Virginia Woolf ('Flush’) is an accomplished swimmer in those deep waters that swirl and eddy in the stream of consciousness. In her novels it has been her method to show the merging of external events with internal impressions. As she has said, she wants to find out ‘what really goes on, what people feel, although they generally try to hide it.’ In nothing that she has written, we dare say, has this method been so peculiarly applicable, so wholly delightful, and so signally successful as in this imaginative biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. Not only has she brought Flush bounding back to Wimpole Street: she has entered into his cunning brain, looked out upon the Victorian world through his eyes, sniffed the very essence of its life through his quivering nose, and, in doing so, has Hashed before us a fresh, new picture of the Barretts and the Brownings. Mrs. Woolf is the daughter of the late Sir Leslie Stephen and the wife of Leonard Woolf. George J. Anderson (‘The Big Pepper and Brine Man’) is a business executive of long and varied experience. Twenty-live years ago he started literally at the bottom of the ladder, — in the basement shipping room of a metropolitan department store, — and the rungs of his ascent have included merchandising, manufacturing, and mining. At present he is engaged in consulting work in the financial and administrative phases of business reorganization. Δ ‘How the Jew Does It’ is a sequel to ‘How the Jew Did It,’ published last month. Milton Steinberg is a young rabbi in Indianapolis. Δ For a decade William Henry Chamberlin (‘Russia and America: A Study in Contrasts’) has lived in Moscow as Foreign Correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and the Christian Science Monitor. His dispatches and his book, Soviet Russia, have made him rank with Walter Duranty as an authoritative reporter of Russian news. He has recently been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the preparation of a three-volume history of the Communist Revolution. Δ Though still in her early twenties, Josephine W . Johnson (‘The Preacher’s Pilgrimage’) has already published numerous short stories and verses. She attends Washington University, lives with her three sisters on a Missouri farm, and gives free rein to her double talent for writing and for painting. Δ In ‘A Letter from Dutch Flat,’ Bill Adams lays bare the record of his extraordinary career. Christina Chapin (‘Two Sonnets’) is a young American poet who has lived most of her life in England. Δ ‘The War and Gertrude Stein’ is another chapter from the autobiography of Gertrude Stein. Δ Most of us have to seek adventure vicariously between the covers of a book, but Charles D. Stewart has an uncanny knack of running into it wherever he may chance to be. ‘The Mistakes of the Fathers’ records an instance that is typical of the man.

Adventure of still another kind is the birthright of Leslie Hotson. From the musty files of the British Record Office and the registers of the Worshipful Company of Vintners he has once more emerged triumphant with a longlost fragment of lusty Elizabethan life (‘Roaring Boys at the Mermaid’). In the intervals between trips abroad on the hot scent of evernew clues, he is Professor of English at Haverford College. Δ Just turned thirty, L. L. Fuller (’The Legal Mind’) has two degrees from Stanford University and is a teacher of law at Duke University, his principal interest lying in the study of legal philosophy. Isadore Luce Smith (‘We Modern Parents’) is not a spinner of theories. A pragmatist to her finger tips, she is the mother of two small sons, and she declares it to be her deliberate intention not to bring them up in the standard modern manner. Δ Readers of the Atlantic will recognize in ‘The Tinker the same scene and some of the same characters which R. H. Sherrick introduced in his first story, ‘Chore Boy,’published last January. N. R. Danielian (‘Gas: A Study in Expansion’) is an instructor and tutor in economics at Harvard. He has recently completed for the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce an intensive investigation of holding-company practices Of the present paper he writes: ‘The facts relative to the industrial feudalism of Associated Gas have been derived from the studies of the Federal Trade Commission, the reports of state public service commissions, and publications of the company itself. The authenticity of the information obtained from the Federal Trade Commission cannot be doubted. Before making its reports public, the Commission submits them to the companies with which they deal for a final check-up of the facts. Consequently, whatever is made public carries at least the implication that the companies have not desired to deny to the Commission the absolute correctness of the facts assembled by its examiners.’ Δ Of Scrutator (‘The Professor’s Dilemma’), suffice it to say that he is not a professor.

Hobby horsical extremes.

Dear Atlantic, —
Very interesting indeed is Mr. Earnest Elmo Calkins’s article, ‘Hobbyhorses,’ in the May issue. The spectacle of a retired business man who can find nothing better to do than wander disconsolately about the boundaries of his former empire is a sad one. But what of that other unfortunate who has all hobbyhorses and no empire to ride away from?
It is curious that both extremes should present themselves side by side. First, the ambitious man who has been so busy all his life building empires that he does not know how to ride a hobbyhorse; and then his Unhappy younger brother who has learned all about hobbyhorses because nobody wanted any more empires built.
At each end of the scale there is a dead weight of thwarted humanity — old age grown cold, blank, and cheerless, with too much work and no play; youth grown cynical, sullen, and depressed, with too much play and no work. If we may indulge in a moderate bit of hope, these hobbyhorses in youth’s stable will one day prove fine, fat steeds to carry us away from the tooexacting world of affairs.
CZARNA H. MOECKER
Ptossnigpr, Illinois

Yo-ho-Ho for the life of a sailor!

