They were now far in advance of the others and quite alone, and at the very top of the hills he took her glove and rubbed her cheeks with it, because he declared she was cold. Around them were the dark hills, and above them the stars.

They seated themselves upon the sledge, and he was quite equal to steering with his feet although she was sitting on his knees, leaning back so that he had to support her with his arm, as they flew along. Once, upon a bridge, the Lightning made a leap into the air, and was quite a long time before it came down again; but it struck the road again without again without flying into splinters, and they dashed on, shouting, frightening the driver of a sleigh almost out of his wits, down to the level ground, with its numerous lights shining in the darkness.

Before the young people separated they stood talking on the road at the foot of the hill for a little while. They had gone to the same school, and had played many a game together both in winter and summer, and now they would soon be men and women. Several of the boys were going to Lofoten this winter, and the girls looked at them with the thought that they might never come back again. In any case, there was an end to games and tobogganing. A period of their life was over, and a new one was beginning in which everything would be more serious than before.

As Lars went down toward Myran, he discovered that he still had one of Ellen Koya's woolen gloves in his hand. He took off his own and drew hers on, and it was really wonderful how warm and soft it was inside.

Christmas came with snow and wind, and as soon as it was over,

the great, heavy Lofoten boats were dragged out of the boat-houses. There they lay full length upon the beach, not rigged as yet; but the men were very busy getting them loaded, and shouted and made signs with their hands to one another when they had anything to say, as if they were already at sea.

By the boat-house below Myran lay the Seal, long and heavy, and the strangest things were being shipped in her. There were nets in barrels, food in barrels, home-brewed ale in barrels, a barrel of sour whey to mix with soup, and as a drink mixed with water, a barrel of oil for the lamp in the hut, chests, boxes, and skin rugs. Most of it disappeared into the large space midships, where there was room for much more. The boat looked like some good-natured animal as she lay there, letting people clamber about and do what they liked with her. Now and then the men would stop work, and the bottle would be passed round. ·

The same activity was to be seen round the Storm-Bird, which lay right out by Nordnæs, and where Andreas Ekra was head-man. A little nearer lay the Sea-Fire, where Peter Suzansa was busy with his men, and nearest of all, the Sea-Flower, which was almost ready for sea, although Jacob limped about in a state of intoxication from morning till night. "Heigh-ho!" he said. "Work away, men! Work away, lads!"

On the last Sunday most of the men went to church with their wives, and even Jacob limped up more or less sober, with his upper lip shaved and looking quite blue.

They all met outside the brown wooden church, whose bell rang out

into the gray wintry air, people from the farms around, who had driven up in sleighs drawn by fine horses with bells on their harness, and fishermen who had waded through the snow with their wives. Inside the church the fishermen were lost among the others, so they had appropriated a fixed place for themselves far back under the gallery.

During the singing of the hymn many a wife from the shore district raised her eyes from her hymn-book to look across at her husband sitting on the other side of the aisle; and the hymn became a little prayer for his return from the long voyage northward. The men, both old and young, looked up at the priest while he preached; but in the minds of the fishermen was the thought that God was in the wind and on the sea, and that they would soon be on their way to meet Him.

The day before, Elezeus Hylla had said to his wife that he thought they ought to take the sacrament this last Sunday that he was at home. Elezeus was not a religious man, but he had spells of being exceedingly good to his wife and children, and if a misfortune happened to any one in the district, it would bring tears to the eyes of at any rate one person, and that was Elezeus.

On this occasion, however, as ill luck would have it, he flew into a rage with Berit again, and before he knew what he was about, he had flung her against the wall and given her several blows, after which he had hurried into his clothes and gone to church, forbidding her to accompany him.

When the sacrament was about to be administered, however, he was seized with such remorse that he left

the church. As he walked slowly homeward before the others, he recollected how the priest had said that one day we should all have to stand face to face with God, and he felt himself to be so great a sinner that he did not know what to do.

The following evening the beach was full of people, for now the boats were to be launched. First of all there was a little merry-making in each poop-cabin. The door was so small that a full-grown man could only just creep through it, and in the narrow space in front of the bunk, with its skin coverings, a fire was burning in a rusty cooking-stove, upon which there now stood a pan of steaming ale. Upon the skin rugs lay and sat women and men, and bowls of hot ale and glasses of spirits went round. Men and women sang, and eyes grew moist; and Kaneles Gomon played the concertina, with a girl sitting on his knee. Lights shone from other poop-windows all round the bay.

Then men with lanterns came tramping in from the boats lying farthest out, and one halted. It was Jacob. The Seal was to be the first boat launched, and the other boats' crews came to help. There was a cutting north wind that carried stinging snowflakes. The light of the lantern shone upon a ring of bearded faces round the boat, and when Oluf Myran succeeded in setting light to a great heap of seaweed and driftwood which he had collected, it was a bonfire that lighted up the snow and the beach and shone upon the gray waters of the fiord.

An old man was led up to the spot. He had a long white beard, and wore a red woolen cap pulled down over his ears, and big, white, fingerless

woolen gloves on his hands. It was Peter Headman, and this was his great day, for he was still able to sing the boats into the sea. He was helped up on to a large stone, and after clearing his throat and wiping his nose on his glove, he cried:

"Now, boys, you must all work together!"

Every one was turned out of the cabin, and the men stood side by side, close together, with their backs against the side of the boat, looking quite small under her great brown bow. Then Peter Headman sang out:

"Here we go-oho-o-o-o!"

The men strained every muscle; their faces contorted with the effort.

The logs under the keel rolled, and the heavy boat moved, but stopped again. Peter Headman sang on: "Heave ho! oho-o-o!" Backs and legs stiffened again, and the boat grated along a little way, but then the men had to pause to take breath.

