However, the future of the English speaking race is with us on this continent, and in Australia and in Africa, and so certain characteristics of the English mind and English literature will be remolded and touched and broadened by other racial influences. They have already been so modified and changed here since Emerson’s day. So, eventually, instead of Americans looking obsequiously over to Paternoster Row and Fleet street in all intellectual concerns, England will shrink into a small and insignificant provincial community, cut off from the rest of the race and its great centres of thought. Modern civilization will upset all the traditions of the old intellectual centres by making new ones. Thus our posterity will have a revenge on British condescension we can only enjoy in anticipatory imaginings. I wish I could live as long as Methusaleh to be alive then. England and English’ literature will perhaps finally hold the importance of the Provencal literature in France—it will be an archaic survival in the midst of the great throbbing heart of a great modern people. Our descendants will roar over our adulation of English female theological novelists. * * * * * The _Chip-Munk_ “Notes” are all long past due; and most depressing to contemplate. It was after trying to make sense of them that Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote: I am tired, and that old sorrow Sweeps down the bed of my soul, As a turbulent river might suddenly break Away from a dam’s control. It beareth a wreck on its bosom, A wreck with a snow-white sail, And the hand on my heartstrings thrums away, But they only respond with a wail. * * * * * Here is a true story that I have pinched for the benefit of the Hivites, the Moabites, the Hittites and the Parasites: A nice young man in Scranton called on a nice young lady and spent the evening. When he arrived there was not a cloud in the sky, so he carried no umbrella and wore neither goloshes nor mackintosh. At ten o’clock when he arose to go, it was raining cats and dogs; the gutters o’erflowed and if it had been in Johnstown, it could properly have been called a Johnstown flood. “My, my, my!” said the nice young lady, “if you go out in all this storm you will catch your death a’ cold!” “I’m afraid I might!” was the trembling answer. “Well, I’ll tell you what—stay all night; you can have Tom’s room, since he’s at college. Yes, occupy Tom’s room—excuse me a minute and I’ll just run up and see if it’s in order.” The young lady flew gracefully up the stairs to see that Tom’s room was in order. In five minutes she came down to announce that Tom’s room was in order, but no Charles was in sight. Like old Clangingharp, he had passed out—no one knew where or how. But in a very few moments he appeared, very dripping and out of breath from running, a bundle in a newspaper under his arm. “Why, Charles, where have you been?” was his greeting.