_By Violence_ and _Matrimony_ are Trevena's most beautiful short tales, and I hardly know which is the finer revelation of poetic grace and gentle vision. Their message is conveyed so quietly that they may be read for their sensuous beauty only, and yet convey a rare pleasure. If their feeling is veiled and somewhat aloof from the common ways of men, there is none the less a fine human sympathy concealed in them, and a golden radiance indissolubly woven into their pages. If Nature's power is inevitable in these stories, it is also kind, and I like to think that from _By Violence_ as a text a new reading of earth may be deciphered. Trevena has written the books of furze and heather and granite and bracken, which outlast time on the hills of Dartmoor. But this tale hints at a fifth force which survives all the others. Some day, when the wind is strong, John Trevena will write the book of "The Rain-drop," which is the gentlest of all elements, and yet outlasts the stone. Edward J. O'Brien _South Yarmouth, Mass._ _February 26, 1918_ BY VIOLENCE "Dear Sir,-- "The wooden enemies are out. "Yours obediently, "Oliver Vorse." Simon Searell read this short message as he tramped the streets of Stonehouse, which were full of fog, from the sea on one side and the river on the other. Vorse was an uneducated man; the mysticism of flowers was nothing to him, the time of spring was merely a change of season, and the most spiritual of blooms were only "wooden enemies." Searell frowned a little, not at the lack of education, which was rather a peace to be desired, but at the harshness of the words, and went on, wondering if the wood-anemones were to be his friends, or little cups of poison. He climbed streets of poor houses, their unhappy windows curtained with mist, and came out near a small church made of iron, a cheap and gaudy thing, almost as squalid on the outside as the houses. The backslider looked at it with a shudder. It was his no longer; he had given it up; he was forgetting those toy-like altars, the cheap brass candlesticks, the artificial flowers, and all the images. They were wooden and stone enemies to him now. He was going deeper to find the throbbing heart of religion, putting aside dolls and tapers and the sham of sentimentality. Solitude and mysticism were to be his stars through the night, and he trusted, with their aid, to reach the dawn. He turned from the church, stopped at a house, and that was squalid too, knocked, then wiped his boots, as if certain of being admitted. "Father Damon?" he asked shortly. Searell's voice was sweet; he had helped people "home," as they called it, with his tongue, not with his soul, just as a sweet-toned organ calls for tears with the beauty of its sounds, though the instrument itself is dead.