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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13708 ***
+
+WALKING-STICK PAPERS
+
+BY
+
+ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY
+
+
+
+1918
+
+
+
+
+AS A CAT MAY LOOK AT A KING
+
+SO I DEDICATE THIS LITTLE DOINGS TO
+
+THREE FINE MEN:
+
+
+W. C. BROWNELL
+
+HILAIRE BELLOC
+
+ROYAL CORTISSOZ
+
+
+
+BECAUSE THEY REPRESENT TO MY MIND
+
+THE BEST THINGS GOING:
+
+THE PURE MILK OF THE WORD
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+These little records of some excursions made by what Mr. James called
+"a visiting mind" first saw the light of public countenance in the
+pages of various publications.  "On Going to Art Exhibitions" has been
+much expanded since its appearance in _Vanity Fair_.  In _The Unpopular
+Review_ the original title of "That Reviewer 'Cuss'" was brought into
+harmony with the dignity of its setting by being changed to "The Hack
+Reviewer."  "A Clerk May Look at a Celebrity" was printed in the New
+York _Times_ under the head "Glimpses of Celebrities."  This paper has
+been included in this collection at the request of several
+distinguished gentlemen who have been so unfortunate as to lose their
+newspaper clippings of the article.  That several of the personages
+figuring in this and one or two other of these papers have passed away
+since these papers were written seems to be thought an additional
+reason for reprinting these essays here.  _The Bellman_ fell for
+"Caun't Speak the Language"; the New York _Tribune_, "Humours of the
+Bookshop"; _The Independent_, "Reading After Thirty," "You Are an
+American" appeared in the New York _Sun_; where the head "An American
+Reviewer in London" was substituted for the title of "Literary Levities
+in London."  The following papers were contributed to the New York
+_Evening Post_: "The Fish Reporter," "On Going a Journey," "A
+Roundabout Paper," "Henry James, Himself," "Memories of a Manuscript,"
+"Why Men Can't Read Novels by Women," "The Dessert of Life," "Hunting
+Lodgings," "My Friend, the Policeman," "Help Wanted," "Human Municipal
+Documents," "As to People," "A Town Constitutional," and "On Wearing a
+Hat."  "On Carrying a Cane" appeared in _The Bookman_.  I thank the
+editors of the publications named for permission to reprint these
+papers here.                R. C. H.
+
+New York, 1918.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ PROLOGUE: ON CARRYING A CANE
+
+     I  THE FISH REPORTER
+    II  ON GOING A JOURNEY
+   III  GOING TO ART EXHIBITIONS
+    IV  A ROUNDABOUT PAPER
+     V  THAT REVIEWER "CUSS"
+    VI  LITERARY LEVITIES IN LONDON
+   VII  HENRY JAMES, HIMSELF
+  VIII  MEMORIES OF A MANUSCRIPT
+    IX  "YOU ARE AN AMERICAN"
+     X  WHY MEN CAN'T READ NOVELS BY WOMEN
+    XI  THE DESSERT OF LIFE
+   XII  A CLERK MAY LOOK AT A CELEBRITY
+  XIII  CAUN'T SPEAK THE LANGUAGE
+   XIV  HUNTING LODGINGS
+    XV  MY FRIEND, THE POLICEMAN
+   XVI  HELP WANTED--MALE, FEMALE
+  XVII  HUMAN MUNICIPAL DOCUMENTS
+ XVIII  AS TO PEOPLE
+   XIX  HUMOURS OF THE BOOK SHOP
+    XX  THE DECEASED
+   XXI  A TOWN CONSTITUTIONAL
+  XXII  READING AFTER THIRTY
+
+ EPILOGUE: ON WEARING A HAT
+
+
+
+
+WALKING-STICK PAPERS
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+ON CARRYING A CANE
+
+Some people, without doubt, are born with a deep instinct for carrying
+a cane; some consciously acquire the habit of carrying a cane; and some
+find themselves in a position where the matter of carrying a cane is
+thrust upon them.
+
+Canes are carried in all parts of the world, and have been carried--or
+that which was the forefather of them has been carried--since human
+history began.  Indeed, a very fair account of mankind might be made by
+writing the story, of its canes.  And nothing that would readily occur
+to mind would more eloquently express a civilisation than its evident
+attitude toward canes.  Perhaps nothing can more subtly convey the
+psychology of a man than his feeling about a cane.
+
+The prehistoric ape, we are justified in assuming, struggled upright
+upon a cane.  The cane, so to speak, with which primitive man wooed his
+bride, defended his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, and brought
+down his food, was (like all canes which are in good taste) admirably
+chosen for the occasion.  The spear, the stave, the pilgrim's staff,
+the sword, the sceptre--always has the cane-carrying animal borne
+something in his hand.  And, down the long vista of the past, the cane,
+in its various manifestations, has ever been the mark of strength, and
+so of dignity.  Thus as a man originally became a gentleman, or a king,
+by force of valour, the cane in its evolution has ever been the symbol
+of a superior caste.
+
+A man cannot do manual labour carrying a cane.  And it would be a moral
+impossibility for one of servile state--a butler, for instance, or a
+ticket-chopper--to present himself in the role of his occupation
+ornamented with a cane.  One held in custody would not be permitted to
+appear before a magistrate flaunting a cane.  Until the stigma which
+attaches to his position may be erased he would be shorn of this mark
+of nobility, the cane.
+
+Canes are now carried mostly by the very youthful and the very aged,
+the powerful, the distinguished, the patrician, the self-important, and
+those who fancy to exalt themselves.  Some, to whom this privilege is
+denied during the week by their fear of adverse public opinion, carry
+canes only on Sundays and holidays.  By this it is shown that on these
+days they are their own masters.
+
+Custom as to carrying canes varies widely in different parts of the
+world; but it may be taken as a general maxim that the farther west you
+go the less you see of canes.  The instinct for carrying a cane is more
+natural in old civilisations, where the tradition is of ancient growth,
+than in newer ones, where frequently a cane is regarded as the sign of
+an effete character.  As we have been saying, canes, we all feel, have
+an affinity with the idea of an aristocracy.  If you do not admit that
+the idea of an aristocracy is a good one, then doubtless you are down
+on canes.  It is interesting to observe that canes have flourished at
+all especially chivalrous periods and in all especially chivalrous
+communities.  No illustrator would portray a young planter of the Old
+South without his cane; and that fragrant old-school figure, a southern
+"Colonel," without his cane is inconceivable.  Canes connote more or
+less leisure.  They convey a subtle insinuation of some degree of
+culture.
+
+They always are a familiar article of a gentleman's dress in warm
+climates.  The cane, quite strictly speaking, in fact has its origin in
+warm countries.  For properly speaking, the word cane should be
+restricted in its application to a peculiar class of palms, known as
+ratans, included under the closely allied genera _Calamus_ and
+_Daemonorops_, of which there are a large number of species.  These
+plants, the Encyclopedia tells us, are found widely extended throughout
+the islands of the Indian Archipelago, the Malay Peninsula, China,
+India and Ceylon; and examples have also been found in Australia and
+Africa.  The learned Rumphius describes them, under the name of
+_Palmijunci_, as inhabitants of dense forests into which the rays of
+the sun scarce can penetrate, where they form spiny bushes, obstructing
+the passage through the jungle.  They rise to the top of the tallest
+trees and fall again so as to resemble a great length of cable,
+adorned, however, with the most beautiful leaves, pinnated or
+terminating in graceful tendrils.  The plants creep or trail along to
+an enormous length, sometimes, it is said, reaching five hundred feet.
+Two examples of _Calamus verus_, measuring respectively two hundred and
+seventy feet and two hundred and thirty feet, were exhibited in the
+Paris exhibition of 1855.
+
+The well-known Malacca canes are obtained from _Calamus Scipionum_, the
+stems of which are much stouter than is the case with the average
+species of _Calamus_.  Doubtless to the vulgar a Malacca cane is merely
+a Malacca cane.  There are, however, in this interesting world choice
+spirits who make a cult of Malacca canes, just as some dog fanciers are
+devotees of the Airedale terrier.  Such as these know that inferior
+Malacca canes are, as the term in the cane trade is, "shaved"; that is,
+not being of the circumference most coveted, but too thick, they have
+been whittled down in bulk.  A prime Malacca cane is, of course, a
+natural stem, and it is a nice point to have a slight irregularity in
+its symmetry as evidence of this.  The delicious spotting of a Malacca
+cane is due to the action of the sun upon it in drying.  As the stems
+are dried in sheaves, those most richly splotched are the ones that
+have been at the outside of the bundle.  What new strength to meet
+life's troubles, what electric expansion of soul, come to the initiated
+upon the feel of the vertebra of his Malacca cane!
+
+The name of cane is also applied to many plants besides the _Calamus_,
+which are possessed of long, slender, reed-like stalks or stems, as,
+for instance, the sugar-cane, or the reed-cane.  From the use as
+walking-sticks to which many of these plants have been applied, the
+name cane has been given generally to "sticks" irrespective of the
+source from which they are derived.
+
+Our distinguished grandfathers carried canes, frequently handsome
+gold-headed ones, especially if they were ministers.  Bishops, or
+"Presiding Elders;" when, in those mellow times, it was the custom for
+a congregation to present its minister with a gold-headed cane duly
+inscribed.  Our fathers of some consequence carried canes of a
+gentlemanly pattern, often ones with ivory handles.  Though in the days
+when those of us now sometime grown were small one had to have arrived
+at the dignity of at least middle-age before it was seemly for one to
+carry a cane.  In England, however, and particularly at Eton, it has
+long been a common practice for small aristocrats to affect canes.
+
+The dandies, fops, exquisites, and beaux of picturesque and courtly
+ages were, of course, very partial to canes, and sometimes wore them
+attached to the wrist by a thong.  It has been the custom of the
+Surgeon of the King of England to carry a "Gold Headed Cane."  This
+cane has been handed down to the various incumbents of this office
+since the days of Dr. John Radcliffe, who was the first holder of the
+cane.  It has been used for two hundred years or more by the greatest
+physicians and surgeons in the world, who succeeded to it.  "The Gold
+Headed Cane" was adorned by a cross-bar at the top instead of a knob.
+The fact is explained by Munk, in that Radcliffe, the first owner, was
+a rule unto himself and possibly preferred this device as a mark of
+distinction beyond the knob used by physicians in general.  Men of
+genius now and then have found in their choice of a cane an opportunity
+for the play of their eccentricity, such a celebrated cane being the
+tall wand of Whistler.  Among the relics of great men preserved in
+museums for the inspiration of the people canes generally are to be
+found.  We have all looked upon the cane of George Washington at Mount
+Vernon and the walking-stick of Carlyle in Cheyne Walk.  And is each
+not eloquent of the man who cherished it?
+
+Freak canes are displayed here and there by persons of a pleasantly
+bizarre turn of mind: canes encased in the hide of an elephant's tail,
+canes that have been intricately carven by some Robinson Crusoe, or
+canes of various other such species of curiosity.  There is a veteran
+New York journalist who will be glad to show any student of canes one
+which he prizes highly that was made from the limb of a tree upon which
+a friend of his was hanged.  In our age of handy inventions a type of
+cane is manufactured in combination with an umbrella.
+
+Canes are among the useful properties of the theatre.  He would be a
+decidedly incomplete villain who did not carry a cane.  Imaginative
+literature is rich in canes.  Who ever heard of a fairy godmother
+without a cane?  Who with any feeling for terror has not been startled
+by the tap, tap of the cane of old Pew in "Treasure Island"?  There is
+an awe and a pathos in canes, too, for they are the light to blind men.
+And the romance of canes is further illustrated in this: they, with
+rags and the wallet, have been among the traditional accoutrements of
+beggars, the insignia of the "dignity springing from the very depth of
+desolation; as, to be naked is to be so much nearer to the being a man,
+than to go in livery."  J. M. Barrie was so fond of an anecdote of a
+cane that he employed it several times in his earlier fiction.  This
+was the story of a young man who had a cane with a loose knob, which in
+society he would slyly shake so that it tumbled off, when he would
+exclaim: "Yes, that cane is like myself; it always loses its head in
+the presence of ladies."
+
+Canes have figured prominently in humour.  The Irishman's shillelagh
+was for years a conspicuous feature of the comic press.  And there will
+instantly come to every one's mind that immortal passage in "Tristram
+Shandy."  Trim is discoursing upon life and death:
+
+"Are we not here now, continued the Corporal (striking the end of his
+stick perpendicularly upon the floor, so as to give an idea of health
+and stability)--and are we not (dropping his hat upon the ground) gone!
+in a moment!--'Twas infinitely striking!  Susannah burst into a flood
+of tears."
+
+Canes are not absent from poetry.  Into your ears already has come the
+refrain of "The Last Leaf":
+
+  "And totters o'er the ground,
+    With his cane."
+
+And, doubtless, floods of instances of canes that the world will not
+willingly let die will occur to one upon a moment's reflection.
+
+Canes are inseparable from art.  All artists carry them; and the poorer
+the artist the more attached is he to his cane.  Canes are
+indispensable to the simple vanity of the Bohemian.  One of the most
+memorable drawings of Steinlen depicts the quaint soul of a child of
+the Latin Quarter: an elderly Bohemian, very much frayed, advances
+wreathed in the sunshine of his boutonniere and cane.  Canes are
+invariably an accompaniment of learning.  Sylvester Bonnard would of
+course not be without his cane; nor would any other true book-worm, as
+may be seen any day in the reading-room of the British Museum and of
+the New York Public Library.  It is, indeed, indisputable that canes,
+more than any other article of dress, are peculiarly related to the
+mind.  There is an old book-seller on Fourth Avenue whose clothes when
+he dies, like the boots of Michelangelo, probably will require to be
+pried loose from him, so incessantly has he worn them within the memory
+of man.  None has ever looked upon him in the open air without his
+cane.  And is not that emblem of omniscience and authority, the
+schoolmaster's ferule, directly of the cane family?  So large has the
+cane loomed in the matter of chastisement that the word cane has become
+a verb, to cane.
+
+There was (in the days before the war) a military man (friend of mine),
+a military man of the old school, in whom could be seen, shining like a
+flame, a man's great love of a cane.  He had lived a portion of his
+life in South America, and he used to promenade every pleasant
+afternoon up and down the Avenue swinging a sharply pointed,
+steel-ferruled swagger-stick.  "What's the use of carrying that
+ridiculous thing around town?" some one said to him one day.
+
+"That!" he rumbled in reply (he was one of the roarers among men),
+"why, that's to stab scorpions with."
+
+They've buried him, I heard, in Flanders; on his breast (I hope), his
+cane.
+
+"When a Red Cross platoon," says a news despatch of the other day, "was
+advancing to the aid of scores of wounded men.  Surgeon William J.
+McCracken of the British Medical Corps ordered all to take cover, and
+himself advanced through the enemy's fire, bearing a Red Cross flag on
+his walking-stick."
+
+Indeed, the Great War is one of the most thrilling, momentous and
+colourful chapters in the history of canes.  "The officers picked up
+their canes," says the newspaper, and so forth, and so forth.  Captain
+A. Radclyffe Dugmore, in a spirited drawing of the Battle of the Somme,
+shows an officer leading a charge waving a light cane.  As an emblem of
+rank the cane among our Allies has apparently supplanted the sword.
+Something of the dapper, cocky look of our brothers in arms on our
+streets undoubtedly is due to their canes.  One never sees a British,
+French or Italian officer in the rotogravure sections without his cane.
+We should be as startled to see General Haig or the Prince of Wales
+without a cane as without a leg.  With our own soldiers the cane does
+not seem to be so much the thing, at least over here.  I have a friend,
+however, who went away a private with a rifle over his shoulder.  The
+other day came news from him that he had become a sergeant, and,
+perhaps as proof of this, a photograph of himself wearing a tin hat and
+with a cane in his hand.  It is also to be observed now and then that a
+lady in uniformed service appears to regard it as an added military
+touch to swing a cane.
+
+Women as well as men play their part in the colourful story of the
+cane.  The shepherdess's crook might be regarded as the precursor of
+canes for ladies.  In Merrie England in the age when the May-pole
+flourished it was fashionable, we know from pictures, for comely misses
+and grandes dames to sport tall canes mounted with silver or gold and
+knotted with a bow of ribbon.  The dowager duchess of romantic story
+has always appeared leaning upon her cane.  Do not we so see the rich
+aunt of Hawden Crawley?  And Mr. Walpole's Duchess of Wrexe, certainly,
+was supported in her domination of the old order of things by a cane.
+The historic old croons of our own early days smoked a clay or a
+corn-cob pipe and went bent upon a cane.
+
+In England to-day it is swagger for women to carry sticks--in the
+country.  And here the thoughtful spectator of the human scene notes a
+nice point.  It is not etiquette, according to English manners, for a
+woman to carry a cane in town.  Some American ladies who admire and
+would emulate English customs have not been made acquainted with this
+delicate nuance of taste, and so are very unfashionable when they would
+be ultra-fashionable.
+
+Anybody returning from the Alps should bring back an Alpine stock with
+him; every one who has visited Ireland upon his return has presented
+some close friend with a blackthorn stick; nobody has made a walking
+tour of England without an ash stick.  In London all adult males above
+the rank of costers carry "sticks"; in New York sticks are customary
+with many who would be ashamed to assume them did they live in the
+Middle West, where the infrequent sticks to be seen upon the city
+streets are in many cases the sign of transient mummers.  And yet it is
+a curious fact that in communities where the stick is conspicuously
+absent from the streets it is commonly displayed in show-windows, in
+company with cheap suits and decidedly loud gloves.  Another odd
+circumstance is this: trashy little canes hawked by sidewalk venders
+generally appear with the advent of toy balloons for sale on days of
+big parades.
+
+In Jamaica, Long Island, the visitor would probably see canes in the
+hands only of prosperous coloured gentlemen.  And than this fact
+probably nothing throws more light on the winning nature of the
+coloured race, and on the character and function of canes.  In San
+Francisco--but the adequate story, the Sartor Resartus--the World as
+Canes, remains to be written.
+
+This, of course, is the merest essay into this vast and significant
+subject.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE FISH REPORTER
+
+Men of genius, blown by the winds of chance, have been, now and then,
+mariners, bar-keeps, schoolmasters, soldiers, politicians, clergymen,
+and what not.  And from these pursuits have they sucked the essence of
+yarns and in the setting of these activities found a flavour to stir
+and to charm hearts untold.  Now, it is a thousand pities that no man
+of genius has ever been a fish reporter.  Thus has the world lost great
+literary treasure, as it is highly probable that there is not under the
+sun any prospect so filled with the scents and colours of story as that
+presented by the commerce in fish.
+
+Take whale oil.  Take the funny old buildings on Front Street, out of
+paintings, I declare, by Howard Pyle, where the large merchants in
+whale oil are.  Take salt fish.  Do you know the oldest salt-fish house
+in America, down by Coenties Slip?  Ah! you should.  The ghost of old
+Long John Silver, I suspect, smokes an occasional pipe in that old
+place.  And many are the times I've seen the slim shade of young Jim
+Hawkins come running out.  Take Labrador cod for export to the
+Mediterranean lands or to Porto Rico via New York.  Take herrings
+brought to this port from Iceland, from Holland, and from Scotland;
+mackerel from Ireland, from the Magdalen Islands, and from Cape Breton;
+crabmeat from Japan; fishballs from Scandinavia; sardines from Norway
+and from France; caviar from Russia; shrimp which comes from Florida,
+Mississippi, and Georgia, or salmon from Alaska, and Puget Sound, and
+the Columbia River.
+
+Take the obituaries of fishermen.  "In his prime, it is said, there was
+not a better skipper in the Gloucester fishing fleet."  Take disasters
+to schooners, smacks, and trawlers.  "The crew were landed, but lost
+all their belongings."  New vessels, sales, etc.  "The sealing schooner
+_Tillie B._, whose career in the South Seas is well known, is reported
+to have been sold to a moving-picture firm."  Sponges from the
+Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.  "To most people, familiar only
+with the sponges of the shops, the animal as it comes from the sea
+would be rather unrecognisable."  Why, take anything you please!  It is
+such stuff as stories are.  And as you eat your fish from the store how
+little do you reck of the glamour of what you are doing!
+
+However, as it seems to me unlikely that a man of genius will be a fish
+reporter shortly I will myself do the best I can to paint the tapestry
+of the scenes of his calling.  The advertisement in the newspaper read:
+"Wanted--Reporter for weekly trade paper."  Many called, but I was
+chosen.  Though, doubtless, no man living knew less about fish than I.
+
+The news stands are each like a fair, so laden are they with magazines
+in bright colours.  It would seem almost as if there were a different
+magazine for every few hundred and seven-tenth person, as the
+statistics put these matters.  And yet, it seems, there is a vast, a
+very vast, periodical literature of which we, that is, magazine readers
+in general, know nothing whatever.  There is, for one, that fine, old,
+standard publication, _Barrel and Box_, devoted to the subjects and the
+interests of the coopering industry; there is, too, _The Dried Fruit
+Packer and Western Canner_, as alert a magazine as one could wish--in
+its kind; and from the home of classic American literature comes _The
+New England Tradesman and Grocer_.  And so on.  At the place alone
+where we went to press twenty-seven trade journals were printed every
+week, from one for butchers to one for bankers.
+
+_The Fish Industries Gazette_--Ah, yes!  For some reason not clear
+(though it is an engaging thing, I think) the word "gazette" is the
+great word among the titles of trade journals.  There are _The
+Jewellers' Gazette_ and _The Women's Wear Gazette_ and _The Poulterers'
+Gazette_ (of London), and _The Maritime Gazette_ (of Halifax), and
+other gazettes quite without number.  This word "gazette" makes its
+appeal, too, curiously enough, to those who christen country papers;
+and trade journals have much of the intimate charm of country papers.
+The "trade" in each case is a kind of neighbourly community, separated
+in its parts by space, but joined in unity of sympathy.  "Personals"
+are a vital feature of trade papers.  "Walter Conner, who for some time
+has conducted a bakery and fish market at Hudson, N.Y., has removed to
+Fort Edward, leaving his brother Ed in charge at the Hudson place of
+business."
+
+_The Fish Industries Gazette_, as I say, was one of several in its
+field, in friendly rivalry with _The Oyster Trade and Fisherman_ and
+_The Pacific Fisheries_.  It comprized two departments: the fresh fish
+and oyster department, and myself.  I was, as an editorial announcement
+said at the beginning of my tenure of office, a "reorganisation of our
+salt, smoked, and pickled fish department."  The delectable, mellow
+spirit of the country paper, so removed from the crash and whirr of
+metropolitan journalism, rested in this, too, that upon the _Gazette_ I
+did practically everything on the paper except the linotyping.
+Reporter, editorial writer, exchange editor, make-up man, proof-reader,
+correspondent, advertisement solicitor, was I.
+
+As exchange editor, did I read all the papers in the English language
+in eager search of fish news.  And while you are about the matter, just
+find me a finer bit of literary style evoking the romance of the vast
+wastes of the moving sea, in Stevenson, Defoe, anywhere you please,
+than such a news item as this: "Capt. Ezra Pound, of the bark _Elnora_,
+of Salem, Mass., spoke a lonely vessel in latitude this and longitude
+that, September 8.  She proved to be the whaler _Wanderer_, and her
+captain said that she had been nine months at sea, that all on board
+were well, and that he had stocked so many barrels of whale oil."
+
+As exchange editor was it my business to peruse reports from Eastport,
+Maine, to the effect that one of the worst storms in recent years had
+destroyed large numbers of the sardine weirs there.  To seek fish
+recipes, of such savoury sound as those for "broiled redsnapper,"
+"shrimps bordelaise," and "baked fish croquettes."  To follow fishing
+conditions in the North Sea occasioned by the Great War.  To hunt down
+jokes of piscatory humour.  "The man who drinks like a fish does not
+take kindly to water.--Exchange."  To find other "fillers" in the
+consular reports and elsewhere: "Fish culture in India," "1800 Miles in
+a Dory," "Chinese Carp for the Philippines," "Americans as Fish
+Eaters."  And, to use a favourite term of trade papers, "etc., etc."
+Then to "paste up" the winnowed fruits of this beguiling research.
+
+As editorial writer, to discuss the report of the commission recently
+sent by congress to the Pribilof Islands, Alaska, to report on the
+condition of our national herd of fur seals; to discuss the official
+interpretation here of the Government ruling on what constitutes
+"boneless" codfish; to consider the campaign in Canada to promote there
+a more popular consumption of fish, and to brightly remark apropos of
+this that "a fish a day keeps the doctor away"; to review the current
+issue of _The Journal of the Fisheries Society of Japan_, containing
+leading articles on "Are Fishing Motor Boats Able to Encourage in Our
+Country" and "Fisherman the Late Mr. H. Yamaguchi Well Known"; to
+combat the prejudice against dogfish as food, a prejudice like that
+against eels, in some quarters eyed askance as "calling cousins with
+the great sea-serpent," as Juvenal says; to call attention to the doom
+of one of the most picturesque monuments in the story of fish, the
+passing of the pleasant and celebrated old Trafalgar Hotel at
+Greenwich, near London, scene of the famous Ministerial white-bait
+dinners of the days of Pitt; to make a jest on an exciting idea
+suggested by some medical man that some of the features of a
+Ritz-Carlton Hotel, that is, baths, be introduced into the fo'c's'les
+of Grand Banks fishing vessels; to keep an eye on the activities of our
+Bureau of Fisheries; to hymn a praise to the monumental new Fish Pier
+at Boston; to glance at conditions at the premier fish market of the
+world, Billingsgate; to herald the fish display at the Canadian
+National Exhibition at Toronto, and, indeed, etc., and again etc.
+
+As general editorial roustabout, to find each week a "leader," a
+translation, say, from _In Allgemeine Fishcherei-Zeitwung_, or
+_Economic Circular No. 10_, "Mussels in the Tributaries of the
+Missouri," or the last biennial report of the Superintendent of
+Fisheries of Wisconsin, or a scientific paper on "The Porpoise in
+Captivity" reprinted by permission of _Zoologica_, of the New York
+Zoological Society.  To find each week for reprint a poem appropriate
+in sentiment to the feeling of the paper.  One of the "Salt Water
+Ballads" would do, or John Masefield singing of "the whale's way," or
+"Down to the white dipping sails;" or Rupert Brooke: "And in that
+heaven of all their wish.  There shall be no more land, say fish"; or a
+"weather rhyme" about "mackerel skies," when "you're sure to get a
+fishing day"; or something from the New York _Sun_ about "the lobster
+pots of Maine"; or Oliver Herford, in the _Century_, "To a Goldfish";
+or, best of all, an old song of fishing ways of other days.
+
+And to compile from the New York _Journal of Commerce_ better poetry
+than any of this, tables, beautiful tables of "imports into New York":
+"Oct. 15.--From Bordeaux, 225 cs.  cuttlefish bone; Copenhagen, 173
+pkgs. fish; Liverpool, 969 bbls. herrings, 10 walrus hides, 2,000 bags
+salt; La Guayra, 6 cs. fish sounds; Belize, 9 bbls. sponges; Rotterdam,
+7 pkgs. seaweed, 9,000 kegs herrings; Barcelona, 235 cs. sardines;
+Bocas Del Toro, 5 cs. turtle shells; Genoa, 3 boxes corals; Tampico, 2
+pkgs. sponges; Halifax, 1 cs. seal skins, 35 bbls. cod liver oil, 215
+cs. lobsters, 490 bbls. codfish; Akureyri, 4,150 bbls. salted
+herrings," and much more.  Beautiful tables of "exports from New York".
+"To Australia" (cleared Sep. 1); "to Argentina;"--Haiti, Jamaica,
+Guatemala, Scotland, Salvador, Santo Domingo, England, and to places
+many more.  And many other gorgeous tables, too, "Fishing vessels at
+New York," for one, listing the "trips" brought into this port by the
+_Stranger_, the _Sarah O'Neal_, the _Nourmahal_, a farrago of charming
+sounds, and a valuable tale of facts.
+
+As make-up man, of course, so to "dress" the paper that the "markets,"
+Oporto, Trinidad, Porto Rico, Demerara, Havana, would be together; that
+"Nova Scotia Notes"--"Weather conditions for curing have been more
+favourable since October set in"--would follow "Halifax Fish
+Market"--"Last week's arrivals were: Oct.  13, schr. _Hattie Loring_,
+960 quintals," etc.--that "Pacific Coast Notes"--"The tug _Tatoosh_
+will perform the service for the Seattle salmon packers of towing a
+vessel from Seattle to this port via the Panama Canal"--would follow
+"Canned Salmon"; that shellfish matter would be in one place; reports
+of saltfish where such should be; that the weekly tale of the canned
+fish trade politically embraced the canned fish advertising; and so on
+and so on.
+
+Finest of all, as reporter, to go where the fish reporter goes.  There
+the sight-seeing cars never find their way; the hurried commuter has
+not his path, nor knows of these things at all; and there that racy
+character who, voicing a multitude, declares that he would rather be a
+lamp post on Broadway than Mayor of St. Louis, goes not for to see.  Up
+lower Greenwich Street the fish reporter goes, along an eerie, dark,
+and narrow way, beneath a strange, thundering roof, the "L" overhead.
+He threads his way amid seemingly chaotic, architectural piles of
+boxes, of barrels, crates, casks, kegs, and bulging bags; roundabout
+many great fetlocked draught horses, frequently standing or plunging
+upon the sidewalk, and attached to many huge trucks and wagons; and
+much of the time in the street he is compelled to go, finding the side
+walks too congested with the traffic of commerce to admit of his
+passing there.
+
+You probably eat butter, and eggs, and cheese.  Then you would delight
+in Greenwich Street.  You could feast your highly creditable appetite
+for these excellent things for very nearly a solid mile upon the signs
+of "wholesale dealers and commission merchants" in them.  The letter
+press, as you might say, of the fish reporter's walk is a noble paean
+to the earth's glorious yield for the joyous sustenance of man.  For
+these princely merchants' signs sing of opulent stores of olive oil, of
+sausages, beans, soups, extracts, and spices, sugar, Spanish, Bermuda,
+and Havana onions, "fine" apples, teas, coffee, rice, chocolates, dried
+fruits and raisins, and of loaves and of fishes, and of "fish
+products."  Lo! dark and dirty and thundering Greenwich Street is
+to-day's translation of the Garden of Eden.
+
+Here is a great house whose sole vocation is the importation of caviar
+for barter here.  Caviar from over-seas now comes, when it comes at
+all, mainly by the way of Archangel, recently put on the map, for most
+of us, by the war.  The fish reporter is told, however, if it be
+summer, that there cannot be much doing in the way of caviar until
+fall, "when the spoonbill start coming in."  And on he goes to a great
+saltfish house, where many men in salt-stained garments are running
+about, their arms laden with large flat objects, of sharp and jagged
+edge, which resemble dried and crackling hides of some animal curiously
+like a huge fish; and numerous others of "the same" are trundling round
+wheelbarrow-like trucks likewise so laden.  Where stacks of these hides
+stand on their tails against the walls, and goodness knows how many big
+boxes are, containing, as those open show, beautifully soft, thick,
+cream-coloured slabs, which is fish.  And where still other men, in
+overalls stained like a painter's palette, are knocking off the heads
+of casks and dipping out of brine still other kinds of fish for
+inspection.
+
+Here it is said by the head of the house, by the stove (it is chill
+weather) in his office like a ship-master's cabin: "Strong market on
+foreign mackerel.  Mines hinder Norway catch.  Advices from abroad
+report that German resources continue to purchase all available
+supplies from the Norwegian fishermen.  No Irish of any account.
+Recent shipment sold on the deck at high prices.  Fair demand from the
+Middle West."
+
+So, by stages, on up to turn into North Moore Street, looking down a
+narrow lane between two long bristling rows of wagons pointed out from
+the curbs, to the facades of the North River docks at the bottom, with
+the tops of the buff funnels of ocean liners, and Whistleranean
+silhouettes of derricks, rising beyond.  Hereabout are more importers,
+exporters, and "producers" of fish, famous in their calling beyond the
+celebrities of popular publicity.  And he that has official entree may
+learn, by mounting dusky stairs, half-ladder and half-stair, and by
+passing through low-ceilinged chambers freighted with many barrels, to
+the sanctums of the fish lords, what's doing in the foreign herring
+way, and get the current market quotations, at present sky-high, and
+hear that the American shore mackerel catch is very fine stock.
+
+Then roundabout, with a step into the broad vista of homely Washington
+Street, and a turn through Franklin Street, where is the man decorated
+by the Imperial Japanese Government with a gold medal, if he should
+care to wear it, for having distinguished himself in the development of
+commerce in the marine products of Japan, back to Hudson Street.  An
+authentic railroad is one of the spectacular features of Hudson Street.
+
+Here down the middle of the way are endless trains, stopping, starting,
+crashing, laden to their ears with freight, doubtless all to eat.
+Tourists should come from very far to view Hudson Street.  Here is a
+spectacle as fascinating, as awe-inspiring, as extraordinary as any in
+the world.  From dawn until darkness falls, hour after hour, along
+Hudson Street slowly, steadily moves a mighty procession of great
+trucks.  One would not suppose there were so many trucks on the face of
+the earth.  It is a glorious sight, and any man whose soul is not dead
+should jump with joy to see it.  And the thunder of them altogether as
+they bang over the stones is like the music of the spheres.
+
+There is on Hudson Street a tall handsome building where the fish
+reporter goes, which should be enjoyed in this way:  Up in the lift you
+go to the top, and then you walk down, smacking your lips.  For all the
+doors in that building are brimming with poetry.  And the tune of it
+goes like this: "Toasted Corn-Flake Co.," "Seaboard Rice," "Chili
+Products," "Red Bloom Grape Juice Sales Office," "Porto Rico and
+Singapore Pineapple Co.," "Sunnyland Foodstuffs," "Importers of Fruit
+Pulps, Pimentos," "Sole Agents U.S.A. Italian Salad Oil," "Raisin
+Growers," "Log Cabin Syrups," "Jobbers in Beans, Peas," "Chocolate and
+Cocoa Preparations," "Ohio Evaporated Milk Co.," "Bernese Alps and
+Holland Condensed Milk Co.," "Brazilian Nuts Co.," "Brokers Pacific
+Coast Salmon," "California Tuna Co.," and thus on and on.
+
+The fish reporter crosses the street to see the head of the Sardine
+Trust, who has just thrown the market into excitement by a heavy cut in
+prices of last year's pack.  Thence, pausing to refresh himself by the
+way at a sign "Agency for Reims Champagne and Moselle Wines--Bordeaux
+Clarets and Sauternes," over to Broadway to interview the most august
+persons of all, dealers in fertiliser, "fish scrap."  These mighty
+gentlemen live, when at business, in palatial suites of offices
+constructed of marble and fine woods and laid with rich rugs.  The
+reporter is relayed into the innermost sanctum by a succession of
+richly clothed attendants.  And he learns, it may be, that fishing in
+Chesapeake Bay is so poor that some of the "fish factories" may decide
+to shut down.  Acid phosphate, it is said, is ruling at $13 f.o.b.
+Baltimore.
+
+And so the fish reporter enters upon the last lap of his rounds.
+Through, perhaps, the narrow, crooked lane of Pine Street he passes, to
+come out at length upon a scene set for a sea tale.  Here would a lad,
+heir to vast estates in Virginia, be kidnapped and smuggled aboard to
+be sold a slave in Africa.  This is Front Street.  A white ship lies at
+the foot of it.  Cranes rise at her side.  Tugs, belching smoke, bob
+beyond.  All about are ancient warehouses, redolent of the Thames, with
+steep roofs and sometimes stairs outside, and with tall shutters, a
+crescent-shaped hole in each.  There is a dealer in weather-vanes.
+Other things dealt in hereabout are these: chronometers, "nautical
+instruments," wax gums, cordage and twine, marine paints, cotton wool
+and waste, turpentine, oils, greases, and rosin.  Queer old taverns,
+public houses, are here, too.  Why do not their windows rattle with a
+"Yo, ho, ho"?
+
+There is an old, old house whose business has been fish oil within the
+memory of men.  And here is another.  Next, through Water Street, one
+comes in search of the last word on salt fish.  Now the air is filled
+with gorgeous smell of roasting coffee.  Tea, coffee, sugar, rice,
+spices, bags and bagging here have their home.  And there are haughty
+bonded warehouses filled with fine liquors.  From his white cabin at
+the top of a venerable structure comes the dean of the salt-fish
+business.  "Export trade fair," he says; "good demand from South
+America."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+ON GOING A JOURNEY
+
+One of the pleasantest things in the world is "going a journey"--but
+few know it now.  It isn't every one that can go a journey.  No doubt
+one that owns an automobile cannot go.  The spirit of the age has got
+him fast.  Begoggled and with awful squawks, feverish, exultant,
+ignorant, he is condemned to hoot over the earth.  Thus the wealthy
+know nothing of journeys, for they must own motors.  Vain people and
+envious people and proud people cannot go, because the wealthy do not.
