As she said this, she teetered again, and I thought she was going back to Cosmos, but her friend vouchsafed: "She always does this when she gets a low mark." Two days later the young lady returned, bringing with her a Newfoundland dog. He loomed up between us, and examined me with moist eyes during the recitation on Rossetti. This intrusion I was left to interpret as I pleased. Let me hasten to say that I never evicted that dog. A class in composition brought other adventures. This time the chapel was crowded with sinners who were atoning for college courses scanted during the winter. I felt that I was in charge of a mob. Here my own naïveté protected me. In announcing the scope of the course I innocently promised the class the pleasure of writing a short story and a play. What a purgative! On the next day I was again at my ease with eight students. The drones had left for easier honey. Write a play, quoth a'! Only creative artists, I took it, remained. Yet with all these whimsical happenings, how much there was that was good and sound, if one cares for teaching! In this ancient New England college I found truly the strength of the hills. Earnestness, right thinking, the love of truth-these were here in abundance. Many of these students are my friends to-day.

The following summer the school caught reorganization. It was accordingly quarantined twelve miles away in the hills, and, in time, declared to have convalesced into a School of English. There were Deans, two of them, a faculty from all corners of the kingdom, a curriculum, and a hundred thousand acres of forest land for walks, fishing, and botany. For the less athletic there were beds of petunias and a set of croquet. The purpose of the School was high, a focusing upon the study of English in its entirety. Altogether it was an enterprise worth aiding. I believe that this is in many ways the best summer school in the United States.

The adventure in this school was at close quarters. We were housed in a single group of buildings, at an enormous distance from civilization and sea-level. Had the air been a factor here, salaries should have been very low indeed. The place itself was a blessing. Nothing academic about it, I assure you. I met one class in a parlor, another in a smoking room-alas, in name

only. My students sat in veranda rockers, or dining room stiffbacks, or three on a sofa. My only bulwark was a marbletopped table around which the clan gathered after the ringing of a colossal dinner bell. You see it was almost convivial. I used the bell effectively in teaching Macbeth.

That class in Shakespeare was the class par excellence. I am tempted to a panegyric in Nestorian vein: "In all my years of teaching, never have I seen nor shall I see-" Every state in America was represented, every college, from Harvard to Otter Creek. From the first moment it was give-and-take, with no pause till the instructor collapsed or the tocsin sounded the next ordeal. I have never had better hours of teaching than with that class, and when I am reminded of the benefit to the teacher from a summer school, I think of them.

But even in such a summer school Comedy misses triumph by only a hair's breadth. I began immediately to have adventures. Every morning, for instance, half my class modestly took places behind the marble-topped table, and behind me. I am sure that we are not to take the famous "circles" of literature too exactly. They must have been half moons. No professor, however owllike in face and neck muscles, can lecture backwards. Each morning I remobilized my cohorts, and each morning they reformed with creaking chairs into a scholastic halo. Then what do you think of the moments when the instructor enthusiastically addresses a score of lady pupils with a loud: "Gentlemen!” or still more vigourously and beseechingly as "Men"? Or, when he misreads his lists and invokes a lady by her first name? Then, too, even among these elect the variety of ages and types was bewildering. One of my most ardent students was summering in the mountains with her grandchildren. At her left sat a débutante. I was always feeling that something more cheerful ought to be done for this lovely creature. I thought of a box of caramels, but dismissed the idea as impractical and profane. I never felt that she was carried away by Cardinal Newman's Apologia. Had I rushed to the piano and shouted: "Now for a dance!" she would have been delirious with joy. But this would not have pleased the married graduate student. He was older and certainly knew more than teacher. The Apologia was his

favourite book. My classroom was as full of humours as a comedy of Ben Jonson's, and my life as merry.

One delightful student of some summer schools is the individual at the back of the room known as "auditor" or "listener". These persons sit together like a jury: they are magnificently unbiased, for they have not read the assignment. They are gleaners; they pick the crumbs from the feasts of others. They are amusing, and I suppose that it is good business to get one's fill of tuition, but it is false education.

