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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Plum Pudding, by Christopher Morley,
+Illustrated by Walter Jack Duncan
+
+
+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: Plum Pudding
+       Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned
+
+
+Author: Christopher Morley
+
+Release Date: May 7, 2005  [eBook #15794]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLUM PUDDING***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Janet Kegg and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
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+
+
+
+
+
+PLUM PUDDING
+
+Of divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned
+
+by
+
+CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
+
+And merrily embellished by WALTER JACK DUNCAN
+
+Printed at Garden City, New York,
+by Doubleday, Page & Co'y
+and are to be sold by All Worthy
+Booksellers, together with Other
+Works by the Same Author, thus
+modestly offered to your Attention
+
+1921
+
+Copyright, 1921, by
+Doubleday, Page & Company
+
+All Rights Reserved, Including That Of Translation
+Into Foreign Languages, Including The Scandinavian
+
+Copyright, 1910, by Public Ledger Company
+Copyright, 1920, 1921, by the New York Evening Post, Inc.
+Copyright, 1920, by the Outlook Company
+Copyright, 1921, By the Atlantic Monthly Company
+
+Printed at Garden City, N.Y., U.S.A.
+
+First Edition
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+              BOOKS BY
+          CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
+
+          PARNASSUS ON WHEELS
+          THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP
+          SHANDYGAFF
+          MINCE PIE
+          PIPEFULS
+          KATHLEEN
+          TALES FROM A ROLLTOP DESK
+          SONGS FOR A LITTLE HOUSE
+          THE ROCKING HORSE
+          HIDE AND SEEK
+          CHIMNEYSMOKE
+          TRAVELS IN PHILADELPHIA
+          PLUM PUDDING
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+        THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
+                  TO
+
+          DAVID WILLIAM BONE
+             DON MARQUIS
+           SIMEON STRUNSKY
+
+            MEMBERS OF THE
+      THREE HOURS FOR LUNCH CLUB
+
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+Almost all these sketches were originally published in the New
+York _Evening Post_ and the _Literary Review_. One comes from
+_The Outlook_, one from _The Atlantic Monthly_, one from the
+_Haverford Alumni Quarterly_, and one from the Philadelphia
+_Evening Public Ledger_. The author is indebted to these
+publishers for permission to reprint.
+
+Roslyn, Long Island
+July, 1921
+
+
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+   The Perfect Reader
+   The Autogenesis of a Poet
+   The Old Reliable
+   In Memoriam, Francis Barton Gummere
+   Adventures at Lunch Time
+   Secret Transactions of the Three Hours for Lunch Club
+   Initiation
+   Creed of the Three Hours for Lunch Club
+   A Preface to the Profession of Journalism
+   Fulton Street, and Walt Whitman
+   McSorley's
+   A Portrait
+   Going to Philadelphia
+   Our Tricolour Tie
+   The Club of Abandoned Husbands
+   West Broadway
+   The Rudeness of Poets
+   1100 Words
+   Some Inns
+   The Club in Hoboken
+   The Club at Its Worst
+   A Suburban Sentimentalist
+   Gissing
+   A Dialogue
+   At the Gasthof zum Ochsen
+   Mr. Conrad's New Preface
+   The Little House
+   Tadpoles
+   Magic in Salamis
+   Consider the Commuter
+   The Permanence of Poetry
+   Books of the Sea
+   Fallacious Meditations on Criticism
+   Letting Out the Furnace
+   By the Fireplace
+   A City Note-Book
+   Thoughts in the Subway
+   Dempsey _vs._ Carpentier
+   A Letter to a Sea Captain
+
+
+
+PLUM PUDDING
+
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+THE PERFECT READER
+
+
+On Christmas Eve, while the Perfect Reader sits in his armchair
+immersed in a book--so absorbed that he has let the fire go out--I
+propose to slip gently down the chimney and leave this tribute in
+his stocking. It is not a personal tribute. I speak, on behalf of
+the whole fraternity of writers, this word of gratitude--and envy.
+
+No one who has ever done any writing, or has any ambition toward
+doing so, can ever be a Perfect Reader. Such a one is not
+disinterested. He reads, inevitably, in a professional spirit. He
+does not surrender himself with complete willingness of enjoyment.
+He reads "to see how the other fellow does it"; to note the turn of
+a phrase, the cadence of a paragraph; carrying on a constant
+subconscious comparison with his own work. He broods constantly as
+to whether he himself, in some happy conjuncture of quick mind and
+environing silence and the sudden perfect impulse, might have
+written something like that. He is (poor devil) confessedly selfish.
+On every page he is aware of his own mind running with him, tingling
+him with needle-pricks of conscience for the golden chapters he has
+never written. And so his reading is, in a way, the perfection of
+exquisite misery--and his writing also. When he writes, he yearns to
+be reading; when he reads, he yearns to be writing.
+
+But the Perfect Reader, for whom all fine things are written, knows
+no such delicate anguish. When he reads, it is without any _arrière
+pensée_, any twingeing consciousness of self. I like to think of one
+Perfect Reader of my acquaintance. He is a seafaring man, and this
+very evening he is in his bunk, at sea, the day's tasks completed.
+Over his head is a suitable electric lamp. In his mouth is a pipe
+with that fine wine-dark mahogany sheen that resides upon excellent
+briar of many years' service. He has had (though I speak only by
+guess) a rummer of hot toddy to celebrate the greatest of all
+Evenings. At his elbow is a porthole, brightly curtained with a
+scrap of clean chintz, and he can hear the swash of the seas along
+his ship's tall side. And now he is reading. I can see him reading.
+I know just how his mind feels! Oh, the Perfect Reader! There is not
+an allusion that he misses; in all those lovely printed words he
+sees the subtle secrets that a lesser soul would miss. He (bless his
+heart!) is not thinking how he himself would have written it; his
+clear, keen, outreaching mind is intent only to be one in spirit
+with the invisible and long-dead author. I tell you, if there is
+anywhere a return of the vanished, it is then, at such moments, over
+the tilted book held by the Perfect Reader.
+
+And how quaint it is that he should diminish himself so modestly.
+"Of course" (he says), "I'm only a Reader, and I don't know anything
+about writing----" Why, you adorable creature, _You_ are our court
+of final appeal, you are the one we come to, humbly, to know
+whether, anywhere in our miserable efforts to set out our unruly
+hearts in parallel lines, we have done an honest thing. What do we
+care for what (most of) the critics say? They (we know only too
+well) are not criticising _us_, but, unconsciously, themselves. They
+skew their own dreams into their comment, and blame us for not
+writing what they once wanted to. You we can trust, for you have
+looked at life largely and without pettifogging qualms. The parallel
+lines of our eager pages meet at Infinity--that is, in the infinite
+understanding and judgment of the Perfect Reader.
+
+The enjoyment of literature is a personal communion; it cannot be
+outwardly instilled. The utmost the critic can do is read the
+marriage service over the reader and the book. The union is
+consummated, if at all, in secret. But now and then there comes up
+the aisle a new Perfect Reader, and all the ghosts of literature
+wait for him, starry-eyed, by the altar. And as long as there are
+Perfect Readers, who read with passion, with glory, and then speed
+to tell their friends, there will always be, ever and anon, a
+Perfect Writer.
+
+And so, dear Perfect Reader, a Merry Christmas to you and a New Year
+of books worthy your devotion! When you revive from that book that
+holds you in spell, and find this little note on the cold hearth, I
+hope you may be pleased.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+THE AUTOGENESIS OF A POET
+
+
+The mind trudges patiently behind the senses. Day by day a thousand
+oddities and charms outline themselves tenderly upon consciousness,
+but it may be long before understanding comes with brush and colour
+to fill in the tracery. One learns nothing until he rediscovers it
+for himself. Every now and then, in reading, I have come across
+something which has given me the wild surmise of pioneering mingled
+with the faint magic of familiarity--for instance, some of the
+famous dicta of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley about poetry. I
+realized, then, that a teacher had told me these things in my
+freshman year at college--fifteen years ago. I jotted them down at
+that time, but they were mere catchwords. It had taken me fifteen
+years of vigorous living to overhaul those catchwords and fill them
+with a meaning of my own. The two teachers who first gave me some
+suspicion of what lies in the kingdom of poetry--who gave "so sweet
+a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter into
+it"--are both dead. May I mention their names?--Francis B. Gummere
+and Albert Elmer Hancock, both of Haverford College. I cannot thank
+them as, now, I would like to. For I am (I think) approaching a
+stage where I can somewhat understand and relish the things of which
+they spoke. And I wonder afresh at the patience and charity of those
+who go on lecturing, unabated in zest, to boys of whom one in ten
+may perhaps, fifteen years later, begin to grasp their message.
+
+In so far as any formal or systematic discipline of thought was
+concerned, I think I may say my education was a complete failure.
+For this I had only my own smattering and desultory habit of mind to
+blame and also a vivid troublesome sense of the beauty of it all.
+The charm of the prismatic fringe round the edges made juggling with
+the lens too tempting, and a clear persistent focus was never
+attained. Considered (oddly enough) by my mates as the pattern of a
+diligent scholar, I was in reality as idle as the idlest of them,
+which is saying much; though I confess that my dilettantism was not
+wholly disreputable. My mind excellently exhibited the Heraclitean
+doctrine: a constant flux of information passed through it, but
+nothing remained. Indeed, my senses were so continually crammed with
+new enchanting impressions, and every field of knowledge seemed so
+alluring, it was not strange I made little progress in any.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Perhaps it was unfortunate that both in America and in England I
+found myself in a college atmosphere of extraordinary pictorial
+charm. The Arcadian loveliness of the Haverford campus and the
+comfortable simplicity of its routine; and then the hypnotizing
+beauty and curiosity and subtle flavour of Oxford life (with its
+long, footloose, rambling vacations)--these were aptly devised for
+the exercise of the imagination, which is often a gracious phrase
+for loafing. But these surroundings were too richly entertaining,
+and I was too green and soft and humorous (in the Shakespearean
+sense) to permit any rational continuous plan of study. Like the
+young man to whom Coleridge addressed a poem of rebuke, I was
+abandoned, a greater part of the time, to "an Indolent and Causeless
+Melancholy"; or to its partner, an excessive and not always tasteful
+mirth. I spent hours upon hours, with little profit, in libraries,
+flitting aimlessly from book to book. With something between terror
+and hunger I contemplated the opposite sex. In short, I was
+discreditable and harmless and unlovely as the young Yahoo can be.
+It fills me with amazement to think that my preceptors must have
+seen, in that ill-conditioned creature, some shadow of human
+semblance, or how could they have been so uniformly kind?
+
+Our education--such of it as is of durable importance--comes
+haphazard. It is tinged by the enthusiasms of our teachers, gleaned
+by suggestions from our friends, prompted by glimpses and footnotes
+and margins. There was a time, I think, when I hung in tender
+equilibrium among various possibilities. I was enamoured of
+mathematics and physics: I went far enough in the latter to be
+appointed undergraduate assistant in the college laboratory. I had
+learned, by my junior year, exploring the charms of integral
+calculus, that there is no imaginable mental felicity more serenely
+pure than suspended happy absorption in a mathematical problem. Of
+course I attained no higher than the dregs of the subject; on that
+grovelling level I would still (in Billy Sunday's violent trope)
+have had to climb a tree to look a snake in the eye; but I could see
+that for the mathematician, if for any one, Time stands still
+withal; he is winnowed of vanity and sin. French, German, and Latin,
+and a hasty tincture of Xenophon and Homer (a mere lipwash of
+Helicon) gave me a zeal for philology and the tongues. I was a
+member in decent standing of the college classical club, and visions
+of life as a professor of languages seemed to me far from unhappy. A
+compulsory course in philosophy convinced me that there was still
+much to learn; and I had a delicious hallucination in which I saw
+myself compiling a volume of commentaries on the various systems of
+this queen of sciences. "The Grammar of Agnostics," I think it was
+to be called: it would be written in a neat and comely hand on
+thousands of pages of pure white foolscap: I saw myself adding to it
+night by night, working _ohne Hast, ohne Rast_. And there were other
+careers, too, as statesman, philanthropist, diplomat, that I
+considered not beneath my horoscope. I spare myself the careful
+delineation of these projects, though they would be amusing enough.
+
+But beneath these preoccupations another influence was working its
+inward way. My paramount interest had always been literary, though
+regarded as a gentle diversion, not degraded to a bread-and-butter
+concern. Ever since I had fallen under the superlative spell of
+R.L.S., in whom the cunning enchantment of the written word first
+became manifest, I had understood that books did not grow painlessly
+for our amusement, but were the issue of dexterous and intentional
+skill. I had thus made a stride from Conan Doyle, Cutcliffe Hyne,
+Anthony Hope, and other great loves of my earliest teens; those
+authors' delicious mysteries and picaresques I took for granted, not
+troubling over their method; but in Stevenson, even to a schoolboy
+the conscious artifice and nicety of phrase were puzzingly apparent.
+A taste for literature, however, is a very different thing from a
+determination to undertake the art in person as a means of
+livelihood. It takes brisk stimulus and powerful internal fevers to
+reduce a healthy youth to such a contemplation. All this is a long
+story, and I telescope it rigorously, thus setting the whole matter,
+perhaps, in a false proportion. But the central and operative factor
+is now at hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a certain classmate of mine (from Chicago) whose main
+devotion was to scientific and engineering studies. But since his
+plan embraced only two years at college before "going to work," he
+was (in the fashion traditionally ascribed to Chicago) speeding up
+the cultural knick-knacks of his education. So, in our freshman
+year, he was attending a course on "English Poets of the Nineteenth
+Century," which was, in the regular schedule of things, reserved for
+sophomores (supposedly riper for matters of feeling). Now I was
+living in a remote dormitory on the outskirts of the wide campus
+(that other Eden, demi-paradise, that happy breed of men, that
+little world!) some distance from the lecture halls and busy heart
+of college doings. It was the custom of those quartered in this
+colonial and sequestered outpost to make the room of some central
+classmate a base for the day, where books might be left between
+lectures, and so on. With the Chicagoan, whom we will call "J----,"
+I had struck up a mild friendship; mostly charitable on his part, I
+think, as he was from the beginning one of the most popular and
+influential men in the class, whereas I was one of the rabble. So it
+was, at any rate; and often in the evening, returning from library
+or dining hall on the way to my distant Boeotia, I would drop in at
+his room, in a lofty corner of old Barclay Hall, to pick up
+note-books or anything else I might have left there.
+
+What a pleasant place is a college dormitory at night! The rooms
+with their green-hooded lights and boyish similarity of decoration,
+the amiable buzz and stir of a game of cards under festoons of
+tobacco smoke, the wiry tinkle of a mandolin distantly heard, sudden
+clatter subsiding again into a general humming quiet, the happy
+sense of solitude in multitude, these are the partial ingredients of
+that feeling no alumnus ever forgets. In his pensive citadel, my
+friend J---- would be sitting, with his pipe (one of those new
+"class pipes" with inlaid silver numerals, which appear among every
+college generation toward Christmas time of freshman year). In his
+lap would be the large green volume ("British Poets of the
+Nineteenth Century," edited by Professor Curtis Hidden Page) which
+was the textbook of that sophomore course. He was reading Keats. And
+his eyes were those of one who has seen a new planet swim into his
+ken. I don't know how many evenings we spent there together.
+Probably only a few. I don't recall just how we communed, or
+imparted to one another our juvenile speculations. But I plainly
+remember how he would sit beside his desk-lamp and chuckle over the
+Ode to a Nightingale. He was a quizzical and quickly humorous
+creature, and Keats's beauties seemed to fill him not with
+melancholy or anguish, but with a delighted prostration of laughter.
+The "wormy circumstance" of the Pot of Basil, the Indian Maid
+nursing her luxurious sorrow, the congealing Beads-man and the
+palsied beldame Angela--these and a thousand quaintnesses of phrase
+moved him to a gush of glorious mirth. It was not that he did not
+appreciate the poet, but the unearthly strangeness of it all, the
+delicate contradiction of laws and behaviours known to freshmen,
+tickled his keen wits and emotions until they brimmed into puzzled
+laughter. "Away! Away!" he would cry--
+
+                For I will fly to thee,
+          Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
+          But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
+          Though the dull brain perplexes and retards--
+
+and he would shout with merriment. Beaded bubbles winking at the
+brim; Throbbing throats' long, long melodious moan; Curious
+conscience burrowing like a mole; Emprison her soft hand and let her
+rave; Men slugs and human serpentry; Bade her steep her hair in
+weird syrops; Poor weak palsy-stricken churchyard thing; Shut her
+pure sorrow-drops with glad exclaim--such lines were to him a
+constant and exhilarating excitement. In the very simplicity and
+unsophistication of his approach to the poet was a virgin naïveté of
+discernment that an Edinburgh Reviewer would rarely attain. Here, he
+dimly felt, was the great key
+
+          To golden palaces, strange minstrelsy,
+          ... aye, to all the mazy world
+          Of silvery enchantment.
+
+And in line after line of Endymion, as we pored over them together,
+he found the clear happiness of a magic that dissolved everything
+into lightness and freedom. It is agreeable to remember this man,
+preparing to be a building contractor, who loved Keats because he
+made him laugh. I wonder if the critics have not too insistently
+persuaded us to read our poet in a black-edged mood? After all, his
+nickname was "Junkets."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So it was that I first, in any transcending sense, fell under the
+empire of a poet. Here was an endless fountain of immortal drink:
+here was a history potent to send a young mind from its bodily
+tenement. The pleasure was too personal to be completely shared; for
+the most part J---- and I read not together, but each by each, he
+sitting in his morris chair by the desk, I sprawled upon his couch,
+reading, very likely, different poems, but communicating, now and
+then, a sudden discovery. Probably I exaggerate the subtlety of our
+enjoyment, for it is hard to review the unself-scrutinizing moods of
+freshmanhood. It would be hard, too, to say which enthusiast had the
+greater enjoyment: he, because these glimpses through magic
+casements made him merry; I, because they made me sad. Outside, the
+snow sparkled in the pure winter night; the long lance windows of
+the college library shone yellow-panelled through the darkness, and
+there would be the occasional interruption of light-hearted
+classmates. How perfectly it all chimed into the mood of St. Agnes'
+Eve! The opening door would bring a gust of lively sound from down
+the corridor, a swelling jingle of music, shouts from some humorous
+"rough-house" (probably those sophomores on the floor below)--
+
+          The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion
+          The kettle-drum, and far-heard clarionet
+          Affray his ears, though but in dying tone--
+          The hall-door shuts again, and all the noise is gone.
+
+It did not take very long for J---- to work through the fifty pages
+of Keats reprinted in Professor Hidden Page's anthology; and then
+he, a lone and laughing faun among that pack of stern sophomores--so
+flewed, so sanded, out of the Spartan kind, crook-knee'd and
+dewlapped like Thessalian bulls--sped away into thickets of Landor,
+Tennyson, the Brownings. There I, an unprivileged and unsuspected
+hanger-on, lost their trail, returning to my own affairs. For some
+reason--I don't know just why--I never "took" that course in
+Nineteenth Century Poets, in the classroom at any rate. But just as
+Mr. Chesterton, in his glorious little book, "The Victorian Age in
+Literature," asserts that the most important event in English
+history was the event that never happened at all (you yourself may
+look up his explanation) so perhaps the college course that meant
+most to me was the one I never attended. What it meant to those
+sophomores of the class of 1909 is another gentle speculation. Three
+years later, when I was a senior, and those sophomores had left
+college, another youth and myself were idly prowling about a
+dormitory corridor where some of those same sophomores had
+previously lodged. An unsuspected cupboard appeared to us, and
+rummaging in it we found a pile of books left there, forgotten, by a
+member of that class. It was a Saturday afternoon, and my companion
+and I had been wondering how we could raise enough cash to go to
+town for dinner and a little harmless revel. To shove those books
+into a suitcase and hasten to Philadelphia by trolley was the
+obvious caper; and Leary's famous old bookstore ransomed the volumes
+for enough money to provide an excellent dinner at Lauber's, where,
+in those days, the thirty-cent bottle of sour claret was considered
+the true, the blushful Hippocrene. But among the volumes was a copy
+of Professor Page's anthology which had been used by one of J----'s
+companions in that poetry course. This seemed to me too precious to
+part with, so I retained it; still have it; and have occasionally
+studied the former owner's marginal memoranda. At the head of The
+Eve of St. Agnes he wrote: "Middle Ages. N. Italy. Guelph,
+Guibilline." At the beginning of Endymion he recorded: "Keats tries
+to be spiritualized by love for celestials." Against Sleep and
+Poetry: "Desultory. Genius in the larval state." The Ode on a
+Grecian Urn, he noted: "Crystallized philosophy of idealism.
+Embalmed anticipation." The Ode on Melancholy: "Non-Gothic. Not of
+intellect or disease. Emotions."
+
+Darkling I listen to these faint echoes from a vanished lecture
+room, and ponder. Did J---- keep his copy of the book, I wonder, and
+did he annotate it with lively commentary of his own? He left
+college at the end of our second year, and I have not seen or heard
+from him these thirteen years. The last I knew--six years ago--he
+was a contractor in an Ohio city; and (is this not significant?) in
+a letter written then to another classmate, recalling some
+waggishness of our own sophomore days, he used the phrase "Like Ruth
+among the alien corn."
+
+In so far as one may see turning points in a tangle of yarn, or
+count dewdrops on a morning cobweb, I may say that a few evenings
+with my friend J---- were the decisive vibration that moved one more
+minor poet toward the privilege and penalty of Parnassus. One cannot
+nicely decipher such fragile causes and effects. It was a year later
+before the matter became serious enough to enforce abandoning
+library copies of Keats and buying an edition of my own. And this,
+too, may have been not unconnected with the gracious influence of
+the other sex as exhibited in a neighbouring athenæum; and was
+accompanied by a gruesome spate of florid lyrics: some (happily)
+secret, and some exposed with needless hardihood in a college
+magazine. The world, which has looked leniently upon many poetical
+minorities, regards such frenzies with tolerant charity and
+forgetfulness. But the wretch concerned may be pardoned for looking
+back in a mood of lingering enlargement. As Sir Philip Sidney put
+it, "Self-love is better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous
+wherein ourselves be parties."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is a vast deal of nonsense written and uttered about poetry.
+In an age when verses are more noisily and fluently circulated than
+ever before, it might seem absurd to plead in the Muse's defence.
+Yet poetry and the things poets love are pitifully weak to-day. In
+essence, poetry is the love of life--not mere brutish tenacity of
+sensation, but a passion for all the honesties that make life free
+and generous and clean. For two thousand years poets have mocked and
+taunted the cruelties and follies of men, but to what purpose?
+Wordsworth said: "In spite of difference of soil and climate, of
+language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things
+silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed, the Poet
+binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human
+society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time."
+Sometimes it seems as though "things violently destroyed," and the
+people who destroy them, are too strong for the poets. Where, now,
+do we see any cohesive binding together of humanity? Are we nearer
+these things than when Wordsworth and Coleridge walked and talked on
+the Quantock Hills or on that immortal road "between Porlock and
+Linton"? Hardy writes "The Dynasts," Joseph Conrad writes his great
+preface to "The Nigger of the _Narcissus_," but do the destroyers
+hear them? Have you read again, since the War, Gulliver's "Voyage to
+the Houyhnhnms," or Herman Melville's "Moby Dick"? These men wrote,
+whether in verse or prose, in the true spirit of poets; and Swift's
+satire, which the text-book writers all tell you is so gross and
+savage as to suggest the author's approaching madness, seems tender
+and suave by comparison with what we know to-day.
+
+Poetry is the log of man's fugitive castaway soul upon a doomed and
+derelict planet. The minds of all men plod the same rough roads of
+sense; and in spite of much knavery, all win at times "an ampler
+ether, a diviner air." The great poets, our masters, speak out of
+that clean freshness of perception. We hear their voices--
+
+     I there before thee, in the country that well thou knowest,
+     Already arrived am inhaling the odorous air.
+
+So it is not vain, perhaps, to try clumsily to tell how this
+delicious uneasiness first captured the spirit of one who, if not a
+poet, is at least a lover of poetry. Thus he first looked beyond the
+sunset; stood, if not on Parnassus, tiptoe upon a little hill. And
+overhead a great wind was blowing.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+THE OLD RELIABLE
+
+
+"Express train stalled in a snowdrift," said one. "The irascible old
+white-haired gentleman in the Pullman smoker; the good-natured
+travelling salesman; the wistful young widow in the day coach, with
+her six-year-old blue-eyed little daughter. A coal-black Pullman
+porter who braves the shrieking gale to bring in a tree from the
+copse along the track. Red-headed brakeman (kiddies of his own at
+home), frostbitten by standing all night between the couplings,
+holding parts of broken steampipe together so the Pullman car will
+keep warm. Young widow and her child, of course, sleeping in the
+Pullman; white-haired old gentleman vacates his berth in their
+favour. Good-natured travelling salesman up all night, making
+cigar-band decorations for the Tree, which is all ready in the
+dining car in the morning----"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Old English inn on a desolate moor," said another. "Bright fire of
+coals in the coffee room, sporting prints, yellow old newspaper
+cutting framed on the mantelpiece describing gruesome murder
+committed in the house in 1760. Terrible night of storm--sleet
+tingling on the panes; crimson curtains fluttering in the draught;
+roads crusted with ice; savoury fumes of roast goose, plum pudding,
+and brandy. Pretty chambermaid in evident anxiety about something;
+guest tries to kiss her in the corridor; she's too distrait to give
+the matter proper attention. She has heard faint agonized cries
+above the howling of the gale----"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I like the sound of hymns," ventured a third. "Frosty vestibule of
+fashionable church, rolling thunders of the organ, fringes of
+icicles silvered by moonlight, poor old Salvation Army Santa Claus
+shivering outside and tinkling his pathetic little bell. Humane
+note: those scarlet Christmas robes of the Army not nearly as warm
+as they look. Hard-hearted vestryman, member of old Knickerbocker
+family, always wears white margins on his vest, suddenly touched by
+compassion, empties the collection plate into Santa's bucket. Santa
+hurries off to the S.A. headquarters crying 'The little ones will
+bless you for this.' Vestryman accused of having pocketed the
+collection, dreadful scandal, too proud to admit what he had done
+with it----"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Christmas Eve in the Ambrose Channel," cried a fourth. "A blizzard
+blowing. The pilot boat, sheathed with ice, wallowing in the teeth
+of the blinding storm, beats her way up to the lee of the great
+liner. The pilot, suddenly taken ill, lies gasping on the sofa of
+the tiny cabin. Impossible for him to take the great liner into
+port; 2,000 passengers eager to get home for Christmas. But who is
+this gallant little figure darting up the rope ladder with
+fluttering skirts? The pilot's fourteen-year-old daughter. '_I_ will
+take the _Nausea_ to her berth! I've spent all my life in the Bay,
+and know every inch of the channel.' Rough quartermaster weeps as
+she takes the wheel from his hands. 'Be easy in your mind, Captain,'
+she says; 'but before the customs men come aboard tell me one
+thing--have you got that bottle of Scotch for my Daddy?'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Big New York department store," insisted the fifth. "Beautiful
+dark-haired salesgirl at the silk stocking counter. Her slender form
+trembles with fatigue, but she greets all customers with brave,
+sweet courtesy. Awful crush, every one buying silk stockings. Kindly
+floorwalker, sees she is overtaxed, suggests she leave early. Dark
+girl refuses; says she must be faithful to the Christmas spirit;
+moreover, she daren't face the evening battle on the subway.
+Handsome man comes to the counter to buy. Suddenly a scream, a thud,
+horrified outcries. Hold back the crowd! Call a physician! No good;
+handsome man, dead, murdered. Dark-haired girl, still holding the
+fatal hat-pin, taken in custody, crying hysterically 'When he gave
+me his name, I couldn't help it. He's the one who has caused all the
+trouble!' Floorwalker reverently covers the body with a cloth, then
+looks at the name on the sales slip. 'Gosh,' he cries, aghast, 'it's
+Coles Phillips!'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The gathering broke up, and the five men strolled out into the
+blazing August sunshine. The sultry glow of midsummer beat down upon
+them, but their thoughts were far away. They were five popular
+authors comparing notes on the stories they were writing for the
+Christmas magazines.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+IN MEMORIAM
+FRANCIS BARTON GUMMERE
+
+
+I often wonder what inward pangs of laughter or despair he may have
+felt as he sat behind the old desk in Chase Hall and watched us
+file in, year after year! Callow, juvenile, ignorant, and
+cocksure--grotesquely confident of our own manly fulness of worldly
+_savoir_--an absurd rabble of youths, miserable flint-heads indeed
+for such a steel! We were the most unpromising of all material for
+the scholar's eye; comfortable, untroubled middle-class lads most of
+us, to whom study was neither a privilege nor a passion, but only a
+sober and decent way of growing old enough to enter business.
+
+We did not realize how accurately--and perhaps a trifle grimly--the
+strong, friendly face behind the desk was searching us and sizing us
+up. He knew us for what we were--a group of nice boys, too sleek,
+too cheerfully secure, to show the ambition of the true student.
+There was among us no specimen of the lean and dogged crusader of
+learning that kindles the eye of the master: no fanatical Scot,
+such as rejoices the Oxford or Cambridge don; no liquid-orbed and
+hawk-faced Hebrew with flushed cheek bones, such as sets the
+pace in the class-rooms of our large universities. No: we were a
+hopelessly mediocre, well-fed, satisfied, and characteristically
+Quakerish lot. As far as the battle for learning goes, we were
+pacifists--conscientious objectors.
+
+It is doubtful whether any really great scholar ever gave the best
+years of his life to so meagrely equipped a succession of
+youngsters! I say this candidly, and it is well it should be said,
+for it makes apparent the true genius of Doctor Gummere's great
+gift. He turned this following of humble plodders into lovers and
+zealots of the great regions of English letters. There was something
+knightly about him--he, the great scholar, who would never stoop to
+scoff at the humblest of us. It might have been thought that his
+shining gifts were wasted in a small country college, where not one
+in fifty of his pupils could follow him into the enchanted lands of
+the imagination where he was fancy-free. But it was not so. One may
+meet man after man, old pupils of his, who have gone on into the
+homely drudging rounds of business, the law, journalism--men whose
+faces will light up with affection and remembrance when Doctor
+Gummere's name is mentioned. We may have forgotten much of our
+Chaucer, our Milton, our Ballads--though I am sure we have none of
+us forgotten the deep and thrilling vivacity of his voice reciting:
+
+      O where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son?
+      O where hae ye been, my handsome young man?
+      I hae been to the wild wood; mither, make my bed soon,
+      For I'm weary wi' hunting and fain wald lie doun.
+
+But what we learned from him lay in the very charm of his
+personality. It was a spell that no one in his class-room could
+escape. It shone from his sparkling eye; it spoke in his
+irresistible humour; it moved in every line of that well-loved face,
+in his characteristic gesture of leaning forward and tilting his
+head a little to one side as he listened, patiently, to whatever
+juvenile surmises we stammered to express. It was the true learning
+of which his favourite Sir Philip Sidney said:
+
+     This purifying of wit, this enriching of memory, enabling of
+     judgment, and enlarging of conceit, which commonly we call
+     learning, under what name soever it come forth or to what
+     immediate end soever it be directed, the final end is to lead
+     and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls,
+     made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of.
+
+Indeed, just to listen to him was a purifying of wit, an enriching
+of memory, an enabling of judgment, an enlarging of imagination. He
+gave us "so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any man to
+enter into it."
+
+He moved among all human contacts with unerring grace. He was never
+the teacher, always the comrade. It was his way to pretend that we
+knew far more than we did; so with perfect courtesy and gravity, he
+would ask our opinion on some matter of which we knew next to
+nothing; and we knew it was only his exquisiteness of good manners
+that impelled the habit; and we knew he knew the laughableness of
+it; yet we adored him for it. He always suited his strength to our
+weakness; would tell us things almost with an air of apology for
+seeming to know more than we; pretending that we doubtless had known
+it all along, but it had just slipped our memory. Marvellously he
+set us on our secret honour to do justice to this rare courtesy. To
+fail him in some task he had set became, in our boyish minds, the
+one thing most abhorrent in dealing with such a man--a discourtesy.
+He was a man of the rarest and most delicate breeding, the finest
+and truest gentleman we had known. Had he been nothing else, how
+much we would have learnt from that alone.
+
+What a range, what a grasp, there was in his glowing, various mind!
+How open it was on all sides, how it teemed with interests, how
+different from the scholar of silly traditional belief! We used to
+believe that he could have taught us history, science, economics,
+philosophy--almost anything; and so indeed he did. He taught us to
+go adventuring among masterpieces on our own account, which is the
+most any teacher can do. Luckiest of all were those who, on one
+pretext or another, found their way to his fireside of an evening.
+To sit entranced, smoking one of his cigars,[*] to hear him talk of
+Stevenson, Meredith, or Hardy--(his favourites among the moderns)
+to marvel anew at the infinite scope and vivacity of his
+learning--this was to live on the very doorsill of enchantment.
+Homeward we would go, crunching across the snow to where Barclay
+crowns the slope with her evening blaze of lights, one glimpse
+nearer some realization of the magical colours and tissues of the
+human mind, the rich perplexity and many-sided glamour of life.
+
+     [* It was characteristic of him that he usually smoked _Robin
+     Hood_, that admirable 5-cent cigar, because the name, and the
+     picture of an outlaw on the band, reminded him of the 14th
+     century Ballads he knew by heart.]
+
+It is strange (as one reviews all the memories of that good friend
+and master) to think that there is now a new generation beginning at
+Haverford that will never know his spell. There is a heavy debt on
+his old pupils. He made life so much richer and more interesting for
+us. Even if we never explored for ourselves the fields of literature
+toward which he pointed, his radiant individuality remains in our
+hearts as a true exemplar of what scholarship can mean. We can never
+tell all that he meant to us. Gropingly we turn to little pictures
+in memory. We see him crossing Cope Field in the green and gold of
+spring mornings, on his way to class. We see him sitting on the
+verandah steps of his home on sunny afternoons, full of gay and
+eager talk on a thousand diverse topics. He little knew, I think,
+how we hung upon his words. I can think of no more genuine tribute
+than this: that in my own class--which was a notoriously cynical and
+scoffish band of young sophisters--when any question of religious
+doubt or dogma arose for discussion among some midnight group,
+someone was sure to say, "I wish I knew what Doctor Gummere thought
+about it!" We felt instinctively that what he thought would have
+been convincing enough for us.
+
+He was a truly great man. A greater man than we deserved, and there
+is a heavy burden upon us to justify the life that he gave to our
+little college. He has passed into the quiet and lovely tradition
+that surrounds and nourishes that place we all love so well. Little
+by little she grows, drawing strength and beauty from human lives
+around her, confirming herself in honour and remembrance. The
+teacher is justified by his scholars. Doctor Gummere might have gone
+elsewhere, surrounded by a greater and more ambitiously documented
+band of pupils. He whom we knew as the greatest man we had ever
+seen, moved little outside the world of learning. He gave himself to
+us, and we are the custodians of his memory.
+
+Every man who loved our vanished friend must know with what
+realization of shamed incapacity one lays down the tributary pen. He
+was so strong, so full of laughter and grace, so truly a man, his
+long vacation still seems a dream, and we feel that somewhere on the
+well-beloved campus we shall meet him and feel that friendly hand.
+In thinking of him I am always reminded of that fine old poem of Sir
+Henry Wotton, a teacher himself, the provost of Eton, whose life has
+been so charmingly written by another Haverfordian--(Logan Pearsall
+Smith).
+
+            THE CHARACTER OF A HAPPY LIFE
+
+          How happy is he born and taught
+            That serveth not another's will;
+          Whose armour is his honest thought,
+            And simple truth his utmost skill!
+
+          Whose passions not his masters are;
+            Whose soul is still prepared for death
+          Not tied unto the world by care
+            Of public fame or private breath;
+
+          Who envies none that chance doth raise,
+            Nor vice; who never understood
+          How deepest wounds are given by praise;
+            Nor rules of state, but rules of good;
+
+          Who hath his life from rumours freed;
+            Whose conscience is his strong retreat;
+          Whose state can neither flatterers feed,
+            Nor ruin make oppressors great;
+
+          Who God doth late and early pray
+            More of His grace than gifts to lend;
+          And entertains the harmless day
+            With a well-chosen book or friend;
+
+          This man is freed from servile bands
+            Of hope to rise or fear to fall:
+          Lord of himself, though not of lands,
+            And having nothing, yet hath all.
+
+Such was the Happy Man as Sir Henry Wotton described him. Such, I
+think, was the life of our friend. I think it must have been a happy
+life, for he gave so much happiness to others.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+ADVENTURES AT LUNCH TIME
+
+
+This window by which we sit is really very trying to our spirit. On
+a clear fluid blue day the sunlight pours over the cliffs and craggy
+coves and angles of the great buildings round St. Paul's churchyard.
