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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Shandygaff, by Christopher Morley
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Shandygaff
+
+Author: Christopher Morley
+
+Release Date: October 13, 2004  [eBook #13739]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHANDYGAFF***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Stephen Schulze and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+SHANDYGAFF
+
+by
+
+CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
+
+1918
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A number of most agreeable Inquirendoes upon Life & Letters,
+interspersed with Short Stories & Skits, the whole most Diverting to
+the Reader
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Photo by Charles H. Davis
+
+CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, AUTHOR OF SHANDYGAFF, WHERE THE BLUE BEGINS, THUNDER
+ON THE LEFT, ETC.]
+
+
+
+
+TITLES AND DEDICATIONS
+
+I wanted to call these exercises "Casual Ablutions," in memory of the
+immortal sign in the washroom of the British Museum, but my arbiter of
+elegance forbade it. You remember that George Gissing, homeless and
+penniless on London streets, used to enjoy the lavatory of the Museum
+Reading Room as a fountain and a shrine. But the flinty hearted
+trustees, finding him using the wash-stand for bath-tub and laundry,
+were exceeding wroth, and set up the notice
+
+  +----------------------------+
+  |                            |
+  |    THESE BASINS ARE FOR    |
+  |   CASUAL ABLUTIONS ONLY    |
+  |                            |
+  +----------------------------+
+
+I would like to issue the same warning to the implacable reader: these
+fugitive pieces, very casual rinsings in the great basin of letters,
+must not be too bitterly resented, even by their publishers. To borrow
+O. Henry's joke, they are more demitasso than Tasso.
+
+The real purpose in writing books is to have the pleasure of dedicating
+them to someone, and here I am in a quandary. So many dedications have
+occurred to me, it seems only fair to give them all a chance.
+
+    I thought of dedicating the book to
+        CLAYTON SEDGWICK COOPER
+          The Laird of Westcolang
+
+    I thought of dedicating to the
+        TWO BEST BOOK SHOPS IN THE WORLD
+          Blackwell's in Oxford and
+          Leary's in Philadelphia
+
+    I thought of dedicating to
+        THE 8:13 TRAIN
+
+    I thought of dedicating to
+        EDWARD PAGE ALLINSON
+      The Squire of Town's End Farm
+        Better known as Mifflin McGill
+          In affectionate memory of
+            Many unseasonable jests
+
+    I thought of dedicating to
+        PROFESSOR FRANCIS B. GUMMERE
+          From an erring pupil
+
+    I thought of dedicating to
+        FRANCIS R. BELLAMY
+      Author of "The Balance"
+        Whose Talent I Revere,
+      But Whose Syntax I Deplore
+
+    I thought of dedicating to
+        JOHN N. BEFFEL
+        My First Editor
+      Who insisted on taking me seriously
+
+    I thought of dedicating to
+        GUY S.K. WHEELER
+          The Lion Cub
+
+    I thought of dedicating to
+        ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY
+          The Urbanolater
+
+    I thought of dedicating to
+        SILAS ORRIN HOWES
+          Faithful Servant of Letters
+
+    But my final and irrevocable decision is to dedicate this book to
+        THE MIEHLE PRINTING PRESS
+      More Sinned Against Than Sinning
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For permission to reprint, I denounce The New York _Evening Post_, The
+Boston _Transcript_, The _Bellman_, The _Smart Set_, The New York _Sun_,
+The New York _Evening Sun_, The _American Oxonian_, _Collier's_, and The
+_Ladies' Home Journal_.
+
+Wyncote, Pa.
+
+November. 1917.
+
+
+
+SHANDYGAFF: a very refreshing drink, being a mixture of bitter ale or
+beer and ginger-beer, commonly drunk by the lower classes in England,
+and by strolling tinkers, low church parsons, newspaper men,
+journalists, and prizefighters. Said to have been invented by Henry VIII
+as a solace for his matrimonial difficulties. It is believed that a
+continual bibbing of shandygaff saps the will, the nerves, the
+resolution, and the finer faculties, but there are those who will abide
+no other tipple.
+
+John Mistletoe: _Dictionary of Deplorable Facts_.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+The Song of Shandygaff
+Titles and Dedications
+A Question of Plumage
+Don Marquis
+The Art of Walking
+Rupert Brooke
+The Man
+The Head of the Firm
+17 Heriot Row
+Frank Confessions of a Publisher's Reader
+William McFee
+Rhubarb
+The Haunting Beauty of Strychnine
+Ingo
+Housebroken
+The Hilarity of Hilaire
+A Casual of the Sea
+The Last Pipe
+Time to Light the Furnace
+My Friend
+A Poet of Sad Vigils
+Trivia
+Prefaces
+The Skipper
+A Friend of FitzGerald
+A Venture in Mysticism
+An Oxford Landlady
+"Peacock Pie"
+The Literary Pawnshop
+A Morning in Marathon
+The American House of Lords
+Cotswold Winds
+Clouds
+Unhealthy
+Confessions of a Smoker
+Hay Febrifuge
+Appendix: Suggestions for Teachers.
+
+
+
+
+A QUESTION OF PLUMAGE
+
+Kenneth Stockton was a man of letters, and correspondingly poor. He was
+the literary editor of a leading metropolitan daily; but this job only
+netted him fifty dollars a week, and he was lucky to get that much. The
+owner of the paper was powerfully in favour of having the reviews done
+by the sporting editor, and confining them to the books of those
+publishers who bought advertising space. This simple and statesmanlike
+view the owner had frequently expressed in Mr. Stockton's hearing, so
+the latter was never very sure how long his job would continue.
+
+But Mr. Stockton had a house, a wife, and four children in New Utrecht,
+that very ingenious suburb of Brooklyn. He had worked the problem out to
+a nicety long ago. If he did not bring home, on the average, eighty
+dollars a week, his household would cease to revolve. It simply had to
+be done. The house was still being paid for on the installment plan.
+There were plumbers' bills, servant's wages, clothes and schooling for
+the children, clothes for the wife, two suits a year for himself, and
+the dues of the Sheepshead Golf Club--his only extravagance. A simple
+middle-class routine, but one that, once embarked upon, turns into a
+treadmill. As I say, eighty dollars a week would just cover expenses. To
+accumulate any savings, pay for life insurance, and entertain friends,
+Stockton had to rise above that minimum. If in any week he fell below
+that figure he could not lie abed at night and "snort his fill," as the
+Elizabethan song naively puts it.
+
+There you have the groundwork of many a domestic drama.
+
+Mr. Stockton worked pretty hard at the newspaper office to earn his
+fifty dollars. He skimmed faithfully all the books that came in, wrote
+painstaking reviews, and took care to run cuts on his literary page on
+Saturdays "to give the stuff kick," as the proprietor ordered. Though he
+did so with reluctance, he was forced now and then to approach the book
+publishers on the subject of advertising. He gave earnest and honest
+thought to his literary department, and was once praised by Mr. Howells
+in _Harper's Magazine_ for the honourable quality of his criticisms.
+
+But Mr. Stockton, like most men, had only a certain fund of energy and
+enthusiasm at his disposal. His work on the paper used up the first
+fruits of his zeal and strength. After that came his article on current
+poetry, written (unsigned) for a leading imitation literary weekly. The
+preparation of this involved a careful perusal of at least fifty
+journals, both American and foreign, and I blush to say it brought him
+only fifteen dollars a week. He wrote a weekly "New York Letter" for a
+Chicago paper of bookish tendencies, in which he told with a flavour of
+intimacy the goings on of literary men in Manhattan whom he never had
+time or opportunity to meet. This article was paid for at space rates,
+which are less in Chicago than in New York. On this count he averaged
+about six dollars a week.
+
+That brings us up to seventy-one dollars, and also pretty close to the
+limit of our friend's endurance. The additional ten dollars or so needed
+for the stability of the Stockton exchequer he earned in various ways.
+Neighbours in New Utrecht would hear his weary typewriter clacking far
+into the night. He wrote short stories, of only fair merit; and he wrote
+"Sunday stories," which is the lowest depth to which a self-respecting
+lover of literature can fall. Once in a while he gave a lecture on
+poetry, but he was a shy man, and he never was asked to lecture twice in
+the same place. By almost incredible exertions of courage and obstinacy
+he wrote a novel, which was published, and sold 2,580 copies the first
+year. His royalties on this amounted to $348.30--not one-third as much,
+he reflected sadly, as Irvin Cobb would receive for a single short
+story. He even did a little private tutoring at his home, giving the
+sons of some of his friends lessons in English literature.
+
+It is to be seen that Mr. Stockton's relatives, back in Indiana, were
+wrong when they wrote to him admiringly--as they did twice a
+year--asking for loans, and praising the bold and debonair life of a man
+of letters in the great city. They did not know that for ten years Mr.
+Stockton had refused the offers of his friends to put him up for
+membership at the literary club to which his fancy turned so fondly and
+so often. He could not afford it. When friends from out of town called
+on him, he took them to Peck's for a French table d'hote, with an
+apologetic murmur.
+
+But it is not to be thought that Mr. Stockton was unhappy or
+discontented. Those who have experienced the excitements of the
+existence where one lives from hand to mouth and back to hand again,
+with rarely more than fifty cents of loose change in pocket, know that
+there is even a kind of pleasurable exhilaration in it. The characters
+in George Gissing's Grub Street stories would have thought Stockton
+rich indeed with his fifty-dollar salary. But he was one of those
+estimable men who have sense enough to give all their money to their
+wives and keep none in their trousers. And though his life was arduous
+and perhaps dull to outward view, he was a passionate lover of books,
+and in his little box at the back of the newspaper office, smoking a
+corncob and thumping out his reviews, he was one of the happiest men in
+New York. His thirst for books was a positive bulimia; how joyful he was
+when he found time to do a little work on his growing sheaf of literary
+essays, which he intended to call "Casual Ablutions," after the famous
+sign in the British Museum washroom.
+
+It was Mr. Stockton's custom to take a trolley as far as the Brooklyn
+bridge, and thence it was a pleasant walk to the office on Park Row.
+Generally he left home about ten o'clock, thus avoiding the rush of
+traffic in the earlier hours; and loitering a little along the way, as
+becomes a man of ideas, his article on poetry would jell in his mind,
+and he would be at his desk a little after eleven. There he would work
+until one o'clock with the happy concentration of those who enjoy their
+tasks. At that time he would go out for a bite of lunch, and would then
+be at his desk steadily from two until six. Dinner at home was at seven,
+and after that he worked persistently in his little den under the roof
+until past midnight.
+
+One morning in spring he left New Utrecht in a mood of perplexity, for
+to-day his even routine was in danger of interruption. Halfway across
+the bridge Stockton paused in some confusion of spirit to look down on
+the shining river and consider his course.
+
+A year or so before this time, in gathering copy for his poetry
+articles, he had first come across the name of Finsbury Verne in an
+English journal at the head of some exquisite verses. From time to time
+he found more of this writer's lyrics in the English magazines, and at
+length he had ventured a graceful article of appreciation. It happened
+that he was the first in this country to recognize Verne's talent, and
+to his great delight he had one day received a very charming letter from
+the poet himself, thanking him for his understanding criticism.
+
+Stockton, though a shy and reticent man, had the friendliest nature in
+the world, and some underlying spirit of kinship in Verne's letter
+prompted him to warm response. Thus began a correspondence which was a
+remarkable pleasure to the lonely reviewer, who knew no literary men,
+although his life was passed among books. Hardly dreaming that they
+would ever meet, he had insisted on a promise that if Verne should ever
+visit the States he would make New Utrecht his headquarters. And now, on
+this very morning, there had come a wireless message via Seagate, saying
+that Verne was on a ship which would dock that afternoon.
+
+The dilemma may seem a trifling one, but to Stockton's sensitive nature
+it was gross indeed. He and his wife knew that they could offer but
+little to make the poet's visit charming. New Utrecht, on the way to
+Coney Island, is not a likely perching ground for poets; the house was
+small, shabby, and the spare room had long ago been made into a workshop
+for the two boys, where they built steam engines and pasted rotogravure
+pictures from the Sunday editions on the walls. The servant was an
+enormous coloured mammy, with a heart of ruddy gold, but in appearance
+she was pure Dahomey. The bathroom plumbing was out of order, the
+drawing-room rug was fifteen years old, even the little lawn in front of
+the house needed trimming, and the gardener would not be round for
+several days. And Verne had given them only a few hours' notice. How
+like a poet!
+
+In his letters Stockton had innocently boasted of the pleasant time they
+would have when the writer should come to visit. He had spoken of
+evenings beside the fire when they would talk for hours of the things
+that interest literary men. What would Verne think when he found the
+hearth only a gas log, and one that had a peculiarly offensive odour?
+This sickly sweetish smell had become in years of intimacy very dear to
+Stockton, but he could hardly expect a poet who lived in Well Walk,
+Hampstead (O Shades of Keats!), and wrote letters from a London literary
+club, to understand that sort of thing. Why, the man was a grandson of
+Jules Verne, and probably had been accustomed to refined surroundings
+all his life. And now he was doomed to plumb the sub-fuse depths of New
+Utrecht!
+
+Stockton could not even put him up at a club, as he belonged to none but
+the golf club, which had no quarters for the entertainment of
+out-of-town guests. Every detail of his home life was of the shabby,
+makeshift sort which is so dear to one's self but needs so much
+explaining to outsiders. He even thought with a pang of Lorna Doone, the
+fat, plebeian little mongrel terrier which had meals with the family and
+slept with the children at night. Verne was probably used to staghounds
+or Zeppelin hounds or something of the sort, he thought humorously.
+English poets wear an iris halo in the eyes of humble American
+reviewers. Those godlike creatures have walked on Fleet Street, have
+bought books on Paternoster Row, have drunk half-and-half and eaten
+pigeon pie at the Salutation and Cat, and have probably roared with
+laughter over some alehouse jest of Mr. Chesterton.
+
+Stockton remembered the photograph Verne had sent him, showing a lean,
+bearded face with wistful dark eyes against a background of old folios.
+What would that Olympian creature think of the drudge of New Utrecht, a
+mere reviewer who sold his editorial copies to pay for shag tobacco!
+
+Well, thought Stockton, as he crossed the bridge, rejoicing not at all
+in the splendid towers of Manhattan, candescent in the April sun, they
+had done all they could. He had left his wife telephoning frantically to
+grocers, cleaning women, and florists. He himself had stopped at the
+poultry market on his way to the trolley to order two plump fowls for
+dinner, and had pinched them with his nervous, ink-stained fingers, as
+ordered by Mrs. Stockton, to test their tenderness. They would send the
+three younger children to their grandmother, to be interned there until
+the storm had blown over; and Mrs. Stockton was going to do what she
+could to take down the rotogravure pictures from the walls of what the
+boys fondly called the Stockton Art Gallery. He knew that Verne had
+children of his own: perhaps he would be amused rather than dismayed by
+the incongruities of their dismantled guestroom. Presumably, the poet
+was aver here for a lecture tour--he would be entertained and feted
+everywhere by the cultured rich, for the appreciation which Stockton had
+started by his modest little essay had grown to the dimension of a fad.
+
+He looked again at the telegram which had shattered the simple routine
+of his unassuming life. "On board Celtic dock this afternoon three
+o'clock hope see you. Verne." He sneezed sharply, as was his unconscious
+habit when nervous. In desperation he stopped at a veterinary's office
+on Frankfort Street, and left orders to have the doctor's assistant call
+for Lorna Doone and take her away, to be kept until sent for. Then he
+called at a wine merchant's and bought three bottles of claret of a
+moderate vintage. Verne had said something about claret in one of his
+playful letters. Unfortunately, the man's grandfather was a Frenchman,
+and undoubtedly he knew all about wines.
+
+Stockton sneezed so loudly and so often at his desk that morning that
+all his associates knew something was amiss. The Sunday editor, who had
+planned to borrow fifty cents from him at lunch time, refrained from
+doing so, in a spirit of pure Christian brotherhood. Even Bob Bolles,
+the hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-week conductor of "The Electric Chair,"
+the paper's humorous column, came in to see what was up. Bob's
+"contribs" had been generous that morning, and he was in unusually good
+humour for a humourist.
+
+"What's the matter, Stock," he inquired genially, "Got a cold? Or has
+George Moore sent in a new novel?"
+
+Stockton looked up sadly from the proofs he was correcting. How could he
+confess his paltry problem to this debonair creature who wore life
+lightly, like a flower, and played at literature as he played tennis,
+with swerve and speed? Bolles was a bachelor, the author of a successful
+comedy, and a member of the smart literary club which was over the
+reviewer's horizon, although in the great ocean of letters the humourist
+was no more than a surf bather. Stockton shook his head. No one but a
+married man and an unsuccessful author could understand his trouble.
+
+"A touch of asthma," he fibbed shyly. "I always have it at this time of
+year."
+
+"Come and have some lunch," said the other. "We'll go up to the club and
+have some ale. That'll put you on your feet."
+
+"Thanks, ever so much," said Stockton, "but I can't do it to-day. Got to
+make up my page. I tell you what, though--"
+
+He hesitated, and flushed a little.
+
+"Say it," said Bolles kindly.
+
+"Verne is in town to-day; the English poet, you know. Grandson of old
+Jules Verne. I'm going to put him up at my house. I wish you'd take him
+around to the club for lunch some day while he's here. He ought to meet
+some of the men there. I've been corresponding with him for a long time,
+and I--I'm afraid I rather promised to take him round there, as though I
+were a member, you know."
+
+"Great snakes!" cried Bolles. "Verne? the author of 'Candle Light'? And
+you're going to put him up? You lucky devil. Why, the man's bigger than
+Masefield. Take him to lunch--I should say I will; Why, I'll put him in
+the colyum. Both of you come round there to-morrow and we'll have an
+orgy. I'll order larks' tongues and convolvulus salad. I didn't know you
+knew him."
+
+"I don't--yet," said Stockton. "I'm going down to meet his steamer this
+afternoon."
+
+"Well, that's great news," said the volatile humourist. And he ran
+downstairs to buy the book of which he had so often heard but had never
+read.
+
+The sight of Bolles' well-cut suit of tweeds had reminded Stockton that
+he was still wearing the threadbare serge that had done duty for three
+winters, and would hardly suffice for the honours to come. Hastily he
+blue-pencilled his proofs, threw them into the wire basket, and hurried
+outdoors to seek the nearest tailor. He stopped at the bank first, to
+draw out fifty dollars for emergencies. Then he entered the first
+clothier's shop he encountered on Nassau Street.
+
+Mr. Stockton was a nervous man, especially so in the crises when he was
+compelled to buy anything so important as a suit, for usually Mrs.
+Stockton supervised the selection. To-day his Unlucky star was in the
+zenith. His watch pointed to close on two o'clock, and he was afraid he
+might be late for the steamer, which docked far uptown. In his haste,
+and governed perhaps by some subconscious recollection of the
+humourist's attractive shaggy tweeds, he allowed himself to be fitted
+with an ochre-coloured suit of some fleecy checked material grotesquely
+improper for his unassuming figure. It was the kind of cloth and cut
+that one sees only in the windows of Nassau Street. Happily he was
+unaware of the enormity of his offence against society, and rapidly
+transferring his belongings to the new pockets, he paid down the
+purchase price and fled to the subway.
+
+When he reached the pier at the foot of Fourteenth Street he saw that
+the steamer was still in midstream and it would be several minutes
+before she warped in to the dock. He had no pass from the steamship
+office, but on showing his newspaperman's card the official admitted him
+to the pier, and he took his stand at the first cabin gangway, trembling
+a little with nervousness, but with a pleasant feeling of excitement no
+less. He gazed at the others waiting for arriving travellers and
+wondered whether any of the peers of American letters had come to meet
+the poet. A stoutish, neatly dressed gentleman with a gray moustache
+looked like Mr. Howells, and he thrilled again. It was hardly possible
+that he, the obscure reviewer, was the only one who had been notified of
+Verne's arrival. That tall, hawk-faced man whose limousine was purring
+outside must be a certain publisher he knew by sight.
+
+What would these gentlemen say when they learned that the poet was to
+stay with Kenneth Stockton, in New Utrecht? He rolled up the
+mustard-coloured trousers one more round--they were much too long for
+him--and watched the great hull slide along the side of the pier with a
+peculiar tingling shudder that he had not felt since the day of his
+wedding.
+
+He expected no difficulty in recognizing Finsbury Verne, for he was very
+familiar with his photograph. As the passengers poured down the
+slanting gangway, all bearing the unmistakable air and stamp of
+superiority that marks those who have just left the sacred soil of
+England, he scanned the faces with an eye of keen regard. To his
+surprise he saw the gentlemen he had marked respectively as Mr. Howells
+and the publisher greet people who had not the slightest resemblance to
+the poet, and go with them to the customs alcoves. Traveller after
+traveller hurried past him, followed by stewards carrying luggage;
+gradually the flow of people thinned, and then stopped altogether, save
+for one or two invalids who were being helped down the incline by
+nurses. And still no sign of Finsbury Verne.
+
+Suddenly a thought struck him. Was it possible that--the second class?
+His eye brightened and he hurried to the gangway, fifty yards farther
+down the pier, where the second-cabin passengers were disembarking.
+
+There were more of the latter, and the passageway was still thronged.
+Just as Stockton reached the foot of the plank a little man in green
+ulster and deerstalker cap, followed by a plump little woman and four
+children in single file, each holding fast to the one in front like
+Alpine climbers, came down the narrow bridge, taking almost ludicrous
+care not to slip on the cleated boards. To his amazement the reviewer
+recognized the dark beard and soulful eyes of the poet.
+
+Mr. Verne clutched in rigid arms, not a roll of manuscripts, but a
+wriggling French poodle, whose tufted tail waved under the poet's chin.
+The lady behind him, evidently his wife, as she clung steadfastly to the
+skirt of his ulster, held tightly in the other hand a large glass jar in
+which two agitated goldfish were swimming, while the four children
+watched their parents with anxious eyes for the safety of their pets.
+"Daddy, look out for Ink!" shrilled one of them, as the struggles of the
+poodle very nearly sent him into the water under the ship's side. Two
+smiling stewards with mountainous portmanteaux followed the party.
+"Mother, are Castor and Pollux all right?" cried the smallest child, and
+promptly fell on his nose on the gangway, disrupting the file.
+
+Stockton, with characteristic delicacy, refrained from making himself
+known until the Vernes had recovered from the embarrassments of leaving
+the ship. He followed them at a distance to the "V" section where they
+waited for the customs examination. With mingled feelings he saw that
+Finsbury Verne was no cloud-walking deity, but one even as himself,
+indifferently clad, shy and perplexed of eye, worried with the comic
+cares of a family man. All his heart warmed toward the poet, who stood
+in his bulging greatcoat, perspiring and aghast at the uproar around
+him. He shrank from imagining what might happen when he appeared at home
+with the whole family, but without hesitation he approached and
+introduced himself.
+
+Verne's eyes shone with unaffected pleasure at the meeting, and he
+presented the reviewer to his wife and the children, two boys and two
+girls. The two boys, aged about ten and eight, immediately uttered
+cryptic remarks which Stockton judged were addressed to him.
+
+"Castorian!" cried the larger boy, looking at the yellow suit.
+
+"Polluxite!" piped the other in the same breath.
+
+Mrs. Verne, in some embarrassment, explained that the boys were in the
+throes of a new game they had invented on the voyage. They had created
+two imaginary countries, named in honour of the goldfish, and it was now
+their whim to claim for their respective countries any person or thing
+that struck their fancy. "Castoria was first," said Mrs. Verne, "so you
+must consider yourself a citizen of that nation."
+
+Somewhat shamefaced at this sudden honour, Mr. Stockton turned to the
+poet. "You're all coming home with me, aren't you?" he said. "I got your
+telegram this morning. We'd be delighted to have you."
+
+"It's awfully good of you," said the poet, "but as a matter of fact
+we're going straight on to the country to-morrow morning. My wife has
+some relatives in Yonkers, wherever they are, and she and the children
+are going to stay with them. I've got to go up to Harvard to give some
+lectures."
+
+A rush of cool, sweet relief bathed Stockton's brow.
+
+"Why, I'm disappointed you're going right on," he stammered. "Mrs.
+Stockton and I were hoping--"
+
+"My dear fellow, we could never impose such a party on your
+hospitality," said Verne. "Perhaps you can recommend us to some quiet
+hotel where we can stay the night."
+
+Like all New Yorkers, Stockton could hardly think of the name of any
+hotel when asked suddenly. At first he said the Astor House, and then
+remembered that it had been demolished years before. At last he
+recollected that a brother of his from Indiana had once stayed at the
+Obelisk.
+
+After the customs formalities were over--not without embarrassment, as
+Mr. Verne's valise when opened displayed several pairs of bright red
+union suits and a half-empty bottle of brandy--Stockton convoyed them to
+a taxi. Noticing the frayed sleeve of the poet's ulster he felt quite
+ashamed of the aggressive newness of his clothes. And when the visitors
+whirled away, after renewed promises for a meeting a little later in the
+spring, he stood for a moment in a kind of daze. Then he hurried toward
+the nearest telephone booth.
+
+As the Vernes sat at dinner that night in the Abyssinian Room of the
+Obelisk Hotel, the poet said to his wife: "It would have been delightful
+to spend a few days with the Stocktons."
+
+"My dear," said she, "I wouldn't have these wealthy Americans see how
+shabby we are for anything. The children are positively in rags, and
+your clothes--well, I don't know what they'll think at Harvard. You know
+if this lecture trip doesn't turn out well we shall be simply bankrupt."
+
+The poet sighed. "I believe Stockton has quite a charming place in the
+country near New York," he said.
+
+"That may be so," said Mrs. Verne. "But did you ever see such clothes?
+He looked like a canary."
+
+
+
+
+DON MARQUIS
+
+
+There is nothing more pathetic than the case of the author who is the
+victim of a supposedly critical essay. You hold him in the hollow of
+your hand. You may praise him for his humour when he wants to be
+considered a serious and saturnine dog. You may extol his songs of war
+and passion when he yearns to be esteemed a light, jovial merryandrew
+with never a care in the world save the cellar plumbing. You may utterly
+misrepresent him, and hang some albatross round his neck that will be
+offensive to him forever. You may say that he hails from Brooklyn
+Heights when the fact is that he left there two years ago and now lives
+in Port Washington. You may even (for instance) call him stout....
+
+Don Marquis was born in 1878; reckoning by tens, '88, '98, '08--well,
+call it forty. He is burly, ruddy, gray-haired, and fond of corncob
+pipes, dark beer, and sausages. He looks a careful blend of Falstaff and
+Napoleon III. He has conducted the Sun Dial in the New York _Evening
+Sun_ since 1912. He stands out as one of the most penetrating satirists
+and resonant scoffers at folderol that this continent nourishes. He is
+far more than a colyumist: he is a poet--a kind of Meredithian
+Prometheus chained to the roar and clank of a Hoe press. He is a
+novelist of Stocktonian gifts, although unfortunately for us he writes
+the first half of a novel easier than the second. And I think that in
+his secret heart and at the bottom of the old haircloth round-top trunk
+he is a dramatist.
+
+He good-naturedly deprecates that people praise "Archy the Vers Libre
+Cockroach" and clamour for more; while "Hermione," a careful and cutting
+satire on the follies of pseudokultur near the Dewey Arch, elicits only
+"a mild, mild smile." As he puts it:
+
+    A chair broke down in the midst of a Bernard Shaw comedy the other
+    evening. Everybody laughed. They had been laughing before from time
+    to time. That was because it was a Shaw comedy. But when the chair
+    broke they roared. We don't blame them for roaring, but it makes us
+    sad.
+
+    The purveyor of intellectual highbrow wit and humour pours his soul
+    into the business of capturing a few refined, appreciative grins in
+    the course of a lifetime, grins that come from the brain; he is more
+    than happy if once or twice in a generation he can get a cerebral
+    chuckle--and then Old Boob Nature steps in and breaks a chair or
+    flings a fat man down on the ice and the world laughs with, all its
+    heart and soul.
+
+Don Marquis recognizes as well as any one the value of the slapstick as
+a mirth-provoking instrument. (All hail to the slapstick! it was well
+known at the Mermaid Tavern, we'll warrant.) But he prefers the rapier.
+Probably his Savage Portraits, splendidly truculent and slashing
+sonnets, are among the finest pieces he has done.
+
+The most honourable feature of Marquis's writing, the "small thing to
+look for but the big thing to find," is its quality of fine workmanship.
+The swamis and prophets of piffle, the Bhandranaths and Fothergill
+Finches whom he detests, can only create in an atmosphere specially
+warmed, purged and rose-watered for their moods. Marquis has emerged
+from the underworld of newspaper print just by his heroic ability to
+transform the commonest things into tools for his craft. Much of his
+best and subtlest work has been clacked out on a typewriter standing on
+an upturned packing box. (When the _American Magazine_ published a
+picture of him at work on his packing case the supply man of the _Sun_
+got worried, and gave him a regular desk.) Newspaper men are a hardy
+race. Who but a man inured to the squalour of a newspaper office would
+dream of a cockroach as a hero? Archy was born in the old _Sun_
+building, now demolished, once known as Vermin Castle.
+
+"Publishing a volume of verse," Don has plaintively observed, "is like
+dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear the
+echo." Yet if the petal be authentic rose, the answer will surely come.
+Some poets seek to raft oblivion by putting on frock coats and reading
+their works aloud to the women's clubs. Don Marquis has no taste for
+that sort of mummery. But little by little his potent, yeasty verses,
+fashioned from the roaring loom of every day, are winning their way into
+circulation. Any reader who went to _Dreams and Dust_ (poems, published
+October, 1915) expecting to find light and waggish laughter, was on a
+blind quest. In that book speaks the hungry and visionary soul of this
+man, quick to see beauty and grace in common things, quick to question
+the answerless face of life--
+
+    Still mounts the dream on shining pinion,
+      Still broods the dull distrust;
+    Which shall have ultimate dominion,
+      Dream, or dust?
+
+Heavy men are light on their feet: it takes stout poets to write nimble
+verses (Mr. Chesterton, for instance). Don Marquis has something of
+Dobsonian cunning to set his musings to delicate, austere music. He can
+turn a rondeau or a triolet as gracefully as a paying teller can roll
+Durham cigarettes.
+
+How neat this is:
+
+    TO A DANCING DOLL
+
+    Formal, quaint, precise, and trim,
+      You begin your steps demurely--
+    There's a spirit almost prim
+      In the feet that move so surely.
+    So discreetly, to the chime
+    Of the music that so sweetly
+      Marks the time.
+
+    But the chords begin to tinkle
+      Quicker,
+    And your feet they flash and flicker--
+      Twinkle!--
+    Flash and flutter to a tricksy
+      Fickle meter;
+    And you foot it like a pixie--
+      Only fleeter!
+
+    Not our current, dowdy
+      Things--
+   "Turkey trots" and rowdy
+      Flings--
+    For they made you overseas
+    In politer times than these
+    In an age when grace could please,
+      Ere St. Vitus
+    Clutched and shook us, spine and knees;
+    Loosed a plague of jerks to smite us!
+
+But Marquis is more than the arbiter of dainty elegances in rhyme: he
+sings and celebrates a robust world where men struggle upward from the
+slime and discontent leaps from star to star. The evolutionary theme is
+a favourite with him: the grand pageant of humanity groping from
+Piltdown to Beacon Hill, winning in a million years two precarious
+inches of forehead. Much more often than F.P.A., who used to be his
+brother colyumist in Manhattan, he dares to disclose the real
+earnestness that underlies his chaff.
+
+I suppose that the conductor of a daily humorous column stands in the
+hierarchy of unthanked labourers somewhere between a plumber and a
+submarine trawler. Most of the available wheezes were pulled long ago by
+Plato in the _Republic_ (not the _New Republic_) or by Samuel Butler in
+his Notebooks. Contribs come valiantly to hand with a barrowful of
+letters every day--("The ravings fed him" as Don captioned some
+contrib's quip about Simeon Stylites living on a column); but
+nevertheless the direct and alternating current must be turned on six
+times a week. His jocular exposal of the colyumist's trade secret
+compares it to the boarding-house keeper's rotation of crops:
+
+    MONDAY. Take up an idea in a serious way. (ROAST BEEF.)
+
+    TUESDAY. Some one writes us a letter about Monday's serious idea.
+    (COLD ROAST BEEF.)
+
+    WEDNESDAY. Josh the idea we took up seriously on Monday. (BEEF
+    STEW.)
+
+    THURSDAY. Some one takes issue with us for Wednesday's josh of
+    Monday's serious idea. (BEEFSTEAK PIE.)
+
+    FRIDAY. We become a little pensive about our Wednesday's josh of
+    Monday's serious idea--there creeps into our copy a more subdued,
+    sensible note, as if we were acknowledging that after all, the main
+    business of life is not mere harebrained word-play. (HASH OR
+    CROQUETTES WITH GREEN PEPPERS.)
+
+    SATURDAY. Spoof the whole thing again, especially spoofing ourself
+    for having ever taken it seriously. (BEEF SOUP WITH BARLEY IN IT.)
+
+    SUNDAY. There isn't any evening paper on Sunday. That is where we
+    have the advantage of the boarding-house keepers.
+
+But the beauty of Don's cuisine is that the beef soup with barley always
+tastes as good as, or even better than, the original roast. His dry
+battery has generated in the past few years a dozen features with real
+voltage--the Savage Portraits, Hermione, Archy the Vers Libre Cockroach,
+the Aptronymic Scouts, French Without a Struggle, Suggestions to Popular
+Song Writers, Our Own Wall Mottoes, and the sequence of Prefaces (to an
+Almanac, a Mileage Book, The Plays of Euripides, a Diary, a Book of
+Fishhooks, etc.). Some of Marquis's most admirable and delicious fooling
+has been poured into these Prefaces: I hope that he will put them
+between book-covers.
+
+One day I got a letter from a big engineering firm in Ohio, enclosing a
+number of pay-envelopes (empty). They wanted me to examine the aphorisms
+and orisonswettmardenisms they had been printing on their weekly
+envelopes, for the inspiration and peptonizing of their employees. They
+had been using quotations from Emerson, McAdoo, and other panhellenists,
+and had run out of "sentiments." They wanted suggestions as to where
+they could find more.
+
+I advised them to get in touch with Don Marquis. I don't know whether
+they did so or not; but Don's epigrams and bon mots would adorn any
+pay-envelope anthology. Some of his casual comments on whiskey would do
+more to discourage the decanterbury pilgrims than a bushel of tracts.
+
+    By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he
+    orders, there is little else about him worth knowing.
+
+    If you go to sleep while you are loafing, how are you going to know
+    you are loafing?
+
+    Because majorities are often wrong it does not follow that
+    minorities are always right.
+
+    Young man, if she asks you if you like her hair that way, beware.
+    The woman has already committed matrimony in her own heart.
+
+    I am tired of being a promising young man. I've been a promising
+    young man for twenty years.
+
+In most of Don Marquis's japes, a still small voice speaks in the
+mirthquake:
+
+    If you try too hard to get a thing, you don't get it.
+
+    If you sweat and strain and worry the other ace will not come--the
+    little ball will not settle upon the right number or the proper
+    colour--the girl will marry the other man--the public will cry,
+    Bedamned to him! he can't write anyhow!--the cosmos will refuse its
+    revelations of divinity--the Welsh rabbit will be stringy--you will
+    find there are not enough rhymes in the language to finish your
+    ballade--the primrose by the river's brim will be only a hayfever
+    carrier--and your fountain pen will dribble ink upon your best
+    trousers.
+
+But Don Marquis's mind has two yolks (to use one of his favourite
+denunciations). In addition to these comic or satiric shadows, the
+gnomon of his Sun Dial may be relied on every now and then to register a
+clear-cut notation of the national mind and heart. For instance this,
+just after the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany:
+
+    This Beast we know, whom time brings to his last rebirth
+    Bull-thewed, iron-boned, cold-eyed and strong as Earth ...
+    As Earth, who spawned and lessoned him,
+    Yielded her earthy secrets, gave him girth,
+    Armoured the skull and braced the heavy limb--
+    Who frowned above him, proud and grim,
+    While he sucked from her salty dugs the lore
+    Of fire and steel and stone and war:
+    She taught brute facts, brute might, but not the worth
+
+    Of spirit, honour and clean mirth ...
+    His shape is Man, his mood is Dinosaur.
+
+    Tip from the wild red Welter of the past
+    Foaming he comes: let this rush, be his last.
+
+    Too patient we have been, thou knowest, God, thou knowest.
+    We have been slow as doom. Our dead
+    Of yesteryear lie on the ocean's bed--
+    We have denied each pleading ghost--
+    We have been slow: God, make us sure.
+    We have been slow. Grant we endure
+    Unto the uttermost, the uttermost.
+
+    Did our slow mood, O God, with thine accord?
+    Then weld our diverse millions, Lord,
+    Into one single swinging sword.
+
+I have been combing over the files of the Sun Dial, and it is
+disheartening to see these deposits of pearl and pie-crust, this
+sediment of fine mind, buried full fathom five in the yellowing archives
+of a newspaper. I thought of De Quincey's famous utterance about the
+press:
+
+    Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be
+    disentombed or restored to human admiration. Like the sea, it has
+    swallowed treasures without end, that no diving-bell will bring up
+    again.
+
+Greatly as we cherish the Sun Dial, we are jealous of it for sapping all
+its author's time and calories. No writer in America has greater of
+more meaty, stalwart gifts. Don, we cry, spend less time stoking that
+furnace out in Port Washington, and more on your novels!
+
+There is no more convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial than
+the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful lyrics of the
+past few years have been printed there (I think particularly of two or
+three by Padraic Colum). In this ephemeral column of a daily newspaper
+some of the rarest singers and keenest wits of the time have been glad
+to exhibit their wares, without pay of course. It would be impossible to
+give a complete list, but among them are William Rose Benet, Clinton
+Scollard, Edith M. Thomas, Benjamin De Casseres, Gelett Burgess, Georgia
+Pangborn, Charles Hanson Towne, Clement Wood.
+
+But the tragedy of the colyumist's task is that the better he does it
+the harder it becomes. People simply will not leave him alone. All day
+long they drop into his office, or call him up on the phone in the hope
+of getting into the column. Poor Don! he has become an institution down
+on Nassau Street: whatever hour of the day you call, you will find his
+queue there chivvying him. He is too gracious to throw them out: his
+only expedient is to take them over to the gin cathedral across the
+street and buy them a drink. Lately the poor wretch has had to write
+his Dial out in the pampas of Long Island, bringing it in with him in
+the afternoon, in order to get it done undisturbed. How many times I
+have sworn never to bother him again! And yet, when one is passing in
+that neighbourhood, the temptation is irresistible.... I dare say Ben
+Jonson had the same trouble. Of course someone ought to endow Don and
+set him permanently at the head of a chophouse table, presiding over a
+kind of Mermaid coterie of robust wits. He is a master of the
+tavernacular.
+
+He is a versatile cove. Philosopher, satirist, burlesquer, poet, critic,
+and novelist. Perhaps the three critics in this country whose praise is
+best worth having, and least easy to win, would be Marquis, Strunsky,
+and O.W. Firkins. And I think that the three leading poets male in this
+country to-day are Marquis, William Rose Benet, and (perhaps) Vachel
+Lindsay. Of course Don Marquis has an immense advantage over Will Benet
+in his stoutness. Will had to feed up on honey and candied apricocks and
+mares' milk for months before they would admit him to the army.
+
+Hermione and her little group of "Serious Thinkers" have attained the
+dignity of book publication, and now stand on the shelf beside "Danny's
+Own Story" and "The Cruise of the Jasper B." This satire on the
+azure-pedalled coteries of Washington Square has perhaps received more
+publicity than any other of Marquis's writings, but of all Don's
+drolleries I reserve my chief affection for Archy. The cockroach,
+endowed by some freak of transmigration with the shining soul of a vers
+libre poet, is a thoroughly Marquisian whimsy. I make no apology for
+quoting this prince of blattidae at some length. Many a commuter,
+opening his evening paper on the train, looks first of all to see if
+Archy is in the Dial. I love Archy because there seems to me something
+thoroughly racial and native and American about him. Can you imagine
+him, for instance, in _Punch_? His author has never told us which one of
+the vers libre poets it is whose soul has emigrated into Archy, but I
+feel sure it is not Ezra Pound or any of the expatriated eccentrics who
+lisp in odd numbers in the King's Road, Chelsea. Could it be Amy Lowell?
+Perhaps it should be explained that Archy's carelessness as to
+punctuation and capitals is not mere ostentation, but arises from the
+fact that he is not strong enough to work the shift key of his
+typewriter. Ingenious readers of the Sun Dial have suggested many
+devices to make this possible, but none that seem feasible to the roach
+himself.
+
+The Argument: Archy, the vers libre cockroach, overhears a person with
+whiskers and dressed in the uniform of a butler in the British Navy, ask
+a German waiter if the pork pie is built. Ja, Ja, replies the waiter.
+Archy's suspicions are awakened, and he climbs into the pork pie through
+an air hole, and prepares his soul for parlous times. The naval butler
+takes the pie on board a launch, and Archy, watching through one of the
+portholes of the pastry, sees that they are picked up by a British
+cruiser "an inch or two outside the three-mile line." (This was in
+neutral days, remember.) Archy continues the narrative in lower case
+agate:
+
+    it is cuthbert with the pork pie the captain has been longing for
+    said a voice and on every side rang shouts of the pie the pie the
+    captains pie has come at last and a salute of nineteen guns was
+    fired the pie was carried at once to the captains mess room where
+    the captain a grizzled veteran sat with knife and fork in hand and
+    serviette tucked under his chin i knew cried the captain that if
+    there was a pork pie in america my faithful cuthbert find it for me
+    the butler bowed and all the ships officers pulled up their chairs
+    to the table with a rasping sound you may serve it honest cuthbert
+    said the captain impatiently and the butler broke a hole in the top
+    crust he touched a hidden mechanism for immediately something right
+    under me began to go tick tock tick tock tick tock what is that
+    noise captain said the larboard mate only the patent log clicking
+    off the knots said the butler it needs oiling again but cuthbert
+    said the captain why are you so nervous and what means that flush
+    upon your face that flush your honor is chicken pox said cuthbert i
+    am subject to sudden attacks of it unhand that pie cried the ships
+    surgeon leaping to his feet arrest that butler he is a teuton spy
+    that is not chicken pox at all it is german measles ha ha cried the
+    false butler the ship is doomed there is a clock work bomb in this
+    pie my name is not cuthbert it is friedrich and he leaped through a
+    port into the sea his blonde side whiskers which were false falling
+    off as he did so ha ha rang his mocking laughter from the ocean as
+    he pulled shoreward with long strokes your ship is doomed my god
+    said the senior boatswain what shall we do stop the clock ordered
+    the captain but i had already done so i braced my head against the
+    hour hand and my feet against the minute hand and stopped the
+    mechanism the captain drew his sword and pried off all the top crust
+    gentlemen he said yonder cockroach has saved the ship let us throw
+    the pie overboard and steam rapidly away from it advised the
+    starboard ensign not so not so cried the captain yon gallant
+    cockroach must not perish so gratitude is a tradition of the british
+    navy i would sooner perish with him than desert him all the time the
+    strain was getting worse on me if my feet slipped the clock would
+    start again and all would be lost beads of sweat rolled down my
+    forehead and almost blinded me something must be done quick said the
+    first assistant captain the insect is losing his rigidity wait said
+    the surgeon and gave me a hypodermic of some powerful east indian
+    drug which stiffened me like a cataleptic but i could still see and
+    hear for days and days a council of war was held about me every
+    afternoon and wireless reports sent to london save the cockroach
+    even if you lose the ship wirelessed the admiralty england must
+    stand by the smaller nations and every hour the surgeon gave me
+    another hypodermic at the end of four weeks the cabin boy who had
+    been thinking deeply all the time suggested that a plug of wood be
+    inserted in my place which was done and i fell to the deck well nigh
+    exhausted the next day i was set on shore in the captains gig and
+    here i am.
