The editor, whose business it is to keep an open mind, scarcely felt equal to the responsibility of passing judgment, where experts differed. But the discussion presented an opportunity which he felt called upon to develop. Therefore, each of the four authors was invited to present his conclusions in fiction form, the four stories to be published under the general caption "The Ten-Foot Chain." Herewith we are printing this unique symposium, one of the most original series ever presented.

Naturally, the stories are bound to provoke opinion and raise discussion. The thesis in the form presented by Dr. Means is quite novel, but the underlying problem of the stability of human affections, is as old as the heart of man. Wasn't it that prosaic but wise old poet, Alexander Pope, who compared our minds to our watches? "No two go just alike, yet each believes his own."

FIRST TALE
AN INDIAN JATAKA
BY ACHMED ABDULLAH

This is the tale which Jehan Tugluk Khan, a wise man in Tartary, and milk brother to Ghengiz Khan, Emperor of the East and the North, and Captain General of the Golden Horde, whispered to the Foolish Virgin who came to him, bringing the purple, spiked flower of the Kadam-tree as an offering, and begging him for a love potion with which to hold Haydar Khan, a young, red-faced warrior from the west who had ridden into camp, a song on his lips, a woman's breast scarf tied to his tufted bamboo lance, a necklace of his slain foes' skulls strung about his massive chest, and sitting astride a white stallion whose mane was dyed crimson in sign of strife and whose dainty, dancing feet rang on the rose-red marble pavement of the emperor's courtyard like crystal bells in the wind of spring.

This is a tale of passion, and, by the same token, a tale of wisdom. For, in the yellow, placid lands east of the Urals and west of harsh, sneering Pekin, it is babbled by the toothless old women who know life, that wisdom and desire are twin sisters rocked in the same cradle: one speaks while the other sings. They say that it is the wisdom of passion which makes eternal the instinct of love.

This is the tale of Vasantasena, the slave who was free in her own heart, and of Madusadan, a captain of horse, who plucked the white rose without fearing the thorns.

This, finally, is the tale of Vikramavati, King of Hindustan in the days of the Golden Age, when Surya, the Sun, warmed the fields without scorching; when Vanyu, the Wind, filled the air with the pollen of the many flowers without stripping the trees bare of leaves; when Varuna, Regent of Water, sang through the land without destroying the dykes or drowning the lowing cattle and the little naked children who played at the river's bank; when Prithwi, the Earth, sustained all and starved none; when Chandra, the Moon, was as bright and ripening as his elder brother, the Sun.

LET ALL THE WISE CHILDREN LISTEN TO MY JATAKA!

VASANTASENA was the girl's name, and she came to young King Vikramavati's court on the tenth day of the dark half of the month Bhadra. She came as befitted a slave captured in war, with her henna-stained feet bound together by a thin, golden chain, her white hands tied behind her back with ropes of pearls, her slim young body covered with a silken robe of the sad hue of the tamala flower, in sign of mourning for Dharma, her father, the king of the south, who had fallen in battle beneath the steel-shod tusks of the war elephants.

She knelt before the peacock throne, and Vikramavati saw that her face was as beautiful as the moon on the fourteenth day, that her black locks were like female snakes, her waist like the waist of a she-lion, her arms like twin marble columns blue-veined, her skin like the sweetly scented champaka flower, and her breasts as the young tinduka fruit.

He looked into her eyes and saw that they were of a deep bronze color, gold flecked, and with pupils that were black and opaque—eyes that seemed to hold all the wisdom, all the secret mockery, the secret knowledge of womanhood—and his hand trembled, and he thought in his soul that the bountiful hand of Sravanna, the God of Plenty, had been raised high in the western heaven at the hour of her birth.