SUPER FLUMINA BABYLONIS The first created thing was light. Then life came, then death. In between was fear. But not love. Love was absent. In Eden there was none. Adam and Eve emerged there adult. The phases of the delicate fever which others in paradise since have experienced, left them unaffected. Instead of the reluctances and attractions, the hesitancies and aspirations, the preliminary and common... more...

The death of D'Avaux, who had formerly been our ambassador in Holland, occurred in the early part of this year (1709). D'Avaux was one of the first to hear of the project of William of Orange upon England, when that project was still only in embryo, and kept profoundly secret. He apprised the King (Louis XIV.) of it, but was laughed at. Barillon, then our ambassador in England, was listened... more...

PREFACE The student of general problems of education or of elementary education finds an extensive literature of varying worth. In the last decade our secondary schools have undergone radical reorganization and have assumed new functions. A rich literature on every phase of the high school is rapidly developing to keep pace with the needs and the progress of secondary education. The literature on... more...

CHAPTER I. In a dark, dirty, foul-smelling room back of a small ship-chandler's store on West Street, four sailormen were seated at a table, drinking, quarreling, cursing. The bottle from which they had imbibed too freely contained a villainous compound that ensured their host a handsome profit, set their brains afire, and degraded them to the level of the beast. Not that their condition in life... more...

CHAPTER I. THE PARLOR. In the dusk of the old-fashioned best room of a farm-house, in the faint glow of the buried sun through the sods of his July grave, sat two elderly persons, dimly visible, breathing the odor which roses unseen sent through the twilight and open window. One of the two was scarcely conscious of the odor, for she did not believe in roses; she believed mainly in mahogany, linen, and... more...

PREFACE Since the appearance of the Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale I have been frequently urged to prepare a condensed guide which would make the application of the tests easier and more convenient. I have hesitated somewhat to act upon this suggestion because I have not wished to encourage the use of the scale without the supplementary directions and explanations which are set... more...

CHAPTER I. SNOW had been falling for more than three hours, the large flakes dropping silently through the still air until the earth was covered with an even carpet many inches in depth. It was past midnight. The air, which had been so still, was growing restless and beginning to whirl the snow into eddies and drive it about in an angry kind of way, whistling around sharp corners and rattling every... more...

THE BALCONY There is much of life passed on the balcony in a country where the summer unrolls in six moon-lengths, and where the nights have to come with a double endowment of vastness and splendor to compensate for the tedious, sun-parched days. And in that country the women love to sit and talk together of summer nights, on balconies, in their vague, loose, white garments,—men are not balcony... more...

Chapter I The new church of St. John's, on Fifth Avenue, was thronged the morning of the last Sunday of October, in the year 1880. Sitting in the gallery, beneath the unfinished frescoes, and looking down the nave, one caught an effect of autumn gardens, a suggestion of chrysanthemums and geraniums, or of October woods, dashed with scarlet oaks and yellow maples. As a display of austerity the show... more...

CHAPTER I THE BACKGROUND The South of today is not the South of 1860 or even of 1865. There is a New South, though not perhaps in the sense usually understood, for no expression has been more often misused in superficial discussion. Men have written as if the phrase indicated a new land and a new civilization, utterly unlike anything that had existed before and involving a sharp break with the history... more...