+We can see the temptation of being a cubist painter as we study all
+those intersecting planes of light and shadow. Across the way, on
+Fulton Street, above the girl in a green hat who is just now
+ingurgitating a phial of orangeade, there are six different roof
+levels, rising like steps toward the gold lightning bolts of the
+statue on top of the Telephone and Telegraph Building. Each of
+these planes carries its own particular impact of light or shadow.
+The sunshine seems to flow like an impalpable cataract over the top
+of the Hudson Terminal, breaking and shining in a hundred splashes
+and pools of brightness among the stone channels below. Far down the
+course of Church Street we can see the top floors of the Whitehall
+Building. We think of the little gilt ball that darts and dances so
+merrily in the fountain jet in front of that building. We think of
+the merry mercators of the Whitehall Club sitting at lunch on the
+cool summit of that great edifice. We think of the view as seen from
+there, the olive-coloured gleam of the water, the ships and tugs
+speckled about the harbour. And, looking down, we can see a peaceful
+gentleman sitting on a bench in St. Paul's graveyard, reading a
+book. We think seriously of writing a note, "_What are you
+reading?_" and weighting it with an inkwell and hurling it down to
+him. This window continually draws our mind outward and sets us
+speculating, when we ought to be answering letters or making
+inquiries of coal dealers as to whether there is any chance of
+getting a supply for next winter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On such a day, having in mind that we ought to write another chapter
+of our book "How to Spend Three Hours at Lunch Time," we issued
+forth with Endymion to seek refreshment. It was a noontide to stir
+even the most carefully fettered bourgeois to impulses of escapade
+and foray. What should we do? At first we had some thought of
+showing to Endymion the delightful subterranean passage that leads
+from the cathedral grottoes of the Woolworth Building to the City
+Hall subway station, but we decided we could not bear to leave the
+sunlight. So we chose a path at random and found ourselves at the
+corner of Beekman and Gold streets.
+
+Now our intention was to make tracks toward Hanover Square and there
+to consider the world as viewed over the profile of a slab of
+cheesecake; but on viewing the agreeable old house at the corner of
+Gold Street--"The Old Beekman, Erected 1827," once called the Old
+Beekman Halfway House, but now the Old Beekman Luncheonette--no
+hungry man in his senses could pass without tarrying. A flavour of
+comely and respectable romance was apparent in this pleasant place,
+with its neat and tight-waisted white curtains in the upstairs
+windows and an outdoor stairway leading up to the second floor.
+Inside, at a table in a cool, dark corner, we dealt with hot dogs
+and cloudy cider in a manner beyond criticism. The name Luncheonette
+does this fine tavern serious injustice: there is nothing of the
+feminine or the soda fountain about it: it is robust, and we could
+see by the assured bearing of some well-satisfied habitués that it
+is an old landmark in that section.
+
+But the brisk air and tempting serenity of the day made it seem
+emphatically an occasion for two lunches, and we passed on, along
+Pearl Street, in the bright checkerboard of sunbeams that slip
+through the trestles of the "L." It was cheerful to see that the
+same old Spanish cafés are still there, though we were a little
+disappointed to see that one of them has moved from its old-time
+quarters, where that fine brass-bound stairway led up from the
+street, to a new and gaudy palace on the other side. We also admired
+the famous and fascinating camp outfitting shop at 208 Pearl Street,
+which apparently calls itself WESTMINSTER ABBEY: but that
+is not the name of the shop but of the proprietor. We have been told
+that Mr. Abbey's father christened him so, intending him to enter
+the church. In the neighbourhood of Cliff and Pearl streets we
+browsed about enjoying the odd and savoury smells. There are all
+sorts of aromas in that part of the city, coffee and spices, drugs,
+leather, soap, and cigars. There was one very sweet, pervasive, and
+subtle smell, a caressing harmony for the nostril, which we pursued
+up and down various byways. Here it would quicken and grow almost
+strong enough for identification; then again it would become faint
+and hardly discernible. It had a rich, sweet oily tang, but we were
+at a loss to name it. We finally concluded that it was the bouquet
+of an "odourless disinfectant" that seemed to have its headquarters
+near by. In one place some bales of dried and withered roots were
+being loaded on a truck: they gave off a faint savour, which was
+familiar but baffling. On inquiry, these were sarsaparilla. Endymion
+was pleased with a sign on a doorway: "_Crude drugs and spices and
+essential oils._" This, he said, was a perfect Miltonic line.
+
+Hanover Square, however, was the apex of our pilgrimage. To come
+upon India House is like stepping back into the world of Charles
+Lamb. We had once lunched in the clubrooms upstairs with a charming
+member and we had never forgotten the old seafaring prints, the
+mustard pots of dark blue glass, the five-inch mutton chops, the
+Victorian contour of the waiter's waistcoat of green and yellow
+stripe. This time we fared toward the tavern in the basement, where
+even the outsider may penetrate, and were rejoiced by a snug table
+in the corner. Here we felt at once the true atmosphere of lunching,
+which is at its best when one can get in a corner, next to some old
+woodwork rubbed and shiny with age. Shandygaff, we found, was not
+unknown to the servitor; and the cider that we saw Endymion beaming
+upon was a blithe, clear yellow, as merry to look at as a fine white
+wine. Very well, very well indeed, we said to ourselves; let the
+world revolve; in the meantime, what is that printed in blackface
+type upon the menu? We have looked upon the faces of many men, we
+have endured travail and toil and perplexity, we have written much
+rot and suffered much inward shame to contemplate it; but in the
+meantime (we said, gazing earnestly upon the face of Endymion), in
+the meantime, we repeated, and before destiny administers that final
+and condign chastisement that we ripely merit, let us sit here in
+the corner of the India House and be of good cheer. And at this
+point, matters being so, and a second order of butter being already
+necessary, the waiter arrived with the Spanish omelet.
+
+Homeward by the way of South Street, admiring the slender concave
+bows of fine ships--the _Mexico_ and the _Santa Marta_, for
+instance--and privily wondering what were our chances of smelling
+blue water within the next quinquennium, we passed in mild and
+placid abandonment. On Burling Slip, just where in former times
+there used to hang a sign KIPLING BREW (which always interested us),
+we saw a great, ragged, burly rogue sitting on a doorstep. He had
+the beard of a buccaneer, the placid face of one at ease with
+fortune. He hitched up his shirt and shifted from one ham to another
+with supreme and sunkissed contentment. And Endymion, who sees all
+things as the beginnings of heavenly poems, said merrily: "As I was
+walking on Burling Slip, I saw a seaman without a ship."
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+SECRET TRANSACTIONS OF THE THREE HOURS FOR LUNCH CLUB
+
+
+The doctor having been elected a member of the club, a meeting was
+held to celebrate the event. Bowling Green, Esq., secretary, was
+instructed to prepare carefully confidential minutes. Weather: fair
+and tepid. Wind: N.N.E. Course laid: From starting line at a Church
+Street bookshop, where the doctor bought a copy of "Limbo," by
+Aldous Huxley, to Pier 56, N.R. Course made good: the same.
+
+The doctor was in excellent form. On the Fourteenth Street car a
+human being was arguing fiercely and loudly with the conductor about
+some controversial matter touching upon fares and destinations. The
+clamour was great. Said the doctor, adjusting his eye-glass and
+gazing with rebuke toward the disputants: "I will be gratified when
+this tumult subsides." The doctor has been added to the membership
+of the club in order to add social tone to the gathering. His charm
+is infinite; his manners are of a delicacy and an aplomb. His
+speech, when he is of waggish humour, carries a tincture of Queen
+Anne phraseology that is subtle and droll. A man, indeed! _L'extrême
+de charme_, as M. Djer-Kiss loves to say what time he woos the
+public in the theatre programmes.
+
+The first thrill was when Bowling Green, Esq., secretary, cast an
+eye upward as the club descended from the Fourteenth Street
+sharabang, and saw, over the piers, the tall red funnels of the
+_Aquitania_. This is going to be great doings, said he to himself. O
+Cunard Line funnels! What is there that so moves the heart?
+
+Bowling Green, Esq., confesses that it is hard to put these minutes
+into cold and calculated narrative. Among ships and seafaring
+concerns his heart is too violently stirred to be quite _maître de
+soi_.
+
+The club moved forward. Welcomed by the suave commissionaire of the
+Cunard Line, it was invited to rise in the elevator. On the upper
+floor of the pier the members ran to the windows. There lay the
+_Aquitania_ at her pier. The members' hearts were stirred. Even the
+doctor, himself a hardened man of the sea, showed a brilliant spark
+of emotion behind his monocular attic window. A ship in dock--and
+what a ship! A ship at a city pier, strange sight. It is like a lion
+in a circus cage. She, the beauty, the lovely living creature of
+open azure and great striding ranges of the sea, she that needs
+horizons and planets for her fitting perspective, she that asks the
+snow and silver at her irresistible stern, she that persecutes the
+sunset across the purple curves of the longitudes--tied up stiff and
+dead in the dull ditch of a dockway. The upward slope of that great
+bow, it was never made to stand still against a dusty pier-end.
+
+The club proceeded and found itself in a little eddy of pure
+Scotland. The _Columbia_ was just in from Glasgow--had docked only
+an hour before. The doctor became very Scots in a flash. "Aye,
+bonny!" was his reply to every question asked him by Mr. Green, the
+diligent secretary. The secretary was addressed as "lad." A hat now
+became a "bonnet." The fine stiff speech of Glasgow was heard on
+every side, for the passengers were streaming through the customs.
+Yon were twa bonny wee brithers, aiblins ten years old, that came
+marching off, with bare knees and ribbed woollen stockings and
+little tweed jackets. O Scotland, Scotland, said our hairt! The wund
+blaws snell frae the firth, whispered the secretary to himself,
+keeking about, but had not the courage to utter it.
+
+Here the secretary pauses on a point of delicacy. It was the purpose
+of the club to visit Capt. David W. Bone of the _Columbia_, but the
+captain is a modest man, and one knows not just how much of our
+admiration of him and his ship he would care to see spread upon the
+minutes. Were Mr. Green such a man as the captain, would he be
+lowering himself to have any truck with journalists and such petty
+folk? Mr. Green would not. Mark you: Captain Bone is the master of
+an Atlantic liner, a veteran of the submarine-haunted lanes of sea,
+a writer of fine books (have you, lovers of sea tales, read "The
+Brassbounder" and "Broken Stowage"?) a collector of first editions,
+a man who stood on the bridge of the flagship at Harwich and watched
+the self-defiled U-boats slink in and come to a halt at the
+international code signal MN (Stop instantly!)--"Ha," said Mr.
+Green, "Were I such a man, I would pass by like shoddy such pitifuls
+as colyumists." But he was a glad man no less, for he knew the
+captain was bigger of heart. Besides, he counted on the exquisite
+tact of the doctor to see him through. Indeed, even the stern
+officials of the customs had marked the doctor as a man exceptional.
+And as the club stood patiently among the outward flux of authentic
+Glasgow, came the captain himself and welcomed them aboard.
+
+Across immaculate decks, and in the immortal whiff, indefinable, of
+a fine ship just off the high seas, trod the beatified club. A ship,
+the last abiding place in a mannerless world of good old-fashioned
+caste, and respect paid upward with due etiquette and discipline
+through the grades of rank. The club, for a moment, were guests of
+the captain; deference was paid to them. They stood in the captain's
+cabin (sacred words). "Boy!" cried the captain, in tones of command.
+Not as one speaks to office boys in a newspaper kennel, in a voice
+of entreaty. The boy appeared: a curly-headed, respectful stripling.
+A look of respect: how well it sits upon youth. "Boy!" said the
+captain--but just what the captain said is not to be put upon vulgar
+minutes. Remember, pray, the club was upon British soil.
+
+In the saloon sat the club, and their faces were the faces of men at
+peace, men harmonious and of delicate cheer. The doctor, a seafaring
+man, talked the lingo of imperial mariners: he knew the right things
+to say: he carried along the humble secretary, who gazed in
+melodious mood upon the jar of pickled onions. At sea Mr. Green is
+of lurking manners: he holds fast to his bunk lest worse befall; but
+a ship in port is his empire. Scotch broth was before them--pukka
+Scotch broth, the doctor called it; and also the captain and the
+doctor had some East Indian name for the chutney. The secretary
+resolved to travel and see the world. Curried chicken and rice was
+the word: and, not to exult too cruelly upon you (O excellent
+friends!), let us move swiftly over the gooseberry tart. There was
+the gooseberry tart, and again, a few minutes later, it was not
+there. All things have their appointed end. "Boy!" said the captain.
+(Must I remind you, we were on imperial soil.) Is it to be said that
+the club rose to the captain's cabin once more, and matters of
+admirable purport were tastefully discussed, as is the habit of us
+mariners?
+
+"The drastic sanity of the sea"--it is a phrase from a review of one
+of the captain's own books, "Merchantmen-at-Arms," which this club
+(so it runs upon the minutes), as lovers of sea literature,
+officially hope may soon be issued on this side also. It is a
+phrase, if these minutes are correct, from a review written by H.M.
+Tomlinson, another writer of the sea, of whom we have spoken before,
+and may, in God's providence, again. "The drastic sanity of the sea"
+was the phrase that lingered in our mind as we heard the captain
+talk of books and of discipline at sea and of the trials imposed
+upon shipmasters by the La Follette act. (What, the club wondered
+inwardly, does Mr. La Follette know of seafaring?) "The drastic
+sanity of the sea!" We thought of other sailors we had known, and
+how they had found happiness and simplicity in the ordered combat
+with their friendly enemy. A virtue goes out of a ship (Joseph
+Conrad said, in effect) when she touches her quay. Her beauty and
+purpose are, for the moment, dulled and dimmed. But even there, how
+much she brings us. How much, even though we do not put it into
+words, the faces and accents of our seafaring friends give us in the
+way of plain wisdom and idealism. And the secretary, as he stepped
+aboard the hubbub of a subway train, was still pondering "the
+drastic sanity of the sea."
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+INITIATION
+
+
+Allured by the published transactions of the club, our friend Lawton
+presented himself at the headquarters toward lunch time and
+announced himself as a candidate for membership. An executive
+session was hastily convened. Endymion broke the news to the
+candidate that initiates in this select organization are expected to
+entertain the club at luncheon. To the surprise of the club, our
+genial visitor neither shrank nor quailed. His face was bland and
+his bearing ambitious in the extreme. Very well, he said; as long as
+it isn't the Beaux Arts café.
+
+The itinerary of the club for this day had already been arranged by
+the secretary. The two charter members, plus the high-spirited
+acolyte, made their way along West Street toward the Cortlandt
+Street ferry. It was plain from the outset that fortune had favoured
+the organization with a new member of the most sparkling quality.
+Every few yards a gallant witticism fell from him. Some of these the
+two others were able to juggle and return, but many were too
+flashing for them to cope with. In front of the ferry house lay a
+deep and quaggish puddle of slime, crossable only by ginger-footed
+work upon sheets of tin. Endymion rafted his tenuous form across
+with a delicate straddle of spidery limbs. The secretary followed,
+with a more solid squashing technique. "Ha," cried the new member;
+"grace before meat!" Endymion and the secretary exchanged secret
+glances. Lawton, although he knew it not, was elected from that
+moment.
+
+The ritual of the club, while stern toward initiates, is not brutal.
+Since you are bursar for the lunch, said the secretary, I will buy
+the ferry tickets, and he did so. On the boat these carefree men
+gazed blithely upon the shipping. "Little did I think," said Lawton,
+"that I was going for a sea voyage." "That," said the club, "is the
+kind of fellows we are. Whimsical. As soon as we think of a thing,
+we don't do it."
+
+"Is that the _Leviathan_ up there?" said one of the members,
+pointing toward a gray hull on the Hoboken horizon. No one knew, but
+the secretary was reminded of an adventure during the war. "One time
+I was crossing on this ferry," he said, "and the _Leviathan_ passed
+right by us. It was just at dusk and her camouflage was wonderful.
+Her blotches and stripes were so arranged that from a little
+distance, in the twilight, she gave the impression of a much smaller
+vessel, going the other way. All her upper works seemed to fade out
+in the haze and she became a much smaller ship." "That would be a
+wonderful plan for some of these copious dowagers one sees," said
+the irreverent Lawton. "Yes," we said; "instead of a stout lady
+going in to dinner, you would see a slim flapper coming out."
+
+Something was then said about a good friend of the club who had at
+one time worked for the Y.M.C.A. "What is he doing now?" asked one.
+"He's with Grace and Company," said the secretary. The candidate was
+unabashed. "Think," he said, "of a Y.M.C.A. man getting grace at
+last."
+
+The club found the Jersey City terminal much as usual, and to our
+surprise the candidate kept up his courage nobly as he was steered
+toward the place of penance, being the station lunch counter. The
+club remembered this as a place of excellent food in days gone by,
+when trains from Philadelphia stopped here instead of at the Penn.
+Station. Placing the host carefully in the middle, the three sat
+down at the curving marble slab. The waiters immediately sensed that
+something unusual was toward. Two dashed up with courteous
+attentions. It was surmised by the club that the trio had happened
+to sit at a spot where the jurisdictions of two waiters met. Both
+the wings of the trio waved the waiters toward the blushing novice,
+making it plain that upon him lay all responsibility. "It is
+obvious," remarked the secretary, "that you, Lawton, are right on
+the boundary line where two waiters meet. You will have to tip them
+both."
+
+The new member was game. "Well," he said, without a trace of
+nervousness; "what'll you have?" The choice fell upon breast of
+lamb. The secretary asked for iced tea. Endymion, more ruthless,
+ordered ginger ale. When the ginger ale came, Lawton, still waggish,
+observed the label, which was one of the many imitations of a
+well-known brand. "The man who invented the diamond-shaped label,"
+said Lawton, "was certainly a pathfinder in the wilderness of the
+ginger ale business. This ginger ale," said Lawton, tasting it, "is
+carefully warmed, like old claret."
+
+The club sought to keep their host's mind off the painful topic of
+viands. "Sitting here makes one feel as though he ought to be going
+to take a train somewhere," said one. "Yes, the express for
+Weehawken," said the vivacious host. From this it was only a step to
+speaking of Brooklyn. The secretary explained that the club had
+outlined a careful itinerary in that borough for proximate pursuit.
+Lawton told that he had at one time written an essay on the effect
+of Brooklyn on the dialogue of the American drama. "It is the butt
+end of Long Island," he cried, with cruel mirth. Lovers of Brooklyn
+in the club nearly blackballed him for this.
+
+With ice cream and cottage pudding, the admirable menu proceeded.
+The waiters conferred secretly together. They carefully noted the
+cheerful carving of the host's brow. They will know him again. A man
+who bursts in suddenly upon a railroad lunch counter and pays for
+three such meals, here is an event in the grim routine! But perhaps
+the two charter members were feeling pangs of conscience. "Come,"
+they said, "at least let us split the ginger ale checks." But
+Lawton was seeing it through. Not a drum was heard, not a funeral
+note, as our host to the cashier we hurried. The secretary bought a
+penny box of matches and lit the great man's cigarette for him.
+Endymion, equally stirred, ran to buy the ferry tickets for the
+return voyage. "This time," he said, "I will be the ferry
+godmother."
+
+On the homeward passage a little drowse fell upon the two charter
+members. They had lunched more richly than was their wont. "Oh,
+these distressing, heavy lunches!" as Aldous Huxley cries in one of
+his poems. But Lawton was still of bright vivacity. At that time the
+club was perturbed by the coming Harding-Cox election. "Which of the
+vice-presidents are you going to vote for?" he cried, and then said:
+"It looks to me like Debs or dubs."
+
+Endymion and the secretary looked at each other solemnly. The time
+had come. "I, Endymion," said the chairman, "take thee, Lawton, to
+have and to hold, as a member of the club."
+
+And the secretary tenderly pronounced the society's formula for such
+occasions: "There is no inanition in an initiation."
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+CREED OF THE THREE HOURS FOR LUNCH CLUB
+
+
+It has been suggested that the Three Hours for Lunch Club is an
+immoral institution; that it is founded upon an insufficient respect
+for the devotions of industry; that it runs counter to the form and
+pressure of the age; that it encourages a greedy and rambling humour
+in the young of both sexes; that it even punctures, in the bosoms of
+settled merchants and rotarians, that capsule of efficiency and
+determination by which Great Matters are Put Over. It has been said,
+in short, that the Three Hours for Lunch Club should be more
+clandestine and reticent about its truancies.
+
+Accordingly, it seems good to us to testify concerning Lunches and
+the philosophy of Lunching.
+
+There are Lunches of many kinds. The Club has been privileged to
+attend gatherings of considerable lustre; occasions when dishes of
+richness and curiosity were dissected; when the surroundings were
+not devoid of glamour and surreptitious pomp. The Club has been
+convened in many different places: in resorts of pride and in
+low-ceiled reeky taphouses; in hotels where those clear cubes of
+unprofitable ice knock tinklingly in the goblets; in the brightly
+tinted cellars of Greenwich Village; in the saloons of ships. But
+the Club would give a false impression of its mind and heart if it
+allowed any one to suppose that Food is the chief object of its
+quest. It is true that Man, bitterly examined, is merely a vehicle
+for units of nourishing combustion; but on those occasions when the
+Club feels most truly Itself it rises above such considerations.
+
+The form and pressure of the time (to repeat Hamlet's phrase) is
+such that thoughtful men--and of such the Club is exclusively
+composed: men of great heart, men of nice susceptibility--are
+continually oppressed by the fumbling, hasty, and insignificant
+manner in which human contacts are accomplished. Let us even say,
+_masculine_ contacts: for the first task of any philosopher being to
+simplify his problem so that he can examine it clearly and with less
+distraction, the Club makes a great and drastic purge by sweeping
+away altogether the enigmatic and frivolous sex and disregarding it,
+at any rate during the hours of convivial session. The Club is
+troubled to note that in the intolerable rabies and confusion of
+this business life men meet merely in a kind of convulsion or horrid
+passion of haste and perplexity. We see, ever and often, those in
+whose faces we discern delightful and considerable secrets, messages
+of just import, grotesque mirth, or improving sadness. In their
+bearing and gesture, even in hours of haste and irritation, the Club
+(with its trained and observant eye) notes the secret and rare sign
+of Thought. Such men are marked by an inexorable follow-up system.
+Sooner or later their telephones ring; secretaries and go-betweens
+are brushed aside; they are bidden to appear at such and such a time
+and place; no excuses are accepted. Then follow the Consolations of
+Intercourse. Conducted with "shattering candour" (as one has said
+who is in spirit a member of this Club, though not yet, alas,
+inducted), the meetings may sometimes resolve themselves into a
+ribaldry, sometimes into a truthful pursuit of Beauty, sometimes
+into a mere logomachy. But in these symposiums, unmarred by the
+crude claim of duty, the Club does with single-minded resolve pursue
+the only lasting satisfaction allowed to humanity, to wit, the
+sympathetic study of other men's minds.
+
+This is clumsily said: but we have seen moments when eager and
+honourable faces round the board explained to us what we mean. There
+is but one indefeasible duty of man, to say out the truth that is in
+his heart. The way of life engendered by a great city and a modern
+civilization makes it hard to do so. It is the function of the Club
+to say to the City and to Life Itself: "Stand back! Fair play! We
+see a goodly matter inditing in our friend's spirit. We will take
+our ease and find out what it is."
+
+For this life of ours (asserts the Club) is curiously compounded of
+Beauty and Dross. You ascend the Woolworth Building, let us say--one
+of man's noblest and most poetic achievements. And at the top, what
+do you find, just before going out upon that gallery to spread your
+eye upon man's reticulated concerns? Do you find a little temple or
+cloister for meditation, or any way of marking in your mind the
+beauty and significance of the place? No, a man in uniform will
+thrust into your hand a booklet of well-intentioned description (but
+of unapproachable typographic ugliness) and you will find before you
+a stall for the sale of cheap souvenirs, ash trays, and hideous
+postcards. In such ways do things of Beauty pass into the custody of
+those unequipped to understand them.
+
+The Club thinks that the life of this city, brutally intense and
+bewildering, has yet a beauty and glamour and a secret word to the
+mind, so subtle that it cannot be closely phrased, but so important
+that to miss it is to miss life itself. And to forfeit an attempt to
+see, understand, and mutually communicate this loveliness is to
+forfeit that burning spark that makes men's spirits worth while. To
+such halting meditations the Club devotes its aspirations
+undistressed by humorous protest. If this be treason...!
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+A PREFACE TO THE PROFESSION OF JOURNALISM
+
+(BEING AN ANSWER TO A LETTER FROM A COLLEGE STUDENT,
+ASKING ADVICE AS TO TAKING UP WRITING AS A CAREER)
+
+
+Your inquiry is congenial, and I feel guilty of selfishness in
+answering it in this way. But he must be a poor workman, whether
+artisan or artist, who does not welcome an excuse now and then for
+shutting out the fascinating and maddening complexity of this
+shining world to concentrate his random wits on some honest and
+self-stimulating expression of his purpose.
+
+There are exceptions to every rule; but writing, if undertaken as a
+trade, is subject to the conditions of all other trades. The
+apprentice must begin with task-work; he must please his employers
+before he can earn the right to please himself. Not only that, he
+must have ingenuity and patience enough to learn _how_ editors are
+pleased; but he will be startled, I think, if he studies their
+needs, to see how eager they are to meet him half way. This
+necessary docility is in the long run, a wholesome physic, because,
+if our apprentice has any gallantry of spirit, it will arouse in him
+an exhilarating irritation, that indignation which is said to be the
+forerunner of creation. It will mean, probably, a period--perhaps
+short, perhaps long, perhaps permanent--of rather meagre and stinted
+acquaintance with the genial luxuries and amenities of life; but
+(such is the optimism of memory) a period that he will always look
+back upon as the happiest of all. It is well for our apprentice if,
+in this season, he has a taste for cheap tobacco and a tactful
+technique in borrowing money.
+
+The deliberate embrace of literature as a career involves very real
+dangers. I mean dangers to the spirit over and above those of the
+right-hand trouser pocket. For, let it be honestly stated, the
+business of writing is solidly founded on a monstrous and perilous
+egotism. Himself, his temperament, his powers of observation and
+comment, his emotions and sensibilities and ambitions and
+idiocies--these are the only monopoly the writer has. This is his
+only capital, and with glorious and shameless confidence he proposes
+to market it. Let him make the best of it. Continually stooping over
+the muddy flux of his racing mind, searching a momentary flash of
+clearness in which he can find mirrored some delicate beauty or
+truth, he tosses between the alternatives of self-grandeur and
+self-disgust. It is a painful matter, this endless self-scrutiny. We
+are all familiar with the addled ego of literature--the writer whom
+constant self-communion has made vulgar, acid, querulous, and vain.
+And yet it is remarkable that of so many who meddle with the
+combustible passions of their own minds so few are blown up. The
+discipline of living is a fine cooling-jacket for the engine.
+
+It is essential for our apprentice to remember that, though he begin
+with the vilest hack-work--writing scoffing paragraphs, or
+advertising pamphlets, or freelance snippets for the papers--that
+even in hack-work quality shows itself to those competent to judge;
+and he need not always subdue his gold to the lead in which he
+works. Moreover, conscience and instinct are surprisingly true and
+sane. If he follows the suggestions of his own inward, he will
+generally be right. Moreover again, no one can help him as much as
+he can help himself. There is no job in the writing world that he
+cannot have if he really wants it. Writing about something he
+intimately knows is a sound principle. Hugh Walpole, that greatly
+gifted novelist, taught school after leaving Cambridge, and very
+sensibly began by writing about school-teaching. If you care to see
+how well he did it, read "The Gods and Mr. Perrin." I would propose
+this test to the would-be writer: Does he feel, honestly, that he
+could write as convincingly about his own tract of life (whatever it
+may be) as Walpole wrote about that boys' school? If so, he has a
+true vocation for literature.
+
+The first and most necessary equipment of any writer, be he
+reporter, advertising copy-man, poet, or historian, is swift,
+lively, accurate observation. And since consciousness is a rapid,
+shallow river which we can only rarely dam up deep enough to go
+swimming and take our ease, it is his positive need (unless he is a
+genius who can afford to let drift away much of his only source of
+gold) to keep a note-book handy for the sieving and skimming of this
+running stream. Samuel Butler has good advice on this topic. Of
+ideas, he says, you must throw salt on their tails or they fly away
+and you never see their bright plumage again. Poems, stories,
+epigrams, all the happiest freaks of the mind, flit by on wings and
+at haphazard instants. They must be caught in air. In this respect
+one thinks American writers ought to have an advantage over English,
+for American trousers are made with hip-pockets, in which a small
+note-book may so comfortably caress the natural curvature of man.
+
+Fancy is engendered in the eyes, said Shakespeare, and is with
+gazing fed. By fancy he meant (I suppose) love; but imagination is
+also so engendered. Close, constant, vivid, and compassionate gazing
+at the ways of mankind is the laboratory manual of literature. But
+for most of us we may gaze until our eyeballs twitch with weariness;
+unless we seize and hold the flying picture in some steadfast
+memorandum, the greater part of our experience dissolves away with
+time. If a man has thought sufficiently about the arduous and
+variously rewarded profession of literature to propose seriously to
+follow it for a living, he will already have said these things to
+himself, with more force and pungency. He may have satisfied himself
+that he has a necessary desire for "self-expression," which is a
+parlous state indeed, and the cause of much literary villainy. The
+truly great writer is more likely to write in the hope of expressing
+the hearts of others than his own. And there are other desires, too,
+most legitimate, that he may feel. An English humorist said recently
+in the preface to his book: "I wrote these stories to satisfy an
+inward craving--not for artistic expression, but for food and
+drink." But I cannot conscientiously advise any man to turn to
+writing merely as a means of earning his victual unless he
+should, by some cheerful casualty, stumble upon a trick of the
+You-know-me-Alfred sort, what one might call the Attabuoyant style.
+If all you want is a suggestion as to some honest way of growing
+rich, the doughnut industry is not yet overcrowded; and people will
+stand in line to pay twenty-two cents for a dab of ice-cream smeared
+with a trickle of syrup.
+
+To the man who approaches writing with some decent tincture of
+idealism it is well to say that he proposes to use as a trade what
+is, at its best and happiest, an art and a recreation. He proposes
+to sell his mental reactions to the helpless public, and he proposes
+not only to enjoy himself by so doing, but to be handsomely
+recompensed withal. He cannot complain that in days when both
+honesty and delicacy of mind are none too common we ask him to bring
+to his task the humility of the tradesman, the joy of the sportsman,
+the conscience of the artist.
+
+And if he does so, he will be in a condition to profit by these
+fine words of George Santayana, said of the poet, but applicable to
+workers in every branch of literature:
+
+"He labours with his nameless burden of perception, and wastes
+himself in aimless impulses of emotion and reverie, until finally
+the method of some art offers a vent to his inspiration, or to such
+part of it as can survive the test of time and the discipline of
+expression.... Wealth of sensation and freedom of fancy, which make
+an extraordinary ferment in his ignorant heart, presently bubble
+over into some kind of utterance."
+
+
+       [Illustration]
+
+
+
+FULTON STREET, AND WALT WHITMAN
+
+
+At the suggestion of Mr. Christopher Clarke, the Three Hours for
+Lunch Club made pilgrimage to the old seafaring tavern at No. 2
+Fulton Street, and found it to be a heavenly place, with listing
+brass-shod black walnut stairs and the equally black and delightful
+waiter called Oliver, who (said Mr. Clarke) has been there since
+1878.
+
+But the club reports that the swordfish steak, of which it partook
+as per Mr. Clarke's suggestion, did not appeal so strongly to its
+taste. Swordfish steak, we feel, is probably a taste acquired by
+long and diligent application. At the first trial it seemed to the
+club a bit too reptilian in flavour. The club will go there again,
+and will hope to arrive in time to grab one of those tables by the
+windows, looking out over the docks and the United Fruit Company
+steamer which is so appropriately named the _Banan_; but it is the
+sense of the meeting that swordfish steak is not in its line.
+
+The club retorts to Mr. Clarke by asking him if he knows the
+downtown chophouse where one may climb sawdusted stairs and sit in a
+corner beside a framed copy of the _New-York Daily Gazette_ of May
+1, 1789, at a little table incised with the initials of former
+habitués, and hold up toward the light a glass of the clearest and
+most golden and amberlucent cider known to mankind, and before
+attacking a platter of cold ham and Boston beans, may feel that
+smiling sensation of a man about to make gradual and decent advances
+toward a ripe and ruddy appetite.
+
+Fulton Street has always been renowned for its taverns. The Old
+Shakespeare Tavern used to be there, as is shown by the tablet at
+No. 136 commemorating the foundation of the Seventh Regiment. The
+club has always intended to make more careful exploration of Dutch
+Street, the little alley that runs off Fulton Street on the south
+side, not far from Broadway. There is an eating place on this byway,
+and the organization plans to patronize it, in order to have an
+excuse for giving itself the sub-title of the Dutch Street Club. The
+more famous eating houses along Fulton Street are known to all: the
+name of at least one of them has a genial Queen Anne sound. And
+only lately a very seemly coffee house was established not far
+from Fulton and Nassau. We must confess our pleasure in the
+fact that this place uses as its motto a footnote from The
+_Spectator_--"Whoever wished to find a gentleman commonly asked not
+where he resided, but which coffee house he frequented."
+
+Among the many things to admire along Fulton Street (not the least
+of which are Dewey's puzzling perpetually fluent grape-juice bottle,
+and the shop where the trained ferrets are kept, for chasing out
+rats, mice, and cockroaches from your house, the sign says) we vote
+for that view of the old houses along the south side of the street,
+where it widens out toward the East River. This vista of tall,
+leaning chimneys seems to us one of the most agreeable things in New
+York, and we wonder whether any artist has ever drawn it. As our
+colleague Endymion suggested, it would make a fine subject for
+Walter Jack Duncan. In the eastern end of this strip of fine old
+masonry resides the seafaring tavern we spoke of above; formerly
+known as Sweet's, and a great place of resort (we are told) for
+Brooklynites in the palmy days before the Bridge was opened, when
+they used to stop there for supper before taking the Fulton Ferry
+across the perilous tideway.
+
+The Fulton Ferry--dingy and deserted now--is full of fine memories.
+The old waiting room, with its ornate carved ceiling and fine,
+massive gas brackets, peoples itself, in one's imagination, with the
+lively and busy throngs of fifty and sixty years ago. "My life then
+(1850-60) was curiously identified with Fulton Ferry, already
+becoming the greatest in the world for general importance, volume,
+variety, rapidity, and picturesqueness." So said Walt Whitman. It is
+a curious experience to step aboard one of the boats in the drowsy
+heat of a summer afternoon and take the short voyage over to the
+Brooklyn slip, underneath one of the huge piers of the Bridge. A few
+heavy wagons and heat-oppressed horses are almost the only other
+passengers. Not far away from the ferry, on the Brooklyn side, are
+the three charmingly named streets--Cranberry, Orange, and
+Pineapple--which are also so lastingly associated with Walt
+Whitman's life. It strikes us as odd, incidentally, that Walt, who
+loved Brooklyn so much, should have written a phrase so capable of
+humorous interpretation as the following: "Human appearances and
+manners--endless humanity in all its phases--Brooklyn also." This
+you will find in Walt's Prose Works, which is (we suppose) one of
+the most neglected of American classics.
+
+      [Illustration: Drawing of "Lightning" statue]
+
+But Fulton Street, Manhattan--in spite of its two greatest triumphs:
+Evelyn Longman Batchelder's glorious figure of "Lightning," and the
+strictly legal "three grains of pepsin" which have been a comfort to
+so many stricken invalids--is a mere byway compared to Fulton
+Street, Brooklyn, whose long bustling channel may be followed right
+out into the Long Island pampas. At the corner of Fulton and
+Cranberry streets "Leaves of Grass" was set up and printed, Walt
+Whitman himself setting a good deal of the type. Ninety-eight
+Cranberry Street, we have always been told, was the address of
+Andrew and James Rome, the printers. The house at that corner is
+still numbered 98. The ground floor is occupied by a clothing store,
+a fruit stand, and a barber shop. The building looks as though it is
+probably the same one that Walt knew. Opposite it is a sign where
+the comparatively innocent legend BEN'S PURE LAGER has been
+deleted.
