seven members of the faculty and six students all told-which has just undertaken the formidable task of cutting down the social activities of Wellesley College. There appear to be twenty-eight 'events' in the official year of that institution which do not fit closely into the work of communcating and getting knowledge for which all educational establishments primarily exist. And of the twenty-eight the very names show how fearfully and wonderfully wise the students must be in things that bring no marks and count nothing towards a degree.. 'Forums,' 'promenades,' 'song competitions' and 'student government meetings' are intelligible enough. But what, pray, are floats,' 'birthday rallies,' 'forensic burnings' and 'barn-swallow parties'?

"For some of these extra-academic interests, of course, there is much to be said. A reasonable amount of time given to language, debating and theatrical clubs is sure to promote intellectual development and tell in the examinations. A sufficiency of athletic exercises is an indispensable prerequisite of the sound mind in the sound body. Nor is the social side of college life out of relation to the more general aims of the college. That side has been greatly intensified in the last ten or fifteen years, and our students would suffer if it were to be seriously curtailed by faculties overfearful for their commencement output. If the spirit of democracy is to be imbibed anywhere it is to be acquired where the fraternities and the sororities meet for social intercourse outside college hours. Here is a blessed influence which lingers in the memory and could be ill spared from our educational processes.

"But there is a due mean in everything, and the interests of study have the right of way. The trouble at Wellesley, as in many other colleges, is

SAN JOSE.

that tendency to over-organization which sooner or later results in the setting up of a hard-and-fast division between the academic and the social, The reformers in our Massachusetts institution have drawn up a program which is well worthy of attention further afield. For they aim to replace this division by a 'freer social' life which shall assimilate, humanize and react upon the ideas gained from books and in the classroom."

This, as all will admit, is not enough, however excellent, and however striking as indicative of the feeling of the supposedly "thoughtless" students themselves. The change must come in the realization of over-busyness and in the rearrangement of the curriculum.

Leisure to commune with one's self is not sentiment; it is not esthetics alone but a thing most practical. It stands for mental orderliness; for educative habits of normal living; for mental and physical hygiene; for happiness; for the best that learning can give or culture wish for. It is the very essence of education. Without it "efficiency" is a reproach.

In ignoring leisure as the student's right, a college is falling short of its highest privilege. Even the student-idler suffers from this disorderliness of the over-ordered college life, while the conscientious student is hurt irreparably.

And no "Zeitgeist" involving the worry of hurry has any standing in the Supreme Court of Common Sense.

It is time that every college, at least, with its supposed elaborated wisdom-of-life and its unique obligation to the coming man and woman, effectively realized it. The truest and best rewards of the race are seldom to the swift. Rash life generally somewhere has its Marne.

The San Jose State Normal School, the oldest on the coast, the oldest west of the Mississippi Valley in fact, has maintained its leadership despite intense rivalry and the calamity of 1906. When the planned-for auditorium is erected Dr. M. E. Dailey will have a beautiful and impressive plant, the buildings having as distinct a personality as Stanford University. Dr. Dailey has never lowered his scholarly or professional standards. The San Jose school has always magnified its library equipment and service, its training school efficiency, and its art and artisan educational features. SACRAMENTO.

If Charles C. Hughes was as good an advertiser and promoter as he is administrator and leader, no city superintendent would stand higher or be better known.

No man administers a system more peacefully or progressively, more inspirationally or economically. He is the originator of "The Companion Plan," which has every advantage of the Gary plan and of the Platoon system as to economy and

some distinct virtues educationally. His annual reports are appreciated as educational classics.

He was one of the first to have the Junior high school and among the very first to have a Junior college. He was one of the first to take the screwed-down desk out of the lower grades, to reduce blackboard space to the minimum, to magnify the kindergarten, and to eliminate non-essentials all along the line. He has never been a trailer, but always an inspiring leader.

ALAMEDA.

