LECTURE (Continued from page 14) Presentment born of envy stirred within the breast of the first speaker. The serious and contemplative mood he had endeavored to establish, indeed, that he had authored, was past history. With less ability, with less effort, with less perspiration, his successor had established a greater control over his audience. He frowned at a most inopportune time, when everyone else was convulsing over one of his competitor's sallies. Quickly he recovered, conventionalized with a smile inwardly more upset. This was cause for concern. His usual egotistical frame of mind was inverted. Accustomed to preminence, this loss of prestige was more than distressing. It was vitally destructive to his sense of self-assurance and confidence. He began to waver. . . . His satisfaction was gone. Substituted was disappointment, discouragement. He wondered if he were really successful. Unconsidered were his security and financial independence. He measured his success only in terms of his ambitions. He had come nowhere near his childish ideals. His criterion had been the realization of happiness only through superior achievement. Now even that one satisfaction was seemingly denied him. He had aimed at the moon; he was only a few inches into the stratosphere. His present achievements were minute, microscopic in comparison with the possibilities. Why the field stretched away infinitely! He was a mere dot upon the horizon, beyond which lay the boundless fields of national, international, and universal endeavor. He considered his qualification, shook his head. His prospects seemed so forlorn. So much lay before him. . . . THE INCOMPLETE ANGLER (Continued from page 17) drag on the line. But remember, do not yank back at a lake trout. Corporal punishment is no longer fashionable discipline. My authority is Chapman and Counts, page 479." "Ha, ha, ha, urp," bespoke the man from Needles. Sheriff Bolano spit on his hands and took firmer hold on his rod. Slaaam! The strike had come. Bolano, a medium-sized man but sinewy, disregarded the caution on jerking. But the professor had a system of introduction that cancelled ignorance at the first decimal. In other words, he was prepared for Officer Bolano. None too soon, either. Sheriff Bolano's hard muscled back was bowed for the heave when the professor flung himself across the bent rod. "Damnation," yowled the sheriff, with other side talk flavored by law and order. "The blamed fool's knocked our blamed fish off just when I was going to hook the blamed thing!" Their guide rose from the sheriff's lap, returned to his seat by the motor, and took out a sandwich he had along. "Just keep the line decently tight, Sheriff," he said; "you have not lost your fish. By and by we shall have it in the boat with us . . . Engineer, will you wind in your tackle? We do not want to lose this . . . this sockdolager. Quotation marks around sockdolager." "Burp," ejaculated the locomotive driver. "I can't. The airbrake'sh draggin' atchu caboose." Their guide beamed. "My, my! Another fish, eh? This is better than a first edition of Cotton Mather." For the moment, Bolano and his strike received no attention. "May I set the hook?" the pedagogue queried at once. Then without waiting for consent, he gave the heavy copper line a turn with his wrist. He did not release his delicate fingering of the line for some minutes. During that time, at command, the fisherman tipsily let line out and took it in. At last there were two or three short rushes downward. Then a heavy black fish with big fins collapsed into the yard-wide landing net. In the bottom of the boat, it growled and bucked among the nets, oars, and tackle boxes. "Eleven pounds no, make it twelve," said the professor. And he cracked the wallowing fish across the snout with a foreshortened axehandle. From an inner pocket, he produced his roll book and made an entry. Then he turned back to Bolano. The officer was having a time of it. His face was beaded with perspiration. A pallor, green like the lake at this hour, had set in about his mouth. "Now what," the sheriff asked, "am I to do? I can't get him more'n half out of the water." By means of the rod, he was with the greatest caution patiently trying to lift a second heavy black fish over the side. It was spent, but each time, its weight pulled down the rod in a bow at the moment the head began to leer over the side of the boat. "Gracious," said the professor. "You must bring an excuse from home tomorrow! Who told you to do this, my boy?" And in the briefest possible space, he plunged his arms into the water, embraced the mackinaw, and wisked it inboard. "It must weigh at least elev no, make it twelve. They weigh the same. A mighty nice catch, Sheriff. My price is a dollar an hour but ..." Sheriff Bolano took a hearty grip on his teacher's shoulder. "The smallest I've got is a ten," he said in a voice all the boats on the north-end could hear. "That will be most satisfactory," the professor assured him. "After all, the joy of the work is a great recompense. Your own reward will" be A on achievement and as for deportment ... I ... let me see ... " "Burp," said the Needlite. "Cu . . . cu . . . come up to the cabin. We got some . . . some . . . thing that's real good up there." DISAPPOINTMENT His dreams had always been complete With lavish thoughts of pow'r and pride And people kneeling at his feet The destiny of worlds to guide. His eyes sought stars on timeless wing To challenge hopes unceasingly. He craved the best that life could bring And all he ever got was me. By aurline osmond Pace Twenty MAX (Continued from page 6) given birth to a code that for him is far more workable, and strains his conscience a good deal less. Max would sooner murder a man than violate his own code. He thinks, and quite rightly, that some people ought to be got out of the way. To break a trust, to find oneself unworthy, to prove false to a friend those are what you don't do if you follow Max's code. He would not think of being anything but frank and honest. Insincerity to him is unforgivable, pretense unthought of. Compromise with his ideals would be unthinkable; and his ideals are strong, lofty ones that would not bear relinquishing. IV Max likes books. He has