one, the Colossus of Rhodes. I was doubtful about Mount Vesuvius. I
remembered not a single one of the seven deadly sins, and, at first,
could place only two of the ten commandments--the ones on filial
obedience and on the Sabbath. Later I thought of the newest realistic
hit at the Park Theatre; that brought back one more commandment. On the
other hand, it was a relief to call the three Graces straight
off--Faith, Hope, and Charity.

I grew humble. I began to doubt if, after all, it is true that a modern
schoolboy knows more than Aristotle did. In any case, whether
Harrington's boy who is still in the grammar grades knows more than
Aristotle, he certainly knows more than his father. They have a
new-fashioned branch of study in the modern schools, which they call
training the powers of observation. And that boy comes home with
mischief in his soul, and asks Harrington which way do the seeds in an
apple point. Harrington stares at the boy, and the boy smiles
quizzically at Harrington, and the father grows suspicious. Are there
seeds in an apple? There are seedless oranges, of course, which
presupposes oranges not destitute of seeds; but an apple? Harrington
tries to call up the image of the last apple he has eaten and he thinks
of sweet and sour apples, apples of a waxen yellow and apples of a
purple red, but he cannot visualise the seeds.

As Harrington sits there dumb, Jack asks him which shoe does he put on
first when he dresses in the morning. Jack knows, the rascal. He can
trace every process through which the cotton fibre passes from the plant
to the finished cloth. He knows why factory chimneys are built high. He
knows how a boat tacks against the wind. And he knows that his father
knows nothing of these things.

But I would rather have Harrington's boy quiz me on things that I can
pretend are not worth knowing, like the seeds in an apple, than on
things that cannot be waved aside. I tried to explain one day how the
revolution of the earth about the sun produces the seasons, and I
succeeded only in proving that when it is winter in New York it is
daylight in Buenos Ayres. Thereupon, Jack asked me what an unearned
increment was. When I finished he said his teacher had told them that
views like those I had just expressed were common among ill-informed
people. The following day he came in and said to Harrington, "Papa, name
six female characters in Dickens, in three minutes." Well, Harrington
did, but it was a strain, and in order to make up the total he had to
count in the anonymous, elderly, single woman whom Mr. Pickwick
surprised in her bedroom. Jack insisted that, as she was nameless, it
was not fair to call her a character, but Harrington put his foot down
and refused to argue the matter.

And as I sit there before the fire, smiling over Harrington and Jack and
myself, my cigar goes out, and I signal Thomas to bring me another.
Thomas has the ascetic countenance of a tragedian, and the repose of an
archbishop. Now, Thomas--and it comes to me with a shock--what do I
know about Thomas, the man, as distinguished from the hired servant whom
I have been aware of this year and more? Is he married or single? And if
he is married, do his children resent their father's wearing livery?
Does Thomas himself like to be a servant? Are there ideals and
speculations behind that close-shaven mask? Has he any views on the
future life? Has he ever thought on the subject of vivisection? Does he
vote the Republican ticket? Does he earn a decent wage?

I could only answer, with an aching sense of isolation, with the wistful
longing of one who looks into unfathomable depths, that I didn't know.
Oh, Thomas, fellow man, brother! We have rubbed elbows for months and I
do not know whether you are a man or only a lackey; whether you drink
all night, or pray; whether you love me or hate me. How can you hold the
cigar box so impassively, so single-mindedly?

I said to myself that I would make amends to Thomas, that it was never
too late. And, quietly, genially, I asked him, "How do you like your
place here, Thomas?" Thomas grew uneasy, and smiled in a sickish
fashion, and entreated me with his eyes to pick my cigar and let him go.
But I was in the full swing of new-found righteousness. "There's nothing
wrong, is there, Thomas?" And he replied, "I beg pardon, sir; but
Henry's my name. Thomas was my predecessor. He left, you will remember,
sir, a year ago last May." "But everybody calls you Thomas." "The
gentlemen were used to the other name, sir."

Might Professor Wilson Stubbs be wrong, after all, I thought. Perhaps no
one is really expected to know what everybody ought to know. I don't
know the name of my Congressman. But neither do I know the name of my
butcher and my grocer; and my butcher and my grocer can slay me with
typhoid or ptomaines, whereas the utmost my Congressman can do is to
misrepresent me. I don't know the man who makes my cigars; he may be
consumptive. I don't know the critic who supplies me with literary
opinions, and the scholar who gives me my outlook upon life. I don't
know the man who lives next door. From the decent silence that reigns in
his apartment, I gather that he does not beat his wife; but that is all.
Yet he and I are supposed to be bound up in a community of interests. We
both belong to the class whose income ranges from $2,000 to $4,000 a
year, of which we spend 38 per cent. on food; and we raise an average of
2-2/3 children to the family, and are both responsible for the wide
prevalence of musical comedy on the American stage. But I have seen my
neighbour twice in the last three years.

So that was the end of it. And because it was late in the afternoon, I
thought I would telephone to the office that I was not coming back. But
for the life of me, I could not think of my telephone number; and Henry
looked me up in the directory.

XVII

THE CHILDREN THAT LEAD US

The mayor sat before his library fire and shivered, and kept wondering
why there was no clause in the city charter prescribing a minimum of
common sense for presidents of the Board of Education. A man thus
qualified would know more than to suggest an increase of three million
dollars for school sittings. The city's comptroller was crying
bankruptcy; the newspapers were asserting that the mayor's nephew was
head of a favoured contracting firm not entirely for his health; and the
Board of Education wanted three million dollars. The mayor had a touch
of fever. The steep rows of figures in the Education Board's memorandum
curled up into little arabesques under his eyes, which were closing
with fatigue. Only he did not wish to sleep. In the perfect stillness he
could hear his own rapid heartbeat. The clatter of sleety rain against
the windows made him restless.

If only O'Brien were here, O'Brien, who was a good chief of police, and
a matchless personal aide-de-camp. They would then put on boots and
oilskins and go out into the night on one of their frequent
Harun-Al-Rashid expeditions. The mayor's wife? Yes, it is true that
before leaving for the theatre she had cautioned him not to stir from
the house. But she could not possibly have known how great was his need
of a breath of air. But O'Brien was not here. Was it because he had just
been appointed president of the Board of Education and comptroller in
one and was a busy man? Perhaps. And yet a person might step to the
telephone and ring up O'Brien if it were not that one's legs were
weighted down with the weight of centuries and of dozens of new school
buildings all in reinforced concrete. Was it concrete? The mayor was not
quite sure, and he turned to ask O'Brien, who stood there at one side of
the fireplace, erect and attentive.

"Do we go out to-night?" said the mayor.

"I should not advise it, your Honour," answered O'Brien. "You are not
well enough. If it is adventure you would go in search of, I have here
quite an extraordinary delegation of citizens who desire an interview
with your Honour."

