[Illustration: Book Cover]

[Illustration: Frontispiece]

 _Cobb's Bill-of-Fare_

 _By_

 _Irvin S. Cobb_

 _Author of_ "_The Escape of Mr. Trimm_, " "_Back Home_, " "_Cobb's Anatomy_, " _etc. _

 _Illustrated by_ _Peter Newell and James Preston_

 [Illustration]

 _New York_ _George H. Doran Company_

 COPYRIGHT, 1911 1912, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

 TO R. H. DAVIS

 (NOT RICHARD HARDING-- THE OTHER ONE)

_AS FOLLOWS_

 PAGE

 I. VITTLES 13

 II. MUSIC 47

 III. ART 81

 IV. SPORT 113

_ILLUSTRATIONS_

 PAGE

 "I now greatly desire to eat some regular food. " 15

 "Those who in the goodness of their hearts may undertake a search for the sucking pig. " 35

 "Where do you find the percentage of dyspeptics running highest?" 41

 "She tries to tear all its front teeth out with her bare hands. " 51

 "Ro-hocked in the cra-hadle of the da-heep, I la-hay me down in pe-heace to sa-leep!" 57

 "Shem undoubtedly sang it when the animals were hungry. " 61

 "And I enjoy it more than words can tell!" 67

 "We looked in vain for the kind of pictures that mother used to make and father used to buy. " 83

 "The inscrutable smile of a saleslady would make Mona Lisa seem a mere amateur. " 93

 "A person who for reasons best known to the police has not been locked up. " 97

 "Collision between two heavenly bodies or premature explosion of a custard pie. " 103

 "Everything you catch is second-hand. " 119

 "He could beat me climbing, but at panting I had him licked to a whisper. " 125

 "She was not much larger than a soapdish. " 137

 "Think of being laid face downward firmly across a sinewy knee and beaten forty-love with one of those hard catgut rackets!" 143

_VITTLES_

[Illustration]

Upon a certain gladsome occasion a certain man went into a certainrestaurant in a certain large city, being imbued with the idea that hedesired a certain kind of food. Expense was with him no object. Thecoming of the holidays had turned his thoughts backward to the care-freedays of boyhood and he longed for the holidaying provender of his youthwith a longing that was as wide as a river and as deep as a well. 

"Me, I have tried it all, " he said to himself. "I have been down theline on this eating proposition from alphabet soup to animal crackers. Iknow the whole thing, from the nine-dollar, nine-course banquet, withevery course bathed freely in the same kind of sauce and tasting exactlylike all the other courses, to the quick lunch, where the onlydifference between clear soup and beef broth is that if you want thebeef broth the waiter sticks his thumb into the clear soup and brings italong. 

"I have feasted copiously at grand hotels where they charge you corkageon your own hot-water bottle, and I have dallied frugally with theforty-cent table d'hote with wine, when the victuals were the product ofthe well-known Sam Brothers--Flot and Jet--and the wine tasted like thestuff that was left over from graining the woodwork for a mahoganyfinish. 

[Illustration: "I NOW GREATLY DESIRE TO EAT SOME REGULAR FOOD. "]

"I now greatly desire to eat some regular food, and if such a thing behumanly possible I should also prefer to eat it in silence unbrokenexcept by the noises I make myself. I have eaten meals backed up soclose to the orchestra that the leader and I were practically wearingthe same pair of suspenders. I have been howled at by a troupe ofSicilian brigands armed with their national weapons--the garlic and theguitar. I have been tortured by mechanical pianos and automaticmelodeons, and I crave quiet. But in any event I want food. I cannotspare the time to travel nine hundred miles to get it, and I must, therefore, take a chance here. "

So, as above stated, he entered this certain restaurant and seatedhimself; and as soon as the Hungarian string band had desisted fromplaying an Italian air orchestrated by a German composer he got theattention of an omnibus, who was Greek, and the bus enlisted theassistance of a side waiter, he being French, and the side waiter intime brought to him the head waiter, regarding whom I violate noconfidence in stating that he was Swiss. The man I have been quotingthen drew from his pockets a number of bank notes and piled them upslowly, one by one, alongside his plate. Beholding the denominations ofthese bills the head waiter with difficulty restrained himself fromkissing the hungry man upon the bald spot on his head. The sight of alarge bill invariably quickens the better nature of a head waiter. 

"Now, then, " said the enhungered one, "I would have speech with you. Idesire food--food suitable for a free-born American stomach on such aday as this. No, you needn't wave that menu at me. I can shut my eyesand remember the words and music of every menu that ever was printed. Idon't know what half of it means because I am no court interpreter, butI can remember it. I can sing it, and if I had my clarinet here I couldplay it. Heave the menu over the side of the boat and listen to me. WhatI want is just plain food--food like mother used to make and mother'sfair-haired boy used to eat. We will start off with turkey--turkey _ala_ America, understand; turkey that is all to the Hail Columbia, HappyLand. With it I want some cramberry sauce--no, not cranberry, I guess Iknow its real name--some cramberry sauce; and some mashedpotatoes--mashed with enthusiasm and nothing else, if you can arrangeit--and some scalloped oysters and maybe a few green peas. Likewise Iwant a large cup of coffee right along with these things--not servedafterward in a misses' and children's sized cup, but along with thedinner. "

"Salad?" suggested the head waiter, reluctantly withdrawing hisfascinated vision from the pile of bills. "Salad?" he said. 

"No salad, " said the homesick stranger, "not unless you could chop me upsome lettuce and powder it with granulated sugar and pour a littlevinegar over it and bring it in to me with the rest of the grub. Where Iwas raised we always had chewing tobacco for the salad course, anyhow. "

The head waiter's whole being recoiled from the bare prospect. He seemedon the point of swooning, but looked at the money and came to. 

"Dessert?" he added, poising a pencil. 

"Well, " said the man reflectively, "I don't suppose you could fix me upsome ambrosia--that's sliced oranges with grated cocoanut on top. And inthis establishment I doubt if you know anything about boiled custard, with egg kisses bobbing round it and sunken reefs of sponge cakeunderneath. So I guess I'd better compromise on some plum pudding; butmind you, not the imported English plum pudding. English plum pudding isnot a food, it's a missile, and when eaten it is a concealed deadlyweapon. I want an American plum pudding. Mark well my words--anAmerican plum pudding. 

"And, " he concluded, "if you can bring me these things, just so, withoutany strange African sauces or weird Oriental fixings or trans-Atlanticgoo stirred into them or poured on to them or breathed upon them, Ishall be very grateful to you, and in addition I shall probably make youindependently wealthy for life. "

It was quite evident that the head waiter regarded him as alunatic--perhaps only a lunatic in a mild form and undoubtedly onecushioned with ready money--but nevertheless a lunatic. Yet he indicatedby a stately bow that he would do the best he could under thecircumstances, and withdrew to take the matter up with the housecommittee. 

"Now this, " said the man, "is going to be something like. To be sure thetable is not set right. As I remember how things used to look at homethere should be a mustache cup at Uncle Hiram's plate, so he could drinkhis floating island without getting his cream-separators mussy, andthere ought to be a vinegar cruet at one end and a silver cake basket atthe other and about nine kinds of pickles and jellies scattered round;and in the center of the table there should be a winter bouquet--a nice, hard, firm, dark red winter bouquet--containing, among other things, asheaf of wheat, a dried cockscomb and a couple of oak galls. Yet if thereal provender is forthcoming I can put up with the absence of theproper settings and decorations. "

He had ample leisure for these thoughts, because, as you yourself mayhave noticed, in a large restaurant when you order anything that is outof the ordinary--which means anything that is ordinary--it takes time toput the proposition through the proper channels. The waiter lays yourapplication before the board of governors, and after the board ofgovernors has disposed of things coming under the head of unfinishedbusiness and good of the order it takes a vote, and if nobody blackballsyou the treasurer is instructed to draw a warrant and the secretaryengrosses appropriate resolutions, and your order goes to the cook. 

But finally this man's food arrived. And he looked at it and sniffed atit daintily--like a reluctant patient going under the ether--and hetasted of it; and then he put his face down in his hands and burst intolow, poignant moans. For it wasn't the real thing at all. The stuffingof the turkey defied chemical analysis; and, moreover, the turkey beforeserving should have been dusted with talcum powder and fitted withdress-shields, it being plainly a crowning work of the artpreservative--meaning by that the cold-storage packing and picklingindustry. And if you can believe what Doctor Wiley says--and if youcan't believe the man who has dedicated his life to warning you againstthe things which you put in your mouth to steal away your membranes, whom can you believe?--the cranberry sauce belonged in a paint store andshould have been labeled Easter-egg dye, and the green peas were greenwith Paris green. 

As for the plum pudding, it was one of those burglar-proof, enamel-finished products that prove the British to be indeed a hardyrace. And, of course, they hadn't brought him his coffee along with hisdinner, the management having absolutely refused to permit of a thing sorevolutionary and unprecedented and one so calculated to upset the wholeorganization. And at the last minute the racial instincts of the cookhad triumphed over his instructions, and he had impartially imbuedeverything with his native brews, gravies, condiments, seasonings, scents, preservatives, embalming fluids, liquid extracts andperfumeries. So, after weeping unrestrainedly for a time, the man paidthe check, which was enormous, and tipped everybody freely and went awayin despair and, I think, committed suicide on an empty stomach. At anyrate, he came no more. The moral of this fable is, therefore, that itcan't be done. 

But why can't it be done? I ask you that and pause for a reply. Whycan't it be done? It is conceded, I take it, that in the beginning ourcookery was essentially of the soil. Of course when our forebears cameover they brought along with them certain inherent and inherited OldWorld notions touching on the preparation of raw provender in order tomake it suitable for human consumption; but these doubtless were soonfused and amalgamated with the cooking and eating customs of theoriginal or copper-colored inhabitants. The difference in environmentand climate and conditions, together with the amplified wealth of nativesupplies, did the rest. In Merrie England, as all travelers know, thereare but three staple vegetables--to wit, boiled potatoes, boiledturnips, and a second helping of the boiled potatoes. But here, spreadbefore the gladdened vision of the newly arrived, and his to pick andchoose from, was a boundless expanse of new foodstuffs--birds, beastsand fishes, fruits, vegetables and berries, roots, herbs and sprouts. Hefurnished the demand and the soil was there competently with the supply. 

We owe a lot to our red brother. From him we derived a knowledge of thevalues and attractions of the succulent clam, and he didn't cook a clamso that it tasted like O'Somebody's Heels of New Rubber either. Fromthe Indian we got the original idea of the shore dinner and thebarbecue, the planked shad and the hoecake. By following in hisfootsteps we learned about succotash and hominy. He conferred upon usthe inestimable boon of his maize--hence corn bread, corn fritters, fried corn and roasting ears; also his pumpkin and his sweetpotato--hence the pumpkin pie of the North and its blood brother of theSouth, the sweet-potato pie. From the Indian we got the tomato--let someagriculturist correct me if I err--though the oldest inhabitant canstill remember when we called it a love apple and regarded it aspoisonous. From him we inherited the crook-neck squash and the okragumbo and the rattlesnake watermelon and the wild goose plum, and manyanother delectable thing. 