+
+The pilgrim on Fulton Street will also want to have a look at the
+office of the Brooklyn _Eagle_, that famous paper which has numbered
+among its employees two such different journalists as Walt Whitman
+and Edward Bok. There are many interesting considerations to be
+drawn from the two volumes of Walt's writings for the _Eagle_, which
+were collected (under the odd title "The Gathering of the Forces")
+by Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. We have always been struck by
+the complacent naïveté of Walt's judgments on literature (written,
+perhaps, when he was in a hurry to go swimming down at the foot of
+Fulton Street). Such remarks as the following make us ponder a
+little sadly. Walt wrote:
+
+     We are no admirer of such characters as Doctor Johnson. He was
+     a sour, malicious, egotistical man. He was a sycophant of power
+     and rank, withal; his biographer narrates that he "always spoke
+     with rough contempt of popular liberty." His head was educated
+     to the point of _plus_, but for his heart, might still more
+     unquestionably stand the sign _minus_. He insulted his equals
+     ... and tyrannized over his inferiors. He fawned upon his
+     superiors, and, of course, loved to be fawned upon himself....
+     Nor were the freaks of this man the mere "eccentricities of
+     genius"; they were probably the faults of a vile, low nature.
+     His soul was a bad one.
+
+The only possible comment on all this is that it is absurd, and that
+evidently Walt knew very little about the great Doctor. One of the
+curious things about Walt--and there is no man living who admires
+him more than we do--is that he requires to be forgiven more
+generously than any other great writer. There is no one who has ever
+done more grotesquely unpardonable things than he--and yet, such is
+the virtue of his great, saline simplicity, one always pardons them.
+As a book reviewer, to judge from the specimens rescued from the
+_Eagle_ files by his latest editors, he was uniquely childish.
+
+Noting the date of Walt's blast on Doctor Johnson (December 7,
+1846), it is doubtful whether we can attribute the irresponsibility
+of his remarks to a desire to go swimming.
+
+The editors of this collection venture the suggestion that the
+lighter pieces included show Walt as "not devoid of humour." We fear
+that Walt's waggishness was rather heavily shod. Here is a sample of
+his light-hearted paragraphing (the italics are his):--
+
+     Carelessly knocking a man's eye out with a broken axe, may be
+     termed a _bad axe-i-dent_.
+
+It was in Leon Bazalgette's "Walt Whitman" that we learned of Walt's
+only really humorous achievement; and even then the humour was
+unconscious. It seems that during the first days of his life as a
+journalist in New York, Walt essayed to compromise with Mannahatta
+by wearing a frock coat, a high hat, and a flower in his lapel. We
+regret greatly that no photo of Walt in this rig has been preserved,
+for we would like to have seen the gentle misery of his bearing.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+McSORLEY'S
+
+
+This afternoon we have been thinking how pleasant it would be to sit
+at one of those cool tables up at McSorley's and write our copy
+there. We have always been greatly allured by Dick Steele's habit of
+writing his Tatler at his favourite tavern. You remember his
+announcement, dated April 12, 1709:
+
+     All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, shall
+     be under the article of White's Chocolate-house; poetry, under
+     that of Will's Coffee-house; learning, under the title of The
+     Grecian; foreign and domestic news, you will have from Saint
+     James's Coffee-house; and what else I have to offer on any
+     other subject shall be dated from my own apartment.
+
+Sir Dick--would one speak of him as the first colyumist?--continued
+by making what is, we suppose, one of the earliest references in
+literature to the newspaper man's "expense account." But the
+expenses of the reporter two centuries ago seem rather modest.
+Steele said:
+
+     I once more desire my reader to consider that as I cannot keep
+     an ingenious man to go daily to Will's under twopence each day,
+     merely for his charges; to White's under sixpence; nor to The
+     Grecian, without allowing him some plain Spanish, to be as able
+     as others at the learned table; and that a good observer cannot
+     speak with even Kidney[*] at Saint James's without clean linen:
+     I say, these considerations will, I hope, make all persons
+     willing to comply with my humble request of a penny-a-piece.
+
+                                          [* Evidently the bus boy.]
+
+But what we started to say was that if, like Dick Steele, we were in
+the habit of dating our stuff from various inns around the town, our
+choice for a quiet place in which to compose items of "gallantry,
+pleasure, and entertainment" would be McSorley's--"The Old House at
+Home"--up on Seventh Street. We had feared that this famous old
+cabin of cheer might have gone west in the recent evaporation; but
+rambling round in the neighbourhood of the Cooper Union we saw its
+familiar doorway with a shock of glad surprise. After all, there is
+no reason why the old-established houses should not go on doing a
+good business on a Volstead basis. It has never been so much a
+question of what a man drinks as the atmosphere in which he drinks
+it. Atrocious cleanliness and glitter and raw naked marble make the
+soda fountains a disheartening place to the average male. He likes
+a dark, low-ceilinged, and not too obtrusively sanitary place to
+take his ease. At McSorley's is everything that the innocent
+fugitive from the world requires. The great amiable cats that purr
+in the back room. The old pictures and playbills on the walls. The
+ancient clocks that hoarsely twang the hours. We cannot imagine a
+happier place to sit down with a pad of paper and a well-sharpened
+pencil than at that table in the corner by the window. Or the table
+just under that really lovely little portrait of Robert Burns--would
+there be any more propitious place in New York at which to fashion
+verses? There would be no interruptions, such as make versifying
+almost impossible in a newspaper office. The friendly bartenders in
+their lilac-coloured shirts are wise and gracious men. They would
+not break in upon one's broodings. Every now and then, while the hot
+sun smote the awnings outside, there would be another china mug of
+that one-half-of-1-per-cent. ale, which seems to us very good. We
+repeat: we don't care so much what we drink as the surroundings
+among which we drink it. We are not, if you will permit the phrase,
+sot in our ways. We like the spirit of McSorley's, which is decent,
+dignified, and refined. No club has an etiquette more properly
+self-respecting.
+
+One does not go to McSorley's without a glimpse at that curious old
+red pile Bible House. It happened this way: Our friend Endymion was
+back from his vacation and we were trying to celebrate it in modest
+fashion. We were telling him all the things that had happened since
+he went away--that Bob Holliday had had a fortieth birthday, and
+Frank Shay had published his bibliography of Walt Whitman, and all
+that sort of thing; and in our mutual excitement Endymion whisked
+too swiftly round a corner and caught his jacket on a sharp
+door-latch and tore it. Inquiring at Astor Place's biggest
+department store as to where we could get it mended, they told us to
+go to "Mr. Wright the weaver" on the sixth floor of Bible House, and
+we did so. On our way back, avoiding the ancient wire rope elevator
+(we know only one other lift so delightfully mid-Victorian, viz.,
+one in Boston, that takes you upstairs to see Edwin Edgett, the
+gentle-hearted literary editor of the Boston _Transcript_), we
+walked down the stairs, peeping into doorways in great curiosity.
+The whole building breathed a dusky and serene quaintness that
+pricks the imagination. It is a bit like the shop in Edinburgh (on
+the corner of the Leith Walk and Antigua Street, if we remember)
+that R.L.S. described in "A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured"--"it
+was dark and smelt of Bibles." We looked in at the entrance to the
+offices of the _Christian Herald_. The Bowling Green thought that
+what he saw was two young ladies in close and animated converse; but
+Endymion insisted that it was one young lady doing her hair in front
+of a large mirror. "Quite a pretty little picture," said Endymion.
+We argued about this as we went down the stairs. Finally we went
+back to make sure. Endymion was right. Even in the darkness of Bible
+House, we agreed, romance holds sway. And then we found a book shop
+on the ground floor of Bible House. One of our discoveries there was
+"Little Mr. Bouncer," by Cuthbert Bede--a companion volume to "Mr.
+Verdant Green."
+
+But Dick Steele's idea of writing his column from different taverns
+round the city is rather gaining ground in our affections. There
+would be no more exciting way of spending a fortnight or so than in
+taking a walking tour through the forests of New York, camping
+for the night wherever we happened to find ourself at dark,
+Adam-and-Evesdropping as we went, and giving the nearest small boy
+fifty cents to take our copy down to the managing editor. Some of
+our enterprising clients, who are not habitual commuters and who
+live in a state of single cussedness, might try it some time.
+
+The only thing we missed at McSorley's, we might add, was the
+old-time plate of onions. But then we were not there at lunch time,
+and the pungent fruit may have been hidden away in the famous tall
+ice box. Hutchins Hapgood once said, in an article about McSorley's
+in _Harper's Weekly_: "The wives of the men who frequent McSorley's
+always know where their husbands have been. There is no mistaking a
+McSorley onion." He was right. The McSorley onion--"rose among
+roots"--was _sui generis_. It had a reach and authenticity all its
+own.
+
+We have said a good deal, now and then, about some of the taverns
+and chophouses we enjoy; but the one that tingles most strongly in
+our bosom is one that doesn't exist. That is the chophouse that
+might be put in the cellar of that glorious old round-towered
+building at 59 Ann Street.
+
+As you go along Ann Street, you will come, between numbers 57 and
+61, to an old passage-way running down to a curious courtyard, which
+is tenanted mostly by carpenters and iron-workers, and by a crowded
+store which seems to be a second-hand ship-chandlery, for old
+sea-boots, life preservers, fenders, ship's lanterns, and flags hang
+on the wall over the high stairway. In the cellars are smithies
+where you will see the bright glare of a forge and men with faces
+gleaming in tawny light pulling shining irons out of the fire. The
+whole place is too fascinating to be easily described. That
+round-tower house is just our idea of the right place for a quiet
+tavern or club, where one would go in at lunch time, walk over a
+sawdusted floor to a table bleached by many litres of slopovers,
+light a yard of clay, and call for a platter of beefsteak pie. The
+downtown region is greatly in need of the kind of place we have in
+mind, and if any one cares to start a chophouse in that heavenly
+courtyard, the Three Hours for Lunch Club pledges itself to attend
+regularly.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+A PORTRAIT
+
+
+"My idea of life," said my friend S----, "would be to have a nice
+lawn running down to the water, several deck-chairs, plenty of
+tobacco, and three or four of us to sit there all day long and
+listen to B---- talk."
+
+I suppose that B----,--I wish I could name him, but it would be an
+indecency to do so, for part of his charm is his complete
+unconsciousness of the affection, and even adoration, of the little
+group of younger men who call themselves his "fans"--I suppose that
+B----'s talk is as nearly Johnsonian in virtue and pungency as any
+spoken wisdom now hearable in this country. To know him is, in the
+absolute truth of that enduring phrase, a liberal education. To his
+simplicity, his valorous militancy for truth, he joins the mind of
+a great scholar, the placable spirit of an eager child.
+
+I said "Johnsonian"--yet even in the great Doctor as we have him
+recorded there were a certain truculence and vehemence that are a
+little foreign to B----'s habit. Fearless champion as he is, there
+is always a gentleness about him. Even when his voice deepens and he
+is well launched on a long argument, he is never brutally dogmatic,
+never cruelly discourteous.
+
+The beauty of B----'s talk, the quality that would make it a
+delight to listen to him all a summer afternoon, is that he gives,
+unconsciously, a perfect exhibition of a perfect process, a great mind
+in motion. His mind is too full, too crowded, too ratiocinative, for
+easy and frugal utterance. Sometimes, unless one is an acute listener,
+he is almost incoherent in his zeal to express all the phases and
+facets of the thought that flashes upon him. And yet, if one could
+(unknown to him) have a stenographer behind the arras to take it all
+down, so that his argument could be analyzed at leisure, it would show
+its anatomical knitting and structure. Do you remember how Burke's
+speech on Conciliation was parsed and sub-headed in the preface to the
+school-texts? Just so, in I and II and III, A. B. and C, ([alpha]),
+([beta]), and ([gamma]), i, ii, and iii, we could articulate the
+strict and bony logic that vertebrates B----'s talk. Reservations,
+exceptions, qualifications, parentheses, sub-clauses, and humorous
+paraphrases swim upon him as he goes, and he deals with each as it
+comes. Sometimes, one thinks, he has lost the spine of the discourse,
+is mazed in a ganglion of nerves and sinews. But no! give him time and
+back he comes to the marrow of his theme!
+
+What a happiness this is to listen to--he (bless his heart) now and
+then apologizing for his copiousness, little dreaming that we are
+all better men for hearing him; that his great gray head and clear
+kindly eye ("His mild and magnificent eye": whose is that phrase?)
+are to us a symbol of Socratic virtue and power; that there is not
+one of us who, after an hour or so with him, does not depart with
+private resolutions of honour and fidelity to wisdom. How he
+irrigates his subject, whatever it is.
+
+I'll tell you who Time gallops withal! It is when B---- sits down at
+a corner table of some chophouse, and (the rest of us seeing to it
+that the meal gets ordered, and now and then saying something about
+the food so that he will remember to eat) we marvel to watch the
+glow and business of a mind so great paired with a heart so simple.
+
+"My idea is this," he says, "subject to an exception which I will
+state in a moment." Taking up his exception, he makes it so lucid,
+so pregnant, so comprehensive, so irresistible, that it seems to us
+the whole and satisfying dogma; and then, suddenly turning it
+inside-outward, he reveals the seams, and we remember that it was
+only a trifling nexus in the rational series. He returns to his main
+thesis, and other counterpoising arguments occur to him. He outlines
+them, with delicious Æsopian sagacity. "Of course this analysis is
+only quantitative, not qualitative," he says. "But I will now
+restate my position with all the necessary reservations, and we'll
+see if it will hold water."
+
+We smile, and look at each other slyly, in the sheer happiness of
+enjoying a perfect work of art. He must be a mere quintain, a poor
+lifeless block, who does not revel in such an exhibition, where
+those two rare qualities of mind--honesty and agility--are locked in
+one.
+
+Of course--it is hardly necessary to say--we do not always agree
+with everything he says. But we could not disagree with _him_; for
+we see that his broad, shrewd, troubled spirit could take no other
+view, arising out of the very multitude and swarm and pressure of
+his thought. Those who plod diligently and narrowly along a country
+lane may sometimes reach the destination less fatigued than the more
+conscientious and passionate traveller who quarters the fields and
+beats the bounds, intent to leave no covert unscrutinized. But in
+him we see and love and revere something rare and precious, not
+often found in our present way of life; in matters concerning the
+happiness of others, a devoted spirit of unrivalled wisdom; in those
+pertaining to himself, a child's unblemished innocence. The
+perplexities of others are his daily study; his own pleasures, a
+constant surprise.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+GOING TO PHILADELPHIA
+
+
+I
+
+Every intelligent New Yorker should be compelled, once in so often,
+to run over to Philadelphia and spend a few days quietly and
+observantly prowling.
+
+Any lover of America is poor indeed unless he has savoured and
+meditated the delicious contrast of these two cities, separated by
+so few miles and yet by a whole world of philosophy and metaphysics.
+But he is a mere tyro of the two who has only made the voyage by the
+P.R.R. The correct way to go is by the Reading, which makes none of
+those annoying intermediate stops at Newark, Trenton, and so on,
+none of that long detour through West Philadelphia, starts you off
+with a ferry ride and a background of imperial campaniles and
+lilac-hazed cliffs and summits in the superb morning light. And the
+Reading route, also, takes you through a green Shakespearean land of
+beauty, oddly different from the flat scrubby plains traversed by
+the Pennsy. Consider, if you will, the hills of the idyllic
+Huntington Valley as you near Philadelphia; or the little white town
+of Hopewell, N.J., with its pointing church spire. We have often
+been struck by the fact that the foreign traveller between New York
+and Washington on the P.R.R. must think America the most flat,
+dreary, and uninteresting countryside in the world. Whereas if he
+would go from Jersey City by the joint Reading-Central New
+Jersey-B.&O. route, how different he would find it. No, we are not
+a Reading stockholder.
+
+We went over to Philly, after having been unfaithful to her for too
+many months. Now we have had from time to time, most menacing
+letters from indignant clients, protesting that we have been
+unfaithful to all the tenets and duties of a Manhattan journalist
+because we have with indecent candour confessed an affection for
+both Brooklyn and Philadelphia. We lay our cards on the table. We
+can't help it. Philadelphia was the first large city we ever knew,
+and how she speaks to us! And there's a queer thing about
+Philadelphia, hardly believable to the New Yorker who has never
+conned her with an understanding eye. You emerge from the Reading
+Terminal (or, if you will, from Broad Street Station) with just a
+little superbness of mood, just a tinge of worldly disdain, as
+feeling yourself fresh from the grandeur of Manhattan and showing
+perhaps (you fondly dream) some pride of metropolitan bearing. Very
+well. Within half an hour you will be apologizing for New York. In
+their quiet, serene, contented way those happy Philadelphians will
+be making you a little shame-faced of the bustling madness of our
+heaven-touching Babel. Of course, your secret adoration of
+Manhattan, the greatest wild poem ever begotten by the heart of man,
+is not readily transmissible. You will stammer something of what it
+means to climb upward from the subway on a spring morning and see
+that golden figure over Fulton Street spreading its shining wings
+above the new day. And they will smile gently, that knowing, amiable
+Philadelphia smile.
+
+We were false to our credo in that we went via the P.R.R., but we
+were compensated by a man who was just behind us at the ticket
+window. He asked for a ticket to Asbury Park. "Single, or return?"
+asked the clerk. "I don't believe I'll ever come back," he said, but
+with so unconsciously droll an accent that the ticket seller
+screamed with mirth.
+
+There was something very thrilling in strolling again along Chestnut
+Street, watching all those delightful people who are so unconscious
+of their characteristic qualities. New York has outgrown that stage
+entirely: New Yorkers are conscious of being New Yorkers, but
+Philadelphians are Philadelphians without knowing it; and hence
+their unique delightfulness to the observer. Nothing seemed to us
+at all changed--except that the trolleys have raised their fare from
+five cents to seven. The Liberty Toggery Shop down on Chestnut
+Street was still "Going Out of Business," just as it was a couple of
+years ago. Philip Warner, the famous book salesman at Leary's Old
+Book Store, was out having lunch, as usual. The first book our eye
+fell upon was "The Experiences of an Irish R.M.," which we had
+hunted in vain in these parts. The only other book that caught our
+eye particularly was a copy of "Patrins," by Louise Guiney, which we
+saw a lady carrying on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania.
+
+But perhaps New York exerts its own fascination upon Philadelphians,
+too. For when we returned we selfishly persuaded a friend of ours to
+ride with us on the train so that we might imbibe some of his ripe
+orotund philosophy, which we had long been deprived of. He is a
+merciless Celt, and all the way over he preached us a cogent sermon
+on our shortcomings and backslidings. Faithful are the wounds of a
+friend, and it was nice to know that there was still someone who
+cared enough for us to give us a sound cursing. Between times, while
+we were catching breath, he expatiated upon the fact that New York
+is death and damnation to the soul; but when we got to Manhattan
+Transfer he suddenly abandoned his intended plan of there catching
+the next train back to the land of Penn. A curious light began to
+gleam in his mild eyes; he settled his hat firmly upon his head and
+strode out into the Penn Station. "I think I'll go out and look
+round a bit," he said. We wonder whether he has gone back yet?
+
+
+II
+
+The other day we had a chance to go to Philadelphia in the right
+way--by the Reading, the P. and R., the Peaceful and Rapid. As one
+of our missions in life is to persuade New York and Philadelphia to
+love one another, we will tell you about it.
+
+Ah, the jolly old Reading! Take the 10 o'clock ferry from Liberty
+Street, and as the _Plainfield_ kicks herself away from the slip
+with a churning of cream and silver, study Manhattan's profile in
+the downpour of morning sun. That winged figure on the Tel and Tel
+Building (the loveliest thing in New York, we insist) is like a huge
+and queerly erect golden butterfly perched momently in the blue. The
+10:12 train from Jersey City we call the Max Beerbohm Special
+because there are Seven Men in the smoker. No, the Reading is never
+crowded. (Two more men did get on at Elizabeth.) You can make
+yourself comfortable, put your coat, hat, and pipecleaners on one
+seat, your books, papers, and matches on another. Here is the stout
+conductor whom we used to know so well by sight, with his gold
+insignia. He has forgotten that we once travelled with him
+regularly, and very likely he wonders why we beam so cheerfully. We
+flash down the Bayonne peninsula, with a glimpse of the harbour,
+Staten Island in the distance, a schooner lying at anchor. Then we
+cross Newark Bay, pure opaline in a clear, pale blue light. H.G.
+Dwight is the only other chap who really enjoys Newark Bay the way
+it deserves to be. He wrote a fine poem about it once.
+
+But we had one great disappointment. For an hour or so we read a
+rubbishy novel, thinking to ourself that when the Max Beerbohm
+Express reached that lovely Huntington Valley neighbourhood, we
+would lay down the book and study the scenery, which we know by
+heart. When we came to the Neshaminy, that blithe little green
+river, we were all ready to be thrilled. And then the train swung
+away to the left along the cut-off to Wayne Junction and we missed
+our bright Arcadia. We had wanted to see again the little cottage at
+Meadowbrook (so like the hunting lodge in the forest in "The
+Prisoner of Zenda") which a suasive real-estate man once tried to
+rent to us. (Philadelphia realtors are no less ingenious than the
+New York species.) We wanted to see again the old barn, rebuilt by
+an artist, at Bethayres, which he also tried to rent to us. We
+wanted to see again the queer "desirable residence" (near the gas
+tanks at Marathon) which he did rent us. But we had to content
+ourself with the scenery along the cut-off, which is pleasant enough
+in its way--there is a brown-green brook along a valley where a
+buggy was crawling down a lane among willow trees in a wealth of
+sunlight. And the dandelions are all out in those parts. Yes, it was
+a lovely morning. We found ourself pierced by the kind of mysterious
+placid melancholy that we only enjoy to the full in a Reading
+smoker, when, for some unknown reason, hymn tunes come humming into
+our head and we are alarmed to notice ourself falling in love with
+humanity as a whole.
+
+We could write a whole newspaper page about travelling to Philly on
+the Reading. Consider those little back gardens near Wayne Junction,
+how delightfully clean, neat, domestic, demure. Compare entering New
+York toward the Grand Central, down that narrow frowning alleyway of
+apartment house backs, with imprisoned children leaning from barred
+windows. But as you spin toward Wayne Junction you see acres and
+acres of trim little houses, each with a bright patch of turf. Here
+is a woman in a blue dress and white cap, busily belabouring a rug
+on the grass. The bank of the cutting by Wayne Junction is thick
+with a tangle of rosebushes which will presently be in blossom; we
+know them well. Spring Garden Street: if you know where to look you
+can catch a blink of Edgar Allan Poe's little house. Through a
+jumble of queer old brick chimneys and dormers, and here we are at
+the Reading Terminal, with its familiar bitter smell of coal gas.
+
+Of course we stop to have a look at the engine, one of those
+splendid Reading locos with the three great driving wheels. Splendid
+things, the big Reading locos; when they halt they pant so
+cheerfully and noisily, like huge dogs, much louder than any other
+engines. We always expect to see an enormous red tongue running in
+and out over the cowcatcher. Vast thick pants, as the poet said in
+"Khubla Khan." We can't remember if he wore them, or breathed them,
+but there it is in the poem; look it up. Reading engineers, too,
+always give us a sense of security. They have gray hair, cropped
+very close. They have a benign look, rather like Walt Whitman if he
+were shaved. We wrote a poem about one of them once, Tom Hartzell,
+who used to take the 5:12 express out of Jersey City.
+
+Philadelphia, incidentally, is the only large city where the Dime
+Museum business still flourishes. For the first thing we see on
+leaving the Terminal is that the old Bingham Hotel is now The
+World's Museum, given over to Ursa the Bear Girl and similar
+excitements. But where is the beautiful girl with slick dark hair
+who used to be at the Reading terminal news-stand?
+
+How much more we could tell you about travelling on the Reading! We
+would like to tell you about the queer assortment of books we
+brought back with us. (There were twelve men in the smoker, coming
+home.) We could tell how we tried to buy, without being observed, a
+magazine which we will call _Foamy Fiction_, in order to see what
+the new editor (a friend of ours) is printing. Also, we always buy a
+volume of Gissing when we go to Philly, and this time we found "In
+the Year of Jubilee" in the shop of Jerry Cullen, the delightful
+bookseller who used to be so redheaded, but is getting over it now
+in the most logical way. We could tell you about the lovely old
+whitewashed stone farmhouses (with barns painted red on behalf of
+Schenk's Mandrake Pills) and about the famous curve near Roelofs, so
+called because the soup rolls off the table in the dining car when
+they take the curve at full speed; and about Bound Brook, which has
+a prodigious dump of tin cans that catches the setting sunlight----
+
+It makes us sad to think that a hundred years hence people will be
+travelling along that road and never know how much we loved it. They
+will be doing so to-morrow, too; but it seems more mournful to think
+about the people a hundred years hence.
+
+When we got back to Jersey City, and stood on the front end of the
+ferryboat, Manhattan was piling up all her jewels into the cold
+green dusk. There were a few stars, just about as many as there are
+passengers in a Reading smoker. There was one big star directly over
+Brooklyn, and another that seemed to be just above Plainfield. We
+pondered, as the ferry slid toward its hutch at Liberty Street, that
+there were no stars above Manhattan. Just at that moment--five
+minutes after seven--the pinnacle of the Woolworth blossomed a ruby
+red. New York makes her own.
+
+
+III
+
+You never know when an adventure is going to begin. But on a train
+is a good place to lie in wait for them. So we sat down in the
+smoker of the 10 A.M. Eastern Standard Time P.R.R. express to
+Philadelphia, in a receptive mood.
+
+At Manhattan Transfer the brakeman went through the train, crying in
+a loud, clear, emphatic barytone: "Next stop for this train is North
+Philadelphia!"
+
+We sat comfortably, and in that mood of secretly exhilarated mental
+activity which is induced by riding on a fast train. We were looking
+over the June _Atlantic_. We smiled gently to ourself at that
+unconscious breath of New England hauteur expressed in the
+publisher's announcement, "_The edition of the Atlantic is carefully
+restricted._" Then, meditating also on the admirable sense and skill
+with which the magazine is edited, and getting deep into William
+Archer's magnificent article "The Great Stupidity" (which we hope
+all our clients will read) we became aware of outcries of anguish
+and suffering in the aisle near by.
+
+At Manhattan Transfer a stout little man with a fine domy forehead
+and a derby hat tilted rather far aft had entered the smoker. He
+suddenly learned that the train did not stop at Newark. He uttered
+lamentation, and attacked the brakeman with grievous protest. "I
+heard you say, This train stops at Newark and Philadelphia," he
+insisted. His cigar revolved wildly in the corner of his mouth;
+crystal beads burst out upon the opulent curve of his forehead.
+"I've got to meet a man in Newark and sell him a bill of goods."
+
+The brakeman was gentle but firm. "Here's the conductor," he said.
+"You'll have to talk to him."
+
+Now this is a tribute of admiration and respect to that conductor.
+He came along the aisle punching tickets, holding his record slip
+gracefully folded round the middle finger of his punch hand, as
+conductors do. Like all experienced conductors he was alert,
+watchful, ready for any kind of human guile and stupidity, but
+courteous the while. The man bound for Newark ran to him and began
+his harangue. The frustrated merchant was angry and felt himself a
+man with a grievance. His voice rose in shrill tones, he waved his
+hands.
+
+Then began a scene that was delightful to watch. The conductor was
+magnificently tactful. He ought to have been an ambassador (in fact,
+he reminded us of one ambassador, for his trim and slender figure,
+his tawny, drooping moustache, the gentle and serene tact of his
+bearing, were very like Mr. Henry van Dyke). He allowed the
+protestant to exhaust himself with reproaches, and then he began an
+affectionate little sermon, tender, sympathetic, but firm.
+
+"I thought this train stopped at Newark," the fat man kept on
+saying.
+
+"You mustn't think, you must _know_," said the conductor, gazing
+shrewdly at him above the rims of his demi-lune spectacles. "Now,
+why did you get on a train without making sure where it stopped? You
+heard the brakeman say: 'Newark and Philadelphia'? No; he said
+'North Philadelphia.' Yes, I know you were in a hurry, but that
+wasn't our fault, was it? Now, let me tell you something: I've been
+working for this company for twenty-five years...."
+
+Unhappily the noise of the train prevented us from hearing the
+remark that followed. We were remembering a Chinese translation that
+we made once. It went something like this:
+
+             A SUSPICIOUS NATURE
+
+         _Whenever I travel
+          I ask at least three train-men
+          If this is the right train
+          For where I am going,
+          Even then
+          I hardly believe them._
+
+But as we watched the two, the conductor gently convincing the
+irate passenger that he would have to abide by his mistake, and the
+truculent fat man gradually realizing that he was hopelessly in the
+wrong, a new aspect subtly came over the dialogue. We saw the stout
+man wither and droop. We thought he was going to die. His hat slid
+farther and farther upward on his dewy brow. His hands fluttered.
+His cigar, grievously chewed, trembled in its corner of his mouth.
+His fine dark eyes filled with tears.
+
+The conductor, you see, was explaining that he would have to pay the
+fare to North Philadelphia and then take the first train back from
+there to Newark.
+
+We feared, for a few minutes, that it really would be a case for a
+chirurgeon, with cupping and leeching and smelling salts. Our rotund
+friend was in a bad way. His heart, plainly, was broken. From his
+right-hand trouser emerged a green roll. With delicate speed and
+tact the conductor hastened this tragic part of the performance. His
+silver punch flashed in his hand as he made change, issued a cash
+slip, and noted the name and address of the victim, for some
+possible future restitution, we surmised, or perhaps only as a
+generous anæsthetic.
+
+The stout man sat down a few seats in front of us and we studied his
+back. We have never seen a more convincing display of chagrin. With
+a sombre introspective stare he gazed glassily before him. We never
+saw any one show less enthusiasm for the scenery. The train flashed
+busily along through the level green meadows, which blended exactly
+with the green plush of the seats, but our friend was lost in a
+gruesome trance. Even his cigar (long since gone out) was still,
+save for an occasional quiver.
+
+The conductor came to our seat, looking, good man, faintly stern and
+sad, like a good parent who has had, regretfully, to chastise an
+erring urchin.
+
+"Well," we said, "the next time that chap gets on a train he'll take
+care to find out where it stops."
+
+The conductor smiled, but a humane, understanding smile. "I try to
+be fair with 'em," he said.
+
+"I think you were a wonder," we said.
+
+By the time we reached North Philadelphia the soothing hand of Time
+had exerted some of its consolation. The stout man wore a faintly
+sheepish smile as he rose to escape. The brakeman was in the
+vestibule. He, younger than the conductor, was no less kind, but we
+would hazard that he is not quite as resigned to mortal error and
+distress. He spoke genially, but there was a note of honest rebuke
+in his farewell.
+
+"The next time you get on a train," he said, "watch your stop."
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+OUR TRICOLOUR TIE
+
+
+We went up to the composing room just now to consult our privy
+counsellor, Peter Augsberger, the make-up man, and after Peter had
+told us about his corn----
+
+It is really astonishing, by the way, how many gardeners there are
+in a newspaper office. We once worked in a place where a
+horticultural magazine and a beautiful journal of rustic life were
+published, and the delightful people who edited those magazines were
+really men about town; but here in the teeming city and in the very
+node of urban affairs, to wit, the composing room, one hears nought
+but merry gossip about gardens, and the great and good men by whom
+we are surrounded begin their day by gazing tenderly upon jars full
+of white iris. And has not our friend Charley Sawyer of the dramatic
+department given us a lot of vegetable marrow seeds from his own
+garden and greatly embarrassed us by so doing, for he has put them
+in two packets marked "Male" and "Female," and to tell the truth we
+had no idea that the matter of sex extended even as far as the
+apparently placid and unperturbed vegetable marrow. Mr. Sawyer
+explained carefully to us just how the seeds ought to be planted,
+the males and females in properly wedded couples, we think he said;
+but we are not quite sure, and we are too modest to ask him to
+explain again; but if we should make a mistake in planting those
+seeds, if we were to---- Come, we are getting away from our topic.
+Peter had told us about his corn, in his garden, that is, out in
+Nutley (and that reminds us of the difficulties of reading poetry
+aloud. Mr. Chesterton tells somewhere a story about a poem of
+Browning's that he heard read aloud when he was a child, and
+understood the poem to say "John scorns ale."
+
+Now Mr. Chesterton--you understand, of course, we are referring to
+Gilbert Keith Chesterton--being from his very earliest youth an
+avowed partisan of malt liquor, this heresy made an impression upon
+his tender cortex, and he never forgot about John, in Browning's
+poem, scorning ale. But many years afterward, reading Browning, he
+found that the words really were: "John's corns ail," meaning
+apparently that John was troubled by pedal callouses.) Peter, we
+repeat, and to avoid any further misunderstanding and press
+diligently toward our theme, having mentioned his garden, who
+should come up to us but Pete Corcoran, also of the composing room
+force, and a waggish friend of ours, and gazing on us in a manner
+calculated to make us feel ill at ease he said, "I suppose you are
+going to write something about that tie of yours."
+
+Now we were wearing a scarf that we are very fond of, the kind of
+tie, we believe, that is spoken of as "regimental stripes"; at any
+rate, it is designated with broad diagonal bands of colour: claret,
+gold, and blue. It was obvious to us that Pete Corcoran, or, to give
+him his proper name, Mr. Corcoran, had said what he did merely in a
+humorous way, or possibly satiric, implying that we are generally so
+hard up for something to write about that we would even undertake so
+trifling a subject as haberdashery; but as we went downstairs again
+to our kennel, _au dixième_, as Mr. Wanamaker would call it, we
+thought seriously about this and decided that we would cause Pete's
+light-hearted suggestion to recoil violently upon his friendly brow,
+and that we would write a little essay about this tie and tell its
+story, which, to be honest, is very interesting to us. And this
+essay we are now endeavouring to write, even if it has to run in
+several instalments.
+
+It was curious, incidentally (but not really more curious than most
+human affairs), that Pete (or Mr. Corcoran) whether he was merely
+chaffing us, or whether he was really curious about a scarf of such
+wanton colour scheme, should have mentioned it just when he did, for
+as a matter of fact that tie had been on our mind all morning. You
+see to-day being warm (and please remember that what we call
+to-day, is now, when you are reading this, yesterday) we did not
+wear our waistcoat, or, if you prefer, our vest; but by the time we
+had decided not to wear our waistcoat we had already tied our scarf
+in the usual way we tie that particular scarf when we wear it, viz.,
+so as to conceal a certain spot on it which got there we know not
+how. We do not know what kind of a spot it is; perhaps it is a soup
+stain, perhaps it is due to a shrimp salad we had with Endymion at
+that amusing place that calls itself the Crystal Palace; we will not
+attempt to trace the origin of that swarthy blemish on the soft silk
+of our tie; but we have cunningly taught ourself to knot the thing
+so that the spot does not show. (Good, we have made that plain: we
+are getting along famously.)
+
+Since the above was written we have been uptown and had lunch with
+Alf Harcourt and Will Howe and other merry gentlemen; and Will Howe,
+who used to be a professor of English and is now a publisher, says
+we ought to break up our essays into shorter paragraphs. We are fain
+and teachable, as someone once said in a very pretty poem; we will
+start a new paragraph right away.
+
+But when our tie is tied in the manner described above, it leaves
+one end very much longer than the other. This is not noticeable when
+we wear our waistcoat; but having left off our waistcoat, we were
+fearful that the manner in which our tie was disposed would attract
+attention; and everyone would suspect just why it was tied in that
+way.
+
+And we did not have time to take it off and put on another one,
+because we had to catch the 8:06.
+
+So when Pete Corcoran spoke about our tie, was that what was in his
+mind, we wondered? Did he _infer_ the existence of that spot, even
+though he did not see it? And did he therefore look down upon, or
+otherwise feel inclined to belittle our tie? If that were the case,
+we felt that we really owed it to ourself to tell the story of the
+tie, how we bought it, and why; and just why that tie is to us not
+merely a strip of rather gaudy neckwear, but a symbol of an
+enchanting experience, a memory and token of an epoch in our life,
+the sign and expression of a certain feeling that can never come
+again--and, indeed (as the sequel will show), that should not have
+come when it did.
+
+It was a bright morning, last November, in Gloversville, New York,
+when we bought that tie. Now an explanation of just why we bought
+that tie, and what we were doing in Gloversville, cannot possibly be
+put into a paragraph, at any rate the kind of paragraph that Will
+Howe (who used to be a professor of English) would approve. On the
+whole, rather than rewrite the entire narrative, tersely, we will
+have to postpone the dénouement (of the story, not the tie) until
+to-morrow. This is an exhibition of the difficulty of telling
+anything exactly. There are so many subsidiary considerations that
+beg for explanation. Please be patient, Pete, and to-morrow we will
+explain that tie in detail.
