stand by the smaller nations and every hour the surgeon gave me another hypodermic at the end of four weeks the cabin boy who had been thinking deeply all the time suggested that a plug of wood be inserted in my place which was done and i fell to the deck well nigh exhausted the next day i was set on shore in the captains gig and here i am. archy So far as I know, America has made just two entirely original contributions to the world's types of literary and dramatic art. These are the humorous colyum and the burlesque show. The saline and robust repartee of the burlicue is ancient enough in essence, but it is compounded into a new and uniquely American mode, joyously flavoured with Broadway garlic. The newspaper colyum, too, is a native product. Whether Ben Franklin or Eugene Field invented it, it bears the image and superscription of America. And using the word ephemeral in its strict sense, Don Marquis is unquestionably the cleverest of our ephemeral philosophers. This nation suffers a good deal from lack of humour in high places: our Great Pachyderms have all Won their Way to the Top by a Resolute Struggle. But Don has just chuckled and gone on refusing to answer letters or fill out Mr. Purinton's blasphemous efficiency charts or join the Poetry Society or attend community masques. And somehow all these things seem to melt away, and you look round the map and see Don Marquis taking up all the scenery.... He has such an oecumenical kind of humour. It's just as true in Brooklyn as it is in the Bronx. He is at his best when he takes up some philosophic dilemma, or some quaint abstraction (viz., Certainty, Predestination, Idleness, Uxoricide, Prohibition, Compromise, or Cornutation) and sets the idea spinning. Beginning slowly, carelessly, in a deceptive, offhand manner, he lets the toy revolve as it will. Gradually the rotation accelerates; faster and faster he twirls the thought (sometimes losing a few spectators whose centripetal powers are not starch enough) until, chuckling, he holds up the flashing, shimmering conceit, whirling at top speed and ejaculating sparks. What is so beautiful as a rapidly revolving idea? Marquis's mind is like a gyroscope: the faster it spins, the steadier it is. There are laws of dynamics in colyums just as anywhere else. What is there in the nipping air of Galesburg, Illinois, that turns the young sciolists of Knox College toward the rarefied ethers of literature? S.S. McClure, John Phillips, Ralph Waldo Trine, Don Marquis--are there other Knox men in the game, too? Marquis was studying at Galesburg about the time of the Spanish War. He has worked on half a dozen newspapers, and assisted Joel Chandler Harris in editing "Uncle Remus's Magazine." But let him tell his biography in his own words: Born July 29, 1878, at Walnut, Bureau Co., Ill., a member of the Republican party.