So, out of all this and from all this our ancestors evolved cults ofcookery which, though they differed perhaps as between themselves, wereall purely American and all absolutely unapproachable. France lent astrain to New Orleans cooking and Spain did the same for California. Scrapple was Pennsylvania's, terrapin was Maryland's, the baked beanwas Massachusetts', and along with a few other things spoon-bread rankedas Kentucky's fairest product. Indiana had dishes of which Texas wottednot, nor kilowatted either, this being before the day of electricalcooking contrivances. Virginia, mother of presidents and of natural-borncooks, could give and take cookery notions from Vermont. Likewise, thiscondition developed the greatest collection of cooks, white and blackalike, that the world has ever seen. They were inspired cooks, needingno notes, no printed score to guide them. They could burn up all thecook-books that ever were printed and still cook. They cooked by ear. 

And perhaps they still do. If so, may Heaven bless and preserve them!Some carping critics may contend that our grandfathers and grandmotherslacked the proper knowledge of how to serve a meal in courses. Let 'em. Let 'em carp until they're as black in the face as a German carp. Forreal food never yet needed any vain pomp and circumstance to make itattractive. It stands on its own merits, not on the scenic effects. When you really have something to eat you don't need to worry trying tothink up the French for napkin. Perhaps there may be some among us hereon this continent who, on beholding a finger-bowl for the first time, glanced down into its pellucid depths and wondered what had become ofthe gold fish. There may have been a few who needed a laprobe drawn upwell over the chest when eating grapefruit for the first time. Indeed, there may have been a few even whose execution in regard to consumingsoup out of the side of the spoon was a thing calculated to remind youof a bass tuba player emptying his instrument at the end of a hardstreet parade. 

But I doubt it. These stories were probably the creations of theprofessional humorists in the first place. Those who are given real foodto eat may generally be depended upon to do the eating without unduenoise or excitement. The gross person featured in the comic papers, whoconsumes his food with such careless abandon that it is hard to tellwhether the front of his vest was originally drygoods or groceries, either doesn't exist in real life or else never had any food that wasworth eating, and it didn't make any difference whether he put it on theinside of his chest or the outside. 

Only a short time ago I saw a whole turkey served for a Thanksgivingfeast at a large restaurant. It vaunted itself as a regular turkey andwas extensively charged for as such on the bill. It wasn't though. Itwas an ancient and a shabby ruin--a genuine antique if ever there wasone, with those high-polished knobs all down the front, like anold-fashioned highboy, and Chippendale legs. To make up for its manifoldimperfections the chef back in the kitchen had crowded it full ofmysterious laboratory products and then varnished it over with awaterproof glaze or shellac, which rendered it durable without making itedible. Just to see that turkey was a thing calculated to set the mindharking backward to places and times when there had been real turkeys toeat. 

Back yonder in the old days we were a simple and a husky race, weren'twe? Boys and girls were often fourteen years old before they knewoysters didn't grow in a can. Even grown people knew nothing, except byvague hearsay, of cheese so runny that if you didn't care to eat it youcould drink it. There was one traveled person then living who wasreputed to have once gone up to the North somewhere and partaken of awatermelon that had had a plug cut in it and a whole quart of importedreal Paris--France--champagne wine poured in the plugged place. This, however, was generally regarded as a gross exaggeration of the realfacts. 

But there was a kind of a turkey that they used to serve in those partson high state occasions. It was a turkey that in his younger days rangedwild in the woods and ate the mast. At the frosted coming of the fallthey penned him up and fed him grain to put an edge of fat on his lean;and then fate descended upon him and he died the ordained death of hiskind. But, oh! the glorious resurrection when he reached the table! Yousat with weapons poised and ready--a knife in the right hand, a fork inthe left and a spoon handy--and looked upon him and watered at the mouthuntil you had riparian rights. 

His breast had the vast brown fullness that you see in pictures of oldFlemish friars. His legs were like rounded columns and unadorned, moreover, with those superfluous paper frills; and his tail was half asbig as your hand and it protruded grandly, like the rudder of atreasure-ship, and had flanges of sizzled richness on it. Here was nopindling fowl that had taken the veil and lived the cloistered life;here was no wiredrawn and trained-down cross-country turkey, but a lustygiant of a bird that would have been a cassowary, probably, or an emu, if he had lived, his bosom a white mountain of lusciousness, hisinterior a Golconda and not a Golgotha. At the touch of the steel hisskin crinkled delicately and fell away; his tissues flaked off in tenderstrips; and from him arose a bouquet of smells more varied and moredelectable than anything ever turned out by the justly celebratedIslands of Spice. It was a sin to cut him up and a crime to leave himbe. 

He had not been stuffed by a taxidermist or a curio collector, but bythe master hand of one of those natural-born home cooks--stuffed withcorn bread dressing that had oysters or chestnuts or pecans stirred intoit until it was a veritable mine of goodness, and this stuffing hadcaught up and retained all the delectable drippings and essences of hisbeing, and his flesh had the savor of the things upon which he hadlived--the sweet acorns and beechnuts of the woods, the buttery goobersof the plowed furrows, the shattered corn of the horse yard. 

Nor was he a turkey to be eaten by the mere slice. At least, nobody everdid eat him that way--you ate him by rods, poles and perches, bytownships and by sections--ate him from his neck to his hocks and backagain, from his throat latch to his crupper, from center tocircumference, and from pit to dome, finding something better all thetime; and when his frame was mainly denuded and loomed upon the platterlike a scaffolding, you dug into his cadaver and found there smallhidden joys and titbits. You ate until the pressure of your waistbandstopped your watch and your vest flew open like an engine-house door andyour stomach was pushing you over on your back and sitting upon you, andthen you half closed your eyes and dreamed of cold-sliced turkey forsupper, turkey hash for breakfast the next morning and turkey soup madeof the bones of his carcass later on. For each state of that turkeywould be greater than the last. 

There still must be such turkeys as this one somewhere. Somewhere inthis broad and favored land, untainted by notions of foreign cookery andunvisited by New York and Philadelphia people who insist on calling thewaiter _garçon_, when his name is Gabe or Roscoe, there must be spotswhere a turkey is a turkey and not a cold-storage corpse. And this beingthe case, why don't those places advertise, so that by the hundreds andthe thousands men who live in hotels might come from all over in thefall of the year and just naturally eat themselves to death?

Perchance also the sucking pig of the good old days still prevails incertain sheltered vales and glades. He, too, used to have his vogue atholiday times. Because the gods did love him he died young--died youngand tender and unspoiled by the world--and then everybody else did lovehim too. For he was barbered twice over and shampooed to a graciouspinkiness by a skilled hand, and then, being basted, he was roastedwhole with a smile on his lips and an apple in his mouth, and sometimesa bow of red ribbon on his tail, and his juices from within ran down hissmooth flanks and burnished him to perfection. His interior was crammedwith stuff and things and truck and articles of that general nature--I'mno cooking expert to go into further particulars, but whatever thestuffing was, it was appropriate and timely and suitable, I know that, and there was onion in it and savory herbs, and it was exactly what asucking pig needed to bring out all that was good and noble in him. 

You began operations by taking a man's-size slice out of his midriff, bringing with it a couple of pinky little rib bones, and then you ateyour way through him and along him in either direction or bothdirections until you came out into the open and fell back satiated andfilled with the sheer joy of living, and greased to the eyebrows. Ishould like to ask at this time if there is any section where this brandof sucking pig remains reasonably common and readily available? In thesedays of light housekeeping and kitchenettes and gas stoves and electriccookers, is there any oven big enough to contain him? Does he stilllinger on or is he now known in his true perfection only on the magazinecovers and in the Christmas stories?

[Illustration: "THOSE WHO IN THE GOODNESS OF THEIR HEARTS MAY UNDERTAKEA SEARCH FOR THE SUCKING PIG"]

As a further guide to those who in the goodness of their hearts mayundertake a search for him in his remaining haunts and refuges, itshould be stated that he was no German wild boar, or English pork pie onthe hoof, and that he was never cooked French style, or doctored up withanchovies, caviar, _marrons glacés_, pickled capers out of abottle--where many of the best capers of the pickled variety comefrom--imported truffles, Mexican tamales or Hawaiian poi. He was--andis, if he still exists--just a plain little North American baby-shoatcooked whole. And don't forget the red apple in his mouth. None genuinewithout this trademark. 

But, shucks! what's the use of talking that way? Patriotism is not deadand a democratic form of government still endures, and surely realsucking pigs are still being cooked and served whole somewhere this veryday. And in that same neighborhood, if it lies to the eastward, thereare cooks who know the art of planking a shad in season--not thearrangement of the effete East, consisting of a greased skin wrappedround a fine-tooth comb and reposing on a charred clapboard--but a realshad; and if it lies to the southward one will surely find in the samevicinity a possum of a prevalent dark brown tint, with sweet potatoesbaked under him and a certain inimitable, indescribable dark rich gravysurrounding him, and on the side corn pones--without any sugar in them. I think probably the reason why the possum doesn't flourish in the Northis that they insist on tacking an O on to his name, simply because somemisguided writer of dictionaries ordained it so. A possum is not Irish, nor is he Scotch. His name is not Opossum, neither is it MacPossum. Hebelongs to an old Southern family and his name is just possum. 

Once I saw ostensible 'possum at a French restaurant in New York. It wasadvertised as _Opossum, Southern style_, and it was chopped up fine andcooked in a sort of casserole effect, with green peas and carrots andvarious other things mixed in along with it. The quivering sensationswhich were felt throughout the South on this occasion, and which at thetime were mistaken for earthquake tremors, were really caused by so manySouthern cooks turning over petulantly in their graves. 

Still going on the assumption that the turkey and the sucking pig andtheir kindred spirits are yet to be found among us or among some of us, anyhow, it is only logical to assume that the food is not served incourses at the ratio of a little of everything and not enough ofanything, but that it is brought on and spread before the company alltogether and at once--the turkey or the pig or the ham or the chickens;the mashed potatoes overflowing their receptacle like drifted snow; thecelery; the scalloped oysters in a dish like a crock; the jelly layercake, the fruit cake and Prince of Wales cake; and in addition, scattered about hither and yon, all the different kinds ofpreserves--pusserves, to use the proper title--including sweet peachpickles dimpled with cloves and melting away in their own sweetness, andwatermelon-rind pickles cut into cubes just big enough to make onebite--that is to say in cubes about three inches square--and the variouskinds of jellies--crab-apple, currant, grape and quince--quivering in anecstacy as though at their very goodness, and casting upon the whitecloth where the light catches them all the reflected, dancing tints ofberyl and amethyst, ruby and garnet--crown-jewels in the diadem of realfood. 