"Let us hear them, by all means," replied the mayor.

O'Brien drew aside the curtain which divided the library from the
general reception room and there marched in, two abreast and maintaining
precise step, a solemn line of children, who saluted the mayor gravely
and ranged themselves in a semicircle across the room. As the mayor
veered in his chair to face his visitors, a girl of some fifteen years
stepped out of the line. She was still in her schoolgirl's dresses, but
tall, with features of a fine, pensive cut and earnest eyes that were
already peering from out the child's life into the opening doors of
womanhood.

"May it please your Honour," she began, "we are a committee from the
Central Bureau of Federated Children's Organisations and we have come
here to protest against certain intolerable conditions of which our
members are the victims."

Had they come in behalf of those additional three million dollars, the
mayor wondered uneasily. "State the nature of your grievance," he said.

The leader of the delegation came a step nearer. "Your Honour, I can
only attempt the merest outline of our general position. Several of my
associates will take turns in acquainting you with the details of our
case. Our complaint is that we, the children of this country, are being
overworked. Formerly it was supposed to be the inalienable right of
children to remain free from the cares of life. That theory has long
been abandoned. The task of solving the gravest problems of existence
has been thrust upon us, and every day that passes leaves us saddled
with new responsibilities. But the limit of endurance has been reached
at last. We feel that unless we protest now the whole structure of
society--its economics, politics, art, and religion--will be shifted
from the shoulders of the world's men and women to the shoulders of us
children. I hope your Honour is willing to hear us."

"Of course, my dear," the mayor answered softly. He said, "My dear," and
he said it tenderly because he had recognised in the speaker his own
daughter Helen, whom he had supposed with her mother at the theatre.

"Step forward, Flora Binns," said Helen, and Flora Binns, who was only
eight, blue-eyed, and with ringlets of gold, approached and curtsied
prettily. "May it please your Honour," she said, "I am the delegate from
Local No. 16 Children of Weak and Tempted Stage Mothers' Union. We wish
to place on record our opposition to the modern society drama, which so
frequently throws the duty of supporting the climax of a play upon
children under the age of ten. Although the playwrights are fond of
showing that our papa is a brute and that our mamma is an angel, they
invariably shrink from the logical conclusion that our mamma is right in
planning to run away with the man who has offered her years of silent
devotion. So the playwrights make one or two of us appear on the stage
just in time to arouse in our mamma a sense of duty to her children and
to prevent the elopement. Now we submit that the office of justifying
our entire modern marriage fabric is too burdensome for us. Don't you
think so, Mr. Mayor?"

"Why, yes," replied the mayor, thoughtfully.

"And they make use of us in other ways, sir. In fact, whenever the grown
up persons in a play are in difficulties and the audience is beginning
to yawn, the author sends us to the rescue. Why, only the other day we
children saved a Wild West melodrama from utter failure. It took three
of us to do it, but we succeeded." Flora curtsied, started back and
returned. "And when I utter these sentiments, sir, I speak also for the
Union of Precocious Magazine Children, which is represented here by Mary
Sparks." Mary Sparks, a dark-haired miss with dancing eyes, bowed
saucily.

"Step out, Fritz Hackenschneider," said Helen, and flaxen-haired Fritz,
radiantly holiday-like in his lustrously washed face and large, blue
polka-dot tie, approached the mayor's chair.

"I don't have much to say, sir," he recited in a nervous, jerky voice.
"I have been sent by the Fraternal Association of Comic Supplement
Children. We wish to raise our voice against the almost universal
conception that people can be made to laugh only when one of us hides a
pin on the seat of grandpa's chair. The burden of an entire nation's
humour is more than we can sustain. Thank you, sir," and he retired into
the background, giving, as he passed, just one tug at Mary Sparks's hair
and eliciting a suppressed scream.

"Mamie O'Farrell," called out Helen. The mayor found it impossible to
decide whether Mamie was thirteen or twenty-five. She was very short
and flat-chested, and the colour of her face in the firelight was like a
dull cardboard. She wore a long, faded automobile cloak and an enormous
black hat with a trailing green feather. On a gilt chain about her neck
hung a locket in the form of a heart half as large as the one that beat
uneasily within her. Mamie came forward reluctantly and saluted. Then
she began to squirm from side to side and to shift from foot to foot,
giggling in unfathomable embarrassment.

"Well," said Helen, in a voice that was not at all unkind.

Mamie's giggle grew worse. She seemed bent on snapping the massive gilt
chain with twisting it back and forth, and finally gave up the whole
case. "You tell it, Helen," she begged. "I forgot wot I was goin' t'
say. I'm scared poifectly stiff."

Helen complied. "May it please your Honour, Mamie O'Farrell wants me to
say that she represents the Amalgamated Union of Cash Girls and Juvenile
Cotton Mill and Glass Factory Operatives. Mamie is fifteen. She works
eleven hours a day and receives three and a half dollars a week. She
passes two hours every day clinging to a strap in a crowded surface car.
She carries her lunch in a paper bundle together with a copy of Laura M.
Clay's novel entitled 'Irma's Ducal Lover.' Saturday nights, if her
father has been strong enough to pass Murphy's saloon without opening
his pay envelope, she goes to the theatre where the play is 'The Queen
of the Opium Fiends.' Sometimes she attends a dance of the Friendship
Circle, but as a rule she spends her nights at home reading the _Evening
Yell_, which tells her that beauty is often a fatal gift and that there
is danger in the first glass of champagne a young girl drinks. Am I
telling your story in the right way, Mamie?" asked Helen.

"Goodness, yes. You're awful kind, Helen," said Mamie.

"Thus far, Mamie has nothing to complain of," continued Helen. "But she
has read somewhere that the slaughter of the poor negroes in the Congo
and of the Chinese in Manchuria, and of the Zulus in Natal, and of the
Moros in the Philippines, arises from the necessity under which the
civilised nations labour to find foreign markets for their increasing
output of cotton goods, brass jewelry, and coloured beads. Now the
members of Mamie's union are engaged in producing precisely those
commodities, and they have come to feel in consequence, that they are
directly responsible for the innocent blood that is being shed in
various parts of the world. It cannot be their employers who are at
fault, because the press and the clergy are unanimous in declaring that
the heads of our great industries are the benefactors of humankind. That
is why the girls protest. They are quite content with their own fate,
but they cannot bear the entire responsibility for the march of
civilisation. Mamie tells me that she cannot sleep of nights for
thinking of the poor little Moorish babies whose mothers were killed by
the French guns. That is the position taken by your union, isn't it,
Mamie?"

Mamie giggled, went through a final contortion of ill-ease and returned
to her place, in the half-circle. She was succeeded by a brown-haired
little maiden, who for some minutes had been showing a strained anxiety
to break into speech.

