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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Genial Idiot, by John Kendrick Bangs
+
+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: The Genial Idiot
+       His Views and Reviews
+
+Author: John Kendrick Bangs
+
+Release Date: February 17, 2011 [EBook #35302]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GENIAL IDIOT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Beginners Projects and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
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+
+
+
+
+  THE GENIAL IDIOT
+  HIS VIEWS AND REVIEWS
+
+  BY
+
+  JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
+
+  HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+  NEW YORK AND LONDON
+  MCMVIII
+
+
+
+
+  BOOKS BY
+  JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
+
+    THE GENIAL IDIOT. 16mo                        $1.25
+
+    THREE WEEKS IN POLITICS. 32mo                   .50
+
+    COFFEE AND REPARTEE, AND THE IDIOT.
+      Illustrated. (In One Vol.) 16mo              1.25
+
+    COFFEE AND REPARTEE. 32mo                       .50
+
+    THE WATER GHOST. Illustrated. 16mo             1.25
+
+    MR. BONAPARTE OF CORSICA. Ill'd. 16mo          1.25
+
+    A REBELLIOUS HEROINE. Illustrated. 16mo        1.25
+
+    HOUSE-BOAT ON THE STYX. Ill'd. 16mo            1.25
+
+    THE BICYCLERS, A DRAMATIC EVENING, THE
+      FATAL MESSAGE, A PROPOSAL UNDER
+      DIFFICULTIES. (In One Vol.) 16mo             1.25
+
+    A PROPOSAL UNDER DIFFICULTIES. 16mo             .50
+
+    PURSUIT OF THE HOUSE-BOAT. Ill'd. 16mo         1.25
+
+    PASTE JEWELS. Illustrated. 16mo                1.00
+
+    GHOSTS I HAVE MET. Illustrated. 16mo           1.25
+
+    PEEPS AT PEOPLE. Illustrated. 16mo             1.25
+
+    THE DREAMERS. Illustrated. 16mo                1.25
+
+    ENCHANTED TYPE-WRITER. Ill'd. 16mo             1.25
+
+    BOOMING OF ACRE HILL. Illustrated. 16mo        1.25
+
+    COBWEBS FROM A LIBRARY CORNER. 16mo             .50
+
+    THE IDIOT AT HOME. Illustrated. 16mo           1.25
+
+    OVER THE PLUM-PUDDING. Post 8vo, net           1.15
+
+    BIKEY THE SKICYCLE. Illustrated. Post 8vo      1.50
+
+    THE WORSTED MAN. Illustrated. 32mo              .50
+
+    MRS. RAFFLES. Illustrated. 16mo                1.25
+
+    R. HOLMES & CO. Illustrated. Post 8vo          1.25
+
+    OLYMPIAN NIGHTS. Illustrated. 16mo             1.25
+
+    INVENTIONS OF THE IDIOT. 16mo                  1.25
+
+  HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, N. Y.
+
+
+
+
+  Copyright, 1908, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
+
+  _All rights reserved._
+  Published October, 1908.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    CHAP.                                          PAGE
+
+        I. HE DISCUSSES MAXIMS AND PROVERBS           3
+
+       II. HE DISCUSSES THE IDEAL HUSBAND            14
+
+      III. THE IDIOT'S VALENTINE                     27
+
+       IV. HE DISCUSSES FINANCE                      39
+
+        V. HE SUGGESTS A COMIC OPERA                 52
+
+       VI. HE DISCUSSES FAME                         64
+
+      VII. ON THE DECADENCE OF APRIL-FOOL'S-DAY      77
+
+     VIII. SPRING AND ITS POETRY                     88
+
+       IX. ON FLAT-HUNTING                          100
+
+        X. THE HOUSEMAID'S UNION                    112
+
+       XI. THE GENTLE ART OF BOOSTING               123
+
+      XII. HE MAKES A SUGGESTION TO THE POET        135
+
+     XIII. HE DISCUSSES THE MUSIC CURE              147
+
+      XIV. HE DEFENDS CAMPAIGN METHODS              159
+
+       XV. ON SHORT COURSES AT COLLEGE              170
+
+      XVI. THE HORSE-SHOW                           182
+
+     XVII. SUGGESTION TO CHRISTMAS SHOPPERS         194
+
+    XVIII. FOR A HAPPY CHRISTMAS                    205
+
+
+
+
+THE GENIAL IDIOT
+
+I
+
+HE DISCUSSES MAXIMS AND PROVERBS
+
+
+"Good!" cried the Idiot, from behind the voluminous folds of the
+magazine section of his Sunday newspaper. "Here's a man after my own
+heart. Professor Duff, of Glasgow University, has come out with a public
+statement that the maxims and proverbs of our forefathers are largely
+hocus-pocus and buncombe. I've always maintained that myself from the
+moment I had my first copy-book lesson in which I had to scrawl the
+line, 'It's a long lane that has no turning,' twenty-four times. And
+then that other absurd statement, 'A stitch in the side is worth two in
+the hand'--or something like it--I forget just how it goes--what
+Tommy-rot that is."
+
+"Well, I don't know about that, Mr. Idiot," said Mr. Whitechoker,
+tapping his fingers together reflectively. "Certain great moral
+principles are instilled into the minds of the young by the old proverbs
+and maxims that remain with them forever, and become a potent influence
+in the formation of character."
+
+"I should like to agree with you, but I can't," said the Idiot. "I don't
+believe anything that is noble in the way of character was ever fostered
+by such a statement as that it's a long lane that has no turning. In the
+first place, it isn't necessarily true. I know a lane on my
+grandfather's farm that led from the hen-coop to the barn. There wasn't
+a turn nor a twist in it, and I know by actual measurement that it
+wasn't sixty feet long. You've got just as much right to say to a boy
+that it's a long nose that has no twisting, or a long leg that has no
+pulling, or a long courtship that has no kissing. There's infinitely
+more truth in those last two than in the original model. The leg that's
+never pulled doesn't go short in a stringent financial market, and a
+courtship without a kiss, even if it lasted only five minutes, would be
+too long for any self-respecting lover."
+
+"I never thought of it in that way," said Mr. Whitechoker. "Perhaps,
+after all, the idea is ill-expressed in the original."
+
+"Perfectly correct," said the Idiot. "But even then, what? Suppose they
+had put the thing right in the beginning and said 'it's a long lane that
+has no ending.' What's the use of putting a thing like that in a
+copy-book? A boy who didn't know that without being told ought to be
+spanked and put to bed. Why not tell him it's a long well that has no
+bottom, or a long dog that has no wagging, or a long railroad that has
+no terminal facilities?"
+
+"Oh, well," interposed the Bibliomaniac, "what's the use of being
+captious? Out of a billion and a half wise saws you pick out one to jump
+on. Because one is weak, all the rest must come down with a crash."
+
+"There are plenty of others, and the way they refute one another is to
+me a constant source of delight," said the Idiot. "There's
+'Procrastination is the thief of time,' for instance. That's a clear
+injunction to youth to get up and hustle, and he starts in with all the
+impulsiveness of youth, and the first thing he knows--bang! he runs slap
+into 'Look before you leap,' or 'Second thoughts are best.' That last is
+what Samuel Johnson would have called a beaut. What superior claims the
+second thought has over the first or the seventy-seventh thought, that
+it should become axiomatic, I vow I can't see. If it's morality you're
+after I am dead against the teachings of that proverb. The second
+thought is the open door to duplicity when it comes to a question of
+morals. You ask a small boy, who has been in swimming when he ought to
+have been at Sunday-school, why his shirt is wet. His first thought is
+naturally to reply along the line of fact and say, 'Why, because it fell
+into the pond.' But second thought comes along with visions of hard
+spanking and a supperless bed in store for him, and suggests the idea
+that 'There was a leak in the Sunday-school roof right over the place
+where I was sitting,' or, 'I sat down on the teacher's glass of water.'
+That's the sort of thing second thought does in the matter of morals.
+
+"I admit, of course, that there are times when second thoughts are
+better than first ones--for instance, if your first thought is to name
+the baby Jimmie and Jimmie turns out to be a girl, it is better to obey
+your second thought and call her Gladys or Samantha--but it is not
+always so, and I object to the nerve of the broad, general statement
+that it _is_ so. Sometimes fifth thoughts are best. In science I guess
+you'll find that the man who thinks the seven hundred and ninety-seventh
+thought along certain lines has got the last and best end of it. And so
+it goes--out of the infinitesimal number of numbers, every mother's son
+of 'em may at the psychological moment have a claim to the supremacy,
+but your self-sufficient old proverb-maker falls back behind the
+impenetrable wall of his own conceit, and announces that because he has
+nothing but second-hand thoughts, therefore the second thought is best,
+and we, like a flock of sheep, follow this leader, and go blatting that
+sentiment down through the ages as if it were proved beyond peradventure
+by the sum total of human experience."
+
+"Well, you needn't get mad about it," said the Lawyer. "I never said
+it--so you can't blame me."
+
+"Still, there are some proverbs," said Mr. Whitechoker, blandly, "that
+we may not so summarily dismiss. Take, for instance, 'You never miss the
+water till the well runs dry.'"
+
+"One of the worst of the lot, Mr. Whitechoker," said the Idiot. "I've
+missed the water lots of times when the well was full as ever. You miss
+the water when the pipes freeze up, don't you? You--or rather I--I
+sometimes miss the water like time at five o'clock in the morning after
+a pleasant evening with some jovial friends, when there's no end of it
+in the well, but not a drop within reach of my fevered hand, and I
+haven't the energy to grope my way down-stairs to the ice-pitcher.
+There's more water in that proverb than tangible assets. From the
+standpoint of veracity that's one of the most immoral proverbs of the
+lot--and if you came to apply it to the business world--oh, Lud! As a
+rule, these days, you never _find_ the water till the well has been
+pumped dry and put in the hands of a receiver for the benefit of the
+bond-holders. Fact is, all these water proverbs are to be regarded with
+suspicion."
+
+"I don't recall any other," said Mr. Whitechoker.
+
+"Well," said the Idiot, "there's one, and it's the nerviest of 'em
+all--'Water never runs up hill.' Ask any man in Wall Street how high the
+water has run up in the last five years and see what he tells you. And
+then, 'You may drive a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink,'
+is another choice specimen of the Waterbury School of Philosophy. I know
+a lot of human horses who have been driven to water lately, and such
+drinkers as they have become! It's really awful. If I knew the name of
+that particular Maximilian who invented those water proverbs I'd do my
+best to have him indicted for doing business without a license."
+
+"It's very unfortunate," said Mr. Whitechoker, "that modern conditions
+should so have upset the wisdom of the ancients."
+
+"It is too bad," said the Idiot. "And I am just as sorry about it as you
+are; but, after all, the wisdom of the ancients, wise and wisdomatic as
+it was, should not be permitted to put at nought all modern thought. Why
+not adapt the wisdom of the ancients to modern conditions? You can't
+begin too soon, for new generations are constantly springing up, and I
+know of no better outlet for reform than in these self-same Spencerian
+proverbs which the poor kids have to copy, copy, copy, until they are
+sick and tired of them. Now, in the writing-lessons, why not adapt your
+means to your ends? Why make a beginner in penmanship write over and
+over again, 'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?'--which it
+isn't, by-the-way, to a man who is a good shot--when you can bear in on
+his mind that 'A dot on the I is worth two on the T'; or, for the
+instruction of your school-teachers, why don't you get up a proverb like
+'It's a long lesson that has no learning'? Or if you are interested in
+having your boy brought up to the strenuous life, why don't you have him
+make sixty copies of the aphorism, 'A punch in the solar is worth six on
+the nose?' You tell your children never to whistle until they are out of
+the woods. Now, where in the name of all that's lovely should a boy
+whistle if not in the woods? That's where birds whistle. That's where
+the wind whistles. If nature whistles anywhere, it is in the woods.
+Woods were made for whistling, and any man who ever sat over a big
+log-fire in camp or in library who has not noticed that the logs
+themselves whistle constantly--well, he is a pachyderm."
+
+"Well, as far as I can reach a conclusion from all that you have said,"
+put in Mr. Whitechoker, "the point seems to be that the proverbs of the
+ancients are not suited to modern conditions, and that you think they
+should be revised."
+
+"Exactly," said the Idiot.
+
+"It's a splendid idea," said Mr. Brief. "But, after all, you've got to
+have something to begin on. Possibly," he added, with a wink at the
+Bibliomaniac, "you have a few concrete examples to show us what can be
+done."
+
+"Certainly," said the Idiot. "Here is a list of them."
+
+And as he rose up to depart he handed Mr. Brief a paper on which he had
+written as follows:
+
+"You never find the water till the stock falls off twenty points."
+
+"A stitch in time saves nothing at all at present tailors' rates."
+
+"You look after the pennies. Somebody else will deposit the pounds."
+
+"It's a long heiress that knows no yearning."
+
+"Second thoughts are always second."
+
+"Procrastination is the theme of gossips."
+
+"Never put off to-day what you can put on day after to-morrow."
+
+"Sufficient unto the day are the obligations of last month."
+
+"One good swat deserves another."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"By Jove!" said Mr. Brief, as he read them off, "you can't go back on
+any of 'em, can you?"
+
+"No," said the Bibliomaniac; "that's the great trouble with the Idiot.
+Even with all his idiocy he is not always a perfect idiot."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+HE DISCUSSES THE IDEAL HUSBAND
+
+
+"Well, I see the Ideal Husband has broken out again," said the Idiot,
+after reading a short essay on that interesting but rare individual by
+Gladys Waterbury Shrivelton of the Woman's Page of the Squehawkett
+_Gazoo_. "I'd hoped they had him locked up for good, he's been so little
+in evidence of late years."
+
+"Why should you wish so estimable an individual to be locked up?"
+demanded Mr. Pedagog, who, somehow or other, seemed to take the Idiot's
+suggestion as personal.
+
+"To keep his idealness from being shattered," said the Idiot. "Nothing
+against the gentleman himself, I can assure you. It would be a pity, I
+think, once you have really found an Ideal Husband, to subject him to
+the coarse influences of the world; to let him go forth into the madding
+crowd and have the sweet idyllic bloom rubbed off by the attritions of
+the vulgar. I feel about the Ideal Husband just as I do about a
+beautiful peachblow vase which is too fragile, too delicate to be
+brought into contact with the ordinary earthen-ware of society. The
+earthen-ware isn't harmed by bumping into the peachblow, but the
+peachblow will inevitably turn up with a crack here and a nick there and
+a hole somewhere else after such an encounter. If I were a woman and
+suddenly discovered that I had an Ideal Husband, I think at my personal
+sacrifice I'd present him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or immure
+him in some other retreat where his perfection would remain forever
+secure--say, up among the Egyptian mummies of the British Museum. We
+cannot be too careful, Mr. Pedagog, of these rarely beautiful things
+that are now and again vouchsafed to us."
+
+"What is an Ideal Husband, anyhow?" asked Mr. Brief. "Has the recipe
+for such an individual at last been discovered?"
+
+"Yes," put in Mrs. Pedagog, before the Idiot had a chance to reply, and
+here the dear old landlady fixed her eyes firmly and affectionately upon
+her spouse, the school-master. "I can tell you the recipe for the Ideal
+Husband. Years, sixty-three--"
+
+"Sixty-two, my dear," smiled Mr. Pedagog, "and--er--a fraction--verging
+on sixty-three."
+
+"Years, verging on sixty-three," said Mrs. Pedagog, accepting the
+correction. "Character developed by time and made secure. Eyes, blue;
+disposition when vexed, vexatious; disposition when pleased, happy;
+irritable from just cause; considerate always; calm exterior, heart of
+gold; prompt in anger and quick in forgiveness; and only one old woman
+in the world for him."
+
+"A trifle bald-headed, but a true friend when needed, eh?" said the
+Idiot.
+
+"I try to be," said Mr. Pedagog, pleasantly complacent.
+
+"Well, you succeed in both," said the Idiot.
+
+"For your trifling baldness is evident when you remove your hat, which,
+like a true gentleman, you never fail to do at the breakfast-table, and,
+after a fifteen years' experience with you, I for one can say that I
+have found you always the true friend when I needed you--I never told
+how, without my solicitation and entirely upon your own initiative, you
+once loaned me the money to pay Mrs. Pedagog's bill over which she was
+becoming anxious."
+
+"John," cried Mrs. Pedagog, severely, "did you ever do that?"
+
+"Well, my dear--er--only once, you know, and you were so relieved--"
+began Mr. Pedagog.
+
+"You should have lent the money to me, John," said Mrs. Pedagog, "and
+then I should not have been compelled to dun the Idiot."
+
+"I know, my dear, but you see I knew the Idiot would pay me back, and
+perhaps--well, only perhaps, my love--you might not have thought of it,"
+explained the school-master, with a slight show of embarrassment.
+
+"The Ideal Husband is ever truthful, too," said the landlady, with a
+smile as broad as any.
+
+"Well, it's too bad, I think," said the Lawyer, "that a man has to be
+verging on sixty-three to be an Ideal Husband. I'm only forty-four, and
+I should hate to think that if I should happen to get married within the
+next two or three years my wife would have to wait at least fifteen
+years before she could find me all that I ought to be. Moreover, I have
+been told that I have black eyes."
+
+"With the unerring precision of a trained legal mind," said the Idiot,
+"you have unwittingly put your finger on the crux of the whole matter,
+Mr. Brief. Mrs. Pedagog has been describing _her_ Ideal Husband, and I
+am delighted to know that what I have always suspected to be the case is
+in fact the truth: that _her_ husband in her eyes is an ideal one.
+That's the way it ought to be, and that is why we have always found her
+the sweetest of landladies, but because Mrs. Pedagog prefers Mr. Pedagog
+in this race for supremacy in the domain of a woman's heart is no
+reason why you who are only bald-headed in your temper, like most of us,
+should not prove to be equally the ideal of some other woman--in fact,
+of several others. Women are not all alike. As a matter of fact, a
+gentleman named Balzac, who was the Marie Corelli of his age in France,
+once committed himself to the inference that no two women ever were
+alike, so that, if you grant the truth of old Balzac's inference, the
+Ideal Husband will probably vary to the extent of the latest count of
+the number of women in the world. So why give up hope because you are
+only forty-nine?"
+
+"Forty-four," corrected the Lawyer.
+
+"Pardon me--forty-four," said the Idiot. "When you are in the roaring
+forties, five or six years more or less do not really count. Lots of men
+who are really only forty-two behave like sixty, and I know one old
+duffer of forty-nine who has the manners of eighteen. The age question
+does not really count."
+
+"No--you are proof of that," said the Bibliomaniac. "You have been
+twenty-four years old for the last fifteen years."
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot. "You are one of the few people in
+the world who really understand me. I have tried to be twenty-four for
+the past fifteen years, and if I have succeeded, so much the better for
+me. It's a beautiful age. You feel that you know so much when you're
+twenty-four. If it should turn out to be the answer to 'How old is Ann?'
+the lady should be congratulated. But, as a matter of fact, you can be
+an Ideal Husband at any old age."
+
+"Humph! At seven, for instance?" drawled Mr. Brief.
+
+"Seven is not any old age," retorted the Idiot. "It is a very certain
+old youth. Nor does it depend upon the color of the eyes, so long as
+they are neither green nor red. Nobody could ever make an Ideal Husband
+out of a green-eyed man, or a chap given to the red eye, either--"
+
+"It all depends upon the kind of a man you are, eh?" said the
+Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Not a bit of it," said the Idiot. "It depends on the kind of wife
+you've got, and that's why I say that the Ideal Husband varies to the
+extent of the latest count of the women in the world. Take the case of
+Mr. Pedagog here. Mrs. Pedagog accuses him of being an Ideal Husband,
+and he, without any attempt at evasion, acknowledges the corn, like the
+honorable gentleman he is. But can you imagine Mr. Pedagog being an
+Ideal Husband to some lady in the Four Hundred, with a taste for grand
+opera that strikes only on the box; with a love for Paris gowns that are
+worth a fortune; with the midnight supper and cotillion after habit
+firmly intrenched in her character; with an ambition to shine all summer
+at Newport, all autumn at Lenox, all winter at New York, with a dash to
+England and France in the merry, merry springtime? Do you suppose our
+friend John Pedagog here would be in it with Tommie Goldilocks Van
+Varick as the Ideal Husband of such a woman? Not on your life. Well,
+then, take Tommie Goldilocks Van Varick, who'd be the Ideal Spouse of
+this brilliant social light Mrs. Van Varick. How would he suit Mrs.
+Pedagog, rising at eleven-thirty every day and yelling like mad for the
+little blue bottle which clears the head from the left-over cobwebs of
+yesterday; eating his egg and drinking his coffee with a furrow in his
+brow almost as deep as the pallor of his cheek, and now and then making
+a most awful grimace because the interior of his mouth feels like a
+bargain day at the fur-counter of a department store; spending his
+afternoon sitting in the window of the Hunky Dory Club ogling the
+passers-by and making bets on such important questions as whether more
+hansoms pass up the Avenue than down, or whether the proportion of
+red-haired girls to white horses is as great between three and four
+P.M. as between five and six--"
+
+"I don't see how a woman could stand a man like that," said Mrs.
+Pedagog. "Indeed, I don't see where his ideal qualities come in, anyhow,
+Mr. Idiot. I think you are wrong in putting him among the Ideal Husbands
+even for Mrs. Van Varick."
+
+"No, I am not wrong, for he is indeed the very essence of her ideal
+because he doesn't make her stand him," said the Idiot. "He never
+bothers Mrs. Van Varick at all. On the first of every month he sends her
+a check for a good round sum with which she can pay her bills. He
+presents her with a town house and a country house, and a Limousine car,
+and all the furs she can possibly want; provides her with an opera-box,
+and never fails, when he himself goes to the opera, to call upon her and
+pay his respects like a gentleman. If she sustains heavy losses at
+bridge, he makes them good, and when she gives a dinner to her set, or
+to some distinguished social lion from other zoos, Van Varick is always
+on hand to do the honors of his house, and what is supposed to be his
+table. He and Mrs. Van Varick are on the most excellent terms; in fact,
+he treats her with more respect than he does any other woman he knows,
+never even suggesting the idea of a flirtation with her. In other words,
+he does not interfere with her in any way, which is the only kind of
+man in the world she could be happy with."
+
+"It's perfectly awful!" cried Mrs. Pedagog. "If they never see each
+other, what on earth did they ever get married for?"
+
+"Protection," said the Idiot. "And it is perfectly splendid in its
+results. Mrs. Van Varick, being married to so considerate an absentee,
+is able to go about very much as she pleases backed with the influence
+and affluence of the Van Varick name. This as plain little Miss Floyd
+Poselthwaite she was unable to do. She has now an assured position, and
+is protected against the chance of marrying a man who, unlike Van
+Varick, would growl at her expenditures, object to her friends, and
+insist upon coming home to dinner every night, and occasionally turn up
+at breakfast."
+
+"Sweet life," said the Bibliomaniac. "And what does the Willieboy
+husband get out of it?"
