quetted with them just out of reach, and finally took to his heels, followed by the two gleaming bayonets.

Straight down the street fled the pig, and Burns and Hogan pursued their elusive breakfast with single-minded intentness. On they went, stumbling over a sleeping soldier at nearly every step, and accumulating an uproarious following of breakfastless messmates.

But they were gaining. Now but a foot intervened between the pig and their bayonets now only six inches. With a yell of triumph, Hogan hurled himself forward and impaled the pig right on top of a sleeper, who awoke bruised and swearing, while Burns stumbled over the heap and landed a full length beyond. In an instant, however, he had clambered to his feet to protect the spoils of war from the gathering crowd.

"I guess I spitted him nice now," gasped Hogan as he recovered himself and the pig. "Who's got

But he never finished his question. The sleeper upon whose body the last act of the tragedy had occurred confronted him with blazing eyes. It was the captain!

"Privates Burns and Hogan, you are under arrest," he said, and then called, "Frensen !"

"Yes, sir," shouted a tow-headed person, saluting.

"Cook this pig for my breakfast."

8. Jean Paul Richter once said, "Never rcad till you have thought yourself empty; never write till you have read yourself full." Just what did he mean by this advice? Do you agree with him?

9. Go to the college library and ask the librarian to point out some of the most reliable reference works. Find the distinctive features of each. By means of a test case, make sure that you can use these books readily.

10. When you begin to collect material from printed sources, you can often find a bibliography already prepared. Have you ever seen the bibliographies on special subjects which are issued by the Library of Congress? Examine some of them.

II. The Writer (Vol. 23, p. 166) tells what unusual efforts several authors have made to get complete information on their subjects before writing. Can you find in the prefaces of authoritative books any evidences of thoroughness in mastering sources ?

12. How does material in The Atlantic Monthly differ from that in McClure's? in Munsey's? in The Political Science Quarterly? in The Wall Street Journal?

13. How can one learn about an author? What information is the title page likely to give? the preface or introduction? such

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books as Who's Who and Who's Who in America? What magazines publish information about their contributors?

14. Do Emerson's Journals show that he had an abundance of material left over from his finished writings? What kind of material did he store up in these journals?

15. In The House of Harper we are told that Thomas Hardy's first conception of Tess was derived from a glimpse he had of a comely country lass sitting in the tail end of a cart which rumbled past him as he was strolling along the road. Her pretty face was so sad and appealing as it slowly disappeared from view that it haunted him many a day, and he evolved from this transient vision the story which has become an English classic. Can you see in this incident an illustration of the sensitiveness, the thoughtfulness, and the human sympathy which characterize the man with "an eye for copy"?

16. As a stimulus to closer observation read Sharp Eyes (in Locusts and Wild Honey) and The Art of Seeing Things (in Leaf and Tendril), by John Burroughs.

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17. Hawthorne said: I would advise you not to stick too accurately to the bare facts, either in your descriptions or your narratives; else your hand will be cramped, and the result will be a wane of freedom that will deprive you of a higher truth than that which you strive to attain. Allow your fancy pretty free license, and omit no heightening touches merely because they did not chance to happen before your eyes. If they did not happen, they at least ought – which is all that concerns you." What "higher truth" did he have in mind when he wrote this? Can you express clearly your own conception of this "higher truth" "?

18. In Representative Men Emerson says of Goethe: "He has clothed our modern existence with poetry. Amid littleness and detail, he detected the Genius of life, the old cunning Proteus, nestling close beside us, and showed that the dullness and prose we ascribe to the age was only another of his masks:

'His very flight is presence in disguise :'

that he had put off a gay uniform for a fatigue dress, and was not a whit less vivacious or rich in Liverpool or the Hague than once in Rome or Antioch." Do you see the poetry of everyday life? Do you try?

