perceive upon the purple glow across the far leagues, and nourishes his canny dourness on the shaggy rocks that fade never from his dreams. It is because Scotland is still Scotch, persistent in the homeland in its national traits, that the sweet accent lingers in every Scottish home beside the seven seas.

Up in the Northland, in rural New England, is the fireside of the American home. There American manhood came first to self-consciousness. There the nation learned the resolute independence and self-reliance, the habit of reasoning about things, the knack of doing things in the easiest way, the love of justice for others as well as for ourselves, which stand before the world as American traits.

It is a sad day for any man when the old homestead no longer shelters the piety and worth that gave it standing in the neighborhood. The gods have ever been attached to localities. Spiritual treasures are not quite the same when they are transplanted to another territory. Kansas may be God's country in good time, but never in all the millenniums will she be Massachusetts. Every faith treasures beyond price the possession of its shrine, and it is no mistaken instinct. Therefore, it were a sad day for America when rural New England, the shrine of American worth, loses the manhood which it has wrought out as the symbol of American character. The nation needs the men who are to go forth from those valleys still. She needs yet more the spirit that will abide there as long as the smoke curls upward of an autumn morning from the little white houses on the hillside.

There are those who love those hills and valleys still, and are glad to make their homes among them. We feel weighted with a trust in behalf of the nation for the preservation on the New England soil of all that is best in the manhood New England has reared.

We are watchers of a beacon whose light must never die; We are guardians of an altar 'neath the silence of the sky; The rocks yield founts of courage, struck forth as by Thy rod;

For the strength of the hills we bless Thee, O God, our Father's God.

The Pioneers

John W. Springer

To those who know the ranch or plains country, or who have in any way come in contact with America's Great Out-of-Doors, this selection, which requires unfeigned enthusiasm and sustained force in delivery, will make a strong appeal.

How we love these old weatherbeaten frontier fathers. How we reverence them for the early struggles, the hardships and the privations they rendered that you and I might occupy a land second to no section in this magnificent country we enjoy. The old days of the trail! How we look back to them as halcyon days of the cattle business. The old boys, the old chuck wagon, the old ponies, with their wondrous hieroglyphics burned all over them; the songs of the cowboys and their marvelous stories around the camp fires, from the gulf far away and the prairies over the hills, along the mountain fastnesses, ever on north to the ranch

limits of Montana, this charming stretch of plains, rivers, hills and valleys was the happy abode of the pioneer cowman. Can you reckon to-day what we owe these pioneers? Not only to these, but to the old mothers, who left the States and the old homes and those they loved, and moved into the little old sod houses and brightened up the dug-outs and the more pretentious log houses up and down the land occupied by the flocks and herds. Their stories live in memory like a benediction.

To-day it is appropriate that we sweep in memory the valley of the Mississippi and the valley of the Missouri, the plains of the Canadian, and the Pecos, and the Rio Grande up and over the hills of the Rockies, and on to the Little Missouri of the Dakotas, away and across the valley of Salt Lake to the rivers of Oregon and the sunlit fields of faraway California. What Elysian fields! In the dreamless solitude of the camp fire you have watched the flickering embers blaze up and then die away, and with tired limbs but happy heart you have drifted down the tides of sleep while ten thousand times ten thousand stars stood guard over pour peaceful slumbers.

Such scenes as I have pictured mark the cow camps of the mighty West. There, where you find the big-hearted men, they draw their fountain of charity from their close contact with Nature and Nature's God. What a limitless field for fiction, for the stories of the brave, the dauntless pioneers who traversed the valley and hillsides of this great stretch of producing territory.

The American pioneer! The stockman and the stockmen of days agone blazed the way for our princely heritage. Their sufferings find their antithesis in our present happiness. Their deprivations, by the evolution of an inexorable fate, mete out plenty and prosperity to us who have succeeded them. All hail the home-builders of the American Union!

Southern Types

Thomas Watt Gregory

This is taken from a speech that Mr. Gregory, U. S. AttorneyGeneral, delivered at the annual banquet of the Southern Society of New York City, February, 1915. Tell the story contained in the first paragraph in a natural conversational manner, not failing to bring out effectively the climax at the end. There follows a transitional paragraph, applying the point of the story and leading up to the serious note struck in the paragraph following, which should be delivered with sustained earnestness and force. The appeal in the last paragraph should be given with real feeling; the touch of sentiment and the word-pictures will require slow rate and time-emphasis for the most effective delivery.

THOSE of you who have not been away from the South so long that you have forgotten everything of any real value you ever knew will recall the fact that the habitat or range of the negro is usually within a circle with a diameter of not over ten miles. Not infrequently a negro is born on a plantation, lives his three score years and ten, and dies without having been twenty-five miles from the place of his birth. I once knew a negro who left his range for good and sufficient reasons, and about two carlengths ahead of the sheriff. Speed and luck being on his side, he loped off about fifty miles and estab

lished a new habitat in a strange community. There he held himself out as a preacher, built up a large congregation, and was becoming quite prosperous. One Sunday night on mounting the pulpit he was horrified to observe on the front bench a negro from his own range who knew every detail of his past career. He was not quite sure whether the strange negro recognized him or not. He watched him carefully during the preliminary hymns and announcements without getting any light on the subject. Finally, he got up to begin his sermon and said: "My bredren, it had been my purpose to-night to preach to you on de pure in heart and how dey shall rest in Abraham's bosom, but since I got in de pulpit de Holy Spirit have whispered to me and said: 'Nigger, don't you preach on dat text, you take anoder text,' and so I is going to preach to you de sixteenth verse of de fifth chapter of Isaiah (and at this point he fixed his eagle eye on the stray negro) which reads as follows: 'If you think you know me, say nothing, and I'll see you later.'"

There are too many strays present to-night from my former ranges for me to get my eye on all of them at the same time, but I trust that they will observe the spirit of the text, and I promise to reciprocate by being equally reticent as to their past. And now having thus shaken hands, and forgotten all unpleasant reminiscences, as prize fighters do, let us proceed to business.

There are many things of which we, as a people, may well be proud; but in his heart of hearts the real Southerner specially cherishes respect for