+Silly people do not know enough to go.  The lazy cannot, because of
+their laziness.  The busy hang themselves with business.  The halt nor
+the aged, alas! cannot go.  In fine, only such as are whole anywise and
+pure in heart can go a journey, and they are the blessed.
+
+"We arrive at places now, but we" (most of us) "travel no more."  The
+way a journey is gone, to come to the point, is walking.  Asking many
+folks' pardon, to tear through the air in an open car, deafened,
+hilariously muddled by the rush and roar of wind, is to drive
+observation from the mind: it is to be, in a manner, complacently,
+intellectually unconscious; is to drink an enjoyment akin to that of
+the shooters of the chute, or that got on the very latest of this sort
+of engine of human amusement called the "Hully-Gee-Whizz," a pleasure
+of the ignorant, metaphorically, a kind of innocents' rot-gut whiskey.
+The way a journey is gone, which is walking, is a wine, a mellow
+claret, stimulating to observation, to thought, to speculation, to the
+flow of talk, gradually, decently warming the blood.  Rightly taken
+(which manner this paper attempts to set forth), walking is among the
+pleasures of the mind.  It is a call-boy to wit, a hand-maiden to
+cultivation.  Sufficiently indulged in, it will make a man educated, a
+wit, a poet, an ironist, a philosopher, a gentleman, a better Christian
+(not to dwell upon improving his digestion and prolonging his life).
+And, too, like true Shandyism "it opens the heart and the lungs."
+Whoso hath ears, let him hear!  Once and for all, if the mad world did
+but know it, the best, the most exquisite automobile is a
+walking-stick; and one of the finest things in life is going a journey
+with it.
+
+No one, though (this is the first article to be observed), should ever
+go a journey with any other than him with whom one walks arm in arm, in
+the evening, the twilight, and, talking (let us suppose) of men's given
+names, agrees that if either should have a son he shall be named after
+the other.  Walking in the gathering dusk, two and two, since the world
+began, there have always been young men who have time to one another
+plighted their troth.  If one is not still one of these, then, in the
+sense here used, journeys are over for him.  What is left to him of
+life he may enjoy, but not journeys.  Mention should be made in passing
+that some have been found so ignorant of the nature of journeys as to
+suppose that they might be taken in company with members, or a member,
+of the other sex.  Now, one who writes of journeys would cheerfully be
+burned at the stake before he would knowingly underestimate women.  But
+it must be confessed that it is another season in the life of man that
+they fill.
+
+They are too personal for the high enjoyment of going a journey.  They
+must be forever thinking about you or about themselves; with them
+everything in the world is somehow tangled up in these matters; and
+when you are with them (you cannot help it, or if you could they would
+not allow it), you must be forever thinking about them or yourself.
+Nothing on either side can be seen detached.  They cannot rise to that
+philosophic plane of mind which is the very marrow of going a journey.
+One reason for this is that they can never escape from the idea of
+society.  You are in their society, they are in yours; and the
+multitudinous personal ties which connect you all to that great order
+called society that you have for a period got away from physically are
+present.  Like the business man who goes on a vacation from business
+and takes his business habits along with him, so on a journey they
+would bring society along, and all sort of etiquette.
+
+He that goes a journey shakes off the trammels of the world; he has
+fled all impediments and inconveniences; he belongs, for the moment, to
+no time or place.  He is neither rich nor poor, but in that which he
+thinks and sees.  There is not such another Arcadia for this on earth
+as in going a journey.  He that goes a journey escapes, for a breath of
+air, from all conventions; without which, though, of course, society
+would go to pot; and which are the very natural instinct of women.
+
+The best time for going a journey (a connoisseur speaks it) is some
+morning when it has rained well the day or night before, and the soil
+of the road, where it is not evenly packed, is of about that substance
+of which the fingers can make fine "tees" for golfing.  This is the
+precise composition of earth and dampness underfoot most sympathetic to
+the spine, the knee sockets, the muscles, tendons, ligaments of limb,
+back, neck, breast and abdomen, and the spirit of locomotion in the
+ancient exercise of walking.  On this day the protruding stones have
+been washed bald in the road; the lines and marks of drainage are still
+clearly, freshly defined in the soil; in the gutters light-coloured
+sand has risen to the surface with the dark moist soil in a grained
+effect not unlike marbled chocolate cake; and clean, sweet gravel is
+laid bare here and there in the wagon ruts.  This is the chosen time
+for the nerves and senses.  On such a day the whole world greets one
+cleansed and having on a fresh bib-and-tucker.  It is a conscious
+pleasure to have eyes.  It is as if one long near-sighted without
+knowing it had suddenly been fitted with the proper spectacles.  It is
+sweet to have olfactories.  Whoso hath lungs, let him breathe.  Man was
+made to rejoice!
+
+How green, on such a day, are the greens; the distant purples how
+purple!  The stone walls are cool.  The great canvas of the sky has
+been but newly brushed in, as if by some modern landscape painter (the
+tube colours seem yet hardly dry); the technique, the brush-marks, show
+in the unutterably soft, warm-white clouds; or, like a puff of
+beaten-egg white, wells above that orchard hill.  Higher up, thinly
+touched across the blue, a great sweep of downy, swan breast-breast
+feathers spreads.  But not one canvas is this sky; ceaselessly it
+changes with the minutes.  To observe is to walk through an endless
+gallery of countless pictures.  It is alone a life-study.  Now the wind
+has blown it clear as blue limpidness; now scattered flakes appear; now
+it is deep blue; now pale; now it tinges darkly; now it is a layer of
+cream.  Again, it breaks into shapes--decorative shapes, odd shapes,
+lovely shapes, shapes always fresh.  Its innovations are unflagging,
+inexhaustable.  Always art, its genius is infinite.
+
+One must go a journey to discover how vast the sky really is, and the
+world.  To mount, bending forward, up by a long, tree-walled ascent
+from some valley, and come upon this spectacular sight--the fair globe
+that man inhabits lying away before one like a gigantic physical map, a
+map in relief, cunningly painted in the colours of nature, laid off by
+woods and orchards and roads and stone walls into many decorative
+shapes until it melts into purple, and fainter and fainter and still
+fainter purple Japanese hills.  The sight is some of the noble quarry,
+the game; this is the anise-seed bag of him that goes a journey.  Some
+glimmering of the nobility of the plan of which he is a fell, erring
+speck comes over one as he looks.  This is the religious side of going
+a journey.
+
+It is best to go a journey on a road that you do not know; on a road
+that lures you on to peep over the crest of yonder hill, that ever
+flees before you in a game of hide-and-seek, disappearing behind great,
+jutting rocks and turns and trees, to leap out again at your approach
+and laughingly, elusively, continually slip before you; a road that
+winds anon where some roaring brook pours near by; a road that may
+deceive you and trick you into miles out of your way.
+
+A high breeze rushes through the trees and fans the traveller's opened
+pores.  With a sudden, startling whir, mounting with their hearts, a
+bird flushes from the tangled growth at the roadside.
+
+The worst roads for walking are such as are commonly called the best;
+that is, macadam.  A macadam pavement is a piece of masonry, wholly
+without elasticity, built for vehicles to roll over.  To go a journey
+without a walking-stick much would be lost; indeed it would be folly.
+A stick is the fly-wheel of the engine.  Something is needed to whack
+things with, little stones, wormy apples, and so forth, in the road.
+It can be changed from one hand to the other, which is a great help.
+Then if one slips a trifle on a down-grade turn it is a lengthened arm
+thrown out to steady one.  It is the pilgrim's staff.  On the up-grades
+it assists climbing.  It is a weapon of defence if such should ever be
+needed.  It is a badge of dignity, a dress sword.  It is the sceptre of
+walking.
+
+Dipping the dales, riding the swells, the automobiles come, like
+gigantic bugs coming after the wicked.  With a sucking rush of wind and
+dust and an odour of gasoline they are past.  Stray pieces of paper at
+the roadside arise and fly after them, then, further on, sink impotent,
+exhausted.
+
+"I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much
+nearer to one another!"  One who goes much a-journeying cannot
+understand how Thoreau got it so completely turned around.  But after
+the first effervescence of going a journey (of speech a time of times)
+has passed, and when, next, the fine novelty of open observation has
+begun to pale, there are still copious resources left; one retires on
+the way, metaphorically speaking, into one's closet for meditation, for
+miles of silent thought--when one's stride is mechanical, and is like
+an absent-minded drumming with the fingers; but that it is better, for
+it pumps the blood for freer thought than in lethargic sitting.
+
+In this rhythmic moving one thinks as to a tune.  To sit thus
+absolutely silent, absent in thought completely, even with that friend
+one wears in one's heart's core, will at length become dull for one or
+other; sitting thus one is tempted, too, to speech.  Walking, it is not
+so.  One may talk or one may not.  If both wish to think, both feel as
+if something sociable is being done in just walking together.  If one
+does not care to go wool-gathering, the other does not leave him
+without entertainment; walking alone is entertainment.  It is assumed,
+of course, that one goes a journey in silence as in speech with the
+companion with whom one has been best seasoned.  Silently walking, the
+movement of the mind keeps step in thought exactly with the movement of
+the man, so that the pace is a thermometer of the temperature at that
+moment of one's brain.
+
+One who has written on going a journey as well perhaps as the world
+will ever see it done owned that he never had had a watch.  Further, he
+intimated that the possession of one was an indication of poverty of
+mental resource.  It was his own wont, he said, to pass hours, whole
+days, unconscious of the night of time.  He described his father as
+taking out his watch to look at whenever he could think of nothing else
+to do.  His father, our author says, was no metaphysician.  It must be
+confessed that one now writing of journeys, sometimes, somewhat
+unmetaphysician-like, conscious of the flight of time, has
+communication with a watch; and, finding the day well advanced,
+decides, speaking very figuratively, to lay the cloth, beneath some
+twisted, low, gnarled apple tree.
+
+"At the next shadow," he suggests.
+
+"Let's wait until we get to the top of this hill, first."
+
+"Here we are."
+
+Sweet rest! when one throws one's members down upon the turf and there
+lets them lie, as if they were so many detached packages dropped.  Then
+one feels the exquisite nerve luxury of having legs: while one rests
+them.  One's back could lie thus prone forever.  One feels, sucking all
+the rich pleasure of it, that one couldn't move one's arms, lift one's
+hand, if one had to.  What are the world's rewards if this is not one!
+
+At length in going a journey comes a time when one tiredly shrinks from
+the work of speech, when observation dozes, and thought lolls like a
+limp sail that only idly stirs at the passing zephyrs; the legs like
+piston-rods strike on; when the pleasure is like that almost of dull
+narcotics; one realises only dimly that one is moving.  At such times
+as these, coming from one knows not whence, and one feels too weak to
+search back to discover, there flit across the mind strange fragments,
+relevant, as they seem, to nothing whatever present.
+
+When a journey has been made one way, the trick has been done; the
+superfluous energy which inspired it has found escape; the way to
+return is not by walking.  A friend to fatigue is this, that in walking
+back one is not on a voyage of discovery; one knows the way and very
+much what one will see on it; one knows the distance.  In fact, the
+fruit has been plucked: the bloom is gone; to walk back would be like
+tedious marching with a regiment.  One should return resting.  On
+trains one _returns_ from a journey.
+
+Whoso hath life, one thinks as his journey draws to its close, let him
+live it!  What does it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and
+never know his own soul?
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+GOING TO ART EXHIBITIONS
+
+There are two opposing views as to going to art exhibitions.  And much
+with a good deal of reason may be said on both sides.  There is one very
+vigorous attitude which holds that the pictures are the thing.  This,
+indeed, is a perfectly ponderable theory.  But it may be questioned
+whether in its ardour it does not go a little far.  For it affirms that
+people are a confounded nuisance at art exhibitions, and should not be
+permitted to be there, to distract one's attention from the peaceful
+contemplation of works of art, and to infuriate one by their asinine
+remarks in the holy presence of beauty.  I have heard it declared with
+very impressive spirit, and reasoned with much force, that only one
+person, or at most only one person and his chosen companion, should be
+allowed in an art gallery at a time.  It is debatable, however, whether
+this intellectually aristocratic idea is altogether practicable.  On the
+other hand, was it not even Little Billie who found the people at art
+exhibitions frequently more interesting than the pictures?
+
+Anyhow, persons who write about art exhibitions confine themselves
+exclusively to the subject of art.  When they gossip it is about the
+pictures, the painters, and the sculpture.  True, of course, this is
+their job, and then, these persons go on press days and so only see,
+outside of that which is intentionally exhibited, other critics.
+
+Now, there is nothing in all the world quite like art exhibitions.
+Beyond any other sort of show they possess a spirit which (to use a pet
+and an excellent critical expression of one of our foremost art critics)
+is "grand, gloomy, and peculiar."  You feel this charged atmosphere at
+once at an art exhibition.  You walk softly, you speak low, and you
+endeavour to become as intelligent as possible.  Art exhibitions, in
+short, present various features indigenous to themselves which, so far as
+I am aware, have not before been adequately commented upon.  The
+principal observations which they solicit are as follows:
+
+First, art exhibitions are attended by two classes of people: very
+fine-looking people, and funny-looking people.  There is a very striking
+kind of a young man goes to art exhibitions that I myself never
+accomplish seeing anywhere else, though sometimes I see pictures of him.
+This young man is superbly patrician.  You may have remarked this
+singular phenomenon.  All the young men in all the advertisements in the
+magazine _Vanity Fair_ are the same young man, whether riding in a
+splendid motor car, elegantly attending the play, or doing a little
+shooting of birds.  You know him, for one thing, by his exquisite
+moustache.  This fastidiously groomed, exclusively tailored young man, to
+be seen in the pages spoken of and at art exhibitions, is certainly not
+of Art, nor is he of business.  He takes no account whatever, apparently,
+of time, as men of business do; and manifestly one could not work in such
+a moustache and such clothes without mussing them.  He is, in fine, of
+Vanity Fair.  Oscar Wilde was, as usual, wrong when he said that all
+beautiful things were quite useless.  This immaculate young man's
+practical function at art exhibitions, as perhaps elsewhere, is that of
+escort.
+
+He is escort to groups of very handsome and very expensive-looking young
+ladies; and these fragrant, rustling groups, with the waxen, patrician
+young man in tow, stroll slowly about, catalogues unnoticed in hand,
+without pause skirting the picture-hung walls.  They are very still, and
+they gaze upon the art that they pass with the look of a doe
+contemplating the meaning of the appearance of a man.  The perfect
+escorts of these groups, who would seem naturally to be rather gay young
+men, look very serious indeed.  Now one of them gracefully, though as if
+careful not to make any noise, bends to one of the young ladies; and,
+indicating by a solemn look one of the paintings, he whispers to her
+apparently concerning it.  She silently nods: it is, evidently, quite as
+he says.  When an art exhibition is so undertakery a thing you wouldn't
+think that one would come.  Though perhaps it is that one ought.
+
+At any rate, there is quite a turn-out to-day moving beneath the ghostly
+glow of the shrouded sky-light ceiling.  Half the Avenue seems to be
+here.  What a play it is, this highly urban throng!  Let us sit here on
+this divan down the middle of the room.  With what a stately march the
+pictures go in their golden frames along the symphonious, burlap walls!
+There, by that copious piece of intelligence, Manet's "Music Lesson," is--
+
+But see!  What has come over our earnest group?  Those who compose it are
+all quite changed.  They look as happy as can be, all beaming with
+smiles, their backs to the neighbouring walls.  Friends, it seems, have
+greeted them.  How they all bubble on, all about the outside world!  But
+goodness!  Now what is the matter?  Suddenly one of the newcomers is
+struck by a startled look.  She sees, that is it, one of the pictures.
+In an arrested voice she says: "Oh, isn't that perfectly lovely!"  At
+once the happy light fades from the faces of all.  An awed hush falls
+upon them as stiffly they turn their heads in the direction of her view.
+"Charming!" one of the young men breathes, staring intently at the
+painting which has come upon them.  That it is awkward for everybody is
+plain.  But, happily, there is much rebound to youth.  One of the young
+ladies, at length, shakes herself free from the pall upon her spirits;
+the mesmeric spell is broken; and presently all are chatting again, gaily
+oblivious to Art.
+
+By the way, there is the proprietor of the gallery, just before the three
+Renoir pastels.  Is there anything about art exhibitions that more
+enlists the imagination than the study of the "dealers" themselves?  The
+gentlemen who preside at art exhibitions fall, rather violently, into
+three, perhaps four, classes.  You have, I dare say, been repeatedly
+struck by the quaintly inappropriate character in appearance of those of
+one of these classes.  I mean, of course, those very horsey-looking men,
+with decidedly "hard" faces, loudly dressed, and dowered with hoarse
+voices.  They would seem to be bookmakers, exceedingly prosperous
+publicans, bunco-brokers, militant politicians--anything save of the
+Kingdom of Art.  Are their polished Bill Sykes' exteriors but bizarre
+domiciles for lofty souls?  I cannot tell.
+
+Here and there, it is true, you find the aesthete in effect among
+dealers: the wired moustaches, the spindle-legged voice, and the ardent
+spirit in discussing his wares with lady visitors.  Our horsey type seems
+rather ponderous and phlegmatic in this matter.  Then there is, too, a
+land of art exhibition which is very close indeed to Art, a kind of
+spirited propaganda, in fact, which is presided over by those of
+hierarchical character, beings as to hair and cravat, swarthy complexion
+and mystic gesticulation, holy from the world and mocked by the profane.
+
+But, to my mind, the most satisfying sort of a host to observe at an art
+exhibition is that of the description of this admirable dealer before us.
+Benign, frock-coated, hands clasped behind him, he stands, symbol of
+gentlemanly, merchantly dignity.  Occasionally he rises upon his toes,
+and then sinks again to his heels obviously with satisfaction.  But that
+which proclaims the perfect equity of his mind is this: his nice
+recognition of the nuances in human kind.  You perceive that his bow to
+each of his guests, that he recognises at all, is graduated according to
+the precise degree of that person's value to Art; that to some few, royal
+patrons presumably, being at an angle of forty-five degrees; while a
+common amateur of Art is acknowledged by one of five.  Where--to continue
+the paraphrase of a pleasant observation upon Mr. George Brummell--it is
+a mere question of recognising the fact that a certain person dwells on
+the same planet with Art "a slight relaxation of the features" is made to
+suffice.
+
+So!  This profound bow is plainly meant for a particular tribute to one
+who wears the richest purple.  Lo!  He advances with unclasped hands.
+Pleasure beams from his countenance.  Without such as she Art, and
+dealers, and galleries, and the recorded beauty of the world would
+perforce pass away.  This entertaining personage, who is the great flurry
+at art exhibitions, is of the novelists' dowager Duchess type.  A short,
+obese, and jovial figure, or dried and withered but imperious
+distinction, as the case may be.  There is much crackling of fine
+garments, a brilliant display of lorgnette, and this penetrating and
+comprehensive royal critical dictum: "Isn't that interesting!  So full of
+feeling."
+
+Two outstanding features, you mark, of art exhibitions everywhere are
+here presented.  Is any one who doesn't know what he is talking about at
+art exhibitions (and which of us does?) properly equipped for attendance
+there without this happy esoteric phrase "full of feeling"?  It is safe,
+or as safe as anything can be, to say about any picture.  It graphically
+indicates in the speaker delicate sensitivity and emotional
+responsiveness to Art.  And, most beneficently, it subtly evades anything
+like the trying ordeal of an analysis of a work of art.  It is, indeed,
+invaluable.
+
+The other thing is this: There is no place going which is so well adapted
+to the exhibition of handsome, fashionable, or eccentric eye-glasses as
+an art exhibition.  You observe there all that is newest and classy in
+glasses, and you are insistently invited to admiring study of the art of
+wearing queer glasses effectively, and of taking them off, letting them
+bound on their leash, doubling them up, opening them out, and putting
+them on with a gesture.
+
+The complimentary type to the storied Duchess at art exhibitions is
+represented by yonder portly blood, in this case a replica of the late
+King Edward.  The fruitful spectacle of art exhibitions, I think,
+presents nothing which gives one a more gratifying sense of their dignity
+and of the imperial character of Art than the presence there of these
+patently highly solvent, ruddy joweled, admirably tailored, and
+impressively worldly looking connoisseurs of painting to be seen
+scrutinising the pictures at close range, in a near-sighted way, and
+rather grimly, as though somewhat sceptically appraising possibly dubious
+merchandise.
+
+Hello, there's Mr. Chase!  And that's a fortunate thing, too, as no
+sympathetic picture of a representative American art exhibition should
+omit Mr. Chase.  Whether or not we think of him as our premier painter,
+we should be inordinately proud of him.  Undoubtedly he is a great
+artist.  He has wrought himself in the grand manner.  In person he
+delights the eye, and satisfies the imagination.  With his inevitable
+top-hat, his heavy eye-glasses cord, his military moustaches and upward
+pointing beard, his pouter-pigeon carriage, his glowing spats and his
+boutonniere, his aroma of distinction, and his ruddy consciousness of his
+prestige, he is our great tour-de-force as a figure in the artistic
+scene.  He is here, naturally, now the target of popular interest.
+
+The practice of having artists shown at their own exhibitions is one too
+little cultivated.  The Napoleonic brow and the Napoleonic forelock
+(famous in their circle) of George Luks, the torrential Luksean mirth,
+how would not their actual presence open the spiritual eyes of visiting
+school-children to the humane qualities of the works of the Luksean
+genius!  And why should we who procure for our better perception of their
+works illuminating biographies of the Old Masters not be permitted the
+intellectual stimulation of beholding the Ten American Painters seated
+along on a bench at their annual show?  The subject of the artists
+themselves, however, brings us around to the line between the two kinds
+of people having to do with art exhibitions: fine-looking people and
+funny-looking people.
+
+Come; let us trot along.  Artists themselves are, in a most pronounced
+degree, of both kinds.  And a very singular thing is this: the funnier an
+artist's pictures are, the funnier-looking is the artist that made them.
+We'll stop in here, at The Advanced Gallery.
+
+"Ah!  How are you?"
+
+That, just going out, is one of the newest groups of painters, known as
+the Homeopathics.  I used to know him before he went abroad.  And the
+curious thing is, that at that time he was very good-looking.  He was
+clean shaven.  This strange assortment of whiskers of different fashions
+on various parts of his face, imperial, goatee, burnsides, he brought
+back with him.
+
+Notice as we step from the car at the gallery floor the numerous others
+here who also were at the show we just left.  And those who are thus
+making the rounds, you perceive, are not of what is called society, but
+of the kind known in these circles, doubtless, as interesting.  Nearly
+everybody in this gallery, in fact, is of the interesting sort.  At once
+it is apparent that there is nothing of the perfunctory here.  Art is
+vital.  Art is earnest.  The atmosphere is tense.  The young women are
+clad in a manner giving much freedom to the movement of their bodies.
+They walk with a stride.  Their clothes are not of the mode of the
+Avenue, but they have--how shall I say?  To twist what Whistler said of
+his model: Character, character is what these clothes have.  They
+suggest, many of these young women, the type that has never got back
+from--
+
+"Do you know Chelsea at all?" asks one of them, of an anarchic-looking
+young man.
+
+Never got back, as I was about to say, from Chelsea.  A couple of other
+anarchic-looking young men are viewing a painting in the manner that a
+painting, or perhaps this particular painting, is intended to be viewed;
+that is by squinting at it first over the tops of their hands and then
+through their fingers.  They discuss it darkly, in low, passionate tones.
+They advance upon it; and, a few inches before it, one, as though holding
+a brush in his hand, sweeps eloquently with his arm, following the
+contour of the painted figure.  Legerdemain kind of thing, painting,
+isn't it?  Sort of a black art, when you see into the science of it.
+
+Well, I declare!  Here's a friend of mine--there, talking with the
+Titian-haired lady in the exotic gown.  Now, he is coming over to us.
+
+He says he wants us to know Ben-Gunn, who is here, "one of the new
+crowd," he says.  My friend is very keen on the new crowd; everything
+else he declares is "passe."  Anyhow, it is a very valuable experience to
+talk with an exhibitor at an art exhibition.  Your mind is impregnated,
+until it swells dizzily in your head.  That would be he, the
+illiterate-looking little creature with the uncombed and
+unsanitary-looking mop.
+
+There!  I knew he would say something, something that would never leave
+you again the same.  "Nothing is shiny in Nature," says Mr. Ben-Gunn as
+though rather depressed, surveying a canvas in this respect unhappily
+divorced from the truth.  "Nature," he adds with Brahminic finality, "is
+always dull."
+
+Mr. Ben-Gunn is greeted affectionately by a gentleman you always see at
+every art exhibition.  This is Mr.--I forget his name--it is French; I
+know he writes on Art for _Demos_; a remarkable being who apparently
+talks, hears, and sees nothing else but aestheticism.  For as there are
+types peculiar to art exhibitions, so there are certain individuals
+apparently quite peculiar to art exhibitions.  Come, let us go on down to
+see some Old Masters.  Notice there in the corner the foreign-looking
+gentleman with the three foreign-looking children.  That, the quiet,
+cultivated, foreign father and his children, is one of the pleasantest
+sights frequently to be seen at art exhibitions.  Thus he is to be seen,
+easily and intimately discussing the pictures with his attentive
+followers.
+
+The great point about the study of art exhibitions from the point of view
+of the humanist is the affinity between pictures and people.  Here, for
+instance, on Madison Square, amid the art heritage of times past, what is
+it that at once strikes you?  Why, that old paintings evidently are quite
+passe to the new crowd.  At these exhibitions preliminary to the big
+auction sales of venerable masters, and of middle-aged masters, and of
+venerable and middle-aged not-quite-masters, there is a very attractive
+class of people, a class of funny-looking, fine-looking people, a class,
+that is, of rather shabby-looking people who look as if they might be
+very rich, of dull-looking people who look as if they might be very
+bright.  They buy huge catalogues at a dollar or so apiece, which they
+consult continually.  They arrive early and remain a long time.
+
+The women of this audience frequently are rather dowdy, and shapen in
+very individual fashions.  The men generally are elderly beings, now and
+then reminiscent of the period of Horace Greeley.  They are very bald, or
+with untrimmed white (not grey) hair, and, sometimes, Uncle-Sam-like
+whiskers.  They are usually very wrinkled as to trowsers and overcoats.
+Here and there among the gentlemen of this company is to be seen one who
+looks strikingly like Emile Zola, or the late Mr. Pierpont Morgan
+slightly gone to seed.  All these charming folk make of looking at
+old-fashioned pictures a very busy occupation, and also in effect a
+rather mundane occupation, as though they were alertly considering the
+possibility of making a selection from among a variety of serviceable
+kitchen chairs.
+
+Argumenting the throng are authentic representatives of the world of
+fashion; some who appear to be students; the ever present foreigners,
+including the frequently present Jap; a number of those enigmatic beings
+who continually take notes at art exhibitions; and a respectable quota of
+those ladies we always have with us at art exhibitions who in the
+presence of pictures and it necessary to say: "Isn't that wonderful,
+marvellous tone quality!"  Occasionally a decidedly quaint student of Art
+strolls in, past the imposing flunky (in finery a bit faded) at the door,
+strolls in in the form of a lodger in Madison Square.  He looks at the
+pictures as if thoughtfully, but without animation.
+
+Well, we have now covered, in an elementary way, about every important
+species of art show, except one, the most human perhaps of all, that held
+annually on Fifty-seventh Street.  We should hardly have time to go up
+there to-day.  I'll tell you about it.  There are several reasons why
+this exhibition is the most human perhaps of all.  One is that more
+people go than to any other.  And these people, taken by and large, are
+more human, too, than one sees at most art exhibitions, that is more like
+just ordinary people.  This may be, for one thing, because the pictures
+as a rule are more ordinary pictures.  And a very human touch, indeed, is
+this: when you see the card "Sold" on a painting it is fairly certain to
+be one of the most ordinary pictures of the lot.
+
+That reminds one of museums.  People who are called in the world to the
+curious pursuit of copying pictures in museums, for some reason or other
+which I have been unable as yet to work out, apparently always copy the
+most bourgeois pictures there.  But museums, with their throngs of
+subdued holiday makers and their crowds of weary gaping aliens of the
+submerged order, museums comprise a separate study.
+
+At any rate, I hope in our stroll I have been able to give you a new
+insight into the fascination of the great world of Art.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+A ROUNDABOUT PAPER
+
+No reader of _The Spectator_ will have forgotten an article which
+appeared there some years ago entitled "As to Bears."  Or ever will
+forget it until his shall be "the shut lid and the granite lip of him
+who has done with sunsets and skating, and has turned away his face
+from all manner of Irish," as William Vaughn Moody says.  Not only
+because it was one of the finest things ever in _The Spectator_, or
+anywhere else (after, possibly, that imperishable dissertation of the
+great Dean's--or was it Sir William Temple's?--"On a Broomstick"), but
+also because it was one pure flower in our day of a kind of art little
+cultivated any more.  "As to Bears." All, me!  How engaging, simple,
+gracious, and at ease; what perfection of literary breeding; what an
+amused and genial wave of the finger tips; how marked by good-humoured
+acuteness, and animated nonchalance; how saturated with a
+distinguished, humane tradition of letters--that title!
+
+That is just the note I would strike in the great book I have been
+brooding for years, "Bums I Have Known."  It has been my felicity to
+have known more bums, I think, than any living man.  But I fear I shall
+never get that book written.  And this is a pity.  It is a pity because
+this book would be of great value in the years to come.  With our
+modern passion for efficiency, and with efficiency rapidly becoming
+compulsory everywhere, that colourful class of ancient lineage, the
+bums, is quickly becoming _persona non grata_ to our civilisation, and
+will soon be extinct.  To the next generation, in all probability, the
+word bum will be but an empty name.  I doubt whether it would be a
+feasible plan for Dr. Hornaday to undertake to preserve a small number
+of this species in the Bronx Park.  The bum nature, I fear, would
+languish in captivity.  The creature would likely lose its health, and,
+worse, its spirits.  It is a nomad, a child of nature.  It takes no
+thought for the morrow, as our modern prophets teach us to do.  I
+remember well an excellent bum (I mean excellently conforming to type),
+one Bain, who, growing restive under restraint, lost a position which
+he happened to have.  I asked him what he was going to do now.  There
+was something sublime about that being.  He had faith that the Lord
+would provide.  His simple reply was: "Well, the ravens fed Elijah."
+
+Stuffed bums in the American Museum of Natural History would not be any
+good.  Any good, that is, as objects of study.  Our children will
+require to know, to see the past steadily and see it whole, the
+_habits_ of bums, their manners and customs.  So, as I say, my work
+would be invaluable.  The wastrel (as they say in England) has, of
+course, been celebrated in the literature of the past from time
+immemorial.  I can't at the moment put my finger on any, but I have no
+doubt there are bums in the pages of Homer, That Persian philosopher
+who found paradise enow with a jug of wine and a book of verse beneath
+a bough, Falstaff, Richard Swiveller, how they flock to the mind, they
+of the care-free kidney!  They are in the Books of the great Hebrew
+literature.  There was he that took his journey into a far country.
+"Gil Blas" and all the early picaresque novels on into the pages of
+"The Romany Rye" swarm with them.  But what is wanting, what will be
+needed, is a richly informed picture of the last of the race, those
+now, like the Indian and the buffalo, fast passing away.  There is only
+one way in which such a book could be, or should be written.
+
+"Peace be with the soul of that charitable and Courteous Author who
+introduced the ingenious way of miscellaneous writing," wrote Lord
+Shaftsbury in the opening paragraph of his "Miscellaneous Reflections."
+Peace be with the souls of all those who, for the delight of the
+anointed, have practised that most debonair of all the arts, the
+ingenious way of miscellaneous writing!  Now, as highly successful
+novelists always say nowadays when interviewed for highly successful
+newspapers, "I know very little about literature," but I fancy this
+benign way of writing had its well-spring in those preposterous days,
+now long fled, when men of reading were content to give their best
+thoughts first to their friends and then--ten years or so
+afterwards--to the "publick."  Its period was the day of the
+"wits"--those beaux of the mind.
+
+I guess the reason it has gone by the board is that it was what would
+be called "literary."  And there is nothing we are so scared of to-day
+as the literary.  It was not those dons the critics, we are told on the
+subway cards, who made Dickens immortal--it was YOU.  And our foremost
+magazines advertise the "un-literary essay."  "Literary expression,"
+that Addisonian English stuff, whose elegance pleasantly conceals the
+lack of ideas beneath, is taboo in these parts.  What we want is
+writers who have something to say, and who say it naturally and without
+any beating about the bush.
+
+While the spell of miscellaneous writing, for those who savour it, is
+the author's joyous inability, it would seem, to get any "forrader," to
+stick to the point, to carry anything with a rush.  See the greatest
+miscellaneous writer who ever lived, as an admirable later
+miscellaneous writer the late (in a literary sense) Hon. Augustine
+Birrell calls him, the Rev. Laurence Sterne.  See positively the most
+buoyant book in all the world; I mean, of course, "The Path to Rome,"
+by Hilaire Belloc.  That glorious newspaper article, "Is Genius
+Conscious of Its Power?" starts off, indeed, with an allusion to the
+subject of genius.  But the genius of this writer, of such unsurpassed
+and ingratiating savagery, soon turns to its true business of getting
+lost in the woods, and we take it from William Hazlitt that all in
+power are a lot of crooks.
+
+So one born under the miscellaneous writer's star who purposed to write
+on, say, bums he had known would quite likely begin with a disquisition
+upon the importance of a good shape of human ear, and very naturally
+would conclude, with some warmth, with a denunciation of tight
+trowsers.  And he would, of course, wander by the way into pleasant
+reminiscences of his childhood--how, for instance, the child gets his
+idea of what a native is from the cuts in his geography book.  I well
+remember the first time I was alluded to in my presence as a native.  I
+was very indignant.  I knew what natives looked like from the cuts I
+had pored over.  They were a fine, spirited race, very picturesquely
+attired, mostly in bows and arrows, and as creatures of romance I
+admired them greatly.  Persons such as I and my parents were generally
+depicted in this connection as fleeing from them.  And it did strike me
+as an ignoramus kind of thing that I should be called a native.  When I
+was reasoned with to the effect that I was a native of Indiana, my
+resentment but grew.  There were no natives in Indiana.
+
+Speaking of efficiency reminds me of the real estate business.  I have
+recently come somewhat into contact with this business and I have
+observed certain outstanding facts about it which I have not seen
+commented upon before.  To set up in the real estate business one thing
+above all else is necessary, that is uncommon familiarity with the word
+"imagination."  If you are thinking of buying a lot you will meet a
+tall, fair man, or a short, dark man (as the case may be), but in any
+case as unimaginative-looking a man as you could readily imagine.  From
+this person you will learn that the thing at the bottom of every great
+fortune was imagination.  If the location of the lot which you view
+strikes you as rather a desolate and barren-looking part of the world
+the trouble is not with the location but with you.  Forty-second Street
+looked worse than that at one time.  Thus, I imagine, if you have
+sufficient imagination you buy the lot.
+
+It is a remarkable thing that the most startling spectacle in New York
+has never struck any one but myself.  Forty-second Street puts me in
+mind of this.  If you were a native of the Sandwich Islands and had
+never before been in town and were standing at the South-East corner of
+Broadway and Fulton Street at nine o'clock in the morning and were
+facing West, you would cry out aghast at this sight: You would see the
+quiet, old world grave-yard of St. Paul's Chapel, the funereal stone
+urn upon its stone post marking the corner and the leaning headstones
+beyond.  There is no trumpet sound.  But from a mouth at the
+grave-yard's side the earth belches forth a host which springs quick
+into the new day.  It is a remarkable spectacle to contemplate, fraught
+with portent and symbol, though the mouth is a subway kiosk, my
+Sandwich friend.
+
+Now, there are men who walk about London just as some men collect
+books.  They are amateurs of London.  Year by year they add precious
+souvenirs to their rich collections, the find of an old passage way
+here, there the view when the light is quite right from one precise
+spot, say, on Waterloo Bridge.  Sometimes, indeed, they write books
+about their hobby, more or less useful to the neophyte: as "A
+Wayfarer's London," or "A Wanderer in London," or "Ghosts of
+Piccadilly," or some such thing; but more frequently they are of the
+highest type of amateur, the connoisseur who will gladly share his joy
+in his treasures with a cultivated friend but has nothing of his love
+to sell.  I doubt whether there are any such amateurs of New York, any
+who for thirty years and more have walked our streets as an
+intellectual sport with unabated zest.  London, of course, has the drop
+on us in the matter of richness of material for this sort of collector,
+but there is plenty to bag at home.  Not far from the corner of
+Broadway and Fulton Street, I recollect, is a queer place called
+Vandewater Street.
+
+Some twenty years or so ago you used to go to melodramas, real
+melodramas.  There are aesthetic revivals of melodrama in Boston, I
+hear.  There was nothing aesthetic about the ones I mean, and the
+enjoyment of them was untainted by the malady of thought.  Come along
+now.  We'll dive through Park Row and turn here down Frankfort Street.
