T

HE idea is prevalent in

many quarters that the creation of a trust under a will or otherwise is something that is open to the wealthy alone. However, with

the greater fund of information that is coming to the public largely as the result of the advertising campaigns of trust companies and National banks, this idea is gradually being driven out. People of moderate and small means are more and more coming to the realization that the trust, both as a form of protecting their property after death and as a means of directing its use, is something that is well worth their practical consideration.

Theoretically, a trust can be very small. It is not a very common thing for an income as low as a hundred dollars a year to be paid out by a trust, but the writer is familiar with a will one clause of which established trust with that annual disbursement for the life of the beneficiary. On the other end of the scale, trusts may pay out tens of thousands of dollars of income. The only practical limit is the size of the fund which it is proposed to place in trust.

What does it cost to have a trust? The usual cost is a percentage of income, usually five or six per cent. Trust companies have the practice in many States of making a minimum fee, often $30 or $50 a year, no matter what the total of the trust. Hence trusts with a yearly revenue of two or three hundred dollars are discouraged. In the case of the trust mentioned above, this was one of several under a will, and the trustee's fee was based on the total revenue of all the trusts, so that the minimum fee was not deducted from the hundred-dollar in

come.

What can a trust do?

This question brings us to the heart of the whole trust problem. A short answer to this question is that a trust can, within reason, do just exactly what its maker intends it to do. No trust, of course, can run forever, except those established for charitable purposes. No trust moneys can be paid out for illegal

objects. The pur

pose of a trust is to maintain a certain principal sum of money in conservative investments and pay out the income to specific persons, finally distributing the principal to individuals or institutions.

To illustrate by a fairly common example:

A man leaves his property, which we may suppose will amount to $80,000 in all, in trust. If he has a wife and children, and if he makes the trust—as he should do before his family is grown, educated, and "on the world," he will probably provide that the income be paid to his widow as long as she lives or till she remarries, if she does. If such an event occurs, the will may well provide that she receive a portion and that the rest go to the support of the children. This contingency aside, the will covers the contingency of the death of the widow before the children are selfsupporting. It provides in a typical case for the education of the children and for the payment of an income to them till, perhaps, the age of thirty years. Often in the case of daughters it is provided that the income shall continue through life, while the sons may receive their share at a stated age.

This trust, then, does several important things. In the first place, it prevents the possible dissipation of principal which might occur were the principal of the estate to go to the widow without the legal protection of a trust. The story of the "small fortune" left to a widow untrained in business and preyed upon by relatives and unscrupulous stock salesmen is, as lurid as it is, unfortunately, common. The trust keeps unfortunately, common. The trust keeps the principal as intact as it is humanly possible to do; pays an income to the widow as long as she lives; looks after the schooling of the children in the event of the widow's death; gives the children, more often in the case of sons than in that of daughters, a share of the principal at an age when, if ever, they should have discretion. (The reason for continuing the trust in favor of daugh

ters is to protect them against the dissipation of their capital through unwise investments of husbands; also because of the lower earning power of women.) These results, in the case of an $80,000 estate, are accomplished at an annual cost, paid from income, of something like $400 or $500.

In these days an estate of this size is not a large one. Even if the estate is half or quarter this size, the reasons for putting it into a trust are identical and even more cogent. The less you have, the more carefully you must guard it. Not long ago a certain trust company issued a circular which pictured two men standing before a burning house. One asks the owner, "Were you insured?" The owner replies: "No; I was waiting till I got a bigger house." Very few people nowadays, no matter the size of their dwelling, fail to cover it with insurance. But the majority of people whose worldly goods are not many do fail to insure their protection after their death. And beyond question the reason for this failure is either that they did not know that it was possible to effect such insurance by means of a trust, or they thought that trusts were "for the rich."

Life insurance, as we have previously pointed out, can be arranged so that, on death, it will be paid into a trust, and thus insure its protection and the protection of the person or persons for whom it was primarily taken out.

