I told Howard King what my attitude is toward clothes. It is my fate always to grow fond of a fashion just as it is passing out. I recalled the exaggerated military styles for men that came in with the Spanish-American and the South African wars. Those enormously padded shoulders and tight-shaped waists and swelling trouser legs, and the strut and the stoop that went with the whole ugly ensemble, roused my anger. My feelings remained unchanged until some time after the Russo-Japanese War, and then one day it came to me that I must have a suit of military cut. It was like the sudden awakening of the unregenerate to grace, it was as irresistible as first love. And when the tailor said that only sloping shoulders were now being worn, that what I wanted was hopelessly out of date, the sense of loss was overpowering. I confessed to King that in my opinion nothing uglier in men's apparel was conceivable than the green plush hats that are just beginning to go out of style. And I told him that I was as certain as I am certain of anything in this world that some day in the very near future I shall be seized with an uncontrollable longing to wear a green plush hat, and I shall enter a shop and ask for one, and the man behind the counter will look at me quizzically, and, after a long search, bring me the only plush hat in his shop, and I shall carry it home in shame, and put it away in my closet, and mourn over the resolution that came too late.

You must not imagine that Howard King and I are conservatives. We do not hold fast to one thing, or even hold fast to the old. We move forward, but at a pace so curiously regulated as to bring us to the front door just when most people are leaving by the back. I have worn every shape of linen collar that the best-dressed men have worn during the last fifteen years; but I have worn them from three to six months late. I became passionately fond of bicycling shortly after all the bicycle factories began the exclusive production of automobiles. I am not very fond of automobiles, but I shall be, I know, when aeroplanes come into extensive use. It is only in the last few months that I have discovered how amusing a toy the Teddy bear makes. And this is true of fashions in games and of fashions in language. I have no fundamental objections to slang, but I always pick up the bit of slang that most people are just discarding.

I recall, for instance, how, up in the hills last summer, the woods and glens were echoing to the sound, half a howl and half a screech, of "Oh, you!" addressed at quarter-minute intervals to every object, animate or inanimate, that came within the howler's vision or thought. This particular bit of gutter-slang induced a peculiar irritation. It seemed to me utter desecration that this quickening beauty of hill and sky and river and green woods, which should have stirred young hearts to madrigals and chorals, should resound to the blatant, shrieking vulgarity of Lobster Square. I do not mind confessing that at times my feelings towards the innocent young barbarians bordered close on murder. Until—until, alas! one September morning, after all the guests were gone and I alone remained; that morning I woke with the poison in my soul, and I walked down to the river for my bath, and, coming across the farmer's herd of cows halfway down the hillside, saluted them, before I knew what I was doing, with that horrid, that unspeakable—I blush now to think of it. When I told Howard King, he admitted humbly that after holding out for years he has just begun to say, "It's me," and that he feels morally convinced that within the next year or two he will be saying "Between you and I."

But you must not think that this peculiarity in Howard King and myself is an acquired habit or a pose in which we take any measure of pride. Our attitude towards those happy people who are always in fashion is one of sincere and profound envy. I think there is nothing more wonderful under the sun than the unknown force that impels the great majority to begin doing the same new thing at the same time. It must be a precious gift to feel instinctively what the right new thing is to do. A mysterious fiat goes forth and a million women simultaneously put on black straw hats surmounted by a cock in his pride. Another mysterious order goes forth and two million women simultaneously begin reading the latest novel by Robert W. Chambers. Pitiable are those in whom this instinct is wanting and who must tag timidly behind, venturing only where a million others have gone before. Perhaps it is, with such people, a case of arrested development. Boys of sixteen and girls of fourteen have supplied the poets with their greatest love stories and direst tragedies. And there are men and women well gone into middle age who balk and stammer in the presence of the most elementary sensation. Perhaps at bottom it is simply a question of courage and cowardice.

In any case, being behind the times is a peculiarly unfortunate trait in a man, who, like myself, is condemned to earn his bread in the sweat of his fountain-pen. In what other profession must a man be so emphatically up to the minute as in this scribbling profession of ours? Only yesterday I walked into an editor's office and suggested a three-thousand word review of "The Rise of Silas Lapham," which I told him was one of the greatest novels in any language. He stared at me and asked if I hadn't some fresher book in mind, and I, somewhat taken aback, told him that I was just finishing Frank Norris's "McTeague" and was about to begin on Mrs. Wharton's "House of Mirth." With a brutality characteristic of editors he asked me whether I didn't care to write a review of Homer's Iliad and the book of Deuteronomy. I told him that I might very well do so if it were a question of writing something he would find personally instructive, and rose to go, with the intention of slamming the door behind me.

But he called me back and insisted that he meant no offence, that he simply must have live, up-to-date copy or nothing at all. He proposed a popular article on art, and wondered if I could write something about the Dutch masters, with special reference to the recent notable exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. I was obliged to confess that I had missed the exhibition by two weeks. "Well," he said, patiently, "there is opera. You might do something about the singers. You have heard Mary Garden, of course?" I told him no. Only the other day I had irrevocably decided to hear Mary Garden in "Thais" next season; and the next morning I learned that Mr. Hammerstein had gone out of business.

He continued to be patient with me. "There's 'Chantecler,' to be sure, although that is ancient history by this time. Have you read the play?" I had not, but just here an inspiration came. "You sneered at Homer just now," I said. "Well, there was another Greek who wrote a bird play 2,300 years before Rostand. I mean Aristophanes——" The editor leaped from his chair. "Great, great!" he cried. "We'll call it 'Chantecler 400 B.C.'" I caught the infection of his enthusiasm. "And Aristophanes had another play on woman's rights," I told him. "You might call it 'An Athenian Suffragette.'" "Splendid!" he cried; "splendid; we can make a whole series, and Goulden will do the pictures in colours. It's the most novel thing I have heard of for a long time. It will beat the others by a mile." And he sent me away happy.



XXIV

PUBLIC LIARS

There are three things that puzzle me; yes, four things that I cannot explain: Why street clocks never show the right time; why thermometers hanging outside of drug stores never indicate the right temperature; why slot machines on a railway platform never give the right weight; and why weather-vanes always point in the wrong direction. At bottom, I imagine, these are really not four things, but one. For it must be the same mysterious and malicious principle that takes each of these contrivances, set up to be a public guide to truth, and turns it into an instrument for the dissemination of error.

What makes me think that there is some animate principle behind such clocks is that they are so like a good many people one meets. There are persons who are packed with the most curiously inaccurate information on the most abstruse subjects, and they insist on imparting it to you. I have no ground to complain if I ask Jones what is the capital of Illinois and he says Chicago. The initiative was mine, and taken at my own peril, and it is fair that I should pay the penalty. But frequently Jones will break in upon me in the middle of a column of figures and tell me that the largest ranch in the world is situated in the State of Sonora, Mexico. "Yes?" I say, hoping that he will go away. "Yes," he assures me. "It is so large that the proprietor can ride 200 days on horseback without leaving his own grounds. He has 2,000,000 men working for him and he lives in a marble palace of 700 rooms. No one can be elected President of Mexico against his will."

Now obviously it would have been better for me to remain altogether unacquainted with Mexican conditions than to share Jones's distorted view of affairs in that interesting republic. But Jones insists on taking the innocent blank spaces in my knowledge of the world and filling them up with the most incorrect data. He tells me, for instance, that Mme. Finisterra once sang the mad scene from "Lucia" before the late Sultan of Morocco, who wept so bitterly that the performance was interrupted lest the monarch should go into convulsions. At the age of eight Mme. Finisterra knew twelve operatic soprano roles by heart, and when she was ten she played Juliet to Tamagno's Romeo. She now gets $10,000 a night, in addition to the service of a maid, a chef, and two private secretaries. In private life she is very stout. All this, needless to say, is not true.

But I must not forget the clocks. The worst of the class, oddly enough, are those found in front of watchmakers' and opticians' shops. I sometimes think that such clocks are purposely put out of order by the shop-keeper. The object is apparently to induce irascible old gentlemen to enter the store, watch in hand, in order to protest against the maintenance of a public nuisance. It is then a comparatively easy task to sell them a pair of solid gold spectacles with double lenses at a handsome profit. I, for one, would not blame the old gentleman who should pick up a stone and hurl it at one of these Tartuffes and Chadbands of the street-corner with their chubby, gilded hands reposing on their prosperous stomachs, sleek and smug and ultra-respectable, but unconscionable liars for all that. They are not content with their own success in cheating, they throw discredit upon honest folk. How many a faithful pocket-piece has been pulled out by its disappointed owner and actually set wrong to make it agree with one of these rubicund old sinners? Such is the overpowering effect of impudent assurance on the ordinary man.

