Writer Bill McHale is back in BUSINESS & FINANCE after three months' work for another weekly magazine, the London Economist. He didn't quit; he wasn't fired; he was lent, from TIME.

The lend-lease plan under which McHale worked began as an idea of T. S. Matthews, editor of TIME. In London one day last spring, Matthews had a talk with Geoffrey Crowther, editor of the Economist. Crowther agreed to give one of our writers "house room," but modestly insisted that he saw no way in which TIME would benefit. Matthews replied that he'd take the chance. So began McHale's tour of duty on the 117-year-old British publication.

His stay was a happy one from the start. In the first of his weekly letters back to Matthews, he wrote that the "Economisters" had welcomed him politely enough to give him a "jam-on-jam feeling" the first day. He soon found himself treated as a "resident American oracle," expected to answer at the drop of a pencil such questions as "What is the first name of Senator Johnson from Texas?" and "What is a cookie-pusher?" The answer to these came easy, but occasionally he was jolted by deadpan requests to rattle off statistics--like the average number of short tons of zinc which U.S. industry normally had on hand at the end of the month.

He wrote at different times for each of the magazine's four sections (Home, Foreign, American and Business World), and supplied one or more articles for each issue. His research and writing included, among other things, reports on the Malayan rubber supply, the British electoral system, the Argentine-induced meat shortage, and the troubles of the Long Island Rail Road. He did a "leader" on the money fight between the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

Meanwhile, he took a look at British industrial plants, and lived in London with wife Connie, an ex-WAVE. McHale liked the easy informality at the Economist, which, like TIME, is a "first-name outfit." The English writers were always ready for a 20-minute chat on any subject, from the sad state of African groundnuts to the poor taste of American movies. Said he: "They speak with such conviction, fluency and lucidity, even when they are talking absolute tripe."

Before McHale left, Crowther stamped the experiment a success by picking one of his men to send over in October to begin a writing hitch on TIME. We look forward to this chance to repay the Economist's hospitality.

Here's a letter that came last week from Arthur W. Sheppard, a TIME-reader in Sao Paulo, Brazil:

"Probably you have never heard of the small town of Garc,a in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo, twelve hours by train from the city of Sao Paulo. The chances are that you would have continued not to be any the wiser, if I had not noticed today that TIME for Feb. 19, with the picture of Charles E. Wilson on the cover, was for sale there in a small bookstall. "The irony is that the owner of the bookstall is a registered Communist, but when it comes to business, he is perfectly willing to take advantage of a superb distribution system that only an efficient, progressive, capitalistic magazine like TIME could make available, at a reasonable price, in the most remote corners of the world on the same date that is printed on its cover."

Cordially yours,

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.