In O. Henry American journalism and the Victorian tradition meet. His mind, quick to don the guise of modernity, was impervious to its spirit. The specifically modern movements, the scientific awakening, the religious upheaval and subsidence, the socialistic gospel, the enfranchisement of women--these never interfered with his artless and joyous pursuit of the old romantic motives of love, hate, wealth, poverty, gentility, disguise, and crime. On two points a moral record which, in his literature, is everywhere sound and stainless, rises almost to nobility. In an age when sexual excitement had become available and permissible, this worshiper of stimulus never touched with so much as a fingertip that insidious and meretricious fruit. The second point is his feeling for underpaid working-girls. His passionate concern for this wrong derives a peculiar emphasis from the general refusal of his books to bestow countenance or notice on philanthropy in its collective forms. When, in his dream of Heaven, he is asked: "Are you one of the bunch?" (meaning one of the bunch of grasping and grinding employers), the response, through all its slang, is soul-stirring. "'Not on your immortality,' said I. 'I'm only the fellow that set fire to an orphan asylum and murdered a blind man for his pennies.'" The author of that retort may have some difficulty with the sentries that watch the entrance of Parnassus; he will have none with the gatekeeper of the New Jerusalem. THE MOWING OF A FIELD _By_ HILAIRE BELLOC We have not had in our time a more natural-born essayist, of the scampering sort, than Hilaire Belloc. He is an infectious fellow: if you read him much you will find yourself trying to imitate him; there is no harm in doing so: he himself caught the trick from Rabelais. I do not propose to rehash here the essay I wrote about him in a book called _Shandygaff_. You can refer to it there, which will be good business all round. I know it is a worthy essay, for much of it was cribbed from an article by Mr. Thomas Seccombe, which an American paper lifted from the English journal which, presumably, paid Mr. Seccombe for it. I wrote it for the Boston _Transcript_, where I knew the theft would be undetected; and in shoveling together some stuff for a book (that was in 1917, the cost of living was rising at an angle of forty-five degrees, as so many graphs have shown) I put it in, forgetting (until too late) that some of it was absolute plunder. Mr. Chesterton once said something like this: "It is a mistake to think that thieves do not respect property. They only wish it to become _their_ property, so that they may more perfectly respect it."