bet had to go to a murky little hall called the Tennys Ball, where half a dozen girls vied with each other in hitting a ball with a racket into holes in a board some four yards distant, and you put your money on Lilly or Minnie, Mary or Rosie, as your fancy directed. As a substitute for the brave efforts of battitore and spalla in the real game, they were poor indeed; but the odds can be even greater than at pallone, which, as a medium of speculation, must be very disappointing to a gambler of any pluck.

Siena's dominating structures, as seen from any distance, are its two lovely towers the black and white marble campanile of the Duomo, rising so confidently above the great cathedral itself, which, in its turn, crowns a precipitous rock; and the Torre del Mangio of red brick, which, in the same way, completes the Palazzo Pubblico, on the border of the great Piazza del Campo, or, as it now is, the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, where the palia races are run, and where is a reconstruction of the fountain that won for Jacopo della Quercia - who stands to Siena much in the same relation as Brunelleschi to Florence and Sansovino to Venice his name of Jacopo della Fonte. Jacopo's hand is to be seen everywhere, but never to more advantage than in the font in the Baptistery, to which Ghiberti and Donatello also contributed. Two of the four putti that Donatello designed are missing. According to Herr Baedeker, who ought to know, one of them is now in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, and it would be interesting to learn how it found its way there. The whereabouts of the other is a mystery, and I can think of few more fascinating commissions to hand to Dr. Sherlock Holmes than to trace it to its present home.

I have had the good fortune to see many beautiful towers in the world,

from the minarets of Agra and Delhi to the home of Big Ben, from the campanili of Ravenna and Torcello, St. Mark's and St. Giorgio Maggiore, to the spire of Salisbury, from the Giralda at Seville to the belfry at Bruges, but none remains in the memory more graciously than Siena's twain. They are not quite so imposing as their cousins at Florence Giotto's tower and the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; but they are not less beautiful. Indeed, the Torre del Mangio has a loveliness lacking at the Palazzo Vecchio; it springs upward with such ease, it is so slender and so light-hearted.

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The Torre del Mangio, which takes its name from the figure, now no more, that used to strike the hours, was built by the brothers Di Rinaldo, of Perugia, in the first half of the fourteenth century. It is three hundred and thirty feet high, of red brick for the first long flight, and then there is a white-stone corbeled capital, and above that a white-stone crown - which in itself would add glory to any ordinary building. On the top of all is the great bell in an iron cage. The triumph of the Torre del Mangio is the more remarkable when one realizes that it rises, so to speak, from the lowlands, and yet from a distance is so commandingly lofty, although then it has to bear comparison with the campanile of the Duomo, which is helped by its naturally exalted position. The campanile is as decorative as the Torre del Mangio is simple; it is built of white and black marble in horizontal stripes, and, but for an ingenious and entirely successful architectural device, might have been restless and heavy. This device was to graduate the framework of the windows- of which there are six on each of the four façades - so that in the top story there are six arches, in the fifth five, in the forth four, and so on down to the lowest window of all, which is

but a single narrow one. They are graduated also in height, the top ones being the highest. The result is that the eye is carried upward toward an expanding and more impressive effect with each change. It is as though the wider windows lift the narrower.

Coming to Siena, as one often does, from Venice or Florence, there is one strange lack. You know how, in St. Mark's Square, in Venice, when the clock strikes noon the gun at the arsenal

sometimes before it, sometimes in the middle, and often when the notes have finished - booms out, and all the pigeons rise in a gray wind; you know how, in Florence, where time is of more importance than in the Adriatic City of the Sun, as the noonday gun is heard every man's head is for a moment bent - not in devotion, but in consultation of his watch. Well, in Siena, finding

myself in the Piazza del Campo a little before twelve, I stood in a doorway opposite the Torre del Mangio to see what happened there when the gun went off. Standing there, I noticed that the myriad holes left in the brickwork of the tower, either for scaffolding or for the fixing of the marble veneer that may, or may not, have been intended, were now the homes of jackdaws, whose sharp cries to each other filled the air just as they do in an English cathedral close. At noon I expected to see every jackdaw fly out, with some of the same affectation of fright—or at any rate, surprise-as the Venetian pigeons; but I was disappointed, for there was no gun. The clock struck, and that was all. I must say that I disapprove of this. Every Italian city should have its noonday gun. The lack of it is Siena's only defect.

WRITERS of memoirs who introduce living personalities into their pages cannot count on the immunity to correction they would enjoy if they confined themselves to the great dead. And even within the limits of such daring, they can choose between toying with explosives and leaving them alone. Apparently the first alternative was the one Mr. Poultney Bigelow chose in his recent volume, Seventy Summers. According to Mr. H. G. Wells, venting his indignation in the columns of the Daily Herald, Mr. Bigelow is guilty of having misrepresented him unconscionably in a passage relating a conversation at Lady Russell's in London.

These are the offending paragraphs from Mr. Bigelow's book:

'Mr. H. G. Wells radiated material prosperity and mental serenity. Of all the roomful at Lady Russell's, where were several notable artists in brush no less than pen, he was perhaps the only one who would have been picked out by a physiognomist as a lucky stockbroker or traveling salesman. He chatted pleasantly of the fabulous amounts forced on him by paradoxical publishers; of his recently published Outline of History; of the hundreds of periodicals in every corner of the world clamoring for his pages.

