s present would
fight on opposite sides.

The Poe tradition is kept vigorously alive at the university. Not long
ago a member of the Raven Society, one of the rather too numerous
student organizations, discovered the burial place of Poe's mother, who
was an actress, and who died penniless in Richmond at the age of
twenty-four and was buried with the destitute. By a happy inspiration a
fund was raised among the students for the erection of a monument to
her--an example of fine and chivalrous sentiment on the part of these
young men, which, one feels, is somehow delicately intertwined with the
traditions of the honor system.

The Poe professor of English at the university, when we were there, was
Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, who has since taken the professorship of English
at the United States Naval Academy. By a coincidence which has proved a
happy one for those who love the stories of the late Sidney Porter (O.
Henry), Dr. Smith grew up as a boy with Porter, in Greensboro, North
Carolina. Because of this, and also because of Dr. Smith's own gifts as
a writer and an analyst, it is peculiarly fitting that he should have
undertaken the work which has occupied him for several years past, the
result of which has recently been given to us in the form "The O. Henry
Biography."

Dr. Smith was Roosevelt exchange professor at the University of Berlin
in 1910-11, holding the chair of American History and Institutions.
While occupying that professorship he met the Kaiser.

"I talked with him twice," he said, "and upon the second occasion under
very delightful circumstances, for I was invited to dinner at the Palace
at Potsdam, and was the only guest, the Kaiser, Kaiserin, and Princess
Victoria Luise being present.

"The Kaiser is, of course, a very magnetic man. His eyes are his most
remarkable feature. They are very large, brilliant, and sparkling, and
he rolls them in a manner most unusual. While he is always the king and
the soldier, he can be genial and charming. One might expect a man in
his position to be blase, but that, most of all, is what he is not. He
is like a boy in his vitality and vividness, and he has a great and
persistent intellectual curiosity. It is this, I think, which used to
cause him to be compared with Colonel Roosevelt. Both would like to know
all things, and both have had, and have exercised more, perhaps, than
any other two living men, the power to bring to themselves the central
figures in all manner of