+
+
+II
+
+It was a bright and transparent cold morning in Gloversville, N.Y.,
+November, 1919, and passing out of the Kingsborough Hotel we set off
+to have a look at the town. And if we must be honest, we were in
+passable good humour. To tell the truth, as Gloversville began its
+daily tasks in that clear lusty air and in a white dazzling
+sunshine, we believed, simpleton that we were, that we were on the
+road toward making our fortune. Now, we will have to be brief in
+explanation of the reason why we felt so, for it is a matter not
+easy to discuss with the requisite delicacy. Shortly, we were on the
+road--"trouping," they call it in the odd and glorious world of the
+theatre--with a little play in which we were partially incriminated,
+on a try-out voyage of one-night stands. The night before, the
+company had played Johnstown (a few miles from Gloversville), and if
+we do have to say it, the good-natured citizens of that admirable
+town had given them an enthusiastic reception. So friendly indeed
+had been our houses on the road and so genially did the company
+manager smile upon us that any secret doubts and qualms we had
+entertained were now set at rest. Lo! had not the company manager
+himself condescended to share a two-room suite with us in the
+Kingsborough Hotel that night? And we, a novice in this large and
+exhilarating tract of life, thought to ourself that this was the
+ultimate honour that could be conferred upon a lowly co-author. Yes,
+we said to ourself, as we beamed upon the excellent town of
+Gloversville, admiring the Carnegie Library and the shops and the
+numerous motor cars and the bright shop windows and munching some
+very fine doughnuts we had seen in a bakery. Yes, we repeated, this
+is the beginning of fame and fortune. Ah! Pete Corcoran may scoff,
+but that was a bright and golden morning, and we would not have
+missed it. We did not know then the prompt and painful end destined
+for that innocent piece when it reached the Alba Via Maxima. All we
+knew was that Saratoga and Newburgh and Johnstown had taken us to
+their bosoms.
+
+At this moment, and our thoughts running thus, we happened to pass
+by the window of a very alluring haberdasher's shop. In that window
+we saw displayed a number of very brilliant neckties, all rich and
+glowing with bright diagonal stripes. The early sunlight fell upon
+them and they were brave to behold. And we said to ourself that it
+would be a proper thing for one who was connected with the triumphal
+onward march of a play that was knocking them cold on the one-night
+circuit to flourish a little and show some sign of worldly vanity.
+(We were still young, that November, and our mind was still subject
+to some harmless frailties.) We entered the shop and bought that
+tie, the very same one that struck Pete Corcoran with a palsy when
+he saw it the other day. We put it in our pocket and walked back to
+the hotel.
+
+Now comes a portion of the narrative that exhibits to the full the
+deceits and stratagems of the human being. This tie, which we liked
+so much, thinking it the kind of thing that would add a certain dash
+and zip to our bearing, was eminently a metropolitan-looking kind of
+scarf. No one would think to look at it that it had been bought in
+Gloversville. And we said to ourself that if we went quietly back to
+the hotel and slipped unobtrusively into the washroom and put on
+that tie, no one would know that we had just bought it in
+Gloversville, but would think it was a part of our elaborate
+wardrobe that we had brought from New York. Very well. (We would not
+reveal these shameful subterfuges to any one but Pete Corcoran.) No
+sooner said than done; and behold us taking the trolley from
+Gloversville to Fonda, with the rest of the company, wearing that
+tie that flared and burned in the keen wintry light like a great
+banner, like an oriflamme of youthful defiance.
+
+And what a day that was! We shall never forget it; we will never
+forget it! Was that the Mohawk Valley that glittered in the morning?
+(A sunshine so bright that sitting on the sunward side of the smoker
+and lighting our pipe, the small flame of our match paled shamefully
+into a tiny and scarce visible ghost.) Our tie strengthened and
+sustained us in our zest for a world so coloured and contoured. We
+even thought that it was a bit of a pity that our waistcoat was cut
+with so shallow and conservative a V that the casual passerby would
+see but little of that triumphant silk beacon. The fellow members of
+our company were too polite to remark upon it, but we saw that they
+had noticed it and took it as a joyful omen.
+
+We had two and a half hours in Albany that day and we remember that
+we had set our heart on buying a certain book. Half an hour we
+allotted to lunch and the other two hours was spent in visiting the
+bookshops of Albany, which are many and good. We wonder if any
+Albany booksellers chance to recall a sudden flash of colour that
+came, moved along the shelves, and was gone? We remember half a
+dozen book stores that we visited; we remember them just as well as
+if it were yesterday, and we remember the great gusto and bright
+cheer of the crowds of shoppers, already doing their Christmas
+pioneering. We remember also that three of the books we bought (to
+give away) were McFee's "Aliens" and Frank Adams's "Tobogganing on
+Parnassus," yes, and Stevenson's "Lay Morals." Oh, a great day! And
+we remember the ride from Albany to Kingston, with the darkening
+profile of the Catskills on the western side of the train, the tawny
+colours of the fields (like a lion's hide), the blue shadows of the
+glens, the sparkling Hudson in quick blinks of brightness, the lilac
+line of the hills when we reached Kingston in the dusk. We remember
+the old and dilapidated theatre at Kingston, the big shabby dressing
+rooms of the men, with the scribbled autographs of former mummers on
+the walls. And that night we said good-bye to our little play, whose
+very imperfections we had grown to love by this time, and took the
+3:45 A.M. milk train to New York. We slept on two seats in the
+smoker, and got to Weehawken in the brumous chill of a winter
+dawn--still wearing our tie. Now can Pete Corcoran wonder why we are
+fond of it, and why, ever and anon, we get it out and wear it in
+remembrance?
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+THE CLUB OF ABANDONED HUSBANDS
+
+
+AJAX: Hullo, Socrates, what are you doing patrolling the streets at
+this late hour? Surely it would be more seemly to be at home?
+
+SOCRATES: You speak sooth, Ajax, but I have no home to repair to.
+
+AJAX: What do you mean by that?
+
+SOCRATES: In the sense of a place of habitation, a dormitory, of
+course I still have a home; but it is merely an abandoned shell, a
+dark and silent place devoid of allure. I have sent my family to the
+seashore, good Ajax, and the lonely apartment, with all the blinds
+pulled down and nothing in the icebox, is a dismal haunt. That is
+why I wander upon the highway.
+
+AJAX: I, too, have known that condition, Socrates. Two years ago
+Cassandra took the children to the mountains for July and August;
+and upon my word I had a doleful time of it. What do you say, shall
+we have recourse to a beaker of ginger ale and discuss this matter?
+It is still only the shank of the evening.
+
+SOCRATES: It is well thought of.
+
+AJAX: As I was saying, the quaint part of it was that before my wife
+left I had secretly thought that a period of bachelorhood would be
+an interesting change. I rather liked the idea of strolling about in
+the evenings, observing the pageant of human nature in my quiet way,
+dropping in at the club or the library, and mingling with my fellow
+men in a fashion that the husband and father does not often have
+opportunity to do.
+
+SOCRATES: And when Cassandra went away you found yourself desolate?
+
+AJAX: Even so. Of course matters were rather different in those
+days, before the archons had taken away certain stimulants, but the
+principle is still the same. You know, the inconsistency of man is
+rather entertaining. I had often complained about having to help put
+the children to bed when I got home from the office. I grudged the
+time it took to get them all safely bestowed. And then, when the
+children were away, I found myself spending infinitely more time and
+trouble in getting some of my bachelor friends to bed.
+
+SOCRATES: As that merry cartoonist Briggs observes in some of his
+frescoes, Oh Man!
+
+AJAX: I wonder if your experience is the same as mine was? I found
+that about six o'clock in the evening, the hour when I would
+normally have been hastening home to wife and babes, was the most
+poignant time. I was horribly homesick. If I did go back to my
+forlorn apartment, the mere sight of little Priam's crib was enough
+to reduce me to tears. I seriously thought of writing a poem about
+it.
+
+SOCRATES: What is needed is a Club of Abandoned Husbands, for the
+consolation of those whose families are out of town.
+
+AJAX: I have never found a club of much assistance at such a time.
+It is always full of rather elderly men who talk a great deal and in
+a manner both doleful and ill-informed.
+
+SOCRATES: But this would be a club of quite a different sort. It
+would be devised to offer a truly domestic atmosphere to those who
+have sent their wives and juveniles to the country for the benefit
+of the fresh air, and have to stay in the city themselves to earn
+what is vulgarly known as kale.
+
+AJAX: How would you work out the plan?
+
+SOCRATES: It would not be difficult. In the first place, there would
+be a large nursery, with a number of rented children of various
+ages. Each member of the club, hastening thither from his office at
+the conclusion of the day's work, would be privileged to pick out
+some child as nearly as possible similar in age and sex to his own
+absent offspring. He would then deal with this child according to
+the necessities of its condition. If it were an extremely young
+infant, a bottle properly prepared would be ready in the club
+kitchen, and he could administer it. The club bathroom would be
+filled with hilarious members on their knees beside small tubs,
+bathing such urchins as needed it. Others would be playing games on
+the floor, or tucking the children in bed. It ought to be quite
+feasible to hire a number of children for this purpose. During the
+day they would be cared for by a competent matron. Baby carriages
+would be provided, and if any of the club members were compelled to
+remain in town over the week-end they could take the children for an
+airing in the park.
+
+AJAX: This is a brave idea, Socrates. And then, when all the
+children were bedded for the night, how would the domestic
+atmosphere be simulated?
+
+SOCRATES: Nothing simpler. After dinner such husbands as are
+accustomed to washing the dishes would be allowed to do so in the
+club kitchen. During the day it would be the function of the matron
+to think up a number of odd jobs to be performed in the course of
+the evening. Pictures would be hung, clocks wound, a number of tin
+cans would be waiting to be opened with refractory can openers, and
+there would always be several window blinds that had gone wrong. A
+really resourceful matron could devise any number of ways of making
+the club seem just like home. One night she would discern a smell of
+gas, the next there might be a hole in the fly-screens, or a little
+carpentering to do, or a caster broken under the piano. Husbands
+with a turn for plumbing would find the club basement a perpetual
+place of solace, with a fresh leak or a rumbling pipe every few
+days.
+
+AJAX: Admirable! And if the matron really wanted to make the members
+feel at home she would take a turn through the building every now
+and then, to issue a gentle rebuke for cigar ashes dropped on the
+rugs or feet elevated on chairs.
+
+SOCRATES: The really crowning touch, I think, would lie in the
+ice-box raids. A large ice-box would be kept well stocked with
+remainders of apple pie, macaroni, stewed prunes, and chocolate
+pudding. Any husband, making a cautious inroad upon these about
+midnight, would surely have the authentic emotion of being in his
+own home.
+
+AJAX: An occasional request to empty the ice-box pan would also be
+an artful echo of domesticity.
+
+SOCRATES: Of course the success of the scheme would depend greatly
+on finding the right person for matron. If she were to strew a few
+hairpins about and perhaps misplace a latch key now and then----
+
+AJAX: Socrates, you have hit upon a great idea. But you ought to
+extend the membership of the club to include young men not yet
+married. Think what an admirable training school for husbands it
+would make!
+
+SOCRATES: My dear fellow, let us not discuss it any further. It
+makes me too homesick. I am going back to my lonely apartment to
+write a letter to dear Xanthippe.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+WEST BROADWAY
+
+
+Did you ever hear of Finn Square? No? Very well, then, we shall have
+to inflict upon you some paragraphs from our unpublished work: "A
+Scenic Guidebook to the Sixth Avenue L." The itinerary is a frugal
+one: you do not have to take the L, but walk along under it.
+
+Streets where an L runs have a fascination of their own. They have a
+shadowy gloom, speckled and striped with the sunlight that slips
+through the trestles. West Broadway, which along most of its length
+is straddled by the L, is a channel of odd humours. Its real name,
+you know, is South Fifth Avenue; but the Avenue got so snobbish it
+insisted on its humbler brother changing its name. Let us take it
+from Spring Street southward.
+
+Ribbons, purple, red, and green, were the first thing to catch our
+eye. Not the ribbons of the milliner, however, but the carbon tapes
+of the typewriter, big cans of them being loaded on a junk wagon.
+"Purple Ribbons" we have often thought, would be a neat title for a
+volume of verses written on a typewriter. What happens to the used
+ribbons of modern poets? Mr. Hilaire Belloc, or Mr. Chesterton, for
+instance. Give me but what these ribbons type and all the rest is
+merely tripe, as Edmund Waller might have said. Near the ribbons we
+saw a paper-box factory, where a number of high-spirited young women
+were busy at their machines. A broad strip of thick green paint was
+laid across the lower half of the windows so that these immured
+damsels might not waste their employers' time in watching goings on
+along the pavement.
+
+Broome and Watts streets diverge from West Broadway in a V. At the
+corner of Watts is one of West Broadway's many saloons, which by
+courageous readjustments still manage to play their useful part.
+What used to be called the "Business Men's Lunch" now has a tendency
+to name itself "Luncheonette" or "Milk Bar." But the old decorations
+remain. In this one you will see the electric fixtures wrapped in
+heavy lead foil, the kind of sheeting that is used in packages of
+tea. At the corner of Grand Street is the Sapphire Café, and what
+could be a more appealing name than that? "Delicious Chocolate with
+Whipped Cream," says a sign outside the Sapphire. And some way
+farther down (at the corner of White Street) is a jolly old tavern
+which looked so antique and inviting that we went inside. Little
+tables piled high with hunks of bread betokened the approaching
+lunch hour. A shimmering black cat winked a drowsy topaz eye from
+her lounge in the corner. We asked for cider. There was none, but
+our gaze fell upon a bottle marked "Irish Moss." We asked for some,
+and the barkeep pushed the bottle forward with a tiny glass. Irish
+Moss, it seems, is the kind of drink which the customer pours out
+for himself, so we decanted a generous slug. It proved to be a kind
+of essence of horehound, of notable tartness and pungency, very like
+a powerful cough syrup. We wrote it off on our ledger as experience.
+Beside us stood a sturdy citizen with a freight hook round his neck,
+deducing a foaming crock of the legitimate percentage.
+
+The chief landmark of that stretch of West Broadway is the tall
+spire of St. Alphonsus' Church, near Canal Street. Up the steps and
+through plain brown doors we went into the church, which was cool,
+quiet, and empty, save for a busy charwoman with humorous Irish
+face. Under the altar canopy wavered a small candle spark, and high
+overhead, in the dimness, were orange and scarlet gleams from a
+stained window. A crystal chandelier hanging in the aisle caught
+pale yellow tinctures of light. No Catholic church, wherever you
+find it, is long empty; a man and a girl entered just as we went
+out. At each side of the front steps the words _Copiosa apud eum
+redemtio_ are carved in the stone. The mason must have forgotten the
+_p_ in the last word. A silver plate on the brick house next door
+says _Redemptorist Fathers_.
+
+York Street, running off to the west, gives a glimpse of the old
+Hudson River Railroad freight depot. St. John's Lane, running across
+York Street, skirts the ruins of old St. John's Church, demolished
+when the Seventh Avenue subway was built. On the old brown house at
+the corner some urchin has chalked the word CRAZY. Perhaps this is
+an indictment of adult civilization as a whole. If one strolls
+thoughtfully about some of these streets--say Thompson Street--on a
+hot day, and sees the children struggling to grow up, he feels like
+going back to that word CRAZY and italicizing it. The tiny
+triangle of park at Beach Street is carefully locked up, you will
+notice--the only plot of grass in that neighbourhood--so that bare
+feet cannot get at it. Superb irony of circumstance: on the near
+corner stands the Castoria factory, Castoria being (if we remember
+the ads) what Mr. Fletcher gave baby when she was sick.
+
+Where Varick Street runs in there is a wide triangular spread, and
+this, gentle friends, is Finn Park, named for a New York boy who was
+killed in France. The name reminded us also of Elfin Finn, the
+somewhat complacent stage child who poses for chic costumes in
+_Vogue_. We were wondering which was a more hazardous bringing up
+for a small girl, living on Thompson Street or posing for a fashion
+magazine. From Finn Square there is a stirring view of the Woolworth
+Tower. Also of Claflin's packing cases on their way off to Selma,
+Ala., and Kalamazoo, Mich., and to Nathan Povich, Bath, Me. That
+conjunction of Finn and Bath, Me., suggested to us that the empty
+space there would be a good place to put in a municipal swimming
+pool for the urchins of the district.
+
+_Drawn from the wood_, which legend still stands on the pub at the
+corner of Duane Street, sounds a bit ominous these wood alcohol
+days. John Barleycorn may be down, but he's never out, as someone
+has remarked. For near Murray Street you will find one of those
+malt-and-hops places which are getting numerous. They contain all
+the necessary equipment for--well, as the signs suggest, for making
+malt bread and coffee cake--bottle-capping apparatus and rubber
+tubing and densimeters, and all such things used in breadmaking. As
+the signs say: "Malt syrup for making malt bread, coffee, cake, and
+medicinal purposes."
+
+To conclude the scenic pleasures of the Sixth Avenue L route, we
+walk through the cool, dark, low-roofed tunnel of Church Street in
+those interesting blocks just north of Vesey. We hark to the merry
+crowing of the roosters in the Barclay Street poultry stores; and we
+look past the tall gray pillars of St. Peter's Church at the flicker
+of scarlet and gold lights near the altar. The black-robed nuns one
+often sees along Church Street, with their pale, austere, hooded
+faces, bring a curious touch of medievalism into the roaring tide
+that flows under the Hudson Terminal Building. They always walk in
+twos, which seems to indicate an even greater apprehension of the
+World. And we always notice, as we go by the pipe shop at the corner
+of Barclay Street, that this worthy merchant has painted some
+inducements on one side of his shop; which reminds us of the same
+device used by the famous tobacconist Bacon, in Cambridge, England.
+Why, we wonder, doesn't our friend fill the remaining blank panel on
+his side wall by painting there some stanzas from Calverley's "Ode
+to Tobacco?" We will gladly give him the text to copy if he wants
+it.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+THE RUDENESS OF POETS
+
+
+The poet who has not learned how to be rude has not learned his
+first duty to himself. By "poet" I mean, of course, any imaginative
+creator--novelist, mathematician, editor, or a man like Herbert
+Hoover. And by "rude" I mean the strict and definite limitation
+which, sooner or later, he must impose upon his sociable instincts.
+He must refuse to fritter away priceless time and energy in the
+random genialities of the world. Friendly, well-meaning, and
+fumbling hands will stretch out to bind the poet's heart in the
+maddening pack-thread of Lilliput. It will always be so. Life, for
+most, is so empty of consecrated purpose, so full of palaver, that
+they cannot understand the trouble of one who carries a flame in his
+heart, and whose salvation depends on his strength to nourish that
+flame unsuffocated by crowding and scrutiny.
+
+The poet lives in an alien world. That is not his pride; it is his
+humility. It is often his joy, but often also his misery: he must
+dree his weird. His necessary solitude of spirit is not luxury, nor
+the gesture of a churl: it is his sacrifice, it is the condition on
+which he lives. He must be content to seem boorish to the general in
+order to be tender to his duty. He has invisible guests at the table
+of his heart: those places are reserved against all comers. He must
+be their host first of all, or he is damned. He serves the world by
+cutting it when they meet inopportunely. There are times (as Keats
+said and Christ implied) when the wind and the stars are his wife
+and children.
+
+There will be a thousand pressures to bare his bosom to the lunacy
+of public dinners, lecture platforms, and what not pleasant
+folderol. He must be privileged apparent ruffian discourtesy. He has
+his own heart-burn to consider. One thinks of Rudyard Kipling in
+this connection. Mr. Kipling stands above all other men of letters
+to-day in the brave clearness with which he has made it plain that
+he consorts first of all with his own imagination.
+
+As the poet sees the world, and studies, the more he realizes that
+men are sharply cut in two classes: those who understand, those who
+do not. With the latter he speaks a foreign language and with
+effort, trying shamefacedly to conceal his strangeness. With these,
+perhaps, every moment spent is for ever lost. With the others he can
+never commune enough, seeking clumsily to share and impart those
+moments of rare intuition when truth came near. There is rarely any
+doubt as to this human division: the heart knows its kin.
+
+The world, as he sees it around him, is almost unconscious of its
+unspeakable loveliness and mystery; and it is largely regimented and
+organized for absurdity. The greater part of the movement he sees is
+(by his standard) not merely stupid (which is pardonable and
+appealing), but meaningless altogether. He views it between anger
+and tenderness. Where there might have been the exquisite and
+delicious simplicity of a Japanese print, he sees the flicker and
+cruel garishness of a speeding film. And so, for refreshment, he
+crosses through the invisible doorway into his own dear land of
+lucidity. He cons over that passport of his unsociability, words of
+J.B. Yeats which should be unforgotten in every poet's mind:
+
+     Poetry is the voice of the solitary man. The poet is always a
+     solitary; and yet he speaks to others--he would win their
+     attention. Thus it follows that every poem is a social act done
+     by a solitary man. And being an alien from the strange land of
+     the solitary, he cannot be expected to admonish or to
+     sermonize, or uplift, as it is called; and so take part in the
+     cabals and intrigues in other lands of which he knows nothing,
+     being himself a stranger from a strange land, the land of the
+     solitary. People listen to him as they would to any other
+     traveller come from distant countries, and all he asks for is
+     courtesy even as he himself is courteous.
+
+     Inferior poets are those who forget their dignity--and, indeed,
+     their only chance of being permitted to live--and to make
+     friends try to enter into the lives of the people whom they
+     would propitiate, and so become teachers and moralists and
+     preachers. And soon for penalty of their rashness and folly
+     they forget their own land of the solitary, and its speech
+     perishes from their lips. The traveller's tales are of all the
+     most precious, because he comes from a land--the poet's
+     solitude--which no other feet have trodden and which no other
+     feet will tread.
+
+So, briefly and awkwardly, he justifies himself, being given (as
+Mrs. Quickly apologized) to "allicholy and musing." Oh, it is not
+easy! As Gilbert Chesterton said, in a noble poem:
+
+          The way is all so very plain
+            That we may lose the way.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+1100 WORDS
+
+
+The managing editor, the city editor, the production manager, the
+foreman of the composing room, and the leading editorial writer
+having all said to us with a great deal of sternness, "Your copy for
+Saturday has got to be upstairs by such and such a time, because we
+are going to make up the page at so and so A.M.," we got rather
+nervous.
+
+If we may say so, we did not like the way they said it. They
+spoke--and we are thinking particularly of the production
+manager--with a kind of paternal severity that was deeply
+distressing to our spirit. They are all, in off hours, men of
+delightfully easy disposition. They are men with whom it would be a
+pleasure and a privilege to be cast away on a desert island or in a
+crowded subway train. It is only just to say that they are men whom
+we admire greatly. When we meet them in the elevator, or see them at
+Frank's having lunch, how full of jolly intercourse they are. But in
+the conduct of their passionate and perilous business, that is, of
+getting the paper out on time, a holy anguish shines upon their
+brows. The stern daughter of the voice of God has whispered to them,
+and they pass on the whisper to us through a mega-phone.
+
+That means to say that within the hour we have got to show up
+something in the neighbourhood of 1100 words to these magistrates
+and overseers. With these keys--typewriter keys, of course--we have
+got to unlock our heart. Milton, thou shouldst be living at this
+hour. Speaking of Milton, the damp that fell round his path (in
+Wordsworth's sonnet) was nothing to the damp that fell round our
+alert vestiges as we hastened to the Salamis station in that drench
+this morning. (We ask you to observe our self-restraint. We might
+have said "drenching downpour of silver Long Island rain," or
+something of that sort, and thus got several words nearer our
+necessary total of 1100. But we scorn, even when writing against
+time, to take petty advantages. Let us be brief, crisp, packed with
+thought. Let it stand as drench, while you admire our proud
+conscience.)
+
+Eleven hundred words--what a lot could be said in 1100 words! We
+stood at the front door of the baggage car (there is an odd irony in
+this: the leading editorial writer, one of the most implacable of
+our taskmasters, is spending the summer at Sea Cliff, and he gets
+the last empty seat left in the smoker. So we, getting on at
+Salamis, have to stand in the baggage car) watching the engine rock
+and roar along the rails, while the rain sheeted the level green
+fields. It is very agreeable to ride on a train in the rain. We have
+never known just why, but it conduces to thought. The clear trickles
+of water are drawn slantwise across the window panes, and one
+watches, absently, the curious behaviour of the drops. They hang
+bulging and pendulous, in one spot for some seconds. Then, as they
+swell, suddenly they break loose and zigzag swiftly down the pane,
+following the slippery pathway that previous drops have made. It is
+like a little puzzle game where you manoeuvre a weighted capsule
+among pegs toward a narrow opening. "Pigs in clover," they sometimes
+call it, but who knows why? The conduct of raindrops on a
+smoking-car window is capricious and odd, but we must pass on. That
+topic alone would serve for several hundred words, but we will not
+be opportunist.
+
+We stood at the front door of the baggage car, and in a pleasant
+haze of the faculties we thought of a number of things. We thought
+of some books we had seen up on East Fifty-ninth Street, in that
+admirable row of old bookshops, particularly Mowry Saben's volume of
+essays, "The Spirit of Life," which we are going back to buy one of
+these days; so please let it alone. We then got out a small
+note-book in which we keep memoranda of books we intend to read and
+pored over it zealously. Just for fun, we will tell you three of
+the titles we have noted there:
+
+     "The Voyage of the Hoppergrass," by E.L. Pearson.
+     "People and Problems," by Fabian Franklin.
+     "Broken Stowage," by David W. Bone.
+
+But most of all we thought, in a vague sentimental way, about that
+pleasant Long Island country through which the engine was haling and
+hallooing all those carloads of audacious commuters.
+
+Only the other day we heard a wise man say that he did not care for
+Long Island, because one has to travel through a number of
+half-built suburbs before getting into real country. We felt, when
+he said it, that it would be impossible for us to tell him how much
+some of those growing suburbs mean to us, for we have lived in them.
+There is not one of those little frame dwellings that doesn't give
+us a thrill as we buzz past them. If you voyage from Brooklyn, as we
+do, you will have noticed two stations (near Jamaica) called
+Clarenceville and Morris Park. Now we have never got off at those
+stations, though we intend to some day. But in those rows of small
+houses and in sudden glimpses of modest tree-lined streets and
+corner drug stores we can see something that we are not subtle
+enough to express. We see it again in the scrap of green park by the
+station at Queens, and in the brave little public library near the
+same station--which we cannot see from the train, though we often
+try to; but we know it is there, and probably the same kindly lady
+librarian and the children borrowing books. We see it again--or we
+did the other day--in a field at Mineola where a number of small
+boys were flying kites in the warm, clean, softly perfumed air of a
+July afternoon. We see it in the vivid rows of colour in the
+florist's meadow at Floral Park. We don't know just what it is, but
+over all that broad tract of hardworking suburbs there is a secret
+spirit of practical and persevering decency that we somehow
+associate with the soul of America.
+
+We see it with the eye of a lover, and we know that it is good.
+
+Having got as far as this, we took the trouble to count all the
+words up to this point. The total is exactly 1100.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+SOME INNS
+
+
+The other evening we went with Titania to a ramshackle country hotel
+which calls itself _The Mansion House_, looking forward to a fine
+robust meal. It was a transparent, sunny, cool evening, and when we
+saw on the bill of fare _half broiled chicken_, we innocently
+supposed that the word _half_ was an adjective modifying the
+compound noun, _broiled-chicken_. Instead, to our sorrow and
+disappointment, it proved to be an adverb modifying _broiled_ (we
+hope we parse the matter correctly). At any rate, the wretched fowl
+was blue and pallid, a little smoked on the exterior, raw and sinewy
+within, and an affront to the whole profession of innkeeping.
+Whereupon, in the days that followed, looking back at our fine mood
+of expectancy as we entered that hostelry, and its pitiable collapse
+when the miserable travesty of victuals was laid before us, we fell
+to thinking about some of the inns we had known of old time where
+we had feasted not without good heart.
+
+To speak merely by sudden memory, for instance, there was the fine
+old hotel in Burlington, Vermont--is it called the _Van Ness
+House_?--where we remember a line of cane-bottomed chairs on a long
+shady veranda, where one could look out and see the town simmering
+in that waft of hot and dazzling sunshine that pours across Lake
+Champlain in the late afternoon: and _The Black Lion_, Lavenham,
+Suffolk; where (unless we confuse it with a pub in Bury St. Edmunds
+where we had lunch), there was, in the hallway, a very fine old
+engraving called "Pirates Decoying a Merchantman," in which one
+pirate, dressed in woman's clothes, stood up above the bulwarks
+waving for assistance, while the cutlassed ruffians crouched below
+ready to do their bloody work when the other ship came near enough.
+Nor have we forgotten _The Saracen's Head_, at Ware, whence we went
+exploring down the little river Lea on Izaak Walton's trail; nor
+_The Swan_ at Bibury in Gloucestershire, hard by that clear green
+water the Colne; nor another _Swan_ at Tetsworth in Oxfordshire,
+which one reaches after bicycling over the beechy slope of the
+Chilterns, and where, in the narrow taproom, occurred the fabled
+encounter between a Texas Rhodes Scholar logged with port wine and
+seven Oxfordshire yokels who made merry over his power of carrying
+the red blood of the grape.
+
+Our friend C.F.B., while we were meditating these golden matters,
+wrote to us that he is going on a walking or bicycling trip in
+England next summer, and asks for suggestions. We advise him to get
+a copy of Muirhead's "England" (the best general guidebook we have
+seen) and look up his favourite authors in the index. That will
+refer him to the places associated with them, and he can have rare
+sport in hunting them out. There is no way of pilgrimage so pleasant
+as to follow the spoor of a well-loved writer. Referring to our
+black note-book, in which we keep memoranda of a modest pilgrimage
+we once made to places mentioned by two of our heroes, viz., Boswell
+and R.L.S., we think that if we were in C.F.B.'s shoes, one of the
+regions we would be most anxious to revisit would be Dove Dale, in
+Derbyshire. This exquisite little valley is reached from Ashbourne,
+where we commend the _Green Man Inn_ (visited more than once by
+Doctor Johnson and Boswell). This neighbourhood also has memories of
+George Eliot, and of Izaak Walton, who used to go fishing in the
+little river Dove; his fishing house is still there. Unfortunately,
+when we were in those parts we did not have sense enough to see the
+Manyfold, a curious stream (a tributary of the Dove) which by its
+habit of running underground caused Johnson and Boswell to argue
+about miracles.
+
+Muirhead's book will give C.F.B. sound counsel about the inns of
+that district, which are many and good. The whole region of the
+Derbyshire Peak is rarely visited by the foreign tourist. Of it,
+Doctor Johnson, with his sturdy prejudice, said: "He who has seen
+Dove Dale has no need to visit the Highlands." The metropolis of
+this moorland is Buxton: unhappily we did not make a note of the inn
+we visited in that town; but we have a clear recollection of
+claret, candlelight, and reading "Weir of Hermiston" in bed; also a
+bathroom with hot water, not too common in the cheap hostelries we
+frequented.
+
+We can only wish for the good C.F.B. as happy an evening as we spent
+(with our eccentric friend Mifflin McGill) bicycling from the
+_Newhaven Inn_ in a July twilight. The _Newhaven Inn_, which is only
+a vile kind of meagre roadhouse at a lonely fork in the way (where
+one arm of the signpost carries the romantic legend "To Haddon
+Hall"), lies between Ashbourne and Buxton. But it is marked on all
+the maps, so perhaps it has an honourable history. The sun was dying
+in red embers over the Derbyshire hills as we pedalled along. Life,
+liquor, and literature lay all before us; certes, we had no thought
+of ever writing a daily column! And finally, after our small
+lanterns were lit and cast their little fans of brightness along the
+flowing road, we ascended a rise and saw Buxton in the valley below,
+twinkling with lights--
+
+          "_And when even dies, the million-tinted,
+            And the night has come, and planets glinted
+              Lo, the valley hollow
+                Lamp-bestarred!_"
+
+Nor were all these ancient inns (to which our heart wistfully
+returns) on British soil. There was the _Hotel de la Tour_, in
+Montjoie, a quaint small town somewhere in that hilly region of the
+Ardennes along the border between Luxemburg and Belgium. Our memory
+is rather vague as to Montjoie, for we got there late one evening,
+after more than seventy up-and-down miles on a bicycle, hypnotic
+with weariness and the smell of pine trees and a great warm wind
+that had buffeted us all day. But we have a dim, comfortable
+remembrance of a large clean bedroom, unlighted, in which we duskily
+groped and found no less than three huge beds among which we had to
+choose; and we can see also a dining room brilliantly papered in
+scarlet, with good old prints on the walls and great wooden beams
+overhead. Two bottles of ice-cold beer linger in our thought: and
+there was some excellent work done on a large pancake, one of those
+durable fleshy German _Pfannkuchen_. For the odd part of it was
+(unless our memory is wholly amiss) Montjoie was then (1912)
+supposed to be part of Germany, and they pronounced it Mon-yowey.
+But the Reich must have felt that this was not permanent, for they
+had not Germanized either the name of the town or of the hostelry.
+
+And let us add, in this affectionate summary, _The Lion_--(_Hotel
+zum Löwen_)--at Sigmaringen, that delicious little haunt on the
+upper Danube, where the castle sits on a stony jut overlooking the
+river. Algernon Blackwood, in one of his superb tales of fantasy (in
+the volume called "The Listener") has told a fascinating gruesome
+story of the Danube, describing a sedgy, sandy, desolate region
+below the Hungarian border where malevolent inhuman forces were
+apparent and resented mortal intrusion. But we cannot testify to
+anything sinister in the bright water of the Danube in the flow of
+its lovely youth, above Sigmaringen. And if there were any evil
+influences, surely at Sigmaringen (the ancient home and origin of
+the Hohenzollerns, we believe) they would have shown themselves. In
+those exhilarating miles of valley, bicycled in company with a
+blithe vagabond who is now a professor at Cornell, we learned why
+the waltz was called "The Blue Danube." So heavenly a tint of
+transparent blue-green we have never seen elsewhere, the hurrying
+current sliding under steep crags of gray and yellow stone, whitened
+upon sudden shallows into long terraces of broken water. There was a
+wayside chapel with painted frescoes and Latin inscriptions (why
+didn't we make a note of them, we wonder?) and before it a cold gush
+sluicing from a lion's mouth into a stone basin. A blue crockery mug
+stood on the rim, and the bowl was spotted with floating petals from
+pink and white rose-bushes. We can still see our companion, tilting
+a thirsty bearded face as he drank, outlined on such a backdrop of
+pure romantic beauty as only enriches irresponsible youth in its
+commerce with the world. The river bends sharply to the left under a
+prodigious cliff, where is some ancient castle or religious house.
+There he stands, excellent fellow, forever (in our memory) holding
+that blue mug against a Maxfield Parrish scene.
+
+Just around that bend, if you are discreet, a bathe can be
+accomplished, and you will reach the _Lion_ by supper time, vowing
+the Danube the loveliest of all streams.
+
+Of the _Lion_ itself, now that we compress the gland of memory more
+closely, we have little to report save a general sensation of
+cheerful comfort. That in itself is favourable: the bad inns are
+always accurately tabled in mind. But stay--here is a picture that
+unexpectedly presents itself. On that evening (it was July 15, 1912)
+there was a glorious little girl, about ten years old, taking supper
+at the _Lion_ with her parents. Through the yellow shine of the
+lamps she suddenly reappears to us, across the dining room--rather a
+more luxurious dining room than the two wayfarers were accustomed to
+visit. We can see her straight white frock, her plump brown legs in
+socks (not reaching the floor as she sat), her tawny golden hair
+with a red ribbon. The two dusty vagabonds watched her, and her
+important-looking adults, from afar. We have only the vaguest
+impression of her father: he was erect and handsome and not
+untouched with pride. (Heavens, were they some minor offshoot of the
+Hohenzollern tribe?) We can see the head waiter smirking near their
+table. Across nine years and thousands of miles they still radiate
+to us a faint sense of prosperity and breeding; and the child was
+like a princess in a fairy-tale. Ah, if only it had all been a
+fairy-tale. Could we but turn back the clock to that summer evening
+when the dim pine-alleys smelled so resinous on the Muehlberg, turn
+back the flow of that quick blue river, turn back history itself and
+rewrite it in chapters fit for the clear eyes of that child we saw.
+
+Well, we are growing grievous: it is time to go out and have some
+cider. There are many other admirable inns we might soliloquize--The
+_Seven Stars_ in Rotterdam (Molensteeg 19, "nabij het Postkantoor");
+_Gibson's Hotel_, Rutland Square, Edinburgh ("Well adapted for
+Marriages," says its card); the _Hotel Davenport_, Stamford,
+Connecticut, where so many palpitating playwrights have sat
+nervously waiting for the opening performance; the _Tannhäuser
+Hotel_ in Heidelberg, notable for the affability of the
+chambermaids. Perhaps you will permit us to close by quoting a
+description of an old Irish tavern, from that queer book "The Life
+of John Buncle, Esq." (1756). This inn bore the curious name _The
+Conniving House_:
+
+     The _Conniving-House_ (as the gentlemen of Trinity called it in
+     my time, and long after) was a little public house, kept by
+     _Jack Macklean_, about a quarter of a mile beyond Rings-end, on
+     the top of the beach, within a few yards of the sea. Here we
+     used to have the finest fish at all times; and in the season,
+     green peas, and all the most excellent vegetables. The ale here
+     was always extraordinary, and everything the best; which, with
+     its delightful situation, rendered it a delightful place of a
+     summer's evening. Many a delightful evening have I passed in
+     this pretty thatched house with the famous _Larrey Grogan_, who
+     played on the bagpipes extreme well; dear _Jack Lattin_,
+     matchless on the fiddle, and the most agreeable of companions;
+     that ever charming young fellow, _Jack Wall_ ... and many other
+     delightful fellows; who went in the days of their youth to the
+     shades of eternity. When I think of them and their evening
+     songs--_We will go to Johnny Macklean's--to try if his ale be
+     good or no_, etc., and that years and infirmities begin to
+     oppress me--What is life!
