OLDER American writers know what Mr. Howells was and is to them, what he did for them and what his strong and gentle teaching saved them from doing. He led the way out of a wilderness of raw and fantastic shapes where many of us dallied, making childish and romantic figures in imitation of the falsities we found there. He knew how to make true things and showed others how to make them.

Some thirty years and more ago, when he was upon his' lecture tour'about the country, he came to a midland city where a nervous young writer, just beginning to publish, had been appointed his guide, to take him to the dinner given for him and to the church where he was to speak, and to see to his comfortable accommodation generally. No privilege could have been thought greater by the young man, who had met Mr. Howells but once before and then under unfortunate circumstances; for the youth, a glee-club performer just out of college, had suddenly, to his utter horror, been called upon to rise, at a Thanksgiving dinner of the Lantern Club, and sing a solo without accompaniment. Already speechless to find himself in the same room with Mr. Howells, it was more possible for him to find a voice for singing than words to decline; but the voice he found was a quavering one at a pitch Nature had never planned for him, and the noises he made in his struggle were so strange that four years later, when he was appointed a day's courier for this illustrious auditor, the vocalist was still anxious to explain