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Samos, in Russia and in Northern ing, loathsome jackals which dog their India.

The vast African deserts have probably afforded the only conditions which rendered it possible for the ostrich to survive. Its hardihood, its Its hardihood, its speed, its wonderful power of vision, and, above all, its fecundity, have enabled it to triumph over extraordinary difficulties. Probably a toll of four fifths of the young is paid to the skulk

footsteps, in the breeding season, to the most remote and barren wastes.

The caprice of man has given the southern variety of the ostrich a fresh lease of being. And the foam-like plumes, the very incarnation of purity and loveliness, are as though blown like derelict blossoms hither and thither upon the unlovely, brown, rigorous face of the unregarding wilderness.

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Well, there'll be staring to see me home,

And there'll be clack and a nine days' talking;

But for all the binding book and bell,

This is the road that I must be walking.

And when they will ask him,

'But where is your bride?'

Then he will be weeping

The slow tears of pride.

And when they are prying,

'But where was the blame?'

It's he will be blushing

The thin blush of shame.

But I'm destroyed with a homesick heart,
And the likes of me would best bide single!
I'll step it brisk till the evening damp,
And I'll sleep snug in a deep, soft dingle.
And I'll win back to the eastern world
By a way himself could never follow;
And I'll be lepping the streams for joy
And lifting a tune by hedge and hollow.
And if they'll look on the morning's morn,
Rising up in the sweet young weather,
Then they'll see me and the darling day
Footing it over the Hill together!

UNCLE SAM

BY MARGARET SHERWOOD

THEY who grow sad over our lack of imaginative insight into the finer meanings of existence, and our consequent barrenness in imaginative creation, may find themselves rebuked, and delightfully rebuked, in looking at our cartoons in magazine and in newspaper. Can one be wrong in thinking that here, in these will-o'-the-wisp flashes of light and of humor on life, one finds a keenness of penetration, insight, and command of means of expression perhaps not found elsewhere in American life?

Best of all the cartoons which both reveal and point the way in our national existence, and certainly the best among the symbols which represent great nations, stands Uncle Sam. Delightful and inexhaustible is the play of imaginative conception in him and about him; in no other representative character is personality so clearly defined; in no other is the range of expression and of action so great. In his steady wear of stars and stripes, with his face constantly changing yet true to type, one finds in him much of the shrewd, old-fashioned Yankee, yet more of Don Quixote. How many are the pictures wherein these two chief strains in him struggle with each other, that keen, bargaining expression blending in puzzling fashion with the wistful look of errantry, of one who stakes all in a perhaps mistaken endeavor to help! Is it through a process of national growth in Uncle Sam, or a deepening penetration on the part of those who irreverently and affectionately in

terpret him, that, as the years go on, the latter expression of chivalric quest seems to deepen and to gain upon the other?

Inexhaustible are his activities, and of endless variety the moments of thought and of action in which the soul of the nation has been thus caught and fixed. Uncle Sam, farmer, householder, and landed proprietor, has domestic responsibilities upon a scale never known before. One sees him, too complacently, in a rich-Jonathan moment, riding the reapers and gathering in inexhaustible harvests; one sees him waking sleepily from a Rip-vanWinkle drowsiness, to guard his forests and waterfalls from despoiling hands; or, with a face less firm than it should have been, settling a dispute among the children, perhaps in a threatened nation-wide strike.

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There is often a fatherly or grandfatherly touch about him; guardian of western lands and seas, he has not only his own but his step-children to look after. Here he goes in the guise of a rich old gentleman, fantastic, almost foolishly good-natured, holding by the hand a small colored boy whom he has adopted, the Danish West Indies,

promising him a gold watch and chain; there he sits, impatient, baffled, with fingers in ears, mouth grim, and hair in flying disorder, listening perforce to the children's row of Mexico, Cuba, and Santo Domingo dancing before him in the guise of sprawling infants, with toot, toot, toot of cymbal, drum and horn-Europe on the long

distance telephone and Uncle Sam unable to hear.

One cannot touch the many aspects of his whimsical, doubting, determined, sensitive face. Nearly the whole range of human feeling, of human expression is there. Fear he knows, and deep sympathy; his hand is ever swift to his pocket upon tidings of distress anywhere upon the green earth. Perplexity and he are oldest friends; to wavering he is no stranger, and he is blind at times, yet not incurably blind. Honestly he tries to secure a right balancing of the scales of justice for his multifarious offspring, yet often finds this delicate adjustment puzzling beyond his power to endure. Swift are the changes whereby his Hamlet moments of indecision slip into his Napoleonic moments of great deeds. Something of woman's intuition is in him, and sometimes, too, woman's overready action in the line of eager and sudden conviction; yet again, sinewy, virile, he shows the muscles stiffening along his arm, and he is become the very incarnation of lean and powerful masculinity, moving determinedly to a goal seen steadily from the beginning. He is usually and rightly pictured all slimness and agility; they err greatly, and fail to see, who make him corpulent. Grossness is not in him, despite the swollen fortunes of the many under his protection; and they are dull of mind and vision who find it there. He is all will, dynamic force, giving an impression of endless power and resourcefulness, working out in many ways, asking for new worlds to conquer, beseeching difficulties, his energy sometimes applied to airy nothingnesses, for there is even in him a tendency to tilt at windmills when nothing else is doing; he is sometimes erratic, and sometimes hits the nail on the head as it has never been hit before.