+
+There is a fine, easy, mellow manner of writing, worthy the subject.
+And we--we conclude with honest regret. Even to write down the
+names of all the inns where we have been happy would be the
+pleasantest possible way of spending an afternoon. But we advise you
+to be cautious in adopting our favourites as stopping places. Some
+of them are very humble.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+THE CLUB IN HOBOKEN
+
+
+The advertisement ran as follows:
+
+          Schooner _Hauppauge_
+          FOR SALE
+          By U.S. Marshal,
+          April 26, 1 P.M.,
+          Pier G, Erie R.R.,
+          Weehawken, N.J.
+          Built at Wilmington, N.C., 1918; net
+          tonnage 1,295; length 228; equipped with
+          sails, tackle, etc.
+
+This had taken the eye of the Three Hours for Lunch Club. The club's
+interest in nautical matters is well known and it is always looking
+forward to the day when it will be able to command a vessel of its
+own. Now it would be too much to say that the club expected to be
+able to buy the _Hauppauge_ (the first thing it would have done, in
+that case, would have been to rename her). For it was in the slack
+and hollow of the week--shall we say, the bight of the week?--just
+midway between pay-days. But at any rate, thought the club, we can
+look her over, which will be an adventure in itself; and we can see
+just how people behave when they are buying a schooner, and how
+prices are running, so that when the time comes we will be more
+experienced. Besides, the club remembered the ship auction scene in
+"The Wrecker" and felt that the occasion might be one of most
+romantic excitement.
+
+It is hard, it is very hard, to have to admit that the club was
+foiled. It had been told that at Cortlandt Street a ferry bound for
+Weehawken might be found; but when Endymion and the Secretary
+arrived there, at 12:20 o'clock, they learned that the traffic to
+Weehawken is somewhat sparse. Next boat at 2:40, said a sign. They
+hastened to the Lackawanna ferry at Barclay Street, thinking that by
+voyaging to Hoboken and then taking a car they might still be in
+time. But it was not to be. When the _Ithaca_ docked, just south of
+the huge red-blotched profile of the rusty rotting _Leviathan_, it
+was already 1 o'clock. The _Hauppauge_, they said to themselves, is
+already on the block, and if we went up there now to study her, we
+would be regarded as impostors.
+
+But the club is philosophic. One Adventure is very nearly as good as
+another, and they trod ashore at Hoboken with light hearts. It was a
+day of tender and untroubled sunshine. They had a queer sensation of
+being in foreign lands. Indeed, the tall tragic funnels of the
+_Leviathan_ and her motionless derelict masts cast a curious shadow
+of feeling over that region. For the great ship, though blameless
+herself, seems a thing of shame, a remembrance of days and deeds
+that soiled the simple creed of the sea. Her great shape and her
+majestic hull, pitiably dingy and stark, are yet plainly conscious
+of sin. You see it in every line of her as she lies there, with the
+attitude of a great dog beaten and crouching. You wonder how she
+would behave if she were towed out on the open bright water of the
+river, under that clear sky, under the eyes of other ships going
+about their affairs with the self-conscious rectitude and pride that
+ships have. For ships are creatures of intense caste and
+self-conscious righteousness. They rarely forgive a fallen
+sister--even when she has fallen through no fault of her own.
+Observe the _Nieuw Amsterdam_ as she lies, very solid and spick, a
+few piers above. Her funnel is gay with bright green stripes; her
+glazed promenade deck is white and immaculate. But, is there not
+just a faint suggestion of smugness in her mien? She seems thanking
+the good old Dutch Deity of cleanliness and respectability that she
+herself is not like this poor trolloping giantess, degraded from the
+embrace of ocean and the unblemished circle of the sea.
+
+That section of Hoboken waterfront, along toward the green
+promontory crowned by Stevens Institute, still has a war-time
+flavour. The old Hamburg-American line piers are used by the Army
+Transport Service, and in the sunshine a number of soldiers, off
+duty, were happily drowsing on a row of two-tiered beds set outdoors
+in the April pleasantness. There was a racket of bugles, and a squad
+seemed to be drilling in the courtyard. Endymion and the Secretary,
+after sitting on a pier-end watching some barges, and airing their
+nautical views in a way they would never have done had any pukka
+seafaring men been along, were stricken with the very crisis of
+spring fever and lassitude. They considered the possibility of
+hiring one of the soldiers' two-tiered beds for the afternoon.
+Perhaps it is the first two syllables of Hoboken's name that make it
+so desperately debilitating to the wayfarer in an April noonshine.
+Perhaps it was a kind of old nostalgia, for the Secretary remembered
+that sailormen's street as it had been some years ago, when he had
+been along there in search of schooners of another sort.
+
+But anatomizing their anguish, these creatures finally decided that
+it might not be spring fever, but merely hunger. They saw the statue
+of the late Mr. Sloan of the Lackawanna Railroad--Sam Sloan, the
+bronze calls him, with friendly familiarity. The aspiring forelock
+of that statue, and the upraised finger of Samuel Sullivan Cox ("The
+Letter Carriers' Friend") in Astor Place, the club considers two of
+the most striking things in New York statuary. Mr. Pappanicholas,
+who has a candy shop in the high-spirited building called Duke's
+House, near the ferry terminal, must be (Endymion thought) some
+relative of Santa Claus. Perhaps he _is_ Santa Claus, and the club
+pondered on the quite new idea that Santa Claus has lived in Hoboken
+all these years and no one had guessed it. The club asked a friendly
+policeman if there were a second-hand bookstore anywhere near. "Not
+that I know of," he said. But they did find a stationery store where
+there were a number of popular reprints in the window, notably "The
+Innocence of Father Brown," and Andrew Lang's "My Own Fairy Book."
+
+But lunch was still to be considered. The club is happy to add The
+American Hotel, Hoboken, to its private list of places where it has
+been serenely happy. Consider corned beef hash, with fried egg,
+excellent, for 25 cents. Consider rhubarb pie, quite adequate, for
+10 cents. Consider the courteous and urbane waiter. In one corner of
+the dining room was the hotel office, with a large array of push
+buttons communicating with the bedrooms. The club, its imagination
+busy, conceived that these were for the purpose of awakening
+seafaring guests early in the morning, so as not to miss their ship.
+If we were, for instance, second mate of the _Hauppauge_, and came
+to port in Hoboken, The American Hotel would be just the place where
+we would want to put up.
+
+That brings us back to the _Hauppauge_. We wonder who bought her,
+and how much he paid; and why she carries the odd name of that Long
+Island village? If he would only invite us over to see her--and tell
+us how to get there!
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+THE CLUB AT ITS WORST
+
+
+A barbecue and burgoo of the Three Hours for Lunch Club was held,
+the club's medical adviser acting as burgoomaster and Mr. Lawton
+Mackall, the managing director, as jest of honour. The news that
+Lawton was at large spread rapidly through the city, and the club
+was trailed for some distance by an infuriated agent of the Society
+for the Deracination of Puns. But Lawton managed to kick over his
+traces, and the club safely gained the quiet haven of a Cedar Street
+chophouse. Here, when the members were duly squeezed into a stall,
+the Doctor gazed cheerfully upon Endymion and the Secretary who held
+the inward places. "Now is my chance," he cried, "to kill two bards
+with one stone."
+
+Lawton, says the stenographic report, was in excellent form, and
+committed a good deal of unforgivable syntax. He was somewhat
+apprehensive when he saw the bill of fare inscribed "Ye Olde Chop
+House," for he asserts that the use of the word "Ye" always involves
+extra overhead expense--and a quotation from Shakespeare on the back
+of the menu, he doubted, might mean a couvert charge. But he was
+distinctly cheered when the kidneys and bacon arrived--a long strip
+of bacon gloriously balanced on four very spherical and
+well-lubricated kidneys. Smiling demurely, even blandly, Lawton
+rolled his sheave of bacon to and fro upon its kidneys. "This is the
+first time I ever saw bacon with ball bearings," he ejaculated. He
+gazed with the eye of a connoisseur upon the rather candid works of
+art hanging over the club's corner. He said they reminded him of Mr.
+Coles Phillips's calf-tones. The Doctor was speaking of having
+read an interesting dispatch by Mr. Grasty in the _Times_. "I
+understand," said Lawton, "that he is going to collect some of his
+articles in a book, to be called 'Leaves of Grasty'."
+
+Duly ambered with strict and cloudy cider, the meal progressed,
+served with humorous comments by the waitress whom the club calls
+the Venus of Mealo. The motto of the club is _Tres Horas Non Numero
+Nisi Serenas_, and as the afternoon was still juvenile the gathering
+was transferred to the waterfront. Passing onto the pier, Lawton
+gazed about him with admirable naïveté. Among the piles of freight
+were some agricultural machines. "Ha," cried the managing director,
+"this, evidently, is where the Piers Plowman works!" The club's
+private yacht, white and lovely, lay at her berth, and in the
+Doctor's cabin the members proceeded to the serious discussion of
+literature. Lawton, however, seemed nervous. Cargo was being put
+aboard the ship, and ever and anon there rose a loud rumbling of
+donkey engines. The occasional hurrying roar of machinery seemed to
+make Lawton nervous, for he said apprehensively that he feared
+someone was rushing the growler. In the corridor outside the
+Doctor's quarters a group of stewardesses were violently
+altercating, and Lawton remarked that a wench can make almost as
+much noise as a winch. On the whole, however, he admired the ship
+greatly, and was taken with the club's plans for going cruising. He
+said he felt safer after noting that the lifeboats were guaranteed
+to hold forty persons with cubic feet.
+
+By this time, all sense of verbal restraint had been lost, and the
+club (if we must be candid) concluded its session by chanting, not
+without enjoyment, its own sea chantey, which runs as follows:--
+
+          I shipped aboard a galleass
+            In a brig whereof men brag,
+          But lying on my palliass
+            My spirits began to sag.
+
+          I heard the starboard steward
+            Singing abaft the poop;
+          He lewdly sang to looard
+            And sleep fled from the sloop.
+
+          "The grog slops over the fiddles
+            With the violins of the gale:
+          Two bitts are on the quarterdeck,
+            The seamen grouse and quail.
+
+          "The anchor has been catted,
+            The timid ratlines flee,
+          Careening and carousing
+            She yaws upon the sea.
+
+          "The skipper lies in the scupper,
+            The barque is lost in the bight;
+          The bosun calls for a basin--
+            This is a terrible night.
+
+          "The wenches man the winches,
+            The donkey men all bray--"
+            ... I hankered to be anchored
+            In safety in the bay!
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+A SUBURBAN SENTIMENTALIST
+
+
+That wild and engaging region known as the Salamis Estates has
+surprising enchantments for the wanderer. Strolling bushrangers, if
+they escape being pelleted with lead by the enthusiastic rabbit
+hunters who bang suddenly among thickets, will find many vistas of
+loveliness. All summer long we are imprisoned in foliage, locked up
+in a leafy embrace. But when the leaves have shredded away and the
+solid barriers of green stand revealed as only thin fringes of
+easily penetrable woodland, the eye moves with surprise over these
+wide reaches of colour and freedom. Beyond the old ruined farmhouse
+past the gnarled and rheumatic apple tree is that dimpled path that
+runs across fields, the short cut down to the harbour. The stiff
+frozen plumes of ghostly goldenrod stand up pale and powdery along
+the way. How many tints of brown and fawn and buff in the withered
+grasses--some as feathery and translucent as a gauze scarf, as
+nebulous as those veilings Robin Herrick was so fond of--his mention
+of them gives an odd connotation to a modern reader--
+
+          So looks Anthea, when in bed she lyes,
+          Orecome, or halfe betray'd by Tiffanies.
+
+Our fields now have the rich, tawny colour of a panther's hide.
+Along the little path are scattered sumac leaves, dark scarlet. It
+is as though Summer had been wounded by the hunter Jack Frost, and
+had crept away down that secret track, leaving a trail of
+bloodstains behind her.
+
+This tract of placid and enchanted woodland, field, brake, glen, and
+coppice, has always seemed to us so amazingly like the magical
+Forest of Arden that we believe Shakespeare must have written "As
+You Like It" somewhere near here. One visitor, who was here when the
+woods were whispering blackly in autumn moonlight, thought them akin
+to George Meredith's "The Woods of Westermain"--
+
+          Enter these enchanted woods,
+            You who dare.
+          Nothing harms beneath the leaves
+          More than waves a swimmer cleaves,
+          Toss your heart up with the lark,
+          Foot at peace with mouse and worm.
+            Fair you fare.
+          Only at a dread of dark
+          Quaver, and they quit their form:
+          Thousand eyeballs under hoods
+            Have you by the hair.
+          Enter these enchanted woods,
+            You who dare.
+
+But in winter, and in such a noonday of clear sunshine as the
+present, when all the naked grace of trunks and hillsides lies open
+to eyeshot, the woodland has less of that secrecy and brooding
+horror that Meredith found in "Westermain." It has the very breath
+of that golden-bathed magic that moved in Shakespeare's tenderest
+haunt of comedy. Momently, looking out toward the gray ruin on the
+hill (which was once, most likely, the very "sheepcote fenced about
+with olive trees" where Aliena dwelt and Ganymede found hose and
+doublet give such pleasing freedom to her limbs and her wit) one
+expects to hear the merry note of a horn; the moralizing Duke would
+come striding thoughtfully through the thicket down by the tiny pool
+(or shall we call it a mere?). He would sit under those two knotty
+old oaks and begin to pluck the burrs from his jerkin. Then would
+come his cheerful tanned followers, carrying the dappled burgher
+they had ambushed; and, last, the pensive Jacques (so very like Mr.
+Joseph Pennell in bearing and humour) distilling his meridian
+melancholy into pentameter paragraphs, like any colyumist. A bonfire
+is quickly kindled, and the hiss and fume of venison collops whiff
+to us across the blue air. Against that stump--is it a real stump,
+or only a painted canvas affair from the property man's
+warehouse?--surely that is a demijohn of cider? And we can hear,
+presently, that most piercingly tremulous of all songs rising in
+rich chorus, with the plenitude of pathos that masculines best
+compass after a full meal--
+
+          Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
+          Thou art not so unkind
+          As man's ingratitude--
+
+We hum the air over to ourself, and are stricken with the most
+perfect iridescent sorrow. We even ransack our memory to try to
+think of someone who has been ungrateful to us, so that we can throw
+a little vigorous bitterness into our tone.
+
+Yes, the sunshine that gilds our Salamis thickets seems to us to
+have very much the amber glow of footlights.
+
+In another part of this our "forest"--it is so truly a forest in the
+Shakespearean sense, as all Long Island forests are (e.g., Forest
+Hills), where even the lioness and the green and gilded snake have
+their suburban analogues, which we will not be laborious to
+explain--we see Time standing still while Ganymede and Aliena are
+out foraging with the burly Touchstone (so very like that well-loved
+sage Mr. Don Marquis, we protest!). And, to consider, what a place
+for a colyumist was the Forest of Arden. See how zealous
+contributors hung their poems round on trees so that he could not
+miss them. Is it not all the very core and heartbeat of what we call
+"romance," that endearing convention that submits the harsh
+realities and interruptions of life to a golden purge of fancy? How,
+we sometimes wonder, can any one grow old as long as he can still
+read "As You Like It," and feel the magic of that best-loved and
+most magical of stage directions--_The Forest of Arden_.
+
+And now, while we are still in the soft Shakespearean mood, comes
+"Twelfth Night"--traditionally devoted to dismantling the Christmas
+Tree; and indeed there is no task so replete with luxurious and
+gentle melancholy. For by that time the toys which erst were so
+splendid are battered and bashed; the cornucopias empty of candy
+(save one or two striped sticky shards of peppermint which elude the
+thrusting index, and will be found again next December); the
+dining-room floor is thick with fallen needles; the gay little
+candles are burnt down to a small gutter of wax in the tin holders.
+The floor sparkles here and there with the fragments of tinsel balls
+or popcorn chains that were injudiciously hung within leap of puppy
+or grasp of urchin. And so you see him, the diligent parent,
+brooding with a tender mournfulness and sniffing the faint whiff of
+that fine Christmas tree odour--balsam and burning candles and
+fist-warmed peppermint--as he undresses the prickly boughs. Here
+they go into the boxes, red, green, and golden balls, tinkling glass
+bells, stars, paper angels, cotton-wool Santa Claus, blue birds,
+celluloid goldfish, mosquito netting, counterfeit stockings,
+nickel-plated horns, and all the comical accumulation of oddities
+that gathers from year to year in the box labelled CHRISTMAS TREE
+THINGS, FRAGILE. The box goes up to the attic, and the parent blows
+a faint diminuendo, achingly prolonged, on a toy horn. Titania is
+almost reduced to tears as he explains it is the halloo of Santa
+Claus fading away into the distance.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+GISSING
+
+
+Our subject, for the moment, is Gissing--and when we say Gissing we
+mean not the author of that name, but the dog. He was called Gissing
+because he arrived, in the furnace man's poke, on the same day on
+which, after long desideration, we were united in holy booklock with
+a copy of "By the Ionian Sea."
+
+Gissing needs (as the man said who wrote the preface to Sir Kenelm
+Digby's _Closet_) no Rhetoricating Floscules to set him off. He is
+(as the man said who wrote a poem about New York) vulgar of manner,
+underbred. He is young: his behaviour lacks restraint. Yet there is
+in him some lively prescription of that innocent and indivisible
+virtue that Nature omitted from men and gave only to Dogs. This is
+something that has been the cause of much vile verse in bad poets,
+of such gruesome twaddle as Senator Vest's dreadful outbark. But it
+is a true thing.
+
+How absurd, we will interject, is the saying: "Love me, love my
+dog." If he really is my dog, he won't let you love him. Again, one
+man's dog is another man's mongrel. Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday, that
+quaint philosopher frequently doggishly nicknamed Owd Bob, went to
+Washington lately to see President Harding. His eye fell upon the
+White House Airedale. Now Owd Bob is himself something of an
+Airedale trifler, and cherishes the memory of a certain Tristram
+Shandy, an animal that frequently appeared in the lighter editorials
+of the _Bookman_ when Mr. Holliday (then the editor) could think of
+nothing else to write about. And of Mr. Harding's dog Mr. Holliday
+reports, with grave sorrow: "I don't think he is a good Airedale. He
+has too much black on him. Now Shandy had only a small saddle of
+black...."
+
+But such are matters concerning only students of full-bred dogs, of
+whom we are not who.
+
+As to Gissing: we were trying to think, while writing the preceding
+excursion, how to give you his colour. Yellow is a word too violent,
+too vulgarly connotative. Brown is a muddy word. Sandy is too pale.
+Gamboge is a word used by artists, who are often immoral and
+excitable. Shall we say, the colour of a corncob pipe, singed and
+tawnied by much smoking? Or a pigskin tobacco pouch while it is
+still rather new? Or the colour of the _Atlantic Monthly_ in the old
+days, when it lay longer on the stands than it does now, and got
+faintly bleached? And in this colour, whatever it is, you must
+discern a dimly ruddy tinge. On his forehead, which is not really a
+forehead, but a continuation of a long and very vulpine nose, there
+is a small white stripe. It runs upward from between his eyes, but
+cants slightly to one side (like a great many journalists). There
+is a small white patch on his chin. There is a white waistcoat on
+his chest, or bosom if you consider that a more affectionate word.
+White also are the last twelve bristles (we have counted them) on
+his tail (which is much too long). His front ankles bend inward
+rather lopsidedly, as though he had fallen downstairs when very
+young. When we stoke the furnace, he extends his forward legs on the
+floor (standing erect the while in his rearward edifice) and lays
+his head sideways on his paws, and considers us in a manner not
+devoid of humour.
+
+Not far from our house, in that desirable but not very residential
+region which we have erst described as the Forest of Arden, there is
+a pond. It is a very romantic spot, it is not unlike the pond by
+which a man smoking a Trichinopoly cigar was murdered in one of the
+Sherlock Holmes stories. (The Boscombe Valley Mystery!) It is a
+shallow little pond, but the water is very clear; last winter when
+it was frozen it always reminded us of the cheerful advertising of
+one of the ice companies, it was so delightfully transparent. This
+pond is a kind of Union League Club for the frogs at this time of
+year; all night long you can hear them reclining in their armchairs
+of congenial mud and uttering their opinions, which vary very little
+from generation to generation. Most of those frogs are Republicans,
+we feel sure, but we love them no less.
+
+In this pond Gissing had his first swim one warm Sunday recently.
+The party set out soon after breakfast. Gissing was in the van, his
+topaz eyes wild with ambition. Followed a little red express-wagon,
+in which sat the Urchiness, wearing her best furry hat which has,
+in front, a small imitation mouse-head with glass eyes. The Urchin,
+wearing a small Scotch bonnet with ribbons, assisted in hauling the
+wagon. Gissing had not yet been tested in the matter of swimming:
+this was a sober moment. Would he take gladly to the ocean? (So the
+Urchin innocently calls our small sheet of water, having by a
+harmless ratiocination concluded that this term applies to any body
+of water not surrounded by domestic porcelain.)
+
+Now Gissing is passionate in the matter of chasing sticks hurled
+abroad. On seeing a billet seized and held aloft with that sibilant
+sound which stirs his ingenuous spirit to prodigies of pursuit, his
+eyes were flame, his heart was apoplexy. The stick flew aloft and
+curved into the pond, and he rushed to the water's edge. But there,
+like the recreant knight in the Arthurian idyl, he paused and
+doubted. There was Excalibur, floating ten feet from shore. This was
+a new experience. Was it written that sticks should be pursued in
+this strange and alien element? He barked querulously, and returned,
+his intellect clouded with hesitation. What was this etiquette? He
+was embarrassed.
+
+Another stick was flung into the trembling mere. This time there was
+no question. When the gods give the same sign twice, the only answer
+is obey. A tawny streak crossed the small meadow, and leaped
+unquestioningly into the pond. There was a plunging and a spattery
+scuffle, and borne up by a million years of heredity he pursued the
+floating enemy. It was seized, and a large gulp of water also, but
+backward he came bearing it merrily. Then, also unknowing that he
+was fulfilling old tradition, he came as near as possible to the
+little group of presbyters and dehydrated himself upon them. Thus
+was a new experience added to this young creature. The frogs grew
+more and more pensive as he spent the rest of the morning churning
+the pond hither and thither.
+
+That will be all about Gissing for the present.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+A DIALOGUE
+
+
+It was our good fortune to overhear a dialogue between Gissing (our
+dog) and Mike, the dog who lives next door. Mike, or Crowgill Mike
+II, to give him his full entitles, is a very sagacious old person,
+in the fifteenth year of his disillusionment, and of excellent
+family. If our humble Gissing is to have a three-barrelled name, it
+can only be Haphazard Gissing I, for his ancestry is plainly
+miscellaneous and impromptu. He is, we like to say, a synthetic dog.
+He is young: six months; we fear that some of the errors now
+frequently urged against the rising generation are plainly
+discernible in him. And Mike, who is grizzled and grown somewhat
+dour, shows toward our Gissing much the attitude of Dr. Eliot toward
+the younger litter of humans.
+
+In public, and when any one is watching, Mike, who is the Dog
+Emeritus of the Salamis Estates, pays no heed to Gissing at all:
+ignores him, and prowls austerely about his elderly business. But
+secretly spying from a window, we have seen him, unaware of notice,
+stroll (a little heavily and stiffly, for an old dog's legs grow
+gouty) over to Gissing's kennel. With his tail slightly vibrant, he
+conducts a dignified causerie. Unhappily, these talks are always
+concluded by some breach of manners on Gissing's part. At first he
+is respectful; but presently his enthusiasm grows too much for him;
+he begins to leap and frolic and utter uncouth praises of things in
+general. Then Mike turns soberly and moves away.
+
+On such an occasion, the chat went like this:
+
+GISSING: Do you believe in God?
+
+MIKE: I acknowledge Him. I don't believe in Him.
+
+GISSING: Oh, I think He's splendid. Hurrah! Hullabaloo! When He puts
+on those old khaki trousers and smokes that curve-stem pipe I always
+know there's a good time coming.
+
+MIKE: You have made a mistake. That is not God. God is a tall,
+placid, slender man, who wears puttees when He works in the garden
+and smokes only cigarettes.
+
+GISSING: Not at all. God is quite stout, and of uncertain temper,
+but I adore Him.
+
+MIKE: No one knows God at your age. There is but one God, and I have
+described Him. There is no doubt about it, because He sometimes
+stays away from the office on Saturdays. Only God can do that.
+
+GISSING: What a glorious day this is. What ho! Halleluiah! I don't
+suppose you know what fun it is to run round in circles. How
+ignorant of life the older generation is.
+
+MIKE: Humph.
+
+GISSING: Do you believe in Right and Wrong? I mean, are they
+absolute, or only relative?
+
+MIKE: When I was in my prime Right was Right, and Wrong was Wrong. A
+bone, buried on someone else's ground, was sacred. I would not have
+dreamed of digging it up----
+
+GISSING (_hastily_): But I am genuinely puzzled. Suppose a motor
+truck goes down the road. My instinct tells me that I ought to chase
+it and bark loudly. But if God is around He calls me back and
+rebukes me, sometimes painfully. Yet I am convinced that there is
+nothing essentially wrong in my action.
+
+MIKE: The question of morals is not involved. If you were not so
+young and foolish you would know that your God (if you so call Him,
+though He is not a patch on mine) knows what is good for you better
+than you do yourself. He forbids your chasing cars because you might
+get hurt.
+
+GISSING: Then instinct is not to be obeyed?
+
+MIKE: Not when God is around.
+
+GISSING: Yet He encourages me to chase sticks, which my instinct
+strongly impels me to do. Prosit! Waes hael! Excuse my enthusiasm,
+but you really know very little of the world or you would not take
+things so calmly.
+
+MIKE: My dear boy, rheumatism is a great sedative. You will learn by
+and by. What are you making such a racket about?
+
+GISSING: I have just learned that there is no such thing as free
+will. I don't suppose you ever meditated on these things, you are
+such an old stick-in-the-mud. But in my generation we scrutinize
+everything.
+
+MIKE: There is plenty of free will when you have learned to will the
+right things. But there's no use willing yourself to destroy a motor
+truck, because it can't be done. I have been young, and now am old,
+but never have I seen an honest dog homeless, nor his pups begging
+their bones. You will go to the devil if you don't learn to restrain
+yourself.
+
+GISSING: Last night there was a white cat in the sky. Yoicks,
+yoicks! I ran thirty times round the house, yelling.
+
+MIKE: Only the moon, nothing to bark about.
+
+GISSING: You are very old, and I do not think you have ever really
+felt the excitement of life. Excuse me, but have you seen me jump up
+and pull the baby's clothes from the line? It is glorious fun.
+
+MIKE: My good lad, I think life will deal hardly with you.
+
+            (_Exit, shaking his head._)
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+AT THE GASTHOF ZUM OCHSEN
+
+
+Looking over some several-days-old papers we observe that the truant
+Mr. Bergdoll was discovered at Eberbach in Baden. Well, well, we
+meditate, Herr Bergdoll is not wholly devoid of sense, if he is
+rambling about that delicious valley of the Neckar. And if we were a
+foreign correspondent, anxious to send home to the papers a complete
+story of Herr Bergdoll's doings in those parts, we would know
+exactly what to do. We would go straight to the excellent Herr
+Leutz, proprietor of the _Gasthof zum Ochsen_ in Eberbach, and
+listen to his prattle. Herr Leutz, whom we have never forgotten
+(since we once spent a night in his inn, companioned by another
+vagabond who is now Prof. W.L.G. Williams of Cornell University, so
+our clients in Ithaca, if any, can check us up on this fact), is
+the most innocently talkative person we have ever met.
+
+A great many Americans have been to Alt Heidelberg, but not so many
+have continued their exploration up the Neckarthal. You leave
+Heidelberg by the Philosophers' Way (_Philosophenweg_), which looks
+over the river and the hills--in this case, lit by a warm July
+sunset--and follow (on your bicycle, of course) the road which
+skirts the stream. There are many springs of cold water tinkling
+down the steep banks on your left, and in the mediæval-looking
+village of Hirschhorn you can also sample the excellent beer. The
+evening smell of sun-warmed grass and a view of one of those odd
+boats grinding its way up-current by hauling a chain from the
+river-bed and dropping it again over-stern will do nothing to mar
+your exhilaration. It will be getting dark when you reach Eberbach,
+and if you find your way to the Ox, Herr Leutz will be waiting (we
+hope) in his white coat and gold pince-nez, just as he was in 1912.
+And then, as you sit down to a cold supper, he will, deliberately
+and in the kindest way, proceed to talk your head off. He will sit
+down with you at the table, and every time you think a pause is
+coming he will seize a mug, rise to his feet (at which you also will
+sadly lay down your tools and rise, too, bowing stiffly from your
+hips), and cry: "_Also! ich trinke auf Ihr Wohl!_" Presently,
+becoming more assured, the admirable creature abbreviates his
+formula to the more companionable "_zum Wohl!_" And as he talks, and
+his excitement becomes more and more intense, he edges closer and
+closer to you, and leans forward, talking hard, until his dark
+beaming phiz quite interposes between your food and its destination.
+So that to avoid combing his baldish pate with your fork you must
+pass the items of your meal in quite a sideways trajectory. And if,
+as happened to our companion (the present Cornell don), you have no
+special taste for a plump landlord breathing passionately and
+genially upon your very cheek while you strive to satisfy a
+legitimate appetite, you may burst into a sudden unpremeditate but
+uncontrollable screech of mingled laughter and dismay, meanwhile
+almost falling backward in your chair in an effort to evade the
+steady pant and roar of those innumerable gutturals.
+
+After supper, a little weary and eager to meditate calmly in the
+delicious clear evening, and to look about and see what sort of
+place this Eberbach is, you will slip outside the inn for a stroll.
+But glorious Herr Leutz is not evadable. He comes with. He takes
+position between you two, holding each firmly by an elbow so that no
+escape is possible. In a terrific stream of friendliness he explains
+everything, particularly expatiating upon the gratification he feels
+at being honoured by visitors all the way from America. The hills
+around, which stand up darkly against a speckle of stars, are all
+discussed for you. One of them is called _Katzenbuckel_, and
+doubting that your German may not be able to cope with this quite
+simple compound, he proceeds to illustrate. He squats in the middle
+of the street, arching his back like a cat in a strong emotion,
+uttering lively miaowings and hissings. Then he springs, like the
+feline in fury, and leaps to his feet roaring with mirth. "You
+see?" he cries. "A cat, who all ready to spring crouches, that is of
+our beautiful little mountain the name-likeness."
+
+Yes, if Bergdoll has been staying in Eberbach, the good Herr Leutz
+will know all about it.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+MR CONRAD'S NEW PREFACE
+
+
+Joseph Conrad, so we learn from the March _Bookman_, has written a
+preface to a cook book about to be published by Mrs. Conrad.
+
+We like to think about that preface. We wonder if it will be
+anything like this:
+
+
+I remember very well the first time I became aware of the deep and
+consoling significance of food. It was one evening at Marlow's, we
+were sitting by the hearth in that small gilded circle of firelight
+that seems so like the pitiful consciousness of man, temporarily and
+gallantly relieved against the all-covering darkness. Marlow was in
+his usual posture, cross-legged on the rug. He was talking.... I
+couldn't help wondering whether he ever gets pins and needles in his
+legs, sitting so long in one position. Very often, you know, what
+those Eastern visionaries mistake for the authentic visit of
+Ghautama Buddha is merely pins and needles. However. Humph. Poor
+Mrs. Marlow (have I mentioned her before?) was sitting somewhere in
+the rear of the circle. I had a curious but quite distinct
+impression that she wanted to say something, that she had, as people
+say, something on her mind. But Marlow has a way of casting
+pregnancy over even his pauses, so that to speak would seem a quite
+unpardonable interruption.
+
+"The power of mind over matter," said Marlow, suddenly, "a very odd
+speculation. When I was on the _Soliloquy_, I remember one evening,
+in the fiery serenity of a Sourabaja sunset, there was an old
+serang...."
+
+In the ample drawing room, lit only by those flickering gleams of
+firelight, I seemed to see the others stir faintly--not so much a
+physical stir as a half-divined spiritual uneasiness. The Director
+was sitting too close to the glow, for the fire had deepened and
+intensified as the great logs slowly burned into rosy embers, and I
+could smell a whiff of scorching trouser legs; but the courageous
+man dared not move, for fear of breaking the spell. Marlow's tale
+was a powerful one: I could hear Mrs. Marlow suspire faintly, ever
+so faintly--the troubled, small, soft sigh of a brave woman
+indefinably stricken. The gallantry of women! In a remote part of
+the house a ship's clock tingled its quick double strokes.... Eight
+o'clock, I thought, unconsciously translating nautical horology into
+the dull measurements of landsmen. None of us moved. The discipline
+of the sea!
+
+Mrs. Marlow was very pale. It began to come over me that there was
+an alien presence, something spectral and immanent, something empty
+and yet compelling, in the mysterious shadow and vagueness of the
+chamber. More than once, as Marlow had coasted us along those
+shining seascapes of Malaya--we had set sail from Malacca at tea
+time, and had now got as far as Batu Beru--I had had an uneasy
+impression that a disturbed white figure had glanced pallidly
+through the curtains, had made a dim gesture, and had vanished
+again.... I had tried to concentrate on Marlow's narrative. The dear
+fellow looked more like a monkey than ever, squatting there, as he
+took the _Soliloquy_ across the China Sea and up the coast of
+Surinam. Surinam must have a very long coast-line, I was thinking.
+But perhaps it was that typhoon that delayed us.... Really, he ought
+not to make his descriptions so graphic, for Mrs. Marlow, I feared,
+was a bad sailor, and she was beginning to look quite ill.... I
+caught her looking over her shoulder in a frightened shudder, as
+though seeking the companionway.
+
+It was quite true. By the time we had reached Tonking, I felt sure
+there was someone else in the room. In my agitation I stole a
+cautious glance from the taff-rail of my eye and saw a white figure
+standing hesitantly by the door, in an appalled and embarrassed
+silence. The Director saw it, too, for he was leaning as far away
+from the fire as he could without jibing his chair, and through the
+delicate haze of roasting tweed that surrounded him I could see
+something wistfully appealing in his glance. The Lawyer, too, had a
+mysterious shimmer in his loyal eyes, but his old training in the
+P. and O. service had been too strong for him. He would never speak,
+I felt sure, while his commanding officer had the floor.
+
+I began to realize that, in a sense, the responsibility was mine.
+The life of the sea--a curious contradiction. Trained from boyhood
+to assume responsibility, but responsibility graded and duly
+ascending through the ranks of command. Marlow, an old shipmaster,
+and more than that, our host--a trying problem. If it had not been
+for the presence of Mrs. Marlow, I could not have dared. But the
+woman complicates the situation with all sorts of delicate reactions
+of tact, conduct, and necessity. It is always so. Well. Humph!
+
+But the apparition at the other end of the room was plainly in
+trouble. A distressing sight, and I divined that the others were
+relying on me. Mrs. Marlow, poor soul, her face had a piteous and
+luminous appeal. It was, once more, the old and shocking question of
+conflicting loyalties. There was nothing else to do. I shoved out
+one foot, and the stand of fire-irons fell over with an appalling
+clatter. Marlow broke off--somewhere near Manila, I think it was.
+
+"Charlie, my dear," said Mrs. Marlow, "Don't you think we could
+finish the story after dinner? The roast will be quite spoiled. The
+maid has been waiting for nearly two hours...."
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+THE LITTLE HOUSE
+
+
+After many days of damp, dull, and dolorous weather, we found
+ourself unexpectedly moving in a fresh, cool, pure air; an air
+which, although there was no sunlight, had the spirit and feeling of
+sunlight in it; an air which was purged and lively. And, so
+strangely do things happen, after days of various complexion and
+stratagem, we found ourself looking across that green field, still
+unchanged, at the little house.
+
+Wasn't there--we faintly recall a saccharine tune sung by someone
+who strode stiffly to and fro in a glare of amber footlights--wasn't
+there a song about: "And I lo-ong to settle down, in that old Long
+Island town!" Wasn't there such a ditty? It came softly back,
+unbidden, to the sentimental attic of our memory as we passed along
+that fine avenue of trees and revisited, for the first time since
+we moved away, the wide space of those Long Island fields and the
+row of frame cottages. There was the little house, rather more spick
+and span than when we had known it, freshly painted in its brown and
+white, the privet hedge very handsomely shaven, and its present
+occupant busily engaged in trimming some tufts of grass along the
+pavement. We did not linger, and that cheerful-looking man little
+knew how many ghosts he was living among. All of us, we suppose,
+dwell amid ghosts we are not aware of, and this gentleman would be
+startled if he knew the tenacity and assurance of certain shades who
+moved across his small lawn that afternoon.
+
+It was strange, we aver, to see how little the place had changed,
+for it seemed that we had passed round the curves and contours of a
+good many centuries in those four or five years. In the open meadow
+the cow was still grazing; perhaps the same cow that was once
+pestered by a volatile Irish terrier who used to swing merrily at
+the end of that cow's tail; a merry and irresponsible little
+creature, she was, and her phantom still scampers the road where the
+sharp scream of the Freeport trolley brings back her last fatal
+venture to our mind. It was strange to look at those windows, with
+their neat white sills, and to remember how we felt when for the
+first time we slept in a house of our own, with all those Long
+Island stars crowding up to the open window, and, waking in drowsy
+unbelief, put out a hand to touch the strong wall and see if it was
+still there. Perhaps one may be pardoned for being a little
+sentimental in thinking back about one's first house.
+
+The air, on that surprising afternoon, carried us again into the
+very sensation and reality of those days, for there is an openness
+and breezy stir on those plains that is characteristic. In the
+tree-lined streets of the village, where old white clapboarded
+houses with green or pale blue shutters stand in a warm breath of
+box hedges, the feeling is quite different. Out on the Long Island
+prairie--which Walt Whitman, by the way, was one of the first to
+love and praise--you stand uncovered to all the skirmish of heaven,
+and the feathery grasses are rarely still. There was the chimney of
+the fireplace we had built for us, and we remembered how the
+wood-smoke used to pour gallantly from it like a blue pennon of
+defiance. The present owner, we fear, does not know how much
+impalpable and unforgotten gold leaped up the wide red throat of
+that chimney, or he would not dream of selling. Yes, the neighbours
+tell us that he wants to sell. In our day, the house was said to be
+worth $3,000. Nowadays, the price is $7,000. Even at that it is
+cheap, if you set any value on amiable and faithful ghosts.
+
+Oh, little house on the plains, when our typewriter forgets thee,
+may this shift key lose its function!
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+TADPOLES
+
+
+Near our house, out in the sylvan Salamis Estates, there is a pond.
+We fear we cannot describe this pond to you in a way to carry
+conviction. You will think we exaggerate if we tell you, with honest
+warmth, how fair the prospect is. Therefore, in sketching the scene,
+we will be austere, churlish, a miser of adjectives. We will tell
+you naught of sun-sparkle by day where the green and gold of April
+linger in that small hollow landskip, where the light shines red
+through the faint bronze veins of young leaves--much as it shines
+red through the finger joinings of a child's hand held toward the
+sun. We will tell you naught of frog-song by night, of those
+reduplicated whistlings and peepings. We will tell you naught of....
+No, we will be austere.
+
+On one side, this pond reflects the white cloudy bravery of fruit
+trees in flower, veterans of an orchard surviving an old farmhouse
+that stood on the hilltop long ago. It burned, we believe: only a
+rectangle of low stone walls remains. Opposite, the hollow is
+overlooked by a bumpy hillock fringed with those excellent dark
+evergreen trees--shall we call them hemlocks?--whose flat fronds
+silhouette against the sky and contribute a feeling of mystery and
+wilderness. On this little hill are several japonica trees, in
+violent ruddy blossom; and clumps of tiger lily blades springing up;
+and bloodroots. The region prickles thickly with blackberry
+brambles, and mats of honeysuckle. Across the pond, looking from the
+waterside meadow where the first violets are, your gaze skips (like
+a flat stone deftly flung) from the level amber (dimpled with
+silver) of the water, through a convenient dip of country where the
+fields are folded down below the level of the pool. So the eye,
+skittering across the water, leaps promptly and cleanly to blue
+ranges by the Sound, a couple of miles away. All this, mere
+introduction to the real theme, which is Tadpoles.
+
+We intended to write a poem about those tadpoles, but Endymion tells
+us that Louis Untermeyer has already smitten a lute on that topic.
+We are queasy of trailing such an able poet. Therefore we celebrate
+these tadpoles in prose. They deserve a prose as lucid, as limpid,
+as cool and embracing, as the water of their home.
+
+Coming back to tadpoles, the friends of our youth, shows us that we
+have completed a biological cycle of much import. Back to tadpoles
+in one generation, as the adage might have said. Twenty-five years
+ago we ourself were making our first acquaintance with these
+friendly creatures, in the immortal (for us) waters of Cobb's Creek,
+Pennsylvania. (Who was Cobb, we wonder?) And now our urchins, with
+furious glee, applaud their sire who wades the still frosty quags
+of our pond, on Sunday mornings, to renew their supply of tads. It
+is considered fair and decent that each batch of tadpoles should
+live in their prison (a milk bottle) only one week. The following
+Sunday they go back to the pond, and a new generation take their
+places. There is some subtle kinship, we think, between children and
+tadpoles. No childhood is complete until it has watched their sloomy
+and impassive faces munching against the glass, and seen the gradual
+egress (as the encyclopædia pedantically puts it) of their tender
+limbs, the growing froggishness of their demeanour.
+
+Some time when you are exploring in the Britannica, by the way,
+after you have read about Tactics and William Howard Taft, turn to
+the article on Tadpoles and see if you can recognize them as
+described by the learned G.A.B. An amusing game, we submit, would be
+to take a number of encyclopædia descriptions of familiar things,
+and see how many of our friends could identify them under their
+scientific nomenclature.
+
+But it is very pleasant to dally about the pond on a mild April
+morning. While the Urchiness mutters among the violets, picking blue
+fistfuls of stalkless heads, the Urchin, on a plank at the
+waterside, studies these weedy shallows which are lively with all
+manner of mysterious excitement, and probes a waterlogged stump in
+hope to recapture Brer Tarrypin, who once was ours for a short
+while. Gissing (the juvenile and too enthusiastic dog) has to be
+kept away from the pond by repeated sticks thrown as far as possible
+in another direction; otherwise he insists on joining the tadpole
+search, and, poking his snout under water, attempts to bark at the
+same time, with much coughing and smother.
+
+The tadpoles, once caught, are taken home in a small yellow pail.
+They seem quite cheerful. They are kept, of course, in their native
+fluid, which is liberally thickened with the oozy emulsion of moss,
+mud, and busy animalculæ that were dredged up with them in clutches
+along the bottom of the pond. They lie, thoughtful, at the bottom of
+their milk bottle, occasionally flourishing furiously round their
+prison. But, since reading that article in the Britannica, we are
+more tender toward them. For the learned G.A.B. says: "A glandular
+streak extending from the nostril toward the eye is the lachrymal
+canal." Is it possible that tadpoles weep? We will look at them
+again when we go home to-night. We are, in the main, a kind-hearted
+host. If they show any signs of effusion....
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+MAGIC IN SALAMIS
+
+
+Why is it (we were wondering, as we walked to the station) that
+these nights of pearly wet Long Island fog make the spiders so
+active? The sun was trying to break through the mist, and all the
+way down the road trees, bushes, and grass were spangled with
+cob-webs, shining with tiny pricks and gems of moisture. These damp,
+mildewy nights that irritate us and bring that queer soft grayish
+fur on the backs of our books seem to mean high hilarity and big
+business to the spider. Along the hedge near the station there were
+wonderful great webs, as big as the shield of Achilles. What a
+surprising passion of engineering the spider must go through in the
+dark hours, to get his struts and cantilevers and his circling
+gossamer girders properly disposed on the foliage.[*] Darkness is no
+difficulty to him, evidently. If he lays his web on the grass, he
+builds it with a little tunnel leading down to earth, where he hides
+waiting his breakfast. But on such a morning, apparently, with
+thousands of webs ready, there can hardly have been enough flies to
+go round; for we saw all the appetent spiders had emerged from their
+tubes and were waiting impatiently on the web itself--as though the
+host should sit on the tablecloth waiting for his guest. Put a
+finger at the rim of the web and see how quickly he vanishes down
+his shaft. Most surprising of all it is to see the long threads that
+are flung horizontally through the air, from a low branch of a tree
+to the near-by hedge. They hang, elastic and perfect, sagged a
+little by a run of fog-drops almost invisible except where the
+wetness catches the light. Some were stretched at least six feet
+across space, with no supporting strands to hold them from
+above--and no branches from which the filament could be dropped. How
+is it done? Does our intrepid weaver hurl himself madly six feet
+into the dark, trusting to catch the leaf at the other end? Can he
+jump so far?
+
+     [* Perhaps the structural talent of our Salamis arachnids is
+     exceptional. Perhaps it is due to the fact that the famous
+     Engineers' Country Club is near by. Can the spiders have
+     learned their technology by watching those cheerful scientists
+     on the golf greens?]
+
+All this sort of thing is, quite plainly, magic. It is rather
+important to know, when you are dealing with magic, just where
+ordinary life ends and the mystery begins, so that you can adjust
+yourself to incantations and spells. As you make your green escape
+from town (which has magic of its own, but quite different) you must
+clearly mark the place where you pierce the veil. We showed it to
+Endymion lately. We will tell you about it.
+
+There is a certain point, as you go out to Salamis on the railroad,
+when you begin to perceive a breath of enchantment in the landscape.
+For our own part, we become aware of a subtle spice of gramarye as
+soon as we see the station lamps at East Williston, which have tops
+like little green hats. Lamps of this sort have always had a
+fascination for us, and whenever we see them at a railway station we
+have a feeling that that would be a nice place to get off and
+explore.
+
+And, of course, after you pass East Williston there is that little
+pond in which, if one went fishing, he could very likely pull up a
+fine fleecy cloud on his hook. Then the hills begin, or what we on
+Long Island consider hills. There are some fields on the left of the
+train that roll like great green waves of the sea; they surge up
+against the sky and seem about to spill over in a surf of daisies.
+
+A quiet road runs up a hill, and as soon as you pass along its green
+channel, between rising thickets where rabbits come out to gape, you
+feel as though walking into a poem by Walter de la Mare. This road,
+if pursued, passes by a pleasing spot where four ways cross in an
+attenuated X. Off to one side is a field that is very theatrical in
+effect: it always reminds us of a stage set for "As You Like It,"
+the Forest of Arden. There are some gigantic oak trees and even some
+very papier-maché-looking stumps, all ready for the duke, "and other
+Lords, like Foresters," to do their moralizing upon; and in place of
+the poor sequestered stag there is a very fine plushy cow, grazing,
+hard by a very agreeable morass. At the back (_L.U.E._) is
+discovered a pleasing ruin, the carcass of an ancient farmstead,
+whose stony ribs are thickset with brambles; and the pleasant
+melancholy of an abandoned orchard rounds off the scene in the
+wings, giving a fine place for Rosalind and Celia and the leg-weary
+Touchstone to abide their cue.
+
+Choosing the left-hand arm of the X, and moving past wild rose
+bushes toward the even richer rose-garden of the sunset, the
+fastidious truant is ushered (as was our friend Endymion the other
+evening) upon a gentle meadow where a solitary house of white stucco
+begs for a poet as occupant. This house, having been selected by
+Titania and ourself as a proper abode for Endymion and his family,
+we waited until sunset, frogsong, and all the other amenities of
+life in Salamis were suitable for the introduction of our guest to
+the scene. This dwelling, having long lain untenanted, has a back
+door that stands ajar and we piloted the awe-struck lyrist inside.
+Now nothing rages so merrily in the blood as the instinct of picking
+out houses for other people, houses that you yourself do not have to
+live in; and those Realtors whom we have dismayed by our lack of
+enthusiasm would have been startled to hear the orotund accents in
+which we vouched for that property, sewage, messuage, and all. Here,
+we cried, is the front door (facing the sunset) where the postman
+will call with checks from your publishers; and here are the
+porcelain laundry tubs that will make glad the heart of the
+washerwoman (when you can get one).
+
+Endymion's guileless heart was strongly uplifted. Not a question did
+he ask as to heating arrangements, save to show a mild spark in his
+eye when he saw the two fireplaces. Plumbing was to him, we saw, a
+matter to be taken on faith. His paternal heart was slightly
+perturbed by a railing that ran round the top of the stairs. This
+railing, he feared, was so built that small and impetuous children
+would assuredly fall headlong through it, and we discussed means of
+thwarting such catastrophe. But upstairs we found the room that
+caused our guest to glimmer with innocent cheer. It had tall
+casement windows looking out upon a quiet glimpse of trees. It had a
+raised recess, very apt for a bust of Pallas. It had space for
+bookcases. And then, on the windowsill, we found the dead and
+desiccated corpse of a swallow. It must have flown in through a
+broken pane on the ground floor long ago and swooped vainly about
+the empty house. It lay, pathetically, close against the shut pane.
+Like a forgotten and un-uttered beauty in the mind of a poet, it lay
+there, stiffened and silent.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+CONSIDER THE COMMUTER
+
+
+When they tell us the world is getting worse and worse, and the
+follies and peevishness of men will soon bring us all to some
+damnable perdition, we are consoled by contemplating the steadfast
+virtue of commuters. The planet grows harder and harder to live on,
+it is true; every new invention makes things more complicated and
+perplexing. These new automatic telephones, which are said to make
+the business of getting a number so easy, will mean (we suppose)
+that we will be called up fifty times a day--instead of (as now) a
+mere twenty or thirty, while we are swooning and swinking over a
+sonnet. But more and more people are taking to commuting and we look
+to that to save things.
+
+Because commuting is a tough and gruelling discipline. It educes
+all the latent strength and virtue in a man (although it is hard on
+those at home, for when he wins back at supper time there is left in
+him very little of what the ladies so quaintly call "soul"). If you
+study the demeanour of fellow-passengers on the 8:04 and the 5:27
+you will see a quiet and well-drilled acceptiveness, a pious
+non-resistance, which is not unworthy of the antique Chinese sages.
+
+Is there any ritual (we cry, warming to our theme) so apt to imbue
+the spirit with patience, stolidity, endurance, all the ripe and
+seasoned qualities of manhood? It is well known that the fiercest
+and most terrible fighters in the late war were those who had been
+commuters. It was a Division composed chiefly of commuters that
+stormed the Hindenburg Stellung and purged the Argonne thickets with
+flame and steel. Their commanding officers were wont to remark these
+men's carelessness of life. It seemed as though they hardly heeded
+whether they got home again or not.
+
+See them as they stand mobbed at the train gate, waiting for
+admission to the homeward cars. A certain disingenuous casualness
+appears on those hardened brows; but beneath burn stubborn fires.
+These are engaged in battle, and they know it--a battle that never
+ends. And while a warfare that goes on without truce necessarily
+develops its own jokes, informalities, callousnesses, disregard of
+wounds and gruesome sights, yet deep in their souls the units never
+forget that they are drilled and regimented for struggle. We stood
+the other evening with a Freeport man in the baggage compartment at
+the front of a train leaving Brooklyn. We two had gained the
+bull's-eye window at the nose of the train and sombrely watched the
+sparkling panorama of lights along the track. Something had gone
+wrong with the schedule that evening, and the passengers of the 5:27
+had been shunted to the 5:30. As fellow mariners will, we discussed
+famous breakdowns of old and the uncertainties of the commuter's
+life. "Yes," said our companion, "once you leave home you never know
+when you'll get back." And he smiled the passive, placable smile of
+the experienced commuter.
+
+It is this reasonable and moderate temper that makes the commuter
+the seed wherewith a new generation shall be disseminated. He faces
+troubles manifold without embittered grumbling. His is a new kind of
+Puritanism, which endures hardship without dourness. When, on
+Christmas Eve, the train out of Jamaica was so packed that the aisle
+was one long mass of unwillingly embraced passengers, and even the
+car platforms were crowded with shivering wights, and the conductor
+buffeted his way as best he could over our toes and our parcels of
+tinsel balls, what was the general cry? Was it a yell against the
+railroad for not adding an extra brace of cars? No, it was
+good-natured banter of the perspiring little officer as he struggled
+to disentangle himself from forests of wedged legs. "You've got a
+fine, big family in here," they told him: "you ought to be proud of
+us." And there was a sorrowing Italian who had with him a string of
+seven children who had tunnelled and burrowed their way down the
+packed aisle of the smoking car and had got irretrievably scattered.
+The father was distracted. Here and there, down the length of the
+car, someone would discover an urchin and hold him up for
+inspection. "Is this one of them?" he would cry, and Italy would
+give assent. "Right!" And the children were agglomerated and piled
+in a heap in the middle of the car until such time as a thinning of
+the crowd permitted the anxious and blushing sire to reassemble them
+and reprove their truancy with Adriatic lightnings from his dark
+glowing eyes.
+
+How pleasing is our commuter's simplicity! A cage of white mice, or
+a crated goat (such are to be seen now and then on the Jamaica
+platform) will engage his eye and give him keen amusement. Then
+there is that game always known (in the smoking car) as
+"pea-knuckle." The sight of four men playing will afford
+contemplative and apparently intense satisfaction to all near. They
+will lean diligently over seat-backs to watch every play of the
+cards. They will stand in the aisle to follow the game, with
+apparent comprehension. Then there are distinguished figures that
+move through the observant commuter's peep-show. There is the tall
+young man with the beaky nose, which (as Herrick said)
+
+          Is the grace
+          And proscenium of his face.
+
+He is one of several light-hearted and carefree gentry who always
+sit together and are full of superb cheer. Those who travel
+sometimes with twinges of perplexity or skepticism are healed when
+they see the magnificent assurance of this creature. Every day we
+hear him making dates for his cronies to meet him at lunch time,
+and in the evening we see him towering above the throng at the gate.
+We like his confident air toward life, though he is still a little
+too jocular to be a typical commuter.
+
+But the commuter, though simple and anxious to be pleased, is
+shrewdly alert. Every now and then they shuffle the trains at
+Jamaica just to keep him guessing and sharpen his faculty of judging
+whether this train goes to Brooklyn or Penn Station. His decisions
+have to be made rapidly. We are speaking now of Long Island
+commuters, whom we know best; but commuters are the same wherever
+you find them. The Jersey commuter has had his own celebrant in
+Joyce Kilmer, and we hope that he knows Joyce's pleasant essay on
+the subject which was published in that little book, "The Circus and
+Other Essays." But we gain-say the right of Staten Islanders to be
+classed as commuters. These are a proud and active sort who are
+really seafarers, not commuters. Fogs and ice floes make them blench
+a little; but the less romantic troubles of broken brake-shoes leave
+them unscotched.
+
+Of Long Island commuters there are two classes: those who travel to
+Penn Station, those who travel to Brooklyn. Let it not be denied,
+there is a certain air of aristocracy about the Penn Station clique
+that we cannot waive. Their tastes are more delicate. The train-boy
+from Penn Station cries aloud "Choice, delicious apples," which
+seems to us almost an affectation compared to the hoarse yell of our
+Brooklyn news-agents imploring "Have a comic cartoon book, 'Mutt
+and Jeff,' 'Bringing Up Father,' choclut-covered cherries!" The
+club cars all go to Penn Station: there would be a general apoplexy
+in the lowly terminal at Atlantic Avenue if one of those vehicles
+were seen there. People are often seen (on the Penn Station branch)
+who look exactly like the advertisements in _Vanity Fair_. Yet we,
+for our humility, have treasures of our own, such as the brightly
+lighted little shops along Atlantic Avenue and a station with the
+poetic name of Autumn Avenue. The Brooklyn commuter points with
+pride to his monthly ticket, which is distinguished from that of the
+Penn Station nobility by a red badge of courage--a bright red
+stripe. On the Penn Station branch they often punch the tickets with
+little diamond-shaped holes; but on our line the punch is in the
+form of a heart.
+
+When the humble commuter who is accustomed to travelling via
+Brooklyn is diverted from his accustomed orbit, and goes by way of
+the Pennsylvania Station, what surprising excitements are his. The
+enormousness of the crowd at Penn Station around 5 P.M. causes him
+to realize that what he had thought, in his innocent Brooklyn
+fashion, was a considerable mob, was nothing more than a trifling
+scuffle. But he notes with pleasure the Penn Station habit of
+letting people through the gate before the train comes in, so that
+one may stand in comparative comfort and coolness downstairs on the
+train platform. Here a vision of luxury greets his eyes that could
+not possibly be imagined at the Brooklyn terminal--the Lehigh Valley
+dining car that stands on a neighbouring track, the pink candles
+lit on the tables, the shining water carafes, the white-coated
+stewards at attention. At the car's kitchen window lolls a young
+coloured boy in a chef's hat, surveying the files of proletarian
+commuters with a glorious calmness of scorn and superiority. His
+mood of sanguine assurance and self-esteem is so complete, so
+unruffled, and so composed that we cannot help loving him. Lucky
+youth, devoid of cares, responsibilities, and chagrins! Does he not
+belong to the conquering class that has us all under its thumb? What
+does it matter that he (probably) knows less about cooking than you
+or I? He gazes with glorious cheer upon the wretched middle class,
+and as our train rolls away we see him still gazing across the
+darkling cellars of the station with that untroubled gleam of
+condescension, his eyes seeming (as we look back at them) as large
+and white and unspeculative as billiard balls.
+
+In the eye of one commuter, the 12:50 SATURDAY ONLY is the
+most exciting train of all. What a gay, heavily-bundled, and
+loquacious crowd it is that gathers by the gate at the Atlantic
+Avenue terminal. There is a holiday spirit among the throng, which
+pants a little after the battle down and up those steps leading from
+the subway. (What a fine sight, incidentally, is the stag-like stout
+man who always leaps from the train first and speeds scuddingly
+along the platform, to reach the stairs before any one else.) Here
+is the man who always carries a blue cardboard box full of chicks.
+Their plaintive chirpings sound shrill and disconsolate. There is
+such a piercing sorrow and perplexity in their persistent query that
+one knows they have the true souls of minor poets. Here are two
+cheerful stenographers off to Rockaway for the week-end. They are
+rather sarcastic about another young woman of their party who always
+insists on sleeping under sixteen blankets when at the shore.
+
+But the high point of the trip comes when one changes at Jamaica,
+there boarding the 1:15 for Salamis. This is the train that on
+Saturdays takes back the two famous club cars, known to all
+travellers on the Oyster Bay route. Behind partly drawn blinds the
+luncheon tables are spread; one gets narrow glimpses of the great
+ones of the Island at their tiffin. This is a militant moment for
+the white-jacketed steward of the club car. On Saturdays there are
+always some strangers, unaccustomed to the ways of this train, who
+regard the two wagons of luxury as a personal affront. When they
+find all the seats in the other cars filled they sternly desire to
+storm the door of the club car, where the proud steward stands on
+guard. "What's the matter with this car?" they say. "Nothing's the
+matter with it," he replies. Other more humble commuters stand in
+the vestibule, enjoying these little arguments. It is always quite
+delightful to see the indignation of these gallant creatures, their
+faces seamed with irritation to think that there should be a holy of
+holies into which they may not tread.
+
+A proud man, and a high-spirited, is the conductor of the 4:27 on
+weekdays. This train, after leaving Jamaica, does not stop until
+Salamis is reached. It attains such magnificent speed that it always
+gets to Salamis a couple of minutes ahead of time. Then stands the
+conductor on the platform, watch in hand, receiving the plaudits of
+those who get off. The Salamites have to stand patiently beside the
+train--it is a level crossing--until it moves on. This is the daily
+glory of this conductor, as he stands, watch in one hand, the other
+hand on the signal cord, waiting for Time to catch up with him.
+"_Some_ train," we cry up at him; he tries not to look pleased, but
+he is a happy man. Then he pulls the cord and glides away.
+
+Among other articulations in the anatomy of commuting, we mention
+the fact that no good trainman ever speaks of a train _going_ or
+_stopping_ anywhere. He says, "This train _makes_ Sea Cliff and Glen
+Cove; it don't make Salamis." To be more purist still, one should
+refer to the train as "he" (as a kind of extension of the engineer's
+personality, we suppose). If you want to speak with the tongue of a
+veteran, you will say, "He makes Sea Cliff and Glen Cove."
+
+The commuter has a chance to observe all manner of types among his
+brethren. On our line we all know by sight the two fanatical checker
+players, bent happily over their homemade board all the way to town.
+At Jamaica they are so absorbed in play that the conductor--this is
+the conductor who is so nervous about missing a fare and asks
+everyone three times if his ticket has been punched--has to rout
+them out to change to the Brooklyn train. "How's the game this
+morning?" says someone. "Oh, I was just trimming him, but they made
+us change." However thick the throng, these two always manage to
+find seats together. They are still hard at it when Atlantic Avenue
+is reached, furiously playing the last moves as the rest file out.
+Then there is the humorous news-agent who takes charge of the
+smoking car between Jamaica and Oyster Bay. There is some mysterious
+little game that he conducts with his clients. Very solemnly he
+passes down the aisle distributing rolled-up strips of paper among
+the card players. By and by it transpires that some one has won a
+box of candy. Just how this is done we know not. Speaking of card
+players, observe the gaze of anguish on the outpost. He dashes
+ahead, grabs two facing seats and sits in one with a face contorted
+with anxiety for fear that the others will be too late to join him.
+As soon as a card game is started there are always a half dozen
+other men who watch it, following every play with painful scrutiny.
+It seems that watching other people play cards is the most absorbing
+amusement known to the commuter.
+
+Then there is the man who carries a heavy bag packed with books. A
+queer creature, this. Day by day he lugs that bag with him yet
+spends all his time reading the papers and rarely using the books he
+carries. His pipe always goes out just as he reaches his station;
+frantically he tries to fill and light it before the train stops.
+Sometimes he digs deeply into the bag and brings out a large slab of
+chocolate, which he eats with an air of being slightly ashamed of
+himself. The oddities of this person do not amuse us any the less
+because he happens to be ourself.
+
+So fares the commuter: a figure as international as the teddy bear.
+He has his own consolations--of a morning when he climbs briskly
+upward from his dark tunnel and sees the sunlight upon the spread
+wings of the Telephone and Telegraph Building's statue, and moves
+again into the stirring pearl and blue of New York's lucid air. And
+at night, though drooping a little in the heat and dimness of those
+Oyster Bay smoking cars, he is dumped down and set free. As he
+climbs the long hill and tunes his thoughts in order, the sky is a
+froth of stars.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+THE PERMANENCE OF POETRY
+
+
+We heard a critic remark that no great sonnets are being written
+nowadays. What (he said morosely) is there in the way of a recent
+sonnet that is worthy to take its place in the anthologies of the
+future beside those of Sir Philip Sidney, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats,
+Mrs. Browning, Louise Guiney, Rupert Brooke, or Lizette Reese?
+(These were the names he mentioned.)
+
+This moves us to ask, how can you tell? It takes time for any poem
+to grow and ripen and find its place in the language. It will be for
+those of a hundred or more years hence to say what are the great
+poems of our present day. If a sonnet has the true vitality in it,
+it will gather association and richness about it as it traces its
+slender golden path through the minds of readers. It settles itself
+comfortably into the literary landscape, incorporates itself subtly
+into the unconscious thought of men, becomes corpuscular in the
+blood of the language. It comes down to us in the accent of those
+who have loved and quoted it, invigorated by our subtle sense of the
+permanent rightness of its phrasing and our knowledge of the
+pleasure it has given to thousands of others. The more it is quoted,
+the better it seems.
+
+All this is a slow process and an inscrutable. No one has ever given
+us a continuous history of any particular poem, tracing its history
+and adventures after its first publication--the places it has been
+quoted, the hearts it has rejoiced. It could only be done by an
+infinity of toil and a prodigal largesse to clipping bureaus. It
+would be a fascinating study, showing how some poems have fought for
+their lives against the evaporation of Time, and how they have come
+through, sometimes, because they were carried and cherished in one
+or two appreciative hearts. But the point to bear in mind is, the
+whole question of the permanence of poetry is largely in the hands
+of chance. If you are interested to observe the case of some really
+first-class poetry which has been struggling for recognition and yet
+shows, so far, no sign of breaking through into the clear light of
+lasting love and remembrance, look at the poems of James Elroy
+Flecker.
+
+Generally speaking, one law is plain: that it is not until the poet
+himself and all who knew him are dead, and his lines speak only with
+the naked and impersonal appeal of ink, that his value to the race
+as a permanent pleasure can be justly appraised.
+
+There is one more point that perhaps is worth making. It is
+significant of human experience that the race instinctively demands,
+in most of the poetry that it cares to take along with it as
+permanent baggage, a certain honourable sobriety of mood. Consider
+Mr. Burton E. Stevenson's great "Home Book of Verse," that
+magnificent anthology which may be taken as fairly indicative of
+general taste in these matters. In nearly 4,000 pages of poetry only
+three or four hundred are cynical or satirical in temper. Humanity
+as a whole likes to make the best of a bad job: it grins somewhat
+ruefully at the bitter and the sardonic; but when it is packing its
+trunk for the next generation it finds most room for those poets who
+have somehow contrived to find beauty and not mockery in the inner
+sanctities of human life and passion. This thought comes to us on
+reading Aldous Huxley's brilliant and hugely entertaining book of
+poems called "Leda." There is no more brilliant young poet writing
+to-day; his title poem is nothing less than extraordinary in pagan
+and pictorial beauty, but as a whole the cynical and scoffish tone
+of carnal drollery which gives the book its appeal to the humorously
+inclined makes a very dubious sandal for a poet planning a
+long-distance run. Please note that we are not taking sides in any
+argument: we ourself admire Mr. Huxley's poems enormously; but we
+are simply trying, clumsily, to state what seem to us some of the
+conditions attaching to the permanence of beauty as arranged in
+words.
+
+It is not to be supposed that you have done your possible when you
+have read a great poem once--or ten times. A great poem is like a
+briar pipe--it darkens and mellows and sweetens with use. You fill
+it with your own glowing associations and glosses, and the strong
+juices seep through, staining and gilding the grain and fibre of the
+words.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+BOOKS OF THE SEA
+
+
+The National Marine League asks, What are the ten best books of the
+sea? Without pondering very deeply on the matter, and confining
+ourself to prose, we would suggest the following as our own
+favourites:
+
+    _Typhoon, by Joseph Conrad
+     The Nigger of the "Narcissus," by Joseph Conrad
+     The Mirror of the Sea, by Joseph Conrad
+     Captains Courageous, by Rudyard Kipling
+     The Brassbounder, by David W. Bone
+     Salt of the Sea, by Morley Roberts
+     Mr. Midshipman Easy, by Captain Marryat
+     The Wreck of the "Grosvenor," by Clark Russell
+     Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
+     An Ocean Tramp, by William McFee._
+
+If one is allowed to include books that deal partially with salt
+water, one would have to add "Treasure Island," "Casuals of the
+Sea," by McFee, and "Old Junk," by Tomlinson. The kind of
+shallow-water sea tales that we love to read after supper, with our
+feet on the nearest chair and a decent supply of tobacco handy, are
+the delicious stories by W.W. Jacobs. Dana's "Two Years Before the
+Mast," which is spoken of as a classic, we have never read. We have
+always had a suspicion of it, we don't know why. Before we tackle it
+we shall re-read "The Water Babies." We have always found a good
+deal of innocent cheer in the passages in John Woolman's Journal
+describing his voyage from Philadelphia to London in 1772. Friend
+Woolman, like the sturdy Quaker that he was, was horrified (when he
+went to have a look at the ship _Mary and Elizabeth_) to find
+"sundry sorts of carved work and imagery" on that part of the vessel
+where the cabins were; and in the cabins themselves he observed
+"some superfluity of workmanship of several sorts." This subjected
+his mind to "a deep exercise," and he decided that he would have to
+take passage in the steerage instead of the cabin. Having our self
+made use of the steerage aforetime, both in the _Mauretania_ and
+humbler vessels, we feel a certain kindred sympathy for his
+experiences. We have always enjoyed his remark: "The wind now blew
+vehemently, and the sea wrought to that degree that an awful
+seriousness prevailed."
+
+To come to poetry, we suppose that the greatest sea-poet who never
+ventured on anything more perilous than a ferry-boat was Walt
+Whitman. Walt, one likes to think, would have been horribly sea-sick
+if he had ventured out beyond the harbour buoy. A good deal of
+Walt's tempestuous uproar about the glories of America was
+undoubtedly due to the fact that he had never seen anything else.
+Speaking of Walt reminds us that one book of the sea that we have
+never read (for the best of reasons: it has not been written) might
+be done by Thomas Mosher, the veteran tippler of literary minims.
+Mr. Mosher, we understand, "followed" the sea in his youth. Not long
+ago, when Mr. Mosher published that exquisite facsimile of the 1855
+"Leaves of Grass," we asked him when and how he first came in
+contact with Whitman's work. He said:
+
+     I don't suppose there was anything particularly interesting
+     about my first acquaintance with Whitman, which at 14 years of
+     age I made in my old family mansion situated at Smith's Corner,
+     America. I had been taking "The Galaxy" from its start, only a
+     few months previous to the date I mention. I can still see
+     myself in the sitting room of the old house. Smith's Cor.,
+     America, I will remind you, is a portion of Biddeford, Me. An
+     extra "d" has got into the old English name--which, by the way,
+     only a year later I passed through after a shipwreck on the
+     Devonshire coast. (That was in 1867.) No one ever told me
+     anything about Walt.
+
+These amateurish speculations on maritime books are of no value
+except for the fact that they elicited an interesting letter from an
+expert on these matters. William McFee wrote us as follows:--
+
+     "The first thing I laid my hands on this evening, while hunting
+     for some forgotten nugget of wisdom in my note-books filled
+     with Mediterranean brine, was that list of books for a
+     projected sea library. Perpend....
+
+                   _The Sea Farer's Library_
+
+          Tom Cringle's Log             Michael Scott
+          Two Years Before the Mast              Dana
+          Midshipman Easy                     Marryat
+          Captains Courageous                 Kipling
+          The Flying Cloud             Morley Roberts
+          The Cruise of the Cachalot  Frank T. Bullen
+          Log of a Sea Waif           Frank T. Bullen
+          The Salving of a Derelict     Maurice Drake
+          The Grain Carriers             Edward Noble
+          Marooned                      Clark Russell
+          Typhoon                              Conrad
+          Toilers of the Sea                     Hugo
+          An Iceland Fisherman                   Loti
+          The Sea Surgeon                  D'Annunzio
+          The Sea Hawk                       Sabatini
+
+
+     "A good many of these need no comment. Attention is drawn not
+     to the individual items, but to the balance of the whole. That
+     is the test of a list. But there is a good balance, a balance
+     of power, and a balance of mere weight or prestige. It is the
+     power we are after here. Regard for a moment the way 'Tom
+     Cringle' balances Dana's laconic record of facts. No power on
+     earth could hold 'Tom Cringle' to facts, with the result that
+     his story is more truly a representation of sea life in the old
+     navy than a ton of statistics. He has the seaman's mind, which
+     Dana had not.
+
+     "Then again 'Captains Courageous' and 'The Flying Cloud'
+     balance each other with temperamental exactitude. Each is a
+     fine account of sea-doings with a touch of fiction to keep the
+     sailor reading, neither of them in the very highest class. 'The
+     Cruise of the Cachalot' is balanced by the 'Log of a Sea Waif,'
+     each in Bullen's happier and less evangelical vein. I was
+     obliged to exclude 'With Christ at Sea,' not because it is
+     religious, but because it does not balance. It would give the
+     whole list a most pronounced 'list,' if you will pardon the
+     unpardonable.... I regret this because 'With Christ at Sea' has
+     some things in it which transcend anything else Bullen ever
+     wrote.
+
+     "Now we come to a couple of books possibly requiring a little
+     explanation. 'The Salving of a Derelict' is a remarkably able
+     story of a man's reclamation. I believe Maurice Drake won a
+     publisher's prize with it as a first novel some years ago. It
+     was a winner among the apprentices, I remember. 'The Grain
+     Carriers' is a grim story of greedy owners and an unseaworthy
+     ship by an ex-master mariner whose 'Chains,' while not a sea
+     story, is tinged with the glamour of South American shipping,
+     and is obviously a work written under the influence of Joseph
+     Conrad. 'Marooned' and 'Typhoon' balance (only you mustn't be
+     too critical) as examples of the old and new methods of telling
+     a sea story.
+
+     "'The Sea Surgeon' is one of a collection of stories about the
+     Pescarese, which D'Annunzio wrote years ago. They are utterly
+     unlike 'II Fuoco' and the other absurd tales on which
+     translators waste their time. In passing one is permitted to
+     complain of the persistent ill-fortune Italian novelists suffer
+     at the hands of their English translators.
