The farce element is there, and the tragic element is not lacking. There is nothing in the demeanour of that wizened yellow Brazilian who is forever rolling cigarettes dexterously with his trembling fingers that leads you to suppose that in his head there is the certain knowledge that thirty days hence he shall have ceased to live. But coldly, impassively, he has just imparted that fact together with the story of his life to a compatriot. Inheriting a great fortune at an early age he rushed into vice and dissipation with the evil precocity of the South American, and after fifteen years of lavish and hideous debauch had found himself shattered in body and with but a pittance of his great fortune left. One day, about three weeks ago, he felt a strange thumping in

his chest, and went to his physician. The physician examined him with a face of darkening gravity, and then bluntly told him that he had less than two months to live, and that there was no power on earth that could save him. The Brazilian took the news calmly, and sat down to ponder the matter over. He found that he had just enough money left to take him to Paris and to live there for one month in that shameless depravity which he had come to love so well. His mind was instantly made up. He had to die; he would die in the manner he would have liked to live, surrounded by those scenes which appealed to the evil which was paramount in his nature and which alone. could stir his jaded imagination.

There is nothing about the smokingroom of an ocean liner that should suggest Mr. Henry James' Daisy Miller-beyond the fact that we recently re-read that book in such a place-and yet the two together start us wondering why no American novelist of recent years has

seriously taken up as a theme the idea of the New Americans Abroad. Now Daisy Miller was all right. It belonged to a period when all Americans abroad were supposed to be eccentric and rich. American men were thought by Europeans to be all Hirams and Joshuas and when they crossed the water in search of their spouses and daughters they delighted Europeans by their lavishness and their manner of saying "I reckon," "you bet," and "to hum." This type has given way to another which is much less popular, and if Miss Daisy Miller is still to be found along the shores of Lake Geneva or about the Colosseum by moonlight, all we can say is that she is a very much changed young lady. Europeans have ceased to associate us with the ideas of vast wealth and eccentricity; and unfortunately have had too much occasion to think of us in connection with dishonest and undisciplined American jockeys, the schemes of wily American confidence men, and the successes of American millionaires who have pitted their rouleaux against the bank of Monte Carlo. Of course this charge is unjust, but it is suggestive. It is a certain phase of the new American abroad.

66

Fifty years ago the child world was made glad by the appearance of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. It is a universal story and so belongs to all time. It has never gone out of fashion and never will as long as children love wonder-stories and grown-ups have young hearts.

But those who read the book when it was first published found in it a delight which the child of to-day misses. Fifty years ago certain poems appeared in every reader and were read over and over again until the child was stupid indeed who did not unconsciously learn them by heart. To-day there is a new fashion in literature. Children are whirled from one supplementary reader to another, conning graceful rhymes and pretty stories all illustrated with artistic pictures, but the old things have passed

away.

All the poems in Alice in Wonderland are parodies upon these once familiar rhymes. Scattered lines of the poems cling to the minds of older people; they remember being once familiar with them; they recognise the metre and can sometimes repeat two or three opening lines, but the complete poem eludes them, and the author they probably never did know. The children of to-day do not know the verses at all, and as a parody ceases to be a parody without the original poem as a background, the trouble of gathering these originals seems worth while..

After Alice had fallen down the rabbit hole and had passed through her first transformation, when she shut up like a telescope until she was only ten inches high and then grew bigger and bigger until "her head struck the roof of the hall," she became confused as to her identity. To make sure of it she tried to repeat a little poem which everybody in those days knew by heart, and to such children it was very funny when it came all wrong and she says,

"How doth the little crocodile Improve his shining tail,"

when she thought she was repeating that highly moral poem by Isaac Watts,

AGAINST IDLENESS AND MISCHIEF.

How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!

How skilfully she builds her cell!

How neat she spreads the wax! And labours hard to store it well With the sweet food she makes.

In works of labour or of skill,
I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.

In books, or work, or healthful play,
Let my first years be passed,
That I may give for every day

Some good account at last.

Again, in her conversation with the Caterpillar, Alice told him that being so many different sizes in a day was very confusing, as he would find when he changed into a chrysalis and then into a butterfly. She confessed that she could not remember things and told her experience with "How doth the little busy bee." The Caterpillar, wishing to test the matter, ordered her to say, "You are old, father William." How well she succeeded will appear from comparing what she said with what she thought she was going to say.

The way into my parlour is up a winding stair, And I've got many curious things to show when you are there."

"Oh, no, no," said the little fly, "to ask me is in vain,

For who goes up your winding stair can ne'er come down again."

This poem has suffered various modifications and several versions appear in print, but the quoted stanza is doubtless from the original one. The beat of the metre is very perfectly kept in the Mock Turtle's "Will you walk a little faster?"

""Tis the voice of the lobster" which Alice repeats at the gruff order of the gryphon, returns to Isaac Watts. Probably no poem in the book is further removed from modern thought and modern literary ideals than this one.