may have its own school-an arrangement which in reality makes these hectoring dissenters better off than before. If they can refuse to be taxed, why not we?

The religious question is indeed "a coming problem"; or rather it has already come; but it is not necessary to wait twenty years to solve it. It could be done to-morrow, but it never will be done along the lines of the Hebrew Professor of Ethical Culture in Columbia who proposes to teach morality without religion, a proceeding which is entirely futile. The Athenæum does not think we must acknowledge "the final supremacy of the ethical ideal."

Thus we have before us for consideration and solution the questions of the almost universal desire for commercial education; of the materialistic methods which modern pedagogy insists upon; of the demands of social individualism and the social whole; of the aloofness of many Catholics not only in practical aid but in sentiment; of co-education which, however, can interest us only historically and speculatively; of the congestion and confusion of courses which many hitherto conservative institutions have unwisely adopted; of the momentary discredit of the old-fashioned intellectual training because of the prevailing commercial spirit that is everywhere around us; of the menace of extinction that is distinctly made by some representatives of the large institutions; and finally of religion. Clearly, we shall not lack material for profound and anxious meditation.

Nevertheless the outlook is not as gloomy as one might be tempted to imagine. For although this view is taken almost exclusively from the pronouncements of prominent officials of great colleges and universities, from resolutions of teachers' congresses and from current articles of educational and school reviews, whose unfriendly utterances are so emphatically and persistently made as to leave the impression that they make a fair consensus of opinion on present educational conditions, yet in reality such is not the case. There are great numbers of distinguished scholars in the larger and especially the more conservative universities whose settled convictions act as correctives of these tendencies. In nearly all those centres of learning there are many men of great influence who not only do not court, but sedulously avoid publicity and who are known to be staunch and determined opponents of educational views and processes which are being constantly aired and advocated in the daily press; men whose whole life is unselfishly devoted to the discovery of truth, and who often sacrifice great worldly advantages for

the delight of scholarly seclusion; who have made wonderful advances in the sciences to which they have devoted their lives, and who even in those scientific investigations which deal exclusively with material things are not looking for arguments against revealed truth; who with that true nobility of character which distinguishes many of them entertain no absurd fear of humble rivals, but are most ready to recognize merit and to encourage and applaud it; who have a horror of advertising and business methods, and who on account of their undoubted ability are the silent but real power of the great institutions with which they are connected. Such men would be the

first to avert a danger which those who are looking to material and financial rather than scientific greatness would wish to inflict on institutions which are not subject or subsidiary. This and the belief that in the long run right and truth will prevail ought to inspire us with the hope that we are not going to disappear in the universal hurlyburly. Perhaps out of the disorder the world may arise to saner ideas ; and out of the chaos into which a deluded and atheistic pedagogy has plunged us there may emerge, even outside of Catholic circles, a system of rational and religious education. Meantime the admission of the enemy that denominational colleges educate better than State universities ought to inspire confidence and compel us to make that superiority still more emphatic. Constantly recurring educational experiments should be avoided, and the course as far as possible should be cleared of rubbish; and, finally, the advice to coöperate for defense and improvement, even though the suggestion come from an unfriendly source, should be carefully examined. Perhaps by such federated effort very satisfactory results may be achieved.

T. J. CAMPBELL, S.J.

THE PIPER OF THE LEAVES.

A STORY OF THE CAROLINAS.

CHAPTER III.

BEFORE leaving the mountains Judge Weldon made inquiry concerning the miserable piece of land owned by Oberia Dace, upon which the cabin stood.

"Bud's welcome tew hit," said Mrs. Week, charitably, forgetting it was his anyhow. "Hit's pore triflin' lan' ez ever ye see. Oberia nur Penk nuvver raised more'n a hen' ful er corn nur a hatful o' shucks on hit f'um fus' tur las'. Bud kin hev hit an' welcome. No one thet I knows on is ahonin' tew git hit."

The Judge agreed with her estimate of the bit of real estate, but, lawyer-like, had the title deed properly recorded in the village courthouse. Here he learned that Bud was not Oberia's son, but her nephew.

"How is that?" he inquired of Mrs. Week. "Whose child is he?" "Oberia's brother, Torm Love, was his father," replied Mrs. Week, "but I nuvver did hear who his mammy was. Oberia keered

fur him ez ef he was her'n. I reckon ez how he's a better right tew be a Dace then a Love. Torm was luny an' drenk hisse'f tew death when Bud thur wasn't much over cheer-high."

Mrs. Weldon looked sober over the Judge's recital of the boy's parentage. She was a great believer in heredity; the Judge was not. But then she had been a Moulton-Livingstone of Charleston, and the Judge's people were originally from New Jersey.

