The Short Story. The short story continues in present-day literature the most popular form of prose writing. The demand of the public for short stories is so great that their makers outnumber the writers of all other forms of literature. The short story is given to the public through almost countless magazines. The large majority of the stories published weekly and monthly are intended only for the passing hour; they are not closely related to life, and lack artistic form. This criticism does not, of course, apply to the best of them, for many stories of enduring worth appear in our periodicals.

Magazine publication has had its effect upon the form of the short story. Its length is frequently determined by the space allowance of the magazine. A length of about eight thousand words, for instance, is usually demanded by one of our most popular monthlies. This same magazine has also developed a fixed type of story, with a definite time for the appearance of the leading character and a particular place for the climax. The practices of publication have always affected the form in which literature appears. But the essential form of the short story remains unchanged. We still have the three important groups: the story of plot; the story of setting; the story of character.

The story of plot, as the detective story, does not vary greatly from its earlier form. The story of setting changes its background material with the particular interests of the passing day. The local color tradition described in the last section of our Story of American Literature has been carried on by a large number of writers-with distinction by Wilbur Daniel Steele in his stories of the fisher-folk of the North Atlantic coast; by Irvin Cobb in his stories of small-town Kentucky life such as the admirable Old Judge Priest series; and by Alice Brown in her Homespun and Gold tales of New England. Current stories are busy with the cosmopolitan life of our racially mixed population. A certain type of Jewish life in New York City is represented in the stories of Fanny Hurst; East Side life in the same

city, where rages a conflict between oldworld manners and ideas and the customs of the newer life in America, is vividly portrayed in the stories of Anzia Yezierksa. Irish life in America is the theme of Rupert Hughes's Long Ever Ago stories. The Oriental's point of view toward America is expressed in the tales of Achmed Abdullah. The Italian and Portuguese settlement in San Francisco is the material Charles C. Dobie uses in his short stories. The American short story stretches its interest to include Africa in Steele's "The Marriage in Kairwan," and to Rumanian gypsy life in Konrad Bercovici's "Ghitza."

The types of character are as varied as the people of our changing life. No class, either high or low, either rich or poor, fails of representation. The trash-gatherer is the hero of Tristam Tupper's excellent story of "Grit"; two convicts furnish the interest in O. F. Lewis's "The Get-Away.". The hero from higher walks of life appears in the stories of Edith Wharton and Katharine Fullerton Gerould. All types of American life pass in review in our short stories.

The Novel. The novel, like the short story, continues in great favor with the reading public. The majority of the hundreds of novels published every year are mildly pleasing romances, whether laid in a far-away world or in our own times and among our own people. The most popular novel of the day does not necessarily have any assurance of enduring. No reason exists, however, why a novel of real worth may not also be a popularly read book.

Some styles in present-day fiction, beyond the mere amusement novel, may be observed. Hard upon the close of the World War came a wave of realistic novels. The most widely read current book in America in 1920 and 1921 was Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, a novel concerned with life in a small Minnesota town. Gopher Prairie, the scene of the novel, the author considered typical of the thousands of villages of its size scattered over the United States. Though a thin thread of plot runs through Main Street, the novel is concerned almost

altogether with a picture of the dull life and the commonplace people of Gopher Prairie. Sinclair Lewis has a remarkable power of observation; his industry in setting down the notebook record of his observations is unfailing. He has, too, caught for display some of the weaker sides of our life. In this way the novel is realistic. But still the book is not real. For the author has drawn but half the picture. To the better sides of life, the finer aspirations and acts to be found in some proportion almost everywhere, the novelist has refused representation. The author's attitude toward life is more than critical; all illusion is gone and no tinge of imagination remains. The same attitude of disillusion toward life, even of disgust and despair, is displayed in the fiction of Sherwood Anderson.

The writing of Main Street was not so remarkable as was its popularity. Published a few years before 1921, it would probably have been highly regarded by a fairly large number of readers, but it would scarcely have swept the country as it did. Its appearance fell in with a temporary letdown which followed as a natural result from the high pitch of idealism to which we had risen during the World War.

Pictures of the unrest in our social life that followed the war appear in many recent novels. The novel of social criticism appears in an honest and popular form in Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams. Tarkington's novel presents a picture of class relations in a Middle Western town, in which the heroine deludes herself into believing that she can succeed in rising in the world by pretending that she is something she is not. Through many a scene of disappointment, some of them described with a fine touch which mingles pathos with humor, Alice Adams is taught that true position in the world depends upon work and worth. At the end of the story she sets out to work and be of some worth.

Miscellaneous Prose. The scientific trend of the nineteenth century continues in the twentieth, and finds its outlet in the writings of many men who add to their knowledge of natural phenomena the culture which enables them to produce real literature. Scientific knowledge, in the writing of John Burroughs and William Beebe, for example, ceases to sound like laboratory notebooks and becomes as fascinating as any story in fiction. At times, the naturalist has been a figure of national importance, as was Theodore Roosevelt.