The difference between the typical public clock and a watch out of order is obvious. Every prudent man knows the peculiarities of his own watch, just as he knows the peculiarities of his own wife and children; and he is consequently prepared to make allowances. But the clock on the street corner persists in thrusting false information upon you. The man who consults his watch does so with a purpose, and is naturally on the alert. But the cheating clock confronts him in moments of unsuspecting security, and throws him into a condition of the wildest alarm. It is peculiarly active on bright spring days, when people rise early and look forward to being at their desks half an hour before their usual time. On such occasions they invariably come upon a clock which points to a quarter of ten, and sends them scurrying breathless up four flights of stairs, to find the janitor engaged in cleaning out the baskets.

Church clocks are not so bad as jewellers' clocks; but they are bad enough, and, in the nature of things, we have a right to expect more from a church clock than from any other kind. For the same reason the weathercock on a church steeple is to be judged by a higher standard than the one over a carpenter's shop or the ordinary dwelling. I cannot, for instance, imagine a more dangerous moral ensemble than a church with a clergyman preaching bad doctrine in the pulpit, a clock indicating the wrong time on the tower, and, over all, a clogged weather vane pointing to the south when the wind blows from the east.

With reference to denominations I have observed that Presbyterian clocks are apt to be more reliable than any other kind, although the truest clock I have ever come across is on a little Dutch Reformed Church in Orange County. One of the most unprincipled clocks I can think of is just outside my window. I use unprincipled with intention, for this clock is not vicious, but giddy. If it were consistently late or consistently early, one might get used to it. But to look out of the window at 9:30 and find this clock pointing to eleven, and to look out ten minutes later and find it pointing to 9:35, is extremely disconcerting. One is inclined to expect something more restrained in a clock connected with the most prosperous parish of one of our most conservative denominations.

What I have said of clocks is largely true of the weighing-machine. Like the public clock, it thrusts itself upon us, and like the clock it betrays the confidence which it invites. I feel convinced that no one would ever think of using a weighing-machine if it did not constitute the most characteristically national piece of furniture in our railway stations. All weighing-machines cheat, but, if cheat they must, give me the machine that flatly refuses to budge from zero after it has swallowed your coin. I prefer that kind to the spasmodic machine on which the indicator moves forward one hundred pounds every two minutes and leaves a person utterly uncertain as to whether he should immediately begin dieting or purchase a bottle of codliver oil. Yet even this mockery of a weighing-machine is preferable to the emotional type of scales which simultaneously gives you a false weight, tells your fortune in utter disregard of age and sex, and plays a tune that cannot be recognised. When such a machine has registered a German matron's weight at 115 pounds and informed her that she will some day be President of the United States, it is ludicrous to have it break into a tinkle of self-appreciation, like a spaniel barking his own approval after walking across the room on his hind legs.

As for the ordinary street thermometer, there is this to be said for it: It may deceive, but it gives pleasure in deceiving. When a person is sagging beneath the heat of an August midday, it is a distinct source of comfort and pride to have the thermometer register 98 degrees. Even when we are fully aware that the mercury is too high by three or four degrees, it is easy enough to make one's self believe for the moment in the higher figure. If it were not for this spiritual stimulus, I should be inclined to regard all thermometers as a nuisance. Translating Fahrenheit into Centigrade and vice versa, is one of the most painful mental processes I can think of. I know that I cannot perform the operation, and I cannot help trying. I remember how a certain European monarch once lay seriously ill and my evening newspaper reported that his temperature was 38.3 degrees C. On my way home I attempted to put 38.3 degrees C. into terms of F., and it speaks well for the constitution of that European monarch that he should have survived the violent fluctuations of temperature to which I subjected him. At Grand Central Station he was literally burning up under a blazing heat of 142 degrees. At Ninety-sixth Street he was down to 74. As I walked home from the station I was forced to admit that I was not sure whether one should multiply by five-ninths or nine-fifths.

I would not be misunderstood. I am no enemy of the public institutions I have criticised. Far from it; clocks, thermometers, weather-vanes, and weighing-machines—they are but the remnants of the fine old communal life of which our urban and Anglo-Saxon civilisation has kept only too little. We do not lounge about and take our meals in the public squares as people used to do in Athens and still do in Sicily. We no longer fill our pitchers at a common fountain or dance on the village green or regulate the life of an entire city to the same signal from a campanile. Ours is an age of exaggerated privacy, where every one works behind closed doors and glances furtively at his watch. But precisely because it is a precious survival the public clock ought to keep itself above reproach and above suspicion.



XXV

THE COMPLETE COLLECTOR—III

Cooper's museum of Proverbial Realities had proven such a source of delight to himself and his friends that the news of its destruction by fire came with a shock to all who knew him. Of all his treasures he succeeded in saving only part of his priceless collection of straws—the straw that showed which way the wind blew, the straw grasped at by a drowning man, the straw that does not enter into the manufacture of bricks, and the last straw that broke the camel's back. How would Cooper stand the blow, his friends wondered. He took it very well. Within a week he had set to work on a new fad, the collection of Statistical Realities, and in a half-year he had filled three good-sized lofts and a large back-yard with his treasures. Yesterday he took me through his galleries.

"What do you make of this?" he said, stopping before a glass jar some four feet high, in which, to the peril of one's nerves, you could distinctly see the upper two-thirds of a child's body. Head, trunk, and arms were beautifully fashioned, but there was no vestige of growth below the knee-caps. I could only show my astonishment. "Well," he went on, "you must have seen the statement by the president of Bryn Mawr that the average number of children among college-bred mothers is 3-6/10. This is the six-tenths of a child. Here," he said, pointing to another and somewhat larger jar, "you see three-fifths of a woman; 1-3/5 women to one man is the ratio in some parts of Ireland. Here, in adjoining bottles, are three-tenths of a physician, seven-eighths of a lawyer, and four-fifths of a clergyman, the latest census having shown that we have 23-3/10 physicians, 29-7/8 lawyers, and 17-4/5 physicians for every 1,000 of our population."

Stopping before a glass case containing little heaps of ordinary copper coins, Harrington pointed out that these were the odd cents which the scrupulous science of statistics insists on leaving attached to vast sums of money. He showed me the 27 cents which, added to $3,469,746,854 represented the value of the foreign commerce of the United States in 1910; he showed me the twopence ha'penny which, increased by L788,990,187, constitutes the total funded debt of Great Britain; and he laid special emphasis on the eleven pennies which Tammany's most vigorous efforts at economy could not pare off from New York City's budget of $166,246,729.11 for the year 1909.

Another row of glass cases contained what appeared at first sight a collection of comic dolls. Cooper pointed to a sturdy little mannikin in boots and a Russian blouse, who, with mouth fearfully distended, was endeavouring to swallow an iron bar four or five times his own size. "You may have read," said Cooper, "that the annual consumption of pig-iron in Russia is 3.7 tons per capita. This figure shows the fact concretely. Here," indicating the figure of an infant apparently a week or two old, "is a French baby. You may observe that she is engaged in counting her share of the national wealth, which is estimated in France at 1,254 francs 63 centimes for every man, woman, and child. She is wondering whether she ought to invest her capital in Russian treasury bonds or in Steel Common. This," pointing to a group of seven or eight dolls riding on a perfectly modelled brindled cow, "represents the proportions of domesticated cattle to the total population of the United States."

The fire which flashes up in the eye of every amateur when he contemplates the gem of his collection, was visible as Cooper led the way to a good-sized platform of polished mahogany and brass on which was set up what I took to be a beautiful reproduction of the planetary system in miniature. I was right. "But observe," said Cooper, "the details of construction. The sun is made up of infinitely small eggs, since we know that the weight of all the hen's eggs consumed by the human race since the beginning of the Christian era is equal to one-billionth the weight of the sun. The planets are fashioned in the same way. Jupiter you see is made up of little, squirming animal-like units; that is because Jupiter occupies the same amount of space that would be filled by the descendants of a single pair of Australian rabbits in five hundred years, if left unchecked. Observe the orbit of the earth. It is marked out in twopenny postage stamps, for statisticians assure us that the path of the earth around the sun is equivalent in length to all the postage stamps consumed since the beginning of the nineteenth century, if laid end to end. In the same way the seven rings of Saturn are made up of copper pennies, obtained by reducing the world's annual output of gold to coins of that denomination."

