rocess I now believe to have been
entirely useless. The bark was next hammered all over with the haft of
the knife, which was held by the blade. Then when the inner layer of the
bark was well bruised, it could be removed in one piece. To effect this
I was taught to hold it in my handkerchief, and after a twist or two, a
delicious yielding was experienced and the bark slipped off. The shiny
white stick which remained in the other hand had to be cut in half,
shaved in a particular way and again fitted into its bark tube. Then
came the exciting moment,--would the thing whistle? The joy was short
lived, and the whistles soon dried and shrank and ceased to satisfy the
artist. But it was always possible to make a new one.

Since the above description was written, there has appeared in _The
Times_ Literary Supplement (February 22, 1917, p. 90) a notice of the
poems of a Canadian writer {3} from which the reviewer quotes the
following beautiful lines:

"So in the shadow by the nimble flood,
He made her whistles of the willow wood,
Flutes of one note with mellow slender tone;
(A robin piping in the dark alone).
Lively the pleasure was the wand to bruise,
And notch the light rod for its lyric use,
Until the stem gave up its slender sheath,
And showed the white and glistening wood beneath.
And when the ground was covered with light chips,
Grey leaves and green, and twigs and tender slips," . . .

This could only have been written by one perfectly familiar with the art
of whistle-making. But it seems to have been misunderstood by the
reviewer, who says that he "once came upon one of these small AEolian
harps in a wooded isle in the 'Land of Afternoon,'" . . . and decided
"that it was a work of superstition by Indian hands." As an AEolian harp
is a stringed instrument sounded by the wind, and a whistle belongs to
the very distinct class of musical things sounded by human breath, I can
only suppose that the reviewer has misunderstood the poem.

I cannot leave the Canadian poet without a reference to the beautiful
line, ("A robin piping in the dark alone.") A Canadian robin must surely
make a song like ours, who seems also to sing in parenthesis.

The other form of rustic pipe that pleased me was a sort of oboe made
from a dandelion stalk by squeezing it at one end. It had a rough nasal
note, which could be controlled by holes cut in the stalk and stopped
with the fing