People who eat dinners like this must, by the very nature of things, cling also to the ancient North American custom of starting the day withan amount of regular food called collectively a breakfast. This, ofcourse, does not mean what the dweller in the city by the seaboard callsa breakfast, he knowing no better, poor wretch--a swallow of tea, a biteof a cold baker's roll, a plate of gruel mayhap, or pap, and a stickyspoonful of the national marmalade of Perfidious Albumen, as the poethas called it, followed by a slap at the lower part of the face with anapkin and a series of V-shaped hiccoughs ensuing all the morning. No, indeed. 

In speaking thus of breakfast, I mean a real breakfast. If it's in NewEngland there'll be doughnuts and pies on the table, and not thosesickly convict labor pies of the city either, with the prison pallor yetupon them, but brown, crusty, full-chested pies. And if it's down Souththere will be hot waffles and fresh New Orleans molasses; and if it's inany section of our country, north or south, east or west, such comfitsand kickshaws as genuine country smoked sausage, put up in bags andspiced like Araby the Blest, and fresh eggs fried in pairs--never lessthan in pairs--with their lovely orbed yolks turned heavenward likethe topaz eyes of beauteous prayerful blondes; and slices of home-curedham with the taste of the hickory smoke and also of the original hogdelicately blended in them, and marbled with fat and lean, like theedges of law books; and cornbeef hash, and flaky hot biscuits; and anassortment of those same pickles and preserves already mentioned; thewhole being calculated to make a hungry man open his mouth until hisface resembles the general-delivery window at the post-office--and sailright in. 

[Illustration: "WHERE DO YOU FIND THE PERCENTAGE OF DYSPEPTICS RUNNINGHIGHEST?"]

The cry has been raised that American cooking is responsible forAmerican dyspepsia, and that as a race we are given to pouring pepsinpellets down ourselves because of the food our ancestors poured downthemselves. This is a base calumny. Old John J. Calumny himself nevercoined a baser one. You have only to look about you to know the truth ofthe situation, which is, that the person with the least digestion is theone who always does the most for it, and that those who eat the mosthave the least trouble. Where do you find the percentage of dyspepticsrunning highest, in the country or the city? Where do you find thestout woman who is banting as she pants and panting as she bants? Again, the city. Where do you encounter the unhappy male creature who has beentold that the only cure for his dyspepsia is to be a Rebecca at the Welland drink a gallon of water before each meal and then go without themeal, thus compelling him to double in both roles and first be Rebeccaand then be the Well? Where do you see so many of those miserable oneswho have the feeling, after eating, that rude hands are tearing thetapestries of the walls of their respective dining rooms?

Not in the country, where, happily, food is perhaps yet food. In thecity, that's where--in the cities, where they have learned to cook foodand to serve it and to eat it after a fashion different from thefashions their grandsires followed. 

That's a noble slogan which has lately been promulgated--See AmericaFirst. But while we're doing so wouldn't it be a fine idea to try to seesome American cooking?

_MUSIC_

[Illustration]

If you, the reader, are anything like me, the writer, it happens to youabout every once in so long that some well-meaning but semi-wittedfriend rigs a dead-fall for you, and traps you and carries you off, ahelpless captive, for an evening among the real music-lovers. 

Catching you, so to speak, with your defense leveled and yourbreastworks unmanned, he speaks to you substantially as follows: "Oldman, we're going to have a few people up to the house tonight--just alittle informal affair, you understand, with a song or two and somemusic--and the missus and I would appreciate it mightily if you'd put onyour Young Prince Charmings and drop in on us along toward eight. Howabout it--can we count on you to be among those prominently present?"

Forewarned is forearmed, and you know all about this person already. Youknow him to be one of the elect in the most exclusive musical coterie ofyour fair city, wherever your fair city may be. You know him to be onterms of the utmost intimacy with the works of all the great composers. Bill Opus and Jeremiah Fugue have no secrets from him--nonewhatever--and in conversation he creates the impression that old IssySonata was his first cousin. He can tell you offhand which one of theShuberts--Lee or Jake--wrote that Serenade. He speaks of Mozart andBeethoven in such a way a stranger would probably get the idea that Moteand Bate used to work for his folks. He can go to a musical show, andwhile the performance is going on he can tell everybody in his sectionjust which composer each song number was stolen from, humming theoriginal air aloud to show the points of resemblance. He can do this, Isay, and, what is more, he does do it. At the table d'hote place, whenthe Neapolitan troubadours come out in their little green jackets andtheir wide red sashes he is right there at the middle table, poised andwaiting; and when they put their heads together and lean in toward thecenter and sing their national air, Come Into the Garlic, Maud, it is hewho beats time for them with his handy lead-pencil, only pausingoccasionally to point out errors in technic and execution on the part ofthe performers. He is that kind of a pest, and you know it. 

What you should do under these circumstances, after he has invited youto come up to his house, would be to look him straight in the eye andsay to him: "Well, old chap, that's awfully kind of you to include me inyour little musical party, and just to show you how much I appreciate itand how I feel about it here's something for you. " And then hit himright where his hair parts with a cut-glass paperweight or a bronzeclock or a fire-ax or something, after which you should leap madly uponhis prostrate form and dance on his cozy corner with both feet and cavein his inglenook for him. That is what you should do, but, being avacillating person--I am still assuming, you see, that you areconstituted as I am--you weakly surrender and accept the invitation andpromise to be there promptly on time, and he goes away to snare morevictims in order to have enough to make a mess. 

And so it befalls at the appointed time that you deck your form in yourafter-six-P. M. Clothes and go up. On the way you get full and fuller ofdark forebodings at every step; and your worst expectations are realizedas soon as you enter and are relieved of your hat by a colored person inwhite gloves, and behold spread before you a great horde of those ladiesand gentlemen whose rapt expressions and general air of eager expectancystamp them as true devotees of whatever is most classical in the realmof music. You realize that in such a company as this you are no betterthan a rank outsider, and that it behooves you to attract as littleattention as possible. There is nobody else here who will be interestedin discussing with you whether the Giants or the Cubs will finish firstnext season; nobody except you who cares a whoop how Indiana will go forpresident--in fact, most of them probably haven't heard that Indianawas thinking of going. Their souls are soaring among the stars in ararefied atmosphere of culture, and even if you could you wouldn't dareventure up that far with yours, for fear of being seized by anuncontrollable impulse to leap off and end all, the same as some personsare affected when on the roof of a tall building. So you back into thenearest corner and try to look like a part of the furniture--and wait indumb misery. 

Usually you don't have to wait very long. These people are beggars forpunishment and like to start early. It is customary to lead off theprogram with a selection on the piano by a distinguished lady graduateof somebody-with-an-Italian-name's school of piano expression. Under nocircumstances is it expected that this lady will play anything that youcan understand or that I could understand. It would be contrary to theethics of her calling and deeply repugnant to her artistic temperamentto play a tune that would sound well on a phonograph record. This wouldnever do. She comes forward, stripped for battle, and bows and peelsoff her gloves and fiddles with the piano-stool until she gets itadjusted to suit her, and then she sits down, prepared to render animmortal work composed by one of the old masters who was intoxicated atthe time. 

She starts gently. She throws her head far back and closes her eyesdreamily, and hits the keys a soft, dainty little lick--tippy-tap! Thenleaving a call with the night clerk for eight o'clock in the morning, she seems to drift off into a peaceful slumber, but awakens on themoment and hurrying all the way up to the other end of Main Street sheslams the bass keys a couple of hard blows--bumetty-bum! And so it goesfor quite a long spell after that: Tippy-tap!--off to the country for aweek-end party, Friday to Monday; bumetty-bum!--six months elapsebetween the third and fourth acts; tippetty-tip!--two years later; dearme, how the old place has changed! Biffetty-biff! Gracious, how timeflies, for here it is summer again and the flowers are all in bloom! Yousink farther and farther into your chair and debate with yourselfwhether you ought to run like a coward or stay and die like a hero. Oneof your legs goes to sleep and the rest of you envies the leg. You canfeel your whiskers growing, and you begin to itch in two hundredseparate places, but can't scratch. 

The strangest thing about it is that those round you appear to beenjoying it. Incredible though it seems, they are apparently findingpleasure in this. You can tell that they are enjoying themselves becausethey begin to act as real music-lovers always act under suchcircumstances--some put their heads on one side and wall up their eyesin a kind of dying-calf attitude and listen so hard you can hear themlistening, and some bend over toward their nearest neighbors and murmurtheir rapture. It is all right for them to murmur, but if you so much asscrooge your feet, or utter a low, despairing moan or anything, they allturn and glare at you reproachfully and go "Sh!" like a collection ofsteam-heating fixtures. Depend on them to keep you in your place!

[Illustration: "SHE TRIES TO TEAR ALL ITS FRONT TEETH OUT WITH HER BAREHANDS"]

All of a sudden the lady operator comes out of her trance. She comes outof it with a violent start, as though she had just been bee-stung. Shenow cuts loose, regardless of the piano's intrinsic value and itsassociations to its owners. She skitters her flying fingers up and downthe instrument from one end to the other, producing a sound likehailstones falling on a tin roof. She grabs the helpless thing by itsupper lip and tries to tear all its front teeth out with her bare hands. She fails in this, and then she goes mad from disappointment and in afrenzy resorts to her fists. 

As nearly as you are able to gather, a terrific fire has broken out inone of the most congested tenement districts. You can hear the enginescoming and the hook-and-ladder trucks clattering over the cobbles. Ambulances come, too, clanging their gongs, and one of them runs over adog; and a wall falls, burying several victims in the ruin. At thisjuncture persons begin jumping out of the top-floor windows, holdingcooking stoves in their arms, and a team runs away and plunges through aplate-glass window into a tinware and crockery store. People are allrunning round and shrieking, and the dog that was run over is stillyelping--he wasn't killed outright evidently, but only crippled--andseveral tons of dynamite explode in a basement. 

As the crashing reverberations die away the lady arises, wan but game, and bows low in response to the applause and backs away, leaving thewreck of the piano jammed back on its haunches and trembling like a leafin every limb. 

All to yourself, off in your little corner, you are thinking that surelythis has been suffering and disaster enough for one evening andeverybody will be willing to go away and seek a place of quiet. But no. In its demand for fresh horrors this crowd is as insatiate as theancient Romans used to be when Nero was giving one of those benefits atthe Colosseum for the fire sufferers of his home city. There nowadvances to the platform a somber person of a bass aspect, he having adouble-yolk face and a three-ply chin and a chest like two or threechests. 

[Illustration: "RO-HOCKED IN THE CRA-HADLE OF THE DA-HEEP I LA-HAY MEDOWN IN PE-HEACE TO SA-LEEP!"]