+Few do turn down Frankfort Street, and I fear its admirable points are
+unappreciated.  For one thing, it goes down, down, down a very steep
+incline; which is a spirited thing for a street to do, I think.  And it
+is very narrow, at the beginning, with sidewalks that hug the walls,
+and is always in shadow, so that it has a fine, wild, villainous look.
+Horses climbing it always come with a plunge and a grinding of sparks.
+And the roar from the cobble stones is deafening, very stimulating to
+the imagination.  The atmosphere is one of typefounders, leather,
+hides, and oyster houses.
+
+Very few people, I fancy, could tell you where there is a portcullis in
+New York just like the one at a gateway in The Tower.  But if you snook
+around the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge you'll find one, with a
+winding stair disappearing beyond it, and mounting, presumably, to a
+dungeon.  Newswomen, I think, are pleasanter to see than newsboys.
+There is a newsgirl who minds a stand here at the corner of Rose and
+Frankfort Streets who is charming as a type of 'Arriet.  She always
+wears an enormous hat.  A fine thing for a 'Arriet to do, I think.
+Sometimes the stand is minded by her mother.  (I take it, it is her
+mother.)  An old body who always has her head wrapped in a knitted
+affair.  A fine thing for an old body to do, I think.  Phil May would
+have delighted in Frankfort Street.  So would Rembrandt.  Here comes an
+elderly person, evidently George Luk's "My Old Pal," who is balancing a
+large bundle of sticks on her head.  Across the way is a Whistler
+etching; Whistler did not happen to etch it; but it is a Whistler
+etching all the same.  You look up a frowsy little courtyard, the walls
+of which are more graceful than plumb, and you see a horse's head
+sticking out into the etching.  Also, across the way the "k" has
+dropped out of steak on the window of a chop-house.  The public-houses
+down this way, many of them, are very low places.  The thing to do in
+this world is to get as much innocent pleasure out of the spectacle as
+possible.
+
+Well, the streets here twist about beneath the Bridge, so that you do
+not know what's beyond the turning.  People going and coming through
+the arches are silhouettes.  Overhead it is like the grumbling of a
+thunder storm.  Wagons going over the stones rattle tremendously, and
+they carry lanterns swung beneath to be lighted at night.  The streets
+have fine names: there is Gold Street, and then Jacob Street.
+Frankfort Street widens out and becomes a generous thoroughfare, all in
+sunlight.  There is a huge, gay hoarding to the right as you go down.
+On your left you see one of the towers of the Bridge rising high in the
+air.  Directly ahead the "JL" crosses the way!
+
+Now comes the point which I have been getting at.  You dip and turn
+into Vandewater Street.  Under the Bridge at once you go, where all
+sounds are weird, hollow sounds, and then out again.  The atmosphere
+has been becoming more and more charged with the character of the
+printing business.  Now may be felt the tremour and heard the sound of
+moving presses.  Printing houses, dealers in "litho inks," linotype
+companies, paper makers, "publishers and jobbers of books," "photo
+engraving" establishments are all about.  Here is a far-famed
+publishing house the sight of which takes you back with a jump to your
+boyhood, your youthful, arrant, adventurous reading.  Those were the
+happy days when the flavour of Crime was like ginger i' the mouth.
+Perhaps the recollection of this affects your thoughts now, and makes
+your mind more active than want.
+
+All the people going through Vandewater Street appear to be
+compositors.  Fine, strapping, romantic people, compositors, smeared
+with ink!  Though there are other interests in this street besides
+printing.  There is a big schoolhouse with every window in it broken;
+grand, desolate look to it!  There is a delightful sign which says:
+"Horse collars, up stairs." There are little homes toward the end of
+the street--it is one block long--little, old, two-story, brick
+dwelling houses, in charmingly bad repair, with fire escapes, little
+stairs twisting up to the doors and iron railings there, and
+window-boxes at the windows.
+
+As you turn at Pearl Street to go back again something comes over you.
+It is melodrama that comes over you.  The vista of this queer, cold,
+lonesome, hard little street, down by the great city's river front, was
+painted, or something very like it was painted, on back curtains long
+ago.  The great, gloomy pile of the Bridge rises before over all.  To
+make it right there should be a scream.  A female figure with hair
+streaming upward should shoot through the air to black waters below,
+where there is a decrepit boat with a man in a striped jersey pulling
+at the oars.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THAT REVIEWER "CUSS"
+
+There are very young, oh absurdly young! reviewers; and there are
+elderly reviewers, with whiskers.  There are also women reviewers.
+Absurdly young reviewers are inclined to be youthful in their reviews.
+Elderly reviewers usually have missed fire with their lives, or they
+wouldn't still be reviewers.  The best sort of a reviewer is the
+reviewer that is just getting slightly bald.  He is not a
+flippertigibbet, and still an intelligent man--if he is a good reviewer.
+
+Book reviews are in nearly all the papers.  Proprietors of newspapers
+don't read these things: they think they are deadly stuff.  Many
+authors don't: because they regard them as ill-natured and exceedingly
+stupid.  Book clerks don't read them much: for that would be like
+working overtime.  Business men infrequently have time for such
+nonsense.  University professors are inclined to pooh-pooh them as
+things beneath them.  Still somebody must read them, as publishers pay
+for them with their advertising.  No publishers' advertising, no book
+reviews, is the policy of nearly every newspaper; and the reviews are
+generally in proportion to the amount of advertising.  Now publishers
+are sagacious men who generally live in comfortable circumstances, and
+who occasionally get quite rich and mingle in important society.  They
+set considerable store by reviews; they employ publicity men at good
+wages who continually supply reviewers with valuable information by
+post and telephone; they are fond of quoting in large type remarks from
+reviews which please them; and sometimes, at reviews they don't like,
+they stir up a fuss and have literary editors removed from office.
+
+Yes, reviews have much power.  They are eagerly read by multitudes of
+people who write very indignantly to the paper to correct and rebuke
+the reviewer when, owing to fatigue, he refers to Miss Mitford as
+having written "Cranford," or otherwise blunders.  They are the wings
+of fame to new authors.  They can increase the sale of a book by saying
+that it should not be in the hands of the young.  They are tolerated by
+the owners of papers, who are very powerful men indeed, engaged in the
+vast modern industry of manufacturing news for the people, and in
+constant effort to obtain control of politics.  Reviewers are paid
+space rates of, in some instances, as much as eight dollars a column,
+with the head lines deducted.  When there is no other payment they
+always get the book they review free for their libraries, or to sell
+cheap to the second-hand man.  Reviewers are spoken of as "the
+critics"--by simple-minded people; when their printed remarks are
+useful for that purpose, the remarks are called "leading critical
+opinions"--by advertisements; and reviewers are sometimes invited to
+lunch by astute authors, and are treated to pleasant dishes to cheer
+them, and given good cigars to smoke.
+
+Occasionally somebody ups and discusses the nature of our literary
+journalism and what sort of a creature the reviewer is.  Dr. Bliss
+Perry was at this not long ago in the _Yale Review_.  Editor for a
+couple of decades of our foremost literary journal, and now a professor
+in one of our great universities, Dr. Perry certainly knows a good deal
+about various branches of the book business.  His highly critical
+review of the reviewing business has somewhat the character of a
+history that a great general might write of a war.  A man who had
+served in the trenches, however, would give a more intimate picture,
+though of course it would not be as good history.
+
+I will give an intimate picture of the American reviewer at work
+to-day: the absurdly young, the slightly bald, and the elderly with
+whiskers; and of his hard and picturesque trade.
+
+There was an old man who had devoted a great many years to a close
+study of engraved gems.  He embodied the result of his elaborate
+researches in a learned volume.  I never had a gem of any kind in my
+life; at the time of which I write I did not have a job.  A friend of
+mine, who was a professional reviewer, and at whose house I was
+stopping, brought home one day this book on engraved gems, and told me
+he had got it for me to review.  "But," I said, "I don't know anything
+about engraved gems, and" (you see I was very inexperienced) "I can
+write only about things that particularly interest me." "You are a
+devil of a journalist," was my friend's reply; "you'd better get to
+work on this right away.  You studied art, didn't you?  I told the
+editor you knew all about art.  And he has to have the article by
+Thursday."
+
+He instructed me in certain elementary principles of the art of
+successful reviewing; such, for example, as getting your information
+out of the book itself; and he cautioned me against employing too many
+quotation marks, as the editor did not like that.
+
+My review, of a couple of columns, cut a bit here and there by the
+literary editor, appeared in a prominent New York paper.  Speaking
+quite impartially, simply as now a trained judge of these things, I
+will say that it was a very fair review: it "gave the book," as the
+term is.  I discovered that I had something of a talent for this work;
+and so it was that I entered a profession which I have followed, with
+divers vicissitudes, for a number of years.
+
+I became good friends with that literary editor, and began to
+contribute regularly week by week to his paper.  He liked my style, and
+always gave me a good position in the paper.  He liked me personally,
+and always put my name to my reviews; which was a thing against the
+rule of the paper--that being that only articles by celebrated persons
+were to be signed.
+
+This is a point sometimes questioned.  It seems to me that it is a good
+thing for the reviewer to have his work signed, particularly for the
+young reviewer, whose yet ardent spirit craves a place in the sun.  It
+contributes to his pleasant conception of reviewing as a fine thing to
+do.  It makes him more alive than the anonymous thing.  He meets people
+who brighten at the recollection of having read his name.  I know a man
+who was a very witty reviewer (when he was young); that fellow used to
+get love letters from ladies he had never seen, just like a baseball
+pitcher, or a tenor; there was a rich man who ate meals at the Century
+Club had him there to dinner, because he thought him funny; he got a
+note from a Literary Adviser asking him for a book manuscript; and two
+persons wrote him from San Francisco.  I myself have had courteous
+letters thanking me from authors here and in England.  That fellow of
+whom I just spoke undoubtedly was on the threshold of a brilliant
+career; he was full of courage and laughter, though very poor.  Then a
+great man offered him a Position as a literary editor.  His name ceased
+to be seen; I heard of him after a year, and it was said of him that he
+was dreadfully bald and had a long beard, I mean of course
+metaphorically speaking.
+
+Whether signed reviewers are conducive to honesty I am not sure.  There
+was a man (I know him well) wrote a book on Alaska or some such place,
+claimed he had been there.  There was another man, his friend, who was
+a reviewer.  Now the Alaskaian said to the critic: "Why don't you get
+my book from the paper?  I'll write the review--I know more about the
+book than anybody else, anyway; and you sign it and get the money."
+And this was done; and it was an excellent review; and the paper (which
+you read every day) was no wiser.
+
+The literary editor who signed my reviews for me was a youth of an
+independent turn of mind.  He encouraged the expression in reviews of
+exactly what one thought; he liked an individual note in them; he had
+an enthusiasm for books of literary quality, somewhat to the neglect of
+other branches of the publishing business; he gathered about him a
+group of writers of a spirit kindred to his own; and he was rapidly
+moulding his department of his paper into a thing, perhaps a plaything,
+of life and colour.
+
+But he lacked commercial tact.  He wanted to make something like the
+English lighter literary journals.  He offended the powers behind the
+man higher up.  I saw him last on a Wednesday; he outlined his plans
+for the future.  On Friday, I know he "made up" his paper.  Saturday I
+looked for him, but he had gone from that place.  There was in it a
+dried man of much hard experience of newspapers, who reigned in that
+youth's stead.  The wrath of authority grinds with exceeding quickness.
+
+This which I have written is history, as many excellent of mind know,
+and should be put into a book: for it reveals how close we came to
+having in this country a Literary Doings that could be read for
+pleasure.  I continued to learn the business.
+
+Sometimes reviewers are poets also.  I know fifteen.  Sometimes they
+are Irishmen.  Sometimes both.  I knew one who was one of those Celtic
+Poets.  His name had all the colour of the late Irish literary
+movement.  That is, after he became a man of letters; before that it
+was Bill Somethingorother.  He was an earnest person, without humour
+(strange for an Irishman!), eloquent, very pronounced in his opinions;
+and he had never read anything at all (outside of Columbia University)
+before he was called to the literary profession.  Later he went into
+politics, and became something at Washington.  Some reviewers, again,
+are lexicographers.  I know about a dozen of these, ranging in age from
+twenty-seven years to seventy.  When they had finished writing the
+dictionary, they joined the army of the unemployed, and became
+reviewers.  I am acquainted with one reviewer who has been everything,
+almost, under the sun--a husband, a father, and a householder; he has
+been successively a socialist, an aesthete, a Churchman, and a Roman
+Catholic.  He is an eager student of the universe, a prodigiously
+energetic journalist, a lively and a humorous writer, a person of
+marked talent.  He will be thirty shortly.
+
+Sometimes reviews are charmingly written by veteran literary men, such
+as, for instance, Mr. Le Gallienne, and Mr. Huneker.  Dr. Perry
+mentions among reviewers a group of seasoned bookmen, including Mr.
+Paul Elmer More and Professor Frank Mather, Jr.  Mr. Boynton is another
+sound workman.  On the other hand, by some papers, books are
+economically given out for review to reporters.  And again (for the
+same reason), to editorial writers and to various editors.   In
+America, you know, practically everybody connected with a newspaper is
+an editor.  The man who sits all day in his shirt sleeves smoking a
+corncob pipe, clipping up with large scissors vast piles of newspapers,
+is exchange editor.  There was a paper for which I worked from morn
+till dewy eve, reviewing hooks, where we used to say that we had an
+elevator editor and a scrub editor, and a nice charwoman she was.
+
+Reviewers of course frequently differ widely in their conceptions of a
+book.  I said one time of a book of Lady Gregory's that it was a highly
+amusing affair; and I gave numerous excerpts in support of my
+statement.  I had enjoyed the book greatly.  It was delightful, I
+thought.  It was then a bit of a jolt to me to read a lengthy article
+by another reviewer of the same book, who set forth that Lady Gregory
+was an extremely serious person, with never a smile, and who gave
+copious evidence of this point in quotations.  Each of us made out a
+perfectly good case.
+
+Now suppose you read in the New York _This_, a daily paper, that
+Such-and-Such a book was the best thing of its kind since Adam.  And
+suppose you found the same opinion to be that of the New York _Weekly
+That_ and of the New York _Weekly Other_.  Notwithstanding that the New
+York Something-Else declared that this was the rottenest hook that ever
+came from the press, you would be inclined to accept the conclusion of
+the majority of critics, would you not?  Well, I'll tell you this: the
+man who "does" the fiction week by week for the New York _This_ and for
+_The That_ and for _The Other_, is one and the same industrious person.
+I know him well.  He has a large family to support (which is
+continually out of shoes) and his wife just presented him with a new
+set of twins the other day.  He is now trying to add the job on _The
+Something-Else_ to his list.
+
+Let us farther suppose that you are a magazine editor.  You wrote this
+Such-and-Such book yourself.  You are a very disagreeable person (we
+will imagine).  You rejected three of my stories about my experiences
+as a vagabond.  Farthermore, when I remonstrated with you about this
+over the telephone, you told me that you were very busy.  When your
+book came out I happened to review it for three papers.  I tried to do
+it justice although I didn't think much of the book, or of anything
+else that you ever did.
+
+Now, reflecting upon the vast frailty of human nature, and considering
+the power of the reviewer to exercise petty personal pique, I think
+there is little dishonesty of this nature in reviews.  The prejudice is
+the other way round, in "log rolling," as it is called, among little
+cliques of friends.  Though I have known more than one case more or
+less like that of a reviewer man, otherwise fairly well balanced, who
+had a rabid antipathy to the work of Havelock Ellis.  Whenever he got
+hold of a book of Havelock Ellis's he became blind and livid with rage.
+
+In the period when I was a free lance reviewer, I used to review
+generally only books that I was particularly interested in, books on
+subjects with which I was familiar, books by authors whom I knew all
+about.  And in writing my reviews I used to wait now and then for an
+idea.  Those were happy, innocent, amateur days.  That is: when my
+thoughts got stalled I would throw myself on a couch for a bit, or I
+would look out at my window, or I took a turn about Gramercy Park for a
+breath of air.  Reviews sometimes had to be in by the following day,
+or, so my editor would declare to me with much vigour over the
+telephone, the paper would go to smash; and then he would hold them in
+type for three weeks.  But they rarely had to be done within a couple
+of hours or less.
+
+In the course of time I got down to brass tacks; I took a staff
+position, a desk job.  It was up to me to review everything going, in a
+steady ceaseless grind.  I began work at half past nine in the morning.
+When I was commuting I began earlier, taking up a book on the train.
+Between nine thirty and a quarter to eleven I did a book, say, on the
+extermination of the house-fly; from then until lunch time, three
+hundred words on a very pleasant novel called, for instance, "Roast
+Beef, Medium"; in the afternoon, three-quarters of a column on a
+"History of the American Negro"; winding up the day, perhaps, with a
+lively article about a popular book on "Submarine Diving and Light
+Houses"; and taking home at night the "Note Books of Samuel Butler."  I
+began the morrow, very likely, with an "omnibus article" lumping
+together five books on the Panama Canal.  And then, as the publishers
+of the latest book on art had turned in a double-column
+hundred-agate-line "ad" the week before, it was necessary to do
+something serious "for" that masterpiece.  I reviewed a dictionary and
+a couple of cookery books.  At the holiday season I polished off a
+jumble of Christmas and New Year's cards, a pile of picture calendars,
+and a table full of "juveniles."  Woman suffrage, alcoholism, New
+Thought, socialism, minor poetry, big game hunting,  militarism,
+athletics,  architecture, eugenics, industry, European travel,
+education, eroticism, red blood fiction, humour, uplift books, white
+slavery, nature study, aviation, bygone kings (and their mistresses),
+statesmen, scientists, poverty, disease, and crime, I had always with
+me.  I became a slightly bald reviewer.
+
+Books of theology and of philosophy were given out to a theologian;
+books concerning the dramatic art were done by the dramatic critic; and
+those on music went to the music critic.  We had an occasional letter
+from Paris on current French literature.
+
+In addition to writing (for I was an editor), I read the "literary"
+galley proofs; "made up" once a week down in the composing room late at
+night; compiled the feature variously called in different papers _Books
+Received_, _Books of the Week_, or _The Newest Books_; and got out the
+correspondence of the literary department--with publishers and with
+fools who write in about things.  I also went over the foreign
+exchange, that is: clipped literary notes out of foreign papers.  Once
+a month I surveyed the current magazines.  I worked in the office on
+every holiday of the year except Christmas and New Year's, and
+frequently on Sundays at home.
+
+With a view to attracting the intellectual elite to a profession where
+this class is needed, I will tell you what I got for this.  It should
+be understood, however, that I was with one of the great papers, which
+paid a scale of generous salaries.  Mine was forty dollars a week.
+That is a good deal of money for a literary man to earn regularly.
+But--
+
+I did, indeed, have an assistant in this office; there was a person
+associated with me who took the responsibility of everything in the
+department that was excellent.  That is, I was "assistant literary
+editor."  Few newspapers can afford to employ a chief solely for each
+department.  It is recognised that the work of the literary editor can
+be economically combined with that of the dramatic editor, or with that
+of the art critic; or the art critic runs the Saturday supplement, or
+some such thing.  My chief looked in every day or so, and frequently,
+perhaps in striving for exact honesty I should say regularly,
+contributed reviews.  He directed the policy of the department,
+subject, of course, to criticism from "down stairs."
+
+But (as I was about to say above) that regular income is very
+uncertain.  Universities cultivate a sense of security in their
+professors, in order to obtain loyal service and lofty endeavour.  The
+editorial tenure, as all men know, is a house of sand--a summer's
+breeze, a wash of the tide, and the editor is a refugee.  I know the
+editor of literary pages that go far and wide, who has held down that
+job now for over a year.  That man is troubled: none has ever stood in
+his shoes for much longer than that.
+
+"Don't fool yourself," I heard a successful young journalist say the
+other day to a very conscientious young reviewer.  "Good work won't get
+you anything.  Play politics, office politics all the while."
+Doubtless sound advice, this, for any gainful employment.
+
+Now about that prime department of the press called the business
+office.  Many people firmly believe that all book reviews--and dramatic
+criticisms and editorials--are bought by "the interests."  One of the
+principal librarians of New York holds this view of reviews.  I never
+knew a reviewer who was bound to tell anything but the truth as he saw
+it.  Nor have I ever written in any review a word that I knew to be
+false; and I believe that few reviewers do.  Because, however, this or
+that publishing house was "a friend of ours," or because the husband of
+this author used to work for the paper (pure sentiment!), or that one
+is a friend of the wife of The Editor (caution!), it has been suggested
+to me by my chief that I "go easy" with certain books.
+
+The good reviewer does go easy with most books.  It is a mark of his
+excellence as a reviewer that he has a catholic taste, that he sees
+that books are written to many standards, and that every book, almost,
+is meet for some.  It is not his business to break things on the wheel;
+but to introduce the book before him to its proper audience; always
+recognising, of course, sometimes with pleasant subtle irony, its
+limitations.  It is only when a book pretends to be what it is not,
+that he damns it.  All that is not business, but sensible, sensitive
+criticism.
+
+To return.  The business office exerts not a direct but a moral
+influence, so to put it, upon the literary department.  Business tact
+must be recognised.  A hostile review already in type and in the plan
+of the next issue may be "killed" when a large "ad" announcing books
+brought out by the publisher of this one so treated comes in for the
+next paper; and then search is made for a book from the same publisher
+which may be favourably reviewed.  Or a hostile review may be held over
+until a time more politic for its release, say following several
+enthusiastic reviews.  And there is no sense in noticing in one issue a
+disproportionate number of books published by one house.
+
+In concluding my discussion I will draw two portraits of professional
+reviewers, one composite of a class, the other a picture of a man who
+stands at the top of his profession.
+
+Seated at his desk is a little man with a pointed beard and a large
+bald spot on top of his head.  This man has been all his life a
+literary hack.  He has read manuscript for publishing houses; he has
+novelised popular plays for ha-penny papers, and dramatised trashy
+novels for cheap producers; he has done routine chore writing in
+magazine offices, made translations for pirate publishers, and picked
+up an odd sum now and then by a "Sunday story."  He has always been an
+anonymous writer.  He has never had sufficient intellectual character
+to do anything well.  The downward side of middle age finds him
+afflicted with various physical ailments, entirely dependent upon a
+precarious position at a moderate salary, without influential friends,
+completely disillusioned, with a mediocre mind now much fagged, devoid
+of high ambition, and with a most unstimulating prospect before him.
+His attitude toward the business of book reviewing is that he wishes he
+had gone into the tailor business or that his father had left him a
+grocery store.  He would not have succeeded, however, as either a
+tailor or a grocer, as he has even less business than literary ability.
+Farther, he regards himself as a gentleman, and books strike him as
+being more gentlemanly than trade.  He has got along as well as he has,
+by bluff about his extensive acquaintance with literature, and his long
+experience in writing and publishing.
+
+This type of reviewing man says that he does the thing "mechanically."
+About the new crop of juvenile books, let us say, he says the same
+thing again now that he said four years ago.  "One idea every other
+paragraph," is his principle, and he thinks it sufficient in a review.
+Sufficient, that is, to "get by."  And whatever gets by, in his view,
+"pleases them just as well as anything else."  Our friend of this
+character has a considerable number of stock remarks which may at any
+time be written very rapidly.  One of these sentences is: "This book
+furnishes capital reading;" another says that this book "is welcome;"
+and he holds as a general principle that, "the reviewer who reads the
+book is lost."
+
+Occasionally, very occasionally, there is found among reviewers the
+type of old-fashioned person who used to be called a "man of letters."
+This is a wild dream, but it would be a grand thing for American
+reviewing if every one of our young reviewers could have for an hour
+each week the moral benefit of the society of such a man.  I know one
+who now has been active in New York literary journalism for something
+like thirty years--a fine intellectual figure of a man.  He makes his
+living out of this, indeed, but his interest is in the thing itself, in
+literature.  He has all that one really needs in the world, he has the
+esteem of the most estimable people, and he follows with unceasing
+pleasure a delightful occupation.  He is as keen to-day, he declares,
+on the "right way of putting three words together" as he was when he
+began to write.  His mellow, witty, and gentlemanly style is saturated
+with the sounds, scents and colours of literature.  The exercise of his
+cultivated judgment is not a trade, but a sacred trust.  To look at him
+and to think of his admirable career is to realise the dignity of his
+calling--discussing with authority the books of the world as they come
+from the press.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+LITERARY LEVITIES IN LONDOW
+
+Now it's a funny thing, that, come to think of it.  Some folks have
+questioned whether, the other way round, it could be done in this
+country at all.  It's a pleasant view anyhow that the matter presents
+of that curious affair the English character.
+
+There is a notion knocking about over here that considerable rigmarole
+is required to meet an Englishman.  And very probably few who have
+tried it would dispute that it is somewhat difficult to "meet" an
+ordinary Englishman to whom you are not known in a railway carriage.
+With the big 'uns, however, the business appears to be simple enough.
+Foolish doings do clutter up one's luggage with letters of introduction
+when all that is needed to board round with the most celebrated people
+in England is a glance at a "Who's Who" in a public library to get
+addresses.
+
+For the purpose of convenience the writer of these souvenirs will refer
+to himself as "I" and "me."  I was all done up in health and was
+advised by doctors to clear out at once.  So I bought a steamship
+ticket, packed a kit bag, crossed the water and took a couple of
+strolls about that island over there; when, feeling fitter, I turned up
+in London for a look about.
+
+It sort of came over me that in my haste of departure I had neglected
+to bring any of my friends along, or to equip myself with the means of
+making others here.  I was unarmed, so to say--a "Yank" in an obviously
+hostile country.  This, you see, was before the war, before we and
+Britain had got so genuinely sweet on one another.
+
+At that time I had two acquaintances resident in London.  One, a
+Bostonian, whose attention was quite occupied with a new addition to
+his family; the other was the errand man stationed before my place of
+abode.  He was an amiable soul, whose companionable nature, worldly
+wisdom and topographical knowledge I much appreciated.  He instructed
+me in the culinary subject of "bubble and squeak" and many other
+learned matters; but unfortunately his social connections were limited
+to one class.
+
+One time not a great while back I happened to review in succession for
+a New York paper several books by Hilaire Belloc.  Mr. Belloc had
+written me a note thanking me for these reviews.  I decided to write
+Mr. Belloc that I was in London and to ask if he could spare a moment
+for me to look at him, Mr. Belloc being one of my literary passions.
+
+Then an ambitious idea popped into my head.  I determined to write the
+same request to all the people in England I had ever reviewed.
+Reviewing, mostly anonymous, had been my business for several years,
+with other literary chores on the side.  I communicated to Mr.
+Chesterton the fact that I had come over to look about, told him my
+belief that he was one of the noblest and most interesting monuments in
+England, and asked him if he supposed that he could be "viewed" by me,
+at some street corner, say, at a time appointed, as he rumbled past in
+his triumphal car.
+
+Writing to famous people that you don't know is somewhat like the drink
+habit.  It is easy to begin; it is pleasurably stimulating; it soon
+fastens itself upon you to the extent that it is exceedingly difficult
+to stop indulgence and it leads you straight to excess.  I wound up, I
+think, with Hugh Walpole.  I had liked that "Fortitude" thing very much.
+
+My Englishised Boston friend--he's the worst Englishman I saw over
+there--simply threw up his hands.  He groaned and fell into a chair.
+
+"Holy cat!" he cried, or English words to that effect, "you can't come
+over here and do that way.  It's not done," he declared.  "You can't
+meet Englishmen in that fashion.  These people will think you are a
+wild, bounding red Indian.  They'll all go out of town until you leave
+the country."
+
+Well, I saw it was awfully bad.  I have disgraced the U.S.A.  That's
+what comes of having crude notions about meeting people.  I felt pretty
+cheap.  I felt sorry for my friend too, because he had to stay there
+where he lived and try to hold his head up while I could slink off back
+home.  My friend pointed out to me that Mr. Chesterton and the other
+gentlemen had only my word for it that I had any connection with
+literature, and that as far as they were aware I might be the worst
+kind of crook, and at the very best was in all likelihood a very great
+bore.
+
+Annie, the maid at my lodgings, handed me a bunch of mail.  Mr. Belloc
+was particularly eager to see me, he said.  He gave me an intimate two
+page account of his movements for the past couple of weeks or so.  He
+had just been out to sea in his boat, the _Nona_, and had only got back
+after a good deal of difficulty outside; this he hoped would account
+for the delay of a day or so in his reply.
+
+During the Whitsun days he had to travel about England to see his
+children at their various schools, and after that he had to go to
+settle again about his boat, where she lay in a Welsh port.  Then he
+must speak at Eton.  He would be "available," however, at the beginning
+of the next week, when he hoped I would "take a meal" with him.
+Perhaps he could be of some use in acquainting me with England; it
+would be such a pleasure to meet me, and so on.  Very nice attitude for
+a man so slightly acquainted with one.
+
+Mr. Chesterton wished to thank me for my letter and to say that he
+would be pleased if I cared to come down to spend an afternoon with him
+at Beaconsfield.  Mr. Walpole apologised very greatly for seeming so
+curtly inhospitable, but he was only in London for a short time and had
+difficulty in squeezing his engagements in.  This week, too, was
+infernally complicated by Ascot.  But couldn't I come round on Monday
+to lunch with him at his club?
+
+Mr. Chesterton is a grand man.  Smokes excellent cigars.  But first, as
+you come up the hill, from the railway station toward the old part of
+the village and to the little house Overroads, you enter, as like as
+not, as I did, a gate set in a pleasant hedge, and you knock at a side
+door, to the mirth later of Mrs. Chesterton.
+
+This agreeable entrance is that for tradesmen.  The way you should have
+gone in is round somewhere on another road.  A maid admits you to a
+small parlour and in a moment Mrs. Chesterton comes in to inquire if
+you have an appointment with her husband.  She always speaks of Mr.
+Chesterton as "my husband."  It develops that the letter you sent
+fixing the appointment got balled up in some way.  It further develops
+that a good many things connected with Mr. Chesterton's life and house
+get balled up.  Mrs. Chesterton's line seems to be to keep things about
+a chaotic husband as straight as possible.
+
+Mr. Chesterton is a very fat man.  His portraits, I think, hardly do
+him sufficient honour in this respect.  He has a remarkably red face.
+And a smallish moustache, lightish in colour against this background.
+His expression is extraordinarily innocent; he looks like a monstrous
+infant.  A tumbled mane tops him off.  He sits in his parlour in a very
+small chair.
+
+Did I write him when I was coming?  Wonder what became of the letter?
+Doesn't remember it.  Perhaps it is in his dressing gown.  Has a habit
+of sticking things that interest him into the pocket of his dressing
+gown.  Where, do you suppose, is his dressing gown?  However, no
+matter.  "Have a cigar.  Do have a cigar.  Wonder where my cigars are!
+Where are my cigars?"  Mrs. Chesterton locates them.
+
+Now about that poem, "The Inn at the End of the World," or some such
+thing.  He is inclined to think that he did write it, but he cannot
+remember where it was published.  Now he has lost his glasses,
+ridiculously small glasses, which he has been continually attempting to
+fix firmly upon his nose.  Slapping yourself about the chest is an
+excellent way to find glasses.
+
+Well, it is very flattering to be told that one is so well known in
+America.  But so he had heard before.  Describes himself as a
+"philosophical journalist."  Did not know that there was an audience in
+America for his kind of writing.  Wonders whether democracy as carried
+on there "on such a gigantic scale" can keep right on successfully.
+Admits a division between our two peoples.  "Trenches have been dug
+between us," he declares.
+
+Rises to a remark about the Englishman's everlasting garden.  "He likes
+to have a little fringe about him," he says.  And then tells a little
+story, which one might say contains all the elements of his art.
+
+When he first came to Beaconsfield, Mr. Chesterton said, the policemen
+used to touch their helmets to him, until he told them to stop it.
+Because, he said, he felt that rather he should touch his hat to the
+policemen.  "Saluting the colours, as it were," he explained.  "For,"
+he added, "are they not officers of the King?"
+
+Mr. Chesterton apologised for being, as he put it, excessively
+talkative.  This was occasioned, he said, by "worry and fatigue."  I
+declined to stay for tea, as I noticed a chugging car awaiting in front
+of the house.  "You must come to see me again," said the grand young
+man of England.  The last I saw of him he was rolling through his
+garden, tossing his mane; the famous garden that rose up and hit him,
+you remember, at the time of his unfortunate fall.
+
+Fine time I had with young Walpole.  Those English certainly have the
+drop on us in the matter of clubs.  They live about in the haunts
+beloved of Thackeray, and everybody else you ever heard of.  Pleasant
+place, the Garrick.  Something like our Players, but better.  Slick
+collection of old portraits.  Fine bust there of Will Shakespeare,
+found bottled up in some old passage.
+
+Fashionable young man, Walpole.  I can't remember exactly whether or
+not he had on all these things; but he's the sort that, if he had on
+nothing, would look as if he had: silk topper, spats, buttonhole
+bouquet.  Asked me if I had yet been to Ascot.  "Oh, you must go to
+Ascot."  Buys his cigarettes, in that English way, in bulk, not by the
+box.  "Stuff some in your pocket," he said.  "Won't you have a whiskey
+and soda?"
+
+Difficult person to talk with, as the only English he knows is the
+King's English.  I was endeavouring to explain that I had left New York
+rather suddenly.  "I just beat it, you know," I said.
+
+"You beat it?" said Mr. Walpole.
+
+"Yes, I just up and skidooed."
+
+"You skidooed?"
+
+I saw that I should have to talk like John Milton.  "Sure," I said, "I
+left without much preparation."  And then we spoke of some writer I do
+not care for.  "I don't get him," I said.
+
+"You don't get him?" inquired Mr. Walpole.
+
+"No," I said, "I can't see him at all."
+
+"You can't see him?" queried Mr. Walpole.
+
+More Milton, I perceived.  "I quite fail," I said, "to appreciate the
+gentleman's writings."
+
+Mr. Walpole got that.
+
+"Fortitude" had done him very well.  The idea of Russia had always
+fascinated him; he had enough money to run him for a couple of years,
+and he was leaving shortly for Russia.  "Is there any one here you
+would like me to help you to see?" he asked.  Queer way for a gentleman
+to treat a probable crook.  "Have you met Mr. James?"  Walpole was very
+strong with Mr. James, it seemed.
+
+Read aloud a letter just received from Mr. James, which he had been
+fingering, to show that his informal, epistolary style was identical
+with that of his recent autobiographical writings, which we had been
+discussing.  "Bennett, of course you should see Arnold Bennett."  Great
+friend of Walpole's.  "And Mrs. Belloc Lowndes," said Mr. Walpole, "you
+really must know her; knows as much about the writing game as any one
+in England.  I'll write those three letters to-night."
+
+Suddenly he asked me if I were married.  "All Americans are," was his
+comment.  He had to be going.  Some stupid affair, he said, for the
+evening.  We walked together around into the Strand.  "Well, good-bye,"
+said Mr. Walpole, extending his hand, "I've got to beat it now."
+
+There was an awesome sort of place where Thackeray went, you remember,
+where he was scared of the waiters.  This probably was not the Reform
+Club, as he was very much at home there and loved the place.  However,
+just the outside of this "mausoleum" in Pall Mall scared Mr. Hopkinson
+Smith, who had been inside a few clubs here and there, and who spoke,
+in a sketch of London, of its "forbidding" aspect, "a great, square,
+sullen mass of granite, frowning at you from under its heavy browed
+windows--an aloof, stately, cold and unwelcome sort of place."
+
+An aristocratic functionary, probably a superannuated member of
+Parliament, placed me under arrest at the door, and in a vast, marble
+pillared hall I was held on suspicion to await the arrival of Mr.
+Belloc.
+
+A large, brawny man he is, with massive shoulders, a prizefighter's
+head, a fine, clean shaven face and a bull neck.  Somehow he suggested
+to me--though I do not clearly remember the picture--the portrait of
+William Blake by Thomas Phillips, R.A., in the National Portrait
+Gallery, frequently reproduced in books.
+
+He gives your hand a hearty wrench, turns and strides ahead of you into
+another room.  You--and small boys in buttons, with cards and letters
+on platters, to whom he pays no attention--trot after him.  A driving,
+forceful, dominating character, apparently.  Looks at his watch
+frequently.  Perpetually up and down from town, he says, and
+continually rushing about London.  Keen on the job, evidently, all the
+while.
+
+He does not know how far you are acquainted with England; "there is a
+wonderful lot of things to be seen in the island."  Tells you all sorts
+of unusual places to go; how, somewhere in the north, you can walk
+along a Roman wall for ever so long, "a wonderful experience."  Makes
+your head spin, he knows so much that you never thought of about
+England.
+
+Discussing a tremendous meeting later on, where all the literary
+nobility of London are to be with you, he follows you down the steps
+when you go.  Later forgets, in the crush of his affairs, all about
+this arrangement.  Then sends you telegrams and basketfuls of letters
+of apology, with further invitations.
+
+"Here you are, sir!  All the winners!  One penny."  This had been the
+cry of the news lads but the week before.
+
+"England to fight!  Here you are, sir.  Britain at war!" suddenly they
+began to yell through the streets.
