ched for another
outing in your literary regions.

Meanwhile you amaze me with the charge that "of literature the city has no
sense, or indeed only contempt," and I await the promised explanation with
interest. For my own part, I often wonder if there will remain any
opportunities for literary intelligence to expand at all when the happy
(?) faculty of man's ingenuity has devastated all nature's countenance and
resources with "improvements," cut down all the trees to make houses of,
and turned all the green waterways into horse-power for machinery. Then we
shall have cotton-mill epics, phonograph elegies from the tops of tall
buildings; and then ragtime music, which interprets that divine art only
for vulgar heels and toes, will take the place of anthems and great
operas.

The books have come, and among them is another lady's literary effort to
make a garden. _Judith_ it is this time, following hard upon the sunburned
heels of _Elizabeth, Evelina_, and I do not know how many more hairpin
gardeners. Why does not some man with a real spade and hoe give his
experience in a sure-enough garden? I am wearied of these little
freckled-beauty diggers who use the same vocabulary to describe roses and
lilies that they do in discussing evening toilets and millinery
creations.

VI

JESSICA TO PHILIP

MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:

We have had a visitor, Professor M----, the doctor of English literature
in E---- College, which you will remember is not very far from
Morningtown. He came to examine a few first editions father has of some
old English classics--(I have neglected to tell you that this is father's
one carnal indulgence, dead books printed in funny hunchbacked type!). He
is a young man, but so bewhiskered that his face suggests a hermit
intelligence staring at life through his own wilderness. His voice is
pitched to a Browning tenor tone, and I have good reasons for believing
that he is a bachelor.

Still we had some talk together, and that is how I came to practise a
deceit upon you. Seeing a copy of _The Gazette_ lying on the table this
morning, Professor M---- was reminded to say that there was a "strong
man," Philip Towers by name, connected with that paper now. I cocked my
head at once like a starling listening to a new tune, for that was the
first time I had heard your name praised by a literary man in the South.
He went on to say that he had been delighted with your last book, _Milton
and His Generation_, and