each of which Mr. Ellerbe lectured on "Education for Citizenship." Mr. Ellerbe spent several months in Washington as assistant chief of the Americanization section of the Council of National Defense, and five months in New York as assistant to John P. Gavitt in the preparation of a volume called "Americans by Choice," which is one of a series of Americanization studies. Mr. and Mrs. Ellerbe are now living in New York.

Norman-Bel Geddes ("The Divine Comedy") made the stage sets here reproduced for his own pleasure, but the chances are that some producer will undertake the fascinating experiment of presenting Dante's "Divine Comedy" according to these designs. It could be done in Madison Square Garden, for which the scheme and stage were designed, but they are planned so that they can be taken up and put down in any large building or could even be set up out of doors. Mr. Geddes tells us that he made the designs for the pure joy of creation, and is not greatly concerned with the actual production. Nor is the work entirely finished. For one thing, there is the orchestra still to be created-an orchestra of chains and whistles and iron balls falling through

For three years Mr. Geddes worked quietly alone, making numberless models for experimental purposes. It is with the experimental that he likes best to work. "One gets much finer results from the things done for one's self than for those done to order," is his way of putting it. Meantime he tried to get some of his sets accepted, but the managers would not listen to him. Finally, in order to get any sort of hearing, he wrote a play, "Thunderbird," which was accepted, but never produced, by a Los Angeles organization. This gave him his start, for he not only wrote the play, but designed all the sets and

costumes. To-day he is one of our greatest designers for the stage. Sets for "Cleopatra's Night," the revival of "Erminie," and the grand operas "La Nave" and "Boudour" are perhaps his best known.

Sheldon Cheney, who explains the idea of Mr. Geddes's production of the "Divine Comedy," is the founder and one of the editors of the "Theatre Arts Magazine," and is the author of three books on the theater, "The Art Theatre," "The New Movement in the Theatre," and "The OpenAir Theatre." Mr. Cheney is a graduate of the University of California, and was educated as an architect. The theater, however, early claimed his interest, and he was one of the first men in America to sense the importance of the new movement represented by such men as Gordon Craig. Mr. Cheney is at present in Europe as the American delegate to the International Exhibit of Theater Arts now being held in Amsterdam.

iron mesh, which will suggest the din of the inferno.

Mr. Geddes tells us that before he found his work as a designer for the stage he had done "everything." With only a brief eight months of art schools he began his youthful "jobs" with delivering groceries and ended by scrubbing down decks on a Great Lake steamer. All this time, however, he was studying art and sketching for his own amusement. Then he came to New York and made a brilliantly successful plunge into illustration. This did not satisfy him, even though he did many good portrait drawings as well, and he turned to the theater. At first it was only for fun. He would climb story after story and then lie out along the "gridiron" (the steel scaffolding above the stage), and from this great height watch the show assembled, the actors and actresses enter and exit, and the sets changed. And then he would go off to work out ideas which all this had suggested.

Theodore M. Knappen ("The Third House of Congress") is an American journalist whose articles have appeared in leading American magazines. He began his career as a newspaper man in Minneapolis and St. Paul, adventured in publicity and advertising, and in colonization during the boom days of western Canada, and took a hand in the political game as head of the Bureau of Clubs with the Democratic National Committee in 1916. In 1917 he was a traveling staff correspondent for the "New York Tribune,"

telling its readers how fighting industry mobilized. Mr. Knappen writes:

Four years spent in Washington as a student and observer of economic and political matters have given me abundant opportunity to watch the multiplication and growth in power of the great associations of business. More and more have I been impressed that itbusiness in general-really "runs" this country, and that it is through informal occupational representation rather than official ballots that the people now speak and direct. And so I just naturally wrote the little article with which I am now concerned.

Ever since the publication of "Silk Both Sides" in December, readers of THE CENTURY MAGAZINE have asked when we were going to have another story by Lorna Moon. Now comes "Feckless Maggie Ann," another Scotch story, and we have just acquired still another about Jessie McLean of "Silk Both Sides," which will probably appear in the June or July number. Miss Moon was born in a little Scotch village, and tells us that her early ambition was to "write like Barrie." Editors, however, did n't appear to sympathize with this, so she turned her unusual facility for the building of plots toward writing scenarios for the moving-pictures. She has for

third birthday was at sea on a ship bound for New York, where I was brought by my parents, who have lived here ever since. At the end of two years of high school I was expelled for an altercation with a teacher and subsequent truancy. I was then sixteen years old. I had been fashioning verses for the preceding two years, and wanted very much to become a writer. What I needed was peace and experience. Both did n't seem to go well together till I came across a quotation from McFee, which said something about sea being the place where an author could shape his thoughts and be untroubled by life. That and Conrad decided me. None of my

folk were seamen. In fact,

I had been born afar from the sound of the sea. Those identical things were true of Conrad, but he went to sea and became our best sea-writer. I wanted to do the same. Thus between the ages of sixteen and eighteen I took several trips, mostly along the west coast of South America. I grew to like the sea, but I found, unless one is an officer, a ship is a bad place in which to write. Even keeping a diary was difficult, because of my fellow-seamen's insistent curiosity and lack of a comfortable place in which to compose. Between trips I spent my time looking for newspaper work, which I never got. Floyd Dell started me on a novel, of which about a quarter is finished. At John Farrar's suggestion I am polishing up my sea-diary for publication. Doran is bringing out a book of my sea verse in the fall. Otherwise I have been contributing sea articles to the New York "Evening Post" and selling verse to various magazines. As soon as I can raise enough money to make me independent of my family, I'll go back to sea.

several years been doing this for the Famous Players organization at Hollywood. Meanwhile her real work has gone steadily forward. "Silk Both Sides," "Feckless Maggie Ann," and "The Sinning of Jessie McLean," which is to appear, as we said, probably in June or July, are some of the fruits thereof. Miss Moon writes us that she is also engaged on a novel.

