e that Mr. Ritchie was, during that winter, taking an agricultural
course at Columbia College, and that this is quite typical of the kind
of professional athlete California turns out. You would have expected
that in a long two-column interview, Mr. Ritchie would have devoted much
of the space to himself, his record, his future plans. Not at all. It
was all about Johnnie Dundee, for whom personally he seems to have
an affectionate friendship and for whose work a rueful and decidedly
humorous appreciation. He analyzed with great sapience the psychological
effect on the audience of Mr. Dundee's ring-system of perpetual motion.
He described with great delight a punch that Mr. Dundee had landed on
the very top of his head. In fact Mr. Dundee's publicity manager
could do no better than to use parts of this interview for advertising
purposes.

I began that last paragraph with the phrase, "A few years ago". But
since that time a whole era seems to have passed--that heart-breaking
era of the Great War. And now the Native Son has entered into and
emerged from a new and terrible game. He has needed--and I doubt not
displayed--all that he has of strength, natural and developed; of
keenness and coolness; of bravery and fortitude; of capacity to endure
and yet josh on.

Perhaps after all, though, the best example of the Native Son's fairness
was his enfranchisement of the Native Daughter and the way in which he
did it. Sometime, when the stories of all the suffrage fights are told,
we shall get the personal experiences of the women who worked in that
whirlwind campaign. It will make interesting reading; for it is both
dramatic and picturesque. And it will redound forever and ever and ever
to the glory of the Native Son.

The Native Son--in the truest sense of the romantic--is a romantic
figure. He could scarcely avoid being that, for he comes from the
most romantic State in the Union and, if from San Francisco, the most
romantic city in our modern world. It is, I believe, mainly his sense
of romance that drives him into the organization which he himself has
called the Native Sons of the Golden West; an adventurous instinct
that has come down to us from mediaeval times, urging men to form into
congenial company for offence and defence, and to offer personality the
opportunity for picturesque masquerade.

That romantic background not only explains the Native Son but the long
line of extraordinary fiction, with California for a back