railing (but that is dangerous, because it advertises as well as guards), and on the glad day when the long twisted petals that more or less simulate the forms of lizards are fully extended, initiate flower-lovers come from London and elsewhere to marvel round it on their knees.

Perhaps the flower that the writer saw recently is less rare than the lizard orchis. Surely it is more beautiful, and therefore on the balance of points quite as near to the ideal of a rare and perfect flower. Each of them bears in the London Catalogue the same number, signifying that it has been found in four only of the hundred and twelve botanical counties in which Great Britain is divided. Ours is Caphalanthera rubra. The local belief, probably wrong, is that it is now found only in our administrative county, and there only in four spots four or five miles distant from one another. At any rate, the other habitats are far away, and men come long journeys even on the bare chance estimated by a reference to the calendar that our rare helleborine may have opened perhaps two blossoms for them to look at.

It is the beech wood that our precious thing loves, and even quite close to haunts of man many beech woods are quite untrodden for months together by the casual rambler. Possibly so beautiful a flower has been recently exterminated in some of the more accessible spots. The places where it is found now have a difficulty of approach that heightens the romantic value of the find. In June, the little genus of the helleborines has the beech woods almost to itself. Scarcely

any other summer flower is there to pierce the age-old carpet of dead leaves, and display its beauty in those solemn aisles. The white helleborine is remarkable enough, breaking out between its diminishing leaves its pearly

blooms with half-open throat of flaming orange. It can be seen in ten times as many botanical counties as rubra which, piercing the dead leaves in the very centre of a wood, lifts a far more elegant stalk with flowers on it of a luminous rose-pink not to be matched in color by any other jewel of Flora's realm.

One who has gone to the worship of rubra year by year knows the landmarks of his journey over rough, bare hills, then down the precipitous side of a wooded gorge to the spot as small as a croquet lawn where five or six plants come up, three or four of them in a good year bearing blossoms. One of our habitats had been lost for twenty years, then found two years ago by one person now in bed. We got from him a charted note of the locality, and set out to find rubra in this comparatively new place. The chart looked plain till we came to the place which is full of hills. A path marked through wood on paper seemed to run over bare stones, and landmarks that seemed within a step of one another were sundered by a gully that it would take an hour to climb across. The memory of the cartographer must surely be at fault and we were very much in doubt as to which way to go.

But when a flower is rich as well as rare, anyone who goes by awkward paths enough may stumble on it. Children in search of wild strawberries, or lost in the wood, may stumble on that which scarcely a botanist has seen, and treat a blossom reputed extinct just as they would a rather superior cowslip. While we stumbled through an almost impenetrable thicket on the way to a spot from which we had some hope of reconciling the country and the chart, one of us almost trod upon a flame of magenta, and though he had the marvellous thing

never seen

before, cried out: "Why, here it is!" And there it is, a rare flower worthy of its rarity. Such a rose-claret shot with a fire of invisible blue as no other blossom of field or garden wears. What can we do with it? Press it between boards into a thing of two dimensions, flattening the curves of its flower-head and crushing the spring of its lancy leaves to the four ways of heaven? What particular hue of scorch and fermentation would that indescribable pink take in the hortus siccus? We do

The Nation.

not know, only that it would be something horrible. Somebody could paint it, though it is very nearly unpaintable. It is impossible to raise progeny from its ten thousand seed, because it has the whole wood to itself in its own conditions and yet leaves no issue. The memory will not carry its brightness for five minutes, always finding itself mistaken when it looks again. We can only leave it there in its Sphinx-like glory and pray heaven that we see it there again next year.

"Little Bird Blue" by William L. and Irene Finley (Houghton Mifflin Co.) is the story of a tiny bluebird who, orphaned almost as soon as he left the shell through the voracity of a prowling cat, fell into kind and fostering hands, became first the charge and then the intimate companion of the children of the home, and stayed a loved member of the family circle till, in the autum the call of the wild came to him and he flew southward with others of his kind. It is a pretty and winning story, simply told, and daintily illustrated with thirty or forty pictures by R. Bruce Horsfall.

The multitude of readers who en joyed Eleanor Hallowell Abbott's story of "Molly Make-Believe" will surely welcome the same author's latest story "The Indiscreet Letter" which is in similar vein and of equal interest. It is no longer than the average magazine short story, and may easily be read in half an hour; but it is better worth while than many full-grown novels. There is in it a blend of sentiment and humor, a combination of romance with keen analysis of character which give it a peculiar charm. Its characters, few as they are and brief as is the

reader's acquaintance with them, are very much alive; and the plot of the story, which sends a young girl upon a long but happy quest for one who had before been only hands and a voice is singularly appealing. The Century Co.

