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ELL, here is Sherwood Anderson again with another disquieting tale, "Dark Laughter."

He is a man rather difficult to make out or to "size up," externally or internally, and one shouldn't go at it too hastily. Your eyes take an impression of him distinct enough: middle height, middle age, a compact, square-shouldered person in rough tweeds, dark blue flannel shirt, and bright-colored tie drawn through a ring or fastened, perhaps, with a horseshoe pin. He stands squarely on his feet, no shifting or teetering. His well-molded head, strong-featured, firm-mouthed, substantial in all its dimensions, sits squarely on his shoulders. In speaking—his speech is mild and slow—his eyes light up quickly with humor; but in silence they are somber with a shadowy introversion. In repose the lines of the face set austerely. I fancy the head would have appealed to the sculptors who limned the tougher-minded of the Cæsars. But this visual impression is inadequate. His secret aspiration, I believe, is to be "preeminent in being more sensitive to everything going on about him than others could possibly be."

He is from the fat Midlands—born, he rather thinks, in Camden, Ohio, in 1877, of a shrewd hardworking mother and a father who was a romantic braggart and a liar. In his youth he haunted race-