Rarely has a small city had such a group of men in school work as has Alameda, where C. J. Du Four is now superintendent.

It has had, as superintendent or principal, Charles C. Hughes, now superintendent of Sacramento; Henry Suzzallo, now president of the State University of Washington; Dr. Kemp, now one of the leading collegians of the state; DunMacKinnon, now superintendent of San Diego; Will C. Wood, now state commissioner of secondary education; Elmer L. Cave, now superintendent of Bellingham, Washington, and Mr.

can

Armstrong, who has been secretary of the State Association, editor of the Sierra News, and is now California representative of the American Book Company. All of these have been prominent in Alameda since I have known the city. CHICO.

For intensity of professional progress the State Normal School at Chico has deserved prominence. Dr. Allison Ware is one of the professional leaders who has a progressive vision and professional heroism. The latest departure is an extension of normal school activities into the rural schools round about with Mrs. Lura Sawyer Oaks in charge.

Grounds and buildings have none of the new

7

ness of Los Angeles, San Jose, San Diego, or Fresno, but the grounds resemble the State University in trees and shrubs and flowers.

The great attraction of Chico is the Bidwell Ranch, which is one of the most famous and beautiful homes in all California, the only one of the great estates of early days remaining. General John Bidwell was one of the recognized noblemen of California of sixty years ago and for half a century the palatial residence was one of the most hospitable homes in the state, and Mrs. Bidwell continues the traditional hospitality. It is thiry-five years since I first enjoyed the hospitality of that historic mansion, and it has lost none of its charm in the passing of years.

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

Keats was only twenty-five years and about four months old when he died; Shelley lacked only a month and four days of being thirty when his little boat foundered in the bay off Viareggio and his stormy career came to a stormy end; Lord Byron lived to be only a little more than thirty-six; Poe ended his troubled career when he was just past his fortieth year. The gods loved them if the old proverb is worthy of credence. Three other poets who are a genuine loss to literature must be added to the same category. Of these Rupert Brooke and Allan Seeger were directly the victims of the terrible War, and were both in their early twenties; the other, James Elroy Flecker, died of consumption at Davos, in Switzerland, January 3, 1915.

He was born in Lewisham, London, November 5, 1884, the son of the Rev. W. H. Flecker, Master of Dean Close School, Cheltenham, where and at Uppingham he was prepared for the University. He studied at Trinity College, Oxford, for a number of years, until 1907, and then after teaching for a time in a school at Hampstead he went up from London to Caius College, Cambridge, to take a course in Oriental languages, preparatory to entering the British Consular service. He was first sent to Constantinople, but after a few months. he was taken ill and returned to a sanatorium in the Cotswolds, where his health seemed perfectly re-established. In April, 1911, he was transferred to Smyrna, and the following month married in Athens a Greek lady, Miss Helle Skiadaressi, whom he had met the year before. He had a three-months' honeymoon in Corfu and then was attached to the British consulate at Beyrout. where he remained fifteen months. He made a brief visit in London and Paris toward the end of 1912 and in March after his return to Syria he was again taken ill; and he spent the last eighteen months of his life partly in the Lebanon, but mainly in various resorts in Switzerland in a battle with the dread disease which finally conquered him.

Even as a rather unusually undeveloped school

boy he was a prolific writer of verses. One of his Oxford acquaintances wrote about his "appalling facility" in versification as follows:

"He imitated with enthusiasm and without discrimination and the taste in those long-gone days being for Oscar Wilde's early verse and Swinburne's complacent swing, he turned out a good deal of decadent stuff, that was, I am convinced, not much better than the rubbish written by the rest of his generation at Oxford. . . . I had, at any rate, a growing feeling that, in spite of his immaturity and occasional bad taste, he was the most important of any of us; his immense productiveness, was, I vaguely but rightly felt, better and more valuable than our finicky and sterile good sense."