+
+     "Assuming, however, that our seafarer wants a book or two of
+     what is euphemistically termed 'non-fiction,' here are a few
+     which will do him no harm:
+
+     "Southey's 'Life of Nelson.'
+
+     "'The Influence of Sea Power Upon History,' Mahan.
+
+     "Admiral Lord Beresford's 'Memoirs.'
+
+     "The Diary of Samuel Pepys, F.R.S., Secretary to the Admiralty
+     in the Reign of Charles II and James II. It is most grievously
+     overlooked that Samuel was the first to draft a naval Rate
+     Book, which is a sort of indexed lexicon of everything one
+     needs 'for fighting and sea-going efficiency.' And it is a
+     pleasure, chastened by occasional fits of ill-temper, to
+     discover that the present British Naval Rate Book hath in it
+     divers synonyms coeval with Samuel and his merry monarchs. As
+     when the present writer tried to order some hammer-handles and
+     discovered after much tribulation that the correct naval
+     equivalent for such is 'ash-helms.' Whereupon he toilfully
+     rewrote his requisitions 'and so to bed.'
+
+     "Another suggestion I might make is a volume to be compiled,
+     containing the following chapters:
+
+         I. "Landsmen Admirals," Generals Blake and Monk.
+        II. "A Dutch Triumvirate," Van Tromp, De Witt and De Ruyter.
+       III. "Napoleon as a Sea Tactician."
+        IV. "Decatur and the Mediterranean Pirates."
+         V. "The Chesapeake and the Shannon."
+        VI. "The Spanish-American Naval Actions."
+       VII. "The Russo-Japanese Naval Actions."
+      VIII. "The Turko-Italian Naval Actions."
+      Conclusion. "Short Biography of Josephus Daniels."
+
+     "Only deep-water sailors would be able to take this suggested
+     library to sea with them, because a sailor only reads at sea.
+     When the landward breeze brings the odours of alien lands
+     through the open scuttle one closes the book, and if one is a
+     normal and rational kind of chap and the quarantine regulations
+     permit, goes ashore."
+
+Gruesome as anything in any seafaring pirate yarn is Trelawny's
+description (in "Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and
+Byron") of the burning of Shelley's body on the seashore near Via
+Reggio. The other day, in company with two like-minded innocents, we
+visited a bookshop on John Street where we found three battered
+copies of this great book, and each bought one, with shouts of joy.
+The following day, still having the book with us, we dropped in to
+see the learned and hospitable Dr. Rosenbach at his new and
+magnificent thesaurus at 273 Madison Avenue. We showed him the book,
+because every time one shows the doctor a book he can startle you by
+countering with its original manuscript or something of that sort.
+We said something about Shelley and Trelawny, in the hope of
+starting him off. He smiled gently and drew out a volume from a
+shelf. It was the copy of "Prometheus Unbound" that Shelley had
+given Trelawny in July, 1822, with an inscription. As the poet was
+drowned on July 8, 1822, it probably was the last book he ever gave
+away.
+
+One wonders what may have become of the log of the American clipper
+that Shelley and Trelawny visited in the harbour of Leghorn shortly
+before Shelley's death. Shelley had said something in praise of
+George Washington, to which the sturdy Yankee skipper replied:
+"Stranger, truer words were never spoken; there is dry rot in all
+the main timbers of the Old World, and none of you will do any good
+till you are docked, refitted, and annexed to the New. You must log
+that song you sang; there ain't many Britishers that will say as
+much of the man that whipped them; so just set these lines down in
+the log!"
+
+Whereupon Shelley autographed the skipper's log for him, with some
+sentiments presumably gratifying to American pride, and drank some
+"cool peach brandy." It was his last drink.
+
+We ourself, just as much as Shelley, enjoy visiting ships, and have
+had some surprising adventures in so doing. We remember very clearly
+our first call upon William McFee, when he was First Assistant
+Engineer in S.S. _Turrialba_. But getting aboard vessels is a much
+more complicated and diplomatic task than it was in Shelley's day.
+Even when armed with Mr. McFee's autographed card, it was by no
+means easy. We went dutifully up to the office of the United Fruit
+Company at Pier 9, to apply for a pass, and were surveyed with grim
+suspicion. Why, we asked gently, in these peaceful times is it so
+difficult to visit a friend who happens to be in a ship?
+Prohibition, said the candid clerk, and a whole province of human
+guile was thereby made plain to our shrinking mind. Mortals incline
+readily to sin, it seems, and apparently evil and base men will even
+go so far as to pretend a friendship with those who go down to wet
+territory in ships, simply for the sake of--well, we cannot bring
+ourself to mention it. "How do you know Mr. McFee wants to see you?"
+we were asked. Luckily we had Mac's card to prove it.
+
+We had long wanted to see Mr. McFee in his sea-going quarters,
+where he writes his books and essays (so finely flavoured with a
+rich ironical skepticism as to the virtues of folk who live on
+shore). Never was a literary sanctum less like the pretentious
+studios of the imitation litterateurs. In a small cabin stood our
+friend, in his working dungarees (if that is what they are called)
+talking briskly with the Chief and another engineer. The
+conversation, in which we were immediately engulfed, was so
+vivacious that we had small chance to examine the surroundings as we
+would have liked to. But save for the typewriter on the desk and a
+few books in a rack, there was nothing to suggest literature.
+"Plutarch's Lives," we noticed--a favourite of Mac's since boyhood;
+Frank Harris's "The Bomb" (which, however, the Chief insisted
+belonged to him), E.S. Martin's "Windfalls of Observation," and some
+engineering works. We envied Mac the little reading lamp at the head
+of his bunk.
+
+We wish some of the soft-handed literary people who bleat about only
+being able to write in carefully purged and decorated surroundings
+could have a look at that stateroom. In just such compartments Mr.
+McFee has written for years, and expected to finish that night (in
+the two hours each day that he is able to devote to writing) his
+tale, "Captain Macedoine's Daughter." As we talked there was a
+constant procession of in-comers, most of them seeming to the opaque
+observation of the layman to be firemen discussing matters of
+overtime. On the desk lay an amusing memorandum, which the Chief
+referred to jocularly as one of Mac's "works," anent some problem
+of whether the donkeyman was due certain overtime on a Sunday when
+the _Turrialba_ lay in Hampton Roads waiting for coal. On the cabin
+door was a carefully typed list marked in Mr. McFee's hand "Work to
+Do." It began something like this:
+
+       _Main Engine Pump-Link Brasses
+        Fill Up Main Engine Feed Pump and Bilge Rams
+        Open and Scale After Port Boiler
+        Main Circulator Impeller to Examine
+        Hydrokineter Valve on Centre Boiler to be Rejointed_
+
+The delightful thing about Mr. McFee is that he can turn from these
+things, which he knows and loves, to talk about literary problems,
+and can out-talk most literary critics at their own game.
+
+He took us through his shining engines, showing us some of the
+beauty spots--the Weir pumps and the refrigerating machinery and the
+thrust-blocks (we hope we have these right), unconsciously
+inflicting upon us something of the pain it gives the bungling jack
+of several trades when he sees a man who is so fine a master not
+merely of one, but of two--two seemingly diverse, but in which the
+spirit of faith and service are the same. "She's a bonny ship," he
+said, and his face was lit with sincerity as he said it. Then he
+washed his hands and changed into shore clothes and we went up to
+Frank's, where we had pork and beans and talked about Sir Thomas
+Browne.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+FALLACIOUS MEDITATIONS ON CRITICISM
+
+
+I
+
+There are never, at any time and place, more than a few literary
+critics of genuine incision, taste, and instinct; and these
+qualities, rare enough in themselves, are further debilitated, in
+many cases, by excessive geniality or indigestion. The ideal
+literary critic should be guarded as carefully as a delicate thermal
+instrument at the Weather Bureau; his meals, friendships, underwear,
+and bank account should all be supervised by experts and advisedly
+maintained at a temperate mean. In the Almost Perfect State (so many
+phases of which have been deliciously delineated by Mr. Marquis) a
+critic seen to become over-exhilarated at the dining table or to
+address any author by his first name would promptly be haled from
+the room by a commissionaire lest his intellectual acuity become
+blunted by emotion.
+
+The unfortunate habit of critics being also human beings has done a
+great deal to impair their value to the public. For other human
+beings we all nourish a secret disrespect. And therefore it is well
+that the world should be reminded now and then of the dignity and
+purity of the critic's function. The critic's duty is not merely to
+tabulate literary material according to some convenient scale of
+proved niceties; but to discern the ratio existing in any given work
+between possibility and performance; between the standard the author
+might justly have been expected to achieve and the standard he
+actually attained. There are hierarchies and lower archies. A pint
+pot, full (it is no new observation), is just as full as a bathtub
+full. And the first duty of the critic is to determine and make
+plain to the reader the frame of mind in which the author approached
+his task.
+
+Just as a ray of sunshine across a room reveals, in air that seemed
+clear, innumerable motes of golden dancing dust and filament, so the
+bright beam of a great critic shows us the unsuspected floating
+atoms of temperament in the mind of a great writer. The popular
+understanding of the word _criticize_ is to find fault, to pettifog.
+As usual, the popular mind is only partly right. The true critic is
+the tender curator and warden of all that is worthy in letters. His
+function is sacramental, like the sweeping of a hearth. He keeps the
+hearth clean and nourishes the fire. It is a holy fire, for its fuel
+is men's hearts.
+
+It seems to us probable that under present conditions the cause of
+literature is more likely to suffer from injudicious and excessive
+praise rather than from churlish and savage criticism. It seems to
+us (and we say this with certain misgivings as to enthusiasms of our
+own) that there are many reviewers whose honest zeal for the
+discovering of masterpieces is so keen that they are likely to burst
+into superlatives half a dozen times a year and hail as a flaming
+genius some perfectly worthy creature, who might, if he were given a
+little stiff discipline, develop into a writer of best-readers
+rather than best-sellers. Too resounding praise is often more
+damning than faint praise. The writer who has any honest intentions
+is more likely to be helped by a little judicious acid now and then
+than by cartloads of honey. Let us be candid and personal. When
+someone in _The New Republic_ spoke of some essays of our own as
+"blowzy" we were moved for a few moments to an honest self-scrutiny
+and repentance. Were we really blowzy, we said to ourself? We did
+not know exactly what this meant, and there was no dictionary handy.
+But the word gave us a picture of a fat, ruddy beggar-wench trudging
+through wind and rain, probably on the way to a tavern; and we
+determined, with modest sincerity, to be less like that in future.
+
+The good old profession of criticism tends, in the hands of the
+younger generation, toward too fulsome ejaculations of hurrahs and
+hyperboles. It is a fine thing, of course, that new talent should so
+swiftly win its recognition; yet we think we are not wholly wrong in
+believing that many a delicate and promising writer has been
+hurried into third-rate work, into women's magazine serials and
+cheap sordid sensationalism, by a hasty overcapitalization of the
+reviewer's shouts. For our own part, we do not feel any too sure of
+our ability to recognize really great work when we first see it. We
+have often wondered, if we had been journalizing in 1855 when
+"Leaves of Grass" appeared, would we have been able to see what it
+meant, or wouldn't we have been more likely to fill our column with
+japeries at the expense of Walt's obvious absurdities, missing all
+the finer grain? It took a man like Emerson to see what Walt was up
+to.
+
+There were many who didn't. Henry James, for instance, wrote a
+review of "Drum Taps" in the _Nation_, November 16, 1865. In the
+lusty heyday and assurance of twenty-two years, he laid the birch on
+smartly. It is just a little saddening to find that even so
+clear-sighted an observer as Henry James could not see through the
+chaotic form of Whitman to the great vision and throbbing music that
+seem so plain to us to-day. Whitman himself, writing about "Drum
+Taps" before its publication, said, "Its passion has the
+indispensable merit that though to the ordinary reader let loose
+with wildest abandon, the true artist can see that it is yet under
+control." With this, evidently, the young Henry James did not agree.
+He wrote:
+
+     It has been a melancholy task to read this book; and it is a
+     still more melancholy one to write about it. Perhaps since the
+     day of Mr. Tupper's "Philosophy" there has been no more
+     difficult reading of the poetic sort. It exhibits the effort of
+     an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged
+     muscular strain, into poetry. Like hundreds of other good
+     patriots, Mr. Walt Whitman has imagined that a certain amount
+     of violent sympathy with the great deeds and sufferings of our
+     soldiers, and of admiration for our national energy, together
+     with a ready command of picturesque language, are sufficient
+     inspiration for a poet.... But he is not a poet who merely
+     reiterates these plain facts _ore rotundo_. He only sings them
+     worthily who views them from a height.... Mr. Whitman is very
+     fond of blowing his own trumpet, and he has made very explicit
+     claims for his book.... The frequent capitals are the only
+     marks of verse in Mr. Whitman's writing. There is, fortunately,
+     but one attempt at rhyme.... Each line starts off by itself, in
+     resolute independence of its companions, without a visible goal
+     ... it begins like verse and turns out to be arrant prose. It
+     is more like Mr. Tupper's proverbs than anything we have
+     met.... No triumph, however small, is won but through the
+     exercise of art, and this volume is an offence against art....
+     We look in vain through the book for a single idea. We find
+     nothing but flashy imitations of ideas. We find a medley of
+     extravagances and commonplaces.
+
+We do not know whether H.J. ever recanted this very youthful
+disposal of old Walt. The only importance of it at this moment seems
+to us this: that appreciation of all kinds of art is so tenderly
+interwoven with inherited respect for the traditional forms of
+expression by which they are conveyed that a new and surprising
+vehicle quite unfits most observers for any reasonable assessment of
+the passenger.
+
+As for Walt himself, he was quite unabashed by this or any other
+onslaught. He was not gleg at argument, and probably rolled up the
+issue of the _Nation_ in his pocket and went down to Coney Island to
+lie on the sand and muse (but no, we forget, it was November!). In
+the same issue of the _Nation_ he doubtless read, in the "Literary
+Notes," that "Poems Relating to the American Revolution," by Philip
+Freneau, was "in press under the scholarly editing of Evart A.
+Duyckinck to form a complete presentment of the genius of an author
+whose influence in the affairs of his time would alone impart a
+lasting value to his works." At this Walt smiled gently to himself,
+wondered how soon "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" would
+get into the anthologies, and "sped to the certainties suitable to
+him."
+
+
+II
+
+These miscellaneous thoughts on the fallibility of critics were
+suggested to us by finding some old bound volumes of the _Edinburgh
+Review_ on a bookstall, five cents each. In the issue for November,
+1814, we read with relish what the _Review_ had to say about
+Wordsworth's "Excursion." These are a few excerpts:
+
+     This will never do.... The case of Mr. Wordsworth, we perceive,
+     is now manifestly hopeless; and we give him up as altogether
+     incurable, and beyond the power of criticism ... making up our
+     minds, though with the most sincere pain and reluctance, to
+     consider him as finally lost to the good cause of poetry....
+     The volume before us, if we were to describe it very shortly,
+     we should characterize as a tissue of moral and devotional
+     ravings, in which innumerable changes are rung upon a few very
+     simple and familiar ideas.
+
+The world of readers has not ratified Jeffrey's savage comments on
+"The Excursion," for (to reckon only by the purse) any frequenter of
+old bookshops can pick up that original issue of the _Edinburgh
+Review_ for a few cents, while the other day we saw a first edition
+of the maligned "Excursion" sold for thirty dollars. A hundred years
+ago it was the critic's pleasure to drub authors with cruel and
+unnecessary vigour. But we think that almost equal harm can be done
+by the modern method of hailing a new "genius" every three weeks.
+
+For example, there is something subtly troublesome to us in the
+remark that Sinclair Lewis made about Evelyn Scott's novel, "The
+Narrow House." The publishers have used it as an advertising slogan,
+and the words have somehow buzzed their way into our head:
+
+     "Salute to Evelyn Scott: she belongs, she understands, she is
+     definitely an artist."
+
+We have been going about our daily affairs, climbing subway stairs,
+dodging motor trucks, ordering platters of stewed rhubarb, with that
+refrain recurring and recurring. _Salute to Evelyn Scott!_ (we say
+to ourself as we stand in line at the bank, waiting to cash a small
+check). _She belongs, she understands._ And then, as we go away,
+pensively counting the money (they've got some clean Ones down at
+our bank, by the way; we don't know whether the larger denominations
+are clean or not, we haven't seen any since Christmas), we find
+ourself mumbling, _She is definitely an artist._
+
+We wonder why that pronouncement annoys us so. We haven't read all
+Mrs. Scott's book yet, and doubt our strength to do so. It is a riot
+of morbid surgery by a fumbling scalpel: great powers of observation
+are put to grotesque misuse. It is crammed with faithful particulars
+neither relevant nor interesting. (Who sees so little as he who
+looks through a microscope?) At first we thought, hopefully, that it
+was a bit of excellent spoof; then, regretfully, we began to realize
+that not only the publishers but even the author take it seriously.
+It feels as though it had been written by one of the new school of
+Chicago realists. It is disheartening that so influential a person
+as Mr. Lewis should be fooled by this sort of thing.
+
+So there is something intensely irritating to us (although we admire
+Mr. Lewis) in that "_She belongs, she understands, she is definitely
+an artist._" In the first place, that use of the word _artist_ as
+referring to a writer always gives us qualms unless used with great
+care. Then again, _She belongs_ somehow seems to intimate that there
+is a registered clique of authors, preferably those who come down
+pretty heavily upon the disagreeable facts of life and catalogue
+them with gluttonous care, which group is the only one that counts.
+Now we are strong for disagreeable facts. We know a great many. But
+somehow we cannot shake ourself loose from the instinctive
+conviction that imagination is the without-which-nothing of the art
+of fiction. Miss Stella Benson is one who is not unobservant of
+disagreeables, but when she writes she can convey her satire in
+flashing, fantastic absurdity, in a heavenly chiding so delicate and
+subtle that the victim hardly knows he is being chidden. The
+photographic facsimile of life always seems to us the lesser art,
+because it is so plainly the easier course.
+
+We fear we are not acute enough to explain just why it is that Mr.
+Lewis's salute to Mrs. Scott bothers us so. But it does bother us a
+good deal. We have nourished ourself, in the main, upon the work of
+two modern writers: Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad; we
+like to apply as a test such theories as we have been able to glean
+from those writers. Faulty and erring as we are, we always rise from
+Mr. Conrad's books purged and, for the moment, strengthened.
+Apparent in him are that manly and honourable virtue, that strict
+saline truth and scrupulous regard for life, that liberation from
+cant, which seem to be inbred in those who have suffered the
+exacting discipline of the hostile sea. Certainly Conrad cannot be
+called a writer who has neglected the tragic side of things. Yet in
+his "Notes on Life and Letters," we find this:
+
+     What one feels so hopelessly barren in declared pessimism is
+     just its arrogance. It seems as if the discovery made by many
+     men at various times that there is much evil in the world were
+     a source of proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern
+     writers. That frame of mind is not the proper one in which to
+     approach seriously the art of fiction.... To be hopeful in an
+     artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is
+     good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of
+     its being made so.... I would ask that in his dealings with
+     mankind he [the writer] should be capable of giving a tender
+     recognition to their obscure virtues. I would not have him
+     impatient with their small failings and scornful of their
+     errors.
+
+We fear that our mild protest is rather mixed and muddled. But what
+we darkly feel is this: that no author "belongs," or "understands,"
+or is "definitely an artist" who merely makes the phantoms of his
+imagination paltry or ridiculous. They may be paltry, but they must
+also be pitiable; they may be ridiculous, but they must also be
+tragic. Many authors have fallen from the sublime to the ridiculous;
+but, as Mr. Chesterton magnificently said, in order to make that
+descent they must first reach the sublime.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+LETTING OUT THE FURNACE
+
+
+The prudent commuter (and all commuters are prudent, for the others
+are soon weeded out by the rigours of that way of life) keeps the
+furnace going until early May in these latitudes--assuming that
+there are small children in the house. None of those April hot waves
+can fool him; he knows that, with cunning management, two or three
+shovelfuls of coal a day will nurse the fire along, and there it is
+in case of a sudden chilly squall. But when at last he lets the fire
+die, and after its six months of constant and honourable service the
+old boiler grows cold, the kindly glow fades and sinks downward out
+of sight under a crust of gray clinkers, our friend muses tenderly
+in his cellar, sitting on a packing case.
+
+He thinks, first, how odd it is that when he said to himself, "We
+might as well let the fire go out," it kept on sturdily burning,
+without attention or fuel, for a day and a half; whereas if he had,
+earlier in the season, neglected it even for a few hours, all would
+have been cold and silent. He remembers, for instance, the tragic
+evening with the mercury around zero, when, having (after supper)
+arranged everything at full blast and all radiators comfortably
+sizzling, he lay down on his couch to read Leonard Merrick,
+intending to give all hands a warm house for the night. Very well;
+but when he woke up around 2 A.M. and heard the tenor winds singing
+through the woodland, how anxiously he stumbled down the cellar
+stairs, fearing the worst. His fears were justified. There, on top
+of the thick bed of silvery ashes, lay the last pallid rose of fire.
+For as every pyrophil has noted, when the draught is left on, the
+fire flees upward, leaving its final glow at the top; but when all
+draughts are shut off, it sinkst downward, shyly hiding in the heart
+of the mass.
+
+So he stood, still drowsily aghast, while Gissing (the synthetic
+dog) frolicked merrily about his unresponsive shins, deeming this
+just one more of those surprising entertainments arranged for his
+delight.
+
+Now, on such an occasion the experienced commuter makes the best of
+a bad job, knowing there is little to be gained by trying to cherish
+and succour a feeble remnant of fire. He will manfully jettison the
+whole business, filling the cellar with the crash of shunting ashes
+and the clatter of splitting kindling. But this pitiable creature
+still thought that mayhap he could, by sedulous care and coaxing,
+revive the dying spark. With such black arts as were available he
+wrestled with the despondent glim. During this period of guilty and
+furtive strife he went quietly upstairs, and a voice spoke up from
+slumber. "Isn't the house very cold?" it said.
+
+"Is it?" said this wretched creature, with great simulation of
+surprise. "Seems very comfortable to me."
+
+"Well, I think you'd better send up some more heat," said this
+voice, in the tone of one accustomed to command.
+
+"Right away," said the panic-stricken combustion engineer, and
+returned to his cellar, wondering whether he was suspected. How is
+it, he wondered, that ladies know instinctively, even when vested in
+several layers of blankets, if anything is wrong with the furnace?
+Another of the mysteries, said he, grimly, to the synthetic dog. By
+this time he knew full well (it was 3 A.M.) that there was naught
+for it but to decant the grateful of cinders and set to work on a
+new fire.
+
+Such memories throng in the mind of the commuter as he surveys the
+dark form of his furnace, standing cold and dusty in the warm spring
+weather, and he cleans and drains it for the summer vacation. He
+remembers the lusty shout of winter winds, the clean and silver
+nakedness of January weather, the shining glow of the golden coals,
+the comfortable rustling and chuckle of the boiler when alive with a
+strong urgency of steam, the soft thud and click of the pipes when
+the pressure was rising before breakfast. And he meditates that
+these matters, though often the cause of grumbles at the time, were
+a part of that satisfying reality that makes life in the outposts a
+more honest thing than the artificial convenience of great apartment
+houses. The commuter, no less than the seaman, has fidelities of his
+own; and faithful, strict obedience to hard necessary formulæ
+favours the combined humility and self-respect that makes human
+virtue. The commuter is often a figure both tragic and absurd; but
+he has a rubric and discipline of his own. And when you see him
+grotesquely hasting for the 5:27 train, his inner impulse may be no
+less honourable than that of the ship's officer ascending the bridge
+for his watch under a dark speckle of open sky.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+BY THE FIREPLACE
+
+
+We were contemplating our fireplace, in which, some of the
+hearth-bricks are rather irregularly disposed; and we said to
+ourself, perhaps the brick-layer who built this noble fireplace
+worked like Ben Jonson, with a trowel in one hand and a copy of
+Horace in the other. That suggested to us that we had not read any
+Ben Jonson for a very long time: so we turned to "Every Man in His
+Humour" and "The Alchemist." Part of Jonson's notice "To the Reader"
+preceding "The Alchemist" struck us as equally valid as regards
+poetry to-day:
+
+     Thou wert never more fair in the way to be cozened, than in
+     this age, in poetry; wherein ... antics to run away from
+     nature, and be afraid of her, is the only point of art that
+     tickles the spectators ... For they commend writers, as they do
+     fencers or wrestlers; who if they come in robustuously, and put
+     for it with a great deal of violence, are received for the
+     braver fellows.... I deny not, but that these men, who always
+     seek to do more than enough, may some time happen on some thing
+     that is good, and great; but very seldom ... I give thee this
+     warning, that there is a great difference between those, that
+     utter all they can, however unfitly; and those that use
+     election and a mean. For it is only the disease of the
+     unskilful, to think rude things greater than polished; or
+     scattered more numerous than composed.
+
+Ben Jonson's perpetual allusions to tobacco always remind one of the
+odd circumstance that of two such cronies as he and Will
+Shakespeare, one should have mentioned tobacco continually, the
+other not at all. Undoubtedly Ben smoked a particularly foul old
+pipe and was forever talking about it, spouting his rank strangling
+"Cuban ebolition" across the table; and Will, probably rather nice
+in his personal habits, grew disgusted with the habit.
+
+At any rate, Shakespeare's silence on the subject has always been a
+grief to smokers. At a time when we were interested in that famous
+and innocent way of wasting time, trying to discover ciphers in
+Shakespeare's sonnets, we spent long cryptogrammarian evenings
+seeking to prove some anagram or rebus by which the Bard could be
+supposed to have concealed a mention of tobacco. But the only
+lurking secret we ever discovered seemed to suggest that the sonnets
+had been written by an ex-President of the United States. Observe
+the 131st sonnet:
+
+      *T*hou art as tyrannous, so as thou art
+      *A*s those whose beauties proudly make them cruel;
+      *F*or well thou know'st to my dear doting heart
+      *T*hou art the fairest and most precious jewel.
+
+And evidently Shakespeare intended to begin the 51st sonnet with the
+same acrostic; but, with Elizabethan laxity, misspelled Mr. Taft's
+name as TOFT.
+
+Reading Elizabethan literature always encourages one to proceed,
+even though decorously, with the use of the pun. Such screams of
+mirth as (we doubt not) greeted one of Ben Jonson's simpletons when
+he spoke of Roger Bacon as Rasher Bacon (we can hear them laughing,
+can't you?) are highly fortifying.
+
+But we began by quoting Ben Jonson on poetry. The passage sent us to
+the bookcase to look up the "axioms" about poetry stated by another
+who was also, in spirit at least, an habitué of The Mermaid. In that
+famous letter from Keats to his publisher and friend John Taylor,
+February 27, 1818, there is a fine fluent outburst on the subject.
+All Keats lovers know these "axioms" already, but they cannot be
+quoted too often; and we copy them down with additional pleasure
+because not long ago, by the kindness of the two librarians who
+watch over one of the most marvellous private collections in the
+world--Mr. J.P. Morgan's--we saw the original letter itself:--
+
+     1st. I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not
+     by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his
+     own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
+
+     2d. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby
+     making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the
+     progress, the setting of Imagery should, like the sun, come
+     natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly, although in
+     magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight. But it is
+     easier to think what poetry should be than to write it--and
+     this leads me to
+
+     Another axiom--That if poetry comes not as naturally as the
+     leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.
+
+Some people can always find things to complain about. We have seen
+protests because the house in Rome where Keats died is used as a
+steamship office. We think it is rather appropriate. No man's mind
+ever set sail upon wider oceans of imagination. To paraphrase Emily
+Dickinson:
+
+          Night after night his purple traffic
+            Strews the landing with opal bales;
+          Merchantmen poise upon horizons,
+            Dip, and vanish with fairy sails.
+
+Another pleasing fact is that while he was a medical student Keats
+lived in Bird-in-Hand Court, Cheapside--best known nowadays as the
+home of Simpson's, that magnificent chophouse. Who else, in modern
+times, came so close to holding unruffled in his hand the shy wild
+bird of Poetry?
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+A CITY NOTE-BOOK
+
+
+Well, now let us see in what respect we are richer to-day than we
+were yesterday.
+
+Coming down Fifth Avenue on top of a bus, we saw a man absorbed in a
+book. Ha, we thought, here is our chance to see how bus reading
+compares to subway reading! After some manoeuvering, we managed to
+get the seat behind the victim. The volume was "Every Man a King,"
+by Orison Swett Marden, and the uncrowned monarch reading it was
+busy with the thirteenth chapter, to wit: "Thoughts Radiate as
+Influence." We did a little radiating of our own, and it seemed to
+reach him, for presently he grew uneasy, put the volume carefully
+away in a brief-case, and (as far as we could see) struck out toward
+his kingdom, which apparently lay on the north shore of Forty-second
+Street.
+
+We felt then that we would recuperate by glancing at a little
+literature. So we made our way toward the newly enlarged shrine of
+James F. Drake on Fortieth Street. Here we encountered our friends
+the two Messrs. Drake, junior, and complimented them on their thews
+and sinews, these two gentlemen having recently, unaided, succeeded
+in moving a half-ton safe, filled with the treasures of Elizabethan
+literature, into the new sanctum. Here, where formerly sped the
+nimble fingers of M. Tappe's young ladies, busy with the compilation
+of engaging bonnets for the fair, now stand upon wine-dark shelves
+the rich gold and amber of fine bindings. We were moved by this
+sight. We said in our heart, we will erect a small madrigal upon
+this theme, entitled: "Song Upon Certain Songbirds of the
+Elizabethan Age Now Garnishing the Chamber Erstwhile Bright With the
+Stuffed Plumage of the Milliner." To the Messrs. Drake we mentioned
+the interesting letter of Mr. J. Acton Lomax in yesterday's
+_Tribune_, which called attention to the fact that the poem at the
+end of "Through the Looking Glass" is an acrostic giving the name of
+the original Alice--viz., Alice Pleasance Liddell. In return for
+which we were shown a copy of the first edition of "Alice in
+Wonderland." Here, too, we dallied for some time over a first
+edition of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, and were pleased to learn that
+the great doctor was no more infallible in proofreading than the
+rest of us, one of our hosts pointing out to us a curious error by
+which some words beginning in COV had slipped in ahead of words
+beginning in COU.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At noon to-day we climbed on a Riverside Drive bus at Seventy-ninth
+Street and rode in the mellow gold of autumn up to Broadway and
+168th. Serene, gilded weather; sunshine as soft and tawny as
+candlelight, genial at midday as the glow of an open fire in spite
+of the sharpness of the early morning. Battleships lay in the river
+with rippling flags. Men in flannels were playing tennis on the
+courts below Grant's Tomb; everywhere was a convincing appearance of
+comfort and prosperity. The beauty of the children, the good
+clothing of everybody, canes swinging on the pavements, cheerful
+faces untroubled by thought, the warm benevolence of sunlight,
+bronzing trees along Riverside Park, a man reading a book on the
+summit of that rounded knoll of rock near Eighty-fourth Street which
+children call "Mount Tom"--everything was so bright in life and
+vigour that the sentence seems to need no verb. Joan of Arc, poised
+on horseback against her screen of dark cedars, held her sword
+clearly against the pale sky. Amazingly sure and strong and
+established seem the rich façades of Riverside Drive apartment
+houses, and the landlords were rolling in limousines up to Claremont
+to have lunch. One small apartment house, near Eighty-third or
+thereabouts, has been renamed the Château-Thierry.
+
+After crossing the long bridge above Claremont and the deep ravine
+where ships and ferryboats and coal stations abound, the bus crosses
+on 135th Street to Broadway. At 153d, the beautiful cemetery of
+Trinity Parish, leafy paths lying peaceful in the strong glow. At
+166th Street is an open area now called Mitchel Square, with an
+outcrop of rock polished by the rearward breeks of many sliding
+urchins. Some children were playing on that small summit with a toy
+parachute made of light paper and a pebble attached by threads. On
+168th Street alongside the big armoury of the Twenty-second
+Engineers boys were playing baseball, with a rubber ball, pitching
+it so that the batter received it on the bounce and struck it with
+his fist. According to the score chalked on the pavement the "Bronx
+Browns" and the "Haven Athletics" were just finishing a rousing
+contest, in which the former were victors, 1-0. Haven Avenue, near
+by, is a happy little street perched high above the river. A small
+terraced garden with fading flowers looks across the Hudson to the
+woody Palisades. Modest apartment houses are built high on enormous
+buttresses, over the steep scarp of the hillside. Through cellar
+windows coal was visible, piled high in the bins; children were
+trooping home for dinner; a fine taint of frying onions hung in the
+shining air. Everywhere in that open, half-suburban, comfortable
+region was a feeling of sane, established life. An old man with a
+white beard was greeted by two urchins, who ran up and kissed him
+heartily as he beamed upon them. Grandpa, one supposes! Plenty of
+signs indicating small apartments to rent, four and five rooms. And
+down that upper slant of Broadway, as the bus bumbles past rows of
+neat prosperous-seeming shops, one feels the great tug and pulling
+current of life that flows down the channel, the strange energy of
+the huge city lying below. The tide was momentarily stilled, but
+soon to resume action. There was a magic touch apparent, like the
+stillness of a palace in a fairy tale, bewitched into waiting
+silence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sometimes on our way to the office in the morning we stop in front
+of a jeweller's window near Maiden Lane and watch a neat little
+elderly gentleman daintily setting out his employer's gauds and
+trinkets for the day. We like to see him brood cheerfully over the
+disposition of his small amber-coloured velvet mats, and the
+arrangement of the rings, vanity cases, necklaces, and precious
+stones. They twinkle in the morning light, and he leans downward in
+the window, innocently displaying the widening parting on his pink
+scalp. He purses his lips in a silent whistle as he cons his shining
+trifles and varies his plan of display every day.
+
+Now a modern realist (we have a painful suspicion) if he were
+describing this pleasant man would deal rather roughly with him. You
+know exactly how it would be done. He would be a weary, saddened,
+shabby figure: his conscientious attention to the jewels in his care
+would be construed as the painful and creaking routine of a victim
+of commercial greed; a bitter irony would be distilled from the
+contrast of his own modest station in life and the huge value of the
+lucid crystals and carbons under his hands. His hands--ah, the
+realist would angrily see some brutal pathos or unconscious
+naughtiness in the crook of the old mottled fingers. How that
+widening parting in the gray head would be gloated upon. It would be
+very easy to do, and it would be (if we are any judge) wholly false.
+
+For we have watched the little old gentleman many times, and we
+have quite an affection for him. We see him as one perfectly happy
+in the tidy and careful round of his tasks; and when his tenderly
+brushed gray poll leans above his treasures, and he gently devises
+new patterns by which the emeralds or the gold cigarette cases will
+catch the slant of 9 o'clock sunlight, we seem to see one who is
+enjoying his own placid conception of beauty, and who is not a
+figure of pity or reproach, but one of decent honour and excellent
+fidelity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One of our colleagues, a lusty genial in respect of tobacco, has
+told us of a magnificent way to remove an evil and noisome taste
+from an old pipe that hath been smoked overlong. He says, clean the
+bowl carefully (not removing the cake) and wash tenderly in fair,
+warm water. Then, he says, take a teaspoonful of the finest vatted
+Scotch whiskey (or, if the pipe be of exceeding size, a
+tablespoonful of the same) and pour it delicately into the bowl.
+Apply a lighted match, and let the liquor burn itself out. It will
+do so, he avouches, with a gentle blue flame of great beauty and
+serenity. The action of this burning elixir, he maintains, operates
+to sizzle and purge away all impurity from the antique incrustation
+in the bowl. After letting the pipe cool, and then filling it with a
+favourite blend of mingled Virginia, Perique, and Latakia, our
+friend asserts that he is blessed with a cool, saporous, and
+enchanting fumigation which is so fragrant that even his wife has
+remarked upon it in terms complimentary. Our friend says (but we
+fear he draws the longbow nigh unto fracture) that the success of
+this method may be tested so: if one lives, as he does, in the
+upward stories of a tall apartment house, one should take the pipe
+so cleansed to the window-sill, and, smoking it heartily, lean
+outward over the sill. On a clear, still, blue evening, the air
+being not too gusty, the vapours will disperse and eddy over the
+street; and he maintains with great zeal that passersby ten tiers
+below will very soon look upward from the pavement, sniffingly, to
+discern the source of such admirable fumes. He has even known them,
+he announces, to hail him from the street, in tones of eager
+inquiry, to learn what kind of tobacco he is smoking.
+
+All this we have duly meditated and find ourselves considerably
+stirred. Now there is only one thing that stands between ourself and
+such an experiment.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are some who hold by the theory that on visiting a restaurant
+it is well to pick out a table that is already cleared rather than
+one still bearing the debris of a previous patron's meal. We offer
+convincing proof to the contrary.