+
+    archy
+
+So far as I know, America has made just two entirely original
+contributions to the world's types of literary and dramatic art. These
+are the humorous colyum and the burlesque show. The saline and robust
+repartee of the burlicue is ancient enough in essence, but it is
+compounded into a new and uniquely American mode, joyously flavoured
+with Broadway garlic. The newspaper colyum, too, is a native product.
+Whether Ben Franklin or Eugene Field invented it, it bears the image and
+superscription of America.
+
+And using the word ephemeral in its strict sense, Don Marquis is
+unquestionably the cleverest of our ephemeral philosophers. This nation
+suffers a good deal from lack of humour in high places: our Great
+Pachyderms have all Won their Way to the Top by a Resolute Struggle. But
+Don has just chuckled and gone on refusing to answer letters or fill out
+Mr. Purinton's blasphemous efficiency charts or join the Poetry Society
+or attend community masques. And somehow all these things seem to melt
+away, and you look round the map and see Don Marquis taking up all the
+scenery.... He has such an oecumenical kind of humour. It's just as true
+in Brooklyn as it is in the Bronx.
+
+He is at his best when he takes up some philosophic dilemma, or some
+quaint abstraction (viz., Certainty, Predestination, Idleness,
+Uxoricide, Prohibition, Compromise, or Cornutation) and sets the idea
+spinning. Beginning slowly, carelessly, in a deceptive, offhand manner,
+he lets the toy revolve as it will. Gradually the rotation accelerates;
+faster and faster he twirls the thought (sometimes losing a few
+spectators whose centripetal powers are not starch enough) until,
+chuckling, he holds up the flashing, shimmering conceit, whirling at top
+speed and ejaculating sparks. What is so beautiful as a rapidly
+revolving idea? Marquis's mind is like a gyroscope: the faster it spins,
+the steadier it is. There are laws of dynamics in colyums just as
+anywhere else.
+
+What is there in the nipping air of Galesburg, Illinois, that turns the
+young sciolists of Knox College toward the rarefied ethers of
+literature? S.S. McClure, John Phillips, Ralph Waldo Trine, Don
+Marquis--are there other Knox men in the game, too? Marquis was studying
+at Galesburg about the time of the Spanish War. He has worked on half a
+dozen newspapers, and assisted Joel Chandler Harris in editing "Uncle
+Remus's Magazine." But let him tell his biography in his own words:
+
+    Born July 29, 1878, at Walnut, Bureau Co., Ill., a member of the
+    Republican party.
+
+    My father was a physician, and I had all the diseases of the time
+    and place free of charge.
+
+    Nothing further happened to me until, in the summer of 1896, I left
+    the Republican party to follow the Peerless Leader to defeat.
+
+    In 1900 I returned to the Republican party to accept a position in
+    the Census Bureau, at Washington, D.C. This position I filled for
+    some months in a way highly satisfactory to the Government in power.
+    It is particularly gratifying to me to remember that one evening,
+    after I had worked unusually hard at the Census Office, the late
+    President McKinley himself nodded and smiled to me as I passed
+    through the White House grounds on my way home from toil. He had
+    heard of my work that day, I had no doubt, and this was his way of
+    showing me how greatly he appreciated it.
+
+    Nevertheless, shortly after President McKinley paid this public
+    tribute to the honesty, efficiency and importance of my work in the
+    Census Office, I left the Republican party again, and accepted a
+    position as reporter on a Washington paper.
+
+    Upon entering the newspaper business all the troubles of my earlier
+    years disappeared as if by magic, and I have lived the contented,
+    peaceful, unworried life of the average newspaper man ever since.
+
+    There is little more to tell. In 1916 I again returned to the
+    Republican party. This time it was for the express purpose of voting
+    against Mr. Wilson. Then Mr. Hughes was nominated, and I left the
+    Republican party again.
+
+    This is the outline of my life in its relation to the times in which
+    I live. For the benefit of those whose curiosity extends to more
+    particular details, I add a careful pen-picture of myself.
+
+    It seems more modest, somehow, to put it in the third person:
+
+    Height, 5 feet 101/2 inches; hair, dove-coloured; scar on little
+    finger of left hand; has assured carriage, walking boldly into good
+    hotels and mixing with patrons on terms of equality; weight, 200
+    pounds; face slightly asymmetrical, but not definitely criminal in
+    type; loathes Japanese art, but likes beefsteak and onions; wears
+    No. 8 shoe; fond of Francis Thompson's poems; inside seam of
+    trousers, 32 inches; imitates cats, dogs and barnyard animals for
+    the amusement of young children; eyetooth in right side of upper jaw
+    missing; has always been careful to keep thumb prints from
+    possession of police; chest measurement, 42 inches, varying with
+    respiration; sometimes wears glasses, but usually operates
+    undisguised; dislikes the works of Rabindranath Tagore; corn on
+    little toe of right foot; superstitious, especially with regard to
+    psychic phenomena; eyes, blue; does not use drugs nor read his
+    verses to women's clubs; ruddy complexion; no photograph in
+    possession of police; garrulous and argumentative; prominent cheek
+    bones; avoids Bohemian society, so-called, and has never been in a
+    thieves' kitchen, a broker's office nor a class of short-story
+    writing; wears 17-inch collar; waist measurement none of your
+    business; favourite disease, hypochondria; prefers the society of
+    painters, actors, writers, architects, preachers, sculptors,
+    publishers, editors, musicians, among whom he often succeeds in
+    insinuating himself, avoiding association with crooks and reformers
+    as much as possible; walks with rapid gait; mark of old fracture on
+    right shin; cuffs on trousers, and coat cut loose, with plenty of
+    room under the arm pits; two hip pockets; dislikes Rochefort cheese,
+    "Tom Jones," Wordsworth's poetry, absinthe cocktails, most musical
+    comedy, public banquets, physical exercise, Billy Sunday, steam
+    heat, toy dogs, poets who wear their souls outside, organized
+    charity, magazine covers, and the gas company; prominent callouses
+    on two fingers of right hand prevent him being expert pistol shot;
+    belt straps on trousers; long upper lip; clean shaven; shaggy
+    eyebrows; affects soft hats; smile, one-sided; no gold fillings in
+    teeth; has served six years of indeterminate sentence in Brooklyn,
+    with no attempt to escape, but is reported to have friends outside;
+    voice, husky; scar above the forehead concealed by hair; commonly
+    wears plain gold ring on little finger of left hand; dislikes
+    prunes, tramp poets and imitations of Kipling; trousers cut loose
+    over hips and seat; would likely come along quietly if arrested.
+
+I would fail utterly in this rambling anatomy if I did not insist that
+Don Marquis regards his column not merely as a soapslide but rather as a
+cudgelling ground for sham and hypocrisy. He has something of the quick
+Stevensonian instinct for the moral issue, and the Devil not
+infrequently winces about the time the noon edition of the _Evening Sun_
+comes from the press. There is no man quicker to bonnet a fallacy or
+drop the acid just where it will disinfect. For instance, this comment
+on some bolshevictory in Russia:
+
+    A kind word was recently seen, on one of the principal streets of
+    Petrograd, attempting to butter a parsnip.
+
+For the plain man who shies at surplice and stole, the Sun Dial is a
+very real pulpit, whence, amid excellent banter, he hears much that is
+purging and cathartic in a high degree. The laughter of fat men is a
+ringing noble music, and Don Marquis, like Friar Tuck, deals texts and
+fisticuffs impartially. What an archbishop of Canterbury he would have
+made! He is a burly and bonny dominie, and his congregation rarely miss
+the point of the sermon. We cannot close better than by quoting part of
+his Colyumist's Prayer in which he admits us somewhere near the pulse of
+the machine:
+
+    I pray Thee, make my colyum read,
+    And give me thus my daily bread.
+    Endow me, if Thou grant me wit,
+    Likewise with sense to mellow it.
+    Save me from feeling so much hate
+    My food will not assimilate;
+    Open mine eyes that I may see
+    Thy world with more of charity,
+    And lesson me in good intents
+    And make me friend of innocence ...
+    Make me (sometimes at least) discreet;
+    Help me to hide my self-conceit,
+    And give me courage now and then
+    To be as dull as are most men.
+    And give me readers quick to see
+    When I am satirizing Me....
+    Grant that my virtues may atone
+    For some small vices of mine own.
+
+And it is thoroughly characteristic of Don Marquis that he follows his
+prayer with this comment:
+
+    People, when they pray, usually pray not for what they really
+    want--and intend to have if they can get it--but for what they think
+    the Creator wants them to want. We made a certain attempt to be
+    sincere in the above verses; but even at that no doubt a lot of
+    affectation crept in.
+
+
+
+
+THE ART OF WALKING
+
+    Away with the stupid adage about a man being as old as his arteries!
+    He is as old as his calves--his garteries....
+
+    --_Meditations of Andrew McGill_.
+
+"There was fine walking on the hills in the direction of the sea."
+
+This heart-stirring statement, which I find in an account of the life of
+William and Dorothy Wordsworth when they inhabited a quiet cottage near
+Crewkerne in Dorset, reminds me how often the word "walking" occurs in
+any description of Wordsworth's existence. De Quincey assures us that
+the poet's props were very ill shapen--"they were pointedly condemned by
+all female connoisseurs in legs"--but none the less he was _princeps
+arte ambulandi_. Even had he lived to-day, when all our roads are
+barbarized by exploding gasoline vapours, I do not think Wordsworth
+would have flivvered. Of him the Opium Eater made the classic
+pronouncement: "I calculate that with these identical legs W. must have
+traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles--a mode of
+exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and all other
+stimulants whatsoever to the animal spirits; to which, indeed, he was
+indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is
+most excellent in his writings."
+
+A book that says anything about walking has a ready passage to my inmost
+heart. The best books are always those that set down with "amorous
+precision" the satisfying details of human pilgrimage. How one
+sympathizes with poor Pepys in his outburst (April 30, 1663) about a
+gentleman who seems to have been "Always Taking the Joy Out of Life":
+
+    Lord! what a stir Stankes makes, with his being crowded in the
+    streets, and wearied in walking in London, and would not be wooed to
+    go to a play, nor to Whitehall, or to see the lions, though he was
+    carried in a coach. I never could have thought there had been upon
+    earth a man so little curious in the world as he is.
+
+Now your true walker is mightily "curious in the world," and he goes
+upon his way zealous to sate himself with a thousand quaintnesses. When
+he writes a book he fills it full of food, drink, tobacco, the scent of
+sawmills on sunny afternoons, and arrivals at inns late at night. He
+writes what Mr. Mosher calls a book-a-bosom. Diaries and letters are
+often best of all because they abound in these matters. And because
+walking can never again be what it was--the motorcars will see to
+that--it is our duty to pay it greater reverence and honour.
+
+Wordsworth and Coleridge come first to mind in any talk about walking.
+The first time they met was in 1797 when Coleridge tramped from Nether
+Stowey to Racedown (thirty miles in an air-line, and full forty by road)
+to make the acquaintance of William and Dorothy. That is practically
+from the Bristol Channel to the English ditto, a rousing stretch. It was
+Wordsworth's pamphlet describing a walk across France to the Alps that
+spurred Coleridge on to this expedition. The trio became fast friends,
+and William and Dorothy moved to Alfoxden (near Nether Stowey) to enjoy
+the companionship. What one would give for some adequate account of
+their walks and talks together over the Quantocks. They planned a little
+walking trip into Devonshire that autumn (1797) and "The Ancient
+Mariner" was written in the hope of defraying the expenses of the
+adventure.
+
+De Quincey himself, who tells us so much jovial gossip about Wordsworth
+and Coleridge, was no mean pedestrian. He describes a forty-mile
+all-night walk from Bridgewater to Bristol, on the evening after first
+meeting Coleridge. He could not sleep after the intellectual excitement
+of the day, and through a summer night "divinely calm" he busied himself
+with meditation on the sad spectacle he had witnessed: a great mind
+hastening to decay.
+
+I have always fancied that walking as a fine art was not much practised
+before the eighteenth century. We know from Ambassador Jusserand's
+famous book how many wayfarers were on the roads in the fourteenth
+century, but none of these were abroad for the pleasures of moving
+meditation and scenery. We can gather from Mr. Tristram's "Coaching Days
+and Coaching Ways" that the highroads were by no means safe for solitary
+travellers even so late as 1750. In "Joseph Andrews" (1742) whenever any
+of the characters proceed afoot they are almost certain to be held up.
+Mr. Isaac Walton, it is true, was a considerable rambler a century
+earlier than this, and in his Derbyshire hills must have passed many
+lonely gullies; but footpads were more likely to ambush the main roads.
+It would be a hardhearted bandit who would despoil the gentle angler of
+his basket of trouts. Goldsmith, too, was a lusty walker, and tramped it
+over the Continent for two years (1754-6) with little more baggage than
+a flute: he might have written "The Handy Guide for Beggars" long
+before Vachel Lindsay. But generally speaking, it is true that
+cross-country walks for the pure delight of rhythmically placing one
+foot before the other were rare before Wordsworth. I always think of him
+as one of the first to employ his legs as an instrument of philosophy.
+
+After Wordsworth they come thick and fast. Hazlitt, of course--have you
+paid the tax that R.L.S. imposes on all who have not read Hazlitt's "On
+Going A Journey?" Then Keats: never was there more fruitful walk than
+the early morning stroll from Clerkenwell to the Poultry in October,
+1816, that produced "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold." He
+must have set out early enough, for the manuscript of the sonnet was on
+Cowden Clarke's table by breakfast time. And by the way, did you know
+that the copy of Chapman's Homer which inspired it belonged to the
+financial editor of the _Times_? Never did financial editor live to
+better purpose!
+
+There are many words of Keats that are a joyful viaticum for the walker:
+get these by rote in some membrane of memory:
+
+    The great Elements we know of are no mean comforters: the open sky
+    sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown--the Air is our robe of
+    state--the Earth is our throne, and the sea a mighty minstrel
+    playing before it.
+
+The Victorians were great walkers. Railways were but striplings; inns
+were at their prime. Hark to the great names in the walker's Hall of
+Fame: Tennyson, FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Kingsley, Meredith,
+Richard Jefferies. What walker can ever forget the day when he first
+read "The Story of My Heart?" In my case it was the 24th of August,
+1912, on a train from London to Cambridge. Then there were George
+Borrow, Emily Bronte on her Yorkshire moors, and Leslie Stephen, one of
+the princes of the clan and founder of the famous Sunday Tramps of whom
+Meredith was one. Walt Whitman would have made a notable addition to
+that posse of philosophic walkers, save that I fear the garrulous
+half-baked old barbarian would have been disappointed that he could not
+dominate the conversation.
+
+There have been stout walkers in our own day. Mr. W.H. Davies (the
+Super-Tramp), G.M. Trevelyan, Hilaire Belloc, Edward Thomas who died on
+the field of honour in April, 1917, and Francis Ledwidge, who was killed
+in Flanders. Who can forget his noble words, "I have taken up arms for
+the fields along the Boyne, for the birds and the blue sky over them."
+There is Walter Prichard Eaton, the Jefferies of our own Berkshires. One
+could extend the list almost without end. Sometimes it seems as though
+literature were a co-product of legs and head.
+
+Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were great city ramblers, followed in due
+course by Dickens, R.L.S., Edward Lucas, Holbrook Jackson, and Pearsall
+Smith. Mr. Thomas Burke is another, whose "Nights in Town" will delight
+the lover of the greatest of all cities. But urban wanderings, delicious
+as they are, are not quite what we mean by walking. On pavements one
+goes by fit and start, halting to see, to hear, and to speculate. In the
+country one captures the true ecstasy of the long, unbroken swing, the
+harmonious glow of mind and body, eyes fed, soul feasted, brain and
+muscle exercised alike.
+
+Meredith is perhaps the Supreme Pontiff of modern country walkers: no
+soft lover of drowsy golden weather, but master of the stiffer breed who
+salute frost and lashing rain and roaring southwest wind, who leap to
+grapple with the dissolving riddles of destiny. February and March are
+his months:
+
+    For love we Earth then serve we all;
+      Her mystic secret then is ours:
+    We fall, or view our treasures fall,
+      Unclouded, as beholds her flowers.
+
+    Earth, from a night of frosty wreck,
+      Enrobed in morning's mounted fire,
+    When lowly, with a broken neck,
+      The crocus lays her cheek to mire.
+
+I suppose every walker collects a few precious books which form the
+bible of his chosen art. I have long been collecting a Walker's Breviary
+of my own. It includes Stevenson's "Walking Tours," G.M. Trevelyan's
+"Walking," Leslie Stephen's "In Praise of Walking," shards and crystals
+from all the others I have mentioned. Michael Fairless, Vachel Lindsay,
+and Frank Sidgwick have place in it. On my private shelf stands
+"Journeys to Bagdad" by Mr. Charles Brooks, who has good pleasantry to
+utter on this topic; and a manly little volume, "Walking as Education,"
+by the Rev. A.N. Cooper, "the walking parson," published in England in
+1910. On that same shelf there will soon stand a volume of delicious
+essays by one of the most accomplished of American walkers, Mr. Robert
+Cortes Holliday, the American Belloc, whose "Walking Stick Papers" has
+beckoned to the eye of a far-seeing publisher. Mr. Holliday it is who
+has bravely stated why so few of the fair sex are able to participate in
+walking tours:
+
+    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 thus 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 forever be 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 forever be 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 his 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.
+
+Mr. Holliday has other goodly matter upon the philosophy and art of
+locomotion, and those who are wise and have a lively faith may be
+admitted to great and surpassing delights if they will here and now make
+memorandum to buy his book, which will soon be published.
+
+Speaking of Vachel Lindsay, his "Handy Guide for Beggars" will bring an
+itch along the shanks of those who love shoe-leather and a knobbed
+stick. Vachel sets out for a walk in no mean and pettifogging spirit: he
+proceeds as an army with banners: he intends that the world shall know
+he is afoot: the Great Elian of Springfield is unleashed--let alewives
+and deacons tremble!
+
+Ungenerous hosts have cozened Vachel by begging him to recite his poems
+at the beginning of each course, in the meantime getting on with their
+eating; but despite the naivete of his eagerness to sing, there is a
+plain and manly simplicity about Vachel that delights us all. We like to
+know that here is a poet who has wrestled with poverty, who never wrote
+a Class Day poem at Harvard, who has worn frayed collars or none at
+all, and who lets the barber shave the back of his neck. We like to know
+that he has tramped the ties in Georgia, harvested in Kansas, been
+fumigated in New Jersey, and lives contented in Illinois. Four weeks a
+year he lives as the darling of the cisalleghany Browning Societies, but
+he is always glad to get back to Springfield and resume his robes as the
+local Rabindranath. If he ever buys an automobile I am positive it will
+be a Ford. Here is _homo americanus_, one of ourselves, who never wore
+spats in his life.
+
+But even the plain man may see visions. Walking on crowded city streets
+at night, watching the lighted windows, delicatessen shops, peanut
+carts, bakeries, fish stalls, free lunch counters piled with crackers
+and saloon cheese, and minor poets struggling home with the Saturday
+night marketing--he feels the thrill of being one, or at least
+two-thirds, with this various, grotesque, pathetic, and surprising
+humanity. The sense of fellowship with every other walking biped, the
+full-blooded understanding that Whitman and O. Henry knew in brimming
+measure, comes by gulps and twinges to almost all. That is the essence
+of Lindsay's feeling about life. He loves crowds, companionship, plenty
+of sirloin and onions, and seeing his name in print. He sings and
+celebrates the great symbols of our hodgepodge democracy: ice cream
+soda, electrical sky-signs, Sunday School picnics, the movies, Mark
+Twain. In the teeming ooze and ocean bottoms of our atlantic humanity he
+finds rich corals and rainbow shells, hospitality, reverence, love, and
+beauty.
+
+This is the sentiment that makes a merry pedestrian, and Vachel has
+scrutineered and scuffled through a dozen states, lightening larders and
+puzzling the worldly. Afoot and penniless is his technique--"stopping
+when he had a mind to, singing when he felt inclined to"--and begging
+his meals and bed. I suppose he has had as many free meals as any
+American citizen; and, this is how he does it, copied from his little
+pamphlet used on many a road:
+
+
+RHYMES TO BE TRADED FOR BREAD
+
+Being new verses by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, Springfield, Illinois,
+June, 1912, printed expressly as a substitute for money.
+
+This book is to be used in exchange for the necessities of life on a
+tramp-journey from the author's home town, through the West and back,
+during which he will observe the following rules:
+
+    (1) Keep away from the cities.
+
+    (2) Keep away from the railroads.
+
+    (3) Have nothing to do with money. Carry no baggage.
+
+    (4) Ask for dinner about quarter after eleven.
+
+    (5) Ask for supper, lodging, and breakfast about quarter of five.
+
+    (6) Travel alone.
+
+    (7) Be neat, truthful, civil, and on the square.
+
+    (8) Preach the Gospel of Beauty.
+
+    In order to carry out the last rule there will be three exceptions
+    to the rule against baggage. (1) The author will carry a brief
+    printed statement, called "The Gospel of Beauty." (2) He will carry
+    this book of rhymes for distribution. (3) Also he will carry a small
+    portfolio with pictures, etc., chosen to give an outline of his view
+    of the history of art, especially as it applies to America.
+
+Perhaps I have tarried too long over Vachel; but I have set down his
+theories of vagabonding because many walkers will find them interesting.
+"The Handy Guide for Beggars" will leave you footsore but better for the
+exercise. And when the fascinating story of American literature in this
+decade (1910-20) is finally written, there will be a happy and
+well-merited corner in it for a dusty but "neat, truthful, and civil"
+figure from Springfield, Illinois.
+
+A good pipeful of prose to solace yourself withal, about sunset on a
+lonely road, is that passage on "Lying Awake at Night" to be found in
+"The Forest," by Stewart Edward White. Major White is one of the best
+friends the open-air walker has, and don't forget it!
+
+The motors have done this for us at least, that as they have made the
+highways their own beyond dispute, walking will remain the mystic and
+private pleasure of the secret and humble few. For us the byways, the
+footpaths, and the pastures will be sanctified and sweet. Thank heaven
+there are still gentle souls uncorrupted by the victrola and the
+limousine. In our old trousers and our easy shoes, with pipe and stick,
+we can do our fifteen miles between lunch and dinner, and glorify the
+ways of God to man.
+
+And sometimes, about two o'clock of an afternoon (these spells come most
+often about half an hour after lunch), the old angel of peregrination
+lifts himself up in me, and I yearn and wamble for a season afoot. When
+a blue air is moving keenly through bare boughs this angel is most
+vociferous. I gape wanly round the lofty citadel where I am pretending
+to earn the Monday afternoon envelope. The filing case, thermostat, card
+index, typewriter, automatic telephone: these ingenious anodynes avail
+me not. Even the visits of golden nymphs, sweet ambassadors of commerce,
+who rustle in and out of my room with memoranda, mail, manuscripts, aye,
+even these lightfoot figures fail to charm. And the mind goes out to the
+endless vistas of streets, roads, fields, and rivers that summon the
+wanderer with laughing voice. Somewhere a great wind is scouring the
+hillsides; and once upon a time a man set out along the Great North Road
+to walk to Royston in the rain....
+
+Grant us, O Zeus! the tingling tremour of thigh and shank that comes of
+a dozen sturdy miles laid underheel. Grant us "fine walking on the hills
+in the direction of the sea"; or a winding road that tumbles down to
+some Cotswold village. Let an inn parlour lie behind red curtains, and a
+table be drawn toward the fire. Let there be a loin of cold beef, an
+elbow of yellow cheese, a tankard of dog's nose. Then may we prop our
+Bacon's Essays against the pewter and study those mellow words:
+"Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity,
+rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth." _Haec studio,
+pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur_.
+
+
+
+
+RUPERT BROOKE
+
+
+Rupert Brooke had the oldest pith of England in his fibre. He was born
+of East Anglia, the original vein of English blood. Ruddy skin,
+golden-brown hair, blue eyes, are the stamp of the Angles. Walsingham,
+in Norfolk, was the home of the family. His father was a master at
+Rugby; his grandfather a canon in the church.
+
+In 1913 Heffer, the well-known bookseller and publisher of Cambridge,
+England, issued a little anthology called _Cambridge Poems 1900-1913_.
+This volume was my first introduction to Brooke. As an undergraduate at
+Oxford during the years 1910-13 I had heard of his work from time to
+time; but I think we youngsters at Oxford were too absorbed in our own
+small versemakings to watch very carefully what the "Tabs" were doing.
+His poem _The Old Vicarage, Grantchester_, reprinted in Heffer's
+_Cambridge Poems_, first fell under my eye during the winter of 1913-14.
+
+Grantchester is a tiny hamlet just outside Cambridge; set in the meadows
+along the Cam or Granta (the earlier name), and next door to the
+Trumpington of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale." All that Cambridge country
+is flat and comparatively uninteresting; patchworked with chalky fields
+bright with poppies; slow, shallow streams drifting between pollard
+willows; it is the beginning of the fen district, and from the brow of
+the Royston downs (thirteen miles away) it lies as level as a table-top
+with the great chapel of King's clear against the sky. It is the
+favourite lament of Cambridge men that their "_Umgebung_" is so dull and
+monotonous compared with the rolling witchery of Oxfordshire.
+
+But to the young Cantab sitting over his beer at the Cafe des Westens in
+Berlin, the Cambridge villages seemed precious and fair indeed.
+Balancing between genuine homesickness for the green pools of the Cam,
+and a humorous whim in his rhymed comment on the outlying villages,
+Brooke wrote the Grantchester poem; and probably when the fleeting pang
+of nostalgia was over enjoyed the evening in Berlin hugely. But the
+verses are more than of merely passing interest. To one who knows that
+neighbourhood the picture is cannily vivid. To me it brings back with
+painful intensity the white winding road from Cambridge to Royston which
+I have bicycled hundreds of tunes. One sees the little inns along the
+way--the _Waggon and Horses_, the _Plough_, the _King's Arms_--and the
+recurring blue signboard _Fine Royston Ales_ (the Royston brewery being
+famous in those parts). Behind the fun there shines Brooke's passionate
+devotion to the soil and soul of England which was to reach its final
+expression so tragically soon. And even behind this the immortal
+questions of youth which have no country and no clime--
+
+    Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
+    And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
+
+No lover of England, certainly no lover of Cambridge, is likely to
+forget the Grantchester poem. But knowing Brooke only by that, one may
+perhaps be excused for having merely ticketed him as one of the score of
+young varsity poets whom Oxford and Cambridge had graduated in the past
+decade and who are all doing fine and promising work. Even though he
+tarried here in the United States ("El Cuspidorado," as he wittily
+observed) and many hold precious the memory of his vivid mind and
+flashing face, to most of us he was totally unknown. Then came the War;
+he took part in the unsuccessful Antwerp Expedition; and while in
+training for the AEgean campaign he wrote the five sonnets entitled
+"1914". I do not know exactly when they were written or where first
+published. Their great popularity began when the Dean of St. Paul's
+quoted from them in a sermon on Easter Day, 1915, alluding to them as
+the finest expression of the English spirit that the War had called
+forth. They came to New York in the shape of clippings from the London
+_Times_. No one could read the matchless sonnet:
+
+    "If I should die, think only this of me:
+      That there's some corner of a foreign field
+    That is for ever England."
+
+and not be thrilled to the quick. A country doctor in Ohio to whom I
+sent a copy of the sonnet wrote "I cannot read it without tears." This
+was poetry indeed; like the Scotchman and his house, we kent it by the
+biggin o't. I suppose many another stranger must have done as I did:
+wrote to Brooke to express gratitude for the perfect words. But he had
+sailed for the Mediterranean long before. Presently came a letter from
+London saying that he had died on the very day of my letter--April 23,
+1915. He died on board the French hospital ship _Duguay-Trouin_, on
+Shakespeare's birthday, in his 28th year. One gathers from the log of
+the hospital-ship that the cause of his death was a malignant ulcer, due
+to the sting of some venomous fly. He had been weakened by a previous
+touch of sunstroke.
+
+A description of the burial is given in "Memorials of Old Rugbeians Who
+Fell in the Great War." It vividly recalls Stevenson's last journey to
+the Samoan mountain top which Brooke himself had so recently visited.
+The account was written by one of Brooke's comrades, who has since been
+killed in action:
+
+    We found a most lovely place for his grave, about a mile up the
+    valley from the sea, an olive grove above a watercourse, dry now,
+    but torrential in winter. Two mountains flank it on either side, and
+    Mount Khokilas is at its head. We chose a place in the most lovely
+    grove I have ever seen, or imagined, a little glade of about a dozen
+    trees, carpeted with mauve-flowering sage. Over its head droops an
+    olive tree, and round it is a little space clear of all undergrowth.
+
+    About a quarter past nine the funeral party arrived and made their
+    way up the steep, narrow, and rocky path that leads to the grave.
+    The way was so rough and uncertain that we had to have men with
+    lamps every twenty yards to guide the bearers. He was borne by petty
+    officers of his own company, and so slowly did they go that it was
+    not till nearly eleven that they reached the grave.
+
+    We buried him by cloudy moonlight. He wore his uniform, and on the
+    coffin were his helmet, belt, and pistol (he had no sword). We lined
+    the grave with flowers and olive, and Colonel Quilter laid an olive
+    wreath on the coffin. The chaplain who saw him in the afternoon read
+    the service very simply. The firing party fired three volleys and
+    the bugles sounded the "Last Post."
+
+    And so we laid him to rest in that lovely valley, his head towards
+    those mountains that he would have loved to know, and his feet
+    towards the sea. He once said in chance talk that he would like to
+    be buried in a Greek island. He could have no lovelier one than
+    Skyros, and no quieter resting place.
+
+    On his grave we heaped great blocks of white marble; the men of his
+    company made a great wooden cross for his head, with his name upon
+    it, and his platoon put a smaller one at his feet. On the back of
+    the large cross our interpreter wrote in Greek.... "Here lies the
+    servant of God, sub-lieutenant in the English navy, who died for the
+    deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks."
+
+    The next morning we sailed, and had no chance of revisiting his
+    grave.
+
+It is no mere flippancy to say that the War did much for Rupert Brooke.
+The boy who had written many hot, morbid, immature verses and a handful
+of perfect poetry, stands now by one swift translation in the golden
+cloudland of English letters. There will never, can never, be any
+laggard note in the praise of his work. And of a young poet dead one may
+say things that would be too fulsome for life. Professor Gilbert Murray
+is quoted:
+
+"Among all who have been poets and died young, it is hard to think of
+one who, both in life and death, has so typified the ideal radiance of
+youth and poetry."
+
+In the grave among the olive trees on the island of Skyros, Brooke found
+at least one Certainty--that of being "among the English poets." He
+would probably be the last to ask a more high-sounding epitaph.
+
+His "Collected Poems" as published consist of eighty-two pieces, fifty
+of which were published in his first book, issued (in England only) in
+1911. That is to say fifty of the poems were written before the age of
+24, and seventeen of the fifty before 21. These last are thoroughly
+youthful in formula. We all go through the old familiar cycle, and
+Brooke did not take his youth at second hand. Socialism, vegetarianism,
+bathing by moonlight in the Cam, sleeping out of doors, walking barefoot
+on the crisp English turf, channel crossings and what not--it is all a
+part of the grand game. We can only ask that the man really see what he
+says he sees, and report it with what grace he can muster.
+
+And so of the seventeen earliest poems there need not be fulsome praise.
+Few of us are immortal poets by twenty-one. But even Brooke's
+undergraduate verses refused to fall entirely into the usual grooves of
+sophomore song. So unerring a critic as Professor Woodberry (his
+introduction to the "Collected Poems" is so good that lesser hands may
+well pause) finds in them "more of the intoxication of the god" than in
+the later rounder work. They include the dreaming tenderness of _Day
+That I Have Loved_; they include such neat little pictures of the gross
+and sordid as the two poems _Wagner_ and _Dawn_, written on a trip in
+Germany. (It is curious that the only note of exasperation in Brooke's
+poems occurs when he writes from Germany. One finds it again, wittily
+put, in _Grantchester_.)
+
+This vein of brutality and resolute ugliness that one finds here and
+there in Brooke's work is not wholly amiss nor unintelligible. Like all
+young men of quick blood he seized gaily upon the earthy basis of our
+humanity and found in it food for purging laughter. There was never a
+young poet worth bread and salt who did not scrawl ribald verses in his
+day; we may surmise that Brooke's peers at King's would recall many
+vigorous stanzas that are not included in the volume at hand. The few
+touches that we have in this vein show a masculine fear on Brooke's part
+of being merely pretty in his verse. In his young thirst for reality he
+did not boggle at coarse figures or loathsome metaphors. Just as his
+poems of 1905-08 are of the cliche period where all lips are "scarlet,"
+and lamps are "relumed," so the section dated 1908-11 shows Brooke in
+the _Shropshire Lad_ stage, at the mercy of extravagant sex images, and
+yet developing into the dramatic felicity of his sonnet _The Hill_:
+
+    Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
+      Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass,
+      You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
+    Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
+    When we are old, are old...." "And when we die
+      All's over that is ours; and life burns on
+    Through other lovers, other lips," said I,
+    --"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"
+
+    "We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.
+      Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said:
+      "We shall go down with unreluctant tread
+    Rose-crowned into the darkness!" ... Proud we were
+    And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
+    --And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.
+
+The true lover of poetry, it seems to me, cannot but wish that the
+"1914" sonnets and the most perfect of the later poems had been
+separately issued. The best of Brooke forms a thin sheaf of consummate
+beauty, and I imagine that the little edition of "1914 and Other Poems,"
+containing the thirty-two later poems, which was published in England
+and issued in Garden City by Doubleday, Page & Company in July, 1915, to
+save the American copy right, will always be more precious than the
+complete edition. As there were only twenty-five copies of this first
+American edition, it is extremely rare and will undoubtedly be sought
+after by collectors. But for one who is interested to trace the growth
+of Brooke's power, the steadying of his poetic orbit and the mounting
+flame of his joy in life, the poems of 1908-11 are an instructive study.
+From the perfected brutality of _Jealousy_ or _Menelaus and Helen_ or
+_A Channel Passage_ (these bite like Meredith) we see him passing to
+sonnets that taste of Shakespeare and foretell his utter mastery of the
+form. What could better the wit and beauty of this song:
+
+    "Oh! Love," they said, "is King of Kings,
+      And Triumph is his crown.
+    Earth fades in flame before his wings,
+      And Sun and Moon bow down."
+    But that, I knew, would never do;
+      And Heaven is all too high.
+    So whenever I meet a Queen, I said,
+      I will not catch her eye.
+
+    "Oh! Love," they said, and "Love," they said,
+      "The Gift of Love is this;
+    A crown of thorns about thy head,
+      And vinegar to thy kiss!"--
+    But Tragedy is not for me;
+      And I'm content to be gay.
+    So whenever I spied a Tragic Lady,
+      I went another way.
+
+    And so I never feared to see
+      You wander down the street,
+    Or come across the fields to me
+      On ordinary feet.
+    For what they'd never told me of,
+      And what I never knew;
+    It was that all the time, my love,
+      Love would be merely you.
+
+We come then to the five sonnets inspired by the War. Let us be sparing
+of clumsy comment. They are the living heart of young England; the
+throbbing soul of all that gracious manhood torn from its happy quest of
+Beauty and Certainty, flung unheated into the absurdities of War, and
+yet finding in this supreme sacrifice an answer to all its pangs of
+doubt. All the hot yearnings of "1905-08" and "1908-11" are gone; here
+is no Shropshire Lad enlisting for spite, but a joyous surrender to
+England of all that she had given. See his favourite metaphor (that of
+the swimmer) recur--what pictures it brings of "Parson's Pleasure" on
+the Cher and the willowy bathing pool on the Cam. How one recalls those
+white Greek bodies against the green!
+
+    Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His hour,
+      And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
+    With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
+      To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping.
+
+To those who tell us England is grown old and fat and soft, there is the
+answer. It is no hymn of hate that England's youth has sung, but the
+farewell of those who, loving life with infinite zest, have yet found in
+surrendering it to her the Beauty, the Certainty, yes and the Quiet,
+which they had sought. On those five pages are packed in simple words
+all the love of life, the love of woman, the love of England that make
+Brooke's memory sweet. Never did the sonnet speak to finer purpose. "In
+his hands the thing became a trumpet"--
+
+
+THE DEAD
+
+    Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
+      There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
+      But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
+    These laid the world away; poured out the red
+    Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
+      Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
+      That men call age; and those who would have been,
+    Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
+
+    Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth
+      Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
+    Honour has come back, as a King, to earth,
+      And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
+    And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
+      And we have come into our heritage.
+
+It would be misleading, perhaps, to leave Brooke's poetry with the echo
+of this solemn note. No understanding of the man would be complete
+without mentioning the vehement gladness and merriment he found in all
+the commonplaces of life. Poignant to all cherishers of the precious
+details of existence must be his poem _The Great Lover_ where he
+catalogues a sort of trade order list of his stock in life. The lines
+speak with the very accent of Keats. These are some of the things he
+holds dear--
+
+                    White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
+    Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
+    Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust
+    Of friendly bread; and many tasting food;
+    Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
+    And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;
+    And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,
+    Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;
+    Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
+    Smoothe away trouble; and the rough male kiss
+    Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
+    Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
+    Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;
+    The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
+    The good smell of old clothes; and other such--
+     ...All these have been my loves.
+
+Of his humour only those who knew him personally have a right to speak;
+but where does one find a more perfect bit of gentle satire than
+_Heaven_ where he gives us a Tennysonian fish pondering the problem of a
+future life.
+
+    This life cannot be All, they swear,
+    For how unpleasant, if it were!
+    One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
+    Shall come of Water and of Mud;
+    And, sure, the reverent eye must see
+    A Purpose in Liquidity.
+    We darkly know, by Faith we cry
+    The future is not Wholly Dry....
+    But somewhere, beyond Space and Time,
+    Is wetter water, slimier slime!
+
+No future anthology of English wit can be complete without that
+exquisite bit of fooling.
+
+Of such a sort, to use Mr. Mosher's phrase, was Rupert Chawner Brooke,
+"the latest and greatest of young Englishmen."
+
+
+
+
+THE MAN
+
+
+The big room was very still. Outside, beneath a thin, cold drizzle, the
+first tinge of green showed on the broad lawn. The crocuses were
+beginning to thrust their spears through the sodden mold. One of the
+long French windows stood ajar, and in the air that slipped through was
+a clean, moist whiff of coming spring. It was the end of March.
+
+In the leather armchair by the wide, flat desk sat a man. His chin was
+on his chest; the lowered head and the droop of the broad, spare
+shoulders showed the impact of some heavy burden. His clothes were
+gray--a trim, neatly cut business suit; his hair was gray; his gray-blue
+eyes were sombre. In the gathering dusk he seemed only a darker shadow
+in the padded chair. His right hand--the long, firm, nervous hand of a
+scholar--rested on the blotting pad. A silver pen had slipped from his
+fingers as he sat in thought. On the desk lay some typed sheets which he
+was revising.
+
+Sitting there, his mind had been traversing the memories of the past two
+and a half years. Every line of his lean, strong figure showed some
+trace of the responsibilities he had borne. In the greatest crisis of
+modern times he had steadfastly pursued an ideal, regardless of the
+bitterness of criticism and the sting of ridicule. The difficulties had
+been tremendous. Every kind of influence had been brought upon him to do
+certain things, none of which he had done. A scholar, a dreamer, a
+lifelong student of history, he had surprised his associates by the
+clearness of his vision, the tenacity of his will. Never, perhaps, in
+the history of the nation had a man been more brutally reviled than
+he--save one! And his eyes turned to the wall where, over the chimney
+piece, hung the portrait of one of his predecessors who had stood for
+his ideals in a time of fiery trial. It was too dark now to see the
+picture but he knew well the rugged, homely face, the tender,
+pain-wrenched mouth.
+
+This man had dreamed a dream. Climbing from the humble youth of a poor
+student, nourished in classroom and library with the burning visions of
+great teachers, he had hoped in this highest of positions to guide his
+country in the difficult path of a higher patriotism. Philosopher,
+idealist, keen student of men, he had been able to keep his eyes
+steadfast on his goal despite the intolerable cloud of unjust criticism
+that had rolled round him. Venomous and shameful attacks had hurt him,
+but had never abated his purpose. In a world reeling and smoking with
+the insane fury of war, one nation should stand unshaken for the message
+of the spirit, for the glory of humanity; for the settlement of disputes
+by other means than gunpowder and women's tears. That was his dream. To
+that he had clung.
+
+He shifted grimly in his chair, and took up the pen.
+
+What a long, heart-rending strain it had been! His mind went back to the
+golden August day when the telegram was laid on his desk announcing that
+the old civilization of Europe had fallen into fragments. He remembered
+the first meeting thereafter, when his associates, with grave, anxious
+faces, debated the proper stand for them to take. He remembered how, in
+the swinging relaxation of an afternoon of golf, he had thoughtfully
+planned the wording of his first neutrality proclamation.
+
+In those dim, far-off days, who had dreamed what would come? Who could
+have believed that great nations would discard without compunction all
+the carefully built-up conventions of international law? That murder in
+the air, on land, on the sea, under the sea, would be rewarded by the
+highest military honours? That a supposedly friendly nation would fill
+another land with spies--even among the accredited envoys of diplomacy?
+
+Sadly this man thought of the long painful fight he had made to keep one
+nation at least out of the tragic, barbaric struggle. Giving due honour
+to convinced militarist and sincere pacifist, his own course was still
+different. That his country, disregarding the old fetishes of honour and
+insult, should stand solidly for humanity; should endure all things,
+suffer all things, for humanity's sake; should seek to bind up the
+wounds and fill the starving mouths. That one nation--not because she
+was weak, but because she was strong--should, with God's help, make a
+firm stand for peace and show to all mankind that force can never
+conquer force.
+
+"A nation can be so right that it should be too proud to fight."
+Magnificent words, true words, which one day would re-echo in history as
+the utterance of a man years in advance of his time--but what rolling
+thunders of vituperation they had cost him! _Too proud to fight_!... If
+only it had been possible to carry through to the end this message from
+Judea!
+
+But, little by little, and with growing anguish, he had seen that the
+nation must take another step. Little by little, as the inhuman frenzies
+of warfare had grown in savagery, inflicting unspeakable horror on
+non-combatants, women and children, he had realized that his cherished
+dream must be laid aside. For the first time in human history a great
+nation had dared to waive pride, honour, and--with bleeding heart--even
+the lives of its own for the hope of humanity and civilization. With
+face buried in his hands he reviewed the long catalogue of atrocities on
+the seas. He could feel his cheeks grow hot against his palms. _Arabic_,
+_Lusitania_, _Persia_, _Laconia_, _Falaba_, _Gulflight_, _Sussex_,
+_California_--the names were etched in his brain in letters of grief.
+And now, since the "barred-zone" decree ...
+
+He straightened in his chair. Like a garment the mood of anguish slipped
+from him. He snapped on the green desk light and turned to his personal
+typewriter. As he did so, from some old student day a phrase flashed
+into his mind--the words of Martin Luther, the Thuringian peasant and
+university professor, who four hundred years before had nailed his
+theses on the church door at Wittenberg:
+
+"_Gott helfe mir, ich kann nicht anders_."
+
+They chimed a solemn refrain in his heart as he inserted a fresh sheet
+of paper behind the roller and resumed his writing....
+
+"_With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the
+step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it
+involves_.... _I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of
+the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war
+against the Government and people of the United States_...."
+
+The typewriter clicked industriously. The face bent intently over the
+keys was grave and quiet, but as the paper unrolled before him some of
+his sadness seemed to pass away. A vision of his country, no longer
+divided in petty schisms, engrossed in material pursuits, but massed in
+one by the force and fury of a valiant ideal, came into his mind.
+
+"It is for humanity," he whispered to himself. "_Ich kann nicht
+anders_...."
+
+"_We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward
+them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse
+that their government acted in entering this war. It was not with their
+previous knowledge or approval_.... _Self-governed nations do not fill
+their neighbour states with spies, or set the course of intrigue to
+bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an
+opportunity to strike and make conquest.... A steadfast concert for
+peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic
+nations_....