We passed into a cosy little alcove lined to the ceiling with books. There seemed nothing out of the ordinary about them at first sight, but my host soon undeceived me. "These," he said, "are the books that might have been written in the last hundred years, if the time and energy that are spent on smoking, drinking, whist, bridge, and out-door games were devoted to the cultivation of literature. Here, for instance, are three plays quite as good as 'Hamlet,' written by two million men named Smith, who gave up the use of tobacco. Here is a philosophical poem which shows on every page an inspiration higher than Goethe ever attained; it embodies the concentrated ideas produced by twenty-five thousand former golf players, thinking half an hour a day for three days in the week. Here is a poetic version of the future life which completely outclasses the 'Divina Commedia.' It is compounded out of the experiences of forty-three thousand moderate drinkers who became total abstainers, seventy disbanded croquet associations, and 1,125 obsolete euchre clubs.

"Perhaps," concluded Cooper, "you should see this before you go," and he pointed to a single shelf of books with a curious mechanical arrangement at one side. "This shelf," he said, "is exactly five feet long. This little electric motor at the side is so constructed that it gets into motion every day for twenty minutes, and stops. By a system of cogs and levers the motor propels a fine steel needle straight through the five feet of books. A glance at this brass dial shows at once how far the needle point has reached. At the present moment, for instance, it is halfway through the front cover of the 'Journal of John Woolman.' And while the dial is recording the distance covered on the five-foot shelf, the blue liquid in this glass tube measures the rising level of culture. It is a very ingenious application of President Eliot's idea, don't you think?"



XXVI

THE COMMUTER

Whenever Harrington urges me to go to live in the country, his place is only forty-three minutes from City Hall. But when he asked me last week to spend Saturday afternoon with him, he told me that some trains are slower than others and that I had better allow ten minutes for the ferry. I have never known a commuter who told the truth about the time it takes him to cover the distance from his office-door to his front lawn. If he is exceptionally conscientious he will take into account the preliminary ride on the Subway and possibly even the walk from his office to the Subway station. But no commuter ever alludes to the fifteen minutes' walk at the other end. I did know one man who never under-estimated the length of his daily trips, but he was a cynic who hated the country and lived there because his wife's mother owned the house, and he multiplied by two the time it really took him to get into town. The exact truth I have never had.

As a matter of fact, sitting there in a rather stuffy car which made its way through much unlovely landscape, I reflected that there are really three different schedules on which suburban traffic is conducted. One is the time it takes a commuter's friends to come out to see him. Another is the time he claims it takes him to come into town every day. The third, and incomparably the shortest of the three, is the time your friend says it will take him to come into town after the completion of some very extensive railway improvements which, in practice, I have found are never completed. I am quite aware that great bridges have been built, and that railway tunnels have been opened into Long Island and other railway tunnels into New Jersey, and that steam is being rapidly replaced by electricity. But it is my firm belief that such of my suburban friends as live within the zone affected by these improvements will move away before the change for the better actually comes. I am no pessimist. I base this expectation on the simple fact that every commuter I know, for as long a period as I have known him, has been looking forward to the completion of railway improvements involving the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars. The march of progress apparently finds the suburban resident always a little in advance.

Harrington met me at the station and asked me if that was not a very good train I had come down on. The suburban virus was in me. I lied and said yes. As we sat at our luncheon I felt how peculiarly a vital factor in out-of-town existence the railroad constitutes. Both Harrington and his wife spoke of trains as of living, breathing people. Some trains, with all their faults, the Harringtons evidently loved. Others they detested, and made no attempt to conceal the fact. I had just finished telling Mrs. Harrington about the latest woman's suffrage parade when Harrington said: "Do you know, my dear, the 8.13 is getting worse all the time." I was still thinking of my own story, and I failed to catch just who or what it was that was getting worse all the time to an extent so inimical to Harrington's peace of mind. But Mrs. Harrington looked up, frowning slightly, and said: "Can't anything be done?" Harrington shook his head. "It's hopeless." By this time I was convinced that it must be some family skeleton that Harrington had rather oddly chosen to bring out before a stranger; some scapegrace cousin, I suspected, who probably got drunk and came to Harrington's office and demanded money. I looked discreetly into my plate as Mrs. Harrington suggested: "You might write to the superintendent." "We have," replied Harrington, "and he threatened to take it off altogether. Not that it would mean any loss. I can make just as good time now by the 8:35."

After luncheon we walked. I have never found the walking in the suburbs very good. There is a regrettable lack of elbow-room. A short stroll brings one either to a railway-siding, which is bad enough, or to a promising growth of trees, which is worse. From the road these trees look like the beginning of a primeval jungle sweeping on to far horizons. Plunge into that timber growth and in five minutes you emerge on a sewered road with concrete sidewalks and ornamental lamp posts and a crew of Italian labourers drinking beer in the shadow of a steam-roller. It is a gash of civilisation across the face of the wilderness, and, like most deformities, it is displeasing to the eye. Walking under such conditions is not stimulative. I miss the sense of space and freedom I get in the streets of New York, where I know that I can walk twenty miles north or twenty miles east without interference or inconvenience. Give me either a mountain-top or Broadway. Suburban vistas are pitifully cramped.

That day it had rained, and I should have been additionally glad to stay indoors. But Mrs. Harrington is a fervent naturalist, and she insisted on taking me out to look at the wild flowers and listen to the bird-calls. Both of these branches of nature-study, I am convinced, call for an intensity of sympathetic imagination that I am incapable of developing; and especially the bird-calls. Concerning the latter, I feel sure that a great deal of humbug is being said and written. I mean to cast no reflections upon Harrington or his wife. The only occasions on which I have known Harrington to deviate from the truth have been, as I have already pointed out, in connection with his train-schedules. And as Mrs. Harrington does not travel to the city, even this charge will not hold against her. And yet I cannot help feeling that neither of the two really hears the catbird say "miaow" or the robin "cheer up," as they pretend to. At the first twitter or chirp from some invisible source Mrs. Harrington stops and with radiant face asks me whether I do not distinctly catch the "pit-pit-pity-me" of the meadow-lark. I say yes; but I really don't, and I don't believe she does. My explanation is that Mrs. Harrington is a woman and consequently ready to hear what she has been led to expect she would hear. As for Harrington, he is a devoted husband.

For let us look at the matter with an open mind. Our alphabetical representations of animal sounds are at best only rough approximations. Most often they are not even that. They are mere arbitrary symbols. We use consonants where the bird uses none, as when we give the name cuckoo to a bird whose cry is really "ooh, ooh." Or else we put in the wrong consonants, which is shown by the fact that different nations assign different consonantal sounds to the same bird. We do not even agree on the vowel sounds. What is there in common between our English "Cock-a-doodle-doo" and M. Rostand's "cocorico"? And we need not go as far as the animal world. See how the nations differ in spelling out that elementary human sound which is the expression of pain or surprise, and which in this country we hear as "Oh," and the Germans hear as "Ach," and the Greeks heard as "Ai, Ai." If the human vocal chords can be so imperfectly imitated, what shall we say of birds speaking after a manner all their own? For myself I confess that in congenial company I can hear birds say anything, but that left to myself I am sometimes puzzled by a parrot. And that is the reason why I am sceptical concerning Mrs. Harrington's accomplishments in this field.

But while the birds about the Harringtons' home simply offend my regard for the truth, the Harringtons' dog causes me acute bodily and mental discomfort. He is of a spotted white, with a disreputable black patch over one eye, and weighs, I should imagine, between eighty and ninety pounds. During luncheon he takes his place under the table, and from there emits blood-curdling howls with sufficient frequency to make conversation extremely difficult. This he varies by nosing about the visitor's legs and growling. I am not fond of dogs under the best of circumstances. I always labour under the presumption that they will bite. Their habit of suddenly dashing across the floor, in furious pursuit of nothing in particular, upsets me. But an invisible dog under a dining-room table is a dreadful experience. It is true that I managed to give Mrs. Harrington a fairly rational account of the woman's suffrage parade. But was she aware, as I sat there smiling spasmodically, what agonies of fear were mine as I waited for those white fangs under the table to sink into my flesh? If, under the circumstances, I confused Harriet Beecher Stowe with Julia Ward Howe, and made a bad blunder about woman's rights in Finland, am I so very much to blame?