"Please, Helen," she entreated, "may I say something?"

"Of course, dear," said Helen.

The little maid bowed to the mayor. "Please, sir," she said, "my papa
was thirty-eight years of age when he married mamma. He was an old
bachelor. He was not anxious to be married, but they put a tax on him
because they were afraid of depopulation. And he loves me very dearly.
But sometimes when he thinks of his old freedom he looks so sadly at me.
I feel very sorry for him then. I don't want him to be unhappy on my
account----"

She withdrew and Helen stepped forward to sum up the case. "You must not
think, your Honour, that it is our desire to embarrass your
administration. Bad as conditions are, we would have continued to suffer
in silence, because, you see, there are still little flashes of freedom
left to us children. But we have learned that there is now on foot in
England a movement which threatens to reduce us to unmitigated slavery.
We understand that Mr. Sidney Webb, Mr. Francis Galton, Professor Karl
Pearson, and Mr. Bernard Shaw are advocating a scheme of state endowment
for motherhood. Now you can see for yourself what that would mean. In
politics it would mean the establishment of a motherhood suffrage with
plural voting based on the size of the family. In the economic sphere it
would mean that we shall be supporting our papas and mammas. In art,
which must reflect the actualities of life, it would mean almost the
elimination of the element of love, since the world is to be a
children's world. In other words, as I have already said, the entire
social fabric will come to press on our shoulders alone. It is against
the mere possibility of such an unnatural state of affairs that we are
here to protest."

"But what is it you want?" asked the mayor, somewhat nettled because
O'Brien, instead of backing him up, was busy piling three million
golden dollars on the floor in stacks two and a half feet high.

"We want to be left alone!" The reply came in a chorus of trebles,
pipings, quavers, and adolescent falsettos that caused the mayor to lift
his hands to his forehead entreating silence. "We want our old
privileges again. We want to be allowed just to grow up."

"Yassir," shrilled one voice above the others, "jist to grow up."

The mayor raised himself in his chair and his eyes lit up with surprise
at the sight of a well-known black little face at the very end of the
second row.

"What, Topsy, you here?" he called out. "Haven't you done growing all
these sixty years, nearly?"

"Yassir," answered Topsy, inserting an index finger into her mouth. "Ah
was shure growin' fas'; but Massa Booker Washin'ton he says that ah and
the likes of me was charged with th' future of the negro race. An' that
skyeered me so ah made up mah mind ah wouldn' grow no further."

The mayor turned to Helen. "You understand of course, my dear, that I
cannot lay a proposition of so vague a nature before the Board of
Aldermen. They are a rather unimaginative set of men."

"We have drawn up a list of demands, your Honour, in terms precise
enough to make it a sufficient basis for practical legislation. May I
read the list to you, papa?"

"Yes, my dear," he replied, and rising from his chair he put his arms
about her and kissed her. Her forehead was cool to his burning lips.
"Pray proceed, Miss Chairman."

And Helen read in her high-pitched, petulantly graceful soprano:
"Resolutions adopted at a special meeting of the Central Bureau of the
Federated Children's Organisations of the United States:

"1. Henceforth the proportion of child fiction in any magazine shall be
restricted to ten per cent. of the total contents of such publication;
and no magazine fiction child under the age of twelve shall be
represented as possessing an amount of intelligence greater than the
combined wisdom of its parents.

"2. The married heroine of a society drama who has consistently
preferred yachting trips, bridge, and the opera to the company of her
children shall be precluded from calling upon them for aid to save
herself from the dangers of a mad infatuation.

"3. Children under the age of eighteen shall be employed in no form of
industry whatsoever. If there are not enough hands to produce piece
goods for the Congo and the Philippines, let them draft all adult
motor-car chauffeurs, diamond polishers, wine agents, amateur coach
drivers, settlement workers, preachers of the simple life, and writers
of musical comedy.

"4. In the public schools there shall be no talks or lessons dealing
with the duties of citizenship. The time now given to that subject shall
be devoted to the reading of dime novels and fairy tales, so that on
graduating, children shall not be confronted with so startling a
contrast between the realities of life and what they have learned at
school.

"5. Cooking and other branches of domestic science shall no longer be
taught in the schools. One-half of us expect to live in family hotels
and the other half will probably be in no position to afford the
expensive ingredients employed in scientific cookery.

"6. Mr. Francis Galton, who invented Eugenics, and Messrs. Karl Pearson
and Sidney Webb, who helped to popularise it, shall be executed. Mr.
Bernard Shaw shall be banished to a desert island."

And the mayor all the while kept thinking how like her mother Helen was:
her voice, her hair, her eyes, but especially her voice. It filled the
room with many-coloured vibrations of the consistency of building
concrete and hid completely from the mayor's sight the crowd of young
faces, O'Brien, the Board of Aldermen, and the three million presidents
of the Board of Education. Only Helen remained and she came close to him
and laid her cool fingers on his aching head.

The mayor started up to find his wife bending over him.

"Edward," she was saying, "you promised me you would go to bed early."

"My dear," he replied, "I would have if I had not fallen asleep in my
chair. Have you had a pleasant evening at the theatre?"

"It is dreadful weather," she said, "and I have a bit of cold. I suppose
I shouldn't have gone out to-night, but it was the last chance, and you
know the children _would_ see 'Peter Pan.'"

XVIII

THE MARTIANS

The saddest thing about the recent announcement that there are no canals
on Mars is that Robert and I will now have so little to talk about.
Robert is my favourite waiter, and when he found out that I am what the
newspapers call a literary worker, he made up his mind that the ordinary
topics of light conversation would not do at all for me. After prolonged
resistance on my part he has succeeded in reducing our common interests
to two: the canals on Mars and French depopulation. Now and then I
venture to bring up the weather or the higher cost of living. Once I
asked him what he thought about the need of football reform. Once I
tried to drag in Mme. Steinheil. But Robert listens patiently, and when
I have concluded he calls my attention to the fact that in 1908 the
number of deaths in France exceeded the number of births by 12,000. When
the French population fails to stir me, he wonders whether the
inhabitants of Mars are really as intelligent as they are supposed to
be.

And yet it must have been I that first suggested Mars to him. Let me
confess. I do not love the Martian canals with the devouring passion
they have aroused in susceptible souls like Robert. But in a quieter way
the canals have been very dear to me. Their threatened loss comes like
the loss of an old friend; a distant friend whose face one has almost
forgotten and never hopes to see again, from whom one never hopes to
borrow, and to whom one never expects to lend, but who all the more
lives in the mind a remote, impersonal, and gentle influence. I am not
ashamed to admit that I have learned to care more for the Martian
canals than for any canals much closer to us. The Panama Canal will
probably cut in two the distance to China, and give us a monopoly of the
cotton goods trade in the Pacific; but I think cotton goods are
unhealthful, and I don't want to go to China. The Suez Canal may be the
mainstay of the British Empire, but I have no doubt that it would make
just as satisfactory a mainstay for some other empire. My interest in
the Erie Canal is connected entirely with the fact that when it was
opened somebody said, "What hath God wrought!" or "There is no more
North and no more South"--I have forgotten which.

