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recognize. "The average person," says the Etude, "knows so little about the grammar of music that he cannot recognize these incriminating blunders. If he had an essay or a story printed with similar grammatical blunders he would want to see it burned to ashes rather than have it circulated as an advertisement of his ignorance." "The best

rule to follow." continues the Etude, "is this: Submit your composition to a half dozen of the best publishers in succession. If it is accepted, you have no further concern than your business arrangements with the house. If it is rejected, put it in the bottom of the trunk in the garret with other souvenirs of your past, and go to work at something new. Unless you have abundant means and are not particular about what you put out, never, under any circumstances, pay any one for putting out your work, not until you are sure that it has been edited by some one who really knows his business. In such a case take it to a music printer, never to a fake publisher."

An interesting fact about Miss Romer Wilson's book, "The Death of Society," to which was awarded the Hawthornden prize, is that it treats of Scandinavia, a country that Miss Wilson has never visited. Her first book dealt with Germany, and she has never been in Germany. The Hawthornden prize is awarded annually for the best work of imaginative literature published during the preceding twelve months, and Miss Wilson's book seems to be imaginative literature in every sense of the word. Writers generally probably would not be so successful in dealing with countries they have never seen, although when J. H. Shorthouse wrote "Joha Inglesant," with its wonderful descriptions of Italy, he had never set foot in Italy.

In the May, 1920, number of THE WRITER attention was called to the fact that Mrs. Mary Virginia Terhune ("Marion Harland"), Mrs. Mary E. Ireland, Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, William Dean Howells, and John Burroughs, in the order named, were the oldest living American writers. Since then Mr. Burroughs, Mr. Howells, and Mrs. Spofford have all passed away, and now the two oldest living American writers are Mrs. Mary

Virginia Terhune ("Marion Harland"), of New York city, and Mrs. Mary E. Ireland, oi Washington, D. C.

In England the veteran author is Frederic Harrison, ninety years old, who wrote "The Meaning of History" in 1862, and who last year was contributing a monthly article to the Fortnightly Review. Next to him come John Morley and Viscount Bryce, both eighty-three, and then come Thomas Hardy, who observed his eighty-first birthday June 2, and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who also is eighty-one.

In France DeFreycinet is ninety-three, while Clemenceau is in his eightieth year. Between seventy and eighty are Emile Boutroux, Ernest Lavisse, Frédéric Masson. Anatole France, Pierre Loti, Camille Flammarion, Comte d'Haussonville, and Alexandre Ribot. In Denmark Georg Brandes is within a year of eighty. Among those who write in German the oldest one surviving is Karl Spitteler, the German-Swiss Nobel Prize winner, who is seventy-six.

LITERARY SHOP TALK.

[This department is open to readers of THE WRITER for the relation of interesting experiences in writing or in dealing with editors, and for the free discussion of any topic connected with literary work. Contributors are requested to be brief.]

Speaking of fashions in the use of words, one word that I have noticed for a year or two as being especially in the mode is "intrigue." If your story in 1920 did not contain at least once that word "intrigue" you were not really an up-to-date writer. Everybody was using it, from Robert Chambers down (or shall I say up?) to Roy Octavus Cohen. Another word, by the way, of which that mention of Mr. Cohen reminds me, is the art term, "chiaroscuro," which was another of the fashionable words of 1920. Since "everybody was doing it." Mr. Cohen put the word into one of his inimitable negro stories, "Hamlet," in the Saturday Evening Post. It certainly

Suppose a fiction writer should cause four of his characters to die within a month at the age of sixty-four, seventy-four, eightyfour, and ninety-four respectively; and furthermore, that the first death should occur on the twenty-second of the month, and the last on the twenty-second of the following month. If such development of a story should cause you to feel that said fiction writer had worked his imagination overtime, I suggest that you get THE WRITER for July, 1921, and read analytically the last nine lines on page 112. BOONTON, N. J. Gilbert P. Chase.

SKETCHES OF WRITERS.

XXIII. TEMPLE BAILEY.

Although Temple Bailey's ancestry is all of New England, she was born in the old town of Petersburg, Virginia. She went later to Richmond, and finally at the age of five to Washington, D. C., returning to Richmond for a few years in a girls' school, which was picturesquely quartered in General Lee's mansion, now the Virginia Historical Association.