+
+    "_Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady to
+    a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow
+    interest of their own_."
+
+With the gathering of the dusk the rain had stopped. He rose from his
+chair and walked to the window. The sky had cleared; in the west shone a
+faint band of clear apple green in which burned one lucent star.
+Distantly he could hear the murmur of the city like the pulsing
+heartbeat of the nation. As often, in moments of tension, he seemed to
+feel the whole vast stretch of the continent throbbing; the yearning
+breast of the land trembling with energy; the great arch of sky,
+spanning from coast to coast, quiver with power unused. The murmur of
+little children in their cradles, the tender words of mothers, the
+footbeat of men on the pavements of ten thousand cities, the flags
+leaping in air from high buildings, ships putting out to sea with
+gunners at their sterns--in one aching synthesis the vastness and
+dearness and might of his land came to him. A mingled nation, indeed, of
+various and clashing breeds; but oh, with what a tradition to uphold!
+
+Words were forming in his mind as he watched the fading sky, and he
+returned quietly to the typewriter:
+
+"_We are glad to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for
+the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included.... The world
+must be made safe for democracy_."
+
+_The world must be made safe for democracy_! As the wires leaped and the
+little typewriter spoke under the pressure of his strong fingers, scenes
+passed in his mind of the happy, happy Europe he had known in old wander
+days, years before.
+
+He could see the sun setting down dark aisles of the Black Forest; the
+German peasants at work in the fields; the simple, cordial friendliness
+of that lovely land. He remembered French villages beside slow-moving
+rivers; white roads in a hot shimmer of sun; apple orchards of the
+Moselle. And England--dear green England, fairest of all--the rich blue
+line of the Chiltern Hills, and Buckinghamshire beech woods bronze and
+yellow in the autumn. He remembered thatched cottages where he had
+bicycled for tea, and the naive rustic folk who had made him welcome.
+
+What deviltry had taken all these peaceful people, gripped them and
+maddened them, set them at one another's throats? Millions of children,
+millions of mothers, millions of humble workers, happy in the richness
+of life--where were they now? Life, innocent human life--the most
+precious thing we know or dream of, freedom to work for a living and
+win our own joys of home and love and food--what Black Death had
+maddened the world with its damnable seeds of hate? Would life ever be
+free and sweet again?
+
+The detestable sultry horror of it all broke upon him anew in a tide of
+anguish. No, the world could never be the same again in the lives of men
+now living. But for the sake of the generations to come--he thought of
+his own tiny grandchildren--for the love of God and the mercy of
+mankind, let this madness be crushed. If his country must enter the war
+let it be only for the love and service of humanity. "It is a fearful
+thing," he thought, "but the right is more precious than peace."
+
+Sad at heart he turned again to the typewriter, and the keys clicked off
+the closing words:
+
+"_To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything
+that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who
+know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood
+and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and
+the peace which she has treasured_."
+
+He leaned back in his chair, stiff and weary. His head ached hotly. With
+elbows on the desk he covered his forehead and eyes with his hands. All
+the agony, the bitterness, the burden of preceding days swept over him,
+but behind it was a cool and cleansing current of peace. "_Ich kann
+nicht anders_," he whispered.
+
+Then, turning swiftly to the machine, he typed rapidly:
+
+"_God helping her, she can do no other_."
+
+
+
+
+THE HEAD OF THE FIRM
+
+
+He always lost his temper when the foreign mail came in. Sitting in his
+private room, which overlooked a space of gardens where bright red and
+yellow flowers were planted in rhomboids, triangles, parallelograms, and
+other stiff and ugly figures, he would glance hastily through the papers
+and magazines. He was familiar with several foreign languages, and would
+skim through the text. Then he would pound the table with his fist, walk
+angrily about the floor, and tear the offensive journals into strips.
+For very often he found in these papers from abroad articles or cartoons
+that were most annoying to him, and very detrimental to the business of
+his firm.
+
+His assistants tried to keep foreign publications away from him, but he
+was plucky in his own harsh way. He insisted on seeing them. Always the
+same thing happened. His face would grow grim, the seam-worn forehead
+would corrugate, the muscles of his jaw throb nervously. His gray eyes
+would flash--and the fist come down heavily on the mahogany desk.
+
+When a man is nearly sixty and of a full-blooded physique, it is not
+well for him to have these frequent pulsations of rage. But he had
+always found it hard to control his temper. He sometimes remembered what
+a schoolmaster had said to him at Cassel, forty-five years before: "He
+who loses his temper will lose everything."
+
+But he must be granted great provocation. He had always had difficulties
+to contend with. His father was an invalid, and he himself was puny in
+childhood; infantile paralysis withered his left arm when he was an
+infant; but in spite of these handicaps he had made himself a vigorous
+swimmer, rider, and yachtsman; he could shoot better with one arm than
+most sportsmen with two. After leaving the university he served in the
+army, but at his father's death the management of the vast family
+business came into his hands. He was then twenty-eight.
+
+No one can question the energy with which he set himself to carry on the
+affairs of the firm. Generous, impetuous, indiscreet, stubborn,
+pugnacious, his blend of qualities held many of the elements of a
+successful man of business. His first act was to dismiss the
+confidential and honoured assistant who had guided both his father and
+grandfather in the difficult years of the firm's growth. But the new
+executive was determined to run the business his own way. Disregarding
+criticism, ridicule, or flattery, he declared it his mission to spread
+the influence of the business to the ends of the earth. "We must have
+our place in the sun," he said; and announced himself as the divine
+instrument through whom this would be accomplished. He made it perfectly
+plain that no man's opposition would balk him in the management of the
+firm's affairs. One of his most famous remarks was: "Considering myself
+as the instrument of the Lord, without heeding the views and opinions of
+the day, I go my way." The board of directors censured him for this, but
+he paid little heed.
+
+The growth of the business was enormous; nothing like it had been seen
+in the world's history. Branch offices were opened all over the globe.
+Vessels bearing the insignia of the company were seen on every ocean. He
+himself with his accustomed energy travelled everywhere to advance the
+interests of trade. In England, Russia, Denmark, Italy, Austria, Turkey,
+the Holy Land, he made personal visits to the firm's best customers. He
+sent his brother to America to spread the goodwill of the business; and
+other members of the firm to France, Holland, China, and Japan. Telegram
+after telegram kept the world's cables busy as he distributed
+congratulations, condolences, messages of one kind and another to
+foreign merchants. His publicity department never rested. He employed
+famous scientists and inventors to improve the products of his
+factories. He reared six sons to carry on the business after him.
+
+This is no place to record minutely the million activities of thirty
+years that made his business one of the greatest on earth. It is all
+written down in history. Suffice it to say that those years did not go
+by without sorrows. He was afflicted with an incurable disease. His
+temperament, like high tension steel, was of a brittle quality; it had
+the tendency to snap under great strains, living always at fever pitch,
+sparing himself no fatigue of body or soul, the whirring dynamo of
+energy in him often showed signs of overstress.
+
+It is hard to conceive what he must have gone through in those last
+months. You must remember the extraordinary conditions in his line of
+business caused by the events of recent years. He had lived to see his
+old friends, merchants with whom he had dealt for decades, some of them
+the foreign representatives of his own firm, out of a job and hunted
+from their homes by creditors. He had lived to realize that the
+commodity he and his family had been manufacturing for generations was
+out of date, a thing no longer needed or wanted by the modern world. The
+strain which his mind was enduring is shown by the febrile and
+unbalanced tone of one of his letters, sent to a member of his own
+family who ran one of the company's branch offices but was forced to
+resign by bankruptcy:
+
+"I have heard with wrath of the infamous outrage committed by our common
+enemies upon you and upon your business. I assure you that your
+deprivation can be only temporary. The mailed fist, with further aid
+from Almighty God, will restore you to your office, of which no man by
+right can rob you. The company will wreak vengeance on those who have
+dared so insolently to lay their criminal hands on you. We hope to
+welcome you at the earliest opportunity."
+
+The failure of his business was the great drama of the century; and it
+is worth while to remember what it was that killed it--and him. While
+the struggle was still on there were many arguments as to what would
+bring matters to an end; some cunning invention, some new patent that
+would outwit the methods of his firm. But after all it was nothing more
+startling than the printing press and the moral of the whole matter may
+be put in those fine old words, "But above all things, truth beareth
+away the victory." Little by little, the immense power of the printed
+word became too strong for him. Rave and fume as he might, and hammer
+the mahogany desk, the rolling thunders of a world massed against him
+cracked even his stiff will. Little by little the plain truth sifted
+into the minds and hearts of the thousands working in his huge
+organization. In Russia, in Greece, in Spain, in Austria, in China, in
+Mexico, he saw men bursting the shells of age and custom that had
+cramped them. One by one his competitors adopted the new ideas, or had
+them forced upon them; profit-sharing, workmen's insurance, the right of
+free communities to live their own lives.
+
+Deep in his heart he must have known he was doomed to fail, but that
+perverse demon of strong-headed pugnacity was trenched deep within him.
+He was always a fighter, but his face, though angry, obstinate, proud,
+was still not an evil face. He broke down while there was still some of
+the business to save and some of the goodwill intact.
+
+It was the printing press that decided it: the greatest engine in the
+world, to which submarines and howitzers and airplanes are but wasteful
+toys. For when the printing presses are united the planet may buck and
+yaw, but she comes into line at last. A million inky cylinders, roaring
+in chorus, were telling him the truth. When his assistants found him, on
+his desk lay a half-ripped magazine where he had tried to tear up a
+mocking cartoon.
+
+I think that as he sat at his table in those last days, staring with
+embittered eyes at the savage words and pictures that came to him from
+over the seven seas, he must have had some vision of the shadowy might
+of the press, of the vast irresistible urge of public opinion, that hung
+like dark wings above his head. For little by little the printed word
+incarnates itself in power, and in ways undreamed of makes itself felt.
+Little by little the wills of common men, coalescing, running together
+like beads of mercury on a plate, quivering into rhythm and concord,
+become a mighty force that may be ever so impalpable, but grinds empires
+to powder. Mankind suffers hideous wrongs and cruel setbacks, but when
+once the collective purpose of humanity is summoned to a righteous end,
+it moves onward like the tide up a harbour.
+
+The struggle was long and bitter. His superb organization, with such
+colossal resources for human good, lavished in the fight every energy
+known to man. For a time it seemed as though he would pull through. His
+managers had foreseen every phase of this unprecedented competition, and
+his warehouses were stocked. But slowly the forces of his opponents
+began to focus themselves.
+
+Then even his own employees suspected the truth. His agents,
+solicitors, and salesmen, scattered all over the globe, realized that
+one company cannot twist the destiny of mankind. He felt the huge fabric
+of his power quiver and creak. The business is now in the hands of the
+executors, pending a reorganization.
+
+
+
+
+17 HERIOT ROW
+
+
+There is a small black notebook into which I look once or twice a year
+to refresh my memory of a carnal and spiritual pilgrimage to Edinburgh,
+made with Mifflin McGill (upon whose head be peace) in the summer of
+1911. It is a testament of light-hearted youth, savoury with the
+unindentured joys of twenty-one and the grand literary passion. Would
+that one might again steer _Shotover_ (dearest of pushbikes) along the
+Banbury Road, and see Mifflin's lean shanks twirl up the dust on the way
+to Stratford! Never was more innocent merriment spread upon English
+landscape. When I die, bury the black notebook with me.
+
+That notebook is memorable also in a statistical way, and perchance may
+serve future historians as a document proving the moderate cost of
+wayfaring in those halcyon days. Nothing in Mr. Pepys' diary is more
+interesting than his meticulous record of what his amusements cost him.
+Mayhap some future economist will pore upon these guileless confessions.
+For in the black memorandum book I succeeded, for almost the only time
+in my life, in keeping an accurate record of the lapse of coin during
+nine whole days. I shall deposit the document with the Congressional
+Library in Washington for future annalists; in the meantime I make no
+excuse for recounting the items of the first sixty hours. Let no one
+take amiss the frequent entries marked "cider." July, 1911, was a hot
+month and a dusty, and we were biking fifty miles the day. Please reckon
+exchange at two cents per penny.
+
+                                                   L |  s. |   d
+
+July 16  pint cider                                  |     |   4
+         1/2 pint cider                                |     |  11/2
+         lunch at Banbury                            |  2  |   2
+         pint cider at Ettington                     |     |   3
+         supper at Stratford                         |  1  |   3
+         stamp and postcard                          |     |   2
+                                                 ____ _____ _____
+                                                     |  4  |  31/2
+
+
+July 17  Postcards and stamps                        |     |   9
+         pencil                                      |     |   1
+         Warwick Castle                              |  2  |   -
+         cider at the _Bear and Baculus_             |     |
+           (which Mifflin _would_ call the           |     |
+           _Bear and Bacillus) _                     |     |  21/2
+         _Bowling Green Inn, _bed and                |     |
+           breakfast                                 |  3  |   2
+         Puncture                                    |  1  |   -
+         Lunch, Kenilworth                           |  1  |   6
+         Kenilworth Castle                           |     |   6
+         Postcards                                   |     |   4
+         Lemonade, Coventry                          |     |   4
+         Cider                                       |     |  21/2
+         Supper, Tamworth, _The Castle Hotel_        |  2  |   1
+                                                 ____ _____ _____
+                                                     | 16  | 51/2
+
+
+July 18  Johnson house, Lichfield                    |     |   3
+         cider at _The Three Crowns_                 |     |   4
+         postcard and shave                          |     |   4
+         _The King's Head_, bed and breakfast        |  3  |   7
+           cider                                     |     |   2
+         tip on road[A]                              |     |  11/2
+         lunch, Uttoxeter                            |  1  |   3
+         cider, Ashbourne, _The Green                |     |
+           Man_                                      |     |   3
+         landlord's drink, Ashbourne[B]              |     |   1
+         supper, _Newhaven House_,                   |  1  |   -
+         lemonade, Buxton                            |     |   3
+                                                 ____ _____ _____
+
+                 TOTAL                            L1    4      1
+                                                     ($5.78)
+
+[Footnote A: As far as I can remember, this was a gratuity to a rather
+tarnished subject who directed us at a fork in the road, near a railway
+crossing.]
+
+[Footnote B: This was a copper well lavished; for the publican, a
+ventripotent person with a liquid and glamorous brown eye, told us
+excellent gossip about Dr. Johnson and George Eliot, both heroes in that
+neighbourhood. "Yes," we said, "that man Eliot was a great writer," and
+he agreed.]
+
+That is to say, 24 bob for two and a half days. We used to reckon that
+ten shillings a day would do us very nicely, barring luxuries and
+emergencies. We attained a zealous proficiency in reckoning shillings
+and pence, and our fervour in posting our ledgers would have gladdened a
+firm of auditors. I remember lying on the coping of a stone bridge over
+the water of Teviot near Hawick, admiring the green-brown tint of the
+swift stream bickering over the stones. Mifflin was writing busily in
+his notebook on the other side of the bridge. I thought to myself,
+"Bless the lad, he's jotting down some picturesque notes of something
+that has struck his romantic eye." And just then he spoke--"Four and
+eleven pence half-penny so far to-day!"
+
+Would I could retrogress over the devious and enchanting itinerary. The
+McGill route from Oxford to Auld Reekie is 417 miles; it was the
+afternoon of the ninth day when with thumping hearts we saw Arthur's
+Seat from a dozen miles away. Our goal was in sight!
+
+There was a reason for all this pedalling madness. Ever since the days
+when we had wandered by Darby Creek, reading R.L.S. aloud to one
+another, we had planned this trip to the gray metropolis of the north. A
+score of sacred names had beckoned us, the haunts of the master. We knew
+them better than any other syllables in the world. Heriot Row, Princes
+Street, the Calton Hill, Duddingston Loch, Antigua Street, the Water of
+Leith, Colinton, Swanston, the Pentland Hills--O my friends, do those
+names mean to you what they did to us? Then you are one of the
+brotherhood--what was to us then the sweetest brotherhood in the world!
+
+In a quiet little hotel in Rutland Square we found decent lodging, in a
+large chamber which was really the smoking room of the house. The city
+was crowded with tourists on account of an expected visit of the King
+and Queen; every other room in the hotel was occupied. Greatly to our
+satisfaction we were known as "the smoking-room gentlemen" throughout
+our stay. Our windows opened upon ranks of corridor-cars tying on the
+Caledonian Railway sidings, and the clink and jar of buffers and
+coupling irons were heard all night long. I seem to remember that
+somewhere in his letters R.L.S. speaks of that same sound. He knew
+Rutland Square well, for his boyhood friend Charles Baxter lived there.
+Writing from Samoa in later years he says that one memory stands out
+above all others of his youth--Rutland Square. And while that was of
+course only the imaginative fervour of the moment, yet we were glad to
+know that in that quiet little cul de sac behind the railway terminal we
+were on ground well loved by Tusitala.
+
+The first evening, and almost every twilight while we were in Auld
+Reekie, we found our way to 17 Heriot Row--famous address, which had
+long been as familiar to us as our own. I think we expected to find a
+tablet on the house commemorating the beloved occupant; but no; to our
+surprise it was dark, dusty, and tenantless. A sign TO SELL was
+prominent. To take the name of the agent was easy. A great thought
+struck us. Could we not go over the house in the character of
+prospective purchasers? Mifflin and I went back to our smoking room and
+concocted a genteel letter to Messrs. Guild and Shepherd, Writers to the
+Signet.
+
+Promptly came a reply (Scots business men answer at once).
+
+
+    16 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh.
+
+    26th July, 1911
+
+
+    DEAR SIR,
+
+    17 HERIOT ROW
+
+    We have received your letter regarding this house. The house can be
+    seen at any time, and if you will let us know when you wish to view
+    it we shall arrange to have it opened.
+
+    We are,
+
+    Yours faithfully,
+
+    GUILD AND SHEPHERD.
+
+Our hearts were uplifted, but now we were mightily embarrassed as to the
+figure we would cut before the Writers to the Signet. You must remember
+that we were two young vagabonds in the earliest twenties, travelling
+with slim knapsacks, and much soiled by a fortnight on the road. I was
+in knickerbockers and khaki shirt; Mifflin in greasy gray flannels and
+subfusc Norfolk. Our only claims to gentility were our monocles. Always
+take a monocle on a vagabond tour: it is a never-failing source of
+amusement and passport of gentility. No matter how ragged you are, if
+you can screw a pane in your eye you can awe the yokel or the tradesman.
+
+The private records of the firm of Guild and Shepherd doubtless show
+that on Friday, July 28, 1911, one of their polite young attaches,
+appearing as per appointment at 17 Heriot Row, was met by two eccentric
+young gentlemen, clad in dirty white flannel hats, waterproof capes,
+each with an impressive monocle. Let it be said to the honour of the
+attache in question that he showed no symptoms of surprise or alarm. We
+explained, I think, that we were scouting for my father, who (it was
+alleged) greatly desired to settle down in Edinburgh. And we had
+presence of mind enough to enquire about plumbing, stationary wash-tubs,
+and the condition of the flues. I wish I could remember what rent was
+quoted.
+
+He showed us all through the house; and you may imagine that we stepped
+softly and with beating hearts. Here we were on the very track of the
+Magician himself: his spirit whispered in the lonely rooms. We imagined
+R.L.S. as a little child, peering from the windows at dusk to see Leerie
+light the street-lamps outside--a quaint, thin, elvish face with shining
+brown eyes; or held up in illness by Cummie to see the gracious dawn
+heralded by oblongs of light in the windows across the Queen Street
+gardens. We saw the college lad, tall, with tweed coat and cigarette,
+returning to Heriot Row with an armful of books, in sad or sparkling
+mood. The house was dim and dusty: a fine entrance hall, large dining
+room facing the street--and we imagined Louis and his parents at
+breakfast. Above this, the drawing room, floored with parquet oak, a
+spacious and attractive chamber. Above this again, the nursery, and
+opening off it the little room where faithful Cummie slept. But in vain
+we looked for some sign or souvenir of the entrancing spirit. The room
+that echoed to his childish glee, that heard his smothered sobs in the
+endless nights of childish pain, the room where he scribbled and brooded
+and burst into gusts of youth's passionate outcry, is now silent and
+forlorn.
+
+With what subtly mingled feelings we peered from room to room, seeing
+everything, and yet not daring to give ourselves away to the courteous
+young agent. And what was it he said?--"This was the house of Lord
+So-and-so" (I forget the name)--"and incidentally, Robert Louis
+Stevenson lived here once. His signature occurs once or twice in the
+deeds."
+
+_Incidentally_!...
+
+Like many houses in Auld Reekie, 17 Heriot Row is built on a steep slant
+of ground, so that the rear of the house is a storey or more higher than
+the face. We explored the kitchens, laundries, store-rooms, and other
+"offices" with care, imagining that little "Smoutie" may have run here
+and there in search of tid-bits from the cook. Visions of that
+childhood, fifty years before, were almost as real as our own. We seemed
+to hear the young treble of his voice. That house was the home of the
+Stevensons for thirty years (1857-1887)--surely even the thirty years
+that have gone by since Thomas Stevenson died cannot have laid all those
+dear ghosts we conjured up!
+
+We thanked our guide and took leave of him. If the firm of Guild and
+Shepherd should ever see this, surely they will forgive our innocent
+deception, for the honour of R.L.S. I wonder if any one has yet put a
+tablet on the house? If not, Mifflin and I will do so, some day.
+
+In the evenings we used to wander up to Heriot Row in the long Northern
+dusk, to sit on the front steps of number 17 waiting for Leerie to come
+and light the famous lamp which still stands on the pavement in front of
+the dining-room windows:
+
+    For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,
+    And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more;
+    And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light,
+    O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night!
+
+But no longer does Leerie "with lantern and with ladder come posting
+up the street." Nowadays he carries a long pole bearing a flame
+cunningly sheltered in a brass socket. But the Leerie of 1911
+("Leerie-light-the-lamps" is a generic nickname for all lamplighters in
+Scotland) was a pleasant fellow even if ladderless, and we used to have
+a cigar ready for him when he reached 17. We told him of R.L.S., of whom
+he had vaguely heard, and explained the sanctity of that particular
+lamp. He in turn talked freely of his craft, and learning that we were
+Americans he told us of his two sisters "in Pennsylvania, at 21 Thorn
+Street." He seemed to think Pennsylvania a town, but finally we learned
+that the Misses Leerie lived in Sewickley where they were doing well,
+and sending back money to the "kiddies." Good Leerie, I wonder do you
+still light the lamps on Heriot Row, or have you too seen redder
+beacons on Flanders fields?
+
+One evening I remember we fell into discussion whether the lamp-post was
+still the same one that R.L.S. had known. We were down on hands and
+knees on the pavement, examining the base of the pillar by match-light
+in search of possible dates. A very seedy and disreputable looking man
+passed, evidently regarding us with apprehension as detectives. Mifflin,
+never at a loss, remarked loudly "No, I see no footprints here," and as
+the ragged one passed hastily on with head twisted over his shoulder, we
+followed him. At the corner of Howe Street he broke into an uneasy
+shuffle, and Mifflin turned a great laugh into a Scotland Yard sneeze.
+
+Howe Street crosses Heriot Row at right angles, only a few paces prom
+No. 17. It dips sharply downhill toward the Water of Leith, and Mifflin
+and I used to stand at the corner and wonder just where took place the
+adventure with the lame boy which R.L.S. once described when setting
+down some recollections of childhood.
+
+    In Howe street, round the corner from our house, I often saw a lame
+    boy of rather a rough and poor appearance. He had one leg much
+    shorter than the other, and wallowed in his walk, in consequence,
+    like a ship in a seaway. I had read more than enough, in tracts and
+    _goody_ story books, of the isolation of the infirm; and after many
+    days of bashfulness and hours of consideration, I finally accosted
+    him, sheepishly enough I daresay, in these words: "Would you like to
+    play with me?" I remember the expression, which sounds exactly like
+    a speech from one of the goody books that had nerved me to the
+    venture. But the answer was not one I had anticipated, for it was
+    a blast of oaths. I need not say how fast I fled. This incident was
+    the more to my credit as I had, when I was young, a desperate
+    aversion to addressing strangers, though when once we had got into
+    talk I was pretty certain to assume the lead. The last particular
+    may still be recognized. About four years ago I saw my lame lad, and
+    knew him again at once. He was then a man of great strength, rolling
+    along, with an inch of cutty in his mouth and a butcher's basket on
+    his arm. Our meeting had been nothing to him, but it was a great
+    affair to me.
+
+We strolled up the esplanade below the Castle, pausing in Ramsay's
+Gardens to admire the lighted city from above. In the valley between the
+Castle and Princes Street the pale blue mist rises at night like an
+exhalation from the old gray stones. The lamps shining through it blend
+in a delicate opalescent sheen, shot here and there with brighter
+flares. As the sky darkens the castle looms in silhouette, with one
+yellow square below the Half Moon Battery. "There are no stars like the
+Edinburgh street lamps," says R.L.S. Aye, and the brightest of them all
+shines on Heriot Row.
+
+The vision of that child face still comes to me, peering down from the
+dining-room window. R.L.S. may never have gratified his boyish wish to
+go round with Leerie and light the lamps, but he lit many and more
+enduring flames even in the hearts of those who never saw him.
+
+
+
+
+FRANK CONFESSIONS OF A PUBLISHER'S READER
+
+[_Denis Dulcet, brother of the well-known poet Dunraven Dulcet and the
+extremely well-known literary agent Dove Dulcet, was for many years the
+head reader for a large publishing house. It was my good fortune to know
+him intimately, and when he could be severed from his innumerable
+manuscripts, which accompanied him everywhere, even in bed, he was very
+good company. His premature death from reader's cramp and mental hernia
+was a sad loss to the world of polite letters. Thousands of mediocre
+books would have been loaded upon the public but for his incisive and
+unerring judgment. When he lay on his deathbed, surrounded by half-read
+MSS., he sent for me, and with an air of extreme solemnity laid a packet
+in my hand. It contained the following confession, and it was his last
+wish that it should be published without alteration. I include it here
+in memory of my very dear friend_.]
+
+
+In my youth I was wont to forecast various occupations for myself.
+Engine driver, tugboat captain, actor, statesman, and wild animal
+trainer--such were the visions with which I put myself to sleep. Never
+did the merry life of a manuscript reader swim into my ken. But here I
+am, buried elbow deep in the literary output of a commercial democracy.
+My only excuse for setting down these paragraphs is the hope that other
+more worthy members of the ancient and honorable craft may be induced to
+speak out in meeting. In these days when every type of man is
+interviewed, his modes of thinking conned and commented upon, why not a
+symposium of manuscript readers? Also I realized the other day, while
+reading a manuscript by Harold Bell Wright, that my powers are failing.
+My old trouble is gaining on me, and I may not be long for this world.
+Before I go to face the greatest of all Rejection Slips, I want to utter
+my message without fear or favour.
+
+As a class, publishers' readers are not vocal. They spend their days and
+nights assiduously (in the literal sense) bent over mediocre stuff,
+poking and poring in the unending hope of finding something rich and
+strange. A gradual _stultitia_ seizes them. They take to drink; they
+beat their wives; they despair of literature. Worst, and most
+preposterous, they one and all nourish secret hopes of successful
+authorship. You might think that the interminable flow of turgid
+blockish fiction that passes beneath their weary eyes would justly
+sicken them of the abominable gymnastic of writing. But no: the venom is
+in the blood.
+
+Great men have graced the job--and got out of it as soon as possible.
+George Meredith was a reader once; so was Frank Norris; also E.V. Lucas
+and Gilbert Chesterton. One of the latter's comments on a manuscript is
+still preserved. Writing of a novel by a lady who was the author of many
+unpublished stories, all marked by perseverance rather than talent, he
+said, "Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite lack of variety."
+But alas, we hear too little of these gentlemen in their capacity as
+publishers' pursuivants. Patrolling the porches of literature, why did
+they not bequeath us some pandect of their experience, some rich
+garniture of commentary on the adventures that befell? But they, and
+younger men such as Coningsby Dawson and Sinclair Lewis, have gone on
+into the sunny hayfields of popular authorship and said nothing.
+
+But these brilliant swallow-tailed migrants are not typical. Your true
+specimen of manuscript reader is the faithful old percheron who is
+content to go on, year after year, sorting over the literary pemmican
+that comes before him, inexhaustible in his love for the delicacies of
+good writing, happy if once or twice a twelve-month he chance upon some
+winged thing. He is not the pettifogging pilgarlic of popular
+conception: he is a devoted servant of letters, willing to take his
+thirty or forty dollars a week, willing to suffer the _peine forte et
+dure_ of his profession in the knowledge of honest duty done, writing
+terse and marrowy little essays on manuscripts, which are buried in the
+publishers' files. This man is an honour to the profession, and I
+believe there are many such. Certainly there are many who sigh wistfully
+when they must lay aside some cherished writing of their own to devote
+an evening to illiterate twaddle. Five book manuscripts a day, thirty a
+week, close to fifteen hundred a year--that is a fair showing for the
+head reader of a large publishing house.
+
+One can hardly blame him if he sometimes grow skeptic or acid about the
+profession of letters. Of each hundred manuscripts turned in there will
+rarely be more than three or four that merit any serious consideration;
+only about one in a hundred will be acceptable for publication. And the
+others--alas that human beings should have invented ink to steal away
+their brains! "Only a Lady Barber" is the title of a novel in manuscript
+which I read the other day. Written in the most atrocious dialect, it
+betrayed an ignorance of composition that would have been discreditable
+to a polyp. It described the experiences of a female tonsor somewhere
+in Idaho, and closed with her Machiavellian manoeuvres to entice into
+her shaving chair a man who had bilked her, so that she might slice his
+ear. No need to harrow you with more of the same kind. I read almost a
+score every week. Often I think of a poem which was submitted to me
+once, containing this immortal couplet:
+
+    She damped a pen in the ooze of her brain and wrote a verse
+        on the air,
+    A verse that had shone on the disc of the sun, had she chosen
+        to set it there.
+
+Let me beg you, my dears, leave the pen undamped unless your cerebral
+ooze really has something to impart. And then, once a year or so, when
+one is thinking that the hooves of Pegasus have turned into pigs'
+trotters, comes some Joseph Conrad, some Walter de la Mare, some Rupert
+Brooke or Pearsall Smith, to restore one's sanity.
+
+Or else--what is indeed more frequent--the reader's fainting spirits are
+repaired not by the excellence of the manuscript before him, but by its
+absolute literary nonentity, a kind of intellectual Absolute Zero. Lack
+of merit may be so complete, so grotesque, that the composition affords
+to the sophistic eye a high order of comedy. A lady submits a poem in
+many cantos, beginning
+
+    Our heart is but a bundle of muscle
+    In which our passions tumble and tussle.
+
+Another lady begins her novel with the following psychanalysis:
+
+    "Thus doth the ever-changing course of things run a perpetual
+    circle." ... She read the phrase and then reflected, the cause being
+    a continued prognostication, beginning and ending as it had done the
+    day before, to-morrow and forever, maybe, of her own ailment, a
+    paradoxical malady, being nothing more nor less than a pronounced
+    case of malnutrition of the soul, a broken heart-cord, aggravated by
+    a total collapse of that portion of the mentalities which had been
+    bolstered up by undue pride, fallacious arguments, modern foibles
+    and follies peculiar to the human species, both male and female,
+    under favorable social conditions, found in provincial towns as well
+    as in large cities and fashionable watering places.
+
+But as a fitting anodyne to this regrettable case of soul malnutrition,
+let me append a description of a robuster female, taken verbatim from a
+manuscript (penned by masculine hand) which became a by-word in one
+publisher's office.
+
+    She was a beautiful young lady. She was a medium, sized, elegant
+    figure, wearing a neatly-fitted travelling dress of black alpaca.
+    Her raven-black hair, copious both in length and volume and figured
+    like a deep river, rippled by the wind, was parted in the centre and
+    combed smoothly down, ornamenting her pink temples with a flowing
+    tracery that passed round to its modillion windings on a graceful
+    crown. Her mouth was set with pearls adorned with elastic rubies and
+    tuned with minstrel lays, while her nose gracefully concealed its
+    own umbrage, and her eyes imparted a radiant glow to the azure of
+    the sky. Jewels of plain gold were about her ears and her tapering
+    strawberry hands, and a golden chain, attached to a time-keeper of
+    the same material, sparkled on an elegantly-rounded bosom that was
+    destined to be pushed forward by sighs.
+
+Let it not be thought that only the gracious sex can inspire such
+plenitude of meticulous portraiture! Here is a description of the hero
+in a novel by a man which appeared on my desk recently:
+
+    For some time past there had been appearing at the home of Sarah
+    Ellenton, a man not over fifty years of age, well groomed and of the
+    appearances of being on good terms with prosperity in many phases.
+    His complexion was reddish. His hazel eyes deepset and close
+    together were small and shifting. His nose ran down to a point in
+    many lines, and from the point back to where it joined above his
+    lip, the course was seen to swerve slightly to one side. His upper
+    lip assumed almost any form and at all times. His mouth ran across
+    his face in a thin line, curved by waves according to the smiles and
+    expressions he employed. Below those features was a chin of fine
+    proportions, showing nothing to require study, but in his jaw hinges
+    there was a device that worked splendidly, when he wished to show
+    unction and charity, by sending out his chin on such occasions in
+    the kindest advances one would wish to see.
+
+    It was not long before Sarah became Mrs. John R. Quinley.
+
+I hear that the authors are going to unionize themselves and join the
+A.F. of L. The word "author" carries no sanctity with me: I have read
+too many of them. If their forming a trade union will better the output
+of American literature I am keen for it. I know that the professional
+reader has a jaundiced eye; insensibly he acquires a parallax which
+distorts his vision. Reading incessantly, now fiction, now history,
+poetry, essays, philosophy, science, exegetics, and what not, he becomes
+a kind of pantechnicon of slovenly knowledge; a knower of thousands of
+things that aren't so. Every crank's whim, every cretin's philosophy, is
+fired at him first of all. Every six months comes in the inevitable
+treatise on the fourth dimension or on making gold from sea-water, or on
+using moonlight to run dynamos, or on Pope Joan or Prester John. And
+with it all he must retain his simple-hearted faith in the great art of
+writing and in the beneficence of Gutenberg.
+
+Manuscript readers need a trade union far worse than authors. There is
+all too little clannishness among us. We who are the helpless target for
+the slings and arrows of every writer who chooses to put pen on
+foolscap--might we not meet now and then for the humour of exchanging
+anecdotes? No class of beings is more in need of the consolations of
+intercourse. Perpend, brothers! Let us order a tierce of malmsey and
+talk it over! Perchance, too, a trade union among readers might be of
+substantial advantage. Is it not sad that a man should read manuscripts
+all the sweet years of his maturity, and be paid forty dollars a week?
+Let us make sixty the minimum--or let there be a pogrom among the
+authors!
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM McFEE
+
+    M'Phee is the most tidy of chief engineers. If the leg of a
+    cockroach gets into one of his slide-valves the whole ship knows it,
+    and half the ship has to clean up the mess.
+
+    --RUDYARD KIPLING.
+
+
+The next time the Cunard Company commissions a new liner I wish they
+would sign on Joseph Conrad as captain, Rudyard Kipling as purser, and
+William McFee as chief engineer. They might add Don Marquis as deck
+steward and Hall Caine as chief-stewardess. Then I would like to be at
+Raymond and Whitcomb's and watch the clerks booking passages!
+
+William McFee does not spell his name quite as does the Scotch engineer
+in Mr. Kipling's _Brugglesmith_, but I feel sure that his attitude
+toward cockroaches in the slide-valve is the same. Unhappily I do not
+know Mr. McFee in his capacity as engineer; but I know and respect his
+feelings as a writer, his love of honourable and honest work, his
+disdain for blurb and blat. And by an author's attitude toward the
+purveyors of publicity, you may know him.
+
+One evening about the beginning of December, 1915, I was sitting by the
+open fire in Hempstead, Long Island, a comparatively inoffensive young
+man, reading the new edition of Flecker's "The Golden Journey to
+Samarkand" issued that October by Martin Secker in London. Mr. Secker,
+like many other wise publishers, inserts in the back of his books the
+titles of other volumes issued by him. Little did I think, as I turned
+to look over Mr. Secker's announcements, that a train of events was
+about to begin which would render me, during the succeeding twelve
+months, a monomaniac in the eyes of my associates; so much so that when
+I was blessed with a son and heir just a year later I received a
+telegram signed by a dozen of them: "_Congratulations. Name him
+Casuals_!"
+
+It was in that list of Mr. Secker's titles for the winter of 1915-16
+that my eyes first rested, with a premonitory lust, upon the
+not-to-be-forgotten words.
+
+MCFEE, WILLIAM: CASUALS OF THE SEA.
+
+Who could fail to be stirred by so brave a title? At once I wrote for a
+copy.
+
+My pocket memorandum book for Sunday, January 9, 1916, contains this
+note:
+
+"Finished reading _Casuals of the Sea_, a good book. H---- still laid up
+with bad ankle. In the P.M. we sat and read Bible aloud to Celia before
+the open fire."
+
+My first impressions of "_Casuals of the Sea_, a good book" are
+interwoven with memories of Celia, a pious Polish serving maid from Pike
+County, Pennsylvania, who could only be kept in the house by nightly
+readings of another Good Book. She was horribly homesick (that was her
+first voyage away from home) and in spite of persistent Bible readings
+she fled after two weeks, back to her home in Parker's Glen, Pa. She was
+our first servant, and we had prepared a beautiful room in the attic for
+her. However, that has nothing to do with Mr. McFee.
+
+_Casuals of the Sea_ is a novel whose sale of ten thousand copies in
+America is more important as a forecast of literary weather than many a
+popular distribution of a quarter million. Be it known by these presents
+that there are at least ten thousand librivora in this country who
+regard literature not merely as an emulsion. This remarkable novel, the
+seven years' study of a busy engineer occupied with boiler inspections,
+indicator cards and other responsibilities of the Lord of Below, was the
+first really public appearance of a pen that will henceforth be listened
+to with respect.
+
+Mr. McFee had written two books before "Casuals" was published, but at
+that time it was not easy to find any one who had read them. They were
+_Letters from an Ocean Tramp_ (1908) and _Aliens_ (1914); the latter has
+been rewritten since then and issued in a revised edition. It is a very
+singular experiment in the art of narrative, and a rich commentary on
+human folly by a man who has made it his hobby to think things out for
+himself. And the new version is headlighted by a preface which may well
+take its place among the most interesting literary confessions of this
+generation, where Mr. McFee shows himself as that happiest of men, the
+artist who also has other and more urgent concerns than the whittling of
+a paragraph:--
+
+    Of art I never grow weary, but she calls me over the world. I
+    suspect the sedentary art worker. Most of all I suspect the
+    sedentary writer. I divide authors into two classes--genuine
+    artists, and educated men who wish to earn enough to let them live
+    like country gentlemen. With the latter I have no concern. But the
+    artist knows when his time has come. In the same way I turned with
+    irresistible longing to the sea, whereon I had been wont to earn my
+    living. It is a good life and I love it. I love the men and their
+    ships. I find in them a never-ending panorama which illustrates my
+    theme, the problem of human folly.
+
+Mr. McFee, you see, has some excuse for being a good writer because he
+has never had to write for a living. He has been writing for the fun of
+it ever since he was an apprentice in a big engineering shop in London
+twenty years ago. His profession deals with exacting and beautiful
+machinery, and he could no more do hack writing than hack engineering.
+And unlike the other English realists of his generation who have
+cultivated a cheap flippancy, McFee finds no exhilaration in easy sneers
+at middle-class morality. He has a dirk up his sleeve for Gentility (how
+delightfully he flays it in _Aliens_) but he loves the middle classes
+for just what they are: the great fly-wheel of the world. His attitude
+toward his creations is that of a "benevolent marbleheart" (his own
+phrase). He has seen some of the seams of life, and like McAndrew he has
+hammered his own philosophy. It is a manly, just, and gentle creed, but
+not a soft one. Since the war began he has been on sea service, first on
+a beef-ship and transport in the Mediterranean, now as sub-lieutenant in
+the British Navy. When the war is over, and if he feels the call of the
+desk, Mr. McFee's brawny shoulder will sit in at the literary feast and
+a big handful of scribblers will have to drop down the dumb-waiter shaft
+to make room for him. It is a disconcerting figure in Grub Street, the
+man who really has something to say.
+
+Publishers are always busy casting horoscopes for their new finds. How
+the benign planets must have twirled in happy curves when Harold Bell
+Wright was born, if one may credit his familiar mage, Elsbury W.
+Reynolds! But the fame that is built merely on publishers' press sheets
+does not dig very deep in the iron soil of time. We are all only
+raft-builders, as Lord Dunsany tells us in his little parable; even the
+raft that Homer made for Helen must break up some day. Who in these
+States knows the works of Nat Gould? Twelve million of his dashing
+paddock novels have been sold in England, but he is as unknown here as
+is Preacher Wright in England. What is so dead as a dead best seller?
+Sometimes it is the worst sellers that come to life, roll away the
+stone, and an angel is found sitting laughing in the sepulchre. Let me
+quote Mr. McFee once more: "I have no taste for blurb, but I cannot
+refuse facts."
+
+William M.P. McFee was born at sea in 1881. His father, an English
+skipper, was bringing his vessel toward the English coast after a long
+voyage. His mother was a native of Nova Scotia. They settled in New
+Southgate, a northern middle-class suburb of London, and here McFee was
+educated in the city schools of which the first pages of _Casuals of the
+Sea_ give a pleasant description. Then he went to a well-known grammar
+school at Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk--what we would call over here a
+high school. He was a quiet, sturdy boy, and a first-rate cricketer.
+
+At sixteen he was apprenticed to a big engineering firm in Aldersgate.
+This is one of the oldest streets in London, near the Charterhouse,
+Smithfield Market, and the famous "Bart's" Hospital. In fact, the office
+of the firm was built over one of the old plague pits of 1665. His
+father had died several years before; and for the boy to become an
+apprentice in this well-known firm Mrs. McFee had to pay three hundred
+pounds sterling. McFee has often wondered just what he got for the
+money. However, the privilege of paying to be better than someone else
+is an established way of working out one's destiny in England, and at
+the time the mother and son knew no better than to conform. You will
+find this problem, and the whole matter of gentility, cuttingly set out
+in _Aliens_.
+
+After three years as an apprentice, McFee was sent out by the firm on
+various important engineering jobs, notably a pumping installation at
+Tring, which he celebrated in a pamphlet of very creditable juvenile
+verses, for which he borrowed Mr. Kipling's mantle. This was at the time
+of the Boer War, when everybody in trousers who wrote verses was either
+imitating Kipling or reacting from him.
+
+His engineering work gave young McFee a powerful interest in the lives
+and thoughts of the working classes. He was strongly influenced by
+socialism, and all his spare moments were spent with books. He came to
+live in Chelsea with an artist friend, but he had already tasted life at
+first hand, and the rather hazy atmosphere of that literary and artistic
+Utopia made him uneasy. His afternoons were spent at the British Museum
+reading room, his evenings at the Northampton Institute, where he
+attended classes, and even did a little lecturing of his own. Competent
+engineer as he was, that was never sufficient to occupy his mind. As
+early as 1902 he was writing short stories and trying to sell them.
+
+In 1905 his uncle, a shipmaster, offered him a berth in the engine room
+of one of his steamers, bound for Trieste. He jumped at the chance.
+Since then he has been at sea almost continuously, save for one year
+(1912-13) when he settled down in Nutley, New Jersey, to write. The
+reader of _Aliens_ will be pretty familiar with Nutley by the time he
+reaches page 416. "Netley" is but a thin disguise. I suspect a certain
+liveliness in the ozone of Nutley. Did not Frank Stockton write some of
+his best tales there? Some day some literary meteorologist will explain
+how these intellectual anticyclones originate in such places as Nutley
+(N.J.), Galesburg (Ill.), Port Washington (N.Y.), and Bryn Mawr (Pa.)