I have always had a softer spot in my heart for the inhabitants of Mars
than for any other alien people. They have always impressed me as more
unassuming than the English, fonder of outdoor exercise than the
Germans, and less addicted to garrulity than the French. They lead
simple, laborious lives, digging away at their canals every morning, and
filling them up every night, for reasons best known to themselves and
certain professors at Harvard. I am attracted by their quaint
appearance. Mr. H. G. Wells, for instance, has depicted them with
cylindrical bodies of sheet iron, long legs like a tripod, heads like an
enormous diver's helmet, and arms like the tentacles of an octopus--as
odd a sight in their way as the latest woman's fashions from Paris.
Others have described the Martians as pot-bellied and hairless, with
goggle eyes, powerful arms, and curly, gelatinous legs, the result of
millions of years of universal culture and Subway congestion. A race so
unattractive could not but be virtuous. One feels instinctively that
there is no graft bound up with the digging of the Martian canals.

No, anything but graft. One of the principal reasons why I am so fond of
the canals on Mars is that they are the most cheaply built system of
public works on record. A professor of astronomy in Italy or Arizona
finds a few dim lines on the plate of his camera, and immediately Mars
is equipped with a splendid network of artificial waterways. Am I wrong
in thinking of the Martian canals as one of the greatest triumphs of the
human mind? An African savage might find an elephant's skeleton and from
that reconstruct the animal in life. Only science can reconstruct an
elephant from a half-inch fragment of the bone of his hind leg. Only a
scientist could have reconstructed the Martian canals from a few
photographic scratches. Of such reconstructions our civilisation is
largely made up. We build up a statesman out of a bit of buncombe and a
frock coat; a genius out of two sonnets and half a dozen cocktails; a
dramatic "star" out of a lisp and a giggle; a two-column news story out
of the fragment of a fact; a multitude out of three men and a band; a
crusade out of one man and a press agent; a novel out of the trimmings
of earlier novels; a reputation out of an accident; a captain of
industry out of an itching palm; a philanthropist out of a beneficent
smile and a platitude; a critic out of a wise look and a fountain pen;
and a social prophet out of pretty small potatoes. I need not allude
here to the process of making mountains out of molehills, beams out of
motes, and entire summers out of single swallows.

But mind, I do not mean that I was ever sceptical about the canals.
Indeed, I have always admired the way in which their existence was
demonstrated. There have always been two ways of proving that something
is true. One way is to bring forward sixteen reasons why, let us say,
the moon is made of green cheese. The other way is to assume that the
moon is made of green cheese and to answer sixteen objections brought
forward against the theory. I have always preferred the second method,
because it throws the burden of proof on your opponent. There is no
argument under the sun that cannot be refuted. Obviously, then, it is an
advantage to let your opponents supply the argument while you supply the
refutation.

Neglect this precaution, and you are in difficulties from the start. You
contend, for instance, that the moon must be made of cheese because the
moon and cheese are both round, as a rule. True, says your opponent, but
so are doughnuts, women's arguments, and, occasionally, the wheels on a
trolley car. The moon and cheese, you go on, both come after dinner.
Yes, says your opponent, but so do unwelcome visitors, musical
comedies, and indigestion. Then, you say, there is the cow who jumped
over the moon. Would she have resorted to such extraordinary procedure
if she had not perceived that the moon was made of cheese from her own
milk? Well (says your opponent), the cow might merely have been trying
to gain a broader outlook upon life. And here you are thirteen reasons
from the end, and your hands hopelessly full.

Now compare the advantages of the other method. You adopt a resolute
bearing and declare: "The moon is made of green cheese." It is now for
your opponent to speak. He argues: "But that would make the moon's
ingredients different from those of the earth and other celestial
bodies." "Not at all," you say; "the earth is made up largely of chalk,
and what is the difference between chalk and cheese, except in the
price?" "But, if it's green cheese the moon is made of," asks your
opponent, "why does it look yellow?" "Only the natural effect of
atmospheric refraction," you reply calmly; "remember how a politician's
badly soiled reputation will shine out a brilliant white, through the
favourable atmosphere that surrounds a Congressional investigating
committee. Recall how a lady who is green with envy at her neighbour's
new hat will turn pink with delight when the two meet in the street and
kiss. Recall how the same lady's complexion of roses and milk will
assume its natural yellow under the candid dissection of her dearest
friends." Your opponent might go on marshalling his objections forever,
and you would have no difficulty in knocking them on the head.

So I used to believe. But if the method breaks down in the case of Mars
and its canals, it breaks down everywhere else. If there are no canals
on Mars, what about the blessings of the tariff, which are based on
exactly the same kind of reasoning? What about the efficacy of mental
healing? What about the advantages of giving up coffee? What about the
impending invasion of California by the Japanese? What about the
Kaiser's qualifications as an art critic? What about the restraining
influence of publicity on corporations? What about the connection
between easy divorce and the higher life? What about the divine right of
railroad presidents? What about the theatrical manager's passion for a
purified stage? What about the value of all anti-fat medicines? All of
these things have been shown to be true by assuming that they are true.
If the canals on Mars go, all these have to go. And that makes me almost
as sad as the fact that I shall have nothing to talk about with my
favourite waiter.

XIX

THE COMPLETE COLLECTOR--II

"The idea of this exquisite little collection of frauds and forgeries,"
said Cooper, "--and I don't believe I am boasting when I speak of my few
treasures as exquisite--came to me in a natural enough way. One of the
bitterest trials the connoisseur has to contend with, is the
consciousness that no amount of care and expense can guarantee him an
absolutely flawless collection. The suspicion of the experts has fallen
upon not a single picture, brass, marble or iron in his galleries; and
yet as he walks those galleries the unhappy owner groans under the moral
conviction that there are spurious pictures on his walls, spurious
marbles in his halls, spurious carvings and coins under his glass
cases, and that there they must stay until discovered and exposed.

"A perfect collection, therefore, in the sense of a collection in which
every object can be traced back with absolute certainty to its author
and its place of origin, is impossible. Unless, and that is how the
inspiration came," said Cooper, "unless one set to collecting objects of
art which have been proved to be fraudulent. Then and only then, could
one be sure that one's treasures were just what one believed them to be.
And that is just what I set out to do. I began buying objects of art,
which, after masquerading under a great name, had been exposed and given
up to scorn. I have kept at it for twenty years, and I can now point to
what no American multi-millionaire can ever boast of, a collection made
up _entirely_ of 'fakes.' When I stroll through _my_ little museum I am
obsessed by no doubts. I am as certain as I am of being alive that no
genuine Leonardo or Holbein or Manet or Cellini has found its way under
my roof.