+
+Rambling, vacant of mind and guileless of intent, in a certain quiet
+portion of the city--and it is no use for you, O client, to ask
+where, for our secrecy is firm as granite--we came upon an eating
+house and turned inward. There were tables spread with snowy cloths,
+immaculate; there were also tables littered with dishes. We chose
+one of the latter, for a waiter was removing the plates, and we
+thought that by sitting there we would get prompter service. We sat
+down and our eye fell upon a large china cup that had been used by
+the preceding luncher. In the bottom of that cup was a little pool
+of dark dregs, a rich purple colour, most agreeable to gaze upon.
+Happy possibilities were opened to our mind. Like the fabled Captain
+X, we had a Big Idea. We made no outcry, nor did we show our
+emotion, but when the waiter asked for our order we said, calmly:
+"Sausages and some of the red wine." He was equally calm and uttered
+no comment.
+
+Soon he came back (having conferred, as we could see out of the wing
+of our eye) with his boss. "What was it you ordered?" he said.
+
+"Sausages," we replied, urbanely, "and some of the red wine."
+
+"I don't remember having served you before," he said. "I can't give
+you anything like that."
+
+We saw that we must win his confidence and we thought rapidly. "It's
+perfectly all right," we said. "Mr. Bennett" (we said, seizing the
+first name that came into our head), "who comes here every day, told
+me about it. You know Mr. Bennett; he works over on Forty-second
+Street and comes here right along."
+
+Again he departed, but returned anon with smiling visage. "If you're
+a friend of Mr. Bennett's," he said, "it's all right. You know, we
+have to be careful."
+
+"Quite right," we said; "be wary." And we laid hand firmly on the
+fine hemorrhage of the grape.
+
+A little later in the adventure, when we were asked what dessert we
+would have, we found stewed rhubarb on the menu, and very fine
+stewed rhubarb it was; wherefore we say that our time was not
+ill-spent and we shall keep the secret to ourself.
+
+But we can't help feeling grateful to Mr. Bennett, whoever he is.
+
+     *       *       *       *       *
+
+Occasionally (but not often) in the exciting plexus of our affairs
+(conducted, as we try to persuade ourself, with so judicious a
+jointure of caution and hilarity) we find it necessary to remain in
+town for dinner. Then, and particularly in spring evenings, we are
+moved and exhilarated by that spectacle that never loses its
+enchantment, the golden beauty and glamour of downtown New York
+after the homeward ebb has left the streets quiet and lonely. By six
+o'clock in a May sunset the office is a cloister of delicious peace
+and solitude. Let us suppose (oh, a case merely hypothetic) that you
+have got to attend a dinner somewhere in the Forties, say at
+half-past seven; and it is requisite that evening clothes should be
+worn. You have brought them to the office, modestly hidden, in a
+bag; and in that almost unbelievable privacy, toward half-past six,
+you have an enjoyable half hour of luxurious amusement and
+contemplation. The office, one repeats, is completely stripped of
+tenants--save perhaps an occasional grumbling sortie by the veteran
+janitor. So all its resources are open for you to use as boudoir.
+Now, in an office situated like this there is, at sunset time, a
+variety of scenic richness to be contemplated. From the President's
+office (putting on one's hard-boiled shirt) one can look down upon
+St. Paul's churchyard, lying a pool of pale blue shadow in the
+rising dusk. From the City Room (inserting studs) one sees the river
+sheeted with light. From the office of the Literary Editor (lacing
+up one's shoes) one may study the wild pinnacle of Woolworth,
+faintly superfused with a brightness of gold and pink. From the
+office of one of our dramatic critics the view is negligible (being
+but a hardy brick wall), but the critic, debonair creature, has a
+small mirror of his own, so there one manages the ticklish business
+of the cravat. And from our own kennel, where are transacted the
+last touches (transfer of pipe, tobacco, matches, Long Island
+railroad timetable, commutation ticket, etc., to the other pockets)
+there is a heavenly purview of those tall cliffs of lower Broadway,
+nobly terraced into the soft, translucent sky. In that exquisite
+clarity and sharpness of New York's evening light are a loveliness
+and a gallantry hardly to be endured. At seven o'clock of a May
+evening it is poetry unspeakable. O magnificent city (one says),
+there will come a day when others will worship and celebrate your
+mystery; and when not one of them will know or care how much I loved
+you. But these words, obscure and perishable, I leave you as a
+testimony that I also understood.
+
+She cannot be merely the cruel Babel they like to describe her: the
+sunset light would not gild her so tenderly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a great relief to us yesterday evening to see a man reading a
+book in the subway. We have undergone so many embarrassments trying
+to make out the titles of the books the ladies read, without running
+afoul of the Traveller's Aid Society, that we heaved a sigh of
+relief and proceeded to stalk our quarry with a light heart. Let us
+explain that on a crowded train it is not such an easy task. You see
+your victim at the other end of the car. First you have to buffet
+your way until you get next to him. Then, just as you think you are
+in a position to do a little careful snooping, he innocently shifts
+the book to the other hand. This means you have got to navigate,
+somehow, toward the hang-handle on the other side of him. Very well.
+By the time the train gets to Bowling Green we have seen that it is
+a fattish book, bound in green cloth, and the author's name begins
+with FRAN. That doesn't help much. As the train roars under the
+river you manage, by leanings and twistings, to see the publisher's
+name--in this case, Longmans. At Borough Hall a number of passengers
+get out, and the hunted reader sits down. Ten to one he will hold
+the book in such a way that you cannot see the title. At Nevins
+Street you get a seat beside him. At Atlantic Avenue, as he is
+getting off, you propose your head over his shoulder in the jam on
+the stairs and see what you are after. "Lychgate Hall," by M.E.
+Francis. And in this case, success left us none the wiser.
+
+Atlantic Avenue, by the way, always seems to us an ideal place for
+the beginning of a detective story. (Speaking of that, a very jolly
+article in this month's _Bookman_, called "How Old Is Sherlock
+Holmes?" has revived our old ambition to own a complete set of all
+the Sherlock Holmes tales, and we are going to set about scouring
+the town for them). Every time we pass through the Atlantic Avenue
+maelstrom, which is twelve times a week, we see, as plain as print,
+the beginning of two magazine tales.
+
+One begins as the passengers are streaming through the gate toward
+the 5:27 train. There is a very beautiful damsel who always sits on
+the left-hand side of the next to last car, by an open window. On
+her plump and comely white hand, which holds the latest issue of a
+motion picture magazine, is a sparkling diamond ring. Suddenly all
+the lights in the train go out. Through the open window comes a
+brutal grasp which wrenches the bauble from her finger. There are
+screams, etc., etc. When the lights go on again, of course there is
+no sign of the criminal. Five minutes later, Mr. Geoffrey Dartmouth,
+enjoying a chocolate ice cream soda in the little soft-drink alcove
+at the corner of the station, is astonished to find a gold ring, the
+stone missing, at the bottom of his paper soda container.
+
+The second story begins on the Atlantic Avenue platform of the
+Lexington Avenue subway. It is 9 A.M., and a crowded train is
+pulling out. Just before the train leaves a young man steps off one
+of the cars, leaving behind him (though not at once noticed) a
+rattan suitcase. This young man disappears in the usual fashion,
+viz., by mingling with the crowd. When the train gets to the
+end of the run the unclaimed suitcase is opened, and found to
+contain--_continued on page_ 186.
+
+     *       *       *        *        *
+
+Every now and then we take a stroll up Irving Place. It is changing
+slowly, but it still has much of the flavour that Arthur Maurice had
+in mind when he christened It "the heart of O. Henry land." Number
+55, the solid, bleached brownstone house where O. Henry once lived,
+is still there: it seems to be some sort of ecclesiastical
+rendezvous, if one may judge by the letters C.H.A. on the screen and
+the pointed carving of the doorway. Number 53, next door, always
+interests us greatly: the windows give a glimpse of the most
+extraordinary number of cages of canaries.
+
+The old German theatre seems to have changed its language: the
+boards speak now in Yiddish. The chiropractor and psycho-analyst has
+invaded the Place, as may be seen by a sign on the eastern side. O.
+Henry would surely have told a yarn about him if he had been there
+fifteen years ago. There are still quite a number of the old brown
+houses, with their iron railings and little patches of grass. The
+chocolate factory still diffuses its pleasant candied whiff. At
+noontime the street is full of the high-spirited pupils of the
+Washington Irving High School. As for the Irving house itself, it is
+getting a new coat of paint. The big corset works, we dare say, has
+come since O. Henry's time. We had quite an adventure there once. We
+can't remember how it came about, but for some reason or other we
+went to that building to see the chief engineer. All we can remember
+about it was that he had been at sea at one time, and we went to see
+him on some maritime errand. We found that he and his family lived
+in a comfortable apartment on the roof of the factory, and we
+remember making our way, with a good many blushes, through several
+hundred or thousand young ladies who were industriously working away
+at their employer's business and who seemed to us to be giggling
+more than necessary. After a good deal of hunting we found our way
+to a secret stair and reached our seafaring engineer of the corset
+factory in his eyrie, where (we remember) there were oil paintings
+of ships on the walls and his children played about on the roof as
+though on the deck of a vessel.
+
+Irving Place is also very rich in interesting little
+shops--laundries, tailors, carpenters, stationers, and a pleasant
+bookshop. It is a haunt of hand-organ men. The cool tavern at the
+corner of Eighteenth, where Con Delaney tended the bar in the days
+when O. Henry visited it, is there still. All along the little byway
+is a calm, genteel, domestic mood, in spite of the encroachments of
+factories and apartment houses. There are window boxes with flowers,
+and a sort of dim suffusion of conscious literary feeling. One has a
+suspicion that in all those upper rooms are people writing short
+stories. "Want to see a freak?" asks the young man in the bookshop
+as we are looking over his counters. We do, of course, and follow
+his animated gesture. Across the street comes a plump young woman,
+in a very short skirt of a violent blue, with a thick mane of bobbed
+hair, carrying her hat in her hand. She looks rather comfortable and
+seemly to us, but something about her infuriates the bookseller. He
+is quite Freudian in his indignation that any young woman should
+habit herself so. We wonder what the psycho-analyst a few blocks
+below would say about it. And walking a few paces further, one comes
+upon the green twitter, the tended walks and pink geranium beds of
+Gramercy Park.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is no time when we need spiritual support so much as when we
+are having our hair cut, for indeed it is the only time when we are
+ever thoroughly and entirely Bored. But having found a good-natured
+barber who said he would not mind our reading a book while he was
+shearing, we went through with it. The ideal book to read at such a
+time (we offer you this advice, brave friends) is the "Tao" of
+Lao-Tse, that ancient and admirable Chinese sage. (Dwight Goddard's
+translation is very agreeable.) "The Tao," as of course you know, is
+generally translated The Way, i.e., the Way of Life of the
+Reasonable Man.
+
+Lao-Tse, we assert, is the ideal author to read while the barber is
+at his business. He answers every inquiry that will be made, and all
+you have to do is hold the book up and point to your favourite
+marked passages.
+
+When the barber says, genially, "Well, have you done your Christmas
+shopping yet?" we raise the book and point to this maxim:
+
+     _Taciturnity is natural to man._
+
+When he says, "How about a nice little shampoo this morning?" we are
+prompt to indicate:
+
+     _The wise man attends to the inner significance of things and
+     does not concern himself with outward appearances._
+
+When, as we sit in the chair, we see (in the mirror before us) the
+lovely reflection of the beautiful manicure lady, and she arches her
+eyebrows at us to convey the intimation that we ought to have our
+hands attended to, old Lao-Tse is ready with the answer. We reassure
+ourself with his remark:
+
+     _Though he be surrounded with sights that are magnificent, the
+     wise man will remain calm and unconcerned._
+
+When the shine boy offers to burnish our shoes, we call his
+attention to:
+
+     _He who closes his mouth and shuts his sense gates will be free
+     from trouble to the end of life._
+
+When the barber suggests that if we were now to have a liberal
+douche of bay rum sprayed over our poll it would be a glittering
+consummation of his task, we show him the words:
+
+     _If one tries to improve a thing, he mars it._
+
+And when (finally) the irritated tonsor suggests that if we don't
+wait so long next time before getting our hair cut we will not be
+humiliated by our condition, we exhibit Lao-Tse's aphorism:
+
+     _The wise man is inaccessible to favour or hate; he cannot be
+     reached by profit or injury; he cannot be honoured or
+     humiliated._
+
+"It's very easy," says the barber as we pay our check; "just drop in
+here once a month and we'll fix you up." And we point to:
+
+     _The wise man lives in the world, but he lives cautiously,
+     dealing with the world cautiously. Many things that appear easy
+     are full of difficulties._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To a lot of people who are in a mortal scurry and excitement what is
+so maddening as the calm and unruffled serenity of a dignified
+philosopher who gazes unperturbed upon their pangs? So did we
+meditate when facing the deliberate and mild tranquillity of the
+priestly person presiding over the bulletin board announcing the
+arrival of trains at the Pennsylvania Station. It was in that
+desperate and curious limbo known as the "exit concourse," where
+baffled creatures wait to meet others arriving on trains and
+maledict the architect who so planned matters that the passengers
+arrive on two sides at once, so that one stands grievously in the
+middle slewing his eyes to one side and another in a kind of
+vertigo, attempting to con both exits. We cannot go into this matter
+in full (when, indeed, will we find enough white paper and enough
+energy to discuss _anything_ in full, in the way, perhaps, Henry
+James would have blanketed it?), but we will explain that we were
+waiting to meet someone, someone we had never seen, someone of the
+opposite sex and colour, in short, that rare and desirable creature
+a cook, imported from another city, and she had missed her train,
+and all we knew was her first name and that she would wear a "brown
+turban." After prowling distraitly round the station (and a large
+station it is) and asking every likely person if her name was
+Amanda, and being frowned upon and suspected as a black slaver, and
+thinking we felt on our neck the heated breath and handcuffs of the
+Travellers' Aid Society, we decided that Amanda must have missed her
+train and concluded to wait for the next. Then it was, to return to
+our thesis, that we had occasion to observe and feel in our own
+person the wretched pangs of one in despair facing the gentle--shall
+we say hesychastic?--peace and benevolent quietness of the man at
+the bulletin board. Bombarded with questions by the impatient and
+anxious crowd, with what pacific good nature he answered our doubts
+and querulities. And yet how irritating was his calmness, his
+deliberation, the very placidity of his mien as he surveyed his
+clacking telautograph and leisurely took out his schoolroom eraser,
+rubbed off an inscription, then polished the board with a cloth,
+then looked for a piece of chalk and wrote in a fine curly hand some
+notation about a train from Cincinnati in which we were not at all
+interested. Ah, here we are at last! Train from Philadelphia!
+Arriving on track Number--; no, wrong again! He only change _5
+minutes late_ to _10 minutes late_. The crowd mutters and fumes. The
+telautograph begins to stutter and we gaze at it feverishly. It
+stops again and our dominie looks at it calmly. He taps it gently
+with his finger. We wonder, is it out of order? Perhaps that train
+is already coming in and he doesn't know it, and Amanda may be
+wandering lost somewhere in the vast vistas of the station looking
+for us. Shall we dash up to the waiting room and have another look?
+But Amanda does not know the station, and there are so many places
+where benches are put, and she might think one of those was the
+waiting room that had been mentioned. And then there is this
+Daylight Saving time mix-up. In a sudden panic we cannot figure out
+whether Philadelphia time is an hour ahead of New York time or an
+hour behind. We told Amanda to take the one o'clock from
+Philadelphia. Well, should she arrive here at two o'clock or at
+four? It being now 5:10 by our time, what are we to do? The
+telautograph clicks. The priestly person slowly and gravely writes
+down that the Philadelphia train is arriving on Track 6. There is a
+mad rush: everyone dashes to the gate. And here, coming up the
+stairs, is a coloured lady whose anxiously speculating eye must be
+the one we seek. In the mutuality of our worry we recognize each
+other at once. We seize her in triumph; in fact, we could have
+embraced her. All our anguish is past. Amanda is ours!
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+THOUGHTS IN THE SUBWAY
+
+
+I
+
+We hear people complain about the subway: its brutal competitive
+struggle, its roaring fury and madness. We think they have not
+sufficiently considered it.
+
+Any experience shared daily and for a long time by a great many
+people comes to have a communal and social importance; it is
+desirable to fill it with meaning and see whether there may not be
+some beauty in it. The task of civilization is not to be always
+looking wistfully back at a Good Time long ago, or always panting
+for a doubtful millennium to come; but to see the significance and
+secret of that which is around us. And so we say, in full
+seriousness, that for one observer at any rate the subway is a great
+school of human study. We will not say that it is an easy school: it
+is no kindergarten; the curriculum is strenuous and wearying, and
+not always conducive to blithe cheer.
+
+But what a tide of humanity, poured to and fro in great tides over
+which the units have little control. What a sharp and troubled
+awareness of our fellow-beings, drawn from study of those thousands
+of faces--the fresh living beauty of the girls, the faces of men
+empty of all but suffering and disillusion, a shabby errand boy
+asleep, goggling with weariness and adenoids--so they go crashing
+through the dark in a patient fellowship of hope and mysterious
+endurance. How can one pass through this quotidian immersion in
+humanity without being, in some small degree, enriched by that
+admiring pity which is the only emotion that can permanently endure
+under the eye of a questioning star?
+
+Why, one wonders, should we cry out at the pangs and scuffles of the
+subway? Do we expect great things to come to pass without
+corresponding suffering? Some day a great poet will be born in the
+subway--spiritually speaking; one great enough to show us the
+terrific and savage beauty of this multitudinous miracle. As one
+watches each of those passengers, riding with some inscrutable
+purpose of his own (or an even more inscrutable lack of purpose)
+toward duty or liberation, he may be touched with anger and contempt
+toward individuals; but he must admit the majesty of the spectacle
+in the mass. One who loves his country for a certain candour and
+quick vigour of spirit will view the scene again and again in the
+hope of spying out some secrets of the national mind and destiny.
+Daily he bathes in America. He has that curious sense of mystical
+meaning in common things that a traveller feels coming home from
+abroad, when he finds even the most casual glimpses strangely
+pregnant with national identity. In the advertisements, despite all
+their absurdities; in voices humorous or sullen; even in the books
+that the girls are reading (for most girls read books in the subway)
+he will try to divine some authentic law of life.
+
+He is but a poor and mean-spirited lover--whether of his city, his
+country, or anything else--who loves her only because he has known
+no other. We are shy of vociferating patriotism because it is callow
+and empty, sprung generally from mere ignorance. The true
+enthusiast, we would like to think, is he who can travel daily some
+dozen or score of miles in the subway, plunged in the warm wedlock
+of the rush hours; and can still gather some queer loyalty to that
+rough, drastic experience. Other than a sense of pity and affection
+toward those strangely sculptured faces, all busy upon the fatal
+tasks of men, it is hard to be precise as to just what he has
+learned. But as the crowd pours from the cars, and shrugs off the
+burden of the journey, you may see them looking upward to console
+themselves with perpendicular loveliness leaping into the clear sky.
+Ah, they are well trained. All are oppressed and shackled by things
+greater than themselves; yet within their own orbits of free
+movement they are masters of the event. They are patient and
+friendly, and endlessly brave.
+
+
+II
+
+The train roared through the subway, that warm typhoon whipping
+light summer dresses in a multitudinous flutter. All down the
+bright crowded aisle of patient humanity I could see their blowing
+colours.
+
+My eyes were touched with Truth: I saw them as they are, beautiful
+and brave.
+
+Is Time never sated with loveliness? How many million such he has
+devoured, and must he take these, too? They are so young, so
+slender, so untutored, such unconscious vessels of amazing life; so
+courageous in their simple finery, so unaware of the Enemy that
+waits for us all. With what strange cruelties will he trouble them,
+their very gayety a temptation to his hand? See them on Broadway at
+the lunch hour, pouring in their vivacious thousands onto the
+pavement. Is there no one who wonders about these merry little
+hostages? Can you look on them without marvelling at their gallant
+mien?
+
+They are aware of their charms, but unconscious of their loveliness.
+Surely they are a new generation of their sex, cool, assured, even
+capable. They are happy, because they do not think too much; they
+are lovely, because they are so perishable, because (despite their
+naïve assumption of certainty) one knows them so delightfully only
+an innocent ornament of this business world of which they are so
+ignorant. They are the cheerful children of Down Town, and Down Town
+looks upon them with the affectionate compassion children merit.
+Their joys, their tragedies, are the emotions of children--all the
+more terrible for that reason.
+
+And so you see them, day after day, blithely and gallantly faring
+onward in this Children's Crusade. Can you see that caravan of life
+without a pang? For many it is tragic to be young and beautiful and a
+woman. Luckily, they do not know it, and they never will. But in
+courage, and curiosity, and loveliness, how they put us all to
+shame. I see them, flashing by in a subway train, golden sphinxes,
+whose riddles (as Mr. Cabell said of Woman) are not worth solving.
+Yet they are all the more appealing for that fact. For surely to be
+a riddle which is not worth solving, and still is cherished as a
+riddle, is the greatest mystery of all. What strange journeys lie
+before them, and how triumphantly they walk the precipices as though
+they were mere meadow paths.
+
+My eyes were touched with Truth, and I saw them as they are,
+beautiful and brave. And sometimes I think that even Time must be
+sated with loveliness; that he will not crumble them or mar their
+gallant childishness; that he will leave them, their bright dresses
+fluttering, as I have seem them in the subway many a summer day.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+DEMPSEY vs. CARPENTIER
+
+
+The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but as
+Frank Adams once remarked, the betting is best that way. The event
+at Boyle's Thirty Acres in Jersey City was the conclusive triumph of
+Reality over Romance, of Prose over Poetry. To almost all the
+newspaper-reading world--except the canny fellows who study these
+matters with care and knowledge--Carpentier had taken on something
+of the lustre and divinity of myth. He was the white Greek god, he
+was Mercury and Apollo. The dope was against him; but there were
+many who felt, obscurely, that in some pregnant way a miracle would
+happen. His limbs were ivory, his eyes were fire; surely the gods
+would intervene! Perhaps they would have but for the definite
+pronouncement of the mystagogue G.B. Shaw. Even the gods could not
+resist the chance of catching Shaw off his base.
+
+We are not a turncoat; we had hoped that Carpentier would win. It
+would have been pleasant if he had, quite like a fairy tale. But we
+must tell things as we see them. Dempsey, in a very difficult
+situation, bore himself as a champion, and (more than that) as a man
+of spirit puzzled and angered by the feeling that has been rumoured
+against him. Carpentier entered the ring smiling, perfectly at ease;
+but there was that same sunken, wistful, faintly weary look about
+his eyes that struck us when we first saw him, at Manhasset, three
+weeks ago. It was the look of a man who has had more put upon him
+than he can rightly bear. But with what a grace and aplomb he stood
+upon that scaffold! Dempsey, on the other hand, was sullen and
+sombre; when they spoke together he seemed embarrassed and kept his
+face averted. As the hands were bandaged and gloves put on, he sat
+with lowered head, his dark poll brooding over his fists, not unlike
+Rodin's Thinker. Carpentier, at the opposite corner, was apparently
+at ease; sat smilingly in his gray and black gown, watching the
+airplanes.
+
+You have read the accounts of the fight to small purpose if you do
+not realize that Carpentier was utterly outclassed--not in skill or
+cunning, but in those qualities where the will has no part, in power
+and reach. From the first clinch, when Dempsey began that series of
+terrible body jabs that broke down the Frenchman's energy and speed,
+the goose was cooked. There was nothing poetic or glamorous about
+those jabs; they were not spectacular, not particularly swift; but
+they were terribly definite. Half a dozen of them altered the scene
+strangely. The smiling face became haggard and troubled.
+
+Carpentier, too, must have been leaving something to the gods, for
+his tactics were wildly reckless. He was the aggressor at the start,
+leading fiercely for Dempsey's jaw, and landing, too, but not
+heavily enough to do damage. Again and again in that first round he
+fell into the fatal embrace in which Dempsey punished him busily,
+with those straight body strokes that slid in methodically, like
+pistons. Georges seemed to have no defence that could slacken those
+blows. After every clinch his strength plainly ebbed and withered.
+Away, he dodged nimbly, airily, easily more dramatic in arts of
+manoeuvre. But Dempsey, tall, sullen, composed, followed him
+steadily. He seemed slow beside that flying white figure, but that
+wheeling amble was deadly sure. He was always on the inner arc,
+Carpentier on the outer; the long, swarthy arms were impenetrable in
+front of his vitals; again and again he followed up, seeking to
+corner his man; Carpentier would fling a shining arm at the dark
+jaw; a clinch would follow in which the two leaned together in that
+curious posture of apparent affection; and they hung upon each
+other's necks--Carpentier, from a distance, looking almost like a
+white girl languishing in the arms of some dark, solicitous lover.
+But Mr. Dempsey was the Fatal Bridegroom, for at each union he would
+rivet in several more of those steam punches.
+
+There was something almost incredible in the scene--so we had been
+drilled in that Million-Dollar Myth, the unscathability of
+Carpentier. Was this Gorgeous Georges, this blood-smeared, wilting,
+hunted figure, flitting desperately from the grim, dark-jowled
+avenger? And then, in the latter part of the second round, Georges
+showed one flash of his true genius. Suddenly he sprang, leaping (so
+it seemed) clear from the canvas, and landed solidly (though not
+killingly) on Dempsey's jaw. There was a flicker of lightning blows,
+and for an instant Dempsey was retreating, defensive, even a little
+jarred. That was the high moment of the fight, and the crowd then
+showed its heart. Ninety thousand people had come there to see
+bloodshed; through several humid hours they had sat in a rising
+temperature, both inward and outward, with cumulating intensity like
+that of a kettle approaching the boil. Dempsey had had a bigger hand
+on entering the ring; but so far it had been too one-sided for much
+roaring. But now, for an instant, there was actual fighting. There
+were some who thought that if Georges could have followed up this
+advantage he still had a chance. We do not think so. Dempsey was not
+greatly shaken. He was too powerful and too hard to reach. They
+clinched and stalled for a moment, and the gong came shortly. But
+Carpentier had shown his tiger streak. Scotty Monteith, manager (so
+we were told) of Johnny Dundee, sat just in front of us in a pink
+skirt, and had been gathering up substantial wagers from the
+ill-starred French journalists near by. Scotty was not in any doubt
+as to the outcome, but even he was moved by Carpentier's gallant
+sally. "No one knew he was a fighter like that," he said.
+
+The rest is but a few words. Carpentier's face had a wild, driven
+look. His hits seemed mere taps beside Dempsey's. In the fourth
+round he went down once, for eight or nine counts, and climbed up
+painfully. The second time he sprawled flat; Dempsey, still with
+that pensive lowered head, walked grimly in a semi-circle, waiting
+to see if that was the end. It was. Greek gods are no match for
+Tarzans in this game.
+
+It was all over in a breathless flash. It was not one lucky blow
+that did it, but a sequence of business-like crushing strokes. We
+shall not soon forget that picture before the gong rang: Carpentier,
+still the White Knight of legend and glory, with his charming upward
+smile and easy unconcern; and Dempsey's dark cropped head, bent and
+glowering over his chest. There was in Dempsey's inscrutable,
+darkling mien a cold, simmering anger, as of a man unfairly hounded,
+he hardly knew why. And probably, we think, unjustly. You will say
+that we import a symbolism into a field where it scarcely thrives.
+But Carpentier's engaging merriment in the eye of oncoming downfall
+seemed to us almost a parable of those who have smiled too
+confidingly upon the dark faces of the gods.
+
+
+      [Illustration]
+
+
+
+A LETTER TO A SEA CAPTAIN
+(To D.W.B.)
+
+
+DEAR CAPTAIN:
+
+You are the most modest of men, but even at the risk of arousing
+your displeasure we have it on our mind to say something about you.
+We shall try not to be offensively personal, for indeed we are
+thinking not merely of yourself but also of the many others of your
+seafaring art who have always been such steadfast servants of the
+public, the greatness of whose service has not always been well
+enough understood. But perhaps it is only fair that the sea captain,
+so unquestionable an autocrat in his own world, should be called
+upon to submit to that purging and erratic discipline which is so
+notable a feature of our American life--publicity!
+
+It is not enough understood, we repeat, how valuable and charming
+the sea captain is as an agent and private ambassador of
+international friendship. Perhaps we do not know you until we have
+seen you at sea (may the opportunity serve anon!). We have only
+known you with your majesty laid aside, your severity relaxed. But
+who else so completely and humorously understands both sides of the
+water, and in his regular movements from side to side acts so shrewd
+a commentator on Anglo-American affairs? Who takes more keen delight
+in our American ways, in the beauty of this New York of which we are
+so proud, who has done so much to endear each nation to the other?
+Yours, true to your blood (for you are _Scot Scotorum_), is the
+humorist's way: how many passengers you have warmed and tickled with
+your genial chaff, hiding constant kindness under a jocose word,
+perhaps teasing us Americans on our curious conduct of knives and
+forks, or (for a change) taking the cisatlantic side of the jape,
+esteeming no less highly a sound poke at British foibles.
+
+All this is your personal gift: it is no necessary part of the
+master's equipment to be so gracefully conversable. Of the graver
+side of the sea captain's life, though you say little, we see it
+unconsciously written in your bearing. Some of us, who know just a
+little about it, can guess something of its burdens, its vigils, and
+its courages. There is something significant in the obscure instinct
+that some of your friends have to seize what opportunity they can of
+seeing you in your own quarters when you are in port. For though a
+ship in dock is a ship fettered and broken of much of her life and
+meaning, yet in the captain's cabin the landsman feels something of
+that fine, faithful, and rigorous way of life. It is a hard life, he
+knows; a life of stringent seriousness, of heavy responsibilities:
+and yet it is a life for which we are fool enough to speak the
+fool's word of envy. It is a life spared the million frittering
+interruptions and cheerful distractions that devil the journalist;
+it is a life cut down to the essentials of discipline, simplicity,
+and service; a life where you must, at necessity, be not merely
+navigator but magistrate, employer, and priest. Birth, death, and
+all the troubles that lie between, fall under your sway, and must
+find you unperturbed. But, when you go out of that snug cabin for
+your turn of duty, at any rate you have the dark happiness of
+knowing that you go to a struggle worthy your powers, the struggle
+with that old, immortal, unconquerable, and yet daily conquered
+enemy, the Sea.
+
+And so you go and come, you go and come, and we learn to count on
+your regular appearance every four weeks as we would on any stated
+gesture of the zodiac. You come eager to pick up the threads of what
+has been happening in this our town, what books people are talking
+about, what is the latest jape, and what (your tastes being so
+catholic!) "Percy and Ferdie" are up to. And you, in turn, bring
+news of what they are saying in Sauchiehall Street or Fleet Street,
+and what books are making a stir on the other side. You take copies
+of American books that catch your fancy and pass them on to British
+reviewers, always at your quixotic task of trying to make each side
+appreciate the other's humours. For, though we promised not to give
+you away too personally, you are not only the sea captain but the
+man of letters, too, eminent in that field in your own right.
+
+There must be some valid reason why so many good writers, and
+several who have some claim on the word "great," have been bred of
+the sea. Great writing comes from great stress of mind--which even a
+journalist may suffer--but it also requires strictness of seclusion
+and isolation. Surely, on the small and decently regimented island
+of a ship a man's mind must turn inward. Surrounded by all that
+barren beauty of sky and sea, so lovely, and yet so meaningless to
+the mind, the doomed business of humanity must seem all the more
+precious and deserving of tenderness. Perhaps that is what old
+George Herbert meant when he said, _He that will learn to pray, let
+him go to sea_.
+
+THE END
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_This and the following are advertisements of Mr. Morley's books._
+
+
+A modern humorist with the tang of an Elizabethan
+
+CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
+
+Once upon a time Christopher Morley was coerced, against the
+objections of a well-nigh blushing modesty, to dictate some notes
+which we may go so far as to call autobiographical. In part they
+were:
+
+"Born at Haverford, Pa., in 1890; father, professor of mathematics
+and a poet; mother a musician, poet, and fine cook. I was
+handicapped by intellectual society and good nourishment. I am and
+always have been too well fed. Great literature proceeds from an
+empty stomach. My proudest achievement is having been asked by a
+college president to give a course of lectures on Chaucer.
+
+"When I was graduated from Haverford in 1910, a benevolent posse of
+college presidents in Maryland sent me to New College, Oxford, as a
+Rhodes scholar. At Oxford I learned to drink shandygaff. When I came
+home from England in 1913 I started to work for Doubleday, Page &
+Company at Garden City. I learned to read Conrad, and started my
+favorite hobby, which is getting letters from William McFee. By the
+way, my favorite amusement is hanging around Leary's second-hand
+book store in Philadelphia. My dearest dream is to own some kind of
+a boat, write one good novel and about thirty plays which would each
+run a year on Broadway. I have written book reviews, editorials,
+dramatic notices, worked as a reporter, a librarian, in a bookstore,
+and have given lectures." Mr. Morley should have added that he is
+now conductor of "The Bowling Green" on the editorial page of the
+New York _Evening Post_.
+
+
+PLUM PUDDING
+
+By CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
+
+"_And merrily embellished by Walter Jack Duncan_"
+
+Thus Mr. Morley entitles his new volume, in which he has occupied
+himself with books in particular, but also with divers other
+ingredients such as city and suburban incidents, women, dogs,
+children, tadpoles, and so on.
+
+_Plum Pudding, $1.75_
+
+
+
+THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP
+
+We have just found an advertisement for "The Haunted Bookshop" which
+was never released, though it was written before the book was
+published. Can you guess the writer of it? We're not at liberty to
+tell, for he would never forgive our mentioning his name.
+
+                    "THIS SHOP IS HAUNTED!"
+
+     Such was the sign that met the eyes of those who entered
+     _Parnassus at Home_, a very unusual bookshop on Gissing Street,
+     Brooklyn. Roger Mifflin, the eccentric booklover who owned the
+     shop, only meant that his shop was haunted by the great spirits
+     of literature, but there were more substantial ghosts about, as
+     the story tells. Read the curious adventures that befell after
+     Titania Chapman came to learn the book business in the mellow
+     atmosphere of the second-hand bookshop of this novel. There was
+     mystery connected with the elusive copy of Carlyle's _Oliver
+     Cromwell_, which kept on disappearing from Roger's shelves.
+     Some readers may remember that Roger Mifflin was the hero of
+     Mr. Morley's first novel, _Parnassus on Wheels_, though this is
+     in no sense a sequel, but an independent story.
+
+_The Haunted Bookshop, $1.75_
+
+
+
+SHANDYGAFF
+
+This is the book at the beginning of which its author has placed
+this bit of explanation:
+
+     _SHANDYGAFF_: a very refreshing drink, being a mixture of
+     bitter ale or beer and ginger-beer, commonly drunk by the lower
+     classes of England, and by strolling tinkers, low church
+     parsons, newspaper men, journalists, and prizefighters....
+                              JOHN MISTLETOE:
+                     _Dictionary of Deplorable Facts_
+
+Published in the war period, "Shandygaff" brought this humorous
+letter from J. Edgar Park, of Massachusetts, Presbyterian pastor and
+author of "The Disadvantages of Being Good":
+
+"This book of Morley's is absolutely useless--mere rot. It has
+already cost me not only its price but also two candles for an
+all-night séance and an entire degeneration of my most sad and sober
+resolutions. Money I needed for shoes, solemnity I needed for my
+reputation--all have gone to the winds in this nightmare of love,
+laughter, boyishness, and tobacco-smoke!"
+
+_Shandygaff, $1.75_
+
+
+
+PIPEFULS
+
+"These sketches gave me pain to write; they will give the judicious
+patron pain to read; therefore we are quits. I think, as I look over
+their slattern paragraphs, of that most tragic hour--it falls about
+4 P.M. in the office of an evening newspaper--when the unhappy
+compiler tries to round up the broodings of the day and still get
+home in time for supper."
+                                                 _The Author_
+
+"Envelops in clouds of fragrant English many quaint ideas about
+life, living, and literature ... A belated Elizabethan who has
+strayed into the twentieth century! These piping little essays are
+mellow and leisurely!"--_The Sun_, New York
+
+_Pipefuls, $1.75_
+
+
+
+KATHLEEN--_a story_
+
+"Kathleen" is about an Oxford undergraduate prank. Members of a
+literary club, _The Scorpions_, agree to write a serial story on
+shares. They invent a tale around certain names in an accidentally
+found letter signed "Kathleen." Their romantic fervor soon takes
+them off together in search of the real author of the letter. One
+suspects that Mr. Morley, as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, might have
+been up to just such pranks. Anyway, consider this dedication: "TO
+THE REAL KATHLEEN--_With Apologies_." His comedy is as interesting
+as his essays, its humor pointed by the rapid flow of action.
+
+_Kathleen, $1.25_
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLUM PUDDING***
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