+
+The life of a merchantman engineer would not seem, to open a fair
+prospect into literature. The work is gruelling and at the same time
+monotonous. Constant change of scene and absence of home ties are (I
+speak subject to correction) demoralizing; after the coveted chief's
+certificate is won, ambition has little further to look forward to. A
+small and stuffy cabin in the belly of the ship is not an inviting
+study. The works of Miss Corelli and Messrs. Haig and Haig are the only
+diversions of most of the profession. Art, literature, and politics do
+not interest them. Picture postcards, waterside saloons, and the ladies
+of the port are the glamour of his that they delight to honour.
+
+I imagine that Mr. Carville's remarkable account (in _Aliens_) of his
+induction into the profession of marine engineering has no faint colour
+of reminiscence in Mr. McFee's mind. The filth, the intolerable
+weariness, the instant necessity of the tasks, stagger the easygoing
+suburban reader. And only the other day, speaking of his work on a
+seaplane ship in the British Navy, Mr. McFee said some illuminating
+things about the life of an engineer:
+
+    It is Sunday, and I have been working. Oh, yes, there is plenty of
+    work to do in the world, I find, wherever I go. But I cannot help
+    wondering why Fate so often offers me the dirty end of the stick.
+    Here I am, awaiting my commission as an engineer-officer of the
+    R.N.R., and I am in the thick of it day after day. I don't mean,
+    when I say "work," what you mean by work. I don't mean work such as
+    my friend the Censor does, or my friend the N.E.O. does, nor my
+    friends and shipmates, the navigating officer, the flying men, or
+    the officers of the watch. I mean _work_, hard, sweating, nasty
+    toil, coupled with responsibility. I am not alone. Most ships of the
+    naval auxiliary are the same.
+
+    I am anxious for you, a landsman, to grasp this particular fragment
+    of the sorry scheme of things entire, that in no other profession
+    have the officers responsible for the carrying out of the work to
+    toil as do the engineers in merchantmen, in transports, in fleet
+    auxiliaries. You do not expect the major to clear the waste-pipe of
+    his regimental latrines. You do not expect the surgeon to
+    superintend the purging of his bandages. You do not expect the
+    navigators of a ship to paint her hull. You do not expect an
+    architect to make bricks (sometimes without straw). You do not
+    expect the barrister to go and repair the lock on the law courts
+    door, or oil the fans that ventilate the halls of justice. Yet you
+    do, collectively, tolerate a tradition by which the marine engineer
+    has to assist, overlook, and very often perform work corresponding
+    precisely to the irrelevant chores mentioned above, which are in
+    other professions relegated to the humblest and roughest of mankind.
+    I blame no one. It is tradition, a most terrible windmill at which
+    to tilt; but I conceive it my duty to set down once at least the
+    peculiar nature of an engineer's destiny. I have had some years of
+    it, and I know what I am talking about.
+
+    _The_ point to distinguish is that the engineer not only has the
+    responsibility, but he has, in nine cases out of ten, to do it. He,
+    the officer, must befoul his person and derange his hours of rest
+    and recreation, that others may enjoy. He must be available
+    twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, at sea or in port.
+    Whether chief or the lowest junior, he must be ready to plunge
+    instantly to the succour of the vilest piece of mechanism on board.
+    When coaling, his lot is easier imagined than described.
+
+The remarkable thing to note is that Mr. McFee imposed upon these
+laborious years of physical toil a strenuous discipline of intellect as
+well. He is a born worker: patient, dogged, purposeful. His years at sea
+have been to him a more fruitful curriculum than that of any university.
+The patient sarcasm with which he speaks of certain Oxford youths of his
+acquaintance does not escape me. His sarcasm is just and on the target.
+He has stood as Senior Wrangler in a far more exacting _viva voce_--the
+University of the Seven Seas.
+
+If I were a college president, out hunting for a faculty, I would deem
+that no salary would be too big to pay for the privilege of getting a
+man like McFee on my staff. He would not come, of course! But how he has
+worked for his mastery of the art of life and the theory thereof! When
+his colleagues at sea were dozing in their deck chairs or rattling the
+bones along the mahogany, he was sweating in his bunk, writing or
+reading. He has always been deeply interested in painting, and no
+gallery in any port he visited ever escaped him. These extracts from
+some of his letters will show whether his avocations were those of most
+engineers:
+
+    As I crossed the swing-bridge of the docks at Garston (Liverpool)
+    the other day, and saw the tapering spars silhouetted against the
+    pale sky, and the zinc-coloured river with its vague Cheshire shores
+    dissolving in mist, it occurred to me that if an indulgent genie
+    were to appear and make me an offer I would cheerfully give up
+    writing for painting. As it is, I see things in pictures and I spend
+    more time in the Walker Gallery than in the library next door.
+
+    I've got about all I _can_ get out of books, and now I don't relish
+    them save as memories. The reason for my wish, I suppose, is that
+    character, not incident, is my _metier_. And you can _draw_
+    character, _paint_ character, but you can't very well blat about it,
+    can you?
+
+    I am afraid Balzac's job is too big for anybody nowadays. The worst
+    of writing men nowadays is their horrible ignorance of how people
+    live, of ordinary human possibilities.
+
+    A----. is always pitching into me for my insane ideas about "cheap
+    stuff." He says I'm on the wrong tack and I'll be a failure if I
+    don't do what the public wants. I said I didn't care a blue curse
+    what the public wanted, nor did I worry much if I never made a big
+    name. All I want is to do some fine and honourable work, to do it as
+    well as I possibly could, and there my responsibility ended.... To
+    hell with writing, I want _to feel_ and _see_!
+
+    I am laying in a gallon of ink and a couple of cwt. of paper, to the
+    amusement of the others, who imagine I am a merchant of some sort
+    who has to transact business at sea because Scotland yard are alter
+    him!
+
+His kit for every voyage, besides the gallon of ink and the
+hundredweight of foolscap, always included a score of books, ranging
+from Livy or Chaucer to Gorky and histories of Italian art. Happening to
+be in New York at the time of the first exhibition in this country of
+"futurist" pictures, he entered eagerly into the current discussion in
+the newspaper correspondence columns. He wrote for a leading London
+journal an article on "The Conditions of Labour at Sea." He finds time
+to contribute to the _Atlantic Monthly_ pieces of styptic prose that
+make zigzags on the sphygmograph of the editor. His letters written
+weekly to the artist friend he once lived with in Chelsea show a
+humorous and ironical mind ranging over all topics that concern
+cultivated men. I fancy he could out-argue many a university professor
+on Russian fiction, or Michelangelo, or steam turbines.
+
+When one says that McFee found little intellectually in common with his
+engineering colleagues, that is not to say that he was a prig. He was
+interested in everything that they were, but in a great deal more, too.
+And after obtaining his extra chief's certificate from the London Board
+of Trade, with a grade of ninety-eight per cent., he was not inclined to
+rest on his gauges.
+
+In 1912 he took a walking trip from Glasgow to London, to gather local
+colour for a book he had long meditated; then he took ship for the
+United States, where he lived for over a year writing hard. Neither
+_Aliens_ nor _Casuals of the Sea_, which he had been at work on for
+years, met with the favour of New York publishers. He carried his
+manuscripts around the town until weary of that amusement; and when the
+United Fruit Company asked him to do some engineering work for them he
+was not loath to get back into the old harness. And then came the war.
+
+Alas, it is too much to hope that the Cunard Company will ever officer a
+vessel as I have suggested at the outset of these remarks. But I made my
+proposal not wholly at random, for in Conrad, Kipling, and McFee, all
+three, there is something of the same artistic creed. In those two
+magnificent prefaces--to _A Personal Record_ and to _The Nigger of the
+Narcissus_--Conrad has set down, in words that should be memorable to
+every trafficker in ink, his conception of the duty of the man of
+letters. They can never be quoted too often:
+
+"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the
+miseries or credulities of mankind.... The sight of human affairs
+deserves admiration and pity. And he is not insensible who pays them the
+undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile
+which is not a grin."
+
+That is the kind of tribute that Mr. McPee has paid to the Gooderich
+family in _Casuals of the Sea_. Somewhere in that book he has uttered
+the immortal remark that "The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps
+cool." I think there is much of himself in that aphorism, and that the
+cool enthusiast, the benevolent marbleheart, has many fine things in
+store for us.
+
+And there is one other sentence in _Casuals of the Sea_ that lingers
+with me, and gives a just trace of the author's mind. It is worth
+remembering, and I leave it with you:
+
+"She considered a trouble was a trouble and to be treated as such,
+instead of snatching the knotted cord from the hand of God and dealing
+murderous blows."
+
+
+
+
+RHUBARB
+
+
+We used to call him Rhubarb, by reason of his long russet beard, which
+we imagined trailing in the prescriptions as he compounded them,
+imparting a special potency. He was a little German druggist--_Deutsche
+Apotheker_--and his real name was Friedrich Wilhelm Maximilian Schulz.
+
+The village of Kings is tucked away in Long Island, in the Debatable
+Land where the generous boundary of New York City zigzags in a sporting
+way just to permit horse racing at Belmont Park. It is the most rustic
+corner of the City. To most New Yorkers it is as remote as Helgoland and
+as little known. It has no movie theatre, no news-stand, no cigar store,
+no village atheist. The railroad station, where one hundred and fifty
+trains a day do not stop, might well be mistaken for a Buddhist shrine,
+so steeped in discreet melancholy is it. The Fire Department consists of
+an old hose wagon first used to extinguish fires kindled by the
+Republicans when Rutherford B. Hayes was elected. In the weather-beaten
+Kings Lyceum "East Lynne" is still performed once a year. People who
+find Quoguc and Cohasset too exciting, move to Kings to cool off. The
+only way one can keep servants out there is by having the works of
+Harold Bell Wright in the kitchen for the cook to read.
+
+Stout-hearted Mr. Schulz came to Kings long ago. There is quite a little
+German colony there. With a delicatessen store on one side of him and a
+man who played the flute on the other, he felt hardly at all
+expatriated. The public house on the corner serves excellent
+_Rheingold_, and on winter evenings Friedrich and Minna would sit by the
+stove at the back of the drugstore with a jug of amber on the table and
+dream of Stuttgart.
+
+It did not take me long to find out that apothecary Schulz was an
+educated man. At the rear of the store hung two diplomas of which he was
+very proud. One was a certificate from the Stuttgart Oberrealschule; the
+other his license to practise homicidal pharmacy in the German Empire,
+dated 1880. He had read the "Kritik der reinen Vernunft", and found it
+more interesting than Henry James, he told me. Julia and I used to drop
+into his shop of an evening for a mug of hot chocolate, and always fell
+into talk. His Minna, a frail little woman with a shawl round her
+shoulders, would come out into the store and talk to us, too, and their
+pet dachshund would frolic at our feet. They were a quaint couple, she
+so white and shy and fragile; he ruddy, sturdy, and positive.
+
+It was not till I told him of my years spent at a German University that
+he really showed me the life that lay behind his shopman activity. We
+sometimes talked German together, and he took me into their little
+sitting room to see his photographs of home scenes at Stuttgart. It was
+over thirty years since he had seen German soil, but still his eyes
+would sparkle at the thought. He and Minna, being childless, dreamed of
+a return to the Fatherland as their great end in life.
+
+What an alluring place the little drugstore was! I was fascinated by the
+rows and rows of gleaming bottles labelled with mysterious Latin
+abbreviations. There were cases of patent remedies--Mexican Mustang
+Liniment, Swamp Root, Danderine, Conway's Cobalt Pills, Father Finch's
+Febrifuge, Spencer's Spanish Specific. Soap, talcum, cold cream,
+marshmallows, tobacco, jars of rock candy, what a medley of
+paternostrums! And old Rhubarb himself, in his enormous baggy
+trousers--infinite breeches in a little room, as Julia used to say.
+
+I wish I could set him down in all his rich human flavour. The first
+impression he gave was one of cleanness and good humour. He was always
+in shirtsleeves, with suspenders forming an X across his broad back;
+his shirt was fresh laundered, his glowing beard served as cravat. He
+had a slow, rather ponderous speech, with deep gurgling gutturals and a
+decrescendo laugh, slipping farther and farther down into his larynx.
+Once, when we got to know each other fairly well, I ventured some
+harmless jest about Barbarossa. He chuckled; then his face grew grave.
+"I wish Minna could have the beard," he said. "Her chest is not strong.
+It would be a fine breast-protector for her. But me, because I am strong
+like a horse, I have it all!" He thumped his chest ruefully with his
+broad, thick hand.
+
+Despite his thirty years in America, good Schulz was still the Deutsche
+Apotheker and not at all the American druggist. He had installed a soda
+fountain as a concession, but it puzzled him sorely, and if he was asked
+for anything more complex than chocolate ice cream soda he would shake
+his head solemnly and say: "That I have not got." Motorists sometimes
+turned off the Jericho turnpike and stopped at his shop asking for
+banana splits or grape juice highballs, or frosted pineapple fizz. But
+they had to take chocolate ice cream soda or nothing. Sometimes in a fit
+of absent-mindedness he would turn his taps too hard and the charged
+water would spout across the imitation marble counter. He would wag his
+beard deprecatingly and mutter a shamefaced apology, smiling again when
+the little black dachshund came trotting to sniff at the spilt soda and
+rasp the wet floor with her bright tongue.
+
+At the end of September he shut up the soda fountain gladly, piling it
+high with bars of castile soap or cartons of cod liver oil. Then Minna
+entered into her glory as the dispenser of hot chocolate which seethed
+and sang in a tall silvery tank with a blue gas burner underneath. This
+she served in thick china mugs with a clot of whipped cream swimming on
+top. Julia would buy a box of the cheese crackers that Schulz kept in
+stock specially for her, and give several to the sleek little black
+bitch that stood pleading with her quaint turned-out fore-feet placed on
+Julia's slippers. Schulz, beaming serenely behind a pyramid of "intense
+carnation" bottles on his perfume counter, would chuckle at the antics
+of his pet. "Ah, he is a wise little dog!" he would exclaim with naive
+pride. "He knows who is friendly!" He always called the little dog "he,"
+which amused us.
+
+On Sunday afternoon the drugstore was closed from one to five, and
+during those hours Schulz took his weekly walk, accompanied by the dog
+which plodded desperately after him on her short legs. Sometimes we met
+him swinging along the by-roads, flourishing a cudgel and humming to
+himself. Whenever he saw a motor coming he halted, the little black
+dachshund would look up at him, and he would stoop ponderously down,
+pick her up and carry her in his arms until all danger was past.
+
+As the time went on he and I used to talk a good deal about the war.
+Minna, pale and weary, would stand behind her steaming urn, keeping the
+shawl tight round her shoulders; Rhubarb and I would argue without heat
+upon the latest news from the war zone. I had no zeal for converting the
+old fellow from his views; I understood his sympathies and respected
+them. Reports of atrocities troubled him as much as they did me; but the
+spine of his contention was that the German army was unbeatable. He got
+out his faded discharge ticket from the Wuertemberger Landsturm to show
+the perfect system of the Imperial military organization. In his desk at
+the back of the shop he kept a war map cut from a Sunday supplement and
+over this we would argue, Schulz breathing hard and holding his beard
+aside in one hand as he bent over the paper. When other customers came
+in, he would put the map away with a twinkle, and the topic was dropped.
+But often the glass top of the perfume counter was requisitioned as a
+large-scale battleground, and the pink bottle of rose water set to
+represent Von Hindenburg while the green phial of smelling salts was
+Joffre or Brussilov. We fought out the battle of the Marne pretty
+completely on the perfume counter. "_Warte doch_!" he would cry. "Just
+wait! You will see! All the world is against her, but Germany will win!"
+
+Poor Minna was always afraid her husband and I would quarrel. She knew
+well how opposite our sympathies were; she could not understand that our
+arguments were wholly lacking in personal animus. When I told him of the
+Allies' growing superiority in aircraft Rhubarb would retort by showing
+me clippings about the German trench fortifications, the "pill boxes"
+made of solid cement. I would speak of the deadly curtain fire of the
+British; he would counter with mysterious allusions to Krupp. And his
+conclusions were always the same. "Just wait! Germany will win!" And he
+would stroke his beard placidly. "But, Fritz!" Minna used to cry in a
+panic, "The gentleman might think differently!" Rhubarb and I would grin
+at each other, I would buy a tin of tobacco, and we would say good
+night.
+
+How dear is the plain, unvarnished human being when one sees him in a
+true light! Schulz's honest, kindly face seemed to me to typify all
+that I knew of the finer qualities of the Germans; the frugal
+simplicity, the tenderness, the proud, stiff rectitude. He and I felt
+for each other, I think, something of the humorous friendliness of the
+men in the opposing trenches. Chance had cast us on different sides of
+the matter. But when I felt tempted to see red, to condemn the Germans
+_en masse_, to chant litanies of hate, I used to go down to the
+drugstore for tobacco or a mug of chocolate. Rhubarb and I would argue
+it out.
+
+But that was a hard winter for him. The growing anti-German sentiment in
+the neighbourhood reduced his business considerably. Then he was worried
+over Minna. Often she did not appear in the evenings, and he would
+explain that she had gone to bed. I was all the more surprised to meet
+her one very snowy Sunday afternoon, sloshing along the road in the
+liquid mire, the little dog squattering sadly behind, her small black
+paws sliding on the ice-crusted paving. "What on earth are you doing
+outdoors on a day like this?" I said.
+
+"Fritz had to go to Brooklyn, and I thought he would be angry if Lischen
+didn't get her airing."
+
+"You take my advice and go home and get into some dry clothes," I said
+severely.
+
+Soon after that I had to go away for three weeks. I was snowbound in
+Massachusetts for several days; then I had to go to Montreal on urgent
+business. Julia went to the city to visit her mother while I was away,
+so we had no news from Kings.
+
+We got back late one Sunday evening. The plumbing had frozen in our
+absence; when I lit the furnace again, pipes began to thaw and for an
+hour or so we had a lively time. In the course of a battle with a pipe
+and a monkey wrench I sprained a thumb, and the next morning I stopped
+at the drugstore on my way to the train to get some iodine.
+
+Rhubarb was at his prescription counter weighing a little cone of white
+powder in his apothecary's scales. He looked far from well. There were
+great pouches under his eyes; his beard was unkempt; his waistcoat
+spotted with food stains. The lady waiting received her package, and
+went out. Rhubarb and I grasped hands.
+
+"Well," I said, "what do you think now about the war? Did you see that
+the Canadians took a mile of trenches five hundred yards deep last week?
+Do you still think Germany will win?" To my surprise he turned on his
+heel and began apparently rummaging along a row of glass jars. His gaze
+seemed to be fastened upon a tall bottle containing ethyl alcohol. At
+last he turned round. His broad, naive face was quivering like
+blanc-mange.
+
+"What do I care who wins?" he said. "What does it matter to me any more?
+Minna is dead. She died two weeks ago of pneumonia."
+
+As I stood, not knowing what to say, there was a patter along the floor.
+The little dachshund came scampering into the shop and frisked about my
+feet.
+
+
+
+
+THE HAUNTING BEAUTY OF STRYCHNINE
+
+A LITTLE-KNOWN TOWN OF UNEARTHLY BEAUTY
+
+
+
+Slowly, reluctantly (rather like a _vers libre_ poem) the quaint
+little train comes to a stand. Along the station platform each of the
+_fiacre_ drivers seizes a large dinner-bell and tries to outring the
+others. You step from the railway carriage--and instantly the hellish
+din of those droschky bells faints into a dim, far-away tolling. Your
+eye has caught the superb sweep of the Casa Grande beetling on its crag.
+Over the sapphire canal where the old men are fishing for sprats, above
+the rugged scarp where the blue-bloused _ouvriers_ are quarrying the
+famous champagne cheese, you see the Gothic transept of the Palazzio
+Ginricci, dour against a nacre sky. An involuntary tremolo eddies down
+your spinal marrow. The Gin Palace, you murmur.... At last you are in
+Strychnine.
+
+Unnoted by Baedeker, unsung by poets, unrhapsodied by press
+agents--there lurks the little town of Strychnine in that far and
+untravelled corner where France, Russia, and Liberia meet in an
+unedifying Zollverein. The strychnine baths have long been famous among
+physicians, but the usual ruddy tourist knows them not. The sorrowful
+ennui of a ten-hour journey on the B.V.D. _Chemise de fer_ (with
+innumerable examinations of luggage), while it has kept out the
+contraband Swiss cheese which is so strictly interdicted, has also kept
+away the rich and garrulous tourist. But he who will endure to the end
+that tortuous journey among flat fields of rye and parsimony, will find
+himself well rewarded. The long tunnel through Mondragone ends at
+length, and you find yourself on the platform with the droschky bells
+clanging in your ears and the ineffable majesty of the Casa Grande crag
+soaring behind the jade canal.
+
+The air was chill, and I buttoned my surtout tightly as I stepped into
+the curious seven-wheeled _sforza_ lettered _Hotel Decameron_. We
+rumbled _andante espressivo_ over the hexagonal cobbles of the Chaussee
+d'Arsenic, crossed the mauve canal and bent under the hanging cliffs of
+the cheese quarries. I could see the fishwives carrying great trays of
+lampreys and lambrequins toward the fish market. It is curious what
+quaintly assorted impressions one receives in the first few minutes in a
+strange place. I remember noticing a sausage kiosk in the _markt-platz_
+where a man in a white coat was busily selling hot icons. They are
+delivered fresh every hour from the Casa Grande (the great cheese
+cathedral) on the cliff.
+
+The Hotel Decameron is named after Boccaccio, who was once a bartender
+there. It stands in a commanding position on the Place Nouveau Riche
+overlooking the Casino and the odalisk erected by Edward VII in memory
+of his cure. After two weeks of the strychnine baths the merry monarch
+is said to have called for a corncob pipe and a plate of onions, after
+which he made his escape by walking over the forest track to the French
+frontier, although previous to this he had not walked a kilometer
+without a cane since John Bull won the Cowes regatta. The _haut ton_ of
+the section in which the Hotel Decameron finds itself can readily be
+seen by the fact that the campanile of the Duke of Marmalade fronts on
+the rue Sauterne, just across from the barroom of the Hotel. The
+antiquaries say there is an underground corridor between the two.
+
+The fascinations of a stay in Strychnine are manifold. I have a weak
+heart, so I did not try the baths, although I used to linger on the
+terrace of the Casino about sunset to hear Tinpanni's band and eat a
+bronze bowl of Kerosini's gooseberry fool. I spent a great deal of my
+time exploring the chief glory of the town, the Casa Grande, which
+stands on the colossal crag honeycombed underneath with the shafts and
+vaults of the cheese mine. There is nothing in the world more entrancing
+than to stand (with a vinaigrette at one's nose) on the ramp of the
+Casa, looking down over the ochre canal, listening to the hoarse shouts
+of the workmen as they toil with pick and shovel, laying bare some
+particularly rich lode of the pale, citron-coloured cheese which will
+some day make Strychnine a place of _pelerinage_ for all the world. _Pay
+homage to the fromage_ is a rough translation of the motto of the town,
+which is carved in old Gothic letters on the apse of the Casa itself.
+Limberg, Gruyere, Alkmaar, Neufchatel, Camembert and Hoboken--all these
+famous cheeses will some day pale into whey before the puissance of the
+Strychnine curd. I was signally honoured by an express invitation of the
+burgomaster to be present at a meeting of the Cheesemongers' Guild at
+the Rathaus. The Kurdmeister, who is elected annually by the town
+council, spoke most eloquently on the future of the cheese industry, and
+a curious rite was performed. Before the entrance of the ceremonial
+cheese, which is cut by the Kurdmeister himself, all those present
+donned oxygen masks similar to those devised by the English to combat
+the German poison-gas. And I learned that oxygen helmets are worn by
+the workmen in the quarries to prevent prostration.
+
+It was with unfeigned regret that I found my fortnight over. I would
+gladly have lingered in the medieval cloisters of the Gin Palace, and
+sat for many mornings under the pistachio trees on the terrace sipping
+my _verre_ of native wine. But duties recalled me to the beaten paths of
+travel, and once more I drove in the old-fashioned ambulance to catch my
+even more old-fashioned train. The B.V.D. trains only leave Strychnine
+when there is a stern wind, as otherwise the pungent fumes of the cheese
+carried in the luggage van are very obnoxious to the passengers. Some
+day some American efficiency expert will visit the town and teach them
+to couple their luggage van on to the rear of the train. But till then
+Strychnine will be to me, and to every other traveller who may chance
+that way, a fragrant memory.
+
+And as you enter the tunnel, the last thing you see is the onyx canal
+and the old women fishing for lambrequins and palfreys.
+
+
+
+
+INGO
+
+"ZUM ANDENKEN"
+
+
+The first night we sat down at the inn table for supper I lost my heart
+to Ingo! Ingo was just ten years old. He wore a little sailor suit of
+blue and white striped linen; his short trousers showed chubby brown
+calves above his white socks; his round golden head cropped close in the
+German fashion. His blue eyes were grave and thoughtful. By great good
+fortune we sat next each other at table, and in my rather grotesque
+German I began a conversation. How careful Ingo was not to laugh at the
+absurdities of my syntax! How very courteous he was!
+
+Looking back into the mysterious panorama of pictures that we call
+memory, I can see the long dining room of the old gasthaus in the Black
+Forest, where two Americans on bicycles appeared out of nowhere and
+asked for lodging. They were the first Americans who had ever been seen
+in that remote valley, and the Gasthaus zur Krone ("the Crown Inn")
+found them very amusing. Perhaps you have never seen a country tavern
+in the Schwarzwald? Then you have something to live for. A long, low
+building with a moss-grown roof and tremendous broad eaves sheltering
+little galleries; and the barn under the same roof for greater warmth in
+winter. One side of the house was always strong with an excellent homely
+aroma of cow and horse; one had only to open a door in the upper hall, a
+door that looked just like a bedroom entrance, to find oneself in the
+haymow. There I used to lie for hours reading, and listening to the
+summer rain thudding on the shingles. Sitting in the little gallery
+under the eaves, looking happily down the white road where the yellow
+coach brought the mail twice a day, one could see the long vista of the
+valley, the women with bright red jackets working in the fields, and the
+dark masses of forest on the hillside opposite. There was much rain that
+summer; the mountains were often veiled all day long in misty shreds of
+cloud, and the two Americans sat with pipes and books at the long dining
+table, greeted by gales of laughter on the part of the robust landlord's
+niece when they essayed the native idiom. "_Sie arbeiten immer_!" she
+used to say; "_Sie werden krank_!" ("You're always working; you'll be
+ill!")
+
+There is a particular poignance in looking back now on those happy days
+two years before the war. Nowhere in all the world, I suppose, are there
+more cordial, warmhearted, simple, human people than the South Germans.
+On the front of the inn there was a big yellow metal sign, giving the
+military number of the district, and the mobilization points for the
+Landsturm and the Landwehr, and we realized that even here the careful
+organization of the military power had numbered and ticketed every
+village. But what did it mean to us? War was a thing unthinkable in
+those days. We bicycled everywhere, climbed, mountains, bathed in
+waterfalls, chatted fluent and unorthodox German with everyone we met,
+and played games with Ingo.
+
+Dear little Ingo! At the age when so many small boys are pert, impudent,
+self-conscious, he was the simplest, happiest, gravest little creature.
+His hobby was astronomy, and often I would find him sitting quietly in a
+corner with a book about the stars. On clear evenings we would walk
+along the road together, in the mountain hush that was only broken by
+the brook tumbling down the valley, and he would name the constellations
+for me. His little round head was thrilled through and through by the
+immense mysteries of space; sometimes at meal times he would fall into a
+muse, forgetting his beef and gravy. Once I asked him at dinner what he
+was thinking of. He looked up with his clear gray-blue eyes and flashing
+smile: "_Von den Sternen_!" ("Of the stars.")
+
+The time after supper was reserved for games, in which Wolfgang, Ingo's
+smaller brother (aged seven), also took part. Our favourite pastimes
+were "Irrgarten" and "Galgenspiel," in which we found enormous
+amusement. Galgenspiel was Ingo's translation of "Hangman," a simple
+pastime which had sometimes entertained my own small brother on rainy
+days; apparently it was new in Germany. One player thinks of a word, and
+sets down on paper a dash for each letter in this word. It is the task
+of the other to guess the word, and he names the letters of the alphabet
+one by one. Every time he mentions a letter that is contained in the
+word you must set it down in its proper place in the word, but every
+time he mentions a letter that is not in the word you draw a portion of
+a person depending from a gallows; the object of course being for him to
+guess the word before you finish drawing the effigy. We played the game
+entirely in German, and I can still see Ingo's intent little face bent
+over my preposterous drawings, cudgelling his quick and happy little
+brain to spot the word before the hangman could finish his grim task.
+"Quick, Ingo!" I would cry. "You will get yourself hung!" and he would
+laugh in his own lovable way. There was never a jollier way of learning
+a foreign language than by playing games with Ingo.
+
+The other favourite pastime was drawing mazes on paper, labyrinths of
+winding paths which must be traversed by a pencil point. The task was to
+construct a maze so complicated that the other could not find his way
+out, starting at the middle. We would sit down at opposite ends of the
+room to construct our mysteries of blind alleys and misleading passages,
+then each one would be turned loose in the "irrgarten" drawn by the
+other. Ingo would stand at my side while I tried in obstinate stupidity
+to find my way through his little puzzle; his eager heart inside his
+sailor blouse would pound like a drum when I was nearing the dangerous
+places where an exit might be won. He would hold his breath so audibly,
+and his blue eyes would grow so anxious, that I always knew when not to
+make the right turning, and my pencil would wander on in hopeless
+despair until he had mercy on me and led me to freedom.
+
+After lunch every day, while waiting for the mail-coach to come
+trundling up the valley, Ingo and I used to sit in the little balcony
+under the eaves, reading. He introduced me to his favourite book _Till
+Eulenspiegel_, and we sped joyously through the adventures of that
+immortal buffoon of German folk-lore. We took turns reading aloud: every
+paragraph or so I would appeal for an explanation of something.
+Generally I understood well enough, but it was such a delight to hear
+Ingo strive to make the meaning plain. What a puckering of his bright
+boyish forehead, what a grave determination to elucidate the fable! What
+a mingling of ecstatic pride in having a grown man as pupil, with
+deference due to an elder. Ingo was a born gentleman and in his fiercest
+transports of glee never forgot his manners! I would make some purposely
+ludicrous shot at the sense, and he would double up with innocent mirth.
+His clear laughter would ring out, and his mother, pacing a digestive
+stroll on the highway below us, would look up crying in the German way,
+"_Gott! wie er freut sich_!" The progress of our reading was held up by
+these interludes, but I could never resist the temptation to start Ingo
+explaining.
+
+Ingo having made me free of his dearest book, it was only fair to
+reciprocate. So one day Lloyd and I bicycled down to Freiburg, and
+there, at a heavenly "bookhandler's," I found a copy of 'Treasure
+Island' in German. Then there was revelry in the balcony! I read the
+tale aloud, and I wish R.L.S. might have seen the shining of Ingo's
+eyes! Alas, the vividness of the story interfered with the little lad's
+sleep, and his mother was a good deal disturbed about this violent yarn
+we were reading together. How close he used to sit beside me as we read
+of the dark doings at the _Admiral Benbow_: and how his face would fall
+when, clear and hollow from the sounding-board of the hills, came the
+quick _clop, clop_ of the mail-man's horses.
+
+I don't know anything that has ever gone deeper in my memory than those
+hours spent with Ingo. I have a little snapshot of him I took the misty,
+sorrowful morning when I bicycled away to Basel and left the Gasthaus
+zur Krone in its mountain valley. The blessed little lad stands up erect
+and stiff in the formal German way, and I can see his blue eyes alight
+with friendliness, and a little bit unhappy because his eccentric
+American comrade was gomg away and there would be no more afternoons
+with _Till Eulenspiegel_ on the balcony. I wonder if he thinks of me as
+often as I do of him? He gave me a glimpse into the innocent heaven of a
+child's heart that I can never forget. By now he is approaching sixteen,
+and I pray that whatever the war may take away from me it will spare me
+my Ingo. It is strange and sad to recall that his parting present to me
+was a drawing of a Zeppelin, upon which he toiled manfully all one
+afternoon. I still have it in my scrapbook.
+
+And I wonder if he ever looks in the old copy of "Hauff's Maerchen" that
+I bought for him in Freiburg, and sees the English words that he was to
+learn how to translate when he should grow older! As I remember them,
+they ran like this:
+
+    For Ingo to learn English will very easy be
+    If someone is as kind to him as he has been to me;
+    Plays games with him, reads fairy tales, corrects all his mistakes,
+    And never laughs too loudly at the blunders that he makes--
+    Then he will find, as I did, how well two pleasures blend:
+    To learn a foreign language, and to make a foreign friend.
+
+If I love anybody in the world, I love Ingo. And that is why I cannot
+get up much enthusiasm for hymns of hate.
+
+
+
+
+HOUSEBROKEN
+
+
+After Simmons had been married two years he began to feel as though he
+needed a night off. But he hesitated to mention the fact, for he knew
+his wife would feel hurt to think that he could dream of an evening
+spent elsewhere than in their cosy sitting room. However, there were no
+two ways about it: the old unregenerate male in Simmons yearned for
+something more exciting than the fireside armchair, the slippers and
+smoking jacket, and the quiet game of cards. Visions of the old riotous
+evenings with the boys ran through his mind; a billiard table and the
+click of balls; the jolly conversation at the club, and glass after
+glass of that cold amber beer. The large freedom of the city streets at
+night, the warm saloons on every corner, the barrooms with their
+pyramids of bottles flashing in the gaslight--these were the things that
+made a man's life amusing. And here he was cooped up in a little cage in
+the suburbs like a tame cat!
+
+Thoughts of this kind had agitated Simmons for a long time, and at last
+he said something to Ethel. He had keyed himself up to meet a sharp
+retort, some sarcastic comment about his preferring a beer garden to
+his own home, even an outburst of tears. But to his amazement Ethel took
+it quite calmly.
+
+"Why, yes, of course, dear," she said. "It'll do you good to have an
+evening with your friends."
+
+A little taken aback, he asked whether she would rather he didn't go.
+
+"Why, no," she answered. "I shall have a lovely time. I won't be
+lonely."
+
+This was on Monday. Simmons planned to go out on Friday night, meeting
+the boys for dinner at the club, and after that they would spend the
+evening at Boelke's bowling alley. All the week he went about in a glow
+of anticipation. At the office he spoke in an offhand way of the
+pleasant evenings a man can have in town, and pitied the prosaic beggars
+who never stir from the house at night.
+
+On Friday evening he came home hurriedly, staying just long enough to
+shave and change his collar. Ethel had on a pretty dress and seemed very
+cheerful. A strange sinking came over him as he saw the familiar room
+shining with firelight and the shabby armchair.
+
+"Would you rather I stayed at home?" he asked.
+
+"Not a bit," she said, quite as though she meant it. "Diana has a steak
+in the oven, and I've got a new book to read. I won't wait up for you."
+
+He kissed her and went off.
+
+When he got on the trolley a sudden revulsion struck him. He was tired
+and wanted to go home. Why on earth spend the evening with a lot of
+drunken rowdies when he might be at his own hearth watching Ethel's face
+bent over her sewing? He saw little enough of her anyway.
+
+At the door of the club he halted. Inside, the crowd was laughing,
+shouting jests, dicing for cocktails. Suddenly he turned and ran.
+
+He cursed himself for a fool, but none the less an irresistible force
+seemed to draw him home. On the car he sat glum and silent, wondering
+how all the other men could read their papers so contentedly.
+
+At last he reached the modest little suburb. He hurried along the street
+and had almost entered his gate when he paused.
+
+Through the half-drawn curtains he could see Ethel sitting comfortably
+by the lamp. She was reading, and the cat was in her lap. His heart
+leaped with a great throb. But how could he go in now? It was barely
+eight o'clock. After all his talk about a man's need of relaxation and
+masculine comradeship--why, she would never stop laughing! He turned and
+tiptoed away.
+
+That evening was a nightmare for Simmons. Opposite his house was a
+little suburban park, and thither he took himself. For a long while he
+sat on a bench cursing. Twice he started for the trolley, and again
+returned. It was a damp autumn night; little by little the chill pierced
+his light coat and he sneezed. Up and down the little park he tramped,
+biting a dead cigar. Once he went as far as the drugstore and bought a
+box of crackers.
+
+At last--it seemed years--the church chimes struck ten and he saw the
+lights go out in his house. He forced himself to make twenty-five more
+trips around the gravel walk and then he could wait no longer. Shivering
+with weariness and cold, he went home.
+
+He let himself in with his latch key and tiptoed upstairs. He leaned
+over the bed and Ethel stirred sleepily.
+
+"What time is it, dear?" she murmured. "You're early, aren't you?"
+
+"One o'clock," he lied bravely--and just then the dining-room clock
+struck half-past ten and supported him.
+
+"Did you have a good time?"
+
+"Bully--perfectly bully," he said. "There's nothing like a night with
+the boys now and then."
+
+
+
+
+THE HILARITY OF HILAIRE
+
+
+I remember some friends of mine telling me how they went down to
+Horsham, in Sussex, to see Hilaire Belloc. They found him in the cellar,
+seated astraddle of a gigantic wine-cask just arrived from France, about
+to proceed upon the delicate (and congenial) task of bottling the wine.
+He greeted them like jovial Silenus, and with competitive shouts of
+laughter the fun went forward. The wine was strained, bottled, sealed,
+labelled, and binned, the master of the vintage initiating his young
+visitors into the rite with bubbling and infectious gaiety--improvising
+verses, shouting with merriment, full of an energy and vivacity almost
+inconceivable to Saxon phlegm. My friends have always remembered it as
+one of the most diverting afternoons of their lives; and after the
+bottling was done and all hands thoroughly tired, he took them a
+swinging tramp across the Sussex Downs, talking hard all the way.
+
+
+I
+
+That is the Belloc we all know and love: vigorous, Gallic, bursting with
+energy, hospitality, and wit: the _enfant terrible_ of English letters
+for the past fifteen years. Mr. Joyce Kilmer's edition of Belloc's
+verses is very welcome.[C] His introduction is charming: the tribute of
+an understanding lover. Perhaps he labours a little in proving that
+Belloc is essentially a poet rather than a master of prose; perhaps too
+some of his judgments of Pater, Hardy, Scott, and others of whom one has
+heard, are precipitate and smack a little of the lecture circuit: but
+there is much to be grateful for in his affectionate and thoughtful
+tribute. Perhaps we do not enough realize how outstanding and how
+engaging a figure Mr. Belloc is.
+
+[Footnote C: Verses by Hilaire Belloc; with an introduction by Joyce
+Kilmer. New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1916.]
+
+Hilaire Belloc is of soldierly, artistic, and lettered blood. Four of
+his great-uncles were generals under Napoleon. The father of his
+grandmother fought under Soult at Corunna. A brother of his grandmother
+was wounded at Waterloo.
+
+His grandmother, Louise Marie Swanton, who died in 1890, lived both in
+France and England, and was famous as the translator into French of
+Moore's "Life of Byron," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and works by Dickens and
+Mrs. Gaskell. She married Hilaire Belloc, an artist, whose pictures are
+in the Louvre and many French museums; his tomb may be seen in Pere la
+Chaise. Their son was Louis Swanton Belloc, a lawyer, who married an
+English wife.
+
+The only son of this couple was the present Hilaire Belloc, born at
+Lacelle St. Cloud, July 27, 1870--the "Terrible Year" it was
+called--until 1914.
+
+Louis Belloc died in 1872, and as a very small child Hilaire went to
+live in Sussex, the gracious shire which both he and Rudyard Kipling
+have so often and so thrillingly commemorated. Slindon, near Arundel,
+became his home, the rolling hills, clean little rivers, and picturesque
+villages of the South Downs moulded his boyish thoughts.
+
+In 1883 he went to the famous Catholic school at Edgbaston. Mr. Thomas
+Seccombe, in a recent article on Belloc (from which I dip a number of
+biographical facts), quotes a description of him at this period:
+
+"I remember very well Belloc coming to the Oratory School--some time in
+'83, I suppose. He was a small, squat person, of the shaggy kind, with a
+clever face and sharp, bright eyes. Being amongst English boys, his
+instinctive combativeness made him assume a decidedly French pose, and
+this no doubt brought on him many a gibe, which, we may be equally sure,
+he was well able to return. I was amongst the older boys, saw little of
+him. But I recollect finding him cine day studying a high wall (of the
+old Oratory Church, since pulled down). It turned out that he was
+calculating its exact height by some cryptic mathematical process which
+he proceeded to explain. I concealed my awe, and did not tell him that I
+understood nothing of his terms, his explanations, or deductions; it
+would have been unsuitable for a big fellow to be taught by a 'brat.' In
+those days the boys used to act Latin plays of Terence, which enjoyed a
+certain celebrity, and from his first year Belloc was remarkable. His
+rendering of the impudent servant maid was the inauguration of a series
+of triumphs during his whole school career."
+
+In '89 Hilaire left school, and served for a year in the French field
+artillery, in a regiment stationed at Toul. Here he revived the Gallic
+heritage which was naturally his, learned to talk continually in French,
+and to drink wine. You will remember that in "The Path to Rome" he
+starts from Toul; but I cannot quote the passage; someone (who the devil
+is it?) has borrowed my copy. It is the perpetual fate of that
+book--everyone should have six copies.
+
+After the rough and saline company of French gunners it is a comical
+contrast to find him winning a scholarship at Balliol College,
+Oxford--admittedly the most rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct in
+England. He matriculated at Balliol in January, 1895, and was soon known
+as one of the "characters" of the college. There was little of the lean
+and pallid clerk of Oxenford in his bearing: he was the Roman candle of
+the Junior Common Room, where the vivacious and robust humour of the
+barracks at Toul at first horrified and then captivated the men from the
+public schools. Alternately blasphemous and idolatrous he may have
+seemed to Winchester and Eton: a devil for work and a genius at play. He
+swam, wrestled, shouted, rode, drank, and debated, says Mr. Seccombe. He
+read strange books, swore strange oaths, and amazed his tutors by the
+fire and fury of his historical study. His rooms were a continual focus
+of noise: troops of friends, song, loud laughter, and night-long
+readings from Rabelais. And probably his battels, if they are still
+recorded in the Balliol buttery, would show a larger quantity of ale and
+wine consumed than by any other man who ever made drinking a fine art at
+Balliol. Some day perhaps some scholar will look the matter up.
+
+Balliol is not beautiful: more than any other of the older colleges in
+Oxford, she has suffered from the "restorations" of the 70's and 80's.
+It is a favourite jest to pretend to confuse her with the Great Western
+Railway Station, which never fails to bring a flush to a Balliol cheek.
+But whatever the merciless hand of the architect has done to turn her
+into a jumble of sham Gothic spikes and corners, no one can doubt her
+wholesome democracy of intellect, her passion for sound scholarship, and
+the unsurpassable gift of her undergraduates for the delicately obscene.
+This may be the wake of a tradition inaugurated by Belloc; but I think
+it goes farther back than that. At any rate, in Oxford the young
+energumen found himself happy and merry beyond words: he worked
+brilliantly, was a notable figure in the Union debates, argued
+passionately against every conventional English tradition, and attacked
+authority, complacence, and fetichism of every kind. Never were dons of
+the donnish sort more brilliantly twitted than by young Belloc. And,
+partly because of his failure to capture an All Souls fellowship (the
+most coveted prize of intellectual Oxford) the word "don" has retained a
+tinge of acid in Belloc's mind ever since. (Who can read without
+assentive chuckles his delicious "Lines to a Don!" It was the favourite
+of all worthy dons at Oxford when I was there.) He has never had any
+reverence for a man merely because he held a post of authority.
+
+Of the Balliol years Mr. Seccombe says:
+
+"He was a few years older and more experienced than most of his college
+friends, but had lost little of the intoxication, the contagion and the
+ringing laughter of earliest manhood. He dazzled and infected everyone
+with his mockery and his laughter. There never was such an undergraduate,
+so merry, so learned in medieval trifling and terminology, so perfectly
+spontaneous in rhapsody and extravaganza, so positive and final in
+his judgments--who spoke French, too, like a Frenchman, in a manner
+unintelligible to our public-school-French-attuned ears."