'Verily, it was all as in a fairy tale gone mad! We stood in a window recess with a splendid view of the Thames from Westminster down to the Tower, and one of us - I think it was Anthony Hope - expressed re

"The blow was a comparatively light one to a New Yorker; but Anthony Hope winced; his eyebrows lifted just a little, and on his lips rested the enigmatical smile that Leonardo da Vinci immortalized on the Gioconda.'

Not unnaturally, Mr. Wells has taken umbrage at this piece of reporting, and written to the Daily Herald in the following terms:

'Some little while ago, I met a Mr. Poultney Bigelow at Lady Russell's flat in London. He sought an introduction to me, and commenced forthwith to saw at me with ill-mannered inquiries about my "sales," my income, and suchlike impertinences. He had got hold of some nonsense about the extraordinary "prices" paid to me, and he pressed me about these stories. In some way they had made him malicious.

'I did my best to convey to him that he had as much right to pester me about these things as to ask where I had bought my trousers, or whether I had an overdraft at my bank. After a time I succeeded in stunning or killing these tentatives to vulgarity, and then he proceeded to discuss the view from Lady Russell's window.

'Change of topic meant no change of quality in his discourse. Charing Cross Bridge was ugly, materialistic, rectangular. (To people like Mr. Bigelow anything curved is more beautiful than anything rectangular.)

"That bridge," said I, exasperated beyond endurance, "at sundown, or in twilight, can be the most beautiful and romantic thing in the world. Have you no eyes? There was an American named Whistler, who could have made even you see the loveliness of it. And have you never thought of all that has gone to and fro on it, since first it was made?"

'After that I somehow got rid of Mr. Bigelow, and thought no more about

him. But he carried off a resentment. I find newspapers sent to me with marked paragraphs, and I discover that Mr. Poultney Bigelow has produced reminiscences of Seventy Summers and made me the hero of an "amusing story." Mr. Poultney Bigelow gets his own back for the chagrin about these quite imaginary "prices" and my disentangling manner. His "amusing story" is written in verjuice.

'I am represented as a large travelling-salesman sort of person pervading Lady Russell's party with violent boasting about these same "prices' that so gall Mr. Bigelow, that is the sort of person he wanted me to be, and that is the sort of person he means me to be if lying can do it, and when the "refained" remarks about Charing Cross Bridge come in- they are very generously ascribed to Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, who is quite incapable of such stupidities- I am represented as endangering the furniture by dramatic gestures and declaring that a railway "represents the finest quality of our people; it is eloquent — it means Progress!"

"Thereupon Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, whom I do not remember there at all, is said to have smiled like the Gioconda, - Anthony must practise this, and the incident terminated.

'Now, it would do little harm to have Mr. Bigelow repeating this silly story to the sort of people who frequent him, or to have him writing it down in a costly book of reminiscences that only the very strangest people will read. But tales of this sort have a fatal fascination for the journalist, and I find Mr. Bigelow's bit of malicious twaddle spreading.

'I may be oversensitive, but I do not like to have this quotation going from paper to paper and a false picture of myself as a shouting, boasting nuisance at tea-parties circulated far and

wide, simply because I failed to delight openly in Mr. Poultney Bigelow. Considering what a bore he was, and how rude he was, I was quite decent to him. I suppose the thing is a libel, and a damaging libel, but life is too short to chase libels.

'I launch this paragraph, therefore, in pursuit of his anecdote and leave the affair to the gods. If these explanations can overtake and pin themselves on to Mr. Bigelow's "amusing story" for good, I feel that the latter will lose little of its interest and much of its harm. American papers, please copy.'

A RUSSIAN POET

THE suicide, the other day, of the young Russian poet, Sergei Esenin, was the tragic culmination of a stormy, brilliant, and unhappy career, not unlike the popular conception of a poet's life. At the time of the Bolshevist revolution, Esenin had left Russia to wander about Europe and America in a boisterous happy-go-lucky way, and had made himself conspicuous in more than one capital as a whole-hearted supporter of the Soviet régime. But for some six years during which he became the husband of a famous dancer and the hero of many picturesque escapades he was sufficiently content with his voluntary expatriation.

of affairs in his home-a disillusion that vented itself in such lines as these: 'So this is our country! What on earth made me protest that I and my people were friends? Now it looks as if I had no need of them and they had still less need of me!'

The poems he wrote after his return to Russia are the painful record of a heartbreaking process of accepting this fact this fundamental cleavage in purpose between a poet and his people. If Esenin's genius had been less authentic than it was, he could no doubt have survived this knowledge; as it was, he had lost the sense of playing a significant intellectual rôle - and he was capable of playing no other. One day this winter he opened his veins and bled to death. His suicide called forth expressions of sincere grief, not only from the official organs at home, but from the emigrant papers abroad and the subjects on which these two unite are very rare indeed.

It is said that when Esenin's body was carried past Pushkin's monument on the way to the cemetery in Moscow, where the Government arranged a stately official funeral, the pallbearers - who were probably fellow poets made a complete round of the monument, as if allowing Esenin, whose genius had been cut off as prematurely as had that of Russia's greatest poet, to take leave of his spiritual ancestor.