e a patriotic hymn of
my own.

"Seizing a scrap of waste paper, I began to write, and in half an hour
I think the words stood upon it substantially as they are sung to-day.
I did not know at the time that the tune was the British _God Save the
King_. I do not share the regrets of those who deem it an evil that
the national tune of Britain and America is the same. On the contrary,
I deem it a new and beautiful tie of union between the mother and the
daughter, one furnishing the music (if, indeed, it is really English),
and the other the words.

"I did not propose to write a national hymn. I did not think that I
had done so. I laid the song aside, and nearly forgot that I had made
it. Some weeks later I sent it to Mr. Mason, and on the following
Fourth of July, much to my surprise, he brought it out at a children's
celebration in the Park Street Church, in Boston, where it was first
sung in public."

LXVI

ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS AND HER FIRST STORY

Some years ago the author of _Gates Ajar_ told in an American magazine
how she began her literary career. From this account we quote:

"The town of Lawrence was three miles and a half from Andover. Up to
the year 1860 we had considered Lawrence chiefly in the light of a
place to drive to.... Upon the map of our young fancy the great mills
were sketched in lightly; we looked up from the restaurant ice-cream
to see the hands pour out for dinner, a dark and restless, but a
patient, throng, used in those days, to standing eleven hours and
quarter--women and girls--at their looms, six days of the week, and
making no audible complaints; for socialism had not reached Lawrence,
and anarchy was content to bray in distant parts of the geography at
which the factory people had not arrived when they left school....

"...One January evening, we were forced to think about the mills with
curdling horror that no one living in that locality when the tragedy
happened will forget.

"At five o'clock the Pemberton Mills, all hands being at the time on
duty, without a tremor of warning, sank to the ground.

"At the erection of the factory a pillar with a defective core had
passed careless inspectors. In technical language the core had
'floated' an eighth of an inch from its position. The weak spot in the
too thin wall of the pillar had bided its time, and yielded. The roof,
the walls, the machinery fell upon seven hundred and fifty living men
and women, and buried them. Most of