PENGUIN PERSONS & PEPPERMINTS

 BY WALTER PRICHARD EATON

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 _Essay Index Reprint Series_

 BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS FREEPORT, NEW YORK

 First Published 1922 Reprinted 1969

 STANDARD BOOK NUMBER: 8369-1288-8

 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 72-93335

 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

 _To My Little Sister who was born just in time to know the old, quiet ways of life in their gentle decline--to know and to love them_

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 _Contents_

 _Page_Author's Foreword ixPenguin Persons 1Spring Comes to Thumping Dick 18The Passing of the Stage Sundial 33On Singing Songs with One Finger 41The Immorality of Shop-windows 46A Forgotten American Poet 51New Poetry and the Lingering Line 65The Lies We Learn in Our Youth 77The Bad Manners of Polite People 87On Giving Up Golf Forever 96"Grape-Vine" Erudition 108Business Before Grammar 114Wood Ashes and Progress 118The Vacant Room in Drama 128On Giving an Author a Plot 132The Twilight Veil 136Spring in the Garden 154The Bubble, Reputation 168The Old House on the Bend 180Concerning Hat-trees 184The Shrinking of Kingman's Field 189Mumblety-peg and Middle Age 209Barber Shops of Yesterday 229The Button Box 234Peppermints 239

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 _Author's Foreword_

It is not a little unfortunate that no one can attempt the essay formnowadays, more especially that type of essay which is personal, reminiscent, "an open letter to whom it may concern, " without beingaccused of trying to write like Charles Lamb. Of course, if we wereever accused of succeeding, that would be another story! There is, tobe sure, no doubt that the gentle Elia impressed his form and methodon all English writers who followed him, and still reaches out acrossa century to threaten with his high standards those who still ventureinto this pleasant and now so neglected field. Such are the rigors oftriumphant gentleness. Still--and he would have been the first torecognize the fact--it is rather unfair to demand of every essayistthe revelation of a personality like Lamb's. Fundamentally, allliterature, even naturalistic drama, is the revelation of apersonality, a point of view. But it is the peculiar flavor of theessay that it reveals an author through his chat about himself, hisfriends, his memories and fancies, in something of the direct mannerof a conversation or a letter; and he himself feels, in writing, adelightful sense of intimacy with his future readers. That Lamb was amaster of this art like no other, without a visible or probable rival, hardly constitutes a reason for denying to less delightful men andgifted artists the right also to practice it, to put themselves andtheir intimate little affairs and idiosyncrasies into direct andpersonal touch with such few readers as they may find. For the readersof his essays are the author's friends in a sense that the readers ofhis novels or dissertations, or the witnesses of his plays, can neverbe. There will be no story to hold them, no fictional, independentcharacters, no ideas nor arguments on high questions of policy. Therewill be only a joint interest in the minutiæ of life. If I like catsand snowstorms, and you like cats and snowstorms, we are likely tocome together on that mutual ground, and clasp shadow hands across thepage. But if you do not like cats and snowstorms, why then you willnot like me, and we needn't bore each other, need we?

The little papers in this volume, issued from the peaceful town ofSewanee atop the Cumberland plateau, between Thumping Dick Hollow andLittle Fiery Gizzard Creek, have been written at various times andplaces in the past fifteen years, many of them while I still dwelt inNew York, and babbled o' green fields, many before, and some fewafter, the outbreak of the Great War. That War, you will perhapsdiscover, finds in them no reflection. It has been consciouslyexcluded, for though the world can never be the same world again, aswe are in no danger of forgetting, there are some things which evenwar and revolution cannot change, such as the memories of ourchildhood, the joy of violets in the Spring, the delight in melody, the humor of small dogs, the coo of babies. I have fancied we aresometimes by way of forgetting that. At any rate, of such matters, inhours when he has no thought but to please himself, the essayistchats, and shall chat in the happy years that are to come again, orall our bloodshed has been in vain. If, at the same time, he chancesto please an editor also, and then to make a few friends who like whathe likes, smiles sympathetically at what makes him smile, why, that isclear again!

This author has been fortunate enough to please several editors in thepast, and to all of them, who have given him permission to reprintsuch papers in this volume as have appeared in their periodicals, heextends his gratitude. They are specifically, the editors of _TheAtlantic Monthly_, _Scribner's_, _House and Garden_, _The Dial_, _Ainslee's_, _The Scrap Book_, _The Boston Transcript_ and _The NewYork Tribune_. 

 W. P. E. 

 Twin Fires, Sheffield, Mass. 

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 _Penguin Persons_

After all, one knows so little about a man from his printed works!They are the gleanings of his thoughts and investigations, the pick ofhis mind and heart; and they are at best but an impersonal and partialrecord of the writer. Even autobiography has something unsatisfactoryabout it; one feels the narrator is on guard always, as it were, and, aware of an audience cold and of strangers, keeps this back and trimsup that to make himself more what he should be (or, in some perversecases, what he should not be). But probably no man who is worthy ofattention sits down to write a letter to a good friend with one eye onposterity and the public. In his intimate correspondence he is offguard. Hence, some day, when he has died, the world comes to know himby fleeting glimpses as he was, --which is almost as near, is it not, as we ever get to knowing one another?--knows him under his littleprivate moods, in the spell of his personal joys and sorrows, sees hisflashes of unexpected humor, --even, it may be, his unexpectedpettinesses Thus dangerous and thus delightful is it to publish agreat man's letters. 

Such letters were Ruskin's to Charles Eliot Norton, which ProfessorNorton has given to the world. No one can fail from those letters toget a more intimate picture of the author of _Modern Painters_ thancould ever be imagined out of that work itself, and out of the rest ofhis works besides, not excepting the wonderful _Fors Clavigera_; andnot only a more intimate, but a different picture, touched withgreater whimsicality, and with infinite sadness, too. Not hishard-wrung thoughts and theories, but his moods of the moment--and hewas a man rich in the moods of the moment--tell most prominently here. And with how many of these moods can the Ordinary Reader sympathize!Again and again as the Ordinary Reader turns the pages he finds thegreat man under the thralldom of the same insect cares and annoyanceswhich rule us all, until he realizes as perhaps never before that poetand peasant, genius and scribe, are indeed one in a common humanity, and sighs, with a lurking smile of satisfaction, "So nigh is grandeurto our dust!"

One of the points of convergence between Ruskin and the OrdinaryReader which has appealed to me with peculiar force occurs in aletter from London dated in 1860. "When I begin to think at all, "Ruskin writes, "I get into states of disgust and fury at the way themob is going on (meaning by the mob, chiefly Dukes, crown-princes, andsuch like persons) that I choke; and have to go to the British Museumand look at Penguins till I get cool. I find Penguins at present theonly comfort in life. One feels everything in the world sosympathetically ridiculous; one can't be angry when one looks at aPenguin. "

Why, of course one can't! It is absurdly true, when one comes to thinkof it, this beneficent influence of penguins, stuffed penguins, atthat, which cannot even waddle. I dare say few readers ever thought ofthis peculiar bird (if it is a bird) in just that light before Mr. Ruskin's letter came to view; I'm sure I never did. But few readerswill fail to recall at a first reading of the words that picture of apenguin which used to adorn the school geographies, and presently willcome to them the old sensation of amusement at the waddly fellowpropped up on his impossible feet, the smile will break over theirlips, and they will be one in mood with Mr. Ruskin. They may affirmthat of course the author was only indulging in a little whimsicality, and they may two thirds believe it, as it is no doubt two thirds true;but just the same, unless I am much mistaken, the image of a penguinwill persist in their minds, as it persisted in Ruskin's mind--elsehow did he come to write of it in this letter?--and they will be thebetter and the happier for the smile it evokes, as Ruskin was thebetter and the happier. Indeed, that letter was his cheeriest formonths. 

For me, however, the image has not faded with the passing of the mood, or rather it has changed into something more abiding. It has assumed, in fact, no less a guise than the human; it has become converted intocertain of my friends. I now know these friends, in my thoughts ofthem, as Penguin Persons. I find they have the same beneficent effecton me, and on others around them, as the penguins on Ruskin. I meanhere to sing their praises, for I believe that they and their kind(since everyone enters on his list of friends, as I do, some PenguinPersons) have, even if they do not know it, a mission in the world, anhonorable destiny to fulfill. They prevent us from taking life tooseriously; they make everything "sympathetically ridiculous"; they areoften "as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. "

But, at the very outset, I would not be misunderstood. I do not meanthat a Penguin Person must resemble the amusing bird in physicalaspect. There are, I know, certain people, a far more numerous classthan is generally supposed, who see in almost everybody a resemblanceto some animal, bird, or fish. I am one of these people myself. It ison record as far back as the fourth generation that some one of mysuccessive ancestors had the same unhappy faculty, for it is unhappy, since it imposes on the person who resembles for us a pig, in ourthoughts of him, the attributes of that beast, and so on through thenatural history catalogue. It is not pleasant to watch a puma kittensitting beside you in the opera house, especially when your mere braintells you she is probably a sweet, even-tempered little matron, or towait in pained expectancy for your large-eared minister to bray, eventhough you know he will not depart from his measured exposition ofsound and sane doctrine. However, the Penguin Persons are such byvirtue of their moral and mental attributes solely, of the similareffect they produce on those about them by their personalities. I havenever met a man yet who physically resembled a penguin, though I fancythe experience would be interesting. 

Still less would I have it understood that Penguin Persons are stupid. Far from it. Dr. Crothers declares, in his _Gentle Reader_, that hewould not like to be neighbor to a wit. "It would be like being inproximity to a live wire, " he says. "A certain insulating film ofkindly stupidity is needed to give a margin of safety to humanintercourse. " I do not think that Dr. Crothers could have known aPenguin Person when he wrote that. The Penguin Person is not a wit, there is no barb to his shafts of fun, no uneasiness from hispreternatural cleverness, for he is not preternaturally clever. Younever feel unable to cope with him, you never feel your mind keyed toan unusual alertness to follow him; you feel, indeed, a sense ofcomforting superiority, for, after all, you _do_ take the world somuch more seriously than he! And yet he is not stupid; he is bright, alert, "kindly, " to be sure, but delightfully humorous, deliciouslydroll. Life with him appears to be one huge joke, and there is anunction about him, a contagion in his point of view, that affects youwhether you will or no, and when you are in his presence you cannottake life seriously, either, --you can but laugh with him. He does yougood. You say he is "perfectly ridiculous, " but you laugh. Then hesmiles back at you and cracks another of those absurd remarks of his, and you know he is "sympathetically ridiculous. " Perhaps you were outof sorts with life when you met him, but one cannot be angry when onelooks at a Penguin Person. 

But do you say that the original bird is not like that at all, that heis the most stupid of fellows? Ah! then you have never seen a penguinswim! He is grace and beauty and skill in the water. If it were onlyhis stupidity that made us smile, not he, but the hen, would be themost amusing of God's creatures. It is something more subtle, morepersonal, than that. It can only be described as Penguinity. 

Penguinity! The word is not in the dictionaries; it is beyond the paleof the "purists"; in coining it I am fully aware that I violate thecanons of the Harvard English Department, that I fly in the face ofphilology, waving a red rag. Yet I do it gladly, assertively, for Ihave confidence that some day, when Penguin Persons have taken theirrightful place in the world's estimation, the world will not be ableto dispense with my little word, which will then overthrow thedictionary despotism and enter unchallenged the leather strongholds ofWebster and Murray. 

Yet before that day does come, and to hasten its coming, I wouldrecord a tribute to my first and firmest Penguin friend, --my friendand the friend of how many others?--long and lank of limb, thin andhigh-boned of face, alert, smiling, ridiculous. On the nights whensteamships were sunk in the East River, or incipient subways elevatedsuddenly above ground, or other exciting features of New York lifecame clamoring for publicity, he would sit calm and smiling, coatless, a corncob pipe between his teeth, and read "copy" with the speed oftwo ordinary men. The excited night city editor would rush about, shouting orders and countermanding them; reporters would dash in andout; telegraph instruments would buzz; the nerve-wracking whistle ofthe tube from the composing room would shrill at sudden intervals, causing everybody to start involuntarily each time and to curse withvexation and anger; the irritable night editor, worried lest he missthe outgoing trains with his first edition, would look furtively atthe clock at three-minute periods and plunge his grimy hand over hissweating forehead; but the Penguin Person would sit smiling at hisplace by the "copy" desk, blue pencil in hand, serene amid the Babel. And when the tension was greatest, the strain nerve-breaking to getthe big story, in all its complete and coherent details, into thehungry presses that seemed almost visible, though they waited thestroke of one, ten stories down, in the sub-basement, the PenguinPerson would sit back in his chair, grin amiably, and say with adrawl, "Hell, ain't it, fellers? D' you know what I'm going to doto-morrow, though? I'm going to put on my asbestos collar, side tracksome beaut, take her to the theatre, and after the show, thanks to theprincely salary I'm paid for keeping split infinitives out of thissheet, I'm going to rush her round to Sherry's or Delmonico's andblow her to a glass of beer and a frankfurter. "

Then as if by magic the drawn faces of all his associates would clear, the night editor would laugh and forget to look at the clock, we wouldresume our toil, momentarily forgetful of the high pressure underwhich we labored, and working the better for the forgetfulness; andthe Penguin Person, the smile still expanding his mouth, would tiltdown his chair and work with us, only faster. If he had seriousthoughts, he never disclosed them to us--seriously. When he opened hislips we waited always in the expectation of some ridiculous remark, even though it should clothe a platitude or a piece of good, common-sense advice. And we were never disappointed. Life with him wasapparently one huge joke, and it came about that when we thought ofhim or spoke of him among ourselves, it was always with a smile. Yetnow he is gone--and what a hole! Other men can do his work as well, ifnot as quickly. The paper still goes to press and the public sees nochange; but we, who worked beside him, see it nightly. By twelveo'clock on a busy night, nervous, drawn faces surround the centraldesk, and profanity is snapped crossly back and forth. There is noalleviation of cheerful inanity. Presently somebody looks up, remarking, "I wish Bobbie Barton was back. " And somebody else replieswith profane asperity and lax grammar, "I wish he was!" Bobbie, meanwhile has become a lawyer, and can now afford a whole plate offrankfurters at Delmonico's. But we are the poorer, and, I do nothesitate to declare, the worse men for the loss of his Penguinity. 

Then there is David. David is penguinacious by fits and starts, notwholly to be depended on, sometimes needing himself to be cheered withthe Penguinity of others, but, when the mood is on him, softly, fantastically ridiculous, like the nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll, asort of _Alice in Wonderland_ person. I should not hesitate torecommend him to Dr. Crothers as a neighbor; indeed I suspect the gooddoctor is almost such a man himself, --too gentle, too fantastic inhumor to suggest, however remotely, a "live wire, " and yet how farfrom being stupid! David's mind works so unexpectedly. You are quitesure you know what he is going to say, and yet he never says it, giving his remark a verbal twist which calls up some absurdlyimpossible picture, and evokes, not a laugh, but a deep, satisfyingsmile. There is something quaint and refreshing about such a mind asDavid's. It does not so much restore one's animal spirits, or one'sgood nature, as it rejuvenates the springs of fancy, brings back thewhimsical imagination of childhood. David will people a room with hisairy conceits, as Mr. Barrie peopled Kensington Gardens with Peter Panand his crew; and it is as impossible not to forget anger and care, not to feel sweeter and fresher, for David's jests, as for _The LittleWhite Bird_. Only a Penguinity like David's is subtle, a littleunworldly, and, like most gracious gifts, fragile. There are days whenthe world is too much for David, when his jests are silent and hisconceits do not assemble. Then it is that he in turn needs the goodcheer of another's Penguinity, and it is then my happy privilege toreward him by hunting up Bobbie Barton, if I can, and joining them ata dinner party. Bobbie's Penguinity is based on an inexhaustible fountof animal spirits, he is never anything but a Penguin. He usually hasDavid put to rights by the roast. 

The other day, while Bobbie was running on in his ridiculous fashion, in an idiom all his own that even Mr. Ade could not hope to rival, telling, I believe, about some escapade of his at Asbury Park, wherehe had "put the police force of two men and three niggers out ofbusiness" by asking the innocent and unsuspecting chief the differencebetween a man who had seen Niagara Falls, and one who hadn't, and aham sandwich, I fell to musing on Ruskin's unhappy lot, who did notknow Bobbie, nor apparently anybody like him. Poor Ruskin! After all, there is more pathos than humor in his periodic visits to thepenguins. Isolated, from childhood, by parental care, from the commonfriendships and associations of life, still further isolated in matureyears by his own genius and early and lasting intellectual eminence, the wonder is that he was not more unhappy, rather than less. He hadfew friends, and those few, like Professor Norton, were intellectualcompanions as well, always ready and eager to debate with him theproblems of Art and Life which were forever vexing him. Theircompanionship must often have been a stimulant--when he needed, perhaps, a narcotic. Their intercourse drove him continually in uponhimself, where there was only seething unrest, when he needed so oftento be taken completely out of himself, where there was peace. And, inhis hours of need, he turned to the Alps, and the penguins. But bothwere dumb things, after all, that could not quite meet his mood, couldnot quite satisfy that hunger which is in all of us for the commonassociation of our kind, for the humble jest and cheery laugh of asmiling humanity. Neither of them was Bobbie, who adds personality tothe penguin, and satisfies a double need. 

Bobbie would not have talked Art with Ruskin, and for a very goodreason, --he knows nothing about it. Bobbie would not have cared asnap about his Turners, though he would have been greatly reverent ofthem for their owner's sake. But Bobbie would have enjoyed trampingover the mountains with him, an eager and alert listener to all histalks about geology and clouds, and ten to one Bobbie would have madefriends of every peasant they met, every fellow traveler on the road, and taught Ruskin in turn a good bit about humdrum, picturesquemankind. And he would have made him laugh! Possibly you think itincongruous, impossible, the picture of happy-go-lucky, ridiculousBobbie, with his slang and his grin and his outlook on life, andRuskin, the great critic, the master of style, the intellectual giant. But then you reckon without Bobbie's quality of Penguinity, andwithout Ruskin's humanness. It is alike impossible to withstand thecontagion of Bobbie's Penguinity, and to fancy a genius so great thathe does not at times yearn for the common walks and the common talksof his humbler fellow creatures. He may not always know how to achievethem, his own greatness may be a barrier he cannot cross, or histemperament and circumstances may hinder; but be sure that he feelsthe loss, though he may not himself, for all his genius, be quiteaware of it. That Ruskin lived in moody isolation, while Shakespearecaroused in an alehouse, does not prove Ruskin the greater man or thedeeper seer; it only shows that one knew how to achieve what theother did not, --contact with the everyday, merry world, escape fromthe awful and everlasting solemnity of life. Ruskin could not achieveit for himself, he did not know how; but Bobbie, all unknown to eitherof them, would have shown him. Bobbie would have made life for him"sympathetically ridiculous, " for Bobbie is a Penguin Person. AndBobbie would have been a living, breathing human being, by his sideand ready to aid him, even to creep into his heart; not a stuffedbiped on a shelf in a musty museum. Poor Ruskin, how much life robbedhim of when it made it impossible for him to win in his youth thecareless, unthinking, but undying friendship of a few men like Bobbie, a few Penguin Persons!

Ah, well! "The dice of God are always loaded. " Doubtless we mustalways pay for greatness by isolation, or some more bitter toll. Andfor our insignificance, in turn, come the Bobbies as reward. Itbehooves those of us, then, who are insignificant, to appreciate ourblessing, to cherish our penguins, the more since we, when "the worldis too much with us, " when the tyranny of economic conditionsoppresses and the wrongness of life seems almost more than we canbear, have not that inward strength, that Titanic defiance, which isthe possession of the great, ultimately to fall back upon, and sosorely need to be shown a joke somewhere, anywhere, in the universalscheme, to find something that is "sympathetically ridiculous. " Thatis why the Penguin Persons are sent to us; thus we can see in them theswing of the Emersonian pendulum. 

But they are naturally modest, and doubtless have no idea of theirmission, further than to realize that "people are glad to have themaround, " as Bobbie would express it, and that it is "up to them" (inthe same idiom) to be cheerful, --not a hard task, since cheerinesssits in their soul. It is awful to think how self-consciousness mightruin the flavor of their Penguinity if they ever were awakened to arealization of the fact that they were involved in anything so seriousas the Law of Compensation! Though I do believe that David at his bestcould make the eternal verities look ridiculous. No, when the PenguinPersons do become aware of their Penguinity, it is in a funny, shamefaced fashion, as if they had been up to boyish tricks theirmanhood should blush for. Came Bobbie to me the other day andconfessed that he had about made up his mind to be "serious. "

"Everybody thinks I'm a joke, " he said, with a melancholy grin; "theyalways expect me to say something asinine, and get ready to laughbefore I speak. What shall I do?"

"Do!" I cried. "Do what you've been doing, only do it more. Keep righton being a Penguin, and God bless you!"

Bobbie looked perplexed and a little hurt; but I was too wise toexplain, and three minutes later he was rattling off some deliciousabsurdity to my four-year-old hopeful, who had fallen down on his noseand needed comforting--and a handkerchief. Bobbie was supplying thelatter from his pocket, and from his penguinacious brain the formerwas effectively coming in the shape of a description of Rocky Mountainsheep, which, according to Bobbie, have right-side legs much shorterthan their left-side legs, so they can run along the mountain slopeswithout ever falling on _their_ noses. 

"But how do they get back?" asks the hopeful, still bleeding, buteager for information. 

"They put their heads between their hind legs and run backward, " saysBobbie. "They have long necks, you know. "

That, of course, may be unnatural history, but it was a very presenthelp in time of trouble. Indeed, it made Bobbie, as well as the boy, forget, and I have heard no more of his dreadful intention to beserious. 

Some one--probably it was Emerson--once said, "Each man has his ownvocation. The talent is the call. " It is no small thing, in this grimworld, to make people smile, to be absurd for their alleviation, torender all things "sympathetically ridiculous" for a time, to bear ina chalice of mirth the water of Lethe. If one's talent lies that way, why, the call should be clear! The Penguin Person should have no doubtor shame of his vocation, nor should anyone else allow him to. LittleJoe Weber, who was on the stage the most perfect example ofPenguinity, was as a stage character beloved of all the thousands whosaw him. He heard his call and followed his vocation, and honor andwealth and fame are now his. The merry host of Penguin Persons whomove outside the radius of the spluttering calcium, whose prosceniumis the door frame of a home, may earn neither wealth nor fame by doingas he has done, but they will win no less a reward, for they will havelightened for all around them the burdens of life, they will havesmoothed the gathering frown and summoned the forgotten laugh, theywill have made of the ridiculous a little religion, and out ofPenguinity brought peace. 

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 _Spring Comes to Thumping Dick_

When the ordinary American who "does things"--atrocious phrase, symbolof our unrecking materialism that does not consider the value of thethings done--wants to give a place a name, he affixes his own, or thatof his sister-in-law or the congressman from his district. Thus ournoblest North American mountain is called McKinley, though it alreadybore a beautiful Indian name--Denali, "The Great One"; and thus inGlacier Park we find a Lake McDermott, a Lake McDonald, and a MountJackson, to contrast painfully with such beautiful titles asGoing-to-the-Sun Mountain, Rising Wolf Mountain, and Morning EagleFalls. The Indians expressed their poetry in their names. The pioneersand the colonial rural Americans expressed, if not poetry, at least afine, spicy flavor of the local tradition; their names grew out of theplace. In the corner of New England where I was born we had a SlabCity, a Tearbreeches Hill, a Puddin' P'int--well-flavored names, allof them, descriptive and significant, even the last, which strangersmispronounced Pudding Point. Even in old New York there were once suchnames rich in historical association as Long Acre Square, now reducedto Times Square to please the vanity or cupidity of a newspaper. But, save the Indians, no body of people on this continent, not even theold-time cowboys and prospectors with their Bright Angel Trail, haveever rivaled the southern highlanders, the mountain folk of the BlueRidge, the Great Smokies and the Cumberlands, in the bestowal ofpicturesque titles. It is hard, sometimes, to say whether the southernmountaineers are poets or humorists or realists; they may be one orthe other, or all three at once. But they never fail with theinevitable appellation. Not Flaubert with his one right word, not theschool "gang" with its nicknames, can equal them. 

Thumping Dick Hollow, Milk-sick Hollow, Little Fiery Gizzard Creek, Falling Water Cove, Maniac's Hell, Lost Creek Cove, Jump Off Point, Rainbow Hollow, Slaughterpen Hollow--they come back to me inpicturesque array, and with them come back the memories of the graycabins, the clear bright water on the race, the silent forests, thebillows of laurel, the song of the brown thrashers, the shy childrenin a dusky doorway, the lean pigs not shy at all, the bloodrootunderfoot, the soft, hazy sky overhead, the sense that here life wasalways as it is, and always will be, with no change but the changingseasons. I remember once more how I met the Spring at Thumping Dick, like a dryad dancing through the wood, caught her in the very act ofclimbing up from the cove below to find a road to take her north. Sowe loitered together for one whole, blissful day, and when I came backto the college campus I wore her violets in my hat. 

But first I must tell you how Thumping Dick Hollow got its name. Thatis more important even than knowing where it is. Many, many years ago, so long ago that all traces of his cabin have disappeared, a mancalled Dick dwelt beside the little brown brook which flows through aslight hollow on its way to the cove below. Now, this Dick was averseto over-much effort, unless it were effort connected with the pursuitof bears or panther, and being of an ingenious turn of mind heinvented a labor-saving device to pound his corn. (Unfortunately, hestill had to grow it himself. ) He took a hollow log and pivoted itacross the brook, at a little fall, in such a way that the upper endwould rest in the water while the lower end projected over the rocksbelow the falls. Then he fastened a board across the lower half ofthis lower opening, and underneath the log, also at the lower end, hefixed a pestle. He then placed his mortar on a stone directlybeneath. The water, flowing into the hollow log, ran to the lower endand piled up against the board till there was weight enough to tip theentire log down. Then enough ran out to tilt the log back again. Ofcourse, each time the lower end of the log descended the pestle strucka blow in the mortar. All Dick had to do was now and then to empty outhis pounded grain and put in a fresh supply. The log kept at itssolemn seesaw night and day, its dull thumps resounding through thewoods. So Thumping Dick Hollow it is to this day, and being close toSewanee, Tennessee, instead of New York City, Thumping Dick Hollow itwill remain, instead of becoming the Pratt Street section of ElmhurstManor. 

To be precise, it is four miles from Sewanee, and to be more precise, Sewanee is eight miles straight up hill from Cowan, and to be stillmore precise, Cowan is thirty-five or forty miles from Chattanooga, and now you begin to know where you are. Chattanooga, as you know, isin Tennessee, and sits beside the superb Moccasin Bend of theTennessee River, under the shadow of Lookout Mountain, entirelysurrounded by freight trains. It runs Schenectady, New York, a closerace for the title of the noisiest city in the United States. Butafter you have taken a west-bound train in the quaint old station ofthe N. C. & St. L. Railroad you pass rapidly into silence, down thegorge of the splendid river, and then into the broken, ragged hills. At Cowan a pig meets you on the platform, with the amiable curiosityof the small-town resident toward the arriving stranger. Here youchange to the little branch line which runs north, up the side of thegorge, to the coal mines. Up and up the train climbs, puffing andstraining, through a tall forest of hardwoods, and eventually reachesan almost level plateau. Once on this plateau, you lose all sense ofmountain country and if you had not been aware of the steep climb toget here, you would not believe that you were on the southern nose ofthe Cumberland Range. Presently you reach a station--and that isSewanee. 

There are no academic squatters at Sewanee, in their $100, 000cottages, as there are at Princeton. It is too far removed from anycities, in the midst of its timbered mountain domain. There is alittle hotel, much frequented in summer, to be sure, but for the mostpart the town is the university and its preparatory academy, and theuniversity is the town. Here is the Gothic chapel, the ivy-cladscholastic buildings, the tree-shaded campus walks, the wanderinggroups of hatless boys, the encircling street lined with professors'houses--all the traditional flavor of a college, in a setting offorest. For it is one of the unique charms of Sewanee that a walk ofa mile in any direction is a walk back into the ancient order, intothe wilderness of the southern mountaineer, into the eighteenthcentury. A class that studies Shaw's plays in the morning may evencatch the vocabulary of Shakespeare in the afternoon, repeatedunconsciously by the lips of mountain children in the coves. 

The word _cove_ is omnipresent here. Even the mountain folk are calledcove-ites. It needs but a short walk to show you why. The lowerCumberlands, on the southern border of Tennessee, are unlike any othermountain region, with a charm all their own, inherent in theirtopography. Apparently an almost level stretch of timbered countryalong the little railroad, in reality this level is the plateau top ofa great rock wall, a kind of huge mesa extending north and south. Ifyou walk to the edge, you discover that it suddenly falls away withstartling abruptness, sometimes in sheer descents of several hundredfeet till the top of the ancient shale pile is reached (now covereddeep with soil) and then dropping away more gradually with that lovelycurve of débris. But nowhere is this Palisade-like wall continuous, and here is where the southern Cumberlands get their unique flavor. The descending water from the plateau top has eroded deep into theprecipice every mile or even every half mile, each brook in thecourse of ages eating far back into the mountain mass, forming aV-shaped depression called a cove, and between two coves thus formedis a reverse [symbol: upside-down V], called a point, always, naturally, composed of the hardest rock, and not infrequently endingin a literal point so sharp that it is like a vast granite bowspritthrust out into the green plains far below, terminating in a sheerprecipice of several hundred feet. Roughly, then, you may visualizethis section of the Cumberlands as a giant double-edged saw, athousand feet thick, laid down across the State, each tooth a "point, "each V between the teeth a "cove. " Standing far out on one of theserock bowsprits, in the soft, hazy air of the southern mountains, youlook over the far valley lands below, you look north and south at theother thrusting bowsprits growing bluer and more mysterious as theyrecede, you look to left and right down into the timbered greenlushness of the coves, where invisible water tinkles. 

But the simile of the saw is only a rough one, after all, becauseerosion is never mathematical, some coves have bitten back far deeperthan others, side coves have developed, and if you follow down themystery of some brown brook, Little Fiery Gizzard Creek, let us say, for love of the name, you may very soon precipitate yourself into sucha maze of coves, such a tangle of tough, tearing shrubbery (the term"laurel hell" is the mountaineer as realist), that you will regret, perhaps, the day you abandoned what in this region is euphemisticallycalled a road. But you will hardly forget the view from some inlandpoint, where you look, not out over the Tennessee plains, but over abranching cañon of coves, cut like the Grand Cañon out of an apparentplain, but, unlike that epic of naked magnificence, timbered withgreat, upstanding hardwoods from floor to rim, a soft, silent, hazygreen hole where the forest floor has sunk a thousand feet, to riseagain in the smoky distance and melt into the blue. There is no signof human habitation, though in those coves, where the forest mould isrich to clear and cultivate and the springs are never dry, thecove-ites dwell, stock of the highlanders who are almost a race apartin the fastnesses of our southern Appalachians. They have no roads, only dim trails or footpaths. The protecting forest hides their littleclearings. Only a hawk sails on silent wings over the leafy depths, and perhaps the faintest thread of smoke winds up and is lost in thehaze of the air, a haze which seems faintly tinged with theall-pervading green. 

But I wander as aimlessly as the enchanted visitor to Sewanee, and amby way of forgetting that it was Spring I set out to recapture with mypen--as if one could recapture the vanished Aprils! It _was_ April, to be sure, early April, very cold in the Berkshires, with great, dirty drifts of snow still lingering on the northern sides of wallsand hedges, and ice on the pools of a morning. Down here on theCumberland plateau the trees were still bare, too, and the morningschill, though you could easily find a blade of grass "big enough toblow, " and the brown thrashers sang in the dooryards. But there came aday when the sun rose misty and hot, and I wandered out through thewoods, by a dim, sandy cart track, missing the solemn evergreen noteof our northern forests but happy in the fragrance of life revivingunder last year's leaves--that peculiar odor of the woods in Spring. The little brown brook at Thumping Dick was softly vocal, and it, too, smelled of leaves. After a time I reached a point which jutted outdirectly over the tops of the trees growing on the débris pile below. These trees were as tall as masts, and as straight, though they werehardwoods, and from my rocky perch I looked through their uppertracery of budding twigs, as through a veil of faint green and red, out on the brown and green plains of Tennessee shining in the sun, orleft and right across the canons of the coves to the statelyprocession of receding headlands. Then I cast about for a way downinto one of the coves, and presently came upon a footpath. 

It led down the headwall by sharp switchbacks till it reached theeasier declivity below, passed a gushing spring where a tin dipperhung on a twig proclaiming unseen passers, and presently picked up thebed of a tumbling brook. It was when I reached this brook that I wasaware of Spring coming up the slope. I could see ahead, and to eitherside, a considerable distance through the open woods, and, lo! theJudas trees were in flower, stray bursts of purplish pink lighting upthe forest floor like bright-robed, wandering dryads. (The mountainfolk call this shrub the red-bud. ) I loitered on down the brook side, through moist leaf-mould and rocks, while overhead the trees began tocover me with their frail, new foliage, and under foot the forestfloor began to burgeon with bloom. Great double bloodroots camefirst--I stepped suddenly into a garden of them and hastily stoopingcrushed some juice on my fingers. Next the umbrella tops of the Mayapple leaves began to push up. There was a great dogwood tree in fullbloom beside the path. A hedge-like bank of azaleas were showing bud. Then came the violets, yellow violets, wood violets, but especiallythe birdfoot variety, with their pink-tinged blue petals ubiquitousamid the leaves. To me this violet is particularly dear, for it wasthe flower which in my childhood was culled to fill thosebright-colored May baskets we hung upon our sweethearts' doors at thefestival of Spring, gathering them in the village cemetery, where theygrew in great beauty and profusion, quite as Omar would have expected. Now I gathered a handful again, for memory's sake, and stuck them inthe band of my hat, before I resumed my journey down the cove. 