+
+It was not an hour now, I felt, to trouble Englishmen with my petty
+literary adventures.  Also, I became a refugee, to some extent.  And,
+well--I "beat it" back 'ome again.  This was the only way I knew, as a
+neutral (then), to serve the countries at war.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+HENRY JAMES, HIMSELF
+
+We have now to record an extraordinary adventure.  Our later education
+was derived in some considerable measure from the writings of Mr. Henry
+James.  This to explain our emotion.  We had never expected to behold
+himself, the illustrious expatriate who had so far enlightened an
+unkempt mind.  But the night before we had been talking of him.
+Indeed, it is impossible for us to fail to perceive here something of
+the supernatural.
+
+But hold!  "William Edwards," says a newspaper notice, "who used to
+drive a post stage between New York and Albany, died on Saturday at his
+home.  He was born in Albany," and so and so, "and many were the
+stories he had to tell of incidents connected with the famous men who
+were his passengers."  Even so.  We were ourselves a clerk.  That is,
+for a number of years we waited on customers in a celebrated book shop.
+This is one of the stories we have to tell of the personages who were,
+so to say, our passengers.  Or perhaps we are more in the nature of
+those unscrupulous English footmen to high society, of whom we have
+heard, who "sell out" their observation and information to the society
+press.
+
+Anyhow, we are of a loquacious, gossipy turn; and we were booksellers,
+so to speak, to crowned heads.  We have recently heard, too, of another
+precedent to our garrulous performance, the publication in Rome of the
+memoirs of an old waiter, who carefully set down the relative
+liberality of prominent persons whom he served.  After having served
+Cardinals Rampolla and Merry del Val, this excellent memoirist entered
+opposite their names, "Both no good."  With this we drop the defensive.
+
+We noticed Mr. Wharton sitting down, legs crossed, smoking a cigar.
+Awaiting, we presumed, his wife.  A not unpicturesque figure, tall,
+rather dashing in effect, ruddy visage, dragoon moustache, and habited
+in a light, smartly-cut sack suit of rather arresting checks,
+conspicuous grey spats; a gentleman manifesting no interest whatever in
+his surroundings.
+
+Mr. Brownell, the critic, entered through the front door and moved to
+the elevator.
+
+There stepped from the elevator car a somewhat portly little man who
+joined Mr. Wharton.  He wore a rather queer looking, very big derby
+hat, oddly flat on top.  His shoulders were hooped up somewhat like the
+figure of Joseph Choate.  A rather funny, square, box-like body on
+little legs.  An English look to his clothes.  Under his arm an
+odd-looking club of a walking-stick.  Mr. Brownell turned quickly to
+this rather amusing though not undistinguished figure, and said, "Mr.
+James--Brownell."  The quaint gentleman took off his big hat,
+discovering to our intent curiosity a polished bald dome, and began
+instantly to talk, very earnestly, steadily, in a moderately pitched
+voice, gesticulating with an even rhythmic beat with his right hand,
+raised close to his face.
+
+Joined presently by Mrs. Wharton, the party, bidding Mr. Brownell
+adieu, took a somewhat humorous departure (we felt) from the shop; Mr.
+James, with some suddenness, preceding out the door.  Moving nimbly up
+the Avenue, he was overhauled by Mrs. Wharton under full sail, who
+attached herself to his arm.  Her husband by an energetic forward play
+around the end achieved her other wing.  In this formation, sticks
+flashing, skirt whipping, with a somewhat spirited mien, the august
+spectacle receded from our rapt view, to be at length obliterated as a
+unit by the general human scene.
+
+We saw Mr. James after this a number of times.  Accompanied again by
+Mrs. Wharton, and later in the charge (such was the effect) of another
+lady, who, we understood, drives regularly to her social chariot
+literary lions.  In something like six years' observation of the human
+being in a book shop, we have never seen any person so thoroughly in a
+book store, a magazine, that is, of books, as Mr. James.  One can be,
+you know--it is most common, indeed--in a book store and at the same
+time not be in a book store--any more than if one were in a hotel
+lobby.  Mr. James "snooked" around the shop.  He ran his nose over the
+tables, and inch by inch (he must be very shortsighted) along the
+walls, stood on tiptoe and pulled down volumes from high places,
+rummaged in dark corners, was apparently oblivious of the presence of
+anything but the books.  He was not the slightest in a hurry.  He would
+have been, we felt, content and quite happy, like a child with blocks,
+to play this way by himself all day.
+
+Happening, by our close proximity, to turn to us the first time in the
+shop that he required attention, upon each succeeding visit he sought
+out us to attend to his wishes.  The position of retail salesman "on
+the floor" is one completely exposed to every human attitude and
+humour.  Against arrogance, against contempt of himself as a shop
+person, a species of "counter-jumper," against irascibility, against
+bigoted ignorance, against an indissoluble assumption, perhaps logical,
+that he is of inferior mentality, this factotum has no defence.  His
+very business is to meet all with amenity.  It is his daily portion,
+included in the material with which he works.
+
+It (he finds) injures him not, essentially; it ceases to particularly
+affect him, beyond his inward appraisement of the character before him.
+Toward him one acts simply in accordance with the instincts of one's
+nature.  His status counsels no constraint, invites no display, has no
+property of stimulation.  Thus the view of a famous man's character
+from the position of retail clerk is valuable.  Mr. James's manner with
+Mr. Brownell would hardly be the same as toward us.  But it was,
+exactly.  There was present in his mind at the moment, was quite
+apparent, absolutely no consciousness of any distance of mind, or
+position, between him and us.  He sought conversation (any suggestion
+of so equalising a thing as conversation with a clerk is not uncommonly
+repressed by the important as preposterous).  In his own talk with us,
+he seemed to us to be a man consciously striving with the material of
+words and sentences to express his thought as well as he could.
+
+He was very earnest.  He looked up at us constantly (we are a little
+tall) with fixed concentration of gaze, and moved his hand to and fro
+as though seeking to balance his ideas.  He asked questions with
+deference.  Among other things, he desired very much to know what per
+cent. of the novels on the fiction table was the product of writers in
+England.  "I live in England myself," he said, very simply, "and I am
+curious to know this."  He expressed a little impatience at the
+measureless flood of mediocre fiction, making a fluttering gesture
+conveying a sense of impotence to give it attention.  He barely glanced
+at the pile of his own book, and did not mention it.  He did not seem
+at first (though we believe later he changed this opinion) to think
+highly of Arnold Bennett (this was at the first bloom of Mr. Bennett's
+vogue here), nor to have read him.  "Oh, yes, yes; he is an English
+journalist," in a tone as though, merely a journalist.  Clear artist in
+fibre.  When he took his departure he bade us "Good day," and lifted
+his hat.
+
+Succeeding visits caused us to suspect that Mr. James's ideas of the
+machinery of business are somewhat naive.  He seemed to regard us as,
+so to say, the whole works.  It entered our head that maybe Mr. James
+thought we received and answered all manner of correspondence,
+editorial as well as that connected with the retail business, opened up
+in the morning, read, accepted, and rejected manuscript, nailed up
+boxes for shipment, swept out the shop, and were acquainted perfectly
+with all confidential matters of the House.  "I wrote you" (us), "you
+know," he said.  And he referred by the way, apparently upon the
+assumption that the matter had been laid before us, to business of
+which we could not possibly have cognizance.  And then he desired to
+send some books.  Fumbling in his breast pocket, he produced a letter,
+from which he read aloud a list of his own works apparently requested
+of him.  Carefully replacing his letter, he said: "I should like to
+send these books to my sister-in-law."  With that he started out.
+
+Now, it was not a difficult problem to assume that this could be no
+other than Mrs. William James, still, it is customary for purchasers to
+state the name of the person to whom goods are to go, and many people
+are sceptical that the salesman has it down right even then.  "Your
+sister-in-law, Mr. James, is------?" we suggested.  "Oh, yes, of
+course--of course; Mrs. William James; of course--of course," Mr. James
+said.  Now, certainly, he supposed (it was evident) he had got finally
+settled a difficult and complicated piece of business.  Mrs. William
+James's regular address we might reasonably infer.  Still it might be
+that she was at the moment somewhere else, on a visit.  It were better
+to have Mr. James give his order in the regular way.  "And the
+address?" we mentioned.  "Oh, yes--oh, yes; of course--of course," Mr.
+James said apologetically.  Then, pausing a moment to see if there was
+anything more in this bewildering labyrinth of details to such a
+complex transaction, he departed, taking, as he drew away, his hat, as
+Mrs. Nickleby says, "completely off."
+
+Instead of ascending directly to that regal domain which is unaware of
+our existence, Mr. James, with the inclination of a bow, approached us
+one day and inquired, in a manner as though the decision rested largely
+with us, whether he "could see" the head of the firm.  The lady who was
+his escort swept past him.  "Oh, I am sure he will see him," she
+declared; "this" (with impressive awe) "is Mr. James."  Had we said,
+No, right off the bat, so to say, like that, we believe (unchampioned)
+Mr. James would have gently withdrawn.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+MEMORIES OF A MANUSCRIPT
+
+I was born in Indiana.  That was several years ago, and I have since
+seen a good deal of the world.  I was reading in a newspaper the other
+day of a new film which shows on the screen the innumerable adventures
+of a book in the making, from the time the manuscript is accepted to
+the point where the completed volume is delivered into the hands of the
+reader.  And it struck me that the intimate life of a manuscript before
+it is accepted might be even more curious to the general public.  The
+career of many an obscure manuscript, I reflected, doubtless is much
+more romantic than its character.  I wonder why, I said, manuscripts
+have all been so uncommonly reticent concerning themselves.  But
+manuscripts, one recollects, have sensitive natures; and their
+experiences, at least the experiences of those not born to a great
+name, could hardly be called flattering to their feelings.  Indeed,
+manuscripts suffer much humiliation, doubtless little suspected of the
+world.  And it requires a manuscript strong in the spirit of detachment
+to lay bare its heart.
+
+My parent--manuscripts commonly have but one parent--bore me great
+love; indeed I think he loved me beyond everything else in the world.
+He was a young man apprenticed to the law, but he cared more for me, I
+think, than for his calling, which I suspect he decidedly neglected for
+my sake.  I know that in his family he was held a rather disappointing
+young man; but his family did not know the fervour of his heart, or the
+tenacity of purpose of which he was capable.  He toiled over my
+up-bringing for two years, and often and often into the very small
+hours.  I think I was never altogether absent from his thoughts, even
+when he was abroad about his business or his pleasure.  I was his first
+manuscript--his first, that is, that ever grew up.  And though I know
+he was not ashamed but very proud of me, he attempted to keep my
+existence something of a secret.  I could not but feel that as I
+developed I was a great happiness to him, and yet at times he would
+give way to black discouragement about me.  I know that I have passages
+which caused him intense pain to bring about.  Throughout the time of
+my growth my dear parent alternated between periods of high exultation
+and of keen torture.  As time passed he became more and more completely
+absorbed in me.  When my climax came into sight he fell to working upon
+me with exceeding fury, and in the construction of my climax it was
+plain that he wrestled with much agony--an agony, however, which seemed
+to be a kind of strange, mad joy.
+
+And then one night (I remember a storm raged without) my parent came to
+me with a wild, yet happy, light on his face.  He pounded at me harder
+than ever before; and at intervals paced the floor, up and down, up and
+down, like a man demented, throwing innumerable half-smoked cigarettes
+over everywhere.  The wind blew, and the little frame house strained
+and groaned in its timbers.  As he bent over me a face enwrapt,
+striking the keys with a quick, nervous touch, great tears started from
+my dear parent's eyes.  Then, it must have been near dawn and the
+little room hung and swayed in a golden fog of tobacco smoke, I knew
+that I was finished.  My parent was bending over my last page like a
+six-day bicycle racer over his machine, when he straightened up,
+raising his hands, and drove his right fist into his left palm.
+"Done!" he cried, and started from his chair to pace the room in such a
+frenzy as I had never seen him in before.  It was fully half an hour
+before his excitement abated, when he fell back into his chair, and
+smoked incessantly until the light of morning paled our lamp.  At
+length I noticed he had ceased to smoke, his head gradually slipped
+backward, his eyes closed, and he slept.  Thus I was born and brought
+up and grew to manuscript's estate in a little Middle-Western town, on
+a rented typewriter.
+
+One day shortly after this I was packed up with great care and very
+carefully addressed, and under my parent's arm I boarded an interurban
+car.  We new over the friendly-looking Hoosier landscape, and at length
+rolled into the interurban station of the bustling capital, the largest
+city I had as yet seen.  I did not see much of it, however, on this
+first visit, as we went quickly around the handsome Soldiers' Monument
+to the office of the American Express Company on Meridian Street.  I
+was given over in charge of a man there who very briskly weighed me and
+asked my parent my value.  My parent seemed to be in a good deal of a
+dilemma as to this.  He hemmed and hawed and finally replied: "Well, I
+hardly know."
+
+"Is its value inestimable?" inquired the clerk.  "Why, in a way I guess
+you might say it is," said my parent.
+
+Finally, against the clerk's mounting impatience, an estimate was
+effected, and I was declared to be worth $500.  I was cast carelessly
+on to a pile of other packages of various shapes and sizes, and my
+parent, giving me a farewell lingering look of love, went out the door.
+
+Of my journey there is not much to say.  I arrived in New York amid a
+prodigious crush of packages, and was delivered, in company with about
+a dozen others, which I knew to be brother or rival, manuscripts, at
+the office of a great publishing house.  Here I was signed for, and, in
+the course of the day, unwrapped.  I was ticketed with a number and my
+title, and placed in a tall cabinet, where I remained in the society of
+several shelves full of other manuscripts for a number of days.  Here I
+was delighted to find quite a coterie of fellow-Hoosiers.  But a
+remarkable proportion of my associates, I discovered, was from the
+South.  The majority of us hailed from small towns.  In our company
+were three or four of somewhat distinguished lineage.
+
+As time passed and nothing happened, I grew somewhat nervous, as I knew
+with what anxiety my dear parent in Indiana would be counting the days.
+One of my new-found friends, a portly manuscript (a story of
+sponge-fishers) that had been out of the cabinet and had had a reading
+before my arrival, told me in the way of gossip something of the
+situation at the moment in this house.  My friend was an old
+campaigner, very ragged and battered in appearance, and had been (I was
+appalled to hear) submitted to seventeen publishing houses before
+arriving here.  It had lost all hope of any justice in the publishing
+world, and was very cynical.  Heavens! would I------
+
+However, it appeared that at this house the first reader had just been
+obliged to take a vacation owing to ill-health occasioned by too
+assiduous application to her task of attempting to keep somewhere
+abreast of the incoming flood of manuscripts.  She was, it seems, a
+large elderly lady who had tried out her own talents as a novelist
+without marked success some twenty years ago.  Her niece, a miss of
+twenty or so, who had a fancy for an editorial career and who had
+vainly been seeking a situation of this character for some time, found
+a windfall in the instant need for a substitute first reader.  It was
+with some petulance, it struck me, that she yanked the door open one
+day.  She was, apparently, showing some one about her office.  "All
+that," she said, waving her hand toward my case, "practically
+untouched; and mountains besides.  I don't know how I'm to get away
+with it.  I suppose I'll have to do a couple every night."  I don't
+know what time it was, but the light was going and the young lady had
+got into bed when she began to read me, propped up against her knees.
+She yawned now and then and sighed repeatedly as she shifted back my
+pages.  I thought I noticed that her, knees swayed, just perceptibly,
+at times.  Then suddenly my support sank to one side; I started to
+slide, and would have plunged to the floor, very nearly pulling her
+after me, if the disturbance had not as suddenly caught the young lady
+back into wild consciousness, and she grabbed me and her knees and the
+slipping bedclothes all in a lump.  Shortly after this she turned back
+to see how I ended, and then went to sleep comfortably, lights out.
+
+I did not see the report the young lady wrote of me, but I had occasion
+to think that she declared I was rather stupid.  However, I got another
+reading.  I was given next to a young man, not, so I understood, a
+regular reader, but a member of the advertising department who was
+frequently called on to help weed out manuscript, who took me home with
+him and threw me onto a couch littered with books and papers.  Here I
+stayed for ever so long.  One day I heard the young man say to his
+wife, nodding toward me: "I ought to try to get that unfortunate thing
+off my hands before my vacation, but I never seem to get around to it."
+As, alack-a-day! he did not get around to me before that occasion, I
+went, packed in the bottom of a trunk, with the young man and his wife
+on their annual holiday.  In my pitchy gaol I had, of course, no means
+of calculating the flight of time, but when I next saw the light, after
+what seemed to me an interminable spell, I appeared to be the occasion
+of some excitement.  The young man brought me up after several vigorous
+dives into the bottom of the trunk, as his wife was saying with much
+energy: "Well, of course, you can do as you please, but if I were you
+I'd telegraph an answer right straight back that I did not propose to
+spend my vacation working for them.  The idea!  After all you do!"
+"Oh, well," was the young man's reply, "some poor dog of an author
+wrote the thing, and it's only right that he should have some kind of
+an answer within a reasonable time.  I ought to have got around to it
+long ago."
+
+Whatever the kind-hearted young man may have said about me I was given
+yet another chance.  A very business-like chap "took a shot at me," as
+he expressed it, one forenoon at his desk, I was considerably
+distressed, however, by the confusion and the multiplicity of
+interruptions to which his attention to me was subject.  When I thought
+of the sacred privacy devoted to my creation, the whole-hearted
+consecration of my dear parent's life-blood to my being, I felt that
+such a reading was little short of criminally unjust.  And how could
+any one be expected to savour my power and my charm in the midst of
+such distractions?  The business-like chap sat somewhere near the
+middle of a vast floor ranged with desks.  In his immediate
+neighbourhood a score or more of typewriters were clicking and perhaps
+half as many telephones were going.  The chap's own telephone rang, it
+seemed to me, every five or six pages, and, resting me the while on his
+knee, he expectantly awaited the outcome of his secretary's answering
+conversation.  At frequent intervals he was consulted by colleagues as
+to this and that: covers, jackets, electros, fall catalogues, what not?
+Nevertheless, he got through me in rather brisk order.  At my
+conclusion I observed no tears in his eyes.  And, it was evident, he
+settled my hash, as the phrase is, at this house.
+
+I certainly felt sick at heart in that express car back to the corn
+belt.  My poor parent, when I again met him, unwrapped me very
+tenderly, and sat for a long time turning me through very dully.  I
+stayed on his desk for several days, and then fared forth again on my
+quest, valued this trip at a hundred dollars.
+
+After the initial formalities, I fell this time first into the hands of
+a driving sort of fellow who had the air of being perpetually up to his
+neck in work, and who handed me to his wife with the remark: "Here's
+another job for you tomorrow.  Make a careful, working synopsis of the
+story, and I'll dip into the manuscript here and there when I come home
+to get a line on the style and general character of the thing."  The
+next night, after rustling energetically through me, he wrote out his
+report, and, passing it to his wife, said: "There are no outright
+mis-statements of fact as to the plot in that, are there?"
+
+I next fell in the way of a fashionable character just leaving for a
+week-end, who read me in the smoking-car on his way up into the
+country.  He burned several holes in my pages with the falling ash of
+his cigarettes.  He read me in bits between scraps of conversation with
+his seat neighbour and recesses of enjoyment of the flying scenery.
+And he found it rather awkward holding me balanced on his legs crooked
+up against the seat in front of him.  This, my precarious position, led
+to a grievous calamity.  I toppled and fell, and my reader, making a
+swooping clutch at me as I went, but the more scattered my pages over
+the polluted floor of the car.  An evil draught carried my third page
+underneath a seat, the third forward from my reader.  It was an
+anguishing thing, but I could not cry out, I could not tell him: as my
+reader, cursing me heartily (for what I cannot admit was my fault)
+gathered me up, he neglected to crawl far enough under the seat before
+him to perceive my page three.
+
+But it does not fall within the scope of my present design to extend
+this chronicle to the length of an autobiography.  With what pain and
+labour my poor parent recovered from his memory, and then very
+imperfectly, of course, my third page; how he grew more melancholy of
+countenance at each of my successive returns to the house of my birth
+and formative years; how I sometimes remained away for months at a
+time, and how once an office boy mis-addressed me to a lady in New
+Jersey who very graciously herself forwarded me to my parent; how my
+poor parent was obliged at length by the increasing dilapidation of my
+appearance to go to the expense of having me completely re-typed by a
+public typist, and how directly after this he entirely re-wrote,
+expanded, and elaborated me at the instigation of one firm of
+publishers; how I was read by a delightful old lady who knitted in her
+office as she read; by a lady of cosmopolitan mien who had me together
+with many other manuscripts sent to her home in a box, and who consumed
+innumerable cigarettes as she perused me; by a young gentleman who I am
+sure had a morning "hang over" at his desk; by a tough-looking customer
+who wore his hat at his desk; by a young lady of futurist aspect who
+took me home to her studio; by an old, old man who seemed to "see" me
+quite, and by many more--all this I may merely indicate.
+
+One very striking phenomenon I should by no means fail to mention, and
+this uncanny fact may be illustrated thus: If an object is blue or if
+it is yellow it will be recognised by all men as being blue or yellow,
+as the case may be.  One will not say of it, "See that lurid yellow
+object," to have another reply, "What! that object directly before us?
+I see nothing yellow about it; it is as black as ink."  But I was
+apparently exactly like such an impossible object.  I was, figuratively
+speaking, no colour of my own and I was all colours.  One, so to speak,
+saw me as green, another as white, and yet another as orange, while
+some saw quite red as they looked at me.  That is, my character
+consisted altogether, it seemed, in the amazingly diverse reactions I
+inspired in my successive readers.  I was intolerably dull, I was
+abundantly entertaining, I was over-subtle, I was painfully obvious, I
+was exceedingly humorous, and I lacked all humour.
+
+How, at length, a group of editorial gamblers succeeded in coming
+sufficiently into harmony about me to render a composite verdict that I
+would be a fair publishing risk; but how the title my poor parent had
+given me it was unanimously held wouldn't do at all; and how I got
+another in book committee meeting; how, after I was (wonderful thing!)
+"accepted," I lay in a safe until I thought I should crumble away with
+age; and how I was suddenly brought forth and hastily read by the
+manufacturing department for ideas for my cover to be, and then by the
+advertising department for "copy dope," before being rushed to the
+composing room--of these things I have not time to speak further, as I
+am now on the press, and am rapidly ceasing to be merely a manuscript.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+"YOU ARE AN AMERICAN"
+
+  "Lavender, sweet lavender,
+  Who will buy my sweet blooming lavender?
+  Buy it once, you'll buy it twice,
+  And make your clothes sweet and nice!"
+
+She was a wretched-looking creature, with a great basket; and it was so
+she sang through the street.  By this you know where we are, for this
+is one of the old cries of London town.
+
+For the sake of my clothes, and for the noble pleasure of associating
+for an instant with the original of a coloured print of old London
+types, I bought a sprig of lavender.  "Thank you, sir," she said.
+
+I saw it coming; ah! yes, by now I knew she would.  "You are an
+American, sir," she added, eyeing me with interest.
+
+You would think that since the "American invasion" first began ever so
+long ago, some time after Dicky Davis "discovered" London, they, the
+British, would have seen enough of us to have become accustomed to us
+by now.  But, as you have found, it is not so--we are a strange race
+from over the sea.
+
+"You are an American, sir," said the barmaid.  She was a huge young
+woman who could have punched my head in.  I am not so delicate, either.
+And she had a pug nose.
+
+"I do not so much care for American ladies," she said.  "I think they
+are a bit hard, don't you?"  Then, perhaps feeling that she may have
+offended me, she quickly added: "Not of course that I doubt that there
+are maidenlike ladies in America."
+
+They are a curious people, these English, with their nice ideas, even
+among barmaids, of the graces of a mellow society.  For some time I
+could not understand why she was so beautiful.  Then I perceived that
+it was because of her nose.  She looked just like the goddesses of the
+Elgin marbles, whose noses are broken, you know.  Still I doubt whether
+it would be a good idea for a man to break his wife's nose in order to
+make her more beautiful.
+
+I will grave her name here on the tablet of fame, so that when you go
+again to London you may be able to see her.  It is Elizabeth.
+
+He was a cats' meat man.  And on his arm he carried a basket in which
+was a heap of bits of horse flesh (such I have been told it is), each
+on a sliver of stick.  There was a little dog playing about near by.
+"Would you care to treat that dog to a ha'penny's worth of meat, sir?"
+asked the man.
+
+I had never before treated a dog to anything, though treating is an
+American habit.  So I "set up" the dog to a ha'penny's worth of meat.
+"Thank you, sir," said the cats' meat man.  I saw by the light come
+into his eye that he had recognised me.  "You are------" he began.  "I
+know it," I said; "I am."
+
+I looked at the wretched dog.  Would he too accuse me?  But he ate his
+meat and said never a word.  Perhaps he was not an Englishman.  No, I
+think he was a tourist, too, like myself.  I was glad I had befriended
+him in an alien land.
+
+"What is the price of this?" I asked.  "Thri'pence?" I inquired,
+reading a sign.
+
+"Three pence," pronounced the attendant very distinctly.  It was but
+his way of saying, "You are an American."
+
+I went into an office to see a man I know.  "How are you?" I said in my
+democratic way to the very small office boy.  "You are looking better
+than when I saw you last," I remarked with pleasant home humour.
+
+"I never saw you before, sir," replied the office boy.  "He is an
+American," I heard him, apologising for me, tell the typist.
+
+Some considerable while after this I went to this office again.  I had
+quite forgotten the office boy.  I handed him my card.  A bright lad,
+he.  "I'm feeling much better, sir," he said.
+
+In Pall Mall there is a steamship office in the window of which is
+displayed a miniature sheet of water.  At opposite sides of this little
+ocean are small dabs of clay, one labelled England, the other America.
+Tiny ships ply back and forth between the two countries.  Observers
+cannot make out how it is that these little boats turn about as they
+do, apparently of their own accord.  And the scene has continually a
+number of spectators.  (This was before the war.)
+
+One day I was looking in at this window, very much interested in this
+problem.  Standing next to me was a fine specimen of a Pall Mallian,
+with his silk "topper," his black tail coat, his buttonhole, his
+checked trowsers, his large grey spats, his shining boots, his stick
+and his glass on its ribbon, apparently equally absorbed.  I turned to
+him after a hit--a quite natural thing to do, I thought--and, "How the
+deuce do you suppose that thing works?" I said.
+
+The tall gentleman slowly turned.  Slowly, stiffly, with an
+aristocratic gesture, he raised his arm and placed his glass in his
+eye, for a moment.  I was frozen by his blank stare, quite through.
+Then he lifted his eyebrow; the glass dropped and bounded before him on
+its ribbon.  And he turned and walked away.  Walked away, I dare say,
+to his frowning club, to tell how he had just been set upon in the
+street and insulted by some strange ruffian.  But, you see, I didn't
+know; I was an American.
+
+To Epsom I went in a cart to see the Derby.  It was at Epsom, you know,
+that the King's horse was thrown several seasons ago by a suffragette
+who lost her life in the act.  Well, most of the fine gentlemen of
+England, I think, were there, all in splendid tall grey hats and with
+their field glasses slung over their shoulders.  And a horde of the
+cleverest crooks in Europe also.
+
+There I had my pocket "cut" by a pickpocket.  That is the way they go
+through you in England, neatly lift your pocket out.  I thought this
+was an interesting thing, so I told it about that I had had my pocket
+cut, but I did not see any international significance in the affair.
+
+The achievement, however, I discovered was much relished by my hearers
+in England.  I, an American, had come over there and had my pocket cut.
+He, the crook, an Englishman very probably, had been "cuter" than I; he
+had "had" me, an American.
+
+It is a curious thing, and a fact not generally known, I believe, that
+all decayed taxicab drivers in London, those who are unfortunate, have
+fallen from a high estate.  Each and every one of them used to drive
+the London to Oxford coach in the days of 'orses.
+
+I met a number of these personages, fat, with remarkably red faces and
+large honeycombed noses.  Not at all like the alert, athletic lads, a
+type of mechanical engineer, who have arisen as cabbies with the advent
+of taxis.  What do they know about 'orses?
+
+It was such an old boy who drove me from the neighbourhood of Russell
+Square, where I was stopping, to Chelsea, where I went into lodgings.
+He frequently had the pleasure of driving Americans, he remarked.
+"Thank you, sir," he said.
+
+I required to have my shoes repaired, and I inquired of my landlord
+where might be found a good cobbler.  He told me that there was an
+excellent one in Battersea.  "In Battersea!" I said.  "Is there none in
+Chelsea?  How am I to get my shoes clear over to Battersea?"
+
+"Why," he replied, "we will send the cobbler a card and he'll send some
+one over for the boots and----"
+
+"And then, I suppose," I said, "he will send us another card saying
+that the boots are done and so on.  And in the meantime I could have
+had the boots repaired and worn out again."
+
+Naturally I was for wrapping up the shoes in a piece of newspaper and
+setting out straight off to find a cobbler.  But my landlord would not
+hear of such a thing at all.  "Of course you are an American," he said.
+
+I gathered that while such a proceeding might be all right in my
+country it wouldn't do in England.  He did not want lodgers, I
+understood, going in and out of his house with parcels under their
+arms.  It would reflect on him.  He was a man with a lively mind, and
+he told me a little story.
+
+"How do you like the new lodger?" asked the first housemaid of the
+second.
+
+"Oh, he's very nice indeed," replied the second housemaid.  "But he's
+not a gentleman.  He helped me carry the coals upstairs yesterday."
+
+"Could you spare me a trifle, sir?" asked the errand man in my street.
+"I haven't had tea today."
+
+It's a funny thing, that; isn't it?--our just being all "Americans"
+(when we are not referred to as "Yankees" or "Yanks").  We are never
+United Statesians.  It is the "American Ambassador," and the "American
+Consul-General."  I have even heard Dr. Wilson referred to as the
+"President of America."
+
+One day I saw a tourist.  He was an American, a young man I knew in New
+York.  I found him going into the Houses of Parliament.  I was fond of
+going in there frequently, and said I would accompany him.
+
+With an easy stride, at a speed I should say of about two miles an
+hour, he walked straight through the Houses of Parliament; through the
+Norman porch, through the King's robing room, the Royal or Victoria
+gallery, the Prince's chamber, the sumptuously decorated House of
+Peers, the Peers' lobby, the spacious central hall, the Commons'
+corridor and the House of Commons; glancing about him the while at art
+and architecture, lavish magnificence and the eternal garments and
+symbols of history.  Returning to the central hall, we passed through
+St. Stephen's and Westminster Hall and arrived again in the street.
+
+"How long did it take us to do that?" said my friend, questioning his
+watch.
+
+"Oh, about fifteen minutes," I replied.
+
+He said he thought he would go across the way and "do" the Abbey next
+while he was in the neighbourhood.
+
+I suppose I could have helped him in the matter of despatch, but I
+didn't think of it at the time.  Later I heard of two Americans who
+drove up to the abbey in a taxi.  Leaping out, one said to the other:
+"You do the outside and I'll do the inside, and that way we'll save a
+lot of time."
+
+The thing a man does in America, of course, when he gets into a
+railroad train is to light a cigar and begin talking to the fellow next
+to him.  There were two of us in the railway carriage compartment on my
+way down into Surrey.  I made a number of amiable observations; I asked
+a number of pleasant questions.  My object was to while away the time
+in human companionship.  "Quite so," was his reply to observations.
+
+In replying to questions he would commit himself to nothing; he
+wouldn't even say that he didn't know.  "I shouldn't undertake to say,
+sir," was his answer.  And then, certainly, there was no possibility of
+pursuing the subject further.
+
+He wasn't reading a paper; he wasn't doing anything but gaze straight
+in front of him.  I concluded that he was "sore" at me; I concluded
+that he was a surly bear, anyway.  And so an hour or so passed in utter
+silence.
+
+The pretty landscape whirled by; we went through a hundred tunnels
+(more or less); the little engine gave a shrill little squeak now and
+then; at old, old railway stations, that remind one agreeably of jails,
+rough-looking men in black shirt sleeves and corduroy waistcoats ran
+out to the train to open the carriage doors, and I forgot the gentleman
+altogether.  Till at length we came to his station.
+
+When he had got out he turned to latch the door, and putting his head
+in at the window, he said to me in the pleasantest manner possible:
+"Good aufternoon, sir."  He wasn't sore at me a bit!  That was simply
+his fashion of travelling, in silence.
+
+I was going into the countryside, to the country places where the old
+men have pleasant faces and the maidens quiet eyes.  To fare forth upon
+the King's highway, to hedgerows and blossoms and the old lanes of
+Merrie England, to mount again the old red hills, bird enchanted, and
+dip the valleys bright with sward, to the wind on the heath, brother,
+to hills and the sea, to lonely downs, to hold converse with simple
+shepherd men, and, when even fell, the million tinted, to seek some
+ancient inn for warmth in the inglenook, and bite and drop, and where,
+when the last star lamp in the valley had expired, I would rest my
+weary bones until the sweet choral of morning birds called me on my way.
+
+There was an ancient character going along the road.  He walked with a
+staff, a crooked stick.  His coatless habit was the colour of clay; his
+legs were bound about just below the knee by a strap (wherein, at one
+side, he carried his pipe), so that his trowsers flared at the bottom
+like a sailor's; over his shoulder he bore a flat straw basket.  Under
+his chin were whiskers; his eyes were merry and bright and his cheeks
+just like fine rosy apples, with a great high light on each.  I asked
+of him the way and we trudged along together.  "You are from Mericy,"
+he said with delight.
+
+He told me about himself.  He was seventy-four and he had never had "a
+single schooling" in his life.  Capel was his home, a village of about
+twenty houses which we were approaching, thirty miles or so from
+London.  The last time he been to London was when he was fifteen.  He
+had then seen some fireworks there.  No fireworks in Capel, he said,
+had ever been able to touch him since.  He had been pushing on, he
+said, pushing on, pushing on all the while.
+
+"You were not born in Capel, then?" I said.
+
+Born in Capel!  Why, he had been born seven miles from Capel.
+
+The difficulty was that I had overlooked the fact that everybody goes
+out of London town at Whitsuntide.  Village and county town I tried and
+I could not find where to lay my head.  Everything was, as they say in
+England, "full up."  It was coming on to rain and the night fell chill
+and black.  Would I have to use my rucksack for a pillow and sleep in
+the fields?
+
+At length I found a man--it was at quaint Godalming, I think, where the
+famous Charterhouse School is--who could not give me a room, but
+offered me a bed and breakfast at half a crown.  "There's another
+fellow up there," he said.  "But he's a nice, quiet fellow; something
+like yourself," he said.  "I think you'll like him."
+
+"You are an American," remarked my landlord.  I sat with him in his
+little parlour behind the bar.  It had a gun over the mantelpiece, a
+great deal of painted china and a group of stuffed birds in a glass
+case.  He asked me if I liked reading, because, if I did, he had an old
+dictionary to which I was welcome at any time.
+
+At length it was the hour for bed.  I followed my heavy host with his
+candle up difficult stairs.  "I think they're all asleep," he said.
+
+"They're all asleep!" I exclaimed.  "Who are?"
+
+"Why," replied my landlord, "there are five of them, you know.  But
+they are nice quiet fellows.  Something like yourself," he added.  "I
+think you will like them."
+
+In that shadowed, gabled room were the noises of many sunk in slumber.
+Well, they were, I found in the morning, rather inoffensive young
+fellows, all cyclists, and indeed not altogether unlike myself.  It was
+after my bacon and eggs that I found on my way a place for a "wash and
+brush up, tuppence."
+
+"Traveller, sir?" inquired the publican, in response to my knock and
+peering cautiously out at his door.  For it was Sunday, after three
+o'clock in the afternoon and not yet six; and to obtain refreshment at
+a public house at that hour one must be a "traveller over three miles'
+journey."  "I'm a traveller all the way from the U.S.A.," said I.
+
+I stood my battered shilling ash stick in a corner and looked out again
+from my window over the old red roofs and at the back of the house
+where he dwelt who when the Queen had commanded his presence said, "I'm
+an old man, ma'am, and I'll take a seat."  When Annie, the maid, had
+brought my "shaving water, sir," in a kind of a tin sprinkling can and
+when I had used it I took up my Malacca town cane and went out to see
+how old Father Thames was coming on.
+
+I thought I would buy some writing paper and I went into a drug store
+kind of a place.  "I see you are an American, sir," said the shopman.
+"This is a chemist's shop," he explained; "you get paper at the
+stationer's, just after the turning, at the top of the street."
+
+Hurrying for my passport, I inquired as to the location of such and
+such a street--whatever the name of it is--where, I understood, the
+place was where this was to be had.  "Ah!" said he whom I addressed,
+"you want the American Consul-General."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+WHY MEN CAN'T READ NOVELS BY WOMEN
+
+George Moore once presented the idea that the only thing of interest
+and value about the creative art of a woman was the feminine quality of
+that art.  The novels of Jane Austen come readily to mind as an
+argument in support of this provocative idea.  Quite first among their
+charms, every one will admit, is the indisputable fact that no man
+could possibly have written them.  They have the lightness, brightness,
+sparkle, perfume, flavour, grace, fun, sensitivity of a young feminine
+mind.  No one more than Miss Austen has captivated the roarers among
+men.  A man admires, say, Conrad.  He--if he is a manly man--falls in
+love with Jane Austen.  Very well.