+
+No one can leave those Balliol years behind without some hope to quote
+the ringing song in which Belloc recalled them at the time of the Boer
+War. It is the perfect expression of joyful masculine life and
+overflowing fellowship. It echoes unforgettably in the mind.
+
+    TO THE BALLIOL MEN STILL IN AFRICA
+
+    Years ago when I was at Balliol,
+      Balliol men--and I was one--
+    Swam together in winter rivers,
+      Wrestled together under the sun.
+    And still in the heart of us, Balliol, Balliol,
+      Loved already, but hardly known,
+    Welded us each of us into the others:
+      Called a levy and chose her own.
+
+    Here is a House that armours a man
+      With the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger,
+    And a laughing way in the teeth of the world
+      And a holy hunger and thirst for danger:
+    Balliol made me, Balliol fed me,
+      Whatever I had she gave me again:
+    And the best of Balliol loved and led me,
+      God be with you, Balliol men.
+
+    I have said it before, and I say it again,
+      There was treason done, and a false word spoken,
+    And England under the dregs of men,
+      And bribes about, and a treaty broken:
+    But angry, lonely, hating it still,
+      I wished to be there in spite of the wrong.
+    My heart was heavy for Cumnor Hill
+      And the hammer of galloping all day long.
+
+    Galloping outward into the weather,
+      Hands a-ready and battle in all:
+    Words together and wine together
+      And song together in Balliol Hall.
+    Rare and single! Noble and few!...
+      Oh! they have wasted you over the sea!
+    The only brothers ever I knew,
+      The men that laughed and quarrelled with me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Balliol made me, Balliol fed me,
+      Whatever I had she gave me again;
+    And the best of Balliol loved and led me,
+      God be with you, Balliol men.
+
+Belloc took a First in the Modern History School in 1895. No one ever
+experienced more keenly the tingling thrill of the eager student who
+finds himself cast into the heart of Oxford's abundant life: the
+thousands of books so generously alive; the hundreds of acute and worthy
+rivals crossing steel on steel in play, work, and debate; the endless
+throb of passionate speculation into all the crowding problems of human
+history. The zest and fervour of those younger days he has never
+outgrown, and there are few writers of our time who have appealed so
+imperiously to the young. In the Oxford before the war all the
+undergraduates were reading Belloc: you would hardly find a college room
+that did not shelve one or two of his volumes.
+
+
+II
+
+There is no space to chronicle the life in detail. The romantic voyage
+to California, and marriage at twenty-six (Mrs. Belloc died in 1914);
+his life in Chelsea and then in Sussex; the books on Revolutionary
+France, on military history, biography and topography; the flashing
+essays, political satires, and whimsical burlesques that ran so swiftly
+from his pen--it did not take England long to learn that this man was
+very much alive. In 1903 he was naturalized as a British subject, and
+humorously contemplated changing his name to "Hilary Bullock." In 1906
+he joined the Liberal benches in the House of Commons, but the insurgent
+spirit that had cried out in college debates against the lumbering shams
+of British political life was soon stabbing at the party system. Here
+was a ringing voice indeed: one can hear that clear, scornful tenor
+startling the House with its acid arraignment of parliamentary
+stratagems and spoils. As Mr. Kilmer says, "British politicians will not
+soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc introduced one day in the
+early Spring of 1908, that the Party funds, hitherto secretly
+administered, be publicly audited. His vigorous and persistent campaign
+against the party system has placed him, with Cecil Chesterton, in the
+very front ranks of those to whom the democrats of Great Britain must
+look for leadership and inspiration."
+
+Perhaps we can take issue with Mr. Kilmer in his estimate of Belloc's
+importance as a poet. He is a born singer, of course; his heart rises to
+a lyric just as his tongue to wine and argument and his legs to walking
+or saddle leather. But he writes poetry as every honest man should: in
+an imperative necessity to express a passing squall of laughter, anger,
+or reverence; and in earnest hope of being condemned by Mr. W.S.
+Braithwaite, which happens to so few. His "The South Country" will make
+splendid many an anthology. But who shall say that his handful of
+verses, witty, debonair, bacchanalian, and tender, is his most important
+contribution?
+
+What needs to be said is that Belloc is an authentic child gotten of
+Rabelais. I can never forget a lecture I heard him give in the famous
+Examination Schools at Oxford--that noble building consecrated to human
+suffering, formerly housing the pangs of students and now by sad
+necessity a military hospital. Ruddy of cheek, a burly figure in his
+academic gown, without a scrap of notes and armed only with an old
+volume of Rabelais in the medieval French, he held us spellbound for an
+hour and a half--or was it three hours?--with flashing extempore talk
+about this greatest figure of the Renaissance.
+
+Rabelais, he told us, was the symbolic figure of the incoming tide of
+Europe's rebirth in the sixteenth century. Rabelais, the priest,
+physician, and compounder of a new fish sauce, held that life is its own
+justification, and need not be lived in doleful self-abasement. Do what
+you wish, enjoy life, be interested in a thousand things, feel a
+perpetual inquisitive delight in all the details of human affairs! _The
+gospel of exuberance_--that is Rabelais. Is it not Belloc, too?
+
+Rabelais came from Touraine--the heart of Gaul, the island of light in
+which the tradition of civilization remained unbroken. One understands
+Rabelais better if one knows the Chinon wine, Belloc added. His writing
+is married to the soil and landscape from which he sprang. His
+extraordinary volatility proceeds from a mind packed full of curiosity
+and speculation. For an instance of his exuberance see his famous list
+of fools, in which all fools whatsoever that ever walked on earth are
+included.
+
+Now no one who loves Belloc can paddle in Rabelais without seeing that
+he, too, was sired from Chinon. Dip into Gargantua: there you will find
+the oinolatrous and gastrolatrous catalogues that Belloc daily delights
+in; the infectious droll patter of speech, piling quip on quip. Then
+look again into "The Path to Rome." How well does Mr. John Macy tell us
+"literature is not born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its
+literary parentage, and criticism reads like an Old Testament chapter of
+'begats.' Every novel was suckled at the breasts of older novels."
+
+
+III
+
+In Belloc we find the perfect union of the French and English minds.
+Rabelaisian in fecundity, wit, and irrepressible sparkle, he is also of
+English blood and sinew, wedded to the sweet Sussex weald. History,
+politics, economics, military topography, poetry, novels, satires,
+nonsense rhymes--all these we may set aside as the hundred curiosities
+of an eager mind. (The dons, by the way, say that in his historical work
+he generalizes too hastily; but was ever history more crisply written?)
+It is in the essays, the thousand little inquirendoes into the nature of
+anything, everything or nothing, that one comes closest to the real man.
+His prose leaps and sparks from the pen. It is whimsical, tender,
+biting, garrulous. It is familiar and unfettered as open-air talk. His
+passion for places--roads, rivers, hills, and inns; his dancing
+persiflage and buoyancy; his Borrovian love of vagabondage--these are
+the glories of a style that is quick, close-knit, virile, and vibrant.
+Here Belloc ranks with Bunyan, Swift, and Defoe.
+
+Whoso dotes upon fine prose, prose interlaced with humour, pathos, and
+whim, orchestrated to a steady rhythm, coruscated with an exquisite
+tenderness for all that is lovable and high spirited on this dancing
+earth, go you now to some bookseller and procure for yourself a little
+volume called "A Picked Company" where Mr. E.V. Lucas has gathered some
+of the best of Mr. Belloc's pieces. Therein will you find love of food,
+companionship, cider and light wines; love of children, artillery, and
+inns in the outlands; love of salt water, great winds, and brown hills
+at twilight--in short, passionate devotion to all the dear devices that
+make life so sweet. Hear him on "A Great Wind":
+
+    A great wind is every man's friend, and its strength is the strength
+    of good fellowship; and even doing battle with it is something
+    worthy and well chosen. It is health in us, I say, to be full of
+    heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of whether we have such
+    health our comfort in a great wind is a good test indeed. No man
+    spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out, riding
+    against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but at the
+    end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. It is
+    as though he had experienced armies. The days of high winds are days
+    of innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of
+    intensity, playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in man. And
+    the days of high wind are days in which a physical compulsion has
+    been about us and we have met pressure and blows, resisted and
+    turned them; it enlivens us with the simulacrum of war by which
+    nations live, and in the just pursuit of which men in companionship
+    are at their noblest.
+
+
+IV
+
+And lest all this disjointed talk about Belloc's prose seem but
+ungracious recognition of Mr. Kilmer's service in reminding us of the
+poems, let us thank him warmly for his essay. Let us thank him for
+impressing upon us that there are living to-day men who write as nobly
+and simply as Belloc on Sussex, with his sweet broken music:
+
+    I never get between the pines
+      But I smell the Sussex air;
+    Nor I never come on a belt of sand
+      But my home is there.
+    And along the sky the line of the Downs
+      So noble and so bare.
+
+    A lost thing could I never find,
+      Nor a broken thing mend:
+    And I fear I shall be all alone
+      When I get towards the end.
+    Who will there be to comfort me
+      Or who will be my friend?
+
+    I will gather and carefully make my friends
+      Of the men of the Sussex Weald,
+    They watch the stars from silent folds,
+      They stiffly plough the field.
+    By them and the God of the South Country
+      My poor soul shall be healed.
+
+    If I ever become a rich man,
+      Or if ever I grow to be old,
+    I will build a house with deep thatch
+      To shelter me from the cold,
+    And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
+      And the story of Sussex told.
+
+    I will hold my house in the high wood
+      Within a walk of the sea,
+    And the men that were boys when I was a boy
+      Shall sit and drink with me.
+
+
+
+
+A CASUAL OF THE SEA
+
+    He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.
+
+    --GEORGE HERBERT.
+
+
+Books sometimes make surprising connections with life. Fifteen-year-old
+Tommy Jonkers, shipping as O.S. (ordinary seaman) on the S.S.
+_Fernfield_ in Glasgow in 1911, could hardly have suspected that the
+second engineer would write a novel and put him in it; or that that same
+novel would one day lift him out of focsle and galley and set him
+working for a publishing house on far-away Long Island. Is it not one
+more proof of the surprising power of the written word?
+
+For Tommy is not one of those who expect to find their names in print.
+The mere sight of his name on a newspaper page, in an article I wrote
+about him, brought (so he naively told me) tears to his eyes. Excellent,
+simple-hearted Tommy! How little did you think, when you signed on to
+help the _Fernfield_ carry coal from Glasgow to Alexandria, that the
+long arm of the Miehle press was already waiting for you; that thousands
+of good people reading a certain novel would be familiar with your
+"round rosy face and clear sea-blue eyes."
+
+"Tommy" (whose real name is Drevis) was born in Amsterdam in 1896. His
+father was a fireman at sea, and contributed next to nothing to the
+support of Tommy and his pretty little sister Greta. They lived with
+their grandmother, near the quays in Amsterdam, where the masts of ships
+and the smell of tar interfered with their lessons. Bread and treacle
+for breakfast, black beans for lunch, a fine thick stew and plenty more
+bread for supper--that and the Dutch school where he stood near the top
+of his class are what Tommy remembers best of his boyhood. His
+grandmother took in washing, and had a hard time keeping the little
+family going. She was a fine, brusque old lady and as Tommy went off to
+school in the mornings she used to frown at him from the upstairs window
+because his hands were in his pockets. For as everybody knows, only
+slouchy good-for-nothings walk to school with pocketed hands.
+
+Tommy did so well in his lessons that he was one of the star pupils
+given the privilege of learning an extra language in the evenings. He
+chose English because most of the sailors he met talked English, and his
+great ambition was to be a seaman. His uncle was a quartermaster in the
+Dutch navy, and his father was at sea; and Tommy's chance soon came.
+
+After school hours he used to sell postcards, cologne, soap, chocolates,
+and other knicknacks to the sailors, to earn a little cash to help his
+grandmother. One afternoon in the spring of 1909 he was down on the
+docks with his little packet of wares, when a school friend came running
+to him.
+
+"Drevis, Drevis!" he shouted, "they want a mess-room boy on the _Queen
+Eleanor_!"
+
+It didn't take Drevis long to get aboard the _Queen Eleanor_, a British
+tramp out of Glasgow, bound for Hamburg and Vladivostok. He accosted the
+chief engineer, his blue eyes shining eagerly.
+
+"Yes," says the chief, "I need a mess-room steward right away--we sail
+at four o'clock."
+
+"Try me!" pipes Drevis. (Bless us, the boy was barely thirteen!)
+
+The chief roars with laughter.
+
+"Too small!" he says.
+
+Drevis insisted that he was just the boy for mess-room steward.
+
+"Well," says the chief, "go home and put on a pair of long pants and
+come back again. Then we'll see how you look!"
+
+Tommy ran home rejoicing. His Uncle Hendrick was a small man, and Tommy
+grabbed a pair of his trousers. Thus fortified, he hastened back to the
+_Queen Eleanor_. The chief cackled, but he took him on at two pounds
+five a month.
+
+Tommy didn't last long as mess-room boy. He broke so many cups the
+engineers had to drink out of dippers, and they degraded him to cabin
+boy at a pound a month. Even as cabin boy he was no instant success. He
+used to forget to empty the chief's slop-pail, and the water would
+overflow the cabin. He felt the force of a stout sea boot not a few
+times in learning the golden rubric of the tramp steamer's cabin boy.
+
+"Drevis" was a strange name to the English seamen, and they christened
+him "Tommy," and that handle turns him still.
+
+Tommy's blue eyes and honest Netherland grin and easy temper kept him
+friendly with all the world. The winds of chance sent him scudding about
+the globe, a true casual of the seas. His first voyage as A.B. was on
+the _Fernfield_ in 1911, and there he met a certain Scotch engineer.
+This engineer had a habit of being interested in human problems, and
+Tommy's guileless phiz attracted him. Under his tutelage Tommy acquired
+a thirst for promotion, and soon climbed to the rank of quartermaster.
+
+One thing that always struck Tommy was the number of books the engineer
+had in his cabin. A volume of Nat Gould, Ouida or "The Duchess" would be
+the largest library Tommy would have found in the other bunks; but here,
+before his wondering gaze, were Macaulay, Gibbon, Gorki, Conrad,
+Dickens, Zola, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Chaucer, Shaw, and what not. And
+what would Master Tommy have said had he known that his friend, even
+then, was working on a novel in which he, Tommy, would play an important
+role!
+
+The years went by. On sailing ships, on steam tramps, on private yachts,
+as seaman, as quartermaster, as cook's helper, Tommy drifted about the
+world. One day when he was twenty years old he was rambling about New
+York just before sailing for Liverpool on the steam yacht _Alvina._ He
+was one of a strictly neutral crew (the United States was still neutral
+in those days) signed on to take a millionaire's pet plaything across
+the wintry ocean. She had been sold to the Russian Government (there
+still was one then!)
+
+Tommy was passing through the arcade of the Pennsylvania Station when
+his eye fell upon the book shop there. He was startled to see in the
+window a picture of the Scotch engineer--his best friend, the only man
+in the world who had ever been like a father to him. He knew that the
+engineer was far away in the Mediterranean, working on an English
+transport. He scanned the poster with amazement.
+
+Apparently his friend had written a book. Tommy, like a practical
+seaman, went to the heart of the matter. He went into the shop and
+bought the book. He fell into talk with the bookseller, who had read the
+book. He told the bookseller that he had known the author, and that for
+years they had served together on the same vessels at sea. He told how
+the writer, who was the former second engineer of the _Fernfield_, had
+done many things for the little Dutch lad whose own father had died at
+sea. Then came another surprise.
+
+"I believe you're one of the characters in the story," said the
+bookseller.
+
+It was so. The book was "Casuals of the Sea," the author, William McFee,
+who had been a steamship engineer for a dozen years; and Drevis Jonkers
+found himself described in full in the novel as "Drevis Noordhof," and
+playing a leading part in the story. Can you imagine the simple sailor's
+surprise and delight? Pleased beyond measure, in his soft Dutch accent
+liberally flavoured with cockney he told the bookseller how Mr. McFee
+had befriended him, had urged him to go on studying navigation so that
+he might become an officer; and that though they had not met for
+several years he still receives letters from his friend, full of good
+advice about saving his money, where to get cheap lodgings in Brooklyn,
+and not to fall into the common error of sailors in thinking that
+Hoboken and Passyunk Avenue are all America. And Tommy went back to his
+yacht chuckling with delight, with a copy of "Casuals of the Sea" under
+his arm.
+
+Here my share in the adventure begins. The bookseller, knowing my
+interest in the book, hastened to tell me the next time I saw him that
+one of the characters in the story was in New York. I wrote to Tommy
+asking him to come to see me. He wrote that the _Alvina_ was to sail the
+next day, and he could not get away. I supposed the incident was closed.
+
+Then I saw in the papers that the _Alvina_ had been halted in the
+Narrows by a United States destroyer, the Government having suspected
+that her errand was not wholly neutral. Rumour had it that she was on
+her way to the Azores, there to take on armament for the house of
+Romanoff. She was halted at the Quarantine Station at Staten Island,
+pending an investigation.
+
+Then enters the elbow of coincidence. Looking over some books in the
+very same bookshop where Tommy had bought his friend's novel, I
+overheard another member of the _Alvina's_ crew asking about "Casuals
+of the Sea." His chum Tommy had told him about his adventure, and he,
+too, was there to buy one. (Not every day does one meet one's friends
+walking in a 500-page novel!) By the never-to-be-sufficiently-admired
+hand of chance I was standing at Joe Hogan's very elbow when he began
+explaining to the book clerk that he was a friend of the Dutch sailor
+who had been there a few days before.
+
+So a few days later, behold me on the Staten Island ferry, on my way to
+see Tommy and the _Alvina_.
+
+I'm afraid I would always desert the office if there's a plausible
+excuse to bum about the waterfront. Is there any passion in the breast
+of mankind more absorbing than the love of ships? A tall Cunarder
+putting out to sea gives me a keener thrill than anything the Polo
+Grounds or the Metropolitan Opera can show. Of what avail a meeting of
+the Authors' League when one can know the sights, sounds, and smells of
+West or South Street? I used to lug volumes of Joseph Conrad down to the
+West-Street piers to give them to captains and first mates of liners,
+and get them to talk about the ways of the sea. That was how I met
+Captain Claret of the _Minnehaha_, that prince of seamen; and Mr. Pape
+of the _Orduna_, Mr. Jones of the _Lusitania_ and many another. They
+knew all about Conrad, too. There were five volumes of Conrad in the
+officers' cabins on the _Lusitania_ when she went down, God rest her. I
+know, because I put them there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And the Staten Island ferry is a voyage on the Seven Seas for the
+landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps to greet
+our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem the ways of
+earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of ships! There on
+every hand go the gallant shapes of vessels--the _James L. Morgan_, dour
+little tug, shoving two barges; _Themistocles_, at anchor, with the blue
+and white Greek colours painted on her rusty flank; the _Comanche_
+outward bound for Galveston (I think); the _Ascalon_, full-rigged ship,
+with blue-jerseyed sailormen out on her bowsprit snugging the canvas.
+And who is so true a lover of the sea as one who can suffer the ultimate
+indignities--and love her still! I am queasy as soon as I sight Sandy
+Hook....
+
+At the quarantine station I had a surprise. The _Alvina_ was not there.
+One old roustabout told me he thought she had gone to sea. I was duly
+taken aback. Had I made the two-hour trip for nothing? Then another came
+to my aid. "There she is, up in the bight," he said. I followed his
+gesture, and saw her--a long, slim white hull, a cream-coloured funnel
+with a graceful rake; the Stars and Stripes fresh painted in two places
+on her shining side. I hailed a motor boat to take me out. The boatman
+wanted three dollars, and I offered one. He protested that the yacht was
+interned and he had no right to take visitors out anyway. He'd get into
+trouble with "39"--"39" being a United States destroyer lying in the
+Narrows a few hundred yards away. After some bickering we compromised on
+a dollar and a quarter.
+
+That was a startling adventure for the humble publisher's reader!
+Wallowing in an ice-glazed motor boat, in the lumpy water of a
+"bight"--surrounded by ships and the men who sail them--I might almost
+have been a hardy newspaper man! But Long Island commuters are nurtured
+to a tough and perilous his, and I clambered the _Alvina's _side without
+dropping hat, stick, or any of my pocketful of manuscripts.
+
+Joe Hogan, the steward, was there in his white jacket. He introduced me
+to the cook, the bosun, the "chief," the wireless, and the "second." The
+first officer was too heavy with liquor to notice the arrival of a
+stranger. Messrs. Haig and Haig, those _Dioscuri_ of seamen, had been at
+work. The skipper was ashore. He owns a saloon.
+
+The _Alvina_ is a lovely little vessel, 215 feet long, they told me,
+and about 525 tons. She is fitted with mahogany throughout; the
+staterooms all have brass double beds and private bathrooms attached;
+she has her own wireless telegraph and telephone, refrigerating
+apparatus, and everything to make the owner and his guests comfortable.
+But her beautiful furnishings were tumbled this way and that in
+preparation for the sterner duties that lay before her. The lower deck
+was cumbered with sacks of coal lashed down. A transatlantic voyage in
+January is likely to be a lively one for a yacht of 500 tons.
+
+I found Tommy below in his bunk, cleaning up. He is a typical Dutch
+lad--round, open face, fair hair, and guileless blue eyes. He showed me
+all his treasures--his certificates of good conduct from all the ships
+(both sail and steam) on which he has served; a picture of his mother,
+who died when he was six; and of his sister Greta--a very pretty
+girl--who is also mentioned in _Casuals of the Sea._ The drunken fireman
+in the story who dies after a debauch was Tommy's father who died in the
+same way. And with these other treasures Tommy showed me a packet of
+letters from Mr. McFee.
+
+I do not want to offend Mr. McFee by describing his letters to this
+Dutch sailor-boy as "sensible," but that is just what they were. Tommy
+is one of his own "casuals"--
+
+    --those frail craft upon the restless Sea
+    Of Human Life, who strike the rocks uncharted,
+    Who loom, sad phantoms, near us, drearily,
+    Storm-driven, rudderless, with timbers started--
+
+and these sailormen who drift from port to port on the winds of chance
+are most in need of sound Ben Franklin advice. Save your money; put it
+in the bank; read books; go to see the museums, libraries, and art
+galleries; get to know something about this great America if you intend
+to settle down there--that is the kind of word Tommy gets from his
+friend.
+
+Gradually, as I talked with him, I began to see into the laboratory of
+life where "Casuals of the Sea" originated. This book is valuable
+because it is a triumphant expression of the haphazard, strangely woven
+chances that govern the lives of the humble. In Tommy's honest, gentle
+face, and in the talk of his shipmates when we sat down to dinner
+together, I saw a microcosm of the strange barren life of the sea where
+men float about for years like driftwood. And out of all this ebbing
+tide of aimless, happy-go-lucky humanity McFee had chanced upon this boy
+from Amsterdam and had tried to pound into him some good sound common
+sense.
+
+When I left her that afternoon, the _Alvina_ was getting up steam, and
+she sailed within a few hours. I had eaten and talked with her crew, and
+for a short space had a glimpse of the lives and thoughts of the simple,
+childlike men who live on ships. I realized for the first time the truth
+of that background of aimless hazard that makes "Casuals of the Sea" a
+book of more than passing merit.
+
+As for Tommy, the printed word had him in thrall though he knew it not.
+When he got back from Liverpool, two months later, I found him a job in
+the engine room of a big printing press. He was set to work oiling the
+dynamos, and at ten dollars a week he had a fine chance to work his way
+up. Indeed, he enrolled in a Scranton correspondence course on steam
+engineering and enchanted his Hempstead landlady by his simple ways.
+That lasted just two weeks. The level ground made Tommy's feet uneasy.
+The last I heard he was on a steam yacht on Long Island Sound.
+
+But wherever steam and tide may carry him, Tommy cherishes in his heart
+his own private badge of honour: his friend the engineer has put him in
+a book! And there, in one of the noblest and most honest novels of our
+day, you will find him--a casual of the sea!
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST PIPE
+
+    The last smoker I recollect among those of the old school was a
+    clergyman. He had seen the best society, and was a man of the most
+    polished behaviour. This did not hinder him from taking his pipe
+    every evening before he went to bed. He sat in his armchair, his
+    back gently bending, his knees a little apart, his eyes placidly
+    inclined toward the fire. The end of his recreation was announced by
+    the tapping of the bowl of his pipe upon the hob, for the purpose of
+    emptying it of its ashes. Ashes to ashes; head to bed.
+
+    --LEIGH HUNT.
+
+
+The sensible man smokes (say) sixteen pipefuls a day, and all differ in
+value and satisfaction. In smoking there is, thank heaven, no law of
+diminishing returns. I may puff all day long until I nigresce with the
+fumes and soot, but the joy loses no savour by repetition. It is true
+that there is a peculiar blithe rich taste in the first morning puffs,
+inhaled after breakfast. (Let me posit here the ideal conditions for a
+morning pipe as I know them.) After your bath, breakfast must be spread
+in a chamber of eastern exposure; let there be hominy and cream, and if
+possible, brown sugar. There follow scrambled eggs, shirred to a
+lemon-yellow, with toast sliced in triangles, fresh, unsalted butter,
+and Scotch bitter marmalade. Let there be without fail a platter of hot
+bacon, curly, juicy, fried to the debatable point where softness is
+overlaid with the faintest crepitation of crackle, of crispyness. If hot
+Virginia corn pone is handy, so much the better. And coffee, two-thirds
+hot milk, also with brown sugar. It must be permissible to call for a
+second serving of the scrambled eggs; or, if this is beyond the budget,
+let there be a round of judiciously grilled kidneys, with mayhap a
+sprinkle of mushrooms, grown in chalky soil. That is the kind of
+breakfast they used to serve in Eden before the fall of man and the
+invention of innkeepers with their crass formulae.
+
+After such a breakfast, if one may descend into a garden of plain turf,
+mured about by an occluding wall, with an alley of lime trees for sober
+pacing: then and there is the fit time and place for the first pipe of
+the day. Pack your mixture in the bowl; press it lovingly down with the
+cushion of the thumb; see that the draught is free--and then for your
+_saeckerhets taendstickor!_ A day so begun is well begun, and sin will
+flee your precinct. Shog, vile care! The smoke is cool and blue and
+tasty on the tongue; the arch of the palate is receptive to the fume;
+the curling vapour ascends the chimneys of the nose. Fill your cheeks
+with the excellent cloudy reek, blow it forth in twists and twirls. The
+first pipe!
+
+But, as I was saying, joy ends not here. Granted that the
+after-breakfast smoke excels in savour, succeeding fumations grow in
+mental reaction. The first pipe is animal, physical, a matter of pure
+sensation. With later kindlings of the weed the brain quickens, begins
+to throw out tendrils of speculation, leaps to welcome problems for
+thought, burrows tingling into the unknowable. As the smoke drifts and
+shreds about your neb, your mind is surcharged with that imponderable
+energy of thought, which cannot be seen or measured, yet is the most
+potent force in existence. All the hot sunlight of Virginia that stirred
+the growing leaf in its odorous plantation now crackles in that glowing
+dottel in your briar bowl. The venomous juices of the stalk seep down
+the stem. The most precious things in the world are also vivid with
+poison.
+
+Was Kant a smoker? I think he must have been. How else could he have
+written "The Critique of Pure Reason"? Tobacco is the handmaid of
+science, philosophy, and literature. Carlyle eased his indigestion and
+snappish temper by perpetual pipes. The generous use of the weed makes
+the enforced retirement of Sing Sing less irksome to forgers,
+second-story men, and fire bugs. Samuel Butler, who had little enough
+truck with churchmen, was once invited to stay a week-end by the Bishop
+of London. Distrusting the entertaining qualities of bishops, and
+rightly, his first impulse was to decline. But before answering the
+Bishop's letter he passed it to his manservant for advice. The latter
+(the immortal Alfred Emery Cathie) said: "There is a crumb of tobacco in
+the fold of the paper, sir: I think you may safely go." He went, and
+hugely enjoyed himself.
+
+There is a Bible for smokers, a book of delightful information for all
+acolytes of this genial ritual, crammed with wit and wisdom upon the art
+and mystery we cherish. It is called "The Social History of Smoking," by
+G.L. Apperson. Alas, a friend of mine, John Marshall (he lives somewhere
+in Montreal or Quebec), borrowed it from me, and obstinately declines to
+return it. If he should ever see this, may his heart be loosened and
+relent. Dear John, I wish you would return that book. (_Canadian
+journals please copy!_)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was contending that the joy of smoking increases harmonically with the
+weight of tobacco consumed, within reasonable limits. Of course the
+incessant smoker who is puffing all day long sears his tongue and grows
+callous to the true delicacy of the flavour. For that reason it is best
+not to smoke during office hours. This may be a hard saying to some, but
+a proper respect for the art impels it. Not even the highest ecclesiast
+can be at his devotions always. It is not those who are horny with
+genuflection who are nearest the Throne of Grace. Even the Pope (I speak
+in all reverence) must play billiards or trip a coranto now and then!
+
+This is the schedule I vouch for:
+
+After breakfast: 2 pipes
+
+At luncheon: 2 pipes
+
+Before dinner: 2 pipes
+
+Between dinner and bed: 10 to 12 pipes
+
+(Cigars and cigarettes as occasion may require.)
+
+The matter of smoking after dinner requires consideration. If your meal
+is a heavy, stupefying anodyne, retracting all the humane energies from
+the skull in a forced abdominal mobilization to quell a plethora of food
+into subjection and assimilation, there is no power of speculation left
+in the top storeys. You sink brutishly into an armchair, warm your legs
+at the fire, and let the leucocytes and phagocytes fight it out. At such
+times smoking becomes purely mechanical. You imbibe and exhale the fumes
+automatically. The choicest aromatic blends are mere fuel. Your eyes
+see, but your brain responds not. The vital juices, generous currents,
+or whatever they are that animate the intelligence, are down below
+hatches fighting furiously to annex and drill into submission the alien
+and distracting mass of food that you have taken on board. They are like
+stevedores, stowing the cargo for portability. A little later, however,
+when this excellent work is accomplished, the bosun may trill his
+whistle, and the deck hands can be summoned back to the navigating
+bridge. The mind casts off its corporeal hawsers and puts out to sea.
+You begin once more to live as a rational composition of reason,
+emotion, and will. The heavy dinner postpones and stultifies this
+desirable state. Let it then be said that light dining is best: a little
+fish or cutlets, white wine, macaroni and cheese, ice cream and coffee.
+Such a regime restores the animal health, and puts you in vein for a
+continuance of intellect.
+
+Smoking is properly an intellectual exercise. It calls forth the
+choicest qualities of mind and soul. It can only be properly conducted
+by a being in full possession of the five wits. For those who are in
+pain, sorrow, or grievous perplexity it operates as a sovereign
+consoler, a balm and balsam to the harassed spirit; it calms the
+fretful, makes jovial the peevish. Better than any ginseng in the
+herbal, does it combat fatigue and old age. Well did Stevenson exhort
+virgins not to marry men who do not smoke.
+
+Now we approach the crux and pinnacle of this inquirendo into the art
+and mystery of smoking. That is to say, the last pipe of all before the
+so-long indomitable intellect abdicates, and the body succumbs to
+weariness.
+
+No man of my acquaintance has ever given me a satisfactory definition of
+_living_. An alternating systole and diastole, says physiology.
+Chlorophyl becoming xanthophyl, says botany. These stir me not. I define
+life as a process of the Will-to-Smoke: recurring periods of
+consciousness in which the enjoyability of smoking is manifest,
+interrupted by intervals of recuperation.
+
+Now if I represent the course of this process by a graph (the co-ordinates
+being Time and the Sense-of-by-the-Smoker-enjoyed-Satisfaction) the curve
+ascends from its origin in a steep slant, then drops away abruptly at the
+recuperation interval. This is merely a teutonic and pedantic mode of
+saying that the best pipe of all is the last one smoked at night. It is
+the penultimate moment that is always the happiest. The sweetest pipe
+ever enjoyed by the skipper of the _Hesperus_ was the one he whiffed just
+before he was tirpitzed by the poet on that angry reef.
+
+The best smoking I ever do is about half past midnight, just before "my
+eyelids drop their shade," to remind you again of your primary school
+poets. After the toils, rebuffs, and exhilarations of the day, after
+piaffing busily on the lethal typewriter or _schreibmaschine_ for some
+hours, a drowsy languor begins to numb the sense. In dressing gown and
+slippers I seek my couch; Ho, Lucius, a taper! and some solid,
+invigorating book for consideration. My favourite is the General
+Catalogue of the Oxford University Press: a work so excellently full of
+learning; printed and bound with such eminence of skill; so noble a
+repository or Thesaurus of the accumulated treasures of human learning,
+that it sets the mind in a glow of wonder. This is the choicest garland
+for the brain fatigued with the insignificant and trifling tricks by
+which we earn our daily bread. There is no recreation so lovely as that
+afforded by books rich in wisdom and ribbed with ripe and sober
+research. This catalogue (nearly 600 pages) is a marvellous precis of
+the works of the human spirit. And here and there, buried in a scholarly
+paragraph, one meets a topical echo: "THE OXFORD SHAKESPEARE GLOSSARY:
+by C.T. ONIONS: Mr. Onions' glossary, offered at an insignificant price,
+relieves English scholarship of the necessity of recourse to the
+lexicon of Schmidt." Lo, how do even professors and privat-docents
+belabour one another!
+
+With due care I fill, pack, and light the last pipe of the day, to be
+smoked reverently and solemnly in bed. The thousand brain-murdering
+interruptions are over. The gentle sibilance of air drawn through the
+glowing nest of tobacco is the only sound. With reposeful heart I turn
+to some favourite entry in my well-loved catalogue.
+
+"HENRY PEACHAM'S COMPLEAT GENTLEMAN. Fashioning him absolut in the most
+necessary and Commendable Qualities concerning Minde, or Body, that may
+be required in a Noble Gentleman. Wherunto is annexed a Description of
+the order of a Maine Battaile or Pitched Field, eight severall wayes,
+with the Art of Limming and other Additions newly Enlarged. Printed from
+the edition of 1634; first edition, 1622, with an introduction by G. S.
+Gordon. 1906. Pp xxiv + 16 unpaged + 262. 7s. 6d. net. _At the Clarendon
+Press_."
+
+Or this:
+
+"H. HIS DEVISES, for his owne exercise, and his Friends pleasure.
+Printed from the edition of 1581, with an introduction. 1906. Pp xviii +
+104. 5s. net."
+
+O excellent H! Little did he dream that his devises (with an
+introduction by Professor Sir Walter Raleigh) would be still giving his
+Friends pleasure over three hundred years later. The compiler of the
+catalogue says here with modest and pardonable pride "strongly bound in
+exceptionally tough paper and more than once described by reviewers as
+leather. Some of the books are here printed for the first time, the rest
+are reproductions of the original editions, many having prefaces by good
+hands."
+
+One o'clock is about to chime in the near-by steeple, but my pipe and
+curiosity are now both going strong.
+
+"THE CURES OF THE DISEASED in remote Regions, preventing Mortalitie
+incident in Forraine Attempts of the English Nation. 1598. The earliest
+English treatise on tropical diseases. 1915. 1s. 6d. net."
+
+Is that not the most interesting comment on the English colonial
+enterprises in Elizabeth's reign? And there is no limit to the joys of
+this marvellous catalogue. How one dreams of the unknown delights of
+"Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books," or "Dan Michel's Ayenbite of
+Inwyt, 1340" (which means, as I figure it, the "Backbite of
+Conscience"), or "Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt sive Veterum
+Interpretum Graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum Fragmenta, edidit F.
+Field. 1865. Two volumes L6 6s. net" or "Shuckford's Sacred and Profane
+History of the World, from the Creation of the World to the Dissolution
+of the Assyrian Empire at the death of Sardanapalus, and to the
+Declension of The Kingdom of Judah and Israel under the Reigns of Ahaz
+and Pekah, with the Creation and Fall of Man. 1728, reprinted 1848. Pp
+550. 10s. net."
+
+But I dare not force my hobbies on you further. One man's meat is
+another's caviar. I dare not even tell you what my favourite tobaccos
+are, for recently when I sold to a magazine a very worthy and excellent
+poem entitled "My Pipe," mentioning the brands I delight to honour, the
+editor made me substitute fictitious names for my dearly loved blends.
+He said that sound editorial policy forbids mentioning commercial
+products in the text of the magazine.
+
+But tobacco, thank heaven, is not merely a "commercial product." Let us
+call on Salvation Yeo for his immortal testimony:
+
+"When all things were made none was made better than this; to be a lone
+man's companion, a bachelor's friend, a hungry man's food, a sad man's
+cordial, a wakeful man's sleep, and a chilly man's fire, sir; while for
+stanching of wounds, purging of rheum, and settling of the stomach,
+there's no herb like unto it under the canopy of heaven."
+
+And by this time the bowl is naught but ash. Even my dear General
+Catalogue begins to blur before me. Slip it under the pillow; gently and
+kindly lay the pipe in the candlestick, and blow out the flame. The
+window is open wide: the night rushes in. I see a glimpse of stars ... a
+distant chime ... and fall asleep with the faint pungence of the Indian
+herb about me.
+
+
+
+
+TIME TO LIGHT THE FURNACE
+
+
+The twenty-eighth of October. Coal nine dollars a ton. Mr. and Mrs.
+Blackwell had made a resolution not to start the furnace until
+Thanksgiving. And in the biting winds of Long Island that requires
+courage.
+
+Commuters the world over are a hardy, valorous race. The Arab commutes
+by dromedary, the Malay by raft, the Indian rajah by elephant, the
+African chief gets a team of his mothers-in-law to tow him to the
+office. But wherever you find him, the commuter is a tough and tempered
+soul, inured to privation and calamity. At seven-thirty in the morning
+he leaves his bungalow, tent, hut, palace, or kraal, and tells his wife
+he is going to work.
+
+How the winds whistle and moan over those Long Island flats! Mr. and
+Mrs. Blackwell had laid in fifteen tons of black diamonds. And hoping
+that would be enough, they were zealous not to start the furnace until
+the last touchdown had been made.
+
+But every problem has more than one aspect. Belinda, the new cook, had
+begun to work for them on the fifth of October. Belinda came from the
+West Indies, a brown maiden still unspoiled by the sophistries of the
+employment agencies. She could boil an egg without cracking it, she
+could open a tin can without maiming herself. She was neat, guileless,
+and cheerful. But, she was accustomed to a warm climate.
+
+The twenty-eighth of October. As Mr. and Mrs. Blackwell sat at dinner,
+Mr. Blackwell buttoned his coat, and began a remark about how chilly the
+evenings were growing. But across the table came one of those glances
+familiar to indiscreet husbands. Passion distorted, vibrant with rebuke,
+charged with the lightning of instant dissolution, Mrs. Blackwell's gaze
+struck him dumb with alarm. Husbands, husbands, you know that gaze!
+
+Mr. Blackwell kept silence. He ate heartily, choosing foods rich in
+calories. He talked of other matters, and accepted thankfully what
+Belinda brought to him. But he was chilly, and a vision of coal bills
+danced in his mind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After dinner he lit the open fire in the living room, and he and Mrs.
+Blackwell talked in discreet tones. Belinda was merrily engaged in
+washing the dishes.
+
+"Bob, you consummate blockhead!" said Mrs. Blackwell, "haven't you
+better sense than to talk about its being chilly? These last few days
+Belinda has done nothing but complain about the cold. She comes from
+Barbados, where the thermometer never goes below sixty. She said she
+couldn't sleep last night, her room was so cold. I've given her my old
+fur coat and the steamer rug from your den. One other remark like that
+of yours and she'll leave. For heaven's sake, Bob, use your skull!"
+
+Mr. Blackwell gazed at her in concern. The deep, calculating wisdom of
+women was made plain to him. He ventured no reply.
+
+Mrs. Blackwell was somewhat softened by his docility.
+
+"You don't realize, dear," she added, "how servants are affected by
+chance remarks they overhear. The other day you mentioned the
+thermometer, and the next morning I found Belinda looking at it. If you
+must say anything about the temperature, complain of the heat. Otherwise
+we'll have to start the furnace at once."
+
+Mr. Blackwell's face was full of the admiration common to the
+simple-minded race of husbands.
+
+"Jumbo," he said, "you're right. I was crazy. Watch me from now on.
+Mental suggestion is the dope. The power of the chance remark!"
+
+The next evening at dinner, while Belinda was passing the soup, Mr.
+Blackwell fired his first gun. "It seems almost too warm for hot soup,"
+he said. "All the men at the office were talking about the unseasonable
+hot weather. I think we'd better have a window open." To Mrs.
+Blackwell's dismay, he raised one of the dining-room windows, admitting
+a pungent frostiness of October evening. But she was game, and presently
+called for a palm-leaf fan. When Belinda was in the room they talked
+pointedly of the heat, and Mr. Blackwell quoted imaginary Weather Bureau
+notes from the evening paper.
+
+After dinner, as he was about to light the log fire, from force of
+habit, Mrs. Blackwell snatched the burning match from him just as he was
+setting it to the kindling. They grinned at each other wistfully, for
+the ruddy evening blaze was their chief delight. Mr. Blackwell manfully
+took off his coat and waistcoat and sat in his shirtsleeves until
+Belinda had gone to bed. Then he grew reckless and lit a roaring fire,
+by which they huddled in glee. He rebuilt the fire before retiring, so
+that Belinda might suspect nothing in the morning.
+
+The next evening Mr. Blackwell appeared at dinner in a Palm Beach suit.
+Mrs. Blackwell countered by ordering iced tea. They both sneezed
+vigorously during the meal. "It was so warm in town to-day, I think I
+caught a cold," said Mr. Blackwell.
+
+Later Mrs. Blackwell found Belinda examining the thermometer with a
+puzzled air. That night they took it down and hid it in the attic. But
+the great stroke of the day was revealed when Mrs. Blackwell explained
+that Mr. and Mrs. Chester, next door, had promised to carry on a similar
+psychological campaign. Belinda and Mrs. Chester's cook,
+Tulip--jocularly known as the Black Tulip--were friends, and would
+undoubtedly compare notes. Mrs. Chester had agreed not to start her
+furnace without consultation with Mrs. Blackwell.
+
+October yielded to November. By good fortune the weather remained sunny,
+but the nights were crisp. Belinda was given an oil-stove for her attic
+bedroom. Mrs. Blackwell heard no more complaints of the cold, but
+sometimes she and her husband could hear uneasy creakings upstairs late
+at night. "I wonder if Barbados really is so warm?" she asked Bob. "I'm
+sure it can't be warmer than Belinda's room. She never opens the
+windows, and the oil-stove has to be filled every morning."
+
+"Perhaps some day we can get an Eskimo maid," suggested Mr. Blackwell
+drowsily. He wore his Palm Beach suit every night for dinner, but
+underneath it he was panoplied in heavy flannels.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Through Mr. Chester the rumour of the Blackwells' experiment in
+psychology spread far among suburban husbands. On the morning train less
+fortunate commuters, who had already started their fires, referred to
+him as "the little brother of the iceberg." Mr. and Mrs. Chester came to
+dinner on the 16th of November. Both the men loudly clamoured for
+permission to remove their coats, and sat with blanched and chattering
+jaws. Mr. Blackwell made a feeble pretence at mopping his brow, but when
+the dessert proved to be ice-cream his nerve forsook him. "N-no,
+Belinda," he said. "It's too warm for ice-cream to-night. I don't
+w--want to get chilled. Bring me some hot coffee." As she brought his
+cup he noticed that her honest brown brow was beaded with perspiration.
+"By George," he thought, "this mental suggestion business certainly
+works." Late that evening he lit the log fire and revelled by the blaze
+in an ulster.
+
+The next evening when Mr. Blackwell came home from business he met the
+doctor in the hall.