The first intimation I had of coming habitation was a pig, a lean, black, razor-back pig which grunted at my intrusion beneath his oaktree and went racing off at a great pace, almost gracefully, I mightsay, for even a pig which wanders on a mountainside develops somethingof the agility of a wild creature. Not far beyond I came quitesuddenly upon such a picture as you may see nowhere in the world butin our southern highlands, in the Spring. Aware of my coming, if I wasnot aware of their proximity, six tow-headed, bare-footed, single-garmented children, the eldest a girl not over ten, theyoungest an infant just able to stand, were ranged in solemn row, likea flight of steps, upon the top of a large flat stone at the edge of alittle clearing, in perfect silence watching me approach, the violetsand bloodroot blossoms they had been gathering dangling in loosebunches from their hands. Behind them, just across the brook whichran, like a road, in front of the gate, stood a weathered-gray cabin, of rough boards, with a central doorway and windows without sashes. At one end was an outside chimney of field-stone, laid, it seemed, with clay. Surrounding this cabin was a rough picket fence, again ofuntrimmed boards, with a gate opening on the brook and stepping stonesacross to the path. In the little compound thus enclosed, and almostovertopping the cabin, were half a dozen peach and plum trees, veritable geyser jets of pink and white bloom. Behind, in a smallclearing, was the stubble of last year's corn. Squalid and poor andmean enough a dwelling, a shiftless clearing, a dirty family ofchildren--yes. But under its geyser jets of blossom that little graycabin was the essence of the picturesque, with the forest wall risingbehind it, and behind that the great headwall of the cove. It wasweathered and old and primitive and lovely; and the six little shyragamuffins on the stone, still staring at me with the eyes of timidanimals, were--well, they were six little shy ragamuffins, and that isnice enough!

"Hello, " said I, "I see you've got the baby out to gather wildflowers, too. "

The eldest girl found speech, after an effort. "That ain't the baby, "she said, with a show of scorn for my ignorance. "The baby's in thehouse with maw. "

My respect for the capacity of that little cabin was still furtherincreased by this revelation. I asked the eldest girl some questionsabout the way, finding her directions for spotting a trail in thisforest maze remarkably lucid, and went again on my wanderings, my lastbackward glimpse of the mouse-gray cabin under its pink and whitegeysers of blossom still showing the six little tow-headed, barefootedyoungsters standing like six little patiences on a pedestal, staringafter me. But when I had disappeared down the trail I heard from faroff, mingling with the murmur of the brook, the shrill sound ofchildish glee, as they resumed their search for wild flowers. Then itwas that Spring smiled, and gave my fingers a little squeeze!

So I wandered on, with Spring for company, all that blissful day, through forests of oak and chestnut where the Judas trees danced, pastdogwood thickets and over beds of violets, into unexpected littleclearings where always the same gray cabin of rough, weathered boardssat under its geyser jets of pink and white, while shy, prettychildren peeped like startled rabbits from the dim doorway and the pigran off through the woods (when he did not follow me), and finally upthe steep slope at the head of a cove again, into the region of theearliest bloodroots, and so to the final shin up the last precipitouswall to the plateau above. As I reached the summit and looked back, Isaw the cove was green, and the veil I had gazed through that morningwas hazier now; Spring had climbed with me back up the slope and evenhere on the two-thousand foot rim the trees were bursting into leaf. There was a carpet of brilliant red stonecrop on the rock at my feet. As I came once more to the brook in Thumping Dick I saw a bloodroot onthe bank, with the dead leaf it had that day pushed up still clingingto it. Yes--and here was a tiny bed of violets, in a warm, shelteredglade, opening to the sun. I gathered them all, and redecorated myhat. Then I bathed my hot face in the brook and lay listening to athrasher for a while, as the long shadows of afternoon crept likelean, ghostly fingers through the forest and between me and the sky Icould see the lacework of the budding twigs, with here and there atree that actually showed leaf. No one passed me on the trail. Thethrasher and I had the woods all to ourselves, except, of course, forSpring, who sat beside me singing _mezza voce_, to herself, a songcuriously like the ripple of a brook. 

At last I rose and followed the dim trail back toward the college, entering the campus as the evening lights were coming on in thedormitory windows, and somewhere a group of boys were singing, notlustily but with the plaintive quality that sometimes steals into thevoices of the young and happy at the twilight hour. I tossed my hat ona table, and saw my withered violets falling dejectedly over theband. But I did not care. Back below Thumping Dick was a cove full onthe march, coming up the slope, the blue battalions of the Spring. Outside, in the smoky, warm dusk, a thrasher still sang. Spring hadleft me, for she had far to go, but all the way north I should see thesigns where her feet had trod, and when at last I reached once more mynorthern mountain home, I should find her waiting with a smile, perhaps with just a trillium in her hand to offer me, before she spedon again toward Labrador. But, I thought, I could never know her quiteso well again as I had this day; she would not loiter with me quite sofamiliarly, with her dear, friendly squeeze of my fingers as thechildish voices drifted with the brook song down the cove. I had kepttryst with Spring at Thumping Dick, for once the favored of all hermyriad lovers. 

 [Illustration]

 _The Passing of the Stage Sundial_

It has been many years since I have seen a sundial on the stage. Therewas a time when the stage could not get along without them; but styleshave changed. "Iram indeed has gone with all his rose, " and EddieSothern, best beloved of romantic actors in your generation and mine, has written his theatrical memoires, which is the player's method ofsaying farewell. _The Melancholy Tale of Me_, he calls them, perhapsbecause they are not in the least melancholy--a good and sufficientreason. Yet Mr. Sothern strangely neglects the subject of sundials inhis book, although they were his prop in how many a play back in thegolden Nineties!--the golden, promise-laden, contradictory Nineties, that _fin-de-siècle_ decade when Max Nordau thundered that we weregoing to the dogs of degeneracy, and we youngsters knew that we wereheaded not alone for a new heaven, but what is much more important, anew earth. 

My school and college days fell entirely in the Nineties, or almostentirely, for I finally emerged with a sheepskin written in Latin Icould no longer translate, in June, 1900. I saw my first modernrealistic play in 1893, when I was a little junior middler at PhillipsAndover. It was _Shore Acres_, and I have not yet forgotten, after aquarter of a century, the thrill of that revelation. It was almost asif my grandfather's kitchen had been put upon the stage, and withHerne himself to play the leading rôle, to blow on the frosty panethat he could peer into the night, to bank the fires, tip the stovelids, lock the door, and climb slowly up to bed while the old kitchen, in semi-darkness, seemed like a closing benediction before thedownrush of the final curtain, I caught the poetry of the commonplace, I had my first unconscious lesson in literary and dramatic fidelity. And I ended my college days, a much more sophisticated person, championing Pinero and Jones, rushing eagerly to special performancesof Ibsen, and ardently admiring the plays of G. B. Shaw, two of which, _Arms and the Man_ and _The Devil's Disciple_, had been acted inAmerica by Richard Mansfield before the end of the century. 

Considering these plays now, and their effect upon me--and notforgetting, either, the passionate admiration, almost the worship, weyoung men of twenty had in those days for the acting of Mrs. Fiske--itwould be easy to infer that the whole period of the Nineties for usyoungsters was a period of revolt and forward-urging, that we werecrusaders for what Henry Arthur Jones called "the great realities ofmodern life" in art. Crusaders we were, to be sure. I well rememberlong debates with my father, a man of old-fashioned tastes in poetry, and a particular fondness for Burns, over the merits of Kipling'spoems. (Think of considering Kipling's poems revolutionary! Indeed, think of considering some of them poems!). We debated from still moredivergent viewpoints over the novels of d'Annunzio. In college, in mylast year or two, some of us even adopted the views of Tolstoy in his_What is Art?_ and under the urge of this new sociological passion wetook volunteer classes in night schools. I remember instructing agroup of Jewish youths in the principles of oral debate, or, rather, debating the principles of debating with them, for being unblessedwith an expensive preparatory school and college education, and beingJews into the bargain, they did not propose to take anything on faith. I used to return to my room in the college Yard wondering just why itwas that these working lads, mere "foreigners", of a race infinitelyinferior, of course, to the Anglo-Saxon, and without the precious boonof a Harvard training, had so much more real intellectual curiosityand mental grasp than any of us "superior" youths. These classesinterfered seriously with my academic work, yet it seems to me nowthat they were infinitely more profitable. 

However, it was a curious paradox of the Nineties that while we werediscovering Pinero, Ibsen, Shaw, Tolstoy, we were also reading _ThePrisoner of Zenda_ and yielding ourselves with luxurious abandon intothe arms of honey-sweet romance. At the very time when the new, realistic drama was leading us out of a pasteboard world intosomething approximating an intelligent comment on life, thecloak-and-sword drama was having a fine little reactionaryrenaissance, the calcium moon was shining down on many a gleaminggarden and flashing blade, and ears were rapturously strained to catchthe murmur of love-laden words. Then it was that the stage sundialflourished in all its glory, generally flooded, to be sure, withmoonlight--that peculiar moonlight of the American theatre which turnsgrease-paint to a horrible magenta--and we youths, with the divineflexibility of imagination only youth can know, responded alike to_Hedda Gabler_ and _An Enemy to the King_. 

Do you remember the sundial, exactly at stage centre, in the latterplay? In what dulcet tones, love-laden, the future Hamlet and Macbethmurmured to his lady fair! Even the sword duel in the last act, allover the chamber, across the great bed ripping down the curtains, back and forth with flash of steel and rattle of blade, was not sothrilling as that moonlit scene across the dial plate. My constantcompanion in those days was a boy who to-day preaches each week from afamous pulpit, with gravity and eloquence. He is a man of substantialparts, on whom life's bitter realities press very hard as he battlesto relieve them. Does he now recall, I wonder, how for weeks after wehad hung from the gallery rail at _An Enemy to the King_ he even said"Thank you, " when somebody passed him a piece of bread, in the deep, long-drawn tones of Sothern's romantic passion? He was a handsomeyouth, and I know not what mischief he wrought that winter in gentlebosoms, with his vocabulary enlarged and romanticized, his tonescolored with emotion, as he sought secluded corners at our dances andpractised his new art. Our Tolstoian moods were not for dances, youmay be sure! We lived in a dual universe. In one world were sundialsand moonlight and the thrill of a woman's eyes; there was slow musicand the ache of unfilled desire ever about to be gratified by somehoped-for miracle. In the other world were only facts, hard facts, andthe scorn of considering them emotionally, of considering them in anyway but with the intellect. I fear in those days our moods did notconnect intellect and the fair sex. Perhaps youth never does. Andperhaps youth is right, not in thus passing judgment on women, forthat is not what is done, but in refusing to surrender any portion ofthe divine romantic mystery of sex at two-and-twenty to the cold lightof reason. When Shaw and Ibsen wrote, they wrote of daily life, and wewere learning to accept their contention that it should be writtenabout truthfully. But there was no lie in these other plays, thesesundial romances, for they were not daily life, they were ages longago and far away, they belonged to the Never-Never-Land of romanticfable--of dreams and the heart's desire. There is no such thing as acomplete realist at twenty. Or, if there is, he should be interned asan enemy alien. 

A generation has passed since the Nineties, and there are no stagesundials any more. Perhaps that is but another way of saying that I ammiddle-aged, but, upon my word, I do not think so. Do you remember thesundial over which Dolly and Mr. Carter philandered, the one whichbore the motto--

 Horas non numero nisi serenas?

I reread that dialogue the other day, and captured some of the ancientthrill. No, the real trouble is that a generation of realism, or whathas passed for realism on our American stage, has done its deadlywork. It has killed romance. That is not at all what realism wasintended to do. Indeed, to the larger view, romance is a part of thereality of life. Realism was a reaction against sham and falsity andsentimentalism, and, above all, perhaps, triviality of theme. But thenet result, so far as the American drama is concerned, seems to havebeen the substitution of a realistic setting and dialogue for a falseone, and then a continuance of the old sham, sentimentalism, triviality. How else can we account for the success of Mr. Belasco?But the taste engendered by the realistic settings and dialogue hasbanished the cloak and sword and sundial, stripped romance of itscharm and allure; and once stripped of these, it ceases to be romance, for it ceases to reach the heart through the sense of beauty and ofmystery. We have succeeded in substituting a chocolate caramel for theapples of Hesperides. 

Yet it cannot be that this condition will be permanent. Comes a littleplay like _The Gypsy Trail_, wherein even through the realisticsetting a strain of romance strikes, and all hearts respond. Youthwill not be denied, but, like Sentimental Tommy, will "find a way. " Itmay be that the old dualism of the Nineties was the sane solution, asso many of the modern "art theatre" directors maintain, at least bytheir practice, and the realistic drama should stick relentlessly toits last, while romance flourishes untroubled by any fetters, infree, fantastic, perhaps poetic, form. I do not know. I only know thatthe sundial must come back to the stage, not, it may be, as the gardenornament of old, but in some guise to further the dreams and deardelusions of our beauty-hungry hearts. For, as you may have guessed, the sundial is a symbol. 

 [Illustration]

 [Illustration]

 _On Singing Songs with One Finger_

James Huneker has pointed out that lovers of the drama, who are soundjudges as well, too frequently have so little taste in music that theytolerate or even approve the most atrocious noises emitted in the nameof musical comedy; while lovers and sound judges of music are quite asoften woefully remiss in their knowledge of stagecraft, acceptingscenery and stage management in their opera which would put men lessskilled in the creation of theatric illusion than David Belasco to theblush. 

How true it is that unto him who hath shall be denied, and unto himwho hath not shall be given what the other man could use to suchadvantage! The composer who can both pucker the lips of thegallery-gods and satisfy the ears of the musical critics, howinfrequent a visitor on this planet! so that Offenbach and Sullivanmust often have suffered from loneliness. The singer who can also act, how rare a song-bird! The interpreter of the _lieder_ of Franz orSchubert or Grieg who will sacrifice vocal display to the composer'smeaning, and who has the fineness of soul to grasp and make manifestthe mood of the lyric, how welcome a guest! And yet those who couldwrite undying comic music if only they were composers, who could liftthe hearts of their hearers into the skies with "Hark, hark, thelark, " if only they could sing, are legion in number. How often, inshort, like those two in Lord Houghton's poem, are temperament andtechnique--"strangers yet. "

So are they in me, alas! total strangers. From my earliest years Ihave been filled with the joyous impulse of song, but never were earsmore false to the one true pitch than mine, never was voice lesscommensurate with ambition. My youthful dreams, when they were not offoot-ball or swimming, were all of the Sirens, and I deemed Ulysses, if prudent, none the less a lack-sentiment sort of hero, not inspiringto know, because he stopped his ears to their song. The jeers of myfellows long ago taught me the bitter lesson to keep my melody tomyself, but the impulse is still in me to sing, the myriad moods ofmusic are still mine, and I still consider Ulysses the first of thePhilistines. 

For some time I thought my own case unique, but acquaintance with amusic critic who cannot hum a tune, and with a celestial tenor (suchtenors are so rare I fear this may be too personal for print) who wasthe most stupid of men, without the slightest capacity for highpassion of any sort, convinced me of my error: and many subsequentconversations with men and women like myself incapacitated by naturefor self-expression, as well as much listening to bad singers withgood voices, have but forced conviction home. And now, when unfeelingrelatives and scoffing friends smile the superior smile of the"musically talented" at sight of my piano which I play with onefinger, and at the pile of music upon it, I let them smile, calm inthe assurance that songs and instrument are mine by better right, perhaps, than theirs, who can raise voices quite on pitch to theaccompaniment of eight fingers and two thumbs. 

For, when none of them is by, I play with my one finger the airs ofthe world's great _lieder_, and hear from that slight suggestion thesongs as they should be sung. As I would rather read _Hamlet_ in mylibrary than see the average actor attempt the part, so I would ratherplay _Der Atlas_ with one finger, with my own imagination callingforth the tragic power and grief, the superb climax of surprise andthunder, than hear it sung by any man at present on the concert stage. The poignant sadness cross-shot with humor of another of Schubert'ssongs, _The Hurdy Gurdy_, vanishes in the concert room, meltshopelessly into the dulcet tones of the young lady soprano, whosefriends titter when she is done, "What a pretty song. " But myone-fingered rendering--aided in this song by occasional jabs withthree fingers of the left hand--brings to my inward ear the pathos ofthe barrel-organ, heard over the distant hum of a careless city, ladenwith the sorrow of all the world; brings memories, too, of thatconsummate singer of songs, Marcella Sembrich. Under the touch of myblunt forefinger the songs of MacDowell distill their delicatemelancholy, that in the homes of my friends, where daughters ripplewell-dusted piano keys and display expensive voices, yield onlytreacle and honey. Why should I mind the supercilious smile of myneighbor next door when he occasionally catches me at my unidigitalperformance, he who is a soloist in a noted church choir, but who, Ivery well know, prefers _The Palms_ or _Over There_ to Purcell's _I'llsail upon the Dog Star_, if, indeed, he ever heard the madly melodiousboast of the "roaring boy"?

After all, there is nothing wonderful in this. It but shows that thegenius which creates and the imagination which appreciates are akin, even as Professor Spingarn has asserted. Even operas and symphonieswere composed at a piano. Strauss heard the one hundred and fiveinstruments which are called on to represent the cry of the baby inhis _Symphonia Domestica_ all tooting and scraping in the notes histen fingers evoked from his piano keys. (Personally I should ratherhave heard them so!) And why cannot I hear at least a simple littlesong in the melody that my one finger plays? The numerical ratio is inmy favor, surely, although my neighbor would doubtless rudely suggestthat I am not Richard Strauss. At any rate, for me there is a greatjoy in singing songs as they ought to be sung, if only with onefinger, which has done much to console me for the technical powersnature has so plentifully denied me. I offer the same solution to allothers who are in my case, only suggesting that it would be wise ofthem, perhaps, to learn while they are yet plastic the use of all tenfingers. They will not thereby secure ten times as much enjoyment, buttheir families will thank them. 

 [Illustration]

 _The Immorality of Shop-windows_

At the heart of morality lies content. That is a statement eitheroptimistic or cynical, as you choose to look at it; but it is astatement of fact. Even the reformer seeks to allay his discontent, which does not arise from the morality in him, but from the immoralityin other people. Anybody who has lived with a reformer knows this. Therefore are modern shop-windows--by steel construction made tooccupy the maximum amount of space, to assault by breadth andbrilliance the most callous eye--one of the most immoral forces inmodern city life. 

This is especially true of the shop-windows on Fifth Avenue, New York. For these windows, even at night illuminated like silent drawing-roomsvacant of people, expose to the view of the most humble passer on thecurb as well as to the pampered rich racing by in motors, the spoilsof all the world. Here are paintings by the old masters and the new;rare furniture and marbles from Italian palaces; screens from Japan;jewels and rugs from the Orient; silk stockings, curios, china, bronzes, hats, furs; and again more curios, cabinets, statues, paintings; things rare and beautiful and exotic from every quarter ofthe globe, "from silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon. " And they arenot collections, they are not the treasures of some proud house, although they might have been once; they are for sale; they may bebought by anybody--who has the price. 

But who has the price? That stout woman riding by in her limousine, witha Pomeranian on her lap instead of a baby? That fifteen-dollar-a-weekchorus-girl in a cab, half buried under a two-thousand-dollarchinchilla coat? That elderly man who hobbles goutily out of his cluband walks a few short blocks to his house on Murray Hill, "forexercise"? Assuredly, somebody has the price, for the shops are everopen, the allurement of their windows never less. But not you, whogaze hungry-eyed at these beautiful objects, and then go to a SixthAvenue department store and wonder if you can afford that Persian rugmade in Harlem, marked down from $50 to $48. 87; or that colonialmahogany bookcase glistening with brand new varnish. Envy gnaws atyour heart. And yet you had supposed that yours was a comfortable sortof income--maybe four thousand dollars a year. Your father, on thatincome, back in a New England suburb, was counted quite a man in thecommunity, and you put on airs. He selected the new minister, and youset the style in socks. But now you are humiliated, embittered. Yourave against predatory wealth. Thus shop-windows do make Socialists ofus all. 

Nor are you able to accept the shop-windows educationally, recallingthat when you went to Europe you saw nothing that had not alreadystared at you through plate-glass on Fifth Avenue--for sale. Who wantsto view one of the chairs that a Medici sat in, only to recall thatmonths before he saw its mate in a shop-window at the corner of FifthAvenue and Fifty-first Street; or to contemplate a pious yellowheathen bowed down before the image of Buddha, while the tinkly templebells are tinkling, only to have rise in his mind the memory of a muchlarger and more venerable Buddha which used to smile out inscrutablyat the crossing of Twenty-ninth Street, below a much sweeter string oftinkly temple bells?

 We've a bigger, better Buddha in a cleaner (!), greener (!!) land, Many miles from Mandalay. 

There is no romance in an antique, be it god or chair or China plate, when it is exposed for sale in a shop-window. And there is no romancein it amid its native surroundings when you realize that any day itmay be carried _off_ and so exposed. Thus do shop-windows destroyromance. 

But in the humbler windows off the Avenue there is an equal, ifgrosser, element of immorality. For these are the windows whereprice-tags are displayed. The tag has always two prices, the highermarked through with red ink, the lower, for this very reason, callingwith a siren voice. The price crossed off is always just beyond yourmeans, the other just within it. "Ah, " you think, swallowing thedeception with only too great willingness, "what a bargain! It maynever come again!" And you enter the fatal door. 

Perhaps you struggle first. "Don't buy it, " says the inhibition ofprudence. "You have more neckties now than you can wear. "

"But it's so cheap, " says impulse, with the usual sophistry. 

And you, poor victim that you are, tugged on and back by warringfactions in your brain, --poor refutation of the silly old theologicalsuperstitions that there is such a thing as free will, --vacillate onthe sidewalk till the battle is over, till your mythical free will isdown in the dust. Thus do shop-windows overthrow theology. 

Then you enter that shop, and ask for the tie. Or perhaps it issomething else, and they haven't your size. You ought to feel glad, relieved. Do you? You do not! You are angry. You feel as if you hadlost just so much money, when in reality you have saved it. Thus doshop-windows destroy logic. 

This has been a particularly perilous season for the man with apassion for shirts. By some diabolic agreement, all the haberdashersat one and the same time filled their windows with luscious lavendersand faint green stripes and soft silk shirts with comfortable Frenchcuffs, and marking out $2. 00 or $3. 00, as the case might be, wrote$1. 50 or $2. 50 below. The song of the shirt was loud in the land, itshaunting melody not to be resisted. Is there any lure for a woman inall the fluffy mystery of a January "white sale" comparable to theseduction for a man of a lavender shirt marked down from $2. 00 to$1. 50? I doubt it. Heaven help the woman if there is! So the unusedstock in trunk or bureau drawer accumulates, and the weekly reward forpatient toil at an office dribbles away, and the savings-bank is noricher for your deposit--and the shop-windows flare as shamelessly asever. There is only one satisfaction. The man who sells shirts alwayshas a passion for jewelry. And that keeps him poor, too!

 [Illustration]

 _A Forgotten American Poet_

I have written the title, "A forgotten American poet, " and I shall letit stand, though I am not sure that he was ever well enough known tobe spoken of now as forgotten. Ten or a dozen years ago a friend ofmine who was working on an anthology of American poetry, at the JohnCarter Brown library in Providence, wrote to me with great enthusiasmof a poet he had "discovered, " and of whom he had never heard before. "His name is Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, " my friend said, "and youwill not find him in Stedman's anthology, though it seems incrediblethat Stedman left out anybody or anything. Get a copy of his poems ifyou can--Ticknor and Fields, 1860. "

I sent in my order for the book, to Goodspeed's, and then forgot theincident. But Goodspeed didn't. A year later the book came. Evidentlyit is an infrequent item at the auctions. The copy I received was asecond edition, dated 1864 (which seems to indicate the poems hadfound some readers), but still in the familiar brown of Ticknor andFields, matching my first American editions of _The Angel in theHouse_. This copy was of special interest because it was apresentation copy from the author to Harriet Beecher Stowe. The leaveshad been opened, but if Mrs. Stowe read, she had made no marginalcomments. The only addition to the book was an old newspaper clippingpasted in the back--a condensed history of the Beecher family! I readthe volume myself with increasing interest and enthusiasm, and at theclose I desired to learn more of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, not ofthe Beechers. Mr. Stedman's complete omission of these poems couldonly have been explained, I felt, by an equally complete ignorance oftheir existence. Compared to the poems of Henry T. Tuckerman, includedby Stedman, the verses of his unknown cousin were as gold to copper. Why, I wondered, had this man been so completely obliterated by Time, or why had he failed in his life to reach a niche where Time could notutterly efface him?

I wrote to Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who, I discovered, hadbeen a classmate of Tuckerman's at Harvard, and who of course knewpractically everybody of consequence in the literary world of hisgeneration. Colonel Higginson was able to supply some data, but notmuch. Tuckerman was born in 1821, of a rather well-known Bostonfamily. Joseph Tuckerman, philanthropist and early Unitarianclergyman, was his uncle. He was a younger brother of EdwardTuckerman, long famous as a professor of botany at Amherst College, and who gave his name to Tuckerman's Ravine on Mount Washington. Frederick Goddard Tuckerman entered Harvard with the class of 1841, but remained only a year, passing over to the Law School a littlelater where he secured his LL. B. In 1842, and for a period evidentlypractised law in Boston. "I remember he came back among us at somekind of gathering during our college course, " Colonel Higginson wrote, "and seemed very friendly and cordial to all. I remember him as arefined and gentlemanly fellow, but did not then know him as a poet. Isee him put down as a lawyer in Boston (in Adams's _Dictionary ofAmerican Authors_), but I have no recollection of that fact. "

It was not until I had written and published in the _Forum_ magazine alittle appreciation of his poetry that I learned from his son, now aresident of Amherst, Massachusetts, that Frederick Tuckerman, even ashis verses seemed to imply, early moved away from cities to thebeautiful valley under the shadow of the Holyoke Range, and therepassed his days, evidently the world forgetting, and by the worldforgot. He issued his single volume of poems in 1860, when he wasthirty-nine, just before the outbreak of the Civil War, but no shadowof that coming contest crosses their pages, as it crossed the pages ofWhittier and Emerson, or as it affected the active life of hisclassmate Colonel Higginson. The second edition, in 1864, was stillunaffected by the great struggle. He produced his slender sheaf ofpoems amid the fields, in quiet introspection, and he might well beaccused of a species of Pharisaism, were these poems not so artlesslyand passionately sincere, and often so tinged with religious awe. Hiswithdrawal, in his verse, from the life of his times was the act of anatural recluse. 

At the time Tuckerman's poems were issued, it is interesting toconsider briefly some of the poetic influences which affected thepublic. The two best-selling poets just then, even in America, wereTennyson and Coventry Patmore, the latter represented, of course, by_The Angel in the House_. Indeed, the poems of these two sold betterthan novels! Whitman was hardly yet an influence. Julia Ward Howe hadwritten, and Booth had accepted, a drama in blank verse. Our minorpoets still wrote in the style of Pope, and the narrative sharedhonors with the moral platitude in popular regard. Tennyson, ofcourse, was a great poet, and Patmore no mean one, even at that time, but it is questionable whether the huge popular success of theirworks, such as _The Princess_ and _The Angel in the House_, was dueto their strictly poetic merits. At any rate, the poetry of FrederickGoddard Tuckerman, lacking narrative interest, palatable platitudes, lyric lilt, but being, rather, contemplative, aloof, delicately minorand in many ways curiously modern, must have fallen on ears notattuned to it. He had none of the Bolshevik revolutionary vitality ofWhitman, to thrive and grow by the opposition he created. He couldhave aroused no opposition. It would have been his happy fate to findmen and women who could appreciate his delicate observation of nature, his golden bursts of imaginative vigor, his wistful, contemplativemelancholy, his disregard of academic form less because it hamperedhim than because he was careless of anything but the exact image. Suchreaders it was apparently not his fate to find in sufficient numbersto bring him fame. He was, in a sense, a modern before his time, butwithout sufficient consciousness of his modernity to fight. He was amute, inglorious Robert Frost--like Frost for one year a Harvardstudent, like him retiring to the New England countryside, like himintent chiefly on rendering the commonplace beauty of that countrysideinto something magical because so true. Only he lacked Frost'sdramatic sense, and interest in human problems. 

Tuckerman's favorite medium was the sonnet; but a sonnet to him was athing of fourteen five-foot iambic lines, and there all rules ended. Sometimes he even crowded six feet into a line. It is possible hislaxness of form was due to ignorance, but more likely that it was dueto a greater interest in his mood than in the "rules" of poetry. Manyof his sonnets were in sequence, one flowing into the next. Here aretwo, thus unified, which show in flashes his sweep of imaginativephrase, and his transcendental bent:

 The starry flower, the flower-like stars that fade And brighten with the daylight and the dark-- The bluet in the green I faintly mark, The glimmering crags with laurel overlaid, Even to the Lord of light, the Lamp of shade, Shine one to me--the least, still glorious made As crowned moon or heaven's great hierarch. And so, dim grassy flower and night-lit spark, Still move me on and upward for the True; Seeking through change, growth, death, in new and old The full in few, the statelier in the less, With patient pain; always remembering this-- His hand, who touched the sod with showers of gold, Stippled Orion on the midnight blue. 

 And so, as this great sphere (now turning slow Up to the light from that abyss of stars, Now wheeling into gloom through sunset bars) With all its elements of form and flow, And life in life, where crown'd yet blind must go The sensible king--is but a Unity Compressed of motes impossible to know; Which worldlike yet in deep analogy Have distance, march, dimension and degree; So the round earth--which we the world do call-- Is but a grain in that which mightiest swells, Whereof the stars of light are particles, As ultimate atoms of one infinite Ball On which God moves, and treads beneath His feet the All!

Turning the page we come on a poem called _The Question_. "How shall Iarray my love?" he asks, and ranges the earth for costly jewels andsilks from Samarcand; but because his love is a simple New Englandmaid, he rejects them all as unworthy and inappropriate, and closingsings:

 The river-riches of the sphere, All that the dark sea-bottoms bear, The wide earth's green convexity, The inexhaustible blue sky, Hold not a prize so proud, so high, That it could grace her, gay or grand, By garden-gale and rose-breath fanned; Or as to-night I saw her stand, Lovely in the meadow land, With a clover in her hand. 

Have not these lines a magic simplicity? It seems so to me. They flowrippling and bright to the inevitable finish, and there is no more tosay. 

Tuckerman's power of close yet magical observation, used not so muchin the Tennysonian way (for Tennyson was a close observer, make nomistake about that) as in what we now think of as the modern way, thatis, as a part of the realistic record of homely events, with beautyonly as a by-product, is well illustrated in the opening lines of anarrative poem called _The School Girl, a New England Idyll_. Hereagain a kinship with Frost is seen, rather than with Tuckerman'scontemporaries:

 The wind, that all the day had scarcely clashed The cornstalks in the sun, as the sun sank Came rolling up the valley like a wave, Broke in the beech and washed among the pine, And ebbed to silence; but at the welcome sound-- Leaving my lazy book without a mark, In hopes to lose among the blowing fern The dregs of headache brought from yesternight, And stepping lightly lest the children hear-- I from a side door slipped, and crossed a lane With bitter Mayweed lined, and over a field Snapping with grasshoppers, until I came Down where an interrupted brook held way Among the alders. There, on a strutting branch Leaving my straw, I sat and wooed the west, With breast and palms outspread as to a fire. 

These powers of observation are again illustrated in a poem of quitedifferent import, called _Margites_, a lyric of thirteen stanzas, someof which are inexcusably crude. It begins:

 I neither plow the field nor sow, Nor hold the spade nor drive the cart, Nor spread the heap, nor hill nor hoe, To keep the barren land in heart. 

After four more stanzas in similar vein, comes this bit of magicword-painting, so instinct with our New England Autumn, yet soentirely the work of a realist, with his eye on the object:

 But, leaning from my window, chief I mark the Autumn's mellow signs-- The frosty air, the yellow leaf, The ladder leaning on the vines. 

 The maple from his brood of boughs Puts northward out a reddening limb; The mist draws faintly round the house; And all the headland heights are dim. 

The poem then continues to its close:

 And yet it is the same as when I looked across the chestnut woods, And saw the barren landscape then O'er the red bunch of lilac buds;

 And all things seem the same. 'Tis one To lie in sleep, or toil as they Who rise beforetime with the sun, And so keep footstep with their day;

 For aimless oaf and wiser fool Work to one end by differing deeds;-- The weeds rot in the standing pool; The water stagnates in the weeds;

 And all by waste or warfare falls, Has gone to wreck, or crumbling goes, Since Nero planned his golden walls, Or the Cham Cublai built his house. 

 But naught I reck of change and fray; Watching the clouds at morning driven, The still declension of the day; And, when the moon is just in heaven, I walk, unknowing where or why; Or idly lie beneath the pine, And bite the dry brown threads, and lie And think a life well lost is mine. 