+
+"Pride, protection, and freedom," said the Idiot. "He's as proud as
+Punch when he sees Mrs. Van V. swelling about town with her name kept
+as standing matter in every society column in the country. His freedom
+he enjoys, just as she enjoys hers. If he doesn't turn up for six weeks
+she never asks any questions, and so Van Varick can live on easy terms
+with the truth. If he sits up all night over a game of cards, there's
+nobody to chide him for doing so, and--"
+
+"But where does his protection come in? That's what I can't see," said
+the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"It's as plain as a pike-staff," said the Idiot. "With Mrs. Van Varick
+on the _tapis_, Tommie is safe from designing ladies who might marry him
+for his money."
+
+"Well, he's a mighty poor ideal!" cried Mr. Pedagog.
+
+"He certainly would not do for Mrs. Pedagog," said the Idiot. "But you
+would yourself be no better for Mrs. Van Varick. The red Indian makes an
+Ideal Husband for the squaw, but he'd never suit a daughter of the
+British nobility any more than the Duke of Lacklands would make a good
+husband for dusky little Minnehaha. So I say what's the use of
+discussing the matter any further with the purpose of arbitrarily
+settling on what it is that constitutes an Ideal Husband? We may all
+hope to be considered such if we only find the girl that likes our
+particular kind."
+
+"Then," said Mr. Brief, with a smile, "your advice to me is not to
+despair, eh?"
+
+"That's it," said the Idiot. "I wouldn't give up, if I were you. There's
+no telling when some one will come along to whom you appear to be the
+perfect creature."
+
+"Good!" cried Mr. Brief. "You are mighty kind. I don't suppose you can
+give me a hint as to how soon I may expect to meet the lady?"
+
+"Well--no, I can't," said the Idiot. "I don't believe even Edison could
+tell you about when to look for arrivals from Mars."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE IDIOT'S VALENTINE
+
+
+"Well, old man," said the Poet, as the Idiot entered the breakfast-room
+on the morning of Valentine's day, "how did old St. Valentine treat you?
+Any results worth speaking of?"
+
+"Oh, the usual lay-out," returned the Idiot, languidly. "Nine hundred
+and forty-two passionate declarations of undying affection from unknown
+lady friends in all parts of the civilized world; one thousand three
+hundred and twenty-four highly colored but somewhat insulting
+intimations that I had better go 'way back and sit down from hitherto
+unsuspected gentlemen friends scattered from Maine to California; one
+small can of salt marked 'St. Valentine to the Idiot,' with sundry
+allusions to the proper medical treatment of the latter's freshness, and
+a small box containing a rubber bottle-stopper labelled 'Cork up and
+bust.' I can't complain."
+
+"Well, you did come in for your share of it, didn't you?" said Mr.
+Brief.
+
+"Yes," said the Idiot, "I think I got all that was coming to me, and I
+wouldn't have minded it if I hadn't had to pay three dollars over-due
+postage on 'em. I don't bother much if some anonymous chap off in the
+wilds of Kalikajoo takes the trouble to send me a funny picture of a
+monkey grinding a hand-organ with 'the loving regards of your brother,'
+or if somebody else who is afraid of becoming too fond of me sends me a
+horse-chestnut with a line to the effect that here is one I haven't
+printed, I don't feel like getting mad; but when I have to pay the
+postage on the plaguey things it strikes me it is rubbing it in a little
+too hard, and if I could find two or three of the senders I'd spend an
+hour or two of my time banging their heads together."
+
+"I got off pretty well," said the Bibliomaniac. "I only got one
+valentine, and though it cast some doubt upon the quality of my love for
+books, I found it quite amusing. I'll read it to you."
+
+Here the Bibliomaniac took a small paper from his pocket and read the
+following lines:
+
+    "THE HUNGRY BIBLIOMANIAC
+
+    "If only you would cut your books
+       As often as your butter,
+     When people ask you what's inside
+       You wouldn't sit and sputter.
+     The reading that hath made _you_ full,
+       The reading that doth chain you,
+     Is not from books, or woman's looks,
+       But fresh from off the menu."
+
+"What do you think of that?" asked the Bibliomaniac, with a chuckle, as
+he folded up his valentine and stowed it away in his pocket once more.
+
+"I think I can spot the sender," said the Idiot, fixing his eyes
+sternly upon the Poet. "It takes genius to get up a rhyme like 'menu'
+and 'chain you,' and I know of only one man at this board or at any
+other who is equal to the task."
+
+"If you mean me," retorted the Poet, flushing, "you are mightily
+mistaken. I wouldn't waste a rhyme like that on a personal valentine
+when I could tack it on to the end of a sonnet and go out and sell it
+for two-fifty."
+
+"Then you didn't do it, eh?" demanded the Idiot.
+
+"No. Did you?" asked the Poet, with his eyes twinkling.
+
+"Sir," said the Idiot, "if I had done it, would I have had the
+unblushing effrontery to say, as I just now did say, that its author was
+a genius?"
+
+"Well, we're square, anyhow," said the Poet. "You cast me under
+suspicion, to begin with, and it was only fair that I should whack back.
+I got a valentine myself, and I suspect it was from the same hand. It
+runs like this:
+
+    "TO THE MINOR POET
+
+    "You do not pluck the fairy flowers
+       That bloom on high Parnassus,
+     Nor do you gather thistles like
+       Some of those mystic asses
+     Who browse about old Helicon
+       In hope to fill their tummies;
+     Yours rather are those dandy-lines--
+       Gilt-topped chrysanthemummies--
+         Quite pleasant stuff
+         That ends in fluff--
+     Yet when they are beholden
+     Make all the world look golden."
+
+"Well," ejaculated the Idiot, "I don't see what there is in that to make
+you angry. Seems to me there's some very nice compliments in that. For
+instance, your stuff when 'tis
+
+        'beholden
+    Makes all the world look golden,'
+
+according to your anonymous correspondent. If he'd been vicious he might
+have said something like this:
+
+        '--withal so supercilious
+    They make the whole earth bilious.'"
+
+The Poet grinned. "I'm not complaining about it. It's a mighty nice
+little verse, I think, and my only regret is that I do not know who the
+chap was who sent it. I'd like to thank him. I had an idea you might
+help me," he said, with a searching glance.
+
+"I will," said the Idiot. "If the man who sent you that ever reveals his
+identity to me I will tell him you fell all over yourself with joy on
+receiving his tribute of admiration. How did you come out, Doctor?"
+
+"Oh, he remembered me, all right," said the Doctor. "Quite in the same
+vein, too, only he's not so complimentary. He calls me 'The Humane
+Surgeon,' and runs into rhyme after this fashion:
+
+    "O, Doctor Blank's a surgeon bold,
+       A surgeon most humane, sir;
+     And what he does is e'er devoid
+       Of ordinary pain, sir.
+
+    "If he were called to amputate
+       A leg hurt by a bullet,
+     He wouldn't take a knife and cut--
+       But with his bill he'd pull it."
+
+"He must have had some experience with you, Doctor," said the Idiot. "In
+fact, he knows you so well that I am inclined to think that the writer
+of that valentine lives in this house, and it is just possible that the
+culprit is seated at this table at this moment."
+
+"I think it very likely," said the Doctor, dryly. "He's a fresh young
+man, five feet ten inches in height--"
+
+"Pooh--pooh!" said the Idiot. "That's the worst description of Mr. Brief
+I ever heard. Mr. Brief, in the first place, is not a young man, and he
+isn't fresh--"
+
+"I didn't mean Mr. Brief," said the Doctor, significantly.
+
+"Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself to intimate that Mr.
+Whitechoker, a clergyman, would stoop to the writing of such a rhyme as
+that," cried the Idiot. "People nowadays seem to me to be utterly
+lacking in that respect for the cloth to which it is entitled. Mr.
+Brief, if you really wrote that thing you owe it to Mr. Whitechoker to
+own up and thus relieve him of the suspicion the Doctor has so
+unblushingly cast upon him."
+
+"I can prove an alibi," said the Lawyer. "I could no more turn a rhyme
+than I could play 'Parsifal' on a piano with one finger, and I wouldn't
+if I could. I judge, from what I know of the market value of poems these
+days, that that valentine of the Doctor's is worth about two dollars. It
+would take me a century to write it, and inasmuch as my time is worth at
+least five dollars a year it stands to reason that I would not put in
+five hundred dollars' worth of effort on a two-dollar job. So that lets
+me out. By-the-way, I got one of these trifles myself. Want to hear it?"
+
+"I am just crazy to hear it," said the Idiot. "If any man has reduced
+you to poetry, Mr. Brief, he's a great man. With all your many virtues,
+you seem to me to fit into a poetical theme about as snugly as an
+automobile with full power on in a china-shop. By all means let us have
+it."
+
+"This modern St. Valentine of ours has reduced the profession to verse
+with a nicety that elicits my most profound admiration," said Mr. Brief.
+"Just listen to this:
+
+    "The Lawyer is no wooer, yet
+       To sue us is his whim.
+     The Lawyer is no tailor, but
+       We get our suits from him.
+     The longest things in all the world--
+       They are the Lawyer's briefs,
+     And all the joys he gets in life
+       Are other people's griefs.
+     Yet spite of all the Lawyer's faults
+       He's one point rather nice:
+     He'll not remain lest you retain
+       And _never gives_ advice."
+
+"The author of these valentines," said the Doctor, "is to be spotted,
+the way I diagnose the case, by his desire that professional people
+should be constantly giving away their services. He objects to the
+Doctor's bill and he slaps sarcastically at the Lawyer because he
+doesn't _give_ advice. That's why I suspect the Idiot. He's a
+professional Idiot, and yet he gives his idiocy away."
+
+"When did I ever give myself away?" demanded the Idiot. "You are talking
+wildly, Doctor. The idea of your trying to drag me into this thing is
+preposterous. Suppose you show down your valentine and see if it is in
+my handwriting."
+
+"Mine is typewritten," said the Doctor.
+
+"So is mine," said the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Mine, too," said the Poet.
+
+"Same here," said Mr. Brief.
+
+"Well, then," said the Idiot, "I'm willing to write a page in my own
+hand without any attempt to disguise it, and let any handwriting expert
+decide as to whether there is the slightest resemblance between my
+chirography and these typewritten sheets you hold in your hand."
+
+"That's fair enough," said Mr. Whitechoker.
+
+"Besides," persisted the Idiot, "I've received one of the things myself,
+and it'll make your hair curl, if you've got any. Typewritten like the
+rest of 'em. Shall I read it?"
+
+By common consent the Idiot read the following:
+
+    "Idiot, zany, brain of hare,
+     Dolt and noodle past compare,
+     Buncombe, bosh, and verbal slosh,
+     Mind of nothing, full of josh,
+     Madman, donkey, dizzard-pate,
+     U. S. Zero Syndicate,
+     Dull, depressing, lack of wit,
+     Incarnation of the nit.
+     Minus, numskull, drivelling baby,
+     Greenhorn, dunce, and dotard Gaby;
+     All the queer and loony chorus
+     Found in old Roget's _Thesaurus_,
+     Flat and crazy through and through,
+     That, O Idiot--that is you.
+     Let me tell you, sir, in fine,
+     _I_ won't be your Valentine.
+
+"What do you think of that?" asked the Idiot, when he had finished.
+"Wouldn't that jar you?"
+
+"I think it's perfectly horrid," said Mrs. Pedagog. "Mary, pass the
+pancakes to the Idiot. Mr. Idiot, let me hand you a full cup of coffee.
+John, hand the Idiot the syrup. Why, how a thing like that should be
+allowed to go through the mails passes me!"
+
+And the others all agreed that the landlady's indignation was justified,
+because they were fond of the Idiot in spite of his faults. They would
+not see him abused, at any rate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Say, old man," said the Poet, later, "I really thought you sent those
+other valentines until you read yours."
+
+"I thought you would," said the Idiot. "That's the reason why I worked
+up that awful one on myself. That relieves me of all suspicion."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+HE DISCUSSES FINANCE
+
+
+A messenger had just brought a "collect" telegram for the Doctor, and
+that gentleman, after going through all his pockets, and finding nothing
+but a bunch of keys and a prescription-pad, made the natural inquiry:
+
+"Anybody got a quarter?"
+
+"I have," said the Idiot. "One of the rare mintage of 1903, circulated
+for a short time only and warranted good as new."
+
+"I didn't know the 1903 quarter was rare," said the Bibliomaniac, who
+prided himself on being a numismatist of rare ability. "Who told you the
+1903 quarter was rare?"
+
+"My old friend, Experience," said the Idiot.
+
+"What's rare about it?" demanded the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Why--it's what they call ready money, spot cash, the real thing with
+the water squeezed out, selling at par on sight," explained the Idiot.
+"Millions of people never saw one, and under modern conditions it is
+very difficult to amass them in any considerable quantity. What is
+worse, even if you happen to get one of them it is next to impossible to
+hang on to it without unusual effort. If you have a 1903 quarter in your
+pocket, somehow or other the idea that it is in your possession seems to
+communicate itself to others, and every effort is made to lure it away
+from you on some pretext or other."
+
+"Excuse me for interrupting this lecture of yours, Mr. Idiot," said the
+Doctor, amiably, "but would you mind lending me that quarter to pay this
+messenger? I've left my change in my other clothes."
+
+"What did I tell you?" cried the Idiot, triumphantly. "The words are no
+sooner out of my mouth than they are verified. Hardly a minute elapses
+from the time Doctor Capsule learns that I have that quarter before he
+puts in an application for it."
+
+"Well, I renew the application in spite of its rarity," laughed the
+Doctor. "It's even rarer with me than it is with you. Shell out--there's
+a good chap."
+
+"I will if you'll put up a dollar for security," said the Idiot,
+extracting the coin from his pocket, "and give me a demand note at
+thirty days for the quarter."
+
+"I haven't got a dollar," said the Doctor.
+
+"Well, what other collateral have you to offer?" asked the Idiot. "I
+won't take buckwheat-cakes, or muffins, or your share of the sausages,
+mind you. They come under the head of wild-cat securities--here to-day
+and gone to-morrow."
+
+"My, but you're a Shylock!" ejaculated Mr. Brief.
+
+"Not a bit of it," retorted the Idiot. "If I were Shylock I'd be willing
+to take a steak for security, but there's none of the pound of flesh
+business about me. I simply proceed cautiously, like any modern
+financial institution that intends to stay in the ring more than two
+weeks. I'm not one of your fortnightly trust companies with an oak
+table, an unpaid bill for office rent, and a patent reversible
+disappearing president for its assets. I do business on the
+national-bank principle: millions for the rich, but not one cent for the
+man that needs the money."
+
+"I tell you what I'll do," said the Doctor. "If you'll lend me that
+quarter, I won't charge you a cent for my professional services next
+time you need them."
+
+"That's a large offer, but I'm afraid of it," replied the Idiot. "It
+partakes of the nature of a speculation. It's dealing in futures, which
+is not a safe thing for a financial institution to do, I don't care how
+solid it is. You don't catch the Chemistry National Bank lending money
+to anybody on mere prospects, and, what is more, in my case, I'd have to
+get sick to win out. No, Doctor, that proposition does not appeal to
+me."
+
+"Looks hopeless, doesn't it," said the Doctor. "Mary, tell the boy to
+wait while I run up-stairs--"
+
+"I wouldn't do that," said the Idiot, interrupting. "The matter can be
+arranged in another way. I honestly don't like to lend money, believing
+with Polonius that it's a bad thing to do. As the Governor of North
+Carolina said to the Governor of South Carolina, who owed him a hundred
+dollars, 'It's a long time between payments on account,' and that sort
+of thing breaks up families, not to mention friendships. But I will
+match you for it."
+
+"How can I match when I haven't anything to match with?" said the
+Doctor, growing a trifle irritable.
+
+"You can match your credit against my quarter," said the Idiot. "We can
+make it a mental match--a sort of Christian Science gamble. What am I
+thinking of, heads or tails?"
+
+"Heads," said the Doctor.
+
+"By Jove, that's hard luck!" ejaculated the Idiot. "You lose. I was
+thinking of tails."
+
+"Oh, thunder!" cried the Doctor, impatiently.
+
+"Try it again, double or quits. What am I thinking of?" said the Idiot.
+
+"Heads," repeated the Doctor.
+
+"Somebody must have told you. Heads it is. You win. We are quits,
+Doctor," said the Idiot.
+
+"But I am still without the quarter," the physician observed.
+
+"Yep," said the Idiot. "But there's one more way out of it. I'll buy the
+telegram from you--C.O.D."
+
+"Done," said the Doctor, holding out the message. "Here's your goods."
+
+"And there's your money," said the Idiot, tossing the quarter across the
+table. "If you want to buy this message back at any time within the next
+sixty days, Doctor, I'll give you the refusal of it without extra
+charge."
+
+And he folded the paper up and put it away in his pocketbook.
+
+"Do the banks really ask for so much security when they make a loan?"
+asked the Poet.
+
+"Hear him, will you!" cried the Idiot. "There's your lucky man. He's
+never had to face a bank president in order to avoid the cold glances of
+the grocer. No cashier ever asked him how many times he had been
+sentenced to states-prison before he'd discount his note. Do they ask
+security? Security isn't the name for it. They demand a blockade,
+establish a quarantine. They require the would-be debtor to build up a
+wall as high as Chimborazo and as invulnerable as Gibraltar between them
+and the loss before they will part with a dime. Why, they wouldn't
+discount a note to his own order for Andrew Carnegie for seventeen cents
+without his indorsement. Do they ask security!"
+
+"Well, I didn't know," said the Poet. "I never had anything to do with
+banks except as a small depositor in the savings-bank."
+
+"Fortunate man," said the Idiot. "I wish I could say as much. I borrowed
+five hundred dollars once from a bank, and what the deuce do you suppose
+they did?"
+
+"I don't know," said the Poet. "What?"
+
+"They made me pay it back," said the Idiot, mournfully, "although I
+needed it just as much when it was due as when I borrowed it. The
+cashier was a friend of mine, too. But I got even with 'em. I refused to
+borrow another cent from their darned old institution. They lost my
+custom then and there. If it hadn't been for that inconsiderate act I
+should probably have gone on borrowing from them for years, and instead
+of owing them nothing to-day, as I do, I should have been their debtor
+to the tune of two or three thousand dollars."
+
+"Don't you take any stock in what the Idiot tells you in that matter,
+Mr. Poet," said Mr. Brief. "The national banks are perfectly justified
+in protecting themselves as they do. If they didn't demand collateral
+security they'd be put out of business in fifteen minutes by people like
+the Idiot, who consider it a hardship to have to pay up."
+
+"As the lady said when she was asked the name of her favorite author,
+'Pshaw!'" retorted the Idiot. "Likewise fudge--a whole panful of fudges!
+I don't object to paying my debts; fact is, I know of no greater
+pleasure. What I do object to is the kind of collateral the banks
+demand. They always want something a man hasn't got and, in most cases,
+hasn't any chance of getting. If I had a thousand-dollar bond I wouldn't
+need to borrow five hundred dollars, yet when I go to the bank and ask
+for the five hundred the thousand-dollar bond is what they ask for."
+
+"Not always," said Mr. Brief. "If you can get your note indorsed you can
+get the money."
+
+"That's true enough, but fellows like myself can't always find a captain
+of industry who is willing to take a long-shot to do the indorsing,"
+said the Idiot. "Besides, under the indorsement plan you merely ask
+another man to be responsible for your debt, and that isn't fair. The
+whole system is wrong. Every man to his own collateral, I say. Give me
+the bank that will lend money to the chap that needs it on the security
+of his own product. Mr. Whitechoker, say, is short on cash and long on
+sermons. My style of bank would take one barrel of his sermons and salt
+'em down in the safe-deposit company as security for the money he needs.
+The Poet here, finding the summer approaching and not a cent in hand to
+replenish his wardrobe, should be able to secure an advance of two or
+three hundred dollars on his sonnets, rondeaux, and lyrics--one dollar
+for each two-and-a-half-dollar sonnet, and so on. The grocer should be
+able to borrow money on his dried apples, his vinegar pickles, his
+canned asparagus, and other non-perishable assets, such as dog-biscuit,
+Roquefort cheese, and California raisins. The tailor seeking an
+accommodation of five hundred dollars should not be asked how many times
+he has been sentenced to jail for arson, and required to pay in ten
+thousand shares of Steel common, in order to get his grip on the
+currency, but should be approached appropriately and asked how many
+pairs of trousers he is willing to pledge as security for the loan."
+
+"I don't know where I would come in on that proposition," said the
+Doctor. "There are times when we physicians need money, too."
+
+"Pooh!" said the Idiot. "You are not a non-producer. It doesn't take a
+very smart doctor these days to produce patients, does it? You could
+assign your cases to the bank. One little case of hypochondria alone
+ought to be a sufficient guarantee of a steady income for years,
+properly managed. If you haven't learned how to keep your patients in
+such shape that they have to send for you two or three times a week,
+you'd better go back to the medical school and fit yourself for your
+real work in life. You never knew a plumber to be so careless of his
+interests as to clean up a job all at once, and what the plumber is to
+the household, the physician should be to the individual. Same way with
+Mr. Brief. With the machinery of the law in its present shape there is
+absolutely no excuse for a lawyer who settles any case inside of fifteen
+years, by which time it is reasonable to suppose his client will get
+into some new trouble that will keep him going as a paying concern for
+fifteen more. There isn't a field of human endeavor in which a man
+applies himself industriously that does not produce something that
+should be a negotiable security."
+
+"How about burglars?" queried the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"I stand corrected," said the Idiot. "The burglar is an exception, but
+then he is an exception also at the banks. The expert burglar very
+seldom leaves any security for what he gets at the banks, and so he
+isn't affected by the situation one way or the other."
+
+"Oh, well," said Mr. Brief, rising, "it's only a pipe-dream all the way
+through. They might start in on such a proposition, but it would never
+last. When you went in to borrow fifteen dollars, putting up your idiocy
+as collateral, the emptiness of the whole scheme would reveal itself."
+
+"You never can tell," observed the Idiot. "Even under their present
+system the banks have done worse than that."
+
+"Never!" cried the Lawyer.
+
+"Yes, sir," replied the Idiot. "Only the other day I saw in the papers
+that a bank out in Oklahoma had loaned a man ten thousand dollars on
+sixty thousand shares of Hot Air preferred."
+
+"And is that worse than Idiocy?" demanded Mr. Brief.
+
+"Infinitely," said the Idiot. "If a bank lost fifteen dollars on my
+idiocy it would be out ninety-nine hundred and eighty-five dollars less
+than that Oklahoma institution is on its hot-air loan."
+
+"Bosh! What's Hot Air worth on the Exchange to-day?"
+
+"As a selling proposition, zero and commissions off," said the Idiot.
+"Fact is, they've changed its name. It is now known as International
+Nitting."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+HE SUGGESTS A COMIC OPERA
+
+
+"There's a harvest for you," said the Idiot, as he perused a recently
+published criticism of a comic opera. "There have been thirty-nine new
+comic operas produced this year and four of 'em were worth seeing. It is
+very evident that the Gilbert and Sullivan industry hasn't gone to the
+wall whatever slumps other enterprises have suffered from."