You know in advance what the big-mouthed black bass is going tosing--there is only one regular song for a bass singer to sing. Fromtime to time insidious efforts have been made to work in songs forbasses dealing with the love affairs of Bedouins and the joys of lifedown in a coal mine; but after all, to a bass singer who really valueshis gift of song and wishes to make the most of it, there is but onesuitable selection, beginning as follows:

 _Ro-hocked in the cra-hadle of the da-heep, I la-hay me down in pe-heace to sa-leep! Collum and pa-heaceful be my sa-leep Ro-hocked in the cra-hadle of the da-heep!_

[Illustration: "SHEM UNDOUBTEDLY SANG IT WHEN THE ANIMALS WERE HUNGRY"]

That is the orthodox offering for a bass. The basses of the world havealways used it, I believe, and generally to advantage. From what I havebeen able to ascertain I judge that it was first written for use on theArk. Shem sang it probably. If there is anything in this doctrine ofheredity Ham specialized in banjo solos and soft-shoe dancing, andJaphet, I take it, was the tenor--he certainly had a tenor-sounding kindof a name. So it must have been Shem, and undoubtedly he sang it whenthe animals were hungry, so as to drown out the sounds of theirroaring. 

So this, his descendant--this chip off the old cheese, as itwere--stands up on the platform facing you, with his chest well extendedto show his red suspender straps peeping coyly out from the arm openingsof his vest, and he inserts one hand into his bosom, and over and overagain he tells you that he now contemplates laying himself down in peaceto sleep--which is more than anybody else on the block will be able todo; and he rocks you in the cradle of the deep until you are as seasickas a cow. You could stand that, maybe, if only he wouldn't make faces atyou while he sings. Some day I am going to take the time off to makescientific research and ascertain why all bass singers make faces whenthey are singing. Surely there's some psychological reason for this, andif there isn't it should be stopped by legislative enactment. 

When Sing-Bad the Sailor has quit rocking the boat and gone ashore, afemale singer generally obliges and comes off the nest after a merrylay, cackling her triumph. Then there is something more of a difficultand painful nature on the piano; and nearly always, too, there is alarge lady wearing a low-vamp gown on a high-arch form, who influte-like notes renders one of those French ballads that's full ofla-las and is supposed to be devilish and naughty because nobody canunderstand it. For the finish, some person addicted to elocution usuallyrecites a poem to piano accompaniment. The poem Robert of Sicily is muchused for these purposes, and whenever I hear it Robert invariably has mydeepest sympathy and so has Sicily. Toward midnight a cold collation isserved, and you recapture your hat and escape forth into the starrynight, swearing to yourself that never again will you permit yourself tobe lured into an orgy of the true believers. 

But the next time an invitation comes along you will fall again. Anyhowthat's what I always do, meanwhile raging inwardly and cursing myselffor a weak and spineless creature, who doesn't know when he's well off. Yet I would not be regarded as one who is insensible to the charms ofmusic. In its place I like music, if it's the kind of music I like. These times, when so much of our music is punched out for us bymachinery like buttonholes and the air vents in Swiss cheese, and thenis put up in cans for the trade like Boston beans and baking-powder, nothing gives me more pleasure than to drop a nickel in the slot andhear an inspiring selection by the author of Alexander's Ragtime Band. 

I am also partial to band music. When John Philip Sousa comes to townyou can find me down in the very front row. I appreciate John PhilipSousa when he faces me and shows me that breast full of medals extendingfrom the whiskerline to the beltline, and I appreciate him still morewhen he turns round and gives me a look at that back of his. SinceColonel W. F. Cody practically retired and Miss Mary Garden went away toEurope, I know of no public back which for inherent grace and poetry ofspinal motion can quite compare with Mr. Sousa's. 

I am in my element then. I do not care so very much for Home, SweetHome, as rendered with so many variations that it's almost impossibleto recognize the old place any more; but when they switch to a march, aregular Sousa march full of um-pahs, then I begin to spread myself. Alittle tingle of anticipatory joy runs through me as Mr. Sousa advancesto the footlights and first waves his baton at the great big German whoplays the little shiny thing that looks like a hypodermic and soundslike stepping on the cat, and then turns the other way and waves it atthe little bit of a German who plays the big thing that looks like aventilator off an ocean liner and sounds like feeding-time at the zoo. And then he makes the invitation general and calls up the brasses andthe drums and the woods and the woodwinds, and also the thunders and thelightnings and the cyclones and the earthquakes. 

[Illustration: "AND I ENJOY IT MORE THAN WORDS CAN TELL!"]

And three or four of the trombonists pull the slides away out and let gofull steam right in my face, with a blast that blows my hair out by theroots, and all hands join in and make so much noise that you can't hearthe music. And I enjoy it more than words can tell!

On the other hand, grand opera does not appeal to me. I can enthuse overthe robin's song in the spring, and the sound of the summer windrippling through the ripened wheat is not without its attractions forme; but when I hear people going into convulsions of joy over SignorMassacre's immortal opera of Medulla Oblongata I feel that I am out ofmy element and I start back-pedaling. Lucy D. Lammermore may have been alovely person, but to hear a lot of foreigners singing about her forthree hours on a stretch does not appeal to me. I have a better use formy little two dollars. For that amount I can go to a good minstrel showand sit in a box. 

You may recall when Strauss' Elektra was creating such a furor in thiscountry a couple of years ago. All the people you met were talking aboutit whether they knew anything about it or not, as generally they didn't. I caught the disease myself; I went to hear it sung. 

I only lasted a little while--I confess it unabashedly--if there is sucha word as unabashedly--and if there isn't then I confess itunashamedly. As well as a mere layman could gather from the openingproceedings, this opera of Elektra was what the life story of the Benderfamily of Kansas would be if set to music by Fire-Chief Croker. In thequieter moments of the action, when nobody was being put out of the way, half of the chorus assembled on one side of the stage and imitated thelast ravings of John McCullough, and the other half went over on theother side of the stage and clubbed in and imitated Wallace, theUntamable Lion, while the orchestra, to show its impartiality, imitatedsomething else--Old Home Week in a boiler factory, I think. It moved mestrangely--strangely and also rapidly. 

Taking advantage of one of these periods of comparative calm I arose andsoftly stole away. I put a dummy in my place to deceive the turnkeys andI found a door providentially unlocked and I escaped out into the night. Three or four thousand automobiles were charging up and down Broadway, and there was a fire going on a couple of blocks up the street, and Ithink a suffragette procession was passing, too; but after what I'djust been through the quiet was very soothing to my eardrums. I don'tknow when I've enjoyed anything more than the last part of Elektra, thatI didn't hear. 

Yet my reader should not argue from this admission that I am deaf to thecharms of the human voice when raised in song. Unnaturalized aliens of abeefy aspect vocalizing in a strange tongue while an orchestra of twohundreds pieces performs--that, I admit, is not for me. But just let apretty girl in a white dress with a flower in her hair come out on astage, and let her have nice clear eyes and a big wholesome-lookingmouth, and let her open that mouth and show a double row of white teeththat'd remind you of the first roasting ear of the season--just let herbe all that and do all that, and then let her look right at me and singThe Last Rose of Summer or Annie Laurie or Believe Me, If All ThoseEndearing Young Charms--and I am hers to command, world without end, forever and ever, amen! My eyes cloud up for a rainy spell, and in mythroat there comes a lump so big I feel like a coach-whip snake that hasinadvertently swallowed a china darning-egg. And when she is through Iam the person sitting in the second row down front who applauds untilthe flooring gives way and the plastering is jarred loose on the nextfloor. She can sing for me by the hour and I'll sit there by the hourand listen to her, and forget that there ever was such a person in thewhole world as the late Vogner! That's the kind of a music-lover I am, and I suspect, if the truth were known, there are a whole lot more justlike me. 

If I may be excused for getting sort of personal and reminiscent at thispoint I should like to make brief mention here of the finest music Iever heard. As it happened this was instrumental music. I had come toNew York with a view to revolutionizing metropolitan journalism, andjournalism had shown a reluctance amounting to positive diffidence aboutcoming forward and being revolutionized. Pending the time when it shouldsee fit to do so, I was stopping at a boarding house on WestFifty-Seventh Street. It has been my observation that practicallyeverybody who comes to New York stops for a while in a boarding house onWest Fifty-Seventh Street. 

West Fifty-Seventh Street was where I was established, in a hall bedroomon the top floor--a hall bedroom so form-fitting and cozy that when Iwent to bed I always opened the transom to prevent a feeling ofcloseness across the chest. If I had as many as three callers in my roomof an evening and one of them got up to go first, the others had to sitquietly while he was picking out his own legs. But up to the time Ispeak of I hadn't had any callers. I hadn't been there very long and Ihadn't met any of the other boarders socially, except at the table. Ihad only what you might call a feeding acquaintance with them. 

Christmas Eve came round. I was a thousand miles from home and felt amillion. I shouldn't be surprised if I was a little bit homesick. Anyhowit was Christmas Eve, and it was snowing outside according to theorthodox Christmas Eve formula, and upward of five million other peoplein New York were getting ready for Christmas without my company, co-operation or assistance. You'd be surprised to know how lonesome youcan feel in the midst of five million people--until you try it on aChristmas Eve. 

After dinner I went up to my room and sat down with my back against thedoor and my feet on the window-ledge, and I rested one elbow in thewashpitcher and put one knee on the mantel and tried to read thenewspapers. The first thing I struck was a Christmas poem, a sentimentalChristmas poem, full of allusions to the family circle, and the oldhomestead, and the stockings hanging by the fireplace, and all that sortof thing. 

That was enough. I put on my hat and overcoat and went down into thestreet. The snow was coming down in long, slanting lines and thesidewalks were all white, and where the lamplight shone on them theylooked like the frosting on birthday cakes. People laden with bundleswere diving in and out of all the shops. Every other shop window had aholly wreath hung in it, and when the doors were opened those spicyChristmassy smells of green hemlock and pine came gushing out in myface. 

So far as I could tell, everybody in New York--except me--was buyingsomething for his or her or some other body's Christmas. It was atolerably lonesome sensation. I walked two blocks, loitering sometimesin front of a store. Nobody spoke to me except a policeman. He told meto keep moving. Finally I went into a little family liquor store. Strangely enough, considering the season, there was nobody there exceptthe proprietor. He was reading a German newspaper behind the bar. Iconferred with him concerning the advisability of an egg-nog. He hadnever heard of such a thing as an egg-nog. I mentioned two old friendsof mine, named Tom and Jerry, respectively, and he didn't know themeither. So I compromised on a hot lemon toddy. The lemon was one thathad grown up with him in the liquor business, I think, and it wasn'twhat you would call a spectacular success as a hot toddy; but it waswarming, anyhow, and that helped. I expanded a trifle. I asked himwhether he wouldn't take something on me. 

He took a small glass of beer! He was a foreigner and he probably knewno better, so I suppose I shouldn't have judged him too harshly. But itwas Christmas Eve and snowing outside--and he took a small beer!

I paid him and came away. I went back to my hall bedroom up on the topfloor and sat down at the window with my face against the pane, likeLittle Maggie in the poem. 

