Arizona republican., 1903-01-01

more than local fame as a writer of charming verse. and it will not sur prise her friends to learn that she is equal to literary work of positive value.
 In the article before us she tells of her childhood acquaintance With old men, and the pleasure which their con- idence and friendship gave her
 "I have always shared" she begins. the preference Of the poet Swinburne for very old people and very little chil- dren, and it has happened, nearly all of my old people have been of that sex to which Shakespeare refers as coming eventually to the lean and slippered pantaloOn. It began when 1 was Il particularly roly-poly little girl of four, with brown braids carried through tine back of my sunbonnet and tied fast in its strings, that the unwelcome shadow of that blue gingham might never be absent
 Miss Hall does not explain. but it is fact, that the environment of her childhood days was graced but slightly by the companlonship of girls and women. She was born, we believe. or the banks of the Verde river. At any rate she grew up there, in a community sparsely settled, and by necessity her friends were limited mainly to her books and to the sturdy men of the frontier.
 Inevitably, in reading "A Memory os Old Gentlemen one is reminded Of Miss Eleanor Gates extremely inter esting book, "The Biography of a Prairie Girl" and finds himself wish ing that Miss Hall would make a book of her experiences. The genius which enables one to "see things" in that which most people regard as life's com monplaces, is all too rare. A Rudyard Kipling or Richard Harding Davis finds in the daily happenings in the world immediately about him an abun- dance of material for delightful descrip- tion, and the same talent is possessed to a remarkable degree by Eleanor Gates and Sharlot Hall.
 Miss Halls portrayal of her sur roundings reveals her as an artist Of the first class. In descriptive writing she excels Charles Egbert Craddock," for none of her effects are strained. Justice is not done the gifted young woman by extracts from her sketch. but we cannot refrain from quoting her mention of one of her old friends;
 After that my old gentlemen began to come in pairs and trios, so that they seldom threw such a clearly focused memory. The one that I loved best was not really the best known; we were both too shy to realize in time how much we might have been to each other. He was gentle, quiet, courtly man; I remember that I always invol- untarily looked for the pages holding up my court train of velvet and erInine when he bowed to me; a scholarly man. whom one would have taken for some gifted professor or diplomat; and he was in fact an Indian scout, known the length of the west for his courage and fidelity and unshakable honor. He would have stood with his life to a promise given the blackest renegade that ever harassed his trail.
 'I knew in vague way that his was a name in history; but we were always too busy with Sir Edwin Arnold and the Vedas and Mahatmas to talk of that. I can see him now throwing back the silver hair from face as fine as some old marble love, and repeating the Sanskrit tales or the lines he loved best:
 
 It needs not man should pass by tn
 Orders Four
 To come to virtue; doing right is more Than to be twice born; therefore wise
 men say
 Easy and Excellent is Virtues way Fit words for him who subdued him. self with such gentle patience to years of blindness; never saying, Is the sun shining but How beautiful the hills