The subject of estate protection is, we think, properly a subject to be included in any discussion of investing and investments. A trust is, after all, a kind of super-investment of a man's entire prop

erty. What is the use of all the care and attention given to investments if their ultimate disposition, which must occur by law upon the death of their owner, is not sedulously planned? Has a man done a complete job of it when he merely writes in his will that he leaves everything to his wife? Is he sure that what he leaves will accomplish the purpose which he would like to have accomplished?

Ironically enough, those who have large fortunes also have financial and legal contacts which, without much exertion on their part, inform them as to the best means of protecting their property. The people who have small fortunes or property so little as not to be classified as a "fortune" are all too apt to live on doing nothing, vaguely conscious, perhaps, that there is something that they might and could well do. For them, first of all, these paragraphs have been written. W. L. S.

I

HAVE lately been walking upon a street where Christmas is dead. It stretches a long way across a great city; shops big and little are on either side, and from one to the other, ever since Thanksgiving Day, strings of electric bulbs have been stretched, so that in the evening you walk with the wind blowing but beneath a glittering roof; you would not know that there was a star in the sky. On the fourth floor of every large shop, between sporting goods and upholstery, a tired salesman in red trousers with horsehair under his chin shakes hands all day with such children as have brought with them buying parents. He is a real Santa Claus. Beside him sometimes stands a real reindeer, rolling dead glass eyes and lifting a stiff foot in clockwork geniality. In the windows of the smaller shops Santa himself is clockwork; all day, save for run-down intervals of immobility, he smiles an ingenious rubber smile, pointing to the real toys about him, marked in plain prices. For everything on this street is real; there is nothing that you may not buy and break.

One day I saw a little girl, some ten years old perhaps, her back to one of these windows, regarding with a curious wonderment a musician performing at the curb. He was playing upon a saxophone "God Rest You, Merry Gentlemen." But the child had no money, and in time he moved to a more profitable position. As he went the lovely faint look of wonder was wiped out of her eyes, that went ranging once more over the stands of real post-cards, crying their mass-production wish for "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year." But Christmas was dead on that street.

For there is no glamour there, and the essence of the Christmas spirit is glamour. There is at Christmas such a

light as lighted the doll's house in Katherine Mansfield's story, so shining that a child hunted from that paradise could yet murmur, "I seen the little light." Lights on the Christmas tree have this magic, and the old ornaments coming back every year, waking on Christmas Eve from their long sleep, shine through such a luminous haze of dream. The voice singing carols, however cracked, carries such mystery. It is the heart of the Christmas spirit. Now that carols come by way of the phonograph or struggle through loudspeakers with the uproar of a thoroughfare, now that resolute salesmanship provides for our children a concrete commercial Christmas, it is worth taking thought to see that in their holiday books, at least, something of the glamour remains. At this time, if ever, let there be some books of wonder -fairy tales, legends, poetry, lovely plays, history rich in amazement, adventure, romance. If you have yourself forgotten the tales of wonder, try reading aloud from "The Fountain of Youth" (Macmillan), a choice of folkstories arranged by Padraic Colum for actual telling, in such words as carry through to the imagination and set it making its own images.

But with the littlest children pictures may carry the tale without words. There are, for instance, scarcely more words in William Nicholson's "Clever Bill" (Doubleday) than are needed to say that a wooden soldier, left at home on a journey, ran until he reached the place before the child himself, and was waiting for him upon the door-mat. But what pictures-full of the determination and action of Bill himself! "The Skin Horse," by Margery Bianco (Doran), has the pictures of young Pamela Bianco; the story is of a toy horse, battered but adored by a children's ward, going to pieces and thrown away while

one child is too ill to know it, and so missed that the Christmas Angel must somehow bring him back. At this point the pictures, thus far languid and tender in line and color, suddenly rise to an outburst of joyous elaboration with the appearance of the heavenly visitor and the beginning of the starry ride. In quite another way, there is magic in the scarlets and greens, the strong shapes and strange landscapes of the illustrations in "Children of the Mountain Eagle," by Elizabeth Miller (Doubleday, Page), a story of children in Albania, vivid as the pictures.

