BRONZE STATUE OF "PETER PAN" IN KENSINGTON GARDENS

FROM THE SCULPTURE BY SIR GEORGE FRAMPTON

there has been no escaping, or the rehearsal

of a new play that has tempted him. Within recent years he has appeared more frequently than ever at public gatherings, though, however public the gathering, Barrie is privacy itself. Ralph Connor tells how he was once invited to a reception at Free St. George's, Edinburgh, which was given by the young people of the church in honor of the rising novelist. Coming in late, the Canadian met Henry Drummond.

"Have you seen Barrie?" asked Drummond.

"No. I should like to see him," was the reply.

"Well," said said Drummond, smiling, "look around till you find a hole, look down in the hole, and you will see Barrie." Ralph Connor found Barrie later in

a quiet corner, evidently looking for a good hole, and somewhat distressed at not finding it.

Journalistic banquets are most apt to attract Barrie. It was at one of these when he made, for him, an extremely long speech. This is the way it went:

"Weel, this is the verry furst time I 've ever had dinner with three editors." Then he sat down.

There is a tradition, however, that Barrie once came within touching distance of standing for Parliament; but, greatly to his amusement, the arrangements became frightfully bungled and eventually went completely awry. Subsequently it has become known that what then chiefly spoiled Barrie's chances for Parliament was Barrie. By way of assisting him to public attention he was induced to preside over a Burns celebration in Scotland. He took the chair as presiding officer, and then kept to it firmly. Throughout the entire proceedings he did not utter a single word; but remained as if glued to the horribly conspicuous chair, loathing his predicament, but inwardly thoroughly amused at the expressions on the faces of all about him, which told dismally of his failure as a presiding officer. When the occasion was almost half-way finished, Barrie took advantage of a talkative group standing in front of him, and quietly stole away before anybody had a chance to miss him. But the next week a well-known Saturday review printed a satirical article called "Mr. Barrie in the Chair." The thing was simply withering in its ironical account of the dumb presiding officer who eventually fled, leaving a meeting to preside over itself. The greatest regret was naturally expressed by those who had persuaded Barrie to come to the Burns celebration, and among his friends tremendous indignation was felt and vented. some day they will know, if they have not already found out, that the article was written by Barrie himself.

But

Barrie's best-beloved London, it must finally be confessed, is not along Adelphi Terrace, or the Victoria Embankment, or in any of his clubs, but on the shores of a wondrous lake. It is easily found, any fair morning, not far beyond a gate that opens on a lovely world of gardens.

Barrie's own directions are the best for reaching it.

"Before you go in at the gate," he says, "you speak to the lady with the balloons, who sits just outside. This is as near being inside as she may venture, because, if she were to let go her hold of the railings for one moment, the balloons would lift her up, and she would be flown away. She sits very squat, for the balloons are always tugging at her, and the strain has given her quite a red face."

All perambulators lead past the lady with the balloons, and then enter the Broad Walk. Presently the Broad Walk is met by the Baby's Walk, and, by following this, you come to the lake on the shores of which is Barrie's best-beloved London.

"It is a lovely lake," says Barrie, "and there is a drowned forest at the bottom of it. If you peer over the edge, you can see the trees all growing upside down, and they say that at night there are drowned stars in it. If so, Peter Pan sees them when he is sailing across the lake in the Thrush's Nest. A small part only of the Serpentine is in the gardens, for soon it passes beneath a bridge to far away where the island is on which all the birds are born that become baby boys and girls. No one who is human, except Peter Pan, and he is only half human, can land on the island; but you may write what you want, boy or girl, dark or fair, on a piece of paper, and then twist it into the shape of a boat, and slip it into the water, and it reaches Peter Pan's island after dark."

Like the lady with the balloons, Barrie had to be content outside the railings of Kensington Gardens for years, tugged at

A SNAP-SHOT OF BARRIE AND GEORGE MEREDITH

SIR J. M. BARRIE AND HENRY JAMES

by an empty pocket, declined stories, rejected plays, and a total want of worldly push. But he persisted in living within sight of the railings at least, and as things got better with him and his funds began to justify it, he moved around the railings to within a better view of the gardens. Dame Fortune came suddenly and plentifully laden when she finally made up her mind to visit Barrie at all. One of his books quickly sang its way round the world, and he became the chief figure in the theater as well as in the book world. Then he moved around the railings of Kensington Gardens once more until he was in sight of the gate by which sits the lady with the balloons. It was then London gave Barrie the golden key to his beloved Kensington Gardens, and now on the shores of its lovely lake stands Peter Pan in bronze, like a thing that has sprung up spontaneously from its native soil.