The relations between capital and labor, between the owner and the worker, are subjects of our poetry and our fiction, as you have learned in the earlier discussion of the tendencies of our literature today. These subjects have also been much discussed in the present-day essay. Of especial interest to the essayist is the relation of man to the industrial world by which he is surrounded. The amalgamation of our foreign population has become an even more acute problem since the outbreak of the World War. You have already noticed the use of this theme in fiction, and you have probably listened to debates or discussions of the subject. Their interesting experiences in becoming Americans have been recorded by some of our naturalized citizens. Two or three such books are notable: Jacob Riis's The Making of an American; Edward Bok's The Americanization of Edward Bok; and Mary Antin's The Promised Land.

The essay also continues to serve its ageold purpose, a means of communicating ideas about human conduct and ideas in regard to the nature of things. The essay may have a turn to sentiment, to humor, or to serious reasoning. Christopher Morley, Simeon Strunsky, and many others are writing delightful essays that record wise or humorous or penetrating comments on life.

SNARING A BOA CONSTRICTOR

WILLIAM BEEBE

My thoughts were far from poisonous serpents when Nupee came into our Kalacoon laboratory late on a Saturday afternoon. Outdoors he had deposited the coarser game intended for the mess, consisting, today, of a small deer, a tinamou, or maam, and two agoutis. But now with his quiet smile, he held out his lesser booty, 10 which he always brought in to me, offering in his slender, effeminate hands his contribution to science. Usually this was a bird of brilliant plumage, or a nestful of maam's eggs with shells like great spheres of burnished emeralds. These he would carry in a basket so cunningly woven from a single palm frond that it shared our interest in its contents. Today, he presented two 20 nestling trogons, and this was against

rules. For we desired only to know where such nests were, there to go and study and photograph.

"Nupee-listen! You sabe we no want bird here. Must go and show nest, eh?"

"Me sabe."

Accompanied by one of us, off he started again, without a murmur. In 30 the slanting rays of the sun he walked lightly down the trail from Kalacoon as if he had not been hunting since early dawn. An hour passed and the sun swung still lower when a panting voice gasped out:

"Huge labaria, yards long! Big as leg!"

The flight of queen bees and their swarms, the call to arms in a sleeping 40 camp, creates somewhat the commotion that the news of the bushmaster aroused with us. For he is really what his name implies. What the elephant is to the African jungles and the buffalo

Nupee had been left to mount guard over the serpent, which had been found near the trogon tree. Already the light was failing; so we walked rapidly with gun, snake-pole, and canvas bag. Parrakeets hurtled bambooward to roost; doves scurried off and small rails flew from our path and flopped into the reeds. Our route led from the open compound of Kalacoon, through the 60 freshly cut Convict Trail, toward the edge of the high bush, and we did not slacken speed until we were in the dim light which filtered through the western branches.

At the top of the slope we heard a yell-a veritable Red Indian yell-and there our Akawai hunter was dancing excitedly about, shouting to us to come on. "Snake, he move! Snake, 70 he move!" We arrived panting, and he tremblingly led me along a fallen tree and pointed to the dead leaves. I well knew the color and pattern of the bushmaster. I had had them brought to me dead and had killed them myself, and I had seen them in their cage behind glass. But now, though I was thinking bushmaster and looking bushmaster, my eyes insisted 80 on registering dead leaves. Eager as I was to begin operations before darkness closed down, it was a full three minutes before I could honestly say, "This is a leaf; that is snake.”

The pattern and pigment of the cunningly arranged coils were that of the jungle floor, anywhere; a design of dead leaves, reddish-yellow, pinkish, dark-brown, etched with mold, fungus, 90 and decay, and with all the shadows

and high lights which the heaped-up plant tissues throw upon one another. In the center of this dread plaque, this reptilian mirage, silent and motionless, rested the head. I knew it was triangular and flattened, because I had dissected such heads in times past, but now my senses revealed to me only an irregularity in the contour, a central 10 focus in this jungle mat, the unraveling of which spelled death.

It was a big snake, seven or eight feet long, and heavy bodied-by no means a one-man job. Again we carefully examined the screw-eyes on the pole, and each looked behind for a possible line of escape.

I quickly formed my method of attack. Nupee was sent to cut forked 20 sticks, but his enthusiasm at having

work to do away from the scene of immediate conflict was so sincere that he vanished altogether and returned with the sticks only when our shouts announced the end of the struggle. An Indian will smilingly undergo any physical hardship, and will face any creature in the jungle, except the bushmaster.

