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tical ends, the good sense bred of independence and of association with a larger world across the sea saved Riga from narrowness of mind. Riga already a hundred years ago was more cultivated than either Moscow or St. Petersburg, more appreciative of artistic sweetness and light even than Königsberg, or many another Prussian town. Riga was never a university town. She never gave birth to a Kant. She preferred to give birth to his publisher. But she welcomed Herder and Hardenberg within her walls. In 1837, too, Riga applauded

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Wagner's lost overture "Rule Britannia," and sheltered the composer while he wrote the music to Bulwer's "Rienzi."

With the same just sense of proportion the City Fathers have not allowed the warehouses, elevators, and factoryshafts of the new era to efface the historic aspect of the city. The towering spires of the old Catholic churches and the Castle still dominate the foreshore of the old town, with its mile of open market on the quays, under the shadow of gables that bear the hall mark of the Hansa.

COUNTRY SOUNDS.

Man's resting instinct is not strongly developed, and even those who are not tethered to toil are apt to go on too long. The stimulus of psychological motives is often strong enough to make us disregard biological warnings, and there are familiar devices, such as a pipe, by which fatigue signals can be muffled. But one of the well-known symptoms of approaching the dangerzone of fatigue is a hypersensitiveness to sounds, especially noises, to which unfagged brains with plenty of energy to spare are quite indifferent. Cases

have been recorded of the jaded hearing the ringing of the door-bell in a house many yards off, and when ordinary urban sounds begin to be an unusual source of irritation it is a hint to those who can that they should seek the country. For there can be no doubt that part of a country holiday is in the rest to the ears. The great hush that wraps the hills is more refreshing than sleep.

They say that the noisiest thing in the world is a sun-spot, a roaring whirlpool of gases in the sun's atmosphere sometimes thousands of miles in diameter; but of the whirlpool which Hux

ley discerned in every organism we usually hear no sound. Matter and energy are continually passing in and passing out-a turmoil of molecules, yet all to us seems quietness! There are combustions and explosions, solutions and hydrations, reductions and fermentations; the living body, Sir Michael Foster used to say, is "a vortex of chemical and molecular change"; and yet our ears hear nothing of the bustle. In all these growing creatures round about us in the woods and meadows there is in every dividing cell an extraordinary manœuvring and meticulous splitting of nuclear rods, yet all is quieter than a dumb-show. Walt Whitman has spoken, we think, of the bustle of growing wheat, but the striking feature about vital processes is their silence. How quietly are the houses broken down and built up again in the streets of the living body; how silently, like ghosts, do the molecules of these colloid crowds rush past one another! Lucky, indeed, this is for us; in the midst of the crowded life of the country we enjoy quietness, and one panting locomotive in the distance makes more to-do than all the

millions of animals and plants, except in the season of the singing of birds (some golfers complain of the larks on the links putting them off), and on such unusual, rather artificial, occasions as the separation of the lambs from their mothers. Then the whole night is full of clamor.

In temperate countries, where violent changes are rare, most of the sounds of the inorganic world are subdued. There is, indeed, the roll of the thunder, the battery of the angry sea, the howling of the storm, the ominous crash of avalanche and landslip, the roar and cannonading of the forest fire, the groaning and travailing of the earthquake, and the booming of the cataract, but all these are more or less unusual. What we are more accustomed to, what we have come to love, are gentler, subtler sounds with some music in them-the sob of the sea, the sough of the wind in the wood, the song of the purling brook, the crickle-crackle of the brittle, withered grass and shriveling herbage, the sigh with which the parched ground receives the heavy rain, and the little sounds that the breeze makes when it rings the sun-dried bluebells by the wayside or makes the aspen leaves quaver, or sets the heather tinkling, or gives a whisper of gossip to the bulrushes beside the lake. It always seems worthy of remembrance that for many millions of years inorganic sounds were the only sounds upon the earth, for it was not until living creatures had been cradled and fostered for many aeons that they found voice. Insects were the first to break the silence, and, as is well known, their sound-production is almost wholly instrumental. Buzzing or humming is mainly due to rapid vibrations of the wings, which often strike the air more than a hundred times in a second, but there is sometimes a special quivering instrument near the base of the wing.

Chirping or trilling is due to some sort of "stridulating" organ, one hard part being scraped against another, as the bow on the fiddle-it may be leg against wing, or limb against body. A true voice, due to the vibration of vocal cords as the air from the wind-pipe passes over them, began in the amphibians, but did not come to its own till birds and mammals appeared on the scene.