The late Professor Charles Richmond Henderson enjoyed rare opportunities to pursue his favorite studies of political economy and sociology, serving both his city and his State by his work, besides acting as the representative of the United States on the International Prison Commission. He died after reading the proof of his last book, "Citizens in Industry," in which he summarized and criticised the work of the unions, and the individual toiler and capitalist, apportion-ing praise and blame with rare impartiality. Mr. Henderson shows a world ruled by capitalist-managers and their assistants, and exhibits them as practising an infinity of virtues with which they are too rarely credited by their zealous detractors. He entitles his chapters The Situation and its. Problems; Health and Efficiency; Economic Inducement to Secure Efficiency of Labor; Methods of Improv

An

ing the Conditions of Home Life of Employees; Neglected and Homeless Youthful Employees; Education and Culture; Experiments in Industrial Democracy; Administration of Welfare Work and the Social Secretary, and Moral and Religious Influences. appendix furnishes a long list of factories, works, and companies, beginning with the Cadburys who seem to have discovered benevolence early, and showing that Germany has more of these beneficent companies than all other countries put together. Mr. Henderson crowned his life work with the valuable book which is not to be overlooked by any student of industrial questions. D. Appleton & Co.

When a highly important lesson is conveyed in a vivacious and diverting way, there is an obvious gain to whatever cause the teacher has at heart. This is true of T. D. MacGregor's "The Book of Thrift" (Funk & Wagnalls Co.). The author is keenly alive to the American sin of wastefulness, which is a natural accompaniment of the easy-going, happy-go-lucky temperament which is characteristic of the typical American; and he seeks to check it by hints and instructions aimed by turns at young men, housewives, parents, householders, business men and small investors. There is good sense, humor and practical wisdom in what he has to say upon all these phases of prudence and thrift, and a general acceptance of his counsel would greatly aid the modern movement toward efficiency, and would strongly re-enforce the tardily-adopted national policy of the conservation of natural resources. This certainly is an appropriate time for teaching this lesson, and it is well to have it so cleverly and effectively taught. The numerous thumb-nail sketches with which the book is illustrated add pungency to the text.

The savage American of the twentyfirst century as pictured by Gordon Grant and described by Jack London in "The Scarlet Plague" is probable enough, granting the plague, but it is difficult to believe that in this age of comparative cleanliness a new plague should fall upon men. Moreover, Mr. London's account of the disease is self-contradictory. In one passage, he says that the bodies of the plaguestricken dissolved into powder almost in a breath. In another he tells of discovering skeletons years after the plague had ceased to devastate the earth. However, he succeeds extremely well in conveying the impression of horror. The supposed narrator is a college-professor twenty-seven years of age when the plague began in 1986 and reserved by fate to behold the retrogression of its survivors stripped of all their earthly possessions by fire, and left to wander almost unclothed in a houseless world. The strongest survived, and a brutish creature named Chauffeur from his former avocation, captured an unpro. tected woman, feeling great satisfaction from the knowledge that she was the daughter of one of the magnates who formerly ruled the world. Her progeny and his and the descendants of the professor hear the learned gentleman's story, receiving it as pure fiction except in such details as are verified by their own experience. How can a savage whose fingers and tes suffice for his arithmetic have any conception of the germ-theory with ts myriads? Death and birth he knov's, and he has the savage's ability for inventing superstitions. He is the man of the stone age, and nobody knows it but the old Professor. Mr. London has not lost the art of swaying his readers. and "The Scarlet Plague" contains as many "thrills" as are needed to make it a story to dwell in the memory. The Macmillan Company.

TO LESSING. (May, 1915.)

You do not know it-nay-for if you knew,

Your soul would burst the bounds of time and space

To stand here crying in the market place,

Crying to those who know not what they do.

Of all your country's loving children, you

The best could serve her in her desperate case

You whom no power could force to aught of base,

Whose life was but the passion to be true.

Ah to what end your spirit's high emprise,

Schiller's white flame, Goethe's Olym. pic calm,

If after you come men of low surmise, Men who belie your truth without a qualm,

Who think to enjoy-God's love!-a place in the sun,

With all around black Hell and faith fordone!

R. R. Morgan.

JEANNE.

A little open window,

And Flemish fields beyond,

A red sun in the trees,

And the whisper of a breeze,
And frogs all a-croaking in the pond,
O my Jeanne!

You had only just turned ten,
And I often wondered, when
You became as old and big as me,
Whether any thought would hover
O'er the memory of your lover,
Who took and dandled you upon his
knee.

But the years they hurry fast,
And your childhood cannot last,
And soldiers go again across the sea;
And my Jeanne with laughing eyes
And her looks of sweet surprise
Will be a phantom in the after years

for me.

For, child, you'll never heed Your beautiful misdeed,

Two hundred Cornish clay workers enlisted in a body in London recently.

I reckon the war'll be over soon, for another two hundred men

Be gone abroad to 'list in London
Town;

They've bid "good-bye" to the Menagew
Stone an' Tre an' Pol an' Pen,
To change their milky white for
khaki brown.

At Carclaze Mine the streams 'll run an' whiten St. Austell Bay,

At Charlestown Port the boats be left to lie,

For another two hundred Cornishmen have bid "Good-bye" to the clay, An' I reckon the Huns 'll know the reason why.