XIII

NEAR Licenza, Italy, on a tiny plateau among the Sabine Mountains, there once

lived a quaint little Roman who had a good liver's taste for fine wines, a gallant gentleman's soft heart for fair ladies, and a true poet's gift for song. Everybody has read at least three words he wrotein medias res. He used the phrase to define the first principle of sound writing; get to the heart of your subject quickly; "go to it," as we say even to-day. The quaint little Roman was Horace.

Near Kirriemuir, Scotland, there once lived a quaint little Scotchman who had a great affection for the quaint little Roman, and though he had not the purse or the taste for fine wines or the folly of a

soft heart for fair ladies, urbanity early marked his style-a more than Roman, a human, urbanity.

It was in pencil, on both sides of the two fly-leaves torn from his pocket edition of Horace, that he first wrote copy for a printer. Labuntur anni: but at the age of thirty-four he "got to it"; at last he was in medias res. He had worked out the Horatian principle in composing his life as skilfully as in composing his writings. The other day a nation, through its king, called him a baronet; but it was a misprint. The distinction should have read, J. M. Barrie, Horatian.

SOME

TH

HIS story was told me by an old friend of mine-told me to use, so I can give it without scruple. But, after all, I don't know if one could call it a story, for life, as it happens, fails often to have a recognizable pattern, like the orderly things called stories which we print in books; for you may bleed your heart. out and finally die of the wound, and yet the pain of which you die, the drama which caused your heart to bleed, will have had neither logical beginning nor definite end, and in the whole course of it, though it has been life and death to you, there will have been none of those first aids to the reader-suspense, dramatic contrast, or plot. You have suffered and died, but it has n't made a story.

So instead of pretending that this is a story at all, I will call it "A Child's Heart"; for, as I listened, it seemed to me that I saw deep into the heart of a very little girl, but a different sort of child from the one I had been. So, after all, this tale without beginning or end had given me a new horizon about childhood, since we are apt to interpret by our own all the psychological happenings in the heads of children.

When my friend first said that little girls have not changed very much since. the days of the Renaissance, when great poets fell in love with slender little things of fourteen, and when fifteen seemed not the moment for nursery tea and bread and butter, but for great romance in the eyes of writers, I smiled; but she smiled back at me with the serene eyes of one sure of her ground, since she had been one of those tragic children to whom love comes

too soon.

When you come down to it, how punctilious are the keeping of ages and records! At such an age, say the miscellaneous body of people known as the schoolboard, a child is old enough to study this thing; at such an age to study that. All

children should begin algebra at the average age of so-and-so. As we try to find a common denominator for their various minds, so do we find one of emotions of young people. Young girls, it is evident, should not begin to think of young men "seriously" until they are out of school. Having decided this, we let our daughters go their way with a peaceful heart.

Yet who can be sure that her little girl of thirteen is a hard-hearted, undeveloped being or a woman with a madly beating heart?

WHEN I first saw him, I was only a little girl. I ran down the stairs of my house, dashed out of the front door and down the three shallow steps that led to our brick walk, and there I almost ran into him. As I looked at him, I felt all the blood rush into my heart. I suppose I stared at him with frightened, questioning eyes, for he laughed and said:

"I'm nothing to be afraid of. I'm only Paul Lewis."

I just said, "Oh!" and then was like to die of shame at my own stupidity, for all power of speech was taken from me. I had no idea why no words could come to me and why the blood ebbed to my heart, or why, at his words, a rush of gladness that was almost triumph swept over me as I thought: "He is coming here to live! He is going to stay here with us!" For how could I know that all at once he had unlocked my closed heart, and I, who had started at the top of the stairs a little girl intent on play, at the sight of him had become a woman? I only knew then that I was disturbed as I had never been disturbed in my life before, that something immeasurably sweet and terrifying had happened at the sight of him.

I have lived many years since then, and, believe it or not, there is no picture in all the gallery of memory that is so vivid to me as Paul coming up the walk. He was