"A life well lost"! The phrase is perhaps pathetically revealing--andprophetic. Or are we stretching the poet's ambitions to be known as apoet? That he published what he wrote indicates a normal desire forrecognition, yet it can hardly be doubted, either, that he was anamateur in verse, whose life was rather centred in his contemplative, retiring existence among the fields and hills of Amherst. There mayeven seem to some a delicate Pharisaism about this sonnet, aPharisaism removed from the robustness of Thoreau, who would certainlyhave argued the point with the farmer:

 "That boy, " the farmer said, with hazel wand Pointing him out, half by the haycock hid, "Though bare sixteen can work at what he's bid From sun till set, to cradle, reap or band. " I heard the words, but scarce could understand Whether they claimed a smile or gave me pain; Or was it aught to me, in that green lane, That all day yesterday, the briers amid, He held the plough against the jarring land Steady, or kept his place among the mowers; Whilst other fingers, sweeping for the flowers, Brought from the forest back a crimson stain? Was it a thorn that touched the flesh? or did The poke-berry spit purple on my hand?

Yet, as we have said, Tuckerman was far from Pharisaism of any sort, either of the æsthete or nature-lover. His mind was too genuinelyoccupied with spiritual problems. Take, for example, this closingsonnet in a sequence depicting the discords of Nature:

 Not the round natural word, not the deep mind, The reconcilement holds: the blue abyss Collects it not; our arrows sink amiss; And but in Him may we our import find. The agony to know, the grief, the bliss Of toil, is vain and vain! clots of the sod Gathered in heat and haste, and flung behind, To blind ourselves and others--what but this, Still grasping dust and sowing toward the wind? No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead; But leaving straining thought and stammering word Across the barren azure pass to God; Shooting the void in silence, like a bird-- A bird that shuts his wings for better speed!

Here, surely, is poetry that would not seem the least among the myriadhosts in Mr. Stedman's hospitable anthology! The rhyme scheme may bequite unorthodox, but the poet's lips have been touched by a coal fromthe high altar, none the less. 

The volume closes with a sonnet sequence which is poignantly intimate;almost it is a diary of the poet's grief for the loss of the woman heloved, and in its stabbing intensity holds a hint of such poems asPatmore's _The Azalea_. Here is one:

 Again, again, ye part in stormy grief From these bare hills and bowers so built in vain, And lips and hearts that will not move again-- Pathetic Autumn and the writhled leaf; Dropping away in tears with warning brief: The wind reiterates a wailful strain, And on the skylight beats the restless rain, And vapour drowns the mountain, base and brow. I watch the wet black roofs through mist defined, I watch the raindrops strung along the blind, And my heart bleeds, and all my senses bow In grief; as one mild face, with suffering lined, Comes up in thought: oh, wildly, rain and wind, Mourn on! she sleeps, nor heeds your angry sorrow now. 

Such use of pictorial observation as "the raindrops strung along theblind, " and "the wet black roofs through mist defined, " is somethingyou will look for in vain through the pages of Longfellow, forinstance. This is the sonnet of a realist. So, also, is this one, which does not seem to me to deserve oblivion, and certainly so longas my memory retains its power will have that little span ofimmortality:

 My Anna! when for thee my head was bowed, The circle of the world, sky, mountain, main, Drew inward to one spot; and now again Wide Nature narrows to the shell and shroud. In the late dawn they will not be forgot, And evenings early dark; when the low rain Begins at nightfall, though no tempest rave, I know the rain is falling on her grave; The morning views it, and the sunset cloud Points with a finger to that lonely spot; The crops, that up the valley rolling go, Ever toward her slumber bow and blow! I look on the sweeping corn and the surging rye, And with every gust of wind my heart goes by!

It must not be supposed that the predominant note in Tuckerman'spoetry is elegiac; rather is it a note of tender, wistful, andscrupulously accurate contemplation of the New England countryside, mingled with spiritual speculation. But as the volume closed with theelegiac poems, and as thereafter no more poems were published, it maybe surmised that the poet's will to create was smothered in thepoignant ripple of his personal sorrow. Had it not been, and had hispen continued to write, one cannot help wondering how much closer hewould have come to the modern note in poetry. That he already felt atendency to progress from the old metres to freer forms is constantlyapparent; and this tendency, combined with his unconsciouslyscrupulous realism, might well have brought him near to the present. Ishould like to close this little paper to his memory with one of hislyrics which throws over rhyme altogether, and strictly formal metre, also, though the fetters are still there. It is the stab of griefwhich comes through to haunt you, the bare simplicity and the woe. Objective it certainly is not, as the modernists maintain they are. Yet the personal note will always be modern, for it has no age. Thislyric belongs to you and me to-day, not in the pages of a forgottenbook, on the shelves of a dusty library. I would that some of our_vers libre_ practitioners could equal it:

 I took from its glass a flower, To lay on her grave with dull, accusing tears; But the heart of the flower fell out as I handled the rose, And my heart is shattered and soon will wither away. 

 I watch the changing shadows, And the patch of windy sunshine upon the hill, And the long blue woods; and a grief no tongue can tell Breaks at my eyes in drops of bitter rain. 

 I hear her baby wagon, And the little wheels go over my heart: Oh! when will the light of the darkened house return? Oh! when will she come who made the hills so fair?

 I sit by the parlor window, When twilight deepens and winds grow cold without; But the blessed feet no more come up the walk, And my little girl and I cry softly together. 

 [Illustration]

 _New Poetry and the Lingering Line_

I have one grave objection to the "new poetry"--I cannot remember it. Some, to be sure, would say that is no objection at all, but I am notof the number. It would hardly become me, in fact, since I have, in aminor pipe, committed "new poetry" myself on various and sundryoccasions, or what I presume it to be, particularly when I didn't havetime to write in rhyme or even metre. The new poets may object allthey like, but it _is_ easier to put your thought (when you happen tohave one) into rhythm than into rhyme and metre. If, indeed, as the_vers libre_ practitioners insist, each idea comes clothed in its owninevitable rhythm, there can be very little trouble about the matter. The poem composes itself, and your chief task will be with theprinter! I don't say the rhythmic irregularity is not, perhaps, moresuitable for certain effects, or at any rate that it cannot achieveeffects of its own; I certainly don't say that it isn't poetry becauseit does not trip to formal measure. Poetry resides in deeper mattersthan this. I recall Ibsen's remark when told that the reviewersdeclared _Peer Gynt_ wasn't poetry. "Very well, " said he, "it willbe. " Since it now indubitably is, one is cautious about questioningthe work of the present, such work as Miss Lowell's, for instance. Ofcourse the mere chopping up of unrhythmic prose into capitalized lineswithout glow, without emotion, is not poetry, any more than the blankverse of the second-rate nineteenth-century "poetic drama, " which oldJoe Crowell, comedian, described as "good, honest prose set uphind-side foremost. " We may eliminate that from the discussion onceand for all. But the genuine new poets, who know what they are about, and doubtless why they are about it, I regard with all deference, hailing especially their good fight to free poetry of its ancientinversions, its mincing vocabulary, its thous and thees, its boskydells and purling streams, its affectations and unrealities, both ofspeech and subject. But I do say they miss a certain triumphantcraftsman's joy at packing precisely what you mean, hard enough toexpress in unlimited prose, into a fettered, singing line; and I dosay that I can't remember what they write. 

At least, nobody can dispute this latter statement. He may declare itthe fault of my memory, which has been habituated to retain only suchlines as have rhyme and metre to help it out. But I hardly think hisretort adequate, because, in the first place, the memory is much lessamenable to training and much more a matter of fixed capacity andaction than certain advertisements in the popular magazines would havethe "twenty-dollar-a-week man" believe, and in the second place, because my case, I find, is the case of almost everybody with whom Ihave talked on the subject. The solution, I believe, is perfectlysimple. Nearly anyone can remember a tune; even I can, within limits. At least, I can do better than Tennyson, who could recognize, he said, two tunes; one was "God Save the Queen" and the other wasn't. But whenmusic is broken into independent rhythms, irregular and oddly relatedphrases, it is only the person exceptionally endowed who can rememberit without prolonged study. The very first audience who heard_Rigoletto_ came away humming "Donna e mobile. " And the very lastaudience who heard _Pelléas et Mélisande_ came away humming--"Donna emobile. " It is the law. Needless to say, I enjoyed _Pelléas etMélisande_, but I cannot whistle it. What I recall is a mood, apicture, a vague ecstasy, a hushed terror. It was James Huneker, wasit not, who, when asked what he thought of the opera, replied thatMary Garden's hair was superb. 

"But the music?" he was urged. 

"Oh, the music, " said he, "--the music didn't bother me. "

But the new poetry does bother me, because I strive to remember notthe mere mood or picture of the poem, but the actual words whichcreated them, and I cannot. I want to compel again, at will, theactual poetic experience, and I cannot, without carrying a library inmy pocket. The words hover, sometimes, just beyond the threshold of mybrain, like a forgotten name ("If you hadn't asked me, I could havetold you"--you know the sensation); but they never come. I have nocomfort of them in the still hours of the day when I would bewhispering them to myself. Instead, I have to fall back upon theold-fashioned Golden Treasury. I cannot remember a single line thatAmy Lowell has written about her Roxbury garden, but I shall neverforget what Wordsworth said about that field of gold he passed; Irepeat his lines, and then my heart, too, with pleasure fills anddances with his daffodils. 

It is an immemorial delight, this pleasure in the lingering line, inthe haunting couplet, in the quatrain that will not let you forget. Bysacrificing it, the new poetry has sacrificed something precious, something that a common instinct of mankind demands of the minstrel. It will not suffice for the new poets to deny that they are minstrels, to assert that they write for the eye, not speak for the ear, that itis not their mission to emit pretty sounds but so to present theirvision of the world that it shall etch itself on men's minds with thebite of reality. Such a creed is admirable, but defective. It isdefective because, in the first place, if the new poets did not writefor the ear quite as much as the old poets, there would be no excuseeven for rhythm. Any reader who is sensitive enough to care to readpoetry is sensitive enough to hear it with his inward ear even as hesees it with his outward eye, and his after-pleasure, as it were, hislingering delight, will be in proportion as his ear retains the echoof the song. All poets are minstrels, still. Such a creed isdefective, in the second place, because it has always been the missionof genuine poets to impress their vision of the world vividly onmankind, though their vision included more, sometimes, than what therealists choose to consider reality. There is nothing new in such aneffort. In slack ages of poetic inspiration, however, the versifiershave no vision of the world, but only of its pale mirrored reflectionsin visions dead and gone, and some jolt is needed to bring the poetsback to first-hand observation. Such a jolt are the new poets. _SpoonRiver_ is a medicine, a splendid tonic. But the form of _Spoon River_is not conditioned by eternal needs, only by temporary ones. Itscomplete absence of loveliness, of lines that linger, will be itsgreatest handicap to immortality--for poetic immortality to-day asmuch as ever is not in the pages of a book on a library shelf, but onthe lips of men and women. A poem from which nobody ever quotes is apoem forgotten. 

Tennyson was something of an Imagist at times, presenting his mood orpicture with a Flaubertian precision of epithet that even Amy Lowellcould not criticise. Consider, for example, his famous _Fragment_ onthe eagle:

 He clasps the crag with crooked hands Close to the sun in distant lands, Ringed with the azure world he stands. 

 Beneath, the wrinkled ocean crawls, He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls. 

The precision of wording here, the tremendousness of scene evoked withstark economy of means, the triumphant vividness of the adjective"wrinkled, " transporting the reader at once to a great height abovethe plain of the sea, the complete absence of any touch of the"poetic" (surely the beautiful word _azure_ may be admitted in moderncompany), make this poem a masterpiece without date or time. It is as"new" as the latest Imagist anthology. And, be it noted, I have quotedit correctly, I feel confident, from memory. My copy of Tennyson is instorage, and I have not read the fragment probably in ten or a dozenyears. Yet whenever I wish to relive its mood, to see again itsincomparable picture, I have only to move my lips, even only to repeatthe lines inwardly, in silence, and the poem is mine again. 

But I have just been reading the latest Imagist anthology, especiallythe _Lacquer Prints_ by Amy Lowell, not ten years, but hardly tenminutes ago--and I cannot repeat one of them. I could learn them, ofcourse, by an effort. But that is not the way man desires to remembermusic and poetry. It must come singing into his head and heart--andremain there without his effort. Here is a "Lacquer Print" called_Sunshine_. It is indeed vivid, though (quite properly, of course) alittle garden pool to Tennyson's vast ocean. 

 The pool is edged with blade-like leaves of irises. If I throw a stone into the placid water It suddenly stiffens Into rings and rings Of sharp gold wire. 

Here is a vivid picture, here is economy and scrupulous selection ofepithet, here is no "poetic" diction of the despised sort. Butsomething is lacking, none the less. It does not haunt you, it doesnot ingratiate itself with your ear, you do not find yourselfrepeating it days and months later. Close the book--and the poemperishes, even as those rings subside on the pool. 

It would be only too easy to find much more striking examples in thenew verse. Take, for instance, the opening stanza of Ezra Pound'spoem, _The Return_:

 See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering!

It is doubtful if any reader will fail to see the trouble in the paceof these lines! No doubt it was exactly the effect the poet desired, but it will forever effectually prevent the repetition of his poem byanybody without the book. When a woman once boasted that she couldrepeat anything on a single hearing, Theodore Hook rattled off theimmortal nonsense, beginning, "She went into the garden patch to get acabbage head to make an apple pie, and a great she bear coming up theroad thrust her head into the shop and cried 'What, no soap?' and sohe died--" and the woman was floored. Such a poem as _The Return_would have floored her quite as completely. I find, after readingcarefully all the twenty pages assigned to Ezra Pound in _The NewPoetry Anthology_, edited by Miss Monroe (a greater space, I believe, than was awarded to any other poet), that I can now repeat just oneline--or, rather, two lines, such is Mr. Pound's odd way of phrasinghis rhythms. Here they are:

 Dawn enters with little feet Like a gilded Pavlova. 

There is a certain humorous charm of epithet here, and a rhythmicsuggestion of metrical beat to follow. That, no doubt, is why the linehas stuck in my memory. But the metrical beat did not follow, and therest of the stanza has gone from me. I am sure even a gilded Pavlovawould be at some difficulty to dance to Mr. Pound's rhythms. 

But Miss Monroe is catholic in her choice of new poets. She includes, for instance, Walter de la Mare, if in less than two pages. Sheselects his wonderful poem _The Listeners_, and the quaint, haunting, _Epitaph_. It is a little hard to see just why _The Listeners_ is newpoetry, except chronologically. Its odd, apparently simple but reallyintricate and triumphantly fluid metrical structure, so unified thatthere is no break from the first syllable to the last; its lyricromanticism of subject; its obvious delight in tune; even itsoccasional lapses into the ancient "poetic" vocabulary (the traveler"smote" the door, the listeners "hearkened, " and so on), are all apart of the nineteenth-century tradition of English verse. It is nomore modern than _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--which, to be sure, isquite modern indeed to some of us. And it has lyric beauty, it haslines of unforgettable musical loveliness, it creeps in through theear and echoes in the memory. You surely remember the close:

 Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the stillness surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone. 

Is there really any loss of sharpness in the imagery here because ofthe rhyme and metre? Could any phrase, of any rhythm, however free, render any better and more economically the peculiar noise of a horseturning on a hard drive and starting away in the night, than "thesound of iron on stone"? The last two lines, surely, are close toperfection. A genuine new poet would probably have hunted long for aless hackneyed word than "plunging, " but though it would possibly havesharpened his final image, it would, at the same time, in allprobability, have robbed it of that very vagueness sought andcaptured. No, the passage pictorially and emotionally is as nearperfection as it is often permitted mortals to approach, and itlingers and echoes in the memory, it will not be forgotten. It has thelilt of music, the chime of tune, the immemorial loveliness of song. If the precise image, the desired emotional effect, the intellectualcontent can be imparted in fettered verse, and, in addition, theancient loveliness can be retained, which the new verse lacks, can itbe possible that the world will long endure to read _vers libre_ when_vers libre_ has done its work of bringing poets back to first-handreality for their subjects, relating the minstrels to the spirit oftheir age? I cannot think so. I cannot but believe that any poetrylong to endure must be memorable, in the literal sense, and that isjust what the new poetry is not. Already, it seems to me from myacquaintance with under-graduates and the just-graduated, _vers libre_is a little the cult of the middle-aged, while youth, the future, isswinging back gladly to the fetters of metre and rhyme, and probablyforgetful that the public which awaits their effort has been preparedanew for poetry by this revolt from what was stale in tradition. Ibelieve that memorable poetry always has been, and always must be, irradiated by

 The light that never was on sea or land, which is but another way of saying that it must have elevation and thehaunting mystery of beauty. The trouble is, of course, to catch thisauthentic radiation, instead of some pale reflection from Patmore orRossetti. It was against the sham of second-hand mood and subject, rather than the great truth of music and loveliness, that the newpoets broke into unmetrical protest. They have done a brave and neededwork, --but they have produced astonishingly little quotable poetry, they have sung their way not far into the hearts of their listeners. The lingering, lovely line is not for them. No, for still, The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are. 

 [Illustration]

 _The Lies We Learn in Our Youth_

The world for a great many years has accepted the dictum of the poet, that--

 Of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: It might have been. 

Even those people who refused to accept the rhyme have accepted thereason. But the fact is that the reason of this copybook couplet is asbad as the rhyme. It would be much nearer the truth to say that of allsad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: He's succeededagain. Here, too, the rhyme may be questioned, but the reason issound. An entirely successful man is the most pitiful object in theuniverse. Not only has he nothing to look forward to, but he hasnothing to look back upon. Having no regrets, no shadows, in his life, he has no chiaroscuro, no depth, no solidity in his picture. It ispainted in the flat. "Regret, " says George Moore, to change the figurea little, "is like a mountain top from which we survey our dead life, a mountain top on which we pause and ponder. " He has no point of view, then, either. So after all the words, "It might have been, " do bear asadness about them in his case; his life might have been a success ifit had only been a failure. "It might have been" thus becomes sad whenit reflects back upon itself, when it means there might have been amight have been but there was only a was. So life whirls into paradox!

Let any man in honesty retire into the solitude of his soul andreflect on his joys that might have been and those that were, and lethim then answer whether any of his realizations were the equal of hisanticipations. Therefore, if he had achieved the anticipated but lostdelights which form the burden of his "Might have been, " they, too, would have been as ashes in the mouth. The truth is that the essenceof delight is in the anticipation, the best of life is the vision, notthe reality. It is pathetic not to have entertained the vision, butmore pathetic, perhaps, to have attained it. Wasn't it Oscar Wilde whosaid that there is only one thing more tragic than failure--success?

Did our regretful poet dream at twenty-one of being the perfect lover?In his dreams he was the perfect lover, then. Yet actually what washe? What was she? What was their courtship, their marriage? You, prosy, contented, forty and forgetful, by your prosy hearth or shakingdown the furnace fire, while the children are being put to bed, youdare to call "It might have been" the saddest words of tongue or pen?Those now almost forgotten dreams of what might have been are the bestyou ever were. Remember them as often as you can, as bitterly, ashappily, for your soul's salvation. Without them you are the lowest ofGod's creatures, a mere married man. 

Or take the case of Maud Muller herself, and her judge. We learn thatthe judge--

 Wedded a wife of richest dower, Who lived for fashion, as he for power. 

Maud, on the other hand, --

 Wedded a man unlearned and poor, And many children played round her door. 

Probably in both cases this was for the best. Only the wildestsentimentalist could in seriousness urge that Maud would have made agood wife for the judge. Being a man who "lived for power, " theprobable unpresentableness of Maud in a town house would have been aconstant thorn in his flesh. She could not appear barefooted at hisreceptions, and the feet that have gone bare through an agriculturalgirlhood do not readily adapt themselves to the size of shoe whichurban fashion dictates. Moreover, the vague yearnings of a young girlfor an alliance with a handsome stranger above her station, do notfit her to speak the speech and think the thoughts and meet the socialdemands of that station. No, Maud would have been a constant thorn inthe judge's side. Summer sunshine, the smell of hay, a drink of coldwater, a pretty, barefoot girl--the mood is compounded. An uneducatedfarmer's daughter for a wife--the reality is accomplished. 

And as for Maud, who will say for certain that she would noteventually have eloped with the coachman because he praised her piesinstead of criticising her grammar?

So to each of them--barefoot girl and bald-headed judge (he probablywas bald-headed, though the poem omits to say so) did what was best, and the school children for several generations have been taught towaste unnecessary sympathy over their fate, have been inculcated witha false view of the whole matter. Both of them found far morehappiness in dreaming of what might have been than ever they couldhave found in the realization; for each of them this dream broughtundoubted sadness, but the sadness which is really pleasure, thesadness, that is, which comes over all of us when "we realize thatthough we have missed certain ideals in our lives we are still able torecall those ideals, we are still not like all the dead, forgetfulclods around us, our wives and husbands and neighbors and friends. Welive with these people as one of them, of course, but we might havebeen so much better than they! Such reflections as these are a greatcomfort. They bring a sadness which makes us mournfully happy. Theyreconcile us with the scheme of things. They are the outcroppings ofthat secret vanity which the best and the worst of us nourish, and ofwhich is born our self-respect, our happiness, our heroism. "

Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a town called Abdera. Thegood people of the town were so much upset at seeing a performance ofthe _Andromeda_ of Euripides that they caught a sort of tragic fever. This began with bleeding and perspiration and was followed in about aweek's time, according to the course of the disease, by anuncontrollable desire to recite. The effect upon Abdera wassurprising. The people walked about in the streets day and nightreciting pages of Euripides until the epidemic was cured by a returnof the cold weather. Well, Tolstoy would have us believe that theEuropean and English-speaking world to-day is about in this conditionregarding Shakespeare, and that there is little hope of a cold spell. A second-rate fellow, this Bard of Avon, according to Tolstoy, whom bya gigantic process of hypnotic suggestion we have been taught to thinkgreat, till we go about quoting him as the law and the prophet, whilehe fills some hundred and seventeen pages of Bartlett. 

There is undoubtedly something in this view of the matter. Withoutholding a brief either for the alleged immortal William or the authorof _What Is Art?_, it may safely be hazarded that at least fifty percent of the "familiar quotations" we children laboriously copied intoruled blank books in our school days and have ever since regarded asnuggets of truth and gems of poetry are neither true nor, beyond thefact of rhyme, poetic. Something as a wave of suggestion passed overEurope and sent thousands of little ones down to their deaths in theChildren's Crusades, thousands of youngsters in our schools to-day arehypnotized into a lasting belief in the poetic value of numberlesscouplets of second-rate verse, and never come to know real poetry atall. Having been forced to swallow rhymed platitudes in the beliefthat they are poetry, a permanent and perfectly natural repulsion forthe very name of poetry is too often the children's only acquisition. In fact, it is a pretty question if the decline of poetic appreciationcannot be directly traced to the rise of the memory-gem book. 

How well I remember my own sense of weariness and repulsion when I wascompelled at the tender age of ten to copy out the whole of _The Psalmof Life_, unconsciously committing it to memory as I did so. 

 Life is real, life is earnest, And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul. --

My infant lips muttered the meaningless words while my poor littlebrain and imagination tried to find some joy, some picture, sometangible delight, some inspiration in the mournful, oppressive poem. If I had then been assigned intelligible verses to copy, anElizabethan lyric, a song that sang because it had to, a bit ofimagery, my childish fancy would have been fired, and I should nothave had to wait till I was eighteen years old before I read a singlepoem voluntarily. And I should not have detested _The Psalm of Life_all the rest of my days--at least I don't think I should. Longfellowwhen I was a child was a particularly prolific mine of memory gems, running as high as three thousand quotations to the ton. I never had ateacher who didn't know her Longfellow with an intimacy almost asgreat as her ignorance of Keats, Shelley, Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, Herbert, Campion, Coleridge, Burns and the rest of the kings who livedbefore Agamemnon. Longfellow was a lovely soul, and, within hislimits, a very true poet. But I was fed on his platitudes. I was dailyinformed that--

 The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight. --

Just as if I cared, at ten, whether they were or not. I was told intripping measures of the village chestnut tree, to the total exclusionof the linden and ilex; and as for the land where the citrons bloom, and golden oranges are in the gloom, and the long silences of laurelrise--"Kennst du das Land?" Not I! The spreading chestnut tree alonecast its oppressive shadow across my childish fancy. 

Another memory gem that I remember with a lasting grudge was--

 Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood. 

This I knew was false, and to be forced glibly to chatter the wordsbefore the class shamed and angered me. Had not a maiden aunt of mine, after many trips to the library of the New England GenealogicalSociety, traced back our line to William the Conqueror? Was thereanother boy or girl in the school who had descended from William theConqueror? No, sir! Several of them had kind hearts, and doubtlesssimple faith--whatever that was--but side of my Norman blood thiscounted for nothing. It is a vastly superior thing to have Normanblood, and as for coronets--well, it may be that the new age will wipethem literally out in a surge of Democracy--some of us hope so--but tothe romantic heart of childhood they are a symbol not of caste andoppression but of dignity and beauty and the heroic. Certainly theyare not to be eliminated by throwing at the child's head such adultplatitudes in rhyme as these, and telling him it is poetry. Alas! hebelieves you, and that is why he hates the very word poetry all therest of his days. 

My memory-gem book lies before me as I write, saved I know not how outof the wreck of boyhood. I have searched it in vain for a singlequotation of lyric song, a single scrap of verse that paints the worldin rosy colors and lets moral platitudes go hang, a single strain of"Celtic magic. " Instead, I learn that as a boy I was taught that--

 We are living, we are dwelling In a grand and awful time. 

I find that at eleven years of age--

 I held it truth with him who sings To one clear harp of divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things. 

Indeed, I must have been a very remarkable child, how remarkable I hadnot hitherto suspected! Evidently, too, I displayed an early tendencyto melancholia, for I find I was admonished in the following words, with their incontestable statement of fact:

 Be still, sad heart, and cease repining, Behind the clouds is the sun still shining. 

Whether my sadness was caused by too much reflection on the fact thatlife is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal, or onthe fact that Bill Carter's air-gun cost more than mine, I cannot nowrecall. Either cause would have been sufficient. At any rate Iapparently braced up and smiled once more, for the next page is blank. That means I went fishing!

Poor kiddies! Shall we grown-ups never learn that their minds don'twork as ours do, and what may be poetry for some of us is cod-liveroil for them? Why must we be forever nagging them at home with "Don'tdo this" and "Don't do that, " and forever preaching at them in schoolwith ponderous prose platitudes cut up into lengths? How much wiserthan we they are, who know that life is free and pleasant and full ofmelody and beautiful things, and dreams more real than reality, andreality born of the dream! Yet we try our best to convince them thatthey are wrong. We see to it that Longfellow lies about them in theirinfancy. 

But perhaps all this is changed since my day, and the nightmare thisbattered memory-gem book recalls to my mind is no longer a load on thechildren of the present. I profoundly hope so. Can it be that thepresent revival of poetry is due to the passing of the memory-gembook? At least, no teacher would have the courage to set her class thetask of copying Amy Lowell or _The Spoon River Anthology_!

 [Illustration]

 _The Bad Manners of Polite People_

All my life I have suffered from politeness--not my own, but thepoliteness of other people. So far as I know, nobody has ever accusedme of being polite. I suspect that I must be, however, for hitherto Ihave borne the politeness of other people without a protest. But Imust protest now, if only to vindicate my lack of politeness; in otherwords, to prove my good manners. 

For what I object to in polite people is their bad manners. It is thisI have suffered from, as, I suspect, have many thousands of myfellows, to whom life is real and earnest, and gabble not its goal. Asa rule, the politer the person the worse are his (or more often, perhaps, her) manners. The limit is reached when the amateur is sunkentirely in the professional, and that curious product of "Society" isdeveloped, the professional hostess. I cannot better illustrate mytheme than with a description of the professional hostess. 

I call her professional because all the joy of entertaining for itsown sake has gone out of her work. She does not invite people to herparties because she is glad to see them, because she is interested inthem, or wishes to give them pleasure. She invites them because toentertain them is a part of her day's work--whether her work be to getinto a certain social stronghold, to keep that stronghold againstassault, or merely to kill time, her arch-enemy. And, in performingthis task of hers, she has developed a technique of politeness whichis to the amateur's technique what the professional golf-player'sstyle is to the form of the mere bumblepuppy. Her politeness isastonishingly brilliant, flexible, resourceful. It is aspired to bythe lowly and aped on the stage. And yet her manners are the worst inthe world. 

Let us suppose her about to give a dinner. She is trimmed down to thefashionable slenderness (perhaps), and brilliant with jewels. Cannelcoal snaps pleasantly in the drawing-room grate, and the lights aregratefully shaded. A guest or two arrive, whom she greets with affablehandshake. The man moves over to the fire, warming his back; his wifetalks to the hostess rapidly, in the way women have when they seem tothink it better to say anything than not to speak at all. But thehostess is quite at her ease. Her politeness is triumphant. Presentlyshe turns to the man, who is, perhaps, an author. 

"Your new book, " she begins, as if she had been waiting all day to askthat question, "--what is it going to be about? I'm tremendously eagerto know. "

Already the genial fire has warmed the noted author after his chillingride in a street car to this mansion of luxury. The kindly questionpositively expands him. He launches eagerly into his answer. 

"You see, " he begins, "the great modern question is--"

But suddenly he is aware that he has no listener. His hostess has gonetoward the door with outstretched hand, and his own wife is gazing atthe gowns of the women entering. The author turns and prods the gratewith his toe. Perhaps, if he is new at being "entertained, " he fanciesthat his hostess will presently return to hear his answer. He holds itin readiness. Poor man!

The newcomers are brought into the circle. When introductions arenecessary, they are made with studied informality. And then the authorhears the hostess say to a big, energetic woman, who is among thearrivals, "Oh, dear Miss Jones, I have heard so much about yourperfectly splendid work down there among the horrid poor! I did _so_want to hear you talk about it at the Colonial Club, this afternoon, but I simply _couldn't_ get there. Won't you tell me just a bit ofwhat you said?"

The tone of entreaty betrays the utmost interest. The big, energeticwoman smiles, and begins, "Well, " she says, "I was just trying to getthe members interested in our new health-tenement for consumptives. You see, we need--"

Then she, too, becomes aware that her audience has departed toward thedoor. She turns about to see if anybody else was listening, but nobodywas. The other women are engaged in inspecting the newcomers. The menare looking uncomfortable, or chatting with one another. Only theauthor's sympathetic gaze meets hers. 

The guests have all gathered by now, but dinner is not yet announced. The hostess moves easily among them, stopping by each with a winningsmile, to ask some carefully chosen personal question. Each aspolitely replies, only to find himself talking to the empty air. 

There is soon a confused babble of voices, a whir of windy words--andno one hears. 

The author watches her, still curious to know whether she willremember that she has not yet heard his answer. But she has quiteforgotten. She moves, the incarnate spirit of politeness, about theroom, rousing trains of eager ideas in her guests, and as speedilyleaving them to run down a side-track into a bumper. 

She has no real interest in any of them, probably she has no realunderstanding of them. She thinks her manners are above reproach, that she is treating her guests in the most exemplary fashion. Inreality, nothing could be worse than her manners, and she is treatingher guests most shabbily. By being polite, she ends by being rude. Fornothing is so rude in this world as to ask a man a question about somesubject close to his heart when you have no intention of listening tohis answer, nor any interest in it. The hostess thinks to feed hisvanity; she ends by wounding it. She thinks to make her guestscomfortable; she ends by making them uncomfortable. 

The best manners I have ever seen were possessed by the most impoliteman I have ever known. As a result, nobody that he ever invited to hishouse felt uncomfortable there. He was interested in all kinds andconditions of people, all kinds and conditions of activities. If heasked you a question, it was because he wanted to hear your answer. Hepaid you the compliment of assuming that it was worth listening to, and other people waited till you were through. At his table youweren't supposed to confine your talk to the sweet young thing on yourleft, who was more interested in the gay young blade on _her_ left, nor to the sedate, elderly female person on your right, who was moreinterested in the bishop on _her_ right. Talk was largely for thewhole table; and if you hadn't some definite contribution to make, youwere usually glad to keep still. 

I say nobody ever felt uncomfortable in his house. That is not quitetrue. Occasionally the person who expressed an opinion on a subject heknew nothing about must have felt uncomfortable. For, though he waslistened to gravely while speaking, conversation was at once resumedas if nothing whatever had been said. 

Nothing could have been more conventionally impolite. And yet the actwas so utterly free from sham that it seemed the only decorous anddecent thing to do. Thus was the dignity of conversation maintained;thus was each man and woman made to feel his or her worth alongpersonal lines of endeavor; thus was a true democratic spiritpreserved, which is the real essence of good manners. True democracyconsists in bringing each man out, not in reducing him to a commonlevel of inanity. Good manners consist in showing him respect for whatis worthy of respect in him, treating him as a rational human being, not as a mere social unit who deposits his hard-won opinions, alongwith his hat and stick, in the care of the butler when he enters thehouse. 

That is why men have, as a rule, better manners than women, thoughthey are far less polite. A man respects the judgment of a specialiston any given subject, and he is rather intolerant of the snapjudgments of the dabbler or the dilettante. He listens, if forced to, with unconcealed impatience to the babbling of his pretty neighbor attable about art, perhaps, or engineering, or some other topicconcerning which her ignorance is as profound as her cocksureness islofty. But, after all, to be polite to her is to insult a whole raceof engineers or artists! Put one of them beside him, and see howreadily he will listen. 

Politeness too often consists of shamming. Good manners are theabsence of sham. It is not the gentleman's place, certainly, to insultthe lady. Good manners seldom go quite so far as that. But evenpoliteness cannot expect him to endure the torture for more than alimited time, especially if the topic chosen chances to be his ownspecialty. It is his place to lead the conversation, as gently aspossible, back upon more neutral ground, where he may find whatconsolation he can in sprightly personalities--while praying for thecoffee. 

