The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-12-04

over to the American town from which the letter was written and there he dis covered this gay gallant, who, 1t seems, had bestowed his affections elsewhere. and had apparently determined to sit tight and let the first girl go hang. Now I call that a really marvellous coinci- dence that my daughter should have hap pened to tell about that letter in, the presence of the one man in London who was acquainted with the facts in the case" And so it surely isl
 James Bars second son. Russell proves
 bye the bye to be a godson of the late w. Clark Russell who wrote "The Wreck of the Grosvenor, "The Frozen Pirate" and so many other stirring tales of the sea and between whom and Barr a warm
 friendship existed so I could not resist asking the latter how their acquaintance
 began.
 Well it began rather oddly,' replied the author of Laughing Through a Will derness. "I had just arrived over here. mere youngster and green as they make 'em in Michigan, to help run the London edition of the Detroit Free Press that then was being published, and that my brother, Robert had started, and one of the first jobs I had was to get an interview with Clark Russell, from whom the paper had just bought a novel, 1t was 'Marooned.' by the way, which they were going to run serially. Well, Russell was then at his zenith, and very particular about what was written about him, and on the whole l don't think I made a happy impression on him. As I say, I was green as grass and though I could write fairly well I hadn't much of the vocabulary, and I could see that Russell was nervous all through the in- terview, wondering. no doubt, what kind of a mess I would turn out.
 Probably my youthful enthusiasm pulled me through, though, when it came to the writlg,' observed Barr, flor as it turned out what I wrote pleased Clark Russell most to pieces, and he promptly | invited me to visit him and we were the
 best of friends thereafter. Of course you know that his end was very pathetic | He was almost entirely paralyzed and i travelled round from place to place in the hope of getting benefit. When I had | that interview with him he was living al | Southampton. and he finally finished UT at Bath. He loathed it there, but he
 refused to move again. He said he knew mined to stick it. And so he lived or
 there. practically dead. all except his clever brain and tongue"
 Wells Helps Belgians
 Last week I told how G. K. Chestertor had pleasure in turning over some of hi. 1 cast-off garments to a massive Belgian refugee. Since then there has been ( letter in the Times by H. c. Wells who says, for my own part I enter | tain three Belgians and make a young | officer possible by supplementing his ex penses, and my wife knits things. Bu | if try to use my pen in behalf of my | country abroad, where I have few | friends and readers, what write is ex posed to the clumsy editing and delays o anonymous and apparently irresponsible
 officials. So practically I am doing noth | ing, and a great number of people ar,
 doing very little more"
 BIames Germany For Nick Carter
 Poor old Germany, she gets blamed fol | almost everything nowadays, even fol
 Nick Carter. For this is what I reat in the London Globe:
 Before the war, writes our Paris cor respondent, there were special courts a the Palais de Justice on Mondays fo | juvenile offenders. Some of the case. showed horrible depravity and precociou vice. In almost every case 1t was showr | that the prime cause was pernicious lit | erature For two sous the children coult
 buy little books of insidious poison bear ing such titles as Nick Carter, 'Ethe King or Nat Pipkerton.' They wer printed in French, but published by German house at Dresden. There wa
 no attempt to hide the German origil of this vicious rubbish, for the fourtl page has the trade mark, Imprime el Allemagne.'
 I'm afraid the author of Mick Carter won't like that vicious rubbish" bu !, it will interest him, anyway, to lear that his sleuth is believed to have bee , made in Germany