Other Books by the Same Author:

 "Journeys to Bagdad" _Sixth printing_. 

 "Chimney-Pot Papers" _Third printing_. 

 "Hints to Pilgrims"

THERE'S PIPPINS

AND

CHEESE TO COME

BY

CHARLES S. BROOKS

1917

Illustrated by Theodore Diedricksen, Jr. 

TO MY FATHER AND MOTHER

CONTENTS

I. There's Pippins and Cheese to Come

II. On Buying Old Books

III. Any Stick Will Do to Beat a Dog

IV. Roads of Morning

V. The Man of Grub Street Comes from His Garret

VI. Now that Spring is Here

VII. The Friendly Genii

VIII. Mr. Pepys Sits in the Pit

IX. To an Unknown Reader

X. A Plague of All Cowards

XI. The Asperities of the Early British Reviewers

XII. The Pursuit of Fire

THERE'S PIPPINS AND CHEESE TO COME

There's Pippins and Cheese To Come

In my noonday quest for food, if the day is fine, it is my habit to shunthe nearer places of refreshment. I take the air and stretch myself. LikeEve's serpent I go upright for a bit. Yet if time presses, there may be hadnext door a not unsavory stowage. A drinking bar is nearest to the streetwhere its polished brasses catch the eye. It holds a gilded mirror to suchred-faced nature as consorts within. Yet you pass the bar and come upon arange of tables at the rear. 

Now, if you yield to the habits of the place you order a rump of meat. Gravy lies about it like a moat around a castle, and if there is in you thezest for encounter, you attack it above these murky waters. "This castlehath a pleasant seat, " you cry, and charge upon it with pike advanced. Butif your appetite is one to peck and mince, the whiffs that breathe upon theplace come unwelcome to your nostrils. In no wise are they like the sweetSouth upon your senses. There is even a suspicion in you--such is yourdistemper--that it is too much a witch's cauldron in the kitchen, "eye ofnewt, and toe of frog, " and you spy and poke upon your food. Bus boys bearoff the crockery as though they were apprenticed to a juggler and were onlyat the beginning of their art. Waiters bawl strange messages to the cook. It's a tongue unguessed by learning, yet sharp and potent. Also, therecomes a riot from the kitchen, and steam issues from the door as though thedevil himself were a partner and conducted here an upper branch. Like theman in the old comedy, your belly may still ring dinner, but the tinkle isfaint. Such being your state, you choose a daintier place to eat. 

Having now set upon a longer journey--the day being fine and the sidewalksthronged--you pass by a restaurant that is but a few doors up the street. A fellow in a white coat flops pancakes in the window. But even though thepancake does a double somersault and there are twenty curious noses pressedagainst the glass, still you keep your course uptown. 

Nor are you led off because a near-by stairway beckons you to a Chineserestaurant up above. A golden dragon swings over the door. Its race hasfallen since its fire-breathing grandsire guarded the fruits of theHesperides. Are not "soys" and "chou meins" and other such treasures of theEast laid out above? And yet the dragon dozes at its post like a sleepydog. No flame leaps up its gullet. The swish of its tail is stilled. If itwag at all, it's but in friendship or because a gust of wind has stirred itfrom its dreams. 

I have wondered why Chinese restaurants are generally on the second story. A casual inquiry attests it. I know of one, it is true, on the groundlevel, yet here I suspect a special economy. The place had formerly been aGerman restaurant, with Teuton scrolls, "Ich Dien, " and heraldries on itswalls. A frugal brush changed the decoration. From the heart of a Prussianblazonry, there flares on you in Chinese yellow a recommendation to try"Our Chicken Chop Soy. " The quartering of the House of Hohenzollern wears abaldric in praise of "Subgum Noodle Warmein, " which it seems they cook toan unusual delicacy. Even a wall painting of Rip Van Winkle bowling attenpins in the mountains is now set off with a pigtail. But the chairs wereDutch and remain as such. Generally, however, Chinese restaurants are onthe second story. Probably there is a ritual from the ancient days of MingTi that Chinamen when they eat shall sit as near as possible to the sacredmoon. 

But hold a bit! In your haste up town to find a place to eat, you aremissing some of the finer sights upon the way. In these windows thatyou pass, the merchants have set their choicest wares. If there is anycommodity of softer gloss than common, or one shinier to the eye--sothat your poverty frets you--it is displayed here. In the window of thehaberdasher, shirts--mere torsos with not a leg below or head above--yetdisport themselves in gay neckwear. Despite their dismemberment they aretricked to the latest turn of fashion. Can vanity survive such generalamputation? Then there is hope for immortality. 

But by what sad chance have these blithe fellows been disjointed? Ifa gloomy mood prevails in you--as might come from a bad turn of themarket--you fancy that the evil daughter of Herodias still lives around thecorner, and that she has set out her victims to the general view. If therecomes a hurdy-gurdy on the street and you cock your ear to the tune ofit, you may still hear the dancing measure of her wicked feet. Or it ispossible that these are the kindred of Holofernes and that they have suppedguiltily in their tents with a sisterhood of Judiths. 

Or we may conceive--our thoughts running now to food--that these gamesomecreatures of the haberdasher had dressed themselves for a more recentbanquet. Their black-tailed coats and glossy shirts attest a rare occasion. It was in holiday mood, when they were fresh-combed and perked in theirbest, that they were cut off from life. It would appear that Jack Ketch theheadsman got them when they were rubbed and shining for the feast. We'llnot squint upon his writ. It is enough that they were apprehended for somerascality. When he came thumping on his dreadful summons, here they werealready set, fopped from shoes to head in the newest whim. Spoon in handand bib across their knees--lest they fleck their careful fronts--theywaited for the anchovy to come. And on a sudden they were cut off fromlife, unfit, unseasoned for the passage. Like the elder Hamlet's brother, they were engaged upon an act that had no relish of salvation in it. Youmay remember the lamentable child somewhere in Dickens, who because of anabrupt and distressing accident, had a sandwich in its hand but no mouthto put it in. Or perhaps you recall the cook of the Nancy Bell and hisgrievous end. The poor fellow was stewed in his own stew-pot. It was theElderly Naval Man, you recall--the two of them being the ship's solesurvivors on the deserted island, and both of them lean with hunger--it wasthe Elderly Naval Man (the villain of the piece) who "ups with his heels, and smothers his squeals in the scum of the boiling broth. "

And yet by looking on these torsos of the haberdasher, one is not broughtto thoughts of sad mortality. Their joy is so exultant. And all the thingsthat they hold dear--canes, gloves, silk hats, and the newer garments onwhich fashion makes its twaddle--are within reach of their armless sleeves. Had they fingers they would be smoothing themselves before the glass. Theirunbodied heads, wherever they may be, are still smiling on the world, despite their divorcement. Their tongues are still ready with a jest, theirlips still parted for the anchovy to come. 

A few days since, as I was thinking--for so I am pleased to call my muddystirrings--what manner of essay I might write and how best to sort and layout the rummage, it happened pat to my needs that I received from a frienda book entitled "The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened. " Now, beforeit came I had got so far as to select a title. Indeed, I had written thetitle on seven different sheets of paper, each time in the hope that bythe run of the words I might leap upon some further thought. Seven times Ifailed and in the end the sheets went into the waste basket, possiblyto the confusion of Annie our cook, who may have mistaken them for areiterated admonishment towards the governance of her kitchen--at theleast, a hint of my desires and appetite for cheese and pippins. 

"The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened" is a cook book. It is due youto know this at once, otherwise your thoughts--if your nature bevagrant--would drift towards family skeletons. Or maybe the domestic traitsprevail and you would think of dress-clothes hanging in camphorated bagsand a row of winter boots upon a shelf. 

I am disqualified to pass upon the merits of a cook book, for the reasonthat I have little discrimination in food. It is not that I am totallyindifferent to what lies on the platter. Indeed, I have more than a tribalaversion to pork in general, while, on the other hand, I quicken joyfullywhen noodles are interspersed with bacon. I have a tooth for sweets, too, although I hold it unmanly and deny it as I can. I am told also--althoughI resent it--that my eye lights up on the appearance of a tray of Frenchpastry. I admit gladly, however, my love of onions, whether they comehissing from the skillet, or lie in their first tender whiteness. Theyare at their best when they are placed on bread and are eaten largely atmidnight after society has done its worst. 

A fine dinner is lost within me. A quail is but an inferior chicken--a poorrelation outside the exclusive hennery. Terrapin sits low in my regard, even though it has wallowed in the most aristocratic marsh. Through suchdinners I hack and saw my way without even gaining a memory of my progress. If asked the courses, I balk after the recital of the soup. Indeed, I am soforgetful of food, even when I dine at home, that I can well believe thatAdam when he was questioned about the apple was in real confusion. He hador he had not. It was mixed with the pomegranate or the quince that Eve hadsliced and cooked on the day before. 

A dinner at its best is brought to a single focus. There is one dishto dominate the cloth, a single bulk to which all other dishes aresubordinate. If there be turkey, it should mount from a central platter. Its protruding legs out-top the candles. All other foods are, as it were, privates in Caesar's army. They do no more than flank the pageant. Nor maythe pantry hold too many secrets. Within reason, everything should beset out at once, or at least a gossip of its coming should run before. Otherwise, if the stew is savory, how shall one reserve a corner for thecustard? One must partition himself justly--else, by an over-stowage at theend, he list and sink. 

I am partial to picnics--the spreading of the cloth in the woods or besidea stream--although I am not avid for sandwiches unless hunger press me. Rather, let there be a skillet in the company and let a fire be started!Nor need a picnic consume the day. In summer it requires but the lateafternoon, with such borrowing of the night as is necessary for thejourney home. You leave the street car, clanking with your bundles like anitinerant tinman. You follow a stream, which on these lower stretches, itis sad to say, is already infected with the vices of the city. Like many acountryman who has come to town, it has fallen to dissipation. It shows themarks of the bottle. Further up, its course is cleaner. You cross it in themud. Was it not Christian who fell into the bog because of the burden onhis back? Then you climb a villainously long hill and pop out upon an openplatform above the city. 

The height commands a prospect to the west. Below is the smoke of athousand suppers. Up from the city there comes the hum of life, nowsomewhat fallen with the traffic of the day--as though Nature alreadypracticed the tune for sending her creatures off to sleep. You light afire. The baskets disgorge their secrets. Ants and other leviathans thinkevidently that a circus has come or that bears are in the town. The chopsand bacon achieve their appointed destiny. You throw the last bone acrossyour shoulder. It slips and rattles to the river. The sun sets. Night likean ancient dame puts on her jewels:

 And now that I have climbed and won this height, I must tread downward through the sloping shade And travel the bewildered tracks till night. Yet for this hour I still may here be stayed And see the gold air and the silver fade And the last bird fly into the last light. 

By these confessions you will see how unfit I am to comment on the old cookbook of Sir Kenelm Digby. Yet it lies before me. It may have escaped yourmemory in the din of other things, that in the time when Oliver Cromwellstill walked the earth, there lived in England a man by the name of KenelmDigby, who was renowned in astrology and alchemy, piracy, wit, philosophyand fashion. It appears that wherever learning wagged its bulbous head, SirKenelm was of the company. It appears, also, that wherever the mahogany didmost groan, wherever the possets were spiced most delicately to the nose, there too did Sir Kenelm bib and tuck himself. With profundity, asthough he sucked wisdom from its lowest depth, he spouted forth on thetransmutation of the baser metals or tossed you a phrase from Paracelsus. Or with long instructive finger he dissertated on the celestial universe. One would have thought that he had stood by on the making of it and thathis judgment had prevailed in the larger problems. Yet he did not neglecthis trencher. 

And now as time went on, the richness of the food did somewhat dominate hisperson. The girth of his wisdom grew no less, but his body fattened. Ina word, the good gentleman's palate came to vie with his intellect. Lessoften was he engaged upon some dark saying of Isidore of Seville. Rather, even if his favorite topic astrology were uppermost about the table, hiseye travelled to the pantry on every change of dishes. His fingers, too, came to curl most delicately on his fork. He used it like an epicure, poking his viands apart for sharpest scrutiny. His nod upon a compote wasmuch esteemed. 

Now mark his further decline! On an occasion--surely the old rascal's headis turned!--he would be found in private talk with his hostess, the Lady ofMiddlesex, or with the Countess of Monmouth, not as you might expect, onthe properties of fire or on the mortal diseases of man, but--on subjectsquite removed. Society, we may be sure, began to whisper of these snugparleys in the arbor after dinner, these shadowed mumblings on the balconywhen the moon was up--and Lady Digby stiffened into watchfulness. It waswhen they took leave that she saw the Countess slip a note into her lord'sfingers. Her jealousy broke out. "Viper!" She spat the words and seized herhusband's wrist. Of course the note was read. It proved, however, that SirKenelm was innocent of all mischief. To the disappointment of the gossips, who were tuned to a spicier anticipation, the note was no more than arecipe of the manner that the Countess was used to mix her syllabub, withinstruction that it was the "rosemary a little bruised and the limon-pealthat did quicken the taste. " Advice, also, followed in the postscript onthe making of tea, with counsel that "the boiling water should remain uponit just so long as one might say a _miserere_. " A mutual innocence beingnow established, the Lady Digby did by way of apology peck the Countess onthe cheek. 

Sir Kenelm died in 1665, full of years. In that day his fame rested chieflyon his books in physic and chirurgery. His most enduring work was still tobe published--"The Closet Opened. "

It was two years after his death that his son came upon a bundle of hisfather's papers that had hitherto been overlooked. I fancy that he wentspying in the attic on a rainy day. In the darkest corner, behind therocking horse--if such devices were known in those distant days--he cameupon a trunk of his father's papers. "Od's fish, " said Sir Kenelm's son, "here's a box of manuscripts. It is like that they pertain to alchemy orchirurgery. " He pulled out a bundle and held it to the light--such light ascame through the cobwebs of the ancient windows. "Here be strange matters, "he exclaimed. Then he read aloud: "My Lord of Bristol's Scotch collops arethus made: Take a leg of fine sweet mutton, that to make it tender, iskept as long as possible may be without stinking. In winter seven or eightdays"--"Ho! Ho!" cried Sir Kenelm's son. "This is not alchemy!" He drew outanother parchment and read again: "My Lord of Carlile's sack posset, howit's made: Take a pottle of cream and boil in it a little whole cinnamonand three or four flakes of mace. Boil it until it simpreth and bubbleth. "

By this time, as you may well imagine, Sir Kenelm's son was wrought to anexcitement. It is likely that he inherited his father's palate and that thejuices of his appetite were stirred. Seizing an armful of the papers, heleaped down the attic steps, three at a time. His lady mother thrust acurled and papered head from her door and asked whether the chimney wereafire, but he did not heed her. The cook was waddling in her pattens. Hecried to her to throw wood upon the fire. 

That night the Digby household was served a delicacy, red herrings broiledin the fashion of my Lord d'Aubigny, "short and crisp and laid upon asallet. " Also, there was a wheaten flommery as it was made in the WestCountry--for the cook chose quite at random--and a slip-coat cheese asMaster Phillips proportioned it. Also, against the colic, which wasravishing the country, the cook prepared a metheglin as Lady Stuart mixedit--"nettles, fennel and grumel seeds, of each two ounces being small-cutand mixed with honey and boiled together. " It is on record that the LadyDigby smiled for the first time since her lord had died, and when thegrinning cook bore in the platter, she beat upon the table with her spoon. 

The following morning, Sir Kenelm's son posted to London bearing therecipes, with a pistol in the pocket of his great coat against the crossingof Hounslow Heath. He went to a printer at the Star in Little Britain whosename was H. Brome. 

Shortly the book appeared. It was the son who wrote the preface: "Thereneeds no Rhetoricating Floscules to set it off. The Authour, as is wellknown, having been a Person of Eminency for his Learning, and of ExquisiteCuriosity in his Researches. Even that Incomparable Sir Kenelme DigbieKnight, Fellow of the Royal Society and Chancellour to the Queen Mother, (Et omen in Nomine) His name does sufficiently Auspicate the Work. " Thesale of the book is not recorded. It is supposed that the Lady Middlesex, so many of whose recipes had been used, directed that her chair be carriedto the shop where the book was for sale and that she bought largely of it. The Countess of Dorset bought a copy and spelled it out word for word toher cook. As for the Lady Monmouth, she bought not a single copy, whichneglect on coming to the Digbys aroused a coolness. 

To this day it is likely that a last auspicated volume still sits on itsshelf with the spice jars in some English country kitchen and that a wornand toothless cook still thumbs its leaves. If the guests about the tablebe of an antique mind, still will they pledge one another with its honeyeddrinks, still will they pipe and whistle of its virtues, still will they--

"EAT"--A flaring sign hangs above the sidewalk. By this time, in ournoonday search for food, we have come into the thick of the restaurants. Inthe jungle of the city, here is the feeding place. Here come the growlingbipeds for such bones and messes as are thrown them. 

The waiter thrusts a card beneath my nose. "Nice leg of lamb, sir?" I wavedhim off. "Hold a bit!" I cried. "You'll fetch me a capon in white broth asmy Lady Monmouth broileth hers. Put plentiful sack in it and boil it untilit simpreth!" The waiter scratched his head. "The chicken pie is good, " hesaid. "It's our Wednesday dish. " "Varlet!" I cried--then softened. "Let itbe the chicken pie! But if the cook knoweth the manner that Lord Carliledoes mix and pepper it, let that manner be followed to the smallestfraction of a pinch!"

On Buying Old Books

By some slim chance, reader, you may be the kind of person who, on a visitto a strange city, makes for a bookshop. Of course your slight temporalbusiness may detain you in the earlier hours of the day. You sit withcommittees and stroke your profound chin, or you spend your talent in themarket, or run to and fro and wag your tongue in persuasion. Or, if you beon a holiday, you strain yourself on the sights of the city, against beingcaught in an omission. The bolder features of a cathedral must be graspedto satisfy a quizzing neighbor lest he shame you later on your hearth, abuilding must be stuffed inside your memory, or your pilgrim feet must wearthe pavement of an ancient shrine. However, these duties being done and theafternoon having not yet declined, do you not seek a bookshop to regaleyourself?

Doubtless, we have met. As you have scrunched against the shelf not toblock the passage, but with your head thrown back to see the titles upabove, you have noticed at the corner of your eye--unless it was one ofyour blinder moments when you were fixed wholly on the shelf--a man ina slightly faded overcoat of mixed black and white, a man just past thenimbleness of youth, whose head is plucked of its full commodity of hair. It was myself. I admit the portrait, though modesty has curbed me short ofjustice. 

Doubtless, we have met. It was your umbrella--which you held villainouslybeneath your arm--that took me in the ribs when you lighted on a set ofFuller's Worthies. You recall my sour looks, but it was because I hadmyself lingered on the volumes but cooled at the price. How you smoothedand fingered them! With what triumph you bore them off! I bid you--for Isee you in a slippered state, eased and unbuttoned after dinner--I bid youturn the pages with a slow thumb, not to miss the slightest tang of theirhumor. You will of course go first, because of its broad fame, to the pageon Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and their wet-combats at the Mermaid. Butbefore the night is too far gone and while yet you can hold yourself fromnodding, you will please read about Captain John Smith of Virginia and his"strange performances, the scene whereof is laid at such a distance, theyare cheaper credited than confuted. "

In no proper sense am I a buyer of old books. I admit a bookish quirkmaybe, a love of the shelf, a weakness for morocco, especially if it isstained with age. I will, indeed, shirk a wedding for a bookshop. I'llgo in "just to look about a bit, to see what the fellow has, " and on anoccasion I pick up a volume. But I am innocent of first editions. It isa stiff courtesy, as becomes a democrat, that I bestow on this formof primogeniture. Of course, I have nosed my way with pleasure alongaristocratic shelves and flipped out volumes here and there to ask theirprice, but for the greater part, it is the plainer shops that engage me. Ifa rack of books is offered cheap before the door, with a fixed price upon acard, I come at a trot. And if a brown dust lies on them, I bow and sniffupon the rack, as though the past like an ancient fop in peruke and bucklewere giving me the courtesy of its snuff box. If I take the dust in mynostrils and chance to sneeze, it is the fit and intended observance towardthe manners of a former century. 