Milton Raison, whose group of four poems appears under the title of "Sea Moods and Sea Men," is only nineteen years old, but he has crowded much experience into his few years. We asked him for some facts about himself and take the liberty of quoting from his letter. He writes:

I was born in a small town called Vetka (my own spelling) situated in the southeastern part of Russia. My

At the present time Mr. Raison is with the American Merchant Marine Library Association, which was organized for the purpose of placing books on ships for the use of the crews. His work is to talk to the men about the books they want, and select the libraries.

John Sloan whose interesting group of drawings accompany Mr. Raison's poems, was represented in THE CENTURY MAGAZINE for March by the reproduction of several etchings, and we devoted considerable space to him in "Among Our Contributors" of that issue. Mr. Sloan is the president of the Society of Independent Artists, a

teacher at the Art Students' League, and ranks as one of the foremost of American artists.

Joseph Pennell, who gives us the fourth of his "Adventures of an Illustrator" under the title of "A King's Coronation," is the dean of American artists. Much of his early work, around which this series of articles is built, was done for THE CENTURY MAGAZINE in the days when Richard Watson Gilder was its editor and Alexander W. Drake was the art editor. Mr. Pennell is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. With Elizabeth Robins Pennell, his wife, he is the author of "The Whistler Journal," one of the notable books of the year.

Alfred E. Zimmern ("The Economic Prospect in Europe") will be remembered as the author of "The Convalescence of Europe" in the January number. This paper is in a sense a continuation of the same line of thought. Mr. Zimmern left Oxford in 1909 and went to the British school at Athens, where he wrote "The Greek Commonwealth,' a book which has become a standard among its kind. During the war he was employed in the Registry of Reconstruction, and later in the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office. In May, 1919, he went to the University of Wales as professor of international politics. He gave this up in 1921 to devote all his time to writing. In addition to "The Greek Commonwealth," he is author of "Nationality and Government" and many articles and pamphlets, and is the translator of the first two volumes of Ferrero's "The Greatness and the Decline of Rome." Mr. Zimmern is now in America, making a lecture tour of our larger cities.

Elinor Wylie ("The Pekingese") has frequently appeared in THE CENTURY MAGAZINE. Her first volume, "Nets to Catch the Wind," has just been published and has been enthusiastically received by the reviewers. Edna St. Vincent Millay, writing in the Literary Review of the New York "Evening Post," says:

The book is an important one. The material from which these poems is made is not the usual material. They are not about love, not about death, not about war, not about nature, not about God, not exclusively about Elinor Wylie. They are not pourings forth. There is not a groan or a shout contained between the covers. They are carefully and skilfully executed works of art, done by a person to whom the creation of loveliness and not the expression of a personality through the medium of ink and paper is the major consideration.

Edward Hungerford ("French and English Railroads") here presents the fourth of his series

dealing with the international railroad problem. Mr. Hungerford is a widely known American journalist and writer who has contributed to various magazines and is the author of two books, "The Modern Railroad" and "The Railroad Problem."

Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., Marquand professor of art and archæology at Princeton, and formerly art critic of the New York "Evening Post," was "writing his way with difficulty" through Italy when he was introduced by Mazzoni, the Italian etcher, to "a young compatriot of yours, a youth of beautiful talent." This was Ernest David Roth, a group of whose drawings we reproduce as an art feature. The critic was captivated by "the quiet boyish American who was lingering at Florence, waiting for a chance to etch his way to the Golden Horn. He brought his Venice and Florence prints one evening, and we enjoyed the rigorous fidelity of his portraiture of places we loved and the patient enthusiasm with which he had enmeshed the very spirit of the two cities. . . . The next summer I had the pleasure of seeing the prints I had studied in trial states holding their own at the Venice International, and I learned that the Queen mother, Margherita, one of the best eyes in Italy, had bought several of the etchings.

It was not long after that first meeting with the young artist in 1907 that the critic protested against what seemed to him the useless multiplication of detail and exactness of transcription which the etchings then revealed. Roth's answer was that he "would begin to leave things out after he was sure he could put them in." The wisdom of that painstaking method is now obvious to all those who have seen the Spanish series, recently exhibited at the Keppel Galleries, interpretative impressions of the country which are at once faithful to his subject and yet delightfully simplified.

B. Seebohm Rowntree ("Some American Impressions"), is managing director of Rowntree and Co., Limited, of York, England, and was a director of the Industrial Relations Department of the British Munitions Bureau during the war. Mr. Rowntree has long been connected with political and social activities in England, and is widely known as an economist and sociologist. He is the author of several well known books, among them "Poverty: A Study of Town Life," "Unemployment: A Social Study," "How The Laborer Lives," "The Human Needs of Labor," and "The Way To Industrial Peace." He has contributed articles to "The World's Work,” "The Atlantic Monthly," and to other American and English periodicals.