As the inorganic sounds of Temperate zones are, on the whole, less violent than those of the Tropics, so is it also with the sounds made by our animals. They may be included in the reproach implied in Heine's definition of silence as the conversation of an Englishman. How little we have that can be compared with the serenading of the tree-frogs, the orchestra of grasshoppers and Cicadas, the chatter of parrots and monkeys in warmer countries! Except during the time of bird-courtship our country is certainly very quiet. We visited the other day an apiary with about a hundred hives; the air was thick with bees, and their coming and going along the broad glass-covered tunnel of an observation hive was like the Strand at a crowded hour. There were hundreds of thousands of bees, and though the hum was stronger than we ever heard before, even in an avenue of limetrees in flower, it simply filled the air with a pleasant, tremulous bourdon of sound. We went in the August gloaming to a beautiful lake hidden in a forest of Scots pine and spruce. As far as one could see there were only two birds visible, a pair of dabchicks, diving every minute or two, and uttering now and then the gentlest possible whit-whit which one would not have heard if the hush had not been almost inviolate. Now and again a silvery trout leaped high, suggesting Excalibur; but that was all-till suddenly a ring-dove gave voice, with

its deep, rich coo-roo, wonderfully soothing and tender. (One must not allow agricultural interests to obtrude on such occasions.) Not far off, someone, we know not why, had set fire to a giant ant-hill, which was flaming on the top and glowing deep red in its recesses. But from the conflagration, with its tens of thousands of victims, and from the mêlée hurrying from the burning city there came no sound at all. It is not so much that the country is sparsely peopled with animals—a fallacious impression due to the "cryptozoic" habits of the great majorityit is simply that relatively few animals act rapidly on matter, for that is the cause of sounds like the woodpecker's hammering, or the snipe's drumming; and that most of our animals have soft voices, or have not very much to say.

In midsummer in the North of Scotland there is hardly any darkness at all-one can sometimes see to read at midnight, and there are not more than two hours when the larks at least are not singing. Now, however, the silent hours must be longer, yet in the very dead of night we hear the dwellers in darkness on the hunt. There is the hedgehog, for instance, which calls incisively in the stillness with a peculiar voice between grunt and squeal. Even in Aberdeenshire the whir of the nightjar is sometimes heard and the loud clap of its wings together, as it hawks for nocturnal insects, or the vibrating "churr" of the male seated lengthwise on a branch. The shriek of the barn-owl and the tu-whit, tu-who of the tawny owl are familiar night sounds, and some people say they can hear the voice of bats. Soon after cock-crow one is wakened by the rather startling, raucous bark of certain black-headed gulls who come to see whether there are any fragments left where the hens are fed, and they are soon followed by the more cheerful jackdaws. Then,

on

the adjacent moor, the cock grouse welcomes the sun, swifts then begin their chase-they will be soon leaving us and their half-triumphant, half-delirious cry, in bad weather and in good, is the last thing we hear at night. Particular places have their characteristic sounds, which we listen for expectantly. The moorland would be incomplete without the melancholy cry of the curlew, with a melodious ripple at the nesting time; in the bed of the stream we wait for the oyster catcher's alarm-whistle keep-keep; by the estuary we enjoy the redshank's warning with a pleasant trill in it, which the male raises to a higher power in spring; among the furzebushes beside the dry wall the stonechats seem to "chap" the stones together; the peewits cry plaintively from the farmer's fields; as we take a short cut across the heathery "preserve" grouse after grouse proclaims our trespass with a ridiculously silly cachinnation kok-kok-kok; but best of all we like "the moan of doves from immemorial elms." It is only in manuals of psychology that we get pure sensations and pigeon-holed perceptions, for around all the country-sounds that have become dear to us there have gathered memories, associations, ideas, and we hear with more than the hearing of the ear. As we walk at nightfall across the common, noiselessly we think, a dog barks just once or twice from a cottage door half a mile away, and then, before the utter quietness is resumed, we hear the children turn in bed, the click-clack of their mother's knitting-needles, the rustle of the newspaper which the shepherd is reading by the fireside; and we see back into prehistoric times when man, whose life depended on recognizing and interpreting sounds, began to evolve the first cousin of a wolf into the trusty guardian of his herds and hearth. So is it with the

other familiar country sounds; we hear not them alone, but what they are symbols and crystallization centers of; for man is ever reading himself into the so-called outer world. It is his particular magic to hear in the lark's

The New Statesman,

miracle of song the music of Shelley and the wisdom of Meredith, to infer the cherubim from the chaffinch, and to find in the "lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee, some coupling with the spinning stars."

J. Arthur Thomson.

A PLEA FOR LESS WAR HUMOR.

This admirable title is not mine. It belongs to a gunner who has fought through all the worst battles in France. It occurred in a conversation we had together in a London drawing-room. If I were free to write the things he told me you would call it a bad title. You would say that I should plead for no war humor at all.

