working man is called in scorn a "stiff":

For instance, one is called a "shovel stiff," another a "cattle stiff"; then there is the "mission stiff," and the "barrel-house stiff." Shovel stiff is the name applied by tramps to navvies and railroad workers. If one of the latter enters a tramps' camp, being out of work and looking for it, it is not long before he sees that his presence is not wanted. He is generally known by his clothes or his heavy boots. Tramps wear light boots, which are begged at the better class of houses, the inmates of which do not wear heavy boots. So when a man on tramp is seen to have on a heavy working pair, it can reasonably be supposed that he has bought them, and must have worked to enable him to do so. For this reason he is only a tramp for the time being, and is despised for being a shovel stiff.

The beggar "boards" trains as a matter of course, sometimes seeking a most dangerous position whence he cannot be removed by the officials when once the train has started. They can, however, stone him, and sometimes do. There is something disconcertingto say the least of it-to the average Englishman in the perpetual lying which is the main part of the beggar's stock-in-trade; and even masters of the craft have a bad time of it, we gather, when they cross the Atlantic. Chicago Fatty, a famous American beggar, visited Liverpool on a cattle boat and forty men did not give him "sixteen farthings for the feather"; that is, money for a fourpenny bed.

Begging in England nearly broke his heart and so sickened him that, when he returned to his own country, New York Slim and Boston Shorty had to feed him, as though he were a babe in arms, until he recovered sufficiently to help himself. Blacky-the halfbreed-who claimed to have enough Indian blood in his veins to make himself dangerous if he had cause-Blacky, I say, 'thought that Fatty would never

again be a good beggar. It certainly seemed, for a long time, that this would be the case until one morning Fatty went out and begged his breakfast, but nothing more. He went out again, begged a meal, a shirt and a handkerchief. In a day or two this good beggar-almost ruined by a trip to England-began to take a man with him to carry the spoils as he had been accustomed to do in his prosperous days.

There are in the book many comments of interest. One is that the supposed "beggars' marks" on houses are all nonsense; another, that tramps are much more frightened of women on the road than women are of tramps. Johnson thought that a beggar would prefer to beg from a man, Sterne thought from a woman. Mr. Davies's objection to the latter is based on the fear that the woman is apt to be nervous about tramps.

The author has already given us in his remarkable verse a view of the cheap lodging-house, and here we get further details of the strange manners and customs of these places. where he wrote letters gratis for the illiterate. His reminiscences are vivid, and gain by a quaint simplicity which is delightful after the journalese in which such lives are generally written. We can well believe that he has "a sharp eye and a clear memory" for people he met years ago, and he almost seems to regret his career an author. The chapters on his literary life offer pungent and somewhat bitter reading, and the old lesson that repute does not necessarily mean money:

as

I am considered to be a liar by those who have read so much about my work. and who at last begin to doubt when I say that Fame in England does not pay so good as begging in America, and that a very small income of my own supports me.

We remark that Mr. Davies's genuine talents and striking career lead to the

sort of reception which spoils an author. He has, it appears, been compared to Daniel Defoe. That is nothing, as praise goes in the indiscriminate press. Who could name off-hand at the present day the modern author of "the

finest thing since 'Lear'"? Until we know the quarter from which these comparisons proceed and the authority which is behind them, we must regard them as a cruel sort of kindness to the rising author.

The Athenaeum.

All the

It is undoubtedly a very considerable success that the friends of good government have won in New York. They have failed to elect their candidate for the Mayoralty, but they have carried without exception all the minor offices, and the charter under which New York is administered is such that the control of these minor offices carries with it the means of checking and supervising the mayor, and of damming the stream of graft at its fountain-head. appropriations for carrying on the city government have, for instance, to be made through the Board of Estimate and Apportionment, and as all the officials who constitute this Board, except the mayor, belong to the Reformers' camp, there is a strong guarantee that expenditure during the next four years will be honest and economical. Again, the office of District Attorney is one of immense importance. It might almost indeed be described as the key to the Tammany fortress. When the District Attorney is honest, fearless and efficient, there is the assurance that Tammany malefactors will at least be brought to trial, that indictments will no longer be mysteriously "lost," and that the machinery of the law will remain intact. It goes without saying that in no municipal or county office is it more essential that all political influence should be excluded than in that of District Attorney. The occupant of that post controls absolutely the machinery of criminal prosecution. It rests with him to see that no "pull" of

any sort shall spare an accused man from a fair trial. The District Attorney, in short, is either a formidable obstacle or an invaluable friend to the politicians and their peculiar operations. The triumph of the Reformers in carrying their nominee for the District Attorneyship implies that the legal, as well as the financial, business of the city will be administered with a single eye to the interests of the people. Tammany is thus cut off from a familiar source of wealth and from the immunity it necessarily enjoys when the law officers of the city are its own henchmen. Much no doubt remains to it.