"I must admit," Cooper went on, "that the question of economy has been
an important factor in the case. When we first set up housekeeping, a
year after our marriage, our means were not unlimited and our tastes
were of the very highest. Buying the best work or even the second-best
work of the best painters was out of the question. But buying cheap
copies of the masters, replicas, casts, photogravures, was equally
impossible. The idea of owning anything that some one else may own at
the same time is abhorrent to the true collector. On the other hand, if
we went in for spurious masterpieces, we were sure of securing unique
specimens at very small expense. And I will not deny that the bargain
element appealed very strongly to Mrs. Cooper. Most of our things we
got at really fabulous reductions. There was the crown of an Assyrian
princess of the twenty-fourth century B.C., for which one of the leading
European museums paid $75,000, and which, after it was shown that it had
been made by a Copenhagen jeweller in 1907, I purchased from the museum
for something like fifty-five dollars, plus the freight. This charming
little landscape with sheep and a shepherd boy brought $23,000 in a
Fifth Avenue auction room two years ago. Three months after it was sold,
a certain Mrs. Smith on Staten Island sued her husband for desertion and
non-support, and in the course of the proceedings it was brought out
that Smith made $10,000 a year painting Corots and Daubignys, and that
the $23,000 picture was one of his latest achievements. I got it for a
little over one hundred dollars. I am really proud of the picture,
because Smith has put into it enough of the Corot quality to deceive
many an expert observer. If I were not in possession of the documentary
proof that Smith painted the picture in 1908, I should myself be tempted
at times to believe that Smith and his wife lied in court and that the
picture is really a Corot.

"But these are the chances," said Cooper, "that every art-lover must
take. I have said that at present I feel perfectly sure that not a
single genuine work has crept in to vitiate my collection. And that is
true. But only a few weeks ago I had a very bad quarter of an hour
indeed over this spurious Tanagra figurine. It had been bought for a
museum not one hundred miles from here by a patron who was a good friend
of mine, and who had paid several thousand dollars for the statuette. I
was in the room with Hawley when Stimson, our very greatest Greek
archæologist and art-expert, entered, and, catching sight of the little
figure, picked it up, studied it for a few moments, smelt it, licked it
with his tongue, pressed it to his cheek, and handed it back to my
friend with a single, blasting comment--'fake.' We two were incredulous,
but within fifteen minutes Stimson had convinced us that the thing was a
palpable fraud. Quite beside himself with vexation, Hawley lifted up the
statuette and was about to dash it into fragments on the ground, when I
caught his arm. 'Let me have it,' I said; and I carried it home in great
glee.

"Well, a few weeks later I was showing my collection to Dr. Friedheimer
of Berlin, who is a much greater man even than Stimson. The German
savant stopped in fascination before the Tanagra figurine. 'A pretty
good imitation,' I said. He seized the statuette with trembling fingers.
'Imidation!' he shouted. 'Chenuine, chenuine as de hairs on your het.
Himmel, wat a find!' And he proceeded to do what Stimson had done, and
he smelt it and licked it, and rubbed it against his beard, and I am not
sure but that he knocked it against his forehead to test its texture.
And then in his agitation he let the figure fall, and it broke in two on
the floor, and inside we found a bit of newspaper dated Naples, January
27, 1903. Dr. Friedheimer could only say, 'Unerhört!' but I was nearly
frantic with delight. I repaired the statuette, and it now holds, as you
see, the place of honour in my collection."

As we sat over our coffee and cigars, Cooper grew reflective. "After
all," he said, "is not the fabricator of frauds fully as great an artist
as the man whose work he imitates? Take the famous marble Aphrodite of a
few years ago, which was attributed by some critics to Praxiteles, and
by some critics to Scopas, until proof came that it had been made in
Hoboken. Consider the labour that went into the fraud. For years,
probably, the dishonest sculptor was engaged in preliminary studies for
the work. He spent months in libraries, museums, and the lecture-rooms
of learned professors. He impregnated himself with the spirit of Greek
art. He devoted months to searching for a suitable piece of antique
marble. How long he was in carving it, I can only guess. When it was
completed, he boiled it in oil; then he boiled it in milk; then he
boiled it in soap; then he boiled it in a concoction of molasses and
wine; then he buried it in moist soil, and let it age for three years.

"Now, suppose the statue had been really carved by Praxiteles. That
joyous master and genius might have put two weeks' work, three weeks'
work, a month's work, upon it, and there you were. What was the labour
of a lifetime to the other man was to Praxiteles just an easy bit of
routine. If art is a man's soul and hopes and brain and sweat and blood
put into concrete form, who produced the truer work of art, Praxiteles
or the unknown sculptor of Hoboken? I speak only of the comparative
expenditure of effort. So far as the artistic result is concerned, it is
evident, from the ease with which we were taken in, that there is no
great difference between the school of Hoboken and the school of
Praxiteles."

XX

WHEN A FRIEND MARRIES

Taking dinner with an old friend who has just been married is an
experience I regard with apprehension. In the first place, it is always
awkward to be introduced to a woman who begins by being jealous of you
because you knew her husband long before she did. She may be a nice
woman; in fact, from the air of almost imbecile happiness that invests
young Hobson, you are sure she is. But since it is natural to hate those
whom we have injured, it is natural for young wives to dislike their
husband's friends.

People say that a woman begins to prepare for marriage at the age of
five. Judging from the absolutely spontaneous way in which the Hobsons
have taken to it, marriage is a career that calls for no preparation
whatever. I am not referring, of course, to the outward aspects of early
housekeeping. The little difficulties that beset the newly married are
there. I can see that my hostess is more anxious about the creamed
potatoes than she will be five years hence. Her attitude to the maid who
waits on us is by turns excessively severe and excessively timid. I
learn that the dining-room table has been sent back twice to the store,
and is still not the one originally ordered. But these are trifles. It
is with the Hobsons' souls I am concerned; and their souls are perfectly
at ease in their new estate.

The first few minutes, like all introductions, go stiffly. The bride
smiles and says that Jack has often spoken to her about you. Whereupon
you remember that there are not many secrets a young husband keeps from
his wife. Jack is no sieve, but he would be more than human if he has
failed to dissect your little weaknesses and humours for his new wife.
He has probably emphasized the two or three particular little failings
of character which have prevented you from realising the brilliant
promise you showed at college. At bottom, Jack thinks, you have the
capacity for being almost as happy as he, Jack, is. But then, again, if
Mrs. Hobson does know you thoroughly well, it strikes you that there is
that much trouble saved, and you sit down to chat with a fair sense of
intimacy.

