It is a young oak whose knotty branches, like playful fists, shoot in unexpected directions. It grows up near a grey solemn mausoleum. The mausoleum acts as if it does not notice the sturdy youngster; but it knows in its heart, if it has one, that it will soon be hidden in the shadow of this tree’s branches. Virile roots will crack the walls and decay will be the deserved fate. The Reader Critic _SHE IS NO FRIEND OF OURS!_ _Arthur Davison Ficke, Davenport, Iowa_: Will you be so kind as to ask your friend, “Virginia York”, to refrain from re-misprinting for a third time, a bit hacked from my _Café Sketches_? If she finds the poem so interesting, why does she not print it in its entirety, and correctly? Then perhaps her readers could decide just where the joke lies—in the light of “Virginia York’s” Olympian pronouncement that “maybe you think this is funny, but certainly it is not intended to be.” Just because a little learning would be dangerous for her, I shall never disclose to her what the poem _was_ intended to be. Besides, she wouldn’t believe me; for her, a thing has to be either _Lear_ or _Charley’s Aunt_, evidently. I have harbored doubts as to the value of _vers libre_; but now they are gone. For I see that it does shut out a certain type of mind. Harriet Dean’s _Pillar_ is admirable! Also Sandburg’s four. Tell your “sixteen year old boy” that his poem is damn interesting—but to cut out the “only sixteen” and “one could not expect me to know much about poetry” stuff. At sixteen most of us had read all the poetry in existence, and were busy writing epics that were to re-make the world. Tell him to stop being a sixteen-year-old worm, and to get up on his hind legs and bite the stars. Tell him to write arrogantly of this “charming” world he sees. It’s time enough to be humble when one is old. _THE PROPHET IN HIS OWN COUNTRY._ _Daphne and Michael Carr, Columbia, Missouri_: