The Crystal Rood

306 pp. Illustrated by Earl Stetson Crawford. Excerpt from The Crystal Rood: The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the children are set on edge. So ran a proverb of ancient Israel. The litera ture of the world impresses upon us the everlast ing truth - The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. Little attention is paid to the converse of the proposmon. Virtue and vice are alike transmissible. Oak trees beget oak trees, and mulberry bushes, mulberry bushes. Forces of good and evil so act and te-act that sometimes in one generation evil characteristics are dominant, and in a succeeding generation the ancient traits of virtue re-assert themselves. Dominants sometimes become recessives, and recessives give way to dominants. It is conceivable that there might be in man a virtue as strong and buoyant, as unconquerable and unsubmersible, as the physical characteristics of his race, like them remaining insistently dominant through all the ages.