This young officer said to me that it is quite impossible to exaggerate the infernal qualities of modern war. He assured me that we at home shall know nothing of what a battle is like until peace is declared. The best of newspaper correspondents have confessed to him that they do not possess the knowledge to describe war. Staff officers do not know what it is. Only the men enduring a bombardment, which is like an earthquake prolonged for days and weeks, and only the men who go over the top to storm machinegun entrenchments, truly know the character of modern war. And only here and there among these muchenduring men is there one able to express in human language the agony of his soul.

War is hell. Anything which tends to obscure this truth is a deadly evil. Any spirit among non-combatants which makes for levity in this matter is a most devilish blasphemy. There has never been in the history of man so great a world-agony. Such widespread torture of human nerves has never hitherto been imagined. The body of humanity is being stretched

on the rack of utmost calamity. Imagine the feelings of men in the trenches when they come home to find us laughing and jesting about the war, or when the illustrated papers from London filled with war humor reach them in their dug-outs. The young officer did not inveigh against humor. He has a mind which responds quickly to brightness, wit, joy, and even frivolity. But he said to me, "In God's name don't let us have quite so much war humor."

Think of that conjunction. War— Humor. War means the killing and disfigurement of men. Its object is the destruction of life. It is state-sanctioned murder on a colossal scale. If you stood in a casualty clearing station for two or three hours after a battle you would not smile. You might break down and weep or you might go mad; but you would find it physically beyond your power to smile. A jest of any kind in such a situation would strike you as something inexpressibly abominable. But here at home, without any sense of absurdity, we talk about war humor. Think of those two words, War-Humor.

The gunner said to me: "People are misled by hearing of jokes from the trenches. Let me assure you that every man in a bombarded trench fears with every stretched nerve of his body. Because two or three of them, in a moment of nervous reaction, utter some casual remark or sing a verse from a barrack music-hall ditty, the British

Army is supposed to be full of Ole Bills. Haven't the people at home got enough imagination to know that the splendid young men who compose our modern armies loathe this beastly war with every ounce of their feelings? Can't they see that trench jokes of which they hear such a lot, are just nervous reactions? Don't they realize that the men are suffering? Don't they know that the whole thing is loathsome to the soul of even the very worst of men? They are living in the utmost degree of discomfort, exposed at any moment to death or mutilation, and with nothing, absolutely nothing that the heart of a man craves for and knows is its human right. It makes my blood boil here at home to go to a theater, to take up a picture paper, and to hear some people talking. Wherever I go in London I encounter war humor. I can't move but I'm confronted by it. Everyone in London seems to take the war as a joke, as something to laugh about. And young men training to be officers come to us in France in this spirit. I once heard a fellow say that it took more than two months, even in the City of Fear (Ypres) to purge the soul of ragtime and flappers. No man is of any use as an officer till he has feared. You've got to look fear right in the eyes, seriously, steadily, quaking like hell in your own heart, before you are any good in the trenches."

There are two good reasons for this plea. To begin with, the frivolous atmosphere at home (besides being in most execrable taste) is bad for the men preparing to go out. Cromwell would have trained his armies in another atmosphere. The welfare of

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the Army demands a more serious and dignified spirit at home. And next, we are fighting to make an end of war, and not, as I heard a wit say, "for political incompetence, commercial corruption, and Lady Diana Manners." We are fighting war much more than we are fighting the German people. It is war, seen as the deadly enemy of mankind, which has brought the great American nation to our side. The real people of England are serious. Whatever may be the merits of our statesmanship, the ethics of our commercial princes, and the war-moods of fashionable society, British democracy is fighting to a finish because it knows it is fighting war. And the only way in which this spirit can be weakened, which otherwise must conquer, is to make war seem anything but the malignant shape of Satan.

To the ancients who loved fighting and who very largely lived by fighting, war was a god, radiant and beautiful. There are those amongst us who would make it a comic figure-a caricature. Instead of praying to Mars, we dress war up in the garments of Charlie Chaplin, and grin at it. But we must hate war, hate it with all our heart, mind, and soul. Men do not laugh at the thing they truly hate. To hate righteously is to hate with enthusiasm.

I am convinced that the very offensive levity which manifests itself with ever less shame and ever more effrontery in the pleasure center of London, is due to a wholesale weakening of those moral restraints which are essential to the progress and to the dignity of the human race. English playfulness is a vastly different thing from war humor.

Harold Begbie.

PETHERTON AND THE RAG AUCTION.

A letter I received last Friday gave me one of those welcome excuses to get

into closer touch with my neighbor, Petherton, than our daily proximity

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