I enjoy the privilege of acquaintance with a very charming person, whohas never paid a compliment to her sex except by being a woman. Someof her sex say that she is a delightful hostess and very beautiful. Others say that she is atrociously rude, and they "can't see what itis people admire in her. " Most men adore her. She herself says thatthe only people she cares to entertain are those who have earned theirown living. Her reasons are, I believe, interesting and significant. 

She earns her own living, I may state, and a very considerable one, for she is famous and highly successful in her branch of artisticendeavor. Socially, one may say of her, in that atrocious phrase whichimplies a queer jumble of values, that she is "very much in demand. "But, though a man in livery opens her front door, the street-carsbring quite as many guests to her house as do expensively purringmotor-cars. 

"For, " as she puts it, "I can stand the talk of the average woman in'Society' just about fifteen minutes, and then I have to scream. Idon't know how the fiction arose that American women of the leisureclasses are so superior mentally to the women of other nations. Thefact is, they are not. The fact is, that they are so superficial thata person who has really _done_ something--I don't mean who has playedat it, but who has really under the spur of necessity got to thebottom of some one subject--can hardly endure their conversation. Theychatter, chatter, chatter, about everything under heaven, and if youhappen to know anything about any of the subjects, it is simplytorture to listen. 

"Life is too short, and too interesting, and the world too full ofreal people, to bother with the folks who don't know their business. The man or woman who has had to be self-supporting has got to thebottom of some branch of activity, however small, and learnedhumility. To learn that mastery of even a tiny subject requireseffort and concentration and skill, is to learn respect for othersubjects; and it is to learn, too, how to listen. 

"Nobody can listen who isn't truly interested, and who hasn't thegrasp of mind to appreciate the complexities of a craft not his own, who doesn't know enough to know when he doesn't know anything. If I'mgoing to talk my shop, I want to talk it with folks who've been in it. If I'm going to hear some other shop discussed, it must be by someonewho is familiar with that, not by directoired dabblers who, you feelafter three minutes have elapsed, don't know a thing about thesubject. If politeness consists in letting them suppose that I takeany stock in what they say, then I plead guilty to being a boor. "

Probably no one who has experienced the awful ordeal of listening tosome female chatter about his chosen subject, or who has undergone theeven worse ordeal of dropping great thoughts of his own into the deep, deep pools of her incomprehension, will fail of sympathy with myfriend. 

"But I tire you, " said an incessant gabbler one day to the great Ducde Broglie. 

"No, no, " replied the duke; "I wasn't listening. "

 [Illustration]

 _On Giving up Golf Forever_

Last season I gave up golf forever two days before our course openedin May, on the evenings of June 17th and July 4th, at noon on July27th, on the evenings of August 2nd, 9th, 15th, and 21st, at 11:15A. M. On Labor Day, again Labor Day evening, on September 19th, 23rd, 30th, and October 3rd, 11th and 18th. I am writing this inmid-January, when the drifts are piled five feet deep over ourbunkers, and the water-carries are frozen solid. I have played my lastgame of golf. The coming season I shall devote to the intensivecultivation of my garden. The links have no allure for me. 

"And if, " says my wife, "I could believe that, I should be happierthan ever before in the long years of my golf widowhood. "

"But you can, " I answer, with grieved surprise. 

She looks at me, with that superior and tolerant smile women know sowell how to assume. 

"You men are all such children!" is her, it seems to me, somewhatirrelevant retort. 

I fell to musing on my friend, the noted war correspondent (now aMajor in the United States Army in France). All things considered, hewas the most consistent, or perhaps I should say persistent, quitterthe game of golf has ever known. He used to quit forever on an averageof three times a week, and I have known him to abandon the game twiceduring a round, which is something of a record. He played every summeron our beautiful Berkshire course, which crosses and recrosses thewinding Housatonic, not to mention sundry swamps, and boasts the mostluxuriant fairway, and by the same token the rankest rough, in allAmerica. It is the course Owen Johnson once immortalized in his story, _Even Threes_. 

How well I remember that peaceful, happy May, back in 1914! Our coursehad emerged from its annual spring flood, newly top-dressed with richriver silt, and a few warm days brought the turf through the scars andmade the whole glorious expanse of fairway, winding through the silverwillows, a velvet carpet. I had given my orders to the greens-keepers, and gone to New York for a day or two--reluctantly, of course--andthere met the famous war correspondent, in those peaceful times out ofa regular job and turned novelist _pro tem_. He had just relievedhimself of his final chapter, and readily yielded to my persuasions toreturn with me to the velvet field and the whistling drive. We"entrained, " as he would say in one of his military dispatches. 

As far as the Massachusetts-Connecticut state-line he talked ofMexican revolutions, Theodore Roosevelt, Japanese art, _vers libre_, mushrooms, and such other topics as were of interest in the spring of1914. But at the state-line, chancing a look out of the window, he sawthe doming billow of blue mountains which marks the entrance to ourBerkshire intervales, and a strange gleam came into his eyes. Hissquare jaws set. His whole countenance was transformed. Turning backto me, he half hissed, grimly, --

"I am _not_ going to press this season!"

I knew he was fairly on his way to giving up golf forever. 

Of course, when a man hasn't played all winter, but has been engagedin the mild and harmless exercise of writing a novel, his hands becomesoft. Then, when he suddenly begins to play thirty-six holes a day, and takes a lock-grip on his clubs as tightly as if he supposedsomebody was trying to snatch them away from him, he is apt to developcertain blisters. To a war correspondent and traveler over the DawsonTrail, such blisters are nothing. To a golf player they are ofprofound importance. The next day, in our foursome, they affected thewar correspondent's game. He became softly querulous. 

"I wish you wouldn't talk when I am about to drive, " he complained toa caddie. 

"This mashie is too heavy for me, " he muttered to himself. 

"Every time I make a stroke, that crack on the third finger of my lefthand, above the top joint, opens and pains me, " he declared to anybodywho would listen. 

His drive from the eighteenth tee went kerplunk into the mud, andburied itself like a startled woodchuck. He said nothing, but took aleft-handed club from his bag--for he began the game left-handed, andhad switched over the year before, upon hearing our professional saythat no left-handed player could ever become a great golfer. With thisfresh implement, he began to dig. He finished the hole left-handed, with three perfect shots! We tried to cheer him up, but he was not tobe cheered. 

"What's the use!" he wailed. "Here I've spent a year and a fortuneunlearning how to play left-handed. I'm never going to play theconfounded game again!"

And, by way of token, he began to talk about Theodore Roosevelt. 

That was his first renunciation for 1914. The next few days the gamewent well, and so did work on a new novel he had commenced, fired byhis success in getting off seventeen perfect tee-shots. But he reachedhis fourth chapter and an off afternoon on the same fair Saturday. What a lovely day it was!--you know, one of those early June days thatinvariably causes some woman to quote Lowell. But the famous warcorrespondent saw no charm in the leafy luxury around him, in the bluesky, the lush grass. He heard no pipe of birds nor whisper of thebreeze. His driver wasn't working right. Then his over-worked mashiewent back on him. By the fourth green he was taking three putts, andby the eighth he was picking up. His face was a thundercloud; hisvocabulary disclosed a richness gleaned from camp and field which wasa revelation even to our caddies; and that is no insignificantaccomplishment. 

Our tenth hole in those days was close to the club-house, and the teewas but 195 yards away--a good iron to the green. By the time wereached this tee, the war correspondent had very nearly exhausted eventhe stock of expletives he had acquired on the Dawson Trail, and haddeclared seven times that he was _through_, yes, _forever_!

"Oh, come on and play just this hole--keep going to the club-houseanyway, " we pleaded. 

"Well, " he said, "I'll take one more shot--it's my last--positively. I'm going back to New York to-morrow. "

He tossed a scarred, cut, battered ball on the turf, scorning to makea tee. Yanking a cleek from his bag, he stepped up with the speed ofDuncan and swung. To our amazement, the ball flew like a bullet to themark and disappeared over the lip of the green, headed straight forthe pin. But he never saw it. He wasn't watching. 

"Good shot!" we cried, with real enthusiasm. 

"I wasn't looking, where'd it go?" he asked, with an attempt at scorn, which, however, was manifestly weakening. 

"Got a putt fer a two, " said his caddie. 

The noted man cast a withering look at this object of his previousinvective. He still suspected something. We backed the caddie up, andhe strode down the fairway with a certain reviving spring in his step. 

There on the green, not six inches from the cup, reposed his batteredball!

"Been anybody else it would have gone in!" he muttered, as he sank itfor a two. 

That was his proud surrender. He said no more. He strode ahead to thenext tee, and tore out a long, straight drive. Then he lit a cigaretteand remarked that he had never seen the willows more beautiful, moresilvery in the afternoon light. 

Ah, well, poor chap, he did give up golf on the first of August, ifnot forever at least for the longest period of abstinence in hiscareer on the links. On our last afternoon over the velvet together, before he left for the steamer that was to take him into themaelstrom, he paid little attention to his game, and a surprised and, I fancied, even a slightly disappointed caddie followed him. (He wasalways most generous to his caddie when he had most abused him, likethe hero of Goldoni's comedy. )

"I sha'n't see nice, sweet, unscarred green sod again for a longtime, " he said, digging up a huge divot with unconscious irony. "I'mgoing to my last war, though. "

"Gracious, " said I, "are you going to give up War forever, too?"

"The world is going to give it up forever, after this one, " hereplied. 

I have seen him twice since, once when he was still a correspondent, once more recently when he came back in the uniform of Uncle Sam. Andeach time his greeting has been the same:--

"Have you got rid of that hook yet?"

Then he smiled--a wistful, tragic smile, and asked where all the newtraps and bunkers are, how we contrived to lengthen the course, whether the new sixth green is in play yet, all the patheticallyunimportant little gossip of our eighty acres of green meadow. 

"Ah, " he said the last time we parted, "some day I'm coming back andmake that 79 at last! Anybody can go over the top, but to break 80 atStockbridge--!"

Then he left for the trenches of France. 

I have another good friend who, unlike the Major, has never given upgolf forever. This, as he himself admits (or I should not dare offerthe explanation), is because he has never yet really played it. He, too, is rather well known at his avocation of play-writing; but golfis his real business in life when the season once gets under way. Hehas enabled several professionals to buy motor-cars, he has sentnumerous fore-caddies through the high school, he has practised by thehour with individual clubs, but still, after almost a quarter of acentury, he has never broken 90 on a first-class course. From mysuperior position (I have on three never-to-be-forgotten occasionsbroken 80, one of them at Manchester!), I sometimes wonder what keepshim at the game. Then I play with him, and realize. He has the divine, inexplicable faculty, once or twice in a round, of tearing off anastounding drive of 300 yards, by some subtle miracle of timing, whichafter hours of rolling finally comes to rest far out beyond any otherball in the foursome, or even the professional's drive. What does itmatter if he scruffs his approach? What does it matter if he takesthree putts? He has the memory of that drive, the unexpected, thrilling feel of it in arms and body, the tingling vision of the daywhen he will find out how he did it, and be able to repeat at will!That keeps him going--that, and a trophy he once achieved by winningthe beaten eight division of the sixth sixteen. It was a little pocketmatch-safe, but it is more precious in his eyes than pearls, aye, thanmuch fine gold or his reputation as perhaps the deftest writer ofdialogue on the American stage. It represents definite achievement inthe game of Golf. 

You may suppose, dear Reader, if by some miracle you are not a golfer, that I have been pressing the essayist's privilege and indulging in anattempt at whimsicality. Nothing, I assure you, could be farther fromthe fact. I am, in this chapter, a realist. All I have here set downis a record of actuality. Nay, I have erred on the other side. I havesaid nothing whatever about my own reasons for giving up golf forever. Nor have I told the story of the elderly gentlemen at a course nearBoston, whom I once observed in an exhibition of renunciation thatperhaps deserved recording. 

This course was of nine holes (it is now the site of several apartmenthouses), and the last hole called for a carry over a little pond, to agreen immediately in front of the club-house. The somewhat elderly andirascible gentleman in question, playing in a foursome, had reachedthis ninth tee on the shore of the pond, and even from the clubveranda it was evident that his temper was not of the best. Things hadnot been going right for him. His three companions carried the pond. Then he teed up, and drove--splash!--into the water. A remark waswafted through the still air. He teed again--another splash. Thenfollowed an exhibition which I fear my wife would describe aschildish. First this elderly gentleman spoke, in a loud, vexed voice. Then he hurled his driver into the pond. Then he snatched his bag ofclubs from the caddie's shoulder, seized a stone from the pond side, stuffed it into the bag, grasped the strap as a hammer-thrower thehandle of his weight, swung the bag three times around his head, andlet it fly far out over the water. It hit with a great splash, andsank from sight. His three companions, respecting his mood, discreetlycontinued their game, while he came up to the club-house, sought a farcorner of the veranda, and with a face closely resembling a Greek maskof Tragedy, sank down huddled into a chair. 

On the veranda, too, his grief was respected. No one spoke to him. Infact, I think no one dared. We were careful that even our mirth didnot reach his ears. He was alone with his thoughts. The afternoonwaned. His three companions again reached the ninth tee, drove thepond, and came into the club-house to dress. The caddies were about todepart. Then a strange thing happened; at its first intimation wetiptoed to a window to observe. He roused himself, leaned over therail, and called a caddie. 

"Boy, " we heard him say, in a deep, tragic voice, "can you swim?"

"Yes, sir, " the caddie replied. 

"All right. About thirty feet out in front of the ninth tee there's abag at the bottom of the pond. Go get it for me, and I'll give youfive dollars. "

The caddie ran, peeling his garments as he went. Modestly retaininghis tattered underclothes, he splashed in from the tee, while thesomewhat elderly golf player gesticulated directions on the bank. Presently the boy's toes detected something, and he did a prettysurface dive, emerging with the bag strap in his right hand. He alsorescued the floating driver, and we saw the promised bill passed tohim, and watched him drag on his clothes over his wet undergarments. Slowly, even tenderly, the somewhat elderly gentleman emptied thewater and the stone from his bag, and wiped the clubs on hishandkerchief. With the wet, dripping burden over his shoulder he cameacross the foot-bridge and into the locker room, while we hastened toremove our faces from the door and windows, and attempted to appearcasual. 

He entered in silence, and strode to his locker. The silence grewpainful. Somebody simply had to speak, or laugh. Finally somebody didspeak, which was probably the safer alternative. 

"Decided to try again, eh?"

The somewhat elderly gentleman wheeled upon the assemblage, hisdripping bag still hanging from his shoulder. 

"Yes, damn it!" he thundered. 

Well, I have never thrown my clubs into a pond, and I am sure you havenever done anything so childish, either. But how many times have youand I both given up golf forever, and then returned to links thefollowing day--"damn it"! We do not play for the exercise, we do notplay because it "keeps us out in the open air. " Neither motive wouldhold a man for a week to the tantalizing, costly, soul-racking, nerve-and temper-destroying game. We play it because there is somediabolical--or celestial--fascination about the thing; somewill-o'-the-wisp of hope lures us over swamp and swale, through pitand pasture, toward the smooth haven of the putting green; somesubtle, mysterious power every now and then coördinates our musclesand lets us achieve perfection for a single stroke, whereafter wetingle with remembrance and thrill with anticipation. Golf is thequest of the unattainable, it is a manifestation of the Divine Unrest, it spreads before us the soft green pathway down which we follow theGleam. That is why you and I shall be giving it up forever on oureightieth birthday. 

 [Illustration]

 _"Grape-Vine" Erudition_

You may recall that Mr. Ezra Barkley acquired a great reputation forlearning by imparting to the spinsters of Old Chester such astonishingfacts as the approximate number of roe contained in a shad. Hissister-in-law, in her ignorance, supposed there were only two hundred!Ezra also knew who first kept bees, and many other important things, usually of a statistical nature. I cannot recall that Mrs. Deland hastold us where Ezra acquired his erudition, and I used at one time towonder. But now I know. He read the "grape-vine" in the first editionsof our daily papers. 

Perhaps you don't know what "grape-vine" is? I rejoice in my abilityto tell you. It is the name given by newspaper men to the jokes andsquibs and bits of information clipped by the busy exchange reader, and put into type, making short paragraphs of varying lengths, whichare dropped in at the bottom of a column to fill up the vacant spacewhen the need arises. This need most often arises in preparing thefirst edition, the one which catches the early trains for thecountry. By the time the city edition goes to press sufficient newsof battles, carnage, and sudden death, of politics and stockexchanges, has been prepared to fill every inch of available space. The city reader, therefore, sees little of this "grape-vine. " Thus wehave a new argument for country life. 

I am now a resident of the country, one hundred and fifty milesremoved from New York and as far from Boston; and I am by way ofbecoming nearly as erudite as Ezra Barkley. I am, indeed, almostbewildered with the mass of information I am acquiring. This morning Iread a column about the European war, all of which I have nowforgotten. But how can I ever forget the two lines of "grape-vine" atthe very bottom which filled out an otherwise vacant quarter inch? Iam permanently a wiser man. 

"Many Filipino women catch and sell fish for a living. "

Amid a world at war, too, how peaceful and soothing is this tabloididyl of piscatorial toil!

After the acquisition of this morsel of learning I set diligently towork on the day's papers, both the morning editions and those"evening" editions which come to us here by a train leaving the cityearly in the afternoon, to see how much erudition I could accumulatein one sun's span. I think you of the cities will be astonished. I wasmyself. In a few weeks I shall read the encyclopædia advertisementswith scorn instead of longing. For instance, I have learned that "Anew tooth-brush is cylindrical and is revolved against the teeth by aplunger working through its spirally grooved handle. " Obviously, justthe implement for boys interested in motor-cars (as all boys are). They will play they are grinding valves and run joyously to brushtheir teeth. 

I have learned that "In the last five years our national and statelawmaking bodies have passed 62, 550 laws. " The surprising thing aboutthis information is that the number is so small!

I have learned that "Russia has ten thousand lepers, taken care of bytwenty-one institutions. "

I have acquired these valuable bits of ornithological lore: "Thefrigate-bird is capable of getting up a speed of ninety-six miles anhour with hardly a movement of its wings. The greater part of its lifeis spent in the air. " "The swallow has a larger mouth in proportion toits size than any other bird. "

I have, from the bottom of a single column, gleaned these three itemsof incalculable value: "By harnessing a fly to a tiny wagon an Englishscientist found it could draw one hundred and seventy times its ownweight over smooth surfaces. "

"Missouri last year produced 195, 634 tons of lead, a fairly heavyoutput. "

"The United States has five hundred and seventeen button-factories. "

The New York _Times_ staggers me with this statistical line: "OneParis motion-picture plant produces an average of three million feetof films weekly. " (This strikes me as a kind of "Frenchfrightfulness. ")

The New York _Evening Post_ contributes to my welfare and domesticcomfort this item: "Both an electric range and a refrigerator areincluded in a new kitchen cabinet, but are hidden from view by doorswhen not in use. "

I am certainly a wiser man for knowing that "The Mexican seacoast onthe Pacific and the Gulf of California is 4, 575 miles. " And I am atleast interested in the fact that "An Englishman has invented a coverfor hatchways on vessels that operates on the principle of a roll-topdesk. " If this hatchway operates on the principle of the only roll-topdesk I ever possessed, God help the poor sailors when the stormbreaks!

Such items as these disclose to me the extent of my previousignorance:--

"Bolivia is producing about one-third of the world's output of tin. "

"Records disclose that for several centuries an infusion of nutgallstreated with sulphate of iron composed the only known ink. "

"The first job held by William G. McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasury, was that of a newsboy selling the Macon _Morning Telegraph_. His nextjob was that of a farm laborer. "

"There are 2, 500, 000 freight-cars in the country, and their averagelife is somewhere about twenty years. "

"Since gold was discovered in the Auckland province, in 1852, therehas been exported from that district gold to the value of$116, 796, 000. "

I should, to be sure, be more completely educated if I could findsomewhere, under the sporting news, or at the base of the obituaries, a statement of where Auckland is. But perhaps that information willcome to-morrow. 

Well, I have presented here only a tithe of the knowledge I haveto-day gleaned from the daily press, that hitherto (by me, at least)underestimated institution. I haven't stated that I now know who firstused anthracite coal as a fuel, and when. You don't know that, I amsure. Neither do you know how many acres of corn were planted inEngland and Wales in 1915 and 1916, nor how many government employeesthere were in France before the war, nor that "A bundle of fine glassthreads forms a new ink-eraser. "

However, I must share with you my choicest acquisition. It seemslittle less than a crime to keep such knowledge from the world atlarge, to bury it at the bottom of a column on the ninth page of thefirst edition of the Springfield _Republican_. So I rewrite it here. For oral delivery, I shall save it till some caller comes whom Iparticularly desire to impress. Then, with all the Old-World courtesyof Mr. Ezra Barkley, I shall offer this guest a chair, and as I do soI shall remark, with the careless casualness of the truly erudite:"Guatemala has only one furniture factory. It employs a hundred andfifty men. "

 [Illustration]

 [Illustration]

 _Business Before Grammar_

We have just been perusing a copy of a certain magazine whichproclaims on its cover that it has doubled its circulation in twentymonths. Within, the editor sets forth what he believes to be thereasons for this gratifying growth. "The magazine accepts man as heis--and helps him, " says the editor. "The magazine is edited to answerthe questions that keep rising and rising in the average man's head. It is not edited with the idea of trying to force into the averageman's head a lot of information which he does not hanker for andcannot make use of. "

Having always considered ourself an average man, we turned the pageshopefully, only to find a considerable amount of information we hadnever "hankered" for, and could not make use of, as, for instance, howto become the biggest "buyer" in the universe, or how a certaintheatrical manager wants you to think he thinks he got on in the world(there is, to be sure, a quite unintentional psychological interesthere), or how to remember the names of a hundred thousandpeople--dreadful thought! So we decided we were not, after all, anaverage man, and shifted to the fiction. 

There were four short stories and a serial in this issue, and not oneof them concerned itself with people who could speak correct English. Some of the stories confined their assaults upon our mother tongue tothe dialogue, one was told by a dog (which, of course, excuses much, in prose as well as verse), and one was entirely written in what wepresume to be a sort of literary Bowery dialect, which we have sincebeen informed by friends more extensively read than ourself is now thenecessary dialect of American magazine humor, as essential, almost, asthe bathing-girl on the August cover. 

 "'I think we got about everything. I'll see that the things is packed in them wardrobe trunks an' sent to your hotel to-morrow morning. An' believe me, it's been _some_ afternoon, Mr. Bentley!'"

--This, at random, from one of the two stories which dealt with the"business woman, " whose motto seems to be, "Business Before Grammar, "even as it is the motto of the editor. The other "business woman" wasnot quite so lax. She tried as hard to speak correctly as the authorcould let her, and won a certain amount of sympathy for her efforts. 

But the gem, of course, was the story told all in the literaryBoweryese. A lack of acquaintance with past performances by our authorprevented us from feeling quite sure who the supposed narrator mightbe, without reading the entire story, but we gathered from earlyparagraphs and from the illustrations that the guy was a pug. (Yousee, it's contagious. ) At any rate, this is how the story began:--

 "The average guy's opinion of himself reaches its highest level about five minutes after the most wonderful girl in the world gasps 'Yes!' He always thought he was a little better than the other voters, but now he knows it! Of course, he figures, the girl couldn't very well help fallin' for a handsome brute like him, who'd have more money than Rockefeller if he only knew somethin' about oil. He kids himself along like that, thinkin' that it was his curly hair or his clever chatter that turned the trick. Them guys gimme a laugh!

 "When Mamie Mahoney or Gladys Van de Vere decides to love, honor and annoy one of these birds, she's got some little thing in view besides light house-keepin'. Some dames marry for spite, some because they prefer limousines to the subway, and others want to make Joe stop playin' the races or the rye. But there's always _somethin'_ there--just like they have to put alloy in gold to hold it together. Yes, gentle reader, there's a reason!

 "But if you're engaged, son, don't let this disturb you. I've seen some dames that, believe me, I wouldn't care _what_ they married me for, as long as they did!"

Having proceeded thus far, we turned back to the table of contents foraffirmation of what we vaguely remembered to have read there. Yes, we_had_ read it! The tale was labeled by the editor, "A funny story. "

So this is fiction for "the average man, " and on this spiritual farehis cravings for literature are fed! So this is the sort of thingwhich doubles the circulation of a popular magazine in twenty months!Such melancholy reflections crossed our mind, coupled with the thoughtthat with no speech at all in the movies, and such speech as this inhis magazines, the "average man" will either have to read his Bibleevery day or soon forget that there was once such a thing as thebeautiful English language. And alas, the circulation of the Biblehasn't doubled in the past twenty months! "This magazine accepts manas he is--and helps him"--so reads the editor's self-puffery. What anindictment of man--and what an idea of help! We would hate to go tobed with his conscience, --if editors have such old-fashionedimpediments. 

But suddenly we caught a ray of light amid the encircling gloom. Theeditor hadn't stated what his circulation was twenty months ago! Werecalled how Irvin Cobb once told us that the attendance at hismusical comedy had doubled the previous evening--the usher had broughthis sister. Doubtless the new circulation isn't more than amillion, --and what is a mere million nowadays?

 [Illustration]

 _Wood Ashes and Progress_

"Once man defended his home and hearth; now he defends his home andradiator. " The words stared out of the bulk of print on the page withstartling vividness, a gem of philosophy, a "criticism of life, " inthe waste of jokes which the comic-paper editor had read and doubtlesspaid for, and which the public was doubtless expected to enjoy. TheMan Above the Square laid aside the paper, leaned toward his fire, took up the poker (an old ebony cane adorned with a heavy silver knobwhich bore the name of an actor once loved and admired) and rolled thetop log over slowly and meditatively. The end of the cane was scarredand burned from many a contest with stubborn logs, and the Man Abovethe Square looked at the marks of service with a smile before he stoodthe heavy stick again in its place by the fireside. 

"It isn't every walking-stick which comes to such a good end, " he saidaloud. 

Then either because he was cold or in penitence for the pun, he walkedover to the windows to pull down the shades. But before he did so helooked out into the night, his breath making a frosty vapor on thepane. Below him the Square gleamed in white patches under thearc-lamps, and across these white patches here and there a belatedpedestrian, coat collar turned up, hurried, a black shadow. The crosson the Memorial Church gleamed like a cluster of stars, and deep inthe cold sky the moon rode silently. A chill wind was complaining inthe bare treetops beneath him and found its way to his face and bodythrough the window chinks. He drew down the shades quickly and pulledthe heavy draperies together with a rattle of rings on the rods. Thenhe turned and faced his room. 

A scarf of Oriental silk veiled the light of the single lamp, set lowon his desk, and the fire had its own way with the illumination. Itsent dancing shadows over the olive walls, it made points of light ofthe picture-frames and a glowing coal of the polished coffee-urn inthe corner; it pointed pleasantly out the numberless books, but toldnothing of their contents; it made dark the spaces where the alcoveswere, but suffused the little radius of the hearth that was bounded byan easy chair and a pipe-stand with a glow and warmth and comfortwhich were irresistible. The Man Above the Square came quickly intothis charmed radius and sank again into the chair. "And some peopleinsist on steam heat!" he said. 

Then he looked into the rosy pit of wallowing, good-natured flames, and fancied he was meditating. But in reality he was going to sleep. When he woke up the fire was out and he was cramped and cold. Hestumbled to a corner, turned on the steam in a radiator, that the roommight be warm in the morning, and returned to his chamber. 

"After all, you have to build a fire; but the steam just comes, " hegrowled, as he crawled sleepily into bed. 

Toward morning the steam did come, but some hours before he was readyto rise. It came at intervals, forcing the water up ahead and thumpingit against the top of the radiator with the force of a trip-hammer andthe noise of a cannon. The Man Above the Square woke up and cursed. The intervals between thumps he employed in wondering how soon thenext report would come, which effectively prevented his going to sleepagain. Presently the thumping ceased, and he dozed off, to awake laterin ugly temper. He went out into the sitting room and found it cold asan ice-box. 

"Where in blazes is all that steam which woke me up at daylight?" heshouted down the speaking-tube to the janitor. The answer, as usual, admitted of no reply, even as it offered no satisfactory explanation. He dug into the wood-box and on the heap of feathery white asheswhich topped the pile in the fireplace like snow--"the fall of lastnight" he called it--he laid a fire of pine and maple. In threeminutes he was toasting his toes in front of the blaze, and goodnature was spreading up his person like the tide up a bay. 

"Modern conveniences would be all right, " he chuckled, looking fromthe merry fire to the ugly radiator, "if they were ever convenient!"

Then he swung Indian clubs for a quarter of an hour, jumped into acold plunge, and went rosy to his breakfast and the day's work, withthe cheeriness of the fire in his heart. 

But while he was gone there entered the chambermaid, and saddesecration was wrought. Chambermaids are another moderninconvenience. The Pilgrim Fathers got along without chambermaids; andeven at a much later period chambermaids worked at least under thesupervision of a mistress of the household. But nowadays they havetheir own way, even in abodes where there is one who could be amistress if she would, or time from social duties and the improvementof her mind permitted. Of course, in the abode of a bachelor thechambermaid is supreme, for bachelors, at least in New York, have ofnecessity to live in apartments, not private boarding houses presidedover by a careful mistress. Probably most of them prefer to; but thatdoes not prove progress, none the less. But the Man Above the Squarewas not of this class. He had a sharp elbow bone, in the first place, which is to signify that he was a "good house-keeper, " as they say inNew England. And in the second place, he knew the value to theæsthetic and moral sense of personality in living rooms, of anorderly, tasteful arrangement of inanimate objects, carpets, pictures, furniture, which, through weeks of comparative changelessness, takeson the human aspect of a friend and silently welcomes you when youreturn at night, saying comfortably, "I am here, as you left me; I amhome. "

So when he entered his room again that evening and turned up the gas, his immediate utterance was not strictly the subject for reproduction. To begin with, the chambermaid had, in disobedience to his strictorders, taken up the centre rug and sent it up on the roof for theporter to beat. Being an expensive rug, the Man Above the Square didnot particularly relish having it frequently beaten. But still lessdid he relish the way it had been replaced. It was not in the centreof the room, so that two legs of the library desk in the middle stoodon the border and two on the diamond centre. One end was too near thepiano, the other consequently too far from the hearth. And in tryingto tug it into position the maid had managed to pull every edge out ofplumb with the lines of the floor. Of course, the photographs on thepiano had smooches on the margins, where the maid's thumb had pressedas she held them up to dust beneath. Pudd'n-Head Wilson would alonehave prized them in their present state. On the mantel each object wasjust far enough out of its proper place to throw the whole decorativescheme into a line of Puritanic primness. And the chairs, silentfriends that are so companionable when an understanding hand placesthem in position, were now facing at stiff angles of armed neutrality, as if mutually suspicious. Not one of them said, "Sit in me. "

But the worst was yet to come. Walking over to the fireplace, the ManAbove the Square looked in and groaned. 

"She's done it again!" he cried. "I'd move out of this flat to-nightif I wasn't sure that any other would be as bad, this side of themiddle of last century. "

It was, indeed, a sorry piece of work. The splendid pile of gray andwhite wood ashes which that morning had been heaped high over the armsof the firedogs, and which drifted high into each corner and out uponthe hearth, was no more. A little pile remained, carefully swept intothe rear of the fireplace, but the bulk of the ashes had been removedand the arms of the firedogs stood inches above what was left. 

"I told her not to do it; confound it! I told her not to do it!" hemuttered aloud, storming about the room. "Here I've been sinceChristmas collecting that pile of ashes, and it had just reached thepoint where I could kindle a fire with three sticks of kindling andburn only one log if I wished. And then that confounded chambermaiddisobeys me--distinctly disobeys me--and shovels it all out!"

He rang angrily for the chambermaid, whose name was Eliza, and who wastall and angular. 

"Didn't I tell you under no consideration to take away any of myashes?" he demanded. 

"But I swept the room into them, and they got all dirty, " sheprotested. 

"Then don't sweep the room again!" he interposed. "I want the ashesleft hereafter. "

"But the fire will burn better without so many ashes; they chokes it, "said Eliza. "Most people like 'em cleaned out every week. "

"Most people are fools, " said the Man Above the Square. "You may gonow. "

The loss of his ashes had so irritated him that it was a long timebefore he could yield himself to the influence of the blaze, whichleapt merrily enough, in spite of the too clear hearth. He filled hispipe and smoked it out and filled it again; he tried the latestautobiography and Heine's prose and the current magazines; and stillhis mind would not settle to restfulness and content. Then suddenlyhe remembered the date, the 20th of January. He took down his Keats. The owl, for all his feathers, might well have been a-cold on thatnight, too, for a shrill wind was up without. He glanced at his fire. Already the kindlings were settling into glowing heaps beneath thelogs, a good start on a fresh pile of ashes. He snuggled morecomfortably into his chair and began once more the deathless poem. 

The clock ticked steadily; the wind sent crashing down the limb of anelm tree outside and shrieked exultingly; a log settled into the firewith a hiss and crackle of sparks. But he heard nothing. Presently helaid the book aside, for the poem was finished, and looked into thefire. It was sometimes a favorite question of his to inquire who ateMadeline's feast, a point which Keats leaves in doubt; but he did notask it to-night. 

"Yes, it was ages long ago, " he said at length. "Ages long ago!"

Then he leaned forward, poking the fire meditatively, and added:"Steam heat in Madeline's chamber? Impossible! But there might havebeen just such another fire as this!"