read everything I have, and more; and I have read everything in the public library. Max absorbs a great deal from books. He finds in them his own thoughts in many different forms. Figures in literature become living, breathing characters for him. Max's feeling for poetry can be traced directly to his grandfather, who was a poet of some rank. Max does not specialize in poetry, as I do, however; he reads the essays of Schopenhauer and Spinoza. Max loves the out-of-doors. He can tramp tirelessly through the hills in autumn and along swollen streams in spring and across unbounded fields in summer, breathing in the clean air and smelling the pine and sage wherever he goes. Max does not like school, because it pens him up and gives him chalk dust to breathe. V Max draws. His innate talent and acquired knowledge of art have given him a keen eye for beauty of the things about him. Once we were swimming in a small stream, and had stopped to rest on a foot-bridge. It wasn't a particularly enchanting spot. The bridge wasn't rustic and covered with vines; it was just an old plank, endowed, seemingly, with porcupine intentions, for it got us full of slivers. The water wasn't the cleanest or bluest; it was, in fact, rather dirty, and I am afraid, unsanitary. A baked clay path led through the ripe June grass at the side of the canal. The banks were covered with cat-tails just a few mangy old cat-tails. And that was all. Yet Max said, "Look at that. God, I'd love to paint it." Then Max showed me how beautiful it was. He can do that. - "Those cat-tails," he said, "are so brave. Hard clay and stinking water, yet there they are, shoving their stalks so bravely up above it all. If only I could do that ..." Max will go to an art school soon. He will make a name for himself there, and then he will go out and be sidetracked to fame. He doesn't particularly want it; but what can he do? You can't kill a love of beauty and desire to catch beauty in paints. And if Max paints, he will deservedly become famous. So there you are. And then what? People will claim that Max belongs to the public and they'll saddle him with work; and then maybe we'll never be able to lie on lonely islands on hot, lazy afternoons, and forget about the rest of the world as we watch the calm water and motionless grass. Or we might not swim in polluted streams and rest on plank bridges and see cat-tails (courageous things!) against the sky. Maybe we'll never find time to splash naked from boat to river, to cover each other with sand, and in our primitiveness to be happy. But whatever happens, I hope they don't change Max. I hope they leave at least a part of him: the part that knows beauty and finds it about him; the part that loves hills in October, wind at dawn, mountain peaks bereft of clouds, and nights pregnant with silence and splashed with a million Stars. CONVERSATION ON AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON (Continued from Page 8) "Between my seasonal dreams and daily going away I have tried to figure things out. It seems to me that my pleasures in life were drawn from a stock large enough to serve the whole world generously. If my living meant the denial to others of something vital to their happiness, then I should be glad to go. But there is so much of what I want. "Some afternoon soon when the splash of sunlight that lies there where my feet ought to be turns out through the window, I'll go along with it. Then I may know whether this is all part of some great plan or only the result of some awful fumbling. Sometimes I've lain here at night and heard screams and smelled medicine and wondered whether I actually am or ever were. Maybe we're all just visions conceived by the universal essence. Maybe life is a dream, our memories dreams within dreams, and death merely a method of transition between two series of imaginings. One night when everything was still and I lay here wide awake, I had a strange feeling. I looked out at the sky and prayed. The stars smiled, but there was no answer." They went away and left him, for there was nothing more to say. I WRITE SO WHAT (Continued from Page 11) Silly; isn't it? But they pay me for it and occasionally I do get a yarn. Sporadically while on the beat (I return to the office in the afternoon to begin the day's dreary output I call in to check whether any tips are forthcoming a habit which has got me in hot water several times. Everything would have been all right had I not later acquired the habit of hiding out on the beat and calling from my hideout, proving that a newsman can and does violate trusts. What if the violation does concern one's employers and not a news source? It's still a violation of trust. It's very easy over the telephone to be someplace from which in actuality you are quite far removed. There's where my hot water began. Once when I called in I reported myself as being in a corner drugstore several blocks away from the agricultural office in which I was enjoying myself looking at aerial photos of the vicinity. The editor, when he heard me say where I was, suggested that if I had nothing better to do, I might cover a four-car collision at the intersection just outside the store. Another time I lied and said I was in a downtown hotel. The editor promptly requested that I sit in a convention of visiting Rotarians. After running several blocks, I arrived at the convention scene but was unable to locate anyone who knew anything about what had occurred. So I faked a yarn, purchasing two previous issues of the paper at the hotel newsstand, picking up a few names from fore-running accounts of what was to occur, and phoning a rewrite man a spurious yarn. How completely unfounded it was I learned a few minutes after the edition had gone to press. Looking up at the lobby clock from the easy chair into which I slumped for a rest after my feverish work on the convention, I noticed the hotel's schedule of daily events hung immediately below the clock. Emblazoned across the top of the schedule was the announcement that the Rotary assemblage had been postponed until the following day. Yet, I'm a newspaperman else why does the publisher not object to my being on the payroll? I write and the job's no sinecure but what? Page Twenty-one