In personal appearance Flecker is described as "tall, with blue eyes, black, straight hair, and dark complexion. There was a tinge of the East in his appearance, and his habitual expression was a curious blend of the sardonic and the gentle." His residence in the East, where he was largely deprived of intercourse and rapt discussion with his fellows, which he enjoyed more than anything else, unless it were things Grecian and Oriental, must have concentrated his genius in a way most conducive to his great poetic development. Just as in his early poems one can easily detect the influence of Swinburne and of Tennyson, and particularly of Shelley, so in his later work, Oriental thought, Oriental pictures and images and Oriental metrical forms are quite noticeable. As a young man he was redoubted for his wit; he delighted in argument; he was a writer of fine prose; his letters are full of himself-not in egotistic mannerism; he gave himself, fully and richly.

Fortunately he had one Oxford friend and still more fortunately he had a wife, both of whom had fine literary taste, and their influence upon him was most beneficent. He wrote perhaps too fluently, but he never wearied in using the "harsh pumice-stone" of correction. He was acquainted with several languages and some of his best work is shown in the translations which he made from French and German, from Latin, Greek and

Italian. In the last letter which I had from him he enclosed a charming version of a poem by that brilliant Frenchman, Paul Fort. There is no better apprenticeship for poets than putting the works, especially the lyrics, of foreign authors into another language. If it leads to a measure of imitation (as was certainly the case with Longfellow), it gives a broader perspective.

While Flecker was spending his last year at Oxford he prepared his first volume of poems and was for a time at a loss for a name. At last, one day while with two of his friends, he suddenly exclaimed:

"I'll call it "The Bridge of Fire' and I'll write a poem with that name and put it in the middle of the book instead of at the beginning. That'll be original and symbolic too." "His first volume, under that title, was published by Elkin Matthews in 1907. The title poem reminds one of Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn," though very different in conception. Four years later Dent issued his second book with the colorless title of "Forty-two Poems."

In all this work there was certainly promise but not the flower of fulfilment; that bloomed with splendor and opulence in his next volume, "The Golden Journey to Samarkand." To this he prefixed a Preface in which he gives his reasons for reckoning himself among "the Parnassians." He believed that English criticism and English poetry were in a state of chaos, and while he declared that "no worthless writer will be redeemed by the excellence of the poetic theory he may chance to hold," still it was evident to him "that a sound theory can produce sound practice and exercise a beneficent effect on writers of genius." He recognized that the Romantic School, in spite of "the perfervid sentimentality and extravagance characteristic of Victor Hugo and some of his followers, had done powerful work and infinitely widened the scope and enriched the language"; but the Parnassians went ahead of them by greatly improving the technique of their art, enabling them "to express the subtlest ideas in powerful and simple verse." What appealed to Flecker in the typical French Parnassian was the fact that while he used traditional forms and chose classical subjects, "his desire in writing poetry is to create beauty; his inclination is toward a beauty somewhat statuesque. He is apt to be dramatic and objective rather than intimate." He had no patience with the critics who accused Heredia, Leconte de Lisle, Samain, Henri de Regnier and Jean Moréas "of cultivating unemotional frigidity and upholding an austere view of perfection." He declared that a sufficient answer was to study their works.

He claimed that his own volume was written "with the single intention of creating beauty."

What attitude Flecker would have maintained regarding the Verslibristes, if he had lived, it is rather hard to say. That he would ever have gone to the extremes of chaotic banality in which their English and American imagists, voticists, eroticists and other futurists have manifested. what seems very like the ravings of insanity is in

