the kitchen table. He was a deacon, an orthodox believer; he recognized the claims of the poor, but he gave alms as a soldier might yield up his sword. Benevolence was the result of warfare with his own conscience.

On the table lay a ham, a bag of meal, one of flour, and a basket of eggs.

"I'm afraid I can't carry 'em all," said Louisa.

"How do you do, Uncle Solomon?" said caught up his hat and went out. Louisa.

"Oh, it's John Britton's daughter! How d'ye do?"

He took his pipe out of his mouth long enough to speak, then replaced it. His eyes, sharp under their shaggy brows, were fixed on Louisa; his broad bristling face had a look of stolid rebuff like an ox; his stout figure, in his soiled farmer dress, surged over his chair. He sat full in the doorway. Louisa standing before him, the perspiration trickling over her burning face, set forth her case with a certain dignity. This old man was her mother's nearest relative. He had property and to spare. Should she survive him, it would be hers, unless willed away. She, with her unsophisticated sense of justice, had a feeling that he ought to help her.

The old man listened. When she stopped speaking he took the pipe out of his mouth slowly, and stared gloomily past her at his hay field, where the grass was now a green stubble.

"I ain't got no money I can spare jest now," said he. "I s'pose you know your father cheated me out of consider❜ble once?"

"We don't care so much about money, if you have got something you could spare to -eat. We ain't got anything but gardenstuff."

Solomon Mears still frowned past her at the hay field. Presently he arose slowly and went across the kitchen. Louisa sat down on the door-step and waited. Her uncle was gone quite a while. She, too, stared over at the field, which seemed to undulate like a lake in the hot light.

"Leave what you can't then." Solomon He muttered something about not spending any more time as he went.

Louisa stood looking at the packages. It was utterly impossible for her to carry them all at once. She heard her uncle shout to some oxen he was turning out of the barn. She took up the bag of meal and the basket of eggs and carried them out to the gate; then she returned, got the flour and ham, and went with them to a point beyond. Then she returned for the meal and eggs, and carried them past the others. In that way she traversed the seven miles home. The heat increased. She had eaten nothing since morning but the apples that her friend had given her. Her head was swimming, but she kept on. Hér resolution was as immovable under the power of the sun as a rock. Once in a while she rested for a moment under a tree, but she soon arose and went on. It was like a pilgrimage, and the Mecca at the end of the burning, desert-like road was her own maiden independence.

It was after eight o'clock when she reached home. Her mother stood in the doorway watching for her, straining her eyes in the dusk.

"For goodness sake, Louisa Britton! where have you been?" she began; but Louisa laid the meal and eggs down on the step.

"I've got to go back a little ways," she panted.

When she returned with the flour and ham, she could hardly get into the house. She laid them on the kitchen table, where her mother had put the other parcels, and sank into a chair.

"Is this the way you've brought all these things home?" asked her mother.

Louisa nodded.

"All the way from Uncle Solomon's?"

"Yes."

over a whole pitcherful; says she's got more'n they can use they ain't got no pig now-an' then you go an' lay down on the sittin'-room lounge, an' cool off; an' I'l stir up some porridge for supper, an' boi some eggs. Father'll be tickled to death. Go right in there. I'm dreadful afraid you'll be sick. I never heard of anybody doin' such a thing as you have."

Her mother went to her and took her hat off. "It's a mercy if you ain't got a sunstroke," said she, with a sharp tenderness. "I've got somethin' to tell you. What do you s'pose has happened? Mr. Mosely has been here, an' he wants you to take the school again when it opens next week. He says Ida ain't very well, but I guess that ain't it. They think she's goin' to get somebody. Mis' Mitchell says so. She's been in. She says he's carryin' things over there the whole time, but she don't b'lieve there's anything settled yet. She says they feel so sure of it they're goin' to have Ida give the school up. I told her I thought Ida would make him a good wife, an' she was easier suited than some girls. What do you s'pose Mis' Mitchell says? She says old Mis' Nye told her that there was one thing about it: if Jonathan had you, he wa'n't goin' to have me an' father hitched on to him; he'd look out for that. I told Mis' Mitchell that I guess there wa'n't none of us willin' to hitch, you nor anybody else. I hope she'll tell Mis' Nye. Now I'm a-goin' to turn you out a tumbler of milk-Mis' Mitchell she brought | mysterious, girlish dreams.

Louisa drank the milk and crept into the sitting-room. It was warm and close there, so she opened the front door and sat down on the step. The twilight was deep, but there was a clear yellow glow in the west. One great star had come out in the midst of it. A dewy coolness was spreading over everything. The air was full of bird calls and children's voices. Now and then there was a shout of laughter. Louisa leaned her head against the door-post.

