performance.  He was an admirable writer of exposition, argument, and narrative—­solid and thoughtful, but never dull. . . .  I came into close relations with him and from him I learned more of my profession than from any one I have ever known.  Scores of other men would say the same.”

But the fact that a new hand had seized the Atlantic was apparent in other places than in the Atlantic office itself.  One of Page’s contributors of the Forum days, Mr. Courtney DeKalb, happened to be in St. Louis when the first number of the magazine under its new editor made its appearance.  Mr. DeKalb had been out of the country for some time and knew nothing of the change.  Happening accidentally to pick up the Atlantic, the table of contents caught his eye.  It bore the traces of an unmistakable hand.  Only one man, he said to himself, could assemble such a group as that, and above all, only Page could give such an enticing turn of the titles.  He therefore sat down and wrote his old friend congratulating him on his accession to the Atlantic Monthly.  The change that now took place was indeed a conspicuous, almost a startling one.  The Atlantic retained all its old literary flavour, for to its traditions Page was as much devoted as the highest caste Bostonian; it still gave up much of its space to a high type of fiction, poetry, and reviews of contemporary literature, but every number contained also an assortment of articles which celebrated the prevailing activities of men and women in all worth-while fields of effort.  There were discussions of present-day politics, and these even became personal dissections of presidential candidates; there were articles on the racial characters of the American population:  Theodore Roosevelt was permitted to discuss the New York police; Woodrow Wilson to pass in review the several elements that made the Nation; Booker T. Washington to picture the awakening of the Negro; John Muir to enlighten Americans upon a national beauty and wealth of which they had been woefully ignorant, their forests; William Allen White to describe certain aspects of his favourite Kansas; E.L.  Godkin to review the dangers and the hopes of American democracy; Jacob Rues to tell about the Battle with the Slum; and W.G.  Frost to reveal for the first time the archaic civilization of the Kentucky mountaineers.  The latter article illustrated Page’s genius at rewriting titles.  Mr. Frost’s theme was that these Kentucky mountaineers were really Elizabethan survivals; that their dialect, their ballads, their habits were really a case of arrested development; that by studying them present-day Americans could get a picture of their distant forbears.  Page gave vitality to the presentation by changing a commonplace title to this one:  “Our Contemporary Ancestors.”