+
+"Hello, doc," he said, "what's up?"
+
+"Mrs. Blackwell called me in to see your maid," said the doctor. "It's
+the queerest thing I've met in twenty years' practice. Here it is the
+17th of November, and cold enough for snow. That girl has all the
+symptoms of sunstroke and prickly heat."
+
+
+
+
+MY FRIEND
+
+
+To-day we called each other by our given names for the first time.
+
+Making a new friend is so exhilarating an adventure that perhaps it will
+not be out of place if I tell you a little about him. There are not many
+of his kind.
+
+In the first place, he is stout, like myself. We are both agreed that
+many of the defects of American letters to-day are due to the sorry
+leanness of our writing men. We have no Chestertons, no Bellocs. I look
+to Don Marquis, to H.L. Mencken, to Heywood Broun, to Clayton Hamilton,
+and to my friend here portraited, to remedy this. If only Mr. Simeon
+Strunsky were stouter! He is plump, but not yet properly corpulent.
+
+My friend is a literary journalist. There are but few of them in these
+parts. Force of circumstances may compel him to write of trivial things,
+but it would be impossible for him not to write with beauty and
+distinction far above his theme. His style is a perfect echo of his
+person, mellow, quaint, and richly original. To plunder a phrase of his
+own, it is drenched with the sounds, the scents, the colours, of great
+literature.
+
+I, too, am employed in a bypath of the publishing business, and try to
+bring to my tasks some small measure of honest idealism. But what I love
+(I use this great word with care) in my friend is that his zeal for
+beauty and for truth is great enough to outweigh utterly the paltry
+considerations of expediency and comfort which sway most of us. To him
+his pen is as sacred as the scalpel to the surgeon. He would rather die
+than dishonour that chosen instrument.
+
+I hope I am not merely fanciful: but the case of my friend has taken in
+my mind a large importance quite beyond the exigencies of his personal
+situation. I see in him personified the rising generation of literary
+critics, who have a hard row to hoe in a deliterated democracy. By some
+unknowable miracle of birth or training he has come by a love of beauty,
+a reverence for what is fine and true, an absolute intolerance of the
+slipshod and insincere.
+
+Such a man is not happy, can never be happy, when the course of his
+daily routine wishes him to praise what he does not admire, to exploit
+what he does not respect. The most of us have some way of quibbling
+ourselves out of this dilemma. But he cannot do so, because more than
+comfort, more than clothes and shoe leather, more than wife or
+fireside, he must preserve the critic's self-respect. "I cannot write a
+publicity story about A.B," he said woefully to me, "because I am
+convinced he is a bogus philosopher. I am not interested in selling
+books: what I have to do with is that strange and esoteric thing called
+literature."
+
+I would be sorry to have it thought that because of this devotion to
+high things my friend is stubborn, dogmatic, or hard to work with. He is
+unpractical as dogs, children, or Dr. Johnson; in absent-minded
+simplicity he has issued forth upon the highway only half-clad, and been
+haled back to his boudoir by indignant bluecoats; but in all matters
+where absolute devotion to truth and honour are concerned I would not
+find him lacking. Wherever a love of beauty and a ripened judgment of
+men and books are a business asset, he is a successful business man.
+
+In person, he has the charm of a monstrously overgrown elf. His shyly
+wandering gaze behind thick spectacle panes, his incessant devotion to
+cigarettes and domestic lager, his whimsical talk on topics that
+confound the unlettered--these are amiable trifles that endear him to
+those who understand.
+
+Actually, in a hemisphere bestridden by the crass worship of comfort
+and ease, here is a man whose ideal is to write essays in resounding
+English, and to spread a little wider his love of the niceties of fine
+prose.
+
+I have anatomized him but crudely. If you want to catch him in a weak
+spot, try him on Belloc. Hear him rumble his favourite couplet;
+
+    And the men who were boys when I was a boy
+    Shall sit and drink with me.
+
+Indeed let us hope that they will.
+
+
+
+
+A POET OF SAD VIGILS
+
+
+There are many ways of sitting down to an evening vigil. Unquestionably
+the pleasantest is to fortify the soul with a pot of tea, plenty of
+tobacco, and a few chapters of Jane Austen. And if the adorable Miss
+Austen is not to hand, my second choice perhaps would be the literary
+remains of a sad, poor, and forgotten young man who was a contemporary
+of hers.
+
+I say "forgotten," and I think it is just; save for his beautiful hymn
+"The Star of Bethlehem," who nowadays ever hears of Henry Kirke White?
+But on the drawing-room tables of our grandmothers' girlhood the plump
+volume, edited with a fulsome memoir by Southey, held honourable place
+near the conch shell from the Pacific and the souvenirs of the Crystal
+Palace. Mr. Southey, in his thirty years' laureateship, made the fame of
+several young versifiers, and deemed that in introducing poor White's
+remains to the polite world he was laying the first lucifer to a bonfire
+that would gloriously crackle for posterity. No less than Chatterton was
+the worthy laureate's estimate of his young foundling; but alas!
+Chatterton and Kirke White both seem thinnish gruel to us; and even
+Southey himself is down among the pinch hitters. Literary prognosis is a
+parlous sport.
+
+The generation that gave us Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Lamb, Jane
+Austen, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, leaves us little
+time for Kirke White considered purely as a literary man. His verses are
+grotesquely stilted, the obvious conjunction of biliousness and
+overstudy, and adapted to the taste of an era when the word female was
+still used as a substantive. But they are highly entertaining to read
+because they so faithfully mirror the backwash of romanticism. They are
+so thoroughly unhealthy, so morbid, so pallid with moonlight, so
+indentured by the ayenbite of inwit, that it is hard to believe that
+Henry's father was a butcher and should presumably have reared him on
+plenty of sound beefsteak and blood gravy. If only Miss Julia Lathrop or
+Dr. Anna Howard Shaw could have been Henry's mother, he might have lived
+to write poems on the abolition of slavery in America. But as a matter
+of fact, he was done to death by the brutal tutors of St. John's
+College, Cambridge, and perished at the age of twenty-one, in 1806. As a
+poet, let him pass; but the story of his life breathes a sweet and
+honourable fragrance, and is comely to ponder in the midnight hours. As
+Southey said, there is nothing to be recorded but what is honourable to
+him; nothing to be regretted but that one so ripe for heaven should so
+soon have been removed from the world.
+
+He was born in Nottingham, March 21, 1785, of honest tradesman parents;
+his origin reminds one inevitably of that of Keats. From his earliest
+years he was studious in temper, and could with difficulty be drawn from
+his books, even at mealtimes. At the age of seven he wrote a story of a
+Swiss emigrant and gave it to the servant, being too bashful to show it
+to his mother. Southey's comment on this is "The consciousness of genius
+is always accompanied with this diffidence; it is a sacred, solitary
+feeling."
+
+His schooling was not long; and while it lasted part of Henry's time was
+employed in carrying his father's deliveries of chops and rumps to the
+prosperous of Nottingham. At fourteen his parents made an effort to
+start him in line for business by placing him in a stocking factory. The
+work was wholly uncongenial, and shortly afterward he was employed in
+the office of a busy firm of lawyers. He spent twelve hours a day in the
+office and then an hour more in the evening was put upon Latin and
+Greek. Even such recreation hours as the miserable youth found were
+dismally employed in declining nouns and conjugating verbs. In a little
+garret at the top of the house he began to collect his books; even his
+supper of bread and milk was carried up to him there, for he refused to
+eat with his family for fear of interrupting his studies. It is a
+deplorable picture: the fumes of the hearty butcher's evening meal
+ascend the stair in vain, Henry is reading "Blackstone" and "The Wealth
+of Nations." If it were Udolpho or Conan Doyle that held him, there were
+some excuse. The sad life of Henry is the truest indictment of overstudy
+that I know. No one, after reading Southey's memoir, will overload his
+brain again.
+
+At the age of fifteen we find the boy writing to his older brother
+Neville: "I have made a firm resolution never to spend above one hour at
+this amusement [novel reading]. I have been obliged to enter into this
+resolution in consequence of a vitiated taste acquired by reading
+romances." He is human enough to add, however, that "after long and
+fatiguing researches in 'Blackstone' or 'Coke,' 'Tom Jones' or 'Robinson
+Crusoe' afford a pleasing and necessary relaxation. Of 'Robinson Crusoe'
+I shall observe that it is allowed to be the best novel for youth in the
+English language."
+
+The older brother to whom these comments were addressed was living in
+London, apparently a fairly successful man of business. Henry permitted
+himself to indulge his pedagogical and ministerial instincts for the
+benefit and improvement of his kinsman. They seem to have carried on a
+mutual recrimination in their letters: Neville was inclined to belittle
+the divine calling of poets in their teens; while Henry deplored his
+brother's unwillingness to write at length and upon serious and
+"instructive" topics. Alas, the ill-starred young man had a mania for
+self-improvement. If our great-grandparents were all like that what an
+age it had been for the Scranton correspondence courses! "What is
+requisite to make one's correspondence valuable?" asks Henry. "I answer,
+_sound sense_." (The italics are his own.) "You have better natural
+abilities than many youth," he tells his light-hearted brother, "but it
+is with regret I see that you will not give yourself the trouble of
+writing a good letter. My friend, you never found any art, however
+trivial, that did not require some application at first." He begs the
+astounded Neville to fill his letters with his opinions of the books he
+reads. "You have no idea how beneficial this would be to yourself." Does
+one not know immediately that Henry is destined to an early grave?
+
+Henry's native sweetness was further impaired by a number of prizes won
+in magazine competitions. A silver medal and a pair of twelve-inch
+globes shortly became his for meritorious contributions to the _Monthly
+Mirror_. He was also admitted a member of a famous literary society then
+existing in Nottingham, and although the youngest of the sodality he
+promptly announced that he proposed to deliver them a lecture. With
+mingled curiosity and dismay the gathering assembled at the appointed
+time, and the inspired youth harangued them for two hours on the subject
+of Genius. The devil, or his agent in Nottingham, had marked Henry for
+destruction.
+
+In such a career there can be no doubt as to the next step. He published
+a book of poems. His verses, dealing with such topics as Consumption,
+Despair, Lullaby of a Female Convict to Her Child the Night Previous to
+Execution, Lines Spoken by a Lover at the Grave of His Mistress, The Eve
+of Death, and Sonnet Addressed by a Female Lunatic to a Lady, had been
+warmly welcomed by the politest magazines of the time. To wish to
+publish them in more permanent form was natural; but the unfortunate
+young man conceived the thought that the venture might even be a
+profitable one. He had found himself troubled with deafness, which
+threatened to annul his industry in the law; moreover, his spirit was
+canting seriously toward devotional matters, and thoughts of a college
+career and then the church were lively in his mind.
+
+The winter of 1802-3 was busily passed in preparing his manuscript for
+the printer. Probably never before or since, until the Rev. John
+Franklin Bair of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, set about garnering his
+collected works into that volume which is the delight of the wicked, has
+a human heart mulled over indifferent verses with so honest a pleasure
+and such unabated certainty of immortality. The first two details to be
+attended to were the printing of what were modestly termed
+_Proposals_--i.e., advertisements of the projected volume, calling for
+pledges of subscription--and, still more important, securing the
+permission of some prominent person to accept a dedication of the book.
+The jolly old days of literary patronage were then in the sere and
+saffron, but it was still esteemed an aid to the sale of a volume if it
+might be dedicated to some marquis of Carabas. Accordingly the
+manuscript was despatched to London, and Neville, the philistine
+brother, was called upon to leave it at the residence of the Duchess of
+Devonshire. A very humble letter from honest Henry accompanied it,
+begging leave of her Grace to dedicate his "trifling effusions" to her.
+
+Henry's letters to Neville while his book was in preparation are very
+entertaining, as those of minor poets always are under such
+circumstances. Henry was convinced that at least 350 copies would be
+sold in Nottingham. He writes in exultation that he has already got
+twenty-three orders even before his "proposals" are ready:
+
+"I have got twenty-three, without making the affair public at all, among
+my immediate acquaintance: and mind, I neither solicit nor draw the
+conversation to the subject, but a rumour has got abroad, and has been
+received more favourably than I expected."
+
+But the matter of the dedication unfortunately lagged far behind the
+poet's hopes. After the manuscript was left at the house of her Grace of
+Devonshire there followed what the Ancient Mariner so feelingly calls a
+weary time. Poor Henry in Nottingham hung upon the postman's heels, but
+no word arrived from the duchess. She was known to be assaulted from all
+sides by such applications: indeed her mail seems to have been very
+nearly as large as that of Mary Pickford or Theda Bara. Then, to his
+unspeakable anxiety, the miserable and fermenting Henry learned that all
+parcels sent to the duchess, unless marked with a password known only to
+her particular correspondents, were thrown into a closet by her porter
+to be reclaimed at convenience, or not at all. "I am ruined," cried
+Henry in agony; and the worthy Neville paid several unsuccessful visits
+to Devonshire House in the attempt to retrieve the manuscript. Finally,
+after waiting four hours in the servants' hall, he succeeded. Even then
+undaunted, this long-suffering older brother made one more try in the
+poet's behalf: he obtained a letter of introduction to the duchess, and
+called on her in person, wisely leaving the manuscript at home; and with
+the complaisance of the great the lady readily acquiesced in Henry's
+modest request. Her name was duly inscribed on the proper page of the
+little volume, and in course of time the customary morocco-bound copy
+reached her. Alas, she took no notice of it, and Mr. Southey surmises
+that "Involved as she was in an endless round of miserable follies, it
+is probable that she never opened the book."
+
+"Clifton Grove" was the title Henry gave the book, published in 1803.
+
+It is not necessary to take the poems in this little volume more
+seriously than any seventeen-year-old ejaculations. It is easy to see
+what Henry's reading had been--Milton, Collins, and Gray, evidently. His
+unconscious borrowings from Milton do him great credit, as showing how
+thoroughly he appreciated good poetry. It seeped into his mind and
+became part of his own outpourings. _Il Penseroso_ gushes to the surface
+of poor Henry's song every few lines; precious twigs and shreds of
+Milton flow merrily down the current of his thought. And yet smile as we
+may, every now and then friend Henry puts something over. One of his
+poems is a curious foretaste of what Keats was doing ten years later.
+Every now and then one pauses to think that this lad, once his youthful
+vapours were over, might have done great things. And as he says in his
+quaint little preface, "the unpremeditated effusions of a boy, from his
+thirteenth year, employed, not in the acquisition of literary
+information, but in the more active business of life, must not be
+expected to exhibit any considerable portion of the correctness of a
+Virgil, or the vigorous compression of a Horace."
+
+The publishing game was new to Henry, and the slings and arrows found an
+unshielded heart. When the first copies of his poor little book came
+home from the printer he was prostrated to find several misprints. He
+nearly swooned, but seizing a pen he carefully corrected all the copies.
+After writing earnest and very polite letters to all the reviewers he
+dispatched copies to the leading periodicals, and sat down in the sure
+hope of rapid fame. How bitter was his chagrin when the _Monthly
+Review_ for February, 1804, came out with a rather disparaging comment:
+in particular the critic took umbrage at his having put _boy_ to rhyme
+with _sky_, and added, referring to Henry's hopes of a college course,
+"If Mr. White should be instructed by alma mater, he will, doubtless,
+produce better sense and better rhymes."
+
+The review was by no means unjust: it said what any disinterested
+opinion must have confirmed, that the youth's ambitions were excellent,
+but that neither he, nor indeed any two-footed singer, is likely to be
+an immortal poet by seventeen. But Henry's sensitive soul had been so
+inflated by the honest pride of his friends that he could only see gross
+and callous malignity and conspiracy in the criticism. His theology, his
+health, his peace of mind, were all overthrown. As a matter of fact,
+however (as Southey remarks), it was the very brusqueness of this review
+that laid the foundation of his reputation. The circumstance aroused
+Southey's interest in the young man's efforts to raise himself above his
+level in the world and it was the laureate who after Henry's death
+edited his letters and literary remains, and gave him to us as we have
+him. Southey tells us that after the young man's death he and Coleridge
+looked over his papers with great emotion, and were amazed at the
+fervour of his industry and ambition.
+
+Alas, we must hurry the narrative, on which one would gladly linger.
+The life of this sad and high-minded anchorite has a strong fascination
+for me. Melancholy had marked him for her own: he himself always felt
+that he had not a long span before him. Hindered by deafness, threatened
+with consumption, and a deadlier enemy yet--epilepsy--his frail and
+uneasy spirit had full right to distrust its tenement. The summer of
+1804 he spent partly at Wilford, a little village near Nottingham where
+he took lodgings. His employers very kindly gave him a generous holiday
+to recruit; but his old habits of excessive study seized him again. He
+had, for the time, given up hope of being able to attend the university,
+and accordingly thought it all the more necessary to do well at the law.
+Night after night he would read till two or three in the morning, lie
+down fully dressed on his bed, and rise again to work at five or six.
+His mother, who was living with him in his retreat, used to go upstairs
+to put out his candle and see that he went to bed; but Henry, so docile
+in other matters, in this was unconquerable. When he heard his mother's
+step on the stair he would extinguish the taper and feign sleep; but
+after she had retired he would light it again and resume his reading.
+Perhaps the best things he wrote were composed in this period of
+extreme depression. The "Ode on Disappointment," and some of his
+sonnets, breathe a quiet dignity of resignation to sorrow that is very
+touching and even worthy of respect as poetry. He never escaped the
+cliche and the bathetic, but this is a fair example of his midnight
+musings at their highest pitch:--
+
+    TO CONSUMPTION
+
+    Gently, most gently, on thy victim's head,
+    Consumption, lay thine hand. Let me decay,
+    Like the expiring lamp, unseen, away,
+    And softly go to slumber with the dead.
+    And if 'tis true what holy men have said,
+    That strains angelic oft foretell the day
+    Of death, to those good men who fall thy prey,
+    O let the aerial music round my bed,
+    Dissolving sad in dying symphony,
+    Whisper the solemn warning in mine ear;
+    That I may bid my weeping friends good-bye,
+    Ere I depart upon my journey drear:
+    And smiling faintly on the painful past,
+    Compose my decent head, and breathe my last.
+
+But in spite of depression and ill health, he was really happy at
+Wilford, a village in the elbow of a deep gully on the Trent, and near
+his well-beloved Clifton Woods. On the banks of the stream he would sit
+for hours in a maze of dreams, or wander among the trees on summer
+nights, awed by the sublime beauty of the lightning, and heedless of
+drenched and muddy clothes.
+
+Later in the summer it was determined that he should go to college after
+all; and by the generosity of a number of friends (including Neville who
+promised twenty pounds annually) he was able to enter himself for St.
+John's College, Cambridge. In the autumn he left his legal employers,
+who were very sorry to lose him, and took up quarters with a clergyman
+in Lincolnshire (Winteringham) under whom he pursued his studies for a
+year, to prepare himself thoroughly for college. His letters during this
+period are mostly of a religious tinge, enlivened only by a mishap while
+boating on the Humber when he was stranded for six hours on a sand-bank.
+He had become quite convinced that his calling was the ministry. The
+proper observance of the Sabbath by his younger brothers and sisters
+weighed on his mind, and he frequently wrote home on this topic.
+
+In October, 1805, we find him settled at last in his rooms at St.
+John's, the college that is always dear to us as the academic home of
+two very different undergraduates--William Wordsworth and Samuel Butler.
+His rooms were in the rearmost court, near the cloisters, and
+overlooking the famous Bridge of Sighs. His letters give us a pleasant
+picture of his quiet rambles through the town, his solitary cups of tea
+as he sat by the fire, and his disappointment in not being able to hear
+his lecturers on account of his deafness. Most entertaining to any one
+at all familiar with the life of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges is
+his account of the thievery of his "gyp" (the manservant who makes the
+bed, cares for the rooms, and attends to the wants of the students).
+Poor Henry's tea, sugar, and handkerchiefs began to vanish in the
+traditional way; but he was practical enough to buy a large padlock for
+his coal bin.
+
+But Henry's innocent satisfaction in having at last attained the haven
+of his desires was not long of duration. In spite of ill health, his
+tutors constrained him to enter for a scholarship examination in
+December, and when the unfortunate fellow pleaded physical inability,
+they dosed him with "strong medicines" to enable him to face the
+examiners. After the ordeal he was so unstrung that he hurried off to
+London to spend Christmas with his aunt.
+
+The account of his year at college is very pitiful. His tutors were,
+according to their lights, very kind; they relieved him as far as
+possible from financial worries, but they did not have sense enough to
+restrain him from incessant study. Even on his rambles he was always at
+work memorizing Greek plays, mathematical theorems, or what not. In a
+memorandum found in his desk his life was thus planned: "Rise at
+half-past five. Devotions and walk till seven. Chapel and breakfast till
+eight. Study and lectures till one. Four and a half clear reading. Walk
+and dinner, and chapel to six. Six to nine reading. Nine to ten,
+devotions. Bed at ten."
+
+In the summer of 1806 his examiners ranked him the best man of his year,
+and in mistaken kindness the college decided to grant him the unusual
+compliment of keeping him in college through the vacation with a special
+mathematical tutor, gratis, to work with him, mathematics being
+considered his weakness. As his only chance of health lay in complete
+rest during the holiday, this plan of spending the summer in study was
+simply a death sentence. In July, while at work on logarithm tables, he
+was overtaken by a sudden fainting fit, evidently of an epileptic
+nature. The malady gained strength, aided by the weakness of his heart
+and lungs, and he died on October 19, 1806.
+
+Poor Henry! Surely no gentler, more innocent soul ever lived. His
+letters are a golden treasury of earnest and solemn speculation. Perhaps
+once a twelve-month he displays a sad little vein of pleasantry, but not
+for long. Probably the light-hearted undergraduates about him found him
+a very prosy, shabby, and mournful young man, but if one may judge by
+the outburst of tributary verses published after his death he was
+universally admired and respected. Let us close the story by a quotation
+from a tribute paid him by a lady versifier:
+
+    If worth, if genius, to the world are dear,
+    To Henry's shade devote no common tear.
+    His worth on no precarious tenure hung,
+    From genuine piety his virtues sprung:
+    If pure benevolence, if steady sense,
+    Can to the feeling heart delight dispense;
+    If all the highest efforts of the mind,
+    Exalted, noble, elegant, refined,
+    Call for fond sympathy's heartfelt regret,
+    Ye sons of genius, pay the mournful debt!
+
+
+
+
+TRIVIA
+
+    The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane,
+    clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.
+
+    --HOBBES, _Leviathan_, Chap. VIII.
+
+
+The bachelor is almost extinct in America. Our hopelessly utilitarian
+civilization demands that a man of forty should be rearing a family,
+should go to an office five times a week, and pretend an interest in the
+World's Series. It is unthinkable to us that there should be men of
+mature years who do not know the relative batting averages of the Red
+Sox and the Pirates. The intellectual and strolling male of from
+thirty-five to fifty-five years (which is what one means by bachelor)
+must either marry and settle down in the Oranges, or he must flee to
+Europe or the MacDowell Colony. There is no alternative. Vachel Lindsay
+please notice.
+
+The fate of Henry James is a case in point. Undoubtedly he fled the
+shores of his native land to escape the barrage of the bonbonniverous
+sub-deb, who would else have mown him down without ruth.
+
+But in England they still linger, these quaint, phosphorescent
+middle-aged creatures, lurking behind a screenage of muffins and
+crumpets and hip baths. And thither fled one of the most delightful born
+bachelors this hemisphere has ever unearthed, Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith.
+
+Mr. Smith was a Philadelphian, born about fifty years ago. But that most
+amiable of cities does not encourage detached and meditative
+bachelorhood, and after sampling what is quaintly known as "a guarded
+education in morals and manners" at Haverford College, our hero passed
+to Harvard, and thence by a swifter decline to Oxford. Literature and
+liberalism became his pursuits; on the one hand, he found himself
+engrossed in the task of proving to the British electorate that England
+need not always remain the same; on the other, he wrote a Life of Sir
+Henry Wotton, a volume of very graceful and beautiful short stories
+about Oxford ("The Youth of Parnassus") and a valuable little book on
+the history and habits of the English language.
+
+But in spite of his best endeavours to quench and subdue his mental
+humours, Mr. Smith found his serious moments invaded by incomprehensible
+twinges of esprit. Travelling about England, leading the life of the
+typical English bachelor, equipped with gladstone bag, shaving kit,
+evening clothes and tweeds; passing from country house to London club,
+from Oxford common room to Sussex gardens, the solemn pageantry of the
+cultivated classes now and then burst upon him in its truly comic
+aspect. The tinder and steel of his wit, too uncontrollably frictioned,
+ignited a shower of roman candles, and we conceive him prostrated with
+irreverent laughter in some lonely railway carriage.
+
+Mr. Smith did his best to take life seriously, and I believe he
+succeeded passably well until after forty years of age. But then the
+spectacle of the English vicar toppled him over, and once the gravity of
+the Church of England is invaded, all lesser Alps and sanctuaries lie
+open to the scourge. Menaced by serious intellectual disorders unless he
+were to give vent to these disturbing levities, Mr. Smith began to set
+them down under the title of "Trivia," and now at length we are enriched
+by the spectacle of this iridescent and puckish little book, which
+presents as it were a series of lantern slides of an ironical,
+whimsical, and merciless sense of humour. It is a motion picture of a
+middle-aged, phosphorescent mind that has long tried to preserve a
+decent melancholy but at last capitulates in the most delicately
+intellectual brainslide of our generation.
+
+This is no Ring Lardner, no Irvin Cobb, no Casey at the bat. Mr. Smith
+is an infinitely close and acute observer of sophisticated social life,
+tinged with a faint and agreeable refined sadness, by an aura of shyness
+which amounts to a spiritual virginity. He comes to us trailing clouds
+of glory from the heaven of pure and unfettered speculation which is our
+home. He is an elf of utter simplicity and infinite candour. He is a
+flicker of absolute Mind. His little book is as precious and as
+disturbing as devilled crabs.
+
+Blessed, blessed little book, how you will run like quicksilver from
+mind to mind, leaping--a shy and shining spark--from brain to brain! I
+know of nothing since Lord Bacon quite like these ineffably dainty
+little paragraphs of gilded whim, these rainbow nuggets of wistful
+inquiry, these butterfly wings of fancy, these pointed sparklers of wit.
+A purge, by Zeus, a purge for the wicked! Irony so demure, so quaint, so
+far away; pathos so void of regret, merriment so delicate that one dare
+not laugh for fear of dispelling the charm--all this is "Trivia." Where
+are Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or all the other Harold Bell Wrights of
+old time? Baron Verulam himself treads a heavy gait beside this airy
+elfin scamper. It is Atalanta's heels. It is a heaven-given scenario of
+that shyest, dearest, remotest of essences--the mind of a strolling
+bachelor.
+
+Bless his heart, in a momentary panic of modesty at the thought of all
+hi sacred plots laid bare, the heavenly man tries to scare us away.
+"These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a
+Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that suborder of the Animal Kingdom
+which includes also the Baboon, with his bright blue and scarlet
+bottom, and the gentle Chimpanzee."
+
+But this whimsical brother to the chimpanzee, despite this last
+despairing attempt at modest evasion, denudes himself before us. And
+his heart, we find is strangely like our own. His reveries, his
+sadnesses, his exhilarations, are all ours, too. Like us he cries, "I
+wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big bushy eyebrows and a
+Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep Thinker, or a great
+Ventriloquist." Like us he has only a ghost, a thin, unreal phantom in
+a world of bank cashiers and duchesses and prosperous merchants and
+other Real Persons. Like us he fights a losing battle against the
+platitudes and moral generalizations that hem us round. "I can hardly
+post a letter," he laments, "without marvelling at the excellence and
+accuracy of the Postal System." And he consoles himself, good man,
+with the thought of the meaningless creation crashing blindly through
+frozen space. His other great consolation is his dear vice of
+reading--"This joy not dulled by Age, this polite and unpunished vice,
+this selfish, serene, life-long intoxication."
+
+It is impossible by a few random snippets to give any just figment of
+the delicious mental intoxication of this piercing, cathartic little
+volume. It is a bright tissue of thought robing a radiant, dancing
+spirit. Through the shimmering veil of words we catch, now and then, a
+flashing glimpse of the Immortal Whimsy within, shy, sudden, and
+defiant. Across blue bird-haunted English lawns we follow that
+gracious figure, down dusky London streets where he is peering in at
+windows and laughing incommunicable jests.
+
+But alas, Mr. Pearsall Smith is lost to America. The warming pans and
+the twopenny tube have lured him away from us. Never again will he
+tread on peanut shells in the smoking car or read the runes about
+Phoebe Snow. Chiclets and Spearmint and Walt Mason and the Toonerville
+Trolley and the Prince Albert ads--these mean nothing to him. He will
+never compile an anthology of New York theatrical notices: "The play
+that makes the dimples to catch the tears." Careful and adroit
+propaganda, begun twenty years ago by the Department of State, might
+have won him back, but now it is impossible to repatriate him. The
+exquisite humours of our American life are faded from his mind. He has
+gone across the great divide that separates a subway from an
+underground and an elevator from a lift. I wonder does he ever mourn
+the scrapple and buckwheat cakes that were his birthright?
+
+Major George Haven Putnam in his "Memories of a Publisher" describes a
+famous tennis match played at Oxford years ago, when he and Pearsall
+Smith defeated A.L. Smith and Herbert Fisher, the two gentlemen who are
+now Master of Balliol and British Minister of Education. The Balliol don
+attributed the British defeat in this international tourney to the fact
+that his tennis shoes (shall we say his "sneakers?") came to grief and
+he had to play the crucial games in stocking feet. But though Major
+Putnam and his young ally won the set of _patters_ (let us use the
+Wykehamist word), the Major allowed the other side to gain a far more
+serious victory. They carried off the young Philadelphian and kept him
+in England until he was spoiled for all good American uses. That was
+badly done, Major! Because we needed Pearsall Smith over here, and now
+we shall never recapture him. He will go on calling an elevator a lift,
+and he will never write an American "Trivia."
+
+
+
+
+PREFACES
+
+
+It has long been my conviction that the most graceful function of
+authorship is the writing of prefaces. What is more pleasant than
+dashing off those few pages of genial introduction after all the dreary
+months of spading at the text? A paragraph or two as to the intentions
+of the book; allusions to the unexpected difficulties encountered during
+composition; neatly phrased gratitude to eminent friends who have given
+gracious assistance; and a touching allusion to the Critic on the Hearth
+who has done the indexing--one of the trials of the wives of literary
+men not mentioned by Mrs. Andrew Lang in her pleasant essay on that
+topic. A pious wish to receive criticisms "in case a second edition
+should be called for"; your address, and the date, add a homely touch at
+the end.
+
+How delightful this bit of pleasant intimacy after the real toil is
+over! It is like paterfamilias coming out of his house at dusk, after
+the hard day's work, to read his newspaper on the doorstep. Or it may be
+a bit of superb gesturing. No book is complete without a preface. Better
+a preface without a book....
+
+Many men have written books without prefaces. But not many have written
+prefaces without books. And yet I am convinced it is one of the subtlest
+pleasures. I have planned several books, not yet written; but the
+prefaces are all ready this many a day. Let me show you the sort of
+thing I mean.
+
+
+PREFACE TO "THE LETTERS OF ANDREW MCGILL"
+
+How well I remember the last time I saw Andrew McGill! It was in the
+dear old days at Rutgers, my last term. I was sitting over a book one
+brilliant May afternoon, rather despondent--there came a rush up the
+stairs and a thunder at the door. I knew his voice, and hurried to open.
+Poor, dear fellow, he was just back from tennis; I never saw him look so
+glorious. Tall and thin--he was always very thin, _see_ p. 219 and
+_passim_--with his long, brown face and sparkling black eyes--I can see
+him still rambling about the room in his flannels, his curly hair damp
+on his forehead. "Buzzard," he said--he always called me Buzzard--"guess
+what's happened?"
+
+"In love again?" I asked.
+
+He laughed. A bright, golden laugh--I can hear it still. His laughter
+was always infectious.
+
+"No," he said. "Dear silly old Buzzard, what do you think? I've won the
+Sylvanus Stall fellowship."
+
+I shall never forget that moment. It was very still, and in the college
+garden, just under my window, I could hear a party of Canadian girls
+deliciously admiring things. It was a cruel instant for me. I, too, in
+my plodding way, had sent in an essay for the prize, but without telling
+him. Must I confess it? I had never dared mention the subject for fear
+he, too, would compete. I knew that if he did he was sure to win. O
+petty jealousies, that seem so bitter now!
+
+"Rude old Buzzard," he said in his bantering way, "you haven't
+congratulated!"
+
+I pulled myself together.
+
+"Brindle," I said--I always called him Brindle; how sad the nickname
+sounds now--"you took my breath away. Dear lad, I'm overjoyed."
+
+It is four and twenty years since that May afternoon. I never saw him
+again. Never even heard him read the brilliant poem "Sunset from the
+Mons Veneris" that was the beginning of his career, for the week before
+commencement I was taken ill and sent abroad for my health. I never came
+back to New York; and he remained there. But I followed his career with
+the closest attention. Every newspaper cutting, every magazine article
+in which his name was mentioned, went into my scrapbook. And almost
+every week for twenty years he wrote to me--those long, radiant letters,
+so full of _verve_ and _elan_ and ringing, ruthless wit. There was
+always something very Gallic about his saltiness. "Oh, to be born a
+Frenchman!" he writes. "Why wasn't I born a Frenchman instead of a dour,
+dingy Scotsman? Oh, for the birthright of Montmartre! Stead of which I
+have the mess of pottage--stodgy, porridgy Scots pottage" (_see_ p.
+189).
+
+He had his sombre moods, too. It was characteristic of him, when in a
+pet, to wish he had been born other-where than by the pebbles of
+Arbroath. "Oh, to have been born a Norseman!" he wrote once. "Oh, for
+the deep Scandinavian scourge of pain, the inbrooding, marrowy soul-ache
+of Ibsen! That is the fertilizing soil of tragedy. Tragedy springs from
+it, tall and white and stately like the lily from the dung. I will never
+be a tragedian. Oh, pebbles of Arbroath!"
+
+All the world knows how he died....
+
+
+PREFACE TO AN HISTORICAL WORK
+
+(In six volumes)
+
+The work upon which I have spent the best years of my life is at length
+finished. After two decades of uninterrupted toil, enlivened only by
+those small bickerings over _minutiae_ so dear to all scrupulous
+writers, I may perhaps be pardoned if I philosophize for a few moments
+on the functions of the historian.
+
+There are, of course, two technical modes of approach, quite apart from
+the preparatory contemplation of the field. (This last, I might add, has
+been singularly neglected by modern historians. My old friend, Professor
+Spondee, of Halle, though deservedly eminent in his chosen lot, is
+particularly open to criticism on this ground. I cannot emphasize too
+gravely the importance of preliminary calm--what Hobbes calls "the
+unprejudicated mind." But this by way of parenthesis.) One may attack
+the problem with the mortar trowel, or with the axe. Sismondi, I think,
+has observed this.
+
+Some such observations as these I was privileged to address to my very
+good friend, Professor Fish, of Yale, that justly renowned seat of
+learning, when lecturing in New Haven recently. His reply was witty--too
+witty to be apt, "Piscem natare doces," he said.
+
+I will admit that Professor Fish may be free from taint in this regard;
+but many historians of to-day are, I fear, imbued with that most
+dangerous tincture of historical cant which lays it down as a maxim that
+contemporary history cannot be judicially written.
+
+Those who have been kind enough to display some interest in the
+controversy between myself and M. Rougegorge--of the Sorbonne--in the
+matter of Lamartine's account of the elections to the Constituent
+Assembly of 1848, will remark several hitherto unobserved errors in
+Lamartine which I have been privileged to point out. For instance,
+Lamartine (who is supported _in toto_ by M. Rougegorge) asserts that the
+elections took place on Easter Sunday, April 27, 1848. Whereas, I am
+able to demonstrate, by reference to the astronomical tables at Kew
+Observatory, that in 1848 Easter Day fell upon April 23. M. Rougegorge's
+assertion that Lamartine was a slave to opium rests upon a humorous
+misinterpretation of Mme. Lamartine's diary. (The matter may be looked
+up by the curious in Annette User's "Annees avec les Lamartines." Oser
+was for many years the cook in Lamartine's household, and says some
+illuminating things regarding L.'s dislike of onions.)
+
+It is, of course, impossible for me to acknowledge individually the
+generous and stimulating assistance I have received from so many
+scholars in all parts of the world. The mere list of names would be like
+Southey's "Cataract of Lodore," and would be but an ungracious mode of
+returning thanks. I cannot, however, forbear to mention Professor
+Mandrake, of the Oxford Chair, _optimus maximus_ among modern
+historians. Of him I may say, in the fine words of Virgil, "Sedet
+aeternumque sedebit."
+
+My dear wife, fortunately a Serb by birth, has regularized my Slavic
+orthography, and has grown gray in the service of the index. To her, and
+to my little ones, whose merry laughter has so often penetrated to my
+study and cheered me at my travail, I dedicate the whole. _89, Decameron
+Gardens._
+
+
+PREFACE TO A BOOK OF POEMS
+
+This little selection of verses, to which I have given the title "Rari
+Nantes," was made at the instance of several friends. I have chosen from
+my published works those poems which seemed to me most faithfully to
+express my artistic message; and the title obviously implies that I
+think them the ones most likely to weather the maelstroms of Time. Be
+that as it may.
+
+Vachel Lindsay and I have often discussed over a glass of port (one
+glass only: alas, that Vachel should abstain!) the state of the Muse
+to-day. He deems that she now has fled from cities to dwell on the
+robuster champaigns of Illinois and Kansas. Would that I could agree;
+but I see her in the cities and everywhere, set down to menial
+taskwork. She were better in exile, on Ibsen's sand dunes or
+Maeterlinck's bee farm. But in America the times are very evil.
+Prodigious convulsion of production, the grinding of mighty forces, the
+noise and rushings of winds--and what avails? _Parturiunt montes_ ...you
+know the rest. The ridiculous mice squeak and scamper on the granary
+floor. They may play undisturbed, for the real poets, those great gray
+felines, are sifting loam under Westminster. Gramercy Park and the
+Poetry Society see them not.
+
+It matters not. With this little book my task is done. Vachel and I sail
+to-morrow for Nova Zembla.
+
+_The Grotto, Yonkers._
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
+
+A second edition of "Rari Nantes" having been called for, I have added
+three more poems, Esquimodes written since arriving here. Also the
+"Prayer for Warm Weather," by Vachel Lindsay, is included, at his
+express request. The success of the first edition has been very
+gratifying to me. My publishers will please send reviews to _Bleak
+House, Nova Zembla_.
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
+
+The rigorous climate of Nova Zembla I find most stimulating to
+production, and therefore in this new edition I am able to include
+several new poems. "The Ode to a Seamew," the "Fracas on an Ice Floe,"
+and the sequence of triolimericks are all new. If I have been able to
+convey anything of the bracing vigour of the Nova Zembla _locale_ the
+praise is due to my friendly and suggestive critic, the editor of
+_Gooseflesh_, the leading Nova Zemblan review.
+
+Vachel Lindsay's new book, "The Tango," has not yet appeared, therefore
+I may perhaps say here that he is hard at work on an "Ode to the Gulf
+Stream," which has great promise.
+
+The success of this little book has been such that I am encouraged to
+hope that the publisher's exemption of royalties will soon be worked
+off.
+
+
+
+
+THE SKIPPER
+
+
+I have been reading again that most delightful of all autobiographies,
+"A Personal Record," by Joseph Conrad. Mr. Conrad's mind is so rich, it
+has been so well mulched by years of vigorous life and sober thinking,
+that it pushes tendrils of radiant speculation into every crevice of the
+structure upon which it busies itself. This figure of speech leaves much
+to be desired and calls for apology, but in perversity and profusion the
+trellis growth of Mr. Conrad's memories, here blossoming before the
+delighted reader's eyes, runs like some ardent trumpet vine or Virginia
+creeper, spreading hither and thither, redoubling on itself, branching
+unexpectedly upon spandrel and espalier, and repeatedly enchanting us
+with some delicate criss-cross of mental fibres. One hesitates even to
+suggest that there may be admirers of Mr. Conrad who are not familiar
+with this picture of his mind--may we call it one of the most remarkable
+minds that has ever concerned itself with the setting of English words
+horizontally in parallel lines?
+
+The fraternity of gentlemen claiming to have been the first on this
+continent to appreciate the vaulting genius of Mr. Conrad grows numerous
+indeed; almost as many as the discoverers of O. Henry and the
+pallbearers of Ambrose Bierce. It would be amusing to enumerate the list
+of those who have assured me (over the sworn secrecy of a table d'hote
+white wine) that they read the proof-sheets of "Almayer's Folly" in
+1895, etc., etc. For my own part, let me be frank. I do not think I ever
+heard of Mr. Conrad before December 2, 1911. On that date, which was one
+day short of the seventeenth anniversary of Stevenson's death, a small
+club of earnest young men was giving a dinner to Sir Sidney Colvin at
+the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. Sir Sidney told us many anecdotes of
+R.L.S., and when the evening was far spent I remember that someone asked
+him whether there was any writer of to-day in whom he felt the same
+passionate interest as in Stevenson, any man now living whose work he
+thought would prove a permanent enrichment of English literature. Sir
+Sidney Colvin is a scrupulous and sensitive critic, and a sworn enemy of
+loose statement; let me not then pretend to quote him exactly; but I
+know that the name he mentioned was that of Joseph Conrad, and it was a
+new name to me.
+
+Even so, I think it was not until over a year later that first I read
+one of Mr. Conrad's books; and I am happy to remember that it was
+"Typhoon," which I read at one sitting in the second-class dining saloon
+of the _Celtic_, crossing from New York in January, 1913. There was a
+very violent westerly gale at the time--a famous shove, Captain Conrad
+would call it--and I remember that the barometer went lower than had
+ever been recorded before on the western ocean. The piano in the saloon
+carried away, and frolicked down the aisle between the tables: it was an
+ideal stage set for "Typhoon." The saloon was far aft, and a hatchway
+just astern of where I sat was stove in by the seas. By sticking my head
+through a window I could see excellent combers of green sloshing down
+into the 'tweendecks.
+
+But the inspired discursiveness of Mr. Conrad is not to be imitated
+here. The great pen which has paid to human life "the undemonstrative
+tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile which is not a
+grin," needs no limping praise of mine. But sometimes, when one sits at
+midnight by the fainting embers and thinks that of all novelists now
+living one would most ardently yearn to hear the voice and see the face
+of Mr. Conrad, then it is happy to recall that in "A Personal Record"
+one comes as close as typography permits to a fireside chat with the
+Skipper himself. He tells us that he has never been very well
+acquainted with the art of conversation, but remembering Marlowe, we set
+this down as polite modesty only. Here in the "Personal Record" is
+Marlowe ipse, pipe in mouth, and in retrospective mood. This book and
+the famous preface to the "Nigger" give us the essence, the bouillon, of
+his genius. Greatly we esteem what Mr. Walpole, Mr. Powys, Mr. James,
+and (optimus maximus) Mr. Follett, have said about him; but who would
+omit the chance to hear him from his proper mouth? And in these informal
+confessions there are pieces that are destined to be classics of
+autobiography as it is rarely written.
+
+One cannot resist the conviction that Mr. Conrad, traditionally labelled
+complex and tortuous by the librarians, is in reality as simple as
+lightning or dawn. Fidelity, service, sincerity--those are the words
+that stand again and again across his pages. "I have a positive horror
+of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself
+which is the first condition of good service." He has carried over to
+the world of desk and pen the rigorous tradition of the sea. He says
+that he has been attributed an unemotional, grim acceptance of facts, a
+hardness of heart. To which he answers that he must tell as he sees, and
+that the attempt to move others to the extremities of emotion means the
+surrendering one's self to exaggeration, allowing one's self to be
+carried away beyond the bounds of normal sensibility. Self-restraint is
+the duty, the dignity, the decency of the artist. This, indeed, is the
+creed of the simple man in every calling; and from this angle it appears
+that it is the Pollyananiases and the Harold Bell Wrights who are
+complicated and subtle; it is Mr. Conrad, indeed, who is simple with the
+great simplicity of life and death.