Toward such conversation you and the man of the house are the principal
contributors. You speak of college days and contemporary politics, and
other things that the wife is not interested in, but she smiles
graciously, and now and then takes sides with you against her husband.
At one point in the conversation you look up and find her quietly
scrutinising you. And you recall what you have heard concerning the
match-making propensities of young wives, and you wonder uneasily if to
herself she is running over a list of girl friends and trying to decide
which one will suit you best. You even suspect that she inclined toward
a Marjorie or an Edith, who is plain, but clever, a good manager, and of
an affectionate disposition. Happily, at that moment the bride thanks
you for your handsome wedding gift.

At table the visitor begins to be more at ease. For one thing, there is
the traditional hazing process to which the bride must be subjected.
Jack takes the lead. Admitting that to-night's repast is an unqualified
success, he hints that there have been occasions when, if he only would,
there might be a different tale to tell. The visitor protests; yet in
the extravagant praise he resorts to there is a suggestion of mild
banter which is considered the proper thing. The wife professes to
enter into the joke; but in her heart she laughs to see the two men go
solemnly through the stupid and outworn ceremonial. Young wives nowadays
are excellent cooks. This one has secretly pursued a three months'
course in domestic science and has a diploma hidden away somewhere. But
she pretends to be properly outraged by our foolish satire, and insists
on both being helped a second time to the custard. Jack, in fact, eats
all that remains. It makes dish-washing easier, he says.

And as the visitor steers his way pleasantly through the meal, he makes
the acquaintance of an extraordinary number of relatives. The spoons, he
finds, are from Aunt Amy. Aunt Amy lives in Syracuse and at first
objected to the match. The salt cellar is from a male cousin who (you
learn this from Jack), it was thought at one time, would be the
fortunate man himself--that is, until Jack appeared on the scene. Poor
fellow, he sought consolation by marrying, only two months later, a nice
girl from Alexandria, Va. The cut-glass salad dish is from the bride's
dearest friend at boarding-school, a charming girl, who paints and sings
and is now studying music in Berlin.

When the coffee is brought in, Jack asks if you will smoke. This is, in
a way, the most dangerous situation of the entire evening. If you say
yes, Jack is apt to pass the cigars and and say, "Go right ahead. _I_
have given it up, you know, and I feel all the better for it." But if
you are expert in reading faces, and decide that the bride probably has
conscientious scruples against the habit, and you reply "No," Jack is
likely to say, "Sorry, but Alice allows _me_ one cigar a day after
dinner," and you are left to suffer the torments of the lost, and have
lied into the bargain. Nor is it possible to lay down any rule for
arriving at the correct reply under such circumstances. A hurried glance
about the house will not help one. A handsome bronze ash-tray may be
only a paperweight. Young wives are in the habit of buying their
husbands the most ornate smoking apparatus, with the understanding that
it shall never be used.

It is after dinner that reflection comes; and with it comes a touch of
sorrowful wonder. Jack bears himself with great equanimity in his new
condition; but it is apparent, nevertheless, that he has changed from
what you knew him. In the first place, he has built up a comprehensive
system of domestic serfdom to which he cheerfully submits. He glories in
his enslavement; he rattles his chains. He actually boasts of the habit
he has acquired of dropping in at the grocer's every morning on his way
to the office. When it is the maid's day out, Jack insists on helping
with the dishes and he tells you with pride that, given plenty of hot
water, there is nothing in that line which he would hesitate to
undertake. He makes it a point to visit Washington Market at least twice
a week, and he comes home with cuts, joints, steaks, rounds, poultry,
fish, game, and fruits in dazzling variety. He carries these things
conspicuously in the Subway. And Jack's wife is appreciative of his kind
intentions, and lets him bring, from long distances, meats which she can
purchase at several cents a pound less from her butcher two blocks away.

The passion for acquiring food commodities is only one phase of Jack's
new character. You begin to see now that all these years you have never
suspected what capacities for home-building he had in him. In the
presence of any kind of article offered for sale his overmastering
passion is to buy the thing and take it home. Instinct apparently
impels him to store up quite useless supplies against a future
emergency. He haunts hardware stores, he rummages in antique furniture
shops, and you may see him any day during the lunch hour flattening his
nose against windowfuls of copper and brass ware. He buys patent hammers
by the quarter dozen, as well as nails, tacks, screws, bolts, casters,
brackets, and curtain poles. He brings home Japanese vases from the
auction rooms. One day he acquired a step-ladder; it came by wagon
because they refused to let him take it into the Subway.

And Jack's wife acquiesces in his self-imposed servitude. She does not
demand it; she is even a good deal incommoded by it. But her woman's
instinct tells her that the thing is a disease, which a man must catch,
like the measles. Until the husband's passion for home-building quiets
down, she is content to accept the unnatural situation; she is even
proud to have inspired it.

But as Jack prattles on, and Jack's wife smiles over her embroidery
frame, it comes over you that, despite all the kindly communion of the
evening, you are an outsider there. You ask yourself bitterly whether
there is such a thing as constancy in man, whether there is such a thing
as true comradeship or affection. For fifteen years, from your freshman
year at high school, you and Jack have been what the world calls
friends. What are you now? Jack still calls you friend; apparently that
is the reason why you have just dined with him and his wife. But in
reality you are not there as his friend. You are there as the guest of
this newly-constituted social unit, this new family. You are there not
as a person, but as part of an institution.

And just when you are ready to accept the new situation you are swept
away by the unreality of the entire arrangement. It is inconceivable
that Jack should have thrown you over for this alien person whom he
calls wife. Your habits and Jack's are so much alike; your tastes, your
outlook upon life. You used to play the same games at college, sing the
same songs, smoke the same tobacco, wear each other's clothes, and now
Jack has thrown you over for one with whom in the nature of things he
can have none of those habits in common. It is not merely puzzling; it
grows almost absurd. You shake your head over it some time after you
have said good-night, and the bride has told you that as a dear friend
of Jack's, they always will be pleased to have you call.

XXI

THE PERFECT UNION OF THE ARTS

I have never had the slightest reason to doubt Harding's truthfulness.
The following episode, I remember, was told with more than Harding's
usual gravity. I can do nothing better than to give it here in Harding's
own words so far as I can recall them:

On the third day after his arrival, my guest, Muhammad Abu Nozeyr, said
to me, "O Harding Effendi, I desire greatly to witness a presentation of
what you and the wife of your bosom, on whom both be peace, have often
referred to as Grand Opera."