I have in mind such a bookshop in Bath, England. It presents to the streetno more than a decent front, but opens up behind like a swollen bottle. There are twenty rooms at least, piled together with such confusion ofblack passages and winding steps, that one might think that the ownerhimself must hold a thread when he visits the remoter rooms. Indeed, suchare the obscurities and dim turnings of the place, that, were the legend ofthe Minotaur but English, you might fancy that the creature still lived inthis labyrinth, to nip you between his toothless gums--for the beast growsold--at some darker corner. There is a story of the place, that once a rawclerk having been sent to rummage in the basement, his candle tipped offthe shelf. He was left in so complete darkness that his fears overcame hisjudgment and for two hours he roamed and babbled among the barrels. Nor washis absence discovered until the end of the day when, as was the custom, the clerks counted noses at the door. When they found him, he bolted up thesteps, nor did he cease his whimper until he had reached the comfortingtwilight of the outer world. He served thereafter in the shop a full twoyears and had a beard coming--so the story runs--before he would againventure beyond the third turning of the passage; to the stunting of hisscholarship, for the deeper books lay in the farther windings. 

Or it may appear credible that in ages past a jealous builder contrived theplace. Having no learning himself and being at odds with those of betteropportunity, he twisted the pattern of the house. Such was his evil temper, that he set the steps at a dangerous hazard in the dark, in order thatscholars--whose eyes are bleared at best--might risk their legs to the endof time. Those of strict orthodoxy have even suspected the builder to havebeen an atheist, for they have observed what double joints and steps andturnings confuse the passage to the devouter books--the Early Fathers inparticular being up a winding stair where even the soberest reader mightbreak his neck. Be these things as they may, leather bindings in sets of"grenadier uniformity" ornament the upper and lighter rooms. Biographystraggles down a hallway, with a candle needed at the farther end. A roomof dingy plays--Wycherley, Congreve and their crew--looks out through anarea grating. It was through even so foul an eye, that when alive, theylooked upon the world. As for theology, except for the before-mentionedFathers, it sits in general and dusty convention on the landing to thebasement, its snuffy sermons, by a sad misplacement--or is there anironical intention?--pointing the way to the eternal abyss below. 

It was in this shop that I inquired whether there was published a book onpiracy in Cornwall. Now, I had lately come from Tintagel on the Cornishcoast, and as I had climbed upon the rocks and looked down upon the sea, Ihad wondered to myself whether, if the knowledge were put out before me, Icould compose a story of Spanish treasure and pirates. For I am a prey tosuch giddy ambition. A foul street--if the buildings slant and topple--willset me thinking delightfully of murders. A wharf-end with water lappingunderneath and bits of rope about will set me itching for a deep-sea plot. Or if I go on broader range and see in my fancy a broken castle on a hill, I'll clear its moat and sound trumpets on its walls. If there is pepperin my mood, I'll storm its dungeon. Or in a softer moment I'll trim itsunsubstantial towers with pageantry and rest upon my elbow until I fallasleep. So being cast upon the rugged Cornish coast whose cliffs are soswept with winter winds that the villages sit for comfort in the hollows, it was to be expected that my thoughts would run toward pirates. 

There is one rock especially which I had climbed in the rain and fog ofearly morning. A reckless path goes across its face with a sharp pitch tothe ocean. It was so slippery and the wind so tugged and pulled to throw meoff, that although I endangered my dignity, I played the quadruped on thenarrower parts. But once on top in the open blast of the storm and safeupon the level, I thumped with desire for a plot. In each inlet from theocean I saw a pirate lugger--such is the pleasing word--with a keg of rumset up. Each cranny led to a cavern with doubloons piled inside. Thevery tempest in my ears was compounded out of ships at sea and wreck andpillage. I needed but a plot, a thread of action to string my villains on. If this were once contrived, I would spice my text with sailors' oaths andsuch boasting talk as might lie in my invention. Could I but come upon aplot, I might yet proclaim myself an author. 

With this guilty secret in me I blushed as I asked the question. It seemedsure that the shopkeeper must guess my purpose. I felt myself suspected asthough I were a rascal buying pistols to commit a murder. Indeed, I seemto remember having read that even hardened criminals have become confusedbefore a shopkeeper and betrayed themselves. Of course, Dick Turpin andJerry Abershaw could call for pistols in the same easy tone they orderedale, but it would take a practiced villainy. But I in my innocence wantednothing but the meager outline of a pirate's life, which I might fatten tomy uses. 

But on a less occasion, when there is no plot thumping in me, I still feela kind of embarrassment when I ask for a book out of the general demand. Ifeel so like an odd stick. This embarrassment applies not to the requestfor other commodities. I will order a collar that is quite outside thefashion, in a high-pitched voice so that the whole shop can hear. I couldbargain for a purple waistcoat--did my taste run so--and though thesidewalk listened, it would not draw a blush. I have traded even forwomen's garments--though this did strain me--without an outward twitch. Finally, to top my valor, I have bought sheet music of the lighter kind andhave pronounced the softest titles so that all could hear. But if I desirethe poems of Lovelace or the plays of Marlowe, I sidle close up to theshopkeeper to get his very ear. If the book is visible, I point my thumb atit without a word. 

It was but the other day--in order to fill a gap in a paper I waswriting--I desired to know the name of an author who is obscure althoughhis work has been translated into nearly all languages. I wanted to know alittle about the life of the man who wrote _Mary Had a Little Lamb_, which, I am told, is known by children over pretty much all the western world. Itneeded only a trip to the Public Library. Any attendant would direct me tothe proper shelf. Yet once in the building, my courage oozed. My question, though serious, seemed too ridiculous to be asked. I would sizzle as Imet the attendant's eye. Of a consequence, I fumbled on my own devices, possibly to the increase of my general knowledge, but without gaining whatI sought. 

They had no book in the Bath shop on piracy in Cornwall. I was offeredinstead a work in two volumes on the notorious highwaymen of history, andfor a moment my plot swerved in that direction. But I put it by. To pay thefellow for his pains--for he had dug in barrels to his shoulders and had asmudge across his nose--I bought a copy of Thomson's "Castle of Indolence, "and in my more energetic moods I read it. And so I came away. 

On leaving the shop, lest I should be nipped in a neglect, I visited theRoman baths. Then I took the waters in the Assembly Room. It was SamWeller, you may recall, who remarked, when he was entertained by the selectfootmen, that the waters tasted like warm flat-irons. Finally, I viewedthe Crescent around which the shirted Winkle ran with the valorous Dowlerbreathing on his neck. With such distractions, as you may well imagine, Cornish pirates became as naught. Such mental vibration as I had was nowgone toward a tale of fashion in the days when Queen Anne was still alive. Of a consequence, I again sought the bookshop and stifling my timidity, Idemanded such volumes as might set me most agreeably to my task. 

I have in mind also a bookshop of small pretension in a town in Wales. Forpurely secular delight, maybe, it was too largely composed of Methodistsermons. Hell fire burned upon its shelves with a warmth to singe so poor aworm as I. Yet its signboard popped its welcome when I had walked ten milesof sunny road. Possibly it was the chair rather than the divinity thatkeeps the place in memory. The owner was absent on an errand, and hisdaughter, who had been clumping about the kitchen on my arrival, wasuninstructed in the price marks. So I read and fanned myself until hisreturn. 

Perhaps my sluggishness toward first editions--to which I have hintedabove--comes in part from the acquaintance with a man who in a linguisticoutburst as I met him, pronounced himself to be a numismatist andphilatelist. One only of these names would have satisfied a man of lessconceit. It is as though the pteranodon should claim also to be thespoon-bill dinosaur. It is against modesty that one man should summon allthe letters. No, the numismatist's head is not crammed with the mysteriesof life and death, nor is a philatelist one who is possessed with thedimmer secrets of eternity. Rather, this man who was so swelled withtitles, eked a living by selling coins and stamps, and he was on his wayto Europe to replenish his wares. Inside his waistcoat, just above hisliver--if he owned so human an appendage--he carried a magnifying glass. With this, when the business fit was on him, he counted the lines and dotsupon a stamp, the perforations on its edge. He catalogued its volutes, itsstipples, the frisks and curlings of its pattern. He had numbered the veryhairs on the head of George Washington, for in such minutiae did the valueof the stamp reside. Did a single hair spring up above the count, it wouldinvalidate the issue. Such values, got by circumstance or accident--restingon a flaw--founded on a speck--cause no ferment of my desires. 

For the buying of books, it is the cheaper shops where I most often prowl. There is in London a district around Charing Cross Road where almost everyshop has books for sale. There is a continuous rack along the sidewalk, each title beckoning for your attention. You recall the class ofstreet-readers of whom Charles Lamb wrote--"poor gentry, who, not havingwherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the openstalls. " It was on some such street that these folk practiced theirinnocent larceny. If one shopkeeper frowned at the diligence with whichthey read "Clarissa, " they would continue her distressing adventures acrossthe way. By a lingering progress up the street, "Sir Charles Grandison"might be nibbled down--by such as had the stomach--without the outlay ofa single penny. As for Gibbon and the bulbous historians, though a wholeperusal would outlast the summer and stretch to the colder months, yet withpatience they could be got through. However, before the end was come even ahasty reader whose eye was nimble on the page would be blowing on his nailsand pulling his tails between him and the November wind. 

But the habit of reading at the open stalls was not only with the poor. Youwill remember that Mr. Brownlow was addicted. Really, had not the ArtfulDodger stolen his pocket handkerchief as he was thus engaged upon his book, the whole history of Oliver Twist must have been quite different. And Pepyshimself, Samuel Pepys, F. R. S. , was guilty. "To Paul's Church Yard, " hewrites, "and there looked upon the second part of Hudibras, which I buynot, but borrow to read. " Such parsimony is the curse of authors. To thumba volume cheaply around a neighborhood is what keeps them in their garrets. It is a less offence to steal peanuts from a stand. Also, it is recorded inthe life of Beau Nash that the persons of fashion of his time, to pass atedious morning "did divert themselves with reading in the booksellers'shops. " We may conceive Mr. Fanciful Fopling in the sleepy blink of thoseearly hours before the pleasures of the day have made a start, inquiringbetween his yawns what latest novels have come down from London, or whethera new part of "Pamela" is offered yet. If the post be in, he will prophimself against the shelf and--unless he glaze and nod--he will readcheaply for an hour. Or my Lady Betty, having taken the waters in thepump-room and lent her ear to such gossip as is abroad so early, is nowhanded to her chair and goes round by Gregory's to read a bit. She isflounced to the width of the passage. Indeed, until the fashion shallabate, those more solid authors that are set up in the rear of the shop, must remain during her visits in general neglect. Though she hold herselfagainst the shelf and tilt her hoops, it would not be possible to pass. Sheis absorbed in a book of the softer sort, and she flips its pages againsther lap-dog's nose. 

But now behold the student coming up the street! He is clad in shiningblack. He is thin of shank as becomes a scholar. He sags with knowledge. Hehungers after wisdom. He comes opposite the bookshop. It is but coquetrythat his eyes seek the window of the tobacconist. His heart, you may besure, looks through the buttons at his back. At last he turns. He pauses onthe curb. Now desire has clutched him. He jiggles his trousered shillings. He treads the gutter. He squints upon the rack. He lights upon a treasure. He plucks it forth. He is unresolved whether to buy it or to spend theextra shilling on his dinner. Now all you cooks together, to save yourbusiness, rattle your pans to rouse him! If within these ancient buildingsthere are onions ready peeled--quick!--throw them in the skillet that thewhiff may come beneath his nose! Chance trembles and casts its vote--eeniemeenie--down goes the shilling--he has bought the book. Tonight he willspread it beneath his candle. Feet may beat a snare of pleasure on thepavement, glad cries may pipe across the darkness, a fiddle may scratch itsinvitation--all the rumbling notes of midnight traffic will tap in vaintheir summons upon his window. 

Any Stick Will Do To Beat A Dog

Reader, possibly on one of your country walks you have come upon a man withhis back against a hedge, tormented by a fiend in the likeness of a dog. You yourself, of course, are not a coward. You possess that cornerstone ofvirtue, a love for animals. If at your heels a dog sniffs and growls, youhumor his mistake, you flick him off and proceed with unbroken serenity. Itis scarcely an interlude to your speculation on the market. Or if you workupon a sonnet and are in the vein, your thoughts, despite the beast, rununbroken to a rhyme. But pity this other whose heart is less stoutlywrapped! He has gone forth on a holiday to take the country air, to thrusthimself into the freer wind, to poke with his stick for such signs ofSpring as may be hiding in the winter's leaves. Having been grinding in anoffice he flings himself on the great round world. He has come out to smellthe earth. Or maybe he seeks a hilltop for a view of the fields that liebelow patched in many colors, as though nature had been sewing at hergarments and had mended the cloth from her bag of scraps. 

On such a journey this fellow is travelling when, at a turn of the road, hehears the sound of barking. As yet there is no dog in sight. He pauses. Helistens. How shall one know whether the sound comes up a wrathful gullet orwhether the dog bays at him impersonally, as at the distant moon? Or maybehe vents himself upon a stubborn cow. Surely it is not an idle tune hepractices. He holds a victim in his mind. There is sour venom on hischurlish tooth. Is it best to go roundabout, or forward with such a nicecompound of innocence, boldness and modesty as shall satisfy the beast? Ifone engross oneself on something that lies to the lee of danger, it allayssuspicion. Or if one absorb oneself upon the flora--a primrose on theriver's brim--it shows him clear and stainless. The stupidest dog shouldsee that so close a student can have no evil in him. Perhaps it would bebetter to throw away one's stick lest it make a show of violence. Or it maybe concealed along the outer leg. Ministers of Grace defend us, what anexcitement in the barnyard! Has virtue no reward? Shall innocence perishoff the earth? Not one dog, but many, come running out. There has gonea rumor about the barn that there is a stranger to be eaten, and it'slikely--if they keep their clamor--there will be a bone for each. Note howthe valor oozes from the man of peace! Observe his sidling gait, his skirtspulled close, his hollowed back, his head bent across his shoulder, hisstartled eye! Watch him mince his steps, lest a lingering heel be nipped!Listen to him try the foremost dog with names, to gull him to a belief thatthey have met before in happier circumstances! He appeals mutely to thefarmhouse that a recall be sounded. The windows are tightly curtained. Theheavens are comfortless. 

You remember the fellow in the play who would have loved war had they notdigged villainous saltpetre from the harmless earth. The countryside, too, in my opinion, would be more peaceful of a summer afternoon were it notoverrun with dogs. Let me be plain! I myself like dogs--sleepy dogsblinking in the firelight, friendly dogs with wagging tails, young dogs intheir first puppyhood with their teeth scarce sprouted, whose jaws have notyet burgeoned into danger, and old dogs, too, who sun themselves and giveforth hollow, toothless, reassuring sounds. When a dog assumes the cozyhabits of the cat without laying off his nobler nature, he is my friend. Adog of vegetarian aspect pleases me. Let him bear a mild eye as though hewere nourished on the softer foods! I would wish every dog to have a fullcomplement of tail. It's the sure barometer of his warm regard. There's noart to find his mind's construction in the face. And I would have him withnot too much curiosity. It's a quality that brings him too often to thegate. It makes him prone to sniff when one sits upon a visit. Nor do I likedogs addicted to sudden excitement. Lethargy becomes them better. Let thembe without the Gallic graces! In general, I like a dog to whom I have beenproperly introduced, with an exchange of credentials. While the dog is by, let his master take my hand and address me in softest tones, to cement theunderstanding! At bench-shows I love the beasts, although I keep to themiddle of the aisle. The streets are all the safer when so many of thecreatures are kept within. 

Frankly, I would enjoy the country more, if I knew that all the dogs wereaway on visits. Of course, the highroad is quite safe. Its frequent trafficis its insurance. Then, too, the barns are at such a distance, it is only amonstrous anger can bring the dog. But if you are in need of direction youselect a friendly white house with green shutters. You swing open the gateand crunch across the pebbles to the door. To the nearer eye there is alook of "dog" about the place. Or maybe you are hot and thirsty, and thereis a well at the side of the house. Is it better to gird yourself to dangeror to put off your thirst until the crossroads where pop is sold?

Or a lane leads down to the river. Even at this distance you hear theshallow brawl of water on the stones. A path goes off across a hill, withtrees beckoning at the top. There is a wind above and a wider sweep ofclouds. Surely, from the crest of the hill the whole county will lie beforeyou. Such tunes as come up from the world below--a school-bell, a roostercrowing, children laughing on the road, a threshing machine on the lowermeadows--such tunes are pitched to a marvellous softness. Shall we followthe hot pavement, or shall we dare those lonely stretches?

There is a kind of person who is steeped too much in valor. He will cross afield although there is a dog inside the fence. Goodness knows that I wouldrather keep to the highroad with such humility as shall not rouse thecreature. Or he will shout and whistle tunes that stir the dogs for miles. He slashes his stick against the weeds as though in challenge. One mightthink that he went about on unfeeling stalks instead of legs as childrenwalk on stilts, or that a former accident had clipped him off above theknees and that he was now jointed out of wood to a point beyond the bitinglimit. Or perhaps the clothes he wears beneath--the inner mesh and verybalbriggan of his attire--is of so hard a texture that it turns a tooth. Bethese defenses as they may, note with what bravado he mounts the wall! Oneleg dangles as though it were baited and were angling for a bite. 

There is a French village near Quebec whose population is chiefly dogs. It lies along the river in a single street, not many miles from the pointwhere Wolfe climbed to the Plains of Abraham. There are a hundred housesflat against the roadway and on the steps of each there sits a dog. As Iwent through on foot, each of these dogs picked me up, examined me nasallyand passed me on, not generously as though I had stood the test, but ratherin deep suspicion that I was a queer fellow, not to be penetrated at first, but one who would surely be found out and gobbled before coming to theend of the street. As long as I would eventually furnish forth the commonbanquet, it mattered not which dog took the first nip. Inasmuch as I wouldat last be garnished for the general tooth, it would be better to waituntil all were gathered around the platter. "Good neighbor dog, " eachseemed to say, "you too sniff upon the rogue! If he be honest, my old noseis much at fault. " Meantime I padded lightly through the village, at firstcalling on the dogs by English names, but later using such wisps as I hadof French. "Aucassin, mon pauvre chien. Voici, Tintagiles, alors donc moncherie. Je suis votre ami, " but with little effect. 

