"CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS"

Romance is dead, long live Romance! "Drake, he's in his hammock"; Frobisher likewise; only the ghost of Captain Kidd is still burying treasure, only a phantom Long John Silver is still digging it up. Writers of the present day can submerge themselves in the atmosphere of other times or more primitive climes and so produce a Sea-Hawk or a Lord Jim. But among the furnaces, the black smoke, and the steel girders of modern America, "where are the snows of yesteryear?"

So says the newspaper reader of today. Yet but a short distance out on the stormy Atlantic hovers romance in plenty; unsolved tragedies, unidentified bodies washed ashore, feminine accomplices and love interest, sudden fierce skirmishes on the high seas, in fact all the sundry trappings of blood-and-thunder yarns. All that lacks is a Stevenson or a Conrad to write the modern romance of Rum Row.

The surprising thing is that the nation has not already produced the writer of such a story. For unless the country, feeling stately prosaic has become convinced of the need of creating romantic atmosphere, it is hard to explain why this ancient game of "cops and robbers" is allowed to continue.