"I

WRITE novels because it's more sport than fox-hunting," said Henry Harland, just before his return to his English home. "I never could shoot a bird, but fox-hunting is great sport. Novel-writing, however, is even finer. Besides you yourself always are 'in at the death' and, if you are lucky, get the 'brush.'"

Mr. Harland had been living fifteen years abroad before his recent visit. When I asked him what struck him most here after so long an absence, he did not answer, like most people, "the skyscrapers," but "the gray squirrels in Central Park. They are so tame and pretty," he said. "I go to the park to feed them and let them eat out of my hand and run over my arms, whenever I find a chance. There is nothing like them in London or in any other foreign city I know of. I have come to know them so well, they let me stroke them. I shall miss the pretty things when I go away." He did not say that he should miss the skyscrapers. In fact he did not mention them. He did not come over here on business, "but just to see Norwich again." He begins to glow at the mere mention of the place. Was he born there? "By the merest accident, not. But I won't tell you where I was born, because I've made up my mind that I was born in Norwich. At all events I wanted to be born there and it's an aggravation to me to think that I wasn't. So I don't think it. I've simply made up my mind that I was, and that's an end to the matter. Any biographer of mine who says that I was born elsewhere than in Norwich, Conn., makes a mistakethough technically he may be correct. Norwich is the Rose of New England.

In fact it is the Rose of the World. Of course there are London and Paris and Vienna and Rome and other large cities, but they are mere satellites of Norwich. Over in London, where the literary world won't admit that I'm an American at all, they laugh at my enthusiasm over Norwich. They think I am talking about Norwich, England. No wonder they laugh!

"Dear old Norwich! On Sentry Hill stands the old house, which has been my people's for two hundred years. They bought it from the Indians. (I can hear my London friends laugh, when I tell them that Norwich is a greater town than London! But it is.) Do you wonder that I am Norwich from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, and from the soles of my feet to the top of my head?

"I was born March 1, 1861, in Norwich, mind you, where my father was a lawyer. Edmund Clarence Stedman, who was my father's chum at Yale, was my godfather. My father enjoyed going abroad, and since very young I have been, off and on, in England, Italy, and France. I should not call my father a traveller, he simply liked to go abroad, and just went, and I went with him. For this reason, probably, I did not go to school, but had a tutor till I was ready for Harvard. After a year there, I went over to Italy. I was here again in 1884 for two years, and again in 1887 for two years. Since then I have lived abroad, chiefly in London, and there, chiefly, because it is the best place in the world to work. One must have that blessed thing called 'tin,' so one might as well live in the place where one can get most of it.

"The day in London is thirty-six

hours long instead of only twenty-four as elsewhere, everything moves so delightfully leisurely and slowly. I think that every now and then during the day in London some giant hand turns all the clocks back. At all events you can accomplish more writing there from nine to one than you could here from nine to six. I had done some writing here and had it published, but I put that behind me as mere boyish stuff and went to work in England writing leaders for newspapers and doing magazine work, and, among other things, editing the 'Yellow Book' with Aubrey Beardsley. You see I found my first public in England and made my first popular success there with 'The Cardinal's Snuffbox.' I am at work on another novel nowyes, I tell you it is the only sport for which I would give up fox-huntingand I expect it to appear first as a serial.

"I know my Italy well. In fact I know it better than the Italians themselves do. A sympathetic outside observer always does know a country better than the natives. I go to Italy every spring, and either take a furnished villa somewhere or visit friends. My wife maintains a definite Italian microbe. It asserts itself with recurring regularity. Whoever maintains the Italian microbe pines at certain times for the sight of an olive-tree or for the blue sky-line of the Mediterranean. The only way to cure them temporarily-you don't want to cure them permanently, since secretly you maintain the microbe yourself—is to take them where they (and you, too,) can see the olive-tree and the blue skyline."

Mr. Harland would not talk about American books because he had not read enough of them to warrant an opinion. "In fact, having been a leader writer, I have no views about anything, except that I am a bigoted Papist. Everybody else is, however, because we all are born so-only many of us don't know it."

Gustave Kobbé.

ANTHONY HOPE

"I have only to put the finishing touches to a novel of what in England is called the upper-middle class -to which, by way of definition, I belong," said Anthony Hope. "The scene is laid principally in London."