But the dogs that one meets in the Canadian woods are of the fiercestbreed. They border on the wolf. They are called huskies and they are sostrong and so fleet of foot that they pull sleds for hours across thefrozen lakes at almost the speed of a running horse. It must be confessedthat they are handsome and if it happens to be your potato peelings anddiscarded fish that they eat, they warm into friendliness. Indeed, on theseoccasions, one can make quite a show of bravery by stroking and dealinglightly with them. But once upon a time in an ignorant moment two othercampers and myself followed a lonely railroad track and struck off on apath through the pines in search of a certain trapper on a fur farm. Thepath went on a broken zigzag avoiding fallen trees and soft hollows, conducting itself on the whole with more patience than firmness. We walkeda quarter of a mile, but still we saw no cabin. The line of the railroadhad long since disappeared. An eagle wheeled above us and quarrelled at ourintrusion. Presently to test our course and learn whether we were comingnear the cabin, we gave a shout. Immediately out of the deeper woods therecame a clamor that froze us. Such sounds, it seemed, could issue only frombloody and dripping jaws. In a panic, as by a common impulse we turned andran. Yet we did not run frankly as when the circus lion is loose, but in ashamefaced manner--an attempt at a retreat in good order--something betweena walk and a run. At the end of a hundred yards we stopped. No dogs hadfallen on us. Danger had not burst its kennel. We hallooed again, to rousethe trapper. At last, after a minute of suspense, came his answering voice, the sweetest sound to be imagined. Whereupon I came down from my high stumpwhich I had climbed for a longer view. 

I am convinced that I am not alone in my--shall I say diffidence?--towarddogs. Indeed, there is evidence from the oldest times that mankind, in itsmore honest moments, has confessed to a fear of dogs. In recognition ofthis general fear, the unmuzzled Cerberus was put at the gate of Hades. It was rightly felt that when the unhappy pilgrims got within, his fiftysnapping heads were better than a bolt upon the door. It was better forthem to endure the ills they had, than be nipped in the upper passage. He, also, who first spoke the ancient proverb, _Let sleeping dogs lie_, did nomore than voice the caution of the street. And he, also, who invented thesaying that the world is going to the bow-wows, lodged his deplorablepessimism in fitting words. 

It was Daniel who sat with the lions. But there are degrees of bravery. OnLong Street, within sight of my window--just where the street gets into itsmost tangled traffic--there has hung for many years the painted signboardof a veterinary surgeon. Its artist was in the first flourish of youth. Oldage had not yet chilled him when he mixed his gaudy colors. The surgeon'sname is set up in modest letters, but the horse below flames with color. What a flaring nostril! What an eager eye! How arched the neck! Here is awrath and speed unknown to the quadrupeds of this present Long Street. Suchmild-eyed, accumbent, sharp-ribbed horses as now infest the curb--merewhittlings from a larger age--hang their heads at their degeneracy. Indeed, these horses seem to their owners not to be worth the price of a nostrum. If disease settles in them, let them lean against a post until the fit ispast! And of a consequence, the doctor's work has fallen off. It hasbecome a rare occasion when it is permitted him to stroke his chin incontemplation of some inner palsy. Therefore to give his wisdom scope, the doctor some time since announced the cellar of the building to be ahospital for dogs. Must I press the analogy? I have seen the doctor withbowl and spoon in hand take leave of the cheerful world. He opens thecellar door. A curdling yelp comes up the stairs. In the abyss below thereare twenty dogs at least, all of them sick, all dangerous. Not since Orionled his hunting pack across the heavens has there been so fierce a sound. The door closes. There is a final yelp, such as greets a bone. Doubtless, by this time, they are munching on the doctor. Good sir, had you lived inpre-apostolic days, your name would have been lined with Daniel's in thehymn. I might have spent my earliest treble in your praise. 

But there are other kinds of dogs. Gentlest of readers, have you everpassed a few days at Tunbridge Wells? It lies on one of the roads that runfrom London to the Channel and for several hundred years persons have gonethere to take the waters against the more fashionable ailments. Its chieffame was in the days when rich folk, to ward off for the season a touch ofancestral gout, travelled down from London in their coaches. We may fancyLord Thingumdo crossing his sleek legs inside or putting his head to thewindow on the change of horses. He has outriders and a horn to sound hiscoming. His Lordship has a liver that must be mended, but also he hasa weakness for the gaming table. Or Lady Euphemia, wrapped in silks, languishes mornings in her lodgings with a latest novel, but goes forth atnoon upon the Pantilles to shop in the stalls. A box of patches must bebought. A lace flounce has caught her eye. Bless her dear eyes, as shebends upon her purchase she is fair to look upon. The Grand Rout is set fortonight. Who knows but that the Duke will put the tender question and willask her to name the happy day?

But these golden days are past. Tunbridge Wells has sunk from fashion. Thegaming tables are gone. A band still plays mornings in the Pantilles--ordid so before the war--but cheaper gauds are offered in the shops. Emeraldbrooches are fallen to paste. In all the season there is scarcely a singledemand for a diamond garter. If there were now a Rout, the only dancerswould be stiff shadows from the past. The healing waters still trickle fromthe ground and an old woman serves you for a penny, but the miracle hasgone. The old world is cured and dead. 

Tunbridge Wells is visited now chiefly by old ladies whose husbands--tojudge by the black lace caps--have left Lombard Street for heaven. At thehotel where I stopped, which was at the top of the Commons outside thethicker town, I was the only man in the breakfast room. Two widows, eachwith a tiny dog on a chair beside her, sat at the next table. This wastheir conversation:

"Did you hear her last night?"

"Was it Flossie that I heard?"

"Yes. The poor dear was awake all night. She got her feet wet yesterdaywhen I let her run upon the grass. "

But after breakfast--if the day is sunny and the wind sits in a favoringquarter--one by one the widows go forth in their chairs. These are wickercontrivances that hang between three wheels. Burros pull them, and men walkalongside to hold their bridles. Down comes the widow. Down comes a maidwith her wraps. Down comes a maid with Flossie. The wraps are adjusted. Thewidow is handed in. Her feet are wound around with comforters against adraft. Her salts rest in her lap. Her ample bag of knitting is safe aboard. Flossie is placed beside her. Proot! The donkey starts. 

All morning the widow sits in the Pantilles and listens to the band andknits. Flossie sits on the flagging at her feet with an intent eye upon theball of worsted. Twice in a morning--three times if the gods are kind--theball rolls to the pavement. Flossie has been waiting so long for thisto happen. It is the bright moment of her life--the point and peak ofhappiness. She darts upon it. She paws it exultantly for a moment. Brief isthe rainbow and brief the Borealis. The finger of Time is swift. 

The poppy blooms and fades. The maid captures the ball of worsted andrestores it. 

It lies in the widow's lap. The band plays. The needles click to a longtune. The healing waters trickle from the ground. The old woman whinestheir merits. Flossie sits motionless, her head cocked and her eye upon theball. Perhaps the god of puppies will again be good to her. 

ROADS OF MORNING

My grandfather's farm lay somewhere this side of the sunset, so near thatits pastures barely missed the splash of color. But from the city it was atwo hours' journey by horse and phaeton. My grandfather drove. I sat next, my feet swinging clear of the lunchbox. My brother had the outside, a placedenied to me for fear that I might fall across the wheel. When we wereall set, my mother made a last dab at my nose--an unheeded smudge havingescaped my vigilance. Then my grandfather said, "Get up, "--twice, for thelazy horse chose to regard the first summons as a jest. We start. The greatwheels turn. My brother leans across the guard to view the miracle. Wecrunch the gravel. We are alive for excitement. My brother plays we area steamboat and toots. I toot in imitation, but higher up as if I were ayounger sort of steamboat. We hold our hands on an imaginary wheel andsteer. We scorn grocery carts and all such harbor craft. We are on a longcruise. Street lights will guide us sailing home. 

Of course there were farms to the south of the city and apples may haveripened there to as fine a flavor, and to the east, also, doubtless therewere farms. It would be asking too much that the west should have all thehaystacks, cherry trees and cheese houses. If your judgment skimmed uponthe surface, you would even have found the advantage with the south. It wasprettier because more rolling. It was shaggier. The country to the southtipped up to the hills, so sharply in places that it might have made itsliving by collecting nickels for the slide. Indeed, one might think that apart of the city had come bouncing down the slope, for now it lay restingat the bottom, sprawled somewhat for its ease. Or it might appear--if yourbelief runs on discarded lines--that the whole flat-bottomed earth had beenfouled in its celestial course and now lay aslant upon its beam with itscargo shifted and spilled about. 

The city streets that led to the south, which in those days ended in lanes, popped out of sight abruptly at the top of the first ridge. And when theearth caught up again with their level, already it was dim and purple andtall trees were no more than a roughened hedge. But what lay beyond thatrange of hills--what towns and cities--what oceans and forests--how besetwith adventure--how fearful after dark--these things you could not see, even if you climbed to some high place and strained yourself on tiptoe. Andif you walked from breakfast to lunch--until you gnawed within and were buta hollow drum--there would still be a higher range against the sky. Thereare misty kingdoms on this whirling earth, but the ways are long and steep. 

The lake lay to the north with no land beyond, the city to the east. But tothe west--

Several miles outside the city as it then was, and still beyond itsclutches, the country was cut by a winding river bottom with sharp edges ofshale. Down this valley Rocky River came brawling in the spring, over-fedand quarrelsome. Later in the year--its youthful appetite having caught anindigestion--it shrunk and wasted to a shadow. By August you could cross iton the stones. The uproar of its former flood was marked upon the shale andtrunks of trees here and there were wedged, but now the river plays drowsytunes upon the stones. There is scarcely enough movement of water to flickthe sunlight. A leaf on its idle current is a lazy craft whose skippernods. There were hickory trees on the point above. May-apples grew in thedeep woods, and blackberries along the fences. And in the season soberhorses plowed up and down the fields with nodding heads, affirming theirbelief in the goodness of the soil and their willingness to help in itsfruition. 

Yet the very core of this valley in days past was a certain depth of waterat a turn of the stream. There was a clay bank above it and on it smallnaked boys stood and daubed themselves. One of them put a band of clayabout himself by way of decoration. Another, by a more general smudge, madehimself a Hottentot and thereby gave his manners a wider scope and license. But by daubing yourself entire you became an Indian and might vent yourselfin hideous yells, for it was amazing how the lungs grew stouter when theclay was laid on thick. Then you tapped your flattened palm rapidly againstyour mouth and released an intermittent uproar in order that the valleymight he warned of the deviltry to come. You circled round and round andbeat upon the ground in the likeness of a war dance. But at last, satedwith scalps, off you dived into the pool and came up a white man. Finally, you stood on one leg and jounced the water from your ear, or pulled abloodsucker from your toes before he sapped your life--for this tinycreature of the rocks was credited with the gift of prodigious inflation, and might inhale you, blood, sinews, suspenders and all, if left to hisugly purpose. 

Farms should not be too precisely located; at least this is true of farmswhich, like my grandfather's, hang in a mist of memory. I read once of awonderful spot--quite inferior, doubtless, to my grandfather's farm--whichwas located by evil directions intentionally to throw a seeker off. Munchausen, you will recall, in the placing of his magic countries, was notabove this agreeable villainy. Robinson Crusoe was loose and vague in theplacing of his island. It is said that Izaak Walton waved a hand obscurelytoward the stream where he had made a catch, but could not be cornered to anice direction, lest his pool be overrun. In early youth, I myself went, ona mischievous hint, to explore a remote region which I was told lay in thedark behind the kindling pile. But because I moved in a fearful darkness, quite beyond the pale light from the furnace room, I lost the path. It didnot lead me to the peaks and the roaring waters. 

But the farm was reached by more open methods. Dolly and the phaeton werethe chief instruments. First--if you were so sunk in ignorance as not toknow the road--you inquired of everybody for the chewing gum factory, to beknown by its smell of peppermint. Then you sought the high bridge over therailroad tracks. Beyond was Kamm's Corners. Here, at a turn of the road, was a general store whose shelves sampled the produce of this whole fairworld and the factories thereof. One might have thought that the proprietoremulated Noah at the flood by bidding two of each created things to find aplace inside. 

Beyond Kamm's Corners you came to the great valley. When almost down thehill you passed a house with broken windows and unkept grass. This house, by report, was haunted, but you could laugh at such tales while the morningsun was up. At the bottom of the hill a bridge crossed the river, withloose planking that rattled as though the man who made nails was dead. 

Beyond the bridge, at the first rise of ground, the horse stopped--for Iassume that you drove a sagacious animal--by way of hint that every oneof sound limb get out and walk to the top of the hill. A suspicious horseturned his head now and again and cast his eye upon the buggy to be surethat no one climbed in again. 

Presently you came to the toll-gate at the top and paid its keeper fivecents, or whatever large sum he demanded. Then your grandfather--if byfortunate chance you happened to have one--asked after his wife andchildren, and had they missed the croup; then told him his corn was lookingwell. 

My grandfather--for it is time you knew him--lived with us. Because of arailway accident fifteen years before in which one of his legs was cut offjust below the knee, he had retired from public office. Several years ofbroken health had been followed by years that were for the most part freefrom suffering. My own first recollection reverts to these better years. I recall a tall man--to my eyes a giant, for he was taller even than myfather--who came into the nursery as I was being undressed. There was awind in the chimney, and the windows rattled. He put his crutches againstthe wall. Then taking me in his arms, he swung me aloft to his shoulderby a series of somersaults. I cried this first time, but later I came todemand the performance. 

Once, when I was a little older, I came upon one of his discarded woodenlegs as I was playing in the garret of the house. It was my firstacquaintance with such a contrivance. It lay behind a pile of trunks and Iwas, at the time, on my way to the center of the earth, for the cheerfulpath dove into darkness behind the chimney. You may imagine my surprise. Iapproached it cautiously. I viewed it from all sides by such dusty light asfell between the trunks. Not without fear I touched it. It was unmistakablya leg--but whose? Was it possible that there was a kind of Bluebeard in thefamily, who, for his pleasure, lopped off legs? There had been no breath ofsuch a scandal. Yet, if my reading and studies were correct, such thingshad happened in other families not very different from ours; not in our owntown maybe, but in such near-by places as Kandahar and Serendib--placeswhich in my warm regard were but as suburbs to our street, to be gained ifyou persevered for a hundred lamp-posts. Or could the leg belong to Anniethe cook? Her nimbleness with griddle-cakes belied the thought: And once, when the wind had swished her skirts, manifestly she was whole and sound. Then all at once I knew it to be my grandfather's. Grown familiar, I pulledit to the window. I tried it on, but made bad work of walking. 

To the eye my grandfather had two legs all the way down and, except forhis crutches and an occasional squeak, you would not have detected hisinfirmity. Evidently the maker did no more than imitate nature, although, for myself, I used to wonder at the poverty of his invention. There wouldbe distinction in a leg, which in addition to its usual functions, wouldalso bend forward at the knee, or had a surprising sidewise joint--andthere would be profit, too, if one cared to make a show of it. The greatestniggard on the street would pay two pins for such a sight. 

As my grandfather was the only old gentleman of my acquaintance, a woodenleg seemed the natural and suitable accompaniment of old age. Persons, itappeared, in their riper years, cast off a leg, as trees dropped theirleaves. But my grandmother puzzled me. Undeniably she retained both ofhers, yet her hair was just as white, and she was almost as old. Evidentlythis law of nature worked only with men. Ladies, it seemed, were notdeciduous. But how the amputation was effected in men--whether by day ornight--how the choice fell between the right and left--whether the woodenleg came down the chimney (a proper entrance)--how soon my father would gothe way of all masculine flesh and cast his off--these matters I could notsolve. The Arabian Nights were silent on the subject. Aladdin's uncle, apparently, had both his legs. He was too brisk in villainy to admit awooden leg. But then, he was only an uncle. If his history ran out to theend, doubtless he would go with a limp in his riper days. The story of theBible--although it trafficked in such veterans as Methuselah--gave not ahint. Abraham died full of years. Here would have been a proper test--butthe book was silent. 

My grandfather in those days had much leisure time. He still kept an officeat the rear of the house, although he had given up the regular practiceof the law. But a few old clients lingered on, chiefly women who carriedchildren in their arms and old men without neckties who came to him forfree advice. These he guided patiently in their troubles, and he would sitan hour to listen to a piteous story. In an extremity he gave them money, or took a well-meant but worthless note. Often his callers overran thedinner hour and my mother would have to jingle the dinner bell at the doorto rouse them. Occasionally he would be called on for a public speech, andfor several days he would be busy at his desk. Frequently he presided atdinners and would tell a story and sing a song, for he had a fine bassvoice and was famous for his singing. 

He read much in those last years in science. When he was not readingTrowbridge to his grandchildren, it was Huxley to himself. But when hiseyes grew tired, he would on an occasion--if there was canning in thehouse--go into the kitchen where my mother and grandmother worked, and helppare the fruit. Seriously, as though he were engaged upon a game, he wouldcut the skin into thinnest strips, unbroken to the end, and would hold upthe coil for us to see. Or if he broke it in the cutting it was a pointagainst him in the contest. 

His diversion rather than his profit was the care and rental of abouttwenty small houses, some of which he built to fit his pensioners. Mybrother and myself often made the rounds with him in the phaeton. At mostof the houses he was affectionately greeted as "Jedge" and was held in longconversations across the fence. And to see an Irishman was to see a friend. They all knew him and said, "Good mornin', " as we passed. He and they weregood Democrats together. 

I can see in memory a certain old Irishman in a red flannel shirt, with hisfoot upon the hub, bending across the wheel and gesticulating in an endlessdiscussion of politics or crops, while my brother and I were impatient tobe off. Dolly was of course patient, for she had long since passed herfretful youth. If by any biological chance it had happened that she hadbeen an old lady instead of a horse, she would have been the kind thatspent her day in a rocker with her knitting. Any one who gave Dolly anexcuse for standing was her friend. There she stood as though she wishedthe colloquy to last forever. 

It was seldom that Dolly lost her restraint. She would, indeed, when shecame near the stable, somewhat hasten her stride; and when we came on ourdrives to the turning point and at last headed about for home, Dolly wouldknow it and show her knowledge by a quickening of the ears and the quiverof a faint excitement. Yet Dolly lost her patience when there were flies. Then she threw off all repression and so waved her tail that she regularlygot it across the reins. This stirred my grandfather to something notfar short of anger. How vigorously would he try to dislodge the reinsby pulling and jerking! Dolly only clamped down her tail the harder. Experience showed that the only way was to go slowly and craftily andwithout heat or temper--a slackening of the reins--a distraction of Dolly'sattention--a leaning across the dashboard--a firm grasping of the tail outnear the end--a sudden raising thereof. Ah! It was done. We all settledback against the cushions. Or perhaps a friendly fly would come to ourassistance and Dolly would have to use her tail in another direction. 

The whip was seldom used. Generally it stood in its socket. It wasornamental like a flagstaff. It forgot its sterner functions. But Dollymust have known the whip in some former life, for even a gesture toward thesocket roused her. If it was rattled she mended her pace for a block. Butif on a rare occasion my grandfather took it in his hand, Dolly lay one earback in our direction, for she knew then he meant business. And what anexcitement would arise in the phaeton! We held on tight for fear that shemight take it into her mild old head to run away. 

But Dolly had her moments. One sunny summer afternoon while she grazedpeacefully in the orchard, with her reins wound around the whip handle--theappropriate place on these occasions--she was evidently stung by a bee. Mybrother was at the time regaling himself in a near-by blackberry thicket. He looked up at an unusual sound. Without warning, Dolly had leaped toaction and was tearing around the orchard dragging the phaeton behindher. She wrecked the top on a low hanging branch, then hit another tree, severing thereby all connection between herself and the phaeton, and atlast galloped down the lane to the farm house, with the broken shafts andharness dangling behind her. Kipling's dun "with the mouth of a bell andthe heart of Hell and the head of the gallows-tree, " could hardly haveshown more spirit. It was as though one brief minute of a glorious youthhad come back to her. It was a last spurting of an old flame before it sunkto ash. 