Not that the Harringtons are the worst offenders in this respect. There is an old classmate, and a very dear friend, indeed, who lives on Flushing Bay, and has a pair of hopelessly ferocious dogs that hold the neighbourhood in terror. The only occasion on which they have been known to show indifference to strangers was one night when burglars broke in and stole some silver and a revolver. When I go out to Flushing, I stipulate that the dogs shall be locked up in the cellar from ten minutes before my train is due until ten minutes after I have left the house. But it would be foolhardy to omit additional precautions. Hence I always carry an umbrella with the ferrule sharpened to a point, and when I am within a block of the house I stoop and pick up a large stone, and go on my way, with all my senses acute, whistling cheerfully. It is odd how people will put themselves out to keep a harmless, poor relation out of the way of visitors, and never think of the much greater discomfort attendant upon the constant presence of an active bull-terrier.

I may have produced the impression that life in the country makes no appeal to me. Nothing could be further from my intentions. Whatever doubts I may have entertained on this point vanish completely as the Harringtons escort me to the station in the cool of the evening, the dog having been left at home at my request. We pass by low, white-pillared houses behind hedges, and the scent of hay comes up from the lawns, and laughter comes from the dark of the verandas. The city at such a time seems a very undesirable place to return to; a place to lose one's self in—yes, and that is all. The Harringtons never were in the city what they are here. They have taken root, they have developed local pride which is only the sense of home. As we walk they point out the residences of the leading citizens. Here lives the owner of one of the largest factories of mechanical pianos in the country. This Japanese temple belongs to a man who writes for some of the best-known magazines. That colonial dwelling is occupied by the lawyer who defended Mrs. Dower when she was tried for poisoning her husband. I reflect, in genuine humility, that in the city I never think of taking strangers to see Mr. William Dean Howells's house or Mr. Joseph H. Choate's. And with real regret and admiration, I say good-night to the Harringtons.



XXVII

HEADLINES

After Stephane Dubost, editor of the Paris Reveil, had been ten days in this country, and had collected all his material for a series of volumes on the American Woman, Yankee and Yellow Peril, Democracy Decollete, and Football versus the Fine Arts—to name only a few—he was asked what single feature of our life had impressed him as most characteristically American. He replied, "The headlines in your daily press." Just what M. Dubost did think of our achievements in that department of journalism may be gathered from a letter he addressed the very same day to his friend, Marcel Complans, director of the Bureau of Cipher Codes in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

"In nothing, my dear Marcel, is the American genius for saving time so strikingly exemplified as in their newspaper headlines. Think of our Figaro or Temps with its dreary columns of solid type introduced by a minute solitary heading, and then pick up one of Uncle Sam's great dailies. It may be only an item of four or five inches, what they call here a stickful or two, but are you left to make your way unassisted through the brief account? No. Your eye immediately catches a time-saving headline like this:

DESERTED GIRL WIFE TO HOLD UP MAN.

Having that concise legend before you, all you need to do, my dear Marcel, is simply to decide for yourself whether our story deals with an unscrupulous wretch who abandons his young wife to engage on a career of highway robbery; or whether it is the history of a deserted girl who becomes the wife of a professional outlaw; or whether it is a betrayed young wife who gives herself up to the cause of elevating the human race. A French reader, under the circumstances, would be compelled to go through as much as thirty or forty lines of small print before he secured the desired information. Thus it requires but a brief experience with American headlines to recognise that when the Chicago Evening Post says

FINDS ENGLISH FOOD FOR LAND TAX FAITH

it means that an American single-taxer, who has just returned from Great Britain, believes that the English people is ready to listen to the principles of the single-tax theory. And when the New York Sun says

LA FOLLETTE TALKING BOLT

it does not mean that the Senator from Wisconsin is a manifestation of crashing, celestial eloquence, but that he is advocating a secession from the Republican party. Can you not see, my friend, what magnificent economies of time are effected by headlines like

WATCH SPRINGS TRAP FOR JAPANESE SPY

over a story dealing with the capture of an Oriental suspect by a sentinel at one of the Pacific Coast forts, or

SCREAMING FRIARS TORTURED CHILD MOTHER FAINTS

which does not mean that a society of howling friars have been guilty of an atrocious crime upon an infant in the presence of its mother; or that a band of religionists are driven by torture to cries of pain, while a young mother faints at the sight. It only means that a poor mother, who has suddenly gone insane, breaks into a house of refuge, where her little boy is being cared for by a religious fraternity, accuses, without warrant, the brothers of torturing her child, and faints. Or take

FRENCH RACE WORN OUT ENGLISH TO TRIUMPH.

These lines are not the summary of a study in national growth and decay, but expressive of the fact that a French bicycle team wins a signal victory over a group of exhausted English competitors. Do you see now how far towards the art of simplified story-telling these Americans have gone?

"I can only express my profound admiration, as I pass, for the genius of those men who almost automatically will dig the heart out of a 'story,' and blazon it before the reader not only with marvellous brevity and meaning, but with extraordinary appropriateness of characterisation. Can you seize, for instance, the full relevancy of a headline like

PRESBYTERIAN FALLS TWENTY FEET

or,

PROFESSOR THRICE MARRIED DENIES AUTHENTICITY OF BIBLE

or see how the essential point is caught when a 'head' writer places

FLORODORA GIRL EXPELLED FROM CZAR'S CAPITAL

over an account of the latest ukase which banishes from St. Petersburg two hundred members of the Duma, twelve professors, fifty-five Jewish bankers and artists, all the labour delegates, as well as the agent of the American Plough Corporation, whose wife was one of the original sextette?

"I will conclude with what to me is an example of the art of headline writing carried almost to perfection. Suppose that at Paris a long-distance foot-race between one of our countrymen and a foreign athlete had been won by our compatriot. The Reveil would probably say, 'Armand Wins at Auteuil,' and go on to give the details. But observe what they do here. I cite the article complete, headline and text:

HAYES WINS

VICTOR IN DUAL MATCH OVER DORANDO

AMERICAN LEADS ITALIAN TO THE TAPE, AND CARRIES OFF PRIZE

DORANDO CAN DO NOTHING BETTER THAN SECOND

ONE MORE VICTORY ADDED TO GREAT RUNNER'S STRING

TEN THOUSAND CHEERING SPECTATORS SEE THE AMERICAN RUNNER REPEAT HIS VICTORY AT THE OLYMPIC GAMES

"New York, November 26.—The race between Hayes and Dorando this afternoon was won by the former."



XXVIII

USAGE

... a certain class of verbal critics who can never free themselves from the impression that man was made for language and not language for man.—Professor Lounsbury.

From a large number of readers we have received requests for a ruling on disputed cases of English usage. We now proceed to answer these inquiries in accordance with the liberal standard for which Professor Lounsbury pleads. One man writes:

Question: Which is right, "To-morrow is Sunday and we are going out," or "To-morrow will be Sunday and we shall go out?" Answer: Both forms are right, but as a matter of fact, if to-morrow is like other Sundays, it will probably rain all day, and your chances of going out are not bright.

Q. Must a sentence always have coherence? What is the practice of our great writers on this point? A. Coherence is not essential. Thus: "Conquests! Thousands! Don Bolaro Fizzgig—Grandee—only daughter—Donna Christina—Splendid creature—loved me to distraction—jealous father—high-souled daughter—handsome Englishman—Donna Christina in despair—prussic acid—stomach pump in my portmanteau—operation performed—old Bolaro in ecstasies—consent to our union—join hands and floods of tears—romantic story—very." (Charles Dickens.)

Q. Must a sentence always have a predicate? A. No. For example: (1) "The Universe smiles to me. The World smiles to me. Everything. Man. Woman. Children. Presidential Candidates. Trolley Cars. Everything smiles to me." (The Complete Whitmanite) (2) "From the frowning tower of Babel on which the insectile impotence of man dared to contend with the awful wrath of the Almighty, through the granite bulk of the beetling Pyramids lifting their audacious crests to the star-meshed skies that bend down to kiss the blue waters of Father Nile and the gracious nymphs laving their blithesome limbs in the pools that stud the sides of Pentelicus, down to our own Washington, throned like an empress on the banks of the beautiful Potomac, waiting for the end which we trust may never come." (From the Congressional Record.)

Q. Is "ivrybody" a permissible variant for "everybody"? A. It is. For instance, "His dinners [our ambassador's at St. Petersburg] were th' most sumchuse ever known in that ancient capital; th' carredge of state that bore him fr'm his stately palace to th' comparatively squalid quarters of th' Czar was such that ivrybody expicted to hear th' sthrains iv a calliope burst fr'm it at anny moment." (Mr. Dooley.)

Q. Is there good authority for saying, "He was given a hat," "He was shown the door," etc.? A. The form is common, and therefore correct. As, "The Senator was paid twenty thousand dollars for voting against the Governor"; "He was offered a third term, but declined"; "The coloured delegates were handed a lemon." (From the contemporary press.)

