EDITOR'S TABLE.

It was a solemn moment for Zoe and Chloe. Atropos had passed to the great beyond and the lone couple were left to cope with the barbarian horde. For new additions had been made lest one good custom should corrupt the LIT.

There they sat, Zoe and Chloe, stifling their jealousy and giving a painful welcome to the novices. There was Carmencita, the Dancer of Castile, a full-blown crimson rose between her full, crimson lips, her lithe limbs swaying in the exotic dreaminess of an incipient Spanish fandango. Her ripe dark beauty hinted at castinets and balconies, troubadours and stilettoes.

Hands on hips, hat akimbo, glaring most military-like, stood Rollo, the Red Terror of the North. Behind his hulking form was a hint at the smoke of burning towns, screaming women, long black ships and much foaming mead. He said nothing, but his glare was like the flaming, smoky radiance of a suddenly opened furnace in a stoke-hold. A man most virile he was and the air was tense with a nimbus of strong animality and the mark of the beast.

Crouching like a woman in the corner of some ruined cottage when the small-lipped Huns burst through the shattered door, huddled the third member of this godless crew, Jacquenetta, the Joy of the Jonquils; sometimes called "The King of Yellow Butterflies." His vast erudition stunted all attempts at intellectuality or the part on the others. At the moment he was discoursing profoundly on the seventeen distinct schools of preRaphaelite Philosophy, Carmencita having remarked that she preferred Mazzini's to Montessori.

A weird quintet they made-these three differing individuals, together with the gay inefficiency of the bemused Chloe and the beflustered, uninspired rag of femininity that answered to the name of Zoe. But there they were, the leading literati of a class that had twice_broken the scholastic records of Yale, from the probational point of view, and on them devolved the duty of "carrying on" the poor old LIT.

And yet some people claim that Providence has no sense of humor.

ZOE.

CAN you conceive yourself a soldier? Don't you often, as

you settle your feet placidly on a chair and read a book of an evening, or as you stroll gently across the Campus-don't you often wonder how you can ever fight? We lead so futile, so diffidently vacuous an existence. We see no enemy but winter, and rough weather, and we combat it with a battery of umbrellas and goloshes; indolence is our pastime; "Tickle Toes" our favorite march. We are so evidently schooling ourselves for a rubber-soled, electric-lighted, steam-heated sort of life. Doesn't it seem incredible that we should ever be hairy, hardened, fighting?

As you read a war book, don't you often halt at a phrase and say, "Shall this ever be me?" Picture this, from "Under Fire": "They throw themselves on the food, and eat it standing, squatting, kneeling . . . cursed at and cursing." Is this you? And will you, ever, say, "I was woke up by the relief that went by, not by the noise but by the smell. Ah, all those chaps with their feet on the level of my nose!" Will this ever fail to excite you: "The smokers spit in a circle, just at the mouth of the dug-out, and flood with tobacco-stained saliva the place where they put their hands and feet when they flatten themselves to get in or out"? Will you learn to look on

calmly: "He was emptied of blood on the spot in an instant, like a bucket kicked over. Little as he was, it was remarkable to see how much blood he had. It made a stream at least fifty metres long." You, with your sanitary drinking cups, and your hysterics if some one wipes his face on your towel, say, will this ever be you? The remarkable thing, of course, is that it will be.

It must first be realized that life itself is composed of this phenomenon of the double spirits, the primal and the developed. In what James calls the "hierarchy of the Me's" there are these two divisions. We have selfishness-we need it to live-we have our brutal passions, as we have our finer strivings. It is odd, too, that of the characteristics prompted by nature all are necessary, while so many of our so-called higher feelings are not at all. It is undeniable that we need these basic impulses, but it is also undeniable that we do need the holier, finer emotions, even some of those that are mere pleasant embroideries on existence.

The lamentable thing is that civilization has carried us so far into superficiality that, although we recognize the brute in us, in the laboratory, we try to conceal it in polite conversation, and temper it by a discreet silence, and refuse to admit that we gloat over our elemental huskiness in private. Strip the finest dandy, however, of his veneer, and you have as primitive a creature as the cave man. He has his red angers, when he'd like to break skulls, and he only bites his nails. It is when the real self breaks through that he becomes heroic. That explains why a man on Easter Sunday will let his silk hat be smashed beneath a horse's hoof, and himself be dragged in the mud for a block to stop a runaway horse. We do not admit that the elemental impulses are the grand ones. It is war's great mission to tear away all the voilet-colored veils with which we screen ourselves, to strip away the silly trumpery we garnish our civilization with, even to hold it up to our own ridicule.

A fine rage is a noble thing, and a strong man with vital, unhampered impulses is far less repulsive than the emotionless, purposeless, sexless stripling we are told to admire. But the true ideal shall be attained when these brutish and selfish impulses have been brought under the rein, when we have learned

to differentiate between religion, for example, and sanctimony, courtesy and etiquette, aestheticism and effeminacy. We are always ourselves, hypocrisy, super-civilization (this is not the word I want) only refines and emasculates and varnishes our manner. We have worshipped false gods for a long time, we are coming to know, and the last smudge of the lip-stick, and the last polish on the nail, and the last twist of the necktie, and the last broad "a," and all the long list of meaningless ritual to our idols-meaningless when it was not thoughtful, can be cleaned away only by the great purifier. We shall emerge from battle like men from a mud-bath, who have sloughed away the mental and moral filth in the physical. And war is the great purifier.

R. M. Coates.

WAR SECTION

THE WINGED TRAIL, III.

LETTERS OF A NAVAL AVIATOR.

February 3, 1918.

DEAR L.:

How are you, Old Thing? As for me, I'm feeling fit enough to kill the Kaiser with one sneeze.

I must tell you about the adventure of a chap here, whom we have met, and who told us about it. To begin with, he is a little "off," because of some previous trying experiences. Well, he was testing a new seaplane scout, and had been doing acrobatics for a while, when he put her (purposely) into a nose dive and spin, to come down. (This is a perfectly regular, though rather hair-raising stunt.) Well, while coming down in this way, he started writing to his girl on his knee and got so intent on writing that he didn't notice how nearly down he was. He realized it suddenly and started to take her out of the spin. He leveled off all right, but saw a wireless mast just ahead of him. He banked the plane up so as to turn away, but he hit the mast, with his machine upside down. The engine got wedged into the mast somehow, as the mast was open iron-work, and the machine stuck there. He was thrown out of his seat by the concussion, and slid down the under side of his top plane (he was unconscious). A wire caught his foot as he was sliding off into space, and he hung suspended by one foot, about a hundred and fifty feet up. A sailor climbed up and got him. There are photographs to prove this.