A great many readers of the powerful poem called “The Wail of the Hack Writer” in this issue, picturing a mood of revulsion and despair common enough among all writers who have to earn a livelihood by the pen, will be surprised in coming upon the name of the author, Sam Walter Foss. This is an interesting phase of personality. This poem reveals a new and serious personality in a writer already known to a wider circle of readers than few of us can ever hope to reach. For years the name of Sam Walter Foss has been synonymous with the most bubbling humor and spontaneous, genial fun. One could guess this man took life smiling from the laugh in all his work, and his optimistic, large belief in his fellows. And the superficial reader, caught with these merry jingles and this good-natured philosophy, might naturally think that Mr. Foss was a man who took all life as a joke, who hated serious books, and never saw the sad side of life. The optimism of the man is in his work, but it is not a narrow optimism, and all this light fun is born of a deep and serious interest in the human drama being played out today. The man himself is a serious man in all his ideas and interests in life, and there is a serious undercurrent of purpose in all his fun making. Yvette Guilbert, the famous Paris chanteuse, who is now singing at the Olympia in New York, is said to give in her repertoire some humorous songs with more point in them than our English speaking audiences are accustomed to. As two thirds of her English speaking audiences will not be able to thoroughly understand her, even those who can read and speak French being unable to follow it closely when sung, it must be interesting to watch the faces of her audiences. While Mlle. Guilbert is singing her sweet ditties of love-lorn maiden’s hopes and trials, it is ten to one the greater part of her audience will be imagining all sorts of wicked, depraved things are being publicly sown in the hearts of our innocent people. London has pronounced her songs shocking. We can scarcely expect Mlle. Guilbert will be much better understood on this side, for the Anglo-Saxon has rarely the temperament to catch the play of Gallic humor. So half the audience will sit and dream in abandonment of the wicked things wicked people are reported to do; and those who are so fortunate as to have wicked thoughts of their own will think them, and Mlle. Guilbert will have to bear all their blushes.