Q. The use of "who" and "whom" puzzles me. Must "who" always be used in the nominative case and "whom" in the objective? A. Not necessarily. Thus, "I told him who I wanted to see and that it wasn't none of his business" (W. S. Devery); "That's the first guy whom he said put him into the cooler." (Battery Dan Finn.)

Q. I am told that it is wrong to place a preposition at the end of a sentence. Why can't I say, "Mr. Roosevelt is a man whom I should enjoy talking with"? A. Your example is unfortunate. You should say, "Mr. Roosevelt is a man whom I should enjoy talking after."

Q. Is it wrong to split infinitives? Is a phrase like "to seriously complain" really objectionable? A. We hasten to most emphatically say "Yes!"

Q. Is there a rigid rule with regard to the use of the preterite tense? When do you say "hung" and when do you say "hanged"? A. Two examples from a universally recognised authority will illustrate the flexibility of our language in the general use of tenses: (1) "'I know a gen'l'man, sir,' said Mr. Weller, 'as did that, and begun at two yards; but he never tried it on ag'in; for he blowed the bird right clean away at the first fire, and nobody ever seed a feather on him arterwards.'" (2) "So I take the privilidge of the day, Mary, my dear—as the gen'lem'n in difficulties did, ven he valked out of a Sunday—to tell you that the first and only time I see you your likeness was took on my hart in much quicker time and brighter colours than ever a likeness was took by the profeel macheens (wich p'r'aps you may have heerd on Mary my dear) altho it does finish a portrait and put the frame and glass on complete with a hook at the end to hang it up by and all in two minutes and a quarter." (Charles Dickens.)

Q. What is "elegance" in style? I know it does not mean long words and many of them; but just what does it mean? A. Elegance is appropriateness. Long and circumlocutory terms are just as elegant in the mouth of a fashionable preacher as shorter and uglier words in the mouth of some one else. Hamlet's "Angels and ministers of grace defend us!" and Chuck Connors's "Wouldn't it bend your Merry Widow?" are equally elegant.

Q. What is force in style? A. We may illustrate with a quotation from Hall Caine's unannounced book: "He drew her to him and kissed her as men and women have kissed through the aeons, since the first star hymned to the first moonrise." Now, as a matter of fact, kissing is only about two thousand years old, and is still unknown to the Chinese, the native Africans, the Hindus, the Australians, the Indians of South America, the Polynesians, and the Eskimos; but the sentence is nevertheless a very forcible one.



XXIX

60 H.P.

For the purpose of getting one's name into the papers, the acquisition of a high-powered automobile may be recommended to the man who has never given a monkey dinner; whose son was never married to a show-girl in a balloon at 2.30 A.M.; whose son-in-law is neither a count, a duke, nor a prince, and does not beat his wife; who has never paid $100,000 for a Velasquez painted in 1897, or for a mediaeval Florentine altar-piece made in Dayton, Ohio. The press, like the public, does not brim over with affection for the motorist. From the newspapers it may be gathered that when a man has been seen in the front seat of an automobile his family prefers not to allude to the subject. Good men occasionally ride, but as a rule only on errands of mercy, and always in a friend's machine. A candidate for mayor will laugh when you accuse him of owning an opium den, taking $10,000 a month from Mr. Morgan, or experimenting freely in polygamy; but he throws up his hands when some one proves that he has been seen in a garage.

To me this seems absurd. If people admit that the automobile is here to stay, they must also admit that it is here to move from place to place occasionally. Automobiles that did nothing but stay would obviously fail in one of their principal aims. Not that the auto has no other important functions. It is evident that motor-cars were intended for little boys who squeeze the signal bulb and stick nails into the tires; for Republican orators to cite as evidence that the American farmer does not want the tariff revised; for foreign observers to prove that we are developing an aristocracy; and for Tammany office-holders to snatch a bit of relaxation after the day's long grind.

Motoring is not unmitigated bliss. The common belief that a body may be in only one place at one time can be easily refuted by a woman with a baby-carriage. Experience shows that such a woman, if she be put five feet from a sidewalk, with forty feet of open road behind her for an auto to pass through, will cover the forty feet backward with incredible speed and propel herself right in front of the car. What would happen if two cars came in opposite directions on opposite sides of a hundred-foot avenue cannot be predicted. Either the woman would be accompanied by another woman with a baby-carriage, or else, having propelled her own carriage in front of the machine going north, she would proceed to give her personal attention to the car going south.

It is difficult to start on a short spin in town, under doctor's orders, without immediately beginning to wonder why house rents and office rents should be going up steadily in face of the fact that the population of New York transacts its business and pursues its pleasures entirely in the middle of the road. German citizens, as a rule, stop to light their pipes on a street crossing. When you give them the horn, they are seized with the belief that you are trying to play the prelude to "Lohengrin," and they run up and down in front of the car in extreme agitation. You frustrate their plans for a beautiful death by rasping your tires against the curb, together with your nerves. At Seventy-second Street two women are saying good-bye in the middle of the street. You swerve to one side and they pursue. You snap your spinal column as you shoot the car straight about, but when you get there they are there. "Ladies," you say, "I am not leading a cotillion. I am an old man out for a bit of fresh air." Thereupon one calls you a brute and the other discerns from the colour of your nose that you have been drinking. At Forty-second Street you catch sight of your doctor. "Have you killed any one?" he says, after the cheerful manner of doctors. "No," you say, "but if you will kindly step into the car, I will."

Of the American farmer it may be said that, Mr. Roosevelt to the contrary notwithstanding, he is not an unimaginative, overworked being. It can be demonstrated that the contemplative life is on the increase in the rural districts. Apparently, there is nothing more peaceful, nothing more restful, nothing more soothing, nothing more permeated with the spirit of dolce far niente, than the American farmer on his wagon in a narrow road with an auto behind him. The grunt of the horn invariably stirs in him memories of his aged grandmother, dead these twenty years, and he falls a wondering whether he was really as kind to her as he might have been. If the road is just wide enough for one vehicle, he moves along pensively. If it is wide enough for two vehicles, he throws his horses straight across the road and enters upon a prolonged examination of his rear axle. If the road is wide enough for three vehicles, he drives zigzag. The necessity of conserving our natural resources would seem to be a meaningless phrase when we consider the natural resources of an American farmer in front of an automobile.

The law and the courts press hard on the autoist. Since the invention of the automobile fine, the position of justice of the peace has become one of the highest offices in the gift of the nation. The city magistrate is a kindred soul. "Your Honour," says the prosecuting officer, "the question is whether the city's boulevards shall be given over to the owners of these destructive vehicles or whether they shall be held clear for the use of Marathon runners, suffragette meetings, baseball teams, and 'crap' games. The streets, your Honour, are for the benefit of the majority; yet only the other day on Fifth Avenue I saw two ash-carts and an ice wagon held up by a continuous stream of automobiles." "Right," says the judge, and he turns to the victim: "What were you doing in the middle of the street when defendant ran you down wantonly and without cause?" "I was sleeping, your Honour," says the complainant, "having been overtaken with drowsiness on my way home from a select social affair." "Outrageous," says the magistrate. "Think of running into a sleeping man. One hundred dollars."

Such incidents make it clear that the automobile as an annihilator of space has established its reputation. In the days before the auto a drive of fifteen or twenty miles constituted a good Sunday's outing. To-day a man can leave New Rochelle at eight o'clock in the morning and pay a fine at Poughkeepsie at one in the afternoon, or he can leave Poughkeepsie at eight in the morning and at one in the afternoon be in the lock-up at New Rochelle.

What hurts the motorist's feelings most of all, however, is to be regarded by the public as a sort of licensed assassin. Yet almost any one can think of people who drive a car and take no pleasure in spilling blood. The common belief that automobile killing is a favourite sport among our best families seems to be based on the fact that in nine cases out of ten the occupants of a man-slaying automobile bear such well-known Knickerbocker names as Mr. William Moriarty, chauffeur; his friend, Mr. James Dugan, who is prominent in coal-heaving circles; and their friends, the Misses Mayme Schultz and Bessie Goldstein. At bottom, it would seem, most of the criticism directed against the automobile is based on its failure to take a hog and turn him into a gentleman. But in this respect automobiles are like many of our colleges. The comforting thing is that the life of the automobile hog is an uncertain one. Sooner or later he runs down a steep place into the sea, like certain of his species mentioned in the Bible, and the question adjusts itself.