+
+Truly in utter candour and simplicity no book of memoirs since the
+synoptic gospels exceeds "A Personal Record." Such minor facts as where
+the writer was born, and when, and the customary demonology of boyhood
+and courtship and the first pay envelope, are gloriously ignored. A
+statistician, an efficiency pundit, a literary accountant, would rise
+from the volume nervously shattered from an attempt to grasp what it was
+all about. The only person in the book who is accorded any comprehensive
+biographical resume is a certain great-uncle of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Nicholas
+B., who accompanied Bonaparte on his midwinter junket to Moscow, and was
+bitterly constrained to eat a dog in the forests of Lithuania. To the
+delineation of this warrior, who was a legend of his youth, Mr. Conrad
+devotes his most affectionate and tender power of whimsical
+reminiscence; and in truth his sketches of family history make the
+tragedies of Poland clearer to me than several volumes of historical
+comment. In his prose of that superbly rich simplicity of texture--it is
+a commonplace that it seems always like some notable translation from
+the French--he looks back across the plains of Ukraine, and takes us
+with him so unquestionably that even the servant who drives him to his
+uncle's house becomes a figure in our own daily lives. And to our
+delicious surprise we find that the whole of two long chapters
+constitutes merely his musings in half an hour while he is waiting for
+dinner at his uncle's house. With what adorable tenderness he reviews
+the formative contours of boyish memories, telling us the whole
+mythology of his youth! Upon my soul, sometimes I think that this is the
+only true autobiography ever written: true to the inner secrets of the
+human soul. It is the passkey to the Master's attitude toward all the
+dear creations of his brain; it is the spiritual scenario of every novel
+he has written. What self-revealing words are these: "An imaginative and
+exact rendering of authentic memories may serve worthily that spirit of
+piety toward all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a
+writer of tales." And when one stops to consider, how essentially
+impious and irreverent to humanity are the novels of the Slop and
+Glucose school!
+
+This marvellous life, austere, glowing, faithful to everything that
+deserves fidelity, contradictory to all the logarithms of probability,
+this tissue of unlikelihoods by which a Polish lad from the heart of
+Europe was integrated into the greatest living master of those who in
+our tongue strive to portray the riddles of the human heart--such is the
+kind of calculus that makes "A Personal Record" unique among textbooks
+of the soul. It is as impossible to describe as any dear friend. Setting
+out only with the intention to "present faithfully the feelings and
+sensations connected with the writing of my first book and with my first
+contact with the sea," Mr. Conrad set down what is really nothing less
+than a Testament of all that is most precious in human life. And the
+sentiment with which one lays it by is that the scribbler would gladly
+burn every shred of foolscap he had blackened and start all over again
+with truer ideals for his craft, could he by so doing have chance to
+meet the Skipper face to face.
+
+Indeed, if Mr. Conrad had never existed it would have been necessary to
+invent him, the indescribable improbability of his career speaks so
+closely to the heart of every lover of literary truth. Who of his heroes
+is so fascinating to us as he himself? How imperiously, by his own
+noble example, he recalls us to the service of honourable sincerity. And
+how poignantly these memories of his evoke the sigh which is not a sob,
+the smile which is not a grin.
+
+
+
+
+A FRIEND OF FITZGERALD
+
+    Loder is a Rock of Ages to rely on.
+
+    --EDWARD FITZGERALD.
+
+
+I heard the other day of the death of dear old John Loder, the
+Woodbridge bookseller, at the age of ninety-two. Though ill equipped to
+do justice to his memory, it seems to me a duty, and a duty that I take
+up gladly. It is not often that a young man has the good fortune to know
+as a friend one who has been a crony of his own grandfather and
+great-grandfather. Such was my privilege in the case of John Loder, a
+man whose life was all sturdy simplicity and generous friendship. He
+shines in no merely reflected light, but in his own native nobility. I
+think there are a few lovers of England and of books who will be glad
+not to forget his unobtrusive services to literature. If only John Loder
+had kept a journal it would be one of the minor treasures of the
+Victorian Age. He had a racy, original turn of speech, full of the
+Suffolk lingo that so delighted his friend FitzGerald; full, too, of the
+delicacies of rich thought and feeling. He used to lament in his later
+years that he had not kept a diary as a young man. Alas that his Boswell
+came too late to do more than snatch at a few of his memories.
+
+There is a little Suffolk town on the salt tidewater of the Deben, some
+ten miles from the sea. Its roofs of warm red tile are clustered on the
+hill-slopes that run down toward the river; a massive, gray church tower
+and a great windmill are conspicuous landmarks. Broad barges and shabby
+schooners, with ruddy and amber sails, lie at anchor or drop down the
+river with the tide, bearing the simple sailormen of Mr. W.W. Jacobs's
+stories. In the old days before the railway it was a considerable port
+and a town of thriving commerce. But now--well, it is little heard of in
+the annals of the world.
+
+Yet Woodbridge, unknown to the tourist, has had her pilgrims, too, and
+her nook in literature. It was there that George Crabbe of Aldeburgh was
+apprenticed to a local surgeon and wrote his first poem, unhappily
+entitled "Inebriety." There lived Bernard Barton, "the Quaker poet," a
+versifier of a very mild sort, but immortal by reason of his friendships
+with greater men. Addressed to Bernard Barton, in a plain, neat hand,
+came scores of letters to Woodbridge in the eighteen-twenties, letters
+now famous, which found their way up Church Street to Alexander's Bank.
+They were from no less a man than Charles Lamb. Also I have always
+thought it very much to Woodbridge's credit that a certain Woodbridgian
+named Pulham was a fellow-clerk of Lamb's at the East India House.
+Perhaps Mr. Pulham introduced Lamb and Barton to each other. And as
+birthplace and home of Edward FitzGerald, Woodbridge drew such visitors
+as Carlyle and Tennyson, who came to seek out the immortal recluse. In
+the years following FitzGerald's death many a student of books, some all
+the way from America, found his way into John Loder's shop to gossip
+about "Old Fitz." In 1893 a few devoted members of the Omar Khayyam Club
+of London pilgrimaged to Woodbridge to plant by the grave at Boulge
+(please pronounce "Bowidge") a rosetree that had been raised from seed
+brought from the bush that sheds its petals over the dust of the
+tent-maker at Naishapur. In 1909 Woodbridge and Ipswich celebrated the
+FitzGerald centennial. And Rupert Brooke's father was (I believe) a
+schoolboy at Woodbridge; alas that another of England's jewels just
+missed being a Woodbridgian!
+
+Some day, if you are wise, you, too, will take a train at Liverpool
+Street, and drawn by one of those delightful blue locomotives of the
+Great Eastern Railway speed through Colchester and Ipswich and finally
+set foot on the yellow-pebbled platform at Woodbridge. As you step from
+the stuffy compartment the keen salt Deben air will tingle in your
+nostrils; and you may discover in it a faint under-whiff of strong
+tobacco--the undying scent of pipes smoked on the river wall by old
+Fitz, and in recent years by John Loder himself. If you have your
+bicycle with you, or are content to hire one, you will find that rolling
+Suffolk country the most delightful in the world for quiet spinning.
+(But carry a repair kit, for there are many flints!) Ipswich itself is
+full of memories--of Chaucer, and Wolsey, and Dickens (it is the
+"Eatanswill" of Pickwick), and it is much pleasure to one of Suffolk
+blood to recall that James Harper, the grandfather of the four brothers
+who founded the great publishing house of Harper and Brothers a century
+ago, was an Ipswich man, born there in 1740. You will bike to Bury St.
+Edmunds (where Fitz went to school and our beloved William McFee also!)
+and Aldeburgh, and Dunwich, to hear the chimes of the sea-drowned abbey
+ringing under the waves. If you are a Stevensonian, you will hunt out
+Cockfield Rectory, near Sudbury, where R.L.S. first met Sidney Colvin in
+1872. (Colvin himself came from Bealings, only two miles from
+Woodbridge.) You may ride to Dunmow in Essex, to see the country of Mr.
+Britling; and to Wigborough, near Colchester, the haunt of Mr. McFee's
+painter-cousin in "Aliens." You will hire a sailboat at Lime Kiln Quay
+or the Jetty and bide a moving air and a going tide to drop down to
+Bawdsey ferry to hunt shark's teeth and amber among the shingle. You
+will pace the river walk to Kyson--perhaps the tide will be out and
+sunset tints shimmer over those glossy stretches of mud. Brown seaweed,
+vivid green samphire, purple flats of slime where the river ran a few
+hours before, a steel-gray trickle of water in the scour of the channel
+and a group of stately swans ruffling there; and the huddled red roofs
+of the town with the stately church tower and the waving arms of the
+windmill looking down from the hill. It is a scene to ravish an artist.
+You may walk back by way of Martlesham Heath, stopping at the Red Lion
+for a quencher (the Red Lion figurehead is supposed to have come from
+one of the ships of the Armada). It is a different kind of Armada that
+Woodbridge has to reckon with nowadays. Zeppelins. One dropped a
+bomb--"dud" it was--in John Loder's garden; the old man had to be
+restrained from running out to seize it with his own hands.
+
+John Loder was born in Woodbridge, August 3, 1825. His grandfather,
+Robert Loder, founded the family bookselling and printing business,
+which continues to-day at the old shop on the Thoroughfare under John
+Loder's son, Morton Loder. In the days before the railway came through,
+Woodbridge was the commercial centre for a large section of East
+Suffolk; it was a busy port, and the quays were crowded with shipping.
+But when transportation by rail became swift and cheap and the provinces
+began to deal with London merchants, the little town's prosperity
+suffered a sad decline. Many of the old Woodbridge shops, of several
+generations' standing, have had to yield to local branches of the great
+London "stores." In John Loder's boyhood the book business was at its
+best. Woodbridgians were great readers, and such prodigal customers as
+FitzGerald did much to keep the ledgers healthy. John left school at
+thirteen or so, to learn the trade, and became the traditional printer's
+devil. He remembered Bernard Barton, the quiet, genial, brown-eyed poet,
+coming down the street from Alexander's Bank (where he was employed for
+forty years) with a large pile of banknotes to be renumbered. The poet
+sat perched on a high stool watching young Loder and his superior do the
+work. And at noon Mr. Barton sent out to the Royal Oak Tavern near by
+for a basket of buns and a jug of stout to refresh printer and devil at
+their work.
+
+Bernard Barton died in 1849, and was kid to rest in the little Friends'
+burying ground in Turn Lane. That quiet acre will repay the visitor's
+half-hour tribute to old mortality. My grandmother was buried there, one
+snowy day in January, 1912, and I remember how old John Loder came
+forward to the grave, bareheaded and leaning on his stick, to drop a
+bunch of fresh violets on the coffin.
+
+Many a time I have sat in the quiet, walled-in garden of Burkitt
+House--that sweet plot of colour and fragrance so pleasantly
+commemorated by Mr. Mosher in his preface to "In Praise of Old
+Gardens"--and heard dear old John Loder tell stories of his youth. I
+remember the verse of Herrick he used to repeat, pointing round his
+little retreat with a well-stained pipestem:
+
+    But walk'st about thine own dear bounds,
+    Not envying others' larger grounds:
+    For well thou know'st, 'tis not th' extent
+    Of land makes life, but sweet content.
+
+Loder's memory used to go back to times that seem almost fabulous now.
+He had known quite well an English soldier who was on guard over Boney
+at St. Helena--in fact, he once published in some newspaper this man's
+observations upon the fallen emperor, but I have not been able to trace
+the piece. He had been in Paris before the troubles of '48. I believe he
+served some sort of bookselling apprenticeship on Paternoster Row; at
+any rate, he used to be in touch with the London book trade as a young
+man, and made the acquaintance of Bernard Quaritch, one of the world's
+most famous booksellers. I remember his lamenting that FitzGerald had
+not dumped the two hundred unsold booklets of Omar upon his counter
+instead of Quaritch's in 1859. The story goes that they were offered by
+Quaritch for a penny apiece.
+
+I always used to steer him onto the subject of FitzGerald sooner or
+later, and it was interesting to hear him tell how many princes of the
+literary world had come to his shop or had corresponded with him owing
+to his knowledge of E.F.G. Arme Thackeray gave him a beautiful portrait
+of herself in return for some courtesy he showed her. Robert H. Groome,
+the archdeacon of Suffolk, and his brilliant son, Francis Hindes Groome,
+the "Tarno Rye" (who wrote "Two Suffolk Friends" and was said by Watts
+Dunton to have known far more about the gipsies than Borrow) were among
+his correspondents.[D] John Hay, Elihu Vedder, Aldis Wright, Canon
+Ainger, Thomas B. Mosher, Clement Shorter, Dewitt Miller, Edward Clodd,
+Leon Vincent--such men as these wrote or came to John Loder when they
+wanted special news about FitzGerald. FitzGerald had given him a great
+many curios and personal treasures: Mr. Loder never offered these for
+sale at any price (anything connected with FitzGerald was sacred to him)
+but if any one happened along who seemed able to appreciate them he
+would give them away with delight. He gave to me FitzGerald's old
+musical scrapbook, which he had treasured for over thirty years. This
+scrapbook, in perfect condition, contains very beautiful engravings,
+prints, and drawings of the famous composers, musicians, and operatic
+stars of whom Fitz was enivre as a young man. Among them are a great
+many drawings of Handel; FitzGerald, like Samuel Butler, was an
+enthusiastic Handelian. The pictures are annotated by E.F.G. and there
+are also two drawings of Beethoven traced by Thackeray. This scrapbook
+was compiled by FitzGerald when he and Thackeray were living together in
+London, visiting the Cave of Harmony and revelling in the dear delights
+of young intellectual companionship. Under a drawing of the famous
+Braham, dated 1831, Fitz has written: "As I saw and heard him many
+nights in the Pit of Covent Garden, in company with W.M. Thackeray,
+whom I was staying with at the Bedford Coffee House."
+
+[Footnote D: No lover of FitzGerald can afford not to own that exquisite
+tributary volume "Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath," by Francis Hindes
+Groome, which Mr. Mosher published in 1902. It tells a great deal about
+Woodbridge, and is annotated by John Loder. Mr. Mosher was eager to
+include Loder's portrait in it, but the old man's modesty was always as
+great as his generosity: he would not consent.]
+
+When I tried, haltingly, to express my thanks for such a gift, the old
+man said "That's nothing! That's nothing! It'll help to keep you out of
+mischief. Much better to give 'em away before it's too late!" And he
+followed it with Canon Ainger's two volumes of Lamb's letters, which
+Ainger had given him.
+
+Through his long life John Loder lived quietly in Woodbridge, eager and
+merry in his shop, a great reader, always delighted when any one came in
+who was qualified to discuss the literature which interested him. He and
+FitzGerald had long cracks together and perhaps Loder may have
+accompanied the Woodbridge Omar on some of those trips down the Deben on
+the _Scandal_ or the _Meum and Tuum_ (the _Mum and Tum_ as Posh, Fitz's
+sailing master, called her). He played a prominent part in the life of
+the town, became a Justice of the Peace, and sat regularly on the bench
+until he was nearly ninety. As he entered upon the years of old age,
+came a delightful surprise. An old friend of his in the publishing
+business, whom he had known long before in London, died and left him a
+handsome legacy by will. Thus his last years were spared from anxiety
+and he was able to continue his unobtrusive and quiet generosities
+which had always been his secret delight.
+
+Looking over the preceding paragraphs I am ashamed to see how pale and
+mumbling a tribute they are to this fine spirit. Could I but put him
+before you as he was in those last days! I used to go up to Burkitt
+House to see him: in summer we would sit in the little arbour in the
+garden, or in winter by the fire in his dining room. He would talk and I
+would ask him questions; now and then he would get up to pull down a
+book, or to lead me into his bedroom to see some special treasure. He
+used to sit in his shirtsleeves, very close to the fire, with his shoe
+laces untied. In summer he would toddle about in his shaggy blue suit,
+with a tweed cap over one ear, his grizzled beard and moustache well
+stained by much smoking, his eyes as bright and his tongue as brisk as
+ever. Every warm morning would see him down on the river wall; stumping
+over Market Hill and down Church Street with his stout oak stick,
+hailing every child he met on the pavement. His pocket was generally
+full of peppermints, and the youngsters knew well which pocket it was.
+His long life was a series of original and graceful kindnesses, always
+to those who needed them most and had no reason to expect them. No
+recluse he, no fine scholar, no polished litterateur, but a
+hard-headed, soft-hearted human man of the sturdy old Suffolk breed.
+Sometimes I think he was, in his own way, just as great a man as the
+"Old Fitz," whom he loved and reverenced.
+
+He died on November 7, 1917, aged ninety-two years three months and four
+days. He was extraordinarily sturdy until nearly ninety--he went in
+bathing in the surf at Felixstowe on his eighty-sixth birthday. Perhaps
+the sincerest tribute I can pay him is these lines which I copy from my
+journal, dated July 16, 1913:
+
+"Went up to have tea with old John Loder, and said a cunningly veiled
+Good-bye to him. I doubt if I shall see him again, the dear old man. I
+think he felt so, too, for when he came to the door with me, instead of
+his usual remark about 'Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest,' he
+said, 'Farewell to thee' in a more sober manner than his wont--and I
+left with an armful of books which he had given me 'to keep me out of
+mischief.' We had a good talk after tea--he told me about the adventures
+of his brothers, one of whom went out to New Zealand. He uses the most
+delightful brisk phrases in his talk, smiling away to himself and
+wrinkling up his forehead, which can only be distinguished from his
+smooth bald pate by its charming corrugation of parallel furrows. He
+took me into his den while he rummaged through his books to find some
+which would be acceptable to me--'May as well give 'em away before it's
+too late, ye know'--and then he settled back in his easy chair to puff
+at a pipe. I must note down one of his phrases which tickled me--he has
+such a knack for the proverbial and the epigrammatic. 'He's cut his
+cloth, he can wear his breeches,' he said of a certain scapegrace. He
+chuckled over the Suffolk phrase 'a chance child,' for a bastard
+(alluding to one such of his acquaintance in old days). He constantly
+speaks of things he wants to do 'before I tarn my toes up to the
+daisies.' He told me old tales of Woodbridge in the time of the
+Napoleonic wars when there was a garrison of 5,000 soldiers quartered
+here--this was one of the regions in which an attack by Boney was
+greatly feared. He says that the Suffolk phrase 'rafty weather' (meaning
+mist or fog) originates from that time, as being weather suitable for
+the French to make a surprise attack by rafts or flat-boats.
+
+"He chuckled over the reminiscence that he was once a great hand at
+writing obituary notices for the local paper. 'Weep, weep for him who
+cried for us,' was the first line of his epitaph upon a former
+Woodbridge town crier! I was thinking that it would be hard to do him
+justice when the time comes to write his. May he have a swift and
+painless end such as his genial spirit deserves, and not linger on into
+a twilight life with failing senses. When his memory and his pipe and
+his books begin to fail him, when those keen old eyes grow dim and he
+can no longer go to sniff the salt air on the river-wall--then may the
+quick and quiet ferryman take dear old John Loder to the shadow land."
+
+
+
+
+A VENTURE IN MYSTICISM
+
+
+I had heard so much about this Rabbi Tagore and his message of calm for
+our hustling, feverish life, that I thought I would try to put some of
+that stuff into practice.
+
+"Shut out the clamour of small things. Withdraw into the deep quiet of
+your soul, commune with infinite beauty and infinite peace. You must be
+full of gladness and love for every person and every tiniest thing.
+Great activity and worry is needless--it is poison to the soul. Learn to
+reflect, and to brood upon eternal beauty. It is the mystic who finds
+all that is most precious in life. The flowers of meditation blossom in
+his heart." I cut out these words and pasted them in my hat. I have
+always felt that my real genius lies in the direction of philosophic
+calm. I determined to override the brutal clamour of petty things.
+
+The alarm clock rang as usual at 6.30. Calmly, with nothing but lovely
+thoughts in my mind, I threw it out of the window. I lay until eight
+o'clock, communing with infinite peace. I began to see that Professor
+Tagore was right. My wife asked me if I was going to the office. "I am
+brooding upon eternal beauty," I told her.
+
+She thought I was ill, and made me take breakfast in bed.
+
+I usually shave every morning, but a moment's thought will convince you
+that mystics do not do so. I determined to grow a beard. I lit a cigar,
+and replied "I am a mystic" to all my wife's inquiries.
+
+At nine o'clock came a telephone call from the office. My employer is
+not a devotee of eternal calm, I fear. When I explained that I was at
+home reading "Gitanjali," his language was far from mystical. "Get here
+by ten o'clock or you lose your job," he said.
+
+I was dismayed to see the same old throng in the subway, all the
+senseless scuffle and the unphilosophic crowd. But I felt full of
+gladness in my new way of life, full of brotherhood for all the world.
+"I love you," I said to the guard on the platform. He seized me by the
+shoulders and rammed me into the crowded car, shouting "Another nut!"
+
+When I reached the office my desk was littered with a hundred papers.
+The stenographer was at the telephone, trying to pacify someone. "Here
+he is now," I heard her say.
+
+It was Dennis & Company on the wire.
+
+"How about that carload of Bavarian herrings we were to have yesterday
+without fail?" said Dennis.
+
+I took the 'phone.
+
+"In God's good time," I said, "the shipment will arrive. The matter is
+purely ephemeral, after all. If you will attune yourself--"
+
+He rang off.
+
+I turned over the papers on my desk. Looked at with the unclouded eye of
+a mystic, how mundane and unnecessary all these pettifogging
+transactions seemed. Two kegs of salt halibut for the Cameron Stores,
+proofs of the weekly ad. for the _Fishmongers' Journal_, a telegram from
+the Uptown Fish Morgue, new tires needed for one of the delivery
+trucks--how could I jeopardize my faculty of meditation by worrying over
+these trifles? I leaned back in my chair and devoted myself to
+meditation. After all, the harassing domination of material things can
+easily be thrown off by a resolute soul. I was full of infinite peace. I
+seemed to see the future as an ever-widening vista of sublime visions.
+My soul was thrilled with a universal love of humanity.
+
+The buzzer on my desk sounded. That meant that the boss wanted to see
+me.
+
+Now, it has always seemed to me that to put one's self at the beck and
+call of another man is essentially degrading. In the long perspective
+of eternity, was his soul any more majestic than mine? In this luminous
+new vision of my importance as a fragment of immortal mind, could I,
+should I, bow to the force of impertinent trivialities?
+
+I sat back in my chair, full of love of humanity.
+
+By and by the boss appeared at my desk. One look at his face convinced
+me of the truth of Tagore's saying that great activity is poison to the
+soul. Certainly his face was poisonous.
+
+"Say," he shouted, "what the devil's the matter with you to-day? Dennis
+just called me up about that herring order--"
+
+"Master," I said mildly, "be not overwrought. Great activity is a
+strychnine to the soul. I am a mystic...."
+
+A little later I found myself on the street with two weeks' pay in my
+pocket. It is true that my departure had been hasty and unpleasant, for
+the stairway from the office to the street is long and dusty; but I
+recalled what Professor Tagore had said about vicissitudes being the
+true revealers of the spirit. My hat was not with me, but I remembered
+the creed pasted in it. After pacing a block or so, my soul was once
+more tranquil.
+
+I entered a restaurant. It was the noon hour, and the room was crowded
+with hurrying waiters and impatient people. I found a vacant seat in a
+corner and sat down. I concentrated my mind upon the majestic vision of
+the brotherhood of man.
+
+Gradually I began to feel hungry, but no waiter came near me. Never
+mind, I thought: to shout and hammer the table as the others do is
+beneath the dignity of a philosopher. I began to dream of endless vistas
+of mystical ham and eggs. I brooded upon these for some time, but still
+no corporeal and physical units of food reached me.
+
+The man next me gradually materialized into my consciousness. Full of
+love for humanity I spoke to him.
+
+"Brother," I said, "until one of these priestly waiters draws nigh, will
+you not permit me to sustain myself with one of your rolls and one of
+your butter-balls? In the great brotherhood of humanity, all that is
+mine is yours; and _per contra_, all that is yours is mine." Beaming
+luminously upon him, I laid a friendly hand on his arm.
+
+He leaped up and called the head waiter. "Here's an attic for rent!" he
+cried coarsely. "He wants to pick my pocket."
+
+By the time I got away from the police station it was dusk, and I felt
+ready for home. I must say my broodings upon eternal beauty were
+beginning to be a little forced. As I passed along the crowded street,
+walking slowly and withdrawn into the quiet of my soul, three people
+trod upon my heels and a taxi nearly gave me a passport to eternity. I
+reflected that men were perhaps not yet ready for these doctrines of
+infinite peace. How much more wise were the animals--and I raised my
+hand to stroke a huge dray-horse by the pavement. He seized my fingers
+in his teeth and nipped them vigorously.
+
+I gave a yell and ran full tilt to the nearest subway entrance. I burst
+into the mass of struggling, unphilosophic humanity and fought, shoved,
+cursed, and buffeted with them. I pushed three old ladies to one side to
+snatch my ticket before they could get theirs. I leaped into the car at
+the head of a flying wedge of sinful, unmystical men, who knew nothing
+of infinite beauty and peace. As the door closed I pushed a decrepit
+clergyman outside, and I hope he fell on the third rail. As I felt the
+lurching, trampling, throttling jam of humanity sway to and fro with the
+motion of the car, I drew a long breath. Dare I confess it?--I was
+perfectly happy!
+
+
+
+
+AN OXFORD LANDLADY
+
+
+It was a crisp October afternoon, and along Iffley Road the wind was
+chivvying the yellow leaves. We stood at the window watching the
+flappers opposite play hockey. One of them had a scarlet tam-o'-shanter
+and glorious dark hair underneath it.... A quiet tap at the door, gentle
+but definite, and in came Mrs. Beesley.
+
+If you have been at our digs, you know her by sight, and have not
+forgotten. Hewn of the real imperial marble is she, not unlike Queen
+Victoria in shape and stature. She tells us she used to dance featly and
+with abandon in days gone by, when her girlish slimness was the
+admiration of every greengrocer's assistant in Oxford--and even in later
+days when she and Dr. Warren always opened the Magdalen servants' ball
+together. She and the courtly President were always the star couple. I
+can see her doing the Sir Roger de Coverley. But the virgin zone was
+loosed long ago, and she has expanded with the British Empire. Not
+rotund, but rather imposingly cubic. Our hallway is a very narrow one,
+and when you come to visit us of an evening, after red-cheeked Emily
+has gone off to better tilting grounds, it is a prime delight to see
+Mrs. Beesley backing down the passage (like a stately canal boat) before
+the advancing guest. Very large of head and very pink of cheek, very
+fond of a brisk conversation, some skill at cooking, slow and full of
+dignity on the stairs, much reminiscent of former lodgers, bold as a
+lion when she thinks she is imposed upon, but otherwhiles humorous and
+placable--such is our Mrs. Beesley.
+
+She saw us standing by the window, and thought we were watching the
+leaves twisting up the roadway in golden spirals.
+
+"Watching the wind?" she said pleasantly. "I loves to see the leaves
+'avin' a frolic. They enjoys it, same as young gentlemen do."
+
+"Or young ladies?" I suggested. "We were watching the flappers play
+hockey, Mrs. Beesley. One of them is a most fascinating creature. I
+think her name must be Kathleen...."
+
+Mrs. Beesley chuckled merrily and threw up her head in that delightful
+way of hers. "Oh, dear, Oh, dear, you're just like all the other
+gentlemen," she said. "Always awatchin' and awaitin' for the young
+ladies. Mr. Bye that used to be 'ere was just the same, an' he was
+engaged to be marrit. 'Ad some of 'em in to tea once, he did. I thought
+it was scandalous, and 'im almost a marrit gentleman."
+
+"Don't you remember what the poet says, Mrs. Beesley?" I suggested:
+
+    "Beauty must be scorned in none
+    Though but truly served in one."
+
+"Not much danger of you gentlemen bein' too scornful," said Mrs.
+Beesley. Her eyes began to sparkle now that she saw herself fairly
+embarked upon a promising conversation. She sidled a little farther into
+the room. Lloyd winked at me and quietly escaped behind her.
+
+"Seeing as we're alone," said Mrs. Beesley, "I come to you to see about
+dinner to-night. I knows as you're the father of 'em all." (That is her
+quaint way of saying that she thinks me the leading spirit of the three
+who dig with her.) "How about a little jugged 'are? Nice little 'ares
+there are in Cowley Road now. I thinks 'are is very tender an' tasty.
+That, an' a nice 'ot cup o' tea?"
+
+The last 'are had been, in Tennyson's phrase, "the heir of all the
+ages," so I deprecated the suggestion. "I don't think hare agrees with
+Mr. Williams," I said.
+
+"'Ow about a pheasant?" said Mrs. Beesley, stroking the corner of the
+table with her hand as she always does when in deep thought. "A
+pheasant and a Welsh rabbit, not too peppery. That goes well with the
+cider. Dr. Warren came 'ere to dinner once, an' he had a Welsh rabbit
+and never forgot it. 'E allus used to say when 'e saw me, ''Ow about
+that Welsh rabbit, Mrs. Beesley?' Oh, dear, Oh, dear, 'e _is_ a kind
+gentleman! 'E gave us a book once--''Istory of Magdalen College,' I
+think he wrote it 'imself."
+
+"I think a pheasant would be very nice," I said, and began looking for a
+book.
+
+"Do you think Mr. Loomis will be back from town in time for dinner?"
+asked Mrs. Beesley. "I know 'e's fond o' pheasant. He'd come if he
+knew."
+
+"We might send him a telegram," I said.
+
+"Oh, dear, Oh, dear!" sighed Mrs. Beesley, overcome by such a fantastic
+thought. "You know, Mr. Morley, a funny thing 'appened this morning,"
+she said. "Em'ly and I were making Mr. Loomis's bed. But we didn't find
+'is clothes all lyin' about the floor same as 'e usually does. 'I wonder
+what's 'appened to Mr. Loomis's clothes?' said Em'ly.
+
+"'P'raps 'e's took 'em up to town to pawn 'em.' I said. (You know we 'ad
+a gent'man 'ere once that pawned nearly all 'is things--a Jesus
+gentleman 'e was.)
+
+"Em'ly says to me, 'I wonder what the three balls on a pawnbroker's
+sign mean?'
+
+"'Why don't you know, Em'ly?' I says. It means it's two to one you never
+gets 'em back."
+
+Just then there was a ring at the bell and Mrs. Beesley rolled away
+chuckling. And I returned to the window to watch Kathleen play hockey.
+
+_October, 1912._
+
+
+
+
+"PEACOCK PIE"
+
+
+Once a year or so one is permitted to find some book which brings a real
+tingle to that ribbon of the spinal marrow which responds to the
+vibrations of literature. Not a bad way to calendar the years is by the
+really good books they bring one. Each twelve month the gnomon on the
+literary sundial is likely to cast some shadow one will not willingly
+forget. Thus I mark 1916 as the year that introduced me to William
+McFee's "Casuals of the Sea" and Butler's "Way of All Flesh"; 1915 most
+of us remember as Rupert Brooke's year, or the year of the Spoon River
+Anthology, if you prefer that kind of thing; 1914 I notch as the season
+when I first got the hang of Bourget and Conrad. But perhaps best of
+all, in 1913 I read "Peacock Pie" and "Songs of Childhood," by Walter de
+la Mare.
+
+"Peacock Pie" having now been published in this country it is seasonable
+to kindle an altar fire for this most fanciful and delightful of
+present-day poets. It is curious that his work is so little known over
+here, for his first book, "Songs of Childhood," was published in
+England in 1902. Besides, poetry he has written novels and essays, all
+shot through with a phosphorescent sparkle of imagination and charm. He
+has the knack of "words set in delightful proportion"; and "Peacock Pie"
+is the most authentic knapsack of fairy gold since the "Child's Garden
+of Verses."
+
+I am tempted to think that Mr. de la Mare is the kind of poet more
+likely to grow in England than America. The gracious and fine-spun
+fabric of his verse, so delicate in music, so quaint and haunting in
+imaginative simplicity, is the gift of a land and life where rewards and
+fames are not wholly passed away. Emily Dickinson and Vachel Lindsay are
+among our contributors to the songs of gramarye: but one has only to
+open "The Congo" side by side with "Peacock Pie" to see how the
+seductions of ragtime and the clashing crockery of the Poetry Society's
+dinners are coarsening the fibres of Mr. Lindsay's marvellous talent as
+compared with the dainty horns of elfin that echo in Mr. de la Mare. And
+it is a long Pullman ride from Spoon River to the bee-droned gardens
+where De la Mare's old women sit and sew. Over here we have to wait for
+Barrie or Yeats or Padraic Colum to tell us about the fairies, and Cecil
+Sharp to drill us in their dances and songs. The gentry are not native
+in our hearts, and we might as well admit it.
+
+To say that Mr. de la Mare's verse is distilled in fairyland suggests
+perhaps a delicate and absent-minded figure, at a loss in the hurly
+burly of this world; the kind of poet who loses his rubbers in the
+subway, drops his glasses in the trolley car, and is found wandering
+blithely in Central Park while the Women's Athenaeum of the Tenderloin
+is waiting four hundred strong for him to lecture. But Mr. de la Mare is
+the more modern figure who might readily (I hope I speak without
+offense) be mistaken for a New York stock broker, or a member of the
+Boston Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps he even belongs to the newer order
+of poets who do not wear rubbers.
+
+One's first thought (if one begins at the beginning, but who reads a
+book of poetry that way?) is that "Peacock Pie" is a collection of poems
+for children. But it is not that, any more than "The Masses" is a paper
+for the proletariat. Before you have gone very far you will find that
+the imaginary child you set out with has been magicked into a
+changeling. The wee folk have been at work and bewitched the
+pudding--the pie rather. The fire dies on the hearth, the candle
+channels in its socket, but still you read on. Some of the poems bring
+you the cauld grue of Thrawn Janet. When at last you go up to bed, it
+will be with the shuddering sigh of one thrilled through and through
+with the sad little beauties of the world. You will want to put out a
+bowl of fresh milk on the doorstep to appease the banshee--did you not
+know that the janitor of your Belshazzar Court would get it in the
+morning.
+
+One of the secrets of Mr. de la Mare's singular charm is his utter
+simplicity, linked with a delicately tripping music that intrigues the
+memory unawares and plays high jinks with you forever after. Who can
+read "Off the Ground" and not strum the dainty jig over and over in his
+head whenever he takes a bath, whenever he shaves, whenever the moon is
+young? I challenge you to resist the jolly madness of its infection:
+
+    Three jolly Farmers
+    Once bet a pound
+    Each dance the others would
+    Off the ground.
+    Out of their coats
+    They slipped right soon,
+    And neat and nicesome,
+    Put each his shoon.
+    One--Two--Three--
+    And away they go,
+    Not too fast,
+    And not too slow;
+    Out from the elm-tree's
+    Noonday shadow,
+    Into the sun
+    And across the meadow.
+    Past the schoolroom,
+    With knees well bent
+    Fingers a-flicking,
+    They dancing went....
+
+Are you not already out of breath in the hilarious escapade?
+
+The sensible map's quarrel with the proponents of free verse is not that
+they write such good prose; not that they espouse the natural rhythms of
+the rain, the brook, the wind-grieved tree; this is all to the best,
+even if as old as Solomon. It is that they affect to disdain the
+superlative harmonies of artificed and ordered rhythms; that knowing not
+a spondee from a tribrach they vapour about prosody, of which they know
+nothing, and imagine to be new what antedates the Upanishads. The
+haunting beauty of Mr. de la Mare's delicate art springs from an ear of
+superlative tenderness and sophistication. The daintiest alternation of
+iambus and trochee is joined to the serpent's cunning in swiftly
+tripping dactyls. Probably this artifice is greatly unconscious, the
+meed of the trained musician; but let no singer think to upraise his
+voice before the Lord ere he master the axioms of prosody. Imagist
+journals please copy.
+
+One may well despair of conveying in a few rough paragraphs the gist of
+this quaint, fanciful, brooding charm. There is something fey about much
+of the book: it peers behind the curtains of twilight and sees strange
+things. In its love of children, its inspired simplicity, its sparkle of
+whim and AEsopian brevity, I know nothing finer. Let me just cut for you
+one more slice of this rarely seasoned pastry.
+
+    THE LITTLE BIRD
+
+    My dear Daddie bought a mansion
+      For to bring my Mammie to,
+    In a hat with a long feather,
+      And a trailing gown of blue;
+    And a company of fiddlers
+      And a rout of maids and men
+    Danced the clock round to the morning,
+      In a gay house-warming then.
+    And when all the guests were gone, and
+      All was still as still can be,
+    In from the dark ivy hopped a
+      Wee small bird: and that was Me.
+
+"Peacock Pie" is immortal diet indeed, as Sir Walter said of his scrip
+of joy. Annealed as we are, I think it will discompose the most callous.
+It is a sweet feverfew for the heats of the spirit, It is full of
+outlets of sky.
+
+As for Mr. de la Mare himself, he is a modest man and keeps behind his
+songs. Recently he paid his first visit to America, and we may hope that
+even on Fifth Avenue he saw some fairies. He lectured at some of our
+universities and endured the grotesque plaudits of dowagers and
+professors who doubtless pretended to have read his work. Although he is
+forty-four, and has been publishing for nearly sixteen years, he has
+evaded "Who's Who." He lives in London, is married, and has four
+children. For a number of years he worked for the Anglo-American Oil
+Company. Truly the Muse sometimes lends to her favourites a merciful
+hardiness.
+
+
+
+
+THE LITERARY PAWNSHOP
+
+
+Excellent Parson Adams, in "Joseph Andrews," is not the only literary
+man who has lamented the difficulty of ransoming a manuscript for
+immediate cash. It will be remembered that Mr. Adams had in his
+saddlebag nine volumes of sermons in manuscript, "as well worth a
+hundred pounds as a shilling was worth twelve pence." Offering one of
+these as a pledge, Parson Adams besought Mr. Tow-Wouse, the innkeeper,
+to lend him three guineas but the latter had so little stomach for a
+transaction of this sort that "he cried out, 'Coming, sir,' though
+nobody called; and ran downstairs without any fear of breaking his
+neck."
+
+As a whimsical essayist (with whom I have talked over these matters)
+puts it, the business of literature is imperfectly coordinated with
+life.
+
+Almost any other kind of property is hockable for ready cash. A watch, a
+ring, an outworn suit of clothes, a chair, a set of books, all these
+will find willing purchasers. But a manuscript which happens not to meet
+the fancy of the editors must perforce lie idle in your drawer though it
+sparkle with the brilliants of wit, and five or ten years hence
+collectors may list it in their catalogues. No mount of piety along
+Sixth Avenue will accept it in pawn, no Hartford Lunch will exchange it
+for corned beef hash and dropped egg. This is a dismal thing.
+
+This means that there is an amusing and a competent living to be gained
+by a literary agent of a new kind. Think how many of the most famous
+writers have trod the streets ragged and hungry in their early days.
+There were times when they would have sold their epics, their novels,
+their essays, for the price of a square meal. Think of the booty that
+would accumulate in the shop of a literary pawnbroker. The early work of
+famous men would fill his safe to bursting. Later on he might sell it
+for a thousand times what he gave. There is nothing that grows to such
+fictitious value as manuscript.
+
+Think of Francis Thompson, when he was a bootmaker's assistant in
+Leicester Square. He was even too poor to buy writing materials. His
+early poems were scribbled on scraps of old account books and wrapping
+paper. How readily he would have sold them for a few shillings. Or Edgar
+Poe in the despairing days of his wife's illness. Or R.L.S. in the fits
+of depression caused by his helpless dependence upon his father for
+funds. What a splendid opportunity these crises in writers' lives would
+offer to the enterprising buyer of manuscripts!
+
+Be it understood, of course, that the pawnbroker must be himself an
+appreciator of good things. No reason why he should buy poor stuff, even
+though the author of it be starving. Richard Le Gallienne has spoken
+somewhere of the bookstores which sell "books that should never have
+been written to the customers who should never have been born." Our
+pawnbroker must guard himself against buying this kind of stuff. He will
+be besieged with it. Very likely Mr. Le Gallienne himself will be the
+first to offer him some. But his task will be to discover new and true
+talent beneath its rags, and stake it to a ham sandwich when that homely
+bite will mean more than a dinner at the Ritz ten years later.
+
+The idea of the literary pawnbroker comes to me from the (unpublished)
+letters of John Mistletoe, author of the "Dictionary of Deplorable
+Facts," that wayward and perverse genius who wandered the Third Avenue
+saloons when he might have been feted by the Authors' League had he
+lived a few years longer. Some day, I hope, the full story of that
+tragic life may be told, and the manuscripts still cherished by his
+executor made public. In the meantime, this letter, which he wrote in
+1908, gives a sad and vivid little picture of the straits of unadmitted
+genius:
+
+"I write from Connor's saloon. Paunchy Connor has been my best--indeed
+my only--friend in this city, when every editor, publisher, and critic
+has given me the frozen mitt. Of course I know why ... the author of
+'Vermin' deserves not, nor wants, their hypocritical help. The book was
+too true to life to please the bourgeois and yet not ribald enough to
+tickle the prurient. I had a vile pornographic publisher after me the
+other day; he said if I would rub up some of the earlier chapters and
+inject a little more spice he thought he could do something with it--as
+a paper-covered erotic for shop-girls, I suppose he meant. I kicked him
+downstairs. The stinking bounder!
+
+"Until to-day I had been without grub for sixty hours. That is literally
+true. I was ashamed of sponging on Paunchy, and could not bring myself
+to come back to the saloon where he would willingly have fed me. I did
+get a job for two days as a deckhand on an Erie ferryboat, but they
+found out I did not belong to the union. I had two dollars in my
+pocket--a fortune--but while I was dozing on a doorstep on Hudson
+Street, waiting for the cafes to open (I was too done to walk half a
+dozen blocks to an all-night restaurant), some snapper picked my
+pocket. That night I slept in a big drain pipe where they were putting
+up a building.
+
+"Why isn't there a pawnshop where one could hang up MSS. for cash? In my
+hallroom over Connor's saloon I have got stuff that will be bid for at
+auctions some day (that isn't conceit, I know it), but at this moment,
+July 17, 1908, I couldn't raise 50 cents on it. If there were a literary
+mount of piety--a sort of Parnassus of piety as it were--the uncle in
+charge might bless the day he met me. Well, it won't be for long. This
+cancer is getting me surely.
+
+"This morning I'm cheerful. I've scrubbed and swept Paunchy's bar for
+him, and the dirty, patchouli-smelling hop-joint he keeps upstairs,
+bless his pimping old heart. And I've had a real breakfast: boiled red
+cabbage, stewed beef (condemned by the inspector), rye bread, raw
+onions, a glass of Tom and Jerry, and two big schooners of the amber.
+I'm working on my Third Avenue novel called 'The L.'
+
+"I shan't give you my right address, or you'd send someone down here to
+give me money, you damned philanthropist.... Connor ain't the real name,
+so there. When I die (soon) they'll find Third Avenue written on my
+heart, if I still have one...."
+
+It is interesting to recall that the MS. of his poems "Pavements, and
+Other Verses" was bought by a private collector for $250 last winter.
+
+Will not some literary agent think over this idea?
+
+
+
+
+A MORNING IN MARATHON
+
+
+One violet throbbing star was climbing in the southeast at half-past
+four, and the whole flat plain was rich with golden moonlight. Early
+rising in order to quicken the furnace and start the matinsong in the
+steampipes becomes its own reward when such an orange moon is dropping
+down the sky. Even Peg (our most volatile Irish terrier) was plainly
+awed by the blaze of pale light, and hopped gingerly down the rimy back
+steps. But the cat was unabashed. Cats are born by moonlight and are
+leagued with the powers of darkness and mystery. And so Nicholas Vachel
+Lindsay (he is named for the daring poet of Illinois) stepped into the
+moonshine without a qualm.
