telephone to call upon one of the colony to act as my cicerone. The youth of twenty who responded was, in dress, looks, manners, and speech, a typical young American of our southern states, but he was a native of Villa Americana, one of many children of a white-haired but still agile man of aristocratic slenderness who lived in the chief mansion of the town, beside a spireless brick Protestant church which he had been mainly instrumental in building. Soon after the Civil War, in 1867, bands of disgruntled Americans from our southern states emigrated to Brazil and settled in the five provinces nearest the federal capital, where they were later joined by others who had first tried their luck in the Amazon regions. The father of my guide and several brothers had come from Georgia with their father, who though he had been a merchant at home and was seventy years old, had started. anew as a farmer. The present head of the family had served two years in the Confederate army, and was still bitter over the sufferings of his family during Sherman's march to the sea. Virtually every American of the older generation in this region had fought through the war as "Johnny Rebs," as they still jokingly called themselves, and had fled to Brazil soon after the

prices prevailed. But the majority spent their fortunes as they earned them, thinking these conditions would last forever, and to-day they are little more prosperous than their Brazilian neighbors. Though many owned slaves up to 1888, there seems to be no bitterness against the men who brought about emancipation in Brazil. They had, however, by no means lost their color-line.

Most of the transplanted Americans now admit that they could probably have done better, at least

beginning of reconstruction days "to escape carpet-baggers, free and insolent niggers, and because we fancied the Yanks were going to eat us up; also so we could keep slaves again." They still called Americans of the North, particularly New Englanders, "them Down East Yanks," and seem hardly to recognize that the Civil War is over. Any of them could quickly be wrought up into a heated discussion of slavery, the character of Lincoln, and the other questions that sent the founders of Villa Americana off in a huff to the hills of Brazil. The Americans were the first to bring modern plows into the country, with the resultant advantages in production when high

economically, to have re

mained in the United States, but none of them seemed to be thinking of returning. They retain the good-heartedness and the unassuming hospitality of the southern plantation in slave days, and with it all the old class distinctions of the south. Such a family among them they spoke of as "belonging to the overseer class," others as "right low down trash." On the whole, the colony seems to have clung rather tenaciously to the American standards of morality though I heard mention of exceptions to this rule. It was surprising how American the better class families, such as that of my guide, had kept. Thanks to their own private schools, their vocabularies were fully equal to those of the average educated American, though their pronunciation had peculiar

little idiosyncracies, such as giving a Portuguese value to the letters of words that have come into our language since the Civil War. Even the men who were born in the United States mixed many Brazilian words, particularly of the farm, with their English. Their farm-hands they called "comrades," though these were in almost every case black and little more than peons, earning an average of 2$500 a day, with a hut to live in and room to plant a garden about it, if they chose, which few of them did. The older men spoke Portuguese with the same ease with which they rolled and smoked cigarettes Brazilian fashion, while the younger generation, of course, pre

ferred that tongue, except in a few houses where the parents had insisted on English. Among the "low down trash," most of the second generation was said to know no English whatever. On the whole the colony was another demonstration of the fact that South America does not assimilate her immigrants to any such extent as does the United States.

When we had eaten a genuine Southern dinner of fried chicken and all that goes with it, the son "hitched up" and drove

me out through eucalyptus trees and whole hills of black-green coffee bushes to visit another American family. There was a suggestion of our southern mountaineers about this household, the women diffident, silent, and keeping in the background, though the men had excellent English vocabularies and the mountaineer's self-reliance. Yet they were not always quite sure of themselves and were leisurely, of wit, with a manner which proved that the intangible something known as American humor is the result of environment rather than bred in the bone. The colony introduced watermelons into Brazil, but the fruit is nearly all in Italian hands now, great wagon-loads of them having passed us on their way into town. When the Americans first

twittering birds making a great racket in the surrounding trees, so we repaired to hammocks outside. Here we still lay when a moleque, or negroboy servant, brought us coffee with milk, and an hour later summoned us to a genuine breakfast, one of the American customs which has outlived long exile in the Brazilian hills. . . .

In Spanish-America, nothing but black coffee is to be had until almoco, or "breakfast," between ten and eleven, which is followed about sunset by jantar.

Indeed, it would be difficult to speak kindly of Brazilian hotels. Both these meals are heavy, lacking in anything but quantity, and made up almost entirely of meat. This carne verde ("green" meat), having just been killed and so called to distinguish it from xarque or carne secca, the salted or sun-dried variety familiar in the rural districts, is cooked in several different ways, all of which leave it hopelessly tough. Whether in hotels or railway-station restaurants, the menu is unvarying, and eight or ten huge plates of meat are slapped down in the middle of a long, noisy, public table, where each guest grasps what he can before his neighbors make way with it. To save time or trouble all dishes are served at once, and are habitually cold before they reach the individual plates. There is a great paucity of vegetables, even potatoes being considered a luxury and rarely reaching the interior of the country. Instead, there stands on every table a glass jar of what looks like course yellow salt, but which proves to be farinha, flour made of the manioc or yuca that is served boiled in the Andean countries, and which is used throughout Brazil to thicken soups, or eaten dry.

arrived, they had planted much cotton and sugar, but these crops have been almost wholly abandoned and they rarely raise more than enough coffee for their own use, giving their attention chiefly to corn and beans.