+
+"That is a goodly number," said the Poet. "Thirty-nine, eh? I knew there
+was a raft of them, but I had no idea there were as many as that."
+
+"Why don't you go in and do one, Mr. Poet?" suggested the Idiot. "They
+tell me it's as easy as rolling off a log. All you've got to do is to
+forget all your ideas and remember all the old jokes you ever heard,
+slap 'em together around a lot of dances, write two dozen lyrics about
+some Googoo Belle, hire a composer, and there you are. Hanged if I
+haven't thought of writing one myself."
+
+"I fancy it isn't as easy as it looks," observed the Poet. "It requires
+just as much thought to be thoughtless as it does to be thoughtful."
+
+"Nonsense," said the Idiot. "I'd undertake the job cheerfully if some
+manager would make it worth my while, and, what's more, if I ever got
+into the swing of the business I'll bet I could turn out a libretto a
+day for three days of the week for the next two months."
+
+"If I had your confidence I'd try it," laughed the Poet, "but, alas! in
+making me Nature did not design a confidence man."
+
+"Nonsense, again," said the Idiot. "Any man who can get the editors to
+print sonnets to 'Diana's Eyebrow,' and little lyrics of Madison Square,
+Longacre Square, Battery Place, and Boston Common, the way you do, has
+a right to consider himself an adept at bunco. I tell you what I'll do
+with you: I'll swap off my confidence for your lyrical facility, and see
+what I can do. Why can't we collaborate and get up a libretto for next
+season? They tell me there's large money in it."
+
+"There certainly is if you catch on," said the Poet. "Vastly more than
+in any other kind of writing that I know. I don't know but that I would
+like to collaborate with you on something of the sort. What is your
+idea?"
+
+"Mind's a blank on the subject," sighed the Idiot. "That's the reason I
+think I can turn the trick. As I said before, you don't need ideas.
+Better go without 'em. Just sit down and write."
+
+"But you must have some kind of a story," persisted the Poet.
+
+"Not to begin with," said the Idiot. "Just write your choruses and
+songs, slap in your jokes, fasten 'em together, and the thing is done.
+First act, get your hero and heroine into trouble. Second act, get 'em
+out."
+
+"And for the third?" queried the Poet.
+
+"Don't have a third," said the Idiot. "A third is always superfluous;
+but, if you must have it, make up some kind of a vaudeville show and
+stick it in between the first and second."
+
+"Tush!" said the Bibliomaniac. "That would make a gay comic opera."
+
+"Of course it would, Mr. Bib," the Idiot agreed. "And that's what we
+want. If there's anything in this world that I hate more than another it
+is a sombre comic opera. I've been to a lot of 'em, and I give you my
+word of honor that next to a funeral a comic opera that lacks gayety is
+one of the most depressing functions known to modern science. Some of
+'em are enough to make an undertaker weep with jealous rage. I went to
+one of 'em last week called 'The Skylark,' with an old chum of mine who
+is a surgeon. You can imagine what sort of a thing it was when I tell
+you that after the first act he suggested we leave the theatre and come
+back here and have some fun cutting my leg off. He vowed that if he
+ever went to another opera by the same people he'd take ether
+beforehand."
+
+"I shouldn't think that would be necessary," sneered the Bibliomaniac.
+"If it was as bad as all that, why didn't it put you to sleep?"
+
+"It did," said the Idiot. "But the music kept waking us up again. There
+was no escape from it except that of actual physical flight."
+
+"Well, about this collaboration of ours," suggested the Poet. "What do
+you think we should do first?"
+
+"Write an opening chorus, of course," said the Idiot. "What did you
+suppose? A finale? Something like this:
+
+    "If you want to know who we are,
+     Just ask the Evening Star,
+       As he smiles on high
+       In the deep-blue sky,
+     With his tralala-la-la-la.
+     We are maidens sweet
+     With tripping feet,
+     And the googoo eyes
+     Of the skippity-hi's,
+     And the smile of the fair gazoo;
+     And you'll find our names
+     'Mongst the wondrous dames
+     Of the Who's Who-hoo-hoo-hoo."
+
+"Get that sung with spirit by sixty-five ladies with blond wigs and gold
+slippers, otherwise dressed up in the uniform of a troop of Russian
+cavalry, and you've got your venture launched."
+
+"Where can you find people like that?" asked the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"New York's full of 'em," replied the Idiot.
+
+"I don't mean the people to act that sort of thing--but where would you
+lay your scene?" explained the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Oh, any old place in the Pacific Ocean," said the Idiot. "Make your own
+geography--everybody else does. There's a million islands out there of
+one kind or another, and as defenceless as a two-weeks'-old infant. If
+you want a real one, fish it out and fire ahead. If you don't, make one
+up for yourself and call it 'The Isle of Piccolo,' or something of that
+sort. After you've got your chorus going, introduce your villain, who
+should be a man with a deep bass voice and a piratical past. He's the
+chap who rules the roost and is going to marry the heroine to-morrow.
+That will make a bully song:
+
+         "I'm a pirate bold
+          With a heart so cold
+     That it turns the biggest joys to solemn sorrow;
+          And the hero-ine,
+          With her eyes so fine,
+     I am going to--marry--to-morrow.
+
+    CHORUS
+
+    "He is go-ing to-marry--to-morrow
+     The maid with a heart full of sorrow;
+          For her we are sorry
+          For she weds to-morry--
+     She is going to-marry--to-morrow."
+
+"Gee!" added the Idiot, enthusiastically, "can't you almost hear that
+already?"
+
+"I am sorry to say," said Mr. Brief, "that I can. You ought to call your
+heroine Drivelina."
+
+"Splendid!" cried the Idiot. "Drivelina goes. Well, then, on comes
+Drivelina, and this beast of a pirate grabs her by the hand and makes
+love to her as if he thought wooing was a game of snap-the-whip. She
+sings a soprano solo of protest, and the pirate summons his hirelings to
+cast Drivelina into a Donjuan cell, when boom! an American war-ship
+appears on the horizon. The crew, under the leadership of a man with a
+squeaky tenor voice, named Lieutenant Somebody or Other, comes ashore,
+puts Drivelina under the protection of the American flag, while his crew
+sing the following:
+
+    "We are jackies, jackies, jackies,
+     And we smoke the best tobaccys
+       You can find from Zanzibar to Honeyloo.
+     And we fight for Uncle Sammy,
+     Yes, indeed we do, for damme
+       You can bet your life that that's the thing
+           to do,
+                 Doodle-do!
+       You can bet your life that that's the thing to
+           doodle--doodle--doodle--doodle-do."
+
+"Eh! What?" demanded the Idiot.
+
+"Well--what yourself?" asked the Lawyer. "This is your job. What next?"
+
+"Well--the pirate gets lively, tries to assassinate the lieutenant, who
+kills half the natives with his sword, and is about to slay the pirate
+when he discovers that he is his long-lost father," said the Idiot. "The
+heroine then sings a pathetic love-song about her baboon baby, in a
+green light to the accompaniment of a lot of pink satin monkeys banging
+cocoanut-shells together. This drowsy lullaby puts the lieutenant and
+his forces to sleep, and the curtain falls on their capture by the
+pirate and his followers, with the chorus singing:
+
+    "Hooray for the pirate bold,
+     With his pockets full of gold;
+       He's going to marry to-morrow.
+         To-morrow he'll marry,
+         Yes, by the Lord Harry,
+       He's go-ing--to-marry--to-mor-row!
+     And that's a thing to doodle--doodle-doo."
+
+"There," said the Idiot, after a pause. "How is that for a first act?"
+
+"It's about as lucid as most of them," said the Poet, "but, after all,
+you have got a story there, and you said you didn't need one."
+
+"I said you didn't need one to start with," corrected the Idiot. "And
+I've proved it. I didn't have that story in mind when I started. That's
+where the easiness of the thing comes in. Why, I didn't even have to
+think of a name for the heroine. The inspiration for that popped right
+out of Mr. Brief's mouth as smoothly as though the name Drivelina had
+been written on his heart for centuries. Then the title--'The Isle of
+Piccolo'--that's a dandy, and I give you my word of honor, I'd never
+even thought of a title for the opera until that revealed itself like a
+flash from the blue; and as for the coon song, 'My Baboon Baby,' there's
+a chance there for a Zanzibar act that will simply make Richard Wagner
+and Reginald de Koven writhe with jealousy. Can't you imagine the lilt
+of it:
+
+     "My bab-boon--ba-habee,
+      My bab-boon--ba-habee--
+      I love you dee-her-lee
+      Yes dee-hee-hee-er-lee.
+      My baboon--ba-ha-bee,
+      My baboon--ba-ha-bee,
+    My baboon--ba-hay-hay-hay-hay-hay-hay-bee-bee."
+
+"And all those pink satin monkeys bumping their cocoanut-shells together
+in the green moonlight--"
+
+"Well, after the first act, what?" asked the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"The usual intermission," said the Idiot. "You don't have to write that.
+The audience generally knows what to do."
+
+"But your second act?" asked the Poet.
+
+"Oh, come off," said the Idiot, rising. "We were to do this thing in
+collaboration. So far, I've done the whole blooming business. I'll leave
+the second act to you. When you collaborate, Mr. Poet, you've got to do
+a little colabbing on your own account. What did you think you were to
+do--collect the royalties?"
+
+"I'm told," said the Lawyer, "that that is sometimes the hardest thing
+to do in a comic opera."
+
+"Well, I'll be self-sacrificing," said the Idiot, "and bear my full
+share of it."
+
+"It seems to me," said the Bibliomaniac, "that that opera produced in
+the right place might stand a chance of a run."
+
+"Thank you," said the Idiot. "After all, Mr. Bib, you are a man of some
+penetration. How long a run?"
+
+"One consecutive night," said the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Ah--and where?" demanded the Idiot, with a smile.
+
+"At Bloomingdale," answered the Bibliomaniac, severely.
+
+"That's a very good idea," said the Idiot. "When you go back there, Mr.
+Bib, I wish you'd suggest it to the superintendent."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+HE DISCUSSES FAME
+
+
+"Mr. Poet," said the Idiot, the other morning as his friend, the
+Rhymster, took his place beside him at the breakfast-table, "tell me:
+How long have you been writing poetry?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said the Poet, modestly. "I don't know that I've
+ever written any. I've turned out a lot of rhymes in my day, and have
+managed to make a fair living with them, but poetry is a different
+thing. The divine afflatus doesn't come to every one, you know; and I
+doubt if anybody will be able to say whether my work has shown an
+occasional touch of inspiration, or not until I have been dead fifty or
+a hundred years."
+
+"Tut!" exclaimed the Idiot. "That's all nonsense. I am able to say now
+whether or not your work shows the occasional touch of inspiration. It
+does. In fact, it shows more than that. It shows a semi-occasional touch
+of inspiration. How long have you been in the business?"
+
+"Eighteen years," sighed the Poet. "I began when I was twelve with a
+limerick. As I remember the thing, it went like this:
+
+    "There was a young man of Cohasset
+     Turned on the red-hot water-faucet.
+       When asked: 'Is it hot?'
+       He answered, 'Well, thot
+     Is a pretty mild way for to class it.'"
+
+"Good!" said the Idiot. "That wasn't a bad beginning for a boy of
+twelve."
+
+"So my family thought," said the Poet. "My mother sent it to the Under
+the Evening Lamp Department of our town paper, and three weeks later I
+was launched. I've had the _cacoethes scribendi_ ever since--but, alas!
+I got more fame in that brief hour of success than I have ever been able
+to win since. It is a mighty hard job, Mr. Idiot, making a name for
+yourself these days."
+
+"That's the point I was getting at," said the Idiot, "and I wanted to
+have a talk with you on the subject. I've read a lot of your stuff in
+the past eight or ten years, and, in my humble judgment, it is better
+than any of that rhymed nonsense of Henry Wintergreen Boggs, whose name
+appears in the newspapers every day in the year; of Susan Aldershot
+Spinks, whose portrait is almost as common an occurrence in the papers
+as that of Lydia Squinkham; of Circumflex Jones, the eminent
+sweet-singer of Arizona; or of Henderson Hartley MacFadd, the Canadian
+Browning, of whom the world is constantly hearing so much. I have
+wondered if you were going about it in the right way. What is your plan
+for winning fame?"
+
+"Oh, I keep plodding away, doing the best I can all the while," said the
+Poet. "If there's any good in my stuff, or any stuff in my goods, I'll
+get my reward some day."
+
+"Fifty or a hundred years after you're dead, eh?" said the Idiot.
+
+"Yes," smiled the Poet.
+
+"Well--your board-bills won't be high then, anyhow," said the Idiot.
+"That's one satisfaction, I presume. They tell me Homer hasn't eaten a
+thing for over twenty centuries. Seems to me, though, that if I were a
+poet I'd go in for a little fame while I was alive. It's all very nice
+to work the skin off your knuckles, and to twist your gray matter inside
+out until it crocks and fades, so that your great-grandchildren can
+swell around the country sporting a name that has become a household
+word, but I'm blessed if I care for that sort of thing. I don't believe
+in storing up caramels for some twenty-first-century baby that bears my
+name to cut his teeth on, when I have a sweet tooth of my own that is
+pining away for the lack of nourishment; and, if I were you, I'd go in
+for the new method. What if Browning and Tennyson and Longfellow and Poe
+did have to labor for years to win the laurel crown, that's no reason
+why you should do it. You might just as well reason that because your
+forefathers went from one city to another in a stage-coach you should
+eschew railways."
+
+"I quite agree with you," replied the Poet. "But in literature there is
+no royal road to fame that I know of."
+
+"What!" cried the Idiot. "No royal road to fame in letters! Why, where
+have you been living all these years, Mr. Poet? This is the age of the
+Get Fame-Quick Scheme. You can make a reputation in five minutes, if you
+only know the ropes. I know of at least two department stores where you
+can go and buy all you want of it, and in all its grades--from notoriety
+down to the straight goods."
+
+"Fame? At a department store!" put in Mr. Whitechoker, incredulously.
+
+"Certainly," said the Idiot. "Ready-made laurels on demand. Why not?
+It's the easiest thing in the world. Fact is, between you and me, I am
+considering a plan now for the promoting of a corporation to be called
+the United States Fame Company, Limited, the main purpose of which
+shall be to earn money for its stockholders by making its customers
+famous at so much per head. It won't make any difference whether the
+customer wishes to be famous as an actor, a novelist, or a poet, or any
+other old thing. We'll turn the trick for him, and guarantee him more
+than a taste of immortality."
+
+"You may put me down for four dollars' worth of notoriety," said Mr.
+Brief, with a laugh.
+
+"All right," said the Idiot, dryly. "There's a lot in your profession
+who like the cheap sort. But I warn you in advance that if you go in for
+cheap notoriety, you'll find it a pretty hard job getting anybody to
+sell you any eighteen-karat distinction later."
+
+"Well," said the Poet, "I don't know that I can promise to be one of
+your customers until I know something of the quality of the fame you
+have to sell. Tell me of somebody you've made a name for, and I'll take
+the matter into consideration if I like the style of laurel you have
+placed on his brow."
+
+"Lean over here and I'll whisper," said the Idiot. "I don't mind telling
+you, but I don't believe in giving away the secrets of the trade to the
+rest of these gentlemen."
+
+The Poet did as he was bade, and the Idiot whispered a certain great
+name in his ear.
+
+"No!" cried the Poet, incredulously.
+
+"Yes, sir. Fact!" said the Idiot. "He was made famous in a night. The
+first thing we did was to get him to elongate his signature. He was
+writing as--P. K. Dubbins we'll call him, for the sake of the argument.
+Now a name like that couldn't be made great under any circumstances
+whatsoever, so we made him write it out in full: Philander Kenilworth
+Dubbins--regular broadside, you see. P. K. Dubbins was a pop-shot, but
+Philander Kenilworth Dubbins spreads out like a dum-dum bullet or hits
+you like a blast from a Gatling gun. Printed, it takes up a whole line
+of a newspaper column; put at the top of an advertisement, it strikes
+the eye with the convincing force of a circus-poster. You can't help
+seeing it, and it makes, when spoken, a mouthful that is nothing short
+of impressive and sonorous."
+
+"Still," suggested Mr. Brief, with a wink at the Bibliomaniac, "you have
+only multiplied your difficulties by three. If it was hard for your
+friend Dubbins to make one name famous, I can't see that he improves
+matters by trying to make three names famous."
+
+"On the modern business principle that to accomplish anything you must
+work on a large scale," said the Idiot. "Philander Kenilworth Dubbins
+was a better proposition than P. K. Dubbins. The difference between them
+in the mere matter of potentialities is the difference between a corner
+grocery and a department store, or a kite with a tail and one without.
+Well, having created the name, the next thing to do was to exploit it,
+and we advertised Dubbins for all there was in him. We got Mr. William
+Jones Brickbat, the eminent novelist, to say that he had read Dubbins's
+poems, and had not yet died; we got Edward Pinkham, the author of "The
+Man with the Watering-pot," to send us a type-written letter, saying
+that Dubbins was a coming man, and that his latest book, _Howls from
+Helicon_, contained many inspired lines. But, best of all, we prevailed
+upon the manufacturers of celluloid soap to print a testimonial from
+Dubbins himself, saying that there was no other soap like it in the
+market. That brought his name prominently before every magazine-reader
+in the country, because the celluloid-soap people are among the biggest
+advertisers of the day, and everywhere that soap ad went, why, Dubbins's
+testimonial went also, as faithfully as Mary's Little Lamb. After that
+we paid a shirt-making concern down-town to put out a new collar called
+"The Helicon," which they advertised widely with a picture of Dubbins's
+head sticking up out of the middle of it; and, finally, as a crowning
+achievement, we leased Dubbins for a year to a five-cent cigar company,
+who have placarded the fences, barns, and chicken-coops from Maine to
+California with the name of Dubbins--'Flora Dubbins: The Best Five-Cent
+Smoke in the Market.'"
+
+"And thus you made the name of Dubbins famous in letters!" sneered the
+Doctor.
+
+"That was only the preliminary canter," replied the Idiot. "So far,
+Dubbins's greatness was confined to fences, barns, chicken-coops, and
+the advertising columns of the magazines. The next thing was to get him
+written up in the newspapers. That sort of thing can't be bought, but
+you can acquire it by subtlety. Plan one was to make an after-dinner
+speaker out of Dubbins. This was easy. There are a million public
+dinners every year, but a limited supply of good speakers; so, with a
+little effort, we got Dubbins on five toast-cards, hired a humorist out
+in Wisconsin to write five breezy speeches for him, Dubbins committed
+them to memory, and they went off like hot-cakes. Morning papers would
+come out with Dubbins's picture printed in between that of Bishop Potter
+and a member of the cabinet, who also spoke. Copies of Dubbins's
+speeches were handed to the reporters before the dinner began, so that
+it didn't make any difference whether Dubbins spoke them or not--the
+papers had 'em next morning just the same, and inside of six months you
+couldn't read an account of any public banquet without running up
+against the name of Philander Kenilworth Dubbins."
+
+"Well, I declare!" ejaculated Mr. Whitechoker. "What a strange affair!"
+
+"Then we got Dubbins's publishers to take a hand," said the Idiot. "They
+issued a monthly budget of gossip concerning their authors, which
+newspaper editors all over quoted in their interesting items of the day.
+From these paragraphs the public learned that Dubbins wrote between
+4 A.M. and breakfast-time; that Dubbins never penned a line
+without having a tame rabbit, named Romola, sitting alongside of his
+ink-pot; that Dubbins got his ideas for his wonderful poem, 'The Mystery
+of Life,' from hearing a canary inadvertently whistle a bar of
+'Hiawatha;' that Dubbins was the best-dressed author in the State of New
+York, affecting green plaid waistcoats, pink shirts, and red neckties;
+witty things that Dubbins's boy had said about Dubbins's work to
+Dubbins himself were also spread all over the land, until finally
+Philander Kenilworth Dubbins became a select series of household words
+in every town, city, and hamlet in the United States. And there he is
+to-day--a great man, bearing a great name, made for him by his friends.
+_Howls from Helicon_ is full of bad poems, but Dubbins is a son of
+Parnassus just the same. Now we propose to do it for others. For five
+dollars down, Mr. Poet, I'll make you conspicuous; for ten, I'll make
+you notorious; for fifty, I'll make you famous; for a hundred, I'll give
+you immortality."
+
+"Good!" cried the Poet. "Immortality for a hundred dollars is cheap.
+I'll take that."
+
+"You will?" said the Idiot, joyfully. "Put up your money."
+
+"All right," laughed the Poet. "I'll pay--C. O. D."
+
+"Another hundred gone!" moaned the Idiot, as the party broke up and its
+members went their several ways. "I think it's abominable that this
+commercial spirit of the age should have affected even you poets. You
+ought to have gone into business, old man, and left the Muses alone.
+You've got too good a head for poetry."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+ON THE DECADENCE OF APRIL-FOOL'S-DAY
+
+
+"I am sorry to observe," said the Idiot, as he sat down at the
+breakfast-table yesterday morning, "that the good old customs of my
+youthful days are dying out by slow degrees, and the celebrations that
+once filled my childish soul with glee are no longer a part of the
+pleasures of the young. Actually, Mr. Whitechoker, I got through the
+whole day yesterday without sitting on a single pin or smashing my toes
+against a brickbat hid beneath a hat. What on earth can be coming over
+the boys of the land that they no longer avail themselves of the
+privileges of the fool-tide?"
+
+"Fool-tide's good," said Mr. Brief. "Where did you get that?"
+
+"Oh, I pried it out of my gray-matter 'way back in the last century,"
+said the Idiot. "It grew out of a simple little prank I played one April
+1st upon an uncle of mine. I bored a hole in the middle of a pine log
+and filled it with powder. We had it that night on the hearth, and a
+moment later there wasn't any hearth. In talking the matter over later
+with my father and mother and the old gentleman, in order to turn the
+discussion into more genial channels, I asked why, if the Yule-log was
+appropriate for the Yule-tide, the Fool-log wasn't appropriate for the
+Fool-tide."
+
+"I hope you got the answer you deserved," said the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"I did," sighed the Idiot. "I got all there was coming to me--slippers,
+trunk-strap, hair-brush, and plain hand; but it was worth it. All the
+glories of Vesuvius, Etna, Popocatepetl, and Pelee rolled into one could
+never thereafter induce in me anything approaching that joyous sensation
+that I derived from the spectacle of that fool-log and that happy hearth
+soaring up through the chimney together, hand in hand, and taking with
+them such portions of the flues, andirons, and other articles of
+fireplace vertu as cared to join them in their upward flight."
+
+"You must have been a holy terror as a boy," said the Doctor. "I should
+not have cared to live on your block."
