edge with spire-like balsams and spruces. It was floored with stones white as alabaster, green as emeralds, yellow as gold, blue as the sky above us. The water flood was as transparent as glass. We came along at a pace as leisurely as the river would allow, fishing the best pools, and with great success. We stopped on a shady point for luncheon, and sat for an hour while he talked of the old times. Always when he spoke of his sister Cordelia, there would be a tender note in his voice. Then he would turn away and a moment of silence would follow.

At the Long Sluice Pool, he would have me take the best position. How the great salmon took my flies and leaped into the air and fought for their lives with me-fourteen of them as I sat in one position! It was a day of ten thousand, flavored with beauty and friendship and the most thrilling sport that man has discovered. But, chiefly, that day was remarkable for its background—of long peace, of respect for law and order, of happiness and prosperity and good will in the world. It was for us the last day of an era in the history of man.

As we approached the landing, six miles from Gaspé, we were living its final moments. We got out of the boats. A man gave Mr. Hepburn an accumulation of mail and newspapers. He tore the wrapper from one of the latter and read its headlines. "My God!" he exclaimed. "Read this."

I read of the murders in Sarajevo.

"That doesn't look like a serious matter does it?" I asked. "It means war, and probably a world war!" he answered. He said not a word on the road to Gaspé-save to himself. He was depressed. He muttered. After that he was different. Indeed all the world was different. which fell upon us as we rode. The old order of things had passed with the sunlight. A new time was come.

I think often of that night

IRVING BACHELLER.

WHAT IS BACKGROUND?

BY MURIEL HARRIS

THE fairy-tale of Paris belongs to all of us, in whatever terms it may be told. For some it is Marie Antoinette and the Petit Trianon; and, curiously, by comparison with a rather worthless Queen, the Great War pales. For some it is Napoleon in his cocked hat and white breeches, and his great tomb, one of the fingertips of Paris. For still more it is the Bois and the elegance and luxury and beautiful women; and for the rest, there is always the particular application-the house where Balzac had his printingpress, or perhaps only a great stone wall, symbol of the centuries, over which a fruit-tree blooms, symbol of centuries continually renewed. I cannot think of anyone for whom there is not in Paris some answering chord, some link with a great aggregate of humanity, which has lived and wrought and piled up history and romance and experience for two thousand years, all under the one banner of Paris.

Nor is it again necessarily an individual circumstance, or a person, which causes a thrilling as it brings the mind in contact with that great accumulation. I like to think that Julian on his island in the Seine took pleasure in watching the waters flow by, even as to-day I note that they are higher or lower, or that one of the indefatigable fishermen has really caught a gudgeon. It is pleasant to contemplate King Louis's Sainte Chapelle and to think upon his piety, wondering how it really struck his people, whether they liked his saintliness or often found it boring, whether he sometimes lost his temper, or appreciated Parisian cooking; to try to disengage the man who built the chapel from all the hearsay and convention which have made of him but one more stone figure upon a tomb. At least he liked his island in the Seine, just as Julian liked it, just indeed as you and I like it to-day. Perhaps too his court caught gudgeons and hoped the heavy rains would not bring a flood. It is moving to see the stones in an

ancient church, some of which go back to the time of Christ, relics of the Roman day; it is very nearly amusing to see the Panthéon, with all its modernness and the Gallic spirit, which buries its great men there, and then with a change of opinion, takes them out again; it is stirring to remember that it stands upon the hill of Saint Geneviève who saved Paris, and to think that there were then, even as now, rebels against the old autocrat, however saintly, rebels indeed for whom Paris has always been famous. All these things may or may not strike the spark which brings the past once more to life. But they form a background for their descendants, against which they in turn achieve significance. They are something which belongs to the Old World and to Paris in particular. For Paris has always been modern, whether in the innovation of her Sainte Chapelle or of her Panthéon. To-day and yesterday, the latest comers have an inheritance of astonishing unity.