+
+Now, then, it is a curious and a paradoxical thing that no man of
+masculine character can read the novels written by women to-day, unless
+he has to; that is, unless he is a book-reviewer, publisher's reader,
+magazine editor, proofreader, or some such thing.  And the reason he
+can't do it, in view of George Moore's idea and Miss Austen's renowned
+magnetism, is curious indeed.  It is because of the peculiarly feminine
+attitude of mind of our present women-novelists.  At least, this is the
+arresting pronouncement delivered with much robust eloquence by my
+leonine friend, Colonel Bludgeon.
+
+The present writer (a pale, spectacled, middle-aged young man) is too
+conscious of the wondrous nature of women to question their ability in
+anything.  But of one of whom he stands in greater awe than of anything
+else in the world he is a humble friend.  The dictum of this my friend
+comes from a quite different character than myself.  He is a great man;
+he has read everything; seen everything; known everybody.  Exception to
+him could be taken only on one ground.  He is perfectly awful.  He
+belongs to an old school; splenetic, choleric.  He is
+Sir-Anthony-Absolute-like; a critic in the spirit of the thundering
+days of William Ernest Henley.  His face is like a beefsteak.  His
+frame is like "a mountain walking."  His voice, Johnsonian.  He knows
+more about literature than probably any other living man.
+
+"No, sir," he rumbled, "you cannot find to-day a cigar-smoking animal"
+(though the Colonel is so erudite a man, his language is terrible) "who
+could be lured into the pages of our women novelists without
+snorts--snorts, sir--of disgust, or bellows of derisive mirth.  Why?
+Because these pages no longer contain an acute transcript of life as
+only a sensitive feminine mind would have the cunning to observe it,
+and of a form of human life in itself highly feminine in its character,
+but they now present a singularly insular travesty of man, an
+unconscious caricature of man as he could only appear to a feminine
+mind bound by the romantic limitations of sex, a mind, that is, devoid
+of masculine understanding, unable to recognise by virtue of
+affiliation of instinct that which is fine in the male character and
+that which is false to type.
+
+"Sir," continued the Colonel, "these pictures are coloured, on one
+hand, by ludicrous prejudice against masculine qualities which the
+feminine nature temperamentally feels to be antagonistic, or dangerous,
+to itself; and, on the other hand, by sentimental worship of masculine
+attributes conceived to be desirable complements to the frailty of
+women.  This amusing view of man springs not only from the element of
+sex, as I have said, but from the very marrow of sex.  We do not get
+from the contemporary authoress creative literature at all; that is, a
+disinterested criticism of mankind; we get in each picture of a male
+character her instinctive, and intensely interested, feeling as to
+whether or not he is a man whom it would be desirable, and safe, for a
+young woman to marry.  Paradoxically enough, it would seem that women
+have less and less knowledge of the world as they have contrived to see
+more of it; that as they have become more emancipated in liberty of
+action they have become more clannish in thought; and that as the range
+of their opportunities has widened and their interests have multiplied,
+their concern with the most elemental female instinct, their
+preoccupation with their immemorial business of the chase, has but
+intensified.  By word of mouth the modern woman tells us that in her
+practical and intellectual capacities she has advanced far beyond her
+sisters of an earlier day; we chance to look into that pool of fiction
+wherein she mirrors her heart, and we find her the same self-centred
+huntress as of yore.
+
+"Sir," cried the Colonel, jolting some tobacco ash off the ledge made
+by his abdomen, which he did by pounding the side of his torso with a
+bulky volume of the "Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini," "what is the
+theme of the most conspicuous portion of our fiction by feminine hands?
+In large measure it is a peevish criticism of husbands.  We have the
+popular creator of a type of husband held up to the scorn and ridicule
+of the sorority of her readers, remarking by way of commentary on her
+satirical pictures that there should be 'a school for husbands.'  It
+is, apparently, this lady's complacent belief that the origin of the
+domestic difficulties of the world is in the inadequate training of
+husbands for their delicate office.  One of 'the essential
+requirements' for marriage which 'men should go to school to learn' she
+mentions as 'understanding.' Wives, presumably, are born perfectly
+equipped for their functions and do not require to be made.  At any
+rate, as the production of fiction nowadays is so largely a feminine
+industry, and as a dominant trait of the male, even when recording his
+observations, is his chivalrous point of view, there is little or no
+opportunity given us on the benches, as you might say, to catch a
+glimpse of life pointing a way for us to see it steadily and see it
+whole."
+
+The Jovian Colonel blew a heavy cloud of tobacco smoke from out his
+massive ebony beard, and sat for a moment looking like some portentous
+smouldering volcano; then continued:
+
+"Men with hair on their chests would find the most agreeable society in
+the pages of our women novelists to be that of the horrible or, as the
+case may be, pitiful scoundrels at whom the authors themselves are most
+indignant.  These miserable beings, generally amiable though rather
+purposeless spirits, are, as Colonel Harvey not long ago remarked of
+one of them, of a sort that almost all men like and hardly any woman
+can tolerate.  Men are free to enjoy their engaging qualities because
+men are not subject to possible misfortune by reason of the
+corresponding infirmities of such characters, that is, men are not
+dependent upon them for their own safety.  Women, on the other hand,
+fear such characters because instinct tells women that they could not
+trust their own comfortable security to them; and, consequently, women
+heartily dislike such as these and find them villainous, beings to be
+branded in any feminine discussion of life as enemies of the sex.
+
+"In the latest novel by one of our most prominent women novelists," the
+Colonel went on, "for months the best-selling book in the country, and
+also undoubtedly the work of an artist sincerely interpreting the world
+according to her lights, we are presented with a distressing scene, an
+incident holy horror at which would make a thrilling and delicious
+success of any tea party.  An undisciplined young pup who is the
+husband comes home a bit late one night, and, as a man would describe
+it, somewhat 'lit up.'  An earnest student of this story cannot find
+that this misguided youth was any worse than is ordinarily the case in
+such delinquencies.  It is intimated, however, that he has been this
+way before.  The horror, the loathing, which the humorous young scamp's
+weakness inspires in his wife, a young woman of thoroughly feminine
+loftiness of character, is dramatic indeed, and partakes of the nature
+of that which so frequently is occasioned by the nervous organism of
+women, a 'scene.'  The total lack of large-hearted and intelligent
+'understanding' of human nature displayed by the conduct of the young
+man would send any connubial craft on to the rocks."
+
+The Colonel mopped his brow with a large bandanna handkerchief.  "Sir,"
+he resumed, "obnoxious as it is to a sensible man to do so, let us
+glance at the hero type of the most popular recent novels by women, the
+figure which strikes admiration into the feminine soul.  Now," he
+roared (and I declare, my hair rose on end), "the most awful thing any
+nigger can call another is a 'nigger.'  So we all rebel against what we
+feel to be the weaknesses of our own position.  None so quick as the
+vulgar to denounce 'no gentleman.'  And so on.  Thus, as we see, there
+is nothing the weaker sex so much despises in a man as weakness of
+character, and, as is consistent with all such reactions of feeling,
+nothing which so much attracts it as a firmness and strength of will
+beyond itself.  Naturally, the adored figures in the popular women's
+fiction are always of the 'strong man' type, in feminine eyes.  And
+here we come to a most extraordinary obliquity of the feminine eye.
+
+"What," he demanded, "are the marks by which you are to know a 'strong
+man'--in the feminine picture?  A strong man, of course, is a man with
+the bark on; polish is incompatible with rugged strength.  An
+exhilarating air of brusqueness breathes from all strong men.  They are
+as ignorant of manners as they are of the effete conventions of
+grammar.  They have fought their way up, and no one can down them.
+They can be depended upon absolutely as what are called 'good
+providers.'  In short, by the written confession of her heart, woman's
+idea of a 'dear,' after several centuries more or less of civilisation,
+remains precisely the primitive conception that it was in the days when
+man wooed her by grabbing her by the hair and handing her one with a
+club."
+
+The Colonel was breathing heavily with the exertion of animated speech
+as he added: "In real life a man of any stability of judgment would be
+decidedly suspicious of the hero of a modern woman's novel if one
+should walk into his office, or, doubtless, he would observe this
+whimsical caricature with something of the amusement he would find in
+the ludicrously false comic Irishman of the vaudeville stage.  This
+irreverent flight of fancy on our part, however, is yanking the strong
+man from his appropriate and supporting setting, where paste is given
+the glow of an authentic stone; in the sympathetic pages created by
+feminine intuition he dominates the machine.  When the heroine takes
+into her own hands the right of the individual to a second chance for
+happiness," the Colonel declaimed with a demoniac grin, "she turns to
+experience with such a one perfect love, as the honoured wife of a
+splendid and prosperous man and the mother of beautiful children.
+
+"The ethics of that engrossing theme of divorce," the Colonel went on,
+lighting another corpulent and very black cigar, "as decided by the
+Supreme Court of our contemporary women novelists suggests that justly
+celebrated principle of perfect equity: 'What's yours is mine and
+what's mine is my own.'  Listen," he demanded; "listen (as the author
+of 'The Gentle Art of Making Enemies' was wont to introduce his
+lectures) to the story of the unfolding of a woman's heart through
+marriage, as it is unfolded in the recent book of a novelist whom both
+the million-headed crowd and shoals of reviewers, of very uneven
+critical equipment, place 'well forward among America's novelists.'  A
+penniless young woman brought up amid the standards of very common
+people marries for money, and comes to face the collapse of her dreams.
+She realises that she is tied to a man for whom she cares nothing.
+Also he is a brute, a typical bad egg of a husband from the extensive
+though rather monotonous stock of this article dealt in by our women
+novelists.  Is it right for this young woman to throw away the chances
+of her whole life for happiness--and so on?  It certainly should not
+seem so to readers of the book.  And it is natural enough, as her
+husband has totally failed to hold her, that this young woman's mind,
+and heart, too, should convince her that she may make what she regards
+as a wiser disposition of her life.
+
+"The inevitable strong man whom she eventually marries seems
+unfortunately to have a bit of a flaw in his granite character; at any
+rate, something is wrong with him, as the heroine fails to hold him
+altogether, and matters even begin to look as though she might lose
+him.  But with her great happiness had come a new standard of honour,
+and a distrust of divorce as the solution of any marital problem.
+Would it be right for her to lose a husband who has tired of her?  Not
+by a long shot!  Marriage is the one vow we take before God.  It is a
+contract.  Is it not against all moral law to break a contract?  And
+all the rest of it.  So feminine logic disposes of what is described as
+one of the great problems of the day."
+
+Suddenly the Colonel broke into a terrifying smile.  "This novelist of
+whom we have just been speaking," he said, "somewhere remarked in an
+interview that it was too bad about poor George Gissing--where she
+picked up Gissing, God only knows--as, writing away all his life at
+stuff people didn't care for, he was one of the tragedies of
+literature.  Well, Gissing may be dead and gone, but his works stick
+on.  I could tell her"--the Colonel glared as he pawed his enormous
+hand through his mane--"of a more profound tragedy of literature."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE DESSERT OF LIFE
+
+Birds of a feather flock together, you can tell a dog by its spots, a
+man is known by the company he keeps--and all that sort of thing.
+
+It is quite astonishing that nobody has before been struck by what I
+have in my eye.  People go round all the while writing about Old
+Greenwich Village, the harbour, the Ghetto, the walk uptown.  Coney
+Island, the Great White Way, the subway ride, Riverside Drive, the
+spectacle of Fifth Avenue, the Night Court, the "lungs" of the
+metropolis, the "cliff dwellers," "faith, hope, and charity" on
+University Heights--a cathedral, a university, and a hospital, "lobster
+palace society," the "grand canons" of lower Manhattan, and about every
+other part of and thing in New York except this most entertaining
+section which I am about to discuss.
+
+Now, I never lived on Mars----
+
+You know "Sunday stories" in the newspapers are continually bringing a
+gentleman resident on Mars to marvel, with his fresh vision, at the
+wonders of this world.
+
+As I say, I never lived on Mars, but, what amounts to the same thing in
+this case, perhaps, I did live all of my New York life, up to a short
+time ago, below Forty-second Street.  I gathered from reading and
+conversation that there were districts of the city above this where
+people dwelt and went about their daily affairs, just, I supposed, as
+fish do at the bottom of the ocean, and beasts in the jungle.  But I
+knew that I could not breathe at the bottom of the ocean, nor be
+comfortable in the jungle.
+
+However, it's this way.  The person to whom I am married declared that
+she could not live below Forty-second Street; said that that was not
+done at all, nobody "lived" below Forty-second Street.  So the matter
+was settled.  I moved "uptown."  Of course, by stealth I continue to
+visit the neighbourhood of Gramercy Park, as a dog, it is said, will
+return to that which is not nice.
+
+The beauties and the advantages of the region in which I now live have
+been pointed out to me.  It is quite true that everything hereabout is
+new and "clean."  Here the streets are not infested by "old bums" as
+those are in that dirty old downtown.  Here one is just between the
+beautiful Drive on the one hand and our handsome Central Park on the
+other.  Here there is fresh air.  Here Broadway is a boulevard, and,
+further, it winds about in its course like the roads, as they call them
+there, in London, and does not have that awful straight look of
+everything in that checker-board part of town.  Here everybody is well
+dressed.  And even the grocers' and butchers' shops are quite smart.
+All this is indisputable.
+
+But all this is a description of the physical aspects of this part of
+town.  What I purpose to do is an esoteric thing.  Through the outward
+aspects of this part of town, its vestments, the features of its
+physiognomy, I will show, as through a glass, the beatings of its
+heart.  I will exhibit the soul of it, interpret its spirit, make plain
+for him that runs its inner, hidden meaning.
+
+The part of town that I mean may be said to begin at Seventy-second
+Street; it runs along Broadway, and comprises the neighbourhood of
+Broadway, to, say, a bit above One Hundred and Tenth Street.  Now we
+shall see what we shall see.
+
+You remember what a celebrated irascible character said about a
+circulating library in a town.  Be that as it may.  As you stroll along
+Broadway, up from Seventy-second Street, you observe, being a person of
+highly alert mind, an astonishing number of circulating libraries,
+devoted exclusively to the latest fiction.  And you note that all
+corner drug stores and all stationers' shops present a window display
+of "50-cent fiction."  Ah! refinement.  Reading people are nice people;
+they are not rough people.  There is, you feel at once, an air, there
+is taste--how shall I say?--selectness, about this part of town.  It is
+not as other parts of town are.
+
+You perceive, as you continue your stroll with a brightened and a more
+perfumed mind, that there are no shoe stores here.  Shoo stores!!
+"Booteries," these are.  Combined with "hosieries."  Countless are the
+smart hat shops for women.  That is to say, the establishments of
+"chapeaux importers."  In the miniature parlours framed by the windows'
+glass these chic and ravishing creations, the chapeaux, rise in a row
+high upon their slim and lovely stems.  This one is the establishment
+of Mlle. Edythe, that of Mme. Vigneau.  Countless, too, are the
+terrestrial heavens devoted to "gowns."  Headless they stand, these
+symphonies in feminine apparel, side by side here in the windows of the
+Maison la Mode, there of the Maison Estelle.  Frequent are the places
+where the figure is cultivated with famous corsets, the retreats of
+"corsetieres"; this one before you bears the name Fayette; it is where
+the model "Madame Pompadour" is sold.  And numerous are shops
+luxuriating in waists, "blouses," lingerie, and "novelties" of dress.
+Conspicuous among them, the "Dolly Dimple Shop."  The many "furriers"
+here all deal in "exclusive" furs and their names all end in "sky."
+
+And there are roses, roses all the way.  That is to say, "roseries,"
+"violeteries," and the like--what we call florists' shops, you know.
+Spots of gorgeous colour and intense fragrance, heaped high with
+orchids, violets, roses, gardenias, or, in some cases, "artificial
+flowers."
+
+See! the luscious wax busts in the window.  With their grandes
+coiffures.  And their pink and yellow bosoms resplendent with gems.  It
+is a hair-dresser's, just as in London, with a gentlemen's parlour at
+the back.  "Structures" are made here in human hair, and "marcel
+waving" is done, not, however, we may suppose, for gentlemen.  Here may
+be had an "olive oil shampoo," and a "facial massage."  One could be
+"manicured" in the stroll you are taking every ten minutes or so, if
+one wished.  And "hair cutting" is done along this way by artistes from
+various lands.  There is, for instance, the Peluqueria Espanola.
+"Service," too, is offered "at residence."  Beauty here is held in
+esteem as it was among the Greeks.  Upon one side of the "chemist's"
+window "toilet requisites" are announced for sale.  The "valet system"
+is extensively advertised.  The industry of "dry cleansing" nourishes,
+and the "shoe renovator" abounds.  And hats are "renovated," and
+"blocked," and "ironed," in places without number.
+
+What a delightful tea-room is this!  With its woodwork, its panelling,
+and its little window lattices, all in beautiful enamelled white.
+_That_ is not a tea-room!  I'm 'sprised at you.  That is a laundry.  A
+laundry?  Shades of Hop Loo!  It is even so.  There are a variety of
+types of laundry in this part of the world, but the great point of them
+all is their "sanitary" character.  All things are sanitary here; the
+shaving brushes at the barber's are proclaimed sanitary; "sanitary
+tailoring" is announced; and the creameries of this district, it would
+seem, go beyond anything yet achieved elsewhere in the way of
+sanitation.  It might be imagined from a study of window signs that a
+perverse person bent upon procuring un-"pasteurized" milk in this part
+of town would be frustrated of his design.
+
+I was sent to what my understanding conceived to be the "bakery" in our
+immediate neighbourhood, on an errand.  This place, I found, was called
+the "Queen Elizabeth."  I was dreadfully abashed when I got inside.  I
+was afraid that there might be some bit of mud on my shoes which would
+soil the polished floor; and I became keenly conscious that my trowsers
+were not perfectly pressed.  I should, of course, have worn my
+tail-coat.  There were several ladies there receiving guests that
+afternoon.  I had a tete-a-tete with one of these, who gossiped
+pleasantly about the cakes--I was to get some cakes.  The nicest cakes
+at the "Queen Elizabeth," it seems, are of two kinds: "Maids of Court"
+and "Ladies in Waiting."  Our neighbourhood is rich in shops given to
+"pastry," "sweets," "bon bons."  Shops of charming names!  There is the
+"Ambrosia Confection Shop," and the place of the "Patisserie et
+Confiserie."
+
+In our neighbourhood there are, too, a vast number of "caterers" and
+"fruiterers," and, particularly, delicatessen shops.  Delicatessen
+shops in our neighbourhood are described upon the windows as places
+dealing in "fancy and table luxuries."  I have heard my wife say that
+many people "just live out of them."  They are certainly handsome
+places.  Why, you wouldn't think there was any food in them.
+Everything is so dressed up that it doesn't look at all as if it were
+to eat, it is so attractive.
+
+Restaurants hereabouts are commonly named "La Parisienne," or something
+like that, or are called "rotisseries."  There are some just ordinary
+restaurants, too, and many immaculate, light-lunch rooms.  "Afternoon
+Tea" is a frequent sign, and one often sees the delicate suggestion in
+neat gilt, "Sandwiches."  Grocers in this part of town, it would seem,
+handle only "select," "fancy," and "choice" groceries, and "hot-house
+products."  There are a number of fine "markets" in this district, very
+fine markets indeed.  In the season for game, deer and bears may be
+seen strung up in front of them; all their chickens appear to come from
+Philadelphia, their ducks are "fresh killed Long Island ducks," and
+they make considerable of a feature of "frogs' legs."  These markets
+are usually called the "Superior Market," or the "Quality Market," or
+something like that.  Great residential hotels here bear the name of
+"halls," as "Brummel Hall" on the one hand and "Euripides Hall" on the
+other.
+
+You will by now have begun to perceive the note, the flair, of my part
+of town.  Its care is for the graces, the things that sweeten life, the
+refinements of civilisation, the embellishments of existence.  Nothing
+more clearly, strikingly, bespeaks this than the proofs of its
+extraordinary fondness for art--I have mentioned literature.  Painting
+and sculpture, music, the drama, and the art of "interior decoration,"
+these things of the spirit have their homes without number along this
+stretch of Broadway.
+
+"Art" shops and art "galleries" are on every hand.  In the windows of
+these places you will see: innumerable French mirrors; stacks of empty
+picture frames of French eighteenth-century design, at an amazingly
+cheap figure each; remarkably inexpensive reproductions in bright
+colours of Sir Joshua, Corot, Watteau, Chardin, Fragonard, some Italian
+Madonnas; an assortment of hunting prints, and prints redolent of Old
+English sentiment; many wall "texts," or "creeds"; a variety of the
+kind of coloured pictures technically called, I believe, "comics";
+numerous little plaster casts of anonymous works and busts of standard
+authors; frequently an ambitious original etching by an artist unknown
+to you; and an occasional print of the "September Morn" kind of thing;
+together with many "art objects" and a great deal of "bric-a-brac."
+Upon the windows you are informed that "restoring," "artistic framing,"
+"regilding," and "resilvering" are done within.  And, in some cases,
+that "miniatures" are painted there.  There are, too, a number of
+"Japanese art stores" along the way, containing vast stocks of Japanese
+lilies living in Japanese pans, other exotic blossoming plants, pink
+and yellow slippers from the Orient, and striking flowered garments
+like a scene from a "Mikado" opera.
+
+In this part of town photography, too, is made one of the fine arts.
+You do not here have your photograph taken; you have, it seems, your
+"portrait" made.  "Home portraiture" is ingratiatingly suggested on
+lettered cards, and, further, you are invited to indulge in "art posing
+in photographs."  The "studios" of the photographers display about an
+equal number of portraits of children and dogs.  The people of this
+community take joy not only in the savour of art, and in taking part in
+its professional production, but they would themselves produce it, as
+amateurs.  The sign "Kodaks" is everywhere about, and "enlarging" is
+done, and "developing and printing for amateurs" every few rods.  So we
+come to the subject of music.
+
+Caruso, Melba, Paderewski, Mischa Elman, Harry Lauder, Sousa, Liszt,
+Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner, Brahms, Grieg, Moszkowsky, the "latest song
+hit" from anything you please.  Ask and you will find along this
+thoroughfare.  There are no more prosperous looking bazaars on this
+street than those consecrated to the sale of "musical phonographs" of
+every make.  And if the name of these places is not exactly legion, it
+is something very like that.  Besides every species of Victophone and
+Olagraph, the music lover may muse upon the wonders and the variety of
+"mechanical piano players."  All of de luxe "tone quality."
+
+As for the drama.  The brightest word at night in this galaxy of ultra
+signs is the gracious word "Photo Play House."  Deep beyond plummet's
+sound is the interest of this part of town in the human story, as
+revealed upon the "screen."  Grief and mirth, good and evil, danger and
+daring, and the horizon from Hatteras to Matapan may be scanned upon
+the poster boards before the entrances of these showy temples of the
+mighty film.  Here one is invited to witness "Carmen," and also a
+"drama of life," "Tricked by a Victim," and also "a comedy drama full
+of pep" entitled "Good Old Pop," productions of the "Premier Picture
+Corporation."  Announcements of scenes of tornadoes, the Great War, of
+"Paris fashions," and, ah, yes! of "beauty films" line the way.
+
+To turn to the home.  The people of this part of town dwell, according
+to their shops, entirely amid "period and art furniture."  And it would
+seem, by the remarkable number of places in this quarter where this is
+displayed for sale, that they dwell amid a most amazing amount of it.
+These marts of household gods are of two kinds: ones of imposing size,
+with long windows stretching far down the cross street, and dealing in
+shining "reproductions," and the tiny, quaint, intimate, delightful
+kind of thing, where it is said on a sign on a gilded chair that
+"artistic picture hanging by the hour" is done.
+
+The fascinating places are the more alluring.  Herein rich jumbles are,
+of tapestries, clocks of all periods--including a harvest of those of
+the "grandfather" era--fire-screens, brass kettles, andirons,
+stained-glass, artistic lamps in endless variety, the latest things in
+pillow cushions, book racks, wall papers, wall "decorations" and
+"hangings," draperies, curtains, cretonnes.  The "decorators" deal,
+too, in "parquet floors," and flourish and increase in their kind in
+response, evidently, to the volume of demand for "upholstering" and
+"cabinet work."  And the floors of this part of town must hold rich
+stores of Oriental rugs, as importers of these are frequent on our way.
+
+The higher civilisations turn, naturally, to refinements of religious
+thought.  What the Salvation Army is to Fourteenth Street, what the
+Rescue Mission is to the Bowery, the Christian Science Reading Room is
+to this stretch of Broadway, and there is no trimmer place to be seen
+on your stroll.  Then, one of the marks of our culture to-day is the
+aesthetic cultivation of the primitive.  Our neighbourhood is invited,
+on placards in windows, to assemble "every Sunday evening" to enjoy the
+"love stories of the Bible."
+
+For the rest, you would see on your stroll, for man cannot live by
+taste and the spirit alone, sundry places of business concerned with
+real estate, electrical accoutrement, automobile accessories, toys, the
+investment and safeguarding of treasure, and so on, and particularly
+with ales, wines, liquors, and cigars.  Each and all of these, however,
+are affirmed to be "places of quality."
+
+Now, the social customs of this part of town, as they may be abundantly
+viewed on our thoroughfare, are agreeable to observe.  At night our
+boulevard twinkles with lights like a fairyland.  The view of across
+the way through the gardens, as they should be called, down the middle
+of the street, is enchanting.  All aglow our spic-and-span trolley
+cars--all our trolley cars are spic-and-span--ride down the way like
+"floats" in a nocturnal parade.  Upon the sidewalks are happy throngs,
+and a hum of cheery sound.  The throngs of our neighbourhood are
+touched with an indescribable character of place; they are not the
+throngs of anywhere else.  They are not exactly Fifth Avenue; they are
+not the Great White Way.  They are nice throngs, healthy throngs,
+care-free throngs, modish throngs in the modes of magazine
+advertisements.  And all their members are young.
+
+You will notice as you go and come that you pass the same laughing
+groups in precisely the same spot, hour after hour.  Those who compose
+these groups seem to be calling upon one another.  Apparently, on
+pleasant evenings, it is the form here for you to receive your guests
+in this way, in the open air.  And you jest, and converse, and while
+the time amiably away, just as many people do at home.  "Well," says my
+wife, "the rooms in the apartments in this part of town are so small
+that nobody can bring anybody into them."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+A CLERK MAY LOOK AT A CELEBRITY
+
+A clerk may look at a celebrity.  For a number of years, we, being
+diligent in our business, stood and waited before kings in a celebrated
+book shop.  Now (like Casanova, retired from the world of our triumphs
+and adventures) we compose our memoirs.  "We know from personal
+experience that a slight tale, a string of gossip, will often alter our
+entire conception of a personality,"--from a contemporary book review.
+This, the high office of tittle-tattle, is what we have in our eye.  We
+are Walpolian, Pepysian.
+
+"These Memoirs, Confessions, Recollections, Impressions (as the title
+happens) are extremely valuable in the pictures they contain of the
+time.  Especially happy are they in the intimate glimpses they give us
+of the distinguished people, particularly the men of letters, of the
+day.  The writer was an attache of the court," the writer was this, the
+writer was that, but always the writer had peculiar facilities for
+observing intimately--and so forth.  So it was with the writer here.
+
+We remember with especial entertainment, we begin, the first time we
+saw F. Hopkinson Smith.  (We are ashamed to say that he was known among
+our confrere, the salesmen, as "Hop" Smith.)  He introduced himself to
+us by his moustache.  Looming rapidly and breezily upon us--"Do you
+know me?" he said, swelling out his "genial" chest (so it seemed) and
+pointing, with a militarish gesture, to this decoration.  We looked a
+moment at this sea gull adornment, somehow not unfamiliar to us, and
+said, "We do."  Mr. Hopkinson Smith, we perceived, regards this
+literary monument, so to say, as a household word (to put it so) in
+every home in the land.  Mr. Smith, a very robust man, wore yellow,
+sulphur-coloured gloves, a high hat, a flower in his buttonhole, white
+piping to his vest.  A debonair figure, Chanticleerian.  Fresh
+complexion.  Exhaling a breeze of vigour.  Though not short in stature,
+he is less tall than, from the air of his photographs, we had been led
+to expect.  A surprise conveying a curious effect, reminded one of that
+subconscious sensation experienced in the presence of a one-time tall
+chair which has been lowered a little by having had a section of its
+legs sawed off.
+
+Mr. Smith's conversation with book clerks we found to be confined to
+inquiries (iterated upon each reappearance) concerning the sale of his
+own books.  We appreciate that this may not be the expression of an
+irrestrainable vanity, or obsessing greed, realising that very probably
+his professional insight into human character informs him that the
+subject of the sales of books is the range of the book clerk's mind.
+He expressed a frank and hearty pride (engaging in aspect, we felt) in
+the long-sustained life of "Peter," which remarkably selling book
+survived on the front fiction table all its contemporaries, and in full
+vigour lived on to see a new generation grow up around it there.  In a
+full-blooded, sporting spirit Mr. Smith asked us if his new book was
+"selling faster than John Fox's."  Heartiness and geniality is his
+role.  A man built to win and to relish popularity.  With a breezy
+salute of the sulphur-gloved hand, he is gone.  Immediately we feel
+much less electric.
+
+Alas, what an awful thing!  Oliver Herford, with heavily dipped pen
+poised, is about to autograph a copy of his "Pen and Ink Puppet," when,
+lo! a monstrous ink blot spills upon the fair page.  Hideous!  Mr.
+Herford is nonplused.  The book is ruined.  No!  Mr. Herford is not Mr.
+Herford for nothing.  The book is enriched in value.  Sesame!  With his
+pen Mr. Herford deftly touches the ink blot, and it is a most amusing
+human silhouette.  How characteristic an autograph, his delighted
+friend will say.
+
+We were quite satisfied in the introduction given us in our sojourn as
+a book clerk with Mr. Herford.  That is to say, our early education was
+received largely from the pages of _St. Nicholas Magazine_; and when
+grown to man's estate and brought to mingle with the great we might
+easily have suffered a sentimental disappointment in Mr. Herford.  But
+no, he is as mad as a March hare.  He never, we should say, has any
+idea where he is.  An absolutely blank face.  Mind far, far away.
+Doesn't act as though he had any mind.  A smallish, clean-shaven man,
+light sack suit, somewhat crumpled.  A fine shock of greyish-hair.
+Cane hooked over crooked arm.  List to starboard, like a postman.
+Approaches directly toward us.  We prepare to render our service.
+Perceives something in his path (us) just in time to avert a collision,
+swerves to one side.  Takes an oblique tack.  But speaks (always
+particular to avoid seeming to slight us) in a very friendly fashion.
+Though gives you the impression that he thinks you are some one else.
+A pleasant, unaffected man to talk to.  Somewhat dazed, however, in
+effect.  Curious manner of speech, of which evidently he is
+unconscious, partly native English accent, partly temperamental
+idiosyncrasy.  A very simple eccentric, what in the eighteenth century
+was called "an original."  Reads popular novels.
+
+It was given to us to see the launching throes of a nouveau novelist.
+We noticed day after day a well-built young man come in to gaze at the
+fiction table, a sturdy, spirited, comely chap.  A fine snap to his eye
+we particularly noticed, and admired.  He seemed to derive much
+satisfaction from this occupation and to be in an excellent frame of
+mind.  And then, it struck us, he grew of troubled mien.  He asked us
+one day how "Predestined" was selling.  So we had the psychology of the
+situation.  He asked, on another, if we had sold a copy of
+"Predestined" yet.  A few days following he inquired, "How long does it
+take before a book gets started?"  Dejected was his mien.  It took
+"Predestined" some time.  Then it went very well.  We sold a
+joyous-looking Stephen French Whitman, an embodiment of gusto--there
+was a positive crackle to his fine black eyes--a pile of books
+concerning themselves with Europe, and did not see him again for some
+time.  Then he flashed upon us a handsome new moustache.
+
+Our acquaintance with Mrs. Wharton was--merely formal.  "Oh, very
+pleased," exclaimed an equiline lady, patrician unmistakable, of
+aristocratic features which we recognised from the portraits of
+magazines, "I'll take this."  She had in her hand a copy of the then
+quite new pocket edition "Poems" of George Meredith.  She was very
+fashionably, strikingly, gowned, somewhat conspicuously; a large
+pattern in the figure of the cloth.  She carried a little dog.  There
+was about her something, difficult to denote, brilliant and hard in
+effect, like a polished stone.  And we felt the rarefied atmosphere of
+a wealthy, highly cultivated, rather haughty society.  "Charge to
+Edward Wharton," she said, very nicely, bending over us as we wrote
+"Lenox, Mass."  She pronounced it not Massachusetts, but Mass, as is
+not infrequent in the East.  "Thank you," she said; she swept from us.
+Our regard was won to this incarnation of distinction by the pleasant
+humanity of her manners, her very gracious "Good morning" to the
+elevator man as she left.
+
+"Dicky" Davis we always called him behind his back.  And such he looks.
+A man of "strapping" physique, younger in a general effect than
+probably he is; immense chest and shoulders, great "meaty" back;
+constructed like (we picture) those gladiators Borrow lyrically
+acclaims the "noble bruisers of old England"; complexion, (to employ
+perhaps an excessive stylistic restraint) not pale.  A heavy stick.  A
+fondness for stocks.  Very becoming.  A vitality with an aversion,
+apparently, to wearing an overcoat in the coldest weather; deeming this
+probably an appurtenance of the invalid.  Funny style of trowsers as if
+made for legs about a foot longer.  In the reign of "high waters"!
+
+We had picked up the notion that Mr. Davis was a snobbish person; we
+found him a very friendly man; gentle, describes it, in manner.  Very
+respectful to clerks.  "One of the other gentlemen here ordered another
+book for me," he mentions.  But more.  A sort of camaraderie.  Says,
+one day, that he just stepped in to dodge some people he saw coming.
+Inquires, "Well, what's going on in the book world?"  Buys travel
+books, Africa and such.  Buys a quart of ink at a clip.  He conveyed to
+us further, unconsciously, perhaps, a subtle impression that he was, in
+sympathy with us, on our side, so to say; in any difficulty, that would
+be, that might arise; with "the boys," in a manner of speaking.
+Veteran globe trotter and soldier of fortune on the earth's surface,
+Mr. Davis suffered a considerable shock to discover in tete-a-tete that
+we had never been in London.  _London_?  Such a human vegetable, we
+saw, was hardly credible.
+
+"Charge," he said, "to James Huneker."  He pronounced his name in a
+very eccentric fashion, the first syllable like that in "hunter."  In
+our commerce with the world we have, with this rather important
+exception, invariably heard this "u" as in "humid."  A substantial
+figure, very erect in carriage, supporting his portliness with that
+physical pride of portly men, moving with the dignity of bulk; a
+physiognomy of Rodinesque modelling.  His cane a trim touch to the
+ensemble.  Decidedly affable in manner to us.  "Very nice man,"
+comments our hasty note.  "One of our young gentlemen here, black eyes,
+black hair."--describes with surprising memory of exact observation a
+fellow-serf--"was to get a book for me a couple of months ago."  Bought
+the Muther monograph on Goya.  Referred humorously to his new book--one
+on music.  Said, "Many people won't believe that one can be equally
+good, or perhaps bad, at many things."  Spoke of Arnold Bennett; said
+he was "a hard-working journalist as well as a novel writer."  Seemed
+to possess the greater respect, great esteem, for the character of
+journalist.  We felt a reminiscence of that solid practicality of
+sentiment of another heavy man.  "Nobody but a blockhead," said Dr.
+Johnson, "ever wrote except for money."
+
+Mentioned the novel then just out, "Predestined."  "He [the author] is
+one of our [_Sun_] men, you know."  Fraternal pride and affection in
+inflection, though he said he did not know Mr. Whitman.  "Thank you
+very much indeed," he said at leaving.
+
+From his carriage, moving slowly in on the arm of a Japanese boy, his
+servant, came one day John La Farge.  Tales of the Far East.  Profound
+erudition, skin of sear parchment, Indian philosophies, exotic culture,
+incalculable age, inscrutable wisdom, intellectual mystery, a dignity
+deep in its appeal to the imagination--such was the connotation of this
+presence.  (Fine as that portrait by Mr. Cortissoz.)  An Oriental
+scholar, all right, we thought.  Mr. La Farge was in search of some
+abstruse art books.  He did not care, he said, what language they were
+in, except German.  He said he hated German.  "Well, we have to go to
+the German for many things, you know," we said.  "Yes," said Mr. La
+Farge, "we have to die, too, but I don't want to any sooner than I can
+help."