+
+"Oh, I wasn't so bad," observed the Idiot. "I never was vicious or
+malicious in what I did. If I poured vitriol into the coffee-pot at
+breakfast my father and mother knew that I didn't do it to give pain to
+anybody. If I hid under my maiden aunt's bed and barked like a bull-dog
+after she had retired, dear old Tabitha knew that it was all done in a
+spirit of pleasantry. When I glued my grandfather's new teeth together
+with stratina, that splendid old man was perfectly aware that I had no
+grudge I was trying thus to repay; and certainly the French teacher at
+school, when he sat down on an iron bear-trap I had set for him in his
+chair, never entertained the notion that there was the slightest
+animosity in my act."
+
+"By jingo!" cried the Bibliomaniac. "I'd have spanked you good and hard
+if I'd been your mother."
+
+"Don't you fret--she did it; that is, she did up to the time I was ten
+years old, and then she had such a shock she gave up corporeal
+punishment altogether," said the Idiot.
+
+"Had a shock, eh?" smiled the Lawyer. "Nearly killed you, I suppose,
+giving you what you deserved?"
+
+"No," said the Idiot. "Spanked me with a hair-brush without having
+removed a couple of Excelsior torpedoes from my pistol-pocket. On the
+second whack I appeared to explode. Poor woman! She didn't know I was
+loaded, and from that time on she was as afraid of me as most other
+women are of a gun."
+
+"I'd have turned you over to your father," said the Bibliomaniac,
+indignantly.
+
+"She did," said the Idiot, sadly. "I never used explosives again. In
+later years I took up the milder April-fool diversions, such as filling
+the mucilage-pot with ink and the ink-pot with mucilage; mixing the
+granulated sugar with white sand; putting powdered brick into the
+red-pepper pot; inserting kerosene-oil into the sweet-oil bottle, and
+little things like that. I squandered a whole dollar one
+April-fool's-day sending telegrams to my uncles and aunts, telling them
+to come and dine with us that night; and they all came, too, although my
+father and mother were dining out that evening, and--oh dear,
+April-fool's-day is not what it used to be. The boys and girls of the
+present generation are little old men and women with no pranks left in
+them. Why, I don't believe that nine out of ten boys, who are about to
+enter college this spring, could rig up a successful tick-tack on a
+window to save their lives; and the joy of carrying a piece of twine
+across the sidewalk from a front-door knob to a lamp-post, hat-high, and
+then sitting back in the seclusion of a convenient area and watching the
+plug-hats of the people go down before it--that is a joy that seems to
+be wholly untasted of the present generation of infantile dignitaries
+that we call the youth of the land. What is the matter with 'em, do you
+suppose?"
+
+"I guess we're getting civilized," said Mr. Brief. "That seems to me to
+be the most likely explanation of this deplorable situation, as you
+appear to think it. For my part, I'm glad if what you say is true. Of
+all rotten things in the world the practical jokes of April-fool's-day
+bear away the palm. There was a time, ten years ago, when I hardly dared
+eat anything on the first of April. I was afraid to find my coffee made
+of ink, my muffin stuffed with cotton, cod-liver oil in my
+salad-dressing, and mayonnaise in my cream-puffs. Such tricks are the
+tricks of barbarians, and I shall rejoice when April 1st as a day of
+special privilege for idiots and savages has been removed from the
+calendar."
+
+"I am afraid," said Mr. Whitechoker, "that I, too, must join the ranks
+of those who rejoice if the old-time customs of the day are now honored
+more in the breach than in the observance. Ever since that unhappy
+Sunday morning some years ago when somebody substituted a breakfast
+bill-of-fare for the card containing the notes for my sermon, I have
+mistrusted the humor of the April-fool joke. Instead of my text, as I
+glanced at what I supposed was my note-card, my eyes fell upon the
+statement that fruit taken from the table would be charged for; instead
+of my firstly, secondly, thirdly, and fourthly, my eyes were confronted
+by Fish, Eggs, Hot Bread, and To Order. And, finally, in place of the
+key-line of my peroration, what should obtrude itself upon my vision but
+that coarse and vulgar legend: Corkage, one dollar. I never found out
+who did it, and, as a Christian man, I hope I never shall, for I should
+much deprecate the spirit of animosity with which I should inevitably
+regard the person who had so offended."
+
+"I'll bet you preached a bully good sermon, allee samee," said the
+Idiot.
+
+"Well," smiled Mr. Whitechoker, "the congregation did seem to think that
+it held more fire than usual; but I can assure you, my young friend, it
+was more the fire of external wrath than of an inward spiritual grace."
+
+"Well," said the Bibliomaniac, "we ought to be thankful the old tricks
+are going out. As Mr. Brief suggests, we are beginning to be
+civilized--"
+
+"I don't think it's civilization," said the Idiot. "I think the kids are
+just discouraged, that's all. They're clever, these youngsters, but when
+it comes to putting up games, they're not in it with their far more foxy
+fathers. What's the use of playing April-fool jokes on your daddy, when
+your daddy is playing April-fool jokes on the public all the year round?
+That's the way they reason. No son of George W. Midas, the financier, is
+going to get any satisfaction out of handing his father a loaded cigar,
+when he knows that the old man is handling that sort of thing every day
+in his business as a promoter of the United States Hot Air Company. What
+fun is there in giving your sister a caramel filled with tabasco-sauce
+when you can watch your father selling eleven dollars' worth of
+Amalgamated Licorice stock to the dear public for forty-seven fifty?
+The gum-drop filled with cotton loses its charm when you contrast it
+with Consolidated Radium containing one part of radium and ninety-nine
+parts of water. Who cares to hide a clay brick under a hat for somebody
+to kick, when there are concerns in palatial offices all over town
+selling gold bricks to a public that doesn't seem to have any kick left
+in it? I tell you it has discouraged the kid to see to what scientific
+heights the April-fool industry has been developed, and as a result he
+has abandoned the field. He knows he can't compete."
+
+"That's all right as an explanation of the youngster whose parent is
+engaged in that sort of business," said the Doctor. "But there are
+others."
+
+"True," said the Idiot. "The others stay out of it out of sheer pity.
+When they are tempted to sew up the legs of their daddy's trousers in
+order to fitly celebrate the day, or to fill his collar-box with collars
+five sizes too small for him, they say, 'No. Let us refrain. The
+governor has had trouble enough with his International Yukon
+Anticipated Brass shares this year. He's had all the fooling he can
+stand. We will give the old gentleman a rest!' Fact is, come to look at
+it, the decadence of April 1st as a day of foolery for the young is no
+mystery, after all. The youngsters are not more civilized than we used
+to be, but they have had the intelligence to perceive the exact truth of
+the situation."
+
+"Which is?" asked Mr. Brief.
+
+"That the ancient art of practical joking has become a business.
+April-fool's-day has been incorporated by the leading financiers of the
+age, and is doing a profitable trade all over the world all the year
+round. Private enterprise is simply unable to compete."
+
+"I am rather surprised, nevertheless," said Mr. Brief, "that you
+yourself have abandoned the field. You are just the sort of person who
+would keep on in that kind of thing, despite the discouragements."
+
+"Oh, I haven't abandoned the field," said the Idiot. "I did play an
+April-fool joke last Friday."
+
+"What was that?" asked Mr. Whitechoker, interested.
+
+"I told Mrs. Pedagog that I would pay my bill to-morrow," replied the
+Idiot, as he rose from the table and left the room.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+SPRING AND ITS POETRY
+
+
+"Well, Mr. Idiot," said Mrs. Pedagog, genially, as the Idiot entered the
+breakfast-room, "what can I do for you this fine spring morning? Will
+you have tea or coffee?"
+
+"I think I'd like a cup of boiled iron, with two lumps of quinine and a
+spoonful of condensed nerve-milk in it," replied the Idiot, wearily.
+"Somehow or other I have managed to mislay my spine this morning.
+Ethereal mildness has taken the place of my backbone."
+
+"Those tired feelings, eh?" said Mr. Brief.
+
+"Yeppy," replied the Idiot. "Regular thing with me. Every year along
+about the middle of April I have to fasten a poker on my back with
+straps, in order to stand up straight; and as for my knees--well, I
+never know where they are in the merry, merry spring-time. I'm quite
+sure that if I didn't wear brass caps on them my legs would bend
+backward. I wonder if this neighborhood is malarious."
+
+"Not in the slightest degree," observed the Doctor. "This is the
+healthiest neighborhood in town. The trouble with you is that you have a
+swampy mind, and it is the miasmatic oozings of your intellect that
+reduce you to the condition of physical flabbiness of which you
+complain. You might swallow the United States Steel Trust, and it
+wouldn't help you a bit, and ten thousand bottles of nerve-milk, or any
+other tonic known to science, would be powerless to reach the seat of
+your disorder. What you need to stiffen you up is a pair of those
+armored trousers the Crusaders used to wear in the days of chivalry, to
+bolster up your legs, and a strait-jacket to keep your back up."
+
+"Thank you, kindly," said the Idiot. "If you'll give me a prescription,
+which I can have made up at your tailor's, I'll have it filled, unless
+you'll add to my ever-increasing obligation to you by lending me your
+own strait-jacket. I promise to keep it straight and to return it the
+moment you feel one of your fits coming on."
+
+The Doctor's response was merely a scornful gesture, and the Idiot went
+on:
+
+"It's always seemed a very queer thing to me that this season of the
+year should be so popular with everybody," he said. "To me it's the
+mushiest of times. Mushy bones; mushy poetry; mush for breakfast, fried,
+stewed, and boiled. The roads are mushy; lovers thaw out and get mushier
+than ever.
+
+    "In the spring the blasts of winter all are stilled in
+         solemn hush.
+     In the spring the young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts
+         of mush.
+     In the spring--"
+
+"You ought to be ashamed of yourself to trifle with so beautiful a
+poem," interrupted the Bibliomaniac, indignantly.
+
+"Who's trifling with a beautiful poem?" demanded the Idiot.
+
+"You are--'Locksley Hall'--and you know it," retorted the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Locksley nothing," said the Idiot. "What I was reciting is not from
+'Locksley Hall' at all. It's a little thing of my own that I wrote six
+years ago called 'Spring Unsprung.' It may not contain much delicate
+sentiment, but it's got more solid information in it of a valuable kind
+than you'll find in ten 'Locksley Halls' or a dozen Etiquette Columns in
+the _Lady's Away From Home Magazine_. It has saved a lot of people from
+pneumonia and other disorders of early spring, I am quite certain, and
+the only person I ever heard criticise it unfavorably was a doctor I
+know who said it spoiled his business."
+
+"I should admire to hear it," said the Poet. "Can't you let us have it?"
+
+"Certainly," replied the Idiot. "It goes on like this:
+
+    "In the spring I'll take you driving, take you driving, Maudy dear,
+     But I beg of you be careful at this season of the year.
+     It is true the birds are singing, singing sweetly all their notes,
+     But you'll later find them wearing canton-flannel 'round their
+         throats.
+     It is true the lark doth warble, 'Spring is here,' with bird-like
+         fire,
+     'All is warmth and all is genial,' but I fear the lark's a liar.
+     All is warmth for fifteen minutes, that is true; but wait awhile,
+     And you'll find that April's weather has not ever changed its
+         style;
+     And beware of April's weather, it is pleasant for a spell,
+     But, like little Johnny's future, you can't always sometimes tell.
+     Often modest little violets, peeping up from out their beds
+     In the balmy morn by night-time have bad colds within their heads;
+     And the buttercup and daisy twinkling gayly on the lawn,
+     Sing by night a different story from their carollings at dawn;
+     And the blossoms of the morning, hailing spring with joyous frenzy,
+     When the twilight falls upon them often droop with influenzy.
+     So, dear Maudy, when we're driving, put your linen duster on,
+     And your lovely Easter bonnet, if you wish to, you may don;
+     But be careful to have with you sundry garments warm and thick:
+     Woollen gloves, a muff, and ear-tabs, from the ice-box get the
+         pick;
+     There's no telling what may happen ere we've driven twenty miles,
+     April flirts with chill December, and is full of other wiles.
+     Bring your parasol, O Maudy--it is good for _tete-a-tetes_;
+     At the same time you would better also bring your hockey skates.
+     There's no telling from the noon-tide, with the sun a-shining
+         bright,
+     Just what kind of winter weather we'll be up against by night."
+
+"Referring to the advice," said Mr. Brief, "that's good. I don't think
+much of the poetry."
+
+"There was a lot more of it," said the Idiot, "but it escapes me at the
+moment. Four lines I do remember, however:
+
+    "Pin no faith to weather prophets--all their prophecies are fakes,
+     Roulette-wheels are plain and simple to the notions April takes.
+     Keep your children in the nursery--never mind it if they pout--
+     And, above all, do not let your furnace take an evening out."
+
+"Well," said the Poet, "if you're going to the poets for advice, I
+presume your rhymes are all right. But I don't think it is the mission
+of the poet to teach people common-sense."
+
+"That's the trouble with the whole tribe of poets," said the Idiot.
+"They think they are licensed to do and say all sorts of things that
+other people can't do and say. In a way I agree with you that a poem
+shouldn't necessarily be a treatise on etiquette or a sequence of health
+hints, but it should avoid misleading its readers. Take that fellow who
+wrote
+
+    "'Sweet primrose time! When thou art here
+       I go by grassy ledges
+     Of long lane-side, and pasture mead,
+       And moss-entangled hedges.'
+
+That's very lovely, and, as far as it goes, it is all right. There's no
+harm in doing what the poet so delicately suggests, but I think there
+should have been other stanzas for the protection of the reader like
+this:
+
+    "But have a care, oh, readers fair,
+       To take your mackintoshes,
+     And on your feet be sure to wear
+       A pair of stanch galoshes.
+
+    "Nor should you fail when seeking out
+       The primrose, golden yeller,
+     To have at hand somewhere about
+       A competent umbrella.
+
+Thousands of people are inspired by lines like the original to go
+gallivanting all over the country in primrose time, to return at dewy
+eve with all the incipient symptoms of pneumonia. Then there's the case
+of Wordsworth. He was one of the loveliest of the Nature poets, but he's
+eternally advising people to go out in the early spring and lie on the
+grass somewhere, listening to cuckoos doing their cooking, watching the
+daffodils at their daily dill, and hearing the crocus cuss; and some
+sentimental reader out in New Jersey thinks that if Wordsworth could do
+that sort of thing, and live to be eighty years old, there's no reason
+why he shouldn't do the same thing. What's the result? He lies on the
+grass for two hours and suffers from rheumatism for the next ten years."
+
+"Tut!" said the Poet. "I am surprised at you. You can't blame Wordsworth
+because some New Jerseyman makes a jackass of himself."
+
+"In a way all writers should be responsible for the effect of what they
+write on their readers," said the Idiot. "When a poet of Wordsworth's
+eminence, directly or indirectly, advises people to go out and lie on
+the grass in early spring, he owes it to his public to caution them that
+in some localities it is not a good thing to do. A rhymed foot-note--
+
+    "This habit, by-the-way, is good
+       In climes south of the Mersey;
+     But, I would have it understood,
+       It's risky in New Jersey--
+
+would fulfil all the requirements of the special individual to whom I
+have referred, and would have shown that the poet himself was ever
+mindful of the welfare of his readers."
+
+The Poet was apparently unconvinced, so the Idiot continued:
+
+"Mind you, old man, I think all this poetry is beautiful," he said; "but
+you poets are too prone to confine your attention to the pleasant
+aspects of the season. Here, for instance, is a poet who asks
+
+    'What are the dearest treasures of spring?'
+
+and then goes on to name the cheapest as an answer to his question. The
+primrose, the daffodil, the rosy haze that veils the forest bare, the
+sparkle of the myriad-dimpled sea, a kissing-match between the sunbeams
+and the rain-drops, reluctant hopes, the twitter of swallows on the
+wing, and all that sort of thing. You'd think spring was an iridescent
+dream of ecstatic things; but of the tired feeling that comes over you,
+the spine of jelly, the wabbling knee, the chills and fever that come
+from sniffing 'the scented breath of dewy April's eve,' the doctor's
+bills, and such like things are never mentioned. It isn't fair. It's all
+right to tell about the other things, but don't forget the drawbacks. If
+I were writing that poem I'd have at least two stanzas like this:
+
+    "And other dearest treasures of spring
+       Are daily draughts of withering, blithering squills,
+       To cure my aching bones of darksome chills;
+     And at the door my loved physician's ring;
+
+    "The tender sneezes of the early day;
+       The sudden drop of Mr. Mercury;
+       The veering winds from S. to N. by E.--
+     And hunting flats to move to in the May.
+
+You see, that makes not only a more comprehensive picture, but does not
+mislead anybody into the belief the spring is all velvet, which it isn't
+by any means."
+
+"Oh, bosh!" cried the Poet, very much nettled, as he rose from the
+table. "I suppose if you had your way you'd have all poetry submitted
+first to a censor, the way they do with plays in London."
+
+"No, I wouldn't have a censor; he'd only increase taxes unnecessarily,"
+said the Idiot, folding up his napkin, and also rising to leave. "I'd
+just let the Board of Health pass on them; it isn't a question of morals
+so much as of sanitation."
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+ON FLAT-HUNTING
+
+
+"Aha!" cried the Poet, briskly rubbing his hands together, and drawing a
+deep breath of satisfaction, "these be great days for people who are
+fond of the chase, who love the open, and who would commune with Nature
+in her most lovely mood. Just look out of that window, Mr. Idiot, and
+drink in the joyous sunshine. Egad! sir, even the asphalted pavement and
+the brick-and-mortar facade of the houses opposite, bathed in that
+golden light, seem glorified."
+
+"Thanks," said the Idiot, wearily, "but I guess I won't. I'm afraid that
+while I was drinking in those glorified flats opposite and digesting the
+golden-mellow asphalt, you would fasten that poetic grip of yours upon
+my share of the blossoming buckwheats. Furthermore, I've been enjoying
+the chase for two weeks now, and, to tell you the honest truth, I am
+long on it. There is such a thing as chasing too much, so if you don't
+mind I'll sublet my part of the contract for gazing out of the window at
+gilt-edged Nature as she appears in the city to you. Mary, move Mr.
+Poet's chair over to the window so that he may drink in the sunshine
+comfortably, and pass his share of the sausages to me."
+
+"What have you been chasing, Mr. Idiot?" asked the Doctor. "Birds or the
+fast-flitting dollar?"
+
+"Flats," said the Idiot.
+
+"I didn't know you Wall Street people needed to hunt flats," said the
+Bibliomaniac. "I thought they just walked into your offices and
+presented themselves for skinning."
+
+"I don't mean the flats we live on," explained the Idiot. "It's the
+flats we live in that I have been after."
+
+The landlady looked up inquiringly. Mr. Idiot's announcement sounded
+ominous.
+
+"To my mind, flat-hunting," the Idiot continued, "is one of the most
+interesting branches of sport. It involves quite as much uncertainty as
+the pursuit of the whirring partridge; your game is quite as difficult
+to lure as the speckled trout darting hither and yon in the grassy pool;
+it involves no shedding of innocent blood, as in the case of a ride
+across-country with a pack in full pursuit of the fox; and strikes me
+as possessing greater dignity than running forty miles through the
+cabbage-patches of Long Island in search of a bag of ainse seed.
+When the sporting instinct arises in my soul and reaches that full-tide
+where nothing short of action will hold it in control, I never think of
+starting for Maine to shoot the festive moose, nor do I squander my
+limited resources on a foggy hunt for the elusive canvasback in the
+Maryland marshes. I just go to the nearest cab-stand, strike a bargain
+with Mr. Jehu for an afternoon's use of his hansom, and go around the
+town hunting flats. It requires very little previous preparation; it
+involves no prolonged absences from home; you do not need rubber boots
+unless you propose to investigate the cellars or intend to go far
+afield into the suburban boroughs of this great city; and is in all
+ways pleasant, interesting, and, I may say, educational."
+
+"Educational, eh?" laughed the Bibliomaniac. "Some people have queer
+ideas of what is educational. I must say I fail to see anything
+particularly instructive in flat-hunting."
+
+"That's because you never approached it in a proper spirit," said the
+Idiot. "Anybody who is at all interested in sociology, however, cannot
+help but find instruction in a contemplation of how people are housed.
+You can't get any idea of how the other halves live by reading the
+society news in the Sunday newspapers or peeping in at the second story
+of the tenement-houses as you go down-town on the elevated railroads.
+You've got to go out and investigate for yourself, and that's where
+flat-hunting comes in as an educational diversion. Of course, all men
+are not interested in the same line of investigation. You, as a
+bibliomaniac, prefer to go hunting rare first editions; Dr. Pellet,
+armed to the teeth with capsules, lies in wait for a pot-shot at some
+new kind of human ailment, and rejoices as loudly over the discovery of
+a new disease as you do over finding a copy of the rare first edition of
+the _Telephone Book for 1899_; another man goes to Africa to investigate
+the condition of our gorillan cousin of the jungle; Lieutenant Peary
+goes and hides behind a snow-ball up North, so that his fellows of the
+Arctic Exploration Society may have something to look for every other
+summer; and I--I go hunting for flats. I don't sneer at you and the
+others for liking the things you do. You shouldn't sneer at me for
+liking the things I do. It is, after all, the diversity of our tastes
+that makes our human race interesting."
+
+"But the rest of us generally bag something," said the Lawyer. "What the
+dickens do you get beyond sheer physical weariness for your pains?"
+
+"The best of all the prizes of the hunt," said the Idiot; "the spirit
+of content with my lot as a boarder. I've been through twenty-eight
+flats in the last three weeks, and I know whereof I speak. I have seen
+the gorgeous apartments of the Redmere, where you can get a Louis Quinze
+drawing-room, a Renaissance library, a superb Grecian dining-room, and a
+cold-storage box to keep your high-balls in for four thousand dollars
+per annum."
+
+"Weren't there any bedrooms?" asked Mr. Whitechoker.
+
+"Oh yes," said the Idiot. "Three, automatically ventilated from holes in
+the ceiling leading to an air-shaft, size six by nine, and brilliantly
+lighted by electricity. There was also a small pigeon-hole in a
+corrugated iron shack on the roof for the cook; a laundry next to the
+coal-bin in the cellar; and a kitchen about four feet square connecting
+with the library."
+
+"Mercy!" cried Mrs. Pedagog. "Do they expect children to live in such a
+place as that?"
+
+"No," said the Idiot. "You have to give bonds as security against
+children of any kind at the Redmere. If you happen to have any, you are
+required by the terms of your lease to send them to boarding-school; and
+if you haven't any, the lease requires that you shall promise to have
+none during your tenancy. The owners of such properties have a lot of
+heart about them, and they take good care to protect the children
+against the apartments they put up."
+
+"And what kind of people, pray, live in such places as that?" demanded
+the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Very nice people," said the Idiot. "People, for the most part, who
+spend their winters at Palm Beach, their springs in London, their
+summers at Newport or on the Continent, and their autumns in the
+Berkshires."
+
+"I don't see why they need a home at all if that's the way they do,"
+said Mrs. Pedagog.
+
+"It's very simple," said the Idiot. "You've got to have an address to
+get your name in the _Social Register_."
+
+"Four thousand dollars is pretty steep for an address," commented the
+Bibliomaniac.
+
+"It would be for me," said the Idiot. "But it is cheap for them.
+Moreover, in the case of the Redmere it's the swellest address in town.