The Mayor's powers of appointment and dismissal are still a great asset, and may easily be converted into an instrument of jobbery and corrup tion. So long as he can appoint the thirty-two magistrates who preside over the lower courts, and can nominate and remove the Police Commissioners, Tammany is far from impotent. But Judge Gaynor, as the solitary, if also the chief, member for Tammany, in a cabinet of Reformers somewhat ludicrously resembles a lion in a den of Daniels.

It is one more illustration of the mysterious methods of Providence that the chief agent in producing this all but unqualified victory for decent government should have been Mr. Hearst. Mr. Hearst for more than a decade has been himself a problem not less disquieting than Tammany Hall. The eight prosperous daily papers that he

owns and directs were the first as they are the last, word in "yellow" journalism; nobody disputes their primacy of the sewer. They are often splendidly and legitimately enterprising, but more often recklessly sensational; they bear the mark of a vivid and alert intelligence, but that intelligence is too frequently prostituted to the basest ends; and their general tone has earned for them the condemnation of all reputable Americans. But the masses relish them, and it is perhaps an open question whether in their ceaseless warfare on the plutocracy they are not doing a necessary and even a useful work. At any rate they have succeeded in making many scores of thousands of Americans believe that in Mr. Hearst there is a genuine champion of the Have-nots against the Haves. He is a man with no record of public services to appeal to, and his personal reputation is rather a hindrance than a help to him in his political career. Yet, four years ago, entering the campaign for the Mayoralty almost at the eleventh hour, and with an untried organization behind him, he fought Tammany to a standstill; and this year his support of the Reformers' candidates for the minor posts has proved unquestionably the main factor in their success. by far the most formidable opponent that Tammany has yet encountered. But that does not of course mean that he will remain its opponent for ever. When Tammany finds a man whom it cannot suppress, its invariable policy is to annex him; and nobody who has followed Mr. Hearst's career and who has seen him fighting for and against every party in turn, can doubt that he has no insuperable objection to being annexed. In New York City it is clear that he holds the balance of power between Tammany Hall on one side and the "good citizens" on the other. The latter will never adopt him as their candidate, but far stranger things have

He is

happened than Mr. Hearst's appearance four years hence, as the Tammany nominee and his triumphant election.

What perhaps is the most satisfactory feature in the Reformers' victory is that it was effected in the absence of the two conditions that hitherto have been held essential to the overthrow of Tammany. Those two conditions are that Tammany should have been actively and glaringly disreputable, and that all the forces opposed to it should be united. But in the campaign that closed recently one of these conditions was virtually non-existent and the other only partially obtained. In the past four years that it has held office, Tammany, still unregenerate behind the scenes, has been comparatively inoffensive in public. There is not the smallest reason to think that it has changed anything but its methods, or that it has ceased to be a many-linked chain of organized rascality. But since 1905 it has successfully avoided the grosser scandals. If it has stolen-and nobody doubts that it has-its operations have been judiciously veiled. If the police have blackmailed, they have done so with some approach to circumspection. If the Boss and his lieutenants have enriched themselves with graft. as of course they have, their guilt is more suspected than proved. If Tammany has been just as much as ever in league with contractors and corporations at the expense of the city and its citizens, the public tokens of this alliance have for the most part been adroitly suppressed. Only two or three of the late Mayor's appointments were obviously bad; only two or three of his actions were palpably "political." There were, in short, few of the usual revelations. Nor was there complete unity among the anti-Tammany forces. Mr. Hearst's intervention split the vote for the Mayoralty, even though his adoption of the other candidates on the Reform ticket

secured their election. It is therefore all the more creditable to New Yorkers that, confronted by a ballot-sheet as large as a dining-table, worked upon by no particularly stimulating disclosures, and conscious of the disunion among the Reformers, they should none the less have smitten Tammany hip and thigh. The fact is encouraging but it is not final. It does not mean the suppression for good and all of the Tammany organization. Tammany has often found itself far more thoroughly defeated than it is to-day, and it has always hitherto been able to recover the lost ground. There are some signs that New Yorkers, and indeed the American people generally, are beginning to cut loose from the domination The Outlook.

of the Bosses and to treat municipa! government as primarily a business and not a political problem. But this movement will have to develop far more strength and constancy than it has done so far if it is to win more than a casual victory or to endanger Tammany's security at all permanently. The citizens of New York have won a respite of sorts for the next four years; but they have not won freedom or anything like it. If it is ever safe indeed to forecast the future by the past, then to prophesy that Tammany in 1913 will be again in power is scarcely to speculate on the unknowable so much as to draw the moral of New York's history during the past hundred years.

