MASSASOIT 



3692 



MASTERS 



human system to be able to locate muscles and 

 nerves with the fingers and follow them in the 

 right course. Stroking back and forth as fancy 

 suggests will not bring results. 



Massage has long been employed to promote 

 physical and facial beauty; the Greeks and 

 Romans considered it one of their luxuries. 

 Facial massage is extensively used at the 

 present time to remove the traces of time. 

 A male operator is called a masseur, a female 

 a masseuse. W.A.E. 



MASSASOIT, mas a soil' (1580-1661), chief 

 of the Wampanoag Indian tribe, whose terri- 

 tory before white men reached New England 

 embraced the southern part of what is now 

 Massachusetts. He made a treaty with the 

 Pilgrims soon after their landing in Plymouth, 

 promising never to allow his people to harm 

 the colonists as long as he lived, and for fifty 

 years the treaty was faithfully kept. In turn 

 the Indians were guaranteed protection. On 

 the first Thanksgiving Day of the colonists, 

 Massasoit and a number of his braves were 

 invited to partake of the feast, and afterward 

 he solemnly said, "The Great Spirit surely 

 must love his white children best." His son 

 Philip became the head of the tribe after his 

 death. See KING PHILIP. 



MASSENET, maas'neh' , JULES EMILE FRED- 

 ERIC (1842-1912), a French composer of operas 

 and songs, born in Montaud. After studying 

 at the Paris Conservatory he became one of 

 its professors in 1878. He composed a great 

 many operas, of which the best known are 

 Werther, The Cid, Le Jongleur de Notre Dame, 

 Manon Lescaut, Herodias, Don Cesar de Bazan 

 and Thais. Massenet developed graceful and 

 imaginative expression in the instrumentation 

 of his operas, and in Manon, particularly, he 

 displayed his gift for creating charming, fluent 

 melody. The famed Meditation, played be- 

 tween two acts in the opera Thais, is intended 

 to typify, in its sensuous color, the soul of the 

 voluptuous Thai's, which is being purged of 

 wickedness. The latter opera was first pro- 

 duced in Paris in 1894, and owes a great deal 

 of its fame to Mary Garden's interpretation 

 of the principal role. 



MASSILLON, mas'ilon, OHIO, a city in 

 Stark County, eight miles west of Canton, the 

 county seat, and fifty-eight miles south and 

 east of Cleveland. It is on the Tuscarawas 

 River and the Ohio Canal, and on the Balti- 

 more & Ohio, the Pennsylvania and the Wheel- 

 ing & Lake Erie railroads. Electric roads 

 connect it with near-by cities. The area is four 



square miles. The population in 1910 was 

 13,879; in 1916 it was 15,310 (Federal esti- 

 mate). 



The city is the seat of a state hospital, a 

 large institution occupying forty buildings, the 

 first state institute for the insane to conduct a 

 school for education and mental training. 

 Prominent public buildings are the Federal 

 building, erected in 1914 at a cost of $100,000, 

 a city hall, a hospital, a theater and a public 

 library. 



The city is in a hilly country which contains 

 rich deposits of coal, white sandstone, potter's 

 clay and iron ore. The industrial enterprises 

 of the city are many and varied; among these 

 are steel mills, aluminum plants, flour and feed 

 mills and agricultural implement works; there 

 are also manufactures of stationary and port- 

 able engines, structural steel and iron bridges, 

 stoves and heating furnaces, silos and fire and 

 paving brick. The city has a large trade in 

 wheat. 



Massillon was founded in 1825, incorporated 

 as a village in 1853 and chartered as a city in 

 1868. A.H. 



MAS'TERS, EDGAR LEE (1868- ), an 

 American lawyer and writer whose name be- 

 came widely known in 1915, upon the publica- 

 tion of his Spoon River Anthology. This book, 

 one of the literary sensations of the period, is 

 a poetic volume, written not in the regular 

 verse forms in which Masters had worked hith- 

 erto, but in free verse, which is far better 

 adapted to the very unusual content of the 

 poems. Each short poem is an absolutely frank 

 post-mortem statement by some dweller in the 

 rural cemetery of Spoon River. If every head- 

 stone could tell the exact, unvarnished truth, 

 without fear or favor, then a collection of the 

 epitaphs in any graveyard would make just 

 such a book as that of Masters only, as one 

 critic has said, Masters has viewed his charac- 

 ters with the eye of a criminal lawyer, and 

 there is indeed a lack of "sweetness and light." 

 Remarkable character delineation, the ability 

 to tell much in few words, humor, and here 

 and there a touch of real tenderness, make the 

 book noteworthy. 



Masters, who was born at Garnett, Kan., 

 and studied at Knox College, Illinois, was ad- 

 mitted to the bar in 1891, and has since 

 practiced law in Chicago. Before The Spoon 

 River Anthology appeared he had published 

 A Book of Verses, The New Star Chamber and 

 plays entitled Maximilian, Althea and The 

 Trifler. 