Perhaps all children in books are creatures of glamour-all that live, that is, and take their places in the lives of children. Alice comes out of Wonderland, a real child, but Heidi, a real child, takes children into a sort of wonderland of her own. Louise Connolly's "Miss Chatterbox and Her Family" (Macmillan) is about a real child, a "smaht chile" who lived in Washington just after the Civil War, and whose cat was near-sighted because, though he could see a moving string, he could not see the Capitol. This child bounces with vitality; older readers will take to her as soon as children will. Older readers like Christopher Robin as well as children do not better, for children make up for an older comprehension by loving him with a whole-heartedness of which maturity is hardly capable. "Now We Are Six," the new Milne book (Dutton), takes a child with the aid of Mr. Shepard's drawings into a sunny country where everything is in scale, where the child himself, as in "Winnie, the Pooh," is a beneficent providence to all the toys, and, in his weakness, a strength and a wisdom to his world.

I do not know how successful has been the attempt of some writers for (Continued on page 539) :

Speaking of Books

A New Literary Department

Edited by FRANCES LAMONT ROBBINS

What Everybody Is Reading

TH

HE books in greatest demand are usually those most discussed. The following list is compiled from the lists of the ten best-selling volumes sent us by wire by eight book-shops each week. These particular book-shops were chosen because we think that they reflect the tastes of the more representative readers. These shops are as follows:

New York-Brentano's.

Boston-Old Corner Book Store.
Rochester-Scrantoms Inc.
Cleveland-Korner & Wood.
St. Louis-Scruggs, Vandevoort
& Barney

Denver-Kendrick Bellamy Co.
Houston-Teolin Pillot Company.
San Francisco-Paul Elder & Co.

Fiction

"Jalna," by Mazo de la Roche. Little, Brown & Co. A clannish family in Canada survives the potentially disrupting love affairs of several members. If you like a good story, peopled by startling and brilliant caricatures, you will enjoy it. Reviewed November 2. "Adam and Eve: Though He Knew Better," by John Erskine. The Bobbs-Merrill Company. You will find this an entertaining satirical tale dealing with the first companionate and the first Mr. and Mrs. marriages. Reviewed last week.

"Death Comes for the Archbishop," by Willa Cather. A. A. Knopf. This imaginative biography of a French missionary bishop to the Southwest is fine in spiritual concept, rich in beautiful description and moving characterization. Reviewed October 26. "Kitty," by Warwick Deeping. A. A. Knopf. A young wife's struggle against her dominating mother-in-law for the possession of her husband, set in post-war England. You will enjoy it if you like a machine-turned story with humor and wholesome sentiment. Reviewed last week.

"The Vanguard," by Arnold Bennett. The George H. Doran Company. Reviewed below.

Non-Fiction

"Trader Horn," by Alfred Aloysius Horn and Ethelreda Lewis. Simon & Schuster, The romantic story of an ancient adventurer, full of poetry, guileless wisdom, action, information, and color. Reviewed November 16. "Bismarck," by Emil Ludwig. Little, Brown &

Co. This splendid biography by a master craftsman is unhesitatingly recommended to any one with a taste for solid reading. Reviewed November 9.

"Our Times. America Finding Herself," by Mark Sullivan. Charles Scribner's Sons. This, the second volume of a social history of our times, is full of information and entertainment. It is especially valuable in presenting a study of many elements which have gone to form the present American attitude toward life in general. Reviewed last week. "We," by Charles A. Lindbergh. G. P. Putnam's Sons. The young hero's story of his life is a direct, simply expressed, and often moving account. It deserves a permanent place among boys' books. Reviewed August 17. "Napoleon," by Emil Ludwig. Boni & Liveright.

You will find this engrossing blography a fine foot-note to the Napoleonic period. Reviewed November 9.

The Vanguard

memory, who has made himself owner of newspapers, mines, cinemas everything that can be bought. For the ultimate purpose of settling a quarrel with his wife, he abducts a rival millionaire, this time a gentleman who owns something that he wants. A young woman whose charms, although they fairly leap at the reader from the page, have been unwept and unsung, gets herself carried off on the yacht at the same time. A pleasant sail along Mediterranean coasts and a visit to Rome end with the quarrel settled to the satisfaction of all concerned, the rival millionaires satisfied, and the young lady engaged.

We all remember our delighted reading of the Five Towns novels, and most of us are old admirers of Arnold Bennett's skill at satiric fantasy. "How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day" and "Buried Alive" are books to read and ponder and laugh over again and again. So it is with a feeling of stupefaction that this reviewer puts down "The Vanguard." The book is gay throughout, and downright funny in spots. It starts off with a good dash of excitement. It pictures pleasantly enough the taming of the millionaire boor, and the capitulation to feminine charms of both the urbane and the vulgar financier, and of the various secretaries, stewards, wireless operators, etc. It contains some wise and spicy comment on humanity in general. A book by Arnold Bennett could do no less. But what of it? Why should he have bothered to write a book which, according to the jacket, will "delight and thrill" when P. G. Wodehouse could have made it much funnier and A. E. W. Mason could have made it much more exciting. "The Vanguard" is called a playful and witty romance. It is playful. It is witty. It is a romance. And the Literary Guild chose it for its December book. A puzzled reviewer can say no more.

HE writer of sober realism, the serious novelist, here turns his hand to light fiction, and the hand which we are accustomed to think of as supremely deft has become heavy, if the fiction is not. The Vanguard is a yacht, the perfection of motor yachts. THE STORY OF THE AMERICAN IN

Its cuisine as described causes the reader's mouth to water; its appointments make him sick for a cushioned steamer chair facing a sunny sea. It belongs to a multimillionaire, a bullying, swearing product of the Five Towns of pleasant

right.

Have You Seen These ? The Basket-sellers' Ancestry

DIAN. By Paul Radin. Boni & Live

Until six years ago, every August an Indian couple came to sell baskets to the summer colony of a little fishing settlement down in Maine. They were very old people, brown, dirty, scrupulously

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polite. Their baskets were delicate and sweet-smelling. The new children peeked around corners when they came to the door; the summer dogs barked. When they stopped coming, the postmaster said: "They're dead. There aren't any Indians in Hancock County any more-but I've got Japanese baskets from the five-and-ten."

Old broken Indians selling baskets, tamed Indians shooting up Buffalo Bill's Deadwood Coach, make-believe Indians out of Cooper and Grinnell; unless you are an anthropologist or a home missionary, that is all you know about the only native American. His last days in North America, bloody and awful, his enslavement by Spaniard and Frenchman, the breaking of his spirit by AngloSaxon-this you know.

You know the

horrors of the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico, of the Creek massacre on the plains. But of the long and brilliant past, the rise and flowering and decline of civilizations which shade back into antiquity, you know nothing.

Dr. Paul Radin, an anthropologist and a genuine scientist, does, in two recent books, much to enlighten you. In "The Story of the American Indian," following a popular narrative style with perseverance only occasionally cumbersome, he tells of the Amerind races which built up great empires and complex civilizations from their shadowy beginnings to their sharp ends. He speaks only briefly of the conclusions arrived at by science as to the racial beginnings of the Indian, fixing upon the Mongolian invasion as the determining factor in the physical, temperamental, and psychic make-up of the race. In elaborate and vivid detail, using much source material, he traces the culture of the North American tribes through the Mound Builders back to the Mayan civilization of Yucatan, which touched and influenced all the primitive peoples to the north; while the lines of the South American cultures are shown to converge upon Peru, the socialized state.

The quotations of original Indian chants and aphorisms which this book contains give it the quality of an anthology as well as of a popular history, and as such it supplements Dr. Radin's other recent book on "Primitive Man as Philosopher" (Appleton), in which much material from original Winnebago Indian sources is quoted, which shows the Indian intellectual as a moralist and philosopher capable of flights of independent thought which cover a wide range and which establish the existence of an intellectual class among people regarded as savages.

With the addition of two anthologies of Indian poetry, an amateur of aboriginal American culture might make Dr. Radin's books the nucleus for a good library. "The Path on the Rainbow" (edited by G. Cronyn, published by Boni & Liveright, and possibly out of print) was the first collection of Indian poetry

Courtesy Boni & Liveright

A Maya decoration in which the
resemblance to Chinese art is
apparent

(From "The Story of the American Indian ")

in which the images, thoughts, and metrical arrangements of the Indian were re-expressed in English verse. Hartley Alexander in "God's Drum" (Dutton) has attempted the same thing. If every civilization contains in its flowering the seeds of its own decay, Dr. Radin makes very plain how obviously true this is of the Indian races. It is possible, after reading these books, to speculate for one's self upon the picture. Looking at the art and poetry of the Indians, one wonders if they may not be the products of an already effete Oriental civilization, bursting into temporary vigor with the infusion of new, entirely savage blood and falling into quick decay-old wine in new bottles. But this. please, is only the hesitant guess of a reviewer whose Indians, until now, were

old, dirty, and scrupulously polite and sold baskets until they died and the "five-and-ten" took over the trade.

66 Seventeen in Seville

TH HE BULLFIGHTERS.

By Henry de Montherlant. Lincoln MacVeagh, the Dial Press.

Alban de Bricoule was being prepared for his first communion when his grandmother gave him a juvenile edition of "Quo Vadis;" but he skipped all about St. Peter and became a Roman at heart. His paganism remained entangled with his Catholicism. His mother sent him to Lourdes, "where he could mix with the litter-bearers and derive some spiritual benefit," but he was "a constant nuisance to the litter-bearers." "He was carried away by the thought that he was a great sinner as well as a great Christian." Fortunately, Alban saw a bullfight, and Lourdes knew him no more. "This bull-fight was second of the great revelations of his youth, or rather of his life.

The first had been the revelation

of paganism through a book intended to instruct, the third was the revelation of the flesh through the heart." This Latin Willie Baxter learned to "play the bulls," and went to Spain as an amateur of the sport, in the same spirit "that he was later to go up to the front for the first time." In Seville his Frühlingserwachen was accomplished somewhere between the violences of Wedekind and the absurdities of Booth Tarkington's adolescent. Alban, melodramatic, a bit ridiculous, a bit pathetic, is still distingué, and at the end magnificent.

Alban's passion for the bulls is interwoven with his love for Solidad, even as it is with his faith. He sees los toros against a rich background of history and mythology, even identifying the god Mithra with Christ. "The fight is an incantation, a rite, a nuptial dance;" "in the silence the bell of the cabestro rang as though for the elevation." To Alban the blood of the slain bulls attains a

mystical significance, and when the beast is in extremis Alban is reminded of the Blood of the Lamb. Likewise when meeting Solidad he notes that "at the bottom of her short skirt-her petticoat showed golden red, like the raw wound of a bull."

This study of a sensitive boy at a period when his enthusiasms approach hysteria is lightened by the author's humor where it might easily fall into an exploitation of morbid tendencies.

We are told that Henry de Montherlant has been a bull-fighter, but such statistics are unnecessary to prove the authenticity of his Spanish landscape

with figures. Solidad is that rare thing, a Spanish woman in fiction who is not merely a sort of Italian prima donna dressed up in the mantilla and castanets of Carmen. She stands as definite and Spanish as the portraits of the Maja. Indeed, this book is so vivid that one instinctively thinks of it in terms of paint. The scenes in the bull-ring are as brilliant as the Goya tapestries. "The arena seemed a vat with the ferment rising from the bottom and spilling over the sides. All the spectators rose in their places and the amphitheater frothed and foamed like a great jar of wine."

