the soul of the building just the same as the master-men who rule the building.

20

Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor empties its men and women who go away and eat and come back to work. Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on them. One by one the floors are emptied . . . The uniformed elevator men are gone. Pails clang... Scrubbers work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit, and machine grime of the day. Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for money. The sign speaks till midnight.

Darkness

...

on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence holds . . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip pockets. Steel safes stand in corners. Money is stacked in them. A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.

By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.

BACK YARD

Shine on, O moon of summer.

25

Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar. Let me pry loose old walls.

Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike. Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.

Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.

Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white

stars.

COOL TOMBS

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin ... in the dust, in the cool tombs.

ST. JOHN DE CRÈVECŒUR, 1735-1813

A figure of increasing importance in the history of early American literature has been St. John de Crèvecœur, a member of a noble French family and a picturesque adventurer in our colonial and revolutionary periods. He had been educated as a youth in London where he had acquired a mastery of the English language, and then, the spirit of roving upon him, he had served as a soldier in Montcalm's army in Canada, had tramped over most of the colonies in search of adventure, and at length had settled down in Orange County, New York, had married into one of the substantial families of the region, had taken out naturalization papers as a citizen of the State, and for something like a decade had lived the idylic farm life he has so enthusiastically described in his writings. The Rev. olution, however, broke harshly in upon his little Eden and destroyed it. He was a loyalist, and as such was so severely handled that he was forced to flee from the country leaving his family behind him. In London, on his way to France, he was able to sell for thirty guineas a series of papers he had written, selections from which were issued in 1782 under the title Letters from an American Farmer, a book that made some stir in England and later in France. Not till 1793, however, was the volume issued in America. His later life was filled with sadness. As soon as possible after the war he returned to America, only to find his wife dead, his children scattered, and his little Eden forever broken. He remained in the city as French Consul for six years, and finally returned to France in 1790.

The volume of Crèvecœur sketches is being more and more recognized as an American classic. Unquestionably it contains the best American prose before Irving. Its author was original, unaffected by models, reporting the results of his own seeing and thinking. He was the first of our nature writers, and, moreover, the first of our realists. Recently (1925) a remarkable addition to the letters has come to light, another and larger volume of material, doubtless the articles rejected for one rea son or another from the earlier volume. The new material increases the value of Crèvecœur's work many fold. Much of it was rejected apparently because of its bitingly realistic pictures of the brutal methods of the Revolution. Some of the papers surpass anything in the earlier volume. "The Snow Storm" reminds us at every point of Whittier, and in their graphic intensity and headlong action some of the Revolutionary descriptions are like the work of Parkman,

ON THE PLEASURES OF AN AMERICAN FARMER

This

I never see my trees drop their leaves and their fruit in the autumn, and bud again in the spring, without wonder; the sagacity of those animals which have long been the tenants of my farm astonish me: some of them seem to surpass even men in memory and sagacity. I could tell you singular instances of that kind. What then is this instinct which we so debase, and of which we are taught to entertain so diminutive an idea? My bees, above any other tenants of my farm, attract my attention and respect; I am astonished to see that nothing exists but what has its enemy, one species pursue and live upon the other: unfortunately our king birds are the destroyers of those industrious insects; but on the other hand, these birds preserve our fields from the depredation of crows which they pursue on the wing with great vigilance and astonishing dexterity. Thus divided by two in terested motives, I have long resisted the desire I had to kill them, until last year, when I thought they increased too much, and my indulgence had been carried too far; it was at the time of swarming when they all came and fixed themselves on the neighbouring trees, from whence they catched those that returned loaded from the fields. made me resolve to kill as many as I could, and I was just ready to fire, when a bunch of bees as big as my fist, issued from one of the hives, rushed on one of the birds, and probably stung him, for he instantly screamed, and flew, not as before, in an irregular manner, but in a direct line. He was followed by the same bold phalanx, at a consider able distance, which unfortunately becoming too sure of victory, quitted their military array and disbanded themselves. By this inconsiderate step they lost all that aggregate of force which had made the bird fly off. Perceiving their disorder he immediately returned and snapped as many as he wanted; nay he had even the impudence, to alight on the very twig from which the bees had drove him. I killed him and immediately opened his craw, from which I took 171 bees; I laid them all on a blanket in the sun, and to my great sur prise 54 returned to life, licked themselves clean, and joyfully went back to the hive; where they probably informed their companions of such an adventure and escape, as I believe had never hap pened before to American bees! I draw a great fund of pleasure from the quails which inhabit my farm; they abundantly repay me, by their various notes and peculiar tameness, for the inviolable hos pitality I constantly shew them in the winter. In