Howl, you who have stultified your artists and buried them under the gingerbread morality of your own monotonous lives. Dreiser is the one novelist being published in America today who doesn’t listen to you, who describes you at your various bests, who wrings the pathos and joys out of your little worlds; who paints in with the brush of a universal art what you and I are doing in Alexandria and Chicago and New York and all the milk-station stops between. I am not a disciple of the Dreiserian Gospel. I would like to argue with him the certain superiorities of monogamy for the artist. But he has limned a hero who is not a sugar-coated moralizer. He has ignored superbly the mob-begotten mandates of literary excellence. Whatever his faults of composition or construction, and there are not so many as his friends endeavor to make out there are, he has magnificently booted the reading public, the morally subsidized critics and the very publishers in the coarsest regions of their bodies—their souls. And for these things I hail him as the greatest novelist in the country. I acclaim him as the only real, uncontaminated genius of these States and pray to God that my friend Sherwood Anderson will hurry up and get published so that there will be two of them. THE SCAVENGER. Leather Lane Three restless gas-jets In Leather Lane; A thousand faces, Wandering in the night, Too dull for pain. God saw; God quenched the light. But God had not choked The clamor of gaunt curses That stalk in Leather Lane, Uncloaked, Blatant with strength of dour years. God heard; God stopped His ears. Ho! God had forgot His nose, And in the stench that rose From Leather Lane, God died. —_Mitchell Dawson._ Etchings ALEXANDER S. KAUN I. Gratitude On the play-grounds. The pretty girl and I withdrew from the noisy festival to the desolate fountain. It was too hot to think, so I merely talked. An old, ragged, grey-bearded, gibbous Jew, with a basket over his arm, was slowly approaching us. The meaningless eyes of the pretty girl clouded. “Peddlers are not allowed on the grounds. He must have sneaked in.” The Jew stood at our side. He said nothing, but his timid eyes appealed. It was too hot to think, but for a moment I thought that a waft of eternity breathed upon me from out the sad, timid eyes, and from out the folds of the soiled old coat, and from out the clotty grey beard of the descendant of Isaiah and the Maccabees. “I shall buy some peaches, yes?” The pretty girl twitched her little nose. “But they are dusty.” “Oh, no. See, they are covered.”