When a Story of the O’Brien school begins like that, you feel sure it is going to lead to something disgusting and you are seldom disappointed, certainly not in this instance. It is a sort of elegy on the falling leaves. Mr. Anderson almost weeps for pity of the falling leaves. Listen to the patter of the Andersonian tears: “* * * the yellow, red and golden leaves fall straight down heavily. The rain beats them brutally down. They are denied a last golden flash across the sky. In October, leaves should be carried away, out over the plains, in a wind. They should go dancing away.” You have a feeling as you read this, that Mr. A. rather fancies it himself. You can almost hear him say: “I do this fallen-leaf stuff rather well, if you know what I mean!” and since it is the only pretty bit in the Story, you hardly blame him for repeating it at the end. For my part, I am suspicious; I am not from Missouri, but, nevertheless, I require to be shown. I ask myself: “Is Mr. Anderson sincere?” I read further on, and I find that he is not. This is what I read: “* * * His arms tightened about the body of the little dog so that it screamed with pain. I stepped forward and tore the arms away, and the dog fell to the ground and lay whining. No doubt it had been injured. Perhaps ribs had been crushed. The old man stared at the dog lying at his feet.” Nothing more about the little dog until, a few lines further on, Mr. Anderson shows that the dying agony of a little dog excited only a passing interest in him. “An hour ago the old man of the house in the forest went past my door and the little dog was not with him. It may be that as we talked in the fog he crushed the life out of his companion. It may be that the dog, like the workman’s wife and her unborn child, is now dead. The leaves of the trees that line the road before my window are falling like rain—the yellow, red and golden leaves fall straight down heavily * * *,” and so on, with a repetition of the opening rhapsody of grief for the falling leaves. So, you see, to Sherwood Anderson a falling leaf is a heart-rending sight, but a falling puppy, even though its ribs be crushed and it scream with agony, is quite another thing. No, Mr. Anderson is not sincere. And if an artist, though he fairly reek with seething dynamic chaos and vitally compelling psychology, have not sincerity, all the Asterisks in Mr. O’Brien’s sweatshop will avail him naught. End of Project Gutenberg's Neither Here Nor There, by Oliver Herford