+Three of the most important divorces of the last social season took
+place at the Redmere. Social position comes high, Mr. Bib, but there are
+people who must have it. It is to them what baked beans are to the
+Bostonian's Sunday breakfast--a _sine qua non_."
+
+"May I ask whatever induced you to look for a four-thousand-dollar
+apartment?" asked Mr. Pedagog. "You have frequently stated that your
+income barely equalled twenty-four hundred dollars a year."
+
+"Why shouldn't I?" asked the Idiot. "It doesn't cost any more to look
+for a four-thousand-dollar apartment than it does to go chasing after a
+two-dollar-a-week hall-bedroom, and it impresses the cab-driver with a
+sense of responsibility. But bagging these gorgeous apartments does not
+constitute the real joy of flat-hunting. For solid satisfaction and
+real sport the chase for a fifteen-hundred-dollar apartment in a decent
+neighborhood bears away the palm. You can get plenty of roomy suites in
+the neighborhood of a boiler-factory, or next door to a distillery, or
+back of a fire-engine house, at reasonable rents, and along the elevated
+railway lines much that is impressive is to be found by those who can
+sleep with trains running alongside of their pillows all night; but when
+you get away from these, the real thing at that figure is elusive. Over
+by the Park you can get two pigeon-holes and a bath, with a southern
+exposure, for nineteen hundred dollars a year; if you are willing to
+dispense with the southern exposure you can get three Black Holes of
+Calcutta and a butler's pantry, in the same neighborhood, for sixteen
+hundred dollars, but you have to provide your own air. Farther down-town
+you will occasionally find the thing you want with a few extras in the
+shape of cornet-players, pianola-bangers, and peroxide sopranos on
+either side of you, and an osteopathic veterinary surgeon on the ground
+floor thrown in. Then there are paper flats that can be had for twelve
+hundred dollars, but you can't have any pictures in them, because the
+walls won't stand the weight, and any nail of reasonable length would
+stick through into the next apartment. A friend of mine lived in one of
+these affairs once, and when he inadvertently leaned against the wall
+one night he fell through into his neighbor's bath-tub. Of course, that
+sort of thing promotes sociability; but for a home most people want just
+a little privacy. And so the list runs on. You would really be
+astonished at the great variety of discomfortable dwelling-places that
+people build. Such high-art decorations as you encounter--purple friezes
+surmounting yellow dadoes; dragons peeping out of fruit-baskets;
+idealized tomatoes in full bloom chasing one another all around the
+bedroom walls. Then the architectural inconveniences they present with
+their best bedrooms opening into the kitchen; their parlors with marble
+wash-stands with running water in the corner; their libraries fitted up
+with marvellous steam-radiators and china-closets, and their kitchens
+so small that the fire in the range scorches the wall opposite, and over
+which nothing but an asbestos cook, with a figure like a third rail,
+could preside. And, best of all, there are the janitors! Why, Mr. Bib,
+the study of the janitor and his habits alone is worthy of the life-long
+attention of the best entomologist that ever lived--and yet you say
+there is nothing educational in flat-hunting."
+
+"Oh, well," said the Bibliomaniac, "I meant for me. There are a lot of
+things that would be educational to you that I should regard as
+symptomatic of profound ignorance. Everything is relative in this
+world."
+
+"That is true," said the Idiot; "and that is why every April 1st I go
+out and gloat over the miseries of the flat-dwellers. As long as I can
+do that I am happy in my little cubby-hole under Mrs. Pedagog's
+hospitable roof."
+
+"Ah! I am glad to hear you say that," said Mrs. Pedagog. "I was a bit
+fearful, Mr. Idiot, that you had it in mind to move away from us."
+
+"No indeed, Mrs. Pedagog," replied the Idiot, rising from the table.
+"You need have no fear of that. You couldn't get me out of here with a
+crow-bar. If I did not have entire confidence in your lovely house and
+yourself, you don't suppose I would permit myself to get three months
+behind in my board, do you?"
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE HOUSEMAID'S UNION
+
+
+"Potatoes, sir?" said Mary, the waitress at Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog's
+High-Class Home for Single Gentlemen, stopping behind the Idiot's chair
+and addressing the back of his neck in the usual boarding-house fashion.
+
+"Yes, I want some potatoes, Mary; but before I take them," the Idiot
+replied, "I must first ascertain whether or not you wear the union
+label, and what is the exact status also of the potatoes. My principles
+are such that I cannot permit a non-union housemaid to help me to a scab
+potato, whereas, if you belong to the sisterhood, and our stewed friend
+Murphy here has been raised upon a union farm, then, indeed, do I wish
+not only one potato but many."
+
+Mary's reply was a giggle.
+
+"Ah!" said the Idiot. "The merry ha-ha, eh? All right, Mary. That is for
+the present sufficient evidence that your conscience is clear on this
+very important matter. As for the potatoes, we will eat them not exactly
+under protest, but with a distinctly announced proviso in advance that
+we assume that they have qualified themselves for admission into a union
+stomach. I hesitate to think of what will happen in my interior
+department if Murphy is deceiving us."
+
+Whereupon the Idiot came into possession of a goodly portion of the
+stewed potatoes, and Mary fled to the kitchen, where she informed the
+presiding genius of the range that the young gentleman was crazier than
+ever.
+
+"He's talkin' about the unions, now, Bridget," said she.
+
+"Is he agin 'em?" demanded Bridget, with a glitter in her eye.
+
+"No, he's for 'em; he wouldn't even drink milk from a non-union cow,"
+said Mary.
+
+"He's a foine gintleman," said Bridget. "Oi'll make his waffles a soize
+larger."
+
+Meanwhile the Bibliomaniac had chosen to reflect seriously upon the
+Idiot's intelligence for his approval of unions.
+
+"They are responsible for pretty nearly all the trouble there is at the
+present moment," he snapped out, angrily.
+
+"Oh, go along with you," retorted the Idiot. "The trouble we have these
+days, like all the rest of the troubles of the past, go right back to
+that old original non-union apple that Eve ate and Adam got the core of.
+You know that as well as I do. Even Adam and Eve, untutored children of
+nature though they were, saw it right off, and organized a union on the
+spot, which has in the course of centuries proven the most beneficent
+institution of the ages. With all due respect to the character of this
+dwelling-place of ours--a home for single gentlemen--the union is the
+thing. If you don't belong to one you may be tremendously independent,
+but you're blooming lonesome."
+
+"The matrimonial union," smiled Mrs. Pedagog, "is indeed a blessed
+institution, and, having been married twice, I can testify from
+experience; but, truly, Mr. Idiot, I wish you wouldn't put notions into
+Mary's head about the other kind. I should be sorry if she were to join
+that housemaid's union we hear so much about. I have trouble enough now
+with my domestic help without having a walking delegate on my hands as
+well."
+
+"No doubt," acquiesced the Idiot. "In their beginnings all great
+movements have their inconveniences, but in the end, properly developed,
+a housemaid's union wouldn't be a bad thing for employers, and I rather
+think it might prove a good thing. Suppose one of your servants
+misbehaves herself, for instance--I remember one occasion in this very
+house when it required the united efforts of yourself, Mr. Pedagog,
+three policemen, and your humble servant to effectively discharge a
+three-hundred-pound queen of the kitchen, who had looked not wisely but
+too often on the cooking sherry. Now suppose that highly cultivated
+inebriate had belonged to a self-respecting union? You wouldn't have
+had to discharge her at all. A telephone message to the union
+headquarters, despatched while the lady was indulging in one of her
+tantrums, would have brought an inspector to the house, the queen would
+have been caught with the goods on, and her card would have been taken
+from her, so that by the mere automatic operation of the rules of her
+own organization she could no longer work for you. Thus you would have
+been spared some highly seasoned language which I have for years tried
+to forget; Mr. Pedagog's eye would not have been punched so that you
+could not tell your blue-eyed boy from your black-eyed babe; I should
+never have lost the only really satisfactory red necktie I ever owned;
+and three sturdy policemen, one of whom had often previously acted as
+the lady's brother on her evenings at home, and the others, of whom we
+had reason to believe were cousins not many times removed, would not
+have been confronted by the ungrateful duty of clubbing one who had
+frequently fed them generously upon your cold mutton and my beer."
+
+"Is that one of the things the union would do?" queried Mrs. Pedagog,
+brightening.
+
+"It is one of the things the union _should_ do," said the Idiot.
+"Similarly with your up-stairs girl, if perchance you have one. Suppose
+she got into the habit, which I understand is not all an uncommon case,
+of sweeping the dust under the bureau of your bedroom or under the piano
+in the drawing-room. Suppose she is really an adept in the art of dust
+concealment, having a full comprehension of all sixty methods--hiding it
+under tables, sofas, bookcases, and rugs, in order to save her back? You
+wouldn't have to bother with her at all under a properly equipped union.
+Upon the discovery of her delinquencies you would merely have to send
+for the union inspector, lift up the rug and show her the various
+vintages of sweepings the maid has left there: November ashes; December
+match-ends; threads, needles, and pins left over from the February
+meeting of the Ibsen Sewing-Circle at your house; your missing
+tortoise-shell hair-pin that you hadn't laid eyes on since September;
+the grocer's bill for October that you told the grocer you never
+received--all this in March. Do you suppose that that inspector, with
+all this evidence before her eyes, could do otherwise than prefer
+charges against the offender at the next meeting of the Committee on
+Discipline? Not on your life, madam. And, what is more, have you the
+slightest doubt that one word of reprimand from that same Committee on
+Discipline would prove far more effective in reforming that particular
+offender than anything you could say backed by the eloquence of Burke
+and the thunderbolts of Jove?"
+
+"You paint a beautiful picture," said the Doctor. "But suppose you
+happened to draw a rotten cook in the domestic lottery--a good woman,
+but a regular scorcher. Where does your inspector come in there? Going
+to invite her to dine with you so as to demonstrate the girl's
+incompetence?"
+
+"Not at all," said the Idiot. "That would make trouble right away. The
+cook very properly would say that the inspector was influenced by the
+social attention she was receiving from the head of the house, and the
+woman's effectiveness as a disciplinarian would be immediately
+destroyed. I'd put half portions of the burned food in a sealed package
+and send it to the Committee on Culinary Improvement for their
+inspection. A better method which time would probably bring into
+practice would be for the union itself to establish a system of
+domiciliary visits, by which the cook's work should be subjected to a
+constant inspection by the union--the object being, of course, to
+prevent trouble rather than to punish after the event. The inspector's
+position would be something like that of the bank examiner, who turns up
+at our financial institutions at unexpected moments, and sees that
+everything is going right."
+
+"Oh, bosh!" said the Doctor. "You are talking of ideals."
+
+"Certainly I am," returned the Idiot. "Why shouldn't I? What's the use
+of wasting one's breath on anything else?"
+
+"Well, it's all rot!" put in Mr. Brief. "There never was any such union
+as that, and there never will be."
+
+"You are the last person in the world to say a thing like that, Mr.
+Brief," said the Idiot--"you, who belong to the nearest approach to the
+ideal union that the world has ever known!"
+
+"What! Me?" demanded the Lawyer. "Me? I belong to a union?"
+
+"Of course you do--or at least you told me you did," said the Idiot.
+
+"Well, you are the worst!" retorted Mr. Brief, angrily. "When did I ever
+tell you that I belonged to a union?"
+
+"Last Friday night at dinner, and in the presence of this goodly
+company," said the Idiot. "You were bragging about it, too--said that no
+institution in existence had done more to uplift the moral tone of the
+legal profession; that through its efforts the corrupt practitioner and
+the shyster were gradually being driven to the wall--"
+
+"Well, this beats me," said Mr. Brief. "I recall telling at dinner on
+Friday night about the Bar Association--"
+
+"Precisely," said the Idiot. "That's what I referred to. If the Bar
+Association isn't a Lawyer's Union Number Six of the highest type, I
+don't know what is. It is conducted by the most brilliant minds in the
+profession; its honors are eagerly sought after by the brainiest
+laborers in the field of Coke and Blackstone; its stern, relentless eye
+is fixed upon the evil-doer, and it is an effective instrument for
+reform not only in its own profession, but in the State as well. What I
+would have the Housemaid's Union do for domestic servants and for the
+home, the Bar Association does for the legal profession and for the
+State, and if the lawyers can do this thing there is no earthly reason
+why the housemaids shouldn't."
+
+"Pah!" ejaculated Mr. Brief. "You place the bar and domestic service on
+the same plane of importance, do you?"
+
+"No, I don't," said the Idiot. "Shouldn't think of doing so. Twenty
+people need housemaids, where one requires a lawyer; therefore the
+domestic is the more important of the two."
+
+"Humph!" said Mr. Brief, with an angry laugh. "Intellectual
+qualifications, I suppose, go for nothing in the matter."
+
+"Well, I don't know about that," said the Idiot. "I guess, however, that
+there are more housemaids earning a living to-day than lawyers--and,
+besides--oh, well, never mind--What's the use? I don't wish to quarrel
+about it."
+
+"Go on--don't mind me--I'm really interested to know what further you
+can say," snapped Mr. Brief. "Besides--what?"
+
+"Only this, that when it comes to the intellectuals--Well, really, Mr.
+Brief," asked the Idiot, "really now, did you ever hear of anybody going
+to an intelligence office for a lawyer?"
+
+Mr. Brief's reply was not inaudible, for just at that moment he
+swallowed his coffee the wrong way, and in the effort to bring him to,
+the thread of the argument snapped, and up to the hour of going to press
+had not been tied together again.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE GENTLE ART OF BOOSTING
+
+
+The Idiot was very late at breakfast--so extremely late, in fact, that
+some apprehension was expressed by his fellow-boarders as to the state
+of his health.
+
+"I hope he isn't ill," said Mr. Whitechoker. "He is usually so prompt at
+his meals that I fear something is the matter with him."
+
+"He's all right," said the Doctor, whose room adjoins that of the Idiot
+in Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog's Select Home for Single Gentlemen. "He'll be
+down in a minute. He's suffering from an overdose of vacation--rested
+too hard."
+
+Just then the subject of the conversation appeared in the doorway, pale
+and haggard, but with an eye that boded ill for the larder.
+
+"Quick!" he cried, as he entered. "Lead me to a square meal. Mary,
+please give me four bowls of mush, ten medium soft-boiled eggs, a barrel
+of saute potatoes, and eighteen dollars' worth of corned-beef hash. I'll
+have two pots of coffee, Mrs. Pedagog, please, four pounds of sugar, and
+a can of condensed milk. If there is any extra charge you may put it on
+the bill, and some day, when the common stock of the Continental Hen
+Trust goes up thirty or forty points, I'll pay."
+
+"What's the matter with you, Mr. Idiot?" asked Mr. Brief. "Been fasting
+for a week?"
+
+"No," replied the Idiot. "I've just taken my first week's vacation, and,
+between you and me, I've come back to business so as to get rested for
+the second."
+
+"Doesn't look as though vacation agreed with you," said the
+Bibliomaniac.
+
+"It doesn't," said the Idiot. "Hereafter I am an advocate of the
+rest-while-you-work system. Never take a day off if you can help it.
+There's nothing so restful as paying attention to business, and no
+greater promoter of weariness of spirit and vexation of your digestion
+than the modern style of vacating. No more for mine, if you please."
+
+"Humph!" sneered the Bibliomaniac. "I suppose you went to Coney Island
+to get rested up, bumping the bump and looping the loop, and doing a lot
+of other crazy things."
+
+"Not I," quoth the Idiot. "I didn't have sense enough to go to some
+quiet place like Coney Island, where you can get seven square meals a
+day, and then climb into a Ferris-wheel and be twirled around in the air
+until they have been properly shaken down. I took one of the Four
+Hundred vacations. Know what that is?"
+
+"No," said Mr. Brief. "I didn't know there were four hundred vacations
+with only three hundred and sixty-five days in the year. What do you
+mean?"
+
+"I mean the kind of vacation the people in the Four Hundred take,"
+explained the Idiot. "I've been to a house-party up in Newport with some
+friends of mine who're 'in the swim,' and I tell you it's hard swimming.
+You'll never hear me talking about a leisure class in this country
+again. Those people don't know what leisure is. I don't wonder they're
+always such a tired-looking lot."
+
+"I was not aware that you were in with the Smart Set," said the
+Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Oh yes," said the Idiot. "I'm in with several of 'em--'way in; so far
+in that I'm sometimes afraid I'll never get out. We're carrying a whole
+lot of wild-cats on margin for Billie Van Gelder, the cotillon leader.
+Tommy de Cahoots, the famous yachtsman, owes us about eight thousand
+dollars more than he can spare from his living expenses on one of his
+plunges into Copper, and altogether we are pretty long on swells in our
+office."
+
+"And do you mean to say those people invite you out?" asked the
+Bibliomaniac.
+
+"All the time," said the Idiot. "Just as soon as one of our swell
+customers finds he can't pay his margins he comes down to the office and
+gets very chummy with all of us. The deeper he is in it the more affable
+he becomes. The result is there are house-parties and yacht-cruises and
+all that sort of thing galore on tap for us every summer."
+
+"And you accept them, eh?" said the Bibliomaniac, scornfully.
+
+"As a matter of business, of course," replied the Idiot. "We've got to
+get something out of it. If one of our customers can't pay cash, why, we
+get what we can. In this particular case Mr. Reginald Squandercash had
+me down at Newport for five full days, and I know now why he can't pay
+up his little shortage of eight hundred dollars. He's got the money, but
+he needs it for other things, and, now that I know it, I shall recommend
+the firm to give him an extension of thirty days. By that time he will
+have collected from the De Boodles, whom he is launching in society, C.
+O. D., and will be able to square matters with us."
+
+"Your conversation is Greek to me," said the Bibliomaniac. "Who are the
+De Boodles, and for what do they owe your friend Reginald Squandercash
+money?"
+
+"The De Boodles," explained the Idiot, "are what are known as climbers,
+and Reginald Squandercash is a booster."
+
+"A what?" cried the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"A booster," said the Idiot. "There are several boosters in the Four
+Hundred. For a consideration they will boost wealthy climbers into
+society. The climbers are people like the De Boodles, who have suddenly
+come into great wealth, and who wish to be in it with others of great
+wealth who are also of high social position. They don't know how to do
+the trick, so they seek out some booster like Reggie, strike a bargain
+with him, and he steers 'em up against the 'Among-Those-Present' game
+until finally you find the De Boodles have a social cinch."
+
+"Do you mean to say that society tolerates such a business as that?"
+demanded the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Tolerates?" laughed the Idiot. "What a word to use! Tolerate? Why,
+society encourages, because society shares the benefits. Take this
+especial vacation of mine. Society had two five-o'clock teas, four of
+the swellest dinners you ever sat down to, a cotillon where the favors
+were of solid silver and real ostrich feathers, a whole day's clam-bake
+on Reggie's steam-yacht, with automobile-runs and coaching-trips galore.
+Nobody ever declines one of Reggie's invitations, because what he has
+from a society point of view is the best the market affords. Why, the
+floral decorations alone at the _fete champetre_ he gave in honor of the
+De Boodles at his villa last Thursday night must have cost five thousand
+dollars, and everything was on the same scale. I don't believe a cent
+less than seventy-five hundred dollars was burned up in the fire-works,
+and every lady present received a souvenir of the occasion that cost at
+least one hundred dollars."
+
+"Your story doesn't quite hold together," said Mr. Brief. "If your
+friend Reggie has a villa and a steam-yacht, and automobiles and
+coaches, and gives _fetes champetres_ that cost fifteen or twenty
+thousand dollars, I don't see why he has to make himself a booster of
+inferior people who want to get into society. What does he gain by it?
+It surely isn't sport to do a thing like that, and I should think he'd
+find it a dreadful bore."
+
+"The man must live," said the Idiot. "He boosts for a living."
+
+"When he has the wealth of Monte Cristo at his command?" demanded Mr.
+Brief.
+
+"Reggie hasn't a cent to his name," said the Idiot. "I've already told
+you he owes us eight hundred dollars he can't pay."
+
+"Then who in thunder pays for the villa and the lot and all those
+hundred-dollar souvenirs?" asked the Doctor.
+
+"Why, this year, the De Boodles," said the Idiot. "Last year it was
+Colonel and Mrs. Moneybags, whose daughter, Miss Fayette Moneybags, is
+now clinching the position Reggie sold her at Newport over in London,
+whither Reggie has consigned her to his sister, an impecunious American
+duchess--the Duchess of Nocash--who is also in the boosting business.
+The chances are Miss Moneybags will land one of England's most deeply
+indebted peers, and, if she does, Reggie will receive a handsome check
+for steering the family up against so attractive a proposition."
+
+"And you mean to tell us that a plain man like old John De Boodle, of
+Nevada, is putting out his hard-earned wealth in that way?" demanded Mr.
+Brief.
+
+"I didn't mean to mention any names," said the Idiot. "But you've
+spotted the victim. Old John De Boodle, who made his sixty million
+dollars in six months, after having kept a saloon on the frontier for
+forty years, is the man. His family wants to get in the swim, and Reggie
+is turning the trick for them; and, after all, what better way is there
+for De Boodle to get in? He might take sixty villas at Newport and not
+get even a peep at the divorce colony there, much less a glimpse of the
+monogamous set acting independently. Not a monkey in the Zoo would dine
+with the De Boodles, and in his most eccentric moment I doubt if Tommy
+Dare would take them up, unless there was somebody to stand sponsor for
+them. A cool million might easily be expended without results by the De
+Boodles themselves; but hand that money over to Reggie Squandercash,
+whose blood is as blue as his creditors' sometimes get, and you can look
+for results. What the Frohman's are to the stage, Reggie Squandercash is
+to society. He's right in it; popular as all spenders are; lavish as all
+people spending other people's money are apt to be. Old De Boodle, egged
+on by Mrs. De Boodle and Miss Mary Ann De Boodle (now known as Miss
+Marianne De Boodle), goes to Reggie and says: 'The old lady and my girl
+are nutty on society. Can you land 'em?' 'Certainly,' says Reggie, 'if
+your pocket is long enough.' 'How long is that?' asks De Boodle, wincing
+a bit. 'A hundred thousand a month, and no extras, until you're in,'
+says Reggie. 'No reduction for families?' asks De Boodle, anxiously.
+'No,' says Reggie. 'Harder job.' 'All right,' says De Boodle, 'here's my
+check for the first month.' That's how Reggie gets his Newport villa,
+his servants, his horses, yacht, automobiles, and coaches. Then he
+invites the De Boodles up to visit him. They accept, and the fun
+begins. First it's a little dinner to meet my friends Mr. and Mrs. De
+Boodle, of Nevada. Everybody there, hungry, dinner from Sherry's, best
+wines in the market. De Boodles covered with diamonds, a great success,
+especially old John De Boodle, who tells racy stories over the
+_demi-tasse_ when the ladies have gone into the drawing-room. De Boodle
+voted a character. Next thing, bridge-whist party. Everybody there.