Meanwhile, however, the decent motorist must suffer for the other's sins. A friend says: "The only time I dare be seen in my machine is between 11 A.M. and 4 P.M. Before that time people point me out as a 'joy-rider' returning from a night's debauch. After that time I am a 'joy-rider' bound for a night of it." The complaint rings true. The exhilaration aroused by a punctured tire in the open country gathers strength from the remarks of the spectators who wonder if you made your money honestly. In town a defective sparkplug brings the close attention of a crowd which exchanges opinions as to whether the lady in the tonneau is your wife. All agree that you must have mortgaged your home to buy the machine.

And yet it is evident that much misunderstanding could be avoided if we had a simple code of rules for people who cross the street just as there are regulations for the autoist. A few such rules suggest themselves: 1. If one is about to cross the street in front of an auto, one should do so either before the man in the car succumbs to heart failure or after, but not while the driver is wrestling with death; it is in such cases that one is apt to get hurt. 2. If one is in the middle of the road and sees a car approaching, one should move either (a) away from the car, (b) towards the car, (c) to the right, (d) to the left, or (e) stand still; under no circumstances should one attempt to combine (a), (b), (c), (d), and (e). 3. The safest place from which to ascertain the make of an automobile or to estimate its cost is the sidewalk.



XXX

THE SAMPLE LIFE

The hour, the occasion, and the scene were conducive to melancholy. We had walked a good fifteen miles into the open country and back again under chilly clouds, and were now paying for it with an empty sense of weariness and disenchantment. There is nothing so depressing as a bare room lit up by flaring gas-jets against the gloom of a late afternoon of rain; and the lights in Scipione's little cellar restaurant flared away in the most outrageous manner. Harding, across the table from me, wretchedly fluttered the pages of a popular magazine and looked ill-natured and horribly unkempt. The new table-cloths had not yet been laid for dinner. The sawdust on the floor was mostly mire. Angelina, the cook, was screaming at Paolo and Francesca, who were trying to boil the cat. It was very dreary.

"Harding," I said, "you were insisting only a little while ago that life is always beautiful."

"So it is," he replied, too listless to be defiant. "To some people."

"To whom?"

"Well, to the two here, for instance," and he pointed to a pair of handsome lovers playing golf all over a double page in the advertising section of his magazine. "Do you mean to say these two ever know what ugliness is, or pain, or want? Or ever grow old? Or cease to love? Here is the perfect life for you."

"Are you so sure of that?" said some one over my shoulder, and I turned about sharply to look into the most entrancing face I have ever beheld in man or woman. It was Apollo standing there above me, or if not he, at least one of the divine youths that the Greeks have left for us in undying marble. He made Scipione's grimy cellar luminous with beauty.

"I beg your pardon for intruding," he said, seating himself at our table as joyously confident and as simple as an immortal should be. "But I feel myself competent to speak on the point you have raised because the Advertising Supplement you refer to is my own home. This very young man playing golf is, as you will observe, no other than myself."

There was no denying the amazing resemblance.

"You say the Advertising Supplement is your home," I collected myself sufficiently to ask, "but just how do you mean that?"

"Literally," he replied. "My whole life, and for that matter my parents' life before me, has been spent in the pages you are now fingering. My name is Pinckney, Walter Pinckney, and if you are sufficiently interested in my career I should be glad to describe it."

"Go ahead," cried Harding, with almost ferocious earnestness.

"If I begin a bit back before my birth," said Pinckney, "you will be patient with me. I will not detain you very long."

"Begin where you please," said Harding in the same grim manner; "only begin."

"My father," commenced young Pinckney, "at eighteen, was a sickly country lad with less than the usual elementary education and no other prospects than a life of drudgery on the old farm. But there was in him an elemental strength of will that was sufficient, as it turned out, to master fate. You have read his life again and again in the Advertising Pages of our magazines. On his nineteenth birthday, as I have heard him tell many a time, he began the reshaping of his life by investing the small sum of fifty cents in a manual of home exercise and enrolling himself at the same time with one of our best-known correspondence schools, which offered an attractive course in engineering and scientific irrigation. Simultaneously, from that day he carried on the work of his bodily and intellectual redemption. We still have at home a collection of the various domestic utensils which he employed in his daily training—an old armchair; a broom; a large gilt portrait frame through which he would leap twenty-five times every morning; a marble clock; a pair of water buckets; an old trunk lid, and other articles of the kind. Close beside his gymnastic apparatus we keep three trunkfuls of note-books and reports representing as many years devoted labour at his studies. At the age of twenty-six my father was a veritable Hercules and held the position of assistant to the chief engineer of an important Eastern railroad. It was shortly after he had won this place that he met my mother."

The caressing fondness with which he uttered the last word imparted to his seemingly supreme beauty an added warmth of appeal.

"Her, too, you have met in the Advertising Columns. She had begun to teach school when a mere girl; but when her father's death threw upon her young shoulders the burden of three little children and a helpless mother, she had risen to her greater needs. She succeeded in quadrupling her income by learning to write short stories, criticism, and verse, from a literary bureau which charged her a nominal fee for instruction and purchased her output at extremely generous rates for disposal among the leading magazines. When my father first saw her—it was in the course of a Fourth of July excursion to Niagara Falls which, including a three days' stay at the best hotels, was offered to the public at half the usual cost—she had sent the eldest boy through college, her younger sister was teaching school, and she was free to follow the inclinations of her heart."

"You were fortunate in the selection of your immediate ancestry," said Harding.

"Was I not?" Pinckney responded in a flush of grateful recognition. "But that is not all. The house in which I was born, though generally recognized as one of the finest examples of Queen Anne architecture in reinforced concrete, was put up by my father, unassisted, from plans which he purchased for a ridiculously small sum. Its every nook was the abiding-place of love, of quiet content, and of nurturing comfort. The furnace was equipped with the latest automatic devices so that it had to be started only once a year. It was then left to the care of my mother, who used to give it only a few minutes' attention every day without going to the trouble of divesting herself of the gown of fine white lawn which she always wore."

"My dear fellow," I could not keep from exclaiming, "you have almost explained yourself. In such surroundings how could you help growing up into what you are?"

"That is what I say, sir," he came back at me eagerly. "But you must call to mind, also, the fostering personal care that was bestowed upon us children. Take the matter of diet. Coffee, cocoa, excessive sweets, every food-element tending to narcotise or over-stimulate the system was rigorously excluded. Instead we had the numerous grain preparations that assist nature by contributing directly to the development of our particular faculties. In my case, for instance, it had been decided some time before I was born that in the course of time I should enter West Point. With that end in view Farinette, because of its muscle-building powers, was made the principal constituent of my bill of fare. Later, when my parents thought that the pulpit offered better chances of a successful career, Farinette was replaced by Panema, which is notably efficacious in the production of cerebral tissue. Just as I was taking my examinations for college it was finally determined that the sphere of corporation finance held out unrivalled facilities for advancement, and Panema gave way to Hydronuxia, which acts particularly on the imaginative faculties. As for my sisters, they fared no worse than I. You surely have seen them in the Advertising Pages in all their splendid bloom. Saved from overwork by soaps that make heavy washing a pleasure, eternally youthful through the use of electric massage, they smile at you through the reticulations of the tennis racket which the champion played with at Newport, or recline under parasols in the bow of canoes that will neither sink nor upset. They are very fond of playing Chopin on a mechanical piano while the moonlight streams over the floor of the open veranda."

Here Harding broke in sharply. "You began by differing with me on the possibility of finding complete happiness in life, and you have done nothing but refute your own position from the very first. I admit there are certain essentials toward the perfect life that you have not mentioned, but I haven't the least doubt that you already possess them or that they will come to you in time. I mean such things as riches or love."

"Ah, love," Pinckney murmured, and the shadow of a cloud passed over his divine brow.

"Surely," I said, "you have not sought for what love has to give and sought in vain?"

"No," he replied thoughtfully, "I have not failed to win love. But does love bring with it untouched felicity; that is what I ask." He hesitated. "I will not attempt to describe her. I really could not, you know, except in a feeble way, by saying that even to other eyes than mine she is a woman more wonderful than any of my sisters, if that is at all possible. We loved at first sight. I had run down for a Sunday afternoon to Garden Towers-by-the-Sea, a beautiful suburb which a number of enterprising citizens had built up out of a sand waste to meet the needs of the tired urban worker who, in his expensive and uncomfortable city flat, finds himself longing for the life-giving breeze of the ocean and the sight of a bit of God's open country. I was walking down the main street of the village, wearing the loosely shaped and well-padded garments that were then popular with young men, and carrying a set of golf-sticks in my right hand and a bull terrier under my arm. Then I saw her. She was sitting on the porch of the house which her father had purchased for one-third of what its value became when the completion of extensive rapid-transit improvements brought it within thirty-five minutes of the New York City Hall. We loved and told each other. My father, at first, insisted that before assuming the responsibilities of marriage a man should be in receipt of a larger independent income than I could boast of. But when Alice pleaded that she could be of help by raising high-grade poultry for the urban market and organising subscribers' clubs for the magazines, my father yielded. We are to be married in two months, sir."

