It will be a shame if, like George Peele and some others, he ends in a jestbook and never flies further. Exaggeration such as that in some of the stories presses upon genius. His pick drags behind him on his way West and the first thing he knows he has cut out the Colorado Canyon; he blows the new dinner horn and down fall three square miles of timber; with his Blue Ox to help him he brings an Alaskan glacier down to the States and digs out Puget Sound for the Government; he raises corn in Kansas enormous enough to suck the Mississippi dry and interfere with navigation; he builds a hotel so high that he has “the last seven stories put on hinges so’s they could be swung back for to let the moon go by”; his ax “had a wove grass handle and Paul he jist swung it round in a circle an’ cut all the trees within reach to wunst.” He has a daughter Teenie of the same heroic breed, an adequate dog named Elmer, and the Blue Ox, Babe, “a ’normous critter—forty ax-handles an’ a plug o’ Star terbacker between the eyes.” The question what the American imagination will make of Paul Bunyan is a curious one. Will it make him another Hercules or another Munchausen? Or will it extravagantly think itself rich enough to afford to neglect him? THE WORST AMERICAN BOOK Now and then an honest superlative is both a luxury and a necessity, and I take real pleasure in declaring my confident belief that the worst book in American literature is one which was written by Milo Erwin of Williamson County, Illinois, and published at Marion, the county seat, in 1876 under the title _The Bloody Vendetta_. Though intended to be an authoritative county history, it concerns itself chiefly with a feud which had lately flourished in the neighbourhood between the Bulliner and Henderson clans, with their allies. Only ruthless quotation can do the work justice.