"Beautify It"

THE COUNTRY IS YOURS--

PRESERVE IT.

MAKE EVERY MILE OF ROADWAY SMILE.

MAR THE SCENERY, YOU'LL BRUISE AMERICA.

Some 6,000 U. S. high school students sloganed thus and similarly in a contest which ended last week. Mrs. John Davison Rockefeller Jr. had offered a prize for a phrase which would stir public sentiment against such man-made rural ugliness as "hot dog" stands, billboards.

Marion Boyd, 17, of Detroit, student at the Northwestern High School, bit her pencil and finally wrote: THIS IS YOUR COUNTRY--BEAUTIFY IT.

That won. The judges included Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wife of the Governor of New York, famed press-agents Ivy Ledbetter Lee, Edward L. Bernays, John Price Jones.

Mrs. Rockefeller's prizes: A three-day trip to Washington, including a presidential handshake, for Marion Boyd and companion.

Lament's Hoppner

Two little maids in flaring bright dresses, a golden-banged boy in absurdly small trousers--the Sackville children played on the greensward around their great ancestral Knole House, Sevenoaks, Kent.* There John Hoppner painted their portrait, a distinguished, worldly man who found innocence a better subject than sophistication. In 1797 his picture was finished, hung in Knole House. It has been there ever since.

Last week Morgan-Partner Thomas William Lament, lately abroad as a Reparations agent for the U. S., confirmed a report that he had purchased The Sackville Children from the present Lord Sackville.

Other U. S. owners of Hoppner-painted children: Banker John Pierpont Morgan; Publisher Cyrus Herman Kotzschmar Curtis; Sportsman-Financier Joseph E. Widener; Pittsburgh Banker William Larimer Mellon.

Rhodesian Palimpsest

Now digging in Rhodesia is Lidio Cipriani, Professor of Ethnology at the University of Florence. Important has been his discovery of flint instruments, for they tend to prove that Rhodesia was a land of the living in prehistoric as well as medieval times. Last week the Professor reported a particularly exciting discovery-- two "Bushman paintings" on rock, one on top of the other. Beneath was a well-dressed Arab. Above was a Bushman ferociously warring with Bantus. It was the first example of superimposed art to be found in Rhodesia. It promised under analysis to help historians to learn what races have crossed Rhodesia and when.

*The ancient, gifted family of Sackville existed in Elizabethan times, later played host to such cultured notables as Poets Pope and Dryden. Best known of living members is Lady-Novelist the Hon. V. Sackville-West (Seducers in Ecuador, The Land.) The family figures importantly in Novelist Virginia Woolf s Orlando.