You know Mr. Hope never planned. to write the "Dolly Dialogues." One day he scratched off one and sent it to the Westminster Gazette. Many of the readers liked it. "So," in his own words, "I wrote them until the vein grew thin. Dolly and the other characters are combination hints I stole from different people, but from what people,' you know, I don't care to say.".

It is nine years now since the publi-' cation of "The Prisoner of Zenda"; Mr. Hope then was still practising law, with chambers at 1 Brick Court, Middle Temple.

"After its success I had to choose," he said, "on account of the amount of literary work I was offered, between law. and writing, and I went over to the latter. I was a little past thirty years old, so there was no family interference. No, none of us had run to literature up to that time, except Mr. Kenneth Grahame, a relative of mine on my mother's side, who wrote 'The Golden Age'; but I think we had run to a tolerable amount of brains. I had, during my six years practice of law, much leisure time, which I occupied in writing. In England, you know, a man builds up a business or a practice slowly. It was in 1889 or 1890, shortly after I was admitted to the bar, that I began to contribute to the papers. At first most of my sketches came back, when I often, after a second reading, agreed with the editors, and either buried them in the back of a drawer or rewrote them."

How few remember his first book, "A Man of Mark"! It had no sale

714.-I should like to find a little book entitled "The Twenty-five Best Poems of the I never saw but the one Nineteenth Century." copy, and have been unable to get the book because I did not remember the publishers.

E. E. H.

We do not remember seeing the book, but any intelligent clerk in a good book store should be We doubt its value, able to find it for you.

however, since in any case it can be only the judgment of some one person as to the merit of the poems, and it is not likely that any two readers or critics would agree as to all the twenty-five. If you wish for such a book that will really satisfy you, use your own taste. Make the selection yourself, and copy the poems There is no such thing into a neat blank book. as an authoritative selection.

715.-Will you kindly tell me what are the best books that have been written on the subject of woman?

C. F.

Probably there are more than we ever have heard of; but we will mention the best that we know about. Margaret Fuller's "Woman in was considered a brillthe Nineteenth Century

iant essay in its day, and it is not yet out of print. Quite as able, and more easily readable, is Gail Hamilton's volume entitled "Woman's Worth and Worthlessness." Mrs. Johnson's "Woman and the Republic" is a discursive essay on woman suffrage in all its aspects and connections. These three books are all American. Among the latest and best of those published in Europe is "The Emancipation of Women," by Adèle Crepaz, written originally in German, of which an English translation has appeared in London. Among older books is "The History of Woman, and Her Connexion with Keligion, Civilization, and Domestic Manners, from the Earliest Period," by S. W. Fullom, published in London. Miss Kavanagh's " Woman in France During the Eighteenth Century" is interesting, and has been republished in this country. Georgiana Hill's "Woman in English Life, from Medieval to Modern Times," is the result of a vast deal of historical research, and is full of interesting facts.

716.-I should be glad if you or any reader would answer these questions for me:

(1) Have any of the books of Levin Schuck

ing, the German novelist, appeared in English translations?

(2) Were the amazing feats of mountainclimbing described in Clarence King's "Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada really performed by him, or are they creations of his imagination?

(3) Who said "Nothing is so surely believed as the things we know least about "?

(4) Who wrote the once popular college song entitled "The Lone Fishball"?

C. L. D.

718.-I have a few queries that come up occasionally in reading or conversation, and would like to submit them to you or your readers.

(1) Who said, and of whom did he say it, "He has written more absurdities than any other author of our century"?

(2) Is it true that the letter "i" has not always been written and printed with a dot over it? (3) Who was the Great Cham of Literature? (4) Where can I find the poem of which this is one verse:

The world is old and the world is cold,
And never a day is fair, I said.
Out of the heavens the sunlight rolled,
The green leaves rustled overhead,
And the sea was a sea of gold.

D. K. R.

(1) Cowper said it of Sir Richard Blackmore (1650-1729), but he confined it to absurdities in verse. Pope attacked Blackmore in his "Dunciad," but Addison and other critics praised some of his poems. Dryden said Blackmore "wrote his poetry to the rumbling of his chariot wheels," which needs a little explanation. Blackmore was a physician, and Dryden probably had in mind the irregular and unmusical noise of his carriage