He read on. Our children’s children—what of them? Who of them? New
means must be discovered to find room for us under the sun. Shall this
be done by war or can it be done by peaceful methods?
Or will we all have to move to Canada?
Our deepest convictions—will Science upset them? Our civilization—is
it inferior to older orders of things?
And meanwhile, in the far-off dripping jungles of Yucatan, sounded the
chopping of the axes of the gum-choppers.
Do we want big men—or do we want them cultured? Take Joyce. Take
President Coolidge. What star must our college students aim at? There is
Jack Britton. There is Dr. Henry Van Dyke. Can we reconcile the two?
Take the case of Young Stribling.
And what of our daughters who must make their own Soundings? Nancy
Hawthorne is obliged to make her own Soundings in the sea of life.
Bravely and sensibly she faces the problems which come to every girl of
eighteen.
It was a splendid booklet.
Are you a girl of eighteen? Take the case of Joan of Arc. Take the case
of Bernard Shaw. Take the case of Betsy Ross.
Think of these things in 1925—Was there a risqué page in Puritan
history? Were there two sides to Pocahontas? Did he have a fourth
dimension?
Are modern paintings—and poetry—Art? Yes and No. Take Picasso.
Have tramps codes of conduct? Send your mind adventuring.
There is Romance everywhere. _Forum_ writers talk to the point, are
possessed of humor and wit. But they do not try to be smart and are
never long-winded.
Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by
the Romance of the unusual. He laid down the booklet.
And meanwhile, stretched flat on a bed in a darkened room in his house
in Triana, Manuel Garcia Maera lay with a tube in each lung, drowning
with the pneumonia. All the papers in Andalucia devoted special
supplements to his death, which had been expected for some days. Men and
boys bought full-length colored pictures of him to remember him by, and
lost the picture they had of him in their memories by looking at the
lithographs. Bull-fighters were very relieved he was dead, because he
did always in the bull-ring the things they could only do sometimes.
They all marched in the rain behind his coffin and there were one
hundred and forty-seven bull-fighters followed him out to the cemetery,
where they buried him in the tomb next to Joselito. After the funeral
every one sat in the cafés out of the rain, and many colored pictures of
Maera were sold to men who rolled them up and put them away in their
pockets.