Lars Myran was looking at the old man with the white beard, standing in the light of the bonfire, and as he looked he thought how, many hundred years before, such an old man would have been the sacrificing priest and the bonfire the sacrificial fire, and the

people were drinking to Thor and Freya before the Lofoten boats set sail. The shore was the same, and the fiord was the same, and the mountains and the boats were as they are now, and the people were probably very much the same, too.

Now the old man sang in a high falsetto:

"There she goes, oho-o-o-o!" And the next moment the great boat lay rocking upon the water. Kristàver shouted his thanks to the other boats' crews for their assistance, and dealt out drams, after which the whole party passed on with their lanterns, and launched boat after boat. The old man's eyes grew moist from the effect of his numerous potations, and his "Heave ho! oho-o-o-o!" grew louder and louder.

Before the men went home to sleep their last night in a comfortable bed, they went out and moored their boats a little way from land, raised the mast, and placed the sail in readiness.

Silence fell at last upon the beach, the lanterns were gone, and the fire had died down; but the four boats lay rocking on the waters of the bay, with their pennons flying from the mastheads, ready to set sail.

MY

Y earliest adventure was New York's lower East Side, where I was born, and my latest adventure has been a catapulting flop from H. L. Mencken and Stuart P. Sherman into space. I have had various other adventures, but I shall dwell upon only those which explain the short stories I have written. These stories are important, because they explain me, and I am in a certain sense an important figure in American life.

I am important in that I am emotionally, and probably always shall be, in harmony with common people, and intellectually in accord with the discerning and learned. I love a cabaret and can enjoy a second-rate musical show, yet I can appreciate a professor's pleasure in Matthew Arnold, in Racine, in Goethe.

I am virtually an American of the first generation, a Jewish American, and a Jewish American who is twentyseven years old and who, despite his A.B. at the age of twenty-three, first really began to become educated well, yesterday. My curse is the curse of many Jews: I am so greedy for equality in this land of the free that I passionately accept every obvious standard which thrusts itself before me-the standard of wealth, of celebrity, of romantic conquest in love, of elegance, of wit, of physical prowess. This is, in general, true of most people, but more intensely so of the Jew. It is the action of one who has roots in no

great tradition, but who has limbs and a trunk with sap in them.

But there is in me, as there is in many of us, Jews and others, that peculiarly human thing, a critical intelligence. It tends to take the pleasure out of wealth, the glory out of celebrity, the thrill out of romantic conquest, the prestige out of elegance, the gratification out of wit, and the pride out of physical prowess.

Sometimes I think that I am an artist. I have a sense of form; I respond with great intensity to certain books, certain tunes, certain pictures, and they make me want to do similar things, but better-better in my own way.

But is that impressive evidence? My mother, without understanding a word of it, might say yes. My wife, understanding all of it, would say yes. But the world demands proof, and my only proof is the stories I have published, mainly mediocre, often affected, too frequently with stock characters, and with a style that is usually reminiscent of a score of other styles, few of them great ones.

Yet I am important. I am important because there are thousands of young persons like me writing in America, and because there are thousands of young persons, thinking and living like me, who will do much to shape the destiny of the nation.

Robert W. Chambers and Gouverneur Morris made me a sentimentalist;

O. Henry made me a trickster, clever in playing with surface contrasts; Richard Harding Davis made me a romanticist, with a yearning for polite, but bloody, adventure; Jack London rendered me more or less immune to civilized influences, and gave me a respect for prize-fighters, thugs, and sea-captains which I may never entirely outgrow; Grimm, Andersen, and James Whitcomb Riley gave me a silly affection for children en masse; and Burt L. Standish made me near-sighted.

These things are happening to thousands of young men as they are happening to me. And perhaps, on the whole, they are not the worst things that could happen. The ideal opposed to this kind of influence might be said to be a sound historical grounding, knowledge of and familiarity with science, literature, painting, and sculpture. I am seriously inclined to doubt whether, out of the common American experience, with a typically American background, many of these influences would "take."

Let us confine ourselves to literature. Is it the fault of our high-school teachers that children do not care for Shakspere? The teachers are bad enough, Heaven knows, but they could never, bad as they are, spoil Robert W. Chambers or Richard Harding Davis for young America. And that is because the whole texture and tone of the average American youngster's life, from his mother's lullaby song to the daily newspaper's way of featuring runaway marriages as well as scandalous divorces, heroic acts of life-saving as well as crime, is such as to make him take to these books with a mind well prepared for them. The exceptional boy in the exceptional home may have the background for reading

Shakspere with honest appreciation, but I am seriously inclined to doubt that. I am much inclined to view the average youth who swallows Shakspere, William Dean Howells, George Eliot, Hawthorne, and the other standards of the high school as a receptive dolt.

Such youths early develop a certain complacently superior air, a natural thing, because it is their only weapon, their only protection, the only egoistic justification they can have, and this air they retain through life.

Many young men of this sort become teachers. A significant proportion of their students are not the sons and daughters of professors, or of the Adamses of Boston, but average Americans like myself. I am not approving our background and our childhood influences; I simply am recognizing them. I am not asking that we remain content with our background, nor am I even praying for the decapitation of the boy who, coming from the farm, the suburb, or the slum, memorizes with docility the dramatis personæ of "Julius Caesar" and the speeches of Mark Antony and Brutus.

Nei

I want this young scholar to remain a scholar; we need him. But I do not want him to be a dolt all his life. ther do I want my kind of youngster to be, as we now are in danger of remaining for the rest of our lives, halfbaked and increasingly arrogant. I want us to come together, and I think that for every educated man who desires to make honest and intelligent overtures to us there are thousands of us who desire to make overtures to him. There should be sympathy here and a painstaking effort to understand one another.