credible. But Gustave Kahn and many of the French writers of free verse have to my mind very satisfactorily liberated the Muse from terribly galling chains of conventional technique, with a consequent enrichment of originality and of beauty. In at least one of Flecker's poems there is an example of super-prose and his study of Turkish and Arabic and Persian verse-forms would naturally have led him to experimentation. He showed in several instances that he could wield the difficult meter used by Sir Richard Burton in his "Kasidah." He also copied the Greek elegiac stanza and the swing of natural hexameters with no small success. As beauty was Flecker's ideal it is likely that he would have been able to express it in whatever form he chose. This worship and chase of beauty make it easy to excerpt illustrative passages; but for those I would prefer to recommend the reader to the volume of "Collected Poems," edited with an Introduction by J. C. Squire and published by Doubleday, Page & Company. This volume, which contains an excellent portrait of the poet, in an Oriental costume adorned with the mystic swastika, reproduces several of Flecker's "Juvenilia"-translations and adaptations from Catullus, his "Sirmio," which may be compared with Tennyson's, which has the same form and the same sequence of o-rimes. There are several instances in which a poem as first produced may be compared with a later revision. In "Tenebris Interlucentem," for instance, each line is a foot shorter :

"Once a poor song-bird that had lost her way
Sang down in hell upon a blackened bough,
Till all the lazy ghosts remembered how
The forest trees stood up against the day.
"Then suddenly they knew that they had died,
Hearing this music mock their shadow-land;
And some one there stole forth a timid hand
To draw a phantom brother to his side."
How much more vivid is the later form:-
"A linnet who had lost her way

Sang on a blackened bough in hell,
Till all the ghosts remembered well
The trees, the wind, the golden day.
"At last they knew that they had died
When they heard music in that land;
And someone there stole forth a hand
To draw a brother to, his side."

:

As female linnets do not sing, it is rather odd that he did not change "her" to "his," especially when it would apply to the word "brother" in the last line!

What characterizes Flecker, especially after he had become thoroughly orientalized, was his use of opulent and gorgeous adjectives and nouns. He loves such words as "nenuphars" (an admirable rime for "stars"), "manuscripts in peacock styles," "heavy "heavy beaten necklaces," tinkling camel-bells (reminiscent perhaps of Burton) "the dim-moon city of delight," "Four Grand Wardens, on their spears reclining," "a rose, but with no scarlet to her leaf-and from whose heart no perfume flows," "the palms that wave, the streams that burst, the last mirage, O Caravan,"

Continued on page 18.

The first school for the training of store employees was opened in Boston in 1907. So successful was this movement that the merchants and the business men who were receiving the most convincing evidence through the work of their employees of the commercial value of this training gave it their hearty support and co-operation. Legislation followed and in September, 1914, the store school became a part of the Boston Continuation School system.

The store school educates the young wageearner along the lines of his particular needs. through the work which he is doing, and with the aid of his daily tools; his textbooks are raw materials, textiles, sale-slips, store tallies, store problems and store merchandise, which the cooperating stores have always loaned most generously to the school for illustrative purposes. His home tasks are not only to think, study and know his present "job" and perform its duties. thoroughly, but to broaden his knowledge and capability by improving every opportunity for the study of store system, store organization, store courtesy and co-operation.

The pupil acquires his knowledge of arithmetic through the teaching of the sale-slip, which introduces almost every kind of problem and neces

tals: fractions, percentage and discount. The need for this knowledge and its connection with the work so vitalizes the subject that the pupils. who formerly were most hostile to arithmetic and the discouraging results obtained, soon take the greatest pleasure in working out the most difficult. problems.

The teaching of the sale-slip accomplishes other results; the pupils are learning spelling and store system; they are acquiring the habit of writing legibly, of thinking accurately and quickly, and are obtaining a knowledge of store merchandise and its values.

Mark-down sales and profit-sales serve only to motivate the teaching of percentage, profit and loss, care of stock, economy in buying and selling, service to customer, how waste can be prevented, but lead to ways of saving and investing money, banks, interest, thrift, etc.

The study of raw materials, textiles, sources of merchandise and its distribution, not only requires a knowledge of commercial geography, but provides abundant material for the work of English which is connected with all subjects.