I replied, with involuntary astonishment. "Son of a hundred sheiks,
forgive my seemingly derelict hospitality. But I should have asked you
before this to go to the opera with us, if I had not thought that the
principles of your faith were opposed thereto. For you must know, O
Father of the Defenceless, that our women go there unveiled even as the
women of the people that you see on our streets, and that on the stage,
singers of both sexes indulge in open exaltation of that thing called
love, which your prophet has confined within the walls of the
_haremlik_."

Abu Nozeyr laughed. "Your knowledge of our customs, Harding Effendi, is
fifty years behind the times. True, I come from the desert, and have
never heard your singing women of the stage. But did not one of the
learned muftis at yesterday's evening repast declare that 'Aïda' was
written for the Khedewi Ismail Pasha, may his soul rest in peace?"

"Yes," I said; "but you will understand, Dispenser of a Thousand
Mercies, why at first blush Islam and the lyric stage should strike me
as somewhat incompatible."

"Not modern Islam," he replied. "Take us not too literally. I am told
that your people, like others of the Feringhi, have succeeded in
building battleships which are really instruments of peace; that you
have trust companies in which you place no confidence, and Open Doors
which you close against people from my part of the world; you have
legislators who speak but do not legislate, and a Speaker who legislates
but does not speak; you have had men in your White House who always saw
red, and you have red-emblazoned newspapers which are yellow; you call
your politicians public servants who are your masters, and you call your
women the masters, but will not let them vote. Why, then, should you be
so surprised at any seeming incongruity in others?"

"I am convinced, Abu Nozeyr," I said, "and to-morrow we will go to see
'Tristan und Isolde.' But shall I attempt to describe for you, in a few
words, just what Grand Opera is?"

"My ear is open to your words, Harding Effendi."

"Know, then, Protector of the Fatherless, that the music-drama is a
perfect blending of all the arts. It calls to its aid the resources of
sculpture, painting, dancing, together with numerous mechanical
agencies, and to a minor extent, music and the drama. For observe, O Abu
Nozeyr, that each art aims to awake its own specific emotion. Sculpture
appeals to our sense of form, painting to our delight in colour, dancing
to the pleasure of rhythmic motion, the mechanic arts to our liking for
sudden action, while music and the uttered word represent the union of
the clearest and vaguest modes of expressing thought. It follows
therefore that the highest phase of human emotion can only be expressed
by that art which gives us simultaneously the living form of a Venus de
Milo with the colouring of a Titian, the grace of a Nautch girl, the
miracle-working powers of a Hindu fakir, the elocution of a Demosthenes,
and the voice of a Malibran."

"By the beard of the Prophet," exclaimed Abu Nozeyr, "I thought such
bliss was to be had only in the Paradise of the Faithful; and that is
Grand Opera, Harding Effendi?"

"With certain modifications," I replied. "Nothing human is perfect, Abu
Nozeyr. It is a regrettable circumstance that the human voice attains
its perfect development many years after the human form. Hence our
heroes on the lyric stage are all middle-aged and our heroines somewhat
heavy in movement. I have seen a pair of starving lovers in an operatic
garret, who would surely not have passed the scrutiny of a United
Charities investigator. It is also to be regretted that adequate
voice-production leaves no breath for dancing or other forms of active
effort. Hence the dance with which Carmen fascinates poor Don José,
argues an intense readiness to be pleased on the part of the latter, and
Telramund's defeat at the hands of Lohengrin is never quite free from a
certain degree of contributory negligence."

"But tell me this, Harding Effendi, are there composers who have carried
the union of the arts to a higher point than others?"

"There are, O Grandson of the Wild Ass. There are operas in which at
certain moments the libretto speaks of a leaping fire, the music plays
leaping fire, and the fire actually leaps and blazes on the stage. But
unfortunately it always happens that the words cannot be heard because
of the orchestra, and the fire sinks when the orchestral swell rises,
and rises when the orchestral surge subsides. I have caught the
orchestral sound of hammer on anvil long before the two have come into
contact, and have heard Spring described as entering through a door
which persists in staying closed. I have seen boats being pushed by
human hands, Rhine maidens suspended on a wire, and harvest moons moving
in orbits unknown to Herschel and Pickering."

"And are there people who still persist in taking their sculpture,
painting, drama, and music separately, Harding Effendi?"

"There are; but that is because they fail to recognise that opera is a
perfect union of all the arts. To-morrow, Abu Nozeyr, we go to hear
'Tristan und Isolde.' It appeals to every one of our senses. To enjoy it
completely, however, it is often wise to close one's eyes and just hear
the singer sing."

XXII

AN EMINENT AMERICAN

After dinner I asked Herr Grundschnitt what headway he was making in his
studies of American life. The professor was in more than his usually
mellow mood. He had enjoyed his dinner. He liked his cigar. He confided
to me that he was hard at work on a volume of sketches dealing with the
career of representative successful Americans, and he offered to read me
one of his early chapters. If the following summary of Herr
Grundschnitt's account of the life of Wallabout Smith can even suggest
the extraordinary impression which the original produced upon me, I am
content.

Wallabout Smith did not attain recognition until late in life. I gather
that he must have been well over fifty when a former President of the
United States declared that Wallabout Smith, by raising a family of four
sons and two daughters, had done more for his country than all the laws
enacted by the Legislatures of all the New England and Middle Atlantic
States since the Spanish-American War. Fame came rapidly after this. The
college professors repeated what the former President said. The
newspapers repeated what the college professors said. The playwrights
repeated what the newspapers said. The pulpit repeated what the
playwrights said. Interviewers descended upon Wallabout Smith. They wore
out his front lawn, the hall carpet, and the maid-servant's temper; but
they always found Smith himself patient, affable, ready to say whatever
they wished him to say.

The reporters would usually begin by asking Wallabout Smith what were
his lighter interests in life. "I find my greatest pleasure," Smith
would reply, "in common things. For instance, I have never ceased to be
intensely interested in the cost of shoes and stockings. The subject is
fascinating and inexhaustible. One gets tired of most things, but there
has never been a time in which the cost of shoes and stockings has
failed to appeal with peculiar force to me. My odd moments on the train
have as a rule been taken up with that question. If you have ever
thought upon this subject, you must have been struck with the fact that,
putting food aside, shoes and stockings constitute the most permanent
and persistent human need. They begin with the first few weeks of our
life, and they continue to the end; the size alone changes. It is a
subject, too, that opens up such wide horizons. For while a man of
comparatively little leisure can confine himself to the simple topic of
shoes and stockings, he may, if he so desires, widen the field of his
interests so as to include the allied subjects of frocks, jackets,
blouses, caps, and collars, until he has covered the entire range of
children's apparel. Nor is that all. I have spent many an absorbing hour
figuring out the annual rate of increase in servants' wages and rent. Of
late years I have been in the habit of putting in part of my lunch hour
in a study of college fees and tailors' bills. In moments of extreme
physical lassitude, when nothing else appeals to me, I think about the
next quarterly premium on my insurance policy."