By now the pavements were two inches deep in whiteness and in the circleof light around an electric lamp up at the corner of Ninth Avenue Icould see, dimly, the thick, whirling white flakes chasing one anotherabout madly, playing a Christmas game of their own. Across the wayfoot-passengers were still passing in a straggly stream. I heard theflat clatter of feet upon the stairs outside, heard someone wishsomebody else a Merry Christmas, and heard the other person grunt in anon-committal sort of way. There was the sound of a hall door slammingsomewhere on my floor. After that there was silence--the kind ofsilence that you can break off in chunks and taste. 

It continued to snow. I reckon I must have sat there an hour or more. 

Down in the street four stories below I heard something--music. I raisedthe sash and looked out. An Italian had halted in front of the boardinghouse with a grind organ and he was turning the crank and the thing wasplaying. It wasn't much of a grind organ as grind organs go. I judge itmust have been the original grind organ that played with Booth andBarrett. It had lost a lot of its most important works, and it had theasthma and the heaves and one thing and another the matter with it. 

But the tune it was playing was My Old Kentucky Home--and Kentucky waswhere I'd come from. The Italian played it through twice, once on hisown hook and once because I went downstairs and divided my money withhim. 

I regard that as the finest music I ever heard. 

As I was saying before, the classical stuff may do for those who likeit well enough to stand it, but the domestic article suits me. I likethe kind of beer that this man Bach turned out in the spring of theyear, but I don't seem to be able to care much for his music. And so faras Chopin is concerned, I hope you'll all do your Christmas Chopinearly. 

_ART_

[Illustration]

In art as in music I am one who is very easily satisfied. All I ask of apicture is that it shall look like something, and all I expect of musicis that it shall sound like something. 

In this attitude I feel confident that I am one of a group of aboutseventy million people in this country, more or less, but only a few ofus, a very heroic few of us, have the nerve to come right out and take afirm position and publicly express our true sentiments on theseimportant subjects. Some are under the dominion of strong-mindedwives. Some hesitate to reveal their true artistic leanings for fear ofbeing called low-browed vulgarians. Some are plastic posers and sopretend to be something they are not to win the approval of theultra-intellectuals. There are only a handful of us who are ready andwilling to go on record as saying where we stand. 

[Illustration: "WE LOOKED IN VAIN FOR THE KIND OF PICTURES THAT MOTHERUSED TO MAKE AND FATHER USED TO BUY"]

It is because of this cowardice on the part of the great silent majoritythat every year sees us backed farther and farther into a corner. Wewalk through miles and miles of galleries, or else we are led throughthem by our wives and our friends, and we look in vain for the kind ofpictures that mother used to make and father used to buy. What do wefind? Once in a while we behold a picture of something that we canrecognize without a chart, and it looms before our gladdened vision likea rock-and-rye in a weary land. But that is not apt to happen often--notin a 1912-model gallery. In such an establishment one is likely to meetonly Old Masters and Young Messers. If it's an Old Master we probablybehold a Flemish saint or a German saint or an Italian saint--dependingon whether the artist was Flemish or German or Italian--depicted asbeing shot full of arrows and enjoying same to the uttermost. If it is aYoung Messer the canvas probably presents to us a view of a poached eggapparently bursting into a Welsh rarebit. At least that is what itlooks like to us--a golden buck, forty cents at any good restaurant--inthe act of undergoing spontaneous combustion. But we are informed thatthis is an impressionistic interpretation of a sunset at sea, and we areexpected to stand before it and carry on regardless. 

But I for one must positively decline to carry on. This sort of thingdoes not appeal to me. I don't want to have to consult the officialcatalogue in order to ascertain for sure whether this year's prizepicture is a quick lunch or an Italian gloaming. I'm very peculiar thatway. I like to be able to tell what a picture aims to represent just bylooking at it. I presume this is the result of my early training. I dateback to the Rutherford B. Hayes School of Interior Decorating. In aconsiderable degree I am still wedded to my early ideals. I distinctlyrecall the time when upon the walls of every wealthy home of Americathere hung, among other things, two staple oil paintings--a still-lifefor the dining room, showing a dead fish on a plate, and a pastoral forthe parlor, showing a collection of cows drinking out of a purlingbrook. A dead fish with a glazed eye and a cold clammy fin was not athing you would care to have around the house for any considerableperiod of time, except in a picture, and the same was true of cows. People who could not abide the idea of a cow in the kitchen gladlywelcomed one into the parlor when painted in connection with the abovepurling brook and several shade trees. 

Those who could not afford oil paintings went in for steel engravingsand chromos--good reliable brands, such as the steel engraving of HenryClay's Farewell to the American Senate and the Teaching Baby to Waltzart chromo. War pictures were also very popular back in that period. Ifit were a Northern household you could be pretty sure of seeing a workentitled Gettysburg, showing three Union soldiers, two plain and onecolored, in the act of repulsing Pickett's charge. If it were a Southernhousehold there would be one that had been sold on subscription by astrictly non-partisan publishing house in Charleston, South Carolina, and guaranteed to be historically correct in all particulars, representing Robert E. Lee chasing U. S. Grant up a palmetto tree, whilein the background were a large number of deceased Northern invadersneatly racked up like cordwood. 

Such things as these were a part of the art education of our earlyyouth. Along with them we learned to value the family photograph album, which fastened with a latch like a henhouse door, and had a nap on itlike a furred tongue, and contained, among other treasures, thephotograph of our Uncle Hiram wearing his annual collar. 

And there were also enlarged crayon portraits in heavy gold frames withred plush insertions, the agent having thrown in the portraits inconsideration of our taking the frames; and souvenirs of thePhiladelphia Centennial; and wooden scoop shovels heavily gilded by handwith moss roses painted on the scoop part and blue ribbon bows to hangthem up by; and on the what-not in the corner you were reasonablycertain of finding a conch shell with the Lord's Prayer engraved on it;and if you held the shell up to your young ear you could hear themurmur of the sea just as plain as anything. Of course you could securethe same murmuring effect by holding an old-fashioned tin cuspidor up toyour ear, too, but in this case the poetic effect would have beenlacking. And, besides, there were other uses for the cuspidor. 

Almost the only Old Masters with whose works we were well acquaintedwere John L. Sullivan and Nonpareil Jack Dempsey. But Rosa Bonheur'sHorse Fair suited us clear down to the ground--her horses looked likereal horses, even if they were the kind that haul brewery wagons; and inthe matter of sculpture Powers' Greek Slave seemed to fill the bill tothe satisfaction of all. Anthony Comstock and the Boston Purity Leaguehad not taken charge of our art as yet, and nobody seemed to find anyfault because the Greek lady looked as though she'd slipped on the topstep and come down just as she was, wearing nothing to speak of except apair of handcuffs. Nobody did speak of it either--not in a mixed companyanyhow. 

Furniture was preferred when it was new--the newer the better. We wentin for golden oak and for bird's eye maple, depending on whether weliked our furniture to look tanned or freckled; and when the carefulhousekeeper threw open her parlor for a social occasion, such as afuneral, the furniture gave off a splendid new sticky smell, similar toa paint and varnish store on a hot day. The vogue for antiques hadn'tgot started yet; that was to descend upon us later on. We rather likedthe dining-room table to have all its legs still, and the bureau to havedrawers that could be opened without blasting. In short, that was theperiod of our national life when only the very poor had to put up withdecrepit second-hand furniture, as opposed to these times when only thevery rich can afford to own it. If you have any doubts regarding thislast assertion of mine I should advise you to drop into any reliableantique shop and inquire the price of a mahogany sideboard sufferingfrom tetter and other skin diseases, or a black walnut cupboard withdoors that froze up solid about the time of the last Seminole War. Isuppose these things go in cycles--in fact, I'm sure they do. Some daythe bare sight of the kind of furniture which most people favor nowadayswill cause a person of artistic sensibilities to burst into tears, justas the memory of the things that everybody liked twenty-five or thirtyyears ago gives such poignant pain to so many at present. 

Even up to the time of the World's Fair quite a lot of people stillfavored the simpler and more understandable forms of art expression. Wewent to Chicago and religiously visited the Art Building, and in ournice new creaky shoes we walked past miles and miles of brought-onpaintings by foreign artists, whose names we could not pronounce, inorder to find some sentimental domestic subject. After we had found itwe would stand in front of it for hours on a stretch with the tearsrolling down our cheeks. Some of us wept because the spirit of thepicture moved us, and some because our poor tired feet hurt us and thepicture gave us a good excuse for crying in public, and so we didso--freely and openly. Grant if you will that our taste was crude andraw and provincial, yet we knew what we liked and the bulk of us weren'tashamed to say so, either. What we liked was a picture or a statue whichremotely at least resembled the thing that it was presumed to represent. Likewise we preferred pictures of things that we ourselves knew aboutand could understand. 

Maybe it was because of that early training that a good many of us havenever yet been able to work up much enthusiasm over the Old Masters. Mind you, we have no quarrel with those who become incoherent andbabbling with joy in the presence of an Old Master, but--doggone'em!--they insist on quarreling with us because we think differently. Wefail to see anything ravishingly beautiful in a faded, blistered, cracked, crumbling painting of an early Christian martyr on a grill, happily frying on one side like an egg--a picture that looks as thoughthe Old Master painted it some morning before breakfast, when he wasn'tfeeling the best in the world, and then wore it as a liver pad for fortyor fifty years. We cannot understand why they love the Old Masters so, and they cannot understand why we prefer the picture of Custer's LastStand that the harvesting company used to give away to advertise itsmowing machines. 

Once you get away from the early settlers among the Old Masters thesituation becomes different. Rembrandt and Hals painted some portraitsthat appeal deeply to the imagination of nearly all of my set. Theportraits which they painted not only looked like regular persons, butso far as my limited powers of observation go, they were among the fewpainters of Dutch subjects who didn't always paint a windmill or twointo the background. It probably took great resolution andself-restraint, but they did it and I respect them for it. 

I may say that I am also drawn to the kind of ladies that Gainsboroughand Sir Joshua Reynolds painted. They certainly turned out some mightygood-looking ladies in those days, and they were tasty dressers, too, and I enjoy looking at their pictures. Coming down the line a littlefarther, I want to state that there is also something veryfascinating in those soft-boiled pink ladies, sixteen hands high, withsorrel manes, that Bouguereau did; and the soldier pictures ofMeissonier and Detaille appeal to me mightily. Their soldiers are alwayssuch nice neat soldiers, and they never have their uniforms mussed up ortheir accouterments disarranged, even when they are being shot up or cutdown or something. Corot and Rousseau did some landscapes that seem toapproximate the real thing, and there are several others whose namesescape me; but, speaking for myself alone, I wish to say that this isabout as far as I can go at this writing. I must admit that I have neverbeen held spellbound and enthralled for hours on a stretch by acontemplation of the inscrutable smile on Mona Lisa. To me she seemsmerely a lady smiling about something--simply that and nothing more. 