The house was quite near the road. Some one passed a man carrying a basket Louisa glanced at him, and recognized Jonathan Nye by his gait. He kept on down the road toward the Moselys', and Louisa turned again from him to her sweet,

CLYDE FITCH (1865-1909)

William Clyde Fitch was born at Elmira, New York, on 2 May, 1865. Elmira was not the home of his parents, but merely a temporary abode. His mother, Alice M. Clark, was a native of Hagerstown, Maryland, where she met William G. Fitch of Hartford, Connecticut, who was at the time an officer of the Union army in the Civil War. In Hagerstown they were married during the war. They had no settled home until 1869, when they removed to Schenectady, New York, where Clyde's boyhood and youth were passed. In 1879 he was sent to a boys' school in Holderness, New Hampshire, where he was prepared for Amherst College. He was graduated from Amherst with the class of 1886. Academic distinction was not for him (though later Amherst gave him an honorary degree), but in college he clearly showed his qualities-attracting attention, not at first favorable, and getting into debt, because of his clothes, showing an eye for decorative effect in his rooms, writing much for the college periodical, reworking on extremely short notice a dramatic piece to be performed by members of his fraternity, acting in college plays, and directing their performance. His father wanted him to become an architect, but he found an irresistible appeal in literature and determined, upon his graduation, to make his own way as a writer. At first he had a sufficiently hard time of it, writing verse, children's stories (a volume of these was published in 1891, The Knighting of the Twins), and other slight pieces, while he earned his bread and butter as a private tutor-work which he detested. He also wrote at this time a novel, A Wave of Life, which was printed in Lippincott's Magazine in 1891, but which was never republished.

Before this year, however, in the fall of 1889, an opportunity had come to him to try his hand at what was to be his life's work, the writing of stage plays. Richard Mansfield wanted a play about Beau Brummell and, at the suggestion of a common friend, asked Fitch to write it for him. The young author soon found Mansfield "unbearable," and wrote to a friend: "To suit a star actor, who wants all the good situations for himself, and is jealous of any other good lines, and who would rather cut all out save his own, is a difficult piece of work, and one needs strength, stubbornness, and great diplomacy, and, besides, a yielding power when it becomes necessary." (Clyde Fitch and His Letters, by M. J. Moses and V. Gerson.) Whatever qualities were needed, however, Fitch seemed to have, and the play was a success. From the time of its first performance (17 May, 1890) he was a play-writer and nothing else. Beau Brummell gave him an exceptional start, but, even so, his way was for some years not easy, and his income remained small and uncertain. The success of Beau Brummell was itself a source of grave embarrassment, because it brought forth a widely published charge that Fitch was in no sense the play's author, but had merely acted as Mansfield's secretary in writing it. The charge, though plausible, was false, and fortunately it did no permanent harm. Originating, however, as it did with a dramatic critic, it was the forerunner of many difficulties which the playwright was to have with other members of that tribe, for he had to contend against adverse press-criticism practically until the end of his life. He wrote a number of plays which were failures or only moderately successful, and it was only about 1898 that he became firmly established in his profession. By this time, however, he still occasionally lacked ready money, not because his income was really insufficient, but because his expenditures were lavish. As a youth he was rather a dandy, and as a man his tastes were luxurious. During his annual summers in Europe he habitually bought himself poor, carrying back with him much old furniture, tapestries, paintings, and smaller objects of art. In 1900 he built himself a small but perfecrly appointed house in New York, and later he built a country home at Greenwich, Connecticut, and afterwards bought another at Katonah, New York. After about 1902 or 1903 the state of his health began to cause his friends some uneasiness, and physicians warned him that the combination of continuous overwork and grave digestive disorders was one that might soon put a term to his life. Warnings, however, were of small avail, and Fitch died, at Châlons-sur-Marne, on 4 September, 1909.

He had written sixty-two plays, of which thirty-six were original, twenty-one were adaptations of French or German plays, and five were dramatizations of novels (including The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton). The most important of these are: Beau Brummell (1890), Frederic Lemaitre (1890), Pamela's Prodigy (1891), The Social Swim (1893), His Grace de Grammont (1894), Mistress Betty (1895), The Moth and the Flame (1898), Nathan Hale (1899), Barbara Frietchie (1899), The Cowboy and the Lady

(1899), Sapho (from Alphonse Daudet's novel of the same title, 1900), The Climbers (1901), Captais Jinks of the Horse Marines (1901), Lovers' Lane (1901), The Last of the Dandies (1901), The Way of the World (1901), The Girl and the Judge (1901), The Stubbornness of Geraldine, (1902) The Girl with the Green Eyes (1902), Her Own Way (1903), Major André (1903), Glad of It (1903), The Coronet of the Duchess (1904), The Woman in the Case (1905), Her Great Match (1905), The Girl Who Has Everything (1906), The Straight Road (1907), The Truth (1907), The Bachelor (1909), A Happy Marriage (1909), and The City (1909).

