shocking fantasy, illustrated with rare distinction and sympathy by Wallace Smith, and "withdrawn," Mr. Harry Hansen tells us, "at the request of the Federal government"; the sequel, "The Kingdom of Evil," and "Humpty Dumpty." Succinctly interpreting the facts before us, one may say that here is a high-strung, excitable mind which has got its shape under the pressures of journalism and contemporary civilization and literature in Chicago.
What is the shape of this mind? Mr. Hecht's friends are acquainted with an eager, friendly young "genius," who fascinates and astonishes them. Mr. Henry Justin Smith, of "The Daily News," tells us in his preface to "A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago," that there are several genial aspects "which appear rarely, if at all, in his novels; the whimsical Hecht, sailing jocosely on the surface of life; the witty Hecht, flinging out novel word-combinations, slang and snappy endings; Hecht the child-lover and animal-lover, with a special tenderness for dogs; Hecht the sympathetic, betraying his pity for the aged, the forgotten, the forlorn." Mr. Harry Hansen, almost unique among the Chicago "school" in writing always like a man who has at some period of his life tasted the milk of human kindness—Mr. Harry Hansen in his remarkably sympathetic and illuminating study of personalities in the Chicago group, "Midwest Portraits," speaks with enthusiasm of Mr. Hecht's ability as a reporter, his imaginative energy, his "faculty for making a drab world seem gorgeous and full of color," his "infatuation with the primal energies of the American people, and with the material results and symbols of that energy—buildings, streets, houses, fire-escapes, chimneys, bridges, railroad trains." Mr. Hansen cor-