[Illustration: "THE INSCRUTABLE SMILE OF A SALESLADY WOULD MAKE MONALISA SEEM A MERE AMATEUR"]

Any woman can smile inscrutably; that is one of the specialties of thesex. The inscrutable smile of a saleslady in an exclusive Fifth Avenueshop when a customer asks to look at something a little cheaper wouldmake Mona Lisa seem a mere amateur as an inscrutable smiler. Quite anumber of us remained perfectly calm when some gentlemen stole Miss Lisaout of the Louvre, and we expect to remain equally calm if she is neverrestored. 

As I said before, our little band is shrinking in numbers day by day. The population as a whole are being educated up to higher ideals in art. On the wings of symbolism and idealism they are soaring ever higher andhigher, until a whole lot of them must be getting dizzy in the head bynow. 

First, there was the impressionistic school, which started it; and thenthere was the post-impressionistic school, suffering from the samedisease but in a more violent form; and here just recently there havecome along the Cubists and the Futurists. 

[Illustration: "A PERSON WHO FOR REASONS BEST KNOWN TO THE POLICE HASNOT BEEN LOCKED UP"]

You know about the Cubists? A Cubist is a person who for reasons bestknown to the police has not been locked up yet, who asserts that allthings in Nature, living and inanimate, properly resolve themselves intocubes. What is more, he goes and paints pictures to prove it--picturesof cubic waterfalls pouring down cubic precipices, and cubic shipssailing on cubic oceans, and cubic cows being milked by cubic milkmaids. He makes portraits, too--portraits of persons with cubic hands and cubicfeet, who are smoking cubed cigarettes and have solid cubiform heads. Onthat last proposition we are with them unanimously; we will concede thatthere are people in this world with cube-shaped heads, they being thepeople who profess to enjoy this style of picture. 

A Futurist begins right where a Cubist leaves off, and gets worse. TheFuturists have already had exhibitions in Paris and London and lastSpring they invaded New York. They call themselves art anarchists. Theirdoctrine is a simple and a cheerful one--they merely preach thatwhatever is normal is wrong. They not only preach it, they practice it. 

Here are some of their teachings:

"We teach the plunge into shadowy death under the white set eyes of theideal!

"The mind must launch the flaming body, like a fire-ship, against theenemy, the eternal enemy that, if he do not exist, must be invented!

"The victory is ours--I am sure of it, for the maniacs are alreadyhurling their hearts to heaven like bombs! Attention! Fire! Our blood?Yes! All our blood in torrents to redye the sickly auroras of the earth!Yes, and we shall also be able to warm thee within our smoking arms, Owretched, decrepit, chilly Sun, shivering upon the summit of theGorisankor!"

[Illustration: "COLLISION BETWEEN TWO HEAVENLY BODIES OR PREMATUREEXPLOSION OF A CUSTARD PIE"]

There you have the whole thing, you see, simply, dispassionately andquietly presented. Most of us have seen newspaper reproductions of thebest examples of the Futurists' school. As well as a body can judge fromthese reproductions, a Futurist's method of execution must becomparatively simple. After looking at his picture, you would say thathe first put on a woolly overcoat and a pair of overshoes; that he thenpoured a mixture of hearth paint, tomato catsup, liquid bluing, burntcork, English mustard, Easter dyes and the yolks of a dozen eggs overhimself, seasoning to taste with red peppers. Then he spread a largetarpaulin on the floor and lay down on it and had an epileptic fit, theresult being a picture which he labeled Revolt, or Collision Between TwoHeavenly Bodies, or Premature Explosion of a Custard Pie, or somethingelse equally appropriate. The Futurists ought to make quite a number ofconverts in this country, especially among those advanced lovers of artwho are beginning to realize that the old impressionistic school lackedemphasis and individuality in its work. But I expect to stand firm, andwhen everybody else nearly is a Futurist and is tearing down Sargent'spictures and Abbey's and Whistler's to make room for immortal YoungMessers, I and a few others will still be holding out resolutely to theend. 

At such times as these I fain would send my thoughts back longingly toan artist who flourished in the town where I was born and brought up. Hewas practically the only artist we had, but he was versatile in theextreme. He was several kinds of a painter rolled into one--house, sign, portrait, landscape, marine and wagon. In his lighter hours, whenbuilding operations were dull, he specialized in oil paintings of lifeand motion--mainly pictures of horse races and steamboat races. When hepainted a horse race, the horses were always shown running neck and neckwith their mouths wide open and their eyes gleaming; and their nostrilswere widely extended and painted a deep crimson, and their legs wereneatly arranged just so, and not scrambled together in any old fashion, as seems to be the case with the legs of the horses that are beingpainted nowadays. And when he painted a steamboat race it would alwaysbe the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee coming down the river abreast inthe middle of the night, with the darkies dancing on the lower decks andheavy black smoke rolling out of the smokestacks in four distinctcolumns--one column to each smokestack--and showers of sparks belchingup into the vault of night. 

There was action for you--action and attention to detail. With thisman's paintings you could tell a horse from a steamboat at a glance. Hewas nothing of an impressionist; he never put smokestacks on thehorse nor legs on the steamboat. And his work gave general satisfactionthroughout that community. 

Frederic Remington wasn't any impressionist either; and so far as I canlearn he didn't have a cubiform idea in stock. When Remington painted anIndian on a pony it was a regular Indian and a regular pony--not one ofthose cotton-batting things with fat legs that an impressionist slaps onto a canvas and labels a horse. You could smell the lathered sweat onthe pony's hide and feel the dust of the dry prairie tickling yournostrils. You could see the slide of the horse's withers and watch theplay of the naked Indian's arm muscles. I should like to enroll as acharter member of a league of Americans who believe that FredericRemington and Howard Pyle were greater painters than any Old Master thatever turned out blistered saints and fly-blown cherubim. And if everyone who secretly thinks the same way about it would only join in--ofcourse they wouldn't, but if they would--we'd be strong enough to electa president on a platform calling for a prohibitive tariff against theforeign-pauper-labor Old Masters of Europe. 

While we were about it our league could probably do something in theinterests of sculpture. It is apparent to any fair-minded person thatsculpture has been very much overdone in this country. It seems to usthere should be a law against perpetuating any of our great men inmarble or bronze or stone or amalgam fillings until after he has beendead a couple of hundred years, and by that time a fresh crop ought tobe coming on and probably we shall have lost the desire to create suchstatues. 

A great man who cannot live in the affectionate and grateful memories ofhis fellow countrymen isn't liable to live if you put up statues of him;that, however, is not the main point. 

The artistic aspect is the thing to consider. So few of our great menhave been really pretty to look at. Andrew Jackson made a considerabledent in the history of his period, but when it comes to beauty, thereisn't a floor-walker in a department store anywhere that hasn't got himbacked clear off the pedestal. In addition to that, the sort of clotheswe've been wearing for the last century or so do not show up especiallywell in marble. Putting classical draperies on our departed solons hasbeen tried, but carving a statesman with only a towel draped over him, like a Roman senator coming out of a Turkish bath, is a departure fromthe real facts and must be embarrassing to his shade. The greatestcelebrities were ever the most modest of men. I'll bet the spirit of theFather of His Country blushes every time he flits over that statue ofhimself alongside the Capitol at Washington--the one showing him sittingin a bath cabinet with nothing on but a sheet. 

Sticking to the actual conditions doesn't seem to help much either. Future generations will come and stand in front of the statue of aleader of thought who flourished back about 1840, say, and wonder howanybody ever had feet like those and lived. Horace Greeley's chinwhiskers no doubt looked all right on Horace when he was alive, but whendone in bronze they invariably present a droopy not to say dropsicalappearance; and the kind of bone-handled umbrella that Daniel Websterhabitually carried has never yet been successfully worked out in marble. When you contemplate the average statue of Lincoln--and most of them, asyou may have noticed, are very average--you do not see there the majestyand the grandeur and the abiding sorrow of the man and the tragedy ofhis life. At least I know I do not see those things. I see a pair ofmassive square-toed boots, such as I'm sure Father Abe never wore--hecouldn't have worn 'em and walked a step--and I see a beegum hatweighing a ton and a half, and I say to myself: "This is not the AbrahamLincoln who freed the slaves and penned the Gettysburg address. No, sir!A man with those legs would never have been president--he'd have been ina dime museum exhibiting his legs for ten cents a look--and they'd havebeen worth the money too. "

Nobody seems to have noticed it, but we undoubtedly had the cube form ofexpression in our native sculpture long before it came out in painting. 

To get a better idea of what I'm trying to drive at, just take a trip upthrough Central Park the next time you are in New York and pause a whilebefore those bronzes of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns which stand onthe Mall. They are called bronzes, but to me they always looked morelike castings. I don't care if you are as Scotch as a haggis, I know inadvance what your feelings will be. If you decide that these two menever looked in life like those two bronzes you are going to lose some ofyour love and veneration for them right there on the spot; or else youare going to be filled with an intense hate for the persons who havelibeled them thus, after they were dead and gone and not in position toprotect themselves legally. But you don't necessarily have to come toNew York--you've probably got some decoration in your home town that isequally sad. There've been a lot of good stone-masons spoiled in thiscountry to make enough sculptors to go round. 

But while we are thinking these things about art and not daring toexpress them, I take note that new schools may come and new schools maygo, but there is one class of pictures that always gets the money andcontinues to give general satisfaction among the masses. 

I refer to the moving pictures. 

_SPORT_

[Illustration]

As I understand it, sport is hard work for which you do not get paid. If, for hire, you should consent to go forth and spend eight hours a dayslamming a large and heavy hammer at a mark, that would be manual toil, and you would belong to the union and carry a card, and have politicalspeeches made to you by persons out for the labor vote. But if you dothis without pay, and keep it up for more than eight hours on a stretch, it then becomes sport of a very high order--and if you continue it for aconsiderable period of time, at more or less expense to yourself, youare eventually given a neat German-silver badge, costing about twodollars, which you treasure devotedly ever after. A man who walkstwenty-five miles a day for a month without getting anything forit--except two lines on the sporting page--is a devotee ofpedestrianism, and thereby acquires great merit among his fellowathletes. A man who walks twenty-five miles a day for a month and getspaid for it is a letter-carrier. 

Also sport is largely a point of view. A skinny youth who flits forthfrom a gymnasium attired in the scenario of a union suit, with a designof a winged Welsh rarebit on his chest, and runs many miles at top speedthrough the crowded marts of trade, is highly spoken of and has medalshung on him. If he flits forth from a hospital somewhat similarlyattired, and does the same thing, the case is diagnosed as temporaryinsanity--and we drape a strait-jacket on him and send for his folks. Such is the narrow margin that divides Marathon and mania; and it helpsto prove that sport is mainly a state of mind. 

I am speaking now with reference to our own country. Different nationshave different conceptions of this subject. Golf and eating haggis in astate of original sin are the national pastimes of the Scotch, a hardyrace. At submarine boating and military ballooning the Frenchacknowledge no superiors. Their balloons go up and never come down, andtheir submarines go down and never come up. The Irish are born clubswingers, as witness any police force; and the Swiss, as is well known, have no equals at Alpine mountain climbing, chasing cuckoos into woodenclocks, and running hotels. I've always believed that, if the truth wereonly known, the reason why the Swiss Family Robinson did so well in thatdesert clime was because they opened a hotel and took in the natives toboard. 

