance dealing with a phase of floating theatrical life that had become obsolete. Not being altogether sure of this, I wrote to the author and she was kind enough to send me the following letter:

There are, I should say, ten or twelve show boats now playing the rivers of the United States. Because of the dangers of the Mississippi they rarely play that river now. But they are well known on the Ohio, the Missouri, the smaller rivers of the middle west, and on the eastern rivers and the southern. The James Adams Floating Theatre, for example, plays Maryland and North Carolina. She's probably somewhere in Maryland now. They are much grander and larger than they used to be, of course. And they make a lot of money. ... I'm sorry you didn't like Show Boat as well as So Big. I like it better. But that you liked it at all is good news.

If I had the art to write either one of them, I should feel ninety feet high; if I had written both, I should explode.

Every one who reads these pages knows that, although I am not a Catholic, I am an admirer of the Catholic Church, and count many intimate friends among priests and nuns. I shall not be misunderstood, therefore, when I say that I think some Catholics are unduly sensitive about Edna Ferber's allusion to a Chicago convent in "Show Boat." I have asked her nothing about it, and have no authority to speak for her, which she is quite capable of doing for herself. But I feel certain that she never intended any slur on Catholics or on Catholic schools. From the Philadelphia Catholic Standard and Times, October 30, 1926, I learn that the Inter

national Federation of Catholic Alumnæ has protested, and demanded that seven pages of the book be eliminated. I am sure that in this instance they are unduly sensitive. Suppose every boys' and girls' preparatory school which has been unflatteringly described by novelists-and there are many instances should utter a formal protest, or threaten to bring suit!

Those Americans who are angry at Dean Inge for what he said in his book "England" will have their feelings assuaged if they will read "American Soundings," by J. St. Loe Strachey, the editor of the London Spectator. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Strachey on his tour through New England, and I regard him as an admirable unofficial ambassador. He seems to have enjoyed himself enormously in America, and has apparently only the happiest memories of his sojourn. I wish we Americans were really so fine as