How well-known men do their work has always interested the public. Few
newspaper men omitted to question Wallabout Smith on this subject. From
the large number of interviews cited by Herr Grundschnitt we may build
up a very fair picture of Wallabout Smith's daily routine. It was his
habit to spend a good part of his day in New York City. He would rise
about six o'clock every week-day in the year, and, snatching a hasty
breakfast, would make his way to the railroad station, pausing now and
then in perplexity as he tried to recall what it was his wife had asked
him to bring home from town. Sometimes he would catch his train and
sometimes he would not. Arrived at his office, he would remove his coat,
and, putting on a black alpaca jacket to which he was greatly attached,
he would proceed to glance over, check, and transcribe the contents of a
large number of bills and vouchers representing the daily transactions
of a very prosperous commercial enterprise in which he had no
proprietary interest. The day's work would be pleasantly broken up by
frequent inquiries from the general manager's office. Every now and then
a fellow-worker would take a moment from his duties to ask Wallabout
Smith how his lawn was getting on. Sometimes he would be summoned to
the telephone, only to learn that Central had called the wrong number.
Lunch was a matter of a few minutes. At 5.30 every afternoon Wallabout
Smith exchanged his alpaca jacket for his street coat with a fine sense
of weariness, and the secure conviction that the next morning would find
the same task waiting for him on his table. "I have no hesitation in
stating," Smith would frequently say, "that some of the busiest hours of
my life have been spent at my office desk."

Walking was his favourite form of exercise. When he lived in the city
during the first few years after his marriage, he used to walk the floor
with the baby. Later when the children began to grow up and he moved out
into the country, he walked to and from the station. His gait was a
free, manly stride, bordering close upon a run, in the morning, and a
more deliberate, sliding pace, somewhat suggestive of a shuffle, in the
evening. He was at his best when tramping the country roads with a
congenial companion or two on a Sunday afternoon. On such occasions he
would pour forth a continuous stream of light-hearted talk on everything
under the sun--the new board of village trustees, the shameful condition
of the village streets, the prospects of a new roof for the railway
station. Good-nature was the keynote of his character, but he would
frequently sum up a situation or a person with a sly touch of irony or a
trenchant word or two. He once described the village streets as being
paved chiefly with good intentions. Another time he characterised the
minister of a rival church as having the courage of his wife's
convictions. But such flashes of satire went and left no rancour behind
them. His high spirits were proof against everything but automobiles.
These he detested, not because they made walking unpleasant and even
dangerous, but because they were run by men who mortgaged their homes to
buy motor cars, and thus threatened the stability of business
conditions.

Wallabout Smith would often be asked to lay down a few rules for those
who wished to emulate his success. He would invariably reply that the
secret of bringing up children was the same double secret that underlay
success in every other field--enthusiasm and patience. "It has always
been my belief," he would say, "that the head of a family should spend
at least as much time with his children as he does at his barber's or
his lodge, and, if possible, a little more. Children undoubtedly stand
in need of supervision. In the beginning, it is a question largely of
keeping them away from the matches and the laudanum. Fortunately, we
live at some distance from a trolley-line and there is no well in our
back-yard. As my children grew up, I made it a point to know what books
they were reading out of school and whether the boys were addicted to
the filthy cigarette habit. On the subjects of breakfast foods and
corporal punishment, I have always kept an open mind."

The experiment of living upon a basis of comradeship with one's children
which we see so frequently recommended was not a success in the case of
Wallabout Smith. "Although my boys are fond of me," he once told a
reporter, "they usually regard my presence as a bore. When I find time
to go out walking with them, they do their best to lose me, and whenever
we divide off into teams for a game of ball, each side insists on my
going with the other side. I have made up my mind that there is a time
for being with one's children and a time for letting them alone, and
that the proper time for being with them is when they are in trouble
and want you, and the proper time for letting them alone is when they
are happy and wish to be let alone. This I admit is the reverse of the
common practice, and probably there is something to be said for parents
who grow fond of their children's society when they, the parents, have
nothing else to do. As a rule, I have never obtruded myself on my boys,
being confident that natural affection and the recurrent need of
pocket-money would constitute a sufficient bond between us."

There was, in conclusion, one factor in his success upon which Wallabout
Smith would never fail to lay the most emphatic stress, and to which
Herr Grundschnitt attached equal importance. "Such fame," he would say,
"as has fallen to my share must be attributed in the very largest
measure to my wife. Many is the time she gave up her meetings at the
Browning Club to watch with me beside the sick-bed of one of our little
ones. And she would do this so uncomplainingly, so cheerfully, that it
almost made one oblivious to the extent of her sacrifice. There must
have been occasions, I feel sure, when it cost her a pang to find her
photograph omitted from the local paper's account of a club meeting or a
church bazaar; but if she ever suffered on that score, she never let it
be known. I can truly say that, without her, my life work would have
spelt failure."

XXIII

BEHIND THE TIMES

I had scarcely exchanged a half-dozen sentences with Howard King before
we knew ourselves for kindred spirits. I was in a roomful of people who
were talking about new books I had not read, new plays I had not seen,
and new singers I had not heard, and I was exceedingly lonesome. There
was one youngish middle-aged lady in pink, who asked me what was the
best novel I had read of late, and when I said "Robert Elsmere," she
looked at me rather grimly and asked whether I lived in New York. When I
said yes, she turned away and began chatting with a young man on her
right, who looked like the advertisement for a new linen collar. It was
this reply of mine that attracted Howard King's attention. He had been
sitting in one corner of the room quite as disconsolate as I was. But
now he walked over and shook hands and told me that in his opinion
"Robert Elsmere" was not so good a book as "Trilby," which he was just
reading.

Howard King and I belong to the comparatively small class of men whom
nature, or fate, or whatever you please, has decreed to be always a
certain interval behind the times; it might be years or months or days,
according to the rate of speed at which a particular fashion happened to
be moving forward. King told me, for instance, that of late he has been
possessed with a passionate desire to learn the game of ping-pong. When
all the world was playing table-tennis eight or ten years ago, King
viewed the game with disgust. He thought it utterly childish,
uninteresting, and admirably illustrative of all the idiotic qualities
that go to make up a fad. But for the last six months, King said, he
frequently wakes at night and sits up in bed and yearns with all his
soul for a ping-pong set. He was, of course, ashamed to speak to others
about it. But if he could find some one who shared his feelings on the
subject, he had a large library with a square table in it. Would I come
to-morrow night? I said I should be very glad, indeed.

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 aëroplanes 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 "Thaïs" 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 rôles 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
£788,990,187, 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 _Réveil_, 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
Décolleté, 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 _Réveil_ 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 æons, 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 mediæval 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