"Rejoicing and Gladness"

A thickset, bristle-haired man of 45 might have been observed last fortnight poking around in the mountainous backwoods of Virginia and the tangled wilderness of rural Maryland. He looked like, and was, a detective. He had been a detective ever since a day in his small-boyhood when he tossed a baseball through a basement window in the outskirts of Philadelphia and, retrieving it, discovered for U.S. agents a nest of counterfeiters.

Mooching quietly about in those backwoods sections, he might have been a detective looking for moonshiners. But his quarry was far more elusive than that. He was looking for, and asking for, and prepared to pay for, the right to catch -brook trout.

April was at hand and the trout-hunter's mission was much more important than might have been suspected. Because he was Lawrence Richey, erstwhile of the U. S. Secret Service, lately raised to the estate of $10,000-per-year secretary to the President of the U.S. And he was looking for places where President Hoover might enjoy "the rejoicing and gladness" of not having "to decide a blanked thing until next week," as he (Herbert Hoover) once put it.

Two spots were found: 1) an 18-mile stretch of the Rapidan River in Shenandoah National Park, 100 miles west by south of Washington, upon which a presidential fishing lease was arranged; 2) a tract of 1,500 acres known as Catoctin Manor, 50 miles north of Washington, watered by Hunting Creek. This tract (but not the Manor House) was purchased in the name of Lawrence Richey. A rustic cabin will be built to receive President Hoover and his intimates.

Long one of the Treasury's best sleuths, favored by President Roosevelt as a bodyguard at Oyster Bay, Detective-Secretary Richey entered Herbert Hoover's service in Food Administration days. Bodyguarding long since ceased to be his sole function. He furnishes the Chief with a pair of extra ears as well as with vigilant eyes and brawn. When the President-Elect went to South America, Lawrence Richey was left behind to Hear Things.

P: President Hoover proclaimed the national origins quotas of immigration ordered by Congress and operative after July 1. Attorney-General Mitchell had advised him that the proclamation was mandatory. Based upon a "scientific" estimate of foreign contributions to U.S. native stock in the past 140 years, national origins is viewed with alarm by President Hoover, who believes its basic statistics unsound. But said Mr. Hoover: "I naturally dislike the duty. . . . But the President of the United States must be the first to obey the law." An effort will be made to repeal national origins in the special session of Congress, if the President mentions it in his message.

P: President Hoover has no great fancy for women in public office. Nevertheless, appreciative of her excellent work in the past, he returned to Jessie Dell, a Georgia Democrat, her resignation as a U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, thus retaining her in office. He also sent back unaccepted the resignation of General Charles Pelot Summerall, Chief of Staff.

P: President Hoover made public no answer to a wistful "open letter" on his religion, published by Editor Charles Clayton Morrison in the Christian Century. Said the letter, in part: "In choosing you, the people of the United States rejected the candidacy of a Catholic. . . . Some day ... the mind of Christ will become the mind of the State."

P: To the White House hurried Captain Einar Paul Lundborg, of the Swedish Royal Flying Corps, rescuer of General Umberto Nobile in the Arctic, to pay his respects to President Hoover. He wore a brand new uniform. Three Washington tailors had made it for him in three hours when his trunk failed to follow him promptly from Manhattan.

P: President Hoover last week granted a pardon, his first, to Nat Goldstein. Missouri politician, convicted in a liquor conspiracy case in St. Louis. Goldstein was a Lowden delegate at the 1920 Republican National Convention to whom $2,500 was paid.

P: Under the clamorous claims of the U.S. drys, consolidated, President Hoover last week grew fretful. Through the press, anonymously he sent forth word that no spectacular or drastic steps would be taken in his law enforcement campaign. He proposed to proceed sanely, to instill in people a respect for all law by education and moral suasion. He sought to avoid specialization on the prohibition law. Wet observers credited him with a shrewd and nimble sidestep. Most embarrassed was Major Edwin B. Hesse of the Washington, D. C., police force, who, with impressive fanfare, had just set out to dry up the trickling capital "as an example."

P: A smiling prophet of woe, Indiana's Senator Watson, now Republican leader, went to the White House to tell President Hoover that the special session of Congress would probably extend through the summer and into the autumn. President Hoover heard this prediction without joy.

P: President Coolidge used to rise and bid his callers good-night before the clock had ceased chiming 10 p. m. Last week President Hoover, host to four New York Republican leaders, kept them smoking and talking in the study until 11.10 p. m., when they went away in sweet harmony.

P: Speechmaking, to President Hoover, is not a pleasure. Last week he refused invitations, customarily accepted by the President, to address annual meetings of the American Red Cross (of which the President is president) and of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Mr. Hoover holds that excessive time and energy are spent in preparing material for such speeches. Two or three addresses a year, he hopes, will suffice to keep the country informed of his stewardship.