Among certain branches of the Teutonic races the favorite indoor sportis suicide by gas, and the favorite outdoor sport is going to a_schutzenfest_ and singing _Ach du lieber Augustin!_ coming home. ToItaly the rest of us are indebted for unparalleled skill in eatingspaghetti with one tool--they use the putting iron all the way round. Our cousins, the English, excel at archery, tea-drinking and putting thefifty-six pound protest. Thus we lead the world at contesting Olympiangames and winning them, and they lead the world at losing them first andthen contesting them. In catch-as-catch-can wrestling betweenSuffragettes and policemen the English also hold the presentchampionship at all weights. And so it goes. 

We in America have a range of sports and pastimes that is as wide as ourcontinent, which is fairly wide as continents go. In using the editorialwe here I do not mean, however, to include myself. At sport I am no morethan an inoffensive onlooker. One time or another I have tried many ofour national diversions and have found that those which are notstrenuous enough are entirely too strenuous for a person of fairlysettled habits. It is much easier to look on and less fatiguing to thesystem. I find that the best results along sporting lines are attainedby taking a comfortable seat up in the grandstand, lighting a good cigarand leaning back and letting somebody else do the heavy work. Readingabout it is also a very good way. 

Take fishing, now, for example. What can be more delightful on a bright, pleasant afternoon, when the wind is in exactly the right quarter, thanto take up a standard work on fishing, written by some gifted travelingpassenger agent, and with him to snatch the elusive finny tribe out oftheir native element, while the reel whirs deliriously and the hookedtrophy leaps high in air, struggling against the feathered barb of thedeceptive lure, and a waiter is handy if you press the button? I haveforgotten the rest of the description; but any railroad line making aspecialty of summer-resort business will be glad to send you the fulldetails by mail, prepaid. In literature, fishing is indeed anexhilarating sport; but, so far as my experience goes, it does not panout when you carry the idea farther. 

To begin with, there is the matter of tackle. Some people thinkcollecting orchids is expensive--and I guess it is, the way the orchidmarket is at present; and some say matching up pearls costs money. Theyshould try buying fishing tackle once. If J. Pierpont Morgan had gone infor fishing tackle instead of works of art he would have died in thehands of a receiver. Any self-respecting dealer in sporting goods wouldbe ashamed to look his dependent family in the face afterward if hesuffered you to escape from his lair equipped for even the simplestfishing expedition unless he had sawed off about ninety dollars' worthof fishing knickknacks on you. 

[Illustration: "EVERYTHING YOU CATCH IS SECOND-HAND"]

Let us say, then, that you have mortgaged the old home and have acquiredenough fishing tackle to last you for a whole day. Then you go forth, always conceding that you are an amateur fisherman who fishes for fun asdistinguished from a professional fisherman who fishes for fish--and youget into a rowboat that you undertake to pull yourself and that startsout by weighing half a ton and gets half a ton heavier at each stroke. You pull and pull until your spine begins to unravel at both ends, andyour palms get so full of water blisters you feel as though you werecarrying a bunch of hothouse grapes in each hand. And after going aboutnine miles you unwittingly anchor off the mouth of a popular garbagedump and everything you catch is second-hand. The sun beats down uponyou with unabated fervor and the back of your neck colors up like ameerschaum pipe; and after about ten minutes you begin to yearn witha great, passionate yearning for a stiff collar and some dry clothes, and other delights of civilization. 

If, on the other hand, I am being guided by an experienced angler it hasbeen my observation that he invariably takes me to a spot where the fishbit greedily yesterday and will bite avariciously tomorrow, but, owingto a series of unavoidable circumstances, are doing very little in thebiting line today. Or if by any chance they should be biting they atonce contract an intense aversion for my goods. Others may catch them asfreely as the measles, but toward me fish are never what you would callinfectious. I'm one of those immunes. Or else the person in chargeforgets to bring any bait along. This frequently happens when I am inthe party. 

One day last summer I went fishing in the Savannah River, and wetraveled miles and miles to reach the fishing-ground. We found the waterthere alive with fish, and anchored where they were thickest; and thenthe person who was guiding the expedition discovered that he had leftthe bait on the wharf. He is the most absent-minded man south of theOhio anyhow. In the old days before Georgia went dry he had to give upcarrying a crook-handled umbrella. He would invariably leave it hangingon the rail. So I should have kept the bait in mind myself--but Ididn't, being engaged at the time in sun-burning a deep, radiantmagenta. However it was not a fast color--long before night it waspeeling off in long, painful strips. 

Suppose you do catch something! You cast and cast, sometimes buryingyour hook in submerged débris and sometimes in tender portions of yourown person. After a while you land a fish; but a fish in a boat israrely so attractive as he was in a book. One of the drawbacks about afish is that he becomes dead so soon--and so thoroughly. 

I have been speaking thus far of river fishing. I would not undertake todescribe at length the joys of brook fishing, because I tried it onlyonce. Once was indeed sufficient, not to say ample. On this occasion Iwas chaperoned by an old, experienced brook fisherman. I was astonishedwhen I got my first view of the stream. It seemed to me no more than atrickle of moisture over a bed of boulders--a gentle perspirationcoursing down the face of Nature, as it were. Any time they tapped apatient for dropsy up that creek there would be a destructive freshet, Ijudged; but, as it developed, this brook was deceptive--it was full ofdeep, cold holes. I found all these holes. 

I didn't miss a single one. While I was finding them and then crawlingout of them, my companion was catching fish. He caught quite a number, some of them being nearly three inches long. They were speckled and hadrudimentary gills and suggestions of fins, and he said they were brooktrout--and I presume they were; but if they had been larger they wouldhave been sardines. You cannot deceive me regarding the varieties offish that come in cans. I would say that the best way to land a brooktrout is to go to a restaurant and order one from a waiter in whom youhave confidence. In that way you will avoid those deep holes. 

Nor have I ever shone as a huntsman. If the shadowy roeshad is not forme neither is her cousin, the buxom roebuck. Nor do I think I will evergo in for mountain-climbing as a steady thing, having tried it. Poetsare fond of dwelling upon the beauties of the everlasting hills, swimming in purple and gold--but no poet ever climbed one. If he everdid he would quit boosting and start knocking. I was induced to scale alarge mountain in the northern part of New York. It belonged to thestate; and, like so many other things the state undertakes to run, itwas neglected. No effort whatever had been made to make it cozy andcomfortable for the citizen. It was one of those mountains that from adistance look smooth and gentle of ascent, but turn out to be rugged andseamy and full of rocks with sharp corners on them at about the heightof the average human knee or shin. The lady for whom that mountain inMexico, Chapultepec, is named--oh, yes, Miss Anna Peck--would have had aperfectly lovely time scaling that mountain; but I didn't. 

[Illustration: "HE COULD BEAT ME CLIMBING, BUT AT PANTING I HAD HIMLICKED TO A WHISPER"]

After we had climbed upward at an acute angle for several hundredmiles--my companion said yards, but I know better; it was miles--I threwmyself prone upon the softer surfaces of a large granite slab, feelingthat I could go no farther. I also wished to have plenty of room inwhich to pant. He could beat me climbing, but at panting I had himlicked to a whisper. He was a person without sympathy. In his bosom themilk of human kindness had clabbered and turned to a brick-cheese. Hestood there and laughed. There are times to laugh, but this was not oneof the times. Anyway I always did despise those people who are builtlike sounding boards and have fine acoustic qualities inside theirheads--and not much of anything else; but never did I despise them morethan at that moment. He sent his grating, raucous, discordant, ill-timedguffaws reverberating off among the precipitous crags, and then heturned from me and went forging ahead. 

He was almost out of sight when I remembered about there being bears onthat mountain; so I rose and undertook to forge ahead too. I was not agreat success at it however. I know now that if ever I should turn to alife of crime forgery would not be my forte. I do not forge readily. Eventually, though, I reached the summit, he being already there. We hadcome up for the view, but I seemed to have lost my interest in views;so, while he looked at the view, I reclined in a prostrate position andresumed panting. That was three years ago and I am still somewhat behindwith my pants. I am going to take a week off sometime and pant steadilyand try to catch up; but the outing taught me one thing--I learned asimple way of descending a steep mountain. If one is of a circular styleof construction it is very simple. One rolls. 

Camping is highly spoken of, and I have tried camping a number of times. When I go camping it rains. It begins to rain when I start and it keepson raining until I come back. It never fails. I have often thought thatdrought-sufferers in various parts of the country who seek to attractrain in dry spells make a mistake. They try the old-fashioned Methodistway of praying for it, or the new scientific way of shooting dynamitebombs off and trying to blast it out of the heavens; when, as a matterof fact, the best plan would be to send for me and get me to go campingin the arid district. It would then rain heavily and without cessation. 

It is a fine thing to talk about the perfumed and restful bed of balsamboughs, and the crackle of the campfire at dusk, and the dip in themirrored bosom of the pellucid lake at dawn--old Emerson Hough does allthat to perfection; but these things assume a different aspect when itrains. There are three conditions in life when any latent selfishness ina man's being, however far down it may be buried ordinarily, will comesurging to the surface--when he is courting a girl against strongopposition; when he is playing a gentleman's game of poker, purely forsociability; and when he is camping out and it rains. Before a man makesup his mind that he will take a girl to be his wife he should induce herto go in surf bathing and see how she looks when she comes out; andbefore he makes up his mind that he will take a man to be his bestfriend he should go camping with him in the rainy season--the answer inboth cases being that then he won't do either one. 

I remember going camping once with a man who before that had appeared tobe all that one could ask in the way of a chosen comrade; but after wehad spent four days cooped up together in an eight-by-ten tent that wasbuilt with sloping shoulders, like an Englishman's overcoat, listeningto the sough of the wind through the wet pine trees without, and dodgingthe streams of water that percolated through the dripping roof within, Icould think of more than seven thousand things about that man that Icordially disliked. 

His whiskers gradually became the most distasteful of all to me. Eitherhe hadn't brought a razor along or it was too wet for shaving--orsomething; and his whiskers grew out, and they were bristly and red incolor, which was something I had not suspected before. As I sat therewith the little rivulets running down the back of my neck and the rustforming on my amalgam fillings and mold on my shoes and mushroomssprouting under my hatband, it seemed to me that he had taken an unfairadvantage of me by having red whiskers. Viewed through the drizzle theyappeared to be the reddest, the most inflammatory, the mostpoisonous-looking whiskers I ever saw! They were too red to be natural. 

I decided finally that he must have been scared by a Jersey bull so thathis whiskers turned red in a single night--and I was getting ready totwit him about it; but he beat me to it. It seemed that all this time hehad been feeling more and more deeply offended at the way in which myears were adjusted to my head. He couldn't make up his mind, he said, which way he would hate me more--with my ears or without them; but hewas willing to take a butcher knife and experiment. He also said that, as an expert bookkeeper, he wouldn't know whether to enter my ears asoutstanding losses or amounts brought forward. Going into those woods wewere just the same as Damon and Pythias; but coming out his bite wouldhave been instant death, and I felt toward him exactly as the tarantuladoes toward the centipede. We were the original Blue-Gum Twins. 

