REMEMBER, NOW, HOW TRUE THROUGH ALL THOSE DAYS HE WAS, FRIEND, BROTHER, HUSBAND, FATHER, SON, FILL THE WHOLE LIMIT OF YOUR SPACE WITH PRAISE, THERE NEEDS NO ROOM FOR BLAME, BLAME THERE WAS NONE W. D. HOWELLS One of the oddest things of which I heard on my trip was that Mr. Howells is credited with being born in more than one place. A wealthy man has bought the property where the novelist dwelt in the family wanderings long after leaving Martin's Ferry. The owner and others in the region are convinced that their locality is Mr. Howells's first home. He was even considering erecting a birth-place for the distinguished author from some ruinous buildings on the premises. But I suppose the fact that a person is becoming legendary in his native region attests the genuineness and permanency of his fame. What vital influence, if any, the Ohio country of Mr. Howells's youth had on his genius I am uncertain. The small cities and rustic villages, and the farmlands with their stump-dotted fields that were still being wrested from the wilderness of the abounding woods, all left their impress, no doubt, but I incline to the belief that his admirable quality and large place in the literature of our day might be the same, even if the environment had been radically different. CLIFTON JOHNSON. _June, 1917._ YEARS OF MY YOUTH I It is hard to know the child's own earliest recollections from the things it has been told of itself by those with whom its life began. They remember for it the past which it afterward seems to remember for itself; the wavering outline of its nature is shadowed against the background of family, and from this it imagines an individual existence which has not yet begun. The events then have the quality of things dreamt, not lived, and they remain of that impalpable and elusive quality in all the after years. I