My grandfather gave his leisure to his grandchildren. He carved for us withhis knife, with an especial knack for willow whistles. He showed us thecolors that lay upon the world when we looked at it through one of theglass pendants of the parlor chandelier. He sat by us when we playedduck-on-the-rock. He helped us with our kites and gave a superintendence toour toys. It is true that he was superficial with tin-tags and did not knowthe difference in value between a Steam Engine tag--the rarest of themall--and a common Climax, but we forgave him as one forgives a friend whois ignorant of Persian pottery. He employed us as gardeners and put abounty on weeds. We watered the lawn together, turn by turn. When I wasno more than four years old, he taught us to play casino with him--andafterwards bezique. How he cried out if he got a royal sequence! With whatexcitement he announced a double bezique! Or if one of us seemed about toscore and lacked but a single card, how intently he contended for the lastfew tricks to thwart our declaration! And if we got it despite his leadof aces, how gravely he squinted on the cards against deception, with hisglasses forward on his nose!

When he took his afternoon nap and lay upon his back on the sofa in thesitting-room, we made paper pin-wheels to see whether his breath wouldstir them. This trick having come to his notice by a sudden awakening, hesometimes thereafter played to be asleep and snored in such a mighty gustthat the wheels spun. He was like a Dutch tempest against a windmill. 

If a Dime Museum came to town we made an afternoon of it. He took us to allthe circuses and gave us our choice of side-shows. We walked up anddown before the stretches of painted canvas, balancing in our desire asword-swallower against an Indian Princess. Most of the fat women and allthe dwarfs that I have known came to my acquaintance when in company withmy grandfather. As a young man, it was said, he once ran away from home tojoin a circus as an acrobat, having acquired the trick of leaping upon arunning horse. I fancy that his knack of throwing us to his shoulder by adouble somersault was a recollection of his early days. You may imaginewith what awe we looked on him even though he now went on crutches. He wasthe epitome of adventure, the very salt of excitement. It was better havinghim than a pirate in the house. When the circus had gone and life was drab, he was our tutor in the art of turning cart-wheels and making hand-standsagainst the door. 

And once, when we were away from him, he walked all morning about thegarden and in his loneliness he gathered into piles the pebbles that we haddropped. 

I was too young to know my grandfather in his active days when he wasprominent in public matters. His broader abilities are known to others. Butthough more than twenty years have passed since his death, I remember histone of voice, his walk, his way of handling a crutch, all his tricks ofspeech and conduct as though he had just left the room. And I can think ofnothing more beautiful than that a useful man who has faced the world forseventy years and has done his part, should come back in his old age to thenursery and be the playfellow of his grandchildren. 

But the best holiday was a trip to the farm. 

This farm--to which in our slow trot we have been so long a time incoming--lay for a mile on the upper land, and its grain fields and pastureslooked down into the valley. The buildings, however, were set close to theroad and fixed their interest on such occasional wagons as creaked by. ASwitzer occupied the farm, who owned, in addition to the more immediatemembers of his family, a cuckoo clock whose weights hung on long cordswhich by Saturday night reached almost to the floor. When I have sat at histable, I have neglected cheese and the lesser foods, when the hour camenear, in order not to miss the cuckoo's popping out. And in the dullerspaces, when the door was shut, I have fancied it sitting in the dark andcounting the minutes to itself. 

The Switzer's specialty was the making of a kind of rubber cheese which onecould learn to like in time. Of the processes of its composition, I canremember nothing except that when it was in the great press the whey ranfrom its sides, but this may be common to all cheeses. I was once given acup of this whey to drink and I brightened, for until it was in my mouth, I thought it was buttermilk. Beyond was the spring-house with cans of milkset in the cool water and with a trickling sound beneath the boards. Fromthe spring-house there started those mysterious cow-paths that led downinto the great gorge that cut the farm. Here were places so deep that onlya bit of the sky showed and here the stones were damp. It was a place thatseemed to lie nearer to the confusion when the world was made, and rockslay piled as though a first purpose had been broken off. And to follow acow-path, regardless of where it led, was, in those days, the essence ofhazard; though all the while from the pastures up above there came the flatsafe tinkling of the bells. 

The apple orchard--where Dolly was stung by the bee--was set on a finebreezy place at the brow of the hill with the valley in full sight. Thetrees themselves were old and decayed, but they were gnarled and crotchedfor easy climbing. And the apples--in particular a russet--mounted to adelicacy. On the other side of the valley, a half mile off as a bird wouldfly, were the buildings of a convent, and if you waited you might hearthe twilight bell. To this day all distant bells come to my ears with apleasing softness, as though they had been cast in a quieter world. Stonearrow-heads were found in a near-by field as often as the farmer turned upthe soil in plowing. And because of this, a long finger of land that putoff to the valley, was called Indian Point. Here, with an arm for pillow, one might lie for a long hour on a sunny morning and watch the shadows ofclouds move across the lowland. A rooster crows somewhere far off--surelyof all sounds the drowsiest. A horse in a field below lifts up its head andneighs. The leaves practice a sleepy tune. If one has the fortune to keepawake, here he may lie and think the thoughts that are born of sun andwind. 

And now, although it is not yet noon, hunger rages in us. The pancakes, thesyrup, the toast and the other incidents of breakfast have disappearedthe way the rabbit vanishes when the magician waves his hand. The horridPolyphemus did not so crave his food. And as yet there is no comfortingsniff from the kitchen. Scrubbing and other secular matters engage thefarmer's wife. There is as yet not a faintest gurgle in the kettle. 

To divert ourselves, we climb three trees and fall out of one. Is twelveo'clock never to come? Have Time and the Hour grown stagnant? We eat applesand throw the cores at the pig to hear him grunt. Is the great round sunstuck? Have the days of Joshua come again? We walk a rail fence. Is it notyet noon? Shrewsbury clock itself--reputed by scholars the slowest of allpossible clocks--could not so hold off. I snag myself--but it is nothingthat shows when I sit. 

Ah! At last! My grandfather is calling from the house. We run back andfind that the lunch is ready and is laid upon a table with a red oil-clothcover. We apply ourselves. Silence.... 

The journey home started about five o'clock. There was one game we alwaysplayed. Each of us, having wisely squinted at the sky, made a reckoning andguessed where we would be when the sun set. My grandfather might say thehigh bridge. I named the Sherman House. But my brother, being precise, judged it to a fraction of a telegraph pole. Beyond a certain turn--did weremember?--well, it would be exactly sixteen telegraph poles further on. What an excitement there was when the sun's lower rim was already below thehorizon! We stood on our knees and looked through the little window atthe back of the phaeton. With what suspicion we regarded my grandfather'sdriving! Or if Dolly lagged, did it not raise a thought that she, too, wasin the plot against us? The sun sets. We cry out the victor. 

The sky flames with color. Then deadens in the east. The dusk is falling. The roads grow dark. Where run the roads of night? While there is light, you can see the course they keep across the country--the dust of horses'feet--a bridge--a vagrant winding on a hill beyond. All day long they arebusy with the feet of men and women and children shouting. Then twilightcomes, and the roads lead home to supper and the curling smoke above theroof. But at night where run the roads? It's dark beyond the candle'sflare--where run the roads of night. 

My brother and I have become sleepy. We lop over against my grandfather--

We awake with a start. There is a gayly lighted horse-car jingling besideus. The street lights show us into harbor. We are home at last. 

The Man Of Grub Street Comes From His Garret

I have come to live this winter in New York City and by good fortune Ihave found rooms on a pleasant park. This park, which is but one block inextent, is so set off from the thoroughfares that it bears chiefly thetraffic that is proper to the place itself. Grocery carts jog around andthrow out their wares. Laundry wagons are astir. A little fat tailor on anoccasion carries in an armful of newly pressed clothing with suspendershanging. Dogs are taken out to walk but are held in leash, lest a taste ofliberty spoil them for an indoor life. The center of the park is laid outwith grass and trees and pebbled paths, and about it is a high iron fence. Each house has a key to the enclosure. Such social infection, therefore, asgets inside the gates is of our own breeding. In the sunny hours nurses andchildren air themselves in this grass plot. Here a gayly painted woodenvelocipede is in fashion. At this minute there are several pairs of fatlegs a-straddle this contrivance. It is a velocipede as it was first made, without pedals. Beau Brummel--for the velocipede dates back to him--mayhave walked forth to take the waters at Tunbridge Wells on a vehicle notfar different, but built to his greater stature. There is also a trickleof drays and wagons across the park--a mere leakage from the streets, asthough the near-by traffic in the pressure had burst its pipes. But only atmorning and night when the city collects or discharges its people, are thesidewalks filled. Then for a half hour the nozzle of the city plays a fullstream on us. 

The park seems to be freer and more natural than the streets outside. A mangoes by gesticulating as though he practiced for a speech. A woman adjustsher stocking on the coping below the fence with the freedom of a countryroad. A street sweeper, patched to his office, tunes his slow work to fitthe quiet surroundings. Boys skate by or cut swirls upon the pavement inthe privilege of a playground. 

My work--if anything so pleasant and unforced can carry the name--isdone at a window that overlooks this park. Were it not for several highbuildings in my sight I might fancy that I lived in one of the oldersquares of London. There is a look of Thackeray about the place as thoughthe Osbornes might be my neighbors. A fat man who waddles off his stepsopposite, if he would submit to a change of coat, might be Jos Sedleystarting for his club to eat his chutney. If only there were a crest abovemy bell-pull I might even expect Becky Sharp in for tea. Or occasionally Idivert myself with the fancy that I am of a still older day and that I havewalked in from Lichfield--I choose the name at hazard--with a tragedy in mypocket, to try my fortune. Were it not for the fashion of dress in the parkbelow and some remnant of reason in myself, I could, in a winking moment, persuade myself that my room is a garret and my pen a quill. On suchdelusion, before I issued on the street to seek my coffee-house, I wouldadjust my wig and dust myself of snuff. 

But for my exercise and recreation--which for a man of Grub Street isnecessary in the early hours of afternoon when the morning fires havefallen--I go outside the park. I have a wide choice for my wanderings. Imay go into the district to the east and watch the children play againstthe curb. If they pitch pennies on the walk I am careful to go about, forfear that I distract the throw. Or if the stones are marked for hop-scotch, I squeeze along the wall. It is my intention--from which as yet mydiffidence withholds me--to present to the winner of one of these contestsa red apple which I shall select at a corner stand. Or an ice wagon pausesin its round, and while the man is gone there is a pleasant thieving ofbits of ice. Each dirty cheek is stuffed as though a plague of mumps hadfallen on the street. Or there may be a game of baseball--a scamperingon the bases, a home-run down the gutter--to engage me for an inning. Or shinny grips the street. But if a street organ comes--not a mournfulone-legged box eked out with a monkey, but a big machine with an extra manto pull--the children leave their games. It was but the other day that Isaw six of them together dancing on the pavement to the music, with skirtsand pigtails flying. There was such gladness in their faces that themusician, although he already had his nickel, gave them an extra tune. Itwas of such persuasive gayety that the number of dancers at once went up toten and others wiggled to the rhythm. And for myself, although I am past mysportive days, the sound of a street organ, if any, would inflame me to afox-trot. Even a surly tune--if the handle be quickened--comes from the boxwith a brisk seduction. If a dirge once got inside, it would fret until itcame out a dancing measure. 

In this part of town, on the better streets, I sometimes study the fashionsas I see them in the shops and I compare them with those of uptown stores. Nor is there the difference one might suppose. The small round muff thatsprang up this winter in the smarter shops won by only a week over thecheaper stores. Tan gaiters ran a pretty race. And I am now witness toa dead heat in a certain kind of fluffy rosebud dress. The fabrics areprobably different, but no matter how you deny it, they are cut to a commonpattern. 

In a poorer part of the city still nearer to the East River, wheresmells of garlic and worse issue from cellarways, I came recently ona considerable park. It was supplied with swings and teeters and drewchildren on its four fronts. Of a consequence the children of many racesplayed together. I caught a Yiddish answer to an Italian question. I fancythat a child here could go forth at breakfast wholly a Hungarian and comehome with a smack of Russian or Armenian added. The general games thatmerged the smaller groups, aided in the fusion. If this park is not alreadynamed--a small chance, for it shows the marks of age--it might properly becalled _The Park of the Thirty Nations_. 

Or my inclination may take me to the lower city. Like a poor starvelingI wander in the haunts of wealth where the buildings are piled to fortystories, and I spin out the ciphers in my brain in an endeavor to computethe amount that is laid up inside. Also, lest I become discontented with mypoverty, I note the strain and worry of the faces that I meet. There is astory of Tolstoi in which a man is whispered by his god that he may possesssuch land as he can circle in a day. Until that time he had been living ona fertile slope of sun and shadow, with fields ample for his needs. Butwhen the whisper came, at a flash, he pelted off across the hills. He ranall morning, but as the day advanced his sordid ambition broadened and heturned his course into a wider and still wider circle. Here a pleasantvalley tempted him and he bent his path to bring it inside his mark. Herea fruitful upland led him off. As the day wore on he ran with a greaterfierceness, because he knew he would lose everything if he did not reachhis starting place before the sun went down. The sun was coming near therim of earth when he toiled up the last hill. His feet were cut by stones, his face pinched with agony. He staggered toward the goal and fell acrossit while as yet there was a glint of light. But his effort burst his heart. Does the analogy hold on these narrow streets? To a few who sit in an inneroffice, Mammon has made a promise of wealth and domination. These few runbreathless to gain a mountain. But what have the gods whispered to the tenthousand who sit in the outer office, that they bend and blink upon theirledgers? Have the gods whispered to them the promise of great wealth? Alas, before them there lies only the dust and heat of a level road, yet they tooare broken at the sunset. 

Less oppressive are the streets where commerce is more apparent. Here, unless you would be smirched, it is necessary to walk fast and hold yourcoat-tails in. Packing cases are going down slides. Bales are coming up inhoists. Barrels are rolling out of wagons. Crates are being lifted in. Isthe exchange never to stop? Is no warehouse satisfied with what it has?English, which until now you judged a soft concordant language, shows hereits range and mastery of epithet. And all about, moving and jostling theboxes, are men with hooks. One might think that in a former day CaptainCuttle had settled here to live and that his numerous progeny had kept theplace. 

Often I ride on a bus top like a maharajah on an elephant, up near thetusks, as it were, where the view is unbroken. I plan this trip so that Imove counter to the procession that goes uptown in the late afternoon. Isthere a scene like it in the world? The boulevards of Paris in times ofpeace are hardly so gay. Fifth Avenue is blocked with motor cars. Fashionhas gone forth to select a feather. A ringlet has gone awry and must bemended. The Pomeranian's health is served by sunlight. The Spitz must havean airing. Fashion has wagged its head upon a Chinese vase--has indeedsquinted at it through a lorgnette against a fleck--and now lolls home todinner. Or style has veered an inch, and it has been a day of fitting. Atrestaurant windows one may see the feeding of the over-fed. Men sit in clubwindows and still wear their silk hats as though there was no glass betweenthem and the windy world. Footmen in boots and breeches sit as stiffly asthough they were toys grown large and had metal spikes below to hold themto their boxes. They look like the iron firemen that ride on nurseryfire-engines. For all these sights the bus top is the best place. 

And although we sit on a modest roof, the shopkeepers cater to us. For inmany of the stores, is there not an upper tier of windows for our use? Thecommodities of this second story are quite as fine as those below. And thewaxen beauties who display the frocks greet us in true democracy with assweet a simper. 

My friend G---- while riding recently on a bus top met with an experiencefor which he still blushes. 

There was a young woman sitting directly in front of him, and when he cameto leave, a sudden lurch threw him against her. When he recovered hisfooting, which was a business of some difficulty, for the bus pitched upona broken pavement, what was his chagrin to find that a front button ofhis coat had hooked in her back hair! Luckily G---- was not seized with apanic. Rather, he labored cautiously--but without result. Nor couldshe help in the disentanglement. Their embarrassment might have beenindefinitely prolonged--indeed, G---- was several blocks already down thestreet--when he bethought him of his knife and so cut off the button. As hepleasantly expressed it to the young woman, he would give her the choice ofthe button or the coat entire. 

Reader, are you inclined toward ferry boats? I cannot include those personswho journey on them night and morning perfunctorily. These persons keeptheir noses in their papers or sit snugly in the cabin. If the market isup, they can hardly be conscious even that they are crossing a river. Nor do I entirely blame them. If one kept shop on a breezy tip of theDelectable Mountains with all the regions of the world laid out below, he could not be expected to climb up for the hundredth time with a firstexhilaration, or to swing his alpenstock as though he were on a rareholiday. If one had business across the Styx too often--although thescenery on its banks is reputed to be unusual--he might in time sit belowand take to yawning. Father Charon might have to jog his shoulder to rousehim when the boat came between the further piers. 

But are you one of those persons who, not being under a daily compulsion, rides upon a ferry boat for the love of the trip? Being in this classmyself, I laid my case the other night before the gateman, and askedhis advice regarding routes. He at once entered sympathetically into mydistemper and gave me a plan whereby with but a single change of piersI might at an expense of fourteen cents cross the river four times atdifferent angles. 

It was at the end of day and a light fog rested on the water. Nothing wasentirely lost, yet a gray mystery wrapped the ships and buildings. If NewJersey still existed it was dim and shadowy as though its real life hadgone and but a ghost remained. Ferry boats were lighted in defiance of themurk, and darted here and there at reckless angles. An ocean liner wasputting out, and several tugs had rammed their noses against her sides. There is something engaging about a tug. It snorts with eagerness. It kicksand splashes. It bursts itself to lend a hand. And how it butts with itsnose! Surely its forward cartilages are of triple strength, else in itszest it would jam its nasal passages. 

Presently we came opposite lower New York. Although the fog concealed theoutlines of the buildings, their lights showed through. This first hour ofdark is best, before the day's work is done and while as yet all of thewindows are lighted. The Woolworth Tower was suffused in a soft and shadowylight. The other buildings showed like mountains of magic pin-pricks. Itwas as though all the constellations of heaven on a general bidding had metfor conference. 

The man of Grub Street, having by this time somewhat dispelled the fumes ofdullness from his head, descends from his ferry boat and walks to his quietpark. There is a dull roar from the elevated railway on Third Avenue wherethe last of the day's crowd goes home. The sidewalks are becoming empty. There is a sheen of water on the pavement. In the winter murk there is alook of Thackeray about the place as though the Sedleys or the Osbornesmight be his neighbors. If there were a crest above his bell-pull he mighteven expect Becky Sharp in for tea. 

Now that Spring is here

When the sun set last night it was still winter. The persons who passednorthward in the dusk from the city's tumult thrust their hands deep intotheir pockets and walked to a sharp measure. But a change came in thenight. The north wind fell off and a breeze blew up from the south. Suchstars as were abroad at dawn left off their shrill winter piping--if it betrue that stars really sing in their courses--and pitched their voices toApril tunes. One star in particular that hung low in the west until the daywas up, knew surely that the Spring had come and sang in concert with theearliest birds. There is a dull belief that these early birds shake offtheir sleep to get the worm. Rather, they come forth at this hour to cocktheir ears upon the general heavens for such new tunes as the unfadedstars still sing. If an ear is turned down to the rummage of worms in theearth--for to the superficial, so does the attitude attest--it is only thatthe other ear may be turned upward to catch the celestial harmonies; forbirds know that if there is an untried melody in heaven it will sound firstacross the clear pastures of the dawn. All the chirping and whistlingfrom the fields and trees are then but the practice of the hour. When themeadowlark sings on a fence-rail she but cons her lesson from the stars. 

