The Birmingham age-herald., 1904-12-07
COMMENTS ON MEN AND
 MATTERS OF THE WORLD

XGAN of Thomas Nelson Pages most
 g remarkable stories, entitled "No
 Haid Pawn" was published in Harpers magazine a number of years ago. In this weird tale of NO Head Pond" which MT. Page chose to designate in the broad negro dialect, the horrors of a great swamp are vivldly pictured Any one who has ever traversed the swamps of Louisiana and Mississippi will readily respond to the descriptive powers of a writer, for these haunts oI the moe easin. the s1imy toad and other creatures that inhabit their noisome depths are im- pressive with a certain gloomy beauty and solemnity. Here nature revels in primeval luxuriousness untrammeled by the hand of man or the march of civilization save where a railway cuts it's way through the trees or in those few places where capital has made an effort to convert the swamps into arabic land. Down about New Or- leans along the route of the Southern Pa ciic railway a typical Louisiana swamp Is traversed for many miles. The train flies through a wilderness of riotous vege-
 
 derive life from the rich black mud and lock tendrels and branches in a promis- cuous embrace that shields the pools be- meath from the sunshine ana creates perpetual twilight No sound disturbs the stiffness. An impressive silence reigns that Is broken only by the soft splash of swamp denizen gliding Into the water, the crash of O rotting trunk as it tumbles down through the undergrowth Into the mud and slime. or perhaps the eerie call of bird. Decayed logs lie immovable on the surface of the black, sullen water, even nature. appears somnolent and the presence of man has apparently never been felt
 Aside from the threat of levers and pes- tilence which the great swamp holds forth there are the terrors of treacherous bogs, poisonous reptiles, malignant plants whose touch breeds disorder of the blood and bewildering maze that would con- fuse the most expert woodsmen, holding forth the prospect of death to him who is so unfortunate as to become lost Yet the grandeur, the undisturbed savageness of these great areas is impressive in the extreme and offers a fruitful inspiration to the novelist and descriptive writer The panther, fearsome beast with It's half-human cry, may also be met in the I swamp, and the cinnamon bear when driven to bay will take refuge in its shell tering fastnesses. The unbrol1en silence that broods over swamp, the utter lone- | Illness and the hidden dangers that are concealed behind the undergrowth, the fantastic shapes of the trees, some re- I clining at angles, others rearing their heads aloft to the sunshine and still oth- CTS prone and fallen from their high es- tate, the haunting fancy that there are hundreds of uncouth forms lurking behind the tree trunks and the desolation of 1t all grip the imagination.
 1
 It hardly seems probable that there are persons in the United States whose views are so narrow and thoughts So de- void of healthy Americanism that they can deliberately state that From Sawyer and 'Huckleberry Finn" are unfit for boys to read. Mark Twain never did any, thing better than these books and they have never been surpassed in English 1 literature by any of those countless vol umes that have been perpetrated for the entertainment Of youth. Yet the trustees of the Des Moines city library, at the instigation of woman teacher,