Harding spoke up impatiently. "Still I fail to see where your unhappiness lies."

"Did I say unhappiness? That is not at all the word, sir. It is rather a sense of awe that seizes us both at times, when we are together, as though we were in the presence of unseen influences; as though, rather, a world not our own were projecting itself into our well-defined lives. I have shown you that Alice and I belong to a very real, very matter-of-fact world. But there are times when we seem to be walking in a land of strange sounds and sights and of shadows that fan our cheeks as they flit by."

"Oh, well," I said, "when two fond young people are together the limits of the visible world are apt to undergo undue extension."

"Let me be specific," said Pinckney. "We first became aware of this state of things some weeks ago. We were walking one afternoon at twilight through a stretch of woods not far from the shore when all at once we were conscious that the familiar aspect of things had vanished. The park had become a virgin forest. Two savage figures girded with skins were panting in deadly combat. One had sunk his thumbs into the eye-sockets of his opponent, who, in turn, had buried his teeth in the flesh of the other's arm. A wild creature, almost hidden in the long tangle of her hair, crouched there, the only spectator of the battle, chanting in weird tones: 'Ai! Ai! the call of the wild summons you to the death-grapple, oh Men, and me to sing who am Woman! Fight on, oh Men; for it is Good! The Race, the Sons of your strong loins through the dizzy whirl-dance of all time, are watching you. Match man-strength against man-strength, breath-rhythm against breath-rhythm, and knee-thrust against knee-thrust!' And then one of the combatants fell, and the victor with a yell of triumph seized the woman by the hair and, flinging her over his shoulder, staggered off, and we heard them call to each other, 'Oh, my Male!' 'Oh, my Female!' Then we were in our own grove by the beach and Alice whispered dreamily, 'Dearest, how tame are our lives.'"

"I think I begin to understand," said I. "What happened was simply that you had walked right out of the Advertising Supplement into the Fiction pages; and that was Jack London. Had you other experiences of the kind?"

"On another occasion," he resumed, "we were walking on the beach and again in a flash we had lost our footing in the world we knew. We were in a magnificent ballroom. The chandeliers were Venetian, the orchestra was Hungarian, the decorations were priceless orchids. Every woman wore a tiara with chains of pearls. There were stout dowagers, callow youths, gamblers, and blacklegs, and, among the many handsome men, one of about five-and-thirty, with a wonderfully cut chin, bending sedulously over a glorious, slender girl whose eyes attested the purity of her soul and fidelity unto death. 'Dearest,' she was saying, 'what does it matter that my father was the greatest Greek scholar in America and my mother the most beautiful woman south of Mason and Dixon's line? What that I have ten million dollars and can ride, shoot, swim, golf, tennis, dance, sing, compose, cook, and interpret the Irish sagas? I love you though you have only twelve thousand a year.' And all over the hall we caught such phrases as, 'Yes, he dropped 25,000 on Non Sequitur at Bennings.' 'Oh, just down for three weeks at Palm Beach, you know.' 'Two millions in three weeks, they say, mostly out of Copper and Q.C.B.' 'Yes, just back from South Dakota on the best of terms.' Then the room vanished, we were by the sea, and Alice said wistfully, 'How limited our lives are, dear.'"

I said: "My theory holds good. That was Robert Chambers, I am sure. Go on."

"I have told you enough," said Pinckney, "to show what I mean by the shadow over our happiness. It will pass away, of course. In the meantime I try to explain to Alice that these are phantoms we vision, of no relation to the practical life that we must lead on our side of the boundary line; I tell her that these things we see are not, and never have been and never will be. Am I right, do you think, sir?"

"Quite right," I told him.



XXXI

THE COMPLETE COLLECTOR—IV

"My latest fad," said Cooper, "is this little library of the greatest names in literature. It is by no means complete, but the nucleus is there."

When Cooper speaks of his fads he does himself injustice. The world might think them fads, or worse. But I, who know the man, know that his fondness for the insignificant or the extraordinary is something more than eccentricity, something more than a collector's appetite run amuck. In reality, Cooper's soul goes out to the worthless objects he frequently brings together into odd little museums. He loves them precisely because they are insignificant. His whole life has been a silent protest against the arrogance of success, of high merit, of rare value. His heart is always on the side of the Untermensch, a name given by the Germans, a learned people, to what we call the under-dog.

"My collection," said Cooper, "is as yet confined almost entirely to authors in the English language. Here is my Shakespeare, a first edition, I believe, though undated. The year, I presume, was about 1875. The title, you see, is comprehensive: 'The Nature of Evaporating Inflammations in Arteries After Ligature, Accupressure, and Torsion.' Edward O. Shakespeare, who wrote the book, is not a debated personality. His authorship of the book is unquestioned, and I assure you it is a comfort to handle a text which you know left its author's mind exactly as it now confronts you in the page.

"Next to the Shakespeare you find my Dickens volumes, two in number. Albert Dickens published, in 1904, his 'Tests of Forest Trees.' It has been praised in authoritative quarters as an excellent work of its kind. An older book is 'Dickens's Continental A B C,' a railway guide which I am fond of thinking of as the probable instrument of a vast amount of human happiness. Imagine the happy meetings and reunions which this chubby little book has made possible—husbands and wives, fathers and children, lovers, who from the most distant corners of the earth have sought and found each other by means of the Dickens railway time-tables. To how many beds of illness has it brought a comforter, to how many habitations of despair—but I must not preach. I call your attention to the next volume, Byron. From the title, 'A Handbook of Lake Minnetonka,' you will perceive that it is in the same class as my Dickens."

Cooper drew his handkerchief to flip the dust from a thin octavo in sheepskin. "This Emerson," he said, "is the earliest in date of my Americana. William Emerson's 'A Sermon on the Decease of the Rev. Peter Thacher' appeared in 1802, at a time when people still thought it worth while to utilise the death of a good man by putting him into a book for the edification of the living. The adjoining two volumes are by Spencer. Charles E. Spencer's 'Rue, Thyme, and Myrtle' is a sheaf of dainty poetry which was very popular in Philadelphia during the second decade after the Civil War. Do we still write poetry as single-heartedly as people did? It may be. Perhaps we might find out by comparing this other volume by Edwin Spencer, 'Cakes and Ale,' published in 1897, with the Philadelphia Spencer of forty years ago.

"I must hurry you through the rest of my books," said Cooper. "Thomas James Thackeray's 'The Soldier's Manual of Rifle-Firing' appeared in 1858, and undoubtedly had its day of usefulness. Thomas Kipling was professor of divinity at Cambridge University toward the end of the eighteenth century. In 1793 he edited the volume I now hold in my hand, 'Codex Bezae,' one of the most precious of our extant MSS. of the New Testament. I like to think of that fine old Cambridge professor's name as bound up with patient, self-effacing scholarship and a highly developed spirituality. But I digress. Cast your eye over this little group of foreign writers. Here is Dumas,—Jean Baptiste Dumas,—whose 'Lecons sur la philosophic chimique,' delivered in 1835, were considered worthy of being published thirty years later. The quaint volume that comes next is by Du Maurier, who was French ambassador to the Hague about 1620. The title, in the Dutch, is 'Propositie gedan door den Heere van Maurier,' etc.—'Propositions Advanced by the Sieur du Maurier,' one of the Regent's able and merry-hearted diplomats, I take it. And here is Goethe; he would repay your reading. Rudolf Goethe's 'Mitteilungen ueber Obst- und Gartenbau' is one of the standard works on horticulture.

"And finally," said Cooper with a flash of pride quite unusual in him, "the treasure of my little library—Homer; again a first edition."

"Homer!" I cried. "An editio princeps!"

"Nearly one hundred and fifty years old," he said. "The Rev. Henry Homer deserved well of his British countrymen when he gave to the world—it was in 1767—his 'Inquiry Into the Measures of Preserving and Improving the Publick Roads of this Kingdom.'"

