sky can bring to refresh the sleeper. And for those troubled moments when, as by some mystic summons, or strange unrest, the eyes flash open to the night, what in the most luxurious chamber can meet their gaze with the soothing spell of the calm, kindly stars and all the "serene of heaven." Stevenson tells the story in his picture of night in the open. "This sudden awakening," he says, "comes as a pleasant incident. We are disturbed in our slumber only that we may the better and more sensibly relish it. We have a moment to look upon the stars, and there is a special pleasure in feeling that we share the impulses with all outdoor creatures in some quickening thrill of Mother Earth." He declares that he "thought with horror" of inns and houses, of “congregated nightcaps, and the nocturnal prowess of clerks and students, of hot theaters and pass keys and close rooms." It is thus that a few nights in the open will liberate man from the whole burden of his costly civilization and give him the "serene possession of himself” that heaven designed for him and society has been stealing away from him for many generations.

Life, which moves in a circle, seems slowly bringing men back to the open-air chamber from which the sons of the morning drew their strength and inspiration. Screened porches, roofless galleries, tents and outdoor cots furnish sleeping quarters for a large portion of the population in certain sections of the country, while camp life has claimed hundreds of those who once stifled themselves at inn and summer boarding place, where congregated night caps and clerks of startling nocturnal prowess profaned nature's sanctuaries of rest. The war upon tuberculosis and other diseases has added to the open-air movement in the lifesaving resources of the race. Nevertheless, while many have sought the crowning wealth in nature's store, "yet still,”

as the old hymn has it, "there's room for millions more," and when the dog star reigns in the sky the call of the night is emphasized by nature herself in the discomfort she drops down from her flaming suns upon the day. It is almost as if she would drive poor, plodding, unobservant mortals out into the realms of night to find the joy of being no day can unfold to them. "I have found I had discovered a new pleasure for myself," said Stevenson of his night in the open, and although he leaves his reader to guess what that pleasure was, he had no hesitancy in declaring that through it was opened to him the life that is "the most complete and free."

But the half of life is known to one who reads its meaning only by day. "And who, and who, are the travelers?" asks the poet, that cover time's stages in the king's highway. "They are night and day and day and night." Why slight one of these "ancient cavaliers" because he walks in shadow? Burning midnight oil to him when he has stars for tapers is a poor human policy whereby even the wise have no doubt hurt his guiding power to wandering men. It may be that "Man-Afraid-of-the-Dark," as the children of nature regard the white brother who "cowers into his house” at nighttime, has deprived night of some of its celestial ministries and raised up ghouls and goblins in its path that timorous mortals may have trouble to lay. Even the star-souled Milton declared that "when night darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine," thus turning his eyes upon the evil and not the hallowed train that move in the path of night. But over all man's fears or visions comes that strain of the heavenly host which chose "the listening ear of night" for the sublimest message ever conveyed to mortal man.

"It came upon the midnight clear

That glorious song of old"

and through "the dead vast and middle of the night" it still

rings out the promise of peace and good-will to men as no hour of noisy day can repeat it.

THE CHARM OF THE SOUTH TO THE NORTHERN

VISITOR

LACES, like people, have a genius of their own. Geo

PLA

graphical lines are not all that mark localities, nor can the ablest of the writers define the special or controlling spell of different sections even of the same land. Innumerable and eloquent efforts have been made to convey to the Northern man the charm of the South. To one who has never crossed the mystic border line the efforts are vain. Nature holds the secret in her own keeping. Her fine enchantments are for those who seek them on her own ground. They may come, as one poet perceives, with a "shock of wonder and delight in which the traveler learns that he has passed the indefinable line that separates South from North." "A color, a flower, a scent" may bring this delicious consciousness, or it may not break upon him until "one fine morning he wakes up with the Southern sunshine peeping through the persiennes and the Southern patois confusedly audible below his windows." But whenever or however it comes it will not be like anything he has found in books or could have laid hold of in any day, but from present consciousness. The best his pleasant Southern tourist books may have done for him is to make him "prick up his ears" at the enthusiasm in the very name of the South and become as anxious to seek out beauties and get by heart the lines and characters of the place, as if he had been told that it was all his own.

Yet, after all, it is not the books, but the conformation

of his own feelings which makes this magic sense of possession lay hold of him. For whether it be the wide, free welcome of the Southern sunshine, or the generous open kindliness of the warm Southern heart, there is a sweet sense of coming into his own which the traveler experiences under Southern skies, as nowhere else in his wandering. It is as Stevenson says, though only experience can confirm it, “even those who have never been there before feel as if they had been, and every one goes comparing and seeking for the familiar and finding it with such ecstasies of recognition, that one would think they were coming home after a weary absence."

It is like trying to define the indefinable, however, to attempt to explain the cause of all the compelling sweetness that lays hold of one in the Southern world. The writers who tell us that atmosphere is the charm of the South and give it up at that, do perhaps, as well as the subtle case allows, although it is a little like saying that temperament is the gauge of the individual and leaving people who confound it with tempers to make what they will out of it. A people subject to all the skyey influences its citizens may be in a marked degree, for whatever else may be said of the South, it is a region where you can never leave the sky out of the landscape, nor out of the brains and ways of men.

Perhaps it is to the wide-awake Northerner that the unparalleled wonders of the Southern sky make the strongest appeal. Its ethereal blue, with cloud argosies of white radiance floating through it by day, draw his gaze upward in defiance of the hottest sun. A vision of the sunset opens a realm of beauty and color in a myriad forms and tints almost too bright, indeed, "for spotted man to intrude upon without novitiate and probation." Sometimes a round silvery moon breaks in upon the scene, through floating waves