+
+But it is not famous authors only that are interesting.  We were
+approached one day by a tall, exceedingly solemn individual who asked
+for a copy of a book the name of which sounded to us like the title of
+what "the trade" knows as "a juvenile."  "Who wrote it?" we inquired,
+puzzled.  In a deep, hollow voice the unknown gentleman vibrated, "I
+did."
+
+A very light-coloured new Norfolk suit, with a high hat; an exceedingly
+neat black cutaway coat and handsome checked trowsers, a decidedly big
+derby hat (flat on top), an English walking coat, with plaid trowsers
+to match, the whole about a dozen checks high.  This?  An inventory of
+the wardrobe of Dr. Henry van Dyke, as it has been displayed to our
+appreciation.  Has not the handsome wardrobe been a familiar feature in
+the history of literature?  And does anybody like Dr. Goldsmith the
+less for having loved a lovely coat?
+
+A slight figure, very erect and alert.  A dapper, dignified step.
+Movement precise.  An effect of a good deal of nose glasses.  Black,
+heavy rims.  A wide, black tape.  Head perpendicular, drawn back
+against the neck.  Grave, scholarly face, chiselled with much
+refinement of technique; foil to the studious complexion, a dark,
+silken moustache.  Holding our thumb-nail sketch up to the light, we
+see it thus.
+
+We regret that our view of this figure so prominent in our literature
+is perforce so entirely external.  But for this Dr. van Dyke has no one
+to blame but himself, his fastidiousness in clerks.  Ignoring, as he
+passes, our offer of service, at the desk where he seats himself he
+removes his hat--a large head, we note, for the figure, a good deal of
+back as well as top head--and, preparing to write, to fill out the
+order forms himself, fumbles a great deal with his glasses, taking off
+and putting on again.  A friend discovering him here, he springs up and
+greets him with much vivacity.  His orders written out, he delivers
+them into the hands of the manager of the shop with whom he chats a
+bit. . . .
+
+Nature imitated art, indeed, when she designed William Gillette,
+remarkable fleshly incarnation of the literary figment, Sherlock
+Holmes.  In the soul of Mr. Gillette, as on a stage, we witnessed a
+dramatic moral conflict.  Two natures struggled before us within him.
+Which would prevail?  Mr. Gillette was much interested in Rackham
+books.  Bought a great many.  In stock at this time was a very
+elaborate set in several quarto volumes of "Alice in Wonderland," most
+ornately bound, with Rackham designs inlaid in levant of various
+colours in the rich purple levant binding.  The illustrations within
+were a unique, collected set of the celebrated drawings made by various
+hands for this classic.  The price, several hundred dollars.  Mr.
+Gillette was torn with temptation here.  And yet was it right for him
+to be so extravagant?  Periodically he came in, impelled to inquire if
+the set had yet been sold.  If somebody only would buy the set--why,
+then, of course--it would be all over.
+
+In our contemplation of the literari we have amused ourselves with
+philosophic reflection.  We recalled that old saw of Oscar Wilde's (as
+George Moore says of something of Wordsworth's) about the artist
+tending always to reproduce his own type.  And we thought what an
+excellent model to the illustrator of his own "Married Life of the
+Frederic Carrolls" Jesse Lynch Williams would have been.  No name
+itself, it struck us, would be happier for Mr. Williams than Frederic
+Carroll--if it were not Jesse Lynch Williams.  A "colletch" chap
+alumnus.  A typical, clever, exceedingly likable young American
+husband, fairly well to do: it is thus we behold him.  Slender, in an
+English walking coat, smiling agreeably.  One, we thought, you would
+think of as a popular figure in a younger "set."
+
+It is irrelevant, certainly, but we must acknowledge our indebtedness
+to a lady customer who supposed that the "Married Life of the Frederic
+Carrolls" was an historic work, dealing with the domestic existence of
+the author of "Alice."
+
+Thomas Nelson Page, autographing presentation copies of "A Coast of
+Bohemia," remarks, "This is one of the rewards of poetry."  At this
+task, or, rather, pleasure, Mr. Page spent a good part of several
+successive days in the store.  A gentleman, with a flavour of "the
+South" in his speech, very like his well-known pictures; stocky; an
+effect of not having, in length, much neck.  Light, soft suit, or very
+becoming Prince Albert, and high hat.  "He will wear you out," whispers
+a colleague to us; "he has no idea where any of his friends live.  I
+doubt if he knows where he lives himself."  The junior Mr. Weller, we
+recollect, when an inn "boots" referred to humankind in terms natural
+to his calling.  "There's a pair of Hessians in thirteen," he said.
+Viewing Mr. Page with the eye of an attendant, we should remark that he
+is a Tartar.  But a kindly, patient, courteous Tartar.
+
+City directories, telephone "books," social registers, "Who's Whos,"
+all are necessary to enable him to tell the addresses of his friends.
+And these are inadequate.  He wishes to send, as a token of his regard,
+a book, affectionately inscribed, to his friend, let us say, J. M.
+D----, Esq.  We learn by the agency of the machinery to which we have
+recourse that there reside in the City of New York four gentlemen of
+this identical name: one on Madison Avenue, one on Ninety-first Street,
+another in Brooklyn, the other somewhere else.  Mr. Page is completely
+bewildered as to which is his friend.  "Well, I don't know," he says,
+"but this man married former Senator So-and-So's daughter."  Now, can't
+we solve that, somehow?  Historic Spirit! we cried that day,
+impracticality of literary men for petty, mundane details, here hast
+thou still thy habitat, a temple in Mr. Page!
+
+Lor', how we do run on!
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+CAUN'T SPEAK THE LANGUAGE
+
+Whenever we go to England we learn that we "caun't" speak the language.
+We are told very frankly that we can't.  And we very quickly perceive
+that, whatever it is that we speak, it certainly is not "the language."
+
+Let us consider this matter.  A somewhat clever and an amusingly
+ill-natured English journalist, T. W. H. Crosland, not long ago wrote a
+book "knocking" us, in which he says "that having inherited, borrowed
+or stolen a beautiful language, they (that is, we Americans) wilfully
+and of set purpose distort and misspell it."  Crosland's ignorance of
+all things American, ingeniously revealed in this lively bit of
+writing, is interesting in a person of, presumably, ordinary
+intelligence, and his credulity in the matter of what he has heard
+about us is apparently boundless.
+
+However, he does not much concern us.  Well-behaved Englishmen would
+doubtless consider as impolite his manner of expression regarding the
+"best thing imported in the Mayflower."  But however unamiably, he does
+voice a feeling very general, if not universal, in England.  You never
+get around--an Englishman would say "round"--the fact over there that
+we do not speak the English language.
+
+Well, to use an Americanism, they,--the English,--certainly do have the
+drop on us in the matter of beauty.  Mr. Chesterton somewhere says that
+a thing always to be borne in mind in considering England is that it is
+an island, that its people are insulated.  An excellent thing to
+remember, too, in this connection, is that England is a flower garden.
+In ordinary times, after an Englishman is provided with a roof and four
+meals a day, the next thing he must have is a garden, even if it is but
+a flowerpot.  They are continually talking about loveliness over there:
+it is a lovely day; it is lovely on the river now; it is a lovely spot.
+And so there are primroses in their speech.  And then they have
+inherited over there, or borrowed or stolen, a beautiful literary
+language, worn soft in colour, like their black-streaked, grey-stone
+buildings, by time; and, as Whistler's Greeks did their drinking
+vessels, they use it because, perforce, they have no other.  The
+humblest Londoner will innocently shame you by talking perpetually like
+a storybook.
+
+One day on an omnibus I asked the conductor where I should get off to
+reach a certain place.  "Oh, that's the journey's end, sir," he
+replied.  Now that is poetry.  It sounds like Christina Rossetti.  What
+would an American car conductor have said?  "Why, that's the end of the
+line."  "Could you spare me a trifle, sir?" asks the London beggar.  A
+pretty manner of requesting alms.  Little boys in England are very fond
+of cigarette pictures, little cards there reproducing "old English
+flowers."  I used to save them to give to children.  Once I gave a
+number to the ringleader of a group.  I was about to tell him to divide
+them up.  "Oh, we'll share them, sir," he said.  At home such a boy
+might have said to the others: "G'wan, these're fer me."  Again, when I
+inquired my way of a tiny, ragged mite, he directed me to "go as
+straight as ever you can go, sir, across the cricket field; then take
+your first right; go straight through the copse, sir," he called after
+me.  The copse?  Perhaps I was thinking of the "cops" of New York.
+Then I understood that the urchin was speaking of a small wood.
+
+Of course he, this small boy, sang his sentences, with the rising and
+falling inflection of the lower classes.  "Top of the street, bottom of
+the road, over the way"--so it goes.  And, by the way, how does an
+Englishman know which is the top and which is the bottom of every
+street?
+
+Naturally, the English caun't understand us.  "When is it that you are
+going 'ome?" asked my friend, the policeman in King's Road.
+
+"Oh, some time in the fall," I told him.
+
+"In the fall?" he inquired, puzzled.
+
+"Yes, September or October."
+
+"Oh!" he exclaimed, "in the autumn, yes, yes.  At the fall of the
+leaves," I heard him murmur meditatively.  Meeting him later in the
+company of another policeman, "He," he said to his friend, nodding at
+me, "is going back in the fall."  Deliciously humorous to him was my
+speech.  Now it may be mentioned as an interesting point that many of
+the words imported in the _Mayflower_, or in ships following it, have
+been quite forgotten in England.  Fall, as in the fall of the year, I
+think, was among them.  Quite so, quite so, as they say in England.
+
+Yes, in the King's Road.  For, it is an odd thing, Charles Scribner's
+Sons are on Fifth Avenue, but Selfridge's is in Oxford Street.  Here we
+meet a man on the street; we kick him into it.  And in England it is a
+very different thing, indeed, whether you meet a lady in the street or
+on the street.  You, for instance, wouldn't meet a lady on the street
+at all.  In fact, in England, to our mind, things are so turned around
+that it is as good as being in China.  Just as traffic there keeps to
+the left kerb, instead of to the right curb, so whereas here I call you
+up on the telephone, there you phone me down.  It would be awkward,
+wouldn't it, for me to say to you that I called you down?
+
+England is an island; and though the British government controls one
+fifth, or something like that, of the habitable globe, England is a
+very small place.  Most of the things there are small.  A freight car
+is a goods van, and it certainly is a goods van and not a freight car.
+So when you ask what little stream this is, you are told that that is
+the river Lea, or the river Arun, as the case may be, although they
+look, indeed, except that they are far more lovely, like what we call
+"cricks" in our country.  And the Englishman is fond of speaking in
+diminutives.  He calls for a "drop of ale," to receive a pint tankard.
+He asks for a "bite of bread," when he wants half a loaf.  His "bit of
+green" is a bowl of cabbage.  He likes a "bit of cheese," in the way of
+a hearty slice, now and then.  One overhearing him from another room
+might think that his copious repast was a microscopic meal.  About this
+peculiarity in the homely use of the language there was a joke in
+_Punch_ not long ago.  Said the village worthy in the picture: "Ah, I
+used to be as fond of a drop o' beer as any one, but nowadays if I do
+take two or dree gallons it do knock I over!"
+
+Into the matter of the quaint features of the speech of the English
+countryside, or the wonders of the Cockney dialect, the unlearned
+foreigner hardly dare venture.  It is sufficient for us to wonder why a
+railroad should be a railway.  When it becomes a "rilewie" we are
+inclined, in our speculation, "to pass," as we say over here.  And ale,
+when it is "ile," brings to mind a pleasant story.  A humble Londoner,
+speaking of an oil painting of an island, referred to it as "a painting
+in ile of an oil."
+
+An American friend of mine, resident in London, insists that where
+there is an English word for a thing other than the American word for
+it, the English word is in every case better because it is shorter.  He
+points to tram, for surface-car; and to lift, for elevator.  Still
+though it may be a finer word, hoarding is not shorter than billboard;
+nor is "dailybreader" shorter than commuter.  I think we break about
+even on that score.
+
+This, however, would seem to be true: where the same words are employed
+in a somewhat different way the English are usually closer to the
+original meaning of the word.  Saloon bar, for instance, is intended to
+designate a rather aristocratic place, above the public bar; while the
+lowest "gin mill" in the United States would be called a "saloon."  I
+know an American youth who has thought all the while that Piccadilly
+Circus was a show, like Barnum and Bailey's.  With every thing that is
+round in London called a circus, he must have imagined it a, rather
+hilarious place.
+
+The English "go on" a good deal about our slang.  They used to be fond
+of quoting in superior derision in their papers our, to them, utterly
+unintelligible baseball news.  Mr. Crosland, to drag him in again, to
+illustrate our abuse of "the language," quotes from some tenth-rate
+American author--which is a way they have had in England of judging our
+literature--with the comment that "that is not the way John Milton
+wrote."  Not long ago Mr. Crosland became involved in a trial in the
+courts in connection with Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas and Robert
+Ross.  He defended himself with much spirit and considerable
+cleverness.  Among other things he said, as reported in the press:
+"What is this game?  This gang are trying to do me down.  Here I am a
+poor man up against two hundred quid (or some such amount) of counsel."
+
+Well, that wasn't the way John Milton talked, either.
+
+The English slang for money is a pleasant thing: thick'uns and
+thin'uns; two quid, five bob; tanners and coppers.  And they have a
+good body of expressive and colourful speech.  "On the rocks" is a neat
+and poetic way of saying "down and out."  It is really not necessary to
+add the word "resources" to the expression "on his own."  A "tripper"
+is a well-defined character, and so is a "flapper," a "nipper," and a
+"bounder."  There had to be some word for the English "nut," as no
+amount of the language of John Milton would describe him; and while the
+connotation of this word as humour is different with us, the
+appellation of the English, when you have come to see it in their
+light, hits off the personage very crisply.  To say that such a one
+"talks like a ha'penny book" is, as the English say, "a jolly good
+job."  And a hotel certainly is presented as full when it is pronounced
+"full up."  A "topper" would be only one kind of a hat.  Very well,
+then it is quite possible, we see, to be "all fed up," as they say in
+England, with English slang.
+
+Humorous Englishmen sometimes rather fancy our slang; and make naive
+attempts at the use of it.  In England, for instance, a man "gets the
+sack" when he is "bounced" from his job.  So I heard a lively
+Englishman attracted by the word say that so and so should "get the
+bounce."
+
+In writing, the Englishman usually employs "the language."  He has his
+yellow journals, indeed, which he calls "Americanised" newspapers.  But
+crude and slovenly writing certainly is not a thing that sticks out on
+him.  What a gentlemanly book reviewer he is always!  We have here in
+the United States perhaps a half dozen gentlemen who review books.  Is
+it not true that you would get tired counting up the young English
+novelists who are as accomplished writers as our few men of letters?
+The Englishman has a basketful of excellent periodicals to every one of
+ours.  And in passing it is interesting to note this.  When we are
+literary we become a little dull.  See our high-brow journals!  When we
+frolic we are a little, well, rough.  The Englishman can be funny, even
+hilarious, and unconsciously, confoundedly well bred at the same time.
+But he does have a rotten lot of popular illustrated magazines over
+there compared to ours.
+
+When you return from a sojourn of several months in the land of "the
+language" you are immediately struck very forcibly by the vast number
+of Americanisms, by the richness of our popular speech, by the "punch"
+it has, and by the place it holds in the printed page at home.  In a
+journey from New York I turned over in the smoking-car a number of
+papers I had not seen for some time, among them the New York _Evening
+Post_, _Collier's_, _Harper's_, _Puck_, and the Indianapolis _News_.
+Here, generally without quotation marks and frequently in the editorial
+pages, I came across these among innumerable racy phrases: nothing
+doing, hot stuff, Right O!, strong-arm work, some celebration, has 'em
+all skinned, mad at him, this got him in bad, scared of, skiddoo, beat
+it, a peach of a place, get away with the job, been stung by the party,
+got by on his bluff, sore at that fact, and always on the job.  I
+learned that the weather man had put over his first frost last night,
+that a town we passed had come across with a sixteen-year-old burglar,
+and that a discredited politician was attempting to get out from under.
+Perhaps it is not to be wondered at that the Englishman frequently
+fails to get us.
+
+You note a change in the whole atmosphere of language.  A pronounced
+instance of this difference is found in public signs.  You have been
+seeing in English conveyances the placards in neat type posted about
+which kindly request the traveller not to expectorate upon the floor of
+this vehicle, as to do so may cause inconvenience to other passengers
+or spread disease, and so forth and so on.  Over here:
+
+  _Don't Spit_?
+  _This means You_!
+
+This is about the way our signs of this kind go.  Now what about all
+this?  I used to think many person just returned from England
+ridiculously affected in their speech.  And many of them are--those who
+say caun't when they can't do it unconsciously.  That is, over here.
+In Britain, perhaps, it is just as well to make a stagger at speaking
+the way the Britains do.  When you accidently step on an Englishman's
+toe, it is better to say "I'm sorry!" or simply "sorry," than to beg
+his pardon or ask him to excuse you.  This makes you less conspicuous,
+and so more comfortable.  And when you stay any length of time you fall
+naturally into English ways.  Then when you come back you seem to us,
+to use one of the Englishman's most delightful words, to "swank"
+dreadfully.  And in that is the whole story.
+
+Mr. James declares that in the work of two equally good writers you
+could still tell by the writing which was that of the Englishman and
+which that of the American.  The assumption of course is that where
+they differed the American would be the inferior writer.  Mr. James
+prefers the English atmosphere.  And the Englishman is inclined to
+regard us in our deviation as a sort of imperfect reproduction of
+himself.  What is his is ours, it is true; but what's ours is our own.
+That is, we have inherited a noble literature in common.  But we write
+less and less like an Englishman all the while.  Our legacy of language
+brought over in the Mayflower has become adapted to our own
+environment, been fused in the "melting-pot," and quickened by our own
+life to-day.  Whether for better or for worse--it may be either--the
+literary touch is rapidly going by the board in modern American
+writing.  One of the newer English writers remarks: "A few carefully
+selected American phrases can very swiftly kill a great deal of dignity
+and tradition."
+
+Why should we speak the very excellent language spoken in the tight
+little isle across the sea?  In Surrey they speak of the "broad Sussex"
+of their neighbours in the adjoining county.  Is it exactly that we
+caun't?  Or that we just don't?  Because we have an article more to our
+purpose, made largely from English material, but made in the United
+States?
+
+XIV
+
+HUNTING LODGINGS
+
+Some people say that it is the most awful trial.
+
+But it isn't so at all.
+
+One of the most entertaining things that can be done in the world, so
+full of interesting things, is to go hunting lodgings.  Also, it is one
+of the most enlightening things that can be done, for, pursued with
+intelligence and energy, it gives one an excellent view of humankind;
+that is, of a particularly human kind of humankind.  It is a confoundly
+Christian thing to do--hunting lodgings--because it opens the heart to
+the queer ways, and speech, and customs of the world.
+
+Now, I myself hunt lodgings as some men hunt wild game.
+
+Nothing is better when one is out of sorts, somewhat run down, and
+peevish with the world generally than to go out one fine afternoon and
+hunt lodgings In some remote part of town.
+
+When in a foreign city, especially, the first thing I myself do, as
+soon as I am comfortably settled somewhere--and after, of course,
+having looked up the celebrated sights of the place, the Abbey, the
+Louvre, Grant's Tomb---is to put in a day or so hunting lodgings.
+
+Even to read in the papers of lodgings to let is refreshing and
+educational.  All lodgings are "sunny"--in the papers.  They are let
+mainly by "refined" persons, and are wonderfully "quiet."  I remember
+last summer in London there was "a small sitting to let to a young
+lady."  Lodgings, by the way, are usually "apartments" in England, as
+you know.  Though, indeed, it is true that when a gentleman rents over
+there what we call a "furnished room" he is commonly said to "go into
+lodgings."  A fine phrase, that; it is like to that fine old expression
+"commencing author."  And that reminds me: the most fascinating
+lodgings to hunt, perhaps, anywhere, are called "chambers."  These
+which I mean are in the old Inns of Court in London.  And the most
+charming of these remaining is Staple Inn, off Holborn.  I used
+frequently to hunt chambers in "the fayrest Inne of Chancerie."  There
+are no "modern conveniences" there.  You draw your own water at a pump
+in the venerable quadrangle, and you "find" your own light.  But to
+return:
+
+There was also last summer an apartment to let to a "respectable man"
+or, the announcement said, it "might do for friends."  One of the
+reasons why many people are bored by hunting lodgings is that they are
+not humble in spirit.  They seek proud lodgings.
+
+As to apartment houses, which are a very different matter: the
+newspapers publish at various seasons of the year copious
+Apartment-House Directories, with innumerable half-tone illustrations
+of these more or less sumptious places.  And these directories are
+competent commentaries on their subject.  George Moore remarked, "With
+business I have nothing to do--my concern is with art."  Except that I
+live in one, with apartment houses I have nothing to do--my concern is
+with lodgings.
+
+There is only one philosophical observation to be made upon apartment
+houses.  And that is this: How can all these people afford to live in
+them?  When you go to look at apartments you are shown a place that you
+don't like particularly.  You don't think, Oh, how I'd just love to
+live here if I could only afford it!  But you ask the rental as a
+matter of form.  And you learn that this apartment rents for a sum
+greater (in all likelihood) than your entire salary.  And yet, there
+are miles and miles of apartment houses even better than that.  And
+goodness knows how many thousand people live in them!  People whose
+names you never see in the newspapers as ones important in business, in
+society, art, literature, or anything else.  Obscure people!  Very
+ordinary people!  Now where do they get all that money?  But about
+lodgings:
+
+I one time went to look at lodgings in Patchin Place.  I had heard that
+Patchin Place was America's Latin Quarter.  I thought it would be well
+to examine it.  Patchin Place is a cul-de-sac behind Jefferson Market.
+A bizarre female person admitted me to the house there.  It was not
+unreasonable to suppose that she had a certain failing.  She slip-slod
+before me along a remarkably dark, rough-floored and dusty hall, and up
+a rickety stair.  The lodging which she had to let was interesting but
+not attractive.  The tenant, it seemed, who had just moved away had
+many faults trying to his landlady.  He was very delinquent, for one
+thing, in the payment of his rent.  And he was somewhat addicted to
+drink.  This unfortunate propensity led him to keep very late hours,
+and caused him habitually to fall upstairs.
+
+Well, I told her, by way of making talk, that I believed I was held to
+be a reasonably honest person, and that I was frequently sober.
+
+"Oh," she said, "I can see that you are a gentleman--in your way," she
+added, in a murmur.
+
+So, you see, in hunting lodgings you not only see how others live, but
+how you seem to others.
+
+It is certainly curious, the places in which to dwell which one is
+shown in hunting lodgings.  Once I was given to view a room in which
+was a strange table-like affair constructed of metal.  "You wouldn't
+mind, I suppose," said the lady of the lodging, "if this remained in
+the room?"
+
+"Oh, not at all," I replied.  "But what is it?"
+
+"Why, it's an operating table," she explained.  "Of course, you know,"
+she added, "that I'm a physician.  And," she continued, "of course I
+should want to make use of it now and then, but not regularly, not
+every day."
+
+To a lady with a patch over her eye with lodgings to let in Broome
+Street I one time stated, by way of being communicative, that I was
+often in my room a good deal doing some work there.  Ah!  With many
+ogles and grimaces, she whispered hoarsely, with an effort at a sly
+effect, that "that was all right here.  She understood," she said.
+Perfectly "safe place for that," it was.  "The gentlemen who had the
+room before were something of the same kind."
+
+As you know, "references" frequently are demanded of one hunting
+lodgings.  To get into a really nice place one must really be a very
+nice person.  "You know, I have a daughter," sighs the really nice
+landlady.
+
+To obtain lodgings in Kensington one must be very well-to-do,
+particularly if one would be on the "drawing room floor."  "I like
+these rooms very much," I said to a prim person there, and I hesitated.
+
+"But I suppose they are too dear for you," she said.
+
+How careful one must be hunting lodgings in England about "extras."
+Lodgings made in the U.S.A. are all ready to live in, when you have
+paid your rent.  But over on the other side, you recall, the rent, so
+amazingly cheap, is merely an item.  Light, "coals," linen, and
+"attendance" are all "extra."
+
+I met an interesting person letting lodgings in Whitechapel.  She was
+not attractive physically.  Her chief drapery was an apron.  This,
+indeed, was fairly adequate before.   But--I think she was like the
+ostrich who sticks his head in the sand.
+
+My sister-in-law, a highly intelligent woman------  There are, by the
+way, people who will think anything.  Some may say that I am ending
+this article rather abruptly.
+
+My sister-in-law, a highly intelligent woman, used to say, in
+compositions at school when stumped by material too much for her, that
+she had in her eye, so to say, things "too numerous to mention."
+
+Anybody who would chronicle his adventures in hunting lodgings is
+confronted by incidents, humorous, wild, bizarre, queer, strange,
+peculiar, sentimental, touching, tragic, weird, and so on and so forth,
+"too numerous to mention."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+MY FRIEND, THE POLICEMAN
+
+To the best of my knowledge and belief (as a popular phrase has it), I
+am the only person in the United States who corresponds with a London
+policeman.  About all you know about the London policeman is that he is
+a trim and well-set-up figure and an efficient-looking officer.  When
+you have asked him your way he has replied somewhat thus: "Straight up
+the road, sir, take your first turning to the right, sir, the second
+left, sir, and then at the top of the street you will find it directly
+before you, sir."  You have, perhaps, heard that the London police
+force offers something like an honourable career to a young man, that
+"Bobbies" are decently paid, that they are advanced systematically, may
+retire early on a fair pension, and that frequently they come from the
+country, as their innocent English faces and fresh complexions
+indicate.  Sometimes also you have observed that in directing you they
+find it necessary to consult a pocket map of the town.  Your general
+impression doubtless is that they are rather nice fellows.
+
+It was in Cheyne Walk that I met my policeman.  I had got off the 'bus
+at Battersea Bridge, and was seeking my way to Oakley Street, where I
+had been directed to lodgings described as excellent.  He was a large,
+fat man, with a heavy black moustache; and he had a very pleasant
+manner.  When I came out that evening for a walk along the Embankment I
+came across him on Albert Bridge, at the "bottom," as they say over
+there, of my street.
+
+"You're still here, sir," he remarked cheerfully.  I asked him how long
+Mr. Whistler's Battersea Bridge had been gone, and he told me I forget
+how many years.  He had seen it and had been here all the while.  In
+the course of time he directed me a good deal about in Chelsea, and so
+it was that I came to chat with him frequently in the evenings, for he
+"came on" at six and was "off" some time early in the morning.
+
+I was a source of some considerable interest to him with my odd foreign
+ways.  "When are you going 'ome?" he asked me one day when our
+friendship had ripened.
+
+"Oh, some time in the fall," I replied.
+
+"In the fall?" he queried in a puzzled way.
+
+"Why, yes," I said; "September or October."
+
+"Oh," he remarked, "in the autumn."  And I heard him murmur musingly,
+"In the fall of the leaves."
+
+Sometimes I met him in the company of his colleague, the "big un," or
+"baby," as I learned he was familiarly called, a very tall man with
+enormous feet clad in boots that glistened like great mirrors, who
+rocked as he walked, like a ship.  My friend had very bright eyes.
+They sparkled with merriment one day when he said to the big un,
+nodding toward me, "He's going 'ome in the fall."
+
+It was a warm evening along the side of old Father Thames.  My friend,
+with much graceful delicacy, made it known to me that a drop of "ile"
+now and then did not go bad with one tried by the cares of a policeman.
+So we set out for the nearby "King's Head and Eight Bells."  When we
+came to this public house I discovered that it was apparently
+absolutely impossible for my friend to go in.  He instructed me then in
+this way: I was to go in alone and order for my friend outside a pint
+of "mull and bitter, in a tankard."  The potman, he informed me, would
+bring it out to him.  The expense of this refreshment was not heavy; it
+came to one penny ha'penny.  The services of the obliging potman were
+gratuitous.  I found my friend in the pathway outside with the tankard
+between his hearty face and the sky.  When he had concluded his
+draught, he thanked me, smacked his lips, wiped his mouth with a large
+handkerchief, and hurried away, as, he said, "the inspector" would be
+along presently.  Just why the inspector would regard "ile" in the open
+air in view of the whole world less an evil than a tankard of mull and
+bitter in a public house I cannot say.  But it may be that as long as
+one is in the open one can still keep one eye on one's duty.
+
+I was hailed several days after this by my friend, who approached
+rapidly.  Well, I thought, he has been very useful to me, and three
+ha'pennies are not much.
+
+"I have something for you," said my friend, somewhat heated by his
+haste.
+
+"You have?" I said.  "What is it?"
+
+"It's a rose," replied my friend.
+
+"A what?" I asked.
+
+"A flower," said my friend, recognising that we did not speak exactly
+the same language.  "You know what that is?"
+
+"Oh, yes.  I know what a flower is," I said.  "Where have you got it?"
+
+"I have secreted it in the churchyard, sir," he replied.  "I'll fetch
+it directly?" he added, and was off.
+
+When he returned through the gloaming he put the flower through my
+buttonhole.  "A lady dropped it out of her carriage," he said; "and I
+thought of you when I picked it up."  He stooped and smelled it.
+"Hasn't it," he said, "a lovely scent?"
+
+I had lived in New York a good while and I had somehow come to think of
+policemen rather as men of action than as poets.  But then in New York
+we do not dwell in a flower garden; we are not filled with a love of
+horses, dogs, and blossoms; and we do not all speak unconsciously a
+literary language.
+
+My friend was very eager that I should let him "hear from" me upon my
+return to the States, and he particularly desired a postcard picturing
+a skyscraper.  So he gave me his address, which was:
+
+"W. C. Buckington, P. C. B. Deyersan, Chelsea Police Station, King's
+Road, Chelsea, S.W."
+
+In acknowledgment of my postcard I received a letter, which I think
+should not remain in the obscurity of my coat pocket.  I wish to submit
+it to public attention as a model of all that a letter from a good
+friend should be, and so seldom is!  There is an engaging modesty in so
+large a man's referring to himself continually with a little letter
+"i."  My correspondent tells me of himself, he gives me intimate news
+of the place of my recent sojourn, he touches with taste and feeling
+upon the great subject of our time, he conveys to me patently sincere
+sentiments of his good will, and he leaves me with much appreciation of
+his excellent nature and honest heart.  Occasional personal
+peculiarities in his style, deviations in unessential things from the
+common form, give a close personal touch to his message.  This is my
+friend's letter:
+
+"DEAR FRIEND--
+
+"It is with Great pleasure for to answer your post Card that i received
+this morning i was very pleased to receive it and to know that you are
+still in the land of the Living i have often thought about you and as i
+had not seen you i thought you had Gone home i have shown the Card to
+Jenkens and the tall one and also a nother Policeman you know and they
+all wish me to Remember them Verry kindly to you they was surprised to
+think you had taken the trouble to write to me they said he is a Good
+old sort not forgetting the little drops we had at the six bells and
+Kings Head.
+
+"P. H.  What do you think of this terrable war it is shocking i have
+just Got the news that a cousin of mine is wounded and he is at Clacton
+on sea he is a Sergt in the 1th Coldstreams Gds got a wife and 4
+Children i have been on the sick list this Last 17 days suffering from
+Rumitism but i am better London is very quiet Especially at Night the
+Pubs Close at 11 m. and half the Lights in the streets are out surch
+Lights flashing all round 2 on hyde Park Corner 2 Lambert Bridge 2 War
+office dear Friend i hope i shall have the Pleasure to receive a Letter
+from you before long Now i think that this is all i have to say at
+present so will close with my best respects to you your
+
+  "Sincere friend
+    "WILLIAM CHARLES BUCKINGTON."
+
+The letter which later I sent him was returned to me by the Post
+Office.  And that is all that I know of my friend, man of ardent nature
+and gentle feeling, lover of flowers, London policeman, gone, perhaps,
+to the wars.  Cheyne Walk would not be Cheyne Walk again to me without
+him.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+HELP WANTED--MALE, FEMALE
+
+The people who (because they think they don't need to) do not read the
+"Help Wanted" "ads" in the newspapers really ought to do this, anyway for
+a week or so in every year.  They are the people, above all others, that
+would be most benefited by this department of journalism.
+
+Now, there is nobody who more than myself objects in his spirit to the
+very common practice of this one's saying to that one that he, or she,
+"ought to" do this or that thing.  Nobody knows all the circumstances in
+which another is placed.  Some people insist upon saying "under the
+circumstances."  But that is wrong.  One is surrounded by circumstances;
+one is not under them, as though they were an umbrella.  Nobody ought to
+say "under the circumstances."  However, this is merely by the by.
+
+It's a queer thing, though, that Mr. Hilaire Belloc, who certainly writes
+some of the best English going, says that "under the" and so forth is all
+right.  Certainly it is not.  But, as I said before, this is not a point
+about which we are talking.
+
+One ought to read want "ads" for many reasons.  For instance, you can
+thus become completely mixed up as to whether or not you are still young.
+"Young man wanted," you will read, "about sixteen years of age, in an
+office."  Goodness gracious!  It does seem that this is an age of young,
+very young, men.  What chance does one of your years have now?  On the
+other hand, you read: "Wanted, young man, about thirty-five."  So!  Well,
+this is an age, too (you reflect) in which people remain young.  There
+are no old folks any more; they are out of fashion.  Witness, "Boy
+wanted, strong, about eighteen."
+
+They (want "ads") ought, particularly, to be read at times when you have
+a very good job.  It is then especially that the reading of them is best
+for you.  They do (or they ought to) soften your arrogance.
+
+If--like Mr. Rockefeller, jr.--I were a teacher of a Sunday school class
+(which, as Mr. Dooley used to say, I am not).  I would say: "The best
+religious teaching is to be found in the help-wanted advertisements in
+the newspapers.  We will take up this morning these columns in this
+morning's papers."
+
+As a matter of fact, if you are out of a job I should strongly advise
+against your reading advertisements for help wanted.  In the first place,
+nobody ever got a job through one of these advertisements.  I know this,
+as the phrase is, of my own knowledge.  Then, the influence of suggestion
+is very powerful in these announcements.  If you are without a position,
+it is depressingly plain to you that you are totally unqualified to
+obtain one again, of any account.  If you have a berth paying a living
+wage, you perceive that some mysterious good fortune attends you, and you
+are made humble by fear for yourself, and compassionate towards others.
+For who are you, in heaven's name, and what the devil do you know, that
+you should make a living in this world!  In this world where there is
+wanted: "Highly educated man, having extensive business and social
+connection.  Must be fluent correspondent in Arabic, Japanese, and
+Swedish, and an expert accountant.  Knowledge of Russian and the
+broadsword essential.  Acquaintance with the subject of mining
+engineering expected.  Experience in the diplomatic service desired.
+Gentleman of impressive presence required.  Highest credentials demanded.
+Salary, to begin, seven dollars."  Knowledge, undoubtedly, is power!
+
+Still, one seeking a position through want "ads" need not altogether
+despair.  A little further down these very catholic columns you will find
+that: "Any person of ordinary intelligence, common-school education not
+necessary, can make $1000 a week writing for newspapers, by our system,
+taught by mail.  Only ten minutes a day before going to bed required to
+learn."
+
+One thing stands out above all others in advertisements for help wanted.
+This is the land of hustle.  Tinker, tailor, candlestick-maker; lawyer,
+merchant, priest; if you are not a "live-wire" you are not "help
+wanted"--"Cook wanted.  On dairy farm, twelve miles from town.  White,
+industrious.  Must be a live-wire!  One that can get results.  No
+stick-in-the-muds need apply!"
+
+Uplifters and governments do not deal a more telling blow at the demon
+rum than do want "ads."  There is no longer any job for the drinker.
+"Bartender wanted.  In a very low place.  Must be strict teetotaler!"
+The student of the help-wanted columns will come to regard it as a very
+great mystery who floats all our "public-houses."
+
+Persons whose outlook on life is restricted to the dull round of one
+occupation and to one class of society will find a decidedly broadening
+influence in the perusal of help-wanted "ads," a liberal and a humane
+education in the subject of the variety and picaresque quality of
+humanity's manifold activities.  And such persons will be made aware of
+their dark ignorance of many matters.  What, for instance (they will say)
+is a "bushelman"?  A great many bushelmen are continually "wanted."  It
+might be well to be one so much in constant demand as a bushelman.  Has
+this welcome character something to do with the delectable grocery trade?
+No, my dears (for though I never saw a bushelman, I'd rather see than be
+one), he engages in the tailoring business, in the sweatshop way (as well
+as I can make out).
+
+There are people wanted in help-wanted "ads" (but not in real life) to do
+nothing but travel in pleasant and historic places as companions to
+wealthy, "refined" persons in delicate health.  There are people wanted
+(in want "ads") to share attractive homes in fashionable country places
+whose duties will be to smoke excellent cigars and take naps in the
+afternoon.
+
+And there are as romantic things to be found among help-wanted "ads" as
+there are in the most romantic romances.  Now, lest it may be thought
+that some of the help-wanted "ads" which I have written right out of my
+head to illustrate the type of each are somewhat fanciful, I will copy
+out of yesterday's paper an advertisement which "Robinson Crusoe" hasn't
+anything on, to put it thusly.  Here you are.