And was it a sudden thought, "like a full-blown rose, " making "purpleriot" in his breast, too, or was it simply the leap of the firelight, which caused his face to flush?

"I wonder where they are now?" he whispered. "'They are together inthe arms of death, ' a later poet says. But surely the world has not sofar 'progressed' that they do not live somewhere still. "

Then he recalled a visit he once made to a young doctor in a fine oldNew-England village. The doctor was not long out of college, and hehad brought his bride to this little town, to an old house rich intiny window panes, uneven floors and memories. Great fireplacessupplied the heat for the doctor and his wife, as it had done for theoccupants who looked forth from the windows to see the soldiery go byon their way to join Washington at the siege of Boston. And when theMan Above the Square came on his visit he found in the fireplace whichwarmed the low-studded living room, that was library and drawing roomas well, a heap of ashes more than a foot high, on which the greatcordwood sticks roared merrily. 

The doctor and his wife, sitting down before the blaze, pointedproudly to this heap of ashes, and the doctor said, "I brought Aliceto this house a year ago, on the day of our wedding, and we kindled afire here, on the bare hearth. Since then not a speck of ashes hasbeen removed, except little bits from the front when the carpet wasinvaded. That pile of ashes is the witness to our year-longhoneymoon. "

Then Alice smiled fondly into the rosy glow, herself more rosy, andthey kissed each other quite unaffectedly. 

The Man Above the Square, when his memory reached this point, let theebony poker slide from his grasp. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "her name wasreally Madeline!"

Again he looked into the fire. "Could the ashes have been preserved ifMadeline had not given the matter her personal attention, but hadtrusted to a housemaid?" he thought. What further reflections thisquestion inspired must be left to conjecture. He did not speak again. 

But presently he got up, went to his desk, and wrote a letter. He wasa long time about it, consulting frequently with the fire and smilingnow and then. When it was done he took it at once to the elevator tobe mailed. Perhaps he thought it unsafe to wait the turning of themood. 

 [Illustration]

 _The Vacant Room in Drama_

I am content to let Mr. John Corbin sing the praises of the stagewithout scenery; I prefer to sing the praises of the stage withoutactors. Ever since I was a little boy, nothing in the world has beenfor me so full of charm and suggestiveness as an empty room. Iremember as vividly as though it were week before last being broughthome from a visit somewhere, when I was four years old, and arrivingafter dark. My mother had difficulty in finding the latch-key in herbag (I have since noted that this is a common trait of women), andwhile the search was going on I ran around the corner of the house andpeered in one of the low windows of the library. The moonlight lay intwo oblong patches on the floor; and as I pressed my nose against thepane and gazed, the familiar objects within gradually emerged from thegloom, as if a faint, invisible light were being turned slowly up byan invisible hand. Nothing seemed, however, as it did by day, buteverything took on a new and mysterious significance that bewilderedme. I think it must also have terrified me, for I recall my father'scarrying me suddenly into the glare of the hall, and saying, "What'sthe matter with the boy?" And to-day I cannot enter a theatre, even atthe prosaic hour of ten in the morning, when the chairs are coveredwith cloths and maids are dusting, when the house looks very small andthe unlit and unadorned stage very like a barn, without a thrill ofimaginative pleasure. I have even mounted the stage of an emptytheatre and addressed with impassioned, soundless words the deeplystirred, invisible, great audience, rising row on row to the roof. Atsuch moments I have experienced the creative joy of a mighty orator ora sublime actor; I have actually felt my pulses leap. And then theentrance of a stage-hand or a scrub-woman would shatter the illusion!

But it is when I am one of a real audience, and the stage is disclosedset with scenery but barren of players, that I derive, perhaps, thekeenest pleasure. A few playwrights have recognized the power of thevacant room in drama, but on the whole the opportunities for suchenjoyment are far too rare. This is odd, too, with such convincingexamples at hand. There is, for instance, the close of the second actof _Die Meistersinger_, when the watchman passes through the sleepytown after the street brawl is over, and then the empty, moon-bathedstreet lies quiet for a time, before the curtain closes. Of course, here there is music to aid in creating the poetic charm and soothingrepose of that moment. But at the end of _Shore Acres_ there was nosuch aid. Who that saw it, however, can forget that final picture?After Nat Berry--played by Mr. Herne, the author--had scratched a bitof frost off the window-pane to peer out into the night, locked thedoor, and banked the fire, he climbed with slow, aged footsteps up thestairs to bed. At the landing he turned to survey the old kitchenbelow, that lay so cozy and warm under the benediction of his eye. Then he disappeared with his candle, and the stage grew quite dim, save for the red glow from the fire. Yet the curtain did not fall; andthrough a mist of tears, tears it cleansed one's soul to shed, theaudience looked for a long, hushed moment on the scene, on the nowfamiliar room where so much of joy and grief had happened, --deserted, tranquil, but suddenly, in this new light of emptiness, realized to behow vital a part of the lives of those people who had made the play!It used to seem, indeed, as if the drama had not achieved full realityuntil the old kitchen had thus had its say, thus spoken the epilogue. 

It is strange to me that more playwrights have not profited by suchexamples. The cry of the average playgoer is for "action, " to be sure;but even "action" may be heightened by contrast, by peace andserenity. Certainly the vitality, the illusion, of a scenic backgroundon the stage can be enhanced by drawing a certain amount of attentionto it alone; and something as Mr. Hardy, in _The Return of theNative_, paints Egdon Heath--"Haggard Egdon"--in its shifting moodsbefore he introduces a single human being upon the scene of theircoming tragedy, it is quite possible for the modern playwright, withan artist to aid him, to show the audience the scene of his drama, tolet its suggestive beauty, its emotional possibilities, charm or firetheir fancies before the speech and action begin. So also, as Wagnerand Mr. Herne have demonstrated, there can be a climax of the vacantstage. I look to the new stage-craft to develop such possibilities. 

 [Illustration]

 _On Giving an Author a Plot_

There are two people who annoy an author more than any others--theperson who calmly supposes that everything he writes is biographical, or even autobiographical, and the person who declares, "I've got adandy plot for you"--and proceeds to tell it. 

The first person, of course, is annoying, because an author's storiesalways _are_ either biographical or autobiographical, and he nevercares to admit, even to himself, how true this is. To be sure, hischaracters are composites, and his self-revelations are ratherpossibilities (or even, alas, Freudian wishes!) than records ofactuality. But fancy trying to explain that to a gushing female whohas developed a sudden passion for calling on your wife, and is heardto remark, "Oh, is that where he writes?" as you flee by a back door, down the garden!

The second person is annoying not so much because most of the "dandyplots" that he or she tells are hoary with age, or even because mostwriters don't start with a 'plot' at all, and couldn't define a plotif they had to; but rather because a writer, however humble, has tofeel the idea for a story come glowing up over the horizon of hisbrain out of the east of his own subconsciousness, or it is never his, it never acquires the necessary warmth to interest him, the color andlight to make it real. This is a curious fact, and one which yourmodest writer shrinks from trying to explain to his well-meaningfriend, lest he seem egotistical. Only the blessed publicity of printcould draw him out. Yet the psychology involved perhaps deserves someattention. 

Suppose it is my common method, in writing a story, to start from somesocial situation which illumines a strata of life; suppose, let usassume, that I am present at a dinner party where a radical has got inby mistake and says something which profoundly shocks somecapitalistic pirate who honestly feels himself a pillar of law andorder, and in this situation I see an irony which gradually demandsfictional expression, as imagined characters and more extensiveclashes begin to shape in my brain. There you have a not at allimpossible evolution of a story. But now suppose that instead of mybeing present at this party, a friend had been present, quite as aliveas I to the ironies of the situation, and suppose my friend laterrepeated the incident to me--why should it not serve me just as well, why should it not start the fictional urge, the gestation of characterand incident?

Generalizing is dangerous work. Of course, there may be authors inwhom it would start the process. But I have never known one. Even inso exceptional a case as this--of course, the usual friendlysuggestion has no real meat of fiction in it at all--something islacking to fire the imagination. It is exactly as if your nose werecalled upon to sense, or your retina to image, an odor or a scenedescribed to you and not directly experienced. Your brain accepts thedescription, but there is no warmth in the reaction, no tingle oflife. Just so, it would almost seem, the conception for a story, apoem, no doubt for a picture, too, or a strain of music, is somethingless, or more, than merely mental; it is in some subtle way sensory, as if the brain had fingers which must themselves touch the thingdirectly to get the feel of it. Is it not, perhaps, this fact whichhas caused so many artists, consciously or unconsciously, to believein "inspiration"?

The singing line walks from nowhere into the poet's head, the perfectsituation comes to the writer of fiction when he is least expectingit. To take a humble example, I was once sitting in an editor'soffice, listening while he expounded to me a grand "plot" for a seriesof stories. I looked across the street from his window to avoid hiseyes, lest I should show my lack of appreciation, and there beheld aslight incident which I instantly knew was a starting-point. Itturned out to be worth a year's income to me. Yet, to a merelyimpersonal judgment, the editor's idea was more interesting and worthwhile than mine. Only it wasn't mine; that's the point. It was foreignborn, and could never become a citizen of my mental commonwealth. Ihave not quite reached the pitch of calling my ideas inspirations, butI long ago recognized that unless they were my ideas from the dim daysbefore their birth they could never be mine, and it was only a wasteof time to wrestle with them. So when a friend declares he has a dandyplot for me, I summon what patience I may and pretend to listen, whileplanning a better succession of perennials for next year's garden, ormentally reviewing the prospect of cutting three strokes off my golfscore. 

 [Illustration]

 _The Twilight Veil_

New York! How few of us call it home! We have been sucked into it, asinto a whirlpool, and as we spin round and round on its mighty unrestour hearts and fancies find repose in memory--the memory of an old NewEngland village, or a corn field and a split-rail fence and then thelevel prairie, or cotton fields and the red handkerchiefs of thenegroes, or the vineyard slopes of Sicily, or the great white surfbeating up the cliffs of Connemara. It may be that the second andthird generations of immigrants, born on the East Side, are true NewYorkers, just as a vanishing generation of elderly men and women onMurray Hill and the Avenue are true New Yorkers. But the greatmajority of New York's five millions cherish in their hearts eitherthe memory or the hope of some spot far away to which they give theallegiance of home love. Ours is a curious city in that respect. Perhaps, indeed, it is a fortunate one. Without such memory or suchhope, the flat-dwelling imposed on most New Yorkers by economicnecessity would be a deadly thing--or shall we say, a more deadlything?

If you desire a curious experience, go into a New York club like theYale or Harvard or Players' club, and collect a dozen men at random, asking each for a little word-sketch of his childhood home. Seldomenough will the scene of that sketch be in New York City, and you willprobably be surprised to find how infrequently it will be in any city. A kind of urban consciousness gets complete possession of us after wehave lived long on Manhattan Island, and we are prone to forget what ageographically tiny spot it is. We forget the country. It comes as asurprise when we discover how many of our fellows were, like us, country bred. We are still a nation, at bottom, of little whitedwelling houses, if not any longer of little white school houses. (Iknow the phrase is little red school houses, only they never were red, but white!) This is probably one reason why our æsthetic sense is notadjusted to find more beauties than we do in the physical aspects ofNew York City. Deep in our consciousness, if not rather oursubconsciousness, lies the ache for green vistas and gardens, for lowsky lines and quiet streets. When we speak of the picturesque in NewYork, we most often refer (aside from the obviously striking aspect ofthe lower city from the harbor) to the old brick houses on WashingtonSquare or the quaint streets of Greenwich Village. Yet we do both thecity and ourselves an injustice by this more or less unconsciousattitude. Let us consider picturesque to mean what is shaped by chanceand the play of light into a beautiful picture, and, if we but walkthe town with eyes upraised and open, we shall see the picturesque onevery side. 

There is the Plaza Hotel, for example. Every New Yorker and everyvisitor to New York knows it, --a great, white, naked sky-scraper, witha green hip-roof, rising close to the Park and St. Gaudens' goldenbronze of General Sherman. But how many know that it is probably theone sky-scraper in the world which can gaze at its own reflection instill water, and that to the spectator looking at it over thiswater-mirror it becomes a gigantic but ethereal Japanese design, evento the pine limb flung across the upper corner?

They say there is an hour at twilight when all men appear noble, andall women beautiful. Certainly there is such a twilight hour when NewYork City is veiled, oftimes, in loveliness; and most lovely at thishour is the Plaza mirrored in the pool. The view is not easy to find, unless you are one of those who know your Central Park. But a littlesearching will uncover it. You will see in the southeast corner of thePark a lake, and just beyond this lake you will find a path turningwest. That path leads to a stone bridge over a northward-stretchinginlet of the pond. Cross the bridge a few paces and turn your face tothe south. At your feet the bank goes down sharply to the still, darkwater. Across the pond the bank rises steep and rocky, covered withthick shrubbery and trees. Shooting up apparently out of these treesis the white wall of the Plaza, three hundred feet into the air, anddown into the water sinks its still reflection, to an equal depth. Itrises alone, open sky to left and right, and there is just room in thelake for its replica. The picture is impressive by day, but astwilight begins to steal over the scene, as the sky takes on a pearlysoftness, and the shadows creep through the trees in the Park, and thelights in half the windows up that white cliff wall begin to gleam ingolden squares, the great building becomes curiously ethereal, thepine limb flung into the foreground of the design catches the eye, thereflection in the water is as real as the reality. The Plaza, monstrous tons of steel and stone, floats between two elements. Thendarkness gathers, the reflected lights in the blackening water growmore golden, and suddenly, perhaps, a duck swims across a tenth storywindow and sets it dancing in golden ripples. You may fare far amongthe ancient and "picturesque" cities of the earth without finding arival for this strange bit of beauty in New York, an etherealsky-scraper in white and gold gazing at its own reflection in theforest pool!

Twilight in the Park, indeed, converts more than one building into athing of beauty, and the Plaza into a thing of beauty from more thanone view. For instance, as you pass into the Park, seeking the spot wehave described, turn back before you have advanced far, and see thegreat cliff wall going up beyond the slender tracery of young trees, with the street lights, just turned on, making a level strip of goldenshimmer at its base, curiously suggestive of crowds and gaiety. Thereis at all hours a certain charm to be found in the long line of highhotels and apartment houses which line the Park to the west, when youview them over treetops, rock ledges, and running brooks, or overwhite fields of snow. It is as if the city had crested in a great wavealong the green shore of the country, ready to curl and fall and dashonward, but had been suddenly arrested by some more potent KingCanute. Loveliness, however, is hardly a word you would apply tilltwilight steals across the scene. Down side streets into the west thegolden sunset glows for a time, and the shadows on the snow areamethyst. Then the glow fades. The arc lamps come on with a splutter, and they, too, at first are amethyst. But in the gathering dark theychange to blue. The sky changes to the deep blue of approaching night. The dim bulks of the buildings change to blue. The shadows about youare but a deeper blue. Even the snow at your feet is blue. In thegreat apartments and hotels the golden window squares appear, and thelooming procession of blue shadow bulks might be a fleet of giantliners going by you in the night. 

There is always a mystery and poignant charm about our parks in NewYork, if you let them have their way with your imagination, which youdo not find in other parks intrinsically, perhaps, more beautiful. Nodoubt this comes from violent contrast between our city and the hushand peace of trees. Our streets are all treeless, and our great heaveof masonry comes up to the very edge of our green oases. Even thesmaller parks which fill but a block or two, when twilight enfoldsthem, blurring the harsher outlines and conjuring out the shadows, cancaptivate the senses. If you chance to wander in Brooklyn--which noself-respecting inhabitant of Manhattan permits himself to do exceptunder compulsing!--you may come upon Fort Greene Park when the eveningshadows are stealing down the streets to meet you, and the Martyrs'Monument strangely converted into a pagan altar, silhouetted againstthe sky amid its guardian druid grove wherein the lamps glow andtwinkle and dark figures move mysteriously. 

But it is not even necessary to enter the parks of New York to findthe picturesque and lovely. Such open areas as Washington and MadisonSquares hold varying aspects of beauty and imaginative suggestion, from sunrise to moonset. Large enough to admit the play of light andto blur a bit the building lines at their further side, these squaresreward the seeing eye with many an unguessed delight. 

For ten years my rooms were six stories up on the east side ofWashington Square, and for ten years, at all seasons and all hours, Iwalked daily up-town through Madison Square to the Rialto, and backagain. I have often regretted that I kept no note-book of the changingaspects of these two oases, as one keeps a note-book of the seasons inthe country. Spring comes in Washington and Madison Squares with signsno less unmistable than the hepaticas by the woodland road. Thewestern wall of the Flatiron Building has its autumnal colorings; andthough the first snow fall may be black mud by noon, at sun-up thosebrick-bounded areas laugh in white and the aged trees arch theirfantastic tracery. 

Spring in the Square! The central fountain is playing again itsrainbow jet of spray, the tulips are a jaunty ring about it, thebenches have put forth a strange, sad foliage of humanity (you mustnot think too much of the benches nor look at them too long!), theshrill children are everywhere, the green 'busses are gay withsight-seers atop, and as you stand by the fountain and look northwardthrough the Washington Arch, you see that an amazing thing has cometo pass. The great arch spans the vista of the Avenue, lined here withred brick dwellings and the sunny white bulk of the old BrevoortHouse. Far off, the sky-scrapers begin to loom, whipping out flags andsteam plumes. It is a treeless vista, yet it is hazed with spring!Imagination, you scoff--and dust. Yet you look again, and it is notimagination, and it is not dust. It is the veil of spring, cast withdelicate hand over the city. These laughing sight-seers atop the green'bus now going under the arch feel it, too. These children screaminground your feet, as they dash through the wind-borne fountain spray, are aware of it. There is an answering benignity in the calm, redbrick dwellings up the vista of the Avenue. Wait for a few hours, letthe sun sink behind the heights of Hoboken, and then wander once moreinto the Square. Twilight, a warm, balmy twilight, is upon yourspirit. Look through the arch southward now. There is still plenty oflight left in the sky, but the great, springing, Roman masonry isdusky. It frames the sweeping curve of the asphalt around thefountain, and beyond that the Judson Memorial tower, graceful, Italian, bearing its electric cross against the failing day like acluster of timid evening stars. It is a tower from the plains ofLombardy, or from an island in the Tiber, seen through an arch ofancient Rome. Do you object to that in an American city? I cannotargue the point. I only know that when I see them so, the one framingthe other, in the spring twilight, or in the early dusk of a winterday, my heart is very glad, and my spirit feels a touch of that peaceand calm the poet felt among the Roman ruins, "Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles Miles on miles. . . . "

How often in New York it is a tower which gathers the picturetogether! Ours is a city of towers. We hide Trinity spire in a well, and Henry Arthur Jones, the playwright, once complained that thewindows of his hotel room on the Avenue looked down upon the pinnacleof a church steeple. Yet our towers rise just the same, new onesleaping up as far above the new three-hundred-foot sky-line as Trinitysteeple once lifted above lower Broadway. We aspire still. Nor is theold Judson tower on Washington Square yet dwarfed. How many redsunsets have I seen glow through its belfry windows, while the toweritself was a black silhouette against the sky, and down in the shadowySquare the night lamps began to come out, or the asphalt, drenched bya shower, shone as if molten copper had been rained upon it! In howmany deep, starlit nights have I thrown open my window for a fresherbreath and a moment of meditation, to see the deserted Square belowme, its white arch faintly gleaming in the radiation of the arc lamps, the long stretch of city roofs beyond, the twinkling lamps on the farheights of Hoboken, and there in the centre of the picture the dark, silent tower, keeping quiet watch and bearing its steady cross like astar-cluster in the night! Many a time I have gone to bed with itsbeautiful image behind my eyelids. 

The Metropolitan tower in Madison Square is less intimate. It has itsmoods, but they are the moods of the mountain. It has dwarfed thegraceful, Spanish tower of the Madison Square Garden, without a doubt, and taken the proud Diana down a peg. But there are compensations inits mightiness. Have you ever seen it on a foggy day going up out ofsight into the driving vapors? Have you stood in ancient GramercyPark--still a bit of the old, domestic New York of the '70's--and seenit booming up over the red brick dwellings, white and confident intothe sun? Have you ever come down through Madison Square late at night, when the relic of a moon was rising behind the tower, and the ghostlyshaft stood up tremendous against the pale, racing cloud-rack? Haveyou seen it with the last pink glow of sunset upon it, and upon thewestern wall of the Flatiron Building, and upon nothing else, alllower buildings being in shadows of obscuring twilight? That is oneof its delicate mountain moods, when it seems to lift above ourearth-bound vision and look over those western cloud ranges into theLand Beyond the Sunset. 

Have you seen it, too, down Madison Avenue in the mysterious twilighthour of blue and gold when all New York is beautiful? The street lampshave come on; the dark figures of home-going pedestrians hurry pastyou; there are lamps in the windows of houses. A filmy blue veil oftwilight obscures the distances, so that they are soft, alluring. Thetower is pale, almost ethereal, at the end of the vista. Its greatclock, pricked out with golden lamps, seems scarce a third of the wayup its side. The white walls rise on, and on, with here and there aspot of gold, and taper into nothing. They are lost in the gloom ofcoming night. But still they must go on, for far aloft you see thelantern glowing like a star, hung between earth and heaven. In thistwilight hour of blue and gold the tower is the mighty guardian spiritof the scene, sending down sonorous word of the hours as they pass, and lifting our eyes, like its steady lantern, toward the watch-towersof Eternity. Must we be forever reminded that those glowing windowsquares up its flanks denote lawyers toiling late at their briefs, ormining stock promoters planning a new cast of the net? Must we beforever told that this is not a spire in praise of God but a monumentin praise of Mammon? Aspiration is in its lines, beauty in itssky-borne shaft of blue and gold, wonder in its shrouded summit. 

 "They builded better than they knew-- The conscious stone to beauty grew. "

It is enough. Let us wonder and be glad. 

There are many odd views of the tower to be had for a littlesearching, spots where its peak appears in unexpected places, or withunusual suggestion. There is just one point in Union Square, forexample, about halfway round "dead man's curve, " where you see thetapering pyramid and the golden lantern overtopping the high buildingsbetween. You do not see it again, if you are walking up Broadway, tillyou are close to Madison Square. Then, if you lift your eyes, you aresuddenly aware of it looming far aloft over the cornice-line to yourright, shredding the mists on a stormy day, or by night lifting itslantern up with the stars. There is always an added impressivenessabout a tower when we cannot see the base. The sheer drop of its sidesis left to our imagination, and the human imagination may generally betrusted to embroider fact. For that reason alone, the view of thetower from a certain point on East Thirty-first Street, betweenMadison and Fourth Avenues, would be worth the searching out. But ithas another and unique charm. If you will walk along Thirtieth Streettoward Fourth Avenue you will see, tucked in between larger and moremodern buildings on the south side, a little two-story-and-a-halfwooden cottage, set back a few feet behind an iron fence. It must havestood there many years, for the wooden age in New York was long, longago. It is a quaint little dwelling, with quaint pseudo-Gothicornamentations, and until recently was used as an antique shop. Alarge weather-stained Venus stood upon the front porch, ironicallybeside a spinning-wheel! Now the house is untenanted, so that you liftyour eyes the sooner to look above and beyond it. It occupies, ofcourse, a slit between higher buildings. Through that slit, as youstand on the opposite curb, you look over a few spindly blackchimney-stacks in the foreground directly to the Metropolitan Tower, booming up suddenly and unexpectedly. You see only that for a moment, because of its Titanic size and white impressiveness. Then you noticesomething outlined against it, a lower tower, much more slender, amere tracery of delicate shafts and belfries, and crowning it, her bowforever poised, the lovely limbed Diana. Whence either of these towerscome, you see not. They merely spring up into the vision over the roofof the little wooden house, the darker one outlined against the otherfor comparison. Between and around them steam plumes from unseenbuildings drift like clouds. Diana turns a little, and points hershaft into the wind anew. The might of the new tower is mightier forthis close comparison. Yet the other tower, too, does not suffer, itsfemininity is the more alluring. But lift your eyes as you walkthrough this commonplace cross-street of New York, and you may see aspicturesque a vista, over the quaint wooden cottage, as any city, anywhere, affords--forty stories looking down on two and a half, andbetween them, in intermediate flight, St. Gaudens' bronze Diana. 

Snow in the city! We in New York think of bespattered boots, of horsesfalling down, of dirty piles, more black than white, lining thestreets like igloos till the tip-carts come and carry them off. "Thefrolic architecture" of the snow is a thing of memory, not of presentfact. Like Whittier, we recall the hooded well-sweep or fantasticpump, and the great drifts by the pasture wall. Yet, once again, it isthe seeing eye we lack, nor do we need even to enter the Park todiscover the snow at its artistic handiwork. Let Sixty-fifth Streetenter the Park for you, from the east, and do you stand upon FifthAvenue and note the conversion from ugliness to beauty of a pavedroad, dipping into a dugway between dirty stone walls. The soiledpavement is hidden now, each rough stone on the bounding walls issoftly outlined with white, not far into the Park a graceful stonefoot-bridge spans the sunken street, supporting a second and moregraceful arch of snow, and the street curves alluringly into the treeswhich rise beyond, a gray wall of misty shadow, the eye is satisfiedwith a clean, well-composed, strongly lined picture, and theimagination almost deluded into a belief of its rusticity. 

I remember once walking down Broadway late at night, after an eveningat some tiresome play and supper at some yet more tiresome and tawdryrestaurant. I had been having what is popularly supposed to be a "goodtime, " and I was bored. There had been a recent deep fall of snow. Thenight was clear and cold. Below Herald Square I met comparatively fewpedestrians, and those few were not of the sort to dispel mydespondent mood. 

"Back home, " I thought, "the moon should be shining on the white, clean hills, and underneath my boots the snow-crust would squeak. Perhaps a screech-owl would whistle his plaintive call in the ghostlyorchard. How beautiful there the night would be! But here--" and Iflung out my arm instinctively toward the walls which hemmed me in. 

But as I drew near Madison Square, and lifted my eyes to the soaringship's-prow of the Flatiron Building, I noted suddenly that its upperstories were bathed in a pale, golden glow; and coming full into thesquare, I saw the moon, riding small and high beyond the white tower. The next strip of canon street shut it out once more, but at UnionSquare it was waiting to greet me, and as I entered the slit ofBroadway to the south and drew near Eleventh street, I was aware ofthe snow-covered northward pitch of Grace Church roof gleaming in itslight, a great rectangle of pale radiance at the bend of the street. Above the roof the Gothic spire stood up serenely. There were nopassers at the moment, not even a trolley-car. The greatest trafficartery in town was hushed as death. The high buildings about were darkand shadowy. At the angle commanding the vista in either direction thechurch slept in the moonlight. 

 "Deep on the convent roof the snows Are sparking to the moon. "

Tennyson's lines came to me instinctively, for here in the heart oftown was their very picture and their simple magic. A littleshamefaced for my sceptic blindness, I passed on toward home. 

Somebody, probably Emerson, said that we bring from Europe only whatwe take to it. But need one go to Europe to demonstrate the principle?We in New York, who are often our city's harshest critics, find prettymuch what we look for. We do not look for beauty, and we do not findit. Then, too, man is no less conventional about beauty than aboutother things. If he believes that the beauty of a city lies in alevel cornice-line, converging vistas, malls of trees, "civiccentres, " of what use to tell him that there may be a beauty as wellof non-conformity, when the magic veil of twilight wraps the cityround, and twinkling lamps climb unbelievable heights and all the townis a mighty nocturne in blue and gold? We would not be thought to saythat New York is always beautiful, or that a great deal of it is notmuch of the time ugly beyond hope. But there is not a street of itfrom end to end but has some point of pictorial charm, whence one maysee a span of the Brooklyn Bridge leaping over the tenements, or thescholastic Gothic spire of the City College chapel crowning the rocksat the close of the vista, or just a rosy sunset over the Hobokenhills. And there are parks and squares of almost constant charm, though it be a charm not of the old world, but the new, of theuprearing steel city of the twentieth century. And finally there arecertain hours when kindly Nature takes a hand at coloring our drabmortar piles and softening out distances and making our forests ofmasonry no less wonderful to look upon than her own forests of timber. Such an hour is the blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet eveningwhen the pavements shine with molten gold and the electric signs alongupper Broadway, like King Arthur's dragoned helmet, make "all thenight a steam of fire, " and round the tall tower of the Times Buildingthe vapour clouds drift, now concealing, now revealing some beam oflight from a window high aloft. After all, it is no great credit toany of us to find the ugliness in New York. The ugliness is ratherobvious. To find the beauty is a worthier task, and might make us morekeen to cherish and to expand it. It is there for the seeing eye. 

 [Illustration]

 [Illustration]

 _Spring in the Garden_

No daffodils "take the winds of March with beauty" in our Berkshiregardens. What daffodils we have in that month of alternate slush andblizzard bloom in pots, indoors. But one sign of spring the gardensholds no less plain to read, even if some people may not regard it asso poetic--over across the late snow, close to the hotbed frames, agreat pile of fresh stable manure is steaming like a miniaturevolcano. To the true gardener, that sight is thrilling, nay, lyric! Ihave always found that the measure of a man's (and more especially awoman's) garden love was to be found in his (or her) attitude towardthe manure pile. For that reason I put the manure pile in the firstparagraph of my praise of gardens in the spring. 

That yellowish-brown, steaming volcano above the slushy snow of Marchpromises so much! I will not offend sensitive garden owners who hireothers to do their dirty work, by singing the joy of turning it overwith a fork, once, twice, perhaps three times, till it is "working"evenly all through. Yet there is such joy, accentuated on the secondday by the fact that the thermometer has taken a sudden jump upwards, the snow is melting fast, and in the shrubs and evergreen hedge thesong-sparrows are singing, and the robins. Last year, I remember, Ipaused with the steaming pile half turned, first to roll up my sleevesand feel the warm sun on my arms--most delicious of early springsensations--and then to listen to the love-call of a chickadee, overand over the three notes, one long and two short a whole tone lower. Ianswered him, he replied, and we played our little game for two orthree minutes, till he came close and detected the fraud. Then abluebird flashed through the orchard, a jay screamed, as I bent to mytoil again. Beside me were the hotbed frames, the glasses newlywashed, the winter bedding of leaves removed, and behind them lastyear's contents rotted into rich loam. Another day or two, and theywould be prepared for seeding--if I only could bring myself to workhard enough until then!

How much hope goes into a hotbed in late March, or early April! Howmuch warmth the friendly manure down under the soil sends up by nightto germinate the seeds, though the weather go back to winteroutside--as it invariably does in our mountains! Last year, forexample, we had snow on the ninth of April, and again on thetwenty-third and twenty-ninth, while the year before, on the ninth, six inches fell. In the lowland regions gardening is easier, perhaps, but yet there is a certain joy in this fickle spring weather ofours, --the joy of going out in the morning across a white garden andsweeping the snow from hotbed mats, lifting the moist, steaming glass, and catching from within, strong against your face, the pungent warmthand aroma of the heated soil and the delicate fragrance of youngseedlings. How fast the seeds come--some of them! Others come soslowly that the amateur gardener is in despair, and angrily decides totry a new seed house next year. The vegetable frames are sown inrows--celery, tomatoes, cauliflowers, lettuce, radishes, peppers, coming up in tiny green ribbons, the radishes racing ahead. The flowerframes, however, are sown in squares, each about a foot across, andeach labeled and marked off with a thin strip of wood. These are theearly plantings of the annuals, for we cannot sow out-of-doors tillthe first or even the second week in May in our climate. Sometimes, indeed, we do not dare to sow even in the frames till well into April. The asters are usually up first, racing the weeds. The little squaresmake, in a week or so, a green checker-board, each promising its quotaof color to the garden, and very soon the early cosmos, thinned to thestrongest plants, has shot up like a miniature forest, towering overthe lowlier seedlings, sometimes bumping its head against the glassbefore it can be transplanted to the open ground in May. But mostprolific, most promising, and most bothersome, are the squares labeled"antirrhinum, " coral red, salmon pink, white, dark maroon, and so on;tiny seeds scattered on the ground and sprinkled with a little sand, they come up by the hundred, and each seedling has to go into a potbefore it goes into the ground. 

There is work for an April day! I sit on a board by the hotbed, cross-legged like a Turk, while the sun is warm on my neck and I feelmy arms tanning, and removing a mass of the seedlings on a flatmason's trowel, I lift each strong plant between thumb and finger, itslong, delicate white root dangling like a needle, and pot it in asmall paper pot. When two score pots are ready, I set them in acold-frame, sprinkle them, stretch the kink out of my back, listen tothe wood-thrush a moment (he came on the fourteenth and is evidentlyplanning to nest in our pines), and then return to my job. Patience isrequired to pot four or five hundred snapdragons; but patience isrequired, after all, in most things that are rightly performed. Ithink as I work of the glory around my sundial in July, I arrange andrearrange the colors in my mind--and presently the job is done. 

But the steaming manure pile is not the only sign of spring, nor thehotbeds the only things to be attended to. If they only were, howmuch easier gardening would be--and how much less exciting! There isalways work to be done in the orchard, for instance, some pruning andscraping. I always go into the orchard on the first really warm, spring-like March day, with a common hoe, and scrape a little, not somuch for the good of the trees as for the good of my soul. The realscraping for the scale spray was, of course, done earlier. There is acurious, faintly putrid smell to old or bruised apple wood, which isstirred by my scraping, and that smell sweeps over me a wave ofmemories, memories of childhood in a great yellow house that stoodback from the road almost in its orchard, and boasted a cupola withpanes of colored glass which made the familiar landscape strange;memories of youth in that same house, too, dim memories "of sweet, forgotten, wistful things. " My early spring afternoons in the orchardare very precious to me now, and when the weather permits I always tryto burn the rubbish and dead prunings on Good Friday, the incense ofthe apple wood floating across the brown garden like a prayer, theprecious ashes sinking down to enrich the soil. 

