happy afternoon it would be for us) copying out for you passages
from "The Sea and the Jungle" that would give you the extremity
of pleasure, O high-spirited reader! It is an odd thing, it is a
quaint thing, it is a thing that would seem inconceivable (were
we not tolerably acquainted with the vagaries of the reading
public) that a book of this sort should lie perdu on the shelves
of a few libraries. Yet one must not leap too heartily to the
wrong conclusion. The reading public is avid of good books, but
it does not hear about them. Now we would venture to say that we
know fifty people--nay, two hundred and fifty--who would never
have done thanking us if we could lay a copy of a book of this
sort in their hand. They would think it the greatest favour we
could do them if we could tell them where they could go and lay
down honest money and buy it. And we have to retort that it is
out of print, not procurable.[1] Is it the fault of publishers?
We do not think so--or not very often. For every publisher has
experience of this sort of thing--books that he knows to be of
extraordinary quality and fascination which simply lie like lead
in his stockroom, and people will not listen to what he says
about them. Whose fault is it, then? Heaven knows.

[1] Since this was written, a new edition has been published by
E. P. Dutton & Co.

SILAS ORRIN HOWES

There died in New York, on February 11, 1918, one who perhaps as
worthily as any man in any age represented the peculiar traits and
charms of the book-lover, a man whose personal loveliness was only
equalled by his unassuming modesty, a man who was an honour to the fine
old profession of bookselling.

There will be some who frequent Brentano's bookstore in New York who
will long remember the quiet little gentleman who held the post nearest
the front door, whose face lit with such a gentle and gracious smile
when he saw a friend approach, who endured with patience and courtesy
the thousand small annoyances that every salesman knows. There were
encounters with the bourgeois customer, there were the exhausting
fatigues of the rush season, there were the day-long calls on the
slender and none too robust frame. But through it all he kept the
perfect and unassuming grace of the high-born gentleman he was. An
old-fashioned courtesy and gallantry moved in his blood.

It was an honour to know Silas Orrin Howes, and some have been fortunate
to have disclosed to them the richness