Suddenly the flash of a small square envelope on its way to the recesses of the visitor's overcoat!
"What are you doing?" demanded Aunt Josephine, coming down the hall.
"Oh! How you startled me! I'm not doing anything in particular--just waiting about till that blessed reading's over." She left the letter concealed in the folds of the coat, and for an instant she held the hat in front of her perturbed face: "Don't men's things have a nice Russia-leathery smell?" she remarked airily.
"Genie Roscoe, what pranks are you playing?" As Mrs. Mathew took hold of the coat, the girl's self-possession failed her a little. She clung to the garment, sending anxious glances toward the door, whispering her nervous remonstrances and begging Aunt Josephine not to talk so loud. "You'll interrupt them."
"What is going on?" demanded Aunt Josephine, relaxing her hold on the coat.
"He's reading."
"Your poor mother!"
"Oh, she likes it."
"Humph! And that young man--does he never get tired of his own works?"
"It isn't _his_ works that he's reading. It's other people's--to make him forget the way they murder the play at rehearsal. It's French things they read, usually." Genie hurried on with a nervous attempt to be diverting. "There's a new poet, did you know? I like the new ones best, don't you? What I can't stand is when they are so ancient, that they're like that decayed old Ronsard--"
The form Mrs. Mathew's literary criticism took was a violent shake of the visitor's coat. Out of the folds dropped a note. It was addressed in Genie's hand to Mr. Chester Keith.
"What foolishness is this--"
"Don't tell mother," prayed the girl, trying in vain to recover the envelope.
Mrs. Mathew's face grew graver as she took in the girl's feverish anxiety.
"Dear Aunt Josephine!" Genie slipped her hand coaxingly through the arm of the forbidding-looking lady. "I know you wouldn't be so unkind.
For all mother seems so gentle and you sometimes look so severe, you're ten times as forgiving, really, as mother is. You're more broadminded," said the unblushing flatterer.
"Oh, really"--Mrs. Mathew smiled a little grimly--but she had ere now proved herself as accessible to coaxing as the cast-iron seeming people often are. They betray, on occasion, a touching gratitude at not being taken at their own grim word.
"Why should I hesitate to tell what you don't hesitate to do?"
But Genie's arm was round her. "Oh, _you_ know why. Mother has such extravagantly high ideas about what people ought to do."
In the other hand Mrs. Mathew still held the note, out of the girl's reach. "You make a practice of this?"
"No, no. It's the first time, and I'll never do it again, if you'll promise not to tell on me."
Mrs. Mathew hesitated.
"Dearest auntie, _be nice_! If you tell," the girl protested, "I'll have no character to keep up and I'll write him real--well, real letters."
"What do you mean? Isn't this a real letter?"
"No. It doesn't say half. It's _nothing_ to what I could--"
"Very well, if it's nothing--" Mrs. Mathew tore open the note.
Before she could so much as unfold it, Genie had plucked it out of her hand and fled upstairs.
Half way to the top she leaned over the bannisters. "If you tell I'll remember it all my life. If you don't I'll love you for ever and ever."
"You're a very silly child. And I'm not at all sure I won't speak to your mother."
"But I am!" the coppery head was hung ingratiatingly over the hand rail.
Aunt Josephine was already thinking of matters more important than a school girl's foolishness. "How long has that man been here?"
"Oh, hours and hours!" said Genie, accepting the diversion with due gratitude. "He stays longer and longer."
"Humph! that's what I think!" Aunt Josephine stalked into the drawing-room.
FOOTNOTE:
[35] Copyright, 1909, by the Macmillan Company.
ELLEN CHURCHILL SEMPLE
Miss Ellen Churchill Semple, Kentucky's distinguished anthropo-geographer, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1863. Vassar College conferred the degree of Bachelor of Arts upon her in 1882, and the Master of Arts in 1891. She then studied for two years at the University of Leipzig. Miss Semple has devoted herself to the new science of anthropo-geography, which is the study of the influence of geographic conditions upon the development of mankind. Since 1897 she has contributed articles upon her subject to the New York _Journal of Geography_, the London _Geographical Journal_, and to other scientific publications. Miss Semple's first book, entitled _American History and Its Geographic Conditions_ (Boston, 1903), proclaimed her as the foremost student of the new science in the United States. A special edition of this work was published for the Indiana State Teachers'
Association, which is said to be the largest reading circle in the world. In 1901 Miss Semple prepared an interesting study of _The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains_, which was issued in 1910 as a bulletin of the American Geographical Society. Miss Semple's latest work is an enormous volume, entitled _Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography_ (New York, 1911). This required seven long years of untiring research to prepare, and with its publication she came into her own position, which is quite unique in the whole range of American literature.
Although scientific to the last degree, her writings have the real literary flavor, which is seldom found in such work. Miss Semple lectured at Oxford University in 1912, and in the late autumn of that year she discussed Japan, in which country she had experienced much of value and interest, before the Royal British Geographical Society in London, and later before the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in Edinburgh. Between various lectures in Scotland and England she continued her researches in the London libraries, returning to the United States as the year closed.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Nation_ (December 31, 1903); _Political Science Quarterly_ (September, 1904).
MAN A PRODUCT OF THE EARTH'S SURFACE[36]
[From _Influences of Geographic Environment_ (New York, 1911)]
Man is a product of the earth's surface. This means not merely that he is a child of the earth, dust of her dust; but that the earth has mothered him, fed him, set him tasks, directed his thoughts, confronted him with difficulties that have strengthened his body and sharpened his wits, given him his problems of navigation or irrigation, and at the same time whispered hints for their solution.
She has entered into his bone and tissue, into his mind and soul. On the mountains she has given him leg muscles of iron to climb the slope; along the coast she has left these weak and flabby, but given him instead vigorous development of chest and arm to handle his paddle or oar. In the river valley she attaches him to the fertile soil, circumscribes his ideas and ambitions by a dull round of calm, exacting duties, narrows his outlook to the cramped horizon of his farm. Up on the windswept plateaus, in the boundless stretch of the grasslands and the waterless tracts of the desert, where he roams with his flocks from pasture to pasture and oasis to oasis, where life knows much hardship but escapes the grind of drudgery, where the watching of grazing herds gives him leisure for contemplation, and the wide-ranging life a big horizon, his ideas take on a certain gigantic simplicity; religion becomes monotheism, God becomes one, unrivalled like the sand of the desert, and the grass of the steppe, stretching on and on without break or change. Chewing over and over the cud of his simple belief as the one food of his unfed mind, his faith becomes fanaticism; his big spacial ideas, born of that ceaseless regular wandering, outgrow the land that bred them and bear their legitimate fruit in wide imperial conquests.
Man can no more be scientifically studied apart from the ground which he tills, or the lands over which he travels, or the seas over which he trades, than polar bear or desert cactus can be understood apart from its habitat. Man's relation to his environment are infinitely more numerous and complex than those of the most highly organized plant or animal. So complex are they that they constitute a legitimate and necessary object of special study. The investigation which they receive in anthropology, ethnology, sociology and history is piecemeal and partial, limited as to the race, cultural development, epoch, country or variety of geographic conditions taken into account. Hence all these sciences, together with history so far as history undertakes to explain the causes of events, fail to reach a satisfactory solution of their problems, largely because the geographic factor which enters into them all has not been thoroughly analyzed. Man has been so noisy about the way he has "conquered Nature," and Nature has been so silent in her persistent influence over man, that the geographic factor in the equation of human development has been overlooked.
FOOTNOTE:
[36] Copyright, 1911, by Henry Holt and Company.
MRS. ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON