near Oxford, where his friends "resorted and dwelt with him, as in a college, situated in a purer air: whither they came, not so much for repose as study, and to examine and refine those grosser propositions which laziness and consent make current in vulgar conversation."

For the purpose of this experiment in the promotion of efficiency, it is fortunate that fashion has deserted the East side of Cleveland and that the name of Euclid Avenue might be Ichabod Road. Had the city continued to expand on the original lines, the forty acres of this knoll, with this picturesque intersection of ravine and dell, as by far the most commanding site in its region, would either have been reserved for a public park, as to all intents and purposes they are now, or else have been impounded by some "magnate" for his private and exclusive demesne.

When you have climbed the steep, and the group detaches itself and spreads out before you on the level, you are, or you come to be, in a position to behold appreciatively and admire rightly the variety in unity of the architecture. Without doubt the architect's choice of the later Georgian for his particular purpose was justified. Almost he makes you say that his choice was Hobson's and he had no other. Even before you are apprised of the purpose of each particular building, any more than you are apprised of it by its specialization of design, you become aware in each of a high degree of specialization. The range and versatility of what you may have come to consider the somewhat sleepy and humdrum monotony of that Georgian building, still for the most part kept entirely within the limits of the style, will increasingly impress you. The style is doubtless prosaic, in comparison with some others. You might call it "businesslike" so clearly subordinated are the little touches of ornament and grace and beauty to the weightier matters of accessibility and convenience and illumination. It harks back, some of it, beyond the Georgian period, and smacks of Queen Anne, Wren's Orangery at Kensington, which served as the pattern for the English building at St. Louis in 1904, is somehow recalled in the design of the power

house and garage, though, indeed, there is little specific resemblance beyond the isolation of the white keystones in arches or fields of red brick. The powerhouse, which serves several other purposes, is nevertheless one of the most striking and successiul of all the erections, recalling really some very extensive set of stables which the architect of some English nobleman of markedly equine tastes might have been well inspired to build during the eighteenth century, but for the unmistakably modern chimney shaft, in the similitude of a Doric column, with its most effective entasis, on which Miss Dempsey has remarked. In no other building more than in this is the charm and the bloom more pleasantly in evidence of the brickwork which has been so carefully brought to the exact nuance of texture and color and bonding of the best English examples until the mere expanse of a blank wall in brick becomes a delight to the sensitive eye. One is in-. clined to call it the best brickwork on this side of the water, and without any superior on the other. It fully deserves, as so few other American examples do, Tennyson's apt epithet of

A bulk of mellow brickwork on an isle of bowers.

But this charm pervades all the buildings of the place, although, as you perceive, it is most distinctly in evidence where the contrasting members of stone or terra cotta are least conspicuous and pretentious. The only really commerciallooking building in the group is the "Lamp Laboratory," so-called, which even carries a very commercial-looking and skylit storage loft. You are to know that Nela Park does not contain a factory. The factories of the association are scattered all over the country, a new one being built whenever and wherever it appears that the cost of transportation makes it advisable to build it in closer proximity to its particular market. But the "laboratory" is near enough to a warehouse to justify it in looking commercial, as it does to a degree not approached in any other of the buildings. It may be a question whether it is justified in carrying the inflated consoles which do duty as keystones in flat arches,

and whether these do not incur the criticism which Mark Twain made upon the cabled report of his death as "much exaggerated.' Miss Dempsey emphasizes the fact that the building project does not include a "colonnade," a mark of pretentiousness and monumentality which few architects could deny themselves "in the present state of the art," or at least of the Beaux Arts. That does not, as you see, mean that there are no "features" which have onlv an architectural function. The portico is as much such a feature as the colonnade, and the free standing hexastyle portico of the Sales Building is emphasized by the material of its shafts, a light bluish granite which has by no means the incongruity of effect you might apprehend from the description but helps to signalize the order and its pediment as a "monumental" feature. A like effect is produced by the engaged order of four doubled pilasters which distinguishes the Engineering Laboratory. It has already been explained how the Administration Building, which one would expect to be the most ornate of all, has, in fact, in deference to the wishes of its chief occupants, been made the plain

est.

From the point of view of architecture. it is plain how such a scheme, on such a site, with the differentiation of the buildings required by practical or aesthetic considerations, is enough to make any architect's mouth water. It will not be disputed, either, that the actual architects have made a shining success of their work. For such a combination of the institutional and the domestic as has here been sought and found they have shown that the repertory of British Georgian is adequate, and the variety of pretty and quaint and fantastic detail by means of which every building is made to have its individual character and its individual interest, while contributing its share to the effectiveness of the whole, shows not only how faithfully the sources

have been explored, but how affectionately the work has been lived with from the beginning by the designer.

Some may question the propriety of the "domestic" element in the architecture of a group of buildings for the headquarters of a commercial corporation. But I think nobody will question its appropriateness who has had the opportunity of visiting Nela Park in circumstances which enabled him to see what goes on there. The establishment of a factory in the country is becoming common enough, merely as an economy in rent. But the notion of establishing the heads of departments, the men who plan and administer and investigate, in a group by themselves and with their own expressly provided surroundings, as it has been carried out in Nela Park, is quite a different matter. The social element is looked out for at every turn. The association, besides its own camping ground for its salesmen on its own premises, has an island in the St. Lawrence for the holiday recreation of its members. If "esprit de corps" is an element of efficiency, and nobody will dispute that it is, how could it be better promoted than by making every one of the thousand or twelve hundred persons who are ultimately to constitute the population of Nela Park feel that he or she is an organic part of the great machine? And how could that conception be better expressed than it is in the architecture of this "college situated in a purer air"? There is a placard one frequently encounters in the office, bearing words quoted from a former President of the Association: "I had rather make men than money." It is evidently still the motto of the concern.

Perhaps the clearest and deepest impression the observant visitor takes away from this scene of co-operative industry is that "big business" may be not only very big, but a very beneficent thing.

a very

LTHOUGH the name of Bela L. Pratt is widely known in Boston, his art is international in scope and is familiar to visitors at the Paris Salon, the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., and the annual expositions of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and the National Academy of Design, New York, or at public edifices and parks throughout the land.

Sculpture and architecture are allied arts; and the art of Bela Pratt, who was formerly a student in the Art League of New York, and a pupil in the atelier of the late Augustus Saint Gaudens, is associated with the imposing Public Library of Boston, designed by McKim, Mead and White, and the Boston Opera House, the latest temple dedicated to the muse of music in the metropolis of New England. Copley Square, in Boston, is apt to lure the visitor from abroad seeking the haunts of temples of architectural beauty; Trinity Church, for instance,

with its lofty spires, and the marble shrine of literature, the classic building of the Public Library.

Here are the names of illustrious painters and sculptors allied with the art of architecture: Puvis de Chavannes, the French painter of decorative subjects, represented in the Library by his phantasy, "The Muses of Inspiration, Poetry, Philosophy, History and Science;" Edwin A. Abbey, the distinguished American artist, who contributed his series of lengendary panels, "The Quest of the Holy Grail," and John Singer Sargent, a brilliant member of the American school, who is represented by a series of paintings symbolical of religion.

The name of Louis Saint Gaudens is also included in the band of artists and sculptors who have contributed to the embellishment of Boston's Public Library. His art is recalled by the figures of two lions, which guard the approach to the stairway leading from the main entrance of the building to the floor above, where the nymphs of Puvis de Chavannes are revealed in the mural decorations. So art and literature join hand and hand within the portals of this imposing library