+
+There are certain little routine joys known only to the servantless
+suburbanite. Every morning the baker leaves a bag of crisp French rolls
+on the front porch. Every morning the milkman deposits his little
+bottles of milk and cream on the back steps. Every morning the furnace
+needs a little grooming, that the cheery thump of rising pressure may
+warm the radiators upstairs. Then the big agate kettle must be set over
+the blue gas flame, for hot water is needed both for shaving and cocoa.
+Our light breakfast takes only a moment to prepare. By the time the Nut
+Brown Maid comes singing downstairs, cocoa, rolls, and boiled eggs are
+ready in the sunny little dining room, and the Tamperer is bathed and
+shaved and telephoning to Central for "the exact time." The 8:13 train
+waits for no man, and it is nearly a mile to the station.
+
+But the morning I think of was not a routine morning. On routine
+mornings the Tamperer rises at ten minutes to seven, the alarm clock
+being set for 6:45: which allows five minutes for drowsy head. The day
+in question was early February when snow lay white and powdery on the
+ground, and the 6 o'clock train from Marathon had to be caught. There is
+an express for Philadelphia that leaves the Pennsylvania Station at 7:30
+and this the Tamperer had to take, to make a 10 o'clock appointment in
+the Quaker City. That was why the alarm clock rang at half-past four.
+
+I cannot recall a more virginal morning than that snowy twilight before
+the dawn. No description that I have ever read--not even the daybreak in
+"Prince Otto," or Pippa's dawn boiling in pure gold over the rim of
+night--would be just to that exquisite growth of colour in the eastern
+sky. The violet star faded to forget-me-not and then to silver and at
+last closed his weary eye; the flat Long Island prairie gradually lost
+its fairy-tale air of mystery and dream; the close ceiling of the night
+receded into infinite space as the sun waved his radiant arms over the
+horizon.
+
+But this was after I had left the house. The sun did not raise his head
+from the pillow until I was in the train. The Nut Brown Maid was still
+nested in her warm white bed as I took her up some tea and toast just
+before departing.
+
+The walk to the station, over the crisply frozen snow, was delicious.
+Marathon is famous for its avenue of great elms, which were casting deep
+blue shadows in the strange light--waning moon and waxing day. The air
+was very chill--only just above zero--and the smoking car seemed very
+cold and dismal. I huddled my overcoat about me and tried to smoke and
+read the paper. But in that stale, fetid odour of last night's tobacco
+and this morning's wet arctics the smoker was but a dismal place. The
+exaltation of the dawn dropped suddenly into a kind of shivering nausea.
+
+I changed to another car and threw away the war news. Just then the sun
+came gloriously over the edge of the fields and set the snow afire. As
+we rounded the long curve beyond Woodside I could see the morning light
+shining upon the Metropolitan Tower, and when we glided into the
+basement of the Pennsylvania Station my heart was already attuned to the
+thrill of that glorious place. Perhaps it can never have the fascination
+for me that the old dingy London terminals have--King's Cross,
+Paddington, or Saint Pancras, with their delicious English bookstalls
+and those porters in corduroy--but the Pennsylvania is a wonderful place
+after all, a marble palace of romance and a gallant place to roam about.
+It seems like a stable without horses, though, for where are the trains?
+No chance to ramble about the platforms (as in London) to watch the Duke
+of Abercorn or the Lord Claude Hamilton, or other of those green or blue
+English locomotives with lordly names, being groomed for the run.
+
+In the early morning the Pennsylvania Station catches in its
+high-vaulted roof the first flush of sunlight; and before the flood of
+commuters begins to pour in, the famous station cat is generally sitting
+by the baggage room shining his morning face. Up at the marble lunch
+counters the coloured gentlemen are serving hot cakes and coffee to
+stray travellers, and the shops along the Arcade are being swept and
+garnished. As I passed through on my way to the Philadelphia train I
+was amused by a wicker basket full of Scotch terrier puppies--five or
+six of them tumbling over one another in their play and yelping so that
+the station rang. "Every little bit yelps" as someone has said. I was
+reminded of the last words I ever read in Virgil (the end of the sixth
+book of the Aeneid)--_stant litore puppes_, which I always yearned to
+translate "a litter of puppies."
+
+My train purred smoothly under the Hudson and under Jersey City as I lit
+my cigar and settled comfortably into the green plush. When we emerged
+from the tunnel on the other side of the long ridge (which is a
+degenerate spur from the Palisades farther north) a crescent of sun was
+just fringing the crest with fire. Another moment and we flashed onto
+the Hackensack marshes and into the fully minted gold of superb morning.
+The day was begun.
+
+
+
+
+THE AMERICAN HOUSE OF LORDS
+
+
+I am not a travelling salesman (except in so far as all men are) so I do
+not often travel in the Club Car. But when I do, irresistibly the
+thought comes that I have strayed into the American House of Lords.
+Unworthily I sit among our sovereign legislators, a trifle ill at ease
+mayhap. In the day coach I am at home with my peers--those who smoke
+cheap tobacco; who nurse fretful babies; who strew the hot plush with
+sandwich crumbs and lean throbbing foreheads against the window pane.
+
+But the Club Car which swings so smoothly at the end of a limited train
+is a different place, pardee. It is not a hereditary chamber, but it is
+none the less the camera stellata of our prosperous carnivora. Patently
+these men are Lords. In two facing rows, averted from the landscape,
+condemned to an uneasy scrutiny of their mutual prosperity, they sit in
+leather chairs. They curve roundly from neck to groin. They are shaven
+to the raw, soberly clad, derby hatted, glossily booted. Always they
+smoke cigars, those strange, blunt cigars that are fatter at one end
+than at the other. Some (these I think are the very prosperous) wear
+shoes with fawn-coloured tops.
+
+Is it strange then that I, an ill-clad and pipe-smoking traveller, am
+faintly uneasy in this House of Lords? I forget myself while reading
+poetry and drop my tobacco cinders on the rug, missing the little silver
+gourd that rests by my left foot. Straight the white-jacketed mulatto
+sucks them up with a vacuum cleaner and a deprecating air. I pass to the
+brass veranda at the end of the car for a bracing change of atmosphere.
+And returning, the attendant has removed my little pile of books which I
+left under my chair, and hidden them in his serving grotto. It costs me
+at least a whiskey and soda to get them out.
+
+It means, I suppose, that I am not marked for success. I am cigarless
+and derbyless; I do not wear those funny little white margins inside my
+vest. My scarf is still the dear old shabby one in which I was married
+(I bought it at Rogers Peet's, and I shall never forget it) and when I
+look up from Emily Dickinson's poems with a trembling thrill of painful
+ecstasy, I am frightened by the long row of hard faces and cynic eyes
+opposite me.
+
+The House of Lords disquiets me. Even if I ring a bell and order a
+bottle I am not happy. Is it only the swing of the car that nauseates
+me? At any rate, I want to get home--home to that star-sown meadow and
+the two brown arms at the journey's end.
+
+_December, 1914._
+
+
+
+
+COTSWOLD WINDS
+
+
+Spring comes late on these windy uplands, and indoors one still sits
+close to the fire. These are the days of booming gales over the
+sheepwolds, and the afternoon ride with Shotover becomes an adventure. I
+am not one of those who shirk bicycling in a wind. Give me a two-mile
+spin with the gust astern, just to loosen the muscles and sweep the
+morning's books and tobacco from the brain--and then turn and at it! It
+is like swimming against a great crystal river. Cap off, head up--no
+crouching over the handle-bars like the Saturday afternoon shopmen! Wind
+in your hair, the broad blue Cotswold slopes about you, every ounce of
+leg-drive straining on the pedals--three minutes of it intoxicates you.
+You crawl up-wind roaring the most glorious nonsense, ribaldry, and
+exultation into the face of the blast.
+
+I am all for the Cotswolds in the last vacation before "Schools." In
+mid-March our dear gray Mother Oxford sends us away for six weeks while
+she decks herself against the spring. Far and wide we scatter. The
+Prince to Germany--the dons to Devon--the reading parties to quiet
+country inns here and there. Some blithe spirits of my acquaintance are
+in those glorious dingy garrets of the Latin Quarter with Murger's
+"Scenes de la Vie de Boheme" as a viaticum. Others are among the tulips
+in Holland. But this time I vote for the Cotswolds and solitude.
+
+There is a straggling gray village which lies in the elbow of a green
+valley, with a clear trout-stream bubbling through it. There is a
+well-known inn by the bridge, the resort of many anglers. But I am not
+for inns nor for anglers this time. It is a serious business, these last
+two months before Schools, and I and my books are camped in a "pensive
+citadel" up on the hill, where the postman's wife cares for me and
+worries because I do not eat more than two normal men. There is a
+low-ceilinged sitting room with a blazing fire. From one corner a
+winding stair climbs to the bedroom above. There are pipes and tobacco,
+pens and a pot of ink. There are books--all historical volumes, the only
+evidence of relaxation being Arthur Gibbs' "A Cotswold Village" and one
+of Bartholomew's survey maps. Ten hours' work, seven hours' sleep, three
+hours' bicycling--that leaves four hours for eating and other
+emergencies. That is how we live on twenty-four hours a day, and turn a
+probable Fourth in the Schools into a possible Third.
+
+And what could better those lonely afternoon rides on Shotover? The
+valley of the Colne is one of the most entrancing bits in England, I
+think. A lonely road, winding up the green trough of the stream, now and
+then crossing the shoulder of the hills, takes you far away from most of
+the things one likes to leave behind. There are lambs, little black
+fuzzy fellows, on the uplands; there are scores of rabbits disappearing
+with a flirt of white hindquarters into their wayside burrows; in
+Chedworth Woods there are pheasants, gold and blue and scarlet, almost
+as tame as barnyard fowls; everywhere there are skylarks throbbing in
+the upper blue--and these are all your company. Now and then a great
+yellow farm-wagon and a few farmers in corduroys--but no one else. That
+is the kind of country to bicycle into. Up and up the valley, past the
+Roman villa, until you come to the smoking-place. No pipeful ever tasted
+better than this, stretched on the warm grass watching the green water
+dimpling over the stones. That same water passes the Houses of
+Parliament by and by. I think it would stay by Chedworth Woods if it
+could--and so would I.
+
+But it is four o'clock, and tea will be waiting. Protesting Shotover is
+pushed up a swampy hillside through the trees--and we come out onto a
+hilltop some 800 feet above the sea. And from there it is eight miles
+homeward, mostly downhill, with a broad blue horizon to meet the eye.
+Back to the tiny cottage looking out onto the village green and the old
+village well; back to four cups of tea and hot buttered toast; and then
+for Metternich and the Vienna Congress. _Solvitur bicyclando!_
+
+And when we clatter down the High again, two weeks hence, Oxford will
+have made her great transformation. We left her in winter, mud and sleet
+and stormy sunsets. But a fortnight from now, however cold, it will be
+what we hopefully call the Summer Term. There will be white flannels,
+and Freshmen learning to punt on the Cher. But that is not for us now.
+There are the Schools....
+
+_Bibury, April, 1913_.
+
+
+
+
+CLOUDS
+
+
+Who has ever done justice to the majesty of the clouds? Alice Meynell,
+perhaps? George Meredith? Shelley, who was "gold-dusty with tumbling
+amongst the stars?" Henry Van Dyke has sung of "The heavenly hills of
+Holland," but in a somewhat treble pipe; R.L.S. said it better--"The
+travelling mountains of the sky." Ah, how much is still to be said of
+those piled-up mysteries of heaven!
+
+We rode to-day down the Delaware Valley from Milford to Stroudsburg.
+That wonderful meadowland between the hills (it is just as lovely as the
+English Avon, but how much more likely we are to praise the latter!)
+converges in a huge V toward the Water Gap, drawing the foam of many a
+mountain creek down through that matchless passway. Over the hills which
+tumble steeply on either side soared the vast Andes of the clouds,
+hanging palpable in the sapphire of a summer sky. What height on height
+of craggy softness on those silver steeps! What rounded bosomy curves of
+golden vapour; what sharpened pinnacles of nothingness, spiring in
+ever-changing contour into the intangible blue! Man the finite,
+reveller in the explainable and the exact, how can his eye pierce or his
+speech describe the rolling robes of glory in which floating moisture
+clothes itself!
+
+Mile on mile, those peaks of midsummer snow were marching the highways
+of the air. Fascinated, almost stupefied, we watched their miracles of
+form and unfathomable glory. It was as though the stockades of earth had
+fallen away. Palisaded, cliff on radiant cliff, the spires of the
+Unseeable lay bare. Ever since childhood one has dreamed of scaling the
+bulwarks of the clouds, of riding the ether on those strange galleons.
+Unconscious of their own beauty, they pass in dissolving shapes--now
+scudding on that waveless azure sea; now drifting with scant steerage
+way. If one could lie upon their opal summits what depths and what
+abysses would meet the eye! What glowing chasms to catch the ardour of
+the sun, what chill and empty hollows of creaming mist, dropping in pale
+and awful spirals. Floating flat like ice floes beneath the greenish
+moon, or beetling up in prodigious ledges of seeming solidness on a
+sunny morning--are they not the most superbly heart-easing miracles of
+our visible world? Watch them as they shimmer down toward the Water Gap
+in every shade of silver and rose and opal; or delicately tinged with
+amber when they have caught some jewelled chain of lightning and are
+suffused with its lurid sparkle. Man has worshipped sticks and stones
+and stars: has he never bent a knee to the high gods of the clouds?
+
+There they wander, the unfettered spirits of bliss or doom. Holding
+within their billowed masses the healing punishments of the rain,
+chaliced beakers of golden flame, lightnings instant and unbearable as
+the face of God--dissolving into a crystal nothing, reborn from the
+viewless caverns of air--here let us erect one enraptured altar to the
+bright mountains of the sky!
+
+At sunset we were climbing back among the wooded hills of Pike County,
+fifteen hundred feet above the salt. One great castle of clouds that had
+long drawn our eyes was crowning some invisible airy summit far above
+us. As the sun dipped it grew gray, soft, and pallid. And then one last
+banner of rosy light beaconed over its highest turret--a final flare of
+glory to signal curfew to all the other silver hills. Slowly it faded in
+the shadow of dusk.
+
+We thought that was the end. But no--a little later, after we had
+reached the farm, we saw that the elfs of cloudland were still at play.
+Every few minutes the castle glowed with a sudden gush of pale blue
+lightning. And while we watched, with hearts almost painfully sated by
+beauty, through some leak the precious fire ran out; a great stalk of
+pure and unspeakable brightness fled passionately to earth. This
+happened again and again until the artery of fire was discharged. And
+then, slowly, slowly, the stars began to pipe up the evening breeze. Our
+cloud drifted gently away.
+
+Where and in what strange new form did it greet the flush of dawn? Who
+knows?
+
+
+
+
+UNHEALTHY
+
+
+On Saturday afternoons Titania and I always have an adventure. On
+Sundays we stay at home and dutifully read manuscripts (I am the obscure
+creature known as a "publisher's reader") but Saturday post meridiem is
+a golden tract of time wherein we wander as we list.
+
+The 35th Street entrance to McQueery's has long been hallowed as our
+_stell-dich-ein_. We meet there at one o'clock. That is to say, I arrive
+at 12:59 and spend fifteen minutes in most animated reflection. There is
+plenty to think about. One may stand between the outer and inner lines
+of glass doors and watch the queer little creatures that come tumbling
+out of the cloak and suit factory across the street. Or one may stand
+inside the store, on a kind of terrace, beneath pineapple shaped arc
+lights, looking down upon the bustle of women on the main floor. Best of
+all, one may stroll along the ornate gallery to one side where all sorts
+and conditions of ladies wait for other ladies who have promised to meet
+them at one o'clock. They divide their time between examining the
+mahogany victrolae and deciding what kind of sundae they will have for
+lunch. A very genteel old gentleman with white hair and a long morning
+coat and an air of perpetual irritation is in charge of this social
+gallery. He wears the queer, soft, flat-soled boots that are suggestive
+of corns. There is an information bureau there, where one may learn
+everything except the time one may expect one's wife to arrive. But I
+have learned a valuable subterfuge. If I am waiting for Titania, and
+beginning to despair of her arrival, I have only to go to a telephone to
+call her up. As soon as I have put the nickel in, she is sure to appear.
+Nowadays I save the nickel by going into a booth and _pretending_ to
+telephone. Sure enough, at 1:14, Ingersoll time, in she trots.
+
+We have a jargon of our own.
+
+"Eye-polishers?" say I.
+
+"Yes," says Titania, "but there was a block at 42nd Street. I'm _so_
+sorry, Grump."
+
+"Eye-polishers" is our term for the Fifth Avenue busses, because riding
+on them makes Titania's eyes so bright. More widely, the word connotes
+anything that produces that desirable result, such as bunches of
+violets, lavender peddlers, tea at Mary Elizabeth's, spring millinery,
+or finding sixpence in her shoe. This last is a rite suggested by the
+old song:
+
+    And though maids sweep their hearths no less
+      Than they were wont to do,
+    Yet who doth now for cleanliness
+      Find sixpence in her shoe?
+
+A bright dune does very well as a sixpenny piece.
+
+We always lunch at Moretti's on Saturday: it is the recognized beginning
+of an adventure. The Moretti lunch has advanced from a quarter to thirty
+cents, I am sorry to say, but this is readily compensated by the Grump
+buying Sweet Caporals instead of something Turkish. A packet of
+cigarettes is another curtain-raiser for an adventure. On other days
+publishers' readers smoke pipes, but on Saturdays cigarettes are
+possible.
+
+"Antipasto?"
+
+"No, thanks."
+
+"Minestrone or consomme?"
+
+"Two minestrone, two prime ribs, ice cream and coffee. Red wine,
+please." That is the formula. We have eaten the "old reliable Moretti
+lunch" so often that the routine has become a ritual. Oh, excellent
+savor of the Moretti basement! Compounded of warmth, a pungent pourri of
+smells, and the jangle of thick china, how diverting it is! The
+franc-tireur in charge of the wine-bin watches us complaisantly from his
+counter where he sits flanked by flasks of Hoboken chianti and a case of
+brittle cigars.
+
+How good Moretti's _minestrone_ tastes to the unsophisticated tongue.
+What though it be only an azoic extract of intense potato, dimly tinct
+with sargasso and macaroni--it has a pleasing warmth and bulk. Is it not
+the prelude to an Adventure?
+
+Well, where shall we go to-day? No two explorers dickering over azimuth
+and dead reckoning could discuss latitude and longitude more earnestly
+than Titania and I argue our possible courses. Generally, however, she
+leaves it to me to chart the journey. That gives me the pride of
+conductor and her the pleasure of being surprised.
+
+According to our Mercator's projection (which, duly wrapped in a
+waterproof envelope, we always carry on our adventures) there was a
+little known region lying nor' nor'west of Blackwell's Island and
+plotted on the map as East River Park. I had heard of this as a
+picturesque and old-fashioned territory, comparatively free from
+footpads and lying near such places as Astoria and Hell Gate. We laid a
+romantic course due east along 35th Street, Titania humming a little
+snatch from an English music-hall song that once amused us:
+
+    "My old man's a fireman
+    Now what do you think of that?
+    He wears goblimey breeches
+    And a little goblimey hat."
+
+She always quotes this to me when (she says) I wear my hat too far on
+the back of my head.
+
+The cross slope of Murray Hill drops steeply downward after one leaves
+Madison Avenue. We dipped into a region that has always been very
+fascinating to me. Under the roaring L, past dingy saloons, animal
+shops, tinsmiths, and painless dentists, past the old dismantled
+Manhattan hospital. The taste of spring was in the air: one of the
+dentists was having his sign regilded, a huge four-pronged grinder as
+big as McTeague's in Frank Norris's story. Oysters going out, the new
+brew of Bock beer coming in: so do the saloons mark the vernal equinox.
+
+A huge green chalet built on stilts, with two tiers of trains rumbling
+by, is the L station at 34th Street and Second Avenue. A cutting wind
+blew from the East River, only two blocks away. I paid two nickels and
+we got into the front car of the northbound train.
+
+Until Titania and I attain the final glory of riding in an aeroplane,
+or ascend Jacob's ladder, there never will be anything so thrilling as
+soaring over the housetops in the Second Avenue L. Rocking, racketing,
+roaring over those crazy trestles, now a glimpse of the leaden river to
+the east, now a peep of church spires and skyscrapers on the west, and
+the dingy imitation lace curtains of the third-story windows flashing by
+like a recurring pattern--it is a voyage of romance! Did you ever stand
+at the front door of an Elevated train, watching the track stretch far
+ahead toward the Bronx, and the little green stations slipping nearer
+and nearer? The Subway is a black, bellowing horror; the bus a swaying,
+jolty start-and-stop, bruising your knees against the seat in front; but
+the L swings you up and over the housetops, smooth and sheer and swift.
+
+We descended at 86th Street and found ourselves in a new world. A broad,
+dingy street, lined by shabby brown houses and pushbutton apartments,
+led in a gentle descent toward the river. The neighbourhood was noisy,
+quarrelsome, and dirty. After a long, bitter March the thaw had come at
+last: the street was viscous with slime, the melting snow lay in grayish
+piles along the curbs. Small boys on each side of the Street were
+pelting sodden snowballs which spattered around us as we walked down the
+pavement.
+
+But after two blocks things changed suddenly. The trolley swung round
+at a right angle (up Avenue A) and the last block of 86th Street showed
+the benefit of this manoeuvre. The houses grew neat and respectable. A
+little side street branching off to the left (not recorded by Mercator)
+revealed some quaint cottages with gables and shuttered windows so
+mid-Victorian that my literary heart leaped and I dreamed at once of
+locating a novel in this fascinating spot. And then we rounded the
+corner and saw the little park.
+
+It was a bit of old Chelsea, nothing less. Titania clapped her hands,
+and I lit my pipe in gratification. Beside us was a row of little houses
+of warm red brick with peaked mansard roofs and cozy bay windows and
+polished door knockers. In front of them was the lumpy little park, cut
+up into irregular hills, where children were flying kites. And beyond
+that, an embankment and the river in a dim wet mist. There was
+Blackwell's Island, and a sailing barge slipping by. In the distance we
+could see the colossal span of the new Hell Gate bridge. With the
+journalist's instinct for superlatives I told Titania it was the largest
+single span in the world. I wonder if it is?
+
+As to that I know not. But it was the river that lured us. On the
+embankment we found benches and sat down to admire the scene. It was as
+picturesque as Battersea in Whistler's mistiest days. A ferryboat,
+crossing to Astoria, hooted musically through the haze. Tugs, puffing up
+past Blackwell's Island into the Harlem River, replied with mellow
+blasts. The pungent tang of the East River tickled our nostrils, and all
+my old ambition to be a tugboat captain returned.
+
+And then trouble began. Just as I was planning how we might bilk our
+landlord on Long Island and move all our belongings to this delicious
+spot, gradually draw our friends around us, and make East End Avenue the
+Cheyne Walk of New York--we might even import an English imagist poet to
+lend cachet to the coterie--I saw by Titania's face that something was
+wrong.
+
+I pressed her for the reason of her frown.
+
+She thought the region was unhealthy.
+
+Now when Titania thinks that a place is unhealthy no further argument is
+possible. Just on what data she bases these deductions I have never been
+able to learn. I think she can tell by the shape of the houses, or the
+lush quality of the foliage, or the fact that the garbage men collect
+from the front instead of from the back. But however she arrives at the
+conclusion, it is immutable.
+
+Any place that I think is peculiarly amusing, or quaint, or
+picturesque, Titania thinks is unhealthy.
+
+Sometimes I can see it coming. We are on our way to Mulberry Bend, or
+the Bowery, or Farrish's Chop House. I see her brow begin to pucker. "Do
+you feel as though it is going to be unhealthy?" I ask anxiously. If she
+does, there is nothing for it but to clutch at the nearest subway
+station and hurry up to Grant's Tomb. In that bracing ether her spirits
+revive.
+
+So it was on this afternoon. My Utopian vision of a Chelsea in New York,
+outdoing the grimy salons of Greenwich Village, fell in splinters at the
+bottom of my mind. Sadly I looked upon the old Carl Schurz mansion on
+the hill, and we departed for the airy plateaus of Central Park.
+Desperately I pointed to the fading charms of East River Park--the
+convent round the corner, the hokey pokey cart by the curbstone.
+
+I shall never be a tugboat captain. It isn't healthy.
+
+
+
+
+CONFESSIONS OF A SMOKER
+
+
+True smokers are born and not made. I remember my grandfather with his
+snowy beard gloriously stained by nicotine; from my first years I never
+saw my father out of reach of his pipe, save when asleep. Of what avail
+for my mother to promise unheard bonuses if I did not smoke until I was
+twenty? By the time I was eight years old I had constructed a pipe of an
+acorn and a straw, and had experimented with excelsior as fuel. From
+that time I passed through the well-known stages of dried bean-pod
+cigars, hayseed, corn silk, tea leaves, and (first ascent of the true
+Olympus) Recruits Little Cigars smoked in a lumberyard during school
+recess. Thence it was but a step to the first bag of Bull Durham and a
+twenty-five-cent pipe with a curved bone stem.
+
+I never knew the traditional pangs of Huck Finn and the other heroes of
+fiction. I never yet found a tobacco that cost me a moment's unease--but
+stay, there was a cunning mixture devised by some comrades at college
+that harboured in its fragrant shreds neatly chopped sections of rubber
+bands. That was sheer poison, I grant you.
+
+The weed needs no new acolyte to hymn her sanctities. Where Raleigh,
+Pepys, Tennyson, Kingsley, Calverley, Barrie, and the whimful Elia best
+of all--where these have spoken so greatly, the feeble voice may well
+shrink. But that is the joy of true worship: ranks and hierarchies are
+lost, all are brothers in the mystery, and amid approving puffs of rich
+Virginia the older saints of the mellow leaf genially greet the new
+freshman, be he never so humble.
+
+What would one not have given to smoke a pipe out with the great ones of
+the empire! That wainscoted back parlour at the Salutation and Cat, for
+instance, where Lamb and Coleridge used to talk into the small hours
+"quaffing egg flip, devouring Welsh rabbits, and smoking pipes of
+Orinooko." Or the back garden in Chelsea where Carlyle and Emerson
+counted the afternoon well spent, though neither one had said a hundred
+words--had they not smoked together? Or Piscator and Viator, as they
+trudged together to "prevent the sunrise" on Amwell Hill--did not the
+reek of their tobacco trail most bluely on the sweet morning air? Or old
+Fitz, walking on the Deben wall at Woodbridge, on his way to go sailing
+with Posh down to Bawdsey Ferry--what mixture did he fill and light?
+Something recommended by Will Thackeray, I'll be sworn. Or, to come down
+to more recent days, think of Captain Joseph Conrad at his lodgings in
+Bessborough Gardens, lighting that apocalyptic pipe that preceded the
+first manuscript page of "Almayer's Folly." Could I only have been the
+privileged landlady's daughter who cleared away the Captain's breakfast
+dishes that morning! I wonder if she remembers the incident?[E]
+
+[Footnote E: The reference here is to Chapter IV of Joseph Conrad's "A
+Personal Record." The author's allusions are often sadly
+obscure.--EDITOR.]
+
+It is the heart of fellowship, the core and pith and symbol of masculine
+friendship and good talk. Your cigar will do for drummers, your
+cigarettes for the dilettante smoker, but for the ripened, boneset
+votary nothing but a briar will suffice. Away with meerschaum, calabash,
+cob, and clay: they have their purpose in the inscrutable order of
+things, like crossing sweepers and presidents of women's clubs; but when
+Damon and Pythias meet to talk things over, well-caked briars are in
+order. Cigars are all right in fiction: for Prince Florizel and Colonel
+Geraldine when they visit the famous Divan in Rupert Street. It was
+Leigh Hunt, in the immortal Wishing Cap Papers (so little read, alas!),
+who uttered the finest plea for cigars that this language affords, but I
+will wager not a director of the United Cigar Stores ever read it.
+
+The fine art of smoking used, in older days, to have an etiquette, a
+usage, and traditions of its own, which a more hurried and hygienic age
+has discarded. It was the height of courtesy to ask your friend to let
+you taste his pipe, and draw therefrom three or four mouthfuls of smoke.
+This afforded opportunity for a gracious exchange of compliments. "Will
+it please you to impart your whiff?" was the accepted phrase. And then,
+having savored his mixture, you would have said: "In truth, a very
+excellent leaf," offering your own with proper deprecations. This, and
+many other excellent things, we learn from Mr. Apperson's noble book
+"The Social History of Smoking," which should be prayer book and
+breviary to every smoker con amore.
+
+But the pipe rises perhaps to its highest function as the solace and
+companion of lonely vigils. We all look back with tender affection on
+the joys of tobacco shared with a boon comrade on some walking trip,
+some high-hearted adventure, over the malt-stained counters of some
+remote alehouse. These are the memories that are bittersweet beyond the
+compass of halting words. Never again perhaps will we throw care over
+the hedge and stride with Mifflin down the Banbury Road, filling the
+air with laughter and the fumes of Murray's Mellow. But even deeper is
+the tribute we pay to the sour old elbow of briar, the dented, blackened
+cutty that has been with us through a thousand soundless midnights and a
+hundred weary dawns when cocks were crowing in the bleak air and the pen
+faltered in the hand. Then is the pipe an angel and minister of grace.
+Clocks run down and pens grow rusty, but if your pouch be full your pipe
+will never fail you.
+
+How great is the witching power of this sovereign rite! I cannot even
+read in a book of someone enjoying a pipe without my fingers itching to
+light up and puff with him. My mouth has been sore and baked a hundred
+times after an evening with Elia. The rogue simply can't help talking
+about tobacco, and I strike a match for every essay. God bless him and
+his dear "Orinooko!" Or Parson Adams in "Joseph Andrews"--he lights a
+pipe on every page!
+
+I cannot light up in a wind. It is too precious a rite to be consummated
+in a draught. I hide behind a tree, a wall, a hedge, or bury my head in
+my coat. People see me in the street, vainly seeking shelter. It is a
+weakness, though not a shameful one. But set me in a tavern corner, and
+fill the pouch with "Quiet Moments" (do you know that English mixture?)
+and I am yours to the last ash.
+
+I wonder after all what was the sweetest pipe I ever smoked? I have a
+tender spot in memory for a fill of Murray's Mellow that Mifflin and I
+had in the old smoking room of the Three Crowns Inn at Lichfield. We
+weren't really thirsty, but we drank cider there in honour of Dr.
+Johnson, sitting in his chair and beneath his bust. Then there were
+those pipes we used to smoke at twilight sitting on the steps of 17
+Heriot Row, the old home of R.L.S. in Edinburgh, as we waited for Leerie
+to come by and light the lamps. Oh, pipes of youth, that can never come
+again!
+
+When George Fox was a young man, sorely troubled by visions of the
+devil, a preacher told him to smoke tobacco and sing hymns.
+
+Not such bad advice.
+
+
+
+
+HAY FEBRIFUGE
+
+
+Our village is remarkable. It contains the greatest publisher in the
+world, the most notable department store baron (and inventor of that new
+form of literary essay, the department store ad.), the most fragrant gas
+tanks in the Department of the East, the greatest number of cinders per
+eye of any arondissement served by the R---- railway, and the most
+bitterly afflicted hay fever sufferer on this sneezing sphere. Also the
+editor of the most widely circulated magazine in the world, and the
+author of one of the best selling books that ever was written.
+
+Not bad for one village.
+
+Your first thought is Northampton, Mass., but you are wrong. That is
+where Gerald Stanley Lee lives. For a stamped, addressed envelope I will
+give you the name of our village, and instructions for avoiding it. It
+is bounded on the north by goldenrod, on the south by ragweed, on the
+east by asthma and the pollen of anemophylous plants.
+
+It is bounded on the west by a gray stone facsimile of Windsor Castle,
+confirmed with butlers, buttresses, bastions, ramparts, repartees,
+feudal tenures, moats, drawbridges, posterns, pasterns, chevaux de
+frise, machicolated battlements, donjons, loopholes, machine-gun
+emplacements, caltrops, portcullises, glacis, and all the other travaux
+de fantaisie that make life worth living for retired manufacturers. The
+general effect is emetic in the extreme. Hard by the castle is a
+spurious and richly gabled stable in the general style of the chateau de
+Chantilly. One brief strip of lawn constitutes a gulf of five hundred
+years in architecture, and restrains Runnymede from Versailles.
+
+Our village is famous for beautiful gardens. At five o'clock merchants
+and gens de lettres return home from office and tannery, remove the
+cinders, and commune with vervain and bergamot. The countryside is as
+lovely as Devonshire, equipped with sky, trees, rolling terrain, stewed
+terrapin, golf meads, nut sundaes, beagles, spare tires, and other
+props. But we are equally infamous for hideous houses, of the Chester A.
+Arthur era. Every prospect pleases, and man alone is vile.
+
+There is a large, expensive school for flappers, on a hill; and a
+drugstore or pharmacy where the flappers come to blow off steam. It
+would be worth ten thousand dollars to Beatrice Herford to ambush
+herself behind the Welch's grape juice life-size cut-out, and takes
+notes on flapperiana. Pond Lyceum Bureau please copy.
+
+Our village was once famous also as the dwelling place of an eminent
+parson, who obtained a million signatures for a petition to N. Romanoff,
+asking the abolition of knouting of women in Siberia. And now N.
+Romanoff himself is gone to Siberia, and there is no knouting or giving
+in knoutage; no pogroms or ukases or any other check on the ladies.
+Knitting instead of knouting is the order of the day.
+
+Knoutings for flappers, say I, after returning from the pharmacy or
+drugstore.
+
+Dr. Anna Howard Shaw does not live here, but she is within a day's
+journey on the Cinder and Bloodshot.
+
+But I was speaking of hay fever. "Although not dangerous to life," say
+Drs. S. Oppenheimer and Mark Gottlieb, "it causes at certain times such
+extreme discomfort to some of its victims as to unfit them for their
+ordinary pursuits. If we accept the view that it is a disease of the
+classes rather than the masses we may take the viewpoint of
+self-congratulation rather than of humiliation as indicating a
+superiority in culture and civilization of the favoured few. When the
+intimate connection of pollinosis and culture has been firmly grasped by
+the public mind, the complaint will perhaps come to be looked upon like
+gout, as a sign of breeding. It will be assumed by those who have it
+not.... As civilization and culture advance, other diseases analogous to
+the one under consideration may be developed from oversensitiveness to
+sound, colour, or form, and the man of the twenty-first or twenty-second
+century may be a being of pure intellect whose organization of mere
+nervous pulp would be shattered by a strong emotion, like a pumpkin
+filled with dynamite." (vide "Pollen Therapy in Pollinosis," reprinted
+from the Medical Record, March 18, 1916; and many thanks to Mr. H.L.
+Mencken, fellow sufferer, for sending me a copy of this noble pamphlet.
+I hope to live to grasp Drs. Oppenheimer and Gottlieb by the hand. Their
+essay is marked by a wit and learning that proves them fellow-orgiasts
+in this hypercultivated affliction of the cognoscenti.)
+
+I myself have sometimes attempted to intimate some of the affinities
+between hay fever and genius by attributing it (in the debased form of
+literary parody) to those of great intellectual stature. Upon the
+literary vehicles of expression habitually employed by Rudyard Kipling,
+Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, and Hilaire Belloc I have wafted a pinch
+of ragweed and goldenrod; with surprising results. These intellectuals
+were not more immune than myself. For instance, this is the spasm
+ejaculated by Mr. Edgar Lee Masters, of Spoon River:
+
+    Ed Grimes always did hate me
+    Because I wrote better poetry than he did.
+    In the hay fever season I used to walk
+    Along the river bank, to keep as far as possible
+    Away from pollen.
+    One day Ed and his brother crept up behind me
+    While I was writing a sonnet,
+    Tied my hands and feet,
+    And carried me into a hayfield and left me.
+    I sneezed myself to death.
+    At the funeral the church was full of goldenrod,
+    And I think it must have been Ed
+    Who sowed that ragweed all round my grave.
+
+The Lord loveth a cheerful sneezer, and Mr. Masters deserves great
+credit for lending himself to the cult in this way.
+
+I am a fanatical admirer of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, and have even
+thought of spending fifty of my own dollars, privily and without
+collusion with his publisher, to advertise that remarkable book of his
+called "WE" which is probably the ablest and most original, and
+certainly the most verbose, book that has been written about the war.
+Now Mr. Lee (let me light my pipe and get this right) is the most
+eminent victim of words that ever lived in New England (or indeed
+anywhere east of East Aurora). Words crowd upon him like flies upon a
+honey-pot: he is helpless to resist them. His brain buzzes with them:
+they leap from his eye, distil from his lean and waving hand. Good God,
+not since Rabelais and Lawrence Sterne, miscalled Reverend, has one
+human being been so beclotted, bedazzled, and bedrunken with syllables.
+I adore him for it, but equally I tremble. Glowing, radiant,
+transcendent vocables swim and dissolve in the porches of his brain,
+teasing him with visions far more deeply confused than ever Mr.
+Wordsworth's were. The meanest toothbrush that bristles (he has
+confessed it himself) can fill him with thoughts that do often lie too
+deep for publishers. Perhaps the orotund soul-wamblings of Coleridge are
+recarnate in him, Scawfell become Mount Tom. Who knows? Once I sat at
+lunch with him, and though I am Trencherman Fortissimus (I can give you
+testimonials) my hamburg steak fell from my hand as I listened,
+clutching perilously at the hem of his thought. Nay. Mr. Lee, frown not:
+I say it in sincere devotion. If there is one man and one book this
+country needs, now, it is Gerald Stanley Lee and "WE." Set me upon a
+coral atoll with that volume, I will repopulate the world with
+dictionaries, and beget lusty tomes. It is a breeding-ground for a
+whole new philosophy of heaven, hell, and the New Haven Railroad.
+
+But what I was going to say when I lit my pipe was this: had I the
+stature (not the leanness, God forbid: sweet are the uses of obesity) of
+Mr. Lee, I could find in any clodded trifle the outlets of sky my
+yearning mind covets: hay fever would lead me by prismatic omissions and
+plunging ellipses of thought to the vaster spirals and eddies of
+all-viewing Mind. So does Mr. Lee proceed, weaving a new economics and a
+new bosom for advertisiarchs in the mere act of brushing his teeth. But
+alas, the recurring explosions of the loathsome and intellectual disease
+keep my nose on the grindstone--or handkerchief. Do I begin to soar on
+upward pinion, nose tweaks me back to sealpackerchief.
+
+The trouble with Mr. Lee is that he is a kind of Emerson; a
+constitutional ascete or Brahmin, battling with the staggering
+voluptuosities of his word-sense; a De Quincey needing no opium to set
+him swooning. In fact, he is a poet, and has no control over his
+thoughts. A poet may begin by thinking about a tortoise, or a
+locomotive, or a piece of sirloin, and in one whisk of Time his mind has
+shot up to the conceptions of Eternity, Transportation, and Nourishment:
+his cortex coruscates and suppurates with abstract thought; words
+assail him in hordes, and in a flash he is down among them, overborne
+and fighting for his life. Mr. Lee finds that millionaires are bound
+down and tethered and stifled by their limousines and coupons and
+factories and vast estates. But Mr. Lee himself, who is a millionaire
+and landed proprietor of ideas, is equally the slave of his thronging
+words. They cluster about him like barnacles, nobly and picturesquely
+impeding his progress. He is a Laocoon wrestling with serpentine
+sentences. He ought to be confined to an eight-hour paragraph.
+
+All this is not so by the way as you think. For if the poet is one who
+has lost control of his thoughts, the hay fever sufferer has lost
+control of his nose. His mucous membrane acts like a packet of Roman
+candles, and who is he to say it nay? And our village is bounded on the
+north by goldenrod, on the south by ragweed, on the east by chickweed,
+and on the west by a sleepless night.
+
+I would fain treat pollinosis in the way Mr. Lee might discuss it, but
+that is impossible. Those prolate, sagging spirals of thought, those
+grapevine twists of irremediable whim, that mind shimmering like a
+poplar tree in sun and wind--jetting and spouting like plumbing after a
+freeze-up--'tis beyond me. I fancy that if Mr. Lee were in bed, and the
+sheets were untucked at his feet, he could spin himself so iridescent
+and dove-throated and opaline a philosophy of the desirability of
+sleeping with cold feet, that either (1) he would not need to get out of
+bed to rearrange the bedclothes, or (2) he could persuade someone else
+to do it for him. Think, then, what he could do for hay fever!
+
+And as Dr. Crothers said, when you mix what you think with what you
+think you think, effervescence of that kind always results.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS
+
+
+This book will be found exceedingly valuable for classroom use by
+teachers of theology, hydraulics, and applied engineering. It is
+recommended that it be introduced to students before their minds have
+become hardened, clotted, and skeptical. The author does not hold
+himself responsible for any of the statements in the book, and reserves
+the right to disavow any or all of them under intellectual pressure.
+
+For a rapid quiz, the following suggested topics will be found valuable
+for classroom consideration:
+
+    1. Do you discern any evidences of sincerity and serious moral
+    purpose in this book?
+
+    2. Why was fifty dollars a week not enough for Mr. Kenneth Stockton
+    to live on? Explain three ways in which he augmented his income.
+
+    3. What is a "colyumist"? Give one notorious example.
+
+    4. Comment on Don Marquis's attitude toward
+
+        (a) vers libre poets
+
+        (b) beefsteak and onions
+
+        (c) the cut of his trousers (Explain in detail)
+
+        (d) The Republican Party
+
+    5. Who is Robert Cortes Holliday, and for what is he notable?
+
+    6. Where was Vachel Lindsay fumigated, and why? 7. Who is "The Head
+    of the Firm"?
+
+    8. How much money did the author spend on cider in July, 1911?
+
+    9. Who was Denis Dulcet, and what did he die of?
+
+    10. When did William McFee live in Nutley, and why?
+
+    11. How are the works of Harold Bell Wright most useful in Kings,
+    Long Island?
+
+    12. Where is Strychnine, and what makes it so fascinating to the
+    tourist? Explain
+
+        (a) The Gin Palace
+
+        (b) Kurdmeister
+
+        (c) unedifying Zollverein
+
+    13. What time did Mr. Simmons get home?
+
+    14. What is a "rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct?" Give three
+    examples.
+
+    15. Who are the Dioscuri of Seamen, and what do they do?
+
+    16. How many pipes a day do sensible men smoke? Describe the ideal
+    conditions for a morning pipe.
+
+    17. When did Mr. Blackwell light the furnace?
+
+    18. Name four American writers who are stout enough to be a credit
+    to the profession. 19. "The fumes of the hearty butcher's evening
+    meal ascend the stair in vain." Explain this. Who was the butcher?
+    Why "in vain"?
+
+    20. In what order of the Animal Kingdom does Mr. Pearsall Smith
+    classify himself?
+
+    21. "I hope he fell on the third rail." Explain, and give the
+    context. Who was "he," and why did he deserve this fate?
+
+    22. Who was "Mr. Loomis," and why did he leave his clothes lying
+    about the floor?
+
+    28. What are the Poetry Society dinners doing to Vachel Lindsay?
+
+    24. Why should the Literary Pawnbroker be on his guard against Mr.
+    Richard Le Gallienne?
+
+    25. What is the American House of Lords? Who are "our prosperous
+    carnivora"? Why do they wear white margins inside their waistcoats?
+
+    26. What is _minestrone_? Name three ingredients.
+
+    27. What are "publisher's readers," and why do they smoke pipes?
+
+    28. What was the preacher's advice to George Fox?
+
+    29. Give three reasons why Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee will not like this
+    book.
+
+    30. Why should one wish to grasp Drs. Oppenheimer and Gottlieb by
+    the hand?
+
+    31. In respect of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, comment briefly on these
+    phrases:
+
+        (a) beclotted, bedazzled, and bedrunken with syllables
+
+        (b) the meanest toothbrush that bristles
+
+        (c) Scawfell become Mount Tom
+
+
+FINIS CORONAT OPUS
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHANDYGAFF***
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