"HALCYON DAYS"

Ere yet the giants of modern science had gone a-slumming in smelly slums,

And through the Ghettos and lazarettos had put in plumbing (and pulled out plums!)

When wily wizards in inky vizards employed their talents at homicide,

And poisoned goblets for faithless squablets by knightly gallants were justified;

When maids were fairest, and baths were rarest, and thaumaturgy was wrought by dames,

When courts were rotten and faith forgotten, and none but clergy could write their names

When he who flouted the Church, or doubted, would find his neck fast in hempen ruff,

And saint and sinner thought eggs for dinner and beer for breakfast the proper stuff;

When men were scary of witch and fairy, of haunted castle, of spook and elf,

When every mixer of cough-elixir was thought a vassal of Nick himself;

When income taxes and prophylaxis and Comic Sections were yet unborn,

When Leagues of Nations and Spring Vacations and Fall Elections were held in scorn

When all brave fellows would fight duellos with sword and dagger, with lance and mace,

When good men guzzled until, clean fuzzled, they'd reel and stagger about the place;

When pious journeys and jousts and tourneys brought high adventure and secret tryst,

When knives were many, but forks not any-'twas fist to trencher, and mouth to fist!

Oh, men had chances for true romances, for fame and glory, and knightly acts .

(And childish quarrels and beastly morals, if song and story would stick to facts!)

Franklin P. Adams

Franklin P. Adams, better known to the readers of his column as F. P. A., was born at Chicago, Illinois, November 15, 1881. He attended the University of Michigan (1899-1900) and, after a brief career as an insurance agent, plunged into journalism. Adams had already been an ardent contributor to B. L. T.'s “A Line o' Type or Two" and, in 1903, he began conducting a column of his own on the Chicago Journal. Late in 1904, he came to New York, running his " Always in Good Humor" section on The Evening Mail until 1914, when he started "The Conning Tower" for the New York Tribune.

Adams is the author of five volumes of a light verse that is not only skilful but energetic as well as facile. Tobogganing on Parnassus (1909), In Other Words (1912), By and Large (1914), Weights and Measures (1917) and Something Else Again (1920) reveal a spirit which is essentially one of mockery. One admires these books for their impudent-and faithful -paraphrases of Horace and Propertius, for their last-line twists à la O. Henry, (with whom Adams wrote a comic opera that never reached New York), for the ease with which their author springs his surprises and, perhaps most of all, for the healthy satire that runs sharply through all of his colloquial and dexterous lines.

WAR AND PEACE

"This war is a terrible thing," he said,
"With its countless numbers of needless dead;
A futile warfare it seems to me,
Fought for no principle I can see.

Alas, that thousands of hearts should bleed
For naught but a tyrant's boundless greed!

Said the wholesale grocer, in righteous mood, As he went to adulterate salable food.

Spake as follows the merchant king:
"Isn't this war a disgraceful thing?
Heartless, cruel, and useless, too;

It doesn't seem that it can be true.
Think of the misery, want and fear!
We ought to be grateful we've no war here."

"Six a week"-to a girl-"That's flat! I can get a thousand to work for that."

THE RICH MAN

The rich man has his motor-car,

His country and his town estate.

He smokes a fifty-cent cigar

And jeers at Fate.

He frivols through the livelong day,
He knows not Poverty, her pinch.
His lot seems light, his heart seems gay;
He has a cinch.

Yet though my lamp burns low and dim,
Though I must slave for livelihood-
Think you that I would change with him?
You bet I would!

THOSE TWO BOYS

When Bill was a lad he was terribly bad.
He worried his parents a lot;

He'd lie and he'd swear and pull little girls' hair;
His boyhood was naught but a blot.

At play and in school he would fracture each ruleIn mischief from autumn to spring;

And the villagers knew when to manhood he grew He would never amount to a thing.

When Jim was a child he was not very wild;
He was known as a good little boy;

He was honest and bright and the teacher's delight-
To his mother and father a joy.

All the neighbors were sure that his virtue'd endure, That his life would be free of a spot;

They were certain that Jim had a great head on him And that Jim would amount to a lot.

And Jim grew to manhood and honor and fame
And bears a good name;

While Bill is shut up in a dark prison cell-
You never can tell.

John G. Neihardt

John Gneisenau Neihardt was born at Sharpsburg, Illinois, January 8, 1881. He completed a scientific course at Nebraska Normal College in 1897 and lived among the Omaha Indians for six years (1901-7), studying their customs, characteristics and legends.

Although he had already published two books, A Bundle of Myrrh (1908) was his first volume to attract notice. It was full of spirit, enthusiasm and an insistent virility-qualities which were extended (and overemphasized) in Man-Song (1909). Neihardt found a richer note and a new restraint in The Stranger at the Gate (1911); the best of the lyrics from these three volumes appearing in The Quest (1916).

Neihardt meanwhile had been going deeper into folk-lore, the results of which appeared in The Song of Hugh Glass (1915) and The Song of Three Friends (1919). The latter, in 1920, divided the annual prize offered by the Poetry Society, halving the honors with Gladys Cromwell's Poems. These two of Neihardt's are detailed long poems, part of a projected epic series celebrating the winning of the West by the pioneers. What prevents both volumes from fulfilling the breadth at which they aim is the disparity between the author's story and his style; essentially racy narratives are recited in an archaic and incongruous speech. Yet, in spite of a false rhetoric and a locution that considers prairies and trappers in terms of "Ilion," "Iseult," Clotho," the "dim far shore of Styx," Neihardt has achieved his effects with no little skill. Dramatic, stern, and conceived with a powerful dignity, his major works are American in feeling if not in execution.