It is on such a bright Spring morning that the housewife, duster in hand, throws open her parlor window and looks upon the street. A pleasant park isbelow, of the size of a city square, and already it stirs with the day'sactivity. The housewife beats her cloth upon the sill and as the dust fliesoff, she hears the cries and noises of the place. In a clear tenor sheis admonished that there is an expert hereabouts to grind her knives. Aswarthy baritone on a wagon lifts up his voice in praise of radishes andcarrots. His eye roves along the windows. The crook of a hungry finger willbring him to a stand. Or a junkman is below upon his business. Yesterdaythe bells upon his cart would have sounded sour, but this morning theyrattle agreeably, as though a brisker cow than common, springtime in herhoofs, were jangling to her pasture. At the sound--if you are of countrytraining--you see yourself, somewhat misty through the years, barefoot in agrassy lane, with stick in hand, urging the gentle beast. There is a subtlepersuasion in the junkman's call. In these tones did the magician, bawlingfor old lamps, beguile Aladdin. If there were this morning in my lodging anunrubbed lamp, I would toss it from the window for such magic as he mightextract from it. And if a fair Princess should be missing at the noon andher palace be skipped from sight, it will follow on the rubbing of it. 

The call of red cherries in the park--as you might guess from its Italiansource--is set to an amorous tune. What lady, smocked in morning cambric, would not be wooed by such a voice? The gay fellow tempts her to apurchase. It is but a decent caution--now that Spring is here--that therascal does not call his wares by moonlight. As for early peas thismorning, it is Pan himself who peddles them--disguised and smirched lesthe be caught in the deception--Pan who stamps his foot and shakes thethicket--whose habit is to sing with reedy voice of the green willows thatdip in sunny waters. Although he now clatters his tins and baskets andcries out like a merchant, his thoughts run to the black earth and theshady hollows and the sound of little streams. 

I have wondered as I have observed the housewives lingering at theirwindows--for my window also looks upon the park--I have wondered that thesemelodious street cries are not used generally for calling the wares ofwider sale. If a radish can be so proclaimed, there might be a lilt devisedin praise of other pleasing merceries--a tripping pizzicato for laces andfrippery--a brave trumpeting for some newest cereal. And should not thelatest book--if it be a tale of love, for these I am told are best offeredto the public in the Spring (sad tales are best for winter)--should not atale of love be heralded through the city by the singing of a ballad, witha melting tenor in the part? In old days a gaudy rogue cried out upon thebroader streets that jugglers had stretched their rope in the market-place, but when the bears came to town, the news was piped even to the narrowestlanes that house-folk might bring their pennies. 

With my thoughts set on the Spring I chanced to walk recently where thetheatres are thickest. It was on a Saturday afternoon and the walk wascrowded with amusement seekers. Presently in the press I observed a queerold fellow carrying on his back a monstrous pack of umbrellas. He ranga bell monotonously and professed himself a mender of umbrellas. He canhardly have expected to find a customer in the crowd. Even a blinkingeye--and these street merchants are shrewd in these matters--must have toldhim that in all this hurrying mass of people, the thoughts of no one rantoward umbrellas. Rather, I think that he was taking an hour from theroutine of the day. He had trod the profitable side streets until truantryhad taken him. But he still made a pretext of working at his job and calledhis wares to ease his conscience from idleness. Once when an unusuallybright beam of sunlight fell from between the clouds, he tilted up his hatto get the warmth and I thought him guilty of a skip and syncopation in theringing of his bell, as if he too twitched pleasantly with the Spring andhis old sap was stirred. 

I like these persons who ply their trades upon the sidewalk. My hatter--thefellow who cleans my straw hat each Spring--is a partner of a bootblack. Over his head as he putters with his soap and brushes, there hangs a rustysign proclaiming that he is famous for his cleaning all round the world. Heis so modest in his looks that I have wondered whether he really can readthe sign. Or perhaps like a true merchant, he is not squeamish at thepraise. As I have not previously been aware that any of his profession evercame to general fame except the Mad Hatter of Wonderland, I have squintedsharply at him to see if by chance it might be he, but there are no markseven of a distant kinship. He does, however, bring my hat to a marvellouswhiteness and it may be true that he has really tended heads that are nowgone beyond Constantinople. 

Bootblacks have a sense of rhythm unparalleled. Of this the long rag istheir instrument. They draw it once or twice across the shoe to set the keyand then they go into a swift and pattering melody. If there is an unusualgenius in the bootblack--some remnant of ancient Greece--he plays such alively tune that one's shoulders jig to it. If there were a dryad or othersuch nimble creature on the street, she would come leaping as thoughOrpheus strummed a tune, but the dance is too fast for our languid northernfeet. 

Nowhere are apples redder than on a cart. Our hearts go out to Adam in thehour of his temptation. I know one lady of otherwise careful appetite whoeven leans toward dates if she may buy them from a cart. "Those dear dirtydates, " she calls them, but I cannot share her liking for them. Althoughthe cart is a beguiling market, dates so bought are too dusty to be eaten. They rank with the apple-john. The apple-john is that mysterious leatheryfruit, sold more often from a stand than from a cart, which leans at therear of the shelf against the peppermint jars. For myself, although I donot eat apple-johns, I like to look at them. They are so shrivelled and soflat, as though a banana had caught a consumption. Or rather, in the olderworld was there not a custom at a death of sending fruits to support thelonesome journey? If so, the apple-john came untasted to the end. Indeed, there is a look of old Egypt about the fruit. Whether my fondness forgazing at apple-johns springs from a distant occasion when as a child Ionce bought and ate one, or whether it arises from the fact that Falstaffcalled Prince Hal a dried apple-john, is an unsolved question, but I liketo linger before a particularly shrivelled one and wonder what its youthwas like. Perhaps like many of its betters, it remained unheralded andunknown all through its fresher years and not until the coming of itswrinkled age was it at last put up to the common view. The apple-john setsup kinship with an author. 

The day of all fools is wisely put in April. The jest of the day resides inthe success with which credulity is imposed upon, and April is the month ofeasiest credulity. Let bragging travellers come in April and hold us withtales of the Anthropopagi! If their heads are said to grow beneath theirshoulders, still we will turn a credent ear. Indeed, it is all but surethat Baron Munchausen came back from his travels in the Spring. Whenelse could he have got an ear? What man can look upon the wonders of thereturning year--the first blue skies, the soft rains, the tender sproutingsof green stalks without feeling that there is nothing beyond belief? Ifsuch miracles can happen before his eyes, shall not the extreme range evenof travel or metaphysics be allowed? What man who has smelled the firstfragrance of the earth, has heard the birds on their northern flight andhas seen an April brook upon its course, will withhold his credence eventhough the jest be plain?

I beg, therefore, that when you walk upon the street on the next day ofApril fool, that you yield to the occasion. If an urchin points his fingerat your hat, humor him by removing it! Look sharply at it for a supposeddefect! His glad shout will be your reward. Or if you are begged piteouslyto lift a stand-pipe wrapped to the likeness of a bundle, even though yousniff the imposture, seize upon it with a will! It is thus, beneath theseApril skies, that you play your part in the pageantry that marks the day. 

The Friendly Genii

Do you not confess yourself to be several years past that time of greenestyouth when burnt cork holds its greatest charm? Although not fallen to acrippled state, are you not now too advanced to smudge your upper lip andstalk agreeably as a villain? Surely you can no longer frisk lightly ina comedy. If you should wheeze and limp in an old man's part, with backhumped in mimicry, would you not fear that it bordered on the truth? Butdoubtless there was a time when you ranged upon these heights--when Kazracthe magician was not too heavy for your art. In those soaring days, let ushope that you played the villain with a swagger, or being cast in a softerrole, that you won a pink and fluffy princess before the play was done. Your earliest practice, it may be, was in rigging the parlor hangings as acurtain with brown string from the pantry and safety pins. Although you hadno show to offer, you said "ding" three times--as is the ancient custom ofthe stage when the actors are ready--and drew them wide apart. The catwas the audience, who dozed with an ear twitching toward your activity. Acomplaint that springs up in youth and is known as "snuffles" had kept youout of school. It had gripped you hard at breakfast, when you were sunk infear of your lessons, but had abated at nine o'clock. Whether the cure camewith a proper healing of the nasal glands or followed merely on the ringingof the school bell, must be left to a cool judgment. 

Your theatre filled the morning. When Annie came on her quest for dust, youtooted once upon your nose, just to show that a remnant of your infirmitypersisted, then put your golden convalescence on the making of yourcurtain. 

But in the early hours of afternoon when the children are once more uponthe street, you regret your illness. Here they come trooping by threes andfours, carrying their books tied up in straps. One would think that theywere in fear lest some impish fact might get outside the covers to spoilthe afternoon. Until the morrow let two and two think themselves five atleast! And let Ohio be bounded as it will! Some few children skip ropes, orstep carefully across the cracks of the sidewalk for fear they spoil theirsuppers. Ah!--a bat goes by--a glove--a ball! And now from a vacant lotthere comes the clamor of choosing sides. Is no mention to be made ofyou--you, "molasses fingers"--the star left fielder--the timely batter?What would you not give now for a clean bill of health? You rub youroffending nose upon the glass. What matters it with what deep rascality inblack mustachios you once strutted upon your boards? What is Hecuba to you?

My own first theatre was in the attic, a place of squeaks and shadowsto all except the valiant. In it were low, dark corners where the nightcrawled in and slept. But in the open part where the roof was highest, there was the theatre. Its walls were made of a red cambric of a floweredpattern that still lingers with me, and was bought with a clatter ofpennies on the counter, together with nickels that had escaped myextravagance at the soda fountain. 

A cousin and I were joint proprietors. In the making of it, the hammer andnails were mine by right of sex, while she stitched in womanish fashion onthe fabrics. She was leading woman and I was either the hero or the villainas fitted to my mood. My younger cousin--although we scorned her for heryouth--was admitted to the slighter parts. She might daub herself withcork, but it must be only when we were done. Nor did we allow her to carrythe paper knife--shaped like a dagger--which figured hugely in our plots. If we gave her any word to speak, it was as taffy to keep her silent aboutsome iniquity that we had worked against her. In general, we judged her tobe too green and giddy for the heavy parts. At the most, she might takepins at the door--for at such a trifle we displayed our talents--or playupon the comb as orchestra before the rising of the curtain. 

The usual approach to this theatre was the kitchen door, and those who cameto enjoy the drama sniffed at their very entrance the new-baked bread. Apan of cookies was set upon a shelf and a row of apples was ranged alongthe window sill. Of the ice-box around the corner, not a word, lest hungerlead you off! As for the cook, although her tongue was tart upon a justoccasion and although she shooed the children with her apron, secretly sheliked to have them crowding through her kitchen. 

Now if you, reader--for I assume you to be one of the gatheringaudience--were of the kind careful on scrubbing days to scrape your feetupon the iron outside and to cross the kitchen on the unwashed parts, thenit is likely that you stood in the good graces of the cook. Mark yourreward! As you journeyed upward, you munched upon a cookie and bit scallopsin its edge. Or if a ravenous haste was in you--as commonly comes up in themiddle afternoon--you waived this slower method and crammed yourself witha recklessness that bestrewed the purlieus of your mouth. If your ears laybeyond the muss, the stowage was deemed decent and in order. 

Is there not a story in which children are tracked by an ogre through theperilous wood by the crumbs they dropped? Then let us hope there is no ogrelurking on these back stairs, for the trail is plain. It would be near thetop, farthest from the friendly kitchen, that the attack might come, forthere the stairs yielded to the darkness of the attic. There it was bestto look sharp and to turn the corners wide. A brave whistling kept out theother noises. 

It was after Aladdin had been in town that the fires burned hottest in us. My grandfather and I went together to the matinee, his great thumb withinmy fist. We were frequent companions. Together we had sat on benches in thepark and poked the gravel into patterns. We went to Dime Museums. Althoughhis eyes had looked longer on the world than mine, we seemed of an equalage. 

The theatre was empty as we entered. We carried a bag of candy against asudden appetite--colt's foot, a penny to the stick. Here and there usherswere clapping down the seats, sounds to my fancy not unlike the first cornwithin a popper. Somewhere aloft there must have been a roof, else the daywould have spied in on us, yet it was lost in the gloom. It was as thougha thrifty owner had borrowed the dusky fabrics of the night to make hiscover. The curtain was indistinct, but we knew it to be the StratfordChurch and we dimly saw its spire. 

Now, on the opening of a door to the upper gallery, there was a scamperingto get seats in front, speed being whetted by a long half hour of waitingon the stairs. Ghostly, unbodied heads, like the luminous souls of lostmountaineers--for this was the kind of fiction, got out of the PublicLibrary, that had come last beneath my thumb--ghostly heads looked downupon us across the gallery rail. 

And now, if you will tip back your head like a paper-hanger--whose Adam'sapple would seem to attest a life of sidereal contemplation--you will seein the center of the murk above you a single point of light. It is thespark that will ignite the great gas chandelier. I strain my neck to thepoint of breaking. My grandfather strains his too, for it is a game betweenus which shall announce the first spurting of the light. At last! We cryout together. The spark catches the vent next to it. It runs around thecircle of glass pendants. The whole blazes up. The mountaineers come tolife. They lean forward on their elbows. 

From the wings comes the tuning of the violins. A flute ripples up and downin a care-free manner as though the villain Kazrac were already dead andvirtue had come into its own. The orchestra emerges from below. Theircalmness is but a pretense. Having looked on such sights as lie behind thecurtain, having trod such ways, they should be bubbling with excitement. Yet observe the bass viol! How sodden is his eye! How sunken is his gaze!With what dull routine he draws his bow, as though he knew naught butsleepy tunes! If there be any genie in the place, as the program says, lethim first stir this sad fellow from his melancholy!

We consult our programs. The first scene is the magician's cave where heplans his evil schemes. The second is the Chinese city where he pretends tobe Aladdin's uncle. And for myself, did a friendly old gentleman offer melollypops and all-day-suckers--for so did the glittering baubles presentthemselves across the footlights--like Aladdin I, too, would not havesquinted too closely on his claim. Gladly I would have gone off with him onan all-day picnic toward the Chinese mountains. 

We see a lonely pass in the hills, the cave of jewels (splendid to the eyeof childhood) where the slave of the lamp first appears, and finally thethrone-room with Aladdin seated safely beside his princess. 

Who knows how to dip a pen within the twilight? Who shall trace the figuresof the mist? The play is done. We come out in silence. Our candy is but aremnant. Darkness has fallen. The pavements are wet and shining, so thatthe night might see his face, if by chance the old fellow looked our way. 

All about there are persons hurrying home with dinner-pails, who, by theirdull eyes, seem never to have heard what wonders follow on the rubbing of alamp. 

But how the fires leaped up--how ambition beat within us--how our attictheatre was wrought to perfection--how the play came off and wracked theneighborhood of its pins--with what grace I myself acted Aladdin--thesethings must be written by a vain and braggart pen. 

Mr. Pepys Sits in the Pit

When it happens that a man has risen to be a member of Parliament, theSecretary of the British Navy and the President of the Royal Society, whenhe has become the adviser of the King and is moreover the one really brightspot in that King's reign, it is amazing that considerably more than onehundred years after his death, when the navy that he nurtured dominates theseven seas, that he himself on a sudden should be known, not for his largeraccomplishments, but as a kind of tavern crony and pot-companion. When heshould be standing with fame secure in a solemn though dusty niche in theTemple of Time, it is amazing that he should be remembered chiefly forcertain quarrels with his wife and as a frequenter of plays and summergardens. 

Yet this is the fate of Samuel Pepys. Before the return of the Stuarts heheld a poor clerkship in the Navy Office and cut his quill obscurely atthe common desk. At the Restoration, partly by the boost of influence, butchiefly by his substantial merit, he mounted to several successively higherposts. The Prince of Wales became his friend and patron and when he becameLord High Admiral he took Pepys with him in his advancement. Thus in 1684, Pepys became Secretary of the Navy. When later the Prince of Wales becameKing James II, Pepys, although his office remained the same, came to quitea pinnacle of administrative power. He was shrewd and capable in theconduct of his position and brought method to the Navy Office. He was aprime factor in the first development of the British Navy. Later victoriesthat were to sweep the seas may be traced in part to him. Nelson rides uponhis shoulders. These achievements should have made his fame secure. Buton a sudden he gained for posterity a less dignified although a moreinteresting and enduring renown. 

In life, Samuel Pepys walked gravely in majestical robe with full-bottomedwig and with ceremonial lace flapping at his wrists. Every step, if hisportrait is to be believed, was a bit of pageantry. Such was his fame, thatif his sword but clacked a warning on the pavement, it must have broughtthe apprentices to the windows. Tradesmen laid down their wares to get alook at him. Fat men puffed and strained to gain the advantage of a sill. Fashionable ladies peeped from brocaded curtains and ogled for his regard. Or if he went by chair, the carriers held their noses up as though offendedby the common air. When he spoke before the Commons, the galleries werehushed. He gave his days to the signing of stiff parchments--AdmiraltyOrders or what not. He checked the King himself at the council table. Inshort, he was not only a great personage, but also he was quite well awareof the fact and held himself accordingly. 

But now many years have passed, and Time, that has so long been at bowlswith reputations, has acquired a moderate skill in knocking them down. Letus see how it fares with Pepys! Some men who have been roguish in theirlives have been remembered by their higher accomplishments. A stringof sonnets or a novel or two, if it catches the fancy, has wiped out atap-room record. The winning of a battle has obliterated a meanly spentyouth. It is true that for a while an old housewife who once lived on thehero's street will shake a dubious finger on his early pranks. Stolenapples or cigarettes behind the barn cram her recollection. But even avillage reputation fades. In time the sonnets and glorious battle have theupper place. But things went the other way with Pepys. Rather, his fateis like that of Zeus, who--if legend is to be trusted--was in his life aperson of some importance whose nod stirred society on Olympus, but who isnow remembered largely for his flirtations and his braggart conduct. A notunlike evil has fallen on the magnificent Mr. Pepys. 

This fate came to him because--as the world knows--it happened that fora period of ten years in comparative youth, he wrote an interesting andhonest diary. He began this diary in 1659, while he was still a poor clerkliving with his wife in a garret, and ended it in 1669, when, although hehad emerged from obscurity, his greater honors had not yet been set on him. All the facts of his life during this period are put down, whether good orbad, small or large, generous or mean. He writes of his mornings spent inwork at his office, of his consultations with higher officials. Thereis much running to and fro of business. The Dutch war bulks to a properlength. Parliament sits through a page at a stretch. Pepys goes upon thestreets in the days of the plague and writes the horror of it--the housesmarked with red crosses and with prayers scratched beneath--the stench andthe carrying of dead bodies. He sees the great fire of London from hiswindow on the night it starts; afterwards St. Paul's with its roofs fallen. He is on the fleet that brings Charles home from his long travels, andafterwards when Charles is crowned, he records the processions and thecrowds. But also Pepys quarrels with his wife and writes it out on paper. He debauches a servant and makes a note of it. He describes a supper at anale-house, and how he plays on the flute. He sings "Beauty Retire, " a songof his own making, and tells how his listeners "cried it up. "

In consequence of this, Samuel Pepys is now known chiefly for hisattentions to the pretty actresses of Drury Lane, for kissing Nell Gwynnein her tiring-room, for his suppers with "the jade" Mrs. Knipp, for hislove of a tune upon the fiddle, for coming home from Vauxhall by wherrylate at night, "singing merrily" down the river. Or perhaps we recall himbest for burying his wine and Parmazan cheese in his garden at the timeof the Fire, or for standing to the measure of Mr. Pin the tailor for a"camlett cloak with gold buttons, " or for sitting for his portrait in anIndian gown which he "hired to be drawn in. " Who shall say that this is notthe very portrait by which we have fancied him stalking off to Commons?Could the apprentices have known in what a borrowed majesty he walked, would they not have tossed their caps in mirth and pointed their duskyfingers at him?