+Society a good winner. The De Boodles magnificent losers. Popularity
+cinched. Next, yachting-party. Everybody on board. De Boodle on deck in
+fine shape. Champagne flows like Niagara. Poker game in main cabin. Food
+everywhere. De Boodles much easier. Stiffness wearing off, and so on and
+so on, until finally Miss De Boodle's portrait is printed in nineteen
+Sunday newspapers all over the country. They're launched, and Reggie
+comes into his own with a profit for the season in a cash balance of
+fifty thousand dollars. He's had a bully time all summer, entertained
+like a prince, and comes to the rainy season with a tidy little
+umbrella to keep him out of the wet."
+
+"And can he count on that as a permanent business?" asked Mr.
+Whitechoker.
+
+"My dear sir, the rock of Gibraltar is no solider and no more
+permanent," said the Idiot. "For as long as there is a Four Hundred in
+existence, human nature is such that there will also be a million who
+will want to get into it."
+
+"At such a cost?" demanded the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"At any cost," replied the Idiot. "Even people who know they cannot swim
+want to get in it."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+HE MAKES A SUGGESTION TO THE POET
+
+
+"Good-morning, Homer, my boy," said the Idiot, genially, as the Poet
+entered the breakfast-room. "All hail to thee. Thou art the bright
+particular bird of plumage I most hoped to see this rare and beauteous
+summer morning. No sweet-singing robin-redbreast or soft-honking
+canvasback for yours truly this A.M., when a living, breathing,
+palpitating son of the Muses lurks near at hand. I fain would make thee
+a proposition, Shakespeare dear!"
+
+"Back pedal there! Avaunt with your flowery speech, oh Idiot!" cried the
+Doctor. "Else will I call an ambulance."
+
+"No ambulance for mine," chortled the Idiot.
+
+"Nay, Sweet Gas-bags," quoth the Doctor. "But for once I fear me we may
+be scorched by this Pelee of words that thou spoutest forth."
+
+"What's the proposition, Mr. Idiot?" asked the Poet. "I'm always open to
+anything of the kind, as the Subway said when an automobile fell into
+it.'"
+
+"I thirst for laurels," said the Idiot, "and I propose that you and I
+collaborate on a book of poems for early publication. With your name on
+the title-page and my poems in the book I think we can make a go of it."
+
+"What's the lay?" asked the Poet, amused, but wary. "Sonnets, or French
+forms, or just plain snatches of song?"
+
+"Any old thing as long as it runs smoothly," replied the Idiot. "Only
+the poems must fit the title of the book, which is to be _Now_."
+
+"_Now?_" said the Poet.
+
+"_Now!_" repeated the Idiot. "I find in reading over the verse of the
+day that the 'Now' poem always finds a ready market. Therefore, there
+must be money in it, and where the money goes there the laurels are.
+You know what Browning Robinson, the Laureate of Wall Street, wrote in
+his 'Message to Posterity':
+
+    "'Oh, when you come to crown my brow,
+       Bring me no bay nor sorrel;
+     Give me no parsley wreath, but just
+       The legal long green laurel.'"
+
+"I never heard that poem before," laughed the Poet, "though the
+sentiment in these commercial days is not unfamiliar."
+
+"True," said the Idiot. "Alfred Austin Biggs, of Texas, voiced the same
+idea when he said:
+
+    "'Crown me not with spinach,
+     Wreathe me not with hay;
+     Place no salad on my head
+     When you bring the bay.
+     Give me not the water-cresses
+     To adorn my flowing tresses,
+     But at e'en
+     Crown my pockets good and strong
+     With the green--
+     The green that's long.'"
+
+"Do you remember that?" asked the Idiot.
+
+"Only faintly," said the Poet. "I think you read it to me once before,
+just after you--er--ah--rather just after Alfred Austin Biggs, of
+Texas--wrote it."
+
+The Idiot laughed. "I see you're on," he said. "Anyhow, it's good
+sentiment, whether I wrote it or Biggs. Fact is, in my judgment, what
+the poet of to-day ought to do is to collect the long green from the
+present and the laurel from posterity. That's a fair division. But what
+do you say to my proposition?"
+
+"Well, it's certainly--er--cheeky enough," said the Poet. "Do I
+understand it?--you want me to father your poems. To tell the truth,
+until I hear some of them, I can't promise to be more than an uncle to
+them."
+
+"That's all right," said the Idiot. "You ought to be cautious, as a
+matter of protection to your own name. I've got some of the goods right
+here. Here's a little thing called 'Summer-tide!' It shows the whole
+'Now' principle in a nutshell. Listen to this:
+
+    "Now the festive frog is croaking in the mere,
+       And the canvasback is honking in the bay,
+     And the summer-girl is smiling full of cheer
+       On the willieboys that chance along her way.
+
+    "Now the skeeter sings his carols to the dawn,
+       And bewails the early closing of the bar
+     That prevents the little nips he seeks each morn
+       On the sea-shore where the fatling boarders are.
+
+    "Now the landlord of the pastoral hotel
+       Spends his mornings, nights, and eke his afternoons,
+     Scheming plans to get more milk from out the well,
+       And a hundred novel ways of cooking prunes.
+
+    "Now the pumpkin goes a pumpking through the fields,
+       And the merry visaged cows are chewing cud;
+     And the profits that the plumber's business yields
+       Come a-tumbling to the earth with deadly thud.
+
+    "And from all of this we learn the lesson sweet,
+       The soft message of Dame Nature, grand and clear,
+     That the winter-time is gone with storm and sleet,
+       And the soft and jolly summer-tide is here.
+
+How's that? Pretty fair?"
+
+"Well, I might consent to be a cousin to a poem of that kind. I've read
+worse and written some that are quite as bad. But you know, Mr. Idiot,
+even so great a masterpiece as that won't make a book," said the Poet.
+
+"Of course it won't," retorted the Idiot. "That's only for the summer.
+Here's another one on winter. Just listen:
+
+    "Now the man who deals in mittens and in tabs
+       Is a-smiling broadly--aye, from ear to ear--
+     As he reaches out his hand and fondly grabs
+       All the shining, golden shekels falling near.
+
+    "Now the snow lies on the hill-side and the roof,
+       And the birdling to the sunny southland flies;
+     While the frowning summer landlord stands aloof,
+       And to solemncholy meditation hies.
+
+    "Now the tinkling of the sleigh-bells tinge the air,
+       And the coal-man is as happy as can be;
+     While the hulking, sulking, grizzly seeks his lair,
+       And the ice-man's soul is filled with misery.
+
+    "Clad in frost are all the distant mountain-peaks,
+       And the furnace is as hungry as a boy;
+     While the plumber, as he gloats upon the leaks,
+       Is the model that the painter takes for 'Joy.'
+
+    "And from all of this we learn the lesson sweet--
+       The glad message of Dame Nature, grand and clear:
+     That the summer-time has gone with all its heat,
+       And the crisp and frosty winter days are here.
+
+You see, Mr. Poet, that out of that one idea alone--that cataloguing of
+the things of the four seasons--you can get four poems that are really
+worth reading," said the Idiot. "We could call that section 'The
+Seasons,' and make it the first part of the book. In the second part we
+could do the same thing, only in greater detail, for each one of the
+months. Just as a sample, take the month of February. We could run
+something like this in on February:
+
+    "Now o'er the pavement comes a hush
+     As pattering feet wade deep in slush
+     That every Feb.
+     Doth flow and ebb."
+
+"I see," said the Poet. "It wouldn't take long to fill up a book with
+stuff like that."
+
+"To make the appeal stronger, let me take the month of July, which is
+now on," resumed the Idiot. "You may find it even more convincing:
+
+    "Now the fly--
+     The rhubarb-pie--
+     The lightning in the sky--
+     Thermometers so spry--
+     That leap up high--
+     The roads all dry,
+     The hoboes nigh,
+     The town a-fry,
+     The mad ki-yi
+     A-snarling by,
+     The crickets cry--
+     All tell us that it is July.
+
+Eh?"
+
+"I don't believe anybody would believe I wrote it, that's all," said
+the Poet, shaking his head dubiously. "They'd find out, sooner or later,
+that you did it, just as they discovered that Will Carleton wrote
+'Paradise Lost,' and Dick Davis was the real author of Shakespeare. Why
+don't you publish the thing over your own name?"
+
+"Too modest," said the Idiot. "What do you think of this:
+
+     "Now the festive candidate
+      Goes a-sporting through the State,
+    And he kisses babes from Quogue to Kalamazoo;
+      For he really wants to win
+      Without spending any tin,
+    And he thinks he has a chance to kiss it through."
+
+"That's fair, only I don't think you'll find many candidates doing that
+sort of thing nowadays," said the Poet. "Most public men I know of would
+rather spend their money than kiss the babies. That style of campaigning
+has gone out."
+
+"It has in the cities," said the Idiot. "But back in the country it is
+still done, and the candidate who turns his back on the infant might as
+well give up the race. I know, because a cousin of mine ran for
+supervisor once, and he was licked out of his boots because he tried to
+do his kissing by proxy--said he'd give the kisses in a bunch to a
+committee of young ladies, who could distribute them for him. Result was
+everybody was down on him--even the young ladies."
+
+"I guess he was a cousin of yours, all right," laughed the Doctor; "that
+scheme bears the Idiot brand."
+
+"Here's one on the opening of the opera season," said the Idiot:
+
+     "Now the fiddlers tune their fiddles
+      To the lovely taradiddles
+    Of old Wagner, Mozart, Bizet, and the rest.
+      Now the trombone is a-tooting
+      Out its scaley shute-the-chuteing
+    And the oboe is hoboing with a zest.
+
+     "Now the dressmakers are working--
+      Not a single minute shirking--
+    Making gowns with frills and fal-lals mighty queer,
+      For the Autumn days are flying,
+      And there's really no denying
+    That the season of the opera is near."
+
+Mr. Brief took a hand in the discussion at this moment.
+
+"Then you can have a blanket verse," he said, scribbling with his pencil
+on a piece of paper in front of him. "Something like this:
+
+     "And as Time goes on a-stalking,
+      And the Idiot still is talking
+    In his usual blatant manner, loud and free,
+      With his silly jokes and rhyme,
+      It is--well it's any time
+    From Creation to the jumping-off place that you'll find at the far
+          end of Eterni-tie."
+
+"That settles it," said the Idiot, rising. "I withdraw my proposition.
+Let's call it off, Mr. Poet."
+
+"What's the matter?" asked Mr. Brief. "Isn't my verse good?"
+
+"Yes," said the Idiot. "Just as good as mine, and that being the case it
+isn't worth doing. When lawyers can write as good poetry as real poets,
+it doesn't pay to be a real poet. I'm going in for something else. I
+guess I'll apply for a job as a motorman, and make a name for myself
+there."
+
+"Can a motorman make a name for himself?" asked the Doctor.
+
+"Oh yes," said the Idiot. "Easily. By being civil. A civil motorman
+would be unique."
+
+"But he wouldn't make a fortune," suggested the Poet.
+
+"Yes he would, too," said the Idiot. "If he could prove he really was
+civil, the vaudeville people would pay him a thousand dollars a week and
+tour the country with him. He'd draw mobs."
+
+With which the Idiot left the dining-room.
+
+"I think his poems would sell," smiled Mrs. Pedagog.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Pedagog. "Chopped up fine and properly advertised, they
+might make a very successful new kind of breakfast food--provided the
+paper on which they were written was not too indigestible."
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+HE DISCUSSES THE MUSIC CURE
+
+
+"Good-morning, Doctor," said the Idiot, as Capsule, M.D., entered the
+dining-room, "I am mighty glad you've come. I've wanted for a long time
+to ask you about this music cure that everybody is talking about, and
+get you, if possible, to write me out a list of musical nostrums for
+every-day use. I noticed last night, before going to bed, that my
+medicine-chest was about run out. There's nothing but one quinine pill
+and a soda-mint drop left in it, and if there's anything in the music
+cure, I don't think I'll have it filled again. I prefer Wagner to
+squills, and, compared to the delights of Mozart, Hayden, and Offenbach,
+those of paregoric are nit."
+
+"Still rambling, eh?" vouchsafed the Doctor. "You ought to submit your
+tongue to some scientific student of dynamics. I am inclined to think,
+from my own observation of its ways, that it contains the germ of
+perpetual motion."
+
+"I will consider your suggestion," replied the Idiot. "Meanwhile, let us
+consult harmoniously together on the original point. Is there anything
+in this music cure, and is it true that our medical schools are
+hereafter to have conservatories attached to them, in which aspiring
+young M.D.'s are to be taught the _materia musica_ in addition to the
+_materia medica_?"
+
+"I had heard of no such idiotic proposition," returned the Doctor. "And
+as for the music cure, I don't know anything about it; haven't heard
+everybody talking about it; and doubt the existence of any such thing
+outside of that mysterious realm which is bounded by the four corners of
+your own bright particular cerebellum. What do you mean by the music
+cure?"
+
+"Why, the papers have been full of it lately," explained the Idiot.
+"The claim is made that in music lies the panacea for all human ills. It
+may not be able to perform a surgical operation like that which is
+required for the removal of a leg, and I don't believe even Wagner ever
+composed a measure that could be counted on successfully to eliminate
+one's vermiform appendix from its chief sphere of usefulness; but for
+other things, like measles, mumps, the snuffles, or indigestion, it is
+said to be wonderfully efficacious. What I wanted to find out from you
+was just what composers were best for which specific troubles."
+
+"You'll have to go to somebody else for the information," said the
+Doctor. "I never heard of the theory, and, as I said before, I don't
+believe anybody else has, barring your own sweet self."
+
+"I have seen a reference to it somewhere," put in Mr. Whitechoker,
+coming to the Idiot's rescue. "As I recall the matter, some lady had
+been cured of a nervous affection by a scientific application of some
+musical poultice or other, and the general expectation seems to be that
+some day we shall find in music a cure for all our human ills, as the
+Idiot suggests."
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Whitechoker," said the Idiot, gratefully. "I saw that
+same item and several others besides, and I have only told the truth
+when I say that a large number of people are considering the
+possibilities of music as a substitute for drugs. I am surprised that
+Dr. Capsule has neither heard nor thought about it, for I should think
+it would prove to be a pleasant and profitable field for speculation.
+Even I, who am only a dabbler in medicine and know no more about it than
+the effects of certain remedies upon my own symptoms, have noticed that
+music of a certain sort is a sure emollient for nervous conditions."
+
+"For example?" said the Doctor. "Of course, we don't doubt your word;
+but when a man makes a statement based upon personal observation it is
+profitable to ask him what his precise experience has been, merely for
+the purpose of adding to our own knowledge."
+
+"Well," said the Idiot, "the first instance that I can recall is that of
+a Wagner opera and its effects upon me. For a number of years I suffered
+a great deal from insomnia. I could not get two hours of consecutive
+sleep, and the effect of my sufferings was to make me nervous and
+irritable. Suddenly somebody presented me with a couple of tickets for a
+performance of 'Parsifal,' and I went. It began at five o'clock in the
+afternoon. For twenty minutes all went serenely, and then the music
+began to work. I fell into a deep and refreshing slumber. The
+intermission came, and still I slept on. Everybody else went home,
+dressed for the evening part of the performance, had their dinner, and
+returned. Still I slept, and continued so to do until midnight, when one
+of the gentlemanly ushers came and waked me up, and told me that the
+performance was over. I rubbed my eyes, and looked about me. It was
+true--the great auditorium was empty, and was gradually darkening. I put
+on my hat and walked out refreshed, having slept from five-twenty until
+twelve, or six hours and forty minutes straight. That was one instance.
+Two weeks later I went again, this time to hear 'Goetterdaemmerung.' The
+results were the same, only the effect was instantaneous. The curtain
+had hardly risen before I retired to the little ante-room of the box our
+party occupied and dozed off into a fathomless sleep. I didn't wake up
+this time until nine o'clock the next day, the rest of the party having
+gone off without awakening me as a sort of joke. Clearly Wagner,
+according to my way of thinking, then, deserves to rank among the most
+effective narcotics known to modern science. I have tried all sorts of
+other things--sulfonal, trionel, bromide powders, and all the rest, and
+not one of them produced anything like the soporific results that two
+doses of Wagner brought about in one instant. And, best of all, there
+was no reaction: no splitting headache or shaky hand the next day, but
+just the calm, quiet, contented feeling that goes with the sense of
+having got completely rested up."
+
+"You run a dreadful risk, however," said the Doctor, with a sarcastic
+smile. "The Wagner habit is a terrible thing to acquire, Mr. Idiot."
+
+"That may be," said the Idiot; "worse than the sulfonal habit by a great
+deal, I am told; but I am in no danger of becoming a victim to it while
+it costs from five to seven dollars a dose. In addition to this
+experience, I have also the testimony of a friend of mine who was cured
+of a frightful attack of the colic by Sullivan's 'Lost Chord,' played on
+a cornet. He had spent the day down at Asbury Park, and had eaten not
+wisely but too copiously. Among other things that he turned loose in his
+inner man were two plates of lobster salad, a glass of fresh cider, and
+a saucerful of pistache ice-cream. He was a painter by profession, and
+the color scheme he thus introduced into his digestive apparatus was too
+much for his artistic soul. He was not fitted by temperament to
+assimilate anything quite so strenuously chromatic as that, and, as a
+consequence, shortly after he had retired to his studio for the night,
+the conflicting tints began to get in their deadly work, and within two
+hours he was completely doubled up. The pain he suffered was awful.
+Agony was bliss alongside of the pangs that now afflicted him, and all
+the palliatives and pain-killers known to man were tried without avail,
+and then, just as he was about to give himself up for lost, an amateur
+cornetist who occupied a studio on the floor above began to play the
+'Lost Chord.' A counter-pain set in immediately. At the second bar of
+the 'Lost Chord' the awful pain that was gradually gnawing away at his
+vitals seemed to lose its poignancy in the face of the greater
+suffering, and physical relief was instant. As the musician proceeded,
+the internal disorder yielded gradually to the external and finally
+passed away, entirely leaving him so far from prostrate that by 1 A. M.
+he was out of bed and actually girding himself with a shot-gun and
+an Indian club to go up-stairs for a physical encounter with the
+cornetist."
+
+"And you reason from this that Sullivan's 'Lost Chord' is a cure for
+cholera morbus, eh?" sneered the Doctor.
+
+"It would seem so," said the Idiot. "While the music continued my friend
+was a well man, ready to go out and fight like a warrior; but when the
+cornetist stopped the colic returned, and he had to fight it out in the
+old way. In these incidents in my own experience I find ample
+justification for my belief, and that of others, that some day the music
+cure for human ailments will be recognized and developed to the full.
+Families going off to the country for the summer, instead of taking a
+medicine-chest along with them, will be provided with a music-box with
+cylinders for mumps, measles, summer complaint, whooping-cough,
+chicken-pox, chills and fever, and all the other ills the flesh is heir
+to. Scientific experiment will demonstrate before long just what
+composition will cure specific ills. If a baby has whooping-cough, an
+anxious mother, instead of ringing up the doctor, will go to the piano
+and give the child a dose of 'Hiawatha.' If a small boy goes swimming
+and catches a cold in his head and is down with a fever, his nurse, an
+expert on the accordion, can bring him back to health again with three
+bars of 'Under the Bamboo Tree' after each meal. Instead of dosing the
+kids with cod-liver oil when they need a tonic, they will be set to work
+at a mechanical piano and braced up on 'Narcissus.' 'There'll Be a Hot
+Time in the Old Town To-night' will become an effective remedy for a
+sudden chill. People suffering from sleeplessness can dose themselves
+back to normal conditions with Wagner the way I did. Tchaikowsky, to be
+well shaken before taken, will be an effective remedy for a torpid
+liver, and the man or woman who suffers from lassitude will doubtless
+find in the lively airs of our two-step composers an efficient tonic to
+bring their vitality up to a high standard of activity. Nothing in it?
+Why, Doctor, there's more in it that's in sight to-day that is promising
+and suggestive of great things in the future than there was of the
+principle of gravitation in the rude act of that historic pippin that
+left the parent tree and swatted Sir Isaac Newton on the nose."
+
+"And the drug stores will be driven out of business, I presume," said
+the Doctor.
+
+"No," said the Idiot. "They will substitute music for drugs, that is
+all. Every man who can afford it will have his own medical phonograph,
+or music-box, and the drug stores will sell cylinders and records for
+them instead of quinine, carbonate of soda, squills, paregoric, and
+other nasty-tasting things they have now. This alone will serve to
+popularize sickness, and, instead of being driven out of business, their
+trade will pick up."
+
+"And the doctor, and the doctor's gig, and all the appurtenances of his
+profession--what becomes of them?" demanded the Doctor.
+
+"We'll have to have the doctor just the same to prescribe for us, only
+he will have to be a musician, but the gig--I'm afraid that will have to
+go," said the Idiot.
+
+"And why, pray?" asked the Doctor. "Because there are no more drugs,
+must the physician walk?"
+
+"Not at all," said the Idiot. "But he'd be better equipped if he drove
+about in a piano-organ or, if he preferred, an auto on a
+steam-calliope."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+HE DEFENDS CAMPAIGN METHODS
+
+
+"Good-morning, gentlemen," said the Idiot, cheerily, as he entered the
+breakfast-room. "This is a fine Sunday morning in spite of the gloom
+into which the approaching death of the campaign should plunge us all."
+
+"You think that, do you?" observed the Bibliomaniac. "Well, I don't
+agree with you. I for one am sick and tired of politics, and it will be
+a great relief to me when it is all over."
+
+"Dear me, what a blase old customer you are, Mr. Bib," returned the
+Idiot. "Do you mean to say that a Presidential campaign does not keep
+your nerve-centres in a constant state of pleasurable titillation? Why,
+to me it is what a bag full of nuts must be to a squirrel. I fairly
+gloat over these quadrennial political campaigns of ours. They are to me
+among the most exhilarating institutions of modern life. They satisfy
+all one's zest for warfare without the distressing shedding of blood
+which attends real war, and regarded from the standpoint of humor, I
+know of nothing that, to the eye of an ordinarily keen observer, is more
+provocative of good, honest, wholesome mirth."
+
+"I don't see it," said Mr. Bib. "To my mind, the average political
+campaign is just a vulgar scrap in which men who ought to know better
+descend to all sorts of despicable trickery merely to gain the
+emoluments of office. This quest for the flesh-pots of politics, so far
+from being diverting, is, to my notion, one of the most deplorable
+exhibitions of human weakness that modern civilization, so called, has
+produced. A couple of men are put up for the most dignified office known
+to the world--both are gentlemen by birth and education, men of honor,
+men who, you would think, would scorn baseness as they hate poison--and
+then what happens? For three weary months the followers of each attack
+the character and intelligence of the other until, if you really
+believed what was said of either, neither in your estimation would have
+a shred of reputation left. Is that either diverting or elevating or
+educational or, indeed, anything but deplorable?"