CHAPTER III - THE WRITER'S MEDIUM

I. THE CHARACTER OF A GOOD WORKING

VOCABULARY

If a writer hopes to say effectively what he wants to say, he must possess an adequate working vocabulary. In the first place, it should express clearly the knowledge he has gained through experience and observation, the so-called facts of life. Whether he is explaining the principle of an aëroplane, arguing against the recall of judges, describing a park full of children from the slums, or telling the story of a vacation spent in Saskatchewan, he must make his reader understand. Secondly, his vocabulary should reflect his own individuality. He must not only explain processes, argue propositions, describe objects, and recount action, but he must make the processes, the arguments, the objects, and the action significant and full of life and color by revealing his attitude toward the material he treats. Sometimes we meet persons whose comments on the most vital matters are expressed in the manner of algebraic formulas; to them, words are only conventional symbols to be used in treating "facts." Again we meet others who cannot explain anything thoroughly, who yet succeed in expressing their dislike or admiration for whatever they may be considering; to them, language is less conventional than personal. These two classes have vocabularies that are equally inadequate. It is true that language is conventional; words are rather rigid symbols which must have essentially the same meaning for writer and reader. But it is no less true that language is personal; words are not dead symbols, as we may see in the fact that writers who are equally clear produce wholly different impressions. The effective writer must combine the

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conventional and the personal. In other words, he must make himself easily understood, and at the same time express the texture of his own character.

II. THE NEED OF IMPROVING THE VOCABULARY

The necessity of improving our vocabularies becomes evident as soon as we attempt to measure them by this twofold standard. Immediately we discover how impossible it is for us to express ourselves adequately. We can see the matter convincingly, perhaps, if we only remember that our reading vocabularies contain four or five times as many words as we use in writing and speaking. That is to say, we possess a large fund of knowledge which is quite unavailable for constructive work. Moreover, much of the knowledge that we do use, though imperfectly, as well as the thinking we base upon it, remains indefinite and inaccurate for the simple reason that we have not developed a vocabulary commensurate with our needs. Evidence of this inadequacy we encounter every day. We are encountering it when we say, I know fully what I mean, but when I say it, it doesn't suit me," or "The word doesn't quite express my meaning," or I should never say it in that way." We are encountering a different kind of evidence on the same matter when in our reading we feel sure that the writer, though he be recognized as having skill, has in some cases weakened his effects by employing unpleasant or impotent words. Although we succeed in gaining his rough, unfinished meaning, we are sure that he did not say quite what he meant to say, and that because of his cramped vocabulary he was not altogether certain that he himself knew when he had expressed the content of his mind. Of course, our knowledge will, in a way, always run

1 For several years the numerical strength of the "average man's" supply of words has been much discussed. Although it undoubtedly is not great, there is good reason to believe that it is greater than is generally supposed. Probably the average college freshman uses three or four thousand words. For an account of studies that the authors made for the purpose of determining the size of the working vocabulary, see the Nation, Vol. 93, pp. 11 and 262.

far ahead of our powers of expression; but as long as the part of our mental experience about which we can speak or write in only the most indefinite terms is large, we may be assured that there is still much need of improving our working vocabularies.

III. AIMS IN IMPROVING THE VOCABULARY

The desired twofold expressiveness of words is always reducible to what Professor Palmer has aptly called range and accuracy. Unless we have many words at command, we cannot write with any degree of effectiveness about some subjects in which we are genuinely interested. If we try to discuss those matters, we never quite make ourselves understood; and our readers smile the smile of pity. But it is not enough to have a wide vocabulary; the words we know must be made to serve us easily and fully. We must know them so well and have such a completely developed feeling for all their possible meanings that we shall not only say what we have to say, but know in advance just what kind of impression we are going to produce. In other words, we must feel a certain personal ownership in the language we write. If we do not, we shall always be lost when trying to make close discriminations in meaning; we shall be compelled either to deal in generalizations or to run the risk of falling into obvious misstatement. All around us we see the unhappy result. College men and women call every object merely a "thing" or a business or a "proposition "; attribute to every desirable experience, condition, or skill, the indefinite quality "clever," "good," or "nice"; and express all relations with "but," "and," and "so." Such vagueness, some one may say, indicates lack of thinking. Undeniably it does. It indicates that we neglect the highest kind of thinking, thinking thoughts out into words." And if we hope to convince others that we do not in reality suffer from a dearth of ideas, we must command our words well enough to express ourselves clearly, sharply, and interestingly; for words are the only body in which the spirit of thought can go forth.

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