O, see not ye that bonny road
That winds about that ferny brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun
gae.

It is a road which many among our greatest poets have never been able to find-perhaps never cared to seek. Some strange fortuitous natural gift it is which opens the gate of Elfinland -something which may, and often does, exist side by side with exalted mental gifts, but which is more often the dower of a simple and untutored nature. Reason and logical capacity, exercised and educated to their highest pitch, are apt to be exclusive, and to dwarf the spontaneous instincts and feelings which are common to humanity, and therefore quite as deserving of development along the proper lines.

It is not, therefore, in what are known as the Augustan ages of literature that we must seek for the true spirit of fairy lore. The period which rejoiced in the building of Palladian

mansions, in lofty white-and-gold salons, in formal gardens and Watteau shepherdesses, also demanded conformity with similar canons in the realm of literature. The middle of the seventeenth century witnessed the banishment of the fairies from poetry, save in country tradition and in survivals of ballad lore. It was not until two hundred years had passed away that they were thoroughly re-instated, for the Elfinland of L. E. L. and of Mrs. Hemans was a stagey limelight affair, which was evidently, in the eyes of its singers, the merest "poetic license."

No amount of gilded epithet, of talk about gossamer cloaks and rainbow wings, can convey the strange mysterious charm which was so real a thing to the early balladists. The elfinland in which our forefathers believed, as the Irish peasantry do to this day, was far more than a gaudily pretty peepshow. It was weird, perilous, terrible. They knew better than to endeavor to give concrete expression to that twilight

realm, and we shall look in vain through the tale of Thomas the Rhymer and of the Young Tamlane for any of those painstaking descriptions into which later poets have been betrayed.

O they rade on, and farther on,

And they waded through rivers aboon the knee;

And they saw neither sun nor moon, But they heard the moaning of the

sea.

It was mirk mirk night, and there was nae stern light,

And they waded through rivers aboon the knee:

For a' the blude that's shed on earth Rins through the springs o' that countrie.

Thus far the balladist, and no farther. And would not the tale of True Thomas have lost half of its mystic charm by any attempt to take away the mysterious glamor of his seven years in Fairyland? Into that wonderful twilight he goes, to the chime of the Elf Queen's ringing bridle, and it is only by the subtle suggestion of the context that we can conjure up a dim vision of Elfinland.

In an age whose literature looked for guidance to classical models, the cult of native tradition naturally went to the wall, save in so far as its creations lingered under the more stilted guise of allegory. It was with the revived influence of early literature, the new vogue of romance, that the fairy folk came to their own again. In the "Idylls of the King" may be seen a perfect example of the transition from one mode of thought to another, where the classical school to which Tennyson's manner partly belongs has grafted upon it the mediæval mysticism of the "Morte d'Arthur."

It was that quality of what we must call, for want of a better expression, the Celtic spirit in Keats' work which

rendered him so little in harmony with the day in which he lived, so strangely in sympathy with modern lovers of poetry. The reading public of that period knew nothing of

Magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faerie lands forlorn.

"La Belle Dame sans Merci" was incomprehensible, and therefore not of the most respectable. Still another early disciple of the new school of legendary lore was James Hogg, whose "Kilmeny" is one of the few modern fairy poems which has the genuine ancient ring.

Kilmeny had been, she kenned not where,

And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare;

Kilmeny had been where the cock never crew,

Where the rain never fell, and the wind never blew.

What wonder that this is the one poem with which most people connect the name of the Ettrick shepherd?

Elfinland is, or should be, dear and near to children and to their elders alike, and any tendency to moralizing or allegory is not wanted in that otherworld atmosphere. There is a spice of irreverence about the idea of making the fairy folk the servants of men. In song, as in story, they must be mysterious, unknown, free or they are not worth talking about at all.

Up the airy mountain,

Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men.
Wee folk, good folk,

Trooping altogether;
Green jacket, red cap,

And white owl's feather.

I think most of us would give up many greater poems rather than these haunting echoes of old legend and ro