+
+"It's perfectly fine," said the Idiot, "to think that we have men in the
+country whose characters are such that they can stand four months of
+such a test. That's what I find elevating in it. When a man who is
+nominated for the Presidency in June or July can emerge in November
+unscathed in spite of the minute scrutiny to which himself and his
+record and the record of his sisters and his cousins and his aunts have
+been subjected, it's time for the American rooster to get upon his hind
+legs and give three cheers for himself and the people to whom he
+belongs. Even old Diogenes, who spent his life looking for an honest
+man, would have to admit every four years that he could spot him
+instantly by merely coming to this country and taking his choice from
+among the several candidates."
+
+"You must admit, however," said the Bibliomaniac, "that a man with an
+honorable name must find it unpleasant to have such outrageous stories
+told of him."
+
+"Not a bit of it," laughed the Idiot. "The more outrageous the better.
+For instance, when _The Sunday Jigger_ comes out with a four-page
+revelation of your Republican candidate's past, in which we learn how,
+in 1873, he put out the eyes of a maiden aunt with a red-hot poker, and
+stabbed a negro cook in the back with a skewer, because she would not
+permit him to put rat-poison in his grandfather's coffee, you know
+perfectly well that that story has been put forth for the purpose of
+turning the maiden aunt, negro, and grandfather votes against him. You
+know well enough that he either never did what is charged against him,
+or at least that the story is greatly exaggerated--he may have stuck a
+pin into the cook, and played some boyish trick upon some of his
+relatives--but the story on the face of it is untrue and therefore
+harmless. Similarly with the Democratic candidate. When the _Daily Flim
+Flam_ asserts that he believes that the working-man is entitled to four
+cents a day for sixteen hours' work, and has repeatedly avowed that
+bread and water is the proper food for motormen, everybody with
+common-sense realizes at once that even the _Flim Flam_ doesn't believe
+the story. It hurts no one, therefore, and provokes a great deal of
+innocent mirth. You don't yourself believe that last yarn about the
+Prohibition candidate, do you?"
+
+"I haven't heard any yarn about him," said the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"That he is the owner of a brewery up in Rochester, and backs fifteen
+saloons and a pool-room in New York?" said the Idiot.
+
+"Of course I don't," said the Bibliomaniac. "Who does?"
+
+"Nobody," said the Idiot; "and therefore the story doesn't hurt the
+man's reputation a bit, or interfere with his chances of election in the
+least. Take that other story published in a New York newspaper that on
+the 10th of last August Thompson Bondifeller's yacht was seen anchored
+for six hours off Tom Watson's farm, two hundred miles from the sea, and
+that the Populist candidate, disguised as a bank president, went off
+with the trust magnate on a cruise from Atlanta, Georgia, to
+Oklahoma--you don't believe that, do you?"
+
+"It's preposterous on the face of it," said Mr. Bib.
+
+"Well, that's the way the thing works," said the Idiot. "And that's why
+I think there's a lot of bully good fun to be had out of a political
+campaign. I love anything that arouses the imagination of a people too
+much given over to the pursuit of the cold, hard dollar. If it wasn't
+for these quadrennial political campaigns to spur the fancy on to
+glorious flights we should become a dull, hard, prosaic, unimaginative
+people, and that would be death to progress. No people can progress that
+lacks imagination. Politics is an emery-wheel that keeps our wits
+polished."
+
+"Well, granting all that you say is true," said the Bibliomaniac, "the
+intrusion upon a man's private life that politics makes possible--surely
+you cannot condone that."
+
+The Idiot laughed.
+
+"That's the strangest argument of all," he said. "The very idea of a man
+who deliberately chooses public life as the sphere of his activities
+seeking to hide behind his private life is preposterous. The fellow who
+does that, Mr. Bib, wants to lead a double life, and that is
+reprehensible. The man who offers himself to the people hasn't any
+business to tie a string to any part of him. If Jim Jones wants to be
+President of the United States the people who are asked to put him there
+have a right to know what kind of a person Jim Jones is in his
+dressing-gown and slippers. If he beats his mother-in-law, and eats
+asparagus with the sugar-tongs, and doesn't pay his grocer, the public
+have a right to know it. If he has children, the voters are perfectly
+justified in asking what kind of children they are, since the voters own
+the White House furniture, and if the Jim Jones children wipe their
+feet on plush chairs, and shoot holes in the paintings with their
+bean-snappers and putty-blowers, Uncle Sam, as a landlord and owner of
+the premises, ought to be warned beforehand. You wouldn't yourself rent
+a furnished residence to a man whose children were known to have built
+bonfires in the parlor of their last known home, would you?"
+
+"I think not," smiled the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Then you cannot complain if Uncle Sam is equally solicitous about the
+personal paraphernalia of the man who asks to occupy his little cottage
+on the Potomac," said the Idiot. "So it happens that when a man runs for
+the Presidency the persons who intrude upon his private life, as you put
+it, are conferring a real service upon their fellow-citizens. When I
+hear from an authentic source that Mr. So-and-So, the candidate of the
+Thisorthatic party for the Presidency, is married to an estimable lady
+who refers to all Frenchmen as parricides, because she believes they
+have come from Paris, I have a right to consider whether or not I wish
+to vote to place such a lady at the head of my official table at White
+House banquets, where she is likely, sooner or later, to encounter the
+French ambassador, and the man who gives me the necessary information is
+doing me a service. You may say that the lady is not running for a
+public office, and that, therefore, she should be protected from public
+scrutiny, but that is a fallacy. A man's wife is his better half and his
+children are a good part of the remainder, and what they do or don't do
+becomes a matter of legitimate public concern. As a matter of fact, a
+public man _can_ have no private life."
+
+"Then you approve of these stories of candidates' cousins, the prattling
+anecdotes of their grandchildren, these paragraphs narrating the doings
+of their uncles-in-law, and all that?" sneered the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Certainly, I do," said the Idiot. "When I hear that Judge Torkin's
+grandson, aged four, has come out for his grandfather's opponent I am
+delighted, and give the judge credit for the independent spirit which
+heredity accounts for; when it is told to me that Tom Watson's uncle is
+going to vote for Tom because he knows Tom doesn't believe what he says,
+I am almost inclined to vote for him as the uncle of his country; when I
+hear that Debs's son, aged three, has punched his daddy in the eye, on
+general principles I feel that there's a baby I want in the White House;
+and when it is told to me that the Prohibition candidate's third cousin
+has just been cured of delirium tremens, I feel that possibly there is a
+family average there that may be struck to the advantage of the
+country."
+
+"Say, Mr. Idiot," put in the Poet, at this point, "who are you going to
+vote for, anyhow?"
+
+"Don't ask me," laughed the Idiot. "I don't know yet. I admire all the
+candidates personally very much."
+
+"But what are your politics--Republican or Democratic?" asked the
+Lawyer.
+
+"Oh, that's different," said the Idiot. "I'm a Sammycrat."
+
+"A what?" cried the Idiot's fellow-boarders in unison.
+
+"A Sammycrat," said the Idiot. "I'm for Uncle Sam every time. He's the
+best ever."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+ON SHORT COURSES AT COLLEGE
+
+
+Mr. Pedagog threw down the morning paper with an ejaculation of
+impatience.
+
+"I don't know what on earth we are coming to!" he said, stirring his
+coffee vigorously. "These new-fangled notions of our college presidents
+seem to me to be destructive in their tendency."
+
+"What's up now? Somebody flunked a football team?" asked the Idiot.
+
+"No, I quite approve of that," said Mr. Pedagog; "but this matter of
+reducing the college course from four to two years is so radical a
+suggestion that I tremble for the future of education."
+
+"Oh, I wouldn't if I were you, Mr. Pedagog," said the Idiot. "Your
+trembling won't help matters any, and, after all, when men like
+President Eliot of Harvard and Dr. Butler of Columbia recommend the
+short course the idea must have some virtue."
+
+"Well, if it stops where they do I don't suppose any great harm will be
+done," said Mr. Pedagog. "But what guarantee have we that fifty years
+from now some successor to these gentlemen won't propose a one-year
+course?"
+
+"None," said the Idiot. "Fact is, we don't want any guarantee--or at
+least I don't. They can turn colleges into bicycle academies fifty years
+from now for all I care. I expect to be doing time in some other sphere
+fifty years from now, so why should I vex my soul about it?"
+
+"That's rather a selfish view, isn't it, Mr. Idiot?" asked Mr.
+Whitechoker. "Don't you wish to see the world getting better and better
+every day?"
+
+"No," said the Idiot. "It's so mighty good as it is, this bully old
+globe, that I hate to see people monkeying with it all the time. Of
+course, I wasn't around it in the old days, but I don't believe the
+world's any better off now than it was in the days of Adam."
+
+"Great Heavens! What a thing to say!" cried the Poet.
+
+"Well, I've said it," rejoined the Idiot. "What has it all come to,
+anyhow--all this business of man's trying to better the world? It's just
+added to his expenses, that's all. And what does he get out of it that
+Adam didn't get? Money? Adam didn't need money. He had his garden truck,
+his tailor, his fuel supply, his amusements--all the things we have to
+pay cash for--right in his backyard. All he had to do was to reach out
+and take what we fellows nowadays have to toil eight or ten hours a day
+to earn. Literature? His position was positively enviable as far as
+literature is concerned. He had the situation in his own hands. He
+wasn't prevented from writing 'Hamlet,' as I am, because somebody else
+had already done it. He didn't have to sit up till midnight seven nights
+a week to keep up with the historical novels of the day. Art? There were
+pictures on every side of him, splendid in color, instinct of life,
+perfect in their technique, and all from the hand of that first of Old
+Masters, Nature herself. He hadn't any Rosa Bonheurs or Landseers on his
+farm, but he could get all the cow pictures he wanted from the back
+window of his bungalow without their costing him a cent. Drama? Life was
+a succession of rising curtains to Adam, and while, of course, he had
+the errant Eve to deal with, the garden was free from Notorious Mrs.
+Ebbsmiths, there wasn't a Magda from one end of the apple-orchard to the
+other, and not a First, Second, or Third Mrs. Tanqueray in sight. Music?
+The woods were full of it--the orioles singing their cantatas, the
+nightingales warbling their concertos, the eagles screeching out their
+Wagnerian measures, the bluejays piping their intermezzos, and no
+Italian organ-grinders doing De Koven under his window from one year's
+end to the other. Gorry! I wish sometimes Adam had known a good thing
+when he had it and hadn't broken the monologue."
+
+"The what?" demanded Mr. Brief.
+
+"The monologue," repeated the Idiot. "The one commandment. If ten
+commandments make a decalogue, one commandment makes a monologue,
+doesn't it?"
+
+"You're a philologist and a half," said the Bibliomaniac, with a laugh.
+
+"No credit to me," returned the Idiot. "A ten years' residence in this
+boarding-house has resulted practically in my having enjoyed a diet of
+words. I have literally eaten syllables--"
+
+"I hope you haven't eaten any of your own," said the Bibliomaniac. "That
+would ruin the digestion of an ostrich."
+
+"That's true enough," said the Idiot. "Rich foods will overthrow any
+kind of a digestion in the long run. But to come back to the college
+tendencies, Mr. Pedagog, it is my belief that in this short-course
+business we haven't more than started. It's my firm conviction that some
+day we shall find universities conferring degrees 'while you wait,' as
+it were. A man, for instance, visiting Boston for a week will some day
+be able to run out to Harvard, pay a small fee, pass an examination,
+and get a bachelor's degree, as a sort of souvenir of his visit; another
+chap, coming to New York for a brief holiday, instead of stealing a
+spoon from the Waldorf for his collection of souvenirs, can ring up
+Columbia College, tell 'em all he knows over the wire, and get a
+sheepskin by return mail; while at New Haven you'll be able to stop off
+at the railway station and buy your B. A. at the lunch-counter--they may
+even go so far as to let the newsboys on the train confer them without
+making the applicant get off at all. Then the golden age of education
+will begin. There'll be more college graduates to the square inch than
+you can now find in any ten square miles in Massachusetts, and our
+professional men, instead of beginning the long wait at thirty, will be
+in full practice at twenty-one."
+
+"That is the limit!" ejaculated Mr. Brief.
+
+"Oh, no indeed," said the Idiot. "There's another step. That's the
+gramophone course, in which a man won't have to leave home at all to
+secure a degree from any college he chooses. By tabulating his knowledge
+and dictating it into a gramophone he can send the cylinder to the
+university authorities, have it carefully examined, and receive his
+degree on a postal-card within forty-eight hours. That strikes me as
+being the limit, unless some of the ten-cent magazines offer an LL. D.
+degree with a set of Kipling and a punching-bag as a premium for a one
+year's subscription."
+
+"And you think that will be a good thing?" demanded the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"No, I didn't say so," said the Idiot. "In one respect I think it would
+be a very bad thing. Such a method would involve the utter destruction
+of the football and rowing seasons, unless the universities took some
+decided measures looking toward the preservation of these branches of
+undergraduate endeavor. It is coming to be recognized as a fact that a
+man can be branded with the mark of intellectual distinction in
+absentia, as the Aryan tribes used to put it, but a man can't win
+athletic prowess without giving the matter attention in propria
+persona, to adopt the phraseology of the days of Uncle Remus. You can't
+stroke a crew by mail any more than you can stroke a cat by freight, and
+it doesn't make any difference how wonderful he may be physically, a
+Yale man selling dry-goods out in Nebraska can't play football with a
+Harvard student employed in a grocery store at New Orleans by telephone.
+You can do it with chess, but not with basket ball. There are some
+things in university life that require the individual attention of the
+student. Unless something is done by our colleges, then, to care for
+this very important branch of their service to growing youth, the new
+scheme will meet with much opposition from the public."
+
+"What would you, in your infinite wisdom, suggest?" asked the Doctor.
+"The wise man, when he points out an objection to another's plans,
+suggests a remedy."
+
+"That's easy," said the Idiot. "I should have what I should call
+residential terms for those who wished to avail themselves of athletic
+training under academic auspices. The leading colleges could announce
+that they were open for business from October 1st to December 1st for
+the study of the Theory and Practice of Gridirony--"
+
+"Excuse me," said Mr. Pedagog. "But what was that word?"
+
+"Gridirony," observed the Idiot. "That would be my idea of the proper
+academic designation of a course in football, a game which is played on
+the gridiron. It is more euphonious than goalology or leather spheroids,
+which have suggested themselves to me."
+
+"Go on!" sighed the Doctor. "As a word-mint you are unrivalled."
+
+"There could be a term in baseballistics; another in lacrossetics; a
+fourth in aquatics, and so on all through the list of intercollegiate
+sports, each in the season best suited to its completest development."
+
+"It's not a bad idea, that," said Mr. Pedagog. "A parent sending his boy
+to college under such conditions would have a fairly good idea of what
+the lad was doing. As matters are now, it's a question whether the
+undergraduate acquires as much of Euripides as he does of Travis, and as
+far as I can find out there are more Yale men around who know all about
+Bob Cook and Hinkey than there are who are versed in Chaucer, Milton,
+and Shakespeare."
+
+"But what have these things to do with the arts?" asked Mr. Whitechoker.
+"A man may know all about golf, base and foot ball and rowing, and yet
+be far removed from the true ideals of culture. You couldn't give a man
+a B. A. degree because he was a perfect quarter rush, or whatever else
+it is they call him."
+
+"That's a good criticism," observed the Idiot, "and there isn't a doubt
+in my mind that the various faculties of our various colleges will meet
+it by the establishment of a new degree which shall cover the case."
+
+"Again I would suggest that it is up to you to cover that point," said
+Mr. Brief. "You have outlined a pretty specific scheme. The notion that
+you haven't brains enough to invent a particular degree is to my mind
+preposterous."
+
+"Right," said the Idiot. "And I think I have it. When I was in college
+they used to confer a degree upon chaps who didn't quite succeed in
+passing their finals which was known as A. B. Sp. Gr.--they were mostly
+fellows who had played more football than Herodotus who got them. The
+Sp. Gr. meant 'by special favor of the Faculty.' I think I should
+advocate that, only changing its meaning to 'Great Sport.'"
+
+Mr. Pedagog laughed heartily. "You are a great Idiot," he said. "I
+wonder they don't call you to a full professorship of idiocy somewhere."
+
+"I guess it's because they know I wouldn't go," said the Idiot.
+
+"Did you say you were in college ever?" sneered the Bibliomaniac, rising
+from the table.
+
+"Yes," said the Idiot. "I went to Columbia for two weeks in the early
+nineties. I got a special A. B. at the beginning of the third week for
+my proficiency in sciolism and horseplay. I used a pony in an
+examination and stuck too closely to the text."
+
+"You talk like it," snapped the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Thank you," returned the Idiot, suavely. "I ought to. I was one of the
+few men in my class who really earned his degree by persistent effort."
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+THE HORSE SHOW
+
+
+"I suppose, Mr. Idiot," observed Mr. Brief, as the Idiot took his
+accustomed place at the breakfast-table, "that you have been putting in
+a good deal of your time this week at the Horse Show?"
+
+"Yes," said the Idiot, "I was there every night it was open. I go to all
+the shows--Horse, Dog, Baby, Flower, Electrical--it doesn't matter what.
+It's first-rate fun."
+
+"Pretty fine lot of horses, this year?" asked the Doctor.
+
+"Don't know," said the Idiot. "I heard there were some there, but I
+didn't see 'em."
+
+"What?" cried the Doctor. "Went to the Horse Show and didn't see the
+horses?"
+
+"No," said the Idiot. "Why should I? I don't know a cob from a lazy
+back. Of course I know that the four-legged beast that goes when you say
+get ap is a horse, but beyond that my equine education has been
+neglected. I can see all the horses I want to look at on the street,
+anyhow."
+
+"Then what in thunder do you go to the Horse Show for?" demanded the
+Bibliomaniac. "To sleep?"
+
+"No," rejoined the Idiot. "It's too noisy for that. I go to see the
+people. People are far more interesting to me than horses, and I get
+more solid fun out of seeing the nabobs go through their paces than
+could be got out of a million nags of high degree kicking up their heels
+in the ring. If they'd make the horses do all sorts of stunts, it might
+be different, but they don't. They show you the same old stuff year in
+and year out, and things that you can see almost any fine day in the
+Park during the season. You and I know that a four-horse team can pull a
+tally-ho coach around without breaking its collective neck. We know that
+two horses harnessed together fore and aft instead of abreast are
+called a tandem, and can drag a cart on two wheels and about a mile high
+a reasonable distance without falling dead. There isn't anything new or
+startling in their performance, and why anybody should pay to see them
+doing the commonplace, every-day act I don't know. It isn't as if they
+had a lot of thoroughbreds on exhibition who could sit down at a table
+and play a round of bridge whist or poker. That would be worth seeing.
+So would a horse that could play 'Cavalleria Rusticana' on the piano,
+but when it comes to dragging a hansom-cab or a grocery-wagon around the
+tanbark, why, it seems to me to lack novelty."
+
+"The idea of a horse playing bridge whist!" jeered the Bibliomaniac.
+"What a preposterous proposition!"
+
+"Well, I've seen fellows with less sense than the average horse make a
+pretty good stab at it at the club," said the Idiot. "Perhaps my
+suggestion is extreme, but I put it that way merely to emphasize my
+point. I've seen an educated pig play cards, though, and I don't see
+why they can't put the horse through very much the same course of
+treatment and teach him to do something that would make him more of an
+object of interest when he has his week of glory. I don't care what it
+is as long as it is out of the ordinary."
+
+"There is nothing in the world that is more impressive than a fine horse
+in action," said the Doctor. "What you suggest would take away from his
+dignity and make him a freak."
+
+"I didn't say it wouldn't," rejoined the Idiot. "In fact, my remarks
+implied that it would. You don't quite understand my meaning. If I owned
+a stable I'd much rather my horses didn't play bridge whist, because, in
+all probability, they'd be sending into the house at all hours of the
+night asking me to come over to the barn and make a fourth hand. It's
+bad enough having your neighbors doing that sort of thing without
+encouraging your horse to go into the business. Nor would it please me
+as a lover of horseback-riding to have a mount that could play grand
+opera on the piano. The chances are it would spoil three good
+things--the horse, the piano, and the opera--but if I were getting up a
+show and asking people from all over the country to pay good money to
+get into it, then I should want just such things. In the ordinary daily
+pursuits of equine life the horse suits me just as he is, but for the
+extraordinary requirements of an exhibition he lacks diverting
+qualities. He's more solemn than a play by Sudermann or Blanketty
+Bjornsen; he is as lacking in originality as a comic-opera score by Sir
+Reginald de Bergerac, and his drawing powers, outside of cab-work, as
+far as I am concerned, are absolutely nil. A horse that can draw a
+picture I'd travel miles to see. A horse that can't draw anything but a
+T-cart or an ice-wagon hasn't two cents' worth of interest in my eyes."
+
+"But can't you see the beauty in the action of a horse?" demanded the
+Doctor.
+
+"It all depends on his actions," said the Idiot. "I've seen horses whose
+actions were highly uncivilized."
+
+"I mean his form--not his behavior," said the Doctor.
+
+"Well, I've never understood enough about horses to speak intelligently
+on that point," observed the Idiot. "It's incomprehensible to me how
+your so-called judges reason. If a horse trots along hiking his
+fore-legs 'way up in the air as if he were grinding an invisible
+hand-organ with both feet, people rave over his high-stepping and call
+him all sorts of fine names. But if he does the same thing with his
+hind-legs they call it springhalt or stringhalt, or something of that
+kind, and set him down as a beastly old plug. The scheme seems to me to
+be inconsistent, and if I were a horse I'm blessed if I think I'd know
+what to do. How a thing can be an accomplishment in front and a blemish
+behind is beyond me, but there is the fact. They give a blue ribbon to
+the front-hiker and kick the hind-hiker out of the show altogether--they
+wouldn't even pin a Bryan button on his breast."
+
+"I fancy a baby show is about your size," said the Doctor.
+
+"Well--yes," said the Idiot, "I guess perhaps you are right, as far as
+the exhibit is concerned. There's something almost human about a baby,
+and it's the human element always that takes hold of me. It's the human
+element in the Horse Show that takes me and most other people as well.
+Fact is, so many go to see the people and so few to see the horses that
+I have an idea that some day they'll have it with only one horse--just
+enough of a nag to enable them to call it a Horse Show--and pay proper
+attention to the real things that make it a success even now."
+
+The Doctor sniffed contemptuously. "What factors in your judgment
+contribute most to the success of the Horse Show?" he asked.
+
+"Duds chiefly," said the Idiot, "and the people who are inside of them.
+If there were a law passed requiring every woman who goes to the Horse
+Show to wear a simple gown in order not to scare the horses, ninety per
+cent. of 'em would stay at home, and all the blue-ribbon steeds in
+creation couldn't drag them to the Garden--and nobody'd blame them for
+it, either. Similarly with the men. You don't suppose for an instant, do
+you, that young Hawkins Van Bluevane would give seven cents for the
+Horse Show if it didn't give him a chance to appear every afternoon in
+his Carnegie plaid waistcoat?"
+
+"That's a new one on me," said Mr. Brief. "Is there such a thing as a
+Carnegie plaid?"
+
+"It's the most popular that ever came out of Scotland," said the Idiot.
