this series have gone on appearing for upward of fifteen years, so that what has accumulated of them would fill a number of books, Catherine Reynolds remains unknown to all her women readers; the author of the series and the creator of Prudence is still a woman of whom they know nothing but the first letters of her name, C. C. R.!

It was cause for my astonishment on the one hand, and for my delight on the other, to find that Mrs. Reynolds is thoroughly informed about the Arab cause and the tragedy of Palestine, and indignant at her country's policy toward it. In her conversation I glimpsed her distaste for certain sides of life in this country, and her deep attachment to peace and tran-quility; so it was no surprise to learn that she intends to travel to Europe and spend some time in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, the haunts of innocence in our world. Her first hope is that the dream of the one world may come true before its little worlds grapple with one another and turn it to nothing.

*

As for Mrs. Lydia Roberts, she too publishes her writings in the Christian Science Monitor, but her articles and short verses appear as well in several other papers and magazines in Boston and elsewhere. Some time ago she published a book in three parts, containing little stories built on the facts of science and nature and on the lives of individuals; it is now studied in the schools by pupils between the ages of 9 and 11.

And though her writings include a number of stories, her articles turn for the most part on what she described as small, ordinary subjects. She said: I never go down to the city without coming back with ideas, opinions, and observations enough for three or four pieces; indeed I sit here at my desk and find myself, in the midst of my work and my duties, opening my little notebook to jot down headings, from which short articles later spring — and she added with a smile: and from which, after that, money orders spring!

And she said: No, I do not write great literature; I leave the writing on the big subjects to other men and women of letters. It is enough for me to write about what I feel I can discuss and be of use in: how to profit from leisure hours, for example; how to make reading beloved to the young; how to plant in children the virtues we wish them to be adorned with; how to make their bedtime an hour they await with longing rather than an ordeal they wish were over; and how, and how...

She too writes her articles in a graceful style that

joins ease with pleasure and is free of verbal orna-ment and figurative images. She holds that literature drawn from life is bound to meet with a welcome from readers that artificial literature will never meet, however refined and embellished it may be.

Mrs. Roberts is a widow with three children and five grandchildren. She worked in Harvard's main library for twelve years, spending the last three of them as assistant to the well-known writer John Sweeney, professor of literature at Harvard, in supervising the Poetry Room; she retired this past June and intends to devote her time to writing.

This Poetry Room is a wing of Lamont Library, one of the university's libraries and the newest of them in building and arrangement; it has been named "the Woodberry Poetry Room" in memory of one of the professors of poetry at the end of the last century. It contains all the principal books that treat of poetry and of the writings of the world's poets generally, and of the poets of England and America in particular; it likewise contains all their collected works, and all the literary magazines from their beginnings down to their latest issues (1). Manuscripts of certain poets and drawings of them are on display there, and it holds one thousand two hundred records on which have been recorded readings by the various modern poets of selections they choose as the best of their poems, readings of certain classic poems by the older poets, folk songs, and various plays as performed on the stages of New York, London, and elsewhere. In the room are a number of listening machines that enable some 25 persons to use them at one time — without producing enough noise to keep those present from carrying on with their listening and their reading. This Poetry Room is distinguished as the most splendid of the library's halls: it is furnished with soft furnishings, laid out to the design of a European architect specially entrusted with that task, lit with lamps of highly artful form, and its contents arranged with wit and originality. It is the meeting place of all lovers of poetry and the spot in whose atmosphere they take their ease, hearing poetry and reading it — and writing it. It remains for me to say that this Poetry Room is a recent idea in the American universities, applied as yet only in a small number of the great universities and on a narrower scale; and that this room has one further "distinction": its use — indeed entry into it — is restricted to men and forbidden to any member of that other sex in whose name this magazine speaks!

*

(1) John Sweeney has asked me to supply the

Room with a copy of every issue of "The Woman's Voice" in which these articles of mine appear on the American women poets I know — whereby "The Woman's Voice" will be the first magazine, or book, in the Arabic language to hold a place in the Poetry Room at Harvard.

Neither Catherine Reynolds nor Lydia Roberts is an outstanding literary figure. I have written about them only