Herewith some incidental intelligence about TIME:

T. S. Eliot is not shy with friends but is inclined to be wary of strangers. Worried at the prospect of being interviewed by TIME'S Thomas Dozier for his cover story last week, the poet said to John Hayward, with whom he shares a flat in Chelsea:"This young man who's coming to see me from TIME, do you think it would get things off to a smooth start if I asked him if his family came from St. Louis? I once knew a family named Dozier in St. Louis."

London Correspondent Dozier was also wondering what his opening gambit should be, and on the way to Russell Square in a taxi had settled on a pseudo-literary observation. "When I walked in," Dozier cabled us, "Eliot stood up, gave me his hand, and then threw me completely off my intellectual rails by asking: 'Does your family come from St. Louis?' I told him it didn't, but his remark got things down to the very human level. We talked for three hours and ten minutes--the longest interview Eliot has ever given a journalist."

Do you recall a recent Press story in TIME (Jan. 30) about the readability of Chicago newspapers? It said that according to Douglas Martin, professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, the sentences in some Chicago papers were too long and too wordy for easy reading.

This story moved us to ask Professor Martin about TIME'S readability. In his classes Martin uses the Rudolph (The Art of Readable Writing) Flesch formula for easy reading, in which an average of 19 words to a sentence and an average of 150 syllables to 100 words is a perfect score. After turning his classes loose on TIME, Martin wrote us:

"TiME is perfect. It hits exactly where Dr. Flesch says it should. Here is the score: average sentence length, 19 words; average syllables per 100 words, 149.7. This means that TIME can be read by students in the eighth and ninth grades . . . and understood easily by 83% of the adults in the linked States."

After TIME'S Canadian Edition ran a story (Jan. 16) on the Sisters Adorers of the Precious Blood in Toronto and four of its cloistered nuns who had been assigned to duty in Japan, we sent a copy of the issue to the monastery. Later, Toronto Correspondent Wessely Hicks, who knew that radio and secular periodicals were not allowed in the monastery, called to find out what had happened.

According to Sister Dolors, secretary of the Toronto community, "Usually we maintain silence at our meals and do religious study, but last night in refectory we forsook our religous reading and read TIME instead. Then we passed the magazine around so everybody could see the picture of the four sisters. We were most pleased."

Sister Dolors added that TIME seemed to be "a very intelligent magazine which gives a wonderful picture of world news. I like the format very much. I hadn't seen it before. It must be quite a new magazine--but, then, I've been in the monastery for 20 years."

The following excerpt is from a letter we have, just received from TIME Perpetual Subscriber 101, a German living in Germany. He writes: "Having had the doubtful privilege of living in a totalitarian state for 12 years, I have been deprived of reading TIME for many years . . . When war broke out I had to put up with a dreary, TiMEless life. For an old perpetual, this was truly an ordeal. Now I am getting TIME again at the very date of issue, like any New Yorker, although I live in a tiny community some four miles from a railroad station.

"After the ban in Germany you wrote and offered to refund part of my subscription fee. I emphatically rejected this offer, which showed that I had much more faith in TIME than in the duration of Hitler's thousand-year Reich. History has proved that I was right."

Cordially yours.

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