loyal readers who lived in the more benighted parts of the United States.  One of its editors had been heard to boast that he never solicited a contribution; it was not his business to be a literary drummer!  Let the truth be fairly spoken:  when Page made his first appearance in the Atlantic office, the magazine was unquestionably on the decline.  Its literary quality was still high; the momentum that its great contributors had given it was still keeping the publication alive; entrance into its columns still represented the ultimate ambition of the aspiring American writer; but it needed a new spirit to insure its future.  What it required was the kind of editing that had suddenly made the Forum one of the greatest of English-written reviews.  This is the reason why the canny Yankee proprietors had reached over to New York and grasped Page as quickly as the capitalists of the Forum let him slip between their fingers.

Page’s sense of humour discovered a certain ironic aspect in his position as the dictator of this famous New England magazine.  The fact that his manner was impatiently energetic and somewhat startling to the placid atmosphere of Park Street was not the thing that really signified its break with its past.  But here was a Southerner firmly entrenched in a headquarters that had long been sacred to the New England abolitionists.  One of the first sights that greeted Page, as he came into the office, was the angular and spectacled countenance of William Lloyd Garrison, gazing down from a steel engraving on the wall.  One of Garrison’s sons was a colleague, and the anterooms were frequently cluttered with dusky gentlemen patiently waiting for interviews with this benefactor of their race.  Page once was careless enough to inform Mr. Garrison that “one of your niggers” was waiting outside for an audience.  “I very much regret, Mr. Page,” came the answer, “that you should insist on spelling ‘Negro’ with two ’g’s’.”  Despite the mock solemnity of this rebuke, perennial good-nature and raillery prevailed between the son of Garrison and his disrespectful but ever sympathetic Southern friend.  Indeed, one of Page’s earliest performances was to introduce a spirit of laughter and genial cooeperation into a rather solemn and self-satisfied environment.  Mr. Mifflin, the head of the house, even formally thanked Page “for the hearty human way in which you take hold of life.”  Mr. Ellery Sedgwick, the present editor of the Atlantic, has described the somewhat disconcerting descent of Page upon the editorial sanctuary of James Russell Lowell: 

“Were a visitant from another sphere to ask me for the incarnation of those qualities we love to call American, I should turn to a familiar gallery of my memory and point to the living portrait that hangs there of Walter Page.  A sort of foursquareness, bluntness, it seemed to some; an uneasy, often explosive energy; a disposition to underrate fine drawn nicenesses