Always a man of deeds, never of

words save phrase or brief sentence, there is no need of sound issuing from those thin, flexible lips to make his meaning known. His constant changes of expression suggest his great vitality, his sensitiveness to ideas-for he is quick and flexible, and capable of unimagined growth. There is nothing about him irrevocably fixed and determined; his task is yet to do. Let the greatest come to him; he will achieve it! The oddest mixture of worldliness and unworldliness that earth has ever seen, he is in this long struggle for the game, for the stakes, for the fun to be got in the playing, for the wrongs to be righted, as, chivalry in shirt-sleeves, he unsheathes his scythe-like sword.

If one finds a great range of expression and of determination in the Uncle Sam of days of peace, following the ways of duty or of pleasure, there is a still greater range, and a profounder revelation, in the Uncle Sam of wartime. A Dutch cartoon gives us a brawny, square-shouldered Uncle Sam, with a grim, heroic, determined face, wearing not a shade of thought, and grasping a strong sword with a heavy arm; yet to us who know him he is hardly this untroubled man of wrath. Rather, in this great crisis, we feel him catching his breath, with something in his look of a Thoreau, suddenly confronted with a grisly practical problem, and as unprepared as he if surprised by the beat of drums and the tramp of armed men when cooking his lone supper of Indian meal, busy with dreams of peace. There is something of consternation in his face, as of one who can recall no weapon save jack-knife or pitch-fork, and who cannot think where either may be at this moment. The long knight-errantry among homely things has hardly prepared him for this plunge into fighting ranks among the armies of the world. He is a bit awkward in putting on his armor; in

this great land of peace only straw helmets are needed; the look of iron comes slowly to his face as he recognizes the need of forging helmets of iron. Here is a bewildered Uncle Sam up a tree, a German wolf symbolizing the submarine campaign, at the foot, while a satchel labeled 'merchandise' is at hand, and the cartoon bears the legend, 'Gentleman now holding responsible position wants chance to travel.'

There is a touch of vulgarity-is it in subject or in artist? — in a London Uncle Sam (Land and Water), as, hands in pockets, cigar in mouth, swallowtails impertinently flying, he steps up to a burly German with a mixture of bravery and bravado, saying, 'Well!' Yet we who read his mind from within know that he has not for a moment held this attitude of swagger.

Well we recognize the truth of the puzzled Uncle Sam in a sketch by one of our own cartoonists, as, with revolver in hand, arms uplifted, he is held by a peace-at-any-price personage in a Quaker hat, while a grim hand holds a ✓ U-boat at the water's edge, and a bandit-like personage cries, 'Hands up!' And we know, and share, his sadness of heart, as in another he crowds OldLady Pacifist over the precipice into

war.

Springing to his ship-building, toiling at the forge, policing the seas, sadly. calling out his boys, he has known no moment's rest since his decision was made. Finer than in many of the humorous cartoons he is in James Montgomery Flagg's war poster, crying out to youth to enlist in the navy. The direct, commanding finger, the steady mouth, the piercing, determined eyes, hint something of his best, as firm as he would like forever to be while Brother Jonathan's practical genius carries out something of Don Quixote's inspiration. True to the very

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soul of him is another sketch, where, beating plough-shares into swords, he is saying, 'I hate this barbarous stuff, but if I must, I must!' So he toils, his sleeves rolled up, the wind of destiny blowing his beard, his face all resolution above his starry vest, his arm all inspired muscle.

Again we see him, weary and forspent, the hair on his brow wet with perspiration, wading intrepidly through the sea, with a large bag of food on his shoulder, a bag of dollars under his arm, the coast-line of America in the distance, pity and resolve in his tired face, as, 'submarines or no submarines,' he carries aid to stricken Europe. Here, as in another, depicting Uncle Sam climbing out of the slough, and just beginning to get his feet on firm ground, with his eyes on the hills ahead, he takes on the aspect of the immortal Pilgrim, progressing slowly, and in burdened fashion, toward that heaven of being of service which is the only Heavenly City that modern eyes discern - and heaven enough it is for the present, if we but reach it.

In all this our own artists can best depict him: oddly true in externals as are many of the caricatures coming from foreign lands, sympathetic as are many of the cartoons done nowadays in England and in France, all are drawn more or less from the outside. Only his own sons can truly interpret Uncle Sam and the grand national adventure of democracy; Uncle Sam and the epic, sometimes the comic epic, of republicanism; Uncle Sam, inheritor and protector of the Rights of Man, of all the revolutionary ferment of the eighteenth century, of all the struggle of the nineteenth toward justice and equality and opportunity. Who else would be wise enough to see him as Laocoön, his spent sons, the Senate and the House, beside him, all writhing in the coils of the giant serpent,

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