A BOOK OF NEW HAMPSHIRE INTEREST A stalwart and handsome volume, as stately as "The Frigate Medusa' and as trim and fast moving as "The Speedwell Privateer," is the 412 page book written by Ralph D. Paine of Durham and published by the Century Company, New York, under the title, "Lost Ships and Lonely Seas." The 17 illustrations, from paintings by Waugh and others, and from old prints, add to its interest, but give no better pictures of sailors, seas and ships than are drawn in easy prose by Mr. Paine, who writes of such things with an understanding equalled by few Americans. In other books Mr. Paine has told of the boxes of iron and steel in which men go over and under the sea today. In reports of facts and in creations of fiction he has given us the most appreciative accounts of what was dared and endured and won by the boys who manned our submarines in the world war. From his own experience he has told the sea side of the Spanish War and has put on paper the reactions of a man in a Yale shell as Harvard changes defeat to victory on the Thames. But this volume is of different type. In it he goes back a couple of centuries to the days when sailormen still wooed the winds, and mast and spar bloomed for the breezes with great clouds of canvas; to "the roaring days of piracy;" to the days when the Sargasso Sea was still a mystery and the South Seas had been violated by no passionate press agent; when there were mutineers and castaways, with new lands to find and new peoples to see. Mr. Paine, like the good newspaper man, he used to be, headlines his 17 tales attractively from "The Singular Fate of the Brig Polly" to "The Noble King of the Pelew Islands." First choice for us must go, to "Captain Paddock on the Coast of Barbary" because it is introduced with a reference to the "frigate, the Crescent, which sailed from the New England harbor of Portsmouth, whose free tides had borne a few years earlier the brave keels of John Paul Jones's Ranger and America," a gift from this government to the Bey of Algiers as part of a "humble tribute to this bloody heathen pirate in the hope of softening his heart." But, as Mr. Paine says, a little later, "while Europe cynically looked on and forebore to lend a hand, Commodore Preble steered the Constitution and the other ships of his squadron into the harbor of Tripoli, smashed its defenses and compelled an honorable treaty of peace. Of all the wars in which the American Navy has won high distinction there is none whose episodes are more brilliant than those of the bold adventure on the coast of Barbary." And with those episodes, also, Portsmouth had a connection which we recall through the fact that one of her most gallant and brilliant sons bore the name of Admiral Tunis Craven. AT TWILIGHT By Lucy W. Perkins The twilight softly falls; Divinely sweet, As though in rarer sphere Some spirit dear Love longs to greet. Such call my heart would send, Through space unknown, Your waiting soul to find And closer bind Unto mine own. WHAT WOULD I MORE? By Elias H. Cheney. (On His 90th Birthday, Jan. 28, 1922) Thou, almighty to deliver, If my Faith grow weak, restore me. Where God's sun is ever shining; There'll be no goodbyes up yonder; MORNING IN THE VALLEY OF THE MAD RIVER By Adelene Holton Smith Aurora the maid of the dawn But the maid of the dawn is a golden rose The maid of the dawn slips over the rim. A DREAM OF MT. KEARSARGE By Alice Sargent Krikorian. Thou member of a mighty Titan brood Is followed from the altar to the door, So mountain follows mountain, crest on crest; Their glory, till our very senses reel; TO AN ICICLE By F. R. Bagley O thou most wonderfully constructed mass Distilled from vapor chastened through and through, Of surly Ajax; whiter than the foam Cast up by mounting tides upon the sands. Pendant from shelving eaves or drooping bough. But hold, don't get conceited! There's no doubt |