Or we remember that he once lived in a garret, and that his wife, "poorwretch, " was used to make the fire while Samuel lay abed, and that shewashed his "foul clothes"--that by degrees he came to be wealthy androde in his own yellow coach--that his wife went abroad in society "ina flowered tabby gown"--that Pepys forsook his habits of poverty andexchanged his twelve-penny seat in the theatre gallery for a place in thepit--and that on a rare occasion (doubtless when he was alone and there wasbut one seat to buy) he arose to the extravagance of a four-shilling box. 

Consequently, despite the weightier parts of the diary, we know Pepyschiefly in his hours of ease. Sittings and consultations are so dry. Ifonly the world would run itself decently and in silence! Even a meeting ofthe Committee for Tangier--when the Prince of Wales was present and suchsmaller fry as Chancellors--is dull and is matter for a skipping eye. 

If a session of Parliament bulks to a fat paragraph and it happens thatthere is a bit of deviltry just below at the bottom of the page--maybe nomore than a clinking of glasses (or perhaps Nell Gwynne's name pops insight)--bless us how the eye will hurry to turn the leaf on the chanceof roguery to come! Who would read through a long discourse on Admiraltybusiness, if it be known before that Pepys is engaged with the pretty Mrs. Knipp for a trip to Bartholomew Fair to view the dancing horse, and thatthe start is to be made on the turning of the page? Or a piece of scandalabout Lady Castlemaine, how her nose fell out of joint when Mrs. Stuartcame to court--such things tease one from the sterner business. 

And for these reasons, we have been inclined to underestimate theimportance of Pepys' diary. Francis Jeffrey, who wrote long ago aboutPepys, evidently thought that he was an idle and unprofitable fellow andthat the diary was too much given to mean and petty things. But in realitythe diary is an historical mine. Even when Pepys plays upon the surface, he throws out facts that can be had nowhere else. No one would venture towrite of Restoration life without digging through his pages. Pepys wrote ina confused shorthand, maybe against the eye of his wife, from whom he hadreason to conceal his offenses. The papers lay undeciphered until 1825, when a partial publication was made. There were additions by subsequenteditors until now it appears that the Wheatley text of 1893-1899 is final. But ever since 1825, the diary has been judged to be of high importance inthe understanding of the first decade of the Restoration. 

If some of the weightier parts are somewhat dry, there are places in whicha lighter show of personality is coincident with real historical data. Foremost are the pages where Pepys goes to the theatre. 

More than Charles II was restored in 1660. Among many things of moreimportance than this worthless King, the theatre was restored. Since theclose of Elizabethan times it had been out of business. More than thirtyyears before, Puritanism had snuffed out its candles and driven itsfiddlers to the streets. But Puritanism, in its turn, fell with the returnof the Stuarts. Pepys is a chief witness as to what kind of theatre it wasthat was set up in London about the year 1660. It was far different fromthe Elizabethan theatre. It came in from the Bankside and the fields to thenorth of the city and lodged itself on the better streets and squares. Itno longer patterned itself on the inn-yard, but was roofed against therain. The time had been when the theatre was cousin to the bear-pit. Theywere ranged together on the Bankside and they sweat and smelled likecongenial neighbors. But these days are past. Let Bartholomew Fair be asrowdy as it pleases, let acrobats and such loose fellows keep to Southwark, the theatre has risen in the world! It has put on a wig, as it were, it hastied a ribbon to itself and has become fashionable. And although it hastaken on a few extra dissolute habits, they are of the genteelest kind andwill make it feel at home in the upper circles. 

But also the theatre introduced movable scenery. There is an attempt towardelaboration of stage effect. "To the King's playhouse--" says Pepys, "agood scene of a town on fire. " Women take parts. An avalanche of new playsdescends on it. Even the old plays that have survived are garbled to suit achange of taste. 

But if you would really know what kind of theatre it was that sprang upwith the Stuarts and what the audiences looked like and how they behaved, you must read Pepys. With but a moderate use of fancy, you can set out withhim in his yellow coach for the King's house in Drury Lane. Perhaps hungernips you at the start. If so, you stop, as Pepys pleasantly puts it, for a"barrel of oysters. " Then, having dusted yourself of crumbs, you take theroad again. Presently you come to Drury Lane. Other yellow coaches arebefore you. There is a show of foppery on the curb and an odor of smokinglinks. A powdered beauty minces to the door. Once past the doorkeeper, youhear the cries of the orange women going up and down the aisles. There is ashuffling of apprentices in the gallery. A dandy who lolls in a box with asilken leg across the rail, scrawls a message to an actress and sends itoff by Orange Moll. Presently Castlemaine enters the royal box with theKing. There is a craning of necks, for with her the King openly "dodiscover a great deal of familiarity. " In other boxes are other fine ladieswearing vizards to hold their modesty if the comedy is free. A board breaksin the ceiling of the gallery and dust falls in the men's hair and theladies' necks, which, writes Pepys, "made good sport. " Or again, "Agentleman of good habit, sitting just before us, eating of some fruit inthe midst of the play, did drop down as dead; being choked, but with muchado Orange Moll did thrust her finger down his throat and brought him tolife again. " Or perhaps, "I sitting behind in a dark place, a lady spitbackward upon me by a mistake, not seeing me, but after seeing her to be avery pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all. "

At a change of scenes, Mrs. Knipp spies Pepys and comes to the pit door. Hegoes with her to the tiring-room. "To the women's shift, " he writes, "where Nell was dressing herself, and was all unready, and is very pretty, prettier than I thought.... But to see how Nell cursed for having so fewpeople in the pit, was pretty. "--"But Lord! their confidence! and howmany men do hover about them as soon as they come off the stage, and howconfident they are in their talk!" Or he is whispered a bit of gossip, howCastlemaine is much in love with Hart, an actor of the house. Then Pepysgoes back into the pit and lays out a sixpence for an orange. As the playnears its end, footmen crowd forward at the doors. The epilogue is spoken. The fiddles squeak their last. There is a bawling outside for coaches. 

"Would it fit your humor, " asks Mr. Pepys, when we have been handed to ourseats, "would it fit your humor, if we go around to the Rose Tavern forsome burnt wine and a breast of mutton off the spit? It's sure that somebrave company will fall in, and we can have a tune. We'll not heed thebellman. We'll sit late, for it will be a fine light moonshine morning. "

To an Unknown Reader

Once in a while I dream that I come upon a person who is reading a bookthat I have written. In my pleasant dreams these persons do not nodsleepily upon my pages, and sometimes I fall in talk with them. Althoughthey do not know who I am, they praise the book and name me warmly amongmy betters. In such circumstance my happy nightmare mounts until I rideforemost with the giants. If I could think that this disturbance of mysleep came from my diet and that these agreeable persons arose from alobster or a pie, nightly at supper I would ply my fork recklessly amongthe platters. 

But in a waking state these meetings never come. If an article of mine isever read at all, it is read in secret like the Bible. Once, indeed, in afriend's house I saw my book upon the table, but I suspect that it had beendusted and laid out for my coming. I request my hostess that next time, formy vanity, she lay the book face down upon a chair, as though the grocer'sknock intruded. Or perhaps a huckster's cart broke upon her enjoyment. Let it be thought that a rare bargain--tender asparagus or the firststrawberries of the summer--tempted her off my pages! Or maybe there wasred rhubarb in the cart and the jolly farmer, as he journeyed up thestreet, pitched it to a pleasing melody. Dear lady, I forgive you. But letus hope no laundryman led you off! Such discord would have marred my book. 

I saw once in a public library, as I went along the shelves, a volume ofmine which gave evidence to have been really read. The record in frontshowed that it had been withdrawn one time only. The card was blankbelow--but once certainly it had been read. I hope that the book went outon a Saturday noon when the spirits rise for the holiday to come, and thata rainy Sunday followed, so that my single reader was kept before his fire. A dull patter on the window--if one sits unbuttoned on the hearth--givesa zest to a languid chapter. The rattle of a storm--if only the room besnug--fixes the attention fast. Therefore, let the rain descend as thoughthe heavens rehearsed for a flood! Let a tempest come out of the west! Letthe chimney roar as it were a lion! And if there must be a clearing, letit hold off until the late afternoon, lest it sow too early a distaste forindoors and reading! There is scarcely a bookworm who will not slip hisglasses off his nose, if the clouds break at the hour of sunset when theearth and sky are filled with a green and golden light. I took the book offthe library shelf and timidly glancing across my shoulder for fear thatsome one might catch me, I looked along the pages. There was a thumb markin a margin, and presently appeared a kindly stickiness on the paper asthough an orange had squirted on it. Surely there had been a human beinghereabouts. It was as certain as when Crusoe found the footprints in thesand. Ah, I thought, this fellow who sits in the firelight has caught anappetite. Perhaps he bit a hole and sucked the fruit, and the skin hasburst behind. Or I wave the theory and now conceive that the volume wasread at breakfast. If so, it is my comfort that in those dim hours it stoodpropped against his coffee cup. 

But the trail ended with the turning of the page. There were, indeed, further on, pencil checks against one of the paragraphs as if here the bookhad raised a faint excitement, but I could not tell whether they sprangup in derision or in approval. Toward the end there were uncut leaves, asthough even my single reader had failed in his persistence. 

Being swept once beyond a usual caution, I lamented to my friend F---- ofthe neglect in which readers held me, to which the above experience ina library was a rare exception. F---- offered me such consolation as hecould, deplored the general taste and the decadence of the times, and saidthat as praise was sweet to everyone, he, as far as he himself was able, offered it anonymously to those who merited it. He was standing recentlyin a picture gallery, when a long-haired man who stood before one of thepictures was pointed out to him as the artist who had painted it. At onceF---- saw his opportunity to confer a pleasure, but as there is a touch ofhumor in him, he first played off a jest. Lounging forward, he dropped hishead to one side as artistic folk do when they look at color. He made aknot-hole of his fingers and squinted through. Next he retreated across theroom and stood with his legs apart in the very attitude of wisdom. He casta stern eye upon the picture and gravely tapped his chin. At last when theartist was fretted to an extremity, F---- came forward and so cordiallypraised the picture that the artist, being now warmed and comforted, presently excused himself in a high excitement and rushed away to startanother picture while the pleasant spell was on him. 

Had I been the artist, I would have run from either F----'s praise ordisapproval. As an instance, I saw a friend on a late occasion coming froma bookstore with a volume of suspicious color beneath his arm. I had beenavoiding that particular bookstore for a week because my book lay for saleon a forward table. And now when my friend appeared, a sudden panic seizedme and I plunged into the first doorway to escape. I found myself facing asoda fountain. For a moment, in my blur, I could not account for thesoda fountain, or know quite how it had come into my life. Presently aninterne--for he was jacketted as if he walked a hospital--asked me what I'dhave. 

Still somewhat dazed, in my discomposure, having no answer ready, mystartled fancy ran among the signs and labels of the counter until Irecalled that a bearded man once, unblushing in my presence, had ordereda banana flip. I got the fellow's ear and named it softly. Whereupon heplaced a dead-looking banana across a mound of ice-cream, poured on coloredjuices as though to mark the fatal wound and offered it to me. I ate a fewbites of the sickish mixture until the streets were safe. 

I do not know to what I can attribute my timidity. Possibly it arises fromthe fact that until recently my writing met with uniform rejection andfailure. For years I wrote secretly in order that few persons might knowhow miserably I failed. I answered upon a question that I had given up thepractice, that I now had no time for it, that I scribbled now and thenbut always burned it. All that while I gave my rare leisure and my stolenafternoons--the hours that other men give to golf and sleep and sittingtogether--these hours I gave to writing. On a holiday I was at it early. OnSaturday when other folks were abroad, I sat at my desk. It was my griefthat I was so poor a borrower of the night that I blinked stupidly on mypapers if I sat beyond the usual hour. Writing was my obsession. I need nopity for my failures, for although I tossed my cap upon a rare acceptance, my deeper joy was in the writing. That joy repeated failures could notblunt. 

There are paragraphs that now lie yellow in my desk with their formermeaning faded, that still recall as I think of them the first exaltationwhen I wrote them--feverishly in a hot emotion. In those days I thoughtthat I had caught the sunlight on my pen, and the wind and the moon and thespinning earth. I thought that the valleys and the mountains arose from themist obedient to me. If I splashed my pen, in my warm regard it was theroar and fury of the sea. It was really no more than my youth crying out. And, alas, my thoughts and my feelings escaped me when I tried to put themdown on paper, although I did not know it then. Perhaps they were toovagrant to be held. And yet these paragraphs that might be mournful recordsof failure, fill me with no more than a tender recollection for the boywho wrote them. The worn phrases now beg their way with broken steps. Likeshrill and piping minstrels they whine and crack a melody that I stillremember in its freshness. 

But perhaps, reader, we are brothers in these regards. Perhaps you, too, have faded papers. Or possibly, even on a recent date, you sighed your soulinto an essay or a sonnet, and you now have manuscript which you would liketo sell. Do not mistake me! I am not an editor, nor am I an agent for thesewares. Rather I speak as a friend who, having many such hidden sorrows, offers you a word of comfort. To a desponding Hamlet I exclaim, "'Tiscommon, my Lord. " I have so many friends that have had an unproductivefling toward letters, that I think the malady is general. So many books arepublished and flourish a little while in their bright wrappers, but yoursand theirs and mine waste away in a single precious copy. 

I am convinced that a close inspection of all desks--a federal matter asthough Capital were under fire--would betray thousands of abandoned novels. There may be a few stern desks that are so cluttered with price-sheets andstock-lists that they cannot offer harborage to a love tale. Standing desksin particular, such as bookkeepers affect, are not always chinkedwith these softer plots. And rarely there is a desk so smothered inlearning--reeking so of scholarship--as not to admit a lighter nook forthe tucking of a sea yarn. Even so, it was whispered to me lately thatProfessor B----, whose word shakes the continent, holds in a lower drawerno fewer than three unpublished historical novels, each set up with a fullquota of smugglers and red bandits. One of these stories deals scandalouslywith the abduction of an heiress, but this must be held in confidence. Theprofessor is a stoic before his class, but there's blood in the fellow. 

There is, therefore, little use in your own denial. You will recall thatonce, when taken to a ruined castle, you brooded on the dungeons until aplot popped into your head. You crammed it with quaint phrasing from thechroniclers. You stuffed it with soldiers' oaths. "What ho! landlord, "you wrote gayly at midnight, "a foaming cup, good sir. God pity the poorsailors that take the sea this night!" And on you pelted with your plot tosuch conflicts and hair-breadth escapes as lay in your contrivance. 

These things you have committed. Good sir, we are of a common piece. Let ussalute as brothers! And therefore, as to a comrade, I bid you continue inyour ways. And that you may not lack matter for your pen, I warmly urgeyou, when by shrewdest computation you have exhausted the plots ofadventure and have worn your villains thin, that you proceed in quietervein. I urge you to an April mood, for the winds of Spring are up anddaffodils nod across the garden. There is black earth in the Spring andgreen hilltops, and there is also the breath of flowers along the fencesand the sound of water for your pen to prattle of. 

A Plague of All Cowards

Having written lately against the dog, several acquaintances have asked meto turn upon the cat, and they have been good enough to furnish me withinstances of her faithlessness. Also, a lady with whom I recently sat atdinner, inquired of me on the passing of the fish, whether I had everproperly considered the cow, which she esteemed a most mischievous animal. One of them had mooed at her as she crossed a pasture and she had hastilyclimbed a fence. I get a good many suggestions first and last. I was oncetaken to a Turkish bath for no other reason--as I was afterwards told--thanthat it might supply me with a topic. Odd books have been put in my way. A basket of school readers was once lodged with me, with a request that Idirect my attention to the absurd selection of the poems. I have been urgedto go against car conductors and customs men. On one occasion I received apaper of tombstone inscriptions, with a note of direction how others mightbe found in a neighboring churchyard if I were curious. A lady in whosecompany I camped last summer has asked me to give a chapter to it. We wereabroad upon a lake in the full moon--we were lost upon a mountain--twice acanoe upset--there were the usual jests about cooking. These things mighthave filled a few pages agreeably, yet so far they have given me only aparagraph. 

But I am not disposed toward any of these subjects, least of all the cat, upon which I look--despite the coldness of her nature--as a harmless andcomforting appendage of the hearth-rug. I would no more prey upon hermorals than I would the morals of the andirons. I choose, rather, to slipto another angle of the question and say a few words about cowards, amongwhom I have already confessed that I number myself. 

In this year of battles, when physical courage sits so high, the reader--ifhe is swept off in the general opinion--will expect under such a titlesomething caustic. He will think that I am about to loose against allcowards a plague of frogs and locusts as if old Egypt had come again. Butcowardice is its own punishment. It needs no frog to nip it. Even thesharp-toothed locust--for in the days that bordered so close upon themastodon, the locust could hardly have fallen to the tender greenling weknow today--even the locust that once spoiled the Egyptians could not nowadd to the grief of a coward. 

And yet--really I hesitate. I blush. My attack will be too intimate; for Ihave confessed that I am not the very button on the cap of bravery. I haveindeed stiffened myself to ride a horse, a mightier feat than driving himbecause of the tallness of the monster and his uneasy movement, as thoughhis legs were not well socketed and might fall out on a change of gaits. Ihave ridden on a camel in a side-show, but have found my only comfort inhis hump. I have stroked the elephant. In a solemn hour of night I havegone downstairs to face a burglar. But I do not run singing to thesedangers. While your really brave fellow is climbing a dizzy staircase tothe moon--I write in figure--I would shake with fear upon a lower platform. 

Perhaps you recall Mr. Tipp of the Elia essays. "Tipp, " says his pleasantbiographer, "never mounted the box of a stage-coach in his life; or leanedagainst the rails of a balcony; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet; orlooked down a precipice; or let off a gun. " I cannot follow Tipp, it maybe, to his extreme tremors--my hair will not rise to so close a likeness ofthe fretful porcupine--yet in a measure we are in agreement. We are, as itwere, cousins, with the mark of our common family strong on both of us. 

There are persons who, when in your company on a country walk, will stealapples, not with a decent caution from a tree along the fence, but farafield. If there are grapes, they will not wait for a turn of the road, but will pluck them in the open. Or maybe in your wandering you come on ahalf-built house. You climb in through a window to look about. Here thestairs will go. The ice-box will be set against this wall. But if yourcompanion is one of valor's minions, he will not be satisfied with thissafe and agreeable research--this mild speculation on bath-rooms--thisinnocent placing of a stove. He must go aloft. He has seen a ladder andyearns to climb it. The footing on the second story is bad enough. If youfall between the joists, you will clatter to the basement. It is hard torealize that such an open breezy place will ever be cosy and warm withfires, and that sleepy folk will here lie snugly a-bed on frosty mornings. But still the brazen fellow is not content. A ladder leads horribly to theroof. For myself I will climb until the tip of my nose juts out upon theworld--until it sprouts forth to the air from the topmost timbers: But Iwill go no farther. But if your companion sees a scaffold around a chimney, he must perch on it. For him, a dizzy plank is a pleasant belvedere fromwhich to view the world. 

The bravery of this kind of person is not confined to these few matters. If you happen to go driving with him, he will--if the horse is of the kindthat distends his nostrils--on a sudden toss you the reins and leave you toguard him while he dispatches an errand. If it were a motor car there wouldbe a brake to hold it. If it were a boat, you might throw out an anchor. Abutcher's cart would have a metal drag. But here you sit defenseless--tiedto the whim of a horse--greased for a runaway. The beast Dobbin turns hishead and holds you with his hard eye. There is a convulsive movement alonghis back, a preface, it may be, to a sudden seizure. A real friend wouldhave loosed the straps that run along the horse's flanks. Then, if anydeviltry take him, he might go off alone and have it out. 