Fitch's success as a practical playwright remains probably unparalleled in America. Neverthe less, as was said, he was subjected throughout his career to attacks from the press. He was accused of hasty, slipshod workmanship, of false taste, of willingness to sacrifice truth for theatrical effect, and of a lack of ideas. Much of this criticism was, as Fitch protested, itself hasty and careless, but it was not wholly mistaken. He was a nervously energetic worker, impressionistic in his methods, full of boyish verve and naïveté, eager, restless, and inevitably superficial. He had ideals, was not without conscience in his work, and not without ideas. His ideas and ideals both were perhaps not the worse for being elementary; but, on the other hand, it is true that he had his way to make in the world, that he wanted the generous, immediate rewards which he obtained, and that he was too ready to adapt himself to the conditions of practical success, shifting the responsibility by declaring, with a sigh, that "there will never be good American dramatists till there are good American producers!" He wrote illuminatingly in reply to adverse criticism of two of his plays: "What I am trying to do is to reflect life of all kinds as I see it. To write, first, plays that will interest and mean something; and, after that, amuse. I would rather entertain everybody than one body. And always and in any case with a result to the good. I am trying especially to reflect our own life of the present, and to get into the heart of the pictures made by the past. To do this I do not consider any detail too small, so long as it is not boring. Nor any method wrong which I feel to be true." Further light on his ideals is cast by an incident of 1904. W. D. Howells had been pleased by Fitch's Glad of It, recognizing in its very looseness of structure a fidelity to his sense of “the way things happen,” and he printed an appreciative review of the play in Harper's Weekly. Fitch's letter of thanks should probably be taken at something less than its face value, both because of his eager reactions and because of his gratitude at the support of a really eminent man of letters; nevertheless, it sheds light on his aims. He wrote: "I don't think I was ever more pleased, or so thoroughly encouraged to do more, and get close to the 'Real Thing,' than I have been by your article.' . . . You see I really represent the Howells's Age. by which I mean when you were in the first glory and fight of your success, I was a boy beginning to 'take notice,'-never in a scholastic sense either, entirely from instinct and the impulse of my natureor I might leave out the 'my.' I grew up on you! And so when I began to bump along the thirties I began to grow hungry to please you, not in your way, but in my own. I have an individual trait, that one sees in children, I cannot be guided. I must learn to walk in my work alone. Tumble after tumble doesn't discourage me. I want to 'get there' through my own experience, from my own point of view, even at the risk of being bow-minded. It's a sort of mental stubbornness or conceit, and it is hampered-perhaps?-by my determination to take my work, but not myself, seriously. All of which means a long way around."

Perhaps the way was too long, other factors which increased its length not being mentioned in this letter. But, still, the fact remains that many of Fitch's plays have, within limits, a genuine documentary interest and value. And the best of them have a felicity and a liveliness which need not acting for their appreciation, so that Fitch fairly earned a place among American men of letters. It is safe to say that no American play written before 1890, or thereabouts, preserves now more than an antiquarian interest, and of playwrights who have written since that year Fitch has been not onl the most prolific and the most successful, but also the most conspicuous for sustained power of dramatic conception and of adroit execution. Moreover, says a recent critic (T. H. Dickinson, Playserights t the New American Theater), "under a skill in the handling of pure artifice second to none in the history of our stage, Clyde Fitch possessed a real knowledge of the fundamentals of character. His treatment of feminine character was not alone the legerdemain of 'the man who knows women."" It is true the same critic continues, that "this mastery of character never eventuated into a play worthy of the insight displayed in its details," but this "must not blind us to his real contributions to our stage. the flesh and blood and nerves of the gentlemen and gentlewomen next door." These living gentlemen and gentlewomen are to be found chiefly, not in the historical plays or in the farces which Fitch produced in considerable numbers, but in those of his plays in which he attempted seriously "to reflect our own life of the present." The Girl with the Green Eyes is one of these, and it fairly exhibits Fitch's skill, mastery of character, and limitations. It is effective on the stage, and is eminently readable, but its theme of jealousy is one of almost unlimited possibilities, while Fitch's treatment of it can only be called superficial.