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the ground along with Mark's hospital, shows how equally if not more futile it is to try to take upon oneself the burden of another man's soul. It turns to mockery the comforting thought with which Mark had come back to his mother and his town: "All honour to the happy people with small horizon, with blinds down towards the world and the great sea, and the windows open to a tiny garden."

One can scarcely jmagine Harold Mark interesting with any great degree of sympathy the American fiction reader. Yet, if we but knew it, his problem is one that, day by day, is coming more sharply home to America and Americans. Here we were, we happy people with small horizon, with blinds down toward the world. Is it the better part of life as a nation that we say with a laugh in the face of the world, "Come, let us cultivate our garden"? The garden has been so fair, so flowing with milk and honey; it has been so cosy behind the lowered blinds. And we have our domestic Ivars to help.

A temptation, but human. Life would be a bleak and wind-torn thing if it were not for the blinds we can fortunately pull down upon some of its horizons. Only for those nations and people with the sturdiest of hearts and the most comprehending and unflinching of eyes is it given to go through life with all the windows of their minds open and the blinds of their spirits up. The chances are nine out of ten that it may accurately be said of the man walking ahead of you in the street, "There is nothing he wants to know." Whether he is the happier man for it, happier that he is not driven by some merciless impulse to push the boundaries of his knowledge and sympathy even farther out, over mankind, beyond the stars—this is the question embodied in the story of Harold Mark.

Are dreams and noble altruisms crimes? Is not the everyday reality of work ultimate? Is one to take upon oneself the burdens of the world or to do that task which lies nearest one in humility and faith? Faith, perhaps; yes, but in what? Mark finds an intellectual resolution of the problem under the inspitation of the Ninth Symphony. It is a weak one and a poor one, but because it is one, and because it is the only sort of answer we get out of life, we put the book down with considerably better feeling than if the author had ended by having Mark join the Royal Fusiliers and find his salvation making the world safe, and so forth. That is one sort of conscience even the American reader would have little patience with, now. Virgil Jordan