"At any rate," said Weldon, "the boy will not be an utter pauper. If the railroad ever runs through or near the Cove the land may be valuable after all. No one else has the shadow of a claim upon it." But this was a remote contingency.

After establishing themselves for the winter in their Charleston house the Weldons found a violin-teacher for the boy, a certain Franz Listner, a painstaking German, who gave him a sound, if dull, method, and taught him the art of making the fingers ache.

The child, whom they called Dace, was docile and quick enough, but his mountain burr was not as easily discarded as his uncouth clothes and manners, and for a long time he was as shy as a Cove

squirrel, happy only when alone, violin in hand, the music-rack (which was one in every sense of the word) set aside, imagination astride the quivering bow. Often he would put down the too exacting instrument, seize upon his primitive flute, and improvise for hours, with a guilty subconsciousness that this was not the way to the goal persistently set before him by Listner,-Berlin, the Hoch Schule, perhaps Joachim himself. He could not divest himself of a feeling of unreality, even after long acquaintance with dismaying surroundings had made them familiar. He had but to shut his eyes in daytime or open them wide at night, to see the great purple ranges of the Balsams against the vivid sky; the clouds trailing mistily about the summits of the peaks, or creeping like thin fog into the Cove, where stood the forlorn cabin in which his adoptive mother died. There was not much sentiment or affection in his recollection of her. Mrs. Weldon's gracious figure either blotted out the other or brought into painful contrast the stooping back over the sulky fire, the head with greasy hair forever falling from the comb, the dirty clawlike hands raised frequently to strike, but never to caress.

The peevish, yellow face, with snuffstick or pipe in the loose lips, with unwholesome patches of crimson on the high cheek bones, with gray eyes gleaming with fever, sometimes hung before him in his drowsiness and "held him from his sleep."

But oftener, in the stillness of night, he heard the wooing voice of the leaping waterfall, shouting from ledge to ledge; the dropping of nuts in the flaming autumn woods, the Eolian roar of the mountain wind in the hemlocks, the chattering of birds and furry creatures in the chestnut trees.

So the putting on of harness was horribly irksome to the untrained child of the woods; he felt cramped, bewidered, even hindered in the free exercise of his powers. But for the tender sympathy and affection of those around him, he would have given up in despair. Then, also, he hated the dark and ugly city where the houses presented their gable-ends to the gloomy streets, and where the space between them was often occupied by graveyards whose sunken stones denoted their antiquity. The railway station lost its terrors for him after his first awful experience, and his geographical researches had given him a pretty definite idea of his location and its distance from Sapona. The Judge gave him a monthly allowance in gold which was hoarded with an inherited parsimony that would have been developed by ig

norance into miserliness. He looked often at this hoard with the ever-recurring question:

"Why not run away?"

He sickened for the air of the mountains in the heavy salt breath of the sea. The Cove meant freedom. Freedom to dangle his legs. from the tree limbs in the delicious water of the icy creek. Freedom to flute on leaf, or pipe on reed from dawn to dusk, and all night long if the moon was full. Above all, freedom from those serried ranks of black dots that dazzled his eyes, confused his brain, and wearied his inmost soul. There was no music in the "damnable iteration" of those terrible exercises of Tartini and Viotti. How could he know that never was it intended there should be? Fortunately his musical intuition was marvellous, his tone-production exquisite, his perception of rhythm keen as lightning, infallible.

The delicate series of open and stopped harmonics he had long ago discovered for himself, to Listner's extravagant wonder.

"The little boy has genuis, Judge Weldon," he said one day, "he has the making in him not of the dilettante, the amateur, but the great player. . . the original artist. He has true perception. He should be sent abroad to study with the great ones of the world of art. He is beyond me. Yet I do the best I can. I will not spoil him.”

While enthusiasm kindled in the bosom of the teacher, dejection fastened her claws more and more deeply in the heart of the pupil. He definitely decided to return to the Cove. This was after a morning's lesson uncommonly trying. He would wait until night. He would take his flute-the one he had made of smooth reed and pierced with a red hot knitting-needle-but the hateful fiddle with the jeering, mocking spirit within it he would leave behind. He would wear the clothes upon his back-the pretty suit that had assisted in his transformation from savagery to civilization-but he would leave all else, gain the mountains and be free!

This decision calmed his agitation and inspired him. In the evening, after school, he took up his violin, a very beautiful one, that the Judge had paid an extravagant price for, and began toimprovise: The schoolroom was growing dark. He stood near a window overlooking the narrow, ugly street, its lamps blurred by the incoming fog. Mrs. Weldon hearing the sound of the violin passionately played, went softly in, sat near him until he dropped the bow, and with a sudden access of emotion leaned his head against the window sill and began to weep, not audibly but bitterly, convulsively.