I have in mind a livery stable in Kalamazoo. Myself and another man ofequal equestrianism were sent once to bring out a thing called a surrey anda pair of horses. Do you happen to be acquainted with Blat's Horse Food? Ifyour way lies among the smaller towns, you must know its merits. They areproclaimed along the fences and up the telegraph poles. Drinking-troughsspeak its virtues. Horses thrive on Blat's Food. They neigh for it. Aflashing lithograph is set by way of testament wherever traffic turns orlingers. Do you not recall the picture? A great red horse rears himselfon his hind legs. His forward hoofs are extended. He is about to tramplesomeone under foot. His nostrils are wide. He is unduly excited. It cannotbe food, it must be drink that stirs him. He is a fearful spectacle. 

There was such a picture on the wall of the stable. 

"Have you any horses, " I asked nervously, jerking my thumb toward the wall, "any horses that have been fed on just ordinary food? Some that are alittle tired?"

For I remembered how Mr. Winkle once engaged horses to take thePickwickians out to Manor Farm and what mishaps befell them on the way. 

"'He don't shy, does he?' inquired Mr. Pickwick. 

"'Shy, sir?--He wouldn't shy if he was to meet a vagginload of monkeys withtheir tails burnt off. '"

But how Mr. Pickwick dropped his whip, how Mr. Winkle got off his tallhorse to pick it up, how he tried in vain to remount while his horse wentround and round, how they were all spilt out upon the bridge and howfinally they walked to Manor Farm--these things are known to everybody withan inch of reading. 

"'How far is it to Dingley Dell?' they asked. 

"'Better er seven mile. '

"'Is it a good road?'

"'No, t'ant. '... 

"The depressed Pickwickians turned moodily away, with the tall quadruped, for which they all felt the most unmitigated disgust, following slowly attheir heels. "

"Have you any horses, " I repeated, "that have not been fed on Blat'sFood--horses that are, so to speak, on a diet?"

In the farthest stalls, hidden from the sunlight and the invigoratinginfection of the day, two beasts were found with sunken chests and holloweyes, who took us safely to our destination on their hands and knees. 

As you may suspect, I do not enjoy riding. There is, it is true, one saddlehorse in North Carolina that fears me. If time still spares him, that horseI could ride with content. But I would rather trust myself on the top of awobbly step-ladder than up the sides of most horses. I am not quite of amind, however, with Samuel Richardson who owned a hobby-horse and rode onhis hearth-rug in the intervals of writing "Pamela. " It is likely that whenhe had rescued her from an adventure of more than usual danger--perhaps hervillainous master has been concealed in her closet--perhaps he has beenhiding beneath her bed--it is likely, having brought her safely off, theauthor locked her in the buttery against a fresh attack. Then he felt, goodman, in need of exercise. So while he waits for tea and muffins, he leapsupon his rocking-horse and prances off. As for the hobby-horse itself, Ihave not heard whether it was of the usual nursery type, or whether it wasbuilt in the likeness of the leather camels of a German steamship. 

I need hardly say that these confessions of my cowardice are for your earalone. They must not get abroad to smirch me. If on a country walk I havetaken to my heels, you must not twit me with poltroonery. If you charge mewith such faint-heartedness while other persons are present, I'll deny itflat. When I sit in the company of ladies at dinner, I dissemble my truenature, as doublet and hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat. If then, you taunt me, for want of a better escape, I shall turn it to ajest. I shall engage the table flippantly: Hear how preposterously thefellow talks!--he jests to satisfy a grudge. In appearance I am whole asthe marble, founded as a rock. 

But really some of us cowards are diverting persons. The lady who directedme against the cow is a most delightful woman with whom I hope I shallagain sit at dinner. A witty lady of my acquaintance shivers when acat walks in the room. A man with whom I pass the time pleasantly andprofitably, although he will not admit a fear of ghosts, still will notsleep in an empty house because of possible noises. I would rather spend aSaturday evening in the company of the cowardly Falstaff than of the boldHotspur. If it were not for sack, villainous sack, and a few spots upon hisfront, you would go far to find a better companion than the fat old Knight. Bob Acres was not much for valor and he made an ass of himself when he wentto fight a duel, yet one could have sat agreeably at mutton with him. 

But these things are slight. It matters little whether or not one can mounta ladder comfortably. Now that motors have come in, horses stand remotelyin our lives. Nor is it of great moment whether or not we fear to be out offashion--whether we halt in the wearing of a wrong-shaped hat, or glancefearfully around when we choose from a line of forks. Superstitions restmostly on the surface and are not deadly in themselves. A man can be trueof heart even if he will not sit thirteen at table. But there is a kindof fear that is disastrous to them that have it. It is the fear of thematerial universe in all its manifestations. There are persons, stout bothof chest and limb, who fear drafts and wet feet. A man who is an elephantof valor and who has been feeling this long while a gentle contempt forsuch as myself, will cry out if a soft breeze strikes against his neck. Ifa foot slips to the gutter and becomes wet, he will dose himself. Achillesdid not more carefully nurse his heel. For him the lofty dome of air ispacked with malignant germs. The round world is bottled with contagion. Astrong man who, in his time, might have slain the Sofi, is as fearful ofhis health as though the plague were up the street. Calamities beset him. The slightest sniffling in his nose is the trumpet for a deep disorder. Existence is but a moving hazard. Life for him, poor fellow, is but a roomwith a window on the night and a storm beating on the casement. God knows, it is better to grow giddy on a ladder than to think that this majesticearth is such an universal pestilence. 

The Asperities of the Early British Reviewers

Book reviewers nowadays direct their attention, for the most part, to theworthy books and they habitually neglect those that seem beneath theirregard. On a rare occasion they assail an unprofitable book, but even thisis often but a bit of practice. They swish a bludgeon to try their hand. They only take their anger, as it were, upon an outing, lest with tooclose housing it grow pallid and shrink in girth. Or maybe they indulgethemselves in humor. Perhaps they think that their pages grow dull and thatridicule will restore the balance. They throw it in like a drunken porterto relieve a solemn scene. I fancy that editors of this baser sort keep ontheir shelves one or two volumes for their readers' sport and mirth. I readrecently a review of an historical romance--a last faltering descendant ofthe race--whose author in an endeavor to restore the past, had made toofree a use of obsolete words. With what playfulness was he held up toscorn! Mary come up, sweet chuck! How his quaint phrasing was turnedagainst him! What a merry fellow it is who writes, how sharp and caustic!There's pepper on his mood. 

But generally, it is said, book reviews are too flattering. ProfessorBliss Perry, being of this opinion, offered some time ago a statementthat "Magazine writing about current books is for the most part bland, complaisant, pulpy.... The Pedagogue no longer gets a chance at the giftedyoung rascal who needs, first and foremost, a premonitory whipping; theyouthful genius simply stays away from school and carries his unwhippedtalents into the market place. " At a somewhat different angle of the sameopinion, Dr. Crothers suggests in an essay that instead of being directedto the best books, we need to be warned from the worst. He proposes to setup a list of the Hundred Worst Books. For is it not better, he asks, to puta lighthouse on a reef than in the channel? The open sea does not need abell-buoy to sound its depth. 

On these hints I have read some of the book criticisms of days past tolearn whether they too were pulpy--whether our present silken criticismalways wore its gloves and perfumed itself, or whether it has fallen tothis smiling senility from a sterner youth. Although I am usually a rustystudent, yet by diligence I have sought to mend my knowledge that I mightlay it out before you. Lately, therefore, if you had come within our PublicLibrary, you would have found me in one of these attempts. Here I went, scrimping the other business of the day in order that I might be at mystudies before the rush set in up town. Mine was the alcove farthest fromthe door, where are the mustier volumes that fit a bookish student. So ifyour quest was the lighter books--such verse and novels as present fameattests--you did not find me. I was hooped and bowed around the corner. Iam no real scholar, but I study on a spurt. For a whole week together I mayread old plays until their jigging style infects my own. I have set myselfagainst the lofty histories, although I tire upon their lower slopes andhave not yet persisted to their upper and windier ridges. I have, also, apretty knowledge of the Queen Anne wits and feel that I must have doggedand spied upon them while they were yet alive. But in general, althoughI am curious in the earlier chapters of learning, I lag in the innerwindings. However, for a fortnight I have sat piled about with old reviews, whose leather rots and smells, in order that I might study the fadingcriticisms of the past. 

Until rather near the end of the eighteenth century, those who made theirliving in England by writing were chiefly publishers' hacks, fellows ofthe Dunciad sucking their quills in garrets and selling their labor for acrust, for the reading public was too small to support them. Or theyfound a patron and gave him a sugared sonnet for a pittance, or strainedthemselves to the length of an Ode for a berth in his household. Orfrequently they supported a political party and received a place in theRed Tape Office. But even in politics, on account of the smallness of thereading public and the politicians' indifference to its approval, theirservices were of slight account. Too often a political office was grantedfrom a pocket borough in which a restricted electorate could be bought at atrifling expense. To gain support inside the House of Commons was enough. The greater public outside could be ignored. This attitude changed withthe coming of the French Revolution. Here was a new force unrealizedbefore--that of a crowd which, being unrepresented and with a realgrievance, could, when it liked, take a club and go after what it wanted. For the first time in many years in England--such were the whiffs ofliberty across the Channel--the power of an unrepresented public came to beknown. It was not that the English crowd had as yet taken the club in itshands, but there were new thoughts abroad in the world, and there was thepossibility to be regarded. To influence this larger public, therefore, menwho could write came little by little into a larger demand. And aswriters were comparatively scarce, all kinds--whether they wrote poems orprose--were pressed into service. It is significant, too, that it was inthe decades subjected to the first influence of the French Revolution thatthe English daily paper took its start as an agent to influence publicopinion. 

It was therefore rather more than one hundred years ago that writers cameto a better prosperity. They came out of their garrets, took rooms on thesecond floor, polished their brasses and became Persons. I can fancy that awriter after spending a morning in the composition of a political articleon the whisper of a Cabinet Minister, wrote a sonnet after lunch, anda book review before dinner. Let us see in what mood they took theiradvancement! Let us examine their temper--but in book reviewing only, forthat alone concerns us! In doing this, we have the advantage of knowing thefinal estimate of the books they judged. Like the witch, we have lookedinto the seeds of time and we know "which grain will grow and which willnot. "

In 1802, when the Edinburgh Review (which was the first of its line toacquire distinction) came into being, the passion of the times found voicein politics. Both Whigs and Tories had been alarmed by the excesses of theFrench Revolution; both feared that England was drifting the way of France;each had a remedy, but opposed and violently maintained. The Tories put theblame of the Revolution on the compromises of Louis XVI, and accordinglythey were hostile to any political change. The Whigs, on the otherhand, saw the rottenness of England as a cause that would incite her torevolution also, and they advocated reform while yet there was time. Thegeneral fear of a revolution gave the government of England to the Tories, and kept them in power for several decades. And England was ripe fortrouble. The government was but nominally representative. No Catholic, Jew, Dissenter or poor man had a vote or could hold a seat in Parliament. Industrially and economically the country was in the condition of Francein the year of Arthur Young's journey. The poverty was abject, the relieffutile and the hatred of the poor for the rich was inflammatory. George III, slipping into feebleness and insanity, yet jealous of hisunconstitutional power, was a vacillating despot, quarrelling with hisCommons and his Ministers. Lord Eldon as Chancellor, but with as nearly thecontrol of a Premier as the King would allow, was the staunch upholder ofall things that have since been disproved and discarded. Bagehot said ofhim that "he believed in everything which it is impossible to believe in. "France and Napoleon threatened across the narrow channel. England stillgrowled at the loss of her American colonies. It was as yet the Englandof the old regime. The great reforms were to come thirty years later--theCatholic Emancipation, the abolishment of slavery in the colonies, thesuppression of the pocket boroughs, the gross bribery of elections, thecleaning of the poor laws and the courts of justice. 

It was in this dark hour of English history that the writers polished theirbrasses and set up as Persons. And if the leading articles that they wroteof mornings stung and snapped with venom, it is natural that the bookreviews on which they spent their afternoons had also some vinegar in them, especially if they concerned books written by those of the opposition. Andother writers, even if they had no political connection, borrowed theirmanners from those who had. It was the animosities of party politics thatset the general tone. Billingsgate that had grown along the wharves of thelower river, was found to be of service in Parliament and gave a spice andsparkle even to a book review. Presently a large part of literary Englandwore the tags of political preference. Writers were often as clearlydistinguished as were the ladies in the earlier day, when Addison wrote hispaper on party patches. There were seats of Moral Philosophy to be handedout, under-secretaryships, consular appointments. It is not enough to saythat Francis Jeffrey was a reviewer, he was as well a Whig and was runninga Review that was Whig from the front cover to the back. Leigh Hunt was notmerely a poet, for he was also a radical, and therefore in the opinions ofTories, a believer in immorality and indecency. No matter how innocenta title might appear, it was held in suspicion, on the chance that itassailed the Ministry or endangered the purity of England. William Giffordwas more than merely the editor of the Quarterly Review, for he was as wella Tory editor whose duty it was to pry into Whiggish roguery. Lockhart andWilson, who wrote in Blackwood's, were Tories tooth and nail, biting andscratching for party. Nowadays, literature, having found the public to beits most profitable patron, works hard and even abjectly for its favor. Although there are defects in the arrangement, it must be confessed thatthe divorce of literature from politics contributes to the general peace ofthe household. 

The Edinburgh Review was founded in 1802, the Quarterly Review in 1809, Blackwood's Magazine in 1817. These three won distinction among others ofless importance, and from them only I quote. In 1802, when Tory rule wasstrongest and Lord Eldon flourished, there was living in Edinburgh a groupof young men who were for the most part briefless barristers. Their casewas worse because they were Whigs. Few cases came their way and no offices. These young men were Francis Jeffrey, Francis Horner, Henry Brougham, andthere was also Sydney Smith who had just come to Edinburgh from an Englishcountry parish. The eldest was thirty-one, the youngest twenty-three. Although all of them had brilliant lives before them, not one of them hadmade as yet more than a step toward his accomplishment. Sydney Smith hadbeen but lately an obscure curate, buried in the middle of Salisbury Plain, away from all contact with the world. Francis Jeffrey had been a hackwriter in London, had studied medicine, had sought unsuccessfully agovernment position in India, had written poor sonnets, and was nowlounging with but a scanty occupation in the halls of the law courts. Francis Horner had just come to the Scottish bar straight from his studies. Henry Brougham, who in days to come was to be Lord Chancellor of Englandand to whose skill in debate the passing of the Great Reform bill of 1832is partly due, is also just admitted to the practice of the law. 

The founding of the Review was casual. These men were accustomed to meet ofan evening for general discussion and speculation. It happened one night asthey sat together--the place was a garret if legend is to be believed--thatSydney Smith lamented that their discussions came to nothing, for they wereall Whigs, all converted to the cause; whereas if they could only bringtheir opinions to the outside public they could stir opinion. From soslight a root the Review sprouted. Sydney Smith was made editor and keptthe position until after the appearance of the first number, when Jeffreysucceeded him. The Review became immediately a power, appearing quarterlyand striking its blows anonymously against a sluggish government, lashingthe Tory writers, and taking its part, which is of greater consequence, inthe promulgation of the Whig reforms which were to ripen in thirty yearsand convert the old into modern England. In the destruction of outwornthings, it was, as it were, a magazine of Whig explosives. 

The Quarterly Review was the next to come and it was Tory. John Murray, theLondon publisher, had been the English distributor of the Edinburgh Review. In 1809, two considerations moved him to found in London a review to rivalthe Scotch periodical. First the Tory party was being hard hit by theEdinburgh Review and there was need of defense and retaliation. In thesecond place, John Murray saw that if his publishing house was to flourish, it must provide this new form of literature that had become so popular. For the very shortness of the essays and articles, in which extensiveconditions were summarized for quick digestion, had met with Englishapproval as well as Scotch. People had become accustomed, says Bagehot, oftaking "their literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches on a journey. "Murray appealed to George Canning, then in office, for assistance and wasintroduced to William Gifford as a man capable of the undertaking, whowould also meet the favor of the government party. The rise of theQuarterly Review was not brilliant. It did not fill the craving fornovelty, inasmuch as the Edinburgh was already in the field. Furthermore, there is not the opportunity in defense for as conspicuous gallantry as inoffensive warfare. 

It was eight years before another enduring review was started. WilliamBlackwood of Edinburgh had grown like Murray from a bookseller to apublisher, and he, too, looked for a means of increasing his prestige. Hehad launched a review the year previously, in 1816, but it had founderedwhen it was scarcely off the ways. His second attempt he was determinedmust be successful. His new editors were John G. Lockhart and John Wilson, and the new policy, although nominally Tory, was first and last themagazine's notoriety. It hawked its wares into public notice by sensationalarticles and personal vilification. Wilson was thirty-two and Lockharttwenty-three, yet they were as mischievous as boys. In their pages is foundthe most abominable raving that has ever passed for literary criticism. They did not need any party hatred to fire them. William Blackwoodwelcomed any abuse that took his magazine out of "the calm of respectablemediocrity. " Anything that stung or startled was welcome to a place in itspages. 

So Blackwood's was published and Edinburgh city, we may be sure, set up aroar of delight and anger. Never before had one's friends been so assailed. Never before had one's enemies been so grilled. How pleasing for a Toryfireside was the mud bath with which it defiled Coleridge, who was--and youhad always known it--"little better than a rogue. " One's Tory dinner wasthe more toothsome for the hot abuse of the Chaldee Manuscript. What stoutTory, indeed, would doze of an evening on such a sheet! There followedof course cases of libel. The editors even found it safer, after thepublication of the first number, to retire for a time to the country untilthe city cooled. 

I choose now to turn to the pages of these three reviews and set out beforeyou samples of their criticisms, in order that you may contrast themwith our own literary judgments. I warn you in fairness that I have beendisposed to choose the worst, yet there are hundreds of other criticismsbut little better. Of the three reviews, Blackwood's was the leastseriously political in its policy, yet its critical vilifications are theworst. The Edinburgh Review, the most able of the three and the most inearnest in politics, is the least vituperative. With this introduction, letus shake the pepperpot and lay out the strong vinegar of our feast!