We approached from three sides, 30 bringing snake-pole, free noose, and gun to bear. Slowly the noose on the pole pushed nearer and nearer. I had no idea how he would react at the attack, whether he would receive it quietly, or, as I have seen the king cobra in Burma, become enraged and attack in turn.

The cord touched his nose, and he drew back close to some bushy stems. 40 Again it dangled against his head, and his tongue played like lightning. And now he sent forth the warning of his mastership-a sharp whirrrrr; and the tip of his tail became a blur, the rough scales rasping and vibrating against the dead leaves, and giving out a sound not less sharp and sinister than the instrumental rattling of his near relatives.

For a moment the head hung mo- 50 tionless, then the noose-man made a lunge and pulled his cord. The great serpent drew back like a flash, and turning, undulated slowly away toward the darker depths of the forest. There was no panic, no fear of pursuit in his movements. He had encountered something quite new to his experience, and the knowledge of his own power made it easy for him to 60 gauge that of an opponent. He feared neither deer nor tapir, yet at their approach he would sound his warning as a reciprocal precaution, poison against hoofs. And now, when his warning had no effect on this new disturbing thing, he chose dignifiedly to withdraw.

I crept quickly along on one side and with the gun-barrel slightly de- 70 flected his course so that he was headed toward an open space, free from brush and bush-ropes. Here the pole-man awaited him, the noose spread and swaying a few inches from the leaves. Steadily the snake held to his course, and without sensing any danger pushed his head cleanly into the circle of cord. A sudden snap of the taut line and pandemonium began. The snake lashed so and curled and whipped up a whirlpool of debris, while one of us held grimly on to the noose and the rest tried to disentangle the whirling coils and make certain of a tight grip close behind the head, praying for the screweyes to hold fast. Even with the scant inch of neck ahead of the noose, the head had such play that I had to pin it down with the gun-barrel before we 90 dared seize it. When our fingers gained their safe hold and pressed, the great mouth opened wide, a gaping expanse of snowy white tissue, and the inch-long fangs appeared erect, each draped under the folds of its sheath like a rapier outlined beneath a courtier's cloak.

When once the serpent felt himself conquered, he ceased to struggle; and this was fortunate, for in the dim light we stumbled more than once as we sidled and backed through the maze of lianas and over fallen logs.

Nupee now appeared, unashamed and wide-eyed with excitement. He followed and picked up the wreck of 10 battle-gun, hats, and bags which had been thrown aside or knocked off in the struggle. With locked step, so as not to wrench the long body, we marched back to Kalacoon. Now and then a great shudder would pass through the hanging loops and a spasm of muscular stress that tested our strength. It was no easy matter to hold the snake, for the scales on its 20 back were as rough and hard as a file, and a sudden twist fairly took the skin off one's hand.

I cleaned his mouth of all dirt and debris, and then we laid him upon the ground and, without stretching, found that he measured a good eight feet and a half. With no relaxing of care we slid him into the wired box which would be his home until he was liber30 ated in his roomier quarters in the Zoological Park in New York.

SOME AFRICAN GUN-BEARERS*

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Of all my wilder hunting companions those to whom I became most attached-although some of them were the wildest of all-were those Kermit and I had with us in Africa for eleven months. Disregarding a very problematical Christian, these were either Mohammedans or heathens. However, after having been in our employ a 10 little while, and after having adopted

*From A Book-Lover's Holidays in the Open; copyright, 1916, by Charles Scribner's Sons.

the fez, jersey, and short trousersand, as a matter of pure pride and symbolism, boots-they all regarded themselves as of an elevated social status, and openly looked down on the unregenerated "shenzis,' or natives who were still in the kirtle-of-bananaleaves cultural stage. They represented many different tribes. Some of them were file-toothed cannibals. Many 20 of them had come from long distances; for-as philanthropists will do well to note-being even a porter in a white man's service in British East Africa or Uganda or the Soudan, meant an amount of pay and a comfort of living and (although this, I think, was subordinate in their minds) a justness of treatment which they could by no possibility achieve in their own homes 30 under native conditions. As for the personal attendants, the gun-bearers, tent-boys, and saises, as well as the head men and askaris, or soldiers, they felt as far above the porters as the latter did above the shenzis. The common tongue was Swahili, a negroArab dialect, originally spoken by the descendants, mainly negro in blood, of the Arab conquerors, traders, and 40 slave-traders of Zanzibar. This is a lingo found over much of central Africa. But only a few of our men were Swahilis by blood.

Of course, most of them were like children, with a grasshopper inability for continuity of thought and realization of the future. They would often act with an inconsequence that was really puzzling. Dog-like fidelity, per- 50 severed in for months, would be ended by a fit of resentment at something unknown, or by a sheer volatility which made them abandon their jobs when it was even more to their detriment than to ours. But they had certain fixed standards of honor; the porter would not abandon his load. the gun-bearer would not abandon his