It is perhaps necessary to have lived in the New World to realize the significance of background such as Paris. The New World is like a clean, white linen sheet, full of utility, good to touch, pleasantly suggestive perhaps of wind and water and green grass. Paris is like a piece of old lace, mellow, exquisite, the outcome of centuries of human effort, all of which whisper their story to those who can hear and give an impetus towards the next. There is hardly a street in Paris which has not a story. And it need not be the story of a Queen who went into a convent here; a King who was murdered there. It need not even be the French Revolution with all its inclusion of the people proper. But there you have a stone stair-case, the steps of which are worn with myriad feet, old and young, sorrowful and joyous. That red tiled floor has been waxed for a century and more. Generations of locksmiths have worked without intermission in the little shop below, while the street echoes and reëchoes with the secular cries and Pan-pipes of the china-menders, the rag-and-bone men, the fruit-sellers, what not. At the café at the corner perhaps the Encyclopædists met and talked; still more significant, the green-grocer and the baker and the oil-merchant thrash out questions of the day, now as then, while their wives, Buddha-like, sit behind the counter in the shop, never moving, it would almost

seem, even to go to bed. It has all been done and done again and is still being done, and in the curiosity-shop-and curiosityshops abound-there is in the bits of lace or china, in the quaint prints selling for a song, in scraps of chintz or brocade, an epitome of Parisian life, as with outward changes it has pursued its changeless way. To the outsider it is at least picturesque; some of it he has seen in books, perhaps on the stage. Here it is actually real, normal, natural, no effort towards "atmosphere", towards effect of any kind, an amazing background, against which real people live and move and have their being.

And what is background? What is the difference between the virgin forest, perhaps as old as Paris after all, and the hill upon which St. Denis's head was cut off, the Paris indeed which is most thrilling by reason of its deeds of violence? What is the difference between the inspiration of an uncharted country and the stones which have been trodden by a race? It is the difference of a great limitation. Background is a frame, a container, a vehicle. It enables men not only to see, but to see something. It is the motor of thought, which, even when the thinker ceases his small effort towards understanding, still carries him along and saves him the effort each time of going back to the beginning. It is not for nothing that the human being is gregarious. The creative effort which is in everyone is always seeking means to express itself. Background provides a common formula, for it also is composed of human beings and it is to human beings that a man tells his story, seeks to gain their sympathy and understanding, to empty himself, as it were, of the thought that is bursting in his mind and so to obtain relief. Possibly the greatest gift of background is its provision of a common language, and just as some languages are halting, limited, so others, such as that of Paris, have a wealth of words that almost outrun their original function: The whispering forest is articulate only to the few, and the man who would express himself in its language has with hard labor to hew out the means by which he can translate it to the many. The common language of Paris is shared in more or less degree by all. The slightest allusion calls up a picture in the mind of the listener, and the speaker is freed from the bondage of means, from the material side of thought, by all this wealth of background,

Background is often called history; but history too often only means a St. Bartholomew, a Fronde, a Joséphine, all the more astonishing things which have as little to do with the real living of the people as have the melodramas of the cinematograph. The Great War taught us what history really is. We saw with our eyes how living events were gradually transformed, shaped and chiselled out of their original semblance to fit in with the general scheme of things-the difference between a man himself and his memorial tablet. In the long chain of events, this monumentalism, this desiccation, has its uses, if we are not to be swamped with detail. But for the particular point upon which we concentrate, it is sadly insufficient. Thus we cling to the magic which now and again enables us to raise the dead—the magic of a word "tocsin," for instance, infinitely more vivid than all the killings of the Bartholomew massacre; the magic of a picture— Puvis de Chavannes's charming Bishop as he discovers the little Geneviève, a real man in relation to a real and dear little girl. The Roman baths at the Cluny Museum give a more sudden jolt into the reality of the Roman occupation than histories of Roman Emperors, just because they are out of their classic setting, and "All Gaul is divided into three parts" ceases to be a Latin exercise and becomes a traveler's discovery. Sometimes indeed it is the present which is the classic and the past which really lives. All the dressmaking side of Paris, for instance, is at least as classic as the Conciergerie or the Place de la Grève. Did not French Queens, four hundred years ago, send Paris fashions to their less fortunate friends of England and Bavaria? Is not the Quartier Latin itself a classic formula of long hair and big black ties, which has been echoed all the world over? Are not the Bird Market and the Flower Market and the midinette at least as much the Paris stock-in-trade as the house of Madame de Sévigné, the Louvre, and all the places which we ought to see and for that very reason had much better neglect if we wish truly to realize Paris? It is not the date of a century that makes it classic; it is not its date that makes it vivid. Some of the incidents of the Great War are already more classic, are more bound up and set upon a shelf, than is, for instance, the survival in the name of Issyles-Moulineaux of the earliest granaries of Paris. The Roman