The bees, too, are always a welcome sign of the returning season, hardly less than the birds, though the advent of the white-throatedsparrow (who delayed till April twenty-first last year) is always agreat event. He is first heard most often before breakfast, in anapple tree close to the sleeping-porch, his flute-like tripletssweetly penetrating my dreams and bringing me gladly out ofbed--something he alone can do, by the way, and not even he after thefirst morning! But the bees come long before. The earliest record Ihave is March thirty-first, but there must be dates before that whichI have neglected to put down. Some house plant, a hyacinth possibly, is used as bait, and when the ground is thawing out beneath a warmspring sun we put the plant on the southern veranda and watch. Dayafter day nothing happens, then suddenly, some noon, it has scarcelybeen set on the ground when its blossoms stir, and it is murmurouswith bees. Then we know that spring indeed has come, and we begin torake the lawns, wherever the frost is out, wheeling great crate loadsof leaves and rubbish upon the garden, and filling our neighbors'houses with pungent smoke. 

There is a certain spot between the thumb and first finger whichneither axe nor golf-club nor saw handle seems to callous. The springraking finds it out, and gleefully starts to raise a blister. My handsare perpetually those of a day-laborer, yet I expect that blisterevery spring. Indeed, I am rather disappointed now if I don't get it, I feel as if I weren't doing my share of work. The work is worth theblister. I know of few sensations more delightful than that of seeingthe lawn emerging green and clean beneath your rake, the damp mouldbaring itself under the shrubbery, the paths, freshly edged, nicelyscarrowed with tooth marks; then of feeling the tug of the barrowhandles in your shoulder sockets; and finally, as the sun is sendinglong shadows over the ground, of standing beside the rubbish pile withyour rake as a poker and hearing the red flames crackle and roarthrough the heap, while great puffs of beautiful brown smoke gorolling away across the garden and the warmth is good to your tiredbody. Clearing up is such a delight, indeed, that I cannot nowcomprehend why I so intensely disliked to do it when I was half mypresent age. Perhaps it was because at that time clearing up was putto me in the light of a duty, not a pleasure. 

There is alas, too often a tempering of sadness in the joy of takingthe covers off the garden. One removes them, especially after a coldopen winter, with much the same anxious excitement that one opens along-delayed letter from a dear friend who has been in danger. Whatsigns of life will the peonies show under their four inches of rottedmanure, and the Japanese irises by the pool, and the beds of Darwins, so confidently relied upon to ring the sundial in late May and earlyJune, before the succeeding annuals are ready? How will thehollyhocks, so stately in midsummer all down the garden wall, havewithstood the alternate thaws and freezes which characterized ourabominable January and February? Then there are those two long rows offoxgloves and Canterbury bells, across the rear of the vegetablegarden, where they were set in the fall to make strong plants beforebeing put in their permanent places--or rather their season's places, for these lovely flowers are perversely biennials, and at least seventimes every spring I vow I will never bother with them again, and thenmake an even larger sowing when their stately stalks and sky-bluebells are abloom in summer! Tenderly you lift the pine boughs fromthem on a balmy April day (it was not until almost mid-April lastyear), when snow still lingers, perhaps, in dirty patches on the northside of the evergreens. Will they show frozen, flabby, witheredleaves, or will their centers be bright with new promise? It is amoment to try the soul of the gardener, and no joy is quite like thatof finding them all alive, nor any sorrow like that of finding themdead. At first I used to give up gardening forever when the perennialsand biennials were winter-killed, just as a beginner at golf gives upthe game forever each time he makes a vile score. Then I began tocompromise on a garden of annuals. Now I have learned philosophy--andalso better methods of winter protection. Likewise, I have learnedthat a good many of the perennials which were stone-dead when thecovers were removed have a trick of coming to life under the kiss ofMay, and struggling up to some sort of bloom, even if heroicallyspindly like lean soldiers after a hard campaign. The hollyhocks, especially, have a way of seeding themselves undetected, andpresenting you in spring with a whole unsuspected family of children, some of whom wander far from the parent stem and suddenly begin toshoot up in the most unexpected places. An exquisite yellow hollyhocklast summer sprouted unnoted beneath our dinning-room window, and wewere not aware of it till one July morning when it poked up above thesill. A few days later, when we came down to breakfast, there it wasabloom, nodding in at the open window. 

Another spring excitement in the garden is the pea planting, both thesweet peas and what our country folk sometimes call "eatin' peas. " Norivalry is so keen as that between pea-growers. My neighbors and Istruggle for supremacy in sweet peas at the flower show in July, andgreat glory goes to him who gets the first mess of green peas on histable. We have tried sweet-pea sowing in the fall, and it does notwork. So now I prepare a trench in October, partially fill it withmanure, and cover it with leaves, which I remove at the first hint ofwarm weather in March. The earth-piles on either side thaw outquickly, and I get an early sowing, putting in as many varieties as Ican afford (my wife says twice as many as I can afford), jealouslyguarding the secret of their number. The vegetable peas are plantedlater, usually about the first or second day of April, as soon as thetop soil of the garden can be worked with a fork, and long before theplowing. We put in first a row of Daniel O'Rourke's, not because theyare good for much, but because they will beat any other variety wehave discovered by two days at least. Then we put in a row of a betterstandard early variety. How we watch those rows for the first sprouts!How we coddle and cultivate them! How eagerly we inspect ourneighbors' rows, trying to appear nonchalant! And doubtless how sillythis sounds to anyone who is not a gardener. Last summer we got ourfirst mess of peas on June twenty-first, and after eating a spoonful, we rushed to the telephone, and were about to ring, when somebodycalled us. "Hello, " we said into the transmitter. A voice on the otherend of the wire, curiously choked and munchy, cried, "We are eatingour first peas! My mouth's full of 'em now!"

"That's nothing, " we answered, "we've got our first mouthful allswallowed. "

"Well, anyhow, " said our disappointed neighbor, "I called up first!Good-bye. "

How is that for a neck-and-neck finish at the tape?

As April waxes into May, the garden beds are a perpetual adventure inthe expected, each morning bringing some new revelation of old friendscome back, and as you dig deep and prepare the beds for the annuals, or spade manure around the perennials, or set your last year'splantings of hollyhocks, larkspur, foxgloves and campanulas into theirplaces, you move tenderly amid the aspiring red stalks of the peonies, the Jason's crop of green iris spears, the leaves of tulips andnarcissuses and daffodils, the fresh green of tiny sweet Williamplants clustered 'round the mother plant like a brood of chicks aroundthe hen. You must be at setting them into borders, too, or putting thesurplus into flats and then telephoning your less fortunate friends. One of the joys of a garden is in giving away your extra plants andseedlings. 

One morning the asparagus bed, already brown again after the Aprilshowers have driven the salt into the ground, is pricked with shorttips. That is a luscious sight! Inch by inch they push up, and thickand fast they come at last, and more and more and more. My diary showsme that we ate our first bunch last year on May ninth. On that day, also, I learn from the same source, the daffodils were out, the Darwintulips were budding, and we spent the afternoon burning caterpillars'nests in the orchard--one spring crop which is never welcome, andnever winter-killed. At this date, too, we are hard at work spraying, and sowing the annuals out-of-doors in the seed beds, and plantingcorn (the potatoes are all in by now), immediately following theplowing, which was delayed till the first of May by a belatedsnowstorm. Winter with us is like a clumsy person who tries over andover to make his exit from a room but does not know how to accomplishit. It is a busy time, for no sooner are the annuals planted, and thevegetables, than some of the seedlings from the hotbeds have to be setout (such as early cosmos), and the perennial beds already have begunto bloom, and require cultivation and admiration, and the flowers inthe wild garden--hepaticas and trilliums and bloodroot andviolets--are crying to be noticed, and, confound it all, here is thelawn getting rank under the influence of its spring dressing, anddemands to be mowed! Yes, and we forget to get the mower sharpenedbefore we put it away in the fall. 

"May fifteen"--it is my diary for last year--"apple blossoms showingpink, and the rhubarb leaves peeping over the tops of their barrelsthis morning, like Ali Baba and the forty thieves. "

Well, well; straight, juicy red stalks the length of a barrel, fit fora pie and the market! It is our second commercial product, theasparagus slightly preceding it. The garden is getting into shape now, indeed; the wheel-hoe is traveling up and down the green rows; thehotbed glasses are entirely removed by day; and the early cauliflowerplants are put into the open ground at the first promise of a shower. The annuals are up in the seed beds; the pool has been cleaned andfilled, the goldfish are once more swimming in it, the Cape Codwater-lily, brought from its winter quarters in the dark cellar, hasbegun to make a leaf, and we have begun to hope that maybe _this_ yearit will also make a blossom, for we are nothing in mid-May if notoptimistic. 

The earlier Darwins are already in bloom. The German irises followrapidly. June comes, and we work amid the splendors of the Japaneseirises and the flame-line of Oriental poppies, setting the annualsinto their beds, from the tender, droopy schyzanthus plants to thevarious asters and the now sturdy snapdragons. The color scheme hadbeen carefully planned last winter, and is as cheerfully disregardednow, as some new inspiration strikes us, such as a border of purpleasters against salvia, with white dahlias behind--a strip of daringfall color which would delight the soul of Gari Melcher, whichdelighted me--and which my wife said was horrible. 

So spring comes and goes in the garden, busy and beautiful, ceaselesswork and ceaseless wonder. But there is a moment in its passage, asyet unmentioned, which I have kept for the close because to me it isthe subtle climax of the resurrection season. It usually comes inApril for us, though sometimes earlier. The time is evening, alwaysevening, just after supper, when a frail memory of sunset stilllingers in the west and the air is warm. I go out hatless upon theveranda, thinking of other things, and suddenly I am aware of the songof the frogs! There are laughing voices in the street, the tinkle of afar-off piano, the pleasant sounds of village life come outdoors withthe return of spring; and buoying up, permeating these other soundscomes the ceaseless, shrill chorus of the frogs, seemingly from out ofthe air and distance, beating in waves on the ear. Why this first frogchorus so thrills me I cannot explain, nor what dim memories it wakes. But the peace of it steals over all my senses, and I walk down intothe dusk and seclusion of my garden, amid the sweet odors of new earthand growing things, where the song comes up to me from the distantmeadow making the garden-close sweeter still, the air yet more warmand fragrant, the promise of spring more magical. The garden then isvery intimate and dear, it brings me into closer touch with theawakening earth about me, and all the years I dwelt a prisoner incities are but as the shadow of a dream. 

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 _The Bubble, Reputation_

A great dramatist is authority for the statement that--

 The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones. 

That is no doubt in a measure true; yet it would be grossly unfair toblame personally certain great ones of the past for the evil that haslived after them and borne their names. For instance, it may bedoubted whether Louis XIV of France was all that he should have been. His private life would hardly have escaped censure in Upper Montclair, N. J. , or West Newton, Mass. , and his public acts were not alwayscalculated to promote social justice and universal brotherhood. But toblame him for all the gilt furniture which has ever since stood aroundthe walls of hotel ballrooms and borne his name is a libel even onthat lax and luxurious monarch. Yet such is his fate. You who arefamiliar with history, I who know next to nothing about it, are alikein this--when we hear the words _Louis XIV_ we do not think of a greatmonarch with a powdered wig and a powdered mistress, of magnificentfountains and courtiers and ladies dancing the gavotte, of a brilliantcourt and striking epoch. Not at all. We think, both of us, of a giltchair with a brocaded seat (slightly worn), and maybe a sofa to match. If you say that you don't, I must politely but firmly--well, differwith you. 

Alas! poor Louis XIV was not the only worthy (or unworthy) of the pastwho has come down to the present, not as a personality but as a pieceof furniture, a dog, a boot, or some other equally ignominious thing. Speaking of furniture, there's the Morris chair. The man who made theMorris chair was a great and good man--not because he made the Morrischair, but in spite of it! He composed haunting poems, he wrote lovelyprose romances of the far-off days of knights and ladyes and magicspells, such as that hight _The Water of the Wondrous Isles_, a rightbrave book mayhap you have not perused, to your exceeding great loss, for beautiful it is and fair to read and full of the mighty desire ofa man for a maid. Beside all this, he printed lovely books by otherwriters, and designed wall-paper, and painted pictures, and thunderedagainst the deadening effect on men of mechanical toil, and in socialtheories was far in advance of his age. Such a man was WilliamMorris--known to-day to the mass of mankind for one of the mostaccursed articles of furniture ever devised by human ingenuity goneastray! Every day, in a million homes, men and women sit in Morrischairs (made by machinery) and read Robert W. Chambers and FlorenceBarclay. Such, alas, is fame!

Then there was Queen Anne--in many respects an estimable woman, thoughleaving much to be desired as a monarch. She had her Rooseveltianvirtues, being the mother of seventeen children (none of whom lived togrow beyond infancy, to be sure); and she had what the world just nowhas come to regard as the monarchical vice of autocracy. In her reignscience and literature flourished, though without much aid from her, and the English court buzzed with intrigue and politics. But speak thename _Queen Anne_ aloud, and then tell me the picture you get. Is it apicture of the lady or her period? Is it a picture of Pope and Drydensitting in a London coffee-house? No, it is not--that is, unless youare a very learned, or a very young, person. It is a picture of ahorrible architectural monstrosity built about thirty or forty yearsago in any American city or suburb, and bearing certain vagueresemblances to a home for human beings. Whatever else Queen Anne was, she was not an architect, and she wasn't to blame for those houses, any more than she was to blame for Pope's "Essay on Man. " But thatdoesn't count. She gets the blame, just the same. She is knownforever now by those gables and that gingerbread, those shingles andstains. 

She had a predecessor on the English throne by the name of Charles. Like Louis in France, he wasn't all he should have been, and therewere those in his own day who didn't entirely approve of him. But itwasn't because of his dogs. However, if you mention King Charles now, it is a dog you think of--a small, eary dog, with somewhat splay feetand a seventeenth-century monarchical preference for the society ofladies and the softest cushion. Maybe the royal gentleman didn'tdeserve anything better of posterity; but, anyhow, that's what he got. 

St. Bernhard fared better. If one had to be remembered by a dog, whatbetter dog could he select, save possibly an Airedale? Big, strong, faithful, wise, true to type for centuries, the most reliable of God'screatures (including Man by courtesy in that category), the St. Bernhard is a monument for--well, not for a king, and a king didn'tget him; for a saint, rather. It is doubtful if the old monk isplaying any lamentations on his harp. 

But I'm not so sure about that peerless military leader, General A. E. Burnside. When you have risen to lead an army corps against yourcountry's foes, when you have commanded men and sat your horse for astatue on the grounds of the state capitol or the intersection ofMain and State Streets, it really is rather rough to be remembered foryour whiskers. Of course, as a wit remarked of Shaw, no man isresponsible for his relatives, but his whiskers are his own fault. Nevertheless, how is a great general to know that his militaryexploits will be forgotten, while his whiskers thunder down the ages, as it were, progressing in the course of time with the changingfashions from bank presidents to Presbyterian elders, and finally tostage butlers? At last even the stage butlers are shaving clean, and astroke of the razor wipes out a military reputation, blasts ageneral's immortality! Fame is a fickle jade. 

An artistic reputation lasts longer, and resists the barber, provingthe superiority of the arts to militarism. "Van Dyke" is still agenerally familiar appellation and sounds the same, no matter whichway you spell it. Of course, there's no rhyme nor reason in it--artistand whiskers should be spelled the same way. Only they're not. "Something ought to be done about it. " However, to resume. . . . If youtell me John Jones has a Vandyke, I don't visualize John as anart-collector standing in his gallery in rapt contemplation of amasterpiece by the great Flemish painter. I visualize him as a manwith a certain type of beard. I may later think of the master who putthese beards upon his portraits. Then again, I may not. Exactly thesame would be true if I told you John Jones had a Vandyke, instead ofthe other way about. Don't contradict me--you know it's so. It isnearly as difficult to-day to own a Van Dyke canvas as it is to paintone, but anybody can raise a Vandyke beard. In fact, many still do, and thus keep the master's memory green. "By their whiskers ye shallknow them. "

A military reputation, as we have already proved by the case ofGeneral Burnside, is a precarious thing. How many patrons of AtlanticCity, I wonder, know the hero of the wars in the Low Countries and hisgreatest triumph by a certain hotel on the Board Walk, and would behard put to say which half of the hyphenated name was the general andwhich the battle? Then there was Wellington, who at one timethreatened to be remembered for his boots, and Blucher who still isremembered for his. A certain Massachusetts statesman (anybody electedto the Massachusetts House of Representatives is a statesman) oncesaid that the greatest triumph of Napoleon was when Theodore Rooseveltstood silent at his tomb. This is witty, but like most witty sayings, not quite true. It was a great triumph, of course, but ratherspectacular. The greatest triumphs are not showy. What actually provesNapoleon's greatness is the fact that he is still remembered as acommander after generations have selected from the tray of Frenchpastry the detectable and indigestible morsel of sugar, flour and lardthat bears his name. To have a toothsome article of food named afteryou, and then to be still remembered for your actual achievements, isthe ultimate test of human greatness. Only a Napoleon can meet it. Even Washington might not now be known as the father of his country ifhis pie had been a better one. 

Who was King, for instance? Was he the cook, or the man cooked for? Ifancy I knew once, but I have forgotten. But chicken-à-la-king willlive to perpetuate his name as long as there are chickens to be eatenand men to eat them. Even Sardou, spectacular dramatist, for all his_Toscas_ and _Fédoras_ (and ten to one you think of Fedora as a hat!), lives for me, a dramatic critic, by virtue of eggs Victorien Sardou, anever-to-be-too-much-enjoyed concoction secured at the old BrevoortHouse in New York. He may actually have invented this recipe himself, for he was a great lover of the pleasures of the table. If so, it washis masterpiece. An egg is poached on the tender heart of anartichoke, and garnished with a peculiar yellow sauce, topped with atruffle. Around all four sides are laid little bunches of freshasparagus tips. What is _Tosca_ compared to this?

Then, of course, there was Mr. Baldwin. Who was Mr. Baldwin? Thepeople of Wilmington, Mass. , know, because there is a monument to theoriginal tree in that town. But we don't know, any more than we knowwho Mr. Bartlett was, when we eat one of his pears, or Mr. Logan, father of the wine-red berry. In this case the Scripture is indeedverified, that by their fruits shall ye know them. 

Two or three times a year my wife gets certain clothes of mine fromthe closet and combs them for moths, hangs them flapping in the breezefor a while, and puts them back. Among the lot is a garment once muchworn by congressmen, church ushers and wedding guests, known to thefashion editors as "frock coats", and to normal human beings as PrinceAlberts. Doubtless, in the flux of styles (like a pendulum, stylesswing forth and back again), the Prince Albert will once more becorrect, and my wife's labor will not have been in vain, while theestimable consort of England's haircloth sofa and black-walnut bureauqueen will continue to be remembered of posterity by this outlandishgarment. Poor man, after all, he achieved little else to be rememberedby!

And as for the queen herself, she will be remembered by a state ofmind. Already "mid-Victorian" has little or nothing to do withVictoria, and is losing its suggestion, even, of a time-period. It iscoming to stand for a mental and moral attitude--in fact, forpriggishness and moral timidity. Queen Victoria was a great and goodlady, and her home life was, as the two women so clearly pointed outwhen they left the theatre, totally different from that of Cleopatra. But she is going to give her name to a mental attitude, just the same, even as the Philistines and the Puritans. It pays to pick the periodyou queen it over rather carefully. Elizabeth had better luck. To beElizabethan is to be everything gay and dashing and out-doory andadventuresome, with insatiable curiosity and the gift of song. Ofcourse, Shakespeare, Drake, Raleigh, ought to have the credit--butthey don't get it, any more than Tennyson comes in on the Victoriandiscredit. The head that wears a crown may well lie uneasy. 

The memory of many a man has been perpetuated, all unwittingly, by themanufacturers and advertising agencies. Here I tread on dangerousground, but surely I shall not be accused of commercial collusion if Ipoint out that so "generously good" a philanthropist as George W. Childs became a name literally in the mouth of thousands. He became acigar. Then there was Lord Lister. He, too, has become a name in themouths of thousands--as a mouth wash. And how about the only daughterof the Prophet? Fatima was her name. 

Who was Lord Raglan, or was he a lord? He is a kind of overcoat sleevenow. Who was Mr. Mackintosh? Was it Lord Brougham, too? Gasolene hasextinguished his immortality. Gladstone has become a bag, Gainsboroughis a hat. The beautiful Madame Pompadour, beloved of kings, is a kindof hair-cut now. The Mikado of Japan is a joke, set to music, heavenlymusic, to be sure, but with its tongue in its angelic cheek. Anoperetta did that. You cannot think of the Mikado of Japan in terms ofroyal dignity. I defy you to try. Ko-ko and Katisha keep getting inthe way, and you hear the pitty-pat of Yum-Yum's little feet, and thebounce of those elliptical billiard balls. Gilbert and Sullivan'soperetta is perhaps the most potent document for democracy since theCommunist Manifesto!

The other day I heard a woman say that she had got to begin banting. Anice verb, to bant, though not approved of by the dictionary, whichscornfully terms it "humorous and colloquial". The humor, to be sure, is usually for other people, not for the person banting. Do you know, I wonder, the derivation of this word? It means, of course, to inducethis too, too solid flesh to melt, by the careful avoidance offarinaceous, saccharine and oily foods, and occasionally its meaningis stretched by the careless to include also rolling on the bedroomfloor fifteen times before breakfast, and standing up twenty minutesafter meals. Yet the word is derived from the name of William Banting, who was a London cabinet-maker. Cabinet-making is a worthy trade;indeed, it is one of the most appealing of all trades; in fact, it'snot a trade, it's an art. I haven't a doubt that William made splendidfurniture, especially chairs, for nobody appreciates a nice, roomy, strong chair like a fat man. I haven't a doubt that it was hisambition in life to be remembered for his furniture, even as thebrothers Adam, as Chippendale and Sheraton. But it was not to be. Inan unfortunate moment, William discovered that by eating fewerpotatoes and cutting out two lumps of sugar from his tea he could takeoff some of the corpulence that troubled him. He told of hisdiscovery--and the world knows him now as a method of getting number44 ladies into a perfect 38. I have always felt sorry for WilliamBanting. He is one of the tragic figures of history. 

Of course, there are many more, if none other quite so poignant, butyou must recall them for yourself. For some paragraphs now I have beenworking up to a climax of prophecy. I have been planning to predictwhat Kaiser William II will be noted for in the days that are to come. It seemed to me that would make rather a neat conclusion for thislittle essay. But, Gentle Reader, I've got to turn that job over toyou, also. Not that the space is lacking, but after long and painfulconcentration I have been unable to think of anything bad enough. Itmay turn out that he will be known simply by the meek and nourishingkaiser roll on the breakfast table--the only surviving relic of amonarchical vocabulary in a peaceful and democratic universe. Perhaps, for him, that would be the bitterest fate of all, the ultimate irony. 

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 _The Old House on the Bend_

I wonder if other wayfarers through New England greet, as I do, withspecial affection the old house on the bend of the road? It is socharacteristic of an earlier civilization, so suggestive of a vanishedepoch--and withal so picturesque! Even if you are unfortunate enoughto "tour" in a motor-car, which of course is far from the ideal way tosavor the countryside, still you cannot miss the old house on thebend, even though you do miss the feel of the land, the rise and dipof the road, the fragrance of the clematis by the wall, the alreadyfading gold of the evening primroses when you start off afterbreakfast. 

Even for a motorist, however, the old house on the bend stands up toview, especially if you are on the front seat with the driver. The carswings into a straightaway, lined, perhaps, with sugar-maples and graystone walls. Between the trunks are vistas of the green fields and farhills. But the chief vista is up the white perspective of the road, which seems to vanish directly into the front door of the solid, mouse-gray house on the bend. 

The ribbon of road rushes toward you, as if a great spool under yourwheels were winding it up. The house rushes on with it; grows nearer;details emerge. You see the great square chimney; the tinywindow-panes, six to a sash, some of them turned by time, not into thepurple of Beacon Hill but into a kind of prismatic sheen like oil onwater; the bit of classic egg-and-dart border on the door-cap; theaged texture of the weathered clapboard; the graceful arch of the widewoodshed entrance, on the kitchen side; the giant elm rising far abovethe roof. You rush on so near to the house, indeed, that the car seemsin imminent danger of colliding with the front door, when suddenly thewheels bite the road, you feel the pull of centrifugal force, and thecar swings away at right angles, leaving an end view of the ancientdwelling behind you, so that when you turn for a final glance you seethe long slant of the roof at the rear, going down within six or eightfeet of the ground. 

Such is the view from the motor-car. If you are traveling on foot, however, there is much more to be observed, such as the great doorstepmade from a broken millstone, the gigantic rambler by the kitchenwindow, the tiger-lilies gone wild in the dooryard, and above all, theview from the front windows. Since the house was visible far up theroad, conversely a long stretch of the road is visible from the house. Standing in front of it, you can see a motor or wagon approaching amile away, and from the end windows, too, can be seen all approachingvehicles from the other angle. Moreover, if you lived within, youcould not only see who was coming, but you could step out of your doora pace or two and converse with him as he passed. The old house isstrategically placed. 

When it was built, a century or even a century and a half ago, nomotors went by on that road, and not enough of any kind of traffic toraise a dust. The busy town to the south, the summer resort to thenorth, were alike small villages, given over to agriculture. Therewere no telephones, no newspapers even. Fortunate indeed was the manwhose farm abutted on a bend, for there he could set his house, closeto the road, viewing the approaches in either direction, and notraveler could get by him, or at any rate by his wife, withoutyielding the latest gossip from the town above or below, perhaps fromthe greater world beyond. The highroad was then the sole artery ofcommerce, of communication, of intercourse of man with man. 

How neighborly was the house on the bend, shedding its parlor-candlerays like a beacon by night down the mile of straightaway, or flappingits chintz curtains in the June sunshine! What a testimony it is, inits present gray ruin, to the human hunger for news and gossip andfriendliness!

The old order has changed, indeed. We no longer build on the bend. Wedon't have bends if we can help it. They are dangerous and hard tomaintain. A house on one would be uninhabitable with the dust. We donot seek the neighborliness of the road, but retire as far as we canto the back of our lot, with our telephone and newspaper. The oldhouse on the bend now stands deserted. From country estates dimly seenin their remote privacy of trees and gardens, the stone highway leadsto other estates equally remote and scornful of publicity. Betweenthem the motors rush. The old house is dusty and falling into ruin, and every passing car kicks up some bit of crushed stone into itstangled dooryard. It looks pathetically down the road with unseeingeyes, the last relic of a vanishing order. 

 [Illustration]

 _Concerning Hat-trees_

It is well sometimes, when we are puffed up with our achievements as arace, --our conquest of the elements, our building of mighty bridgesand lofty sky-scrapers, our invention of wireless telegraphy andhorseless carriages and aëroplanes and machine guns and secretdiplomacy and wage slavery and war, --it is well to indulge in thechastening reflection that there are still some things we cannotachieve. We may reflect that the appleless Eden has not yet beendiscovered, or that the actor without vanity is yet unborn, or the"treasonless" Senate yet unassembled. My own method is to reflect thatthe ideal hat-tree has never been constructed. 

At present I have no hat-tree, because I live in an old farm housewhere there is a square piano and a hall closet, and we don't needone. In New York I never had one, either, because there is never roomin the hall-way of a modern apartment both for a hat-tree and apassage-way. But occasionally I visit at the homes of friends whoboast one of these arboreal adornments, and renew my acquaintancewith the species. I was to take a walk with one of these friends theother day. 

"Wait, " he said, pausing in the hall, "till I get a pair of gloves. "Stooping over, he pulled at the hat-tree drawer. First it stuck on oneside; then it stuck on the other side; then it yielded altogether, without warning. My friend sat down on the floor, the ridiculouslyshallow drawer in his hand, between his feet a sorry array of the oddsand ends of the outside toilet, --broken hat pins, old veils, buttons, winter gloves rolled into wads, old gloves, new gloves, gloves pulledoff in a hurry with the fingers inside out, dirty white glovesbelonging to his charming sister. I turned away, feeling that I gazedon a domestic exposure. My friend spoke softly to the drawer. 

"Sh!" said I, "your family! Put the drawer back. "

"I will not put it back, " he said. "We would never get started. Letthe--"

Again I cautioned him, and we set out on our walk leaving the litteron the floor; and as we tramped through the marvelous sky-scraperwilderness which is Manhattan, we talked of hat-trees, and thefutility of human effort, and sighed for a new Carlyle to write thephilosophy of the hat-tree drawer. 

How well I remembered the hat-tree that sheltered my caps in youth, beneath the protecting foliage of the paternal greatcoat and thematernal bonnet! I did not always use it; the piano was moreconvenient, or the floor. But there it stood in the hall in all itsblack-walnut impressive ugliness, with side racks for umbrellas, andsquare, metal drip-pans always full of the family rubbers. There was amirror in the centre, so high I had to climb three stairs to see howuncle's hat fitted my small head. There were pegs up both sides; but, as is the way with hat-trees, only the top ones were useful; whateverwas hung on them buried everything below. The only really safe placewas the peak on top, just above the carved face of Minerva. Sometimesthe paternal greatcoat lovingly carried off the maternal shawl of amorning, which would be found later somewhere between the door and thestation. And this hat-tree also had a drawer, of course. There was therub, indeed!

Summer or winter, wet or dry, that drawer always stuck. It had but onehandle, --a ring in the middle. First one side would come out too far, and you would knock it back and pull again. Then the other side wouldcome out too far, and you would knock that back. Then both sides, bydiabolical agreement, would suddenly work as on greased ways, and youstood with an astonishingly shallow drawer dangling from your finger, its long-accumulated contents spread on the floor. The shock usuallysent down two derbies and a bonnet to add to the confusion. When youhad gathered up the litter and stuffed it back, wondering how so smalla space ever held so much, the still harder task confronted you ofputting the drawer in its grooves again. Sometimes you succeeded; moreoften you left it "for mother to do"--that depended on your temper andthe time of your train. The drawer was a charnel-house of gloves andmittens and veils. When you cut your finger you were sent to it to geta "cot", and it had a peculiar smell of its own, the smell of thehat-tree drawer. A whiff of old gloves still brings that odor back tome, out of childhood, stirring memories of little garments worn longago, of a great blue cape that was a pride to my father's heart and awound to my mother's pride, --but most of all of lost temper andincipient profanity caused by the baulky drawer. 

My friend's recollections but supplemented and reinforced my own. Wecalled to mind other hat-trees in houses where we had visited, and oneand all they were alike perverse, ridiculous, ill-adapted for theirmission in life. We thought of various substitutes for the hat-tree, such as a pole with pegs in it, which tips over when the preponderanceof weight is hung on one side; the cluster of pegs on a framesuspended from the wall like a picture, while a painted drain-pipecourts umbrellas in a corner; a long, low table (only possible in apalatial hall) on which the garments are placed by the butler inassorted piles, so that you feel like asking him for a check; thesettle, often disastrous to hats. We found none of them satisfactory, though they eliminate the perils of the drawer. 

Only the wooden pegs which were driven in a horizontal row into theboard walls of grandfather's back entry ever approximated the ideal. But such a reversion to primitive principles would now be consideredout of the question, even in my farm house--by the farmer's wife, atleast. The problem of a satisfactory hat-tree, which baffled thegenius of Chippendale, is still unsolved in Grand Rapids, and itprobably will remain unsolved to the end of time, unless Eden shouldbe found again, where the hat-tree is the least of the arborealtroubles. 

 [Illustration]

 _The Shrinking of Kingman's Field_

"It was rats, " said I. 

"It was warts, " said Old Hundred. 

"I know it was rats, I tell you, " I continued, "because my uncle Ebenknew a man who did it. His house was full of rats, so he wrote a verypolite note to them, setting forth that, much as he enjoyed theirexcellent society, the house was too crowded for comfort, and tellingthem to go over to the house of a certain neighbor, who had more roomand no children nor cats. And the rats all went. "

Old Hundred listened patiently. "That's precisely right, " said he, "except it must have been warts. You have to be polite, and also tellthem where to go. You rub the warts with a bean, wrap the bean up inthe note, and burn both, or else throw them in the well. In a few daysthe warts will leave you and appear on the other fellow. Mygrandfather, when he was a boy, got warts that way, so he licked theother boy. "

"Rats!" said I. 

"No, warts, " persisted Old Hundred. 

So that was how we two aging and urbanized codgers came to leave thecomfortable club for the Grand Central Station, whence we senttelegrams to our families and took train for the rural regionsnorth-eastward. The point had to be settled. Besides, I stumped OldHundred to go, and he never could refuse a stump. 

But Old Hundred was fretful on the journey. We called him Old Hundredyears ago, because he always proposed that tune at Sunday eveningmeetings, when the leader "called for hymns. " I address him as OldHundred still, though he is a learned lawyer in line for a judgeship. He was fretful, he said, because we were sure to be terriblydisillusioned. But he is not a man accustomed in these later years toact on impulse, and the prospect of a night on a sleeping car, withoutpajamas, did not, I fancy, appeal to him, now that he faced it fromthe badly ventilated car aisle, instead of the club easy-chair. Yetperhaps he did dread the disillusionment, too. It was always I, evenwhen we were boys, who loved an adventure for its own sake, quiteapart from the pleasure or pain of it--taking a supreme delight, infact, in melancholy. I have still a copy of Moore's poems, stainedwith tears and gingerbread. Some of the happiest hours of my childhoodwere spent in weeping over this book, especially over "Go Where GloryWaits Thee, " which affected me with an incomprehensible but poignantwoe. Accordingly it was I who rose cheerful in the morning and piloteda gloomy companion to breakfast and a barber, and so across Boston tothe dingy station where dingy, dirty cars of ancient vintage awaited, and in one of which we rode, with innumerable stops, to a spot off thebeaten tracks of travel, but which bore a name that thrilled us. 