How to talk intelligently and convincingly about the selling points of goods, to impersonate a skilful and successful salesperson in a demonstration sale, and acquire a knowledge of business ethics is the goal which the ambitious pupil aims. at. This training gives the student a general knowledge of the business and produces a steadier, more intelligent and efficient worker.

This clinching of practice and theory stimu

Pupils are better able to judge the kind of work they are best adapted to and decide whether they would be more valuable to the store in the merchandise department or in office work, and they make every effort to qualify for the desired position, and the store profits by the progress which they make. Some pupils realize that they are not adapted for store work. They are given advice and assistance in finding employment for which they are better suited, and the store gains by the elimination of misfits from the junior force. No one realizes more fully than the employer the necessity for providing future employees who will be intelligent, efficient and contented; and the most precious asset a store can have is the bright, capable, and willing worker.

The school builds up a trained group that the store may draw upon for workers in other positions. Ambition is fostered in the young pupils by giving them the training which will best fit them for higher positions, and promotion and advancement should be the reward for good, faithful and efficient service. It is certainly good business to get young, trained workers every year that can make fewer mistakes and more profits; therefore, the business world of today is calling into its employment those who have had this training or who are to have it.

The following statistics show the advancements made during 1916 in one large Boston department store as a result of the store school work. Promoted from :—

The following examples illustrate the way in which many of these promotions are made: A demonstration sale of shirt-waists was given in the classroom; one of the pupils, a bundle girl, acted as salesperson for a very "fussy" customer. The store manager was present at the sale; he expressed himself as being not only surprised, but amazed at the splendid talking points used, and the skill with which the customer was handled. A few weeks later this girl was promoted to the selling force by the store manager as a result of her school work, and she has been giving excellent service for nearly a year. She has not yet reached her eighteenth birthday.

A similar case was the promoting of a sixteenyear-old stock boy to a selling position in the men's

The advantages to the store of the training of juniors are: Greater profit to the store, better service, greater content and happiness among employees (making the daily work wholesome and profitable), greatly diminished loss of time and expense in preparing new employees for work, no "hiring" and "firing" among the junior force, a steady force of workers of higher ability and greater fitness.

Education is of practical value in promoting service; and service is the very foundation of business; all else fails unless backed by a force which brings to the store service in behalf of high ideals in thinking, doing and being.

HON. HENRY HOUCK

BY REV. J. L. HYNSON
Lebanon, Pa.

It is no easy problem to analyze the life of any man and set forth the qualities of his character that win. It is hard to do it rightly, and impossible to do it worthily.

No school man, or statesman, or patriotic citizen, or school child will pass through this day unmindful of the life and death of Mr. Houck, whose value to the public school system of this state is perhaps greater than that of any other man to any other state, during a similar epoch of its history. It is said that three hundred years after the battle of Thermopylae every child in the public schools of Greece was required to recite from memory the names of the 300 martyrs who fell in defence of the Pass. What an inspiration to the patriotic aspirations, and what a triumph in education if every child of school age could contemplate the rare qualities and look into the face of him whom we today mourn!

In searching out some of the qualities in his character which made him a great man, we are deeply impressed with his mental qualities.

Some critics of distinguished men either omit saying anything concerning their mental powers or unite them to qualities of goodness. A man who was so often called to preside in our public meetings, to speak at literary and social functions throughout a score of states, who was received repeatedly on the same platform with hearty welcomes and cheers, who graced many occasions of public sympathy, who always responded so generously and freely with his energy and time to the call of public charity and public duty, must have enjoyed an unusual amount of mental force. He was not a scholarly man in the sense that would be recognized at Princeton or New Haven, but he had a keen and ready grasp of facts, ability to see the essential things, and a singularly perfect education in everything that concerns the practical affairs of life. His judgment was excellent, and his information accurate. Not only did he quickly grasp facts, but retained them with an unusual memory. Throughout a rare career of public and private life, he stored his mind with a rich fund of information and stories from which, in his public course as a teacher and speaker, he drew as