"I think it was, perhaps, because of my life in cities," she says, "that I learned in

months of each year in the mountains, or at the sea-shore, or on my grandmother's pleasant farm; and in addition there were weekend adventures with my father. He had no sons, and I was his boy.' I fished with him in the upper Potomac for bass, and in the tide-water streams of the Chesapeake for rock and pike and perch. I caught eels at Quantico, and crabs from a dozen rickety piers along the Bay. My remembrance of these days is very vivid, and I am sure that the contrast between life in the open and my life in town gave me a keen realization of the beauty of field and forest, of river and stream. The pictures which remain in my mind have to do with a great lake which seemed to rise up like a blue wall against the horizon, of waves dyed purple by a tropical haze, of apple trees flaunting their rose-tipped

bloom against the silver background of a spring sky.

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Set against this, are the winter-picturesof great chunks of coal burning bright in an open grate, of a fox-fur rug in front of it, and of myself, a slip of a child, stretched at full length upon it, and deep in a book. We had a fine old library, and I shall never again feel the rapture that came to me when, after tasting somewhat languidly of Oliver Twist' and Great Expectations,' I chanced on 'Pickwick Papers.' After that, Dickens was my idol. I did not, however, confine myself to any one author, for my tastes ranged from 'Huckleberry Finn' to Bunyan's 'Holy War.' I read Miss Alcott with avidity, and with equal eagerness I devoured the account of the arctic explorations of Sir John Franklin. There was, too, on the shelves, a strange old volume of Hogarth, and some colorful prints in a book of English verse. I am quite sure that I understood neither the pictures nor the prints, yet I derived a subtle sense of satisfaction from the ugliness of one and the beauty of the other.

"I was not a strong child, and my schoollife was somewhat intermittent, but my father in my out-of-school days supervised my English as carefully as my mother supervised my manners. I had to write themes, which my father blue-penciled, and so I came to girlhood, and finally to womanhood, with a rather easy gift of writing. I have, in fact, always been an intensely social person, liking my kind, and loving good times and gayety.

"There came, however, a season of stress and sorrow, which drove me to self-expression. I scribbled a story or two, and found, eventually, that editors liked them. A prize came to me from a love-story contest in the Ladies' Home Journal, and I was much encouraged. After that I wrote children's stories, a child's book, love stories, appearing at last in the pages of Harper's, Scribner's, the Saturday Evening Post, the Outlook, Collier's, and most of the women's magazines.

"A series of novels followed. The first was The Glory of Youth,' then 'Contrary Mary,' 'Mistress Anne,' and 'The Tin Soldier.'

"I have found much inspiration in travel. Everywhere I go I look for the human inter

Rand, McNally, & Company (Chicago) announce the publication of a new magazine, designed principally for children of from two to ten years. Rose Waldo will be the editor of the magazine, which will be called Child Life, and the first issue will be on sale November 15.

The American Boy (Detroit, Michigan) wants stories and articles that will inculcate the best literary standards, as well as carry interest and an effective message to boys. The atmosphere must be wholesome, alive, and inspiring, and the story should be a force for good, not by moralizing but by implying moral truths by setting forth high ideals in the characters and the action. Stories that have a point to make that is worth while a story of daring which provides a hero with an appeal for boys; a story of adventure that satisfies a boy's natural longing to roam; a story of an exciting game which, while enthralling the boy, makes right and wrong clear to him; a story of service that will help the boy to adjust himself to social life; or a story of business that will give the boy a true impression of the workaday world he is to enter stories strong in plot quality are what appeal to the American boy.

The Magazine of Fun (800 North Clark street, Chicago) is in the market for short humorous stories, of about 500 words. Stories of exaggeration are particularly desired. A sample copy of the Magazine of Fun will be

The Lyric West (Los Angeles, Calif.), which at present pays only in subscriptions, would like some narrative poems and some dramatic poems.

The Collegiate World (Chicago) a magazine for the undergraduate, is in the market for high-grade articles pertaining to anything collegiate. Interesting articles about college men and women who have “made good" are especially wanted. Authors submitting articles should state their schools.

Adventure (New York) which will be published on the tenth, twentieth, and thirtieth of each month beginning with October, welcomes clean stories of action, of any length up to 120,000 words, and a limited amount of poetry having sufficient strength and genuineness to appeal to a masculine audience. Stories that are morbid, too sophisticated, crimeglorifying, psychological, or that treat of problems, sex, love, or the supernatural are not wanted.

Robert Mackay, the managing editor of the New Success Magazine (New York) says that, like other publications, New Success is keen for the new writer, but the editors are building up a proposition that needs the most special attention, and it is necessary for those in editorial charge to create tables of contents that will fill the particular field that New Success is trying to occupy. What the magazine