When we alighted from the train, a large factory greeted our vision, across the road from the railway station. We walked up a faintlyfamiliar street to the village square. There we paused, with wryfaces. Six trolley lines converged in its centre, and out of thesurrounding country were rolling in great cars, as big almost asPullmans. All the magnificent horse-chestnut trees that once lined thewalks were down, to expose more brazenly to view the rows of tawdrylittle shops. These trees had once furnished shade and ammunition. Ihad to smile at the sign above the new fish-market--

 IF IT SWIMS--WE HAVE IT. 

But there was no smile on Old Hundred's face. Here and there, risingbehind the little stores and lunch rooms, we could detect the tops ofthe old houses, pushed back by commerce. But most of the houses haddisappeared altogether. Only the old white meeting-house at the headof the common looked down benignly, unchanged. 

"The trail of the trolley is over it all!" Old Hundred murmured, as wehastened northward, out of the village. 

After we had walked some distance, Old Hundred said, "It ought to bearound here somewhere, to the right of the road. I can't make anythingout, for these new houses. "

"There was a lane down to it, " said I, "and woods beyond. "

"Sure, " he cried, "Kingman's woods; and it was called Kingman'sfield. "

I sighted the ruins of a lane, between two houses. "Come on down toKingman's, fellers, " I shouted, "an' choose up sides!"

Old Hundred followed my lead. We were in the middle of a potato patch, in somebody's back yard. It was very small. 

"This ain't Kingman's, " wailed Old Hundred, lapsing into bad grammarin his grief. "Why, it took an awful paste to land a home run overright field into the woods! And there ain't no woods!"

There weren't. Nevertheless, this was Kingman's field. "See, " said I, trying to be cheerful, "here's where home was. " And I rooted up apotato sprout viciously. "You and Bill Nichols always chose up. Youeach put a hand round a bat, alternating up the stick, for the firstchoice. The one who could get his hand over the top enough to swingthe bat round his head three times, won, and chose Goodknocker Pratt. First was over there where the wall isn't any more. "

"Remember the time we couldn't find my 'Junior League', " said OldHundred, "and Goodknocker dreamed it was in a tree, and the next daywe looked in the trees, and there it was? I wonder what ever became ofold Goodknocker?"

He moved toward first base. The woods had been ruthlessly cut down, and the wall dragged away in the process. We climbed a knoll, throughthe stumps and dead stuff. At the top was a snake bush. 

"Here's something, anyhow, " said Old Hundred. "You were Uncas and Iwas Hawk Eye, and we defended this snake bush from Bill's crowd ofIroquois. We made shields out of barrel heads, and spears out of youngpine-tree tops. Wow, how they hurt!"

"About half a mile over is the swamp where the traps were, " said I. "Let's go. Maybe there's something in one of 'em. "

"Then times would be changed, " said he, smiling a little. 

We walked a few hundred feet, and there was the swamp, quite dried upwithout the protection of the woods, a tangle of dead stuff, and inplain view of half a dozen houses. "Why" cried Old Hundred, "it wasmiles away from _anything_!"

I looked at him, a woeful figure, clad in immaculate clothes, withgray gloves, a cane in his hand. "You ought to be wearing redmittens, " said I, "and carrying that old shot-gun, with the ramrodbent. "

"The ramrod was always bent, " said he. "It kept getting caught intwigs, or falling out. Gee, how she kicked! Remember the day I got therabbit down there on the edge of the swamp? It made the snow all red, poor little thing. I guess I wasn't so pleased as I expected to be. "

"I remember the day you didn't get the wood pussy--soon enough, " Ianswered. 

Just then a whistle shrieked. "Good Lord, " said Old Hundred, "there'sone of those infernal trolleys! It must go right up the turnpike, pastSandy. "

"Let's take it!" I cried. 

He looked at me savagely. "We'll walk!" he said. 

"But it's miles and miles, " I remonstrated. 

"Nevertheless, " said he, "we'll walk. "

It was difficult to find the short cut in this tangle of slaughteredforest, but we got back to the road finally, coming out by theschool-house. At least, we came out by a little shallow hole in theground, half filled with poison-ivy and fire-weed, and ringed by a fewstones. We paused sadly by the ruins. 

"I suppose the trolly takes the kids into the village now, " said I. "Centralization, you know. "

"There used to be a great stove in one corner, and the pipe went allacross the room, " Old Hundred was saying, as if to himself. "If yousat near it, you baked; if you didn't, you froze. Do you remember MissCampbell? What was it we used to sing about her? Oh, yes--

 Three little mice ran up the stairs To hear Biddy Campbell say her prayers; And when they heard her say Amen, The three little mice ran down again. 

And, gee but you were the punk speller! Remember how there was alwaysa spelling match Friday afternoons? I'll never forget the day you felldown on 'nausea. ' You'd lasted pretty well that day, for you;everybody'd gone down but you and Myrtie Swett and me and one or twomore. But when Biddy Campbell put that word up to you, you looked it, if you couldn't spell it!"

"Hum, " said I, "I wouldn't rub it in, if I were you. I seem to recalla public day when old Gilman Temple, the committee man, asked you whatwas the largest bird that flies, and you said, 'The Kangaroo. '"

Old Hundred grinned. "That's the day the new boy laughed, " said he. "Remember the new boy? I mean the one that wore the derby which weused to push down over his eyes? Sometimes in the yard one of us wouldsquat behind him, and then somebody else would push him overbackward. We made him walk Spanish, too. But after that public day heand I went way down to the horse-sheds behind the meeting-house in thevillage, and had it out. I wonder why we always fought in the holyhorse-sheds? The ones behind the town hall were never used for thatpurpose. "

This was true, but I couldn't explain it. "We couldn't always wait toget to the horse-sheds, as I remember it, " said I. "Sometimes wecouldn't wait to get out of sight of school. "

I began hunting the neighborhood for the hide-and-seek spots. The barnand the carriage-shed across the road were still there, with cracksyawning between the mouse-gray boards. The shed was also ideal for"Anthony over. " And in the pasture behind the school stood the greatboulder, by the sassafras tree. "I'll bet you can't count out, " saidI. 

"Pooh!" said Old Hundred. He raised his finger, pointed it at animaginary line of boys and girls, and chanted--

 "Acker, backer, soda cracker, Acker, backer, boo! If yer father chews terbacker, Out goes you. 

And now you're it, " he finished pointing at me. 

I was not to be outdone. "Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, --" I began tomumble. Then, "One thousand!" I shouted. 

 "Bushel o' wheat and a bushel o' rye, All 't 'aint hid, holler knee high!"

I looked for a stick, stood it on end, and let it fall. It fell towardthe boulder. "You're up in the sassafras tree, " I said. 

"No, " said Old Hundred, "that's Benny. "

Then we looked at each other and laughed. 

"You poor old idiot, " said Old Hundred. 

"You doddering imbecile, " said I, "come on up to Sandy. "

Somehow, it wasn't far to Sandy. It used to be miles. We passed byMyrtie Swett's house on the way. It stood back from the turnpike justas ever, with its ample doorway, its great shadowing elms, its air ofhaughty well-being. Myrtie, besides a prize speller, was something ofa social queen. She was very beautiful and she affected ennui. 

 "Oh, dear, bread and beer, If I was home I shouldn't be here!"

she used to say at parties, with a tired air that was the secret envyof the other little girls, who were unable to conceal their pleasureat being "here. " However, Myrtie never went home, we noticed. Ratherdid she take a leading part in every game of Drop-the-handkerchief, Post Office, or Copenhagen--tinglingly thrilling games, with unknownpossibilities of a sentimental nature. 

"If I thought she still lived in the old place, I'd go up and tell herI had a letter for her, " said Old Hundred. 

"She'd probably give you a stamp, " I replied. 

"Not unless she's changed!" he grinned. 

But we saw no signs of Myrtie. Several children played in the yard. There was the face of a strange woman at the window, a very plainwoman, who looked old, as she peered keenly at the two urban passers. 

"It _can't_ be Myrtie!" I heard Old Hundred mutter, as he hastened on. 

Sandy was almost the most wonderful spot in the world. It was, as mostswimming holes are, on the down-stream side of a bridge. The littleriver widened out, on its way through the meadows, here and there intoswimming holes of greater or less desirability. There was Lob's Pond, by the mill, and Deep Pool, and Musk Rat, and Little Sandy. But Sandywas the best of them all. It was shaded on one side by great trees, and the banks were hidden from the road by alder screens. At one endthere was a shelving bottom, of clean sand, where the "little kids"who couldn't swim sported in safety. Under the opposite bank the waterran deep for diving. And in mid-stream the pool was so very deep thatnobody had ever been able to find bottom there. In the other holes, you could hold your hands over your head and go down till your feettouched, without wetting your fingers. But not the longest fish-linehad ever been long enough to plumb Sandy's depths. Indeed, it waspopularly believed that there was _no_ bottom in Sandy, and a mythicalhorn pout, of gigantic proportions, was supposed to inhabit its dark, watery abysses. 

Old Hundred and I stood on the bridge and looked down on a littlepool. "I could jump across it now, " he sighed. "But I wish it were awarmer day. I'd go in, just the same. "

There was a honk up the road, and a touring car jolted over the boardsbehind us, with a load of veils and goggles. The dust sifted throughthe bridge, and we heard it patter on the water below. 

"I fancy there's more travel now, " said I. "And the alder screen seemsto be gone. Perhaps we'd better not go in. "

Old Hundred leaned pensively over the white rail--the sign of a Statehighway; for the dusty old Turnpike was now converted into a graystrip of macadam road, torn by the automobiles, with a trolley trackat one side. 

"There's a lucky bug on the water, " he said presently. "If we were innow, we might catch him, and make our fortunes. "

"And get our clothes tied up, " said I. 

"As I recall it, you were the prize beef chawer, " he remarked. "Inever could see why you didn't go into vaudeville, in a Houdini act. Iused to soak the knots in your shirt and dry 'em, and soak 'em again;but you always untied 'em, often without using your teeth, either. "

"You couldn't, though, " I grinned. 

 "Charlo beef, The beef was tough, Poor Old Hundred Couldn't get enough!

"How many times have you gone home barefoot, with your stockings andyour undershirt, in a wet knot, tied to your fish-pole?"

"Not many, " said he. 

"What?" said I. 

"It wasn't often that I wore stockings and an undershirt in swimmingseason, " he answered. "Don't you remember being made to soak your feetin a tub on the back porch before going to bed, and going fast asleepin the process?"

"If you put a horse hair in water, it will turn to a snake, " Ireplied, irrelevantly. 

"Anybody knows that, " said Old Hundred. "If you toss a fish back inthe water before you're done fishing, you won't get any more bites, because he'll go tell all the other fish. Bet yer I can swim fartherunder the water 'n you can. Come on, it isn't very cold. "

I looked hesitantly at the pool. 

"Stump yer!" he taunted. 

I started for the bank. But just then the trolley wire, which we hadquite forgotten, began to buzz. We paused. Up the pike came the car. It stopped just short of the bridge, by a cross-road, and an old manalighted. Then it moved on, shaking more dust down upon the brownwater. The old man regarded us a moment, and instead of turning up thecross-road, came over to us. 

("Know him?" I whispered. )

("Is it Hen Flint, that used to drive the meat wagon with the whitetop?" said Old Hundred. "Lord, is it so many years ago!")

"How are you, Mr. Flint?" said I. 

"Thot I didn't mistake ye, " said the old man, putting out a large, thin, but powerful hand. "Whar be ye now, Noo York? Come back to lookover the old place, eh? I reckon ye find it some changed. Don't knowit myself, hardly. You look like yer ma; sorter got her peak face. "

"Where's the swimming hole now?" asked Old Hundred. 

"I don't calc'late thar be any, " said the old man. "The gol durntrolley an' the automobiles spiled the pool here, an' the mill-pond'sno good since they tore down the mill, an' bust the dam. Maybe thelittle fellers git their toes wet down back o' Bill Flint's; I see 'emsplashin' round thar hot days. But the old fellers have to wash in thekitchen, same's in winter. "

"But the boys must swim somewhere, " said I. 

"I presume likely they go to the beaches, " said Henry Flint. "I see'em ridin' off in the trolley. "

"Yes, " said I, "it must be easy to get anywhere now, with the trolleysso thick. "

"It's too durn easy, " he commented. "Thar hain't a place ye can't gitto, though why ye should want to git thar beats me. Mostly putshigh-flown notions in the women-folks' heads, and vegetable gardens on'em. "

He shook hands again, lingeringly. "Yer father wus a fine man, " hesaid to Old Hundred--"a fine man. I sold yer ma meat before you wusborn. "

Then he moved rather feebly away, down the cross-road. Presently areturn trolley approached. 

"Curse the trolleys!" exclaimed Old Hundred. "They go everywhere andcarry everybody. They spoil the country roads and ruin the countryhouses and villages. Where they go, cheap loafing places, calledwaiting-rooms, spring up, haunted by flies, rotten bananas and villagemuckers. They trail peanut shells, dust and vulgarity; and they makeall the country-side a back yard of the city. Let's take this one. "

We passed once more the hole where the school had been, and drew neara cross-road. I looked at Old Hundred, he at me. He nodded, and wesignalled the conductor. The car stopped. We alighted and turnedsilently west, pursued by peering eyes. After a few hundred feet thecross-road went up a rise and round a bend, and the new frame housesalong the Turnpike were shut from view. Over the brambled wall we sawcows lying down in a pasture. 

"It's going to rain, " said I. 

"No, " said Old Hundred, "that's only a sign when they lie down firstthing in the morning. "

Then we were silent once more. Into the west the land, the rocky, rolling, stubborn, beautiful New England country-side, layfamiliar--how familiar!--to our eyes. To the left, back among the oaksand hickories, stood a solid, simple house, painted yellow with greenblinds. To the right almost opposite was a smaller house of white, with an orchard straggling up to the back door. And in one of them Iwas born, and in the other Old Hundred. Down the road was anotherhouse, a deep red, half hidden in the trees. Smoke was rising from thechimney now, and drifting rosily against the first flush of sunset. 

"Betsy's getting Cap'n Charles's supper, " said Old Hundred. 

"Then Betsy's about one hundred and six, " said I, "and the Cap'n onehundred and ten. Oh, John, it was a long, long time ago!"

"It doesn't seem so, " he answered. "It seems only yesterday that wemet up there in your grove on Hallow-e'en to light our jack-lanterns, and crept down the road in the cold white moonlight to poke them up atBetsy's window. Remember when she caught us with the pail of water?"

"I remember, " said I, "the time you put a tack in the seat of Cap'nCharles's stool, in his little shoemaker's shop out behind the house, and he gave you five cents, to return good for evil; so the next dayyou did it again, in the hope of a quarter, but he decided there weretimes when the Golden Rule is best honored in the breach, and gave youa walloping. "

"It was some walloping, too, " said Old Hundred, with a reminiscentgrin. "It would be a good time now, " he added, "to swipe melons, ifBetsy's getting supper. Though I believe she had all those melon stemsconnected with an automatic burglar-alarm in the kitchen. She ought tohave taken out a patent on that invention!"

He looked about him, first at his house, then at mine. "How small theorchard is now, " he mused. "The trees are like little old women. Andlook at Crow's Nest--it used to be a hundred feet high. "

The oak he pointed at still bore in its upper branches the remains ofour tree-top retreat, a rotted beam or two straddling a crotch. "PeterPan should rebuild it, " said I. "I shall drop a line to Wendy. Do youstill hesitate to turn over in bed?"

"Always, " Old Hundred confessed. "I do turn over now, but it was yearsbefore I could bring myself to do it. I wonder where we got thatsuperstition that it brought bad luck? If we woke in the night, up inCrow's Nest, and wanted to shift our positions, we got up and walkedaround the foot of the mattress, so we could lie on the other sidewithout turning over. Remember?"

I nodded. Then the well-curb caught my eye. It was over the well wedug where old Solon Perkins told us to. Solon charged three dollarsfor the advice. He came with a forked elm twig, cut green, and holdingthe prongs tightly wrapped round his hands so that the base of thetwig stuck out straight, walked back and fourth over the place, followed by my father and mother, and Old Hundred's father and mother, and Cap'n Charles and Betsy, and all the boys for a mile around, silently watching for the miracle. Finally the base of the twig bentsharply down. "Dig there, " said Solon. He examined the twig to see ifthe bark was twisted. It was, so he added, "Bent hard. Won't have terdig more'n ten foot. " We dug twenty-six, but water came. And suchwater!

"I want some of that water, " said I. "I don't want to go into thehouse; I don't even know who lives in it now. But I must have some ofthat water. "

We went up to the well and lowered the bucket, which slid boundingdown against the cool stones till it hit the depths with a dullsplash. As we were drinking, an old man came peering out of the house. Old Hundred recognized him first. 

"Well, Clarkie Poor, by all that's holy!" he cried. "We've come to getour hair cut. "

Clarkson Poor blinked a bit before recognition came. "Yes, " he said, "I bought the old place a couple o' year back, arter them city folksyou sold it to got sick on it. Too fer off the trolley line for them. John's house over yon some noo comers 'a' got. They ain't changed itnone. This is about the only part o' town that ain't changed, though. Most o' the old folks is gone, too, and the young uns, like you chaps, all git ambitious fer the cities. I give up cuttin' hair 'bout threeyear back--got kinder onsteady an' cut too many ears. "

A sudden smile broke over Old Hundred's face. "Clarkie, " he said, "youwere always up on such things--is it rats or warts that you write anote to when you want 'em to go away?"

"Yes, it's rats, isn't it?" I cried, also reminded, for the firsttime, of our real quest. 

"Why, " said Clarkie, "you must be sure to make the note verypartic'lar perlite, and tell 'em whar to go. Don't fergit that. "

"Yes, yes, " said we, "but is it warts or rats?"

"Well, " said Clarkie, "it's both. "

We looked one at the other, and grinned rather sheepishly. 

"Only thar's a better way fer warts, " Clarkie went on. "I knew a boyonce who sold his. That's the best way. Yer don't have actually tosell 'em. Just git another feller to say, 'I'll give yer five centsfer yer warts, ' and you say, 'All right, they're yourn, ' and then theygo. Fact. "

We thanked him, and moved down to the road, declining his invitationto come into the house. Westward, the sun had gone down and left thesky a glowing amber and rose. The fields rolled their young green likea checkered carpet over the low hills--the sweet, familiar hills. Foran instant, in the hush of gathering twilight, we stood there silentand bridged the years; wiping out the strife, the toil, the ambitions, we were boys again. 

"Hark!" said Old Hundred, softly. Down through the orchard we heardthe thin, sweet tinkle of a cow-bell. "There's a boy behind, with thepeeled switch, " he added, "looking dreamily up at the first star, andwishing on it--wishing for a lot of things he'll never get. But I'msure he isn't barefoot. Let's go. "

As we passed down the turnpike, between the rows of cheap framehouses, we saw, in the increasing dusk, the ruins of a lane, and thecorner of a small, back-yard potato patch, that had been Kingman'sfield. We hastened through the noisy, treeless village, and boardedthe Boston train, rather cross for want of supper. 

"I wonder, " said Old Hundred, as we moved out of the station, "whetherwe'd better go to Young's or the Parker House?"

 [Illustration]

 _Mumblety-peg and Middle Age_

Old Hundred and I were taking our Saturday afternoon walk in thecountry--that is, in such suburbanized country as we could achieve inthe neighborhood of New York. We had passed innumerable small boys andnot a few small girls, but save for an occasional noisy group on abase-ball diamond none of them seemed to be playing any definitegames. 

"Did we use to wander aimlessly round that way?" asked Old Hundred. 

"We did not, " said I. "If it wasn't marbles in spring or tops inautumn it was duck-on-the-rock or stick-knife or----"

"Only we didn't call it stick-knife, " said Old Hundred, "we called itmumblety-peg. "

"We called it stick-knife, " said I. 

"Your memory is curiously bad, " said Old Hundred. "You are alwaysforgetting about these important matters. It was mumblety-peg. "

"My memory bad!" I sniffed. "I suppose you think I've forgotten how Ialways licked you at stick-knife?"

Old Hundred grinned. Old Hundred's grin, to-day as much as thirtyyears ago, is a mask for some coming trouble. He always grinned beforehe sailed into the other fellow, which was an effective way to catchthe other fellow off his guard. I presume he grins now before hecross-questions a witness. "I'll play you a game right now, " he saidsoftly. 

"You're on, " said I. 

We selected a spot of clean, thin turf behind a roadside fence. It wasin reality a part of somebody's yard, but it was the best we could do. I still carry a pocket-knife of generous proportions, to whittle withwhen we go for a walk, and this I produced and opened, handing it toOld Hundred. "Now begin, " said I, as we squatted down. 

He held the knife somewhat gingerly, first by the blade, then by thehandle. "Wha--what do you do first?" he finally asked. 

"Do?" said I. "Don't you remember?"

"No, " he replied, "and neither do you. "

"Give me the knife, " I cried. I relied on the feel of it in my hand toawaken a dormant muscular memory to help me out. But no muscularmemory was stirred. Old Hundred watched me with a smile. "Begin, begin!" he urged. 

"Let's see, " said I, "I think you took it first by the tip of theblade, this way, and made it stick up. " I threw the knife. It stuck, but almost lay upon the ground. 

"You've got to get two fingers under it, " said Old Hundred. He tried, but there wasn't room. "You fail, " he cried. "There's a point for me. "

"Not till you've made it stick, " said I. 

We grew interested in our game. We threw the knife from our nose andchin, we dropped it from our forehead, we jumped it over our hand, wehalf-closed the blade and tossed it that way, and finally, when thetalley was reckoned up in my favor, I began to look about for a stickto whittle into the peg. 

Old Hundred rose and dusted his clothes. "Here, " I cried. "You're notdone yet!"

"Oh, yes I am!" he answered. 

"Quitter, quitter, quitter!" I taunted. 

"That may be, " said he, "but a learned lawyer of forty-five with adirty mug is rather more self-conscious than a boy of ten. I'll buyyou a dinner when we get to town. "

"Oh, very well, " said I, peevishly, "but I didn't think you'd sodegenerated. I'll let you off if you'll admit it was stick-knife. "

"I'll admit it, " said Old Hundred. "I suppose in a minute you'll askme to admit that prisoners'-base was relievo. "

"What _was_ relievo, by the way?" I asked. 

"Relievo--relievo?" said Old Hundred. "Why that was a game we playedmostly on the ice, up on Birch Meadow, don't you remember? When we gottired of hockey, we all put our coats and hockey sticks in a pile, one man was It, and the rest tried to skate from a distant line aroundthe pile and back. It the chap who was It tagged anybody before he gotaround, that chap had to be It with him, and so on till everybody wascaught. Then the first one tagged had to be It for a new start. "

"I remember that game, " said I. "I remember how Frank White, who couldskate like a fiend, used to be the last one caught. Sometimes he'd getaround a hundred boys, ducking and dodging and taking half a mile ofice to do it, but escaping untouched. Sometimes, if there weren't manyplaying, he'd go around backwards, just to taunt us. But I don't thinkthat game was relievo. That doesn't sound like the name to me. "

"What was it, then?" said Old Hundred. 

"I don't know, " I answered. "It's funny how you forget things. "

By this time we were strolling along the road again. "Speaking ofBirch Meadow, " said Old Hundred, "what glorious skating we kids usedto have there! I never go by Central Park in winter without pityingthe poor New York youngsters, just hobbling round and round on ahalf-acre pond where the surface is cut up into powder an inch thick, and the crowd is so dense you can scarcely see the ice. Shall you everforget that mile-long pond in the woods, not deep enough to drown inanywhere, and frozen over with smooth black ice as early asThanksgiving Day? How we used to rush to it, up Love Lane, as soon asschool was out!"

"Do you remember, " said I, "how we passed it last year, and found thewoods all cut and the water drained off?"

"Don't be a wet blanket, " said Old Hundred, crossly. "The country hasto grow. "

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. The mood of memory was onhim. I repented of my speech. "Yes, " I answered. "No doubt the countryhas to grow. The colleges now play hockey on ponds made by the firedepartment. But there isn't that thrilling ring to your runners northat long-drawn echo from the wooded shores when a crack crosses theice. "

"I can see it all this minute, " said Old Hundred. "I can see my littleself like a different person [which, indeed, he was!] as one of thecrowd. We had chosen up sides--ten, twenty, thirty on a side. Stones, dragged from the shores, were put down for goals. Most of us hadhockey sticks we had cut ourselves in the woods, hickory, with a bitof the curved root for the blade. You were one of the few boys whocould afford a store stick. We had a hard rubber ball. Bobbie Prattwas always one goal because he had big feet. And over the black ice, against the sombre background of those cathedral aisles of whitepine, we chased that ball, charging in solid ranks so that the icesagged and protested under the rush of our runners, wheeling suddenly, darting in pursuit of one boy who had snaked the ball out from themaze of feet and was flying with it toward the goal, all rapid action, panting breath, superb life. It really must have been a beautifulsight, one of those hockey games. I can still hear the ring and roarof the runners as the crowd swept down in a charge!"

I smiled. "And I can still feel the ice when somebody's stick gotcaught between my legs. 'Hi, fellers, come look at the star Williemade!' I can hear you shouting, as you examined the spot where myanatomy had been violently super-imposed on the skating surface. "

Old Hundred smiled too. "Fine little animals we were!" he said. "Isuppose one reason why we don't see more games nowdays is because welive in the city. Even this suburbanized region is really city, dirtied all over with its spawn. Lord, Bill, think if we'd beencramped up in an East Side street, or reduced to Central Park for askating pond! A precious lot of reminiscences we'd have to-day, wouldn't we? They build the kids what they call public play-grounds, and then they have to hire teachers to teach 'em how to play. Poorbeggars, think of having to be taught by a grown-up how to play agame! They all have a rudimentary idea of base-ball; the Americanspirit and the sporting extras see to that. But I never see 'emplaying anything else much, not even out here where the suburbs smutan otherwise attractive landscape. "

"Perhaps, " I ventured, "not only the lack of space and free open inthe city has something to do with it, but the fact that the seasonsthere grow and change so unperceived. Games, you remember, go by akind of immutable rotation--as much a law of childhood as gravitationof the universe. Marbles belong to spring, to the first weeks afterthe frost is out of the ground. They are a kind of celebration of theseason, of the return to bare earth. Tops belong to autumn, hockey tothe ice, base-ball to the spring and summer, foot-ball to the cold, snappy fall, and I seem to remember that even such games ashide-and-seek or puss-in-the-corner were played constantly at oneperiod, not at all at another. If you played 'em out of time, theydidn't seem right; there was no zest to them. Now, most of these gameperiods were determined long ago by physical conditions of ground andclimate. They stem us back to nature. Cramp the youngsters in theartificial life of a city, and you snap this stem. My theory may bewild, all wrong. Yet I can't help feeling that our games, which weaccepted and absorbed as a part of the universe, as much as ourparents or the woods and fields, _were_ a part of that nature whichsurrounded us, linking us with the beginnings of the race. Most kids'games are centuries upon centuries old, they say. I can't helpbelieving that for every sky-scraper we erect we end the life, forthousands of children, of one more game. "

Old Hundred had listened attentively to my long discourse, nodding hishead approvingly. "No doubt, no doubt, " he said. "I shall hereafterregard the Metropolitan Tower as a memorial shaft, which ought to bearan inscription, 'Hic jacet, Puss-in-the-corner. ' Yet I saw some poorlittle duffers on the East Side the other day trying to play soak witha tattered old ball, which kept getting lost under the push carts. "

"They die hard, " said I. 

We had by this time come on our walk into a group of houses, theoutskirts of a town. Several small boys were, apparently, aimlesslywalking about. 

"Why don't they _do_ something, " Old Hundred exclaimed, half tohimself. "Don't they know how, even out here?"

"Suppose you teach 'em, " I suggested. 

Again Old Hundred grinned. He walked over among the small boys, whostopped their talk and regarded him silently. "Ever playduck-on-the-rock?" he asked, with that curiously embarrassedfriendliness of the middle-aged man trying to make up to boyhood. After a certain period, most of us unconsciously regard a small boyas a kind of buzz-saw, to be handled with extreme care. 

The boys looked at one another, as if picking a spokesman. Finally oneof them, a freckle-faced, stocky youngster who looked more like acountry lad than the rest, replied. "They dunno how, " he said. "They're afraid the stones'll hurt 'em. We used to play it up Stateall the time. "

"There's your theory, " said Old Hundred in an aside to me. 

"You're a liar, " said one of the other boys. "We ain't afraid, are weBill?"

"Naw, " said Bill. 

"Who's a liar?" said the first speaker, doubling his fists. "I'llknock your block off in about a minute. "

"Ah, come on an' do it, Rube!" taunted the other. 

Old Hundred hereupon interfered. "Let's not fight, let's play, " hesaid. "If they don't know how, we'll teach 'em, eh Rube? Want tolearn, boys?"

They looked at him for a moment with the instinctive suspicion oftheir class, decided in his favor, and assented. Like all men, OldHundred was flattered by this mark of confidence from the severestcritics in the world. He and Rube hunted out a large rock, and placedit on the curb. Each boy found his individual duck, Old Hundred triedto count out for It, couldn't remember the rhyme, and had to turn thejob over to Rube, who delivered himself of the following:

 "As I went up to Salt Lake I met a little rattlesnake, He'd e't so much of jelly cake, It made his little belly ache. "

When It was thus selected, automatically and poetically, Old Hundreddrew a line in the road, parallel to the curb, It put his duck on therock, and the rest started to pitch. Suddenly one demon spotted me, asmiling by-stander. "Hi, " he called, "Old Coattails ain't playin'. "

"Quitter, quitter, quitter!" taunted Old Hundred. 

I started to make some remark about the self-consciousness of alearned _litterateur_ of forty-five, but my speech was drowned in aderisive howl from the buzz-saws. I meekly accepted the inevitable, and hunted myself out a duck. 

After ten minutes of madly dashing back to the line pursued by thosesupernaturally active young cubs, after stooping again and again topick up my duck, after dodging flying stones and sometimes notsucceeding, I was quite ready to quit. Old Hundred, flushed andperspiring, was playing as if his life depended on it. When he wastagged, he took his turn as It without a murmur. He was one of thekids, and they knew it. But finally he, too, felt the pace in hisbones. We left the boys still playing, quite careless of whether wewent or stayed. We were dusty and hot; our hands were scratched andgrimed. "Ah!" said Old Hundred, looking back, "I've accomplishedsomething to-day and had a good time doing it! The ungrateful littlesavages; they might have said good-bye. "

"Yet you wouldn't pull up the mumblety-peg for me, " I said. 

"My dear fellow, " he replied, "that is quite different. To take a darefrom a man is childish. Not to take a dare from a child is unmanly. "

"You talk like G. K. Chesterton, " said I. 

"Which shows that occasionally Chesterton is right, " said he. "Speaking of dares, I'd like to see a gang of kids playing dares orfollow-your-leader right now. Remember how we used to playfollow-your-leader by the hour? You had to do just what he did, like arow of sheep. When there were girls in the game, you always ended upby turning a somersault, which was a subtle jest never to be too muchenjoyed. "

"And Alice Perkins used to take that dare, too, I remember, " said I. 

"Alice never could bear to be stumped, " he mused. "She's either becomea mighty fine woman or a bad one. She was the only girl we everallowed to perform in the circuses up in your backyard. Often wewouldn't even admit girls as spectators. Remember the sign you paintedto that effect? She was the lady trapeze artist and bareback rider. You were the bareback, as I recall it--or was it Fatty Newell? Anyhow, one of her stunts was to hang by her legs and drink a tumbler ofwater. "

I felt my muscles. "I wonder, " said I, "if I could still skin thecat?"

"I'll bet I can chin myself ten times, " said Old Hundred. 

We cast about for a convenient limb. There was an apple-tree besidethe road, with a horizontal limb some eight feet above the ground. Itried first. I got myself over all right, till I hung inverted, myfountain-pen, pencil, and eyeglass case falling out of my pocket. Butthere I stuck. There was no strength in my arms to pull me up. So Icurled clean over and dropped to the ground, very red in the face, myclothes covered with the powdered apple-tree bark. Old Hundred graspedthe limb to chin himself. He got up once easily, he got up a secondtime with difficulty, he got up a third time by an heroic effort, theveins standing out on his forehead. The fourth time he stuck twoinches off the ground. 

"'You are old, Father William, '" I quoted. 

He rubbed his biceps sadly. "I'm out of practice!" he said with someasperity. But we tried no more stunts on the apple-tree. 

Beyond the orchard was a piece of split-rail fence, gray and old, withbrambles growing at the intersections--one of the relics of an elderday in Westchester County. Old Hundred looked at it as he put on hiscoat. 

"There ought to be a bumblebees' nest in that fence, " he said. "If weshould poke the bees out we'd find honey, nice gritty honey, all overrotted wood from our fingers. "

"Are you looking for trouble?" I asked. "However, if you hold yourbreath, a bee can't sting you. "

"I recall that ancient superstition--with pain, " he smiled. "Why doesa bee have such a fascination for a boy? Is it because he makeshoney?"