Occasionally the summer school teacher has his adventures outside the classroom. In large summer schools the instructor is often paid per course, and during the other hours he may either study or drink himself to death; nobody cares which. But in others he may have opportunities for other kinds of self development. He may give readings on occasional evenings. He may act in Shakespearean plays. Or he may be blackfaced and sing verses about swinging on an old apple tree. In the dining room he may eat with his students and discuss literature and the problems of teaching. At the end of each week other students may be shifted, as in the good old game of Boston, to his table, and the teacher may thus know the problems of his students. Do you like the idea? (It was the best part of my experience.) I do. But, as I wrote the Dean, I have other things to occupy me. I like to give readings; I like amateur theatricals; I admit an interest in vaudeville, and I play with my students the year round. But who-let him speak out boldly! can satisfy the requirements in college for new courses, for publication, for tireless and effective teaching, and spend summer after summer in playing school? For teaching, winter or summer, is exhausting. The teacher's summers are his years of plenty: they are for travel, reading, research, knowing other men. Sometimes they are merely for listening to the music of a trout stream or watching the shadows play over the hills; just loafing. This, then, is the text of these confessions: summer school during every summeris a calamity! During no summer?-well, you have missed a real experience.

STANLEY T. WILLIAMS.

ANCIENT EGYPT IN AMERICA

BY MRS. SCHUYLER VAN RENSSELAER

I

THE tremendous ploughshares of the French Revolution, rooting out and burying many time honoured things, upturned into the light of day others long forgotten, unregarded, or misprized. Thanks to the guiding hand of General Bonaparte, one of these recoveries was the art of ancient Egypt. The French occupation of the Nile country lasted less than three years, yet it bore immediate and splendid fruit in the encyclopædic work called Description de l'Egypte. Other explorations, other great illustrated books, soon followed. England was awakened to interest by important collections taken from the French when they surrendered at Alexandria in 1801. Travelling savants and wealthy tourists began to bring home works of art. So did more or less commercially minded "antiquity hunters", exploring the sandshrouded temples, entering the Pyramids, discovering hidden tombs. The most successful of these was the Italian Belzoni, who worked partly on his own account, partly as agent for Henry Salt, the British consul-general at Cairo. Publishing the story of his adventures and exhibiting some of his finds in London in 1820, Belzoni figured for a time as a popular hero. Many of Salt's acquisitions were bought for the British Museum in 1823, others by the King of France for the Louvre. In 1824 Champollion made known his great achievement, the reading of the hieroglyphs. In 1836 the obelisk of Ramses the Great was set up on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, and soon the collections and the writings of Lepsius, and Wilkinson's books of a more popular kind, were spreading in Germany and in England the new knowledge of a civilization in regard to which Herodotus had remained for twenty-three centuries the chief authority.

Nor was America untouched by this new knowledge. Many

American travelers must have examined the collections rapidly growing in European cities, while the most indifferent could not escape acquaintance with some of the elements of Egyptian art as they had affected, especially in the designing of furniture, the development in France of the style of the First Empire. Not until near the middle of the century were the products of this style wholly submerged by successive waves of nondescript forms and patterns. So in old-fashioned American houses may still be seen beautiful pieces of Empire furniture brought home in the 'thirties and 'forties, and also a variety of articles de Paris modeled at long distance!-upon Egyptian suggestions: little marble sphinxes, sarcophagi, and obelisks adorned with makebelieve hieroglyphic inscriptions, which served as thermometers, inkstands, paper-weights, or "mantel ornaments". And every self-respecting American bookcase then contained at least one book on Egypt-Sir Gardiner Wilkinson's Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, first published in 1837.

But this was not all. More Americans than might be supposed visited Egypt; a number of them wrote books about it, two of which are still remembered,-Prime's Boat Life in Egypt and Nubia and Curtis's delightful Nile Notes of a Howadji,―and some of them brought home valuable antiquities for the benefit, as it has proved, of the public of today. The earliest of these was a Colonel Cohen of Baltimore, who believed that in 1832 he had been the first to carry up the Nile the flag of the United States. His collection, which contained a part of Henry Salt's, was not exhibited until 1884, when it was given by his heirs to Johns Hopkins University. But even before his day mummies had been more than once shown to our public. Between 1842 and 1850 George Gliddon, an Englishman whose father had acted as the first consul of the United States in Cairo, lectured here on Egypt with the aid of objects of art and of paintings enlarged from one of the great illustrated books. A volume of his lectures, printed in New York in 1843, had by 1847 run through fifteen editions, each of several thousand copies.

Of course all this does not mean that any real knowledge of Egyptian art was spread abroad in our far-off country when it had as yet no help from museums of art or even from photography.