The country is ten times as thoughtful about social problems as it was when my generation began. Recently the legislature made an appropriation to give me a new assistant in the Tombs. I wrote to several colleges and a dozen men applied for the job. I could take my pick. Twelve men out of one year’s college crop! I was a pioneer. And young Fletcher, the man I chose, asked me the other day, what I thought of Devine’s book, "The Causes of Misery." He is beginning work on the basis of that book. And Devine speaks of "The Abolition of Poverty" as if it was a commonplace. No one dared to dream that poverty could be abolished when I was a young man. We thought it was an indivisible part of civilization. I remember when I first heard Jacob Riis talk of abolishing the slums! I thought he was a dreamer. The tenement house department reports that a million new homes have been built in the city—under the new law—with no dark rooms. And the abolition of tuberculosis! Why I can remember a cholera epidemic! These young socialists do not realize what we have done. Last summer I took Nina and Marie and young Arnold, he is ten now, down on the Maine coast to an island where Billy and some of his artist friends have a camp. As I mingled with this colony of ardent young people, in spite of the sympathy, which real friendship with Billy has given me for them, I felt like a stranger. I am sure they think I am an old fogey. My mind kept jumping back to my own youth, comparing them with what I had been at their age. In so many ways they were better men than I was, better equipped for life. I remember especially one conversation with Billy. He had just finished a canvas as the twilight was falling. I think it is the finest thing he has done yet. There is a stretch of surf in the foreground and beyond the islands rise higher and higher to the peak of Mount Desert. I cannot describe it beyond these barren details. Somehow he has accentuated the rising upward lines, by some magic of his color he has infused the thing with immense emotion. "What are you going to call it?" I asked as he was putting up his tubes. "It hasn’t any name," he said. "It’s just a feeling I get sometimes—up here with the sea and the mountains." He pondered it a moment, seeking words. He is not a ready talker. "I think it’s one of the psalms," he said at last, "you know the one that begins: ’I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ It’s sort of religious—being all by one’s self and looking up." "What is your religion, Billy?" I asked. He sat silent, stopped arranging his brushes and looked off at the last of the sunlight on the summit of the mountain. "Have you got one?" I persisted.