+
+"WANTED--A man (or woman) to live alone on an island, eight miles from
+shore; food, shelter, clothing furnished; no work, no compensation.
+Summer time, Box G, 532 Times, Downtown."
+
+I knew a man once who got several replies to advertisements for help
+wanted.  He bought ten New York papers one Sunday and a dollar's worth of
+two cent stamps.  At ten o'clock in the evening he went out and stuffed
+the ballot-box, I mean the letter box.  He said in his own handwriting
+that he was an excellent man to be manager of "the upper floors of an
+apartment house"; that he was uncommonly experienced in the
+moving-picture business and knew "the screen" from A to izzard; that he
+had edited trade journals from the time he could talk; that he had an
+admirable figure for a clothing model; that he was very successful in
+interviewing bankers and brokers; that he was fond of children; that he
+would like to add a side line of metal polisher to his list; and that he
+certainly knew more about Bolivera than anybody else in the world, and
+would be prepared to head an expedition there by half-past two the
+following day.
+
+That man already had a job that he had got from a want "ad."  He had been
+"copying letters" at home, "light, genteel work for one of artistic
+tastes."  But he found that one could not make any money out of it.
+Because, after one had bought the "outfit" necessary one discovered that
+it was humanly impossible to copy the bloomin' letters in the somewhat
+eccentric fashion required.
+
+He got several replies, as I said, to his replies to want "ads," this
+man.  One was a postcard which read: "Call to-morrow morning about work,
+Room 954, Horseshoe Building, X. Y. Z. Co."  Considering himself a
+gentleman, and being touchy about such things, he was annoyed at this
+manner of addressing him on a postcard.  However he went to the Horseshoe
+Building.  Room 954 had a great many names on the door, names there
+stated to be those of "attorneys," "syndicates," and "corporations,
+limited."  Among these names was that of the X. Y. Z. Co.  Within, one
+side of Room 954 was partitioned off into many little alcoves.  An
+antique, though youthfully dressed, typist, by the railing near the door,
+showed our friend to the X. Y. Z. Co., who was seated at a bleak-looking
+desk in one of the little alcoves.  The alcove contained, besides the
+"Co." (a little whiskered man, wearing his hat and overcoat) and the
+desk, an empty waste basket, and one unoccupied chair.
+
+It was a "demonstrator" that was wanted, on a commission basis, for a
+fluid to cleanse silver.  This alcove, it developed, was merely one of
+many thousand branch offices of the "Co." scattered across the country.
+The "Co's." "factory," he said, was over in New Jersey, a very large
+affair.
+
+Mr. Bivens, that is the name of the gentleman of whom I have just been
+speaking, was invited, too, this time in a letter politely beginning "My
+Dear Sir," to call at the offices of a moving-picture "corporation."
+Asking to see "M. T. Cummings," who had signed the letter, he was
+presented to an efficient-looking person, evidently an elderly, retired
+show-girl, who directly proved him wofully deficient in knowledge of "the
+screen."
+
+His next experience was with a portly, prosperous-looking gentleman who
+had elaborate offices in a very swell skyscraper.  This man wrote an
+excellent business-like letter; he unfolded to H. T. (I always
+affectionately call Bivens "H. T.") admiration-compelling plans for large
+business enterprises, which included a project of taking five hundred
+American business men on a trip through Europe after the war at a cost to
+each one of only four dollars and a half, the balance of the expenses of
+each to be paid for in local business co-operation.
+
+Bivens was taken right into this energetic and enterprising man's
+confidence.  He did considerable outside work for his employer for ten
+days.  On the eleventh day, reporting at the office, he found the
+promoter's secretary and office boy awaiting him, in company with his
+office furniture, outside the locked door.
+
+Bivens next answered an advertisement for a strike-breaker to light
+street lamps, and for a person to distribute handbills at a pay of
+seventy-five cents a day.  But his luck had changed; he never got another
+reply to any answer to a help-wanted "ad."
+
+He thinks this is strange, because he believes (and I know this is true)
+that he writes a letter which would instantly mark him as a man of high
+merit among the multitude.
+
+But I once knew a man who put a help-wanted "ad" in the paper.  He ran a
+hotel, and he advertised for a clerk.  I was stopping at his place at the
+time, I and my three brothers.  And the five of us, Mr. Snuvel (the hotel
+man), I, and my three brothers, used to bring up from the village every
+night for a week (the place was in the country) the mail, which consisted
+of replies to this help-wanted advertisement.  We used large sacks for
+this purpose.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+HUMAN MUNICIPAL DOCUMENTS
+
+A literary adventurer not long since found himself, by one of the
+exigencies incident to his precarious career, turning over in the process
+of cataloguing a kind of literature in which up to that time he had been
+very little read, a public collection of published municipal documents.
+This gentleman had had a notion for a good many years that municipal
+documents were entirely for very serious people engaged in some useful
+undertakings.  He had never conceived of them as works of humour and
+objects of art.  But his disinclination to this department of pure
+literature was dissolved, as most prejudices may be, by acquaintance with
+the subject.
+
+Municipal documents are human documents.  They are the autobiographies of
+communities.  The personalities of Topeka, Kansas, of Limoges, France,
+and of Heidelberg, Germany, rise before the impressionable student of
+municipal documents like the figures of personal autobiography, like
+Benvenuto Cellini, Marie Bashkirtsev, Benjamin Franklin, Miss Mary
+Maclane, Mr. George Moore.
+
+A very touching quality in municipal documents is their naivete--that
+unavoidable and unconscious self-revelation which is much of the great
+charm and value of all autobiographies.  By the way, do statisticians
+really understand municipal documents, or do they think them valuable
+simply because they are full of statements of fact?
+
+Our literary gentleman, at all events, found his task very engaging,
+though as a cataloguer he was much perplexed by the extraordinary
+informality, in one respect, of formal public papers, a curious
+provinciality, as he could but take it to be, of municipalities.  A very
+common neglect, he found, in such publications is to make any mention
+anywhere of the relation to geography of the community chronicling its
+history.
+
+He would read, for instance, that the pamphlet in his hand was the
+"Auditor's Report of Receipts and Expenditures for the Financial Year
+Ending February 10, 1875, for the Town of Andover."  Where, he asked,
+with absolute certainty, was the town of Andover here referred to?  He
+examined the printer's imprint, which was explicit--personally: "Printed
+by Warren F. Draper, 1875."  There was something very friendly about
+this.  Printers of public documents seem to be an amiable, neighbourly
+lot: "Printed at the Enterprise Office," one mentions casually in a
+large, warm-hearted fashion.  Another imprint reads, "Auburn, Printed by
+Charles Ferris, _Daily Advertiser_ Office, 1848," Mr. Ferris, in his
+lifetime, was evidently a very pleasant man, but a little careless of
+what to him, no doubt, were inessential details.  He was thoughtless of
+the dark ignorance in places remote from Auburn of the _Daily
+Advertiser_.  Another prominent Auburnian of the same craft, one W. S.
+Morse, it may be learned from some of the products of his press,
+flourished in 1886.  But, the puzzled cataloguer inquires, was Mr. Morse
+successor to Mr. Ferris, or was he official printer to the Government of
+Auburn, Maine, far from the scene of Mr. Ferris's public services,
+possibly in Auburn, New York?  To these picayune points the breezy
+gentlemen make no reference.
+
+The worker with public documents turns from the title pages to search the
+documents themselves.  Are these the "Proceedings of the Board of Chosen
+Freeholders" of the City of Albany, Missouri, or of Albany, New
+Hampshire?  (A cataloguer has a faint impression that there is an Albany,
+too, somewhere in the State of New York.)  Is this a "Copy of Warrant for
+Annual Town Meeting" of Lancaster, Massachusetts, or New Hampshire, or
+Pennsylvania?  Impossible, he thinks, that there should be no internal
+evidence.
+
+He reads on and on.  He notes the intimate nature of an Article 19: "To
+see if the town will accept a gift from Hannah E. Bigelow, with
+conditions."  He peruses "Selectman's Accounts" of expenditures, how
+there was "Paid on account of Grammar School" such or such an amount; he
+learns the cost of "Hay Scales," the expenses of "Fire Dep't, Cemetery,
+Street Lamps."  He peers behind the official scenes at Decoration Day:
+monies paid out of the public treasury for "Brass Band, Address ($20.00),
+flowers, flags, tuning piano."  He goes over appropriations for "Repairs
+at Almshouse."  He sits with the "Trustees of Memorial Hall," and informs
+himself concerning conditions at the "Lunatic Hospital."  He follows with
+feeling municipal accessions, "purchase of a Road-scraper, which we find
+a very useful machine, and probably money judiciously expended."  But
+more and more amazed at the circumstance as he continues he is left
+totally in the dark as to where he is all the while.
+
+Sometimes the mention, made necessary in connection with plans for some
+public improvement, of a well-known river, say, revealed the town's
+location.  Occasionally the comparative antiquity of the civilisation
+supplied inspiration for a good guess as to its situation--that it was
+the town of that name in New England rather than the one in Oklahoma.
+Multiplied clues of identity, again, built up a case: "Official Ballot"
+(ran the title) "for Precinct W. Attleburough, Tuesday.  Nov.  3, 1896."
+The name "Wm. M. Olin" was given as that of the "Secretary of the
+Commonwealth."  Of the first page that was all.  In heaven's name!
+exclaimed the cataloguer, what commonwealth?  A study of the list of
+candidates on this ballot, giving their places of residence, however,
+fortified one's natural supposition--"of Worcester, of Lynn, of
+Haverhill, of Amherst, of Pittsfield" (ah!), "of Boston."  It is a
+reasonable surmise that this Ballot pertains to the commonwealth of
+Massachusetts.
+
+It is not here stated that the name of its native State is never
+discovered in the whole of any American municipal document.  Often, in
+some indirect allusion, somewhere in the text it may be found.
+Frequently, too, it is true, the State seal is printed upon the title
+page or cover of the volume.  And in instances the name of the State
+stands out clearly enough upon the page of title.  But in case after
+case, in the occupation giving rise to this paper, the only expedient was
+recourse to a file of city directories, collating names of streets in
+these with those mentioned in the documents.
+
+Another curious idiosyncrasy of one branch of public document--which
+informs the labour of cataloguing them with something of the alluring
+fascination of putting together jig-saw picture puzzles ("spoke," in the
+words of Artemas Ward, "sarcastic") is the extraordinary variety of names
+that can be found by municipalities to entitle the Mayor's annual
+eloquence.  This versatile character may deliver himself of an Annual
+Address, Message, Communication, Statement, or of "Remarks."
+
+A cataloguer was surprised to discover, in "An Act to Incorporate and
+Vest Certain Powers in the Freeholders and Inhabitants of the village of
+Brooklyn, in the County of Kings," the prophetic enlightenment of the
+Inhabitants of that village in the year 1816.  The voice of Andrew
+Carnegie, Colonel Roosevelt, and Prof. Brander Matthews speaks in the
+following passage: "That the section of the town of Brooklyn, commonly
+known as 'The Fire District,' and contained within the following bounds,
+viz.: Beginning at the public landing south of Pierpont's distillery,
+formerly the property of Philip Livingston, deceased, on the East River,
+thence running along the public road leading from said landing to its
+intersection with Redhook lane, thence along Redhook lane to where it
+intersects Jamaica turnpike road, thence a North East course to the head
+of the Wallabaght mill-pond, thence thro the centre of said mill pond to
+the East river, and thence down the East river to the place of beginning,
+shall continue to be known and distinguished by the Name of the Village
+of Brooklyn."  "Thro" certainly is phonetic spelling.
+
+It was the sterling character of these villagers that then laid the
+foundation for the better half of a mighty city to come.  The "act"
+concludes: "And then and there proceed to elect Five discreet
+freeholders, resident within said village, to be trustees thereof."  So
+witness is borne to this vernacular quality of discretion in the twilight
+of Brooklyn history.
+
+The aesthetic consideration of municipal documents has not received much
+attention.  The format of a municipal document, however, is in itself a
+delightful essay in unconscious self-characterisation.  Those of the
+United States express a plain democratic people.  They have, in fact, all
+the commonness of the job printer.  "Printed at the _Journal_ Office,"
+is, indeed, their physical character.
+
+The municipal documents of Great Britain are usually bound, in good
+English book-cloth, that peculiar fabric to which the connoisseur of
+books is so sensitive, and which, for some inexplicable reason, it is,
+apparently, impossible to manufacture in this country; or in neat boards,
+with cloth backs.  Or if in paper it is of an interesting colour and
+texture.  A noble heraldic device, the coat of arms of the city or
+borough, is stamped in gold above, or below, the title.  This is repeated
+upon the title-page, the typography of which is not without distinction.
+The paper has more refinement than that used in such American
+publications.  The effect, in fine, is of something aristocratic.  The
+"Mayoral Minutes" of Kensington is rather a handsome quarto volume.
+
+An added touch of distinction is given these British volumes by the
+presentation card, tipped in after the front cover.  A really exquisite
+little thing is this one: it bears, placed with great nicety, its coat of
+arms above, delicately reduced in size; across the middle, in beautiful
+sensitive type, it reads: "With the City Accountant's Compliments"; in
+the lower left corner, in two lines, "Guildhall, Gloucester."
+
+The municipal documents of Germany are very German.  Verwaltungsbericht
+is one of those extraordinary words which are so long that when you look
+at one end of the word you cannot see the other end.  These volumes
+sometimes might possibly be mistaken, by a foreigner, for "gift books."
+Often they are bound, in pronounced German taste, in several strong
+colours in a striking combination.  Buttressing the decorative German
+letters, on cover and title page, appears some one of various
+conventionalisations of the German eagle, made very black, and wearing a
+crown and carrying a sceptre.  In "Verwaltungsbericht des Magistrats der
+Koniglichen Haupt- und Residenzstadt Hanover, 1906-7," the frontispiece,
+the armorial bearings, "Wappen der Koniglichen" and so forth is a
+powerfully coloured lithograph, a very ornate affair, of lions (of
+egg-yolk yellow), armour, and leaves and castles.  These German
+publications are filled with excellent photographs of public places and
+buildings, and extensive unfolding coloured maps and diagrams.  A
+gentleman with a taste for art viewed with much admiration a handsome
+plate of "des Dresdener Wassenwerks."  They contain, too, these volumes,
+multitudes of pictures of distinguished citizens, often photogravures
+from official paintings; these gentlemen sometimes appear decorated with
+massive orders, or again decorated simply with very German expressions of
+countenance.  The "Chronik der Haupt- und Reisdenzstadt Stuttgart, 1902,"
+somewhat suggests bound volumes of "Jugend," with its heavy pen and ink
+head and tail pieces, of women marketing, of a bride and groom kneeling
+at the altar, and one, an excellent little drawing of a horse mounting
+with a heavily laden wagon a rise of ground, the driver beside him, and a
+street lamp behind protruding from below (remember this is a municipal
+document).
+
+A quaint little duodecimo is the "Jaarbockie voor de Stad Delft," with
+little headpieces pictorially representing the seasons and a curiously
+wood-cut astrologer introducing "den Almanak."  A rather square-toed kind
+of a little volume, neatly bound in grey boards, and very nicely printed,
+having altogether an effect of housewifely cleanliness, is the "Verslag
+van den Toestand der Gemeente Haarlem over het jaar 1894.  Door
+Burgemeester en Wethouders Uitgebracht aan den Gemeenteraad; imprint
+Gedrukt bij Gebr Nobels, te Haarlem."
+
+The language of Great Britain's municipal documents is lofty: "The Royal
+Burrough of Kensington, Minute of His Worship the Mayor (Sir H. Seymour
+King, K.C.I.E., M.P.) for the year ending November, 1901."  (Here is
+imprinted the design of a quartered shield containing a crown, a Papal
+hat, and two crosses, and, beneath, the motto: "Quid Nobis Ardui.")
+"Printed" (continues the reading) "by order of the Council, 30th,
+October, 1901.  Jas. Truscott and Son, Printer, Suffolk Lane, E.C."  And
+in the following there is something of the rumble of the history of
+England:
+
+  "Addresses
+  Presented from the
+  Court of Common Council
+  to the
+  King.
+
+  On his Majesty's Accession to the Throne,
+  And on various other Occasions, and his Answers,
+  Resolutions of the Court,
+  Granting the Freedom of the City to several
+  Noble Personages; with their Answers,
+  Instructions at different Times to the
+  Representatives of the City in Parliament.
+  Petitions to Parliament for different Purposes,
+  Resolutions of the Court,
+  On the Memorial of the Livery, to request
+  the Lord Mayor to call a Common Hall;
+  For returning Thanks to Lord Chatham,
+  And his Answer;
+  For erecting a Statue in Guildhall,
+  to
+  William Beckford, Esq.; late Lord Mayor,
+  Agreed to between the 23d October, 1760, and the
+  13th. October, 1770
+  Printed by Henry Fenwick, Printer to the Honorable
+  City of London."
+
+Henry Fenwick, Esq., takes himself with dignity.
+
+But to turn from the pomp of state, to peep for a moment at the intimate
+life of the people of England a couple of centuries ago, few things could
+be better than "The Constable's Accounts of the Manor of Manchester,"
+from which a few items of "Disbursements" are cited;
+
+  "Pd. Expences apprehending two Felons....    -/1/-
+  "Pd. Expences maintaining them two Nights
+      in the Dungeon ......................    -/2/-
+  "To Ann Duncan very ill to take her over into
+      Ireland .............................    -/4/-
+  "To Straw for the Dungeon ...............    -/4/-
+  "To Belman sundry public Cries ..........    -/7/6
+  "To three pair of Stockings and dying for the
+      Beedle ..............................    -/9/-
+  "To Wine drinking Royal healths the Prince's
+      birthday at his full age ............    3/16/6
+  "To a distressed Sailor to Leverpoole ...    -/1/-
+  "Pd. Boonfire on King's Coronation Day ..    -/6/6
+  "Gave Nancy Mackeen a Stroller ..........    -/-/6
+  "Pd. Musicians at rejoicing for good news
+      from Germany, and on birth of the Prince
+      of Wales ............................    2/7/-
+  "Pd. for a Cat with nine Tails ..........    -/3/-
+  "To a lame Stranger .....................    -/1/-
+  "Pd. lighting Lamps last Dark ...........    -/2/6
+  "Several Fortune Tellers Indicted, etc...    -/12/-
+  "Pd. Lawyer Nagave advising Roger Blomely's
+      Case bringing Actions agt. the Constable
+      for putting him in the Dungeon for being
+      drunk on Sunday in time of divine
+      Service ..............................   l/l/-"
+
+It is interesting to note in this connection that on August 16, 1762, was
+"Pd." one "Barnard Shaw maintenance of Rioters and Evidence, 1-11-6."
+
+A circumstance of considerable human interest, too, and one possibly
+little known, is the great aversion to the sight of bears held by the
+inhabitants of the Isle of Wight, at least in the year 1891.  A copy of
+the "Bye-Laws" of the "Administrative County of the Isle of Wight,"
+issued that year, contains, following articles relating to "Regulating
+the Sale of Coal" and "Spitting," this:
+
+"As to Bears.
+
+"1. No bear shall be taken along or allowed to be upon any highway,
+unless such bear shall be securely confined in a vehicle closed so as to
+completely hide such bear from view.
+
+"2. Any person who shall offend against this Bye-law shall be liable to a
+fine not exceeding in any case five pounds."
+
+"Atti del Municipale!  Atti del Consiglio Comunale di Siena.  Bollettino
+Degli atti Pubblicati Dalla Giunta Municipale di Roma."  It is fitting
+that quartos of such titles as these, containing addresses beginning
+Signori Consiglieri and Onorevoli Signori, should look something like
+Italian opera, and be bound in vellum, title and date stamped in gold on
+bright red and purple labels, with sides of mottled purple boards, and
+imprints such as "Bologna.  Regia Tipografia Fratelli Merlani," and of
+typography the best.  And on genuine paper, far from the woodpulp of
+American municipal graft contracts.
+
+Once, indeed, municipal documents were august pages.  Some of the early
+Italian and German are on paper that will last as long as the law.  And
+in these times the title pages of municipal documents were Piranesiesque:
+massive architectural scroll work framing stone tablets, hung with
+garlands of fruit and grain, and decorated with carved lions, human
+heads, and histrionic masks.  And initial letters throughout to
+correspond.
+
+Now who but France would bind her municipal documents in heavily tooled,
+full levant morocco, with grained silk inside covers?
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+AS TO PEOPLE
+
+It is a very pleasant thing to go about in the world and see all the
+people.
+
+Among the finest people in the world to talk with are scrubwomen.
+Bartenders, particularly those in very low places, are not without
+considerable merit in this respect.  Policemen and trolley-car conductors
+have great social value.  Rustic ferry-men are very attractive
+intellectually.  But for a feast of reason and a flow of soul I know of
+no society at all comparable to that of scrubwomen.
+
+It is possible that you do not cultivate scrubwomen.  That is your
+misfortune.  Let me tell you about my scrubwoman.  I know only this one,
+I regret to say, but she, I take it, is representative.
+
+Her name--ah, what does it matter, her name?  The thing beyond price is
+her mind.  There is stored, in opulence, all the ready-made language, the
+tag-ends of expression, coined by modern man.  But she does not use this
+rich dross as others do.  She touches nothing that she does not adorn.
+She turns the familiar into the unexpected, which is precisely what great
+writers do.  To employ her own expression, she's "a hot sketch, all
+right."
+
+She did not like the former occupant of my office.  No; she told me that
+she "could not bear a hair of his head."  It seems that some altercation
+occurred between them.  And whatever it was she had to say, she declares
+that she "told it to him in black and white."  This gentleman, it seems,
+was "the very Old Boy."  Though my scrubwoman admits that she herself is
+"a sarcastic piece of goods."  By way of emphasis she invariably adds to
+her assertions, "Believe _me_!"
+
+Her son--she has a son--has much trouble with his feet.  His mother says
+that if he has gone to one "shoeopodist" he has gone to a dozen.  My
+scrubwoman tells me that she is "the only fair one" of her family.  Her
+people, it appears, "are all olive."  My scrubwoman is a widow.  She has
+told me a number of times of the last days of her husband.  It is a
+touching story.  She realised that the end was near, and humoured him in
+his idea of returning before it was too late to "the old country."  One
+day when he had asked her again if she had got the tickets, and then
+turned his face to the wall to cough, she said to herself,
+"_Good_-night--shirt."
+
+But most of the discourse of my scrubwoman is cheerful.  She is a valiant
+figure, a brave being very fond of the society of her friends (of whom I
+hold myself to be one), who works late at night, and talks continually.
+I know that if you would contrive to find favour with your scrubwoman you
+would often be like that person told of by mine who "laughed until she
+thought his heart would break."
+
+The most brotherly car-conductors, naturally, are those with not over
+much business, those on lines in remote places.  I remember the loss I
+suffered not long ago on a suburban car, which results, I am sorry to
+say, in your loss also.
+
+The bell signalling to stop rang, and a vivaciously got-up woman with an
+extremely broad-at-the-base, pear-shaped torse, arose and got herself
+carefully off the car.  The conductor went forward to assist her.  When
+he returned aft he came inside the car and sat on the last seat with two
+of us who were his passengers.  The restlessness was in him which betrays
+that a man will presently unbosom himself of something.  This finally
+culminated in his remarking, as if simply for something to say to be
+friendly, "You noticed that lady that just got off back there?  Well," he
+continued, leaning forward, having received a look intended to be not
+discouraging, "that's the mother of Cora Splitts, the little
+actress;--that lady's the mother of Cora Splitts, the little actress."
+
+"Is that so!" exclaimed one who was his passenger, not wishing to deny
+him the pleasure he expected of having excited astonishment.  A car
+conductor leads a hard life, poor fellow, and one should not begrudge him
+a little pleasure like that.
+
+The conductor twisted away his face for an instant while he spat
+tobacco-juice.  Thus cleared for action, he returned to the subject of
+his thoughts.  "That's the mother of Cora Splitts," he repeated again.
+"She's at White Plains tonight, Cora is.  Cora and me," he said, as one
+that says, "ah, me, what a world it is!"--"Cora and me was chums once.
+Yes, sir; we was chums and went to school together."  Some valuable
+reminiscences of the distinguished woman, dating back to days before the
+world dreamed of what she would become, by one who played with her as a
+child, doubtless would have been told, but the conductor was interrupted;
+a great many people got off, some others got on the car just then, and he
+went forward to collect fares from these, and the thread was broken.
+
+At my journey's end, I recollect, I went into a public-house.  There was
+a person there whose presence made a deep impression upon my memory.  A
+fine stocky lad, with a great square jaw, heavy beery jowls, and a
+blue-black, bearded chin; in a blue striped collar.  He put both hands
+firmly on the bar-rail at a good distance apart; straightened his arms
+taut and his body at right angles with them, so that he resembled a huge
+carpenter's square; then curled his back finely in, and said, with a
+significant look at the man behind the bar, "Gimme one o' them shells."
+A thin glass of beer was set before him; he relaxed, straightened up, and
+drank off its contents.  Then, apparently, feeling that he was observed,
+he looked very unconcernedly all about the room and appeared to be bored.
+He then examined very attentively a picture on the wall, and his neck
+seemed to be temporarily stiff.  I can see him now, I am happy to say, as
+plain as print.
+
+One's mind is, indeed, a grand photograph album.  How precious to one it
+will be when one is old and may sit all day in a house by the sea and, so
+to say, turn the leaves.  That is why one should be going about all the
+while in one's vigour with an alert and an open mind.
+
+Wives are picturesque characters, too.  I mind me of my friend Billy
+Henderson's new wife.  Billy Henderson's wife looks like a balloon.
+She's so fat that she has busted down the arches of her feet.  In order
+to "fight flesh" she walks a great deal.  She walks a mile every day, and
+then takes a car back home.  Her father comes over from Philadelphia once
+every week to see her, because she is so homesick.  For months after she
+was married she just cried all the time, she was so homesick.  She never
+goes to the movies.  The movies make her cry.  One time she saw at the
+movies a hospital scene.  It horrified her for days.  A friend of hers is
+about to be married.  But she has told her friend that she cannot go to
+the wedding.  Weddings always make her cry so.  She just can't read the
+war news; it is too terrible; it affects her so that she can't sleep a
+bit.  She hasn't read any of it at all, and, she says, she has no idea
+who is winning the war.  She takes some kind of capsules to reduce flesh,
+which cost six dollars for fifty.  She has taken twenty-five.  The
+extension of the draft age being spoken of, she said to Billy:
+
+"Dearie, I'll put you under the bed where they won't get you."  She
+doesn't want to vote, and she can't understand why any one should want to
+go to poles and vote and all that kind of thing.
+
+Billy Henderson's wife is handsome; she is rich; she is an excellent
+cook; she loves Billy Henderson.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+HUMOURS OP THE BOOK SHOP
+
+The panorama before his view is the human mind.  He panders to its
+divers follies, consults its varied wisdom.  He stands umbrellaless in
+the rain of all its idiosyncrasies.  Why has he not lifted up his
+voice?  He, the book clerk, that lives among countless volumes of
+confessions!  Whose daily task is to wrestle hour by hour with a living
+Comedie Humaine!  Has the constant spectacle of so many books been
+astringent in its effect upon any latent creative impulse?  Or has he
+been dumb in the colloquial sense, forsooth; a figure like Mr.
+Whistler's guard in the British Museum?  Sundry "lettered booksellers"
+of England have, indeed, given us some reminiscences of bookselling and
+its humours.  But they were the old boys.  They belonged to an old
+order and reflected another day.  "As physicians are called 'The
+Faculty' and counsellors-at-law 'The Profession,'" writes Boswell, "the
+booksellers of London are called 'The Trade.'"  Let us look into this
+Trade as it is to-day, we said.  So for a space we played we were a
+book clerk.
+
+There are two, decidedly contradictory, popular conceptions of the man
+whose business it is to sell books.  One is the sentimental notion of
+an old gentleman in a "stovepipe hat," a dreamer and an idealist, who
+keeps a second-hand stall.  The most delightful pictures of him are in
+the pages of Anatole France.  He is a man of much erudition.  And books
+are his wife and family, food and drink.  Then there is the other idea.
+"Why is it," we report the remark of an important looking gentleman in
+a high hat, "that clerks in book stores never know anything about
+books?" (or anything else, was perhaps not far from his thought.)  This
+gentleman, it was readily perceived, had an idea that he had said
+something rather good.  But it was not new.  This conception of the
+book clerk is one of the world's seven jokes--brother to that of the
+mother-in-law.  The book clerk of this view is a familiar figure in the
+pages of humour, like the talkative barber or the comic Irishman of the
+vaudeville stage--a stock character.  His illiteracy is classic; his
+ignorant sayings irresistable.  He was sired by Charles Keene and
+damned by Punch.  Phil May was his godfather; and every industrious
+humourist employs him periodically.  These two ideas of the book
+business are perhaps reconciled by the popularly cherished sentiment
+that book sellers are not what they were.  Newspapers from time to time
+print feature articles about the days "When Book Sellers Knew Books."
+If you ask a salesman in a modern book shop if he has "Praed," you of
+course expect him to reply, "I have, sir (or madam), but it doesn't
+seem to do any good."
+
+Well, at the Zoo there is humour from the inside looking out, as well
+as from the outside looking in.  The book clerk is in the position to
+remark certain human phenomena patent to him beyond the view of any
+other, most curious, perhaps, among them a pleasant hypocrisy.  "Oh!"
+purls a sweet lady, pausing to glance for the space of a second at her
+surroundings, "I think books are just fine!"  "I love to be in a book
+store," rattles a vivacious young woman.  "Books have the greatest
+fascination for me," says another.  A young lady waiting for friends
+looks out of the front door the entire time.  Her friends express
+regret at having kept her waiting.  "Oh!" she exclaims, "I have been so
+happy here"--glancing quickly around at the books--"I should just like
+to be left here a couple of years."  There is a respectful pause by all
+for an instant, each bringing into her face an expression of adoration
+for the dear things of the mind.  Then, chatting gaily, the party
+hastens away.  We turn to hear, "Oh, wouldn't you love to live in a
+book shop!"
+
+What is it that all men say in a book shop?  The great say it, even,
+and the far from great.  Each in his turn looks solemnly at his
+companion or at the salesman and says: "Of the making of books there is
+no end."  Then each in his turn lights into a smile.  He has said
+something pretty good.
+
+"There are persons esteemed on their reputation," says the "Imitation
+of Christ," "who by showing themselves destroy the opinion one had of
+them." Though one might think it would be the other way, it is
+difficult, indeed, to sell a book to a friend of the author.  "Oh, I
+know the man who wrote that," is the reply.  "I wouldn't read a book of
+his."  You see, a great writer must be dead.  A common error of book
+buyers is to confuse the words edition and copy.  "Let me have a clean
+edition of this," is frequently asked.  Once a lady asked for something
+"bound in gingham."  No one, it is our belief, ever sold a light book
+to a Japanese.  They are the book clerk's dread.  Terribly intelligent,
+somewhat unintelligible in their handling of our language, they always
+want something exceedingly difficult to find, something usually on
+military or political science, harbour construction or the most
+recondite form of philosophy.
+
+Then there are the remarkable people who "keep up" with the flood of
+fiction; who say, "Oh, I've read that," in a tone which implies that
+they are not so far behind as that!  "Have you no new novels?" they
+inquire.  Novels get "old," one might suppose, like eggs, in a couple
+of days.  The quest of these seekers of books suggests the story of the
+lady at a public library who, upon being told that seven new novels had
+come in that morning, said, "Give me, please, the one that came in
+last."  There are, too, those singular folks who appear regularly every
+year just before Christmas, buy a great quantity of books for presents,
+and disappear again until the next year just before the holiday season.
+What, we have wondered, do they do about books the rest of the time?
+Ministers are always very trying characters to book clerks.  "Beware of
+the gallery," says a fellow serf to us, "there's a minister browsing
+around up there."  The official servants of the Lord fall, in the book
+clerk's mind, into that class technically described by him as
+"stickers." All gentlemen wearing high hats also belong to this
+classification.  Deaf customers are embarrassing, for the reason that
+one always addresses one's next customer as though he were deaf, too.
+Foreigners are invariably very polite to clerks.  They bow when they
+enter and take off their hats upon leaving.  Very respectful people.
+"There," said a fellow thrall, "come two old women in at the door.
+Now, if I were my ancestor, I'd dance around that table with a stone
+club and brain them."  As it is, they ask, "Have you Hopkinson Smith's
+'Gondola Days'?"  He says, "I think so."  A lady, very rich and
+important looking, wants a book "without an unpleasant ending."  "I
+wonder how this is" (looking at the last page).  "No" (closing the book
+with a thump), "that won't do."  A gentleman orders two sets of the
+Prayer Book and Hymnal, to be marked upon the cover with his name, the
+words Grace Church and his pew number.  He informs us that every year
+while he is away in the summer his set of these books is stolen.
+
+'Tis a merry life, the book clerk's, and a hard one.  Customers: Two
+youngish women.  "Can you wait on us?"  They want to get something, do
+not know just what, for a present.  "Oh, no!" they say, "we don't want
+anything like so big a set as that.  Something nicely bound."  A copy
+of "Cranford" is near by.  "Oh, when I read it I didn't think it much
+good." "Poetry?"  "No, I don't think she is much interested in poetry."
+"Do you suppose an art book?"------"No, she is not interested in art."
+"Memoirs, then?"  "No, she would not care for that."  "Why, I had no
+idea," said one somewhat reprovingly to us, "that it would be as hard
+as this."
+
+A calling which requires the practitioner to turn easily from the
+recondite gentleman inquiring the author of "Religious Teachers of
+Ancient Greece" to consideration of the problem (no less recondite) of
+a lady anxious to find something to entertain a child of five and a
+half inculcates some degree of mental agility.  "I want," said the very
+fashionable lady, "to get a book for an old man--a" (with some
+petulance) "very stupid old man."  "I want," from a serious old lady,
+"to get a book for a young man studying for the ministry."  "I want,"
+exclaimed a very smart apparition, "a dashing book for a man!"  "What
+is the best book on Russia?"  "Do you know, now, if this is a good
+story?--there are so many poor books nowadays."  Says a large,
+uncommonly black lady, "I want 'Spears of Wheat, No. 3.'"  (Discovered
+to be a prayer book.)  "I want the latest book, please, on how to bring
+up a baby."  "I'd like to see what you have on 'physical research.'"
+"Can you recommend a book for a young man with softening of the brain?
+Poor fellow, he's in Bloomingdale."  "Is there any discount to
+Christian workers?"  "Do you know," a demure person, an awful blank
+look coming over her face, "what I want has gone quite out of my head."
+There is an appealing look for help.  "Something American," in a
+patrician voice, "for the ladies to read going over on the boat.  This
+is American, now, is it?  New York society?  Ah, very good!  Have you
+anything about the Rocky Mountains, or that sort of thing?"
+
+Now we see coming the man who has been directed in a letter from his
+wife to get a certain book, about which he knows nothing, and the title
+of which he can not decipher.  Here is a person asking for "comfort
+books" for the sick.  Here is Mrs. So-and-So, who tells us her husband
+is very ill, unconscious; she has to sit up by him all night, and must
+have something "very amusing" to divert her mind.  Here is the angry
+man to whom by mistake was sent a book inscribed "to my good wife and
+true." Heaven help the poor book clerk when the same good wife and true
+comes in with her present of a naughty book with humorous remarks
+written in it!
+
+Now, how do you like the job?
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+THE DECEASED
+
+I think it was William Hazlitt's brother who remarked that "no young
+man thinks he will ever die."  Whoever it was he was a mysterious
+person who lives for us now in that one enduring observation.  That is
+his "literary remains," his "complete works."  And many a man has
+written a good deal more and said a good deal less than that concerning
+that "animal, man" (in Swift's phrase), who, as Sir Thomas Browne
+observes, "begins to die when he begins to live."
+
+No young man, I should say, reads obituary notices.  They are hardly
+"live news" to him.  Most of us, I fancy, regard these "items" more or
+less as "dead matter" which papers for some reason or other are obliged
+to carry.  But old people, I have noticed, those whose days are
+numbered, whose autumnal friends are fast falling, as if leaf by leaf
+from the creaking tree, those regularly turn to the obituary column,
+which, doubtless, is filled with what are "personals" for them.
+
+And yet, if all but knew it, there is not in the press any reading so
+improving as the "obits" (to use the newspaper term), none of so
+softening and refining a nature, none so calculated to inspire one with
+the Christian feelings of pity and charity, with the sentiment of
+malice toward none, to bring anon a smile of tender regard for one's
+fellow mortals, to teach that man is an admirable creature, full of
+courage and faith withal, constantly striving for the light,
+interesting beyond measure, that his destiny is divinely inscrutable,
+that dust unto dust all men are brothers, and that he, man, is (in the
+words of "Urn Burial") "a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous
+in the tomb."  I doubt very much indeed whether any one could read
+obituaries every day for a year and remain a bad man or woman.