After killing the bull he had feared above all, Alban was at last released from his obsession, and he returned to France without even a farewell to Solidad. After all, it was not two passions that fired him-only one. Solidad or his toros, it was all the same thing—a part of the disease of being seventeen.

MARY SHIRLEY.

HE editor of this department will

The clad to help readers with ad

vice and suggestions in buying current books, whether noticed on this page or not. If you wish guidance in selecting books for yourself or to give away, we shall do the best we can for you if you will write us, giving some suggestions, preferably with examples, of the taste which is to be satisfied. We shall confine ourselves to books published within the last year or so, so that you will have no trouble in buying them through your own bookshop.

The Old Christmas Magic

(Continued from page 536)

children to throw about the details of life in a mechanical age the light of romance and the magic of folk-lore. I have not yet heard from the children themselves, for example, whether they find that "A Merry-Go-Round of Modern Tales," by Caroline Emerson (Dutton), invests the typewriter, the motor truck, and the steam-roller with the attributes of fairyhood. I do not see why this should not be acceptable to children, every one of whom at all imaginative has at some time played out dramas of family life with plain bone buttons and informed the five fingers of his hand with distinct personalities. I only wish that when verses are written about dumb-waiters and fire-escapes, such as are in James Tippett's "I Live in a City" (Harper), they would not be quite such pedestrian poetry. But it is not at all a bad idea to find your fireescape flowering into rhyme when you are little; rhyme should be at home in the house. Nor is it impossible to use

for this purpose pictures so modernistic as those of Boardman Robinson, who makes an unexpected and refreshing appearance as illustrator of the "Rhymes of If and Why," by Betty Sage (Duffield)-rhymes that celebrate a child's idea of city and seashore, batter-cakes at Child's, and boasts about adenoids. It is a trifle depressing, though, to reflect that pictures and print together present a metropolitan American child's vision of a garden of verse.

Wonder tales may or may not make terms with natural history. Mrs. Bradley's story of "Alice in Jungleland" (Appleton), her own little girl's wonderful trip through Africa, certainly does. Peggy Bacon's "The Lion-Hearted Kitten" (Macmillan) certainly does not. No animals act like these charming and vigorous creatures; pictures and story together, they are dream cats and hippos and what-not, gentle enough to mingle with a child's dreams, for they are bedtime stories. Helen Fuller Orton's "Prancing Pat" (Stokes) is about an actual horse, for at the age for which it is meant, the time of life when one begins to read, the peculiar charm of the horse has by no means waned. At this time, and keeping the needs of the new reader in mind, come Mildred Batchelder's "Peggy Stories" and "Topsy Turvy Tales" (Scribner's), about the life that little children lead. The doll's-house people appear in "The Popover Family," by Ethel Calvert Phillips (Houghton Mifflin).

There are plenty of animals in the charming series known as "The Little Library" (Macmillan) because the volumes are of the right size and shape to fit a little hand, and, I am happy to find, with type of a size and shape to fit a young eye. In this series (ranging in age one step below the same house's "Children's Classics" of old favorites) are "The Good-Natured Bear," "The Cat and the Captain"-and what a cat! -and a French rabbit to go with the famous English "Peter" of Beatrix Potter, Alice Dussanze's "Little Jack Rabbit."

A little older, and one comes to the age when the Beacon Hill Bookshelf, published by Little, Brown & Co., may be drawn upon by parents in search of certified favorites, sure that whatever book they may choose from it will have a welcome from a normal child. Here are newly illustrated (color) editions of such Louisa Alcott stories as hold their own against newcomers, of Susan Coolidge's "What Katy Did," and Mary Wells's "Jolly Good Times," written in and about the Massachusetts countryside fifty years ago and showing no sign of age. There have been several rediscoveries this year, and one of these at least is a blessed boon: Stokes has brought out Frank Stockton's "The Poor Count's Christmas" just as it was in the prehistoric days of "St. Nicholas" -so long ago that for years bits of its pictures figured in the patchwork of old illustrations that made the enthralling