+"It's called the Carnegie because of the size of the checks. Then
+there's poor old Jimmie Varickstreet--the last remnant of a first
+family--hasn't enough money to keep a goat-wagon, and couldn't tell you
+the difference between a saw-horse and a crupper. He gives up his hall
+bedroom Horse-Show week and lives in the place day and night, covering
+up the delinquencies of his afternoon and evening clothes with a long
+yellow ulster with buttons like butter-saucers distributed all over his
+person--"
+
+"Where did he get it, if he's so beastly poor?" demanded the Lawyer.
+
+"He's gone without food and drink and clothes that don't show. He has
+scrimped and saved, and denied himself for a year to get up a gaudy
+shell in which for six glorious days to shine resplendent," said the
+Idiot. "Jimmie lives for those six days, and as you see him flitting
+from box to box and realize that he is an opulent swell for six days of
+every year, and a poor, down-trodden exile for the rest of the time, you
+don't grudge him his little diversion and almost wish you had sufficient
+will power to deny yourself the luxuries and some of the necessities of
+life as well to get a coat like that. If I had my way they'd award
+Jimmie Varickstreet at least an honorable mention as one of the most
+interesting exhibits in the whole show.
+
+"And there are plenty of others. There's raw material enough in that
+Horse Show to make it a permanent exhibition if the managers would only
+get together and lick it into shape. As a sort of social zoo it is
+unsurpassed, and why they don't classify the various sections of it I
+can't see. In the first place, imagine a dozen boxes filled with members
+of the Four Hundred, men and women whose names have become household
+words, and wearing on their backs garments made by the deft fingers of
+the greatest sartorial artists of the ages. You and I walk in and are
+permitted to gaze upon this glorious assemblage--the American
+nobility--in its gayest environment. Wouldn't it interest you to know
+that that very beautiful woman in the lavender creation, wrapped up in a
+billion-dollar pearl necklace, is the famous Mrs. Bollington-Jones, who
+holds the divorce championship of South Dakota, and that those two chaps
+who are talking to her so vivaciously are two of her ex-husbands, Van
+Bibber Beaconhill and 'Tommy' Fitz Greenwich? Wouldn't it interest you
+more than any horse in the ring to know that her gown was turned out at
+Mrs. Robert Bluefern's Dud Studio at a cost of nine thousand seven
+hundred and fifty dollars, hat included? Yet the programme says never a
+word about these people. Every horse that trots in has a number so that
+you can tell who and what and why he is, but there are no placards on
+Mrs. Bollington-Jones by which she may be identified.
+
+"Then on the promenade, there is Hooker Van Winkle. He's out on bail for
+killing a farmer with his automobile up in Connecticut somewhere. There
+is young Walston Addlepate, whose father pays him a salary of
+twenty-five thousand dollars a year for keeping out of business. There's
+Jimson Gooseberry, the cotillon leader, whose name is on every lip
+during the season. Approaching you, dressed in gorgeous furs, is Mrs.
+Dinningforth Winter, who declined to meet Prince Henry when he was here,
+because of a previous engagement to dine with Tolby Robinson's pet
+monkey just in from a cruise in the Indies. And so it goes. The place
+fairly shrieks with celebrities whose names appear in the _Social
+Register_, and whose photographs in pink and green are the stock in
+trade of the Sunday newspapers of saffron tendencies everywhere--but
+what is done about it? Nothing at all. They come and go, conspicuous
+but unidentified, and wasting their notoriety on the desert air. It is a
+magnificent opportunity wasted, and, unless you happen to know these
+people by sight, you miss a thousand and one little points which are the
+_sine qua non_ of the show."
+
+"I wonder you don't write another Baedeker," said the
+Bibliomaniac--"_The Idiot's Hand-book to the Horse Show, or Who's Who
+at the Garden._"
+
+"It would be a good idea," said the Idiot. "But the show people must
+take the initiative. The whole thing needs a live manager."
+
+"A sort of Ward MacAllister again?" asked Mr. Brief.
+
+"No, not exactly," said the Idiot. "Society has plenty of successors to
+Ward MacAllister. What they seem to me to need most is a P. T. Barnum. A
+man like that could make society a veritable Klondike, and with the
+Horse Show as a nucleus he wouldn't have much trouble getting the thing
+started along."
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+SUGGESTION TO CHRISTMAS SHOPPERS
+
+
+"By Jingo!" said the Idiot, as he wearily took his place at the
+breakfast-table the other morning, "but I'm just regularly tuckered
+out."
+
+"Late hours again?" asked the Lawyer.
+
+"Not a late hour," returned the Idiot. "Matter of fact, I went to bed
+last night at half-after seven and never waked until nine this morning.
+In spite of all that sleep and rest I feel now as if I'd been put
+through a threshing-machine. Every bone in my body from the funny to the
+medulla aches like all possessed, and my joints creak like a new pair of
+shoes on a school-boy in church, they are so stiff."
+
+"Oh well," said the Doctor, "what of it? The pace that kills is bound
+to have some symptoms preliminary to dissolution. If you, like other
+young men of the age, burn the candle at both ends and in the middle,
+what can you expect? You push nature into a corner and then growl like
+all possessed because she rebels."
+
+"Not I," retorted the Idiot. "Mr. Pedagog and the Poet and Mr. Bib may
+lead the strenuous life, but as for mine the simple life is the thing.
+I'm not striving after the unattainable. I'm not wasting my physical
+substance in riotous living. The cold and clammy touch of dissipation is
+not writing letters of burning condemnation proceedings on my brow.
+Excesses in any form are utterly unknown to me, and from one end of the
+Subway to the other you won't find another man of my age who in general
+takes better care of himself. I am as watchful of my own needs as though
+I were a baby and my own nurse at one and the same time. No mother could
+watch over her offspring more tenderly than I watch over me, and--"
+
+"Well, then, what in thunder is the matter with you?" cried the Lawyer,
+irritated. "If this is all true, why on earth are you proclaiming
+yourself as a physical wreck? There must be some cause for your
+condition."
+
+"There is," said the Idiot, meekly. "I went Christmas shopping yesterday
+without having previously trained for it, and this is the result. I
+sometimes wonder, Doctor, that you gentlemen, who have the public health
+more or less in your hands, don't take the initiative and stave off
+nervous prostration and other ills attendant upon a run-down physical
+condition instead of waiting for a fully developed case and trying to
+cure it after the fact. The ounce-of-prevention idea ought to be
+incorporated, it seems to me, into the _materia medica_."
+
+"What would you have us do, move mountains?" demanded the Doctor. "I'm
+not afraid to tackle almost any kind of fever known to medical science,
+but the shopping-fever--well, it is incurable. Once it gets hold of a
+man or a woman, and more especially a woman, there isn't anything that
+I know of can get it out of the system. I grant you that it is as much
+of a disease as scarlet, typhoid, or any other, but the mind has not yet
+been discovered that can find a remedy for it short of abject poverty,
+and even that has been known to fail."
+
+"That's true enough," said the Idiot, "but what you can do is to make it
+harmless. There are lots of diseases that our forefathers used to regard
+as necessarily fatal that nowadays we look upon as mere trifles, because
+people can be put physically into such a condition that they are
+practically immune to their ravages."
+
+"Maybe so--but if people will shop they are going to be knocked out by
+it. I don't see that we doctors can do anything to mitigate the evil
+effects of the consequences _ab initio_. After the event we can pump you
+full of quinine and cod-liver oil and build you up again, but the ounce
+of prevention for shopping troubles is as easily attainable as a ton of
+radium to a man with eight cents and a cancelled postage-stamp in his
+pocket," said the Doctor.
+
+"Nonsense, Doctor. You're only fooling," said the Idiot. "A college
+president might as well say that boys will play football, and that
+there's nothing they can do to stave off the inevitable consequences of
+playing the game to one who isn't prepared for it. You know as well as
+anybody else that from November 15th to December 24th every year an
+epidemic of shopping is going to break out in our midst. You know that
+it will rage violently in the last stage beginning December 15th, thanks
+to our habit of leaving everything to the last minute. You know that the
+men and women in your care, unless they have properly trained for the
+exigencies of the epidemic period, will be prostrated physically and
+nervously, racked in bone and body, aching from tip to toe, their energy
+exhausted and their spines as limp as a rag, and yet you claim you can
+do nothing. What would we think of a football trainer who would try thus
+to account for the condition of his eleven at the end of a season? We'd
+bounce him, that's what."
+
+"Perhaps that gigantic intellect of yours has something to suggest,"
+sneered the Doctor.
+
+"Certainly," quoth the Idiot. "I dreamed it all out in my sleep last
+night. I dreamed that you and I together had started a series of
+establishments all over the country--"
+
+"To eradicate the shopping evil?" laughed the Doctor. "A sort of Keeley
+Cure for shopping inebriates?"
+
+"Nay, nay," retorted the Idiot. "The shopping inebriate is too much of a
+factor in our commercial prosperity to make such a thing as that
+popular. My scheme was a sort of shopnasium."
+
+"A what?" roared the Doctor.
+
+"A shopnasium," explained the Idiot. "We have gymnasiums in which we
+teach gymnastics. Why not have a shopnasium in which to teach what we
+might call shopnastics? Just think of what a boon it would be for a lot
+of delicate women, for instance, who know that along about
+Christmas-time they must hie them forth to the department stores, there
+to be crushed and mauled and pulled and hauled until there is scarcely
+anything left to them, to feel that they could come to our shopnasium
+and there be trained for the ordeal which they cannot escape."
+
+"Very nice," said the Doctor. "But how on earth can you train them?
+That's what I'd like to know."
+
+"How? Why, how on earth do you train a football team except by
+practice?" demanded the Idiot. "It wouldn't take a very ingenious mind
+to figure out a game called shopping that would be governed by rules
+similar to those of football. Take a couple of bargain-counters for the
+goals. Place one at one end of the shopnasium and one at the other. Then
+let sixty women start from number one and try to get to number two
+across the field through another body of sixty women bent on getting to
+the other one, and _vice versa_. You could teach 'em all the arts of the
+rush-line, defence, running around the ends, breaking through the
+middle, and all that. At first the scrimmage would be pretty hard on the
+beginners, but with a month's practice they'd get hardened to it, and
+by Christmas-time there isn't a bargain-counter in the country they
+couldn't reach without more than ordinary fatigue. An interesting
+feature of the game would be to have automatic cars and automobiles and
+cabs running to and fro across the field all the time so that they would
+become absolute masters of the art of dodging similar vehicles when they
+encounter them in real life, as they surely must when the holiday season
+is in full blast and they are compelled by the demands of the hour to go
+out into the world."
+
+"The women couldn't stand it," said the Doctor. "They might as well be
+knocked out at the real thing as in the imitation."
+
+"Not at all," said the Idiot. "They wouldn't be knocked out if you gave
+them preliminary individual exercise with punching-bags, dummies for
+tackle practice, and other things the football player uses to make
+himself tough and irresistible."
+
+"But you can't reason with shopping as you do with football," suggested
+the Lawyer. "Think of the glory of winning a goal which sustains the
+football player through the toughest of fights. The knowledge that the
+nation will ring with its plaudits of his gallant achievement is half
+the backing of your quarter-back."
+
+"That's all right," said the Idiot, "but the make-up of the average
+woman is such that what pursuit of fame does for the gladiator, the
+chase after a bargain does for a woman. I have known women so worn and
+weary that they couldn't get up for breakfast who had a lion's strength
+an hour later at a Monday marked-down sale of laundry soap and Yeats's
+poems. What the goal is to the man the bargain is to the woman, so on
+the question of incentive to action, Mr. Brief, the sexes are about
+even. I really think, Doctor, there's a chance here for you and me to
+make a fortune. Dr. Capsule's Shopnasium, opened every September for the
+training and development of expert shoppers in all branches of
+shopnastics, under the medical direction of yourself and my business
+management would be a winner. Moreover, it would furnish a business
+opening for all those football players our colleges are turning out,
+for, as our institution grew and we established branches of it all over
+the country, we should, of course, have to have managers in every city,
+and who better to teach all these things than the expert footballist of
+the hour?"
+
+"Oh, well," said the Doctor, "perhaps it isn't such a bad thing, after
+all; but I don't think I care to go into it. I don't want to be rich."
+
+"Very well," said the Idiot. "That being the case, I will modify my
+suggestion somewhat and send the idea to President Taylor of Vassar and
+other heads of women's colleges. As things are now they all ought to
+have a course of shopping for the benefit of the young women who will
+soon graduate into the larger institution of matrimony. That is the only
+way I can see for us to build up a woman of the future who will be able
+to cope with the strenuous life that is involved to-day in the purchase
+of a cake of soap to send to one's grandmother at Christmas. I know,
+for I have been through it; and rather than do it again I would let the
+All-American eleven for 1908 land on me after a running broad jump of
+sixteen feet in length and four in the air."
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+FOR A HAPPY CHRISTMAS
+
+
+"I have a request to make of you gentlemen," observed the Idiot, as the
+last buckwheat-cake of his daily allotment disappeared within. "And I
+sincerely hope you will all grant it. It won't cost you anything, and
+will save you a lot of trouble."
+
+"I promise beforehand under such conditions," said the Doctor. "The
+promise that doesn't cost anything and saves a lot of trouble is the
+kind I like to make."
+
+"Same here," said Mr. Brief.
+
+"None for me," said the Bibliomaniac. "My confidence in the Idiot's
+prophecies is about as great as a defeated statesman's popular
+plurality. My experience with him teaches me that when he signals no
+trouble ahead then is the time to look out for squalls. Therefore, you
+can count me out on this promise he wants us to make."
+
+"All right," said the Idiot. "To tell the truth, I didn't think you'd
+come in because I didn't believe you could qualify. You see, the promise
+I was going to ask you to make presupposes a certain condition which you
+don't fulfil. I was going to ask you, gentlemen, when Christmas comes to
+give me not the rich and beautiful gifts you contemplate putting into my
+stocking, but their equivalent in cash. Now you, Mr. Bib, never gave me
+anything at Christmas but advice, and your advice has no cash equivalent
+that I could ever find out, and even if it had I'm long on it now. That
+piece of advice you gave me last March about getting my head shaved so
+as to give my brain a little air I've never been able to use, and your
+kind suggestion of last August, that I ought to have my head cut off as
+a sure cure of chronic appendicitis, which you were certain I had,
+doctors tell me would be conducive to heart failure, which is far more
+fatal than the original disease. The only use to which I can put it, on
+my word of honor, is to give it back to you this Christmas with my best
+wishes."
+
+"Bosh!" sneered the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"It was, indeed," said the Idiot. "And there isn't any market for it.
+But the rest of you gentlemen will really delight my soul if you will do
+as I ask. You, Mr. Brief--what is the use of your paying out large sums
+of money, devoting hour after hour of your time, and practically risking
+your neck in choosing it, for a motor-car for me, when, as a matter of
+fact, I'd rather have the money? What's the use of giving thirty-six
+hundred dollars for an automobile to put in my stocking when I'd be
+happier if you'd give me a certified check for twenty-five hundred
+dollars? You couldn't get any such discount from the manufacturers, and
+I'd be more greatly pleased into the bargain. And you, Doctor--generous
+heart, that you are--why in thunder should you wear yourself out between
+now and Christmas-day looking for an eighteen-hundred-dollar fur-lined
+overcoat for me, when, as a matter of actual truth, I'd prefer a
+twenty-two-dollar ulster with ten crisp one-hundred-dollar bills in the
+change-pocket?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't see why I should," said the Doctor. "And I promise you
+I won't. What's more, I'll give you the ulster and the ten crisp one
+hundred dollars without fail if you'll cash my check for eighteen
+hundred dollars and give me the change."
+
+"Certainly," said the Idiot. "How will you have it, in dimes or
+nickels?"
+
+"Any way you please," said the Doctor, with a wink at Mr. Brief.
+
+"All right," returned the Idiot. "Send up the ulster and the ten crisps
+and I'll give you my check for the balance. Then I'll do the same by
+you, Mr. Poet. My policy involves a square deal for everybody whatever
+his previous condition of servitude. Last year, you may remember, you
+sent me a cigar and a lovely little poem of your own composition:
+
+    "When I am blue as indigo, you wrote,
+     And cold as is the Arctic snow,
+       Give me no megrims rotting.
+     I choose the friend
+     The Heavens send
+       Who takes me Idiyachting.
+
+Remember that? Well, it was a mighty nice present, and I wouldn't sell
+it for a million abandoned farms up in New Hampshire, but this year I'd
+rather have the money--say one thousand dollars and five cents--a
+thousand dollars instead of the poem and five cents in place of the
+cigar."
+
+"I am afraid you value my verse too high," smiled the Poet.
+
+"Not that one," said the Idiot. "The mere words don't amount to much. I
+could probably buy twice as many just as good for four dollars, but the
+way in which you arranged them, and the sentiment they conveyed, made
+them practically priceless to me. I set their value at a thousand
+dollars because that is the minimum sum at which I can be tempted to
+part with things that on principle I should always like to keep--like
+my word of honor, my conscience, my political views, and other things a
+fellow shouldn't let go of for minor considerations. The value of the
+cigar I may have placed too high, but the poem--never."
+
+"And yet you don't want another?" asked the Poet, reproachfully.
+
+"Indeed I do," returned the Idiot, "but I can't afford to own so much
+literary property any more than I can afford to possess Mr. Brief's
+automobile--and this is precisely what I am driving at. So many people
+nowadays present us at Christmas with objects we can't afford to own,
+that we cannot possibly repay, and overwhelm us with luxuries when we
+are starving for our necessities, so that Christmas, instead of bringing
+happiness with it, brings trial and tribulation. I know of a case last
+year where a very generous-hearted individual sent a set of Ruskin,
+superbly bound in full calf that would have set the Bibliomaniac here
+crazy with joy, to a widow who had just pawned her wedding-ring to buy a
+Christmas turkey for her children. A bundle of kindling-wood would have
+been far more welcome than a Carnegie library at that moment, and yet
+here was a generous soul who was ready to spend a good hundred dollars
+to make the recipient happy. Do you suppose the lady looked upon that
+sumptuous Ruskin with anything but misery in her heart?"
+
+"Oh, well, she could have pawned that instead of her wedding-ring,"
+sniffed the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"She couldn't for two reasons," said the Idiot. "In the first place, her
+sensibilities were such that she could not have pawned a present just
+received, and, in the second place, she lived in the town of Hohokus on
+the Nepperhan, and there isn't a pawnshop within a radius of fifty miles
+of her home. Besides, it's easier to sneak into a pawnshop with a
+wedding-ring for your collateral than to drive up with a van big enough
+to hold a complete set of Ruskin bound in full calf. It takes nerve and
+experience to do that with a cool and careless _mien_, and, whatever you
+may have in that respect, Mr. Bib, there are few refined widows in
+reduced circumstances who are similarly gifted. Then take the case of my
+friend Billups--some sharp of a tailor got out a judgment against
+Billups for ninety-eight dollars for a bill he couldn't pay on the
+fifteenth of December. Billups got his name in the papers, and received
+enough notoriety to fill him with ambition to go on the stage, and it
+nearly killed him, and what do you suppose his friends did when
+Christmas came around? Did they pay off that judgment and relieve him of
+the odium of having his name chalked up on the public slate? Not they.
+They sent him forty dollars' worth of golf-clubs, sixteen dollars' worth
+of cuff-buttons, eight ten-dollar umbrellas, a half-dozen silver
+match-boxes, a cigar-cutter, and about two hundred dollars' worth of
+other trash that he's got to pay storage-room for. And on top of that,
+in order to keep up his end, Billups has had to hang up a lot of
+tradesmen for the match-cases and cigar-cutters and umbrellas and trash
+he's sent to his generous friends in return for their generosity."
+
+"Oh, rot," interrupted the Bibliomaniac. "What an idiot your friend
+Billups must be. Why didn't he send the presents he received to others,
+and so saved his money to pay his debts with?"
+
+"Well, I guess he didn't think of that," said the Idiot. "We haven't all
+got the science of Christmas-giving down as fine as you have, Mr. Bib.
+But that is a valuable suggestion of yours and I'll put it down among
+the things that can be done in the plan I am formulating for the
+painless Christmas."
+
+"We can't relieve one another's necessities unless we know what they
+are, can we?" asked Mr. Whitechoker.
+
+"We can if we adopt my cash system," said the Idiot. "For instance, I
+know that I need a dozen pairs of new socks. Modesty would prevent my
+announcing this fact to the world, and as long as I wear shoes you'd
+never find it out, but if, when Christmas came, you gave me twenty-five
+dollars instead of Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_ in words of one syllable,
+you would relieve my necessities and so earn my everlasting gratitude.
+Dr. Capsule here wouldn't acknowledge to you or to me that his
+suspenders are held together in three places with safety-pins, and will
+so continue to be until these prosperous times moderate; but if we were
+to present him with nine dollars and sixty-eight cents on Christmas
+morning, we should discern a look of gratitude in his eye on that
+suspender account that would be missing if we were to hand him out a
+seven-dollar gold-mounted shaving-mug instead. We should have shown our
+generous spirit on his behalf, which is all a Christmas present ever
+does, whether it is a diamond tiara or a chain of sausages, and at the
+same time have relieved his anxieties about his braces. His gratitude
+would be double-barrelled, and his happiness a surer shot. Give us the
+money, say I, and let us relieve our necessities first, and then if
+there is anything left over we can buy some memorial of the day with the
+balance."
+
+"Well, I think it's a pretty good plan," said Mrs. Pedagog. "It would
+save a lot of waste, anyhow. But it isn't possible for all of us to do
+it, Mr. Idiot. I, for instance, haven't any money to give you."
+
+"You could give me something better," said the Idiot. "I wouldn't accept
+any money from you for a Christmas present."
+
+"Then what shall it be?" asked the Landlady.
+
+"Well--a receipt in full for my bill to date," said the Idiot.
+
+"Mercy!" cried the Landlady. "I couldn't afford that--"
+
+"Oh, yes you could," said the Idiot. "Because for your Christmas I'd
+give you a check in full for the amount."
+
+"Oh--I see," smiled the Landlady. "Then what do we get for our
+Christmas? Strikes me it's about as broad as it is long."
+
+"Precisely," said the Idiot. "We get even--and that's about as conducive
+to a happy Christmas, to Peace on Earth and Good-will to men, as any
+condition I know of. If I can get square for Christmas I don't want
+anything else."
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+    Transcriber's Note:
+
+    Punctuation has been standardised. Spelling has been retained
+    as in the original publication except as follows:
+
+    Page 29
+    do you think or that _changed to_
+    do you think of that
+
+    Page 52
+    its as easy as rolling _changed to_
+    it's as easy as rolling
+
+    Page 75
+    went there several ways _changed to_
+    went their several ways
+
+    I think its abominable _changed to_
+    I think it's abominable
+
+    Page 102
+    a bag of aniseseed _changed to_
+    a bag of ainse seed
+
+    Page 150
+    said the Idiot, gratefuly _changed to_
+    said the Idiot, gratefully
+
+    Page 156
+    Tchaikowski, to be well _changed to_
+    Tchaikowsky, to be well
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Genial Idiot, by John Kendrick Bangs
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