WEDNESDAY. Josh the idea we took up seriously on Monday.

(BEEF STEW.)

THURSDAY. Some one takes issue with us for Wednesday's josh of Monday's serious idea. (BEEFSTEAK PIE.) FRIDAY. We become a little pensive about our Wednesday's josh of Monday's serious idea-there creeps into our copy a more subdued, sensible note, as if we were acknowledging that after all, the main business of life is not mere harebrained word-play. (HASH OR CROQUETTES WITH GREEN PEPPERS.)

SATURDAY. Spoof the whole thing again, especially spoofing ourself for having ever taken it seriously. (BEEF SOUP WITH BARLEY IN IT.)

SUNDAY. There isn't any evening paper on Sunday. That is where we have the advantage of the boarding-house keepers.

But the beauty of Don's cuisine is that the beef soup with barley always tastes as good as, or even better than, the original roast. His dry battery has generated in the past few years a dozen features with real voltage the Savage Portraits, Hermione, Archy the Vers Libre Cockroach, the Aptronymic Scouts, French Without a Struggle, Suggestions to Popular Song Writers, Our Own Wall Mottoes, and the sequence of Prefaces (to an Almanac, a Mileage Book, The Plays of Euripides, a Diary, a Book of Fishhooks, etc.). Some of Marquis's most admirable and delicious fooling has been poured into these Pref

aces:

I hope that he will put them between

book-covers.

One day I got a letter from a big engineering firm in Ohio, enclosing a number of pay-envelopes (empty). They wanted me to examine the aphorisms and orisonswettmardenisms they had been printing on their weekly envelopes, for the inspiration and peptonizing of their employees. They had been using quotations from Emerson, McAdoo, and other panhellenists, and had run out of "sentiments." They wanted suggestions as to where they could find more.

I advised them to get in touch with Don Marquis. I don't know whether they did so or not; but Don's epigrams and bon mots would adorn any pay-envelope anthology. Some of his casual comments on whiskey would do more to discourage the decanterbury pilgrims than a bushel of tracts.

By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he orders, there is little else about him worth knowing. If you go to sleep while you are loafing, how are you going to know you are loafing?

Because majorities are often wrong it does not follow that minorities are always right.

Young man, if she asks you if you like her hair that way, beware. The woman has already committed matrimony in her own heart.

I am tired of being a promising young man. I've been a promising young man for twenty years.

In most of Don Marquis's japes, a still small voice speaks in the mirthquake:

If you try too hard to get a thing, you don't get it.

If you sweat and strain and worry the other ace will not come -the little ball will not settle upon the right number or the proper colour-the girl will marry the other man-the public will cry, Bedamned to him! he can't write anyhow!the cosmos will refuse its revelations of divinity-the Welsh rabbit will be stringy-you will find there are not enough rhymes in the language to finish your ballade the primrose by the river's brim will be only a hayfever carrier-and your fountain pen will dribble ink upon your best trousers.

But Don Marquis's mind has two yolks (to use one of his favourite denunciations). In addition to these comic or satiric shadows, the gnomon of his Sun Dial may be relied on every now and then to register a clear-cut notation of the national mind and heart. For instance this, just after the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany:

This Beast we know, whom time brings to his last rebirth
Bull-thewed, iron-boned, cold-eyed and strong as Earth.
As Earth, who spawned and lessoned him,
Yielded her earthy secrets, gave him girth,

Armoured the skull and braced the heavy limb

Who frowned above him, proud and grim,

While he sucked from her salty dugs the lore

Of fire and steel and stone and war:

She taught brute facts, brute might, but not the worth ref

Of spirit, honour and clean mirth .
His shape is Man, his mood is Dinosaur.

Up from the wild red Welter of the past
Foaming he comes: let this rush be his last.

Too patient we have been, thou knowest, God, thou knowest.

We have been slow as doom. Our dead

Of yesteryear lie on the ocean's bed

We have denied each pleading ghost

We have been slow: God, make us sure.

Did our slow mood, O God, with thine accord?
Then weld our diverse millions, Lord,

Into one single swinging sword.

I have been combing over the files of the Sun Dial, and it is disheartening to see these deposits of pearl and pie-crust, this sediment of fine mind, buried full fathom five in the yellowing archives of a newspaper. I thought of De Quincey's famous utterance about the press:

Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be disentombed or restored to human admiration. Like the sea, it has swallowed treasures without end, that no diving-bell will bring up again.

Greatly as we cherish the Sun Dial, we are jealous of it for sapping all its author's time and

calories. No writer in America has greater or more meaty, stalwart gifts. Don, we cry, spend less time stoking that furnace out in Port Washington, and more on your novels!

In

There is no more convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial than the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful lyrics of the past few years have been printed there (I think particularly of two or three by Padraic Colum). this ephemeral column of a daily newspaper some of the rarest singers and keenest wits of the time have been glad to exhibit their wares, without pay of course. It would be impossible to give a complete list, but among them are William Rose Benét, Clinton Scollard, Edith M. Thomas, Benjamin De Casseres, Gelett Burgess, Georgia Pangborn, Charles Hanson Towne, Clement Wood.

But the tragedy of the colyumist's task is that the better he does it the harder it becomes. People simply will not leave him alone. All day long they drop into his office, or call him up on the phone in the hope of getting into the column. Poor Don! he has become an institution down on Nassau Street: whatever hour of the day you call, you will find his queue there chivvying him. He is too gracious to throw them out: his only expedient is to take them over to the gin cathedral across the street and buy them a drink. Lately