Cooper sat down and eyed me doubtfully, as if awaiting an unfavourable opinion. His face quite lit up when I hastened to assure him that his library was one of the most impressive collections it had ever been my good fortune to know.

"Very few collections," I told him, "bear the impress of a personality. As a rule they are shopfuls of costly masterpieces such as any multi-millionaire may have if he doesn't prefer horses or monkey dinners. But how often does one find a treasure-house like yours, Cooper, revealing an exquisitely discriminating taste in co-operation with the bold originality of the true amateur?"



XXXII

CHOPIN'S SUCCESSORS

"It is his own composition, the final word in modern music," I had been told. "He does not merely play the concerto; he lives it. Be sure to watch his face." It was not a very impressive face as artists go. It was rather heavy, rather sullen, and seemingly incapable of mirroring more than the elementary passions. The great pianist entered the hall almost unwillingly, and wound his way among the musicians with consummate indifference to the roar of applause that greeted him. You might have said that he was once more a little boy being scourged to his piano day after day by parents who had been told that they had brought forth a genius. He half-dropped into his seat, glanced wearily about him, then let his eyes sink expressionless on the keyboard and his hands fall flat on his knees, nerveless, heavy, apathetic.

The orchestra leader poised his baton and the two-score strings under his command swung into a noble andante. The artist at the piano slowly raised his eyes to a level with the top of his instrument, his lips just parted as if in halting wonder at something he alone in the great hall could see, the hands made as if to lift themselves from his knees. "Look at his face," my neighbour said. I looked and saw that the dull mask was slightly changing, that some emotion at last was rising to the surface of that stolid countenance, striking its cloudy aspect with the first anticipations of breaking light. Would that cloud dissolve? Would the light completely break and irradiate player, piano, and audience, all equally keyed up to the delayed climax? Would those massive hands rise slowly, slowly, and hanging aloft an instant crash down in a rage of harmony upon keyboard and auditors' hearts? No. The clouds once more swept over that massive face. The player moistened his lips with his tongue, half-turned on his chair, and slowly swept the hall with an indifferent, almost a disdainful eye. Then he sank into his former lassitude. His hands dropped to his side without striking the keys. Evidently the time had not come. The violins in the orchestra sang on.

My neighbour was not the only one to fall under the spell of such masterly musicianship. Twenty-four ladies in the parquette shrank back into their seats with a half-sob of brimming emotion, and implored their escorts to look at the artist's face. Eleven ladies in the lower boxes interrupted their conversation to remark that it was wonderful what soul those Slavs managed to put into their playing. In the upper balconies listeners strained forward in their seats so that from below it seemed as if they were about to precipitate themselves over the railings. What expert opinion had described as the sublimest ten minutes in the great pianist's greatest concerto had just begun. The conductor slightly raised himself on his toes. Instantly through the weaving of the violins the voices of the wood instruments began to break out. The contest between the two came quickly to its climax. The strings were forced back and back, wailing an ineffective protest against the shrilling advance of the woods. A solitary 'cello made dogged resistance, knowing its cause hopeless, but determined to sell life as dearly as possible. But the 'cello, too, went down and for a bar or two the flutes and oboes sang a paean of victory. Too soon. Upon them, like a tidal wave, swept down a hurricane of brasses and shook the hall with its resonant thunders.

That was the moment our artist at the piano had been waiting for. His heavy figure straightened up; it seemed to swell to monstrous proportions, forcing orchestra and leader out of the vision and consciousness of his listeners. His face now was all eloquence. A divine wrath almost made his eyes blaze as he prepared to hurl himself at the silent, yet quivering instrument. His huge hands hovered over the keyboard ready to fall and destroy. His eyes ran over the keys as if searching for the vulnerable, for the vital spot. Back and forth his eyes ran, and his outstretched fingers kept pace with them in the air. But those fingers could find no resting-place. Still the piano remained silent. And then came the inevitable reaction. Such passion could not last without crushing player and audience alike. Seven ladies in the parquette were grasping the arms of their chairs, and three women in the upper balcony had seized the arms of their escorts, as the brasses crashed once and died out. The flutes for an instant reappeared, to make way in turn for the violins, which now began timidly to peep out from their hiding-places. They grew bolder; they joined hands, and once more their insistent story quivered and sang throughout the house. And as they sang, the player at the piano, exhausted by his supreme effort, sank more and more into his indifferent former self. His form collapsed, the fire in his eyes died out, and the powerful hands wearily drooped and drooped till they rested once more on the player's knees. A sigh of relief swept over the hall. Human emotion could stand no more. The audience could hardly wait for the last throb of the violins, to break out in rapturous applause. The master rose, bowed sorrowfully towards nobody in particular, and walked off.

"Did you watch his face?" asked my neighbour. "Have you ever come across such utterly overpowering individuality? I have played for fifteen years, but if I played for fifty years I could never even approach art like this."



XXXIII

THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT

"The arguments for and against woman suffrage," said Harding, "seem to me very evenly balanced. I agree with Dr. Biddle of the Society for the Promotion of Beautiful Manners, that it is unseemly for a woman to climb a truck and demand the ballot. Dr. Biddle maintains that if woman wants the ballot she should wait until every one is asleep and then go through somebody's pockets for it. Woman, Dr. Biddle thinks, has her own peculiar sphere, which, as the latest Census figures show, includes the nursery, the kitchen, the vaudeville stage, college teaching, stenography, the law, medicine, the ministry, as well as the manufacture of agricultural implements, ammunition, artificial feathers and limbs, automobiles, axle-grease, boots and shoes, bread-knives, brooms, brushes, buttons, carriages and wagons, charcoal, cheese, cigars, clocks, clothing and so on to x, y, and z.

"Can anything be more fatal to our ideals of true womanliness, Dr. Biddle asks, than a suffragette who throws stones? In reply to this, Miss Annabelle Bloodthurst asserts that if we count the number of successful suffragette hits woman is never so true to her sex as when she is heaving bricks at a British prime minister.

"Professor Tumbler lays particular stress on the outrageous conduct of the English suffragettes. He recalls how the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, while eating a charlotte russe, felt his teeth strike against a hard object, which turned out to be a cardboard cylinder inscribed 'Votes for Women.' The chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster was about to light his after-dinner cigar the other day when the cigar suddenly expanded into a paper fan bearing the legend, 'Tyrants, beware!' The newest Dreadnought with the First Lord of the Admiralty on board was preparing to set out on her trial trip when it was discovered that the boilers were not making steam. When the furnace doors were opened two dozen suffragettes, concealed within, began to shout, 'We want votes!' The leader of the Opposition is known to have walked all the way down Piccadilly with a tag tied to his coattails inscribed: 'I see no reason for bestowing the suffrage on women.'

"But perhaps the most dastardly outrage occurred at the baptism of the youngest child of a prominent treasury official. It seems that the nurse, who was a suffragette in disguise, had removed the child, a girl, and substituted a mechanical doll, with a phonographic attachment. The clergyman was in the middle of his discourse when the doll began to scream, 'Votes for women.' The father gasped, 'What! So early?' and fainted.

"The more you weigh the reasons pro and con," continued Harding, as he lit one of my cigars, "the harder it is to decide. Mrs. Cadgers has pointed out that under our present system the wife of a college professor is not allowed to vote, whereas an illiterate Greek fruit peddler may. But Mr. Rattler replies that the college professor, too, seldom votes, and if he does he spoils his ballot by trying to split his ticket. Why, demands Mrs. Cadgers, should women who pay taxes be refused a voice in the management of public affairs? Because, replies Mr. Rattler, the suffrage and taxes do not necessarily go together. In our country at the present day many millionaires who regularly cast their votes never pay their taxes.

"Mr. Rattler is particularly afraid that woman suffrage will break up the family. 'Imagine,' he says, 'a family in which the husband is a Democrat and the wife a Cannon Republican. Imagine them constantly fighting out the subject of tariff revision over the supper-table, and conceive the dreadful effect on the children, who at present are accustomed to see father light his cigar after supper and fall asleep. Or suppose the wife develops a passion for political meetings. That means that the husband will have to stay at home with the baby.' 'Well,' replies Mrs. Cadgers, 'such an arrangement has its advantages. It would not only give the wife a chance to learn the meaning of citizenship, but it would give the husband a chance to get acquainted with the baby.' And besides, Mrs. Cadgers goes on to argue, a woman's political duties need not take up more than a small fraction of her time. That, retorts Mr. Rattler, with a sneer, is because woman derives her ideas on the subject from seeing her husband fulfil his duties as a citizen once every two years when he forgets to register.