houses about as big as your little back garden!  There’s one fellow here (an artist) whom I used to know in New York, so small has the world become!

On another hill behind us is a triangular stone monument to John Knill.  He was once mayor of the town.  When he died in 1782, he left money to the town.  If the town is to keep the money (as it has) the Mayor must once in every five years form a procession and march up to this monument.  There ten girls, natives of the town, and two widows must dance around the monument to the playing of a fiddle and a drum, the girls dressed in white.  This ceremony has gone on, once in five years, all this time and the town has old Knill’s money!

     Your mother and I—­though we are neither girls nor widows—­danced
     around it this morning, wondering what sort of curmudgeon old John
     Knill was.

     Don’t you see how easily we fall into an idle mood?  Well, here’s a
     photograph of little Alice looking up at me from the table where I
     write—­a good, sweet face she has.

     And you’ll never get another letter from me in a time and from a
     place whereof there is so little to tell.

     Affectionately, dear Kitty,

     W.H.P.

     To Ralph W. Page
     Tregenna Castle Hotel,
     St. Ives, Cornwall,
     March 12, 1918.

     MY DEAR RALPH: 

Arthur has sent me Gardiner’s 37-page sketch of American-British Concords and Discords—­a remarkable sketch; and he has reminded me that your summer plan is to elaborate (into a popular style) your sketch of the same subject.  You and Gardiner went over the same ground, each in a very good fashion.  That’s a fascinating task, and it opens up a wholly new vista of our History and of Anglo-Saxon, democratic history.  Much lies ahead of that.  And all this puts it in my mind to write you a little discourse on style.  Gardiner has no style.  He put his facts down much as he would have noted on a blue print the facts about an engineering project that he sketched.  The style of your article, which has much to be said for it as a magazine article, is not the best style for a book.

Now, this whole question of style—­well, it’s the gist of good writing.  There’s no really effective writing without it.  Especially is this true of historical writing.  Look at X Y Z’s writings.  He knows his American history and has written much on it.  He’s written it as an Ohio blacksmith shoes a horse—­not a touch of literary value in it all; all dry as dust—­as dry as old Bancroft.

Style is good breeding—­and art—­in writing.  It consists of the arrangement of your matter, first; then, more, of the gait; the manner and the manners of your expressing it.  Work every group of facts, naturally and logically grouped to begin with, into a climax.  Work every group up as a sculptor