_A Boy, Chicago_: I am a boy sixteen years old, and one could not expect me to know much about poetry—especially free verse. But I have heard of your magazine as a magazine that was ready to print what all kinds of people thought. So I have written a little verse—it is not a poem—telling you something about what is going on inside my mind, for these matters trouble every boy’s mind, although you may think that we are light-minded at my age. BLINDNESS I suppose I must be blind. People say continually that the world is a wicked place; I hear them talking about it all the time. They say our city streets reek With sin and sorrow And all manner of misery and filth, And yet I do not see any of it. I go up and down these streets every day And I see that they are ugly and that many people Are deformed and sick and hungry; But I close my eyes to it. I suppose somebody will call me cowardly, but what shall I do? I have no money to give the poor, and perhaps That is not getting at their real trouble anyway. I cannot heal the sick and deformed. I cannot make the streets cleaner. So I just think of other things. Of my books at home, or the tennis courts in the park, Or my pretty sister or anything. There is nothing wrong in my own world. I am happy. I like my school well enough. I have my boy friends, and they are healthy athletic boys. All the girls I know are good girls, With charming and high minds. And yet it is true that many boys lie and steal, And girls run away and are dragged into lives of shame. Why do I not see it? Why do I not do anything? Why am I so helpless, if I have any duty to others? FROM “THE INTERSTATE MEDICAL JOURNAL” A case in point showing how little has been achieved by our medical men who have gone among the people, torch in hand, to lead them to the Promised Land of happiness and content and physical and mental health has been well illustrated in a poem, recently published in THE LITTLE REVIEW (Chicago), wherein the authoress, Mary Aldis, unwittingly indicts the whole medical profession for still allowing the sale of a patent medicine to reduce obesity. The strange title of the poem in homely and unadorned “free verse” is “Ellie: The Tragic Tale of An Obese Girl.”