Coming now to aquatic sports as distinguished from pastimes ashore, Ifeel that I am better qualified to speak authoritatively, having hadmore experience in that direction. Let us start with canoeing. Canoeingis a sport fraught with constant surprises. A canoeing trip is rarelythe same thing twice in succession; and particularly is this true instreams where the temperature of the water is subject to change. It iscomparatively easy to paddle a canoe if you only remember to scooptoward you. You merely reverse the process by which truly refined peopleimbibe soup. Even if you never master the art of paddling you may stillget along fairly well if you know how to swim. On the whole I would saythat one is liable to enjoy a longer career as a canoeist where oneswims but can't paddle, than where one paddles but can't swim. 

Approaching the subject of motor-boating as compared with sailboating, we find the situation becoming complicated and growing technical. Insailing, as is generally known, you depend upon the wind; and there areonly two things the wind does--one is to blow and the other is not toblow. But when you begin to figure up the things that a motor boat willdo when you don't want it to, and won't do when you do want it to, youare face to face with one of the most complicated mathematical jobsknown to the realm of mechanical science. 

A motor boat undoubtedly has a larger and fancier repertoire of cutetricks and unexpected ways than anything in the nature of machinery. Iknow this to be true, because I have a relative who suffers frommotor-boatitis in an advanced form. He has owned many different brandsof motor boats--that is one reason, I think, why he is not wealthier; infact he has had about all the kinds there are except a kind that willstart when you wish it to and stop when you expect it to. His motorboats do nearly everything--backfire, and fail to spark, and clog up, and blow up, and break down, and smash up and drift ashore, and driftout from shore, and have the asthma and the heaves and impediments ofspeech; but he has never yet owned one that could be depended upon todo the two things I have just mentioned. 

After trying various models and discarding them, he now has one of themost complete motor boats made. It has what is known as a hunting cabin, it being so called, I think, because the moment anybody gets into it hehas to get out again while the owner crawls in and takes up all theseats and hunts for something. It is the theory that one could liveafloat in this hunting cabin--and so one could if one were only adachshund and inured to exposure. It is plenty wide enough for theaverage dachshund and plenty high enough, too, but not more than abouttwo-thirds long enough. If one were a dachshund one would either have tocoil up or else remain partly outdoors. Also, on board is a galley, which would be a success in every way if you could find a style of cookwho could get used to sitting on one hole of the stove while he cookedon the other. One of those talented parlor magicians who does lighthousekeeping in a borrowed high hat by breaking raw eggs into it andthen taking out omelet souffles, might fill the bill--only I never havechanced to see a parlor magician yet who could crowd himself and hisfeet into that galley at the same time. 

The principal feature of this motor boat, however, is the engine, whichis a very complicated and beautiful thing, with coils and plugs andbrakes strewed about over it here and there, and a big flywheelsuperimposed right in front. It is the theory that, by opening severalcocks and closing several others, and adjusting about fifteen or twentylittle duflickers just so, and then revolving this wheel briskly with acrank provided for that purpose, the engine can be started. It issupposed to say chug-chug a couple of times impatiently, and then goscooting away, chug-chugging like an inspired slide-trombone. 

Such is the theory, but such is not the fact. I've seen the owner crankher until his backbone comes unjointed, without getting any responsewhatsoever. And then, just when he is about to succumb to hate andoverexertion, the thing says tut-tut reprovingly--and then gives onetired pish and a low mournful tush and coughs about a pint of warmgasoline into his face and dies as dead as Jesse James. I've seen her dothat time and time again; but if she ever does start, the only way tostop her is to steer into some solid immovable object, such as theWestern Hemisphere. 

At that, motor-boating for an amateur such as I am has certainadvantages over sailboating. A motor-boatist--even the most recklesskind--knows enough to stay ashore when a West Indian hurricane isromping along the coast, playfully chasing its own tail like a youngpuppy; but that kind of a situation is just pie for your seasonedsailboatist. 

Only last summer I had a very distressing experience in connection witha sailboat, which was owned by a friend of mine--or perhaps I should sayhe was a friend of mine until this matter came up. From the clubhouseporch I had often admired his boat skimming gracefully over the bay, with its sail making a white gore against the blue background; and oneday he invited me to go out with him for a sail. Before I had timefor that second thought which is so desirable under such circumstances, I found myself committed to the venture. 

Right here, though, I wish to state that if anybody ever gets me out ina small sailboat again it will be over my dead body. 

[Illustration: "SHE WAS NOT MUCH LARGER THAN A SOAPDISH"]

Well, anyway, we cast off, as he called it. I did not like thatphrase--cast off--it sounded too much as though one were biddingfarewell to all earthly ties--and almost immediately I was struck byother disconcerting facts. The first one was that his boat, which hadlooked roomy and commodious when viewed from shore, appeared to shrinkup so when you were aboard her. Really, she was not much larger than asoapdish and not nearly so reliable. And another thing I noticed was alot of the angriest-looking clouds that anybody ever saw, piling up onthe horizon. And the waves were slopping up and down, and giving to thewater that dark, forbidding appearance that is so inspiring in a marinepainting, but so depressing when you are thrown into personal contactwith it. 

I made a suggestion. As I recall now, I said something about waitinguntil the typhoon was over; but my friend grinned in an annoying, superior kind of way and said he doubted whether the wind would blowmore than half a gale. He was right there--but it was the last half. Anyhow he swung her round and she heeled away over in an alarmingfashion, and we headed right into the center of the vortex. He gave methe end of a rope to hold and told me to swing on to it, which I wasvery glad to do, because there are times and places when it gives you aslight sense of comfort to have anything at all to hold to, even if itis only a rope. On and on we careened madly. I was so occupied withharkening to the howl of the mad winds in the rigging and watching themad waves that, when he suddenly called out something which sounded likeHard Ah Lee, I paid no attention. If his fancy led him in a moment ofdire peril like this to be yelling for somebody with a name like aChinese laundryman, it was no concern of mine. 

Then he bellowed: "Leggo that sheet!"

Now I knew there was something about a sailboat called a sheet, but Inaturally assumed it was the sail. I leave it to any disinterestedperson if a sail, being white and more or less square in shape, doesn'tlook more like a sheet than a mere rope does. So, as I wasn't near thesail, but was merely holding on to my rope, I started to tell him Iwasn't touching his blamed old sheet. But the words were never spoken. 

The boat tried to shy out from under me and came very nearly succeeding. At the same time, she buckjumped and stood right up on one edge, like ademented gravy dish. At the same moment, also, a considerable portion ofthe Atlantic Ocean came aboard and lit in my lap, and something struckme alongside the head with frightful force; and something else scrapedme off the place where I was sitting and hurled me headlong. 

When I came to, the man who owned the boat was scrambling round, stepping on me and my clothes, and grabbing at loose ends, and swearing;but as soon as he had a moment to spare from these other duties hecalled me a derned idiot! I was his guest, mind you, and he used thatlanguage toward me. 

"You derned idiot!" he said. "Didn't you see she was about to jibe?"

I told him in a dignified manner that I certainly did not; that had Iknown she was about to jibe I would most certainly have jobe with her;that personally I preferred any amount of jibbing, however painful, tobeing drowned first and then beaten to death. I demanded to know why hehad assaulted me upon the head and what he did it with. 

It developed, though, that he had not struck me at all. The boom swunground and hit me. This is a heavy section of lumber, and I think it iscalled a boom from the hollow, ringing sound it makes when dashing outthe brains of amateur sailors. In my judgment these booms are dangerousand their presence should not be permitted aboard a sailing craft--or, at least, they should be towed a safe distance aft. 

But I digress. Referring to the devastating and angry elements thatencompassed us, the owner of the boat said there was now a nice, fresh breeze blowing, and that he hated to miss the fun; but if Ipreferred to he would run back in and hug the shore. Hug it! I was readyto kiss it! What I wanted to do was to take that dear shore in both armsand press my throbbing cheeks against her mossy breast, and swear thatnothing should ever again come between me and the solid part of thecontinent of North America. 

So, by a sheer miracle escaping death on the way, we returned, and Ibetook myself off of that craft and headed straight for the clubhouse. Iwish to take advantage of this opportunity, however, to deny the reportsubsequently circulated by certain malicious persons to the effect thatI was scared. Any passing agitation I may have betrayed was due to myrelief at finding that the cyclone, despite its fury, had not swept theNorth Atlantic Coast bare. I also wish to deny the story that I waspale. I have one of those complexions that come and go. Anybody whoknows me will tell you that. 

However, I have decided to give up sailboating; and, to a person of myshape and conservative tendencies, this leaves the field of outdoorsport considerably circumscribed. I am too peaceful for baseball and notwarlike enough for football. I had thought some of taking up tennis, buthave been deterred by the fact that so many young women excel at tennis. I could stand being licked by another man, but the idea of facing one ofthose sinewy young-lady champions whose stalwart face looks out at youfrom the sporting page is repellent to me. 

I can understand why so very few of these ultra-athletic college girlsmarry off early. A man instinctively is drawn to the clinging-vine typeof female. If there is any sturdy oak round the place he wants to be it. But what I cannot understand is how these brawny young persons can bethe granddaughters and the great granddaughters of those fragilecreatures, with wasp waists and tiny feet, who lived back in the EarlyVictorian period and suffered from megrims and vapors. I'll venture thatnone of this generation ever had a vapor in her life; and as formegrims, she wouldn't know one if she met it in the big road. She may bemuscle-bound and throw a splint sometimes, or get the Charley horse; butmegrims are not for her--believe me!

Oh, I've seen them often--the adorable yet brawny creatures, leaping sixfeet into the air and smacking a defenseless tennis ball with such vigorthat it started right off in the general direction of Sioux Falls at therate of upwards of ninety miles an hour, and coming down flat-footedwithout having jostled so much as a hairpin out of place. You mayworship them, all right enough, but it is safer to do so at longdistance. 

[Illustration: "THINK OF BEING LAID FACE DOWNWARD FIRMLY ACROSS A SINEWYKNEE AND BEATEN FORTY-LOVE WITH ONE OF THOSE HARD CATGUT RACKETS!"]

Suppose you were hooked up for life to a lady champion and you happenedto displease her? She'd spank you! Think of being laid face downwardfirmly across a sinewy knee and beaten forty-love with one of those hardcatgut rackets! The very suggestion is intolerable to a believer in thesupremacy of the formerly sterner sex. 

So I have decided not to take up tennis; but the doctor says I needexercise, and I think I will go in for golf, which is a young man'svice and an old man's penance. I have already taken the preliminarysteps. I have joined a country club; I have also chosen my caddie. He isa deaf-and-dumb caddie, who has never been known to laugh at anything. 

That is why I chose him.