Dear Atlantic, —
Bill Adams knows sea life all right, but to one who sailed the briny in the seventies there seem to be some touches of luxury in his picture of the grub. In the first place, he mentions a table in the apprentices’ berth, which was used on occasion for racing the crawlers. We had no such table; the races took place on our sea chests, which were our only furniture. And Bill Adams evidently never encountered a Calcutta rice pantile. It ice pantiles had at least 400 per cent more resist ing power than the Liverpool variefy — but no crawlers.
Bill Adams tells about ‘Harriet Lane.’ I never heard that story. In my sea days the Australian meat-canning industry was in its infancy, and on special occasions we were served a sort of stew of canned mutton, which, for obvious reasons, we called ‘railway accidents.’ Another luxury he mentions is marmalade. Neither marmalade nor butter was known to me in my apprenticeship days. So, on the whole, I am inclined to regard Bill Adams as one of an overfed crowd who don’t know what real ship’s grub was like.
HENRY C. LAHEE
Boston, Massachusetts

A note for Jasper Jarrow.

Dear Atlantic, —
In reading ‘Technocratic Pyrotechnics,’ my son Charles took exception to the statement that machines may not be able to do certain jobs, such as hunting eggs on the farm. He says this could be accomplished by means of a cackle detector, in much the same way that airplanes are spotted and shot at. As for school-teaching, he has always contended that some of his teachers are machines, others worse.
LAURA S. HOOVER
Johnstown, Pennsylvania

For sponsors in baptism.

Dear Atlantic, —
In the summer of 1891 my wife presented me with a baby girl for whom I had no name ready. At the moment the news reached me I was reading an article by Miss Repplier in the Atlantic, and I said, ‘Let her name be Agnes Repplier.’ So it was, and she remains ‘Miss Repplier’ to this day, although she is married and has two boys in college.
A. W. KINNARD, SR.
Bryan, Texas

Useful to both sexes.

Dear Atlantic, —
Apropos of the letter from Julia Florence Alexander in the April Contributors’ Column, I am moved to remind you that, in many families, the opinion is firmly held that a young woman traveling alone and carrying an Atlantic is most adequately, safely, and perfectly chaperoned.
OTA LOUD
New Britain, Connecticut

Daer Atlantic, —
I am a successful travel companion considering positions offered me by private families for this summer. In making out a recent application and declaration of my favorite reading, I neglected to cite the Atlantic and thereby lost a desirable position in the Southwest. Briefly, this will be of interest to other young gentlemen.
STAUNTON; MORAN
Boston, Massachusetts

The itch to write.

’Do people ever send you manuscripts without being asked?’ This, one of the favorite questions popped at editors, can be answered with an unequivocal ’Yes.’ The postman who serves the neighborhood of 8 Arlington Street can testify to that ; his broad shoulders have grown rounded and bent under the burden of authors’ hopes which he daily deposits at our doorstep.

The reasons for this extensive traffic are not far to seek. In America. where a nation-wide system of primary education guarantees to every mother’s son and daughter at least a nodding acquaintance with the three R’s, the inarticulateness that most of us are born to is transmuted at an early age into an urge of self-expression — ergo, the itch to write has become universal. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is only a light skin infection, easily scratched and quickly cured. The afflicted one, however, never believes that he is numbered among the ninety and nine; something tells him that he is the hundredth case; that his is that deep-seated, perhaps congenital, inflammation of the soul for which the only known catharsis is a repealed exercising of the muscles in fingers and forearm.

Sooner or later, he works up the courage to consult an editor, the specialist in these matters, whose job it is to make a diagnosis. The common prescription, writ not in Latin, but in plain English, is technically called a rejection slip, and it is usually quite effective in dealing with the less serious forms of the disease. Indeed — and we say this without boasting — it is our professional experience that the great majority of the patients who consult us speedily recover, and, with spirits purged, are soon restored to their normal occupations as bankers. farmers, school-teachers, plumbers, and iron puddlers.

But figures speak louder than words; let us submit the record of an average month’s offerings. In April 1933, the following manuscripts, less than a dozen of them invited, were ours for the taking: —

Poems. 900

Articles and essays. 808

Stories. 444

2152

In bulk, here was sufficient material to keep the Atlantic supplied for ten years. In quality, there was just enough for one issue: we accepted 18 items out of 2152.

The poets, as one would expect, are the most sanguine of all would-be contributors, the least daunted by what Mr. Mencken calls ‘the cold and clammy facts.’ Since we rarely print more than two poems a month, a mathematician will tell you that the chances of acceptance are about 1 in 450 — but, of course, poesy has nothing to do with mathematics.

‘How on earth,’ says an eager voice, ‘do you manage to read so many manuscripts?’ Incredible as it may seem, every poem, every article, every story that comes to us is carefully considered and judged upon its merits. Day after expectant day the editor is stimulated by the hope and the ever-present possibility that the manuscript before him, with its ink smudges and marks of greasy thumbs, may prove to be the work of genius. And sometimes, sure enough, it is. Then the editor’s faith is fed by the discovery of a hitherto mute and inglorious Milton.

’But do you mean to say that you ponder every word of every line of every manuscript?’ Come, come, my dear fellow ! An editor is not the fool you lake him for. He cannot spend a lifetime at his desk without learning a useful trick or two. When Walter Hines Page was editor of the Atlantic, he received one day a long manuscript written by a garrulous lady. He examined it and returned it in the next mail. Whereupon she wrote him an indignant letter, complaining that her paper could not possibly have received the attention it deserved, because it came back too soon.

To this Page replied: —

’Dear Madame: When you eat an egg, do you have to eat all of it before you know it’s a bad one?’

T’anks, we no buy this way.

Dear Atlantic, —
I am writing you to fine out if you buy short, story for your magerzine, as I have a short story writen contain about 4 thousands words. But this story is not copy roght from Patent Office. I can write story, but haven’t the mean to secure copy right unless I can sell one first and then use part of the sum receive for the first one sole. I would like to know if you buy them this way for your Atlantic Monthly Magerzine. If you buy this way, I will send you a copy of the story I have writen.
Oblidge your truly.
F. A. LASSERIE
Iowa, Louisiana