The college graduates and the young intellectuals of China are faced today with some terribly difficult decisions. No one knows this better than NORA WALN, the author of The House of Exile and Reaching for the Stars, who has been living and writing in the Orient for the past two years. This is the third Atlantic article drawn from her actual experiences, and for obvious reasons she was careful to disguise the identity of An-kuo, that young Chinese scholar who for a time took refuge in Japan.

On the ponds and marshes of the inland side of Nauset Beach, and in the river estuaries in the neighborhood of Ipswich, DR. WYMAN RICHARDSON has observed the bird life as he has paddled, fished for stripers, or with his son Fred watched in concealment, with his glasses rather than his gun at hand. Dr. Richardson has long been aware that birds communicate, for reasons he explains in this, the sixth of his series of Atlantic essays.

Reared on a farm in Utah and later in Colombia, South America, GRANT CANNON now lives in a century-old house on the outskirts of Cincinnati with his wife, Josephine Johnson, and their three children. During the war Mr. Cannon served as a combat intelligence officer with the Fifth Air Force, and since that time he has been managing editor of the Farm Quarterly — a job, he writes us, “which pleases me enormously because of the aesthetic satisfactions which come from publishing such a beautiful as well as useful magazine.”

“The development of a living active organism from a seemingly inert egg, while you watch and wait, is a miracle that never palls,” writes N. J. BERRILL, Professor of Zoology at McGill University. Atlantic readers will remember “Detectives of Time” which Mr. Berrill wrote for the July issue, and his book Journey into Wonder, an account of the explorations of the great naturalists, of which we printed three chapters last year. The following article is taken from his new book, Sex and the Nature of Things, to be published soon by Dodd, Mead.

A graduate of Queens’ College, Cambridge, T. H. WHITE published his first novel, Loved Helen, in 1926 when he was a young schoolmaster at Stowe. He scored his first major success in this country with The Sword in the Stone; and then, when he had resumed writing after the war, he again hit the target of the Book-of-the-Month Club with his novel, Mistress Masham’s Repose. Atlantic readers will remember his charming story. “The Fairy Fire,” which appeared in the November issue.