In the judgment of the Edinburgh Review, Tom Moore, who had just publishedhis "Odes and Epistles" but had not yet begun his Irish melodies, is a manwho "with some brilliancy of fancy, and some show of classical erudition... May boast, if the boast can please him, of being the most licentious ofmodern versifiers, and the most poetical of those who, in our times, havedevoted their talents to the propagation of immorality. We regard his book, indeed, as a public nuisance.... He sits down to ransact the impure placesof his memory for inflammatory images and expressions, and commits themlaboriously in writing, for the purpose of insinuating pollution into theminds of unknown and unsuspecting readers. "

Francis Jeffrey wrote this, and Moore challenged him to fight. The policeinterfered, and as Jeffrey put it, "the affair ended amicably. We havesince breakfasted together very lovingly. He has expressed penitence forwhat he has written and declared that he will never again apply any littletalents he may possess to such purpose: and I have said that I shall behappy to praise him whenever I find that he has abjured these objectionabletopics. " It was Sydney Smith who said of Jeffrey he would "damn the solarsystem--bad light--planets too distant--pestered with comets. Feeblecontrivance--could make a better with great ease. "

Jeffrey reviewed Wordsworth and found in the "Lyrical Ballads""vulgarity, affectation and silliness. " He is alarmed, moreover, lesthis "childishness, conceit and affectation" spread to other authors. Heproposes a poem to be called "Elegiac Stanzas to a Sucking Pig, " and of"Alice Fell" he writes that "if the publishing of such trash as this benot felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot beinsulted. " When the "White Doe of Rylstone" was published--no primefavorite, I confess, of my own--Jeffrey wrote that it had the merit ofbeing the very worst poem he ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume. "Itseems to us, " he wrote, "to consist of a happy union of all the faults, without any of the beauties, which belong to his school of poetry. It isjust such a work, in short, as some wicked enemy of that, school might besupposed to have devised, on purpose to make it ridiculous. "

Lord Byron, on the publication of an early volume, is counselled "that hedo forthwith abandon poetry ... The mere rhyming of the final syllable, even when accompanied by the presence of a certain number of feet ... Isnot the whole art of poetry. We would entreat him to believe, " continuedthe reviewer, "that a certain portion of liveliness, somewhat of fancy, isnecessary to constitute a poem; and that a poem in the present day, tobe read, must contain at least one thought.... " It was this attack thatbrought forth Byron's "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. "

As long as Jeffrey hoped to enlist Southey to write for the EdinburghReview, he treated him with some favor. But Southey took up with theQuarterly. "The Laureate, " says the Edinburgh presently, "has now beenout of song for a long time: But we had comforted ourselves with thesupposition that he was only growing fat and lazy.... The strain, however, of this publication, and indeed of some that went before it, makes usapprehensive that a worse thing has befallen him ... That the worthyinditer of epics is falling gently into dotage. "

Now for the Quarterly Review, if by chance it can show an equal spleen!

There lived in the early days of the nineteenth century a woman by the nameof Lady Morgan, who was the author of several novels and books of travel. Although her record in intelligence and morals is good, John Croker, who regularly reviewed her books, accuses her works of licentiousness, profligacy, irreverence, blasphemy, libertinism, disloyalty and atheism. There are twenty-six pages of this in one review only, and any paragraphwould be worth the quoting for its ferocity. After this attack it wasMacaulay who said he hated Croker like "cold boiled veal. "

The Quarterly reviewed Keats' "Endymion, " although the writer naivelystates at the outset that he has not read the poem. "Not that we have beenwanting in our duty, " he writes, "far from it--indeed, we have made effortsalmost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it;but with the fullest stretch of our perseverance we are forced to confessthat we have not been able to struggle beyond the first of the fourbooks.... " Finally he questions whether Keats is the author's name, forhe doubts "that any man in his senses would put his real name to such arhapsody. "

Leigh Hunt's "Rimini" the Quarterly finds to be an "ungrammatical, unauthorized, chaotic jargon, such as we believe was never before spoken, much less written.... We never, " concludes the reviewer, "in so few linessaw so many clear marks of the vulgar impatience of a low man, consciousand ashamed of his wretched vanity, and labouring, with coarse flippancy, to scramble over the bounds of birth and education, and fidget himself intothe stout-heartedness of being familiar with a Lord. " In a later review, Hunt is a propounder of atheism. "Henceforth, " says the reviewer, "... Hemay slander a few more eminent characters, he may go on to deride venerableand holy institutions, he may stir up more discontent and sedition, but hewill have no peace of mind within ... He will live and die unhonouredin his own generation, and, for his own sake it is to be hoped, moulderunknown in those which are to follow. "

Hazlitt belongs to a "class of men by whom literature is more than at anyperiod disgraced. " His style is suited for washerwomen, a "class offemales with whom ... He and his friend Mr. Hunt particularly delight toassociate. "

Shelley, writes the Quarterly, "is one of that industrious knot of authors, the tendency of whose works we have in our late Numbers exposed to thecaution of our readers ... For with perfect deliberation and the steadiestperseverance he perverts all the gifts of his nature, and does all theinjury, both public and private, which his faculties enable him toperpetrate. " His "poetry is in general a mere jumble of words andheterogeneous ideas. " "The Cloud" is "simple nonsense. " "PrometheusUnbound" is a "great storehouse of the obscure and unintelligible. " In the"Sensitive Plant" there is "no meaning. " And for Shelley himself, he isguilty of a great many terrible things, including verbiage, impiety, immorality and absurdity. 

Of Blackwood's Magazine the special victims were Keats and Hunt andColeridge. "Mr. Coleridge, " says the reviewer, "... Seems to believe thatevery tongue is wagging in his praise--that every ear is open to imbibe theoracular breathings of his inspiration ... No sound is so sweet to him asthat of his own voice ... He seems to consider the mighty universe itselfas nothing better than a mirror in which, with a grinning and idiotself-complacency, he may contemplate the physiognomy of Samuel TaylorColeridge.... Yet insignificant as he assuredly is, he cannot put pen topaper without a feeling that millions of eyes are fixed upon him.... "

Leigh Hunt, says Blackwood, "is a man of extravagant pretensions ... Exquisitely bad taste and extremely vulgar modes of thinking. " His"Rimini" "is so wretchedly written that one feels disgust at its pretense, affectation and gaudiness, ignorance, vulgarity, irreverence, quackery, glittering and rancid obscenities. "

Blackwood's wrote of the "calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocyof Endymion, " and elsewhere of Keats' "prurient and vulgar lines, evidentlymeant for some young lady east of Temple Bar.... It is a better and a wiserthing, " it commented, "to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; soback to the shop, Mr. John, back to 'plasters, pills and ointmentboxes. '" And even when Shelley wrote his "Adonais" on the death of Keats, Blackwood's met it with a contemptible parody:

"Weep for my Tom cat! all ye Tabbies weep!"

Perhaps I have quoted enough. This is the parentage of our silken andflattering criticism. 

The pages of these old reviews rest yellow on the shelves. From them therecomes a smell of rotting leather, as though the infection spreads. The hourgrows late. Like the ghost of the elder Hamlet, I detect the morning to benear. 

The Pursuit of Fire

Reader, if by chance you have the habit of writing--whether they be sermonsto hurl across your pews, or sonnets in the Spring--doubtless you havemoments when you sit at your desk bare of thoughts. Mother Hubbard'scupboard when she went to seek the bone was not more empty. In such plightyou chew your pencil as though it were stuff to feed your brain. Or if youare of delicate taste, you fall upon your fingers. Or in the hope thatexercise will stir your wits, you pace up and down the room and press yournose upon the window if perhaps the grocer's boy shall rouse you. Somepersons draw pictures on their pads or put pot-hooks on their letters--fortalent varies--or they roughen up their hair. I knew one gifted fellowwhose shoes presently would cramp him until he kicked them off, when atonce the juices of his intellect would flow. Genius, I am told, sometimeslocks its door and, if unrestrained, peels its outer wrappings. Or, in yourpoverty, you run through the pages of a favorite volume, with a notebookfor a sly theft to start you off. In what dejection you have fallen! It isbest that you put on your hat and take your stupid self abroad. 

Or maybe you think that your creative fire will blaze, if instead ofthrowing in your wet raw thoughts, you feed it a few seasoned bits. Youopen, therefore, the drawer of your desk where you keep your rejected andbroken fragments--for your past has not been prosperous--hopeful againstexperience that you can recast one of these to your present mood. Thisis mournful business. Certain paragraphs that came from you hot are nowpatched and shivery. Their finer meaning has run out between the lines asthough these spaces were sluices for the proper drainage of the page. Youhad best put on your hat. You will get no comfort from these stale papers. 

One evening lately, being in this plight, I spread out before me certainodds and ends. I had dug deeper than usual in the drawer and had brought upa yellow stratum of a considerable age. I was poring upon these papers andwas wondering whether I could fit them to a newer measure, when I heard aslight noise behind me. I glanced around and saw that a man had entered theroom and was now seated in a chair before the fire. In the common natureof things this should have been startling, for the hour was late--twelveo'clock had struck across the way--and I had thought that I was quitealone. But there was something so friendly and easy in his attitude--hewas a young man, little more than a lanky boy--that instead of beingfrightened, I swung calmly around for a better look. He sat with his legsstretched before him and with his chin resting in his hand, as though inthought. By the light that fell on him from the fire, I saw that he wore abrown checked suit and that he was clean and respectable in appearance. Hisface was in shadow. 

"Good evening, " I said, "you startled me. "

"I am sorry, " he replied. "I beg your pardon. I was going by and I saw yourlight. I wished to make your acquaintance. But I saw at once that I wasintruding, so I sat here. You were quite absorbed. Would you mind if Imended the fire?"

Without waiting for an answer, he took the poker and dealt the logs severalblows. It didn't greatly help the flame, but he poked with such enjoymentthat I smiled. I have myself rather a liking for stirring a fire. He setanother log in place. Then he drew from his pocket a handful of driedorange peel. "I love to see it burn, " he said. "It crackles and spits. " Heranged the peel upon the log where the flame would get it, and then settledhimself in the big chair. 

"Perhaps you smoke?" I asked, pushing toward him a box of cigarettes. 

He smiled. "I thought that you would know my habits. I don't smoke. "

"So you were going by and came up to see me?" I asked. 

"Yes. I was not sure that I would know you. You are a little older than Ithought, a little--stouter, but dear me, how you have lost your hair! Butyou have quite forgotten me. "

"My dear boy, " I said, "you have the advantage of me. Where have I seenyou? There is something familiar about you and I am sure that I have seenthat brown suit before. "

"We have never really known each other, " the boy replied. "We met once, butonly for an instant. But I have thought of you since that meeting a greatmany times. I lay this afternoon on a hilltop and wondered what you wouldbe like. But I hoped that sometimes you would think of me. Perhaps you haveforgotten that I used to collect railway maps and time-tables. "

"Did you?" I replied. "So did I when I was a little younger than you are. Perhaps if I might see your face, I would know you. "

"It's nothing for show, " he replied, and he kept it still in shadow. "Wouldyou mind, " he said at length, "if I ate an apple?" He took one from hispocket and broke it in his hands. "You eat half, " he said. 

I accepted the part he offered me. "Perhaps you would like a knife andplate, " I said. "I can find them in the pantry. "

"Not for me, " he replied. "I prefer to eat mine this way. " He took anenveloping bite. 

"I myself care nothing for plates, " I said. We ate in silence. Presently:"You have my habit, " I said, "of eating everything, skin, seeds and all. "

"Everything but the stem, " he replied. 

By this time the orange peel was hissing and exploding. 

"You are an odd boy, " I said. "I used to put orange peel away to dry inorder to burn it. We seem to be as like as two peas. "

"I wonder, " he said, "if that is so. " He turned in his chair and faced me, although his face was still in shadow. "Doubtless, we are far different inmany things. Do you swallow grape seeds?"

"Hardly!" I cried. "I spit them out. "

"I am glad of that. " He paused. "It was a breezy hilltop where I lay. Ithought of you all afternoon. You are famous, of course?"

"Dear me, no!"

"Oh, I'm so sorry. I had hoped you might be. I had counted on it. It isvery disappointing. I was thinking about that as I lay on the hill. Butaren't you just on the point of doing something that will make you famous?"

"By no means. "

"Dear me, I am so sorry. Do you happen to be married?"

"Yes. "

"And would you mind telling me her name?"

I obliged him. 

"I don't remember to have heard of her. I didn't think of that name onceas I lay upon the hill. Things don't turn out as one might expect. Now, Iwould have thought--but it's no matter. "

For a moment or so he was lost in thought, and then he spoke again: "Youwere writing when I came into the room?"

"Nothing important. "

The boy ran his fingers in his hair and threw out his arms impatiently. "That's what I would like to do. I am in college, and I try for one of thepapers. But my stuff comes back. But this summer in the vacation, I amworking in an office. I run errands and when there is nothing else to do, Istudy a big invoice book, so as to get the names of things that are bought. There is a racket of drays and wagons outside the windows, and along inthe middle of the afternoon I get tired and thick in my head. But I writeSaturday afternoons and Sunday mornings. "

The boy stopped and fixed his eyes on me. "I don't suppose that you happento be a poet?"

"Not at all, " I replied. "But perhaps you are one. Tell me about it!"

The boy took a turn at the fire with the poker, but it was chiefly inembarrassment. Presently he returned to his chair. He stretched his longarms upward above his head. 

"No, I'm not, " he said. "And yet sometimes I think that I have a kind ofpoetry in me. Only I can't get it into words. I lay thinking about that, too, on the hillside. There was a wind above my head, and I thought that Icould almost put words to the tune. But I have never written a single poem. Yet, goodness me, what thoughts I have! But they aren't real thoughts--whatyou would regularly call thoughts. Things go racing and tingling in myhead, but I can never get them down. They are just feelings. "

As he spoke, the boy gazed intently through the chimney bricks out intoanother world. The fireplace was its portal and he seemed to wait for thefires to cool before entering into its possession. It was several momentsbefore he spoke again. 

"I don't want you to think me ridiculous, but so few understand. If only Icould master the tools! Perhaps my thoughts are old, but they come to mewith such freshness and they are so unexpected. Could I only solve thefrets and spaces inside me here, I could play what tune I chose. But myfeelings are cold and stale before I can get them into thoughts. I have nodoubt, however, that they are just as real as those other feelings that intime, after much scratching, get into final form and become poetry. Iknow of course that a man's reach should exceed his grasp--it's hackneyedenough--but just for once I would like to pull down something when I havebeen up on tiptoe for a while. 

"Sometimes I get an impression of pity--a glance up a dark hallway--an oldwoman with a shawl upon her head--a white face at a window--a blind fiddlerin the street--but the impression is gone in a moment. Or a touch of beautygets me. It may be nothing but a street organ in the spring. Perhaps youlike street organs, too?"

"I do, indeed!" I cried. "There was one today outside my window and my feetkept wiggling to it. "

The boy clapped his hands. "I knew that you would be like that. I hoped forit on the hill. As for me, when I hear one, I'm so glad that I could cryout. In its lilt there is the rhythm of life. It moves me more than ahillside with its earliest flowers. Am I absurd? It is equal to the pipe ofbirds, to shallow waters and the sound of wind to stir me to thoughts ofApril. Today as I came downtown, I saw several merry fellows dancing onthe curb. There are tunes, too, upon the piano that send me off. I play alittle myself. I see you have a piano. Do you still play?"

"A little, rather sadly, " I replied. 

"That's too bad, but perhaps you sing?"

"Even worse. "

"Dear me, that's too bad. I have rather a voice myself. Well, as I wassaying, when I hear those tunes, I curl up with the smoke and blow forthfrom the chimney. If I walk upon the street when the wind is up, and see alight fleece of smoke coming from a chimney top, I think that down belowsomeone is listening to music that he likes, and that his thoughts rideupon the night, like those white streamers of smoke. And then I think ofcastles and mountains and high places and the sounds of storm. Or in fancyI see a tower that tapers to the moon with a silver gleam upon it. "

The strange boy lay back and laughed. "Musicians think that they are theonly ones that can hear the finer sounds. If one of us common fellows cockshis ear, they think that only the coarser thumps get inside. And artiststhink that they alone know the glory of color. I was thinking of that, thisafternoon. And yet I have walked under the blue sky. I have seen twilightsthat these men of paint would botch on canvas. But both musicians andartists have a vision that is greater than their product. The soul of a mancan hardly be recorded in black and white keys. Nor can a little pigmentwhich you rub upon your thumb be the measure of an artist. So I supposethat is the way also with poets. It is not to be expected that they canexpress themselves fully in words that they have borrowed from the kitchen. When their genius flames up, it is only the lesser sparks that fall upontheir writing pads. It consoles me that a man should be greater than hisachievement. I who have done so little would otherwise be so forlorn. "

"It's odd, " I said, when he had fallen into silence, "that I used to feelexactly as you do. It stirs an old recollection. If I am not mistaken, Ionce wrote a paper on the subject. "

The boy smiled dreamily. "But if small persons like myself, " he began, "canhave such frenzies, how must it be with those greater persons who haveamazed the world? I have wondered in what kind of exaltation Shakespearewrote his storm in 'Lear. ' There must have been a first conception greatereven than his accomplishment. Did he look from his windows at a wintertempest and see miserable old men and women running hard for shelter? Dida flash of lightning bare his soul to the misery, the betrayal and themadness of the world? His supreme moment was not when he flung thecompleted manuscript aside, or when he heard the actors mouth his lines, but in the flash and throb of creation--in the moment when he knew that hehad the power in him to write 'Lear. ' What we read is the cold forging, wonderful and enduring, but not to be compared to the producing furnace. "

The boy had spoken so fast that he was out of breath. 

"Hold a bit!" I cried. "What you have said sounds familiar. Where could Ihave heard it before?"

There was something almost like a sneer on the boy's face. "What a memoryyou have! And perhaps you recall this brown suit, too. It's ugly enough tobe remembered. Now please let me finish what came to me this afternoon onthe hill! Prometheus, " he continued, "scaled the heavens and brought backfire to mortals. And he, as the story goes, clutched at a lightning boltand caught but a spark. And even that, glorious. Mankind properly accreditshim with a marvellous achievement. It is for this reason that I comfortmyself although I have not yet written a single line of verse. "

"My dear fellow, " I said, "please tell me where I have read something likewhat you have spoken?"

The boy's answer was irrelevant. "You first tell me what you did with abrown checked suit you once owned. "

"I never owned but one brown suit, " I replied, "and that was when I wasstill in college. I think that I gave it away before it was worn out. "

The boy once more clapped his hands. "Oh, I knew it, I knew it. I'll givemine tomorrow to the man who takes our ashes. Now, won't you please playthe piano for me?"

"Assuredly. Choose your tune!"

He fumbled a bit in the rack and passing some rather good music, he held upa torn and yellow sheet. "This is what I want, " he said. 

I had not played it for many years. After a false start or so--for it wasvillainously set in four sharps for which I have an aversion--I got throughit. On a second trial I did better. 

The boy made no comment. He had sunk down in his chair until he was quiteout of sight. "Well, " I said, "what next?"

There was no answer. 

I arose from the bench and glanced in his direction. "Hello, " I cried, "what has become of you?"

The chair was empty. I turned on all the lights. He was nowhere in sight. Ishook the hangings. I looked under my desk, for perhaps the lad was hidingfrom me in jest. It was unlikely that he could have passed me to gain thedoor, but I listened at the sill for any sound upon the stairs. The hallwas silent. I called without response. Somewhat bewildered I came back tothe hearth. Only a few minutes before, as it seemed, there had been a briskfire with a row of orange peel upon the upper log. Now all trace of thepeel was gone and the logs had fallen to a white ash. 

I was standing perplexed, when I observed that a little pile of papers layon the rug just off the end of my desk as by a careless elbow. At least, I thought, this impolite fellow has forgotten some of his possessions. Itwill serve him right if it is poetry that he wrote upon the hilltop. 

I picked up the papers. They were yellow and soiled, and writing wasscrawled upon them. At the top was a date--but it was twenty years old. I turned to the last sheet. At least I could learn the boy's name. To myamazement, I saw at the bottom in an old but familiar writing, not theboy's name, but my own. 

I gazed at the chimney bricks and their substance seemed to part before myeyes. I looked into a world beyond--a fabric of moonlight and hilltop andthe hot fret of youth. Perhaps the boy had only been waiting for the fireupon the hearth to cool to enter this other world of his restless ambitionand desire. 

Reader, if by chance you have the habit of writing--let us confineourselves now to sonnets and such airy matter as rides upon thenight--doubtless, you sit sometimes at your desk bare of thoughts. Thejuices of your intellect are parched and dry. In such plight, I beg younot to fall upon your fingers or to draw pictures on your sheet. But mostvehemently, and with such emphasis as I possess, I beg you not to rummageamong your rejected and broken fragments in the hope of recasting awithered thought to a present mood. Rather, before you sour and curdle, it is good to put on your hat and take your stupid self abroad.