Rain came on at dusk and with it the blackest of nights, and what was said to be the worst drought in forty years was broken suddenly and in earnest. The trip back to Villa Americana in the impenetrable darkness, over poor, washed-out roads, was out of the question, and we were shown to excellent beds of un-Brazilian softness in the typical guest-room of the American mountaineer farmer. It was broad daylight before five, with

The hotel proprietor usually gives his attention exclusively to the bar, which he claims to be the only paying part of his establishment.

In short, hardly anywhere in South America, off the tourist trails, is hotel comfort to be found.

L

IKE Somerset Maugham, Frank Stayton,

the author of "Threads," is an English playwright who has had many plays produced-some eighteen or twenty, we believe-with a high average of success. He chose to put the present plot into the form of a novel, and it is remarkable how very much at ease he moves in the new medium. Here is none of the feeling that every few pages must accomplish a "situation," that the speech of the characters is set to cues-on the contrary, one gets an impression almost of relief, certainly of great surety and pleasure, in his development in a subtle, deep-tickling ironic humor, of the purely psychological possibilities of a striking situation.

A man of education and in good circumstances has been convicted of murder. His sentence is commuted to life imprisonment, and he arranges

L

with his wife that she shall assume another name

and take up life ostensibly as a widow, for the sake of the children. The real murderer being discovered, after fifteen years the husband and father returns to his family.

The pitch of the story is ultra-modern, the people emphatically of to-day; there is scarcely a shred of sentimentality in the lot of them, and the author's adjustment of each individual to the strange situation is as intensely absorbing as it is clever. One is piqued at the unexpectedness, the unaverageness, or these folk-but absolutely convinced that so they were and did and thought.

This is Captain Stayton's first novel; we believe it is not likely to be its last. There is too large a reading public in this country for books inspired with the strong individuality which we have here presented to America for the first time.

ILLIAN Barrett has written a book which

is not merely a brilliant tour de force but a piece of sincere work decidedly of spiritual as well as intellectual intelligence and achieving solid conviction.

In the society novel-and this is a society novel -the glitter of cleverness, of superficial wit, often leaves one with a suspicion that he has been played to by lay figures which have no more solidity than will sustain their glimmering draperies. But here are human hearts, hot with the common passions and the common blood of humanity or chilled and slowed and shaken with the common portion of dread and sorrow.

The author has a keen sense of the sort of illusion which their life develops in the predatory rich: the clever, hard-shining surface; the stagy pluck; the carefully eclectic and exotic culture; the love of beauty and form which has nothing whatever to say to the sterile spirit. "She has made her book sparkling, amusing;—and she has achieved as well a serious criticism of life.

"Paddy," the mother of the heroine, is an incorrigible waster, a devastator of lives and hearts, a dancer on graves; one who wreaks a bitter, mordant wit unsparingly on everything, destroying with the light touch of a finger-tip. From the day she laughingly mocks at her small daughter's delusion that "there is a God" until she dies, "Paddy" is to Charlotte, child and woman, her life's great responsibility. "To take care of 'Paddy'" is the unchildish weight on her small shoulders even while her beautiful mother yet shows to the world none of that terrible need of care which later is too plain.

The story moves swiftly from "smart" circles in America to a luxurious, secluded life in Florence; again to America, and back to Florence again—a very different Florence, and not at all luxurious this time. Yet Via Guicciardini, the colorful, noisy street of the fruit vendors, is not as far in any sense from the lovely villa of the old days as is Charlotte's heart from the heart of the child who drank in all that was beauty in those golden Italian days.

finds that she has mortally hurt the lives of the two persons for whom she has sacrificed her own whole life. This is neither a blatant challenge to the belief that sacrifice may be fruitful, nor mere luxuriating in morbid conceptions: it is the inevitable, logical outcome of the situation and the characters and the things they have willed. Charlotte clear of illusions, strongly entrenched in the eternal verities of love and truth-in-love, would not have been the Charlotte whose early years were twisted, strained, tormented, beneath all the soft surface of luxury and beauty, by the life about her. She "overcompensates" their selfishness with her sacrifice.

Her love story, the idyllic hour of it among the purple mountains and strong sweetness of pine and fern; the ruthless hand she laid upon her own heart later, and what came of it, make a strong, sincere, absorbing and extremely well handled love-motif in this novel of American life.

Rich with the qualities which make English books of the better type so acceptable to us, yet racy of our own land-for that reason alone, if for no other, this is an unusually important novel.

The author, Lillian Barrett, was born in Newport, Rhode Island, and was graduated from Smith College. She lives in New York and Newport, but has traveled extensively, spending considerable periods in places all over the world: Port Antonio, Jamaica; in many different parts of Europe; in Cairo; Beirut, and Turkey-in-Europe. She has been writing "seriously" since 1917 and has already done a considerable amount of work in the magazine field besides publishing, two years ago, a first novel.

THE

HERE is at least one book, this fall, which was deliberately created for the Tired Business Man. Indeed, it may be said without much exaggeration to have been written "to order" for him.

Of course it is a crisp, swiftly-moving mystery story. That is the sort of book a gathering largely of men friends of the author (who is in private life Mrs. George Avery Reeder) voted for as the kind that "did the most" for people, and more especially for the T. B. M.

"The men in the party," the author writes to

her publishers, "emphatically agreed that a mystery story held enough recreation for a tired brain, and was not so deep or so psychological as to urge one to a further mental effort that was exhausting. The glow of finally having the mystery solved, the hero and heroine extricated from the web that enmeshed them, they declared, would send the reader to bed in a satisfied state with a feeling of having witnessed a good fight, fairly won, with none of the responsibility for it resting on their own already weary shoulders.

"The concensus of opinion was that in the stress