he government in the sum of $500,000.
Twenty years hence the sureties on that bond could be held for a
shortage in the Treasurer's office, if it could be traced back to Mr.
Roberts' term.

Not one of the employees under Mr. Roberts gives a bond, though they
handle millions every day. But the Treasurer's office is one which
every responsible employee has been weighed carefully. Its clerks have
been in service many years and have proved worthy of confidence.

HOWELLS DISCOVERS A NEGRO POET.

Mr. Paul Lawrence Dunbar has been until recently an elevator-boy in
Dayton, Ohio. While engaged in the ups and downs of life in that
capacity he has cultivated his poetical talents so successfully that
his verse has found frequent admission into leading magazines. At last
a little collection of these verses reached William Dean Howells,
and Mr. Dunbar's star at once became ascendant. He is said to be a
full-blooded Negro, the son of slave-parents, and his best work is in
the dialect of his race. A volume of his poems is soon to be published
by Dodd, Mead & Co. and in an introduction to it Mr. Howells writes as
follows:

"What struck me in reading Mr. Dunbar's poetry was what had already
struck his friends in Ohio and Indiana, in Kentucky and Illinois. They
had felt as I felt, that however gifted his race had proven itself in
music, in oratory, in several other arts, here was the first instance
of an American Negro who had evinced innate literature. In my
criticism of his book I had alleged Dumas in France, and had forgotten
to allege the far greater Pushkin in Russia; but these were both
mulattoes who might have been supposed to derive their qualities from
white blood vastly more artistic than ours, and who were the creatures
of an environment more favorable to their literary development. So
far as I could remember, Paul Dunbar was the only man of pure African
blood and American civilization to feel the Negro life esthetically
and express it lyrically. It seemed to me that this had come to its
most modern consciousness in him, and that his brilliant and unique
achievement was to have studied the American Negro objectively, and to
have represented him as he found him to be, with humor, with sympathy,
and yet with what the reader must instinctively feel to be entire
truthfulness. I said that a race which had come to this effect in any
member of it had attained civilization in him, and I permitted myself
the imaginative prophecy t