+
+In many respects, the best obituaries are to be found in country
+papers.  There, in country papers, none ever dies.  It may be because,
+as it is said, the country is nearer to God than the town.  But so it
+is that there, in country papers, in the fulness of time, or by the
+fell clutch of chance, one "enters into his final rest," or "passes
+from his earth life," or one "on Wed. last peacefully accepted the
+summons to Eternity," or "on Thurs." (it may be) "passed to his eternal
+reward."  "Died" is indeed a hard word.  It has never found admittance
+to hearts that love and esteem.  Whitman (was it not?) when he heard
+that Carlyle was dead went out in the night and looked up at the stars
+and said that he did not believe it.  Even so, are not all who take
+their passing "highly esteemed" in country papers?  In small places,
+doubtless, death wears for the community a more tragic mein than in
+cities, where it is more frequent and where we knew not him that lies
+on his bier next door but one away.  In the country places this man who
+is now no longer upright and quick was a neighbour to all.  And the
+provincial writer of obituaries follows a high authority, another
+rustic poet, deathless and known throughout the world, who sang of his
+Hoosier friend "he is not dead but just away."
+
+When one enters upon his last role in this world, which all fill in
+their turn, he becomes in rural journals that personage known
+throughout the countryside as "the deceased."  It might be argued that,
+alas! the only thing you can do with one deceased is to bury him.  It
+might be held that you cannot educate him.  That he, the deceased,
+cannot enter upon the first steps of his career as a bookkeeper.  That
+he cannot marry the daughter of the Governor of the State.  That
+whatever happened to him, whatever he accomplished, enjoyed, endured,
+in his pilgrimage through this world he experienced before he became,
+as it is said, deceased.  That, in short, he is now dead.  And that it
+should be said of him, as we say in the Metropolitan press, as a young
+man Mr. Doe did this and later that.  But in places simpler, and so
+more eloquent, than the Metropolis the final fact of one's existence
+colours all the former things of his career.  In country obituaries all
+that has been done was done by the deceased.  In this association of
+ideas between the prime and the close of life is to be felt a sentiment
+which knits together each scene.  This Mr. Some One did not merely
+apprentice himself to a printer at fourteen (as city papers say it) and
+marry at twenty-one.  But he that is now deceased was once full of hope
+and strength (at fourteen), and in the brave days of twenty-one did he,
+that is now struck down, plight his troth.  So, doubtless, runs the
+thought in that intimate phrase so dear to country papers, "the
+deceased."
+
+And there are no funerals in the country.  That is a word, funeral, of
+too forbidding, ominous, a sound to be under the broad and open sky.
+There where the neighbours gather, all those who knew and loved the
+departed from a boy, the "last sad rites are read," and the "mortuary
+services are performed."  Then from the fruitful valley where he dwelt
+after his fathers, and their fathers, he mounts again the old red hill,
+bird enchanted.
+
+He is not buried, though he rests in the warm clasp of the caressing
+earth.  Buried has an inhuman sound, as though a man were a bone.  The
+deceased is always "interred," or he may be "laid to rest," or his
+"interment takes place."
+
+Now, it is in these biographical annals of small places that one finds
+the justest estimates of life.  There folks are valued for what they
+are as well as for what they do.  Inner worth is held in regard equally
+with the flash and glitter of what the great world calls success.  I
+was reading just the other day of a late gentleman, "aged 61," whose
+principal concern appeared to be devotion to his family.  His filial
+feeling was indeed remarkable.  It was told that "after the death of
+his parents, three years ago, he had resided with his sister."  After
+his attachment to his own people, his chief interest, apparently, was
+in the things of the mind, in literature.  He had "never engaged in
+business," it was said, but he "was a great reader," he could "talk
+intelligently on many topics which interested him," and in the circles
+which he frequented he was admired, that is it was thought that he was
+"quite a bright man."  Who would not feel in this sympathetic record of
+his goodly span something of the charm of the modest nature of this
+man?  Again, there was the recent intelligence concerning William
+Jackson, "a coloured gentleman employed as a deck hand on a pleasure
+craft in this harbour," who "met his demise" in an untimely manner.
+Clothes do not make the man, nor doth occupation decree the bearing.
+This is a great and fundamental truth very clearly grasped by the
+country obituary, and much obscured elsewhere.
+
+On the other hand, positively nowhere else does the heart to dare and
+the power to do find such generous recognition as in the obituaries of
+country papers.  The "prominence" of blacksmiths, general store
+keepers, undertakers, notaries public, and other townspeople bright in
+local fame has been made a jest by urban persons of a humorous
+inclination, who take scorn of merit because it is not vast merit.
+Pleasing to contemplate in contrast to this waspish spirit is the noble
+nature of the country obituary, inspiration to humanism.  Here was a
+man, to the seeing eye, of sterling stamp: "He attended public grammar
+school where he profited by his opportunities in obtaining as good an
+education as possible, etc."  Later in life, be became "well and
+favourably known for his conservative and sane business methods," and
+was esteemed by his associates, it is said, "fraternally and
+otherwise."  He was "mourned," by those who "survived" him, as people
+are not mourned in cities, that is, frankly, in a manner undisguised.
+Country obituaries are not afraid to be themselves.  In this is their
+appeal to the human heart.
+
+They are the same in spirit, identical in turn of phrase, from Maine to
+California, from the Gulf to the Upper Provinces.  That is one of the
+remarkable things about them.  You might expect to come across, here or
+there, a writer of country paper obituaries out of step, as it were,
+with his fellow mutes, so to put it, one raising his voice in a
+slightly off, or different key, a trace, in short, of the hand of some
+student of the modes of thought of the world beyond his bosky dell or
+rolling plain.  But it is not so in any paper truly of the countryside.
+And, perhaps, that is well.
+
+A type of obituary which very likely is read rather generally in cities
+is that of slow growth and released from the newspaper-office "morgue"
+as occasion calls.  One such timely and capable biographical account is
+waiting for each of us that is a Vice-President, King, lord of great
+dominions, high commander of armed forces, intellectual immortal of any
+kind, recognised superman in this or that.  Big Chief anywhere, or
+beloved popular idol, nicely proportioned according to our space value.
+Of course, if we are a very great Mogul indeed we get a display head on
+the first page upon the dramatic occasion of our exit.  But, generally
+speaking, this type of matter would run somewhere between the seventh
+and the thirteenth or fifteenth page, according to the number of pages
+of the issue of the paper coinciding with the date of the ending of our
+day's work.  There, if we are pretty important, we should lead the
+column, and take a two-line head, with a pendant "comb."  This,
+altogether, would announce to the passing eye that we went out (as the
+poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson, puts it) in such or such a year of our
+age, that pneumonia, or what not, "took" us, that we were a member of
+one of the city's oldest families, that a family breach was healed at
+the death of our sister, or the general points of whatever it is that
+makes us interesting to the paper's circulation.  We are likely to have
+a date line and a brief despatch from Rome, or Savannah, or wherever we
+happen to be when we shuffle off, stating that we have done so.  This
+to be followed by a "shirt-tail dash."  Then begins a beautifully
+dispassionate and highly dignified recital of the salient facts
+connected with our career, which may run to a couple of sticks, or,
+even, did our activities command it, turn the column.
+
+Or, suppose for the sake of our discussion that your achievements have
+not been quite of the first rank.  You get a one-line head, a sub-head,
+and a couple of paragraphs.  Somebody has exclaimed concerning how much
+life it takes to make a little art.  Just so.  How much life it takes
+to make a very little obituary in the great city!  Early and late, day
+in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, in the
+sun's hot eye of summer, through the winter's blizzard, year after year
+for thirty-six years you have been a busy practising physician.  You
+have lived in the thick of births and life and death for thousands of
+hours.  What you know, and have lived and have seen would fill rows of
+volumes.  You are a distinguished member of many learned societies,
+widely known as an educator.  You are good for about a hundred and
+fifty words.
+
+Perhaps not.  Perhaps you were a person of rather minor importance.
+You are, that is, you were, we will say, an astronomer, or you were a
+mineralogist, or a former Alderman, or something like that.  So you
+call for a paragraph, with a head.  Your virtues (and your vices) have
+been many.  You were three times married.  As Mr. Bennett says of
+another of like momentous history, the love of life was in you, three
+times you rose triumphant over death.  Goodness! what a novel you would
+make.  You call for a paragraph, with a head.  All your clubs are given.
+
+You are doing pretty well.  Many of us, just somebodies but nobodies in
+especial particular, do not have a separate head at all but go in a
+group into the feature "Obituary Notes."  Our names are set in "caps,"
+and we have a brisk paragraph apiece, admirable pieces of composition,
+pellucid, compact, nervous.  Our stories are contained in these
+dry-point-like portraits stript of all that was occasional, accidental,
+ephemeral, leaving alone the essential facts, such as, for instance,
+that we were, say, a civil engineer.  I think it would be well for each
+of us occasionally to visualise his obituary "note."  This should have
+the effect of clarifying our outlook.  Amid the welter of existence
+what is it that we are above all to do?  To thine own self be true.
+You are a husband, a father, and a civil engineer.  That is all that
+matters in the end.
+
+But after all, all obituaries in a great city are for the elect.  The
+great majority of us have none at all, in print.  What we were is,
+indeed, graven on the hearts that knew us, and told in the places where
+we have been.  But in the written word we go into the feature headed
+"Died," a department similar in design to that on the literary page
+headed "Books Received."  We are arranged alphabetically according to
+the first letter of our surnames.  We are set in small type with lines
+following the name line indented.  It is difficult for me to tell with
+certainty from the printed page but I think we are set without leads.
+Here again, frequently, the reader comes upon the breath of affection,
+the hand of some one near to the one that is gone: "Beloved husband of
+------."  And he is touched by the realisation that even in the rushing
+city, somewhere unseen amid the hard glitter and the gay scene, to-day
+warm hearts are torn, and that simple grief throbs in and makes
+perennially poignant a bromidian phrase.
+
+As this column lengthens the paragraphs shorten, until is reached what
+seems to me the most moving obituary of all, that most eloquent of the
+destiny of men.  "ROE.  ------ Richard.  1272 West 96th St., Dec. 30,
+aged 54."  It is like to the most moving line, perhaps, in modern
+literature.  For nowhere else, I think, is there one of such simplicity
+and grandeur as this from "The Old Wives' Tale": "He had once been
+young, and he had grown old, and was now dead."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+A TOWN CONSTITUTIONAL
+
+There is certainly no more grotesque fallacy than that humorously
+bigoted notion so generally entertained, particularly by our friends of
+other nations (at any rate, before the war), that the only thing in the
+world for which we as a people care is success as measured by money.  A
+walk about any day will give this ridiculous idea a black eye.  Any one
+with ears to his head will perceive that we scorn things which are to
+be had for money.  Money!  What is that?  Phew!  Everybody has it.  It
+is mine, it is yours, it is nothing--trash.  Any one with a brain-pan
+under his hat will recognise inside of half an hour that we are
+anything but a nation of shopkeepers spiritually.  It is as plain as a
+pike-staff that we are a nation of perfectly rabid idealists.  It is
+sounded on every side that the things which we most fervently prize,
+inordinately covet, envy possession of, and hold most proudly, are
+precisely those things which the wealth of the Indies would not
+procure.  To wit:
+
+Jimmy was a waiter, humble, but celebrated--as a waiter--among a
+circle.  An admirer of Jimmy's, a journalist continually on the lookout
+for copy, wrote him up for the paper at space rates.  Thence till the
+day Broadway suffered his loss by untimely death did Jimmy fold and
+unfold his worn clipping to exhibit with a full heart this tribute to
+him which was of a kind (as he never failed to say) which "money could
+not buy."  It is reported upon reasonably reliable authority that
+Jimmy's last words, in a faint whisper, were: "Money could not have
+bought------"  And then he went on his way.
+
+So it was, too, with a tobacconist whom I knew--who had an article
+framed which referred to his shop.  "In such a paper, too!" he
+exclaimed a hundred times a day, "money could not have bought it."
+
+Your aunt has a lot of old spavined furniture which would bring about
+tu'pence at public sale.  Some of it was your great-aunt's.  All of it
+has been in the family from time immemorial; and its peculiar and
+considerable value, your aunt and her neighbours are agreed, resides in
+the esoteric fact that it is the kind of thing which "money couldn't
+buy."
+
+Health is a great blessing, and, we are repeatedly told, we should
+prize it beyond measure,--as it is a thing that money will not buy.
+
+His money, it is commonly said of a rich man in bereavement, will not
+bring his son back to life.  The impotency of money in the life of the
+spirit is notorious among us.  Of a deceased miser we declare with
+satisfaction: "Well, he can't take his money with him."  And money--the
+righteous well know--will get none into heaven.
+
+What is the moving theme that holds the multitude at the movie theatre
+bound in a spell?  What is it that answers deep unto deep between the
+literature vended at drug stores and the people?--Concern for money
+overthrown by idealism!  The triumph of ethereal love over the base
+temptation of lucre!  Is it not so: the rich wooer in the top hat and
+the elegant Easter-parade coat is turned away, and the poor lover with
+his flannel shirt open at the collar and a dinner-pail hung upon his
+arm is chosen for bluebird happiness--and the heart of the maligned
+masses is satisfied.
+
+Money (the conviction has passed into an industrious bromideum) will
+not buy happiness.
+
+I knew a man who had a wife; and he was told by sage counsellors that
+if he would treat her right she would give him "what money could not
+buy."
+
+But what need is there to multiply examples?  Take a turn around the
+block and return with the wisdom that money can not buy.  Come; get
+your stick and let us go.
+
+A beneficent Providence, sir, has caused it to be that the finest shows
+in this world are free of all men.  Nature charges no admission fee.
+The dawn and the evening are gratis.  In the matter of art, the
+performances of the little men of the passing hour are to be seen in
+Bond Street, on the Avenue, and at the academies and societies, for a
+price; but those treasure houses of the enduring masterpieces, the
+great museums of the world, demand naught from him that hath nothing.
+A collector of customs sitteth at the golden door of the movies; but
+the far more delightful and far more human shows shown in the show
+windows are quite free for all to see.  And to those blessed ones whose
+eyes have not lost their innocence and whose hearts remain sweet and
+simple the costly spectacles of the world are but tawdry vanity as
+compared with the feasts of entertainment enacted daily in show windows.
+
+One of the very best theatres in this country for entertainments of
+this nature is lower Sixth Avenue, though the Bowery is not to be
+overlooked, and the passionate lover of pleasure should not neglect any
+business thoroughfare which presents a particularly shabby appearance.
+The actors and actresses in these fascinating histrionic presentations
+are not called comedians and tragedians, comediennes and
+tragediennes--but "demonstrators."  The effect of their performances
+thus is twofold: they gratify the spectator's sense of the humorous or
+the curious, and they demonstrate to his intelligence the value of
+something with whose merits possibly he is not acquainted.
+
+There are not many things in life, I think, which you find pleasanter
+than this: You are slightly obstructed in your perambulations on a fine
+afternoon by a small knot of loiterers pausing before a shop window in
+which an active young man of admirably mobile countenance is holding
+forth in dumb show.  Your progress is slackened as you edge about the
+throng with the intention of proceeding on your way.  As it were, you
+poise on the wing.  Then, like a warming liquor stealing through the
+veins, the awakening of your interest in the artful antics of this
+young man makes fainter and fainter your will to proceed on your
+course, until it dies softly away.  What is this ridiculous thing he is
+doing?  By its magnetism it has, at any rate, become for you the
+supreme interest, for the moment, of the universe.
+
+With a horrible grimace the young man yanks fiercely at his cravat.  It
+does not budge, or at least only very slightly.  With still further
+display of energetic effort, accompanied by a ferocious expression of
+pained and enraged exasperation, he yanks again.  No, the cravat is
+stuck fast behind within the collar.  With a gesture of hopeless
+despair and a face of pitiful woe the young man abandons his struggle
+with the ordinary kind of cravat which loops around the neck, and
+which, foolishly enough, is so universally worn.  You see, so his
+eloquent flinging out of the hands saith, it is of no use.  He shakes
+his fist.  Then, registering the extremity of disgust, he rips the
+loathesome, cravat-clogged collar from his neck and flings it from him.
+
+What will he do now? is the thought that holds his audience bound in a
+spell.  Ah!  His face breaks into light.  He snatches up his collar and
+industriously adjusts it without a cravat.  He picks up a small object
+which he holds aloft between thumb and forefinger, turning it this way
+and that.  It is the ready-made bow of a bow tie, the bow and nothing
+more.  Yes, there are patent prongs to it, which he deftly slips
+beneath the wings of his collar.  So!  No trouble whatever.
+Instantaneous.  A smile of luxurious blandness spreads over the face of
+the young man.  Thus he stands for a moment.  Then stoops and places in
+a corner of the window a large card inscribed "Ten Cents."  With a
+pleasing sense of curiosity satisfied, the current of your own life as
+distinct from show-window shows flows back again into your
+consciousness.  You turn, and the great movement of the city takes you,
+although some souls of spacious leisure and of apparently insatiable
+curiosity linger on to drink in the happiness of witnessing a
+repetition of the fascinating exhibition.
+
+Of such shows is the freedom of the kingdom of heaven.  There is the
+other young man in a show window a bit further on who all day long
+gashes blocks of wood with a magic razor, only to sharpen it to greater
+keenness, so that before you he continually cuts with it the finest
+hairs.  There is the young woman garbed as a nurse who treats the corns
+on a gigantic plaster foot.  In show windows cooks are cooking
+appetising dishes; damsels are combing magnificent, patent-medicine
+grown tresses; and in show windows are spectacles of infinite variety
+and without number.  All for the delight without cost of a penny of
+those whose hearts are as a little child.  There is the trim maid who
+folds and unfolds a Davenport couch.  I had a friend one time of a
+roving disposition (alas! he is now in jail) who once got the amazingly
+enviable job of doing nothing but smoke an endless succession of cigars
+in a show window.
+
+Brother (as Lavengro used to say), there is nothing high about the cost
+of pleasure.  But hold! would you, without a thought, pass by here?
+Though this, yon show, is without its rapt throng to do it reverence,
+it is, to an ardent mind, the most enticing, and the most instructive,
+of all the classic exhibitions to be seen from the pavement, the one
+fullest of all of (in the words of one Quinney) "meat and gravy."
+Always tarry, fellow man, before the cheap photographer's.
+
+Any one who has ever been enough interested in human matters to examine
+the sidewalk exhibitions of the cheap photographer does not need to be
+told that the fine old star character there, a character somewhat
+analogous in popular appeal and his permanency as an institution to the
+heavy villain of melodrama, a character old as the hills, yet fresh as
+the morning, is the naked baby.  Nobody ever saw a cheap photographer's
+display without its naked baby.  Just why he should be naked is not
+clear.  However, there is undoubtedly inherent in the mind of the race
+this instinct,--that you should begin your photographic life naked.
+Perhaps this is in response to a sentiment for symbol: naked came ye
+into the world.  Perhaps it is because your face at the time of your
+initial photograph is as yet so uncarved by time that it is deemed more
+interesting to display the whole of you, clothed, as it were, in
+innocence.  The art of painting, of course, from the earliest rendering
+of the Child of the Virgin down to Mary Cassatt, has been fond of
+portraying infants nude,--the photographer may be said only to continue
+a very old tradition.  But painting has always observed the baby with
+ceremonious respect; painting stripped him to admire him and softly
+caress him.  The broad humanity of the cheap photographer "jokes" him,
+as you may say.
+
+The most popular way of presenting the baby at the cheap
+photographer's,--seated, standing, on his back, or on his belly; stark
+naked, or (as sometimes he is found) girded about the loins, or (as,
+again, he is seen) less naked and wearing an abbreviated shirt, and in
+various other stages of habilimentation,--is on a whitish hairy rug.
+No background but the hairy rug.  It is background (very largely), one
+suspects, that gives one the sense of a baby's value.  The idea occurs
+to a thoughtful observer of his photograph that it is to a considerable
+degree from background, surrounding atmosphere, local colour, that the
+baby derives personal identity.  Twenty cabinet-sized naked babies,
+each on a hairy rug:--one conceives how an unscrupulous photographer
+(as may very likely commonly be the case) might save money on
+negatives, after he had a stock of a little variety, by snapping babies
+with an unloaded camera and printing from old plates, without anybody's
+being the wiser.  (Here, indeed, would be a utilitarian motive behind
+the baby's being naked of articles of identification.)  It is, alas!
+undermining to the pride of race to reflect that that photograph of
+one's cousin's fine new baby Edward, which reminded every one so much
+of the infant's mother, may not impossibly have been the original
+likeness of some baby now long extinct.
+
+History, so called, deals exclusively with persons of distinction;
+fiction, though more catholic, sees man in a glamour, with the various
+prejudices this way and that of a mortal eye.  The development of the
+discovery announced by Daguerre in 1839, and first applied to portraits
+by one Draper,--this is the great historian.  The photograph business,
+sir, alone sees life steadily and sees it whole.  Photography is the
+supreme sociologist, master psychologist.  In the sidewalk display of
+the cheap photographer is the poor, naked, human story,--poignantly
+touching, chastening of pride, opening the heart of the responsive
+beholder to deeper knowledge of the inherent kinship of all humankind.
+
+How does the consummate realism of the cheap photographer show its
+babies of yester-year, clothed now in the raiment of mature years and
+simple honours?
+
+That appealing spectacle, the girl who has performed somewhere in
+curiously home-made-looking "tights," and, laughing roguishly at the
+camera, been photographed afterward (from this sight what roue would
+not turn away his sinful eyes in shame and pity?).  The highly
+satisfied young man in the very rented-appearing evening clothes
+(photographed, it is apparent, in the day time).  The blank-looking
+person who for some cryptic reason is enamoured of the studious,
+literary pose, and appears, in effect like a frontispiece portrait,
+glancing up from a writing table (an obviously artificial cigar between
+the fingers of one hand, apparently made of carbon, and, presumably,
+the property of the photographer).  The aspiring amateur boxer, in
+position, with his sparing trunks on and an American flag around his
+waist (or sometimes, in default of trunks, he is seen in his nether
+undergarment).  The jolly girl in boy's clothes (who has not seen
+her?).  The little child in costume performing a cute dance.  The
+coloured beau, a heavy swell, in spats and a van Bibber overcoat.  The
+gay banqueters of the So-and-So Association, around their festive board
+(one man, devilish fellow! holding aloft a beer bottle).  The young
+girl in confirmation attire, standing awkwardly by a table (her slip of
+a mind, as she stands there, very probably less upon her God than upon
+her common, foolish dress).  The team of amateur comedians (sad
+spectacle!).  The bride and groom (perennial as the naked baby)
+standing, curiously enough, upon our old friend, the hairy rug.  The
+family group (all the figures of which have a curious wax-work effect,
+reminiscent of the late Eden Musee).  The policeman, in uniform
+(sitting in a chair of cathedral architecture).  The fireman (a hero,
+perhaps,--though no man is a hero, merely amazingly human, to the cheap
+photographer's camera).  The youthful swains posed beside that
+indestructible stage property of the popular photographer, the
+artificial tree stump.  The immortal woman vain of that part of her
+which Mr. Mantalini referred to as "outline," and careful to keep her
+near arm from obstructing the spectator's view (sometimes she is
+clothed; sometimes simply wound in a sheet; sometimes, in either case,
+she is like the Dowager whose outline Mr. Mantalini described as
+"dem'd").  All these--and many others--are the traditions of the cheap
+photography.
+
+Nobody, apparently, is so unattractive, nobody so poor, nobody wears
+such queer clothes, nobody is so old, or faded, or fat, or "skinny," or
+short, or tall, or black, or bow-legged, or so anything at all, that he
+or she won't pose for a photograph.  So that it may reasonably be said,
+that to have lost the instinct to have one's "picture taken" is to have
+lost the love of life.  Nobody, no doubt, but is interesting to
+somebody.  And, as Stevenson has said, can any one be regarded as
+useless so long as he has a friend?
+
+And when--brother--at length, one has withdrawn forevermore from the
+tawdry stage of the cheap photographer's, a last view is taken of one,
+as it were, in the grave.  Side by side at the cheap photographer's
+with the naked baby and with the bride and groom--is the "floral
+emblem."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+READING AFTER THIRTY
+
+Somewhere in the mass of that splendid, highly personal journalism of
+his, William Hazlitt declares that he was never able to read a book
+through after thirty.  That penetrating man, Samuel Butler, reflecting
+in his "Note-Books" on "What Audience to Write For," says: "People
+between the ages of twenty and thirty read a good deal, after thirty
+their reading drops off and by forty is confined to each person's
+special subject, newspapers and magazines."  Thirty again, you see.
+
+We all have friends who have been omniverous readers, persons who, to
+our admiration and despair, seem to have read everything in
+"literature."  It may have struck us, however, as a curious thing that,
+except possibly in rare instances, such persons appear not to read much
+now, beyond newspapers and magazines.  The upshot of what they are able
+to say, when you ask them why this is true, is that one simply reaches
+a time of life when one "quits reading," as one ceases to dance, or
+cools in interest toward the latest fashions in overcoats.
+
+But, undoubtedly there are persons who continue to read, apparently
+with unabated industry and zest, no matter how old they may become.
+Dr. Johnson, of course, was a constant reader all his life, and would
+cheerfully read anything whether it was readable or not.  Though did
+not he somewhere confess to himself that he did not read things
+through?  Mr. Huneker, who is well on the richer side of thirty, would
+seem to read everything printed about five minutes after it has left
+the press, and before anybody else has had a chance to see it.  There
+are so many capital letters on the pages of his own books that it makes
+one dizzy to look at them.  Whether or not he reads through all the
+books he mentions is of course (as he is a reviewer) a question.  And,
+then, both Mr. Huneker and the Doctor belong to the trade, so to say.
+Another startlingly prodigious reader is Theodore Roosevelt,
+hilariously past thirty, and not exclusively identified with literary
+"shop."  He is continually discovering and vigorously recommending new
+poets and short-story writers whom professional critics have not yet
+had time to get around to.  It does not appear that a fundamental or
+organic change in the composition of the human brain which inhibits
+reading occurs more or less suddenly at thirty.
+
+Why then do so many reading animals cease at about that time to read?
+Butler does not say.  Arnold Bennett (was it not?) has asked what's the
+use of his reading more, he knows enough.  Hazlitt, in his own case,
+surmised that the keener interest of writing rather asphyxiated the
+impulse to read.  And, doubtless, that generally is about the size of
+it.  As in the cure of the drink habit, a new and more intense interest
+will drive out the old.  The reader, of course, is a spectator, not an
+active participant in the world's doings.  After thirty, desirable
+citizens of ordinary energy have little opportunity for the role of
+noncombatant, and the taste of action and of success, like the taste of
+war, makes them impatient with quieter things.  Failures read more than
+successful men.  Bachelors no doubt read much more than husbands.  And
+fathers seldom are great readers.  This last fact may explain the
+observation that even college professors do not read fanatically.  When
+they are "off" awhile they "play with" their children (children are
+great enemies everywhere to reading), who are much more real to them
+than study.
+
+In one of his later books George Moore chronicles his resolve to
+cultivate the habit of reading, to learn to read again.  And he sucks
+much naive pleasure from the contemplation of this prospective
+enterprise; but he finds it very difficult to persevere in it, and
+drifts away instead into reveries of what he has read.  There is a
+thought here, however, to be hearkened to: the idea of learning to read
+again.
+
+What is it that happens to one in consequence of his ceasing to read?
+He suffers a hardening of the intellectual arteries.  There are quaint
+old codgers one knows here and there who declare that in fiction there
+has "been nothing since Dickens."  They are delightful, of course; but
+one would rather see than be one.  We all know many persons whose
+intellectual clock stopped some time ago, and there are people whose
+minds apparently froze at about the time when they should have begun to
+ripen, and which are like blocks of ice with a fish (or a volume of
+Huxley) inside.  Nothing now can get in.
+
+At those times of earnest introspection, when one would "swear off"
+this or that, would reduce one's smoking, would adopt the principle of
+"do it now," and so on--at those times an excellent New Year's
+resolution, or birthday resolution, or first day of the month
+resolution, would be to re-learn to read, to keep, as Dr. Johnson said
+of his friendships, one's reading continually "in good repair."
+
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+ON WEARING A HAT
+
+There is a good deal to be said about wearing a hat.  And yet this
+humorous custom, this rich topic, of wearing a hat has been sadly
+neglected, as far as I can make out, by scholars, scientists, poets,
+composers, and other "smart" people.
+
+Man has been variously defined, as the religious animal, and so on; but
+also, to the best of my knowledge and belief, he is the only animal
+that wears a hat.  He has become so accustomed to the habit of wearing
+his hat that he does not feel that he is himself out of doors without
+it.  Mr. Howells (I think it was) has told us in one of his novels of a
+young man who had determined upon suicide.  With this intent he made a
+mad dash for the sea.  But on his way there a sudden gust of wind blew
+off his hat; instinctively he turned to recover it, and this action
+broke the current of his ideas.  With his hat he recovered his reason,
+and went home as alive as usual.  His hat has come to mean for man much
+more than a protection for his head.  It is for him a symbol of his
+manhood.  You cannot more greatly insult a man than by knocking off his
+hat.  As a sign of his reverence, his esteem, his respect, a man bares
+his head.  Though, indeed, the contentious Mr. Chesterton somewhere
+argues that there is no more reason for a man's removing his hat in the
+presence of ladies than for his taking off his coat and waistcoat.
+
+In the more complex social organisms of Europe the custom of lifting
+the hat to other men whom one thus acknowledges as superiors is much
+more prevalent than in our democratic country.  Though in America we
+remove our hats in elevators upon the entrance of ladies, a practice
+which is not followed in England.  It was Mrs. Nickleby who indicated
+the extreme politeness of the noble gentlemen who showed her to her
+carriage by the celebrated remark that they took their hats "completely
+off."  We express great joy by casting our hats into the air.  If I
+wish to show my contempt for you I will wear my hat in your house; if I
+wish you to clear out of my house I say: "Here's your hat"; if I am
+moved to admiration for you I say: "I take off my hat to you."  I
+greatly enjoy seeing you run after your hat in the street, because you
+are thereby made excessively ridiculous.  The comic Irishman of the
+vaudeville stage makes his character unmistakable to all by carrying
+his clay pipe in his hat band.  The English painter, Thomas
+Gainsborough, gave his name to a hat.  The seasoned newspaper man
+displays his cynical nature and complete disillusionment by wearing his
+hat at his desk.  A hat worn tilted well back on the head indicates an
+open nature and a hail-fellow-well-met disposition; while a hat
+decidedly tilted over one eye is the sign of a hard character, and one
+not to be trifled with.  In the literature of alcoholism it is written
+that a common hallucination of the inebriate is that a voice cries
+after him: "Where did you get that white hat?"  Upon assuming office
+the cardinal is said to "take the hat."  When a man is conspicuously
+active in American political life "his hat is in the ring."  Whistler
+topped off his press-agent eccentricity with a funny hat.  The most
+idiosyncratic hat at present in America is that which decorates the
+peak of Mr. Bliss Carman.  The hat-stands in our swagger hotels make a
+great deal of money; I know a gentleman who affirmed that a hat which
+had originally cost him three dollars had cost him eighteen dollars to
+be got back from hat-checking stands.  Cheap people evade the hat-boy.
+
+When the present enthusiast for the splendid subject of hats was a
+small boy it was the ambition of every small boy of his acquaintance to
+be regarded as of sufficient age to possess what we termed a "dice
+hat," what is commonly called a "derby," what in England they call a
+"darby," what Dickens aptly referred to as a "pot-hat," what, in one
+highly diverting form, is sometimes referred to on the other side as a
+"billycock."  That singular structure for the human head, the derby
+hat, one time well-nigh universally worn, has now gone somewhat out of
+fashion and been superseded by the soft hat of smart design, though
+there are indications, I fear, that the derby is coming in again.  When
+we were young the soft hat was most commonly worn by veterans of the
+Civil War, in a pattern called a "slouch hat" or "Grand Army hat."
+Though, indeed, such romantic beings as cowboys in popular ten cent
+literature and the late Buffalo Bill wore sombreros, and the
+picturesque Mexican a high peaked affair.
+
+Our grandfathers wore "stove-pipe hats"; and the hats of politicians
+were one time frequently called "plug hats."  This male head-dress even
+more extraordinary than the derby, books of etiquette sometimes say you
+should not call a "silk hat" but a "high hat."  In London but a few
+years ago no man ever went into the City with other than a top-hat, or
+"topper" as they say there.  It is said that the going out of general
+favour of the silk hat has been occasioned in a considerable degree by
+the popularity of raincoats in preference to umbrellas.  If you observe
+any great crowd in England to-day you will find in it few hats of any
+kind; it is in the main a sea of caps.  The American "dude" and the
+anti-bellum British "knut" always wore silk hats.  Gentlemen at the
+British race courses and fine old clubmen of Pall Mall affect a white
+or grey top hat, of the sort which was so becoming an ornament to the
+late King Edward.  The opera hat is said to have startled many persons
+who had not seen it before.  Intoxicated gentlemen in funny pictures
+have always smashed their silk hats.  Some men have worn a silk hat
+only on the occasion of their marriage.  High hats are worn by small
+boys in England.  The most useful occupation to-day is that which
+envolves the wearing of a "tin hat."
+
+The day in the autumn fixed by popular mandate when the straw hat is to
+be discarded for the season is hilariously celebrated in Wall Street by
+the destruction by the affronted populace of the straw hats of those
+who have had the temerity or the thoughtlessness to wear them.
+Coloured men in livery stables, however, sometimes wear straw hats the
+year round.  To the habit generally of wearing a hat baldness is
+attributed by some.  And the luxuriant hair of Indians and of the
+cave-man is pointed to as illustrating the beneficent result of not
+wearing a hat.  And now and then somebody turns up with the idea in his
+head that he doesn't need a hat on it.  There is a white garbed
+gentleman of Grecian mould who parades Broadway every day without a hat.
+
+It is indisputable that the hats women wear to-day are more beautiful
+than they have been for generations, perhaps centuries.  Yet this fact
+has met with little expression of appreciation.  This present
+excellence is because women's hats now are the product of intellectual
+design.  In the '80's the idea was entertained that decoration of a
+woman's hat was increased by attaching to it something in the way of
+beads or feathers wherever there was a space free.  A fashionable
+woman's hat to-day may be as simple and, in its way, as effective as
+art as a Whistler symphony; a single splotch of colour, it may be,
+acting as a foil against a rich mass.  Or the hat is a replica, as it
+were, of the celebrated design of a period in history.  But the erudite
+subject of women's hats should not be touched upon without a salute to
+that racy model which crowns the far-famed 'Arriet, whose Bank-holiday
+attire was so delightedly caressed by the pencil of the late Phil May.
+None could forget his tenderly human drawing of the lady with the
+bedraggled feather over one eye who has just been ejected by the
+bar-man, and who turns to him to say: "Well, the next time I goes into
+a public house, I goes where I'm _respected_!"
+
+A hat is distinguished from a cap or bonnet by the possession of a
+brim.  The modern hat can be traced back to the _petasus_ worn by the
+ancient Romans when on a journey; and hats were also thus used by the
+earlier Greeks.  Not until after the Norman conquest did the use of
+hats begin in England.  A "hatte of biever" was worn by one of the
+"nobels of the lande, mett at Clarendom" about the middle of the 12th
+century; and Froissart describes hats that were worn at Edward's court
+in 1340, when the Garter order was instituted.  The use of the scarlet
+hat which distinguishes cardinals was sanctioned in the 13th century by
+Pope Innocent IV.  The merchant in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales had
+
+  "On his head a Flaundrish bever hat";
+
+and from this period onwards frequent mention is made of "felt hattes,"
+"beever hattes," and other like names.  Throughout mediaeval times the
+wearing of a hat was regarded as a mark of rank and distinction.
+During the reign of Elizabeth the caprices of fashion in hats were many
+and various.
+
+The Puritans affected a steeple crown and broad brimmed hat, while the
+Cavaliers adopted a lower crown and a broader brim ornamented with
+feathers.  In the time of Charles II. still greater breadth of brim and
+a profusion of feathers were fashionable features of hats, and the
+gradual expansion of brim led to the device of looping or tying up that
+portion.  Hence arose various fashionable "cocks" in hats; and
+ultimately, by the looping up equally of three sides of the low-crowned
+hat, the cocked hat which prevailed throughout the 18th century was
+elaborated.  The Quaker hat, plain, low in crown, and broad in brim,
+originated with the sect in the middle of the 17th century.  The silk
+hat is an article of recent introduction.  Though it was known in
+Florence about a century ago, its manufacture was not introduced into
+France till about 1825, and its development has taken place entirely
+since that period.  In all kinds of hat-making the French excel; in the
+United Kingdom the felt hat trade is principally centred in the
+neighbourhood of Manchester; and in the United States the States of New
+York and New Jersey enjoy the greater part of the industry.
+
+So much for hats.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Walking-Stick Papers, by Robert Cortes Holliday
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13708 ***