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Arthur (Cheney) Train was born in Boston, 6 September 1875, the son of Charles Russell Train and Sarah M. (Cheney) Train. His father was Attorney-General of Massachusetts, 1873-1880. Arthur Train was graduated from Harvard (A. B.) in 1896 and received the law degree three years later. In 1897 he married Ethel Kissam, daughter of Benjamin P. Kissam, of New York. Mrs. Train, also a writer, died in the spring of 1923. Her book, _“Son” and Other Stories of Childhood and Age_ is being published posthumously.

Arthur Train went almost immediately into the District Attorney’s office in New York. He never entirely sacrificed his connection with it until 1916, when he became a member of the firm of Perkins & Train. As a special deputy Attorney-General of the State of New York, in 1910, he brought about the indictment of over one hundred persons, political offenders in Queens County, in the city of New York. He is a member of the Century, University and Harvard Clubs of New York, and of the Downtown Association. In his attractive home, at 113 East Seventy-third street, New York, there is a room, up one flight, occupying the whole width of the front of the house, with southerly windows, book-lined walls, an ample desk, and a roomy davenport confronting a fireplace. The fireplace is fenced about and the top of the fence is leather-cushioned, making a comfortable seat. Nothing could be more pleasant than to sink into the davenport and face Mr. Train, who has seated himself on the fireplace fence and lighted a cigarette.

“But don’t you mind the interruptions?” you ask him. “Suppose you are in the middle of a novel and a big case comes along----”

“That’s very refreshing,” he answers. “I come back to the novel as from a vacation.”

And you recall the early writing, done, so to speak, between telephone calls.

There _has_ been a change; Mr. Train freely acknowledges it. “I can’t say exactly when it occurred. It was during the war. I felt differently about my writing. I felt much more intent about it. It took hold of me very strongly when I was writing about Ephraim Tutt--_Tutt and Mr. Tutt_, you know. I think those were possibly the first stories I had written which made me feel emotion.”

It is easy to see why, easier, perhaps, in Mr. Train’s new collection of these tales, _Tut, Tut! Mr. Tutt_, than in the first book. For the emphasis upon Ephraim Tutt’s attitude is more pronounced as we see him deliberately employing the tricks of the law in the interests of justice. Himself moved by that most permanent of human emotions, the desire for the just, and by that most continual of human delights, the extraction of good from evil or even good wreaked by means of evil, and moved also by that human protest against the application of general rules to individual dilemmas, Mr. Tutt would be strange if he did not arouse in his creator the emotion inseparable from any act of art.

Once felt, never without. The practise of law seems less important than once it did to Arthur Train. The number of cases that really are interesting--are they growing fewer? There is something about private practise ... duller than the old court work, less stimulating....

He has “an infinite capacity for taking pains.” It has been proven. There, I think, our case rests.

Books by Arthur Train

1905 _McAllister and His Double_ 1906 _The Prisoner at the Bar_ 1908 _True Stories of Crime_ 1909 _The Butler’s Story_ 1909 _Mortmain_ 1909 _Confessions of Artemas Quibble_ 1910 _C. Q., or In the Wireless House_ 1911 _Courts, Criminals and the Camorra_ 1914 _The “Goldfish.”_ This book, published anonymously, caused a sensation by its satirisation of American social life 1915 _The Man Who Rocked the Earth_ (with ROBERT WILLIAMS WOOD) 1917 _The World and Thomas Kelly_ 1918 _The Earthquake_ 1920 _Tutt and Mr. Tutt_ 1921 _By Advice of Counsel_ 1921 _The Hermit of Turkey Hollow_ 1923 _His Children’s Children_ 1923 _Tut, Tut! Mr. Tutt_

_6. The Lady of a Tradition, Miss Sackville-West_