"Not at all; that's a secondary issue. It's because he's a bee, " Ianswered. "Don't you remember the fun of stoning those gray hornets'nests which used to be built under the school-house eaves in summer?We waited till the first recess to plug a stone through 'em, andnobody could get back in the door without being stung. It was againstthe unwritten law to stone the school-house nests in vacation time!"

"Recess!" mused Old Hundred. "Do you know, sometimes in court when thejudge announces a recess (which he pronounces with the accent on thesecond syllable, a manifest error), those old school-days come back tome, and my case drops clean out of my head for the moment. "

"I should think that would be embarrassing, " said I. 

"It isn't, " he said, "it's restful. Besides, it often restores mymislaid sense of humor. I picture the judge out in a school-yardplaying leap-frog with the learned counsel for the prosecution and theforeman of the jury. It makes 'em more human to see 'em so. "

"A Gilbertian idea, to say the least, " I smiled. "Why not set thewhole court to playing squat-tag?"

"There was step-tag, too, " said Old Hundred. "Remember that? The boyor girl who was It shut his eyes and counted ten. Then he opened hiseyes suddenly, and if he saw any part of you moving you became It. On'ten' you tried to freeze into stiffness. We must have struck somefunny attitudes. "

"Attitudes, " said I, "that was another game. Somebody said 'fear' or'cat' or 'geography, ' and you had to assume an attitude expressive ofthe word. The girls liked that game. "

"Oh, the girls always liked games where they could show off or getpersonal attention, " replied Old Hundred. "They liked hide-and-seekbecause you came after them, or because you took one of 'em and wentoff with her alone to hide behind the wood-shed. They liked kissinggames best, though--drop-the-handkerchief and post-office. "

"Those weren't recess games, " I amended. "Those were party games. Youplayed them when you had your best clothes on, which entirely changedyour mental attitude, anyhow. When a girl dropped the handkerchiefbehind you, you had to chase her and kiss her if you could, and whenyou got a letter in post-office you had to go into the next room andbe kissed. Everybody tittered at you when you came back. "

"Well, soak and scrub were recess games, anyhow. I can hear that gladyell, 'Scrub one!' rising from the first boy who burst out of theschool-house door. Then there were dare-base, and foot-ball, which weused to play with an old bladder, or at best a round, black rubberball, not one of these modern leather lemons. We used to kick it, too. I don't remember tackling and rushing, till we got older and went toprep school--or you and I went to prep school. "

"I'd hate to have been tackled on the old school playground, " said I. "It was hard as rocks. "

"It _was_ rocks, " said Old Hundred. "You could spin a top on itanywhere. "

"Could you spin a top now?" I asked. 

"Sure!" said Old Hundred. "And pop at a snapper, too. "

"It's wicked to play marbles for keeps, " said I impressively. "Onlythe bad boys do that. "

"Poor mother!" said Old Hundred. "Remember the marble rakes we used tomake? We cut a series of little arches in a board, numbered 'em one, two, three, and so on, and stood the board up across the concretesidewalk down by Lyceum Hall. The other kids rolled their marbles fromthe curb. If a marble went through an arch, the owner of the rake hadto give the boy as many marbles as the number over the arch. If theboy missed, the owner took his marble. It was very profitable for theowner. And my mother found out I had a rake. That night it went intothe kitchen fire, while I was lectured on the awful consequences ofgambling. "

"I know, " said I. "It was almost as terrible as sending 'comicvalentines. ' Remember the 'comics'? They were horribly coloredlithographs of teachers, old maids, dudes, and the like, with equallyhorrible verses under them. They cost a penny apiece, and you bought'em at Damon's drug store. They were so wicked that Emily Ruggleswouldn't sell 'em. "

"Emily Ruggles's!" exclaimed Old Hundred. "Shall you ever forget EmilyRuggles's? It was in Lyceum Hall building, a little dark store up aflight of steps--a notion store, I guess they called it. To us kids itwas just Emily Ruggles's. It was full of marbles, tops, 'scholars'companions, ' air-guns, sheets of paper soldiers, valentines, fire-crackers before the Fourth, elastic for slingshots, spools, needles and yards of blue calico with white dots, which hung overstrings above the counters. Emily was a dark, heavy-browed spinsterwith a booming bass voice and a stern manner, and when you crept, awedand timid, into the store she glared at you and boomed out, 'Whichside, young man?' Yet her store was a kid's paradise. I have oftenwondered since whether she didn't, in her heart, really love usyoungsters, for all her forbidding manner. "

"Of course she loved us, " said I. "She loved her country, too. Don'tyou remember the story of how she paid for a substitute in the CivilWar, because she couldn't go to the front and fight herself? Poorwoman, she took the only way she knew to show her affection for us. She stocked her little shop with a delectable array which kept aprocession of children pushing open the door and timidly yet joyfullyentering its dark recesses, where bags of marbles and bundles ofpencils gleamed beneath the canopies of calico. Nowadays I never seesuch shops anymore. I don't know whether there are any tops andmarbles on the market. One never sees them. Certainly one never seesnice little shops devoted to their sale. Children are not importantany longer. "

Old Hundred sighed. We walked on in silence, toward the brow of ahill, and presently the Hudson gleamed below us, while across itsmisty expanse the hills of New Jersey huddled into the sinking sun. Old Hundred sat down on a stone. 

"I'm weary, " he said, "and my muscles ache, and I'm stiff and sore andforty-five. Bill, you're getting bald. Wipe your shiny high-brow. Youlook ridiculous. "

"Shut up, " said I, "and don't get maudlin just because you can't chinyourself ten times. Remember, it's because you're out of practice!"

"Out of practice, out of practice!" he said viciously. "A year atMuldoon's wouldn't bring me back the thoughtless joy of a hockey game, would it? No, nor the delight of playing puss-in-the-corner, orfollowing a paper trail through the October woods, or yelling 'Daddyon the castle, Daddy on the castle!' while we jumped on Frank Swain'sveranda and off again into his mother's flower-bed!"

"I trust not, " said I. "Just what are you getting at?"

"This, " answered Old Hundred: "that I, you, none of us, go into thingsnow for the sheer exuberance of our bodies and the sheer delight ofplaying a game. We must have some ulterior motive--usually a sordidone, getting money or downing the other fellow; and most of the timewe have to drive our poor, old rackety bodies with a whip. About thetime a man begins to vote, he begins to disintegrate. The rest oflife is gradual running down, or breaking up. The Hindoos were right. "

"Old Hundred, " said I, "you are something of an idiot. Those games ofours were nature's school; nature takes that way to teach us how tobehave ourselves socially, how to conquer others, but mostly how toconquer ourselves. We were men-pups, that's all. For Heaven's sake, can't you have a pleasant afternoon thinking of your boyhood withoutbecoming maudlin?"

"You talk like a book by G. Stanley Hall, " retorted Old Hundred. "Nodoubt our games were nature's way of teaching us how to be men, butthat doesn't alter the fact that the process of being taught wasbetter than the process of putting the knowledge into practice. I hatethese folks who rhapsodize sentimentally over children as 'potentiallittle men. ' Potential fiddle-sticks! Their charm is because they_ain't_ men yet, because they are still trailing clouds of glory, because they are nice, mysterious, imaginative, sensitive, nastylittle beasts. You! All you are thinking of is that dinner I owe you!Well, come on, then, we'll go back into that monstrous heap of mortardown there to the south, where there are no children who know how toplay, no tops, no marbles, no woods and ponds and bees' nests in thefences, no Emily Ruggleses; where every building is, as you say, thegravestone of a game, and the only sport left is the playing of themarket for keeps!"

He got up painfully. I got up painfully. We both limped. Down the hillin silence we went. On the train Old Hundred lighted a cigar. "What doyou say to the club for dinner?" he asked. "I ought to go across tothe Bar Association afterward and look up some cases on that rebatesuit. By Jove, but it's going to be a pretty trial!"

"That pleases me all right, " I answered. "I've got to meet Ainsleyafter the theatre and go over our new third act. I think you are goingto like it better than the old. "

At the next station Old Hundred went out on the platform and hailed anewsboy. "I want to see how the market closed, " he explained, as heburied himself in his paper. 

 [Illustration]

 _Barber Shops of Yesterday_

I have just been to a barber shop, --not a city barber shop, where youexpect tiled floors and polished mirrors and a haughty Venus by atable in the corner, who glances scornfully at your hands as you giveyour hat, coat, and collar to a boy, as much as to say, "Manicureshimself!"--but a country barber shop, in a New England small town. Irather expected that the experience would repay me, in awakenedpleasant memories, for a very poor hair-cut. Instead, I got a verygood hair-cut, and no pleasant memories were awakened at all; not, that is, by the direct process of suggestion. I was only led to museon barber shops of my boyhood because this one was so different. Eventhe barber was different. He chewed gum, he worked quickly, he usedshaving powder and took his cloths from a sterilizer, and finally heheld a hand-glass behind my head for me to see the result, quite likehis city cousins. (By the way, was ever a man so brave as to say thecut _wasn't_ all right, when the barber held that hand-glass behindhis head? And what would the barber say if he did?) No, this shop wasantiseptic, and uninteresting. There was not even a picture on thewalls!

But, to the barber's soothing snip, snip, snip, and the gentle tug ofthe comb, I dreamed of the barber shops of my boyhood, and of ClarkieParker's in particular. Clarkie's shop was in Lyceum Hall block, oneflight up--a huge room, with a single green upholstered barber's chairbetween the windows, where one could sit and watch the town go bybelow you. The room smelled pungently of bay rum. Barber shops don'tsmell of bay rum any more. Around two sides were ranged many chairsand an old leather couch. The chair-arms were smooth and black withthe rubbing of innumerable hands and elbows, and behind them, making adark line along the wall, were the marks where the heads of thesitters rubbed as they tilted back. Nor can I forget thespittoons, --large shallow boxes, two feet square, --four of them, fullof sand. On a third side of the room stood the basin and water-taps, and beside them a large black-walnut cabinet, full of shelves. Theshelves were full of mugs, and on every mug was a name, in giltletters, generally Old English. Those mugs were a town directory ofour leading citizens. My father's mug was on the next to the topshelf, third from the end on the right. The sight of it used tothrill me, and at twelve I began surreptitiously to feel my chin, tosee if there were any hope of my achieving a mug in thenot-too-distant future. 

Above the chairs, the basin, the cabinet, hung pictures. Several ofthose pictures I have never seen since, but the other day in New YorkI came upon one of them in a print-shop on Fourth Avenue, and wasrestrained from buying it only by the, to me, prohibitive price. I'vebeen ashamed ever since, too, that I allowed it to be prohibitive. Ifeel traitorous to a memory. It was a lurid lithograph of a burningbuilding upon which brave firemen in red shirts were pouring copiousstreams of water, while other brave firemen worked the pump-handles ofthe engine. The flames were leaping out in orange tongues from everywindow of the doomed structure (which was a fine business block threestories high), but you felt sure that the heroes would save alladjoining property, in spite of the evident high wind. Another picturein Clarkie's shop showed these same firemen (at least, they, too, worered shirts) hauling their engine out of its abode; and still anotherdisplayed them hauling it back again. On this latter occasion it wascoated with ice, and I used to wonder if all these pictures depictedthe same fire, because the trees were in full leaf in the others. There also hung on the walls a truly superb engraving of the loss ofthe Arctic. Her bow (or was it her stern?) was high in air, andfigures were dropping off it into the sea, like nuts from a shakenhickory. This was a very terrible picture, and one turned with reliefto Maude S. Standing before a bright green hedge and looking everyinch a gentle champion, or the stuffed pickerel, twenty-four incheslong, framed under glass, with his weight--a ponderous figure--printedon the frame. 

Clarkie Parker was in reality a barber by avocation. The art he lovedwas angling. Patience with a rod and line, the slow contemplation ofrivers, was in his blood, and in his fingers. It took him a long timeto cut your hair, even when, on the first hot day of June, you badehim, "take it all off with the lawn-mower. " (Do any boys have theirheads clean-clipped in summer any more?) But while he cut, he talkedof fishing. You listened as to one having authority. He knew everybrook, every pool, every pond, for miles around. You went next daywhere Clarkie advised. And there was no use expecting a hair-cut or ashave on the first of April, when "the law went off on trout. "Clarkie's shop was shut. If the day happened to be Saturday, many apious man in our village had to go to church upon the morrow unshavenor untrimmed. 

I know not what has become now of Clarkie or his shop. Doubtless theyhave gone the way of so many pleasantly flavored things of ourvanished New England. I only know that I still possess a razor he soldme when my downy face had begun to arouse public derision. I shallalways cherish that razor, though I never shave with it. I never couldshave with it! But I love Clarkie just the same. He only provedhimself thereby the ultimate Yankee. 

 [Illustration]

 _The Button Box_

"Have you, " said I, "anything like the ones left?"--and I held out tomy wife a shirt just back from the laundry, and minus a strategicbutton. 

"I'll look in my button box and see, " she answered, taking the shirt. 

Her button box! I did not know she had one, and followed her into herretreat to see it. But alas! it was a grievous disappointment, beingnothing but a drawer set in some sort of a fancy contraption ofchintz-covered pasteboard, like a toy bureau, which stood on her worktable. No doubt it contained buttons, and was serviceable. But abutton box! To call it that were to libel a noble institution of anelder day. 

As I waited for the restoration of my shirt I thought tenderly of thebutton box of my childhood. It was no dinky six-by-four-inchpasteboard drawer, not two inches deep--no, sir! It was a cylindricalwooden box of the substantial and finished workmanship which went intoeven such humble things as a butter box a century ago, for mother hadinherited it from her mother. It must once have contained ten poundsof butter, but all traces of its original service had longdisappeared. The drum, of very thin, tough wood, which had kept itsshape uncracked, had been polished a dark nut brown by countlesshands. The bottom and cover, of pine, were darkened, too, but withoutpolish. This box dwelt on the second shelf of the old what-not, which, in turn, stood in the closet passage underneath the stairs. When anyaccident befell our garment fastenings, "Go and get the button box, "mother said, as she reached for her needle. Or, on rainy days, when wegrew more and more restless and all other devices failed, "You may goand get the button box, " mother would say, and we were solaced tillsupper time. 

No modern patent sewing-table receptacle could possibly hold onequarter of the contents of that button box, the accumulation of atleast three generations. It was heavy, and having no handles, you hadto grasp it with open palms on either side--hence the polish. Itrattled when taken down from its shelf, and the very first thing youdid when the lid was off was to plunge your two hands down into themass, and let fistfuls of buttons trickle through your fingers. 

Sometimes we played it was a treasure chest, and these buttons wereSpanish doubloons. Sometimes we trickled them just for the cool feelof it, the sound of the rattle, the sensation of plunging fingersinto the oddly liquid mass. There were great steel buttons, littlepearl buttons, white bone buttons, black suspender buttons, clothbuttons, silk buttons, crocheted buttons, elongated crystal buttons(which we held to the light "to make prisms"), lovely agate buttons, brass military buttons with the U. S. Eagle upon them, wooden buttons, either once covered or yet to be covered, shoe buttons (whichinvariably were in practical demand and invariably had sunk to thebottom of the box), strange great buttons from some long-forgottengarment of grandmother's, familiar buttons from some newly rememberedgarment of our own. 

It seems odd, when I think of it now, the endless delight we childrengot just from the contemplation and discussion of those buttons. Sometimes, of course, we picked out the suitable ones, and strung themin long chains. Sometimes we used them for counters in games. Butoften we just turned them over and over, or tipped them out on a paperspread on the floor, and from the hints they gave us reconstructedancient garments or recalled forgotten clothes of our own. 

"Oh, that one used to be on my winter jacket!"

"Look, here's one of papa's pants buttons--it says 'Macullar andParker' on it!"

"Hi, there's my old brown overcoat!"

"Oh, dear, I wish I still had that pretty gray suit, with those steelbuttons on it!"

The silly talk of children--and how like some conversations thepropinquity of piazzas has since forced me to listen to!

To find just the button she wanted was sometimes a long task formother, and father, it must be admitted, had varied the proverbialneedle simile for our domestic establishment, to read, "like huntingfor a button in your mother's button box. " But still the odd buttonscontinued to go in, and only the ones needed came permanently out. Younever could tell, to be sure, when the most unlikely button would comein handy. Sometimes there were days when the village dress-makerarrived after breakfast and remained till almost supper time, converting the upstairs front chamber into a maze of threads andsnippings, and requisitioning the button box in long searches for "aset of six". That was a fine game! Sometimes it was easy. Sometimesonly five could be found of the type she particularly desired. Butnever did the box fail completely; always there were enough of _some_button that, she said, without dropping the pins from her mouth, woulddo, "though it ain't quite what I wanted. "

All this flashed through my memory as I waited for my wife toreëstablish connections on my shirt. As she finally finished, andpushed in her silly little drawer, I said:

"Do you call that thing a button box? Why don't you have a real one?"

"That's quite large enough when you have to find a match, " said she, "and too large when you drop it. "

Women are practical creatures; there is no sentiment in them. Theiralleged possession of it is the most spurious of all the argumentsagainst equal suffrage. 

 [Illustration]

 _Peppermints_

I have just purchased a little bag of peppermints, and returned withthem to my rooms above the Square. I did not purchase them at thepromptings of a sweet tooth, but of a hungry heart. They take me backinto the forgotten Aprils of my life, where I often love to loiter, not from any resentment that I have been unable to emulate Peter Panand remain a boy forever, but because this great town is drab anddusty and imprisoning, and it is sweet to escape down the green lanesof April, even if only in a memory. A physical sensation--the sound ofa voice, a hand patting us to the rhythm of "Tell Aunt Rhody", anodor--can plunge us deeper and swifter down to the buried places ofour memory than any process of deliberate recollection. No robin singsagainst my window of a morning here--only the noisy sparrows twitterand quarrel, reminding me of the curb market. No lilac sheds itsperfume on the still air. I am perforce reduced to peppermints. Thetaste of peppermints on my tongue, the pungent fragrance of them in mynostrils, have the power, however, to transport me far from this mazeof mortared cañons, back across the years, to a land where the robinssang against the spacious sky and a little boy dreamed great dreams. 

So now I am sitting high up above the Square, with my little bag ofpeppermints before me (somewhat diminished in quantity already), andthink, between slow, sipping nibbles, of that little boy. 

In his day, in the land where he came from, peppermints were almost asymbol of life's best things--of grandmothers and other dear oldladies who kept cookies in cool stone crocks in sweet-smelling"butt'ries" (sometimes foolishly called pantries by those who put onairs); of Christmastides when to the joy of peppermint sticks wasadded the unspeakable delight of sucking barley toys, --red dogs, golden camels that lost their humps and elephants that lost theirtrunks as the tongue went succulently 'round and 'round them; of thewonderful village "notion" store, presided over by a terrible femaleperson with a deep bass voice, who asked you over the counter as youentered, "Which side, young man?" It was bad enough to be called"Bubbie", but to be called "young man" in this ironic bass was almostinsufferable. Yet you bore it nobly, for the sake of the pound of shotfor your air-gun or the blood-alley or the great pink and whitepeppermints, two for a cent, that reposed in a glass jar on the leftside of the shop. Was Miss Emily so terrible a person, I wonder now?She was always looked upon a little askance by the ladies of ourvillage because she was "so masculine". But if she did not conceal asoftness for children under her stern exterior why did she keep astock of so many things dear to the childish heart, from papersoldiers (purchased by the yard) to sleds and shot? Perhaps thatfantastic stock of hers was her curious expression of the EternalMotherly. After she died, every year on the 30th of May the"Vet'rans, " as they marched two by two in annually dwindling linesabout the cemetery, placed a fresh print flag and a basket ofgeraniums on her grave, because she had sent a substitute to the War. To us youngsters this substitute used to explain why she kept shot forsale; she was by nature a bellicose person, and, we were sure, hergreat grief was her sex. 

In my own family peppermints were directly connected, by legend, withfeminine attractiveness. A great grandmother on my mother's side hadbeen in her day a famous beauty. And when asked the secret of hercharm, as she frequently was (to my infant imagination she appeared asa superhumanly radiant vision who walked about the streets in ahoop-skirt with an admiring throng in her wake, constantly beingforced to explain why she was beautiful), she did not uttertestimonials for anybody's soap, nor for a patent dietary system, noreven for outdoor exercise. She replied simply, "Peppermints". Greatgrandmamma died when my mother was a girl, and to mother fell the taskof going through the old lady's possessions. She says it was a task;probably it was a privilege. At any rate, my mother records that shefound peppermints everywhere, in every kind of wrapper, stowed in thedifferent receptacles, in boxes, bags, trunks, in bureau drawers andwriting desks and "secretaries". They were among letters and laces, inthe folds of silk gowns and even the table linen. Some of thepeppermints had crumbled and almost evaporated. Some had "ossified", as mother says. "And, " she used to add, telling the tale tolarge-eyed, hungry-mouthed little me, "I have not seen so manypeppermints outside a candy shop since that day. "

"But did the peppermints really make great grandmamma beautiful?" Iwould ask. 

"She always said so, " my mother would reply, "and she was certainlyvery beautiful. "

"Is that why you eat peppermints?" I then inquired, on a day when Ihad detected her with a bag of the confection. 

At this point there was a masculine chuckle from the armchair by thebookcase. Also, a peppermint was promptly produced for my personalconsumption. I had a great fondness for the memory of my beautifulancestor. 

Peppermints, too, are intimately connected with the religiousexperiences of my childhood; or, perhaps I should say, with thereligious observances of my childhood. Our minister's whiskers alwaysinterested me more than his discourses. As I nibble a peppermint fromthe bag before me--lingeringly, for the supply is being fastdepleted--and the frail yet pungent odor fills my nostrils, I am oncemore in that half-filled church, on a Sabbath morning in early Spring, dozing through the sermon, with my head tumbling sleepily now and thenagainst my father's shoulder. Slowly the scene comes back, in everyleast detail, the smallest sights and sounds of that morning all here, but all thin and faint and frail, spun of the gossamer web of memory. Can I hold them till they are set down? I shall have to eat anotherprecious white lozenge from my bag. 

My cheek had bumped my father's shoulder again when I caught a suddenwhiff of peppermint drops and raised my head just in time to see anold lady across the aisle whisk her dress down over her petticoatpocket. For a few moments I watched her in envy, for her mouth wasmoving ever so little and I could fancy the delicious taste. But howcould she enjoy the candy and not make her mouth go more than that, Iwondered. I did not shut my eyes again, but sat very still against myfather's arm and let my eyes wander around the church. 

Ours was one of the "new" churches. The beautiful old "meeting house"at the head of the village green, with its exquisite white spire andits pillard pulpit and windows of "common" glass, purpling with age, was the property of the Methodists--which in some manner I could notthen understand (and do not clearly yet) was always a source ofresentment in our congregation. Our church had stained windows, achocolate brown field with white stars in the centre and around theedges tiny squares of many colors, atrocious reds, blues and yellows. These windows were opened a little at the top, and through theopenings came soft sounds of Spring, the wind racing among the buddingbranches, the sudden call of a bird, and occasionally the crooning, sleepy cackle of hens from a distance. Now and then a cloud driftedby, across the sun, dimming the interior for a moment, so that theminister's voice seemed to come from farther off. The sunlight throughthe stained glass projected colored splotches here and there. Iwondered if the people knew how homely they looked with thosesplotches on their faces, like great birth-marks. That suggested apastime to relieve the monotony. 

Starting with the choir (which consisted of four people, boxed inbefore the organ at the right of the pulpit) I began to count peoplewith colored spots. First there was the tenor with a purple spot onhis left cheek and on his sandy hair and beard. But the organist andsoprano were splashed with scarlet. Then I forget to count, because Inoticed that the 'alto had a new violet hat, which eclipsed thesoprano's old green one. I wondered whether she had gone to Boston tobuy it, or had "patronized home industries"--a phrase I had justdiscovered with pride in our local paper. The bass was nodding andletting his hymn book slip toward a fall. I hoped slily that it wouldfall, and braced my nerves for the crash. But he woke with a funnyjerk, like my jack-in-the-box, just in time to catch it, and beganlistening intently to the sermon as if he had been awake all thewhile. The soprano smiled at someone in the congregation, whispered tothe tenor, and then sat silent again. 

My gaze wandered to the minister's pleasant face, with its greatsquare-cut gray beard, which always suggested to me--why, I don'tknow--one of the minor prophets; and then past him to the gilded crossthat was painted on the apsidal wall behind him. I knew that if Ilooked at this cross, with its gilded rays spreading out in alldirections, long enough the rays would begin to melt together and thento turn 'round and 'round in a kind of dizzy dance. So I lookedsteadily, till I had to shake the sleep out of my eyes with a greateffort. Then I fell to speculating on the tablets painted at the leftof the pulpit, to balance the organ. These tablets were encased in adesign that suggested a twin tombstone. On one of them were the words, "God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spiritand in truth, " a sentence which had always given me great difficulty. But this morning I interpreted it at last to my satisfaction. Itmeant, I decided, that a man must first die and become a ghost, aspirit, before he could tell what church he really ought to go to. Iwondered if, in that spirit region, there would be any Methodists. 

Directly below the tablets, in a front pew, sat Miss Emily, she of abass voice and the "notion" store. Her Paisley shawl was foldedtightly around her broad, bony shoulders, and made the lower half of adiamond down her back, the pattern exactly in the middle. If thepattern had not been exactly in the middle I am sure the service wouldhave stopped automatically, till it was adjusted. She sat verystraight and looked with partly turned head, showing her masculineprofile, sternly at the minister, as if defying him to be unorthodox. I tried to picture her asking _him_, as he entered her shop, "Whichside, old man?" Would she dare, I wondered? And what would he reply? Afew pews behind Miss Emily sat "the spilled-over old lady". My sisterhad first called her the spilled-over old lady, because she seemed tohave been crowded out by the six old ladies in the pew behind, and tohave been permanently soured by the slight. Her hair was done up in atight, emphatic pug, her profile suggested vinegar--or perhaps it washer complexion. At any rate, when I looked at her I thought ofvinegar. I wondered if she ever ate peppermints, and if they tastedthe same to her as to other people. 

Presently I leaned forward and extracted a hymn book from the rackattached to the back of the pew in front. This rack contained, besideshymn books, a pair of old gloves done into a wad wrong side out, twofans, "leaflets" of all sorts, and little envelopes for thecollection. Most of the "leaflets" were appeals for charity, I fancy. At any rate, many of them were full of pictures of poor little citychildren suffering from all sorts of diseases, and oppressed mehorribly. But I could always rely on the hymn book. My firstconsciousness that there is any difference between prose and poetryexcept in the matter of rhyme came from reading the hymn book, fromWhittier's, --

 I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air; I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care. 

I had no idea what kind of a palm a fronded palm is, but I fancied itsomething much grander and taller than other palms; and the whole hymnfilled my mind with a large, expansive imagery, breathed over mylittle spirit an ineffable serenity. This hymn I now read while theminister talked away behind his minor-prophet whiskers;--this, andWesley's, --

 A charge to keep I have, A God to glorify; A never-dying soul to save, And fit it for the sky. 

This stanza always made me want to get up and shout. I read andre-read it, repeating it, with noiseless lips. The tune it went toseemed inadequate, the more so as in our church tunes were alwaysdragged to the limit of non-conformist dolorousness. The stanza seemedto me, even then, happy, hopeful, staccato, jubilant. I wonder what Ishould have thought had I known its author was a Methodist? Could goodcome out of Nazareth, after all? Instead, I fell to wondering aboutthe after life in the sky. Heaven I pictured as a city builded on acloud. If, on a very clear day, the cloud should dry up what, Ispeculated, would the angels walk on? Then it occurred to me that theydo not walk, they fly. So they would go flying about streets out ofwhich the bottoms had dropped, and look right through far down to theearth, which to their sight would doubtless resemble the raised map ofAmerica in our school, that stood on a table in the corner and alwayshad chalk dust, like snow, in the inch-deep ravines of the RockyMountains. I wondered if the lower stories of the houses would haveany floors. The cellars wouldn't, anyway. What kept the furnaces inposition? Perhaps they didn't need furnaces in heaven; it was theother place where the furnaces were. Then I dozed. 

In our church Sunday School began at noon, immediately following thechurch service, in a large room at the rear, known as the vestry. Thefirst small boy on his way to school stamped by on the walk outside, with what sounded like defiant aggressiveness. I roused from my dozein time to see the old man in front of me wake up with a start at thesound and reach quickly for his hymn book, as if he supposed thesermon were over. Then the stamping of other children was heard on thewalk. The scholars passed in groups, talking shrilly. I knew it mustbe nearly twelve o'clock. In the congregation there was a rustle ofgathering restlessness; women put on their gloves, tried to glanceback at the clock without seeming to do so, stirred in their seats. The last vestige of sleep mysteriously yielded to this influence andleft me. At last the minister came to the conclusion of his discourse, and instantly there was a sound all over the church as of watersreleased and hurrying over dead leaves. It was the congregationshifting their positions, expelling their breaths, and turning thepages of their hymn books. I listened curiously for the next sound. It was the clearing of a hundred throats, getting ready to sing. I tooarose and in my tuneless treble made a joyful noise unto the Lord. Then church was over. 

And my peppermints are all eaten, too, and the gossamer web of memorydissolves, the picture fades, and I see before me this room of mine, littered with some learned literature but more pipes and prints andmiscellaneous rubbish, and I hear outside in the Square, not thespring wind racing among the budding branches, but the coughing of aconsumptive motor car, the penetrating squeak of a trolley rounding acurve on a dry track, the irritating jolt of heavy drays, and a great, subdued, never-ceasing rumble and roar, the key-note of the giantcity. Only the little bag remains. Shall I blow it up and "bust" it?That act, with a final pop, will bring back a flash of my childhood. Here goes. . . . 

It didn't pop nicely at all. It exploded in a kind of a spudgycollapse, with very little noise. Ah, well, you cannot eat yourpeppermints and have them too--nor the bag! But it has been verypleasant to eat them, to wake up with a whiff and a nibble the memoryof those vanished days, those voices and peaceful paths of life veryfar from here and now. It may be true that we mount on our dead selvesto higher things, but it is well to hold little Memorial Days now andthen, and on the graves of our dead, especially of those who diedyoung in the flower of innocence, to leave a peppermint, as thesoldiers leave on the grave of Miss Emily a print flag and a basket ofgeraniums. A cemetery need not be a mournful place. Maids were wooedand won in _our_ cemetery, and the high school pupils ate theirlunches out of collapsable tin boxes every noon on the tomb of MajorBarton, he of Revolutionary fame, who horse-whipped the Britishcaptive when he refused to eat beans. Noble New Englander! And perhapsmy own peppermint feasts are not so much memorial banquet, after all, as ceremonial rites in honor of my native land. For I cannot think ofthis great city of New York as my home, I cannot fit into the rushing, roaring cogs and grooves of its machinery without a protest, without ahope that some day I may hear the wheels no longer roar at their cruelrevolutions. Thus my peppermints speak to me of home, of quiet, ofcertain green places and a lilac hedge; there is about them the tasteand odor of the ideal. They are for the future as well as for thepast. Perhaps in some subtle way they do after all have potency forbeauty. I fancy that some day I too shall stow away bags of them amidmy worthless precious junk, and when prying hands disturb the dust thenostrils of a youngster now unborn will be greeted by a frail yetpungent aroma. I can only trust that he will know well what it is. 

 TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

Since the book is a collection of essays printed at different magazinesand at different times, varied spelling has been preserved. Obvioustypographic errors have been corrected. See the list below for details. 

 Issues fixed:

page 15--typo fixed: changed 'conciousness' to 'consciousness'page 16--typo fixed: changed 'hankerchief' to 'handkerchief'page 23--spelling normalized: changed 'debris' to 'débris'page 38--typo fixed: changed 'captrued' to 'captured'page 43--typo fixed: changed 'supurb' to 'superb'page 52--typo fixed: changed 'Wentworh' to 'Wentworth'page 100--typo fixed: changed 'tremendiously' to 'tremendously'page 105--typo fixed: changed 'spash' to 'splash'page 107--typo fixed: changed 'tantelizing' to 'tantalizing'page 107--typo fixed: changed 'there it' to 'there is'page 140--typo fixed: changed 'hadows' to 'shadows'page 146--typo fixed: changed 'mountian' to 'mountain'page 147--typo fixed: changed 'latern' to 'lantern'page 155--typo fixed: changed 'nitnh' to 'ninth'page 171--typo fixed: changed 'hourse' to 'horse'page 172--typo fixed: changed 'coures' to 'course'page 174--typo fixed: changed 'morsal' to 'morsel'page 181--typo fixed: changed 'centrifugul' to 'centrifugal'page 184--typo fixed: changed 'appartment' to 'apartment'page 185--typo fixed: changed 'First is' to 'First it'page 191--typo fixed: changed 'innumerble' to 'innumerable'page 192--typo fixed: changed 'arouud' to 'around'page 192--typo fixed: changed 'lasping' to 'lapsing'page 192--typo fixed: changed 'grammer' to 'grammar'page 198--typo fixed: changed 'hankerchief' to 'handkerchief'page 232--typo fixed: changed 'suberb' to 'superb'page 234--typo fixed: changed 'griveous' to 'grievous'page 235--typo fixed: changed 'possible' to 'possibly'page 236--typo fixed: changed 'bottons' to 'buttons'page 239--typo fixed: changed 'rythm' to 'rhythm'page 244--typo fixed: changed 'interrior' to 'interior'page 246--typo fixed: changed 'unothordox' to 'unorthodox'page 247--typo fixed: changed 'imagry' to 'imagery'